Does the Virus Sleep? Pandemic Conversations with a Little Boy

I'd been so used to calling my son a toddler that it'll take some getting used to maintain calling him a "little boy." No way, something tells me this will all be over in a blip. He's huge, been using the toilet easily for a few weeks, and will be four years old in a few weeks. He's no longer a toddler.

As children can be, he's full of questions. On the way to daycare when I'm listening to NPR I'm usually surprised with how well he listens. Who knew? He can pick out the word "virus" like a moth can a flame. He's been told that the virus is the reason we can't go to playgrounds anymore, for a little bit. The virus is also keeping us from hanging out with friends, or going to the beach, or heading to our favorite pizza place to sit and have dinner.

"Is the virus in your comic shop?"

I mean, I hope not, but the presence of the virus itself is not the reason that the comic shop downstairs is closed. It's complicated. We have to be alone to beat it, we have to stop it from being able to spread, and to do that, everyone has to hide in their homes.

The mighty moon-walking, genome-sequencing, solar-system-leaving Homo sapiens, finding all they can do against a microscopic enemy is run home and hide.

"Does the virus sleep?"

Nope. It doesn't sleep or eat or even have babies. See, you're made up of trillions of cells, cells make up every organ you have, like your tummy, or muscles, or brain, and even your skin. Viruses are so small that they can sneak into one of your cells. Then they find your mitochondria---that's what powers that cell---and hijack it. Instead of making fuel for your cell, the powerhouse makes copies of the virus, until the cell, packed full, bursts open, sending viruses everywhere.

Some people think that viruses aren't even alive. They just snip out a bit of RNA and replace it with their own.

"Does the virus have a mouth?"

Since they don't eat, they don't have mouths.

"Does the virus have a butt to poop out of?" (This is the funniest comment ever, apparently.)

Since they don't eat, they don't make any poop that needs a butt to pooped out of. (Until this.)

Is the reason so many white folks are having a hard time with this entire extended lockdown because it precisely is an invisible enemy, so tiny that even one of our trillions of cells dwarfs it, so dangerous that even our best weapons are meaningless against it? Are white folks really than accustomed to getting their way that being told to chill out for a few months is enough to jack them all up?

IT IS NOT INHERENTLY MALICIOUS. IT DOES NOT CARE THAT IT CREATED A PANDEMIC. IT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND WE HAVE AN ELECTION THIS YEAR, OR EVEN WHAT ELECTIONS ARE.

I had a union zoom meeting last week, for which I spent the entire time holding my daughter because of the time of day. One of the guys from the meeting was gung-ho about returning to work. Common dismissive refrains came from him: This is just like the flu, and We're all going to get it at some point, and the general ethos of many a thousand people, We have got to get back to work.

I just wanted to ask him: Are you okay with killing someone's grandma because you've got to go back to work so badly? And, bigger picture, is it morally okay to kill somebody just because you didn't know you were doing it?

There are no good answers here, folks. At a Christmas Eve party five months ago a family friend said, "Well, at least this sociopath hasn't had any true disasters to deal with." Welp, here's an opportunity to shine...

How's that working out for everyone?

George Packer nails it in his opening piece in this month's Atlantic.

Historic and colossal mismanagement is harder to discuss with a little boy than whether or not viruses are alive.

"Is the virus at Diz-nee-land?"

Things I've Learned on Quarantine

1. My Son's Breakfast Game is Amazing

In these weeks that I haven't been needing to drive to work, I've been able to be up early with my boy and make him breakfast before taking him to daycare/school. It operates out of a home with less than a dozen kids and provides both him and us our only social interaction, at drop off and pick up.

With little incentive to rush out the door, besides trying to have a modicum of regularity in my own work schedule, I'm usually game to let him eat what he wants for breakfast. Many mornings go  like this:

1. Bowl of Cheerios
2. Second bowl of Cheerios
3. Waffle from our homemade batter
4. Second waffle
5. Fried egg
6. Second fried egg
7. Third fried egg

By the second fried egg I'm usually like, "You want another egg? Well, hell yeah!" The third is foregone conclusion.

My son turns four next month, and I expected it to take another dozen years before I was exhausted just watching him eat.

2. The Origins of Friday the 13th as a Negative Idiom

I was caught up in some twenty-five minute documentary on Curiosity Stream, a very worthy quarantine subscription purchase (twelve bucks for the year?!?), about Parisian secrets, and it was the Knights Templar episode. I wasn't interested in many of the other episodes, but I didn't know so much about the Knights Templar, and the time commitment was low, so I hit play.

So...a group of, eh, mercenaries tried to protect Christian pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. That area was home to lots of non-Christians, so it was a serious gig. Eventually the Knights were given a temple as a headquarters (maybe I'd had too many gin and tonics by this point?), which led to their name.

Anyway, by 1100 they were hired by the French king to be a special protective force and given some land right outside of Ile de la Cite, the island in the Seine where Notre Dame sits today. Historically some scholars think the origin of Paris itself, starting around 200 CE, was on this island. 

