making steve a dull boy

I am turning into Jack Torrance.

That is one of those names that sounds vaguely familiar to you, but it is hard to place. I suspect because of the California-ish connection.

Jack Torrance is Stephen King's main character in The Shining. He is a writer who accepts the position of winter caretaker at an isolated resort closed for the season. It is the perfect gig. Very few duties. And lots of solitude to help him write.

Of course, it does not turn out that way for him. One of the movie's climactic scenes is when his wife looks at the pages Jack has been typing. They are all the same "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Actually, it made him a mad boy.

Now, I know there is something a bit perverse about a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer, but the spirit of Jack Torrance haunts my computer keys.

I have tried to come up with some essay topics that have never heard of the coronavirus. It has not been easy. The morning newspaper is fuilled with coronavirus stories. Facebook seems to know no other topic. Even The Economist has sacrificed a lot of space to the virus

Even though I am bored with the subject, I take the virus seriously. In the same way I take music seriously. But there are just so many words I can hear or read without turning into a very dull boy.

I have been dallying with self-isolation here in Mexico. Not that it much matters. Whenever I get the urge to venture forth from my medieval castle, the streets in these little tourist villages have turned into the hallways of the Overlook Hotel. With only the specters of the past wandering about.

A week ago, the Feast of San Patricio and the three-day Benito Juarez birthday holiday were winding down. The villages were packed with residents, and Mexican and northern tourists. Most of the Mexican visitors left by Wednesday. And our Canadian population was rushing back north.

I had already dropped off my car to be repaired by Cruz, so I walked the four-miles to San Patricio to replenish my cash to pay the rest of the repair bill when my car was done. Usually, I run into a lot of northerners walking on our andador. Not on Wednesday.

San Patricio was still filled with a fair number of people on the streets. The Intercam branch was busy with northerners making their last-minute financial transactions. What surprised me most were the large number of Canuks-on-Bikes. Obviously, not everyone had yet boarded the last plane to Lisbon.

One of my favorite ways to top off my day is to walk to the Barra de Navidad malecon to watch the sun set. The sun puts on a good show every evening.

But the malecon is also a good social barometer of the size of crowds in town. Wednesday night, there were a few -- about the same number as during the much-dreaded shoulder between the end of Mexican school vacation in August and the early arrival of northerners in October.

On the way home, I stopped at a restaurant with sidewalk seating for dinner. Three other couples had the same idea.

Last night, when I visited the malecon, I did not see one person on the street between my house and central Barra. No one. I could have been walking through one of those deserted mining towns in the Sierra Nevadas.

And I soon knew why. The malecon, which had had a smattering of visitors the night before, was almost bereft of people. The restaurant I had stopped at the night before had a sign blocking the entrance, but stating the restaurant was open.

I suspect the sign was the result of a meeting yesterday between the restaurant operators and the local health department. The health department had instructed the operators on how to improve sanitation practices -- and still stay open -- during the epidemic.

Apparently, the local authorities had met in another meeting to develop a plan how to deal with the crowds that will inevitably descend on the beach for their traditional vacation the week before Easter. Some countries (Peru, for instance) have militarized their beaches to avoid crowds gathering. I guess on the assumption that crowds of police officers and soldiers will not infect one another.

That is not going to happen here. The decision was to leave the beaches open but to "tamp down" vacation expectations by convincing hoteliers to not rent rooms. Several housing providers have already closed down their establishments. But I talked with two operators of large hotels in San Patricio yesterday who said they are staying open, and they are already fully-booked.

The dilemma is obvious. Semana santa is one of the biggest revenue streams for businesses who cater to tourists. Losing the income would be like all American businesses losing their revenue from Black Friday to Christmas.

This is not the first rodeo for most of these businesses. When H1N1 hit (or started in) Mexico in 2009, the economy was already headed to recession. But it took six years for tourism to recover to the 2009 levels.

This ride on the bull is starting out the same. Mexico had negative growth in the last quarter of 2019, and there was a danger it would slip into recession this quarter. The collapse of oil prices guaranteed there would be a recession. The coronavirus is now the last buck of the Brahman.

The Economist, a magazine that is often sympathetic to economic growth in Mexico, took President Lopez Obrador to task for failing to implement minimal national standards to combat the virus. Like his fellow-populist up north, he is still publicly shaking hands and embracing people. The decision not to close the beaches appears not to be an oversight, but a conscious decision.

Mexico would be better served if the government would do more to try to limit exposure to the coronavirus. The more crowds that gather, the more people will be affected.

No nation has a medical system capable of dealing with the number of severe cases of this epidemic. The reason is simple. No nation can afford a system that is primarily based on peak epidemics. Mexico is no different. It will treat until it runs out of resources.

Any economist would tell us that a system that is prone to clogging up needs to control the variable at the start of the process. That means reducing the number of people who are exposed and infected by the virus.

I am not a poster boy for self-isolation. I already told you of three excursions out of my house since I theoretically went to ground on Tuesday with the abandonment of my car. But, with the exception of the bank, it was easy on each excursion to avoid people -- people who are no longer on the streets.

Time will tell how Mexico (rather, Mexicans) survive this storm. Maybe something in this fatalistic culture will pull the country through.

Whenever I write lines like that, it reminds me of some of the most-amusing words from Tom Stoppard's pen in Shakespeare in Love. 

That may be a bit light-hearted for the times we are in. But it was the bard who reminded us: "With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come."

But I am also prudent enough to take Michael Che's advice from the Weekend Update skit on Saturday Night Live:

I don’t want to make jokes about this coronavirus and not because it’s too sad. It’s because I don’t know that I don’t have it yet, and if I do have it, the internet is going to play this clip of me making fun of it over and over again."

So, I will take this epidemic seriously. Seriously enough that I will try not to axe my way into the bathroom like Jack Torrance.

Instead, I have started my own Alfred Hitchcock film festival in The Steve Cotton Memorial Library. But more on that later.

See you on the other side.