is it just me or is The Big C no longer cancer, which I always found incredibly annoying anyway: the illness hierarchy! the adverts; mothers on the warpath in pink t-shirts showing the kids how you beat up your opponents, surely not the playground motto I hope, for the innocent parent who even suggested that maybe there was some evidence that perhaps… bash, bash , bash, we gonna beat cancer, fisti cuffs up, snarls and menacing growls. Noooo we need expensive research and drugs and we need them nowwwww. Honestly I do get it, I’m no friend of the old Big C, but now everyone and their grandmothers are out buying CBD oils, so where the Bash Street Gang at now… who fucking cares quite honestly, tackling Coronavirus, policing the naysayers and such?
Well jumping on the band wagon is an important part of information dissemination, opening the doors of possibility, not everyone can be driving the first stagecoach, leading round and round in a circle. Within the circle of wagons lies context.
I have been stuck inside for a long ol’ while now, due to illness and self protection, energy too. My world hasn’t shrunk much at all, and what I found most trying and challenging was the loss of where to place myself psychologically. Where did I now fit really, where was my personal meaning and fulfilment, stripped, as I felt I was by so much that defined me. Ha, what a high falutin’ notion, but as I wake up on week three of what has now become an enforced lockdown with my son, who at 19 was in the middle of a first year at University I am feeling the gentle and corrosive shift of context in the air, the holiday charade is over, the dust has settled, literally in our case as I abhor hoovering, the what now’s and what thens and what if’s.
Stripped of the world of work and shops and study, coffee shops and eateries, and hobbies and human interactions the insecurities and transparencies of the human psyche begin to throb. Thankfully so too does empathy and creativity, self worth and importance. That’s how we survive.
There are those out there whose lives are built on fashion and cooking shows who are desperately posting images and alternative ways to continue their status in society on maintaining “the importance of being dressed right”, and “it has to be left for at least two hours to rest”, when PJ’s and a tin of beans standing at the open fridge door is perfectly apropos a la Nigella the Diabetes Goddess, or the mushrooming of online exercise classes, when your 10000 steps means walking up and down the living room, every day, all day. The novel fun factor only lasted a couple of weeks, the enthusiasm is grating and the reality of empty streets and faces looking blankly out of windows is frankly dispiriting.
There is one group of people though who are genuinely in it for the long haul, and by that I mean were before and will be after, people who if anything have found their professions cut through the lockdowns. I personally know of maybe 10 people who are out there like its 1994; talking therapy counsellors, online, on skype, in prisons, caring , helping professions, and food shop everythings, refuse collections, the whole of the health service workers, delivery drivers, postal services, well that’s my little world done.
so surely at this time and surely in the months to come, the question of the society we made and its efficacy, coronavirus notwithstanding, will be more and more laid open to scrutiny, was the intention ever to be a good quality of life for the people on earth, or was the intention always one of personal survival, not even at any cost, but always at any cost. Instead of being told what to think, politically we are experiencing what it all means.
Those 8 people who hold in trust (sic) all the 236 trillion, half of it actually holed up in their possession, (see my recent post https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/returnfromthebewilderness.com/384) might well be thinking to themselves “hell son, me an’ mines aight“. I mean if I was sitting in my house with the rest of almost nearly all the 7 billion people on the planet, which I am, I’d pretty much be doing all I could to sort this mess out, along with all the other messes, instead of beautiful bill gates going online to smile inanely and talk about fleecing yet more money from the impoverished 80% to “find a cure goddamnit” and pretend that they are all bound by the same rules as the rest of us. Too expensive to test everyone, HA, is it? Define expensive.
Excuse me can I get 118 to go please, trillion that is. With sprinkles on top purleeze.
