team wash your hands

Hello, friends!  Rob here.

Last Friday, I came home from a tour interrupted to find a note from the city slapped on my car:

DATE     3 - 13 - 20   

THIS VEHICLE IS IN VIOLATION OF THE LAW AND WILL BE REMOVED FROM THE CITY STREETS OR OFF PRIVATE PROPERTY WITHIN        5         DAYS.

VEHICLE WILL BE IMPOUNDED AND SOLD TO A SCRAP DEALER AFTER   3 - 18 - 20   

[ASSORTED LEGAL JARGON]

It turns out my license plate had been stolen sometime in the two weeks that we'd been gone, and my car had subsequently been flagged by the city.  In a way, it's a pretty sick (and well-deserved) burn, because while my eleven-year-old Toyota still runs perfectly fine, I have to admit it's looking a little worse for the wear on the outside.  The notice was dated Friday, March 13, (ugh I know) which was the day we returned.  I'm still not sure if this is the worst part or the least-worst part.  On one hand, if the process had started last week, my car would already be stuck in an impound lot and/or diced up like an onion.  (Other than sweeping the streets after a parade, taking your car and selling it is the one thing New Orleans city government does efficiently.)  On the other, if it had happened like, a few hours later, it wouldn't have happened at all.  The notice from the city, at least.  My license plate was gone as hell either way, and, given that I could only narrow the window in which it disappeared down to two weeks while filing the necessary police report over the phone, it's never coming back.

So there I was, home from a tour that was postponed in the tide of a global pandemic, trying to decide if it's worth taking a trip to the Office of Motor Vehicles- the platonic ideal of ineffectual civic bureaucracy- on this, the Fridayest afternooniest Friday afternoon in the history of the five-day work week.  I took a nap instead.

So my car spent all of last weekend parked in front of my house without a license plate.  Nobody said anything.  I tried to get it replaced on Tuesday.  There were around fifteen people in a loose approximation of a line outside the door at the nearest the Louisiana OMV branch.  I was not surprised to see this- I had read that what branches remained open were limiting the number of people allowed inside at once.  The security guard out front asked me what I needed.

"A new license plate.  Mine was stolen."
"Not gonna happen today.  Computer's down.  Ain't nothing gonna get done till they get it back up."
"Uhh," I glanced at the line of people outside.  The security guard motioned towards them.
"Those are the few and the faithful.  You can wait if you like, but it's probably not going to be back up until tomorrow morning.  That's the line."

I thanked him and left.

I came back on Thursday.  Things were functional, if a bit militant.  They have a metal detector at the entrance and instead of just checking my bag and handing it back to me, the security guard barked at me to wait at the end of the long table separating us and then slid my stuff across to me, like it was a briefcase full of ransom money.  It was a ghost town inside.  Still, the process was uncharacteristically efficient, and felt as safe as one could reasonably expect.  New license plates don't come with screws, so I had to brave a trip to a hardware store as well, but I'm pleased to announce that I am no longer riding dirty.  Meanwhile, if you see a car with Louisiana plate number WUP-464 driving getaway for a daring TP heist or changing lanes without signaling, please be advised that that is NOT me.

I think one of my greatest concerns about this whole situation (setting aside the obvious, like the staggering economic impact and the creeping death toll and the fact that I'm not allowed to hug anybody) is the worry that no one- and I mean  no one- is going to learn anything from all of this.  If (miraculously, at this point) the Coronavirus ends up being relatively contained, half the country will say social distancing saved millions of lives (full disclosure: I am very much in this camp- and not just because I'm okay with having an excuse to binge on video games spend a few months woodshedding in seclusion like a young Charlie Parker) while the other half will be saying, "see? We told you the media was blowing it out of proportion."  If it turns into the calamity it's shaping up to be, those same doubters will insist there was nothing we could have done to stop it, while team Wash Your Hands will blame foot-dragging and misinformation and say that our collective response was too little, too late.  Somehow, you'll be able to predict everybody's vote in the upcoming general election by which of these camps they're in, and if we have a Thanksgiving this year, then it's a mortal lock that you'll have to bite your tongue while listening to your worst uncle explain how there were more reported cases in "liberal areas" (once again deliberately ignoring the concept of population density), and that more people die from heart disease, or H1N1, or car accidents, all of which were invented by Barack HUSSEIN Obama as a part of his plan to destroy the Constitution.

Other than that, we're doing fine.  My wife is able to work from home, and I've been cooking and writing and trying to keep my chops in shape.  I know at some point life is going to turn into this classic Portlandia sketch, so I've been compiling a list of binges.  I'm working on a not-so-secret plan to get my wife to sit through season one of The Wire, after which she will hopefully be invested enough to watch the whole thing and appreciate it for the masterwork that it is and then I'll have somebody to talk to about Lester Freamon in the coming weeks.  It's good to have goals.