A Journal of the Pandemic #3

This past week work finally made tangible concessions to COVID-19, insofar as everyone now works every other day (scheduled skip days are covered financially), as there are very few kids coming in, it was the first week effectively combining two of the three centers, with today marking all three sharing the same building. So now I have some of that free time the pandemic has been promising.

There are a lot of parents out there who aren’t particularly happy about this state of affairs, and I’m not talking about the situation with my childcare center(s) specifically. They’re parents who don’t...really know how...to parent. I’m not talking about overt abuse, although neglect is emotional abuse, and it has obvious and at best unfortunate results all the same. Some of the kids coming in last week have behavioral issues stemming from parenting of this kind, and their parents have been the kind who don’t see all the new social restrictions as affecting the decisions they’re used to making. I truly hope that one effect of COVID-19 is to begin a process of awakening real responsibility in such parents, when they begin to run out of excuses to actually be present in the lives of their own children. On the one hand we suddenly don’t have to worry about school shootings, which to my mind is a direct result of this kind of systemic neglect, whether from parents boxed in by economic conditions or personal choice (I honestly can’t say which is worse). The thing about this situation is that summer vacation and other holidays are always sending kids home from school. The only real difference is that the parents have been sent home, too. Parenting is never easy. It demands an honest and complete surrender to someone else in ways that don’t exist in any other context, and if you choose to ignore this responsibility, the effects will resonate throughout many other lives, not just yours and theirs, but the many other lives that intersect over time...

Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I’m always thinking about anyway, regardless of pandemics causing massive disruptions to everyday life. Since I have no kids and rarely participate in social gatherings (the great irony in all this is that for some people, the few things they randomly had lined up in that regard were cancelled), my ordinary activities are much as they’ve always been. Since I don’t have internet at home outside of my phone, I used to go to the library on the weekend to catch up on blogging. Another of the ironies of this situation is that I had bumped up my data plan on the phone before the dominos started falling, and I’ve found out in recent days that...I have a lot of internet time available to me. I’m composing this post on my phone. I’d upgraded the data plan to ensure I could video chat with my niece undisrupted (heh), and here we are at the end of the month, and all the extra time I’ve had at home has seen me wasting time on the internet (nothing terribly new there), seeing how people are interpreting the pandemic, what Facebook has been up to (I’d say that chatter has been slowing; aside from the fact I myself stopped posting funny things, a lot of others have, too, perhaps because apparently you can only joke about toilet paper so many times, even on the internet, a phenomenon that culminated in toilet faces, which if you’re reading this in the future I apologize, because I am not going to elaborate).

I actually have been writing during all of this. I wrote “Just a Regular Joe,” which along with “If Sidekicks Never Existed” (a title based on a book I really wanted to like more) I was greatly looking forward to submitting to a comic book company whose submissions were supposed to open up again mid-month. But now comics have temporarily lost their main distributor, and most stores are either closing or desperately, gamely soldiering on, and I don’t think submissions are opening soon. So maybe I have a chance to write even more stories and have an even greater chance to get published. Unless the company changes its submission policy because of the pandemic, or actually ends up going out of business.

I also started work on “Falling Toward Oz.” I had a false start that didn’t feel right, so I started over again, and was immensely pleased with the results, and the words absolutely flowed, as they do when I’m truly engaged. I haven’t written, yet, during this extended weekend (see: first paragraph), but I swear I will a little later today.

Instead I’ve been catching up on my Obsolete Physical Media purchases, DVDs of TV shows, in this instance. I just watched the two seasons of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (great first season!) and the only season of Men with Brooms, the second-best Canadian sitcom I’ve watched recently, although it was always going to be tough competing with Letterkenny (suck it up, Pat; and yes, it was your garbage-fire review that made me interested). I watched the second season of Titans before those. Continues to be a great show, best when it’s focusing on particular elements of the plot, whether flashback material or the debut of Superboy. Deathstroke was handled particularly well. Really want to tackle reviews for some of the movies I watched earlier. I finally caught the Psycho remake. And of course I liked that, too. Still need to catch up on the final two episodes of Picard, which I had been avoiding before I got a better idea of what the new data plan could handle, or how plausible blogging on my phone was (maybe it works better on my new phone? because I tried this previously and was not at all satisfied).

