1. I’m extremely bored.

2. No I’m not bored. I’m restless. We’ve been sheltering-in-place for a month. During this period we’ve left the house eight times: 1. a grocery run; 2. drive to a small bodega at the end of our neighborhood; 3. drop our car at the mechanic (taxi home; snowing/raining); 4. walk around the neighborhood; 5. pick up our car at the mechanic (9-mile walk into town; sunny/flowers blooming) + drive to Palm Springs for another grocery run (Whole Foods search for tofu; no tofu); 6. leisure drive to Pioneer Town; 7. leisure drive to Integratron (we initially had a soundbath reservation; just checking it out); 8. tennis (testing the waters of outdoor activity) + grocery run (Walmart search for tofu; no tofu).

3. A lot of folks have been in quarantine much longer. A lot of folks are not bored. Many of our friends are actually busier at work. Many have children. We’ve had Zoom calls for happy hour, kids eating; ones mid-morning on the weekend with children showing off their toys, artwork, pets; night calls midweek with tired parents who’ve just put the kids to bed (at some point, often, both parents will suddenly dart their eyes offscreen, their child awake (standing creepily still in the crack of the bedroom door)). The number one quarantine issue? Children. And taking care of them while keeping a job. We have no children or jobs.

4. We’ve been watching a lot of movies. The Criterion Channel has a series called “Observations on Film Art,” small craft discussions on specific films given by film scholars Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell, and Jeff Smith. Discussions include topics such as three-point lighting, analytical editing, narrative and subjective perspective, and mise en scène. We typically watch them mid-afternoon during the week, and in the evenings we’ll watch one of the films discussed. We call it “film school.” We’ve also been watching non-Criterion movies. We call that “junkfood.”

5. The world now is characterized by invisibility. There is a simple two-part structure to this. The first part is the coronavirus itself, which is invisible. It’s invisibility, as it were, plagues us. I don’t mean the virus itself but specifically its invisibility. The threat of contagion is a contemporary obsession, hence our fascination with zombies and vampires (this is an idea from my friend Carrie). And contagion is tied up in invisibility. Of course pathogens are essentially invisible. These past months, how many times have we visualized the aerosol physics of a sneeze or the infinitesimal transactions of an external surface to our hands and then to our faces? Have we imagined the virus as a globular mass moving like a weather system across a map? Have we thought of it as a binary system, a yes-or-no equation compiled into an exponential curve on a graph? I think that these are all just models to help us see something invisible. The second part of the two-part structure is the world itself, which has become invisible. City streets are empty, businesses dark, playgrounds quiet. The very photographs of these dramatically emptied places feel, themselves, empty, simply tricks of light (Zoom calls can feel this way, too). And of course no other news embodies our discourse, not even the US election―all other facets of the world have become invisible. Our relationships have been emptied of their physical substantiation. I believe that, for many of us, our desires have become invisible (the word that keeps occurring to me as I see folks on video is “enervated”). The future is very much invisible.

6. Yucca Valley has felt pretty remote. We are thousands of miles away from most of the people whom we know. We are not in anything like a city, which is what we are most familiar with. Our home is not ours, nor most of the things in it. But we are situated on an elevated acreage at the foothills of some mountains, in the middle of the Mojave desert, and from here we have the distinct feeling that we can look out across the world. It is a vantage. From it, we’ve been thinking a lot about other people, how their experiences must be different (or the same), and how they are caught up in a society, economy, and governments that have long had massive shortcomings. I look at photos of hospitals in Brooklyn (of drive-up testing lines in Tampa, a lone vendor on a New Delhi street, elaborately suited sanitation workers spraying the floors of a hospital in Wuhan, half-obscured arms and faces hanging out of various apartment windows). I profusely thank the cashier at the grocery store. I wonder about the McDonald’s employees (every time I’ve driven past the one here in Yucca the drive-thru line has extended into the street (maybe the world isn’t so invisible after all)). My wife and I have been lucky to be merely restless, and every item I hold in my hand at the grocer, every truck I see on the highway, the daily sound of the mailman driving the rutted-out dirt road in front of our house, the semiweekly sound of the garbage collectors, every movie I fire up, every light switch I flip, every glass of water I drink, all remind me now, constantly, of how much I depend on other people. “Privilege” is a word, but it isn’t sufficient.

