LAST NIGHT, I had something like a panic attack. I was on the couch when it overwhelmed me. It’s a mix of anxiety and dread. I am not sure why the mind likes to replay a greatest hits of the most difficult moments of one’s life. All of those wounds, wounds I can never openly discuss with anyone, really. The tendency of well-wishing listeners is to brush away the concerns of others. People like to say, “That is the past,” as if that means something. If you are still troubled by something that happened in the past, a terse statement like, “That’s all history” doesn’t really help much. The fact is, some people are traumatized. Be it by a real, physical accident, or, let’s say, uncontrollable changes wrought by the merciless gods, some things just don’t sit right inside of us, some things haunt us, some things fill us with dread, despair, anxiety, and panic. So the key here is not to ignore the panic or trauma, but to accept that it is now part of your life, and to live with it and live through it. The same way a knee or shoulder injured years ago in a game can still ache from time to time, one’s traumas or anxieties or pains can lurk and manifest themselves, sometimes sharply, painfully, for a small amount of time. Maybe it’s an evening, or a couple of days. Usually they subside, but you can’t just write it off as “but that all happened so long ago.” It’s a white-gray day here in Viljandi. Lots of late October mist and fog. I think I lived through yesterday’s panic though. My ship righted itself and sailed on. What a nightmare, for sure. For those of you who have never felt this, I never want you to know how it feels. Stay secure under your warmest blankets. Tell yourself there’s no need for worry. It was all just yesterday.

I WAS STARTING TO get used to solitary confinement. I saw very few people: only my daughter and some people walking by the windows. Watching people walk by was of interest, because I wondered where are they walking to, and why do they even bother doing anything? What propels people forward? Are their minds like little magnets, radiating the next destination or coordinates, telling them that there is a reason they have to go there. “I must throw out the trash.” “I must take the car for inspection.” “Someone needs to give me a book.” This sort of mosaic of self-perpetuating behavior is then lumped under an umbrella called “life.” I have this kind of skewed perspective, because my life was more or less a bed, and a shower, a toilet, a plate with some food on it. My thought processes didn’t really exist, or were not happening on a continuum. I made the most of an online app to have food delivered to me through this. But I was glad to go to the shop. Sadly, my friend Gunna was not in the apteek as I passed by. I like Gunna. She only has to smile to me and I feel better. I keep little people around in my own trajectories like these, people I hang onto in a way, safe people, people who lift my spirits and Gunna is one of them. They were doing an inventory in there, and the apothecary was closed for the day. At the shopping center, all went well, except that I had to listen to really bad pop songs. One of them I have heard many times. There is a repetitive piano figure and some man sort of whines over it. I can’t remember one lyric from the song. There are a lot of rough characters in Viljandi. I don’t understand how people can drink and smoke and fight themselves to infinity and back and still manage to make it through a day. I saw some of these characters in a parking lot. Thanks to doctor’s orders, I kept a very safe distance. When I came out of the shop, I saw a local folk musician was advertising a performance called “accordion meditation.” I thought, of all the weird ideas I had during my illness, I would have never linked accordion music and meditation. There was something unique about that. Damp, gray weather here, reminding me of Cork, Ireland, many years ago. The pool halls and the beer halls and the broken faces in the toilets. It’s a tough life in Ireland and it’s a tough life in Estonia. It’s just a tough life.

MORNING LIGHT, SUNLIGHT. Sunlight comes through my window. I slept so deeply and so soundly that I was certain that I had slept half the day. But when I summoned the strength to grasp my phone and read the time, it said it was still just 8.51. Our homes here are still heated by wood furnaces. There is no turning of knobs, pushing of buttons. Fortunately, last night, I discovered a whole stash of dry firewood in a chest next to the fireplace, filled with old newspapers too. This meant that I did not have to go outside. It was very damp at night. In the morning, it dropped below freezing, and turned all the moisture to frost. In the morning, I did go outside. The light and air felt good on my face. The town felt somehow reassuring. It reminds me of a maritime ferry town. Unfortunately though there is just a lake here, and there is no reassuring blast of ferry horn to announce departures and arrivals, or especially thick fog. There is something liberating about living seaside, and something arresting about being landlocked. I shouldn’t despair. In my dream, I went back to my university with my friend Raoul and his mother, who looked like the actress Sally Field. I developed some kind of crush on Sally Field in the dream, which I suppressed, because one is not supposed to be attracted to his friend’s grandmotherly mother. Nii ei tohi. We wandered the halls of the university, but everything had changed, and only the basic layout of the place remained. “It must have been nice to go here,” Sally Field said, and I agreed, except that it didn’t really look like the place I had attended, and none of the people who were once here remained. All of that had been reupholstered, as it were. There was more dreamblur. Trying to escape from a woman who kept pursuing me, and a Japanese psychologist who was waiting for me in his office, but I never managed to get there. Instead, on the way to the office, someone asked me about a classmate of mine, called Buddy (really, in real life) and I commenced to tell the tale of prom night, and how we all went out to the Hamptons and got furiously drunk, and that the last time I had seen Buddy, he was sitting beside a swimming pool the following morning, drinking some bottled water, cool and hungover. That really was the last time I saw him, or heard of him. Like many classmates, other than some postgraduate sightings, Buddy vanished. And that is the way it should be.

