How many times do I need to remind myself not to look at my telephone in the morning? Woke up to a message about freezes, pay cuts, and furloughs at the school where I teach. Then I read that our president suggested injecting household disinfectants to kill the virus and clean our lungs. It’s become a hallmark of the times: thinking something is a joke until enough headlines and articles convince you it is true.
Spent the rest of the day scrolling past local, regional, and national alerts instructing Americans not to drink bleach. Our president, this man with a name like a slur, he also said something surreal about injecting light into our veins, but there’s no poetry in stupidity. Sometimes there’s poetry in anger, and I saw it scrawled across the street this afternoon.
As of today, 50,000 people have died from this virus in America. There’s the very real and woozy sensation of living in a country that’s circling the drain. Waiting in line to enter the supermarket, a woman dressed in blue scrubs stood six feet behind me and hollered into her phone. “You want to tell me this is sensationalized? Come talk a walk with me through the fucking ICU.”