7. In Street of Shame, Kenji Mizoguchi frequently eschews traditional shot/reverse shot editing for dialogue, instead employing continuous shots of characters arranged in very deep composition, through windows and doorways and down hallways, as they converse. The film is set in a red light district of 1950’s Tokyo, when the prohibition of prostitution was being hotly debated, and explores the lives of brothel workers while the existential threat of their legality looms in the background (often, on radio news reports). The effect of Mizoguchi’s direction (and Kazuo Miyagawa’s cinematography) imparts a sense of claustrophobia and tunnel-vision―characters trapped by different layers of fate. At the same time, it highlights their will and ingenuity, the elaborate social (and staged) choreography they use to keep themselves going.

8. One of the most necessary people in the world is the grandparent. Grandparents have always played an important role, often numerous roles, assisting overburdened parents with childcare; lending knowledge, experience, and emotional support; being a chauffeur, a cook, a maid, a repairman. Now, with no schools or daycare, their value is even greater. One of the most necessary sectors of the economy is the remittance economy. Without it many regions of the world would be unlivable, increasingly so, the more that wealth regionally consolidates. The remittance economy provides critical (if fraught and exploitative) access to those regions of consolidation (I also believe it provides a meaningful act of devotion and heroic narratives of expedition and return). I think a lot about grandparents and migrant laborers during the pandemic, which has been nullifying them. Grandparents, as the group most vulnerable to the virus, have to dramatically limit their interactions with family. Migrant laborers―who literally cannot work from home―face lockdowns, difficult travel, and a contracting economy (and probably increasingly unsafe conditions when they can work).

9. My response to the pandemic, from the specific place that privilege, planning, and luck has put us, has been something like stringent resourcefulness (or ambitions thereof). Buy only what we will absolutely use, in as few and as thoroughly planned trips as we can make. Make use of what we have. If possible, don’t order anything online, or otherwise place stresses on distribution centers and supply chains. Exercise and stay healthy, if mostly immobile. Try to keep days organized, recognizing the inherent limits of time even when time feels endless. Foster my marriage, the one relationship that isn’t cut-off. Say yes to every Zoom and phone call, and make the scheduling work. Wear masks, wash hands, handle as little as possible out in the world. Become, in some ways, invisible. But also deliberate.

10. When we arrived to Yucca Valley, we planned to stay put. We didn’t move the car in five days. During that time, rodents climbed up into our engine block and gnawed on various wires and hoses, damaging a significant amount of the car’s electrical and air systems. Fortunately we were still able to drive it to the mechanic, with alerts going off and very weak acceleration. Repairs cost $1500 and took just shy of two weeks as the pandemic put delays on parts. Since we’ve had it back, I’ve been very nervous about keeping it here. The property owner very swiftly sent us a care package of rodent repellents: peppermint oil spray and an ultrasound noisemaker and light strobe. I installed the noisemaker and every night have been spraying the oil on the tires, wheel wells, CV axles, and front grill, running the engine for a few minutes and driving the car to a new spot on our property. So far we’ve had no new issues. I’ve never worried about rodents damaging my car, but now, and for the rest of my life, I will, at least a little bit. It is a new invisible threat.

11. I had dinner in New York last September with a friend who was elated that his chronic, lifelong illness had maybe, finally, found an effective and sustainable therapy. He was buoyant describing it. I am sad for him that just as he became healthy the rest of the world became sick. I take the liberty to say that my wife and I experience a similar absurdity, that just as we set out to see the world, the world went into hiding.

12. The opening credits of The Big Lebowski feature a flyover of the lights of Los Angeles, where we were supposed to be in April. Watching the credits, and then rest of the film―the casualness of the bowling alley, streets lined with strip malls, thinly rolled joints and CCR on a beater radio, bathrobes and diner coffee, this sense of the plain citizens of a city magically caught up in the elaborate (and elaborately styled) mysteries of that city―I pined for Los Angeles; I felt the loss of it in our itinerary and our lives. Of course it occurred to me, too, that I pined for that Los Angeles, one in which plain things still exist, and you could be a deadbeat and still live in Venice Beach.

