The View from My Office

By Scott Dickensheets

Greetings from my quarantine hidey-hole — my home office — 1,062.5 cubic feet of bookish clutter and reassuring knickknacks in the lower right-hand corner of my two-story madhouse in Henderson. Four adults, three kids, three dogs, two cats, and a tank of hermit crabs occupy this rowdy sitcom premise. So, for the last 9,000 months of compacted togetherness, this office has been my refuge, sanity anchor, and, most crucially, the Zoom-enabled cockpit of my professional life. Sitting at my desk, I have within reach everything an effective work-from-home ninja might need: computer, pens, Diet Coke, a small muskrat skull, a chrome pineapple, a paperweight shaped like a snail...apologies for the detail overload, but thanks to the pandemic’s psychological and temporal flux, I’ve got a strong urge to catalogue specifics. In this case, trivial objects I find comforting.

If I were to chart the ways the pandemic has changed my life, I’d start with this office. Before lockdown, it was an occasionally useful sidebar to my work office, good for a few keystrokes now and then; mostly I’d idle in here for a few quiet minutes amid the domestic squawk and gabble. Then, about this time last year, my bosses told me to begin working from home. I converted like a zealot: Perversely, being out of the bosses’ sight prompted me to work longer and harder, lest anyone think I was horsing around in the oversight vacuum. It wasn’t long before the horizons of my day contracted to 1,062.5 cubic feet, with additional cubic footage denoting the bathroom and the fridge.

This kinda worked for me, and not just because I’ve long aspired to be a hermit. No, I found that the centrifugal effect of whirling nonstop in this small space kept the rest of the world at a somewhat manageable distance: the COVID-19 death toll, the economic collapse, American democracy glitching toward some terrifying denouement. This office was largely where I rode it out, the skull and snail no longer just quirky décor but psychologically soothing reminders of the old normal.

Then, a few months ago, my bosses told me I no longer had to work at home. Because I was being laid off, though reluctantly. (Note to self: Many thousands of Nevadans have been through this, too, so easy on the sad trumpets.) Everything that was already changing changed in a new way. “Have you ever started your life completely over?” someone asks on Twitter as I draft this. Let me get back to you on that.

And so, bereft of purpose, what is this office to me now, other than the place I keep my chrome pineapple? I’ll get back to you on that, too. Some day.

It was either a wise man or a fortune cookie who noted, Every disaster creates its own rules, and the pandemic’s seemed to involve a new and paradoxical sensation of being both shut in and set adrift. Perhaps you felt this, too: Wobbling loose from our routines, not only in the time-stream — “What day is this?” I ask my wife, always forgetting the previous day’s answer — but in our own upended headspaces, as well. The hours we spent relieving our claustrophobia by pinballing listlessly through social media, impulse-buying from Amazon, watching comfort TV, drawn to or recoiling from current events. However deeply cocooned in familiar domesticity, during dinners or daily frantic dog-barking sessions, I felt continually tugged-at by these new uncertainties. Even the small act of observing my mug in a grid of Zoom windows — of watching myself from outside of myself (Don’t say that stupid thing I just thought, I would implore my Zoom self, who’d say it anyway) — heightened my sense of disengagement. These changes were far more interior and tidal, difficult to gauge by means of desk tchotchkes.

Now, on top of all that, unemployment — the baffling randomness of it: Once this, on a 35-year trajectory, I am now *finger snap* that, with almost no direction at all. I know I promised no sad trumpets, but I have to admit, it makes me hella queasy, in terms of self-identity as much as lost income. At least, my financial anxiety can be mitigated, a little, assuming I ever crack DETR’s defenses. Which may take a while: Last year, someone filed a fraudulent unemployment claim in my name, using my social security number (a widespread problem during the pandemic, as it turns out). This has stymied my real, nonfraudulent claim. To straighten it out, I need my social security card. Which, naturally, I have lost. To replace it, I’ll need to — you see what I’m getting at, right? Ever more limbo, compounding daily, with a rising disinterest rate. I try to see the bright side of this thing — Hey, someone thinks I’m worth impersonating! — but mostly I’m measuring out my life in hold muzak. At least, the recording assures me, my call is important to them.

