Given the current ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ situation, I’m finding it a little difficult to sit down and write anything that seems remotely worthwhile. Steven Pressfield didn’t cover this in The War of Art. Put it in your revised edition, Steven.
Anyway, I’ve decided to keep a diary for the time being. How long is the ‘time being’? That’s the joy of this whole thing: nobody has an answer. Maybe I’ll write my final entry next week. Maybe it’ll run and run for six months. Maybe I’ll get sucked into a YouTube hole well before then and never emerge again.
Here is my Pandiary.
14 Mar
The last waltz before the band all get sick and die of pneumonia. I walked from Alexanderplatz to Kottbusser Tor after being glued to the news for 10 hours. Perked up a little when I saw there were no death squads in gas masks hunting down the weak yet. At a friend’s house we drank Champagne and it felt like that scene in The Road when the boy and his dad share a can of Coke in a ransacked fitness centre. As I recall, it pretty much goes downhill from there.
15 Mar
First full day indoors. Usually I’d love not getting messages saying “yo dude u wanna hang later?” but now, like a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome, I miss them. Finished Moby-Dick. Turns out the whale was Ahab’s dad. Watched Steve Austin’s debut WWF match, discovered Triple H’s ring name used to be Hunter Hearst Helmsley. Sounds like a legal firm you’d hire to make sure you win everything in a divorce settlement.
16 Mar
Like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, I broke out of quarantine in the evening and headed for Switzerland. Got as far as Prenzlauer Berg. Despite the ban, one bar was open. A couple of utter Charlies wearing gilets were sitting outside drinking white wine and staring at anybody who walked by with a kind of white-hot smugness in their eyes. On the way back to prison, a guy on a bike with a beer in hand shouted at groups of people as he pedalled by. “You’re all gonna die! All of you! You’re zombies and you don’t even know it yet.” He brought a smile to my face. I returned home with fresh energy. Then I lay on the couch.
17 Mar
Did this day even exist? Or was it just a thought experiment where I imagined how boring a Tuesday could possibly be and then somehow made it happen? Kind of like when Albert Hoffman accidentally synthesised LSD and smashed his mind to pieces on it, except instead of fractals and ego-death, I got urgent translation requests and coronavirus memes on WhatsApp. I’m cracking.
18 Mar
Met up with my boxing trainer in desperation to see a human face other than the haunted one in the mirror. Went to the park with his dog. Place was like a May bank holiday: kids running around with their grandparents (aww), teenagers grilling and drinking, and super pumped dudes gurning at each other as they shared the only pull-up bar for 5 km. We watched them for 20 minutes from a safe distance and then went home for a cry.
19 Mar
Had my first ever filling. I told my dentist it was my highlight of the week. I think she thought I was joking. The drill burrowing into my decaying tooth reminded me what it means to feel. When she was finished, I wanted to beg her for a root canal, but I wandered home, my face as numb as the idiots in the park.
took this in 2014 on xmas day. weren’t no people out at that time either.