Post 1: The White Sock
By Collin Hockenbury
I was in a good place. Going commando in sweatpants on our living room couch, about a third of the way through my Bell’s Two Hearted, watching two middle-of-the pack NBA teams trade lazy threes on a Wednesday night. It was around 9pm.
The back door opened and shut.
“We’re f--ked, dude. I mean, we are so f--ked.”
My roommate was home.
I kept my eyes on the TV and took a sip of beer. Ahh, citrusy.
“Jackson, what are you talking about?” I asked.
“The market. The market is plummeting. We’re going into a recession, dude. It’s over. We’re f--ked.”
Jackson had recently begun a new job as a financial advisor and he was really into the stock market. I figured this was just him… being really into the stock market.
“This coronavirus thing is bad,” he went on. “It’s crashing our economy and it’s gonna spread and people are gonna get really sick. In a month, you won’t be going into the office. No one will.”
I finally averted my eyes from the Memphis Grizzlies and looked over at him. He started loosening his tie. His fingers twitched.
“Dude. No one at my office has mentioned anything like that. My parents don’t seem worried. I know this is serious, but there are barely any cases in the U.S., right?”
“I’m telling you, Collin. One month.”
He left the room on this ominous note and went to put his Lululemon gym shorts on, the first phase of his pre-bed routine.
This was just over one month ago.
Jackson was right. We were f--cked.
The weeks that followed were as strange as any I can remember in my 27 years of life. It was like a meteor was going to smash into the earth, or a hurricane was going to uproot our houses, and we all knew about it ahead of time. Warnings of “COVID-19” sprung up all over the evening news and Twitter. I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but when I heard we were calling the virus “COVID-19,” I immediately thought of the “We have a 23-19!” scene from Monster’s Inc., when the big fluffy monster emerges from a kid’s room with a white sock stuck in his back fur and has to be decontaminated.
This wasn’t a Pixar movie, though. No one knew when this story would truly begin or how long it would last. But everyone was getting worried.
And then came Rudy Gobert. The guy with the metaphorical white sock stuck to his back.
Word spread Rudy had the virus, and the hammer was dropped. The NBA cancelled its season. The flood gates opened.
All other sporting events were suspended or cancelled outright. School was postponed. The WFH movement got underway as governors and advisors and Donny himself took to the podium to let us know there would be no more large gatherings — not at the office, not anywhere. Why? Because if life as we knew it proceeded, a lot of people were going to die. In fact, a lot people dying was already unavoidable at this point.
The only way we could save as many people as possible was to stay home, they all said. Stay home, wait this thing out and pray.
That leaves us where we are today. Quarantined.
Once the age of Corona was officially upon us and social existence had evaporated, a couple of friends and I had an idea. Why not start writing about this? We couldn’t talk to people about our quarantine experiences in person — that was the whole point of quarantine. So we made us a blog.
I’m sure you’ve heard it a billion times: we’re in the midst of something “unprecedented.” That’s where this blog gets her name.
We’re all living through something we’ve never seen before. This is where a few of us will share a little of our new lives and growing perspectives. Hopefully it reads as more than a big scary shared virtual diary, but no promises. We’ve never tried this.
On a serious note, our primary hope is that everyone takes care of themselves and their loved ones as we go through these unprecedented times. Our secondary hope is that we can bring you something you’ll actually enjoy reading in the meantime. Who knows, maybe you’ll even want to write a post. Has to be a better use of time than scrolling through depressing tweets and endless Tiger King memes of the dude on the jet ski.
Alright, the jet ski guy is actually a phenomenal one.
