How to Have a Good Time in Quarantine Even Though Everything is Terrible

Like most people on Planet Earth right now, I am currently in quarantine. According to the CDC and the World Health Organization, I have at least eight more days of sitting on the couch in my pajamas ahead of me before I can determine if the cough I picked up in New York City last week is a potentially deadly coronavirus or just a natural result of the fact that I am a dirty filth goblin who isn’t tall enough to dust my ceiling fan.

Honestly, at this point, the next great pandemic lives somewhere in that grime layer and it probably should not be disturbed.

With so many people currently stuck at home, the Internet has been overrun with advice about how to manage your mental health and fill your time while in self-isolation. People who are in much better physical and emotional shape than I am have told me that I should maintain a regular routine, stick to a normal sleep schedule, eat healthy meals and send text messages or desperate carrier pigeons to my friends in the outside world. Experts also recommend that we all make an effort to get dressed every day, get some regular exercise, and engage in hobbies that are more stimulating than playing fourteen straight hours of Skyrim with our mouths slightly ajar. Fortunately and unfortunately, I am not one of those experts.

And I have some better ideas.

Because frankly, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this.

Falsify historical documents to confuse future anthropologists.

Sometime in the future, tens or hundreds of years from now, there will be entire fields of academic study dedicated to analyzing the incredible amount of shit we’re all creating to document our lives in quarantine. Assuming that mankind has not been reduced to a single scrappy band of survivors that uses canned beets as currency, the year 2220 will see graduate students defending theses with titles like “An Analysis of the Changes in Themes Found in TikTok Videos Between Week 2 and Week 16 of the COVID-19 Pandemic”, “Cross-Stitching in the Time of Coronavirus: a Feminist Perspective on Plague-Era Pastimes”, and “Why Did Quarantiners in the 2020 Pandemic Make So Much Goddamn Sourdough Bread: A Qualitative Analysis of Instagram Posts”. Everything you post online or create and then toss into the attic for your great-grandchildren to find is eventually going to become a historical artifact that generations of history nerds will pore over to understand what life was like during an unprecedented era of human history.

Which means it’s a perfect time to get weird with it.

After more than a week of isolation, “weird” is something I do well right now.

Instead of becoming the nine millionth person to document on Twitter that your local store is out of eggs and that video conference calls are annoying, seize this opportunity to fabricate fake documents that will create unnecessary discrepancies in the historical records for generations to come. Write a diary claiming that COVID-19 was a collective hallucination brought on after everyone else in the world but you ate some bad shrimp. Forge official government documents decreeing that all citizens were legally required to wear lederhosen during the spring of 2020 and later invented the pandemic to explain why they’d deleted three months of humiliating pictures from social media. Create an unhinged series of videos where you explain that those lunatics who stormed Area 51 in September 2019 were successful, and the current pandemic is just a cover story to hide the fact that we’re being hunted by escaped aliens. Make it as strange as you can, and when you’ve finished, find a box somewhere in your house to stash your ahistorical documents.

Because we’re actually all set for misinformation right now, thanks.

Then when you are on your deathbed – ideally, many years from now, after you sustain grievous injuries while becoming the oldest person to base jump from the Hoover Dam, and not three weeks from now after catching coronavirus – grab the face of your nearest loved one and pull them in close to you. With all the strength you have left, whisper urgently in their ear and tell them the location of the box.

“You must open the box,” you will tell them, as your lungs struggle to draw breath. “The world needs to know the truth. About the pandemic. It wasn’t… it wasn’t what they said it was. The truth cannot die with me.”

And then perform a dramatic swoon as your loved ones dash from the room at your insistence, to retrieve the big box of lies you made when you got bored of Netflix halfway through the quarantine.

Although to be perfect honest, I’m not “bored” of Netflix as much as I am “concerned that Netflix will call in a wellness check if I don’t find something else to do”.

And after you’re gone, you can rest easy with the knowledge that your little creative writing and art project will probably fragment the field of COVID-19 pandemic studies for years to come. In every comprehensive book on the subject, and at every academic conference, someone will have to address this collection of primary sources, authentically dated to the year 2020, that completely contradicts everything else that has been written about the pandemic. Whatever you make will probably be named after you – like “the Cooper tapes” or “the Mason diaries” – and academics will come to curse that name as they spend their entire careers trying to figure out why you were the only person who thought to jot down that everyone in New York City lost their marbles fourteen weeks into the pandemic and started having daily pineapple fights in the middle of Central Park.

The things you make and create now will shape the future’s understanding of the global coronavirus pandemic, and you don’t owe the future shit. They’re probably going to have access to space-age stem cell medicine and genetically engineered mangoes that aren’t a pain in the ass to peel, and thousands of other things that you can only dream of while you sit on the couch by yourself for three months so that your parents don’t catch COVID-19 and end up hooked up to dog ventilators. You might as well have some fun and mess with them a little bit.

