I am worried about one of my friends, because she told me today she and some friends got together at the friend’s house. Inside. She seems to be taking more and more risks, and nothing I can say makes a difference to her. I decided against having the homemaker come in and will just have her do shopping, because she comes here directly from the nursing home where she works. I do not think I am irrational about this. I may have mentioned ten or twenty times about being ill in December, and I doubt that was the virus. I was really, really sick and breathing was very difficult, so I do not want to risk getting the actual virus because I don’t think I would survive. Seriously. My friend could bring home the virus to her husband, even if she didn’t get sick from it. Not my business really, and nothing I can do anyway.

Dressing my self this morning, and it was not going well. ‘Why is everything always so much harder than it needs to be?’ popped into my head, a thought I have probably at least once a day. Nothing ever seems to go well. I can’t do anything in the kitchen without making some sort of mess. I run into things. I omit steps in cooking because I just can’t stand there long enough to do everything, if I can even cook at all. Everything I do seems to be harder than it needs to be, harder than it used to be before my body betrayed me.

Then something else I’ve been thinking about a lot popped up. How would I manage if I was in jail, or a concentration camp, or a refugee camp? Privacy, access to hygiene materials. Clean anything. I sometimes think of all those anti-maskers. I would imagine they would be the first to collaborate with the enemy to avoid any inconvenience to themselves, because they are obviously the only ones who matter.

I read that a restaurant in NH closed rather than ask their patrons to wear masks, because it’s their bodies and they can risk them if they choose. No concern at all for the people who do not choose to abandon masks and become ill from these selfish and self-centered people. Does no one think about the fact that they are not the only ones whose lives they are risking? Do they not understand contagion? Do they just not care?

I am listening to some good bass notes on Pandora. Right now it’s Jungle, by X Ambassadors. I do love some good base-centric music. Drums. Yes. Lots of beat going on. Makes me want to move, which is not something I am usually too enthusiastic about because pain. I wake up in pain. Before I’ve moved at all, and it just goes on all day. Today I took three ibuprofen, because I really need to get a couple of things done, and not being able to stand up straight or for more than a minute or two is not helpful. And two ibuprofen are not enough. I have a high pain tolerance, but I also need a lot of medication to combat it when it is just too much to deal with.

It is gray again today. No rain, no snow, just gray. Bah! Also, humbug! The 7-eleven across the street closed down yesterday. Signs gone, dumpster in front, and some guy is over there tossing things today. I don’t think they would have lasted even without the pandemic, because they just never did the business that L’il Peach or Tedeschi’s did in the same location. No booze. Booze brings in the customers, that seems a given. So one business left in the mini-mall and that is the laundromat. They drove out the hair salon several years ago, by raising the rent to an unmanageable level, and the shop has sat empty ever since. Like foreclosing homes and then leaving the houses to rot. How is this a good business model? Is there some invisible to me financial advantage to leaving shops and homes vacant and rotting? Which reminds me. Watching the West Wing (finished last night) and the Chinese ambassador was dealing with the Chief of Staff who was trying to make a deal for something. I give you this, I make that easier, if you do whatever. He was very snarky about the whole thing and wound up saying this, and remember, this episode is from 2005 or 6, fifteen years ago. He said ‘Your American Dream is financial, not ethical’. And how true is that. We don’t destroy governments to help the citizens, we do it because we want access to oil or other resources. Greed is our motivation, not humanitarianism. I remember when we were told we are the beacon of freedom for the world, and everyone wants to be us or be here. Yeah, right. We all drank the koolaid back then, it seems. Because it was never true. Ever. We even experimented on our own citizens without their knowledge. We overthrew governments, we did a lot of really bad things that if another country had done them, we would be shouting for punishments. Disillusionment. It’s hard to take. And yes, I would not just complain but change things, if I had even the vaguest idea of how to do that. Remember, more people voted for Hillary Clinton, but the Electoral College decided for us that they liked Trump better.