Tag: Mrs. UpintheValley

Cat Lady Summer

Nineteen down, half a dozen to go. But who can tell?

“Yes, there was a Cat Zero and yes the man, a former tenant, brought it on property as a gift to his girlfriend who didn’t want it and yes he may have set her free in the yard and maybe another cat came over the fence to hang out but everything after that was like fog rolling down a hillside. What can you do but watch? We don’t feed them or anything, except the woman living in the garage does so maybe that’s on her.”

Zelda appeared in the spring, a spindly black feline residing in the bamboo along the back fence, sneaking into the kitchen to loot unguarded kibble, belly scraping the ground.

We already have four cats.  Additionally, Mrs. UpintheValley has for years fed a feral tribe off the front porch, veterans of the cat colony crisis of 2013, when she trapped, neutered and released 46 neighborhood ferals.

It took a decade for Darwin and Nature to reduce their numbers to a lone snuffling, arthritic, gooey-eyed survivor, who waits quietly in the evening for leftovers.

Things were back to what passes for normal around here, and suddenly this interloper, this furry child of Biafra had entered the garden.

Then Zelda disappeared for awhile. When she returned, the belly was gone, and praise Jesus, no kittens. I toasted the coyote, the raccoon, the neighborhood eating machine which intervened on our behalf. Thank you blessed nature, for your dispassionate cruelties.

One morning a few weeks later, four adorable kittens are cavorting on the back patio, mocking us. They had been living in the pocket of space between the back fence and the neighbors back fence. Ha!

Did I mention Zelda is less than six months old?

Two houses away, we have our own little slice of Appalachia in Van Nuys, a compound of trailers, junked cars and shanties owned by a mentally challenged man who rents spaces to a revolving cast of marginal characters, high functioning druggies, and from whence it must be said, we have heard the late night yowls of estrus.

Two dozen un-neutered cats back there, Mrs. U discovered. Four of them pregnant. Which would put us on the brink of leaving the fourth tier of the flow chart, which is to say Cat Crisis II: This Time It’s Math!

So she set to work, starting with the low hanging fruit, the kittens, who will walk right into a carrier and go to sleep if you leave some treats.

The East Valley Animal Shelter was not pleased to receive them: WHY ARE YOU BRINGING THEM TO US? WE HAVE NO ROOM FOR THEM. THEY’RE NATURAL PREDATORS. LEAVE THEM WHERE THEY ARE!

Things have changed since 2013, and not for the better.  She put out an SOS on a feline trappers website only to be told: “I personally do not take in kittens any more, and the rescue I work with is stuffed full and has to turn away 20-30 requests like this every day. And that’s just the beginning of the bad news. There literally is not a single good option for them. Vet appointments are impossible to come by, spay/neuter clinics are booked out 2-3 months or more ahead. Three or more years ago, this situation could have been solvable. Now it’s not.”  

As advertised, it took months to get traps and appointments. This summer has been a long slog of evenings walking over to West Virginia, setting/checking the traps and mornings driving to FixNation under the indifferent gaze of the feckless people who set so much chaos into motion.

White people, raised in California, living rent free in someone else’s house. This detail shouldn’t bother me, but I can’t get past it. Their indifferent selfishness feels metaphoric.

When Mrs. U brought in two pregnant felines at the clinic at one time, there was high-fiving all around.

The last pregnant cat remained elusive, and rather clever about traps. As the days ticked by, her belly spreading like a pig in a python, drama built. A veteran trapper was recruited from Silver Lake. She got the job done with a net.

We whisked her, bones and belly, to FixNation with her litter just about poking from her nether regions, on the last open appointment Mrs. U could get. The grace of small victories.

A cat does not have the ability to alter its thinking.  It eats, and poops, and licks its paws and makes little cats. What does it say about us we are overrun with easily resolvable problems of our own creation?  Who will rescue us from our own disordered belief?

It is magical thinking to believe we can maintain an equitable nation without a border and maintain cities without law enforcement. Yet here we are, coasting on assumptions of the world pre-2020. Arrangements which always worked before will therefore continue to work even though the structural underpinnings they rely on have been removed.

Spoiler alert: No one is coming.  No blue-ribboned panel of government experts is going to descend to set the world right. We have only ourselves.

This morning little Zelda hangs out by the kitchen door, mewling, waiting for Mrs. U to break her resolve not to feed.  It’s a test of wills. I know who is going to win this one.

