For the collection: 'Life in the time of #COVID'
Sing along to that wonderful cover of “Imagine” by John Lennon, performed by an ensemble of all your favorite celebrities.
Read a short story, like The Masque of The Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe.
Watch a movie, like Parasite by Bong Joon-ho, or Jaws by Steven Spielberg.
Play board games, like Risk, or Monopoly.
Play video games, like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, or DOOM Eternal, or The Oregon Trail.
Watch something factual, like a documentary about the Roman Empire under the rule of Emperor Nero. Or something more current, such as journalistic fact-checking about all the things Trump said about his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which he afterwards said he didn’t say, all while calling it and defending his choice in calling it the ‘Chinese virus.’
Read an article or book for intellectual enrichment. Like some research on ‘stochastic terrorism,’ defined as ‘the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted,’ in conjunction with federal warnings concerning the rise of racially-motivated hate crimes against people of Asian descent. Or study the subject of ‘precarity’ as defined by the field of cultural anthropology, that definition being, “the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks becoming differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.”
Learn a new skill. Teach yourself how to create something simple, practical, and in high demand. Like protective breathing masks for when you go outside. Or poetry, because the only raw materials you need are some way of writing the words down, as well as all the thoughts and feelings you’re having while living under quarantine. Or guillotines, for when band-aids just aren’t cutting it for you anymore.
Marc Cid is a photographer for The Definitive Soapbox, a Long Beach-based open mic night venue in California; the author of a book of poetry due to be published this year by Silver Star Laboratory, titled 'Your Funeral Sucked, by the Way,' which contains poems about suicide ideation, bereavement, and stigmatization; and he is beginning his first quarter this spring at Antioch University in their MA in Clinical Psychology program. His work has been published in print and online publications such as Black Napkin Press, The East Jasmine Review, and Sadie Girl Press.