True Stories with Teeth
I’m very happy to report that I’ve had a couple more essays accepted by really terrific literary journals recently, and they’ll be published in the coming year.
I’ll be updating this blog with any news and links to the essays in Brevity and Michigan Quarterly Review for anyone who’d like to check them out.
2020 is a strange year.
Over on Instagram, I often pair a very short story with my photos, and I thought I’d share a couple of them (and a life update, of sorts) here. If you’re on IG, feel free to follow along.
1.
Guys, I’m interrupting the fall of democracy for a selfish reason. Today, I’ve been clean and sober for one year.
Considering I was quarantined for three months and haven’t been to an in-person recovery meeting since February, and also the cascading chaos of world-jarring events that we’re all navigating—well, I’m happy I made it this far.
Once upon a time I had many more sober years under my belt, and this one year took about three to finish, but life sometimes has other plans. I mean, look around. But the cool thing about rough times is that with some luck they can make you kinder and easier to cry and immune to bullshit and hopefully a little more useful to the people around you who may not be having, like, the best year of their lives.
As any sober person can tell you, none of this was accomplished through willpower. I don’t know why I got to a year when others didn’t. I have more resources than some and so much comes down to just plain luck, or grace, or the severity of one’s defeat. Sobriety is more than just getting by without drugs or booze. It’s closer to Dorothy opening the door to Munchkinland. And finding some traveling companions who pull you out of the wreckage of your own personal tornado.
Thank you especially Bill W., Peter, Charlie, Court and John, Todd, Patrick, Becca, Maura, Phil, David and many others, including some cool folks on here. I didn’t do this alone.
Thank you, Agnes—you endured all of it with me. I’ve tried to be your rock and you gave me a reason to go on. The world is scary and heartbreaking right now but also sort of beautiful, seeing so many people work so hard, in the face of great cruelty, to take care of each other. If you need to talk to someone about addiction, reach out to me and I’ll try in a very imperfect way to listen.
2.
I pass my neighbors in the lot behind my building, a converted factory with 50 units. We come and go, sometimes stopping for a quick chat. I know the smokers better than the others. They’re fond of my dog. One of them drove me to the tow lot on New Year’s Day when I forgot to move my car during snow plowing.
Many of the dogs in the building have cranky temperaments, so their owners and I avoid each other, fiddle with face masks, nod across the distance. I mouth, “Hello” to the deaf woman who lives beside me. I can often hear her through the walls as she scolds the new puppy.
It’s a subsidized building, all of our incomes falling below a specific annual salary per occupant, a communal detail that you don’t normally know about your neighbors. Working folks, folks on disability, young families. The full racial spectrum. A few odd, lone souls like me, climbing out of some recent wreckage that we keep to ourselves.
My salary is a bit higher now, but they let me stay. I don’t know how many of my neighbors lost their jobs in the pandemic, though fewer cars swap spots during the day, and the property manager thanks me for my rent checks with a new intensity. The caretaker, who’s repaired my sink and AC and conducts inspections while I’m at work, has a personal relationship with my dog, developed over visits I’ve never seen.
One smoker likes to tease me about all the food I must eat when she sees me lumbering past with six full grocery bags dangling from my fists every weekend. A father of two tells me, “God Bless,” every time we pass. The small girls who used to fawn over Agnes are a bit older now and have turned awkward, as if we no longer know each other.
I never thought I’d still be here, back when I’d moved in, the first building in the valley that would let me keep my dog. Three and a half years have passed and almost every day I wonder, as I make my way through the lot, how I ended up here, as if I’ve forgotten how my life had fallen apart. And the two-bricks-forward, one-brick-back pace of my reconstruction, and how I’d miss these people—in a small, sharp way—should I ever leave.
3.
The first boy I ever fell in love with lived in Nicaragua. I met Alfredo on a high school exchange trip when I was all of 15. We’d talk together in my broken Spanish late into the night after our families had gone to sleep.
One night I sat in the courtyard as he stood in front of me, telling me about being chased by a bull in a nearby field, and I struggled to grasp his words and he leaned forward, put his hands on my knees and rested his weight there, slowing his words for me, and the crucifix slipped out of his collar and caught the streetlight. I fell in love with him in that moment, in the way that a scared, closeted 15-year-old boy could fall in unrequited love with a boy whose culture had different norms for affection between men.
I never told him I loved him, though we exchanged letters after I returned to Minneapolis, where I marched in protests against the Contra War, getting clubbed in the gut by a cop and arrested at the age of 17. I was driven, for the first time in my life, by concern for the welfare of people outside of myself. For that boy and my host family and the other people I’d met, none of whom supported the U.S.-funded Contras waging war in their country and killing their sons, brothers and husbands.
I was saving my money for a return trip when I received word that Alfredo had been drafted into the war, his truck had been ambushed by the Contras, and he’d been killed. I may have been too young for my activism to survive that blow. I just felt hopeless futility. That I could march and protest and write essays and educate my peers but, in the face of well-funded and corrupt power, none of it would matter.
