JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I got email from a representative of J.D. Salinger’s literary trust demanding that I take down a photo, from a blog post in 2011, of a letter Salinger had written in reply to a fan. I first heard of the letter from the excellent Letters of Note, and I linked to an auction house that was selling said letter. While I was deleting the post, having time on my hands, I deleted other posts containing anything that might conceivably be construed as infringement on J.D. Salinger’s rights. (If only they had stopped those two terrible movies about their late client.)

And since I still had time to spare, I started considering at last if I am too old to be a J.D. Salinger fan, being way past 14—the age at which I started admiring a novel about a rich teenager on the lam in New York. I am so attached to The Catcher In The Rye that I learned to write fiction by imitating the voice of its protagonist (with laughable results).

Finally I concluded, not without pettiness but with much nostalgia, that there’s no time like a pandemic to move on from my childhood identification with a fictional character. I shall always regard Catcher and the Glass stories with affection, but from hereon they go into my Young Adult memories, along with the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the James Blish novelizations of the original Star Trek, and Hall and Oates cassettes.

Lockdown is the right time for dramatic pronouncements—they have no competition. At the moment I am reconsidering fast fashion. Of course dressing up at home is good for the morale, especially if one is attending conferences remotely, but I am happiest wearing ancient oversized T-shirts while reading and writing. My going-out clothes are just sitting in the closet—I realize I could go a year or three without buying new clothes. And a lot of things I buy at the mall, like vegetables (Fine, I never used to buy them, but I do now), milk, and coffee, I can now get online, direct from the source, more cheaply.

True, it’s not good for the economy and labor force if we stop spending money, but I will shop hand-made, local, sustainable. And buy even more books. Books have kept me comparatively sane in quarantine, plus I have a vested interest in the survival of books and booksellers (I wonder when I can start selling books again).

Along with pretty much everything, the pandemic is trashing my theory of world domination (i.e. that the millions of Filipino workers overseas are our advance army.) Someone reminded me that in the worldwide economic downturn, OFWs will probably be sent home. With oil prices in freefall and so many OFWs in the Middle East, that looks likely. We have long relied on remittances from OFWs to keep our economy afloat in bad times; we are heading for very bad times without that reliable life preserver. Now we have to do what we should’ve been doing: create jobs at home so Filipinos don’t have to go abroad to support their families. The world is resetting. We cannot rely on the same stopgap measures that have become economic policies.

Some good news: Mass screening for Covid-19 has begun. Slooowly, but it’s started. Friends report that is possible to find a boyfriend on dating apps during lockdown. And in Carmona, Cavite, a mobile circumcision booth called “Operation Manhood on Wheels” will conduct procedures door to door. Yes, in these times of great peril, no boy need go uncircumcised: better coronavirus than foreskins. Priorities!