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Okay. I'm a big enough man to admit it: I have Zoom fatigue. Staring at a computer screen with the faces of people with whom I am supposed to be meeting with is causing me to wonder how much longer I can do this. Don't forget to mute yourself when you come into the meeting. Do you prefer gallery view?
Send me to a breakout room all by myself, thank you.
I have become enormously self-conscious about my own face as I know that I appear in a much larger format on my colleague's screens. Is it okay to itch my nose? Should I mute myself as simple courtesy since I tend to talk too much anyway? In a room full of eight to ten people, you could get away with checking out. Maybe not completely, but at least for those mind-wandering moments when the conversation has one wheel in the sand. Sticking a camera and a microphone in front of me seems to suggest that I have something important to add at any moment.
Yes, I know you can turn off your camera and mic and cruise by with just that placeholder initial or stock photo. I know that I am hard at work on any given day trying to get elementary schoolers to listen with their eyes, ears and heart, but all that staring at one another seems just a little excessive, doesn't it?
Speaking of smaller people, I have noticed that younger folks don't seem nearly as concerned with the leering eye of the camera. Some get shy, but for the most part, the lure of that screen is immense and all but unshakable. This is the generation that gets teleconferencing. Face Time. They think very little about taking a video of themselves doing jumping jacks in their front yard and sending them off to share with their classmates and teacher. When the pandemic first struck and we all headed for our holes, I suggested that I should get a Fortnite account so I could keep track of our kids. Not to worry. The ones who have access to any sort of social media have been happy to share their adventures. By any means necessary.
Even Zoom. Perhaps it's because it gives them the chance to connect with friends. Maybe it's because they aren't old enough to know any different. This is their reality, after all. And mine, for that matter. I just haven't become accustomed as yet. I look forward to a day when those kind of events retreat again to the background. But I know the truth: We have just proved how easy it is to carry on business, class and socializing via Al Gore's Internet.
Just not for me.
Not yet.

Up Until Now

Fifteen years ago, I had an eight year old son. I had been married for more than ten years, and was up to my knees in a career in teaching. My dreams of being a writer had been dashed by the lack of an aspiring literary agent approaching me on the street begging me to come and be a part of his new billion dollar stable of short story authors. And maybe it had a little to do with the hardly noticeable amount of promotion I gave myself. I have always been happy to have someone look over my shoulder and say, "Hey. I didn't know you were a writer."
Well, yes. I am a writer.
I've been writing on this location for the past decade and a half. George W. Bush was halfway through the first year of starting up the second in a series of two terms in office, and  I was not happy about it. It was from behind this keyboard that I waged my defense of what I saw as a threat to democracy as we knew it.
But more on that in a bit. Heh. Heh. I said "moron."
Get it?
And it was also here that I began to spin tales of the often tumultuous world of elementary education. The struggles. The triumphs. The day to day joys and tragedies of an urban school. Looking back at those earliest entries, I can see the relative youth sprinkled over the top. I had so much to learn. I so much to teach. I still do. Teach, that is. And learn.
Pope Benedict had just been rung in as head of the Catholic church. The first YouTube video had been uploaded, entitled "Me at the zoo." The young man standing in front of the elephant enclosure became the co-founder of that Internet watering hole called YouTube and about a year later he was bought out by another Internet watering hole called Google and now he has a bunch of money. Not Google kind of money, but still.
For your own edification, Google also bought Blogger, upon which I tap out my daily musings. I have yet to be offered anything for my much smaller corner of that corner of Al Gore's Internet.
But it's not about the money. I'm doing this, have been doing this, will continue to do this because there seems to be a need for me to express myself. In this model of the universe, you are that audience that I was hoping would flock to my musings back when I tumbled out of college. For that I owe you a debt of gratitude whether this is the first time you clicked or if you've been paying attention to me straight along. I celebrate you for your patience and curiosity, and what amounts to your patronage. This is a signpost in the middle of a wilderness. I don't know where this path will lead most days, but I'm glad to have company on what can be a lonely journey.
I can feel you reading these words. They're not mine, after all. They're in pretty common usage. I just happen to arrange them in this particular order.
Tune in tomorrow as I begin my sixteenth year of arranging words and muddying the waters.

