What the Hell Just Happened?
Blogging in the time of COVID
Will Leitch, best known as a sports writer (founder of Deadspin, etc), has started writing on Medium with an interesting, and very different goal:
As I embark on this new Medium project, for which I’ll be writing regularly every week. I am trying to capture the madness of living through this moment: Not just the political fights, not just the idiots marching through Target, not just the whole American West on fire, not just everything we think we think about everything crumbling around us at every moment. It feels like we are at a pivot moment in history, and it affects every aspect of American life: Schools, churches, entertainment, car pools, grocery shopping, all of it. That’s what I am going to try — and likely fail, but I will still try — to capture. The day-to-day experience of surviving 2020 … and what we’ll tell our children about it. If there’s a world left for them to ask it in.
I think about this a lot as well. Our daughter is about to turn two. This past year has certainly been the most surreal of her young life because it has been the most surreal of my almost-39 year life. The difference, of course, is that she won’t remember any of it — well, one can only hope! Still, I imagine a not-too-distant future where we’ve escaped the clutches of COVID and she learns about it and asks about it. I’m not sure I’ll know where to start.
Documenting it in real time makes a lot of sense. In a way, this has always been what I’ve liked the most about having a blog: the ability to put down your thoughts to look back upon later. Oh, and it’s nice when people read such thoughts as well :)
I actually thought about this two years ago as well when our daughter was just about here. What if I wrote down my thoughts each day to document her early life? But that idea, as nice as it sounds, quickly got swept away in the tides of parenthood.¹ It’s hard enough to keep up with writing one blog, let alone several. So instead my ever-aspirational goal is to get back to writing daily wherever I can. And I think some of Medium’s new changes make it more likely than ever. Hence, posts like this one. Not everything has to be a polished gem of insight and analysis. Just thoughts.
Anyway, back to Leitch:
There is something about being in the middle of history that is uniquely disorienting. Watching Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s epic “The Vietnam War” in 2017, it was staggering for me to imagine what it must have been like to be alive through the experience. I was born in October 1975, three months after North and South Vietnam officially unified. In the span of time between his high school graduation and my birth, my father joined the Air Force, watched close friends die, met my mother, married her during a weekend furlough from his base in Virginia, started a career as an electrician, bought a home, buried a son and then gained another. He did all this, of course, during one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. But every time I ask him what it was like live through all that, the protests, the civil rights movement, Watergate, man walking on the goddamned moon, he can never quite describe it. “I was too busy trying to figure out my own life and my own family,” he says. “I didn’t quite realize what was all happening until it was all over.”
I think in many ways we can only live through times like these by not stopping to think about them. It would be too much. And it often is. You put on blinders and keep going and then someday, when it’s over, you look back and say “what the hell just happened?” And posts like the ones Leitch is trying to write will help us remember what we’re trying so hard right now to forget. And you talk about those times, ideally over drinks with family and friends in person.
¹ Still, I do write her a weekly email about her life, which I send to an email account we set up to give her access to in the future.
