Texas notes: Real life

     As the COVID crisis unspools, month after month, rather then get more ordinary, it seems to get stranger, a quality that Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey elucidates in today's report.

     The world around doesn't seem real. It's like we're living in a version of "The Truman Show." No hint as obvious as a huge stage light marked SIRUS (9 CANIS MAJOR) falling out of the sky, revealing our reality to be false, like in the movie. But that sense of falseness is real, ironically.
     There's a vague sense of disconnection from your surroundings. Maybe you are on an evening walk and see your neighbors in their lit-up homes, watching TV or sitting at a kitchen table laughing together. You feel so far removed it’s as though you are looking into a Hollywood set. Everyone daydreams and wanders off in their minds from time to time. With COVID- stress and a surreal time in history, I’ve been noticing this sense of separation between myself and the world more often. It’s a somewhat comfortable place to be, as though I am in a bubble or a glass jar where I am safe and protected from all outside influences. I no longer try to keep up with the Jones’s or feel my life is less than it should be. COVID solitude— living a simple life untethered by fear of missing out, or pressure to get dressed up for an imaginary audience of strangers, has proven to bring me closer to myself.
     I’ve thrived in the peace and quiet of the 2020 world. I can simply put one foot in front of the other (last night it was about 20,000 steps) and exist in the moment with less pressure from the outside. I wonder if I will ever be able to rejoin a bustling society again?
   

  I didn’t realize this new reality was forming until last night. I was on a walk and became acutely aware that I was in the middle of a serene and beautiful neighborhood. I felt I was seeing it for the first time even though I’ve lived here for over a year. Most of the lawns are well manicured or have an intentionally funky style, and the homes are lovely—older models with wooden porches and Adirondack chairs in sets of two, as well as brand new sleek designs appealing to the California crowd who are infiltrating trendy Austin.
     Some of my neighbors don’t like the gentrification and that makes sense to me on a sociopolitical level. As a newcomer it doesn’t really rattle my chain like it did to watch Bucktown do the same in Chicago where folks I knew were being pushed out with rising property taxes. Instead, it’s soothing to see the austere minimalist landscapes of bonsai-like bushes and strategically placed cacti amidst crisp white gravel, and hear the sounds of families splashing around in chlorine-free saltwater pools, unseen behind repurposed barnyard-wood privacy fences.
     There is enough of an eclectic flair that still permeates the neighborhood to make it feel like weird old hippyish Austin of Richard Linklater days. His 1990 movie "Slacker" perfectly encompasses the original Austin vibe. Joseph Jones, in the movie, is a skinny gray haired man who aimlessly meanders around near the University of Texas campus in central Austin, recording his thoughts into an old fashioned, corded and battery operated device. “The more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself and become coherent.”

      After I first started visiting Austin in the '90s when my sister moved here, downtown was still a ramshackle haven for wandering beatniks. It’s hard to believe how much this town has grown and changed into a thriving urban mecca of start-ups with a skyline that might rival Chicago’s one day. Keep Austin Weird tire covers still pepper the roads on the backs of old beat-up jeeps as well as brand new hipster models, the same words making very different points— one says “I am an original therefore I belong,” and the other says “I want to belong here too.”
     When I first moved to Austin in 2014 I noticed lampposts papered with “Don’t Move Here” stickers. I felt a little guilty but I also felt the right to be here since I was grandfathered in by an almost-original, my sister who’s cool enough to have discovered this place when it was still a frontier. I overhead everyone taking about how much they hated the insurgence of city-folks flocking to their special southern town. At this point there’s no sense in complaining anymore—we have become little California and some West Coast kids are just figuring out that Austin is the place to be and they are still coming in droves. As of last year we were seeing about 150 people move here per day—that’s about 55,000 per year. Hold onto your hats cowboys, the city folk have arrived and they are not going anywhere. The housing market is booming.

     These days it’s normal to see Teslas nestled between pick-up trucks the size of small houses, and somehow we are (kind of) sharing the roads. Things seem a bit friendlier with less traffic during this semi-shutdown. Previously we were a daily parking lot that could actually compare to New York traffic nightmares. I wonder if this will change, and the terrible road rage and regular accidents I saw on the roads before the pandemic will resume. I hope not. Perhaps we will have learned about the precious nature of life when this is all over. I know things won’t be the same as they were before as we get on the other side of this crisis, but they will be a lot closer to normal than they are now. Let’s look to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, to guide us out of this strange alter reality and back to a simpler life as we once knew it. A life where we automatically flipped each other off as we raced to and from overcrowded restaurants and fought each other for the rare Saturday night movie seat at the theater. One can only hope.

