Journal

We’re juggling home office spaces here in Casa Del Brain Jar, trying to find an optimal amount of space to get everything done on my end while also factoring in space for my partner to work from home a few days per week.

It’s interesting to sit down and interact with things from this perspective: the wireless keyboard which proved to be untenable for writing because the Shift key wasn’t reliable may find new life on the second desk; the upgrade from printer to printer/scanner back at the start of the pandemic proves itself to be a prescient decision; my old desk-top, only ever bought as a back-up if the laptops end, starts to show its age as my partner sizes it up as a potential second screen only to discover that it’s a relic of an era before HDMI ports, requiring a VGA connection.

I’m doing up a proper business plan for Brain Jar Press this week, guided through it as part of the New Enterprise training program. It’s a moderately intense experience for an artist who, despite being relatively business minded, still gets away with flying by the seat of my pants an awful lot when it comes to strategy and planning.

One of the tasks is doing an SWOT analysis, breaking down the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the business model. And while the biggest threat is always illness or incapacity on my part–such are the dangers of being a one-man shop–the real threat lies in the reliance on a single computer that runs the software I need to keep Brain Jar running.

And, because it’s a Mac, that computer will be pricy as heck to replace, which means there’s very limited redundancy in my systems. In an ideal world, I would have been purchasing a back-up desktop with my tax return this year, but then COVID hit and discretionary cash evaporated into the miasma of OH FUCK that settled over our finances.

Which made yesterday an anxious kind of day, all things considered, even if I’m pretty sure I’ve got a work-around if the main laptop gives up the ghost. It’ll be less efficient and likely eat up a lot more time than I’d like, but producing books will still be feasible in the long run.

But I have to admit, I’m eying the cost of a proper desktop that will be feasible for the work I’m doing, and quietly doing math on how many books we need to sell before I can replace the old PC clunker that only gets used for playing very old computer games.

Interesting thing about putting a Now Page on the internet: you’ll put up things that are very much a work-in-progress line of half-baked thinking up there, and people in other timezones will will prod you for more information before you’ve had your morning coffee.

At which point you will need an extra three shots of caffeine just to cope with the idea that you need to be human and articulate.

Which also means I could be doing a long, thinking-in-progress series of posts about the “Structuring a prose-based publishing company around comic book publishing models” entry, trying to pin down exactly what I’m thinking beyond “reading too many Warren Ellis rants about the state of publishing.”

Please send coffee. No, more than that.

I posted this to Facebook on Sunday, when I was still twitchy as fuck about everything that happened. Now I’m revisiting it, 48 hours later, because this shit has derailed things pretty badly on the writing front, given the way it spiked my anxiety..

The story begins like this: our local pharmacy was out of the medication my partner uses to ease their chronic arthritis pain. For our household, this qualifies as a very bad thing, so we made plans for me to try the pharmacy at the local shopping centre when I did the weekly shopping.

That pharmacy has been locked down, with signs on the doors alerting everyone there was an active COVID patient on the premises over the last few days. I start doing the math, figure trying a third pharmacy is a better choice than doing shopping. So I hit Google, search for other small pharmacy outlets in my local area, and hie over to a hole-in-the-wall place about ten minutes away.

It’s not exactly a place doing a lot of business at 3:30 PM on an Easter Sunday. The woman behind the prescription counter is one of those cheerful customer service types who asks how your day is going and chats as they take your order, which is a surprisingly comforting trait in a world where you don’t leave the house more than once a week.

I put in my partners script, and the pharmacy is well stocked. Their chemists go to work, and I loiter out of the way so that any new customers have a clean path along the spatial distancing markers when they come in.

Then the fuckhead appears. Young bloke. Late twenties or early thirties. Not looking well.

This sniffly, coughing motherfucker walks in without giving the spatial distancing markers a second glance. Woman on the counter asks how his weekends going, and he tells us his tale: he’s got bronchitis, but the hospital put him in a COVID ward.

“Oh no,” the woman on the counter says. “Good that your tests cleared okay, though.”

“Didn’t wait,” this asshole says. “They weren’t treating us like adults, and I’m a grown man, so I discharged myself. Going to head home and eat my mum’s cooking while I recover.”

Woman at the counter stares at him in semi-professional horror. I am far less discreet as I back the fuck away to get as much distance as possible between us. My brain is a riot of questions, the firs six or seven layers of which are panicked variations of what the actual fuck? Which is followed by how the actual fuck do you discharge yourself from a COVID ward?

Meanwhile, this stupid motherfucker stands in the middle of the store, trying to tell us the hospital is a hellhole and a man shouldn’t have to put up with that. All the ways in which he is personally aggrieved and affronted by the way he’s treated by hospital staff in the middle of, you know, a fucking pandemic.

They call my name, so I collect the medication and bail the fuck out. He’s coughing into his hand as I leave, positioning himself in the walkway between doorway and counter. It’s easy enough for me to go around him, skirting the fringes of the store, but nobody coming in has the background.

I feel sorry for the woman on the counter, and even sorrier for this asshole’s mum.

I keep wanting to tell this story to people, even now that I’m calmer than I was, because it was basically two minutes of horror. A short window where the permeability of the steps we take is laid bare–my partner and I have careful as heck about spatial distancing and exposure, and started a week or so ahead of the guidelines for such.

Those precautions are so easily undone, all because this asshole with a head full of toxic masculinity was affronted by the way hospital staff dealt with him.

Sure, the odds of infection are significantly slimmer than it seems on the surface: COVID is more reliant on an hour’s exposure than a few minutes, and it’s more likely this guy was in an observation ward than an actual COVID-specific treatment if he hadn’t been positively tested.

Still, it’s a wake-up call. I’m living on our couch for the next week or so while my partner takes the bedroom. A precaution, because the odds may be crazy slim, but neither my partner nor I are eager to take chances.

Right now, the urge to retell the story is all about regaining some small measure of the control I lost.

That’s the nice thing about writing. Every experience gets transmuted, somewhere along the line, transforming from a moment of hideous panic into a more reasoned and reflective understanding of the moment.