Marmalade skies

 This morning I woke in a planned darkness for an early meeting. The sky had been clouded and smoky the previous day, and the light was a dull orange at 6:30 in the morning. I made coffee and signed in to a presentation about the end-stages of a project that I started in 2009, and which I hope will finally bear some (if bitter) fruit.

The sun rose, but did it? The streetlights flickered off, the fog lightened... and then began to darken. 

By 8:00 am it was noticeably darker than before, and by 8:30 the street lights flickered back on. The light took on a hellish quality out of a movie. I tried again and again to capture it on my phone, but the phone was too smart - white balancing the grim ashy orange color away.

The entire state, inundated with smoke from the ongoing wildfires, was blanketed with multiple layers of airborne ash and soot. By 9am, it was as dark as 9pm in my apartment, and I could not stop weeping. I ate lunch with the lights on, under a skylight that let in no light. I stood on the back porch looking out on a world I didn't recognize.

Paradise is burning and we need to pay attention.

And yet I don't know if we have enough time to stop it before it stops us.

She said

 "I just want you to be safe, and happy, and healthy and strong. Even if I'm not there." 

He sobbed unexpectedly, a single barking sound.

But what she really meant was: "I love you."

The Protocol

Bring a handkerchief if you can. Fabric dries, and on balance, is easier on the eyes than paper.

Maintain your dignity while it's happening. If you have to emote let it fall inward, be self-contained.

You are a rock on the shore, and it washes over you. Let it pass. Condense inward, harden yourself into a diamond inside if you need to. 

Uncurl when it's over. 

Agree not to see each other for however long. This does not need to be an indefinite period.

Call, text, or message a friend as soon as you're alone. If you're driving home, let it be before you start. Let them know where you are, and where you're going.

Go home. (If home is worse, find a friend to stay with.)

Let the first thing you do after arriving home is drink water. You can drink or eat anything you like after, but the first thing past your lips on arriving home must be water.

Does anything smell like them? Take it off, put it in the laundry. Does your bed remind you of them? Change your sheets. Now. I don't care if it's 2 am or 9 am or 3 in the afternoon. Do it now.

Find a blanket. Curl up and take a nap.

Check your living spaces for things that remind you of them. Put those things away, however you see fit.

Eat or drink something sweet. Take about 400mg of ibuprofen or aspirin.

Remove them from the requisite social networks, calendars, and long range planning. Put them on a 30 day mute where possible. 

Take another nap.

Drink at least another liter of water. Eat some comfort food.

Masturbate. Shower. Sleep.

Find a project to work on for the next week or so, and distract yourself as best you can. Make plans when you can to be with people (even if virtually). 

On the day after, chop wood, carry water.

Why weep

 It's been a bit.

Overall, I cannot complain. And yet that's all I want to do. 

I'm in this weird place where everything should be fine, but I'm just feeling so anti everything. All the things that normally sustain me in the real world are moving online and I find that they just have no savor at all there. Is it work? Is it me? Is it pandemic? Is it anxiety?

I'm sitting here writing around the edges of what's really bothering me, and it's hard to get it out so consider this bit above a preface.

I almost didn't survive 2017. I had (have!) the love of a wonderful man to prop me up, and it's been hard to admit how close I came to... whatever I would've done. I didn't, and I didn't really get *that* close in the end, but there were moments when I was thinking about how broken I was (am?) and how little point there was (is?) to living. And in those moments it was hard not to see a continuous trail of how I've bent and contorted myself to meet the whims of men who do not deserve me, in order to get their approval. What happened to the girl who stole the heartthrob of summer camp one year, who saw a boy in passing at faire and took him for her own... not once but twice? Where did the girl who owned her own sexual desire go?

I had the most surreal experience this weekend. Saw a painful ex in a photo feed, and did my best to delicately enquire if I should unfollow for my own comfort. The friend said he was now housemates with said ex, but he knew the ex and I had dated and it ended poorly. My reaction was that I must've drunkenly told him about it at some point in the past, but no - he said he'd heard about it from the ex's current partner. My reaction was to brace myself for impact; nobody could ever even want to be friends with someone like me after having a Laura-breakup recounted third-hand. I can imagine how each man I've dated and stopped dating has somehow blamed me; and for several I don't have to imagine because they told me to better twist that bitter knife.

