The COVID Chronicles

     I look like a madman freshly escaped from the asylum—disheveled and unshaven; my thick, curly hair poofs into an oily afro reminiscent of a Medusa head full of squirming vipers.  Unusual odors permeate from my pores and soak into yellow stains beneath the armpits of a previously white t-shirt as the warm, cleansing water of the shower rests unused and unwanted in rusty pipes.  I don’t even remember the aroma of my body wash or deodorant; my cologne as foreign a smell as a former lover’s perfume.  If I could only catch my breath long enough to crawl down to the closest intersection, passing vehicles would shower me with loose pocket change and crinkled dollar bills thinking I some broke miscreant beggar.  I have the croup, the plague, the Black Death of the 2020’s…I am the rider of the white horse Pestilence, wielding a bow and the dreaded crown of COVID-19.    



   My boredom torments me more than my symptoms, like some fatiguing parasite sucking the blood from my veins and the life from my soul.  Quarantining is self-vampiric by nature, a drain on one’s own psyche; isolation is a torture—four walls like prison cells and solitary confinement.  I am quarantining…well…kinda sorta.  I make daily trips to the liquor store for a pint and three minis of Jose Cuervo, energy drinks from the gas station, and an occasional trip to the vape shop.  I wear a blue surgical mask and routinely cleanse my hands with sanitizer to prevent my small town from turning into Albert Camus’ novel The Plague.  But these are my only sources of social interaction, which I make brief and keep everyone at a distance.  For their own safety.

    I lack the energy or motivation to attend to basic hygiene.  My daily routine centers around a fixation on vice to cure my apathy.  I can barely sleep and have little to no appetite.  No fever or chills, I still retain the ability to both taste and smell.  My cough and sore throat gradually fade like the passing days as I look optimistically forward to my return to work.

    With so much leisure time suddenly available, I’ve been plotting out my next novel.  While in the Low Country I plan to write a short novel when I’m not working or beach-bumming it or slumming some lowly bar.  I re-read Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary for inspiration.  The first novel I wrote was a coming of age tale of an early twenty-something, but I like the theme of RD where thirty-somethings come to grips of edging ever closer to middle-age and wondering what they’re doing with their lives.  The theme I’m working with is the concept of searching for a something in a strange somewhere.  I know where I’m searching, but I’m not sure what I’m searching for—some sort of larger existential meaning or discovered purpose—but I don’t know what that is yet.  I guess I’ll find out when I get there.  Just so long as it’s not something fucking stupid like “what he found was what he always had all along.”  Go kill yourself with that sort of psuedo-moralistic horse shit. 

    

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