I’d like you to imagine a drunken phone call, at 3am, from me to you. You’re probably groggy, disoriented, worried it must be bad news and then somewhat annoyed it isn’t. The voice on the wire — my voice — is attenuated, slightly slurred, echoing faintly across the thousands of miles between us.

No, no, everything’s fine, I’d say. I’m sorry for calling so late, I’m sorry we haven’t talked in … well, it’s been a while. No, there’s no emergency, yes, in retrospect I should have waited until tomorrow. Maybe I screwed up the timezones again. Maybe I just needed to chat.

I’m glad you’re there. It’s good to hear your voice. Have you got a moment to talk?

I don’t know what I am anymore. Visa applications always ask the reason for your travel — Vacation? Business? Family reunification? Political asylum? — and I don’t know man, I’m just trying to live out here, you know? I dutifully check off “tourist” and fill out the rest and it’s as true as anything. But it never feels right.

The Coronavirus has made that all worse, of course. I’m deliberately trying not to travel, to sit still and stay in and keep safe. All the same I check the “tourist” box when I cross a border, and it’s how I’ll be dealt with legally if it came up for some reason. But by now I’ve spent five months in Ireland, nearly all of it through various stages of lockdown, and that seems more like a resident, albeit a reluctant one. And with the disastrous response in the United States to COVID-19, I’m feeling a lot like a refugee as well. The borders are still closed most everywhere to US residents. Virtually everyone on a visa in Ireland has long overstayed it and only remain here legally by the grace of the Naturalisation and Immigration Service. But the extensions they’ve granted expire come January, and I’ll have to hope they get extended again or start casting about for someplace new to wait out the vaccine.

When people ask me where I live, I tell them New York City. I haven’t lived there in over two years. I haven’t even been there since 2019. It’s easier to say I live there than explaining I don’t live anywhere, really, that I’ve been traveling and don’t intend to stop until I have a reason to. I don’t fit any of the categories.

I’ve been reading a lot of Zygmunt Bauman recently. He was a philosopher and social theorist who argued modernism, with its structures and rules and frameworks, was largely about asserting control over a chaotic environment in order to banish ambiguities. Of course that doesn’t work — can’t work — and ends up pushing all sorts of people to the edges and margins in its frenzy to categorize everyone. But Bauman felt as modernity progresses into the contemporary age, it was becoming increasingly unmoored and fluid, “liquid modernity” in his coinage. Previous sources of stability, like relationships, or careers, or institutions, or gender roles, are by now all upended. Our very identities, the social constructions of ourselves, are continuously in flux. As he put it, “Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries — or we may tremble out of fear of drowning.”

In other words, we are now eternal tourists in our own lives. We may embrace it or recoil from it, cheer it or deny it, but there’s no going back. The world is reinventing itself around us by the hour. And we are forced to reinvent ourselves, in response.

I have a tremor. I have always had a tremor; at least, I can’t recall a time where I didn’t have it. In my first explicit memory of it I was about 12, waiting in line at a fast food restaurant, and one of the other customers pointed it out. Maybe they thought they were being helpful. Even then, in my memory, it had always been there.

It’s not going to kill me, thankfully. It’s not going to gradually make it hard to breathe or destroy my ability to think given enough time. But it will get worse. It was minor and infrequent years ago but it’s a progressive disease, and it’s progressing. I notice it a lot now. It used to mostly show up at specific times like mornings or when I’m anxious, but more and more often it will appear out of nowhere, without any obvious triggers. I’ve started resting my hand on the edges of plates when I’m eating, to cover it up. It’s to the point where I sometimes have trouble printing my own name.

At the moment it’s mostly annoying and embarrassing — it makes me self-conscious around other people, which is not a great thing to pile on top of my generalized social anxiety — but it might, eventually, get bad. Some people reach the point where they can’t feed or dress themselves. In particularly severe cases you can lose the ability to speak, because the tremor takes over your tongue. Maybe I’ll get there some day. Maybe I won’t. There’s no way to tell.

That’s just one of many ailments, of course. My knee is riddled with psoriatic arthritis, another progressive disease, which means it’s nearly always stiff and sore. I have high blood pressure. I need glasses to read street signs. My skin is nearly always lousy — a combination of rosacea and the aforementioned psoriasis — and my hair went grey in my thirties, which may be an attractive shade but certainly doesn’t read as a young one.

I’m expiring, in other words. No quicker than anyone else, as far as I know, but steadily and inevitably. None of my current health problems are life-threatening, just the usual minor humiliations aging forces on most of us eventually. But they are precursors, the first aches in a joint hinting at the storm just over the horizon.

And, you know, I’m fine with it. I mean, I’m not ready, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be. I’d like to live forever, or at least long enough to get sick of living forever. That’s not a choice we get to make, though. We can do our best — exercise and lose weight and and sleep eight hours nightly and cut out fatty foods while meditating and drinking two liters of water every day — and still find ourselves blundering into the path of a speeding taxi with shoddy brakes.

