Expert Germaphobes.

My partner and I are walking around our place like full-blown hypochondriacs. We are discovering new aches and pains that never surfaced before. Every sneeze, every cough is suspect. This is new. We have both become expert germaphobes. Who knew that could be a job?

There is an invisible enemy loose in the land, and really, it is legion. All we can do is be vigilant, careful, determined. Doing our best to be super-clean, and safe. We are taking our vitamins, sipping lots of hot tea, eating garlic, & ginger. Don't know if that does jack-shit, but it does make us feel a bit better.

Yesterday, I received a letter from my cousin who lives in Arizona. He sent me two face-masks, a photo of the TV show Pop band, The Monkees, as well as a cool photo of a Gretsch guitar. A perfect little missive from the Land of the Sun. The masks may come in handy. I laughed at the photo of Mickey, Davy, Michael and Peter, and I lusted after that old, classic Gretsch guitar.

My cousin is hunkering down, just like us. Cases of the plague there, cases of the plague here. It really is near and far and everywhere in between.

My partner and I had a little music session in our kitchen. We ran through some old songs, and some brand new songs too.  Just two voices, an acoustic guitar and a few bells, shakers and a tambourine. That's the whole thing, right there. It felt good to play. Our voices reverberated thru the apartment. The kitchen is all hard surfaces, which results in a nice reverb effect. It's not exactly Phil Spector reverb, but it's not bad.

We also ventured out. The sun was shining in the afternoon, and like little moths to the flame, we had to take a trek to the lakefront, to look at the waves crashing in, to bask in the sun a bit, to notice the new roots pushing up from the black earth, little buds on the trees, new flowers coming. Damn, Spring really is coming back.

Late in the day word came that our Toxic Clown President is getting bored with the global pandemic.  Seems he's bummed that all the attention is on the virus and not on him. Plus, of course, if the economy crashes, folks may hold him accountable for fucking up the response to the virus. President. It's a tough job. “Trump is like an 11-year-old boy waiting for the fairy godmother to bring him a magic pill.”

Right. Yikes. Best to tune the Toxic Clown out. He is gonna get more people needlessly ill. There are plenty of other voices to turn to, listen to the doctors, the medical professionals, the more intelligent and responsible Governors through the land (Priztker, Newsom, Cuomo, etc.). Be smart, be safe, take it one day at a time...

The a.m. soundtrack - Gillian Welch & David Rawlings' "Time (The Revelator)."  Yes. Essential. Two voices. Two guitars. This record puts me in mind of Flannery O'Connor and her short stories of hard, bible-belt, southern, bleak-gothic country. These are songs of fire and heart. A dark, stripped down, beauty. So American. Plain. Gritty. Well-constructed. Beautiful. Gillian and David met at music school, but they seem like hard-boiled Americans from a time and place long ago. You can hear echoes of the Carter Family. Hard-won songs after the apocalypse, after the drought, after the locust & the plague. Two folks singing songs in a shotgun shack. "I dreamed about Elvis, the day that he died, the day that he died..."