Feels like I’ve not written in a month, even though I have some entries posted. This is because, for that month, the pandemic and its restrictions had finally flattened me. I’ve not written in my book, which got to over 16,000 words by the way, and was reluctantly dragging myself into work at best. As with all of us I’m sure, it’s been a real struggle with me, living this becalmed existence, but I hope we’re on the backside of this thing finally! Numbers are coming down, now let’s just hold on and try to make it to the other side before we go too crazy.

Anyway, I’m starting to find my way back out of the doldrums, thanks to three things: the gift of music, improved sleep, and the remembrance of love.

First the music, as we all know it can be one of the best forms of therapy. I sort of accidentally came up with the idea a few days ago to listen to every year’s hip hop and R&B and Pop playlists on Apple Music of the 1990s. I’ve only gotten through 1991 and 1990, having started them in the wrong order because initially I’d just wanted to hear songs from 30 years ago, and these tracks both take me back and make me feel a lot better. And the good news, from my perspective, is that I’ve got songs to listen to in this way probably till early April or so, when it will hopefully be warmer and I can get outside for some sun again.

And speaking of sun, sort of, I (or more truthfully my wife) undertook a few steps to try and help me get my sleep back on track. It had gone dangerously off the rails, and especially when trying to get that all-important set-up sleep on Sunday night to prepare for work. First, she got me a My Pillow, that pricey pillow that makes all kinds of promises about its ability to change your sleeping habits and life for good. I broke it in this Friday night, knowing I would have time if I indeed found it harder to sleep instead. And at first I did, because the pillow kid lower than I’ve gotten used to with the two-pillow Elevation I’d had before.

Then Saturday, she’d ordered me some Melatonin gummies. They’re actually pretty good, and you take two of them to get a three-mg dose of that stuff. So I tried those, along with re-elevating that pillow on Saturday night, and I’ve really slept like a baby sense. It’s meant feeling so much Better at work, and slowly but surely getting back to where I feel like doing stuff afterwards too though of course being tired after a long workday is normal anyway. We don’t really know whether the pillow or Melatonin are truly doing the trick, (I joke that this is because our experiment is not enacting one variable at a time) but I don’t really care as long as something works.

She’d gotten me that for Valentine’s Day, having remembered my recent statements about how a lack of sleep was effecting me. I got her flowers from 1-800-flowers.com, mostly as a physical expression of the love I feel. Acquiring them wasn’t a lovely experience at first, as I couldn’t get the site to populate with choices based on my zip code. After fighting with that thing for hours and just about throwing up my hands in frustration, I finally selected the automated SMS feature. It was pretty cool, allowing me to make a series of choices then providing me with a link to pay for the order at the end, similar to what Apple did when I ordered the iPhone. This does not, in my opinion, replace the need to make a site accessible to blind users and really all users, but I guess it’s a fill-in and hope people keep working on longer-term solutions.

And to finish this post with a bonus that is related to said accessibility, because it’s one that had rocked the blindness community and threatened to send us back a ways, I was pleased to discover that Domino’s Pizza finally made its app accessible at least on iOS. It has gone from the least usable app to order pizza and other goods from them to the most usable. I don’t know all of the things that happened behind closed doors to make this possible, but I’m sure it was a big win for our advocates after the big fuss they put up in court wishing to not have to comply, and a reminder to let all of our voices be heard. So that’s a little motivation for me and hopefully for all of us, as we all try our best to survive the grind.

As some have said, Black history is not just American history, but also global history. People of color have had an impact on culture and life in nearly every country, to greater and lesser extent, and one of the most interesting ways to explore this impact is through fiction. So, I’ve somewhat randomly chose six novels that take place in various world regions and look at how Black folks coped “then” and are coping now. NOTE: I do not actually know if all of my chosen authors are Black and am ok with that, as the told stories still hit on important themes in ways that few other novels have.

