“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.
––Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
I don’t know about you but personally, stumbling across the second quote above, following Dillard’s death on September 15 at the age of 83, I couldn’t help but feel more than a little bit irritated with her, a little bit pissed, really. Because how I’m spending my days right now – how I’m spending my life, apparently – is popping Paxlovid and blowing a seemingly limitless fountain of gelatinous snot into tissues that pile up all day around me on the couch like little doll-sized used diapers. The upside is that amid attempts by the Trump admin to enforce binary gender, these seem like refreshingly suitable accessories, whether you’re looking to dress a geriatric Barbie or Ken, a P.J., Skipper, Scooter, or what have you.
The situation seems particularly ironic and frustrating not the least because my lovely spouse and I are masked and quarantined at opposite ends of the house in the hope that he at least can dodge it. We crossed the threshold of sixty-five together this year, and we’d rather not tempt fate. We have both consistently and vigilantly gone out into the world masked day after day for the past six years. We’ve done so because we both know that whatever the head Joker at Health and Human Services might have to say about the matter these days, Covid remains a serious health threat to us both at a moment when the healthcare system, like the social safety net, is in tatters thanks in no small measure to Elon Musk’s mad clown posse of Ketamine-popping adolescent Hamburglars and of course, RFK.
I will concede, of course, the latter’s impressive familiarity with animal taxidermy and his deep immersive knowledge of the reproductive organs of northern or common raccoons – or as Linneas would have it: Procyon Lotor. It bears stating, moreover, that RFK is no doubt too occupied with such essential matters as classifying bacon as an effective off-label class B treatment for coronary artery disease – especially when paired with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine – to register the potentially long-term impact of Covid even on the vaccinated. An oft-cited study by Ziyad Al-Aly, and Hannah Davis, et al, published in 2024 estimates the “cumulative global incidence of long COVID is around 400 million individuals, which is estimated to have an annual economic impact of approximately $1 trillion—equivalent to about 1% of the global economy.”
It’s the literature on the links between Covid and dementia that I personally find most concerning. And then there’s the anecdotal evidence from friends who are Covid frequent flyers and who are now reporting significant memory issues, reinforcing my concerns about the potential of Covid to go full brain worm on my hippocampus. It’s the part of my body I’ve grown most attached to over the course of a lifetime, USB flash drives or “memory sticks” aside.
I only recently bore witness to a dear friend’s nearly decade long struggle with dementia. And in 1999, as a newly tenured English professor on my first sabbatical, I worked for a time as a caregiver for a woman in her 90s, who’d been a journalist and anti-fascist resister in Germany in the 1930s. At least once at night when I went to help her to the toilet, she started kicking me and shouting “freedom.” Coming unstuck in time and revisiting even the best of times is no cake walk.
Bette Davis, of course, famously proclaimed in her later years that “Old age is no place for sissies,” and you can forgive perhaps a bit of internalized misogyny and homophobia from someone who helped put the gay in icon.
Personally, as much as I’ve enjoyed visiting memory care units over the years, to quote the immortal words of Bartleby the Scrivener and Tina “Bossy Pants, Fey,” “I prefer not to go to there” myself any time soon. Whatever the AI slop out there in the internet ether might have to say about it, a robust body of research suggests that Covid exacerbates all manner of pre-existing conditions, putting the pedal to the metal of whatever disease processes are already under way. For a more comprehensive review of the literature on “post-acute health effects that follow Covid infection,” check out this commentary from Julia Doubleday.[1]
That said, in the U.S., it’s easy to feel cut off from community when your compromised immune system – or the compromised immune system of someone close to you –compels you to cover more than half your face on a daily basis. A few months back a MAGA-coded dude in a baseball hat accosted me while I was minding my own business at a bookstore, “You sick?” he asked me with what I took to be more than a wee bit of derision, as though it’s somehow now routine to expect people to publicly give up our medical histories to random strangers on the street. I thought, after all, that that’s what we had DOGE for, right?[2]
Worse yet than the randos with their commentaries on the street or in the grocery store, are statewide mask bans in North and South Carolina and Alabama, among others. These laws force immune-compromised people and people with disabilities out of public spaces, out of their jobs, into the margins and onto the streets, where people are susceptible to all kinds of injuries, including TBIs.
