Covid Chronicles
19 memories from the weirdest time of my life
Covid-19 was declared a pandemic 6 years ago.
Does this sentence feel insane to anyone else?
When I try to remember what those years and especially those first few months were like, it’s all very hazy, like my brain put the whole experience in a filing cabinet, locked it, and chucked the key into the raging waters of the Pacific.
That surreal stretch of time was somehow both overwhelming and underwhelming, tremendously stressful and mostly boring, the repetitive mundanity of my claustrophobic days occasionally pierced through by terrifying reminders of how harsh and fragile our economy, politics, and society had become.
I am still making sense of all of this than half a decade later. I am not sure any of us learned the lessons we were supposed to. But here is what I remember:
Panic in aisle two- One of my best friends from college is visiting, and I’ve promised to make pozole for dinner. I swing by the Bowl to grab a few last-minute ingredients.
When I walk in, I freeze.
Berkeley Bowl is more crowded than I’ve ever seen it—like the pre-Thanksgiving rush is taking place inside Penn Station. Checkout lines snake so far down the aisles that you can’t see the shelves, much less shop from them. Every cashier looks like they are about to cry. Frantic shoppers in improvised masks wash over the place like a tidal wave. The shelves have already been ransacked, though the gaps and stragglers speak volumes. Apparently Berkeley people would rather starve than eat smooth Skippy peanut butter.
I move through the store, grabbing onions, cilantro, and pork shoulder, while overhearing conversations that sound like dialogue from a disaster movie:
“They’ve cancelled the NBA!”
“Tom Hanks has it. I hope he makes it…”
And then, in the refrigerated Asian specialty aisle, as I debate tofu brands, I hear:
“I think the Midwest will run out of food in a few days. We might be fine because we’re near the farms, but who knows…”
Hearing this, I grab two jars of kimchi—just in case. If I have to survive on beans, rice, and tofu for a month, at least I’ll have a flavorful way to stave off scurvy.
Power hour- I’m wearing a suit for a Zoom happy hour with my high school friends. Someone proposes a tequila shot, something I don’t do anymore but am oddly excited to do now. As the tequila enters my blood stream I wonder why I never used to do Zoom catch ups with my friends across the country and start scheduling dozens of them. Then Alexis and I jump off to attend a Zoom power hour our frisbee team is putting on and proceed to get into an argument about who gets to sit in which of our two identical West Elm Chairs because one chair has a slightly better view of my laptop screen. The goal of a power hour is to drink a shot of beer a minute for an hour. I remember them being chaotic in college, but over Zoom it’s absolute pandemonium, with people talking over each other and the song changing every minute. I’m not sure if it’s the alcohol or the Wifi, or the creeping dissociation taking over every waking second of my life, but it feels like everything is happening with a small but disorienting amount of lag.
Let’s just go to Spain- After seeing hours of news footage of people cleaning out grocery stores and brawling over toilet paper, I have a theory that I want to test out. I bike to The Spanish Table, an Iberian import store on San Pablo. It is full of food and drink but I am the only customer. Elated, I buy two hundred dollars of boutique Spanish groceries: Chorizo, morcilla, jamon, canned ventresca tuna, brava sauce, Pocha beans, lentils, adorably small Mahou beers, Basque cider, and lots and lots of olive oil. For the next few weeks we live like Andalucian peasants, subsisting on a meager diet of chorizo, beans, tuna, and olives as we binge Tiger King.
What the hell is a jellicle? We’re only a few months in, but we’re already running out of so-bad-it’s good drinking movies. I already made Alexis watch Sharknado, a film so ridiculous it made our friend Charlie say “oh… I’m far too sober for this” before chugging his to-go margarita out of a quart container. Desperate, I’ve opted for the nuclear option: 2019’s Cats, a film so disturbingly poorly made that it’s already become a meme. I have created a drinking game with some help from the internet, but it is no match for this movie. The people look neither cat-like nor human and are all oddly horny and sexless at the same time. The CGI looks like an unfinished video game cut-scene. The scale is upsettingly inconsistent. Worst of all, they’ve managed to make Idris Elba look decidedly un-handsome. The opening number spends five minutes explaining what jellicles are without ever actually defining the word jellicle. The plot is just a bunch of celebrities briefly introducing their one-dimensional characters. I have never felt more alienated and gaslit by a movie. Within ten minutes I know in my heart that no amount of alcohol will salvage this film, much less this y ear.
