You want that to be the last thing you say to someone
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
Today we have the second installment of a series looking back at loved ones we lost over the past year. In it M.G. McIntyre reckons with the impact of isolation during Covid and lost time in his father’s final year.
“Somebody asked me what changed the most when he was diagnosed and I just said that you say ‘I love you’ a lot more because you want that to be the last thing you say to someone when you’re aware everything you say could be the last thing.”
It’s for paid-subscribers only but there’s an excerpt below. You can find the whole thing here.
If you missed the previous beautiful piece by Lucy Schiller please read it here.
If you can’t subscribe at this time no worries here’s some other shit to read for zero dollars.
This by David Roth on Caitlyn Jenner was characteristically great.
What this base wants to see is itself, reflected in shades of gunmetal and gold, because it does not trust and cannot care about anything but that reflection. This is the language that Jenner is trying to learn to speak, the uncanny patois of sunburned small-business tyrants and seething but secretly bored bosses and aggrieved middle-management. The task before Jenner is to learn the things that the deranged hornball grifters and serial antagonizers of customer service professionals and sloppy hair-trigger affluenza cases hear all day from their televisions, and then learn to say it back to them. Trump was able to do this because, for all his wealth, he was exactly as small of spirit and vacant of principle and jealously selfish as the people that idolized him, and just as voracious a consumer of the same terrible television. For all the other things that might hold Jenner back as a candidate, she does at least seem to have all that going for her.
The point in this comment on the Hell World from the other day about restaurant workers explaining why they aren’t going back after the last year was touched on in the piece but I think it’s worth highlighting.
Service industry workers are used to dealing with entitled and pushy assholes, but always mixed in with them are the cool and nice and fun people it makes you generally happy to take care of. What the past year seems to have done is provide a sort of controlled experiment in which almost every single customer — due to them being in a restaurant during a pandemic in the first place — was an entitled and pushy asshole. A sort of Leftovers type scenario where all but the worst had disappeared. I can imagine it, to use a technical term, fucking sucked. No wonder so many were driven to their breaking point.
You may remember we reported on a nurses strike going on in Worcester, MA in here a few weeks back. The strike is about to enter its thirteenth week coming up. Jacobin has a follow up on the situation here.
This being Memorial Day weekend I thought you might take a look back at this piece from a couple years ago.
At the end of it I knew I could hug my parents and sister
by M.G. McIntyre
It was February of the second year of the pandemic and I was puking in the bathroom of a funeral home. I don’t know if it was the hangover or the trauma or both but it was among the less dignified places I’ve ever vomited. Not that there’s typically much dignity to be found in vomiting in any scenario. The way your body betrays you. One minute I was looking at an urn that was supposed to be a heart, but looked more like a big red ass, and the next I was on my knees in a stall hoping the nice old lady at the reception desk couldn’t hear the animal sounds I was making. I guess when you work in the death business you probably see a lot worse.
Putting my mask back on after wasn’t great.
I’ve been thinking about this huge patch of forest I used to spend time in when I was young. Near my high school, it was boxed in by the neighbourhood on all sides, but otherwise untouched. A copse of gigantic Nova Scotian trees stretching a hundred feet tall. There was a path that wound through the middle, and some days I would walk home that way and enjoy the silence. There was a specific tree, my tree, that I would sit under and listen to my discman and smoke stolen cigarettes and watch the squirrels and birds.
One September a hurricane made its way up the coast and pummelled our province. We were off school for a week or so. Driving up the street on my first bus ride back I realized that the forest was gone. It looked like a herd of elephants or mastodons or some god with a giant thresher had just levelled the whole thing like a field of wheat. The scar was so huge and ugly and obvious that no one could miss it and everyone knew what had happened, but there was a place in that pile of timber that was special to me. It was a loss that felt absurd even then to try to articulate, that somewhere in that tangle of broken wood was my specific tree. The tree that was important to me. Dozens of them had been pulled up by the roots and shattered into a million pieces, but the absence of mine felt overwhelming.
I spent nine months almost completely alone in Vancouver in 2020. I saw one person face to face between March and November of that year. My father had stage 4 colon cancer, which made me hesitant to fly home to Nova Scotia for fear of getting him sick or getting my mother sick. I had contacted Covid myself in April and was sick for almost two months. Beyond the physical toll it really fucked with my head. My already extant mental illness was pushed into overdrive and so I drank too much to self-medicate and sat alone in my apartment staring at the walls. I used to like being alone, but self-imposed solitude and forced isolation are two very different things. There’s a reason one of them is used as a form of torture.
Read the rest here.