#plague diary

[moonmothmama]

i'm taking another test please please be negative this time

[samiholloway]

So, I feel like crap s lot of time time.

And when I don't feel good, I research science and treatments and traditional cures.

And there's this collection of data points I'm wrestling with right now:

Magnesium helps nerves work right and so helps mental issues, sleep, pain

Magnesium is an electrolyte, which helps the whole body maintain balance along with the others

When I'm stressed I crave salt and feel better after consuming it

Stress throws off the body balance by overtaxing the thyroid and adrenal glands, which can lead to mineral and electrolyte imbalances

COVID seems to throw the whole body out of whack, including vascular and neurological systems

The vagus nerve handles mind-body balancing, including digestion and stress recovery

Poor digestion can lead to nutrient deficiencies just because they aren't being absorbed right

The sciatic nerve and the vagus nerve are some of the largest ones in the body

My sciatica is acting up very strangely and my vagus nerve is involved in st least two of my chronic issues

Bromelain might have something to do with easing sciatica issues (probably by being an anti-inflammatory?)

So here's what I'm thinking:

I can try taking bromelain to help with both my digestion and general inflammation

I can keep up talking the electrolytes for the nerves and the mineral imbalances

I can go back to taking magnesium before bed like I started to do and then forgot about for like six months

I can work on finding ways to minimize and better recover from stress

And maybe I'll feel better? Because right now I feel very strange and often downright icky most of the time, and recovering from COVID has only made that worse.

I'll keep ya informed on how it goes if you want.

[marchdaughter]

Been working at home since March 2020 in a very tiny apartment and i’m finally reaching the point where it is just impossible to focus. I am somehow always simultaneously ahead & behind, I finish work every day and walk directly into housework (or take a “break” from work to do housework) and am all around just losing my mind. The workload keeps piling on and piling on and I find myself procrastinating because it all just feels fake & purposeless.

[dustedmagazine]

Bill Meyer: Lockdown pickers 2020

You don’t need me to tell you that it’s been a hell of a year. The pile-on of environmental disaster, the COVID pandemic, people being blasted with teargas for having the temerity to suggest that living while Black shouldn’t be a shooting offense, 70 million-odd Americans endorsing and abetting buffoonish fascism, and the virtual evaporation of live music — and that’s just off the top of my head.  

Still, 2020 has been a great year for recorded music. Working from home and not going out at night has meant more time to play it, and while the supply and production chains have been undeniably wonky (oh yeah, I forgot to mention our departing president’s efforts to drown the US Postal Service in the bathtub and the Apollo Masters factory fire; really, fuck you, 2020), a lot of good records have made it into my house. The year has also yielded creative musical responses by creative music makers to the loss of live performances. Chicago Experimental Sound Studio provided a platform for The Quarantine Concerts, a series of live-streaming and prepared video performances that took us into performers’ homes, basements, back yards and pottery studios (I’m talking about you, Terrie Ex). No, live-streaming is not the same as attending a concert. The experience of community and shared space can’t reach you through a screen. But hearing Joe McPhee send a shout-out from his basement Batcave to Peter Brötzmann, seeing Arto Lindsay struggle with the orientation lock on his phone and getting drawn into the layered environment that Olivia Block created with film projections, played sounds and no help from an intruding cat delivered some of the same authenticity, disaster and wonder that concerts at their best can provide. And if you have had the chance to attend some concerts since March (I’ve seen three; two appearances by improvising ensembles involving Dave Rempis in a park on Chicago’s north side, and an all-outdoor edition of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival on the south side), you probably already know that live music events aren’t the same, either. The feelings of communal trust and safety, the internal shift that says “yup, this is where I’m supposed to be,” is gone. We have a lot to recapture and rebuild once the pandemic passes.  

