Just A Normal Wednesday
Heyo! It’s Wednesday, and you know what that means!
Wait, do you know what that means?
Can you tell me???
Because apparently time has started to “mean something,” and the kids are “back in soccer,” and we just returned from a “family vacation” that required us to “fly on an airplane,” and it seems like we should all be “returning to normal,” but I’m really not sure what any of this means.
I thought I was feeling normal, bopping along in mah fancy mask, chatting with Rhonda at the Safeway curbside pickup (she always asks the boys what Pokemon they’ve caught recently).
But now apparently there’s a previous normal to which I’m meant to return posthaste, the one where we’re all basically fine with strangers sneezing on the produce at Safeway.
Is that the normal we’re yearning for? I’m really asking. It’s okay if the answer is yes. I understand that sneeze-spattered zucchini is the price we pay for baseball games and birthday parties and hugs. Besides, I can wash my produce, you know?
But here’s a thing I can’t shed as easily as a mask: I don’t trust you fuckers anymore. I don’t trust you to preserve your own lives, much less your neighbor’s.
We were just in Tennessee at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Ryan and I were talking about bears (there’s a truly mind-fucking amount of bears at GSM) and he didn’t get why they worried me. His argument: we have bears in our rural town in Washington, and they don’t worry me.
I told him I don’t worry about wild animals. I trust them to behave predictably, in alignment with their wild brain stem mandate to eat, sleep, bone, poop, and avoid the hell out of two-legged perfumed skinbags. A wild black bear’s gonna show me classic Black Bear ™ 99 times out of 100. I can handle Black Bear ™.
Wild animals don’t scare me. Wild animals that have been habituated to humans scare the shit out of me. A black bear that’s been changed by people who don’t really care about it? It’s not gonna Black Bear ™ anymore. It’s gonna Yogi Bear All Up On Us For Our Pringles And That’s A Hard Fanged Furry Nope From Me™.
So yeah, I worry about national park bears.
When I look at people I see a national park bear, a creature whose nature has been changed by something that doesn’t really care about it. A creature I can’t depend on to protect itself or behave like an animal that wants to live. A creature that behaves like an animal that’s been trained out of its instincts toward self-preservation for the sake of convenience. A creature that expects people to get out of its lumbering, dangerous way.
You scare the shit out of me.
And I’m not just talking about anti-vaxxers here, people! How many of us thought we could use Q Anon as a crowd-pleasing, timely punchline… all the way up until someone we loved, trusted, and thought we knew DID NOT LAUGH.
Ohhhhh Aunt Deborah noooooooooo…
I can’t trust you fuckers anymore—and please know that I’m using fuckers here in its most tender form, my most precious and beloved fucker dumpling—so when I see you fuckers frolicking about maskless I am torn in half by my competing desires to join you in the rumpus like a national park bear, and bolt in the other direction like the Black Bear ™ I used to be.
Two thoughts appear simultaneously in my head, like two judges holding up their scorecards at the same instant:
YAY! RUN!
WHEEE! WHAT THE FUCK!
PARTY! SURVIVE!
In the early, heavy days of our pandemic, I thought removing the trappings of crisis would return me to normal. I thought reversing my outsides would reverse my insides. But I’m starting to understand that despite my overall cushy as hell pandemic experience, I think it’s possible that was actually… yeah, it was really hard and it changed me. Irreversibly.
I’m fucking weird now and not in a charming pre-makeover way. I went to an outdoor adult gathering (which sounds like a forest orgy but sadly was not) and I started chatting with strangers about CATHOLICISM, then pivoted to an hour-long chitty-chat under Edison lights about CHILDHOOD TRAUMA, not in general but MY CHILDHOOD TRAUMA and HER CHILDHOOD TRAUMA and also I’ve stopped drinking and I told my friend I couldn’t go to her birthday dinner in March because I had to paint my kitchen cabinets but the truth was I was freaked out about going to a restaurant? Lying to my friends is not a thing I do unless their haircut is real, real bad and even then I tell the truth, very very carefully.
Babe, you’re gorgeous. This isn’t what you expected, but a) it will grow, and b) while it grows, you’re still fucking gorgeous. Oh I bought you this hat totally unrelated no reason really just thought it looked like you. Yeah, try it on! No yeah, right now.
Anyway, it’s Wednesday.
On Wednesdays I spend 90 minutes sitting in my car writing because Chicken has rock climbing and I don’t have to wear a mask in my car.
Today I walked into the climbing gym and the plexiglass panels over the check-in desk were down.
I remember when those panels went up. They’d scared me and comforted me at the same time. They made the pandemic real. The presence of the panels changed me, but then I’d gotten used to them. I’d gotten used to being the person who was used to pandemic dressing, a twinge of annoyance whenever people strayed within my six-foot bubble. I’d gotten used to recognizing which people I could trust by the position of their masks on their faces.
I’d kind of assumed we’d keep the plexiglass.
Now the absence of the panels is changing me again. It scares me and comforts me at the same time: YAY! RUN! PARTY! SURVIVE!
Now I will have to get used to being the person who can adapt to life after a pandemic, which I guess is supposed to resemble life before a pandemic, only with more gratitude and better home office chairs?
I will have to figure out how to move through this new reality as a normal, predictable Happy Lady ™ on the outside, while carrying this stowaway cargo of vigilance, readiness, the unforgettable knowledge that the world as I know it can shatter in the time it takes for one person to sneeze on a zucchini. I imagine that knowledge as a glowing packet that hums in my body, a glass box marked “break in case of emergency,” that sits somewhere in my gut, waiting.
Shit changed me, man. I lost friends this year. Friends lost custody of their children in hideous divorces. Friends suffered in the relentless privacy of the last eighteen months. Friends overdosed and died.
Their funerals were phone calls from the back porch. I listened hard to try to see my friends’ faces as we grieved together, apart. That shit’s not Purell. It doesn’t evaporate from my skin if I rub hard enough.
I didn’t know it eighteen months ago but shit changed me and now I know:
It was easier to plunge into caution than to plunge into seeming recklessness. It was easier to protect myself than expose myself. I thought putting on a mask was scary but taking it off is so much scarier. To do it, I have to trust you fuckers. My darling, precious fuckers… if you listen very hard you can see my face. Yes, that’s side-eye.
Anyway, it’s Wednesday, and if you know what that means, can you help a bitch out? I’m doing my best and trying very hard but I could really use an assist over here.