No Focus
with
Natasha Stagg

Coming up with tag lines is a weird balance between addressing relevant topics and attempting relevance, which in the end can feel as slippery as writing poetry, but whenever some overwhelming, ubiquitous topic creates a current of new meanings, writing copy gets murkier: words float upwards or get sucked downwards, depending on what associations could be read into them, and nothing sounds as prescient as it would have a few months ago.

Communications with friends and acquaintances have become loaded. The crisis is so complex and far-reaching, I don’t find it refreshing to avoid it, as if casual conversation is possible. But others disagree. The problem is that I’m listing grievances but not solutions. Why, I ask, should I know the answers?

Most ideas are bad, as an economist on NPR said the other day. It feels as if I’m in a dystopian plot, wherein some of the characters have chosen not to question it. I’ve heard it described as a tangible end to collective anxiety, the brink of an unfathomable catastrophe, and a cold war. I have to admit that I get a thrill every time Amy Goodman says she’s reporting from the epicenter of the crisis, New York City.

I think about physical spaces that might disappear. I met my boyfriend at a sweaty basement party. I’ve never had so much fun as when I am on a plane with him, or on a boat with my friends, or in a hotel room alone. Time is moving incredibly quickly now, like a storm after the sky had been swelling ominously for years. Still, people are bored by the new breakneck pace of life because it is happening to each of us in isolation, if we can afford it. I have become aware that some people do not find hourly calamity updates impressive, and that I have little in common with these people.

When I begin to imagine the ultimate irony—that our current president’s legacy could be some version of universal basic income, paid sick leave, declining carbon emissions, student loan forgiveness, or a higher minimum wage, instead of a stronger economy—I hear him introduce another set of CEOs leading the fight to make America entirely corporate, and then a report on the environmental protection laws, quietly being turned back. The New York primary already felt so far away, and now it’s been postponed.

There are no solutions I, a copywriter with an MFA in fiction, can offer, and that’s the way it should be. All I can say is, this world is bullshit. The system is rigged. Money isn’t real. Self-care isn’t healthcare. The maxim “stay home,” while helpful to some, is grating to those who once had valid reasons for spending as much time away from home as possible.

Neither our government nor most people care about the empty little bars and movie theaters in my neighborhood, or their out-of-work employees. It feels backwards that my job as a freelance writer is less precarious than theirs are, at least at this moment. Madonna, from a bathtub of rose petals, called this coronavirus a great equalizer, but it has so far created a new set of class distinctions.

When I was in college, I didn’t have a home other than the campus, which is closed now. I don’t know what I would have done if something like this had happened then. I would have figured something out, but I also would have tried to let the world know how unfair it was, relentlessly, maybe for the rest of my life. I would also have been considered an essential worker, since I was a store clerk. There are pictures of me then, wearing a hat and gloves because it was always too cold in that store, scowling at the men who wanted me to carry full cases of wine to the trunks of their cars.

I missed that job when it ended—the wooden shelves I would climb to reach the top shelf liquor in a short skirt and the bottle return counter that smelled like cigarette butts soaking in empties. I remember it as where I was most in my element, even though I complained about having to work my way through college by servicing my wealthier schoolmates. It would be closed now, anyway, if it wasn’t already leveled years ago to make room for more dorms. It’s absolutely the end of an era, but somehow it doesn’t feel like we’ll witness anything altogether new.

Natasha Stagg is the author of Surveys (2016) and Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011–2019 (2019), each published by Semiotext(e).