Evening Pages: January 6th, 2021

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

No funny picture today. Just don't want to go on Reddit and find one.

I thought maybe I'd be writing this out of anger, but I think I'm actually calm now.

So I blew up at my parents...because disagreements related to our current president...and the curfew that started at 6PM today which is when my last meeting of the day ended and when I wanted to go buy groceries and go walking outside after a day indoors...which happened because the Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters blocking the vote by force (successfully, I'm surprised to say)...after 350,000 people have died of the COVID-19 pandemic...of which a friend is currently working in COVID ICU in L.A. county where 350,000 infections occurred and 10,000 people died in December alone, of COVID alone, in LA alone (and where January is supposed to blast through that ceiling), and everything just sucks.

So I yelled and screamed and tired myself out for an hour, and my parents didn't change their views one bit, and then started talking to my friend Jordan based out in SF. So I ranted a bit and managed to catch myself barely, and we talked, and he asked whether I'd like to hear a nice song. So I log onto this app he made, FourHands, and played this song, "Misty", which a jazz standard apparently, and I almost burst into tears of joy. I don't know what it is about music that soothes the soul, but it does. So I bought him 20 coffees. Hopefully it'll be enough caffeine for a demo.

Also took some time in order to reach out to my downstairs neighbor (who's really chill) and offered some eggs and frozen salmon if the curfew turns into a lockdown, and he invited me over for a beer, which I politely declined because I'm coughing still for reasons. Also reaching out to other friends online, which helps some.

I look at my life and parts of it are fucked up. But there's a lot of it I like, and I really enjoy having this support network available to me. I still consider myself to be a lucky guy, and to have what I have and to be what I am. And I think knowing that gives me the strength to carry on.