Ken's Blog

When you are waiting out a global pandemic, you sometimes have food delivered. As it turns out, you don’t always know exactly what you will get.

This weekend I opened up a package of yummy Gardein brand frozen plant-sourced burgers, and did not see exactly what I expected to see. Below, you can see the label on the packaging:

Toward the bottom left, if you look carefully, you can see that the package states that you get four burgers per serving. I have purchased these burgers many times before, and that has always been a true and accurate statement.

But this time, when I opened the package, I got a surprise:

As you can clearly see, there are not four, but six frozen plant-sourced burgers inside. Somehow, two extra frozen plant-sourced burgers decided to come along for the ride.

It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a secure yet easily opened plastic wrapping. It seems that I am the recipient of a mutant Gardein burger package.

But I am not complaining. If providence wants to send me more of them, then to providence I just say thanks for the burgers.

This evening I finally saw The Bob Newhart episode of The big bang theory, and I am very happy.

If you’ve ever seen it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

I am very happy right now.

Usually I think of cleaning a room as a chore. But it turns out that there are notable exceptions.

When you are cooped up in one physical space, and don’t have the option to leave, the place where you are takes on new significance. Your electronic presence may roam the world, but your corporal body remains bounded by four walls.

Today I’ve been engaged in radical room cleaning. I’m putting things into neat piles, separating out the useful from the less useful, throwing out the clearly useless.

And it feels absolutely wonderful. It’s as though I am putting my entire world into order.

Which, in a sense — considering the current circumstances — I am.

In some traditional Passover Seders, children love the fact that a portion of the matzoh, called the Afikoman, is hidden by the head of the household somewhere in the house for the children to find. Usually the hiding place is chosen very cleverly, but the children always find it anyway.

This Passover, when everything has gone virtual, and my brother and sister-in-law held their Seders over Zoom, there was a need to improvise. Each Passover there are two Seders, and tonight was the second Seder, when my brother and sister-in-law often plan something whimsical (last year the Seder was run as a game of Dungeons and Dragons).

The idea for this’s year Zoom Seder was to have people contribute a song. You start with the melody of a well known song, then substitute original lyrics on a Passover theme. Everyone sings along, and sometimes the goal is to get people to laugh as they gradually realize what they are singing.

I contributed several, but I was particularly pleased by one. It is sung to the tune of “Found a Peanut” (you know: “Found a peanut, found a peanut, found a peanut last night…”). Below are the first three verses:

Afikoman, afikoman, afikoman last night
Last night I found the afikoman
Afikoman last night

In the bathroom, in the bathroom, in the bathroom last night
Found the matzoh in the bathroom
In the bathroom last night

Ate it anyway, ate it anyway, ate it anyway last night
Last night I ate it anyway
Ate it anyway last night

I have been having a number of conversations with friends in recent days about how particularly odd is this pandemic. It’s not that we haven’t gone through difficult times before — we certainly have.

It’s that no other tragedy in our lifetimes has utterly changed the nature of society. The very way that people connect has changed, in fundamental ways. Ways of personal connection that we thought were immutable have ceased full stop.

One topic that comes up often is how we will describe this time to those who are not yet born. It might be impossible to truly comprehend to anyone who has not actually lived through it.

I imagine it might be something like the dilemma facing soldiers who came back from the front in WWI and WWII. There was no way to truly convey what they had gone through, so in many cases they simply did not try.

The difference is, of course, that in this case the “front” is everywhere. So the question is not so much what we will tell our children, but how we will tell them.

This evening, tired of watching all the sad TV news reports about the current situation, I went out for a walk. It was a beautiful night, not a cloud to be seen, the sky opening up dark and beautiful above me.

Tonight is a full moon, and I bathed in the light of Luna in all her glory, as Venus shone like a precious Jewel in the sky, while Orion fairly leapt out at me, as I vmarveled at the strangely uncharacteristic dimness of Betelgeuse.

These majestic objects out in the universe provide so much beauty. Yet in their vastness and their majesty they are indifferent to both the triumphs and tragedies of human life down here on Earth.

For reasons I cannot quite explain, at a time like this I find their serene indifference to be strangely comforting.

For obvious reasons, I’ve been watching a lot more YouTube than usual. Which means I see a lot of ads.

Ads are weird. On the one hand, I appreciate them. Without ad revenue, the entire economy of “free” on-line videos wouldn’t exist.

On the other hand, the entire concept is strange. People are trying to sell things, so advertisers put enormous amounts of time and effort into making slick videos to grab the attention of viewers.

But all those viewers really want to do is skip the ads. At the earliest possible moment, a typical viewer will click on the button that skips the remainder of the ad.

So it becomes an oddly adversarial ecosystem. People put enormous amounts of effort in to making ads to lure in viewers, yet those same viewers hate the ads, and consider them a nuisance.

Isn’t it amazing that this is the basis for one of the largest sectors of our economy?

We just went through a period where most of the people I know left their abodes only for essentials, and even then with trepidation. A trip to the grocery required wipes, latex gloves, perhaps some face covering and a plastic spray bottle filled with antiseptic alcohol, ever on the ready.

But today that game has changed. The government is now telling us not to go out even for groceries. Order in if you can. If all else fails, get take-out from a restaurant.

Which means we may all be shut in for the long haul. We will meet each other socially on-line, do our double dates over Zoom, pretend to share a beer. But we won’t actually be in physical contact with people outside our household.

These habits will start to be ingrained, as they become integrated into our daily rituals. I wonder whether, after we are once again free to roam the earth, we will have found ourselves changed in fundamental ways.

Maybe we won’t enjoy the bar or restaurant crowded with strangers in quite the same way. We might get an uneasy feeling when packed tightly into a concert venue.

In the future, we might all acquire agoraphobia. But that’s not the strangest thing. No, the strangest thing is that being agoraphobic might simply come to seem normal.

I know two people who have started a practice of meeting each other once a week for a virtual lunch. Each time they agree to discuss a topic of interest.

They have established only one rule, by mutual agreement: There is one topic they never discuss.

I probably don’t need to tell you what the topic is. Here is a hint: You almost certainly have already heard this topic discussed many times today.

I think it’s a great idea. After all, in times like this we don’t just need to look after our physical well being. We also need to consider our mental well being.

Bill Kemp, the Governor of Georgia, just in the last day issued a stay-at-home directive for his state. But the astonishing thing is how he explained the lateness of his decision. Here is what he said, in his own words:

“What we’ve been telling people from directives from the CDC for weeks now that if you start feeling bad stay home, those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad. But we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours.”

There is clearly something wrong with this statement. As we all know, the CDC made has been warning since mid-February about documented cases of asymptomatic transmission.

Which brings us to the most interesting word in Kemp’s announcement.

That word is “we”. When Kemp says that “we” didn’t know, who else could the governor possibly be referring to, in addition to himself? After all, Americans have been glued to the TV for weeks, so we have all been quite aware for some time that asymptomatic transmission of COVID19 is a very real and present danger.

I did some research, and came up with some candidates. At the governor’s mansion they have a German shepherd named Rhett and a golden retriever named Bailey. And at their farm in Athens, Georgia, the Kemps keep a horse named Lula, a goat named Butterscotch, and a sheep named Miracle.

So there you have it. If we simply expand beyond the restrictive category of “must be human”, we indeed find individuals in Kemp’s personal sphere who would not have known about the dangers of asymptomatic transmission. So I could be convinced to take the good governor at his word.

But it might take a Miracle.