My philosophy before, during, and presumably after a pandemic.

This spring, during lockdown, I was dropped off in an emergency room parking lot by my wife. It was pitch-black outside, cold, raining. Visitors weren’t permitted at the hospital, so she couldn’t join me. Cars weren’t allowed near the ER entrance. She later told me she had sobbed behind the wheel that night, watching me totter toward nurses huddled near a tent, worried I’d fall over. It wasn’t the first time she’d dragged me there and probably won’t be the last, but it was the only time she had to wait for phone calls to know what was happening.

The good news: I didn’t have COVID-19 and we never suspected I did. (We were, in all likelihood, repeatedly exposed to the virus earlier in the year. We’d each gotten sick then, with very different symptoms. By the time antibody testing was available to us, it was too late to be useful.) My complaint was severe abdominal pain and nausea, which we correctly assumed was related to my Crohn’s disease. My immune system’s been attacking my intestines for most of my life, which I’m fairly certain accounts for most of my baseline crankiness.

Being in an empty hospital was eerie, encountering no hallway traffic on the way to a CT scan disorienting. The building was a ghost town, the staffing sparse. In lockdown, people weren’t getting injured as much as usual and even the unwell were afraid to seek help. “We’re dead,” a porter observed after testing the next day, wheeling me back to my room after I’d been told to prepare for surgery. He added, “That’ll change as soon as people start going out again.”

There were two to three other patients on the ward at any given time. Between our rooms were empty suites. The hospital workers were masked the whole time, as was I (with masks I’d brought from home), except when one particular nurse would check on me overnight and yank it down. “You don’t need that,” she would say. But I wanted it, and if I was still awake when she left I’d pull it back up as the door closed behind her. We got lucky with my minor procedure; old scar tissue didn’t complicate things as we feared it would. I was home by the end of the week, ensconced in pillows to keep our curious pets at bay.

I’ve never much enjoyed the physical company of others. Maybe I’ve had my fill of it as a member of a large, boisterous family. Maybe it’s more related to the autism I don’t discuss here. Whatever the case, social distancing has been easy for me because I generally like being left alone. Though prolonged distancing wouldn’t be optimal—I miss leisurely strolls through grocery stores and would like to hold our new niece while she’s still a baby—I could do additional years of this with both hands tied behind my back.

One thing lockdown has made me miss is the routine of writing inconsequential articles about frothy subjects, which I would rather do here than anywhere else during a period of prolonged boredom and underemployment. While there’s still another few weeks ahead of editing old posts to fix the havoc wrought by switching platforms, I hope to post some new stuff occasionally, whether it’s about Betty Buckley’s angry tweets at John Cornyn or the missed opportunity of the rightfully forgotten Eulogy, an ensemble comedy featuring Debra Winger, to atone for the sins of Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow.