The masks are off, the delta variant spreads, there are localized pandemics of the (mostly) unvaccinated across the country, the bees busy themselves around the spread-eagle heads of our sunflower flock. Pandemic news takes a backseat, you have to glance in the rearview to see it, background noise to other more-pressing news, like infrastructure deals and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Walking into the grocery store without a mask for the first time in over a year was a memorable and prosaic moment. Some people still wore masks, most did not. I did not feel defenseless in the trenches with yellow plumes of mustard gas pouring in. No, it felt normal. A strange normal, somewhat registering in the back of my mind that I was probably inhaling little covid beasties as I stood perusing the produce section, but the thought quickly dissipated in the whirlwind of plain ol' grocery store concerns: which aisle for the toothpaste, which for the kid's yogurt, now backtracking across the store to look for sparklers for the 4th of July. No sparklers. Bummer. Time to checkout.It's a normal the vaccines have allowed. Plus, visits from friends and family. A lot of catching up to do, hugs, hanging about, sharing meals. It's been good.
I've been reading H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald the past several weeks and I'm still not finished. I've got literally ten pages left to read but every night I think, Maybe tonight I'll finish it, but there's always something for me to write, or rewrite, more like it.
I'm working on a creative nonfiction, somewhat memoir-ish piece encompassing the last four months of my second deployment to Afghanistan. Roughly August to December 2009. It's taken multiple rewrites, a ballooning draft cut in half, brutal self-examinations, worries about what people will think of it, whether I am being honest with myself or my readers. It's exhausting, lots of late nights.
It's the first time I've really endeavored to write anything nonfiction about my combat experiences. I don't much like it. Give me fiction, please, instead. I can go places with fiction, hide in fiction, so much better than I can in nonfiction. In fact, that's kind of the point of nonfiction, isn't it? To be true, real, ruthlessly honest, to be hampered—constrained, you might say—by the facts of the matter.
But, I'm learning, nonfiction requires just as much storytelling as fiction, sometimes more, and can involve wonderful blurs of reality, escapes to lands unknown, obfuscations of fallible memory.
Indeed, our minds are the playhouse of memories, where they go to flirt with and fuck our imaginings, our pretend-selves, our phantom-friends. It's the dirty little secret of nonfiction writing—memoirs especially. But the prostitute of nonfiction is the respectable spouse of fiction, both the same, flipsides of the same storytelling coin.
Whether pulling from experiences to write thinly-veiled autobiographical fiction or pulling from our imagination to spice up the telling of our "true" story, or simply employing storytelling techniques for fiction in nonfiction, the line between the two is not nearly so definite as many readers like to think. That's part of the illusion. The line between fiction and nonfiction in the shelves of the bookstore are more of a squiggly watercolor abandoned in the rain. That's part of the beauty of it, too.
So, yes, the story I'm working on now is still a work-in-progress. But it's a beauty. I can't wait to see where it ends up and what people think of it.
In my last post, I mentioned that this might be my final Pandemic Periodical. It might be. I'm wondering what to call any upcoming posts in August, whether I should start a new thread of theme-based posts, or if there isn't another one or two pandemic months left in 2021. If the pandemic's over can I really continue posting periodicals about it?
Is the pandemic over?
Yes, covid will remain with us, it'll flood people's airways again come winter, is doing so, again, right now in pockets across the country, but will it affect everyone's lives so widely and strenuously as it has from March 2020 till now? Will there be any more lockdowns?
True, millions still suffer around the globe. The bonus of being born and living in a first world country like America is unfair, unequal. It's something of a spit in the face to people in less privileged countries who want a vaccine but can't get one when there are first-worlders, here, who refuse it. What a privilege to refuse a vaccine. What a privilege to see family and friends again, face to face.
No, the worldwide pandemic is not over and it won't be for some time.
In any case, that's all from the end of the river that drains into another this perhaps weekly. I'll be back here, next month, with another post for you to peruse. Keep safe and, perhaps, spare a thought for the majority of humankind who does not enjoy the same privilege of access to a vaccine as we, Americans.
Bye for now.