Day 158: Digging Pandemic, the Hard Way

What am I supposed to say about the imposition of martial law in LA? Obviously it’s a nightmare, but I’m not there. Nor do I know what to make of the announcement that RAISE is helping enterprising states set up recruitment centers to hire and train medical, fire, and security personnel for emergency service. Anyone whose blood test shows antibodies to H5N1 (and who lacks a criminal record) will be hired, uniformed, paid, and given priority for related jobs after the crisis ends.

The official statement mentioned U.S. citizenship as a possible reward, so DHS—which runs immigration—must be hoping that foreign cops, firefighters, and medical professionals with flu seasoning will jump ship for our troubled shores.

A MUST IN EVERY NEW YORKER’S FLU SURVIVAL KITEvelyn chastises me for forgetting she was the person who first told me about the LES DIY “when you were nesting happily with your banker.” Yeah, yeah. She says the group is overworked and divided over how to dispose of the burgeoning supply of corpses. They hear that scores, maybe a hundred, fester behind apartment doors in our corner of New York.

I’m wondering if the cops I saw in Central Park were chasing people who were trying to bury flu victims. (Did they make the ones they caught carry their corpses away?) An email just popped up to report that stray dogs were spotted unearthing human bodies in nearby Tompkins Square Park—just three blocks square, mostly concrete.

The LES DIY’s coordinator runs one of the biggest community gardens in the East Village and she resolutely opposes the members who want to turn the verdant lots into impromptu cemeteries.

The city and developers have never accepted that the gardens—survivors from a time when residents planted greenery and built fountains in rubble-packed lots to enliven blighted blocks—should remain in community hands. The properties are now priceless and she thinks the city will grab them if residents are caught using them for unauthorized activities. Imagine how the media will portray illicit burials in two years, when everyone is feverishly trying to forget what things were really like now.

She’s probably correct about the long-term peril. For the moment, I’m sure the police appreciate the LES DIY’s activities, which help maintain order. Desperately famished folks can make trouble. The group has even enlisted doctors and nurses who have withdrawn from the organized chaos of Public Health to help people in a more accessible setting—a back room at the restaurant. Why should the cops oppose that?

Still, residents with dead roommates and relatives are frantic, and the group is fracturing. My correspondent didn’t state her position. Ric has gone inactive. He writes to explain that the bedbugs must’ve joined him via a book he found in the lobby of his apartment building. Ric worked hard to keep his restaurant free of the parasites, but a novel called Cloud Atlas proved too intriguing. I remember when Ric texted me to praise it.

I sure hope the LES DIY can bear up. Nothing else works around here. Brownouts are becoming frequent around the country as utilities hoard coal and oil. Even writing at night, I save my text every few words. Count Blogula can’t afford to waste thoughts these days. They could dry up.

In Lieu of Coal: Breathe/Don’t Breathe

We must be close to running out of vital supplies. Power plants generally stock three weeks’ worth of fuel. If, as we were promised, the authorities spent the hiatus preparing for Round Two, why are the shops so empty?

Fortunately, I’ve realized—doh!—just how much my protective gear is worth. (No, I’m not raising prices, although shipping costs have risen because it must all be insured for so much more; my cleverly disguised packages have started to vanish.)

Whenever I go out, I wind up making sales. I can’t let people come here. Like a crack dealer, I meet them in the park or on street corners. I have yet to be robbed. I’ve managed to restock a little survival cash.

Storekeepers seem happy to barter food and kibbles for my goods, so Sneeky and I are plush with dull sustenance. I could trade for a car but I’d never manage to switch registration or insure it. Most bureaucracies remain shut.

The media tell us that New York’s trend-setting Quarantine Culture is hot, so long as we consume it digitally. However slowly the pipelines move it, money flows to the ISPs and vendors of downloadable games, streamable movies, and songs that do both. The runaway hit theme of Round Two is Breathe/Don’t Breathe, by Uncle Monkey. If you listen carefully, the song has nothing to do with bird flu, but who can resist something both ominous and cheerful? Let’s hope we all get to dance to the post-pandemic nostalgia remix.

The overworked and understaffed gendarmes of the 9^th Precinct spend precious hours pursuing me. I’ve heard from a dozen cops who want free protective gear. After agreeing to a couple of requests, I took to throwing things again. I could never satisfy the world’s biggest municipal police force.

