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Just got back from the grocery store and I am strangely euphoric.
In small part, this is because I tucked away rice, beans and ramen weeks ago. ABQ has only just begun to panic, since the schools closed last night. And a little bit is the normal headrush of buying food while hungry on payday.
Largely, though, I’m energized by crisis. I spent my twenties careening from crisis to crisis, constantly under threat of eviction or starvation or infection. I thrive in emergency. I’m about to clean my whole damn house.
Too, the daily grind in America is a long slow catastrophe. There’s nothing to do, no obvious way to save anyone, yet every day people are going hungry and getting sick and suffering. But the illusion of normalcy makes it all bearable, long enough to get drunk and go to bed again.
The world ending is not a bad thing. I don’t want people to suffer unnecessarily. But that’s the reality of most people’s days: we suffer unnecessarily! We don’t need to produce, package, market, sell, bag, and consume all this garbage. Nobody wants this.
We want to be happy. We want to have meaningful work to do for people who care about us. I know, because I wasn’t happy, so I looked up what makes people happy, and I tried it. And it’s working.
Health, peace of mind, creative pursuits, friends, family, love. Not goods and services. Not markets.
Oh, the amount of beer and cabbage in my house reminds me that Food and Drink are right up there too. For it is written:
for my money.. nothin hits the spot quite like Food, or Drink
— wint (@dril) February 5, 2015
Again, I’m not happy that people will get sick or die. Except, there was this big-ass redneck in the store wearing one of those USA shirts where the flag is like rivulets of blood running down his chest…
This dude looked at the ransacked pasta aisle and said “Can you believe, all this for the flu?” With a knowing look, like we’re in on a joke together. That guy can get sick.
Naturally, I told him this is not the fucking flu, gave him the finger and kept shopping. I must have been lit, because this dude was quite big.
I know that doesn’t make me a badass. What do I care if he’s been listening to the wrong end of TV and puts himself at risk? Except, the little old ladies in that aisle seemed grateful. Meatneck isn’t the one endangered by his stupidity. They are.
Drove home just screaming out the van window: “IT’S TIME! GET READY, IT’S FUCKING HAPPENING!” Apparently I’m stoked for the apocalypse.
Obviously this one virus, with its R0 and CFR, is not the end of the whole world. But it’s a harbinger, and goddamn I love a harbinger.
The knock-on effects are impossible to predict, but here’s a guess: the market crash reveals the fact that no real value has been created since 2008. Just stock buybacks, quantitative easing, the Airbnb real estate bubble, and the SoftBank shell game.
Somewhere between a thousand and a million people are dead from COVID. I would love to think that some of our political misleaders are among them, and that Bernie is not. But his odds aren’t great either, so let’s ignore the presidency. It doesn’t affect as much as people think.
Economic depression: people lose their jobs, businesses go under, retirement funds go down the drain. The richest people are bailed out, of course. This is still America.
But we’ll all have seen it, we can’t unsee: we didn’t need to be “growing” the “economy”. Those who are most fortunate got to spend a few months playing with their kids, walking the dog, catching up on books and TV shows. Why would they want capitalism to come roaring back?
Some of us have been worse off. We’ve been caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, supporting the burnt-out doctors and nurses. And, of course, burying the dead.
Many people have gotten sick and gotten over it. From my understanding, this is the sort of virus you can build an immunity to. At least for a year or so, until it mutates again. This is the case with the four coronaviruses already endemic in the human population.
Many people have suffered greatly from this virus by the end of this year. They have survived, or they haven’t, and the sorry state of our healthcare system has become visible to all. We realize again that we are not competing individuals. We remember that our destinies are tied.
Somewhere in me there is an optimist peering through the dark glass of material reality. That part of me hopes, despite all evidence, that the supply chains will not collapse, that we will not fall prey to xenophobia and warlordism. That I can keep tweeting while the world burns.
I don’t know if that’s good or bad. What I know is that this system cannot last. The internal contradictions have become too much to bear. We need to start envisioning the world we want to live in. Because the alternative is bleak.
Anyway my hands are starting to crack from all this typing. Time to go wash them again, and moisturize, and clean the house, and make some kraut for when the fresh veg runs out. Now is not the time to despair. Now is the time to start building. That’s why I’m excited.