Day 18 was a Sunday. New York is getting hot, and comparing the numbers makes the outlook poor. No country’s response to the pandemic has been poorer than that of the USA, and the cost will pass half a million souls, conservatively. I’m thinking of the cost because I wrote to my mother today for the first time in nearly a year. My father is continuing to work at the hardware store in their small town, where a handful of people have already tested positive. It’s a matter of time, she said. He wants to work until he’s 80, he wants to die working, is what she said. This virus doesn’t let people die working; it puts them on their face, or on their back, and that’s that. It’s that level of not taking things seriously that will be the American legacy of this time period.
We went to a coffee shop either yesterday or the day before. We went because we tried to buy cheap coffee on Amazon and it was too bitter to ingest. I asked Javi there how he was holding up and he said business was slow.
We went to the supermarket to stock up a little. My stress level rose exponentially as time passed. Savannah said that she was looking forward to the day when she wasn’t horrified by the sight of another person. I came home and got high.
We finished watching Tiger King, the show that will define this brutal period of American history. It’s about the trash that wants to be worshiped, the trash that is worshiped, and the trash that yearns for the time when it was worshiped. Who worships trash? The Anthropocene is a geological period of trash worship.
I have been playing a video game called Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The game features an extreme curvature of the cartoon landscape. The avatar catches bugs and fish and gentrifies a deserted island. It’s calming.
