Throughout this extended period of isolation for Americans, this newsletter will be a daily look at what it is like to actually live through this moment, until this moment is over. It will feature brief opening remarks from me every day, but will mostly be stories from you about how this is affecting you, your family, your friends … your daily life. (The regular weekly newsletter will continue uninterrupted.) Email me your story at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.)
All those people who keep saying they’re spending so much of their self-isolation and quarantine days binging on Netflix shows and reading books they’ve always meant to crack open obviously don’t have children. I actually have a Word file on my computer of all the shows I plan on getting around to, whenever the mythical concept of “free time” actually arrives in my life, and suffice it to say, it hasn’t been cracked open in the last 12 days. In the time it took me to type this paragraph, the children have interrupted me roughly 47 times. It just doesn’t seem like the time to finally get caught up “Peaky Blinders,” is what I’m saying.
But we’re still doing the Grierson & Leitch podcast, and I’ve got an even greater need for escapism these days just like everybody else does. But watching movies from the Before time is highly, highly disorienting at this point. Normal human behaviors seem fantastical through the current prism. I was watching Margaret for the show this week, and at one point someone coughed, and I instinctively turned my head away. Watching people gather together, under any context, suddenly feels like watching someone go bungee jumping, or play Russian roulette. Regular every day life in the movies now seems impossibly dangerous.
In a way, it reminds me a little bit of what it felt like to watch a movie that had the World Trade Center in it after September 11. My friend Dan Meth made a video on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 that featured every prominent appearance of the Twin Towers in popular culture. Watching it was—is—unnerving and eerie, like a ghost is reaching out, somehow trying to signal something. They feel like phantom limbs.
But the thing about this time is now everything in movies feels like that. All movies and television shows are from the Before time, back when people met in restaurants, when they attended sporting events together, when they jammed together in elevators, when they got in bar fights, when they embraced, when they rattled together so that they did not break apart. I find myself nostalgic for literally every single thing in these movies and shows, even the terrible things. I watched an episode of “Better Call Saul” this week in which a character is ganged up on and attacked by a group of young punks. And my first thought was: Wow, must be nice to get to interact with strangers like that.
In 12 days, what was a regular life already feels like a phantom limb. I used to watch movies and television and sports to escape. Now I watch them to remember.
A side note: Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri wrote a wonderful piece this week about Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. Hertzfeldt, whom Grierson and I interviewed earlier last November, has made the film available for free during this period of isolation. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more moved by a film. It’s only 62 minutes long and might just change your life.
Here are today’s stories. Send me yours at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.
From Greg Cameron, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
When I interviewed for my job just under a year ago at a bike share company, I said to the director of my team that I wanted to work with a crew like that of the summer camps I worked in my youth. You know the ones. Good days, bad days, at least you all had each other and you know you could depend on each other to pick you up because earlier that summer, you had to pick them, up. A team. At my job, our entire office is like that. It's a perfect storm of people in their late twenties and early thirties, who just damn like each other.
On Tuesdays at my office we have a meeting with everybody in the company altogether to go over what's been going on in our industry and people present about what they on a day-to-day basis. This Tuesday was going to be my day. I got up early, had a couple of English Muffins, and got ready for a day as the marketing/comms guy at a micro mobility company. Nine turned to ten and ten turned to eleven ... then word started to slip out that today's All Hands was going to be the kind of meeting that was going to swift, decisive, and altogether crappy. Text messages between my co-workers and I began to gurgle up what we were to be expecting. We were still not ready for the words that our CEO spoke. Furlough. What a funny, but terrifying word. The majority of us at the Boston HQ are now on our keisters waiting for a call that may never come in the next few weeks. It's the worst.
As the afternoon waned and emails were written to showcase what work was left. my team and I did what we do best outside of the cozy confines of work, keep together. We started a text chain to keep each other going and keep morale high. It's going to be a few stormy days ahead, but we'll be alright. After all, we've got each other.
After a couple of cocktails and some cheap takeout ordered and procured, the day headed for home. Then a buzz of the phone, and my best friend from home. Thanks to $69 (of course) spent on a Cameo video from an actor from the show “Letterkenny,” I was asked to be one of his groomsmen next summer.
Even the worst days have happy endings.
From Dwight Zimmerman:
I own a house in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn. Windsor Terrace is bordered on one side by Prospect Park, a large park, and on the other by an even larger cemetery, Green-Wood. It's a quiet neighborhood, made even more quiet by the pandemic. I feel like I'm in the eye of a hurricane. Most of the rest of the country has a distorted impression of life in NYC, because most of what they see are sights of Manhattan with its skyscrapers and apartment complexes. But, as you know, once you get outside Manhattan, the housing situation dramatically changes.
The only time I'm physically reminded of the pandemic is when I see some people wearing masks, the empty shelves in the grocery stores, and closed businesses. But that will change, and soon. One sight did shock me. That happened last Saturday, a warm day that got into the low 60s. The park was filled with people, like it was the 4th of July in the park. It was stunning. Think of those sights of spring break crowds on the Florida beaches, only in this case the age range covered the spectrum. The physical danger was not just from the pandemic, but from irresponsible bicyclists--while most were leisurely riding, there were a few that were hardcore racing. My wife was in the park and she saw an accident where a speeding bicyclist had struck a pedestrian. An ambulance had been called.
The park was so filled that my wife chose to quickly leave as it was impossible to keep the recommended minimum of six feet away from others. My brother, who is the Vice President of Design and Construction for the Prospect Park Alliance, was beside himself with concern. He said the park is filled with too many people and there's nothing he can do to stem the traffic.
