From my personal journal, May 20th:
This morning had a spring feel to it, and not simply because of the season, or the sunshine, or the warmth, but because this is the first week of the first phase of our return to the new normal. At least that’s what everyone is calling it. Privately, I remain skeptical that we can return this soon to anything like normal. Not without consequences. However, I’ll take what I can get, enjoying the sunshine while still wearing a mask and keeping my distance. I need the vitamin D.
Another reason for the springlike feeling in the air is that many storefronts that shuttered their windows in March are emerging now from behind their plywood barriers, almost mimicking the May flowers. I noted in March how the Starbucks in the TD Centre had removed all its furniture so patrons couldn’t sit and visit; they could only take their orders and leave. A week later, that location was closed along with everything else in the PATH. This morning, I passed several Starbucks locations where they were offering coffees and iced teas from the doorway. We still can’t gather inside, but we can buy their products to take away. I noticed the same thing of other stores along Bloor Street. Again, in March, I had photographed the Holt Renfrew for Men store boarded up on the corner of Bloor and Belair. This morning, as I passed, workers were dismantling the plywood sheets and stud frames.
More people were out, too, and more of them without masks. At the corner of Yorkville and Bay, I had a chat with a man of about fifty who had ridden his Fatboy bike to the Pusateri’s for a coffee. He wore a Tesla jacket. In appearance, he reminded me of the psychotic taxi driver in the movie, Siesta, the one who raped Claire on a Dare.
The conversation began, as so many of them do, with him asking me if I was getting any decent photos. It’s been so long since I’ve been out schmoozing with my camera and I was grateful for the chance to fall into an old habit. Chatting with people is an integral part of street photography. The conversation began innocuously enough with the disclosure that he did astral photography, had an eight inch lens with German glass that cost him $24K used and was made of precision materials that were illegal to buy on their own. He would set it up on a clear night north of the city and start by getting it to track the pole star.
The longer I listened to him, the more I felt like Woody Allen talking to Annie Hall’s younger brother (Christopher Walken) at the family dinner when he cut him off and said: “I’m due back on the planet Earth.” Somehow his trip to Santorini with his Hasselblad where he shot an old man on a cobblestone road morphed into a proof for the existence of God. As I understand it—and forgive me if I’m missing some of the nuance—we could not have evolved but must have been created. Supposing woman appeared way in the past and man appeared a thousand years later. Reproduction would have been impossible and we wouldn’t exist today. No, the odds of woman and man appearing on Earth at exactly the same time are infinitesimally small, and yet that’s how it happened. Since it couldn’t have happened by chance, it had to have been deliberate. Therefore God. The same kind of argument applies to the fact that we have all our organs. If humans had no liver, that would have been the end of that. But here we are, all our organs all at once. So there must be a God.
It struck me as entirely reasonable that the next phase of our conversation should involve aliens, starting (naturally) with Roswell. The US military has reverse engineered alien space ships. Same for the aliens themselves. (I wasn’t clear on the idea of reverse engineering aliens since, presumably, they aren’t machines but living beings.) There are different kinds of aliens, like reptilians and greys, and half-breeds, too. The half-breeds pass as humans, living among us, mostly in government. Not all aliens are good. Some are hostile towards the human species. Back in the days of Eisenhower, some aliens refused to deal with humans unless we destroyed our nuclear arsenals, but Eisenhower wasn’t having any of that; it would leave us too vulnerable.
Somehow my new friend managed to segue from aliens to government conspiracies, the most serious of which is the conspiracy to cover up information about aliens. But there are other conspiracies too. In particular, there’s a conspiracy of stupidity. Just when I thought he was running off the rails, he went and said something plausible. However, he started to get worked up and his f-word quotient shot into the stratosphere. I was afraid I’d have to yell at passers-by to see if anyone had an EpiPen for an anti-Government fit. Would a person in the throes of an anti-Government fit even use an EpiPen or would they assume, like the anti-vaxxers, that the medication was, in fact, designed to render them suggestible? I tried my best to offer soothing words to calm the man.
Whenever I have conversations like this, I pause afterwards and ask myself: what else was being expressed that went unsaid? During this period of isolation, what are this man’s primary relationships? What are his emotional supports? What are his stressors? A single conversation is evidence of nothing in particular, but it certainly doesn’t contradict the wider observation that, in these times, Covid-19 is not the only source of suffering. And the symptoms of suffering vary from person to person. Maybe, more than anything, we suffer from a feeling that we are powerless. Unseen forces place our health at risk, destroy our work, erode our savings, drive a wedge between us and people we care about, keep us from doing things we love. Feeling so powerless, it strikes me as eminently understandable that people would turn to conspiracy theories.
Wild. Yes. We are all suffering with something.