I’m currently working on two of the novels, and the other four I might have completed by the end of February, but who knows. The first of my current reads is The Book of Lost Friends, by Lisa Wingate. This story, set in the Louisiana of 1987 and 1875, takes a look at what happened after slavery. Sharecropping, scratching out survival by traveling through dangerous parts of the then-forming country, and most importantly, as the title suggests, an attempt to find people lost or scrambled about during slavery. The 1875 story tracks a specific family as three women, who had to disguise themselves as boys to get by, work their way through Texas and encounter issues that alter their lives forever. In the 1987 story, we see the descendants of this family and its house as they cope with the politics of what should or shouldn’t be taught in schools, particularly represented through a teacher from out of town who dares to venture into the controversial with a class project, because she sees that the kids strongly relate to it. The story is captivating and I’ve nearly completed the 15 hours of audio.

My second read is A Good Neighborhood, by Therese Fowler. I was compelled to grab this title because it is set in my home state of North Carolina, though no specific city is named. In the Oak Knoll neighborhood, a long-time resident becomes upset when a million-dollar buyer has a house constructed that ruins her favorite tree. Things become complicated when the mom prepares to sue the well-off father of the other household, even as her son starts to like their teenager. This story is a lot more dynamic than I kind of thought it would be, especially as we see the complex interracial reactions that occur between them all and the ways that class, and especially the experience of poverty, also plays into it.

As it happens, both of these books are set in the United States of America. The only other book in this country that I plan to read is Concrete Rose, by Angie Thomas. It’s the third in her Garden Heights series, which began with The Hate U Give. I assume it’s kind of stand-alone-ish, as it examines the life of Maverick (the family patriarch) seventeen years prior to that book. I think it’s gonna take a good Look at life as a black boy in a tough neighborhood, set in a major, again unnamed, city.

The fourth book I am considering sounds interesting to me. It’s called HowThe One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, by Cherie Jones. It takes place on an upscale beach in Barbados, an island I know little about and am fascinated with. In an NPR Weekend Edition interview, the author discusses things like the power of braiding hair in Black culture and how some people can be, well swept under, if they are seen as less.

The fifth book, called Africaville, is by an author named Jeffrey Colvin. This story is set in Nova Scotia against the Great Depression, And apparently examines how three generations of one family are affected by prejudice during that time. Again one in a region I know next to nothing about, which intrigues me. It is also narrated at least in part by the excellent Robin Miles.

And my final choice, which I’m sure is going to be equally well narrated, is Purple Hibiscus, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This story, as does most of her work, examines life in Nigeria and some of the challenges that arise because of ideas about treatment of women by men in particular. I’ve read two other of her novels, Americanah and Half of A Yellow Sun, both of which were excellent. So I’ve been meaning to check this one out as well.

Of course there are so many books on my wishlist that I could read for this purpose, and I will read them over time. But I thought this would be a fun way to get a sense of life for Black folks within and outside of my own circle and my own country.

So here we are, almost last week of April. And, I will have to make a massive push to meet that goal I set a few weeks ago. I shall give it a go, even with the relative dearth of content these days.

How are we? It’s been five weeks, and still no buildings entered, no person seen outside of my wife and her sisters. That in itself is unreal and would have been unthinkable a short time ago. Like all of us though, I have better days and worse days. The latter has kind of predominated of late, but I am praying that I’m starting to emerge from the fog and get going again.

Of course, a large part of my sustenance, and the thing that reminds me that life is still going on beyond these four walls, is the Internet. Can you imagine if we had something like this happen in the early 90s? How would we have stayed entertained. Found stuff to read. And most importantly, stayed connected.

Like all of you, I suddenly find myself doing everything online these days. First, I have already experienced three Zoom meetings: two of which were with the Norrie Disease Association. There was also a third wherein someone instructed us on making Google Docs accessible with screen-reading software. I was pleased to discover that the Zoom software is easily accessible, and I could hear people in fairly high quality. Plus, whereas our phone NDA board meetings tend to feel more stilted, the one we conducted over Zoom felt a little closer to the natural flow that occurs when in person. I must admit though that I still had (have?) Qualms about enabling my video, because I don’t know what y’all sighted folk are seeing or the reactions it may cause. It does show a nice still photo of my background, though.

