Plague Balm

I was about as well-equipped for the COVID-19 pandemic as I could have been, even if it fucked up everything and knocked me off-course in a way I'm probably still dealing with. Long stretches of my life had been building up to a bunch of things that happened in 2019, and then I cashed all that work in for a few quietly devastating years as the world burned.

In February 2019, I turned 30, and then

- in April, I bought a house with my partner of eight years
- in July, we got married, and so many of the people I love came in for the wedding, making it truly one of the best days of my life
- in August, we adopted a dog, Pumpkin Pie– considering my wife and I would still be together if we'd got married any other year, but Pump was a once in a lifetime dog and if we hadn't adopted her that day, somebody else would have, I feel comfortable saying this was the highlight of highlights
-from late August to early September, I spent about three weeks working on a film in Michigan
- in November, I spent two weeks watching other people work on a film in Los Angeles
- in August, I set a goal to write a new poem every couple days until the end of the year, and by the end of December I'd written 100 of them; whether or not they were any good, I put the work in

And then around Christmas, I flew home and saw my family for what would turn out to be the last time in almost two years.

There were other great things in there– the Found Footage Festival did a show at our rehearsal dinner, I saw Devon Welsh put on an unbelievable concert while I was in LA, David Berman briefly returned to music with an album I can no longer listen to– but the bullet points were the culminations, the things I'd worked for and had spent months planning, that I can still recognize as fundamental life changes seven years later.

I used the cliche "quietly devastating" up there to describe luck. Everybody had a hellish 2020, but not everybody's devastation was quiet. I had a house to live in, and if the pandemic had hit a year earlier, my partner and I would have been cooped up in a tiny one bedroom apartment whose only windows looked out on the building's dumpster. I had a dog, which meant I was forced to leave home and go for regular walks, while my usual tendency would definitely have been to stay in bed all day, looking at my phone. Working on the movie in Michigan in 2019 meant I had something concrete to look forward to– in 2020, that project was in post-production, and once the pandemic ended, I'd be able to see what it'd become. And, in a different kind of luck, I didn't live around (loud) anti-vaxxers/maskers, which helped my optimism immensely.

It didn't all last. Most of it didn't last. The film industry was already in a tough spot and then it completely collapsed as the pandemic rolled on. I'm not just talking about collapsing on a theatrical level, either. Distribution went haywire. I was involved with three low-to-microbudget projects– we made the Michigan thing for what most studios spend flying talent to set– and I still lost literally every penny I had put into them. For most of 2020, it was "I just have to get through this and then I can keep pursuing movie dreams, inch further into that world, get more involved," and then by 2021 it had become a little more clear my 2019 activity had been a fluke, and it was "I have to treasure how that felt, because that wasn't the first steps forward, that was the entire experience in and of itself." And the experiences were good. I'm still friends with people I met through them, the films themselves turned out great. But I had thought maybe I'd be able to, in some capacity, work on one movie a year, and then COVID and the financial hit I took and the responsibilities involved with having a child overtook that completely. I'd rather have our son than anything. There's absolutely no comparison. But that's the trade-off. I think it was probably 2025 when I finally accepted there would be no return.

In 2019, when I agreed to work on the film in Michigan, I was going to need to take three weeks off work, but I didn't have three weeks of PTO. The plan was to get some stuff lined up for the future, leave my job right before production, be some weird combination of a PA and a producer on the movie, and then come back and do part-time and freelance jobs while pursuing film. My boss wouldn't let that happen. I was good at my job and it would take too long to train another person to handle all of my tasks. On a darker note, I had been one of two people with my job title and they'd fired the other one a few months earlier without hiring a replacement for her (or raising my pay), and most of the reluctance to let me leave probably tied into the understanding nobody else would do that much work, that well, for that little. People are very gracious if they think they're on the verge of no longer being able to exploit you.

I worked with a lot of great people I loved, but I hated that job. I can't tell you how much I hated it. I felt a little sad I'd built up the nerve to make a clean break and then the perks had been bumped up so unreasonably that I needed to stay. Between August and December 2019, I took six weeks away from my job. I'll never be free enough to do that again.

I only became grateful I hadn't quit when COVID's scope really became clear and the office shut down in 2020. I was nowhere near an essential worker, so I stayed at home with the dog, got all of my work done in the first hour or so of the day and then played video games and watched DVDs with the rest of my time.

My wife wasn't as lucky. She was furloughed for a couple weeks and then forced to go into her offices, where she was a music therapist and where her employer had, some could argue, overloaded her with clients and done a miserable job protecting its employees from the virus killing people and fucking their lungs up. She caught COVID pretty quickly. After she'd healed, she went back to work for a bit and then quit to start a private practice. I allegedly still can't believe how horrible that company allegedly was to her. We moved to my work's insurance and I was once again thankful I hadn't fully left in 2019. That job sucked, but it wasn't constantly throwing me into small rooms with groups of unvaccinated teens. There are degrees here.

