Two Seven Eight: Boccaccio

Early spring, and the Red Death is here. The city where I live is in semi-quarantine, with empty streets and social life reduced to nothing. My understanding is that hospitals here in the city are quietly moving towards a crisis.

It's a grim season, and there's no denying that. My lovely blonde friend in the Land of the Long White Cloud has gone missing. New Zealand is under crisis rules, with its borders shut and businesses closed. I've no idea if she's well or if her employers have shut down altogether.

It's an odd thing, the plague in a social media age. I suppose people are still texting, but no one seems to be lamenting that there are no voices out there over the aether. I'm a creature of a dying generation, and telephone voices do matter to me. I suppose that FaceTime and Skype still count as interaction sites, but somehow that's not the same as long talks by phone late at night.

I've seen a few suggestions that here in the time of the Red Death, writing letters is a key skill to revive. I do agree with that, actually. There's something heartening about actual physical letters. There's something about ink and handwriting that makes you feel like you're actually part of a relationship with someone.

COVID-19 has of course destroyed not just the bar and restaurant industry, it's also ruined sex work and most sexual interactions. Sex workers in Europe and North America are trying to move online, to do webcam and cam-girl sex to stay financially afloat. There are no bars or clubs anymore, and fear has emptied out dating apps. In a world of N95 masks and using Clorox wipes on everything anyone touches, sex is fairly out of the question. Even s/m is hard to do if you're Social Distancing--- whipping a lovely young companion at a minimum distance of six feet (two meters?) is a difficult thing.

Now I will assume that the online sale of vibrators and dildos has spiked.  The Solitary Vice is the one sexual release left...so long as Amazon Prime continues to deliver. I could note that while Lelo and Hitachi are still bringing pleasure to women, there's no equivalent for men. Or at least no equivalent that anyone male can discuss. Women can tell clever, amusing stories of getting through quarantine and Social Distancing with their vibrators, but no one male can preserve any self-respect if he admits to wanking his way through the plague season. Of course, that's a story for another day.

Tonight I'm thinking about Boccaccio and the Decameron. You know the backstory for that, I'll presume. Somewhere in Italy during the Black Death, a group of wealthy and cultured refugees from the Plague assemble in a country estate and fight off boredom by telling one another stories--- usually scandalous, lascivious, and wickedly clever tales of adultery, seduction, and complicated affairs. I think that there was an updated version in the late 1960s, an Italian film called "Boccaccio '70". But in any case, I am thinking of Boccaccio's characters telling tales of lust and passion while the Plague hovers just offstage.  I'm thinking that we need a Decameron 2020. We need to tell one another tales of encounters and adventures, tales of the things we're all prevented from doing by COVID-19 right now.

My thought is that I'll spin out more threads here, that I'll tell stories from the Pasts of lovely friends, and just possibly a few tales from my own past. I hope you'll read this and respond with your own tales. If phone sex is a dying art, and no one actually writes letters any longer, then at least we can tell one another tales here.

I'm expecting that there'll be very little "normal" happening through the rest of the year. The Red Death may not be just outside the window, but it is out there.

So if you are reading this, do write. Do let me know about the stories I'll be posting...and let me know your own stories. This may be all we'll have for a while.