Kefir, Quarantine, and Catastrophe (Daily Thought-storm 1)

Once upon a time, I had a stomach ache. Shouldn’t have drunk that kefir, it was rancid. I killed all the beneficial bacteria by pouring piping-hot water over it. I’ll have to throw out three weeks’ worth of fermentation because I couldn’t wait five minutes for the water to cool down, and that's a lesson in patience.

But my mistake is also a lesson in precaution because I spent months preparing enough starter to grow another batch of the sour-stinking gut defender. Today I’ll be making more kefir, but first I should address this meteor hurtling toward the earth.

It’s as if God became bored while playing a round of Sim City and began dropping natural disasters just to watch it all burn. I suppose we’ve always been plagued by nature’s wrath and indifference, but today's zeitgeist is either apocalyptic or “these are strange times” at the most optimistic end of the scale. That’s an article I want to write later, about how we get so caught up in the fear and outrage of the times that we forget a note from history: This shit has been going on from the very beginning, and we are no strangers to uncertainty, disaster, corruption, and fireballs hurtling from the heavens above.

Navigating the sun at over 31,000kmh and sized between 1.8km and 4.1km across, Asteroid 52768 (1998 OR2) will miss us by a whopping 6.29 million km. Well, that’s a relief.

According to NASA, Asteroid 52768 will skirt right past us on the morning of April 29. Close call, but apparently this happens all the time if you explore NASA’s database of close approaches (like this one. That’s right, it passed by at one-fifth the distance of the moon and was the largest to reach that distance in more than a century). Or as I like the think of them, apocalyptic near-misses, and perhaps second chances. We get quite a few of them, so don’t mourn too much if we finally blow ourselves to pieces, or in this case, the universe drops a melting fireball overhead while our pants are still down.

Being honest, I am not concerned at all with events so cosmic that we couldn’t come close to stopping them. But speaking strictly of non-world-ending events here, I'm interested in how I can prepare myself for the aftershock. When the dust settles, life tends to go on. If you have the privilege to prepare for a disaster, do it. Otherwise, be honest with yourself, you are trading in some level of future security. There will always be things that you miss, no one is ever completely prepared for a pandemic, the outbreak of war, a death in the family, or a stomach ache, but the parts that you address early will pay dividends in the very long run.

I didn’t go overboard during the initial Coronavirus raid of grocery stores and markets, but I bought enough to survive for about four weeks if the army came by and nailed my door shut. I would have liked to have three months’ worth of supplies in stock, but I am also living abroad. I’m a tourist, and I behaved degenerately with my finances (another precautionary tale I’ll save for later), so now I’m locked down in Peru with the incredible opportunity to experience expatriation during a global pandemic and ensuing recession. I could have made more strategic decisions, but panic and rumination are a poor way of addressing the present situation. I misfired in several directions, but I also did a few things right, and those actions made an enormous difference.

I wrote about how I sorted out a healthy and productive routine in this article, but the takeaway is to take care of the body and soul. Buy a jump rope, sleep well, address your toxic behavior, remove nasty people from your life, do what heals and inspires you, give a shit about other people, have some patience, and please don’t pour boiling water over the kefir.

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