In all this quarantine loneliness for a while I went around town leaving chalk messages for folks: You Got This! Motivational speeches spanning blocks targeted to the people I knew and loved. Then the same types of messages increasingly targeted to people I did not know or know whether I loved.
Then I started in on more ambivalent messages. Cheer up: civilizations die! If they didn't then new ones couldn't be born. Lucky numbers 20, 20, 5...
Then I decided that language itself was too clear whatever layers and rotations of irony I threaded through. I started in on geometric drawings full of noise and without symmetry, devoid of clarity. My hope was to freeze people in their tracks; to interrupt the interpretative process. If we all stay in one place, even if do so having made the cardinal mistake of ever going outside, the odds of transmission decrease significantly.
To be clear, the barbed wire gloves are in case anybody ever tries to shake my hand, I'll do it and then hack off both of my own hands for microbiological safety using a device designed solely for that purpose right after. I just want to leave a reminder or set of reminders if you will that such things as physical contact are unsafe and we're in distinctly more of an adapt or die situation, buddy.
I managed to avoid Walmart for the first couple months of this shit but I got there today because honestly there aren't a lot of other go-tos for DVD-R discs in the apocalypse. Place was hopping! But also big enough that it wasn't purely terrifying, except for the moment close to checkout when I imagined no felt no was certain that COVID-19 was crawling around behind my glasses and directly into my eyes. And the people, I don't know how to put it any other way, they were just distinctly nicer than they are at Wegman's.
