End Times Margarita 

Stay at home, inside, spinning your wheels. Illustration by Paul Blow

Well, it’s been forty days since I last gathered with friends for a public event. One where we sat together, drank, listened and spoke to each other within a two meter radius and hugged each other good-bye. Forty days in the wilderness. Forty days confined in solitary. Forty. Four-tee. For tea. Language in an empty house sounds strange. It’s strange how long ago forty days feel. Not like a month or so, but almost entirely out of memory. Days pass like weeks. It’s the strangest aspect of this time. Time itself. I usually know the day of the week but have no idea of the day of the month. It’s messing with my perception of time. It’s a forced perspective of time, like a crazy kitchen but with minutes and hours.
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Is It Safe? 

Image from the Todd Haynes’ film, Safe, which pretty much looks like someone practicing safe social distancing.

Christian Szell: Is it safe?... Is it safe?

Babe: You're talking to me?

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: Is what safe?

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: I don't know what you mean. I can't tell you something's safe or not, unless I know specifically what you're talking about.

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: Tell me what the "it" refers to.

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.

Christian Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: No. It's not safe, it's... very dangerous, be careful.

This is a scene from the 1976 thriller, Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier and Roy Scheider but it could just as well be a scene between the public and the public health authorities during a COVID-19 press conference. In truth, we only know what we know. What we know is the only way to beat a virus is to avoid other people who may or may not have or even know they have the virus. The only way to do that is to stay home and avoid other people. To me and those of my ilk, this is not really a problem. As explained often, I’m almost neither here nor there about seeing other people, even ones I really like. I have been accused of being incapable of making an “emotional connection”. I’m not sure about that but I do know that I do not have the capacity to love any one person enough to share a tandem bicycle, or even a two-person kayak. Basically, I’m like a low maintenance house plant, I’m here when you need me, but it’s alright to forget to water me for a week. To some, being separated from others is like sucking all the joy and sunshine out of the world.
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Seen in March 

Parasite. Image via The Movie Db

What has been roughly 30 days of isolation already feels like one hundred years of solitude and this list of what I watched in March is the proof.

Parasite

A poor unemployed family living in a cramped apartment find a way to exploit nepotism in their favour by finding work with an affluent family. What first appears an obvious case of “entitled haves” versus “ingenious have-nots” becomes more complicated when one night a harrowing discovery throws the family’s schemes and perceptions in disarray. That’s pretty much all I can say without ruining the whole thing but just know that this film deserves its many accolades as does the director Bong Joon-ho whose previous films include Mother, The Host and Snow Piercer.
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