It's like a fucking horror movie that never ends
This piece appears in my book Lockdown in Hell World and today is the anniversary of when most of it was written so I thought I’d share it here.
Jesus Christ this dude even has to lose weird. I decided to wait to see what happened with the election before finally and irrevocably finishing this book and sending it off into the remainder bins and full satisfaction has yet to arrive. It’s like a José Saramago novel where everyone in the country suddenly has to sneeze all at once but we just can’t do it and we all live imprisoned in that hesitation indefinitely. Or a better analogy than that. All this month it’s felt like waiting to find out what kind of cancer we’ve got meanwhile one of our doctors is crying that the MRI is rigged. I don’t know man I can’t think straight I haven’t had a normal hour since the election which was roughly four years ago as best as I can tell. If this has been a year of the neverending March this month has been one continuous and interminable election day. It’s the sort of purgatory this diseased and spiraling country deserves.
I nonetheless will be happy to see Trump finally and utterly and officially lose. Although “Joe Biden is president now” will feel so much less good than “Donald Trump is president again” would have felt bad if you follow me there. It’s like the emotional ceiling of a Biden win is a modest ranch home and the emotional basement of a Trump win is the cursed tunnel from Annihilation.
It’s also all pretty funny though. Biden is not going to improve many of our lives in any material way but watching Donald Trump the worst man we have produced in decades speed-running through the stages of grief and trapped in a constant state of having just lost and always being just about to lose is delightful.
As we’re waiting violent rallies to “stop the steal” have begun as Trump insists the election was fixed—which he also did for some reason in the last one he actually won—and I guess at this point our best case scenario is Trump flags becoming the next lost cause symbol and contractors with $50,000 trucks terrorizing us with them for the next twenty years until the climate becomes too terrible to remember anything that happened more than a week previously and then we’re all dead anyway.
I’m not stupid (citation needed) but there was at least a small part of me that hoped as I was writing this book that by the time it came out we might at least have some vague glimmer of hope on the horizon for the pandemic ending but where we stand now is worse than it has ever been. The past week in mid-November we recorded one million new cases of coronavirus for the first time and we’re breaking new records for infections and deaths every day. There is still no stimulus coming and no nationwide mask mandate and no clear guidance on what to do from anyone besides governors scolding us for getting together with friends while keeping bars and gyms and salons open. The virus can’t spread when you’re spending money apparently. Just this week a case of the virus was reported on a cruise ship—the first to set sail in the Caribbean since the pandemic began—and it’s had to go immediately into lockdown. We’re at the point where history is rhyming already and the first note of the song hasn’t even resolved yet. Thanksgiving and Christmas are approaching and people everywhere including the good ones like you are going to travel to see your stupid fucking families and eat some shitty turkey and bring the virus back home to wherever you came from. I just saw a headline from the Mississippi Free Press: After Big Thanksgiving Dinners, Plan Small Christmas Funerals.
I also just saw a thread on Twitter from a nurse named Jodi Doering in South Dakota a state that is currently being pummeled by infections although I guess they all are right now it’s just a matter of degree.