Notebook

The stock market spiked in response to encouraging test trials for a vaccine. Some say it might be ready for the public early next year. I feel compelled to write this down because I want to remember this moment of optimism; time will tell if this announcement was made in good faith or simply to juice a few pharmaceutical stocks. The design of America encourages suspicious thinking. At a press conference, our president proudly said he was dosing himself with an anti-malarial drug that has no proven effect on coronavirus but might trigger a heart attack.

Maybe we’ll have a vaccine soon. Maybe the president will poison himself. Things can go either way these days.

I’ve started reading Erik Davis’s High Weirdness, a catalog of 1970s visions, paranoia, and the “strange loop of cultural play” seen through the lens of figures like Terence McKenna, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson. Seems like an appropriate companion as we enter this deeply peculiar summer.

Shadrack Chameleon – Don’t Let It Get You Down

IGL Records, 1973 | More

One of my favorite 1970s songs, heavy and plush. Although I knew this album was recorded by a few teenagers in a homemade studio in Iowa in 1973, I didn’t know much else. While searching for more details, I came across this update from 1998 that’s a beautiful blend of the banal and reassuring: “Today, Steve Fox is an electronics technician in State Center, Iowa, and also publishes analyses of social issues; Randy Berka is a genetic researcher in Davis, California, and still plays music; Jon Porter is an insurance agent in Boulder City, Nevada, and also a representative in the Nevada State Legislature; Dan Dodgen owns a retail store in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and continues to play music locally.”

They’re taking down the makeshift hospital in Central Park. Someone put masks on the status of Romeo and Juliet. Masked icons have become a new genre, an emblem appearing on statuary all over the world.

The mood is shifting in New York City. The Chinese takeout spots have pulled up their metal shutters. The florist is open. Bars are serving takeout drinks, and there’s a block party atmosphere along the Avenues as people gather among the corporate art and concrete plazas of the high-rises.

Finished Ling Ma’s Severance this afternoon. Although I’ve had my fill of emotionally-detached narrators from Brooklyn, I admire how she places something that feels like a memoir within a dystopian frame. Her depiction of a pandemic-stricken New York harmonizes with our current moment to an eerie degree, particularly the slow unwinding of normalcy rather than the sudden cataclysm that defines so many other apocalyptic visions. And she writes wonderfully about how we cling to routine while craving disruption: “We hope the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn’t go to brunch instead.”

Last night I dreamt that I could not read. Every book was filled with gibberish. The words shape-shifted and flickered between shades of red, white, and blue. My mom appeared and handed me a small paper bag of medicine and told me it would help. We were the same age. “You look so old,” she said. “But I have to get back to my new family now.” I woke up.

A loss of understanding. The colors of the American flag. The need for a cure. This dream feels stupidly obvious in this pandemic season, but I cannot puzzle out its personal meaning. I’m left only with a handful of symbols: garbled books, a bag of medicine, and my mother.

In dreams, the murk of emotions, traumas, and truths too raw for language become distilled into symbols, and these images hold more power than the mechanics of plot. We might remember crouching on the sidewalk, frantically trying to gather the teeth falling from our mouths—not the circumstances that led us there. A broken mirror or the sensation of falling from a terrible height. Our dead coming and going.

It’s remarkable how quickly we recover from our dreams, that we don’t spend our days staring into space with haunted expressions. A line from Schopenhauer: “What is to be expected from heads of which even the wisest is every night the playground of the strangest and most senseless dreams, and has to take up its meditations again on emerging from these dreams?”

Suicide – Dream Baby Dream

Island, 1979 | More

An eighty-degree day at last. We spent a few hours in the park because it’s almost possible to forget this pandemic while hiding in the grass beneath a tree. Almost. The virus tints every snippet of conversation from people passing by; these fragments from mouths hidden behind surgical masks and customized bandanas:

New Zealand beat it. Why can’t we?
Just stay over there.
Our fuckstick of a mayor.
They’re gonna have rules at the beach.
Oh wouldn’t it be a kick if our president got it?

We exchanged plague novels: she read Stephen King’s The Stand and I read Ling Ma’s Severance. Sitting on a scratchy blanket with our plastic bags, we envied the serious picnic game of other New Yorkers: their moisture-wicking blankets that fold into tote bags, the chairs that transform into backpacks, the collapsible containers and modular cups. Most of all, we admired how so many of us have agreed to cover our mouths and keep our distance.

Fantasizing about the road again. I’m craving the sensation of speed and possibility like the time C. and I spiraled out of the mountains and rode along the California and Nevada border, racing past names like Lake Topaz and Antelope Valley. “I like the color palette of cows,” she said.

She recited the items on the menu at Denny’s like a koan: “Lumberjack slam, grand slam, triple slam, maybe the grand slamwich.” I could listen to that for days.

A tiny airplane flew low in the sky while we walked the bleached shores of Mono Lake, an otherworldly landscape of alkaline and soda towers that surrounded flat waters without a single ripple. We checked into a $40 motel on the edge of California City, where the only lights were fluorescent, and the TV was on the fritz. Tonight I want to dream in the electric blues and whites of Mono Lake.

