Tag Archives: california

01.24.21
by

Climbing That Hill

After a fantastic week of Joe, Kamala and Amanda Gorman, a 22 year-old young woman who made me love poetry once again for the first time since my early twenties, it started to happen.

I began falling into the…

ABYSS.

to the sunken place I go

Strange the way it creeps up on you.  And even stranger how, once you get to be a certain age and have had enough therapy, you know how to begin to creep out.

What brought me careening down there after this cataclysmic week of exciting firsts?

  • L.A. house arrest to avoid a virus
  • Vaccine searching fatigue
  • Zoom communication (meetings, teaching, and even socializing)
  • Screen watching fatigue (what was once fun and decadent now feels dronish and labored no matter how much YOU liked it and swear I MUST see it).
  • Fascism and other tales percolating from the dark side of nowhere
The true spirit of this week #onlyBerniememeIwillshare

Of course, this is merely a partial list.  Feel free to add on and subtract for yourself as you see fit.

I was sort of embarrassed to write this because of the privilege I enjoy.  White, employed (Note: Well, for now, nothing is permanent), happily married, friends, house, food, shelter and pasta guilt-free more nights than I can count because, more than anything else, THAT’S allowed these days).

Still, living through these times feels like dancing on the head of a pin too often than not.  At any point you can slip and impale yourself.  Perhaps not too badly but just enough that a small puncture slowly turns into a crack, and then a wound, which gets larger and larger and then suddenly emerges as a…gaping hole

Nothing to see here… totally normal day

And, you know, that can’t be good.  Imagine what awaits you when you’re fully sucked down inside.

Um, no….THAT’S not what I mean.

Seriously.

Living in Los Angeles, California has had so many benefits but the most recent downside is navigating at the epicenter of U.S. Covid-19.  We’re averaging well over 10,000 new cases daily and more than one million overall. 

Our home state of California has over 3.4. million cases thus far, the most of any state in the country.  When you consider there are just shy of 25 million people infected in the entire U.S. that means we account for almost 20% of cases.

We’re #1! We’re #1! #uhoh

And yet, we have far less vaccines available than other states. A friend in Florida told me it was easy peasy to register for your shot.  Yet the first day you could register in L.A. county, the site crashed, appointments were cancelled and many of us (Note: ME) spent hours trying to book vaccinations at sketchy clinics that wanted ALL your insurance info online and STILL didn’t manage to offer a definite spot for both shots.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the Trump administration had it in for California and gave Florida a larger part of our vaccines just cause HE lives there.

But I’m not a conspiracy theorist.

Yet.

Searches Etsy for fashionable tin foil hats

Nevertheless, it did give me a lesson on how others might have begun to succumb. 

This, of course, was countered by watching a kind and decent man being sworn into the presidency pledging that his first priority would be fixing the CoVid mess by listening to SCIENCE and not poll numbers.

But what was even more encouraging has been his appointment of seemingly EVERY top expert in EVERY field of government to do that and much more AND to, in turn, save the Republic.

(Note: It also didn’t hurt that not ONE of them was related to him by either blood OR marriage).

Like magic… BUT REAL!

Call me crazy (and many have) but I found this to be oddly encouraging.  That and watching the unmuzzled Dr. Anthony Fauci spreading honesty on TV once again, particularly about all things CoVid.  He even got down in the weeds and reassured crazies like me that there is NO real difference between the Pfizer and Moderna shot and that the only reason he took the Moderna one was that it happened to be the one available the day he had his vaccination at the National Institute of Health.  But that he would have done either.

Speaking of straight shooters, AND decency, tell your Fox News viewing relatives there is neither to be found there.  Sean Hannity this week had a banner onscreen headline categorizing Joe Biden’s first week as president  “DISASTROUS.”  Not sure if this was due to the one million shots for the first 100 day pledge, which was already being met after several days in office, or the US reentering both the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization.

My charitable way of saying “you are a moron”

Still, they did surface with two compelling Biden scandals.  Our new president has the temerity to wear a Rolex watch AND owns and exercises on a Peleton bike.

Oh, the no golden toilet of it all!  Oh, the shame!!

The President EXERCISES?!

Sure, I’m being snide but I’ve found that’s one way to brighten up my world and get by.  The other is to take in the fact that after four years DECENCY might actually be back in vogue. 

How do I know? 

Well, when Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff was walking down Constitution Avenue with his wife, VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS OF CALIFORNIA, he made international news just for briefly stopping and doubling back where they had previously been in order to retrieve the earring that had just fallen out of her ear.

So shocking was this act of valor in these days, I heard one journalist this week actually say on air, where do you make copies of a guy like that?

Get yourself a man that would wear your name on a t-shirt! #weloveDougie

Yes, that’s how starved we’ve been and how low the decency bar is.  Which means imagining how high we might get back to during the next four years is indeed something to live on for and celebrate no matter how long it takes to get us all immunized so we can return to hugging (and more) in person again.

Though if all that doesn’t do it for you, reveling in the words and images of our young poet laureate on Inauguration Day was a real, um…shot in the arm for my psyche, not to mention a reliable booster on each awful day since.  And that was even AFTER listening to Gaga sing the National Anthem with a giant Dove on her chest.

It was the gold mic choreography that really got me

I mean, if Amanda Gormans exist in the world – a young person with that much talent, grace and theatrical style – who also overcame a speech impediment – to live perform a POEM(!) she wrote for the ages to the world on Inauguration Day –  how bad are things, really? 

