I think we are all going a bit bonkers because of Covid. The reason I say this is because in the last week nearly all my friends have texted or emailed me saying I think I am going a bit bonkers because of Covid.
It’s not just that everyone is depressed, daytime drinking, and putting on forty pounds. It’s a serious burnout factor with the world in general, a sort of what the hell mentality. Or if we are feeling really energetic, oh what the hell.
To counteract this feeling of lassitude, I decided last night to watch a movie called Infinite Potential, recommended to me by a new friend who clearly thought me more intelligent than I am. Since our summer porch bedroom was registering a record low world temperature, I clambered into the spare bed in the much warmer spare bedroom, known as The Bird Room, on account of its garish wallpaper. After I had rid the bed of some sand, eleven teddies, and a tinfoil teddy crown, I settled down to try and find the movie online.
First I got distracted by Netflix’s vast array of TV shows. Suddenly it seemed a very attractive idea, to get addicted to a TV show. It’s what everyone seems to be doing in Covid. But on closer examination, most of them turned out to be about murderous psychopaths, hideous crimes against children, or futuristic dystopian Madrid. Much better to cleanse my mind in a deep bath of science.
Infinite Potential is a movie about David Bohm and how he tried to find a theory of physics that would unify the disparate theories of Einstein and Niels Bohr. Not so much a unified theory of everything, that had been tried by some physicists in the 70s and 80s and by their own admission, it didn’t go too well. But a theory that would help the big and the small meet in the middle. After sparkling nuggets of wisdom from numerous physicists, authors, and philosophers, I couldn’t help feeling they were missing the fundamental point: big and little meet where things are medium sized.
I had this feeling directly before I fell asleep for a bit. Even though I was interested in the movie, and delighted to be watching something that proved how fascinating and intellectual I am, it seemed to be going around and around some central point that it never reached or I couldn’t quite grasp. Sort of like life at the moment.
You would think that most people would be trying to be cheery in this gloomy time. Yet I find that this is not always so. Take our nurses’ monthly education meeting, for instance. Last month’s education topic was Really Depressing Diseases that Particularly Afflict Children. These were a buffet of the conditions you really don’t want to get: MS, ALS, Huntington’s. I sat through the meeting with my second cup of coffee, and after a while my third, looking at slides of terribly skinny kids with a variety of skeletal deformities while the speaker intoned how short their life expectancy would be. Did I know there are five kinds of muscular dystrophy? I did not.
And then there was the radio today. I was driving home from getting a Covid test when I switched it on to a distressingly loud blaring sound. This was followed by a serious newscaster type warning us of a massive Winter storm approaching tomorrow night. Expect ten to eighteen inches, he intoned, dry fluffy snow. It’s hard to take a weather forecaster seriously when he uses the word fluffy. He went on to warn us against venturing out without flashlights, extra blankets and food for three months.
It’s going to be fourteen degrees when we wake up tomorrow. One must have a mind of winter, said Wallace Stevens, to regard the frost and the boughs. I am working on this. It’s seriously freezing here, is what my Mind of Winter is saying. But I have glimpsed some frost and some boughs, and I noticed driving home tonight that the setting sun looked very good behind the black silhouettes of the leafless trees. And have been cold a long time, he continued, to behold the junipers shagged with ice. I haven’t been cold a long time yet, it has only been a couple of weeks. But I am getting the impression that by the time Spring arrives? Then I will have been cold a long time.
There are a few things that I like about Winter so far. You could quibble and say it hasn’t actually started yet, not till the 21st, but I say if the outside temperature is in the teens, screw waiting till December 21st. Here are Some Things I Like About Winter:
Crunching around in Blundstones on the snowy ground, all rugged and invincible.
Coming out of my basement after using the treadmill, warm to the core, and there’s snow and it’s freezing but it can’t get me because, well, I’m rugged.
The way ponds freeze.
Finding my water bottle turned to a block of ice in the car.
Long underwear.
That’s it.
Friday we have another nurses’ education meeting. I’m going to make a whole pot of coffee. By then the world should be a pristine wonderland. A friend who used to live on the East Coast told me a big snowstorm is cleansing. She also said Spring will make me feel born anew. I’d kind of rather be doing the born anew thing than the cleansing, but if there’s one thing moving to rural upstate New York has taught me, it’s that you have to take each change as it comes. That, and never leave home without three months of food.