A call from “Sergeant Petruca’s nephew Cazimir” was the last straw. Of course Poles and Italians interbreed; it just sounded farfetched in the moment. I told him my stash was fully committed to doctors and politicians. And to you, my loyal patrons.

Let’s hope they don’t yank my temporary Health Security Certificate. The security of my health is nothing to sneeze at.

Day 158 (#2): ‘Our’ Birds—A Scary Drama

I’ll post this bonus entry and then I’ll sleep.

I was restless after I wrote, wanted to walk, breathe, ride. I stuffed my curfew permit, a water bottle, and a couple of masks into a backpack, biked north in darkness. There were more people circulating than I’d expected. Everyone moved silently—walking without conversation, driving without music. Traffic is scarce, with few cops. No one asked for my papers.

GORGEOUS, HELPFUL, INSPIRING ('TO THE LIGHTHOUSE,' Kieran McGonnell)I made it to Central Park not long before sunup, tried to pause on a ghostly Fifth Avenue to await the light. The park looked as it always does at night—forbidding. Impatient, I entered it to ride north on the East drive toward the Ramble, reckoning that the people who go there at night were finished.

Once there, a gorgeous faint light lured me into the woods, empty but for some early birds and a few squirrels posing like prairie dogs. It was exciting to see life stirring afresh, independent of man, in the world’s capital city.

Lisa would have cherished seeing the cardinal that gently and persistently chased the blue jay from tree to tree. I couldn’t figure out which of them was what gender, or why the red bird was so intent on being with the blue one. They looked like forbidden wannabe lovers who’d come to the Ramble to try their luck.

I went to the promontory I like at the lake. Ducks and geese floated around preening, oblivious to the terror they inspire in the planet’s top dogs.

In his book, Dr. Michael Greger says that ducks catch waterborne flu for a few days when young. They don’t fall ill, merely shed billions of doses of a digestive virus that gives people pinkeye at worst.

Then the innocuous duck flu drifts into our stinking chicken factories, where the virus must move up from the stomach to the respiratory tract to replicate among poultry. Once airborne, it can infect humans.

A gram of ordinary chicken dung contains enough viral particles to infect a million birds. China harbors huge multispecies farms in which chickens defecate onto pigs that eat the poultry dung and then void their own into waters that sustain commercial fish. When healthy, migrating ducks drop in for a drink and a bath, they can pick up enhanced virus and fly it to distant chicken factories—if shipments of infected poultry don’t bring it first.

Thus can a mild disorder mutate into a versatile plague that infects pigs and chickens—and you-know-who.

We’re not just talking exotic locales. In 2011 kids in Indiana and Pennsylvania contracted cases of H3N2 influenza that had been circulating only in swine—until that strain picked up a gene from the pandemic 2009 swine flu virus that had affected people.

A Man-Bird-Pig Virus in Missouri

In 2006, a variation of 1957’s H2N2 pandemic strain (to which people born after 1968 have no immunity) turned up at separate pig farms in Missouri. This H2N3 subtype contained genetic material from a swine virus, a human virus, and at least three different avian viruses. (Raccoons can serve as influenza mixing bowls, too.)

That was three years before everyone was shocked, shocked that an H1N1 subtype with genes from swine, human, and avian viruses broke out in North America and became infamous as swine flu. In the midst of that pandemic, Mike Coston blogged about an article from a veterinary news site that detailed how the pork industry was resisting testing for influenza because it didn’t want to lose money on infected herds.

Coston's post came just two months after pork, chicken, and beef producers told the government they opposed any effort to stop them from using antibiotics to grow their animals faster. The freewheeling use of antibiotics in factory farms is spreading MRSA, as problems in the Netherlands have made clear. (Read this New York Times column about an Indiana county with lots of hog farms and loads of MRSA; it was published six weeks before the 2009 swine flu pandemic was detected.)

'KING OF FEAR' (Alfred Hitchcock by Frank Zirbel)

Nothing changes. No one remembers anything. We just get sicker.

But our viral vulnerability is greater and deeper than that sparked by greed for cheap food and dirty profits.

As Frank Ryan posits in Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues, we are squeezing natural life out of the planet. Every road we cut into virgin rain forest seems to trigger some kind of unusual outbreak. Each creature going extinct seems to harbor a virus that needs to leap fast to another species. In killing off our primate cousins, we wind up with mysterious maladies like HIV.

