Music: Nine Inch Nails “Every Day is Exactly the Same”

Ausnahmezustand

When I lived in Austria my newspaper of choice was either Die Kurier (a solidly middle of the road and plainly written broadsheet) or Die Presse, a higher brow broadsheet that I read partially to put on airs of being deeply integrated in upper/middle class culture.¹ Part of my choice had to do with my working for a political party for a spell. But that’s another story for another time.

The editor of Die Presse is an especially witty writer by the name of Rainer Nowak whose daily newsletter during Austrian national elections I’ve long enjoyed (with no attempt to put on airs). So I was delighted–if one can be delighted by such a thing right now—to see his daily email show up every day since Austria began an effective lockdown two weeks ago.

I want to highlight a quote from today’s edition:

Wir werden diese Phase in unseren Leben nicht vergessen. Wir werden uns noch Jahre gegenseitig fragen: Wie hast du das damals erlebt? Wie ist es dir ergangen? Und dann wollen wir nicht antworten: Ich habe mich gefürchtet und immer beobachtet, ob die Nachbarn nicht vielleicht doch feiern. (Selbst wenn wir uns so gefühlt haben.) Und bitte zitiert jetzt niemand die letzten Drinks auf der Titanic. Wobei: Die Musik soll nicht so schlecht gewesen sein.

Or, my shite translation (it makes me sad to lose my German skills, yet I do nothing to stop it):

We will never forget this part of our lives. We will ask one another for years to come: “How did you experience this crisis? How did you get through it?” But we won’t want to answer: “I was afraid and always watched whether the neighbors were also miserable” (even if we felt that way). And no one should talk about the last drinks on the Titanic. The music probably wasn’t that bad.

We are all doing our best. For that, in these bizarre and extraordinary times, we should feel no shame.

Edit 2020-03-29:

Ich möchte eine Antwort geben, was ich am ende dieser Krise sagen will:

„Ich tat alles was möglich war, um diese schwere Zeit nicht nur durchzukommen, sondern sie zu erobern. Damit am ende war ich eine bewusstere Person geworden.”²

Oder anders gesagt…

At the end of this crisis, I want to be able to say:

“I did everything possible not just to make it to the other side of this crisis, but to overcome it. So that at the end I had become a more conscious person.”³

In my tiny little plastic box
Where caffeine is the only drug
The doors and windows never open
Something contagious could come up

-Hundreds “Happy Virus”

fate

To be perfectly honest, by the time I came back from Pittsburgh I had kind of resigned myself to the idea that I would, at some point in the coming months, contract Covid-19. Despite being a consistent handwasher, despite taking every precaution, despite doing what I thought would be enough, I’d get it.

Last Friday I started feeling lethargic with a dry cough. My chest began to tighten up. I had a headache that no matter what just wouldn’t go away. Stomach cramps and a fever consistently around 100.5-102° F. By Sunday, it was bad enough that I called Kaiser Permanente’s advice line and was scheduled for a video visit the next day with my primary care physician. Dr. Egan designated me a ‘presumptive positive’ (I’m in a higher risk group to boot) and arranged for me to be tested three hours later. Because as a ‘presumptive positive,’ I’m not supposed to take public transportation, I had to find a car (or walk) to the testing site. I’m very grateful for my friend Stephen, who loaned me his and for people staying the hell home. That was the easiest drive I’ve ever had in this area. Though the person who honked at me for going the speed limit in DC’s Center Leg Freeway tunnel (the one that runs under the National Mall) can go to hell.

I received my test results just today and with them the news that I have tested negative. Apparently there’s another strain of the flu that bears many of the same symptoms currently circulating. Great timing buddy.

Still feel like shite though. Though that probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve spent very little time not on my sofa this week.

luck

I am extremely lucky in all of this. Lucky because of the fact that my symptoms have been fairly mild. Lucky because I have access to an excellent, well integrated group of physicians, and especially because I have a primary care doctor with whom I’ve built a deeply trusting relationship. This is to say nothing of the fact that I was lucky that I could even get a test.

gratitude

A lot of people have helped me adjust to this bizarre reality we now inhabit. And I want them to know that am grateful from the very bottom of my heart.

an apology

For the folks I notified at the beginning of the week, I am deeply sorry for any distress this may have caused. As we all cope with this bizarre and uncertain time, let’s remember to be especially kind to one another. We’re all in this together.

