Covid-19

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool”.
~Lester Bangs, Almost Famous

I am as about as uncool of a person as they come. Seriously. And so I’m sharing some of the ‘currency of the uncool’ with y’all, my fellow passengers on this E-ticket ride called life. And here’s what I’ve noticed lately:

Every damn person, myself included, thinks they’re doing this pandemic thing wrong.

Not that there’s a “Living Your Best Life During A Global Catastrofuck” handbook, which I personally view as a terrible oversight on God’s part and I will have words with her about it when this thing is over;  but, you can get goaded by social media (which tragically, has been our only glimpse into the void) into thinking there’s a right way to be living your life right now and when I say ‘you’——I mean me.

In the beginning I pretty much winged it since it was my first pandemic and just like the rest of the world I was making shit up as I went along. I baked an embarrassing tonnage of chocolate chip cookies and distributed them to my neighbors— like life jackets on the Titanic. I mean, who doesn’t want to be discovered ten thousand years from now with the fossilized remnants of chocolate chip cookies as proof of their last meal?

It all felt very dystopian future meets apocalyptic end-of-times——if you’re living inside of a Nora Ephron movie.

Once my sweat pants got tight, I looked at Instagram and switched to gardening, and home improvement (you guys, my thumb has never been greener, my silverware shinier, or my back sorer) in-between Zoom calls.
Zoom.
Don’t get me started.
I could write an entire book on the way Zoom has simultaneously saved and ruined my life.
It has kept me connected in the weirdest way imaginable by lulling me into a false, Jetsonian sense of intimacy with one-dimensional images of people I used to be able to hug, smell and taste (don’t ask). It has introduced me, or rather my head from the neck up, to people I’ve never met; revealed my questionable taste in home decor to strangers I would never invite inside my house——and saved my ass as far as work is concerned.

Have you noticed? Some people are Zoom naturals. It’s a thing. 

They glow and effuse with breathtaking ease. Their ideas flow with an effortless acuity, in long, erudite monologues that sound like they were written by Aaaron Sorkin.
Not me.
I show up more times than I care to admit, tragically unprepared, mumbling and laughing inappropriately, with my hair styled by a helicopter, whitening strips on my teeth and an adult beverage in my coffee cup.

So yeah, Zoom.

And as grateful as I practice being for my health and life in general, I have to admit to a certain sense of Ground Hog’s Day claustrophobia. Every day has begun to bleed into the next. There’s not much to look forward to. There are no weekends anymore. Don’t ask me what day it is or the month, I do not know. It’s warm, there are flowers, and if I owned a bikini I could wear it—so I’m guessing summer.

 All I know for sure is that today ends in a Y.

Another thing I’ve noticed lately that I’m sure is probably true for you too— All I do is work.

I write, Zoom, shovel shit, paint shit, stain shit, clean shit, wash shit, cook shit, fix shit, edit shit, watch shit——lather, rinse, repeat. And if you’re someone who is home schooling kids, well, we are not in the same league, let alone the same zip code! And I thank you for your service and will insist you go straight to the head of the line at the Pearly Gates.

And all of this—since March!

My sister and I, agreed yesterday in one of our epic Karen bitch-seshes, not on the way California is handling Covid (because, oh bloody hell, we’re all gonna die!) but on the fact that we’ve forgotten how to have fun.
Fun. You know, that thing you do in-between work and more work and twice as much in the summer.
Fun. We’re not even doing THAT right!

But I am not alone. WE are not alone in our Narnia of despair. If you haven’t seen this already, it from Saint Glennon 0f Doyle, author of Untamed and patron saint of all women embracing their inner cheetah while confined to house arrest.

She gets it.

I think—somewhere in the middle of last week—I hit a wall.

I am sad. I feel lost and aimless in my home most of the day. I am cranky with my people. Even though we’re together all day—I’m somehow gone. I’m claustrophobic in this covid world. The news makes me terrified and so full of rage I want to scream. I wander around all day with this nagging feeling that I’m not doing enough writing enough helping enough creating enough parenting enough wifeing enough BEING enough—that I’m wasting my time, my hours, my days, my life.

Is it just me? And if so I was just joking I’m fine, totally carpeing the hell outta these diems and all that shit.

Crawling along.
Gonna keep going.
Love you madly.

“No feeling is final.” -the magical Rainer Maria Rilke.

