Tag / pandemic

by Edward Champion

The Other Side of Being Kind

Being kind requires a bold willingness to perceive the most invisible and vulnerable souls as human beings. But our ability to connect with others and grasp grim realities has been compromised by the pandemic and the performative and self-serving vagaries of social media.

This happened just before the pandemic.

I met her as I was heading to a bar after hitting quite a few other ones. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to the other bar. She was in her early thirties. Her dark hair flowed down her shoulders in a tangled and confused mess. She wore several layers of mismatched clothing and she moved in the somewhat jerky and protective manner of someone who was accustomed to being hurt and demeaned on a daily basis. Occasional winces. A thin arm that often popped up to protect herself even as she made a valiant good faith attempt to connect. I could tell that she was someone who had been very open with people before she had fallen on hard times. Her limpid eyes singled me out and she seemed to see a tenderhearted light in me. She said hello. I said hello back. And we talked.

She sang me a song, one she had written, and she had a beautiful voice. She told me that she had been homeless for months and that she didn’t have any place to sleep. She told me a few things about herself and she seemed to me a pretty decent and severely hurt soul. She told me that she was very hungry. So I took her to a bodega to buy her a hero. She had been in New York for a few months and she had stayed on the streets the entire time, but nobody had bought her a hero before. She was clearly unfamiliar with how sandwiches worked in Brooklyn bodegas. She thought that I was buying her a gyro and she asked for sprouts. The guy at the bodega, seeing her and me, gave me a wink and a thumbs up. And that creepy assumptive gesture really pissed me off. Because I had no designs. The only thing I wanted to do was to help her. Probably because I was lost myself.

I could smell her pungent odor. So I said, “Would you like a shower?” I told her that I had some leftover shampoo because I had just shaved off my latest beard and she could use the shampoo to clean her hair. She said that she trusted me and we went to my apartment. I made sure she had a fresh bar of soap. I made sure she had a fresh towel and luckily I had a brand new toothbrush for her to use. Then she finished cleaning herself up and got dressed and opened the door and emerged from the bathroom and I offered her a beer and she jumped on me and tried kissing me with an almost animalistic instinct, the kind of thing you do when you really need to survive. I gently pushed her away. She offered me sex in exchange for crashing at my pad and, when I was making my bed up for her, she tried to go down on me and she tried to move my hand on her body. And I stopped her and I said, “No, that won’t be necessary. Please. I’m not that kind of man. You can stay here tonight unconditionally.”

I did, however, record her singing. Because when she first walked into my apartment, she saw one of my microphones mounted high in the main room and she wanted to sing. But she didn’t have a phone. And she didn’t have an email address. And so I have this recording of her singing that I’m not going to share with anyone and, I suppose, if she ever contacts me again, I can give it to her. Then I made sure she was comfortable in my bed while I crashed on the couch.

I only got bits and pieces of her story, but I learned enough about her to know that pretty much every other man she’d met had used her and that the quid pro quo she had offered me was pretty much par for the course. And I hated myself for not being able to do more for her. But at the very least, I could treat her with dignity and make sure she was fed and showered and had a MetroCard with a few rides on it. She declined my offer of breakfast.

She said that I was a very cool person. And I told her that I wasn’t that cool. I asked if she had gone to a shelter and she said that she had, but that it hadn’t worked out. I did my best to urge her to call her family, offering my phone. But she declined. I asked her what she’d be doing that day. She said that she’d be spending the day wandering around Times Square. And it broke my heart. But at least I could help her for one night and treat her with a kind of respect she didn’t usually receive. I asked her if she wanted one of my books. Something to read while she tried to survive another day. And she slipped my copy of Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? under her coat — largely because she thought the idea of a “frog hospital” was very funny. When I escorted her to the subway station, she told me that she felt it was going to be a very good day. And I really hope it was for her. When we parted ways, I spent some time thinking about her for a while, hoping that she would get back on her feet, wondering if I did enough. But I did the best that I could with what I had.

I was shaken by what happened, in part because there was a time in my life not long ago (and maybe even not far in the future) in which I could have been some version of this woman. And it has me wondering if my sincere efforts at kindness arise in some way from a baleful solipsism. I feel uneasy about chronicling all this because, even in mentioning the facts here, I fear that I have painted myself as a hero. But I’m far from a hero. I’m just a wildly flawed human being.

