Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

Now that we're approaching the four year anniversary, I thought we could have repository of our early days memories
Those first Zoom calls.. people crossing the street to avoid each other... wiping down groceries with alcohol... meeting friends in the park but sitting in a giant circle.. coyotes howling in the Financial District

I was just putting toilet paper away, and I still have a roll of this really awful stuff that I bought four years ago.. made in vietman, visible wood chips in the paper, and it cost nine dollars for four rolls at a convenience store

Anyway, this is where we can share the good, the bad, the sad

Funny, I never suffered a toilet paper shortage -- I was usually the guy who brought my parents toilet paper from the store and leave it early in the morning outside their door.

The first week felt like a vacation: we were supposed to come back in April, remember? But on a vacation things are open and you can hang out with friends. The psychological toll didn't become apparent until early or mid April. It sucked.

Yeah, I remember when they warned that this 'could last as long as six weeks'(!)

I started my last in-office job on March 16, 2020. (My previous full-time in-office job had ended in May 2017; I'd been freelancing and doing contract work from home since then.) On Wednesday, March 18, we were told we would be working from home for the time being. My initial 90-day contract was not renewed at the end of June, because the job was doing social media for a medical school and there was basically no activity to share, other than media hits by professors being interviewed about Covid.

I remember going to the store for the first time when we had to stand outside in line because only a certain amount of people were allowed inside the store at one time. I felt extremely maudlin and dissociated.

I also remember another grocery trip to a large international market where the store music started playing the Sufjan Stevens song "Chicago." At first I thought I might be dead bc this was all too surreal to be real, and then I realized I wasn't dead and this was reality and I started crying in the frozen food aisle near the pierogi/dumpling area.

i remember lots of walks in the phoenix park, which we were lucky to have on our doorstep at the time.

On April 20 we celebrated a good friend's birthday -- my first contact with people outside my family -- in his backyard. Just four of us. We had three tables set up about twenty feet apart. Masks to use the bathroom.

I remember going to the store for the first time when we had to stand outside in line because only a certain amount of people were allowed inside the store at one time. I felt extremely maudlin and dissociated.

Yeah, my wife and I were standing in line outside Target and the woman ahead of us felt like we were too close; she looked back at us and exclaimed, "Six feet! Six feet!" We took a step backwards and she visibly relaxed.

Trying to remember when we switched from just wearing bandanas over our faces to actual masks. It was probably only a few days but it seemed like longer.

Hardly anyone was driving so the air smelled so clean for months. I wish it could have lasted forever.

oh god i just remembered teaching online the first few weeks and one of my students had her autistic 12 year old son at home too (because obvs he wasn't going to school either) and he was giving her a very hard time and screaming "I fucking hate you" so loud that she had to mute. But she didn't know how so we all heard it :(

i remember finding some solace in the truth that no one knew what they were doing and we were all just doing our best, whatever that means.

I was just in a grocery store last weekend that had faded strips of red tape on the floor, six feet apart leading up to the cash register

We'll probably be seeing these reminders for years to come

I had a bag of surgical masks from, like, 2011 left over from a bad cold. I used them and whatever shitty fabric masks you could buy on Amazon before they became available. To think that KN95 masks didn't become easily available until mid '21!

Trying to remember when we switched from just wearing bandanas over our faces to actual masks. It was probably only a few days but it seemed like longer.

I remember the first few days when we'd all been sent home, taking long walks around our neighborhood with bandanas and balaclavas around our noses and mouths. A few days into it (though in retrospect it feels much longer), my mom had handmade some masks she sent out to the whole family. Obviously those turned out to not be "safe" masks anyway, but it's a strong memory of the second half of March 2020 for me. Those were the days of the "flatten the curve" signs in some houses, while things were quiet just before the sirens became near constant to the nearby hospital.

I specifically remember the day we turned the corner and saw the field tent in the hospital parking lot that had been constructed, literally, overnight. That was really a "holy shit" moment for me.

I went to a local shop that first weekend and it was decimated, ransacked even. That afternoon, I drove to a farm shop (not quite as posho as it sounds, but not far off) and there was this apocalyptic atmosphere: huge queues, the stink of slurry in the air, everyone wild-eyed and frantic. At one point, a white van pulled up, driving aggressively close to the queue; three huge blokes got out and pushed their way to the front. I remember thinking 'fuuuck, this could escalate quickly'.

I had a bag of surgical masks from, like, 2011 left over from a bad cold. I used them and whatever shitty fabric masks you could buy on Amazon before they became available. To think that KN95 masks didn't become easily available until mid '21!

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, March 12, 2024 2:52 PM (six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

I had a pack of n95s in my desk from about a decade earlier as well. A colleague came to work sick - coughing, sneezing, etc. - and I marched down the street to CVS because damned if I was going to catch this guy's cold. But when I got back to my desk, I was too embarrassed to wear them, so I just caught his cold anyway. I found them in my desk when I snuck back to the office in May 2020 to nab my monitors and docking station, and was like "score!"

also everyone was sewing masks and giving them to friends. i gave an erstwhile ilxor (carl agatha) an old vintage dress that she turned into masks, and my sis in law (who has since contracted and died of cancer) made a bunch of masks for the family too.

I specifically remember the day we turned the corner and saw the field tent in the hospital parking lot that had been constructed, literally, overnight. That was really a "holy shit" moment for me.

same! same hospital too iirc

Good topic. Out and about right now, but will jot down some thoughts later.

The period in February 2020 just before the formal UK Lockdown was really scary: I work in the UK public sector and rumours were abounding that Ministers had just been briefed that tens of thousands of people were expected to die, and were shocked and 'scared shitless', and that government was exploring requisitioning football stadiums to store the bodies.

My "Holy Shit" moment was walking through Camden Market on the afternoon of 13 March 2020 after a work event and it was apocalyptically deserted.

same! same hospital too iirc

ha, yep! assuming it is indeed.

It was April. All the restaurants were closed and most of them hadn't figured out how to convert to take-out, yet. We would walk through our neighborhood streets around suppertime smelling hamburgers being grilled everywhere we went. It became a joke.

We have always cooked our own meals at home, so our diet was far more varied than hamburgers. otoh, I recall the challenge of making one grocery shopping trip to buy 15 to 17 days worth of fresh food for two and not having any food spoil before it was eaten, shuffling along in the line of people waiting to be admitted to the store, six feet apart, wearing a homemade cloth mask. People were always polite, but we didn't converse.

The public library closed and stayed that way for many months. We're big readers, but luckily I always have at least 30 books waiting on the shelf. The main problem became finding reading material that could be enjoyed when everything in life was skewed and depressing. We ran through a lot of our old DVDs on nights we would normally have read books.

I was sent home from work right around March 16th or 17th, with a laptop.. I didn't even have home internet! But my quick-thinking girlfriend called the library and I borrowed a wifi hotspot for three weeks until I could get something more permanent through work

key memories

- wearing an N-95 for the first time at the farmers market: couldn’t breathe right, felt so panicked, felt like I was in a horror movie, all i could see were masks everywhere & scared eyes, got back to the car & had a massive panic attack

- going to the supermarket: checkout attendants looking so scared behind perspex barriers; toilet paper shelves completely empty; watching couples double up on TP and join separate checkout lines & feeling RAGE

- our office went remote by march 20th iirc and we stayed permanently remote to this day. thought i would hate it, did at first, but love it now wouldnt trade it for anything

We were very lucky: our public libraries resumed curbside service the first week of May! You'd reserve the book online, then pick it up.

The second week of June the libraries reopened to the public with limited occupancy and face masks required (and a security guard enforcing the rules). THAT was my lifeline. I'd spent hours at my laptop and browsing the shelves for stuff I'd never usually read.

I live in Wisconsin where the Tavern League has an insane amount of influence over local law for whatever reason. All the businesses and restaurants were closed but many of the bars were still open. It was so surreal to drive around at night and see the whole town dead except these little corner bars which were still all lit up.

Mid-March 2020 and maybe like a day or two before we learned that a case had been reported in our office and on our floor (and, like, not shared publicly with the employees who were about to walk out in droves if we hadn't gone fully WFH the next day), but numbers were slowly increasing in Chicago and everyone was understandably on edge. I was walking down the street and saw two business dudes approach one another and automatically shake hands as business dudes do, and both of their faces just immediately melted into expressions of dread at the realization of the deadly plague that they had so casually passed on to one another (RIP, business dudes).

The weather in the first six weeks was incredible, particularly for the UK in April. We were only supposed to take an hour of exercise, but the countryside was so deserted that I was doing longer and longer loops from my house. One of my main memories is of opening farm gates with my elbows, and, if I absolutely had to use my hands, sanitising immediately. It was irrational but somehow the idea of infection pervaded everything.

Same in South Florida -- the mildest of springs.

I remember flying from LA to Atlanta just after Garcetti's stay at home order came out. The crew took an extra hour to clean the plane before we got on. It was surreal, I felt like I was in a movie.

Remember the NYC morgue trucks? Such grim imagery, I kept thinking of The Andromeda Strain or some dystopian sci-fi movie

https://ei.marketwatch.com/Multimedia/2020/04/01/Photos/ZH/MW-ID515_NYCtru_20200401095435_ZH.jpg

Definitely a time. My running assumption is that baking sourdough and watching Tiger King consumes a lot of memories then. In SF it was more this sense of a slow motion build that was in the air for weeks, thanks in part to regular flights between East Asia and here in particular. I remember seeing my first maskers in public in early February, then of course there was that cruise ship docked in the bay itself. The real tell was the slow reduction in gathering size over the final three weeks before lockdown — I went to a slew of shows then and was on the verge of another when hours beforehand the mayor basically said “That’s it.” It was a Friday so I locked up the library and I believe a day later told my supervisors that according to city regulations (my library is essentially a split between the city and my campus) we had to stay closed. Didn’t go back even quickly for an equipment overview for surely months; location didn’t reopen until last May.

My one on-point comment at the time to Kate was that we were about to see who could actually live with themselves if they had to stay put and chill for a bit. I still think that the very idea of it drove people beyond a boundary that they have never recrossed; I get human connection and its need and all but the sense of a slew of extroverts who absolutely had no idea what to do was pretty clear.

i remember putting a lot of effort into cooking new things, planning movie nights, reading up on pieces of info on jobs that could be done around the place.

got very productive for a burst of the first six months or so

(may not have lasted)

xp my ex and I actually drove out to see the cruise ship at the Port of Oakland... we actually got pretty close, there were no security staff and we just walked right up to it; a lot of ambulances coming and going

One of the first recorded deaths (maybe THE first recorded death in the U.S.) was a woman in Santa Clara, thought with hindsight there were probably many more - they just didn't know the cause of death at the time

My one on-point comment at the time to Kate was that we were about to see who could actually live with themselves if they had to stay put and chill for a bit. I still think that the very idea of it drove people beyond a boundary that they have never recrossed;

*raises hand* I learned a few things that spring and summer. I'm an introvert but not shy. Except for an outdoor visit to my parents' on Fridays I was on my own seven days a week for weeks. It crushed me.

I'd do it again if I had to, only this time I'd insist on moving in with a friend.

My brother lives by himself. The isolation was not good for him at all. He became absolutely convinced he had stomach cancer. (He didn't."

I routinely met a couple buddies for beers down by the lake, starting almost immediately... I think we had a somewhat fatalist idea of our meetups because we didn't necessarily social distance as diligently as we should have

But those hangs helped save my sanity

In retrospect, to keep from dredging up painful memories of how bad my mental health got some months, I try to hold onto the undeniable good (and there was, actually!) to come out of it. Which isn't to say I want to minimize the very real suffering or imply it was a good time, but I remain ever thankful that I was able to have a lot more time with my school age kid than I would have through those first 18 months or so.

Yeah, as the relative safety of outdoor activity became clear, I used to go to a friend's for an outdoor happy hour a couple times a week. She wouldn't even let me in the house: I'd go around the back and she'd bring a drink out to me. She wouldn't let me tip.

After waking up at 5:30 a.m. every workday and commuting two hours each way for 14 1/2 years, I felt peace! It helped that remote work technology had caught up by then. As an introvert it was great (I lived with my brother though, and had two cats, so not alone. The cats loved us being home all the time.). For the first several months also I didn't have any sick family or friends, until a close friend maybe had a medical emergency that was ostensibly not COVID but I still wonder.

A good friend lost his mom to Covid.. I knew her pretty well. She got it at a rehabilitation hospital that was neglecting safe practices.. he's still pretty bitter about it

We moved out of the city in the middle of the pandemic, first to a rental and then bought a house. I will probably get rotten eggs with "check your privilege" written on them thrown at me for saying it, but I have a lot of good memories from that time. It was scary and strange, but we were very lucky to be able to do what we did. I got to watch a lot more of a crucial time in my kids' growing up than I would otherwise. I have really sweet memories like watching them learn to roller skate on the driveway, the fake "day camp" my wife invented for them where they learned about different countries, nice BBQs, long walks and hikes (and my kids learning to actually enjoy hikes), all kinds of absurd imaginary games and stories we invented, funny songs they made up, doing a puzzle late at night with my then 5yo when she couldn't sleep, seeing fox and groundhog in the yard and the kids giving them names, simple pleasures like pizza delivery seeming extra enjoyable, etc. I got really attached to an orb weaver spider I found in our yard spinning its web. I remember one night sitting in the back yard and I heard jazz, like actually surprisingly good modern jazz, wafting from the distance, and I just went walking and followed the sound until I found a very tiny outdoor socially distanced concert in someone's yard and watched from across the street.

It all sounds very corny and NPR and oblivious I know, but it was part of my experience. There was of course stress and isolation and worry too, but the feeling of the nicer parts of it is unlike anything I've experienced at any other time in my life.

I wouldn't say the pandemic was a root cause of our moving from urban New Jersey to rural Montana, but the pandemic — and specifically seeing how many industries shifted to remote work much more seamlessly than one might expect, and how much people seemed to like that and refuse to "return to the office" later — definitely planted the seed in our heads that hey, we can live anywhere, there's no financial/professional reason we have to stay where we are.

we bought our home during covid, moved in in july 21

wouldnt have happened without covid savings and remote working

I got to watch a lot more of a crucial time in my kids' growing up than I would otherwise.

Yeah, this is what I was getting at.

and specifically seeing how many industries shifted to remote work much more seamlessly than one might expect

And yet, so many of those very same industries (or at least companies) were already by 2023 furiously backtracking that, actually, "remote doesn't work". *insert all of the eyerolls here*

yeah, our CEO was writing things about how 'we can't wait to get everybody back into the office!' Then she bought a house in Florida and hasn't brought that shit up again

My one on-point comment at the time to Kate was that we were about to see who could actually live with themselves if they had to stay put and chill for a bit. I still think that the very idea of it drove people beyond a boundary that they have never recrossed; I get human connection and its need and all but the sense of a slew of extroverts who absolutely had no idea what to do was pretty clear.

