Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow brings pace another post of me blabbering gibberish onto once blank lines.
So, here I am.
Today has been the best of quarantine so far. I can say that with pure truth. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a Saturday? A day that I would usually be able to spend most of my time at home, and I’d relish that fact.
I woke up at 8:00 AM still, to feed the cats that were crawling all over my face and diving at my feet that were comfortably wrapped in blankets. I spent some time brewing coffee and cooking breakfast. It seemed normal for a bit. I forgot about some of the bad that was going on just outside my living room window.
Then I started getting the texts of complaint. The ones about one thing or another that got canceled that someone or other was looking forward to. I remembered that I wouldn’t be going to work today. I remembered that it was dangerous to go out and socialize. I remembered the reality.
But, for the first time, that stuff didn’t’ bother me? I’m sure it will continue to ebb and flow, but today…was a good day.
I had my coffee, after all. And the sun was shining just right so that I could lay down on the couch, turn on season two of GLOW (staring my favorite comic, Marc Maron), and play Animal Crossing. So I did just that for…a good long while. I got through a couple of episodes before my eyes needed something else going on.
I made with my own hands (for the first time) a Bloody Mary, minus the pickle (not by choice, I just don’t have any), and sat back down on that couch, sun streaming onto my face, with the most recent issue of the New Yorker. Listening to my friend Jack Senff’s new album for the fifthish time, I let the sun make me start to sweat while I took in some of our nation’s best journalists. My head propped up on yellow and gray throw pillows, a cat laying on the perch next to me, basking in just as much sun. I was content.
Tunes washed over me, cats did too, and I read. That’s what I think needs to be done during this whole thing, too. I, along with everyone else, needs to find those moments of clarity and bliss. Where we can put the world aside and dive into art. I’m not so religious these days, but growing up as a pastors kid, there’s surely a lot of that spirituality left in me. And this was medicine for that spirit.
Eventually, I decided it was time to put down the New Yorker and get out into the world. The State Theatre here in Traverse is doing curbside candy and popcorn delivery’s, so I took advantage of that, bought some black coffee from our local Mundos, as well as margarita mix and tacos (all to go, of course) from Mama Lou’s, a frequent from the before time. It’s still so important to support our local businesses during these trials I had my coffee, and I walked the near-empty streets. Interacting with strangers (from six feet away) best I could; trying to make them laugh.
And now, belly full of tacos and alcohol, I sit and write again. Listening to Andy Shauf’s The Party album, after I spent far too long on YouTube watching clips of Broadway star Alex Brightman singing his lungs out.
It’s going to be okay.
I’m sure of that.
One way or another.
Micah Mabey
