This is the Story
This is the story of a bar cart. It’s the story of how I bought a bar cart at the beginning of the pandemic and how I imagined that when the pandemic was over I would write about how great, how splendid!, it was that we made it through. I would talk about a few of the cocktails I’d learned to make and maybe by then I’d have a signature drink that I’d serve to my friends when they came over and we’d toast to the end of the “experience.” Would it be a whisky sour? An old fashioned? A classic martini? A French 75? We were glib then, where now we are more solemn. We are more sober. We know more, but we don’t know everything.
This is the story about a woman who has so far made it through the pandemic relatively unscathed but who has been changed by now in more ways than she will be able to set down in a simple blog post on the internet. Perhaps you are also this woman. This is a woman who was wont to say before the pandemic, I believe in stories and fundamental goodness and that understanding is worth working for, and that beauty might not be exactly the secret to the universe, but maybe it’s near it or beside it. This is the story of a woman who now regularly says, I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure that I believe in this or that any more. I want to but I’m not sure.
One of my favourite essays is by Leslie Jamison and it begins, “This is the story of a layover. Who tells the story? I’m telling it to you right now.” I love her writing because it’s big hearted, but it’s dogged and not sentimental and she never lets herself off the hook. I love the way her mind works, and the way she works to get to know her subject, and gets to know herself, and say something larger in doing so. About strangers, she says, “Sometimes I feel I owe a stranger nothing, and then I feel I owe him everything; because he fought and I didn't, because I dismissed him or misunderstood him, because I forgot, for a moment, that his life — like everyone else’s — holds more than I could ever possibly see.”
From time to time during the pandemic, I’ve started to write a document that I always call, “Impact Statement.” And then I end up deleting it, because a lot of the things that have impacted me have impacted others with much more force. I delete it because it’s full of things that are confidential or because the story of my impact would reflect badly on someone else. I delete my impact statement because who really cares? I delete my impact statement because some of it is embarrassing. I delete it because at first I weathered the storm quite well, and then I did not for a while, but I pretended quite convincingly to some people (though not all) that everything was fine. I delete the Impact Statement because I really want to put it behind me. I deleted my Impact Statement Document because at the end of it I’m always alive and in reasonably good health, and right now that seems to be a huge blessing. I delete my ISD every time because I don't want any of those people who participate in the fuckery of the world to think that they’ve got anything over me.
At first the pandemic was the story of isolation, really, a bit of loneliness, and the denial of a low-grade panic. It was the story of hoping for a vaccine and how that would end the fear and after the vaccine, we could get on with dancing and having friends over for charcuterie boards and going out for dinners and building community of all sorts. We started off hearing “we’re all in this together” and some of us even embraced that. We would never take for granted again, our ability to work together toward common goals.
“Things happened that didn’t have to happen.”
Things happened that didn’t have to happen. That’s a phrase I’ve used in a number of circumstances so far in the pandemic.
We lost things we held dear and we learned that grief was a word that could be applied to more moments than just death and we learned that grieving a death had even more layers than we thought it could. People I love lost people they love and I also lost a few. I learned that the feelings of sadness were accompanied by an anger because even if the deaths would have happened anyway, maybe they wouldn’t have been quite so soon, or maybe they could have been better deaths, or that they could have happened more peacefully and more comfortably. We all catalogue our griefs now and try not to think too much about those who are to blame for prolonging them, making them more horrific and / or sad than they needed to be.
At the beginning of the pandemic I bought a bar cart and mixed some cute cocktails with delightful names. But somewhere near the middle of the pandemic so far, I realized I like my Scotch on the rocks and my whisky neat. Sure I was drinking too much but who wasn’t? I regret none of my drinking. There were late night Prince concerts watched with friends over social media when the restrictions were quite intense. In text messaging groups, we drank heavily, photographing our own tipple and making jokes that were only slightly less funny in the morning. God we were pretty hilarious! We engaged in gallows humour and tried to figure things out. We tried to make sense of this behaviour and then that one, all while excusing or empathizing, but often just ranting because how does one parse the level of what is normal in a pandemic? What does one do in X situation we asked over and over again, to ultimately answer with, who really fucking knows? And, it shouldn’t be this way, it didn’t have to happen quite this way.
“At the beginning of the pandemic we worried about money in one way, and then much later we worried about it in another way. ”
At the beginning of the pandemic we worried about money in one way, and then much later we worried about it in another way. Now I look back and think about how that low grade fog affected me, but how all the other semi-traumatic things that went on BTS also affected my writing. I found it difficult to concentrate and was constantly being distracted by those things that maybe didn’t necessarily have to happen the way they were happening. There was grief and then there was grievances. And everything that played out on one’s private TV screen of our own Personal Life, also happened on the big screen movie called The Pandemic. One view heightened the other.
I’m talking more abstractly than I want to here but it has to be this way, partly to be respectful, and partly because specific examples can be so raw right now.
At the beginning of the pandemic I was able to meet my self-imposed deadlines but those frequently slipped away from me. (Here, I add, that writers live and die by the self-imposed deadline). I began editing my novel (due out this month), Everything Affects Everyone, which had been written in the beforetimes, but even the title seemed to take on new meaning. Every ounce of my limited creative juice went into the editing process for that. And if I wasn’t writing anything new, that would have to be okay. I remember telling myself that if I die, at least I’ll have finished this novel. At each stage of sending the edits in to my editor, I poured myself a gin and tonic, or made an old fashioned. When the last proofs were looked over, we had some Pro Secco.