13. I’ve been mixing up the word “suspicion” with “superstition” in writing and speech and thought. I amuse myself with a little joke that I am a “superstitious rationalist.” This goes a long ways back, to my teenage years when I struggled with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I had a working belief in highly ordered superstitions. If I turned a doorknob a precise number of times, then walking through that door would forestall whatever disasters constantly occupied my mind. I could prolong a “good state” (no disasters coming), once attained, by never ceasing movement, resulting in a little tick where I would rub my thumb and forefinger together in endless circles. I did a lot of things like this, and they are worth much longer writings on another occasion. For now to say that for decades I have been in control of my OCD but still see little vestiges of it (for instance, my slightly ritualized way of turning the car on now that I’m worried about rodents). This makes it confusing, sometimes, to understand how to behave during the pandemic. If I don’t leave the house, I won’t get anyone sick―that’s one cause-and-effect thought, but another that I have, almost equally, is that I should always use my red bandannas as a mask. This is just a little fucked up, isn’t it?

14. And superstitions can become suspicions, or vice versa. I see this more when I think about (and judge) how other people behave. I worry tremendously, perhaps most of all, more than anything else with the pandemic, about how suspicious we are becoming. Suspicious that that person, a bit sweaty looking, has the virus. Suspicious that this plastic bag was made in China and thus likewise has it. Suspicious that people are breaking the rules and endangering us (having wild parties in bold defiance, under cover of night, or as here, tucked back in the mountains). Suspicious, rather, that the coronavirus is not as dangerous as has been made out, and that we have shut down the economy and jettisoned millions of jobs for nothing. Suspicious that someone, somewhere, is making a lot of money off of this. Suspicious that when this is over, we will be irretrievably worse off, accustomed to new norms of social distance, new economic orders, new forms, indeed, of suspicion. None of these suspicions is necessarily untrue, but to me (for me) they all behave alarmingly like superstitions, which I am not allowed to have.

15. Judy Davis is absolutely fantastic in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career.

16. I am proud of a few resourceful things we’ve done this month, mostly food-related. I soaked, then blended, some of the numerous pounds of mung beans we have, making savory and nutritious pancakes that we’ve tooled into several dishes. I made a delicious vegan mayonnaise with the leftover juice from a can of chickpeas (known as “aquafaba”). I conditioned my exercise bands with coconut oil (usually they need Armor All); I use our hammock straps suspended from our pull-up bar as an olympic ring setup; I can do pretty satisfactory dips on our twin kitchen bins. My wife made fruit leathers with inexpensive frozen strawberries plus overripe bananas; she made potato bark from a cheap bag of russets; she’s cooked and dehydrated three different dals (I’ve done one); she’s pickled several batches of onions and cucumbers in leftover commercial pickle juice. I wiped a sluggish Macbook Pro and put Linux on it (typing now in LibreOffice), learning (yet again) about its quirks, and learning, especially, the photo-editing application Darktable (since I no longer have access to Adobe’s Lightroom; Darktable proves a superior, if harder-to-use, application). My wife made an elaborate meal plan for the next several weeks using the colored pencils and drawing paper in our art supply–appointed rental. She also cut her own hair. We both wear the same clothes for longer than we should.

17. I read the New York Times pretty obsessively and yet I still do terribly on the quizzes.

18. In Robert Altman’s Nashville, a presidential campaign van (for the fictional candidate Hal Philip Walker, running under the “Replacement Party”) is always driving around at the periphery, proselytizing a political sea-change via its loudspeaker. The ensemble cast of characters seem mostly to ignore it, too focused on their personal ambitions and desires (“Neoliberal Subjectivity,” as it were). But for the audience, the constantly droning speech from this mostly invisible source imparts a faint but widespread sense of menace. The film’s timeline leads up to a fundraising gala for the campaign, and there is an increasing anticipation in the film that something bad will happen there, or at least that everything will fall apart. This suspension of ambient dread atop the individual energies of the individual characters lost in their pursuits is one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever experienced in a story. It is similar to the public dread + personal ambitions dynamic of Street of Shame (though more comically employed). And yet what I take away most from Nashville is the desire to see live music, be elbow to elbow with sweaty (70s sweaty) strangers.

19. There is a tremendous amount of both law and marketing being improvised right now. My wife and I encounter the first mostly as we navigate campground and forest closures while we try to figure out what next steps, if any, we can take in our travels. Jurisdictions overlap. I’ve read national, state, county, and municipal documents―from CDC guidelines to gubernatorial executive orders, National Park Service boilerplate to statements from regional BLM field offices. Language shifts and shimmies―squirms, maybe―through neighboring connotations, “stay-at-home” vs. “shelter-in-place” vs. “stay home, stay healthy” “orders” or “recommendations” or “initiatives.” The second―marketing―feels slightly desperate and especially improvised. The Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago (we were longtime subscribers when we lived there) has been proffering podcasts, videos, virtual performances, or simply “thoughts.” The Greenwood Sip ‘N Ship (who handles our virtual mailbox) has increased their email campaigns, offering words of inspiration and camaraderie (“Kindness is Contagious” and “Six Feet Apart Can’t Keep our Love Away”). REI has altered the approach of their famous sales (the “Inside/Outside” sale, for instance), and the various cottage outdoor brands I follow have been sending emails geared toward planning and training (“No Gear Required: 11 Bodyweight Exercises to Train for Hiking”), encouraging its readers to keep thinking about that next adventure. Law describes and conditions our material reality. Marketing stands in lieu of it. Both are to the side of it. They are, as it were, derivatives. I ask you to remember that word.

