Have we entered the Fight Club part of this pandemic?
And I swear to God I came up with that opening line BEFORE the Academy Awards were held.
You remember Fight Club, don’t you? That wild 1999 movie that had Brad Pitt dispensing shirtless bro wisdom, Helena Bonham Carter doing beguiling Helena Bonham Carter things, some gross facts about soap, and, of course, lots of fighting. Probably the most memorable thing about Fight Club is the first rule of Fight Club. If you saw the film just once, you almost certainly remember the rule.
Let’s have Brad Pitt’s character Tyler Durden spell it out.
“The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.”
You might even remember the second rule.
“The second rule of Fight Club is you DO NOT talk about Fight Club.”
Those rules are oddly resonant for me right now as we click into year three on the COVID-19 odometer. The first rule of the pandemic seems to be that you do not talk about the pandemic.
It’s not an official, hard and fast rule. I mean, neither was the Fight Club rule, otherwise how did the size of the club keep growing? Someone must have been talking about it!
But it is kind of a rule. People have told me to lay off the pandemic talk in this column. “You don’t want to become a COVID Guy,” they say.
And, I mean, yeah. They’re right. That would suck being COVID Guy. Like, someone says the word “COVID” and I come crashing through the wall like the Kool-Aid man, dressed up as a plague doctor and snapping N95s at people. “Oh yeah!”
But you don’t even need to be told not to talk about the pandemic. You feel it. Talking about it is lame.
“Oh man, I’d love to go to the pub with you guys. But, you know. … How’s the ventilation in there? Maybe we can get a patio seat … it’s not raining THAT hard.”
It does not feel cool at all to still be fussing about indoor spaces, or staying hunkered down at home when you see sports stadiums full of people. I mean, did you see what passed for safe physical distancing at the Oscars!
COVID, as a topic of conversation, is played out. It’s the eye-roll emoji.
It’s just … it’s still a thing, you know? I guess I’ll whisper this next part: why are so many people I know getting COVID right now? And like, they’re not the yahoos you’d expect to get it. The safe people. The cautious people. Soccer buds. Family friends. Barack Obama.
And yeah, most of them come out of it just fine. It’s just like a cold, or whatever. It’s mild, right, especially for the vaccinated?
Except there’s a young, healthy, vaccinated dad that I know who caught COVID a couple of months ago during the height of the Omicron era and still feels absolutely flattened by it some days. And it seems like we don’t really know what the “mild” COVID you catch now could do to you if it keeps hold of your body for weeks, months, or … years?
Gah, sorry! There I go being lame again, talking about the pandemic. And of course, all that talk about my multiple friends with COVID – that’s all anecdotal evidence. I don’t have hard numbers, because, well, they stopped counting, didn’t they?
What’s not anecdotal is that lots of people who have felt some level of comfort by wearing proper masks now have to ride the bus crowded up against people who aren’t required to wear a mask. And lots of people who have maintained an extra layer of safety and sanity by working from home for the past two years are now being ordered back to the office.
And my kids, who through a combination of luck and the protective power of my wife’s vigilance somehow haven’t caught COVID yet, are headed back to school this week to sit with classmates who are just back from Spring Break adventures abroad and who also are no longer wearing masks.
I mean – shouldn’t we maybe talk about this a little more? Or have we really reached the third rule of Fight Club: “If someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out, the fight is over.”
We shouldn’t fight each other – violence is not the answer, Will! – but we shouldn’t be tapping out either. I’m open to more talk. As long as it’s from a safe distance.
Andy Prest is the sports and features editor of the North Shore News. His lifestyle/humour column runs biweekly. [email protected]
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