I still have that ambivalence, a calibrated sense of injustice in the world around me, dampened by paralyzed cynicism. And maybe, if I took that feeling and multiplied it by a factor I’m not equipped to calculate, it would be similar to that sense of exhausted, trampled outrage that a good chunk of this country feels on a daily basis. That trip was the best thing I ever did with my young life. It gave me a lens I still use to understand the world that continues to break my heart and stir my hope.
[A longer version of this piece appeared in War, Literature and the Arts. You can read it here.]
Just over four million cases globally, with 276,000 deaths. In the U.S., 1,327,000 cases and 79,000 deaths. With our national need to be number one, we win the Biggest Number of Deaths Contest, hands down. We got this.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted. Listen, shit is fucked. Every time I went to draft a post (after ten hours working on my laptop) I felt suffocated by isolation and bad news. Hacking my way through a mile of thorns with a butter knife. Easier to lie on the couch and trade nudes with dudes in Chicago, London, and Melbourne.
20.5 million Americans lost their jobs in the month of April. The most since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate shot up to 14.7%, with no quick fix in sight. Decades, the experts say. It’ll take decades to pull ourselves out of this hole.
The federal $349 billion small business loan program emptied in two weeks. Most of it dispersed to suspect “small” outfits (publicly-held hotel chains, etc.) who refused to give it back. A Louisiana evangelical pastor who’d defied state social distancing guidelines to hold massive, in-person services, later kicked off a campaign to get his followers to donate their personal $1,200 stimulus checks to his church—the checks had been delayed in the mail just a moment while Trump had his name stamped across each one.
The pages of the Boston Globe’s obituaries have more than doubled, which reminds me of reading the local gay rags my dads had around the house in the late 80s, and scanning page after page of handsome, mustachioed men who’d died at ages younger than I am now. What a world I came out in. What a world now.
Blame China is the new plan to lead our country out of this mess. In other news, 59% of the nation’s Chinese restaurants have stopped taking debit and credit transactions, a sign they’ve ceased all operations.
One-third of all U.S. deaths are nursing home workers or residents. 50 residents and staff of a facility in the next town over caught the virus. 60 dead bodies were found in trucks outside a Brooklyn funeral home after neighbors complained about the smell. Cruise ships across the globe warped into floating, doctor-less hospital wards, stranded off the coasts of cities that wanted nothing to do with them.
For every 100,000 Americans, 40.9 blacks have died, along with about 17.9 Asians, 17.9 Latinos and 15.8 whites. These numbers make me sad and cynical about the push to reopen, and about whose deaths get to matter. This virus is bent on making life meaner for those with mean-enough lives.
A writer disguised as a daytime clock-punching marketer, I’m officially sick of the advertising phrase, “In these unprecedented times…”
If I could sum up the current state, I’d put it this way:
Scientist A: We could have a vaccine soon.
Scientist B: The U.S. could be socially distancing into 2022.
Trump: Just sip some bleach.
He’s blocked the CDC from dispensing guidelines that counter his delusional optimism, muted doctors whose level-headed advice ran smack up against his constant, snake-oil quackery, even as two people in the White House tested positive this week. If they can’t avoid it, how can we?
Under the cover of the pandemic, he’s cut environmental protections, kicked 100s of immigrant kids from our border, and dropped charges against a crony who pled guilty in a court of law. He’s such an unrelentingly corrupt, moronic trash-monster that it’s like anyone left with a shred of heart is living this shared, hallucinatory nightmare. We’re crammed into a school bus with no driver at the wheel, barreling towards the edge of a cliff. We’re a rudderless, festering cruise ship in the Bermuda Triangle.
The pandemic reaction has splintered, like everything in this country, along a deep gap between us and them. Us are listening to public health officials, wary of returning to work, and wearing face masks in public.
Them are screaming for life to get back to normal, strapping guns to their belts and protesting, mask-less, at state capitols for their right to believe that the pandemic is a deep state hoax. They think we’re scared pussies. We think they’re fucking nuts and doomed for bleak ends in red-state hospital wards.
We each have our own sources and separate facts to bolster our bulwarks. We share the same contaminated air, sucking down the same COVID, hunkered down in alternate realities.
It’s a struggle to maintain a sunny outlook, is what I’m saying. When you’re stuck at home, alone, 24 hours a day (22 on a good day) and every view onto the outer world is a window onto some separate, profound, unending pain, well, you go put on a smile. I’m saving my energy for the fight to come.
And then I got sick.
Every interaction with the outside world is a calculated risk. Do I go to the grocery store or opt for delivery? Do I hike when I’m mostly sure I can stay 20 feet away from the small town locals? Do I use my building’s laundry room? Do I break down from a shuddering need for physical connection and invite a dude over who’s also been quarantining and bears no symptoms? Somewhere in there, someone got me sick. Let’s be honest—it was the dude.
A sore throat that turned painful to swallow. Chills, then heat, then chills again. Body aches. Pounding head. A fever inching past 100. No respiratory problems, so I was on the fence about its critical, COVID-likely weight.