Mrs. U’s Victory Garden

About 20 years ago I was at a wedding, talking with an old guy who grew up in L.A. in the 1930s. He graduated from Manual Arts High School. I told him how envious I was he got to live in the city before freeways and strip malls and straight pipe mufflers and tagging and homeless encampments.

He looked at me like I was stupid. “1934 was horrible. I was hungry.”

Yeah, yeah. But one third the population. The Red Car. Craftsman bungalows everywhere. No smog. Jake Gittes.

Like a putz, I began embellishing with film references. The man grew noticeably upset. Indignant.

“You don’t understand. I was hungry. Understand? I waited in line with my mother for flour to make bread.”

We have not had shortages of basic goods since the 1970s. We haven’t had hunger since the Great Depression.

Ours has been a world of ever cheaper calories, of YouTube testimonials of retail ‘hauls’ –look at everything I got at Aldi for $100!- of gout-ridden families waddling through Target, their carts piled with pizzas and cereal and impulse buys. Long supply chains and just-in-time inventory work really well until there is a bump in fertilizer costs. Or a lost shipping corridor. Or the price of fuel per tractor/day goes from $68 to $128. Or the price of barley feed from $295 to $470/ton.  That’s just in America.

Potash and urea have quadrupled on the international markets. The Ukraine spring planting (25% of the global wheat) has been curtailed for obvious reasons.

Cheap food, like cheap fuel, may no longer be possible for the foreseeable future.  Some of us may have to relearn the lived experience of our great grandparents, the people who saved their bacon grease and kept their money in mattresses.

Fortuitously and wholly unrelated to global events,  Mrs.UpintheValley decided this was the year she would garden in earnest. Back in January we put together some containers, thinking it might be pleasant, not realizing it was like buying BitCoin in 2017.

I built four of these for her. Each four feet by eight, 18 inches deep. Materials were about $100 per. Half the lumber was recycled. She filled the bottom with free chips, followed by one third compost, free from the city, about half bagged soil, and then a layer of mulch on top, also free. Looking left to right you can see the stages of filling, and the string line grid.

If you’re a salad freak like us, it’s a bowl of Eden every day, courtesy of Mother Earth.

If you plot it correctly, you can pack a lot of food in a small space. The fourth box is strictly for tomatoes, though they are all babies now.

New York Times

With government mandated food rationing in effect during WW II, gardens flourished across Los Angeles. In 1942, roughly 15 million families planted home crops; by 1944, an estimated 20 million victory gardens produced roughly 8 million tons of food—40 percent of all the fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States.

Believe it or not, she used it all

Good times make for weak men. Weak men make for hard times. Hard times make for stronger women. Strong women bring back tolerable times.

Everyone Is Lying. Merry Christmas!

On Saturday I drove a trio of beauties to the pageant of pulchritude at Petit Hermitage in West Hollywood, young women who spent the trip altering PDF files of Covid tests to satisfy the doorman.

There was never any question of their gaining entry, Wuhan status be damned. Take it from someone who knows, the nightclub economy is founded on the presence of such women being prominently visible.  How else can you charge $2000 for a table and move discount champagne from Costco at $2o a flute?  Stretch pants and cleavage…

On Monday, I moseyed down to mandate-free Santa Monica for dinner, and was irritated to learn this particular restaurant was asking for proof of vaccination. Neither my companion nor myself being vax-submissive, we turned to leave, as which point the hostess rather furtively urged us to just show her our phones.  She looked at our blank screens, smiled broadly and seated us amidst the other unmasked diners who may have been showing  proof or nothing at all.

In June we had a preference cascade where everyone took their masks off. This winter we have a preference cascade for fake paperwork.

We’ve entered the public hypocrisy phase of late stage Communist nations. They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.

Behold the mission failure of Wuhan Zero. Behold the arrogance of the administrators who claimed they would stop a virus. Mutations of the 1918 Spanish Flu are with us today, but Omicron is the little people’s fault for insufficient obeisance to diktats from on high. If only we ignored the adverse event profile and lined up for the vaccine which turns to not to be a vaccine after all, if only we would submit to a protocol of semi-annual shots, and masks, and distancing, and permission slips for family gatherings, it would be over.  Our liberties will be restored.  Why can’t we be nudged toward perfection?

Not a true statement. Not even close.

Masks will protect us, says Fauci, knowingly lying. Children are at risk of Covid, schools should be closed. That too is a lie. People who have a positive PCR test actually have Covid, also a lie. Here’s another lie, squared: the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration are discredited frauds.

