#MOC19: Pandemic Games

I’m a grown-up. I know that I’m supposed to be employing these enforced stay-at-home leisure hours with sedate pastimes suitable for a gentleman of more than half a century. What pastimes are those, exactly? Bonsai? Numismatology? The Jumble? Sitting in an easy chair, wearing a sweater vest, gently chuckling over the collected essays of Jean Shepherd?

Nah. I have been spending my time in isolation playing video games. I’ve loved video games since I first reverently slipped a quarter into a cabinet edition of Pong at the 1974 Virginia state fair. Shoved in among the pachinko units and the Bally pinball machines in a dirty tent toward the back of the midway, Pong’s electronic bloops and bleeps as its square slowly volleyed between two rectangular paddles mesmerized me deeply as a ten-year-old. To lure me back outdoors, my father had to ante up promises of an elephant ear, then sweeten the pot with promises of a trip to the fun house.

As a teen I spent my after school hours at the Station Break arcade in the louche neighborhood bordering my parents’ university, saving doomed cities in Missile Command. When I was a high school sophomore, I saved my lawn-mowing money to purchase my first home gaming console, an Atari 2600. My memory of my college junior year consists almost entirely of hunching over the Crystal Castles machine in the Tinee Giant convenience store across from my dorm. It’s safe to say that I have a lifetime love of video gaming.

And now, in these days in which the long hours seem to fill all too easily with emptiness and anxiety, for me there’s no greater antidote than allowing myself to be soothed by pixels dancing across an LCD screen. (Hey, the World Health Organization said I should.)

Some might imagine that video games are by their nature isolated from the events of the world. Super Mario is forever chasing after Princess Peach in yet another castle; Ms. Pac-Man is doomed to spend her multiple lives munching pellets down the same hallways, haunted by the same ghosts. Neither of them receive news reports of pandemics in the worlds outside the boxes they play upon. But there’s actually a lot of spillover from the real world into those universes behind a glowing screen.

And vice-versa. Years ago, I had a love affair with World of Warcraft, a virtual universe in which hundreds of thousands of players at a time occupied a world together, questing and grouping up together or ignoring each other as each went about his business. In 2005 there was a famous incident known today as the Corrupted Blood Plague—a programming bug gone rogue, in which players who’d finished the newest group dungeon returned to one of the game’s metropolitan centers infected with a fatal disease. Infected players would rather explode into a gout of blood and then die as a pile of bones.

The problem was that the plague was highly contagious; anyone who’d been in contact with one of those plagued dungeon divers could catch Corrupted Blood. The newly-infected could then spread it to someone in proximity. Very quickly, as Corrupted Blood leapt from one player to a nearby other, the major cities in the game became a landscape of corpses. Of course, death isn’t permanent in WoW. But players would try to run their spirits back to their bodies to resurrect, only to catch the plague from someone nearby once again. Entire servers ground to a halt as players died, revived, then tried to run a few feet, only to die over and over again as they attempted to escape the plague-ridden city streets.

I remember being online trapped between the capitals of Ironforge and Stormwind when the plague hit, intrigued but panicked at the communications from friends and guild members. Don’t go near the cities! they’d warn, as they’d frantically type out descriptions of the scenes of carnage around them. Those of us fortunate enough to have been somewhere rural and isolated when the plague began were spared a bloody death, but we were far from unaffected. All the banking was in the cities. The shops, the houses in which we could put our goods up for auction, the inns where some of us made our homes—all in WoW’s expansive metropolitan areas.

Our reactions as players ran the gamut as well. Some numbskulls gamely would hitch a griffon and fly into the havoc just for the LOLs of it. (Obviously, these would be the same folk in Florida crowding the beaches today, or congregating for coronavirus parties.) Other more noble souls playing classes with healing skills attempted to brave the cities in an attempt to cleanse as many sick people as they could of the disease, while shielding themselves as long as possible from the plague’s deadly affects. They too eventually perished. Many simply attempted to isolate themselves as best they could in remote areas, socially distancing themselves from the plague and from anyone else who might bring it to them. Or else they logged off—the best social distancing of all.

The Corrupted Blood Plague was quite a phenomenon at the time it happened; it was one of the first times I recall that the social aspects of a video game made mainstream news. More interestingly, epidemiologists studied the event, including scientists who used the in-game plague recently to make projective models of how COVID-19 would spread in the real world, and of the degrees of seriousness with which real-life people would take the epidemic.

