I am so desperate to move. Threshold energy rolls restless through my legs demanding a response I'm struggling to deliver. I want to wake up in the morning and charge out the door to wring every ounce of possibility from the world until I'm utterly exhausted from the struggle and fall into the most perfect sleep until I'm recovered enough to try again. The world--this cantankerous calamity sphere--has, however, imposed a speed limit on our affairs.
I write software and stories. I read books and stars. My calling card says I'm an introvert and, if I'm not careful, I'll forget to seek out company for weeks at a time before this human machine starts getting a little wobbly. By all rights, I should have no trouble adapting to a low social contact environment and being largely confined to my home, a place I have cultivated to be an entangled series of nesting dens and book stacks--my operating theory of housekeeping is that if you can't nap on something you should at least be able to read it--and yet I've been struggling to shake this sense of restlessness or at least make use of this untappable reservoir of energy.
I'm getting distracted from reading more easily than normal. Writing is harder to focus on. Work is...well, let's just say work isn't as compelling as one might hope though I've at least moved past the phase of constantly refreshing the NPR/BBC Bad News Drip. Contrary to the demands of my limbic system, F5 did nothing to improve the situation.
The work aspect is frustrating because I've spent the better part of the last four years lamenting office life and talking up how pragmatic and sensible remote work is and then when our CEO got in front of the pandemic and declared we'd be working from home for the foreseeable future...I folded. I got the bare minimum done in the maximum time which led my workout and writing schedules to collapse and that left me in an extraordinarily disgruntled state. Were I observing myself I would not take this as a vote of confidence in the value of remote work. And yet even accounting for the frustration of collapsing into a tiny white husk like a late-stage star, there's still a glut that I've left unaccounted.
Last year was challenging. In June, right as The Breakup reached its culmination, I tore my ACL clean through. Surgery was required, and I spent the next six months in my own personal vortex of formless time. The only things that existed were work, physical therapy, and endless tortured hours reflecting on how I'd come to New Orleans with the love of my life only to be laid up alone in a far too big house in the Ninth Ward.
Even my foulest moods tend to be fleeting, though, and by the turn of the year I was stable and clear-headed enough to start venturing back into the world. 2020 had all the trappings of being an excellent year, a fresh start and a time of self-discovery and social exploration after several unpleasant inward-focused years.
I don't think I have to explain how inaccurate those dreams turned out to be.
So here we are staring down the barrel of a year or more of social distancing and every gathering larger than a waltz has been canceled. Now we have to weigh every human encounter against the risk we'll accidentally bring home something that will kill grandma in some isolated ICU chamber. I'd been mentally preparing myself for the devastation that climate change is going to wreak in my older years and the accompanying unpredictability but this was not on my fucking bingo card. Fortune is inconsiderate like that.
Even my foulest moods tend to be fleeting, though, and now there's nothing left but to brush off the cobwebs and look for north.
