Quarantine Day #20

Worldwide cases stand at 1,289,000. As I write this, US deaths passed 10,000. In New York City, 653 people died on Saturday. In the next town over from me, 23 veterans died at the Holyoke Soldiers Home.

Since widespread testing is still out of reach, some of these numbers should be treated with suspicion.

The CDC, after fighting Trump’s team for days (weeks?), recommended that US citizens wear homemade masks (since even nurses can’t get surgical masks now) when going outside. On TV, he said, “You can wear them if you want. I’m not going to do it.” Later that night, someone in my Facebook feed posted a link to this quote with the caption, “Fingers crossed.”

Yesterday, he again touted an experimental drug that no doctor on the planet will publicly endorse. A few weeks ago, a Phoenix couple found a version of the chemical in a bottle of fish medicine they had at home and did a little self-treatment. The man died, the wife ended up in the hospital. “I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?'” she said.

I’m not saying the full load of idiocy here rests on one man’s shoulders.

At the end of ten hours churning copy on my couch, my mind grows sluggish, good soil for bad thoughts. When the weather’s fine, I hike in the patch of woods near my place, where I can avoid the locals. Sitting beside the pond, listening to the spring frogs and watching the herons fish—it all pulls my sanity back from the swirling drain, but I still feel vaguely ashamed. Adhering to the strictest social distancing requirements (such as “never go outside”), posting about it on social media, and shaming others for breaking these shifting rules is the new “woke.” For the first time since moving here, I’m grateful that I’m not in a bigger city. I’ll suck in the woods’ serenity as long as I can.

This week should be awful for the nation, death-wise. “This will be our Pearl Harbor,” some health official said. Others quickly trounced that analogy. The country has yet to cohere around reality. The last five states without a stay-in-place restriction are all run by Republican governors.

Someone sent me a link to a YouTube compilation of a bunch of “citizen journalists” descending upon their local emergency rooms with video cameras to show their compatriots that there’s no COVID-19 crisis in their podunk towns. The level of…oh, never mind, I won’t waste your time. I wasted plenty, fuming.

Yesterday I turned 49. Hopefully, if I survive all this (of course I’ll survive this, don’t be melodramatic, right?) I can look back with bittersweet nostalgia: my quarantine birthday. What’s weird and sometimes hard about this pandemic lock-down is that it mirrors the dark, solitary, locked-down place I endured for several years. I feel like I only just now clawed my way free. Home, alone, nearly 22 hours a day, with no gym, meetings, or in-person human contact. The future dim at best.

Back then, trying to describe what it felt like to be battling old demons who wore new skins, roiled by constant, generalized, free-floating terror, hiding from the world in my back bunker of a spare bedroom, I’d resort to the metaphor of an astronaut on a cut tether, spinning away through the yawning vacuum of deep, black space. The utter lonesomeness killed me. How easily I spun out of the reach of others, and for how long I hung out there, my tank depleting, blind to all horizons.

This is different. For the first time in my life, the whole world is sharing one experience, hunkered down at home (though stay-at-home is a privilege unavailable to many). Instead of spinning off alone, out of reach of a bustling, functioning earth full of human connection, I’m now just one of millions of folks enduring life in a bunker. I think of how gay men must have felt in the AIDS epidemic, drifting through their own collective dark space—and lovers dropping one by one—while surrounded by a silent, aloof, unaffected world.

But anyone can get this thing. And while HIV is mostly passed through fucks or needles, COVID-19 can pass through the most fleeting of human encounters. “Is this fuck worth death?” I wrote in my last post. A friend told me he had the same thought once, pausing outside a bathhouse in the late 80s. Now, it’s more like, is this carton of milk, this delivery pizza, this brisk walk through a park worth it?

Disconnection is the modern condition. Digital isolation. An epidemic of loneliness. All of this diagnosed long before COVID-19 came and chased us away from what few connections we sustained.

I made a calculated risk and invited one man into my bunker. We grabbed each other and held on like we hadn’t been touched in years. In our hours together, naked and unclothed, I thought, “This is worth it.”

I’m a year shy of 50. My life doesn’t look like I thought it would, back when I was 25, 35, even 45. I have different friends, no partner. I haven’t gathered the external markers of success I thought I should have by now. I’m trying to shake my head, clear my mind of the veils of lives I should have lived. I want to see the life I have. The real one. Willing to fight for a bit of joy, if that’s what I’m meant to have.

Maybe I’m a late bloomer, some geezer slowly coming into his own. Uncertain about a future that’s never looked less sure. Seeing beauty around me, still. Every night, New Yorkers stand at their windows and cheer the first responders, health care workers, delivery drivers and grocery clerks going to work while the rest of us are locked at home. An ovation audible in the streets, a thin path forward through the fog.