I Don't Remember

Tuesday I drove to LA for the second time in less than a week. I haven't really been out there much since COVID hit, which isn't that out of the ordinary really. For those of you who live outside the greater Southern California area, going to LA is something you actively avoid on a standard day. Yes, it's the second largest city in the country and, despite its reputation as a culture-free wasteland of asphalt and indifference to the suffering of the homeless, well appointed with sophistication and urban grace that only happens to be indifferent to the suffering of the homeless. The trick is, unlike other, more walkable cities, you have to know where you're going before you get in your car to go specifically there. The opportunities for wandering and discovery are more limited, unless the thing you want to discover is the suffering homeless. We've got culture, it's just that you don't notice most of it as it occurs in a blur past your window on your way to a TGI Fridays in Sunland-Tujunga or whatever. It's basically New York, but requires a bit more homework and a lot more intention.

I wasn't in LA for the culture on Tuesday though; I was there because I know a person who lives there, one of my favorite people of all time whom I haven't been able to see much due to the worldwide plague complication we both independently had decided to not disregard, unlike about 30% of the national population and the fucking governor of Florida. Because of the confounding and profound stubbornness of that cadre, the trip to LA itself was about as social as we dared get. The whole agenda was vegan takeout and catching up inside the confines of a downtown-adjacent one-bedroom apartment on a quiet-ish street.

The attention spent exchanging information on important things like the unrelenting indignities of online dating and what the fuck is up with that Nate guy on season 2 of Ted Lasso at the expense of, well, everything else. The whole trip, with the drive out, was around 7 hours, zero percent of which was spent thinking/talking about/checking up on the stupid fucking governor recall election in my stupid fucking state.

I actually like my state quite a bit. It's got lovely coastlines and accessible mountains... no fresh water to speak of and it's built on earth biding its time before it inevitably shakes us all into powder, but it does also have not that many fucking Republicans, so I'm staying. I know Texas has no state income tax, but it's also allowable there to arrest ladies for--and I'm not 100% on the details but this doesn't feel far off--getting their period in a given month. Finally a place that has codified the fact that there's nothing more suspicious than an empty womb. In California, however, GOP voters aren't even in second place in the list of registered voters. It goes Democrats, unaffiliated voters and then Republicans. Try as our stupid system might to make it possible for 12% of the population to trigger a chaotic recall that threatens to remove from office a governor voted in a by a margin of 8 million votes when he was legitimately elected, we managed not to step on that particular rake and end up with a right-wing radio host as governor. At least last time we ended up with the guy from Predator as governor. This time the best they could throw at us is a guy who will almost certainly defiantly die of COVID sometime between now and the winter solstice.

Not that I noticed because, again, I was busy very specifically not paying attention Tuesday. That wasn't new as I hadn't paid any attention to the run-up. Sure, I voted by mail, but I even resented entirely the four minutes of effort that extracted from me. In the day or so since the results were know, I've learned that apparently the polls were somewhat erratic, leading to some consternation among state Democrats and the rest of us in the Anti-Self-Immolation voter bloc coalition.

I understand the uncertainty. I've seen one of the recall rodeos succeed in the past. Also when you're living through an event, a lot of noise can get through when the result/final reckoning is still in question. I'm old enough to remember the morning of 9/11 after the first plane hit and then we had to brace for the panic of an untold numbers of planes dropping onto any number of National Park Service targets, or some other escalation like a massive hostage situation (which I guess the whole days was, essentially) or a dirty bomb or what. By the next day when the scope of the disaster had calcified and became knowable, we were all able to switch from abject panic to abject-plus-jingoistic-rage, which thankfully only lasted until like two weeks ago.

That's how all of history works, though. Election days are fascinating as the trajectory of history swings violently minute to minute until the final result of the race is known. During COVID, the very active phase stubbornly refuses to abate, which leaves room for the contrarian and cynical to make hay with conspiracy and public-health malpractice on facebook or whatever. At some point in the future we will know for sure that horse deworming medicine was just as effective as hydroxychloroquine in treating the disease, which is to say not-at-fucking-all. Meanwhile the countries where vaccination is a thing that is understood as a rational pre-emptive to pandemic instead of a plan to make us all radio-frequency receivers in order to activate the slave-lizard-person latent gene, they get to have nice things. I'm not sure if that's an actual conspiracy theory, but the state of things is such that it's as likely to be wrong as it is to be a "source" someone's dipshit uncle cites as "proof" on facebook later this week.

I guess I don't mind the spinning out. On a human level, it makes sense to respond with fear and panic to a situation that is unprecedentedly scary. And I do know: reality is patient. It will wait for you. At a certain point the infection rates will fall into controllable territory and we won't all be CRISPR-altered to be 5G capable at the cellular level. The problem might be that all the people who most needed to live to see that corrective truth will probably all have drowned to death in their own mucus before then.