Hopefully final covid update:
I realized earlier this week that I’m nothing but grief these days. I think some of my loved ones already knew and that’s why it seemed like they were looking at me funny. There’s the grief of doing everything I was told for eighteen months and getting covid anyway. There’s the grief of so many people’s first question being not “how are you?” but “how did you get it?” (Licking doorknobs and vents at an orgy, of course—there, now do you feel safe that it can never happen to you?)There’s the grief of my mother’s home state being so busy making new, volunteer deaths—they are storing the dead in refrigerator trucks now—that we can’t hold a memorial there, can’t gather to mark death in the death state. There’s the grief—unavoidable—of a book project transitioning from limitless, unwritten possibility to a hundred and twenty thousand actual words on pages, a set of choices that circumscribe other choices. There’s the grief of information I can’t unhear about someone I thought I understood to the bones. There’s the grief of seeing firsthand how a man’s harm to women hurts other men too, and the co-existent grief of looking at the very best men I know and thinking “Could you possibly be one of them? Is there something scary in you that we’ve tacitly agreed I will not notice?” There’s the grief for seventeen million Afghan women who, let’s face it, don’t stand a fucking chance and for all the American parents hearing that their covid school decision is the wrong one, no matter what it is. There’s the grief for Aussie friends who can’t sleep for the noise of helicopters patrolling their every move, and for other friends (and a few people I don’t like much at all, too) who can’t catch a breath between crises. There’s the grief that sometimes sobriety doesn’t equal grace or wisdom or (good lord) serenity; it just equals not sticking a fork in an outlet when you’re already feeling nauseous with electrical current.
I know it’s getting covid that unlocked all the grief but I’m not entirely sure how. Maybe it was the revelation that diligence and care and fear aren’t magical powers after all, though I thought I had already learned that twenty or thirty times. I’m not sure what to do about it, either, though I did watch all of Schmigadoon last night. Tonight, maybe The Music Man.
A hint of a cough remains. I’m cooking and going out and running and doing hill repeats again. There’s not much else to say.