Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

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