That morning, I got a call from my incredibly sweet and deeply spiritual friend. She has an uncanny instinct for checking in on me at the right moments. And I apparently possess the same timing with her. I told her what happened. We got to talking about how so many people who mete out benevolent gestures towards the marginalized are besmirched. My wise friend reminded me that there have been many saints in human history who have been inexplicably belittled and badmouthed. One can look no further than Hippolytus’s castigation of Pope Callixtus I. Pope Callixtus I, an incredible bishop who is justly celebrated by the Catholic Church, was condemned because he extended absolution and forgiveness to those who had committed sexual transgressions. He was upbraided simply for having the stones and the instinct to be merciful. I certainly do not consider myself to be a saint and I am often not sure if I am a good person, although I certainly try to be. In chronicling the details, at least as I perceived the situation, I am wondering if I am not acknowledging my faults or even fully reckoning with my privilege. Could I have stopped the woman from kissing me faster? Yes, but I was extremely surprised and very tired and thus slightly delayed in my response. Could I have done more for her? Maybe, but I had just paid off a huge bill. The one thing I knew that night was that I had the ability to help someone and that I couldn’t bear the thought of this woman sleeping on the streets. How many times has any New Yorker passed by one of the countless thousands of people who need our help, not once considering their perspective? Is my good act diminished by other actions in which I have kept my head down on the subway when someone has asked me for help? Am I truly doing enough to help other people when there are other times in which I don’t have the energy for it?

The problem with being kind is that we are inevitably forced into a situation in which our actions are perceived as pious absolutism and further promoted on social media. I think of all the self-aggrandizing TikToks in which people depict their professed acts of kindness for likes and follows. It is the same perceptual problem that we see in those who we deem evil: namely, that evil people are incorrigible monsters who are incapable of change. Both hard archetypes fail to account for the vaster middle ground that all human character is rooted in. Yet we must be good. And that goodness must emerge by unprompted natural instinct.

In Phenomenology of Perception, existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty believed that “living” was defined by what he deemed “circumscribed absences,” which is to say, in plain English, that heartfelt life and everyday behavior both contain certain qualities that can only be understood through the body and by the physical gestures from which we assign and interpret motivation:

The meaning of a gesture thus ‘understood’ is not behind it, it is intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by the gesture…[i]t is arrayed all over the gesture itself — as, in perceptual experience, the significance of the fireplace does not lie beyond the perceptible spectacle, namely the fireplace itself as my eyes and movements discover it in the world.

If Merleau-Ponty is correct, it’s quite possible that what we comprehend as “being kind” can only be interpreted through the structure of the world. But if the structure of the world leaves little room for expressive variation — and during the pandemic, we find our faces covered by masks, our bodies increasingly removed from public space, and we leave far too many in the cold — we seem forever fated to be enmeshed within a structural construct hostile to natural kindness in which we have no control. If the structure of our world is further vitiated by the vicious construct of social media — itself an imperfect representation of tangible experience and palpable reality that rewards self-serving networkers and the savage wolf pack mentality — then the benison of a kind gesture becomes lost in the miasma of blind spots and a failure to grasp human totality — this at a time when we really need to know and feel it most if we hope to solve our numerous social ills. Perhaps the natural instincts of the human heart are too volatile and too foggy for anyone to entirely trust. Perhaps the structure of the world can never be altered, particularly since empathy has been increasingly politicized. The cruelty is the point when the point should be all about the kindness.

by Edward Champion

Decline of a Wandering Brooklynite

Back in late December, I lost a vital part of myself. One year into the pandemic, these antisocial conditions have lobotomized us. We need to start being honest about the toll that this is having on our mental health and wellbeing.

My friends know me as someone who can easily locate some recherche venue in a city I’ve just set foot into for the first time. Even without GPS, I can usually drive my way to where I need to be. It’s a blind instinct. The seeds for this sense of direction were planted when I was four years old. There was a large map of Santa Clara County hanging on my bedroom wall and I memorized all the streets to pass the time. I asked my mother to order more free maps from AAA and I scooped up these new geographical sectors with relish, happily adding these fresh streets to the spatial depository of my ravening mind. My mother was someone who could get easily lost. But I had traced the clover leaves and followed the construction of new freeways with my little fingers. I had calculated the shortcuts that got you to your destinations faster. At four years old. A few years later, I would sneak out of the house and spend the entire day bicycling to areas on the map that I was curious about. I once got into trouble when a neighbor ratted me out after discovering that I had high-tailed it six miles away. I’ve always felt wanderlust was something vital that binded you to a community. My heart flows with a great hunger to investigate every nook and cranny of any neighborhood I live in.

I learned yesterday that the pandemic has destroyed this essential part of me.

