How dare the government require us to wear pants in public?!

I know my Constitutional rights and you can’t make me wear pants in public places. I don’t care that the presence of pants may slow the spread of this urine-borne “disease.” I simply refuse to buckle to political correctness and cover up. Don’t tread on me (with pants)!

This is all about freedom. Specifically, it’s about my freedom not to face the onerous burden of covering a part of my body in public, not about your freedom not to catch a disease. My God-given rights to constant comfort don’t end where your feelings begin, snowflake. And my grandpappy didn’t fight at Grenada just so I can have my rights stripped away and be crushed under the boot of totalitarianism. Requiring people to wear pants during a pandemic is exactly the government overreach Alexander Hamilton warned us about in the Federalist Papers.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say: “Cases of the urine-borne disease are spiking because we lifted the pants requirement too early in certain states, and people started flocking to bars and public gatherings wearing nothing below. We were warned and now we’re paying the price.” To that, I take off my pants, stomp my feet and offer the eternal cri de coeur of the aggrieved: “I shouldn’t have to!”

I’m just so over this pandemic. The weather’s just too nice for it. And when a critical mass of Americans decides something is over—even a fatal disease—it vanishes in a puff of smoke.

The other day, my friends and I decided to resist the government tyranny and go to a crowded bar without pants. All the other sheep patrons were appalled at our freedom. Sure, there were signs at the door saying, “Pants required during urine-borne disease pandemic,” but they’re not the boss of me.

The manager asked us all to leave, citing some government regulation. I told her, “Um, last time I checked, this was still America and we still have the First Amendment.” She looked at me like I had three heads. So I guess I showed her.

So yeah, now I have a court date because I was a freedom fighter for pantslessness. I know it’s an uphill battle against this lawless tyranny, but if I end up in a courtroom that has an American flag without a gold fringe, I may just prevail.

Beautiful Blue

I did not realize, somehow, the way the pool water would glitter blue over the blinding white paint. Water in its natural state, I figured, would be clear and common and unmemorable. I did not think that particular shade of blue, even chemical free, was just a bedrock part of summer.

You don’t even need to add anything to it to get that shade that I remember even on blinding Saturday mornings waiting for the swim team to dive in, the only time the surface was perfectly calm and promising.

It is promise and anticipation and fulfillment all at once. It is a blue so much more beautiful than I ever expected.

Derail Away

Really, it’s fine! You can go right ahead and make your own spur-of-the-moment alterations to the thing I’ve spent time and effort working on. Just rip up what I’ve already accomplished and throw it in the trash. I’ll just sit here and take it.

If I’ve just cleaned or organized something, feel free to make a mess or ruffle what I’ve just straightened. As long as you do it with a big smile and a devil-may-care attitude, we’re golden.

If I’ve spent time planning an event or project, you just go ahead and derail it entirely and suggest diametrically opposed plans. I’m not offended whatsoever. It will even further endear you to me if you call me “stubborn” for not unquestioningly going along with what you’re trying to force on me.

If I’ve painstakingly worked out a budget or a long-term financial plan, feel free to casually suggest I spend all that money somewhere else. I certainly don’t mind you overturning some apple carts in the name of whatever breezy whim passes through your head.

Most of all, if I’ve organized some piles of paperwork, literal or figurative, on my desk, I’d love it if you came along and just dropped a bunch or crap, literal or figurative, all over that pile and ruin what I worked on. Then pirouette away.

It’s completely fine on every level!

Because you know what’s really important here? Beyond respecting the work I’ve put into something? Your big personality. If you’re brash and/or breezy enough, nobody could possibly object to your taking things over and injecting some welcome last-minute entropy. The problem is always that other people need to loosen up and stop being so rigid, not that you need to be more organized and get your act together rather than swoop in at the eleventh hour and insist everyone go along with you.

So feel free to derail away!

What is 'commute'?

He opens the door and sits down in the four-wheeled steel-and-plastic conveyance in the driveway. The metal stick feels familiar in his hand and he has the sense that he must insert it in an aperture and turn it. He does so and the field before him blazes to life. All manner of digital numbers and symbols start to glare—rpmx100, mph, mpg, AM, FM, E, F. He gasps at the sudden display, now remembering a distant past when they would have meant something to him.

What to do next? Another atavistic memory surfaces from the mire: He seems to remember executing a pulling action with his right arm on some sort of pole. He pulls the gearshift. But what letter? “R” sounds vaguely familiar, so he chooses that and the car moves backward into the street. From muscle memory, he shifts to “D” and begins to drive.

For the first few blocks, he is comfortable. These are the same streets he would take to run errands to the supermarket or other places during the pandemic. Then he moves into stranger territory. A bit up the highway, he sees a sign saying, “Welcome to” but doesn’t catch the rest of it. Penn-something. Pennslaw? Pennvain?