SIDENOTE: A country song by the group Big and Rich called Stay Home just played on my Apple Music. It’s clearly written for this period. Interesting, first I’ve heard of such a thing.

Anyhow, my other tele-experience occurred yesterday as I spoke with the nutritionist to whom I had been recommended by my doctor. The medical folks of course use a proprietary platform, and here I also could not get myself to be seen. I asked her if this mattered, and she said not really. We had a good conversation, but the changes she suggested will require me to eat more unusual vegetables. Hmmm…

Other than that, still beating the job search grind. I’ve recently also acquired a representative at NC Works, the program that is run by the office that also administers Unemployment benefits. We’re doing the 11th re-design of my resume, but I think her idea, that of composing a combination resume, is one of the best. Not sure when or if I will return to my old employer, but amazingly to me they’re still open and about 80% staffed, according to their latest update. This makes me feel a little questionable about not going, but I also have a more complex set of health needs. Hopefully we’ll soon see these numbers start going back down if people can be patient a bit longer, and we’ll all be able to return to our lives and livelihoods.

In theory, I will be writing to you again on Sunday, then I’ll have to get entry number 4 in by next Thursday. Perhaps. Till then, stay safe.

Before this Covid stuff began, I set a crazy goal to write the number of blog posts that correspond with each month of the year. Easy in January, not so much by December. Realistically, I’m already finding it difficult to do so as a malaise creeps in as day what? 18? Who knows, of this time locked inside rolls around.

I came up with this idea for a couple of reasons. First, I have set, and mostly successfully met, reading goals every year since 2015. I have no doubt that reading as much as I now am is increasing my comprehension and ability to take in large amounts of information quickly. I guess I am hoping to have a similar impact on writing, though this is admittedly a much harder mountain to scale. It depends on coming up with good topics and being able to wax poetic on them on a consistent basis, a benchmark which I can by no means guarantee.

But then that’s just it, isn’t it. I want also to get myself to post on a regular basis, as I must do if I hope to really turn this into something. So sometimes it will just have to do to sit here and bang on the keys, letting the thoughts stream onto my screen as I rock (literally in my recliner) to music streaming from my Bose speaker.

So what do I have for you today, after all that prattle? Recurring dreams. I seem to have them, or at least some really similar versions of them, more than the average bear. If asked, I would put them into three categories: some kind of crazy family drama, college or high school oddness, and not reaching my destination on some form of transportation.

The family dreams naturally leave me the most unsettled. They usually involve people arguing back in my childhood days, or me doing or saying something at home that I definitely shouldn’t. I mostly feel like these occur because I need to call my parents, something I do not do nearly as often as I should. In the latest of these, I break an oven when trying to prepare some sort of meal. Perhaps that just means I need to stay out of the kitchen?

Then, there are the dreams of going back to school. In one of the more amusing of these, Tupac is teaching a class at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind. I do not know about what, but of course the room was packed. Mostly though, I’m in my college dorm room wondering if I should have registered for classes by the time we get to the day before. Or I somehow still have a room even though I am definitely no longer a student at the university, and live in constant fear of getting caught. In another, the housekeeper encounters me in the hall and tells me “you have to go downstairs because you’re in the way!” “Can I go back in my room and get my stuff?” I asked. “No,” she says as she shoves me into an elevator that leads me into a basement with no exits and what sounds like a loud boiler going. It was scary.

The last kind involve getting onto some form of transport; a bus, train, or plane, and never quite reaching my destination. The plane starts to land, and just goes down, down, down, until I finally awake. Or the bus seems to continue on the highway for hours, days even, without stopping. In the latest, one of my sisters and I were on a train. We did reach our stop, but had to run nearly a mile to get out of the car before it pulled off. Somehow we managed to slam through the doors just in time. Without question, these transit dreams are the most common.

I wonder what these mean, if anything. Would you say you have recurring dream categories like that? Dreams have always fascinated me with their depth and complexity.

