“Family Distancing”

A semi-fiction by Jay Hass

To my grandson Noah –

December 31, 2020

I document this alarming account to you only days after the world has overcome a devastating pandemic that made life unbearable. In its time of blighting our weeks and months, simple joys that your parents and I had known our whole lives prior were radically altered. This modern “Armageddon” lasted nearly a year – about nine months, give or take, that you were lucky enough to get to (mostly) sleep through. So since it is only your 2nd birthday, you will not remember this nightmare first-hand, but I need to warn you of the retroactive impact it will have on your life in more subtle ways.

Consider for a moment all the freedoms you will one day know -- to just hop in your car for a drive, host a picnic in the park, hop a flight to Miami, attend an Ariana Grande concert! Running its course, the pandemic I speak of shut down every public, cultural and athletic event; airports were ghost towns. Liberties that society had always taken for granted were drastically impeded. Throughout its duration every human on the planet was at risk to contract and possibly succumb to the toxicity of the pathogen. The “coronavirus” made everyday air potentially deadly to breathe. If you have taken biology by the time you read this you will have learned that, despite their arrogance to the contrary, hubris human beings are not the superior power on earth they think they are, that even microorganisms invisible to the naked eye have the unseemly capability of wiping out the most robust of men.

Repeatedly throughout the nine months of this confinement I was reminded that incarceration had been a long-standing form of punishment dating back centuries, and so here we were, sentenced to the same punitive fate without just cause. It occurred to me: is it karma? What did the world do to deserve this? What did I do? Nevertheless, the coronavirus’ threat succeeded in relegating every human being to this aggravating confinement. It can’t be disputed that quarantining all of mankind was, ironically, the antithesis of bondage, that it was judicious, that it proved the most instrumental in vanquishing the rise of the pandemic. Still, to our family, natives of the United States – born with individualism in our DNA – this outlandish segregation duplicated restrictions that the most barbaric gulag could boast.

So, what did we do to while away the indeterminate number of unproductive hours we dreaded waking up to every day What a perfect time to rob a bank since it was required by law to wear a cotton mask in public! Everyone had to keep 6-feet apart from any stranger you passed. Small businesses closed for good, major corporations had to eliminate jobs that would be gone forever.

On the homefront, your grandmother and I refused to have physical contact with you. Being over 60 we were likely carriers of this undetectable contagion even if we didn’t display obvious symptoms. But thanks to technology we could at least see you via the computer, albeit in constant anxiety about seeing you in person ever again. Your grandmother and I (never big on technology; thus this old-fashioned letter) resumed the old routine that was common to us during our years as parents. We sought sweet refuge in things you have probably never heard of: board games, reading paperback books, unboxing a deck of cards. We even pulled out our old music maker, this machine called a record player, for the occasional foxtrot. During daylight hours your grandmother had her gardening while I took to improvising with wood and soldering projects in the garage, and finally getting around to household repairs I had no hope of excusing any longer -- though life was definitely more relaxing under the cover of darkness.

We were careful in exile, not particularly worried about contracting the contagion -- it was the cruel detachment from everyday, ordinary things that was excruciating. I very often felt glum. One day my brain whirled and flooded my thoughts with disturbing visions of an apocalyptic future that prophesized nothing but hopelessness for me, our family, for mankind. Such were our precarious circumstances when I confessed to your grandmother that I didn’t care if I caught the blasted disease and died. A coronavirus death could be extraordinarily painful. Your lungs became filled with fluid. You will feel as if you are drowning. And unless properly treated in a hospital, an option not available to many at the time, becoming a statistic of history was inevitable to an old duffer and his wife of thirty five years. So, is it any surprise, my (grand)son, that in these dark moments I nearly gave up my will to live? Fortunately, your gran and I looked forward to watching you grow up -- which kept us optimistic -- but not possessing the knowledge of when this stunted permanence was going to end, or even if, was a daily torment. We expended the minimal amount of energy every day during those nine months, but even that equated to mere existence, I tell you honestly now, not living. Yet, somehow we got through it, thank God. Now the question remains as to how life will be...going forward....

I worry more about your future than I do my own. And I’m so sorry, my

boy – like the conventional grandfather, I am without any sage advice to offer you. Typically, advice can only be passed on when prior knowledge and tradition are long-established. Sadly, this pastime no longer connects you and I. Any outlining of lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid that I had previously deemed useful to pass on, even as recently as one year ago, is now moot. Any morsel of wisdom that a grandfather in olden days would have felt proud and obligated to bequeath to a male heir is futile at this time. I, (we all), suspect that this New Dawning (or whatever it will be named) is going to require a massive restructuring from anything practiced in modern times. All proven results and scientific hypotheses known in the pre-virus era have been reset; age-old practices of medicine, finance, society have been wiped clean. The pandemic has leveled the playing field.

