Matthew Gallaway

Socks and Sweaters (Week 6)

In the sixth week of the pandemic, the days seemed to fall over like a row of dominos. The small variations in the pattern of my days had no bearing on the speed at which one gave way to the next. When I held my weekly standing meetings with my colleagues at work, it seemed impossible that a week had already gone by. People seemed less inclined to ask about 'how things were going' and more eager to 'jump right in' to the business at hand. It was comforting to know that, in some ways, we were all floating through these rapids of time on the same raft.  

It occurred to me that to go through this period of isolation was a valuable escape from so much of the mindless commuting and traveling that, until six weeks ago, had defined so much of my life. I remembered how much I used to think about where I would have to be at a certain hour or day, even if it was many months in the future. How would I get downtown? Or to Brooklyn. Would the trains be running? What time did I need to leave for the airport? When should I buy my ticket? Or book the hotel? What would my life look like for the three days I had to spend in Denver or Washington, DC, or Seattle, and what would it look like when I returned? So much of our old lives, I realized, had been devoted to how we move our bodies from one place to another, with very little thought devoted to whether we actually needed to be moving to accomplish whatever it was we needed to accomplish. But now, and for the foreseeable future, all of these demands had vanished. I had no doubt that we would all be better -- from mental and environmental perspectives -- if some of these demands never returned. 

The news and the sirens reminded me that this opportunity to reflect on the state of life was the result of a disease that continued to take many lives and whose repercussions for society -- the short and long term -- were to some important degree unimaginable and, in many ways, terrifying. I sometimes felt guilty about having a job, a house, a garden, three cats, a relationship partner, and an antisocial disposition that had been carefully (if at times unconsciously) honed over several decades since coming out, all of which made me a good candidate for isolation. As I allowed my mind to drift between states of focus and distraction, I felt thankful to have this time, knowing that, in the future -- under any number of scenarios both good or bad or both -- it might be much harder to find.   

I tried to be productive/creative without forcing myself to be productive/creative, which meant more late-night recording sessions on my phone after watching episodes of Terrace House. [Link at the bottom of the post if the video doesn't embed.]

After some false starts, I finally started learning some synths, which I found very satisfying on account of my shoegaze tendencies. Next up are drum loops and samples, which are going to change EVERYTHING :)

In the sixth week of quarantine, I wore cute socks that matched my sweater and pants. 

It occurred to me that I was changing in ways I couldn't have predicted and was only beginning to detect. Looking outside, I felt the stirrings of sadness and hope that come from one season giving way to another. 

DEATH CULTURE @ SEA // Isolation Songs 

Bride (Week 6) 

April Come She Will (Week 4)

Hunting Grounds (Week 3)

Long Way To Fall (Week 2) 

An Outsider in My Own Life (Week Five)

In the fifth week of the lockdown, I began to assess my routine and found it to have tyrannical tendencies. In loose terms, it worked pretty well: each day, I woke up, exercised, ate breakfast, and worked (with breaks for lunch and short bouts of relaxation or existential despair). After work, I ate dinner, watched television, read, and played guitar before going to sleep. None of these activities were tied to a particular time of day: it didn't matter if I started work at 9:00 or 9:30 or 10:00. As long as I finished the work, I could be flexible. There was enough time to do chores and play with the cats. Nevertheless, I felt oddly overwhelmed, which made no sense given that I wasn't going anywhere. I tried to remember my life in early March and for the approximately twenty years leading up to that point, during which period I regularly took the subway downtown two to five times a week to my office. I remembered when my current job had given me the option to commute fewer days a week, and how nice it had felt to cut back on the commute -- this during the 'Summer of Hell' era of the MTA -- and yet here I was, with the commute now entirely eliminated, feeling burdened by responsibilities I had apparently handled in far less time as recently as just a few weeks ago.  

