I stopped the original RSOAKL blogs at the conclusion of the first New Zealand lockdown last year because everything had become too introspective and not especially funny.  I was woeful, emotionally fraught and self-absorbed, and looking back now, I cringe at the innocence of all of us back in those early pandemic days.

They had taken on a whining tone, grappling with So Many Feelings, losing the original intent of a witty, cynical, middle-aged dating blog with bad language and talk of sex toys and lovers.  And so it was parked, with a brief resurrection earlier this year to do a couple of reviews of the worst thing I’ve ever seen on Netflix and the curiosity of night in a local 5 star hotel.

The review approach is now somewhat short-lived because now Auckland is seventy-five days into our fifth lockdown as the Delta Dawn of cold, harsh pandemic reality finally reached our shores.  I really, really wanted to resist playing dear lockdown diary with this blog again, but fuck me, here I am again, somewhat motivated to express my view of the world around me right now, but with far less feeling, as befits the state of one who is languishing.

Apologies to the sex/dating blog followers, there’s not a lot to see here, so you may want to move on.  Apart from a few delicious “bubble” visits from the lover and that special kind of self-love stress relief in an attempt to get to sleep to circumvent covidsomnia, this missive is a moment-in-time snapshot of the languishing life in a city/country the international media now views as a “mysterious socialist hermit kingdom”, apparently “world-leading” in the severity of our locked down-ness and insanely ambitious expectation that no one can have their freedom until the entire nation is 90% double-vaxxed.  It is a noble ambition, albeit crippling for those of us in Auckland and the Waikato who may well not be out of lockdown until Christmas, if we are lucky, given the nowhere else in the developed world has managed to achieve this when they locked up their citizens.

In the grand scheme of all things languishing, Aotearoa New Zealand is quite late to the piece.  And I mean really quite late, because the rest of the vaccinated first world has long exited lockdowns to live with the virus, and people are returning to something resembling normal, or as normal-ish as being double-vaxxed in a raging Darwinian natural selection event/pandemic allows.

Perhaps Darwinian is a bit harsh?  Nah. Scientifically, it is blatantly obvious that this shit show is continuing to unfold because of the unvaccinated.  I acknowledge the medical reasons for some not being vaccinated, but ultimately, the current situation facing Auckland and surrounds (and inevitably soon the rest of New Zealand) is dependent on those who are not vaccinated who have become the tail wagging the dog of the greater population’s freedom.  In no democratic scenario ever, has the minority impacted the majority so significantly as now.  Actually, I stand corrected, multiple New Zealand MMP general election governing outcomes have been decided upon by minority parties and is without question an early puzzle piece that set things in motion for the political quagmire in which we are standing right now. 

I’m not going to talk politics though.  I am going to talk life in Auckland today, to document this for our children.  Or perhaps grandchildren, because really, the children are probably going to be scarred by memories of this time they aren’t going to school or seeing their friends or extended family, or maybe even lost loved ones they couldn’t say goodbye to.  They will be the ones who will vow not to let this happen again, as our grandparents did when polio swept through our land before big pharma conspiracy theories and social media became our modern plague.

Auckland life in “level 3, phase 1” with 90% of the population having now had their first vaccine dose, is an apparently endless holding pattern of ambiguity in which we have no idea when we will be able to move to our new “traffic light system” when said double jab target is reached.  Life is quite restrictive (note how I use quite as an understatement objectively, yet intentionally passive-aggressively here), unless you are a tradie or work in construction or essential services, for whom things may seem relatively normal, other than there still isn’t actually anything to do after you finish work.

Alas I am not fortunate enough to leave the house to go to work each day.  The last time I saw anyone from my company was three weeks into lockdown, two months ago, when we were allowed an outing to the office to be vaccinated, albeit in shifts and carefully managed bubbles.  I didn’t actually see anyone I knew, although it was nice to go where other people were, given we were grinding our way through the unforgiving severity of level 4 lockdown at that point.  I was seeing colleagues occasionally at online work drinks, which we tried to extend into level 3, but found that no matter how much we enjoy others’ company in person, we had all become utterly sick of being online, and with languishing setting in, regular drinkies were duly abandoned.  

It had become really fucking hard to find the energy to chop half a bottle of chardonnay on a Friday afternoon while maintaining vaguely engaging chat for sixty to ninety minutes, because we all know there is no good chat now, other than complaining about couriers or having yet another conversation to decipher the traffic light pathway to our freedom that awaits.   I had run out of good chat in week three, realising this as I blathered on about how my local supermarket has the best music videos to sing along to while shopping.  I regretted saying this out loud, because not only is that a tragic reflection of the most fun I can have outside my home right now, I didn’t want more people to go to my supermarket, because no one wants the hordes where they shop because queues are annoying, and because, COVID.

