Things To Do During COVID-19, November 2020

1: Masturbate, mostly.

2: Uh. 

Moving on from the punchline of this post's title/my to-do list for the rest of my life, I'd like to talk about what it's like to be clinically melancholy. See, I suffer from a serious case of the blues. Humanity was given a perfectly pleasant world, along with all the brain power and opposable thumbs needed to turn it into a utopia, and after like a million years of evolution and hard work the best shit we could come up with was the morning commute and artificial sweeteners. I find it impossible to reconcile myself with such a biblical level of pathetic failure, and as a result, I'm sad all the time. Well, let me rephrase that. Mostly I feel dead inside, but when emotions manage to trickle out of my concrete-encased heart, the prevailing one is sadness. I've attended therapy and taste-tested a fair amount of medication to try to feel better, but the raw truth is that I don't think anything can make me un-see the sorry state of the world. In the face of rough and lawless reality, I cling to my sorrow like a security blanket because it's the only thing that makes any sense to me. Also I masturbate a lot. Don't act like you're any better than me, fuck you.

Figure (1): Masturbating in the shower and the effects on the human brain. 

I didn't write this with any sort of thesis in mind. This post, like a lot of what I write, doesn't have a moral or a point. These are just the words of some guy, simultaneously overwhelmed by the world and underwhelmed by life, who spends a lot of his time sitting alone in a dark room wishing things were different. Maybe I'm writing because some other poor lonely person out there might see this and feel like they're not so alone. Mostly I write to get the words out of my head. Until recently, I was on Lamictal to treat what my psychiatrist thought could've been cyclothymia, which is kinda like having sugar-free bipolar disorder. Before that, I was on Wellbutrin, and before that I was on Lexapro. Over the last year, the Lexapro turned me into an emotionally stunted zombie, the Wellbutrin just sort of quit working one week, and the Lamictal gave me a skin rash that almost put me in the hospital. The string of medicinal failures, along with a recent change in insurance providers that conveniently doesn't cover a fucking a nickel of this shit, have compelled me to take a break from the appointments and medications while I figure out if being a little less sad is really worth $150 out of pocket per session, plus whatever the monthly cost of the next medicine might be. 

At both my workplace and my roommate's, COVID cases are cropping up like weeds, and our employers' responses have collectively been about as useful as giving a fleshlight to a eunuch. Day to day life consists of mustering up enough willpower to put in some amount of effort at a job that explicitly could not give a shit less about us until the day we wake up with a fever and hope we don't die. I think most of us feel this way. 

 

These are, respectively, the results that came up when I looked up 'fleshlight' and 'eunuch' on a stock image website. You just think on that for a while. 

So I'm depressed. Therapy is expensive, and psychiatrists are expensive, and navigating the American insurance machine to find an in-network provider that I get along with is like trying out used underwear until I can find a pair without any lice in it. In February, shortly before the world came to a grinding halt, I started a new job where I work night shift. As you can imagine, any prospect of an active night life fizzled away around the start of the pandemic when they were using semi trailers for corpse storage in New York City. For me, the world suddenly got very quiet and lonely. I wake up to the daily deluge of headlines signaling the end of the world, I feed my cat, and then I clock in at a workplace that almost feels like it's trying to give me COVID. On my days off, I wrestle with my hopelessness and crippling ennui while my friends and family are all asleep. I think about the conspiracy theorists, the rise of nationalism and disinformation, the anti-maskers, the demise of the middle class, all those pesky scientists who tell us we're obliterating the environment. I think of some of the poor stupid fucks I work with, the kind who are so concerned with the insidious rise of socialism in our great country that they can't feel their own orifices getting torn asunder by the big throbbing weenie of late stage capitalism. I think about how this past summer was punctuated by a months-long wildfire that blotted out the sun for weeks at a time, and I wonder if that's just how it's going to be from now on. I think about a lot of things. Yet for all the thinking I do, I can never come up with a reason to get out of bed. 

Do I believe in God? That changes with the weather. Am I going to kill myself? I wasn't planning on it, no. Why aren't I going to kill myself if things seem so hopeless? I don't know. Why do anything? 

This poor big mustache bitch is always getting misrepresented. 

True long-term depression isn't fun or interesting to look at. Mostly, it looks like someone sleeping too much and spending their waking hours wishing they were in bed. Sometimes I'll go a couple days without showering and most days I eat too much. When I was younger, there was a lot more emotion in it. I spent a sizeable chunk of my youth just weeping and praying that things would be different. Nowadays I don't feel much of anything besides irritation and fatigue.  

