April 2020

Anyone else feel like they are stuck in the montage from the second Twilight movie where she sends emails that never get read or responded to, and just sits in a chair and stares out her window as the seasons change and it cuts to her screaming a lot in the night.

No?

Just me then?

Okay.

That blood curdling, sorrowful scream of so much pent up pain and loss. It is easier to accept absence if the other person doesn’t exist anymore. At least you can logic your way around the holes in your heart, eventually. Mourning the living hurts like hell. Never heals. I mean technically Edward was dead; but lived forever. There is no metaphor in that. just an odd observation. Mourning an immoral must be extra fucky.

For an actress who constantly looks like she is holding in a fart and hesitates after Every. Single. Word. She sure can screech in a way that I feel it in my soul.

Can we just get to the church on time and end this already?

I was supposed to be off the internet and working on a book, any book today. But I realized I barely rewrote the beginning of the Little Mermaid for one of them so that might not work. Didn’t open the big new one and I can’t find the intro for the other.

I did look, rather thoroughly and ended up revisiting old blog posts, using them for jumping off points and writing new things as well as revamping and expanding on things that were never meant to be public, but hey, fuck it. I wrote the intro during retrograde so we can safely assume it is gone forever into the ether. I don’t think it was that great anyways.

My usual trick for getting writing done is to have a basket of socks that need sorting and I will cure cancer to avoid it.  I hate sorting socks. No idea why. I like organizing things, sometimes.

On my list of quarantine tasks is going through all 600+ posts on the blog and fixing them.

I reeeeeally don’t wanna.

In there somewhere, pretty much everywhere, exists a girl who pined after this boy or that one, got hella catfished and heartbroken and watched a lot of Twilight.

I was dealing with the shedding of High School Sweetheart at the time, to be fair. 26 years lost and wasted over what turned out to be nothing but a racist roughneck who thought me no better than to split his time between his wife and I. She left him a year or so later and took everything. Somehow, he managed to be surprised by this. Can’t say I didn’t warn him. He wanted me to be salve for the wounds, ex hubby did too. Come on guys, even at my worst I am better than that.

I had to forgive myself for caring about someone who hurt me as badly as he did. As badly as any of them did really.

That was the beginning of all of this. The magical 6 year journey.

Since then, I have lost 3 best girls. Reclaimed the only one that mattered and made some semblance of peace with another.

Another thing on the list of shit I really aught to be doing is cleaning out my downloads folders, both on my phone and ye old laptop. There is so much porn on my phone I can’t find anything. Maybe tomorrow.

This is in there.

I know it looks benign, but it bothers me a bit. Just one more example of being worshipped then forgotten. I forgave him last time I saw him. How could someone be so enamored of me to think to photograph traces of me like this, and then leave? Drugs, the answer is drugs. Even a good witch doesn’t trump hillbilly heroin. So be it.

But it’s all in here. Every mister and mistake. Every time I made someone into something they weren’t.

No grudges, just lessons.

I stumbled on an old post about me and Giant, last leap year. No idea why I didn’t remember that. Every time we see each other I have to do mental math on how long it’s been. I highly doubt, now that I have put that together, that I will ever have trouble remembering again. We were gonna hang out, but he is a mortician so ya, he’s been a bit busy lately. I wish I could go back in time and tell the sad girl in that tiny, albeit beautiful room, in our old apartment that it was okay to be sad and everything was going to be alright in the end. We evolved, both separately and together into what we were meant to be. I was right about him the whole time. He is important and we remain friends to this day.

I have a half formed theory regarding leap years being really fucking tumultuous. And I just found out Pluto went retrograde so basically we are having to deal with unresolved issues from our past and being locked up for as long as I have with literally nothing to do, I am in the thick of it. Might as well start the autopsies and see what I can glean from the viscera.

A different ex accused me of ‘taking hugs’ and sucking his energy or some other such shit. He just didn’t like physical contact unless he was getting his dick wet. That did not go over well. I hate being manipulated. I just learned to live without both and shortly thereafter learned to live without him.

For me, good touch is as necessary (if not more) as food. And I am fucking starving with only a vague idea about when supper will be ready.