There was a place in Queens that I needed to be at. Anybody who lives off the 2 line in Brooklyn knows that the easiest way to get there is through one simple transfer move. In the Before Times, that free-wheeling maskless epoch now so inconsolably long ago, the switch between Hoyt and Hoyt-Schermerhorn was as easy as breathing oxygen. You’d shuttle up the stairs from the 2, walk a few blocks over, and descend into the subway system’s subterranean bowels to catch the A.

But yesterday, as I squinted into the early morning light, I found myself incapable of recognizing whether I was north or south. I didn’t seem to know where I was at. It was shocking. The stores along Fulton Street seemed as foreign to me as they were fourteen years ago, when I had first mapped Downtown Brooklyn’s bustling blocks onto my mind, pleasantly amazed that I was ambling down the same strip that Spike Lee and Ernest Dickerson had captured in beautiful black-and-white in She’s Gotta Have It.

Perhaps I was fated to feel confused because I had excavated four pairs of pants from the closet that very morning — slacks and trousers that I had not worn in a good two years and that I had replaced with more elastic jeans — and discovered that only one pair still fit me. My waistline had expanded under lockdown by a few inches. It was bad enough that the pandemic had saddled me with a burgeoning mass of neck fat that had nestled uninvitingly beneath my chin. I lost a lot of weight seven years ago and had always kept it off through exercise. But the exercise bike in my apartment, which I once used regularly with gusto, has lost any allure and now feels as tedious as taxes. My three hour constitutionals had been denied me. My long walks through New York didn’t feel fun anymore because, even with the double mask protection, my glasses still fogged up. Whenever I leave the house, my only choice to stumble blindly into a metropolis I love but can now no longer see, with everything five feet ahead of me rendered into some blur, the muddy vista of a previous city that now lurks only on the mnemonic fringes. The random social encounters and the trips to new places no longer exist. So any saunter feels tiresome. The only geography that most of us have are the cells we now call home.

Earlier this week, Ellen Cushing noted our collective decline in The Atlantic, pointing to an epidemic of people forgetting words or names and succumbing to absent-mindedness. Like Cushing, I can trace the decline of my motivation and my productivity to the grim cold of late December, in which the risk of hypothermia became the prerequisite for safe socializing. I saw my friends less. I dated less. Even when I did the math to meet someone in socially distanced real life, I would find that the date or the friend would backpedal at the last minute, disrespecting the two weeks of self-quarantine I had subjected myself to before meeting anyone (and only meeting one person at a time). Life increasingly became a relentlessly bleak calendar of entombed solitude. I would go weeks or months without smoking or drinking, only to take one or both up again. Anything to change the grim and hopeless cadences of routine. My mind and body atrophied. My progress on my audio drama and the wild novel that I had drafted in a gleeful three-month summer frenzy stalled. Without the social glue to keep me effervescent, there really wasn’t much point in doing anything. It didn’t help that looking for work was becoming increasingly demoralizing. I had always been able to land a job before with a phone call or, in a few daring cases, showing up in person, cracking jokes, and introducing myself. I was still able to play guitar. I started learning keyboard, but found that this was increasingly pointless. I obtained a ukulele at the start of this month, learned it fairly fast, and that lifted my spirits a bit. I became prolific on TikTok in an attempt to remedy some of the loneliness of living alone. I read books at a ridiculous rate, slamming back nearly a book a day during the month of February. But even that part of me surrendered to dismal pandemic perdition.

One year of this. Who knows how many more months? We weren’t built to live like this. But we have no other choice.

But I’m most disturbed by the fact that I can’t find my way in a city anymore. Even one that I’m deeply familiar with. I’m terribly alarmed that something that was as vital to me as food and water seems to be permanently lost. While Cushing ends her Atlantic essay on a sanguine note, I’m not sure if my synapses or hers are as plastic as she thinks they are. Even if we somehow hit the magical goal of mass vaccination by the summer, we cannot deny the reality that our collective mental health will take years, maybe even decades, to repair. Maybe there’s a case to be made for human beings showing more kindness and understanding to each other, given that we all know that nobody has escaped this pandemic without some kind of crippling toll. But I’m not so sure. Those who have been lucky enough to be vaccinated have developed signs of what I call “vaccine privilege,” where they are boasting about how invincible they are and eagerly making plans to be social while leaving the unvaccinated sad sacks in the dust. Selfishness seems to be an ineluctable part of the grim equation, perhaps more so now than ever. And we can’t even begin to rebuild our social fabric unless we relearn how to be there for other people and to include them. But many of us can’t or won’t be able to do this. Our vital parts have been deracinated. The qualities that once made us distinct are trapped in amber. What kind of community can anyone build when our personalities are so lobotomized?

by Edward Champion

The Ghosts of Flatbush

Nine months after the pandemic started, the good people in my neighborhood have turned into energy-reserving ghosts.