20. There are remarkable similarities between Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. They are both portraits of a defined social milieu. They both intermix their ensemble casts in various dialogue combinations (Renoir preferring mobile long shots that poke into different conversations, Linklater lacing together medium shot walk-and-talks) to articulate a complex social network. They both feature an abundance of alcohol. They both have a hunt (Renoir’s is for pheasant and rabbits, Linklater’s for freshmen). They both careen toward an epic party (La Colinière, the Moontower). As such, both also focus a lot on hooking up (Linklater’s is decidedly more innocent). They both have characters who wrestle with the limitations society has given them. Music drives them both. I don’t know maybe I’m describing a lot of movies.

21. I guess my other relationships haven’t been fully “cut-off.” In fact, one joyous aspect of the pandemic has been Zooming with old friends. A major motivation of our trip was to reconnect with people from whom we’ve grown―if still occasionally connected―mostly estranged. Zoom calls are a poor substitute for the deeper and more sustained engagements we had in mind, but they do evince a new commonality, a will to be together despite the quarantines (and, I would argue, the separate social and economic demands) that keep us apart.

22. I love Goddard’s Breathless even though I am weary of every character type in it.

23. Mine and my wife’s 10-year wedding anniversary is May 1. Six months (plus one day) prior to that date, I woke up just before 6AM to spam Recreation.gov with my keystrokes so I could get a choice coastal camp in Big Sur. In many places, especially California, this kind of behavior is necessary. I succeeded, and we’ve looked forward to our stay there. Upon the pandemic, the campground we selected (Kirk Creek Campground in the Los Padres National Forest) was closed. That closure went through April 30^th, one day into our reservation. But our entire reservation was canceled. I was notified of this just as I was about to jump in the shower. I took a shower, then got back onto Recreation.gov to see if I could rebook the rest of our itinerary. In that time (my shower), someone else had booked our site. Most of the rest of the camp was also booked. I will be frank about my anger with this maddening dynamic. The campground is emptied, and yet then it is made rapidly full. I am competing with both forces simultaneously. People, in both cases, and in oddly the same way, are the problem. I am also a person.

24. These are the sounds where we are: dirtbikes and ATVs, dogs (many dogs) barking, roosters, a pig, a donkey (hilariously cliché, “hee-haw, hee-haw”), the minute clacking sound of lizards running across the rocks of our driveway, the surprisingly heavy sound of wingbeats from many kinds of birds (from hummingbirds to doves to enormous ravens), lots of chirping, ambient highway noise, ambient wind noise.

25. Of course The Big Lebowski also employs a peripheral menace: this aggression will not stand, geopolitical uncertainty conditioning the super (media: Bush Sr. on the TV at the grocery store) and sub (dreams: Saddam Hussein handing the Dude his bowling shoes during his Rohypnol dream sequence) consciousness.

26. Surely we’ve all had some difficulty understanding public health guidelines. Mostly we should be at home―got that. But is it OK to go to the park sometimes? Should I shop at the grocery store rapidly? How often should I wash my clothes? Going back and forth over what’s right and what’s wrong has, I’ll bet, made some of us feel, if ever so faintly, like a criminal. Is being, merely, outside, illegal? What about driving in my car, touching this handrail, letting my mask slide this far down my face? Is it criminal to see my mother? As a longtime (i.e. before any states legalized) user of cannabis, I’m fairly comfortable with a diffuse sense of criminality. I’m also good at recognizing it, and finding, for what it’s worth, entertainment in it.

