It had to be in tulle, of course. With puff sleeves. Baby blue. Iridescent and irrelevant.
“This is Made-To-Order Fashion for the Existentially Pissed Off.”
It makes me happy, she says, which I don’t feel too often.
She was 16 years old, old enough to be existentially pissed off. You should be comfortable in what you wear because you are going to die soon, she said. There is no point. I am an optimistic nihilist. If my fashion designs make you happy, knock yourself out. Buy me some roller skates. The most valuable thing in this big stupid world is time. Like this souvenir lingerie. Beautiful, huh? But unwearable in any case.
Keep your pants on honey, til I come home.
Oh my my my. This is what happens when the internet teaches teens what love is.
I don’t think I ever really understood the true meaning of nihilism until I heard a 16 year old present a very good case for it in her Zoom conferenced entrepreneurship exposition. Just to think, in high school I was writing book reports, probably still making dioramas. Here we have 16 year olds making Joy in a Cup, premium sorbets and ice creams delivered to your door for 20 dollars a quart. Another teen is making bandanas for service chickens. Down the street they are recording a new song, “I guess the theme was just, love song type stuff.”
He sang it well enough, I could have believed it. How our perceptions of time are changing. This is our assignment, in which it is inevitable that the students now outsmart the teachers. The teacher always asks the basic questions, the ones that enframe the assignment. All the bounds the students are given to exceed.
The World Is Different Today.
We Need to Set the Rules Now.
It’s Memorial Day weekend but unfortunately the Governor isn’t going fishing. Not on the South (or the North) Shore of Long Island, at least. But nonetheless we are going to represent the people, open the beaches, allow marching bands of ten people and vehicle parades.
In the meantime let us recalibrate and reassess our position.
Who are we? What are our priorities?
This is not an ongoing campaign, this is a thing called government.
Just as New York has its list of characteristics, so does government.
Government must be Smart, Competent, Non-Political, Non-Partisan, Fair, Effective.
Government matters now. It is important again. He should repeat this list often. Maybe it will get ingrained in our collective memory.
There is something called Government and you have to know how to do it. It’s like being a Dentist, or a Doctor. There are specific skills and qualities. You can’t just Tweet your way through it.
This is Open-Your-Heart-Week here at Quarantine Camp and we are playing disco to help you along. This content inside your chest, let it pour out. Send it far. You were brought to this earth to live.
(Encounter her, Encounter her, Encounter her)
The Governor walks in and we are All Smiles Today. Even though The Boyfriend left. We are all smiles because that which goes away must come back. Love in an open hand, that is what we say. Boomerang effect.
Here is where the virus is continuing to spread.
Morrisania in the Bronx. 34%.
Brownsville in Brooklyn. 41%.
Hollis in Queens. 35%.
This is what we call Death By Zip Code.
Or else, what else can we call it?
There is no Negative Capability capable of creating beauty in this mass of facts.
The ability to think, to perceive, to operate beyond presupposed capacities of the human being. It’s something like adaptability, but definitively more complex. The capacity to pursue beauty over reason, essentially.
What do you think, the Governor says, the virus was just sitting over there in China, waiting for you to get there?
No, like everything else in this world, the virus got on a plane, and left.
We’re all about energy and aggressiveness here in New York, says the Governor. We always want to be the first ones out the door. But this is different. There is an art to this Re-opening, and it isn’t always about “The Best is The First.”
Meanwhile, offstage and in the shadows, Trump pulls us out of the Open Skies Treaty, an arms accord basically set up to prevent nuclear war. Nobody knows what this means, what it can mean, other than eventual chaos.
Get used to this, he says. You want to take a day off? We’ll take a day off when the virus takes a day off.
People continue to ask the questions, some profound, some profane. What about summer camps? What about all the children dying? What is this delayed response? Seems we succeeded in fighting off the virus only to be taken down by our own defenses.
As far as I can see it, from this small table here near Tiergarten in Berlin, the virus is just a mirror of our society. It is, like us, very smart. It is also disciplined. And tough. It is even unified. Is it loving? Is that all it lacks? Is that what can defeat it?
I need to know what I am fighting against, the 14 year old said. Then I can fight it.
