Chapter 22: A Pandemic

ADSS Presents Genesis

Coronavirus for a Simp (2020):

Flatten the curve?

Who the hell wants to flatten the curve?

I love her curves.

Her curves are vivacious.

Her curves, I adore.

Her curves, make me feel a little less lonely at night,

Her curves keep me awake as I watch her IG Live,

Her curves,

She curves,

I’m left alone.

Crying for help,

On the internet.



The pandemic for me, like many other folks, was a heart-wrenching experience. It was in January of 2020 was when I first started to hear whispers at work and in the news of a deadly virus that could reach the states. At this point I was like most other naive Americans and didn’t think it would reach us or make a major impact. When my mind changed was when the NBA shut down. On March 11, 2020 a player tested positive for COVID, and the season was indefinitely put on hold.

The day after this, I made a sly remark in a work thread that the NBA, a billion-dollar business that invests in player health is shutting down, yet, we, non-profit workers, are asked to come to work. Little did I know that the dichotomy of who would and wouldn’t be asked to go to work would be a major talking point throughout the pandemic. Essential workers continued to help our economy flow.

Soon after that comment was made, either the next day or so, we all were asked to work from home. The first few days were confusing. Catching the news each day, it was hard to discern how one could and couldn’t catch the virus. Early on I decided to shut my windows, despite my rundown apartment in Pilsen, Chicago having no AC, to ensure I didn’t catch the virus. The routine of getting high to the point I was pretty much incapacitated would run it’s course.

I would spend weekend days going outside to Harrison Park. Sometimes bringing a chair to read and journal. Other times just to wander around. One day specifically I remember finding some holes in a concrete wall and creating a game where I tried to toss rocks into the various holes. A couple that passed by got a chuckle out of my imagination. I thought it would turn into a bonding opportunity.

Later in the summer, I sat reading one day and saw a man laid down on the other side of the soccer field. It was a warm day, I didn’t think much of it. An hour later, a couple of police officers arrived and circled the man. An ambulance would be called. The man was dead.

I would be remiss not to reflect on the murder of George Floyd, and the social after effects. I never watched the full video of George Floyd’s death. I was not interested in seeing another black life killed. I wasn’t interested in trying to explain to myself why it felt normal.

As protests started to pop-up, I wasn’t aware. I wasn’t on social media. While I had before been avoidant of mainly black spaces, I had just finished teaching a school year with a majority black staff for the first time in my life. I had done the early reflections on better understanding myself as an adult black male within the American landscape. I was ready to march.

I marched with a BLM protest, through downtown Chicago, on a summer day in 2020. Yelling through my COVID surgical mask, I was proud to walk alongside other people my age, those who wanted their voices heard. I reflected back on my childhood. The times I didn’t feel “black” enough, and thinking about myself then, in that moment, walking for racial justice. Better understanding that that childhood internal battle, of trying to measure up to societal pressures to act a certain way, based on my race, is just a monkey dance. To those that would never view me as equal, the idea of blackness, to them, is just a competition at death.

It was inspiring to see the level organization that day in reaction to events. With thousands of people, blocking major roadways throughout a major American city, without much prior notice. While I was alone in my apartment, I knew I wasn’t the only one experiencing the world on the outside.

My mental health struggled during that time. But, I was using the struggles to teach me about my emotions. Awakened to myself, starting a journey of sobriety, struggling at work, and eventually leaving my non-profit job to go back into teaching solely for the pay, the summer of 2020 was one that took quite a toll on me. I heard of many folks that went home so they wouldn’t have to be on their own. I didn’t have that solace as my relationship with my parents was poor since that traumatic Christmas back in 2017.

I was beginning to reconnect and talk with my mom though. In my head, that traumatic experience made me regress the next three years. I didn’t want to spend more years of my life going backwards. I made the decision that wherever I was at that moment, would be my starting place.

During those pandemic summer nights, I would chat on the phone with a friend from my hometown, ride the new electric city bikes around Pilsen streets, and simply live. I wasn’t at peace mentally, but I was grateful that the wild rollercoaster that was my life had stop moving. I began writing just to write. Through writing, I felt the need to share what I was writing. Maybe hoping that the things I was thinking, would be of interest to others. I didn’t have to talk about things in a curriculum, and I could write instead of talk. Teaching was quickly behind me, replaced with the freedom of creativity. I started two blogs. One titled, “Undefined”.