This morning I went to the grocery store. I'm 66 years old, so now I can avoid crowds by shopping for an hour starting at 8 a.m. Later I'll go to the Italian butcher shop that I patronize to pick up meat. On its door is a hand-written sign requesting that customers form a line outside the shop. Like most stores and shops in NYC, it's small. Aisles in grocery stores notoriously so. My wife has taken to using my office chair when she conducts her classes. She had double hip replacement surgery a couple of years ago and her hips began bothering her because of the chair she had been using. So, now I'm sitting in my 120-year-old heirloom chair that my grandfather hand-made in Norway. A light rain is falling now, helping to keep people inside. All to the good.
From Tony, LaGrange, Illinois
I wanted to relay something personal to me in hopes that you might find it worthwhile for others, or at least for folks you know to whom it may be relevant. Like a lot of people my age (pushing 60), I am on a couple of different medications to manage cholesterol, hypertension and blood sugar. I'm one of those nerds who bought a couple of 7-day pill organizers because some meds are taken in the morning, others at night. However, since all the stuff hit the fan, like everyone else, our routine has gone completely out the window. Accordingly, I found myself last Friday discovering that I had forgotten to take at least one dose of each of my pills. Looks like I spaced it off on Wednesday night and Thursday morning.
I set daily alarms on my smartphone as an extra reminder not to forget these maintenance drugs, and it's working quite nicely. If anyone else finds themselves in this boat, they should give it a try. A month ago, I would have considered it overkill--hell, I've already got the goofy pill boxes. But not anymore.
From Tyree in California:
I'm asymptomatic and have not had so much as a sniffle in forever, but my experience over the past couple months is emblematic of how this country's lack of coronavirus testing is obviously a disaster.
In mid-February, my spouse, young child, and I went on a weeklong trip to London and Paris. We'd been planning it for nearly a year and blew out all our miles for a nonstop flight and nice hotels, and it was a fantastic trip. Now, however, looking at our photos and videos, the whole thing looks like a nightmare. We spent the whole time in crowds, at Borough Market, at Westminster Abbey, at a soccer match, in pubs at lunchtime, on Eurostar, at the Musee d'Orsay, on our flights... everywhere. We were aware of the coronavirus at the time, but thought of it as a problem in China, and at no time during our travels — entering the U.K., entering France, returning to the U.K., returning to the U.S. — did anyone ask us about our health or where, precisely, we'd been. We gave dismissive looks at the people wiping down their armrests and tray tables on our return flight, because at that time very few people were signaling to us that this was something we, specifically, ought to take seriously.
I work at a private school, and my spouse works at another school, where our child attends. My first day back at work, a colleague who works in close proximity to me was complaining about how they and their whole family were coming down with something and they'd probably go home early. That colleague did not return to work the rest of the week. That Saturday, my spouse and I went to a fundraiser at a nightclub where hundreds of people — the majority over 50 years old — were packed together, eating off an appetizer buffet, shaking hands with acquaintances old and new, and then dancing to a live band.
I was back at work that Monday, but early in the week we learned my colleague's parents had been diagnosed with Covid-19 and that my colleague likely had it, too. We have office jobs at the school, so we don't interact much with students, but we do use the dining hall, and lots of adults had been in and out of our office, so the school took swift action and sent everyone home while the whole campus was deep-cleaned. In consultation with the school nurse, I was told to stay home until two weeks after I'd last interacted with my colleague. The nurse also told me that if my colleague was eventually diagnosed as a coronavirus carrier, I could expect a call from the county department of health, I might then be interviewed to track my movements since coming in contact with a contagious person, and perhaps I'd even get tested, myself.
Now, a few short weeks after all that went down, my school, like 99 percent of the schools in the country, has vacated its campus, and my spouse and I are both trying to get work done from home while giving proper attention to an energetic kindergartener. My colleague has been diagnosed with Covid-19, one of their parents has passed away, and the other is in critical condition. The last I heard, my colleague's spouse had pneumonia, and I haven't heard about their young children.
As for me, my spouse and I are still untested and untraced. I considered contacting the organizers of the fundraiser we attended to let them know what had happened, but I never received any guidance on that from anyone, so decided early on it would be unnecessarily alarmist unless the county health department reached out to me and told me otherwise. My spouse's school was aware of what happened with me from the start, but as long as I was asymptomatic, they told my spouse to keep coming to work, which they did until everything was shut down.
A big thing that weighs on me is the notion that lots of carriers are completely asymptomatic, and in these past six weeks I've been in close contact with an unusually large number of people while I was on vacation and then at my school — and then my spouse was in close contact with me and all the children and employees and a good deal of parents and guardians at their school.
It's terrible that I don't know if I carried the coronavirus while traveling from Europe to the U.S., and thus to my school. It's terrible that I don't know if I picked up the coronavirus from my colleague and carried it to anyone else at the school, or to my spouse and child's school, or to an entirely new network of people at the fundraiser. It's terrible that there's no way for us to know how many other people were carrying the coronavirus at that fundraising event, or went on vacation during the February break and brought the virus back to our schools. It's all terrible because we should have known by then, by late February, that we had to take this seriously and start testing extensively in order to identify the people who ought to isolate, but the key people who could make that happen dropped the ball.
My spouse and I will never be able to confirm or disprove that we brought the virus to thousands of new people. While I don't beat myself up too much about that, I'm deeply frustrated knowing there have to be many other people like me who were super-spreader candidates and went untested, for reasons that defy sound logic.
Send me your stories of this moment in history at williamfleitch@yahoo.com.
Best,
Will