Sleepwalking into the First Pseudo-Season...

We are headed into what may be the first ever theoretical Season of this pandemic:Pseudo-Summer, and I am clueless about what to make of it.

Tomorrow is the Friday before the official start of the Summer season, Labor Day. Normally, this is where you can feel the shift into the main part of the year with more sunlight, rising temperatures, and the drive that the season brings. But I am just not there. We coasted into this Spring with the psychological momentum of not knowing what was going on and still having a memory of our old lives and freedoms. It was March 19 and we were newly into this dark world. But here it is two months later, now worn and apathetic to the news.

I don't bother to watch the daily updates. I realize that this is because A) the numbers are going down and B) I know this is not ending anytime soon. I am slowly getting things in order to have a new digitally based creative life. I mean, the move had to be made anyway, but I saw it as riding sidecar to the real analogue life of Music and such. Now, not a chance. This is going to go on for some time and will most likely come back hard in the winter, so it is best to get ready now for the next dark time.

I went for a walk today and kept thinking about how no one I grew up around ever mentioned the Spanish Flu. I mean, I worked with guys from the WW2 era and there were many old grandmother-types at the church I went to. I heard tons of stories about the depression and WW2, but I cannot for the life of me remember a Spanish Flu story. The people would have had to have been at least 70 years old to have solid memories of that and I remember being around people that old, but still, not a trace of it.

Will we do that? Will we all just close off this part of our collective memory and never talk about this? It makes sense, no? Who the hell wants to remember a plague? But that makes no sense when one thinks about history. People always talk about the darker times at some point. I mean, even if it is mentioned that a relative died from the pandemic, it would come up. I even used to mow grass at a cemetery where there was a mass grave from the Spanish Flu and not a soul ever talked about it, EVER. I only found out about it during my last year working there via a fluke one season return to the job during a dark time of low employment.

Will we look at this time as some kind of collective fever dream? When we all are allowed to have our subconscious relax at the reality that death is not possible when we go outing give someone a hug, will it just erase these things when our amygdala is finally allowed to be out of crisis mode?

I can see how everyone will want to put this behind them. No movies about this. No TV dramas. Nothing. We want to see a creative work that deals with a fear we have not lived through. Life is easier that way and understandably so. We will only really understand the toll this has taken after we are able to get out there and see what we have been missing out on. Our perspectives are not normal these days and who the hell is going to want to be reminded of that?

But nature is amoral and cares nothing about what we do, and that is beautiful. Summer will be here during this crisis and be here when it is over. Will we be more appreciative of it? Of anything? If Camus is right, the answer is yes then no. Of course we will be amazingly joyous to go out again. But, no one can stay in a state of over-riding joy all the time. There will be the celebrations and then we will move on, having to repair the damage that was done by this thing. During that time, we will get lost in the day to day problems and place the past firmly in the rearview mirror. But that is human nature. That's how you rebuild a city after a war, how you get on after the death of someone you love. You keep walking and working and you somehow get distance between you and the immense feeling of pain. If you're lucky, you can get to the point where the memory of what once was will not knock you to your knees all the time, just sometimes. And you keep going because there is some beauty and reward in taking that next step, that next breath.

Personally, I never want to forget this pseudo-season because I want it to make all the seasons in freedom be the best I have ever known...or at least try to.