The other called, “A Dollar and A Dream”:

I share each logo from the site because this would be my first forrays into design. I took what I knew about Microsoft Word and Canva to create each design, respectively. The first blog was just a place to write.I would put journal entries and my first attempts at stories there. The second blog was a bit more focused. I would write about things that interested me in pop culture. Music, comedy, technology, movies.

Here’s a sample article I titled, “The AR Race Begins”:

In 2020 amid the pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg conducted an interview with Marques Brownlee, a Youtube tech wiz, to talk about the future of technology, among other things. In the interview, Zuckerberg imagines a situation where friends are playing cards, each friend in a different location, their experience shared through hologram versions of one another. One friend snaps their fingers, and cards appear, allowing the group of friends to play a card game virtually without coming into contact with one another. I’ve thought about that scenario for a while now, thinking about all the ways a tech giant like Facebook is thinking of ways of profiting off our our forced distancing from one another, and designing ways for us to interact with one another virtually, though at a price.

Facebook is beginning to work to make this a reality. Their newest AR/VR headset, Oculus Quest 2, released right during the holiday season in October of 2020, with a reasonable pricetag of $299. The Washington Post reported that the headsets sold over 2 million units in the fourth quarter of last year, possibly leading to more investment in the future of similar headsets. And they were right.

A couple days ago, Microsoft debuted a video of their AR platform and headsets, Microsoft Mesh, with a video with no release date. In the video it shows a complete AR software that could have various potential uses for a range of fields from business, to the classroom, to personal use.

Google has already debuted AR technology to their Google Maps.

Apple has patented a headset most likely hinting they’re not far behind.

I’m sure Amazon is thinking about the AR/VR future.

Where is this all headed? With anything in technology, these tech giants are trying to predict or better yet, decide, what we need for our future, and the pandemic has quickened the pace to their projections. We have been sitting around our homes for a year on these video calls, lacking the dynamic of in-person interaction, growing more fatigued by the day from trying to transform our human experience into 3x3 square versions of ourselves on a computer screen.

These tech giants aren’t betting that the comforts of working from home are here to stay, they are betting that American convenience is. Why head to the office when you can be working remotely from a beach somewhere and still make that meeting? A Lakers game at the Staples Center is fun, but why not be able to enjoy the game with your college buddy in New Jersey from the comforts of your homes? Ultimately we are looking for a convenient way to partake in said experience, not necessarily that it needs to be the real thing.

Does all this AR/VR technology take off in the next 10 years? Who knows? These tech companies obviously are betting yes. The question is, will people take the bait? Or do we value our in-person experiences more than any virtual duplicated replica? Only time will tell.

It wouldn’t be until later in the pandemic where I began a consistent writing practice. At first, I was writing out of need. A deep primal need inside me to express myself. For some, screaming, or punching, or acting out of control may do. For me, my soul howls through my pen. While I had written pieces I was proud of before, I noticed that a few poems I wrote during the early stages of the pandemic unleashed a creative writing side of me I hadn’t quite seen before.

My first piece, I regretted for a while. I don’t look down on folks that bare their souls on social media, but that wasn’t me. I had a Facebook account, more out of habit than interest, I would look at once a day. Over time, as other social media sites exploded like Twitter, and Instagram, I wasn’t very interested in the social media world, and I barely used Facebook at all.

Then, during the pandemic, I wrote a poem, titled “Father”, and felt a deep desire to share it. I was a bit high and lonely, and outside of the poem expressing a deep truth, I felt it showed a bit of talent. I posted it on my Facebook page. People even “liked” the post so I got the external validation I wanted. But, I felt embarrassed for not being able to control my emotions later on.

For the poems that I felt proud of writing during that time, I felt like they each came to me naturally. A feeling that someone put the words inside me, and it was just my job to get them out. As I’ve written more consistently since this point in my life, I’ve grown to understand my creativity to be a bit like that.

It’s not that I don’t craft my pieces, but sometimes, I just write, and what comes out I think is beautiful. I wish I could say I planned it all, or spent days or weeks crafting it. And sometimes I do. But other times, the words just spill out of me and I am proud of them. Here are the 4 poems I was most proud of writing during the pandemic.

Father (2020):

Father. I cried out for you.

