September 2020 – MOIRARTS

Caution

Yesterday I learned that a new Killers album came out 41 whole entire days ago and nobody on the entire internet told me. Sometimes I don’t even know.

I suppose you could call me a Killers superfan. Not in a creepy stalker way. I don’t know all the band members’ names, and I probably wouldn’t even remember Brandon’s if his last name weren’t Flowers and he didn’t have side projects. I have a terrible brain for names and dates–of actors, band members, b-sides–so I couldn’t tell you a single thing about them as people, but I haven’t heard anything by the Killers that I don’t love.

I’ve found over the years that a lot of people get resentful when a band doesn’t sound the same on later albums. People get hooked on what a debut sounds and feels like, and I get it. I love debut albums: so many years of writing, refining, and feeling get concentrated into those first songs. Debut albums are gifts from the heart, and many of my all-time favorite albums are a band’s debut, a subject definitely worthy of more posts.

No matter how much I love a band’s sound, I eventually get tired of hearing more of the same. Therefore I love it when I find artists that can put out great sounds that defy categorization, where each album has its own vibe that isn’t bound to previous sounds. The Killers is one of those bands and I can’t get enough of how each album has its own internal coherence that doesn’t GAF about what came before or what people expect from them. (Sidebar: Jets to Brazil and Amy Ray both have this talent and I also adore them for it.) This new album is just the uplift I needed 6 months into a pandemic; sorry, not sorry if you can’t get past the fact that it’s not one hundred percent the new new wave electronica of their early days.

Besides my addiction to guitars and growly tenors, the thing I love most about the Killers is the strong impression that their experiences growing up in Nevada were very much like mine growing up in Indiana. Not since Live’s songs about York, PA, have I felt so much like a musician knows so well what it’s like to grow up among trailers, fields, meth heads, diners and roads to nowhere. These are the songs for those of us who did everything we could to leave where we were, and I’m always here for it.

If I don’t get out of this town, I just might be the one who finally burns it down.

Day 200

Two hundred days. I don’t know why increments of ten are compelling here, as they don’t align with the weeks, months, or (I suspect) years that we will be doing this. Still, two hundred days seems like a long time, even more in light of the way the days and weeks are slipping by. We have acclimated to living in a pandemic even while thousands of people die each day, to a degree that is a bit mind-boggling. It seems like just last month that I was writing about Day 100, that I was marveling at how the weeks were running into one another. Blink, another 100 days. Blink, another 150,000 dead.

This week I’m thinking about what’s coming. For months, I’ve lived as much in the present as possible, trying to neither wallow in yearning for the past nor fear of the future. Foot in front of foot, day by day, sleep when I can, cook what I have to, read as much genre fiction as I need to numb my racing thoughts. Repeat repeat repeat. However, the seasons are changing, school is in session, winter is coming. All of it demands an assessment of where we are and where we’re going, a recommitment to principles, a recalibration of the machine.

First day of autumn. It feels significant, probably only to me and my addled sentimental brain, that the first day of this delightfully cool season aligns with our two hundredth day of pandemic distancing. This is when I would be taking stock of what needs to be done before winter, getting the cars repaired and the house battened down, calculating how much time in the weeks I have for my work now and determining what I want to do with that time. All of that is happening, but I was jolted into a realization that I need to take stock of our pandemic planning as well.

Winter is coming (har har, yeah) and it’s not going to be good. There is no way for it to be good. There is no vaccine coming to save us; the virus travels better (farther, faster, longer) in cooler drier air; indoor spaces become more dangerous; outdoor spaces become less available; and all of us want more than anything else to start being with other humans again in close contact. (Don’t we? I know I do.) I am looking at our plan to pod (bubble, quaranteam, whatever cute phrase we’re using) with another family like ours–one kid, two parents based at home, no family in the area, similar protocols for shopping–that seemed very reasonable over the past three months we’ve been discussing it and wondering if maybe I’m being completely stupid and we’ve lost our ever-loving minds. We undertook these UN-level negotiations out of a desire to have someone for our child to play with in the winter, to have other adults to converse with in the dark months, to have people other than the three of us to share a meal or a board game with as this drags on, et cetera. The lovely cool weather that I’m reveling in this week will ultimately mean we can’t all lounge in the yard for much longer.

I know that all of our choices are about managing risk, balancing the chance of dire health consequences down the line with the reality of negative health consequences accumulating every day this goes on. I’m not good at trusting other people, and even though I believe I’ve found another family as paranoid and mistrustful as I am (just kidding, but really), there’s no guarantee. No sure thing. Our brains and our moods are going to start urging us to take more risks because this has gone on so long and we’re struggling. Maybe that restaurant is okay (it’s not) or that BBQ will be fine (it won’t) or church will be good if we sit apart (nope again). Not that I’m planning to do any of these things, but the things we are doing–biking outdoors with other families, relying on distancing but not also masks for yard chats, bubbling up–seem reasonable to me. Maybe they’re just as ill-advised. Basically, my brain is locked in a cage match between I’m sure this one thing will be fine and WILL THIS BE HOW WE ALL DIE.