The problem, I realized after mulling it over, was that despite emphasizing (to myself) the flexibility of my schedule, my adherence to its individual elements verged on obsession. Work was obviously a given, not a place to cut corners, but it didn't require an inordinate amount of time, or any more than usual. It was the other, more optional things that proved difficult to juggle: for example, if I spent an extra hour reading one day, I would contemplate the next day with dread as I tried to envision reading, which I enjoyed doing and struck me as something I should 'work in to my schedule,' and also playing guitar, which I found a very good way to 'get out of my head,' and also watching television (ditto, except most shows were becoming background noise for my Twitter scrolling, which is never quite relaxing). Lurking behind this dread of fitting everything in was a sense of disbelief that thousands of people were getting sick and dying, thousands more were taking care them, along with some guilt for having a relatively stable job that allowed me to work from home. It seemed important -- as a way to counter or perhaps regulate the chaos of the outside world -- not only to strictly adhere to my own regimen, but also to increase its difficulty, to get through the steps of my day as if I were following an exercise program. But then I understood that I wasn't training for anything: this was my life and I was in it.   

I resolved to spend some more time in the garden, where -- as happened each spring -- the new leaves of dogwood reminded me of glowing butterflies. It was one of my favorite parts of spring and it was still here. And this year it was even better than last: the tree had grown, there were more flowers. 

The camellia continued to bloom and, unlike every other year, I had the chance to see its flowers at every hour of the day, to notice how the sun -- as it moved across the sky and filtered down through the neighboring apartment buildings -- changed the petals from translucent white to deep pink, how the flowers looked most ethereal in the light reflected off the windows next door. 

The book I've been reading, probably not coincidentally, is How To Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell. It's less about how to do nothing -- if 'nothing' is understood to say, sit in a room in the dark -- than to actively and permanently disengage from the commercial and mostly online world that increasingly demands our time and attention. Odell positions this choice in a long line of thinkers and artists going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, which makes for very interesting reading. Her message, as I understand it, seems to be that the best option is not to completely abandon society -- or the internet -- but to position yourself as a skeptic or an outsider to the more repulsive parts while at the same time becoming more attuned to the interesting and uncommercial world around us, whether in the form of nature or sound or art or anything else whose impact on us can't be measured in units and capital.

As someone who over the course of my life has moved through many communities without ever quite feeling embraced by or at home in any of them, I found the book reassuring. Maybe part of living was learning how to resist it, to fight against the easier choice, to step away from the routine, no matter how logical it seemed.  

The discomfort of life, it seemed, was the source of some of its most beautiful things. 

April Come She Will (Week Four)

In the fourth week of isolation, the hours and days flew by with a strange, frantic quality that seemed at odds with the fact that we didn't go anywhere. Days and nights seemed far less demarcated than in the past; periods of time did not begin or end so much as seep into each other. I found myself going to bed later and later, but still waking up before dawn, restless with questions that no amount of news could seem to answer. Sometimes I convinced myself that the sirens were abating, but then they would start up again. I had no idea what was really happening anywhere, much less what I could expect to happen in three weeks or three months.  

For exercise, I began to trot in place in the garden and found that I could almost attain the high of a regular long run. As with so much during these times, it was close enough, a compromise. I had already resolved not to run outside because of the health risk -- small but significant -- but I also felt bad about all of the negative press runners were getting for swerving through pedestrians on crowded sidewalks. I understood why pedestrians were frustrated, but I also wished that they would widen the scope of their anger to include cars, which are granted the vast majority of public space in the city. I wanted to explain that most runners in my experience were good people and describe how it had changed my life for the better by providing a mental space where I could retreat from everything else in the world. (Especially the straight world.) I wanted to tell them about my experience with the Boston Athletic Association -- how organized and efficient they were when I ran the Boston Marathon during a nor'easter two years ago -- and my wish that they were managing the country through this crisis instead of our current leaders.  

Mostly, however, I just wanted to avoid Twitter; but it was first place to get news, so it was hard to put down. 