Non affectionate ex might have had the right idea, at least now and going forward. Anyone I hug is going to have to psychically block me from feeding off of them accidentally. I have become Rogue in my isolation. Complete with white streaks in my hair.

I am trying to channel my inner Churchill, ‘if you are going through hell, keep going’ but I am awfully starved for affection and I am really tired.

Samuel Beckett —
ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.

I can, and I will.

It’s a bad day, not a bad life.

But I really need a hug.

And I really need to get back to writing. Preferably about the future or a fantasy I can escape into at least.
I am trapped in an attic alone, Pluto is in retrograde and my ghosts are all here.

This started out as a story time email.
As my isolation continues and I get even deeper into both my introspection and looking for things to do that are marginally productive, like going through old documents where I found this.
I think I need my therapist again.

I was crossed eyed when I was a kid.

I hope you weren’t expecting a sexy story.

My libido is through the roof and I just can’t right now.

One of my earliest memories was my mother shrieking in the kitchen, I had to wear an eye patch. It gave me a headache and bandages in the 70’s were gooey and sticky and it hurt coming off. I was hiding behind my dad’s chair in the living room. She found me and the patch went on. That probably happened every other day for 100 days.

The idea was to force the muscles in my weak eye to work by covering my good eye.

Didn’t work.

I could read when I was 22 months old. We had those Disney read along records, and I just taught myself. But with the patch on I couldn’t read. I still have a hard time reading with just my right eye, I can see the words, but they don’t compute exactly.

I had corrective surgery when I was just a bit over 2 years old.

My parent’s friends from Michigan had bought a farm in Ontario a year or 2 before my folks and they remain close to this day. Carolyn and Todd. Carolyn gave me a stuffed dog as a surgery present. She was my magic mama.

This story was prompted by me opening the closet in my attic room last night and seeing Snoopy in the corner.

Yep, I still have him. And yes, he was part of the important ‘stuff’ that came with me from Newfoundland.

A few years back my girlfriend was very into Feng Shui and decided we couldn’t have stuffed animals in our rooms, especially not on our beds. They are bed guardians and keep potential lovers away. Snoopy will be emerging from the closet and making his way to my bed sometime today. I have a lover, the only one I ever want. A stuffed dog can guard my bed while I wait.

My eye doctor was this really sweet old man. He had polio when he was young and was in a wheelchair. I wish I could remember his name, I can see his face and hear his voice as I write this. He was the one who diagnosed me with Poland Syndrome weirdly. He studied odd physical deformities as a hobby.

I remember the old wooden box full of glass lenses. The dark of his office. The bright lights in my eyes and wearing too big sunglasses when we left because of the drops he put in to dilate my pupils made my eyes super light sensitive. The clack of the machinery, ‘which one is better, one or two’.

I remember getting a chocolate bar at the hospital gift shop if I behaved.

I ended up in that hospital a lot between 2 and 19. First my eye then my tit.

My poor mom. She wanted a child, tried so hard for 7 years to conceive before I was born, and she got me, a weird fixer upper.

I say that with a bit of bitterness. She has, as the years gone on, expressed resentment that I needed more time and effort than her other daughters. Physically and emotionally. But let’s skip over that.

I remember wanting to take Snoopy into the O.R. More shrieking from my mother. A nurse said he couldn’t come but compromised by letting me take some plastic zoo animals in with me, I can only assume because they could be sterilized and Snoopy could not.

I don’t remember much from the hospital. Just sitting on the floor in a hospital gown in the playroom playing with those plastic animals. Everything was white and the sun was streaming in the window. Then laying on the stretcher with a rhino in my tiny hand.

The next thing I remember is waking up and throwing up a lot. And I was blind. Not really but I was maybe 26 months old, so I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. My eyes were bandaged. Apparently, I had a reaction to the anesthetic, and they couldn’t wake me up properly for a few days.

Next memory after that was waking up on the couch at home and my eyes were stuck shut. Like every bit of eye pook I would ever have had appeared overnight and was gluing my eyelashes together.

