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NEWS AND VIEWS - DECEMBER 2020
WRITING NEWS Didn't do a lot of writing this month -- mostly because I was sick for over two weeks, but also because I've been feeling vaguely dissatisfied with The Brassfire Fleet lately and I just haven't been all that excited to work on it. Hopefully I'll have better luck next month. * * * * * * * * COVID-19, UGH A couple of days into December I started getting a mild cough. At first I thought it was just a cold, but the way it started made me suspicious, because my colds almost always begin with a very bad sore throat, followed a few days later by a stuffy, runny nose and sometimes an occasional cough. This time I didn't get the sore throat at all; it just went right into the cough. So that was weird. My first clue that this wasn't an ordinary cold came a few days later, though, when I woke up in the middle of the night in absolute agony -- my hips and my lower back were aching terribly. I took some aspirin, which helped, but that was a bad, bad night. Over the next few days I lost my appetite and started feeling nauseous if I ate anything too rich, so I spent those days eating nothing but dry cereal, buttered toast, and pills. Which was just as well, because by then my sense of smell and sense of taste were completely gone. At first I chalked it up to my sinuses being plugged, but after putting my nose under an incredibly potent Christmas candle (with an evergreen scent) and inhaling deeply, and realizing that I couldn't detect any odor at all, I was forced to conclude that my sense of smell was fried. Taste, too; I had a piece of homemade chocolate fudge at one point, and it was like eating a bar of soap. Just nothing. I started feeling better about a week into it, but it took a few more days for the cough to go away, and it took another week for my sinuses to completely clear. My sense of taste is still gone, unfortunately, but my sense of smell seems to be returning. Overall this thing felt like a long, drawn-out cold, with a few odd symptoms -- the body aches, the nausea, and the loss of smell/taste. I never felt fatigued or short of breath, the cough was never anything more than a nuisance, and if I had a fever it was probably only during the first couple of days. So how did I catch it? Hard to say. In the week prior to my feeling the first symptoms, I'd only left the house twice, to do a couple of water heater installs for work. I wore gloves and a mask the whole time I was out, and I didn't come within ten feet of anyone. If I had to guess, though, I'd guess that I picked it up at the dairy. On a Monday afternoon (exactly five days before I started feeling sick) I replaced a water heater at one of the big dairies. The H-2A workers at these dairies live in apartment buildings on the premises, usually about 20-24 guys to one building, and they don't keep them very clean. In the basement, where I was working on the water heater, these guys had set up a makeshift barbershop, with a barber's chair and a mirror, and the floor was covered in hair clippings that had not been cleaned up. Even worse, the water heater had leaked all over, so the floor was a mess of water and clumped-up hair. So I had to deal with that, and with some dirty laundry that was in the way, and...yeah, if I picked this bug up anywhere, it was at this place. Like I said, I was wearing gloves and a mask, and I didn't get close to anyone, but those apartments (they're actually more like barracks; they share bathrooms and a kitchen and sleep on bunk beds) are warm, damp, dirty, and crowded. The COVID was probably just floating around in the air. 
So anyway, I stayed home for over two weeks, spending most of my time watching old familiar MST3K episodes to distract myself from my misery. I got through almost all of season five, all of seasons six and seven, and most of seasons eight and nine, usually watching four or five episodes a day. I even made it through The Wild Wild World of Batwoman, which I regard as one of the most unwatchable movies ever featured on MST3K, along with Hamlet, the latter half of Invasion of the Neptune Men, Manos (never did understand the fascination with Manos, which I simply find boring), The She Creature, The Starfighters, and Alien from L.A. (There's probably some Joel-era episodes that are even more boring and unwatchable than these, but I prefer Mike's style to Joel's and I confess I haven't seen most of those earlier episodes.) * * * * * * * * CHRISTMAS 2020 Fortunately I was more or less over the COVID by Christmas. We didn't have the usual family gathering this year, so I had to make my own fun, with my own little Christmas rituals -- watching oddball Christmas specials, for example. My favorites are the MST3K flick Santa Claus, The Star Wars Holiday Special, He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special, and 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, a good-hearted little special from the 70's that used to air in primetime back when I was a kid. I just really dig the soundtrack. |