It is a lovely and soft and warm and sunny April morning and I am having my second cup of coffee after a little walk in the early light. It's part of my learning to live again in what I call my post-plague life. I, alas, had a very close encounter with the Virulent Virus and I am more or less learning to walk and talk again. Sometimes my eyesight is still a little fuzzy, which may be part of the reason the morning seems soft.
How did I, who lives out here on the edge of nowhere and never sees anybody up close and who hasn't been in a crowd for years, catch the plague? Well of course the obvious answer is that I breathed in some of the little beasties, and they found my lungs a happy home and soon I was coughing and sore all over my body and had a fever and could hardly move. But there is I think a more important reason, and that is not so much the availability of the virus as the unavailability of human interaction linked with a general languor brought about by the lock down.
In my 'normal' life I go out into the big world every day, and hang out at coffee shops where I can sit in the window and watch the beautiful people go by while I sip my espresso. During the lockdown, all I could do was buy a paper cup of not-very-good drip coffee and take it far away from the other people, ugly or beautiful. In my 'normal' life I ate out a lot. I'm lazy, so when I remodeled my little tin can nearly four years ago, I just didn't put in a kitchen so I would never have to clean a stove again. During the lockdown, what food that was available to eat out was over-priced--I mean, the restaurants still have their normal expenses--and in styrofoam containers with plastic forks. So, gradually, I went out less and less and became lazier and lazier, often just having cold cereal for brekkers instant ramen for dindin. But for most of the Covidian Captivity, I still got in a bit of exercise every day. My smart watch, an LG until last January and then and Apple Watch for two months, would nag me into just moving another thirteen minutes and nine seconds to close some wonderful ring for another merit badge. Annoying, but probably life-saving. And then I got tired of all things Apple, and I sold the watch. And no one nagged me to go that extra 267 yards. And it rained. And I quit my usual walking circuit of duck pond and building sites and probably even worse, I quit riding my bike to buy more Cheerios and ramen, because of the mud, and took the bus. Which is probably where the virus found my lungss.
So, post-plague, I have a nice bright new nagger, a made-in-China TikWatch something or another. And it nags me delightfully well. This morning, no sooner had I finished my first cup of coffee and eaten my Cheerios--Cheerios with bananas and cranberries and cottage cheese and milk--but it told me it was time to move around a bit. So, I went out into the top of the morning and walked .45 miles and enjoyed the budding plants along the way.
I do not intend to host the Virulent Virus or any other inconvenient disease again if I can help it. And since I am by nature a lazy bum, I will put up with a bit of nagging along the way.
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