As the dominant global species asserts its primacy over air, land, and water, perhaps it’s only fair that we acquire all the diseases. They migrate to the strongest carrier: us.

We charge in and wreck these viruses’ habitats, killing the hosts with whom they coexist and forcing them to adapt or die. It’s as if we barged into a cave full of armed psychopaths and chased them into the Mall of America to seek new victims.

Pandemics are natural, and the conditions that foster them are spreading just as fast as we are.

So I sat in the morning sun, sucking up Vitamin D, listening to birds warble. My face and hands were naked, my mask and gloves and goggles arrayed on a rock. Some squawking crows reminded me of a rainy autumn night years ago, when I watched The Birds screen in a park behind the New York Public Library.

By then I was tracking H5N1’s evolution. I marveled that Alfred Hitchcock had captured nature’s fury long before it became clear that we could actually kill off the world’s birds. Wetlands International said in 2007 that there were only half as many wild waterfowl as there had been five years earlier. Half of U.S. songbirds are thought to have vanished over the past 40 years—a growing problem because of summer habitat destruction in the north and the use of banned pesticides in the southern climes where they winter.

When the eradication of wild birds leaves us to the mercies of mosquitoes, will we feign surprise? I can taste the outrage—the bile of hypocrisy—as the public seeks culprits.

Day 159: A Plague of Bureaucrats

I can’t sleep. The LES DIY has split. The singer who runs the community garden resigned with threats for anyone who might contemplate using her turf for corpse disposal.

Anna has become acting coordinator, as if she weren’t overworked. She has already weathered a surprise inspection from the city Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. I’m told they found little to complain about: The clinic had moved into an adjacent storefront, staffed in part by medical pros fired by the city and/or their employers for alleged failures during the pandemic. They don’t mind working for free.

ALERT: THE DEPT. OF HOMELAND SECURITY IS HERE!My brief old friend 'Val,' whom I met at Ric’s reopening, is one of them. She says that some big contractors are offering the hospitals foreign workers and trainees to fill gaps left by the purge. “All I did was question why we were wasting resources dumping good people who stayed home sick or needed a couple of days to care for their families,” she told me. “Next thing, my grant dissolved.”

Which raises another question: How can a city without the means to pick up moldering corpses dispatch health department officials to harass volunteers who feed the starving and sick? I’m surprised I haven’t heard from Evelyn.

Outraged, I called my newspaper friend. I hoped he might look into it, ask questions, back the community with some coverage. He astonished me by explaining that the Department of Homeland Security is hunting for terrorists who might exploit the pandemic.

After the Pentagon, DHS is the biggest federal agency. In addition to running such security functions as Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and InfraGard (a weird ‘partnership’ between the FBI and America’s private sector), it directs the national pandemic response. DHS is in charge of FEMA and the startup, Restore America’s Independent Spirit & Enterprise. I’ve seen complaints that executive jobs at RAISE are going to career Federales, rather than to FEMA or Red Cross-type relief professionals.

Public Enemy #What?

My newshound pal said DHS and RAISE are leaning on municipalities to document independent groups that have sprung up to fight H5N1 (preferring institutional, faith-based initiatives). In his best Bart Simpson undertone, he lazily suggested the city inspectors might have been detectives. Then he pleaded deadlines and hung up.

I replayed Bart’s last quote in my (biological) memory several times before I realized my heart was pounding. His blasé comment scared and shocked me. The Feds have the time and interest to crush secular self-help groups?

I fled to my little peninsula in the park. Getting there is half the fun—maskless, wind in my face, legs pumping. Then I take out the excellent binoculars I got from a photo supply store in exchange for some gear, or I doze on a big rock that slants to the east in the early light.

I’m happy there. Lusty, too, in a lazy way. Life feels hot and promising so far from reality.

Escape in New York

Sometimes I imagine sharing my bubble with someone who loves life intensely enough to fight for it unconditionally: A survivor with heart and soul. Showered with light, surrounded by waking creatures of like mind, I can almost feel her with me. Of course we’d wish we were at a real lake, in a real forest, really safe. Till then we’d escape to my secret world, full of wonder even as human society dredges up pain, fear, and suspicion.

I guess the Ramble’s nocturnal visitors feel the same way. They seemed creepy and exotic at first because they’re after quick, casual sex with other men at a time when I can’t talk to a pretty woman without a plastic coating. Some of the denizens wear masks, stalking the woods and paths in high Q Zone fashion.

