Misery Loves Company

 

I wanna be around to pick up the pieces 

When somebody breaks your heart 

Some somebody twice as smart as I 

A somebody who will swear to be true 

As you used to do with me 

Who'll leave you to learn 

That misery loves company, wait and see

**********

Dear Kate,

It would take a fool perversely relentless to still be chanting the same prayer to "go back to normal" two Christmases into this pandemic.

What is "normal," and why do I want it back so badly urgently?

Over this Christmas I talked to a few people going through normal life, in a shape so steadily normalized that the pandemic is a mere distraction--not a bad thing, that is: to have attention diverted from what is sure to become of the Self, one's own awareness, other people's analysis.  You don't want to be a specimen of loss for the world to entertain and entertain themselves with.

Feel sorry for your little virus and stop looking at me!  You and I are not planning to check ourselves into a Care Home before next Christmas, so this would not be our line.  But who's to say we won't be checking ourselves into an emergency room before today's over?  When we find our disfigured face owning the line with conviction, the abnormalcy of this pandemic might well be the most soothing, normalizing context we want, for the world to look away from our drool, for us to feel it on our paralyzed chin within the story of a universal paralysis.

The only thing "normal" about life is our losing of it.  The more we gain, the bigger the loss we set ourselves up to incur.  If you did get what you wanted for Christmas, well, sucks to be you.  Beautiful family?  Flawless skin?  A Tesla to save your soul too?  "I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart."

This pandemic, like a world war (but really, nothing like it, not even remotely comparable, but whatever), is so normalizing that we shall find it that much harder when (and if) it is over to lie to ourselves and each other, to misrepresent life with the conviction that there is an ideal normalcy we once did and shall forever enjoy.

Hope is  not conceivable: never is, never will be, not with our intellect, and even less by our emotion.  We are damned, and our ever depressing heart is the only truth-speaking engine that is still ticking among the ruins.  When will we come clean to declare there is a Human Crisis that is a crisis of hope, a crisis of no-good-news?  When will we stop reducing ourselves, our troubles, into fragments of our particular cause so to claim salvation is nigh and not least via our very hands?  Politicians are detestable but we love them playing dirty with us.

The question: why the hell do you want to play politics with yourself?

Yours, Alex