Got some blood work back recently, and have come to twitter dot com to tell you that Covid-19 is a weird disease.
I probably have it, but I seem to be out of the woods. Here's what went down . . .
1/17

On a grocery store run 13 days ago (Mar 24), exhaustion hit me out of nowhere, like a bag of doorknobs was challenging my immune system. I went home and told @justinelavaworm (who's immunocompromised) that I had to leave right away. Luckily I had a place to isolate.
2/17

Spoiler: Justine still has no symptoms after 13 days, so we got lucky. If you feel symptoms and are able to isolate from the rest of your household, it's worth it to do so quickly. At least use different dishes, hand towels, etc.
3/17

The first days were REALLY weird, halfway between a gnarly flu and a gnarly party drug. Yes, a party drug! When I get a bad flu, I often feel trippy for a few hours before the illness proper hits. With this thing, that disassociated feeling stuck around FOR A WEEK.
4/17

The *newness* of coronavirus was palpable. Neither the disease nor my body seemed to know what they were doing. My joints fizzed, like Alka Seltzer was stuck behind my kneecaps. I could somehow FEEL the clockwork of self-replicating whirligigs at war in my bloodstream.
5/17

The progress of the disease was chaotic, with lots symptomatic pendulum swings. In some ways, a new disease isn't an Invasion narrative; it's a First Contact story.
The virus thought I was a pangolin, and my immune system was hunting mosquitos with a bazooka.
6/17

It was also pretty trippy for this global event (freighted with discourses about race, foreignness, and capitalism) to shift from a distant, abstract news story to something fizzing away in MY ACTUAL BODY.
7/17

Having flown through Beijing in early November, I'd read tons about the virus, and here it was transcribing itself in my cells. (Maybe fatally, because I'm a 56-yo man with family heart issues.)
Like Kafka's "In the Penal Colony," with my crime being . . . globalism?
8/17