But it’s impossible to look at symptoms now through any other lens than COVID, so I emailed my GP, who called in a referral to the local testing site. I drove, fuzz-brained, into the next town, pulled my sensible Civic up to a tent in a hospital parking lot and a nurse in full protective gear had me inch down my window, lower my face mask to cover only my mouth, and then stuck a long-ass swab about a foot up my nose, where for ten long seconds she held the burning tip in my sinuses, rubbed it around, then sent me on my way.
Drove home in a fever, passed out on the couch with Agnes. The next day I felt a bit better, so I wasn’t shocked when my test came back that afternoon, marked “negative.” It had felt like the usual flu.
I had this weird, unpleasant experience in the following days as a couple of friends and several coworkers asked, over text, pointed questions about how I’d managed to contract the flu during quarantine. People holed up with partners and families implied that my inability to be completely alone for eight weeks was a moral failure.
(Half of this might be all in my own head. But half of everything we see at any moment of the day is in our own heads.)
What I’m trying to get at is that it reminded me of the moral quandary of safe sex, and the shame we were meant to feel every time we failed at its perfect practice. My default headspace is that everyone secretly hates me and thinks I’m a bad person, so the safe sex game, transplanted to the COVID era, is another thick, fertile patch of thorns for me to play in. The cuts comfort because I’ve long known their depth.
The sweet side effect of my sick-scare is that two friends, a couple in the next town over, took good care of me. One’s a doctor and between the two of them, I had constant texts, phone appointments for my current list of symptoms, and even a delivery from the supermarket. After my test results, I Venmo’d them the total with the memo line, “non-COVID groceries.”
My Big Brothers. Two years ago I’d been perched alone at the edge of an abyss in this town, so this was…something I can’t yet articulate, because saying it aloud will make it disappear. It’s an unfamiliar resource. Because I was raised by wolves, by a man who used me for his own needs, and by a woman who believed that movement, ambition, work for its own sake, performance for approval, were the true indicators of worth. Inaction, reflection, rest—all sins. Sickness—when you’re shut down, confined, and weakened—was a moral failure, worthy of contempt.
I think about the word mother, when we use it in the context of sickness. We want, when weakened, to be mothered. We want—in the middle of a flu, in the eye of a pandemic—to know we’ll be okay. “You are not alone,” my Big Brother texted me the night before my test results. His own life had taught him that at moments of weakness and fear, we need to hear that won’t be abandoned.
I texted the Big Bros to tell them that I loved them. I wasn’t even feverish at the time. During my mom’s death, I learned that saying such words is an act you never regret.
I don’t know how the fuck you’re enduring, but this is what’s getting me through the thorns. These little gleams of light and connection. As the whole world burns down, how else are you going to skate by?
Snapped this pic outside my apartment building after 12 hours inside, writing blogs for a client about proper hand hygiene. I almost missed the buds, coming back from a hike with my dog. The world contains everything. It’s hard to remember sometimes, in lockdown, but there’s beauty along with the pain. You have to look for it.
Worldwide cases closing in on two million, with 121,000 deaths. 547,000 cases in the US, with 26,000 deaths. New York City today revised its estimated death count to over 10,000. They’ve been burying bodies unclaimed by family on Hart Island in Long Island Sound, home to about a million other bodies. For 150 years, folks have ended up in the ground there after dying from TB, yellow fever, AIDS. I just caught myself scanning the news of these burials for actual numbers – that’s how we measure anything anymore. The number of dead.
I’ve still got my health, though COVID-19 is nibbling at the edges of my circles. A few dudes in my Facebook feed listing symptoms, one’s husband on a respirator in Vancouver. A coworker’s husband is an EMT and his partner tested positive. Another coworker’s grandparents both caught it, and one passed away.
16 million Americans tried to file for unemployment through systems ill-equipped for the surge. Disney furloughed 43,000 employees this week. Goofy and Mickey, shit out of luck. One-third of Americans didn’t pay April rent. International Money Fund projects the worst slump since the Great Depression. $1200 stimulus checks hitting bank accounts, but a whole slew of folks deemed “ineligible.” Trump demanded that the Treasury stamp each check with his own name.
I may have saved my butt this week. A client we landed even in quarantine picked my slogan for a big billboard and media campaign. A sign that, at least here in this valley, someone thinks the future will still come. That billboard bought me time, maybe.
The partisan divide on the virus keeps cracking wider: the new battlefront is the economy vs health – when to quit lockdown, with Trump, Fox News and conspiracy sites downplaying the odds of a second surge in deaths. Everyone else going, “Duh, science.” It’s coming down to governors, forming factions of fellow regional states, versus Trump, who pulls fantasy laws out of his ass: “I have the ultimate call.” A mutiny, he called the state pacts.
Gov. Cuomo shot back: “We don’t have a King Trump.” More like an emperor, and fuck – talk about new clothes. He’s resplendent.
Haven’t filled my gas tank in four weeks. Factories shuttered. Air pollution is down. Bears now roam the empty roads of Yellowstone. I wash fewer clothes but more dishes. Retailers have entered the stage of hair dye shortages. Clumsy home beauty. A million dudes Netflix-and-napping, the backs of our heads unevenly buzzed.
