The Other Shoe

Every morning, I travel through time. 

I wake up at 3:30, darkness still covering the world outside my window, and do some light stretches to prepare for the journey. Then I boot up my time machine, a 2012 MacBook Air tethered to a mobile hotspot, and greet my friends and colleagues half a world away and nine hours in the future.

Since our sequestration began over a month ago, the time difference between my Oregon home base and Central Europe, where I work with leaders and campaigners in the local climate movement, has felt more like weeks than hours. Measures to contain virus are being lifted in Austria, my hub office, as infection rates have slowed there. Even in hard-hit Italy, people are emerging slowly from self-containment.

Meanwhile, the United States represent a patchwork of localized measures that range from strong and effective to weak and irresponsible. Our institutions are structured in such a way that they provide the most vulnerable with only a couple of bad options. You can return to your workaday job and scrape together enough earnings to keep food on the table and roof above your head, or you can stay at home sequestered from the virus and wait out creeping poverty. 

Take what you want and pay for it.

For my part, lucky to have my time-traveling work, I nevertheless feel a persistent threat hanging over every decision. There’s no more clarity on when the crisis will end than there was a month ago. Everything is different now.

How are you doing? Are you eating well? Have you taken time to breathe and process your thoughts today? Is the sun shining where you are?

What are you dreaming about these days? Anxiety and other negative thought patterns have a way of making a home in dreams. I started keeping a dream journal recently to aid my efforts to make sense of it all. That seems like a bit of a leap, sure, searching for answers in dreams. A tin-house Freud. Anyway, I’m just looking for signposts. 

Speaking of time travel, I recommend Recursion for anyone in need of some accessible sci-fi to distract the mind. I picked it up recently and appreciated the author’s tasteful innovations to the genre.