This whole business is so curious. We’re locking everything down in order to limit the spread of a virus that kills in small numbers. People keep arguing that “flattening the curve” and “social distancing” are measures meant to limit the effect on limited medical facilities. That’s what they say in the States. But literally every country is getting around to this. You keep hearing meaningless sampling about countries that are handling it better, handling it worse. Another of the ironies is that when we talked about healthcare before the pandemic (antecovidian, perhaps), people would argue how barbaric and backwards the American system is compared to everyone else. The American pandemic statistics are beginning to take the world lead, but this is meaningless without considering population size and density (hardest hit is of course New York; there has been an argument for about the past month that Florida would be the next hotspot, given its prominent retirement population, and here we are headed into April and it hasn’t happened yet despite the rapid spread, which of course seems to contradict the rapid measures taken to combat the problem, with plenty of eagerness to suggest we somehow haven’t done enough soon enough; this is literally impossible in a truly unprecedented response).

I talked last time (or perhaps in the comments on someone else’s blog; my phone doesn’t like giving me the option to comment; please don’t be offended if I seem to be saying nothing, because I’m still reading) that I didn’t want to begin writing about the pandemic in my fiction. But you can be absolutely certain that in the years and decades to come that we’re going to see an endless flood of pandemic material. And it seems wrong to ignore it, other than these blog posts, in my own work. This shouldn’t become the only thing we care about (me, I’m still hoping, best case scenario, that this is what finally gives us The Snyder Cut), because life, or something like it, goes on, but it’s a thing, and it’s happening, and it may not be interesting (it’s very, very boring), but it’s impossible not to think about.

So I end this long entry with the hope that I can continue to use this time wisely. Or at least, with more refrigerator art. I don’t want to brag, but there was a kid on Friday who spontaneously drew my portrait.

The Plot Thickens

In the last several days, the plots of two stories I'm tackling suddenly came together.

I was watching Ad Astra (a really good movie, by the way) when I realized what "Just a Regular Joe" actually looked like.  It came tumbling into view just as Brad Pitt was plunging down to earth, an image that itself made the movie for me.  Suddenly I knew what the main character in the story was struggling with, the relationships that defined him, everything. 

Similarly, after watching The Gentlemen in theaters, I knew how to write "Rest Stop."  (By the way, actually writing the thing will have to take a miracle, because now I have to do that on the day it's due, a classic scholastic scenario if there ever was one.) 

These were matters of knowing the stories but not knowing them.  There's a huge difference.  One is the basic plot, the basic elements.  The other is knowing what to do with them.

I think a lot of writers misunderstand this fundamental aspect of their craft.  They get hung up on the mere act of writing that they hope later revisions will iron out the differences.  But once you set out on a journey, you're already halfway there.  You have to have a solid plan.  If you haven't at least allowed yourself to figure it out along the way (another valid option), you're going to end up with something that's infinitely less than it could have been, because even if you and most of your readers won't be able to tell the difference, it will still be there.  And the story will die a slow death, or if you're really lucky, someone will care enough in the future to fix it for you.

Because the story is in the details.  The story is in how you tell it.  Movies have made it so much easier to distinguish the craft from the concept.  As far back as Citizen Kane, which hinges entirely on finally learning what "Rosebud" is (and in hindsight, everything makes so much more sense), and up to Memento, which is entirely defined by its flashback structure (seeing it in sequence would in theory make as much sense, once you'd seen it as originally intended, but then you'd lose the shape of it), filmmakers have understood that the language of the story is at least as important as the story itself.  Even the cold detachment of Melville explaining whaling is essential to the tragedy of Ahab's madness, however baffling and unnecessary it might seem to the unsuspecting reader.

So now I know how to tell a few of the stories I've been trying to tackle.  I'd had ideas already, but in hindsight they now look hollow and impoverished.  As to whether or not I can pull either of them off, that's another matter entirely.  But I can try.