Covid, Day 4.

Day 4 of Covid. I don’t know why it comes up so much more now than ever before, maybe because I have friends who have kids?, but this notion of concern for the well-being of people in the world when I am no longer in it is, to be honest, a concern I don’t find as urgent or important or even real as most people seem to. Like, why?

I don’t generally share these thoughts because I think people think they’re monstrous, but I just don’t get as worked up as I guess I should about things like population rate decline and climate change. I practice thrift and the “three R’s” but that’s because I believe we all share the world and its resources and it’s immoral to waste stuff. But all the railing at oil companies—the oil companies have sins to account for, absolutely, but producing oil is not the worst of them. Our world requires massive amounts of energy to function, and you can’t just radically change that overnight without causing more harm than climate change is causing. The population anxiety is genuinely puzzling to me: why, if people are so worried about the planet are they not thrilled to see the population decline? At any rate, it doesn’t feel like a good use of my limited sanity to be in a constant panic about climate change. Implementing global measures big enough to reverse it—a project that requires the buy-in of some 8 billion people—doesn’t seem realistic.

Maybe it’s partly my on and off Buddhist training (“Abandon any hope of fruition” or, as a dear friend of mine, who, like me, tends to worry, says, “Is it happening now?”) but that’s not all. I think I’m just temperamentally disinclined to take the far future all that seriously. (When I was much younger, late teens and twenties, I seriously believed I would die young. It wasn’t like a fear, it was just something I knew. Obviously, that didn’t happen.) 

But the last few days, feeling very sick and very angry to be sick, I have been thinking about it. The status quo now, apparently, is that we have to get regular Covid vaccines in order to hold the virus at bay just enough so that we don’t die, but, fairly regularly, we get very sick. I’ve had every vaccine available as soon as it was available, and I’ve had Covid twice. Two years ago, my case was much worse than this one (I could barely move for a couple days), but this one is pretty fucking bad.

Don’t construe this to mean I’m a vaccine denier or anything like that. I will get vaccinated because I don’t want to die yet, and I certainly don’t want to die with a tube down my throat. But it’s depressing to imagine this situation projecting into the future. I only have 20-25 years left if I’m lucky so I can put up with it, but kids now who have many decades of their lives in which this pattern of alternating vaccines and illness is just what you have to do? And how many more similar viruses will take the same shape? Maybe it’s just the sore throat talking (seriously, there is no sore throat more painful than a Covid sore throat) but that’s just bleak. So I guess Covid has unearthed something in me I didn’t believe was there.

I see the contradictions in my attitude here. Just the fact that I worry a lot betrays a concern for the future, but that kind of fretting about possibly bad outcomes doesn’t project out very far, no more than a few months, usually a day or two. But much more telling: I’ve just placed the Y’all archives, and plan to place my own personal and professional archives eventually, in a research library because I want future scholars to have access to them. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.

P.S. While I’m feeling justified in my crankiness: what is the deal with everyone raving about Japanese egg sandwiches? Who hurt you? Did your mother never make you an egg salad sandwich for lunch and cut the crust off? Just because you call it “Japanese” doesn’t make it new. Jesus, people.