At 12:01 am this morning, seven Bay Area counties went into Shelter In Place. From now until April 7, you have to remain at home indoors unless going to get food, going for medical reasons (including care taking duties) or going to a designated essential job. Which, well, my employer may be essential but my role is at best “the guy behind the guy behind the guy”, and we are doing everything 100% remote until made to do otherwise. Which seems to be working, as I have already been remote for almost two weeks at this point owing to trying to be sure I could have my corticosteroid injections on time.
For a long time, when asked for my vision of what I would like life to be like, it was that whole small town where I could work 100% remote, walled off from the bullshit of Silicon Valley and the real world. Now, through no fault of my own, I’m almost going to be test-driving that vision for a minimum of three weeks. Which is sort of a “careful what you ask for” thing…I don’t know how much longer the closest purveyors of takeout food and sorta-groceries will continue to be open, and the restaurants further out that are doing curbside takeout pickup may not have that long to function without some kind of financial relief. I suspect there’s a real chance this will trend less wish-fulfillment and more slow-motion apocalypse, but that’s not a right-now problem.
At least we’re acting. It’s difficult not to feel like this crisis interprets the Tr*mp Administration as damage and routes around it. California has been ahead of the curve on scaling down gatherings, and if putting the Bay on lockdown is going to bend the curve, then let’s !-ing go. I’ve got beer and snacks enough to last two or three days, in confidence that we’ll still be able to go get groceries and the like. Which may be foolish, because it’s who knows where this thing could go from here, but we have some canned goods and the usual earthquake supplies. Our 72-hour quake planning was sound, so now we just have to keep outrunning three days.
So now we work remote, we Zoom and FaceTime with friends and family who need contact, we watch Ken Burns documentaries and brew coffee and wait for Sunday when it’s probably going to be farmers’ market time again, and we see what’s doing tomorrow. And tomorrow. Win the day, keep going. That’s where we are right now in 2020, which is honestly where we’ve been all along.