The games I play now might be a haven from my real-world anxieties, but neither are they completely sheltered from the realities of what’s going on around us. One of the games in which I’ve immersed myself for the last year and a half is Fallout 76, an online multi-player entry in the Fallout series of post-apocalyptic roleplaying games. 76 takes place twenty-five years after a nuclear war that brought civilization to a standstill, set in the deserted hills and slag heaps of West Virginia. Across the expansive map of West Virginia, only twenty-four players co-exist on any single server at a time, questing, killing mutated creatures, and participating occasionally in events that bring them together.

I’m fond of 76’s serene, permanently autumnal setting and its lonely solitude. Mostly, though, I’m in it because it’s a game in which I can find stuff, search for stuff, pick up stuff, look into containers for stuff, and then turn stuff into other stuff. For me it’s basically a game that allows me to become a digital candidate for Hoarding: Buried Alive in a way I’d never allow myself in my real life.

I venture out into the deserted dead world and scavenge in ruined houses and deserted amusement parks and ski resorts and farms for abandoned items of clothing, for beer bottles and tin cans, for boxes of scouring cleaner and old teddy bears and boxed food and acetone canisters and turpentine and old typewriters and desk fans. Then I lug my precious loot back home and scrap everything for parts. From those parts I can craft walls and floors, roofs, furniture, and all manner of lighting and decorations for the little homestead I’ve scraped together and established on a silent road outside of Morgantown. I also get to create vending machines to sell homemade armor, food, scrap, and baked goods to other players passing through.

Yes, basically I play Fallout 76 as a post-nuclear variation on The Sims—I make it a decorating and house-building game with occasional irksome yet necessary jaunts to clear out nests of deathclaws and Super Mutants so I can bring home more stuff with which to decorate my little holocaust gas station, where machines vending baked goods stand where the gas pumps ought to be.

One of the reasons I like 76 is the unrelenting cheerfulness of the player base. I’ve been playing online games long enough that I’ve seen the gamut of bad behaviors. Temper tantrums. Dog-piling. Misogynistic and homophobic name-calling. And in WoW, enough ganking—the mean-spirited in-game bullying of low-level players unable to defend themselves against the more experienced high-level warriors—to make Heathers look like Little Women. Fallout 76, though, isn’t a particularly popular game. It has a reputation, perhaps earned in its early days, of being exquisitely buggy to the point of being unplayable. It didn’t review well. Its aficionados could have spent their tenure in Appalachia wandering around shell-shocked and defensive, but just about everyone I encounter on the servers is cheerful, good-natured, and helpful.

People stop by my roadside gas station and let me know how much they love what I’ve built; they’ll shop at my machines and lounge on my sofa and we’ll play the piano and bass upstairs together in my little parlor. Instead of ganking level 1 players, those at 100 or above descend upon them bearing gifts of armor and weapons and plans for them to learn; we’ll buy out whatever nonsense junk a new player puts into her vending machines, just so she’ll have a little cash of their own. For a game that’s essentially a first-person shooter set in a radioactive hellscape, Fallout 76 is pretty much the next friendliest little community next to Mayberry R.F.D.

One of the things I noticed in my daily Appalachian encounters, about two weeks ago when life started shutting down, was how frequently visitors to my camp were wearing protective facewear. Once my real-life social distancing had started, in the game I dug out from the depths of my inventory a plague doctor’s mask, and paired its beaked nose with a leather cap and an body-covering outfit that included gloved hands. After that, day by day, I witnessed players changing their everyday outfits to correspond with what was happening in the world around them. Instead of road leathers or power armor, more and more people began visiting wearing fuzzy robes, pajamas, and slippers, their faces covered with medical masks. There were a handful of plague doctors like myself, and others stopping by in hazmat suits that protected them from head to toe. Gas masks suddenly became popular. Everywhere in West Virginia I’d travel, players were dressing themselves up in out-of-the-usual clothing that indicated their tangible isolation and—judging by the handkerchiefs and bandanas worn over their mouths—a certain consideration of the pandemic driving us into the virtual world.

