The new Loki series on DisneyPlus got our household through Lockdowns 4.0 and 5.0.
Miss Minutes, the wholesome, sweet-faced, orange cartoon clock of the Time Variance Authority (TVA), explains to Loki, Prince of Asgard,
‘Long ago, there was a vast multiverse war. Countless unique timelines battled each other for supremacy, nearly resulting in the total destruction of, well, everything. But then, the all-knowing Time-Keepers emerged, bringing peace by reorganizing the multiverse into a single timeline, the Sacred Timeline.’
As we learned with Loki the significance of the Sacred Timeline and its proper flow of peace and order, we were anxiously getting our home ready to sell (Lockdown 4.0), and then trying to sell with about as much certainty as executing a perfectly puffed souffle (Lockdown 5.0).
Miss Minutes goes on to tell Loki,
‘Sometimes, people like you veer off the path the Time-Keepers created. We call those Variants. Maybe you started an uprising or were just late for work. Whatever it was, stepping off your path created a nexus event, which, left unchecked, could branch off into madness, leading to another multiversal war.’
They say that selling a house is one of life’s greatest stress events, sitting alongside the death of a loved one, a break down in a marital relationship, or losing a job.
They probably are also starting to say somewhere now that it’s best not to sell a house when there is a pandemic happening at the same time lest you lose your mind.
I’m sure house selling is not up there at the top with the worst of all things. But making the risky (and privileged) decision to sell a cherished family home steeped in memories, in the midst of a trauma-compounding global pandemic, does feel like stepping off the path of the proper flow of time towards idiocy.
The reaction to Lockdown 6.0 was subtly different again to the last one (Eau de Farked) and the one before that (fuck-fuddled) and before that (mini-fuck) and before that (clusterfuck) and before that (totally ok here and we got this and we are in it together). This one caught us off-guard. Donut day, then bam, donuts wolfed down by new numbers. We are increasingly growing accustomed to swearing like we’ve never sworn before. Off we went this time like a skein of geese in full flight pooing on heads and hooting like a raucous cocktail party.
‘FFS!’ screamed WhatsApp. ‘Flippin fuck!’ hollered Facebook. ‘Fuck you home learning’ shouted the schoolground. ‘Fuckity fuck! Fucken shit! Fark this! Friggin, flippin, fucken, fucking, FUCK!’ bellowed Twitter relentless with nothing else at all to say to sum it up. What else was there?
Six million plumes of curses in hysterical hyper-colour spewed into the Victorian sky.
There should be a collective noun to describe this, so instantaneously united were we in our response. A cluster of Melbourne fucks. A pandemonium of profanities. A caravan of blasphemes.
Even the German 1500m athlete showed he was with us as we sniveled into evening drinks on couches. Thanks Robert Farken. That’s the Olympic spirit! And when Farken ran alongside our Ollie Hoare, Farken and Hoare took that spirit to a whole new solidarity level.
As Lockdown 6.0 was setting in with the sun across our beloved state, our family had an offer on our house. It was not as much as we anticipated, an overpowering, gut-wrenching, drop-to-the-floor sensation that was far less about the money than it was about the reduced worth someone else would place on our memories and dreams—on parts of ourselves—entrenched in this physical space. Neuroscientists and psychologists have long studied how a material space can be linked to memory and hold far greater value beyond monetary transaction. But it was a buying offer nonetheless (checking privilege again), after months of exhausting process, during a pandemic and on the cusp of another interminable lockdown, so we took it.
And all this while an elected and completely trolleyed politician gushed codswallop in the federal parliament.
And while Australia closed that nonsensical little loophole which Heaven forbid should have allowed non-resident citizens to leave Australian shores to get back to their homes.
And while COVID-19 in New South Wales continued to climb off the Richter and still does and we know your pain Sydney.
And while we really are now on the brink of climate catastrophe and we need to stop those animals farting and stop the world around us from dying. Sixth climate report due, sixth lockdown.
‘You ridiculous bureaucrats will not dictate how my story ends!’ says Loki.
On giving the real estate agent the order to proceed, my customarily unruffled husband ferociously bit the earloops off his cloth facemask in the long take-away line outside Laksa King. It was an insane outburst, such was the deepened stress from personal happenings and global happenings and the snowballed deviation from the Natural Order of Things, the Sacred Timeline.
We are living through a pile-up of nexus events branching into madness, for each of us an amalgamation of the personal, whatever our circumstances, and the universal. And the branches are spreading further and the events are coming faster, an ‘epoch of increduality’, a crash course to a multiversal war. It’s achingly depressing and we need to urgently reset the timeline.
The Time-Keeper, He Who Remains, says in the last episode of Loki,
‘Existence is chaos. Nothing makes any sense, so we try to make some sense of it.’
Not much is making sense in the disorder these days except the number six seems to feature a bit. Eruptions of swearing in the immediacy of lockdown announcement is the only thing that we can understand, a Melburnian sixth sense of collectively knowing and feeling.
- The number of the beast.
But as always, and because we simply must, we shift from cussing frenzy into the unhurried, humming swing of a new lockdown, summoning up whatever we have left to go on, checking in on each other via SMS or Twitter—‘You ok? Everyone ok?’, oscillating between holding our shit together, hiding in closets, and occasional upbeat spates of ‘COME THE HECK ON!’ our own internal Cedric Dubler, goading us forward with a voice in our craniums bouncing like a bat out of hell. What an Olympic moment that was and Cedric please come help us all!
Soon, and slowly, our family will start to move from panic, to sadness of memories left behind, to looking towards a fresh future together in a new family home.
The flamboyantly costumed, golden crowned Richard E. Grant as Classic Loki, the original God of Mischief, fights with lifeforce and fun all the way to the end.
The timeline is resetting for the golden crowned Helmeted Honeyeater, our glorious official Victorian emblem released back into the wild, in the hope that he will rise again.
Put on your golden crown and keep on going. We advance on, softly, we will all rise again in time, and hopefully, one day, the Sacred Timeline will be restored.
Even if you aren’t a Marvel fan (of course, if you’re not, you really should be).
What series should we watch in Lockdown 6.0?
