This Week in JPEGs

A long long time ago we had baseball and I would reflect on it and then draw pictures about it. Those days seem a thousand years behind us. But you know, I was thinking the other day about how we don’t have baseball anymore and things are probably 100 times weirder than they were the first time I did this and that got pretty weird anyway so it’s probably weird enough for me to do this weird thing again and it not be too weird.

So here goes. We’ll do some JPEGs about the world in general, because why not. This is the week of March 28th to April 3rd, 2020 as reflected upon and rendered in Microsoft Paint by me, Charlie Scrabbles.

Quarantine Self-Portrait, Week 3

Charlie Scrabbles

It’s really profound that humanity has never in it’s entire collective history experienced anything like this. Well, billions of people have been placed in quarantines in attempt to staunch an epidemic of one flavor or another, but never have we been so capable of and free to maintain strong social ties in spite of it.

Think about it - quarantine is total isolation. It’s the only way to stop the spread of a highly contagious pathogen, but it also paralyzes something absolutely fundamental to the flourishing of the human condition: our social networks. The family, friends, co-workers, patrons, servers, strangers, and drivers we see every single day under normal conditions are now suddenly not present.

But we now have the internet! I’m writing to you right now! We can Facebook Portal with family in New York, text our best friends in Atlanta and the Bay Area, we can read the newspapers and flip through twitter and more-or-less reach out to others as freely - hell, exponentially more freely - as in the regular ol’ face-to-face world. They didn’t have that in 1918!

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about the other night when I was laying upside down on the couch, eating Easter candy, and watching Tiger King.

Exasperated Anthony Fauci

Charlie Scrabbles

This slow-motion unfolding of a horrible train derailment that will kill hundreds of thousands of Americans has me exasperated, flummoxed, nonplussed, and so forth. I know eventually folks will come around and see what’s happening, but damn it’s gonna be so late and so many people will be hurt because of that.

Our great avatar of exasperation in this time of unprecedented exasperation is Dr Anthony Fauci, the grown-up at the president’s press conferences.

The Boy Learns to Ride a Bike

Charlie Scrabbles

One of these days I might have to write about what it is like to be quarantined with small children and know that there are people out there without small children who are experiencing an infinitely better quarantine than I am. I don’t know those words, though.

One thing we’ve been doing this week is trying to get my four-year-old son Adam to ride his bike without training wheels. We have the time and he has the desire, so we’ve been practicing every day. He’s really getting the hang of it and I’m pretty confident he’ll be zipping around with all the big kids on the street in a couple of weeks.

It is 100% Best Dad Stuff and I cannot get enough.