still feeling my way through this whole quarantine thing.

there are all the comforts and vices around me but I work from home so I must keep them at bay so I can be productive and creative in the mornings and in this hour of seven o’clock and I keep this 717 project on path for the last 3 days and there is much that can derail it but not really because I don’t sleep in but I have found myself sleeping in more each day and as I usually write here on these dumb fucking pages that I will get better that I will do more that I will not drink as much that I will read more and that I will take this time to focus on me and I have stopped reading the news and listen to only about 15 minutes of NPR in the morning.

I have started to think about what I can do after this insidious monster has passed us by. there will be so many who are without work, it will be time to read The Grapes of Wrath again or perhaps a re-imagining of that tale put in modern times and starting with the end of the quarantine; this idea just came out of this whole mass of words and tiptoeing around self-loathing and self-affirmation; but what else do I have now? a lot more than many, I will admit. it even seems that now I have more in regards to punctuation as this note goes along; there is more form, more function, more purpose after the opening paragraph that is full of nonsense like “full of nothing” and there is Cobain singing in my ears, “I’m anemic royalty” and “distill the life that’s inside of me” and the meaning of lyrics and music changes with such times as does the meaning of literature; in my self-absorbed moments of isolation, I think about how my novel may need some more tweaks because the world has changed as such that there is far more unity than there was in any other time over the last two decades; but I think that is only because all we hear is that people are dying and everyone has a similar chance at death or knowing someone who has died or knowing someone who is at high risk of getting infected and dying; as such, we are on our phones…what the fuck do I know about “we”? I am on my phone to my parents 3 times a week, I call my sibs a couple times a week, just the other day I talked for fifteen minutes with a colleague I haven’t seen in five years; maybe there is something in the recreation she chose in the before-times: camping. how about all of us who take this isolation thing seriously take turns going to national parks with our co-quarantined people for a week to re-set, to commune with nature, to get us away from this nightmare that we cannot wake up from; here’s the thing: there likely wouldn’t be too many people who would take this opportunity, such is the mania about places where other possibly infected people have been.

“Somewhere I have heard this before
In a dream my memory has stored
As defense I’m neutered and spayed
What the hell am I trying to say?”

                                                   (Kurt Cobain, “I’m On A Plain”)