Breezy and cloudy this late-afternoon Wednesday in California’s Central Valley. In truth, I had to check my laptop’s date/time thingie to make sure it was indeed Wednesday — it most-easily could have been a Thursday, not much so a Tuesday, for some reason.

Our mental-strangling, encompassing  coronavirus epic continues. On the local front, as of 10 AM today Merced County had 118 confirmed COVID-19 cases, but still only three deaths, the same the last month or so.
Surrounding counties have seen an uptick in cases, and this thing is not going away soon.
This morning a trip to the grocery store, my first in maybe two weeks. Just a short jaunt, which a short time ago would have been mundane to the way-max, and not worth noting to anyone — but today an odd, quiet unfamiliarity in familiar surroundings.  A major shift in a short space.
Most everybody had masks, and everything seemed if viewed through a camera lens. I feel superimposed when I wear mine, like I’m not really there, just walking around, getting coffee or whatever, keeping distance without much dialogue. My daughter and I went today, took precautions used sanitizers, wipes and disinfectant sprays.
This coronavirus might be the weirdest, and strangely-unsettling experience in my lifetime.
Great kudos and appreciation to those who work keeping these outlets viable. All store (Raley’s) employees were face-masked, and cashiers behind glass.
Scenes from our collective Twilight Zone episode.

A nauseating anxiety on top of everything else — America in this freaked-out period supposedly-alarmingly is in the hands of Ivanka’s nasty-faced grifter of a husband, Jared Kushner. Details on Kushner activity comes via an absorbing piece from yesterday by Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair.
Read the whole post, some interesting/disturbing shit on the worse West Wing operation in US history. Way-bottom, gloom-feeder line: ‘“Jared is running everything. He’s the de facto president of the United States,” a former White House official told me.‘
Maybe wonder why we’re not worse off than we are right now — then again, maybe we will be.

Despite all the shit on COVID-19, the Kush indeed is pimping for Ivanka’s daddy, creating an idiot’s fantasy. And like all liars, feeds off the lies — HuffPost has the story on this:

Jared Kushner, the morning after we hit 1 million cases and more deaths than in the Vietnam War:

“We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this. The federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story.”pic.twitter.com/sRGDR4rNsl

— Ian Sams (@IanSams) April 29, 2020

And the world, too, appears to have lost sense. The T-Rump disinfectant disaster seemingly has repercussions beyond FOX viewers to bleach on the beach — a horror story from Spain where they’ve had 23,800 COVID-19 deaths (via BBC this morning:):

Zahara de los Atunes, near Cadiz, used tractors to spray more than 2km (1.2 miles) of beach with a bleach solution a day before Spain allowed children out of lockdown for the first time.

Environmentalists say the move caused “brutal damage” to the local ecosystem.
…
María Dolores Iglesias, who heads an environmental volunteer group in the Cadiz region, said she had visited the beach at Zahara de los Atunes and seen the damage for herself.

She said the bleach “killed everything on the ground, nothing is seen, not even insects”.

The beach and its dunes are protected breeding and nesting places for migratory birds and Ms Iglesias said she had seen at least one nest with eggs destroyed by the tractors.
“Bleach is used as a very powerful disinfectant, it is logical that it be used to disinfect streets and asphalt, but here the damage has been brutal,” she told Spanish media.

“They have devastated the dune spaces and gone against all the rules. It has been an aberration what they have done, also taking into account that the virus lives in people not on the beach. It is crazy.”

Ms Iglesias said that because of the lockdown, wildlife had been thriving on the beach.
“The beach has its own way of cleaning itself, it was not necessary,” she said.
“They do not think that this is a living ecosystem, but a lot of land.”

Local official Agustín Conejo admitted it was “a wrong move”.
“I admit that it was a mistake, it was done with the best intention,” he said.

Yes, it is crazy, and ‘best intention‘…?(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Self Portrait Facing Death‘ (June 30, 1972), was originally found here).