But I was wrong. The ex's current partner knew about me because... the ex knew he'd been horrible to me and told her as much. That dislodged something sharp in my chest that's been rattling around wreaking havoc for the last few days. 

So here I am drinking bourbon on the living room floor and weeping, and writing about it.

How many men did it take to break me? We talk about the "body count" of a slut, but I wrote once long ago about how every single one takes a piece of me away with them. How much of me is left? How many scars upon scars are there, how much of me is real anymore?

There was the one who didn't want my love; the one who wanted it but only if I gave him everything and took nothing in return; the one who loved me back but rightly ran to face his own demons and left me to face the former; the one who couldn't see me for who I was; the trio of spawners in their succession - one who thought I was too young, one who thought I was too fat, one who thought I was too fat and too old; the one who couldn't face what he wanted from me; and the one who wanted and also gave nothing.

I have gotten by all these years by erasing myself from their lives, their bodies, their heads, their beds. Silent, like a secret, asking nothing in return, inoffensive, transparent as a breeze. Feed me the crumbs of your regard and I am your Echo, trailing voicelessly behind.

Where am I, when I am not reacting to layers upon layers of trained-in him-pleasing? Who am I anymore? Where did she go?

I didn't expect to find, three years later, that I am still so broken - but I suppose it's to be expected when you never take care of other wounds and simply pile more hacky work-arounds and compensation around the butcher's bill of broken parts. 

And how much of this is my upbringing? How much is that I've bent myself over backwards for decades to please my blood kin, and when that was impossible sought others who I might have better luck with? Why am I trying to fix everything for everyone?

I had a Silicon-Valley-conversation long ago, with someone far more well-adjusted than I, about why I would never pursue eternal life: my desire for my own annihilation is too strong to contemplate eternal life with anything more than horror. Why would I sign up for more of this suffering? (And to my lack of desire for children - why would I condemn another soul to join me here in it?) 

When do I get a break? When do I get to feel whole, and purposeful again? When will I not be fighting my own body, my own brain, anxiety, the capitalist system, greedy other humans. My legacy can only be something small in the end; a terrible place made - if only temporarily - slightly less terrible. I cannot take care of myself but at least I can nudge the threads in my network towards happier, stronger, better. I can do good works now, regardless of if they'll be remembered when I'm gone and that must be enough. 

But here I am, an avowed terrible person, still taking every little thing as a personal attack. Nothing feels safe, nothing feels secure, even when I know it to be so. I feel so utterly incapable of joy right now, and it's a bit of a spiral. I don't want to pursue joy for fear of rebuff, so I'm scolded for hiding.

---

I'm looking forward to getting away from this malaise. A few days of sunlight and trees, fire and dirt, and no more of this ceaseless clammy gray.

I've had this tab open for three weeks now

...trying to start a post.

I'm surviving, but I'm not doing well.

Collectively, the US has decided that since it can't coordinate a response, the only way out of this mess is straight through the meat grinder. Lockdowns are partially lifted, infections are spiking, but there's no going back now. Our best hope appears to be to get in line, get it while there's still hospital capacity, and survive.

So here we are, four months in, with no answers and no firm date to look forward to.  (Except haircuts, allegedly coming July 13th.)

It's hard to write about how I feel, because the overwhelming dread has been replaced with a numbness, interspersed with random crying jags. It feels like those nightmares where you're running away from something, but the harder you run, the stickier and more gelatinous the ground gets, until you're exhausting yourself to move at all and the thing you're running from is catching up behind you and...

I'm told that this exhaustion is called "allostatic load".  It sucks in normal times, but I think it's really starting to wear on me doubly around now.

Housing is scary. My landlords went from shitty-but-sure-whatever, to hostile over the course of a few weeks. We're now looking to buy a place. This is not *decreasing* my stress level by any means.