One day I'll learn how to end these things on a positive note. That's a commentary on my deficiencies as a writer, but it also doubles as a nice epitaph on my headstone. 

In Which a Large Child Introduces Himself and Bitches Incessantly

 My name is not important, but my pen name at the moment is Johann. It came to me like ten years ago and I thought it sounded fine. I've lived in Denver, CO my whole life and I don't really have strong feelings about it. I'm a twenty-something dipshit who's recently been grappling with the realization that every institution and patriotic ideal I was ever raised to believe in has been exposed as a big crock of shit, and like my peers, I'm not too sure how I'm handling that. I've seen how American capitalism has panned out for me and my friends as we've grown up, and I can't help but feel that it's ultimately been a terrible failure, so now you could say I'm more socialist-leaning. 

For most of my life I avoided forming strong political opinions, which worked out okay for me because I'm a white guy and, really, the whole world has been built to work in my favor. But 2020 happened and I realized I could only be a fucking moron for so long, so then I put on my thinking cap and started to decide how I feel about things. Firstly, I don't believe in feminism. Mostly because feminism implies the idea of equality, and as a guy who works in a virtually all-male industry, I can assure you that men are just about fucking worthless compared to most of the women in my life. I pulled a little bait-and-switch there, which was scummy of me, but I thought it was funny. Anyway. 

As far as the abortion debate goes, I wouldn't even say I'm pro-choice so much as I am straight pro-abortion. Just get rid of all of them. There's no punchline on this one, I just really don't like people. My main problem with kids is that, eventually, they turn into people. I firmly believe that you could delete, like, half of everyone, and the only noticeable difference would be a sharp decrease in traffic. I was rooting for Thanos, honestly. Obviously I would prefer if I was in the half that stayed alive, but that's more out of a lizard brain survival instinct than any belief that I'm worth keeping around. I'm kind of a nihilist, which is just being emo but with a substantially larger mustache. 

It's cha boi, the void!

If I were to fill out a dating profile, I would say my turn ons include socialized healthcare, therapy, malicious compliance, and red meat, although that last one is more of a kink that I indulge in with a healthy amount of shame. My turn offs include class traitors, corporate apologists, insurance companies, and adults in diapers. I know some people abhor kink shaming, but you know what, if you're turned on on by acting like a literal baby then you're a fucking freak and you can stay a million feet away from my penis please. 

I grew up in an era of post-disasters. Post-Columbine, Post-9/11, Post-2008. When a kid flipped his lid and shot up my high school, the only surprising part of it was that it didn't happen before I graduated. My friends and I shared theories on who we thought would eventually bring his arsenal to class, and we were all wrong on the details, but we expected it all the same. When society as we know it started falling apart around us, the only surprising part was that it was jumpstarted by a virus and not, I don't know, environmental collapse or something. Fuckin' COVID. When the SVP of my department at work told us, in no uncertain terms, that there would be NO compensation whatsoever for our "essential worker" status, despite the fact that our department is currently getting its shit rocked with COVID cases, I was fuming fucking mad but not terribly surprised. His wording on the subject was "business decisions," but I say corporate cocksucking. Tomato potato. Whatever. They say business isn't personal, which is certainly a convenient excuse. You never see employers give a two weeks notice before they let people go, but if a worker resigns on the spot it's like a whole big thing. I think that's a double standard. 

I think about death a lot, to the point that when anything bad happens in my life, I make myself feel better by remembering that I'll be dead soon. I'm not terminal or anything, but on a cosmic scale, we'll all be dead tomorrow. You see, the house I grew up in was across the street from a cemetery. I could hike my leg over the chain link fence in the backyard, cross a two lane road, and in short order I'd be surrounded by dead people. For a long time that cemetery was my favorite place to go when I just wanted to walk and be alone. One day, a girl I knew from high school killed herself, and they buried her there, and you could see her headstone from my bedroom window. She was in my girlfriend's friend circle, and when that friend circle went to visit her parents after she died, they stole her weed from her bedroom while her parents were downstairs. Well, my girlfriend didn't steal anything, because she's an angel, but her other friends did. I don't like that cemetery anymore. 

My favorite part about having a blog is that I can end my posts on whatever note I want, thus voiding the need to write an actual ending, which is the hardest part of writing for me. As such, here's a picture of a duck.