Three Irritants, Lockdown Day 45

Is the world not enough a place of grief and horror and idiocy?

Irritant number one, this tweet:

 

If the “personal essay” were abolished tomorrow, no one who doesn’t write them would miss it.

 

I’ll never understand people’s excitement to crow that some form of storytelling is dead or should be dead (blogging, essays, recipes with stories attached, whatever). Why do you want to quash any form of expression? Is it so hard not to read things you don’t care about? Why is “personal essay” in quotes; do you not believe they really exist? If they don’t exist, then what’s the problem?

Somehow, it’s always forms of writing dominated by women and women’s stories that get shit on. (“Somehow.”) I understand that we’re all stuck in a shitty sexist capitalist scarcity model, but jeez louise; kill the model, not the art form. Like the world isn’t sad enough, and now you want a world with few stories and fewer opportunities for people to connect with one another in meaningful ways?

Why do you hate humanity? Too bad you can’t answer; that would require a personal essay.

Irritant number two, this headline:

 

If Liquor Stores Are Essential, Why Isn’t Church?

 

Does not partaking of the eucharist frequently lead to severe physical illness, which is especially problematic in a time when healthcare institutions are already stretched beyond their limits? No? Are liquor stores places where large numbers of people congregate for hours at time, which is especially problematic in a time when a highly-infectious asymptomatic virus has killed nearly 200,000 people worldwide? Oh, also no? Zoom-mass it is!

The real irritant here is the fact that I continue to look to the New York Times for decent news and opinion.

Irritant number three, rain:

It’s been raining for three days. My main joy in life at the moment is the 20 minutes a day I spend on the roof stretching in the sunshine, per my quarantine goals of (1) ending the lockdown looking jolly and bronze and rosy-cheeked, to belie my scrambled mental and emotional state and (2) being more tan than the guy two apartments down who also spends his afternoons sitting on the roof in the sun.

I will never achieve #2 because I’m not quite as willing as neighbor guy to embrace skin cancer, but goddamn it, those 20 minutes mean a lot to me.

Maybe I’ll have a bottle of wine delivered and write an essay about it. I mean, I won’t, because I can’t focus enough to write anything other than lists of threes, but I COULD and that is right and just.