Diarist D-50
Entry for 24 September 2020
[This entry will take the form of a self-interview.]
Diarist D-50: Thank you for joining us, Diarist D-50! I’ve read so much about your exploits and thoroughly enjoyed your incisive and penetrating pensées. What are you doing right now?
Also Diarist D-50: Thank you, Diarist D-50, your kind words mean so much. Right now I’m writing the answers to your incisive and penetrating questions, which I am also writing. I’m also enjoying a relaxing kava drink and listening to some stimulating electronic ambient and jazz music. But I’ll bet you already knew that.
So tell me about how you spent your summer. I noticed you didn’t participate in the “Hundreds” exercise.
That’s true. Unfortunately, I spent much of my summer weathering a personal health crisis. I did in fact begin writing the exercise, but never finished it or turned any of it in, hoping that I would eventually finish it, but then it was time to write this entry. By way of explanation, let me share with you and our readers the few paragraphs I did set down:
June going into July is a lot to process and unload. The first thing to note is that we are still having this pandemic, which won’t go away because we as a technologically advanced society can’t agree that the germ theory of disease contagion is correct. We Americans still have a morally and mentally defective “leader.” We have recently rediscovered our race problem and are thoroughly relitigating it on Twitter and in the streets of our cities. Global warming still exists (although the decrease in our economically-meaningful activity due to Covid-19 has caused a measurable dip in emissions).
It’s true we haven’t had a really messy school- or workplace shooting in a while, on account of there being greatly decreased school- and workplace activity in general. But then there was the commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence, and the anonymous paramilitary squads pulling protesters off the streets into unmarked vehicles, and the Russian bounties on U.S. troops, and so on. While all those things were happening, there was also my own urgent hospitalization and near-death, which, while hardly a national emergency, nor even my first close encounter with death, was still a pretty big deal to me.
My wife took me to the ER after I briefly lost consciousness a couple times. I was also running a fever and experiencing delirium. They admitted me right away. My blood pressure was around 75/55, I was running a fever, and they didn’t know what I had, so I got blood drawn and chest X-rays taken, and they told me I have pneumonia, sepsis, and an acute Clostridioides difficile infection. Then I was bustled off to the Intensive Care Unit, where I spent several days confined to my bed by tubes and wires. [Reader: this is your last exit before things get graphic.]
This is where I stopped writing about my hospitalization. I’ll just leave the lacuna here to your imagination because things did indeed get graphic and probably shouldn’t be included in an EDLM Diary entry anyway; I was still not yet myself when I wrote it. Let it suffice that, after eight days in the hospital, and a catheter angiogram, I was discharged to my home to recover. Recovery has been slow and is ongoing.
Were you diagnosed with Covid-19?
No, I was not.
So have you been keeping a personal Covid Diary?
No, I suppose I tend to resist doing anything that’s trendy. I did write a few more random “Hundreds” paragraphs later in the summer, when I was beginning to feel more steady:
Sometime this morning between cleaning up the kitchen after making bread dough and going out to my garden to pick carrots, I looked down at what I was wearing (old, ripped blue jeans; old, bleach-stained, long-sleeved T-shirt; Birkenstock sandals, with socks), became aware of what I was doing, and realized how much I’ve become like my father. Who is 30 years older than I am, and retired, and not someone I wish to emulate in every way. And in that moment it occurred to me that I was so tired, and in the throes of a deep grieving.
Laughing at myself for telling the dog we’ll go out in five minutes. According to child psychologists, even human toddlers have only the most abstract, rudimentary sense of time. Ordering events on a timeline, or being able to judge or anticipate measured timespans, is beyond most three-year-olds. It’s simply something that’s processed in a part of the brain that hasn’t developed yet. The phenomenological experience of today versus two years from now must be learned as the brain grows. And we’re collectively like a child who doesn’t understand that the time of reckoning is at hand, here, now.
