Year 0, F.O.

In Which Those That Fucketh Around, Findeth Out

Truth Coming Out of Her Well, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1896

Over the last few months, I’ve been sick with shingles (again), and very sick with an unpleasant illness that makes my brain fog worse. Whether this unpleasant illness is “New Covid”¹ or “Old Covid that’s Flaring Up Again” is impossible to tell, because like many other patients, I never test positive on PCR tests.² Just one of many examples where the phrase “we have the tools” is all about going through the motions, and creating a Potemkin Village of trust rather than the real thing.

I’ve been searching, in the midst of all this physical unpleasantness, for something to say, and something to write. Mostly though, I feel a sad blankness, a feeling beyond the anxiety, anger, and hypervigilance I’ve been cycling through these last few years. And while a large part of that blankness is surely the latest round of not-covid or maybe-covid or even worse long covid — a disease which is ripping through my higher brain function as surely as a mummifier’s hook — the other part is a sense of the present time, and the present nadir.

Things are not getting better.

Things are getting worse.

This last holiday season, everybody got sick. Everybody is still sick. Every zoom meeting, somebody is ill. Every doctor’s appointment, the doctor is ill, that is if he or she doesn’t cancel outright. The pharmacists have a hacking cough. Even my long covid doctor caught covid. If someone treating people crippled by long covid all day can’t avoid it, what hope do the rest of us have?

And it’s not just Covid. It’s a constant stream of disease. It’s, “Well my family got Covid and then we got RSV and now we’re sick again and we don’t even know what this latest round of illness is….”

These are the words I recently heard from my doctor, who is a neurosurgeon. He operates on peoples’ spines.

If I were to pick a group of people that I don’t want to repeatedly infect with a brain-damaging disease, “people who do spinal surgery” would be high on that list. But this is why can’t have nice things.

Meanwhile, on the world stage, we’re seeing rates of measles skyrocketing to a 30-fold increase. Funny thing about measles — it erases immune memory. If you have chickenpox, and then you get measles, you can get chickenpox again. A few years ago, a study came out that said the rates of all-cause child mortality went down after the measles vaccine was rolled out, because it had been weakening children so badly that they became more vulnerable to multiple kinds of infections even years afterwards. So if measles is breaking out everywhere…well, it’s not good.

And as with measles, Covid also weakens immunity, although probably by different mechanisms / degrees.³ So now Covid can make you more likely to get measles, which in turn will weaken you even further and make it more likely to contract everything else.

Just today, news broke that a cruise ship is under quarantine due to a suspicion of cholera. Cholera!

In addition — and I would find this latest news frightening if, again, I was feeling anything other than resigned numbness at the moment — data has come out of Finland showing an alarming increase in birth defects, and increasing more every year:

In a normal world with a functioning media, a 16-fold increase in birth defects would be front page, banner headline news. But, just as Covid has destroyed our personal immune systems, capitalism and the forces aligned with business-as-usual have destroyed the press. The press always served as a kind of immune system for society itself. Now our society is missing this first and most important protective layer.

So instead of front-page news, we are left to maybe stumble upon world-changing information such as this when a few people on Twitter scream it into the void — until Twitter learns to completely suppress this information as well.

Morever, each wave of Covid is leaving a new cohort of freshly-disabled people in its wake, and since this latest surge of immune-evasive variant JN.1 has been the second-highest in the whole pandemic, this latest cohort will be very large, indeed.

In short, the holiday season of 2023 and beginning of 2024 seems to be the start of a sea change. While many in society could tune out the consequences of let ‘er rip for the first few years, it seems that with this latest wave, the Fuck Around era is ending.

We are now officially entering Year 0: Find Out.

As Sarah Kendzior has noted, being a Cassandra means taking no pleasure in being right. It was late 2020 when I would lie in the dark, unable to sleep, calculating in my head different long-term scenarios and disability metrics. “If Covid disables just .5% of the time, by 2030 how many people will be disabled?….but if it disables 1% of the time…with 200 million workers…assuming most people get Covid at least every other year….” and on and on it went in my unquiet mind.

No matter how I ran my scenarios, or how generously I assumed some people might manage to avoid Covid completely for years on end, I still came up with hellish outcomes where millions of people would soon be taken out of the workforce, either due to their own disability, or because they’d have to care for their newly-disabled family members.

While it wasn’t clear to me whether “soon” was going to be in 1, 3, or 7 years, it was clear to me that the tsunami was coming, and on the cosmic scale of things, whether it was due to arrive in 2025 or 2030 was immaterial. It was coming too soon to stop it. It was coming too soon and too brutally to be anything other than a catastrophe when it arrived.

I thought staring at this abyss of neatly-laid-out numbers, comprehending how little time we had until our workforce imploded, was fairly “rock bottom” for me. But, as the Russian saying goes, I thought I’d hit rock bottom, but then I heard knocking from below. Because now, of course, I’m too sick to even be able to do these calculations in my head anymore. My brain regularly feels like somebody doused it with battery acid and then inserted an immersion blender into it for good measure. Just as Cassandra couldn’t prevent herself from being enslaved by Agamemnon,⁴ we are all caught in this maelstrom. That’s why it’s called “public” health, not “my own private island” health.

So, the question I have in this Year 0 of Our Lord Findeth Out…Now What?

In the following year, I’ll be writing about what’s next. Given that we’ve been assigned to a dystopian hellscape that is somehow the perfect blend of Idiocracy and The Handmaid’s Tale, how do we, you know, live?

If it takes 5 or 10 or 15 years for a sterilizing vaccine, or a PreP for Covid, where does that leave us in the meantime?

How does a person live a good and worthwhile life in the midst of all this? Is it even possible?

And, to be clear, I definitely, absolutely, do not have the answers to these questions. Covid has been brutal for my relationships, my body, my mental health, and my overall sense of connection and purpose in this world.

But I am trying to follow the advice of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and love the questions:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

So; this is the journey, for all the terrible, terrible questions, that we will all be living into the answer. I do not know how to do this. Mostly likely, you do not either. But let’s share it together. I’d rather have my apocalypse with some company.

1. Much like New Coke, New Covid leaves much to be desired.

2. My Long Covid specialist says that he sees many instances where entire families get sick, and only some of them ever test positive.

3. One thing I have learned in the last few years: immunology is very, very complicated, and I don’t really understand it.

4. Or slaughtered by Klytemnestra — Cassandra really got the shit end of the stick.