Notes from Ground Two, March 28th#
New York City is finally the center of the universe, and I happen to live in the approximate geographical center of the NYC metro.1[1] At some point today or tomorrow, I will have to hand-wash a lot of socks, so I am doing everything else I can think of first, including this.
After Wuhan and Italy, New York is the latest epicenter, so in a zero-based count, it is ground two. Leah and I are stuck inside for the foreseeable future. We both have jobs we can do from home, working at technical companies which in turn serve businesses that are closed, so in the last week we’ve had our joint income slashed about 30 percent, but we both survived the layoffs. With the end of dining out and going to bars, we’re almost breaking even.
On the rare occasions we go out, the streets are not as empty as they probably should be, and include everyone from the people with masks and gloves studiously maintaining six-foot distances, to the usual handful of oblivious bumblers on their cellphones with no protections at all. The nearest grocery store and liquor store have both instituted limits on the number of people who can be inside at any time, which makes shopping easy if you go when there are no lines. They appear to be the cautious exceptions; it’s clear that a lot of people in the city don’t think this is a big deal, and for every ten people building toilet paper castles, there’s one who won’t stay put until directly ordered by police. Leah and I fall somewhere in the middle of this: we stay in, and try to keep our supply trips down to one a week. We wear gloves when we go out, which we already had because we need them to handle my cat’s chemotherapy. At the liquor store I scan the wine myself, put it in my own bag, and pay with my phone.
Supply thinking is the biggest shock to the white-collar urbanite. We came here expecting—and receiving—life on tap. We’re used to being able to go out and get any thing at any time. Over the last ten years, that’s evolved to being able to get anything we want delivered within hours. We can coordinate plans in minutes, deliver our own bodies to wherever those plans are in an hour, send them home whenever we like with little to no consequence. Anybody with sufficient income has lived in God mode for a decade, and it just got switched off. Now we’re making bread and freezing homemade stew.
The modes of being have become distinct. Standing in my backyard without my cell phone, I can feel almost calm. The only sounds are birds and sirens. There are usually parties on every side of my apartment this time of year, along with Sunday sermons of the hellfire variety at the end of my block. Touch any kind of realtime media, and the world is screaming. In my memory, this is the longest collective attention paid to anything since 2001.
The worst part, right now, for us in the city, is listening to the president try to dodge giving us federal help because he doesn’t like us. We never liked him, and he gradually figured that out when he became front-page news every day, and now he gets to punish us with death. Everybody now knows out that he does not perceive other people as beings like him, but as automatons that move and shit and die for unknowable reasons. I don’t think he has a concept of his own mortality.
I expect people will say things like, “Sorry, I was on mute” and “I think your audio dropped out” in everyday conversation after this. The oddest part of socializing is the group. I spend my evenings chatting with former coworkers, people I haven’t seen face-to-face in years, and shut-ins who never came out. I used to see my friend Alex so frequently we only texted each other when one of us wouldn’t be at our traditional time and place; now I’ve seen him once in three weeks, when we caught up while I stood ten feet from his building. The majority of my text chatting used to be with Leah on Google chat, as we complained about our workdays. Now that we’re in sight of each other 24 hours a day, we spend our workdays in a group chat on Facebook with our former bar crowd.
I’m glad we have these tools, but the new dependence on them in the face of isolation has sharpened the distinction between virtual and real. Virtual information is an avalanche of numbers and fatality. Virtual money is demanding blood sacrifice. Virtual meetings don’t even allow eye contact, much less touch. I’m realizing how much of my life has been virtual, and my efforts to engage with the real in the face of the encroaching virtual were more valuable than I imagined. Real people are dying to keep real people alive. Real trust is more important than credit. In a few days, if nothing is done, a cascade of broken trust for real homes is going to shock my city all the way to the stock market. The whole chain is sprinkled with enough predators to spark violence. A few might steal to make rent. Landlords will harass broke renters. Banks will find loopholes to foreclose on landlords. I want to say fuck the stock market, but a fucked market will send already psychopathic companies into defensive and ultimately murderous spirals. It will take this and many more savage blows to stop the momentum of death capitalism.
The abstract of our society is wanton self-destruction. It’s been happening for centuries. On the ground, the real is saying not yet. Most of the rich, living purely virtual, on-demand, on-tap existences, have fled the city. I may yet run away, but I still trust the people here to do better than most, because despite the now absent rewards of the city, we’ve always lived with an infrastructure screwing us over. We’re used to living on the ground, surrounded by guarded towers of wealth that don’t care when we die.
1 This is according to something I did with strings and pushpins that I learned in 2nd grade. I can’t remember if I included Staten Island or Hoboken.