I have a long history of being stubborn and willful and then getting smacked in the face with reality. I don’t know where Steve Jobs got his reality distortion field — which never failed him until… um… uh oh, it turned out that medical doctors actually knew things and were right — but I have frequently acted as though I had one, and sometimes (sometimes) it has worked for me.

So here were my willful self-reinforcing beliefs — or dictates to myself, really — about COVID-19.

“Great! It’ll be like a week’s vacation!”

“I can just lie about and read!”

“I can catch up on some tasks while I’m home, too!”

“Ugh — I’m so tired of other people. This’ll be a break!”

These came crashing into the reality. And periodically I hate reality like this:

That work you had to do? It just piles up. You still have to do it — either now, or later. Some vacation!

Those books you were going to read? Who can read, with this going on? When every book seems “boring,” you know it’s YOU.

If by “catch up” you mean “wander listlessly and look at home-improvement projects you should be doing but that you can’t even work up the energy to write down right now — then yes.

Tired of other people? Nay — just TIRED. Like:  taking multiple 2-hour naps during the day while still sleeping for 8-12 hours at night.

Let’s talk worst side effects. No, not the flu-like symptoms or the lack of energy or the persistent cough or the aggravating throat-clearing. The worst side effects were, in ascending order: skipping a ticketed event at UCLA that I was very excited about; reassigning my tickets to see one of my favorite bands, Modern English, at a tiny venue in a performance that my friend later reported, damn him, as “I’m almost embarrassed to say it… it was one for the history books. Utterly amazing…” the bastard; and, even worse than those things, not seeing my lovely girlfriend in the flesh for two weeks. Yeah, thanks for FaceTime, and I’m grateful, but it doesn’t measure up to in-person real life.

But this morning, I decided, Fuck it, I’m done with this. Nietszche and I have learned our lessons and are stronger for them. And so I have rallied.

Now that I’ve been able to sit up for more than two hours.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2022 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.