Today in The Superheroes We Need, Not The Ones We Deserve: The Flâneur, strolling the city streets, giving out free samples of sweet, custardy flan to all the sad people. I stare at the screen of my goddamn phone like one of these icons is going to tell me something good. It’s the same impulse, I think, that motivates one to open up the refrigerator and stare. It’s the waiting to see what happens, because until we know what’s going to happen, we can’t really plan, we can’t push past waiting mode. We can’t breathe because we’re holding our breath.
So what happened today?
Today I had an appointment with my doctor, because the pneumonia has been slow to clear up and I’ve been experiencing considerable shortness of breath. We discussed the results of my most recent chest X-ray—my lungs are finally fluid-free—and I took a lung-capacity test. First I had to blow into a tube three times to measure the volume of air I was exhaling. Then I was given albuterol sulfate. Then I took the test again. The second test showed a 65% increase in lung capacity, indicating adult-onset asthma, likely caused by the pneumonia. So not great news. Then I came home and made dinner. Now I’m exhausted.
Other than exhausted and out-of-breath, how do you feel having survived your ordeal?
Ignoring the obtuseness of your question, I feel tired, used-up, spent, and expendable. Obsolete. A few observations:
The past months of reduced socialization have left many people I know feeling under-stimulated and lonely, desperate for social interaction. But I now find myself experiencing something like agoraphobia, not to mention germaphobia, whenever I must venture outside of my bubble. I’m content here at home. I know how to keep myself busy and intellectually stimulated. My wife and I get along, and not having children turned out to be a personally fortunate as well as a profoundly humane decision. (No offense intended toward my hypothetical offspring and/or future readers, but I’m not liking your odds.)
All of these feelings were really brought to the fore recently when I teleconferenced with a group of about a dozen of my college friends, all of whom are more or less like me in most important respects—though most of them are more accomplished in their respective fields—yet who all seemed to me unbearably tiresome and ridiculous and risibly not up to any future challenge, almost every one of them—like me—a sorry, neurotic specimen in his or her own way, trying to be funny and clever and relevant, or even just adequate to the times. But there was little sign of emotional adequacy—just anxiety and a kind of generational and social maladjustment.
And I know harping on this topic yet again only proves the above point, but I’m also feeling a great deal of fear and disgust vis-à-vis the political situation in this country—particularly in this state—and the unpleasant behaviors one sees from supporters of the current regime. I can’t wrap my head around people who have narrowly benefitted from it (say, because they now pay less in income or capital-gains taxes), or people who take pride in their tribal identification with it, but are fine with the suffering of (mostly poorer, browner) others being the price for their prosperity and/or vicarious boost in self-esteem. How can you be happy in a body politic that is so irreconcilably divided and unhappy? That is what our capitalist conditioning has brought us to: the idea that everything is individualistic, that we have no social ties beyond family and close friends important enough that the degradation of politics negatively affects our perceived happiness and wellbeing. I feel as though I’m coming to see many of my fellow-citizens more clearly, and I don’t like what I see. It’s ugly and base. And with the recent death of Justice Bader Ginsburg, the Breonna Taylor grand jury decision, and the election right around the corner—which I actually haven’t spent much time mulling over because it’s such a very simple choice: hope (even if attenuated) or fascism…
We’re like those three-year-olds trying to understand what your birthday is next week means. My money is on continued mass psychosis and denial, violent repression of both facts and human beings by those in power, and complete inability to comprehend the scale of our problems, let alone conceive how to solve them.
I was recently watching a storm blow in and following it on the Doppler radar feed on my phone’s weather app, and it occurred to me that something about watching bad weather from above while simultaneously living it is totally uncanny—the creeping Doppler image is almost as frightening as experiencing something bad about to happen to me, or anyone. That’s what now feels like. But I’m repeating myself and becoming tiresome.
Can we at least try to end on a positive note?
Yes, let’s. Today I bought a painting from a local artist friend, and some truffles from a local confectioner friend. That’s been keeping me going lately: the fact that Muncie has a sizable community of gifted artists, in every medium. I respect and honor the fact that they are able to respond to the anxiety and horror of the times by creating beauty, and they’ve been busy lately. I’m so grateful to all of them. They allow me a sliver of hope.
Thank you, Diarist D-50! We hope to read more from you in the coming months.
Back atcha, Diarist D-50.