But not for long*; in a land blessed with “the best [for-profit] healthcare system in the world”, not to mention the world’s most powerfully funded pharmaceutical [need we say “for profit”?] industry is it really appropriate to call the government to task for the failures of a privatized industrial complex? Particularly a government which…well, words fail me. There was a time in recent history when healthcare similar to that of the more civilized nations was proposed for us, but it was floated by a person so “crooked” she should have been “locked up” [for that sin as well as others, presumably] so fortunately we, or the medical-industrial complex, were spared that pain, and as a result have other, ongoing and unsustainable issues laid eloquently bare as the virus attempts to rid the planet of certain ongoing destructive and unsustainable forces, perhaps more deliberately then we give it credit for.  Anyway, I can’t help but be perturbed

about how much revenue all those often fatal intubations are racking up for the best for-profit healthcare industry in the world as this disaster rolls through, no offense, kids.  People are suffering and dying and I’m thankful not, so far, to be one of them and grateful the professionals are out there taking great risks and doing their bests but nonetheless also potentially putting a whole lot of the people who survive or their survivors [if they don’t] into egregious debt;

it’s just our system, best in the world. For its purposes, which maybe turn out to be not so laudable in times like these.  Just another potential for ruin in a nation of them…

Dissonance; no plague here, not yet; one person close to us sickened, stayed home, and is very slowly recovering…as yet we know no one hospitalized, no one we know has died so

we take our distanced walks, do our work, enjoy meals outside with Large Breed Puppies as

weather allows and life and whatnot go on.

Memories from dogs past dog us [the inimitable Dazzle-Lefty-Speckle pandemonium]

to the quiet quarantined streets of Benicia interwoven with lunch,

images from the the early nineties’ slide library

and Sumi, CE.

In the abundance of another California spring, missing out on the last of the Nevada winter

…a jungle in there, where once was just a parking lot.

We shelter on the streets, the straits

and in the slide files where

the past is never far behind, except when it isn’t.

The Large Breed Pups’ births were celebrated on the 28th largely by marveling

at how much they continue to grow. Where oh where will it end?

Soon after we cautiously eased our quarantine and had Scott [his Covid sculpture, top]** over to engineer and install a gate to secure our extremely vulnerable single-pane kitchen door

as as we may be away for as long as five months beginning mid-May it was thought prudent to render home invasion on our side of the fence at least a LITTLE more difficult***.

Meanwhile empty or half-empty oil tankers are showing up headed for the various refineries upstream to shuffle that suddenly less than desirable commodity around as best they can.

As our friend Enrico said, “my still favorite quote from Sheik Yamani, Saudi oil minister in the 70’s during my brief oil patch era, is ‘the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stones’ – I’m curious to see what’s next…”  For my part I finally got curious enough to take a closer look at the actual

photo of the post-oil gas station in McDermitt I’ve been painting lately and discovered I’d had it…all wrong.  Uh-oh.  In any event we’re ALL curious, curious as to whether this runny nose

is a seasonal allergy or will necessitate an eventual possibly fatal intubation, curious as to whether a second wave will sweep through and if so, like the Kansas Flu of 1918, be even more devastating, curious in the meantime…curiouser and curiouser.

* Nonetheless, the Twitterer-in-Chief is said to be enjoying near record approval ratings and to cement this [inexplicable to me] popularity he’s mobilizing militias across the country against both state and federal governments, just in case…and hoping nobody gets sick though even if they do, en masse [skewing their ill logic], the news cycle will have passed; Mission Accomplished. DO we feel safer now?

**Scott Zoog, sculptor, bricoleur and Linda’s studio assistant.

***Our new hand-me-down neighbors dragged a beater travel trailer in through Dean’s garage to the backyard where they’ve taken to sanding it with intermittent endlessness…so much so I wonder how any of the doorskin and thin plywood those things are made of can still be intact. Despite such annoying industry we’re not convinced they’d be a very reliable resource to fall back on in our absence.