When I made this collage, five years ago, I never dreamed it would capture the feeling of going to the grocery store in 2020. As a person with a history of lung ailments, bi-weekly trips to the grocery store put two of my basic, human drives at odds with each other: the need to eat versus the need to continue breathing. The anxiety over this conflict, alone, produces shortness of breath. Then, there is the added knowledge that so many workers are asked daily to spend eight-hour shifts in the same environment that causes me strife after ten minutes or so.
Do workers go home feeling, as I do, shaken, worried, anxious? Do they do this day in, day out, instead of every two weeks, like me? And what does this daily exposure to risk and anxiety do to them? My own anxiety is thus mixed with a deep feeling of humility, guilt and gratitude. Why do I get to stay home and they don't? My lizard brain encourages me not to ask these questions--attend to my organism's own survival needs. But my organism is part of a larger one, which it can't do without. Is my relationship to the larger whole a parasitic one? What are the systemic elements that might make it so, or that might, rather, mitigate and correct the kinds of parasitic relationships that keep contemporary, Canadian society running?
The severity of COVID-19's effects on a person are likely related, not just to the binary of exposure/non-exposure, but to the daily, recurring amount of exposures. It depends on viral load. But, workers in retail, health care, and other services deemed essential are daily exposed, not just to greater risks and levels of infection, but to greater doses of negative affect: anxiety, anger, resentment, fear. When I visit the grocery store, I afterwards enjoy a two-week interval during which my emotional health can regain equilibrium. Not so for front-line workers who, after a stressful shift, must wake up the next morning, or a day or two later, and go back to that place that I have come to dread. What are the protracted effects of the negative affective loads that workers are being exposed to? Does the celebratory culture that has sprung up, recognizing such workers as "heroes" compensate for the increased emotional load they must assume, or does it make it worse by covering over the realities of the experiences and systems of exploitation with which they must grapple?
Taking refuge in abstractions is a kind of comfort. Another comfort comes from cleaning the kitchen, sterilizing the access points between my apartment and the outside world: the doorknobs, the handrails, my clothing. Do these things reduce my chances of getting sick, of losing the ability to breathe? Maybe. Or maybe they help me feel better, and breath more easily, in the now.
But what would allow us all, collectively, to breathe a little easier? What kind of minimum distance from necessity is required so that grocery store and health care workers feel less disposable? The feel-good, "we're all in this together" commercials that sprung up, seemingly overnight just make me feel more upset, angry and nauseous. We are not all in this together. Our society is not designed that way. It is designed so that the comfort of one group is purchased at the expense of the lives and safety of others. This was going on long before COVID-19 hit, but the situation has exacerbated the fault lines, making them more immediately visible. The stridently saccharine TV ads from Apple and Tim Hortons are a response to these amplified signals, and an attempt to dampen them, so that a system of exploitation and inequity can persist a little longer.
So, rather than take refuge in empty affective platitudes, I try to embrace and nourish my anxiety, my guilt, indignation and my privatized and shared compensations, in the form of cleaning, blogging, making art. And breathing. I would like to live in a world where we could truly breath together, where the convenience and comfort of some do not steal away the ability to breath of others. As the nice spring weather hit, I started smelling a gas smell in my house. At first, I thought it was some weird haunting. Perhaps a can of WD40 I had just used to fix a door was leaking. At day two, I worried that the stale, feint gas smell was an early sign of COVID contraction, but I didn't want to feed this anxiety, so I resisted looking up the symptom on the Internet. If it was COVID, I would know soon enough.
Then, a few days later, as I sat on the porch watching the increased traffic go by, I realized I was just smelling the cars on Main Street. Two events had coincided: first, the nice weather, with a kind of Dionysian, spring euphoria had coaxed people out of isolation, virus be damned! This caused an increase in road traffic since, as my girlfriend pointed out, driving around is really the only collective activity we are currently allowed in public space. The second event is the beginning of the warm season, where air pollution is trapped ground-ward to a greater degree than in the winter, when the cool air allows it to disperse into the larger atmosphere faster.
Thus, what I initially misidentified, in my anxiety, as a possible sign of the respiratory disease COVID-19 was actually the parasitic, background pollution of a car culture that has made so many of us that much more susceptible to respiratory ailments. My misidentification of the symptom had a kind of deeper truth to it. Through social distancing, self-isolation, and the exposure of essential workers to the risks that the rest of us would like to avoid, we are managing to clear the air of a dangerous virus. But the larger, parasitic culture that has made us collectively susceptible to that virus remains, and is just beginning to kick into summer gear, with unpredictable results...
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