I remember thinking that I had gone blind forever. Todd’s dad was blind and my tiny child’s brain was afraid that I had looked at an eclipse, like I thought he had done. He didn’t, but I believed that for years.

I remember being quiet as a mouse and touching my eyes even though I wasn’t supposed to, trying to get the gook off. I succeeded and the process repeated itself for at leas a week. Wake up blind, quietly unstick my eyes.

I can still cross that one eye. I looked at some selfies today and in 2/3 that one eye looks a little crossed still. Maybe it’s me seeing things with my overly critical way of seeing myself.

There is a 98% chance of becoming near sighted after the corrective surgery. Something about tightening the muscles altering the shape of the eye itself.

So, I have been wearing glasses since I was 3 or 4. Tiny little kid, with glasses and a bad bowl cut. My mom also had a penchant for giving me perms. I was a terribly awkward child. I had a really bad stutter on top of everything else. Speech therapist said my vocabulary was too big for my mouth. I managed to get over it by the time I started kindergarten. It comes back if I am stressed or if I see, hear or read about someone with a stutter.

We moved when I was 7 and I started grade 2 at a different rural school. Not fun.

People like to say that I am used to being told I am pretty. I am really not. It wasn’t something I was told as a kid, even into my teenage years. I was just awkward and angry by then and had the added yuck of braces and one of those fake boobs that resemble a chicken cutlet they give to women who had mastectomies stuffed in my bra.

This is also why I worry about being a burden. At some point I realized if I just tried to do things on my own, I wasn’t bothering anyone. If I just stayed away from people as much as possible, I wasn’t bothering anyone. It’s just part of who I am now.

Some days I am that scared little girl hiding behind the big brown chair, somehow knowing I was making it worse the longer I hid and louder my mom screamed and still being unable to move. I still feel so insignificant that if I hide long enough, I will be forgotten. Part of me wants to be.

And, as I have wasted another day, scrolling through social media, instead of doing anything that might possibly improve my situation, I honestly don’t know how to break out of this.

All I have to do is commit to and survive some discomfort to strengthen some long atrophied muscles.

I have to stop hiding and I don’t know how.

I think everyone has a hard time admitting they are wrong about certain things.

For me, it’s people.

If I see something in someone it is because I SEE it. And usually it is the color of roses and good. I see potential.

Something in me recognizes the best version of them, and for a long time, that was all I saw.

I got hurt in the process. Lost time and money. Felt betrayed. Happened three times in the last few years. I could joke and say I was drunk, but the actual truth is, I took a huge leap of faith and grabbed onto everything and everyone I could to break my fall, instead of just falling. I regressed to a former version of myself in a lot of ways. I am out now, and I am alright.

Level up.

6 years ago I accidentally decided to put the work in and deal with myself. It didn’t start out that way, but when I realized what was happening, I stuck with it.

Before that I have no trouble admitting I had no idea who I was or what I wanted. How could I? I had been half of myself for my whole life almost.

In high school I toned myself down to fit in. College years, when I should have been fucking up and finding myself, I had a baby on the boob that I had to keep alive. And I was so scared of no one wanting me with a kid, because single mom was the worst thing I could be until I upped the ante and I was a single mom stripper, I settled into a dissatisfying string of relationships that lasted until my kid graduated high school.

I did not weigh my partners against anything at all. If they wanted me and I wanted them. That was enough. I had no idea who I was, so it was easier to blend into them than to be alone and figure all that out. They weren’t all bad exactly. Some were fucking horrible. I look back at a couple fondly. No hard feelings. But I know I did not love them because I had no idea what that meant at all.

I was not overly choosy about friendships either.

I really just wasn’t feeding nor feeling my soul in the slightest.
I never listened to my gut.

Everything is different now. I literally function on instinct. I rarely question my intuition.

Got me this far.

I have also met people wherein any interaction with them is the equivalent of biting down on tinfoil. I avoid them like the plague. Somewhere in my heart of hearts I know they have some really vile secret just under their skin and I don’t care to find out what it is.

Some people I am pulled to like gravity. No explanation, just am.

I keep meaning to go back and delete the old posts about the fake soldier boy.

He was next level insane, but alas. We dated for less than 30 days and I was in Florida for 22 of them. It is easy to fool me over text. Just ask the catfish Poet.

Every time I go back through ye olde blog to do so. I stop.

And I will tell you why.

I am okay being wrong.

I reread an old post today entitled Penance and Peace.
https://www.ourladyoflustandgrace.com/penance-and-peace.html

I just had to think back long and hard about who I was talking about. Newfoundland seems to have caused a shift in my reality wherein I can’t remember if I was there for 22 months or 84 years. It was Cruz. Not my greatest relationship. Far from the worst. Killed some time, we had fun, until we didn’t, and I walked.

Doesn’t matter. None of it matters because it is the past and I am not her anymore.

I am okay being wrong.

I am okay with everything I ever was. Stupid, smart, sober, fucked up, slutty, pious. Doesn’t matter. I learned from all of it and built the version of me who is writing this to you now. I like her.

I read the end of the aforementioned article this morning and felt peaceful.

I know what it is like to dwell in the crazy underground shit filled garage of rock bottom. And it is a long climb out. I know what it is like to be clean for a while and fall right back into that pit of despair.

Rock bottom is the most solid foundation to build yourself from.

“I used to be…” is an empowering statement. It comes when you can accept your flaws and leave them behind you.

But enough about that. Sorta.

Let’s talk about the plague.

At the beginning of this, I made some statement about people behaving like lemmings wherein one saw a shadow and didn’t check to see if it was a cloud or a hawk and they all ran off a cliff.

Little did I know, Disney made that up with some rather clever camera work considering it was 1950ish and since then we have all decided this was the truth. Then, 50ish years later, along comes the internet, 70ish years later I post a status about it and my mind is officially blown.

https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=56

If this is not the most perfect example of what the fuck is going on right now, I don’t know what is.

I can admit that I was wrong about so many things. Lemmings, exes. Trusting this one or that one. Not doing right by my child and the consequences that still exist. That one time I was really high going home in a cab and mistook the Sheraton Hotel sign for a low red moon and never knew the truth until taking another cab 12 years later, sober this time and when I saw it, I howled at myself.

Are we, as a group, going to be able to step back and realize we were wrong about this virus?

I see people staunchly defending their fear like pro-lifers picketing outside a clinic.

I am off social media for a few days.

There is an annoying trend happening wherein my supposed friends are goading me into arguments.

The truth is, 15% of the population has had this already with zero complications. Quite possibly more. Which puts the fatality rate down around .0019%. There is an undeniable offset of traffic fatalities and other causes of death that have dropped dramatically due to the entire world being indoors. And the 2018 flu season claimed a greater number of lives 80 000 respectfully, the numbers might match by the time this is over, but the global fatality rate is already starting to drop, just like the other countries that had it before us.

But if I say it’s not that bad, I am a monster.

Am I really? Or can I just do math and think logically instead of emotionally.

Zero part of me has any desire to gloat or say, I told you so. I realize all of these are human beings with families and loved ones. The ripple effect ramifications of our planetary reactions to this are terrifying at best.

Of course I want to be right, means life can resume without fear. But some of you have developed Stockholm syndrome with this virus. I have been in abusive relationships. I remember lying to myself and others trying to justify staying, and all it did was prolong my hurt.

I will be okay admitting if I am wrong. But we all need to be able to do that, and we need to do it soon.

There is about to be a reckoning and we get to decide how this goes. Let’s make it smooth, please.

Been a bit restless today, did not feel like writing until now.

Got my period this morning and other than thinking I was a useless worthless piece of shit for the bulk of the day before yesterday and crying about Jake and Amy last night, oh and doing bad math on antibody numbers. I have skated through this one okay. They aren’t all awful. I get a freebie every now and again.

Pain is manageable.

I scrubbed and blessed my room on the new moon in anticipation of being a sad, bed ridden zombie girl hosting some kind of hacking ripping tearing burning Viking skirmish in my uterus. But as it stands, I am alright.

The floor is already needing a mop again and that ain’t happening. It is actually hot in the attic and my darling man child left his cats with me for a bit so…no open door until they go. I have sky lights, no openable windows. So no extra exertion shall occur upon this day.