― Ned Raggett

i'm managing to live with myself better than i used to. my ex-wife, on the other hand...

it's hard to sort the memories out. i'm glad i have a journal for it. it all blends together in my mind. transition, COVID, Trump's invasion of Portland, the slow collapse of my marriage. looking at my journal i talk about there being what i termed at the time a "phony war". it was serious and not at the same time. there were all these random product shortages. everything seemed like a harbinger to me then. it seemed like everything was going to fall apart. so much of a sense of personal disappointment. i'd just socially transitioned a little over three months before, i was just on HRT. after a lifetime of isolating, of avoiding people, i wanted to get _out_, i wanted to be _social_, i wanted to be _me_. i wanted people to see who i really was. for a lot of people, covid isolation allowed them... to see who they really were, without being judged by other people. it helped a lot of people to transition. the wave of COVID transitions, i think of that as a new generation, a separate generation. i felt differently.

looking back i see what i remember. a lot of fear. a lot of panic. when the smog hit that august i pretty much lost it completely. i think i quit ilx at some point because i couldn't handle communicating with other people like that.

All I did was practice viola, play video games, cook my way through Marcella Hazan and drink too much every night. It was a weird year. I didn't want to reach out to friends over text or call them because I had nothing to talk about, nothing was happening, which was weird.

I remember the 4th Feb 2020, my son's 18th birthday and the last time I travelled on a train and also the last time I visited a public swimming pool. iirc it was a few days after the first UK cases and I was nervy + pulling my t-shirt over my mouth on the train and my son was getting annoyed with me and pulling it back down, he does the same if I pull it over my face when he does a disgusting fart in my proximity! I was convinced my mum and stepdad would soon contract it because he goes in Wetherspoons and casinos every evening and she was dismissing it as nothing to worry about when I told her to try and minimise the time she spends in supermarkets and shops. As it turned out neither of them or myself have ever contracted it yet.

What sticks in my memory is about a week before lockdown and buying milk and bread was a struggle, walking past this 50-something bloke with a bag of clinking bottles that looked like a random hodgepodge of just any booze that was left on the shelf. And he had a really grave look on his face and said good luck to you, lad.

And more ominously I was nervously queueing in the Co-op, and it was panic buying season. There was a very scared looking woman in front of me who was the only mask wearing person in the shop and she had half a dozen bottles of white wine in her basket. In front of her was a loudmouthed high-viz bloke having some banter with the tiller about how he was an essential worker and it wasn't right there was no milk or bread left for him. Tiller replied, you only water daffodils in the park, what's so essential about that m8. Then the whole queue went momentarily frozen when he said: no the council have moved me from Parks, they want me to dig graves now.

wow, I just went momentarily frozen...

my wife died in February 2020 so after her memorial at the end of the month I basically had to deal with that completely isolated for 5 months, I knew nobody where I lived at the time. I don't really know how I managed to get through that but somehow I did. I think the first person that I actually knew that I saw in person after things opened up was mark s as he was in town visiting his sister (my mum came down for my birthday a couple of weeks later)

I was in my last semester of graduate school, already writing my thesis, teaching one course and taking another one. I got basically zero instruction on how to take my course online, thankfully it was only a twice-a-week meeting and largely based on video instruction from the start, so I started recording talks for one meeting and basically having open hours for the second meeting. The course I was taking was a disaster, the instructor was totally inept at anything online and the whole thing devolved into chaos. Everyone got As and we didn't produce anything (it was an art course, to be clear.) I defended my thesis via Zoom a week after the riots following George Floyd's murder cooled down (I went to UMN in Minneapolis.)

Outside of school things I spent a lot of time taking the dog to the park, meeting people there but being cautious about distance. Had a few backyard hangs but March in Minnesota isn't great, weather-wise, so most of that didn't kick in for a couple more months.

Some of the big things I remember from March/April of that time was how quiet the city was, how gas prices kept falling, getting good at planning our food menus for two weeks at a time (learning to appreciate, even love, frozen vegetables), my wife learning to work from home—four years later and she's still remote, and drinking way, way too much. Eventually we hauled ass to Michigan where I bought as much legal weed as I could (it wasn't legal in MN yet) and sweating a lot while bringing it back to the city.

I actually got covid watching the first Dune movie, but that was late 2021 so things were a lot more 'known' by that point... I spent my birthday alone with a 12 pack of beer a buddy dropped by lol

Dan- should there have been another dash after 'remote' ? lol

memories include

my wife and I had been separated, but I had not moved out of the house we owned together, at her suggestion when the lockdowns hit in mid-March I moved back in and eventually we rebuilt our relationship <3

started weekly online D&D sessions with user ian and former user 69 plus two other record dorks, sessions continue to this day

not gonna lie, the ILX Slack video meetups really helped, I remember hanging with Colonel Poo in particular as he dealt with all that shit he posted above

started working remotely and have never looked back

I also vividly remember being at a record show in early March where I was selling at a table, this was in the "wipe down everything and wash your hands" times, before masking. I remember bringing an entire roll of paper towels and a bottle of alcohol, and washing my hands a lot. Nobody had masks.

and hearing about the Washington choir practice outbreak, which was a truly terrifying "holy shit it travels through the air and you get it by breathing" moment

Chastening to read this thread, look back, and realise that aside from not having to work for 18 months(an unequivocally good thing) that absolutely nothing about how I lived my life changed aside from masking once a week to grocery shop. Definitely one of the lucky ones.

I had a half-baked idea to go shopping and stock up on tinned goods and stuff, and the local supermarket was the busiest I'd ever seen it. What I remember is that it was bustling and hectic, but not really loud or chaotic, because everyone seemed really focused on what they were doing, and a lot of people were obviously scared shitless. About a week later, my parents got an emergency flight home from a Spanish Island that had gone into lockdown, I went out to run some errands for them and I had never seen the town so quiet - almost no cars, no people.

My workplace eventually let us work from home, but it took some time to happen. In the first two months or so, we had to sit over two metres apart, so every second desk could not be used. I usually started my shift later in the afternoon, and because the 9-5 people were still there, I'd spend a farcical amount of time wandering around the whole building, looking for a spot to work (and hoping that spot actually had functioning equipment)

Dan- should there have been another dash after 'remote' ? lol

Ha, probably, but yknow, who cares? :D

There are some really moving posts above and I read through and thought "I should reply to that" but then got overwhelmed.

I remember being in north Norfolk on holiday the week before "we" were sent home from work. Swerving people on sea walls, conscious of people running out of things like Calpol.

I remember reading this and being moved and scared by it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/a-letter-to-the-uk-from-italy-this-is-what-we-know-about-your-future

I have nice memories of (once it was possible) making the most of my social life: walking with one person is probably my ideal!

I remember feeling privileged to order some food (Cheese! Wine!) deliveries from Oxford shops.

I remember loads of horrible, sad things.

oh man i almost forgot: the 2020 norcal wildfires that summer on top of all of the pandemic craziness really spun things out for me, and i think everyone in the region

i really started getting cabin fever then

yeah, the fires added a visually apocalyptic element to the weirdness

super fucking scary

Chastening to read this thread, look back, and realise that aside from not having to work for 18 months(an unequivocally good thing) that absolutely nothing about how I lived my life changed aside from masking once a week to grocery shop. Definitely one of the lucky ones.

Kinda true for me, too. The only person I knew personally who died was my landlord, whom I thought was an OK guy but wasn't exactly attached to. His widow and sister taking over management of the building we lived in, and being fucking terrible at everything, was another big push to get out of there, though.

I've got a million scattered memories, like lining up outside of stores and being let in one at a time, or spending a lot of time (eventually) volunteering at vaccine clinics and seeing the people ecstatic at getting the shot (especially when their little kids could finally get them), or seeing Opeth with my friend on Valentine's Day 2020 and knowing things were already getting weird, or seeing my friend's cover band do a night of Rush on March 7 and feeling that that show might be it for a while. But one of the foremost things I recall is not quite panicking but definitely considering what supplies I should stock up on, then blanking. Eventually the only two things that came to mind were maraschino cherries and Chemex coffee filters. (Right?) I'm just now on the final jar of cherries, but more amusingly it turns out that Chemex coffee filters *were* in short supply, but I had no idea, because I had stocked up!

Honestly, 2020 through the end of 2022 was all a blur to me. I was not well the entire time, have forgotten much of the details of what happened when, few clear memories. A couple of lost years from my life.

Oh, and celebrating New Year's Eve (or some sort of Christmas thing?) outside in the sub-zero weather with our good friends where it was so cold the shrimp literally froze, and we had to thaw them out to eat them under the heat lamp (which was also a covid thing).

This was late July 2020, so the furor over masking had already begun, dividing the nation along the usual polarizing political lines, with Trump egging on his supporters about Freedom! and ivermectin.

I was backpacking in a very remote wilderness area, about 9 miles from the trailhead. A solo woman backpacker was coming up the trail toward me wearing a bandana for a mask. There was plenty of room to step off the trail, so I stepped aside about 20 feet to let her pass. Seeing me, she stopped and asked me to put on a mask. I said sorry, but I didn't have one with me. She then stood about 100 feet from me and spent the next five minutes vehemently berating me as an irresponsible lout and public menace. Once she slowed enough that I could respond, I asked her if she'd feel more comfortable if I moved even further off the trail so she could pass. Very reluctantly, she assented to this solution. So I did. And she walked by and was gone.

Afterwards I realized I was wearing a bandana on my head during all this, but I didn't think of it because it wasn't "a mask". It was also visible to her, but she evidently didn't realize it, either. It was a strange time.

I've told this story before. Exactly four years ago I left Chapel Hill after a Destroyer concert for NYC to meet a guy I was seeing. I kept hearing that line by Treebeard: "It's likely we march to our doom." The Raleigh-LaGuardia flight was the emptiest I've ever seen; both airports were deserted. In NYC cabbies and Uber drivers had already put up plastic sheets b/w them and us. I met a friend for cocktails who said that two weeks earlier he'd been so sick he couldn't even think; he thought it was COVID. Cleaning crews were scrubbing subways. Arriving on a Thursday, I was already in a panic on Friday -- I thought Cuomo would shut the airports down, requiring me to drive down, as if it were 9-11 again. I was supposed to stay through Monday but changed my flight for Saturday morning (I rode those airline credits well into 2022).

Quick memories/thoughts:

* In February 2020, I kept refreshing a Guardian Covid Q&A webpage that included the question "Should we be worried?" and the answer "No." Sometime in early March that question disappeared and I finally accepted we were fucked.

* For a while, if I left the house, I would shampoo when I got home, in case I caught Covid off my own hair.

* Our daughter was born in September 2019 and I quit my job in December 2019, so I could spend six months as a stay-at-home parent. It turned out to be two years! Finding a new job was fucking impossible, but the extra time with my daughter was priceless so it was certainly worth it.

* It was incredibly sunny in the UK in 2020 and I spent a lot time reading books outside with a beer while my daughter slept inside, and that was pretty good really.

* I feel like I hallucinated watching a whole season of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

* We started seeing my parents inside again (we saw them quite a lot outside) around June 2021 once we'd all been double vaccinated. And then my dad died in December 2021 (not of Covid). So because of covid, I missed way too much grandad-dad-grandaughter time, which fucking sucked.

there were some people a couple streets over from me doing the evening pot-banging thing, which somehow was supposed to show support for medical staff and essential personnel. They kept at it for a couple months, and then there was just this one young girl, about 10 or so, and she kept at it for a LONG time, still out there in the evening, banging on a saucepan. I'm sure the neighbors were glad when she finally retired her slotted spoon

My overarching memory is being very, very sacred and convincing myself if I got it I was going to be on a ventilator. I was more determined than anyone I knew not to put myself in a situation where I might catch it.

I could see which way the wind was blowing way before anyone else I knew. Several friends and my partner thought I had lost my mind as I locked myself down 2 weeks before the country was told to. I was all stocked up on all required supplies long before any panic buying had begun. I was a very early adopter of washing my shopping and pivoting to having everything delivered.

I can laugh about some of my behaviour now but even though a whole load of positives eventually came out of it - eg I got very fit, my partner proposed to me and I had a wildly creative period post summer 2020, I do think that initial level of heightened anxiety slightly changed me forever.

Yes, that May-June period was the most intensest creative period of my life.

one nice & lasting memory is my friend in Australia and I started a pandemic bookclub in Dec 2020 for just the two of us so that we could have something to talk about aside from the pandemic & trump (lol)

it’s still going -mostly an excuse to chat once a week but it really did keep us both sane through the worst periods

When Big Ears 2020 was cancelled I was in line at at a Starbucks for my afternoon coffee and I decided to tell my boss that won’t be coming in the next Monday. He was quite understanding— then Maryland shut everything down that week, including the commuter bus I took to work.

Also, I continued to see my girlfriend every weekend throughout and we stared a little pod. We wed last year.

Yes, that May-June period was the most intensest creative period of my life.

Just realizing now that I wrote two books during the pandemic.

Those kind of things were important, weren't they? A couple of friends and I used to listen to Glen Johnson's Arcane Delights radio show *at the same time* and message each other and drink wine, just to communicate with people that meant loads to us.

"my wife died in February 2020 so after her memorial at the end of the month I basically had to deal with that completely isolated for 5 months, I knew nobody where I lived at the time."

I'm so sorry, poo! its just such a terrible thing for anyone to go through. oof. When my mother died during covid a grand total of four extended family members came to her funeral and i couldn't see their faces or hug them and they left as soon as it was over. I feel like I never really grieved back then. It was all just so depressing and terrible and I never thought my father would make it through those days. The very beginning of covid was even more depressing and scary if that's possible but I won't go into that here.

But again, my apologies and sympathies to you and your family. A hug from across the Atlantic.

My condolences, poo.

absolutely terrible times. <3

I remember some moments of sweetness as well: I was on that crummy NextDoor site, and there were neighbors asking if any seniors or invalids in the area needed any help with groceries, picking up prescriptions, pet walking, yard work, etc.

Before the awful culture war began over vaxxing & masking (almost immediately), there was a really cool period of community engagement that was very touching and sincere

i'll tell you what, in retrospect, really did help me. after that part where everything was closed - i can't even remember how long that lasted - i kept my store open full-time throughout the whole thing and, while i am no one's idea of an essential worker, giving people a place to go during that time - just some time away from the house or apartment or their horrible family or whoever - gave me something to focus on and really did make me appreciate that i had somewhere else to go myself and wasn't trapped in some studio apartment somewhere because those are the people i felt really bad for. anyway, my store never got really full and people could browse and take their mind off of things before they had to go home or run the terrifying gauntlet of the supermarket. i felt good about that and it did distract me from my own screaming brain a bit.

you are a treasure, scott! i’m sure folks appreciated it a lot, i know i would

(it helped that i lived somewhere with a small population and low covid numbers for the most part. and we were as safe as we could be especially when my dad was in the store too after moving in with us toward the end when people were still masked but also getting shots and all that. maria was the only person in our house to get pretty bad flu-like covid and she isolated in a bedroom and it sucked really bad for her but the rest of us luckily stayed healthy.)

