i tried thinking one thing every day this week and it nearly killed me
Hello, friends! Rob here.
The last few months have been utterly bewildering. It have about six drafts for posts floating around my desktop in varying states of disrepair, and every time I sit down to try to write about something, it turns into writing about everything, which is impossible, because there's a lot of everything going on these days. Too much everything.
In an effort to narrow my focus and keep things manageable, I had the idea to try to just flesh out a single thought per day, Monday through Friday, and then compile everything for a weekend post. It was much less stressful than the sprawling eight-page labyrinth of tangents and alternate versions of the same paragraph that I've been staring at for the last two months, so I might try doing something like this in the coming weeks. I might just post this and then fuck off for another two months. Who knows? Anyway, here's some stuff I thought about this week:
Monday: One silver lining of livin' that COVID life is that it's given me the opportunity to demystify a few aspects of cooking. I'm usually the one who cooks in our house, and I've been decent at it for a while now, but there are some dishes that I've always been hesitant to tackle. Steak, for example- for some reason I got it in my head that I needed a cast iron pan and a nuclear furnace range top and three years of silent meditation atop Kilimanjaro in order to do a good cut of beef justice. What the hell was I thinking? The whole point of a good steak is that it already tastes good. In fact, the nicer the steak is, the harder it is to ruin it. Just throw it on the grill with some butter and dry seasoning, bro. Another example: as a native Oklahoman, I will douse virtually any savory food in white gravy, but I always thought there was some kind of voodoo to making it. This weekend I tried doing it at home for the first time while my wife was making biscuits, and it turns out it's embarrassingly easy. You just dump flour over a pan of sausage and then add milk. I've wasted years of my life. Never again will my biscuits go unslathered.
Tuesday: While many of us may not understand the appeal, there's nothing inherently immoral or harmful about a man watching another man bone his wife, provided that all parties involved are consenting adults. HOWEVER. Jerry Falwell, Jr. is still an awful person because he inherited an evangelical empire and used his vast influence to rally opposition against marriage equality on the grounds that it was an affront to “traditional families.” Championing anti-LGBT discrimination is bad no matter who you are and what your reasons, but doing so under the pretext that marriage is a sacred covenant between one man and one woman and then going home and making a video of your wife getting drilled by the pool boy requires a profound lack of decency and self-awareness. It's so brazenly repugnant that you almost have to respect it. Hopefully, this whole episode will make Falwell reconsider some of his public positions, but I'm sure it won't. He'll spin it into a narrative about sin and redemption, and the people he most desperately needs to forgive him will do so because forgiveness is central to Christianity- which is a beautiful thing when it's not being exploited by conmen. In a year's time, Falwell will have returned to his awesome life full of booze, coke, yachts, and hookers, without ever having to reflect upon the harm he has caused by stoking ignorance and prejudice for personal gain. The man belongs in a garbage can.
Okay, fine: allegedly.
Wednesday: It's Wednesday, which means it's a good day to arrest the cops that murdered Breonna Taylor. That's the meme, right? Because, while I am in complete and unqualified agreement with Black Lives Matter (both the sentence and the movement), and although I shed honest-to-God tears the first time I saw a photo of the smiling EMT who'd been shot in her sleep for literally no reason, I do have a small quibble here: Personally, I think we ran out of “good days” to arrest those men about a week after they did the shooting. Don't get me wrong, they still should be arrested. Breonna Taylor's friends and family deserve closure, the community deserves justice, and the statute of limitations on murder is infinity years, so I can't think of a good reason to let these guys walk. But we're well past calling it a “good day” to arrest them. If your house has been without electricity for 165 days, then you probably need to pay your bill. But that doesn't mean it's a good time to settle up. It means you're five months past due.
Thursday: It's been raining off and on all day. It's that temperamental sort of rain that you only seem to see in this part of the country: still one minute, savage the next. There was a brief power outage in the small hours of the morning. Cars are parked up on the neutral ground in anticipation of street flooding. I heard talk of a tornado watch, but my gut says little will come of that. Barring some dramatic reversal of fortunes, this fleeting caress of an outstretched arm will be all we feel of Hurricane Laura here in New Orleans.
My Katrina story is comparatively tame. When the storm hit, I was days away from starting my sophomore year at Tulane. I won't pretend the fall of 2005 was an easy time for me, but I know it was a lot harder for a lot of other people. I had been looking for ways to help when a high school friend mentioned she was organizing a service trip to New Orleans. We all agreed- with no small amount of winking and nudging- that I was somehow affiliated with whatever Christian collegiate fellowship organization was sponsoring the expedition. We fudged my paperwork and no one subjected it to much scrutiny.
There were about seven of us in total. We spent a week sleeping on cots in the rec room of some church in the suburbs. We worked on two houses while we were there. The second house I recall more vividly. It was out in New Orleans East, a part of the city that had been absolutely shellacked by the storm. It ticked off all of the Katrina disaster porn checkboxes: head-high water stains in the living room, sagging ceiling fans, a biohazard refrigerator, a ruined wedding dress, and creeping black mold everywhere you looked. We spent most of the trip at that second house, peeling up the carpet and stripping the spongy drywall off of the timbers and heaping these two nice women's waterlogged possessions into trash bags like we were raking leaves.
The first house I don't remember quite as well. I think it was in a part of town that wasn't hit as badly. We spent most of our time there clearing stuff out of rooms that had taken on water. Everything had to go. I remember it was a family of three, with a son probably around my age- late high school or early college at the time. We kept finding stuff upstairs, particularly in the son's room, that looked salvageable. I remember asking if they wanted us to set anything aside. “Just get rid of it all,” the young man said.
