Four years ago this month, my northern California county closed the schools, offices, and shops, and went into pandemic lockdown. I was four months into being a national humor columnist for The Saturday Evening Post.
This is my story.
When I began writing a national humor column in November 2019, I had no idea that the country was about to enter an era of fear, illness, economic devastation, and many other unfunny problems.
For years, I’d written a light-hearted newspaper column, riffing on topics like Mafia movies and low-maintenance dogs. In late 2019, I was thrilled to sign a contract for my own humor column in The Saturday Evening Post’s online edition.
What could go wrong? Confidently, I banged out columns on computer passwords and grocery store music. American life was fairly amusing in January 2020.
In early March, the national mood changed. Suddenly, everyone was talking about the deadly “coronavirus” that had shut down Wuhan, China and was spreading to the West. As a Post columnist, I could not evade history in the making. I felt it was my professional duty to tackle the virus head-on.
“We’re a few weeks into the coronavirus era,” I bravely typed on March 7, 2020, “and from where I’m sitting, it looks pretty serious.”
So began a humor column, published online two days later, about “coronavirus life hacks.” The joke was that busy Americans now had an excuse to quit work, school, and virtually all other activities. It was illustrated by a photo of a giant N-95 mask.
I was aware that this column was possibly in poor taste. I only hoped the coming days would not be so filled with death and destruction that it would make me look like a bad person.
“I don’t understand how you could make light of such a terrible crisis,” began one reader response. “Everyone at the Post who had a hand in it being published should be quarantined themselves, from the top down! You won’t think she’s entertaining then, I can tell you!”
The next week, my seventh and fifth graders’ schools were closed by county mandate. My husband began working from our bedroom while I worked at the dining room table. I began supervising the kids’ classes on something called Zoom. Around the country, family members anxiously holed up. My siblings and I began video-chatting with our 76-year-old mother in New Mexico. My brother sent us all black face masks and Zinc capsules.
Life had gotten weird, but soon my next column was due. It seemed like we would be “locked down” for a few weeks, a rather droll absurdity. On March 20, my list of “ways to keep the spark alive while sheltering in place” went live. One reader cheerfully remarked: “Loved these suggestions! I’m going to try every one.” It was like living through a giant power outage—a shared, slightly scary adventure—on the assumption that the lights would turn on any minute.
By mid-April, Covid-19 was still the only thing on anybody’s mind, so I came up with a third light-comic take on the shutdown. My April 21 column discussed all the funny Internet memes that Americans, desperate for a laugh, were sharing from the deepening isolation of their homes.
Was the shutdown actually funny? Sometimes, kind of. In those first months, my mood ranged from domestic contentment to boredom to, increasingly, irritation. In early May, I was seized with the urge to watch the most offensive comedy I could find—we settled on Eddie Murphy’s Norbit—just so, for two hours, I could feel like a free American citizen and not a moldering lizard kept in a jar.
And sometimes, funny things occurred in my own life. In mid-May, I received a gorgeous bouquet and a sweet note from my sister in Oregon. Assuming all florists were closed as “non-essential,” all I had sent her, earlier that day, was an Internet meme of Grumpy Cat saying: “HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY WHORE.”
By then, I was sick of the coronavirus era. One sunny afternoon, it dawned on me that the county had no intention of lifting the lockdown order when virtual school ended in June. Two weeks to flatten the curve was stretching into summer, with no end in sight. In a strange mood, bordering on disbelief, I wrote a May 11 column called “Get Ready for the Worst. Summer. Ever.” It warned that “6,000 new rules” for life outside the house were going result in “major buzzkills” in the summer of 2020.
One reader described this piece as “asinine drivel” and curtly advised me to “go back to where you came from.” But I hadn’t even left my house! The Post deleted his comment as abusive. Another reader liked the column, calling it “a gruesomely accurate . . . sneak preview.”
Sure enough, in June 2020, things took a dark turn. Confined to our homes for the third month straight, we watched, incredulous, as American cities burned on TV. Looting and rioting ran rampant while police stood by. Meanwhile, I could not enter a grocery store without a cloth face covering, and everywhere I went, I had to follow arrows on the floor. A masked young woman posted at the doorway of Home Goods barked at me to cover my nose like she had been deputized and was now exerting the full force of authority, a glaring half-faced hybrid of Nurse Ratched and a strip club bouncer. And she was not alone: This attitude was everywhere.
My July 6 column was titled “Americans on the Edge.” It chronicled our family’s drive up Highway 1 after a beach vacation— a daring choice when everyone I knew was hunkered down at home. The tone was not jokey like earlier columns, but numb and dazed:
We’d seen elephant seals dragging their four-ton bodies across the sand with great effort, only to flop down in a different spot, like COVID shut-ins on a Netflix binge.
We’d passed a place called Ragged Point, a name that seemed widely applicable in 2020.
We’d driven through Big Sur, where half the state seemed to be hanging out. Every parking lot was full, every roadside surf shop bustling.
