Finally getting around to posting these? Anyway, this was actually written back in April when I was trying to do more writing. Four months later isn't too bad...
It’s been awhile since I’ve really done any writing. I always seem to have ideas swirling around in my head but getting it from there to the paper is not so easy. It is far too easy for me to decide to do something else and these days, it’s even easier. It’s hard to do much of anything when you are more or less confined to your house and all future plans are on hold if not canceled. It all just kind of hangs in the air, and you’re waiting because that’s all you can do is wait for life to return to normal again or at least some semblance of normal because really, after something like this, can the world ever really get back to normal?
You see all of these disaster movies where the world is affected by some big disaster or another. Maybe it’s a meteor. Maybe it’s a catastrophic global storm. Or maybe the world for some reason or another comes just to the brink of total annihilation. The end of the movie always ends with things having stopped and the pieces needing to be put back together but you don’t see how that happens. You suppose that it WILL happen because somehow it HAS to but you don’t see how that will be. You don’t see how people will pick up the pieces of their lives again and go back to living.
We obsess over the disaster, the drama of the disaster itself. We like to watch things be destroyed or fall apart. We want to root for the characters who make it against all odds. But in reality, when it’s all over and done with, we don’t really want to watch how people will pick up the pieces of their lives and put them back together. We don’t want to see that because that’s not as much fun. It’s not easy, it doesn’t have a neat little ending. Picking up the pieces is messy and drawn out and complicated. People don’t like that as much. People want their happy endings and will get that even if it means that the happen ending doesn’t really show what happens AFTER. And the AFTER part is important too. But we never get to see that.
Independence Day actually showed a little bit of this but it sort of glossed over a lot of it too. You see Bill Pullman’s character still suffering from flashbacks and having some sort of physical issue and maybe mental issues as well but it’s not really explained what happened. Other characters have issues as well but you don’t see the process from the event to the now as to how they got there. You’re just briefly introduced and the story goes on.
Then you have dystopian movies/novels. Those are even more interesting in that they are the result of a disaster and it creates this world that is totally foreign to our own but you’re not shown how it gets there, it is just suddenly there. Sometimes, you may get a brief glimpse, usually in a voice over or news report type things that goes into a little bit of how something came to be but again, not enough to really give you an idea.
I was thinking of the movie Surrogates the other day. And I realize that with the pandemic we are currently experiencing that something like that can easily come as a result of that. I mean, in Japan, you have a graduation where robots are used in the place of students and the “heads” of the robots are tablets with the students coming in from Zoom or something like that. So you have these robot bodies that can accept their diploma and everything and then the students themselves are present through remote video conferencing. So, this is in a sense a very basic form of what surrogates ultimately becomes. In the movie, you have these robot people controlled by a person at home, a person who never leaves their house except in this robotic body. Right now, being out in person is not safe. You can become ill, very ill and even die from this virus that has no vaccine and no cure. So, the idea of a surrogate going out for you, working for you, shopping for you, etc, and if everyone had one then you wouldn’t need to worry about people going out, everyone would be in their homes, safe. Seems crazy in theory but if the right people put it into play, not so farfetched of an idea when you think about it. It’s whether people could handle being inside all day operating a robot of themselves. I think some can but others might have a harder time with that.
Until something like that comes to fruition or a vaccine comes out or we all just get totally sick to death of staying inside that we no longer care if we get it or not, we’re kind of stuck. And that has been a challenge. Even trying to stay home for two weeks to limit the amount of time I’m going out is hard but I know I have enough food here at home and I know that at the moment I don’t need to go out before next Wednesday. It’s hard though, day in and day out not having anywhere to go or really anything to do. It really does show that there is something to day to day living just having something to look forward to each day. When you can’t really plan ahead, it just makes life that much more challenging to get through. You really do have to take it day by day or you just go insane.
So yeah, that’s where we are all at right now, this 13th day of April in the year 2020. I turn 40 in just under 26 weeks and I really did not remotely anticipate my 40th year of life going like this. This is something we are most definitely not going to forget anytime soon, something that will be remembered and told by my children to their grandchildren and their great grandchildren. We just have to survive this whole thing first.
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