Plague Diary, January 27, 2021: A few weeks ago, a presidential election and a failed coup ago, I drove over to Hillsborough, to sit outside on a cold day, in a winter brown yard, ten feet away from a friend, the way you do when you’re trying to survive a pandemic. I stopped on the way for a short walk around the historic center of town, so I could feel like a tourist, and shuffled […]
My parents got vaccinated yesterday. All three of them. They’re all over 65, and had been trying to get an appointment somewhere for days. Here, in my state, the various county health departments and large urban health care entities seem to have no functional system for handling the people that want a shot. There are theoretical appointment times, a theoretical waitlist for a phone call in which you might get an appointment time. But mostly […]
When I was nineteen, I used to go see bands play at a small-dingy rental house across the railroad tracks from the university. In those lazy, hazy, safety-pinned gas station jacket days of yore, I used sit (gingerly) on the moldering brown sofa on the deteriorating front porch between sets, smoking cigarettes and listening to the people around me discuss radical politics in between arguments about whether charging more than $5 at the door started […]
For the better part of the last twenty years, I’ve slipped from one year to the next, often drunkenly, usually at the bar up the street from my old house, always sequined, sweating off my mascara, standing in the dance floor with a bottle of champagne under a wing of balloons. The year passes in a holler of a second in which I wonder, like the overgrown adolescent I am, whether it would be nice […]
On average, I feel like I’m at least mildly losing my mind about once a day. The more acute freak-outs are maybe once a week these days, a real improvement from the early days when every morning felt like a siren. I don’t know if that means that things are any better—survey says they are, at least Covid-wise, they’re manifestly worse, but at least, I know that right now, for me, things are kind of […]
Recently I’ve been thinking about Richard the III, the play, not the historical character. Not so much for the political allegory (among other things our current, still-hopefully outgoing, overtly criminal tyrant-in-chief not only lacks the wit but the demented charm of the only great historical egomaniac/Shakespearean villain to have turned up buried under a Social Services parking lot, though I still holding out for more). Also I can’t imagine Donald Trump offering his kingdom for […]
A week ago Friday , about fifteen minutes after news broke of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, I was walking up and over the hill connecting my suburban neighborhood with the next one over where a friend lived. As a forty-something, flabby, puffy-eyed white woman with a four-pack of Guinness (medicinal, obvs) under an arm trying to navigate my way between streetlamps without using up the last 4% of battery life on my phone, I realized […]
I don’t remember when it started. All I know I woke up one Thursday morning in July? August? and found a bunch of workmen in crossing guard vests pulling up the peonies in my front yard. I dashed out in a disproportionate, apocalyptic-level panic, , because the peonies (a surprise when I bought the house) were this next level swoon of pink and white botanical tutus plopped down into the absolute dregs of spring 2020. […]
A couple eons, several millennia, four score and seven years, a hundred and sixty-odd days ago, when the world was new and we were all still so young and innocent, I ended my first full/real week of quarantine on a Facetime call with my best friend from her rooftop in Brooklyn. New York City was shutting down at end up day. My best friend had invited several people to join her on the rooftop for […]
Some people are extremely good at being grown-ups. They save money. They know how to fix things. They know what all the buttons do on their appliances. They can grow things and raise things and build things. They can iron. They can operate Saran Wrap without wasting a whole roll or nearly amputating a finger. At sign of a crisis, they seem to know exactly what to do. I am not one of those people. […]
