Hey there! Thanks for stopping by to look at this blog! Ok, that may be enough exclamation points for the time being, but this is an exciting thing for me. If nothing else, it will get me writing on a regular basis. Before I get to the main point that I wanted my first blog post to be about, I just want to go over some basic things about this site, chiefly the name. A few suggestions were tossed around, but I kept coming back to the name you see on the website now. I chose this name because, aside from the singer being one of the most played on my Spotify playlist, for a couple of reasons. One such reason is so that when you tell your friends you read on the Writer’s Rosarita Beach Café, people listening in passing will think you’re a high-class person who just got back from a nice vacation while catching up on some reading. Another such reason is because I wanted this blog to be a kind of forum, where no idea was off limits for a discussion…or maybe the more appropriate term would be monologue, but as I have been very active in live theater for the past few years, hopefully I can make this “monologues” engaging and entertaining at least some of the time. Now that that’s out of the way, onto the first blog post! (at least I spaced out this exclamation point)
When I think back to my resolutions on January first of 2020, I laugh at how impossible those goals seem now. As I toasted in the new decade with a dram of whiskey, I made a vow that I would try to reinvent myself; go out to listen to live music, experience/observe live slam poetry artists, just be more social, maybe even figure out how to ask someone out I had a crush on for the past few months. For a time, I started to work on those goals: I went out to see friends from high school sing at local bars, I went to more events that in 2019 I would never have dreamed of going to, and just as I was about to ask out that special person, then came March.
With March, of course, came the shutdown. As staying in and writing had been my habit just a few months prior to that event, it was a little disappointing to see my plans to reinvent myself come to a halt, but at least I was not at a complete loss of how to handle it. When it first started, I just shrugged, not because I was determined to go out and live my life the way I had promised myself, but because I saw it as a sign that I needed to spend more time on my writing. However, even when not in a deadly pandemic, writers are experts at finding excuses not to write. Despite all the excuses I found, I did manage to make progress on a novel I already had in the works, in addition to brainstorming new ideas, even if it wasn’t as much as I had hoped.
Perhaps because of the habit I was in before the pandemic hit, I followed much more along Dr. Anthony Fauci’s mindset of caution; while I did occasionally see a friend or two, I wanted to avoid all higher risk situations. As an example, I did not feel comfortable sitting down at a restaurant until at least one month after Dr. Fauci himself went on the news to say that it was acceptable if the proper guidelines were adhered to by the restaurants. There is, however, one exception to this: a French restaurant in Providence by the name of Pot au Feu. When the governor of Rhode Island rolled back the restrictions on dining out, the owner of that establishment did not agree with the decision, as he felt that it left his employees exposed. What did he do? Exercising a similar philosophy of safety, he set out to make his restaurant one of the safest in the nation, getting KN-95 masks for his staff in addition to requiring them to double mask, installed HVAC air filters over and above the state’s requirements, UVC light treatment of the restaurant after the customers left, using FDA approved fogging techniques, requiring gloves whenever his servers handled food, constant temperature checks for both employees and customers, regular disinfectant wipes on all possible surfaces, and using even more precautions, as he did not wish to put either his staff nor his clientele at risk. Due to responsible people like that, I was comforted with the knowledge that I wasn’t overreacting, that there were at least some other people taking the pandemic as seriously as I did, and still do.
One of the aspects that started out as strange, but grew to become normal, was the wearing of facemasks in public. For a time, I was willing to allow people a little room for error, such as not wearing their masks in the most effective manner. As the weeks stretched into months, however, my view of this practice began to change. I began to judge others for conscious decisions not to wear a mask, or even wearing it in less than effective manners. There was one instance about six months into the pandemic when I was at my local pharmacy and saw an older man walk in without any sort of facial covering. Rather than reasoning that he may have had any medical issues, I looked down on him, scowling (which would have been obvious, had I not been wearing my facemask). However, my scowl turned into a kind of sheepish remorse when, after about three steps into the pharmacy, a look of realization dawned on his face; “Forgot the mask in the car,” and with that, instead of finding an excuse to go about his pharmacy visit maskless, he proceeded to leave the building, presumably to get his mask from the car. That was a welcomed event for me to witness, for a week earlier I was running errands at the supermarket and saw a man with his mask pulled down because he was on the phone. While I do understand that having a mask on makes it more difficult to be understood, at least in my view that is preferable to risking the possibility of being on a ventilator, and it is not worth the risk just because of one damn phone call.