‘It’s been hard. I’m not going to lie’—Teen mom's life looking up

     Kitty Perez’s first name is a nickname. Her birth name is “Katsumi,” and learning that, a person might be forgiven — I hope — for peering closer at the eyes above the mask and asking if she’s Japanese.
     She’s not, she says, laughing. Her father named her for a Japanese porn star.
     “I was his first kid,” she explains. “So everything was kinda weird.”
     We are sitting in the brightly painted main room of the Crib, the Night Ministry’s youth shelter that moved earlier this year from a church basement in Wrigleyville to larger quarters at 1735 N. Ashland Ave. in West Town. The Night Ministry invited me to tour the new space and, so I didn’t visit an empty room, arranged for me to talk with former residents. Perez stood out. 

    “Right now, I’m sort of in the middle of transition over to an apartment,” says Perez, 19. “I’m also a mother. I have an almost 2-year-old daughter. She’ll be 2 in November.”
     And how has that been?
     “It’s been hard. I’m not going to lie. My ... well, I don’t call him my ‘partner’ at all. I call him my ‘sperm donor.’ Because he left as soon as I told him. He bounced, completely, to a different state. It’s been hard, especially during the pandemic. I couldn’t find no diapers anywhere. I couldn’t find no wipes. Everyone just stocked up on everything; I couldn’t find anything.”

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Everything old is new again. And blue.

     The two old motel chairs gave a certain Dogpatch feeling to our front porch. Mottled with rust by their—what?—nearly 20 years of being battered by the rain and weather.
    The thing to do would be to pitch them and get new chairs that cost, what? A hundred dollars or so?  That's what people do; throw out the old, move to the new.
     But we liked these chairs. Comfortable.
     "Pick a couple colors," I told my wife, and she did, grabbing two cans of Rustoleum at the Ace Hardware. I set about repainting the chairs. First I took a wire wheel brush, set on the end of a drill, and flayed the rust off. Then a sander. Then I masked the things off, and painted the selected colors. It took a few days, what with the drying and retouching. But finally I finished the first chair.
    "The blue is a little bright," I observed to my wife.
     "Yes," she said. "Brighter than I thought it would be."
     "I could repaint it a different color," I suggested.
     "No," she said. "It'll be nice bright."
     Maybe it is. You tell me. I finished the first and am, today, beginning my vacation by going after the second. There is nothing wrong with bright blue chairs, per se. The neighbors won't complain. I hope. Who knows? Maybe they'll like them. I do. Or at least am trying to. Giving it a go. They seem an improvement over the rusty chairs. Heck. I'm sure that there are people who prefer bright blue. For me, there will be an adjustment process. I really need to have them both set up on the porch, and come home for a month, or a year, or a decade, before I decide.
     "You know," I might observe to my wife one day in 2032, out of the blue, as it were, "Maybe those are too bright..."
     The chair-painting process is oddly enjoyable, though time-consuming. Maybe because it's time consuming.  I'm not sure what I'm really accomplishing, writing this. But those chairs sure are re-painted. No denying that. 
    I don't repaint chairs much. In fact, I don't think I've ever repainted a chair. It's rather peaceful, with the masking and the going over rough patches with steel wool. The result wasn't perfect; that is the hardest part, for me, even harder than the bright blue. And perhaps the most valuable part as well. I'm used to polishing sentences, going over the imperfect improving it. Just stopping, and having it be finished, though a bit homemade, well, that's a new skill. I was aiming for a higher state of perfection. But didn't make it. You can't really tell from the photos but, well, rough around the edges. A bit ragged, close up. 
     Which is how the world is, and accepting it as such is a useful skill. I can't fix anything, completely. But I can get rid of the rust and repaint, though not in the shade prudence would dictate. Anyway, the sun's up, and I better get at that second chair. 

