In Extremis

I’ve disappeared down the well.

I started a new job last Monday, May 5, at Prudential. I’m working on creating taxonomies to describe business processes. It’s fun work – I never thought I’d have fun working in insurance and financial services, but here we are, it’s a brand new day, and I’ve learned something about myself.

I also lost my voice.

The laryngitis struck the day I started work, and has only recently started to abate. I went to the doctor’s, and it’s apparently just allergies or some kind of unspecified virus – not strep, not COVID. If it were a cold, I’d know – I would need steroids because I have asthma, and colds and I do not get along.

So that’s been fun. It’s hard, in meetings, to contribute when you have to kind of rev up your voice before you speak – the moment for your contribution passes, leaving you behind.

Because Pru is very 9-5, as opposed to 8-8 or worse at my last job, I’ve been doing a lot more reading after I log out/come home. I’ve never read The Dark Tower series by Stephen King. So I whipped through the first book, and then realized…the antagonist there has a history. And that history began with The Stand. And I’ve never read the “real” version – the one that King restored. So I’m deeply embedded in 1300-some pages of magnificent storytelling.

Obviously, I’m getting COVID flashbacks. The shortages. The terror. The weekly/daily/hourly addresses from community or state leaders. It’s not nostalgia – but I understand how some people can feel that way. Our lives were curtailed, strictly circumscribed. Controllable, in some ways. If you never go outside, things are very controllable.

But I think COVID gave fuel to these oligarchs like Musk and Thiel and Bezos – these “transhuman longtermers” who see human salvation only in rockets. And that rocket fuel elected this administration for a second time.

The psychopathology continues to bloom. These people not only are devoid of empathy, they revile empathy and fellow-feeling altogether. They dream of things that most of us can’t even conceive of, much less think about and entertain. They are obsessed with whiteness and its attendant benefits.

I have, for the most part, blotted out the news entirely. When I bumpity-bump my way into the office three days a week (thanks, Newark potholes!), I’m listening to WQXR, the regional classical station. I’ll even put up with the pledge drive if I don’t have to think about what this administration is trying to do. I need to be focused and sane for work. In my previous commutes, I used to listen to NPR, but I just cannot hack it anymore.

And when I come home, I read. Voraciously, for hours, until the words start swimming in front of me and I need to put on my marathon rewatch of Call the Midwife. Stephen King’s work is full of human connection and empathy. Call the Midwife is empathy incarnate. I need to live in a world that acknowledges the horrors – the absolute horrors – that are possible. But I also need the redemption that comes when two or more people connect, even if only briefly, and recognize that we are all in this world together, and we need one another.