I can do 30 push-ups in a set, but I’m shrinking. Literally, less of a man, by some measures. I fucking miss the gym but I’m still healthy, employed, and complaining about closed gyms is the ultimate vapid gay male privilege.
A completely unscientific survey reveals that everyone I know is slowly losing their minds. Texts and FaceTimes turn moody, as I have no words to fix the lives of my friends. Not that they expect it. Not that I could. One is stuck in a city far from home. Another can’t take that job in Paris. Lives interrupted, like we’ve all missed the last flight in some empty connecting airport. Everyone stir-crazy, horny and lonesome, most of us stuck in an experience that the entire world is sharing, but enduring alone.
But others lead lives made suddenly more essential. I read a journal entry online by a New York City doctor, who can’t stop seeing the bodies piled in the refrigerated trucks idling at his hospital’s curb. The nice trucks, he wrote, have shelves. In those trucks, the bodies don’t need to be stacked.
As a longtime social lockdown professional, some quarantine measures comes easy to me. But other habits I’d thought I’d outgrown. I once shied from strangers, the fog of depression sapping the strength it took to endure small talk (all small talk demands of introverts Herculean courage).
But now, are you like me? When a stranger crosses your path, do you before conscious thought, recoil? I once saw strangers as taxing, but now they’re maybe fatal. How long till that fades? What if it doesn’t?
Still, we smile and wave from a distance, keeping our dogs pulled back on their leashes, crossing to the other side of the street. Agnes doesn’t understand social distancing.
When the weather’s good we still hike in the woods. I unleash her at the edge of the path that skirts the pond. Frogs sing in the reeds. I shake off my brain’s thickening sludge under the white pine and hemlocks. Agnes tears across the beds of needles, a burst of explosive joy. She’s my soul, scruffy, briefly set free, feeling pure thrill in our flight.
Worldwide cases stand at 1,289,000. As I write this, US deaths passed 10,000. In New York City, 653 people died on Saturday. In the next town over from me, 23 veterans died at the Holyoke Soldiers Home.
Since widespread testing is still out of reach, some of these numbers should be treated with suspicion.
The CDC, after fighting Trump’s team for days (weeks?), recommended that US citizens wear homemade masks (since even nurses can’t get surgical masks now) when going outside. On TV, he said, “You can wear them if you want. I’m not going to do it.” Later that night, someone in my Facebook feed posted a link to this quote with the caption, “Fingers crossed.”
Yesterday, he again touted an experimental drug that no doctor on the planet will publicly endorse. A few weeks ago, a Phoenix couple found a version of the chemical in a bottle of fish medicine they had at home and did a little self-treatment. The man died, the wife ended up in the hospital. “I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?'” she said.
I’m not saying the full load of idiocy here rests on one man’s shoulders.
At the end of ten hours churning copy on my couch, my mind grows sluggish, good soil for bad thoughts. When the weather’s fine, I hike in the patch of woods near my place, where I can avoid the locals. Sitting beside the pond, listening to the spring frogs and watching the herons fish—it all pulls my sanity back from the swirling drain, but I still feel vaguely ashamed. Adhering to the strictest social distancing requirements (such as “never go outside”), posting about it on social media, and shaming others for breaking these shifting rules is the new “woke.” For the first time since moving here, I’m grateful that I’m not in a bigger city. I’ll suck in the woods’ serenity as long as I can.
This week should be awful for the nation, death-wise. “This will be our Pearl Harbor,” some health official said. Others quickly trounced that analogy. The country has yet to cohere around reality. The last five states without a stay-in-place restriction are all run by Republican governors.
Someone sent me a link to a YouTube compilation of a bunch of “citizen journalists” descending upon their local emergency rooms with video cameras to show their compatriots that there’s no COVID-19 crisis in their podunk towns. The level of…oh, never mind, I won’t waste your time. I wasted plenty, fuming.
Yesterday I turned 49. Hopefully, if I survive all this (of course I’ll survive this, don’t be melodramatic, right?) I can look back with bittersweet nostalgia: my quarantine birthday. What’s weird and sometimes hard about this pandemic lock-down is that it mirrors the dark, solitary, locked-down place I endured for several years. I feel like I only just now clawed my way free. Home, alone, nearly 22 hours a day, with no gym, meetings, or in-person human contact. The future dim at best.
Back then, trying to describe what it felt like to be battling old demons who wore new skins, roiled by constant, generalized, free-floating terror, hiding from the world in my back bunker of a spare bedroom, I’d resort to the metaphor of an astronaut on a cut tether, spinning away through the yawning vacuum of deep, black space. The utter lonesomeness killed me. How easily I spun out of the reach of others, and for how long I hung out there, my tank depleting, blind to all horizons.
This is different. For the first time in my life, the whole world is sharing one experience, hunkered down at home (though stay-at-home is a privilege unavailable to many). Instead of spinning off alone, out of reach of a bustling, functioning earth full of human connection, I’m now just one of millions of folks enduring life in a bunker. I think of how gay men must have felt in the AIDS epidemic, drifting through their own collective dark space—and lovers dropping one by one—while surrounded by a silent, aloof, unaffected world.