Clip clop- Sometime in May, Hilary gives the Imperfect brand team Friday off. No meetings, no Slack, no deliverables. Just: go be a person for a day.
I spend the entire day on the couch playing Red Dead Redemption 2, or as Alexis has christened it: “clip clop horsey fun time.” The game is perfect Covid medicine — vast, slow, beautiful, set in a world where your biggest problem is whether to rob a stage coach or go camping.
I usually handle the combat because the shootouts stress Alexis out. But she loves the gentler parts: riding into town for a haircut, petting dogs, buying Arthur Morgan a new hat, feeding our horse, Waffles.
I’ve been playing all morning and realize we need to eat lunch so I hand her the controller and set our horse to auto-ride toward the next town. All she has to do is enjoy the scenery.
I start to cube up a loaf of homemade sourdough into the makings of a panzanella salad. As soon as I start picking dill I hear Alexis call out woefully from the other room:
“Babe, we hit a train.”
Sure enough, Arthur Morgan has ridden headlong into a locomotive at full speed. Somehow the horse has survived. We do not stop laughing for a long time.
Even in 1899, nothing can go right.
Zoom me to hell- I am convinced that there is a circle of hell that is just one never-ending Zoom birthday party.
It’s weird- A 25 pound bag of flour has arrived from a mill in Utah. To keep me company while I knead and rest the dough I’ve got The New York Times playing over our turquoise Bose speaker, which for once is not heavy Covid content. It’s a segment called the Sunday Read, which today is an in-depth profile of Weird Al Yankovic. I keep inventing more kitchen chores to do so I can keep listening. I’m gazing lovingly on another freshly baked loaf of sourdough crackling as it cools on the counter as the narrator walks me through Weird Al’s meticulous process for choosing the perfect rhyming couplets for his Chamillionaire parody: “White & Nerdy.” For the first time in months I feel like there really isn’t anywhere else I’d rather be than here at home.
30- On my 30th birthday I wake up to Alexis playing “Right Hand Man,” my favorite song from the Hamilton soundtrack over our speakers.
I’m hungover from birthday rum on Matt’s patio the night before. To nurse me back to health, she’s ordered DoorDash delivery from 900 Grayson, our favorite brunch place. She got us both the harissa tofu scramble, my favorite order.
Alexis has arranged my presents on the dining room table: a Julie Ertz jersey (number eight, my lucky number), a 23 year old bottle of Zacapa rum, Bose noise-cancelling headphones, Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, and two Lonely Planet guidebooks: French Polynesia and New Zealand.
I stand there in my pajamas looking at them and feel like I am twelve years old again.
We set up a picnic blanket in San Pablo Park. A dozen friends show up.
We briefly play spikeball in the sun but I lose every game. When Lauren leaves I hug her without thinking, then immediately apologize. We both laugh nervously.
Later, I’m sipping some of the rum while watching Princess Mononoke.
My thirty year old stomach now has strong opinions about rum and makes them known. Lying in bed and unable to sleep I consider my reading options: one book about why our political system is broken and two guidebooks to places I can’t go.
Work it out- By August, we’ve tried Zoom beer pong, Zoom dinner dates, and many cursed Zoom birthday parties, but Zoom CrossFit seems like the one thing that might actually scale.
We started going to Crossfit Oakland in December of 2019. Right when I finally stopped being startled by the noise of weights being dropped our gym closed along with everything else.
Half of today’s at-home workout consists of cleans, with the instruction to use a kettlebell if you have one or an “odd object” if not.
The other half consists of 200 meter runs.
We only have one suitable kettlebell, so Alexis and I trade off lifting our kettlebell and a jug of laundry detergent.
As soon as we leave the house, we realize we have no idea what 200 meters is from our front door and around the block. Every time we leave for a run we have to put on shoes and lock the door behind us, which eats into our run times.
We make it through two rounds.
Then mid-run, Alexis thinks she sees a bee and leaps backwards into me to dodge it before screaming
“IS IT OFF ME?”
I say yes but she doesn’t believe me and then we are fighting about the existence of a bee in the middle of our South Berkeley sidewalk.
We are both wound up too tight from back to back Zooms and the pressure of these runs, cleans and bees, real or imagined, is somehow too much.
She keeps running but I walk the rest of the way home, deflated.
Half the class has finished. I look at the Zoom grid — all those small rectangles of people cooling down, catching their breath — and something tears loose in me.
“HOW THE FUCK ARE THEY DONE ALREADY?”
