In isolation, it’s tempting to think you have it all figured out. That’s right, you’ve got the answers, the philosophy, the explanations, and even the tidy rationalizations to sweep away points of confusion. It’s all quite comfortable. Knowledge of confirmation bias provides nonexistent inoculation against this pathology.

You never have to be isolated, of course – there’s infinite information out there just begging for consumption. But the tricky stuff is not easily changed through dissenting voices and long hours in the library, because the tricky stuff is not a matter of facts per se. Rather, the tricky stuff is another way of saying “life philosophy” which is another way of saying the stuff you really, really want to get right but to which objective answers are fleeting.

And so, you sort through aphorisms and religions (and a whole lot in between) searching for what feels right. Toss in your experiences and the hard-won lessons of youth, and the tricky stuff may not feel that tricky anymore. It’s at this juncture where people trend toward being stuck in their ways, an isolation where new information is easily dismissed.

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Everybody’s got boring lives so they just sit around and talk about someone else’s.

she understood the presidential premium on flexibility.

Obama’s attitude could be seen a cavalier – or deeply cynical. But is also reflected an instinctive disdain for the conventional rules of politics. To Obama, the ritual parsing of these kind of statements was a tedious preoccupation of the media, an obsession few Americans shared.

No one ever thinks they don’t have the experience to do this. No one thinks that way. He wouldn’t have gotten tot his point and then said, “Oh, I don’t have the experience.” You don’t think about your weaknesses. You think about your strengths.

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Gratitude is easy. In fact, it’s so easy, one wonders how a billion-dollar self-help industry can ruthlessly support itself by continually selling “secrets” to gratitude – from journals to meditation. Here, I’ll give the ultimate “secret” away for free: if you covet gratitude, enter a state of deprivation. That’s it, that’s all. Want to appreciate tiresome home-cooked meals? Fast for a few days. Want to adore the jogs your therapist firmly suggested? Break your leg and suffer through immobility for 6-8 weeks. And on and on. The examples are endless. The truth is undeniable. For those last remaining skeptics, the ones tempted to spend $19.95 on that new book Kendall Jenner blurbed with, “I must have bought 15 of these books and gave them out to people!!! I believe this book might have saved my life,” just stick ‘em in quarantine and they’ll swiftly fall in line.

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I didn’t turn the light on. I should have. Or rather, the programming built into any middle-class child like myself reads =if (and(>=dusk, walk into room), “lights on”). But I’m not some robot. No siree. Like anyone, there is malleability within me deeply connected to my openness to change. Easier said than done since programming is très comfortable and forking, even with promises of potential upside, requires considerable kwH.

Fortunately, less individual energy is required in an isolated system if someone else enters and shares the burden, thereby making isolation not the dreaded variety, just the thermodynamic one. In the case of =if (and(>=dusk, walk into room), “lights on”), you made it oh so easy for code rewriting. For you noticed things I’d never before considered. Texture, angle, color, and the fundamental, vital question: Why are you turning on the light right now? New code crafted itself as a result. Naturally, whenever I fork to post-xxxxxxxxx =if (and(>=dusk, walk into room, light amplitude is predicted to be moderate, visibility is seriously compromised in only sunlight, the beam angles are optimal), “minimal number of lights on”, “no lights on”), I think of you.

Much is lost without human contact. While I haven’t really felt this effect (Will I? Could I go years without touch? Decades? Ha), I have come to think extensively about something that’s diminished in quarantine: the ability to be understood. “Being understood” is usually presented in reference to “serious” personal truths. I now wonder if this focus misses something basic and vital.

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There’s some girl in pants costing no less than $125.95 standing at the x, posing for a few selfies pre-run. Once she sees me humming, the faux smile fades, the camera slides into a nifty side pocket, and she begins running in earnest. For she thinks she knows what’s coming. She thinks I’m going B-A-B, a popular route, no doubt, and she, like any person raised in this brutal dog-eat-dog world, wants to win. Still, while getting passed with her considerable head start would be unpleasant, it’s salvageable under some invented story about my genetically advantaged lung capacity. If that unfortunate outcome did indeed occur, she’d still probably receive credit from her friends for trying so hard on a Saturday when they themselves were busy indulging in “mindless” activities. What this poor victim didn’t know, however, was that I was going B-A-C-B, and losing the race to B given my impossible handicap would not be at all o.k.