I am science, says Fauci, lying abundantly, those who question my policy are anti-science.

Here’s a little science: the “vaccines” neither prevent infection nor transmission, and have a useful life cycle of less than six months, obliging the CDC to quietly rewrite the definition of the term vaccine.  Boosters appear to be of little use against Omicron, a mutation beyond the reach of Pfizer and Moderna. Natural immunity following infection has proven the strongest, ideal resistance.

If I said this on Twitter, Facebook or IG, I would be de-platformed for trafficking in misinformation.  This would be a lie, wholly endorsed by the legacy media, eager to license free speech on its terms. Their answer to Omicron, as is Fauci’s, is more jabs and silencing questions.

Have you noticed no one is talking about herd immunity anymore? Herd immunity has an off-ramp, and we can’t have that. Wuhan metrics now reference deadlines of total compliance. Deadlines perpetually pushed back weeks or months in the face of passive resistance from those lying liars, the segment of the public insensible to bullying.

Here are therapeutic protocols which have proven to work at scale:
-Vitamin D
-Ivermectin
-Hydroxychloroquine
-Zinc
-Monoclonal antibodies
-Exercise in the sunshine

Here’s what hasn’t worked: keeping everyone indoors, sedentary and isolated, for two years.  Sending people who test positive home to wait until they develop respiratory failure before a treatment protocol is offered. Putting people on respirators.

Guess which we are obligated to lie about?

The Clerisy’s ideal citizen. Very on brand for 2021 and ready to inform on others.

Here is wisdom, from an older source: there is nothing new under the sun. Viruses have been with us since the beginning.  So has human folly. One can no more eradicate the mutations of the former than one could frailties of character.  Hubris and arrogance are with us always. It is our nature.

Tonight we celebrate the birth of Christ, who had something to say about man’s fallen nature and the futility of earthly perfection. People will light candles and publically lie about believing in Him. Others will lie to themselves in an effort to discount any possibility his revelation might prove true, then quietly fulfill his teachings.

Mrs. UpintheValley hasn’t darkened the door of a church in a decade. Tonight she’s going to sneak a $100 gift card into the mailbox of a neighbor who is struggling to pay her bills.  One could say she has been infected with an irrepressible urge to commit virtue.

I take comfort in the assumption He will not return in my lifetime as I fear we just might kill him all over again. In the meantime, let us live not by lies. Let us build our immune systems. Merry Christmas!

Breaking Apples


Two years ago, UTLA went out on strike for a 6% pay increase and Vista Middle School was selected as one of the sites for a picket line. As a neighbor and husband of a teacher, I walked up there in an act of skeptical solidarity, to see how the shakedown of Los Angeles taxpayers was progressing.

What struck me at the time was the amount of honking support they received from passing cars in working-class Latino Van Nuys.

The outcome was preordained. The union banged the spoon and L.A. surrendered everything it wanted.   Plus seconds. And dessert. What followed was Soviet-era astroturfed propaganda from UTLA bathing in the adulation of a grateful public, paid for by…the same public, who had no say in the matter.

Fast forward to 2020, and to the Wuhan virus.  In a time of shared sacrifice and difficulty, guess who didn’t want to report to work and had the power not to do so and to be paid anyway?

Only 36% of students in L.A. Unified regularly engaged in distance learning, i.e. turned in homework and completed tests, i.e., received an education.  This is desertion in the face of the enemy.  It would be bad to do this to kids for a semester. For three semesters in a row, across two academic years?

Suffice to say, this is not what schools are doing in China. Or Korea. Or Europe. Or Texas.  This is not what is happening at the prep school where Mrs. UpintheValley teaches.

Getty Images

What if Wuhan isn’t killing people so much as breaking America as we once understood it? What if the pandemic is a political toxin in medical drag?

To judge it by its works, if you were told a year ago that one-third of small businesses would be put to death by government policy, would you have believed me?  What if I said the richest men in America would see their fortunes expand by 50%, also due to government policy? That the educational divide between public and private schools would become unbridgeable? That the tectonic plates between those who could telecommute and the service class who delivered their comforts would shift to the point they no longer touched? That the chief beneficiary of these changes would be China itself, which would exercise a veto over the discussion of pandemic origins by dangling the carrot of access to its markets? That the infrastructure of think tanks and academic departments which might serve as a bulwark of market critique would be revealed to be funded by China? That Zoom would become indispensable to our work life and TikTok embedded in our play and both would be Chinese owned? That teenagers in Wuhan would be throwing Lollapalooza-sized pool parties while Americans cowered in masks in the outdoors, fearing a scold of Karens. That bureaucrats would presume extra-constitutional powers. That the first amendment would become fully fungible to corporate diktats. That every cable network would maintain a death clock that magically disappeared with the departure of Trump, the first president to renegotiate trade agreements with China in terms more favorable to American workers, if only slightly.

