This corona-virus shit is so real now and I don't know what other people are thinking and feeling but I'm personally shuttling between a nihilistic zen and then being the emotional equivalent of getting fucked up by that serial-killer-surgeon in America who used to sew surgical instruments inside his patients/victims so that they'd go home thinking everything was fine and then sit funny and bleed to death; by which I mean I'm physically carrying a bundle of nerves and stress and abject fear around in my gut and it feels like a tender lump that is gonna lethally explode any second, so it's like having a bomb strapped to my chest. But then the prospect of death and suffering is wrapped up in existence itself so why should I let this particular contingency (which statistically has less proximity with my person than being hit by a bus or getting cancer) give me such internal grief. It's probably nudging me towards cancer, my worry about coronavirus.
My mum called me last Sunday concerned about that covid19 thing and I said 'what's that?' Because I was more concerned with getting a beer from the stall at the festival I was at, and she said 'what are you doing in a beer garden?' and I said 'it's Sunday why wouldn't I be in a beer garden?', and then she told me things about how people are losing their shit in her small town (somewhere between Taupo and Rotorua) and I was genuinely surprised because up until yesterday evening it'd felt like business as usual in the city. Is it some classist bias I have to think that I understand this difference in reaction, between the city and the provinces? Probably. But hey, as the CNN feed at my gym keeps telling me, there are far worse things in the world, and they're all (apparently) waiting in the wings to pounce. Yikes.
So basically I'm experiencing, much like everyone else, the slow pan into focus of a mediated crisis happening 'over there' shift into local immediacy in ways crises vary rarely do for us New Zealanders, if for any reason at all probably being our geographical isolation. I mean, apart from certain military personnel and ripples in the economy (which we should be expecting again) Bush's war on terror never really breached as far as us, and if it did then I was too young to perceive it except for some great SNL parodies and a whole new generation of fashionable anti-American rhetoric (which is having another Trump-era boon; seriously, deja-vu). I remember last year being on a plane home from California and overhearing a group of American teens (maybe a school trip) excitedly asking questions about New Zealand and what to expect of their teacher/parent/custodian (definitely some kind of field trip). The adult sort of sighed and said 'they're gonna hate you because you're American'. I remember my ears pricking up and feeling a combination of pity but also harsh agreement; the rest of the world had every reason to be disgusted by America and the consumer hegemony they'd been imposing since the eighties (and nascently even earlier).
And then he said, 'but just say you're anti-Trump and they'll relent'.
I couldn't help laughing out loud. At least the fuckers have self awareness in this trying time.
I can see beneath the harried faces of 'business as usual' an underlay of apocalyptic misenscene, like an afterimage that's actually a prescience lifted right from the opening sequence of 28 Days Later, or literally any of the Resident Evil movies. I can see the Mad Max aesthetic-potential in shopping malls and the movie-complex downtown I was at last night, or food courts and public crossings. With a little dust and less people and more artfully placed bones they'd all make haunting set pieces for a Terminator reboot-reboot-reboot.
As for the corona-related self imposed isolation I'm not a hundred percent sure I can commit. Normally sex with strangers is how I ground myself in the city, how I locate myself in relation to lives I see everyday but never actually touch; such is the nature of class management in urban environments, that income and status group people in invisible ways, down to the level of your own desire which you think is yours but is actually an implant that ensures you'll stay within your designated herd. If anything corona-virus is going to ratchet up the 'stranger danger' which has been a mainstay of tactical class-warfare since forever, making the privileged even more phobic of contact with who they perceive to be carriers of virulent poverty, the economically incompetent and unclean. Like they're personally responsible for the systemic exploitation and misery-inducement of late-stage capitalism, and even if they're not then certainly they should be individually tasked with bearing it's consequences. In another vein, this is the message behind much therapy, that mental health (general declines in which can be statistically measured back to industrialisation and as progressively worsening with the sprawl of global capitalism) is on the individual, and situations beyond their control are illusions. If something bad happens the onus remains; the individual is responsible. This takes the pressure off increasingly corporatised governmental bodies who don't have to acknowledge that world-systems as they are make people sick; rather, they can espouse psychology epithets of 'accountability' when dissenters make such claims. And then it's business as usual.
In other news, literally over night and with very little public consultation (as in none at all), the sale of poppers has been banned; if you didn't know, poppers (amyl nitrate) is a sniffable substance available over the counter (until recently) that's not addictive and has been used by gays since the dawn of time; I'm pretty sure there's a Plato reference somewhere. If I'm enlightening anyone, it's a liquid in a small bottle which you huff deeply after which you experience a moment of belly-warmth and euphoria (and crunchy brain) simultaneous with your sphincter loosening a touch. Thus it's use for anal sex.
According to my source one of the reasons authorities have given for the ban is that it's too easily acquired and we don't want our youth having it. Um, honey please the youth are doing MDMA, and the only people recreationally using poppers for something other than anal sex are probably doing it as a very last resort. No danger of addiction here folks (though if you're already a sex addict there's probably a circumstantial relationship between the two).
I can't help but feel like the timing of this ban has pointedly coincided with a national health panic, whereby any dissenters would have their priorities questioned and be gently reminded that we're collectively attempting to halt a chain of viral transmission. If only authorities had been as efficient when it came to the initial spread of AIDS and HIV; but of course access to healthcare and public concern are selective acknowledgements, the privileges of citizens. Thus history teaches us citizenship is not for everyone, not a given or birthright. And until recently dying queers (no matter how statistically large a chunk of the general population) were of no concern because queer lives were of no concern. This is just an arbitrary example of how the Human Being is measured and managed against the subaltern who remains invisible and thus incapable of receiving all the benefits of the visible, the patriated. I'm wondering what and who will be lost as collateral while covid19 finds liveable-equilibrium in the general body of citizenship.
Meanwhile concerns of public health are being used to smokescreen a frankly un-democratic moral crusade on sex-on-site venues (which a ban on poppers is), regardless of the queer lives these spaces have historically served and those they continue to serve despite certain apps having recently changed the landscape (grindr, scruff, squirt etc). Undermining these sites and their histories is part of the ongoing erasure of our queer histories, even if those histories are ugly, embattled, speaking of alienation and violence on the doorstep of more decent households and lifestyles. Perhaps these uglier histories are even mor precious, giving as they do a fuller picture of how we got to be where we are (not that there's anything especially beautiful about where we are).
I don't know. Everything's particularly fucked at present. I'm avoiding alcohol and cigarettes for my health but a part of me just wants to obliterate myself with the above.
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