As I write this, mankind is reinventing itself and the world is hurtling back to what your parents and I consider “semi-normal”, though we remain vigilant to the new criteria of life, with all of its mysteries and challenges, will hold for you, your, and future generations.

Your loving, grandfather (and namesake) Noah H***

Thanks to "The Prose" for its format of serializing chapters. I started the first chapter of a novel on prose.com in 2016 and just this week finished the novel in its entirety. Don't think that would have happened without the audience on prose.com. Even if only one person read one entry, that encouraged me to keep going. That kind of "pressure" I recommend to anyone on prose.com who has a big project planned. Because we write in a vacuum, it is essential to feel that there is something in the future to aim for.

I have a second novel in my mind, gestating....

Think About It.......

All this trivial in-fighting over Trump. At most, six more years. Presidents are only figureheads. Sure, they do a little but others control the President, whoever it may be.

People have short memories. 45 years ago this month, Nixon resigned from office. It turns out that we are seeing much of the same. I want to say that it is political parties, political ideologies and career politicians of/in both parties that are to blame. We need more statesmen in politics. The contagions polluting US politics can be traced back to LBJ if not further. Watch Noam Chomsky on YouTube go down the list of presidents more than 50 years ago and listen to their own personal list (each one of them) of High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Sure, Trump has broken the mold on conduct in office. But it will be politics as usual in 2020. And, legislatively, we are going backwards -- immigration, abortion, health care -- rather than addressing new issues. Of course the Pentagon gets the increases in spending that it wants, and depletion allowances haven’t gotten reviewed. Can’t anybody see that Trump is not the problem even if he doesn’t attempt to stop something that has already been legislated?

No one single president is the problem. It is the domino effect in a long succession of presidents, their appointees, and the kids who are minding the cookie jar. How are well-known unscrupulous characters allowed to get jobs in the government? Everyone who worked for Nixon worked for Ford, then Reagan and the Bushs. Now Trump is drawing from a different, but not any less unscrupulous stockpile of criminals. Why is he allowed to hire his family and conduct his private business from the White House?

To sum it up: the average person could not do what the ruling class self-legislates itself to do, and politicians, although they work for taxpayers but seem to forget that, and don’t care anyway, are the elite, ruling class.

He was a little more than a block from his house when he was goaded into a dead run by her relentless pursuit. At the home-stretch he carried out an innate lunge onto the front porch of his house, but success turned to defeat when he realized it was hopeless to thwart the forward momentum propelling his body. His stars were aligned at that moment, pubescent neurons sparked, and he converted a straight jump drilled into his brain from seventh grade P.E. into a rolling front flip. Airborne, he congratulated himself…

Pretty damn good!

...being confident he’d land sure-footed on his porch. But he had under-estimated gravity: his tattered kicks never touched the ground and he crash-dove onto his doormat in a lump. Then, scrambling to his feet, sweat dripping off his face and trickling down his back, he turned the knob, hurried inside, slammed the door and locked it. Pressing his back against the door to reinforce it, and because it felt good, he gasped for breath. After several beats, his weight shifted and his backpack slid from his shoulders and onto the floor. Two seconds later, on a puddle of sweat, he lost his balance, slipped, and his 67-inch tall, 123 pound body came to rest on top of it all, his knees forked over his head in comic repose.

Am I hurt? Nah…but damn….

This type of return trip home was outlandish for him except for one specific afternoon when he was in sixth grade. He had sucker-punched Boris Decker and found himself making a not-quite-but-similar bee-line for the same front door...though that match-up, even through piles of snow and over slippery ice, had been a less desperate, much less foolhardy contest.

Neurons in his fifteen year-old brain triggered again and passed along information to his bruised ego that he had never hauled ass quite like this before. He had never had to: Decker knew his house number.

Tired!

It's not the President that is dysfunctional -- it is our political system. Let's identify that as the problem and make a move toward fixing it. It is going to take a long time. 

This dysfunction...from the 45th administration: it proves to be a distraction from reforms desperately needed for the people. All of the folderol being thrown at us takes our minds from social issues. Social issues? Corporations dating back to Rockefeller and Rothschild set the stage for the country, and still are. Wake up, people!