In fact, the hills adjacent to Highway 1 were busier than I’d ever seen them. In many spots, dozens of vehicles lined the road. Groups of young people, couples, entire families were clambering over the bluffs, getting as high up as it was possible to get, and staring down at the blue churn of the Pacific.
People had jumped the guardrails and arrayed themselves along the rocky cliffs, seized by some notion that — in 2020 — all rules were made to be broken. The posted warning signs were jokes; all the constraints of civilization were flimsy threads, slipped with more ease than anyone could have imagined.
Back in my Berkeley grad school days, I’d admired San Francisco Chronicle columnists Jon Carroll and Adair Lara, who wrote free-form meditations about whatever was on their minds that week. Before that, as a young reporter, I’d pored over the work of H. L. Mencken, one of the greatest, funniest columnists of all time. In high school, I’d loved a book-length poem about a cockroach (Archy) and a stray cat (Mehitabel) first published in The New York Sun by star columnist Don Marquis.
With these role models, I didn’t feel constrained by the column format. I had an easygoing editor who let me write whatever I wanted, lightly edited and published online within days. That summer, as the disorienting fog of 2020 deepened, I decided to write whatever popped into my head, like improvisational jazz.
My July 14 column began by noting that, two weeks earlier, “vandals attempted to burn down a 120-year-old bronze statue of an elk in Portland, Oregon.” After calling the vandals “morons,” I went on to discuss a word I’d recently learned from the Internet:
When I first heard the term miserabilism, it seemed to describe many Americans’ inner life, where things once considered fine were increasingly a source of guilt and disapproval.
There was a long list of things to feel bad about for one reason or another, including drinking straws, grocery bags, cars, air travel, graduation parties, playgrounds, routine medical procedures, restaurants, meat, gluten, dairy, getting a tan, football, politics, history, literature, comedy, and Mount Rushmore.
Yet, on the night of July 4th, in our blue-collar neighborhood that still lit fireworks in the street, “a non-miserable time was had by all.”
In August, all the pools were closed and inexpensive home pools on back order. I took the traditional First Day of School photo for eighth and sixth grade, then sent my kids to their bedrooms, where they would spend the next five hours slouched over their laptops. Around town, it was not uncommon to see a masked woman pushing a masked toddler in a baby swing in the middle of an empty park. People were settling into whatever this was, for the long haul.
My August 19 column was about the TV show Cheers. The eighties now seemed like a golden age, a genteel, broad-minded time when the differences between elites and deplorables were fodder for a witty prime-time sitcom. Cheers’ class-based ribbing—between, say, psychiatrist Lilith and waitress Carla—was all in good fun and “contributed to the general hilarity.” In 2020, Cheers’ characters would barely be on speaking terms, half of them huddled in a corner inveighing against “science deniers” while the other half, increasingly resentful, ran the bar.
My September 1 column talked about “strategic relocation”—leaving your state for greener pastures, a subject very much on my mind.
Californians are the most disliked strategic relocators, always blowing into other states and acting like Angelina Jolie on the red carpet. We arrive with a long list of unreasonable demands: six dozen white roses (and a single blood-red rose) in our dressing room; bottled water that has been vibrated by the sound of a Tibetan gong and absorbed its healing frequencies; servants to take care of our dogs; a bunch of new, annoying rules we just made up.
But I plan to be the exception: a California transplant whom people don’t hate.
This was sheer fantasy: The next month, we were still in California, and I had another column due. My October 5 column was about my daughter’s bearded dragon, a shutdown pet I had reluctantly agreed to when she was put under long-term house arrest. That fall,
everyone was either getting a new pet or thinking about getting one, spooked by the ringing emptiness of their apartments or alarmed that their children spent 15 hours a day on screens. All over town, people were hauling home puppies, gerbils, parakeets, ferrets, snakes, and white mice and giving them 2020 names like Gaslight and Desesperación.
In November 2020, things became crazier still. I had lived through the 2000 presidential election, which launched a month of legal battles and a recount of every Florida ballot down to the last hanging chad; then, everyone calmed down and went back to their lives. But now, the idea of forensically analyzing a confusing and unprecedented mail-in election was being treated like high treason. Like most events of 2020, it was not subject to debate. What country was this, anyway? I didn’t really care who was president, but I’d enjoyed living in the United States.
Meanwhile, I was getting an eyeful on Zoom school. My daughter’s sixth grade teacher was an obese woman with long, stringy gray hair. She seemed spaced out or perhaps high on legal cannabis, assigning the 12-year-olds not one but two essays on Burning Man. In her spare time, she crossed the gender-specific pronouns out of Dr. Seuss books, replacing them with terms she found less offensive. My daughter did not like this lunatic, and the whole thing made me angry. Hadn’t these kids been through enough? The only normal class was math, and though that teacher did his best, it was difficult for my lively daughter to learn math on Zoom. Some afternoons, attempting to do confusing worksheets to submit online, she cried.
