All my previous posts and drafts have had to do with places in New England and how to travel. The appearance of Covid19, and the death of my parents, put everything into a new perspective. I haven't gone anywhere on vacation, or really even wanted to write anything, until last weekend, when I realized I had only been addressing physical travel. Without meaning to sound incredibly corny or trite, there are still virtual travel and mental travel possibilities.
This epiphany came as a denouement from my pennypinching. I pay a monthly fee for unlimited online reading and was irked with what I perceived as not getting my money's worth. Qualitatively perhaps, but it was slow going and my quantitative perception was that I was overpaying. The lightening bolt was the unlimited magazine access also available to me. If I read only two magazines per month (which I wouldn't have purchased in any case!!) suddenly it's like I'm saving money and achieving a "deafening bang for my buck." Yeah, you have to try living in my universe.
My surprise was the amount of information and insights I absorbed causing me to think critically, realizing the trends I had been spotting were already published, which was all right as I had come to these independently and was only just now starting to use my atrophied brain. 2020 has been difficult at best for almost everyone worldwide. I can't help but wonder how many of then changes we have experienced, the obstacles we have had to overcome, will become imbedded in our psyches, in our personalities, changing us forever? Adjustment disorder - did you know there is a name for it?
Finally, I remembered "The Writer's Journey" by Christopher Vogler, used in my college writing classes to great success in my case as I superimposed an abstract pattern faintly reminiscent of Ulysses in my papers, manifesting a physical journey or metaphysical wandering in assignments to arrive at an end, a conclusion, the denouement of my required papers. Anybody who has been in lockdown 2020 either longs for the previous status quo or something anything not resembling the isolation alienation loneliness in the metamorphosis of 2020. We are looking for a way back, or the way forward to a resolution. We are all on a journey. I will tell you about mine - taking a huge cut in pay to change my daily existence.
Picture #1 is from CNN on August 8, 2020 - notice the death toll from picture #2 which was two hours later. My last remark - NPR awakes me daily at 5am - yesterday iit was broadcast that one in every 1,000 African Americans in the United States had died from Covid19. This is NOT "what it is." This is wrong.
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