But anyone can get this thing. And while HIV is mostly passed through fucks or needles, COVID-19 can pass through the most fleeting of human encounters. “Is this fuck worth death?” I wrote in my last post. A friend told me he had the same thought once, pausing outside a bathhouse in the late 80s. Now, it’s more like, is this carton of milk, this delivery pizza, this brisk walk through a park worth it?
Disconnection is the modern condition. Digital isolation. An epidemic of loneliness. All of this diagnosed long before COVID-19 came and chased us away from what few connections we sustained.
I made a calculated risk and invited one man into my bunker. We grabbed each other and held on like we hadn’t been touched in years. In our hours together, naked and unclothed, I thought, “This is worth it.”
I’m a year shy of 50. My life doesn’t look like I thought it would, back when I was 25, 35, even 45. I have different friends, no partner. I haven’t gathered the external markers of success I thought I should have by now. I’m trying to shake my head, clear my mind of the veils of lives I should have lived. I want to see the life I have. The real one. Willing to fight for a bit of joy, if that’s what I’m meant to have.
Maybe I’m a late bloomer, some geezer slowly coming into his own. Uncertain about a future that’s never looked less sure. Seeing beauty around me, still. Every night, New Yorkers stand at their windows and cheer the first responders, health care workers, delivery drivers and grocery clerks going to work while the rest of us are locked at home. An ovation audible in the streets, a thin path forward through the fog.
Worldwide cases top 850,000, deaths near 42,000.
Today our governor extends the closure of non-essential businesses until May 4th. Trump caves and admits that the States will lose 100,000 to 240,000 people in the next few weeks, according to models (everything is according to models—we’re all in uncharted swamp).
Two days ago at the grocery store they erected four-by-four pieces of plastic to screen the high schoolers manning each cash register from the questionable breath of the valley’s shoppers. Reusable bags from home now forbidden.
States in a bidding war for respirators. Nurses wearing single-use face masks for a week straight. Doctors threatened with termination for complaining to the media about equipment shortages. New York City buying 14 refrigerated trucks to store bodies. Homeless folks relocated to parking lots and sports stadiums.
Countries are slamming borders shut. Citizens stranded in far-flung bunkers across the globe. The CDC considers telling Americans to wear masks outside. A church in Florida congregates in defiance, its pastor saying, “Because we are raising up revivalists, not pansies.”
Your political party determines your level of COVID-19 panic. We scoff at each other over a growing mound of the dead.
I’m in a long, desperately slow slog, sucking me away from comedy and buoyant mental health. I slouch on my couch and tap on my laptop for ten hours straight, churning out copy and clicking between a dozen windows. Agnes naps beside me or ducks into the bedroom for peace. I suspect that was her daily routine, when daddy went to the office. At 5:30 each night I feel mentally dead and physically hungry. I chat with dudes. I watch porn. I flirt, then rebuff. I talk dirty, I turn cold. I ask several times a day if a fuck is worth death? Or is that dramatic? I shrug and click to another headline about the end of the world.
An unofficial survey of friends confirms high levels of quarantine masturbation. Hackers are breaking into Zoom accounts and interrupting the workdays of corporate slaves with hardcore porn. Kmart is selling many more shirts than pants these days. Gotta look good from the waist up—home office apparel is the new business casual.
Yesterday the building next door set up construction equipment outside my window. Today they shredded asphalt. I’m taking this in stride, surprisingly., though check with me next week.
I’m stuck in a mess I can’t really write about, which is frustrating the fuck out of me, as writing is how I endure the unendurable. I’m in close confines—metaphorically—with a vocal Trump supporter and I must remain, for very good reasons, nonvocal in response. But having that so close to me, while I watch the soulless, moronic trainwreck “steer” the country into mass death and ruin, is beyond rough. It’s crippling me. I want to flee but—like the entire world— I’m handcuffed in place.
Worse, I can see a path for him to reelection, and that makes me want to give up completely on my countrymen. Moving to Canada was a clichéd response. And in light of global pandemics, no longer an option.
It’s hard to find hope.
But my anger and despair is only making one man suffer. It isn’t making the Trump supporter suffer, or the president suffer. Fox News anchorpeople still sit in blithe ignorance of my bitterness, probably sexting their news directors during commercial breaks for Depends undergarments.
In tough times I still revert to fantasy. I picture a universal ledger of suffering, locked in some dim basement, and in my delusions its caretaker flips to the right page, catches this oversight, and corrects the mistake.
But there’s only one man to blame for my own happiness. And waiting for life to revert to the hard-fought form I built and defended is futile. I’m lucky. I have a home, no annoying quarantine roommates, and a paycheck (for now). I’m in perfect health. There are people in the world who love me. I still think human connection is the thing. I would like to avoid subtracting from the world’s happiness during one of the strangest times in its history.
