The Pandemic Age will be one remembered for taking place behind closed doors. Those of us who do go out are exploring a cultural wasteland, masked and carrying on as usual while many sit alone inside, afraid of illness and other human beings, friend and stranger alike. Art and music of the day color our desperation for distraction, balking the abstract for immediate gratification and comfort in the familiar. The things that used to excite us only remind us of the things we’ve lost in the year.
These days, I can’t think of anything to do with myself except go get food. Grab a drink. Go for a drive, see the sunset and find someone to spend the night. It feels all the more mechanical to place myself in near mortal danger for the mundane pleasures afforded by society. Everything I experience is Kitsch. Disposable. Something to pass the time before death.
It’s not the pandemic that has me down. It’s the realization that there’s nothing out there to save. That we’ve long past reached the half-life of our society. All that’s left is entropy through reiteration and degradation. Finding purpose by retreading the ground of our forebears and stopping short of progress, caught in a cycle of meaningless existence.
Believing in society is necessary to be a productive part of it, but the world is stagnant. We’re watching the ruins of the world rise up around us in the form of industry, strangling life from the things we hold dear until we have nothing left to give but blood and are too broken to care. Passion is dead and survival is dull.
Wherever I am, I want to go home. Home to a place that actually makes me feel something for being alive. Anything that makes me believe there might be something left when I’m dust besides the weak and well-meaning masses succumbing to the greedy and wicked. Some escape from this bleak reality that doesn’t exist at the bottom of a bottle and oblivion.
Sour Revelry 