Trance Trance Trance
By: Laura Buchholz
Tags: Masks, Pandemic, Trance, Wisconsin, Winter

2021: A welcome respite, but also kind of gross.

Have you ever stopped arguing with someone, not because the argument was over and you came to some sort of mutual understanding, but because you realized that there was no point in arguing anymore, and you just needed to get away from them?

That is the point I’m at with this pandemic.

Pointless

Sometimes fighting online is fun. I’ve done it. People have watched. Well I wouldn’t say *fun.* But when you know you’re right and the other side is way out of line and coming at you like a school of hungry piranhas fueled by toxic condescending masculinity — sometimes you just have to. Sometimes it works.

But when “sometimes you just have to” stretches into the 11th, nearly 12th month of the pandemic and you have idiots sorry esteemed representatives in Madison who are *still* trying to repeal the state mask mandate (OH MY GAHD STAHP) — and oh look, they actually did it — sometimes you hit a point where it’s like — okay forget it.

Just wow

Now, I could say “Wow what a bunch of fucking lunatics” or “Wisconsin is embarassing to humanity” or compare these officials who someone apparently elected to secret robot aliens bent on total planetary destruction via bad legislation. I could say that. But instead I think I’ll just say, “interesting choice.”

DIY or no

My little town might enact its own mask mandate, I don’t know. They were debating it last night, again. This mandate, if passed, would include a fine for violations, which I’m sure will be super fun to enforce. Here’s a fun story from Madison about a dance studio that got fined for doing a production of The Nutcracker. Awesome. Anyway the last time a local mandate came up in Eau Claire, the council put it on hold to get more buy-in from the business community, which is like trying to get a drug addict to repay a loan by giving them the keys to your car.

I don’t have a lot of hope. So I don’t want to think about it anymore. With the vaccine rollout moving at the speed of double-hip-replacement rehab patient, it looks now like I might be staying home for 2021, too. So what to do with this next chunk of down time?

Trance it off

I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing but my aim is to enter a sort of state of suspended animation where I’m technically still alive and aware, but a few steps closer to a coma than would normally be ideal in regular life. If I did drugs, I suppose I’d achieve it that way, but I don’t, so I’m figuring out other ideas.

In short, I’m hoping to put myself into a sort of a chronic, long-term trance, where I’ll only really wake up when I get called in for the vaccine, and even then I’ll have to trance it out between shots, and again for two weeks after the second shot. So I imagine we’re talking about five to six months of staring, glassy-eyed into the void, but by choice, while wearing cool robes. I don’t have the details worked out yet, but here is my short list of ideas to help achieve this state of voluntary long-term detachment:

Knitting a sweater. This is a big endeavor and could easily take me months. Based on what happened last night, it might even take me months just to cast on 28 stitches of thin, lumpy yarn onto some very slippery needles to do my test swatch. Writing a thing. I don’t want to talk about the thing here but let’s just say this is also a big endeavor that could take months. It may also take me a few weeks and up to a year to metabolize the oversized shame bolus I have somewhere in my body from not having finished this thing years ago. Even though I know that the nature of my full-time job makes returning to the computer in the evening an unlikely if not impossible feat. Honestly it’s been completely impossible. Maybe slipping into a trance will help. Maybe I’ll have to make a different life adjustment. Getting a new candle and burning it down. Somehow I’ve managed to burn my entire apple orchard candle already. It was a big one — like a REALLY big one. It’s gone. I need a new candle. One that smells like something aspirational. Staring at the fire. In the fireplace. Or the candle. Or both. Get me some flames to look at. Optional: ice candles. It’s cold enough, so I want to try making those ice candle things that you put out in your yard. I’m thinking of trying them with food coloring to do pink or red ones, for a little extra wow factor. But maybe that’s tacky. It’s probably tacky. But not as tacky as our legislature — hey-O!

Okay, welp. There you go — winter life in Wisconsin, the aspiring Death Star of the North. Follow me for more lifestyle tips.