Entry 592: We're Gonna Need A New New Normal

These coronavirus variants seem perfectly timed to keep me from visiting my family in the Pacific Northwest. This summer we had to scuttle a trip because I actually contracted the disease (almost certainly the Delta variant), and now Omicron has emerged at the exact right-wrong moment, when we are scheduled to fly out on Monday. Dealing with holiday airport crowds, and then being in an enclosed tube with a bunch of strangers for five hours, is awful in normal times. I didn't think it could get much worse, but here we are.  

To make things even more unsettling, we had a few close contact situations this week. Lil' S1 had to stay home from school yesterday because a kid in his class tested positive. It was kinda ridiculous, however, because the kid was last in school Friday last week. So it was a full seven days after contact. At that point, why even bother? The damage is already done, if there is any. But there almost certainly wasn't because Lil' S1 wasn't sick (a week later) and should have been able to go to school. Whatever. It wasn't a big deal for us to have him home with us. We're fortunate that way.

Also, earlier in the week, I got an email from a friend I played pub trivia with on Sunday saying he tested positive for Covid. I debated on whether or not I should get tested, but ultimately decided against it. It was already three days after contact, and I'm booster-vaxxed, and I already got Covid, which means I'm probably (not definitely) pretty well inoculated, even against Omicron. Plus, mostly importantly, I wasn't sick. So, I figured I could just stay out of public, and wait it out, which is basically the same thing I would do even if I had it. (Also, for what it's worth, five other people on my team did get tested and all were negative.)

I will admit, however, that part of me didn't want to get tested because I was scared it would come back positive and ruin our trip. Then I felt guilty about this, so I confessed it to S, and she told me I should at least tell my family about it, so I sent everybody a text explaining everything, and everybody was cool about it. They get it. There's no way to be totally safe. Of course, I don't want to be reckless, but by the time we fly out on Monday it will be eight days after my close contact, and we've made it a point to not be around anybody outside the family since then (except the kids at school). If I, nor anybody else in the family, is sick on Monday (so far so good), then I think we've done pretty much all we can. You can't practically get much safer than that. If early indications concerning Omicron bear out, we might have to adopt a new new normal in which symptoms guide us more so than test results.

Although that can be tricky for people like me because I can manifest symptoms in my head just by thinking about them. I'm not a hypchondriac, but I do have an obsessive side to me, so I can fixate on the smallest twinge or pang and scare myself into thinking it's a sign of Covid. This is especially annoying for me because I kinda live my life with low-grade Covid symptoms. I always have a little bit of a runny nose (especially in the winter); I frequently wake up with a dry throat (presumably because of how I breath in my sleep); I lift weights regularly, so my muscles are often sore; and I'm always tired because I go to bed too late.

You know how you can say a word over and over until it doesn't make any sense? Ant, ant, ant, ant, ant, ant, ant... I can do that with Covid symptoms. I can dwell on them in my own head, until I can't tell if I actually feel them or not. Thankfully, at some point, life will snap me out of this -- I'll have to take a call or rake the leaves or cook dinner or something -- and then I'll forget about it, and then I'll remember again later, but this time I'll realize that I'm definitely not actually sick, because if I was, I would have noticed it while I was doing whatever it is I was doing earlier. And then I'll feel a little ache in my thigh and the entire sequence will repeat itself. It's a fun a little cycle.

And speaking of things not making sense, lest we get there with this post, I'm going to wrap it up now.

Until next time...

Entry 591: Beatlemania

I finally finished all seven and a half hours of the new Beatles documentary Get Back. It took me a week, but I did it. It's really good, even if, like, 70% of it is just them sitting around playing the same few songs (often poorly at first) over and over again. I kinda fell in bro-love with 28-year-old Paul McCartney. He comes off as the coolest, most talented dude to ever live. There's a scene of him working out the beats for "Get Back" for the first time that's just phenomenal. He also seems like he's the only one who genuinely wants to keep the Beatles together and move them forward in new ways. John seems so sick of it all -- cynical and sarcastic; George is clearly resentful of the band's hierarchy and wants to move out from behind the Lennon-McCartney shadow and do his own thing; and Ringo comes off as the go-with-the-flow, happy-to-be-there, ride-this-train-while-it's-running role player, which I appreciate because that's probably how I would be. Billy Preston is also in a lot of it. He stops by one day to say hi, and the band adopts him as their electric piano player. Imagine being such a good musician that you can just walk in off the street, join the Beatles, and make them better -- so badass.