Release your children into the wild.

If you are currently in quarantine with children, the first step to improving your happiness is to no longer be in quarantine with children, by the fastest means possible. At the beginning of this pandemic, the humane thing to do would have been to call them an Uber to the nearest fire station, but that’s the kind of non-essential travel we just can’t risk anymore at this point in the global crisis. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and in this case, the desperate measure required is to simply open up your back door and release those little monsters straight into the wild.

Children are believed to be relatively safe from the coronavirus, but they are not safe from being stuffed head-first into the recycling bin the fifth time they interrupt your work-related Zoom call. If they aren’t nibbling on your ankles during a meeting, that simply means that they’re probably having a wine tasting with the chemicals under the kitchen sink or putting their brother through a tumble-dry cycle, and nobody needs that kind of aggravation going on in their house while they are trying to inventory their remaining toilet paper supply.

Also, the vast majority of schools have shut down for the rest of the year; if you weren’t a trained teacher or a seasoned homeschooler before this pandemic, you’ve probably already lost patience with the fact that basic math has been replaced with wizard nonsense and just started hoping that your children magically learn fractions by watching the battery percentage on their Nintendo Switch decline. They’re unhappy. You’re unhappy. But luckily, there is one option out there for providing your children with the kind of hands-on instruction, daily exercise and restrictions on screen time that they need – sending them out into the wilderness to be raised by your local wolf pack.

At this point in the self-isolation and quarantine process, your children probably need very little convincing to rush out into the great outdoors. If they don’t immediately sprint for freedom to escape the hell-cavern of quiet time and boredom that your home has become the moment you open the door, toss a handful of Cheerios out onto the lawn and slam the door behind them. If you’re feeling generous, you can pack them an extra sweater or two to tide them over until they can fashion themselves their own crude garments made from the hides of scavenged roadkill. It’s important not to feel any guilt as you watch your children disappear into the tree line – with people trapped in their homes and cars off the roads, there has never been a better time for your children to learn exciting new skills like setting fires, finding new uses for animal poo and hunting weaker men for sport while you finally have the peace and quiet you need to get some real work done.

So you can get back to your essential job as a UFO researcher.

And remember that this is only temporary. Someday, years from now, when coronavirus is a distant memory because we either went back to normal or completely collapsed into a new society of sickly feuding warlords, you will see your children again. They will emerge from the wilderness, possibly accompanied by a talking bear or panther, singing a haunting tune about their need to find a mate and once more live among mankind. They will be strong. They will be hardened. They will have troubling ideas about the White Man’s Burden. But with the primitive bits of language that they have left after raising themselves in isolation, they will agree that it was for the best and tell you they forgive you.

Befriend the squirrels and rule over them as their God.

The only thing better than quarantining without children is to quarantine with a pet. I am currently quarantined with three dogs that range in size from “probably a cat” to “probably a pony”, and their presence is the only thing currently preventing me from setting myself adrift on the North Atlantic ocean on an ice floe. Unfortunately, if you don’t already have your quarantine pet lined up, your window to get one is rapidly closing; many animal rescue organizations saw an enormous boom in adoption and foster applications at the start of this pandemic, and shelters are largely closing down until the madness is over. But before you go breaking into your neighbours’ homes to commit some literal cat burglary, remember that there is a third option available to you in these trying times. You already know what it is, because you read it in the title of this section, but I’m going to tell you anyway: it’s squirrels.

These guys.

Squirrels, for those of you who’ve spent your entire lives living in the caverns beneath a Paris opera house and don’t get out much, are small to medium-sized rodents that have been around for almost 200 million years, and are commonplace in nearly every country around the world. They are not actually native to Australia but live there anyway, after humans presumably decided that the kangaroos looked lonely and released crates full of them in Perth in 1898.

Importantly, squirrels are equally at home in dense rural forests, or in the downtown cores of major cities; they are adaptable creatures that can survive on tourist garbage and stolen bagged lunches if acorns are not readily available, and most importantly of all, they are fearless monsters that give zero fucks what you think. I spent my entire first year in New York City being terrorized not by a subway rat, but by a squirrel the size of a West Highland Terrier that lived on my fire escape and made it his mission in life to become the fourth roommate in an 800 square foot apartment with three anxious grad students. Squirrels are a force to be reckoned with, and the time to harness their power is upon us.

Behold my first twelve months in NYC.