The sun set only a few hours ago and my hood is quiet. The building across from me is dark, with only half of the windows revealing the dependable orange glow of incandescent light. In one window, I see a Christmas tree. Nobody blasts music. Nobody even washes their cars anymore. The streets are lined with metal carcasses that don’t seem to move for alternate side parking, which is rarely enforced anymore.

Nobody in the building across from me utters a peep. I wonder if some of the residents have left, unable to pay their rent. Or maybe they lie there waiting. Waiting in the dark for the pandemic to be over. Waiting for some hope that neither the city nor the state nor the nation can give them.

There are two kids I once saw on a regular basis in one of the windows. They jumped up and down on their bed sometime around ten and engaged in pillow fights. And they did this through October. When I went into my kitchen to pour a nightcap, I would watch them, feeling some hope that joy and life had not died in Flatbush. But I haven’t seen them in the last six weeks. And I worry about them. I worry that they have been forced out of their unit or that their ability to make the most of a bad situation had reached a natural end point.

Even the guys who used to hang out for hours on the corner are gone. Last year, they stood there until December, pulling hoodies over their heads and chatting and smiling through shivers on chilly days. They likewise departed the streets sometime after Halloween. The only trace that they ever existed are a few bottles left on the sidewalk from their outdoor drinking. The only sign of their conviviality. Nobody has touched the bottles. In ordinary times, I would probably dispose of the trash. But I can’t find it within me to do so. Because those bottles are the only remaining indicator that people were there. I suspect that other neighborhood neatniks, the many here who silently pine for our old ways to return, feel the same way. The empty bottles serve as a memorial. A memorial to how the hood used to be. To how it might be again.

Over Thanksgiving, there was a lot of festive music played in my building. But nobody blasts any music now. They preserve the funereal silence of waiting and not knowing and staying quiet. Of knowing that we’re at the beginning of another crest of COVID infections and who knows how many deaths. Of understanding this is just the beginning of a dark time. A repeat of what went down here in March. The ambulance sirens are more frequent. They often wake me up at 3 AM. And I always think of the person inside ushered at high speeds to an ICU. My eyes moisten as I understand that the patient will probably die, leaving further grief for the patient’s friends and family.

The fight has gone out of people. We’ve accepted this as the new normal. We’ve accepted Trump’s indefensible inaction. We’ve accepted Governor Cuomo’s present “policy” to pledge “very strong action” while not actually doing anything. While keeping indoor dining and gyms open. Sure, there’s a vaccine on the horizon, but it won’t be here for months. We’re not even halfway through this long pain. Every other developed nation has a monthly stimulus check. We have nothing. Unemployment if we’re lucky.

So we sit in our apartments like ghosts. Because to inhabit the corporeal in any form is more exhausting these days, even when we are not in motion. And we need all the energy we can get. Because it’s going to be a long time before things return to normal again.

by Edward Champion

Robert Carroll: Brooklyn’s Scumbag Scrooge

State Assemblyman Robert Carroll has proposed one of the most unjust tax schemes that New York State has seen in sometime. A $3 delivery surcharge would needlessly penalize struggling families, the disabled, the elderly, and anybody else in New York who is hanging on by a thread.

I’ve spent the last two days trying to tame a great rage I have towards an entitled millennial New York State Assemblyman named Robert Carroll — or “Bobby4Brooklyn,” as this clueless asshat likes to call himself on Twitter. (Sorry, Bobby, but styling your handle like the title of a Prince song doesn’t make you any less whiter.) But I cannot find it within my heart to stifle my indignation towards a remarkably insensitive and entitled dickhead who clearly does not recognize the struggles of people with disabilities, economically disadvantaged New Yorkers who are hanging by a thread for dear life, and the elderly, who are often barely getting by on social security and pensions. Carroll has proposed one of the cruelest and most poorly devised bills I’ve observed in some time. And this dimwitted weasel has the effrontery to call himself a Working Families Party candidate!

