By now, it’s Friday, I’m asymptomatic except for the cough that wakes me every morning between 2:45 and 3:00. It’s dry, still rasping, the kind of cough that begs your throat and lungs to come up with something to spit out, but gets no reply except more ugly, scraping sounds. I take 20 mg of dextromethorphan, wait five minutes, and go back to sleep. When I wake up, breathing is easy, oxygen level is 97, temperature is 97.8, the voice is very close to normal (on Tuesday I could make Tom Waits sound like Tony Bennett). Will test for C-19 this afternoon, after 7 doses of paxlovid.
There are Covid-related symptoms to report, however. These are functions of self-imposed quarantine. Isolation feels like confinement, which breeds introspection, which leads to plans for a prison break from the rusted grey corridors of your own mind. You want out, but you got no place to go. So you brood, you start thinking about nothing, or rather nothingness. about things that add up to less than zero.
I haven’t taken a shower in five days, a new record for me. Once a day has been the habit since 6th grade, when close proximity to girls became the animating principle of my life—you can’t smell bad if you want what they can give you, although, come to think of it, I had a fraternity brother nicknamed “Big Stinky” because you could smell him from five feet away, and the sorority girls just adored him. Pheromones and all that.
If you’re not in such proximity, and don’t expect to be, why take a shower? You won’t be seen or smelled, you’re invisible now, embodied only as an occasional voice on the phone. I pick up on calls clearly labeled as “Spam Risk” because I want to talk to somebody, anybody, even a drone selling medical insurance I don’t need. I hang up only if it’s a robocall. I also ask the delivery men how they’re doing as they run for the elevator.
It’s like being unemployed. You don’t have to leave the apartment to go to the job, so if you get up and get dressed—an open question—you still look like you just rolled out of bed. All day. And then you go back to bed.
Sure, you see other people, but only “remotely,” because they’re not actually there with you. (My windows to the outside face north from the back of the building, so the only human beings I see daily are construction workers on a 16-story site two blocks away.) I “go to” an AA meeting every morning at 7:30, for example, which is convened via Zoom-like software. But this ain’t water cooler chat that verifies your insertion into the normal, boring flow of everyday life, it’s serious business—these people are trying to salvage the possibility of normal, boring, everyday life.
As it happens, alcoholics are accustomed to isolation, confinement, self-quarantine—we’re not “social drinkers,” we drink alone because we crave blackout, oblivion, nothingness—so an AA meeting is the right place to discuss the mechanics of retraction, the tools we use to abstain from the world, and to discover the devices that will let us re-enter it. How can sober introspection turn us outward?
I convened the meeting yesterday morning because one of the regulars asked me to fill in for him. It's a meeting that asks the lead to outline a topic instead of just opening the floor after the ritual incantations (the preamble, the meeting's protocols, etc.). So I proposed estrangement from your self and your "loved ones"--your family, your friends--under and after the spell of alcohol. I was thinking of my straitened life as a recovering alcoholic, for sure, but I was also asking for help in making my prison break from confinement by Covid.
I opened the meeting along these lines:
For me the mystery of alcohol is that what you want (and get) from alcohol is the same thing you want (and get) from abstinence unto sobriety via AA--you "get outside yourself," you "become somebody else," you discover a "new and different you."
You erase the ego that was, either by unleashing that old id under the influence, letting alcohol legalize his mutiny against all rules and boundaries, or by renouncing the ego's narcissistic extremities, using abstinence to discipline your single-minded, self-centered agenda. Either way, you relinquish what was once your will, you ask a “higher power” (not necessarily God) to guide you, and you die to your old self. Either way, you become a specimen, an object of inquiry, as you split off from your self.
How to manage this process? How to treat it as an opportunity, rather than a wound to be healed, closed up, forgotten? As a normal part of human being?
Then I introduced my estrangement from my own kids—they won’t speak to me 13 years after I divorced their mother—by reminding the group of its consensus last time we discussed familial issues: "let 'em go," “they have their own higher powers," "what makes you think you caused this, maybe you're not the center of the universe." I was stunned by this attitude, I said, and asked the meeting not to reconsider but to elaborate on its unanimous verdict. Same result, same happy abnegation all around, whatever the relation, to children, parents, brothers, sisters--”it's not you, so let it go.”
How to manage that? For me it's harder than it seems for the comrades in the room, even though I've been trying to get used to the estrangement as a permanent feature of my life. I don't know why. Maybe because I can't attribute "higher powers" to my kids--maybe I haven't granted them their will, their power of choice?
No good answer to that question, either. Still, I don’t feel quite as locked up with my self as I did yesterday. I think I’ll take a shower, right now.
As one who is estranged from my own immediate family, the meeting's narrative is helpful. thanks.
Thanks, Jim, for sharing. Gratitude, Prayer (letting go and letting God), and doing the next “right” thing (pragmatic wisdom) are getting me through these days. Regarding adult children (Al-Anon 201) the goal is detachment with love. And that’s hard, very hard.