I find myself getting into an anxious-avoidant media consumption loop, and it's sapping my productivity which increases my anxiety. I feel like I need more time off and I feel guilty about it, which makes me feel bad, and I feel bad for feeling bad; whenever I start having meta feelings you know it's becoming a problem.

Work is... work? We're hiring a "lead writer" which... I can't even describe the fear that goes into this process. We're trying to work while the US slowly collapses into a fascist regime and it often feels like polishing the brass on the Titanic, but possibly also looking into a deck cannon.

I should stop there and try to get some sleep. My circadian rhythms are entirely shot, and I'm worried I could be getting sick.

Object Permanence

My boss ordered me to schedule time off, and to put a walk outside during daylight hours on my calendar. It's been working; I've gotten out, and though focus is still like trying to contain and recollect a bucket of bouncy balls, my mood has softened a little and I *feel* better generally.

I've been walking from my apartment at 20th and Judah down to Sunset and back each day. If I have time, I'm sometimes going to Andytown, the last coffee shop open around here, for a slice of something like normality. They're a few blocks from the ocean. Tomorrow I think I'm going to go all the way down to the beach, find a sand dune to sit on, and just not be here for a bit.

While I walk, I listen to music. Not because I want to, but because it makes the brain weasels shut up for a bit. I realized, and this is perhaps a sign of something neurodivergent about me, that for the most part I've lived my life in silence since May of 2017. It's honestly not great for me. Most people turn on music or the radio or something, but I realized I don't feel the need to do that because there is always a snippet of something or other running on an endless loop in my head. I'm not sure what exactly changed. The breakup was traumatic, but... was it so bad as to permanently alter my brainmeats? Maybe? Or is this one more thing that points again to "perhaps you should get assessed for ADHD, you nutty hyperfocuser, you."

While I walk, while the brainweasels are drowned out by pop songs, I finally have the chance to think.

It's really strange how fast all of this has become routine. It's also really strange how thick a layer it is, of "feels routine" spread over a fast-moving current of terror-fear-grief. It's amazing how fast we all went from our normal lives to standing in line for flour and eggs, to cooking with what we've got instead of what we want, to staring out the window and doing all of our social interaction mediated by an electronic service. And yet, almost anything will make me cry right now. Not just eyes-watering, like my normal emotionally-close-to-the-surface self, but sobby, streaming face, uncontrollable ugly-cry.

... Okay and there I go again.

On Monday March 16th, when Mayor Breed was making her announcement along with the six other Bay Area county leaders, I was in a grocery store. It was a remarkably quiet, but tense store, and as word got out that we were about to go into lockdown, people started *jogging*. I realized, standing in line, not knowing what was happening or what would happen, that I was shaking, and my chest felt tight. 80% of the way into a panic attack in a grocery store, but I also realized that if I lost it and started crying, it might crystalize the situation and make things considerably *worse*. I waited in line, shaking. I paid for my groceries, got into the car and drove home. And as soon as the garage door closed behind me, I started to sob. It took me a good few minutes to stop, and I've long since realized that when I start doing this, there's nothing I can do but hang on until my meatsuit is done with it.

I keep thinking back to the Tom Hanks movie, Captain Phillips, and how everyone was amazed at the lifelike depiction of comedown-shock or safety shock. I feel like this is what I'm getting, in bits and blots, any time I acknowledge what's going on outside. At 7pm this evening, I heard a bunch of weird sounds outside; when I realized that it's the "applaud for our medical workers" thing I lost it and had to go inside. Fundraisers for the things that I love are making me cry. I donate, and it feels pitifully small and insignificant, never enough, and I'm afraid for them, and I cry.

But walking, in the afternoons, it all drifts away for a time, and I have to thank my bizarrely wired brain for this one bit of peace. I think we're all waiting in a state of trusting object permanence. Object permanence is something we learn around 6 months old, which is that things continue to exist even though we can't see, hear, or otherwise sense them. In the bright sunlight, walking in the chilly April sea breeze, I can forget that these things are in danger, and I can revert to how I've always been: I trust that when this is all over, I can look for them and they'll be back. I can't see them now, or drink their drinks, eat their food, listen to their songs, watch their dances, hear their speeches and performances, feel their care, but I can trust that they haven't gone away forever.

