My yinz. We haven’t had a mental wellness check-in for a while and since the genesis of this newsletter lives at the genesis of the pandemic, let’s take our mental temperature. Or rather, let me tell you about my mental temperature and I bet you’ll read it and go …
Here’s where I am: I’m at this point, two years in —. Holy fork we need to press pause already.
Two years. Can that be? Nearly two years ago everything changed when the collective rug was pulled out from under all of humanity. Just writing that sentence takes my breath away a little. The surreality of it. The cruelty of the punishing pace of time’s forward march. Two years in and millions of worldwide deaths and I sit here and you sit there and the world moves out there and sometimes we watch it go by and sometimes we jump in and move with it.
[Rewind and press play again]
Here’s where I am: I’m in a state of suspension. I’m suspended in air. Time. Place. Floating even while I’m moving. I can’t just let gravity work and hit the ground running with open arms and upturned face one-step two-step three- and accomplish what I want every single day, because the pandemic still paints the backdrop of our lives — sometimes in muted blurriness easy to ignore, but sometimes in harsh detail screaming out for our anxiety.
I can go weeks waking up and setting out to do what I want and need with a smile and a positive attitude and I write and I edit and I do my schoolwork and I hike and I read and I go to bookclub and I plan my travel and I care for my children and I do my daily Duolingo lessons. And I always hope. Soon we can meet for happy hour and it won’t feel just a little weird. Soon we’ll get an invite to an event and we won’t automatically check to see if it’s virtual. Soon we won’t have a box of masks next to the place where we keep our car keys.
But then there are those days — I know you know them well — those days when the weirdness comes and settles around your shoulders. That unmistakable yet intangible weirdness that shadows you so you spend the day with it, feeling it, trying to ignore it and all the questions and worries it whispers to you. You can’t describe it and you try to put your finger on what exactly it is, but it evades your reach while doing something cringe like …
You try to dissolve it with rose-colored glasses, but it remains your companion, just pink now. You and your weirdness. Walking through your day. This is me. This is my weirdness — yes, it looks like John Cena wearing all pink. We’re both pleased to meet you. It makes you feel heavy. It comes when you spend too much time absorbing news and social media. It comes when there are whispers of a new variant or subvariant. It comes if you think about the time you lost and the age you gained. It comes at the end of a day spent inside the stress of being deaf and trying to understand masked people whose lips you can’t read. It comes when your ease of being is threatened by the inward push of a pandemic that doesn’t seem to want to fully relinquish itself to science’s weapons. It comes when your attempts at normal are interrupted with reminders of the abnormal. Sometimes it comes for no reason at all.
Here’s where I’m at: I accept it. I acknowledge it. My weirdness. It won’t fully leave me until this pandemic truly ends. So the days when it comes and sits next to me or on me or floats in whispers all around me, I wave to it. Hi, weirdness. You’re back. You see this shit about the stealth subvariant? I’m going to give you today, John Cena, to slow me down, to weigh me down, to make me sad, to suffocate my motivation, but tomorrow maybe you tap out and let me float a bit more freely.
Two years in, the weirdness is normal. We all have it visit us from time to time. None of us are fully mentally okay all of the time. Take comfort in that and take comfort in the lessons of history that say this is temporary. Let’s all plan to go to a city-wide happy hour when the time comes to finally bid our weirdness goodbye. I’ll meet you under the Kaufmann’s clock. Just don’t ever call it the Target clock or I’ll sic my pink John Cena on you. That is not a euphemism.
Let’s talk Pittsburgh!
1. Speaking of the Kaufmann’s NOT TARGET Clock
I went on the quickest of history hunts out of curiosity. Here’s the first news mention of the Kaufmann’s clock from 1897 in The Pittsburgh Press, and the first mention of “meeting under the clock” in 1935 from overheard chatter at a Pitt football game:
It’s iconic and historical and will ALWAYS be the Kaufmann’s clock.
2. This one weird animal might be living in your backyard
Let me show you some real headlines and you tell me where your brain goes, okay?
Before our brains engage our logic cores, they first fire up their holyshitwhattheeff synapses and therefore when you read those headlines you immediately think this woman has found some new horrifying creature — a snarling, freakish genetic chimera with like the head of a warthog and the body of an obese otter. Some secret DNA experiment gone wrong before escaping from the lab. A doomish harbinger of a zombie animal apocalypse.
But finally your logic core activates and you read the articles to find … this …
All this clickbait for what is either a mangy dog or coyote (or perhaps even the rare mix of the two). That’s what they can’t figure out. Maybe it’s a dog. But maybe you just rescued a coyote, lady. We better alert the media.
And the media goes, “Oh, someone rescued either a dog or a coyote but you’re not sure? Sounds to me like you’re ‘baffled’ about a ‘mystery creature’ that might be ‘terrorizing locals’ while ‘possibly feeding on human flesh’ and also ‘your Instant Pot could kill you while you sleep.’”