now. go wash your fucking hands, please.

let Powernerd help

at a loss for words

I’ve been trying in the past few days to come up with a way to describe the situation we find ourselves in. It was foreseeable back in January, all things considered. When “The Virus” (this is all anyone talks about nowadays and always as “The Virus”) spread from China to other parts of the world—South Korea then Japan then Italy and then Seattle!—it still hadn’t quite hit. Even as it became clear in early March that the situation in the US was rapidly deteriorating, it still occupied very little mental space (a consequence of Trump era desensitization, I think). I went off to Code4Lib 2020 in Pittsburgh on the 7th of March, I gave some consideration to skipping (the whole thing is live streamed) but never seriously. An email from the organizers about Covid-19 that I saw while I was on the Metro to Union Station gave me pause, but when I bought my train ticket, I felt like I was doing the right thing.

But here is what I mean by a loss for words: from stepping on to the MARC train in DC on Saturday the 7th to Tuesday night (the 10th) and walking by a TV with CNN on in the lobby of the hotel, I was totally focused on the conference. Sure there were some conversations about it, mainly “oh yeah her institution just banned travel so she couldn’t make it” or “sorry, not shaking hands right now” But you’re in a ballroom with 300 people, many of whom I admire, respect, enjoy talking to, etc. Even on Twitter, I almost always had my twitter “libtech” and “#c4l20” tabs open in twterm. The rest of the world could frankly go to hell.

Until I froze in the lobby that Tuesday night, glued to CNN.

The magnitude of this crisis ahead finally hit, like a cast iron skillet to the face. I still have not truly grappled with it. It’s just too much to deal with. To say nothing, of course, of the paranoia and hypochondria that grips us all.

the world hangs together by a thread

This crisis has done more to magnify the fact that our “system” is profoundly fragile. I don’t mean this in a Marxist economic sense, but simply that the supply chains that make the materials that we depend on. Testing swabs to collect mucus samples for Covid-19 from Italy, plastic valves for ventilators from Japan or China or Taiwan, medications made in a factory near New Delhi. And at this very moment with the world in crisis and shortages of medical equipment and supplies more and more acute, the supply chains that provide the goods and services we need to maintain what we might call normal life seem on the verge of snapping.

With the St. Louis Federal Reserve predicting as much as 30% unemployment, is it any wonder I’ve been sleeping so poorly the past few weeks?

With that all said, there’s a very real chance that the resulting recession is mostly temporary. But that doesn’t especially matter if small businesses are wiped away in scores, if landlords go bankrupt and more and more real estate falls into the hands of private equity groups, it’s not the United Airlines or McDonalds of the world that are at risk here, it’s Buzz Bakery or Alto Fumo or Cafe Mozart. To say nothing of the fact that our hollowed out social welfare system (such as it is) is totally incapable of handling such a massive influx of the suddenly jobless. But don’t worry, we’re all going to get $1200 checks(!) which will barely cover most folks’ rent, especially in the hardest hit areas along the coasts.

What is the point of doing this—any of this? A massive portion of the population is on the verge of absolute destitution and half of the political class is looking for an excuse to shovel hundreds of billions to airlines and chain restaurants. The other half can’t be bothered to embrace a proposal that is actually significant enough to address the problem. Perhaps the scale is too much for the members of the Senate.

wash your fucking hands

I don’t know what else I can say or if any of this is coherent. I wrote this mainly for a vague sense of catharsis.

So I’m going to close with an excerpt from Carmen Maria Machado’s “Inventory” from her collection Her Body and Other Parties (find in a library or in an indie bookshop) that I reread the other day:

One woman. Brunette. A former CDC employee. I met her at a community meeting where they taught us how to stockpile food and manage outbreaks in our neighborhoods should the virus hop the firebreak.

…

Afterward, she traced the indents in my skin from the harness, and confessed to me that no one was having any luck developing a vaccine. “But the fucking thing is only passing through physical contact,” she said. “If people would just stay apart—” She grew silent. She curled up next to me and we drifted off.

We can’t see beyond this crisis. No one knows how long it will last, just that it will be a while yet. My prediction to my boss that I’d see him in June now feels optimistic.

The only thing we can know for certain is that this will eventually end, even if we don’t know when.

Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt.