Damn, my friend. What a horrible story. I’m so sorry that you’ve had to go through this and I’m glad you’re getting help for it.
And I’m very glad you feel that way about us that you think you can share it.
Thank you for all you do and did.
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For the last couple of days, I keep hovering my cursor over the Reply button, but I don’t know what to write to you. I’m so glad you shared that. But so incapable of actually understanding or relating to your experience beyond that.
It was over a month after 9-11 that I went to NYC, and I remember getting off the train in Grand Central Station, walking through the main concourse and starting up one of the long ramps up and out to the street, as I’d done many times. And running along the middle of the ramps, there were the bulletin boards set up, side by side, running the full length of the long ramp, completely plastered over with photos of the missing and desperate notes full of (futile) hope.
I thought I’d be able to just walk right past them, just keep moving. Lots of other people were. But I couldn’t stop looking. I finally just stopped and walked up to the closest one and started actually looking at the faces and reading the notes, and that was really stupid, because then I started crying in the middle of all those people.
I’ll never forget the suddenness of that grief, the reality of those missing people. And it was nothing at all to what you saw and experienced. I just can’t even imagine what you go through, Jon.
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That’s the thing that gets me, and I don’t know if I’ll express it very well or not.
John we see you here all the time, we game with you, we laugh with you, we see the side of you that you present to the outside world.
However, we don’t know what you’re dealing with all the time. We don’t see this inner side of you until you present it like you did here.
It really puts in front of our faces that no matter how chummy we are with our friends online, and even in person if we’re not close enough to see the warts in somebody, we don’t really know what’s going on in somebody’s life and the struggle that they’re facing, no matter what it is.
So again, I have to say thank you for trusting us enough to share something as traumatic as this with us.
It puts a bunch of things in perspective.
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Thanks for the kind replies all. I’ve been studiously avoiding the news, social media, etc, which I always do around this time of year, but especially this year with the twentieth anniversary.
Had a therapy appointment on the 10th, and she asked if I felt like crying; I didn’t have it in me right then, felt emotionally numb or whatever. But typing that post and seeing the replies was a great catharsis, and I’ll stress again how strange it is to be closer friends with people on the internet than some of the face to face people you know.
You all have a place in my heart and home should you need it, despite the side eye that my wife will offer.
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No link because it’s in a Breitbart piece.
That’s a gold in the mental gymnastics.
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Yeah, that’s what I don’t understand.
I thought the vaccine was terrible?
They’re talking out of both sides of their mouths.
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My wife had a great idea on how to get the Right to get vaccinated. Keep the vaccine free in blue states, and then start charging for it in red states, and like Shkreli prices on the vaccine.
This will just anger The Right so much that the lefties are charging them for something that blue states get for free, they will show us what is what by getting into their pickups and driving to a blue state and getting a free vaccine! That will show us!
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On a related note, https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/ has provided me with delicious schadenfreude.
Just more goalpost moving … first the vaccine wasn’t FDA-approved (“emergency approval isn’t good enough”), then they didn’t trust the FDA, and now we’ve added one more shovel of bullshit to the top of the pile in the completely crazy corners of the country.
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My favourite is “icu isn’t busy because I’ve seen nurses dancing on TikTok” but “icu is full of people who are reacting to the vaccine”
Edit: also, much to my amusement, there was an anti everything protest planned, they’ve just had to move it forward because their date was going to be after lockdown ended. No point in having an anti lockdown protest if there’s nothing left to protest about right?
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Going to a cinema tomorrow for the first time in 4 years. It hurts my heart to see the turnout cinemas make with DUNE (2020) now, knowing it might be the death sentence to DUNE (part 2).
Anyways…curious about all the new norms regarding herd behavior while watching movies in a cinema (post(?))-covid…
Wait–there’s a vaccine to protect us from Trump? How did I not know about this?
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Sign me up!
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I did really well for most of the pandemic. I really did not mind quarantine. I am going out a little these days. I have dinner with a friend every other Monday night. My wife, daughter and I rented a house in the Poconos for a week this summer, and another in the Hudson Valley another week.
And yet I have had a very short fuse the past month or so. A car making a left turn while I was in the crosswalk with friends, my kid and my friends kids got full barrels from me a couple weekends ago, I literally tried to pull someone out of a car I was so angry.
I have not got into a fight on the street in a decade.
My friend who I have dinner with regularly said he had been feeling the same only the past couple months also, and that he knew others that were feeling similarly.
I don’t think it is the pandemic itself though. Not sure. I discussed it with my therapist, and usually he can help me figure out the root of something like this, but not this time.
Anyway, just venting here.
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Maybe it’s just how it seemed like we were done yet now we got thrown back into it. That whiplash caused by Delta and vaccine hesitancy might be part of what has worn on you of late.
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I’ve had a similarly short fuse lately, too, so I guess it’s nice to know I’m not alone. The vaccine hesitancy might very well be part of it—I’m definitely pissed at people taking that stance and how it affects everyone else. I’m back to work in person but masked up unless I’m alone in my office. Part of my frustration is losing the hope that we’d be “back to normal” by now—we’re anything but that.
Hang in there, Kenn—I keep telling myself better days are coming. Just don’t know when.
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What @Hustlertwo said. This pandemic will never end, not because we don’t have the medical knowledge or ingenuity, but because huge swaths of this country’s population would rather infect others and die before taking a free vaccine. And if you are trying to remain sane with kids, elderly parents, immuno-compromised people near and dear to you, etc., it can be overwhelming. And that’s without mentioning Us national politics and climate change!
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So 50 days later, it appears the attempt to eliminate covid in New Zealand has failed. Despite a hard national lockdown after discovering 1 case, it seems our efforts weren’t enough. Delta moved faster than our ability to keep it bottled up. The populace has been generally compliant, yet daily case numbers stubbornly stayed in the teens, with new cases spawning new locations of interest for the contact tracers, which lead to more clusters of cases and so on.
The good news is that sacrifice has allowed a significant majority of the country to be vaccinated. New Zealand had previously donated a large part of its vaccine stock to covax and the pacific islands, and its really pleasing that when New Zealand needed help the government was able to swiftly source large numbers of doses with good faith deals from Spain and Denmark. The single dose vaccination rate is close to 80%, which I assume will convert into 80% fully vaccinated in the near future.
I write this today because Delta has finally broken out of the city it was ring fenced in, and has just started spreading around towns nearby. Delta has shown that it can’t be eliminated, so now we get to take part in the next phase of the experiment. What is the effect of delta on a highly vaccinated community with zero previous exposure to the virus? Let’s find out.
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This fucking world.
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I went to college about 10 minutes up the mountain from Cumberland, and I have to tell you, this does not surprise me. There are a lot of great people in the area, I loved going to school there, but there are also a lot of people who have never left that very rural area in their lives, own lots of guns, and harbor a lot of hate.
Here’s a write-up of a recent book about Appalachian culture, if you’re curious:
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