Hello from Paris!
Yes, I’m back at home, finally.
I don’t know how to summarize the trip to New York. Not the weird hallucinogenic state of living several weeks upstate among trees. Or the few days in the city that didn’t feel very much like the place where I lived for almost three decades, or even saw on the news, bodies piled up in refrigerator trucks and bulldozers digging giant graves, people huddled in their apartments.
The businesses I heard had failed, leaving store fronts gaping empty as mouths, had all been replaced. In the East Village, there was a whole new crop of hair salons or gender neutral barbershops, and cute, niche, saccharine restaurants that weren’t just, for instance, serving Chinese or Indian food, but your Auntie Chi-Ling’s steamed buns, or Granny’s dosas made only in one tiny neighborhood of Udupi.
The already crowded sidewalks had been reduced to obstacle courses as the bars and cafés annexed the pavement in front of them and swathes of the street with hasty or elaborate shanties built of 2x4’s and plywood, packed not only on Friday and Saturday, or even Thursday, but every day of the week, Mondays included, in what looked like a frenzy of consumption while a growing wave of junkies nodded off on park benches, and beggars demanded spare change. For brunch, they all had identical and bottomless fruity alcoholic drinks for their customers to suck down—often women in their twenties and thirties who were already having quite a spike in alcoholism before the pandemic, and now are entering hospitals with liver failure helped along by a 40% increase in binge-drinking.
Sitting at the Hudson river one day, watching the sun set, I saw two young beautiful people swanning for Twitter or Instagram, smiling blankly and charmingly at the camera, over and over, and trying so intently to get the perfect, casual selfie that I imagined them influencers. I imagined them, too, the face of a new Lost Generation. The tip of an invisible, melting anxious iceberg.
The toll of Covid was there, but obscured in a way that WWI wasn’t, or even 9/11 with its reminders in the physical world: two plumes of smoke rising for months, and posters of the lost and dead wheatpasted on First Avenue beginning downtown where the attack took place and lining the street up to the East Side hospitals that received the few victims that made it out. Most didn’t. I remember having to take the bus uptown and staring at the faces on the posters, Have You Seen. The Lost remained with us New Yorkers who were oddly kind to each other for months, less abrasive. It was weird. Day by day, though, we returned to our old, cranky selves as the homemade images on the lampposts and bus shelters softened and grew dim.
I wonder how we will digest this time which isn’t over yet. If we will mark it somehow. I google flu epidemics and monuments. There are almost none. I know I lost three or four acquaintances to Covid, but I’ve already forgotten all but one. I have only a vague sense of the lives not lost but profoundly altered, even destroyed. Jobs lost. Power shifted. Away from women, of course.
They often are more impacted by job instability and lower wages, and having a larger parenting role in most households — all stressors that have been heightened during the pandemic.
Violence against women has jumped, too.
Among us all, male and female alike, depression and anxiety are as common as the browning, autumn leaves and discarded masks filling the gutter.
I want to bang a pan out the window in fury and grief, but instead just shrug. I’m tired. My neighbors would think I was nuts. Maybe I am. Like you, in secret. When I talked to anybody in New York I felt we were teetering over an enormous gap that seemed nearly impossible to bridge, the words inadequate, false. I talked too loud or too soft, was uncertain or so certain it was probably painful to watch.
Sitting on the 6 train heading away from Lenox Hill one day, I remembered going to visit my brother-in-law who was dying of cancer in a hospital uptown, and after hours on the ward listening to him struggle for breath, sitting on another 6 in a similar plastic seat, with the bright lights around me, wondering how it was that the world continued so indifferently. Those people going to work, those students giggling. What a strange thing it was to survive.
Cocktail for the End of Days
1 part bourbon
1 part bourbon
1 part bourbon
Open bottle. Drink. Cough.
That calls for a few sick jokes.
As for the unvaccinated…
The remarkable success of vaccine mandates shows it is not firm ideological commitments that have kept everyone from getting vaccinated, and that the stubborn, unpersuadable holdouts may be much smaller than we imagine.
In fact, there seems to be a large category of people who may be ashamed to admit they were wrong. And giving them a nudge, an external obligation, gives them a face-saving way out. And of course, allows them to go on hating the fascist guvment. Who do they think they are?
That’s it for this time,
Jetlaggedly y’alls,
And of course, feel free to up your subscription to a paid one. You will be richly rewarded. In the hereafter, and maybe even sooner.