A more fearless America, during the 1969 Swine flu

That’s a lot of damage for 12 months. We can’t do much about geopolitical arrangements, but we can do something about Vista Middle School.  We know a few things we didn’t know a year ago. Children are not at risk and are low vectors of transmission. Teachers are not retail workers.  They can temp check every child who enters the building. They can demand plexiglass barriers and daily disinfection of classrooms. They can also accept the reciprocal obligations of public service to the working-class Van Nuysians who supported them when they were banging the spoon for more money.

Defibrillator Man, Gunshot Guy and Dr. Slick

Me: Can I take my appendix home with me?
Nurse: No, no. If it comes from the body, it goes to pathology.
Me: Did I creep you out by asking?
Nurse: I’ve heard it all and seen it all. I once had a patient covered with swastika tattoos tell me he didn’t want a nigger to touch him. I say to him: Would you prefer death?
Me: God commands us to be colorblind
Nurse: This is what I think. He doesn’t exist.  I am from Africa. There is no explanation for the suffering of children you see in the third world.  American people don’t understand suffering. We quarrel over the smallest things.

Then she wheeled me into the operating room.

Last Sunday I woke with tenderness and discomfort in my lower right abdomen which spread outward during the day and grew more painful to the touch.  My belly began to distend.  As someone who goes to the doctor about once every 25 years, my first instinct was to wait it out.  Then I remembered my friend Paul.

Back in the aughts, he went to an ER in Los Angeles presenting with abdominal pain.  After a few hours, they sent him home with antibiotics and some medication.  His pain worsened. In the morning he returned to the ER, jaundiced. Overnight his appendix had burst and peritonitis had set in. They intubated him. A comic writer and actor, he entertained everyone with jokes on a small whiteboard. Five hours after walking in under his own power he was dead. His fiance was 7 months pregnant.

Mrs. UpintheValley remembered Paul as well and insisted on driving me to Valley Presbyterian which is how I came to lay in a gurney at 2 am listening to Defibrillator Man on the other side of the curtain bellow at the nursing staff for more Oxy 30.  D-Man is what is known in the medical trade as a frequent flyer. The fire department wheeled him in, along with his garbage bags, complaining of heart palpitations and squeezings and whatnot.

“It’s my own faults for skipping dialysis this week.”  He smoked Newport 100s up until his first heart attack.  He’s had four. Now he wheels his own defibrillator with him in his wanderings around the Valley.  Prolonged litigation ensued with the nursing staff over which arm to put the saline drip.

“Not the left. That’s where all the hard veins are.  You’ll never get the needle in. You have to use this one over here. It still good.”
“That one won’t work, sir.”
“You telling me I don’t know my veins? I asked for my Oxy 30 an hour ago!”

It had been about five minutes. This argument recycled itself.  There was a wet splash on the linoleum and a satisfied groan from D-Man.

“I told you so.”

Against my nature and my politics, I sympathized with him more than I should.  Pain changes you.  So does addiction.   It was not my finest hour, nor his. We were two men of similar age but very different lives separated for the moment by a wisp of curtain.

The nurse poked his head in to give me the results of the CT scan: acute appendicitis, not yet burst.

“I’m going to give you some morphine now. How much would you like?
“As little as possible.”

As little as possible flattened me to the gurney. For a precarious moment, I was Ewan McGregor falling through the carpet in Trainspotting.  A flash of paranoia: in all the mishegas they must have given me Defibrillator Man’s dosage by mistake. Yes, I must be O.D.ing. This is what it feels like. I am about to be a cautionary tale at a local nursing school. “This is why Kevin is working retail now…”

But no, it was just morphine doing what it has done for centuries.

They brought me upstairs to a private room with 12-foot ceilings and a window facing south, protected from the sun by a run of trees. Quiet as a monastery. Pleasingly asymmetrical. I was on the second floor of one of the two original circular pod towers designed by William Pereira in 1958, a groundbreaking innovation at the time.  The charge nurse was astonished to hear me praise my accommodation.