If we don't know each other in real life, you probably aren't aware my house flooded a few months ago. On the morning of May 11, an already bad year emptied its bladder on my face when the pipe connecting the toilet to the wall on the third floor of our narrow row home burst. For about half-an-hour, the water went straight down, damaging everything between the bathroom and the basement, and we did what we could to stop it, but that's led to an ongoing saga of insurance nightmares, moving between temporary housing options, throwing waterlogged belongings away, boxing everything else up, crying, ripping the cartilage in my abdomen, losing an incredible amount of money, etc. I'm pretty sure I'm losing my hair at a much faster rate than I already was, and, let me tell you, it wasn't looking great for me before.

As far as personal upheaval goes, this is what our 2020 could have been. Back then, I'd finish working by 11am and then stay on-call while spending the rest of the morning and afternoon replaying WarioWare on my stomach, on the floor, as my snoring, farting dog slathered her 60 pounds on my legs. I'd been blessed with that kind of space. Now, I'm getting ready to move for the fifth time. If construction isn't on schedule, there'll be a sixth time before we make it back home. My PTO is exhausted, so we had to pack nights and weekends to get here, and I'll be doing the same to move back home. On a typical day, I went to work, I went to the house, we put things in boxes, we went home, we crashed out. We've done all of this while keeping our 4-year-old son from feeling the weight. I've become nostalgic for the way I was allowed to weather a much larger storm.

I wanted to explain all that– the friction and lack of friction in dealing with two crises– to properly contextualize something I've reached for in dealing with each. The newsletter up to here has been the solipsistic personal essay that precedes the recipe Google indicated you'd see.

In summer 2020, a YouTuber named NerdRush took the full, 78-minute-long 1987 Alvin and the Chipmunks movie The Chipmunk Adventure and pitch-shifted almost every line so the squeakiest characters had somewhat normal voices. The Chipmunk and Chipette voices you hear in the movie weren't just sped up, they were treated in other ways, so if you slow them back down, they don't sound like a normal person talking. They sound like a breathy maniac moaning.

By September 2020, the video had picked up steam and was posted to places like The A.V. Club and Boing Boing. Maybe I read about it on the A.V. Club, maybe somebody linked to it on social media. I loved it. Watching the characters in this dumb movie talk in dumb voices made me laugh until I cried.

What are Alvin and the Chipmunks to you? Does anybody have a real relationship with the property? I'm asking because the franchise's Wikipedia master template looks like this:

That is:

• 38 studio albums
• 8 soundtrack albums
• 3 TV shows
• 7 TV specials
• 5 theatrical features
• 2 direct-to-VHS/DVD features

In 1958, Ross Bagdasarian wrote and recorded the novelty single "Witch Doctor" under the name David Seville. The song was a hit and Bagdasarian was so in love with the high-pitched voice he'd given the witch doctor that "Dave" evolved from an ethnically-ambiguous stage name to a character who managed the fictional band Alvin and the Chipmunks. Boring as it is to complain about Christmas music, I have to note the Chipmunks' debut, also released in 1958, is an aural abscess. Even without the squeaky voices, "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)" is unlistenable for its punishing repetitiveness and a tempo that's always a little slower than you'd remembered.

But I can't "Even without the squeaky voices..." this. As Adam Serwer once wrote, the squeaky voices are the point. When I said Dave transitioned from stage name to character, this is the character I was referring to:

You shouldn't be able to copyright that. It's a placeholder image. It's got 2% more life than a artist's mannequin. Bagdasarian didn't draw a separation between Dave's pants and his shoes, and I promise you he didn't take advantage of all the time he saved there by putting even five extra seconds toward developing the character's personality. It's been half-a-century and all you can say about Dave is that he works with singing chipmunks and he gets mad.

And The Chipmunks– Alvin, Simon and Theodore– have the same voice. It's Dave's voice sped up. Alvin's the star and he's bad at taking directions. Simon has glasses so he's smart. Theodore likes to eat. In the 80s, Bagdasarian's son, Ross Bagdasarian, Jr., invented The Chipettes– Brittany, Jeanette and Eleanor– a three-piece girl group whose personalities directly correspond to the sassy/brainy/eats food dynamic in The Chipmunks. Let's also not gloss over that Ross Bagdasarian was so bad at coming up with new ideas he named his son Ross Bagdasarian.

If I want to over-intellectualize my reaction to NerdRush's edit of The Chipmunk Adventure, when I laughed hard at a racist nonsense kids movie I never could have sat through normally, I'll say it's very funny engaging with an IP where the only novel aspect introduced in its then-62-year-long life-span is "weird voices" but somebody removed the weird voices. It's a gimmicky thing presented without its gimmick, like one of those YouTube videos that removes the laugh track from a multi-cam sitcom, underlining the strange way actors can talk when they're accommodating an audience's reactions.

At some point, NerdRush's video was taken offline. Rights holders Bagdasarian Productions, LLC, filed a copyright removal request, because of course they did. It's their movie. I can't hold it against them. I'd assumed this edit of the film was gone forever until finding a copy on the Internet Archive. It takes a second to load, but it's there. I might be able to send you a copy if that's easier. Maybe I've downloaded it.

After discovering that link in an ocean of dead Internet Archive results, I watched the un/re-pitch-shifted cut of The Chipmunk Adventure last week. I guess it's an ice pack now. It'll be something I have to fish out whenever I'm sore. If you'd like to watch it, I'd like to share it with you.