Difficult mood today. I watched footage of thousands of protestors swarm Michigan’s capital to chant “Lock her up” because they don’t like the governor telling them to stay home during a pandemic. They called it “Operation Gridlock” and hollered into cameras about tyranny. They carried guns.
Maybe it’s because I heard a chipper news anchor announce that only six hundred people died from this virus yesterday in New York City. Only. This is the bar for good news. On my desk, there’s my bandana, my notebook, and a photograph of my parents. I wonder what they would make of this situation if they were still here, if they could see how much the world has changed. Would they have any familial wisdom or generational memory? What would they say? I have absolutely no idea. There is no frame of reference.
This season is marked by the utter impossibility of considering the future. Maybe I could become a Zen lesson in the art of presence, but it feels more like I have the attention span of a goldfish: understanding the world only nine seconds at a time.
Brittle atmosphere at the supermarket. Our bemused collectivism has shifted towards something more twitchy. A man snipes at a girl for not standing six feet away. Others blithely plow through the aisles and shoulder past me like beings from another planet, unmasked and uncaring.
I leave the usual bag of groceries by my elderly neighbor’s door, a woman I admire because she lives only on cheese, dark chocolate, and papaya. I knock lightly and head down the stairwell like a backwards thief, and I hear her voice calling behind me: “Slow down, there’s no need to hurry through this world.”
