Denouement: Covid
The lockdown began in March 2020, almost three years ago. In September of 2022, after all these months of watching other people get sick and wondering if maybe I was immune... I finally got Covid.
I was in San Francisco for "Dreamforce", this ridiculous conference that my company puts on. It was the first Dreamforce since the pandemic started and, in typical fashion for this particular company, everything was a shit-show. Literally, every possible task you can imagine in a corporate setting has been relegated to "self-service"--we have nobody in HR to talk to anymore because every single HR duty has been converted to its own process that siphons off to an anonymous Slack channel ("have questions? check out this Slack channel!") where a person can post something in a public forum and someone they don't know might or might not respond. Everything is impersonal and nobody is accountable and that's okay because... nobody is accountable. (Out of rage, I once timed how long I got to spend in an average work day doing my actual work and it came out to about 20% of my time. The other 80% of my time is spent finding links or threads that I need on a million different platforms, re-setting and entering forgotten passwords, and reading instructions and foibling through all the administrative overhead and inane apps that have been created to ostensibly make things more efficient.) Magnify this ethos to a massive conference and you can imagine how absolutely everything was a wreck and things got done only thanks to the last-minute heroics of the indelible human spirit. Fuck technology. What a house of cards. I am so fried by all the constant multi-tasking.
Anyway, my job at Dreamforce was putting on a stupid keynote game show thing and, last minute, Bono (one of the other keynotes) wanted a smaller room because he was nervous he wouldn't fill the big room they had for him because all he was doing was reading from his book. So our show got moved to his room and his keynote got moved to our room. In the fracas, the new production team for the new stage realized last minute that none of the music, videos or even the show-flow or band rider had been received in the right format, but they only realized this on the day of our *single* 60 minute rehearsal. So there was no rehearsal and we spent all night talking the production team through all the materials they should have already been familiar with. We had planned this fancy dinner in a private room at a nearby restaurant for the game show contestants (who were all customers) but nobody could go to it anymore because they were busy talking through the show-flow with production. So, against my better judgment, instead of cancelling the dinner, I was the one leader who decided to host and go to it in order to keep up everyone's spirits and to show the customers that everything was under control. It was a closed-door dinner next to the wine cave. The contestants bonded and had a great time and that one dinner apparently saved the day, creating the rapport that made the on-stage live show (which had no rehearsal) actually good the next day. BUT... somebody from that dinner also tested positive for Covid. By the time I was back in Seattle, I tested positive too.
***
It was just as bad as everyone has said, but not in the ways I thought. The first two days, I felt like every bone in my body was broken. But more than the physical pain was the psychological pain. Covid does something to the brain. I felt like it was the end of the world, like I had failed everything, that there was no hope. I had a panic attack about my upcoming December book deadline ("This book is so dumb. I am so stupid. Everyone is going to laugh at this. I'm such a loser. These drawings look like shit. What a joke. I've fucked up my life. I can barely write anymore. I hate my writing. I am such a failure. I probably won't even finish this. etc. etc. ad nauseam") I did not sleep for two days. All with a fever. The panic and depression were SO bad that... I decided to work on the book. Nay, I told myself that I *had* to work on the book to meet my quota and stay on deadline, or else. So, friends, the remaining duration of being sick with Covid was spent *forcing* myself to do the most brainless but tedious parts of the book: the drawing. I worked 15-hour urgent days drawing the pages I needed to draw, sometimes so sick with a fever that I had to put my head on the table while I drew. I threw up between pages. All with the voice of the monster in my head. It was possibly one of the worst experiences of my life.
And that is how I will remember Covid. Which is a shame because now that I have all these drawings, I can't remember actually drawing them!!!! My doctor said that blackouts sometimes happen with high fevers or traumatic events. I did not tell my doctor that I was working with a fever and that this was probably the "trauma" involved. The good news? NOW I AM ON SABBATICAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
My tree book started because of the extra time the lockdown gave me. So I think it's appropriate that much of the drawings in the book were completed in the inevitable denouement of contracting Covid. This book is the unlikely and random gift that Covid gave me. It is the singular focus that helped me get through everything, the only purpose. Regardless of its merits, it will be an artifact of this era, a physical manifestation of time spent. It is also an object of grief, a deep sadness about the ephemeral nature of life and what feels more and more like a tenuous future.
The panic has not subsided, and it won't until the book is done. I have five weeks on sabbatical to finish writing it (which is probably why I'm procrastinating by writing this post instead). If I can just keep on schedule and get through the writing, I tell myself the rest of the drawing I can do in my sleep... My deadline is mid-December. (In my nightmares, I imagine my editor receiving the manuscript draft, taking one look, then realizing she's made a horrible mistake and canceling the whole thing.)
These years have felt like alternate dimensions traveled, like a very long and complicated dream. These are my 40s. This is also "midlife", the dark crisis we were warned about. And this virus, this disease of our times... has been a trip.
