Journal of the Plague Year: Waiting for Corona

(Above: the goddamn thing appears to be made out of yarn!)

We’ve known this would happen eventually, although most of the scenarios were based on a “gene shift” of the influenza family of viruses (“Nobody expects the Spanish Influenza!”). Instead, COVID-19 has flown from the Celestial Kingdom on the leathery wings of bats, and is busy replicating itself all around our global village, abetted by a certain amount of global village idiocy.

Well, let’s leave politics aside. The genie is out of the bottle, and coming to a theatre, and a supermarket, and a subway, and a workplace and—OK, one little bit of politics—a nominating convention or two near you. I think kissing babies and shaking hands may go out of style this election cycle.

As Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows the plague is coming/Everybody knows it’s moving fast,” although he was referring to an STD which, while lethal, was far more readily containable. This one…well, if it proceeds even according to the median-case scenarios, 2020 is shaping up to be a rough ride. The disease, to which it appears no one enjoys even legacy immunity, is going to go through humanity like a pitbull in a playground. A year from now many people we know (I am pretending for a moment that this blog has readers other than its author, who has been diffident about promoting it over the years) may well have died of this, even if they do not die well. I have had pneumonia a couple of times. It has been called “the old man’s friend,” and I gotta say that any “friend” like that would go right off the Christmas card list. Indeed, I might die myself, being close to the upward end of the mortality curve, and bringing to the party some cardiac complications. Oh, well.

Well, as to that, not much I can do. It’s fairly certain that, absent isolating myself in The Crumbling Manse™, I can’t avoid infection, and after all, my demographic tranche puts the chances of my death from COVID-19 at a little under ten percent. Look on the bright side: if someone handed you a Powerball ticket with the assurance that you had a 90% chance of bringing home the big jackpot, would you not already be scanning the tonier real estate ads—or, if you’re a better human being than I am, weighing the merits of sundry charities?

This feels from here as though we’re waiting for a tsunami. We’re trapped more or less near the beach. Will we be drowned? Impossible to know as the wave builds offshore. If I’m not here at year’s end, well, this remote atoll will endure for a while, an echo in dead coral of my former presence, as the poison tide recedes.