Binge
“Everything is awful
Everything is bad ‘cause of Covid-19
Everything is awful
When you live in quarantine.”
I am overdoing everything except for the stuff I am not doing at all, and not doing is a kind of excess as well, so, yeah, I’m overdoing everything.
Eating, watching, writing, shopping, sitting, running, fasting, sleeping, yelling, crying, working, grading, cleaning, drinking. I’ve done too much of all these things in the last few weeks, and what I have not done, I have been avoiding like the ‘rona.
I like all or nothing. Cold turkey. There is no try. When you can choose between having what the family is eating for dinner or having no dinner, decisions feel easy.
Do you want to go out to a restaurant or order in?
Shall we go to the movies or just watch Netflix?
Whose family are we visiting for Easter?
See? In the corona, all those decisions are a snap.
Similarly, I ask myself, do I want to write a journal about the Covid-19 situation or something else? Well, the obvious answer is something else, but there isn’t anything else to write about. Anything new worth exploring is the result of or tainted by Covid-19.
My son is sleeping in my bed and my husband is sleeping on the couch because my son has developed a mysterious new anxiety.
Our grocery bill has gone through the roof because, for some reason, we are eating a lot more meals at home.
Our bathing, teeth-brushing, and clean-clothes-wearing practices have strangely diminished (though, even more strangely, I still have tons of laundry).
Vanilla, yeast, and chocolate chips have, without warning, disappeared from supermarket shelves because baking has replaced baseball as the national pastime.
Even if I were to attempt to write about what is going on around me right now— daffodils blooming or the brutality of a lamb-shaped cake or the sudden onset of menopause, I would still come back to Covid-19.
It’s not the elephant in the room, it is the room.
Because of Covid-19, I am suspending my weekly blogs. This time, it’s intentional! But it’s not because I’m sick or I don’t have time or my computer doesn’t work, but because I don’t have anything else to write about. I will come back to this page when I have something to say or do or think about that isn’t that.
