I had one of those liminal dreams this morning, where not just the strange immediate details of a fantasy, but an an entire alternate reality is taken for granted and then blows away like a dandelion puff as I awaken. I remember mainly the shape of the space where it used to be. There were many details, looming before me and in the dream’s background, but all I recall is a puzzle on a website and online obligations and promises I hadn’t honored. That so much of it involved something on the internet may indicate that “online” has become a part of reality as tangible as the street outside. The world-building of my dreams now includes an imaginary internet.

Which is not surprising, given that the internet is now the main “place” where so many of us work, play and communicate. Sometimes I feel as if we are moving towards E.M. Forster’s great science fiction short story “The Machine Stops.” Published in 1909, it describes a compartmentalized world of people living entirely within their homes, never touching each other, communicating, eating, living, via “the machine.”

And yet, I think if it were not for “the machine” of the internet, many of us would go mad from loneliness and boredom during this shut-down.

It’s important to be aware of the bad, but also the potential for good in any massive change. I first stepped into the internet more than thirty years ago, when it was a rarefied, shadowy world of black screens and pale text. Most of the people typing and posting in this unseriffed light green font were academics, so the level of discussion was the opposite of the stereotype now of the mindlessly malevolent troll. Debate online tended to be intellectual, detailed, multi-syllabic, and logical. To fail to cite, to back up your arguments, was considered embarrassing.

It wasn’t until the ’90s, when the doors were flung open and the multitudes descended, that willful stupidity and ignorance became assets. The internet was to be treated as either a marketplace or a playground, and only spoilsports violated netiquette by bringing up reality. This contempt for intelligence was still in play and evident when Scribophile went bright back in 2008. I can remember my first attempts at starting a serious discussion on the forum here being almost instantly derailed by deliberate nonsense. The reasoning seemed to be “It’s the internet! Get with the program Granny!” Serious discussions that lasted for more than ten pages were cause for unease and taken down, while threads consisting of little but gossip, fart jokes, and penis jokes went on for hundreds and hundreds of pages.

It’s improved. A little. The merits of moderated discussions are better understood today, but the real world consequences of celebrating dumbness on a massive scale, even for just a few years, are dire and long-lasting, and we are living with them.

My hope is that it’s been a learning process. My hope is that, now that so many of us are living online, now that so much of our welfare depends on the internet, enough of us have looked around at this environment and realized that intelligence and expertise are important. We’ve learned that ignoring people who weaponize stupidity does not make them go away; that the truth is not only worth defending but must be defended; that shaming callousness is not a waste of time; that irrationality and malice are not amusing, but dangerous.

Lessons like the above are almost always hard-won. How hard-won this one will be remains to be seen. The price we will ultimately pay for two decades of laughing and winking at liars depends on us.

Every time I look in the mirror my face seems smaller. My hair, which I usually keep short, is very thick. It looks as though my head is being swallowed by a Lhaso Apso.

This morning I heard Michael get up. He walked into the living room, then returned to the bedroom. After a few minutes I went in to find him propped up on his pillows reading his Ipad. I put my hand on his forehead to check for a fever (felt normal) and asked if everything was all right. He insisted he was fine. Just felt like relaxing in bed.

I pointed out that this kind of somnolence is a bad precedent. In quarantine, we need at least some sort of shape to our days and we wouldn’t get that by spending the day in bed. I was going to toast him a bagel with artichoke spread and would put it on his desk. If he wanted it, he could go there.

He’s now at his desk eating his bagel and typing away.

This is the time of year when we usually get our check-ups, and even before the pandemic that made me uneasy. I have long considered myself a borderline hypochondriac. I once convinced myself, via a Facebook post, that I had cancer of the tongue because I had an allergic reaction to a mouthwash our dentist had given me.

Now I’m going to have to go get my blood drawn in a couple of weeks for my yearly lab work, and I dread going to that crowded, dirty little office downtown. Michael, in the meantime, is due for some yearly tests and has to find a new specialist because his physician abruptly retired last January. Everything has to be done and seems twice as complicated. Nail biting time.

Yesterday I phoned my mother for Mother’s Day. Caught her on her cell phone, running her dogs outside, and for a moment I was — vicariously at least — on the mountain, listening to that eternal sigh of wind in the leaves, breathing in its wonderful air.

Amazon is too backed up to send flowers or chocolates, so I conferred with her about what books she has or has not read and sent her A Gentleman in Moscow for her Kindle. It only occurred to be afterwards that it’s a novel about a man “quarantined,” a Russian aristocrat who ends up imprisoned in a ritzy Moscow hotel after the revolution, forbidden to leave it. I believe the sight of our pharmacy down on Polk, its windows and doors boarded up, has affected me more than I realized. It’s now a pale, plywood-covered spot in my consciousness.

So, yesterday I took a sort of vacation. After getting my writing done for the morning, I spent much of the rest of the day playing Sims. It did me good. I’ve played Sims ever since the first version came out, and it always puts me in the mood to work. It sparks the part of me that tells stories. Not a complete vacation, of course. Dinner had to be prepared. We now have a large pot of chicken etouffee in the fridge. Comfort food.

Part of getting older is seeing your life, your world, divided into segments of before and after. In my lifetime, there has been before the Kennedy assassination and after, before 1968 and after, before the Reagan era and after, before the AIDS epidemic and after, before the Murrah building bombing and after, before 9/11 and after…

Deaths also divide your life. At first you barely notice them. Grandparents die, and only later do you realize how your memory of sunlight changed color.

Before and after my gay friends from college began showing up in obituaries. Before and after my childhood playmate died from the heart condition she was born with. Before and after my ex fell dead in his house from an embolism at the age of 43. Before and after my father-in-law died, my father, died, my mother-in-law died… A crisis like this hits, and I think of the dead who missed it. They are all fading into the distance, along with the world that existed when they were alive. I don’t think you can truly understand mortality until you see for yourself the passing of eras and those left behind in them.

Now is not forever, any more than was the 1918 epidemic. This time will change us forever, but an adapted version of normalcy will return. Before this pandemic, my generation looked back at 1918 puzzled about why that flu pandemic was so rarely spoken of by those who survived it. Was it too traumatic? Too terrible to remember?

I don’t think that’s why my grandparents, all of whom lived through and remembered the Spanish Flu epidemic, never brought it up. I think it changed things so profoundly that they would simply have shrugged and asked “what is there to say about it?”