Feels Like The Third Time

“Feels Like the Third Time” is the third album from Freakwater, an alt-country band that came out of the late 1980s Louisville punk scene. The core members are Catherine Irwin, Janet Beveridge Bean and David Wayne Gay. They’re a wry, mournful, funny band with brilliant turns of phrases and memorable harmonizing between Irwin and Bean. I’ve listened to a lot of Freakwater in my life. The music loves a porch, late nights, and a bottle of bourbon. So do I. Alt-country came out of the 1990s, beginning with Uncle Tupelo that begat Wilco and your dad loves Wilco. It was an expression of country music outside of mainstream Nashville and country music radio. The music is less produced and less polished, looking more to Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris rather than Shania Twain and Garth Brooks. 

The first song of the first side is titled “My Old Drunk Friend.” My friend Nyssa sang it to me when I visited Brooklyn for the first time, about 25 years ago. “My old drunk friend, it’s good to see you again. Every time you walk in I should run the other way.” No one has ever literally run away from me, that I recall, but I’m sure the thought has crossed some minds, or my name has been cursed the next morning. I’m listening to the record on vinyl right now. I found this lone copy counting records during inventory at a job in 1997 at an independent record distributor. It was a time when if you didn’t have a physical copy of the music, you didn’t get to listen to the music, before the internet. The most popular songs that year were the Macarena, “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John, “MMMbop” by Hanson, something from Celine Dion and something from Jewel. Whew. Brutal. I don’t tell you this thinking it makes me cool, I’m telling you this so you know I am a 48 year-old white, middle-aged woman. There’s nothing cool about that.

I was saving “Feels like the third time” for an essay about self-destruction, but I just got a positive PCR result from Centers, my local urgent care. This is the third time I have COVD in 6 months, all 3 symptomatic in their own, special ways. The first time was early Omicron, December 2021. The city’s COVID hotel policy was still in effect, so I was able to stay in a Holiday Inn Express across Grand Central Parkway from Citifield. We were let out twice a day for “fresh air breaks” or “smoke breaks”, depending on what you needed. All the locks were taken off the doors. I stayed there so my partner wouldn’t get it, and I could convalesce without a mask on. A weird sense of relief washed over me when I read the word DETECTED on the urgent care email, and, because I was vaccinated and boosted, it wasn’t life-threatening. I got out right before Christmas. 

The second time my partner got it in March. I thought my body had natural immunity from December. I was wrong, very wrong, with a fever of 102. When it broke I felt like I got beat up.  This time around I felt like a failure, having contracted it so soon after having it. 

And this time around? I feel all of it: failure, freakishness, vulnerability, sickness, like I’m standing in place while the world moves around me. Maybe there will be a Lifetime movie about me, the Woman Who Cried COVID. I send pictures of DETECTED screenshots to work so they don’t think I am lying. I’ve felt what I consider the COVID hallmarks for my body, intense internal aches, consistent weariness, a pain behind my right eyeball I’ve only felt before during a night recreationally drinking Robotussin. 

Maybe I have COVID for the third time so I can get this Substack up. Is that the divine plan here? No, I just don’t have natural antibodies. You think you’re tired of COVID? I’m an essential worker. I don’t know if we’re still called that or are relics of evenings spent two years ago banging on pots and pans at 7 pm. Now we’re allowed out, so I imagine the notion of “essential” goes back to “jobs I don’t want.” I work at a non-profit food pantry and soup kitchen. We were called an essential provider, open the entire time, figuring out how to get food to people without any of us getting sick. The early days were grim, there was a marked difference between the people who could stay home and the people who had to find food. We had people coming from New Jersey and Staten Island, the air was anxious, an unknown, marked by having a city shut down. After 5 pm everywhere was a ghost town. Our emergency response to COVID habit has now become our daily reality, there is no “back to normal.” This is it. This is life now. 

We are definitely living in a world damned by COVID, and I’m not talking about having to wear a mask.

The repercussions of COVID are going to have generations-long ramifications for a lot of regular people, working families and people on the margins. We’re not on the margins because we want to be, we’re on the margins because that’s where we are left. The people I see and hear from the most, in the press and on social media, those voices are not representative of the struggle most of the people in this city we live in. Once you get behind, it’s nearly impossible to get ahead.

The numbers we see at the food pantry are high, higher than they were a year ago. There are more and more people living on the street, and more people having mental health issues. It’s so hard to take care of yourself if you don’t have the security of a home. For the people who do make homes for themselves, the city will throw it away. Could you imagine? You own so little, and the Department of Sanitation comes and takes your damn house? They’re probably making overtime while tossing tents in the trucks.. 

What drives me nuts is that we know why more people are in need of shelter and more people are in need of food. We know why, we lived through it. We were all almost in this together, but that caring trended as quickly as a Tik Tok dance. We all collectively experienced how fraught our society is, how little support the government offers people. How can you pay your bills if you can’t work? How can you afford food for your family when the prices increase so quickly and your rent can be increased by hundreds or thousands of dollars overnight, legally? How can you pay for anything when none of the major corporations that run this country are regulated and their CEOs made a ton of money during the pandemic. All the government welfare has protected them. We know why people are suffering, yet we still want to believe that personal responsibility is why people don’t have proper housing. That they don’t want to participate in this society that promises us life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We want to believe that people have more choices than they do. 

Maybe if more people truly understood how deeply fucked our society is, they would be compelled to change it. It took an entire nation to stay home and stand still to notice things a lot of people could have told you if we would only listen: kids rely on school lunches for one not-so-solid meal a day, the police murder Black people without repercussions, your generational wealth has a lot more to do with your success than you’re willing to admit…There will never be another shutdown no matter how dire public health gets, because when we stopped we realized what actually matters. The government noticed that too. 

People will say “the system’s broken” because we need to believe that what is wrong with this country is not by design. “A few bad apples” couldn’t possibly corrupt our institutions, except these rotten apples run things, including hiring and training people. “People want to live on the street.” Well, when the only other option is a dangerous, overcrowded city shelter that wouldn’t pass the NYC Health Department inspection can you really call that a choice? 

I am particularly raw right now, which I know can be off-putting to read. The rawness usually works better with music. The expression is immediate and necessary, less palatable,  more urgent. I can’t help but think of Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick,” but I don’t know if that’s because my friend thinks she got COVID seeing Mudhoney or because I need to hear it. I think this third time came from seeing the band Eyehategod at a sold-out St. Vitus, my first trip back there since before. I wore a mask, but I also stood next to the pit. I don’t think there’s a mask safe enough to wear for that. I wonder if I just have an eye for dystopia, or if it just has an eye for me. 

Welcome to my Attitude Adjustment Facility. It can only get better. Except the world’s getting worse.