Is every day secretly the same day?

I'm thinking now of that quote from Pinky and the Brain:

Pinky: Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight? 

Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky — try to take over the world!

The cartoon I barely remember, and when I thought very hard about it my memory of the show got hazier, like a receding tide. It felt like I dreamed the whole thing until Google jogged (replaced?) my memory. I can still picture the titular lab rats, though. Pure white, and very good at failure.


Each day of quarantine has proceeded mostly the same for me. I read the news; I eat a clementine; I wash my dishes; I text with friends about the latest news; I read the news. In a lot of ways it feels like the normal flow of time has been suspended, and sometimes I think there's only one present moment that's somehow extended itself across multiple afternoons. And then I sleep, after a beer or three. I watch my supplies dwindle.

This morning was different. I heard from a friend who's been sick that his sickness — a bacterial pneumonia — was caused by COVID-19, and that he tested positive for the virus. He's been sick for a while with the pneumonia; it was only recently that he learned about his test result. We work on a podcast together, a thing I love to make with him and the few other people we work with.

The problem, really, is that we all met a few weeks ago in the studio before he caught pneumonia, presumably just as he was contagious with the coronavirus. I experienced symptoms at the end of the next day: I was feverish, I ached, I was tired, and I had developed a small, dry cough.

I didn't think anything of it at the time, because why would I? It was the middle of flu season. Everyone was sick, or recovering from something, and allergy season was on its way; the pollen counts were rising, anyway. My friend Nicole came over that night to stream a video game with me. Four or five days later, she was sick — same symptoms. By then I had begun my isolation. Not because I suspected I'd caught the virus, but because the news had started to change.

I probably won't know if I had it or not — or if I gave it to my friends, which is the really worrying thing — until there's large-scale testing for viral antibodies, the signature the virus leaves behind in a body that's successfully fought off an infection. As testing ramps up, you'll probably get a more accurate picture of who in your circles might have been exposed; you'll start asking yourself the same questions I was, which are mostly the same: where was I, and when?

I keep a calendar. I put everything I want to remember there: dates, drinks, events, etc. The stuff that feels out of the ordinary that's easier to outsource than to fix in my short term memory. What I don't put there are the more mundane things that have now come to matter: when I was in the office last, for example, or where I went for lunch on any given day. The decisions I didn't record are the ones that felt like they mattered, at least this morning. And isn't that always the case?

There isn't a lesson here. Or if there is it's this: we are so much closer to each other than we think or imagine, most of the time. A virus like this one, which spreads so easily, illuminates the thinnest webs of our connections; a touch is enough to let a friend know you care, and enough to make them ill.

This period of isolation feels like an experiment, perhaps one that would go hilariously awry for Pinky and Brain. I am adrift in my small apartment, thinking about how big the world is, and what's left to come. And these days my calendar is empty, because I know exactly what I'll be doing.