“Interlude”

3 weeks. They go by so fast.

Up. Coffee. Back to bed. I forgo the social media in favor of a copy of Grimm’s fairy Tales, always a nice go to comfort. Fully caffeinated, I stretch, lace up my shoes and hit the track. A sprawling 3 and a half miles that takes me from underneath a normally busy intersection, beneath an overpass past an eighties era neighborhood, into a park, where I do 4 rounds and then take a beat. This is a sacred time. My answer to meditation. Some goofy at home exercise wont fit the bill, and I’ve never needed endorphins more. I have at this at least, I think somewhat bitterly.

Sitting under a tree at the park, I’m happy to see other people there, runners and elderly couples on walks mostly. All politely keeping a sizable distance of up to and including 6ft. I look about my own surroundings as my leg muscles burn and I feel a trickle of sweat cause my head to itch furiously under my knit cap. The sky has never looked more grand. The birds sing in chorus, so sweet and so lively. It can’t be all bad, at least nor for nature. I recall my thoughts in my last entry. The torpor my mind was enmeshed in. The mounting images, the ugly ply-boards on windows, the feeling of being pulled into a crazed societal whirlwind, the erroneous information being spread like gospel, the feelings of scarcity. The inability to embrace a loved one. For one reason or another, I crashed and burned that day only a few weeks ago. Something cracked. Perhaps my own cognitive dissonance, or being buffeted to and fro by a force much larger than myself, comprised of mania, medical masks and ever present uncertainty.

The days that followed werent as dark, but still peppered with an aura of unknowing. It could be felt everywhere. In the eyes of grocers. In the weariness of hospital staff. In the unfeeling phone queue for unemployment. Through all this, I etched out a life, not as though there was another option.

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Its afternoon. I sprawl out on my sage green sofa. I hear the birds outside. The late spring winds whips the windowpane. The taunting siren song of reborn world we are not permitted to fully embrace. For some reason, I feel tired. I attempt to close my eyes and nap, but my tireless brain still churns out mental offal comprised of the latest covid19 reports, well meaning though patronizing diatribes on hand washing and face touching, the soul sucking rantings of a blithering orange faced fool continuously doubling down on his own incompetence, as well as a mental inventory of the contents of my pantry and what I should retrieve from the store- if I’m brazen enough to go to one, and last but not least a veritable assembly line of “what ifs”, that seem to rule the currant collective consciousness like an unseen, though omnipotent sky king.

“This is how you become old”, I think.

WHEN DOES THIS END?

I’ve wondered so many times, I’ve made myself dizzy. ” We don’t know”. The only answer I get. I feel mocked and taunted. I envision mobs of people, parading down streets and backallys, clutching bags of stolen goods, shattering windows and inducing heart attacks. The most jarring reality of all, that it wasn’t at all far from possible. It was so far afield from my perception of reality, my brain almost won’t permit me to indulge such things. But here it is, in all its surrealism, coming at me like a typhoon, full force.

Suddenly, I catch myself having an internal dialogue. “Why do you want it to end?” It gives me pause. I mean, in the abstract, it would seem ideal to any writer or creative. Long tapering listless days of sketching thoughts and thinking. You could live in that realm forever, pontificating and creating. But the romance ends fast. Soon you crave the human touch. Contact, voices outside a sterile screen. “So why do you want it to end?” I hear myself asking. That innate knee jerk desire to want something simply because we can’t have it.

“Normalcy, I suppose? ” Alright, but what was normalcy? A busy, though ultimately hallow existence comprised of filling voids with unnecessary things. Engaging in forced dialogue. Forced get togethers. Laughing vacant laughter, tempered with occasionally profound, meaningful moments, yet still smiling empty smiles to a parade of people I’ll most likely forget, ultimately making a mad dash to the safety of home and waking up to notice I’ve forgotten almost all of it. That fever dream existence. Was that ever really living? Was that really a life worth longing for? It wasnt simply myself. It was a comforting numbness that seemed to pervade others. A perverted stagnant version of reality that was so long standing, it seemed a sin to even question it. Now people were loosing themselves in take out fare and over-hyped Netflix schlock instead of using the opportunity to confront their own shadows and come out better for it. So what was the solution? The answers I provided only seemed to invoke more questions. The questions becoming steadily more prying and oblique and convoluted as the world around finished it off with an absoluteness that made me shudder.

‘Things will NEVER be the same!”

“We CAN’T go back to normal”

“We are FOREVER changed”

It was all too much, even for a writer.

There’s a saying in Buddhism. ” Desire causes suffering”. I was desiring, and in turn I, and many others-suffer. For what, is all relative. That said, with this interlude yet ongoing, let’s all see where this leads-hope for the best-and keep our pens handy.

There’s still much to be said.

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