The Whale Belly

At the vaccination site where I volunteered, I was tasked with prefilling a card with the initials of the vaccine, the date, the site of the vaccination, and some other code that I never bothered to ask about but will never forget. I wrote this information over and over, perhaps a thousand times. And at…

Today I assembled syringes for seven hours in a tent in the parking lot of the Alamodome. Now my brain is a squid in a stryofoam cup, left in the car all day. The last thing I want to do is write, but I suppose I have to. I worked next to a nice lady.…

I’ve been listening to an audiobook rendition of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. What would strike anyone living today is the similarities — and differences –of societal and cultural responses between seventeenth century London and our current pandemic. We see the same forms of panic, denial, conspiracy theories and general promiscuity of…