Shot in the Heart and You’re to Blame
You give a something something a bad name
In what is easily the best news in over a year, Nuvia got the first shot of the vaccine last weekend.
Nuvia qualified because she is a teacher on loan at the graduate school at High Tech High, even though she’s not in the classroom anymore. After she received her vaccination at her alma mater, UCSD, we went to a bakery in La Jolla and bought some overpriced croissants. We walked down to the edge of the sea and ate our croissants while the waves dashed themselves to pieces on the rocks below.
I didn’t expect it to be such an emotional event, but I felt a mix of joy and relief and sorrow that the wait has been so costly. But mostly what I felt—and still feel—is hope.
Many of you know Nuvia as an artist and a teacher, but when I first met Nuvia she was a scientist working for a pharmaceutical company in Sorrento Valley. Our first date was a walk in Torrey Pines the day after her company’s holiday party. (She was late and hungover but alls well that ends well.)
Throughout the pandemic, Nuvia has been extremely calm about COVID-19. To her the outbreak wasn’t literary or dystopian or nightmarish or even political (at least not at first) but scientific. She knows how viruses and vaccines work. She’s talked me down from the ledge, so to speak, on numerous occasions when I was being especially paranoid about the coronavirus.
So it seemed proper and fitting for Nuvia to get the vaccine at the institution where she studied biochemistry and other subjects that make my brain hurt just thinking about them.
I am full of gratitude for what this means to our family’s safety and hope for our future. But you know what I have no patience for?
Outrage over the vaccine rollout.
The Biden administration is clearly going for expediency over efficiency. The approach has been to ramp up production and get it out as quickly as possible, which had resulted in a less-than-perfect rollout.
The messaging is inconsistent. Signing up for an appointment is a roll of the dice. And sometimes it seems like the decision as to who gets a shot and who doesn’t is completely random, and when things don’t make sense it can feel like the odds are stacked against you.
I get that. I believe things would be a lot different if Trump hadn't been fucking us all over for the last 15 months, but that's not the case. The federal government has opened the floodgates on the vaccine and everyone at every level is playing catch-up. As a result, the vaccine is available in more places than ever and the amount of vaccines available to the public increases every day.
When we returned home on Saturday, we heard that one of Nuvia’s colleagues had been turned away from a vaccination site. (I don’t have the details and wouldn’t share them if I did out of respect for this individual’s privacy.) Apparently, some of the online portals through which people had been booking appointments had closed. Nuvia, realizing that she’d left the tab open on the site where she’d booked her appointment, discovered she could book appointments for her colleagues. So she did.
She started reaching out to other teachers she’d worked with at various campuses and was able to book appointments for them too. She was on the phone all afternoon and into the night and at the end of the day she booked about dozen appointments before the link stopped working. But in the process of sharing this knowledge with others she learned of other places where teachers could sign up.
That, my friends, is what we should be doing. Instead of complaining about an imperfect system that is trying to help us rather than actively trying to harm us, we should be helping each other, especially those who can’t help themselves.
I will contribute to the good will generated by Nuvia’s good deed by sharing some information with you that we learned.
To sign up for a Pfizer vaccine at UCSD: First, if you’re an educator, sign up with the VEBA system here. Then immediately go to the scheduling portal to make an appointment. It will ask for your school type and your school name should pop up. If it doesn’t, choose another (wink wink). It should now display the available appointments. After you verify a time, continue as a guest. But you’re not done yet. It will ask for insurance, but the vaccine is free and won’t accept your insurance anyway. Select SOMEONE ELSE. Don’t close the window until the confirmation email appears in your inbox.
To sign up for the Moderna vaccine through SHARP: This process is more intuitive, but you need direct links to sign up.
Knollwood (Serra Mesa)
Wednesday, March 3
Thursday, March 4
Friday, March 5
South Bay (Chula Vista)
Wednesday, March 3
Thursday, March 4
Friday, March 5
Also, many pharmacies like RiteAid and CVS have the vaccine, and are scheduling appointments throughout the day. These stores are often overlooked as options for those who are eligible. But I’ve been told that at the end of the day pharmacies sometimes have leftover doses that have to be used or will be rendered inert. Pharmacies can’t advertise that they have leftover doses, but if you ask for one, and they have it, they can give it to you. Also, signing up is easier and verification less rigorous.