Biden’s profit-driven 2022 declaration of a purely fictitious end to the pandemic went a long way toward reassuring people even on the left that a return to business as usual is wholly warranted, and that daily masking is little more than a signifier of individual neuroses, or worse, delusion. As the late disability justice organizer and founder of the Disability Visibility Project Alice Wong has written, “The messaging is obvious from the top all the way to the local level: The pandemic is not deadly and getting COVID is just a mild flu for ‘normal’ people because that’s just how hypercapitalism, racism, eugenics, and ableism work.” Wong went on to assert that, “The normalization of repeated infections, preventable deaths, and anti-science propaganda is tearing the fabric of society, with the most marginalized hanging by a thread.”
The “underlying” disease processes that make people more prone to contract Long Covid are anything but equally distributed globally or in the U.S. It’s a fact that racist eugenicists like Elmo Musk, RFK, and legions of D.C. lobbyists for corporate polluters, would rather we not know that. It stands to reason they’ve been working overtime at repackaging racist junk science as Shinola. They want to roll back the hard-fought gains of the environmental justice movement, which has racked up victories for communities fighting back against corporate windigos bent on profiting off the genocide in Gaza, offloading toxic waste as fertilizer, and asserting their god given right to go on pillaging a planet at the tipping point.
“Out, damn spot!”
Years of vigilant masking aside, it took me all of about three hours of tabling without a mask in a heavily trafficked city park – Esther Short Park, in downtown Vancouver, WA –for me to come down with Covid. I woke up five days later feeling like I’d been hit by – not so much a Mac truck, as an EV-powered golf cart. And having that increasingly rare commodity in the form of a robust health insurance plan, I dragged myself to the closest urgent care clinic. My suspicion confirmed, I was prescribed a round of Paxlovid in the hope of staving off long Covid.
The event for which I was tabling on September 12 when I most likely caught the aforementioned Covid was the 22nd annual Vancouver Peace and Justice Fair. The fair was spawned as an alternative to the nationalist, xenophobic spectacles normalized in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Personal and collective national grief was literally weaponized, made a pretext for “shock and awe” assaults on Iraq – as well as Afghanistan and beyond – and for a massive transfer of wealth from housing, healthcare, schools, and communities.
The terror the U.S. unleashed across the Middle East fueled explosive growth of the already bloated military industrial carceral complex, spinning out record amounts of carbon and complex new webs of capital linking weapons and drone manufacturers, surveillance and security infrastructure, an explosion of prisons and detention camps, a steady stream of “surplus” war toys and chemical weapons regularly coming home to Cop Shops – and “Cop Cities” across the U.S.
I eagerly look forward to one day drafting a more extended, more tedious essay about my various health issues and assorted aches and pains, but perhaps most relevant here is the fact that my thyroid is precious close to giving up the ghost. Having an autoimmune disorder known as Hashimoto’s means that my immune system has been doing its best to throttle my thyroid for going on a couple of decades and the better part of that butterfly-shaped gland has effectively flown the coop. Symptoms caused by my thyroid’s disappearing act can include variously muscle and joint pain, hair loss, depression, anxiety, brain fog, and a lovely paradoxical mix of fatigue and insomnia.
Over the years, sleep deprivation has whittled away at my already limited capacity for small talk, and especially in pressured social circumstances, my sentences seem to disintegrate, clauses snapping off. I’ve lately been holding informal focus groups with friends and, overall, they mostly seem in favor of my proposal to hand out calling cards to new acquaintances that read, “Sleep-deprived and neurodivergent AF. Have no small talk in me. Topics I can successfully engage around include the following: climate collapse, death, militarism, fascism, death,” etc. For me writing is nothing if not an assistive technology.
Many thanks to Linda Cargill, Frann Michel, and Mikel Clayhold for commenting on drafts. Any errors are my own.
1. Also checkout Frann Michel’s 2024 commentary in Counterpunch “Mask Bans and the Age of Pandemics, (and Fascism and Climate Crisis),” which introduced me to Doubleday’s work and other disability justice organizing around masking. ↑
2. When Congress passed the legal mandate and Obama signed in 2009 to centralize medical records under the auspices of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health with the (HITECH) Act, I’m guessing I was hardly alone in feeling like it was putting an empty cart before a nonexistent horse. If the powers that be actually wanted an integrated medical system, you’d think they’d build a single payer universal healthcare system so it would have something to be integrated into. Personally, I couldn’t help but guess that the feds never really got over the business getting caught breaking into a psychiatrist’s office when they were caught trying to find incriminating materials on Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. They’ve been only too eager to embrace new ways to get at the most intimate caches of data on all of us.