AFTER THE ILLNESS, the mind sputters back to life like a greasy old engine. You are not your thoughts, but your thoughts try to make themselves you. Little geysers, little cascades of ideas, fragments, obligations, ejaculating into the air. Your mind tells you to get out of bed and make coffee, when your body wants no such thing. I don’t think it’s a wise thing to trust the mind. Don’t trust your mind. Don’t let it tell you that tomorrow is Sunday, and the day after Sunday is Monday, which is a working day. The body is wiser, let it direct you. The body has no use for days. As my little eyes, my tiny windows reopen on the world, all I see is incomprehensible. A mass demonstration today against vaccinations and masks and other restrictions in Tallinn, Estonia. With the amount of Estonian flags on display, you would think that Konstantin Päts himself had risen from the safety of his mossy plot out in the Forest Cemetery and proclaimed again independence. After that, some health official assuaging the public that if you are vaccinated, and you get ill, your illness will be mild. “For a vaccinated person, the disease does not quite qualify as a common cold, but it is significantly safer and does not cause severe illness.” I guess this all boils down to how you rank severe. Watching these arguments, I begin to think about what an argument even is. An argument is a string of connected thoughts in your waking, functional mind. But when you are occupied by the sickness, the ability to process these kinds of linked thoughts crumbles. You can’t have an argument when you do not know who you are. Your life, your consciousness — because they are more or less the same thing — they exist outside of thoughts and arguments. Just as a virus is a biological entity, we too are rather curious biological entities. Thanks to a cozy relationship between my mother and father some cold winter night in the middle years of the Carter Administration, my own entity was launched, shot straight across the moonscape of existence. It’s hard for me to communicate in words at this point, but after waking up from a blurry tiring mess, watching people shout at each other about masks while waving national flags, or having an official tell me how my sickness is, just seems irrelevant. I am going to watch the rest of Casino Royale. It’s a good film. Wish me luck.

DAY NUMBER UNKNOWN, second day in isolation. According to the health authority, who was kind enough to call me personally yesterday, upon receipt of my positive test, I probably became infected on or about the 15th of October, as my symptoms presented on the 17th. This could have been at the viewing of No Time to Die, but I really don’t know. People think they can game this thing with unlimited booster shots, rubber gloves, masks, sprays, supplements. Distancing, perhaps, is the only measure that can keep it away, as it travels from person to person. But, as Ian Malcolm says in Jurassic Park, “life will find a way.” This is another reason why I don’t necessarily want to discuss the situation with friends and acquaintances. It invites second guessing. “But did you wear two pairs of socks, instead of one pair?” At the beginning of this pandemic, I did think that the populist right, combined with the eco-left, were the most out to lunch, but at some moment in the summer, I started to realize how reprogrammed much of the mainstream center had become, as many people became walking infomercials for vaccination efforts. These are educated, experienced people. It was not that they were wrong per se, it was how they were interacting with information. We have lived through the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, not to mention the War on Terror. One might think that we would have retained some independent reasoning, some natural skepticism, survival tools for navigating confusing times, but, alas, not really. At some point, it became increasingly easy not to think, and to buy into popular narratives. As such, I will probably be told that my symptoms are mild, even though they are not mild at all. Because the symptoms should be mild. It’s rather frightening terrain. Zombies of the Living Dead. “But the man on TV said …” Oh well, into my second hot cup of instant coffee. I was lying in bed thinking about a concept I had conjured, throwing love. The other day in the café, I had encountered a really beautiful female soul, sitting there all in pink, and rather than do the usual “man on the hunt” thing (“Hey, can I add you on social media?”) I just decided to let the love feeling grow in me and walk by her slowly, without even looking at her. My belief is that people are sensitive, and they will sense this kind of energy, so that when I walked by, “I threw my love.” And that was all. No words needed to be shared, or awkward interruptions made. I kind of liked this woman. She struck a nice balance between being understated, delicate, but also interesting, and a touch võimas, or powerful. I like powerful women. If you are going to bask in the rays of the sun, then give me the brightest, hottest, most terrible sun. That is the kind of man I am. At night, during a storm, I dreamt I was in a movie theater with my first-year college girlfriend, and we were both nude beneath a blanket. Her roommate was there too. Then we kissed and she asked me to go get a coffee. I wandered the halls of that building, but the coffee machine was broken, and while a fully catered buffet was being set up in an adjacent ballroom, the coffee hadn’t been boiled yet. Which is why this hot cup of instant coffee tastes so well on this sunny second day in isolation. At last, I have it. Behold the cup!