Feel free to share this info. Remember, school aids and facilities workers or educators too!
Don’t give in to hopelessness. Let’s lean one another and help each other get through these dark times. Just because there’s light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t mean that we aren’t still in the shit. In fact, there is considerable anecdotal evidence that suggests that the most challenging time in the pandemic is right now.
Astronauts, Antarctic research scientists, and submariners report it’s not unusual for people to bug out once the end is in sight. When I was in the Navy, we called this short-timer’s syndrome. When you enlist, you are confronted with so much you don’t know that the only way to manage it all is to put your head down and do it. But once you start counting down the days until you’re enlistment is up, things can get really screwy.
In fact, now that I think about it, this happens in schools, too. After spring break and before the end of the year is when many high school students do something really stupid that gets them expelled.
Or, as my friend Evan Dando says, like a horse that bolts when it knows it’s close to home.
That’s where we are right now. So keep your eye on the prize, which is the health and safety of you and your family. There’s no point in getting through this if we can’t do it together.
It’s a Shame About Your Wallet
Speaking of Evan Dando, I thought I’d share this story related to my other rock and roll book project. Dando made the news earlier this week after he misplaced his wallet.
Walgreen’s called to let him know that someone had turned in his wallet after he dropped it on the street. When Dando came to reclaim it, he busted out a couple of tunes to show his appreciation, including “Confetti” the second track from It’s A Shame About Ray.
What’s hilarious is that we spoke on the phone at length about the record later that afternoon, long before the video started spreading across the internet.
PssSST…
In my weekly post about my book about SST Records, I want to pass on a movie recommendation.
I finally chatted with the drummer I’ve been trying to get ahold and had a great conversation that had all kinds of unexpected turns that I’m going to keep to myself (for now anyway). But during the course of our conversation the drummer recommended a movie that I watched last week and absolutely loved.
The film is called The Distinguished Citizen and was shot in Argentina by Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn in 2016. (If an Argentinean film about a writer strikes you as a strange recommendation from a punk rock drummer, maybe you haven’t spent enough time with punk rock drummers.) The film explores what happens when a famous Argentinean novelist living in Barcelona returns to the tiny town of Salas that he left 40 years before.
The movie opens in bold fashion with the writer in question, Daniel Montovani, being honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Montovani accepts the award but not before letting the prize committee have it for effectively ending his career as an artist.
The Distinguished Citizen has a very dry sense of humor but I thought it was an absolute scream. I generally don’t like stories about writers, but this one is right up there with Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp and the Coen Brothers Barton Fink.
Here’s the trailer, but I advise you not to watch it. The Distinguished Citizen is on Netflix and you can watch it now.
Now I want to go to Argentina. Perhaps I can stay in one of these houses.
Cowboy Graves
Speaking of famous Latin American authors who move to Barcelona, Roberto Bolaño has a new book. As someone on Twitter quipped, Bolaño is more prolific in death than most writers are alive. It’s called Cowboy Graves and consists of three novellas. The occasion of a new book by Bolaño comes with complaints from those who believe Bolaño would be very upset that all his old manuscripts are being published posthumously. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Bolaño’s reputation has been established. His legacy is safe. I think he’d be pleased to know that his estate is still generating income and his books are still being written about in newspapers and talked about by other writers.
I’ve read the first “novella,” which is a disjointed collection of four short stories. That’s probably not entirely fair but since at least one of them has been published as a standalone story, it’s hard not to think of them as such. Let’s call them episodes:
1. The Airport: In what feels like a very autobiographical tale, Arturo Belaño, Bolaño’s alter ego in The Savage Detectives, travels with his mother and sister to Santiago in an attempt to leave Chile for Mexico City where his father lives. While their paperwork is being processed, they stay with one of his mother’s friends, who shares an apartment with her sister Monica. Arturo and Monica have a moment out on the balcony after everyone else has gone to sleep that is reminiscent of a very similar scene in Bolaño’s short story “Sensini,” about which I have more to say later, which was translated by Chris Andrews and published in English in the collection Last Evenings on Earth in 2006.
