Covid-19 Journal - Week 6 Begins

I'm kind of in shock this morning as I watch the price of crude oil rapidly fall to near zero. It actually hit one penny per barrel a few seconds ago, and at this moment the price is around twenty-five cents a barrel. That is a disaster for the world economy that is going to have some longterm effects that most people don't think about. It's a great feeling to get gasoline for under a buck a gallon, I agree. But it's a killer for a country that had finally reached energy independence because now many domestic oil producers are going to disappear forever - and we will be dependent on the Saudis once again for our energy. 

(Before I finished this post, the price of oil had gone negative for the day. That, in effect, means that some producers are willing to pay you roughly $35 a barrel just to haul the stuff away.)

Virus Stats from Johns Hopkins:

In the last week,

Worldwide cases increased from 1,846,963 to 2,440,876,
United States cases increased from 555,398 to 766,212, and
Texas cases went from 13,741 with 286 deaths to 19,512 with 504 deaths.

Outside:

We were on the very edge of the storms that clobbered the Southeast yesterday, so we really didn't get any of the high winds or much of the heavy rain. It did rain pretty much all day long, but it really only came down very hard three or four times all day. And today is one of the most beautiful days of the year with bright sunshine, cool temps, and very little wind. 

Reading/Watching/Listening to:

This is the only recently published e-book I was able to get from my library last week, and I'm about 75% of the way through it this morning. The Other Wes Moore was written when its author learned there was another man by the same name in his city who is living a life 180 degrees from the one the author has known. The author is a Rhodes Scholar, a veteran, a businessman, and a White House Fellow. The other Wes Moore is serving a life sentence in prison for his part in a jewelry store robbery during which a policeman/security guard was shot and killed.  Both men are black. 

I was pleasantly surprised that I was able also to snag an e-book loan from my library of Louise Penny's 2010 Armand Gamache novella The Hangman. It appears to be 100 pages long, and I'm wondering how it chronologically fits into the Gamache timeline, or if that even matters. Penny also published Bury Your Dead, the sixth novel in the Gamache series, that year, so I wonder if the novella started life as an intended-novel that she quit early on, or if it was always planned as a novella. I'll read this one as soon as I finish The Other Wes Moore because the due-date clock is ticking on it. 

I enjoyed several good movies and documentaries last week, but  honestly, with such an abundance of choice these days it would probably be more surprising if I hadn't. First Man (2018) is a biopic of Neil Armstrong that focuses on America's quest to beat the Russians to the moon. I had not realized that Armstrong had some emotional problems that he had to battle throughout his life, problems serious enough that they sometimes had the NASA decision-makers wondering if he was the best choice for various missions. The movie stars Ryan Gosling.

The Tomorrow Man (2019), starring John Lithgow and Blythe Danner, is a strange little movie about a "survivalist" who is preparing for apocalyptic times by storing food and gear in a secret room of his house. Because he is divorced and lonely, when he spots the Blythe Danner character he thinks he's found his soulmate after he observes her buying in large quantities just the way he does. Little does he know that she is just a hoarder. The last minute of this one is especially strange - never saw The Tomorrow Man going where it ended up.

Watching Drunks (1996) is a lot like sitting in on one of the AA meetings that take place all over the world every day. It is one heck of a reality check, but not nearly as depressing a movie as you might think it would be. The best part of this one for me was watching the actors, most of whom got so deeply into their roles that it was easy to forget they weren't a bunch of actual alcoholics and addicts. As you can see from the attached image, the cast of this one is pretty remarkable.

Listening To:

I got part of my music-fix last week from watching a couple of documentaries that were truly wonderful. First, I finished up Ken Burns's eight-part documentary series called Country Music. Burns had the good sense to end the documentary in the late 1980s because, sometime in the early nineties, real country music was destroyed by the likes of Shania Twain and Garth Brooks, and it never really recovered from their influence. I also watched Ron Howard's documentary on The Beatles called The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years. Even to this day, I listen to The Beatles more than to anyone else, so this one was a real treat for me last night. Ron Howard did a great job of putting all the material together. 

I also broke out a few of my older compilation albums, the kind where a dozen or so different artists contribute a song each based on a unifying theme or one core singer they all duet with. I had forgotten how good some of those albums are. But what I enjoyed most from my collection last week was rediscovering the amazing voice of Patty Loveless (a cousin of Loretta Lynn, by the way). Patty can sing just about any kind of music but I am particularly fond of her two or three bluegrass/mountain music albums. If you are a grasser, I very much recommend the album pictured.

In the Kitchen:

Life goes on. We are still finding pretty much what we need from the grocery stores every week, but it requires me to go to two or three of them every Friday morning to make that happen. I'm a little surprised that there are still large gaps on the shelves of the three grocery stores I shop in my north Houston suburb - and how the outages are so different from store to store. What one chain has been out of for weeks, another has in semi-abundance, and vice versa. I would definitely prefer not having to make three stops every week, tripling my exposure, but I don't expect that to change soon. 

The Outside World:

Texas is starting to open up just a little bit this week. The barriers to all the State Parks have been lifted, and the parks are open to those who wear masks and maintain the required spacing from each other. I doubt that will have much of an impact on the economy, however, since access to state parks is, I think, free. Maybe some folks will at least burn a little gasoline getting to the parks.

The governor has also said it's now OK for small businesses of all types to offer curbside service, something that might help the economy a bit, maybe even saving a few jobs that were on the brink of being lost in the next few days.

I wonder, though, even when things are more generally opened for leisure, shopping, exercise, etc. how soon people like me are going to feel comfortable going out in crowds of any size again. When will I feel comfortable  shopping without a mask, maybe even gloves? Will I return to major sporting events at all this year, or even next year? 

Will the "old normal" ever be normal again?