“See you on the social.”
What a stylish mask, the Governor says. Very fashion forward.
I manage to go a whole day without turning on my smartphone. It feels miraculous. Incredible tangible detox. My smartphone is not my mobile phone, so I am still available in emergency. I even check in, briefly, on social media. But the lack of that palm-sized location device in my hand feels decidedly clarifying. Like breaking the connection to Big Brother.
A filling in my tooth falls out by surprise and I call the dentist, amazed to get an appointment the next day. As I am there under their bright lights it seems for once reasonable to be surrounded by face masks and plastic gloves, though I have the same base worries about hygiene that I always do at the dentist, as I see them typing on their computers and adjusting the lamp with the same gloved hands they put into my mouth. This strangeness is turning into normalcy. That is the part that is becoming frightening.
“When there is a lot of wounding, even if those wounds are touched with love, it still hurts.”
(When he said poison, he just meant that it hurts)
Just please, don’t forget to dance. That is our doctor’s instruction.
As I listened to the sounds of the different vibrating machines grinding away surfaces in my mouth like they were asphalt on the street, I found myself wryly thinking of the Governor’s words — “We build bridge; we are bridge-makers.” Indeed there they were, building bridges in my mouth. The dentist pulled at the fascia in my cheek, not willing, but demanding, it open. I spent the rest of the day, and the day after that, feeling a little like the Joker, having been cut an involuntary new smile. Thought in reality, I start to enjoy smiling. Feels like a gift.
The sense of a supply chain begins to be more striking. There are not many things I depend on in mainstream society, but the dentist is apparently one of them. Essential. At least in terms of how we do things nowadays. I guess in the past they wouldn’t have gone at it with a drill. More string and a door slam. In any case, the strings of our supply chain are becoming more apparent, and I feel we are only beginning to feel the whiplash from that leash as it continues to tighten, and the shelves on the market become increasingly empty. Terrance McKenna said many years ago — either you consume, or you produce. It appears now is the time, when we can no longer choose.
(I’ve always had an appreciation for materials, especially natural ones, but even more so now that supply chains are being eliminated and leather jackets that were Made In Italy seem even more special than they were before)
I bought the red shoes during the last financial crisis, in the fall of 2008. I remember distinctly standing in a parking lot in San Diego, talking to my fiancé at the time on the telephone about how the world as we knew it was ending. I went into an open air mall one day, and it was nearly deserted. In the window of a fancy shoe shop I saw red stilettos with a patent leather heel, red suede uppers. Normally well over 400$, at this moment they were 70% off. I was beyond tempted. A good friend had died that spring, of an unintentional pharmaceutical overdoes. She had red heels like these ones, wore them the last time I saw her, with her teal colored short silk dress, dancing on the hardwood floors of her small living room in Pittsburg.
So I bought them. Such things are essential sometimes.
How essential are you, he asks?
It is a good question — are you essential, or are you luxuriously expendable?
Personally, I find the birds the most untiring essential workers. They call to me each morning, noon, and night, regardless of whether or not I notice, just singing their hearts out for all that care to hear. People love negative in society, but birds, they just love to sing.
We build bridges
We are bridge builders
Building a bridge between here and tomorrow
Risk reward is life —
How much is a life worth, Jesse? Do you have an answer for that?
None of the gears can turn, unless all of the fears turn. That is what we mean by a capitalist economy.
So let us also ask, what is this machine that is always turning? Must it always turn and make noise? In time I become acutely aware of the demand this society places upon us to absorb stimulus. There is just so much of it now. More content than relation usually.
Here at a distance society still seems sometimes too close. I imagine hearing my phone ring (which it isn’t) and already having anxiety about it. About some potential person on the other end with needs and wants and desires, while here I am in this cave and seeming to just go deeper within it.
The Buddha used to instruct his discipline that three months out of every year they should go into retreat. This was part logistical, due to the annual season of rains, but also nourishing. If one has gone forth into the world, it is necessary periodically to also retreat from it. Three months out of twelve seems about reasonable, if one isn’t to take the schedules and doctrines of the human work/life cycle into account. A quarter of our life in retreat, three quarters engaged.
I once said to a partner that eventually, after kids and everything, I could imagine settling into one month a year, as long as I have suitable infrastructure set up so as to not become backlogged, which is how I felt prior to the moment when corona quarantine hit. Now society is schedule to reopen in some weeks, and I am not sure if I’m ready yet.
But I guess then, I don’t really have a choice, now do I?