“Usually I have to apologize for putting anyone here. People hate this room. It’s too small. They prefer the new annex building. The bathrooms there are about as big as this room.”

What can I say? It was bigger than my bedroom. There were no bright lights and annoying beeps, no moaning effluence two feet away.  I was in God’s Hotel.

Valley Pres at its booster-ish conception was the epitome of mid-century modern cool. It was also, like the freeway system and the water pipes, woefully inadequate in size and scope for the city it served. A street grid for over a million people had already been laid across the Valley, and everyone pretended a hospital of this size was sufficient. Permits were easy then, planning negligible.  A third tower, twice as tall, was added in 1966, then support buildings, parking structures, the annex. Today the original building is stripped of its iconic metal shutters that kept the sun off the windows, a forgotten starter home dwarfed by larger McMansions, barely visible from the street.

Gunshot Guy was on the gurney to my left as we waited for our turn in the operating bay.   He lay fetally on his side, his foot poking out from the blankets, wrapped in a rugby ball-sized swath of bandages.

“Are you on cocaine right now?  It’s okay we don’t judge.”
“How much cocaine did you take?”
“How much heroin are you using?”
“Is that daily? The anesthetist needs to know before we operate.”
“We can remove the bullet, and reset the bones, but you will have difficulty putting any weight on it for a long time.”
“We have a physical therapist to help you re-learn walking.”

Gunshot Guy mumbled his responses from underneath the blankets.   The double doors opened and they wheeled in an obese woman, who recited her list of surgeries to a captive audience of nurses as though a reality show film crew were in the hallway with us, recording her every word.  First had been her ankle, then her hip, then her back, and now her neck. The injustice of human frailty was ascending her body like a clan of mountaineering trolls.

“This is so unfair. I’m only 48 years old. I’m too young for this shit.”

At this juncture, the African nurse bent into view to tell me with perfect colonial grammar and a baroque accent she would be shaving my groin. I wondered if she would use a straight razor. I considered all the comedic possibilities of my testes and Murphy’s Law.  Her face was filled with exactly the compassion one seeks at such a moment, and it was here we had our lovely conversation about God and suffering.

I was in the best hands, she assured me. Dr. Slick would be attending to me.

LBJ and his gallbladder scar
The day after Dr. Slick

I had heard of Dr. Slick from the E.R. nurse the night before. Also from the floor nurse upstairs and the attending physician. How lucky I was to catch him!  They all said how fast he was, a virtuoso with a laparoscope.  My only association with speed and medicine was Dr. Nick Riviera from The Simpsons, and the creepy lobotomist in the film Frances, so it was a relief to be greeted by a guy who looked like an accountant but had a roll in his step like a professional athlete.  I was easily his most boring case of the day. He would be going through my belly button and a 5mm opening on my left side.

“Count backward from 100,” they said once I was situated on the table.  I decided to recite the Lord’s Prayer instead. I got as far as “our father, who art in…”

Erocide, USA

America 2020, waiting for tokens

Suppose you woke one morning to find yourself inside a sci-fi film…

…where no one was allowed to show their face in public. Everyone had to stand six feet apart and line up in rows for basic goods and services.  Most small businesses were closed by government policy but corporate chains like Target were declared essential and prospered.  People who couldn’t telecommute were paid to be idle.  Paid more than what they were earning before the movie started.

No one was allowed to name the virus or its point of origin. To say the words Wuhan or Chinese or was to self-denounce as racist and risk de-platforming.  The limits of speech were proscribed by three tech companies in San Francisco which made no apologies.  Without an ability to organize online, resistance dwindled.   People were bribed with their own money to be docile (TBC: their children’s future earnings)  and they accepted it.   They gave the minutiae of their lives to Chinese software.  They streamed webcams on 5G internet switching from Huawei. They made TikTok videos and attended Zoom cocktail parties.

Drug dealers and pizza delivery and porn prospered.  The fat and unhappy got a little fatter and unhappier than they were already.  Main Street declined, the stock market boomed. In the name of safety the media normalized this, then the rest of us. We agreed to be faceless in public.  There are no emojis IRL to hint at irony or dissent.

Schools were closed to in-person instruction.  Students pretended to attend online and were handed “diplomas” in the form of yard signs. They queued up in cars for graduation while teachers danced and waved goodbye.

