For the last week or so it’s been sinking into me. Simultaneously appalling and suffocating, and so overwhelming that I’ve only been able to gradually process it one day at a time. We’re all living in a dystopian realm, the likes of which I’ve never known, almost a kind of On The Beach atmosphere…a low-security, self-policed concentration camp with all the comforts of home.

As HE regulars know (especially the scolding “virusbros“) I’ve been out two or three times since returning from Texas…wearing the usual mask and surgical gloves, and of course keeping my distance from one and all. CVS and Pavilions stopovers plus aimless rumblehog roamings.

What an inert, boring, vanilla, nothing-level existence.

In a 3.24 piece called “10 Comedies to Lift Your Mood”, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy mentioned that what we’re all going through is spiritually analogous to what many Americans went through during the early days of the Great Depression. That sunk in. Right now probably is the bleakest time of my life in certain ways…perhaps in all ways.