Where is God?

This is a strange time given my mental quirks. (Even without them, it is strange, but it is stranger still with them.) I have worked for years to tamp down my instinct to over-plan everything to sate my anxiety. Now, I am surrounded by people panicking and buying up supplies I hope they will not have to use. People stockpile ammunition and are furious that gun sellers are not considered essential. A palette of toilet paper seems excessive when people may still visit the grocery store once a week. What I considered excessive in my own head is now overshadowed by the actions of many.

Is it still an advantage for me to slow my neuroses? People around me plan to raid CVS for medication. Not for themselves, but to use to barter. They make clear that they are not joking. One of my coworkers talked about buying cigarettes and alcohol, as these will be valuable currency when cash is no longer king. Our economy is crashing, no question, but I do not yet think we are to a post-apocalyptic barter economy. (Given that unemployment claims were a straight line into the stratosphere, it may not be far off.)

We have been under a national state of emergency for a week. Much has changed -- orders to stay home, startling jumps in diagnosed infections and deaths in New York, other states stopping cars with New York license plates -- but not yet that much. Civilization is still in place and seems to be holding steady. I am not to come in close contact with unfamiliar people, but that is no major sacrifice. When I took runs in the past, the point was not to slow and engage in conversations with strangers.

Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs. We hope temporarily, but nothing feels definite. Given that we are not able to go to restaurants, that government degree has shuttered malls, and the pandemic limits us from many economic activities, some of these jobs will not exist when coronavirus lets us go. Few new jobs will be created. Dedicated Sanitizer will only be a few people. Assistant Grave Digger is probably going to be unnecessary.

I do not know what happens, which has become something of my mantra. Reasonable people around me are behaving and thinking in unreasonable ways, unsettling me. The disordered thinking that I went to therapy to clarify is now commonplace. The irrational seem to be the majority, or at least a vocal minority that convinces others into cognitive deviance. If we could calm down, we could weather this better. This is unlikely to happen. For almost all Americans, this is an unprecedented world.

Since Friday and Cuomo's declaration that 100% of non-essential workers are to stay home (which was the push for my job to dismiss the teachers for two weeks), things have grown even more unreal. It has been less than two weeks since I saw my new friends Aaron and Amanda. It feels like months. I have lost my sense of time, something that the weeks away from work will not improve. Amber is much the same, both of us asking our smart speaker what day it is.

A minority is not taking this seriously, crowding together, going to parties, hiking with strangers because the parks are free, hooking up on dating apps. In short, providing COVID-19 with fertile breeding grounds and eager victims. Others are going too far in the other extreme, preparing for the apocalypse and their immediate plundering of resources. There is no trust that your neighbor is not preparing to take a hatchet to your head if you have a bag of rice that she wants. I always assumed that there was a percentage waiting for the world to end so that they could act out their sociopathy. I didn't expect them to take the first week of a national emergency to brag online that they are ready to murder the rest of us. I particularly didn't expect that our politicians would be fearless of saying grandparents should be sacrificed to Moloch.

Paranoia seems commonplace. I was never arrogant enough to believe I had a reason to be paranoid. People were not conspiring against me, except in the way of governments conspiring against everyone. Our president, who has always seemed like a paranoid narcissist, is only becoming more unhinged as the days go by. Coronavirus is not something that he can wave his hand at and call fake news, though he did do this for months, and now he's trying to gaslight people into saying that he didn't despite ample evidence. He, like the ammo-hoarders, has made explicit that he is willing to have us die if it will improve the stock market.

There is a greater lack of certainty than I have felt in my life, aside from a few weeks after 9/11. This is a slow decline into a world different from the one I expected. Perhaps this is only because I was never in a position to have to doubt the world so profoundly. I'm a straight, white, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied man living in an erstwhile prosperous country. The Western world is not built to be hard for my demographic. (Even my mental imbalance and alternative spirituality are shrugged off as within acceptable parameters.)

