Day 15

The view from the UCV bedroom sometimes makes it feel like one is living in a tree fort.

Injections of the Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose covid vaccine came to a sudden halt in much of the United States on Tuesday following the emergence of a rare blood clotting in six recipients. One of those six recipients has died.

Nearly seven million Americans have received the J&J vaccine so far and only six have displayed the blood clotting. That’s less than one in every million recipients.  But since the health risk is approaching the one in a million threshold, officials correctly have decided to halt new injections while the health risks are being re-evaluated.

Conservatives and Fox News viewers, who already had reservations and concerns about the vaccine, will use this development to prove their point that the vaccines aren’t safe. Yet these are the same people who claim that the health risk from the covids is overstated, and that 99.9% of the people who contract the covids survive.

The 99.9% statistic is misleading. Not only does it ignore the suffering of those who became gravely ill from the disease but survived and the long-term health effects on many survivors, but the number is not even correct.  To date, some 31,200,000 Americans have contracted the covids, and about 562,000 have died. That’s 1.8% of the total, so in actuality, only 98.2% have survived.

To look at it in terms of health risk, roughly 2 out of every 100 persons who are infected by the covids dies. That’s an “acceptable” risk to the conservatives. On the other hand, less than one out of every million dies from the J&J vaccine (if the vaccine proves to even be the cause of the blood clotting). That’s an “unacceptable” risk to the conservatives. 

It is literally 10,000 times safer to get the vaccine than it is to get the covids.

As the data emerges, we’ll know more about whether or not the vaccines actually caused the blot clots, and what the actual health risk is. But all the available data so far shows you’re far, far better off with the J&J vaccine than without it.

Day 14

It's minimalist living here at the UCV - no television, a modicum of furniture, spotty internet access.  The cats still can't quite figure out what happened to change their environment.

I start each day with almost comically low goals, and then often don't even complete that much.  One day - a successful one, a banner day by recent standards - my goal was to change a lightbulb.  Another day, to buy Chinese takeout.  On another, go for a walk (that day was not as successful).  And so it goes.

The days and nights pass like in a dream.  I'm scarcely aware of the passage of time.

Day 13

People experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” researchers say. 

Day 12

 

Twelve days now in the Unsellable Condo in Vinings.  The Contractors are telling me to expect another dozen or so days before the house will be ready for me to move back in.

Today, I went back and visited the house to see how things are going. They've boarded over the floor in the bedroom, and they've sanded and prepped the living room ceiling in preparation of painting.  Slow progress, but it's less horrific than it was last week.

This Week Summarized In One Screen Shot

 

Music Is Coming Back

This post might fit in better over on the music blog, but this post really isn't about the song per se but about the fact that the Nashville band Bully will be playing The Earl on this coming August 21   It's the first live-music announcement I've seen post-pandemic.

I bought tickets to the show today, the first tickets I've purchased in over a year.  Tickets don't officially go on sale until tomorrow, but the band sent me a pass code for the presale (I'm a fan and am on their mailing list).  Goddamn, it feels good to be buying tickets again.

A big part of my retirement plan was catching live music as often as I could, but then fate pulled the rug out from under me with the coronavirus pandemic and the shutdowns and quarantines and social distancing. If the Bully show turns out to be the first show I've seen post-pandemic (or even possibly still during the pandemic), it will be my first live show in 18 months.

At this point, I'd probably go to the show even if I wasn't vaccinated.  I'd go to the show if there were a 25% chance I'd catch the covids.  I'd go to the show if there was a 50% chance I'd catch AIDS.  Hell, at this point, I'd go to the show if there was a 75% chance of catching Ebola.  It's not like I'm gonna live forever.

Springtime

I drove over and visited the house today to see how the repairs are going.  

This is the time of year my azaleas are in bloom, if only briefly.  The blossoms last only about a week or two, but this is the week.  I'm not there to enjoy the display, holed up as I am to the Unsellable Condo in Vinings while they repair the interior of my house. But a pile of scrap wood that is being replaced has a grandstand view of the pink and white flowers.

This is my bedroom, or what's left of it.  This is why I have to be out of the house while they do the interior repairs.  Those new planks were installed to support my formerly sagging floor.

I'll be glad when all of this is over.

Zen and the Art of the UCV

Even the cats are starting to get used to living here.

Zen and the Art of the UCV

Recent reporting in the NY Times describes a state of "behavioral anhedonia," a reduced ability to take pleasure in activities.  The opposite of "hedonism," you might say. After all the time and anxiety of the long pandemic, the loss of income and loved ones, and all the uncertainty, many people feel they've become dimwitted approximations of their former selves and got lethargic, show a lack of interest in new activities, and experience a reduced ability to take pleasure in life. 

That's a pretty apt description of my state of mind for most of 2021.  Recall that in July 2019 I had retired from a long career and by the time the pandemic quarantine got really started in March 2020, I had already been practicing a sort of austere solitude for some nine months.  And then in late October 2020, the tree fell on my house, increasing my anxiety and feeling of helplessness as I struggled to get contractors and insurance payments arranged.

