Last night a friend gave us a package of red-white-and-blue Oreos that were produced for the Olympic Games that did not happen this summer. Now they’ve been rebranded as some kind of all-purpose patriotic cookie. I ate ten of them for breakfast because time is no longer measured by clocks, only the steady drip of votes. A razor-thin margin in Nevada. Refresh. A nail-biter in Georgia. Refresh. A slow-motion drift in Pennsylvania. Refresh. A lot of places are sold out of nicotine gum.
After so many months of isolation, working the polls for seventeen hours reminded me of something important: New Yorkers are beautiful and insane.
Through the evening, the possibility of a landslide and repudiation stretched into a close race, and now it’s a nail-biter in several states. There’s no excuse for this, given all the needless death and pain in this nation. But now there’s nothing to do except to keep the faith while we count the votes.
One more day until the election. My head is garbled with stories about yard signs booby-trapped with razor blades and news that the White House is barricading itself behind a non-scalable fence in case the president’s craving for bedlam comes true. These final hours feel like pacing the halls of a hospital, waiting and bargaining. So I’m going to focus on something small and stupid tonight. It’s a juvenile ritual and I’m not proud, but it’s an undeniable feature of my year, and I might as well mark it down.
A few years ago, I started jogging to ward off the entropy of middle age. What began as a lousy replacement for cigarettes slowly became an aestheticized way to empty my head of thoughts—dusk, doom metal, and rain. By the time I round the southwest corner of Central Park, I’m about five miles into my run, and my thoughts are a distant hum. When I glimpse the name of our president on his obnoxious tower, I’m forced to think about him again, this braying mouth that has swallowed the nation’s attention. So I give his tower the finger each time I lumber past it, a satisfying if feeble echo of Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective series.
A grown man flipping the bird at a building. At first, I was mortified by just how childish I’d become, that I would allow any man to crank my lizard-brain into full swing, blotting out dignity and common sense. I’ve never made this gesture in any other situation. Yet it gradually became ritualistic and almost superstitious, something I had to do each time I rounded that corner. An old woman joined me the other day, and it was a beautiful moment of connection. Tomorrow I’ll wake up at four o’clock in the morning to help work the polls, and hopefully, the desire to delete this man’s name from our heads will carry us to more dignified times.
We stopped the clocks for an hour last night, and even though we do this every autumn without much fanfare, it still feels like a rare kind of magic. The end of Daylight Savings Time is my favorite holiday because it creates more night. And if you’re staying at a motel, you get a free hour. It’s such a beautiful thing, this annual reminder that we can tinker with our shared fictions and rules.
Changing the clocks should be the biggest celebration of the year with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving. Because if we can rearrange time, we can do whatever we want. Invent new colors. Add more days to the week. Rewind the internet to 2005. Erase the borders on maps.
In the meantime, I stare at my watch, waiting and wondering. In 48 hours, we might take a decisive step towards writing a better future—and hopefully the president’s road-raging supporters are simply the scattered last gasps of something being swept off the stage.
I’ve never enjoyed Halloween because it reminds me that I’m not very fun. Maybe it’s my childhood memories of fake cobwebs, canned moans, candy corn, and those plastic spider rings that pinched your fingers—it all feels sticky and feverish.
But I doubt anyone’s having much fun this Halloween. America hit nearly 100,000 new infections yesterday. Britain declared another lockdown tonight, joining Germany and France. A study says the president’s campaign rallies may have caused seven hundred deaths. In North Carolina, police pepper-sprayed a get-out-the-vote rally. In Texas, a group of Trump supporters in pick-up trucks swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus and nearly forced it off Interstate 35. The president cheered them at his rally. Despite these horrifying tactics by the state, voter turnout remains stupendously high, and I have faith this augers well. And there was one promising if slightly unnerving piece of news: artificial intelligence might be able to detect COVID-19 by listening to your coughs.
Tonight I’m grateful because the clocks will rewind an hour and we’ll have longer nights. And tomorrow is All Saint’s Day. Although I’m not a Christian, it’s one of my favorite days simply for its cadence—and it’s the beginning of the end of this year.
It sneaks up softly, then twists sharply: the realization that it’s going to be another sleepless night. There’s a rhythm to it. First, the tossing and denial, the hours spent skating across near-sleep, chasing the trails of happy thoughts and better times. Then comes the metallic twitch when it’s clear the brain will not tire itself out. So I sat on the sofa in the living room gloom and looked at my watch. October 30.
Devil’s Night. That’s what they called it in Detroit for a decade or two. Growing up just north of Eight Mile Road, I remember the anxiety that gripped the city in the 80s and 90s around this time of year, how the six o’clock news would advertise the number of houses that burned. This was my first understanding of how media hysteria works, the way it creates a dark scoreboard with a record begging to be broken. By the late 90s, the fires began to fade, thanks to volunteer patrols who rebranded it as Angel’s Night.
A few years ago, I mentioned Devil’s Night to my students in New York—a class of undergrads from all corners—and they blinked at me, uncomprehending as I explained it was a night devoted to setting buildings on fire. “But why?” they asked.
This morning I read an article about upscale retailers who are boarding up their windows for the election, bracing for bedlam. Maybe this is the new state of democracy in the USA. But hopefully it’s just half-heat and vapor, the result of media-manufactured anxiety that spreads like a virus.
