Category: Pandemic Diary

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I wore a mask to the bank today.

Nobody batted an eye.

They probably would have been more concerned if I hadn’t worn a mask, since they’re now required for anyone working at or visiting an “essential” business that’s still open to the public.

A month ago, when I first went outside after recovering from the flu, only a handful of people were wearing masks. It’s still not everyone, but a lot more people are masking up these days.

Bandanas mostly, and pleated cloth masks. At the grocery store I saw a few people, mostly older, with more serious filters.

Maybe half the people I see walking around residential areas. It’s not required in this area, at least not yet, if you’re going for a solo walk, just if you’re going to be interacting with people. And if you’re out with someone from your own household, it’s not like you’re endangering each other. And yeah, I get it: it’s a pain to grab a mask just to walk around the block.

More people along bigger streets, where they might be on their way to or from a store or restaurant that’s still open, or a bus.

Everyone doing construction or landscaping or gardening.

Someone standing on a street corner selling masks for a few dollars apiece. A sign on a telephone pole advertising hand-made masks by someone in the neighborhood. Parked cars with cloth masks hanging from the rear-view mirrors.

And scattered around, the occasional discarded masks. I don’t understand: They’re not easy enough to find that you can just toss one and replace it on a whim. What’s the story? Did someone rip another person’s mask off and throw it in the dirt as a form of bullying? Throw their own mask away in frustration?

A discarded face mask in the dirt.

Update 4/25: Found another one that I thought made for an interesting image, though the previous one’s still better. I don’t think the plants need the mask.

Weeds by the edge of the sidewalk and a discarded face mask.

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You know how in every outbreak movie there’s someone who thinks quarantines shouldn’t apply to them and ends up spreading the disease past where it could have been stopped?

I never thought we’d see a bunch of them getting together for protest marches.

Basically “we don’t need brakes because we didn’t actually hit the wall we were heading for” (or hit it slower than expected)…because we hit the brakes instead.

I wonder if the guy applying “live free or die” to a freaking pandemic actually means it.

Or if he just assumes it’ll be someone else.

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I know there’s essentially zero chance that the audio stream from my phone playing the Cracked podcast on ridiculous psy-ops that governments have actually considered will get picked up by my kid’s video-conference class session on another device. Even if Zoom is listening for more traffic than it should, there’s HTTPS, WPA2, etc. I’d have to accidentally pull the headphones out and have left the phone’s volume on full.

But I find myself really reluctant to take that chance.

Music’s easier to code to, anyway 🤷‍♂️

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WonderCon has been our main fan convention for the past decade or so. We’ve been every year since it moved to Anaheim in 2012, and several years back when it was in San Francisco.

But this year it’s not happening.

By February we were already looking at what was going on with the new coronavirus and starting to think, do we really want to go somewhere with huge crowds and lots of travelers? This could easily turn into ground zero.

By early March it became clear that a convention in April wasn’t going to be ground zero — because the virus was already here and spreading. An outbreak would be pretty much guaranteed.

So we weren’t surprised when they officially canceled the event on March 12. California had only started ramping up restrictions on gatherings, but WonderCon is a lot bigger than 250 people (the cutoff at the time, which sounds like a huge crowd now after weeks of “safer at home”). They refunded the tickets, which I hear some conventions had problems with.

This weekend was going to be one of chaos, crowds, comics, cosplay, and crafts. Instead we’re sitting at home, like last weekend, and the weekend before, and the weekend before. Sure, there’s the online “WonderCon@Home”, but it’s more something to check in on once in a while, not an all-encompassing event.

Summer’s still up in the air. If they’ve made a decision about Comic-Con International, they haven’t announced it. On one hand, it would be a huge blow to fan culture for them to cancel San Diego. On the other…I’m not sure who’s going to want to be there. Even if the current wave of the pandemic subsides before then, and even if it fades during summer (which is just wishful thinking at this point), cramming 100,000 people into a convention center for five days (plus setup/tear-down) seems like asking for trouble. [Update: A few days later, they cancelled SDCC too.]

I haven’t even tried to get tickets to SDCC in five years. I suspect they may be easier to get next year. (Or not. People are good at forgetting risks, as long as they’re abstract enough.) But I’m not sure I’m even going to want to attend a smaller con until we come out the other side of the pandemic.