Illustration by Steven Ketchum

Pandemic To-Do List

1. Look at door handles with suspicion. Interrogate their whereabouts until they stutter.
2. Monitor the breaking news until the blue light of your computer screen fries your eyes like an egg.
3. Talk about pandemic with everyone you know. It is the only proper subject of conversation.
4. Find new use for elbows. Surprise yourself with their capabilities: cough shield, door opener, elbow-bump greetings.
5. Consult the homeopaths and the witch doctors. Save their numbers to speed dial.
6. Panic because it’s trendy. Panic because it’s so in right now. Talk about your panic, but don’t let anyone see it. Coat panic in a fine patina of the blasé.
7. Fill your shopping cart with everything. Essential and non-essential is beyond the point. Who knows what will have value in the coming weeks.
8. Find creative replacements for toilet paper. For some reason, this was the first to go empty from the shelves.
9. Approach grocery isles with a clenched jaw and tight fists. Your neighbor is no longer your neighbor. His cart is full of something you lack.
10. Become an expert in home remedies. Take up drinking ginger tea by the gallon. Sprinkle turmeric powder in your bathwater. Feast on cloves of garlic, raw, unsure if you’re fighting off a virus or a vampire.
11. Prepare for a new hobby. Daydream about how good at it you will become. Order all the accoutrements for this hobby to be delivered to your doorstep. Be sure to remind people about this hobby, and how good you will be at it now that you have the time
12. Reach out to people you thought you’d never speak to again. Think about them before you fall asleep.
13. Start working from home. Wake into the unnecessary hassle of office life. Realize you and everything you do is expendable.
14. Count days on your fingers. Chop your calendar into sections of 14. Marvel in them like a well cut piece of meat.
15. Keep loved ones at arm’s length though you want more than anything to be held, cradled in someone’s arms like a child, calmed with a soothing rocking motion. Remind yourself distance is how you protect them.
16. Your body is a stranger, but it always was. We know more about the bottom of the sea than we do about the mechanics of your double helix.
17. Throw a quarantine party. Invite all your friends to attend virtually. Telecommute to your own birthday.
18. Share the new mythic of the virus with anyone who will listen. Something about drinking water. Something biblical. These new myths are as easily transmissible.
19. Question your apathy to religious structures. Ask yourself “have I been naïve this whole time?” Ponder, but only briefly.
20. Walk around your city’s drained streets. Wonder how this is what we’ve come to. Recognize your part in the collective “we”.

Times are hairy now. The world is teetering. But now is the time to turn to each other, to help when possible and heal when we can. Now is the time to take up the pen.