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plague journaling
Apr. 14th, 2020 06:18 pmI was listening to the April 3rd episode of Desert Oracle Radio on my way home from work today. Ken talked about the decrease in pollution around the greater Los Angeles area due to the sudden drop in travel of all sorts. About the fundamental way in which normal American life has been switched off.
The surreality of listening to this whilst driving home amid fairly normal traffic was significant.
I'll grant that the turn onto the highway to head for home has gotten slightly easier. There does seem to be a bit less cross-traffic and less of a pileup of us trying to get out. But that may be down entirely to the gap they added between the two shifts--we're no longer all leaving from AM at the same time PM is arriving. The highway is part of a trucking route, and I don't think there's any particular drop in the number of rigs going either direction.
I've mentioned before that working in an essential industry means that my schedule hasn't changed in the slightest through all this. I've realized it's more than that, though. I'm sure people working in essential industries that interact with the public--medical care, retail, food services--are having a vastly different experience. Even though they're still working, the actual day to day experience of that is probably much changed. I don't interact with the public; I work in a closed facility.
I think that might be why I've been feeling so bafflingly removed from everything that's going on. Driving home, I truly felt like I was living on another planet. Nothing I have experienced tracked with what Ken was describing. With what anyone has been describing. I've only had to go out once in almost a month, personally, so the difficulties of shopping now haven't really sunk in in any meaningful way. Everything else is normal. Which is real fucking weird.
Imagine news broadcasts one day just started reporting...the weather on Mars exclusively. The current economic difficulties in Narnia. Traffic reports for sunken Atlantis. All the rest of your life is continuing as normal, but every day you get home from work, turn on the television, and get blasted by an hour of reportage that seems really important and also seems to exist independently of anything you can confirm with your own senses.
And I don't mean to suggest that this is somehow reassuring for me. That I'm blithely thinking, oh good, somebody else's problem. It's...OH! I've got it! (Metaphor torments me today.) There's dramatic horror movie orchestration playing in the background as you go about your day. You increasingly sense that something terrible is going on, but you CAN'T SEE IT. You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. For something to connect the dots for you. For any of this to feel real.
Because if it's real, maybe you can actually do something in response. If it's just sinister music and the alternate universe news hour, all you can do is sit there and let the surreal deluge crash over you.
The surreality of listening to this whilst driving home amid fairly normal traffic was significant.
I'll grant that the turn onto the highway to head for home has gotten slightly easier. There does seem to be a bit less cross-traffic and less of a pileup of us trying to get out. But that may be down entirely to the gap they added between the two shifts--we're no longer all leaving from AM at the same time PM is arriving. The highway is part of a trucking route, and I don't think there's any particular drop in the number of rigs going either direction.
I've mentioned before that working in an essential industry means that my schedule hasn't changed in the slightest through all this. I've realized it's more than that, though. I'm sure people working in essential industries that interact with the public--medical care, retail, food services--are having a vastly different experience. Even though they're still working, the actual day to day experience of that is probably much changed. I don't interact with the public; I work in a closed facility.
I think that might be why I've been feeling so bafflingly removed from everything that's going on. Driving home, I truly felt like I was living on another planet. Nothing I have experienced tracked with what Ken was describing. With what anyone has been describing. I've only had to go out once in almost a month, personally, so the difficulties of shopping now haven't really sunk in in any meaningful way. Everything else is normal. Which is real fucking weird.
Imagine news broadcasts one day just started reporting...the weather on Mars exclusively. The current economic difficulties in Narnia. Traffic reports for sunken Atlantis. All the rest of your life is continuing as normal, but every day you get home from work, turn on the television, and get blasted by an hour of reportage that seems really important and also seems to exist independently of anything you can confirm with your own senses.
And I don't mean to suggest that this is somehow reassuring for me. That I'm blithely thinking, oh good, somebody else's problem. It's...OH! I've got it! (Metaphor torments me today.) There's dramatic horror movie orchestration playing in the background as you go about your day. You increasingly sense that something terrible is going on, but you CAN'T SEE IT. You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. For something to connect the dots for you. For any of this to feel real.
Because if it's real, maybe you can actually do something in response. If it's just sinister music and the alternate universe news hour, all you can do is sit there and let the surreal deluge crash over you.
