The Plague Notebooks

In college, I started carrying around little notebooks/journals small enough to fit in my pocket. When I had ideas, I want to be able to write them down before I lost them. Fifteen years later, I’m still perserving thoughts and observations in the same way. But, over the last year and a half, I have experimented with one minor adjustment: I’ve been making the notebooks myself.

It all started with Who Gives a Crap. Being the sickly waif of a writer that I am, I’ve almost always got a runny nose, so I go through a lot of tissue boxes and I got tired of just sending all that cardboard off in the recycling bin. I’d already experimented with drawing and painting on scraps of cardboard, so I thought, why not write on it? Throw in a hole punch and some string and next thing I know, I’m on my 13th of these scrappy little homemade wonders. They’re cobbled together out of everything from cereal boxes to Amazon packing paper.

As this period has coincided with the pandemic, I’ve dubbed these my Plague Notebooks. Recently, I went back through them and gathered up all of my reflections on the Covid world we’ve been living in. I’m presenting them below in an essentially unedited form, not because I think they’re particularly brilliant, but more like the literary equivalent of a no-makeup-selfie.

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• 

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Extracts from the plague notebooks

2020: from the start, I thought of it as an impossible year. 

2020: something meant to hang on the horizon forever, 

but never get here. Pure scifi. 

A time for lunar colonies and flying cars. 

A year we wouldn’t/couldn’t see in our lifetimes. 

Something perpetually far. 

But here it is 

and with it, the plague. 

Not the deadliest, 

not yet at least, 

but in some sense, the hardest hitting. 

An impossible impact – 

the economy crippled, 

the workforce shelved, 

the world waiting at home, 

literally holding their breaths.

*

The bug that broke the world

*

Give me something normal, 

Something open,

like an ungloved hand

extended in greeting

or an unmasked face,

grinning – 

anything

besides a politician’s mouth

or Pandora’s box

or the gates of Hell, 

something simple, 

like a restaurant or shop,

not a freshly-dug grave.

*

You think you should/want to go away. 

Anywhere.

You can’t go anywhere. 

There is no ‘Anywhere’. 

The ‘Here’ follows you everywhere. 

There is no ‘Going’.

*

Don’t get your hopes up.

Tomorrow is bankrupt

and the day after 

is a complete disaster.

*

The plague opened up

like a hole in the year;

spring fell in

and summer after it.

*

Rule #1: don’t touch anything, 

no surface held in common, nothing 

any other hand could’ve contaminated, 

no doorknob, counter, or computer

Rule #2: don’t breathe any shared air,

When in doubt, shut yourself out

Or suffocate

*

Like the North American landmass

at the close of the last ice age, 

the feeling of a dying glacier

grinding down your back,

cold, hard, plowing

mountains into hills,

relentless pressure and friction,

filling soil with stone fragments,

fracturing as it goes,

reshaping the surface

*

We Can’t Stay – a title?

*

When does a plague stop being a plague?

How do you recognize the end?

Does it come down to the death count,

a low enough number of daily dead?

*

22/9/20

I think the walls are closing in again.

Perhaps we’ll have a lockdown Christmas…

*

You were born into a difficult year

of discord and disease, 

bad blood and crooked politics,

but your smile was contagious, 

a gift that we shared

*

Each day like a sheet of sandpaper

rubbed over a piece of wood,

subtly wearing away, little by little,

shaping and taking

**

2020:

a good year for Ctrl+Z – 

so much to undo

*

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things – a title?

*

Lockdowns and circus clowns

*

Miley Cyrus notwithstanding, 

my instinct was to think of this year 

like a wrecking ball, 

but that’s wrong. 

It’s more like the treads of a tank.

I’ve been not so much struck 

as crushed,

a great weight, yes, 

but not the kind

that punches holes in walls, 

just the sort of bulk 

that grinds it all down.

*

New Strains – a title?

*

Lament for 2021 – 

Where’s my f***ing flying car?

Where’s my colony on Mars?

Where’s my pristine, glistening city of the future?

Where’s my android maid?

My teleporter getaway?

Where’s my goddamn laser pistol/ray gun?

What the f**k, 2021,

What have you done?

What have you got to say for yourself?

You were supposed to be sci-fi?

*

I can’t remember the last time 

I met a new person 

and had a conversation

*

(Can’t remember if I wrote it down before, but)

I continue to be struck 

by the contemporary phenomenon 

of single use surgical masks and gloves 

blowing around the streets 

like tumbleweeds

*

There are two ways to be stoned to death. In the first, a crowd hurls projectiles. In the second, the victim lies flat and stones are slowly piled on top of them until they’re crushed to death. This reminds me of the phases of the pandemic. The waves of fear struck first, sharp and hard. But as that subsided, it was replaced by the dull weight of fatigue, mounting.