In the middle of a pandemic, as many people have been forced to stay indoors and remain socially isolated and thus order packages to get what they need, Carroll has had the audacity to propose a $3 surcharge for any delivery in New York City. The bill — specifically, A06078 — does provide an exception for “essential medical supplies, food deliveries and for those using supplemental nutrition assistance program, special supplemental nutrition for women, infants and children and any other successor program,” but this still leaves a woefully gargantuan set of essential items that will still cause the underprivileged to pay up. Got a deal on a winter coat? Pay $3. Or how about some household goods you need to keep your home in tidy shape? Pay $3. Need a specialized tool for your job that you can’t get elsewhere? Pay $3. Your landlord won’t fix the radiator and you need a heater to stay warm in the winter? Pay $3.

You may be thinking, “Well, $3. That’s not that big of a deal.” Well, how many times have you been forced to order something online when it isn’t available in the store? Or when you’ve feared braving the teeming throngs of people crowding a supermarket? Moreover, if Amazon decides to split up your delivery across multiple packages, would you have to pay $3 for each separate delivery? That would seem to be the case based on the language of the bill. You could easily pay $12 if the algorithm decided to split up a bulk purchase into four separate deliveries. And for many people struggling in New York, $12 could mean the difference between paying this month’s electricity bill or playing Russian roulette with Con Ed, hoping that they won’t shut the lights off after months of falling behind on the payments.

This bill is also a slap in the face to small businesses, who are often forced to shell out for UPS and FedEx in an effort to keep their customers happy and fend off the big online behemoths. Amazon has succeeded in undercutting small businesses by pricing down goods at a reduced profit margin. The cash-strapped New Yorker is often forced to go with the cheaper deal. But what if that $3 surcharge — theoretically on every item — is simply too much for someone looking for loose change under the couch to stay alive? Well, they may go to the retail stores. They could clog the parking lots, creating the very congestion that Carroll, in his infinite imperiousness, claims to be fighting.

Our fundamental goal here in New York is to prevent people from socially congregating as much as possible. According to the Washington Post, social gatherings are leading the COVID spread. The spread has been so disastrous that Governor Cuomo was forced to cap social gatherings at ten people. Moreover, in an age in which three dollars is the new thirty dollars, Carroll’s bill is a repugnant war on the working class. All the funds generated by this would go to bailing out the MTA — which, not to put too fine a point on it, hasn’t exactly been known for its financial scrupulousness. Disabled people — who rely on deliveries in order to survive and who cannot use the subway easily due to the fact that only 77% of stations are accessible — are now being asked to bear the financial brunt of a public transportation service that has declared itself enemy to their mobility. And what about the immunocompromised? Surely, it’s an unfair financial burden on them as well.

Carroll clearly hasn’t thought out these obvious drawbacks to his bill. The $300 million he hopes to generate annually from a bill aimed at regular people would be a drop in the bucket for Amazon, which Carroll hasn’t targeted and which made $96.1 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2020. If you asked Amazon to pick up the $30 million tab, that would be .3% of just one quarter of revenue. For the struggling New Yorker who has only $90 to buy an $89 winter coat, that would mean a $92 bill that he could not pay.

Robert Carroll is, in short, a heartless Scrooge for even considering this punitive scheme. He has received righteous pushback on Twitter and is too much of a cowardly Jacob Frey type to man up and address the criticism and walk back the bill. Since social media opened up a glorious can of whoop-ass on Carroll and his foolish and unjust bill, Carroll has tried to mask his assault on the working class by aligning himself with a “tax the rich” campaign and hypocritically stumping against state pension dollars divested to gas an doil.

Well, it won’t work, Bobby. We now know that you’re an enemy of the people. We know that you’re a Scrooge and that you’re actively contributing to undermining public health during a pandemic.

If Carroll manages to pass this bill, here is my promise. I will put my energies into supporting any 44th District candidate who will primary him. I will knock on doors to expose this charlatan and tilt votes. I will do everything in my power to ensure that Carroll loses his seat.

Asking the people — especially disabled people who cannot use the subway — to take a tax hit for a corrupt and bloated agency that requires significant reform is an unconscionable and morally unjust act. You surrender any right to call yourself a defender of the people when this bill is your “big idea.”

So what’s it going to be, Bobby? Are you going to walk this vile bill back and admit that you did not think this thing through? As a man of Brooklyn, I will be the first person to defend you if you do so.

Or will you continue to remain smug and stubborn? Will you continue to believe that you know what’s best for the people of Brooklyn? If that’s the case, I’ll be happy to volunteer my time and energy to become a significant factor to ending your political career with a sizable turnout in the next election.

