Groundhog Day:  COVID-19 and The Long Now

“I was in the Virgin Islands once.  I met a girl.  We ate lobster.  Drank piña coladas.  At sunset we made love like sea otters.  That was a pretty good day.  Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over?” – Groundhog Day

It’s Quarantine Day.  Again.

Groundhog Day is one American film where the word “treasure” isn’t used lightly.  It features Bill Murray in his last collaboration with Harold Ramis – a duo that together made the funniest movies in the world for more than a decade.  But there’s something different about Groundhog Day:  mixed in with the comedy is a story of personal consequence you don’t see in Ghostbusters or Stripes.

The movie also features a suicide with a groundhog driving a pickup off of a cliff ending in a fireball.  Harold Ramis had originally written Groundhog Day to be a typical Bill Murray comedy.  Murray wanted something deeper and more meaningful.  Together that tension created a thoughtful movie about a weatherman who takes a bath with a toaster.

If you are one of the three people on planet Earth who haven’t seen it (I exclude people from France, for obvious reasons) I’ll give you a short synopsis:  Bill Murray plays a self-absorbed weatherman who is sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for Groundhog Day.  Again.  The weatherman has done this silly segment for the television channel he works at again and again, and he’s not happy.  The entire concept of doing a trivial public event to amuse groggy morning television viewers having their morning coffee is something he feels is as meaningless to him as trying to teach Paris Hilton to read.

Paris Hilton got tired of a man knocking on her door all night.  She finally let him out.

Bill Murray’s character and the television crew don’t make it out of town before the roads close because of a snowstorm.  When Murray wakes up after spending another night in Punxsutawney, he finds he has to live that very same Groundhog Day over again on an endless loop.  The movie’s cue that Murray character is stuck in the same day?

The time on the clock radio flips to 6:00AM with a click.

The radio starts playing the same song to start each day.

It’s bad enough to have to live the same day again and again, but to turn it to a special kind of hell, the song every morning for the rest of his life is:  Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.”

After Cher spent time at Chernobyl, you could tell she was happy when she was wagging her tail.

The only variable is what Bill Murray’s character does during that particular version of his one endless day that has become his whole life.    When asked, Ramis said that Murray’s character probably spent “thirty or forty years” living the same day over and over again.  But not making love like a sea otter.

Babe
I got you babe
I got you babe

Which is how I (and probably millions of others) feel right now.  Corona-chan has infected the county where the Wilder family lives at a rate 10 times less than the nationwide infection rate.  Even COVID-19 doesn’t seem to want to vacation in Modern Mayberry.  Perhaps it’s because of the human sacrifices we make to Opie, the Old One, at our Harvest Festival?  I keep telling the Chamber of Commerce that they should stop advertising that.  Let it be a surprise to our visitors!

The recent shelter-in-place orders that have popped up all around the country have changed everyone’s life.  I’ve written a LOT about the thermonuclear economic disintegration machine that’s munching at our GDP.  But, wait, there’s more.  It’s also the cause of the change in the routines of nearly everyone in the country.

I hear even pirates can’t take vacations, since ArrrrBNB® is closed, too.

Normally, families go on vacations.  This year, I expect that most family vacations will consist of not taking vacations with the people you’ve been in the same house with for six weeks.  Will the NFL® play games to empty stadiums this year, so that 11 people not from Cleveland will play on the field against 11 people not from Tampa Bay?  I imagine that the NFL™ players might pay big money to get out of the house.  Will the local high school team play?  I think the local kids will play because the parents would pay big money to get them out of the house, but who can say?  It’s all up in the air.

All of the things that we normally take for granted are likewise up in the air – for many people that includes having a job.  Yet, with all that tension lots of us are living the same day, again and again.  But for me, it’s not the same day I’m used to.  Over time, I built up a schedule around work.  Get up at the same time every day.  Go to work, hit the gym for lunch, and then come home.  When we got home, the family would do something – often that would be going out for dinner.  On the weekends?  Visiting friends.  Eating Midwest sushi.  Pugsley’s frequent cross-country corn skiing tournaments.

All of those options are gone.

We had variety in our lives, and choices.  Want to drive two hours to go to a big city?  Sure.  We’d do that once every other month for a $9 hamburger (that’s -$26 in metric dollars).  We didn’t do it often, but we could do it.  We could still drive to the big city, but why?  To eat an expensive burger in our car?

Oh, that’s the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion?  I guess the French don’t know what a $9 burger is.

So, the weekends have looked pretty much the same.  We goof around the house, have a nice Saturday dinner, sit on the deck, maybe play a game.  It’s fun, and it’s good family time.  But in doing that, we’re forced to confront each other.  Daily.  All the time.  Again.  In the same situation.  And even though we’re bombarded by daily news about the WuFlu and the reaction to it, the only real variable is how we interact in that particular day.

Babe
I got you babe
I got you babe

A few weeks ago Pugsley and I were in Wal-Mart©.  We went through the checkout line and the clerk was a girl who had gone to high school with The Boy.  Small towns are great that way.  She had just started working at Wal-Mart® and even though she had known our family for years, she was surprised.  “Oh, having a cookout?” she asked as she looked at the hamburger, bratwurst and steaks on the belt.

“Yes.”

“I guess you’re learning to cook!”

Well, no.  Even Pugsley has been able to turn out a tasty dinner from scratch since he was about 10 or so.  And The Boy is now the grill master and does a fantastic job, even though I keep him out of the grill master’s secret beverages.  Who knew that the ice cold, golden bubbly elixir wasn’t the source of my grilling powers?

What kind of burgers do adopted boys get?  Bison burgers.

The Mrs. has been the heavy lifter in cooking forever.  And although each of us has been cooking, The Mrs. gets tired of the male preference for “meat and bratwurst every night.”  I will admit that after a while The Boy and Pugsley both looked like they were suffering from withdrawal symptoms related to pizza roll and Taco Bell® depravation.

One big missing piece in my new “routine” is exercise.  Missing 40 minutes of treadmill time, five days a week?  Yeah, that’s easy to skip the discipline I built into my life on days when I’m not even bothering to wear pants.

It’s my fault.  I built that routine to make the discipline of daily exercise easy for me.  When I traveled for business, I had one that kept me exercising.  But now, when staying home is what I’m doing?  Have I built that routine?

No.  Not yet.  Like I said, it’s my fault.  And it’s especially my fault because I know how to build that routine.  The key is fairly simple.  I just need to do it.  Even though I don’t know if I’m going to even have a vacation, I do know where I’ll be tomorrow.

Babe
I got you babe
I got you babe