“Watching” feels like too strong of a word to describe what I’m doing when the TV is on. As was the case during a particularly rough couple of months several years ago, Guy Fieri is my go-to TV comfort food. I say Guy Fieri as not just a man, but as an intertextual character who has gone beyond the realm of hosting “Triple D,” (Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives) by adding “Triple G” (Guy’s Grocery Games) into his repertoire. I dream of a channel devoted solely to Fieri-focused programming, from “Triple A” to “Triple Z.” Watching Guy do what Guy does, is more cleansing than sage-burning, and his utterance of short incantations such as “flavortown,” and “out of bounds,” will exorcise most ill-willed spirits. There are, however, demons that cannot be ousted so easily.
For now (although I hold out hope for a 26-show catalog), I must settle with watching just the two selves of Fieri in marathon binges. For me, watching these shows has the same feeling of finding a bathroom in an emergency and subsequently finding out that the bathroom has a fan switch to create a white noise buffer between you and the outside world. Like all vulnerable moments, we need to know we are safe, and TV as white noise can be as helpful as mindfulness.
Maybe it’s mindful obliviousness.
That being said, I’ve also found it soothing to write (never-) to-do lists, where I set out on a certain TV or book-related topic, and create a web of cultural consumption that I won’t ever follow-up on. I wrote “QUARANTINE” in white out (a purchase for an art project that has lost all appeal in this world-shift) in all caps on a shoebox. Inside the shoebox, I throw my scraps of paper that have lists of things to do, consisting mostly of doodles I’ve drawn while I’m trying to de-fuzz my brain and words that have materialized from possibly nowhere. Today, as my notes from last night’s panic-fueled jotting session tell me, is the day that I make my bedroom a bedroom again, and organize it to feel “cozy.” I am probably not going to finish this task. Instead, I will play video games for three hours with friends (via conference call). We will put on funny voices and slip into characters, putting on accents, performing for one another in a strange and abstract apparatic extension of our own world. But even here, in this digital space, the real world will creep in, and I will start to wonder if the voices I’m putting on are getting tiresome—am I being annoying? I confessed this to my two gaming friends, but they just laughed, and didn’t tell me if it was, in fact, annoying sometimes.
***
I’ve been sleeping on the couch and I’ve arranged my Dog’s two beds, a dirty pillow, her squeaky football, and her squeaky gorilla by the window. She sleeps when I sleep and wakes up multiple times, as dogs do, checks to see if it’s breakfast time, and sleeps again until 7AM (a decidedly welcome change from the pre-quarantine 6AM wakeup call). Without Dog, I could sleep until I’m sleep-sick. The kind of sleep where I revert, like in Altered States, to a former, primordial state. I think of myself being covered in an embryonic fluid, waiting to become something, anything. Dog keeps me alive and receptive to things. Watching her fill her days with arbitrary meaning helps me to feel something removed—but not scary in the out-of-body way—from my own person.
So, I have this shoebox of scraps and I am telling myself I’ll do something with them one day, but I likely won’t, though there’s something that I think about writing things down that I’m not sure I can support with evidence, but I feel it is true nonetheless, and therefore I would like to talk about it:
It’s important to write things down because by doing so, you are simplifying things for your brain. The note will provide you with the answers. Since your brain doesn’t have to remember anything beyond looking at the note, then you don’t need to remember anything other than looking at the note. On the other hand, sometimes the act of writing something down helps to internalize what is being written, and then you’ve inadvertently remembered manic lyrics from a feverish song that came from nowhere.
Often, the notes don’t excuse oneself from an appointment with a malevolent trickster: the mind. All of a sudden a gigantic clammy hand is squeezing my head and I find that things are both hot and cold. Is this it? To fight back I self-administer smell tests, because smelling is, as always, but perhaps now more than ever, a grounding technique. I run my nose (at safe distance) along the smellable edges of things: an orange, the unused incense I bought just a month ago. If I can smell, I am not dead. Other smellables and sniffables in the apartment include: a silver-framed woven image of a hatching duckling, that is losing its scent, but used to smell like my grandmother’s house, and by extension of that, her as well. The diminished scent isn’t helpful in distinguishing whether or not I am alive or dead, but I like to go through the motions anyway. I also smell my armpits and a particularly malodorous block of cheese in my fridge that I should just finish.
Dog has her own list of sniffables, and as I watch, she presses her nose deep into the carpet, inhaling deeply, unlocking latent thread-locked smells that I will never attain. She then pulls her head away, looking at me glossy-eyed as if she is asking forgiveness for that which she has forgotten to ask permission, and then sighs, snorts, sneezes, and licks about her snout. All this before her eyes go blissfully cross, secondary lids and all, and drifts to sleep.
***
I’m awake. A note is telling me that I am going to start watching more British television. I want to watch Cracker, Nighty Night, and a slew of other across-the-pond oddities. I will start watching all of these shows just as soon as I forget, dismantle a shelf, wipe the floors, feed Dog, make a face mask, cry, forget to flush the toilet, get my pants pocket caught on a cabinet handle, charge my headphones, and remember again. I want to watch TV with intent. I want to become a writer, so when I watch TV, it is doing work. And if I am doing work, then I am doing good for my soul. So, I will watch TV with hard-edged analytical vision, deciphering its inner workings, and then, one day, I will work on my own work and carve my own relief in the great pantheon of binge-able things.