This is hardly a novel observation, gather ye rosebuds and all that, but the pandemic has it all fresh in my mind. Lack of travel has given me a lot of time to think, and what I think is that staying in one place for too long makes me feel like I’ve already passed over. To quote another great social philosopher, the street poet Weird Al Yankovic, “I’ll be mellow when I’m dead.” Until then, there’s just too much left to do.

We’re some weeks past the presidential election in the United States, and the fears that the results might be overturned have nearly completely faded. I suppose there’s still time for disaster — there’s always time for disaster — but we’re heading back to the political status quo that held for most of Obama’s term, which is almost total legislative deadlock. But deadlock isn’t stable. If the last eight years have proven anything, it’s that stasis is rot: the steady destruction of the ability of the government to address our collective problems in any meaningful way.

It’s an understatement to say my optimism over the future of the United States is at a low ebb; I think we’re in well in “freefall of Rome” territory. I suppose it’s possible the Republican coalition cracks up yet, or gets pulled so far rightward that there’s finally a solid and overwhelming reckoning at the ballot box. Either might allow the Democrats to actually address some of the issues. I’m not holding my breath.

But if politics is so broken we can’t expect national solutions, all we’re left with are local, insufficient patches to the problems. The cost of health care is going to keep skyrocketing. Taxes will remain too low to fund infrastructure or social programs that have any shot of addressing poverty or social inequality. The changing nature of work is going to shunt more and more people, especially the young, into the precariat.

This is all anticipated by Bauman’s thesis. Part of what makes modernity liquid is the rise of transnational forces operating outside of government oversight. Those come from corporate economic might, or terrorist cells, or even climate change. The critical thing is that nobody’s in control of any of it. These problems can only be addressed collectively, but all the structures we’ve built to deal collectively with them don’t work at those scales.

The pandemic provides an all too neat illustration of this. Our ability to resume a normal life is almost entirely in the hands of our neighbors. If everyone takes precautions we can keep the disease from getting out of control. Instead, most of us are in the middle of a second or even third wave of deaths. Things are particularly bad in the United States, where the delusion that everyone is solely and utterly responsible for themselves has run into the dysfunction that’s been bred into the network at just about every level. Lack of a nationalized health care system means there’s no simple mechanism for responding to a public health crisis, and an ideological opposition to helping people suggests there wouldn’t be much interest in using it even if it existed.

It didn’t have to be that way. China’s doing well — the ability to enforce real lockdowns early can do that — but even democracies like Iceland and New Zealand are handling it significantly better than most of the EU and the US. Some of that’s geography, and some of it’s dumb luck, but by now it’s clear most of it is just having both the political will and the community spirit necessary to beat the pandemic. The last vestiges of modernism holding back the chaos, Bauman might say. Everywhere else? We’ve been left on our own.

I’m sorry for waking you up. Are you still there? I think that’s all I really wanted to say, I’d say, my voice bouncing off a satellite. It felt so urgent when I dialed.

I miss you. I miss everything, in our collective annus horribilis, the travel and the late nights drinking and the live music and the laughter and the after parties. But mostly I miss you. I can sacrifice the rest. That’s the one that hurts.

I guess it’s Thanksgiving, or it would be if I were back in the USA. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. Thanksgiving’s one of those holidays that’s been built on bad faith and a willful misunderstanding of history. And yet. Every year of my childhood my family would bundle everyone into the car and drive hours to spend the holiday with my grandparents. And that’s the magic of the ritual — it can work in spite of the history, as a repudiation of the narratives we’ve been handed down, as a way to spin gold from straw. As long as we let it.

My family doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving the way we used to. My grandparents eventually passed, as did my mother. My aunt hosted for a few years, but decided it was too much hassle. It’s now an ad hoc thing; as often as not nobody’s hosting anything at all. That’s especially true in 2020.

For the past few years I tended to find myself traveling alone over the holiday anyway. I’m in one place now, though, and since I’m staying with a friend I’m cooking as well. Just something small, a vegetarian roast, maybe some mashed potatoes and creamed corn. She’s making a pie. The ritual still works, for as long as you let it.

The first time I was living in New York City, in early 2002, an artist named Anissa Mack held an exhibition in Grand Army Plaza. It was titled Pies for a Passerby. She built a small cottage, complete with gingham curtains and flower boxes and blue shutters and, critically, a working oven. And she would spend the day inside simply baking apple pies, one after the other. And when one was finished, she would set it on one of the three windowsills to cool.

It would inevitably get stolen, although maybe that’s not the right word for it, given the title and clear intentions of the artist. The work was trying to recreate a vision of small-town life in the middle of Brooklyn, of the sort that never really existed except in the movies, and it was inviting you to be a part of it.

I went to see it with a friend, just sat there on the steps of the library and watched her rolling out the dough and slicing the apples, sliding pies into the oven as they were assembled and out as they finished baking. It was a warm, sunny, spring day, with just enough of a breeze that it filled the plaza with the scent of apples and cinnamon and sugar and allspice. It smelled amazing. It smelled like home.

Next: Easter, 2021, Dublin
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