the tris mccall report

It is hard to overestimate how wonderful it would be if hydroxychloroquine worked. The long search for a pharmaceutical intervention in the progress of the coronavirus would come to an end, not with a new compound that’s difficult to manufacture, but through the re-purposing of a fairly simple one that’s already in wide use. It would be an epidemiologist’s dream come true: a cheat code to the pandemic, a plot twist at the end of a feel-good movie. We already know what the drug does, we know its risks, and we know it’s pretty well tolerated. Hydroxychloroquine can be dangerous, but it’s not the sort of pharmaceutical that turns the patient inside out in order to cure her. It’s cheap, and, like all treatments administered by pill, it’s quick and easy to administer. There’s not a doctor alive who wouldn’t be delighted to share the good news with her patients.

Unfortunately, there’s still no evidence that it does any of the things that its proponents say it does, and there’s mounting evidence that it doesn’t. The latest medical publication to cast doubt on the usefulness of hydroxychloroquine is the Lancet, which just published a large observational study about the drug. The doctors who ran the study looked at hydroxychloroquine taken in isolation, and hydroxychloroquine taken with azithromycin, an antibiotic that has also been anecdotally linked to the alleviation of coronavirus symptoms. The bottom line: neither approach worked. Patients given hydroxychloroquine, in any combination, had significantly poorer outcomes than those who weren’t.

Hydroxychloroquine enthusiasts responded as they always do: angrily, and with absolute conviction that they know how to run medical studies better than those trained to do just that. The study was too big, or it wasn’t wide enough, or the timing was all wrong, or they didn’t give the proper combination of supplementary drugs in the proper sequence, or the results are automatically disqualified because the Lancet is in the pocket of a pharmaceutical industry looking to push vaccines instead. The theory among those who take a ride-or-die view of hydroxychloroquine is that the drug creates conditions under which other drugs — zinc, in particular — can interfere with the replication of the coronavirus, but if that process is started too late, the progress of the pathogen becomes irreversible and no amount of medicine can help. A study that focuses on people who’ve already been hospitalized isn’t useful. They’re too far gone. The hydroxychloroquine needs to be given during the first stages of illness, or even prophylactically, in order for it to do any good.

For researchers who want to take hydroxychloroquine seriously, this creates a methodological problem. Early-stage or asymptomatic studies aren’t easy to conduct. The coronavirus is a very dangerous pathogen, and case fatality rates and hospitalization rates continue to be scarily high, but most of the people who get sick aren’t going to die, and they aren’t going to be hospitalized, either. Most of them are going to recover on their own. Patients who never get seriously ill may attribute their recoveries to hydroxychloroquine; they might just as well put it down to prayer, or fresh air, or a lucky rabbit’s foot. This puts those who are committed to touting hydroxychloroquine in an unassailable position. If a patient takes the drug and dies, well, too bad, that meant he started too late. Only those who take it and survive are worthy to be counted, and when they’re counted, their recovery is attributed to the drug.

Logic like that might be gratifying to entertain, but it’s medically useless. It generates the sort of tautology that I associate with the Catholic Church at its worst. If a patient recovers, that proves faith in the drug is properly placed, and if she doesn’t, she must have done the drug wrong. Humans are faulty; only the drug is unquestionable. Those doctors and researchers who doubt the power of hydroxychloroquine aren’t just incorrect, they’re downright evil: they’re participants in a grand global scheme to suppress a cure.

Is this possible? Sure it is; the history of the world is full of examples of large groups of people doing pernicious things. But I do wish that the many who commit acts of casual calumny against the Lancet, and other publications like it, would understand the breadth of the accusation they’re making. They’re not merely accusing doctors, researchers, and drug companies of conspiring to kill millions. They’re suggesting that people who are actively involved in the treatment and attenuation of the pandemic would be unwilling to take a simple measure to check its spread, thereby putting themselves at greater risk of catching the coronavirus and dying horribly. I am a paranoid cuss, but that’s a bridge too far for me.

