Franz Ferdinand, "Always Ascending"

There are two kinds of COVID-19 stories. The first is the tragic kind. There are far too many of these stories, and we don’t hear them enough, because the people who own them tend to hold them close. It’s too painful and difficult to talk about.

Contrast the second kind of story, of inconvenience and upheaval and disorientation. These are the stories we can’t stop telling. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen months out from the kick in the ass Omicron dealt us on its way through the door (So you think you’re gonna celebrate Christmas? BULLSHIT!), each of us still feels compelled to encumber others with his own “unique” account of the events of March 2020 and thereafter.

I stripped down to my underwear, on our FRONT PORCH, the first time we ordered in during lockdown. Packed all my clothes into a sealed bag to take into the house to launder, because I’d stepped inside the shop for all of one minute to pay for the pizza.

Yeah? Well, we were scrubbing THE MAIL with Clorox wipes before we opened it.

And so on. In fact, borrowing from Godwin’s Law, I would postulate that the longer a social engagement lasts, the probability that at some point the participants will exchange tiresome non-tragic COVID-19 stories approaches 1. As time wears on, and we put this whole experience further into our rear-view, the slope of that line goes flatter: we’re able to go deeper and deeper into an evening before we feel the need to trot these stories out. But eventually we all do. Over and over again. Give me credit: I put three months into this page before I trotted out my COVID story, but now I’ve hit the wall. Sue me: this was 3% of my life, so I’m not gonna not write about it.

Here goes:

Kate is a biologist. She understands how viruses work, and in this respect, I think I can say that she was tracking the novel coronavirus before it was cool. What I recall in the weeks leading up to lockdown—December, January, February—is lying half-awake at 5:30 each morning, as Kate sat up in bed to read the updates posted on the several websites charting the progress of the virus.

“In Seattle now,” she would say. “Five cases.” And I would roll over, turning away from the soft glow of her iPhone screen, toward a dark corner of the room.

On most days, she simply read off case counts and locations. Hard data. Sometimes she’d append an editorial comment: “This is gonna be a shitshow,” and so on.

Fast-forward to Lockdown Eve. A work colleague pulled me into her office on Monday to advise me that the President would be announcing the closure of the University the next day. Come Friday morning I was walking out of our office suite with my keyboard and mouse in a bag and a wide-screen computer display under my arm. I held my breath in the elevator (nine floors, two stops), pulled $400 cash from the ATM across the street, bought two last slices of Sicilian—artichoke and Buffalo chicken—from Pinocchio’s, and walked to my car. Bad, loud music played as I hurried down Mt. Auburn Street: the finals clubs were throwing last-hurrah parties, before the 02138 was emptied of students.

By this time Kate had us well-prepared. She had stockpiled supplies, worked out a protocol for quarantining inbound deliveries. She had researched all the possibilities for pulling groceries, tuned up our Internet service to handle four feeds of two-way videoconferencing. Whatever needed done, Kate was either planning or directing. Picture a hardcore survivalist, but with actual good reason and none of the fixation with guns (that I’m aware of). I followed her instructions and otherwise kept the hell out of the way.

There came a point, at the end of the beginning, when I freed up my mind to get really scared. When that happened, I took two critical steps to help myself cope with the chaos and uncertainty. It wasn’t a case of sitting down and working through what I needed; these two things just happened—almost as an autonomic response. The first thing I did was start a text thread with Alli, Sean, Mark, Bob, and Brad. My first message to that thread, which I posted at 1:21 PM on March 15, 2020:

Writing my oldest and best friends here because we’re gonna be in lockdown for a while and (1) I want to know how you all are doing and (2) this seems like a way to compensate for social distancing.

Asking for personal/ family updates and links to things online that make you happy.

E.g.:

And I sent this video.

This video stitches together footage of several live performances of Blondie performing what might be the Best Song of All Time. My favorite is the Top of the Pops appearance, which aired on Christmas Day, 1979. Red glitter confetti rains down on the band and sprays off Clem Burke’s drums as he hurls his body at the kit. Debby Harry shifts and skips joyfully in her striped dress, grinning ear to ear as she assures us that dreaming is, in fact, free. I found this video years ago on YouTube, and I come back to it all the time, because it makes me smile. Watching it now, and recalling that I sent it to my friends on the Ides of March, 2020, it also makes me cry.

Dream, dream: even for a little while. Dream, dream: filling up an idle hour. Fade away, radiate.

Sean named the text thread “COVID Kids.” Over the next twelve months, the six of us were in constant communication. On average, I’d say together we posted thirty or forty messages per day to COVID Kids. It wasn’t always perfect—there were times when certain of us needed to take breaks from the group. But we always found our way back. We were (still are) six friends scattered across five states: California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas. Through the wonders of modern-day technology, I had the other five right with me, all the time, through all the fear and bullshit and political upheaval. The best thing I did during COVID was take care of and spend time with my family. Next-best was connecting with the COVID Kids.

My second step toward coping was to start a playlist. I called it Social Distancing Since 1985! Over the ensuing six months I would load 118 songs into that playlist. Not all, or even most, of the songs were thematically tied to the pandemic conditions, but a good number of them certainly were. I wryly added, for example, “Breathless” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Texas, “Call the Doctor” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Sleater-Kinney, and Joy Division’s “Incubation” (Apple Music, Spotify). More to the point, which was to fix my eye on the desired end state when all this drama had gone away, I decided early on that whatever songs I added, the last track in the playlist was and would always be “Turn Off This Song and Go Outside” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Lonely Forest.