~Glennon

In closing, I know this:
Stillness brings up so much shit!
Perfectionism kills.
Don’t watch the news.
You must march to your own damn drum.
Nap if you’re tired.
Try to belly laugh once a day.
And cookies and pie are essential to our mental health (which is the reason I’m telling myself I couldn’t find flour in a store until June).

And when I get twitchy and snarly, I will report myself to whoever is in charge of me (besides my husband who has been my quarantine roommate and is struggling with combat fatigue) which is usually my sister or my BFF—for an attitude adjustment and yet another virtual hug.

Find your people and report in as much as needed.

I love you. Carry on. Crawling is fine.

xoxJB

I don’t know about you guys but I’m exhausted.

I’m all at once raw and stoic, fearful and fearless, feeling the big sadness, exploring the pockets of grief that show up unexpectedly, expressing absolute candor and telling lies of omission because, let’s face it, it’s easier. All of this happens in the space of a day if I’m lucky—or an hour if I’m low on sleep.

I. AM. DYING. TO. WORRY. ABOUT. SOMETHING. OTHER. THAN. DYING.

So, when I reached out to my dear friend of thirty-something years, my hairdresser, to see how they were doing, and found them struggling to survive, (let’s not be overly dramatic here) make ends meet, I turned my attention toward a much more familiar obsession. My hair. Because hair is everything.

I can feel all of the rapid eye blinking virtually changing the direction of the jet stream as you read that, and if you think that’s bad, then you should stop reading any further because I am not the spirit animal you seek.

I am shallow. Some may call me a heartless turd even as the news breaks my heart every goddamn day. But I tell you guys all the truths. Even when they’re complicated. Because I know deep down, that we are all more alike than we are different. And that spending a few hours being “normal” felt like redemption. Like an extra large scoop of ice cream in hell.

Anyhow, read on if you can.
xox

Dear Pearl-Clutching-Barbara’s,

I did something subversive today that I’m reticent to tell you about. BTW: Reticent and I seldom, if ever, breathe the same air, so this is weird. 

I drove almost one-hundred miles each way to do a cocaine drop, run guns to the border, get a haircut.

A haircut. Something that I’ve done without a scintilla of forethought and a minimum of fanfare (although that purple fringe did make me want to throw a parade) every 45-60 days—of my entire adult life.

Now, before you go and choke on your kale salad, hear me out. 

About a week ago I woke up and looked in the mirror only to find Phil Spector – The Trial Years, staring back at me. 

You see, I’ve spent most of my early Covid-19 weeks congratulating myself on listening to the thunder rumbling in the distance. I, with my keen sense of the obvious, sensed a lockdown was imminent so I bought enough supplies, food, and such (although, full disclosure, the voices in my head did not warn me about the toilet paper shortage and I’m pissed—irony alert!) to take care of a traveling circus, which, if you knew us, is not such a stretch. I have also learned in the past few months how to use Zoom, paid for the upgrade, and purchased a hot spot to support my janky office internet.

But, (and this is a bone of contention I’m picking with the rumbling thunder) I have come to realize that the high maintenance haircut I’d gotten recently was a mistake. In the beginning, it was a fun and flirty 70’s shag that played up my natural curl. Soon, it transitioned to The Rachel, and now it’s so big and unruly that if I don’t arm wrestle it into blow-dried submission—it scares dogs and small children whose company I looked forward to on my walks every day. 

Yet, I feel bad about feeling bad about my hair.

Everyone gets outraged when you get off-topic. It’s a literal pandemic out there! People are dying!

I get that. I do. How could I NOT? But I cannot stay in the big sadness 24/7. I just can’t. I’m still alive, and the anxiety will kill me before the virus ever does if I don’t refocus my attention sometimes. 

So hair.

Over the weekend I spoke to my stylist via the dark web like all good subversives do. In reality, it was by text but you get the gist.

“How r u doing?” I inquired.

“Ok.” They replied.

“Just ok?” I winced, knowing I could be opening a Pandora’s Box of Pandemic Misery.

“Yeh…I’m out of money.” 

