Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (I was in the park yesterday and this fucking cop told me I wasn't allowed to be on the grass doing my crunches, that if I was to be out of the house taking my state approved exercise then I had to keep moving; I hope he gets cancer because when we come out of isolation and I have no core to speak of and zero self esteem then whatever I do as a result will be on his head)

Feeling myself disintegrating in a not completely unpleasant way, like there's this caustic dissonance between the roving anxiety inside me (about things like financial ruin and premature death) which when I leave my house for my designated walk is incongruously offset by abundant leisure, which in any other circumstance would be a sign of national abundance. Instead it's the result of this ghostly pause on everything. There were birds in my window box the other night, who never normally venture this far from the refuge of the park come dusk. The city is that quiet. It's unnerving and gratifying all at once; gratifying to that part of myself that's too lazy to think constructively through crisis and would rather there be a conflagration to clear the slate. Harrowing to that part of myself that hopes there'll be enough time to have a nice life with an admittedly vaguer hope (if only for lack of a radical program) for equal access of the same to others. 

But that's definitely not going to happen. We will not be afforded the luxury of a singular event with bells and whistles. Instead collapse will be prolonged, agonisingly so. People will die, are dying. Meanwhile other people will play music and video games and watch movies and get high and cook their favourite comfort foods, all under duress of public health. Disaster, and leisure, deployed in amounts equal to recognised citizenship, to existing privileges; the more the merrier, the more the easier to weather an unprecedented global event such as this, the more a quarantine resembles a working holiday. For some. 

Funny how this virus has thus far, or until recently, had a character of severity only to those in certain age brackets and with pre-existing health conditions; in the circulation of these facts and to the layman (myself included) a profile has formed, definitely inaccurate, of those prone and those practically immune. But now people in their twenties are dying too, and I feel stupid for ever thinking a virus would make demographic selections on which hosts it would infect and to what degree. I keep thinking about low income families and how my mind is melting here in my relative privilege, which is basically only a privilege of not having dependents and certainly not a privilege of means. It's also a privilege of community. I've chosen to root myself in one particular area and as a natural result I'm basically surrounded by support. There's a lot of mutual leaning happening right now and it's kind of fucking great. I'm wondering how long this will even be possible though, when the dust settles and no one has jobs and there's no economy to speak of. What then? Is it counterproductive to be having these concerns now? Or is it reckless not to, to just sink into an ennui that I swear these walls are whispering me towards? 

Just kidding, I'm not hearing voices just yet. 

I don't know what everyone else's situations are during isolation but mine can barely be called isolation in as much as I am sharing a flat with seven others, boyfriend included. But then this is also giving a false face of pleasantness to the situation. It's collapse and we think the storm has started but it hasn't, and that might've sounded hysterical last week but this week it's too fucking true. I can't believe how easily disrupted, how vulnerable it turns out our world order actually is, that something complaisantly relegated to the dark ages (a virus!) could bring us to our knees practically over night. 

I have never felt so revoltingly close to history. 

Some thoughts on one of the many movies I've been rewatching of late;

Alex Proyas, the 'visionary' behind The Crow (which let's be honest must've been a fluke because everything he's done since has been characteristically stylish but not remotely ballsy enough to carry his ludicrous plots), released a film in 2009 which I think is the best apocalypse movie this side of Deep Impact (another insanely underrated end-time movie). The movie is called Knowing and stars a typically hammy Nicholas Cage as this science professor who's grappling with his purpose in life after the death of his wife. He is also now raising their hearing impaired son and having the same Shamaylan-esque crises of faith as Gibson's ex-priest character from Signs, despite being an academic and not a man of the cloth. The first half (or generously two thirds) of the film runs like a well oiled machine of suspense and intrigue, truly unpredictable and riveting enough to make you forgive it's cheesier riffs on cosmology and determinism. The ending is insane, far-fetched pure science-fiction nonsense and really after the impossible promise of the first half it could only have gone down the road of bonkers. Far from a negative though, the dizzying ambition of the film's conclusion is what makes this stand out for me. 

Spoiler alert. 

Basically the deaf-ish son pulls a letter out of a time capsule at his school, which has been buried in the ground for roughly fifty years. His astro-phsyicist (or something) father figures out that it's a cypher with the dates, coordinates and fatalities of every significant disaster (natural or otherwise) from the last twenty years. Three dates remain and Cage realises these are disasters which are yet to occur and that this cypher is an act of prophecy, which by unseen forces has made it's way into his hands so that he might prevent them from happening. The trouble is the last date is actually an extinction event, the end of all life as we know it. 

Turns out the predictions were made by a little psychic girl who could tap into some higher-dimensional communication by extraterrestrial beings who've known for a very long time that our planet had an expiration date, that a massive solar flare would wipe out all life. Though never confirmed in the film it's implied that these extraterrestrial beings are something like interplanetary guides, perhaps the race that seeded humanity in the first place;  not an overly original idea, but linking this up with exegetical notions of biblical revelation, insinuating the prophecies and angels from the bible are actually alien in origin and not celestial. That's a nice touch. 

The film ends with the children being taken to a second planet so that humanity can continue which leaves more questions than answers; why only kids allowed on planet B? (there is of course a bible passage in which we 'must be like little children to come unto The Lord'; don't ask me which). Also, if they knew earth would burn eventually, why even set up shop here? Why not start on planet B in the first place? It would certainly save an excessive waste of human life, considering they only took like two percent of the population and let everyone else die. Did the adults do something wrong? Is it another romanticism of childhood innocence, when actually we know children if anything are feral instinct-driven bastards and if such a thing as innocence exists then it is learned, acquired through rigorous moral lesson. 

Maybe we were seeded to terraform the planet with carbon, extract it as a resource where they couldn't because the earth's natural atmosphere was poisonous to them? 

Or maybe, and this is more likely, the aliens are bigoted geneticists who feel their creation has been muddied. At the film's conclusion it turns out they're only just taking kids to the new planet, but kids who've 'heard the call'. The criterion remains vague, but what with the nazi aesthetic of the beings themselves, there's a definite eugenics vibe which makes all the existentialist talk before it seem ideologically nasty.