The sales and streaming platform, Bandcamp, became a hero simply by virtue of simply treating musicians like people who need a hand rather resources to be sucked dry and discarded. The monthly Bandcamp Fridays, when the company refrained from taking its cut and passed that percentage along to the artists and labels, afforded fans a direct way to help out folks whose work was getting them through the day, and allowed people who had lost all their performing opportunities a chance to make a little money. Some players took the opportunity to release music solely through Bandcamp. English soprano/tenor saxophonist John Butcher has issued seven titles collectively dubbed The Memory of Live Music. They are a sequence of previously unreleased, archival concert recordings monthly, all splendid musical statements, but also reminders of what we have been missing. Chicago saxophonist Dave Rempis’ Aerophonic Records likewise posted live recordings of short-lived ensembles like the Outskirts that he’d never gotten around to documenting, as well as one-off encounters, such as a marvelously wooly 2012 concert with guitarist Terrie Ex and drummer Tim Daisy at Milwaukee’s Sugar Maple.  

But Bandcamp also gave some musicians an opportunity to create outside the frameworks of physical recordings and performance in physical proximity. Soprano/tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and her husband, drummer Tom Rainey, used her Bandcamp page as a conduit for Stir Crazy, a semi-weekly series of home recordings. Each installment lasts 15 or 20 minutes, and it might be a free improvisation, a run through a friend or inspirational elder’s compositions, or a topical commentary, such as the loving, skeletal performances of tunes from the American Songbook that they offered a few days after the election. And jazz clarinetist Ben Goldberg has kept a Plague Diary of nearly-daily sketches for clarinet and electric keyboard. Some celebrate friends, colleagues, family members, and historical figures; others simply work out an idea. It feels a bit like an invitation to look over the guy’s shoulder and see how his notions come into being.  

Other parties made the circumstances of the time into a premise for new work. Mary Staubitz (Donna Parker) and Russ Waterhouse (Blues Control) reached out to fellow musicians to contribute to Distant Duos. Each candidate’s mission was to improvise for five minutes while thinking of another player, who would likewise improvise for five minutes while thinking of their counterpart. Then Waterhouse and Parker would combine the tracks. The circumscribed duration and prior acquaintance kept collaborations by the likes of Kryssi Battalene / Jayson Gerycz and Jeb Bishop / Joseph Mauro charged and focused.  And the Swiss label Insub instituted Distances, for which it enlisted eight composers (including Michael Pisaro-Liu, Ryoko Akama and Sarah Hennies) to devise pieces to be performed by two physically remote musicians (such as Mike Majkowski & Cyril Bondi, or Cristián Alvear & Violeta Motta). Each contribution consists of two videos, one a sequence of interviews with the composer and the players, the other a split-screen projection of the music being played. And if you want to take the music home, you can always buy it on Bandcamp.  

But the response that compelled me most is AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine, an online festival of new work initiated by Estwhile Records’ Jon Abbey. On March 12, as concert seasons canceled and countries went to lockdown, Abbey and a circle of associates invited sound artists to contribute newly recorded pieces. Over the next six months they posted 240 pieces to Facebook and Bandcamp. Most were solo works, but several were blind duos for which musicians with shared histories and separate addresses submitted solo pieces with the understanding that they’d be mixed together. At the end of the festival, Taku Unami combined sounds from all 240 pieces into a final entry, “All Together Now.” The works encompassed paint-stripping noise, solemn études, field recordings, electronic music, musique concrete, improvisations, compositions, and works that combined several of the aforementioned methods. The contributors included people you probably know (Tom Carter, Toshimaru Nakamura, Sarah Hennies, Vanessa Rossetto), others I certainly didn’t (Fangyi Liu, Asha Sheshadri), and one who also writes for Dusted (Michael Rosenstein). They made diaries of their circumscribed days, laments for lost experiences and memorials for friends who died during the festival’s duration. There are too many good ones to name, so I’ll just single out a couple performers whose work especially touched me. Reinier van Houdt’s first piece, “drift nowhere past (22 march 2020),” marvelously captured the still loneliness of life that had shrunk to what you could perceive through a window or a screen. Five subsequent monthly instalments came to feel like notes of progress from an ongoing search for purpose and grace. And the radio captures that make up Keith Rowe’s “GF SUC,” recorded as Black Lives Matters protests arose around the world, imparted sadness beyond words; I’ve heard no music that was truer to the tragedy of this time. 