I don’t believe the burden of proof always falls on the skeptics. I just think that if you’re going to make a world-shattering claim in the face of good evidence to the contrary, gathered by professional evidence-collectors, you ought to have the common courtesy to back it up with something substantial. Anecdotal accounts from country doctors aren’t going to cut it. We’re all frightened, and we’ve got good reason to be; we’re going to be rummaging through the ammunition drawer for magic bullets. Alas, viruses are rarely defeated outright by a pharmaceutical. Even vaccines are only partially effective. The way we beat this thing is by putting in the work — wearing masks, and keeping our distance and behaving responsibly, reconfiguring workspaces and redefining the idea of work, improving ventilation, and making sacrifices to drive the reproductive rate of the coronavirus down to zero. None of that has been fun, and the things we’re going to have to do in immediate future won’t be fun, either. But it’s all necessary. And I can’t help but notice that some of the loudest advocates for hydroxychloroquine have been people who don’t like to put in work — lazy people, ones who’ve made careers out of cutting corners and chasing easy solutions for complicated problems. I don’t expect them to back off any of their claims, because that would require them to think, and act, and those are two things they’re always reluctant to do. Just remember when you hear them talk: if they were right about the game-changing powers of hydroxychloroquine, the pandemic would be over by now.

Columbia University came down hard on Andrew Cuomo and Bill DeBlasio on Wednesday night. I only wonder what took them so long. Their report reveals that the Governor and the Mayor dithered in the face of the crisis, and suggests that if they’d acted sooner, they could have saved more than fifteen thousand lives. I was right here in the New York metro in early March, and I can confirm: dithering happened. I believe that Cuomo and DeBlasio feel worse about this than the President does about his own inaction. Right now, though, I’m not too concerned about anybody’s feelings. It’s all the same to me. They can take it up with their psychotherapists if they’d like to.

The Governor and Mayor have excuses at their disposal that the President doesn’t, and they’ve been availing themselves of them. Nothing they’re saying in their own defenses is inaccurate. The state of New York has no central intelligence agency (although I wouldn’t be surprised if one was getting put together right now) and no access to the sort of classified analysis that comes across the desk of the chief executive in Washington each morning. We don’t expect Albany to keep spies in Wuhan. New York received no guidance from the federal government until it was far too late, and even then, the official response was confused and flailing at best. A national crisis plan never came.

None of that gets Cuomo or DeBlasio off the hook. Risk assessment is the chief executive’s primary responsibility. He’s there to cushion the shocks and smooth the path so that the rest of society can function. That’s his main role as a public servant; everything else is secondary. Neither the governor nor the mayor anticipated or managed risks well, and yes, the incoherence of the administration in Washington was, and is, absolutely one of those risks. The governor of New York has had three years to study the Trump White House. He could not have seriously thought that help would be coming in a crisis. The moment he heard about a breakout in China — December 2019, surely — he needed to swing into action. That goes double for DeBlasio, because there are few places on earth as vulnerable to pandemics as the five boroughs. He had to make sure that New York City was supplied and ready.

When the mayor and the governor attempt to reassign blame to the President, they don’t sound all that different than the President does when he tries to reassign blame to the Chinese Communist Party. They’re looking to distract you from the gamble they made — a gamble that has blown up spectacularly in their faces. They knew that a lockdown would damage their popularity, and for a modern public figure, popularity is everything. We already know that the President is willing to chuck everything into the fire in order to ensure his re-election; that’s been established dozens of times over, and only a sucker or a cultist would have expected responsible behavior during a global health crisis. Cuomo and DeBlasio play the statesman better than Trump ever could, but neither passed the guts test. It would have been brutally difficult to put the squeeze on New York in February. We would have hated them for it. But that’s what we elected them for: they’re there to absorb that hate. They’re there to do the right thing, at all times, including times when the right thing is hard to do.

New York is the world’s capital of commerce, and those chosen to lead the city are representatives of the commercial sector as surely as they’re representatives of ordinary residents. I get it, and I understand that neither Cuomo nor DeBlasio wanted to piss off the captains of industry in Manhattan who were, and are, determined to stay open for business. But regardless of whether we measure the bottom line in dollars or human lives, inaction is going to prove much more costly than a heavy hand would have. Cuomo has been discouraging hindsight, as you might imagine he would, and as a chief executive in a time of crisis who is not actively encouraging his constituents to drink Clorox, he’s kept his approval rating high. Nevertheless, just as America leads the world in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, New York leads the nation. Those are rude facts, and they aren’t budging. Eventually, there’s going to have to be a reckoning.

There are people in America who fear that a coronavirus vaccine will be spiked with silicon tracking devices that will record every step they take. Yet they already carry objects in their pockets which do exactly that. Technically, they could leave their phones behind when they go out, but do they ever? A few manage to disable or scramble the homing signal, and if you’re one of them, my hat is off to you for your ideological consistency. I get it; I really do. In the midst of a pandemic, I can’t say I sympathize, but I know where you’re coming from. The rest of you: I don’t get it.

