It’s been four months and 21 days since I started writing about my experience during the pandemic. Around the one-month mark, my mental state started fraying badly enough that I couldn’t make myself write anymore. I was skipping days, something was breaking. Looking back - and that’s what this is for - I see now that I was trying to employ my faculties in persisting in spite of the new situation, while it was still new for me. By March, China and Italy had already descended into the doldrums and the US had just started to taste the “new normal”, as we’re calling it. I found that I couldn’t continue, and so I shut the blog down.
Now, just over a hundred days later, I have felt the tug of the keyboard again. I feel a measure of responsibility to myself to fill in the missing time, but I must own here that much of it is slushy time, nearly free of structure. Ever since I watched MTV’s Dreamtime back in the day, and discovered the root meaning of the term behind the pun, I’ve been a bit fascinated and prone to fantasizing about it in the Australian aboriginal sense as interpreted by my inadequate Western mind: time unspoken for, seething over itself in both directions, both forward and back again, lapping and frothing for tens of thousands of years while certain rules and ways were established, their foundations formed by beings that will one day be called “ancestor” by future peoples. I imagine the land as a great forge, where molten time and matter are alloyed together to form a new society. The me that existed before the pandemic is dead now, I feel, and the future will be undertaken by a new me that survived by staying home and doing nothing.
That’s as nearly as I can describe the feeling of living through an extended quarantine, relying upon Savannah’s working from home to lend a little structure, while my own work has separated itself into light jobs (teaching, tutoring) that I do now and again, and studio work that I sometimes must force myself to do. Anxiety, depression, existential dread…these are constant companions in these times, and I’m smoking weed and/or taking edibles daily, and am draining stopper-bottles of CBD oil to try and level the playing field.
Is that enough of a description? Maybe I’ll think of more later. To today, then.
The coronavirus is ravaging the southern and rural portions of the US. Yesterday, a massive explosion at a fertilizer storehouse, or fireworks depot, leveled the port at Beirut, Lebanon, and tore a giant hole in the structure’s foundation. The US government is telling us that children should go back to school, but that it’s too dangerous to vote in person. We Americans are once again pariahs to the global community, which happens every time a conservative is President. We are banned from entering many countries. The government is doing what it did during the AIDS surge in the 80s: it’s counting many deaths as caused by complications arising from “pneumonia” in the interest of deflating the true death toll, which officially rests at about 160k as of now. Probably, it’s closer to a quarter million people dead of COVID-19, and it’s not slowing down yet. If it doesn’t slow down before next year’s flu season, well, it may be a replay of the Spanish Flu, where it did a little damage the first year and really got down to killin’ everyone the second year. Hope and morale are low nationwide.
Nationwide, the police are being exposed as the poorly educated thugs they are. Black Lives Matter has become a mainstream movement, the idea of de-funding the police is gaining traction, and police unions have revealed themselves as hives of white nationalism, bastions of toxicity that rely upon white supremacy to maintain their influence and power. The good news is that due to George Floyd’s murder, the dirt around all of this has been excavated and the foundations are showing, and are more vulnerable now than they ever have been in American history. The pandemic has aided in this, laying bare the secret spaces where fascism hides. A lot of people are fighting every day to eradicate these institutions, and to create a sea change in national perception. It’s the Culture War, I think.
My role? I don’t know. I’m making moving pictures now. I do the chores around here as Savannah works and finishes up her MBA. I play Elder Scrolls Online and I read The Witcher books. I try to be a good husband but my eyes are clouded with self-doubt. We both want to leave this country behind, as we have done previously.
I’m rambling now, this is not going anywhere. I’ll write again soon.