Saturday evening. It’s still kosher to say “good morning” after you wake up at 2pm, right?

Tonight will be dedicated to a nocturnal roadtrip, a high-tech infiltration (and exfiltration) mission, a matter of life and death! To put that in more plebeian terms, though, one of xgf’s friends and I will give her a ride from her tiny little town to an MRI appointment (conveniently scheduled for midnight on Saturday night) and back again. The friend will drive her there; I’ll drive her back. I don’t usually run chores under the cover of darkness, but hey – this is for a good cause, MRI’s are awesome, and this will add some much-needed variety to the dull routine that is the lockdown life. (I’m fairly certain “yeah, but it was interesting, though” will end up becoming my famous last words at some point in the future.)

To prepare, and since I won’t get back home till maybe 3am, I stayed up till 5am doing the usual procrastination routine. Some assorted caffeinated beverages will serve as emergency measures should my attention span begin to waver. Plenty of experience with that back when I worked night shifts as a warehouse grunt… Highly inadvisable, of course – and yet another reason women generally live longer than men.

In covid news, I’ve stumbled on this most excellent page describing the pandemic up until the present moment. Fair warning, TV Tropes is an amazing but also very addictive site: it’s easy to lose track of time as you explore all of its interconnected pages. (Personally, I’m a giant fan of their “Real Life” section.) It’s written in a simple and accessible wiki-page format. It’s very strange to read a condensed summary of everything we’ve all experienced throughout the year – cataloged so precisely and neatly. This is an actual multifaceted global historical event, and we’re all characters in it. Reading that page was like getting a glimpse of a history book from the future… Some of the things it mentioned were news to me, since no one can keep track of everything. On the other hand, I’ve almost forgotten about some of them, like the firing of Brett Crozier, the captain of the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier. That was less than six months ago, but it already feels like it’s been ages.

I’m morbidly curious what updates will be added to that site: it’d be fascinating to access a, say, 2025 version of the page just to see how this all ended. (Assuming it does end.) Alas, that’s not an option. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

Enjoy your weekend if you can, y’all.