On the other hand, Friday, June 4, will mark one year since I’ve worn actual pants, so I’ve got that going for me.

A friend texts the day after the inauguration. It’s the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century, he burbles. Make a wish. Well, sure, he can afford metaphysics; he’s an artist. I’m just a guy on hold. But okay, a wish: I wish the people in charge of phone trees would program good jazz. But I sense that’s not the premium content you’re here for, so I’ll try again:

I wish I had a great cheeseburger, a million bucks, and a sure sense of where all this — what? Yes, I’ll hold for the next available wish.

Says here in the papers that our COVID-19 numbers are trending in a good direction, which is terrific. Yet so much in the world still feels up for grabs. You see the word existential a lot. (“But has there ever been a better time in our lives to use it?” a different friend asks.) There may be a new administration, but doubt we’ve seen the final post-credit sequence of Trump: Ragnarok — lotta resentment still floating out there. We’ll always be confronted by a virus of one kind or another. It is, as our former philosopher in chief noted, what it is.

When I’m not jousting with state bureaucracies, I’m doing my best to settle into this new thing. At first I figured I’d convert my now-abundant free time into a sort of premium-blend indolence, languid hours filled with high literature and peak TV — finally, I can read Knausgaard. But it’s mostly been cheap lethargy, my brain still bobbing in the drift. Yes, I’ve read a few pages of Knausgaard. But I’ve watched a lot more Hallmark.

I’m also doing my best to force-quit this stubborn notion that productivity equals quality of life, though it’s not easy after you’ve been caramelized in capitalist prerogatives your entire life. I still get up early and settle into this office, greeting the snail paperweight as I fire up the computer. But to do what? Nothing’s coming to me just yet.

Perhaps I’m feeding myself placebo wisdom here, but I have to trust this standstill is merely the prelude to a new something; maybe freedom’s just another word for nothing else to do. Knowing I have a tendency to mope, my wife has ordered me to treat unemployment not as a setback but as an opportunity to change myself instead of merely being changed. Make some art, she says. Start a blog. Finish college. Write a book. Anchor myself to some fresh excitement. Point this office in a new direction. I’ll get back to you on that.

This morning, I worked a puzzle someone had posted on social media, in which you try to find words in a scramble of random letters: “The first four you see will be your focus in 2021.” Sure, puzzle, whatever you say. The words I found were shahmlf and jomses, and I was a little unclear about what they portended for my future. But once I got the hang of it, these were my four actual words: breakthrough, change, gratitude, creative. I’m not kidding, those were my words — trust me, I wouldn’t fabricate that much schmaltz just to make a point. Still, not a bad set of signposts for whatever lies ahead.

Scott Dickensheets has been the deputy editor of Nevada Public Radio’s Desert Companion magazine, as well as editor in chief of Las Vegas CityLife and The Las Vegas Weekly, and a columnist for The Las Vegas Sun. He’s edited or contributed to eight volumes of the annual Las Vegas Writes anthology, a program of Nevada Humanities, and has been a long time member of the Literary Committee for the Las Vegas Book Festival.

Thank you for visiting Humanities Heart to Heart, a program of Nevada Humanities. Any views or opinions represented in posts or content on the Humanities Heart to Heart webpage are personal and belong solely to the author or contributor and do not represent those of Nevada Humanities, its staff, or any donor, partner, or affiliated organization, unless explicitly stated. At no time are these posts understood to promote particular political, religious, or ideological points of view; advocate for a particular program or social or political action; or support specific public policies or legislation on behalf of Nevada Humanities, its staff, any donor, partner, or affiliated organization. Omissions, errors, or mistakes are entirely unintentional. Nevada Humanities makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on these posts or found by following any link embedded in these posts. Nevada Humanities reserves the right to alter, update, or remove content on the Humanities Heart to Heart webpage at any time.

Kathleen KuoMarch 15, 2021FComment