Tag: diary

825 days later, it was February again.

I’ve got some shit going on and I probably will get around to writing about it.

I started the month with a sore throat and was running daily Covid tests on myself for about four or five days. All were negative. I guess it was just another respiratory virus, but my immune system overreacted and I had a cough for a couple of weeks. And then I got better.

For Valentine’s Day, I painted another Fresh Direct bag.

I’ve got this one master list on the kitchen counter and I’m working my way through it in no particular order, but there are things on it that take five minutes and other things that won’t be finished in five months. As I work my way through it I remember all the things I’ve left off it, so it isn’t getting any shorter.

People are still getting Covid. People are still dealing with symptoms long afterwards. People are still dying of Covid. No one talks about it anymore. When they cannot avoid talking about the pandemic, they call it the panorama, or the pandemonium, like it mustn’t be invoked by name. But also, it is spoken of only as something in the past. A couple of years ago now.

And then, suddenly, two years had passed.

732 days.

It’s clear from the persistently high numbers of people hospitalized and dying in the U.S. that Covid is doing great. It’s also clear from the drop in number of cases that people with symptoms aren’t being tested, or they’re doing their testing at home.

As we arrived, our wet brakes locked and ineffectually screeching at the end of a blind turn in a downhill, damp, humid October, out from the shadows of the Twitter timeline lurched the hulking, monstrous news that thanks to the threat of the U.S. legal system actually somehow applying to some of the people some of the time, the weirdo bajillionaire who’d troll-threatened to acquire Twitter and was taken seriously and is now apparently its owner. I’m pretty confident that the stated goal of making profits off the hell-site is impossible to achieve, and they’re starting with lots of firings, humiliating code reviews, and half-assed tweets about making people pay to keep their verified checkmarks. Fun stuff (as long as you don’t work there)!

I have something a bit different in mind for November. I dare everyone to stop getting Covid so I can stop making these.

I found another mangled cereal box in the recycling bin the other day, flattened and then bent in half. Of course, I’ve asked the one other person in the house who eats cereal to save me empty cereal boxes, but I guess they forgot. Really, I should stop using cereal boxes. They have creases. The ink sometimes peels off in a layer. It takes many coats of gesso and paint to cover the printing, and sometimes it still shows through. But something about re-using the cereal boxes–and then turning them over and using the other side–feels like we are trapped in this 80s museum in Bedhead Hills, waiting for the end of the plague, making due with whatever we have on hand.

Because we are. We don’t know which small decision, which quick errand, which trip to town leads to getting Covid. I don’t know many people who haven’t had it yet, but I do know some. I think it’s still worth trying not to get it. I am not ready to give up.

Sometimes I save newspaper photos of famous people that I like so that I can make them into skulls. Sometimes I save newspaper photos of famous people I don’t like so that I can make them into skulls. Most of the skulls are people I don’t feel one way or another about, and not all of them are dead yet. But everyone dies.

But not everyone has to get Covid, and so, not everyone has to die from Covid.

On the 26th through the 29th, I wrote down the number of total Covid deaths in each of the 50 U.S. States (and also the places like Guam and Puerto Rico that were listed along with the states), copying them from a list where they were in order of deaths per capita. I imagine it would be interesting to study the differences between Mississippi’s coronavirus response, where the deaths have been 430 per 100,000 so far, versus Vermont’s, where the deaths number 113 per 110,000. Maybe it’s their vaccination rates (Mississippi 53% vs. Vermont 83%), or maybe those rates reflect the efficacy of the states’ respective health departments. Mississippi’s many public health challenges predate the pandemic, though, and correlation does not imply causation.

It is so scary and frustrating to know that an American’s chances of getting through the pandemic unscathed is going to come down to being lucky enough to live in the right state in the first place.