Quarantine Blues
It’s springtime in the south and the world outside my house is closed for business. Billions of people are on lockdown.
An unforeseen pandemic has brought the modern world to its unscarred knees. Our freedoms and the busyness of our lives have been postponed until further notice.
Such a precarious situation we all find ourselves in today. Such a tragedy for so many of us in this already crazy world. And it will likely get worse before it gets better.
We live in the age of information, or better yet, the age of conflicting information; or even better, the age of misinformation.
In spite of a lot of babbling from social media philosophers and so-called “public officials”, no one really seems to know what the fuck is going on.
Most are completely clueless on how to deal with such a grave problem that so many people were unprepared for. Even governments. Even you.
The severity of the situation continues to be debated among the so-called experts. Some say we’re all overreacting. Some say we’re not doing enough. And depending on your politics, you side with one.
But the truth is: you don’t know who’s right. Neither do I.
Anyway, I stick up my middle finger to it all and drink IPA’s in the midmorning sun. I’ve got the quarantine blues, damn it.
With nothing much else to do, I throw an old Mississippi Fred McDowell record on and loiter around barefoot in the dead grass of my back yard. I let a tiny red ant bite the tip of my toe for a quick reminder of my impermanence. I do that sometimes.
The smell of jasmine wafts through the stickiness of the Florida air. Little rays of sunshine splinter through the bamboo leaves. I watch a red-tailed hawk with a small creature in its mouth fly toward the sun.
Just 30 days ago, people were living high on the hog, racking up credit card debt, eating out on the daily, enjoying their false lives of prosperity without a whiff of concern in the air.
Today, with a simple twist of fate, the world is crumbling right before our very eyes. If you would have told people of their future predicament a month ago, you would have been deemed a conspiracy theorist, a kook, a dingbat.
Now here we are.
Sonofabitch.
One little virus has shattered that delicate little wall of security that we’ve all built our lives around. One little virus has reminded us just how fragile our lives really are.
As Camus once said, “In the best ordered lives, there always comes a time when the structures collapse.”
No one is ever prepared for a total revision of what they thought would last forever. We get too used to the illusions that feed us the contentment we need to never question or look deeper into things. As the great Henry Miller once sadly reminded us:
“Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will last forever or else are so frightened it won’t, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.”
The other day the Federal Reserve chief warned that unemployment may hit 30% in the US — that coalesced with a 50% drop in GDP. That’s worse than the goddamn Great Depression. I hope he’s wrong.
I take another pull from my cold IPA. McDowell’s guitar makes my dusty old soul smile despite it all. I turn it up a little. The sun is high in the sky now as I stare at it as long as I can before my eyes pool with tears.
They said on the news today that in New York city one person dies from this novel virus every hour. The United States has reached 100 deaths a day.
Italy is enduring the brunt of it — the entire goddamn country on lockdown as hundreds parish daily. One doctor over there even claimed they’ve stopped treating people over 60 so as to save the younger.
Absolutely devastating. I pray to the silent sky gods that most countries do not end up like this.
People here in the United States are starting to lose their minds. Just the other day, a 64-year-old man jumped to his death from a luxury apartment building in Manhattan. Was it caused by the quarantine? Who knows, but I’m sure it’s likely.
Forced solitude is a major dilemma for folks who’ve built their lives around haste and money-making and constant companionship.
Solitude for some people is worse than hell. It was the great Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, who once said that “people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
Yesterday I was walking through the streets of my small town. A car drove by with two obese women who were both wearing purple medical gloves and swinging their meaty arms outside the windows. They had gospel music blaring as loud as humanly possible while screaming out that “Jesus is coming.”
The nation is going mad. We live in a whirlwind of insanity.
The stock market, like the intelligent levels of our politicians, continues to plummet. Most small businesses have been forced to close their doors. Bartenders, cooks, and waitresses are jobless and the unemployment rate is rising like a motherfucker.
Our so-called leaders are too incompetent to get a grasp on things. Re-election and election trump the need of the people. The remedy like always is to create money out of thin air and throw it at us and big business. Of course, a temporary fix with detrimental long term consequences — but they don’t care.
The collapse we are witnessing today is largely due to the massive bubble inflated by the Fed during the 2008 collapse. Central banks have been propping up our debt-maddened, brittle system for the past ten years.
All it took was a black swan event to bring about the day of reckoning. Most nations are in the same boat.
Maybe we’ll bounce back fine. I highly doubt it.
I think it was Groucho Marx who once said: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
A bright red cardinal in my crape myrtle sings me love songs. And I think it helps stave off the melancholy a bit. I sit in an old wooden chair on my back porch and start reading the lyrical essays of Albert Camus. He reminds me of the absurdity of it all — “Everything seems futile here except the sun, our kisses, and the wild scents of the earth.”
When the world falls to shit I still have my books and therefore a little sanity.
Stay safe friends. Cheers!
