"'Yes,' the papers would say. 'But what if there’s a powerful surge this summer? This Christmas? A year from now? What if our next pandemic is worse than this one? What if it kills all the fish and cattle and poultry and affects our skin’s reaction to sunlight? What if it forces everyone to live underground and subsist on earthworms?'"
That's David Sedaris, in "Happy-Go-Lucky/'Who are you?' I want to ask the gentle gnome in front of me. 'And what have you done with Lou Sedaris?'”
That's in The New Yorker, so it's some kind of read on the location of the liberal American mind in this stage of the disease. I'm sure the story was written and nailed down before the most recent summer spike and new CDC words of guidance, but I'm going to take Sedaris's ridicule as a statement of where we — we, the New Yorker readers — are now.
There's much more to the story, and I won't spoil it, but it's an important update in the longstanding comedy that is the Sedaris family. I was delighted to see at the bottom of the last page: "His new book, 'A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020),' will be published in October, 2021." That is the second volume of his diaries, and I am — I believe — the world's biggest fan of the first volume. I have listened to the audiobook over 1,000 times.
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JPS writes:
"Sedaris' mention of scurvy reminded me of the story my biology prof told our class some 30 years ago. He was at the crunch time of his doctoral studies, broke, and decided he'd save time and money by just eating pasta, every meal, for the duration. He didn't need variety in his diet, he needed to fuel up and get back into lab.
"For a while everything was fine. Then he started feeling run down all the time. He started to bruise easily. His gums were painful. He went to see a doctor, who looked him over, scratched his chin, and remarked, "You know, if I weren't living in Princeton, New Jersey in 1966 I would swear to God that you had scurvy.""
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