Month: March 2020

Worldwide cases top 850,000, deaths near 42,000.

Today our governor extends the closure of non-essential businesses until May 4th. Trump caves and admits that the States will lose 100,000 to 240,000 people in the next few weeks, according to models (everything is according to models—we’re all in uncharted swamp).

Two days ago at the grocery store they erected four-by-four pieces of plastic to screen the high schoolers manning each cash register from the questionable breath of the valley’s shoppers. Reusable bags from home now forbidden.

States in a bidding war for respirators. Nurses wearing single-use face masks for a week straight. Doctors threatened with termination for complaining to the media about equipment shortages. New York City buying 14 refrigerated trucks to store bodies. Homeless folks relocated to parking lots and sports stadiums.

Countries are slamming borders shut. Citizens stranded in far-flung bunkers across the globe. The CDC considers telling Americans to wear masks outside. A church in Florida congregates in defiance, its pastor saying, “Because we are raising up revivalists, not pansies.”

Your political party determines your level of COVID-19 panic. We scoff at each other over a growing mound of the dead.

I’m in a long, desperately slow slog, sucking me away from comedy and buoyant mental health. I slouch on my couch and tap on my laptop for ten hours straight, churning out copy and clicking between a dozen windows. Agnes naps beside me or ducks into the bedroom for peace. I suspect that was her daily routine, when daddy went to the office. At 5:30 each night I feel mentally dead and physically hungry. I chat with dudes. I watch porn. I flirt, then rebuff. I talk dirty, I turn cold. I ask several times a day if a fuck is worth death? Or is that dramatic? I shrug and click to another headline about the end of the world.

An unofficial survey of friends confirms high levels of quarantine masturbation. Hackers are breaking into Zoom accounts and interrupting the workdays of corporate slaves with hardcore porn. Kmart is selling many more shirts than pants these days. Gotta look good from the waist up—home office apparel is the new business casual.

Yesterday the building next door set up construction equipment outside my window. Today they shredded asphalt. I’m taking this in stride, surprisingly., though check with me next week.

I’m stuck in a mess I can’t really write about, which is frustrating the fuck out of me, as writing is how I endure the unendurable. I’m in close confines—metaphorically—with a vocal Trump supporter and I must remain, for very good reasons, nonvocal in response. But having that so close to me, while I watch the soulless, moronic trainwreck “steer” the country into mass death and ruin, is beyond rough. It’s crippling me. I want to flee but—like the entire world— I’m handcuffed in place.

Worse, I can see a path for him to reelection, and that makes me want to give up completely on my countrymen. Moving to Canada was a clichéd response. And in light of global pandemics, no longer an option.

It’s hard to find hope.

But my anger and despair is only making one man suffer. It isn’t making the Trump supporter suffer, or the president suffer. Fox News anchorpeople still sit in blithe ignorance of my bitterness, probably sexting their news directors during commercial breaks for Depends undergarments.

In tough times I still revert to fantasy. I picture a universal ledger of suffering, locked in some dim basement, and in my delusions its caretaker flips to the right page, catches this oversight, and corrects the mistake.

But there’s only one man to blame for my own happiness. And waiting for life to revert to the hard-fought form I built and defended is futile. I’m lucky. I have a home, no annoying quarantine roommates, and a paycheck (for now). I’m in perfect health. There are people in the world who love me. I still think human connection is the thing. I would like to avoid subtracting from the world’s happiness during one of the strangest times in its history.

What’s coming? Fuck if I know. Tonight, as I sat with the chihuahua by the pond across the street, I watched two boys fishing from the dock. They cast and reeled and cast again, their faces wrapped in scarves, calling to each other from where they stood, six feet apart.

Joked this morning on Instagram that I only felt 8% crazy so far, but ten hours later my toes are poking at the edge of the abyss again. As I feared, our clients are now demanding that my boss freeze their marketing contracts with her due to the shitstorm kicking up across the planet, sending everyone scurrying inside for cover and slamming their wallets shut.

Headline: Confirmed U,S. Cases Doubled in Two Days

By the end of the day she’d made a couple of “adjustments” to our staffing, moving one PTer to contractor status, and a FT writer to PT. So far I’m untouched, but it’s hard to imagine that things won’t get way, way worse. For weeks now I’ve wondered to myself, like, if I were a boss, and I had one dude who was the best writer on the team but a bit of a quietly rebellious loner who divulged nothing about his personal life at work, and I had another writer, the fastest on the team, who was a personal friend that kissed my ass several times a day, at minimum five days a week (sometimes seven on Facebook), whom would I pick to stay?

Hard to make that call, from where I sit in quarantine, listening to my neighbor through the thin walls actively not practicing social distancing with family members visiting from a few towns away.

(I just got back from a short dog walk, hands freshly sanitized. I try to act like my hands would burn the skin from my face if I touched it. I still touch it.)

One of our more “important” clients is in the middle of their own COVID-19-related PR crisis, and I was asked to churn out a blog on the topic that would normally take me two and a half hours to write, but I kicked it out in one, with writing so good that she jumped on the instant messaging app to tell me that it brought tears to her eyes. Did that save my ass? For now? For a bit?

What kind of social posts to create for clients when nobody wants to leave their fucking house? Amazon will survive and prosper, as always. By the time I die we’ll all be citizens of Amazon.

