Strange Building Dream and a Call for a Blanket

Last night I had a dream about tall buildings that were sliding across the land like pieces on a chessboard. It was somehow the result of a new kind of earthquake. The buildings were running into each other. It was all highly cinematic. I was riding around in one building like it was a ship, and I could see from inside the building as another building came toward me and went through the building that I was in. Later, I could also see from the point of view of the building, and I was moving through forests and other buildings until I came to a large hole in the ground, and then I woke up.

There was a quick dream about a cake I was trying to bake, but I used only half the batter required, so it came out weird and twisted.

In the last of these dreams, I was floating in a kind of empty space that you might describe as being like the night of Brahma, a place where all of creation withdraws into a state of unrealized potential. I saw a kind of cosmic mist that was churning and spinning. A voice was explaining that beings were emerging from the mist so they could have the experience of being human. I saw a girl forming from the mist before I started to wake up.

I started the day feeling like I could face the world with a sense of purpose. I made a schedule that included an hour long work out and working on this blog and a tutorial, though it was hard to stick to the schedule. With more news coming out about the thousands of people dying every day from the pandemic, it was hard to think of anything else, so of course I become distracted with my friends' posts on Facebook. After lunch, I had a Facetime session with my therapist. We went over the events of the past week. I shared with her my perception of the current mood of the nation, or even the human race, as being like a gray fog that was permeating everything. I felt that I had to form a space around myself that would be like a bubble full of sunshine. How does one do such a thing? By invoking your own joy and hope. That might seem like a simple trick. It's not.

I called a police dispatch number and asked if someone could do a welfare check on Alycia. The operator asked why. I explained that Alycia was living in a wrecked car and might need help. She said that I should do it myself since I have that capability. I decided that I would wait until night fall, since Alycia would have nowhere to go at that time, but, strangely, that's exactly the time that she called me. She asked me to have dinner with her and to help her buy a blanket at Target. She was freezing. The dinner offer sounded like a kind of gratuity for helping her out, but I told her that people are being told to stay home. No one can go out for dinner. I offered to let her have an old blanket of mine, but she refused.

"You can borrow it, then," I said.

She was determined to buy a blanket of her own and ended the call. Later, I thought that if I had said that I could buy the blanket for her at Target and let her pay me back, that might have worked, but you can't reason with her when she's in this state. I felt frustrated. She was about to sleep in a cold car while it was raining. A person can get pneumonia that way. What if I just drove there and gave her a blanket? If you're freezing and someone gives you a blanket, you'll probably take it no matter what's going on in your head. I have an old blanket in a plastic bedding case that I was planning to give to charity anyway, so I put on my gloves and mask, put the blanket in my car, and drove to Alycia's car while listening to a Rachel Maddow podcast. I parked in front of her car, got out, and looked through the mist on the windows of her car. She had reclined the driver's seat and seemed to have wrapped herself up in a blanket, but it might have been layers of clothes. She was asleep. I called her name. I didn't want to scare her by knocking on the window. I called her, but her line when to voicemail, and I didn't see her phone lighting up. It must have been turned off. I thought of leaving the blanket by her car, thinking the plastic would keep it safe from the rain, but after I spoke to Steve on the phone, I decided against that plan. I called Cassie and told her what was going on. We decided that this was as far as I could go. She told me that I'm a good friend. I drove home and left the blanket in the car.

Election Dream and Kaitlynn's Birthday

Last night, I dreamed that I was working for a political party during an election. It was probably the Democratic Party, though I wonder if the pandemic may redefine politics so much that the current political parties get swept into the dustbin of history, replaced with new parties.

I felt a bit less anxiety this morning. My experience of it isn't like ordinary fear. It's like the slowless and feeling of being ineffective that I've been feeling for a week. Having a purpose could help me overcome that feeling, and I had one this morning. My friend, Cassie, organized a birthday party parade on Facebook. She asked friends to drive by her place to say happy birthday to Kaitlynn, her daughter. I gave myself the task of printing a kind of banner that said "Happy birthday, Kaitlynn!" in multi-colored letters. My printer failed to print. I pulled out a crumpled piece of paper inside it, but after that it still took many tries to get a good print. I drove to Simi Valley knowing that heavy rain was predicted, but I caught a lucky break in the rain. There were only clouds in the sky when I got to Cassie's place. I waited my turn while Cassie took a picture of another car full of birthday greeters. I said "happy birthday" to Kaitlynn from a distance while Cassie took a picture of me and the banner, which she collected from me. I wasn't sure if I should give it to her, since you can be shedding the virus if you have it but are asymptomatic, but I gave it to her anyway. I'm sure Cassie is taking precautions against infection.