I found myself getting really annoyed by John in the first part of this doc. I've long thought he was a bit of a charlatan and a hypocrite. The "deep" thinker who actually has nothing interesting to say. But then at about hour three or so, during a break, I read an old Playboy interview he and Yoko did in 1980 (only a few months before he died), and I revised my views a bit. The weird thing is that the only reason I read the interview is because I heard John was very critical of Paul in it, and I wanted to be indignant about it, but then I found myself liking, or at least understanding, John more and more as I read on.

He is needlessly brutal to Paul in it, but he at least acknowledges his own failings -- except when he doesn't. That's the thing I came to appreciate. It's not that John was a hypocrite, it's that he was a genuine contradiction. He didn't have perfectly formed ideological boundaries, and I think that's something most people can appreciate. A lot of his quotes remind me of quotes from '90s grunge rockers who were simultaneously embarrassed and enthralled by their fame -- like Kurt Cobain publicly mocking Nirvana's world-wide success, while privately facilitating it. It's not hard to see how this type of internal struggle could really mess with somebody's soul, especially if you toss heroin into the mix (as it was for both Lennon and Cobain). 

We've seen a lot of rock 'n' roll icons come out the other side of this and grow into lovably cantankerous old coots, and we've seen a lot die young. John falls into the latter category, but, who knows, if he wasn't tragically murdered maybe he and Paul would have totally reconciled, and we would have had a Beatles '88 tour that would have made like a $100 billion and been slightly disappointing to everybody who attended it. I mean, Paul and Yoko apparently have an amicable relationship now (and have for years). They were co-producers of the documentary. If a history of rock 'n' roll feuds have taught us anything, it's that they usually fade if everybody lives long enough to let that happen.

Also, part of why I didn't like John very much, I now realize, might be my own personal pettiness. Few things are more deflating than loving a piece of art and then hearing the artist shit on it. Yeah, you know that thing that means so much to you? It's actually very insignificant and you're an insignificant person for thinking it's actually meaningful. Get a life, man! It's makes you feel like a fool. (It's still real to me, dammit!) I mean, in the interview, John talks about his time with the Beatles as if it was just a job he once did with some dudes he once knew and nothing truly great came out of it. (Although, it's tough to say if this sentiment is heartfelt or if it's a defense mechanism. I mean, he claims his music with Yoko is better than his stuff with the Beatles and that history will vindicate his opinion. That is something nobody could actually believe.) I prefer artists like Quentin Tarantino who love their art at least as much as I do and don't pretend like they don't. But artists should be able to feel any way they want about their art. If I don't like their opinion on it, then that's on me, really.

Another thing is that I always thought I liked Paul's Beatles songs more than John's, but when I actually look at the list, it's a lot closer to 50-50 than I thought. In fact, I might even give the edge to John (and George has some bangers too). Let's test it: I'm going to pick my three favorite* songs off of each Beatles album and tally up the results. One point goes to the composer of each song listed below. If the composer is not a Beatle or it was composed by two Beatles, then the primary singer gets a point. If it was a true 50-50 collaboration, then both collaborators get a point. I'll link to my very favorite* song from each album and give a bonus point to its composer.

*My favorites right now, as I write this. Catch me on a different day and I might pick totally different songs. 

Here goes...