Whether the government keeps a file on you is debatable. We know they’ve got the technology, but can they acquire the inclination? If they outputted your data from the corporate mainframes where it’s stored, would they even know what to do with it? I’ve always felt that if those in power really wanted to screw with me, they wouldn’t bother to assemble a dossier: they’d just do it, and they’d worry about justification later on. That’s the way that the authorities operate, I’ve noticed — they go ahead and do what they want to do, and send in the clean-up teams later if they have to. Generally they don’t have to. There we are, flat on the macadam with the bulldozer treads in our backsides, and in no position to lead the resistance. KRS-ONE explained all of this to us in the late ’80s, and in rhyming verse, no less. Thirty years on, I’ve seen no indication that anything he told us was inaccurate.

No, data, like everything else, is only the authority’s friend when it can be marshaled to support what the authority is up to. When it can’t, it’s just drowned out. Executive regimes, I notice, are hanging on to the massive power they’ve accrued by their fingertips, and with gritted teeth, and public relations is an indispensable ingredient in the binding agent that keeps the governed stuck to the governors. For instance, it’s almost certainly true that the State House in Tallahassee has suppressed the number of Floridians who’ve died from coronavirus complications. The chief medical examiner even said so earlier this month. Now we learn that they’ve canned the woman who operates the dashboard of their virus website. She wouldn’t cook the books for them. She’ll be replaced by someone who will.

The minimizers — and they’re legion — accuse New York and New Jersey of inflating our death counts. We’re electorally insignificant, so they don’t mind kicking us while we’re down. We who live here don’t need to be told anything about the severity of the crisis. But it certainly seems possible that our governors are ginning up the numbers in one direction or another. How can we know for sure that they aren’t?

It turns out there’s a pretty easy way to check. The severity of medical conditions may be disputed and caseloads can be fudged by clinics, but death is tough to misinterpret, and bodies, as every Raymond Chandler fan knows, are hard to hide. Deaths can be safely predicted — there are entire industries that are predicated on expected fatality rates — because they tend to be consistent from year to year. If many more people died in April 2020 than they did in prior Aprils, in the absence of another variable, it’s a cinch that the spike can be attributed to the coronavirus. Epidemiologists even have a name for this. They call it excess mortality, and it’s one of the simplest and clearest ways to measure what’s going on and where it’s happening.

Alas, it is very hard to find excess mortality counts. Governments don’t want you to see them, and why would they?, people are scared enough as it is. It’s up to journalists to gather this data from available public sources. There’s only one newspaper I know that’s been putting in the work and collating what they’ve found; luckily for us, it’s the very best periodical in the English language. I could go on for awhile about why The Economist is so much better than any other magazine, and I may do just that in a future dispatch. For today, I hope it suffices for me to assure you that my faith in The Economist has little to do with its editorial outlook, which I broadly disagree with, and everything to do with the diligence with which the editors put the publication together. When you get a page of facts from The Economist, you know it hasn’t been pulled from a think tank or copied from a PR office or thrown onto the Internet in the chase for clicks. That’s not how they operate. They’re the real deal — maybe the last real deal around.

The Economist‘s tracker is consistent, and what it reveals isn’t pretty. Excess deaths are up, all around the globe, in numbers that will make your stomach turn. In places like New York City, the number of reported fatalities tracks pretty well with the mortality spike; even here, we appear to be underreporting, but not by all that much. In other parts of the world where testing is sporadic and medical services are hard to come by, the variance is startling. Jakarta has only attributed 14% of its excess deaths to the coronavirus. That’s the big city in Indonesia; further into the country, they don’t have much capability to confirm cases. They just have the coffins.

New York City has attributed more than fourteen thousand deaths to the coronavirus. The city is running about sixteen thousand fatalities above the expected baseline, which, to my non-trained eye, looks like it’s within the bounds of acceptable error (the statistics, I mean; there’s nothing acceptable about the deaths). What this means — and it means it conclusively — is that we aren’t exaggerating, and those who accuse us of exploiting the crisis are every bit the heartless jerks that it seems like they are. That doesn’t tell us why the case fatality rate in New York City has been so high, or how it spread so fast and with such lethal consequences. Nobody is off the hook. Once we get to the other side, whenever that may be, there’ll have to be a reckoning. But we aren’t lying outright about the body count. That’s more than the authorities in some other parts of the country can say.

