I’m having trouble breathing in
A nihilistic love letter to the lyrics of Avant Gardener by Courtney Barnett, written in the time of COVID-19
There are hardly any cars on the road but the pavement is gridlocked with new joggers. Our homes have become prisons and the city is a giant exercise yard. We’re a month into lockdown. I’m driving to the supermarket, which is normal. But the idea of grocery shopping makes my chest feel tight, which isn’t. Down a side street there are two ambulances outside an average semi-detached house. The paramedics are in full hazmat gear, but this isn’t Salisbury. It might have been a fall. It might have been a heart attack. It’s being treated like a state-sponsored Polonium poisoning.
It’s a Monday, it’s so mundane.
What exciting things will happen today?
Avant Gardener was released in the Year 7 BC (Before Covid) but it plays like a ballad of pandemic distortion. It’s the song that will most vividly transport me back to these days, once these days have become those days. The STD, the socially transmitted disease, that has brought us closer together but driven us two metres apart. The surreal, omnipresent menace that’s hard to gauge. The microscopic friendly-fire tragedy waiting to happen. You can catch it from shaking hands. You can catch it from a shopping trolley.
Anaphylactic and super-hypochondriactic
Should’ve stayed in bed today.
I much prefer the mundane.
Home is where the hard is. It’s all new. It’s not normal. Zoomed out. Quizzed out. Not allowed to go out. Except for groceries and exercise. Lucky if you have space to separate home working from home schooling. Even luckier if you still have a job to do from home. Truly blessed if you have a garden. The social pressure to learn new skills. Bake bread. Grow your own food. The oppression creeps up on you. Courtney Barnett had no idea she was writing about this stuff, but she was doing a very good job.
Life’s getting hard in here so I do some gardening.
Anything to take my mind away from where it’s supposed to be.
The nice lady next door talks of green beds
And all the nice things she wants to plant in them.
I wanna grow tomatoes on the front steps,
Sunflowers, beansprouts, sweetcorn and radishes.
I feel proactive, I pull out weeds.
All of a sudden I’m having trouble breathing in.
I am meeting someone for coffee. In person. It’s the first time I’ve done this in five months. It’s the first time I’ve ever met this person in person, although we’ve spoken several times over video. There’s a moment of adjustment for both of us because we don’t fully recognise each other. A face seen only in two dimensions looking directly to camera is different to a face seen in three dimensions in three-quarter profile. The face also has a body and legs.
We both work for an arts organisation. We talk of venues whose income has flatlined, and how there’s no crash team for culture. We talk of artists who have lost their livelihoods. Livelihood for an artist is as much about the ability to create and perform as it is about the ability to earn. We shudder at the prospect of cultural austerity. Our artists are key workers too.
I’m still not keen on key as an adjective, although I’m in a shrinking minority. You never see it in comparative or superlative form — keyer, keyest. Who’s the keyer worker in a wellbeing economy, the artist or the health professional?
The paramedic thinks I’m clever ’cause I play guitar.
I think she’s clever ’cause she stops people dying.
Just in time. The virus has given us a glimpse of what will happen when Mother Nature brings the hammer down on our food supply. We’ve seen how fragile our just in time retail system is. Early on there were empty shelves where the pasta and flour used to be. Christmas came early and the stores weren’t ready. An unpredicted increase in demand broke the system. So will a predictable, climate-induced reduction in supply. Supply chain efficiency is inversely proportional to supply chain resilience. Today’s toilet roll is tomorrow’s bread. The world is on fire and under water and you’re an organised criminal if you display your anxiety in public.
I’m really sorry Courtney, you were just telling a story about an asthma attack in suburbia. But it’s like you knew. You knew.
It’s forty degrees and I feel like I’m dyin’
Fascism is abroad. Fascism is abroad over there and over here. They want to take the shame out of racism. They want to pile the blame onto migrants. At least you can see this danger, although many people haven’t seen it for what it is yet. George Floyd has. He takes a knee to the back of his neck. He can’t breathe. The jackboots are on the other foot. We voted in the very people we fought a war against. I don’t buy your avuncular bumble. I choke on your brazen venality.
I’m having trouble breathing in.
My hands are shaky, my knees are weak.
I can’t seem to stand on my own two feet.
I’m breathing but I’m wheezing,
Feel like I’m emphyseming.
My throat feels like a funnel
Filled with Weetbix and kerosene…
Courtney saw all of this coming. She’s an unwitting and perhaps unlikely soothsayer. She’s a seer with a knack for easy, conversational prose. She writes in the present tense. Her words are present and they are tense. This is my lockdown song.
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