What’s coming? Fuck if I know. Tonight, as I sat with the chihuahua by the pond across the street, I watched two boys fishing from the dock. They cast and reeled and cast again, their faces wrapped in scarves, calling to each other from where they stood, six feet apart.
Worldwide cases top 415,000. U.S. cases at 50,000, with 685 deaths, climbing fast, especially in NYC, where Governor Cuomo (who’s emerged as the nation’s new “Daddy’s Home,” in the vacuum left by our trainwreck leadership) now pleading for respirators from the federal government, along with enough hospital beds for the estimated 140,000 cases expected to hit the city at the rapidly-approaching apex.
Trump still hasn’t enacted the Defense Production Act. States and cities are now begging him on live television for help. He’s now, in defiance of all health experts, talking about “opening the economy” again before Easter. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to hate someone more than I hate him. It’s made worse by being a helpless hate.
The fact that we live in a country divided has always worried me, but it’s begun to feel personally dangerous. If, for example, hypothetically speaking, your boss was a vocal Trump supporter, and Trump gave the all clear to reopen for business, would that boss, in defiance of every public health official on the planet, require you to come back to the office? Would you go? At what point do you go to war?
I’ll try to take comfort in the state of Massachusetts, and a governor who more or less has the smarts to prevent that boss from doing so.
Without gym, fresh air, AA meetings or sex, my moods shift wildly throughout the days. With the future looking like the edge of a cliff, where do set your faith? Smooth Operator got me crying last night as I again inched down the thorny imagined path of lost job and homelessness. “I have your back,” he told me. I don’t actually believe that I’ll lose my home (job loss may be likely), but the fact that I cried at his reassurance tells me that under my usually calm veneer is a roiling pot of panic.
Every day I shove that pot onto the back burner to clear my head and get shit done. But it boils up sometimes, like when my bonehead GP wanted me to come in for a consultation and labwork for a routine prescription he could phone in. Requiring me to come into a healthcare setting for a non-urgent task right now just seems pointlessly cruel, especially for a doctor. I went around him and got what I needed from some random online clinic, fuming as I clicked away on the trackpad.
Drove to the drugstore through traffic that was light for rush hour but not apocalyptically empty. The pharmacy had set a card table in front of the counter to give the techs extra distance. I swiped and pressed the keys of a credit card machine like it was a nuclear device. They had tape marks on the floor throughout the store, which looked to be about six feet apart, probably a guide for keeping distance from fellow shoppers. I thought about confirming this hypothesis with the store manager on the way out, but we’re at a point now where you have to factor in the risk of a mundane human interaction (do you have the virus? do I?), so instead I slipped out in silence and sanitized my hands before they touched the steering wheel. Hit the grocery store on the way home, with its Soviet-level shelves, another radioactive credit card machine and the bag boys asking me to stuff my own bags. The woman behind me in line crowded me, and I tried to inch away, keeping mental track of every surface I touched, willing my hands away from my face. I moved like a new, clumsy character. Navigating it all felt like playing the tutorial level of some role playing game on PS4, learning the alien ropes of a treacherous new world.
Came home to news that playwright Terrence McNally, who wrote Love! Valour! Compassion! had died from COVID-19 complications. He’d survived the AIDS epidemic, COPD and lung disease, but passed away at a hospital in Sarasota, where I’d gone to college. He left behind a husband.
As my bud Tiny Dancer put it, “Why couldn’t it have been Ivanka instead?”
Today’s headlines: 75 Million Americans Told to Stay Home; U.S. Cases Top 18K; NYC becomes nation’s epicenter in one week; Coronavirus recession looms, its course “unrecognizable.”
Trump’s embrace of unproven drugs defies science; U.S. intelligence warned Trump in January and February as he dismissed coronavirus threat.
Smooth Operator tells me over FaceTime that Trump is really through this time. “I feel like we’ve had this discussion every other month over the past three and a half years,” I replied. “There are never any consequences.”
I mean, in a rational world, yes, he’d be done. And there will come a day when even his supporters will realize that he is the shittiest shit stain to have ever “run” a country, and he’ll have to hope that he’s got a well-fortified bunker on some island he bought with his father’s money. But this week? A poll finds that the majority of Americans approve of his handling of the crisis.
Sometimes it’s too painful to hope.
In the meantime, people I know are already losing their jobs, and news reports come from all over the country about severe medical supply shortages weeks before the infections are predicted to peak.
Got pretty grumpy the other night, picturing losing my job and then my home. Feels like I only just pulled myself back from the brink of total poverty and desperation. My head goes to the worst places because in the past five years I’ve seen some of the worst places that a single white dude with one marketable skill can see. I throw that in there to acknowledge my privilege. I know many, many folks have it worse. Funny how that doesn’t always relieve one’s panic.
Later: U.S. surges cases surge past 21,000. NYC and LA docs told not to test patients unless doing so would alter their treatment (to save the insufficient supply of tests)….”Containment battle is lost, prepare now for onslaught…”
A smart, local bud calmed me down a bit over the phone, reminding me that, if one were to suffer through a worldwide pandemic in the U.S., Massachusetts is one of the best states for social safety nets, and I’d be ok with unemployment and wouldn’t get kicked out of my apartment.
