11/16 – Lockdown 2.0
A case of deja vu in which toilet paper disappears and small businesses gasp for air. Moreover, the weather has changed to all day cold and dark. I can’t ride a bicycle through a downpour (I mean, I could, but where to go?) and the playgrounds are damp and frigid. I am trying to read.…
10/20 – Thoughts
All day my thoughts are not my thoughts. I can’t think. I wake up and my children start talking, putting in orders, chattering. I say, wait till my first up of coffee is done. Just wait. Give me a minute. They do not wait. I do not get a minute. I log into work. I…
9/19 – Survivors
“I can’t breathe.” The famous last words of George Floyd and others. Those three words. Could be the slogan of the year. We can’t breathe because of police brutality. We can’t breathe because the West Coast is burning due to climate change and the smoke hangs thick and acrid, yellow skies with a blood-red sun. …
7/29 – How to Do The Things
1. Try to understand it all on a big scale. Like decades, or eons, even. Like, in the life span of the globe dinosaurs weren’t alive too long ago. Consider the scale of nature, before humans came along and fucked things up with our greed and arrogance and oil-lust and atomic bombs. Consider that planetary…
7/28/2020 – I Stopped Counting Days
I stopped counting days. There was a time in late May and early July when the country erupted and I lost the thread on C-19. It felt small when compared to a larger story of police brutality, racial justice, looting, burning cities, a fascist dictatorship. Yes, the virus was there in the conversation, but it…
Day 81 – We Adapt
In a strange turn of events, the world of C-19 has been overshadowed by a larger crisis, a crisis that has pushed the global pandemic to the peripheries of daily news cycles. Protests over the death of George Floyd fill the streets. I’ve been glued to the news for the past week and a half,…
Day 67 – How to Get Through the Day in 5 Easy Steps
You seek tranquility, but meditative thoughts and breath control no longer work. Embrace the polar opposite. Get the crappiest boom box and dial in 1990s hip hop hits or 1980s power ballads on FM radio and blast it into your ears. Your mind is emptied. You are free.Revisit your favorite novels on the bookshelf. Touch…
Day 62 – Feeling the Days/Virtual Reality
I feel the days, the passing of time. People talk about the distortion of time — what day of the week is it? What is a work day, where does it start and end, when? What’s a weekend if you can’t go out and hang with your friends (when there are no bars and you…
Day 60 – Goodbye to the Old god
And this evening I’m filled once again with a terrible optimism. Terrible, because I feel fortunate during this time of social upheaval and suffering. Sometimes I sort of forget, even, about the pandemic (even though I read about it all day in the newspaper — a new habit). Forget because it’s normalized now: mask, hand…
Day 57 – Chaos Comes to Town
But there is no one to impose true order on this chaos. Yes — there were detailed models, even, for how a pandemic would likely break out, and what the government’s response to it ought to be. Yet denial ruled the day. There was bad information, the suppression of information, the downplaying of the breaking…
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From the Epicenter 