-
サマリー
あらすじ・解説
I tested negative for COVID a couple of weeks ago, but I was sick with something, and the symptoms were just like the ones I had when I had COVID the last time. I couldn’t do anything for more than twenty minutes without having to lie down for two hours. I think I’m still feeling the effects. My left ear is ringing. Is it Long COVID? Will I have to change my name to Robert Long Covid? Whatever this illness is, it seems like everyone in the United States either had it in the last few weeks, has it now, or will have it by mid-October. Are the tests inaccurate? Are we all getting COVID again? What if we’re headed for reinfection after reinfection, followed by many years of suffering under our idiosyncratic forms of Long COVID? Mine will be like chronic fatigue syndrome plus deafness in one ear and dementia. Yours will be brain fog and post-exertional malaise.What if Ovid got COVID? What would happen then? Ovid wrote Metamorphoses. What if COVID is the author of our collective metamorphosis, the force that will ultimately, either the first time it strikes us or the twenty-first, transform us all into people who are dead or nearly there?OhioI need to do something about my face. I have been querying agents with my novel We Eat the Rich, and I have reason to believe that some of the agents I contact are curious enough about me to go to my website. The reason I believe this is that the company I registered and made my website through has a handy app that shows me the IP address of everyone who visits it. I can’t see who they are, but I can see where they are. When someone in New York City visits www.robertlongforeman.com, I gather that sometimes it’s an agent I have recently contacted, who wants to see what I’m like before taking an interest in me. They go to the front page, they go to the Bio page. They see what my face looks like, and they say, No thank you. So I need to do something about my face. I am forty-three, which means that in the next year I am likely to need corrective lenses. I have never needed them before, and when I do I can start wearing glasses. It’s possible that with glasses on in photos I will look more appealing to the right people. I’ll look smarter and stronger, more trustworthy and less bustworthy. What do I do until then? I don’t know. Continue to go unrepresented, I guess. There are worse things. I tried having AI generate a new author photo for me that represents me better than the extant photos do, but I’m not sure if I’ll use it. Meanwhile, I subbed for my daughter’s fourth-grade class on Monday afternoon. Let me tell you, grade school teachers have one of the hardest jobs there could be. They should be paid five times what they’re paid. It’s infuriating that things are the way they are. The kids were talking constantly. Nothing I said or did stopped them from yakking it up with one another, getting out of their chairs to go talk to their friends, whatever. The experience took a week off my life, and one of the strangest things about it was how I was reminded of what the word “Ohio” means to children across America. When I was growing up, Ohio was a state with millions of people in it that my family lived half a mile from. We were in West Virginia. Ohio was right over there. One of the kids asked where I had lived before, and I obliged, since trying to maintain order in the class was a lost cause by then, so I might as well make conversation. I mentioned I lived in Ohio for a while, and half the kids in the room started laughing. Ohio? Seriously? Children think Ohio is funny. I guess there are songs about it? People say mean things about Ohio. They think people from Ohio have something wrong with them.I found that I wanted to defend Ohio, and explain to them that it’s an enormous state with millions of people and a bunch of large cities in it. There’s Cincinnati, there’s Cleveland, there are Dayton, Toledo, and Columbus. Those places are not at the top of many lists of favorite cities of the world, but they are full of people and they’re not conceptually funny, the way children seem to think they are.But why do I want to defend Ohio? I would be lying if I said I didn’t get that schadenfreude buzz from everyone around me thinking Ohio sucks without ever having gone there or knowing anything about the place. I’m from West Virginia, the most universally disdained part of the United States. It’s kind of nice to see another state getting ridiculed for no apparent reason.And I’m kind of glad it’s Ohio the kids think is a wasteland of degenerates, because it was people from Ohio who always gave me the most s**t for being from West Virginia. I lived there from 2003 to 2007, and when George W. Bush was reelected to the presidency several people took me aside to give me a hard time about it. West Virginians voted for Bush, and he won the state’s electoral votes, so of course these Ohioans acted like I decided, all by myself, that the ...