I wrote some notes on my fear of the winter.

I’m afraid of the coming winter. In my mind pandemic life has meant never leaving the house but really I’ve taken walks around the neighborhood, run around in the yard, gardened a little. Moving around has been a way to pump the brakes when I’ve felt my mind fishtailing. Going outside has also meant some level of contact with other people - neighbors lobbing hellos across the street with a wave of the arm enacted by the whole body.

Sam - from three houses down and originally from, according to different neighbors, Vietnam, Cambodia, or Burma - nods vigorously when I call his name, calling back “Good! You good?” “Yes, I’m good. You doing good?” “Good, yes good, all good, very good!” If he sees me first he asks “good?” Another Sam, half a block down, had a newborn baby over the summer. He said “you got a big baby, mine’s just two weeks!” the first time we talked, me carrying my then two year old. I haven’t seen him in a minute.

Conversation topics in our brief exchanges have been either brief pandemic commiseration ending with forced resolve - sure is a crazy time! Yup sure is! But we’re getting through it. That’s all anyone can do - or domestic banality: I learned a lot about black walnuts from a neighbor whose name now escapes me as he raked the walnuts from his lawn, explaining that he bags them up to give away. Another neighbor explained to me which landscaping features in the sculpted yard and flower beds around his small cream colored ranch house were his idea (the small cedar fence around the beds) and which his wife’s (the new gazebo, he’s skeptical and it’s a pain in the ass anchoring it, but you do what you have to). I’ve come to love the glimpses of the day to day and the very minor household repairs. I look for excuses to talk about the faucet I fixed and the one I still have to fix, the new shut offs I bought, the old one that doesn’t work anymore. I’m excited to mention the toilet flapper I just replaced. These small projects are a headache but they’re merely a headache. They’re a loss of scant free time but also a way to declare our capacity to roll along and maintain.

I can remember being in my early twenties and disdaining small talk. Have a real conversation or don’t bother, I thought. I’ve changed my mind on this. I have never had so much appreciation for conversation that’s just about being in the presence of other people, regardless of content: you are here, I am too, and I wish you well, see you next time. It snowed this weekend and dropped below freezing, so the next time might not be for six months.

My wife read a book about anxiety once, a memoir, and told me snippets over meals. The author described something about chickens’ social response to disturbances in their environment, claiming that two chickens generally calm down faster when there’s a minor issue that’s not a predator, while chickens alone remain agitated longer after surprises. That’s because they read each other’s level of response and slowly climb down together. The second chicken serves as a kind of indicator as to how much fight or flight response is necessary. Talking about these home repair projects and the minor bumbling of “hey, sorry, remind me your name again?” dissipates, temporarily, the slowly welling panic. After all, if any of us was dying or being evicted we wouldn’t be making this exact kind of small talk, right?

With the coming winter I worry I will be without a second chicken. And without any significant physical movement. Of course I worry as well about the predictions of a further spike. The numbers of the dead flip a breaker in my mind, cutting off thought, and the numbers will climb. It’s too much to take in. There’s that, and there’s also the election chatter, and there’s the work irritation and worry and emotional blackmail - so much in my inbox! Will there be layoffs? I guess I should be grateful I’m still employed and working from home.

Amid all of that my creative and intellectual energies feel tapped out. Flabbier by the day, like my swelling meatsuit, this slowly rotting daily aching fleshprison. I am simultaneously hungry for intellectual and creative community and unable to work up a mental and artistic appetite. At this point so much of what I used to think of as real conversation feels like a game not worth playing, arguing about current events with each other, or in heated agreement against someone who isn’t there, as if powerless people coming to agreement eventuates into some change in the world, or exchanging notes on aspirations I struggle to believe I can spend time on, let alone fulfill, and which then sour, irritate.

Things that feel like play are going a little better - a little more music and drawing, for instance. I suspect there is something about play and flow states and this current condition. I both crave that state more and have a hard time finding and remaining in the pocket. With writing, I struggle to get into and stay in the zone. That feels related to how my perception of time feels off. I wrote some notes on my fear of the winter. That was eleven days ago. It feel like both a month ago and yesterday. I try to make myself grind out sentences, try not to notice that doing so has become something that I try to make myself do. I crave more routine and automaticity: typing words because that’s what I do, moving around and working out because it is simply the time to do so. Some of what used to be automatic now seem to require a decision. I think that’s part of what’s so good about flow states, it doesn’t feel like it takes any decision or will power. It’s like coasting downhill.

It feels good to type this out. My dread of the cold and the increased darkness (daylight savings time my hairy and expanding ass! Who gets up early enough to save light? Only degenerates, surely!) decreases as I type this. (That parenthetical remark felt good, feels nice to swear, to exclaim, to recreationally judge while implicitly self-deprecating, and getting meta a moment, a satisfying chaser.) I’ve had harder times personally, been broker, more scared, more alone, less sense that the bad will eventually go away. I’m just tired, and I have less free time now, less room to focus on what I think of as higher-yet-smaller pursuits like doodling, fiddling around with words and noises. That’s it, I think - one difference from now and past hard times is less time and energy to play. That’s why I like swearing in parentheses, that’s a device for stepping out of my own expectations and just goofing around a bit, even if my riffs may be a bit stock. I’ll have to think more about that.

I didn’t intend to talk myself into a better mood. I’d hoped to write something sad about the winter, something depressing about how my house feels too small and crowded yet also too big and empty, about how I can’t listen to Joy Division anymore, can’t bear to hear someone sing about isolation (will there be singing, in the dark times? Yes, about the dark times, and I will turn it off, desperate for literally anything else), but I’ve ended up failing at that and, despite myself, concluding feeling a bit lighter. Metaphorically I mean - the stress eating and the lack of movement have accelerated my age- and genetic-defect-induced dadbodification, but fuck it, I’m not trying to get into the gene pool again anyway, and it means I can just wear the same thing from day to day if I want to - no point in putting a spoiler on the back of a station wagon anyway, amiright? I’m still afraid of the winter but for the moment less loudly. I cluck to myself “the other side’s not so bad, it comes to us all eventually, really it’s just like going to sleep.” I am my own second chicken. I’m tempted to make a masturbation joke here but I worry that might spoil the ending. Bawk bawk.