The country woke up with Triple Sec and cranberry juice on its breath. Just out of reach: the scuffed brick of a Nokia phone, a bottle of pills to stoke the serotonin, 2½ pounds of more than you needed to know about President John Adams. The phone on the nightstand couldn’t read the news, so on went the television. Something about a woman in the Houston suburbs who drowned her five children in the bathtub. And that D.C. intern — another intern scandal — was still missing, and her parents were suspicious of a congressman with whom she allegedly had an affair. In Las Vegas that week, Whitney Houston accepted a BET lifetime achievement award at the ripe old age of 37. (Sept. 3, 2021)
Yes, a truly rotten year. America ragged, wrung-out, coding blue in hospitals, bleeding red in the streets. A frightening spring, a feverish summer, a school year in shambles, a third wave of virus, a hard-candy Christmas. Restaurants, theater, church and sports turned into herky-jerky approximations of what used to be routine joy. Jobs gone. Togetherness gone. One in every 1,000 Americans, gone from covid-19. Millions more who don’t care, who are living in their own worlds instead of the one that desperately needs their cooperation. It was hard to breathe. It was hard to see smiles, even if they were there. It was hard to think good thoughts when bombarded by so much bad.
Here’s something, though: Eloise learned to ride a bike. (Dec. 29, 2020)
Plywood capital of a screw-loose nation. Boarded up, braced for impact, zombie-eyed and pulse-crazy, bluer than blue but governed by a red menace with enduring appeal out there in the several states. There was supposed to be catharsis Tuesday night, or at least a preview of catharsis, but all Washington got was another round in the torture chamber of the U.S. electoral system, with the media as scourge, unable to escape or exclaim because of a pandemic (worsening once again) that’s put much of the nation under volunteer house arrest. (Nov. 4, 2020)
The past 45 months have been all plot and no climax. Now we have, a mere five weeks away, a presidential referendum that many anxious Americans are counting on to provide catharsis — relief from a bad dream, or at least the affirmation of a waking nightmare. Instead, we may have a Dark November: disbelief, ambiguity, rage, resistance, depression. A contested election piled on to economic and racial turmoil, destruction and trauma from epic wildfires out West, and a possible third wave of the coronavirus — all while colder weather traps us in our homes and shorter days rob us of light and warmth. (Sept. 28, 2020)
American exceptionalism was our preexisting condition
America is sick. Still sick. The fever spikes, abates, returns. The shortness of breath lingers. America is waiting in virtual bread lines, listening to bad jazz, on hold with the unemployment office. America is strewn with the glass shards of Starbucks windows, busted by protesters, and bullied by unidentifiable agents of the government. America, barefoot and in Brooks Brothers, is defending its marble palazzo with an AR-15 rifle. (July 23, 2020)
A flight to space. A fight in the streets.
The Falcon 9 rocket pushed Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into orbit at 16,000 miles per hour. The pepper pellet that hit Darrell Hampton’s face on Earth was traveling at about 1.4 percent that speed, fast enough to shatter the back of his cellphone before walloping his eye and showering his neck with an indescribable burning sensation. Up until that point, Hampton had marched peacefully with other Denver protesters Saturday afternoon, at around the same time astronauts Hurley and Behnken were flying toward the International Space Station. Then around 6 p.m., at West 14th Avenue and Lincoln Street, a masked policeman in riot gear hopped on a vehicle and, as it pulled away, casually squeezed his trigger. (June 1, 2020)
Spring is in bloom, and so is our dread
The hyacinths are up. So’s the dread. It’s a bad mix. The mulch is here. Neighbors are gardening. The phlox is spaced just so. The rosebushes can be trimmed, tamed. Nature is blooming as the economy closes. It’s the beginning of a David Lynch movie. Little niceties mask hidden trouble. Everyone’s out jogging, and at first it felt like a national holiday, or some alternate dimension. A fitness utopia. But then: Should we be out jogging at all? Will we look back and think: What were we all doing jogging? (March 23, 2020)
Coronavirus is a test no one knows how to pass
Now we’re all under the microscope. An invisible virus will make visible our true strengths and weaknesses. It will expose the faults in our systems, the sincerity of our relationships, the ways in which we work together or don’t. The week started out with cute quips about chapped hands and voyages of the damned. It ends with few certainties except these: There will be more sickness and death. The farther we remove ourselves from each other, the more we will need each other. Our way of living will be upended, and for how long? (March 13, 2020)
The decade has ended, but it will never be over
In the first week of the second decade of the third millennium, it was 68 and sunny southeast of Baghdad. At an outpost known as Contingency Operating Station Hammer, intelligence analysts for the U.S. Army sat at workstations in “secure classified information facilities” and combed through “classified significant activity reports.” Beneath the jargon was a clearer snapshot of the dawn of the 2010s: bored and exhausted young Americans, sequestered in sun-blasted warehouses on a patchwork battlefield, scanning terse bulletins about the execution of civilian informants, about shrapnel in the Green Zone, about the cooking pots and jagged wires that were used to make “improvised explosive devices,” which itself was a euphemism for “bombs.” (Jan. 1, 2020)