Five years after the pandemic...

...and the guy who exacerbated it is back in office.

I’ve not written about the pandemic before, ever, mostly because it was a shared traumatic experience that I managed to get through a hell of a lot better than many Americans. Why?

I was affluentish and could buy my isolation.

Millions and millions weren’t so lucky.

My experience and trauma from it was interesting, mostly between me and my poor therapist. Honestly, I’ve only discussed it in passing for several years, because who really wants to dive into pandemic stories? Also: do not tell me about a pandemic novel. Not reading it.

My wife missed the first year of her first grandchild. I know I didn’t see two of my kids for 14 months. One of them came down in the winter of 2020, I think, and we sat outside by a cheap outdoor fireplace I had delivered here for the occasion. We kept the fire going for a few days; I think he drove down. I still have the fireplace and the bagged firewood.I can’t throw it away or burn it. It rests in the backyard, rusting, a small, grim monument to a catastrophe.

I happened to be in New York City in mid-February, 2020, as a Pulitzer Prize judge (there’s a column right there), and COVID was coming at us like a tumbling asteroid. We washed our hands every 15 minutes, while simultaneously going into tiny, tight restaurants and cafes, sitting in Penn Station for hours, riding the subway, and touching every disease-bearing railing in Manhattan.

I had read the incubation time was 14 days, and when I got back from New York, I just lay down on the sofa and waited. Meanwhile, I read hideous stories, hundreds of them. The Atlantic specialized in them, and they were magnificently written.

After 14 days, I didn’t get sick.

When I was judging the Pulitzers, not one single New Yorker had died from COVID. Several weeks later, the refrigerated morgue trucks were parked outside of every hospital in New York. Gov. Cuomo was routinely lying at news conferences when he wasn’t humiliating women in his employ (but now he’s going to elected mayor! Yay!) Doctors were committing suicide and saying goodbye to their families. Infected people were dropping dead from viral storms in their chests after onset.

Don’t you remember that?

49.4 percent of the electorate didn't in 2024, after throwing this senile fascist we’re currently stuck with out of office. Oh, and we (they) threw Biden out because egg prices were too high. I guess no one noticed the record-setting Dow then.

Has MAGA checked their IRA today?

I remember that the day the pandemic forced everyone into quarantine, March 15, 2020—which was also that glorious day that I could access my IRA at age 59 and 1/2.

“Oh, boy! When I can get at that dough, I can get new furniture!” or some other temporal, materialistic thought.

I had also loaded my life’s work into a van rented by my dear colleague I haven’t heard a peep from since I was fired. In case you’re counting, I think we got 13,000 or so cartoons into it, a clown car of satire.

Instead, on March 15, 2020, I had a long chat with my stock broker about how this could really screw up the markets, and I began to have the usual apocalyptic thoughts that have re-plagued me since the present occupant of the White House is now conjuring each waking moment— when I’m not forcing myself out of the house or watching the NBA, a sport I wasn’t exactly obsessed with prior to the election.

As to the occupant of the White House, I mostly recall his absolute idiocy in handing it, and everything else.

I guess 49.4 percent of the electorate did not.

It’ll go away when it warms up! It’s just the flu! Bleach! Ivermectin! Bash Fauci! Put Pence in charge!

I recall when this mentally ill freak said he didn’t even know why it was “COVID-19,” and discussed it like it was a stand-up act. Fundamentally, we have to recall that Trump is a failed stand-up comic. I can’t think of one clever or amusing remark he’s ever made. Nixon was funnier. Way funnier.

Hey, MAGAmerica, remember when a million people died from COVID in the United States? Interestingly, it killed a lot of unvaccinated MAGA folks, who begged for the vax on their deathbed.

Death has a way of cutting through the BS, right? Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it’s not true.

No? It was a lot of your red hat folks, if you recall. You didn’t want the vaccine, and entire nuclear families got wiped out in a few weeks. If someone got COVID and was compromised, they could likely suffer from long COVID, with the accompanying brain fog and worse. But hey, Big Gummint ain’t gonna tell me wut to do! I’ll just mix this bleach with the Ivermectin and call it good.

I didn’t get COVID in those fourteen months. I went in about five interior spaces in during that time, and for way under five minutes each. I golfed a lot—five times a week, just so I could see my buddies. I watched almost the entire run of What’s My Line? I went for endless walks. I ate DoorDash. Too much DoorDash. I put on 20, easy (I lost it, mostly). I discovered they delivered cookies and ice cream to the door. Who brought it to me, and how can you eat three huge cookies AND ice cream every night?

People who couldn’t afford to be insulated, like me. I was very mindful of my privilege, and I kept thinking of single people in studio apartments in February in Cleveland, trapped, lonely, and angry, while Californians gutted it out outside on their golf courses.

As an extrovert (if you know me, you’ll think that a mild understatement), I discovered my many dear neighbors sitting in a driveway a few doors up. That group saved my life. They’re all sweethearts, some of them in their nineties. But we all got together so we wouldn’t go nuts. They let me do a few minutes of material every night at five, and to this day we all get together in the driveway. I seem to be the only one who works full-time, so I’m not there as much, but I see all of them a lot.

When I did finally get COVID, I could feel the symptoms coming after my first shot of the second booster. My wife and I both were sick. I took one fifteen minute nap, had no symptoms other than a mild cold, and worked every day.

And thank God.

Thinking back to a moment, about six weeks into isolation, I sobbed for a half hour, wondering when they were going to come up with the vaccine.

The last time they had to crank one up like that took four years.

Four years.

Not this time.

Of course, the president of the United States was, as usual, bipolar in his approach to tackling the problem. On one hand, he said all this silly, batshit garbage all the time, was very anti-mask, and routinely made fun of them or denigrated them. On the other hand, he did get Operation Warp Speed cranked up and personally got the shots himself while pooh-poohing the rest of the world for doing so.

I can’t explain this mad man, then or now.

Of course, Trump got COVID, and was given experimental treatments at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He survived.

While he disparaged masks and suggested horse medicine as a treatment, he got first class care that his “subjects” did not.

What I really do not understand, as we observe the fifth anniversary of this horror show, why the 49.4 percent of the electorate didn’t recall how bad it all was. Now we have another narcissistic sociopath as HHS secretary who seems to like vaccines for himself and his kids, but is letting other kids die from…wait for it…the measles.

The measles. We have had that one knocked for decades. Now children are dying from measles, a completely avoidable tragedy.

The Kennedy torch is passed, in order to set America on fire. Trump is standing by with the kerosine.

Now we’re watching avian flu and H5NI light up, while Trump nominates cranks and idiots to run major public health agencies. Oh, and we pulled out of the World Health Organization.

So, happy fifth COVID anniversary, America. Let’s hope we don’t have to celebrate another preventable pandemic anniversary.

Maybe stock up on Ivermectin and bleach, because that’ll likely be the only Trump team response.

Maybe there’s a stockpile of hand-sanitizer around from the people trying to make a buck off of COVID. Don’t worry, Trump and his freak show will figure out a way to monetize that disaster, just like he does on everything—emoluments are no longer a factor.

After, the 49.4 percent want it that way.

Don’t they?

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Hey, YBs: Hope you have a great evening. As usual, I am so heartened by the response here, and am grateful to you all for your subscriptions, paid or free. I’ll be getting to that Week in Review shortly, probably tomorrow. Meanwhile, I should go move my legs for 40 minutes. —J.