There’s something just right about this Beequeen re-issue that was re-released back into the world last fall. What do you call it? Pop? Experimental? Kind of ambient but more present? Lets just call it music. I’m glad it’s back with us, even if I don’t rightly remember hearing it before yesterday. There’s something very familiar.

It’s peaceful. I may or may not be guilty of leaning hard into music that’s got a more anxious or anxiety producing edge. Things that evoke fear. Sounds that could give a person a case of the creeps. This is not a confession. It’s just a statement of fact. I am more comfortable with less comfortable feelings than a lot of people so my musical tastes may or may not reflect that. Around Midnight is pretty chill though. Listen for yourself.

So…

Covid-19…

Not much to say, really. It’s been a different experience so far. I’m assuming that being triple-vaxxed has kept it from being worse than it could have been. That’s an acceptable premise given the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths being down. The one thing I will repeat though is that it’s a persistent infection. The symptoms remain very much what they were at the beginning of the week with very little change. There have been moments when they seemed to be lessening but then they’ve circled back with the same intensity as earlier. Other flus have done the same thing but with each wave being a bit less than the last until they disappeared altogether.

This? No such thing. Every wave comes back the same size. And the exhaustion is uncommon for me. For real. It’s not that I can’t fall asleep any time I sit down night or day but that’s not exhaustion so much as a practiced skill. This is real tired though. Like energy draining out my limbs feeling like collapse tired. Again, and again, and again… My temperature has never gone above 100.2 either so it’s not that. I just don’t know. This is just different. There’s no real way yet to track any progress toward recovery. Current temperature is 98.6 which may be a little high for me but who knows? This is simply not like any other ailment I can recall.

Between bouts of deep sleep I’ve gone heavy on Netflix. The best of the lot so far:

Ganglands: Belgian crime drama set in North African immigrant communities. It was six hour-long episodes and while the story seemed complete from start to finish, it would have been nice if it were longer. It was really all that engaging. They could have given it more and nothing would have suffered for it.

The Harder They Fall: Very well filmed sort of Spaghetti-Western with an all Black cast. Sure, Melvin Van Peebles pioneered that with Posse, but this was really enjoyable. Idris Elba is always good but he had a lot of support here, including Delroy Lindo, who really should be due for a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars. Dude is always en pointe and multi-dimensional. I’m glad someone saw fit to cast him as an Old West gunfighter. He was perfect.

Flu: I’m not going to say this Korean plague drama was good, but it wasn’t bad either. Someone told me that watching an epidemic film while being sick during a pandemic was like binging on WebMD but worse. Okay, I’ll buy that. It was a good story though and actually kind of wholesome despite the gore.

Not going to bother getting into the bad stuff. There are things that I start that I just can’t get my head around for varying reasons. It’s easy enough with Netflix to revisit them but why? If it can’t capture a person’s attention when they’re bored and quarantined when exactly might it work?

Anyway… I feel weird and funky. Thank you Covid-19, for leaving me alone until I was strong enough to deal with you.