Tuesday March 24 2020
Covid’s on the mat and I’m standing over him, his eye is cut and the bitch is not getting up, not for a little while anyhow. He’ll go to his corner to get it checked, and now I have a moment to catch my breath and look around…a nod to the crowd, a nod to my ladies in the corner, a tap of the forehead and a fist pump, i’m dancing, I’m moving, that felt good…
Click boom bust, a swing and a punch…
I feel better today, my head is not quite as foggy, I can move around and think a bit. After being inside for two days, I decide to go for a drive, just sit in the car, not get out at all. Just drive.
Seattle is a ghost town. This place is shut down. The streets are deserted…streets usually slammed with cars, construction, people running, people walking, dogs. Nobody’s out. Intersections empty. Every now and then a jogger. I drive to a parking lot to look out over the city, walk to an overpass and see that highway 99 is empty. Literally a car goes by every two or three seconds. Usually crowded. Nothing there. I still don’t feel tip top so I get back in the car before someone comes and drive around greenlake. Two joggers out. The place is utterly deserted.
Yesterday I put out a video. Just clowning and goofing and whatnot for anybody in need of a laugh. And after finding a way for covid to suck it, I took my balls and said I’m going to put these where it hurts. So I put them on either side of my head, where my temples hurt, stuck them there…suck on that, covid, I said…and I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and imagined covid sucking on that…and…
And an image floated into my mind, it was the image of frankenstein. Frankenstein in some weird trippy world, everything is blown out, not a normal landscape, I feel the stuff sucking more and it’s like…oh…..I’m frankenstein, those little iron bars are my bars…so there’s some kind of programming I have had, and it is now getting sucked out of my brain, I have stubs of experiences, notions of the world, how it operates, and I’m stumbling around, the balls are sucking that programming out, because I’m now in a world that is not programmed, does not meet my programming, all of it fades and drifts away, now I can look with fresh eyes and free mind see what awaits.
I took the balls from the side of my head and I put one on my nose and breathe deep and then the other…
On the first breath out…
I expelled out all of this dirty garbage, that’s what i saw, like dark dirty junk leaving me…and I put the other nose on, suck that covid, and breathed out and the air felt so fresh and clean and I saw wide open space, wide open and beautiful, a sea, the calm puget sound on a clear day, the san juans maybe, building this lovely journey into the unknown, i’m reminded of the journey, the path I’ve been on, wanted all along.
Okay!
Mind open, soul open, heart free, parked in an empty pcc parking lot, this is a good place to stop, take a look around and see.
New York is in trouble. The infection rate triples every few days. They estimate one in a thousand people has covid. The population density is 28000 people per square mile and It’s been circulating through the city for who knows how long. They have 2000 ventilators. They estimate they’ll need 30000. The federal government just gave them 400. Apparently there is more in inventory but they’re held for…who knows what. The governor is calling for them to be released and given to the city. The exponential curve is doing its thing and it can’t be stopped. People are on lockdown now. That town is in trouble. It’s going to play out over the next few weeks and we’ll see what happens and how bad it gets.
I think about 9/11 and the terrorist attacks that destroyed the world trade centers and killed 3000 americans and I ask…what would you rather have? A quick stab to the guts or a long slow slicing off of your arm with a rusty blade? We’re in for a long misery and a lot of pain and I can’t help but wonder if at some point, like a fox caught in a snare, we’re going to start tearing at ourselves to escape.
After 9/11 there was complete unity in the nation…for awhile. Everyone was with bush as he stood on the rubble and held that megaphone and said we are going to get those fuckers. It’s worth looking at again, just to remember what that feeling of unity can inspire and what it means.
We don’t have that right now. And that’s what makes covid such a wicked enemy, such a perfect storm of shit. On the one hand, as I’ve demonstrated myself, he’s deceptive. He appears to just be a cold virus. But then beneath that surface layer, there’s an infection rate and hell to pay on the weak and the old. So you have to stop and really think things through because what this kind of enemy creates are very tough moral choices. Real dilemmas. That I’ve discussed here and have struggled with and still struggle with. What lives do we value? How far do we go to save a human life? At what point do the costs to other lives and livelihoods and the good of the greater community come into play? Is the goal of a society to save all lives so that everyone lives an execrable existence, or is the goal of a society to see as many people as possible have a chance to truly thrive? These are huge existential questions that this disease forces us to ask.
