Writing a blog post in lockdown is the most heinous act imaginable. If you weren’t already mentally collapsing behind the eyes, someone sharing their own miserable existence from another box on the planet is now preying upon your wandering boredom.
Even worse, they might believe they’re providing an invaluable historical log. Instead of grazing the grand Twitter archives, future historians will swan down your URL for university seminar teaching material; dissecting how 2020 panic buying left you with neglected spaghetti hoop tins and off-brand teabags nobody else likes.
I’m not exempt from this dickery by pointing these things out. Instead, I’ve found myself in a compromised position – drinking tins of San Miguel, listening to nostalgic music from my teenage years, while trying to flirt on Tinder so my sexual frustration doesn’t swerve towards a fling with an empty crisp packet.
It’s not pretty but it’s weirdly comforting thinking we’re all a bit of a state. It’s important to remember the human lives directly affected by all this, of course, but even as someone who can switch into hermit quite comfortably, it’s eye-opening how important human contact is to the fabric of sanity. I’ve started to miss hugs. I’m scared to be drunk because I’ll hug. I’m worried my body will overreact when we return to a hug-accepting society.
Luckily, I’ve not been completely starved of human contact. I live with six housemates in London, which sounds overwhelming but it’s not as chaotic as it sounds. The house is spacious enough we’re largely never in each other’s way, and it’s rare we’re all in the house at one time.
The high number however has led to paranoia over someone bringing the virus into the house and causing a domino effect. Any signs are followed by hasty explanations to ease hesitant faces: “Don’t worry, it’s just my allergies”, “I was just in bed all day watching The Simpsons”, “I just cough after showers because the steam gets on my lungs when I don’t open a window”.
That last one, the sentence too lame for Ralph Wiggum, was me. Our landlord, desperately in need of the rent, also saw it wise to move in a new housemate during this whole pandemic – striking fear into the hearts of the cough patrol. Turns out, the newbie plays the cello. He was quickly accepted to soundtrack our Hitchcockian cough thriller.
There’s plenty of sequel material from family phone calls. Midway through a chat with my mum, the tone immediately soured as she became concerned over my stepdad’s loud, uncontrollable coughing from the bathroom.
Dread sunk to a morbid silence as she asked if he was okay, only to discover he’d eaten some cake with too much gusto. We probably should have been more concerned about the choking, but a rare moment to launch into laughter was impossible to resist.
In this weird subverted reality though, we’ve all become bonded together by gradual mental decline. One housemate has started painting random parts of the kitchen, another cackles into the night on Houseparty, while one is ready and waiting to join anyone who decides to walk to the cornershop.
For myself, obnoxiously loud dance music has crept into my listening habits while I perform menial tasks in video games – blasting away the day-blending haze while maintaining a false sense of progress.
If anything, I’m craving the kind of disconnect from reality you can only get sweating in a nightclub dialled to infinity on alcohol – clinging to that feeling of invulnerability at a time when we’ve never felt more helpless to circumstances beyond control.
Essentially, this is the closest we’ve come to seeing how we’d deal with an apocalyptic scenario. There’s twats hassling supermarket staff over bog roll limits, your gran is learning to video chat, Brits are still flocking to sunshine like moths, and silly writers are trying to piddle out diary of Anne Frank-equivalents from a suburban house-share in Streatham.
Lockdown has shown we’re all fragile meat sacks barely keeping any of it together – let’s just unravel and enjoy oblivion.
StarkTreatment 