it's been an angry week, or an angry second half of the week. i tell myself that i've been unflappable for most of the past couple of months, but the truth is that i'm usually unflappable until i'm abruptly and notably flapped, and it's shitty. i have been fixating on friends and acquaintances who have left new york city to hole up in other places; while i joke about sanctimony as if it's something i don't return to all the time, i am so very sanctimonious. how dare they cart their germs out of town and risk overburdening underequipped regional care centers because staying in new york makes them itchy? i'm the hypocrite out here rocking a month-old n95 (and cotton masks) and making additional trips to the grocery store and pharmacy for compromised neighbors who could in theory be coached through trying to join the order-in sweepstakes with delivery services that appear to pay their employees fairly (stereotypical senior-senior-citizen computer literacy issues aside), but.
i called my mom this afternoon, as it's her birthday, and she told me that her hairdresser, R, had come over to cut my stepdad's hair; he's going to be coming back to cut her hair soon. i told her they and R were being reckless; i noted that if R truly had good protective gear, then it was his responsibility to donate it to his local hospital; i gave fair warning that i was going to narc on her to my sisters and make them call and pressure her, too. then i texted mom and stepdad after the call to say, with love, that if they went through with mom's appointment i would name and shame R online and make sure that he went out of business.
joe said that that was way too much; he noted that i have been in a freaky mental place of late. i suspect that i should limit myself to, like, making cheesy jokes about design for work projects until someone has a plausible idea of what's happening next and my interior landscape is closer to the great plains, would you just look at that unwrinkled grosgrain road.
i wake up half a dozen times a night mumbling apologies for things i did in my dreams. i pinch an earlobe, cross my eyes, and consider the idea that if you aren't yourself in a catastrophe then you didn't really survive, did you.
2 comments:
A fierce sense of justice pursues its faithful. I do love you anyway, and your fire has on occasion made me more honorable.
this isolation is centrifugal: parts of me are so concentrated that i can barely lift them, and others are so empty that they might as well be gone.
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