I am writing this from my office in our home. The room is about 100 square feet, but right now it is all pretty squished, as about 90 of those feet are taken up by The Fear. I'm about to turn 65. I have no idea if I'll ever be 66. I have five coronary stents, not so great lungs and I soak up germs better than a Bounty paper towel. My instinct tells me if the coronavirus comes by our door, unlike the plagues in the Passover story, it's not going to pass me by. In the meantime, however, we go on in isolation, atop a hill in the country. It's a good place to be if you want to give yourself the best chance to survive. I'm a writer. My sixth book is in a constant state of near completion despite some 40 years of work and research. The story of Alger Hiss and how he was wrongly convicted is my life's work, so there's an urgency to get it done, so if it comes to it I will be able to leave it behind. On the other hand, there's this crippling depression and...
Five hours of sleep last night, interrupted by a check of the Times and the Post. Today, the Times published one of those core articles ( here's another about how political conservatism is the driving force behind many of the administration's choices, well, that and racism and having a psychopath in charge), that drill down to what is driving this crisis. The story is about masks, and it's instructive because the report gets to the central issues behind the desperate shortage of masks and other protective equipment. Here's another . It doesn't quite say this, but if we take the facts unearthed by the reporters and add in a few that are well-known about Trump, we understand why I and so many I know are at serious risk of losing our lives if not in the first wave, in the second or third. Think about it, when Trump was elected in 2016, some many of us thought the results would be disastrous, but did any of us say, "He could actually kill me?" ...
I had been having chest pains and finding myself out of breath when walking up the slightest hill so the cardiologist suggested I come in to the hospital for a catheterization, a procedure where like a plumbing snake, they make a tiny cut inside your wrist and run a camera up your arm, through your shoulder and into your coronary arteries. It's terrifying — not the procedure, that's easy and I'm fine, but just walking into a hospital. I'm 65, have had five stents, so I'm a high risk person, and you don't know what's floating around in the air over there or lurking around on the bannisters, but as the cardiologist said to me through my computer last week, "you have to weigh the risk against benefits," and based on my history he thought it was a risk, whatever it was, that was worth taking. So I drove the car for the first time in six weeks (it was just like riding a bike) with a worried wife next to me. Since it's an in-and-out procedure,...
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