20 Happenings in a Year of Quarantine
1. I justified the annual cost of Amazon Prime. And then some. And then some more.
2. I worked my way through my garage stash of nonperishable goods past their expiration dates. Costco bulk green beans and microwaveable canned lasagna pair surprisingly well with a fine Bordeaux.
3. I honed a new level of skill with salty language. I thought I knew how to proficiently wield the ‘F’ word before 2020. But by the middle of that year, I was functioning at an all-time peak performance level, a true-blue fuck you gunslinger. I could conquer galaxies with that fuckin’ shit.
4. After extensive research and rumination, I made a final conclusion on the famous Lake Tahoe mythical legend of Jacques Cousteau’s long rumored, yet never corroborated, deep dive into its depths during the seventies. Purportedly upon his return to the surface, he said, “The world’s not ready for what’s down there.”
What did he see?
(A) A watery graveyard full of preserved 1950’s mob victims.
(B) A watery graveyard full of drowned 1800’s Chinese railroad workers.
(C) Tahoe Tessie, the local serpentine equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster.
(D) The Ong, a giant bird of Washoe tribal legend with a taste for human flesh.
(E) The cold-preserved skeleton of Mingo, an elephant from local conservationist George Whittel’s early 1900’s private zoo, who supposedly crossed the lake on a barge, fell off and drowned.
(F) The ghost of Marilyn Monroe, said to haunt the rooms of the former Cal Neva hotel resort, also said to take leisurely moonlit ghostly swims on the north shore along with the ghost of Captain Dick Barter, hermit of Emerald Bay, who kept a box full of his frostbitten toes.
(G) A submerged UFO base.
The answer is (E), Mingo the Elephant. I know this because I’ve seen him in the depths while wave-running in the middle of the lake. It was either a waterlogged elephant skeleton, or a large underwater boulder. Either or. But the idea of an elephant at the bottom of Lake Tahoe is too good to be untrue.
5. I realized an unsettling amount of childhood standards no longer hold up on repeat viewings. Misogyny and racism abound. Example: The Breakfast Club, a quintessential eighties flick, saw it three times in the theater, but when Judd Nelson’s John Bender ducks under a table to hide from Paul Gleason’s Richard Vernon and takes the opportunity to look up the skirt of Molly Ringwald’s Claire Standish…ugh. As much as I love John Hughes’ movies – I’m of the opinion that Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is his finest work – he definitely had some questionable whiteboy hard wiring. Look no further than his embarrassing Asian stereotype of Long Duck Dong in Sixteen Candles. How the hell did we give that a pass?
6. At last, I took the opportunity to check out why so many friends and celebs ranted and raved about Rick and Morty and stream-binged the first four seasons available at the time. I was a big adult animation fan throughout my life. Anybody remember midnight showings of Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation? Oh my goodness, we were bongo stoned for those outings. My take on Rick and Morty? Dark and dense, but I’m a convert.
7. I perfected pandemic protocols of fueling at gas stations down to a science. Mask, gloves, no-touch everything. It was super irritating when people at adjacent pumps clearly didn’t care and weren’t wearing masks. More irksome, when those ‘Mericans approached and wanted to strike up conversation, almost like they were challenging my self-masking. They were, of course.
8. I reread an adolescent staple of literature, what I remembered as standard sword-and-planet fantasy, John Norman’s Gor series. Staggering misogyny. I couldn’t excuse even my still forming juvenile mind for overlooking that level of sexist drivel. The writer laid out an exceedingly pathetic case for the secret desires of women to be subjugated. I’m thinking he never got properly laid.
9. I ordered a one ounce copper American Eagle coin to augment hand washing and disinfectant routines. Pro tip! Egyptians and the Chinese were using the stuff pre B.C. to treat bacterial infections. Carry a copper coin or bar around in your pocket. Look it up. Modern pennies won’t work. They’re mostly comprised of zinc and nickel.
