1/13/24
Newsletter #547
The Crack of Dawn
Four years ago, on January 13, 2020, I had been sober for ten days, and was wearing a voluntary alcohol tether on my ankle. In a month I would be going back to court to be sentenced for my third DUI. I was potentially looking at a year or two in prison. Except that I had the best criminal attorney in Oakland County, Michigan. Instead of a year in prison, I got sixteen days in jail (plus probation, testing, etc.). I was a lucky motherfucker with a great lawyer.
The day I was taken in handcuffs from the courthouse to jail, February 20, 2020, the first cases of some new virus had just been diagnosed in the previously unknown city of Wuhan, China. It was no big deal, just a local malady – I don’t think it even had a name – that was being expertly handled by Chinese doctors, and would certainly stay contained in Wuhan.
Over the course of my next sixteen days in jail, I walked hundreds of circuits around the day room, where the mostly young, black prisoners played cards and watched one of two TVs. One TV was always on Black Entertainment Television, showing dismal TV movies with black casts, no better or worse than their white counterparts. On the other TV was always news or sports. I never sat down and watched either one; I either read or walked in circles. But each time I’d pass the news/sports TV, I’d pause to get updates on this Chinese virus, now called the Novel Coronavirus or Covid-19. It had spread beyond Wuhan and was being found in different places in China and beyond. However, as an American I needn’t worry. Luckily for us, President Donald Trump assured us all that Covid-19 was a big nothing, would certainly be gone in a month, and would absolutely never penetrate the borders of our formerly great country.
There are many things wrong with American society – making it similar to every other society on earth – but I don’t think that our response to Covid-19 was wrong, or mistaken, or mishandled. It was handled exactly as it was done, and in a very civilized manner. The idea of transforming Dr. Anthony Fauci — obviously a good-hearted man and doctor, trying in vain to be as calm, clear, and patient as he knew how — into a villain is truly absurd. The idea of going back to America’s, and the world’s, response to Covid and complaining about it as some enormous failure is painfully stupid. As they kept saying at the beginning of the pandemic, it was a “novel,” meaning it was new and the situation – whether it came from a wet market or a lab – spreading globally as it did, had not been seen before. It was novel, for goodness’ sake.
In my sixteen days in jail, the virus spread around the world. As I was released from jail on February 6, they locked a GPS tether on my ankle so that I was in 30-day, court ordered lockdown, only allowed to go as far as my mailbox at the end of the driveway.
Then, from the comfort of my house, I watched on TV as country after country went into lockdown mode, finally arriving here in America – just like me. I felt like everybody in the world was doing it in solidarity with me, and it made my month of forced lockdown fly right by.
I thank everybody for the show of support.
We’ve got our first, honest-to-goodness snowstorm here in Detroit. It’s been snowing for two days, plus getting progressively colder. Frozen snow is encrusting the limbs of the trees. It’s going down to zero tomorrow. This used to be known as “fucking cold,” but now it goes by the pithy moniker of, Polar Vortex.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Another good one!