The goal here is not to tame a squirrel, or to keep a squirrel as a pet in your house. Any fool with a jar of peanut butter and good enough renter’s insurance can manage that. No, your goal is to understand the squirrels. To comprehend them. You want to be able to stare into the dark voids behind a squirrel’s eyes and know what it is to be a squirrel, to forage in the deep snows for long-buried stashes, to feel the wind in your fur as you dash through the treetops far above the earth. You will spend the long hours of quarantine at your open window, trading Kirkland Signature trail mix for the company of local squirrels. You will listen to their sounds, you will learn their language, and in time, you will whisper the poetry of their ancestors into their ears as they eat sunflower seeds from your hands. They will come to you with their sorrows and you will weep the tears that they cannot. You will gain their trust. You will earn their admiration. And if you are wise and have a sufficient supply of pretzels, you will become their leader.

You will also completely freak out the neighbours but that’s not important right now.

When this quarantine ends, weeks or months from now, most people will emerge with a new hobby or two and a whole lot of Netflix shows fully caught up on. They will have a new lease on life, and a new appreciation for their non-essential job as a professional nose hair trimmer and the ability to get a lukewarm cup of gas station coffee whenever they damn well please. But not you. You will be the new reigning God of the squirrels. Everywhere you go, squirrels will stream from the sleeves of your Squirrel God robes, as the tiny creatures spring forth to do your bidding. It will be terrifying and it will completely destroy your ability to hold down any kind of normal job, but you’ll never have to worry about anyone getting within six feet of you ever again.

Have a passionate love affair with a ghost.

Pandemics are not an especially great time for romance. Even if you are quarantined with the love of your life right now, with nothing but spare time on your hands and no interruptions from other people, there’s only so much you can do to keep the love alive after you run out of toilet paper and witness your significant other wipe their ass with the shower curtain for the first time.

All the odd socks at the bottom of your drawer are getting real nervous right about now.

Perhaps the only thing worse than watching your partner slowly turn into a damp pile of Dorito crumbs and unwashed pajama pants is to be single and looking during your time in quarantine. Unless you happen to live across from a sexy but reclusive neighbor who is willing to gradually fall in love with you by flicking Morse code messages back and forth with your bedroom lights, the only way to meet someone right now is with an online dating app like Tinder. Even under ideal conditions, Tinder is an excellent place to potentially contract a deadly disease, and face a 1-3% risk of death. Right now, the best case scenario is that you find someone to be your sexually tense pen pal for the next twelve weeks, until you finally get to have an underwhelming first date with someone who has also been cutting their own hair for months. Worst case scenario, you match with a very patient serial killer who now has a whole lot of free time to triangulate your location based on the angle of the sun in your profile pictures.

Also in both scenarios, you still contract COVID-19.

So what’s the answer here? Should you communicate openly and clearly with your partner so that you can navigate sharing the same small space for weeks at a time without compromising the relationship? Should you do your best to access the mental health supports available to you so that you can avoid spiraling into a cyclone of depression and body odor that puts a strain on your relationship? Should you invest some of your newfound spare time into developing hobbies that give you a sense of personal fulfillment outside of a romantic relationship while you ride out this global pandemic?

No. Well, actually, yes, you probably should, but all of those things sound like a great deal of work. There’s a better answer available here.

That answer is ghosts.

These guys.

Ghosts are the ultimate romantic partner for pandemic times. For one thing, they don’t actually have to shower; unlike your human partner, who will quickly start to smell like a rancid container of apple sauce forgotten at the bottom of a schoolchild’s locker within two weeks of giving up on themselves, ghosts always smell like nothing. Ghosts also have the ability to phase through walls and leave the house, even in the midst of a full pandemic lockdown, allowing them to collect information for you about how many people outside are violating social distancing by licking strangers, or why the fuck your upstairs neighbour always makes so much noise at three o’clock in the afternoon.

Pictured: every neighbour who has ever lived above me.

Best of all, ghosts don’t have to eat – never again will you fly into a primal monkey range after peeling yourself off the couch where you’ve been watching that bizarre Netflix tiger show for four hours to discover that your rubber doorstop of a partner already ate the Pringles you’d been looking forward to all day and put the empty can back in the cupboard. Ghosts need only love, attention, and the eternal torment of their own unfinished lives to keep them going, making them the perfect low-maintenance pandemic companion.

Go through your home and gather up all the ghost-summoning supplies that you have on hand. A Ouija board is probably the simplest solution, but if you don’t have one, just collect all the things you’d need for a white woman’s Wiccan Instagram account – some candles, twigs, rocks, mason jars and a container of that incredibly overpriced pink salt should do the trick. Dim the lights, reach out to the anguished spirit of your choosing, and enjoy a passionate quarantine romantic fling – one comprised mostly of cold spots, rattled kitchen cupboards, and messages mysteriously written in the steam on your bathroom mirror.

Happy quarantine! Wash your hands.

 

If being trapped in your house has you missing the great outdoors, check out my illustrated reminder that the outdoors is a terrible place and it has always wanted to kill you.

To find more of my work, or to learn how to impersonate me well enough to steal my pandemic unemployment benefits, check out my Facebook page, my Twitter, my Instagram, and my hysterically funny true crime podcast.