GOING VIRAL

April 2020

This series of impressionistic sketches, written in April 2020, will be published in an upcoming book entitled My time with you has been short but very funny.

Dystopia

We live in downtown Montreal, in the heart of Chinatown. The viral panic has driven everybody off the streets except people without shelter. These neglected souls are left milling about in a state of distress, their mental health issues exacerbated exponentially by the climate of fear. Any notion of “social distancing” in this context is patently absurd.

The streets are strewn with garbage that is picked up and blown about by the cold winds of a spring that has never really sprung. The scenes are reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984.

Shopping involves a bizarre set of ever-changing rituals. Lining up, squirting (two squirts, three squirts), following the arrows, flailing at the plexiglass. People look like Halloween remnants: masked marauders, weird visors (Darth Vader clones), spectres wearing what look like pyjamas. Glowering, peering furtively, quaking about contact. Six feet apart. Six feet under.

What if all this ugliness and stress is worse for our collective health than any virus could possibly be?

Mortality

I’m 68 years old. I have a lung condition. In the current context of constant panic, I am in the throes of mega hypochondria. And my hands are chapped raw.

I think about my impending death practically every moment of my waking day, and the spectre of death haunts my disturbed, nightmare-ridden sleep. It’s not primarily the virus that I fear; what terrifies me are the consequences of the prevailing stress and panic. I feel like I’m going to die from a heart attack at any moment. Absurdly. In a lonely abyss of futility. And my son and partner are suffering so much, my son chafing in the chains of confinement and my partner drowning in a sea of anxiety.

I have begun to script my funeral so that my family won’t have to do so.

I listen obsessively to a piece entitled Struggle for Pleasure.

I want this played at my impending funeral.

Virus from hell

Our neighborhood is an enclave of horrible poverty and despair where people deprived of shelter congregate and mill aimlessly, desperately, alone.

A man staggers up to us on our filthy street. He looms menacingly, pauses, his face a rictus of despair.

“Goddamn, fucking VI-RUS,” he screams and then lumbers away.

Bad hair days

Various friends and family members complain of very bad hair. Those our age are turning into geriatric hippies.

One says she’s discovered a silver lining in this crisis: where her grey roots are showing as the hair dye grows out.

Dystopia revisited

Purchasing a tasty alcoholic beverage at the local SAQ liquor store. An absurd trial.

A pair of dudes outside the establishment. A table at their disposal, equipped with the ubiquitous hand sanitizer. They’re wearing Darth Vader visors. The mechanical third degree. Administered identically to each supplicant:

“ Travelled outside the country in the last 14 days?” No.

“ Any virus symptoms… cough, cold, fever?” No.

“All right. Press the cap twice. Two squirts. Go in and out of fast.”

I feel like giving a ‘wrong’ answer…”Just back from the Riviera actually…” See what happens. Like the crucifixion scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Expelled from the garden

Our apartment building in Chinatown has a beautifully landscaped garden where we could walk and rest, away from the urban hell just beyond our doors.

Yesterday the authorities expelled us from the garden, on the grounds of virus security.

No tempting apple, just a snake. The snake of officious arbitrary authority.

Rubber gloves and other protective measures

In our garden yesterday, a man was seated on a lovely park bench. He was wearing a pair of blue rubber gloves and a bizarre plexiglass visor. He was smoking.

Good to see him looking after his health in these times of the virus!

Going to pot

I’m regressing, taking up the habits of my hippie youth. (The viral no-haircut geriatric hippie look is a contributing factor.)

I’ve been devouring chocolate laced with cannabis, a birthday gift from our son in Ontario.

Music sounds so good. It helps drown out my raging anxiety.

The munchies. I’m developing quite the pot!

Two weeks to fatten the curve…