or perhaps there is just something missing. I wonder if they have taken the drug. If so did they want to take it, or was it forced on them? I have visions of them strapped down, screaming - 'no, No! NO!' But I don’t think it went that way at all. Something in the drinking water, perhaps? Or something on TV? There was a movie about a killer cassette once, remember that? This virus is certainly viral, many times over, so it seems, but this — this thing that people have, or rather don't have. It’s a kind of a lack, a gentle ‘something missing,’ something sliding away. You gaze into their eyes and wonder —they are the same people, aren’t they? I’m talking about the ones who are not upset, and certainly not angry. It’s a Stepford Wives sort of thing. I ask them, ‘How is it going for you?’ — meaning that it’s some kind of agony for me. They consider the question. “Um…well…?” Oh come on. You have to think about it? You have to consider what this pandemic has done to you? It reminds me of years ago when I was trying to figure out whether Anne-Marie MacDonald’s novel was gay without reading it. I asked a woman I knew who was a kind of a lesbian (it’s complicated) is it a gay novel? She screwed up her nose and thought for a minute “I think there’s a scene about halfway through where… she kisses somebody….I think so.” Well forget it then, if you have to think that hard, if doesn’t start off with some woman’s hard nipples or a mess of sperm on the walls, then well it’s just not gay, is it? So when I ask someone if the pandemic has been difficult for them, I don’t expect an actual thought process. I expect a flood, a confessional expectoration, an unbound ejaculation, a song of pain —remorse, something. No. But they are still considering. "Um actually, I have a lot more time to spend with my family, that’s a good thing, I guess.” You guess, okay, I won’t go there, I'm certainly not going to be the one to suggest that there might be anything wrong with your friggin’ family. Or “I’m kind of enjoying the time alone, I guess.” Great, You’ve got lots of that now. I won’t even dignify those who say anything about yoga, meditation, or baking cookies. I really want to know how it happened to them. The Stepford Wives were robots — is it possible that some new software has inserted a device into their brains and now they are computers themselves? I daren’t mention hugging, kissing —would never mention sex — drinking, getting completely blasted, partying of any kind. I’m sure they would stare at me blankly as if — and what am I to say? The only way to come clean in this respect is to actually admit that I am a debauched person, that I am somewhat of an addict, a lowlife, that I used to stay up all hours of the night in certain unsavory public places looking for (un)love and afterwards they had to wipe the floors with me because that's frankly all that was left. But that’s who I am — and what I miss (which is the same thing). But one by one my friends are becoming more docile. A kind of passive acceptance of everything. And then they begin talking about Netflix. I too, have started watching The Crown. I admit it, I’ve been pestered for so long ‘Don’t you just love The Crown?’ Okay, okay shut up, I admit it, it’s good. I’m mad at myself for watching it, I think mainly because there is always the thought somewhere deep inside that I actually might be doing something else. But that’s crazy; there is nothing better I could be doing probably — other than writing this (and that's a moot point). Last Sunday I spent the evening with two dear friends —they are COVID friends — that’s the kind you want, the ones you got to know during a pandemic, and the kind of connection you make is desperate and somehow, for that, more real than it ever was once before, when you 'kind of' knew them. I’ve had sex with one of them (not bragging, just explicating) and they are lovers and open, in fact I think they regularly service the Niagara Peninsula with Good Old Clean Canadian Fun. At one point in the evening the one I had sex with once in Montreal (it was an accident, honestly, I didn’t know it was him) handed me a butt plug (just to examine — we weren’t having sex or anything — we were just getting very drunk and listening to Old Grace Jones Albums). And it was a vibrating butt plug. But the interesting thing was that you could turn on the butt plug with your iPhone. Yup, your iPhone. The vibration was very intense. I had to imagine what it would be like to be shopping for toilet paper (in other words, posing as a quite normal, i.e. COVID-19 -terrified, individual, wearing a mask — with not one, but two filters on it -- just in case) only to have someone somewhere, touch their cellphone, and then to feel my asshole vibrating as if there was no tomorrow. It would be an act of love. You couldn’t call it sex, because there would be no one there but the other shoppers. I must tell you I did have sex with a stranger two weeks ago. If you can call it that. It was really something awful, beyond sex. No it was behind sex. It was definitely in back of sex. But I had to do it, just to get out of the house. And I mean that metaphorically; in other words to literally get out of this friggin house which is my own friggin rational mind. And it went well. Meaning it was one of the most bizarre fiascos that I have ever endured in the name of ‘doing it.’ I moaned a lot (he seemed to like that). His apartment was far too clean and at one point he pulled out a big black dildo (I know, I feel the same way, a dildo is one thing, but a black dildo? He was, after all whiter than white, so isn’t that appropriation? Where’s Black Lives Matter when you need them?) And then things got messy, to say the least. And all I could think of was -- this is embarrassing, and I’m not enjoying watching him clean up. Watching a man clean up his own apartment is far too intimate — far to personal. He was very polite. I left the fashionable suburb of Forest Hill in a fashionable Uber (yes, he lived in Forest Hill) and was on my way home regretting every minute of it. No. I lie. I relished every bit of what was a terrible experience, because despite it all, it was actually real. It is that longing for reality that I no longer see in the eyes of my old, now somewhat ex-friends. My terror comes from watching it dwindle; once a fire, then a spark, then, barely a light. Then, it all goes dark.
