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?