How am I supposed to accommodate my lofty aspirations, when they’re so blah in the current? I find that the days are long and short simultaneously. Two speeds demanding split selves, like the two Fieris, and it’s hard to reconcile the two for long enough to simply be, let alone induce the ecstatic high of knowing that I am participating in something greater than myself. Mostly, time passes and I am either there or I am not. If you can induce that trance-like state that writing has though, you might purge things that you didn’t know needed purging. Flavortown. Out of Bounds.
***
DuoLingo has become my calendar. I’m on a twenty-three-day streak of doing Spanish lessons. That means it’s been about twenty-three days of minimal interactions with other people. I’ve run out of things to talk about, and worse, I’ve run out of ways to be the blank slate that is needed to listen to others. But, one thing that this quarantine period has taught me is that people are still people. All of my friends who have always bottled things up are still the exact same, or different, but not sharing with me that they have undergone some change. It is a criminal offense to wish a cold person would just loosen up, let out a good cry, and call me, but I do wish that. People don’t change so quickly, and even in the face of a pandemic, there are formalities to which one must adhere. Social and personal codes are important to give one’s life a sense of purpose, but adhering to codes that have existed before ourselves is a classic square-peg-round-hole scenario. I want to put on a voice and do a funny bit. I want to be annoying if it will take people (myself included) out of themselves for a moment.
***
It took me until just last year to know that when my feet get cold, I can usually just jump rope or go for a walk, and they won’t be cold anymore. I am a slow learner, but living with myself in such a concentrated environment is providing me with insights to every tic and mechanism inside myself. If I am my own TV show then I am picking it apart and seeing how it works with the hopes that I can reinvent myself at a later date.
In a piece I was working on, while classes were still in-person, I wrote a line, that I won’t bother to look up, about how prolonged proximity to a subject can make one an expert in that subject. As I, like you, am stuck with myself 24/7 on the Howie Network, I am, invariably, the expert and the subject. There are things that I know about myself that no one else knows. If I approach these things pragmatically, I can create a schedule for myself that works for me and me alone.
Amidst these thoughts, I wonder how I am going to show off my quarantine six pack that I have simply not found the time to work on.
***
On my actual calendar (a greyhound rescue calendar) I have things marked like, “Dog drugs,” “oat milk opened,” and “food?” I’m filling in the days with arbitrary meanings as one fills most of life with arbitrary meanings. This is important, to build a mound of something, so I can look at it and forget the thing that it’s supposed to be blocking.
I want to sit on the couch. I want the filmy anxious feeling to enshroud me. I will wake up six months from now, stepping out from the chrysalid couch, into a new world, a new me, with a 12-pack thorax, and scythes for hands. But life is, at the moment, either painfully potent or doe-eyed and anesthetized. I hope I can find a way to exist in that liminal median space, between the potent and the anesthetized.
***
I’ve been talking to my mom about thirty times a day, which is about three times less than when we spoke in the pre-quarantine era, and about twenty times less than when I lived in New Mexico. I can see myself twinkling my toes in a river in Santa Fe, as a family plays upstream, and a child pees as I am mindfully oblivious to the proceedings.
If you’ve ever eaten fish in a landlocked state, you might have experienced violent food poisoning. When I lived in Santa Fe, I had eaten the best (and, subsequently, the worst) salmon tacos I’ve ever had. At the time, I had been living with two women whose lives were brim-filled with social activities. I, on the other hand, had no friends, except two of the bartenders at the movie theater. Yes, bartenders who worked at the movie theater. I spent most of my days in Santa Fe watching movies, drunk.
When I was felled by the salmon tacos, it must have been someone’s birthday, because one of my roommates had people over, and, during the bargaining phase, I asked God to empty the house so I could, at least, go to the bathroom with a sense of privacy(a flickable fan switch would be asking too much). My prayer was answered, and several uncomfortable hours later, I was still alive, and I was feeling better, if not kind of slim, and more appreciative of life. I remember thinking, at the tail end of the sickness, that I was probably supposed to be home with my mother and my father. I remember thinking that I was very alone in a place where my body could not adjust to the climate. I remember thinking that I wasn’t cut out to be independent—at least, not independent in Santa Fe. Shortly thereafter, I moved back to my parents’ couch in New York. And in time, I found myself missing the cilantro-scented air of my early morning bike rides on the outskirts of Sante Fe’s central square.
I can’t add anything new to the folks who’ve already spent their lives discussing wanting what one can’t have and failing to see what one already has. I’m thinking about Sante Fe now because I’m thinking about separate selves, living together, trying to make things work. I’m trying to be the person I want to be and I am trying to embrace the person I already am. Where I am and where I want to be are not always going to coincide in the same moment. But having the opportunity to type for a little bit about myself right now has helped me to see that it’s a possibility, and that is enough. My secondary lids are closing and I am both here and somewhere else at the same time.