10. I had a sobering series of evenings in deriding social media ads offering anti-BLM and tacticool swag, realizing the hate-for-profit industry wasn’t just alive and well, but prospering.
11. I lamented the onset and eventual regularity of ‘Zoomerals,’ a forced condition upon Americans trying to lay their loved ones to rest. Remote funerals via video conference. A lot of families got fucked because of that.
12. I watched in shock as BBC news reports showcased live feeds of the flooding in Bangladesh. Torrential rains and continued rising sea levels submerged a full quarter of the country, entire villages and towns washed away. Humanitarian agencies were at an utter loss. Another abject inequity of our era. Societies in the third world which contribute the least amount of pollution to the world continue to be the hardest hit by pollution’s effects. Bangladesh more or less drowned. Horrific.
13. Zombie cicadas? It was a joke, right? But it wasn’t! That fucking year. Over in West Virginia the bugs were being infected by a parasitic psychedelic fungus called massospora that first ate and then replaced the bugs’ genitals, then took over their brain functions and forced them to infect other insects by ramping up their hypersexual drives so that they might try to mate with anything nearby, thus spreading the fungus. You can’t make this shit up.
14. I marveled at how a considerable segment of the usually progressive leaning, multi-billion-dollar wellness industry seemed to have lined up with alt-right conspiracy groups on their conclusions about Covid-19, hashin’ and bashin’ all over social media about 5G, Bill Gates, and how the virus was a cover for restricting freedoms and most horrific of all for those anti-vaxxer, Pilates lovin’ lefties, the specter of forced vaccinations. Journalist Michael Kelly coined a term in the 90’s that applied: fusion paranoia, wherein the left and the right find common ground in anti-government views. All that straw man debate to avoid our fears of facing mortality. Anne Frank would tell us we Americans are pansies. She hid out in a building and didn’t leave for over 750 days to escape Nazi persecution. A half year of quarantine would’ve been a walk in the park for her.
15. I mourned for a man I never met. One of the first of many fuck you’s 2020 handed to me, along with millions of other Rush fans. I grieved in the passing of celebrated drummer Neil Peart, who succumbed to brain cancer shortly before the pandemic hit American shores. He was a personal hero, a brilliant and intensely private man who penned some of the loveliest and profound lyrics ever to grace the world of progressive rock. A tighter live power trio than Rush, there never was. I was at their last show, at the Los Angeles Forum in 2015. When Neil came out from behind his drum kit for the first time in forty years of touring, what would be the last time as well, to take a bow with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, I cried like a baby, and so did the other 19,000 whiteboys in attendance. Admittedly, Rush is a whiteboy band through and through. Being as private as he was, there wasn’t going to be a public service, so the city of Hollywood set up a wreath of flowers on Rush’s star at the Walk of Fame and I drove down to pay my respects. I imagine he would’ve had some thoughts about the world affairs of 2020. I certainly don’t have to tell Rush fans about the parallels of modern politicking to Rush’s epic song 2112. There are real life Priests of the Temple of Syrinx, who control the flow and dissemination of information, and there is indeed a kind of ‘Solar Federation’ in the American military-industrial complex. The ‘Elders’ have not yet assumed control. Only Rush fans are gonna get that reference.
16. Speaking of celeb deaths just prior to the pandemic, the helicopter crash that took the lives of NBA legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna was a seminal event in SoCal. It was tragic unfathomable for many SoCal residents. The communal loss of a vaunted local icon was palpable, so much so that it compelled me to drive the 200 mile round trip to downtown Los Angeles at Staples Center, when nearly the entire city showed up for a week straight to honor his memory, placing countless bouquets of flowers, candles, works of art, photos, and jerseys outside of the arena. I’m not much of a basketball fan, but what I am is a born and bred citizen of SoCal. It seemed apropos at the time to join the masses.