Please Please Me: "I Saw Her Standing There" (McCartney), "Love Me Do" (McCartney), "Do You Want to Know a Secret" (Lennon)

With the Beatles: "It Won't Be Long" (Lennon), "All My Loving" (McCartney), "Don't Bother Me" (Harrison)

A Hard Days Night: "A Hard Day's Night" (Lennon), "I'm Happy Just to Dance with You" (Lennon), "And I Lover Her" (McCartney)

Beatles for Sale: "No Reply" (Lennon), "I'll Follow the Sun" (McCartney), "Eight Days a Week" (McCartney)

Help!: "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" (Lennon), "I've Just Seen a Face" (McCartney), "Yesterday" (McCartney)

Rubber Soul: "You Won't See Me" (McCartney), "I'm Looking Through You" (McCartney), "In My Life" (Lennon)

Revolver: "Eleanor Rigby" (McCartney), "I'm Only Sleeping" (Lennon), "Doctor Robert" (Lennon)

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: "Getting Better" (McCartney), "She's Leaving Home" (McCartney), "A Day in the Life" (Lennon/McCartney)

Magical Mystery Tour: "The Fool on the Hill" (McCartney), "I am the Walrus" (Lennon), "Penny Lane" (McCartney)

White Album: "Back In the USSR" (McCartney), "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (Harrison), "Blackbird" (McCartney)

Yellow Submarine: "All Together Now" (McCartney), "Hey Bulldog" (McCartney), "All You Need is Love" (Lennon) 

Abbey Road: "Come Together" (Lennon), "Something" (Harrison), Medley (Lennon/McCartney)

Let It Be: "Two of Us" (McCartney), "I've Got a Feeling" (Lennon/McCartney), "Get Back" (McCartney)

Non-Album Songs Early: "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" (Lennon/McCartney), "Day Tripper" (Lennon), "Paperback Writer" (McCartney)

Non-Album Songs Late: "Hey Jude" (McCartney), "Don't Let Me Down" (Lennon), "Old Brown Shoe" (Harrison)

Final Tally:
McCartney 34
Lennon 24
Harrison 7

Well, there you have it. I guess I do like Paul best. Although if you just look at very best songs from the albums, it would be Paul 7, John 6, and George 3. (The latter is pretty impressive considering how few songs George wrote for the band.) So, at their best, they were all pretty close.

And that, I guess, is the takeaway: The Beatles were all brilliant. They were a once in a century collaboration, which is why I just did a blog post on them, even though they broke up almost a decade before I was born. They are perhaps the most enduring pop culture entity ever, and I would gladly watch another eight hours of tape on them if such footage ever gets unearthed.

Until next time...

Entry 590: Uh-Omicron

I'm not freaked out about Omicron, but I am non-trivially concerned about it, in a very selfish way. I'm not worried about my safety or the safety of loved ones or even that of society at large; I'm worried this new Covid variant is going to somehow mess up our travel plans to visit my family in a few weeks. I haven't seen them in person in two and a half years (save my brother-in-law, whom we briefly saw this summer), and we've already had to reschedule this trip once due to Covid. It would really, really suck if things get derailed again.

I'm cautiously optimistic that that won't happen, though. My hunch is that Omicron is going to cause another surge (hopefully a small one) but not put us totally back to square one. The early evidence is that it is more transmissible, but I don't think it's going to be like a whole new disease against which we have no immunization. I suspect vaccines and natural antibodies will grant us some protection against it, and in a few months we will all need another special variant-specific booster. As long as it isn't significantly more lethal for fully vaccinated people, I'm not scared of it. Even if a bunch more people contract it, if the worse thing that happens is they are bedridden for a few days, like I was in August, then that's not that bad. We can live mostly normal* lives under those circumstances, especially if treatment and testing technology continues to improve. Although, the latter is one area I think we've gotten totally wrong in this country from the get-go. We should have put resources into getting cheap, reasonably reliable rapid tests into stores. Imagine if you were throwing a dinner party and you could ask everybody attending to take a test an hour before they came -- how much would that do to reduce Covid spread and set people's minds at ease? A lot, I suspect. And we could still do it! My understanding is that there are some regulatory/financial hurdles impeding this course of action, but, c'mon, where there's a will, there's a way. Get on that, Joe!

*New normal, which could include indoor masking and/or vaccine requirements.

