Blursday Blues
The virus has created its own clock, and in coronatime, there is less demarcation between a day and a week, a weekday and a weekend, the morning and night, the present and the recent past.
—Arielle Pardes, Wired
If a week is a unit of listlessness, I am a centenarian Black man— longest living through a mouthful of flames hawked into CNN headquarters. We scarcely singe our intended audience. The camerawoman twists her lens, zooms in. White folks notice their reflections— cracked or unkind. As if, spotlit by a giant magnifying monocle into a parallel past. Some of them liked it there, called it a shade tree to retire under. Some of them blacked out LinkedIn. Some of everyone saw the inside of our deflated lung. Saw alternate versions of themselves die poorly, via video recording or digital archive. Americans saw themselves, suddenly, without. Unemployed or bored. Watched purple-black sore after sore, newly snatched from a never-ending wound I refuse to undress, for fear of further injury. When the fire up & seized me, I had high blood pressure. A history of asthma. My days an antique carousel on the blink. Wincing up & down. Eyeless ponies. Dusty bulbs. I framed my phone inside an L between thumb & middle digit. Indexed a scroll of crisscrossed ankles, wrists, brown paper dolls intertwined by headlines, ending in a campaign ad. My inbox rang like a siren. became a badge of solidarity. Garlic against unseemly appearances.