None of this is particularly novel, reported the New York Times: In 1904 a well-dressed young foreigner shot himself at a cave by the lake, 18 years before an artist was sentenced to three months in the workhouse for trying to pick up a man there, and 25 years before The Times noted that 335 men had been arrested for “annoying women” in the park, particularly near the cave.

Whatever goes on these days takes place silently. The scariest sound I’ve heard was a vicious, hacking cough that sounded like someone was on his last cruise. I did happen upon a violent act—someone being struck by another—but it was a moonlit spanking performed for gleaming eyes in the bushes. Phone cams lit up like fireflies.

The taser I carry is for roving packs of canines, not people. I walk like an Indian, as they used to say, noiselessly rolling my feet heel to toe, one just ahead of the other. I think I learned it from reading Mark Twain.

Today I watched a tabby cat attempting to shadow sparrows in the reeds near where I sit. The kitty was trying to learn how to feed itself. It was scrawny and dirty, one of numerous feral felines I’ve spotted in recent days. That’s bad news for the lake’s residents; the toxoplasmosis that some cats shed can poison fish and amphibious creatures. (Frogs are already dying around the world from a fungus called chytrid.)

That hapless kitty was still wearing its collar and license. I trust the flu has killed its owner. If any healthy people abandoned this creature, I hope they die soon in a manner no less painful than the fate their desperate cat intended for those sparrows.

Day 160: Relenza & I Go Underground

Count Blogula has much to report, some of it surreal, some scary.

The evening began with late bartering—masks for herbs. I set out for the Ramble from the West Village in high spirits. As I approached Penn Station, I noticed a vehicular armada parked on 8^th Avenue, lights flashing in a way uncharacteristic of New York cops these days. I hunched with my bike against a dim porno storefront to watch the distribution of a consignment of boxes that must have arrived by rail during curfew hours.

WHAT WERE THEY CARRYING—AND WHY?When I saw the NYPD standing back deferentially, I reckoned it wise to freeze. Armed figures in blue DHS jackets were supervising lesser beings as they forklifted pallets into some trucks. The process took an hour. Ordinary folks would have done it in 15 minutes.

I had to urinate grievously by the time the trucks started off in various directions, heedless of traffic regulations. These were evidently very important boxes. I felt like the protagonist in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (the original one—watch the trailer), witnessing a shipment of alien pods. It was a dark and misty night….

When the last truck passed my hiding place, how could I resist tailing it on my old blue bicycle, in my old black clothes? WWJD? That’s What Would Jimmy [Stewart] Do? Why, shucks, he’d follow them!

The truck didn’t get far. It meandered west and north till it pulled into a parking lot near a shuttered diner on 11^th Avenue. There stood a similar truck peopled by identical types in blue windbreakers that didn’t say DHS. The new guys used their hands to lug boxes from the first truck to their own. DHS merely watched. As did I, huddled by a bus parked in a corner of the lot, my bladder throbbing.

The DHS men left first, having handed off half a pallet’s worth of boxes. Their unidentified colleagues drove directly west to one of the idled party boats berthed near the Circle Line on the Hudson River. It took five minutes to shift the packages onto the vessel—enough for me to bike up, across, and down the highway to a point from which I could use my binoculars to see what the boxes said: GSK.

GlaxoSmithKline makes Relenza.

The U.S. government is thought to maintain a Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) of antivirals in 12 secret depots for use in the pandemic. This was apparently a shipment from one of those facilities. I had just watched the diversion of half a pallet to an alternate location, presumably in New Jersey.

Those boxes would each contain thousands of powder disks worth hundreds of dollars apiece on the black market. Priceless. The pictures I shot ain’t much, but they’re mine.

I cell-phoned my newspaper pal, woke him with a whisper. I was hoping Bart could track the boat, an absurd idea at 2 a.m. He said he’d ring back in the morning. Nothing. He’s stopped answering my calls. I hope he’s okay.

NYC’s warped dreamscape was hardly finished with me. When the boat had motored west and the truck driven east, I pedaled north along the Hudson.

Lust in the Weeds

Under the West Side Highway, where I’d planned to relieve myself, I happened on something no less shocking—an outdoor disco.

As I urinated in fogbound shadows, my binoculars revealed a speakeasy with lights, thumping beats, and dancing girls, surrounded by a multicultural crowd of dancers with naked faces. I heard whoops and howls and shattering glassware as people partied with abandon.