Toilet paper has become a popular item in 76 as well. Part of my routine, every time I log in, is to scavenge through the various public restrooms in buildings through the world to collect rolls of toilet paper—which I’ll then put into my vending machine. With the real-life shortages of toilet paper across the country, everyone’s hopped onto the hoarding of virtual toilet paper. We’ve basically a player-created mini-game within the game itself in which we log in, peek in restroom after restroom, and fill our inventories with toilet paper rolls to sell in our vending machines at exorbitant prices. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. No one poops in Fallout 76. Videogame toilet paper serves no real purpose. But occasionally someone will buy several rolls of bathroom tissue from my machine for a cool 2500 apiece, and I’ll return the favor by visiting her vendor to see how much of her toilet paper I can buy. It’s a silly time-waster—but then again, what else do we have to do?

Even in the bucolic landscape of the cartoon-y Animal Crossing series, the latest installment of which released just as much of the world retreated into hiding, I’ve seen player after player donning respirators and surgical masks before they visit another player’s village—and I’ve seen a lot of home islands created this last week with the name ‘Quarantine.’ People playing Minecraft post photos of the hospitals and emergency services tents they’ve been building in their games.

Video games might be a retreat from the stresses of the world. At the same time, they can’t help but be part of it. Any game that gives players agency to create their own narratives is going to see this pandemic woven into the stories that players choose to create with their names, their mode of dress, the ways in which they interact with each other. Reflecting aspects of real life in virtual worlds gives players an outlet for creativity and commentary. It reminds us that there are frightened people behind the plague doctor’s masks. And ultimately, there’s real solace to take in knowing that in this virtual community of strangers, all of us have foremost in our minds the same fears and anxieties.




This essay has been written as part of the Mass Observation: COVID-19 writing project. If you'd like to join our volunteer writers, visit our Call for Volunteers at https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ .

#MOC19: Supermarket Shopping in the Time of Coronavirus

One of the standard so-called jokes I make with students, at the beginning of each semester, is that I encourage them to contact me any way they’d like for the class’ duration. Email, social media, old-fashioned voice calls, texting, a letter written on parchment with quill and ink and sealed with blood-red wax. “But if you see me at Shop-Rite,” I add, “It’s probably best you just move to the side and get out of my way.”

I say it’s a joke. It’s not—not really. For some reason during every weekly visit to the local supermarket, I encounter not only students, but a random sample of everyone else I know. School administrators. People from church. Neighbors. My physician. My physician’s receptionist. Random writers from workshops I attended years ago. And every single one of them to a man or woman, with hesitant expressions, has told me later when they encounter me elsewhere, “I saw you at the grocery store but I was afraid to say hello to you because you looked so…um…intent on your shopping.”

It’s a kind way, I think, of telling me how manic I seem when I’m behind the wheels of a shopping cart.

To say that I’m focused when I’m prowling for groceries is underselling. Upon crossing the threshold of Shop-Rite, I transform into a falcon—my eyesight becomes eight times sharper than any mere human as I peer from the produce section to see what’s on sale at the deli, or as I fly into the bread aisle to spy if potato buns are in stock far at the other end. In every aisle I’m like one of my cats on squirrel patrol in a window, no longer a cuddly layabout but a vicious feline, pupils at their widest, whiskers bristling, tail whipping, my head unmoving as I keep my quarry of the last flank steak in unwavering focus. I am the king of the lions, cutting at top speed through the lesser species of the supermarket savannah in pursuit of my quarry. Behind that cart I become a grocery predator—and I like to savage and capture my prey and return to my den as quickly as humanly possible.

I always take exquisite care with my meal planning. Every dinner gets plotted out on the calendar; I leave a blank space for the traditional Friday night dinner out. I’m always disposed to meals that provide leftovers, both because I like them, and because they’re an opportunity for one less night I have to spend at the stove. From the calendar I create extensive lists to save on my phone, covering ingredients not only for dinners, but for our usual grab-and-go breakfasts and lunches. I’ve always kept a well-stocked pantry of staples to have at hand—rices, beans, boxes of pasta and jars of pasta sauce and sofrito, spices, flour, sugar—for my regular use and in case there’s a need to improvise a meal.

Improvisation is my last resort, though. Sure, I can whip up a last-minute spicy fried rice with pantry items, an egg or two, and remnants of the Christmas ham from the freezer—but isn’t it nicer to avoid that last-minute uncertainty by putting on the calendar and making certain I’ve got frozen edamame to include in it? I’m willing to eat a lazy-ass one-man cacio e pepe any day of the week when I’m on my own. I’ve always got pasta in the cupboard and parmesan in the fridge. But for two does such an easy dish really, I hear in my mom’s distant voice, constitute a proper meal?

