3/29/20
Why we decided to defrost our fridge/freezer on Day 9 of the Covid-19 Lockdown in California I couldn’t tell you, other than to state the obvious. We could no longer open the freezer. Before the Lockdown, before the entire Golden State was actually shut down, Hubby and I, like so many North Americans, had been gearing up for what we suspected would be a long haul. Unfortunately, we weren’t so great at our gearing, especially since our freezer was nearly frozen shut. We had intended to defrost it prior to the New Year three months earlier, but had failed to do so. Now our failure came back to bite us. Who could say how long the entire State of California, would remain–well, closed, for all intents and purposes? Yep, California was closed. What a weird sentence, and an even weirder surreality. (I like that word. I made it up). Nobody could say, and even the experts couldn’t offer a reasoned guess how long this viral attack would last…and here we were, stymied to prepare adequately. Our freezer was nearly impossible to fill due to its Titanic “icebergs dead ahead”—pun intended. Trump was an idiot (no surprise there) and on March 24, 2020 (!), while death tolls climbed steadily throughout the country, he actually had the audacity to say that we would all get back to work by Easter. “It’ll be beautiful,” he said; it would be “absolutely beautiful.” What a jackass!
But of course there was no way that the United States of America could go back to normal anytime soon, if ever. Between the stock market crash, soaring unemployment and, you know, countless deaths, it will take a long, long, time to “come back,” no matter how much we wish we could. Certainly the earliest twinge of our recovery is many, many months, or probably years away. The Corona virus might wreak its bitter destruction and burn itself out sooner than several months, but economic and spiritual recovery will take years. Realistically, if so many people continue to be silly billies, refusing to stay quarantined inside their homes, instead taking public transportation and licking groceries in Wal-Mart, this virus will certainly take a lot, lot longer to be contained than the couple weeks we have from March 24 (when he said it) until Easter Sunday, the beautiful time Trump promised. This was the same doofus who said he “had a hunch” that there were far fewer people who had the Corona virus than the numbers being reported. A hunch?! Really? Scientists and actual intellectuals who knew stuff about science, intelligent people of all kinds, or even just regular people, knew that Trump didn’t know what he was talking about. Viruses don’t disappear just because it’s an election year, and they, viruses, certainly don’t “contain” themselves simply because a powerful orange-haired leader says that it’s “under control.” It is far, far from under control… and we are so screwed.
Like many others in California and elsewhere, in advance of the entire state’s lock down, my Spouse and I went shopping. We bought groceries of many kinds, none of them from Wal-Mart, thank goodness. We bought the requisite toilet paper (at the time it wasn’t yet completely out of stock) and some food. We didn’t buy enough food, though, because we have a small refrigerator. Our freezer was such an iceberg that we couldn’t even slide out all the drawers to fill it. We bought a lot of veggies because we figured we should eat as well and as healthily as we could for now… anticipating a future when we are forced to resort to frozen food once the real stuff is in short supply. We don’t usually eat frozen processed food, which was part of the reason we had such a poor sense of how bad the state of our freezer was in. When it comes to frozen food, we eat ice cream (well, nondairy) the occasional pre-prepared curry, but that’s about it. Early on we shopped, smugly, knowing we were ahead of it, at least a little. At Raley’s, we had filled our cart with veggies, fruits, and oat milk. At Trader Joe’s we bought gluten free bread, gluten free bagels, soy cherry chip ice cream, and decaf fair trade, organic coffee. And potato chips, though it would soon be revealed that three measly bags of potato chips are not enough by a long shot. In Quarantine, there is time for plenty of stress eating. Even though we definitely had not bought enough potato chips, I comforted myself because we had several boxes of gluten free brownies. I’m happy to have fresh vegetables, really, but let’s be clear. My staples are gluten free brownies and potato chips. Hubby chooses artichokes. Goody for him. I can’t eat artichokes for reasons best not discussed. Then the second time we shopped at Trader Joe’s, the bags of potato chips were scarce. There were plenty of gluten free bagels, though. And artichokes.
It’s not that I don’t want to be healthy. I sort of do. I feel better when I eat fresh fruit and veg, which is why we bought a lot of fresh fruit and veg preparing for Lockdown. That’s one side of me. The other side, since I turned 50 in November, recognizes that it is all going to end soon, anyway. (Maybe sooner than expected, if we’re honest). This is why I can live fully, even embrace, the apparent contradiction: buy gluten free bagels at Trader Joe’s, stop for a donut on the way back home. If the donut place made a gluten free donut, I would probably eat it. But they don’t, so I suffer through the gluten and delight in eating the donut. People ask what happens when I eat gluten. Don’t ask. Okay, since you asked, the polite version is that a critical part of my anatomy, rhymes with SWOLLEN, hurts like hell the next day, and my pooping is just… not right. (I told you not to ask, but you asked anyway. The nerve of some people!) As a general rule, I mostly save my gluten and dairy for pizza (which has both) and ice cream (which doesn’t). Ice cream has dairy, of course, but not gluten-unless you put it in a cone, in which case it sort of has gluten, but not really because the gluten is in the cone, not the ice cream. It still has dairy, though). People may also wonder why I eat nondairy ice cream (an oxymoron, of course) yet also go out for “real” ice cream. Use your head, people! I eat nondairy at home because I can. I eat dairy “in the world” because I have to. (If McDonald’s ice cream sundaes are a “have to,” which of course they are. Don’t be foolish).
