New Methods to the New Madness

This new way of life, even if it’s already been almost six months, is madness. So many people are worried for the moment things will really fall apart when I think to myself, we’re already there. We’re already in the heart of madness. How are people doing it? Going with the motions, lashing out, or lashing inward by drinking or destroying themselves? What’s the new methods to this new madness?

Here’s the daily regimen.

Wake up. Brush teeth. Wash hands. Take immune boosters. Find clean masks from your new drawer of masks, yeah we all have one of those now. Find the clean clothes, which you’ll want to burn by the time you get out of your essential job, for the fear of what you’re bringing home with you. You work. You smile, even though it can’t be seen behind the masks, and it can barely be heard in your voice. You’re called slow, incompetent, inconsiderate, by the costumers you are risking your health to serve and help. You eat your lunch, though you hardly taste it, not because you have COVID 19, but because your brain is full of so much activity you can’t even focus on what you’re eating.

You have cigarette after cigarette, even though you know well that it’s going to make it harder to know if your lungs have COVID 19 or just the usual lung butter from the smoking. This is one of the few breaks you get where you get to collect yourself, keep yourself from crying, keep yourself from walking into the boss’s office (the same boss who loves to brag about his new eighty thousand dollar pool while his employees get their hours cut and can barely get by) and tell him you quit. But you know you can’t do that. You know you can’t quit because the good standing you have with your landlord has more importance than your mental health does. You walk out of the building when your shift ends. You want to scream from the relief that’s all ended. When you get to your car, you strip off your work clothes, put them in the bag in the trunk of your car, you have a tank top and leggings on underneath. Then after you’ve sanitized feel at least momentarily safe, you sit and smoke two cigarettes before you get on the road, so you can feel like you can keep moving, like you can keep living.

At home, you just stay put, don’t make any noise, don’t rock the boat. You don’t rock the boat of the house even though you’d love nothing more than to tip that boat over so you can just feel something, to feel like you’re getting noticed. You want to flip the whole ocean upside down to feel alive again, to feel SOMETHING again, though you know it will be for nothing.

But, you don’t do this. You stay in your room, you watch Netflix, watch Hulu, eat until you feel like bursting when you actually have food. You have sex, most of the time you enjoy it, but there are still tornadoes in your head when really you should be able to enjoy yourself. After a while, your partner notices, and asks what’s wrong. You do your best to articulate, but it just turns into an argument, it turns into a fight. The kinds of fights you guys never use to have, where you worry about the foundation of everything, where you start to question, everything.

These are the new methods of the new madness, questioning everything you hold dear, while people in suits you’ve never met make all the major decisions, even if they don’t care about the hypothetical you. All of it, is enough to make you just want to crawl under a rock and stay there.

The only problem with that for me, I like the sunlight too much. I love the rain when it patters upon my face too much. I don’t want to hide. I don’t want to just move through the motions that are the methods of this new madness. I want our lives back. Though, with the way we’ve taken things for granted, I’m not sure we really deserve our lives back.