But now all of Auckland has now reached the stark realisation that pretty much every supermarket in the Supercity has been named as a location of interest at least once after being visited by COVID cases.  All the supermarkets, not just Pak n Saves and Countdowns, all the petrol stations, and all the Chemist Warehouse branches.  We all just go to them anyway because it’s just how things roll when you live with this thing in your community.  Still, the rest of New Zealand has a few fear factor hurdles ahead of them to overcome to reach the same level of desensitisation.  It was especially obvious seeing the interviews this week of panicky shoppers of the one Christchurch supermarket named as their outbreak starts to unfold, reminiscent of Auckland’s news interviews back in lockdowns 3 and 4 in February, when we had the energy to be triggered by this.

The plight of Aucklanders is not unique, in many other parts of the world people have also been in strict lockdowns.  However, there are some notable exceptions – many of them seem to have been able to have had haircuts.  It is now four months since I had a proper styling that does not involve supermarket hair colour or hacking at my own fringe with nail scissors.  While the result is passable for online Teams meetings and socially distant picnics in the park, I am one headscarf away from looking like I’m from an incestuous religious cult on the West Coast of the South Island.

That’s okay though, I have spent a lot of this lockdown brutally declining unnecessary meetings at work and fiercely defending work-life balance after burning out in previous lockdowns when I battled through to deliver big projects.  Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t actually do that this time round because the ennui from languishing is real.  Morning start times have drifted in favour of staking my tomatoes, walks in the park and leisurely coffees, and actually, no one has really noticed because they seem to be doing the same.  People have also stopped caring about interruptions from children, dogs and couriers in meetings too, because those things have become perfectly normal and acceptable things to attend to.

Interestingly I am not anxious or even that emotional now, just quite flat, and completely and utterly unfocused.  It didn’t start like that.  My lockdown 5.0 started with an ill-timed sore throat and subsequent COVID test that fortunately came back clear.  Then in the following few weeks, when the national vaccine supplies were apparently running perilously low, I was turned away from a drive-in centre, and several weeks away from a first jab appointment at the only over-subscribed centre in the CBD (at the time).  A growing, gnawing anxiety was very real until my workplace expedited my vaccination journey and finally I was on my way.

This time round I also made some very conscious choices about managing the crap we are exposed to that is just irritating and dumb.  Two weeks in, I made the call to stay away from Facebook, because I was finding the endless content and conversation was becoming overwhelming, not to mention the complete fucking idiots trolling the comments section on everything and anything.   While I missed seeing what friends and family were up to, for the most part I have not really missed it at all, validated further when I have had the odd scroll to see if anyone I know has any news of note.   Bar two new babies, apparently not a lot is happening in Facebook land. 

I also stopped watching the 1pm briefings that were compulsory viewing in earlier lockdowns.  After the first few weeks it became pretty clear that, apart from case numbers and statistics, we are not really learning anything, and for the most part these have become a spin platform for the government.  I sometimes watch the big announcements in the rash hope we will have a level change, but even those have become disappointing, empty, and uninformative experiences, given nothing really seems to be changing at all.  I even stopped drawing up witty buzzword bingo drinking games that were so much fun in earlier lockdowns, because it’s all just a bit meh now, and getting shitfaced from press briefings has simply lost it’s lustre. I was also at serious risk of kicking in my precious television screen in frustration, or any mention of the “Team of 5 Million”, which would be utterly catastrophic in taking out my main tactic for passing the time.

Now, this all probably seems a bit bleak, and let’s be honest – the Auckland lockdown experience is a really, really hard turd to polish.  There have been some good things too though.  Glengarry will deliver your wine order the very next afternoon for only $1.  Caretaker and Deadshot deliver some beautiful cocktails that have elevated weekend late afternoons well beyond the heavy-handed G&Ts I was sipping previously.  And the best thing by far is the beautiful food delivered/takeaway from Auckland’s best restaurants and bakeries, who don’t grace the likes of uber eats in normal times.  All of this eases the monotony while we all wait.

I’m not really sure what is the purpose of this share, other than I have managed to kill a few hours on yet another Sunday in lockdown.  Let’s call it a post for posterity, and in case there are some sort of archives, then one for The Archives.  Maybe in fifty years’ time some schoolkid or first year uni student will be trawling the metaverse or whatever supersedes that (hopefully something with a better name), looking for the state of mind of their forebears navigating a global pandemic with unsophisticated population control mechanisms, and decisions that somehow allowed this to be worse than it needed to.    

Given that prospect appeals to my inner writer’s ego, I am going to run with it.  I just hope that taking on the self-inflated mantle of being the voice of a generation has not wound up too morose and introspective.