Aong with today's TMW 'toon, Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) wrote:
Hey all,
April 5. It’s my birthday today. Last year I had a party, my apartment crowded with friends, old and new. There were even a couple of legitimate celebrities in attendance! It felt like a triumph, demonstrable evidence that I had lifted myself up after landing in New York broken and bleeding, and created an entirely new, exciting, sophisticated life for myself. The last stragglers left around 5 a.m. It was a good night.
This year of course I’m in quarantine like everyone else -- at least like every other responsible person. I know people who are still making up their own isolation rules and it kind of makes my head explode. All I can say is, the virus doesn’t care about your special exemptions. I urge everyone to read this and take it to heart.
I need to admit to a human failing here, though I ask you not to judge too harshly. My ex was a heavy smoker when I met her, and as a result of that relationship, I have gone through phases of my life as what we might politely call a “social smoker,” and sometimes more. On the day in November 2017 when I learned that nothing in my life was what I thought it was and that the marriage I’d genuinely believed to have an unshakable foundation was, in reality, collapsing — suddenly and brutally and without warning, from my perspective — I started smoking again. There was a comfort to the small routines of addiction as I walked around my suburban neighborhood wondering how I hadn't seen the wrecking ball that just crashed into my life. And then it just became a thing that I did -- in some ways, a physical link to the last shreds of a life that I couldn't quite admit was gone forever. It took me a couple years but I’m extremely happy to say that I was able to shake the habit six months ago, with the help and encouragement of an extremely supportive, then-new girlfriend. With a virus out there that attacks the lungs, this is a very good moment to have that particular bad decision in the past. (Also, kids, don’t smoke. Stupid fucking habit.)
The reason I mention this less-than-flattering fact is to explain why I often found myself sitting on my front stoop at odd hours, in the first year of my unexpected and unwanted new life in New York. I live on a quiet-ish street, as streets in New York City go, and there were moments when I would be out there at midnight or maybe six in the morning — I slept odd hours in those days, when I could even sleep at all — and if you squinted just right and ignored the traffic on the busier north-south avenues, you could imagine that you were the only person alive in the city.
The image stuck in my head, and for awhile I thought I might try to turn it into some sort of story — I’ve always had an underlying desire to try my hand at writing a novel. Actually, I *did* write a novel once, a lame attempt at a private eye story, when I was backpacking through Europe at the age of 29 and had a lot of time on trains and beaches. Never published (and now embarrassingly outdated), though it did win some prize in a contest for aspiring writers — don’t mean to pull a Donald Trump “I was voted Michigan Man of the Year” or whatever, I just don’t remember the specifics, though it seemed very exciting at the time. It was borderline-competent enough that I even had an agent representing me on it for awhile, though it never went anywhere. Call it a Gibson-esque stub, a possible timeline, an alternate career that never materialized.
But I’ve always thought, if I had just had the time, or maybe a little more creative space that wasn’t occupied entirely by this compulsion I have to pour everything I’ve got into the cartoon, if the work of immersing myself in the awfulness of the news didn’t leave me so creatively drained at the end of every week, that I might have written more. I remember how much I enjoyed the fugue state of being lost in the act of story-writing — a much different process than cartoon-writing. And I kept thinking about the image of being alone in the city. I never figured out what the story was exactly, but I imagined the protagonist in a slightly-futuristic version of New York, in which there were automated delis and drone deliveries but no other people, a city still functioning on automation, for reasons that I suppose would have become apparent if I had ever figured them out.
What I was drawn to about that story, of course, was the sense of loneliness and isolation. When I moved to New York, I had a handful of old friends who were generally busy with their families, as I had been just a month or two previously myself. I knew a few other people, and spent a lot of time reaching out to Twitter friends and suggesting with great thirst that we should hang! out! in! real! life! I don’t do that as often anymore — well these days, obviously, I don’t do it at all — but it was a good, if needy, impulse — many of my dearest friends today are people I met during that phase.
But mostly, I just felt alone and isolated in one of the most densely-populated cities on the planet, trying to figure out how to live an entirely different life than the one I had been expecting. My son's visits every other weekend — another current casualty of the virus — kept me grounded, connected to the world. And there were dating apps, of course — thank god for dating apps. They seemed like an unfathomable mystery at first, and then I got the hang of it, and eventually I grew exhausted by the whole process -- think of the World War 2 movie trope of the fresh-faced private who eventually turns into the grizzled veteran with the thousand-yard stare. That’s all probably a story for another day, though.
The thing is, when I was imagining this science fiction story of solitude and isolation in an empty New York City — people, it was a *metaphor*. I didn’t want to literally live in it. I just wanted a vehicle through which to examine the disorientation of my life in that moment. I am currently keeping my time outside to a minimum, but there are certain necessary errands, like going to the grocery store, and there is the need for some bare minimum of exercise and fresh air, so I do get out at least, I don’t know, every couple of days for a little bit. And while Central Park (which I live near) can be harrowingly crowded, the streets around me, depending on the time of day, are some real Omega Man/I Am Legend shit. The broad avenues are nearly empty of traffic — I can jaywalk across Amsterdam and Broadway in the middle of the day, which if you know New York at all, is almost unimaginable. And the majority of people you do see are wearing a face mask of some sort, a constant reminder that there's an unseen menace out there stalking us all. It feels like the end of the world.
And we’re all in the same boat. The last thing I mean to do here is to suggest that my experience of this is in some way unique. If my divorce was the most personal of traumas, this thing we’re going through now is the diametric opposite — a collective national trauma, the aftermath of which we will deal with for years. Maybe the past couple of years prepared me a little bit, though it would be a real stretch to call that a silver lining. I was a *lot* better situated to ride a storm like this out two and a half years ago than I am today. But this is the hand we were dealt. All we can do is try to not to expose ourselves to the virus, try not to expose others if we are asymptomatic carriers — which we should all assume that we are, until widespread testing is available. If it ever is.
Anyway, it’s a strange birthday. A friend of mine got his in under the wire, about a month ago. My girlfriend was in town (it’s a long-distance thing, and currently video-only, but that should be the case for anyone who doesn’t already live with their partner until we flatten the goddamn curve), and we went to his party in a crowded bar in Brooklyn and drank and talked and played pinball and it feels like something from another lifetime now.
I hope you are all well.
If this is a (fair & balanced) belated wish for a happy birthday to this blog's favorite 'toonist, so be it.
[x TMW]
Donald Trump's Guide To Crisis Management ICoronavirus Eduition)
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
Copyright © 2020 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
