Six months. Six whole months with very few ambitions as a person and even fewer ambitionz as a writer. Six entire months.
I could have gone on like this, you know. I could have avoided writing any of what follows and I could have continued living this strange life. I could have maintained this pandemic monotony and I could have continued making excuses as to why I’m not really up for being myself. I could have upheld my beliefs that this would all be over soon, and I could have, I really could have, until I received the annual domain invoice for themorganyouknow.com and realized it was finally time to succumb to what I still don’t want to admit: This is what real life looks like now.
The first month of the pandemic was an odd but welcome respite. We were getting stuff done around the house. We were day drinking and playing board games with our son. We were cooking big meals. We were making the best of it. The first month of lockdown was actually alright. Then one month turned into four months and four months turned into six months and that initial hiatus somehow turned into my everyday.
After a month, I quickly fell into a pattern of anxious apathy; a pattern of excuses. It was easy for me to settle into a fussy kind of funk. I wanted to write, I really did, but there was working and cleaning and cooking and complaining and drinking and e-learning and hate reading/watching the news that needed to be done. There was also racial injustice and politicized science and hundreds of thousands of deaths and craven leadership and wildfires and anger and outrage and now the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, too. I knew I’d get to the blog when all “this” was over. Then six months later “over” never came, but the domain invoice did.
I still have hope things may in fact get better. What I’ve given up on though is any hope that life will someday soon go back to being what it was before this year. This is where we live now and “this” is somehow “normal.”
Then again, what did normal feel like before “this?” And why, when we discuss normalcy in 2020, do we preface it with “new?” Our “new” normal. Like tagging “new” onto our everyday outrage, boredom, and anxiety is somehow supposed to make it better. “New” was once used to represent a cute top or a themed restaurant. Now it’s used to describe the mundane, the wicked, and the egregious. What we’re living through now should not be churched up or described by a word synonymous with “advanced.” 2020 is not new or exciting or something to celebrate. It simply is and we (rather, I) need to deal with it.
Years ago, at a concert with The Stone Jack Ballers, I overheard a member of a very intoxicated group of youngins say, “You guys, come on. One of us has to be a person.” This is exactly how I feel now; it’s time for me to be a person again in what I now know only as “normal,” not new.
So here it is, folks, my first blog post of the pandemic. Six months later. I’m slowly seeing myself again, and I’m finding my way back to normal.
And the universal irony of it all is that I didn’t come to this realization from a profound Zoom call with a friend. I didn’t get here through the help of the (unreasonably overpriced) Calm app or a self help audiobook. I got here because of a bill. A bill set up for auto payment. And if that’s not 2020, I don’t know what is.
One final note: I listened to a lot of David Bowie during the pandemic and I gotta say, if there’s any artist who can get us through a global catastrophe it’s him. Thank you, Starman, for your life giving tunes and your endless wisdom. I’m quite sure 2020 would have provided you with a lot of inspiration, and we all could have used it.
Title Track: “Life on Mars?” David Bowie. Listen here.
