by Daniel Sherman

In these languid days of early summer, lazy mid-mornings are up and stretching. They are full of energy and striving, but strive for nothing at all, mostly.

They are found in the cracks of broken-bottle sidewalks, green shoots aiming straight for the sun. The force that through the green fuse…. but we can’t be taxed to recall the rest. The weeds will grow anyway, they’re like Gen X kids. Being ignored fertilizes them. Weeds have ambition in spades.

Spring’s early scythe keeps swinging; perhaps it will be set aside for a fall sharpening. Whether through viral mechanics or blunt sociological force, our future with Covid-19 is far more uncontrolled than anyone is happy believing. Maybe we should vent on social media about the masks other people aren’t wearing? That’ll do her. Betcha Covid Karen will cow to the shame because we said something to our friends.

When this all started, the American people were driven past nervous exhaustion. With quarantine comes a mostly-missed chance to step off the gerbil wheel. Many of us went home and installed our own rickety wheels, and vaunted this proud act of self-gerbiling to the world. Nothing stops me! I can use my nose to push the couch around, wearing primary-colored yoga pants and a sport bra! I’m still so hot. The guy with the Adonis-like abs carefully adjusts a reading light to throw shadows over his muscles like he’s Eugene Sandow. And he’s forty.

Others pried open the vats of digital ink and loosed upon us a Shining-like blood gush of needless advice, lest any time goes unspoken for. Read a book! Catch up on classic movies! Have the kids interview grandparents! A young Cannabis Lifestyle Expert with a septum ring writes a listicle on things to do when high. I guess that job title freed up when the former Cannabis Lifestyle Expert decided to go teach at the London School of Economics. The advice: try garden work or baking cookies, as if no one ever knew.

Let no sweep of the clock hands fail to insufflate the hours with a result, even thoughtfully-constructed idyll. At the apogee of the advice orbit, homo economicus is given “forest-bathing.” The simplest pleasure second to orgasm has to be given a name and be A Thing, coming from Japan as it does.

Some grabbed snacks, a pack of Marlboro reds and a handle, pulled the curtains and tried to find out just how far spirits can go. That’s more common than bookshelf building, a fact nobody can prove. Both are ambitious directions.

The times we remember will be none of these. It’s ten am in somebody’s apartment, in Florence or Seoul or Kansas City or Montreal. You’ve dropped out of school or are thinking of going. There’s a girl with tousled hair wearing some man’s, any man’s college shirt. She could be a sister, or your friend’s lover, or your own friend who just became a lover. There’s a vague sense that something should be made of the day but coffee keeps getting poured, cigarettes lit. New avenues of conversation sheave off and curl in the smoke. What do to after the Army? Should I move to Colorado and study art? Point of agreement: life in a trailer is far better than the people driving past it imagine.

A rangy teen with Beethovian hair fishes the recommendation to inject cleaning products out of the zeitgeist, and stages a picture of himself shooting up Windex like heroin. It happened around 10am. His dad is relieved it was Windex and not some off-brand glass cleaner.

The United States of America, one of the poorest nations on earth, is now affluent in the best times of all. There are the hours that could be put to better use, but are let fallow to purposeless lovemaking or unenforced chatting, or combing and preening. It is flipping through a book of poems written by a dead-long friend. Our neighbors, yoked to themselves, plow and comb the earth, coax her cleavage and stroke her Young Corn bosom like it came from a Grant Wood painting. But you’ve got to admit, around this time of day, that you’ll never be a farmer, and you’ll never be Grant Wood.

Do something? Or nothing? The first to assail the choice are the collegiate sort who consider the luxury of the question a fat thing of the economically advantaged.

But what of the workers, the tens of millions of unemployed, the desperate grinding millstone of inequity that is pressing us to ever finer dust so Wall Street may eat the whitest bread? And who else if not us, the people we have been waiting for, will stand at the cross-roads of intersectionality, give voice and perspective to something-something normative, cis-hyphen or hyphen-phobia, battle the discounting sneer of adultism, and… wait for it… ally….. and appropriation…. and….. here it comes… privilege.

Am I boring you? I’m bored. Having to write that made me want to put Windex in my veins or drink it straight. The dysenteric commentary on privilege somehow mainly issues from the privileged. The flow does not deviate during a national quarantine, but courses with new life. Line cooks and warehouse hands and retail clerks co-exist with unfairness and uncertainty better than most, even more if they are black or Latin or Asian or gay or put-upon by any shade of social class. They are richly privileged in resiliency. They do not need to re-discover the surprise that life is mostly unjust, and lived between the hammer of need and anvil of want.

At the antipodes of the world, Windex-boy’s father is in a knit with cassette tape ribbon, trying to get his favorite flugelhorn hits of the 70’s on the hi-fi.

That’s a lie, he’s only a zip code away.

It is ten am and you don’t have to do this. Farmers don’t hoe or harvest for a minute more than necessary. We’re never going to be that much better than we already are. The search for an area of talent we possess above the median returns little. Summer is coming, sweet corn will still show up at farmer’s markets, Flag Day is on the calendar. Sun-warm strawberries will meet cold cream. Soon our woes will be gone.

Daniel Sherman is an entrepreneur lucky enough to depend on both Italy and China for his income. He is developing a textbook on ethics for adolescents and their parents.