I gasped, and your hand suppressed my voice.

I cried out, begging, to find faith, the faith I lost,

In life. In the ability to love.

I existed. Underneath. Down an endless spiral staircase of fear I drifted.

To where, I could not see.

I landed. I stopped breathing. I embraced death.

At the end of all, what is loss?

I remembered, but I could not forgive. And I crumbled.

And by hand.

Brick.

By brick.

Alone.

I reconstructed.

I forgave.

And with tears streaming down my chin,

I looked to a brighter day;

To a cloud,

And saw...

I dreamed a friend. (2020):

When I was young, I dreamed a friend,

of a kind I yet knew.

A simple glimpse, and knowledge shown,

A gift to a select few.

At times I patched the silhouette,

Took care and kept, bedside it slept,

When I was young, I dreamed a friend,

of a kind I yet knew.

When I was old, I dreamed a friend,

of a kind never met.

Across the skies, my candied prize,

A smile sweet as sunset,

With moonlit eyes, on stars we crept,

Aloft the cries of clouds we met,

When I was old, I dreamed a friend,

of a kind never met.

When I was dead, I dreamed a friend,

of a kind I once had.

Tried and true, but black and blue,

Eternity turned fad.

Brushed off the dust to search the crust,

Though depth been long decayed,

When I was dead, I dreamed a friend,

a friend I dream today.

My Rap Name Should Be Morpheus Vol. 2 (2020):

Falling down like a star from sky,

Landing in the muck of fear and lies,

Opaque on the surface, underneath lies truth,

Acceptance of failures and choices from youth.

A spirit, reborn! A weight has been lifted,

Once thought only given to children of privilege.

With fear non-existent, I grow and I listen,

I glisten, I’ve risen, up from that dark prison.

But who am I kiddin’? I’ve run from my mission,

I hope to one day be the man I envisioned,

It starts with decisions, you feel me? I’m different.

To drinking and smoking, I’m saying good riddance,

I’m healing myself, my sole focus of livin’,

It costs to be GREAT, and greatness ain’t given,

I’ll beat my addictions, I see no restrictions,

In time, I will show that my dreams are not fiction,

So trust when I say this is only beginnin’.

God Said Nothing (2020):

At death’s door I waited.

God grinned; he said nothing,

But bellowed words of wisdom;

Deafening--soul shattering soliloquies,

Whispered in his wily silence,

And echoed through his haughty eternities.

Rejected from heaven,

I watched the story of men

Play out in cycles,

Rotating along a finite thread of time.

From hell I wrote,

“Boy begets man,

Man begets monsters,

And monsters beget tomorrows.”

Or so the story goes.


Each poem here, written between May and August of 2020, gave me a bit of confidence I wouldn’t immediately act on. I shared each poem with folks, and I think the reaction was varied. I think most folks were like, “Yes, I write too.”

What those folks didn’t realize is that I felt that I was tapping into something deeper within me.

I needed extra validation with my budding talent and enjoyed seeing what people thought of my writing. I would occasionally hope on Reddit and share my poems. On a poetry Reddit page, I remember someone saying in response to “God Said Nothing”, “You are insanely talented”.

I remember reading it and being like, huh. I don’t hear that everyday about anything I do. Especially with feeling like such a mess with teaching at the time.

For the poem “I dreamed a friend.”, I took the words and set them to street art I had taken pictures of wandering around Chicago during those first few months during the pandemic. Google Photos allows you to print out photobooks where you can add text below the images. I created a “poem book” if you will, using the images of street art, and the text of the poem and gave it as a gift to folks in my family. My aunt said it made her cry. I remember telling her it was showing a bit of my artistic side, and she said, “maybe you should be”, as in, maybe I should be an artist. I recall these moments for a reason. They were the micro-moments of validation I needed that would help me get to where I am now. We’re not there in the story yet though.

It was by September of 2020 when I first decided I would commit to writing each day. I first had a small notebook, one that could probably fit in your palm, that I was writing in. I chose that size specifically because it was the same size of the first composition notebook I had in high school that I used as a journal and a place for my poetry and writing during my first bout of depression. The journal was a bit of nostalgia. Also a reminder of the ways the past is so hard to let go. I didn’t put pressure on myself to write poetry or anything of substance, though I felt in my bones I wanted to.

My journal started out as calls for help.