2020: A Year in Photos

Reclaiming Joy in This Lost World

Celia Farber had an interesting and thought provoking post regarding her son’s wedding in Spain and a photograph she had taken of a very humn connection between mother and daughter.

A Mother and Daughter

In it she writes:

Imagine a people and a culture, allowed to love themselves.

We’re allowed too, but we are frozen in trauma.

America loved its President, and probably itself, that day, Nov 22, 1963. Now we have a second chance, not merely through a person, but through a collective reclaiming. They tricked us into believing we weren’t allowed hope. And that if we summoned joy, they would shoot it down in front of us. We were, from that day, orphans, with no family, whether we were born or not. And Covid was the finale.

Why did I give them my life? Why did we? I want it back. We want it back. I can’t give them another day, or another hour, of joylessness.

I came back to the US on the very last day of my visa, knowing full well I would be returning to the repressed frequency of a land where some kind of force conspired against our joy. Knowing full well, I didn’t know how to overcome it. But we weren’t done fighting. America was still taken hostage by the joy killers…

It wasn’t our fault. It was as though a very powerful vacuum cleaner had sucked the life out of the air, leaving us alive but not human. Fighting lies, day in day out, just to break even.

If the kids hadn’t fallen in love and planned a wedding, I wonder if my soul would have “made it” or if it would have forgotten how to be human altogether. It felt like we were all going to be arrested, for breaking the cardinal American rule of Covid: The cardinal rule of Covid was not merely to mask up, live in terror, receive multiple toxic injections, and despise our fellow man. It was somehow implicit that one was supposed to constrict. Move slow, and expect nothing, like a turtle. Go shopping, and come home. Every day the same as the last. Why couldn’t something happen? Here…

Yes, it’s over. The rest is up to us. To shake off the layers and layers of sadness, the decades—to stop living in anticipation of the next boot kick to our rightful, joyful lives. That’s the part none of us talk about. It’s ephemeral. We don’t even think about it as something we are owed. We’re not slaves, or paupers—we’re people. Why is joy so out of the question, since 2020? How do we break out of this misery trance? This tightly wound cat’s cradle of accusations and cynicisms?

I don’t share these two photos to say something about my life, but about life itself.

I didn’t know how to admit I’d stopped living. Or how sick and tired I was of “fighting.”

Or how empty it felt, to be somebody who understood all this evil long ago. That wasn't what I wanted—to be right.

What I wanted was a family. The very thing the Covid reich could not tolerate, and sought to bring to ruin.

What’s a family?

I see it in these photos. It’s a secret alloy, passed down, a whisper of God’s divine plan for us all. A mother and a daughter, moments before a wedding—a mother stopping to embrace her daughter, amidst the bustle of the last minutes before the ceremony. An ancient energy and promise.

I’ve been harvesting photos from Facebook. All of these were taken during 2020, the year the world decided that Hell would be a nice place. I was trying my best to keep them from taking it all. I still am. I’ll try to go in order, with one from each month.

We went to a celebration for the Chinese New Year in Phuket in January of 2020. They had a nice spread and it was a good party. Nobody knew of the horror that was soon to unfold, but news spread quickly about China’s lockdown, and people became very nervous:

We met with Chaokay in February near Nai Yang beach. Many of the tattoos this guy sports were done by my first husband Oh. He likes spearfishing and now appropriately has a marijuana stand next door to his beach house. He’s a really mellow guy!

This one was from March of 2020. I was feeling good!

The lockdown happened. So I did what any normal human would do: I flew back to America during it. These photos are while I was delivering food near the Fremont Street Experience in April of 2020. They had the whole area closed off with a special entrace for delivery drivers for the few restaurants inside that were taking virtual orders:

Despite being blurry I thought this selfie with my daughters is cute. April 2020.

The girls were enjoying the swimming pool at the hotel in Utah in May 2020. It was one of the more “open” states at the time:

The clouds over Kansas on Interstate 70. May 2020:

The five cousins at the Ohio house with Mom in the background. June 2020

For July 4, 2020 we went to Willow Beach State Park in Arizona and had a BBQ. I can’t remember if they cancelled traditional fireworks displays over Covid or not…

My daughter is swimming in Venice Beach, California in this August 2020 photo:

In September she was trying to figure out how to fashion Barbie clothes out of facemasks in the quarantine hotel in Bangkok. They’re good for something I guess:

She got a new outfit from the Sunday market in October 2020:

Her chickens were growing by November:

I think this is always the answer. From December 2020:

Buy me a ko-fi