Best of 2020

Introduction

I've been delaying this for some time. The primary reason being that there have been myriad summations of this year, so many individual reflections that struck me as somewhat dull and I didn't really want to contribute with more platitudes. Thinking about all these social media posts of the dreaded year of our lord 2020, there were so many memes, so many ironic sentiments, so many dramatic diatribes that sounded more like petty complaint than honest strife. What can I provide in a way of an observation that can sum up this year? Drinking a beer in the shower this morning, a word kept being repeated over and over in my head.

Suffocation.

Covid-19 is a disease that disrupts the respiratory system caused by a virus that weaponizes the act of breathing. When caught, the air around you becomes poison to everyone else. Generating this poison may seem like a villainous act, and there were so many examples from the past year where an ill person was blamed for the fallout of simply breathing. One could say that this now walking weapon should stay at home and wait it out, or die, whichever comes first. But, many are forgetting the rhetoric of the nation, rhetoric so obsessed with personal freedoms that sometimes being given honest advice is taken as the most egregious offense. 

A society who thinks itself a rabble rousing group of revolutionaries is the perfect delivery machine for a transmittable respiratory illness. The soapboxes on which these revolutionaries stand have been transformed from a platform of idea proliferation to death distribution. So the loud Americans among us are given a profound conflict. They must stop talking, they must stop breathing, they must stay at home in the stink of cigarettes and dried beer, the musty stench of unwashed sweatpants and dog dander.

Walking around downtown, wearing my cloth mask of course, I couldn't help but think every time I smelled the expelled smoke of a cigarette, my life was now at risk. This smell which indicated the relaxing of nerves, the nostalgic moments in the back alleys of dive bars and music venues where tobacco gave the hard won and expensive drunken stupor temporary clarity, was now a warning signal that I'm now breathing in the content of someone else's diseased lungs.

There were countless moments this year I felt like I was suffocating. When someone gets a little too close, when my anxiety rises a little too much, when the nightly curfew gets more and more strict. In a way, this has forced me to rethink my self-destructive nature and subsequent behaviors. When getting wasted at a bar is illegal, I have to get wasted at home, and for some reason this activity is so much less rewarding. No one is around to overhear my overthought musings, my blowhard explanations of why heavy metal is the best music and if people were paying attention to the sound of warning sirens in distorted guitar leads the world would be a better place.

So without the pleasure of my close-talking charisma, interpret these posts as me taking a breath after a long hiatus from doing so. It's not the real thing in a dimly lit bar after a few beers, but it's the best I can do in this year 2020.