2. The Grub describes a first person account of a student in Mexico City who skips school and spends his days reading and going to the movies. Nice work if you can get it. This episode was published as a short story in Last Evenings in Earth and appears as a short story in Last Evenings on Earth. This version is similar in that it follows that story beat for beat but all the key scenes have been rewritten. Interesting for scholars, I guess, but a fine story nonetheless.
3. The Trip. Our protagonist, Arturo, is returning to Chile by boat. There’s a romantic entanglement with a striptease dancer but what makes The Trip bizarre is that it includes an unfinished science fiction story that Arturo relates in great detail to another passenger. It’s an alien invasion story about antlike creatures that begin to colonize the earth on a tobacco plantation in Jefferson County, West Virginia. My father has lived in Jefferson County, West Virginia for over 20 years. Why is Jefferson County, West Virginia, in a Roberto Bolaño novella? Your guess is as good as mine. I love it when Bolaño puts a story in a story but this one goes on and on and is kind of hard to fathom. The alien invasion is a compelling metaphor for authoritarianism but I still want to know how Jefferson County landed on Bolaño’s radar.
4. The Coup. This last short episode takes place in Santiago where the narrator falls in with a crew of leftist militants, i.e. ordinary citizens, sent to guard the streets. It feels like a vignette and not a particularly satiffying one.
That’s “Cowboy Graves” in its entirety. (The novella, not the book.) Does it make sense? I don’t know. Does it hinge on knowing Bolaño’s relationship to Chile? Probably. Do I care? No.
I love reading Bolano. He’s the one writer that never fails to inspire me. I took Last Evenings On Earth with me on my travels throughout 2018, and read Bolano is Mexico City, Merida, Guadalajara, and Barcelona. I even took it with me to the Tower. Reading Bolaño’s story in “Sensini” inspired me to write a story set in Mexico City. Nuvia and I were walking down a street think with jacaranda trees in bloom. More than half the avenue was in shadow so when we saw an old man on a hospital gurney we thought our eyes were playing tricks on us. But no. There really was an old man in a gurney in the street. As we approached, the rest of the scene filled in: a clinic, an ambulance backing out of an alley, attendants waiting to load the gurney into the ambulance. Everything was as it was meant to be, but the image stayed with me and I wrote a story around it.
I sent the story off to a contest and it was named a finalist. It didn’t win the contest but it’s going to be published. (One of the things the story “Sensini” is about is literary contests.) I’ll link to it later, but for now just look at the cover. They say that you have to be exposed to a book 87 times before you buy it. Actually, the number is closer to 3 or maybe it’s 13. I don’t know. Just gaze at the cover. Commit it memory. Don’t fight it. Stop reading. Look.
Nice, right?
March Plaidness
Does it feel Iike I’m always asking you do things? Click on this. Watch that. Look. Well, guess what? Now I’m going to ask you to vote.
March Plaidness has begun. What is March Plaidness? It’s an annual March Madness inspired music writing tournament where people write essays about songs. Readers vote for their favorites on Twitter and on the website and the winner advances to the next round, etc. Each year the organizers choose a theme that rhymes with “Madness.” This year’s grunge-oriented contest is “Plaidness.” Are you with me so far?
Some of you may recall that two years ago I won the whole shebang during March Vladness i.e. the goth themed tourney, although “won” isn’t really the right word, which I’ll perhaps explain in greater detail down the line if my essay advances to the next round. It’s a sad story I’ve been putting off for two years, but it needs to be told.
This year I wrote about how I witnessed the birth of Stone Temple Pilots in 1992 while working at a North Hollywood coffee shop when me and a member of STP both had a crush on the same woman. True story.
My essay is up on Saturday morning. I’ll send out a special March Plaidness Message from the Underworld this weekend with links to both the Twitter poll and the website. You can vote in both places, which I strongly encourage you to do, and also read the essay. So you have that to look forward to.
Until Saturday.
Excellent!
This was a great message for this morning. You are right about all of it and I'm so glad that Nuvia has her first vaccination. And I never really knew how you guys met so it was fun for me to learn.