Current Events

2024 (Covid’s Version)

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My brain was producing a redacted document, live.

* * * *
There does not need to be a term more precise for the phenomenon of brain fog than “brain fog.” Of course, one may want to quantify things, determine a precise number with a decimal point and a percentage sign to let people know that under this number one does not have brain fog, but above it … hoo boy! Above this percentage point, one should not be able to complete, you know, those things that people write. You know, sentences!

I spent most of 2024 in a case of brain fog. It relented in August, eight months after my first and so far only case of Covid. I do not know how bad a case of post-Covid brain fog I lived with this year, and medicine does not have a firm, numbers-with-a decimal-point-and-percentage mark grasp on the phenomenon at this point anyway. I still have it, a little, and I now consider brain fog to be a part of what I refer to as me, like my gray hair.

Physicians around the world started to publish papers in 2020 that describe and measure cognitive deficits patients encounter thanks to Covid; patients score lower on IQ tests while sick and also after, and some patients of a certain age (around my age: mid-to-late 50s) exhibit symptoms of early-onset dementia post-Covid. Those who have contracted Covid more than once display even more serious cognitive troubles. The library of peer-reviewed articles in medical journals about the nervous system problems experienced during and after Covid grows each day. I do not have a comprehensive list, but there are many social media accounts that compile the articles, and I can direct anyone who is curious to those. The articles are cautious, as they should be, yet all describe a condition that is still only partly understood. Millions of people who have had COVID have suffered cognitive deficits if not declines.

I do not know if I am one of those cases. I only know what I experienced this year. I only know that until August I sometimes had trouble following what people said to me and what I read, and that when I started a sentence, both in conversation and at the keyboard, it felt like an adventure to reach the end.
Read More

‘Mystic chords of memory …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

On this particular Veterans Day, in this particular time and place and moment, I think more of my Civil War ancestors, and what it meant to be a part of the Union. I do not know what it meant for them; I know what they mean to me.

* * * *
I do not know what my great-great-grandfather James Metcalf (above) saw at the Battle of Gettysburg. He and his father, Amos, my great-great-great-grandfather, were both there with the 6th Battery, 1st Battalion, Maine Light Artillery.

The list of locations (from the National Park Service) at which the 6th Battery saw action while my Metcalf ancestors served from November 15, 1861, till the war’s end includes the names of some of the bloodiest battles in Civil War history: Antietam, the Wilderness Campaign, the months-long Siege of Petersburg, and Gettysburg. James was a private and his father was a hospital cook, so perhaps their experiences were different ones. However, both died years after the war of diseases contracted in service: Amos was disabled with rheumatism and died in 1883, and James died of malaria in 1905. Amos was in his forties during the war, and James turned twenty in 1863.
Read More

All Love Is Local

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The late film critic Pauline Kael is mistakenly said to have remarked after Richard Nixon was reelected, “How could that be? I don’t know ANYONE who voted for him.” The story is apocryphal, as Ms. Kael never said it; but many of us have reacted in a similar naive way if only for a split-second after an election whose results surprised/dismayed us.

Unlike our film critic friend, I do indeed know people who voted opposite me yesterday. (To be open: I voted for the vice-president and our local representative and in favor of a proposition in New York that may prove salutary and, now, surprisingly important in the coming years.) You see, I attend several recovery meetings each week and sit next to men and women who feel vehemently happy today or at least contentedly pleased about the result of the presidential election and unhappy the proposition passed.
Read More