On any given day only 36% of middle and high school students in Los Angeles participated, i.e., submitted work, took tests, posted on a discussion board.  Another 25% logged on, but didn’t participate.  40% never showed up at all.

Knowing the kill rate on distance learning was 64%, the teacher’s union refused to return to the classroom in the fall.   They had terms:

1% wealth tax
1% millionaire tax
3.3% income tax raise
$250 million federal bailout
A moratorium on charter schools
Paid sick leave for parents of sick kids
Defunding of police
Medicare for all
Homeless housing as a “right”

That these wishes were not politically possible, or virus related, was beside the point. With taxpayer money, UTLA erected hagiographic billboards to celebrate their refusal to report for duty.

In China, the teachers and students reported for class. In Sweden, they never closed.

If you are a really well-off Chinese businessman you fly your kid to Los Angeles and pay $40,000 to send them to the prep school where Mrs. UpintheValley teaches.   You get in-depth, hands-on instruction from her. You get an entire software package designed by her.  So do the children of the American professional classes and entertainers and professional athletes. The parents of unnamed prep school voted 70% to return to the classroom and were only prevented from doing so by Gov. Newsom. The minute waivers are allowed, the kids will return.   Until then, there is a brisk side business for private tutoring at $135/hr.

If you thought the country was divided by privilege before, what does it look like now?  Have another stimulus check. Consult Weedmaps. Buy porn tokens. Those girls in the top picture are America. They can be bought. It says so in their Twitter feed.  Tell me how this movie ends.

Flu D’Etat

Pop quiz: Is skateboarding social distancing compliant? A: Why, yes.
Are skateboarders a risk group for Wuhan virus? A: Not at all.

If skateboarders can shred about in the spring air, then the edifice of submission and compliance is pretty well mocked, and mockery is one thing the tyrant can’t bear.  Someone call public works!

How dispiriting it is to see people in the Valley wearing masks inside their own cars because Mayor Yoga Pants told them to.    You would not know this from listening to local media, but he has ZERO statutory authority to do so. These are requests of the public presented to us as binding commands from the state.   There is no municipal code called Thou Shalt Not Defy Garcetti.  

The Wuhan regulations have little to do with public health and everything to do with our Liberty.  We submit to them at our peril.

We snuck into Fryman Canyon over the weekend to discover a small fellowship of hikers edict defiers skulking on the trail with masks around their necks, which they hastily pulled over their noses when they saw us, lest we report them.

Every model of viral prediction has proved wrong, not by a percentage, but exponentially.  As we descend the right side of the bell curve,  the will to power has not been leavened by the fragility of prognosis or the absence of a tsunami of demand on the hospitals, nor the revelation the morbidity rate is far lower and seroprevalence far greater than assumed.  Those details shall be memory-holed.  Crisis is the order of the day. May the wealth-leveling panic continue, command the Clerisy. No herd immunity for you! A poorer electorate is a submissive one.

Sometimes an act so small as swinging from a tree can be restorative of citizenship.  Where the feet go, the mind follows.

Days of Wine and Slow DSL

When the sun returns we’ll feel differently, but for the moment it’s like we’ve fallen into the pages of someone else’s unfinished novel.   Our lovely week of rain has softened this unfamiliar oddity of mandatory hooky. We have new struggles, like remembering the Hulu passcode so we can watch Contagion.

We rediscover guilty pleasures and then realize our schedules overlap a bit too completely. I predict a spike in births around Christmas. Also divorce petitions.

Flowers will soon riot across the Valley, and our pent up cabin fever will shake us from this sheep-like submission to madness.

In the meantime, we teach To Kill A Mockingbird from the safety of the bedroom.

We expel all members from LA Fitness until April 1st. Effective in five minutes.

We flatten the curve in Echo Park.   Not so unreasonable. A happy middle ground.

Photo by John Sanphillippo

Thank goodness someone is flouting shelter in place orders in San Francisco.  Blessings be upon he who beta-tests.

From Wuhan, With Love

In January, when I reported for jury duty there were a number of older Asian women in the pool wearing masks, which I found a bit paranoid, though polite.  I chalked it up to cultural differences, but now you can’t buy one.  My nephew this week is in the desert winds of New Mexico wiring a cooling tower without a dust mask in violation of OSHA regulations. Masks are great for industrial particles. They don’t do squat against the pandemic, but he waits on Amazon to fill backorders.

