Notes from the End of a World
Each night in 2020 I wrote a short post because I wanted to etch these strange days into my memory before I forget them. Before the world changed completely. And 2020 delivered more than anyone could have bargained for.
Each night in 2020 I wrote a short post because I wanted to etch these strange days into my memory before I forget them. Before the world changed completely. And 2020 delivered more than anyone could have bargained for.
Moon
I should understand the rhythm of the moon by now.
Normal
Giving up on normal seems like a critical psychic adjustment these days.
Max
“You’re looking at the future: people translated as data.” This line from Max Headroom certainly holds up thirty-five years later.
Cigarette
There was a half-moon in the sky and a large man in a red pick-up truck was talking to somebody on the phone about Jesus.
Ready
“You can put on a jacket,” she says, “but you can’t take off your skin.”
Pray
When I consider the man I want to become someday, I often picture myself as someone who prays.
Demon
Today’s headlines featured phrases about “demon sperm” and “the umbrella man” because we’ve slipped into a psychedelic hell.
Inspiration
A list of things that inspired the book I’m writing.
Wave
The seven o’clock cheers faded long ago.
Feedback
It’s two-thirty in the morning, and a caravan of motorcycles and dune buggies are growling up First Avenue, their engines rattling the windows.
Clay
The Stand brought me back to teenage nights of staying awake into the small hours with a flashlight, promising myself just one more chapter.
Way
It doesn’t matter if the nail is in the exact right place, so long as it’s holding together two pieces of wood.
Downpour
And for a lunatic moment I wonder if it will keep raining until everything is washed clean.
Detach
I remember speeding across a blank Oklahoma plain dotted with pump jacks and cattle pens.
Cover
Finishing a project means closing doors, killing darlings, and foreclosing possibilities.
Echo
Tonight I’m craving the kerchunk of a rewind button and the ritual of scotch-taping the edge of a cassette
Run
They say you never see a cheetah stretch, but maybe I should. My legs always hurt.
Anchors
Rode the subway home in an empty car except for me and an old woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “Love is so gangster.”
Soul
These medieval Catholics were haunted men who desperately wrestled with the question of a soul, not like the playful Greeks who made up the world as they went along.
Spear
And what is my intuition telling me? My first thought is to turn down the volume on the world so I can hear.
Remembrance
There’s a strange dynamic to this nightly journal, this sensation of writing against time. Or more precisely: writing for myself in the future.
Breakup
Nobody died from the pandemic in New York City the other day.
Empty
Ten years later, I still remember the sight of a young couple marching along an empty desert road in Nevada.
Diver
In this case, it was the half-remembered image of a woman grinning as she plunged into a shallow industrial canal.
Rain
There’s something oddly soothing about the sound of traffic peeling down wet streets on a rainy night.
Embers
Maybe it’s an ancestral memory of bearing witness through the night while tending to the flames.
Sleepless
You can almost taste it, that bright metallic sensation which floods the brain when it decides there will be no sleep tonight.
Nature
We contemplated where waterfalls came from and wondered how saltwater becomes freshwater and vice versa.
Vivid
A world without the color green. A man who repainted all the seashells on the beach.
Forgetting
It was remarkable, this sudden act of forgetting as if we’d left the past four months behind.
Independence
A degraded and muffled Fourth of July. The prospect of celebrating America these days feels like a dark joke.
Toll
Sometimes I dream about tollbooth operators, the half-glimpsed faces with cigarettes on their lips, their left hands forever clutching a quarter and a dime in change.
Spasm
Tonight I sat in front of a fan while premature firecrackers echoed through the streets. I wondered how to live in a nation that’s circling the drain.
Abandon
Maybe I should go live in a tree. Learn the phases of the moon and teach myself to cook with the sun.
Shadow
Sometimes I find comfort in a two-thousand-year-old myth about a Chinese emperor.
Belief
Last night I woke in the middle of the night and wondered if it’s possible to believe in something otherworldly in 2020.
Humid
We had a pleasant June for a while, but the long mean heat of summer is finally here. Beyond this, I’m losing the plot.
Rhythm
And there’s the sound of someone in the street laughing and saying, “How did we get like this?”
Invasion
Aliens could land in America and we would politicize them until they became just another round of ammo in our endless red versus blue battle.
Grace
As I listened to a woman talk to the pigeons, I began humming that Jesus’ blood never failed me yet.
Sand
They’re calling it the Gorilla Dust Cloud, and you can see it from outer space.
Routine
For years I would reach for my telephone the moment I woke up, groping for it with a junkie sense of need.
Phase
She made a comment about her life that seems like a solid piece of wisdom for dealing with any kind of history: “I need to look back, but I don’t need to stare.”
Radioland
During commercial breaks, I sang along to radio jingles for machines that control your brainwaves while you sleep.
Solstice
People are edgy, their dreams infected with anxiety if they can sleep at all.
Midnight
I scrolled through streets named after Hank Williams and Big Mama Thornton while the radio worried about leftists and alien abductions.
Convulsion
More than ever, surrealism might be the best strategy for surviving these days.
Tactile
And I’m reminded that I think better without the screen tugging at my thoughts like a magnet.
Reconciliation
I want to square my life with these instructions from Thich Nhat Hanh: “Vow to work for reconciliation by the most silent and unpretentious mean possible.”
Wolf
They call it the hour of the wolf, and I think it’s reassuring there’s a name for this time, that others feel it too.