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I’ve been outside twice in the last two days. Yesterday, my cat needed a new medication for a new medical problem. He’s had an upper respiratory infection1[1] for several months. He’s had trouble fighting it off because of the chemotherapy for his cancer, so we weened him down to one chemo treatment a week during February. His infection seemed seemed to get better until his eye swelled up suddenly, so his vet decided to put him back on antibiotic drops. She’s doing home deliveries from her home in Brooklyn, which is a five-minute walk from my home, so I thought I’d give her a break and walk over.
The streets remain the same. I’m avoiding a whole corner of my block because of the usual crowd loitering in and around the bodegas, maskless and ungloved. In general people are still out, on sidewalks, and in buses and subways and cars.
I live in a residential area near the northeast Brooklyn industrial areas. Those industries are still required, which accounts for a lot of the traffic. I also live in an affordable area, heavily populated by the people who are keeping the essential services open. Every store open in Manhattan right now has somebody from my neighborhood stocking, delivering, or working a register. My streets are still nominally busy because there’s no fallback plan if the people here stay home. Our whole infrastructure has been just barely running. Everything, always, just barely runs in this city. The emergency rooms have always been running at capacity. There was never any margin. I estimate 4 percent of East Williamsburg will be dead by June.
The military is not going to be delivering food and medicine to this neighborhood any time soon, if ever. A couple of years after Sandy,2[2] I ran into a neighbor in Maine, who was enlisted at the time. I mentioned I lived in Brooklyn, and he replied, “Oh, well you’re welcome.”
I blinked at him. “For what?”
“I was part of the LaGuardia cleanup.”
To this day, I’m not sure if I wish I’d replied, “Could you do the subway next time?”
If I see the military, I expect to see it in YouTube videos in Manhattan. Which brings up another issue with reporting anything from here: You can’t really see it yet. The nearby schools are closed along with 70 percent of the other businesses, which is a shock to be sure, since residential areas are still half commercial here. But it’s not much different from a cold Sunday evening. Sunday evening is just forever, so far.
On the way to the vet, I hear a window open and somebody say, “Stupid fucking dumbass.” I’m not sure if he’s talking to me, or commenting on a disintegrating domestic situation. The handoff for the meds goes perfectly. The vet doesn’t even open her gate; she has a medical mask and gloves, I’m in my bandana and gloves. We did the credit card over the phone, so we exchange only medication and necessary information. I’ve kept one gloved hand in my pocket the entire way, using it only to extract my keys to get in to my apartment.
Today’s trip bordered on criminal. I had to mail the rent check, having no other means to pay. Most nearby landlords do not provide another option, nor do they pick up checks themselves. This was vaguely necessary; the problem is I also used the need to get out as an excuse to get more cigarettes.
It’s hard to explain how stupid smoking feels right now. I am actually smoking less, which I have never done in response to anything except physical inability and threat of arrest. It’s generally known that smoking is not the best of habits in normal times. Now it’s a particularly sick joke: the everyday, right-now effects of smoking are reduced ability to taste and smell, shortness of breath, and a dry cough. The only worse thing I could do to myself is lick subway floors. I also walked four blocks to get them.
To sum up: I endangered myself and others to feed an addiction that exacerbates my vulnerability to the danger and is damaging to my current and future health. This tells me a couple of things. It reinforces my belief that everyone is just trying to get through the next five minutes, and the only way we make any progress past this human issue is through functioning agreements and institutions that make us use the occasional five minutes to lock down a few hours or weeks of future five-minute intervals.
It’s also a way to look at the whole system. A fragmented, anxious collection of competing drives, mortally addicted to the maximum possible motion of money, beginning to come apart, looking for a fix. Something non-addicted people don’t understand about addiction is how it changes the actions of the brain in which we’re so invested. My reason detaches itself from reality exactly as far as it needs to in order to justify self-destructive chemical satisfaction. It will argue with itself, as my kneecapped better nature struggles to make me fight through the withdrawal, but in the end, I get another fix, and my better nature gets another lesson in accepting defeat.
If you look at the U.S. as an irredeemable money junkie, everything else clicks into place, including the future. We’re about to get the DTs.
