Not literally, but still.
I only caught it once. Got behind on my boosters, flew somewhere immediately after a multi hour tattoo session covering my torso, and somewhere between the time I left the airport and the time I got back that bugger somehow crept into my perforated skin.
But before that, I was among the world's most diligent COVID-avoiders. I masked up, got vaxxed, did all the right things and stayed away from large gatherings of people.
I was flying from Ghana via London the day everything shut down. Almost had to stay in the UK until the borders opened back up however many months later. When I landed for a connection in a deserted LaGuardia, we were almost kept on the plane and a girl sitting next to me started freaking the fuck out.
I remember the first few months being like a giant global snow day, at least for everyone who could still work. A long stretch of working in pajamas, peering into everyone's kitchens and spare bedrooms on Zoom. It didn't take long for the fashion world to embrace luxury mask chic.
I'm going to release one song a day for as long as this thing lasts, I wrote on my social media, trying the make the best use of the time, assuming the sheer strength and resolve of a great nation that won two world wars, a Great Depression and a space race would surely get us through all this in a few cozy weeks or perhaps a month or two.
When the businesses started shutting down, the snow day phenomenon turned into a creeping dread. When the stores were raided of their toilet paper and Lysol, and people started to lose their mind in conspiracy and junk science, the dread turned into a sort of doom. And not the drop-C kind.
But I still never got the virus. At least, until one random-ass flight late last year. I made it through ok with the usual fevers, shakes and pounding headaches. It was more or less gone in a week and half minus some weird nosebleeds I still get. But the COVID gray seems to have never fully left my head. Not in the literal sense. After experiencing the weirdness of 2020-21, I feel like things have changed.
Something about watching how disinformation works its way into people you thought would be immune to it. Watching those within my orbit catch it, die from it, and then watching others in that same orbit say "well, they were kinda old and they really died from this other thing." It kind of ripped off the blinders for a split second, just enough time to let you know who the cannibals would be in the event of a total societal meltdown. We had the honor of the world's highest bodycount so we could all make our Olive Garden reservations.
Beyond all that, though, it feels like the pandemic marked a singular pre and post in the way I experience the world. Things are different. I feel older because of it. Millennials are now the "look whose aging now" spotlight, and a new generation seems to have sprung up from nowhere, saying things like no cap and finna. (How do you do, fellow kids?)
The two-year existential pause that COVID brought hit me hard than I realized. My son seemed to have grown three feet, and my parents seemed to have shrunk a few inches. More than any other time before, I started feeling my time with them had an expiration date. I find myself already missing people who haven’t died yet. A strange future-feeling, that I’ve lived too long and everyone else won’t live long enough.
All this may have happened with or without the coronavirus, but the pandemic marked the end of some kind of innocence. Like going back to your hometown after being away for a couple years and half the old buildings are gone with new ones in their place. Things are the same, but they're not.
It feels like I'm going the same speed I always was, but I might just be slowing down. After two years of sheltering in place, the world seems to move faster now. A symptom I think I'm still recovering from.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Subscribe to the newsletter for monthly digests of blog posts, free downloads of music releases and exclusive previews.
What I’m reading: How To Write One Song (Jeff Tweedy)
What I'm listening to: Songs: Ohia - Ghost Tropic
Comments