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Having returned to New York City, I ask: why did so many people permanently leave? The answer can only be: the overweening fear generated news factories which altered our neurochemistry in the first months of the pandemic. In exchange for our advertising dollars, our attention, we have been paid back in a massive dose of fear, cut off from the street level reality of life. We have not loved truth enough; we have been satisfied with a highly-managed form of security instead. I think many people actually like ‘staying at home’ — like the feeling of having nothing to do but receive unemployment and Chlorox their vegetables. The complications of life get reduced down to a pathetic little routine. The anxiety — the burden — of existence gets replaced by the more reassuring anxiety of basic survival (as if the danger were actually immanent). This is why a code of virtue had to be generated to redeem this behavior: because otherwise, it would be too sad, too meaningless. I’m a hero! I wore a mask to drive to the grocery store! I hate public transportation now! I won’t see my friends! I’m afraid of public parks! Restaurants should never re-open! Viva la takeout…. As the summer commences, as some people — some real fucking bastards — insist on returning to something approaching normal, I can feel the disappointment of the perma-quarantiners. They don’t know what to do. Their hypothesis is: stay home, stay safe. They’re unable to calculate that a lost year of lost intimacy, creativity, and eros is significant in a way that transcends the binary of survive/die. And so they don’t and vitality leaks away, subtly but surely.