And oh what a difference a week makes. If I thought things were strange at the time of my last posting, well they are just plain unheard of now. Other than an appointment to get my heart checked, (sort of a long story that resulted from random passing out/vomiting on the floor and being taken to the ER [ugh hospital bills!] Fortunately all is normal though) I have not seen anyone but my wife and her sisters. When the weather is warm, this is ok as I can step out onto the balcony to feel the kiss of much-needed sunshine and relax in the lounge chairs for hours. Or we can take a socially-distanced walk around the neighborhood as we did this past Sunday night. But when the temps and rain fall, as was the case today, it can result in a sense of sluggishness, isolation, and perhaps depression.

I should acknowledge first that for folks who actually come down with this condition and sadly in some cases even die, things are a lot worse than just finding it hard to not be around others. I think one thing that is making me nervous though is hearing about all these people who continued to function through their symptoms, potentially exposing others like myself, who are coping with health conditions, to the virus. This comes from the usual American ethos that says we should not take off if we can even walk to work, and it’s a tough thing to shake overnight.

I certainly have taken off though, and I sort of hesitate to say this, but I am using this time to better myself. Being able to get adequate amounts of sleep and take the time I need to see to my health needs have meant I am experiencing the best two weeks, from a physical perspective, that I have all year. I’m teaching myself to write cover letters and searching for positions I might find interesting. I’ve even found that I have enough stamina to work through job applications that may not as well cooperate with screen-reading software and feel a deep sense of accomplishment when I manage to get a particularly difficult one submitted.

And of course, I am remembering to have fun. How I wish I could turn on some good sports! But now that I have a better understanding of how this thing works, I am also glad for the many that they went ahead and canceled those leagues when they did. The spread may have been incalculable otherwise. I am enjoying music a lot, and particularly the Apple Music playlists, both those that they create and ones I have made myself. Check out my list My Life The Soundtrack if you also happen to have Apple. It’s composed of 80 songs two per year from 1979 to 2018, and it’s fun to press shuffle and see what comes up in that grab bag.

And finally, I am reading. Trying to find books that aren’t so much about criminality, though that’s actually a lot harder than it might looks. A really good one I am about to wrap up is The Perfect Wife, by JP Delaney, where Abbey emerges five years later and soon discovers she is not who she thinks she is. It’s hard to tell you anything without giving too much away, but let’s just say it explores what exactly it means to be human, and who has the right to identity. It’s an interesting concept that suddenly lots of writers are examining.

So how are you dealing with this stay-at-home stuff. If you are an “essential worker,” I say God bless you. I hope you are holding up and staying safe, and thanks for continuing to do what you do to keep us supplied. I know that it is often those with the least income who feel compelled to keep plugging in this time, so I just wish you well. See you all in April.

In my last post, I spoke of my own entry into an unwanted “new world” of illness and coping. Since then, it seems we all have found ourselves with an unthinkable menace: a pandemic. This has caused uncertainty in how to proceed among nearly everyone, all the way up to the world’s great governments. We all live on edge, trying to figure out how far this Covid-19 will go and how long it will last. (I read somewhere, I wish I remembered which site, that the Novel Coronavirus is to Covid-19 as HIV is to Aids, in that one causes the other. So they’re not necessarily interchangeable as terms, though common usage has tilted in this way.)

Anyhow, like the rest of you I find myself trying to adapt to restaurant closures, fewer supplies being available at grocery stores, and the most difficult of all being mostly stuck at home. One of the great challenges I face is whether to continue going to work. The place has not yet closed, so I sort of hesitate to leave needed dough on the table. And unfortunately, my position definitely cannot be done from home. They are starting to practice social distancing measures though, making sure that the fewer and fewer of us who arrive each day do not sit directly across from each other and are spaced as far apart as the equipment allows. I do believe that at some point soon some sort of total lockdown will be issued, but until then I will just wash my hands a lot, try not to touch my face, and hope that I have not been passively exposed.

When things are normal, I am still mostly doing the same job I have for the majority of my seven years at good ol’ LCI: packaging light sticks. I feel like I might finally be getting up to everyone else’s speed, which means that I can be left in bliss and to proceed through my thoughts as I desire. I’m a natural introvert, but do try to interact occasionally.