17. Trayvon Martin’s killer, a man by the name of George Zimmerman, became a celebrity to a segment of alt-right whiteboys after gunning down the 17-year-old Black youth in 2012. An overly zealous neighborhood watchdog, Zimmerman claimed self-defense, though Martin had no weapons on his person. Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges and the Department of Justice found insufficient evidence for their standards in prosecuting hate crimes. Six years later, he sued the Martin family in 2019 for 100 million dollars on the grounds of abuse of process. In early 2020, an increasingly opportunistic Zimmerman filed suit against Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, two Democratic nominees for president, for defamation of character (they’d mentioned his horseshit during campaign speeches). The unfairly maligned victim of leftist abuse ended up selling the gun he used to kill Martin for a quarter million dollars, calling it an ‘American firearm icon.’ He was the kind of guy who went around signing Confederate flags for his patriotic fame earned by killing a Black teenager. Whatever Zimmerman was, he was utterly American in nation, dragging his litigious heels on becoming peace literate.
18. Russian president Vladimir Putin announced the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine. He called it Sputnik-V. Ooh. Sexy. He said one of his own daughters received it. Health officials were skeptical as Sputnik-V didn’t complete standard Phase III trials to establish whether it was going to be safe or effective. Russia was hard hit by Covid. Johns Hopkins University estimated their numbers at 900,000 cases and 15,000 deaths in late summer of 2020.
19. People were going nuts over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s new song, WAP, or Wet Ass Pussy. Apparently it was okay to covet the subject of that song, yet talking about it out loud was taboo. God forbid if any of those humans who actually have wet ass pussies emote, explore, or assert the fact that they do indeed have wet ass pussies, as Cardi and Megan were obviously doing, riffing on the longstanding patriarchal notion that women should be subjects of sexual fantasies, but never in control of those same sexual fantasies. Gynecologists lauded the song, in that yes, women have pussies, and yes, pussies should be wet, both for health reasons and for effective sexual concourse. The outrage was just more misogyny, of course. There was no need to be a pussy about it.
20. I celebrate Dia de Los Muertos. I’ve been doing it for some years now. I’ve caught myself wrestling with my possible whiteboy appropriation of a cultural tradition that isn’t mine by birthright or region of origin. I erect an ofrenda altar and adorn it with marigolds and calaveras and tokens and photos of passed loved ones, as well as offerings of pan de muertos and shots of tequila for visiting spirits. I’m not Latin American or Mexican, and I haven’t been Catholic since I was nine years old. I found and embraced the tradition at a time when I was searching for a way to celebrate those who’d gone to the next world, rather than continue to perpetually grieve their absences. The whiteboy world doesn’t have much in the way of a festive commemoration of death, short of Irish wakes. The Mexican holiday’s general acceptance of a netherworld that coexisted with our own…that spoke to me. There are many scholars who pose the idea Americans seek out cultural appropriations of traditions because outside of the Judeo-Christian holidays, they have little of their own. Many holidays across the world are cherry-picked from early pagan traditions. Two major forces of suppressing any pagan ideologies were Protestantism and Catholicism, which, as it happens, were the founding premises upon which the United States of America was created. Quakers and Puritans fled England and colonized the eastern coast of North America primarily to escape religious persecution. In other words, faithful whiteboys of colonial yesteryear produced the entirety of American conservatism, its followers taught to dilute or dress down what the church deemed to be unnatural challenges to a theologically based set of morals and practices, challenges which technically included pagan-based celebrations like Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s. If they couldn’t eradicate them outright, they gradually tweaked them to suit their agendas. Thus the circle goes ‘round. Am I certain that in embracing Dia de Los Muertos, as a whiteboy, I’m not contributing to its diluted appropriation? I hope not. Still, it concerns me at times. My Mexican friends tell me to relax, it’s a holiday for all who wish to commemorate their dead, that I’m over-thinking it, as is my tendency to do, and perhaps they’re right. But I fear it’s too fine a line. In the interim, until I make peace with it one way or another, there were two new additions to my ofrenda that year, as loyal readers may recall. It was bittersweet. But honoring them was tantamount. And so, I did. Doggie biscuits on the altar. Tears, too.
*Compiled from August 10, 2020