I finished watching Star Trek: Picard on CBS All Access. Overall, I enjoyed the show, even though there were some holes in the plot. For example, if the Tal Shiar secret society of Romulans wanted to get rid of the threat of sentient life and had been able to plant agents in Star Fleet at the time that Doctor Noonian Soong was creating Data, and Data was the source of all sentient AI that they wanted to destroy, why then didn't they simply kill Data when they had the chance? But that kind of nitpicking takes away from what was enjoyable about the show, such as Patrick Stewart's performance, intriguing subplots, and adventurous characters. Captain Rios is as close as Star Trek has ever gotten to a Han Solo character, and the show even had a scene that vaguely resembled the Mos Eisley scene in Star Wars. Seven of Nine came back as a kind of lone ranger character, who helps the helpless. Seeing her take control of the deactivated Borg cube was a moment of high drama worth waiting for, considering her compunctions about enslaving a hive of inactive borg. There should be a spinoff show for her. There's a rumor that this may be happening. I'm geeking out on Star Trek again. That hasn't happened in a long time.

In the afternoon, I spoke to Steve on the phone. Steve is a mutual friend of Alycia's. He had previously told me that he was planning to give her some survival supplies like clothes and toilet paper. I asked him how it went. He said it didn't go well. She rejected all contact with him. There's nothing we can do for her but pray.

In the evening, I watched an episode of Black Lightning while cleaning the kitchen and bathroom floors. I'm almost done with that series. It's pretty cool. Later, I did an hour of cardio with a YouTube video. I was wondering if I was even capable of doing it. No one knows if they're sick unless they get tested, but you can't get tested unless you have symptoms. The only symptom I've had is shortness of breath. I decided that if I can't finish the workout, I should register for a test. To my relief, I was able to get through the whole workout. When I had rested a bit, I felt that I could breathe freely. Maybe I just had a chest cold before. Resting for a couple of days helped. I felt like I got what Chris Cuomo was saying about how he has been fighting the virus. It's about will, he said. The virus wants you to lie down. Don't. Get up and fight it. I'm thinking of that line from the first Captain America movie, when he's being beat up by a bully. Steve Rogers gets up from the ground, gets into a fighting stance, and says, "I can do this all day."

Palm Sunday

In the morning, I watched recordings of Good Morning, America and This Week with George Stephanopoulos as I usually do. The TV news shows were showing church services for Palm Sunday with priests and ministers performing their ceremonies for live streams without congregations. The Pope prayed in an empty St. Peter's Basilica. A local church allowed people to take communion if they used social distancing. That seems reckless to me. I usually do chores on Sunday but everything feels difficult to do now. I'm not as productive as I used to be. I wanted to do laundry in the morning but I didn't get around to it until afternoon. I didn't clean the floors. I didn't do any coding. It was mostly Facebook and TV today.

After watching the evening news, I went grocery shopping at Ralphs and Trader Joe's. There are no paper products of any kind at Ralphs. You can't bring in your own cloth bag at Trader Joe's now. They use their own paper bags only. I understand why they would want to follow that policy. They have to see hundreds of people every day and they can't have hundreds of bags from people's homes infecting the cashiers. I wanted to get in as much grocery shopping as I could before the rain starts and I think I did it. At home, I checked in with friends on Facebook and worked on this blog. I'm finding it hard to get things done. This blog is not a major work, and yet it seems to take me forever to do a single entry. I did what I could and then finished putting away laundry while watching Trisha Yearwood and Garth Brooks singing live from their home studio on Garth & Trisha Live! on Fox 11. I've never listened to their much, but I enjoyed the songs they performed. The last song was "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

Rest Day

I meditated before breakfast the way I always do, but even while I was making coffee I felt tightness in my chest again. Was it anxiety or a chest cold? I don't know, but I decided to eat a whole cannabis edible instead of half of one the way I usually do. I haven't been eating these every day, and I hadn't touched one in months since boot camp, but sometimes now I'm finding I need it. I didn't exercise today. If doing an hour of cardio a day is wearing me out and adding to my stress, I should take a day off.

