Chapter 91: WTF

I. Am.      FUCKED. 

It’s really true that no one saw this coming. At least not peasants like me. I guess it’s possible some evil overlord orchestrated the whole thing, a madman in his sinister lair cackling at humanity, the world suffering unaware, blindly infected by his evil plan. MUAHAHA! Take that, little people!! But I have no way of knowing about any secret nefarious plot, all I have is a nebulous suspicion that someone with a metric shit-ton of money miiiiggghht have been doing something they really shouldn’t have been doing. 

It’s a diabolical nightmare come to life. I’m supposed to wake up shaking and sweating, grateful to be back to reality, eyes darting around the room to make sure everything is normal. Problem is, no matter how hard I pinch myself, this reality isn’t going away, and I continue to cease waking up from this bad dream.  And suddenly I live in this bizarre Aldous Huxley world of externally imposed decrees.

I can’t work. 

I can’t go to the gym. 

My daughter can’t go to her University. 

I can’t go out. 

I’m not supposed to see my friends, or really anyone at all, and if I do, I am required to stay a specified distance away. Taped circles and arrows suddenly appear everywhere, and never in my life have I ever felt more like a chess piece STAY ON YOUR SQUARE, PAWN!! It is so fucking bizarre. Overnight, weird dictates are imposed. Many of them make absolutely no logical sense, and I wonder what insane meetings had to have happened in order to come up with these deranged rules. Six feet! Why? Because, ummm…..We need an arbitrary amount… Six feet!

Along with all of this weirdness, no one is supposed to leave their houses. 

Every now and then, a half-baked idea pops up in society, this time there is the concept that isolating everyone, an impossibly unsustainable idea, will somehow fix it. From the very beginning I see this as kicking the can down the road. Oh, there’s that damn can again, only this time we’re out of money and resources because of a lack of productivity and a ruined supply chain. Yeah, that’ll help. 

We are told that healthy people with good immunity have the best odds, then we are all shipped  home to sit and have food delivered into our laps whilst binging Netflix and drinking copious amounts of alcohol. 

Makes perfect sense. 

There is only one major country in the world, and a handful of states who decide not to participate in this nuclear solution. And the fallout is causing serious problems. 

I am ordered not to work for two weeks. 

 Then a month. 

Then two months. 

I run out of money. I fret, and fear, and despair. I become best friends with my couch. 

Well, what the hell do I do now? 

People who are crowned Necessary Human Beings are allowed to stay at work. Married couples with small children write long condescending diatribes on social media: “STAY HOME TO SAVE LIVES… WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE?” 

Look, lady, You have a husband, a two year old, and an infant who looks like you waited a whole eight seconds to start plastering her all over your account. YOU… weren’t leaving the house anyway. You won’t be for quite some time.  What the hell do you have to say to someone like me, who lives alone??! 

But levels of misunderstanding like this are reaching a fever pitch. 

Every person on this earth filters events through the lens of their experience, and this is no different. Those with health problems or elderly relatives freak out and yell at everyone that they are killing Nana, while parents panic over somehow persuading their children to sit staring at a screen all day after decades of being told that the very worst thing for a child is to sit staring at a screen all day. In the Captain Obvious department, after people are barred from their jobs and imprisoned in their homes with nothing but the TV and their annoying wife, there is civil unrest. Shocking. Areas of cities are burned to the ground. A renegade group starts their own small, short-lived country, flag and all. Doomsday preppers  descend into their bunkers and are probably eating canned spam right now, still  waiting for the all-clear signal that will never come. 

My lens of experience is, of course, the church, and all of these commandments smack of yet another external parental figure, another voice telling me how to live my life, instead of just presenting me information and allowing me, a grown-ass adult, to decide for myself how I will negotiate this. It all feels spectacularly patronizing to me, and I handle it as only someone who has already made a lot of renegade decisions will. 

I commit to living as normally as possible. I find a local gym who decided to buck the rules and sneak in for some illegitimate Burpees. I manage to find a bar that remained open in defiance, and hang out there and chat with the last semblance of normalcy I can manage to find. I go to the houses of my clients, checking over my shoulders as I bring in my bags to make sure the minions don’t turn me in. 

And, I come up with a plan. 

Surrounded by a sea of humanity in hidey-holes, I make a decision.

 I refuse to live in fear.

 I will be brave, I will live my life, I will not cower. This decision is so similar to the decisions I have already been making, it’s almost a foregone conclusion. I think back to Esther in the Bible, having the necessity to approach the King, even though the rules decree that she will be put to death for doing so. If I die, I die. This is far from the first time in my life I’ve had to face the question of death. Ever since I first filed for divorce I’ve been waiting for the crack of thunder from the sky, a blinding flash of lightning, a bolt taking me out for daring to be a church leader who decided to end her marriage in front of the world. 

I’ve been ready to die for a long time now, which makes me AWESOMELY qualified to live. 

Western society doesn’t do this very well.  We all will face this moment, but few are willing to do so. When I was in the church, repeatedly we would be called on to handle a funeral for someone whose death had zero planning, poor souls standing there begging for answers, won’t you please tell us what to do? It’s heartbreaking.  Death is…not great, it’s always painful, and always leaves you with the sense of having been robbed.

 But it’s not always unpredictable, though in our society most people  don’t want to see it, deal with it, or admit that  there is a point when the final credits roll on our story.  I remember when I was with Prepdude, the entire family failed to make any plans whatsoever for their ninetysomething year old parents, apparently hoping somehow in the back of their minds that they would be the first people ever to achieve immortality. It’s an easy pitfall with those you love. No one wants to let go, it’s understandable. Some societies have a far greater acceptance of the inevitable than do we here in the Western world, and a process and plan for grieving loss. And yes, it’s painful, but the only way to handle pain is to go through. Not deny, not bury, not let it become septic. 

It’s good to cry. 

There is a tendency to attempt to crush this. Some hold it back, building a massive fortress of a dam until all of the feelings are buried deep inside like festering immobile water, yellowed and mucky and full of every kind of sucking creature and larvae, until the vessel holding it, the person, is impossible to be around for the stench of their unprocessed emotion. 

Remember my long-lost best friend from the South? We used to have a saying when someone was crying, “Clean up in aisle four!”… because that’s how society tends to handle the inevitable difficulty  of emotion. It’s a mess, clean it up, hide it, just will you get RID of it for crying out loud, no one wants to see this instead of just admitting that each and every one of us has our own mess of a life going on. No one is charmed, no one is perfect, and if you keep burying the garbage, hiding your own towering boxes about to burst behind a beautiful cardboard facade, it’s too easy to feel superior and start treating others really poorly. Or become a despot or dictator, if you have a lot of money. 

Did you notice how money doesn’t fix this internal problem? 

It never does. I have known many very wealthy, very miserable people, especially during my ministry years when they would come to church attempting to figure out why money couldn’t fix them.  You can’t buy your way out of this. You must soul-search, and admit responsibility, and accept that there are things that are out of your control, and face your own dark side, and concede your mortality. Some just can’t, or won’t, take a clear look at themselves. 

I have already faced this place. I have faced the possibility of death. I have survived having nothing, I have survived all of these pages of adversity in your hand, and I refuse to live in fear of this latest boogeyman. 

I refuse to participate in the panic. 

I know exactly what to do next.