#7 Reality Check
My stratosphere is saturated with articles and posts and suggestions—10 things to read at home, 100 ways to kick boredom alone, 1000 ways to be a person—crowding our minds with instructions on how not to want to crawl out of one's own skin. As if the situation as it is isn't surreal enough to jolt us out of our habits to re-examine our lives thus far.
Feeds and posts and articles of people staying at home and talking about it makes me increasingly uncomfortable. It almost feels like I who have long preferred isolation, moved to a deserted island, and suddenly the whole population airdropped onto my private island complaining about the remoteness, deaf to one another. This thing, tho, is really just physical distancing, nothing to do with social or connectedness, unless you want it to be. Do I? Perhaps to finally have a reason to do what I've always known I should but didn't because it wasn't apocalypse, yet.
Listen
Woke up this morning to Gomez's Ben Ottewell's gravelly vocals but when I opened my eyes, the voice was gone. I cycled through the tracks until I found a match to the rhythm in my head—Get Miles. The song starts like this, “I love this island but this island’s killing me/ sitting here in silence, man I don’t get no peace”
24 years ago, when Jamiroquai’s Travelling without Moving was released, I had it on loop day and night. The restlessness matched my excitement for the future. Revisiting the album this month, though musically no less enjoyable, many of the tracks now seem to be framing stark reality.
Read
I kept hoping I misread the article title No, the coronavirus didn't come from outer space. Perhaps it would have been easier on my fragile heart to attribute it to the unknown than if it was man-made or man-caused.
I loved My year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. It's funny, bizarre, and takes what we often say in jest to the extreme. “Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.” Our overworked earth needs a nap, too.
"Time” is just an operational ritual, intended to create the illusion of regularity.—this quote from Time has no Meaning in the North Pole got me thinking about good habits vs trappings we create for ourselves.
Watch
Even more so now than before, Nagi's Long Vacation inspires me to try harder by trying a little less.
New borns
I was worried about making another hammerhead shark in such a short time. What if familiarity turns it into a duplicate devoid of soul. Problems hit early in the putting scrap fabric together. Like all beakies, Heather rise above the circumstances to be her own. Time wasted worrying, as usual.
Tortoiseshell cat, but not in tortie colours?!? I've always loved the intensity of their expressions, and I imagine all the moral dilemmas in their heads. Story, not yet.
In progress
The goldfish is still paddling against the undercurrents of my mind, marooned somewhere on my desk.
Eat
The virus got to us more than a month ago. Either the selfish souls have grown a heart and stopped hoarding or the local businesses matched the demand, our supply for most staples have resumed. But, some shelves are still empty, like that for wholemeal flour. I had to settle for bleached (yes, bleached) white flour for bread. I know I won't like the taste so I combined it with roasted chickpea flour and finger millet flour for a more nutty flavour. It was o-k, looks like bread, tastes like bread, could-be-better-next-time-bread. Oh well.
On the couch, listening for a break in the weather, while sipping strong ceylon tea with a dash of soy no sugar, marn.