Quarantine Chronicles Day 43: Stockholm Syndrome provides comfort in captivity

Woke up this morning with the worst case of Stockholm Syndrome I’ve ever had. First, I saw my wife off to work, which is a lie. She was long gone by the time I finally woke up to the sound of quacking ducks that are billeted in my neighbor’s swimming pool.

Took a long, hot shower and changed into some clean clothes, just some cotton pants, a T-shirt and a pair of fuzzy slippers. Your basic hostagewear.

My dogs, of course, were overjoyed to see me settle into my easy chair rather than rush out to my car and drive away like I used to back in my days of freedom. Forty-three days in a row now of hanging around the house; I choose to believe they couldn’t be happier. I tossed them some rawhide bones and plugged in the electric kettle and made a cup of coffee smoothed out with a shot of Baileys Espresso Creme.

The copy editor in me noted the fact that, in an era of overly misused apostrophes, there’s a  curious absence of one in “Baileys,” so I killed part of the morning researching the brand to find out why. Turns out the brand’s manufacturer wanted to name it after the historic The Bailey’s Hotel in London, but the name of the beverage was trademarked without the apostrophe, so there’s no good reason for why it’s missing on the bottle.

Hannah, my co-isolationist, came out of hibernation looking for a book to rip pages out of for an art project for her online course at Long Beach City College, and I felt the need to accompany her out to the garage to go though a couple hundred books that needed to be exiled from the house. It’s like a good used bookstore out there, and I could tell that if I wasn’t careful, I’d drag a few dozen back into the house, but I settled for Greil Marcus’ “Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads—An Explosion of Vision and Humor That Forever Changed Pop Music.”

And that’s sitting beside me now waiting for me to finish today’s “Chronicles” installment, which has to do with the Stockholm Syndrome in that I’m beginning to become enamored of my being held hostage by COVID-19, to the extent that I might put up a ferocious fight against anyone attempting to pry me out of the house now and back to my old 9-to-5 existence.

COVID could sit me down in a chair and make a hostage video of me declaring the fact that I’m fine here. Postmates delivers fine food almost every night. Nothing that my colleague Brian Addison would feed to a cat, but cuisine that’s more than fine for my taste, stunted from decades of living in East Long Beach: chopped BBQ chicken salad from California Pizza Kitchen, fish and chips from John’s Drive-Thru, shrimp and salmon from the Fish Company, French dip sandwiches from Jongewaard’s Bake-N-Broil, Nos. 6 and 24 from Super Mex, slippery shrimp from Yang Chow 2.0.

There are flashes of freedom that I miss a bit: the congeniality and horseplay with my old coworkers and bosses, the view from my office desk, the strolls around Downtown, the office dogs and writing a story without the words “COVID,” “coronavirus” or “droplets” in them.

It’s been a long time in isolation now, during which I’ve been on a hair-raising emotional rollercoaster, zooming from a new and novel experience, to a crisis of story ideas and flurries of writer’s block, to the doldrums of the days in the 30s.

But my COVIDian captors have, for the most part, been OK with me. Somehow, money keeps being sent to my bank account, the spa stays at 104 degrees, I have an ample supply of paper products, enough Lysol to fill a punchbowl and I’m not saddled with the chore of teaching my children how to fail algebra.

Now, after just a month and a half of sacrifice, your suburban lobbyists are demanding the city reopen so they can return to their homes on the golf course, and business people are pushing to de-barricade their shops and offices and open their cash registers. I can hear them rattling their swords and sabers outside the gates to the fortress.

If they get their way—and when have lobbyists and businessmen ever not gotten their way over us mere, hardworking hostages?—I’m afraid Long Beach and the rest of the state will begin tip-toeing back out into the sunlight again, with civic chaperones wielding 6-foot-long broomsticks to assure we don’t get too cozy with one another.

And that re-opening, no matter how slow and cautious, could haul me back into the world of button-down shirts, non-fleece-lined shoes and unadulterated coffee and far away from my comfortable captivity.

I’m not saying we’re living in hopeless times these days, but I am saying I don’t know what to hope for anymore. Could any of the cleaning products I have under the kitchen sink be a cure for Stockholm Syndrome? Who knows? But what have I got to lose?