LAKEVIEW — As the pandemic lurches into the end of its 10th month, Chicagoans are finding lots of ways to beat the cabin fever that’s proved even more formidable than the intense, below-0 winters the City of Big Shoulders is known for. One local man in particular, Louis McKloskey, 32 has adapted to his changing schedule by ensuring he sets aside at least 6 hours to do the simplest tasks on the off-chance he accidentally spends 5 and a half of them staring into the middle distance.
“This COVID stuff, y’know, it’s tough on everyone,” explained McKloskey outside his Roscoe Ave. apartment. “I’m luckier than most I suppose, but I’ve been finding it’s been harder and harder every day to get out to the Target or the Mariano’s without succumbing to a deep melancholy about the state of the world.”
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“I find that it resolves itself pretty much on its own so long as I just spend a real long time not moving and just kind of staring off into the middle distance,” he continued. “So I’ve opted to work smarter and not harder in order to maintain a sense of normalcy about this.”
According to McKloskey, the hardest part about changing up his routine was in the fact that there wasn’t a way to rush a one-size-fits-all solution.
“Getting a routine together is really a game of inches,” he noted. “I had a ton of false starts after the first 6 months of the pandemic where I really thought I had a routine down. I’d be in the CVS picking up some Pepto Bismol, something that I thought I had winnowed down to about three hours round trip and all of a sudden they start playing a Linda Ronstadt song over the loudspeakers that my college girlfriend used to love and it’s like, blammo! I’m stuck in place working through everything that went wrong between me and her and next thing you know the night manager is telling me they’ve been closed for three hours and he’ll just give me the Pepto but I gotta get out.”
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“It’s a process,” he concluded. “You just do the best you can every day. Anyway, what time is it? 1 pm? Oof, I better get started on dinner. I’m making my mom’s beef stew tonight and I figure if I leave myself a couple of 2 hour stretches to stare at the corner of my living room, I should have just enough focus and energy to be eating by around 11:30 tonight.”
