Quarantine Dreams

I sit in my fourth floor apartment and watch the street below. A schoolbus goes past, a rigid ruler-distance from when I saw it pass this morning. I sip another cup of coffee, my heart already racing (self-inflicted). I’m trying to drink less, maybe after a few more hours at my computer, I’ll feel the sun’s low enough to earn another sip into the dissolving agent. It’s hard to tell which way this is to the wedding, the low and slow or the high and fierce. Either way, it’s leading to something abnormal, a journey I hate more and more but a destination I feel distantly as someplace grand.

When the pandemic first hit in March-April, the memes were all about the white collar suburbanites recently laid off to live in an ambiguous leisure-month, before their employers had adjusted to a distanced 4HL. Baking bread, Tiger King, the insane glee that Etsy neurotics took to enforcing the new pandemic law, all long faded now to a sort of Soviet drudgery, a long slide downwards into universal impoverishment and political tension, the world feeling as though everyday it loses a little more color, fades a little deeper into muted middle-grey threatened to be scorched brown like Moscow or Sarajevo a few decades prior. My own memories of the time are similar in both respects. I saw blue, not grey, but the threat was always there. I saw Cuomo on television, shaken by the sight of an American politician feeling the situation has gotten to the point that he needs to put in even a shallow show of effort. Slush, rain, the usual melting cold… for some reason I mutated a temporarily thermogenic form, incredibly hot in my bare t-shirt, my goosebumps not even perking up in the windy wet air preceding the floods. 

I spent the plague season in hiding. Berate me for cowardice all you want - my FOMO at seeing the orgy of burning cars and tear gas fog over every major city certainly made me regret leaving humanity for the wild territory - though for my own development, I can’t imagine anything more beneficial. While watching careless birds sing amidst berries and bloom, I lost everything, then regained it all back in one of the wildest bear-bull cycles the market has ever seen, certainly anyone alive today has ever seen. Yet my productivity dropped off more than ever. I went into the forest and went on aimless walk after aimless walk. My life slowed down, to a pace it still keeps. I work far less, sometimes doing nothing except sitting, sitting, watching, nothingness.

We’re so often wrapped up in the business of an existence, that we forget that we’re alive at all. My life has been put on a standstill. I do less, I think less. I see only nothingness when I look outside. I walk hours and hours everyday, when I break ground, my shovel opens up below bedrock to the void.

I wrote in the beginning of quarantine that the most striking thing about the modern plague season is the way it, like all plagues, acts as a sort of accelerant to society. For ours, that was a life of the upper 20% or so increasingly atomized into isolated bubbles of consumption while an underclass lives in forever more desperate conditions, working on the supply chains to feed that upper 20%. I was correct, though I can’t remember at what point I wrote this, and how much of a prediction versus an observation that writing was. In many respects it began worse of course. Even for that top 20%, material comforts are ashes in the mouth when forced to live in an exile-at-home, cut off from all society, living in constant fear, social instability, and the ever-growing spectre of the plague itself. The comfortable go insane until they go numb and dumb. The precarious perish from frostbite and heatstroke. One has to wonder, with the looming threat of economic consequences from the sudden impoverishment of that truly proletarian lower-middle class, whether the vaccine will be anything but a momentary reprieve from the growing tensions, opened by the virus, like stab wounds - too deep to heal comfortably.

We all cling to eschatology because it gives us hope that we will never end. Oblivion is something few can properly comprehend, even fewer want to. Eschatology gives the hope of a clean end, an end not of annihilation, but of tying every last bow, dotting the T’s, dotting the I’s, and letting truth reign finally in a stone-like eternity. Recently a group of right wing protestors stormed the United States capitol building. Re-enacting some sort of revolution, they fought with security guards, got five people killed, and took lots of selfies in the rooms they’ve seen on television. A tweet was made, about the irony of storming the gates and finding - the throne was empty. We too, have all grown to realize this over time. More and more are thrown off into the realization previously only reserved for the most exiled - break ground below the barest crust of civilization and you’ll find a subsoil layer of - nothing at all. The nothing from which it came and the nothing into which it can all just slip away.