#13: Everything is Everything
I wasn’t really in the mood to write anything this week. Mostly I want to crawl into a dark little cave and hibernate. I have something cheery(?) planned for the next newsletter, I promise, but I just couldn’t quite get there this week.
There’s a scene in an episode of the Simpsons when they explain that evil boss Montgomery Burns is only alive because he has so many diseases that they’re all blocking any one disease from getting through. The doctor demonstrates this by trying to shove a bunch of colorful little plush toys through a miniature door all at once.
That’s basically how my feelings are operating at the moment. The result is that I feel sort of numb, like, if I let one feeling over the threshold, they’ll all flood in. But really, nobody has time for that right now.
It feels surreal to be two years into this pandemic. Two years ago this Friday is what I like to call my last hurrah, though to be fair, it was more like a timid whoop. I went to the Instagram-worthy yet modestly priced Thai Villa in Flatiron with a couple of friends. There was a buzz about “the Coronavirus,” but no one knew for sure whether it was in NYC yet, or at least none of us wanted to believe it. I took the subway there and washed my hands before I sat down, but I never even considered wearing a mask. My boyfriend went to the Nets v. Spurs game that night with a friend. He had originally planned to go with a different friend, who has a small child, be he declined—which, in retrospect, was the only reasonable choice made by anyone that evening.
I don’t remember whether they’d already announced an outbreak in New Rochelle. If so, it seems unthinkable that I would go out for dinner. It also seems unthinkable that a week later, my boyfriend and I almost went to a movie, but we did. I don’t remember what we were going to see but it was something neither of us was particularly excited about; we just needed to use our monthly movie pass. We were already late and almost certainly going to miss the beginning, and it was that, plus watching the train to Astoria get fuller and fuller as we approached our stop, that made us decide to turn back. That was our last attempt at an outing. One week later, I was at Trader Joe’s staring at empty shelves and two weeks later, the city was shut down completely. The rest belongs to history.
Recently I re-watched a PBS documentary from last year that memorializes the first year of the pandemic. It was released at a moment when vaccines were being rolled out—after the second wave had subsided and before the delta wave had begun—back when people still believed that we might learn something and that the newly released vaccine would bring us to the precipice of a new and better world, if only we could learn the lessons COVID had to teach us.
The documentary ends with these fateful words, delivered with such assurance by a frontline doctor in the UK: “Good riddance 2020, because I tell you what, 2021 cannot be any worse.”
Viewing it after yet another year of COVID, one that was more deadly than the first in places like the U.S. and India, I see the documentary now as an artifact of a brief moment in time when we had not resigned ourselves to an amoral calculus of how many lives are worth sacrificing to continue fueling the compulsive consumption that passes for good living these days.
I haven’t seen as many memorials for our second COVID anniversary. No one is pretending to know what this will all mean in the end or even when it will end anymore. Almost a million people have died in the U.S. alone and it seems like we’re only becoming more inured to suffering. The media cycle has moved on, selectively, to more immediate crises, and we are left in its wake to find a new normal.
I wish I had more to say. I fear so many people are saying the same things—the right things—over and over again and getting nowhere. But I think it’s worthwhile to mark this moment as a way to reflect on our changing humanity every year hence and perhaps stop ourselves from completely losing it while we still can.
This Week’s Top Five
This self-explanatory Youtube video.
The short film “Excuse Me, Miss, Miss, Miss.” From filmmaker Sonny Calvento: “At the end of the day, contractual workers in our country are still helpless and voiceless. At the end of the day, they are still not treated as decent human beings but as disposable objects.”
Bojangles is coming to New Jersey! I can’t eat much of anything on the Bojangles menu anymore, but as a North Carolinian born and bred this makes me so happy!
Someone let me borrow their Showtime log in so I can see more of this ;)
This tweet, which should be shouted from the rooftops:
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