Well…

Pretty much everything is closing. Broadway and any venues hosting over 500 people are shut down until further notice by order of the city. Looks like we’re all going to have to either learn to read or settle for Netflix. It’s weird.

I did go into work yesterday and spent the day on the phone with clients talking about the future of our events with a not-so-lowkey emphasis on the general idea of the future. The fact is, or at least my general hunch is, there are no longterm changes to how we go about our lives. The history of epidemics around the world suggests otherwise. We will wait it out, some of us longer than others, and eventually go back to business as usual. There will be professional sports again. There will be conventions and meetings. There will be Broadway. There will be concerts. Etc. Fear is like that. It’s all relative to what we are accustomed to first and foremost. We do what we do and with the exception of a handful of people who actually are introverts or agoraphobes we are social creatures and social distancing is how we roll. We will ignore the risks until we forget the risks until the next one and the next one. Rinse and repeat.

I’ll be working from home today and I will see what that brings. The focus for now is events for later in the year but people haven’t yet wrapped their heads around “later in the year” so they’re not really booking anything at all. There will be more conversations about risk and fear. They wore me the fuck down yesterday and I ended yesterday with a blazing headache which is lingering this morning. You would think I would be more used to discussing fear and uncertainty now what with therapy and 12 steps meetings and all, but it still knocks the stuffing out of me. It’s not truly in my nature to be so… social? The world wasn’t really made for people afflicted with… What am I afflicted with? A weak constitution? I don’t know. It makes me weary.

We’re all supposed to slog back into the office on Monday and go about the business of running a business. We’ll see what happens. We may not be allowed to by Monday, or even by this afternoon. Schools are open. Most businesses are still open but it looks from the empty seats on the train that everyone who has the opportunity to stay home is already doing so. Will public transport be closed down for a week or so while the government measures the outbreak? Moves have already been made that would have seemed a bit sci-fi just a few days ago.

ODAAT.

Or a couple hours at a time.

It appears that Donald Trump and Mike Pence, the highest level officials in the country, were exposed to infected parties at a meeting in Trump’s private club a couple days ago. Trump surely looked sick or uncharacteristically exhausted during his television statement a few nights back. The officials they met with, ate with and shook hands with have tested positive. They are not young and their health has always been in question. Frankly, he looked like shit. His eyes looked like two burnt holes in a pillowcase. Love him or hate him (and there is no in between on that) it would be very big news if they were even sick, let alone in serious risk of snuffing it. It would not be a good thing. As a matter of fact, there are so many old people in government, widespread infection there would be catastrophic. We would be a ship without a rudder on a national level. This is when we would see just how effective our local governments are and it’s easy to see that local government responses would vary greatly. The situations will be mishandled.

Of course this is all conjecture at this point but the door is wide open to any range of possibilities. Not that this hasn’t always been the case but the veil is dropped now and it’s easy to see how utterly lame we are, and how vulnerable we have always been.

For once I hope the skeptics, like the guy on the phone yesterday who described himself as a “fucked up old man,” are correct. I hope this is blown way out of proportion to the actual threat.

Or maybe it’s exactly what we’ve always needed to push us over the edge to meaningful change.