"Life just kind of empties out"
“We have to come back, and that’s what we’re aiming to do beginning on May 1,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) announced last week, which was why I spent half an hour on Tuesday talking to my boss about what we think the next month and a half will look like. We don’t expect to reopen the salon until the end of May, at earliest, barring any drastic increases in the availability of tests, the effectiveness of treatments, and the development of technology that will let a stylist cut or color somebody’s hair from six feet away. As I told my boss, I’m hoping that DeWine will extend the state’s lockdown for another month once we get a little closer to its current end date. At least that would take the decision out of our hands. Even if the state government lets us open for business again in the next few weeks, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be willing to go back to work, where I handle dozens of credit cards or bills a day, sitting at a desk directly in the splash zone of any sneezing or coughing clients. And I wouldn’t be able to ask any of my coworkers to do that, either.
“I think we’re looking at staying closed into June,” my boss said, before one of his children made an inquisitive noise, effectively ending the conversation.
I do too. People have changed their behavior. That means that they are adjusting to a new normal, shaping their lives around it, learning through trial and error what elements of the previous normal are still relevant and which are not. White people are wearing face masks as a matter of course. That’s something I never thought I’d see in the United States. Dylan and I have been talking about the things people have stopped doing as a result of the pandemic and may never do again:
Going to movies
Dancing in mosh pits
Squeezing into crowded bars
Going to shopping centers
Playing chess in the park
Attending conventions
Hugging acquaintances
Sharing cigarettes
Shaking hands
There’s more, I know there is, but it’s hard to remember because the past is already slipping away. I do wonder if this is what it feels like when a golden age ends, never mind that it was never particularly golden for some people — you keep turning over those memories in your mind so that they never fade, so that you never forget what it was like to do things you won’t be able to do again until the world is a little less afraid. I find myself reminiscing fondly of otherwise unremarkable nights I spent shouting to be heard over the ambient roar of an East Village bar, afternoons I spent lying on the floor in New York Comic-Con’s artist alley, the movie Dylan and I went to during that first week we spent together, the way I doubled over laughing in the parking lot afterwards, all those last times we weren’t aware of yet.
If you spend too much time living in the past, it can eat you alive. I usually tend to overcorrect: I tell myself that what used to be no longer is, and thus has no relevance to the present or the future, and thus I overlook the ways that it continues to inform my actions and choices. I tell myself that I just have to keep moving, to look ahead and not back, because I’ve seen what happens when you get stuck. It’s a natural response — some moments exist outside of linear time, playing over and over. This is the stuff of which ghosts are made. People can become ghosts too, if they aren’t careful.
I’ve always loved stories that find the ordinary in the extraordinary — the genre of low fantasy best typified by Terry Pratchett’s writing, for example, or magical realism at large, or horror stories that explore how the unthinkable can become everyday. Humans are so adaptable, so good at encountering the totally unknown and reducing it down to eight trillion memes in a matter of minutes. In the weeks before Ohio’s lockdown started, I had started trying to spend less time on Twitter for my mental health, which is obviously fucking hilarious in retrospect since now I spent thirty hours a day refreshing my feed in desperate search of even a single molecule of serotonin. Anyway, here are a few that made the little engagement lightbulb in my brain flicker weakly. May they do the same for you.
And here’s a tweet that is exactly what it says on the tin, which is great for my broken brain.
If you aren’t familiar with Internet Broken Brain Disease (common name irony poisoning), Ashley Feinberg has an excellent description.
Feinberg has broken a number of stories online, but does she feel that online has broken her brain in the process?
“Absolutely,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s Twitter, so much as the constant news cycle, but what’s the difference?”
Sometimes, Feinberg tells me, she’ll step off the subway and start writing a tweet before realizing a minute later that she’s standing there in the way of other passengers, only to soon forget what it was she even tweeted. Feinberg has a notification for whenever Mike Flynn, Jr. tweets and she can’t bring herself to turn it off for reasons she doesn’t understand. She says she doesn’t remember her dreams anymore.
“Ever since the primary, my memory has gotten progressively worse, to the point I’m incapable of retaining new information in any normal way,” Feinberg said.
And that was in 2018! Anyway, we’re doing all right. On Wednesday I made short rib stew that is allegedly based on Roy Choi’s recipe for 갈비찜, although I’ve modified my own version of the recipe so extensively that I can no longer call it that in good conscience or refer to the original recipe for guidance. I’ve made it with different cuts of meat, with turnips instead of taro, omitting the sugar and apple juice, switching different alcohols in for mirin, microplaning the garlic and ginger instead of running the whole mess through a food processor, and so on and so forth. This time I used daikon instead of turnips or taro. (I’ve never used the chestnuts. Chestnuts are… fine. My strongest association with chestnuts is the time my father tried to boil chestnuts on the stovetop for Christmas (why? Still not sure) and forgot to add water, detonating each and every nut in a fusillade of holiday spirit and imminent retaliation against everybody in his immediate area. Again, chestnuts are fine.) We have a glass of green onions sprouting on the windowsill, and I’m about to start reading Deluge, by Leila Chatti, a poet who lives in Cleveland. It keeps snowing, on and off, for up to half an hour at a time, and then it’s back to cloudy skies. The future, at least in this moment, looks a lot like the past. A moment from now — we’ll see.
—R.