Worse still, because she decided to never turn around, whereby she could have quickly understood I wasn’t going B-A-B and appreciated the humiliation risk in play, she assumed the lack of huffing and/or footsteps behind her meant the race, with 100 meters to go, was hers. Her mind thus drifted to which witty line or two to place underneath those pre-run selfies she now simply could not wait to post. The BE IN THE MOMENT gospel misses the beauty of daydreams like this. The moment was filled with one final climb, and she’d rather just skip ahead, in her mind, to what was to follow. No sensible person could blame her. Unfortunately, she happened to be dealing with a true menace, a menace who cares not about sensibilities or loyal IG followers.

The last anyone saw her, she was headed to xxxxxxxxx. I sure do hope they aren’t out of ventilators.

I reached a place today where I’d like to reside for a lifetime. Just after the initial .35mi climb, there’s relief when you turn onto xxxxxxxxx. The grade goes negative, and without any effort at all, your legs carry you forward. Pre-run I decided I needed to do more. I needed to run into the downhill instead of coasting. That’s where I found the place.

The places that actually matter are never suburbs v. cities or country A v. country B. True, those distinctions make some difference, but only because you let them, only because superficial details seem to matter when one is distanced from what’s going on mentally. That distance isn’t such a bad thing – it certainly allows one to exist in the modern world instead of a cave in India. Furthermore, better controlling the mind is incredibly challenging. As much as I buy the truth of “mindfulness” and that paying attention is all that’s necessary to eliminate boredom and illuminate the world, it doesn’t mean I actually perform these skills.

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I relay this to you not to boast, but to remind you the strength of my weakness. The Friday we spoke was a “running day” for me. Unfortunately, a few hours after our conversation, it began raining so hard I couldn’t accurately decipher objects a few feet outside my windows. Worse still, my trusty iPhone SE, with the dope headphone jack, informed me it was 51 degrees, which happens to be the coldest temperature since I arrived in Ted Cruz’s great state a month ago.

No, I didn’t see this as any sort of “challenge.” I saw this as an excuse to push the run to Saturday, maybe even Sunday if the conditions remained unfavorable. I’m telling you, my weakness is so good at negotiating it could convince Kim Jong-un to unilaterally disarm. Just check some of these persuasive arguments:

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I feel like it’s easier to find someone who will admit to being a real racist than it is to find someone who will admit to being an extrovert. The charmer at the party? Oh no, this stuff exhausts me. The energetic go-getter simultaneously climbing social and professional ladders? You wouldn’t believe how introverted I am. The person who of his own free will chooses to interview strangers for a living? Not me.  

Fortunately, this once-in-a-thousand-years statistical anomaly of introversion overload offers a massive upside in a Covid-ravaged world. Beaten, broken, and drained from all that pesky interaction with humans, the introverts can finally recharge in solitude. Praise be to Christ our Lord!

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Someone can truly believe it, but not me, not us. And by someone, I mean someone who is not alive, because anyone still breathing is programmed to think The Terrible can’t really happen, especially this iteration of human which has seen little but peace and growth. That “little” offers still further proof against panic: we have been through tough times before and always emerged victorious.

Past results don’t predict future outcomes and all other foreboding clichés have thus lost resonance. We can understand them on an academic level – multiply this probability by that one – but not at a level where we truly grapple with the consequences of numbers that declare a nonzero chance that life forever changes in awful ways. The numbers are, actually, quite beside the point since there aren’t numbers for that which has never happened before.

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xxxxxxxxx may well have been Satan. Actually, probably worse.

“Um. Hey. Would it be cool if my friend xxxxxxxxx lived with us too?”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

At least with Satan I could be assured a tan and the most interesting stories ever.¹ This oddly-named person offered no such guarantees. But sure, cool, whatever, it doesn’t matter, I like people, right? The more the merrier, right?

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