The new normal

A visit from Dr. Schnabel, Plague Doctor

Anxious is the new normal. Suddenly everything is different. Things you are accustomed to doing without thought now take a lot of concentration. Things you took for granted no longer are. What makes us strong now makes us weak and what makes us weak now makes us weaker. Some things you just don’t do anymore. Go to the office. Go out to dinner. Run down to the store. Everyone is paralyzed, waiting – waiting for something to NOT happen. If we are lucky.

Right before everything was cancelled, the Managing Partner and I had tickets for a modern interpretation of Waiting for Godot at one of the local theaters. Sorry we missed it. Though it may have been somewhat redundant given that we all now find ourselves characters in a similar absurdist drama. Waiting for Corona, perhaps? As Beckett forced us to ask the existential questions, so does our current drama.

What is important? What do we believe? What is even real? Is there actually an invisible virus infecting and killing tens of thousands of people around the globe? Can I actually get it by being within six feet of someone else who’s infected? How are we to understand such a thing? And if it is true, how does it change things? Is anything different? Is everything different? Does it matter? And what are people doing with all the goddamn toilet paper?!

Of course our collective reality had already been undermined by our current leadership, with just shy of half our population living in a separate universe that has an entirely separate set of alternative facts. Our equilibrium was already off kilter, undermined by a constant stream of calumny and hubris. But nothing is new there. Just one more brick in the [border] wall of lies.

I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would live through such an amazing time in human history. Since I was born well into the second half of the last century, some of the most amazing things have happened. Big things. Historic things. The moon landing. The computer revolution. The genetic revolution. Amazing things. Glorious things. But also horrific things. 9/11. Forever war in the Middle East. Climate change. Global pandemic. I mean, what the actual fuck? What’s next, complete economic collapse? Societal breakdown? Station Eleven?!!

The current situation with the covid-19 pandemic is unfortunately not fiction as far as I can tell. At least it feels real. The anxiety is real. You can see it in the empty store shelves. In the empty streets and closed businesses. In the volatility of the stock market, the 2 trillion dollar bailout package just passed into law and in the 3.3 million Americans who just filed for unemployment. All news seems to be a continual stream of discussion about the corona-virus.

You can see fear in the faces of everyone you encounter - even from six feet away. There's a combination of amazed disbelief and low level dread. The expression seems to be kind of ubiquitous at this moment. Though it should be noted that this observation comes from a necessarily narrow sample, since I am engaging in some serious "social distancing" just at the moment. Oh, right, you can see it in the new phrases that have suddenly appeared in our vocabulary. No doubt German speakers already have one of their great concatenated terms for it. Unglaubenfürchtenangst or something.

So here we are in a state of suspended animation. Pacing through the house, looking out the windows, popping out for a quick bike ride in the park - vaguely worried some over-eager roadie will launch a viral snot rocket at me - and generally just waiting for this thing to be over. We muddle through the work-from-home days glad for the distraction. But it's hard to concentrate. Hard to care about meetings and reports and websites when for all we know our world will never be the same again. Or maybe it will. Maybe this will pass and we'll go right back where we started. A little older, a little poorer and not one bit wiser. Too early to tell.