Wednesday 18 March 2020

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Oh, Fuck! What Now?

The city is finished. I have this walking, waking reverie that one perfect day I’ll be moving through the streets of my town and virtually everything around me will be in its absolute, ideal state. Every single construction project has been completed. All the roads are in good repair. All the light rail stations are open and the trains are running on time. Every park and lawn is manicured; there are no dandelions. There’s no brown paper in a single storefront. Nothing needs a fresh coat of paint. My impossible dream, is there any other kind?

As I signed my first mortgage contract I felt nauseous, tasted bile in my throat absorbing the implications of those amortized numbers. Those quick and viscous pre-vomit swallows are now part of my morning ritual of coffee, cigarettes and the goddamned newspaper. These days I am a newly minted senior citizen living in historic times. Since I’m a trifle too pedantic I venture that all times are historic because history has a pronounced penchant for unfolding its quilt endlessly. Still, contemporary history has never seemed quite so personal and rife with existential dread.

Because the most commonly used verb in The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business section of late has been ‘plunge’ I have resisted the temptation of reviewing my investment portfolio online. I know if I give in I’ll be like a teenaged boy with Internet porn, looking at my declining numbers every ten minutes. History tells me that economic depressions and recessions, bear markets, don’t last. I remind myself to think long term. Trouble is I don’t know how many future years of my life I’ve frittered away fretting these past six or seven weeks.

Lately I’ve seduced myself with another crazed daydream. Tomorrow morning’s Globe and Mail will have no content. The relentless assault of bad news, tragic human interest stories and earnest mental health advisories will cease. The opinion columnists will mutely opine in white space because just for one day nothing either good or bad happened anywhere. Nothing. Sweet fuck all. A sweet, stable stasis.

A few months ago the renowned American novelist John Irving became a Canadian citizen. A good friend of mine wrote me: ‘You will never win the Giller Prize now.’ But this dream of mine of a newspaper with no news is almost a reality these days, more real than any fantasy I ever concocted for myself. There are no reviews of live events in the arts pages and no game scores in the sports section. Almost there, if only the news cycle would stop like everything else has.                                    

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative record of existential dread since 2013. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9.

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