With 9/11, I could see the danger. I cannot see viruses. Some of the infected show no symptoms. Allergies or a cold can look the same. I cannot know it is in front of me. Anyone could infect me with something capable of killing my loved ones. There are asymptomatic infected. One sheds the virus readily and it stays on surfaces for days. (I have not given up the notion that I may be one of them or that I have run through a mild course of COVID-19 already. No one is going to give me a test for "I have been run down and have had mild respiratory issues, but I am healthier now.") How can I feel safe?

I tried to tell my students that this will define their generation, but they do not see it or believe at this point. They are not always capable of accurate self-reflection.

The building wave is hitting us. We could have avoided it with less arrogant leadership, but we did not. There are states now who are pretending this will not ravage them, much as New York hoped only two weeks ago. I cannot understand when this wave will roll back and let us deal with the full consequences. I do not know when the consequences will be clear.

I don't want to look at social media and the news, yet I want to know everything so that I might be prepared should there be another upheaval. It is a painful dichotomy. My family has had a group text going for years, though it is often fallow for a lack of reason to exploit. Every time I had exited work and turned my phone on, there would be fifteen new messages -- articles about the downfall of society, the upticks in diagnoses, and, of course, memes -- that would buzz for several minutes. On a good day, my phone would stop buzzing with updates before I got home. I was anxious and lost sleep, my brain trying to figure out a way that this would all be okay.

It won't be okay. It will one day be something new, but it won't be what was okay before.

Not every week, but enough, I used to walk to a local cafe and have dinner on nights where Amber was working. I would sit with my sandwich and write, people-watching and feeling cozy. Now, I cannot envision when that will happen again. I hold out hope that this cafe will still exist when coronavirus recedes. There is no guarantee. The landscape of my idyllic town is uncertain.

The world is shutting down. I was unaware it could do this, that it always was a possibility. It is clear how many jobs can be done remotely, in stark contradiction to what businesses have told employees. The Trump administration and their hangers-on went from "Socialism is the ultimate bugbear!" to "Here is a one-time check so you don't all become homeless once your jobs disappear." People say that this is his attempt to buy votes, a statement with which I do not disagree. ($2400 is not an adequate payment for allowing something into the country through negligence that could kill people I love.) It is also an awareness that the economy will halt as people lose their jobs. Landlords are not known for their generosity, no matter the order that they do not evict anyone this month. We are watching this pandemic strip away societal lies people defended and held dear. It would be lunacy to pretend we had not seen behind that curtain.

I have long talked about a zombie survival plan. It has always been a conversation starter at parties. I acknowledge that Amber has most of the useful skills -- farming, crafting, medical knowledge, scientific acumen, chemistry, etc. All I can do it socialize well -- which is less useful right now -- and write. I can talk people into helping or deescalate them. I am hard to faze, as yelling and threats are frequent behaviors in my classroom and have lost their power. I am still not the person you would pick first for your team.

I want to cry all the time now. I don't, but it is always there. It is a need for catharsis that I cannot get but from ranting about the erosion of civil rights in the face of the plague. I am grieving the world now drown beneath latex gloves, fever sweat, and face masks. The other day, when I was making dinner for Amber, I became overwhelmed and overstimulated. I needed to go down to my bedroom and lie in the quiet with a pillow over my face. I couldn't put a specific reason I was so distraught, only that I could not be in the light and sound. I worry that these attacks will become more frequent.

The world I was in before COVID-19 was far from perfect. In fact, it was close to surreal and the decisions of many beggared belief, but it did not require my state to shut down. Something died and keeps dying in front of me. My peers tread water by posting nihilistic or Dadaist memes. The immediate effects may be temporary, though that will be far easier to say when it is in retrospect. I only know that I may not be returning to my job in a few weeks and that businesses on which I relied will not reopen. The world after this will turn unfamiliar in places. That will not be a temporary change. This will be indelible.

I have felt isolated before. It is an issue I have confronted in my life. Never was the isolation mandated by the government and society. Never was I given no other choice.

