Nonfiction
How are you holding up?
Fine. Just fine. Actually, pretty good. Can you see me okay? You look a little pixelated. It’s probably my Wi-Fi, sorry. Anyway, I’m doing pretty well, considering. It’s interesting because I think this whole thing has revealed an odd personality quirk—or maybe it’s not so odd, it’s just been brought to the fore. I don’t mind isolation. That is the quirk. I find this kind of isolation—‘social distancing,’ as they’re calling it—to have blanket-like qualities. For me, at least. I’m wrapping myself in it. People seem fairly put off by having to distance themselves from one another, but with me it’s like ‘you don’t have to tell me twice,’ you know? I don’t know if that’s a generational thing. I’m Gen X. My wife is, technically, a Millennial—but she’s like right on the cusp, so her tendencies vary, depending. But I grew up playing by myself for hours or days, even. Using my imagination and whatnot. The Atari or, later, Nintendo, was a treat for which we needed to ask permission. So was the TV, for that matter. In our home, at least. Anyway, this is all kind of reminding me of those long, legless days when you were tired of your friends, tired of riding bikes or playing Statue Tag or Kick the Can or Colored Eggs. You’d explored the backyards and the sidewalks and the concrete drainage ditches of the neighborhood and you’d skinned your knees and elbows raw and your parents stung them with Solarcaine till you cried. And you’d gotten into enough trouble. You’d experimented with pieces of plywood atop a skateboard as a makeshift go-kart. You played guns. You’d gotten a hold of a brick of bottle rockets and tried taping a bunch of them together then lighting them to see what would happen. You experimented with minor vandalism or stole petty things from big stores just to see if you could get away with it. It would be raining or you were just fucking done with your friends and your siblings, and you’d be inside, in your bedroom or your basement, playing. LEGOs or GI Joe or Star Wars or whatever was around. Old toys. Baby toys, which were okay to play with again because your friends weren’t there to mock you. Besides, they were doing it too. You were home free. There’s a reason you scream that in Ghost in the Graveyard and those kinds of games in which you are hunted but evade being tagged. You can’t be touched. You’re safe. Anyway, this feels a little like that. Maybe I’m infantilizing. Regardless, I’m finding I can do this brand of isolation standing on my head, both hands in my pockets. It doesn’t feel like isolation. It feels like a parent sent me to my room or the school sent me home, which I never minded in the least. Like right before all of this, my wife received passes to a suite at the United Center for a Blackhawks game, courtesy of our house contractors who had talked her into doing an on-camera testimonial for their company as a satisfied customer. They renovated our fireplace, did some painting, laid down new carpeting. They did a good job. The place looks nice. But they gave us two dozen passes, which meant we had to find two dozen friends between us. This is our second marriage—for both of us—so we don’t have any in-common friends. Besides that, I don’t have many friends anymore. I’ve passed through so many stages of life that I find making and maintaining friendship to be an exhausting undertaking. I don’t like icebreakers, and my life’s story just keeps getting longer, more complex, complicated—or, rather, nuanced such that introductory smalltalk feels a monumental endeavor, and then the ensuing weeks, months of delving deeper into grounds I’ve already covered, it’s just—so anyway I choose not to. My last group of new friends was in grad school—that was more than twenty years ago. I knew then they would be my last group of new friends. I told them as much. Sometimes I still talk to one or two of them. Anyway, we extended invitations to people—friends, I suppose, for lack of colder terminology—for the Hawks game, and for the four weeks prior to the game, I agonized over it. My people didn’t really know one another, and I didn’t know their spouses. My wife’s friends didn’t know any of my friends. I worried about the open, gratis access to top-shelf booze in the suite. Who might get drunk, behave badly, maybe piss off the suite owners. Maybe it would be me. It probably would be me, then I would shame my wife, myself in front of “friends.” I dreaded it. The pandemic happened and the NHL canceled the season just three days before the game. Tragedy averted, I tore up the suite passes and opened a bottle of wine and drank it. All by myself in the comfort and safety of our renovated family room.
How are you holding up?