So be it. This is temporary. The period, the attic, the cats, the quarantine. Everything is temporary on a long enough timeline.

I think we are past the point of no return, and I have no desire to go backwards.

Anyone listening? My prediction is you have about 34 days left to do whatever it is you promised yourself you would do if you had time.

Before all this happened…
I had a plan.
Didn’t really plan past June. Not far anyways.
Newfoundland, states, Owen Sound.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

I don’t have a plan now.
I have money and travel vouchers.
I have a car that’s no longer encased in ice that I can now afford to fix.
Another car I can buy or trade or whatever.

And I have faith.

I am actually okay not knowing. This is the first day I could say that and mean it.

I really think everything is going to be okay.
And maybe my plans weren’t the best version of what they could be.
Maybe this will be bigger and better than I could have planned on my own.

Definitely.
(happy sigh)

I didn’t plan on going to Arizona, but I went, and I had a good time. I didn’t plan my last trip to Wolf, but fuck I am glad it happened.

Maybe I can’t plan big enough. But I still want to see Graceland.

When I was young, we had one radio station that came in clearly. CKNX. A lot of Canadian bands and a lot of generic crap. They played old comedy sketches on Sunday nights. It was heavy on top 40’s and the can con.

My dad’s best friend had the most amazing record collection. Stacks and stacks of vinyl. They always had music playing when we went to visit. God I loved their house. No furniture that couldn’t be climbed on. Trees for outdoor climbing. Nothing but cows and fields for days. And so many toys and good things to eat. The house of pink applesauce. I went back a few years ago and it is still somewhat the same. The worn out couches are new worn in couches. The revolving door of barn cats all have new faces and new names. The woodstove is new, kitchen too. But the vinyl and turntable remain.

My mom always had the radio on, but it wasn’t the same. I didn’t have to wait for a song to come on; I could choose what I wanted to hear, and it was glorious. I think the adults thought it was cute that 10 year old me wanted to listen to Sting and the Velvet Underground. But my generation grew up listening to Rumors, took us a long while to figure out what players only love you when they’re playin’, and laying me down in the tall grass and doin’ my stuff meant. It’s funny how uncensored our childhoods were.

My dad has also stood on the corner in Winslow Arizona. He loves the Eagles.

I had a musical childhood.

I also had trouble sleeping as a kid and my dad bought me a double cassette player. I loved it. Did not help me sleep at all because I would just stay up and listen to music, but I was happy. He and his best friend, realizing I had a thing for music, made me tapes from vinyl.

It is how I got introduced to Peter Gabriel. I heard In your Eyes on the radio one night coming back from dance class in the car with my dad and we had a conversation about Genesis and Phil Collins. It didn’t make sense to me that something so beautiful could have come from something so generic. And a day later I had a copy of that album for my little ghetto-blaster tape deck thingee.

It remains part of my definition of love to this day.

Part of me wanted to fit in with my friends and listen to pop and part of me loved being in my room alone and listening to this next level deep shit. Then grade 8 happened and the Joshua Tree came out and my musical tastes went one way and the other kids kept listening to Whitney and Madonna.

In addition to the album So, I had a copy of Graceland by Paul Simon. We listened to Simon and Garfunkel live in Central Park so often when I was little. I find his voice really soothing. Graceland is playing right now.

I listened to it before I went to the festival in Arizona.

There’s a line that says, “take this child orphan to Tucson Arizona, give her the wings to fly through harmony and she won’t bother you no more.” I went to Tempe, but still. Love that line. Had to hear it while I was packing.

And then there is now, or what was supposed to be now. I was going to take Attica to Pensacola for the swimming, NOLA for the magic, Shreveport because of True Blood and I really want to go to Memphis.

The line is “for reasons I cannot explain there’s some part of me wants to see Graceland.” I can explain. Its from the song.

And I too want to stand on the corner in Winslow, Arizona.

And I have to go here too… future me does anyways

So there I was and there you were
All black and white but you colour
Dry season in the town of Broome
I found my staircase to the moon
John Butler, Just Call

But before that happens

I have a reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.