On Saturday I picked up a woman in Marina Del Rey a bit miffed at developments. She owns a condo in Palm Springs which she AirBnBs for Coachella.  It’s certain to be canceled, she said, and soon she’ll have to refund the $5000 she’s already collected. Was she worried about taking an Uber, a natural vector for infection? Of course not. “No one under 60 needs to worry about COVID-19”. Is she right?  Yes…but there are caveats.

Mrs. UpintheValley went to Trader Joes yesterday to discover a run on canned goods.  She settled for pasta sauce.   She went to Target to double our reserves of toilet paper and tissue.  They were all out of bacterial wipes.  I went to the gym and had to stand in line to use the treadmill. The Zumba class was full. All the dumbells were in use, one sweaty hand after another trading off on the same damp bacteria encased grip.  Tame Impala played a sold-out show at the Forum last night.  Snctm, the $75,000/year Beverly Hills sex club, will be proceeding with its scheduled orgy this weekend.

We are free with our fluids in month two of the pandemic, then we reach for bacterial wipes and wonder about our neighbor’s cough. We go to the Laker game and then blame the President for not doing….well, something more.  He stopped flights from China in January and they called him racist. Tonight he embargoed flights from Europe for 30 days and the media is in an ecstasy of sanctimony: Too late! Our American Chernobyl is upon us!  Get the widow on the set!  Get me B roll of people on ventilators!

Except…its not happening. Yet. The seasonal flu kills 50-80,000 people every year, mostly the very elderly. Wuhan virus, we’re looking at hundreds.  So far, all elderly.   But…the vectors have been established. The bacteria has breached our shores, and if the epidemiologist math is correct, its spread should peak on March 21.  If there was a time to self-quarantine it was now. Naturally, I went out for a beer.

MacLeod was not wanting for business. Andrew was there and confessed to anxiousness.  We had entered a time of madness, but there was no way to wash your hands of it, he punned. On cue, the bartender brought me a ten-dollar bill I had mistakenly folded into a pile of singles I had given him.  It was a gesture of honesty, and I accepted it from his bare fingers, which had handled dirty sweaty cash all day, and then I put my hands into a bowl of peanuts and helped myself.  Everyone who came to MacLeod before 7 pm was now in my mouth.

I stopped at Target on the way home, just in case there were provisions for the siege not yet obtained and was greeted by an exodus of carts piled high with bleach, the wipes having sold out.  Alternatively, you could simply sing “Happy Birthday” twice as you washed your hands and achieve a better result.  I happen to be both a thorough hand-washer and at the same time an indiscriminate muncher of free grub from sneeze bowls. That is my particular dementia.

The last generic DayQuil in Van Nuys…for now

Get some DayQuil, Mrs. U advised, you never know.  I’m not entirely sure what good that would do in the event of respiratory illness but I scrounged the very last box in the store, forgotten on the bottom shelf.  When I got home she announced school was canceled for the rest of the month, all the private schools in LA,  and she would be undertaking “distance teaching”.  The NBA was suspending games until further notice.  Coachella was postponed to October.

I texted my nephew. The power was out in the mountains. He was assembling an automatic rifle by headlamp.   No cough medicine for him.  To each his own prep.

The Floor Scrapers

“I take no joy in cleaning, none whatsoever,” says Mrs. U.  “But the state of cleanliness gives me calm. I’m very unhappy in clutter.”

I’m certain the men scraping the paint off the floor of Gustave Caillebotte’s studio by hand in 1875 took little joy in their labor either, but Monsieur Caillebotte, a man of leisure, found it rather erotic…and now they are immortalized in the Musée d’Orsay.

The bottle of wine on the floor fascinates me. Was this common among the Parisienne working class, or an indulgence he allowed them as compensation for modeling?

At 34, Gustave retired to the countryside to garden and be a patron of the arts. A strange choice in my book, for a man with at least one masterpiece to his name. He became a lotus-eater and grower of orchids.

He turns up later in The Luncheon of the Boating Party, seated lower right, his attention fixated on the other man in the straw boater and singlet, who as the proprietor’s son, is not exactly a member of the party himself nor dressed for it.   Renoir immortalizes Gustave a second time, in longing.

Wish as I might, there is no eroticizing the floor in Chez UpintheValley.  The robot does half the work.  Flickers of recognition pass before me…momentarily I feel like Degas with an iPhone admiring the washerwomen, and then …no, darling. Just no. I really hate this. And it’s leading up to nothing. Finish the outlet box in the ceiling.