Every state and city’s calling their own shots. Smooth Operator, still stuck in that Chicago hotel, says the mayor’s on the verge of imposing a stay-in-place citywide restriction. (Later: the entire state of California has now done so.)

Weird, too, that I can chat with dudes online in Australia, South Africa, Italy, and Argentina, and we all ask each other the same question: how you holding up?

How often does the whole world run and hide from the same, single enemy? And again—what the fuck will this all look like in two weeks?

A shred of light in the morning news—China, where the virus first hit, is reporting no new infections. But trusting 100% in China’s honesty is, well, a risky bet. (A smart friend reminds me its best not to trust any number out there completely. He also reminds me about basic science. As in, even that is not known about this virus. In other words, the odds are stacked against us.) The Washington Post took a pic of Trump’s State of the Nation script, where he’d crossed out “corona” and in its place scrawled “Chinese.”

Other bits of data in the swirling river: men are more likely to die than women. Young people in the states get it, too, and sometimes die. Italy’s deaths passed China’s. Canada closing its border. State Department urging no more travel abroad. Republicans—no doubt terrified at their political future—passing a trillion dollar stimulus package but I can’t help think that $1k or $2k will only last each of us so long. Bailouts for the airline industry. Trump insisting, guys, I knew this was gonna be real bad. Petulant teenagers partying on Florida beaches. The Times reporting on multiple missed warnings in the past three years at the federal level about our vulnerability to a pandemic with no cure.

Stories of celebrities getting tested more quickly and more often than us poor schmucks. The wealthy hightailing it to their second homes on Martha’s Vineyard and upstate New York and the locals there pissed as hell because, let’s face it, who’s gonna get the last respirator in the town clinic? California estimating that half its residents will get infected within 60 days.

I navigate doors without my hands and step out into the dusk. After 12 hours inside, the air feels alien. Or I feel alien. Like I’m a newborn animal on spindly legs. The parking lot is full but quiet. Another dog walker at the distant edge. Two boys throwing rocks in the creek behind the mill building. The air smells like skunk. As for which direction to go, I let the dog decide.

Actually it’s day three, but who the hell starts a plague diary then? This will be rougher than my usual verbiage. Nature, beast, etcetera.

How often do you come face to face with a time when nobody really knows what the world will look like in two weeks? Usually it has a predictable rhythm and form. A song you heard in your mother’s womb. Now we adapt. Improvise. We’re a jazz band making the walls hum in a dark basement club mismanaged by blind Republicans.

Spent the day at home, remotely connected to my PC at the agency, churning out a bunch of words for a bunch of clients in several industries. Every business now needs messaging.

Due to the crisis. Precautionary measures. Closing early. Closing today. Team working from home. Wash your hands. Maintain six feet of distance. Out of prudent concern. Sanitize. Hopefully temporary. Will keep you updated.

And spotty government messaging growing darker every day. Could last weeks. Months. Two years. Life as we know it. Stay in place. Stay inside. Hospital crisis. Respirator shortage. Market collapse.

A bud whose husband works at the local hospital said they got the first two confirmed cases today. It’s in our valley now. Thought about informing my coworkers on our instant messaging app, a little bubble of doom popping up on their screens, the two dozen of us strewn across the local landscape, but management keeps insisting that we display positivity (and other delusions). So I refrained.

I figured they’d hear the news soon enough.

An Instagram bud texted me from Rome. “The doctors are having to choose,” he said, “who lives and who dies.”

I was solid, nearly cocky, in the real recent past. I was gonna ride this fucker out. Social isolation? No sweat.

Three days later, and endless hours of writing and researching and seeing how this thing is gonna shut down nearly every industry across the planet, indefinitely, my toes peek over the abyss. Will our clients flee? Will I keep my job? My apartment? Where would I go? What would I eat? Could I feed my dog? Will I get a check from the government? How long could it possibly last me? How have six thousand hours of post-apocalyptic television left me so unprepared?

Also, as I’m learning, when it comes to the other virus, undetectable doesn’t mean unconcerned. Not way down deep, where the facts can’t touch. Will cross that bridge if needed. For now, I’m good.

The pandemic has stripped some parts from my rickety flying contraption of mental health. Gym closed. AA meetings shunned. My shrink wants to Skype. I had a mild panic attack this morning, realizing I might go months without a tight fade from the barber. First world problem? Fuck no, dude. Life or death.

As a veteran introvert I can handle the seclusion better than most, maybe, but I know from experience that it can take a toll, how far you can burrow into your own brain when there’s nobody nearby to crack the window. Smooth Operator is trapped in a hotel in Chicago following the death of his dad. We FaceTime every day, more than once, usually. Keep cracking each other up to keep from cracking up.

Single, alone in my joint save for an 8-pound chihuahua, I can’t stop thinking about the thing I can’t have–casual fucking. What will we become, if we go months untouched? It can’t be done. I’m guessing dudes across the planet will slip out and brave death for the relief and oblivion found in a fuck. For the reminder that you’re worth touching.

Rocky terrain at the edge of a cliff. Best to stay in the day, breathe, and chat with the chihuahua.

I feel a bit better, writing shit down.

I saw a video today of two quarantined musicians in Barcelona, serenading the city below their balconies. Applause rang out from the surrounding windows. Beauty and human connection still possible, maybe, if we try hard enough. Can you hear this tune I’m singing?