While going through Facebook I found out that one of my friends from high school had gotten the coronavirus. I was at least a week behind in hearing about the story. She had just returned from a week long stay at a hospital and Facebook friends were heaping love on her timeline. Dawn and I went to Redlands High School together, but we didn't know each other very well back then, which is a shame because she's a very sweet person. I've gotten to know her on Facebook over the years and I've seen her a few times at high school reunions. She bakes cupcakes for a living, or at least she used to. I sent her a private message and she sent me PM's telling me the whole story. She's recovering at home now. I sent her a funny dog picture to make her feel better.

The highlight of the evening was a movie from 2017, Logan Lucky, which is a very funny Soderbergh film that's been on my movie list a long time. At one point I was howling with laughter at the joke about the way the prisoners were complaining about how the prison library didn't have two books by G.R.R. Martin that they wanted to read, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. It's 2020 and Martin still hasn't finished those books! After the movie I opened this blog so I could put in another post but I found that most of the content for Friday's post was gone. I had to redo it from memory. I'm not sure how that happened, but it's another sign of what a difficult time I'm having. It's seems to take longer to do everything, even though I'm not working or doing very much.

TV Day

I thought I was doing well this morning. I was able to go through the morning routines of meditation, breakfast, and checking e-mail and social media in less time then usual, and then I did a workout for an hour. I felt good about being able to put on pants in the morning and looked forward to getting back into coding, but something happened. I felt a tightness in my chest. It felt like the beginning of another panic attack. I found it hard to do any coding. I needed to get away from the increasingly bad news. I watched another episode of Star Trek: Picard. That helped.

Later, I used a new Chrome browser extension called Netflix Party to watch an episode of the a new series on Netflix called Locke and Key. I've heard it described as being like an updated version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but it's more adult than that. The episodes involve teenagers and their kid brother who discovers magical keys that open doors in the family's ancestral house with unexpected results. I used Netflix Party so I could watch it simultaneously with my sister Monika, who lives in Seattle. The chat feature in the program allows us to make smart remarks about the characters and weird situations in the show. We watched the first episode on Wednesday; we're trying to spread out the episodes over the next few weeks. This episode was entertaining enough, and Monika and I said our goodbyes and logged off. I spent the rest of the evening trying to catch up on e-mail and study code, but when I went to bed I still felt some tightness in my chest and wondered if I have something that is more than just anxiety.

Back to Coding

I've been working on tutorials and other projects to keep myself in the practice of coding, but lately it's been harder to do it consistently. I think it's because of the pandemic. The news has been getting more dire since Monday, when the number of deaths due to the coronavirus in the U.S. went above 3,000. Today it went up to 6,000. I'm finding it hard to concentrate. I can't help watching the news because I've been a news junkie probably since I first started watching the evening news with my dad when I was a kid, but I think it's taking a toll on me. I've tried to make myself feel better with social time. I tried using the Netflix Party extension in the Chrome browser yesterday so I could watch a show called Locke and Key with my sister Monika, who lives in Seattle. The show itself is all right as a teen-oriented magical reality thriller, but a lot of the fun came from the chat feature on Netflix Party, which let's you chat with other viewers while you watch the show. We made jokes about the scary imagery and characters. That was last night. Today, I only connected with people on Facebook, which is starting to feel insufficient.

I worked out with an hour-long cardio video in the morning. That helped, I think. Strangely, watching an episode of The Handmaid's Tale made me feel better. Watching Elizabeth Moss navigate a dystopian future world controlled by religious fanatics for some reason felt better than the reality that I'm actually living in. I'm by myself in a studio apartment and I'm not supposed to have social contact with people because of a highly contagious plague for which there is no cure. It's like house arrest. It may be that just allowing myself to be in another world for a while was helpful, even a world as awful as Gilead.

After watching the show, I saw on LinkedIn that I got a message from my boot camp instructor, Zane. He was checking in to see how I'm doing. I think that helped. I was eventually able to get back to working on a WordPress tutorial that I had dropped earlier this week. I don't know how much WordPress will help me as a web developer, but progress of any kind feels helpful. I'll work on it more tomorrow. It's not like when Shakepeare was writing King Lear during the plague.

"Day 6: Ben Jonson must have written, like, six plays by now."