It was surreal to scroll through Twitter while sitting in the garden, which this week was all of a sudden filled with a thousand small, pink clouds. 

Late at night, I played guitar and recorded myself on my phone. I became obsessed with learning "April Come She Will," one of my favorite songs by Simon and Garfunkel (or anyone). For no particular reason, it seemed important to master it, despite the certainty that I will never play guitar as well as Paul Simon, much less sing with the beauty of Art Garfunkel. Meaning it's not really something that can be mastered, or at least not by me. (Which didn't stop me from trying.) Given the simplicity of the song structure, it's surprisingly intricate, filled with odd picking patterns and subtle technical flourishes. Getting a passable recording required endless takes, which in itself -- the repetition, the countless small but unique failures -- was kind of soothing. It was like playing a video game. You start, you go as far as can, dodging quicksand or bullets or whatever else until you succumb, and then you press a button and start again.

Which in a way is how life in isolation feels. The days are identical, the challenges expected, the failures small and unpredictable. Each day we expire, and the next we are reborn. 

Here are the links to the videos/songs I posted last week (and this week) in case they didn't/don't make it through the various feeds:

DEATH CULTURE @ SEA Isolation Songs

Long Way To Fall

Hunting Grounds

April Come She Will

  

Life in a Box with Dappled Light (Week Three)

In the third week of the quarantine -- and in this assessment, I'm sure I speak for many -- the novelty wore off. Somehow being in a pandemic no longer felt even vaguely exciting, even (or especially) in the political sense. The hope I had been nursing that maybe this catastrophe would be the precipitating event for great changes in our deeply flawed society now seemed preposterous: things -- the lies, the corruptions, the mismanagement, the deaths -- were getting worse. It was sobering to hear the constant peal of sirens and to realize that sick people were getting taken to the hospital and dying. It was more than a chart. There was no good reason -- beyond the good fortune of having a job that allows me to stay home -- that I wasn't in the same position. I could be there soon, just by touching the wrong metal railing or taking in the wrong breath of air. I tried not to think about it too much, but it was an idea that never left the back of my mind. 

Meanwhile, the business of life continued. The days passed in a blur of meetings. There seemed to be so many more now than during the pre-virus era. Or was my perception flawed because social and work meetings now both took place on the same platform? So much of the internet had already become a nightmare, and now we were being forced to spend the majority of our lives online. And where was all the spare time and boredom people had been talking about? I felt oddly pressed for time, given that I had nowhere to go. Routines became cemented into place: it would be hard to say what differentiated last Tuesday from last Friday (or next Friday). This sense of repetition felt necessary, but also heavy and extreme. There were so many articles about how to survive the quarantine (assuming you are not sick): yoga and fitness apps, cooking, games and movies, online cultural events, whatever else; I'm not saying any of this is wrong -- I enjoy the same fitness apps, watch the same television shows, and waste the same hours scrolling through Twitter -- but I'm sometimes overcome by a sense of dislocation that leaves me feeling fraudulent and naive, a member of the Louis XVI's court just before the revolution, except now -- in our post-modern dystopia -- the revolution will never come.    

When I found the time, I retreated to the garden. 

I tried to enjoy the camellias, which for the first time are blooming in three shades (pink, red, and white). 

The red was first. 

Followed this week by the white. I waited for the watery light that filters down for a few minutes each morning through the apartment buildings into the garden. 

And late at night, when I had trouble sleeping, I recorded songs on my phone.  

The hours passed quickly and quietly in a cocoon of sound. I had forgotten how recording can be a kind of drug. 

I had doubts: was now a good time to write songs? Was it pointless and self-indulgent? Or was it a good way to cope, despite the certainty that so many others were coping with much, much worse? I decided that, if it doesn't hurt anyone else and makes me feel a little more alive -- even for a few seconds -- I'm in favor.

Which was comforting when I remembered that it's the same way I felt about so much before the virus, too.