But how are we supposed to feel now? How are we supposed to process this? How are we supposed to talk about this? Is levity even appropriate, and is it foolish to ask if levity is appropriate? How are we supposed to work and produce and create with this in and over our heads? When will this end, and who will we be when that happens? (If it happens.) No one alive has experienced this convergence of instantaneous mass communication and pandemic, where we all know that something unprecedented is coming, is happening, is here; but our evolved and invented methods of defense might be futile. Are we crashing or just market-correcting?

I don’t know. Several days ago, I could say that no one I personally knew had fallen seriously ill from the coronavirus. I can no longer say that. And I know that many of us have had similarly abrupt shifts in how intimate the fallout has been. But I also know that, along with the exhaustive cleansing we’re tasked with, a welcome byproduct of our post-coronavirus lives has been a massive culling of certain social and economic functions wrongly believed to be essential.

From now on, the answers to “Could this meeting just have been an email?” and “Could this email just have been a text?” will always be “Yes.” Yes, this job can be done remotely. Yes, accommodations for special needs can be made. Yes, landlords and mortgage companies can afford to be a bit less stringent with their customers. Yes, there is extra money available.

And these epiphanies are mostly about the mundanities that impact our day-to-day.

There’s so much that doesn’t matter; so much I did just two months ago seems ludicrous now. (Brunch every Sunday? Really?) So many silly habits and desires and feuds and consumptions and relationships that aren’t just bandwidth-consuming; they’re bandwidth-stealing, snatching time and energy away from the people and things that matter.

And I’m reminded today of all those times I made that lonely and awkward walk to the bar when the Electric Slide came on, all because of a senseless and aggressively self-absorbed personal edict to be a drip.

I might have to run to the supermarket this weekend. We’re low on milk, and my son is in a sweet potato phase. We need more sweet potatoes. So many sweet potatoes. I’m sure it’ll be a ghost town today. The lines will be shorter, the aisles emptier, the few people there will be donned in masks and gloves and so I’ll be in and out.

I’ve always hated the bustle and forced intimacy of a Sunday supermarket — packed with hundreds of people haggling, negotiating, bumping, sweating, exerting, assessing.

Well, at least I thought I did.