After more than 60 days, I needed to venture out more than 10 miles away from home. I headed east, where I was taking a break in front of a catholic church called Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament. I’m in Miami, Arizona, with the hope of stopping in at Guayo’s El Rey Mexican Restaurant for their amazing carne asada, but should they still be closed, there’s Guayo’s on the Trail just 10 miles down the road in Globe.

I’d like to say I didn’t come out here just for something to eat, but with the desert baking in 100+ degrees temperatures and nothing much open due to COVID-19, I suppose that my stomach is dictating the plan. I brought my notebook so I could write if I found a cozy (safe) place to pull up to, maybe have a coffee and chill, but instead, I’m in the car with the A/C on under the shade of a few Mediterranean cypress trees as Guayo’s doesn’t open until 11:00 and I’m a bit early. When Caroline and I were last out this way on my birthday on April 4th, the Miami location was closed. As my early lunchtime rolled around I continued up the street to find the place locked up, not because of the pandemic but because Wednesday happens to be their day off. This turned out well, as the other location had four empty picnic tables. On the other hand, things weren’t all great as the carne asada is off the menu until the dining room reopens.

Really, what I wanted more than a bite to eat was to find something to spark my imagination and drag me into a story that might unfold as I put myself somewhere other than home. What becomes humorous about this is not that I should admit boredom as I’m certainly not bored, but I have come to a realization about how lucky I am that I enjoy reading and various digital hobbies. My awareness focuses on the fact that I’m recognizing that those who are likely bored during this extended period of self-isolation typically use restaurants, gyms, and coffee shops to help them step off their paths of routine. Their lives are boring at other times, too, but they distract themselves with moments that absolve them from being responsible for their mind’s entertainment and edification.

Not to say that going to a gym is not being responsible as it certainly is, but it also fills the gap where they might otherwise need to face a period of free time in which they’d have to choose something to do. With those amenities mostly forbidden right now, they find themselves at home too much and run out of stuff they can fix or family they want to have a Zoom chat with. What they are seeing is their life stripped bare, and they are shown just how boring they are to those of us who have interests aside from sports, restaurants, bars, gyms, and shopping.

I suppose to that end, I, too, am trying to escape my own routine, and I’d like to make the excuse that I’m trying to spur my brain to cooperate with finding some novelty that will inspire my words to move beyond relating events of the day. You see, last year, while in Germany, I started to work on an idea that seemed to have legs and hinted at the possibility that the words I was putting down could become something along the lines of a novel. In the intervening 12 months, I’ve not been able to return to that thread. I’ve wondered if it was the setting on the streets of Frankfurt, after spending two weeks in various other German cities, that was my inspiration? Maybe that writing session can only be warmed up by putting myself back over there, though that is not happening any time soon.

In Europe, I’m surrounded by people needing to move around between museums, operas, concerts, and a vibrant club scene, stop for coffee to chat with friends, and watch others coming and going. Meanwhile, in America, I feel that people keep to themselves even in the best of times as they are afraid of others. They are afraid of potential violence, robbery, begging, a conversation they won’t relate to or understand, being picked up on, being scammed, or simply interrupted from their jaunt to get to the important things that will reassure them that those tasks completed make them whole.

Almost two hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States and was the first person to accurately describe America’s character; then, in the mid-’80s, Jean Baudrillard came along and took a snapshot of who we’d become. Today I cannot find a flattering image or discover what kind of dream the American people are sharing. I don’t believe it is only the virus that has shut us down; this is the nature of decay.

This entropic state could inspire me to use it as a basis for my writing, but this is the dystopian potentiality I want to avoid. Life has been about becoming, going forward, learning, and discovering; to give in to accepting the rot is hopelessness I cannot normalize. The absurdity of having our incredible wealth of opportunity with tools no other generation could have ever imagined but allowing them to lay fallow as we grasp at a past that nostalgia holds fast to is a tragedy with real consequence.

The incongruous nature of hearing a people clamor for greatness while basking in despair and lamenting much of where the world is today is disheartening at best and devastating at worst. Maybe the only thing to take from this is that we are at a generational divide where the chasm is so large that it cannot be bridged. So, has the older generation become lemmings? Have they molded many of their children in their own broken image? Are the days of seeing all things possible from a dynamic and vibrant America dried up?

I moved back to America in 1995 as I came to understand a unique characteristic of the American ideal, and that was that no matter the strata you emerge from, you can ascend terrific heights in this country. Conversely, if you are outside of the target demographic, your ascension will be fraught with the same roadblocks one would find in any other corner of the world by those outside the controlling class, but perseverance really made an incredible difference for many people who would have never found that opportunity anywhere else. While remnants of opportunity still exist, it is being consumed by the megalithic wealth of a tiny minority represented by both individuals and large corporations.

Then, when I think it can get no worse, there’s new insanity that hopes to catapult America fully into the abyss. Not content to scream into the unknown, we apparently want to inhabit the place of monsters in a kind of schizophrenic self-mutilation of our higher ambitions, all in the act of becoming our better selves. Well, this seems to be our current delusional state. Knowledge and wisdom used to be our driving forces, now they’ve been replaced with blind faith and saviors acting against vague conspiracies.

What is in the water that is bringing us into madness? How has our poisoning of the intellectual and cultural environment come to sap our insight? How long before the contagion of self-destruction infects the people of other countries?