The Beard is Gone

Last time I shaved off my beard was in 2009, just after I was fired during the recession. Then I did it just to see what was under the facial hair, as part of the ritual of self-examination during a fit of depression.

This time I cut it off slowly to make sure my face masks would fit properly. Starting with a type of cut, close to the goatee, the full beard came off in piles. I kept it like this through most of March 2020, shaving with my electric trimmer every 10 days or so.

In April 2020, I cut off the goatee so I could ensure a good fit with the mask. I left the soul patch and mustache. Same day I cut it all off word went around about wearing masks in public.

I have two unopened painters balaclavas, they are fine mesh in beige and I think I may wear one if I go to the market this week.

Last week, I looked at our market list and asked myself “is this essential?” and decided at this time, it was not, so stayed home.

Two weeks ago, I bought a fully wrapped Morning Glory Muffin as part of my Thursday morning shopping ritual where I get the 10% senior discount at our local market. Normally, the muffins are in an open basket behind a clear plastic door in the bread isle. After I ate the muffin, I realized that it could have killed me. Until we work out how the guarantees of safety come about in eating prepared foods, I won’t do that again. All the other food we eat is made at home.

I have been in touch with my family in the Northwest and Mexico via text messages and phone. I have not been in contact with anyone outside the house for at least two weeks and find I don’t miss it at all.

I like that people are staying in, conserving what food and fuel they have and not being excessive. I agree with many writers about how this may effect our long term thinking about the climate emergency. We need to apply the same thinking to our daily acts in regard to the climate as we do to the pandemic. Both have the same fatal weight in my thinking. If we don’t rally to stop our mad consumptions, we will kill ourselves as surely as if we ignored our health officials and began to group together.

Over on the New York Review of Books Daily is an excellent series of posts about life in the pandemic posted by writers from around the world. Their perceptions are global and amazing:
Pandemic Journal, March 17–22
Pandemic Journal, March 23-30
Pandemic Journal, March 30–April 5

April 11, 2020
In the New Yorker, Zadie Smith concludes an essay entitled The American Exception:

Death comes to all—but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.

One potential hope for the new American life is that, within it, such an idea will finally become inconceivable, and that the next generation of American leaders might find inspiration not in Winston Churchill’s bellicose rhetoric but in the peacetime words spoken by Clement Attlee, his opposite number in the House of Commons, the leader of the Labor Party, who beat Churchill in a postwar landslide: “The war has been won by the efforts of all our people, who, with very few exceptions, put the nation first and their private and sectional interests a long way second. . . . Why should we suppose that we can attain our aims in peace—food, clothing, homes, education, leisure, social security and full employment for all—by putting private interests first?”

As Americans never tire of arguing, there may be many areas of our lives in which private interest plays the central role. But, as postwar Europe, exhausted by absolute death, collectively decided, health care shouldn’t be one of them.

April 15, 2020