LAST NIGHT, I watched Quantum of Solace. This is a 2008 film, the second to star Daniel Craig as James Bond. I had seen it once before. With a running time of 107 minutes, it runs tightly, and yet it is a perfect film. I can see no problem with it. Ian Fleming actually left future scriptwriters with loads of material, and “Quantum of Solace” was a short story of his, but for some reason, nobody wants to make film versions of these stories like “The Hildebrand Rarity,” “Risico,” or “007 in New York.” From what I understand, the only aspect from the short story that was borrowed for the film was the title. This time the villain is a very believable nefarious businessman named Dominic Greene, played by Matthieu Amalric, who schemes to take over Bolivia’s water supply. (One thing I rather enjoy is how many actors who turn up in Wes Anderson’s films also appear in the Bond world. Both Amalric and Lea Seydoux appear in The Grand Budapest Hotel. This begs the question, now that Craig is done with Bond, will he turn up in future Anderson movies?). One aspect of the film that was nice to see was the technology, what smartphones looked like back in 2008. I don’t think I had a smartphone capable of transmitting emails until about 2009 or 2010. Back then, life was more “Did you get my email?” Rather than, “Why didn’t you reply to my email?” One thing I learned from this film is how short, well-written dialogue, or well-blocked scenes, can provide ample back story without slowing the pace of the narrative. This is actually one reason why I watch these kinds of action films: to become a more engaging writer. Yesterday I went and got my PCR test done for Covid-19. I walked up to the market and stood in line in the rain with my umbrella. This morning the result was positiivne. I have not disclosed my vaccination status, because of how ugly that issue has become. I do not trust either vaccine advocates or so-called antivaxxers because they have no respect for people’s personal boundaries. Just because you got a shot doesn’t give you the right to stick your nose in someone else’s face and lecture them about “science.” And just because you have watched a night’s full of YouTube conspiracies doesn’t make you a better authority. It’s been disgusting, the whole thing. But, let’s just say, I have been fully able to access public events, restaurants, and cafes here in Estonia, where people are checked at the door, and there is the illusion of health safety, and here I am sprawled out on the couch for days, watching my consciousness dissolve into the air and imagining my blanket is an Aston Martin DB5. This has been a full-fledged flu, and there has been nothing so mild about it. That being said, having to lie around and watch Bond movies isn’t the worst fate, now is it? I might try Casino Royale. I don’t know if I can bring myself to watch Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) drown again at the end, but, as I said, if you leave the film dry eyed, you’re just not satisfied.

ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, I drove out into the country. All of the apothecaries and pharmacies had closed at 3 pm in town, but I managed to assemble a bag full of supplies for an older couple suffering from Covid-19. Turmeric, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, some other vitamins, ginger, paracetamol. Yes, they were both vaccinated, but had breakthrough infections. I left the bag of goodies at the door of the farm, called to alert them that it was there, and on the way back began coughing. It was a dry, painful cough that continued into the next day. An unusual cough. The following day, I began to feel rather sluggish. Then I decided to arrange a test for myself. I went to the private clinic that offers fast turnaround antigen testing, ordered my test while standing there on my mobile phone, had that nice tickler inserted in my nose yet again, and waited for the result. A half an hour later, it arrived: negatiivne. Still, I was feeling slow. At night, I ordered Spectre, the 2015 James Bond film, and watched it. I quite enjoyed it. I am not sure what people expect from a Bond movie. It delivered on suspense, car chases, boat chases, helicopter chases. It had Lea Seydoux, who is inarguably beautiful. I mean, she really is stunning. Compared to some of the ridiculous stuff that Roger Moore put out in the 1970s, you can’t really do better than this. Still, it somehow got mediocre reviews. I mean, come on, people. What else do you expect? I suppose people want to cry too, which is why Skyfall and No Time to Die were somehow more satisfying. We want to cry at the end. Somehow I was lost in this Bond world as my illness continued, to the point that I began to have those slightly feverish dreams, where you lose your focus, or your perspective, and perception starts to shift. I started to think that I was Bond, and that my blanket was Bond’s Aston Martin DB5. This continued until I lost all comprehension of existence all together. The only thing I remember was Freyja bringing me a glass of water. Freyja is Dulcinea, the “youth” of “The End of Days.” She really has lovely eyes, eyes like oceans. You can just stare at them forever. I don’t think I have ever fallen for someone so young, but I am getting a little older, so maybe this trend will continue. And maybe she is not so young anymore. Anyway, she brought me a glass of water and I drank it, and then I whispered to her, aitäh, aitäh, aitäh, or “thank you, thank you, thank you.” I think I actually said this out loud during my shapeshifting sleep. For me, that gesture was worth everything. The water was gravely needed. 007 was parched.

TODAY SOMEONE ASKED me about the blues. I had said that I was living the blues. “What do you mean? The music?” No, not exactly. The blues are presented in the music. I guess you could stitch the two of them together, but the blues are bigger than the music. The blues are a belief system, a way or key to interpreting life. The way this belief system is presented is via the music. The music is the teachings of the system presented for the people. The architecture. The layout. This goes here, that over there. At their core, the blues are about survival. They are about people who have been kicked out, kicked low, kicked high, kicked, shoved, pushed, pulled, molested, hurt, pained by life, and yet keep moving on, no matter what, out the back door, in the front door, out the back window at night, in the front window in the morning. “When I first started hoboing,” sang John Lee Hooker, “I took a freight train to be my friend, Oh Lord.” That’s all it is right there. Solitude. Desperation. Loneliness. There is a monastic quality to the blues, yet one that does not demand of its adherents monastic qualities. No. No. You do whatever you need to get by. That is the tenet of the blues. You have to move.

THERE, ALL IN PINK, curious new eyes, lioness ringlets dropping to the pinkest softest pillows, exuding, channeling, challenging, caressing, possessing, as if by virtue, the softness of all imperfections of perfection, with ballads, haikus, novellas, and miniatures, dropping loose from your waistcoat, like shards of broken sunlight cascading through pink autumn 10 am Old Town confectioners, bakeries, cafes, bistros, putkas, pulling me up …

… Up, up, rising like hot bread, out of my mossy granary burial ground grave, up, up, up you pull me, ballooning out into full hurricane blossom, rejuvenated, refreshed, revived, currant purple starlight shooting cosmic moon dust comet love, yes, you, you know the type exactly, the kind of pull that makes you do foolish things, splurge on rash plane tickets, set up money laundering operations in Curaçao and the British Virgin Islands, the kind of pull that makes you promise that which can never be delivered, pledge that which can never be accomplished, commission public works, organize tropicalist festivals, win gold medals, entertain His Holiness the Dalai Lama …

… and all for your love, love, all for your pink, all for your Jupiter moonburst honeycream explosions of the profound, that strawberry geyser pink cream comedown, those buttery dreams of post-aftermath bliss, those sweet runny dreams of wisdom, dreams of rebirth, dreams of palm tree reveries, dreams of kaleidoscopic intergalactic oblivion, dreams of raindrops, spicy teas, and the perfect late morning, the morning I saw you, my fall dream of you, for this is my dream of you, sitting there, unaware, dreaming …

ONE DAY AFTER MANY HOURS of work, I decided to explore Paalalinn. This is not something I usually do on purpose. In fact, the more years pass, the more I try to avoid leaving the Old Town and its environs altogether. I have all I need here, food, shelter, clothing, vinyl records, and the gym at the Grand Hotel where I can work out and watch documentaries about Stalin in peace. Everything that anyone could ever need. Yet I decided to go and seek adventure in Paalalinn. There was something there that people said I should see.