By January 2021, it all started getting to me - the social isolation of the pandemic, the anxiety over finances on a fixed income as I faced six-digit repair costs, the increased awareness of my own mortality reflected by dangling gutters and plywood patches on my ceilings. The physical state of the house was a pretty good metaphor for my psycho-physical self.

I fell onto an anhedonic fog of insomnia, joyless television watching, and mindless distractions.  I ate poorly, exercised infrequently, and found it difficult to get along with the contractors trying to repair my home.  For a while there, I even stopped posting to this blog.  You can consider the majority of what I  did post here between January and March 2021 as expressions of an anhedonic mind.

But I absolutely did not want to move out of the house and back to the Unsellable Condo in Vinings while they completed the remaining repairs. Not only was it all the myriad little tasks associated with packing and hauling one's belongings, but it also felt like acquiescing to the demands of an uncaring, unfeeling universe.  I looked forward to it less than you might look forward to root-canal dentistry.  .  

But it turns out it might have been the single best thing for me.  The change of scenery broke the soulless rhythm of anhedonic life.  Counterintuitively, having less to do and fewer distractions here at the UCV has made me more mindful and more involved in my own life.  For example, if all I have to do for the next five minutes is peel and eat an orange, say, then my mind is fully engaged in the peeling and the eating of that orange.  It's not something I'm doing as the television's airing the Chauvin trial, a video game is loading on the computer, and I'm simultaneously perusing Facebook on my iPhone.

I have no tv here and internet access is tricky at best (mobile hotspot created with my phone) and there's definitely less to do any given day here compared to back home.  I only moved three major pieces of furniture (my bed, a sofa, and a kitchen table), so there's also less places to do things.  But the move has snapped me out of anhedonia and I'm sleeping better, which means I can meditate better, and I'm also eating better, walking further and along new routes, and generally feeling better than I have in months.

What a surprise.

I've Got A Ceiling

I stopped by the house today to pick up my mail and a few items, and to check on the progress of the repairs.

I've got ceilings!  Sure, there's still a lot of work left to be done, obviously, but it's better than the bare rafters that were exposed late last week.

I'm encouraged by the progress I'm seeing.

We Go For A Walk

Still readjusting to life back at the UCV.  

Today, with literally nothing else to do, I went out for a walk in my new, old neighborhood.

There is no Beltline Trail within walking distance of the condo, but the roads do have sidewalks.  Nearby Woodland Brook Drive has a sidewalk on one side of the street that extends for about two miles from Log Cabin Road to West Paces Ferry and features a steep hill to provide some level of challenge to the casual walker..  Back when I lived here in the early '00s, I used to jog the length of the road, but this 20 years later, I'm more than content with walking the route.

Woodland Brook and the little communities off the side roads are fairly upscale neighborhoods, with house on 1 to 2-acre lots selling for $1 to $3 million.   Price is more related to the size of the house and the number of beds and baths than the size of the lot.

But given the price of real estate, it has to be quite the status symbol that one resident can afford enough "spare" property to pasture a couple of horses.  Rather than sell that property for a million-dollar home, they can afford to let their horses graze on the grass there.  

Sure, the property is adjacent to a stream and the pasture appears to be floodplain, limiting its potential for new construction, but I'm sure a reasonably creative engineer can come up with a solution to capitalize on the value of the real estate.

But I like it that instead, they just allow their horses to roam free around multi-million-dollar McMansions and exploitative land speculators.  If you can afford it, why not go for it, and if friends and neighbors look on with envy, all the better.

Zen and the Art of the UCV

I have to admit, I didn't expect my residency here in the Unsellable Condo in Vinings to be such a Zen experience.

To save costs, I moved only the minimum of furnishings here - a bed, a sofa, a dining table, some kitchenware, and a microwave.   A pair of computers - my laptop and my gaming computer.  No television, no stereo equipment.  It's pretty Spartan.

There's no cable or wifi here, but I can create a wifi hotspot with my iPhone.  It's pretty slow speed and it takes a lot of patience to watch streaming content on line, so I only do it sparingly.

There's not a lot to do here so I've been spending a lot of time doing nothing.  Sitting on the sofa.  Petting the cats (yeah, I moved them, too).  Preparing a meal, eating a meal, then washing the dishes after a meal.  After a while, doing nothing becomes doing something - the "nothing" becomes the "something" that I'm doing.

What I've found is that without all of the usual distractions, I've been more mindful and attentive to the little tasks.  Since all that I have to do is fold some laundry I've just washed, I find I'm doing it with complete concentration.  It's not just some pesky little chore I have to quickly complete before I get to the main thing I want to do - say, watch tv or play a video game or distract myself with my phone (or all of the above at the same time).  For the next 10 minutes, all I have to do is fold some underwear and t-shirts and put them on a shelf.  After that, it's just more staring into space or petting the cats.  There's no other task or distraction for my mind to wander to, so I do it with more concentration and attentiveness than I'm accustomed to.

Also, I bought this condo 21 years ago, and it's where I lived when I first started meditation and practice of Zen, so there's probably some resonant memories and remnant energy from that here.

I've been here for only three full days now, but it's already slowed me down, and I like that.