Thank you for introducing me to the idea of “allostatic.” Please consider this phase one of props, to be followed with another one when I incorporate it into my world view.

My adaptation began with a woo woo thought experiment. I figured hey, as black as I am (you know, COVID thinks we are delicious), the ornery stubbornness that Inused to consider a curse became a super power.

For example, my first “mask” was more like a homemade space suit. I wore safety glasses under a snorkel with an extra long pipe. I put N95 fabric in the blow hole and wore rubber gloves. I wore a regular mask inside the snorkel and yelled at anyone who came near me.

Then I decided that isolation was my (rhymes with rich). I sat on a bench outside the art store and I figured I would “beam” love (small l) to the world while I meditated, only when the sun was high.

I carried a notebook and I observed the effects. That SunBench would become a neighborhood center for connection, with occasional (friendly) yelling from me when folks got too close.

I began playing guitars with John SunBench (people I met got the surname in honor of the love experiment. Sometimes Cool Babushka, a Russian senior citizen who is as hip as can be with the big sunglasses and fashionable gear, would sit six feet from me and read her Gogol while I perused the New York Review of Books. I said hi only to dogs for a while. Also awesome — just was.

I remembered to remember that love is a verb, that music in the sunshine can save your soul, and that other humans are not disease vectors trying to kill me — they are what help make life worth living. And that I cry far more easily than I remember, but holy crap, it sure makes accepting what is easier.

Anyhow. Thanks. This is the first time I figured all that out. Thanks fir asking the final question, and for helping make sense of now. This was good work.