A close friend just got the message we’ve long feared he’d get. His father has tested positive for the virus. He hadn’t been sick: he was tested as a precaution, along with the other residents of the nursing home where he lives. Neither my friend nor his siblings have been able to see him. Instead, he’s going to be transported to a different nursing home within the same system — one outfitted to handle cases of coronavirus. I imagine he’ll be isolated and watched closely. Life in a nursing home is difficult enough as it is. Life in a nursing home during a pandemic has got to be terrifying, and lonely, especially for those who’ve been infected.

Testing positive without symptoms is better than testing positive with a cough and a fever. It’s possible that my friend’s father will never get sick: some people in every group won’t, and that includes elderly people with scary underlying conditions. We don’t know when or how he caught the virus, and we’ll probably never know. There’ve been other cases in the same nursing home, and my friend has been getting automated alerts by text from the care center: 3 people infected with the virus, 0 precious lives lost. Those aren’t illuminating; mostly, they’re just creepy.

In New Jersey, the coronavirus has killed ten thousand people. More than half of those — 5,376, and counting — were residents of long-term care facilities. Over 500 homes have reported infections. The scale of this disaster is breathtaking, but it wasn’t unanticipated. We always knew that senior housing was full of kindling for the blaze. In the middle of February, our friend Amy ventured into the online wilderness to warn whoever she could reach about the need to contain the coronavirus before it reached nursing homes. She blew the whistle until she was red in the face. She was right to sound the alarm. I wish we’d listened better.

Those of us who live in New Jersey are painfully aware that the coronavirus doesn’t skip over younger people. We all know people in the primes of their lives who’ve become seriously sick. But almost eighty per cent of those who’ve died from the virus are over the age of 65 — and getting a public health message to our elders can be a challenge. Many of our friends are up against the steely recalcitrance of parents, and aunts, and uncles, and older friends, some of whom are determined to get their news from dodgy sources. The father of someone close to me recently forwarded her a scare article, straight from a clickbait mill, about the neurological hazards of wearing masks. She wrote back a kind and measured response. She hasn’t heard anything from him since.

I consider myself lucky that my parents have taken this crisis seriously. They live in Chester, a small town on the periphery of the metro, which is a good thing: they’re out of the way of most of the state’s major transportation corridors. They don’t have to go anywhere if they don’t want to. That said, their house is part of a development reserved for those aged 55 and older. Nearly half of the township is over 45. That doesn’t put them in the line of fire, necessarily: part of what people are paying for when they move to places like Morris County is permanent social distance. But when there’s so much virus — and so much misinformation — flying around the Eastern seaboard, it’s hard not to worry. It’s a small relief to know that Hilary’s mother is ensconced in the mountains of Vermont. It becomes less comforting when I think about what she does all day: she’s a nurse in a prison. It’s a tough job that somebody has to do, and I’m grateful that she’s doing it. So far, they haven’t reported any cases there. Keep your fingers crossed.

In my late twenties, I broke a tooth. Second molar from the back on the upper left side— an important one, I’d learn. It’s hard to chew without it. My then-dentist recommended a root canal. About ten years later, my current dentist declared that root canal inexpertly done, and re-did it. By then, I’d sunk a lot of money into that twenty millimeter area of my face.

After the second root canal, I figured that was that: the tooth was dead, sealed, and stuffed with inorganic material. I didn’t realize that the tooth could still be a problem. My last visit to the dentist was an utter disaster — he found problems all over my mouth, once that he felt had been exacerbated by the elevated stress I’d been living with for the prior eighteen months. Right in that same troublesome molar, he found an infection brewing, a black spot on the x-ray where all had been pleasantly white in the days before Hilary’s diagnosis. This, he told me, was a matter of some urgency. He recommended extraction and a dental implant.

Implants are expensive. They also take a long time to finish. First, there’s an extraction, and then a post needs to be cemented in place, and only after you’ve healed from that does the dentist begin to build the new tooth. Hilary has been through it, and so has my mother; if you haven’t had one, I recommend you take preventative measures to avoid getting one. After the dentist caught the infection, I’d resigned myself to joining the club. But for insurance reasons, I didn’t want to do it immediately. I thought that if I held off for a little while, I could time things so that the dental visits could be minimally distracting from the rest of my life. We threw the dice.

