MAKING LEMONADE

You can be forgiven for not wanting to read anything more about the God-damned Coronavirus. At this point, we -- the country, I mean -- is already mentally exhausted from anxiety, bad news and the psychological effects of self-quarantine and social distancing ... and, truth be told, the battle is only in its first round. We have a lot more ahead of us yet, for the crisis has not even hit its peak. Now, as a rule, it's never a good sign when you start panting a quarter-mile into your five-mile run, but there is good news. The present situation, surreal and unpleasant and frustrating as it is, has yielded some surprising benefits.

It so happens that these benefits, or most of them, involve things which money cannot buy. In capitalist society, such things are generally frowned upon or dismissed with contempt, but one of the net gains of this crisis is that it may force a certain re-evaluation of the modern, uniquely American form of capitalism. Those without a grasp of history, which is most everyone, seem to believe that the atmosphere of rampant consumerism in which we live is a normal, healthy thing which is part of our birthright, and unless one signs onto this creed, one must be a communist at heart. This is hardly the case. The idea that shiny objects should fill the length and breadth of our desires is a relatively new one: it is a direct result of America's victory in the Second World War, which found us possessing more factories than any other nation in the world, an unlimited supply of raw materials, and a populace grown bored with wartime rationing that now had money to burn. It was artificially kept going, long after the postwar boom had faded into an echo, by a series of fiendishly clever tricks, foremost of which was the idea that people could, and indeed should, buy things on credit they could not otherwsie afford. Indeed, the entire idea of savings died an ugly death within my own lifetime. Credit replaced savings as the means by which Americans measured their purchasing power, leading to the present situation, where the vast majority of our citizens no longer have any money in the bank at all, and live paycheck to paycheck beneath staggering burdens of high-interest debt they will never be able to repay. The pallative for this is the afformentioned shiny objects. We all own tons of shit we don't really need, and in many cases, do not even enjoy owning, but we've been so habituated to want things that our desire to get the highest-definition TV or the very latest mobile device has replaced, in our own minds, the actual pleasure that comes with obtaining something truly valuable. Now, I am hardly immune to this cultural brainwashing, but circumstances have now made me aware, or perhaps simply reminded me, that there is a whole category of "shiny objects" that life offers completely gratis, if one is simply willing -- in this case, forced -- to notice.

When the lockdown orders were announced here in California, I felt a certain smugness, because I, as a writer and a freelancer by trade, already lived a life of semi-isolation. It was not always necessary for me to leave the house to go to work...or even to put on pants...and obtained at least half of all my exercise by hiking local mountains, parks and trails, activities that do not require any social interaction at all. With my vast collection of DVDs and books, as well as a sprinkling of video games, I considered myself well-equipped to do nothing in isolation for as long as it was deemed prudent and patriotic to do so. Put another way: My shiny objects would see me through the storm better than yours, fools!

Just a few days into the quarantine, however, I began to experience some psychological strain. Until that moment I had not realized the degree to which I was dependent on going swimming, or meeting friends for lunch now and again, or ducking into a diner for breakfast or for dinner, or stopping at a pub to drain a pint or two, or cruising down to Hollywood to watch an old movie at the Egyptian Theater, just to obtain some psychological relief from isolation and, well, shiny objects. When I had the chance to do these things, I did not always avail myself, but now that I no longer had the option, damn it, I missed them all like crazy.

My stir-craziness got me walking again. And not my normal half-hour walk that I take to get fresh air or wind down before bed, which always follows the same course around the neighborhood, to the point where I don't even pay attention to my surroundings. I mean walks that go on for up to two hours and take me all over town. I haven't walked so much, so consistently, in probably 25 years, and during my travels I made a series of discoveries that have helped me cope with the anxiety, the frustration, the boredom and the routine of Life in the Age of Corona.

The first observation is that, with very few people going to work and not much open to go to anyway, only a tiny fraction of folks are driving. This has had the most astounding effect on air quality that can be imagined. I have lived in Los Angeles for 12 1/2 years, and have grown used to the idea of haze, smog, low visibility and air that tastes like ozone or burnt paper. Indeed, on my hikes, its normal for the city to be half-drowned in a dull grayish fog and the horizon simply blotted out completely. It's a rare day indeed when, from the top of a mountain, I can see the gleam of the sun on the water off Santa Monica Pier, which is only 14 miles away. Well, a few days ago I made the same hike to the same point, and saw Catalina Island... which is 58 miles distant.

The truth is that the air, the sky, the clouds, and most especially the mountains that horseshoe around Burbank from the north-northwest to the southeast, are so sharply rendered in my vision that, in the case of the mountains, I can make out the most minute details of their slopes – folds in the earth, vegetation, everything. The air, too, smells wonderful all the time: today, while walking, I was almost blown over by the scent of orange and lemon blossoms, and at night the smell of jasmine hangs in the hair in a way that is difficult to describe unless one has inhaled it. At night, the air is wonderfully crisp and sharp and clean-scented, and I can see more stars in the heavens than I have ever seen before in this normally cloudy, light-crowded city.

