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So here’s where we are. Sometime in the next day, the US will hit its fifty thousandth confirmed COVID-19 death. In the next week, we’ll have more than a million confirmed cases. (These understate the actual numbers by an unknown factor.) Over 30 million people are unemployed, or 20% of the workforce—a figure not seen since 1934. The effect on the economy is unknown but could reach an inconceivable level when a death spiral begins.

Sometimes I play a game where I think of an industry and imagine what happens. Higher ed? Who’s going to pay $50,000 for their kid to take a correspondence course? College campuses will lay of tens of thousands, who will lose income and buy less. New cars? Who is going to take on a $500/mo payment in the middle of a worldwide depression? Sales will tank. Hundreds of thousands (millions) in the parts, manufacturing, and sales pipeline will be out of business. New commercial and home construction? Who will occupy new retail space when no one is buying? Who will move into shiny new (and expensive) apartments with no job?

I have spent a great deal of time considering the ramifications to breweries, which may, as an industry, survive more intact than others. (We have come to the place where the loss of perhaps 20% of the breweries in country would be considered relative good news.) But if you want an especially obscure, tiny effect of all this, how about a glance at the health of beer blogs? One might imagine—and I did—that it would be a boom time for sites like this. Lots of people home with nothing to do but read and stream Netflix. In fact, my readership is down substantially. I’ve noticed the trend extends to beer Twitter, which is far less active than it was two months ago. I’ve been joking that it’s been slightly deflating to learn that your site is less a place of intrinsic interest than one where bored workers rest their eyes as they avoid work, but this pandemic has brought hard truths to us all. And maybe it runs deeper than that.

Beer has a strong community element. Most of the beer people drink is mass market lager, but they don’t talk about it. They don’t create Twitter accounts devoted to the subtleties of Natural Light. No, the thing people talk about is good beer, interesting beer, and a big part of what makes it interesting is this shared community experience. We still have access to good beer, but we’re now lacking that community element, the shared experiences that lead to recognition. “I’m sitting at home drinking a Brewery X Beer” is a sentiment somehow drained of interest. Or anyway, that appears to be the case based on social media chatter.

Then there’s the weight of this unknown future pushing down on our chests. How bad is it going to get? Will I lose my job? Will I lose my house? Will someone close to me die? Will I die? It’s like watching a two trains rushing toward each other on the same track, unable to stop in time. The impact hasn’t happened yet, and we can imagine what the devastation will be; but can only wait, in the painful, pregnant moments before impact, helplessly watching on. We can’t actually begin dealing with matters because they haven’t happened yet. The pandemic has started to happen, but the effects loll out in front of us, not quite real, and we are helpless do do anything about them.

So anyway, that’s me. How are things going in your life?