Post #8 - Halfway Through Quarantine, and the Mad Hatter Speaks

We are in day seven of Lizzie's quarantine. So far, she shows no symptoms and no indication of any infection. We are optimistic at this point that she'll be fine and can't wait to open the door and give her a real hug as opposed to the virtual ones she gets every night, although put a young millennial in a room for two weeks with the windows shut, a bag of snacks and a pile of dirty laundry, and who knows what new deadly microbe might be mutating in there.

She refuses to complain, no matter how unhappy she is. She knows as we all do that so far we are the lucky ones. Still, I obsessively check the Johns Hopkins University tracker the same way my grandfather used to sit in front of the TV and stare at the stock market ticker tape. I note which countries are up and which are down.  I drill down in the numbers and see only 30 cases in our county, but then I compare that number with the overall population and don't like what comes up. Because I failed math in high school, I check and recheck the calculations. Unfortunately, I get them right.

Friends say don't watch the news, especially don't watch Trump but I take heart watching Andrew Cuomo's press conferences or Nicolle Wallace's program at four. Although the news is all bad at this point, the broadcasts at least show smart people who tell the truth and have our backs unlike 45 who continues to show no evidence that he has any grip on reality. At one point last night, he sounded like a demented Professor Irwin Corey. Indeed, Nicolle Wallace called his babbling complaint about the trials and tribulations of being a billionaire "a descent into lunacy."

It reminded me of New York City in the late 1970s when not far from my apartment on the Upper West Side, I used to see a group of people gathered on one corner of Riverside Drive, engrossed in animated conversation. But when you got close enough you realized they were all just talking to themselves. It's frightening to think that half of them probably made more sense than Trump did last night.

If you haven't seen the clip, it's the kind of madness that would have been funny three months ago. Click here to watch it.












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