I reflexively put the collar of my royal blue Under Armour shirt in my mouth and bite into it. Then I rip it apart, roaring in frustration before throwing it in the trash.
I close the front door. Alexis closes the laptop.
We both stand there in our kitchen that is also our office that is also our gym.
There is nothing to say, so I start making dinner.
Blade Runner 2020- I know something is wrong as soon as I wake up.
I’ve felt this way for most of 2020, so it’s initially hard to figure out what’s making this particular Wednesday feel different.
I look at the map view of my air quality app. Normal air is blue or green and bad air is yellow, orange, or red. Today, it looks like the entire West Coast has a bruise.
I turn on the news, taking note of the latest Covid death count while sautéing Imperfect’s bacon ends and pieces alongside some sweet potatoes. I turn off the news and call to Alexis to come eat.
I ask, “How did you sleep?”
She responds, “Not great.”
This is becoming a theme for us. Alexis occasionally has nightmares and I gently wake her up and tell her it’s going to be okay. A few weeks prior I tried to do this and she started screaming, which made me start screaming, so we both woke up screaming in terror directly at the other person’s face.
She asks, “Do you want to go to the gym tonight?”
I respond, “We’ll have to see how this air quality shakes out.”
Crossfit recently started doing outdoor classes in the parking lot. They check our temperatures on arrival, then we do barbell movements with masks on before sanitizing all of our equipment. It is absurd but a better arrangement than working out in our kitchen.
Finally, we have somewhere to be besides home. It’s the one hour of the day when the apartment doesn’t exist.
When wildfire season started, we had to start checking the air quality before going. For a while things were fine. Then the air was bad for a week straight and just like that our world shrunk back to the couch, the Playstation, and each other.
“What’s up with the weather?”
“What do you mean?”
“The light is all weird.”
“How am I supposed to know why the light is weird?”
“I was just asking.”
Then I open our front door.
The sky is the dim orange of sunset at 8:00 AM. The sun is nowhere to be found.
The blue watering can on the steps is coated with ash. So are the roller blades Alexis has left there. We both stare at the ochre sky in silence. The idea of doing anything else but look at the sky in shock feels incomprehensible.
I recently started my second Sober September two days earlier. I already want a drink, badly.
I turn to Alexis: “If I didn’t know about science, I would totally believe that the Gods had abandoned us.”
Horizon Zero Day- I cannot go outside because of wildfire smoke but am not supposed to see anyone inside because of a new Covid wave. I am yet again trapped in the 600 square feet of our apartment. I decide to play Horizon Zero Dawn for the rest of the day. After upgrading all of my bows and armor I realize that I’ve seen multiple in-game sunrises and sunsets but never once seen the sun outside. I wonder how long my life will go on like this: the air quality checks before breakfast, the compulsive sourdough loaves, and the endless Zoom happy hours that don’t make me any happier. These days are almost comfortable in a way that’s profoundly destabilizing, like spending hours in a lukewarm hot tub.
Confirmation - Tracking Covid waves, test results, and which friends are still in our theoretical pod becomes too exhausting to sustain. We give up. San Pablo Park becomes our living room. There, we sit in cautious, awkwardly spaced out circles of friends, sipping beers and picking nervously at the grass, struggling to think of updates because no one has any news to report. Nothing new is happening besides death counts and wildfires but no one wants to talk about those. Today is different, though. Donald Trump has Covid! The timing is cinematic: nearly his entire cabinet contracted it at Amy Coney Barrett's nomination ceremony. Despite every public health guideline, they held the entire thing unmasked in the Rose Garden, with an indoor reception after. Unsurprisingly nearly everyone there got sick. As I pull idly on the tab of my second park beer, this all feels like karma. Finally, the man who seemed unwilling or unable to manage this pandemic now has to deal with it personally. As I walk back to the apartment to pee I contend with the distinct possibility that our sitting president will die in office. The park swims around me and I feel dizzy and claustrophobic, even out here in the open air.
The Cheesy Pirate Party Playoff Pack- I park my bike in front of Matt Bedrick’s apartment, take out a Marine Layer tote bag and stash it in the bushes. I take a photo of my delivery like a DoorDash driver, text it to him, and then hop on my bike to head home. In those bushes is what Alexis and I have christened “Bedrick’s Cheesy Pirate Party Playoff Pack.” Today the Green Bay Packers are playing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFC Championship game. We will be watching, separately, but have agreed to do a conference call on speaker phone for the first half to virtually hang out as we watch. Alexis has batched him a cocktail, a rum drink we’ve christened “Giselle’s Booty Call,” along with some cheese puffs to snack on in honor of Aaron Rodgers and Green Bay. We only agreed to conference call for the first half but are enjoying the cocktails and banter so much that we chat for the entire game. I’m rooting for Green Bay but by the end of the half I have a sinking feeling that Tom Brady is going to his tenth Super Bowl. There is no way Brady should be playing this well on a new team, but nothing this year is going how it should.