Bill Meyer

[thewoodbinewitch]

I'm exhausted and drained. I don't want to go to work. Customers treat me like I'm not even a person, they break social distancing constantly and waste my time. They are snarky and rude and tell me their political opinions while I'm cashiering.

I am not supposed to be an essential worker. I sell plants for a living. I get that we have veggies but for fuck's sake a houseplant isn't essential. Hanging baskets aren't essential. I get that gardening is what's getting so many if us through this, but holy hell there's a pandemic going on and you're complaining that we aren't letting you inside to get your grass seed? People are dying and you're strolling through for fun.

I'm burnt out. I'm sick of being a nonhuman to too many and being thanked for being open by others. I chose to stay because I desperately don't want to be a seasonal worker anymore and working through this practically guarantees that I'll be hired on year-round. And now I have the guilt for wanting to call out sick only ten days after I last called out because we're short staffed and it could hurt my chances of this quite literal gamble with my life paying off. It's just one more day, what could it hurt? Only my mental health.

[grandmotherseal]

friday // downeast maine

[suburban-plague-diary]

My Ability to Adapt Scares Me

Something changed for me today. Like flipping a switch, I stopped feeling so afraid. I found peace. My inner animal stopped flailing around in my head like a fly in a web and lay down in its cage and closed its eyes. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not happy. I miss the partner I don’t live with keenly. I miss normal grocery shopping and being able to blithely decide that I’m not cooking today. I miss my coffeeshop and my pub and my witchy shops. I want to go to the beach and the mountains. This was supposed to be the summer we would finally explore the obsidian fields and go to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. I want to walk through the redwoods again and fly home to Boston. I want to collect river rocks and buy vegetable seedlings and go to the farmers market. 

But I’m not in a full-blown panic all the time anymore. Last night, I slept a normal amount. It was the first time my body let me sleep a whole night since the governor closed down the state. I woke up feeling normal. The limitations feel normal. I was able to write a coherent blog post about something other than corona for the first time since all this started. I didn’t fret about having to make do with the food in my kitchen. I just did. Like not being able to run out for eggs was entirely normal.  

My ability to adapt scares me because this isn’t normal. 75,000 people dying shouldn’t feel normal. It shouldn’t feel normal to live in confinement, separated from people I care about. It makes me wonder what other things feel normal and shouldn’t. What else have I been putting up with, what else have we been putting up with that we shouldn’t, just because it is what it is? 

[moonmothmama]

covid timeline

so, me and Brian have covid for the first time ever. our years-long no covid streak is finally over. here is the timeline.

sometime last week: one of his coworkers comes in sick to work with what he thinks- and maintains- is just a cold, although we have had NO other contact with ANYONE sick, so you do the math.

Sunday, Oct 29th: Brian has a very slight sore throat, which he attributes to snoring harder than usual (which he was). this isn't out of the ordinary. has no other symptoms at first.

Halloween: i have a pretty fucking good day carving pumpkins and then hanging out on a voice call watching movies with a friend who lives in another state. late at night, i start feeling sinusy. pass out all at once. also, Brian has realized he might be coming down with something.

Wednesday, Nov 1st: wake up with the worst fucking sinus headache i can remember having, like ever. note that this is very distinctly a sinus headache. the day wears on and the headache does not go away. nose becomes slightly stuffy/runny. i start feeling Off. Brian, who now feels like he has a cold, takes a covid test just to be sure, which for the first time comes back positive. i do not bother testing because there's no way in hell that he has it and i don't. fever hits me like a train, i spend the night freezing or boiling or both. head still hurts. body aches set in, but almost exclusively lower back and down. my hips, knees, and leg muscles all hurt. spend the night sleeping fitfully.

Today, Thursday Nov 2nd: Brian is the same as he has been. my fever is either down or gone completely. still have body aches but noticeably less severe. still having mild cold symptoms, very slight cough, sneezing, stuffy/runny nose. also fucking hives appear on my legs. HIVES. i have never had hives in my LIFE. this is so FUCKING weird