We don’t have the answers. Or, more to the point, we have competing answers. And then it gets political. And I’m not even going there between right and left and all that shit, those are limiting barriers, those are labels, that quickly destroy free and open thinking, so fuck that. We’re just talking here, so I’m going to keep talking. We don’t though. we don’t have a unified response to this threat. What does that mean? It means you have some people, like Bill Gates and the governor of new york saying that nobody should be out shopping while bodies are piling up. That’s a quote. Gates said that to the founders of ted this morning. Clearly, he takes the view that all lives should be saved, we should be on lockdown to prevent this disease from spreading, and it is abhorrent that we would risk lives to try to keep the economy and the country moving. Meanwhile, you have the lt. governor of texas saying, for the first time publicly a comment that has lurked in my mind and been at least implicitly stated here early on — that none of the grandparents in texas he talks to wants to see their economy an their grandchildren’s livelihood destroyed so they can live a little bit longer. yes. What about the children? Right now my daughter is staring at a computer screen with fractions on it. She has no idea what she’s doing. She’s sitting in her room, in her underwear, in the dark, smashing buttons on the computer, waiting for it to beep three times, so she can move on to the next problem. Doesn’t give a fuck. And why should she? it’s stupid. This is not school, and she knows it. Every day that slips by her world disappears a little bit more. I still stand by my position that this is unconscionable. And she is one of the lucky ones. In this town right now there are god knows how many kids on the street because they lost their only…
Okay. I’m not going to get off on that. Clearly, we all have our hot buttons. And none of them line up.
So where does that leave us? In the worst possible of places. We have a tragedy, a true horrific event, and we have no grounding point, no way to create meaning from it, no way to accept loss, no way to move forward. Everyone is sort of right. And everyone is sort of wrong. And we can’t, because of the nature of our society, and this enemy, find a way to come together and make sense of all of it. To make hard choices in unison and move on. It sucks to have something shitty happen. It is deadly to a community or a country to have that shitty thing send splinters into everyone and obliterates our ability to move forward collectively. To say, this is what this means. This is what we stand for. This is what we believe. This is the price we will pay for our action but we believe in it so we are going to do it together anyway.
Without this, this is how civil wars begin.
That sounds hyperbolic, but think about it. For years one side has said the other side will fuck up life. For years the other side has responded saying the other side will fuck up life. Up until now, it’s been mainly theoretical. Now, it’s real. No matter how you slice it, people are going to die. And it’s going to be public. It’s going to play out on the internet, in the comments sections, on facebook, and everyone in their echo chambers are going to amplify their own specific messages and those messages are not one of peace and love and unity. A popular phrase being passed around online today is “Covidiot”. Lovely. We can chalk that up with all the other dipshit phrases like ok boomer and woke and mansplaining and god knows what else is out there that labels and limits and dehumanizes people and belittles differing views so now you don’t have to listen to anyone else anymore. What a bunch of fucks. On the other side, well…fuck if I know if what they are going to do, we’ll see. Trump just came out and said they need to open everything up by easter which makes your head spin, because finally it is clear what this thing is and what needs to be done, he’s been advocating for it, and then he quickly does a 180 against all national health policy advice? It’s crazy making. Opinion writers in Seattle are stirring the pot, people are settling in. It’s comfortable to find what peace they can in all of this, and after awhile, all of these little sticks they hang onto to stay afloat can very quickly become weapons.
Add to this that the communal feeling amongst us has disappeared. Last weekend you went out and it was a party. We all needed to connect, to see one another and say, hey bud, let’s party — to recognize we weren’t alone and that for the first time, really, we all shared something deep in common. I have lived on this street for three years and don’t know the names of half my neighbors. That’s a communal decision. But now we all have something deep to share, a bond, let’s embrace it.
Nah…on second thought maybe not. Because now we see one another not as partners in some weird and strange adventure, but possible agents of covid, accomplices who just might get us sick. we’ve realized that the next person we come across might sneeze or cough and send us to the hospital. It makes sense. When you realize that there aren’t enough beds for everyone who is going to get sick, that there aren’t enough ventilators, that someone in this town in the next month, if the graphs hold up, is going to die because there wasn’t gear to save their life…well you start taking your own life a hell of a lot more seriously. No eye contact. No hello how are you? Nope. None at all.
The grocery store workers know this. They’ve pasted blue tape on the floor and will bark at anyone who crosses the line. They all have gloves on, and gone is the banter of last weekend, when everyone was bravely buying food for a week and showing just how happy and carefree they were. Nope. Now we get it. Now we understand. Now we want to live and survive a disease our society is not prepared for.
How far will all of this go?
I don’t know.