Not bad. Days are a little repetitive, but like I said before, it feels familiar to me. Keeping busy enough. Teaching has moved online, which feels completely ineffectual to those of us who have never desired to teach online. And writing? No. I haven’t been writing. Who could? The news cycle is enough to make a person want to hang themselves. Christ. Creative pursuits feel a bit frivolous. Maybe a less jaded person would say that now is exactly the right time for creativity. They probably would. But I kind of feel like right now creativity isn’t an essential service, as they are saying. It actually reminds me of an episode in grad school on 9/11. The morning of. The world was just fucking chaos. You remember how it was, how it felt. The images of the spectral planes swooping unnaturally low and the gray buildings. The perspective of it had MC Escher-like qualities, like it was an optical illusion until the things converged and then a brilliant fireball against the azure sky. And then the buildings collapsed, and everything turned the color of elephant skin and you felt like you were choking on dust, no matter where you were. Anyway, we were in Iowa. Friends, colleagues from out east—from New York City, especially—tried to get a hold of other friends and family back home. They couldn’t get through. Our students—all of these 18-year old, blonde, fresh faced kids from the middle of nowhere Iowa or the suburbs of Chicago—took it in with a distant, cinematic awe. New York City may as well have been a ridge on Mars’ southern hemisphere, as far as they were concerned. You know? And these were the kids of Columbine—the generation baptized into school shootings and mass trauma of that ilk—so you saw the traces of a generation less affected by what they saw on TV than those of us who bore witness to the Challenger explosion. Anyway, I had to teach a few classes that day, but really didn’t want to. None of us did. In the English building, there was a palpable buzzing—an excited anticipation. Something Big was happening in the world, and should we cancel class because of it? Felt like we should. I encountered a colleague in the hallway—I’ll never forget what she said because it kind of haunts me to this day. I really wonder if it haunts her. She held court with a bunch of other graduate instructors and declared, “People, mass hysteria is no reason to cancel academic, intellectual pursuits.” I was moved to immediate anger by this, thinking that there were thousands of people—fellow Americans, to use a tritely patriotic phrase—lost, utterly lost and confused, injured, maimed, crushed, burned, missing, etcetera. People were falling from great heights on top of other people below. Her classification of that event as ‘mass hysteria,’ was as inappropriate as it was technically flawed. A disparate group of people claiming to suffer from the same physical or psychogenic illnesses due to fear of real or perceived threats—that’s the summation of ‘mass hysteria’ that I recall from my college psych class. Anyway, were we not canceling class to simply bear witness? Isn’t it important in times like that, like these, to bear witness? Perhaps that was outmoded. Maybe it was the comfort and safety of distance from the Awful Event she was reacting to—but the thought of going in and teaching rhetoric and argument analysis to a group of kids that morning simply didn’t jibe. You know? I feel that way right now. Don’t you feel that way? Doesn’t everyone feel like that? Things that we deem important, day to day, are so highly contextual. Are you noticing the increasing number of TV commercials that are directly addressing these ‘unprecedented’ or ‘uncertain times?’ It only took maybe a week before those terms lost their meaning. I’m imagining a marketing exec at, like General Mills, who just a month ago had his ass chewed out for Lucky Charms’ abysmal, lagging sales. (“But, sir, you know that our sales spike around St. Patrick’s Day, then dip a bit through the summer. It’s more of a spring/fall kind of comfort cereal.” “I don’t give a sweet fuck, Henry. If you don’t get those numbers up, I’ll have your lucky charms in a vice so fast.”) So he pays the ass chewing forward to his ad or marketing agency, telling them to come up with something or else. Then this happens, and maybe the marketing exec is rethinking the order of things, as the sales of Lucky Charms feels somehow less than important. I suppose if he’s in marketing, what he’s actually thinking is how to parlay this virus into increased sales. During these ‘unprecedented times.’ Maybe that’s an illustration of why creativity is needed now. Still, I don’t feel like it.
How are you holding up?
Ugh. I feel slightly off. Like a couple of ticks this side of depressed, maybe. I’m taking the maximum dose of Zoloft, and I feel more or less like if not for that I’d be in bed, under the covers, all fucking day long. I don’t have that sense of unreality that comes with my old friend depression, but I don’t feel far off from that either. You know what I mean? I am putting a lot of faith in the little Zoloft molecules doing their collective, neuropsychic duty against odds that are the things of war movies. They’re completely surrounded, and the enemy is closing in. I keep imagining the little Zoloft molecules forming a huge chain, Red Rover-style, holding off the depression molecules, which for some reason I have imagined bear the face of Bob Heckle—a neighborhood bully growing up; thin moustache, feathered hair, mirrored sunglasses, a muscle car and a wooden baseball bat—who keeps trying to burst through. Bob Heckle was the baddest of the bad awful bullies, I cannot overstate that enough. We scattered like fucking roaches if Bob Heckle came around. His particular brand of terror was free roaming and indiscriminate. He had unlimited range, so no matter where you were, you just weren’t safe. Anyway, his face immediately popped into my head as the face of depression molecules because of the brute nature of their attacks. The little Zoloft molecules all wear this Superman-style “Z” on their chests, which are normally bulging and muscular. So my little Zoloft molecules are strong, but they are getting a real, constant drubbing from Bob “Crippling Depression” Heckle, and it’s unclear how much longer they can hold the line. They’re only as strong as the weakest molecule and all of that, right? Once one of the little Zoloft molecules’ tiny arms feel the horrible full weight of Bob “Crippling Depression” Heckle’s acne-ed body launching against them, the dam breaks and depression—a thin-mustached, early 80s bully—prevails. Once that happens, I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do.
How are you holding up?
