I was planning on publishing a post tonight, the first in a two-part edition about my sister Ann. But as I was spiffing it up last night, I got that chill: this is all wrong. It just doesn’t convey what I want to. It reads as resentful and full of gotchas.
So I’m going to start over next week. I have a Plan. It’s an important post to me, because I do love my sister, and I never was able to connect with her after a certain point.
Instead, holy, I got Covid, it turns out. Due to my age and heart issues, I’m really at risk of having this turn really bad. But it isn’t at all, not compared to people who get full-blown cases of it. I have a persistent cough, a little sore throat, and I’m just exhausted all the time.
It’s a good thing I’m retired because I slept all afternoon. Wait, what? Didn’t I do that as a lawyer as well? No wonder it felt so familiar. I just didn’t have to put my feet in a desk drawer.
I think I got it from Nancy, who also had a minor case though worse than mine. She never complains about anything, but she said she could only work for a while and then had to lie down. We both have had it for about two weeks.
It’s obvious to a lot of my readers (my faithful, faithful few!!) that Covid is a very big deal. A million people died in the United States alone. A million!
Yet, in the last year, I heard a different point of view. My back, which now appears to be a victim of uncurable, unfixable severe stenosis, led me to a quack of a chiropractor because he offered laser therapy, and I was trying anything short of surgery at that point.
Between exhortations to the effect of, “Can you feel that working? Can you tell?” No, I couldn’t. He would spew a little subtle right-wing crap, one element of which was that the media was over-stating the Covid threat. “I don’t think it’s as bad as the media likes to portray,” he asserted.
As this man had some control, at least for the time being, over my physical well-being, I kept my mouth shut. I wish I’d said, “Gee, I think something that has killed a million Americans is something to be afraid of, media or not.” (It’s always clever to interject with these people that American Lives are at stake, as no one else matters, amirite? Non-Americans also lack our fortutide. Yeah, right, check with the Ukrainians on that.) But I didn’t say anything, curse me, and too late now. He’s not the type to be persuaded anyway.
I digress. My main point is that Covid is really really real. I had only minor symptoms, a cough and this fatigue, so I can only speculate what it’s like to end up in a hospital gasping for one’s last breath.
It happens often, this right-wing blaming of the “liberal media” (who do they think Fox News etc is?) I was at a party with old friends, and I said how Kate had had it with this racist, misogynist, xenophobic country and so we were pursuing residency in Portugal, at least so that she can have an EU passport. My conversation partner said about racism, “Don’t you think that the media makes too much of that?”
I asked, “Have you ever lived in the South?”
To his credit, he said no and shut the fuck up. It is ironic to note that this guy’s family hails from Idaho or Montana or another of those big dopey Christian Nationalist red states, so he should know from racism.
See you next week. Coming up: My sister; and then the agony and the ecstasy of a trial lawyer.
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Hey, my viewer numbers are down. It’s weird; some older posts have over 100 views, some around 60, and most much fewer. Who are all of those people? If you have any feedback about what really works for you, I’d love to hear it. And if you’re enjoying this, could you please tell a friend? I want to take the best of these and make it a book someday, and it would be keen to show an editor a whole lot of views. Thank you so much for your kindness and your loyalty!
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