What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague

The Bad General

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, "The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him." This means that a good general prepares to defend his nation from a attack instead of assuming that the nation is safe from all enemies. We have a president with no military experience who has claimed that he knows more about Islamic State (known as ISIS to many) than the generals. On January 20th, a man who traveled from Wuhan, China, to Washington state became the first person to be diagnosed with a coronavirus or COVID-19 infection, the same disease that killed thousands in Wuhan. On the same day, the first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in South Korea. The South Koreans acted swiftly to deal with the disease, testing thousands of people and putting them into quarantine, in effect, fighting the attack with a fast counterattack. Two months later, they have almost finished winning the battle. They have few than 4,000 active cases. Total deaths: 169.

How did our president rise to the occasion of defending America from this global pandemic? Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Trump claimed that we have it totally under control. "It's going to be just fine," he said.

Sun Tzu: "Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand." When the Chinese first deciphered the genome of COVID-19, they converted it into a data file that they uploaded to the internet so that everyone could use it to create tests for the virus. The Germans did this immediately and have succeeded in keeping the number of cases down as a result of massive testing of their citizens. I began to look at the growing numbers on sites such corona.help and worldometers.info to calculate how the numbers were rising exponentially. I learned that the exponential curve needs to hit an inflection point before it can level off into what's called a logistic curve. Even though there were only 66 active cases in the U.S. at the beginning of March, I was alarmed because I saw how the exponential growth could raise that to the hundreds of thousands, even as much as a half a million,
depending on what measures we took to reduce the growth rate, measures such as social distancing. Most other people were not alarmed. Trump was saying this was a hoax created by the Democrats to stop his election. "One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear," he said in February. But the numbers kept rising like the grains of rice in that story about the king of India who paid the inventor of the game of chess by doubling the number of grains of rice for each square on the chess board. There are just a few grains in the beginning, but after a enough squares are added, the number of grains is so high that that rice has to be stored in warehouses. Only in the middle of March, when fears of the pandemic made the stock market crash, did Trump declare a national emergency. He had the gall to call himself a "wartime president" even though he had spent six weeks dismissing the disease as no threat. As of this writing, over 5,000 Americans are dead. There are over 200,000 active cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and the numbers are still spiking. This is not a wartime president. This is a fool who has the blood of thousands on his hands. Recent scientific models created by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who works for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, show that the number of cases could go up into the millions and the number of dead could be between 100,000 and 240,000 before the numbers level off. The biggest threat to America isn't a foreign enemy. It's the president.

Social Time with Speed Racer

I've been avoiding people in order to comply with the stay-at-home order and yet today (March 30th) was a bit more social than usual for me. I had an online video chat with some Facebook friends. I had scheduled this as a lunch event in a Facebook group I run called Liberals. There were some problems in the beginning. I used the app to call the three other people who said that they were attending, but no one showed up at first. Eventually, a lady named Faye came online, but she was sick and couldn't stay. Another lady named Carol, who is the mother of my friend, Leta Lambert, came into chat but didn't say much, other than that she is shut in like everyone else and has food delivered to her. She wasn't visible in the video. She didn't want to be seen. My college buddy Jerry showed up. Jerry and I studied theatre arts togethe. This was great because I haven't seen him in years. He's working for a live theater in Michigan called The Barn. The owners are letting him live rent free in a nice house they own. We had a lot to catch up on, and also reminisce about, like our experiences trying at standup comedy when we were in college. I showed him the tie that I was wearing, a Speed Racer tie. It's one of a number of several conversation piece ties that I inherited from my brother James after he passed away. I wore the tie with a button-down shirt because I was tired of wearing sweatpants and T-shirts all the time. I had to cut the call short at one o' clock because I had an appointment with my therapist, but it was still great chat.

I Facetimed Paula and we talked for about 50 minutes. She's been my therapist since after my mother died. She says that I used to beat myself up a lot back then, but I'm better now. I know I'm different. We talked about the need to love yourself and I told her about Shakespeare's Sonnet 10 that expresses that idea. I had recently seen Patrick Stewart recite the sonnet on Facebook. I told her about the people I've been keeping in touch with, like my cousin Chris. I also told her about my last meeting with Alycia. There's probably nothing I can do for her. It's good to have a therapist you can talk to about your problems, especially during difficult times like these. I'm writing this past midnight, which is why the date is off, so I'll have to end this here.