There’s a pic of me and my girlfriend Cheryl. I think it was my birthday 3 years ago, I’m mocking her duckface and holding a cigarette.

It’s weird to see myself holding a smoke. Even though I smoked a lot.

I started quitting a year ago.
I was away and I haven’t really seen much of my friend’s for the last couple years, so they forget that I quit. I smoked for 30 years. A year is barely a drop in the bucket of time.

Cheryl is coming home tomorrow.

“When I get back we can have a bottle of wine” she said.

“Babe, I quit drinking, remember?”

I didn’t know my last drink was going to be my last drink.

And honestly? I don’t exactly remember what it was.

Logic dictates it was really shitty whiskey at a really shitty strip club I was working at before the end of the world.

They had $2.50 bar rail Tuesdays and I know the Tuesday prior I had gotten tipsy and weepy. So I decided not to work Tuesdays anymore.

So it was probably a shot or 2 the following week. Some time in February.

I would not have chosen that for my last libation.

And really? I should have stopped after the blackout in St. John’s where I wasted a night having a pukefest whiskey meltdown and was totally mortified.

But I didn’t.

Habits are hard and I hated the place I was working.

Hate is not a good reason to drink.

I drank more than I should have in high school. I was very violent and acted out badly. I destroyed property and friendships. I decided smearing toothpaste on a boy’s bed was a good plan. Threw a can of frozen orange juice at my other friend’s head and left a hole in the drywall. Thank fuck I missed.

That didn’t stop me.

I got really bad alcohol poisoning on a snow day during our grade 10 exams. My girlfriend’s mom was at work and we got into her cheap vodka and did clock shots. One shot every 5 minutes. We were 15 and didn’t know any better. Started at 11. By quarter after we were wasted but it hadn’t hit yet so we kept going.

I have flashes of recollection wherein we decided walking downtown was a good idea. I feel like another, more sober friend or two had shown up to help, but I honestly have no idea.

I was told I knocked over a magazine rack in one store. They called the cops. We had gotten to the other end of the street by then and I was attempting to order food before the cops showed. We ran out the back door and I almost tumbled down a 150-foot embankment into a river. I vomited on the cop’s shoes and was put in the drunk tank. My dad had to leave work to pick me up. And the cop’s shoes were waiting in a plastic grocery bag for me to clean when I finally stopped feeling sick 3 days later.

That didn’t stop me either.

I dropped out of high school on and off from 15 years old til I was 18. I gave up on school and worried about working and paying rent. I had a good job. Worked in a restaurant. Loved it, made decent money and it was kinda like a dysfunctional family.

Cue the Christmas party.

I was bartending, fairly good at it. But then I started drinking. And then I almost threw up on my boss’s girlfriend.

Then I quit.

And I quit for a long time.

I didn’t have another drink until my 24^th summer.

I was in Montreal, at a fetish club and the owner’s girlfriend gave me Goldschlager on the rocks, just to sip. And I liked it. First drink I ‘d had since that Christmas party 5.5 years prior.

Amazing I held on as long as I did. I was a waitress at a strip club for a year prior, never drank. Started stripping, never drank, the boyfriend I had at the time was a raging alcoholic, didn’t drink with him. He actually got so drunk he shit the only pair of pants he brought to Montreal; they were leather too. That might have kept me from drinking now that I think about it.

Wait…

I did get insanely alcohol poisoning drunk one more time, with him, trying to keep up doing shots of Jager. I drank a bottle of the stuff. That was enough to keep me clean for a couple more years.

I never really started drinking until a few months after he and I broke up.

I was bad for a bit, then better, then bad again, then I quit dancing and drinking at the same time.

And so it went.

Couple years of a slow decline into stripping and drinking. Then cold turkey out of both, then back again.

I was never a social drinker. Just at work. And when I was settling into being single and living alone, I had a few whiskeys every now and again to take the edge off. But, I’d been living with a barely functioning alcoholic prior to that and after a year of drinking together after supper, it had become a habit. I see that now.

All habits can be broken.

I decided to try 30 days no meat, no alcohol the day I left for Florida last year. I had a tiny bit of both. But nothing to affect how much better I felt. Then I went back to Newfoundland and blacked out for the second to last time.

