So Joyce has been after me to get tested for COVID for a few weeks now. She’s been worried about the virus a lot more than I’ve been, but I suspect she’s got one of those complicating conditions that make it much worse when you get the virus. She’s never really talked about her health with me, but I think it might be high blood pressure. She looks perfectly healthy, so it can’t be too bad…but it’s obviously enough to make her nervous.
Joyce got tested through her job. They had everyone come into the office, which has been closed since March, to have it done. That’s part of their plans to reopen. Joyce tested negative I’m glad to say, but there’s still no talk about when everybody can go back to the office.
Since I don’t have an office, Joyce arranged for me to go to Dodger Stadium to get tested. Ok, y’all know I love going to ball games, and I’ve been to Dodger Stadium quite a few times since I moved to LA…but I’d never have believed you if you told me that I’d be going there one day to get checked out for a disease.
Joyce made the appointment for me and told me to get there half an hour before my 10:00 time for getting swabbed. She’d clearly researched it a lot. I followed instructions, ended up waiting in my car in the heat for 40 minutes, and was dang glad that the shitbox had air conditioning and that I had a George Strait CD from Keaton to keep me company.
Ok…so the test was totally weirdass. Basically they take this longass qtip, shove it way up your nose, twist it until they count 15, and then pull it out. If it sounds uncomfortable, that’s because it is. It ain’t nothing I’d ever want to go through again, although Joyce says I need to go again in 14 days to make sure that I really am negative. I don’t understand why, but Joyce knows a heck of a lot more about this than I do. She watches too much news, I think…and she’s always researching COVID on the computer and telling me what she’s learned. Maybe she’s right and I should be better informed, although I probably am informed better than most people just from listening to her.
I haven’t gotten my results back yet. But the good part is that I feel perfectly healthy (Meemaw’d tell me to knock wood after saying that), so, if I do turn out positive, I’m probably one of those asymptomatic cases. I’d still have to stay the heck away from Joyce, although we’re still being super careful about social distancing as it is. And I’d be lying to you if I told you that it wasn’t getting pretty dang annoying having a girlfriend but not being able to do anything with her. But she wants to stay safe and she wants me to stay safe…and there’s nothing wrong with being careful. She hasn’t said anything, but I think that, if I test negative twice, we’ll be able to go back to being normal boyfriend and girlfriend. In the meantime, it’s one more big inconvenience of the quarantine…and I’m starting to get real bored with it.
Not that I can afford to go out and do much, even now that things are starting to reopen. Although Joyce did take me to the big latino market up by where she lives and stocked me up on food, I’m getting by on unemployment. Still, Keaton’s got me thinking about a job driving for Amazon. He says he’s kinda gotten to enjoying it, and that he doesn’t feel like he’s putting himself in danger. Most of the time he just drops off the packages in front of people’s doors, so there’s not much contact there, and he says there’s not a whole lot of contact at the warehouse where he goes to load up the truck, either. He says they’re super super careful there about checking temperatures and giving people new masks every day, so I’ll bet it is reasonably safe working for them. And it wouldn’t be forever…the hotel is bound to open up sooner or later.
Joyce is still very against the idea, though. She says that, just because things are opening up again doesn’t mean that there’s no danger anymore, and that people are probably going to start getting sloppier instead of more careful about things like social distancing. She’s right when she says that the reason that there weren’t more cases and deaths in California is because we were so careful about closing the state down early. In other words – again, this makes sense – we need to keep up the masks and the social distancing all the more because we’re going out among people again and can do things like get haircuts.
That reminds me: I still desperately need one of those. Joyce says she likes me with longer hair, Keaton says I’ve been nothing but gay complaining about not being able to get one for almost three months…and the mirror tells me I need to get one ASAP.
It’s not like I’ve got anything else more important to take care of today.
Hunter Block's Blog 