On the subject of masks, I feel it relevant to discuss my first real job, and why it is no longer what I do for employment. My first real work experience was at a safety company where I assembled N-95 masks, in addition to a few other safety supplies that seem minor next to breathing protection during a pandemic. It was a very educational experience for me, not because of all I learned about N-95s, but rather because I learned new ways of incorrectly wearing face masks. I was already familiar with the technique of wearing it with an exposed nose, as well as what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo not so affectionately deemed “chin guards,” but I learned new ways of not doing it correctly, such as the self-explanatory “neck guards” or even something I had come to know as the “Darth Vader,” named such because of it revealing the upper lip of the person wearing it, as audiences could see with Vader at the end of the movie “Return of the Jedi.” Another reason why I left feeds into this point. The woman I witnessed wearing her mask in this Darth Vader fashion clearly did not understand what it meant to be in a pandemic, as she was hugging, and even kissing her coworkers. Now, a good portion of the factory’s workforce was made up of those from Hispanic communities, and from what I have observed, those with that cultural background can be more expressive in their natures as opposed to the stereotypical white culture. However, in a pandemic where we know saliva and even contact can potentially transmit coronavirus, perhaps curbing that type of interaction is for the best in a safety company. Ironically, I left there because I felt like I was not in a safe work environment.
Perhaps onlookers to how I live my life think that I am being overly paranoid, as I am not in a high-risk demographic for the serious consequences of coronavirus. I have no prior medical conditions that today would put me at any greater risk of death if I did somehow contract COVID. Yet I know there is still a possibility of my getting the disease and were that my only reason for expressing more caution, then perhaps I would agree that I am a little too paranoid about this, but there is more to the story behind my reasoning. When I was little more than a toddler, I was hit by a car that left me with a traumatic brain injury among other complications, such as complete hearing loss in my left ear. Of course, the immediate consequence of this was my lapsing into a coma, requiring machines to help me survive. Despite the fact that I emerged from that coma and today no longer require any sort of medical equipment for survival, I have never stopped thinking of the trauma my family was forced to endure seeing me on a respirator as I struggled to ultimately recover. I have no desire to put them in a similar situation when it can be easily prevented.
As much as we might want it to, time does not stop as the world waits for a way to have some sense of normalcy. So, what happened to my New Year’s resolutions to be more outgoing? Like so many other things after coronavirus, they had to be adapted. Instead of going out to local bars to see friends perform their music, I instead grew to become content to watching them stream their performances from what they chose to use as studios. Last March, I was thrilled to watch a special live stream St. Patrick’s Day concert performed by the Irish Rock group Dropkick Murphy’s, during which I was silently grateful for not having bought tickets to a music festival in Boston a few months prior. While it was not exactly what I had in mind at the beginning of that year, that was the way I adapted to make the goals I had set work out in the end.
While some goals were able to be met, there were others that I thought had to be put on the sidelines, such as asking out that special someone I had previously mentioned. Despite that Zoom meetings had become the preferred method of gathering in a responsible fashion, it can be difficult for intimacy to form over such a means of communication. For similar reasons, texts alone cannot always convey accurate sentiments. As an example, there was a sketch comedy duo a few years ago who based a skit upon that premise; one friend having a very lax approach to a conversation while his high-strung acquaintance becomes ready to become physically violent due to his interpretation of the friend’s response as condescending. Indeed, years prior to the coronavirus outbreak, I had lost a good acquaintance for a remarkably similar reason. As I was in no rush to repeat that situation, I put off asking out that special person, and while I do still remain hopeful, the question of whether or not anything will happen as a result of those feelings remain as unclear as when the vaccine will be widely available to the public.
I might not have attempted pursuing romantic interests during the pandemic, but that does not mean others have not done what they can to adapt to continuing their relationships. I saw that someone I met through the hospital (that’s a blog post for another day) had found a way to practice a socially distanced date, that is when nature permitted her to do this. Being over six feet apart outdoors sitting in lawn chairs on opposite sides of a chalk circle, she did say it felt like an adjustment going from seeing each other every day to only in person when circumstances allowed. Other than those few times when the weather allowed for this, they had to settle for seeing each other through virtual settings. She did confess it strained her relationship, but she felt like there were others for which the same applied. I cannot help but think back to lessons from science classes on Darwinism, as well as his voyage to the Galapagos Islands; how all creatures seemed to adapt to fit their way of life, and the similarities learning how to live within a pandemic.
Of course, another aspect of life that needed to be adjusted was how job interviews were and still are conducted in these strange times. For most of 2020, virtual interviews over Zoom were all that I could find that were offered. My living room became a virtual conference room where I met with employers about the prospect of working for them. Later, I attended a few in person interviews, and while one might think it was easier to form a better connection when you are not behind a screen, it was a little more intimidating. This is because I could not see the lower half of the other person’s face, and I feel that can be more telling about what one is actually thinking. Nevertheless, this reiterates the point of this piece; we survive, and we adapt.
When the ball dropped and rang in the new year of 2020, I find it difficult to believe that anyone truly knew what would happen. Despite all the twists and turns of the pandemic, humanity displayed true adaptability after being dealt a poor hand just a few months into the year. Although we did and still do have our struggles, it truly represents the resilience of our species; we may stumble, we might even fall down a few times, but we always need to be ready to brush off the dirt and keep working towards our rewards. Life will always find a way to go on.