The first time I watched Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting, it had been more than three weeks since I stepped outside. What was the point? At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic I lived a five-minute stroll from a great collection of shuttered restaurants and a two-minute walk from a train station I no longer used. Several times a day I listened to the Red Line clattering past me down the tracks towards the day job I wasn’t sure I still had.
At first, it could have almost been a vacation. I went on my little walks, held Zoom dates with friends, set out to make a sourdough starter that smelled like nail polish from hell. But one day it rained, I stayed inside, and the whole routine turned to smoke; I stopped plodding around the block, delayed responding to messages even though I had all the time in the world, and the sourdough died in a cloud of farts.
I felt like a zoo animal pacing back and forth in my cage, occasionally stopping at the refrigerator to eat shredded cheese straight out of the bag. The thought of making food exhausted me. Everything did. I said to my wife, “Leave the couch? What am I, an Olympian?” She was doing better than me. It seemed like everyone was.
I spent hours in front of the TV, wearing a permanent groove into a couch I couldn’t afford to replace. Confronted with the golden age of streaming, I never found anything to watch, and even an umpteenth trek through my favorite sitcoms was about as appealing as a mouthful of ash.
I remember scrolling past Netflix ads for The Joy of Painting, wondering what kind of person would tune in to a man with a terrible perm painting dollar store landscapes. Not for me, I thought. But one day I switched on Netflix and didn’t even scroll, just set down the remote and stared blankly at nothing at all. Autoplay saved me — autoplay and Peapod the squirrel.
Ross’ affection for squirrels dated back to his childhood in Florida. “I spent a great deal of time in the woods, and there weren’t any other kids around and I had to learn to play with the creatures that were in the woods,” he once recalled. “That’s why I like animals and little squirrels and raccoons and all those things so much, because they’re very special, very special. And when I got old, I guess I didn’t lose that.”
