Grigory Lukin.com

Monday evening. Another day just like any other. Over 100 days now since I’ve actually gone to work. That place must be so different now, with all the precautions they take…

I’m trying to concentrate on the advice I read the other day, that life should be about living, not waiting for some other, better part of life – but there just aren’t that many fulfilling and fascinating things to do right now, when every stranger’s every cough could hypothetically change your entire life. I’ve finished binge-watching The Walking Dead series, though the last episode of season 10 hasn’t been released due to covid. (Somewhat ironic that a show about the zombie plague got stopped in its tracks by the real plague.) Time to tackle another piece of entertainment: there’s enough out there to fill a lifetime…

One of my landlords is looking forward to the US-Canadian border reopening. (I can’t entirely understand what his employer does, but it has something to do with tourism.) The current reopening date is July 21st, but that’s been pushed back a few times now, and it likely will again. I tried explaining that things will like stay close till at least August, but I’m not sure he believed that.

There’s civil unrest, even in the allegedly civil EU. An apartment building in Germany got quarantined after two covid cases turned into 120. There are 700 people, and they’re rather unhappy… They clashed with the police enforcing the quarantine. Cases are spiking in rural India, after all the migrant workers got home from major cities. (I’m positive I’d predicted this earlier, but I can’t find that blog entry for the life of me.) Brazil crossed 50,000 deaths – and that’s just the official count. The excess mortality analysis showed that the true worldwide death most likely stands at 600,000 – not 450,000. 25% of the total isn’t being accounted for… And last but not least, they’ve discovered the D614G strain with more “spike” proteins: it came to the east coast of the US by way of Italy, and it appears to be much more dangerous than the west coast strain that came from China. It’ll be hard to determine just how much impact different state reactions had when they weren’t quite dealing with the same virus. Small wins, I suppose.

…I wonder how many people these days read as much covid-related news as I do. 50%? 10%? I have this sneaking suspicion that if more people had read about the long-term risks, the worldwide reopening wouldn’t be greeted with quite as much enthusiasm. And if I were the kind of person to disregard the news… Would I be happier? Likely. Would I be more at risk? Certainly. And as a side effect, then y’all wouldn’t have this blog to keep you company. Heh.

We’re one step closer to the weekend now, for what it’s worth.

It’s Sunday night, the 100-day plaguaversary of my personal pandemic experience. One-hundred days ago today, xgf (or just gf back then…) and I had that fateful phone call when we agreed things were getting too dangerous to be around other people. The following day, we began our AirBnB odyssey across Ontario and Quebec, a journey that lasted 72 days. Today is four weeks since we returned and parted ways. It’s also ninety-seven days since Trudeau declared the state of emergency and declared that the US-Canadian border would get closed. It’s also one day since the summer solstice, which I’ve completely missed. The year is past the halfway point. I wish I could say the same about the pandemic.

The first mention of the US death toll I found on my own blog was 1,045 – way back on day 12. The current official estimate (which doesn’t include the excess mortality above the baseline) is 122,000 Americans, or at least 1,375 people per day since I posted that first number way back on March 25th.

The world has changed so much… If you went back in time even 100 days ago and described what has happened, no one would’ve believed you. At best, you’d have been accused of being a fear-mongerer. I wonder what strange tales a time traveler from 100 days in the future might tell us. Guess I’ll look back at this in late September and find out.

There was a miniature alarm on the personal front today: I woke up to the sound of my landlords’ son coughing. Didn’t get a chance to talk to him, so I just called xgf and said it might not be a good idea to meet today. We compromised and sat very far apart in a sunny park while we had a picnic, and cut the day short after an hour. The whole time, we were talking about whether it’d be better for me to get a month-long AirBnB or just build my own mini-kitchenette in my room so I wouldn’t have to go downstairs at all. When I got back home, the kid said he always coughs when he wakes up because his throat is dry… False alarm, then. I’m not a fan of having to be so hyper-attentive and far more anxious than I’d been before the pandemic. Then again, can’t be too careful, right?

Not much is new in the world covid news. At last night’s rally, Trump openly admitted that he ordered less covid testing because he wanted to bring the numbers down. There’s no way to estimate how many people died because of that alone. There’s some fist-shaking over this, but it got relatively little media coverage. It may get used in a campaign ad or two, but even in the best-case scenario (barring unexpected covid casualties), he’ll still be in power for another seven months. I left the US partly because other horrific things had gotten normalized: things like concentration camps for children whose families tried crossing the southern border. And now it’s just a fact of life, like so many others… I’m glad I got out. I’m sad none of my friends or relatives followed.

I’ll keep this blog going daily until a) there’s a working vaccine, and b) I get vaccinated. Something tells me it’s still far away. I fully expect there to be a “Day 200” post, and maybe one for “Day 300” and beyond. Whatever else happens, this should never get normalized or forgotten. I’m just one guy writing random stuff on an outdated, unfashionable medium, but hey – it’s better than nothing. Happy plaguaversary, y’all.

Saturday night. I’ve made peace with the fact that we all live in a satirical article (likely written by The Onion staff binge-drinking after the 2016 election), and yet the news never fails to surprise me.

The big rally scheduled in Tulsa ended up half-empty, and the overflow stage didn’t get any action. The interesting part is that six of Trump’s staffers helping out with the event tested positive for covid. Fortunately, since he claims the virus isn’t a big deal, he should be safe.

