Tag Archives: isolation during pandemic

Pandemic Hangover: Nostalgia for Solitude

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The thing that I missed most during the pandemic was live music. I dreamed of the day when we would all gather again and celebrate the joy of humanity. That had to wait, and so I wrote, did puzzles and got to the next level of Fishdom.

The lockdown eased, and I went around the city, visiting parks and outdoor restaurants in the freezing cold and soon enough was inside again, in stores and theaters, everything, the measures easing until it all seemed an odd memory.

But there was little joy to be found in gathering again. A war had started. Mass shootings continued. Rights were overturned. And while I did return to see live music, many were either falling-down drunk or shoving that much harder to get to the front.

Or maybe I just remembered it differently. It was me. That was it. And so I write about that and stay focused on Fishdom, now at Level 6334.

2020: Always Remember The Bad

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2020 was a distinctly bad year and is burned into my memory. It wasn’t just the pandemic, although that sure had a motherfucking big role. Not will I soon forget the dark days of New York’s Covid Spring, the eerie silence punctuated by the banging of pots and pans at dusk.

Soldiers returning to Javits Center transformed to a medical center for Covid patients.

2020 was a lot of other bad things too.

I was attacked on a Zoom call in front of the entire faculty by an angry woman who claimed that I discriminated against black students. It didn’t matter that none of it was true nor that she knew none of the students nor even that many, including my black colleagues, called immediately afterwards to express their outrage. It was ugly and awful, and I had just been laid off. I was never given the chance to respond nor ever received an apology.

I received a call from my mother’s caretaker with the news of my mother’s death. It wasn’t sudden – it was more of a relief – but the image of the fire escape stairs and the multitude of drinks along with repeated viewing of the climax of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (my mother’s favorite opera) are indelible memories. As was the Zoom funeral that followed.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss played the climax of La Nozze Di Figaro on a loop for 12 straight hours.

I had both of my knees replaced and was stuck in a hospital room with no air conditioning, the bedsheet sticking to my back. They didn’t do anything about it until a day later when they noticed that my temperature was high, and I explained the connection.

Brooklyn Hospital Center halls

I lost ten pounds in eight days. Hospital food always lives down to its name. That would have been a good thing to remember except that I gained it all back and then some.

Kinetic Thinking: It’s Physical!

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One of the greatest challenges during this pandemic, which I compounded by getting both knees replaced, has been the lack of movement. Being stuck in my apartment for such an interminably long period made me a dullard who spent too much time either staring out the window or at a screen of some kind.

Matthew McConaughey in Fool’s Gold (2008)

As I noted in previous posts, I need to move. If I don’t move, I don’t think. It’s that simple. Without motion, my brain barely moves. It’s like mush. It just doesn’t do much. According to Brian Greene (who despite my many references to his words of late is not my guru), thinking is an actual physical event. He uses Boltzmann Brains as well as an entity of his own called The Thinker to demonstrate that thinking demands the physical movement. Particles must dance about in our heads for our brains to function. And that makes it a physical act. There’s a lot more to it, but I don’t understand much – quantum tunneling you say?? – except what I wrote: thinking requires energy.

I know this because, four months after getting my knees replaced, I am back on the bike and my brain is back at it. I figured out a number of blog topics – sacred sex and more! – and narrative fixes in Anori as well as deciding to end a meaningless feud and that I hold no animosity toward the people who fired me (almost) as well as a bunch of other nonsense you don’t want to hear about – all in less than an hour.

I move therefore I think. That’s the thing. Which begs the question: Was Walter Payton the smartest of all?

Walter Payton, Chicago Bears running back

Looking To Answer To Someone

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I’m looking for someone to answer to, someone who knows what matters most in this life, someone who has unequivocal answers about what I’ve done and said and should do and say next. I had a sense when I was younger that it was an older person, like my mother or father, someone had lived life and knew things. It took me time to figure it out, but I now know that the answers aren’t there.

I scroll through my phone in the evening, go down through the numbers to see who there is to talk to, who I know that might help me to make some sense. There are many friends and family who help for a time, who say the right things and make me laugh. But it eventually runs its course and I am drifting off and thinking of who else there might be.

It might be as Carrie Fisher mused. “All these people we weren’t finished talking to, that we will never be talking to until we see them again someday and pick up where we left off. Or we can talk to them as we go along, like talking to ourselves but so much better.”

Anyway, I just want to know what this so very wise person might think of my script about this guy who makes all of these calls during the pandemic, leaving messages for family and friends, hanging up when someone answers, and then killing himself in the end. It’s a dark comedy. It’s a little funny, right?

More Socially Distant Every Day

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Haven’t we always been socially distant? Isn’t that where we’ve always been evolving? #we-never-cared-about-each-other #only-pretended-to-give-a-shit

All of these people are playing this game of finding peace at home when they’re just trying to stay sane. Are they going to wax melancholic for those sweet, quiet days when it’s said and done? “Yeah, I remember those war years. That was a time.”

I’m back to the writing. Em, Q, Calli and Apollo V have arrived on Planet Mina and live temporarily inside a magnetic shield while they test the air. And so, yeah, they are like us now, venturing out in space suits, getting samples and scampering back to safety. And they’re okay with that. Or so they say.

What really happens when we do get out of this? Will we actually have changed? probably so. But this idea of finding peace is hard pill to believe. The truth is that we will continue to evolve toward being more removed and less empathetic, no mater what. Virus or no virus, that’s what we are. Covid-19 has nothing on our virulence.