Ravings of a rambling rebel
Student recalls year under lockdown
I’ve spent the better part of a year shouting in my boxers. Being fortunate enough to stay inside since early March, jeans have become my formal wear.
Only for the most prestigious occasions like the 30-minute drive from my Oroville home to pick up food from a local Chico business, and maybe just maybe, donning a mask and spending the few minutes it’s safe, to browse the videogame section of Best Buy.
Aside from these extraordinary circumstances I‘ ve spent the year indoors, clicking away at my keyboard, shouting profanities at the TV or lazily drowning my boredom in whatever would sate it.
2020 was a rough year, not that I need to inform you of that. With a political news cycle that reads like an Onion article and more than 300,000 people dying as the result of the coronavirus in the United States alone.
There is more than enough reason to shout at the evening news when the melodrama villains who masquerade as our elected officials twiddle their mustaches mischievously into the camera.
All of this social and political unrest left me feeling empty and helpless. Outside millions of people are facing tragedy, while I am anxiously dancing around my room in my boxers, strumming the chords to a Green Day song as I figure out how in the hell I’m going to finish the three writing assignments I have due on Sunday.
Furious with the state of the world, my thoughts, and my voice are confined to walls of my room, where the angsty tones of My Chemical Romance and Rage Against the Machine assault my ears.
With no outlet to channel my delusions of revolutionary grandeur, I was left time to think.
Being a socially anxious loner I lamented at the loss of the opportunity to talk to all the women I definitely would have talked to had I not been trapped inside.
But in between the fits of the teen angst I should’ve outgrown by now, I came to realize my place in the world.
As much as we as Americans idealize the gruff cowboy, the Clint Eastwood type with his pension for cigarillos and his heart of gold that hides behind a grim demeanor. None of us can live up to this heroic fantasy. That may seem like an obvious truth, but in the eyes of an idealist confronting this becomes a hopeless reality.
Despite my homebody status I came to find that maybe all this shouting in my boxers isn’t as useless as I make it out to be. Not to say that I somehow think federal politicians will somehow hear me through my TV screen and have a change of heart. But maybe all this anger, all this thought can be translated into something that has some kind of value.
While ranting in my underwear doesn’t have the same importance as marching for racial equality or saving people’s lives in the hospital.
Maybe typing up my ravings into an article or a song, can have some sort of good for the world.
Maybe if we all say how fed up we are with the status quo we could drown out the divisive voices that make us think the world has gone absolutely insane.
Maybe it’s time we drop the notion that one politician or figure is going to save us all. That one voice or one person can fix all the problems we’ve come to see all around us.
Maybe it’s time we became a nation that spent less time worshiping idols and more time shouting in our underwear.
While ranting in my underwear doesn’t have the same importance as marching for racial equality or saving people’s lives in the hospital. Maybe typing up my ravings into an article or a song, can have some sort of good for the world.