A friend in New Orleans said the power might be out for several days after last night’s hurricane, the fifth to hit Louisiana this year. Another record broken. Its unexpectedly powerful winds were amplified by an ice storm in Oklahoma, which was fueled by a firestorm in California. Fire, ice, and wind from coast to coast, as if generated by the national tension as a pandemic rages and an election approaches.
Here in New York, it’s damp and gloomy. Deep autumn is finally here. I went for a rainy run, pausing on an empty street to admire how the skyscrapers vanished in the fog. The grey light and spectral towers reminded me of an afternoon in Michigan, maybe ten years ago. It was the last time I saw my grandfather.
I picked him up from the nursing home to see the old sights, the family plot at the cemetery and the little harbor where the Reeves once had a fishery. We drove through the flat soybean fields that stretched toward Saginaw Bay, a blank line of road I’d known since childhood. But now wind turbines straddled the fields, alien sculptures that left me feeling futuristic and a little uneasy. My grandfather often watched them from the window of his nursing home. “Sometimes I think they are graceful like ballerinas,” he said as we drove. “Other times, I think they are wicked.”
I often think about this unexpected moment of lyricism from my grandfather, and how wildly our perception can change depending on our mood or maybe just a shift in the light.
Today the White House declared victory over the coronavirus while infection rates continue to soar and people suffer. But this is the spirit of our government, a crazy-making funhouse mirror designed to leave us disoriented. “One person dies from coronavirus every ninety seconds,” said the television.
Six days until the election and color-coded maps of the nation clutter our screens while pundits outline increasingly baroque strategies for flipping states, winning battlegrounds, and carving a path to victory through shades of red and blue. It looks like half the country is burning while the other half is freezing.
Meanwhile, I try to do my work. But I keep wandering into the weeds of polling websites, compulsively refreshing the latest numbers from Pennsylvania and Arizona as if I might find revelation. The numbers look encouraging. Maybe we’ll put an end to this sorry chapter when we let a vicious clown take the wheel. It’s an awful feeling, being afraid to hope. But I’ve relied on pessimism as a protective measure for too long, only to discover it’s another warped mirror.
While puttering in the kitchen, I heard the television say that voters in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania hold an unprecedented amount of power in human history because of the garbled logic of the electoral college. “They hold the fate of the world in their hands,” said the television while I fried an egg. These are hyperbolic days. It’s an uneasy sensation, knowing something massively historical is one week away. Hackers briefly seized the president’s website, issuing a bizarre message in broken English before demanding cryptocurrency. Another hurricane is pointed at the Louisiana coast, which is unusual this late in the year.
Meanwhile, pandemic-themed advertisements for banks followed me around the city while I ran errands. They thanked me for wearing a mask and reminded me we’re all in this together. They told me it’s a great time to set up an appointment with a financial adviser. Restaurants are dragging heat lamps into the street, and for some reason, the sight of them made me want to start smoking again. I miss the ritual and unique solitude of a cigarette, a reason to step into the night chill for five minutes and stare into the middle-distance.
A medieval judge was confirmed to the Supreme Court tonight, sealing this country’s fate for years unless the Democrats can find some spine. The energies that have brought us to this point can only be expressed by a sucking of the teeth followed by a pointless scream. “She has such hollow eyes, that judge,” said my elderly neighbor when I dropped off some face masks and a gallon of water. “Nefarious forces are afoot.” Then she told me a complicated joke about a bee, hoping to lighten the mood.
I’d like to see the world through a supernatural lens like my neighbor. Maybe the world would make more sense.
Tonight I received my assignment for Election Day. I need to report to a middle school at five o’clock in the morning to help set up the machines. This means reversing my sleep schedule if I want to be halfway sensible and avoid causing an incident. So I will channel my anger into becoming a morning person this week.
A friend sent me an article about a helmet you can buy that creates its own microclimate of filtered, customized air. It inspired me to rewatch Safe, Todd Haynes’s 1995 film about a woman who becomes allergic to the modern world and maybe her life. She develops nosebleeds and has seizures. She blames the polluted air and the chemicals in the carpet. After joining a hermetic community in a “toxin-free zone” somewhere in New Mexico, she listens to their charismatic leader give speeches about cultural illness. They stop reading the papers and watching the news—not to protect their minds, but their immune systems. Everything is poison. She lives in a spare room like a prison cell, safe at last.
Twenty-five years later, this ambiguous film is no longer a cinematic metaphor now that the air is far more likely to infect us with a new disease. We wonder what it will take to feel safe. But it’s also a reminder that 1995 believed the modern world was poisonous. So did 1895. “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things,” said the designer William Morris, “the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” But I struggle to reconcile anxiety as a relative condition with the fact that the world is genuinely, objectively more insane.
Communes and off-grid living. Strange how the desire to flee the world is so deeply associated with cult logic. And sometimes it’s difficult to tell which way of living is more irrational.
Eighty-five thousand new cases reported in America yesterday, another record smashed in a year with too many records broken. Here in New York, people are still dining outside in the autumn chill, determined log as much time outdoors as possible before the weather confines us to our tiny apartments.
There aren’t many visitors to the city these days. It’s nice to have the sidewalks to ourselves, but I miss how the tourists would remind me to look up. Sometimes I’d see a family on a corner in Midtown, gazing up slack-jawed at the dizzying buildings, and I’d realize I should this more often. The gargoyles and friezes, the dignified stonework and dramatic arches that have weathered everything.