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.
Dear Michael, I heard your story on “This is Actually Happening,” and I was so moved I had to look up your blog…and, boy oh boy, it didn’t disappoint! I work for a podcast that features stories of addiction and recovery, along with mental health struggles, so your experience resonated like crazy. During the worst of the pandemic, I lost a loved one to fentanyl overdose (he took half a Percocet bought on the street and died in the middle of the night at my apt). New York City was unimaginably grim during those times; so many died of OD and suicide related to the awfulness of seeing those trucks and being isolated and all the other shit that came with COVID and Trump. It gave me hope to hear and read your honest, brave words. Much love, my hat is off to you!