I remember after a couple months of isolation I couldn't sleep in my bed normally anymore, I had to lie perpendicularly on it sitting up or I couldn't fall asleep. A laugh for Austinites: I would go out walking in the middle in the night and sprawl out on the greens at the Hancock Golf Course and pass out. Sometimes drunk but usually just exhausted. Also vividly remember going to the ER for a kidney stone and being absolutely delighted the entire time by how normal it was in there, and how fun it was to see and talk to different people.

wonderful that you enjoyed your kidney stone experience, that must be a first

i was thinking the same thing D:

lol f. hazel, that is some great imagery

I found myself getting nostalgic for that couple of months after lockdown had fully lifted and people were just starting to feel comfortable with mingling again. It was a rare period when the world felt less cynical than it had before or would after. That year, 2022, just felt like the year when everyone was excited just to be alive and to be able to go out and see each other and enjoy life

(When I say EVERYONE, obviously I don't mean everyone. One of my best friends works as an infections control nurse and was battling with demons, personal and vocational, every day and night. It was a traumatic time for people like her, and obviously everyone who had been affected by covid through losing loved ones or having their own health affected; so I don't mean to sound insensitive about the gravity of it)

We figured when Tom Hanks got it we were going to be shutting down work within 48 hours. We lost a fella who worked in the gear room very early in april. He had many preexisting conditions that made his passing seem inevitable, in retrospect, but he was a great guy and one of those people whose career i consider a happy “plausible outcome,” so to have him die from the disease as he was cheerfully winding down his working life was doubly sad. I got good at being in and out of market in 10 minutes or less and bathing as soon as i got home. I remember telling my now-wife that i wasnt worried about food shortages for humans but i was worried about food shortages for the cat.

I found myself getting nostalgic for that couple of months after lockdown had fully lifted and people were just starting to feel comfortable with mingling again. It was a rare period when the world felt less cynical than it had before or would after.

I know you referred to a year later, but for me it was April-early-July '21, what I call the Post-Vax Honeymoon before Delta came along: the first time friends and I actually met in restaurants. I also had my first sex since March '20. I didn't retreat again when Delta hit, just pulled back for a bit, but it was the last time I thought, "Oh, COVID's GONE, man!"

Memories of actual covid times

- livestreaming five hour DJ sets from my bedroom to my friends

- getting a positive test five minutes before I was meant to jump in the car (with a boot full of Christmas snacks) to see my family. Spent the week eating cocktail sausages in bed and bingewatching movies. I was so sad but also looking back, it was kind of a good time!

- summer days spent in this one field hanging out with friends because the pubs weren't open. We never go there any more. It was our covid field. I miss it

- losing my shit at my housemate for bringing a friend back to the house during a lockdown. I feel bad about it now, but at the time I was livid. I think I was going round the twist

- my partner at the time lost her job in events and got a temp job as a covid checker at the local college. I remember us getting up early mornings in the middle of winter so I could lift her there. It was grim, I won't lie

- going to the BLM march where they toppled Colston and being really very excited but also very nervous about the crowds, especially when someone started playing a bloody saxophone right behind us

In the uk it was the immediate aftermath of the miserable December 2019 election; there was a soul-sucking protracted labour leadership contest, we got brexit done in feb, & when the plague hit it was like watching a slow motion train crash cause it was obvious weeks out that the cunts in charge would be inadequate to the task. I remember everyone being in complete denial, going about business as usual even as italian colleagues were talking about how bad it was over there.

My job then was basically entirely lab-based & we stayed open throughout the pandemic so I was working the whole time except for about a month at the beginning when we were quiet & I was able to "work from home". I didn't do any work but I didn't do anything else either except be vaguely stressed at how little I was doing - admittedly the circs were exceptional but it made me realise wfh is really not for me: my flat is tiny so I'd be spending all my waking & sleeping hours in one room p much. I got a proper orthopaedic desk chair from fb marketplace, most of one anyway. I drank a lot and made stupid (very clever) jokes

but as I say wfh is basically impossible for me so then I was walking the 4 miles to work (as noted upthread the weather was amazing that spring, & we were supposed to avoid public transport) & I don't think I will ever forget the eeriness of those walks, how I'd see almost nobody, no cars on the road at all, just the occasional bus that was completely empty of passengers driving around pointlessly - and on the side of these buses was an ad for a film that was supposed to have come out but now the cinemas were all closed & the film was shelved indefinitely: a quiet place 2

Because I live alone I was allowed to have a "social bubble" with another household - these friends of mine are both healthcare workers so we didn't get together that frequently but man what a release, we ate a lot of pizza and went thru the trash canon (miami connection!) I think we were a bit punch-drunk (also drink-drunk) but those were good times. Then yes there were the zoom chats with ilx ppl. Sanity saving. I drank a lot and made very clever (stupid) jokes

- funnily enough, I got very sick with a chest infection in Feb 2020. I doubt very much it was covid, but I have a distinct memory of feverishness and playing minecraft and now I hate minecraft. Anyway.
- we were all packed up and shipped off home from work with laptops, testing our home internet and ensuring we had backup mobile internet on top of it, in March.
- my birthday happened the weekend before full lockdown. The bar I'd booked a 20-person afternoon drinks table at arbitrarily closed its doors without contacting me that aftrnoon (wether due to lockdowns I dont know), they never contacted me or anything. I had to awkwardly try and text/facebook a heap of people and tell them to come to my house instead.
- I loved working from home. I still do. The company went back and forth with some in-office demands since lockdowns eased back up in 2021, but now they seem to have given up (prob cos its one way to keep good staff).
- I have never recovered from the hermitage/agorophobic headspace it put me in. I still rarely leave the house and have wasted 3 of my last 4 summer holidays sitting around at home doing nothing whatsoever. How my bf has not got fed up with me is anyone's guess but he hasn't.
- standing in line multiple times to wait for ou govt-provided covid vaccinations and boosters. How passively and politely pretty much everyone was about also doing so.
- I regret not pushing for us to move house while lockdowns were in force - the fact we had shut borders meant landlords were DESPERATE for tentants, and rental prices dropped massively. We'dve got a great deal. Now, its gone so far the other way we're too scared to even try moving - theres nothing available anymore.

Late-February 2020, our daughter had bad croup (cough like a seal's bark) coupled with a high fever so we took her to the ER in Santa Clara County* and every worker was wearing full PPE and handed us masks to wear when we checked in. My wife had been getting alerts that things were getting more serious here but seeing a sea of healthcare workers and doctors in full PPE was unlike anything I'd ever experienced (and I was traveling overseas quite a bit during SARS & H1N1).

*Andy mentioned upthread that the first US COVID fatality might have been at this hospital.

trayce otm - this is me too

- I have never recovered from the hermitage/agorophobic headspace it put me in. I still rarely leave the house and have wasted 3 of my last 4 summer holidays sitting around at home doing nothing whatsoever.

it took me way way longer than anyone i know to go anywhere. like a restaurant. i was store/home/local market for seemingly ever.

I work at home and usually have the house to myself during the day, so the first thing I remember besides the general sense of alarm and surreality is having to adjust to everyone being home all the time, my wife and two teenage boys. And for a while anyway, most of my reporting was completely remote. Learning to Zoom, all of that.

I think my job helped me deal with it psychologically, because I was immersed in it every day as a reporter, and having to be kind of a dispassionate, observer and conveyor of information. Also, even though it was all remote, I was still talking to lots of people all the time. So I didn’t have the same sense of isolation as a lot of people. But domestically, we did a lot of the same stuff as everybody. Cooking, baking, taking long walks. We live in an old neighborhood, and it has alleys everywhere. So we made kind of a project of going up and down all the alleys in the neighborhood. That was fun.

But I don’t want to be rosy about it. It was all very stressful. And by the end of the summer, my older son started having anxiety attack attacks for the first time in his life.

Attack attacks are like attacks, but more attacky.

there’s an elderly lady on my street, she lives alone and always seemed a little agoraphobic before but COVID seems to have fully broken her & it is very sad

I remember reading in some American paper like the Atlantic or the New Yorker that the best thing you could do in early March 2020 was to stop going to your office, so I showed it to some coworkers and we all started working from home. We’d always done about two days from home and we felt autonomous as contractors so we just all decided to do this and nobody stopped us. That job seemed to sort of melt away as fairly soon after I was told I would be finishing in May, after a few years contracting there. My birthday was a few days after the UK went into lockdown, I remember stockpiling a lot of food and booze. It was really weird doing Zooms at the kitchen table back then. I remember reading the numbers rising one night and feeling my heart rate increasing, like a really sudden spike of physical anxiety that I'd never really known before, the sense of something completely out of control.

My friend’s restaurant had just opened and had to close immediately for lockdown and I went over there and bought a lot of stuff off him, wine and cheese and butter. While we were there he gave some duck confit which he put into an industrial mayonnaise bucket topped with clingfilm. I remember getting back to my apartment that night and thinking it was that sort of “board the door” feeling from a post-apocalypse movie, and also that I didn’t want my neighbours to see me entering my home with a bucket of duck. There was a strange sort of comforting feeling of having everything you need and knowing you won’t be leaving the house which has stayed with me and is still a part of my life, and isn’t always so good, a kind of increased need for safety as some others have mentioned. I can't really shake it, I guess because I still work from home every day.

After the first job ended, I began working a lot on covid services for the UK government website. The pages I was responsible for are some of the most-used in its history, and it was often manic and crazy, but also sort of demanded me to use everything I’ve ever learned about my work and to draw on a lot of my own personality and resilience. This is weird too in that although it was stressful and crazy and all happening during lockdown it’s probably the work I’m most proud of in my life, and all my other jobs since have felt easy and lacking. I have considered that maybe I have or had some small version of trauma after that work, and the fact it all happened while mostly alone at home.

There are a lot of strange conflicts with covid, things that felt better among things that felt worse, things that only seemed bad after the opening up, the inability to remember what you were doing or wanted to do before you were temporarily prevented from doing it. I feel like a lot of the sense of control and being able to control every part of life has exacerbated some tendencies in me to lean towards safety and carefulness. I go out more than say in the immediate aftermath but I still am worried by small unpredictable things. I check the weather when flying more. I've had chronic illness problems since long before covid and maybe there was something nice about a world in which they sort of disappeared as a problem, because most activities were at home. I still live half in that world because of working at home. I still think of things as a sort of before and after even though if you’d asked me before I couldn’t have honestly said my life was perfect, not at all, and in fact a lot of stuff has improved, I bought a flat during the pandemic, I started exercising daily. I guess it just somehow seems the before was more innocent in a way I still can’t really understand.

It's weird even writing this how non-linear the memories feel. Christmases were so odd. 2020 I didn't get to go home to Dublin for the first time in my life at Christmas. Phoning my mum to tell her was really sad. After that I assembled a lot of stuff and did Xmas dinner with two of my oldest friends in London, which is a day I'll never forget, just the strangeness of it and the funny thing of the three of us buying each other presents and watching the usual Xmas stuff on TV. Christmas 2021 I had to isolate for a few days but was able to leave my room by the day itself. That too was weird and there was a lot of family tension and factions around the situation that took a little while to go away, for me anyway.

Another really vivid memory, one that will stay with me forever, for some reason, is the day after getting the first shot of the vaccine, around June 2021 I guess. I had a feverish night, teeth chattering one minute, drenched in sweat the next, then woke up with that feeling of the storm having broken, temperature normal, body functioning. It was a really sunny morning and at about 6am I walked to a shop absolutely craving orange juice, which I never really drink. I then went to the park and sat on a bench and drank my orange juice. I just remember that day feeling incredibly optimistic but also like a realisation of how difficult some of the times before had been. I remember just the feeling of walking, feeling good, the sun on my skin, and somehow really conscious of my body and how it felt versus the night before. But also that seems like some kind of resolution to it, even if that wasn't the end.

(hi everyone prob won't delurk again but all the posts here made me want to share also)

- I have never recovered from the hermitage/agorophobic headspace it put me in. I still rarely leave the house and have wasted 3 of my last 4 summer holidays sitting around at home doing nothing whatsoever.

Has anyone had the opposite experience? I find it difficult to stay home. Even if it's to the local Starbucks I gotta be out all the time.

A few things I remember, "en vrac":
- Video of bulldozers building a hospital in China in record time (Feb 2020)
- Sitting at home with nothing to do during the extra month at the end of my internship, which they had to pay me a real competitive salary + benefits (March 2020)
- Awesome weather, easy access to the river and countryside, reading Gravity Rainbow (April 2020)
- Being so relieved to land my first real job during the pandemic (May 2020)
- First infection and fearful monitoring of syndromes (October 2020)
- Death of my grandfather, followed by my grandmother, attended both funerals (end 2020)
- My wife losing several loved ones, who were all ridiculously young, us losing a best friend who was 34
- Those videos of this woman lipsyncing Trump talking about injecting yourself chemicals
- Reading graphs every day, pro- versus anti-
- Being bored and frustrated for months of 100% remote working
- The nightmare of travelling for work during Covid, the worst being denied access on a plane (at the gate) because of confusion of regulations as countries were dropping regulations but information was not circulating
- Getting over it

Some of the positive memories:

-getting to wfh for the first & only time

-my wife being furloughed and spending all day in the garden

-watching way too much Bon Appetite Youtube content and both of us doing some really ridiculously good cooking and baking

-being in great shape due to Youtube yoga + the usual exercise

There was bad stuff too of course but I look back fondly on a lot of it. Obviously we were very lucky, these same circumstances (wfh, furlough) would have been much harder if we had kids, didn't have my job, etc.

One of my favorite pastimes was making weird faces behind my mask while walking around the grocery store - puckering up my lips, wrinkling my nose, baring my teeth, etc.

Which reminds me, there was something weirdly sexy about having to guess what people looked like from just the upper face.

I went to a wedding on Feb 29 2020 and came away with a dry cough that lasted precisely 1.5 days. Spent a few weeks fretting I'd caught it and spread it but also baffled over whether that could really have been all it was for me, if it was. In the final week before first lockdown I was wearing gloves in the office except at my desk.

I'll never forget the weeks of warm sunny weather which felt unusual even for late Spring in southern UK...while we could barely be out in it and we had no garden (but also knowing how fortunate we were with the ease of sudden WFH for both of us). The palpable collective euphoria in parks that Summer too after the initial wave seemed to have passed was something else even if premature. Rivalled maybe only by Trump's defeat later that year + the vaccine news in the same fucking week.

We had additional luck in that when our cat died that Summer by that point they were allowing people in to the vet to witness pets passing.

I doubt I'll ever have a year like that for So. Much. time for music listening and discovery too.

Wow, I never even thought about that. it's hard enough to lose a pet, I can't imagine just dropping them off and not being with them in their final moments.

I(hi everyone prob won't delurk again but all the posts here made me want to share also)

A weird net positive for a lot of academic libraries with deep archives was that being closed meant the chance to get a lot of material that had been scanned but hanging fire for metadata etc happened big time. In our case, since by default all the access team members like myself weren’t doing anything (though I had some other online duties at least) that meant we did a lot of that work in 2020 to assist our archives and industry documents folks in clearing out a backlog. It was good work getting so much stuff read through — one of the more moving things I did was help out on AIDS History Project material, not merely for the obvious resonances, but seeing letters and mentions of people like Fauci and all. A real sense of continuity.

I was lucky in that nobody particularly close to me died or got seriously ill, but it was still surreal that it was happening to random people you knew. Like all the sudden "you hear who's on a ventilator?" and it's one of your neighbors, or someone who owned a restaurant you like, or one of your co-workers you had regular meetings with. Some of them pulled through but some of them didn't. Also hearing from people you went to school with, saying stuff like "I had a mild case but that was 6 months ago and I still feel tired all the time". It was scary. Didn't seem like it was worth it to do anything. Real apocalyptic vibes too with the wildfires. And then Trump on TV every day saying the stupidest shit you ever heard. I'm surprised I didn't have any sort of mental breakdown.