That should have been the end of it too.

But as it stands, I don’t know when my last drink was, and I don’t know what it was. And I don’t really care. I am just glad it’s over.

I have been actively trying to quit for over 2 years now.

I decided to stop trying and just do.

I know when my last cigarette was. I got semi peer pressured into having it and it tasted like death. Haven’t had another since. It was a Marlboro and I was looking out over the ocean after a really nice dinner with my roommate and the anarchist farmers.

And here I sit, almost 6 months later, at the end of the world. Full liquor cabinet downstairs, cartons and cartons of cigarettes and I don’t want them.

The day Wolf messaged me and said ‘okay, I quit drinking’ it was like this huge weight was lifted. And I decided to quit too.

It was the last nail in a coffin that had refused to stay shut and buried for 30 years.

And I wasn’t alone.

I am not trying to be mean or downplay the people affected by this, which is pretty much everyone at the moment.

It just occurred to me, after way too much time online, a lot of people don;t understand how a virus works. Like at all.

If you still insist on calling this the China virus. Don’t bother reading any further.
You are racist and dangerous.

Everybody else…

This virus is super new. I get that. New information is coming out all of the time. And we get it in real time. From varying sources. Some factual and data driven. Some semi factual and emotionally driven.

This is emotionally factual.

I am not a doctor.
I do have the ability to read and process information in a non-biased, non-reactionary way.
I question things. I fact check. I do my own research. I look for language clues in articles. I factor in variables.

I don’t expect others to do this, however, this is how I manage to stay calm.

Care to join me?

You want to keep being scared? I can’t stop you.

You want to keep re posting articles meant to scare you, just to scare other people?
Kinda mean and crazy but, okay I guess.

Seriously, why though.

Same psychological reason we prefer not to watch scary movies alone I suppose.
You could just turn the scary movie off, there’s that.
Besides, that would and possibly will be another article for another time.
Crisis Psychology 101, for Dummies

I am a bit angry at the media, a lot mad really.

Read 2 articles yesterday. Both reputable sources. I checked.

CAN MOSQUITOES CARRY COVID-19?
That was the attention-grabbing title. I saw 4 people repost it all freaking out.
I then opened the article and the answer is no.
So why not just say that in the first place?
Because you won’t click on it and in this day and age, a click is the same thing as buying a magazine or a newspaper, that is how they make money.

You are literally paying them to freak you out.

Can we please be done with the panic portion of the exercise now?

Stop reposting without reading the article. Look for words like ‘potentially, presumably, might possibly, maybe’ basically anything non-committal a fuck boy might say if you are asking if you are exclusive.

And my new nemesis.
REINFECTION. Everyone’s new favorite headline.

Open

The

Fucking

Article.

Read it. They use the word reinfection in the headline and switch to reactivation in the article.
There is no cure for COVID-19. Even a vaccine is not a cure. The difference between sick and well is viral load versus antibodies. How many foreign cells are present, are they active and replicating faster than your body can fight them off or inactive, not replicating or replicating at a manageable level.

Reactivation is different than reinfection. Reactivation means the minimum viral load necessary to register positive was not present at the time of one (OR 2) negative tests, and the virus multiplied again enough to register positive on yet another test.

The other reasonable explanation is human error. The negative wasn’t really a negative in the first place.
And buried in every REINFECTION article is a small disclaimer stating exactly both of the things I just said.

REINFECTION is sexy, scary, keeps us afraid.

And it isn’t really real.

Reactivation is common in viruses. Get a cold, feel like shit, feel a bit better then feel like shit again. Reinfection is rare and would mean that the person 100% for sure cleared the virus, went out and caught it again from someone else. That doesn’t really happen.

Chicken pox you get once (mostly), Norwalk viruses mutate, and you can catch them every few years.
My entire family had it this year, my immunity from having it 2 years ago prevented me from getting reinfected. See how that works? I had antibodies.

Antibodies from those infected from the SARS virus were still present 1 to 2 years after the initial infection. This is a good thing, means your body knows how to fight that particular thing. Same goes with flus and colds.

