Haunted by the Ghost of 2019, The Atlantic, Helena Fitzgerald, December 8, 2022

I’ve been thinking a lot about the pandemic lately. Specifically, the long tail of it, how we’re in this period that is post-pandemic in the sense of “no longer in a crisis” but not quite “whew, that’s over.” In some ways, I find this subtly off quasi-after period more difficult than lockdown.

While I don’t think I agree that we can’t go back to 2019, I think this article gets at some of this. Like this bit:

In 2022, the pandemic isn’t over, but something is over. The era of mandated restrictions, of collective sacrifice as a popular idea, of talk about a transformed world has been replaced with an uneasy, fractured normalcy. Most people can do just about anything you could do pre-pandemic, although it’s not always clear whether you should or what the risks and consequences might be.

Or this: “The name of a year becomes a shorthand for a particular catastrophe, rupture, or cultural shift. When 2020 became synonymous with crisis, 2019 became synonymous with normalcy, with ‘real life.’” And yet, “none of it feels quite the same.”

And finally this, which captures my own feeling of just having subtly aged through all of this. As if there’s some part of myself which is now closed off:

Every change in the landscape—every missing restaurant, every piece of new construction—feels like a reminder of all the much larger things lost, and of how I won’t ever again be the person I was when I hadn’t been through any of this yet…. I feel as if I am role-playing someone else’s normal life in an alternate timeline where none of this happened.

It’s a funny thing how many of the same people who warned about the unknowable fallout from the COVID-19 restrictions are the same people who laughed at “reentry anxiety” or who would laugh at these feelings of lingering uncertainty now. The people who now insist on snapping back to the pre-pandemic everything are whistling past the graveyard, and are ignoring the warnings they once issued.

Now, when Fitzgerald says that “we can’t imagine a new way of being if we cling to an old one,” I think she goes too far. And it kind of makes me think of the time Democratic politico Rahm Emanuel counseled “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

But aside from that, almost every line in this piece captures what it feels like to be a young person almost on the other side of this thing.

Celebrating Vermont’s most famous river at the Battenkill Fly Fishing Festival, VTDigger, Ethan Weinstein, May 2, 2023

I love little bits of local life and news like this. I’ve never done fly fishing—some very casual fishing with live worms and lures only—but I find the art of it fascinating. In the big L.L. Bean store, I like looking at the drawers of fly fishing lures.

A nice detail here:

The Battenkill is famous among anglers for its large, selective brown trout. Unlike most rivers in Vermont, which require the stocking of hatchery-grown fish to support their trout populations, the Battenkill contains only wild fish in its Vermont section….

In these conditions, the river's brown trout can live six or seven years, exceeding 20 inches in length along the way. But the fish grow wise with age, and the Battenkill’s reputation as an exceedingly challenging stream makes any fish caught a small victory. 

And this bit of human psychology:

Once upon a time, elm trees lined the river, Lyons explained, but Dutch elm disease wiped out the massive old trees. Without riparian vegetation, more sediment enters the river, he said, which negatively affects bug life and fish populations. 

But with all the habitat restoration efforts put into the river, spearheaded in part by Vermont fisheries biologist Rich Kirn, the fish populations rose quickly, Lyons explained. Now, the river has between 30 and 50 “trophy” fish per mile. But that doesn’t keep anglers from whining.

“It was always better 10 years ago,” he joked. “People have been complaining for decades.”

Nice, pleasant read.

Cooking With Garlic: Everything You Need To Know, The Woks of Life, May 1, 2023

I’ve linked The Woks of Life once or twice before. It’s a really great Chinese cooking/recipe blog with some travel and culture pieces too. The quality of the recipes is fantastic: if you follow them, you’re almost guaranteed to get it right. They are obviously tested and retested before being written and published.

This is a wonderfully detailed guide on using garlic in Chinese cuisine, which, the piece notes, might just use garlic in more different ways than any other cuisine. If you cook and use garlic, this will be very interesting to you. Go read “sizzled garlic” in particular!

If I Eat at a Chain Restaurant, Does That Make Me a Bad Local Advocate?, Strong Towns, Tiffany Owens Reed, April 18, 2023

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh!” I exclaimed, “We’re getting a CAVA!” 

My excitement climaxed into a spontaneous, joyful march around the living room….I made a mental note of the open date, ended my mini dance parade with a dramatic sigh, and returned to my seat on the couch.

A few moments later, I found myself still sitting there. Once the thrill died down, more sober thoughts marched into my mind. As someone who believes in the need for greater local resilience, what did it say about me that I was excited about a new chain coming to town? Knowing what I know about how they take money out of the city, drive small businesses out of operation, and weaken a communities’ social fabric, did my excitement mean I was now contradicting my own values?

I’ve had this thought myself—like when I drive further to go to Walmart to save a dollar or two on something. But I don’t think it’s a contradiction or hypocrisy. Especially not in the case of chain restaurants. Every chain, after all, started as a single location. Many arose from successful independent businesses—as CAVA did—rather than being corporate inventions like Applebee’s. It seems fickle to punish businesses for being too successful, as long as they’re not doing anything dishonest or wrong.

This makes me think of two things. One, my dad’s preference for McDonald’s on road trips, because you know what you’re getting. And two, my idea in this piece that doing the “right thing” (driving less, shopping local, etc.) should not be like “eating your vegetables.” It should just work well and be a competitive option.

And this higher-level analysis gets at why it doesn’t always feel that way:

The reality is that most of us live highly customized, dispersed social lives, the nexus of which has nothing to do with where we live. Most of our friends don’t live within walking distance from us. Most of our daily problems can now be solved by Amazon or an app on our phones. Most of our leisure time is happily allotted to Netflix, not to porch-sitting. In this kind of world, proximity no longer governs our social ties the way it used to a century ago and “improvements” in technology have eroded our need to engage with people, at all. 

None of these things—walkability, community, local commerce—should be issues. They should just be the way things are. But there’s room for a restaurant to scale up too, I think.

Related Reading:

New and Old #69

New and Old #70

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