JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I don’t watch horror movies because my brain won’t shut up afterwards, and I can’t sleep from imagining worst-case scenarios. What if the heroes are overwhelmed? What if an ally turns? What if the big bad can’t be destroyed that way? It’s my work. Fiction-writing entails answering a series of What if’s, usually with very little information. Pick an option and live with it, or produce nothing.

Last night this happened, but I didn’t need a horror movie to trigger it. Right now reality beats the shit out of vampires and demon babies. My fears did not center on contracting covid-19, but on the attendant scenarios. What if we run out of food, will there be food riots? A friend used to say that in the event of an apocalypse he did not want to be the last person left alive, spending his remaining days guarding a pile of canned goods with a shotgun. Will there be cannibalism? Closer to home, what if lockdown lasts more than 30 days and I run out of money? (I’ve been on the verge of poverty, it’s not pleasant.) What if the inevitable global recession kills all my sources of work? What if, having survived the Dark Ages (which were not so dark), the Black Death, and the digital revolution, books finally die? I would have no way of making a living, not that there would be any point to it. What if resources become so scarce that we have to line up for hours for toilet paper and beans as they did in the USSR? What if civilization collapses and society becomes a John Carpenter movie or Mad Max: Fury Road?

On and on my brain kept blabbing until I fell asleep from exhaustion. But when I woke up my anxiety had diminished: I had imagined terrors and I was still alive. That’s why we watch disaster movies, because ghastly things happen and we get to walk away from the theatre unscathed.

Movie theatres are closed, as are shops in malls except for groceries, drugstores, hardware stores, diagnostic clinics, banks, and restaurants for take-out orders and delivery. So last night’s meal at Ikomai is the last time I dine out till mid-April.