My neighbours' kids came home from university and spent the very hot April partying in their garden, which made my working from home pretty difficult. When my office reopened in the summer I was one of the first to go back and would often be the only person there in a space for 200 people. Walking through deserted central London and seeing shops still closed with Mothers' Day displays in their windows was bizarre. Once I was entirely alone in Lincoln's Inn Fields and could hear only the sound of a horse's hooves in the distance.

I must admit I wish I could've spent more time in deserted London, or really anywhere that would normally be busy. I got particularly envious watching one guy filming his stroll around the empty streets of Venice although I have no sense any more of when that was, could've been well into 2021.

I remember being initially sceptical of the Coronovirus news and then sitting in the office on a Friday in early March we all received an email telling that we were closing the doors and should work from home from the following week. I was healthy and felt protected. I had a 2 year old daughter and a partner who works in a hospital. I was more concerned for them. I think I really adapted to working from home full time but my employer was difficult and wanted me to use annual leave for any days I would be (through no choice of my own) looking after my 2 year old. This contributed to me feeling anxious over that period in addition to the health risks and isolation.

I miss the time on my own, with my child, as a family. We would exercise early in the little square in east London near where we lived. I bought pints of lager from the window of the pub on my street. Planning meals, drunken friends on Zoom calls, the increase in wildlife, change in the city sounds (much quieter), and the glorious weather. I miss how neighbourly and caring the local community felt. I miss my 96 year old neighbour. I obsessed over the first 5 Sault albums, the Test Pressing playlists and a few other records but bought less music. I did support a local shop by ordering online and the owner handing me the records from the window for a while.

I think I was always waiting for Covid to be over but when it happened it wasn't the release I was kind of expecting. I was, and still am, angry at the social impact of Covid. It seemed so unfair that people where dying before they needed to and people were making money out of this terrible time. We moved to be nearer my partners job in June 2021. It was overdue. I remember asking the estate agent about market conditions
and telling me that Covid created winners and losers. I went out to a restaurant and bar for the first time in October 2021. People had taken their masks off and so did I after a while. I got ill 4 days later and an ambulance took me to hospital 9 days later for a week. I regret that a lot. In some ways I'm still recovering.

It was a strange time. It feels like a dream.

and HIM telling me

i was talking to a guy i know yesterday and he worked for a beer distro and he did events for them and he had just set up a big beer fest in new orleans that he was really excited about and then -boom- the place he worked for closed up shop and let everyone go. i had forgotten how fast everything was happening back then. and then i tried to extrapolate his situation with the thousands of events that were ready to happen that never happened. just so crazy. the entire calendar wiped out.
i think i had also just forgotten that there were lots of people who really liked their jobs! all i heard about was people being kinda relieved that they could get checks and stay home. i was very happy to be able to go to work. its all i really know how to do other than watch t.v. and read literary fiction and listen to records.

Yes, that May-June period was the most intensest creative period of my life.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

that whole period, 2020-2022, that's when i learned to be a good writer. i started a blog the month before and i just kept going with it for the next three years. by the end of it i was a lot better of a writer. i wrote a memoir in early '21, the first three months of '21. first time i finished a book. i'm not going to do anything with it. it was the writing itself that was important.

i was really afraid to leave the house when covid started, not because of covid, i was just out and was still in that phase where i was convinced that i was going to be hate-crimed. people just yell slurs, they're not gonna be physically violent around here. but we had neighbors with trump yard signs and you never knew.

i remember going out and everything just being so quiet. it felt like i was living in a post-apocalyptic world, like everybody had died already.

I know you referred to a year later, but for me it was April-early-July '21, what I call the Post-Vax Honeymoon before Delta came along: the first time friends and I actually met in restaurants. I also had my first sex since March '20. I didn't retreat again when Delta hit, just pulled back for a bit, but it was the last time I thought, "Oh, COVID's GONE, man!"

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

in early april of '21 the hospital called me asking if i could do GRS (bottom surgery) the next week. no, of course i fucking couldn't, so then they were like "ok how about early june". that was my next couple of months. i missed that whole "false thaw" period. i was really conflicted about it. i was _incredibly_ fortunate to be able to get GRS as early into transition as I did... COVID worked in my favor in a lot of ways, I'm not gonna get into detail here about exactly how... I just wouldn't have been able to get that surgery as early as I did without COVID. Recovery time was three months, though. I kept thinking of that St. Vincent song "Surgeon", the opening line "I spent the summer on my back..." I was upset since I hadn't done Pride since coming out... I wanted to be part of in-person queer community. Then by the time I was better, Delta and then Omicron...

I found myself getting nostalgic for that couple of months after lockdown had fully lifted and people were just starting to feel comfortable with mingling again. It was a rare period when the world felt less cynical than it had before or would after. That year, 2022, just felt like the year when everyone was excited just to be alive and to be able to go out and see each other and enjoy life

― your mom goes to limgrave (dog latin)

When things lifted in late '22, I'd just moved out from the house I shared with my ex, we'd just sold it. I was seriously fucked up. The trans community helped me recognize that I had to leave, that the things my ex was doing were abusive, but I hated myself for leaving. It caused problems. I lit a lot of fires during that time. Other shit was going on but my shit didn't help with things.

I got COVID for the first time in late July, when I was moving out of the house my ex and I shared. My best friend was helping me move... she'd just flown back from a conference in Vegas. She was conscientious about it - said she had some early symptoms but had taken rapid tests for three days since coming back and they were all negative. So she came over to help and of course she had it. My ex-wife was livid. She had a particular... she viewed catching COVID as a deliberate, malicious act. She didn't actually catch it. I did. So I'd just moved in and I was sick with COVID and sick with grief, and I couldn't tell which was which. The day I moved into my new place, by coincidence my oldest brother called. I torched that relationship that day. We haven't talked since. The next week I remember screaming, crying at all hours, hallucinating. I don't think it was COVID. My COVID symptoms were actually very mild. It was mostly grief.

That week the hospital called again, asked if I could do the revision surgery next week. (The hospital's care is great; their scheduling is pretty structurally fucked, though.) This time I said "yes", but then they asked if I'd had COVID in the last three months and my answer was "well actually I had COVID now...". So it was another three months.

I didn't really start to repair the damage from those few months until mid-2023. I'm slowly reaching out again. Learning to trust. Learning to keep at arm's length from all of the fucked up shit I see all around me.

I never thought of COVID as the real pandemic. I still don't.

Has anyone had the opposite experience? I find it difficult to stay home. Even if it's to the local Starbucks I gotta be out all the time.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

I did spend those first couple of months after the pandemic going out every night of the week, socializing fiercely and incessantly. It was one of the reasons it hit me so hard when shit fell apart around Christmas of '22. I socialize a few nights a week now. It's hard for me to spend so much time by myself. I live alone, and I get lonely. It's hard for me to motivate myself to do things without other people around. That's why I limit my social interactions... it's important for me to learn to take care of myself, get my basic needs met - laundry, showers, groceries, my day job, things like that - without needing other people to caretake me. I've never been in that situation before.

Which reminds me, there was something weirdly sexy about having to guess what people looked like from just the upper face.

― Nabozo

Masking also really helped a lot of trans people I knew pass.

-

I spent a lot of time wondering which of the people I knew were going to die. When it would hit someone I was close to. It hasn't yet. Not directly, at least. Someone in my life dies of suicide every couple months. Only one person I knew died of COVID - an ex-co-worker who I never really liked. I do remember reading a lot of the charts, trying to figure out what was going to happen, how bad it's going to be. I don't really care now. Whoever dies, dies. We're alive now.

I remember trying out bangs. I remember quitting makeup, and never really picking it back up. Letting my ear piercings heal. Having lots of wigs and not wearing them much.

-

I'm such a different person coming out than I was going in. I was just... I was telling my girlfriend yesterday, back in late '19, my life seemed like a wish fulfillment dream. It didn't seem real, how good I felt all the time all of a sudden. And then later on, I started looking at my old life as a nightmare... the way I was living seemed real and the way I had felt before, I couldn't imagine feeling that bad.

Nowadays everything seems... I don't feel like I'm the same person I was pre-COVID. I don't feel like I was the same person I was between '20 and '22, either. I was... incandescent during that time. I remember saying a lot during that time that I felt like I was on fire. Everything just overwhelmed me. I wanted to light myself on fire, literally, until I learned that a friend of a friend had done just that, and it didn't matter, it didn't change anything.

Now life seems like a dream in a different sense. Everything just seems terribly strange and nothing makes a whole lot of sense. One thing doesn't connect to another. I don't know what's going to happen next. Now I'm mostly... Curious. Curiouser and curiouser.

That wasn't all COVID, but COVID was a bigger part of that than people... might assume sometimes.

Which reminds me, there was something weirdly sexy about having to guess what people looked like from just the upper face.

― Nabozo, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 12:57 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I definitely thought "You have nice eyes!" more than I usually would do.

" I obsessed over the first 5 Sault albums"

― mmmm, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 3:36 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not necessarily during lock downs but I listened to Microphones in 2020 everyday during a period I was WFH.

xp there's a fairly big percentage of the Asian population here in Oakland who have not given up on masking, and seemingly never will

xps I became more conscious of smiling with my eyes, something that I've carried beyond mask-wearing.

the pandemic was the beginning of the final stages of my mental collapse and I have on occasion re-read the threads where we document the onset of the pandemic and it just brings back memories. it was all of the things that happened afterward that completed it, but constantly living in a heightened state of fear, anger, and stress, as well as the negative affects isolation had on me for that first year, the rage at the conspiracy theorists and people who defied any and all public health initiatives, and me already having OCD was too much of a lethal combo. particularly what it did to my doomscrolling habit, which finally got so out of control in 2022 that my brain essentially fractured and stopped seeking out new news of any type.

I do have positive memories of participating in the COVID vaccine study for Moderna - at least being a part of that lead to some good. but I do not at all miss the days of getting ripped off my ass on Vodka and being on Stream playing Jackbox games each night with kids half my age and spending my weekends sobbing from loneliness. the few days I stayed w/ my folks while dad recovered from gallbladder surgery were a relief at the time, because I had someone to talk to. still drank way too much though.

*brings back bad memories

Stream = Twitch...see? brain still not working lol

Aww Neanderthal - I'm sure that there's quite a few folks who share similar memories, it was pretty isolating

I had a low point when I actually had the Cove... I followed the stated rules pretty closely and didn't even leave the house for a week, and then only to ride my scooter out to the port on a Sunday to walk on empty railroad tracks where I knew I wouldn't encounter anyone. Nowadays they're like 'Fuck it! Go to work, don't bother masking, who cares!!'

i think i had also just forgotten that there were lots of people who really liked their jobs!

i love my job and really, really missed it for the almost 2 years it was shut down. it was quite hard to deal with all the friends bragging about mastering baking sourdough bread and having more disposable income than they knew what do with.

I remember being in the break room at work and seeing a news clip about a COVID case in Illinois, which now feels like one of those moments in a zombie film where the news reports are running in the background, but the characters don't notice.

I was working at a ticket vendor at the time and remember the deluge of calls that started once it was announced that March Madness wasn't happening. Either that day or the next, the office started handing out laptops.

I met my partner a week before she moved out of state for grad school, and we started long-distance dating about a year before she graduated. She moved back to Chicago only a month before the pandemic. That was a stroke of luck, as I don't know if our relationship would have kept going if we'd been faced with an indefinite separation without even occasional visits.

Most of all, I remember the bitterness about how the government was handling it. All these proclamations about wearing a mask—but where were we going to get them? What was the purpose of our government if not to help us by providing such things, instead of putting the responsibility on us to find/make/buy them? (Obviously, these questions were rhetorical, as I knew all too well.) Despite who was leading our government, a small part of me still hoped this disaster--straight out of a film--would prompt some sort of Second World War-type push.

I work in health and so didn't get time off. But I'd forgotten (until pondering this thread) that there was a period when I was thinking about volunteering for one of the Nightingale hospitals.

I do have positive memories of participating in the COVID vaccine study for Moderna - at least being a part of that lead to some good.

Getting a booster today, I’ll raise a lemonade in your honor on this hot March day.

i had forgotten how fast everything was happening back then.

no kidding, the whole thing was so surreal. I'd really thought this was just another bird/swine flu thing (not that those weren't serious!) and the fact that only conservatives seemed to be freaking out was a sign that it was probably no big deal. and then entire countries started to shut down. I remember during my team meeting at work on Monday being like "uhhh folks what are we doing about this?" and my manager saying "I have no idea yet". then one or two days later I told her "hey I think I'm going to work from home tomorrow if that's okay, things are getting too weird", and that night as I was putting my kids to sleep I find out that Tom Hanks has it, and then the NBA shut down an hour later, and then an hour after that we all get an email and a text saying not to come into work tomorrow. one of the weirdest days of my life.

Remember this? Utah Jazz & OKC Thunder

At 8:39 p.m., just prior to tip-off, the league made the dramatic decision to announce to the crowd, and the nation, that the game had officially been suspended. The arena packed with fans would be forced to evacuate, with the look of uncertainty plastered across each and every one of the unsuspecting customers’ faces.

xp I took a couple of weeks’ annual leave before they finally locked down, my friend still makes out that I was some kind of Cassandra & I’m like no it was really really obvious at that point, everyone just had their head up their arse

I got really into running. Like a lot of people ITT, I got to just about the fittest I'd ever been.

It was strange running around these empty streets and fields, and then one day seeing the restaurants and bars open again.

I also decided to teach myself philosophy, and listened to a whole lot of philosophy lectures on Audible while I was out running. There was something very Zen about it all

Everyone got a text from the govt that said “stay home. Protect the nhs.” V surreal

(Esp cause the ppl who ostensibly sent the text were like “last one to the pub is a bum boy” days earlier”

)

I think my main memory looking back was the timing of everything. I retired in the spring of 2019, sold my house in Toronto that summer, then moved to a small town two hours away. As 2020 started, my financial health was taken care of for life, and I had moved from a densely populated city to a town of 7,000 that was largely case-free for the first six months. I was so incredibly lucky, and I've tried to pay that back in a variety of ways ever since.

Lots else, good and bad, and the longest walks of my life around town in March and April, through streets that were virtually deserted. (Mild weather, I think.) I do tend to see life through the prism of art, though--should be the other way around--so a couple of non-personal things I think about.

The seventh episode of The Leftovers, where you see life the day before the Departure. You can't do that with Covid, which developed over a few weeks and months--there was no official start, even if we tend to use that day when the NBA shut down as the beginning. If you could, I'd like to see what my life was like the last day where I'd never given a thought to Covid, which was probably some day in February. I think the world was so different in so many small ways. I'm old enough that I don't see the need to spend time trying to figure out and describe all those ways, but people younger than me might want to.

There's also a speech in Mad Men I think about, Don talking to Peggy about why she's so good as an ad person. I'd try to quote it exactly, but I'm not sure which episode--Don speechified a lot. Anyway, he says something to the effect that she understands that something happened which changed the way people feel about themselves; he's referring to, without naming it, the JFK assassination. And because she understands that, she knows how to reach those same people. Same thing with Covid: something changed with people that I'd have a hard time describing.

I feel profoundly sorry for kids in school who had to miss so much, and I see the long-term effects of that every day.

