Fear and Loathing in the Time of Corona

I used parts of another old typewriter to fix this one. And fix it I did. For the most part.

It is an eighty-fiver year old piece of equipment, though. I'm just glad she works at all.

The last time I was plucking at these sorts of keys, I was searching for the thread of a narrative through a world not much different than the one we are quarantined in now.

That feels beyond surreal to me.

It is a strange and terrifying time in America. The whole world, really.

All of civilization is at a stand-still.

Overnight, some poor bastard an ocean away ate a bat and "stopped the motor of the world.”

Some of the keys are sticking. It's an old machine.

I'm tickled by the fact that I get to see such times. Not that I would wish harm on any of my fellow sapiens, but we always seem to see the best in ourselves in times of collective struggle.

True enough we also see the worst, but this whole instance seems so global in its scope that it would be be silly to ignore the impact of the connectedness we get to witness.

I'm still not convinced this is the end of the world. I'm also not entirely sure I know a damned thing about any damned thing.

I wanted to be ready for this moment my whole life.

Maybe I wasn't meant to be, or maybe this isn't that moment. But I spend so much time asking for a direction and I got a quarantine.

I want to know what we are supposed to do with all this momentous stillness.

I can't shake this notion that we were put here for just such an occasion, me and all my friends. A large part of this frustrated restlessness is that recently I had begun to feel left behind by them. Like a fool lost in fancy and no small amount of sauce. Yet now, I look around and see all my peers banding together and making their vibrations and moving in formations I feel like I had been shouting for them to all along.

But I can't seem to find a place, still.

Some of not knowing where to begin comes from the nascent sense I harbor of this all having much further to go.

I see all these collectives collecting, and yet they are only bones. A skeletal framework of the things we could become after all this. A slightly panicked herd of recently displaced artists with their channels and accounts wider open. Ready and scrambling to make some viable valuable somethings.

There's something a bit too dependent about it though I don't know enough of my own feelings to bring it up to any of them.

I want there to be a vacuum. One so gaping and wide that whole new systems must arise.

I think maybe I'm waiting for some of this dust to settle. For this first wave to wave a bit further along.

Or perhaps I'm only waiting for a decent place to begin. To pull the trigger by simply starting. Creating.

You know me; never one to take it a step at a time.

This is a wild time to be be alive in America and trying to make it. Anything real, that is.

I can already sense the stress on my sense of direction. And reality.

Thinking that the walls are closing in. That the great battle has begun and all are enemies.

Or at least competition.

But we could get it done. So long as I stay out, and in, and all in the way.

All in. The way.

So much of this looks so much different than I thought it would, and so goddamned the same.