The Surly Bonds of Earth

It's a cliche by this point to refer to 2020 by some metaphor that equates it with unmitigated, soul-breaking disaster of an open-ended variety, where the end that is open is somewhere way, way below you inside the pit you've been falling in without end--long since reached terminal velocity--toward a bottom you can't see but if it's filled with anything, it's definitely going to be some combination of vomit and snakes.

Or a dumpster that is on fire. That is also a popular one.

Positivity is a choice. I understand that. Right now the number of new cases of coronvirus in California is down to about the same as it was in early June, which is great! Only about 5,000 new cases a day anymore. Now all we have to do is avoid the making the same, exact, down-to-the-letter mistakes we made back then that prompted the summer spike in cases and deaths that roared to an excruciating peak in July. So, you know, there's no real reason to feel like the world is definitely about to end in a rage-fit of opted-for stupidity. Logically, things can't keep getting worse forever, haha.

You know, you clench and you clench and you clench to get through the worst of it. Then you make it through the excruciating political conventions and think, Well, at least now we can say we're in the home stretch, maybe it's time to unpucker a tiny bit, let the blood flow back to the extremities, see if we can stop the uncontrollable shivering...

And then the fucking Rock gets COVID. That's right, the indestructible star of the classic 2018 building-terror thriller Skyscraper was laid low by the disease. He lived, yes, but what a blow. Are there any symbols of resilience left? Any pillars of physical defiance to give the rest of us any hope that something--ANYTHING--will be left when the ravaging invisible scourge is done carving a ragged valley of bleeding death through the whole of human society? Next thing you're going to tell me is Batman got COVID.

Oh shit, Batman got COVID.

Well fuck. It's tempting to surrender to the darkness, but I find that there are always ways to find some kind of distraction that isn't a capitulation to nihilism or a slough toward a libertine hedonism dedicated to a superficial and tragically temporary wallow in a craven, dopamine satiety.

My new relaxation and emotional hygiene regimen is in teaching my 17 year old son to drive a manual transmission in famously hilly Southern California. You keep binge-watching Gilmore Girls or whatever the fuck, I'm going to co-pilot helplessly alongside Personified Death in his careening Chariot of Mortality disguised as a 2015 Ford Fusion SE hatchback. As my eyes stretch open wide, past the safety of the visible whites to expose the shocks and tendrils of pink attaching them to my skull, and the involuntary barks of what is probably best described as laughter hiccups and coughs (an escape more than an expression) out of the rictus gape of my mouth, more than at any other time in my recent memory, I think with definitive clarity: I Am Alive.

And it renews again and again and again, past every lamppost, every tree, every onrushing tractor-trailer that doesn't sublimate us into mist, in every dreaded, cruel red light. I've never been a thrill-seeker, but now I know. If there is a god, she is only visible in the gloaming, in the liminal space between the definitional Is of existence and the void, voided infinitude of No More one can only glimpse in fleeting flashes of existential peril. If I've learned anything, it's that there is a forever and I'm not ready for it yet.

I gotta stick around long enough at least to vote. Then we'll reassess.