For years meal planning has been my bedrock. It’s what I do first thing every new week. In a way it’s my sanity, the one thing I know will kick off even the gloomiest of Monday mornings. I plan our meals, I make my list, I hit the supermarket like a man possessed. I buy every item on my list—nothing more, nothing less—and then I return home to store away my foodstuffs. The structure of the week is settled. The hunter-gatherer in me beats his hairy chest and is pleased.

Only that’s all changed now, in this era of pandemic, hasn’t it?

I hadn’t at all been surprised at the notion of COVID-19 reaching New York City and Westchester; I didn’t expect, however, for it to arrive so suddenly. When I’d been on my own the first week of March, the prudent planner in me thought he was doing enough by buying extra-large bags of both white and brown rice, as well as a few extra boxes of dried pasta. However, when Connecticut started to shut down the second week of March, and we’d heard from friends that the store shelves were emptying rapidly, it was plain that we really hadn’t stocked up enough on food that would get us through a long period of isolation, if necessary.

It’s not as if our fridge was empty. (It’s not as if our fridge is ever empty.) My pantry of staples was fairly well stocked, and I certainly had two heavy bags of rice and all that pasta with which to work. Inside my chest freezer were a number of portions of black beans that I’d pressure-cooked in previous weeks, as well as several divvied-up half-pounds of ground beef and, for some reason, frozen veal patties enough for two months’ worth of dinner. Also frozen: three kringle pastries we’d received as a Christmas gift, several pounds of leftovers from that fabled Christmas ham, and multiple containers of an unsuccessful Mexican noodle dish (even typing those last three words out, I now ask myself, why?) I’d attempted whose leftovers weren’t tasty enough to consume immediately, yet weren’t awful enough to justify throwing away. We weren’t going to starve.

Maybe some of that mainstream panic seeped in, though. Over the weekend we felt an increasing sense of urgency to get to the supermarket. To stock up. Toilet paper was sold out everywhere, we’d heard—fine. We still had the better part of a Costco bulk package of that stuff. Disinfectant wipes? We’d snagged a large five-tub pack only a few weeks ago when they were on sale. Hand sanitizer? We’d bought dozens on sale before the Christmas holidays, and still had most. Somehow when it came to food, though, we felt an urgency to get what we could, while we could.

I made a meal plan for two weeks. So the word was that entire aisles of Italian food were cleaned out save for lasagna noodles? Well, I make several different very good lasagnas, and with the leftovers those suckers can last for four entire meals. So I put the ingredients for a lasagna on the list. I could make porcupine meatballs with the rice and beef I already had, and that would cover a couple of meals. I could buy a pound of fresh chorizo and use half to make Craig’s favorite chori-pollo, then freeze the other half for another meal down the road.

The act of planning, in the face of a pandemic, gave me a sense of security. We would triumph over this uncertain time through the magical power of lists! Thinking about dropping every one of those items in my cart, accompanied by the satisfying tap of checking off that ingredient in my shopping app, made me feel safe against the encroaching epidemiological tide. In your face, coronavirus. We went to bed that night pledging to get up at seven, when Shop-Rite opened, to beat the crowds.

Then we actually got to the store.

At seven-thirty in the morning, Shop-Rite wasn’t crowded. There weren’t hordes of panicked shoppers crashing into each other. The parking lot was fairly empty, in fact. Inside, people went about their business—mostly at a distance of six feet from each other—as usual. Yet while the shelves weren’t completely empty (except in the paper goods aisle, which was completely cleaned out), I think it’s fair to say that I almost immediately recognized my careful meal planning was going to face certain, well, challenges.

There was fresh produce aplenty. The deli meats section was stocked about as well as usual. When we rounded the corner to survey the refrigerated meat section, though, I was shocked. I’d expected maybe certain cuts to be sold out, but there was nothing whatsoever to be had. Nothing. Just long empty open refrigerated shelves. The Italian food aisle was hit-or-miss with sauces and tomato products, but had been stripped of every noodle—except lasagna noodles, which I collected. Shoppers had also avoided any dried pasta made from chickpeas, or whole wheat, or vegetables. The bread aisle was sparse, but the long tiers of snack food barely had been touched. There were plenty of dairy products and cheeses and eggs, but the frozen foods were hit or miss. The dried beans and rices had been devoured entirely.