No debate- No human experience delivers mental whiplash quite like transitioning from your therapist softly asking you follow up questions to having Donald Trump screaming about imminent election fraud and mercilessly mocking Hunter Biden for his drug addiction. My blood pressure skyrockets. I immediately regret tuning in. Thanks to Covid, I can now schedule very disparate things directly next to each other and since they’re all on screens, transition between them instantly. Early on this sounded liberating. In practice, everything now competing for the same real estate makes my whole life feel jarring, boundary-less, and cramped. When I mention this struggle to my boss she doesn’t miss a beat, responding: “Reilly, we’re not working from home; we’re living at work.”
Epiphanies- Our frisbee team regularly plays beach volleyball and multiple people have bought backyard fire pits. I turn out to be surprisingly decent at volleyball. San Francisco, it turns out, is surprisingly cold when you can never go inside.
Not so super- Early Covid is bookended by two underwhelming Super Bowls featuring the Chiefs. A month before everything fell apart we watched the San Francisco 49ers blow a fourth quarter lead and lose to the ascendant Chiefs. Jimmy Garoppolo’s play was not the same caliber as his looks. Now, a year later Matt Rowett, Alexis, and I are bundled up on Matt Bedrick’s deck on Dwight Way drinking Alexis’s herby gin drink called “Mahomes and Garden.” As we watch Mahomes fail to connect with any of his receivers, I feel an odd kinship with him, united in the sense that nothing is going right for us, before it’s overtaken by the cynical realization that of course Tom Brady is the one person winning Covid.
Tapas snuggee- Alexis has a pink snuggee knock off that she got as a secret Santa gift. Now we offer it to Kevin and Kaitlyn as they come to visit us at our new apartment. They politely decline. After the landlords of the tiny in-law unit got in on the pandemic-driven Bay Area real estate gold rush and decided to sell the house, masked realtors started knocking on our door during dinner to show affluent couples our cramped living quarters while we sheltered in place. So we decided it was time to move too. We migrated a mile North up San Pablo, to the upstairs half of a duplex in West Berkeley. It has a back patio where we do all of our entertaining now. Alexis produces a bottle of champagne to toast to our move. The temperature drops and the West Berkeley winds begin to whip across the patio as we pick at paella and patatas bravas from La Marcha Tapas Bar. Kevin goes inside to use the bathroom and re-emerges wearing the snuggee.
Where the Bay comes to play- I grew up two and a half miles away from Golden Gate Fields but I’ve never been there until today. The massive parking lot next to this horse racing track has been converted to a mass vaccination site. As I pull up in our VW for a drive-through Fauci-Ouchy I profusely thank the PPE-clad workers. I have no idea what awaits me on the other side of this. I reason that as long as this jab has something other than U2’s new album in it, my life has to get better.
Hey, Arnold- I haven’t felt this giddy or this socially anxious since college. We arrive at an AirBnb in Arnold, a pine-scented hamlet in the Sierra foothills, to an embarrassment of riches. The whole squad is back together, fully vaccinated just in time for Matt Rowett’s 31st birthday, armed with a fridge full of beer, a case of Kermit Lynch’s finest wine, and a pile of ramps I've brought, braving the aisles of Berkeley Bowl for the first time in a year to buy them. Someone decided the first night is a formal so we are all milling about looking like we’re attending friend prom as 2010s bangers blast over a portable speaker. I’m drinking Beaujolais out of a margarita glass and wearing a bright green apron over a navy suit. I feel like the dog that finally caught the car. I have no idea how to talk to all my friends in person again but I do know how to chop vegetables, so I retreat to the kitchen. Kevin materializes, hands me a beer, and starts chopping, too. From the other room I can hear the cozy quilt of overlapping voices. This is what I wanted for nearly two years and now that it's here I don't quite know what to do with it. But the grilled ramps smell incredible, so I keep chopping as Kevin and I keep talking.
What do you remember from Covid? What were the highlights and lowlights of that time period for you?
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