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Today's Keyboard Smash
Jun. 16th, 2020 04:57 pmI've been listening to back episodes of Our Plague Year, a nonfiction podcast from the people behind Welcome to Nightvale. It's mostly small voice essays, sometimes in the form of voicemails left by listeners on the station phone line. Sometimes there will be a bit of a theme to an episode, but mostly it's just people's thoughts about the pandemic. How they're impacted. How they're coping.
There's something deeply surreal about listening (or watching or reading) these messages from weeks or months ago. We've all talked about how time moves strangely these days, when the hours drag and the weeks pack in the upheaval of a year. The messages seem to come from another age. The emotions in them are relatable, yet they feel distant--ah, yes, I remember when I worried about toilet paper and thought maybe events could be rescheduled to June.
What I find strangest is the fear and uncertainty that come through raw in the voices. They're genuinely afraid of what might happen next. I find myself thinking, was I that scared once? Did the me of April also feel so keenly that the world was not just coming to an end but had already ended--everything familiar changed irrevocably--and mourn and rage and brace myself for further loss?
Because it doesn't feel the same now. Things have changed again. Instead of fear, I mostly feel the dull grinding of this new succession of normals. The danger has not passed, but some of the urgency has. I take what precautions I can, and I risk what I can't avoid, and I get on with life.
There's something romantic about the days when the fear was fresh and anything seemed possible. Awful, yes--all those possibilities were varying degrees of awful. But it felt like things were happening, like the change would mean...something. Mostly now, it just seems routine. Maybe all apocalypses become so, if you manage to live long enough to see it.
It can't all be wasteland drag races against warlords. Sometimes you just have to tend the hydroponic gardens and the lizard herds. Sometimes you just dust your skull insignia and oil your bondage-inspired leathers and nap when it gets too hot. Maybe life is just fundamentally kind of dull if you're not actively dying.
I'm not complaining. It's just strange to hear from the past us when we all thought everything changing might mean something changed.
There's something deeply surreal about listening (or watching or reading) these messages from weeks or months ago. We've all talked about how time moves strangely these days, when the hours drag and the weeks pack in the upheaval of a year. The messages seem to come from another age. The emotions in them are relatable, yet they feel distant--ah, yes, I remember when I worried about toilet paper and thought maybe events could be rescheduled to June.
What I find strangest is the fear and uncertainty that come through raw in the voices. They're genuinely afraid of what might happen next. I find myself thinking, was I that scared once? Did the me of April also feel so keenly that the world was not just coming to an end but had already ended--everything familiar changed irrevocably--and mourn and rage and brace myself for further loss?
Because it doesn't feel the same now. Things have changed again. Instead of fear, I mostly feel the dull grinding of this new succession of normals. The danger has not passed, but some of the urgency has. I take what precautions I can, and I risk what I can't avoid, and I get on with life.
There's something romantic about the days when the fear was fresh and anything seemed possible. Awful, yes--all those possibilities were varying degrees of awful. But it felt like things were happening, like the change would mean...something. Mostly now, it just seems routine. Maybe all apocalypses become so, if you manage to live long enough to see it.
It can't all be wasteland drag races against warlords. Sometimes you just have to tend the hydroponic gardens and the lizard herds. Sometimes you just dust your skull insignia and oil your bondage-inspired leathers and nap when it gets too hot. Maybe life is just fundamentally kind of dull if you're not actively dying.
I'm not complaining. It's just strange to hear from the past us when we all thought everything changing might mean something changed.
