Can You Catch COVID From the Internet?

The answer may surprise you, when we come back…

And we’re back.

And no.

The featured image I used for this post is a picture I took on my way to work in 2019. I had my camera in my bag and the usual Philly traffic was raging outside, and as our cars marched slowly through the EZPass sensors, I managed to fish my K-1 out and blindly fire off this shot. It’s not perfect. It barely catches the subject I meant to get. It’s mostly in focus, but not really. There are a million flaws with it and yet I can’t stop looking at it.

I was listening to a podcast while working from home, and it was the first thing I ever heard about the then-coronavirus, later COVID-19. We were still in the “sales of Corona beer are tanking” stage of the pandemic, a moment so foolish that we care to forget about it, and yet, it seems like something equally strange and foolish has been quick to replace it in the days and years since. The podcast told me about what was to come: deaths, hospitals filling up, quarantines, all the things that were to come in the next month, and I said what just about everybody else did at the time. It will never come to that. It just sounded like someone who wanted to get some unwarranted attention, pay it no mind.

Laura and I did as much as everyone else did: we gathered as much toilet paper as was humanly possible, we sheltered in place—fortunately we both had jobs that allowed us to work from home—made lots of plans to do the things we never had time for and promptly didn’t do them, eventually wore masks, and tried as much as possible to keep from catching the disease that had taken over the world. We all had become my grandmother, whose horror for public toilet seats, which as you know is the established source of all known disease, was legendary.

When it was vaguely over, sometime around 2021 or 2022, or even 2023 depending on where you live, we considered the aftermath. My Oma died in 2020, just a few months before the vaccines, at the age of 102. A few of our relatives had gotten it, but nothing too major, and we ourselves had come through strangely unscathed. I thought.

As much as I enjoyed not dying during those years, there was always the question of living. A strange phenomenon took place, at least in my mind, that I’ve never heard anyone talk about before: we had spent so much time avoiding people, talking behind masks and at a distance, only seeing each other’s faces under the cover of Zoom meetings, that it seemed like human contact had become the enemy and not the disease. I had ditched Facebook at least three years earlier, but I started to drift away from social media altogether. My photography dwindled. Inspiration seemed like a memory. Months passed, years even, and I hadn’t posted anything on Instagram. I tried to tell myself that I had just lost interest in social media, but no, it wasn’t that. No matter how irrational it sounds, I was afraid that by doing things, seeing people even through a computer screen, it would be harmful to my health.

This last year was lost to health issues having nothing to do with COVID, or computer screens, or toilet seats. Laura was going through treatments and was immune-compromised, and our newfound freedom-from-masks lifestyle reverted back to the fall of 2020. Another year, but over now, scars still healing, and suddenly it’s 2024.

My work is still a blessing in the fact that I can still work from home, but that has its challenges in and of itself, especially when you want to rid yourself of well-established fears, so I more or less have to force myself. The sign-finding expeditions I would go on ten years ago were increasingly difficult to organize, as old neon seemed to vanish in the same speed as new normals.

In particular, these two disappeared in the COVID years, my two favorite test subjects. The Charcoal had closed down years before, but the sign was still standing even though it had been transformed into the Bieber Bus Station. The lot was bought by a local car dealership and the sign is now part of a private collection. Nick’s was a COVID casualty.

As difficult as it is sometimes, I realize that I need to get out as a matter of mental health, so when this weekend rolled around and we realized we didn’t have any plans, it seemed like a good opportunity to get out and see the world again, prove to myself once and for all that humanity is safe, or at least, reasonably so. We’ve been helping out with my sister-in-law’s Bed and Breakfast (which by the way, visit here), and we were looking at things to do around the Hershey area for the website.

Have you ever left the house and about halfway on your way to where you’re going, you think to yourself, ‘well, this is just wrong’? Usually you can put this aside by telling yourself that you’re in your own head, but it’s especially difficult when you’re dealing with some fear issues. Even worse, it’s hard to put aside when you’re kind of right? We went to three places that morning—I’ll leave off telling you what they were, to be fair to them—and none of them was really what we hoped they would be.

In the car, in between disappointments, we were having one of those lost conversations, the one that goes like this:

“Are you doing all right?”

“I’m fine.” repeat x 20

Laura had put on some music. In times like this, she usually puts on Undercurrent by Bill Evans and Jim Hall, because it’s terrifically uncomplicated: two men, one on piano, one on guitar. Unfortunately, since we end up playing this under these circumstances, it has become the soundtrack of awkwardness.

After a while, I start to realize yep, it’s me and I start to snap out of it. So it’s not going great, so what? It doesn’t need to be perfect.

That afternoon the rain came and it didn’t stop. We had reached our final stop, which was a winery, and we had to wait in the car until the first wave had come through. We sat in the car, as the drops crashed against the windshield, and thought about taking off before trying an ounce of wine.

There are times when you just need to fight through it. We waited it out, and ran through some remaining drops and we got inside, and do you know what? We sat down and had some wine, in a lovely outdoor space overlooking the vines. A group of women were at the next table over, celebrating a 50th birthday for one of them, and they had bought pink sashes for the occasion. A few young families came in and ran around on the lawn with their toddlers. And for just a moment, the cracks in the irrational fears started to show, and it didn’t matter that things weren’t perfect, and it didn’t matter if it rained, and the past didn’t matter and I’m not sure if even the future does.

“Are you all right?” Laura asked me again.

“Yeah,” I said. And I smiled.

And we’re back.