We spent two years wondering, wishing, delirious: “What’s life going to be like when they invent a vaccine and everyone can get out again?” Well, friend, friend: without a gong or a bugle, William Bonner’s speech or cell phone notification, we went from “going to be” to that’s it.
In the last few weeks I left the house a few times, dying to meet the infamous “new normal”. So far, what caught my attention the most was: everywhere I look, there’s no shit going on. (True: maybe I’m looking the wrong way. Or right? At the level of sruba, the user experience depends a lot on one’s position)
A new Sodom was the most common prognosis during the endless slumber of lives, zooms, cleaning, Doritos with cream cheese and daytime drinking – Monday, 3.30pm, sun outside, lunchtime [Doritos com requeijão], why not a beer [7]? On television shows, historians told us about pantagruelic post-plague orgies: an “Eyes Wide Shut” at the tail end of every defeated virus.
I glimpsed a future of sabbaths, of insatiable Bacchantes to the sound of “Man eater”, drowned here and there by the shouts of “chuuuuupa, Boccaccio!” Some people started running on the treadmill as soon as they heard “AstraZeneca” for the first time. I myself must have said, from time to time –on the treadmill–, “when this is all over, I’m going to fall in the bag!”, but it was lip service. From the lip in, I never wanted to participate in a slut.
I already find it very difficult to deal with social events where everyone is dressed, just wanting to exchange ideas. Can you imagine psychosocial algebra in an entire naked bar, wanting to exchange fluids? WL. Since April 2020, I suffered: how should we behave in a sorceress? What is the etiquette –or, in Fiel’s orgies, the “procedure”– in group sex situations? Better to stay on your own, playing defense, on the set ball, and, finding an opening, go up with speed? Or, on the contrary, the tip is to launch yourself in a Dutch Carousel scheme, going through all the positions, with your chest open by chance?
I’d be terrible at groping. Terrible. I’ve always suffered a lot from team sports, including the most brutal and anarchic one, conversation. Yesterday, in a bar, without any sexual tension involved, I’ve already made four or five faux pas. I changed names, confused stories, wronged spouses – and I wasn’t under the influence of Doritos or any narcotics. It was just my old me being myself again around. Imagine if it was suruba?
I can see the scene: two friends talk about those who have already met after the vaccine, until they reach me. “Boy, I heard that Antonio isn’t cool, he’s been turning up in a sorrel…”. “Do you know that I heard the same thing? Was it in the suburb of Gonçalves, from the Santa crowd?”. “No, nothing to do, it was in Vila Leopoldina, people from the Oficina”. “Oh man, so it was more than one…”. The adulation in the old and good one (a) to one (a) is already horrible. Imagine getting up (without double meaning) in front of countless human beings in full activity and having to cry out: “I’m sorry, guys! It’s not you, okay?! It’s me!”
No. Suruba –if it rolls over– I’ll be passing by. I prefer to take advantage of the gradual return to social life to rediscover a pleasure I have been deprived of in the last twenty months: find a Saturday night schedule, take a shower, change into old clothes and play, with the euphoria pent up for 600 days, in the pillows from my sofa.
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