27. People are literally dying.

28. Thinking about thinking a lot about certain things: I’ve been captured by a notion introduced to me by Michael Allen Gillespie’s excellent, if unwieldily titled, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History. In his history of the philosophy of history, Gillespie discusses a Heideggerian concept that supposes a development of rationality into the hyperrational. Bear with me. The idea is that the project of rationality (i.e. the Enlightenment, democracy, and capitalism) has lead to a hyperrational state wherein the very forces of liberty, equality, science, and truth are leveraged via technical supremacy to consolidate power, ultimately evaporating “reality” and replacing it with, for lack of a better word, “representation.” So the electoral college process of democracy becomes distorted by severe gerrymandering. The rigors of journalism and the labor of fact-finding and documentation give way to the cheaper content of talking heads, and then to the even cheaper content of audience opinion (i.e. social media). Politicians are no longer legal scholars or decorated veterans but celebrities, and not even celebrities but “reality” TV celebrities. Our economy implodes not because of drought or war or even fear, but the insubstantiation of debt and speculation and “derivative instruments” (did you remember?). Human experience is replaced by law and marketing (and photography and videos and emojis). In all of these cases power leaps from reality to the representation of reality (from gold to “trust”), where greater efficiencies and scales lie. Except that Heidegger (and many other important philosophers) would probably argue that it’s not so much a leap from reality to representation but a radical exposition of reality as only, ever and always, representation. There is no ontology, only epistemology. There is not thought, only language. No truth, only games. And yet within this radicality, within the specific history of its intellectual development (i.e. the Twentieth Century), the emergence of “mankind” has been profound (here I’m citing Foucault and The Order of Things), recourse to humanity as an inviolable narrative, an exceptionally real nucleus negotiating an unreal world.

29. Zombieland was just satisfying, for whatever stupidities it exploits (do we really need a love interest in this?). Fuck you, apocalypse.

30. I should mention here that I am anxious, but not necessarily fearful. This is maybe tied up in my OCD. I sense dread, immensely, but in terms of the system and not necessarily myself. I don’t mean to be saintly about this, just trying to understand myself. I worry about maintaining my relationships and what others think of me, but I am not, as best as I can suss out, afraid of dying.

31. National Lampoon’s Vacation, directed by the still underappreciated Harold Ramis (and starring the skilled if somewhat insufferable Chevy Chase, who struck me this go-round as something of a reup of Jacques Tati but with speaking lines and a libido), gratifies mine and my wife’s situation by positing a roadtrip (“holiday ro-ohhhhhh-ohhhhh-ohhhh-ohhhh-ohhh-ohhhh-ohhhh-oh-od”) across the American West that ends in an abrupt closure of the promised land. I want to punch that fucking moose right in its fucking nose.

32. And so maybe our humanity is secured by the emergence of “mankind,” except that I am reminded of the opinions of numerous polar scientists, which are paraphrased deftly in Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Spend enough time in the worrisome mental perambulations of pandemic thought and one will undoubtedly arrive at climate change as an even more horrifying future. Much of the communication of climate change is anchored in a concept of human stewardship, of the Anthropocene, of our own fault, responsibility, and possibly redemption. Like many I believe climate change is our greatest task ahead, that we have to exercise our great powers responsibly, caringly. And yet how do the polar scientists of Herzog’s film feel? We should be so arrogant to think that we have control. This is not the Anthropocene. Nature is always in control. When we exceed its allowances, Nature will simply regulate us.

33. So the coronavirus. Are we the inviolable nucleus of reality navigating the indeterminacies of an unreal world? Nay, we are merely hosts of an even greater indeterminacy, the not-even-DNA-complete force of a virus. We have become derivative to life itself.

34. OK that’s enough of that. I should probably walk this back a little bit. Look I can get kind of goth sometimes, as a lover of German philosophy, as a recovering obsessive-compulsive. It’s late April, and yes April is the cruelest month, but things are looking up. “Mankind” might be a myth, but I believe in the human will, because I see it everyday during this god damned thing, the smartest, hardest working people (it goes without saying that the US president is not included in this description) employing unprecedented technologies (which humans have built) and sharing their knowledge and skills at breakneck speed to try and beat this thing. I’m suspicious that the pandemic might even help us see more clearly, understand how connected we really are, realize that Nature needn’t regulate us, that we can in fact regulate ourselves. My wife and I will celebrate our 10-year anniversary right here in Yucca (extending our stay), cooking a great meal and working on a playlist of the music that has been most meaningful to us during our marriage. We plan to get back on the road soon―probably not the California coast, more likely southern Utah―as long as we can do it responsibly. I want a better world, but there is still no other world, and no other time, I would rather live in.

―Yucca Valley, CA, April 27, 2020