The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 9

I woke up this morning feeling like I’d had a stack of 1977 World Book Encyclopedias dropped on me.

Part of it is that my department’s been cramming in more than half a dozen talks in the space of two weeks, something only possible with the wonders of Zoom. This requires that my colleagues and I be “on” and prepared to engage in ways we haven’t quite had to do outside of academic conferences. So there’s that.

But there’s also my last week of 2021 and my first week of 2022.

I’d give you the too long didn’t read version, but it’s a newsletter, so I’ll tell you the stories.

The week before Xmas I went to a xmas party. The original plan wasn’t to stay long, and to hang out in the backyard, with masks. I was more or less successful at the second part, kind of successful at the third part, but I sucked at the first part, the part about only staying an hour. The party was glorious—Before COVID (BC) it was my second favorite party of the year, and it was everything we all needed it to be. But the brunch the day after? The one where a guest quietly announced to everyone (including the host) that he/she hadn’t been vaccinated because he/she was a “scientist”?

BC I would drive to Detroit the day after the party, and because this year we decided to get together in Detroit for Xmas—it would be the first time all of my children have been together in a few years—I did the same thing I used to do. However because I knew I’d be going to a party and I didn’t want to risk folks unduly, I had a hotel room. When I got into Detroit Monday evening I had a sore throat. Tuesday morning I drove around looking for rapid tests, and found three. I took one on Tuesday, and tested negative. I spent some time at my former wife’s mothers house (where some of my children were staying for the holidays) masked. Wednesday I went to visit my parents (masked), and then spent some time taking downtown in—even in the past two years it’s changed tremendously, for the first time in decades it looks like a real downtown (only white).

Thursday I take another test and I’m positive. I attended the party with my girlfriend and a married couple in Baltimore. My girlfriend tests negative as does the husband, but the wife also tests positive.

There’s something called COVID shame.

I now know a bit of what that’s like. Although I didn’t have anything more than a sore throat and a headache—thank God for vaccines and boosters—I felt like I put my family at risk, and that I wasn’t up on Omicron like I should’ve been. And if anyone should’ve been up on it, it should’ve been me. I should’ve either gone to the party or to Detroit but not both. If I was as up on how virulent the disease was I would’ve been. As a result of my carelessness, not only did I spend Xmas eve driving back to Baltimore, three of my children (the ones on the east coast) drove into Detroit on Thursday only to turn back around themselves to go to Baltimore. To be fair this wasn’t just me, because another family member on my former wife’s side also tested positive, and there simply weren’t enough tests to go around to make sure that everyone was good.

I’d thought about all of this last year, as I distinctly remember calculating how many people would have to take tests to enable our family to get together safely. Just with my own biological family (including my former wife) we’re talking about seven (with a full six of us in different places). I think I got to 24 or so before my head started to hurt.

So I spent Xmas and the following week in the basement of my home, while my youngest daughter stayed upstairs.

Everything was fine. But it wasn’t.

…..

The following New Year’s Weekend, my daughter went out of town to visit friends she hadn’t seen in well over a year. I figured I’d finally test negative sometime during the weekend but revelled in the chance to finally get an opportunity to move around the house without a mask and without spraying lysol behind me wherever I walked. I think I tested negative either on New Year’s Day or on the day after. I took several hours to decompress—I didn’t realize what being confined would take out of me—and then went out.

Sunday night I check in on my daughter, and she tells me she’s in Virginia but the bus is running a bit late. Because the bus driver spent more time on the road than he was supposed to, another driver needed to take his place and it was taking sometime for that driver to get to her. By the time she finally gets on the road and gets to Richmond, it’s impossible for her to get another bus to Baltimore. As I text her I pull up Google Maps to get a sense of what type of drive I’m looking at. It’s midnight….it takes about 3 hours to get to Richmond….I’ll just take the loss, drive to Richmond, pick her up and then turn back around. Should get back home at 6am or so, enough time to take a nap and then get ready for the first of these talks. My daughter was prepared to stay overnight in the bus terminal, but real talk there’s no way in fuck that’s happening.

So I hit the road.

Now I didn’t mention that the east coast had been hit by a blizzard that appeared out of nowhere. The Richmond area was about 65 degrees the night before, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. I’m not sure how many inches they got, but they got inches and then on top of that, black ice. I learned to drive in Detroit, so driving in winter didn’t bother me that much. There were a few patches of black ice that I had to navigate, but I was ok.

But I had two signs that something was afoot.

The first sign was an eighteen wheeler stuck on its side in the middle of the two lane highway. It was clear the driver had jackknifed and lost control of the vehicle. There was no signs of the driver, and no signs of any attempt to deal with the vehicle. It was just there.

The second sign was I-95 North. Google Maps suggested that I don’t take I-95 south all the way so instead I basically looped around I-95, only catching it again when I was near the Richmond exit. When I caught I-95 south again, I saw that I-95 North was backed up a bit. I figured I’d just loop back around it after I got my daughter, so it wouldn’t be a problem.

And in one way it wasn’t. I picked up my daughter fine, picked up some Mountain Dew for the drive back, and hit I-95 north. I didn’t see a lick of traffic, until about a mile or so away from the exit that allowed me to loop around I-95 going back. I’m only a mile and a half away so I think I’m good.

Only, I’m not.

It takes about 2 hours to get within eyesight of the exit driving on the shoulder of the road, and then another hour or so before I’m able to actually get off of I-95.

And then when I do so……I run into another traffic jam that lasts about three hours. The eighteen wheeler? They finally brought someone out to remove it, but because it was a two lane highway, and because the roads were still treacherous it took some time to remove. What was supposed to be a six hour trip took twelve. By the time I got home I could only take a nap for about an hour or so before the academic talks started. 

I didn’t realize what I dodged until later that night. Turns out that my six could’ve been 27 (or 39!) if I’d driven past my original exit.

(Someone asked me what I did during those six hours. I didn’t have internet, didn’t have phone, and my daughter was knocked out. I had about an hour or so of podcasts to listen to, so I did. The rest of the time? I got out for about twenty minutes or so to take pictures—I didn’t know that I was in the middle of a semi-historical event but I knew it was something—and may have gotten about twenty minutes or so of sleep in between slow moving traffic, but the rest of the time? I just stayed in the moment.)

I’m already about to hit the 1500 word mark, so I’ll end with this. While experiencing COVID the way I did was byproduct of politics gone right—the politics that supercharged the vaccine/booster process made what could’ve been a life altering experience into a minor pain—everything else is a byproduct of politics gone wrong. Going from a region (Baltimore) in which pretty much everyone wore masks, unless they were in private quarters with people they knew, to a region (Detroit) in which it was pretty much like COVID didn’t exist (I had to wear a mask inside of the hotel, but nowhere else) was scary. And then experiencing a thin slice of the horrific traffic jam that was caused by a combination of climate change and infrastructure breakdown, tells me how close we are to a real life version of 2022 dystopian SF.

All this to say that I’ve got a good reason to feel like I’ve been hit by all those World Books.

Some of you probably do too.

(Oh. My youngest son tested positive for COVID. What a year these last two weeks have been.)