Quarantine Chronicles - Part 3

Jesus H. Fuck. On one hand, it seems like the last three months have crawled by at a snail's pace, since there's nowhere to go and nothing to do as a result of the never-ending pandemic. On the other hand, if I look at all of the things that have transpired in the last three months, it seems like a whirlwind. Can we stop the world, please? I'd like to get off this fucktastic ride. Where do I even start?

Broke up with the girlfriend. For someone who had been poly for many years, it was a big change for her to try the not-poly thing for awhile, and the bottom line was that she needs more out of her relationship(s) than one person, or at least one blackbird, could provide. It also didn't really help matters that two of the things that are critical issues for her just so happen to line up with what some might say are my biggest relationship weaknesses. She has a lot of insecurity around relationships, generally, and needs a lot of verbal affirmation to know that things are still in a good state. This is so not me. If someone isn't confident in themselves and in the state of our relationship, then I'm the wrong person for them to be dating. The other one was that our interest levels in sex just didn't really match up. Usually they say that it's the guy who wants to be fuckin' all the time and the woman who's not so into it, but in this case it was the other way around. For me, sex is one of those things where, while I'm not going to say I can take it or leave it, it's also just not super high on my priority list. Never really has been. Probably didn't help matters that we were only seeing each other every other week, but whatever.

Anyhow, we attempted to stay friends after the breakup, but that didn't really work out, either. We were having a discussion over the different emphasis each one of us places on words vs. actions - as you might guess from the previous paragraph, she's a words gal. To me, words are hollow, and it's what people do that matters. Anyone can say anything at any time if they think it's what you want to hear, but you can't fake showing up for someone. I was trying to give her an example of where she had said something but it wasn't at all received in the way that she had said it- the whole point was to illustrate that just because you think you're saying XYZ doesn't mean that the other person is saying XYZ, and so words aren't as foolproof as you might think. This conversation devolved into an argument and finally I just said fuck it - well, "fuck off" to be precise. It's a bummer, but what I realized in the end was that when she told me in the beginning of our relationship that her ex thought she was a narcissist that this was the big red warning sign. I wish her well - there are a lot of things I really liked about her - but in the end the incompatibilities won out. I wonder if things would have been different if coronavirus hadn't ruined the world.

C moved back to CT, which really felt like the end of an era. Yeah, I moved to Denver, so it's not like we'd been hanging out for pizza night on any sort of regular basis since November, but the east coast just feels like a completely different planet - even moreso now that we have coronapanic and travel has become a complete shitshow. I have zero desire to get on an airplane right now - not because I'm afraid of getting sick, but because I just don't want to deal with all the bullshit. I wear my mask to the grocery store because it's required and I have no interest in paying the city of Denver a $999 fine, but that's 10-15 minutes, tops - there's no way I'm going to wear one of those fucking things for hours at a time - but more on this later. It's not like C and I don't talk anymore or anything like that, but the reality here is that our lives have diverged and will continue to do so to a greater and greater degree - she's got a minion to take care of now, and video chat every few weeks just isn't the same thing as sitting on the couch bitching about the world.

And then Priss died. Jesus H. Fuck. I was muddling my way through all of this new reality with some degree of success (and some degree of failure) - and as she had been doing for the last 19 years, along with her brothers when they were still alive, my cat was helping me stay sane. I'd mentioned in the previous post that things were starting to look iffy; it wasn't long thereafter that she started spending most of her time in the bedroom closet, hiding in the corner. She'd come out to eat and she'd hang out with me as much as she could, so I think she was doing her best to be a cat for as long as possible, but after what happened with Shiznit I couldn't watch her slowly decline like that. I'd been going back and forth on whether or not to call the vet and send her on to her next life or try to wait it out a little longer to see what would happen, but then one night during the first week of June I had a dream and Priss was in it - in human form - and she told me that it was time to go. And so on June 5th, we said our goodbyes. I ended up driving down to Arizona to bury her in my mom's backyard; Shiznit is buried in the backyard of C's old place in SF, and Raven and Mika are in the backyard of my old house in Tempe - at least Priss is somewhere that eventually I could go visit her.

Like I said earlier - it's the end of an era. All my cats are dead. My best friend moved 2000 miles away. I'm living in a new city where I have yet to actually make any new friends. The friends that I do have here I've barely seen - part of this is, I'm sure, due to coronapanic, but I also think part of it is due to the fact that I live downtown and they are all out in the suburbs. The thought of trying to start dating again completely turns me off. I just don't have any desire to deal with anyone else's shit. I'm having a hard enough time dealing with my own shit. I'm not sad. I'm not crying. The best word I can think of is "resigned". The world is in a sorry-ass place, and it's going to be there for months to come. Sure, I think eventually it will all be over and we won't have to mask up every time we go in a building, but I don't expect that happy day to occur this year or even next year - I think it'll be 2022 before life returns to normal. It's like S told me the other day - I'm just trying to find reasons to continue existing. It's not easy.

Actually, TBH, I don't have any reasons right now. I continue to exist because that's the default state of affairs. It used to be that no matter how much life sucked, I could always say "well, maybe it will be better tomorrow" or "maybe something really great will happen today" - but I don't believe those things anymore. It isn't going to be any better tomorrow. It might not be any worse, either - it's just going to be one more in a long slog of meaningless days where we attempt to occupy our waking moments because we can't sleep forever. I've thought about getting another cat or two, but when I actually imagine it past the initial musing, I just can't do it. About the only emotion I seem to be capable of feeling these days when I do feel something is rage. Depressing, ain't it?