I could be wrong about all this, however. I'm not a virologist, and even if I was, I'm definitely not a seer, which is what you really need to be to accurately say what's going to happen. Even the experts can't predict the future with a high degree of certitude. The best we can do at this point, it seems to me, is follow the basic safety guidelines*, live our lives, and hope for the best.

*Vaccinations are still the key. I just got a booster yesterday (along with a flu shot). My arm hurts a little, and I'm quite tired -- I mean, even more so than usual -- but otherwise not experiencing pronounced side effects. My boys got their second doses on Tuesday and both felt a bit under the weather on Wednesday, but it was nothing a good night's sleep couldn't take care of.

So, I'm not worried about Omicron, I'm worried about Delta -- the airline. They keep jerking us around with our tickets, imposing huge changes to our itinerary with no other alerts than emails that could easily be snagged by a spam filter. The latest is our outbound flight now leaves Dulles at 6:00 am (meaning we need to wake up at, like, 3:30 am), and we have a layover in NYC. And this was the best we could get after S spent an hour on hold to talk to an agent -- the initial changes were even worse. The layover is what really chaps my hide. We are always willing to pay the extra for a direct flight. It's not that switching planes with a family of four is a massive inconvenience (although it is), it's that a second flight introduces so many more potential problems. We've got an hour and a half between flights, which is fine if everything goes smoothly, but that's a big if, especially around the holidays.

What can you do though? We are at the mercy of big air. Changing carriers incurs a huge financial hit (S has some sort of Delta voucher she's using to subsidize the tickets), and there is no guarantee a different airline would be any better. We usually fly United, and anecdotally, they are better than Delta, but it's not like they are devoid of delays and cancellations.

In other news, we got a new TV. It's a little bigger than our old one, but mainly we got it because we couldn't stream everything to our old TV. I bought our old one the day we brought Lil' S1 back from the hospital. (The NFL season was about to begin, and I realized I couldn't spend hours in a sports bar every Sunday anymore.) So, it was nine years ago, just before the proliferation of app-based smart TVs. In theory, it could connect to the internet and stream Netflix directly, but the only time I tried to do it, I got an error message, so we just bought a Chromecast stick and cast everything from another device. It usually worked, but there were some services that didn't allow it, and even the ones that did were buggy sometimes. It's so much nicer to have everything built-in and fast. It's one of those things, where once we set it up, it was like, Why didn't we do this years ago?

Now the question is whether or not I break down and get Hulu+ or some sort of TV subscription. I've been hesitant to do it because we already have a bunch of streaming services, and our digital antenna works quite well for the over-the-air channels. But I only have access to all the live sports I want (ESPN, TBS, FS1, etc.) through other people's cable accounts. I used my friend JY's account for a long time, but they moved to two-factor authentication, so every time it logs me out, I have to text him to text me an authorization code within five minutes, which gets annoying after a while (presumably for him to). I still have my parent's account, which is good because it doesn't require two-factor, but if it ever does, or they get rid of it, which my dad once said they might, then I might have to bite the bullet and pay for Hulu+.

The thing is, it's not necessarily the cost that bothers me. It's that I have to pay bundle prices for like the five channels I want, which is the reason I quit cable in the first place. (Well, that, and we had DirecTV, and a tree grew and blocked transmission to our dish.) Having a bunch of individual streaming services has its own annoyances, but at least you can better tailor them to what you want. I just get so resentful paying for things I never want to watch, especially when it's $70 per month, the current cost of Hulu+. Not only will I never watch the vast majority of channels that come in the bundle, I won't even watch much of those I will watch. I'd be paying all that money to put a game on in the background once or twice a week while I do other things -- just doesn't seem worth it.

One thing that is worth it: Disney+. Mainly it's for the kids, but it has a few things S and I enjoy. I'm really looking forward to getting started on this eight-hour Beatles documentary I've heard so much about. In fact, I was kinda hoping I'd feel a little shittier from my booster, so that I would have an excuse to lie down on the sofa and knock out a few hours of it. Alas, I'm well enough to be a functioning member of society. But S is going out with some friends tonight, so I'll be getting my Get Back on at some point.

Until next time...