Little People

Last Friday was kind of a watershed for us.
In the morning, after an video meeting with parents from our school our principal asked if anyone would like to bring their kids into our virtual space. One parent called her first grader into the room and for about a minute we had contact with her for the tiniest bit. That was the reason I have been doing all this digital distance preparation.
I have not been in regular contact with all of our young charges since the middle of March. I have made a few phone calls to homes where I have been able to help families connect to Al Gore's Internet. But I haven't seen them. I have heard about them from their teachers. I have even seen a few pictures and a couple short videos letting me know that they are out there. Somewhere.
I didn't see kids.
Then a call went out from Oakland's Tech Exchange that at last we could drop by and pick up Chromebooks for trade. Fourteen refurbished devices for children who need a way to connect up to the school where we all used to have recess and hang out on the steps after the last bell and wait for parents to come pick them up and it seems like so long ago that all of these things happened that I have forgotten how sometimes they used to get under my skin and periodically annoy me.
I haven't completely forgotten, but I can say that I miss it.
Which is why, when my wife extended an invitation to a few of our neighbor kids to come over and use our front yard for a play space, I did not object. Yes, there was some concern about mixing vectors and keeping some semblance of social distancing. Eventually there were six kids, aged two to seven, scampering about our yard. There were only a few moments in their brief visit that my wife felt the need to intercede. One was when the boys chose to put themselves on a team, leaving the lone girl on a team all by herself. Another when one of the four year olds decided to toss his friend's squirt gun across the lawn. These things happen when kids get together. As quickly as the storm brewed, it blew away.
And then they went back to their apartments on either side of our house. We were left alone again, but we had our memories stirred by the sounds and movements of the little people. The ones for whom we are working so hard.
I look forward to seeing them all again.

Equinimity

Horses.
My wife loves them.
Then again, she also loves cats, so I may not have to feel so bad.
But I do. Sometimes. When she starts waxing for those days when she would go out to the barn and groom her steed, or the time she went fox hunting. No fox was involved, of course. She loves all living creatures equally, so chasing a fox across the countryside would be an ill-advised avocation for her. Galloping about the green fields and into the woods holds more than just a little attraction for her. Stuck here in Oakland, the opportunities to ride the range are a little few and far between.
This means that it takes some effort to get out and enjoy a little equestrian experience. There are stables in the hills above our town, but unless you happen to be the owner of one of the pampered ponies housed within their temperature controlled stalls, it can be more than a little expensive to just head out for a little canter. And yes, there are places around the bay where you can rent a horse to meander up and down a stretch of beach, but it's not the same as hopping aboard your living breathing conveyance and just riding.
As mentioned earlier, I have not great love for horses. We had one of those rubber ponies attached to a stand by springs and one of my more unpleasant visceral childhood memories is getting the webbing between my thumb and forefinger stuck in one of those springs. And in a family of three boys, it was only a matter of time before all four springs had been sprung and we were left with a big, lame rubber pony that would not support our weight.
And there were some real horses too. The ones at the Y Indian Guide Camp. The ones we took for seemingly endless trail rides that consisted primarily of shifting your weight back and forth uncomfortably as you pondered the back end of the horse directly in front of you. There were also a few occasions when my younger brother and I went along with our godmother and her daughter to a stable that would take us out for a very similar experience to the Y Camp, but at the very end, the guide would let us run our patient mounts back to the corral.
That's the part I get. That, and the relationship one could have with a big animal. Like Sunny, the tired old Palomino who lived in the vacant lot behind our house. There was just a chain link fence between us kids and all that horseflesh, and initially it was more than a little intimidating to feed Sunny a carrot or a fistful of grass. I was pretty sure he would just keep gobbling until he got past my elbow. But that never happened. I know that Sunny probably only lived over the back fence for a couple of years, but in my childhood memories, he was a fixture. He became my horsey archetype.
I have no such example from the cat world.
So it's probably just a little more likely that we'll be converting the front lawn to pasture before we have a litter box in the kitchen. 

What Happens Next?

There was a gathering of former teachers from my school last week. This crew was the one for which I initiated the sentiment, "There are no ex-Horace Mann teachers, only recovering Horace Mann teachers." This has been my refrain for nearly a decade now as I have worked my way up the totem pole to nearly the top. I have been assured by our cafeteria supervisor that she will be retiring in December, so that will leave me. The lone survivor.
Or something like that. Some would argue that hanging around at one school site doesn't make me a survivor as much as stubborn. Or tenacious. Or boring. Like when I go in to donate blood and I can fly through all those questions about tattoos and world travel without blinking because I am a pretty boring guy. But an excellent candidate for blood donation.
Which is pretty much what makes me such a star at my school. My relative skills and enthusiasm are not usually in question, but I do know that simply showing up every day for more than twenty years makes me some sort of institution. Which is natural, since so many have suggested for years that I be institutionalized.
But now I have begun to bump up against the reality of what life might be like if I eventually had to pack things in and call it a career. Retire. Which is kind of a funny word, since it suggests that I wasn't already tired enough, so I ought to go back for some more. Being locked out of school and hanging out at home has been, much to my wife's chagrin, a coming attraction of sorts. What will life be like when all this hunkering down is just a matter of fact and not part of some government conspiracy?
I recognize ahead of time the struggle that I will experience once I have said goodbye to being an elementary school teacher. There are only so many times the sink trap can be cleaned and the lawn can be mowed. And I expect that once I ride off into the sunset I'll be back. So many of the teachers I know who have "retired" have gone on to spend their golden years volunteering or substituting or loitering in the office of schools because they just can't imagine a life without it.
I can imagine it, but I still pine for those moments when things came together just so and I was responsible for some kids learning. I've been able to do some of that from my desk here in my home office, but I have started to wonder how much longer I will be this enthusiastic. Or able.
I have maintained for some time that I expect someone will have to carry me out of the school and toss my belongings after me. "And don't come back!"
With love. And appreciation. But someday this has all got to end.
Doesn't it?

