Other people are excited,
as though they were at a parade.
I alone don’t care,
I alone am expressionless,
like an infant before it can smile.
Tao te Ching
I had to guess what day it is for the title, because it’s been a while. I’m not sure exactly how much time has passed. It might have been a handful of days. It might have been a handful of decades. Does anybody know? Is anybody SURE? Yeah, I thought not. So I just wrote the number that feels the closest to accurate
I’m somewhat of a homebody, so for the first week or so of this whole lock-down shelter-in-place thing I was fine. In fact, I barely noticed a difference, except for the super scary things all over the internet and on the TV, and the fact that my husband is home A LOT. Other than that, I crocheted and wrote and played piano and binged on subscription TV and read novels and continued my study-from-home philosophy class (which I am taking with two people who are WAY smarter than me, so “study” is more like “watch the video and then listen to the smart people talk about it” and chatted with friends and made the occasional half-hearted swipe and something house-chorey so I could pretend that I am anything other than a lazy retiree. I did miss taking a walk every day, but since I’m always trying to invent excuses to myself about why I shouldn’t have to do that, I mostly felt like I was getting away with something. So, normal. It’s a rough life, I know. But somebody has to live it.
But time is twisty and stretchy and weird and after the first week things started warping out of control. I lost track of a lot. Simple things, like days of the week (like everyone else), but also other things like “What the hell am I doing here?” and “Who am I?” and “Do I really have to cook dinner EVERY SINGLE NIGHT?” and “Is this really my life? Like… forever now?” and “Is Netflix going to add anything new, soon?”
And speaking of scary things on the internet, did you hear that Joe Exotic (Tiger King) got put into medical isolation for Coronavirus? When your weird entertainment and your weird reality get all blended up like that, it’s easy to start feeling like you slipped through the crack in the back of your sofa and ended up in some eerie, Kafka-esque fictional world. Some of the nightly “news” doesn’t help with that feeling, either. I mean, in this day and age, who needs drugs? I’m pretty sure I’m already tripping about 80% of the time. Not to over-discuss the whole Tiger King thing, but… tripping. Because that cannot be real, right?
Anyhoo, the one reality I did not lose track of are the quirks of my favorite knight-in-rubbery-armor. It’s hard to pick a single story from the last week… there are so many Charlie-isms. My life is a series of them. They get me through the day. And I’m pretty sure I’ll never run out of them to write about. So if this end-of-the-world thing hangs on for a while, I’ll still have plenty of entertainment right in my very own home.
And since it would be selfish of me to keep all that Charlie-ness to myself, here is one of my favorites from the last week:
CHARLIE-IN-THE-BOX
The other day I came out into the dining room where Charlie has his workstation set up to see him leaning almost sideways to peer out through the window in the adjacent living room.
As I entered the room, he quickly sat up. Then he leaned over again. Then sat up again. Back and forth, like an addled jack-in-the-box, Charlie popped up, went down, and popped up. There was an imaginary “boing boing boing” soundtrack running through my mind, and I just stared at him for a few minutes, entranced.
Finally I turned and looked out the window to see what had fascinated him so. Was a naked neighbor doing jumping jacks in their front yard to relieve the tension? Had the military invaded our small hillside neighborhood to make sure none of us were up to no good? Had the zombies finally emerged from their homes and started wandering in the streets looking for brains and other delicious treats?
But… nothing.
I watched a few more boing boing boing iterations, and then finally asked.
“What. The hell. Are you looking at?”
“Wisp of smoke.” He said. I looked again. No smoke.
“What?” I asked, leery of the potential answer as I stared out, squinting and crossing my eyes a little, as if it was one of those magic pictures and the smoke would appear if I unfocused just so. Still no wisp.
“Something burning? Maybe?” He kept boinging.
I peered out over the horizon. Nothing.
“Nope.”
“It was on our street. A wisp of smoke.”
“Well, there’s nothing there now.”
He boinged a few more times, just to be sure, then settled back to his computer, as if nothing had ever been there and he had not just spent fifteen minutes bopping up and down like a madman.
I’m not sure why a wisp of smoke would cause that type of stealth peeking. I think he thought if he stopped looking, the wisp would reappear and he could spring back down and “catch it” before it disappeared again. Maybe he thought it was a ghost, or a secret “save me” signal being sent from far away. Maybe it was the emissions of a secret cloaked UFO. Who knows what goes on in the mind of a Charlie?
I’ll never know for sure. And I know better than to ask.
Keep on surviving, folks.
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Up the Tao Staircase 