We Defy Augury

By way of update after last week's blog about the heady days of third-shot preventative re-Pfizer-ization, I was going to open this week's blog with "As far as I know, I don't have COVID." But it's still 2021 and this morning I half-choked on an English muffin and since then I've felt scratchy in the throat. So maybe I do actually have COVID! I haven't seen any indicators online whereby English muffin figures in as a signifying precursor of infection, but if you have seen any of those lists, pretty much everything is an indicator of COVID infection: respiratory, gastrointestinal, joint pain, headache, olfactory, cognitive, febrile, cardiac, neurological... basically anything off baseline is an indicator that you've got the 21st century bat pox. I think I remember Chris Cuomo saying he saw his dead grandparents or something when he got it, so maybe hallucination too, but you have to consider the source; that guy is weird about family stuff.

I still have my senses of taste and smell. I do feel cold all the time, but it is under 60 degrees here in inland Southern California, which passes for Positively Arctic in this neck of the woods, so that's obviously skewed by environmental factors. I haven't taken a test yet, but I used my last home test a few weeks ago when I felt too warm after working out. Long story short, I didn't have COVID then either. Turns out I just went too fucking hard at the gym, bro. It turns out the only disease I have is get-after-it-itis. Wish it was contagious, for your sake, bro, but you gotta go out and get it yourself. Like Lyme disease, bruh. Like fucking Lyme disease.

I spend way too much time wondering if I have COVID. I have three doses of the vax, so the odds are that even if I were exposed a) I would likely not get it, and b) if I did, the resulting illness would be mild and in no way life-threatening. Maybe I'd lose my sense of taste and/or smell, which doesn't sound like that big of a deal when the other things on the menu include suffocating to death, but I'm just a week or two away from the part of the year where I make ginger-molasses cookies. There are levels of risk I'm not prepared to accept.

That more or less answers the last question I have though: if I've gotten all the vaccine and boosters and I live in an area where the vaccination rates are actually respectable, am I ready to go full mask-free and live among the people, as a living, breathing, spittle-producing, grocery-cart-fondling member of the disgusting, disgusting human race?

I tried a little bit of it back after I finished my first round of vaccinations in May. I didn't wash my hands for 30 seconds every time I came back into the house, I lost track of my masks for a minute, I went to a full-attended sporting event or two... and then Delta showed up and this-is-Sparta kicked me back into the pit of paranoia and proactive vigilance. The masks came back out, the hand-washing recommenced and I re-adopted the Tourette's-like twitching and swearing at strangers who came within the six-foot cone of impermeability.

I would have liked to have been able to take it easier, but I'm an American living in a country where people gather around school board meetings to physically threaten and chase home adult administrators who have taken the brazen, audacious step of making decisions based on public health during a pandemic. It's not so much that I'm freaked out about the transmissibility of COVID itself, it's just that self-protection becomes even more of an imperative when you don't know who in the population around you has bought in to a Matt Gaetz level intellectual abdication of the basic tenets of cause-and-effect.

So this past week I've gone out there and masked up, more out of habit than anything. There's comfort in the habit of it, the kind of irrational hiding you learn as a toddler when you think covering your eyes makes you invisible. It's not totally irrational as apparently Omicron is out there now, punching through antibody responses at curious rates. And things are a bit more crowded out there in the retail space (the only place I really ever go these days) with the whole Christmas thing still annoyingly, persistently insisting on happening. But at some point it is going to be time to try it, to insert myself into the body politic, bareback, as it were. I know all the risks. I watched enough health class film reels and public service announcements in the 1980s to know that ultimately, if I get it, it will be all my fault.