But this virus is new.
Hard data is rare, speculation is rampant. This is all theoretical.

There are two strains, and they are too close to each other to risk a true reinfection.
The antibodies produced from fighting strain L are good enough to fight strain S also.

Let me break it down.

Our bodies are exposed to viruses and bacteria all day long.
We do NOT get a lot of them for 3 reasons.
1. We survived a similar infection and our defense system created antibodies. Lil soldier cells that attack and kill virus cells on contact.
2. We have been exposed to small enough doses of a virus or similar virus that, over time, our lil soldier dudes already trained how to kill said virus. This is also a very base explanation for how vaccines work.
3. Our natural immune system, the one we were born with, came equipped with the soldiers to fight said virus.

This is why cousins should not have children. Our natural immune system is a double, combination of immunities from each parent, which are combinations of their parents etc… too close in the gene pool = sickly kids.

Your mom is immune to x y z, your dad is immune to a b x
You are immune to a b X y z

Alternately, when we travel really far from home, sometimes we need vaccines. Our bodies are not equipped to deal with certain viruses that are common in other countries. Bad, but easy example. Don’t drink the water in Mexico, everyone knows this right? Travelers Diarrhea, key word traveler. People who live in Mexico don’t run around shitting their pants all day every day. They have a natural immunity to the microorganisms that cause this, and/or a tolerance built up over time. Travelers do not.

So what about COVID-19. Its new. The presumption can be made no one is immune. Not so at all.
No virus is 100% infectious.
The cruise ships were for all intents and purposes, closed control groups.
100% exposure and rigorous testing for both the virus and antibodies after the fact.
Less than 1/3 tested positive for the virus AND antibodies.
People were directly exposed to the virus and did not catch it.
Let that sink in.

The options with this particular virus (any virus really) are as follows.

1. Exposure without infection
2. Exposure with infection but no symptoms
3. Exposure with infection and mild symptoms
4. Infection leading to severe symptoms

Some people are naturally immune, been exposed, did not get it at all, no way to count that number really.
Some people carry the virus and do not get sick, which seems to be a higher number than previously understood, means you have antibodies, also means you can transmit the virus to others until the viral load decreases*. Some people get sick and recover, which means you have antibodies.
Some people get sick and their bodies cannot produce antibodies fast enough to keep the viral load in check and the virus takes over which leaves the body susceptible to pneumonia and other issues and you don’t make it.

*This is what makes this particular virus both scary and not scary.
Usually you feel sick and are contagious on a short timeline.
This hangs out in your body, replicating for up to 14 days without you feeling sick at all. = Scary
You probably already had it or came in contact with it and did not get sick = less scary

I would love to have a handy dandy little graph to show you what percentage of who is what, but I don’t. No one does.

As it stands today, there are 7.7 billion people in the world. Most of them fall into category 1 or 2. Like really mostly. Up to 40% are 2.

If you scroll down on worldometers.com they split the numbers into active and resolved, then again into mild and critical. Today Italy had 100 000 active cases, all but 3000 are mild. 30 000 recovered.

It takes substantially longer to get a diagnosis of negative than to be registered as a positive. How many people are going to go running to the already overwhelmed hospitals if they are simply feeling better, finally.

In my opinion, just using logic, a vast portion of the population of earth, especially in urban areas have already been exposed to the virus. If you left your house in March and went anywhere other people were, you probably got micro-dosed at the least or fully exposed.

But this idea makes it less scary doesn’t it. So would mass antibody testing so people can stop being afraid of hypotheticals

As does looking at the number of tests processed versus positive tests.

• USA has held steadily at 4/5 tests being negative.
• Canada is 3 out of 4 are negative. A negative can easily turn into a positive yes, which is why we need antibody testing badly.
• But, the reason for bringing this up is it is easier to get a COVID-19 test in both of those countries if you can prove direct contact with a positive case or are presenting symptoms. Not easy by any stretch, just easier.

This is all based on my research and my perspective. I am totally fine being wrong or changing my mind when new information presents itself.

I wish everyone else would.

It is time to stop panicking and start being practical.

Stay home, stay safe.