I don't know about you, but for now I'm going to hold on to the illusion that the pandemic is over, while trying not to become irresponsible in my behavior.
It is just too delicious to openly socialize with people in our houses or the cafes and restaurants that are open now. Doing so has started to bring back a vitality to my daily life that was lacking for too long.
There's a certain urgency behind my need to "network" and connect again. Not for professional reasons any longer, but for much deeper reasons. Let me explain.
I came close enough to dying two years ago to get a sense of what that will be like. And for many, many months afterward I had trouble going to sleep at night -- I was afraid I wouldn't ever wake up again. This was what you could call a severe sleep disorder if it needs a name. For at least a year, maybe longer, I woke up every other hour all night long as if my brain was programmed by a checklist.
"Yep, 3 a.m., still alive. Okay, you can go back to sleep now."
As if that would work.
Eventually after hundreds of nights of waking up over and over, something started to change. Slowly, and I mean really slowly, I gave up the worrying about dying bit.
Since it hadn't happened yet, I reasoned, it must not be all that easy to do -- the dying part, that is. Then I had an epiphany: It wasn't the fear of dying that was keeping me awake, it was the fear of not living.
Two sides of the same coin perhaps, but two very different sides.
Since I'd survived serious health problems, I now rather desperately wanted to feel completely alive again, to experience the things I'd been fortunate enough to know previously. This epiphany, of course, will strike anyone more savvy than I will ever be as rather pathetic and obvious, but it was also clear that something besides not dying was keeping me from fully living, at least the way I yearned to do.
And that something was Covid-19.
Not being able to freely move about, see people, meet people, share moments, have conversations, fall in love -- all of that had been placed into a state of suspension.
So I started to write about it. I wrote and wrote and wrote some more. I became the virtual Forest Gump of writers. Write, David, write. As I posted my writings on Facebook, more and more people started to respond, until I spent as much time every day corresponding with people as I did with writing.
In the process, I realized that only a minority of the new friends I was making via social media were other journalists, because they asked basic but crucial questions about the news, especially Covid. So I decided to research the pandemic and seek out articles from a wide variety of sources that might answer some of my Facebook friends' questions.
That led in a natural way to an unconscious decision to just go ahead and start aggregating all the news that mattered on a daily basis. After all, it was an election year. And since I'd been doing this already for the better part for a half-century, it wasn't much trouble and maybe it would prove a service to people who felt uncertain what information they could trust among all of the stuff circulating out there.
And there is a lot of stuff circulating out there in this Internet Age, much of it useless or worse -- dangerous.
Fast forward a year or so, most of us have gotten vaccinated and life has started to return to what we used to consider normal. I could cease my efforts to process the news but by now it has become too ingrained in my daily routine for me to tinker with it. Like most people, I am a creature of habit, albeit in my case, some fairly weird habits, like reading hundreds of news stories when nobody pays me to do that.
Anyway, back to my point, if I have a point, much more recently I started sleeping almost all the way through the night. I stopped worrying about dying, because now I am focusing much more on getting enough rest so I can be ready for the excitement the following day may bring.
And I'm really enjoying this living in the moment thing.
Life is precious, but not infinite, and it's certainly not always pleasant or simple. Some days it is complicated and messy. I have all the old yearnings and heartaches I have always had. And of course no one can say how much longer we have until the masks will return (they already are in some places) as well as the new variant after delta that may bring all of this happiness to a screeching halt.
If and when that happens, we'll all be sad. And we'll have to hunker down again.
But I know one thing -- until then, I ain't gettin' cheated!
***
While I was writing the above, the disturbing news about vaccinated people in Massachusetts getting sick broke, and the inability the government to convince the unvaccinated to save themselves has become clear.
That we may be teetering on the verge of a new surge makes getting together with friends and loved ones all the more urgent. So don't put those plans off. If you do, they may go into a holding pattern before the next window for seeing each other opens up again.
THE HEADLINES:
* World Economy Roars Back From Covid-19 Collapse --The world economy likely returned to its pre-pandemic size in the spring, according to economists, but new variants of Covid-19 are casting a cloud over the global expansion. (WSJ)
* How Europe, After a Fumbling Start, Overtook the U.S. in Vaccination
-- Just a few months ago, European Union efforts were a mess, but its problems were temporary. The United States turned out to have the more lasting challenge. (NYT)* CDC document cites delta variant’s ability to spread among the vaccinated -- Scientists were so alarmed by the new research cited in the internal document, obtained by The Washington Post, that the agency significantly changed mask guidance for vaccinated people even before making the data public. (WP)
* Biden Seeks to Revive Vaccine Effort With New Rules and Incentives -- The president said those refusing to get a coronavirus shot should expect inconveniences as long as they decline a vaccine. (NYT)
* What if the Unvaccinated Can’t Be Persuaded? -- To reach herd immunity, we need a different approach. (NYT)
* Where People Are Most Vulnerable to the Delta Variant -- Estimates show much of the country is still susceptible to the kind of rapid spread that can put stress on hospitals and lead to worse outcomes for patients. (NYT)
* States race to use COVID-19 vaccines before they expire (AP)
* The amount of Greenland ice that melted on Tuesday could cover Florida in 2 inches of water. (CNN)
* Another heat wave will hit the Pacific Northwest late this week and continue into this weekend, which could make the Bootleg fire in southern Oregon and the Dixie fire in Northern California even harder to control. The Dixie fire has burned 220,000 acres so far. (California Today)
* Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is set to introduce bold legislation today that would create a guaranteed income program in the U.S. to send $1,200 a month directly to most Americans. Her measure would fund pilot programs in hundreds of communities, then start a national program in 2028. [HuffPost]
* How Biden Got the Infrastructure Deal Trump Couldn’t -- The early success of the deal vindicated the president’s faith in bipartisanship. If he can keep it on track, it will help affirm the rationale for his presidency. (NYT)
* When Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) took the stage on Jan. 6 to rile up Donald Trump supporters ahead of their violent siege of the U.S. Capitol, he was wearing body armor under his windbreaker. [HuffPost]
* U.S. flies 200 Afghan interpreters and family members to Virginia, in first wave of evacuations (WP)
* These Herders Lived in Peaceful Isolation. Now, War Has Found Them. -- Accompanied by their livestock, hundreds tried to flee the Wakhan Corridor, a mountainous region of Afghanistan now threatened by the Taliban. But they were turned back by northern neighbors (NYT)
* Encouragement Of Family, Friends Motivating Man To Keep Struggling Indefinitely (The Onion)
***
"Your Cheatin' Heart"
Song by Drifting Cowboys (aka Hank Williams)
Songwriters: Lovetta Pippen / Fred Thomas / Warren Michael Defever
Your cheatin' heart will make you weep
You'll cry and cry and try to sleep
But sleep won't come
The whole night through
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you
When tears come down like fallin' rain
You'll toss around and call my name
You'll walk the floor the way I do
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you
Your cheatin' heart will pine someday
And crave the love you threw away
The time will come when you'll be blue
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you
When tears come down like fallin' rain
You'll toss around and call my name
You'll walk the floor the way I do
Your cheatin' heart will tell on you
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