When Sydney got all locked down I had a work exemption and sometimes had to drive into the city. The sci-fi filme eeriness of the familiar streets empty will stay with me.

Generally I felt fear and concern for humans both known and unknown - but more than anything else I think I felt relief that "business as usual" had stopped, that is something I had been craving for a long time

Working from home and having two school-age kids was tough and particularly tough on our youngest - I still feel his mental health is a bit knocked around by that time

I bought my dream turntable from a ludicrously cheap Gumtree ad early in 2020 and "tending to my records" (cleaning, new sleeves, organising, buying more of the fuckers) was a very therapeutic pursuit

My music taste definitely skewed nostalgic - listened to largely 60s/70s/80s stuff and it is only now that I feel like I am properly engaging with new stuff again - albeit still in a spotty kind of way

I still feel his mental health is a bit knocked around by that time

That's what I meant--mental health, socialization, graduations, field trips, etc., much more than academics. That's a concern, but you can fix that gap over time. Other things were missed for good.

Hm, that reminds me that the 'Covid Coping' series I did on my Patreon was really helpful in a 'stay engaged' way, even if I was listening to things old as well as new. Having the chance and discipline to write in a little detail about something each day anchored around a song was a good way to process things in a removed fashion.

Not necessarily during lock downs but I listened to Microphones in 2020 everyday during a period I was WFH.

― djh

For the entirety of '22 and most of '23 I just had _Dots and Loops_ on repeat in my car. It was the last record I listened to in the car with my ex. I guess that would be a good way of delineating it. When I took Dots and Loops out of my car things started to get better.

I still really like Dots and Loops, funnily enough. I don't have any negative memories at all associated with it. I just kept it in there because it's a good album. I just kept waiting to see when I would get tired of listening to it, and I never did. Probably the highlight of my life during that whole time period was listening to Dots and Loops. I wouldn't want to leave the house and I'd say well, if I do, then I can listen to Dots and Loops, and that was about the only thing that got me out of the house. So, I mean, kudos to Stereolab. They put out an album that soundtracked one of the most depressing and traumatic parts of my life and I still fucking love it.

I remember seeing this thread title and being like, Christ, why would I want to remember this time at all? But reading the responses of others was really nice, so I thought about it.

I remember my husband was in Singapore & Indonesia right when there were cases popping up there. I think the first reference I have to this affecting our lives was a text from him, in February 2020, talking about how the hotel he was staying in beeped his forehead to check his temperature on entrance. (Remember when places did that? Hahahaha.)

I remember when we started working from home and it didn’t feel like it would be for that long, and then it was. Time sort of collapsed due to the sameness of the days and I find it hard to pick out individual happenings from that time.

The slack was a godsend; we did a Christmas present exchange, regular zooms, and stuff like everyone buying scampi fries from Amazon and it becoming a thing for a while. A while ago I was in a pub with my mother and I bought a packet of scampi fries for us, which she had never seen me do, and took a picture with them. Impossible to explain, but it made me smile.

I made two of my best friends on slack and we have a WhatsApp group and we talk pretty much every day. Of all the things I expected as an outcome for the pandemic, I didn’t expect that.

I found it almost easier to make new friends than keep existing friends during the initial period of the pandemic where nothing was happening, because there’s no news. Nothing’s happening. When you’re making friends with new people, everything is novel. But when things opened up again, I wanted to see everyone, because I really felt the wasted time not seeing people. I remember going to dinner with ten of my friends in February right before stuff got really serious really fast and for ages we joked about calling it the last supper. Even now writing this is a good reminder to make plans with people.

I missed my family terribly. The first Christmas we had, I can’t even remember what happened. The Christmas omicron was circulating we had to cancel our flights to Ireland and I was so upset. I remember going on an impromptu trip to see my parents in January the year of the pandemic, and I think about that bit of serendipity all the time. I didn’t end up seeing my family in person until a year and a half later. Voice notes were always a thing we did but they became very important to us. My mother was in hospital with covid at one stage and I was so frightened she was sick enough to be admitted to a covid ward. My sister said I made this horrendous sound when she told me. I listened to her voice notes she’d sent me while I waited for news. Look, this was the pandemic, too much time to think.

I’d love to say I developed a new skill or baked bread or something, but no. I ended up getting into baseball in 2022 which in retrospect I couldn’t really have done in the same way back then (And I would probably have hated players for being antivaxx).

I think I say yes to things more. I went to New York with my family literally just on a whim after decades of not going on holidays with them, and it was fun. I arrange things. As a result I get invited to things more.

I have had covid at least twice that I’m aware of. I didn’t actually get it until 2022! The weird dreams and lack of taste were the worst symptoms for me. Both times my husband got it far worse. (My mother: “That’s men for you.” Yes, her that was in hospital).

It’s bizarre how “normal” things seem now. In New York I would see people wearing masks constantly and I haven’t seen that in a long long time. Ireland was way better about wearing masks than the UK from when I went home during the vaccine rollout stage, but I haven’t really seen many people wearing masks in public for a while. I assume they have covid if they do.

Yeah, in Ireland last June I didn't see a single mask wearer (my mom and I were the only ones wearing them on the Galway-bound train). Memories associated with lockdowns way more serious than America's, I gathered.

I live near a high school, and it's amazing how many kids are still masking, even when walking outdoors alone. It was explained to me that masks are almost like safety blankets for some kids, a way to sort of hide out. Four years is a long time when you're fourteen, I can see where they'd be fully acclimated to it.

no kidding, the whole thing was so surreal. I'd really thought this was just another bird/swine flu thing (not that those weren't serious!) and the fact that only conservatives seemed to be freaking out was a sign that it was probably no big deal. and then entire countries started to shut down. I remember during my team meeting at work on Monday being like "uhhh folks what are we doing about this?" and my manager saying "I have no idea yet". then one or two days later I told her "hey I think I'm going to work from home tomorrow if that's okay, things are getting too weird", and that night as I was putting my kids to sleep I find out that Tom Hanks has it, and then the NBA shut down an hour later, and then an hour after that we all get an email and a text saying not to come into work tomorrow. one of the weirdest days of my life.

― frogbs, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 4:09 PM (six days ago)

https://i.imgur.com/1ysy1Ds.jpeg

https://www.instagram.com/p/C4TX8elrqK3/

I do feel like the early overconfident public health messaging of "don't want COVID? just wash your hands!", prior to all of the experts discovering it was airborne, lead to the weirdest deep-cleaning obsession in history, which really became COVID theatre when it was realized fomite spread contributes little to nothing to the overall spread and that most of the 'deep-cleaning' methods employed were probably no better than like...using those alcohol wipes.

when my mom got it last month, she was still wiping down everything in hyper-sanitize mode like it was March 2020, and I finally said "mom, if I get it, it's from breathing air you sneezed in, not you touching a counter".

no kidding, the whole thing was so surreal. I'd really thought this was just another bird/swine flu thing (not that those weren't serious!) and the fact that only conservatives seemed to be freaking out was a sign that it was probably no big deal. and then entire countries started to shut down. I remember during my team meeting at work on Monday being like "uhhh folks what are we doing about this?" and my manager saying "I have no idea yet". then one or two days later I told her "hey I think I'm going to work from home tomorrow if that's okay, things are getting too weird", and that night as I was putting my kids to sleep I find out that Tom Hanks has it, and then the NBA shut down an hour later, and then an hour after that we all get an email and a text saying not to come into work tomorrow. one of the weirdest days of my life.
― frogbs, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 4:09 PM (six days ago)

I was at rehearsal for a Fringe Festival play that night. Things were already looking ugly when I left to drive there. We had only just entertained for the first time at rehearsal the "non-zero possibility" that the entire festival would be cancelled, but nobody put it at more than like a 25% chance. right as we were being dismissed, the news that Trump had banned travel from Asia hit, and that Tom and Rita Hanks had gotten it.

I got to my car, and saw the news about the Jazz game (which had been cancelled an hour prior, but I hadn't seen it). I spent about 30-40 minutes in my car reading news and not leaving to go home and during that time the NBA suspended its season. by the time I got to my house I knew I was going to be seeing a lot of it and nothing else for a while.

To this day using wipes -- I SEE this every day -- is way easier for many people than masking. It requires no sacrifice.

And I gotta say if people washed their hands more, this is no bad thing.

well no argument there.

I remember the horrifying speed with which things changed. On 29 Feb I went to a football match along with thousands of people and the world was basically normal. Three or four days later I was at a committee meeting for my cycling club and we were making plans for the various spring and summer events and COVID wasn't even mentioned, didn't even enter our thoughts. Two or three days after that I remember having conversations about what was happening in Italy and thinking 'it's coming here next' but still feeling like we had a month or two to get ready. Then everything just collapsed. No toilet roll, then no pasta/rice/cans of soup, then no fresh food at all at the supermarket. More and more colleagues and students who I was supposed to be teaching off sick or staying at home in fear. My daughter's school having to send whole year groups home because of a severe lack of staff. The news from Italy getting grimmer and grimmer. Boris Johnson announcing that many will die before their time and then just fucking off and vanishing for several days leaving everyone to panic in a vacuum. Doom scrolling Twitter about just how bad it could get and either not being able to get to sleep or waking up at 4am full of fear. Monday 16 March about a third of my students were missing and all anyone wanted to talk about was the pandemic situation. The next day two thirds were missing. Wednesday 18 March I had just 1 student left. Everyone knew we were going to be closed down and couldn't understand why we were being forced to carry on going to work. I went to Sainsbury's in the evening and there was literally *no food* left at all. When the lockdown was eventually called, at least a week, probably two weeks later than it should have been, I just felt massive relief.

"The news from Italy getting grimmer and grimmer"

that was horrifying at the time. I had two members of my family with cancer and my partner with MS and dementia. I felt like there would be nobody left in my life after it hit the UK.

When dad had his gallbladder out and I was staying with the folks to help with recovery, I was so worried about getting it and giving it to Dad that I wore my "mask" (a balaclava that me sweat) indoors for 14 hours a day.

Mostly because I made a lot of trips to the store then out of necessity

echo all of that NBS, thats very close to what i remember , and how i remember it hitting me

Sometime in mid-to-late February 2020 I read a story about it spreading in China and they couldn't stop it. I somehow just knew if it got to the US we were so open and dysfunctional we wouldn't be able to either. That weekend I went to the store and bought $300 of shelf stable food: pasta, rice, beans, cans of tomato, etc. I should have bought toilet paper instead. Oh well.

The night the NBA stopped playing games I called my boss and told him I was working from home indefinitely. I had worked with them for 19 years and they needed me so I was lucky I could do this. I went into work very early the next day, grabbed a small box of things I would need and split. The next week everything shut down including my company.

When my kids had to start doing remote learning from home it was tough, but they finished at noon and then... what? And like an angel sent from above it became apparent that a loose group of ping pong players in the neighbourhood were playing every day, in the Olympic Park, a 10 minute walk from my house. And my two boys became obsessed with ping pong. A Whatsapp group was started. We all got to know each other. So every day the boys would finish their schoolwork, we'd give them sandwiches in a bag and they'd race to the park with their paddles and a big bottle of water. The weather was sensational. Eventually some of the guys there (it was 90% guys)started bringing a chess board, because there were only two tables and maybe a dozen people who wanted to play. So those who weren't on the tables played chess. This literally happened every week day. For months. So when people talk about the mental health problems that lockdown caused kids, we really dodged a bullet. It was one of the greatest little spontaneous displays of community togetherness I've ever witnessed.

Tracer that's great (as tbh your posts on ILX of experiencing COVID at the time haunt me to this day).

I took this photo Jan 26 2020 at Bank tube station, in pouring rain:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49461142038_3c78ce7e14_c.jpg

After that there were weeks of... birthdays, trips to L'pool and Amsterdam, galleries and days out, gigs, bowling... no masking anywhere, just half-hearted attempts at social distancing, hand-washing stations in the office. Then, Mar 12 - "WFH for two weeks, it's experimental". I've been back to the office maybe 15 times in four years.

I recall the neighbours hired someone to spray 2m chevrons on our lane in late April, and we got this instead :)

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49834655143_c301788756_c.jpg

That bank station picture is incredible, Michael. Real Vertigo Comics panel energy.

we pulled our kid out of school a week before LAUSD officially closed its doors. we pretended he was sick. but really, it was a bad idea to slow-walk the closures so we kept him home, and explained to him why. one other family we talked to did the same. LAUSD actually dealt with the pandemic *exceptionally* well after they shut down. the superintendent at the time was someone who folks regarded with a bit of side-eye in the wake of the teacher's strike a year or so previous, but he did a very very good job.

i remember going to half a dozen grocery stores the day the big panic-buying started and i wound up getting the scraps of what remained. so many pierogis. and andouille sausages. in the end, we went to Ikea to go grocery shopping and they were stocked up, so we got a ton of swedish meatballs and gravlox.

my mom was visiting at this time, she flew in on March 7 for a visit. I suggested she might want to postpone and she thought it would be ok. flying maskless on a crowded plane to L.A. on that date was, in retrospect, taking a gamble. but she was fine. of course, 17 days later, when i dropped her off at LAX (a much bigger gamble but she had masks by then), there were fewer people traveling. anyone familiar with LAX knows this photo is not usual --

https://i.imgur.com/3JYgGuf.png

Los Angeles was dead for quite awhile. I could stand in the middle of the street with the kid and play catch for an hour and see two cars. and at the time, it felt risky because we weren't wearing the masks outside! we kinda knew we'd be okay, but we didn't *know*.

Hollywood was dead on a Friday night, even.

https://i.imgur.com/RRzpbCq.png

https://i.imgur.com/nFFaoTA.png

we remained fully locked down for i'm sure at least a year, and our kid didn't attend school in person until fall of 2021. we remained more locked down than most due to my wife needing to visit her dad, who was isolated and living alone. she visited her mom to, but her mom was in a group home and they could only wheel her to the sliding glass door in the backyard so she could see her from outside. her mom couldn't see and wouldn't recognize her if she could, so it was even more of a one-way thing. like visiting a zoo. it was so hard on her. her parents both died the same week, Thanksgiving week 2021, her dad in failing health after a fall, probably indirectly related to being locked down and less mobile. he fell and was found shortly after by his in-home caregiver (part-time, we couldn't afford more) and just never recovered. what a guy he was -- a gentle soul. and her mom...a journalist turned teacher, gone too soon, so immediately kind to me it was like finding a second mom.

my career evaporated during the pandemic, it's still tough times. i don't feel old but according to others i got old and honestly it's probably for the best. i still don't really know what i'll do next for longer-term prospects vs what i've pieced together. but i can't complain too much. i guess i had a decent run.

our friendships changed -- we stopped hanging out with some people, not as a political statement but due to our own general caution, and many just kept on being social with their "pod" being very large. many of them caught covid multiple times.

we survived psychologically, at least in terms of the pandemic stuff. my kid thrived somehow and remained his relentlessly cheery self.

i think in the end, we were happy to be where we were in L.A. since everyone was on board with being careful and respecting others, and politically it was the best place to be i suppose. for me the pandemic took a turn earlier when Trump lost in 2020, walking thru the hood w/everyone celebrating and listening to "FDT" by YG at a corner gas station, most people wearing masks, me turning to someone standing next to me and saying "This is fucking incredible!" and she replied, "SOOO incredible!" and i realized it was A1ia $hawkat. haha if we only knew we couldn't kill what was already dead! FDT and F covid too.