Day #6
Global cases doubled in the last week to over 310,000, death total now stands at 13,000. Hawaii will quarantine any new arrivals for 14 days. It Italy, 793 people died in a single day.
After five days inside, I steeled myself for a grocery run Friday. I brought hand sanitizer (the two-thirds bottle I’d “borrowed” from work, as there is none to be found elsewhere) and leather driving gloves—less for virus protection than as a reminder to NOT TOUCH MY FUCKING FACE. The strangest part of the trip was how busy my town looked. The only sign of crisis: half-stripped shelves at the store.
Shelves once full of frozen vegetables, cheese, pasta, rice, soup, meat, cereal, coffee (luckily my neighbors haven’t discovered the best coffee the store carries, so that was left for me, while they stocked up on shitty Starbucks), bananas, toilet paper, dishwasher pods, and so on. Somehow I got what I wanted, navigated the checkout line with debit card, gloves, a chip/swiper that took five minutes to process my transaction, and a gloveless cashier who looked to be about 16 years old. I stopped at the second, smaller store on the way home. Better stocked, with smartly set limits like two boxes of pasta each visit, to curtail panicked greed.
Drove home, put my groceries away with my gloves, then peeled them off, shed my clothes, and took a shower. I used to be cavalier when it came to hand hygiene during flu season, never really adjusting my behavior. Now it’s different. I keep picturing myself, alone and sick on my couch, fighting for breath, every respirator in the valley taken.
Expecting new restrictions soon, I took Agnes for a hike yesterday to the top of Mount Tom (a short peak only five minutes from my place). There’s a very narrow crevice near the top that required me to carry the chihuahua in one hand and use various rock and tree handholds to scale to the top. Every time I touched something, I thought about its risk for transmission. Stupid? Panicky? I dunno—the basic science isn’t yet understood. It was good to get out, up to a sweet view of the valley, and sit in the sun with my dog while we still can, before stay-in-place orders come down from the governor.
But dozens of others—no doubt equally full of cabin fever—had the same idea, and as morning shifted into afternoon, I began to pass them all on the trail. Sometimes groups of six or ten or more. Each time you pass someone, you think, do they have it?
There’s something here, some obvious parallels and stark contrasts, with the AIDS epidemic, which I mostly experienced second-hand in my early twenties, sheltered at a Sarasota college campus of 600 students, reading about ACT-Up in the library. Difference being, gay men were dying by the thousands in the middle of an unaffected general population, who never gave a shit until a famous basketball star caught it. It’s too soon, I don’t have any perspective, to make any connections. Just to note that this time, it’s coming for straight folks, too.
On the mountain I passed families, college buddies talking about the apartments they’d rent on the Upper West Side, fellow dog walkers, trail runners, bickering couples, and a young man, drenched in cologne, delirious with excitement over glimpsing an eagle, coasting on the wind currents along the edge of the cliff. “Yeah, bro!” He yelled at me, “that’s one from the pocket list!”
Me, holding my breath just a second or two as I passed each of them, wishing I’d picked an even more distant hike, socially-speaking.
Joked this morning on Instagram that I only felt 8% crazy so far, but ten hours later my toes are poking at the edge of the abyss again. As I feared, our clients are now demanding that my boss freeze their marketing contracts with her due to the shitstorm kicking up across the planet, sending everyone scurrying inside for cover and slamming their wallets shut.
Headline: Confirmed U,S. Cases Doubled in Two Days
By the end of the day she’d made a couple of “adjustments” to our staffing, moving one PTer to contractor status, and a FT writer to PT. So far I’m untouched, but it’s hard to imagine that things won’t get way, way worse. For weeks now I’ve wondered to myself, like, if I were a boss, and I had one dude who was the best writer on the team but a bit of a quietly rebellious loner who divulged nothing about his personal life at work, and I had another writer, the fastest on the team, who was a personal friend that kissed my ass several times a day, at minimum five days a week (sometimes seven on Facebook), whom would I pick to stay?
Hard to make that call, from where I sit in quarantine, listening to my neighbor through the thin walls actively not practicing social distancing with family members visiting from a few towns away.
(I just got back from a short dog walk, hands freshly sanitized. I try to act like my hands would burn the skin from my face if I touched it. I still touch it.)
One of our more “important” clients is in the middle of their own COVID-19-related PR crisis, and I was asked to churn out a blog on the topic that would normally take me two and a half hours to write, but I kicked it out in one, with writing so good that she jumped on the instant messaging app to tell me that it brought tears to her eyes. Did that save my ass? For now? For a bit?
What kind of social posts to create for clients when nobody wants to leave their fucking house? Amazon will survive and prosper, as always. By the time I die we’ll all be citizens of Amazon.
Every state and city’s calling their own shots. Smooth Operator, still stuck in that Chicago hotel, says the mayor’s on the verge of imposing a stay-in-place citywide restriction. (Later: the entire state of California has now done so.)
Weird, too, that I can chat with dudes online in Australia, South Africa, Italy, and Argentina, and we all ask each other the same question: how you holding up?