So there I was in Shop-Rite, behind the cart, my senses alert and quivering, my focus intent, my list on the phone in my hand. For the first time in a very long time, I was completely adrift. Very few of the meals I’d planned upon were viable with the hodgepodge of ingredients left on the shelves. All my planning had let me down.

It was the first time since I’d heard of COVID-19 that I started to panic. Part of me wanted to snatch whatever random items were left and bang them into the cart. Could I live for a month off of Sour Patch Kids and white cheddar popcorn. That’s possible, right? With some Chef Boyardee?

Unwilling to betray my internal hysteria, though, I clamped down and juggled decisions in my mind. Okay, so there was no Italian sausage for the lasagna—but I did have ground beef at home I could use, and here were some pre-cooked links of turkey Italian sausage in the prepared foods section. I could slice those thinly and make them work. Okay, so I couldn’t make chori-pollo without either the chori or the pollo, but maybe that could be the night I broke out a couple of those veal patties instead. This package of chicken sausages could be cooked like hot dogs, and served with homemade fries. That was a meal I hadn’t planned. What about a pancake dinner? Those were always fun.

I suppose I became focused in another way entirely. Instead of zipping from item to pre-planned item like a man on a mission, I took stock on what ingredients were at hand and made on-the-spot mental calculations about what components might be stockpiled, what might be substituted (could I use pasta sauce I already had at home for the porcupine meatballs instead of out-of-stock tomato sauce? Why the heck not!), and what meals needed to be jettisoned altogether.

We haven’t had to return to the supermarket for the last two weeks. We haven’t starved. I keep imagining headlines like Couple Found Dead of Malnutrition Had Twenty-Five Pounds of Veal Stockpiled in Freezer, Police Say, but our diets haven’t been particularly monotonous. My on-the-spot strategy of recalibrating my perfect disaster planning was successful, overall.

But I hated it. I know that the next time we have to venture out to Shop-Rite, I’m not going to be able to zip through the aisles on my laser-focused hunt for precisely twenty-four items that will comprise our meals for the week, but that I’ll have to do it with an ‘open mind’. With ‘flexibility’ as my biggest priority. (Picture me saying those words with mocking finger quotes and a sneer on my face.)

But I know unless things have drastically changed for the better at the supermarket, in the two weeks we’ve not been out of the house, that careful scheduling and planning will not be the bulwark never failing that I’ve relied upon in the past. For the indeterminate future, uncertainty at the supermarket is an unwelcome guest.

I dread its tenancy.




This essay has been written as part of the Mass Observation: COVID-19 writing project. If you'd like to join our volunteer writers, visit our Call for Volunteers at https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ .

A Call for Volunteers—Writers, Diarists, and Thoughtful Observers Welcome! #MOC19

We are living through a time of worldwide crisis. It’s easy to feel helpless. But you—yes you!—and your thoughts and stories can make a difference.

Are you a blogger? Do you keep a personal journal that you are willing to share? Are you a writer who recently has felt the urge to narrate your rapidly-changing world?

All of us are witnessing massive upheaval in our lives. COVID-19’s exponential spread has disrupted our routines, our employment, and our incomes. The outbreak has forced vast deviations in the ways we work and interact. Perhaps worst of all, this emergency has compelled us to isolate ourselves when we need each other most, with no assurance of certainty in the weeks or months to come.

I am recruiting volunteers to join me in recording our stories of this era of anxiety.

Mass Observation: COVID-19

The original Mass-Observation project rose to prominence during World War II in the United Kingdom. In a decade of nightly bombings, food shortages and rationings, blackouts, and vast social upheaval, five hundred diarists volunteered to record their day-to-day wartime experiences in notebooks shared with social scientists…and later, historians.

Sometimes the volunteers followed directives, responding to questions developed by the Mass-Observation organization. Mostly the diarists wrote what and how they wanted.

A diary is a valuable historical testimony. We all are witnessing history in the making, right now, day by day. Personal narratives can be exceptionally candid and open in ways that other documentation cannot.

I’m proposing that writers of all experience levels use this time to record their perceptions and share them with others, forming a collective of witnesses worldwide: Mass Observation: COVID-19, or #MOC19.

