BY STEPHEN GEORGE
I can’t believe it took a global pandemic to act as an ultimate social (and in some cases) economical equalizer. A catalyst for some change.
The playing fields are leveled though not how we want. All you see is eyes. It is quite literally and figuratively impossible to see a spark of emotion. All of this amasses to something unexplicable. A feeling nearly impossible to describe. A world void of smiles, frowns, smirks. Nothing.
If you’ve ever been a person who felt low in this life, the lack of standard social human interaction is the final push you needed to sink lower than the Mariana Trench.
One by one. Day by day. Confusion is king.
My wife is 5 months pregnant. This is extra frightening. Circus show daily briefings provide nothing. The more we hear, the less we know.
Puzzles. Card games. Phone calls.
Getting bored of Brooklyn. Ground zero it’s called. Will I be allowed to witness the birth of my first child? Do we know he will be born healthy? I guess we will know when we know.
Virtual baby showers. No toilet paper. Not enough alcohol.
The man doesn’t come by anymore. You can only sit on your front stairs for so long. Times square, empty. 34th Street, empty. Subway stations, empty. There’s an eerie stench of invisible death.
Where can you go to breathe air? There’s death in the air. There’s death on the ground. Just breathe. You’re breathing for two. Eating for two. I’m living for you.
Food rations, need distractions, slow reactions.
Pay your rent, don’t pay your rent. Cause and reaction. Thank you for the six hundred dollar ration fair leader. The third world first world strikes again. “It is what it is”. Lack of empathy, humility, solidarity. This is the American we expected.
Our lives are open books. We’ve torn some chapters out. My sons first memories will be masks and mass fear and confusion.
How to bring a child into this? Why bring a child into this? Why reopen schools if the educated are ignored?
Equalized. Sanitized. Demonized.
Forty hour labor after four months isolation.
Is this a dream? Is the cure a vaccine?
Red turns to blue, as if that will do. Projections are low and so is morale. The great 2020 equalizer ripped through us like nothing we could’ve predicted. Not completely surprised yet not prepared.
This is now the place we are. This is the menace we were never expecting.
Too late to close the border, they’ve closed it on us.
Nine months in the womb, nine months out. We’re in Tallahassee now. Of all places I feel at home here. Not much emotion, even less fear. “Espn is getting too liberal” I heard my new boss say. I understand randy Newman’s song “red necks” more than I ever wished to know.
The virus is not here. The cure is less fear. What you don’t know or see won’t hurt you. If ignorance is bliss, Florida is nirvana. The south will rise again. For some reason being against a group who is against fascists makes you a fascist. This irony I will never understand
I am happy my boy is healthy and so is my wife. I feel content at a time I know I shouldn’t.
Author: Stephen George