I think I remember tossing some DVDs or video games that were in fine condition. One of the other kids on the trip scavenged a thing of teeth-whitening strips that was still in its shrink wrap. At the time, I didn't understand why they wanted us to throw everything away. Looking back, I figure they just wanted to put it all behind them and start fresh. Too many memories in that old house. Too much grief. Lives and plans and communities, all bulldozed overnight by the whims of nature- it's too much to fit inside our tiny human brains. We push it aside because it doesn't make sense. It's exactly the kind of thing that would never happen to you. Right up until it does.
A few hundred miles to the west of me, it's happening right now. It's weird thinking about hurricanes in terms of luck. When a storm makes landfall, it's a zero-sum game- New Orleans can't dodge a bullet without our friends in Houston or Biloxi or Lake Charles taking one in the chest. As of this writing, there has been one reported death on top of widespread property damage. By the time you read this, we will likely have more information. I can't assume much of it will be good. There will be opportunities to help, hands off or on. For the moment, with the situation still developing, it seems like the best thing we can do is donate. I know these are lean times all around but if you have anything to spare for your extended family down here, please consider it. We're currently collecting donations through RevCauses (there's a link in video description), but if you'd rather do your own thing, here is a nice, diverse list of avenues for giving.
Friday: In the course of raising two energetic boys with a shared thirst for adventure and some pretty severe ADHD, my parents came up with a game. The name of that game was “Words I Never Thought I'd Have to Utter.” As in, “Andy, get the fork out of your nose- words I never thought I'd have to utter.” “Rob, why did you and Brandon pee in the air vents in the boys' bathroom at school? Words I never thought I'd have to utter.” (This was like, first grade. In case you were picturing me doing that in high school. My accomplice, Brandon, would eventually graduate from Harvard.) It started as one of those “laugh to keep yourself from crying” sort of things, and now that us kids are all growned up, the game persists as a sort of in-joke around the Ingraham family dinner table whenever we all get together.
I've been thinking about “words I never thought I'd have to utter” a lot lately, mostly since seeing this tweet from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a while back:
How can we possibly need to discuss whether or not it's awesome to have plainclothes agents from some vague-yet-menacing government agency roll up on a protest and just start black-bagging civilians? It's completely bonkers that this is even up for debate. “There is no excuse for snatching women off the street and throwing them into unmarked vans- words I never thought I'd have to utter.”
That Ocasio-Cortez even feels the need to weigh in here speaks to a broader problem, though: remember when our idea of a hot-button topic was, like, abortion? Now it's all, “are Nazis bad?” and “do we really need a postal service?” and “is 185,000 dead Americans a lot?” It is astounding to think about the things that are up for debate in 2020. We are having some truly embarrassing discussions at the national level.
I would just like to say for the record that, yes, 185,000 dead Americans is a lot- words I never thought I'd have to utter. If someone nuked Providence, Rhode Island, obliterating the city and its entire population, would you be out there sharing "IF UR LIVING IN FEAR THAN YOUR ALREADY DEAD" memes and reminding us to rest easy because the majority of America wasn't vaporized in a sudden act of unspeakable aggression? Because 185,000 is the population of Providence, plus a few thousand. Incidentally, it's also more people than were killed in either of the only two actual nuclear attacks in human history, which means that Japan- the country whose soldiers used to disembowel themselves in order to avoid embarrassment- quit a whole damn war over fewer bodies.
This isn't some cute little statistical blip. This is a slow-motion catastrophe that has claimed more American lives than World War I and Vietnam combined. In the past five months or so, we've seen over 200,000 excess deaths- meaning deaths above the average rate during these months- at a time when we're encountering a deadly new variable that we're still struggling to fully understand. Why are we still talking about this in terms of whether or not it's a big deal? Why is this even a conversation?
And spare me the comorbidity talk. I've heard all about the dang comorbidities. They may be vital for things like triage and prognosis, but they aren't a lampshade you can throw over a worldwide death event. If you're standing next to a cliff, and somebody pushes you off, that's murder, right? I mean, sure, it probably wouldn't have been so easy to push you over the edge if you hadn't been standing so close to it, but you didn't die of “cliff proximity.” You were pushed. Likewise, COVID patients don't die of “comorbidities;” they die of COVID. I don't care if we're talking about someone who was ninety-four years old, 320 pounds, and asthmatic. If COVID pushed them over the edge of the cliff, then COVID is what killed them.
Beyond that, you start getting into some really sticky territory. I'm not a particularly religious person, but I do believe that as human beings- as fallible mortals with narrow perspectives and a rudimentary understanding of the universe we inhabit- it is out of bounds for us to weigh the value of one another's lives, particularly as a function of general health. “Well, he was old and fat, so he was probably a lost cause anyway” is not a legitimate reason to shrug off a single death, much less a thousand deaths a day.
Again, why are we even having this conversation? We've known all of this for months now. Absent any coordination or leadership at the national level, we've been left to our own devices, resulting in a hodgepodge of half-measures and overcorrections and widespread defiance of even the most basic precautionary measures. You know when someone says “thank you,” and half of your brain thinks “you're welcome” and the other half thinks “no problem,” and you end up blurting out “you're problem”? Our pandemic response has been one big, months-long “you're problem,” with one half of the country diligently adhering to public health guidelines while the other half is busy posting about nanobots and throwing full-on toddler meltdowns in a grocery store to own the libs. We are Wile E. Coyote painting a fake tunnel on the side of a mountain and then running headlong into it, over and over again, forever. I think I might be depressed.
Saturday: Did I mention I'm on Instagram now???