I made the mistake of reading about victims of this pandemic, this virus. Stayed awake for nearly a whole night last week just reading obituaries from regional news sites. A lot of them have a whole special section of virus-related death notices, which I found odd and disturbing. It appeared as if ‘virus death’ was a special, limited edition kind of death. It chilled me. Anyway, there they all were—dozens and dozens of human beings of various ages—separate from the natural causes, cancer, heart attack, car accident, suicide, gunshot deaths. But there was this one guy in particular that struck me, and I haven’t been able to shake it since. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was a decorated Vietnam veteran—a marine—who’d survived Khe Sanh, survived being a junior high teacher, survived marriage, and survived cancer—lymphoma, I think it was. This virus killed him, though. This. I wish I could remember his name. I read about him and imagined interminable days and hours in Vietnam during battle—this Marine fighting on whatever reserve fumes he never knew existed within him, believing that he would die. Accepting death in his heart, for all of the death that surrounded him. Accepting death in his head. Perhaps then, later, came the surprise that he’d survived, despite losing so many of his friends. Perhaps the relief of returning home to safety. Home free. A wife, multiple kids, grandkids. Devotes his career to teaching an age of child so flippant and overrun with hormones that no sane person would choose to enter a classroom with one of them without certified nerves of blue steel. Fights cancer, fights lymphoma. Wins again. More relief. Home free—again. Then a cough, a fever, a ventilator and no funeral. Dies alone. No one to see him off, as it were. After all of that. I know I’m inferring a lot about a stranger based on a few paragraphs in the local ‘special virus death obituary’ section. I think his name was Dan or Dale. Maybe in his life, he was an addict or abusive, but the obit was fairly laudatory of both life and legacy. Or maybe he’d lived a full life to satisfactory completion. Nothing left to see or do or accomplish. Visited all of the continents with his wife, took pictures on the Great Wall and shared an Aperol Spritz with her at a café on the Amalfi coast. Still. To have survived so much, then to be mowed down by the replication of viral protein. I read so many of these stories like (maybe) Dan’s/Dale’s. But reading about him caused me to lose my mental and emotional shit pretty hard, right there in bed. My wife woke up and I said I was just having a bad dream. She said, “Don’t worry, you’re safe.”
How are you holding up?
….and, really, this is the thing— This is the thing that feels omnipresent in the most infuriating way. The thing I can’t shake, though, is an inevitability that I felt also in my childhood during those long, summer days. At some point, we have to emerge from the house and go out into the world. Even though a virus doesn’t really care how long it’s been—how tired you are of not going places. How much you long for a night out at a restaurant. That tapas place where we used to get sangria and dátiles con tocino. That street taco place where we used to get barbacoa and papas con rajas. That tavern where we used to sample a different local IPA each time. How badly you want to get on a plane and go anywhere—could be Toledo, Ohio, for all you care. Just not here. You have to return to the classroom. You have to return to your car, to the store, to the gas station, to the dentist’s office. And out there somewhere is the Thing itself. Bob “The Virus” Heckle with his mustache and his bat. There’s this awful game I’ve been playing on my computer instead of writing or reading or thinking about teaching in the fall. You are a dart-wielding monkey, for some reason. You choose a map and you place these various spike-wielding towers throughout the map to pop a nonstop flurry of balloons that parade through the course. The balloons come in a variety of shapes, colors and strengths—the colors of the balloons correlate to the strength of the balloon. Some balloons burst into dozens of other balloons. So like a black balloon is popped and turns into thirteen other balloons that need to be popped. Your towers all have different capabilities—one is a cannon that blows up multiple balloons, one is a submarine that can be placed in water, one is a ninja monkey that throws a shuriken to pop the balloons. And so on. You get the idea. Anyway, I myself am a Level 70 balloon popper. That should give you an idea of how many times I’ve played this. I find the game to be soothing, cathartic. I don’t know why I can’t stop playing it. The balloons start out small, slow. As a trickle, and as you pop them you get money to buy and place new defense towers. Every round, the balloons increase in volume and intensity, and you win the game if you make it eighty-five rounds without letting 150 balloons complete the course unharmed. If you succeed, you win extra money, lives, and defenses. Just by popping these balloons. Extra money, lives and defenses. I play for hours. I forgot to feed the dog one afternoon, I had been playing so much. And there’s this one make-or-break level that tests your strategic, balloon-popping mettle. Whether you’ve got the right defenses with the right upgrades in the right places. It’s level 76. On Level 76, the balloons of different sizes and strengths come so fast that my laptop lags—there’s just too much action happening, and the processor can’t keep up. The screen slows and then freezes and the MacBook spinning wheel appears. If I have a special Super Monkey thing, I can clear the whole board with it, reap the cash and carry on. Sometimes the processor can keep up and it will continue. Sometimes not. But it only does this on Level 76. I was playing the other day and got to Level 76, and the balloons rushed out from the left of the screen. Just pouring out, and my little monkey tower defenses did their best to destroy them, but the action on the screen slowed and eventually froze. I just waited, watching the spinning wheel to see if it might stop and the game would come back to life and carry on. Nothing happened and I knew I’d likely have to shut down my computer. But as sure as Bob Heckle would take a bat to us all, I waited.
~
Josh McColough’s short fiction has appeared in Split Lip Magazine and SPLASH! (Haunted Waters Press). He has an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.