Paalalinn is a district in Viljandi about which I know very little. I don’t even know how it got its name, or if there even ever lived someone named Paala. A few years ago at Vinoteek Mulks, I did meet some old-timers who had grown up in Paalalinn before the building boom of the 1960s. They said that Paalalinn used to be a country place, before all of the housing projects, and children frolicked in the forests and along the streams there. At some point though, they built those large apartment buildings, and the man-made lake alongside them, now called Paala Lake. 

This is now a popular summer spot for locals, who come to sun themselves on its sandy beach, play on its playground, and buy ice cream from a small ice cream cafe at lake’s edge. This is also, as I recently learned, the site of an intriguing dive called the Paala Järve Vaala Baar, or the “Paala Lake Whale Bar.” It is built into the side of one of the hills. Apparently, it is such an inspiring place that Puuluup, the eclectic musical duo, had to write about it. In the video for the song, they can be seen swimming fully clothed and singing in the water, as well as wrestling in the beach sand. The song itself is structured like choral music. There is a mysterious, Eastern inflection to this tune that recalls the incantations of holy monks. Puuluup are like monks, I have thought, which makes it strange that they would hang out in bars, especially this bar I had never heard of. Somehow after years of living here, I had never managed to encounter the Whale Bar. 

Because of this, I decided to undertake my pilgrimage.

Getting to Paalalinn is not difficult, but not particularly pleasant either. I walked past the two buildings that burned in the summer down Jakobsoni Street, following the road past the earthworks for the hospital that’s being built, and then by Leola, that building that encloses another legendary underground bar, the one that locals call auk or “hole,” presumably because once you go in, you never come out. Also, auk, as I have learned, means “blood” in the Inuit language. Something to keep in mind. At last, I came upon the lake and saw the buildings of Paalalinn towering against a gray horizon. The people of Paalalinn are different from the ones in the Old Town, but how, I cannot say. The few I saw on my walk seemed indifferent to me, neither particularly happy nor sad, and I decided not to trouble them with my search for the Whale Bar. Instead I pressed on toward, eventually discovering it across from the beach. There was a table outside the bar, and the door was open. Smoke curled from a chimney which, because of the way the bar is built, made it seem as if smoke was coming out of the ground. Inside, a client was talking with the bartender, but they stopped their talk as soon as I entered. 

“So this is it,” I said, admiring the place.

“This is what?” the bartender said.

“The Paala Järve Vaala Baar, of course.”

“No,” the bartender said. “This is the Järve Baar. The Lake Bar.”

“But I thought there were supposed to be some whales here.”

“No,” said the bartender. “There are no whales here. There is a lake here though. That is why it is called the Lake Bar and not the Whale Bar. I don’t know why people keep coming here and asking about whales, really. It makes no sense to me. There are no whales in Paala Lake.”   

“Maybe because it just sounds nice,” I said. “Paala, vaala. See, it’s like poetry.”

“You’re probably right,” said the bartender.

I ordered a drink and took one last look around the bar, whatever its name was, and left. This trip to Paalalinn was over. 

Recently while talking with a local writer friend whom I will call Jaak, he remarked on how much he has missed Venice in the pandemic years and, to cheer him up, I suggested that they could replace the streets in Uueveski, where he lives, with canals, and that way he could take a gondola to the cafe in the morning instead of his bike. “And look at all the work they are doing on Uus Street,” I said, referencing the construction that has left this major thoroughfare completely dug up. “They’re already installing the canals! All they have to do is fill Uus Street with water and it will be ready.” Jaak was not amused. He wanted the real Venice, not some fake Venice, but as I walked back from the bar in Paalalinn, I considered how much of our town experience is imaginary and how much of it is real. In some ways, Puuluup’s Paala Järve Vaala Baar really exists, for many even moreso than the actual bar. And my idea of turning Uueveski into the Venice of the North is now unforgettable. Close your eyes and you can see it. So, who knows, maybe in a few years there really will be a Whale Bar in Paalalinn, and gondolas on Uus Street. 

All we have to do is dream and dream well, and our dreams will become the new reality.

***

An Estonian version of this piece appeared this week in Sakala.