Facepalm
by Mike Nagel
It's March 2020. There are mayflies everywhere. I guess they came early this year. Or maybe they're just poorly named. "Who named these things?" I say, to no one, swatting another one away from my bedside light. They fly around like alcoholics, like they have no idea how to fly and they can't believe that what they're doing is actually working. They die on contact. They're super fragile. They're made out of mud and cotton candy. Most people don't know that.
When you smash a mayfly nothing happens. It's anticlimactic. Surprise. There's nothing inside. Like an empty Wonder Ball. I guess I mean a ball.
Like everyone else in the world, I'm home waiting out the spread of the virus, seeing who gets it, seeing if I get it, seeing what happens to all of us when we all eventually get it. Probably the worst. It's a fantastic time to be a pessimist. "So many situations and people to assume the worst about!" I tell my wife. "I almost can't decide!"
Once a day I walk around my neighborhood to keep the blood from pooling in my heart. I am, according to my most recent blood work, 85% chicken nugget. I walk past the police station, through the frisbee golf park, then over to the pond. I listen to Run the Jewels, The National, Small Black, Bleachers, in that order. I keep my mouth shut. If I didn't keep my mouth shut I would eat about a hundred mayflies. They would fly directly into my mouth and dissolve. They would taste like mud and cotton candy. I thought about buying a 3M brand N95 series COVID-19 edition mask just to keep the mayflies out of my mouth. But everyone else beat me to it.
"It was a good idea and you beat me to it," I say to everyone else as I walk past them at the pond. I'm not shy about calling out a great idea when I see one and this was a great idea, no question about it.
***
An executive order comes down from the mayor's office. "Everyone is hereby ordered to stay home for the foreseeable future."
There is, of course, no such thing as the foreseeable future.
There might not even be such thing as the future.
"Should we just go ahead and pretend to take this seriously?" a reporter at the press conference asks.
"Great question," the mayor says. "Yes. Everyone is hereby ordered to go ahead and pretend to take this seriously."
***
"What am I supposed to be, like, getting out of this?" I say to my wife, J, as we start our second week at home.
"I think the point is what you're supposed to not be getting out of this," she says.
"Well it's working," I say, "because I'm not getting anything out of this."
***
I still think that everything happens for my education. You'd think I'd know better by now. But I don't.
***
When I was a kid somebody told me that mayflies are the most poisonous bugs on earth. Their fangs are just too small to bite us. I have no idea if that's true. Probably not. Very few things are true. But I've gone on believing it anyway. I'll believe anything anybody tells me about bugs. I do very little research. Let's call it none.
Still though. After accidentally swallowing the mayfly near the pond, I wonder if maybe it's time for me to start doing some due diligence in terms of my understanding of the Animal Kingdom. I ask J about it. She's getting her PhD in being right about everything all the time. She's almost done with her coursework.
"I ate a mayfly three days ago," I say. "What can you tell me."
"Mayflies prevent the spread of algae, contribute to local nutrient cycling, and hunt mosquitos for sport. We need as many of them around as possible," she says. "You really should try not to eat them."
***
This year I'm celebrating my ten-year anniversary of believing that we're all alone in the big dumb empty universe.
Before I believed that we're all alone in the big empty universe, I believed that we weren't all alone in it. I believed in God. That was nice. I'm not trying to be condescending. I'm being condescending on accident.
It's not particularly special to believe in God. Most people do. And it's not particularly special to not believe in God. Most people don't. There is, I suspect, a lot of overlap.
Honestly, though, the subject of God and whether or not he/she does/doesn't exist bores me to death.
To death.
And I wouldn't have even brought it up if I didn't suspect it is somehow, inexplicably, inextricably, fundamentally related to The Point.
***
First the mayflies, then the June bugs. They hurl themselves against the windows at night. I guess they're trying to get in. In the morning I find them dead on the patio.
"Failure!" I say.
I go around pointing at each one individually.
"Failure! Failure! Failure!"
I don't know what the June bugs are doing out so early but here they are.
"It's March," I say. "March."
On Wednesday I saw a TED Talk.
"As I'm sure you know," the Talk began, "we are living in the Sixth Extinction Of Life As We Know It On Planet Earth."
"Actually, for your information, I didn't know that," I said to the TED Talk. "And, to be honest with you, I really feel like I should have been told."
On second thought it made sense.
On third thought I did know that we are living in the Sixth Extinction Of Life As We Know It on Planet Earth. I'd just forgotten. I'm super forgetful. There are a lot of things to remember and it's hard to remember all of them at once. I should really start writing some of them down.
Now that I remembered that we are living in the Sixth Extinction of Life As We Know It On Planet Earth, I remembered something else: I had no idea what I was supposed to do with that information. I never know what to do with information. I don't know what information is for. What’s the point of knowing things? I just walk around all the time nodding and smiling like, "Uh huh, uh huh, yep, this all makes sense, sure, why not."
***
Thursday evening I go for my walk and my neighbor has two ducks in her front lawn. They have big green heads. They're swimming around in a Rubbermaid container the size of a rollaboard suitcase. Ducks are capable of swimming around in really small circles. That's just a little duck information for you. You probably won't need it.
"Are these your ducks?" I say to my neighbor.
"They're just passing through," she says. "They're late this year."
"Are you sure they're not early this year?" I say. "A lot of things are early this year."
"Nope," she says. "Late."
***
So. I don't know. Sometimes it's almost like there's not even a theme.
***
I'm not going to lie it's a little scary being all alone in the big empty universe. Sometimes I get a stomach ache just thinking about it. It’s almost like anything can happen at any moment and there might not even be some sort of takeaway.
Like how in high school I knew this kid named P. He had absolutely nothing going for him, P. Not talented. Not good-looking. Not funny. Not smart. Not well-liked. Not anything. I'm not trying to be mean. These are facts.
Facts.
Anyway. Halfway through P's freshman year of college he dropped dead of a brain aneurism. They found him on his dorm room floor. They checked. Definitely dead.
"Well what was the point of that," I said, when I found out P had died.
Or like how one day in Downtown Dallas a man jumped off a building right in front of me.
"Ummmmmmmmmmmmm," I said.
***
"Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm," I continued to say, sort of under my breath, for the next five and a half years until it was sort of a Zen thing.
***
An executive order comes down from the mayor's office. "All non-essential businesses are hereby closed until further notice."
It's nice, I think, to finally know what's essential.
When it comes to the day-to-day functioning of this operation very few of us are what you would call ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL. In a pinch, the world could continue basically as-is with a skeleton crew of 150 mildly competent ninth-graders. The rest of us are just bonus. We should try to remember that.
***
When I noticed my tan getting uneven, I decided to start walking in the opposite direction.
"It's time," I announce to J, "to turn things around."
I walk to the pond. Then through the frisbee golf park. Then past the police station. I listen to Bleachers, Small Black, The National, Run the Jewels, in that order. I smile at people. I turn on the charm.
When the sun starts setting, the light catches the mayflies just right and they glow. They look like they're battery powered or something. They look like they're made out of fiberoptic cable and LEDs. I do some quick math. There are one hundred billion of them.
"Buncha drunks!" I say. "Sober up, you fucken buncha drunks!"
And then, against my will, I start thinking about that stupid Coldplay song, the one where he says that we live in a beautiful world.
Coldplay? I think. At a time like this?
And I try to think about another song — a better song — I really do, but I can't think of any other song, so I just keep on walking around and thinking about that dumb Coldplay song, I think it's called "Don't Panic."
Mike Nagel's essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and The Paris Review Daily. He lives in Dallas.