I was in San Francisco for "Dreamforce", this ridiculous conference that my company puts on. It was the first Dreamforce since the pandemic started and, in typical fashion for this particular company, everything was a shit-show. Literally, every possible task you can imagine in a corporate setting has been relegated to "self-service"--we have nobody in HR to talk to anymore because every single HR duty has been converted to its own process that siphons off to an anonymous Slack channel ("have questions? check out this Slack channel!") where a person can post something in a public forum and someone they don't know might or might not respond. Everything is impersonal and nobody is accountable and that's okay because... nobody is accountable. (Out of rage, I once timed how long I got to spend in an average work day doing my actual work and it came out to about 20% of my time. The other 80% of my time is spent finding links or threads that I need on a million different platforms, re-setting and entering forgotten passwords, and reading instructions and foibling through all the administrative overhead and inane apps that have been created to ostensibly make things more efficient.) Magnify this ethos to a massive conference and you can imagine how absolutely everything was a wreck and things got done only thanks to the last-minute heroics of the indelible human spirit. Fuck technology. What a house of cards. I am so fried by all the constant multi-tasking.
Anyway, my job at Dreamforce was putting on a stupid keynote game show thing and, last minute, Bono (one of the other keynotes) wanted a smaller room because he was nervous he wouldn't fill the big room they had for him because all he was doing was reading from his book. So our show got moved to his room and his keynote got moved to our room. In the fracas, the new production team for the new stage realized last minute that none of the music, videos or even the show-flow or band rider had been received in the right format, but they only realized this on the day of our *single* 60 minute rehearsal. So there was no rehearsal and we spent all night talking the production team through all the materials they should have already been familiar with. We had planned this fancy dinner in a private room at a nearby restaurant for the game show contestants (who were all customers) but nobody could go to it anymore because they were busy talking through the show-flow with production. So, against my better judgment, instead of cancelling the dinner, I was the one leader who decided to host and go to it in order to keep up everyone's spirits and to show the customers that everything was under control. It was a closed-door dinner next to the wine cave. The contestants bonded and had a great time and that one dinner apparently saved the day, creating the rapport that made the on-stage live show (which had no rehearsal) actually good the next day. BUT... somebody from that dinner also tested positive for Covid. By the time I was back in Seattle, I tested positive too.
***
It was just as bad as everyone has said, but not in the ways I thought. The first two days, I felt like every bone in my body was broken. But more than the physical pain was the psychological pain. Covid does something to the brain. I felt like it was the end of the world, like I had failed everything, that there was no hope. I had a panic attack about my upcoming December book deadline ("This book is so dumb. I am so stupid. Everyone is going to laugh at this. I'm such a loser. These drawings look like shit. What a joke. I've fucked up my life. I can barely write anymore. I hate my writing. I am such a failure. I probably won't even finish this. etc. etc. ad nauseam") I did not sleep for two days. All with a fever. The panic and depression were SO bad that... I decided to work on the book. Nay, I told myself that I *had* to work on the book to meet my quota and stay on deadline, or else. So, friends, the remaining duration of being sick with Covid was spent *forcing* myself to do the most brainless but tedious parts of the book: the drawing. I worked 15-hour urgent days drawing the pages I needed to draw, sometimes so sick with a fever that I had to put my head on the table while I drew. I threw up between pages. All with the voice of the monster in my head. It was possibly one of the worst experiences of my life.
And that is how I will remember Covid. Which is a shame because now that I have all these drawings, I can't remember actually drawing them!!!! My doctor said that blackouts sometimes happen with high fevers or traumatic events. I did not tell my doctor that I was working with a fever and that this was probably the "trauma" involved. The good news? NOW I AM ON SABBATICAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
***
My tree book started because of the extra time the lockdown gave me. So I think it's appropriate that much of the drawings in the book were completed in the inevitable denouement of contracting Covid. This book is the unlikely and random gift that Covid gave me. It is the singular focus that helped me get through everything, the only purpose. Regardless of its merits, it will be an artifact of this era, a physical manifestation of time spent. It is also an object of grief, a deep sadness about the ephemeral nature of life and what feels more and more like a tenuous future.
The panic has not subsided, and it won't until the book is done. I have five weeks on sabbatical to finish writing it (which is probably why I'm procrastinating by writing this post instead). If I can just keep on schedule and get through the writing, I tell myself the rest of the drawing I can do in my sleep... My deadline is mid-December. (In my nightmares, I imagine my editor receiving the manuscript draft, taking one look, then realizing she's made a horrible mistake and canceling the whole thing.)
These years have felt like alternate dimensions traveled, like a very long and complicated dream. These are my 40s. This is also "midlife", the dark crisis we were warned about. And this virus, this disease of our times... has been a trip.