Well, here on Planet Panic, it looks like we’ll all be
spending some time alone as everything in this cancel culture of ours has been,
well, canceled.
The girls’ schools have closed for the next two weeks.
So have the malls, my wife’s working grounds. My superiors here at work are in
the process of providing me with a souped up laptop to do payroll and all its
assorted tasks from home. Soccer tournaments, matches, and practices have been
canceled. Heck, even the libraries are closed, so there’s nowhere to go this
weekend to score some interesting reads. Have to avoid the internet, because no
matter where you go the soundtrack is REM’s “It’s the End of the World,” droning on and on and on.
I, for one, am looking forward to this.
No more crowds. No more chatty parents on the
sidelines. No more rushing to do this, rushing to do that, hurry up and wait
here, hurry up and wait there. Yeah, the economy is going to suffer. Family
Hopper will lose $5,000-$10,000 because of the Wu Flu shutdown, and that’s only
if things pick back up by April Fool’s Day. But, hey, anything to whip the herd
to panic mode to vote blue in November. Or get more clicks.
Now, I may sound cavalier, but a small percentage of
me is worried. Maybe 2 percent. I do have family members in the red zone so to
speak. I myself have a defective lung from my hospital follies a decade ago.
Other than that, though, my spidey sense tells me this, like just about every
other black swan in 21st century America, is overhyped at exponential
velocities. It used to be the-trial-of-the-century-of-the-week. Now it’s the
end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-hot-on-the-heels-of-the-last-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.
I feel fine.
I’ve been upbeat. Listening to a lot of Sinatra –
particularly his definitive, caricature-like tunes, like “Come Fly With Me” – if you can use some exotic booze, there’s a
bar in far Bombay – and “I’ve Got the World on a String.” They’re fun,
mindless, PC antidotes. The girls and I have been watching Season 1 of “Jack
Ryan” on Netflix starring Jim from the Office, so we’ll finish that. Patch will
do her Dribble-Up every day (that’s soccer foot drills on the iPad), the Mrs.
will crack a book, Little One will binge on The
Twilight Zone and World War II in
Color.
I will work on my book. I am in the zone, that area I
unpredictably visit a handful of times a decade, and I am in heaven. In the
book we follow four men, three on one side, the other on, uh, the other, during
the course of one battle during the Civil War. I have a dozen maps, charts,
pages and pages of notes, a plot with potential, character names and a skeleton
of an outline. This weekend I want to flesh out the character histories and get
a fully-formed working outline.
Then, to begin the first draft. The mindless melding
of the mind into that vision beyond the whiteness of a blank Word Doc, where
one loses oneself in time and space and creates at the speed of a thousand
words a day. Three, four months later, the first draft is done, and the right
brain brushes its hands in triumphant satisfaction. Then, the left brain shoves
the right one off the chair and says, “Now it’s up to me to make this mishmash
make sense!”
So that’s where Hopper and Co. stand on the brink of
the Great Curve Flattening, our country’s first offensive in the war against
the Rona Virus.
1 comment:
Sounds like you have everything under control and you proved Papa right...he said Hooper is probably loving this solitude! Good luck!
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