My Jandek Plague Journal: 5/9/20 "The Slow Burn"

"Go away and fall down dead/And when you’re all gone/I’ll live in peace in a house that’s not burned down." Everyone's trying to move backwards to live in the time before. If we reopen the economy, we can return to the time before coronavirus. If we vote for Biden, we can return to the time before this administration. If you believe in MAGA, we can go back to the time before everything wrong. America consistently fails to regard the future as a place arrived at by moving through the past. We never acknowledge where we were or what we've done so we never move forward. "Normal," both pre-COVID and 4 years ago, was people dying because they couldn't go to the doctor. That's still the case. And both candidates are promising to maintain that state of affairs. The tragedy of the pandemic, like every American tragedy, is that it's not remarkable. The crisis lies in who we've always been. -5/9/20. "The Slow Burn" from The Door Behind (lyrics) (one week earlier) (one week later)