So let's talk about rage for a minute. One major world event that I haven't said anything about yet is the death of George Floyd, a random black dude in Minnesota who had the unfortunate bad luck of encountering a racist white cop. It's not that Floyd's death was, in itself, particularly remarkable; plenty of black people have been killed by white cops over the years and nobody has seemed to give much of a shit about it - or there would be protests and they'd fizzle out, or the cops wouldn't be charged, or any of a number of other related things. This case, however, was different. The bulk of the encounter was captured on video and it went viral faster than COVID-19. Those cops straight-up killed that dude. For something like 8 or 9 minutes, the lead cop had his knee on Floyd's neck and isn't doing jack or shit to make sure he's OK, even as you hear him say that he can't breathe and see him display increasing signs of distress. The cop (Derek Chauvin) ignores the other cop who wants to roll him over, and they also ignore the protests of the bystanders who are asking them to check for a pulse. This wasn't another case of "oh, he looked like he had a gun so I shot him even though he was actually reaching for his wallet" - this was "the dude is pinned to the ground and not moving and we're going to hold him there until he dies." If you watch the video, it really does look like Chauvin is enjoying the whole thing. At least that's my take.

Anyhow, this all goes down, and the country completely loses its shit in a way I've never seen before. There were days of protests all over the country, and even all around the world. Some of these protests turned into riots; quite a few cities around the US were put under curfew, including Denver. Then you've got this massive outpouring of public support from businesses and celebrities and run-of-the-mill white folks who probably never gave a rat's ass about black people up until now (and, frankly, I bet most of them still don't, but it's bad PR to be seen as not a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement) - everything from thousands or even millions of dollars being donated to black-related charities to campaigns on social media to an overnight surge in popularity of books on racism and black history, and so on and so forth.

And from there it expands even more. People start tearing down statues of various historical figures, from the largely-reviled Christopher Columbus (this is nothing new - it seems that only the Italians like this guy now) all the way to people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson - because they happened to own slaves. Nevermind anything good that they might have done for the country - they owned slaves, and therefore they cannot possibly have been good people and their monuments must be torn down. Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir - none of these guys owned slaves, but they held racist views, and so they, too, must be thrown onto the bonfire of the vanities. This is where any support that I might have had for BLM goes out the window - but I actually think most of the people who are pushing for a re-examination of history are white people trying to outwoke each other. Nobody wants to give off the appearance of being a racist (except for the people who are hardcore racists and don't give a fuck) and so in their attempt to be as anti-racist as possible, they're going to do whatever they can to score perception points.

This reminds me of a quote that I'd always thought was attributed to French statesman Cardinal Richelieu (according to Wikipedia, it's disputed): "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

I don't know what people expect from their historical figures. All of these people were flawed humans, just like all of the people today who are trying to re-adjudicate their worth in society, and there seems to me something inherently wrong with trying to apply the standards of today to the people of two hundred years ago. Half of the delegates to the constitutional convention in 1787 owned slaves. Some of them were against slavery, some of them were not. I wonder how many of the ones were were anti-slavery would have supported gay marriage. I bet none of them supported giving women the right to vote. So maybe they don't get tarred and feathered because of their views on slavery, but I'm sure there's some other issue on which their views differ widely from modern orthodoxy that we can find a reason to hate on them, too. Jesus H. Fuck!

In fact, let's throw a little shade on some non-white historical figures, just to even things out. Martin Luther King couldn't keep it in his pants. Gandhi was a racist. Yet both of these men are held up as paragons of virtue in the fight for freedom and civil rights.

And perhaps your counter-argument is "yeah, but at least they weren't slave owners." Sure, that's true, I'm not trying to equate slavery with adultery; but what I am saying is that even the best among us is not perfect. In fact, I would say that it is with probability 1 that everyone who has ever lived will eventually be deemed as unfit given the fullness of time. Societal standards keep changing, and with them, baselines of what is and is not acceptable / moral / ethical behavior. Things that we view as entirely fine in 2020 are probably going to be looked back upon in 200 years (if the human race still exists) as barbaric and dehumanizing.

The other question I find myself asking is "ok, then what?" Let's say that we start teaching that all the old white dudes that wrote the constitution were a bunch of bastards who hated anyone who wasn't like them. Let's take it even farther and say that all of American history is built on an artifice of lies and enslavement and dehumanization. If we, as a society, decide that all of these things are true, then what does that mean for current and future America? Are we supposed to dissolve the country and start over? Are white people supposed to throw their hands up in the air and just give all their material possessions away to the first black person they see? Are we going to try to swing the pendulum of race relations so far back the other direction that white people get a taste of their own medicine, so to speak? It's all well and good to say "this shit is fucked up", but what are you going to replace it with? I don't have the answer, and I've never claimed to - but one thing that I don't see working is the current attempt to try to balance out racial representation by flooding the airwaves with anything and everything that isn't white.

I see this on Instagram, for example. Various posts from IG itself about black-this, or LGBTQ-that, or Latino-whatever - but not a single one that doesn't feature some minority/represssed/underrepresented/whatever group. But, um, hey, white people are still here. Yeah, nobody gives a shit about us right now because we were the only ones that got any shit given about them for the longest time, but we didn't just magically disappear when George Floyd was killed. If the racial makeup of the US is 63% white and 13% black, then wouldn't it make sense to show white people 63% of the time and black people 13% of the time? For people who say that the answer to this is "no" - why not? This seems like the fairest possible solution - it mirrors the demographics of the country.

Anyway, I'm going to have to come back to this. There's more, including the tale of how I almost rage-quit my job last week. Maybe by the time I actually do come back to write the next entry, that saga will have resolved itself one way or the other. At this point, all I can say is that if I'm going down, I'm going down swinging.

Jesus H. Fuck!