January: I quit a horrible job that I hated and that was hurting my well-being. Good timing, because it was in a school and things were about to go completely impossible for schools and my work environment was already toxic as hell. Later in January we made a point of going to Chinese restaurants which were being hit by anti-Asian xenophobia/racism and fears of disease from the stories coming from China, a brief period perhaps when dining out but there were no lines at Nan Xiang.

February: While aimlessly wandering around a picturesque historic park one day, I felt the return of something that had been out of reach for so long I didn't even recognize it--which after some introspection I decided was probably happiness. I wasn't kidding about the job, it was killing me.

March: I woke up in Brooklyn and looked at the way the morning light brightened my bedroom walls and decided that if this was the end of normal life, I was going to act decisively. I packed a lot of bags and called my partner to come get me, and effectively moved to the country. I only had this option because he moved out of NYC a couple of years prior, which is turns out was ALSO great timing.

Spent the next 3 years living my cottage-core gardening dreams.

this thread is hard to read but someday i hope to write some sort of more measured reminiscence of how things were and what happened.

the pandemic was like a bomb that went off in my life. i still don't understand the extent of the trauma but everything is different now. some things are better, for sure, and then there are other nagging things (like a loss of trust in "people" in general, knowing that 100M+ people in the U.S. alone are horrible people who do not care at all about anything except themselves, heavily confirmed by the 2016 election and then extra heavy no doubt confirmed by the pandemic) that i'm not sure what to do with. i expect a lot of other people feel the same, but we can't even get it together to designate a shitty national day off of work for the 1.1M who died in the u.s., because absolutely no one wants to talk about or remember it. (this makes me pessimistic about the next pandemic). so i really doubt there will be some sort of "national conversation" about coming to terms with collective trauma. the collective trauma is already under the rug, down there with vietnam and shit.

i fondly remember getting on a crappy video chat iphone app called marco polo and making/watching/sharing all sorts of really weird video messages with a close group of friends for several months straight. i'd wake up and watch 10 minutes of marco polo every morning before work, just catching up with my friends' routines and dilemmas. it was nice, and i miss it in some ways, as the status quo of the occasional text message / funny meme has replaced the daily chatting and bonding that was there in april/may 2020

I know what you mean - 4 people I knew died from it and it didn't feel like anyone got to really process the losses at all. there were funerals but not like what you had pre-COVID. just people going "whoa, that's crazy" in the groupchats. even now it's like these people are barely even remembered. just people who existed in some sort of "before time"

i've often had the (incredibly depressing) idle thought that i wish there could be a day where everyone who knew someone who died from covid just walked outside and stood on the sidewalk for about 10 minutes. just to look up and down the street and see who else is standing there. no words, no signs, no bloodcurdling screams threatening revenge against trump (that rule is for me) - just standing there for a second and seeing who else is there

(i feel like a prequel to 1984 could explain that just before fascism took over, there was a pandemic, a shocking and relentless display of inhumanity from half of humanity, the end of the pandemic, followed by the first implementation of 2-minutes-hate, which initially was two large groups shouting about the other but eventually merged into one)

lol, sorry! just read what i typed over the last few minutes, and yeah, i shouldn't be on this thread. the cool part about believing hundreds of millions of people are straight up evil is that i really do believe that the other hundreds of millions of people fucking kick ass and do care about other people.

"The news from Italy getting grimmer and grimmer"

I'm certain I've said this already but a Guardian article headlined something like "Letter from Italy" had a massive influence on me - I recall stuff about care homes being abandoned (with the residents still in there), relationships failing under the trauma of stuff, queues outside of shops (and friends making sure they were in the same queues, so at least they saw each other).

I keep getting bogged down, trying to post here. Like, my brain wants to do this precise timeline and no, that's awful. So:
I started 2020 with one cat and now I have 7. I went from flying 50k+ miles per year to zero. I went from working 80+ hours/week to retired to consulting on 2 24/7 projects to working an incredible job I fully enjoy. I suffered the worst depression/anxiety/insomnia I've ever dealt with, got help, got lucky with meds, got lucky with therapy. Lost 4 people I was close to in the course of 2 weeks mid-2020. My grandson was born healthy and hale in July 2020 and I was able to meet him in person right before his 1st birthday. Moved house twice. Got over my intense needle phobia. Lots of bad stuff relatively balanced by good stuff.

I remember telling my son, in maybe late March 2020: “Don’t worry. This will be over by May.” He’s never let me hear the end of that.

I went to a local shop that first weekend and it was decimated, ransacked even. That afternoon, I drove to a farm shop (not quite as posho as it sounds, but not far off) and there was this apocalyptic atmosphere: huge queues, the stink of slurry in the air, everyone wild-eyed and frantic. At one point, a white van pulled up, driving aggressively close to the queue; three huge blokes got out and pushed their way to the front. I remember thinking 'fuuuck, this could escalate quickly'.

― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Tuesday, March 12, 2024 1:57 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Whoa.

xp - Well, to be fair, there was A LOT of messaging that we just needed to "flatten the curve" for a few weeks and it'd all blow over!

Also none of us alive right now had a very valid frame of reference for a global pandemic!

I think I’ve erased a lot of the worst of the pandemic in my mind, or muted it. A response to trauma maybe. But there was a big, rough stretch of 2020 (pre-election) of just gaping, desperate fear and sadness and wondering if life would ever return to normal. I worked from home long before COVID (and do now) and when work would end for the day I would push the laptop way and reach for my phone and doomscroll, in a daze, until suddenly it was time to get a shower and go to bed. I just couldn’t believe that we were in the worst situation and led by the absolute worst person possible in that moments. It was crushing:

(I do recall, vaguely, some very surreal supermarket low-stock situations, and the randomness of what I could get. How awful I’d feel wearing a mask for what seemed like forever, until I started to get used to it. A stepsister buying everyone masks; getting into the mask-making business and selling them to family for cheap.)

... and then finding out that only N95s really worked worth a damn :(

I remember a friend of mine went with the "face shield" option, he still has long COVID

I messaged a hoos one day in desperation: "WHAT CAN I DO? What are we doing? Where is the organizing in this moment?" and he was like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and then a mutual aid group in a nearby town asked for more online administrative support, and I volunteered. And I'm still doing it! Actually it got me a part-time job for about a year and has completely changed my life. I finally understand what I want to do (build self-reliant community networks) and found so many people to learn from.

It was a weird summer though, cognitively. There were deffo times I sat down at the computer and read something 5 times and felt a wave of panic that it didn't make sense. That may also have been menopause though, xp to the "There Will Not Be Blood" thread. Hard to tell in 2020.

we had one friend die during the pandemic, a bit over a year after it started. don't know how he got covid, but he was feeling under the weather and apparently said he'd go to the hospital the next day, went to bed, and died in his room overnight.

a friend's aunt died in the worst way possible.. alone in a hospital, facing the floor in a ventilator (to drain the lungs)... a lot of people went like that, we forget what an awful ending it was for so many

I've heard about a possible (U.S.) national covid memorial in the works, not sure where they're at in the planning stages

i think they're in the "planning to plan until it's not a political issue" stage, so given how long it has taken for the GOP to acknowledge climate change, 20-30 more years minimum, and only kicking and screaming for some of them, even then

I dont think I know of anyone who died from covid but one aunt died during lockdowns (she was old and ill anyway) and they had to do a mostly-absentee funeral.

I do know multiple people who have been quite crippled by long covid. One has developed really bad heart problems for example.

One of my wife's law partners who she worked with for 18 years died in the first weeks. His wife never saw him in person alive after he went into the hospital that first week. That certainly framed our early covid experience.

I do not know anyone personally who died, but def friends/relatives of friends. I know one person with long COVID as noted above. My early experiences were nowhere near as harsh as many that are described here, I was relieved to work from home and it was actually feasible. I do remember days before the mid-March shutdown giving a customer a ride from work to a UPS place maybe half a mile away, we disinfected everything but of course did not open the windows of the truck.

The weekend of March 5 we went to the funeral of a local activist found dead in his room after two days; in November 2020 we learned it might've been COVID. He was the only person I know infected between March 2020 and March 2021. My friends and relatives started falling like trees in the post-omicron period in 2022. I got an asymptomatic case in September 2022, so I still don't know what symptoms are like.

Whatever wave it was in early 2022 had a big negative impact locally: bodies were stacking up because so many licensed crematory operators were out sick. It took until September for the backlog to be cleared at the largest crematory in the state, running 24/7.

that was one thing that pissed me off when fighting with the "Plandemic" crowd. people saying things like "if this was really what public officials said, you'd see an overflow of bodies with nowhere to put them" and it was like THAT'S LITERALLY HAPPENING, YOU FUCKING IDIOT, they are using refrigerated trucks as makeshift morgues right now

I have to credit my genius friend from high school and my partner who was following what was happening in Asia for mentally preparing me for the pandemic. Honestly they both got a huge jump on most of the country, if not more.

My partner was frantically looking for N95 masks, which apparently were cleaned out around our area. We were told it was primarily the Asian residents of Flushing, with many of them far more concerned about a potential pandemic since it obviously was already having a huge impact in Asia. I reached out to my family in the Midwest as they were far from the city, and their local Home Depot had plenty of N95 masks so we got some that way (as well as some for my family, which they were soon glad to have). I took it as a "just in case," and moved on with my life, but over the course of a 6 or 7 weeks, the country was getting more worried. Then the day before lockdown happened, my friend was texting me, and I STILL have those texts:

You really shouldn’t be going into work. How is it possible that what is happening in Italy won’t happen here? In 2 weeks most businesses will be shut down and travel around the country restricted. And lots of ppl will die.

As I read these, I looked out my window and it was just so fucking surreal - like life still LOOKED normal and I actually just got back from the bank to have something notarized. (In an awkward moment, I just sat there nodding to the nice guy who helped me, and I think he was expecting a handshake because of my body language and verbal thank you, but I was too paranoid to touch anyone at that moment.)

He sent these as he was packing his family into his minivan to drive off to his wife's family's rural home in Virginia or West Virginia, where they'd have plenty of space and isolation, and inside the minivan was three months worth of emergency packs that he bought a month earlier when they were still readily available through Amazon.

An hour later, we found out someone who called in sick was now coming down with flu-like symptoms, so we all were sent home. We never came back to the office.

That weekend, my partner then gave me an academic periodical (forgot which) that was published like a month ago - it was about COVID and every epidemiologist was matter-of-factly agreeing that it was only a matter of time before COVID reached the U.S. It wasn't a guess, it was a sure bet given how the disease was spreading, something that was par for the course for viruses like it even if the actual effect on anyone infected by it was new territory. Anyway, in retrospect, it just seemed like a lot could and should have been done to prepare people, but most people were in denial and of course we had an ignorant and morally bankrupt asshat running the country.

Quick correction, those texts were issued on March 12, so the co-worker getting sick happened a few days later

I was in a pretty bad place emotionally/mentally in the late twenty-teens, so when covid came along I thought "nice, I don't have the guts to kill myself, so maybe this'll do the job for me." I would say as much and pass it off as a joke -- "if god wants me, he/she/it can have me, lol" -- but I wasn't really joking. Still, I masked up and behaved myself because I didn't want to risk anyone else's life, just my own. I'd worked from home since late 2001 and had always done the shopping, so no changes there.

Some friends who had put plans in motion in December 2019 to open a restaurant/bar kept plowing ahead even with covid. They had been at the parties where I'd tended bar over the previous three years, thought I knew my stuff, and offered me the job to tend bar, build its cocktail program, order booze, be de facto bar manager, etc. I jumped at the chance -- my freelance dayjob wasn't keeping me busy enough and I was spending weeks at a time in my own head, stewing over my grievances at my family and at the world. Here was a chance to get out of the house, make drinks and hone a new craft, and maybe catch the rona and die, or at least see if the world cared if I got sick. Yes yes, hugely self-pitying.

Meanwhile, my mother, who had always been fiercely independent and proud about being able to take care of herself, had finally moved to an assisted living facility in early 2019 after an accumulation of health problems. She was furious at her body's breakdown -- it was no consolation to her that it happens to everyone. Covid was the last straw. She still had her car and could come and go as she pleased, and she found a lot of errands to run and never seemed to be able to remember to take a mask with her. She finally managed to chase down and catch covid in August 2020, passing away after six days. She went to the local ER on day 2 of symptoms and I stayed with her while she saw the doctor. Sometime during the week I caught it, probably from my mother during that ER visit. Roughly 9-day case, very mild, symptoms arriving the day of her funeral.

When it didn't kill me, I quit joking about it. I quit masking fall 2020. I'm mostly, not 100%, in a better headspace now. Mom was the linchpin of the family, and I haven't seen much of my brother or sister in the last couple of years since we sold Mom's house. They just fought all the time with me in the middle, so that's fine.

That’s heavy stuff, WmC. Glad you are doing somewhat better now.

My mom had gone to an assisted living facility in December '19, but it quickly became obvious to everyone that she needed to be in the memory care wing. They moved her to MC the weekend in March that everything shut down, and we could only talk to her through her window for a few months. She was somewhat cognizant of the fact that there was a virus going around and that that was the reason we couldn't come inside. After a few months we were allowed to sit 6' apart from her at a table at an outside patio, then when the weather turned in Fall '20 they set up a vacant room inside of MC as a visitation room, still maintaining 6' distance. We didn't get back into her room until April '21. I had some issues with the facility management but they did a fantastic job keeping everyone safe through COVID; no COVID fatalities in either AL or MC.

My son came home for Spring break around March 5th; was supposed to go back on the 14th but by that time it was apparent things were not going to reopen. We drove from Cleveland to St. Louis to move him out of his dorm room and drove back the next day. I remember stopping at a Chipotle near Columbus, the three of us walking into the restaurant, and getting yelled at by the doorkeeper for standing too close to each other. . .

The night of the 15th I turned on a Liga MX match, knowing it was the last live sports I would see on TV for awhile. IIRC they had closed the game to fans and it was very weird to see a stadium (especially the Azteca) empty of fans while a match was going on. Turns out that would be a common sight soon.

Both gyms I belonged to closed and I remember a lot of long walks in the Metroparks that spring/summer trying to stay in shape -- didn't work, I had gained about 15 pounds by fall '20.

I was very fortunate not to lose any close relatives or friends. What I remember most during the first months was. . .I wouldn't say confusion, but just a feeling of not knowing how things were going to unfold. My work was pharma/life sciences-adjacent, and I knew that every day, we would get a bit more information about what was happening, and that there were lots of smart people working on understanding the problem and finding ways to slow the transmission and mitigate the damage.

a year before covid, my partner had an accident that affected their mobility and left them housebound for several months for physical reasons. While they stayed at home recovering, I worked 5 days a week, out the house from 7am til 7pm. Their mental health suffered as a result of the isolation - we had visitors but not many, and he didn't work or get to do the things that brought him joy, like gigs and clubs. So by the time lockdown arrived, they had been "socially distanced" for a year already, or near enough.

In Feb 2020 we travelled from Glasgow to Manchester with two pals for a Carly Rae Jepsen concert and a night on Canal St. It was a disaster - he did well with the travel and the concert, but the night of clubbing was disastrous and he committed an act of serious self-harm that let us know he just wasn't ready for this kind of activity.