 
   

Trump blows into Kenosha to fan the flames

     Police know an arsonist will sometimes return to the fire he has set, to enjoy the commotion and savor the flames.
     But arsonists don’t run up in full view of everybody and pour more gasoline to the fire.
     That’s basically what Donald Trump did in Kenosha Tuesday. Though begged to stay away by the mayor of Kenosha, the governor of Wisconsin, and leaders in Illinois, Trump has an election to win. Since claiming he beat the COVID-19 pandemic that he in fact completely botched won’t work as the death toll rises, he’s shifting to his standard go-to move: whipping up fear. In 2016, it was Mexican rapists and South American refugee caravans. That’s old hat — the fearsome becomes familiar, which is why it’s much easier to go grocery shopping now than it was in April.
     So Trump is fanning the flames of urban chaos, the riots that began after the killing of George Floyd, and continued in Kenosha after Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times a week ago Sunday.
     Most leaders hurry to scenes of trouble intending to comfort and unify. But most leaders aren’t narcissistic sociopaths. Trump is deepening the divisions in America today, under the impression that he can disassociate himself from the bedlam happening on his watch and somehow pin it on his opponent, Joe Biden, while offering himself as the solution. He’s basically running against himself, promising he’ll do a better job in 2021 than he’s doing in 2020.
     Toward that end, Trump toured burned-out blocks in Kenosha and met with business owners. Together they posed before the rubble, the business owners masked, Trump, of course, unmasked.

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Quick to react to the peril that wasn't there

     One of the many challenges of being a liar is you have to keep track of your fabrications. If I claim to be the King of France on Monday, that claim is undercut—for those who care about such details as actual reality—if on Tuesday I claim to be Emperor of Austria. Which is it?
     During the dystopian nightmare of the Republican National Convention last week, the president and his enablers claimed in chorus that Donald Trump was quick to grasp the threat of COVID-19 and react decisively.
      “We developed a wide array of effective treatments, including a powerful antibody treatment known as convalescent plasma,” Trump said—a double lie, since the process has been around for years. This, he said, “will save thousands and thousands of lives.”

     Save thousands of lives from what? On Sunday, during a barrage of 89 early morning tweets and retweets, Trump shared a Q-Anon conspiracy theory that the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths were misinterpretations or fabrications. That only 9,210 people have died of the virus, and "this week the CDC quietly updated the Covid number to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from Covid." 

    Which is it? France or Austria? Did Trump leap to boldly respond to the pandemic peril? Or was there no peril in the first place?

     This of course only matters to those of us who live in the world of reality, who are trying to keep alive in country where our leader is a delusional, traitorous sociopath, surrounded by fawning toadies. Who simply want our actual problems to be perceived and coped with, as opposed to ignored then lied about. 

    That will never happen in a Donald Trump administration. To him,  there is no lie so enormous it can't be plastered over with more lies. He doesn't bother to keep track because he demands that we don't keep track either. And millions of Americans, incredibly, tragically, are all too happy to comply. 

     On Monday, Twitter took down Trump's false tweet. You know you're in trouble when a freewheeling social media site is acting as a reality check for the President of the United States.

     Spoiler alert: we're in trouble.

About more than playing ballgames

     Sports is the same thing happening over and over.
     Teams meet, agitate a ball, which is thrown and caught. Tossed through a hoop or hit with a bat. Sometimes kicked. There’s also hockey.
     I am not insulting sports fans, mind you. I understand that for them, sports is the hub on which the universe spins. It just isn’t my table. The night the Cubs won the World Series in 2016, I attended a lecture at the Field Museum on tattooing in Polynesia. I was not alone.
     Sports is the same thing happening over and over.
     To me. Generally. But not always. Occasionally, something noteworthy happens. Something will transpire in the world of sports so seismic that even I perceive it, like a deaf person sensing the orchestra by vibrations through the floor.
     Last Wednesday, the Milwaukee Bucks announced they wouldn’t play their first round playoff game against the Magic. Not with Kenosha roiled nightly with unrest over the shooting of Jacob Blake.
     The NBA didn’t count the game as a forfeit but picked up the series three days later. The rest of the NBA, even some baseball teams joined in. Now they’re talking about using basketball arenas as polling places.
     That seems significant.

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Flashback 1996: Sometimes the one you can't trust is yourself

     Trying to keep the house we're confined to orderly, I pulled open a night table drawer and started to unjam. There, an expense check from December 19. $100.43. Quite a lot. The checks says "VOID AFTER 90 DAYS." Ever the optimist, I deposit it anyway, thinking maybe that's more of a suggestion. 
    It's not. The check bounces back, and the bank charges me $12 for my trouble. I appeal to our human resources department, which, used to my bumbling, says they will look into a new check, and delicately suggests I consider direct deposit for my expenses.
     Yes, I say, "that would be smart." I already have direct deposit for my pay, arranged after the episode outlined below. 

