doodling on the deck of the Titanic

I have been feeling more acutely the urge to do and to make, to participate in creative outlets. I don’t know why. It’s always come and gone for me on some kind of cycle. My theory there is that I need it and when I don’t have it after while I feel the absence - something hurts - and I take steps to correct it. It’s much like my need for physical exercise and mobility, the provision for which is similarly regulated by a rhythm of absence and neglect: my back feels tweaky again, I need to be better about moving around. That’s the ordinary cycle. I wonder if there’s something about this extraordinary time that also feeds this urge. Maybe it’s a need for distraction: when I draw and make music the rest of my brain eventually shuts off; the flow state is enjoyable in part because it’s a relief from any other state. Maybe it’s a need for meeting: so much feels pointless right now, having time on something I genuinely care about feels good. Maybe it’s about control: the world seems to be spinning out of control and I’m a passenger in the back seat; drawing back here makes me feel like at I can least shape the outcomes of something, create a thing, deepen my capacity to create. Maybe it’s a desire for both isolation and community: others are so present in my life right now as impositions and yet often without a strong sense of connection; making something means subtracting myself mentally from others’ imposed presence, and yet sharing something is a way to connect through that object.

These thoughts keep asserting themselves, and these as well: I am old enough now to have just a little perspective. I know I live halfway up a low foothill, I know there are others down below closer to the river, and I know there are many far above me on the mountains nearby. I feel so small, my kids smaller still, and I am far enough up the slope of my own life now to see how low it is and to see more of the other slopes, to place my little hill in context of its irrelevance in the shadows of true peaks, and the river seems to be rising fast. I stare in horror, draw and write and play guitar about it a little, when I can wrench myself from the window and force myself to sit in a chair, and try to stop wishing I could build a life raft.

Joan Didion writes “confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred.” I feel this every day, and a reversal as well - in the face of this slow apocalypse no circumstances seem unremarkable, nothing ordinary seems trustworthy, moments of normality remind me of the threat gathering right now.