April Has Been Canceled

Everyone I talked to yesterday was doing a bit of drain circling.

To be expected, of course. This is the time of the Great Uncertainty, and even minor uncertainties suck the soul straight out of you. Far more than fear, I suspect. There are cognitive defenses that deal with fear. Denial, displacement, regression, sublimation.

It’s harder to enlist any defense mechanisms when you face uncertainty.

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Max had been doing really well for the first few days. A few days ago, he remarked, “You know, it’s the oddest thing. I feel… lighter. It’s like there are fewer expectations being placed on me, you know? And I’m finding that freeing.”

Of course, Max is one of those people who over-schedules himself on a massive scale, and since he’s a perfectionist, he wants to do every single one of those too many things better than anyone on the planet has ever done them before.

He sets himself up for failure, in other words. A person can’t possibly juggle that many plates and keep them spinning.

Last night, he was depressed again. “I had a rough day. Nothing happened. I’m just feeling anxious. Directionless, but also like I should be doing all these things—“

“I think ‘directionless’ is a universal human emotion just at present, honey,” I told him. “Nobody knows anything right now.”

I think the real reason he’s depressed is because his flakey girlfriend just took off to shelter in place in remote Mendocino County with her other boyfriend and her other boyfriend’s parents.

I am thinking that Mia is gonna have a miserable time when she runs out of foundation and mascara and condoms in Mendocino. Mendocino is terribly remote. Beautiful! But without very much in the way of manmade distractions.

I am thinking that her other boyfriend’s mother is not gonna like Mia’s princess act very much; that Mia’s gonna notice her other boyfriend has bad breath in the morning and smokes far too much dope; that Mia’s gonna get pregnant.

I am aware that the malevolence of such thoughts reflects badly on me.

###

Also spoke for a long, long time with Barbara Angell, my dear, dear friend from nursing school. After we graduated, I went to an ER, and she went to an ICU, and that tells you a lot about our respective personalities.

Barbara ended up working for 18 years in the ICU.

“Then one day, I just… woke up,” she told me. “I don’t know how else to describe it. It was a very adrenalin-filled environment, of course, and that was part of its attraction. It was all about the equipment. The patient attached to the equipment was kind of an afterthought, you know?

“Working conditions were very unsafe: There was supposed to be one-to-one staffing for ventilated patients, but when we got our assignments, we often had three ventilated patients. And the administration was like, Deal with it! And, you know, you still had to do your charting, and there was never time, so you ended up charting for two hours after your shift, and if you put in to get paid for that, the administration would give you side eye.

“But, of course, it was drilled into you: We are the elite!

“After 18 years, I finally got hip. Took a job doing rehabilitation education in a cardiac step-down unit.”

“Are they trying to get you to go back to the ICU?”

“Oh, fuck, yeah!”

“Are you going back?”

“Absolutely not. I mean, I might do it if they were doing anything to protect the nurses. But they’re not. You get one mask for a 12-hours shift! You’re told never to take it off! You’re basically a disease vector in scrubs. No thank you.”

###

I was in a melancholy mood yesterday myself, which I attribute mostly to lack of exercise: Third rainy day in a row.

In the afternoon, I took off for a walk around the neighborhood. I suppose where I live could be described as a suburb, but it’s a rustic suburb set amidst acres and acres of woody marshlands.

It began to rain after 20 minutes or so. Bad time to catch a cold, I thought. The villagers might stone me.

So, I turned back.

I’ve been alternating between reading I, Claudius and The Mirror and the Light, both windows into different times and different places when civilization also seemed to shimmer.

And like everyone else, I’ve been having the most fabulous dreams, only to wake up and find that April has been canceled.