I haven’t done one of these in a while. COVID has become pretty routine for me. I wasn’t one to leave the house without a good reason previously, so for me, this is largely more of the same.

The most stark contrast I’ve seen between now and March or April has been that wearing masks is pretty normal now, and it’s fairly rare to go out and see somebody at the grocery store without one. It’s a nice change. The other night, I was watching a TV show in the realist tradition (mostly I guess I watch other stuff) and I was suddenly horrorstruck that nobody was wearing masks. What were all these people from this TV show from 10 years ago thinking?

Whether things seem all that different to me or not, here’s what we’re looking at right now in Tennessee.

Back in July and August was our first big uptick. It looked pretty severe at the time, and I think it was actually at about that time that I noticed more consistent mask usage. New cases even dipped for a while. But now they’re 2-plus times higher than they were during that spike. And with Thanksgiving and Christmas around the corner, it’s hard to imagine this sort of graph will start to look better any time soon.

Meanwhile, we had an election. Trump lost, though he is not conceding and indeed is raising a big lying stink about it, opening lots of lawsuits to try to end-run around the results somehow. I worry that he and others will find a way to get past the election results and that we’ll double-down on fascism if he manages it. Meanwhile, he seems to be doing nothing but tweeting and golfing. He’s not really acknowledging that this virus is still a thing (though he and a bunch of the people who work closely with him contracted it) and has no apparent plan to try to do anything further about it. Biden and Harris meanwhile have formed a committee but can’t do much until the White House starts working with the transition team.

School is still in session, though I’m seeing more and more short-term closures as specific schools run out of custodial staff or substitute teachers. With the numbers climbing again, it’s really hard to believe the kids’ll go back post-Christmas, but then I thought they’d only go for a week or two so far this year, and they’ve been in session since late September. The school system has done a surprisingly good job with things, though I wish they had taken a different approach.

This past Sunday night, before the kids started school for the year on Monday, I got word that there had already been a case of COVID among the staff of my son’s school. Similar news from my daughter’s school landed on Monday. This isn’t surprising, really, but it’s discouraging. Our school system provided a pretty crummy set of options for returning to school — either virtual with the possibility (and, it turns out, reality) of limited access to certain classes or in-person with the associated COVID risks. Other school systems have taken what seem more sensible approaches to me, with in-person and virtual school staggered to reduce in-person class sizes. I really don’t understand why we didn’t do something similar. I wrote a fair few emails to school officials late in the summer, to no avail. We opted for in-person schooling, hoping sense would prevail and that school would be shifted to virtual. So now my kids are in the building; at least they have their correct classes. It certainly feels like a bit of a Sophie’s choice.

I get that none of this is easy for school administrators. Federal funding has been tied to in-person attendance, for example. Well, schools are already under-funded. I imagine it’s a bit of a Sophie’s choice for administrators who wish to provide education but have their own options limited. Still, it’s frustrating, and I am consistently baffled by some of the magical thinking and lack of basic human decency and any sense of equity in our government at all levels (which is not to say by all individuals in those governments).

COVID numbers in Knoxville had begun to look better in the week or two leading up to school. I had seen a lot more people with masks on out in public. I think it’s finally been normalized enough that most reasonable people have adapted to the inconvenience of it, and that has been heartening. But the university opened back up and kids started partying, and naturally that resulted in hot spots on campus. It seems likely that the return to school (not just for college kids) will further the spread. The numbers in the county are beginning over the last week to creep back up.

Gas prices have risen a bit, though they’re still a dime or so under $2. Groceries on the whole are available, though paper products and isopropyl alcohol and such remain in pretty short supply.

Another Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot by police offers this week. They shot him in the back while his children watched from his car; now he’s paralyzed. He was unarmed and doing nothing wrong. Police apologists are saying that he had a knife in his vehicle (which he was not inside). Protests erupted as they should have, and a 17-year-old white boy shot three protesters with an assault rifle, killing two. Police did not shoot him.

Meanwhile, the Republican National Convention has been held this week. I haven’t watched it, though it sounds like it’s been a circus. It closed, apparently, with a rally on the White House grounds, which besides being a breach of ethics at best (and actually a breach of the Hatch Act, meaning that it’s illegal) also seems profoundly risky during a pandemic. These conventions are always circuses. I didn’t watch the Democratic convention either, though I understand it was more measured. I don’t typically go in for politics that much, though I do vote. I’m starting to pay a lot more attention to local politics. I feel so helpless about policy at the national or even state level, where I think largely you pay to play and it’s hard for politicians (if they even try) to understand how most of us live. And I say that as a very privileged person who knows he’s disconnected from how hand-to-mouth many people live. But at the local level, double digit vote differentials can determine outcomes and influence policy, I’m learning. I don’t like this stuff, but I’m feeling more these days as if it’s important for me to become more engaged and to lend my voice (or at least my vote) more conscientiously on the local scene rather than leaving those who are not as privileged as I am to shoulder the whole burden of caring and engaging. I’m not patting myself on the back here; it is pretty much the very literal least I can possibly do that is not doing nothing.

