I tested positive two weeks ago. And I've tested positive in the four (or five?) tests I've taken since the middle of last week. Annoying shit, man. At this point I do genuinely feel fine and I got a PCR test this morning so I'll find out tomorrow if I'm still positive. So, we'll see? Who cares, I suppose. I made it through it and will one day tell my kids about how I felt weird and my legs hurt a lot for like a week in the middle of January 2022. Frankly I'd just like to be able to go to the grocery store again.
The sickness kind of screwed up my brain and I haven't been able to string a sentence together for about two weeks. There's a chance that could just be typical writer's block, but I'd like to use the excuse of the global pandemic thank you very much.
The experience of Covid was strange though. In the throes of it, I felt a bit of disassociation not too unlike a psychedelic drug. There weren't any colors or hallucinations, but instead a feeling of separation — the limbs of my body not quite responding to the direction of my brain, like a buffering YouTube video or lag in a video game. I found myself staring at my hands on numerous occasions, kind of like Neo does at the end of The Matrix when he’s realizing he has the power to stop bullets. As far as I know, Covid didn’t give me the ability to stop bullets, but on the other hand I never tried so I guess we’ll never know.
In hindsight, that foggy feeling was kind of scary and I’m very glad my brain is working again. But while I was tripping through the Rona, I didn’t seem to mind. At a few points, I didn’t really know what day it was, not that it really mattered because I just went back to sleep.
Or maybe these are just the typical feelings of January, a month that proudly remains extremely long and extremely strange with each passing year. Days fly by and the winter sun is briefly bright; then come long nights and the seasonal depression is strong. All the holiday warmness has vanished and we're all collectively staring down the next 12 months and wondering how we're gonna make it. We always do, though, so we’ve got that to look forward to.
Here are a few things that helped me think when I couldn't think over the last few weeks. Maybe they'll help you think, too.
A poem by the great William Carlos Williams, who always is there to remind us of the pain of living.
I missed this great flick Slow West back in 2015 in which Michael Fassbender plays a really hot and rugged cowboy helping a young boy from Scotland find his lost love in American West. The film is tightly edited, elegant, and stylistic in a way that doesn't feel like a Marvel movie. A genuinely perfect western.
On the note of Marvel movies, I stumbled across this essay Past Hauntings by Peter Kranitz from May 2020 ruminating on why culture continually gets recycled these days. It struck a nerve with me, because I believe bravery is required for us to find success as artists. This isn't meant to be some diatribe against “cancel culture” and that “we need to separate the artist from the artist” or whatever. But rather that I fear we are creating a cultural and artistic environment that does not provide a safe space for risk taking. It’s really that simple, and that does feel like something concerning. What to do about it? I don’t know. But I did enjoy the following paragraph.
We tend to lose sight of how outright offensive so much of “canonical” art seemed when it was created. We’re now only able to view these works as historical artifacts rather than as acts of rebellion. Be it Ulysses, Lolita, or Elvis’s hips, great art becomes great by thrusting something raunchy or disturbing into the public’s face and overwhelming the public’s initial reservations with the work’s sheer power. Even punk rock, which retains its bad-boy image to an extent, has been calcified by its induction into the musical canon, making us forget how outrageous it really was. As a relatively tame example, the Ramones, icons of the ’70s punk era and movie soundtrack staple, wore Third Reich regalia and recorded demos with the lyrics “I’m a Nazi, baby, I’m a Nazi, yes I am.” Were they just starting out today, the Ramones would be canceled before they could upload a YouTube video. Perhaps paradoxically, desublimation has obliterated our ability to be shocked and left us only with the ability to be outraged. Since nothing can represent anything other than what it really is, wearing a swastika cannot be an act of protest against an oppressively tight-laced culture, but can only identify the wearer as a literal Nazi. A novel that includes the plopping of a man’s shit into a toilet bowl or that’s narrated by a pedophile can be nothing but scatological or pedophilic. Desublimation not only prevents contemporary art from being “great,” but prevents it even from being art.
I've been re-reading Eve Babtiz's Eve's Hollywood since she passed away. I wrote about her influence on music already, but there isn't enough infinite space on the internet to cover her importance to me and the way that I view the world. I've been reading this book on my iPad, which is the first time I’ve ever read a book on my iPad. Something tells me that would piss Eve off, but something also tells me that she wouldn't care. RIP.
David Bazan is one of the best voices in indie rock history. He's got quite the story too, openly wrestling with his belief in God, alcoholism, evangelical upbringing, and everything else you'd come to expect from a solemn guy with a guitar. He just released a surprise album under his Pedro the Lion moniker, and I recommend listening to it while you stare at the sky.
Last summer, Neil Young made an album with Crazy Horse in an old barn in Colorado. Now there's a documentary. It's a lot of Neil puttering around and being a smartass boomer. Nothing could honestly be better.
This poem by David Berman.
Something I always come back to is this video of Stevie Nicks casually rehearsing “Wild Heart” sometime in the early ‘80s. I first saw it probably a decade ago at this point, and if you’ve been around the internet, maybe you’ve come across it. But that shouldn’t stop you from watching it again right now. I don’t really get what it is about it that’s so damn cool, but she makes it seem so easy.
While spending time out west, I've discovered a cool old magazine that just got rebooted called Mountain Gazette. You should check it out. It’s dedicated to ski bums and freaks and all the other things that you find in the crevices of the mountain west. They pointed me to this 1969 documentary called The Last of the Ski Bums.
A writer I've admired for the last few years is named Sam Kriss based out of the UK. He wrote about the new Matrix, which I still haven't seen, and the idea of the "red pill."
These days, the mantra of the good progressive types is not question everything, but in this house we believe. Believe the science, believe the experts, believe in our institutions, believe women. Liberals no longer think ordinary people should get to interrogate the big questions for themselves: your Google search is not the same as my medical degree. They don’t think corporate media is inherently propagandistic: it’s our last bulwark against online disinformation. They don’t even oppose the totalizing effect of mass culture: they just want culture-commodities to carry the right kind of didactic messaging. Along the way, an entire language has vanished, a whole stock of concepts has fallen out of use. Who, in 2022, bothers railing against conformity? Who wants to talk about alienation? Who is trying to shock us with their bold critiques of consumerism?
I was in a city over the holidays and found myself sitting in a dive bar that served good beer. While enjoying a high-octane IPA in a pretty can, I watched this old video of Albert Hammond's “It Never Rains in Southern California” play on a big TV behind the bar. It's such a funny little video, kitschy and cool and denim friendly. It took my brain to the blissful era of adult contemporary in the 70s and I imagined myself dancing under a disco ball in bell bottoms with my famous friends, also in bell bottoms. I hope it does the same for you.