I've always needed more socialization than Amber. She is an introvert, as are many of my friends. They can survive without much social contact (though they may survive less readily as their hours are cut or their jobs eliminated entirely). I'm not explicitly an extrovert, able to enjoy time on my own, but I do need social interaction to feel fully myself. The times when I am happiest in my life involve being around other people, often sharing food. In at least two ways, this is not likely to happen in the next three months. Usually, at my worst, I can just get out of my house and see people. At the very least, it distracts me from the anxiety and depression building within me. Often, it drains it away and I feel invigorated by the company. Now, it is an anathema to suggest seeing someone in person. Now, I rely wholly on my wife to tell me that this is all real and will be okay, though I do not think that she wholly believes this either.

It is going to be a part of my life for a while. Gradual changes, you can adjust to. Anything drastic and people lose their minds. Given the reports every hour, the ridiculousness from some quarters, I am surprised people are not losing their minds more. I expect that I'll be able to get food, that my apartment will still be here. If utilities continue, I think that our nation can be okay. If the National Guard isn't in everyone's cities, if we don't have to see people in hazmat suits, the world won't feel as though it is ending.

The Black Plague upturned the world. The death of many adults ended the era of serfdom. If lords wanted their work done, they had to treat the remaining workers better, as they were now in demand. People now are suggesting or executing general strikes. Businesses that tried to mark themselves essential against government decree are having their licenses pulled. Many take note how quickly the government instituted "impossible" social programs when doing otherwise threatened the economy and their reelection chances. The rich and powerful could have always saved us with barely any effort. They chose not to and made us fight to defend them.

My younger brother, a consummate nurse with perhaps a faltering bedside manner in group texts, believes that the greatest number of deaths will not be to the disease directly but rather the despair it provokes. People want to be productive and social, whatever we say when we ask for long vacations. This is not a vacation. It is being grounded without our allowance, though "allowance" in this case means "resources to survive."

The suicide rate will increase during this national emergency. These deaths are not a priority, nor will they be added to the tally of the COVID-19 deaths (nor, indeed, will the deaths of people dying from other maladies who could not get a treated). Cut people off from their tribe and we falter and wilt. Seeing an unpredictable new world emerging is enough to set someone off. This virus and our government's inept response are taking so much out of us.

Added to this, COVID-19 is all about our mortality. It is the human condition that we try not to think of the deaths of ourselves or our loved ones. Allowing these thoughts into your daily life is pathological. Now, we cannot look at a screen without being made morbid (or, for my peers, sardonic).

If all this wasn't fatal enough--and it is--we could just be bored. You've caught up on your queue and you don't want to start a new book, so you consider which of the products under your sink would end your life with the least amount of pain. Caged animals suffer similar fates if understimulated, but they lack thumbs, internet connections, and drain cleaner. (Do not drink drain cleaner.)

I have often seen connections where they did not exist. I have assumed that I am blessed with an intuition that not everyone has honed. All this was demonstrative of mental illness, delusions. But now, more people are conspiratorial, overtly and publicly. Many are experiencing derealization for the first time in their lives. I used to get it weekly back when I treated myself like a fictional character to write about.

This all seems too weird to be true. I have felt this way with increasing frequency since 2012, joking that that is when reality switched tracks. I told myself that this sensation was something inside my head. Now that I'm living through a public health crisis of this magnitude, things are too bizarre for me.

Oh. There.

All this is too cinematic, and more a farce than straight drama. The reality show president bungling the pandemic response because it hurt his ego; the ready-made militias ready to go to war over toilet paper; spring breakers welcoming the virus as they admission price to the keg party; late show hosts recording with cellphones; business owners trying to convince people that their videogames, candy, and crafts are essential needs; politicians who have all but opened the door for this "hoax" themselves becoming infected and quarantined; people blaming it all on some anonymous Chinese guy who ate a bat. No screenwriter would get this script out of the slush pile. Bruce Willis tying a bomb to a meteor is a serious fare by comparison.

How can I be expected to see this happening and cling to my defense mechanisms? Nothing makes sense and has no interest in changing this. How can this be reality?

Soon in Xenology: Magical thinking and witchcraft. Probably more about COVID-19, since, you know, the world is ending and everything.

last watched: Broadchurch
reading: Sex and Rockets