Hello Better Thinkers,
Ah the ironies- the last time I was in Florida, it was the New Yorkers who raised their collective eyebrows at snowbirds courting Covid, fleeing responsible Gotham for hedonistic and plague defying Miami. I’m once again down South (Beach), but this time it feels like everyone I know in NYC is getting Omicron’ed, the newest, flammably contagious variant. If it wasn’t at a Hanukkah party it was at a Christmas one, and if it wasn’t a wild night at the club it was excessive exposure to SantaCon.
Mercifully, no one I’ve spoken to is very ill with it, but it’s still startling. Maybe this is the next phase- those of us who spent almost two years waving our negative tests like golden tickets will have to put in time in childhood bedrooms and cramped studios. Covid will not be something you get, but that gets you. Vaccines will ensure that is not how the vast majority of us will die, but it seems clear that it is how we all will live.
When I think about the past year and a half, it seems to have been more a suite of interconnected short stories than one long novel. There was the initial surreality of Spring 2020, the hushed horror of a suspended world that followed on those first days of confusion and delirium. Relationships were cemented or cut off and the office became a ghost rather than a place to schlep to in the morning. People spent more time than they ever had with their families, or else saw them more infrequently than ever.
Next came the small but warm pleasures of that first summer, life in the streets even as there were microbes in the air. The sense in fall of settling in to a pandemic shaped world, and dates in winter freezing outside pretending that you didn’t regret deciding to come out on a Tuesday night. The new year brought the extraordinary fact of vaccines, as deliverance that seemed impossibly far away all of a sudden barged into your bicep. The end of the pandemic seemed just within reach. I certainly thought so. Remember Hot Girl Summer?
And then came the Delta variant and the decay of vaccine efficacy and the dawning realization that we were fighting not a decisive and dramatic battle but a grinding war of attrition, boosters the reinforcements to the front to relieve the faltering doses coursing through our blood. Months went by fumbling through wallets and swiping through screens for vaccination cards and licenses. In Madrid and Paris, Bordeaux and Ibiza, I flashed passes to enter and exit, drink and dance. This wasn’t the world we knew, but it wasn’t nothing.
Now, Omicron. The number of people I know who are coming down with it is simply astonishing. Traveling swifter than the bad news it clearly is, Omicron has flown from South Africa like a virus on a mission, and December 2021 is starting to sound depressingly like its 2020 incarnation: parties cancelled, plans rescheduled, housewarmings put in the oven for a little while longer, classes cancelled, PSA’s asking for good recommendations for “warmi-ish” places to grab a drink in Brooklyn.
It’s all very depressing, and given the numbers of the still unvaccinated, terrifying. Every life is infinitely precious, and the idea of this ripping through United States over the holiday season is yet another slow motion car crash that we are powerless to stop. I don’t want to scold anyone or be scolded, and I don’t want my social world to melt away again.
I’m sick of talking about Covid, thinking about Covid, worrying about Covid. I know you are too. But this is one card in the hand our generation has been dealt. Call your friends in their little rooms. Our hearts are bigger than this bug. Like sadness and joy, anger and lust, Covid is something that we’ll live with for as long as we live. But then again, blessings are just as contagious as viruses.
Have a great weekend,
A
P.S. This was a newsy week for Middle East watchers, with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett visiting Dubai(!) and former President Trump bashing Bibi from Mar-a-Lago.
For more on these wild developments:
check out my op-ed in The Forward arguing that both the right and left get Trump’s legacy wrong.
Listen to me on Seattle talk radio breaking down the news with (confusingly) Ari Hoffman. It was a fun spot.