It's the tide moving in and out
It's going away. We're rounding the turn we're rounding the corner
The following is a chapter in my new book Lockdown in Hell World available now. Please consider purchasing a subscription to support this newsletter if you can.
He didn’t die. He didn’t fucking die. Motherfucker. It’s the middle of October now about a month since I turned in the final draft of this book and so much has happened you could write an entire other book about it but I’m not going to do that because I have had quite enough of the writing of books at the moment. Just the first week of the month alone was an endless onslaught of news most notable of which was our strongman president’s dozens of bungling infected henchmen puking and shitting deadly disease all over each other slipping and skating down the diarrhea covered halls of the White House like an ice slick sidewalk. But then he didn’t die. None of them died. Not even Chris Christie and that one seemed like a freebie. This is of course because the rich and powerful are afforded a level of medical care that the rest of us can only dream of. Meanwhile the number of deaths has risen over 220,000 and Joe Biden is still at this late date talking about ensuring everyone has “access” to healthcare. Even in the best case scenario no help is forthcoming.
The other week I hit a low point when I saw ol’ Donny No Breath standing on the White House balcony barking out poison from his hopefully rapidly scarring lungs while saluting a departing helicopter shortly after having been released from the hospital and I realized I had crashed after a few days of excitement during which I let myself start to think that this horrific pig dick of a man might actually face one single and uniquely ironic consequence. I should’ve known better. I guess Rachel Maddow and the rest of the civility libs prayed too hard for his speedy recovery which was a whole thing we were arguing about there for a while remember that? In any case no comeuppance will be presently arriving unless he loses the election in humiliating fashion which is information you people reading this now have and I do not. What’s the future like?
In the beginning of all this I used to go haha what day is it? as like a bit but now I just say what day is it? flatly and without any sort of levity behind it. When you first gain ten pounds you might go haha I’m getting a little thick over here as a means of deflection but if you keep on gaining weight you stop joking about it and that’s just how you are now. Michelle told me just now it was Friday and it made no difference to me one way or the other like when you walk into a room and someone is watching a baseball game you don’t care about and you ask the score just to ask something. Like when you meet someone’s child and go oh how old are they? but you don’t care you just don’t know how else to speak to people.
One still even now likes to know the name of the day in any case it’s like when it’s still dark and silent out and you reach for the wall or the dresser on your way to the bathroom and so then there you are and you know what you’re bracketed by. A landmark of a kind.
That reaching out in the dark happens for me more regularly now since I go to bed so early and wake up so early and lately it’s pitch black when I do both but I refuse to turn on a light in the morning it feels like a defeat of sorts and so I go and sit on the porch and have my cigarette in the dark in the same spot I had one in the dark eight or nine hours earlier and if you don’t actively pay attention you can lose track of which end of the telescope you’re looking through.
I’ve been in the middle of one my famous attempts to “get my shit together” and “take it easy” the past couple of weeks which is a task that seems all the more pointless with nowhere to be and nothing to necessitate having oneself held together for but on the plus side I’ve managed to start finishing books again which is a lot easier to do when you can wind down into sleep over the course of a couple hours as opposed to being cold-cocked into darkness by a haymaker that comes from inside your own brain. Think of the difference between a leaf drifting slowly to the ground on the wind and an air conditioner being pushed out of a window.
Recently reports have come out about how Kirstjen Nielsen and Rod Rosenstein and Steven Miller and them made child separation at the border an objective and purposeful part of their plan for deterring migrants which is something we all knew but didn’t know know and then a couple weeks later it was reported that civil rights lawyers cannot find the parents of at least 545 children we snatched at the border so one thing I want to know at long last is this: Is it ok for me to piss in these monsters’ fucking food yet?
Elsewhere some eight million or so have “slipped into poverty” as The New York Times put it which sounds almost cute like uh oh I tripped and now I’m homeless and no second stimulus support for actual people has been passed yet and we’re almost eight months into this thing now.
I understand logically by the way that the days of the week still mean something to a lot of people including Michelle because she’s in the room we had to turn into a broadcasting studio for 3rd graders right now speaking in a different more professionally jubilant voice than the one I recognize as hers but for me and for a lot of people what does it mean anymore to be one day or the other? The signifier remains but the signified has been demeaned.
“Friday” then. Ok. If you say so pal. I seem to recall Friday but I just cannot place it.
People are bored with the virus Trump said the other day and that pretty much sums up his administration’s approach to this whole thing. Fuck it not my problem. Even after they all got it. People just want this all to be over with he said essentially and he’s right about that but for different reasons.
“It will go away,” Trump said at the final debate. “We’re rounding the turn, we’re rounding the corner, it’s going away.”
There have been around a thousand new deaths a day this week and something like 70,000 new cases a day for a while now and people say it’s a second wave but it doesn’t feel like that it feels like the first one is still cresting although I don’t know if it’s accurate to refer to these clusters of death as waves anymore it’s more like it’s just the tide moving in and out.