Addendum: The below article was all ready to go when I found out that we lost John Prine. So before we get on to my silly bullshit, here's a John Prine song. Bill Withers last week and John Prine this week. Fuck everything.
. . .
It's a few weeks into this self-quarantine business and I'm starting to realize how little I ever went outside to begin with. I guess being an antisocial misanthrope who was practically a shut-in to begin with has its benefits during the plague. It's my time to shine.
The only real adapting that I've had to do is day jobbing from home. After twenty years of observing the behavior of my corporate overlords, I'm surprised that even happened. Their usual approach to a calamity is to tell the help to show our company IDs to any law enforcement we might encounter on our way to the office and try to convince them to let us pass any closed roads or checkpoints.
The company started out by distributing certificates from Homeland Security for us to show at roadblocks and for us to be able to buy gasoline, if we get to the point where gas stations shut down. The next day, it went to getting a headcount for volunteers to work from home so they could provide laptops.
The following day it progressed to giving us all twenty-five foot ethernet cables to see if we would be able to run them from our modems to a spot at home where we could set up our computers. The next morning, management met everyone at the door and told us to unplug our computers, pack up anything else we might need and to go home until further notice. After two decades of having pens and post-it notes on lockdown, I kept waiting for security to tackle me as I walked through the parking lot with a computer tower and two monitors.
I have had to make sure that I stick to a similar routine as if I were leaving the house to go to work. My depression already has me operating at a level that is very much a lame version of Captain Willard at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, laying on the couch staring blankly at the ceiling. My fear is that if I allow these habits to break down, I'll go full Colonel Kurtz and make my own army of natives out of leftover vinyl mailers and poster tubes. The horror, the horror.
Now that I'm working from home and all punk shows have been cancelled for the foreseeable future, I have damn near no reason to go outdoors at all anymore. Outside of getting the mail in and a weekly Charlton Heston in The Omega Man-like run to the grocery store at 7am on Sunday mornings, I have no real need for the outside world. I've got plenty of shit tickets and I picked up ten pounds of coffee before Zeke's decided to close so I should be alright for a while.
After the events of the past few months this has provided me with some much needed downtime that I will gladly take advantage of. This will give me time away from humanity to find the plot that I have so thoroughly lost without taking it out on people that don't deserve it. I can't be a miserable prick in someone's general direction if there's no one around.
The only thing I'm really missing is going to a punk show. I haven't been to a show since I ventured to New York with Killer Of Sheep. I was really in the mood for one and they all got called off as soon as I was able to make it to one. And I do realize the strange paradox between hating to be around people while also wanting to be in a room full of them for a show. I never said that I wasn't a hypocrite.
Since my workstation is only a few feet away from the stereo in my living room, I've been giving myself daily listening assignments to fill the silence. I think by the time this is all over with, I will have worn the needle on my turntable down to a nub. I pull a stack of records off of the shelves either by artist or by some sort of theme that I cooked up in my head. I'll keep them spinning until I get to the bottom of the stack. I'll start at 7am and go well into the evening on some days.
I have learned that the usual punk rock comfort food records that I used to turn to when times were difficult are not giving me the solace that I used to find in them. There's something missing when I listen to them now and whatever it is that's gone will hopefully come back at some point. That crutch of meaningless bullshit that I have always relied on to keep me grounded may have broken.
But then there are other records that cut into my brain like a knife and I lose all function. I found that out the hard way with I Used To Be So Young by The Homeless Gospel Choir. One minute I was fine and the next I was balled up on the couch for the rest of night.
The one constant on the turntable over the past month or so has been the reissue of Rowland S. Howard's Teenage Snuff Film that Fat Possum put out. That man had a tone and an attitude from the most depressing pits of Hell and is right up my alley. Teenage Snuff Film never had a North American release and was always hard to come by at a reasonable price. The new vinyl mastering sounds lightyears better than the less than legit download that I borrowed off of the internet years ago.
The one thing that I'm hoping to see in all of this is a battalion of apes riding horses down the middle of what used to be a busy street. There are already roving gangs of monkeys foraging for food in Thailand so we can't be too far off from Planet Of The Apes. Humanity has had a less then great run so let's give another species a chance. A Sci-Fi nerd can hope, can't he?
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