My highly-conscientious older child was doing fine in school. But he’d developed a mild anxiety disorder, constantly checking food labels for “too much sodium” and other “bad” ingredients. He spent a lot of time playing video games and none with peers, all locked down in their houses, too.
My November 23 column was called “Let's All Be Thankful We're Not Our Kids.” It was the first in a series of essays in which my burgeoning rage was barely contained. Life on indefinite lockdown was getting to be too much. I was ceasing to be amused.
Whatever 2020 was, it wasn’t funny anymore.
My December 14 column, “On Facebook, the Peasants are Revolting,” discussed the widespread use of the “laughing face” emoji to mock official pronouncements. On a personal level, it marked my descent into a disreputable online world in which autists discussed things like psy-ops, mass psychosis, and color revolutions.
They seemed a little crazy. Often, they seemed right. Over the past six months, I’d stuffed an accordion file with printouts, real-time takes on what the hell was going on in 2020. I told myself that it was “research” for a “dystopian novel,” but I was trying to get a handle on the present. I had to maneuver my kids through this bizarre new world we lived in—a world with no known name but shitshow—and these Internet weirdos were my spirit guides.
“Now more than ever,” I wrote sanely for The Saturday Evening Post, “we could all use a good laugh.” Americans’ trust in major institutions was at an all-time low. I summarized the polls, polls which I felt understated the case.
So here we are: Glumly scrolling through news we don’t trust, on a social media platform we don’t trust, to keep up with the latest edicts from a government we don’t trust. No wonder some brave soul realized that one click on a [laughing] emoji could serve to publicly announce: “The emperor has no clothes!”
This acid-toned column was not particularly well-received. I could feel half the national audience turning against me, eyeing my words with suspicion. But there was nothing I could do, no other kind of column I could write.
In my next column, I sounded even more adrift, far from the great ice floe of civilized opinion in January 2021. Titled “No More Bread, No More Circuses,” it was basically a farewell to society at large. I rambled on about The Hunger Games, Joan Didion, and “the avant-garde form of theater known as Grand Guignol.” My conclusion was that our new collective life, as a people and a nation, was “not my circus, not my monkeys.”
That one got no comments at all.
February 12, 2021 marked my last funny column for The Post. Attempting to return to form and keep it light, I wrote about our family’s “love languages” for Valentine’s Day. We still made jokes around the house, eleven months into the lockdown, in part because I made it my job to keep up the kids’ morale. They had nothing to fear, I constantly told them. Only Nana had to be careful about catching Covid—and Nana was fine! We were lucky, healthy, mentally and spiritually strong. Everything was going to be okay.
In truth, I was sinking into depression, isolated with my rogue thoughts, surrounded by true believers in all the lockdown represented. I couldn’t produce another column for six weeks, and it was called “How Sting Taught Me to Say 'No Thanks' in 2021.”
On March 29, 2021, I discussed a pop song I’d loved as a teenager. It “taught me how to live as a misfit,” and that lesson was now coming in handy. For copyright reasons, I couldn’t quote much from the song—being sued by Sting’s estate was a problem I did not need—but I cited one line from the chorus, which I’d listened to a million times in my formative years:
Be yourself, no matter what they say.
I went on to renounce broad swaths of culture in the Current Year:
Recent movies and TV, social media, popular books, celebrity award shows, professional sports — much of this now falls in the “thanks, but no thanks” bucket. I could go on for a while, but I’ll stop there.
No one told me rejecting things would feel oddly liberating. It’s like that classic comic exchange:
“See you later!”
“Not if I see you first!”
In 2021, I’ve seen enough. Thanks, but no thanks.
That was the last column I wrote for The Post—not because they fired me for sullying a flagship American publication with my ravings, but because I just couldn’t do it anymore.
Post-2020, there was no way to write jokes for a national audience. The country was too bitterly divided: one person’s joke was another person’s jailable offense.
Nor did I want to write for seniors, and they comprised a lot of The Post’s readership. Today, in 2024, I have nothing against old people—some of my best friends are old people!—but back in 2021, the things I had to say to old people could not be printed in a family publication. They were complacently content to let my children’s lives be ruined for a virus dangerous only to themselves, and it was gross, and I didn’t want to be their jester anymore.
My editor—gracious and supportive to the last—said she was “bummed” to lose me as a writer and would be happy to work with me again.
It was an honor and a pleasure to write for The Saturday Evening Post, and I’m so grateful they let me. Perhaps I’ll take her up on it one day. This year, I’m writing my second novel, so my dance card is full.
Recently, some random person posted in some tweet or comment: “Who you were during the Covid years is who you really are.”
And I believe this to be true. The randos have all the good lines, now.
I was nobody of importance in 2020-’21, just a suburban working mom with a writing gig on the side.
But as a writer, I feel like I did my job.
And I stand by my record.
If only I had known you then. We could have commiserated .....and laughed together.