Flipped on the news and I swear to god someone named Dr. Bright said this might be “the darkest winter in modern history.” At this point the news is just bad writing. I clicked through images of drive-in discos in Germany and drive-thru strip clubs in Oregon. I scrolled through predictions that cities will become wastelands of vacant office buildings now that so many people are working from home.

Somebody scrawled the word “unconstitutional” on the signs in our neighborhood park that remind us to stay six feet apart. As if the Constitution grants us the right to infect one another. The Federal Reserve says the economy might be permanently damaged unless Congress acts, and the World Health Organization says the virus might never go away. The White House wants to close America’s borders indefinitely.

I’m writing these things down tonight because I want to look back in a few months and see if any of these dire predictions came true. Right now there’s such a dizzying array of weirdness, dread, and hope that I can’t remember anything. Will the tensions between the alarmists and the deniers fizzle away, or will they produce new factions and psychologies? And hopefully the winter won’t be so dark that I wouldn’t want to know if drive-thru strip clubs and dancing in cars were blips of novelty or the beginning of something new.

Suicide – I Remember

Suicide | Red Star, 1977 | More

And what does reinvention look like? I suppose it starts with giving up plans and letting go of ideas. But my brains are too mushy for that today. Added 34 new words to my book and shuffled through index cards with cryptic notes that I no longer understand even though the handwriting is mine: Sundown Motel, aural destabilization, and a frightening Max Ernst bird. So I kept refreshing the news as if I might find clues for how to proceed.

Watched the Senate hearings about the pandemic and the optics were science-fictional: a dozen senators sat along the edges of the room at tables draped in black cloth. A robotic camera panned and zoomed. Other senators and health officials teleconferenced into the scene, their faces intermittently scrambled, their voices delayed. Yet some senators insisted that everything was just fine.

Someone down the hall has been practicing “New York, New York” on their piano for the past hour, and it’s absolutely beautiful because they’re so bad but determined.

Emeralds – Does It Look Like I’m Here?

Does It Look Like I’m Here | Editions Mego, 2010 | Bandcamp

I did not think the future would begin with drive-in theaters, tennis, and landscaping. But our governor says these are the first steps towards reopening society this summer. And we will return to a very different world, one cleaved into a before and an after.

Although I know better, an idiot part of my brain still expects this pandemic to end neatly, like stepping outside after a thunderstorm. I can’t help but picture us standing in the streets as the skies clear, sweeping away the fallen branches and nodding at our neighbors. We’ll say, “Wasn’t that strange?” This is the deranged logic of grief, like bargaining with a stone. The fact is that we will live very differently for months and possibly years: six feet apart from one another, our mouths veiled and hackles up. Society will turn even more inward.

The triggers for fear are largely universal: loud noises, fast-moving objects, and the sudden loss of orientation. The loss of orientation has been sudden this year. We’re hardwired to fight or run. I tend to flee through distraction. My fantasies about living in the desert might be another form of flight. The only workable option is reinvention, a balancing act between rethinking how to live and remembering that what we’re living through is absolutely unacceptable and should have been prevented.

Today is Mother’s Day. There are still so many emotions that I will not or cannot unlock. I planted some tomato seeds in a small pot on my windowsill. This seemed like a decent way to remember the days I spent by her side drinking sun tea while she “played in the dirt,” as she liked to say. When I was little, she forced me to run errands by myself to make sure I didn’t develop her anxieties, her bouts with agoraphobia. She loved to watch sailboats. Whenever she saw a motorboat, she’d crinkle her nose and call it a ‘stinkpotter’. I remember the way she’d stand in the kitchen and say she wasn’t just going to turn over a new leaf but a whole tree.

This is dedicated to everyone who has lost their mothers. I try to find solace in these instructions from Epictetus: do not say something is lost, only that it is returned.

Time feels like an increasingly fictional concept as these weeks and months continue to bleed into one very long day. Even the weather is confused. For a few hours last night, snowflakes fell across New York City, the first May snowfall since 1977.

As the city prepares to reopen, this summer might feel even weirder than this springtime of isolation and suspension. We’ll be returning to a world we once knew only to find everything utterly changed: the way we shop and eat, how we ride the subway and pass one another in the street. Already it seems like wearing a mask makes some people far too comfortable with yelling at strangers, as if it’s an extension of an online avatar.

The Caretaker – Misplaced in Time

Everywhere at the End of Time | 2016 | Bandcamp

Today would have been my parents’ anniversary, and I might be the only one who still remembers this. I do not want this information to disappear with me, but I’m not sure how to catalog it. A record-breaking cold front is moving across the East Coast, casting this May afternoon in shades of February. My thoughts return to the desert because I do not want to think about the weather, the unemployment numbers, or the future of New York City. Tonight I want to believe in reinvention, possibly transcendence.

In 1967 a ballerina’s car broke down in Death Valley Junction. She transformed a ruined building into an opera house and performed without an audience. “I will create a world from the past,” she said, and she painted faces on the adobe walls and danced for them every Saturday night. That show lasted nearly fifty years.

She described herself as “the dust devil, a ghostly figure spiraling up out of nowhere, lingering in the soft desert light.” Her name was Marta Becket, and C. and I were fortunate enough to shake her hand and thank her before she passed away at the age of 92. Her life is one of the most beautiful stories that I know.

Further reading: Marta Becket and the Amargosa Opera House.