Inventory of Items Found Under My Couch. 2020-2022 The Covid Years
I can’t imagine there’s a person on earth that doesn’t have some interesting stories from the Covid Years. Even if stuck in a house with nothing to do I’m sure, for better or worse, the very fact most of the world shut down due to a global pandemic was enough to spur the imagination and senses to perform jumping jacks.
I wish I had been so confined. The day California went into lockdown my parents were already struggling to stay ahead of the bills. About a year prior I prepared my life to help them in their time of need. My father, an aging entrepreneur, owned a struggling pizza restaurant and worked in commercial real-estate on the side. With great fortune, the restaurant sold the month before the lockdown. If it had not, my parents would have surely joined the millions of American’s who lost businesses and homes.
With luck on our side, I worked full time as a carpenter installing cabinets and on the weekends helped my parents renovate their home to sell. Most of the construction jobs were in the San Francisco Bay Area. With the absence of most commuters, the drive from Sacramento was enjoyable most days except the year California burned. One time I almost passed out while driving from smoke inhalation the morning the fires reached I-80 near Vacaville. It was scary, unprecedented times. The same year I joined and supported the Black Lives Matter protests at the Capital, however the protests quickly plunged into riots that wrecked the city and my home ushering in curfews and the military to patrol city streets.
As I briefly write of my experience of the Covid Years, I am also reminded of the myriad ways my world expanded. However, please don’t misinterpret my optimism. To say that the pandemic was devastating to the equilibrium of my artistic practice is an understatement, but where one attribute plummets four fold rise in its place. For instance, my parents renovated home sold for much more than they had anticipated securing their future retirement. And despite working constantly, I feel I had the time to see the world in new and profound ways. I took photographs of this new, strange landscape, made videos, sketched, and took notes on wild perspectives that I know will take years to unravel. I reconnected to friends and family while making new ones orphaned by the chaos. I wrote and played music when I had time and made recordings I could add lyrics to while working. I listened to audiobooks and studied languages in a hope to one day speak in the lands of their origin. The true numbers of death, loss, and mental anguish seems now to be an abstraction, but through this experience I feel more deeply, more alive and more connected to humanity, to the earth, and to an enigmatic sense of purpose. More than ever.