Day of the Dread. Mine was yesterday, and despite the nominal similarity to Mexico’s doubtless superior version, no one was celebrating but me.

I had the feeling all Sunday that something horrible would happen. To me, to my body in particular. Dread, I am learning, has a power all its own. It is among those experiences somewhat glibly labeled as posttraumatic. 

Observations that are provided on background only, as any good reporter would understand…but in no way serve to accurately depict the news. Which is that I spent the day perched on the brink of something bad, some occurrence that would further undermine my fragile existence.

What in particular? That I’m going to have a heart attack on my exercycle. That I have cancer. That I’m going to snap my heel cord, rather than stretch it, which is the current physical medicine goal. That I will fall during my daily exercise schlep along the terrace railing. And so on.

Such is my world. How many people live in such worlds? Hard to say, because who would admit it?

Luckily, the dread machine only works intermittently. Who knows where it comes from or exactly what it means? Something bad will happen, and that is beside the point. Dread represents needless and obsessive preparation. Sober caution is the antithesis of dread, just to be clear.

Things are bad enough, just to be clear. And to be even clearer, things are bad enough for people other than me. I am very lucky. I have a nice home in a fine city. No one is foreclosing on me. I don’t have a job to lose. I don’t have much to lose in general, except a few years. And having had so many more years than medical science would have led me to expect, what’s to complain?

I immerse myself in news. Some advise against this. I don’t care. It is certainly possible to give ground regarding timing. Maybe news exposure should come early in the day. Possibly this is true.

But the larger issue is that collective human existence has gone quiet, quiet enough to hear the misery of the nation. This is no way to live, people are saying. And we are going to get sick, and get sicker, now here and now there, until we listen to each other. Until enough of us understand that we are all in this together.

Which is one of the remarkably clear, completely unavoidable, yet consistently avoided, messages of the whole coronavirus pandemic. Think your Iowa town with its 18 people and 17 churches will be passed over like the biblical Jews in Egypt? Just wait. You may not have friends among the Hispanic workforce of the meatpacking plant outside of town, you know the ones who are getting sick? No matter. They have kids who go to school. And, okay, maybe they don’t go to your church, but they clean the homes of people who do. Not to mention stuffing you bags of groceries, or handing your teenagers fast food.

Nothing makes one feel more out of control than a general loss of rationality. Collective loss, in particular.

San Francisco can be accused of many things these days, principally not being what it once was. But regarding the pandemic, I take heart in one thing that occurred in the Mission District. The latter was a lively, slightly down-at-heel Latinex neighborhood when I was younger. Allen Ginsberg and the other best minds of this generation dining for years at the Roosevelt Tamale Parlor on 24th St., a restaurant now deceased owing to gentrification. Generations of San Francisco’s less affluent are getting squeezed out of the area.

However this was the neighborhood that the city health department targeted early for intense scrutiny. Thousands of people got tested. A liberal, do-gooder effort to help the poor folks? No. An effort to understand the neighborhood where people live more closely together, can’t avoid crowding and, therefore, can’t avoid the virus as easily. To remedy the situation, the City has made hotel rooms available to people who need to isolate. It’s a positive step. And we need all we can get.