Pandemic blues: The id speaks

Everyone is having his or her own reaction to this drab and dreadful state of affairs – the coronavirus pandemic. But I think that if we’re honest, we’re all feeling somewhat sick of the mass of people because we have to concern ourselves with and “care about” the mass of people. I, personally, don’t have much material for misery as my blueprint dysthymia doesn’t let me get too jazzed by travel or entertainment: I’m into the small things like hummingbirds and kissing the dog’s nose, and cosmic things like how is the universe possible. I live ten minutes from The Strip, Las Vegas, and have no interest in seeing a show, comedian or magician.

The great majority of my clients seem adequately gyroscopic, maintaining some positive spin despite this new ground tilt. They go kayaking, hiking, trek up Mt. Charleston, camp in Utah, go deep-sea fishing off San Diego. They even find jobs (McDonald’s, ten-something an hour, Target, fifteen-something an hour, TikTok censor, real estate office).

But there is that changed world, the dreadful drab. Normally, “hypervigilance” is something you qualify for by having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Now, though, we’ve all had to cultivate that dysfunction. It’s vaguely like the folks in Irritable Bowel Syndrome commercials who unpredictably have to go to the bathroom instantaneously and disappoint their fun-antici­pating friends who look on ruefully.

So I can see why the Trump fanatics are sneering at the liberals who jump on the bandwagon of this group-think, this change to being harnessed to each other’s conscience: Let’s all bow before the rules and wear masks and social-distance six feet apart! (And while we’re at it, tip over that statue of Abraham Lincoln!)

For individualists (the neurotically self-enclosed) like me, it is unpleasant to even think that the country is now One, or at least that one’s state is now One, our enemy that is our friend against other enemies: the other states. Nevada is getting sick less than many other places. Ha ha! It is unpleasant, to put it frankly, to think of “the world” as people rather than as a neutral background in which we live our own and our family’s lives. Nathaniel Branden complained about one species of too-much-peopleness: the “social metaphysician” who lies on the bed of others’ ideas and approval.*

So what can we do, living this hijacked existence, being a forced passenger on some disease’s ride? I ignore it, see my clients five-and-a-half days a week, chop vegetables for my wife’s cooking, binge-watch with her an occasional series. No clients have brought up the matter of the burdened mindset of a lesser life. If they did, we would chew on it, but as part of their overall – or “under all” – psychic continent. On the cosmic scale, I’d like all you jackasses to get well and for the bad dream to evaporate one morning, like dew.

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* Nathaniel Branden’s unintentionally droll lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmQAnVh6K-4.