Beware the Ides of October:

How the Pandemic Illuminates Our Dark Corners

I recently went down a Wiki-hole and came across the term apophenia, which is the tendency to make too much of random connections. Having been guilty of seeing synchronicity whenever I look at a clock (1:11, 11:11, 3:33, just me?) and attributing ‘signs’ to squashed animals on the road (don’t ask), I worried at one point that my meaning-making might be pathological. It reminded me of sitting in 12-Step meetings years ago hearing people rave about how God found them a parking space. Yes, Eunice, that’s exactly how that works.   

It seems logical to attribute a sense of dread to this pandemic, which stretches on and on, worse in some countries than others, but still a factor, whether the restrictions are travel-related, severe lockdowns, masks, or you know, death. I’m seeing the pandemic put extraordinary stress on relationships and even friendships, in the sense that we know more about folks than we would have, had there not been a pandemic. In many cases, it feels like we now know too much.

How each member of a couple handles the whole plague thing can become a whole skeleton of contention. One person may be more at risk and demand greater caution or just have a harder time with impending doom, while the other might weigh the risks and opt in. For me, seeing a small group of unmasked family members a few weeks back gave me whole-body euphoria, just to be around other people, like IRL. Believe me when I tell you, before Covid, I wasn’t necessarily the looking-forward-to-a-family-gathering type.

That same week, I connected with a hot lady and thought we might be friends for a minute… until we had a vaccination talk and well, dealbreaker. I would have loved to get to know her, tricky as it can be to make new friends in middle age, but it was a difference I couldn’t ignore. A difference it might have taken me ten years to find out in olden times, so I guess thank you? For saving me time?

The way I think of the pandemic now is the same way I think about sex after you have kids, as a kind of accelerant. Let me explain…

In Quantum Theory, you can anticipate the behavior of certain particles—throw them in a reactor and their trajectory will be measurable and somewhat predictable. However, at higher frequencies, when scientists scatter those same particles and add extreme cold or heat, it forces them to collide and behave completely differently[i]. New workable theories have to be developed to manage this state-change.

Similarly, if you heat up or cool down your previously sustainable sex life with tiredness, stress, and other variables brought on by having kids, you don’t get fun things like String Theory, you get unfun things like divorce.

The truth is that the issues we experience after procreating were often there to begin with—sometimes just on a Quantum level—they were just accelerated, inflamed, and/or brought into physical being by those pesky spawn. Consider that it’s not little Jason in the next room that’s making you uncomfy with oral sex, but maybe you didn’t like it to begin with and tiredness just made you sick of pretending. Either way, it’s not poor little Jason’s fault. 

And that’s how I perceive the myriad factors faced by us vulnerable lumps of carbon through this interminable pandemic. Kids allow us to see our own and our partner’s flaws and inconsistencies in dazzling relief, just as the pandemic has revealed fault lines that might otherwise have lay untouched (like homeschooling). And just as the stakes are heightened by parental love, the Covid triple threat of sickness, isolation, and financial fear have felt real enough to merit a personal reckoning.

You might feel like the pandemic changed you—for better or worse—but my contention is that the seed energy for that change was inside you all along, Dorothy. The pandemic, like having children, dramatically underscores what’s already there but fast-tracked. Just like my potential friend was a bad match in the long run and you might eventually have started baking your own focaccia even if you hadn’t been home for 533 days straight.

My point is, if you feel unlucky in March, you’ll feel unlucky in October, and even more so if that October happens to be during a global pandemic, or in the event you see not one, but three whole possums squashed on the roadside on the way home. (Not good.)

I’ve come to believe our stress, our anger, and our paranoia are all free-flowing entities that, without careful redirection, can attach themselves to any circumstances in our lives.  So, if you weren’t already fighting about little Jason, you could fight about Covid or sex or “this focaccia is dry.”

Even in the mystical beliefs of Kabbalah, it says there is no such thing as “all of a sudden,” there are only signs along the way that you missed… But if you’ll excuse me this piece is now 888 words, so I must sign off…

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[i] “The fact that the plasma behaved like a liquid surprised scientists, who had expected it to take the form of a gas.” Research by Brookhaven National Laboratory, where physicists had been studying head-on collisions of gold nuclei at RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/02/16/a-first-string-theory-predicts-an-experimental-result