My inescapable escape from the pandemic

My friend sent me A Field Guide to American Houses as a surprise Christmas present, and it's sitting next to me on the bed as I write this, and literally all I want to do is read it and paint walls and lay tile and do other home improvement stuff all day while the COVID-19 pandemic fades out of every crevice of my brain.

It is December 11, 2020, and my pandemic escapism is at an unprecedented level. I do not want to think about COVID-19 anymore. I do not want to doomscroll on Twitter at night. I would instead prefer to think about paint colors, roof lines, and the finer differences between the Georgian and Federal styles. Did you know that the ornate spindlework trim on Queen Anne-style houses, which generally were built between 1880 and 1910, proliferated because of new manufacturing abilities from the Industrial Revolution? As a 21st-century observer, I've assumed this stuff was all carved by hand, but actually they used machine lathes, and — oh, right, the pandemic.

So yeah, my brain is over it. And this is a little surprising to me, because my work entails thinking about bad stuff for long periods of time. My escapism in normal times looks like an episode of The Office while I fold laundry. That fairly brief diversion wouldn't cut it now. The need it fills is very different from this more persistent feeling of not wanting to turn my head to look at the thing I can always see in the corner of my eye.

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Writing about foreign policy as an American in the post-9/11 era means writing about wars. It means writing about U.S. drone strikes on weddings and school buses full of innocent kids getting blown to bits by American-made bombs. If I can think about all that stuff week in and week out, why am I feeling so escapist about COVID-19? It's not as if my experience of this pandemic, which until about a month ago did not even include personal knowledge of anyone who'd suffered a serious case of the disease, is more difficult than much of what I write about — quite the opposite in fact.

Nor is it that escapism is especially easy here. On the contrary, coronavirus news and conversation seems omnipresent. Nothing about our lives right now feels like a "new normal" to me, even though, as a longstanding remote worker, my day-to-day has been comparatively little changed. Every now and then I'll abruptly realize, usually around 4 p.m. on a Saturday, that I haven't thought about the pandemic all day. That feels strange. It's more the exception than the rule. Most days I google "U.S. COVID cases" in the morning to check the latest numbers. Most days I google it again in the afternoon, even though I (ought to) know there won't be new data since last I looked.

My best explanation — and I suppose it's an obvious one — is that the pandemic and its mitigation programs have a proximity to me lacking in other bad things I regularly discuss. Many of the public crises of my lifetime were remote, brought to our television and phone screens but not really our lives. There was never a "war effort" for the global war on terror. We didn't plant Afghanistan victory gardens or save scrap so we could win in Iraq. Even the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when we feared there would be more attacks around the country, was different from this: Then it was a worrisome chance that the bad thing would come to us; now it is already, inexorably everywhere.

The crisis is here, wherever here is for me or you in America. It feels so much closer than crises past, and thus fosters a stronger feeling of need for escape. But, crucially, the way our country has chosen to combat the virus — as compared to less disruptive approaches other countries have successfully employed — puts many of our normal, healthy means of escapism out of reach.

In non-pandemic times, we might take our kids to a museum or mall on a cranky, rainy day. We might enjoy a leisurely afternoon at our friends' home, sharing a meal and playing board games for hours. I might meet a friend for a fancy cocktail after a hard workweek.

That's exactly what I can't do now. The lack of escapist options makes the longing to escape that much more intense. The normal ways I'd withdraw from a harried schedule are unavailable. There are no breaks, no havens. The nature of the crisis precludes the remedy.

Thus the house book and the home improvement, the latter of which I am far from alone in selecting as a means of COVIDtide escape. It feels weightier than TV, more productive and therefore more engrossing. There's a satisfying planning element — What colors will work here? Can you see this wall from that room? What is the light like? — plus the momentous feeling of waiting at the hardware store counter while the clerk creates your painstaking picks. (Dark green for our bedroom, in this case, and a pale, dusky pink in the living room with a deep, marine blue for the dining room to contrast with the kitchen's white.)

Painting is also happily impervious to the changes the pandemic has wrought. You always have to be at home to paint your house. I think that's what makes painting (and similar home projects, like sourdough) perhaps the best option for pandemic escapism when the need strikes: In the middle of painting, the pandemic is irrelevant. It can finally, if only briefly, fade from view.