Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

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.

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.