And he did. Like that he won.
He fought for life. Not the absence of life, not some meaninglessness of life. But real life. The one where people are happy and exchange hugs and laugh and also cry. The life where we scream and fall and then also the life where we die. Live now, die later.
“My position is that I don’t have a position.”
Yet. He says so convincingly.
Just to provide a slight change of mood, just to remind myself that THIS is also America the Beautiful, I watch Obama’s speech from his last correspondence dinner. It is off-the-hook good. The type of thing you are only allowed to do when you are about to quit a job you did well.
“You may not like steak or fish, but that’s your choice people!”
He makes himself laugh. And honestly, he’s just a little too smart for everyone in the stands. But he’s so damn good. Would have made a better artist than a politician, perhaps. Done well in a place where he don’t have to give AF.
With him, the press was a matter of agreeing on a baseline of facts. Not disinformation campaigns. Who even knew what disinformation meant, before The Donald came in?
This is just the beginning.
Just take a moment to listen, and there they are. The six o’clock bells.
We are remembering people who died, listening to the solitary trumpet in a field on Memorial Day.
Today is the 155th Memorial Day, in the state of New York where Memorial Day was invented.
Suddenly the Governor is quizzing his Press Corps. Who knows where the first Memorial Day parade was?
(No one does)
Seneca, NY. 1866.
I’m sorry Sir, I have an annoying question.
You always have annoying questions, when are you going to have an uplifting and inspiring question?
All the same, your question isn’t annoying, it is repetitive. You guys tend to juxtapose two different things that don’t make sense. Hence, the premise of your question is controversial, and maybe illogical. Here we are going together in straight lines, this is what we call parallel. These things don’t contradict each other. Probable is probable, by the way, that’s why it’s called probable.
Life is about Stamina, says the Governor. 83 days is nothing in a tour of duty. Imagine if you were in a real war!
Mask Up.
This is the PSA that our Governor would have voted for. The Tough Mask Up.
Here we are still, the same table, same late nights. We study what is happening, make decisions based upon data, facts, things other people said at one time that may or may not have been right.
Many small businesses are shutting down forever, they say. Changing the face of the economy forever. Welcome to The Jetsons’ reality plan. Certain assumptions that quote unquote experts made.
The Governor makes a statement.
The Press ask a question about said statement.
This is emblematic of my interactions with the press, the Governor says, laughing. Emblematic in the sense that the Press is too busy thinking about what question they want to ask that they miss actually listening to what’s said.
Wear a mask, get a test. This is the New Nature’s Bill of Rights. Know what you’re carrying, at least in confined quarters. That way, when you come to the mansion, I can show you around, no problem.
Today the Governor is at home. He stayed home, but he didn’t take a day off. Inside he is having a silent celebration, because he hit one of his marks. You need something to shoot for, he said, and back when way too many hundreds of people were dying each day I asked a doctor what we should be looking for, when will know that we have turned a curve, and that doctor said when we have less than 100 people dying each day.
As if by a weird turn of fate, today on Day 84 of this Crisis, (only) 84 people have died.
This is God’s gift to the Governor, on Memorial Day.
I can’t do it anymore. And yet, we have to do it. More.
We must continue to step up. 35% of carriers have no symptoms. This is how we are spreading, invisibly. The invisible New Yorker Code of Ethics and its likewise invisible virus.
That’s really really really New York, says Rachel Maddow.
I’m really really really curious to know what that means, says the Governor.
Come to the mansion and we’ll go to the boxing ring. That is what Teddy used to propose. And here we have FDR’s wheelchair, which he used to wheel out to the pool in the backyard for his workouts. The Roosevelt version of Tough was the Tough Guy facade. The Tough Guy who could throw punches and use guns and shoot things. Masculine authority.
My father’s version, Mario Cuomo, his was something different. His kind of Tough was Loving Tough. Inclusive. Here we find strength in Giving, in Community, in Selflessness. Here we find Commonality among people. Here we are one family.
“It is never too much ! It is only ever not enough ! Bite your teeth into the ass of life boy.”
Times are always tough for somebody.
But in the end of the big night, no matter what the fight, you gotta make your brother breakfast.
Salutami tutti.