The Destruction of Devices
“The country I live in is a strange one, a place where the poor express their frustration by stealing and destroying electronic devices, while the rich express theirs by threatening to shoot everyone.”
Photo by Tbel Abuseridze
Six Weeks In
My state has now been on lockdown for six long weeks, with almost everything closed except the supermarket and the liquor store. I know some of my friends are loving the isolation, loving the slower pace of daily life and the chance to spend more time with loved ones.
That’s not how I’m living. I worked from home before the lockdown started, and I still work from home. Most days, what the lockdown means for me is that I don’t interact with other human beings at all. On a typical day, the first time I say a word out loud is when I call my daughters at 7pm. Other than one brief call, most of my days are lived in silence.
From the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep – assuming I sleep at all – I have to fight to maintain my mental health. The best time of day for me is always the morning. I start with a massive cup of good black coffee, a plate of eggs, and a book. Right now, I’m reading Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson, a story of a cyberpunk future that seems increasingly unrealistic as our technological world teeters on the edge of collapse. I’m also reading Mama Lola by Karen McCarthy Brown, a book about a Vodou priestess who lives in Brooklyn.
After breakfast, I still train martial arts for half an hour, and I still pray to the elements of Gaelic lore. Standing in front of my window, I bless my day with an ancient prayer: “I arise today by the strength of heaven, by the light of the sun, by the radiance of the moon…”
Then I sit down and work for several hours: freelance writing and editing for multiple clients. I hardly notice the day pass. At least for me, working from home means working so hard that whole days disappear like dreams. I’ll look up from a project and it will be almost time for dinner; I won’t even remember what my day was like.
That isn’t the hard part, though. The hard part is after dinner, when the sun sets, and the night stretches out in front of me, and I have to face my solitude. The lockdown didn’t change my life much; it just took away everything that made it easier. My days are spent strategizing how to survive without the things I need.
Things Get Broken…
Every now and then, I have to leave the house to replenish my supplies. Two weeks ago, I took a train to the supermarket. When I got on the train, there was a man behind me coughing violently. I was on that train for twenty minutes, and not for a single minute of that ride did he stop coughing.
On the other end of the car, a man suddenly reached out and grabbed someone else’s smart phone. He turned around and whipped it at the floor as violently as possible, then ran over and picked it up before throwing it at the floor again. The phone was destroyed, and the man he had stolen it from stood up and attacked him suddenly. They had a fistfight in the aisle, bobbing and weaving and throwing punches, and the sick man kept coughing behind me the whole time.
I picked up my groceries and got back on the train. By the time I stepped off and started walking home, a powerful wind had come up. The wind was so strong that it forced me to take two steps back, pushing me up the hill with several bags of groceries in my hands. I set down my bags to rearrange them, and one of my bags of groceries blew away down the street.
The next time I had to leave my apartment, a man walked into a pharmacy and stole a piece of electronic equipment. I don’t know what it was exactly, but he grabbed it and ran out and then smashed it into pieces on the street, throwing it at the ground until it cracked apart in the box.
I don’t know why people keep stealing devices and then destroying them in front of me. It feels like it means something, but I don’t know what.
Meanwhile, the country keeps getting weirder. People are showing up at protests against the lockdown, waving Confederate flags or signs with Nazi slogans on them. These aren’t like the people on that train: essential workers, unable to practice social distancing, packed into a train car with each other in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t know why I keep seeing people destroy devices, but I’m not surprised that the stress and fear of this situation is producing strange behavior.
No, the people attending these protests are from a completely different world, a world where you can show up at a protest carrying a rifle that costs thousands of dollars, intentionally threatening people with the fear of death… and face no consequences at all.
The country I live in is a strange one, a place where the poor express their frustration by stealing and destroying electronic devices, while the rich express theirs by threatening to shoot everyone.
It’s also the most powerful country in the world. Or at least it used to be. There are cracks in that power now, and the cracks are widening. I don’t know what’s coming next, but from here it looks frightening.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
Christopher Scott Thompson is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, devotee of Brighid and Macha, and a wandering exile roaming the earth.