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?
Ohio
I 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 shit 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 state would go that way. I was living in Ohio, and voted in Ohio, and Ohio also went for Bush in that election, which they ignored for the duration of our conversation. Nothing mattered. I was from the most abject state in the union, and I had to be put in my place.
There is something satisfying about how the whirligig of time has brought in his revenges. But I can’t enjoy it for long before I hear that voice in back of my mind that says it’s really not good for anyplace to be considered beneath contempt. All it does is prejudice everyone else against the people who come from there. It makes it easier for industry and the forces of resource extraction to do their work without having to consider the livelihoods of the local human beings.
I know that the kids’ opinion of Ohio comes from memes and things they see online. I don’t know what the source of those is, but it makes me wonder if someone has discovered vast wells of oil, coal, or natural gas in the ground beneath Dayton or Columbus. They have to start laying a firm groundwork of universal hatred for Ohioans, before they start poisoning the water supply and giving everyone pancreatic cancer. If they manage that, then in thirty years when the revelations of widespread pollution outside Toledo finally emerge, and we learn the extent of the damage the fracking industry has done, Ohio will be a joke to everybody, and we won’t have to take their suffering seriously at all.
Heavens to Begvey
I have been working on Heavens to Betsy, by Begvey Belsh Bigg.
What is that, you may wonder?
Why, it is nothing other than the autobiographical account I’m writing of the time recently when I saved the life of a pug who ran into traffic because she loves dump trucks.
I threw myself to the ground in order to save her. I put everything on the line for that dog, and Heavens to Betsy is my detailed account of that successful lifesaving effort.
Accompanying my tale of heroism is a deep investigation of what it means to be a hero, the burden of having a valiant heart always beating in your chest, and the universal disregard that everyday people have for selfless triumphs like mine.
I adopted the pseudonym Begvey Belsh Bigg when I asked an image generator to make a book cover for Heavens to Betsy and it vomited this onto my computer screen:
My plan is to write this book, make it as utterly stupid as I can, hire an artist to make a cover that’s not computer-generated, and self-publish it.
The cover can look like anything, when it’s made by a person. It can look more like this:
One reason I’m spending my time creating garbage on purpose is that I think it will be funny.
I’m also doing it, though, because after years of labor I recently finished revising the novel I mentioned above, which is now done and ready for publication. Or it’s at least ready for an agent or editor to read it and weigh in on it, offering guidance for how it might be further perfected. Close enough.
I have learned not to celebrate these moments. I don’t revel in the fleeting minutes in which the artist steps back from his work, and with a triumphant sigh, and an admiring glance at the product of his own genius, whispers, “Here we go again, old boy. Good show, I say. Voila.”
That moment never lasts. Uncertainty and self-doubt come creeping, seconds later, and the people who can turn the manuscript into a book, and make it a success, live many miles away from me.
I carry on and try not to let that distance get to me. One way of doing that is to write Heavens to Betsy by Begvey Belsh Bigg. It’s a way of saying, “Fine. Whatever. Goddamnit.” It’s a way to take that hopeless feeling that says I’m going nowhere and do something with it.
I worry that the novel I’ve just finished, which took years to write, will never be championed, will never be published, and will never be read by more than two other people. That feeling could so easily curdle into bitterness. So I make it instead into something that can be printed as a cheap book and stuffed into little free libraries, which is one of the things I intend to do with Heavens to Betsy.
It’s a lot of fun to make plans for this terrible thing.
I want to sneak Heavens to Betsy into Salvation Armies, and stick it on the shelves of books that are all sold for a quarter. I want someone to buy it, because it looks cute enough, and why not? It’s only a quarter. I want them to take it home with them, to Belton, Missouri, where they’ll sit at their kitchen table and puzzle over this ridiculous trash I made in my basement. I want them to get really mad at me. Or at Begvey.
I will have to create a whole identity for Begvey Belsh Bigg.
I’m thinking of having a book launch for Heavens to Betsy, where I wear a black robe and a white mask like the ones in the image below, but with a big hole cut out for my mouth:
I will also have on a fake moustache.
I want to wear these things to the public library, and read my book to the patrons there. I will walk very slowly, as if ambulation isn’t easy for me.
The problem with this frenzy of making bad plans on purpose and puking garbage into Word documents is that at some point I am likely to end up taking all of this at least a little bit seriously.
At some point, I’ll probably start actually believing in this project—not to the point of publishing it with my real name attached, but definitely to the point of trying to make it good. Like, if someone spends time with a book I have written, even if it’s terrible on purpose, I will want them to reach the end having had an experience. I will want people to enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it. And that ends up taking a lot of work, and some degree of dedication. I may get attached.
How much does it cost, to self-publish a book? Can I do it for $100? Will I end up caring if it looks nice?
My plan right now is to not care at all how it looks. In fact, I want it to look like trash.
Will I feel that way next week, when I’ve invested more hours into it?
How about in December?
What about after that?