Regardless of the name, he knows he’s somewhere he only traveled in the dim miasma of memory. The numbers look strange: 202, 1, 926. He has vague memories from the Before Times of crawling up the highway in annoyance behind frequently braking cars under a white sky framed by skeletal tree branches. Now under a blue sky with a pleasant breeze, he drives unimpeded.

Where did everyone go?

Passing the last of the traffic lights, he reaches the highway. It comes back to him: Angry mornings idling behind People Who Can’t. Accidents blocking lanes. Signs telling him how long it would be to get to his destination. People slamming on the brakes for every snowflake or raindrop. They have all gone somewhere else and he drives in bliss.

He reaches the building at 8:03. This seems strange to him, like the numbers are reversed. He vaguely remembers 8:30, stomping through the door in annoyance after being stuck on the road for an hour. Now it’s just 35 minutes.

Out of instinct, he reaches for his key card in the glove compartment. He walks into his office, finding it only by virtue of his name on the door. Aside from pictures of his family, it seems strange to him. Four walls and a beat-up chair. Papers on the wall with important deadlines and phone extensions. Did he really used to sit here editing for eight hours a day? Now few people roam these halls.

He sets up his laptop and monitor, sits down and checks his email. Life is slightly closer to how it used to be.

You know what angers me?

It’s not the broken glass on the streets. It’s not people taking electronics from Target or looting leggings from Lululemon. It’s not people marching down the street with signs and bullhorns. It’s not people blocking highways. The looting is disheartening and counterproductive, but it doesn’t keep me up at night.

What angers me is some police officers—certainly not all, but any number doing so is alarming—shooting tasers at kids through car windows, driving police cars through crowds, and firing paint canisters at people sitting on their porches while saying “light them up.” It angers me that police officers are firing rubber bullets at journalists so the journalists can’t tell the world what they’re seeing. It angers me that one officer pulled down the surgical mask of one black man, who had his hands up, and pepper sprayed him in the face. It angers me that police pushed an old man to the ground and gave him a head injury. It angers me that so many police officers are responding to protests over police brutality with more police brutality, and that they’re doing so knowing that a powerful institution has their backs no matter how they behave. What angers me is the presence of uniformed police in Washington, DC who will not say who they work for and who will not display names or badges. Most police (like most protestors) behaved well but we need to call out those who didn’t.

What angers me is that when we need a leader like never before, America is led by a man who scurried to a bunker and turned out the lights at the White House. Who tear-gassed peaceful protestors before curfew so he could walk to a church that he has only attended once so he could hold up a Bible like a prop. Who did not read the Bible or pray. Who did not speak to anyone in the church or the community to hear of their concerns or try to solve the underlying problems. Who did not seem to care that his administration’s tear gas affected the church’s rector, who was trying to help the protestors. Who did all that and then dared to invoke Christianity.

What angers me is that the president of the United States invokes a dog whistle like “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” and threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military. It angers me that a senator calls for “sending in the troops,” giving protestors “no quarter” and sending in the 101^st Airborne (I guess to bomb the protestors?) and gets a platform in the op-ed section of the New York Times.

What angers me is that with all of the above, it feels like the United States of America is spiraling down closer into fascism than ever before in my lifetime. When militarized police attack protestors and journalists in other countries, the U.S. condemns it. Now other countries are appalled. The warning bells are ringing.

What angers me most is that there are only so many talks and so much advice and so many survival tips you can give your kids, and eventually they will go out into the world and crash up against some ignorant person who never got a talk of his own on the right way to behave, and badly needed one.

Maybe “angers” doesn’t encompass everything. I’m sickened and angry and ashamed and flabbergasted by what’s been happening in this country since George Floyd was killed in the street. And it scares me too, but not enough to paralyze me. Certainly not enough for me to just sit here and take it.

Troubled Sky

The sky threatens and roils, yet I am at my calmest. The storm moves in like the slow burn of grief settling in, yet I am rarely happier than now.

It is the moment the airy blue slides irrevocably into miserable gray-black. The moment lightning flickers at the edge of consciousness and horizon, in a color not white or blue or yellow or pink, slightly beyond what I can describe.

For a rare moment, I put down my book, push debts and repairs out of my head, and just watch and listen. Birds having taken shelter, it is just the drone of a window unit, the blurble of the pool filter (finally on) and a rumble in the sky like a premonition.

If I could, I would freeze all this. Live in these moments, this loop of time as clouds coalesce, then part while thunder still thrills from far away and the lightning still entices, and before the rain chases us inside. I would sit here in this very spot, never as happy as when the sky is at its most troubled.