I Ching Reading: Revolution

I often use the I Ching as a way find out where I'm at emotionally. Today I got Hexagram Number 49: Revolution. It implies that chaos rises out of order. The I Ching is based on Taoist philosophy, which teaches us how to find balance in a world that may seem out of balance. I'm not involved in a political revolution right now, but I believe we are all in a time when the COVID-19 global pandemic is forcing people to think in ways that were once considered revolutionary. Andrew Yang, the presidential candidate, was considered revolutionary for suggesting that every American should get $1,000 a month from the government. It seemed that our government would never try any policy that seemed so socialistic as too be impossible and yet Congress just passed a bill to give everyone at least $1,200 to help us get through the economic difficulty that social distancing has caused. But in what way am I supposed to find balance in this hexagram?

Ever since I graduated from a coding boot camp last December, I've been avoiding substitute teaching and staying home so I can apply to web development jobs and study whatever technologies I might need for a new job. Now that the world has turned upside-down, everyone else in California is living a lot like the way I've been living. For me, the main difference is that I can't study at Starbucks or go to the gym to workout. Everyone else is applying for unemployment like the way I've had to apply for unemployment when I can't get teaching jobs. In a strange way, everyone has been brought into my world. It's a little disorienting. What am I to make of it?

This hexagram came with what's called a "changing line," which means that there is an extra hexagram after this one, in this case Number 63: After Completion. I've seen this before. After a project is completed, there is always more to do. I knew it would take some time for me to find a job after I graduated from boot camp, but now that the economy is paralyzed, it's hard to tell if I can even hope to get a job.

Today, I had a phone interview with a lady who works for a company called 8th Light. They offer apprenticeships to junior coders. We talked about how much I would be paid and the company's philosophy of coding as a kind of craft. I told her about how I would prefer a front end job, which has to do with the way a web site works. She seemed nice and we had a good chat, but when we ended the call she said that there are many candidates and only one position available. That doesn't make me feel optimistic, but this is part of the process. I'll just have to keep applying and hope I can get more interviews.

Wake Up Call

I woke up at about 3:30 this morning. It was my friend Alycia calling. She had just rear-ended a parked car. The police had already come to deliver their report and left. This was bad news for more than the obvious reason that her car no longer worked. She had been living in her car after having left the halfway house she had been living at for a year. Before that, she had been living with me because she had no place to go after she got out of jail. Long story short, she was convicted of the crime of being mentally ill. Since she was taking medication this time, I had agreed to help her. When she was living with me, she was anxious and depressed all the time, which was a burden to deal with. After she moved to the other place, she changed. She became a completely healthy person. She was even joyous, a lot of fun to be around. Lately, she had been taking steps to improve her life. She had passed a mortgage license exam. She was applying for jobs. This picture of her and me was from her birthday last month. But then, unexpectedly, she turned to the dark side again and left the halfway house. This issue, according to her, was a dispute with the owner about her medication. With the pandemic becoming worse, the was the perfectly wrong time for her to be living in her car. I've heard that there is a correlation between pandemic infections and psychosis, but the true cause may never be known.

I kept falling asleep while she was talking to me. I couldn't let her stay with me due to the governor's call for social distancing. I told her it's too late for me to help her and we ended the call.

After lunch, she called me again. She wanted me to help her get cash because her debit card was no longer giving her cash from ATM's. Her car was parked six miles away in a neighborhood in Calabasas. She told me to call her when I was almost there because she would be getting something to eat and wanted time to walk back to her car. I told Siri to call her and text her warnings when I was was on my way, but she didn't answer. I parked my car up the street from her car. She wasn't in it. The front end was totaled. I took a picture of it and went back to my car. After I texted the picture to her sister, Alycia called me. She didn't even know that I had tried to call her. I drove to the Denny's where she was waiting for me in front of the restaurant, not inside, since it was closed, like most other businesses these days. We didn't hug. That's a bad idea now. I was wearing the mask and gloves I wear when I go shopping. She sent me some money online and I gave her the same amount in cash. She left to get something to eat and I said I'd see her later. I felt empty when I walked back to my car.

People are dying from the coronavirus. It has killed about 2,400 Americans so far as of this writing, and about 34,000 worldwide. As terrible as that as, we have to remember that mental illness is also a disease that destroys lives.