Gut punch. I saw the three little dots waiver…then disappear. Uncertain what I could do to help my mind jumped on its habitrail. I could send them a check for the haircut I’d missed, which I knew they would never cash and send back with a mildly sardonic note and a loaf of freshly backed banana bread, OR…

“When can we do this very forbidden thing?” I asked like I was holding Liam Neeson’s daughter for ransom. Months went by. Okay, minutes, but when it feels like the FBI is about to come and bust down your door, well, it feels like a long time.

“I can do it in a week,” they replied.

I don’t know why, but I was surprised.

“You can? I mean, how does that even work?” I texted back.

Are you beginning to see what a terrible criminal mastermind, rule-breaker I am? I am the worst kind of bad. I treat it like a joke and then I wait for the other person to incriminate themselves. Not really, but it started to feel that way. Texting is so weird. It is void of all nuance and sarcasm and THAT is why I am so often misunderstood. 

Anyway, they explained that they’d been mixing and delivering hair color complete with instructions to client’s doors and that they’d started to cut one person’s hair a week, behind a partition in the back of the salon while following very stringent guidelines. See you guys? Other people, in a very prohibition kind of way, had been bending the rules! (Which by-the-way would still hold no water in an argument with my mother.)

“First, it’s gonna smell like Lysol-hell in here because I disinfect the place like I’m about to perform open-heart surgery. I’m gonna take both of our temperatures when you get here, we’ll both be wearing masks and gloves (see what they did there, they didn’t suggest, they insisted) Then I’m gonna dip you in a vat of sanitizer AFTER you wash your hands and I’ll always stand behind you.” 

“Uh, okay.”

“It’s what they’re going to make us do in a few weeks anyway, only with more people so…” Their text trailed off at the thought of trying to style hair while staying alive, a skill-set that transcends any beauty college curriculum. 

“Okay, so when?”

“Wednesday,” they texted back. “It’s that day that follows that day that’s after the weekend.”

That was funny. We both sent laughing emojis.

“Hey thanks,” they texted, “This really helps me.”

“Me too! (kiss face emoji) That wasn’t a lie.

And that’s the point really, isn’t it? To help the living keep on living? 

That night I felt different about myself. I’ve been such an obedient quarantiner. I haven’t ventured further than the market, hikes, and walking the dog. But now, clearly, I am someone who runs toward the Zombies. I swim the moat. I take matters into my own hands and…I can feel the lingering stares and all the nostrils flaring out there.

STOP.

Let’s put this in perspective, shall we? I’m not storming the barricades brandishing an assault weapon in lieu of a mask— I’m getting a haircut in a level three quarantine setting.

On my one-hour-plus drive to this clandestine, undisclosed location (that I had to find on Google maps) I couldn’t help but notice the lack of traffic. It felt surreal. So did the yellow helicopter that hovered ten feet over our heads on the freeway. Three separate times, three different yellow helicopters appeared out of nowhere, hovering low over our cars while we drove underneath them.

I called my husband.

“Helicopters are tailing me!” I hyperventilated into the car’s Bluetooth. 

“What?”

“Yellow helicopters are hovering above my head on the freeway!” 

“Yellow? Well at least they’re not all black,” he laughed.

“Well, maybe the black ones are yellow now! I’ve seen this movie! This does NOT end well!”

Suddenly, the moat didn’t feel worth swimming.

My mind was reeling. I was an escaped Tribute and the Capitol was here to take me back into custody.  I had broken free and The Google had turned me in! 

Just to be clear, I don’t want to live in a dystopian world like that. 

So I hit the gas, coddiwompling toward what felt like freedom.

“You’re overreacting,” he said. (As an aside, that is just the perfect thing to say to a hysterical person, especially if you’re their husband. I’m not kidding. It immediately turns their fear—to rage, which somehow feels more manageable.)

“You’re fine.” (Again, this may be ideal for soothing a hostage-taker—just not your wife who is being harassed by helicopters.) “You’re getting a haircut not trafficking children.”

“Okay, gotta go, bad cell!”

Hi, my name is Janet. I’ve been cutting my own bangs with dull cuticle scissors after too much wine, so I broke quarantine in favor of a haircut by someone with sharp shears and a license.  

Listen, Barbaras, we were safe. The salon was empty and will continue to sit empty for another week to “rest”. My stylist lives alone. I live alone (almost). They needed the money and I needed some fresh air and open space.

I know. You’re outraged. 

But Carry On Anyway,
xox Love, Janet

I’m sitting in my den watching the news when the phone rings. Someone I love wants to be soothed. By me. I feel ill-prepared which always leads to me shoveling raw cookie dough. 

