Raising awareness, now more than ever!

H.P. Lovecraft and his cat, whose name you should Google

Do you ever get a phrase stuck in your head? Like it just repeats over and over and over, and even though there's no sound inside your brainpan it's still somehow there? That happens to me a lot. More lately, to be honest, probably because I'm not speaking as much as I normally do.

Anyway, there are two that have been tormenting me during my waking hours, lately: "now more than ever," which is a shitty sentiment even at the best times — let's be honest, it's nearly always used to whip up jingoistic furor in service of some atrocity — and "raising awareness," which is emptier than hell itself. (All those demons and lost souls are here.)

I think what I'm trying to describe is the feeling these phrases give me when I read them or hear them said, which is a not-terribly-complex mix of sadness, anger, ennui, and desperation. In other words: psychic damage.

The other day my friend Mike was telling me and the rest of our podcast gang about this tabletop roleplaying game from the ’80s titled Call of Cthulhu, which I've recently come to think is a fairly accurate model for what we're going through as a society right now. The game starts with ordinary people who are drawn into the realm of the truly weird, and they don't have any special powers; they can gain skills, but never any hit points. As they encounter the underworld, or the world behind the world, they begin to lose their sanity, which is described in a stat that depletes as things get stranger. As Wikipedia puts it: "Eventual triumph of the players is not assumed."

I'm not suggesting that we're really in the middle of a Lovecraftian fable — except for the racism levels, which have somehow increased — but doesn't this pandemic have all the hallmarks of bad horror fiction? It's like there's a silent killer targeting people more or less at random, and it will touch all of us in some way. There are precautions we can take, but the ambient level of risk for just being alive has gone up. That realization — triggered for me by going to a grocery store so crowded it wasn't really possible to take any of the aforementioned precautions — is enough to lower your SAN stat, I think. Or to deal a couple points of psychic damage. And then there is the solitude of quarantine.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how people encounter the weird, and how it changes them afterward. Like a lot of people, of my favorite shows is The X-Files, and I think one of the best things about it is its depiction of how Scully's absolute faith in reality starts to waver — she doesn't want to believe, but at some point she must. It's right there in front of her eyes, even if only for a second. It feels faithful to the real experience of seeing something that definitionally shouldn't be there. When I get up to use the bathroom and I see something flash by, it takes a moment to resolve, for reality to reassert itself. Was it a mouse? Or something worse?

For me it's always been a mouse, and for that I'm glad. I don't know how I'd handle an encounter with the weird, especially now, when things have already departed so far from what I used to accept as normal. The pandemic is weirdly supernatural in that way, right? It's like if we discovered evidence that, actually, god isn't dead and we all changed our behavior to account for that. Of course it's not like that at all. But the unsettling thing remains: normalcy departed very quickly. (Which is a good thing, in this case!) It feels like a veil has been pulled back, and now we can see the world for what it is — class, racial, and economic divisions have never been so stark. And this was always the case; some just weren't able to see it before.

What's left to see now, I think, is who advocates for a return to normal, to the lives we had before the plague. Because they are dangerous, those who see and don't believe.