Recently, I texted a friend that I feel as though my life has been suspended in amber since March. You know, like those perfectly preserved insects and fossils? And this photo–taken accidentally as I was handing off our cat in the veterinarian’s parking lot yesterday–somehow captures that sentiment. My hair, I notice, has grown increasingly unruly; aside from trimming my own bangs, I haven’t had a haircut in nearly a year. Perhaps I never will again. Perhaps I’ll simply let it grow, on and on forever, in commemoration of the prolonged nightmare that has been 2020. I once read that the ancient Egyptians practiced a mourning ritual of shaving their heads and beards after the death of a loved one. This not only determined the duration of their mourning, which lasted until their hair grew back to its full length, but also allowed their bereavement to be recognized by others. How to mourn now, our staggering collective losses? How not to stumble naked through the streets? These are the questions that preoccupy me, along with others, many of which have been posed by my daughter on our routine rambles through the neighborhood:
Why are there so many Santas?
How do you fall in love?
Why does the bath make my nose go crazy?
When will you die?
And a personal favorite, voiced with indignation while watching “My Little Pony”: How can a unicorn STAND on a CLOUD? Clouds are made of VAPOR!!
So it appears she’s learning something in online school, after all (not, of course, that unicorns aren’t real, but that a cloud couldn’t support one’s weight?!?). I answer her as best I can, but she’s stumped me on more than one occasion. Per the title of this post, my days feel like a postmodern mashup of The Shining and “Bartleby, The Scrivener”. They vacillate between horror and comedy, rage and abstention. I find myself transfixed by the dead-wall revelry that is Zoom, this terrible flattening of ourselves, yet back away from any human I encounter in three dimensions.
How long can this go on?
Well, then 