Pandemic Psycho
My morning news brought me the cheery information that one third of my fellow incarcerated plague avoiders had mental health issues due to the effects of the Lockdown. If you live here on the South End, that is welcome news. It means that our mental health is improving radically, don’t ask me why. Maybe just as simple as that misery loves plenty of company. Even if that company can’t come around very often.
The rest of the shut-ins across America, well, this sudden break in normality, something we here are accustomed to, must be a shock to their reality. For maybe the first time they are confronted with life lived mostly in their heads. No wandering down to the malls, no vacations, no extramarital affairs, not even the distraction of their jobs. Just the day in day out of four walls, online shopping, toilet paper searches, plague masks, quick in quick out grocery shopping, kids underfoot, spousal arguments, nothing much to relieve the menacing monotony of life endured during the Plague.
Naturally they turn to the panaceas we Enders always resorted to, drinking and drugs. But of course, they’re amateurs, unlike ourselves who have built tolerance and defense systems for years, and so tragedy is pretty much assured. Arguments with the kids, petty squabbles with the mizzus, shouting at the dinner table, eventually domestic violence of the worst sort. Nothing we aren’t familiar with here, but elsewhere, this is unexpected and completely without our boundaries. Little wonder a third of the country, wallowing in self-pity and smoldering rage, fueled by conspiracy theories on the internet and partisan politics everywhere they turn, are slowly going batshit crazy.
Here on the slap-happy South End, we channel these psychoses, we work with them, we mold and shape and fine tune the neuroses that drive others to suicide or debauchery. We embrace the weird, we celebrate the abnormal, we idolize the insanity. In other words, we became artists. Not, I repeat, not that I would advise the rest of my fellow citizens to follow in our footsteps. Like drinking and drug abuse, a life of art must be taken slowly. Too much too fast is a recipe for tragedy and certainly no cure for pandemic psychosis, which means I’m afraid I have bad news for the rest of the country. The cure is probably worse than the disease.
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Tags: Cure Worse Than the Disease, Fighting Fire with Gasoline, Pandemic Madness