We got back to Glasgow and I was ill. At first I thought it was a hangover, then it got insanely difficult. Fever and sweats, and a constant cough I couldn't get rid of. I took a week off work. People were joking that I had covid because in February it was still a mysterious disease on the other side of the world, but with hindsight I think I might have had it then. I went back to work but was already using a bottle of hand sanitiser a week because I had to touch stock, and also customers due to the nature of what my shop sold. I remember joking with a customer that I hadn't heard of covid because I had been on a boat trip to Italy and missed the news, and us all laughing because we had no idea how serious or real it was going to be, which feels grotesque now.

March arrived and it became increasingly real. I went to a Tove Lo concert on the Monday, and I remember a lad chatting/flirting with me at the sinks as we washed our hands for twenty seconds while singing a So Solid Crew verse (?!?). Work was utterly pointless - our shop took £2000 a day normally and that week we couldn't even put £100 in the till in a day. On the Wednesday we got told by Head Office to prepare a sale and be ready to launch it on the Thursday. I remember moaning to a colleague how irresponsible it was to attempt to drive footfall to the high street at a time that we were being discouraged from going out. It was moot: by Thursday the shop was closed for lockdown, a day earlier than the rest of the country. I went in to do things like turn off the fridge and throw out any food, and put dust covers down, and the person I went in with and I joked about how good a three week holiday would be. It turned into five months.

Five months at home with my partner and their mental health struggles. Did lockdown exacerbate them? Perhaps. But I doubt they would have been going out otherwise. They don't go out now without me, a pal or their mother. I was there to talk to them, comfort them, entertain them, watch nonsense on Netflix and Youtube with them. When they picked up the scissors or the knives I was there to take them back out their hands. It wasn't easy, but it was better than what might have happened when I wasn't there. They started having seizures during this time. The first time was terrifying. I called NHS 24 but of course the lines were so busy and the resources so limited that I was basically told, if he doesn't die then good luck to you. Those seizures have become a part of life for us now - at least one a day - but it was months before we could get the necessary MRI scans and blood tests to confirm they weren't part of something scarier like a brain tumour.

I also had a very creative five months. I had bought a DJ controller but was scared to set it up and practice because I had a fear I would find it so difficult and hard to use that it would turn out to be a waste of money. I got better with it, and now a few years later I'm at a point where I'm playing out in public. I also recorded my own music and put it online and made a not-insignificant (to me, at least) amount of money from it. I haven't made any new original music in a while, and in the four years since lockdown ended I've made as many minutes of music as I did during lockdown itself, if not less.

I realised I was going to get heavy during lockdown. I don't enjoy exercise and I never do it, and for all the yoga videos and Joe Wicks content we saw it just wasn't for me. All I did was run up and down stairs at work all day, which was enough to keep my waistline under 36" it seems. I wear elastic waistbands now and I'm probably never going to lose the weight. Pre-lockdown my diet was terrible: nuggets, wedges, dippers and bites. I decided to learn to cook better foods, figuring that if I was going to get fat then I was going to do it in style. I made fancy decadent dinners. 18 months later I got a kidney stone and was told to avoid foods like beetroot, chickpeas, lentils and rhubarb - all the food I had become confident in using and had been making nice meals with.

My first niece was born in the first week of lockdown. We met her for the first time in the garden from 10 ft away, months later. My brother and his family live 15 miles away so we were never going to be close due to simple geography and the fact neither of us drive, but I wonder if lockdown has exacerbated that. My brother and his partner doubt they'll have another child, because they don't think it would be fair that they got to spend so much time with their kid and they wouldn't be able to do it again.

I remember being close to telling people to just fuck off in the supermarket. The first trip to ASDA was gruelling. We had to queue for nearly an hour to get in, but once we got in people seemed to just give up on social distancing. I also remember queueing to get into the corner shop and having to hear some homophobic "banter" from a lad behind me. My tolerance for other people's nonsense dried up very quickly. When I saw people having street parties for Royal Family nonsense while I thought of people dying alone in hospitals I felt - feel - so sick and angry and I find it hard to believe this country was ever able to recover from what felt like such an obvious schism in attitudes.

While on furlough I was on 80% of my wage, and I wasn't exactly earning good money before that. I worried about costs. But it turns out, being at home meant not spending money. Pre-lockdown I would cheer myself daily with a trip to Greggs, once weekly to McDonalds or similar, and I would walk past other shops and drop money if the sales were on. It changed my spending habits substantially.

When the time to go back to work came, I realised I would be responsible for the safety of my team. I would be the person who would have to get into arguments about why we couldn't let ten people into the store, why they had to wear masks, why they would have to be taking hand sanitiser before they came in. I'm not naturally a confrontational or confident person in many ways, but I was going to have to be to ensure my personal safety and that of my staff. So I spent a weekend practicing saying in the mirror "I need you to do this" until it sounded natural, confident, forceful and expected. I didn't have too many difficult encounters but I was prepared in a way I wouldn't have been before, and going forward I now practice and learn scripts for difficult situations I can predict, and feel much more able to say "no" in a way I wouldn't have in 2019.

tl;dr - lockdown was a land of many contrasts

when it was safe to go clubbing again, a group of us bought tickets for a weekend at a place in Glasgow where local heroes Melting Pot and Optimo were playing. The Saturday was the day for Melting Pot who play around the theme of disco, and it was a little disappointing - they usually play quite eclectic and interesting but the vibe was very School Disco and I heard "I'm Every Woman" three times in the space of four hours. But they also played this, which I had previously enjoyed but never really felt was top tier - but on a sunkissed balcony after months of staying in, sounded absolutely glorious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syPi_HXY1e0

I flew back from a holiday in Prague to Bournemouth on 10 February 2020, and there were signs at the airport about the outbreak of novel coronavirus in the Far East. I assumed it would go the way of avian flu or the heatwaves in France, e.g. it would kill 20,000 people who were already poorly, but otherwise life would go on. On 14 March 2020 I went to see Lawrence of Arabia at the BFI Southbank, and I remember thinking "is this a good idea". They closed the cinemas seven days later:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/17/cinemas-across-the-uk-to-shut-in-response-to-coronavirus-odeon-cineworld

The roads were really quiet for a short while, so in May I spent a small fortune on a Brompton, thus contributing to the great bicycle boom of 2020:
https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/the-great-bicycle-boom-of-2020.html

I lived near a town that was at the time popular with tourists from the Far East, and pre-COVID they often wore facemasks, which was disconcerting, because pre-COVID facemasks came across as an overreaction. Admittedly my home town has a distinctive odour, but for the most part it's not unsanitary. However those tourists obviously knew their onions, because China's official death toll was something like 80,000 for the entire COVID wave (roughly the same as Japan, slightly more than the Philippines and Malaysia), so they must have known what they were doing. I was also struck with the depressing thought that COVID wasn't going to be like a war, with a definite end. It was just going to chunter on, and then slowly fade away, but never vanish entirely, like the ending of The Birds.

I visited Hong Kong in October 2019, because I was briefly flush with cash. It was £450 to fly from London to Hong Kong and back. I remember thinking "this can't last" and "what kind of world do we live in where a flight half-way across the globe is £450" and "it's a good job I'm a documentarian and traveller, not a tourist, otherwise people might blame me for climate change". It feels like a completely different world now.

Back in 2020 the whole travel blogger "van life" thing was just becoming established (Itchy Boots, the motorcyclist, ended up being stuck in Peru) and I remember laughing heartily to myself at the thought of these well-scrubbed yuppies suddenly having to pay for accommodation instead of demanding free rooms etc, but also not laughing because they started off richer than me and would presumably continue to be richer than me. I imagine it also affected people for whom international travel is a power signifier, such as Timothy Garton Ash and Thomas Friedman etc.

The big tragedy is that after getting thumping majorities and pretty much vanquishing the lefties in 2016 and 2019 it seemed as if we had finally won, and had been given a guaranteed lock on the subsequent elections. COVID was a golden opportunity to humanise the right wing and show empathy with ordinary people. But the Tories and the Republicans shot themselves in the foot... feet... foots and essentially wrecked their own chances of election victory against weak opposition. If Donald Trump had simply gone into hibernation throughout the pandemic - if he had gorged himself on cheeseburgers and gone to sleep in a cave - he would have won the 2020 election by a landslide, and now he would be at the end of his second term, with no chance of ever being President again. It would all be over.

And if Boris Johnson had used his brush with COVID as a learning experience he would still be Prime Minister and would presumably have called a general election last year, which he would have won handily. Instead we have this mess. This mess.

Wildlife who were dependent on humanity’s leavings - I’m thinking of restaurant dumpsters and such - had a tough time during the early pandemic. My neighborhood had, suddenly, mouse and rat problems.

One of my enduring memories of this time was discovering a squirrel on top of my plastic garbage bin, gnawing a hole through the lid. We were separated by a few feet, and I gawped at the squirrel doing this, wherein the squirrel glared back and then took another bite of the lid, as if to say, “What? What? You got something to say? You gonna step to me?”

Clearing out my drafts and found this shopping list from March 16, 2020

List for hanging out at home

potatoes
fried shallots
Spring onions
Minced beef extra
bread
Chicken carcass
white pepper
anise seeds, cardamon, cloves, cinammon
coconut milk
Pasta
sausages
Toilet paper and kitchen roll
Garlic
eggs
Sanitising products
Wipes/dettol
Chocolate
More instant ramen
Chips
Pancake mix
Candles?
Razor
Shower wash
Alcohol

Came into the San Francisco office today, on a lark. I've been in for a couple meetings and lunches, but this is the first time in four years that I've done the morning commute, on the BART train. It's kind of surreal - a trip I've made literally thousands of times, so it's very familiar, but it's also like something from a dream.. the alleys I used to walk, the sandwich shops.. it all seems so weird and distant, like from a different life

(There's like four other people here, all dudes.. they're having lunch together)

That's a moving post, boxedjoy.

good thread.
so much fades away - my kid's school closing while he was learning to read, Zoom for everything, feeling guilty for online supermarket deliveries every fortnight - but the death of our friend from Covid that first winter is what I still think of at least weekly.

Like others I still felt/feel very confined to staying near home even when I didn't have to - combination of young kids (so out of the habit) and covid. Flew abroad for the first time last summer.

I quite like that you can wear a mask and not feel too weird about it. I did (on trains/enclosed spaces) last winter before visiting relatives having chemo just to reduce the chance of catching anything I could pass on.

also one of the first people to die in England, as far as was reported, was in the next town, despite the SW having relatively low prevalence throughout, so I guess I was on high alert from the start.

An older friend and his wife died of Covid in, I believe, late 2020 or early 2021. A poet who was kind of the ringleader of the poetry group I belonged to in Pennsylvania. There was no funeral for obvious reasons - it hurts to think about this, but as someone noted upthread, it also feels unreal, like something that happened into a dream someone else is relating to me.

you could only get covid tests in the test centre. which for us was an airport. driving through silent roads to go to an essentially disused airport with disaster relief tents, barriers and ominous signs everywhere really was surreal.

Feel very fortunate that I didn't have anyone close to me due to COVID, but some family members that died during early peaks. Still get really sad when I remember my aunt telling me how sad and surreal it was to be at his funeral, outdoors at a tiny church in Wisconsin, attended by only a handful of people. Contrasted with his brother, my other uncle, who passed away in 2018 and his funeral was a really well attended funeral that led to a surprisingly joyful wake and family reunion.

Things like that stick with me, the other, quieter losses and shadows that crept through the pandemic.

Came into the San Francisco office today, on a lark. I've been in for a couple meetings and lunches, but this is the first time in four years that I've done the morning commute, on the BART train. It's kind of surreal - a trip I've made literally thousands of times, so it's very familiar, but it's also like something from a dream.. the alleys I used to walk, the sandwich shops.. it all seems so weird and distant, like from a different life

I could definitely see that. It was a little weird to essentially be within about ten blocks for almost a year where I was at, though at the same time there were still always people out and about when I was, if in lesser numbers, and so I mentally adjusted. But it wasn't Market or anywhere where all the big office buildings are so basically everything's felt like more of a continuum. (Being away from the hospital area itself for over three years was, I think, very helpful too -- aside from going in for vaccinations and one or two quick checks on piled up mail, I missed both the worst of the scourge in general when the numbers of patients in care was overwhelming as well as the construction of a new building right near mine, which would have made every day really noisy and crazy. I have to salute everyone who was not so fortunate as I when it came from working from home.)

(like a loss of trust in "people" in general, knowing that 100M+ people in the U.S. alone are horrible people who do not care at all about anything except themselves

I think I was pessimistic from the start because loads of parents refused to believe that "they" would close the schools. but I thought it was crazy to keep them open. and when it happened I could see that without a vaccine there was no "way out" of it so we'd probably be spending Christmas with covid hanging over us.

remember when Boris made everyone go back to school that one day after Christmas then changed his mind?

Some other memories, some of which seem absurd in retrospect:
- Washing beer cans in the sink that I had ordered online -- I got some variety pack from a beer distribution company and a lot of it turned out to be unsold stuff from pride, so I spent a lot of my summer drinking stuff called, like "Bob's Super Gay IPA" or whatever
- wiping down mail
- ordering toilet paper from a hotel distributor because I couldn't find any, and having a truck show up in front of the house
- ordering food from Baldor when it first converted from restaurant distribution to groceries and having weird glitches, like the time they accidentally sent us 48 ears of corn. Ate corn every day and still couldn't finish it.
- crossing the street when we saw people
- a haunting feeling almost like we had left earth and lived in a terraforming colony on Mars
- hearing a fox mating at night for the first time and briefly panicking that a child was being attacked
- the kids named the groundhogs "Geronimal" and "Sheila." Geronimal is still one of my favorite names of all time.

I found coming into the city today strangely moving and kinda sad... I was still with my girlfriend in early 2020 (we split a little over a year ago) and just walking around this neighborhood and the Safeway put me right back there, in happier times. I would get on the CalTrain to go to her place in Redwood City, often stopping to get a bottle of wine or something. It's physically all still here, but that world is gone forever :-(

I'd started a new job on the week of 9th March, two weeks later we were told to work from home. So for the next year I'd had hardly any hands on training, the company wasn't set up for home working at all. A bit of a mess.

I've got two good friends who had the covid-era coincide with (I suspect) maybe mild cases of mid-life crisis, the result being they're tons of fun to be around, because they say yes to almost anything, are almost always free to grab a beer, and so on. Between the general state of things and seeing so much change and pain and whatnot, they just cut right through the bullshit and try to make the best of every day. I love that, not least because they temper my own tendency toward despondency. But I also have a couple of other (still!) good friends that I barely see. Between work from home and their caution and various other life changes, they just never recovered, socially, and don't get out much, largely remaining stationed in place, not as lonely shut ins or anything, just ... stationary. They seem content, but they also seem tired.

I admit I am constructing my own narrative, but both sets of friends are reminders, in their own way, of The Covid Years.

Yeah, I emerged fleeter of foot than ever -- I go out, sometimes on weekday nights, more than ever -- but also even more regimented.

