As we near the close of the third week of a shelter-in-place quarantine order, days are beginning to meld one into the next. Sleep is furtive, and comes when it pleases, often leaving for days at a time, and returning with a furor to encompass nights and days back to back. People are checking their calendars more often, not because they have things to do, but because they can’t remember which day of the week it is, with no daily schedules to help them mark the time passing. Few of us are working regular day jobs, as many have moved to working from home, and many more have become completely unemployed.
We (here in the SF Bay Area) are no longer allowed to leave our homes, except to perfom necessary tasks such as grocery shopping, pharmacy pickups, and animal care. We are still permitted to exercise outdoors, though it looks as though that privilege will soon be greatly restricted.
We are not to congregate in groups, and are discouraged from having any physical contact with others, excepting those with whom we live.
Each day, a good portion of the world looks with fascination and horror at a somewhat-meaningless chart, detailing how many new cases of COVID19 have been diagnosed, and where. We see a running total of active cases, recovered cases, and (increasingly) deaths.
We read articles about politicians bickering, casting blame, and fumbling around ineffectively in attempts to mitigate the damage. We listen to our Clown President changing his story daily, always in an attempt to make it look as if he is doing a fantastic job handling this crisis, when nothing could be further from the truth. We cringe, we attempt to turn off the news, and many of us fail.
It isn’t as if there are no projects to be done at home — for many of us, there is work that is piling up rapidly, and for me, there are also many organizational, craft, and art projects that I have yet to get to doing. This time at home seems as if it would be the perfect time to do those things, yet I feel mostly emotionally paralyzed, and unable to turn away from the slow-crush apocalypse that is encroaching on my reality. I know that the world I once knew is not coming back, and I have no idea what to expect in its place.
Spatchcocking the Future 