Mulligan

I don't play golf. Unless it's miniature. But I do understand the concept of a Mulligan. It is the version of a "do-over" brought to us through various origin stories about a golfer named Mulligan who was given, or chose to take, another shot. Circumstances beyond the control of the player, inside our outside the game, have given an agreed chance to make good on a moment of confusion or weakness.
The NCAA has decided to offer an additional year of eligibility to student athletes whose seasons were cut short or eliminated by COVID-19. Even as the smoke clears from the first NFL "virtual draft," one has to wonder how the lack of March Madness affected the stock of basketball players who were denied the chance to shine in front of all those pro scouts. As the nation's Virus Wizard Dr. Anthony Fauci suggests that sports might be allowed to continue without fans in the seats, we start to wonder what the point is. Professional sports are, by their very nature, spectator sports. Recently there have been experiments, such as having professional wrestlers square off against one another in an empty arena. If The Edge falls in a ring and nobody's around to hear it, does The Edge really fall? At least we have video games, the pinnacle of socially distant sports.
All of which remains to be seen. Could we just skip the 2020 football season? It's difficult to imagine crowds piling into stadiums in the same way they did just a couple of months ago. A number of people have related to me over the past few weeks how they reacted with mild panic to seeing groups of humans nestled together in old TV shows. We are becoming a world of Enochlophobes. And maybe that's a good thing. 
As an elementary school teacher, I have spent great chunks of time herding kids into lines and manageable pods to move them from place to place. Lately I have been spending much more time herding kids to monitors for their Zoom meetings. And wouldn't you know it, the "president" thinks we might need to get all those kids back into classrooms sooner rather than later. The man who made George W. Bush look like a reasonable Head of State "strongly urged" governors to consider reopening schools before summer. What could happen?
Sorry, I think we're going to give the kids a Mulligan on this one. 

Fox Fire

I've never been thrown out of a bar. This probably has less to do with my behavior than the bars in which I used to hang. I say this with complete understanding of how I appear, or used to appear when dive bars were my thing. Like we used to say, "You can't fall off the floor."
So, here's the deal: Diamond and Silk fell off the floor.
If you're not familiar with Diamond and Silk, they are Ineitha Lynette Hardaway and Herneitha Rochelle Richardson, social media video bloggers who have made their name in the virtual world by promoting their favorite "president," Donald J. Trump. They somewhat famously stirred up a fuss in 2016 and 2018 by insisting that Facebook blocked or censored their page. Not that they had any specific evidence to back up these claims, but it certainly brought them notice. All the way to the halls of Congress, where Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn concluded her questioning of Facebook CEO and Jesse Eisenberg impersonator Mark Zuckerberg by insisting, "Let me tell you something right now, Diamond and Silk is not terrorism." 
Not terrorists? Check. Rabid supporters of the MAGA agenda? Check. Fox News fodder? Check. Eventually the duo made the transition from Al Gore's Internet to the big time. After numerous appearances on various Fox shows from Hannity to Ingraham they showed up on the "president's" favorite Fox & Friends. It was there that Diamond and Silk claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was a "non-functioning alcoholic" who "slurs her words." They made this claim based on a doctored video that showed up on (ta-dah) Facebook. For their efforts, they were given their own show on Fox's streaming service. Fox News did have to go back and apologize for airing the doctored video.
Fast forward to the age of coronavirus, and we find Diamond and Silk spreading their own special brand of "the truth." Over the past several weeks, the pair have at different times suggested that COVID-19 was “engineered” possibly with “a little deep-state action.” that Bill Gates was pushing a vaccine as a means of population control. That 5G technology was being used to deliberately infect people, and that the death toll of the pandemic was being inflated. 
So Fox fired them. 
And yet, somehow Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson still have jobs. Well, as we say, stay tuned.