I HAVE started writing a journal. It’s late but it isn’t too late, I think. I had promised myself to do it on the first day of the first quarantine but I never got to put pen to paper. So many things always came in the way.
There are still so many things to record and so many observations to make. This pandemic isn’t going to vanish soon and that’s an understatement. Maybe, the coronavirus will not even go away at all. It will probably just lie low after a vaccine has been found only to reappear later as mutated pathogen that scientists will expectedly call by another name.
But my journal will not talk about viral behavior but of the human kind. The virus may be deadly but apart from that, it is not interesting. A book on the virus will never be a best seller. In comparison, a collection of rants against the ECQ, the quarantine pass, the featherless chickens and all those in the endless list of grievances to rant against will definitely fare better.
Not that I intend to make my journal public. To quote the neighborhood wit, it is for private consumption only. I have shared enough of my experiences with the public already. I will keep the transcript of my innermost thoughts to myself.
Because of the three-month gap between planning and executing, there will be events that I can no longer recall along with the feelings they evoked when I saw them unfurl. But not to worry, there is always Facebook. Zuckerberg’s baby has become a repository of recent history, if there is such a thing. It is not always trustworthy; in fact, it contains mostly garbage but there lies a most enjoyable challenge, that of separating the wheat from the grain (with apologies to the grain), if you will pardon the metaphor.
Of course, I still remember tuob and the controversy that it generated when the Capitol tried to promote it among its employees, because it is fresher. This entry is going to be emotional because I am figuratively torn between two lovers: my own pleasant tuob experience when I was a child and my respect for professional opinion.
Like tuob, featherless chickens and bogo will also appear as footnotes to my daily meanderings. Here, there is no emotional involvement, only curiosity in the workings of herd mentality. Like when somebody claims thousands of chickens cannot be accounted for and everybody behaves as if they know personally that the chickens have been stolen and continues to behave that way even after someone has explained where the chickens went.
Or like when someone blurts in irritation that those who continue to question him on something even after he has explained to them what that something was are bogo, and then someone complains that he has been called dumb and all the people follow suit, feeling insulted that they have been called dumb too.
These people should bash me now if they are minded to do so because they will have no access to my diary. Holy cow, I have not even written a word of my footnotes yet but I am already enjoying it!
That’s it. I am not giving away anything more about what I am going to enter in my journal. Some grow vegetables, others learn to cook and bake while the rest rant and rage to maintain their sanity during these difficult times. I chose to do my growing, cooking and baking and ranting and raging through pen and paper.
And if I am running around in circles and making you dizzy, please understand that this is the introduction to my diary, the one that you will never get to read.