By far the question most asked of me on week one of the pandemic was was :
“Are we going to be okay?”

The uncomplicated answer was…

“Yes. But, I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, and I don’t know what that’s gonna look like.” 

Silence.

Some people who weren’t already crying started. The ones who were crying continued. That’s what happens when you ask a question you can’t imagine the answer to. You hear something you may not like, or even worse—be emotionally prepared for. 

I suggest not giving anyone, even me, that power. 

I believe in deferring to the experts. My gut and my heart. 

And I’m not gonna lie, even they had a hard time finding the truth inside all of the fear, adrenaline and cortisol coursing through me that first week. I mean, they told me I would be okay even if I got sick and died. But no matter how much you believe it in theory, that’s not something you want to put into practice— and it’s certainly not a truth you pass onto your friends when they text or call. 

So I didn’t. 

“Are we going to be okay?” They asked.

“Yes.” I simply said. “Yes, we will.” No further explanation offered. That’s when the crying stopped. 

Weeks two and three: Shit gets real.

I’m making cookies for the neighborhood. I’m answering the unasked request for cookies that came to me in a dream.

It’s barely 8 am.

A friend is talking to me on speaker-phone. “I had to delete some of my fears, she says. “I just don’t have the room for them in my head anymore!” She exclaims over the sound of my mixer. “They’ve been replaced by bigger, life or death ones now.”

Which got me to thinking; I’m sorry if I’m a bit indelicate here but don’t the things that triggered you previous to the pandemic (a sentence I never imagined writing) don’t they seem, well, ludicrous?

I mean, come on, hasn’t this put all of our pre-pandemic fears (which I won’t list here for fear of embarrassing us) into perspective?

Listen, I think we can all agree, global shaking of the Etch-A-Sketch on this level hopefully only happens once in a lifetime, and since no one can tell us for sure what the future will look like, our fears have an unbelievably limited job description these days:

Kill the virus. Do I have enough toilet paper?

And all the Karens of the world with their free-range outrage, doesn’t what you were on hold to complain to customer service about only one short month ago seem ridiculous?

People are scared, Karens.

People are dying. 

People are lonely.

People are worried and hungry and need more masks, and gowns and hand sanitizer! 

For the love of God, Karens, make yourselves useful, rage on that!

————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Week four: Adaptability.

I’m waking up…happy. What. The. Fuck. 

Who am I to be happy amid all of this death, uncertainty, and sorrow? I go immediately to the place in my brain to shut that shit down when I get stopped by curiosity. How did this happen? Three weeks ago I was waking up terrified. Am I suddenly brave? uh, no.

You know why? Because human beings are incredible creatures. 

First, we freak out, cry, hide, or run. Then we adapt. 

Eventually, we fall into a “new normal” because it’s how our brains are wired and seriously, what other choice do we have? 

Because I’ve never witnessed a “disturbance of the force” of this magnitude I’ve also never seen this level of adaptability.
It’s mind blowing. It takes my breath away. 

The creatives are back to creating.
The inventors are hard at work, as are the big thinkers and the innovators.
Zoom is connecting us in ways that were incomprehensible six months ago. 
Easter services were streamed online. Andrea Bocelli sang Amazing Grace in an empty cathedral in Milan and we all saw it. Same with the Pope holding mass in St. Peter’s. 

At seven PM every evening entire cities gather at their windows to cheer doctors as they change shifts. 

Food is still being delivered to school kids in need.
Classes continue for most students online.

My husband’s Dermo was able to diagnose his hives over the phone via a video chat. 
My doctor sent me a similar link.

People are holding happy hours on Zoom. There are video yoga classes, video meditation, video AA and mental health care. The list goes on and on and on. 

Ben Affleck held a video poker game for charity. 
Chris Martin and John Legend to name a few, have held video concerts.
Birthday caravans drive neighborhood streets with kids and balloons and singing.

The farmers market and local bakery in my sister’s neighborhood are offering $25 and $40 boxes of veggies and baked goods a couple of times a week and donating the rest. 

Adaptation—the ability to change with new conditions. To change you’re expectations and pivot. 

It looks to me like we’re all starting to get the hang of this. 

Who knows what the following weeks will bring?

Carry on and stay well my friends,
xox