Sometimes after an errant roll, the dice are easily retrieved; sometimes they bounce under the washing machine and can’t be picked back up without tearing the house down. Once I was ready to schedule the extraction, I couldn’t. All non-emergency dental procedures were scratched from the planner by the coronavirus. If I’d wanted to push it, I’m sure I could have convinced my dentist to squeeze me in before he ceased daily operations, but then I’d be sitting here in the middle of a pandemic with a hole in my mouth. My desire to undergo lengthy dental procedures — mouth open and throat receptive — during an outbreak of a contagious respiratory illness is about what you’d think it would be. I’d like to avoid getting into that chair for as long as I can, and I suspect my dentist feels the same way. He doesn’t want to trade breaths any more than I do.

It has now been exactly six months since I was told I needed a dental implant. My tooth didn’t hurt on the day I got that x-ray, and it doesn’t hurt now. If it wasn’t for the imaging tools at the dentist’s office, I’d have no idea there was even a problem. Since I haven’t developed any pain or inflammation, I’ve tried to convince myself that I’ve kept the infection in check by brushing and flossing, even though I know there’s no way that it works like that. It’s kind of like how I’ll reflexively wash my hands to protect myself from a virus that may well have already infected me. I don’t think that’s likely, but I didn’t think there was a problem with my root canal tooth, either.

Just writing this post feels like a jinx. But I’ve made it this far without a return trip to the dentist’s chair, and there’s a part of me that’d like to see how much longer I can hold the symptoms of the infection at bay. Semi-consciously, I’ll bet that the bacteria in my jaw is a figure for the virus at large, and if I can suppress the former, that means I’m fit enough to dodge the latter. That’s absurd, and stupidly magical, but so many of my woolier thoughts are. My anxieties, though, are real. Every night since March, I go to bed wondering if I’ll wake up with a fever from the coronavirus, or an abscess in my face that needs an emergency treatment. Every morning, I’ve been reasonably okay. I’ll keep praying for you if you keep praying for me.

I dreamed I was at a family gathering. We were indoors, in the New Jersey suburbs, in the den of the house where my cousin lives. This is the cousin who was hospitalized in March, and both of her daughters were there: the one who first contracted the virus at a business conference in Colorado, and her younger sister, who has never been tested, and has never gotten sick. Hilary was with me. Other family members were there, too, but their faces were diffuse; for the purposes of the dream-narrative, they were treated by my unconscious as bystanders. Food covered the kitchen table. People were eating and talking. I remember thinking it was a little stuffy.

A bug on the wall of the kitchen tipped the party straight into chaos. The insect was big and caramel-brown, and it scurried fast. This was the sort of bug that you hate to look at too close, so you squint, and hold your breath, and try not to have your primal fears awakened by the feelers, and the tendrils, and the compound eyes. We all ran into the den. But the younger sister wasn’t afraid of the insect. She leaned over and picked it up. I was happy she did: I didn’t think that squashing it with a shoe was a good idea. She’d bring it over to the window and set it free.

Instead she carried it to the middle of the den and let it go. In a blur of bug-wings, it flew directly at the opposite wall, hovered, dove, and began running fast across the carpeted floor. It was at that moment that I realized I’d broken my glasses. The lens was shattered and one of the arms was bent. I didn’t want Hilary to see. She’d insist on going into Manhattan to get it fixed. I couldn’t run that risk — not with a virus on the loose.

I woke to a very nice day and began working. I had something to write in the morning, and another thing to write in the afternoon, and some additional work arriving in the evening. I tried to set aside dreams and fears. Before the day had gotten any traction, our buzzer rang. Hilary leaned out the window and saw a group of policemen in our small front yard. They’d opened the gate and poured themselves in. At first she thought we must have parked the car in an illegal spot. But they didn’t want us to go outside. They wanted to get inside.

From behind his mask, the biggest policeman shouted up to us. A truck, he said, had backed into one of the wires and torn it from a supporting pole. It either needed to be re-attached, or he’d have to snip it altogether and leave us without cable service. They’d need to get access to the far unit on the second floor of our building. From the window, I could see the dangling wire. It looked more like a great untied shoelace than a public hazard.

The usual occupants of the apartment on the second floor haven’t been around in weeks. They fled Jersey City during the early days of the crisis, and they haven’t even been back to pick up their mail. We’re the longest-tenured residents of this building, and by accident and attrition, we’ve come into possession of the master keychain. Hilary found it, put on her mask, and went straight downstairs. I followed after her.

