I should be writing this week’s incomplete progress notes but I really don’t feel like diving down that rabbit hole on this dreary gray afternoon and so I have the television playing old episodes of CSI Miami in the background and I’m playing catch up on various household things that have been neglected the last three weeks as my spare energies have been channeled into learning the six minute monologue and 45 minute scene that comprise my piece of Seven Santas. I am proud to say that I have forced all of those words into my brain and that they mainly come out at the right time and in the right order on stage. There are a couple of lines that I seem to drop routinely and I have no idea why I have such a block against them but my castmates have figured out which ones they are and there are plans in place to keep things on track when I screw up. We officially opened last night. The audience seemed to enjoy it. Although I’m not sure it’s the sort of play you enjoy as much as take in and cogitate on as it’s got some very astute political and sociological points to make in the trappings of mordant black comedy. Two more performances this weekend and three next, and then it’s on to Into the Woods, the next project in the queue.
We’re in that lull period of the work year which lasts from roughly Thanksgiving through MLK day. People have way too much on their plates so they tend not to schedule routine physician visits and all of those problems that generally require them to send multiple portal messages magically go on hiatus while there are other things to occupy the waking hours. Things take off like a rocket again in January, however, when the out of town kids come to visit the parents for the holidays and realize what has been covered up or minimized and they then start pushing their elders in to deal with the cognitive and physical changes that the out of towners recognize more than the in towners as the delta of chronic disease is big enough between visits to declare itself. I have two more work weeks, then two weeks off. I’ve taken the post Christmas holiday period the last two years so I probably won’t be able to take it next year. It will be someone else’s turn. Unless I retire in the interim.
Covid numbers continue to go up. Hospitalizations have been going up by about 10% every ten days or so throughout the fall. It’s not high enough to cause significant impacts on the system, but it is high enough to raise eyebrows on those who make it their business to follow public health trends. All of the deaths I’ve heard about the last few months have been anecdotal. They’ve all been relatively young and healthy people. I’m probably hearing about them because of this so it’s a skewed sample. I haven’t seen any scientifically sound data suggesting that mortality rates for serious infection have shifted significantly since the beginning of omicron two years ago.
There have been a couple of things of note. First, the CDC has a new nifty little tool that summarizes the wastewater surveillance results by region. It’s available at https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/… and it’s a handy way of seeing what trends have been over the last few weeks and months. Second, immunization numbers for the most recent booster are pretty abysmal with fewer than 20% of adults having taken advantage of it. Some of that is messaging. Some of that is the end of the emergency and the federal government stepping out of distribution. Some of that is the residual follow out of the vaccine wars and a certain level of skepticism. And the third, and perhaps most important, data is coming out confirming that with every subsequent Covid infection, chances of developing long Covid symptoms increases, to the point that it rises to about 35% chance after a fourth infection. That’s enough to keep me heading off to the pharmacy for boosters as they become available. I have seen enough of long Covid to know that it’s not something I want.
I’m off to NYC for New Years. I plan to avoid Times Square on the evening of the 31st. That might have been fun at twenty or twenty five, but at sixty, it just seems nightmarish. It will be my first trip back since the pandemic. I haven’t decided what theater I will attend. I’m pretty caught up after two weeks in London this past year. The thing I would most like to see, the revival of Merrily We Roll Along, is priced astronomically so it’s pretty much out. I’ll make it up as I go along. The one thing I can say about theater is that it’s usually possible to get a single seat to even the most sold out show. You just can’t get two together. The gang that went to London last year is doing a different cultural capital together this year. Should be fun. And we’ve worked out how to do it on a budget… other than theatre tickets…
I think a nap before call time is in order. The cats have the right idea.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 