Looking back on the Pandemic Year, season by season.
How it Started
In March 2020 I was just beginning to get settled into what I thought would be my adulthood — the previous summer I graduated college and made a prodigal return to my home state of Texas, determined to get back to my “roots”. Already I felt I was floating in midair, stuck in the emotional limbo of what I call the post-art school blues. After recovering from a mysterious illness that left me bedridden for a month and on the watch for pneumonia after traveling from NYC in January, I returned to my room in my rental house in Austin, and had just landed a new receptionist job that was exactly what I was looking for — low effort and high(ish) pay.
In the early aughts when we were just hearing whispers of the strange new virus that we are now all too familiar with, a good friend and I had decided that we were “so over” the clubbing scene, the party scene, the social scene at large — we had seen it all, done it all, heard every bad techno set, exhausted every gay club the city had to offer, been to every 80’s night, women’s night, trivia night, and themed party we could stomach — we were firm in our belief that it was all a trivial distraction from the higher calling of our writing, our purpose, our art. We slumped in dark corners of musky clubs and sighed while chewing the straws of our overpriced…
