Notes from the Sick Bed

The vanity of ad hominem attacks, podcast appearances with Michael Moynihan and Eli Lake, and a pitch for your Chicago connections

Good morning! So I was in Home Depot the other day, looking to buy a 24-inch electric range. This, because the induction range we bought last spring, frankly I hate it. Everything in the oven burns, and the burners up top are completely unmanageable, on a “2” the food sort of lies there, on a “3” it burns immediately. Then the oven stopped turning on completely, anyway, as I was walking into Home Depot I noted the impulse-buy bags of soil and sprouting bulbs and thought, yes, next trip, but today I am just a little tired….

“Hello?” I said, answering the phone as I was considering a four-burner Hotpoint and learning why I was tired: Covid.

The first time I caught the bug was December 2021. A slew of us went to a Reason holiday party in downtown NYC and, within the week, 80% of us were wiped out.

This was back in the days when Covid tests were as rare as blue-footed boobys, and somehow, I found out that my friend Karol Markowicz had a spare one. I grabbed a Lyft to her place in Park Slope, where her tween daughter met me on the stoop and handed off the test in a brown paper bag like it was so much contraband. Then I took another Lyft to Matt Welch’s, as he and his tween daughter had already come down with Covid and, gentleman that he is, he offered to give me the test. That’s how foreign and scary taking a test was in yonder innocent days…

I spent Christmas alone in my apartment, rereading Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, who had just died. I didn’t feel great but, it wasn’t too bad.

Let’s see what’s changed in the intervening two-plus years…