There is no better time than now to share your unique story.

How Can I Participate in #MOC19?

If you have an existing blog or website on which you publish your journal, you’re already ahead of the game—please continue writing and sharing just as you have in the past.

Are you new to keeping a blog or online journal? Simply set up a blog that can be publicly viewed at any site you choose. There are dozens of easy-to-use free or low-cost options—WordPress, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr…you pick. #MOC19 is platform-agnostic.

As coordinator for this project, I am asking our volunteers to follow a few simple guidelines for the project:

1) Depending on the number of volunteers, I am hoping to maintain a publicly accessible list or page of participants in #MOC19. Please send me a message or an email (grandiose@mac.com) to let me know your blog’s name, its address, and your country and state of origin.

2) Tag your posts with #MOC19 in the title or somewhere in the body of the post. If you share links to your posts on social media, please include the hashtag there, too!

3) Write daily, or often, or at least consistently!

4) Most importantly, write your truth. Share what you are thinking during this crisis. What you’re experiencing. Your everyday routine. Your feelings. Your narrative is unique. Your story is important.

#MOC19 Questions and Answers

Do I have to be a professional writer to participate?

Nope! I envision our Mass Observation movement including anyone who wishes to put pen to paper (or fingertips to a keyboard, more probably). Novice writer, secret diarist, aspiring journalist, bestselling-author, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with a platform of millions—all are equally welcome to volunteer!

What should I write about?

Your blog or journal or diary should be the story you want to tell. Share your daily struggles, your triumphs great and small, the activities that are keeping you busy, the thoughts that run through your mind in quiet corners of the day. Describe your community’s reaction to this crisis. Write about your personal worries, your anger, your hopes. Anything goes.

I will be coordinating writing prompts for inspiration as needed. Some of these might suggest core essays anyone can attempt, while others may be periodic challenges in which we all turn our scrutiny to the same topic—just like the original Mass-Observation project. Keep in mind, however, that these prompts will always be optional. It’s your journal.

Is there an age requirement to participate in #MOC19?

Follow the guidelines of whatever platform on which you’re publishing your entries. That should be fine.

Do I have to associate my name with my blog? I want to remain anonymous.

Neither I nor anyone else need to know your real name. Make your blog anonymous or use a pseudonym if you desire.

Am I ceding any sort of rights to my blog or essays?

Absolutely not. Your blog is your own and will remain so. The original Mass-Observation organization appropriated volunteers’ notebooks as well as the rights to them; #MOC19 will do no such thing.

All I propose to do is maintain a list of #MOC19 participants and provide links to cooperating blogs, so that participants may investigate and discover other writers volunteering for the project.

Wait, who are you, exactly?

I am Vance Briceland, a novelist and instructor of creative writing. I live in the metro New York City area, in Connecticut. Since I was 14 I’ve kept a journal. As reluctant as I am to admit to my advanced years, that’s over four decades of diary-keeping, and a lot of notebooks and computer files.

After my spring semester of writing classes was shut down because of the advance of COVID-19 in early March of 2020, I found myself searching for ways to keep the writing momentum of my own students on a forward track. My journey for their inspiration caused me to stumble upon the original Mass-Observation movement, then led to a conviction that there is no better time for a collective of writers—no matter the level of practice or experience—to turn our eyes upon a rapidly-changing world.

So what's next?

Continue writing in your blog—or start one for yourself. Email me at grandiose@mac.com
and let me know you’d like to participate in Mass Observation: COVID-19, and include your own email address, a link to your website or blog, and your country and state of origin. Use the #MOC19 hashtag in your blog titles and social media. It’s that simple.

Also important: please share this information with your friends and family, your students, your writing groups, your favorite story-tellers!

If you know someone whose writing and insight would make them an ideal diarist, particular in the unusual and stressful months to come—let them know about the Mass Observation: COVID-19 project!

If you are aware of individuals who are willing to write from their unique perspectives, encourage them to share their testimonies.

Even if you don’t feel moved to participate in #MOC19 (and why shouldn’t you?), please pass on this information to others, any way you can. A copy of this call for volunteers may always be found at: https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ

Remember: even in isolation, every new day affords prospects for fresh insights, for close study, and for narratives to be shared.

Your story matters. Now is the time to write, and to record history as it happens.