Speaking of “in the world,” let’s talk for a moment about what that looks like in the context of Lockdown. My spouse and I are staying in, for the most part, like all good citizens should. I might go out for a walk while he works on his construction projects. Sometimes we go on a walk together, social distancing from others as needed. Thank goodness for his construction projects, because otherwise it would be a battle for the computer. I would lose and then pout. Instead I get to write, and nap. The house is cleaner now, too, which you can guess is part of the work I do when I am not napping or writing whilst “sheltering at home.” It is astounding how many cobwebs you will discover if you never de-cobweb your blinds. (Until now de-cob-webbing the blinds was only slightly more frequent than defrosting our freezer). Part of why I avoid cobwebs, and I know this will sound strange, is that I am allergic to them. If they touch my skin, it stings and hurts, a possibly rare reaction to cobweb poison. (I don’t know if it’s rare; I’ve never asked anyone if they are allergic to cobwebs). Then soon after, I will develop very small welts all over the places where the evil cobweb strings touched me. When I go to the doctor, and they ask what I am allergic to, I am tempted to say, “cobwebs,” but I doubt they would believe me and it’s probably not relevant. I just say adhesives, and nobody has any trouble believing that. It’s true, too. I digress.
Back into the world we go, Spouse and I. A walk. Groceries. We go to Trader Joe’s a second or third time after the previous pre-panic time. This time we have only partial success. The customers are subdued, with the strange mix of “Day of the Dead” or the feeling after an earthquake. Quiet, eerie stillness. We can still find gluten free bagels, which we buy, and plenty of gluten free pasta, which we don’t, because gluten free pasta is disgusting. This time there is no toilet paper for sale, of course. We as a society are fully in panic mode these days. Spouse and I aren’t quite in panic mode yet because we eat oxymoronic nondairy ice cream and gluten free bagels (of which there are plenty still available at Trader Joes). When we are not in Trader Joe’s, sometimes we meditate, too, which helps us stay grounded. Sometimes. After we ran out of our pre-Lockdown-early-shopping-food that we had smugly purchased long before Quarantine had begun, I admit I had a momentary panic today. I realized we were actually running out of food already! We were out of turkey bacon, which I will eat because I could kill a bird. I don’t eat beef of pork because I couldn’t kill a beef or a pork. How much we all take for granted all the time: turkey bacon, soy ice cream, coffee, cheese, meat…toilet paper. You don’t realize how much you take for granted in this world until you realize how much you take for granted. It seems simple, but it’s true.
Regardless, if I were an inventor, I would probably create a way to use the many, many, cobwebs that quarantined people are now discovering in their homes. I would pair those webs with the dire need for toilet paper at this time of crisis. Thus I’ve created cobweb toilet paper, you see. Of course, I couldn’t use it myself, because I’m allergic.
Ah, but as I imagine myself as the first ever inventor of environmentally sound, fair trade, cage-free toilet paper, I realize the enormous challenges of this very invention. For one, how do I collect the cobwebs from their cobweb owners? Not only am I allergic, there is a shelter-in-place order across the entire Golden State. Therefore, not only would it be silly to attempt cobweb hunting, it’s probably illegal to leave my house for the critical main ingredient. This contradicted by the fact that there is currently a well-documented toilet paper shortage across the nation, so maybe my need to leave the house is an exception. My toilet paper brainchild could, indeed fall under “vital, essential services,” couldn’t it? I could look into that, but there are probably no government agencies working on such a specific a task right now (the invention and patent of cobweb toilet paper), and I can’t blame them. We don’t have enough ventilators, for Pete’s sake! It is a time of global emergency after all, so my groundbreaking toilet paper invention is dead in the icy, melting freezer water. Besides, I couldn’t even use it myself. Cobweb toilet paper can wait.
Somehow I reign my inventor’s mind back in from my development of cobweb toilet paper, where I had been unselfishly saving all of humanity from the huge lack of TP (well, not Muslims, they don’t use it. I don’t know about Hindus). Either way, Muslims are a huge portion of the global population who don’t even need my ridiculous (or is it genius?) cobweb toilet paper, not to mention those other rare breeds who, like me are also allergic to cobwebs. Suddenly I am utterly deflated, beaten if you will. I have just invented the almost-most needed commodity on the planet right now, but Muslims don’t need it, Hindus might not need it, and people with cobweb allergies certainly can’t use it! Further, even if I were to ignore these brutal facts, there is no government agency in the world that is processing patent requests for cobweb toilet paper right now, because of the damn global crisis. Still, it probably is a good invention, if you think about it, because even though not everyone uses toilet paper, everyone has spiders. I wonder if there are any cobwebs in my freezer.