But I don't know if that's true.

The good news is that San Francisco seems to have flattened its curve; our hospitals are seeing huge ramp-ups in covid-19 patients, but we haven't (yet?) gotten to the point where we've got more sick people than capacity for them, and the current modeling seems to predict that... we might not ever get to that point. New York, on the other hand, is loading refrigerator semi trucks with dead bodies. New York is being hit hard, and fast but I wonder if this means they'll see the peak and begin to recover faster? San Francisco's estimated peak date is 24 days from now; I worry that every little thing I love will begin to wither on the vine, sustained only limpingly for a few weeks by our collective charity before succumbing to greedy landlords. People are thinking about the tyranny of landlords right now. I can and still do hope for some sort of centralized edict of rent and mortgage pause and forgiveness.

The centralized response has resembled more of a chaos-monkey script than an actual attempt to be helpful. But in contrast to the grandstanding, showboating, and profiteering of the current federal administration, we're seeing the seeds of a new federation, new cooperations between governing entities. It gives me the tiniest sparkle of hope.

Everyone wants to find something, anything, that they can do. We've got hundreds of people making masks, every university and makerspace is 3d printing ventilator parts and making homebrew DIY PPE, anyone with contacts in China is desperately trying to import supplies to distribute to hospitals, people are organizing in the neighborhoods to protect the vulnerable, organizing the feed the front line workers, and just plain ol' organizing (fuck yeah, bring back the unions). There is a real possibility that this crisis will help undo the distancing, disconnection, and suspicion of one's neighbors that social media (and its manipulators) have wrought, even while we're standing 6 feet apart, prevented from hugging or singing together.

And that's an interesting change as well - when everyone is apart, everyone is together in being apart. I've attended a bunch of digital events with friends I never get to see; geobreakfast, classes with my favorite yoga teacher who I haven't seen since 2014, impromptu jazz concerts from musicians I'd never heard of until now, livestreaming zoo animals, plays, concerts and productions that I'd otherwise never get to see in person.

I have to believe, for now. There's no use and no sense in breaking down until after the damage is done and we're safe again; only then can we take our grief and rage and turn it into something productive.

Fear

They say that we're living in historic times, and we should journal.

Well, okay. It's been literally a decade since I fell so hard into work that I forgot to write, and I forget how much it feeds my soul. But this has been hard, so hard, and it's not making it any easier to write about.

Let's start with anxiety mixed with survivor's guilt: I still have a job, I can still pay rent, I still have healthcare and groceries and I can pay bills and my home is pleasant and lovely.  I do not appear to have contracted the virus in the many pre-order activities we did.

We're now approaching a full month of shelter in place, and while I find that I'm starting to finally hit my stride in taking the time I need away from work, I'm also finding that the fear and waiting is ramping up, not down. The list of things I want to keep alive and somehow preserve keeps growing. The number of places and services, events and providers who I want to support is growing longer and this doesn't appear to be stopping any time soon. I am afraid that so much of what I loved in the last few years will be gone when we all are able to poke our heads out of hiding. I am so scared, and so overwrought, almost anything will make me cry and I *cannot* seem to stop.

And I'm not even on the front lines. I can't even imagine what's going on for my friends who are healthcare workers, delivery drivers, other essential services. I feel helpless and useless and terrified, and I see all the dreams and plans I had, that others had, foundations cracking in slow motion as the rentier class demands its pound of flesh, crumbling a little more to dust each week. What the opera, theaters, the little independent movie house that serves truffle popcorn, of our favorite Indian places, the all-beef ramen shop, our favorite coffee shops, the tiki bars we've come to view as home? What of the sweet lady who cleans my house, my acupuncturist, chiropractor, the fine arts museum and the science museums and the MOMA, the botanical gardens, the antique fair, the bakery that makes the amazing cinnamon bread, the coffee shop that holds kink events, the tech writer conference, Burning Man? What of the home of our own we'd thought to buy? What if it's all gone when we reemerge?

I am sitting here adrift, despite my own comforts.