It’s the end of the first week of serious social distance, and it’s been about like one would expect. The company I work for sent out an email on Monday instructing everyone who could work from home to do that. So I set my laptop up in the room my wife and I have always called “the office”. Working from home is a bit more difficult than being on site, but I’m certainly not going to complain. I’m still employed.
The reason I bring this up is that on the shelf above my computer monitor is Kevin Starr’s eight book Americans and the California Dream series. I’ve started the first book a half dozen times or so and never finished it. But with the time I’m likely to have for the next several weeks I have no excuse to not actually be reading them instead of looking at them on the shelf. Not during working hours, of course.
Add to that California, The Great Exception by Cary McWiliams and rereading Joan Didion’s Where I Was From and Mike Davis’ City of Quartz. For extra credit, Obi Kaufman’s California Field Atlas and The State of Water and there’s no way I get through it all before we’re all back to our usual anti-social society. At least I hope so.
On an associated note, I’ve noticed some good and not so good things in my fellow Californians this week. It seems most of us are actually staying home; I went by the office to get some things I needed on Tuesday and at 9am the 405 was 70 mph both ways. The traffic (as shown by the local news helicopters and the web) is a small fraction of normal. On the other hand, half a dozen people on the 405 used the light traffic to drive even dumber than usual. Saturday’s news had footage of a bunch of people out on the beach (who the governor called out that evening by telling them to grow up). I’ve had people on bicycles startle me from behind on the sidewalk obviously closer than six feet, and pedestrians shoot me the stink-eye when I walk into the empty street to avoid them.
I’ve been reading a couple books about the 1918 pandemic, and if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that this outbreak is serious beyond description. I’m guessing there are less than five people who read this blog and whoever you are I don’t want to lose any of you. So stay home, read (from my list or your own), binge watch California’s Gold, and stay six feet away from everyone when you go out to look for toilet paper (since you haven’t been able to buy any for the last week).