Listen to “Dystopia Heaven” on Spreaker.

I should have seen this coming, but what can you say about a guy who’s always thought the oncoming train was the light at the end of the tunnel.

Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve offloaded most of our household chores (at Carol’s insistence, I hasten to add). But lately I’ve seen a new dynamic; I’ve become the new purpose and direction for Carol’s Covid-19 survival.

For some time, Carol has been concerned about my jogging, and what would happen if I fell, passed out or just forgot where I was and where I lived. I’d resisted carrying my driver’s license, figuring I’d eventually lose track of it. So now my left sneaker has a metal ID tag with my name and her phone number typed on it. I’m like a kid at camp with mommy’s phone number sharpied into my underwear.

“After Carol had perused the menu and saw only items like “popcorn chicken,” “tenders” and their globally famous chicken sandwich, she pronounced that Popeye’s was now on the Do Not Call list for dinner deliveries.”

Speaking of underwear, I was recently informed of significant changes to the ordering of my dresser drawers. It had come to Carol’s attention that my decision to put my skivvies and socks in the top double drawer to be a wholly inefficient use of drawer space, having crammed my tee shirts and shorts into the single drawer in the middle of the dresser. Never mind that my socks and skivvies have always been stored in the top drawer of my dressers since time immemorial, conveniently kept there because I tend to use those items on more or less a daily basis. Nonetheless, for some time into the near future, the creature of habit that I am, I will be opening two drawers in order to retrieve a fresh pair of undies.

This …what?… “loving attentiveness” to my overall well-being has also crept into my dietary habits, something that I must consider an existential threat. Last evening I had worked her into a Popeyes chicken delivery, having agreed to trade off buying a sweet little deep fryer that popped up on my Facebook feed for the occasional delivery from an elite fried chicken emporium. After Carol had perused the menu and saw only items like “popcorn chicken,” “tenders” and their globally famous chicken sandwich, she pronounced that Popeye’s was now on the Do Not Call list for dinner deliveries.

What all this amounts to, of course, is a gradual, but inevitable wearing down of Carol’s capacity for enduring the ongoing lockdown. It’s one thing to wash down the mobile home, replace all the interior door knobs, rearrange the living room furniture, pot two privet bushes, scrub the bricks on the patio, hose down the driveway and alphabetize the spice drawer (I’m not making this one up. Incidentally, that home improvement lasted precisely as long as it took for me to need basil, garlic powder and rosemary for a recipe), as a way of releasing some of Carol’s natural, pent up energy. But I’m afraid her turning that New York yenta busyness toward making me a safe, efficient and healthy human being is going to be a bridge too far.

We need a Covid-19 vaccine fast. I want me some Popeyes popcorn chicken!