Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

Coronavirus fuels a news storm unlike any other

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

The Covid-19 pandemic is an ongoing news story unlike any other we’ve seen.

Most news reports are about things that have happened – past tense – but this one is more a matter of watching things coming our way, threatening to happen in the near future.

Add in the two-week period between the time of infection and the appearance of symptoms, there’s even a sense of something ghostly in the air, a present tense that’s uncomfortably ethereal.

The closest similar coverage I can think of comes in sportswriting, as in anticipating an NFL game coming up, say, next Sunday. There, though, there are only two possible outcomes, it’s a limited time span, and a score will settle the matter.

The unhealthy emphasis on public opinion surveys regarding upcoming political elections might also fall into this future-tense focus, though we still see reports of candidate appearances and policy positions along with charges and countercharges.

With coronavirus, though, the scope spreads across many beats rather than something only on the sports desk or political reporter. It’s not just medical and health fields but also stock markets and economics,  education, transportation, technology, even lifestyles as well as sports and politics as we go into lockdown and shelter-in-place. Americans aren’t used to being confined anywhere, especially with their mate.

Well, we are also seeing potential major changes in the way we do many things in the years ahead. How much will online meetings catch on, for instance? Or what will happen to local retailing? It’s all fascinating.

~*~

There’s one other ongoing story that might emerge along these lines. Climate change.

Let’s see if experience with one leads to an increased interest in the other.

Building a lingering legacy

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As she asks her aunt Nita for details about the hippie era, she gets an earful. Here’s a passage that was condensed before the final version of my novel, What’s Left:

You know, peace and social activism. Environmental and ecological awareness. Racial and sexual equality. Sustainable economics. The whole spiritual revolution, including yoga and meditation. Education reform. Well, I miss the music – the fact it got lost in time. Don’t forget the health and nutrition angles, either – not just natural food and vegan. Farmers markets? We’ve certainly been participants on that front.

Weren’t there some communes around our Mount Olympus?

They’re hanging on, actually. The survivors turned into cooperative housing, where the members own their own homes but share the land. An interesting concept. Land trusts, too.

Thea Nita, you know how Theos Tito rants from time to time about the Establishment’s interference with the counterculture?

You mean, beginning with the CIA’s role in moving hard drugs into the country to undermine the peace movement? And Big Money’s work to undermine radical economics? Sure.

What do you make of it?

It’s another big book waiting to be written.

So we come back to politics?

Yes, Cassia. The nation’s divided by the fact we won’t look openly and honestly at the experience. Why should we be embarrassed by our hippie identity? Our antiwar righteousness? Our desire for liberty? There’s no real public dialogue, and that’s a disgrace.

~*~

OK, open up: Do you think the hippie generation should be embarrassed?

~*~

A large Queen Anne-style house with a distinctive tower something like this is the headquarters for Cassia’s extended family in my new novel, What’s Left. If only this one were pink, like hers. (Manchester, New Hampshire.)

A new kind of doctor’s house call

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

When I was a rug rat, family physicians would still visit patients in their homes. The docs even carried little black bags, as I remember, along with a different demeanor than we see today.

And then all of that became history. The front-line medical personnel even became referred to as primary caregivers or physician assistants or nurse practitioners rather than docs.

The Covid-19 outbreak, though, has it returning with a twist. The medico in question, even a specialist, is now calling some patients at home. Yup, on the phone. Voice, not texting. I’d say dialing them up, except nobody has a dial phone anymore.

And that’s what’s happening with my latest cardiologist checkup.

OK, I did have the echocardiogram at the hospital lab, so he has those results to work with. I’m wondering if he’s going to want my latest weight and blood pressure readings. I do have the home kit for that. There will be no listening to my breathing and other internal sounds.

Well, I’m also told of psychotherapists who are conducting their sessions over the phone, though I have trouble imagining that going very deep. Dunno. There are just certain things that come up in face-to-face interactions that don’t happen by telephone.

What’s with all the hoarding?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Where I live, any weather forecast of an approaching nor’easter, big snow, or deteriorating hurricane is enough to prompt a run on all of a supermarket’s milk, canned soup, and bread, usually in that order. It’s idiotic, I know, but it is a New England tradition for many households.

Somehow, though, those grocery shelves are always reloaded by the next day or two. Not to worry.

What we’re seeing with Covid-19, however, is something different. I mean, toilet paper? At first, I thought it was a joke, considering all the BS emanating from the hat-guy and the mess we’ve been hoping to clean up through the last three years. But no, not quite that, even if it does make for an easy-to-connect symbol of what’s passing for leadership.

I’m not sure where this one originated, but my old roommate from the early ’70s sent it my way.

Face it, people are scared.

Scared of something they can’t see, a virus.

They want something to hold on to, a sense of security or invincibility.

No wonder sanitizer suddenly became a valued commodity.

As “it” spread – the virus and the hoarding – the dried bean shelves were soon also emptied of something most Americans normally wouldn’t eat on a bet. (When’s the last time you had bean soup? It raises a specter of soup kitchens and poverty in the Great Depression, right?) So leave the chick peas (garbanzos), lentils, turtle beans, and the like for those of us who really cook with them, will ya? Store after store, ransacked.

‘Fess up. How are using beans in your kitchen? Which ones? Kidney beans in chili count, by the way.

Add to missing in action list all those ramen soup packets, which do reflect changing tastes in the USA. Besides, they’re easy to cook, even for a 10-year-old, so I can understand why they’ve been raided. But the sriracha? Maybe we should spread a rumor that it’s Chinese. (Its roots are Thai or Burmese, actually, but why quibble?)