The trouble though, with not writing anything new, is that you have nothing to send out, nothing to apply for grants with, nothing to make a little bit of that side income I usually rely upon. My mental depletion reflected my financial depletion. Sure we were doing just fine because luckily my partner’s artistic output was steady and welcomed by his public. And of course I still had my half-time day job, though the extra hours I usually picked up in the beforetimes were no longer available. When I was writing my Impact Statement document, usually right before tossing it out, I would write some variation about how these things that shouldn’t have been, were in many ways directly responsible for me losing my side-hustle mojo and therefore my side-hustle income. And sure the pandemic started with tales of all the trips that were cancelled but one of those trips was going to turn into a book for me which again, would have been future income. That’s on hold, obviously, ongoingly. What was a lost trip though, compared to someone losing a loved one though? It seemed a very minor sacrifice.
So that’s all ducky. We’re still here, still standing. But I think the world, or at least my 12 readers should know about the chunk of hair that fell out of my head due to stress, early on in the pandemic. The depression that I went into at one point that scared the hell out of me. The way that a few of my important relationships became more frayed than they needed to be. At the beginning of the pandemic, I exercised and had been getting into shape — god, I remember feeling actually quite good! Eventually, I let myself go and said to hell with fitness and spent the winter eating and drinking whatever I wanted. I still stand by this decision but I’m also paying for it a bit now because it’s contributed to my overall lethargy. This story is the story of my bar cart, but what I should really show you is the collection of the empties in the garage. This story is about my bar cart but I could also talk about the dust that collected on my treadmill and on my dumbbells.
At the beginning of this whole thing, I watched a few people unravel, and smugly congratulated myself for having come into the sitch with a full toolbox of coping mechanisms. Later I realized, and maybe now again, that what is needed is an entirely different set of tools. I’m still feeling toward what those magical devices might look like and what and how they might repair the possibly or near irreparable.
My life hasn’t been that extraordinary over the pandemic and even my Impact Statement Document is blessedly short. I’ve felt rage over the antivaxers and antimaskers, but who in their right mind hasn’t? (Keep in mind that where I live, they are an intense lot). These days my rage has mainly transformed into eye rolling, and when it rises up, I can usually school it back into the state of supreme disappointment.
In a book I’ve long loved, A Chorus of Stones by Susan Griffin, she writes: “Were you to trace any life, and study even the minute consequences, the effect, for instance, of a three-minute walk over a patch of grass, of words said casually to a stranger who happens to sit nearby in a public place, the range of that life would extend way beyond the territory we imagine it to inhabit.”
I’m at the point in the pandemic where I’m asking you to imagine that my life has been affected by the irresponsible and uncaring actions of others, but I want to be at the point where I can look at your life and the life of strangers and say, hey, I want to know what has affected you and how. I want to pay attention to the details of the lives of people I come across so that I can imagine the scenes they inhabit differently, with more empathy and more imagination.
In my Impact Statement Document, sometimes before I delete it, I note that I’ve neglected my blog, lost followers, and because all my posts are quite dull and depressing, I refrain from pointing out the tip jar. Because frankly, we’ve all lost income and how can you ask others who have experienced same to shell out. You can’t. That’s okay. In my ISD, I sometimes write that I used to smile when someone called my art and my writing a “labour of love” in the context of “it’s okay that what you do won’t make you rich, dear.” Sometimes I know people mean well, but sometimes now I know, they certainly do not. I’m way more jaded now, and a lot less ‘rich.’
One of the items on my deleted list is that my patience has been worn so thin it’s quite diaphanous. Another item is all the Tylenol I’ve had to take. Another item the knotted muscles in my neck, my stomach aches, insomnia, psychic ache, spiritual malaise. Another item the anxiety attacks which isn't something I’ve ever had to deal with. The aches the aches the aches. I hardly ever dream any more. I don’t day dream; I don’t night dream. There are people I liked. I don’t like them any more.
At the beginning of the pandemic I joked that I was going to learn to ride a motorcycle and I was going to get a tattoo. Okay, I haven’t learned to ride a motorcycle and probably won’t. But you just wait for that tattoo. Some day. I keep fluctuating between wanting a skull or angel wings.
Maybe I’ll look back from some future point, and this, right here today, is what we’ll call the middle of the pandemic. Maybe some of the pain and the things that have impacted us will seem quaint. Our worries right now will seem adorable and petty. But they will have happened, and this is why it’s important to record things in whatever way we can, even though we have no way of knowing whether this is the middle or still close to the beginning.
There is a part in the Susan Griffin book where she says “any sentence, any event to which one is exposed leaves a permanent impression. The brain is changed forever. Of course Whitman knew this when he wrote, “A boy went out one day and all he beheld he became.””
If this is the story of a bar cart, let it also be noted that the morning light will illuminate the contents of it and call to me. I’ve not succumbed to it at that time, even though there have been moments when, and I’m not proud of this and I’m not making light of it, on the contrary, but I’ve certainly wished to.
“Everything that happens to us is in us forever.”
The story of the bar cart should have ended here with a hearty toast, “We’re through to the other side!” Or, with the exclamation that next time, we’ll be raising our glass in a pub! But of course that is not the case. To once again quote Griffin, “No detail that enters the mind, not the smallest instance of memory, ever really leaves it, and things we had thought forgotten will arise suddenly to consciousness years later, or, undetected, shape the course of our lives.” Everything that happens to us is in us forever. And if this is true for us, and I think it is, then, it’s true for all the people we disagree with, and it’s true for their children, too. I admittedly struggle right now with the idea, but at some point, we’ll be sitting at a table together with people in community, at a pub or a bar say, and we’ll maybe learn to raise a glass (not necessarily alcoholic) with someone who right now we are ethically and morally opposed to. For now, though, I’m okay with drinking alone.
September 13, 2021
