Howl

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by enforced isolation, dragging themselves maskless outdoors at dusk to howl – not at the moon and maybe not to each other, but to declare I am here! I am real! I am alive!

Or something like that.

Maybe I’m laying it on a little thick.

And maybe they aren’t the best minds of our generation. Not theirs, not yours, not mine. In fact most in this quasi-wolfpack are probably quite ordinary.

Yet they howl nightly into the wind. In the midst of our shared, enforced isolation, howling has become a cultural phenomenon.

Have you heard it in your town? Weather permitting, it happens here every night at eight. In an era where the nearest clock is your phone, synchronization is not a problem. The first distant yips are heard at precisely 8pm, and quickly swell into a howling chorus (though some nights are more active than others). The howling is well-distributed, spread far and wide, though by no means is it universal.

Howling is not in my nature, so I don’t do it. But I walk out on the back deck each night to listen.

Different howling styles are identifiable. Some people just open up and let loose a sustained, single-note cry. Others imitate our wolfean brethren: ow-ow-oooowwwww! Still other forms are recognizable: yips and yaps and barks.

One might expect a few comprehensible words (I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!), and someone somewhere must actually verbalize. But I’ve not heard any.

Meanwhile, the communal ritual during this generation-defining health crisis continues.

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With apologies to Allen Ginsberg

Wear the Fucking Mask (With Digressions)

In the midst of this COVID-19 era, I don’t always wear a mask in public. Things have gotten a little out of hand, when it comes to covering up your mouth and nose.

This morning I had a checkup with my doctor – the most ordinary thing I’ve done in a long time. For that I wore a mask. So did everyone else in the place. My doctor wore one not much different from mine, a very generic type from Walgreen’s. No N95 for her. She said that due to shortages, she must wear the same thin mask for a week before replacing it. “It used to be that you could be written up for wearing the same mask for two consecutive appointments,” she told me.

Not so long ago this same practice had a stash of masks for patients to wear during appointments, if they were sick. Now they cannot keep them in supply. Ordinary masks, I told the doctor, are the new toilet paper. She laughed.

Don’t get me wrong, I take the pandemic very seriously. I wore a mask to the doctor and I wear one to the grocery store, which is about the extent of my contact with the outside world. But when I’m out for my daily stroll around town, or out on my bike, I do not and will not wear a mask.

A local bicycle advocacy group takes a strong stance on this. “Wear masks while riding!” they said on social media. “We are getting lots of complaints about bicyclists not wearing masks!”

Twaddle.

Yet this seems to be the consensus – and a growing issue. “Face masks ... have become a new fault line in America,” CNN recently opined. “The decision to wear or avoid them [has] taken on political dimensions.”

I absolutely agree with the need to flatten the curve by isolating as much as possible. The “protesters” who have made very public, very menacing displays in Michigan recently are ostensibly arguing their rights are somehow violated by the isolation. They are not a spontaneous bunch; they are provocateurs, paid provocateurs in some cases, whom President Parasite called “very good people.”

Sound familiar? These fake protesters, these “very good people,” are neo-Nazi types cut from the very same cloth as the “very fine people” whose actions led to the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017.

But I digress.

The thin mask I wore to the doctor may have been all but useless. “A trial has revealed that regular thin cloth masks are highly susceptible to the virus,” according to Dr. Dimitar Marinov, Assistant Professor at the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology in Bulgaria. “They can get penetrated by up to 97% of the viral particles from the air.”

When I wear one – and again, I do at the appropriate time – I feel a little bit like Groucho Marx with his fake mustache. The mask is a ruse, something to deflect potential criticism from zealots.

Meanwhile, Trump is prepared to let you die. “We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100 thousand people,” he told Fox News in early May, in reference to the pandemic. And masks? What masks? Reopen the economy. Improve his reelection chances. The people he so blandly dooms are an abstraction to him – but as I write this they are alive and well, people with families and friends, jobs, pet dogs they play with. Trump is prepared to let them all die, along with you and me – in exchange for an improved economy and a second term.

But I digress.