The flu was almost inevitable since we were both teaching at the time.
I've always been a thin guy and I lost so much weight I was starting to look like a living skeleton.
When I got out of the hospital my parents cleared out my sisters old bedroom to recuperate, which was weird, but I wasn't really making any decisions at the time. To my parents I was still this extremely troubled kid who wouldn't talk to them and would sometimes disappear from their lives for many months at a time. I haven't told them or anyone else the lot of it.
This wasn't the first time pneumonia happened to me. As a kid I'd suffered the "Hong Kong" flu epidemic in a similar way.
My wife is a medical professional these days. This will rip through her patient population like a hurricane.
It reminds me too much of the years I worked in a blood bank and AIDS was killing our hemophilia patients. My wife and I both lost a few gay friends to AIDS as well.
Ronald Reagan was useless, just as Trump is useless now.
My anger so far exceeds my anxiety today but that's not a healthy or sustainable way to live.
We were in San Francisco yesterday for a family get-together we've been looking forward to since January. One of our children was flying in for a conference that was canceled just a few days ago, but decided to come anyways. We had dinner at an Asian restaurant and it was strange. All the restaurant staff were wearing face masks and gloves, and there were big bottles of hand sanitizer on various counters for customers to use.
Two of my siblings have owned restaurants at various times but got out of the business because it was too stressful. I can't imagine what small restaurant owners are going through now... I don't feel bad about eating out.
Nearly everyone in my family has, at one time or another, worked in restaurants and fast food.
One of my nieces is in college. This weekend they told her not to come back to class, and to finish out her term online. She works part time as a food server to pay for college and that's off too.
I went to our neighborhood grocery store today and it was insane. There's no bread, rice, pasta, milk, paper products, water, bleach, and curiously, no cheap beer.
But I don't feel insecure. I like most of my neighbors. We will deal with this as a community.
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