In quarantine, you realize who you are. Steeped in the onion burrito scent of your own B.O., staring into a party sized bag of Cheetos, you’re forced to deal with your dark night of the soul. Who are you without the structure forced on you by your boss, your dad, your boyfriend, your gynecologist? You question everything you ever stood for and everything you believe!!! WHO ARE YOU?!
On the bright side of things, depending on your situation, self-quarantine might be good for you. The way an apple cider vinegar cleanse might be good. Or a colonoscopy.
It’s times like these that force me to come to terms with how many of my usual daily activities are unnecessary and frivolous. To decide what activities to keep and purge. Without the outside world interrupting your thoughts every five minutes to ask what size latte you want or what your major was in college, you can think.
This is the chance to discover how much of your daily schedule is dictated by the needs or wants of others. To find out whether you’re human waste waiting to be picked up and disposed of in what Mom, Boyfriend, or Janie from accounting has deemed your proper place. Or if you’re human waste that can sort itself!
Being a writer has made me a pro at being confined to one place for long stretches of time, but no more than a few weeks. The possibilities of extended isolation are endless and I’m looking forward to examining the results of this grand experiment. What a dream!
I could become anorexic or fat. Go so long without brushing my teeth that my throat hurts from the tongue residue. Realize which people I really miss and who doesn’t miss me at all. I may not be able to leave my apartment, but these are the psychological trips that money just can’t buy!
That said, over the last month my usual existential dread has transformed into a focused pandemic-dread, with not much room for self-reflection. Every once in a while between reading COVID-19 tweets, my throat will start to burn like there’s ash in it, and I’ll swear it’s coronavirus creeping, when really it’s just allergies that come with the miracle of spring.
Really, though: A month in quarantine is nothing for someone living as charmed a life as I am right now. No one has shown up to nail my door shut, there’s still plenty of paid writing work for me to support myself and I’m not being forced to spend entire days with children I happened to birth. Also, now that he is jobless thanks to comedians being deemed “non-essential,” my boyfriend has taken on the role of House Slave until further notice. I haven’t washed a dish or cooked for myself in at least a fortnight and I’m testing to see how much of my not showering he can take. I am a Scum Princess!
All that said, I’m feeling fucking lucky as hell today (because I very much am), but who knows what’s to come? Even for a blessed, elegant Scum Princess such as I, perhaps being confined to my small, shitty and overpriced apartment watching brown rust crawl into the bathroom sink’s overflow will eventually drive me to madness. Next week may indeed hold the Day Of Reckoning.
But for now, aside from being plagued by the anxiety of a global health crisis, I’m finding ways to occupy myself. The freedom to map out each 24-hour block however I want is the tits. The kind of tits unburdened by a bra, flopping in political protest as cops chase them through the public square.
There are a million new things to do with all the extra hours in a day not spent commuting or shaving my armpit hair. Like doing extra freelance work. Lifting weights. Absorbing the novels of Chuck Palahniuk. Writing this blog to you.
I’ve also gotten a lot of extra time to be a useless piece of shit! Why, just yesterday I spent three hours playing Nancy Drew puzzle computer games, ate five pounds of fajitas and binge-watched Melrose Place. The results of the great quarantine experiment in play, folks!
I also spent entirely too much time putting together a playlist of cryptid-related songs on Spotify that I’m now sharing with all of you. They make me laugh and cause me to tap my fully slippered foot in between Cheeto bites, an experience I think we could all benefit from right now.
While toiling in your dark night of the soul, give these sweet jams a listen. It’ll give you an abbreviated sense of my musical palate, which seems to be roughly as sophisticated as that of a teenage boy in the early 90s. The sickkkk Bigfoot art for the playlist was thrown up by the brain of my buddy Rick. You should check out his shit if you haven’t already.
Also, if you find that your soul’s dark night is lasting longer than usual, you can also listen to this interview I just did for the Mysteries & Monsters podcast. I give my extremely uneducated and cheeky assessment on coronavirus bullshit and do a deep dive into violent Bigfoot stories in history. There could be worse ways to wait for the light on your soul’s horizon, I suppose.
But in all seriousness, while I veer towards humor in dark times, this situation sucks up, down and sideways. I hope you all are taking care of yourselves and being sure to stay weird through this process. In fact, if you don’t come out even weirder when all this is over, I’ll be tragically disappointed.
Scum Princess, out.
