Missives from a home office

For one thing, the commute is grueling.

Today I had to detour around a stack of unwashed dishes and a basket of laundry.

My office is under construction by the cat. He is stomping across the table like Godzilla sashaying through Tokyo, hurling papers and empty plastic bottles of diet iced tea over the side.

He says he’ll be done never, so I relocate to the opposite end of the dining room, where the sun shines in my eyes most of the morning.

My chair is hardly ergonomic. It’s just hard. I should complain to the boss. Oh, wait.

It’s tough to tell what day it is. All I know for sure is that it ends in a “y.” As in, why am I here? What is my purpose?

I know it’s not Saturday or Sunday because the newscasters on TV are the ones who work on the weekdays. I can’t tell the date from the stories because they’re all the same: Some state official is arguing with the big orange guy in D.C., somebody is throwing a virtual birthday party for somebody else, a mom in Poughkeepsie is stressed because she can’t send her three kids, ages 6, 8, and 11, to school.

I start the day playing Brady Bunch on my computer. The game is always the same. Zoom this, Zoom that. Or Google Hangout, let it all hang out.

When we started virtual meetings, everybody had their cameras on, and it was fun to peek into co-workers’ living rooms and kitchens. Somebody had a banana in a wire basket hanging from the ceiling. Each day, it got older and blacker. The banana, not the ceiling. Fascinating.

But now, all the video shades are drawn, and coworkers hide behind avatars. Just disembodied voices, shouting into the void.

I saw a Saturday Night Live skit about virtual meetings recently. Or maybe last year. Time has no meaning anymore.

In the skit, one Zoom participant takes her computer into the bathroom while her co-workers beg her, for the love of God, to stop. It’s supposed to be funny.

At some point, I wander outside to get the newspaper. I could have sworn one day there was an inch-and-a-half of snow, but it’s April. Unless it’s still March, and my sometimes officemate, who is married to the only other human occupant of the office, got ambitious and changed the calendar early.

Some mornings I wear gloves and turn the newspaper pages gingerly, like they’re brittle artifacts unearthed from a dead civilization. Which, well.

The printed news is the same as on the TV — the COVID Chronicles. It’s the only show that isn’t on hiatus.

I kind of remember watching something about a Tiger King. And Carole, who maybe fed her officemate, who was married to the only other human occupant of her office, to a tiger.

It seems to me they said tigers can devour a person so completely that they leave no bones behind. I thought only pigs did that. I will have to look it up. Maybe this afternoon. Or next year.

Online news isn’t much different than the printed stuff. There’s just more of it. I skip all the big stories in the name of good mental hygiene even though physical hygiene has gone by the wayside.

I might still be brushing my teeth. The toothbrush is wet, at least.

I go straight to the arts and culture sections online. Somebody is writing about plague literature. Again. Did you know Shakespeare wrote many of his best works while the London theaters were closed because of the plague?

All I’ve written during our pandemic is this column. Way to overachieve, Shakespeare.

Anyway, most of those stories also mention Camus and “The Plague,” Stephen King and “The Stand,” and of course Edgar Allan Poe and “The Masque of the Red Death.”

Not so many mention Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend,” about a plague of vampirism. That’s one of my favorites. At the end, the main character is the only human left in a world of blood-sucking ghouls. Sorry if I spoiled the ending.

By the way, Carole is guilty. There, spoiled that one, too.

Lunch in this office sucks. The in-house cafeteria is serving three-day-old sloppy joes on stale buns, and I have to serve myself. A few oranges are still rattling around, too. At least I won’t get rickets.

Well, gotta go. A rerun of the Brady Bunch is starting.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter