Object Permanence

Sitting here typing this at almost 9 pm on a Thursday is a little galling, to be honest. It's not that I don't want to sit here and formulate, synthesize, express... I make my jokes about the ultimate meaninglessness of blogging 15 years past the time when blogging was a relevant means of human connection, but I wouldn't do it if it wasn't a way of ingesting, breaking down and metabolizing the way I experience the world. Did I sort of just compare my work here to post-digestive excreta? I did that just now, that is true. But for me, it's necessary.

Over the last couple of days my job, like many jobs, has switched from being a thing I do outside my house to a thing I do inside my house. I have a very ready-thinky-typey sort of job and I have several hobbies that are in their own ways ready-thinky-typey or at least sit-in-one-spot-in-front-of-a-screeny. Now that I'm doing that all in the same spot, all day long, for a full week now, I'm well over it. My brain still needs this exercise, this purgative. But the gym is closed, the movies are closed, I'm even mad the hiking trails are closed and I don't hike. It's one thing to do this because I have a compulsive drive to pulse along on this metronomic wavelength I kicked in motion myself back in 2004. It's another thing to do it when I know I don't have any other real options. There's only so much TV I can stand to watch. As of about 10 minutes ago, I'm even all out of new Star Trek shows.

I'm not really complaining, though. Frustration comes and goes but, as an adult, I understand it's a feeling that passes. The school district my youngest goes to has confirmed a staff member has tested positive for COVID-19. If school had been in still, hundreds if not thousands would have been exposed, and from there possibly everyone I know potentially through me. There's a joke to be made about how it wouldn't bother me that much to infect some specific people, but it would. I'm a pansy-ass pacifist liberal. We get our kicks on sanctimony and judgment, not causing others to suffer.

All this separation and isolation and denial of a few consumerist impulses churns up a surprising cocktail of mostly uncomfortable emotions, but I recognize it's from a disruption of the routine. The human attachment to routine is confusing and obvious at the same time. The time dilation caused by the tediousness of doing the same thing over and over makes the finitude of life seem a little farther out there. I mean, I'm definitely not going to be dead next week, Monday is laundry day again. And so is the one after that. And the one after that. To, hopefully, infinity! And yet, at the very same time, routine is the thing that makes you stop and look back and realize, somehow, 20 years have gotten past you almost without noticing. 1,040 laundry days will do that to your brain.

For some people, for some completely inexplicable, lizard-brain reason, the lack of opportunities to spend money is the crisis. A pandemic is a life-or-death crisis, but I honestly think to a certain percentage of people, the economy as it is IS the real life. There's no transcendence, no value that isn't value. I can't decide if it's paradoxical or entirely inevitable that it's an entirely Marxian construction, not a political prescription but as an analysis. We're definitely nowhere near (in the opposite direction even) "property is theft!"* but we're definitely living out loud all-history-is-class-struggle. Go ahead and tie yourself to the idea that the GDP is worth dying for, even if the people doing the dying for aren't you, but the other side of that is this Bernie thing is going to turn into something a lot more torch-and-pitchforky by 2024.

It's an awkward time to be ruled by a cadre of anti-intellectuals who disdain expertise, not in anything specific, but just as an idea. If all this is the case, it shouldn't be surprising to see the beginnings of an economic recovery plan made independent of a public health plan in the days before the infection rate has even reached anything near a plateau, let alone a peak. But that's the obscenity of the moment. If you're in Seattle or New York or New Orleans, you already know: there's no cavalry coming. Or worse, the people in charge of the cavalry decided sometime last year to shoot all the horses.

We're going to be here a while.

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*I know that's Proudhon, not Marx, oh man the avalanche of emails I've just invoked!