Masks are back :(

I wrote a thing about how it felt like the virus was over, how we all got to spend a minute feeling like this whole sad era of isolation and death was finally behind us—at least for those of us in the United States, in cities with high vaccination rates—but you know what happened. I don’t even want to hear myself complain about it anymore.

My friend Kathleen Frydl, a historian and all-around brilliant person, gave me the long view when we hung out last week. COVID is going to be with us for years. New variants will keep arising. We’ll get on top of one, figure out what it does, figure out who suffers the worst and how, and maybe update our vaccines, or not. Then the next one will crop up and we’ll to start this mess again. Is Delta worse in kids? Will our daycare have to close? Will I be able to keep my job? Nobody knows.

I hate uncertainty. I’ve had enough. This might be where I’m supposed to tell you some new age axiom about embracing the unknown, but the only unknowns I want right now are in art. Where not-knowing is good. From Donald Barthelme:

The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

Which is true for art. But is not true for me. I am tired of this shit.

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Read, Read, Read

So let’s talk about something else. The dog days of summer are already over, but it isn’t too late to read books about dogs. My favorite is Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, about a woman who inherits a Great Dane after the death of her best friend. Both characters are writers. Read it if you’ve already read Lily King’s Writers & Lovers twice and want to read more about the interiority of being a writer, or need something cathartic to read about loss. (The final scene, on Fire Island, is uplifting in its sadness in a deeply beautiful way.) Or just read it if you love dogs!

Jill Ciment’s Heroic Measures, about aging, New York, and an elderly dachshund, is another one of my favorite books about a dog, as is Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories. (Bonus: Ciment and Hempel co-wrote a thriller, The Hand That Feeds You, about murder, deception, and two dogs accused of the crime.)

All of the links above, by the way, go through Active Listening’s affiliate page on Bookshop, where all the books I’ve written about in this newsletter can be found in one place. (Second bonus: Last month I interviewed Bookshop’s CEO, Andy Hunter, for the House of Beautiful Business. The short version is that Bookshop is taking a bite out of Amazon—and supporting independent bookstores—and that is an excellent thing.)

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In other news

Matt and I don’t have a dog, but we are about to buy our first house! Raising two kids in an apartment without any outdoor space has not been easy. And we finally decided where we want to live. (About which, more later!)

Where we don’t want to live, sadly, is Portland. It’s where Matt grew up, it’s a place that we both love, and a place where we have family and friends. But buying a house there has gotten incredibly hard, and it’s not the best place to live for a reporter who covers national news. And, with my mom in Miami needing more and more care, it’s also too far away.

Matt just finished writing a long article about why we’ve decided not to live there for Insider, which should be online sometime this week.

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Sexy Sax Man

Unrelated: Ten years ago a man named Sergio Flores became famous for playing George Michael on his saxophone while in character as same. Matt somehow missed the year 2011 (I don’t know how, we were together then), and so last night I introduced him to the spectacle, on YouTube, in a video that’s now part of the Western canon.

This kind of irony is gone now. It’s what Millennials excelled at. Gen X was so intensely earnest—we all got tattoos about things that were stupid and that mattered to us deeply—and the Millennials just laughed. They got tattoos of coffee cups and pizza slices and never even worked in pizzerias. What was bewildering about Millennials back then was that they seemed almost earnest in their irony. Everything mattered—and was hilarious. Sexy Sax Man might have been the pinnacle of that. I think he really felt that passionate about George Michael. Even if he performed that passion only for the laughs.

Gen Z doesn’t have the reference point. They don’t remember just how innocent Gen X was. They’re highly medicated and pansexual and are asking, what? What is the matter with you people? Which, I mean, I can’t exactly blame them. They’re inheriting a world that is literally on fire.

So, on that note, I leave you with a picture of George Michael:

He’s looking at you looking at his hair.