The end of the world

Where do you live? We’ve been in the thick of it for a few weeks in the NY tristate area.

It's the end of the world as we know it ... and I feel fine.

I feel like a worse virus is mutating right now. I not armed and I don’t have any food. I’m really fucked. My dog is a non working group how is she going to help me.

I think we'll get through this. I really do. It's surreal and bizarre, but we will find a way to continue on when all is said and done. Things will be different, but this doesn't seem like the end to me.

This is interesting and worth a read.

“ For me, there’s an even greater resonance between Shakespeare and our current moment. Last December, I began rehearsing “Timon of Athens,” another tragedy composed during the worst years of the pestilence, but one traditionally dismissed by critics and audiences alike. Set in a contemporary Greece, and with the traditionally male protagonist played by the skillful Kathryn Hunter, I reimagined this unloved tragedy for our moment, but never imagined how prescient this work would become.

The drama begins with Timon, a famous philanthropist, resplendent in gold, sharing her bounty. Gifts abound in a glorious extravaganza of excess. In a flash, things change. Timon becomes bankrupt, is abandoned by her friends and, in one of the first moments of literary self-isolation, retreats alone to the forest, a deranged misanthrope, raging at the moral collapse of mankind. “Breath infect Breath” she cries, wishing a plague on Athens and that “friendship” would become “merely poison.” Lonely and brokenhearted, Timon finally takes her own life, walking into the sea never to return.

In our early performances at Theatre for a New Audience in New York City, with a booming stock market, rising employment and bullish consumer confidence, audiences enjoyed the gleeful excess of the story’s first part but felt bemused by the dramatic reversals. How could one person’s life change so entirely and so fast? How could the world feel so extreme? Why tell this story now?

Then it happened.

On March 13, as the actors were preparing to go onstage in the District in front of a full house, news arrived: All theaters were to close. In a few moments, our world collapsed. Our final week in the District was canceled. As the cast gathered onstage to say a shocked goodbye to each other, Shakespeare’s clairvoyance felt profound. Life was imitating art.”

I’m in Vancouver and up until the 15th or 16th of March nobody seemed to really be taking this seriously. We’re not in lockdown but people are trying to self isolate as much as possible. I’m still working.

Remember when all we had to fear was the plastic bag ban?

I think the plastic bag ban might of intensified this. Have you seen the gross, germy bags people use? Bitches aren't washing them once a week like they should. They had a rise in emergency room visits in Northern California when they started it. I buy the bags at the store and then reuse them for my trash. When they did studies of the effects of plastic bags they didn't factor in that people reused them for trash, litter boxes, and to pick up dog poo. They weren't actually as bad as they claimed. You have to use a recycled bag about 100 times before it is better for the environment. And making them, shipping them, and washing them all factor in to how environmentally sound they really are.

Sing it, Skeeter!