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ISO Breathing Room



We've been binge watching a series that first aired in 2014 called The Last Ship. It can be a bit campy and veers into a fair amount of melodrama, but the story line checks several boxes. 

First, as Klara saw first hand when we visited eastern European towns together some dozen years ago (where I dutifully photographed plague monuments), I'm all in on plague stories. This is a long-standing interest. The biology, the social impacts, and the public health responses over centuries fascinate and (still) shock me. Second, there's a navy component that appeals to my guy who served on a ship for years before I knew him. (He confirmed the depiction of deployment is realistic.) Finally, it's surreal to see a pandemic depicted so eerily close to what we experienced just six years before the COVID pandemic. It's like revisiting the future.

The constant threat and plot turns in the series feel very true to today. You know, the increasingly unstable world order and all. Each day seems we're witnessing the veneer of civilization chafe away. So, in watching this series I guess I want to believe that what we're living in today will soon be history -- the stuff of a new drama that finds sanity and resolves well. One can hope.

Unhealthy Air

Meanwhile, the heat, wildfire smoke and particulate matter this summer that has smothered vast swaths of the world from Europe to Canada to the U.S. Midwest and Northeast has taken hold in the west and yesterday swept into the mountain community where I live. The soon-to-close window of clear air we breathed just weeks and days ago was not lost on me. I gulped it in, gratefully while I could, as I read about the choking smoke and hazardous air quality blanketing other parts of the world. 

Now as close to hermetically sealed as I can get with closed windows, HEPA filters, and portable air purifiers, I feel that awful sinking feeling I experienced when the pandemic headlines first appeared. Then, as now, I know I have to retreat from the world to save my respiratory system. Unlike the pandemic when I could sit outside and commune with nature, this time my nose is pressed up against the glass wondering how long the smoke and particulate matter will be hovering. My inhaler and nebulizer are on stand by.

Revisiting the Painful Past

I'm trying to make the best use of my latest house arrest by turning my attention to a writing deadline. Within the next three weeks I have to complete an unusual assignment. It's a double-edged sword. Months back I learned about a new academic reference guide in development that glaringly omitted any mention of people without children. I reached out to the editors and made a case for the 16-20% of the population who are childless by circumstance and infertility. The editors agreed that this omission should be remedied and offered space for me to write 2,000 words. The larger book will be a resource for scholars, students, and the public. Some of the numerous writing requirements:

  • The first paragraph summarizes the entire entry and explains why the topic is relevant to the subject of the encyclopedia. 
  • The entry avoids direct quotations or parenthetical citations. For any unavoidable direct quotations (including material from websites), a citation (including page number if applicable) must be included in the text and a matching reference in the Further Readings. 
  • The entry does not contain footnotes or endnotes. 
  • The entry is written in third-person voice, not first- or second-person voice. 
  • The entry avoids bias or editorializing.

Of course, this all requires me to revisit not only painful, revelatory periods in my own life, but to revisit the testimonies and comments of hundreds of others so that I can carefully synthesize decades of hard-won observations and information in an arms-length manner. My entry will go through several rounds of editorial review. 

I'll do my best, of course, but what have I signed up for here? (The refrain in my head).

Remember, deep slow breaths.


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