Quarantine

BrooklynI live on a grim block. Each year another glass-and-steel human filing cabinet, billed by developers as ‘luxury living’ and so sterile you could perform surgery inside, sprouts up to accommodate the millennial hordes charging into neoliberalism’s hippest zip code. These residences have names like The Edge, or The Brooklyn, or The Douchebag. They’re crumbling before anyone has even moved in. The sun-bleached, warped particleboard facades must be constantly replaced. A strong wind hurls Styrofoam paneling, used to resemble concrete or stucco, onto the streets, and rain streaks the aluminum paneling with brown sludge that bakes into a stain.

As soon as the lockdown guidelines were announced across the UK last week, I made the decision to move back in with my parents. As you can imagine after three years at university, this has been a somewhat challenging situation to adjust to! It has been made even more testing due to the fact father has had to lay off many of the staff due to them calling in sick. We are down to one cook and a mere handful of cleaners. It’s a nightmare! Thankfully we have a solid internet connection and I have been able to occupy myself on social media the past few days. I say ‘occupy’, but that’s more of an understatement. It’s been more of an essential lifeline to me.

A scroll through a millennial’s Twitter feed in the time of coronavirus shows a few dominant themes: adorable pets; extravagant home-cooked meals; worrying scatter charts; and the Text From An Ex.All our exes are bored, the meme goes, and nostalgic, and it’s so annoying, and so typical. 'Crazy times,' they say, 'Hope you’re doing OK ;).' The thing to do is to post the screenshot and complain about the ex’s ham-fisted manipulations while secretly reveling in the attention, smug and secure in the knowledge that we’re the ones who got away.Don’t get me wrong: a ritual ‘checking in’ on significant figures from your past seems to be a harmless, if slightly disingenuous, emotional safety valve in a catastrophe.

In America, we don’t have snow showers anymore. Those meteorological events are now known as Snowmageddons, Snowpocalypses, or Polar Vortices. We’ve even begun to name them, like hurricanes. Each season, as newscasters brace for the arrival of Winter Storm Mephistopheles, inching along the map with its Judgment Day payload of fluffy white powder, most Americans see through the hype, but we’ll ransack grocery store shelves anyway. After all, it might be weeks before another thrill like this comes along. When something truly unnerving arrives, like a global pandemic, America serves up just the right pitch of high-octane, Hollywood disaster-flick pandemonium to make the whole thing a bit zanier and more camp. The world depends on us for that. We invented the genre.