For some reason a sound truck drove up a silent and empty Eighth Ave the other morning below my window loudly blaring Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” which echoed up the windy canyons. I thought that was rather cool. There are a lot of little weird things like that here, mid-May in the year two thousand and stayed at home.

Manhattan is deserted looking in large part because many who can afford it – usually those with second residences – have understandably fled. But I’ll go down with the ship.

As you’ll have experienced wherever you live this is the first time in our lives where pretty much all of humanity is focused on one terrifying threat able to kill or bankrupt us regardless of identity – but it is in the most (formerly) densely populated mega-cities where the difference between “before and after” is so stark and dramatic.

The Yemeni run deli in my building is still open, thankfully. Delis here are frequently run by either Yemenis or Koreans, the latter having a wider range and slightly higher prices but the Yemenis are kinder, customer wise. They tell me business is down which surprised me since they have little competition (now) although many folks are ordering delivered groceries. Delis and supermarkets are fully stocked but to avoid crowding sometimes you have to line up outside in those new social distancing, staccato lines waiting for entry.

Chelsea is a snazzy, gentrified neighborhood so with above average incomes and housing prices the streets are lined with fancy restaurants and fru-fru ice-cream “shoppes”. Well not anymore. A few restaurants have hung on with delivery orders but restaurants survive on alcohol revenues, not food, so it’s been very hard on them. Liquor stores are open as “essential services” – which they ARE as evidenced by the recycling bins in my building which overflow with empties. I haven’t seen such building wide alcoholism here since Trump won the election.

I have a ten year old dog named “Aussie” because he’s a mini-Australian Shepherd breed, pictured above, and I’m Australian originally. Get it? He is my furry little ticket outside – an alibi and walking license to go downstairs without guilt several times a day. Furry doesn’t describe him these days though: after too many months of no grooming he’s the abominable snow-dog, a regular hippy.

And a funny thing happened on our walk the other day when Aussie introduced me (you know how dogs are) to a puppy walking a pretty young lady on a leash. There are many more puppies about I’ve noticed. She and I got chatting about our dogs, Central Park, Switzerland where she is from – a great New York doggie conversation. On leaving I turned around and said: “Oh, by the way, if you see me again, I look like *this*!” pulling the scarf down from my face for the first time. She smiled and pulled off her own mask and there was a weird, almost Saudi Arabian intimacy to the whole experience.

All the masks, scarfs and bandannas – now compulsory by law – are a change in the human landscape. In Japan where I lived as a young man they’ve always been common because Japanese people with a cold or flu wear them so as not to infect *other* *people*. The story behind that reflects the differing levels of “social trust” in Japan verses other countries.

Policing is done differently now here – the police let some of the little crimes slide apparently and if you were a cop up close and personal bodily arrests for minor offenses like dope smoking or subway turn-style jumping would take on an entirely different threat calculation to you.

Hilariously though, gear heads sensing this briefly turned our empty streets into speedways with themselves as amateur “The Fast and The Furious” stars until they learned to their cost that speed ticketing is done automatically by speed cameras and the tickets started arriving. Both here and apparently in Washington, D.C. city revenues for speeding fines have increased dramatically.

There has been a police car parked with lights on – often with officers inside – outside a drug store I can see nearby for several months. It has had some robberies in the past but this permanent sentry thing is new. On driving around the cops were urging all (non-“dog-alibied”) pedestrians to go indoors – except the NYPD cars they were broadcasting from were those teeny little golf cart cars you see in Rome or Amsterdam and so compliance with their lawful orders was limited: who is taking orders from a golf cart I ask you?

I don’t know what the hospitals are like because my apartment isn’t near one and we live a very “local” existence these days. Some neighborhood homeless friends I regularly donate to tell me the bottom has fallen out of the panhandling business – nobody’s about, see – but on the bright side some lucky homeless folks have been put up by (secular) charities in cheap hotels for the time being.

Locals, especially with dogs are still pretty chatty and being New York you can usually assume they’re leftie Democrats. We talk politics sometimes and there’s a general feeling that our country is currently an embarrassment and a tragedy on an international scale: “America First” – sure, first in infections and deaths, incompetence and corruption. This is the MAGA doctrine in its purest form.

With a wider perspective I find the mass stupidity I see in the media; the endless grifters, MAGAs, conspiracy theorists and Holy Roller Christ-Clappers more distressing than the very real viral threat to my life as a middle-aged *male* in the Hot Zone so maybe I shouldn’t watch or read the terrifying news? But you can’t do that, can you?