Expect more poignant one-year anniversary memories this March.
We reached our disembarkation stop and stepped off. I put my mask away. We hugged and said our goodbyes. Didn’t think it would be the last time I’d ride MUNI light rail. Or hug a friend without a second thought.
First you cope and then you adapt. The kicker: once you adapt, you may not want to go back.
It me.
And yet now, in this moment of semi-stillness, the pause button may have slowed down our geographical dashing, but it has only accelerated our inner flounder. The dull thrum of imprecise apprehension. The gratitude for semi-safety made weird by the ever-blooming realisation that there is little to get excited about.
Well, this is impressive (and brave)—competing a 100 words for 100 days during lockdown …with a baby.
And remember, this isn’t writing and publishing at least 100 words every day; it’s writing and publishing exactly 100 words (that’s the hard part).
What a brilliant homage! And what a spot-on pop-cultural reference for The Situation.
2020: an isolation odyssey is a reenactment of the iconic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Restaged in the context of home quarantine, the journey through time adapts to the mundane dramas of self-isolation–poking fun at the navel-gazing saga of life alone and indoors.
Naomi Kritzer published a short story five years ago called So Much Cooking about a food blogger in lockdown during a pandemic. Prescient.
I left a lot of the details about the disease vague in the story, because what I wanted to talk about was not the science but the individuals struggling to get by as this crisis raged around them. There’s a common assumption that if the shit ever truly hit the fan, people would turn on one another like sharks turning on a wounded shark. In fact, the opposite usually happens: humans in disasters form tight community bonds, help their neighbors, offer what they can to the community.
Fellow Brightonians, here’s a handy one-stop shop for all the places doing deliveries right now, generated from this spreadsheet by Chris Boakes.