Clutter

The disruptions of life during the pandemic are innumerable, and I do not think we will again have access to the life we lived before the onset of this condition. I have hope that we will have life though I don’t know what that life might look like when this will be over. Maybe it won’t end, however. I have been sequestered for the most part since February and seen veritably nobody. The movie houses have all been closed but I cannot imagine wanting to enter one even when they reopen for screenings. I never was one to visit restaurants, either because I was too frugal or because I preferred my own cuisines and cooking. Certainly the wines I pour chez moi are less expensive than any I could order at the table. My counterspaces are covered. The last social engagement which I enjoyed was mid-March and I am not eager to be invited anywhere or to invite anyone here for the near future. I do shop with the older folk at the grocery store and about once a month (well, sometimes more) I visit the liquor store. Twice a day I walk wearing a mask and look angrily at those who go without or who refuse to maintain six feet distance between me and them. I find my moods are not just a bit darker but tend toward the incensed and infuriated. I believe that no one’s freedom should endanger my own and I resent Trump and his sycophants who refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of the pandemic and do little to offer some relief. Even as I type the Republican governor of Florida, the new epicenter of the pandemic, refuses to mandate the wearing of mask and insists that the schools will open soon. The governor of Minneapolis has behaved judiciously and has again mandated masks in public indoor locations, but the neighboring Republican legislature in Wisconsin has been criminally inept and incautious and opened bars and restaurants and other business establishments. The government has become openly fascistic though its has behaved fascistically for its entire reign. We are governed by an administration of liars and bullies.  

I have cooked regularly and baked bread, muffins, scones and cobblers. I learned to make ice cream in a mason jar, but ice cream in the house represents a constant danger. I feed my sour starter with regularity. Outside of myself, the starter is the only other living thing in the apartment. And I have come to be oppressed by the clutter that develops in the seclusion. Issues of the journals to which I subscribe lie about on the floors where I have tossed them, or they cover the kitchen table where I might read them during a meal. I retain them so that I can’t run out of reading material een if some of the articles don’t really appeal to me. But sometimes I am desperate. I can’t go into a bookstore and so I order from Amazon.com. Some of these books are not meant for my shelves but I cannot take them to Half-Price Books where they will buy them for much less than half-price. Many I have started but could not finish. They pile up on the nightstand and by almost every chair in the apartment. Most surfaces including the floor are carpeted with pieces of mail destined eventually for recycling all about the apartment. I purchase everything through the mails and so I have accumulated supplies of everything I might need for the next six months. They are stored in cabinets that are slowly filling up. And as long as I am at it, why not purchase an expensive new chef's knife. I buy and it is here in two days. More wrapping materials. Why not a new duvet cover: I’ve been looking at the same one steadily for six months. It seems that changing it out is something I can do when there is so much I can’t. Three days delivery. More packing materials. Clothes hang in the bathrooms and the bedrooms on hooks or on the backs of chairs. There are too many cables and cords and attachments all hooked up somewhere and coiled snakelike on floors and desks. I yet have three desks but I don’t know why even as I note their surfaces are covered.

It has become a claustrophobic space. As the virus spreads the walls close in. And it is even summertime and the sun shines brightly. The livin’ ought to be easier and less cluttered.