But I know it’s not anywhere near over and it’s going to get a lot worse. And when images of people dying without ventilators in New York show up who knows what these fissures will do to us? How far they will crack and how far it will go?
There is already real poison in this city. It’s been here for a long time and it’s got really bad the last few years. People have left town to escape it. Creative types I know have said fuck that and have left. I’ve left. So much top down, authoritarian, just…dogma. People absolutely convinced they have the answers to everything and it is everyone else’s job to adhere to those answers and if those answers fail to provide safe spaces for all then clearly someone fucked up somewhere because they know the answers are right.
Then you have the other side. If you’re from Montana and you want to label seattle a degenerate city filled with heroin junkies (while you drink beer all night), okay, go ahead. But I’ve seen these people. They are helpless. They are fucked. I’ve seen the kids of these people. They are helpless. They are fucked. I know a lot of people who work in the service industries who are screwed right now. Some of them work in the service industries because they are artists trying to pursue passions they deeply love. They go onstage and they give all they have got to bring pleasure and joy and wonder into people’s lives. You take away safety nets, you take away a community’s responsibility to its most vulnerable and weakest citizens, to some of its most unique, creative, daring, and DIY motherfuckers…you turn the place into…well…another billings. Or another silicon valley. Good luck making anything like a home in that and so long NW.
So what do you do? Fuck if I know. Ideally, we’d all decide and do something together. This would be a national conversation and there would be a national consensus and we’d deal. Trump would get up and lay out the situation clearly and we’d fucking deal. Or someone would. Before any sort of backbiting or confirmation bias could take hold.
That hasn’t happened.
Finally, we have the media complex and facebook. These entities exist to get more clicks. They do this by manipulating people’s emotions. They have learned the best way to manipulate emotions is to encourage negative emotions. They monitor and track every one of their users and they make sure to amplify anything that encourages a click. Someone clicks on trump fucking up the world? great, let’s feed them trump fucking up the universe. Likes that, great, trump fucking your granddaughter. LIkes that great trump fucking a donut…YOUR DONUT. RIGHT NOW. THat you are eating. And it just keeps going. You have the comments sections where people get off on shouting each other down or on agreeing with the original writer so that they can all pat each other on the back about how smart they are and how much they know and how wrong everyone else is.
This is how people communicate. On a usual basis. I’ve sat in rooms with people where the moment there is down time…in creative settings!…they flip on their phones and sit on facebook. They built the thing to be addictive! It is! Now, with everyone at home, this is all that there is. I fucking hate facebook. I’ve been on there this week because there is nowhere else to go. I don’t check my notifications, and I don’t respond to public comments, because i know the majority of the time people are only making those comments because they know other people are watching. It’s virtue signalling, it’s insincere, it’s the very worst of the high school lunchroom, and it is all manipulated by a machine that wants to take us to a dark hell so we listen and watch more and end up confirmed in our biases…or in the bias it spouts as a corporate entity run by a guy who looks like a fucked up pychopathic cyborg (who as someone said was a nerdy anti-social dork who created a program that turned us all into anti-social dorks) and never go outside and never trust ourselves. Fuck that.
It’s not good.
And the kicker, the final kicker…is that we’re looking at a scourge that I really don’t know if our society could have prevented. And this is debatable, and this will probably be one thing people definitely use to bash each other over. Well obama should have been ready, well trump should have been ready…
You can’t be ready for an earthquake. You can’t be ready for a tsunami. Could we have prevented this? Was any country ready? I guess you could say taiwan was ready. but this was also something they had experienced in 2003. We’ve never experienced this.
So, what will we learn from all of this, to be ready again in the future? What kind of future will we have? Who will we become?
We will survive this. But there’s a whole lot more than survival at stake today.
And that’s not all of it.
That’s just the intellectual, rational breakdown of the situation.
There’s a whole lot more.
I’m saying all of this into my phone while I sit in an empty pcc parking lot at 2 in the afternoon. It is so weird and trippy how empty everything is.
And it is so, so, so so sad.
there’s no way around it. How utterly sad this is for everyone. And what’s even sadder than that is that in our terror and our horror and our fear, more and more there is no one we can turn to to share our sadness with. How terrible is that?
But it’s there. The emotion is there. If you want to tap into it. If you want to listen.
I do.
I’m in this all the way. I’ve been writing shit about this and I’m going to keep going.
I’m in. This is personal.
So let’s keep going.