I have no answers. There is no conclusion. When I make it to the check-ins that are still a saving grace of this whole situation, many of us like to end with be safe, stay strong. Hold the line. Distance, mask, don’t hang out indoors. But as winter approaches, I really want to know that people living alone have a plan to get through it. I don’t want to advocate for podding, because who the hell knows if it’s safe, but I do want to hope that everyone has someone they’ll be able to hug this winter, some way, somehow. Please don’t crack and go to a bar and then the movies because you just can’t take it anymore. I really don’t want you to do that. We’re looking at another year, though, which is a long time. I really want us all to live through this, hearts and brains intact.

Be safe, stay strong.

Do You Realize?

Ten years ago, I went into labor three weeks early and twenty-four hours later, my heart was living outside my body. My child was born at 11:58 at night; once, I suggested maybe we should have had their birthday be the next day and my partner said, “Absolutely NOT, you were in labor literally the entire day, that is their birthday!” So. That is their birthday.

It is the most bizarre thing to grow another human being, to look upon someone and know that they once were just a group of cells inside you, and that you had to generate an entire additional organ solely to sustain their growth. So much growing, and then those cells become a being capable of independent life, which is maybe the most bizarre part of all. It only gets more surreal as that life that is initially so dependent grows and changes, walks and runs and bikes and swims, becomes truly an actual whole different person whom it is a joy to get to know.

I’ve had a decade to get used to having grown a whole entire person and I still marvel at it sometimes. Look at what my unreliable and prematurely aged body did! In the old stories that our child’s Waldorf preschool told, children wait in the spirit world until they spot the people they want to be their parents and then cross the Rainbow Bridge to join them once they’ve made their choice. I love this story, because it makes me reach for whatever there could possibly be inside me that called this lovely amazing beautiful surprising spirit who is my child into being.

Ten days after giving birth, I sat on the side of our bed and cried my eyes out because I realized that this tiny baby, whom I had just barely gotten to meet, would one day grow up and leave me. Which is, of course, exactly what every parent wants, a healthy well-adjusted independent child, but it was devastating to imagine then. My partner said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: they’ve only been here for ten days. We have time.” Ten years have gone by in the blink of an eye and it’s true that it’s a little easier each day to raise them to be ready to leave me, as doing so means we are privileged to witness them grow into who they are, a little bit more deeply each day. And who they are is absolutely perfect. I may have brought this child into the world, but I am only along for the ride.

Six Months

Today marks six months of pandemic living. Weeks of full quarantine, months longer of modified quarantine with masks. Truthfully, our family is still as isolated as we can be while balancing the risk of contracting a deadly virus and the strain on our mental, emotional, and physical health. What’s the old pop punk line? I’m not sick but I’m not well. We grocery shop, we work from corners of our home, we read, we write, we walk, we bike, we see our friends at a distance, in masks. We grieve, we worry, we overeat, we undersleep, we bicker, we grouse.

In the last six months, we have spent more time together as a family of three than ever before. I have been based at home since my child was born, first as a parenting choice in the early years and then as a necessity in recent ones, when my aches and pains became first a chronic illness and then a disabling condition. Never in those years, beyond the initial weeks when my partner was on parental leave, has our child spent so much time with both parents present. Never has my partner been available for eating and walking or biking over lunch. Never have we been able to rise, eat, and prepare for the day at our own pace. Never have we had dinner together so regularly (and when I think of my partner coming home from work and eating meals alone late at night all those years because I fed our child hours earlier, the loneliness breaks my heart). There is no commute for any of us.

We are all here together in a structure that is the most relaxed it has ever been for our family and we are under strain we never could have imagined bearing and surviving. All day, every day, we function in the face of unrelenting stress. The stress of keeping a job, making decisions at that job that impact the lives of other people who are similarly trying to keep a job while making decisions that impact the lives of other people. The stress of monitoring local, county, state, national, and international events, to know what is mandated and what is recommended, to find the path where we survive a deadly pandemic and determine if and how we can walk it. The stress of worrying about every single person we know and love, and every single person they know and love, all around the country and the world. The stress of managing how much we know about wildfires and police brutality and neo-Nazi violence and voter suppression and poverty and hunger and homelessness and refugees and abuses of power and relentless deadly racism. The stress of determining how much of that is necessary for our child to know, in what ways and to which degrees, before or after they hear garbled versions of current events from classmates and friends. The stress of not crying, of finding somewhere private to cry, of getting out of bed each day while wanting to not get out of bed again until it’s over. The stress of knowing that it will never be over.

Six months. I will keep counting the days, weeks, and months since this began. Since we came home and stayed. I will do this partly because I am a nerd and making notations soothes me, and partly because I have always been attuned to dates and the passage of time, to anniversaries and the arrival of days where I feel off for no reason and then remember, ah, yes, that, then. I know that many more people have been at work and in school, in and out on different timelines throughout this year. I know that things will get worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all. I know that the day we came home from work and school and stayed was not the beginning, and I know that the day we line up to be vaccinated and return to our school and office buildings will not be the end.

Six months, ten years, a lifetime. Whatever the meaningful increments are: we’re still here.