The new normal.

People talk a lot about the new normal. My new normal is that I panic first thing in the morning every morning. My brain is a like cable system with a thousand channels of terrible programming (as a friend in CA said, “So just like an actual cable system”). Even if I limit the news, it’s still a rotating list of terrors. I wish I could go back to sleep (doesn’t work). I get up. I wash my face and hands. I put on gym clothes. I make coffee. I breathe.

I wish I had the headpsace to read and do art. I thought I would do so much. Instead I spend so much time paralyzed by worry that I can hardly do anything at all. I haven’t been able to make it through a single episode of television, because it just reminds me of how things were, not how things are. And that just makes me sad all over again.

It does get better though–the terror, the panic– over the course of every day. Then I go to bed and dream of a different world, hating that I have to wake up in this one. It’s nice out today, springlike, so I had coffee on the porch. I watched the geese on the pond. I talked to a friend in New Orleans about the eerie silence of an empty Quarter, then about the Bubonic Plague, which should have been depressing, but it felt weirdly cathartic.

“I guess I’m here because people survived that –several rounds of it ” I said.

I guess I’m here.

Picture today is of my homebound view, taken over the weekend. It’s spring. The window are open. Things could be worse.

As of this writing, 84,557 people have recovered from COVID-19.