Meanwhile, Florida is setting a new daily record with every passing day… One of my sisters lives in New York and has a condo in Miami. She didn’t get out of New York in time when the pandemic spread there, but her family has been lucky so far. It really is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” thing in her case, given the virus’s spread in those two cities.

An old friend of mine reconnected with me recently. He moved back to Reno after having his own share of adventures… Among other things, we talked about DuoLingo: he sent me a friend request through the app, and I got blown away when I saw his progress. He hasn’t skipped a day in two years, and covered an impressive amount of Spanish and – for some reason – German, while also flirting with Norwegian. It’s a fun app, and now I have a mild competitive/envious urge. Did you now that the French word for “yuck” is “beurk”? Heh.

Xgf’s neighbours were having a barbecue earlier today, so we moved our weekly hanging out day to tomorrow. (My landlords also brought four friends and relatives to celebrate the fact that they didn’t catch any fish earlier today.) There wasn’t a lot of social distancing going on at either gathering, so we each stayed inside. Here’s hoping a) nobody was sick, b) nobody will cough at us tomorrow as we go hiking, and c) there are no more shootings next to xgf’s house. Modern life is weird, eh.

Thursday night. The downright depressing covid news keeps on coming, but the sheer mass of it has made banality out of what would’ve been horrifying before the pandemic.

Media outlets no longer post how many people die each day, though there sporadic reports of some states, some cities getting more cases, more deaths. A few days ago, even the bare-minimum official death count managed to exceed the US death toll in World War I, but that was also mostly ignored. What’s really strange is that masks themselves have become a political issue. The fundamental scientific knowledge of airborne disease is being dismissed as some liberal conspiracy, a sign of cowardice, and so on.

The divide is particularly interesting on the state level. California governor Gavin Newsom has issued an order calling for mandatory mask use. There are, of course, lots of exceptions – if you’re walking, running, dining 6′ away from the staff, etc. (I would love to see servers toss plates and coffee at their shitty patrons.) On the other hand, Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts said that counties that require masks in government offices will not receive federal covid relief funds.

If this were a work of fiction, no self-respecting editor would allow such blatant partisan prose to be published. It’s too much on the nose, too ridiculous to be believed in. I heard that some of the contemporary accounts from the last days of the Roman Empire are so bizarre and outlandish that historians think they were just exaggerations – fables designed to make a point about the political decay. Some think that all of those stories, weird though they may be, are true. I think our own age will be remembered the same way: just far too many random happenstances, all unbelievable and stranger than fiction. Heh… There’s a chance that if someone reads this blog far enough in the future, they’ll think this was an exercise in creative writing, embellished here and there with my own imagination. It’ll definitely be easier to accept than the fact the world has turned into one giant satire, if only for a while.

If Kurt Vonnegut were still around, he’d have a blast.

It’s Wednesday evening, and I’m a bit of a prophet. There was a rather big reorg at work a few weeks ago. I’d immediately predicted that there would be many departures on our team. The newbies I spoke with were aghast, but they had to admit I was right when the fourth person announced their departure earlier today. (Well, technically, the third and the fourth announced that simultaneously.) Now, in addition to being the oldest Amazon employee in Canada (I joined before Canada was even launched), I’m also the fourth-most-senior person in Canada Finance. Heh… That’s somewhat amazing, considering I transferred in only 14 months ago. This world – it’s very strange. Of course, every crisis is an opportunity, and being at the top (even if it’s for all the wrong reasons) will definitely have its benefits.

The lawyer ferrets at work are still working hard on my application for permanent residence. HR friends at work came through with yet another final piece of paperwork, sooooo – any day now, maybe? With my luck, my PR application will take either a couple of weeks or the entire six months to get processed. We’ll see.

I chanced a trip Walmart today, face shield be damned. It was peculiar to see most people wearing masks. (~70%, I’d say.) Granted, some of them wore their masks incorrectly, without covering their noses, but hey – an attempt was made. I see no rhyme or reason for the different mask adoption rates on my admittedly infrequent visits. My best bad guess is that everyone is alarmed by the covid-related news coming out of the US. There were no coughers this time around.

The supply chain breakdown is making itself known. Ground beef is still roughly the same price, but regular AAA beef is far more expensive than I’ve ever seen it. I snagged some for $31 CAD/kg, or $10.35 USD/lb, which is rather excessive. (If you’re reading this in the future, it probably costs even more. Sorry for destroying the world for y’all, eh.) This is probably not related to shoddy manufacturing practices, but one of the cans of cider I bought sprang a leak (that never happened before), and now I have a blueberry cider-flavoured trunk. Heh. (Note to self: my half of the freezer can fit exactly seven pizzas.)

In covid news… Today, social media had a genuine damn glee party over the reports of a Florida woman who went to a bar with her friends (the number varies between 10-15), after which they got covid. Apparently, she works in healthcare, though it’s unclear what she does. Many blame and laugh at her, yet she was merely following the government’s instructions: when the US reopened, everyone got the cheery all-clear signal, as if the virus had gone away. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is refusing to shut down the state, even as covid cases keep climbing. It’s the government who is to blame, not its people. (As someone originally from Russia, I say that a lot…) In broader world news – the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, and his wife, Ana García Carías, both got diagnosed with covid. I wish them well. Trump’s Tulsa rally is still scheduled for Saturday, June 20th, and that alone is likely to become a super-cluster.

If you’re reading this in the future and can’t figure out what the hell we were thinking… If it’s any consolation, I have no idea either.