In the centuries that followed, the Knights started buying the surrounding land, amassed a ton of wealth, and started lending money. They even used their power and fame to help travelers, becoming the first recognized international backer of currency: if you lived in Paris and wanted to visit Genoa, you could drop off money at the Knights Templar's headquarters and they would write you a note promising to back the equivalent amount of Genoan currency. This was a major breakthrough in traveling, as now people could travel without carrying their own money and be susceptible to bandits.

By 1303, the French king had grown weary of the wealthy and powerful Knights, how they'd purchased enormous swaths of Paris, and mostly about how they had a little too much independence. In the middle of the night, on Friday the 13th of October, the king had his men kick down the doors to the unsuspecting Knights and swept them all away to jail, thereby seizing their assets. Within a decade nearly all were burned at the stake.

There remains, on the tip of the Ile de la Cite, in the proverbial shadows of Notre Dame, a marker of the last knights burned at the stake rests.

3. There are Asteroids Orbiting the Sun Between Venus and Mars

I remember hearing about how Japanese astronauts were planning on landing a spacecraft onto an asteroid a number of years back. On a different Curiosity Stream short documentary, this close encounter was highlighted. The target was Ryugu, an asteroid a few kilometres across:

I was wondering how far away they had to travel, but the number of millions of kilometres seemed pretty small, for being in the millions.

Then they showed it's solar orbit: it was in between Earth and Mars. 

WAIT, WHAT? was how my brain processed that information. I've heard many times about the NEO, the Near Earth Objects, but I guess I'd never realized that they formed a group of heady-sized asteroids orbiting the sun in between Venus and Mars. Doesn't something else orbit the sun between Venus and Mars?

4. My Video Game Skills Suck

Norm sent out an SNES mini he wasn't using. I've been showcasing games for Cass and trying to get him to try them out, maybe improve his hand-eye coordination, but it is a little early in his life (it is physically, for sure), but I realized something about myself: I'm not a video game guy.

Sure I like some video games, having beat a very few number of games. But...this mini console brings out the frustration and anger.

I wanted to have an entire post dedicated to my detailed frustrations, and I think I will do just that. But I'm going to need to start taking notes...

5. My Daughter is a Pinkie Like Her Old Man

Corrie has some Cherokee in her background, and we believe it's for this reason that she tans beautifully instead of lobstering like me. Cass has been lucky enough to get this gene. He's been called "the whitest baby I've ever seen" more than once, and yet he's never really gotten a sunburn. We put lotion on very seldom, which is our bad, since burns or no, the sun is damaging.

But Camille doesn't seem to have gotten the gene. Our beaches were finally opened, and we spent some time there this past Saturday:

Cass had a great time. It was awesome to get him some activity off his bike and off the sidewalk around our building, since he's been using the toilet exclusively, and we like to be close.

We thought we'd be able to use an open public bathroom in the event it was necessary, but they were all closed. Cass did eventually use a Port-A-Potty that someone had broken the lock off of.

No masks for a few minutes

 Camille slept most of the time, but after we got home, and relaxed, and the sun started to show off of our skin, it became clear: she may be a lobster like her old man.

I'm not sure this picture shows it off well enough, but the left side of her face and her arms (and backs of legs) all got pretty pink:

She's a trooper, though, and doesn't complain about it.

Also, it seems like Long Beach's west-side marina didn't get the memo that all this quarantining has been great for the environment:

Surviving the Great Dying

There is evidence that we're living through a mass extinction event, and I'm not referring to the pandemic. In general, we're losing dozens of species every year, and that's likely conservative in the estimate.

Anyway, the end of the Permian period, there was one of the greatest mass extinctions ever. So many species died off that the event is known as the Great Dying today. It happened around 252 million years ago, at the line between the historical eras of the Permian and the Jurassic. Enough land animals disappeared that the dinosaurs came into their own, and the rest we (as in the masses) kinda know about.

But, besides the animals that survived, some plants also survived. Here are two from my walk to the grocers:

In the background is a fern tree, an ancient pre-flowering plant, nearly half-a-billion years old. Next to it, in the foreground, is a cycad, a fibrous, palm-looking plant that isn't closely related to palms at all. Having developed over 300 million years ago, cycads survived the Great Dying, survived the dinosaurs, and survived the end of the dinosaurs.

And that's just out on the walk to the grocery store.

Also in the neighborhood is another survivor of the Great Dying:

Ginkgo biloba is a broad green leafed tree that isn't an angiosperm---it doesn't flower. It's sometimes known as a "shit-berry" tree, since the fruits of it smell like poop, or vomit. I usually smell barf, and the idea is that they spread all over the planet because the fruits smelled like carrion. Today ginkgo can be found all over the globe. They're hearty, strong, and, above all else, are survivors.

Another plant that's in our neighborhood is a magnolia. I've taken many pictures of them over the years, but I just learned something about them. They are angiosperms, and we know that they flower from any number of popular cultural references.

BUT, the magnolia is one of the oldest remaining angiosperms. Like, ancient. But, once you think about it, it makes a certain sense.

Check it out: the leaves are extremely tough and covered in wax. The flowers are large, and the core of the flower grows after the petals go away. It grows and grows, and eventually looks like pine cone. It even behaves as a pine cone eventually, as it matures and the red seeds finally avail themselves to the tree rodents in the neighborhood.

Not a survivor of the Great Dying, but pretty cool nonetheless.