The only tough thing these days is that work has become a lot less reliable than it had been. Well on looking at my previous Job Days post, some of that changeability had already crept in. The difference now is that by Wednesday each week, we will have usually run out of light sticks to package. This is because each truckload is relatively small, and they only come in on Fridays. So if no work is available in flatware, we must spend the rest of the week sorting folders or doing some other sort of busywork. The worst is when we have stretches where nothing is available at all, but fortunately these are few and far between.

Moving Forward

Before all this Covid stuff started, I was launching myself onto the path to become a CPACC, Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies. This followed the SourceAmerica Training I had been doing for much of the latter part of last year, and is being completed through Deque University, a series of online courses offered by Deque Systems. The material is challenging, but no doubt my prior knowledge gained through an HTML course I had taken with the Cisco Academy for the Vision Impaired has helped me tremendously. To this point, I have completed four courses: Accessibility Fundamentals, Designing An Accessible User Experience, Semantic Structure and Navigation, and Images. Now working on one that deals with colors. The visual stuff is the hardest, but I am learning.

And finally, I have just acquired another Rehab Counselor with the North Carolina Division of Services for the Blind. She reached out to me, and we are going to try one more time to see what we can make happen on the job front. I am feeling hopeful though, and might especially see if I can find something that allows me to work from home so that I can nix the work commute. We’ll see how this story continues to unfold.

I am a newly diagnosed diabetic. This simple statement, confirmed by a long-dreaded but I knew much-needed test at my doctor’s office rocked my world more profoundly than anything I have recently experienced. It certainly seemed more momentous than the high blood pressure noted in my Ask Your Doctor post. But, it is what it is and now I must get on adapting.

According to the American Diabetes Association, Type 2 Diabetes results from the body’s inability to use insulin properly. The NIDDK, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, says that diabetes appears in approximately 30 million Americans, most 65 or older but becoming a factor by age 45. Either way you look at it, I’m younger than I wanna be with this condition.

What do you tend to associate most with Diabetes? For me, I often think of two great but sad movies, Steel Magnolias and Soul Food, in which the diabetic characters were ultimately unable to manage due to a desire to have children against medical advice and an unwillingness to alter eating habits respectively. Popular culture does not tend to portray this well, as with most conditions, I suppose because functioning well with it tends not to be dramatic. So I seek out hopeful stories, wherever they may lie.

My own story has, in the ten days since I have known for sure that I have it, consisted of a ramping up of knowledge and a gathering of needed materials to help me. (I would venture to say that this has actually been present a lot longer perhaps in a form that could have been mitigated, which is why it is so important to have a doctor who will test as you ask! Please y’all, don’t let your voice be silenced.) Anyhow, my current, awesome medical provider told me to make slow change that sticks. As suggested by the title, my most abrupt alteration was to immediately eliminate soda because it is BAD BAD BAD! I used to have a glass with dinner, and now substitute it with sparkling water or similar sugar-free beverages. She said I can still have coffee sometimes, and while it would be best to take it black, artificial sweeteners are also acceptable.

In addition, I ordered a talking glucose meter from LS&S Products, which I am waiting to acquire. This company makes products for blind and low vision people to maintain independence with whichever condition they find themselves, and while towards the upper end of the price spectrum, I am finding them to be a lifesaver. I want to get the talking blood pressure cuff as well, but that will have to wait.

So the take-home message for you, if you’ve not yet gotten it, is to monitor your health and listen to what your body is telling you. I had already lost nearly all taste for sweets and don’t even want bread all that much. I feel in some ways that my coping strategies, which used to involve consumption of brownies and such late at night, have come back to get me, but also acknowledge that some of this is genetic. Not that those strategies were ever all that helpful. I have since found that diving into a good book, finding a sporting event or perhaps just catching some Z’s are far superior methods for handling stress. If I accomplish anything with this post, I hope it is to help you avoid having to deal with this yourself.