I’ve seen the memes comparing what we’re all experiencing right now to the stages of grief and that does seem pretty accurate, a sort of looping nonlinear ride through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, then whooooaaaah back to denial, and on it goes.

Today I woke up feeling pretty bleak and I know that’s temporary but it’s definitely shadowing my view at the moment. What a thing it is to see HALF-MILLION INFECTED WORLDWIDE in large type on the local paper and reading endless accounts of misery and anxiety and living in a country with a president who keeps opening that despicably creepy blowfish mouth of his to say we’ll all be back on track by Easter.

I have been remembering this ridiculous night, years and years and years ago, when I was out with friends and we were all enormously high on LSD, and my friend Gabby kept talking about The Bog. The details of that evening have largely escaped me but she was basically having a bad trip which she could only articulate as The Bog, and she would be okay one minute and in The Bog the next. Get out of The Bog, Gabby! we’d say, and she would sort of come around then bam, she’d be knee-deep again, totally paralyzed. The Booooooooog, she’d moan.

So I guess the only thing we can all do right now is try and stay out of The Bog. It’s a real thing this time rather than a chemically-induced mess of paranoia and fear, but until we’re actually in it, we have to stay out of it, together.

If you would like an update on the DIY kit I mentioned in my last post here is a terrible tiny chair that looks absolutely NOTHING like the example and took me about fifty-seven headache-infused years to assemble plus I glued my fingers together like twice and now the cat is judging it (rude, like she could do any better), so anyhoo that’s all coming right along.

I am definitely starting to feel a little stir crazy, at least I find myself gazing out the window on a regular basis with that third-day-of-being-snowed-in feeling where the novelty has dissolved and now you just want to drive to TJ Maxx without putting your life at risk.

Maybe some of that trapped feeling comes not just from being, you know, legitimately sort of trapped aside from walks, but from being absolutely bombarded with this one thing we’re all constantly talking and thinking about. It’s every piece of media, every deserted street, every closed sign, every text and every phone call. I go to sleep worrying about it and wake up worrying about it. It’s smothering, you know?

Whenever I am tempted to click YES on the mental Evite RSVP for a looming pity party I try to remind myself how incredibly lucky my family is to be so well-suited for lockdown. Both of us already worked from home, our jobs are intact thus far, the children are old enough to not require constant care, we have a decent if dwindling supply of toilet paper, we live in a golden age of streaming entertainment, everyone’s healthy, and all four of us are various levels of introvert so no one really minds being forbidden from social activity.

I mean honestly, we’ve got this. (But also: hnnnnngggggggggggghhhh.)

Speaking of streaming entertainment, I sure hope you are watching Tiger King on Netflix right now. Get past the first episode which just kind of introduces you to the players and settle in for a wild ride into polygamy, cults, drug lords, insanely terrible mullets, plenty of missing teeth and/or arms, more animal print leggings than you ever could have imagined existed, murder, and more. If that can’t buy you a brief break from All Covid, All the Time, I don’t know what will.

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