The New Silence (3-22-2020)

Last night at 10 PM, I opened the window to hear....nothing.

This is New Jersey and I am near a strip club, so, there is always some sound of traffic or (what sounds like) gunfire at night on the weekends. But not now. Last night and this morning, there is the most prescient silence. The birds singing outside the windows are, for now, louder than the traffic.

I had to go out today to get abandoned gear from a church basement. I thought the roads would be empty and I would be pulled over by police for driving. Well,......no. There were more cars on the road than I ever would have expected. Granted, it was not 3 pm on Thanksgiving Eve, but way more than I had thought would ever be there.

The drive was surreal. The billboards and signs spoke of a future that no longer exists. Ads fo tennis lessons, spa treatments, and happy hours flooded the drive with colors that seemed to shriek of dissonance with the present era. It was the same with all the terrestrial radio ads that were created and booked months in advance. I listened to them almost as if in some low budget horror movie. There were ads for stock market investment (I have firm belief that the Dow Jones will hit 15,000 before too long, half of its epic high a very short time ago), and ads about things no one even thinks about with the nightmare of being in an ICU with a respirator fighting for ones life within each paranoid breath.

Nature, in all its beauty and amoral bliss, was showing signs of the rebirth of Spring. I grew up in the last decades on the Cold War era and was tattooed with the reality that, even if all the nukes went off and we were all gone, nature would not even blink and continue. The town of Chernobyl now bears witness to tat Truth. But I will say that there was beauty out there, outside the computer monitor, beyond the walls of the house.

I just read that the governor of New York believes that this could go on for up to eight months. I cannot grasp such a thing, to be so far from the shore with the taste of my last meal still with me. My old life, one of many decades through great personal tragedy and pain, seemed to be able to be lived regardless of what was going on outside.

But this is the new world, one no one has ever seen before. So, everything is new, or should be expected to be. Even now as I type this, as the sun is setting and I cannot hear any traffic outside, just the birds. It is one thing for our daily life of activity to be redefined, but it is even stranger when silence, that which is attained when all else is absent, is shocking.

I believe everyone is going to have to be redefined within the New Silence.