The choice, Bobby, is yours.

by Edward Champion

The Limits of Escapism

It’s been nine months in isolation. The winter is coming. The lockdowns are heightening. If our ability to escape from this deadly reality is compromised, how can we be expected to live?

I should be laughing and shaking off the sediment. Feeling joy roiling from my rouse heart. Finding a liminal space to land. The television show I am streaming is comedic and should make me happy in theory, but it is too close to a life I once lived, one now presently impossible to live. The images are too vivid, too palpable, too recognizably amateurish, frustratingly reproducible only nine months before. I wish I could succumb to this work of art, giving myself over to it completely. I see what it is trying to do and, deep down, I commend it. In another year, I would be chortling over its clever premise and singing its praises and telling anyone who will listen to me that this is something that speaks the truth and is worth the journey. But I can’t. And I feel ashamed that I cannot give this show the attention it clearly deserves. As the ghosts of how I once lived melt across my monitor, as the images of a quotidian life that will not be possible for at least another year haunt my starved soul, I feel the tug of deep grief. And I am shocked to find myself crying.

This wasn’t the case a few months ago. Who knows how I’ll react six months from now?

These days, I can’t handle the images of New Yorkers slapping each other on the back and talking within inches of each other. The casual cigarette exchanged from one person to another just outside a bar. The hugs. All the hugs. All the physical contact. The kissing. The banter. The ability to walk into a random building and get into trouble and have an adventure. The small talk. The eccentrics and the true originals in the subway. The packed elevators. All of this is now gone. Sure, you can find bits of it here and there. There are still buskers in the Village. There are still dependable outliers shouting obscenities in the streets. There are still friends you can see if both of you take a rapid test the day before and the results are negative and you haven’t seen anyone for a week. But even then you are taking a calculated risk. You see people escaping the cold into enclosed tents with heat lamps, tempting fate as they drop their masks for a meal and the underpaid and undertipped waitstaff nervously serves them, some of them terrified out of their minds. Outdoor dining was fine when there was plenty of air and you could feel the warm sun pour onto your skin and you felt that the setup was reasonably safe for you and the servers who braved this new world. But despite many enticing invites, I can’t bring myself to take the plunge for this new “outdoor dining,” which is decidedly indoor.

We all know that existence won’t be fully restored for a while. Yet we try to live anyway, often forgetting that we are in a pandemic.

After ten minutes of watching the show, I can’t watch any more. I’ve reached my limit. Perhaps it is the documentary quality that is too real. Perhaps I recognize myself as a potential participant within the frame. What I know is that I cannot escape into a world that bears strong resemblance to what my universe used to be. If I am seeing New York from twenty years ago, it sits sufficiently enough in the past for me to enjoy it. If it is science fiction or fantasy, particularly if there are preposterous creatures, even better. But if it is true to me, if there is a strong likelihood that I could meet and know these people in my former regular life, then I find my heart pleating and retreating, tightening into a balled bundle of wistful tension. I can read books and listen to podcasts. Because I am using my imagination and using my memory on my own terms. But the stark visuals of once ubiquitous panoramas are just too much.

I am fatigued by the screens. I have grown exhausted by the Zoom meetings. If there is a potential romantic partner, I insist on voice only for that vital vetting. Because the voice is as close to human presence as we can get these days. It’s a ludicrous burden to get dressed up and tidy up everything that’s going to be within the camera’s range if you’re not even going to meet. Better to talk with a prospective paramour in your boxers. Or nothing at all if you’re spending the endless days going commando.

It goes without saying that we were never meant to live such a disembodied life. Theatre has survived for centuries because there is no better substitute for emotional intimacy other than face-to-face contact. Our best moments happen in the flesh. And that is no longer possible.

The reason so many of us have ordered so many items by mail is not merely because we need them. It is not blind consumerism. It is not merely because there’s a certain comfort in getting a new item by mail. A new item in the mail is like a present, particularly if one forgets ordering it, which is often what happens to me. If we can’t have other people, what we can have in our lives is something tangible, something we can touch. I ordered a dozen board games just so I could feel the cards and grasp the tokens and roll the dice and clomp around the splayed out board as if I had four other friends in my apartment. (I was fortunate to have a friend come by to play some of these games with me. But, for the most part, I’m carrying out imagined multiplayer scenarios on my own. This is ridiculous and possibly a little pathetic.)

Home used to be something you returned to. Now it is a place you stay. For living. For work. And no matter how comfortable or ideal your home may be, no matter how much you have, there comes a point for anyone in which escapism has its limits. How many of us will crack permanently before we have a nationally distributed vaccine?