     "Bzzzz!" The buzzer. "UPS!" the intercom cries. A glance out the front window confirms the presence in the street of a big, boxy, brown truck. I let the guy into the building.
     That glance is a practiced part of city living. Can't be too careful. This supposed UPS guy could be a maniac, fresh from Stateville, with a double-edged ax under his coat. The truck is a good indication that everything is on the up-and-up.
     In day-to-day living, you have to assume the worst. Scan the bill for ripoffs and bad math. Check for complaints to the state when hiring the new plumber. Nothing dire about this; just being smart.
     Spending my days as I do scanning the horizon for trouble, I was doubly shocked last week not only to lose a big chunk of money, but to do so in a manner so stupid and careless that I never before imagined possible.
     I'm sharing the tale here, despite deep humiliation, for the purpose of perhaps helping one poor hapless individual avoid a similar circumstance.
     Also, my wife insists it is funny. She's been laughing all week. Perhaps you, too, will find it funny. I certainly don't. Maybe in several years. But not now. Not anytime soon. Maybe never.
     Here goes. Every week I take my paycheck and deposit it in the bank, personally. I understand doing this has become an antiquated process, on par with dipping candles or spinning wool. I understand banks discourage their customers from actually showing up and demanding services. A reader complained that his bank charges him 5 percent to run coins through the change machine. Make a deposit at the wrong ATM and you end up owing the bank money.
     What's next? A whack with a big mallet when you open an account? They used to give away toasters. . . .
     The bank wants us to use direct deposit or their ATM machines. But I like going to the bank. Or used to. It was a manageable errand, like dropping off a pair of shoes for repair at the shoemaker. No stress. Something I could do often and do well. The bank tellers are nice young people who respond politely and quickly.
     Returning to the tale: Every week I deposit my check, carefully filling out a bank deposit slip. About a month ago, I noticed the balance on the receipt was huge—many times what it should have been.
     I mentioned this to my wife, who handles the bookkeeping. She didn't blink. "You must be reading the wrong number," she said. "A code or something." The matter dropped.
     The next week it happened again. And the third. I gathered my courage and tried again. "Honey, I really think this is the amount in our checking account. It's got a dollar sign in front of it."
     The dollar sign usually means something.
     She got off the couch, sighed, and took the receipt from me. There was a long silence. I could hear the clock ticking in the next room. Her face went slack, and when she spoke, her voice sounded tinny and far away, as if filtering up through the heating ducts.
     "You've been writing the wrong account number—see, two numbers are switched," she said. "You've been depositing your paycheck into somebody's else's bank account."
     A month earlier, with great effort, I had memorized our account number. I had been so proud.
     In the movie version, the camera, at this moment, would pull back quickly, perhaps spinning, while the soundtrack filled with boisterous cosmic laughter: "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-hah!"
     There's a feeling common in childhood, mine anyway, a kind of sinking in the gut, a horrid, "I'm-in-trouble-now" feeling that doesn't happen much in adulthood, thank God.
     I felt it now, and no matter how much my brain reassured me that of course the bank would rectify the error, my gut tormented me with images of grinning bank clerks shrugging their shoulders. "Tough luck, pal. Be more careful next time and don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. . . ."
     My wife added this helpful thought: "Well, maybe the people whose account you put our money into will be honest and agree to give it back." Thanks, dear.
     The most galling thing to me was this: It was a problem I had never imagined possible. I just assumed the tellers checked the number against the name on the slip. I had counted on the kindness of strangers, bilking myself the way so many people get bilked, through trust.
     The next morning I slunk to the bank, hat in hand, and presented my case. I could have taken the offensive and yelled that it was their fault—why have a spot on the bank slip for a customer's name and address if nobody looks at it?
     Instead, I meekly pushed the crumpled deposit slips I had found in coat pockets and atop dressers at the teller and begged for my money back.
The teller was very nice—of course they'd look into it, he said, right away. He would pull the records and set everything right. Very friendly and sympathetic. I'm going to miss those bank people, I thought, as I immediately arranged for direct deposit. Better safe than sorry.
—Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 15, 1996