Then I detected an undercurrent of moans and grunts. People were having sex around me on the lawn and grasses by the river, a lot louder than gays do in the Ramble. Heterosexual New Yorkers are tossing caution aside, too. I wonder what sex clubs must be like. Profitable beyond belief is my guess, even after deducting for bribes.

A libidinous upsurge during the pandemic would make sense. It would mirror the activities of the particles that seek to invade us.

Influenza replicates with amazing speed. When two viruses infect the same cell, they can swap genes in an evolutionary process called reassortment; each can contribute units of the eight genetic segments needed to assemble fresh flu particles. Dr. Robert Webster, who suppressed a 1997 H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong, calls it “virus sex” when influenza A mutates by drawing on the 16 H genes and 9 N genes in its hereditary arsenal. Reassortment is how those little piggies in my home state wound up with an H2N3 comprised of genes from birds and swine (with a dollop of humanity, too). And that was before Novel H1N1 swine flu popped up from the same hodgepodge.

Genetic Flu Passports

Dr. Henry Niman pursues a more aggressive theory called recombination, by which two moderate strains of the same virus can contribute to a new killer subtype by swapping genetic information from snippets of the same gene. Niman says this entails a quicker promiscuity, and he backs it up by posting genetic strings that detail where selected viral strains have roamed, like stamps in a passport.

At least the viral exchanges are voluntary. Humans aren’t so civilized. Tribulation Beat, the Brooklyn blog, says New York’s women are being sexually assaulted. I’ve seen nothing in the regular media, beyond reports from cities that endured sustained looting.

It could be that a greater percentage of women on the street are being attacked but that fewer are venturing out, so the number of actual rapes is falling. Or that women attacked in their homes aren’t calling the police for fear of being exposed to further potential flu carriers. Who knows what goes on in a city whose population is hiding? What would the police know or do?

This must be a prime time to settle scores, knock off enemies. How many autopsies can the city be conducting? It could be tempting to poison unloved family members with prescription medications. How many detectives would be spared to grill an unhappy couple’s contacts? Would neighbors even answer the door?

After so much skullduggery, it was a joy to reach my innocent avian pals. They fluttered happily and sang that I should let go, enjoy the rising sun and wind and critters. I sat in a bracing breeze for two hours as I contemplated what to say about what I’d seen. Now I know.

And so shall you: Save & Enter.

Day 161: Your Revolting Hero

I’m posting early because it’s raining and I have a batch of instant emails.

It seems that I have two kinds of readers. One type attacks me for implying that DHS—or anyone, really—has done anything wrong. Emails call me “traitor,” “renegade,” and best of all, “human sunken retrovirus.” That one’s a little obscure, but it’s fun to break down. The gist here is that I should never have … what?

THEY COULD HAVE USED RELENZA AT VALLEY FORGEI reported what I saw, added no judgments. Those who condemn me as a “quisling”—in rather obscure reference to a Norwegian Fascist who administered his occupied country for Hitler—betray their own dark thoughts as to what it means that I saw what I saw. Hey, maybe the State of New Jersey needs to send plainclothes goons to pick up federally distributed antiviral medicine in a Manhattan party boat. Heck, George Washington used a far shabbier vessel to cross the Delaware and surprise the Germans in New Jersey.

The second group thinks I should drop everything and run, that I have dangerously vexed the military-pharmaceutical-industrial complex. These folks say I’m “brave” and “insane.” They counsel me to lie low till the pandemic has long concluded. Wouldn’t they miss my bloggings? I’m insulted!

If I believed the government capable of executing much of anything, let alone an obscure, dissident mask vendor, I could sweat. But these clowns can’t even deliver boxes. I doubt my fate is of much interest to them or anyone else. My buddy Bart never called back, so my little tale has concluded in a blink.

Believers in both groups contributed religious spin. One branded me an “atheistic scum who wouldn’t see the truth if God painted it on [my] eyeballs.” Conversely, a reader commiserated that this godless society ought to get what it deserves, but said he hopes I “will be spared, God willing.”

Then came variations on my bread and butter. The patriots threatened not to buy masks and gloves and goggles from me; the paranoids warned that no one else would buy protective gear from me because I’m too outspoken.

The good news: There were a lot of paranoids, so my business will easily endure any drop off in demand from the Washington Rules gang. To welcome the alarmists. We’ve cut prices AND added a new line of less-expensive disposable masks.