Rumbelstrips

Rumble strips.

It’s only when you are veering slightly to the one side of the motorway, dozing off or zoning out, that the rumblestrips wake you with the electricity of the shorting shock. The world returns in loud and glorious technicolour, bringing your focus from dreamy to laser-like so fast it spasms through your veins, making the blood seem sluggish. You feel relief and terror, relief and horror, relief and such a clarity that it could be religious or drug-induced.

The shocking, visceral experience of the rumblesrip sensation has basically accompanied me all my life. Though I don’t remember it, I suspect it started when my dad died. I was six. And it has been far more intrusive since my sister was murdered 15 years ago - a constant and nauseating companion.

Rumblestrips are designed to be discordant and jarring, to remind you that you are off the path. And so with my life, too odd to be brought in any way back into the safety of the right track. Even as a little kid my knowledge of the fragility and pointlessness of things never left me and any attempt to put it away in its ill-fitting sleeve so I could go to a party and play musical chairs would always result in it bursting forth once I was alone again, stopping me sleeping, making me too nauseous to eat.

Inevitably I’ve become accustomed to the juddering sensation and angry growl of the rumbelstrip. It’s my leitmotif that mostly only reveals itself in others’ shocked looks when I make a bleak joke. I feel as if I’m Pig-Pen from Peanuts, only instead of some hum of filth, my whole existence drums out a dissonant and jarring thrum for others. Of course I sometimes sing at the top of my voice in the car, but only, really, to drown out the incessant shuddering pounding of road the engineering. The rumblesrip, my constant companion.

It was, then, a strange thing that happened when the prospect of isolation hoved into view, as the pandemic’s hold dug in and nation after nation girded its loins to brace for the unknown, to add to the clear loss and fear. And that thing was that I stepped into line with life, or rather it stepped into line with me. The disconcerting weirdness of the exigencies of Covid-19 circled above us, suggesting the darkest of times, threatening our very understanding of ourselves and everything we work for, why we get up every day.

It was as if the world slid into my step, that suddenly what I have been assured is a terrible way to look at and think of the world, my point of view, had become just the thing. The noise of the rumblestrip subsided as we all started to breath the same fears. There was no more disonance, no more keeping to the straight and narrow: in a matter of days the straight and the narrow had vanished.

Accustomed as I am to disaster, this feels horrible and right, just as life always has to me. This is what I was expecting, what I have always expected. This Thing or something like it. Terrible Things. If you think you’ve thought of it, the Terrible Thing which will happen will, almost always, be outside not only your experience but your imagination too. The knowledge of the Terrible Thing and its imminence, distant or near, is one of the reasons I can never concentrate, never get on with anything, I mean, what is the point? Something Terrible is always about to happen - has already happened - and I can’t imagine what the point of anything is in the light of the about-to-occur Terrible Thing. In normal life I am unproductive and sluggish, often so apathetic that I watch myself driving my own life off a cliff and can’t even raise my head from the pillow to yell ‘stop!’.

So what’s changed? I am still and always dragging myself through the molten custard of disaster, but now, so are most people. No one knows what’s right. Twitter has gone from telling each other that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine, to assuring themselves that the grip of a pandemic is not necessarily a time where you have to be productive, to generate endless work or words or leads or positivity. Creatives are announcing that it’s okay to mourn, because it is hope we are mourning. Whatever you thought 2020 would bring it’s pretty unlikely it’s going to go that way. Of course that’s always true, but this time all normal bets are off.

And the illusion of control, which is what most humans hanker after most of the time, cannot be collectively or individually maintained in the way that it was. Are you a good person? A hard worker? Got irons in the fire? Covid-19 does not care. And yet it is not an equal opportunity virus, people will be affected in similar but different ways. There is no controlling much at all, maybe what you decide to cook with what you manage to buy, maybe how you divide up your day - if you suddenly find yourself without your usual work routine, but not much else. And even if you were a person with your own routine which you created before, you may find you cannot adhere to it. We have lurched onto the rumblestrip and keeping ourselves on the straight and narrow could be a mammoth challenge.

It was only relatively recently that I realised I’ve lived a life of anxiety, that general anxiety about everything and nothing. Anxiety about what was going to happen, when it happened, and how on earth I would manage That Thing which was going to happen. Now at least I know roughly what might happen. Having any thought of being able to control events, that I am failing when others around me are making lives, being successful, unconcerned by impending doom, has receded remarkably. Who’s achieving anything? Of course, those who are caring for others, and who are making our society tick over with their driving/checkout/ intubating skills. They are achieving it all. But apart from that? I am not them, although I am trying to do what I can for those around me. It relieves so much steam and stress to know that suddenly we are all thrown into an abyss of what-the-very-fuck.

Of course I worry that I’ll end up with no bones, no skin, no structure at all, but that was happening to me anyway. I’ve always been disintegrating. Now it’s just The Thing That’s Coming - there is no point in fighting the moment. There are things we can do, but this will make its own progress and we will all make a life with whatever’s left, and that will have to be okay. As with bereavement, you can fight the idea of the loss, but the loss is itself, it remains. This time, though, in different ways, we are all in it together and unlike bereavement we are collectively losing your sense of reality, rather than doing it by ourselves. Doing it alone, as we mostly do, is lonely and disorientating. This is lonely in an entirely different way and more disorientating than most life experiences, yet so many people are doing it.

My strange life of loss and lack of progress seem to have be preparation for these days. I am unproductive, and unhappy, yet I am far less anxious than usual. I remain pointless, but the difference is, I suspect, that at this time I am far less alone in all of that than I have ever been. And that knowledge makes me sorry - who would want to think and feel like me? And it makes me super-aware that we are not alone during this time of isolation as we face The Thing which is just on the other side of the rumblestrip. We are together, dancing to its maddening sound.