Especially when it leaves us with this life lesson:

..We will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one

We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west,

We will rise from the windswept northeast

Where our forefathers first realized revolution

We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states,

We will rise from the sunbaked south

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover

and every known nook of our nation and

every corner called our country,

our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,

battered and beautiful

When day comes we step out of the shade,

aflame and unafraid

The new dawn blooms as we free it

For there is always light,

if only we’re brave enough to see it

If only we’re brave enough to be it

Lady Gaga – “The Star Spangled Banner”

Check out the Chair’s newest project, Pod From a Chair , now available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

08.02.20
by

We’re Number One!

To mask or not to mask, that is NOT the question.

It’s not up for debate.  You go outside, you wear the f-n mask.  If you don’t you get fined $10,000 the first time.  The second time you go to jail.

And yes, I’m a liberal.

I will get the hose!

Jail is the last place you want to be in a national pandemic but jail is where you will go for not adhering to the #1 medically approved way you can best protect yourself and others from contracting and spreading COVID-19. If you’ve ever watched any of the Law and Order shows (Note: And at this point in our lives, who hasn’t?) you’ve doubtless seen the one about the person who knowingly spreads some very contagious, possibly lethal disease and is charged for assault or even murder in court for callously using their bodily fluids as their weapon of choice.

So, life imitates art, right?  And we haven’t even started on death.

Then why don’t we?

You tell ’em, Olivia!

I live in California and we now have the dubious distinction of being #1 in the country for COVID-19 infections.  More than half a million and counting.  We were doing okay for a while but since businesses reopened in the last couple of months we’ve seen a sharp surge or spike or whatever you want to call it in cases.  

Our death rate (Note: Almost 9224 people so far) is not quite commensurate with other hot spots but health care in California is a bit better than it is in other states.  Still, we’re catching up (Note: 219 dead in the last 24 hours) and if this continues, well, watch your back, America!  We’re gonna contribute mightily to the almost 160,000 and counting Americans who have already perished, with no end in sight.

(Note: FYI, that is more Americans killed than in the Vietnam, War, Gulf War, Afghanistan War, Iraq War AND Korean War combined).

Get a nice haircut for your open casket

California has for decades been known as the place that nationwide trends originate.  This has been both good and bad.  Sadly, we gave you the Valley Girl but on the good side Silicon Valley did revolutionize the world.

On second thought, perhaps that wasn’t as good as we figured.

Never a good sign when Zuckerberg is looking more and more like a Batman villian

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 40 years and have heard all the jokes, the jealousies and the jerk-offs who put us down but secretly long to be or at least borrow from us.  They haven’t really bothered me because even though I’m a New Yorker through and through California won me over long ago.

It had a freedom, an openness and a sea of possibilities that I was never able to find or be comfortable with on the east coast or in my wonderful New York City.  To this day I love the east coast, New York especially, but it simply isn’t California.

Forget the beach, I’m talking Laurel Canyon, Joni, Carole, Tapestry on repeat

And yet these days that’s the last thing New York, or any state should try to be.

As my husband travelled in the car this Los Angeles afternoon, he drove through the somewhat busy streets of West Hollywood and spotted packed tables of people seated in sidewalk cafes, browsing store windows or simply walking and jogging all up and down the streets without masks.

At his count at least 50% of the people he saw had ZERO face coverings.

WHAT THE F-CK!!!!????

I don’t get why this is so hard.

But please, scream FREEDOM and wave your flag

I do get that this mask thing has become somewhat political and that many members of the Republican Party are choosing to go mask-less as a political statement against Democratic liberals.  Even the recent death of 2016 Republican presidential aspirant Herman Cain from COVID, which was diagnosed right after he attended that huge Trump rally mask-less in Tulsa, Oklahoma, hasn’t stopped them.

But West Hollywood ain’t Tulsa, you’ll just have to trust me on that.  You have as much chance of attending a Trump rally here as you do of buying a ticket to an AOC fundraiser in Tulsa’s BOK Center, the downtown stadium where Mr. Cain and thousands of others exchanged air, spittle and who knows what other types of bodily fluids back in June to kick off Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

So again, let’s pose the open question – WHAT. THE.  F-K.  GIVES?????

WHAT. IS. LOGIC

I say this pretty much sequestered in my house – high-risk group member that I am, and a very vocal one – and at the end of my rope.  I mean, I love my house, don’t get me wrong, and I know I’m A LOT more fortunate than most.  But even I don’t want to be here for the rest of my life.

However, I will be if the alternative means taking my life (and yours) in my hands because my fellow citizens are too dumb, selfish and/or vain to mask up.

My bet is that it could take the hot spot illnesses and underestimated deaths nationwide of thousands of teenagers once school begins to get people motivated.  But then again, the slaughter of an entire classroom of  6 and 7 year olds by a lone gunman with an assault weapon didn’t foster much of a change almost a decade ago to our nation’s gun laws, so perhaps I’m mistaken.

The Chair does not sugarcoat things!

We Americans are a really, really, really strange breed.  We elect our first African American president and then eight years later turn around and put a White Supremacist racist (Note: Can you be one without the other?) in the White House.

We could easily do a similar reverse turnaround on masks and COVID-19.  Or we could just let the virus spread further, mutate and mow a good 25-50% of our population down (Note: FYI, that’s 80-160 million people sick and/or dead) and make the decision for us.

Who knew SNL could predict the future? #idid

Count on me to be at home, watching it unfold from my safe house in California.  If you happen to pass by I’ll be the one screaming obscenities at the window at you if you’re showing too much nose, mouth or skin as I wonder who the f-ck we are and what the f-ck we have all become.

The Eagles – “Hotel California”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcmjDPDOk7c