How often does the whole world run and hide from the same, single enemy? And again—what the fuck will this all look like in two weeks?
A shred of light in the morning news—China, where the virus first hit, is reporting no new infections. But trusting 100% in China’s honesty is, well, a risky bet. (A smart friend reminds me its best not to trust any number out there completely. He also reminds me about basic science. As in, even that is not known about this virus. In other words, the odds are stacked against us.) The Washington Post took a pic of Trump’s State of the Nation script, where he’d crossed out “corona” and in its place scrawled “Chinese.”
Other bits of data in the swirling river: men are more likely to die than women. Young people in the states get it, too, and sometimes die. Italy’s deaths passed China’s. Canada closing its border. State Department urging no more travel abroad. Republicans—no doubt terrified at their political future—passing a trillion dollar stimulus package but I can’t help think that $1k or $2k will only last each of us so long. Bailouts for the airline industry. Trump insisting, guys, I knew this was gonna be real bad. Petulant teenagers partying on Florida beaches. The Times reporting on multiple missed warnings in the past three years at the federal level about our vulnerability to a pandemic with no cure.
Stories of celebrities getting tested more quickly and more often than us poor schmucks. The wealthy hightailing it to their second homes on Martha’s Vineyard and upstate New York and the locals there pissed as hell because, let’s face it, who’s gonna get the last respirator in the town clinic? California estimating that half its residents will get infected within 60 days.
I navigate doors without my hands and step out into the dusk. After 12 hours inside, the air feels alien. Or I feel alien. Like I’m a newborn animal on spindly legs. The parking lot is full but quiet. Another dog walker at the distant edge. Two boys throwing rocks in the creek behind the mill building. The air smells like skunk. As for which direction to go, I let the dog decide.
Actually it’s day three, but who the hell starts a plague diary then? This will be rougher than my usual verbiage. Nature, beast, etcetera.
How often do you come face to face with a time when nobody really knows what the world will look like in two weeks? Usually it has a predictable rhythm and form. A song you heard in your mother’s womb. Now we adapt. Improvise. We’re a jazz band making the walls hum in a dark basement club mismanaged by blind Republicans.
Spent the day at home, remotely connected to my PC at the agency, churning out a bunch of words for a bunch of clients in several industries. Every business now needs messaging.
Due to the crisis. Precautionary measures. Closing early. Closing today. Team working from home. Wash your hands. Maintain six feet of distance. Out of prudent concern. Sanitize. Hopefully temporary. Will keep you updated.
And spotty government messaging growing darker every day. Could last weeks. Months. Two years. Life as we know it. Stay in place. Stay inside. Hospital crisis. Respirator shortage. Market collapse.
A bud whose husband works at the local hospital said they got the first two confirmed cases today. It’s in our valley now. Thought about informing my coworkers on our instant messaging app, a little bubble of doom popping up on their screens, the two dozen of us strewn across the local landscape, but management keeps insisting that we display positivity (and other delusions). So I refrained.
I figured they’d hear the news soon enough.
An Instagram bud texted me from Rome. “The doctors are having to choose,” he said, “who lives and who dies.”
I was solid, nearly cocky, in the real recent past. I was gonna ride this fucker out. Social isolation? No sweat.
Three days later, and endless hours of writing and researching and seeing how this thing is gonna shut down nearly every industry across the planet, indefinitely, my toes peek over the abyss. Will our clients flee? Will I keep my job? My apartment? Where would I go? What would I eat? Could I feed my dog? Will I get a check from the government? How long could it possibly last me? How have six thousand hours of post-apocalyptic television left me so unprepared?
Also, as I’m learning, when it comes to the other virus, undetectable doesn’t mean unconcerned. Not way down deep, where the facts can’t touch. Will cross that bridge if needed. For now, I’m good.
The pandemic has stripped some parts from my rickety flying contraption of mental health. Gym closed. AA meetings shunned. My shrink wants to Skype. I had a mild panic attack this morning, realizing I might go months without a tight fade from the barber. First world problem? Fuck no, dude. Life or death.
As a veteran introvert I can handle the seclusion better than most, maybe, but I know from experience that it can take a toll, how far you can burrow into your own brain when there’s nobody nearby to crack the window. Smooth Operator is trapped in a hotel in Chicago following the death of his dad. We FaceTime every day, more than once, usually. Keep cracking each other up to keep from cracking up.
Single, alone in my joint save for an 8-pound chihuahua, I can’t stop thinking about the thing I can’t have–casual fucking. What will we become, if we go months untouched? It can’t be done. I’m guessing dudes across the planet will slip out and brave death for the relief and oblivion found in a fuck. For the reminder that you’re worth touching.
Rocky terrain at the edge of a cliff. Best to stay in the day, breathe, and chat with the chihuahua.
I feel a bit better, writing shit down.
I saw a video today of two quarantined musicians in Barcelona, serenading the city below their balconies. Applause rang out from the surrounding windows. Beauty and human connection still possible, maybe, if we try hard enough. Can you hear this tune I’m singing?