My Pandemic Life June 2020
Frankly, I thought a global pandemic would be a lot more fun. This is the most boring worldwide health crisis ever. I always thought something that completely disrupts the world in every considerable way would be like “The Walking Dead”. Going on missions of survival and adventures to save friends and family while always being a little grimy and sweaty. But nope. All we do is sit around watching screens and being terrified of standing next to someone. My daily mission of survival is going to Walgreens to buy gum. While not exciting or dangerous at all, I still bring my crossbow. It is Walgreens, after all.
It’s frustrating to live in a time that is both boring and weird. I never associate boredom and weirdness. Those two adjectives exclusively cancel one another out. This is like having a talking dog but the only thing the dog wants to talk about is soup. Everyone is drinking too much, posting way too much on social media, and watching too much news. Also, uncontrollable masturbation.
I want to see my friends. When I see my friends, I immediately regret seeing my friends. What am I seeing my friends for? There’s nothing to do and nothing to talk about. We just talk about how dull and frustrating life is. These conversations are dull and frustrating. In normal times my friends and I had stories and experiences to exchange because we all lived lives. An exchange of stories and anecdotes about our daily lives is a good conversational foundation. Days don’t really exist anymore so who cares. Thursdays feel like Mondays and there’s no difference between 8am and 3pm. There’re no stories to exchange because none of us are doing anything. My reflections on my comfy my new flip flops isn’t really a story that can sustain a conversation. My most interesting story from the past two weeks is a brief altercation I got into with a woman at a burrito shop about our wildly different definitions of “extra cilantro”.
I go for a lot of walks these days in my really boring neighborhood. There’s nothing to look at or take in. There’re no crazy people to watch and wonder about. There’re just sidewalks and people avoiding each other. I don’t really mind that, actually. Usually if someone crosses the street when they see me approaching, I take it personally. Now I just take it socially. Everyone is avoiding each other in a zig zag formation. It’s like a terrible game of dodgeball that no one ever wins and every person is a ball to be dodged. Everyone is so terrified of being outside; in this era, taking a walk is tantamount to losing your tether while on a spacewalk. I’ve named every tree on my daily walk to Walgreens.
In this time of confusion and uncertainty, I look to our authorities for information. I do so foolishly and without any positive feelings afterwards. The president is an idiot of almost impossible proportions. He speaks and behaves in a manner that suggests he can’t possibly exist outside of MAD Magazine. He’s like a general that gives long, rambling, poorly articulated soliloquys about strength and superiority during a war while his soldiers are being picked off by snipers on live TV. He’s like a decrepit garbage can who sort of learned to speak. His hand movements during his speeches are almost hypnotic, if the hypnotist was an exquisitely stupid robot. He constantly moves his hands back and forth over the podium like an accordion player who doesn’t know how to play the accordion or pronounce Minneapolis. Maybe the worst thing about this pandemic is the fact that he’s here for it.
Our media isn’t really doing anything to help us. The media is like a 24-hour televised haunted house with attractive women and distinguished men leading us down the hallways. Plus, Sports and Weather. The media exists solely to keep us afraid and fully aware of how bad things are. Yes, things are bad, but gee whiz, hasn’t someone adopted a puppy lately? Has no Girl Scout hit her cookie quota? No one has a parrot that does a great Charles Barkley impression? Can we see something positive on the news? There has to be some positivity coming from all of this tragedy. The air is cleaner, people are slightly nicer, traffic is almost non-existent. The reduction in traffic makes this pandemic a jay walker’s dreamland. Can’t the media take pandemic lemons and report some pandemic lemonade?
The face mask situation is controversial. I don’t know why. Just put on a Goddamn mask. It’s not a big enough deal to fight about. Be angry with someone who doesn’t like pickles or people who still wear cargo pants; those are arguments that make sense. Eat your pickles, buy some Chinos and wear a mask. No one loves wearing these masks. I have a substantial beard, if outside I’m wearing sunglasses, and I use old school wired earbuds. None of these makes wearing a mask fun. Putting on and taking off my mask is like trying to remove spiderwebs from my face while underwater. Everything’s getting tangled, my glasses fall off my face, my phone catches on fire. I hate wearing a mask but I don’t want to accidentally kill anyone’s nanna. I was on a city bus last week and I realized that I had forgotten my mask. The looks of hatred and disdain from the other passengers felt like a sunburn. I was reviled. I covered my mouth and nose with the top of my jacket, like some kind of public transportation vampire.
This is a terrible time and everyone is sad. People have died and we’re all stuck indoors or on walks with friends where there’s nothing to talk about aside from how terrible things are. No one is happy and no one is doing anything. I’m more miserable than usual and so are all of my friends. Time has frozen yet we’re all still getting older. This seems unfair but that’s where we’re at. I feel like I’m in suspended animation but I’m still losing my hair.
Every day, to prevent my brain from turning to mush, I think of games to play. I’ve assigned personality types to all my toes. Left ring toe is the one that calls when it’s drunk to just to argue, when really, he’s just projecting her own feelings of inadequacy. Right Pinkie toes is actually the reincarnation of Dom Delouse but he doesn’t make a big deal of it. I’ve taken to despising my roommate just to feel something. Mainly because he performs Zoom karaoke shows at our dining room table, a designated common space in our lease. The fact that my signed lease was printed on a Dollar Store brand paper towel seems irrelevant. Still, don’t do karaoke in a common space. Or don’t do karaoke. My pending eviction aside, my favorite game is to count everything in my bedroom of a certain color. It’s therapeutic, kills time, and rests firmly at the bottom of the barrel of fun. From my desk chair I can see 51 blue things. I’m saving red for Wednesday and green for Friday. I want to space out the insane adrenaline rush of this game.
I feel trapped and bored and looking towards a future that is going to be very strange, only rivaled by how strange now is. We live in a threatening time with leaders who have their heads so far up their asses they can check their own lungs for Covid. People hate mask wearers almost as much the masked hate the maskless. We live in a time history will call “The Newest, Stupidest Civil War.”; brothers torn apart over whether or not to wear a mask at a gas station. I can’t wait for the Ken Burns documentary about this. Emotional footage of a dude in a Raiders jersey maskless, calling his best friend wearing a SF Giants mask in a Safeway a “sellout” for wearing a mask. It will make for a fantastic documentary. Especially with a sepia filter.
