Note: I found these in an old drafts folder from Christmas Day, 2020. I was home during COVID. At that point, the vaccines were only a rumor. The morning was spent Zooming with relatives who lived just down the street. I found this note today and wanted to publish it as a time capsule of how things felt then.
Nostalgia is not a symptom of time passing. It is the unacknolwedged realization that we can’t go back.
I was rife with nostalgia for March in the early weeks of April.
I have no distinct memories from the month of July. I know I didn’t celebrate the 4th, but I don’t know what I did instead.
If stories are a tool for organizing sensations into biography, the repetitiveness of quarantine has made this year a narrative desert. The days are too similar to be remembered. I know there were a few dead, then a thousand. Then ten thousand. And so on.
The youth who had their future taken in 2008 have now been robbed of their present. They take revenge on their parents by attacking the past.
Prediction: the U.S. will blame individual factions for its performance. The world will see causes that are more endemic in nature. Our history books will feature political parties and state governors as characters of action. Theirs will discuss our national culture.
Exponential thinking is difficult.
Pandemics are embarrassing. They are almost impossible to assign human meaning to. And they tickle that unconquerable voice in our psyche which will never be convinced our lives have significance. We are servants of microbes.
Being home has meant being exposed, once again, to my parents’ television habits, namely, the evening news. Listening to suits discuss the power of hope, I imagine this must be how worms talk when they find one another in the stomach of a crow.
The time spent at the grocery store is now being spent studying charts from Sweden. In place of local experiences, we have global data. We have never been more connected to the world but removed from the earth.
A new metaphor for the internet: a fountain of screams. An indigestible rush of catastrophes and trivia.
In a state of emergency, even the most cherished rules can be immediately suspended. A politician’s primary job is to convince the crowd of an emergency, giving them free reign to re-write the world.
Our fears disguise themselves as pity.
It’s hard to believe we ever got along. Perhaps we’re just realizing we never really did.
If I have little faith in a more informed world being a smarter world, it stems from a belief that information is never received impartially. Cults feed on counter-evidence. Rather than avoid inconvenient facts, they rush to explain them within their own terms. The observation is made to fit a theory it would otherwise disprove. Seeing what they want to see in the data, our most cultish beliefs and tribal behaviors may only be compounded by the continued growth of available data. Buckle up.
A sinking ship still has time to argue over who should be captain. Emergencies breed messiahs then swallow them whole.