As I trample around, I have taken notice of things that used to move past me without intruding upon my consciousness, most notably flora. I have roses and orchids in my own yard, but along Burbank Boulevard the empty sidewalks are awash in cherry blossom petals, and the private gardens of homes along the side-streets where I live are full of
colors that stagger me: oranges that seem to paint the air, flame-yellows, vivid imperial purples, soft blues. I have noticed funny little details, too, such as the fact that many flowers close their petals when it gets cold. Probably everyone on earth knew this but me -- and indeed, I knew it once too, but forgot it longer ago than I care to remember.

Meanwhile, on the sidewalks themselves, children -- and some adults -- have been hard at work with colored chalk. This is an old American ritual that had very nearly gone out of existence, but which has come back full force and then some in the last few weeks. The most common sights are hopscotch squares, drawings and affirmations -- I am especially fond of the affirmations. "Tough times don't last, but tough people do" is one I saw a few days ago. Simple, positive messages like "Stay safe!" "Be Well!" "Breathe!" and "Take Care!" are everywhere. Some folks have written damn-near essays on positivity that sprawl across quarter blocks. Today I saw a paen to First Responders that took up an entire driveway.

Normally, when walking I see only a few people here and there, usually being led by their dogs, and very few of those I encounter give me more than a disinterested grunt of greeting as we pass on the street. Now people are out in strength, cycling, skate-boarding, jogging and pushing prams, and the politeness I encounter astonishes me. Los Angeles is not a friendly town: most everyone here is either so nakedly out for themselves or just plain suspicious of strangers that they avoid eye contact, much less conversation. Not anymore. This morning a man -- speaking from safe distance -- told me the entire pedigree of his dog while we waited for his wife to come out of the coffee shop so I could go inside. (The dog's name was Chewbacca; his parents were, I was told, Darth Vader and Princess Leia).

I freely admit that I myself have dropped, to some degree, the Daniel Craig scowl I generally wear everywhere I go, and have found myself opening up to my neighbors through the fence, something I have previously avoided in the nearly 7 years I've lived in my house. I found myself humiliated to realize that there are some great people in my neighborhood that I never troubled to get to know, and as evidence of this I point the fact that, "Do you need anything?" was the first sentence out of the mouths of two of my neighbors when the lockdown hit. It turns out that the quality of tribal kindness known as "neighborliness" is also free, and feels pretty good.

Because food is more difficult to obtain -- not scarce or more expensive, just more of a pain in the ass to get in quantity -- I have been utilizing the skills poverty taught me 20-odd years ago to make do with less, and to utilize every aspect of what I have and waste nothing. Take my oranges for example. I have an orange tree in my backyard which is ridiculously fertile, and no matter how many I eat or give away (I just mailed 6lbs to my mother), some of them, quite a few of them, always go bad in the end. But not this time. This time I have been gathering, juicing, and freezing them a dozen or fourteen at a time, so that nothing goes to waste. I have even taken to grinding the skins into zest for use in other dishes. It is the same with the windfalls of grapefuit, lemon, lime and tangerine that I find in alleys and on sidewalks around my house. I used to walk past them as they slowly rotted. Now I gather them up and use them in my breakfast shakes. The natural generosity I have mentioned above also applies to others' and their own fruits: I have passed more overflowing baskets of lemons on sidewalks festooned with notes that say FREE LEMONS - TAKE ALL YOU WANT this season than all the others I've lived here combined. Nobody wants to see any waste nowadays, and everyone seems to want to demonstrate that they care about others. This applies even to the "little free libraries" that abound around Burbank. Most of them now have anti-bacterial sanitation wipes inside of them, and nobody ever seems to steal these things, despite the ongoing shortage.

Isolation has also made me more communicative. I am now spending hours on the phone each day with friends I have not spoken with in months or in some cases, years. Listening to the problems that others have faced, and the solutuons they have formulated in this time, reminds me that we are all going through this together. America in recent years has become increasingly obsessed with identity politics, and the general consequence of this was a splintering effect -- the national tribe became a thousand sub-tribes divided along economic, racial, ethnic, religious, sexual and political lines, and these in turn divided again and again as new hypens and buzz-words were thrown into the mix, until our entire society became atomized. All of this horseshit has been put on pause. We are now in an us-them situation with "us" being humanity and "them" being the virus. As with the last world war, during which rationing made it at least theoretically impossible for a rich person to buy more food or more sundries than a poor one, the net effect of pandemic is a actually a leveling and a uniting one.

Now, I don't want to romanticize what is happening or slap some kind of watery feel-good facepaint over an ugly situation. We are in the soup, and the temperature is only going to rise over the next month or two. Too many people are still acting selfishly and irresponsibly, and far too many of our politicians are behaving in a manner which, if they were serving in the wartime military, would get them cashiered and possibly shot for criminal negligence. It's no use whistling past this particular graveyard. At the same time, however, there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by pretending that there is no upside. COVID-19 is a bitch, but it is a bitch that has reminded us of several important facts, the most basic of which is that a temporary suspension of our frantic quest to acquire shiny objects carries with it opportunities to enjoy those things about life which don't cost us anything at all.