The Ever-Elusive Return To Normal

I’m sure that I’m not alone when I say that I’m sick of this pandemic. Tired of dodging people in the street. Tired of the anxiety when I accidentally get too close to someone. Tired of the demoralizing frustration at seeing crowds at Kerry Park jammed together or one of our neighbors inviting people over for a visit. Frustrated with not being able to check books out from the library. Worried about the state of the arts, the devastation and erosion of culture. The growing divisions and atomization of people. It's been almost a year old now. I keep looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. But I don't see one. I wonder if I'll ever see a return to normal. When was the last time I saw anything that looked normal?

     I don’t want to get into a debate about what’s normal and what’s not normal, who or what body of medical authorities decides what’s normal, or the various asphyxiations to the spirit in trying hard to be normal, particularly in a sick society. That’s a discussion for another day. I’m talking about that time when going to a restaurant was a relaxing diversion, or going to a concert, big or small, was a ton of fun and there was no need to wear a mask. Or just going to visit friends was a lighthearted affair that didn’t require any precautions or rationalizations or argumentation. 

     I thought the pandemic would be well under control by now. Vaccines distributed. A robust percentage of the world population already vaccinated and life back to normal. Instead, it keeps getting worse. Over 100 million dead worldwide, 425 thousand dead in the United States. More super-Covid mutant strains are infecting people at a faster rate with a higher viral load. It’s beginning to seem as if the virus – acting on behalf of the planet – is determined to see our species go extinct. 

     What the pandemic has revealed is more disturbing than the pandemic itself. Every day I’m stunned at the dysfunctionality, the negligence, the incompetence, the selfishness, the lack of courtesy, the open hostility, the sheer stupidity that is more pandemic than the pandemic. The Biden administration has learned nothing. They’re more concerned with funneling greater quantities of money to Wall Street, giving nothing to the working class or small businesses, and already pumping more money and troops into the stupid, meaningless wars started by the previous administrations. 

     The U.S. government has been taken over by corporate entities. There’s really no government left, not the kind of government that concerns itself with the welfare of its population. The government, for lack of a better word, has one goal: protect property. Use whatever force and power is necessary to maintain the wealth of the faux-meritocratic elites and billionaires. The public can go fuck itself. 

     Normalcy was gone before the first Covid victim sneezed and began struggling for breath. A lot of businesses in Seattle were already closed. The theatres where we used to go see movies outside of the Hollywood blockbusters were already defunct: The Guild 45th, the Seven Gables, the Harvard Exit, the Neptune, the Ridgemont and The Crest had all either closed or – as in the case of The Neptune – ceased showing movies and become a venue for comics and music acts. The Seven Gables has since burned down. 

     The Northgate shopping mall, home to JCPenny and Macy’s and Radio Shack, among many notable retail chains, was already slated for demolition to make room for 1,200 “housing units,” a “Central Park,” and a hotel. In other words, more ridiculously priced real estate for the moneyed class employed at corporations like Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft. It will, no doubt, be ringed by the squalor of tent cities, people bankrupted by a heinously extortionate healthcare system or laid waste by drug addiction in a society so toxic and pathological that it takes a shot of heroin or methedrine to get through the day. 

     None of that is, was, or ever will be normal. When was life truly normal? Never, if you’re talking about life in the U.S. It has always been a heavily militarized police state founded on slavery and genocide. But there were recognitions of another opposing, more utopian vision, running contrary to the obsession with commerce and market dominance. There was an active awareness of philosophers, poets and thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis Mumford, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman and Emily Dickinson. Books like Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, On The Road by Jack Kerouac, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag and Go Tell It On The Mountain and many others by James Baldwin – perhaps the most notable intellect of the 50s and 60s, although at age 24 he’d given up on the U.S. and gone to live in Paris. 

     Also, great orators like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Trudell and Chief Joseph. 

     There have been far more benign alternatives for the human spirit on the North American continent than the obsessive push for wealth and real estate. 

     I was lucky to come of age in the 60s, that brief window in time in which eccentricity and poverty weren’t treated like leprous diseases and people – however vulgar, shallow and sociopathic – weren’t respected because of the amount of money they had. I don’t know why so many people were traumatized by having Trump as president; he is, by far, the purest embodiment of the American ideal as it evolved into its greatest expression in the 80s and 90s under Reagan, Bush senior and Clinton. 

     The kind of normal that gives me a sense of nostalgia has never really existed. The closest I’ve come to finding an environment that has been the least hostile to artistic and intellectual endeavor is France. But that’s only because I haven’t traveled in that many other countries. And until the pandemic slows down enough for various countries to open their borders to U.S. citizens, I won’t be visiting any too soon. 

     So let’s just say the normal I envision for now is a simple trip to La Palma on 15th Avenue West for a plate of enchiladas and a stop at the branch library in our neighborhood on the way back home to pick up a book. Or visiting friends in someone’s backyard. Or attending a literary reading with an actual audience instead of ghostly, disembodied faces on Zoom. Or boarding a plane to Paris for an extended visit. And by extended I mean indefinite.