I leaned hard on this playlist over the first few months, when we all were adapting to the narrowing of our lives and adjusting our expectations upward from <just three weeks, to flatten to curve> to <the vaccines won’t be ready for 15 to 18 months>. The weather softened up, and I started running. I ran for all sorts of reasons: to go somewhere, to get stronger, and because like a lot of people, I felt like something—everything?—was chasing me. At some point I got it in my head to run the full length of every street in the town limits.

Running the Belmont streets was the only time when I could well and truly give my brain over to listening to music. Not at my desk, when 95% of my RAM was assigned to managing the legal implications of shifting the majority of a massive research institution’s operations into its faculty and staff’s spare rooms and kitchens. Not around the house, when my attention was turned to Kate and the kids. Certainly not at night, either, after lights-out, when I was lying in bed wondering whether we would make it through all this unscathed.

But on the road, huffing up hills, treading down the middle of scantily trafficked residential streets—the better to avoid disease vectors walking their dogs on the sidewalks—this was when and where I really plugged into the music I had programmed to carry me through the coming months. And there were songs that hit hard in that moment. Consider Car Seat Headrest’s “Something Soon” (Apple Music, Spotify):

Biting my clothes to keep from screaming, taking pills to keep from dreaming … Heavy boots on my throat, I need something soon … All my fingers are froze, I need something soon.

I would hear Will Toledo sing these lines and I would double my speed.

As the year wore on, politics took over—riot police rousting protesters so that godless men could wave their prop-Bibles, bearded men strapped with bandoliers laying siege to the homes of public health officials, and so on. Against the background of mass death and civil disorder, the virus preened and took selfies. It had shown it was perfectly adapted to expand and exploit the divisions in our society. Eat your heart out, Russian trolls. And if you were thinking now is the moment when we pull together, like the Brits did under Churchill, you looked toward Pennsylvania Avenue and saw that no such inspiration was forthcoming. From time to time my shuffled Playlist would serve up “All I Really Want” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Alanis Morrissette. More than once I startled bystanders when the moment overtook me and I was suddenly shouting alongside Alanis, in the middle of the street:

All I really want is SOME JUSTICE: AHAAAEEYAAAEEAAAHAAH

This line was, of course, short-form for All I really want isn’t just for the bad guys not to get away with it, but for them also not to get us all killed. AHAAAEEYAEEAAAHAAH, indeed. Phone records show I texted this very sentiment—Alanis’s words, not mine—to the COVID Kids, as early as May 7. They knew I was going through something in that moment, and their responses were appropriately respectful of my state of mind. After all, it was just as likely one of them would be melting down tomorrow. Merry Clayton’s backing vocals on “Gimme Shelter” (Apple Music, Spotify)—“RAPE! MURDER!”—felt on-point, too, when I was in one of these moods, but I kept those cries off the text thread.

The Playlist didn’t just hit the down buttons. Shuffling it just now, the first three songs to surface are “Everything is AWESOME” (Apple Music, Spotify: self-explanatory) from The LEGO Movie soundtrack, “Now My Heart Is Full” by Morrissey (Apple Music, Spotify: “There’s gonna be some trouble …”), and Chapterhouse’s “Pearl” (Apple Music, Spotify), which is one of the most warming and lovely songs in all my library.¹ We all felt a range of emotions during the pandemic, just as we have at any other time in our lives. Only more so in that moment—the emotions had more charge and spun off more sparks, because of the greater load and tension in the lines.

It might sound overstated, but for at least the first eight months of lockdown Social Distancing Since 1985! functioned as a kind of power grid for me. When I needed a boost of energy, it was there. When I was overcharged and needed to offload, it served that purpose, too. And maybe in writing these last few sentences I just fell ass-backward into my first accurate rendition of the work music does for me.

I’ve name-checked a ton of songs thus far, and I haven’t even hit upon this post’s title track. I’ve loved me some Franz Ferdinand ever since they issued their glorious self-titled debut album in 2004. Franz Ferdinand is the definitive statement of Alex Kapranos, Nick McCarthy et al. It is Gang of Four meets Adam and the Ants: New Romantic club themes backed by the so-called “angular guitars” of post-punk. Herky-jerky and fun as hell, Franz Ferdinand is one of my favorite records, front-to-back, and some might argue that it rendered all subsequent FF compositions—maybe even all subsequent indie rock—redundant and unnecessary.

Nevertheless, when a new Franz Ferdinand record comes out, I buy it, because pandemics and other acts of God to one side, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will prevent me from driving into Boston to see this band play, when they’re touring. Each subsequent album generally hews to the tried-and-true FF formula, albeit with some new seasoning and variation, and though none of them grabs you by the shoulders and lifts you into a tree like that first record did, every one is worth the time and money.

The fifth studio album is Always Ascending. Side A, Track 1 is “Always Ascending” (Apple Music, Spotify), and I was playing it a lot in early March, while COVID-19 circled over and above us, working through its plans to land and stick. “Always Ascending” happened to be front of mind when I started the Social Distancing playlist, and like most FF songs, it cheers me up and gets me dancing. For these reasons and no other, it was the first song I grabbed for the Playlist. There it sits to this day, right at the top of the list. Track 1. It’s only now, as I look back on that crazy time, that I’ve really given a minute to think about the messaging Alex fed into my ear with his opening lines:

Don’t be concerned. It’s just the way that gravity works ’round here. Now slowly rising, falling patiently, feel no fear.

Music is self-care. It’s that simple. Having said that, I’m gonna close out this post now and go outside.

1. You can hear more of what I think about “Pearl” in this podcast episode (Apple Podcasts, Spotify).