The policemen were already inside. Our neighbor on the first floor let them in, and immediately fled back to the safety of his flat. We’ve all heard about the prevalence of coronavirus in the city police force, and although the main man was masked, that didn’t make me feel any better. His presence felt less like an affront than a scientific impossibility — just something that didn’t compute, and shouldn’t, couldn’t be, a rip in the fabric of expectation. Nobody but the residents have crossed our threshold since March ended. Have I unfit myself for visitors? If a friend were to come over, would it seem just as incongruous?

He could see we weren’t too happy. Through his mask, he told us that he wouldn’t come in any further if we didn’t want him to, but then he’d have to cut the wire. This felt like a bit of a backhanded threat, but by usual police standards, it wasn’t all that aggressive. We opened the second floor for him. One of his partners followed. I became conscious of their breaths, filtered through their masks, but still joining the rest of the air in our small stairwell. The equilibrium of microbes that we’d all carefully cultivated over the past few months was disturbed. What a ridiculous thing to be concerned about!, what an absurd thought to have, how inevitable it was, given everything that we’ve been through, that we’d be so preoccupied with the invisible.

Back upstairs in our flat, we graded ourselves on our crisis performance and found it wanting. Yes, we’d solved the problem and kept the cable on, but our alienated reaction to a stranger in the house alarmed us. For years, I was the guy who didn’t even want a front door; come on in, world, say hello, stay awhile, play a few games, touch all the surfaces. Now here I was with a mask on, my expression unreadable, bothered by the imposition of another masked face belonging to someone who was here to help. If we’d been bare-faced and able to gauge the intent behind our expressions, perhaps we would have acquitted ourselves better. Probably not, though. I’ve learned to fear my neighbor. For my own sake, and for the sake of the stranger, I need to unlearn that as soon as I can.

I am not a forceful conversationalist. I’ve always preferred it if other people would take the lead. Whenever many other people are talking — especially when they’re talking loudly — I’ll never raise my volume and wedge myself into the discussion. I’ll be quiet, and wait it out, on the assumption that if anybody has any interest in what I think, they’ll ask me directly. Of course they never do, because human interaction doesn’t work like that. The person who is loudest doesn’t defer to those who are quieter than he is. As he sees it, our softness signals acquiescence to his superior wisdom. He just gets louder.

This has always made me useless in meetings. It makes me extra hopeless on video chat sessions. Zoom reinforces my feeling that nobody is listening to me when I talk — and that, chances are, they can’t even hear me. My voice is soft, and my manner isn’t imposing in the slightest. The camera makes me appear smaller and more fragile than I even imagine myself to be, and I think of myself as rather mousy to begin with. Part of the reason why people like me take to the stage to make music is because we know we’ll be able to avail ourselves of spotlights and amplification systems. We’ll be able to say what we need to say in a way that we can never manage to do in daily life. We can stop the world long enough to express something complicated.

Stages, alas, are off-limits to us right now. Video chats, and other forms of camera-based expression, are proliferating. Zoom demands that I cultivate social skills that are foreign to me. This makes me no different from millions of others who are learning, on the fly, new strategies of interaction on a planet where face-to-face contact is discouraged. But I know from experience that I don’t adapt very well. If I were a biological weapon, I’d never make it out of the lab.

Yesterday I was a participant on a video conference held by a city publication that I’ve done some writing for. Only I wasn’t; not really. A lot of talking happened, but none of it was done by me. During story meetings of all kinds, I’ve always had a hard time inserting myself. Zoom reduces me to a small spectacled face, in a box, in a Siberian corner of a crowded grid. Never am I able to speak without somebody else speaking at the same time, invariably louder that I do. The terrible truth is that I had nothing much to contribute anyway. The galleries are closed. I can’t encourage people to crowd into a basement club to hear music. I’ve already done the story about how arts organizations are coping with our new realities. The answer: they’re coping badly. How could it be anything other than that? When could we possibly expect a different answer?

Last year I made a decision to pay closer attention to the public culture of the city. Things that inspire me always compel me to write, and after months of nothing but worry, I felt like I could use a few good prompts. Beyond that, I wanted to find a way to engage with my neighbors in a way that wouldn’t be misunderstood, and on terms that I might establish myself. I imagine that desire is common among writers who aspire to overcome introverted dispositions and develop some measure of public spirit. Anyway, the important part was that it was working: arts organizers were amused and maybe even entertained by my reactions. It would be a wild overstatement to say that I’d gained anybody’s trust, because that takes a long time, and rightfully so. But I’d opened a conversation, and done it in a manner that was sustainable for me. It was a step in the right direction. With public culture shut down, I’m going to need to come up with an alternate strategy for taking another step. Feels like a doozy, does it not?