The Pandemic, a P.T. Cruiser, and the Pasadena Parrots: An Accounting

Also, a throwback: "Shelter in Place Schedule"

Beginning April 15, I’ll be teaching a 6-week online flash fiction workshop for Stanford Continuing Studies. Still a few spaces left—more information here.

Submission info:

On April 1, Electric Literature will open for submissions in all categories (for two weeks or until the submission cap of 750 per category is reached).

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Since March 2020, when many of us began ordering sweatpants online, seeing how long we could go without a shower, and adopting pit bulls and piebald kittens, I’ve found myself increasingly distracted and ADD-prone, as in, Who was I supposed to call…four days ago? and Gah! My toast!

Add to that a general decline in my hearing, probably from tinnitus (thank you, AirPods and my addiction to podcasts!). Specifically speaking, if for some reason you were eavesdropping outside Adam’s and my door, all you’d likely hear are frequent volleys of What? when Adam starts talking to me from two rooms away, and I yell, “Whaat?” and he yells back, “Whhaaat?” and I mutter, “#*%@$!” before yelling, “WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

If you were in fact loitering outside our door for an entire night and fell asleep on our HELLO! doormat, you might be awakened when the Pasadena parrots begin their distinctive, strident chatter around 6:30 a.m., or it might be a car alarm in the parking lot directly south of us that wakes you, the same lot where on some nights a woman in a P.T. Cruiser shows up, parks under a tree directly beneath my study window, and sits there for an hour or two with some guy who arrives with a white plastic grocery bag shortly after she pulls in.

Featured above: the car one half of this household loves to hate.

We aren’t sure what they’re doing. For one, they remain fully clothed. Sometimes, to keep things interesting for us spectators, the woman parks the P.T. Cruiser at the entrance to the parking lot. It could be she’s unable to get past the gate. Or maybe she wants to block someone else’s ingress. A mystery that drives one of the members of this household bonkers. (Hint: not me)

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about March 2020 and the four ensuing years, wondering why life has to pass so criminally fast. It felt slower for a little while in the spring of 2020 when we were all worrying about whether we should be washing the canned goods we’d brought home from the store where we’d double-masked and donned gloves before buying up the last jar of sweet and sour beets and the green pasta we’d never have bought in a thousand years if it weren’t a pandemic.

It’s mating season for many birds in our part of the world, and in honor of the bird with a starring role in a shelter in place schedule I wrote in May 2020 and published in ZYZZYVA, I’m reposting it here. (Note the anachronistic Twitter mention below - back before Elon Musk changed its name and promptly turned it into a Dumpster fire.)

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