I know what you mean - 4 people I knew died from it and it didn't feel like anyone got to really process the losses at all. there were funerals but not like what you had pre-COVID. just people going "whoa, that's crazy" in the groupchats. even now it's like these people are barely even remembered. just people who existed in some sort of "before time"

― frogbs

The idea of "before time" is so interesting to me... I mostly use it to refer to my pre-transition life, but it does have a whiff of pre-COVID life as well. Because they were so close together.

I think I’ve erased a lot of the worst of the pandemic in my mind, or muted it. A response to trauma maybe. But there was a big, rough stretch of 2020 (pre-election) of just gaping, desperate fear and sadness and wondering if life would ever return to normal. I worked from home long before COVID (and do now) and when work would end for the day I would push the laptop way and reach for my phone and doomscroll, in a daze, until suddenly it was time to get a shower and go to bed. I just couldn’t believe that we were in the worst situation and led by the absolute worst person possible in that moments. It was crushing:

― Marten Broadcloak, mild-mannered GOP congressman (Raymond Cummings)

I haven't. COVID was... when I stopped fighting and started surviving. When 2016 happened, it shattered me, and I said, OK, here's what I have to do to survive, and I did more than that, in retrospect. I did more than that. I went through a lot of shit, I grew, I changed, I got stronger, and when I transitioned, it was... there was some of that hope. There was, hey, even if I don't make it, maybe I can help make a better world. Maybe a better world can remember me. It wasn't so much a sense of "this will all blow over" but that "things need to change, and we will come together, we will make that change, and we will do it soon because how much longer can this go on?"

And I still don't have the answer to that. I have a hard time believing that the change that will come will be... well, it'll be a hard change. It's like someone said upthread... there are people, a lot more people than there were, I think, who do believe in doing the right thing, who do _try_ to do the right thing. Even if we're all powerless right now, we're here, we exist, and that matters.

But a better world? No. I don't believe I'll see a better world in my lifetime. I'm working to find joy and meaning such as I can in this life, but COVID, the way that went down, the way people are _still_ treating it... I've made my peace with it. I'm pretty sure that this is as good as things get for me. That from here on out, things will keep getting worse and worse until I die, whenever that is.

So I try to keep my world pretty small. And I don't talk about it much, about how I feel, because I don't want to depress people. Because the only thing that's going to change my mind is evidence. And there is... there is evidence, in the small things, in the margins, that someday things will be better. Someday there will be a better world. It's not something I can personally imagine. You know, they say "If you dream it, you can do it", and I don't really have dreams. I have nightmares.

My mother, back in Ireland, contracted COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) sometime around 2014 - as you might know, it's less of a disease and more a certificate of "Yep, your lungs sure are fucked". She got it via double pneumonia, from forcing down a mixture that she was supposed to drink before a join bowel operation / full hysterectomy. In the end she never had the operation - they wouldn't put her under until her lungs were improved, and they never got there. She was also, bless her, bad at managing it - she had a oxygen mask for use at night, but she'd been convinced that it wasn't wise to vape (which she'd switched to a few years before from a lifetime of smoking) with the mask on her, so she would set it up, take it off for one last vape, and then fall asleep with it off. She'd also been curled over to one side from a ministroke earlier that year, which has not done the lung on that side any favours.

Which is all to say then when it became clear that Covid was happening, and would soon be happening everywhere, I thought "Oh okay, that is what will do it". It'd been a long-standing joke between the kids that it wasn't clear that anything could kill her, but this seemed custom-made? I'm glad I got back over to see her at the start of February 2020 when this was more "in the background in the first scene of a zombie movie" levels. And also that since the pneumonia, I'd been ringing her more or less daily for a chat.

The lockdown didn't make much of a difference to her, she lived in a granny flat attached to my sister's house, and basically only ever saw her and her family. She kept getting ill with various things and going into hospital, which obviously wasn't great, but it'd kind of already been a thing.

On Christmas Day 2020, she had to go into hospital again (kidney stuff, I think, it was often kidney stuff that year) - my sister was more annoyed about the timing than concerned. And she was back out in a week, but only out for a week and then she was back out in a week but only out for a week... The second time that she'd been in, my sister said that the lung x-rays that they'd taken had the ground-glass consistency of Covid, but she'd kept testing negative. When she went in the third time, she tested positive for Covid, and went downhill from there. A few days later that sister (that was the one person she could see under Covid rules) asked me to record something to say to her, just a message in lieu of talking to her, as that would be too much of a strain. On the day that they said that the only next step up would be a ventilator, but that they would be prioritising other patients for the ventilators, my sister went in to see her in the morning, and realised that the end was near, but had to go back home because it was her daughter's birthday. And while she was there, she felt worse, and tested, and so she spent the next week recovering from Covid (while the rest of her family also came down with it); my mother died that night.

Grim thoughts that I can't recommend: It occasionally returns to me, the idea of her waking up alone and confused, and wondering what is going on, and finally realising that what is going on is that she's dying, and that what will happen next is a few more rounds of the same confusion and realization

Being the one who lived far away and didn't see her nearly so often weighed a lot on me then - she'd become the person I tell my days into stories for, and the loss of that became bewildering. The securitycam-level footage of the funeral didn't help, either. I'm glad though, that I did have 2020 to come to terms with the chance that it was going to happen, and to continue to chat to her - there were no matters outstanding by the end, only love.

I'm really sorry - that must have been beyond awful. I do think that in all the (deserved! ) bad memories of covid loads of people forget how many loved ones were in those headline figures.

I keep thinking how everything seemed very serious but also farcical

I spent the first few days of March out of town for what would be my last couple concerts for some time. That was March 2-3 2020, and I felt like it was mostly fine for the first evening. The second, the fear set in a little bit and I was kind of consciously standing away from the rest of the concertgoers a little bit.

That weekend, I went on a shopping spree and bought a bunch of essentials at Costco and the like. Friday, March 16, I worked from home, but didn't make a big deal out of it even though I suspected something was coming. The following Monday, we were told not to come into the office. That week, we were allowed in to get as many things as we'd need to work from home for the immediate future.

I was crossing off the days on a calendar on my refrigerator, along with cataloguing the days when I'd ventured out for shopping and supplies. Some vague idea of knowing when I'd been around people in case I needed to quarantine or isolate. My fridge ended up dying several months into the pandemic, and when I replaced it with a smaller fridge I bought from a friend, I quit doing the calendar thing because it didn't fit on the new one.

I remember attending a protest in early June, masked and outdoors, and one of the organizers urging us not to huddle up too closely because "there's covid out here on these streets"

Since I was working from home and my hours were increasingly flexible as the teams I was working were were pretty geographically diverse, I started doing all my shopping during times that'd be less busy, like a Tuesday afternoon. Stores were limiting the number of people and requiring masks, but I seldom encountered a line at that time. One day at Costco, I turned down an aisle only to see a woman I estimated to be in her 50s wearing a Guy Fawkes-style mask. A lot of crazies were coming out of the woodwork by that point. I mumbled "nope" and turned back to avoid having to pass her.

The midwestern derecho went through in August 2020 and ended up knocking out my house's electricity for several days. A bunch of neighbors were wandering around helping to clear out tree branches and debris. I was a little nervous, but it was cleanup that needed to be done and we were all looking for a reason to do something. I worked from a friend's vacated apartment that week, as she'd moved the prior week halfway across the state to be closer to family. My coworkers joked at me about the echo after I'd told them there wasn't and furniture in the room.

I don't my friend actually got together that often with her siblings, as her sister's family was being pretty cautious and her brother's new wife decided she'd had enough by mid-summer and started throwing caution to the wind. Her brother died of covid in November.

My parents retired at the end of 2019 and this was less than ideal, all things considered. Somehow they managed to not drive each other insane, and they would drop by on occasion to plant some decorative things in my backyard and do a little landscaping while I was working from home. We'd sit outside and have some lunch during my breaks.

My manager of the time quit at the beginning of 2021 and, paradoxically, all of the recommendations my other coworkers had resisted that we'd been pushing for years took off after he was gone. I think, professionally, 2021 might have been my favorite year of my career.

had to look up the date - it was March 5th, 2020 when a buddy and I drove to Milwaukee to see They Might be Giants. I thought this was gonna be another bird flu type thing, as evidenced by the fact that the only people panicking about it were the idiot conservatives I still had on Facebook, who were wrong about everything. but that week it really did feel like something was up, it came up more and more in conversation, and by the time of the show we were like "is it really smart to do this?" and realizing that well, this might be the last thing we do for a while. John Flansburgh kept making jokes about it, saying stuff like "this uh might be our last show", which drew a lot of nervous laughter. idk how to explain it but there was this sense of foreboding in the air. you could feel it.

a week or so later I think I dropped $300 at a grocery store. it took me like 20 minutes at the self-checkout to finish. they were out of so many things, I was buying brands of cereal I'd never even heard of before. strange times.

Foreboding is right. The first case in Oregon was reported in late February and it had spread at a nursing home outside Seattle causing death and chaos, so we were already very cognizant of covid's coming.

We had reservations to stay at a room at the coast in the first week of March and debated whether it was safe. We decided that we could wipe down all the surfaces with disinfectant and open all the windows on our arrival and make do. When we'd unpacked and made our preparations, we went out for a walk on the beach. Sunset was approaching and the way the sun and clouds looked, with weird rays and bruised coloring was the strangest looking most ominous sky either of us had ever seen.

The big shutdown moment when the NBA cancelled a game minutes before tipoff and announced the league was suspending games until further notice came on the second evening of that trip.

When we got home from the coast the phone was ringing as we walked in the door. My wife's brother was in the ICU. We grabbed some food, got back in the car and drove to the hospital, but we weren't allowed to enter the ICU area, so we sat in the parking lot and called his wife and waited for news. It wasn't covid, but Gillan-Barre Syndrome. He was in ICU for two weeks and nearly died. Meanwhile, the whole world was shutting down. It was a crazy time.

the pandemic started to hit close to home for me when a high school friend, who runs a family wine shop back in Illinois, reported that his dad (who co-founded it with him) passed away a couple weeks after getting covid, because a sick customer decided to come into the store unmasked. despite him wearing a mask, he caught it. this was pre-vaccine, and he was in his 70s.

it's kind of astonishing for me to think that for at least a solid year i didn't enter any businesses, just had groceries delivered or picked up.

the first time i ventured out anywhere to get food, May 2020, picking up food at a taco stand near downtown LA, the guy who was standing in front of me in line wandered off down the block after ordered and was promptly shot in a hail of automatic gunfire. i don't think i went out the rest of the summer after that.

just checked and it was 14 March 2020 that the person in the next town died after getting covid, so it was in the papers, one of the first nationally I think, and I looking back it set my risk assessment at higher than it would otherwise have been right from the start.

shit omar what was that?

It was a drive-by shooting, and it was never talked about on the news and never made the local papers and never even showed up on the crime report map as far as I could tell. Just the most insane random terrible thing buried in the middle of so much other terrible shit.

I started making all our meals in mid-March both because we were simply staying home and also because I didn't want to contribute to making people go back to work unnecessarily if it meant putting them at risk, but by the end of May I was going insane with the meal prep so we picked up fancy bistro dinner for my birthday and ate outside in a riverside park. The restaurant seemed happy for the business so I stopped feeling so bad about it after that.

xp jc Omar :(((((

Thanks, kinder.

That aspect was terrible in the details but broadly how we thought something would happen at some point - more alarming is that after my sister's family caught it, my brother-in-law was fucked up by it for several months - he's got a physical job (prison guard) and couldn't do it at all. Eventually he got the first vaccine, and turned around after a few weeks.

And myself and my wife, Jen, were really careful for longer than nearly everyone we knew, masking in shops and on buses (but not in pubs, but we just didn't go to pubs). One day we stopped? After I'd gone back down to London in July 2022, and masked on trains and busses and in a gig, and came back with Covid, as I'd joked I would. Jen caught it then, and we were both weary for a while, but we made it out - and then last April Jen got it and I didn't, and she had Long Covid for most of the year - after a month completely flat, she got back to where she'd probably have enough energy for a day at work (she switched her day off to Wednesday so there was never more than two days in a row) and then toss a coin whether she'd have enough energy to do anything else. And the end to this (since the UK has largely stopped supplying Covid boosters) came when she got the yearly flu jab - again, two wobbly weeks and a sharp return.

Bah, woe is not all I have to say about this, I'll have some other stuff soon but I suppose it does good to write it out.

(also jfc omar)

Sounds like you've had it rough, Andrew

“The big shutdown moment when the NBA cancelled a game minutes before tipoff and announced the league was suspending games until further notice came on the second evening of that trip.”

Oh, I forgot about this! My son was very into the NBA at that moment, and was following the games. I followed along with him. Vividly remember us texting back and forth about the cancellation, and both of us realizing in that moment that this was for real.

Yeah, when the Thunder/Jazz game was cancelled (March 11th?), that was the moment where I was 'holy shit, maybe this thing is for real and not just another SARS-type hysteria'

8:39 p.m.: As Frankie J left the court, the public-address announcer told the crowd to leave the arena because the game wasn't going to be played. "We are all safe," he said. "Please drive home safely, and good night, fans." Twenty minutes later, the NBA suspended the season following the March 11 games.

We knew at my Miami-based university that Something Terrible was coming as early as January -- I still have the emails. By late February we knew sooner or late our president would give the remote order. I was in North Carolina on March 11 when my dept chair called to ask, "Are you ready?" We went remote that weekend.

Despite what DeSantis did later in 2020, our county behaved quite well. I felt safe. I hung out with my best friend and family, part of my bubble, often that summer. We went on a beach vacation and felt totally safe in our respective cottages; we got takeout and would eat outside. Well into 2021 until the vaccines I ate outdoors if I ate out at all. Unlike many posters, I could not stand being alone. Once we learned that sitting outside and separated was safe, I hung out at a couple of liberal cafes where they respected these things. I realized I liked people, loved talking to bartenders, loved being out. Even so, I restricted activity beyond masked outdoor activity until May 2021 when my full vax immunity kicked in. My first indoor experience happened that summer. Then the Delta wave happened. I retreated. I returned with baby steps until the much bigger and deadlier Omicron wave, after which I retreated again.

I more or less returned to pre-2020 activity in September 2022 after an asymptomatic case -- the only time I've had COVID (I still test at CVS). I still mask on planes, crowded theaters, confined spaces, and wherever I feel safe.

I know I'm permanently scarred by the isolation of the early pandemic. Next time I bunk with someone and hunker down.

Next time I bunk with someone and hunker down.

wait, what 'next time'?? Are you keeping something from us?

I will live a long life and experience another pandemic after AIDS and COVID.

just as Bill Gates has planned

i mostly got the advance warnings from you all and a doctor that I knew who was sharing what was happening near him. the outbreak thread actually helped me understand the gravity of things better than the public messaging because it was kind of a repository of information in one place.

then fried my brain on twitter between 2021-early 2023

There's still some insane shit out there. I was reading otherwise sane Twitter/X feeds from mid 2020 that suddenly demanded total lockdowns between early December and late January. And it's a strange place to be when positions like this make you look like Ron DeSantis.

*b/w early December and late January 2023-2024

I have a friend that is sharing nonsense alarmism from a long-discredited crank, and the stuff they're sharing is so specific I know exactly who it is even though they've never specified it.

was amusing to get called a 'minimizer' when I basically lived under overcautious precautions for an extremely long time. but I just laughed.