That was a bit of a digression, I know, but these things — racism and politics and public health — seem so profoundly intertwined right now that it’s hard to think of one without thinking of the others.

On the whole, for my very fortunate family, things seem normalish right now. The kids were definitely ready to see friends and have more structure in their days again, so even though the decision to send them to school was very difficult, I think it’s been good for them so far. Let’s just hope we don’t regret it. I’m sort of skeptical school will remain in session for long. The sense I’m getting from emails being sent out these days is that the school is basically trying to get the kids trained on how to use virtual schooling technology (most of my son’s first week focused on this) so that when school inevitably goes virtual in the coming weeks, the kids will be better equipped to handle it.

COVID-19, while only getting worse after a brief trend toward improvement, has all but fallen to the background of the national dialogue in recent weeks. The murder of George Floyd by police offers a few weeks ago was a straw on the proverbial camel’s back, and led to a number of protests and marches, which police largely responded to with remarkable force. Trump has continued to stir up his base, today apparently tweeting a video in which a supporter shouted in support of white power. He has also continued to weaken the federal government, removing people fit to do their jobs and putting supporters with little experience in their place. It is shocking and pretty scary how unfit he is for the office and how little the other branches of the government have really done to try to rein him in. It is such a strange time, and I feel like I’m living in a satire or some sort of over-the-top dystopia. I feel pretty powerless. Mostly I am responding by donating money where I think it’ll help, but that feels pretty toothless.

Meanwhile, COVID cases and deaths continue to rise. Cases in Tennessee continue to climb as bars and other businesses open up. Texas and Florida have become hot spots. People have flocked to beaches for summer vacations. Nationally, the death rates have fallen some, but here’s a graph of a big recent uptick in cases (presumably deaths will follow):

That’s the graph since March, and we’ve got more daily cases than ever. The biggest hospital in Austin this week had all of its ICU beds full.

I see people wearing masks in public, but I see plenty who don’t, too. Plenty of folks have masks but have their noses exposed.

This is a big election year, and Republicans are limiting polling places. I read that in some places, single polling locations are now going to have to serve hundreds of thousands of people. Trump and his ilk have tried to prevent mail-in voting options. Democrats traditionally fare better at the polls when more voters show up, so this all makes sense but is very disturbing.

Meanwhile, Black people continue to be treated badly. Amid all the protests, after some of the gatherings had begun to dissipate, several Black people were found hanged, their deaths apparently ruled suicides. Police officers in Wilmington (near where I grew up) were recorded venting, using racial slurs and wishing (or even maybe plotting) violence toward African Americans. It feels like we’ve regressed 100 years. It’s shameful.

I worry a lot that Trump with Russian or other allies will steal the coming election and that our government and its checks and balances will further erode over the following four years. I worry that he’ll do more damage in the next few months in any case. Biden is the current Trump alternative, and he’s a milquetoast establishment candidate I have trouble getting excited about, though I’d take very nearly anybody with an ounce of intelligence and a rumor of integrity over Trump.

Gas is still cheap. You can get toilet paper if you go to the store at the right time, and when I last went, restrictions on how much meat you could buy had been lifted. So things feel a little more normal on the surface, but when you read the news, it’s clear that the new normal is anything but normal.

A couple of days ago, I needed some lime zest and lime juice for a recipe. I’ve been a bit of a slob about the kitchen lately, so I just left the lime halves lying around, and today it occurred to me that they looked like tiny watermelon halves.

Also, in the U.S., we’ve had nearly 90,000 deaths from COVID-19. But don’t worry, states are opening back up before we know it’s safe, and people are blithely going out without regard to the safety of themselves or others. I’m sure it’ll be ok. As long as we don’t test people, Trump has said recently, then we won’t have any new cases to report.

In other news, I know I said that I had left some limes lying around, but actually those are watermelon halves after all. I know I also said that it was a tiny watermelon. But it’s actually an extra-large watermelon. And an extra large pencil! I wrote this post with it. Also the pencil isn’t a pencil, it is a mastodon named Chuck who assures me that truth and facts and reason and empathy don’t matter anymore.