Coffee and beer supplies, meanwhile, seem to be holding up, at least here.

We’re told of massed shoppers queued up in lines winding around one Costco building in California days on end. We just don’t have one within an hour of home, so we haven’t witnessed that phenomenon for ourselves.

We do know of one independent grocery, however, that’s being shunned – the Chinese one down the road. That’s a shame, for their food’s notable. You want fresh fish? They know their stuff. Where do you think we first found ramen and Sriracha and tofu, anyway?

Well, in all of this, we can add another phrase to our common usage: shelf-stable items.

What empty shelves and missing items have surprised you the most?    

Ten distances from their part of the Ozarks

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Few Americans know much, if anything, about the Ozarks, where Jaya and Joshua resettle in my novel Nearly Canaan.

Here are some driving times to points from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to major cities.

~*~

  1. St. Louis: 5 hours, 20 minutes.
  2. Memphis: 4 hours, 39 minutes.
  3. Tulsa: 1 hour, 55 minutes.
  4. Dallas: 5 hours, 13 minutes.
  5. New Orleans: 9 hours, 41 minutes.
  6. Kansas City: 3 hours, 32 minutes.
  7. Nashville: 8 hours, 47 minutes.
  8. Denver: 11 hours, 53 minutes.
  9. Chicago: 9 hours, 52 minutes.
  10. New York: 12 hours, 17 minutes.

~*~

Frankly, the Ozarks is more isolated than I’d thought. I’m surprised that its center is almost as far from New Orleans as it is from Chicago or that it’s halfway between St. Louis and Dallas. Looks like a long way to anywhere, actually.

How long does it take you to get to a major destination?

Now for the real estate hit

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 11 Comments

A few months back, I was reading an analysis by one business columnist who argued that in the upcoming recession, which at the time looked about a year away, real estate prices would be little impacted.

Hah! Despite his numbers and the curves on his charts, I thought he was badly mistaken. I felt – and still do – that he was leaving an important factor out of his calculations. So much of what I saw in the 1990 real estate collapse was a consequence of households where one of the two working adults had been laid off. With housing prices as high as they were, one income was dedicated solely for the mortgage payment while the other was left to cover the remaining living expenses. Nonexistent savings weren’t going to be part of that calculus.

An old rule-of-thumb was that the purchase price of the home should be no more than 2½ times the annual household income Looking around here, I’ve been puzzled that anyone can afford a home at all, especially considering the declining wages we’ve been seeing across the board or the difficulty of younger workers trying to land full-time jobs with benefits.

Quite simply, we couldn’t afford to buy our own house if we were in the market again. And many of the people we talk to admit the same thing, nodding their heads in sad agreement.

As for single-adult households? The odds are even worse.

Flash to the present, with its record layoffs already. History sometimes does repeat itself.

~*~

In the past week, two stories have pushed the developing Covid-19 situation along these lines.

One noted that real estate transactions have essentially gone dormant. Nobody’s out looking to buy and move up, forget an open house, and sellers are reluctant to have strangers traipsing through their dwelling and touching their stuff. We’re all more or less hunkered down.

And now we’re hearing dire warnings that the mortgage industry is on the verge of collapse or meltdown as homeowners (and presumably many businesses as well) are already falling behind in their payments.

Let’s see how the stock market reacts when it wakes up to these turns.

There’s a lot more to the economy than Wall Street, for sure.

~*~

By the way, the U.S. is now the epicenter of the pandemic, and the numbers are just beginning to soar. Nate Silver, the statistics guru at FiveThirtyEight, reports that the cases and fatalities are rising faster in the Trump-leaning red states than in the blue states, where more of the testing has occurred. Within a month, he says, the per capital rate of new coronavirus cases in Trump country should outstrip those in the rest of the nation.

Let’s see what that does to public discourse and opinion.

Welcome to New England

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
Vanity No. 13 … as seen in Maine, not the British Isles. You can bet this car wasn’t driven across the Big Pond. From JJW’s auto plate archive of when personal expression hits the road.

Oh, my, I realize how much things have changed since I first scheduled this! Considering the Covid-19 conditions in Britain and the reaction of some Mainers to out-of-state license plates, maybe the title should be changed to Unwelcome to New England. Any thoughts?

 

A big city and its stretch of influence

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A major metropolis has a gravitational pull that reaches far beyond its city limits and suburbs. Actually, this can affect various fields quite differently.

Manhattan, for instance, holds sway over classical music and opera across the entire continent. Most soloists have an apartment there, as do many conductors who also reside in the cities whose orchestras they lead. It’s all about connections.

Los Angeles, meanwhile, has the movie industry, thanks to Hollywood, and Nashville is the nation’s country-music capital.

And Washington, as the center of national government, is always in the headlines.

You get the picture.

Across the country, smaller clusters appear. State capitals, of course, are one focus as they span all the communities in the state – and this often includes much larger cities. Again, consider Albany, miniscule in comparison to the Big Apple, or Harrisburg in between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Chicago’s long reach over the meat industry is another, or the Twin Cities’ impact on the grain industry. Think of Toledo, Ohio, with glass, Detroit with the automotive world, or Pittsburgh with steel.

In fact, the economic pull and push of a city is a fascinating topic of investigation. The money that powers the place has to come from somewhere – as do the materials that supply it. In turn, the city has to sell its goods and services somewhere. It’s a matter of balancing what comes in with what goes out, in more ways than one.

So business and finance are defining elements. Again, Wall Street’s role in corporate investment gives New York national prominence, but other cities have similar impact.

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