It’s been more than a month since my last confession, and not much has changed. In particular, the grind of COVID-19 around here hasn’t really slowed down, staying just below the red line where hospitals won’t be able to keep up with the demand for beds but not moving down much below it, either.

For me, the biggest surprise is how quickly I have become adjusted to just staying at home. This was hard at first, and I had to go on a couple of 15-mile or so drives around northern Virginia just to feel some human contact and see something other than my neighborhood. I no longer have that issue; I haven’t been more than a couple of miles from my house in weeks now and I spend almost all my days in a four-block radius.

Meanwhile, summer crowds are showing up in beach towns, with a lot of folks not wearing masks and just pretending everything is the same as it ever was. I’m not sure how long that’s going to last but I give it about a month — basically, long enough for this to create a new surge of cases.

It is very hard for me to accept that some people have decided to die – or worse yet, to kill someone else – because they needed to get some boardwalk fries in Ocean City. But they have, and while most of them are probably going to get lucky, some of them won’t. Those folks don’t realize yet that they’re living the last few weeks of their lives, and that their candle is about to go out because they refused to believe what they were told by health and science professionals. It breaks my heart.

Lots of things break my heart these days. Our government is in shambles and is being looted before our eyes; thousands of people are dying unnecessarily; we are in the midst of learning some very, very hard lessons that should have been much easier. I have accepted the fact that this grind might take years to resolve. A lot of people seem to think it’ll end any day now. It won’t.