Walking notes – Volume 1: A stream of consciousness project of turning on the speech-to-text feature on my phone and having it record whatever I say as I take my morning walk – with very little editing and even less proper punctuation.
I’m losing track of everything I think is true…
During this coronavirus apocalypse, all of a sudden up is down, black is white, day is night, I’m saying sir to a woman and yes ma’am to a man. I’m saying you too when the delivery guy delivers my DoorDash meal and tells me to enjoy it. I’m saying good morning in the middle of the night have a good day when it’s night time. I’ve lost all track of time and I’ve lost all track of propriety. Hell, I’m even enjoying a Justin Timberlake song. What the hell is this turning me into?
Regarding personal hygiene, my hair has become and fashionably long for me, my beard is getting long and bushy and the salt and pepper coloring is really pronounced and making me look old. I seem to have lost all interest in showering or wearing different, let alone clean, clothes on a daily basis, and it seems my headphones have become a permanent fixture inside my ears.
Meanwhile, I’m spending days sitting in my house under quarantine, I’m in the middle of this retirement new thing which means I have nothing timely to do and I feel absolutely unneeded and irrelevant, my last attempt at meditation to ease the monkey mind that’s racing around inside my head lasted a crowd-pleasing an award-winning 45 seconds before I melted down. I’m selling everything I own to get ready to move into planned homelessness, it’s springtime in Denver which means it snows one day and it’s 70° the next, and I’m starting to question whether it’s OK to start drinking at 10 o’clock in the morning, not that that’s really any different than my normal life. Things are just getting a little weird.
On a personal note, I seem to be experiencing some sort of weird existential wanderlust. I’m having dreams of going out to the world but this time it’s to places that I’ve been a number of times and just longing to go to again, like the mailbox, Home Depot, or the grocery store.
I also seem to be having these fantasies about cooking. I look at recipes on the Internet, obsessed and fixated like I’m looking at porn, but understanding that not only will I not make this food but there’s not even a way I’ll be able to go to the grocery store or even have the ingredients available on the shelves if I were to actually go. I mean, seriously, there’s no way I’m gonna risk my life or my reputation in the neighborhood to head out to the grocery store just to pick up some fucking okra, only to find out okra has now taken its rightful place long toilet paper as the newest thing that everybody in the world needs to hoard just in case the supply chain breaks down, society crumbles, and gumbo has become the only currency.
The mind wanders.
