Summertime in a Pandemic Chicago
No heavy thoughts here. I’ve taken two days away from work during the pandemic. That means, I stayed home, I took time to write, hours to myself to edit, pacing back and forth with my iPad in the park, hours staring at words on a screen. After that spent me, I took bike rides with my best friend, my long time lover of 23 years and we explored parts of the city that we never go together when we can take CTA or drive or walk.
We brought cans to a park. We laid out a blanket. We looked at all the people eating on blankets like us. We had a dog run onto our blanket and try to get at our mouths. We found a lake I never once noticed in the center of the city before. We used these new tarot-inspired cards that were invented by some academic group in Milan to spur imagination.
I’ve got a 360 camera that was purchased to document gallery space and installations, but given our drought of artsy affairs, I started playing with it wherever I go. I feel like a kid again with this little device. You don’t do much, you hold it or put it on a stand and it takes literally everything into a photo. I could spend a lot of time thinking about what this means as someone who writes fiction. I spend plenty of time worshipping the idea of ‘slowness’ in fiction.
Taking a moment, slowing it down, showing its every detail. Well, with this device, a single click can do that and the way you can explore the photo later, zooming in, zooming out, playing it like a video - it’s bizarre and familiar, it feels like a thing my mind goes through when I’m drafting a scene, feeling my way frame by frame through a still image I see in my mind. That’s how I love to write. That’s how I love to see. It’s a form of omniscience, a slow, quiet knowing.
