What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year by Charles Finch

Author:Charles Finch [Finch, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Literary Collections, essays, Literary Criticism, General
ISBN: 9780593319079
Google: qS9GEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-15T00:17:39.937523+00:00

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What Pandemic? asks a headline. Carnival Cruise bookings soar 600 percent for August trips.

June 23

After more than a hundred days almost completely inside, people in New York can dine outdoors again, get takeout, shop, get haircuts, and so on. We ask Ben and Rachel how it’s going. She’s refreshing Seamless to see if her favorite Indian restaurant is open again yet. No luck so far.

I’ve settled into a routine despite my lack of will to work: three crabbed hours in the morning, a long walk if it’s not too hot, reading and admin after lunch, and then the pure, total relief of smoking. Not sustainable. I’ve done it before 3:00 the last few days. Time for a break, a week off starting today I’ve decided.

It was almost possible to forget in the thrill of the first few weeks of this month, but the pandemic is surfacing into sight. Partly that’s for the hopeful reason that Dr. Fauci has said a vaccine could be ready by the end of this year: “I believe it will be when and not if.” Everyone longs for this to be true. A few doctors on Twitter throw cold water on the idea. Nathan says he hopes Fauci’s right, but that some doctors think we might get a “garbage vaccine” around Christmas and then a better one in later 2021. We tell him that sucks. He concurs.

In most places the numbers are better, and in some they’re great. In New York, there were just five deaths today, the fewest since March 15. But in Florida, the numbers are spiraling upward, and leakers claim that the state is manipulating the data to make it look like Florida has fewer covid deaths than it does.

The governor of Florida is a “mini-Trump” named Ron DeSantis who went briefly viral for wearing a mask on upside down at a press briefing on covid. He’s a weird, stubby little fellow, a college athlete but in his current incarnation as hippy as Marilyn Monroe, frowning, with sausage fingers and the kind of lobster brown Florida tan that goes forty layers deep.

He’s been downplaying the virus since the start of the pandemic and people there are going to die. That’s true of many of these governors—none with states as big as Florida—but as it happens I went to college with this one, Ron DeSantis. He was the year ahead of me. I only met him a few times. Sometimes, today for instance, I contemplate the compromises he’s making with public health for his own calculated political reasons, and it’s too dark to think about once you start really getting into thinking about who’s about to die forever in Florida, which is a lot of communities without white faces for a start, and a lot of others filled with 91-year-old lifelong smoker die hard #MAGA believers, and reading about more of his stupid bullshit today, it’s stressful enough that on the stroke of 5:00, scrolling through stories about “D,” as

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