The pandemic is over (!!!!!!!!)
Unsure who needs to hear this
Hi. (Hi.)1
How was everyone’s pandemic?
I had a strange pandemic.
It is bugging me that the end of the pandemic is murky, contested, and itself unmoored from time. That last bit, at least, fits the rest of the experience. Time melted in 2020. Melted like a Salvador Dalí clock. (Art reference.)
At this point, time has un-melted. It happened at different times for different people, but by 2023, we are back In Time.
The fourth dimension
There’s an Ashbery line I’ve loved for years; something something “and all our wasted time disappears without a trace.” I quoted that to my friend Andy, who looked alarmed.
“Alex. That is not true.”
I’m not close friends with time; too often, we aren’t even on speaking terms. One of my main complaints is that it will someday kill me and everyone I love.
So I find it calming to remember that time is merely a component of reality. A dimension.2 Something my 8th grade geometry teacher holds total mastery over. On paper, a dimension looks like a line. Not figure but ground, time is where experience takes place: the invisible stage of these our lives.
So the pandemic happened and the pandemic ended. I’m relieved to have that settled.
—It’s nice to pretend, anyway.
It’s bugging me that, even if we reach an impossible large-scale social consensus and Covid is non-controversially announced to be over… there still won’t be a tickertape parade.
I don’t even NEED a parade. (I’m low maintenance like that. …Medium maintenance.3) What about, like, the end of summer camp, or a school year? I want to sign someone’s yearbook. I want to hug. I want to look someone in the eye and say I’ll see them again and know on some level that it isn’t true, that they are probably thinking the same thing, and we’re both glowing in spite of everything, because this is the agreed-upon ritual, and we are sticking the landing like Kerri Strug.
Wait—is the pandemic over?
Technically, it depends who you ask. Plenty of laptop softies, aka my people, are loathe to say it’s over. But fuck it.
Yes. The Covid-19 pandemic is over. Obviously!!!
We are never going to eradicate disease, misfortune, or subpar governance as categories of human experience. I’m sorry if you were invested in that outcome. If you don’t believe me, open a book older than Coca-Cola and discover it has always been thus. Meanwhile, I regret to inform you that tons of stuff has gotten better in the meantime. (That is, since the invention of Coca-Cola in 1886.) Like what? Like hundreds of millions of women can vote and own property. World-historically speaking, that’s new. (!) Speaking of governance, these last 136 years have also seen the spread of democracy across most of the inhabited planet—also new. If it seems like more people have been screaming at each other, maybe that’s because we democrats are, to a non-trivial extent, our very own subpar governors, pointing at each other in ironic outrage like the Spiderman meme.
“But Russia invaded Ukraine.” They did. Invasions are extremely regular, historically speaking. Yet large-scale war is decreasing in overall frequency. The fact that the invasion of Ukraine seems so fucked up reflects the fact that warfare itself is going emphatically out of style. At least for now!!
Meanwhile, the world itself is literally not ending—unless you’re a traditionalist conservative, in which case the sky arguably is falling.
Next time you disagree with me, ask yourself whether your latest evidence for the end of society is more than a minor inconvenience, if it’s even that, and maybe take a walk instead of reading another terrifying article about something that 1. barely affects you; 2. was framed in the scariest possible terms by the headline writer because that is their job, just as it’s the job of the relevant scientists to point out that those headlines are often laughably wrong; and 3. is subject to revision, pushback, and the popular consequences of the uproar sparked by the article itself—uproar which frequently overcorrects the original problem (thus sparking more articles). P.S.: Is the article making you feel offended on someone else’s behalf? Is it making you pity them? Are you 100% sure they want your pity? Are you even sure they share your offended-ness?
They say news is the first draft of history. Remember: as a rule, first drafts are garbage.
…Hear that? It’s the present author being pelted by… is organic tomatoes too obvious a punchline? Slash, could the haters’ choice to throw tomatoes reflect anti-Italian bias? Let’s debate that question for the rest of our lives. Let’s forget we learned what r-naught means. Let’s hug.
This message brought to you by: everything I desperately needed to hear but refused to listen to, leading to a personal mental crisis in 2019—and then another one, a sequel mental crisis, in 2020.
I can’t wait to tell you about both of them, about how my politics have and haven’t changed in the last four years, and most importantly, about how I learned to stop worrying and love destroying Apple products. All during the Covid-19 pandemic, which, while not the best part of our lives, is still a lot like Lil Wayne’s paramour: we love to watch her leave.
Is there even a part of me that hates to see her go?
Technically, Covid was the best pandemic I’ve ever been part of. My favorite part was when scientists all over the world heroically concocted lifesaving vaccines and treatments at unprecedented, nearly science-fictional speeds, and before that, when no one I knew initially took me seriously that Covid was going to be a giant problem, and later, when all those same people looked at me like I was crazy when I said Covid was no longer a giant problem, because now we had vaccines.
In all seriousness, I used to say some of the changes I’ve made since 2020 were silver linings to Covid, but the truth is they’ve been more than that.
Never waste a crisis!!
SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY SLASH SOONISH, DEAREST FRIENDS.
Hiiiiiiiiiiiiii
Whoever decided time is a dimension was a smart cookie.
Upper-middle maintenance.
"Laptop softies" is now my favorite and least favorite way to think of us all.