Self Portrait with Covid

It rained a lot while I was in Hawai’i and once, the lights went out. I had let the dogs out just minutes before and in the pitch black, completely lost sight of Hawai’i dog. I stood on the back step scanning the yard with the flashlight on my phone, calling her name. She appeared a minute or so later, not nearly as bothered as I had been by the darkness, though she got quite clingy the moment the lights snapped back on. 

My time there had not been the rest and solar charging I had hoped for. My job — a role I had taken with so much enthusiasm — had gone rapidly and irreparably off the rails. I was stunned by how bad I felt at the end of every work day. I spent the evenings and weekends staring into the middle ground. I quit when learned I’d been one of a string of employees to walk away from that place in a very short period of time. 

There was no resolution in which I did not become a lightning rod for the, um, source of the issue. It’s the second time this year I’ve been the problem. I am, to paraphrase my friend R, predisposed to give fools the shove and that is my extreme weakness, to be sure. But I increasingly look at work through the same lens I’d look at a date. Say it’s your turn to plan the date and your date shoots down every single idea. Say they trash talk your friends, maybe they trash talk you behind your back. They accuse you of cheating or they tell you your shoes look stupid. “I… thought you liked those shoes, you picked them out.” “God no,” they snark at you, “they’re terrible.”  You’d bail, right? 

While there were intermittent moments of great delight during my time in Hawai’i — seeing my friend’s band that night in the pouring rain, that picnic by the river, the amusement of a Costco run, the thrill of having Harley the Dog there with me — much of the time my brain was stuck in WTF mode. Plus, you know, the election. That shit is exhausting. I got back to Seattle in time to see fall roar into winter and ten days later I tested positive for COVID.

It’s the first time I’ve had the bug. Well, maybe, I was very sick in January 2020, but we’ll never know for sure if that was COVID or not. I started to feel messy on Sunday morning; on Monday I got a rapid and almost enthusiastic positive test result. My doctor put me on Paxlovid, which has made my mouth feel as though I am chewing on a rusty beer can that’s been underneath a freeway underpass since the mid-1970s. I was in a fair bit of pain on day one, but my symptoms have been mild. My biggest complaint has been the Paxlovid side effects, the swamp mouth and sleeplessness as a result. 

It’s felt like a run of bad luck, the job mismatches, COVID finally catching me, oh there were a handful of household repairs I had to do that were equally expensive and annoying including one in which the worker abandoned my house mid-job. In his pre-flight exam, the vet suggested that Harley the Dog, my sidekick, my familiar, might have a heart murmur, and I’m sick about that. Bad luck is always expensive, though I did not have to pay the $1500 retail price tag for Paxlovid that I was initially quoted on the phone, it was covered by my insurance. It’s still unclear if the scan recommended by the vet is covered. 

We had a whopping great storm that wiped out power for thousands of people around Seattle but my house was spared. I signed paperwork for a tech project and a former client asked if I could help out for a few hours. I feel wobbly and aggravated but mostly unharmed (knock on wood, fingers crossed, salt over the shoulder, etc) by my late run with COVID. I got a great deal on a barely-used car and while it’s not the color I wanted, it is the touring version which is nice for a person who road trips — and it’s a staggering upgrade from my 2007 ride. I have an invite to the beach next month and I’m looking forward to the drive. I’m working on a podcast, people seem to like it, so I have a good creative project. Yeah, I got the ‘rona, but I’m actually relieved to get it done in the sunset week of our pro-science government. Friends have come round with necessaries to help me get through quarantine: two kinds of soup, some groceries, a jar of caramel pecan sauce… I am well cared for. I went to Hawai’i with my dog like some kind of goddamn celebrity and he traveled like he’d been doing it for years. 

It’s November, the days are dark and wet. I am bunkering down for the winter, the length of which is as of yet undetermined, it is maybe three months, it is maybe four years. It has not been an easy run, this year, but I think there has been enough light to get me through the winter. I hope so.