I sit and I imagine the people in new york living their lives right now who are going to feel sick, who are gong to go to a hospital, who won’t be able to breathe, I think about watching my daughter being intubated when she is two days old, i think about sitting there watching the numbers on her oscillator ventilator hour after hour, making sure that those blood gas scores are above 90. I think about watching her get switched to a conventional ventilator and watching as the pneumonia set in, her lungs inflamed, and her scores dropped like the doctor said they would, and I think about watching them up the o2 on her machine, and the whispers of ecmo to maybe save her (a truly horrible disgusting awful necessary invention) and I think about listening to her heartbeat, over and over again…
And then I picture a family standing around someone they love who is gasping for air and laying on a floor and can’t breathe and is choking on their own lung tissue and nobody can do a damn thing.
Somewhere someone is shouting save the economy.
Somewhere someone is shouting lockdown more and it’s you non-social distancing fucks who are to blame and, hey, aren’t most of them white people???
But for me, now…I’m headed somehwere else…
To the world of emotions, and the world of love, the world of connection, of gratitude and openness and inspiration that s the world of the artist…
It’s a world I’ve been lucky to spend time in. In a razowsky workshop, you enter the space blank. You stare at what is before you and you let it affect you, hit you, all the way, down to the deepest part of your guts, and then whatever comes out, that’s what it is, and that’s where you’re going.
Razowsky talks a lot about viewpoints, and i’ve done a shitload of stuff with it since his workshops.
Briefly it works like this — There’s a shape. Someone sitting a certain way. Maybe with their back to you. Maybe facing you. Maybe smiling. Maybe scowling. You stand before them in a certain way. This is a scene. this is a moment. What does it make you want to say. Whatever it is. Say it.
Hey, I’m with you.
Hey, i didn’t do it.
Yes, leave.
Whatever it is, say it.
I think about the world and the shape the world has been in these last few years, and how I’ve stood in relation to it, and how nice it has been.
And then slowly but surely and inevitably and like a fucking force 5 hurricane the world’s shape the last 12 days has changed. It’s morphed into something else completely different and foreign and strange.
And now I picture myself on stage with this new shape staring at me.
And I look and it and I let it affect me all the way.
It takes a few tries because fuck a duck if you don’t have to dig deep to really see what it is, and what it has become, to let it in all the way, to accept it and where it might head…
Finally, I respond to that shape, my body instinctively moves, by looking away, looking up at the ceiling of my car…squinting it away…and there’s nothing I can offer, nothing to say…but a prayer, to something, someone else, off stage, who knows, maybe this is a three person scene…nnetheless, the words come out of my mouth before I know what I am going to say, the only words I can say in this place are this…
God help us all.
I drive home. The girls are going for another bike ride. They got new helmets at the bike store. The guy who works there apparently is really cool and told my wife she doesn’t need some big fancy bike to do her triathlon, in fact he says she’s pretty bad ass to be doing it on an old mountain bike, so she is feeling hardcore (and she should!) and my daughter apparently really likes farts because she’s singing a song about it.
They leave and I take out my balls.
Covid’s still in me. I’m still feeling a little sick today. Nothing big. And I can tell whatever it is, I’m getting better. But I take the balls out. Today I place one on my heart. And I breathe into it, imagining all of covid sucking out of me, leaving me, leaving me free and clean and whole…and I see the ball doing its thing, and I then…
I close my eyes and this the time the image of the world appears, like a globe, but it has been cleaved in half. Sliced down the middle. Severed. Inside the world are arteries and flesh and tendons.
I take the other ball, fuck this painful, and I stick it on my forehead, between my eyes. This feels like a good spot.
Suck on that Covid…
And then I see the world healed. Made whole again. Not in the shape that it was. No longer symmetrical. There’s a scar where the cut was, where the two pieces were put back together. It’s sort of misshapen. But it’s still the world. And in it people still laugh and love and eat and drink and play. Who knows how far in the future this is. But it is.
I breathe out the first blast from the first ball…and I see pink breath, the breath of sickness, I’m reminded of the descriptions of the dying — they spew their own lung tissue, a respiratory therapists says.
Then I breathe out the breath from the second ball, and I see clean, strong air. The air of the healthy. And it says to me, in this time now healthy strong breath is needed most. To keep this whole thing going. It will take healthy strong breath, to move forward, to survive, and to heal.
I can’t help but feel inspired. And when I think about the “scene” in the pcc parking lot, something connects — All of this struggle, mano y viro, mano y world. mano y mano. How easy to forget that you are not alone. If “god help us all” is what is required, well okay then, maybe it’s time to turn to god.