QUARANTINE DIARIES
As Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote “Hell is other people” and I am in heaven. I cannot tell you how long I have been in government-enforced isolation. Nor can I tell you how much longer it will be. It is not so different from my self-imposed isolation spanning the many years up to now. I am happily sequestered away on a bush block in the northern Waikato writing and studying and working remotely. To me, this moment of enforced downtime is a gift and I am profoundly grateful for it. I don’t have to talk to or listen to anybody, I don’t have to leave the house, and the apparent weirdness of my lifestyle choices can be explained away by the weirdness of the times. I am living my best life. I cook nice meals, walk in the woods, read a lot (currently engrossed in a science fiction novel, a fantasy series from my childhood, a book on herbal medicine, a history of the human species and tomes on thermodynamics and classical mechanics) and am working my way through the Witcher 3 on PlayStation. I have maintained a routine. I wake around 7 am, have coffee, sometimes breakfast and get stuck into the various tasks of my choosing for the day. I sleep around 11 pm although I wake regularly during the night to enjoy the quiet darkness. My main cause of melancholy is the knowledge that this will end and I will be dragged kicking and screaming back into the world, much the same as I reluctantly entered it to begin with. If only life could always be this simple but no, we ruined it with capitalism and now we have to pay for the privilege of our suffering. Can we re-elect COVID for a new term? Yours sincerely, #TeamPandemic
