2020 Historical Reenactment Society
Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in
I saw Protomartyr at Warsaw last Friday. I think of them as my favorite band these days, in the same childish way that Duran Duran was my favorite band when I was 12. Something about them just speaks to me.
If you aren’t familiar with Protomartyr: imagine if Joy Division were from Detroit and had a sense of humor. In case that doesn’t help, here’s their best song:
Anyway, a great night out, we got pizza afterward, and at some point that night I contracted COVID-19.
The Phantom of the Riverhouse
We had two weekends in a row planned with two distinct circles of friends.
Maya and I went up to the house on Saturday morning, and weekend number one was uneventful. Everybody was gone by Monday afternoon, and we did some yardwork just as the heat wave was beginning to make itself known. When we were done I was surprised by how dehydrated and wiped out I felt, but that didn’t stop me from kissing Maya on the mouth before she drove back to Brooklyn.
I had decided to stay another night and go back for work on the bus the next day, but my condition suddenly went off a cliff. I went from feelin’ fine to totally ill in the space of an hour, so I dug up an unexpired Binax and yup, the beet-red second line showed up right away.
I called Maya just as she was walking in the door, and she took a test that we interpreted as just barely positive. I wrote all our friends from the weekend and no one else seemed to be infected. Maya drove back up the next afternoon, and surprise, she was actually testing negative.
Weekend number two was supposed to have been with a bunch of Maya’s pals from an old job. They had planned to make a long weekend out of the Juneteenth holiday, and were super bummed about the last-minute cancellation.
So, when Maya continued to test negative, we devised a bold plan: everyone would come up after all, and I would spend the weekend haunting the mother-in-law apartment off the Riverhouse, having meals delivered to my door and playing Xbox like a feral teenage failson.
As it turned out, an expansion pack for Elden Ring dropped on Friday night. It’s like it was meant to be.
So in the end everyone had a lovely weekend, including me. My tests are still faintly positive as I write this, but my symptoms are gone. Moral of the story, I guess, is that COVID, like Elden Ring, is still a thing. Do with this knowledge whatever seems appropriate to you.
One more thing from the weekend: something, probably the heat, caused a massive firefly population bloom. We took a masked nighttime walk down the road and were just amazed by the pyrotechnics over the fields in our neighbor’s farm. This video does not in any way capture the phenomenon, but is still mildly cool if you watch it in a dark room:
Also Still A Thing: Goat Girl
This new video is mildly unsafe-for-work.
Solstice photo dump
It’s been a weird month and I apologize for the radio silence. We’re going on vacation soon so this service disruption will likely continue. Enjoy your summer! Try not to think about politics! Log off and run into the woods!
Covid. Still a good excuse to fuck off.