I finish a walk in my impossibly, stereotypically cute suburban Los Angeles neighborhood, while keeping a respectful social distance from other walkers. I was listen to a comedy podcast and trying to drive away a sense of dread that follows me everywhere like a dog right now.

I’m living in a city ordered to stay inside to avoid a virus.

I sit in my backyard where my flowers in containers are bursting with life. My hot desert city is in an extended cool, wet winter; the weeds I saw on my walk today were all exuberantly and impossibly green. We have two jasmine bushes in the front yard of our rented home that will knock you out with their perfume right now.

Still: death don’t have no mercy in this land. The virus rumbles on. The obituary pages in the L.A. Times are growing.

I’d  been editing pages of a  book I’m writing all morning before my walk.I sit as the backyard flowers salute a squadron of hummingbirds; green, red, magenta blurs industriously darting between tree, flower, feedstaion and branch. One nested on a string of lights under our patio cover in early February as the virus was just finding a way into American bodies. We watched as a tiny beak became a fat chick and then a sturdy young male with fledgling shades of red on his chest. He’s flying around here now.

I check social media on my phone, against my better judgment. I’ve been spewing rage at The General who sends our soldiers—doctors and nurses— to die without bullets; in Iraq it was armor, now it’s Protective gear. There’s always a guy with a sharp pencil wringing his hands about the bottom line somewhere. We’re all soldiers too, since this virus is bombing the homeland like the unseen Stukas dropping bombs on civilians in Picasso’s Guernica, as doctor and patient alike await the dice-throw of a bad cough, intubation or death.

I said in one social media post that I want to piss on Dear Leader’s grave and that I curse the day he was born. I compared him to a man my Grandfather and ancestors cursed; Vikdun Quisling, the man who sold Norway out to the Nazis. I compared his cabal of bootlickers to the Vichy French.  I mixed a metaphor. Someone stated the difference to me later in a comment as if I didn’t know there was one and I hit them with my sarcasm flamethrower; I mixed a metaphor-please fucking shoot me.

I’m overreacting to lots of things right now. Underreacting to to others.

Anger is easy and accessible. The powerlessness, the fear, the denial, the bargaining all put my very human pattern-finding brain into an emotional fog.

I went into the house and washed my hands again. Should I have sat on that wall? Should I take off my shoes? I wash my hands over and over and over like Lady Macbeth. Oh, that reminds me; it’s a good time to watch Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood again.

It’s a beautiful cloudy day in L.A. Why do I feel shitty? I’m retired and don’t have to worry about a job. I worry about myself. My partner. My children, their partners, my precious one-year old grandchild.

Scrolling through other people’s anger, I stop and read a piece by my dear friend Helen Boyd that captures this moment and how it brings every single thing we’ve ever grieved with it. Helen is a New Yorker and when she speaks, you know how it felt to be a real New Yorker on 9/11. To be a mother in Staten Island who will never see her two sons again. To be a cop covered in carcinogenic dust. To be someone who grew up loving a city of straight talk, smartasses, cawfee regulah, and perfect cannoli.

Not a Queens asshole who bragged about how his buildings were the tallest when the Towers fell, although it’s not even about him or the stupid injustice this country serves up to the people that keep it going every fucking day and twice on Sundays in the city that’s chased out the regular working stiff so Saudi Princes can have a view.

No. Helen’s piece captures the moment, grit and all with honest, almost brutal vulnerability:

Goth kid, you know? Gloomy and emo and deep and way too damn serious all the time. And I write that as a kind of defensive gesture, and to say: if the tiger show or whatever distraction helps you, I am so glad for that. But so much just falls away for me and I wish those things didn’t. I wish I could be distracting, and funny, and sarcastic or cutting. 

But mostly I’m just sad. I cry a couple of times a day as I suspect a lot of you do. I’m yearning for wisdom and flipping through Thucydides and Mann and Dos Passos and Woolf and Salinger – anyone whose words have brought me comfort in the past. Writers are the best friends you can have, except if you know them in person. 

In my opinion, a piece is a work of genius when I finish it and see my own life through the lens that it holds up for me, even for a flashing moment. This piece does that.

I’m a writer, now, or trying hard to be. I’m bad company too, sometimes. I’m reading Tomas Tranströmer, Pablo Neruda and playing Allen Ginsburg reading “America” over and over to hear a smartass homosexual New York Jew offer his soothing rage with an eyebrow cocked.

America, the plum blossoms are falling…

My wife watches old movies on TCM, Lifetime movies with killer nannies, and manages to take a nap every day. I got up early and did a 12-step meeting on Zoom this morning, which was helpful, because I am sober at the very least.

Like I said, I walked and I’m sober. Give me a fucking medal.

My mother used to make peanut butter, lettuce and mayonnaise sandwiches for my lunch almost every day in elementary school, and now I’m making them with wheat bread minus the wax paper bags they were lovingly packed in. I’d give anything to have some of her crusty macaroni and cheese.

My hunger goes up and down. I am almost always hungry, but now, not so much. We found out tonight that here in L.A., “China Virus” notwithstanding people want their Lo Mein and General Tso’s; “We’re so busy…” the lady apologized. I told her I understood. The kid left the bag outside the door; he was wearing a mask.

I did a tarot throw today. The Tarot of Marseille is wise counsel to me right now. The flaming sword and crown mean death, right at the center of the question right now. The King perches precariously on the creaky wheel, barely on top; he could topple tomorrow. The wheel is between that full cup of life and blood we treasure but who the fuck knows as the wheel goes round? On the flip, the Queen has her mind on her money, holding her staff, relaxed, because she has a few moves left. The Empress looks ahead. Like me, like all of us, she doesn’t want to be litter on the field of the card with no name, number or human face; a skull in a crown is still just a skull.

I listen to Hot Tuna and the Dead playing “Death Don’t have no Mercy in this Land,” written by the Reverend Gary Davis, who knew what it meant. Jorma Kaukonen took lessons from him:

Y’know death don’t have no mercy in this land
Death don’t have no mercy in this land, in this land
Come to your house, you know he don’t take long
Look in bed this morning, children find your mother gone.

I said death don’t have no mercy in this land.
Death will leave you standing and crying in this land,
Death will leave you standing and crying in this land, in this land, yeah!

You must have that true religion, as another spiritual says.

Unlike Helen, I grew up in an upper-middle-class bubble of a school and neighborhood on the West side of L.A. in Brentwood, where there’s a cluster of Covid19 cases now. My Dad grew up poor in Iowa, my mom’s parents were right smack in the middle of the gray, white-collar middle-class outside Chicago. My parents wanted me to be popular and fit in with the rich kids, and I wanted to be female, which wasn’t going to happen in 1966.

It’s happened,and absolutely not how I expected it to.

I’m sixty-eight now, and it’s taken me this long to even begin to love myself for who I am, even after I put down the cocaine, Tequila and bennies almost twenty-two years ago. Meanwhile, there are states like Idaho who feel this is the moment to pass legislation forbidding trans kids from being who they are, even as the reaper walks down the streets of their towns cradled by beautiful mountains.

I have been the imagined enemy of so many for so long. Hucksters have grown rich selling gold, survival supplies and guns to people who fetishize their fear, whiteness and opinions while that nameless figure on the number 13 card walks the streets as it did in the plague and the 1918 influenza, encouraged when it sees us gathered in defiance. A skull in a crown, or in a red hat is still just a skull.

Death don’t have no mercy in this land.