Musings on Life, Death, Coronavirus, and Bruce Springsteen

Everybody’s out on the run tonight

But there’s no place left to hide

—Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run,” 1975 

Well…it looks like times have changed. For you sports fans out there, 1975 was forty-five years ago. Us math majors call 45 years, in academic circles, a long ass time. In 1975, of course, Bruce wasn’t doing too bad a job at describing the American urban motorized angst and hunger that swept from the east coast westward, with turnpikes and street racing the latest battlegrounds in a fight for expression that has characterized Americans since 1776. In mathematical jargon, 1776 was a really long ass time ago.

But now it’s 2020, this bizarre, unprecedented, historic, and often troubling collection of days that has completed almost half its allotted time. And in 2020, unlike 45 years ago, nobody is out on the run tonight, and we’ve all been hiding for months. The only people on the run are those defiant enough to break quarantine, and our homes, our self-isolating castles where we’ve hidden ourselves away since March, have become prisons. Bruce, by the way, is 70 these days, and is therefore statistically quite susceptible to the most damaging effects of coronavirus. The mathematical term for anyone who has reached the age of 70 is old ass boomer.

Why am I writing this? What do Bruce Springsteen’s scorched vocals from a bygone decade have to do with a global pandemic in a year of uncertainty? Well, I’m not entirely sure yet. But during quarantine I’ve picked up the unfortunate habit of looking for meaning in the most mundane things due to boredom and lack of stimulation, so somehow I’ll find a link through it all. It all has to be connected. Right? The charts on my walls, the red string linking them together, the sleepless nights, the endless repetitiveness of life these days—it all has to mean something, right? Right?

Anyway, we’ll find out. My mom, like any good English teacher, has been telling me to write about all this (by “all this” I mean 2020. You know what I’m talking about. Math majors call 2020, officially, a really fucking weird year) for months now, ever since I was forced to move home to Gretna to live with my parents. My usual reaction to her suggestion was something like why? What is there to write about? Every day feels more or less the same—what is there to say about spending 12 hours a day in my childhood bedroom at age 21?

Then, recently, as world affairs have grown ever more momentous and remarkable, I realized that perhaps living through history, as boring and mundane as that history may sometimes feel, might just be worth recording. Future historians, I’m looking at you. If I’m not quoted in Voices of A Pandemic: The Coronavirus Crisis, 2019-20, published in 2057 by Professor A. S. K. Yu, I’m going to be furious. Basically what I’m saying is getting famous is my one and only goal in writing this and I have no artistic or literary merit in mind. Just kidding. Well, kind of. As one of my math professors used to say, “If you believe that, I have a very good deal on bridges to sell you.”

So what have I been doing since March 13, the day the world stood still? Great question, dear reader, and the answers may SHOCK and AMAZE you! Click here to learn more, after watching a quick ad from our sponsor. Just kidding, I’ll tell you for free. I’m that kind of guy.

First, whatever I may have told my mom, I’ve been writing. This spring (easily the strangest school semester in memory) I took a fiction-writing class and thoroughly enjoyed it, writing nothing but remarkably bleak stories about disaffected white millennials living unfulfilling lives in New York. Good news: since school ended a month ago, I've continued writing on my own. Bad news: I am so far unsuccessful at writing the Great American Quarantine Novel. Good news: I'm not trying to write the Great American Quarantine Novel. I'm sure someone out there is even now (I'm writing this at 11 pm) bent feverishly over a grease-stained laptop keyboard, face illuminated by a glowing pale screen, sweating and chugging Red Bulls while pounding out a tenth draft of that novel. Not for me, thanks: 2020 is stressful enough already. Math majors, of course, typically refer to short story-writing as a worthless pursuit.

I've also been reading. I always thought having unlimited free time to read as much as I want would be sort of my personal paradise, and to some extent that’s been true—except the circumstances that gave me that free time is a soul-crushing, existentially worrying, macabre pandemic. So that sort of takes the rosy glow out of things. Regardless, before I moved home from Lincoln in March, I went on a raid of sorts at the Bennett Martin Public Library downtown and checked out several books: a few by Philip Roth, a few by Don DeLillo, and a few by Thomas Pynchon. I finished those in the long months of quarantine, as well as some others I had ordered online. Highlights: "The Human Stain" by Roth and "Mason & Dixon" by Pynchon. "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein was also excellent—and nonfiction, which was neat.

To counteract the caloric splurge of my mother’s home cooking, I’ve been running pretty consistently. The problem, of course, is every time I’m running I ask myself why am I getting in shape if no pools are open and thus having a beach body is unnecessary? Motivation, unsurprisingly, is getting harder and harder to find. I’ve also watched like 600 episodes of Crash Course Astronomy, gotten addicted to crosswords, and slowly gone insane living with my parents like I'm 16 again. I won't dwell on those last few, but I will say this: hometowns always seem smaller every time you return. Luckily I’m able to visit my girlfriend in Lincoln regularly, which both keeps me sane and makes the boring days in Gretna pass quicker. (I also want to thank her for being my first reader on all the crazy stuff I send her way, including this).

And of course, I’ve been listening to Bruce Sprinsteen. I blare the Born in the USA or the Born to Run albums late at night, my noise-canceling headphones wrapped tight around my ears, desperately searching for some jewel of universal truth that I could apply to the horrendous uncertainty of these trying times. The power and energy of his shredded rock and roll lamentations for an Americana that existed perhaps only in memory might be the greatest truth of all: everything looks different in hindsight, whether it’s 1975 or 2020. How will we view these times in ten years, or forty-five? I don’t know, but as a math major I can tell you this: when Professor Yu publishes his book, he’ll quote a mathematician as saying, “Newton invented calculus during a plague, but all I did during coronavirus was read shitty short stories.”