They just keep moving the line
A report from early-middle quar, if that's what time is now.
I organized my closet today, which feels about six months late in quar time, but then again I also just set up a home office. I pulled two bags of clothes to donate and finally swapped out a terrible collection of plastic and Rent the Runway hangers for those slim velvet types, bought on Black Friday sale from Bed, Bath & Beyond. (For $4 they brought them to my doorstep?!)
I have a lot of clothes, almost all dresses, a surprising number of which are relatively cheap so-called fast fashion — Target and H&M, mostly — but many having lasted long past their reasonable expiration date. Some are more than a decade old. For the past few years I was an aggressive consumer of Rent the Runway’s subscription service, which loaned me a revolving door of four designer items and also meant I bought very few new pieces myself. Though I’ve never cared much for the gamification of almost anything — blame it on growing up a casino rat; I know the game is rigged — my ruthless, relentless quest to absolutely get the most value out of that monthly fee was almost as enjoyable as the fashion. (Only rent items more expensive than I’d ever purchase; send back anything immediately that I wouldn’t wear the next day; when in New York for work take advantage of same-day delivery there to refresh the wardrobe mid-week; etc.)
Since March I’ve paused my RTR subscription each month rather than canceling my membership, though I haven’t used any of the few benefits still available, and there was a really not great series of exposes about their early pivot and layoff of employees that I sent a number of angry emails to them about to no avail or response. On principle it’s a smart business model run by a woman that I’d still like to see succeed and I know venture capital often cares as much about member numbers as actual revenue.
But also, as became immediately apparent while re-hanging a hundred-plus dresses: I’ve been too depressed to wear even the fun fashion I already owned. I’ve been rotating through a comfy and also bland diet of black and gray cotton sacks while sitting on an average of four to six hours of video conference calls every day for no good reason other than that I didn’t have enough energy or enthusiasm to care otherwise. (This is also the explanation behind my decision to stop coloring my hair in March, though I was fully equipped to do so and have dyed my own roots every three or four weeks for years.)
I wistfully tucked our whole subset of glittery/sequined/sparkly party dresses into the least-accessible middle of the closet and felt more FOMO than I have maybe this entire time we’ve spent primarily at home: a night out! How glamorous and unimaginable. I’ve been loathe to do a full purge of the closet because — I mean, how do we know this isn’t the actual cusp of a Great Depression, economically speaking. What if that worn but entirely functional piece of fabric has to get me through the next decade? This, I sort of joked to my wife last week, is what happens to a kid raised on both stories of the Holocaust and the Donner Party. I have been assuming disaster is just outside the door forever.
I am trying to care again, to imagine. I can feel that, too, on the edges of my consciousness. Weekends — holiday weekends! — that don’t have to be filled up every minute just to keep myself from thinking about the (lack of) future. But it’s going to take our bodies, or my body anyway, a lot longer than a few weeks to let go of years of acutely traumatic fear about my future alleged personhood, and then also this year of pandemic that is nowhere near over.
Then this evening I saw this question:
Many, if not most, of the replies set a date for summer or even late fall 2021 as the time when plans might be made, trips might be taken, family might gather in groups. Logically, I would have said the same.
But emotionally I was clinging to those sparkly party dresses in the closet, a full keening arms-around-the-clothes kind of moment. Fall 2021? A year? A year more of this? Suddenly I didn’t care so much about making myself wear the fun dresses to walk down the hall and sit on a video call. A year more of this.
Where are we on “time,” though. That part I’m still considering.
Another year makes this the middle. The beginning is easy to pick out — early quar, when people Marie Kondo’d their closet (except me) and made a new workspace (not quite), and we left the house only to protest and make surgical strikes on a grocery store. We knew people who died then, in the first couple of months, but then not so much until recently has the more personal incursion and fear ramped up again.
The end of the beginning for us, I guess, was deciding to flee the fires in the foothills near our home and spend a month on the road and with friends in cleaner climes, which seemed risky but reasonable at the time (and also absolutely necessary for the bare minimum of my sanity amidst that smoke) but kind of wild already in retrospect. More on all that to come, watch this space, etc.
As much as I believe so fervently that progress and change are not linear — hello, we have clearly been in a massive backslide for some years now — when I write I am often quite literal about the passage of time. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end to every story, no matter what order you tell it in. You start there and try to get here, and in between you learn where you were and what you want and what it takes to transform. To become.
We have been so ready for this chapter of our lives to be over — not over over, if we’re lucky, just of the past — and we’re so clearly nowhere near that conclusion.
Back in mid-early quar, though I’d already spent months (weeks?) covering various live reunions and/or performances, I hadn’t watched any of them in full, not until the cast of the late sometimes-great Smash performed its show-within-a-show, Bombshell, as a fundraiser. Somehow that was enough to warrant a stream being cast to the big tv and a rapt audience of two (plus Miss Thing) on our couch. I remember we cried so much, one of those surprise sobs that hid around every corner especially back in April and May.
That version seems to have already expired from the internet, but here’s Megan Hilty belting out “They Just Keep Moving the Line” from a 2015 performance:
I almost didn’t make it here today, to this Sunday newsletter, despite having been off since Tuesday. I had four days of pretty empty-minded calm followed by an extra-strong Sunday on top of which I suddenly had to consider time. I feel less paralyzed than I did a month ago, but we are hardly set free. We just keep moving the line.
❤️❤️