I’m going to start a no-clickbait news site that gives you the news with zero attempts to force you to scroll to find answers. So my write-up of this story would have been:
Fairfield, PA — A local woman rescued an animal that is undergoing DNA testing to determine if it is a dog or coyote. Either way, it looks like a sweet dog with mange. We’ll see.
No ads. No fear-mongering. No “THE CHUPACABRA COMES IN THE NIGHT.” You pay me a single quarter a month. I’ll be a millionaire because would you look at this?
And here’s my write-up:
Pittsburgh, PA — North Side bar Park House will reopen in March. It has been closed since December of 2020. It had pretty good peanuts.
Also, Legendary Closed Pittsburgh Bar is my new band name. We play Donnie Iris covers.
3. Speaking of caged animals
Remember a few editions ago when I gave historical evidence to show that monkeys escape Pittsburgh zoos and labs way more than we realize? Well, hold on to your flinging feces:
We nearly had 100 CDC monkeys on the run. Only 3 monkeys managed to literally head for the hills where one hissed in his good-Samaritan rescuer’s face and she then went on the local news and claimed she was getting sick but then the national news outlets picked up the story all “PENNSYLVANIA WOMAN EXPOSED TO CDC MONKEYS AND TOLD TO GET RABIES SHOTS IS HAVING SYMPTOMS,” so she then changed her story to, “No, I’m not really sick. But I did go to a birthday party with a bunch of COVID-positive people. Please stop calling me. I’m only talking to PETA now.”
Again, we all need to try very hard to engage our logic cores before our holyshitwhattheeff synapses start setting off all the alarms. But the real moral of this story is once again this — Always be ready for monkeys.
That’s my new email sign-off.
The countdown to New Jersey’s Dr. Oz tweeting, “CDC monkeys on the loose in PA thanks to Joe Biden’s CDC. Vote for me, Pennsylvania, and I’ll fight for America Freedom Spacious Skies Trucks Bacon. Farms.” starts now.
God, I love making fun of that man.
4. Dottie strikes again
We love my mother, yes? We love when she tries technology (“What’s a Venmo?” “Why is my phone in Korean now?” “What’s Korean for ‘erase phone’?”). We love that we call her Dottie when that’s not even her name, but is the name of her alter ego who unintentionally does or says funny things. The other day she randomly texted me and my sisters, “Sick of this weather. On my way to eye doctor. Been having bouts of seeing only black and white in my eye. I also went blind for a bit. How are you all today?”
(She’s fine.) Moms love to do that don’t they? I’m not quite there yet, but I imagine someday I’ll text my kids, “Lovely weather we’re having. Got bit by a chupacabra last night. I think it gave me rabies so I called the CDC and asked to speak to the manager. Well, off to Target!”
Last weekend she told me I should start selling my Instagram pictures “on the internet” because they are good. She is honestly so pure. Anyway, all of this is not even the point of this newsletter item. This is:
I still haven’t answered her because I don’t quite know the best question to ask to understand what she’s trying to do or if she really knows what a meme is and everything the meme-world encompasses from gifs to photos. When I texted my sisters for a good chuckle at Dottie’s expense, Tina Fey’s solution was …
If you have a Memes for Dummies book, please send it to Dottie. If she ever creates this meme of herself, I’ll be sure to share it. I imagine it will be epic.
5. Goodness, gracious …
Speaking of memes. Goodbye, Ken Rice’s Floating Dumpster and hello, Beaver County Train on Fire.
I hope it wasn’t carrying monkeys.
I’m looking forward to this photo or video being paired with, “The Trump 2024 Train rolls on!” or “Live look at the Pirates’ bullpen” or “Me: I don’t like drama. Also me: [photo of train on fire casually rolling through a snowy landscape].”
Right now my mother is reading this and going, “Oh. That’s not what I thought a meme was. Maybe I’m thinking of an NFT?”
6. Public Service Announcement!
If you pay taxes on your earnings, REGARDLESS OF YOUR IMMIGRATION STATUS, you are eligible to file a federal tax return and to get a refund or child tax credit, if owed. Please read every word of that sentence and then send this information to anyone in your life who that applies to whether undocumented, documented, or a family with a mix. A local organization, Just Harvest, with bilingual volunteers (full disclosure, one of the volunteers is my niece) can help you file. You pay taxes; get what’s owed you without fear. Everything is in the article I linked to. Not an ad.
7. And that’s all for this week!
Accept your weirdness — maybe yours looks like Jason Momoa; he’s pretty. Be kind. Be safe. And most importantly, always — ALWAYS — be ready for monkeys.
If my Trump Train joke upset you, please call 1-800-DID-I-ASK and choose option 6 for, “No, I sure as hell did not.”