The Clintons and Bushes are lame ducks. If Hillary was not able to defeat an unknown Black senator in 2008, her time had passed before 2016. If Jeb Bush was not able to beat Donald Trump, his time in elected office has passed. It's bad enough that #41-#42-#43 only represent two American crime families. That was the beginning of the end. No sane person wants to run for President and I don't blame them. So we were left with two horrible choices in 2016.

Sorry, but I choose to "unplug". I rely now, purposefully, on Zen-inducing concerns.

Non-Sensical

I need to stop listening to news, tune out of social media, hibernate into a cocoon. I am too often frustrated and/or angered by damaging incongruities in message and thought. 

About religion I recently heard someone discounting Darwin's "Origin of Species". Because it is over 100 years old and it deflected original sin as documented by biblical renditions of creationism, Darwin's investors devised the plan to distract people from remembering the 8th commandment which, coincidentally, they were breaking as often as possible. Therefore, the commentator claimed, Genesis is the only legitimate story of the first man. It makes more sense for Creationism to trump Evolution for this reason.

About The News, ever since Bill Clinton regulated TV news as entertainment, that is exactly what it has become  -- speculation, gossip, and fabrication fashioned by true events. News is 24/7, 365, and news agencies are expected to generate profit. This is the corporate blueprint for entertainment outlets as well.

About social media, there are no superstars. Celebrity is bought, not earned. Any previous stables of talent have been diluted by amateurs, mediocrity. More flash-in-the-pan entertainers are needed to inhabit round-the-clock television and social media, even if they are, literally, "overnight" sensations.  

"Enough is Enough"

Let's start over. Let's go back in time a lot further than November 9. 2016. Let's go back about, oh, thirty five years --  a time when deregulation ran rampant. Deregulated institutions have no place to go except to stockholders. Social institutions such as prisons and the military are now corporate businesses that are run to generate a profit. Profits from private investors for armaments and prison overpopulation are not used appropriately: i.e., VA hospitals or halfway houses. This is not a cry for government regulation, only in certain cases, only for social institutions that have been set up as self-funding. The military and  the prison system are managed as big business, they must generate returns, at any cost. And with the wealthy who expect these returns, government regulations have been manipulated to guarantee these profits.

Just because we live in America, greed has won out. Social institutions are thus-ly named for a reason and need to remain so. They have been corrupted, and that has compromised their integrity.  

So sad. I refuse (anymore) to bait friends over subjective disagreements. The friendships are too valuable! I always felt my friendships could withstand diversity of opinions, but the recent political climate makes keeping a level head a veritable challenge.

Smart, intelligent people I know make erroneous choices and it saddens me. I have deduced that it boils down to news sources...where they choose to get their information. After all I wasn't there in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Had I been there and even been closely observing, invisible activities may have been at play, so this is why forensics and investigation are vital. Therefore, opinion of events can only be gathered on what professionals espouse. But some, like myself, look at materials available and often can't believe my eyes. And won't.

I concur how lack of time and intense passion about an issue can make one satisfied, therefore: no longer curious. Though I do not believe everything I read in school or see on the internet as legitimate, discretion and good judgment are more needed than ever in the pursuit of an answer. So you make good contacts and skeptically listen, just soak it all in, using your good judgment and discretion always. You are being objective.

There is an underbelly. What has saddened me most, lately, is the genuine denial I have seen -- those who get their information from sources that, though may not practice actual deceit, reticence is a form of lying. Add that lack of informing to denial and you have concocted a recipe for a lot of wrong and harmful thinking. Naivete plays a part when one is OCPD and cannot possibly comprehend political and military events/decisions on the grandest of scales. 

It's so sad.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Where there ain't respect, there can only be indifference or dislike -- even hatred. Respect is genuine trust and appreciation in someone or something. Think about it, really think about it...count all of the people you truly respect. Judge a man by his intent, I suppose. Everyone makes mistakes but did the bad judgment come from black bile in the person's heart and liable to be much repeated?

I write about respect because as I grow older my criteria for who or what I deserves my respect has risen drastically. For instance, no politician can possibly be respected, nor a religious leader either. You need integrity to get my respect. Another example is, very few professionals working in the media are worthy of emulation or praise. It pretty much boils down to greed: if you toil in your field because you love wealth, or are greedy, or a crook, you are not employed for your natural skills and passion for your field. Therefore, you do not have my respect. 

I say that respect must be earned. If you beat your children, assault your spouse, you are not to be respected just because of your marital or genetic relationship to them. Strive to give your family thoughts and actions that are respectful. Mostly, respect yourself  first and foremost.  

The world cannot survive unless respect and honor are made a priority.