Feel like screaming? You’re not alone

There was a time before pandemic, before herd immunity, and before terms like “incubation period” and “community spread” became common topics of conversation.

“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

These were not the words that came out of my mouth after finding out that my son Louie would miss two weeks of school because he had a “headache, I think.” But I said something close to that, I think.

“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore,” is the famous catch phrase from the 1976 film “Network.” In the film, news anchor Howard Beale loses it on live TV and screams these now famous words, starting a nationwide plea from fed up people everywhere. Windows are thrown open, and maddening crowds gather, as people repeat his rallying cry. Suddenly the film shows an entire world screaming “I’m mad as hell, as I’m not going to take it anymore,” which became a slogan for 1970s American angst.

“I feel like that every morning,” my friend told me.

I know what she means, but at this stage, my rallying cry is more like:

“I’m not sure what I feel anymore, and I’ve taken it for so long I can’t remember what it means not to take it, because that’s no longer an option, so I’m mad but my madness comes in waves on this Corona-coaster from hell.”

I had a weird dream last night about Gwyneth Paltrow again, but this time smack in the middle of a GOOP- driven rage, I suddenly started yelling these very words: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” And I wasn’t talking about her Psychic Vampire Repellent Spray. I was talking about our COVID- 19 existence. And what really got me was I seemed to be shocked by my own sudden outrage, sort of like: Wait, where is this coming from?

It was as if my existence had become so thoroughly enmeshed in our COVID “new normal,” that a sudden expression of fury over this entire situation was out of place. And yet some psychic force within me said, “Oh yeah — this IS insane. And you’ve forgotten how insane it is, but you have a right to really lose it because this is not how life is supposed to be.” Then the dream went back to Gwyneth, as my dreams are wont to do.

I was reading through a column I wrote called “The Plague,” which was published in January by Greenwich Time, which feels like it was unleashed from some kind of weird time capsule. In the article I talk about how “paranoid” I was of a littleknown virus called COVID-19 and quoted my husband as saying, “Wuhan is a long way from Greenwich.”

“Nothing says maternal care like a surgical mask,” I wrote cheerfully.

Aside from the fact that you should no longer trust anything I write, rereading this archaic prose made me realize how dramatically and totally life can change in a matter of hours.

“That’s why you need to reread Sophocles’ ‘Ajax,’” my mother told me. I love how she always says “REread.”

On March 11, 2020, my kids were overjoyed to hear school would be closed the next day, and playdates morphed into spur-of-the-moment sleepovers with glee.

My kids didn’t go back to school until September. If you had told me this at the time, I would never have believed you. It was week by week, then month by month and now ... we don’t even know.

Which takes me to Rick Moody’s novel “The Ice Storm.” I have always found its opening pages to be among the most powerful openings in modern American literature because of the way Moody immerses his reader into the time period in which the novel takes place (1973) by listing everything that has not yet come to pass. What follows is a run-on series of non-sentences:

“No answering machines. And no call waiting. No compact disc recorders or laser discs or holography or cable television or MTV. No multiplex cinemas or word processors or laser printers or modems. No virtual reality. No grand unified theory or frequent flyer mileage or fuel injection systems … centers for adult children of alcoholics. No codependency. No punk rock, or post punk, or hardcore, or grunge. No hip-hop. No acquired immune deficiency syndrome … no Perestroika. No Tiananmen Square.”

Every time I read it; it blows my mind. Suddenly, you are in the 1970s simply by realizing all the things that had not yet happened. You are placed in time through negation.

And so if the little voice within your head starts to go “Network” on you, I urge you to remember you are NOT crazy. There WAS a time when all of this didn’t exist.

There was a time before pandemic, before herd immunity, and before terms like “incubation period” and “community spread” became common topics of conversation. There was no 2019-nCoV, no remote learning, no droplet transmission, or superspreader or flattening the curve, or remdesivir. No social distancing, no shelter-in place orders. No PPE, or PCR, or N95. No 53.6 million confirmed cases, no 1.28 million dead.

There were holidays and birthday parties and relatives visiting. There were vacations and travel and crowded restaurants and theater and opera and concerts and all of it. Really there was.

Remember?