With the advent of my work's absolutely farcical "telework" shenanigans that the corporate drones have cooked up to justify the DOL paying our absolutely obscene salaries while their employees essentially have snow-days from actually showing up to work, I've been taking to long walks to cure the mind and refresh the spirit during the hysterical national nightmare that is COVID-19. It's been a heartening time and I try to get out for an hour or so each day and I've been disappointed in the lack of treasures that I've found. The spring is thawing and items are beginning to rebirth from their frozen wombs and present themselves to the world once more yet I'd not cached a find worthy of note. Then, Saturday came and I was rewarded with the gem below.
I was tooling down Evergreen in a serious alter and listening to shoegaze on my Spotify and it was the most right and just soundtrack to everything - gray sky, spotty patches of dim sunlight, gutter water moving in a capillarian sludge underneath an icy skin, other extrusions of yet to be melted ice like molten glass arrested in mid pour, the trash, the trash, the trash, half exposed newspapers in plasticine wrappers, the cars pouring by in the street at a much reduced rate, the general deadness of a town, much like everyone else's, in the midst of a shutdown. It was likely shed by the insane man who wanders town and smokes weed from a huge glass pipe on the bench outside the Moosehead and it reminded me of a younger time, one filled with a ridiculous patriotism, merged with the current, seeming endless panic that reappears anew, yet in a different avatar each year - Ebola, housing crash, Great Recession, the, holy shit, 19 year war with Afghanis, shelves denuded of paper and cleaning products, climate change, runs on meat, eggs, milk, cheese, SARS, swine flu, the general, interminable, group paranoia quelled momentarily by a new distraction or ever more dire catastrophe. It's something, being alive that is, in the current era, but then again that's true for each Ecclesiastical, in the Biblical sense, time frame.
On today's walk I found this chit along the path that runs behind the high school. It's torn from a spiral notebook and written in what looks like a middle school girl's block print. I folded the paper and secreted it in my coat and resumed my walk. The air outside was rank with the odor of spring, a smell that reminds me of when I was a young boy and I visited one of my father's worksites and there was a large excavation that had filled with rainwater and the sides were a viscous mud. It was springtime then too, and I didn't spend long at the site yet the memory persists. I've smelt similar odors on farmyards and in the plains states rich with grain and livestock. I remember the old man describing it as "sour" when I asked him what it was. Everyone connected with that site, except for me, is likely dead and the thought that the memory only resides in one remaining mind is disturbing, for obvious reasons. This paper affected me likewise, in that this jejune and unfinished start to a narrative only existed in one other mind, one other cluster of neurons, of someone wholly alien to me and this reality made me weep at the importance of my finding it and of Art and the immortal desire to be remembered, if only for a time.
I'm certain I've got corona'd.
