It's a happy memory, but I don't live there. -- Geraint Wyn-Davies

According to The Washington Post, 146.2 million Americans have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine as of today. That represents 54.7% of the total population -- every other person. Me sharing my own experience in this regard may therefore seem either rendundant, pointless or just plain narcissistic; but it's my understanding, backed by considerable evidence that the effects of the vaccine vary from person to person and to some extent, vaccine to vaccine. For posterity for the hell of it, and for curiosity's sake, I am sharing my own experience here, if only to see if it provokes a few others to share their experiences with me.

In the United States, three forms of the vaccine are currently in use: Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. I received the Pfizer vaccines on 4/9 and 4/30 of this year, respectively. I would have liked to have gotten mine considerably earlier, but in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where I have resided for better than half of my pandemic-era experience, I was ranked "1c" in order of vaccine eligibility. I tried and failed not to be insulted by this, given the essential nature of my work, but c'est la pandémie.

Like many people, I had some reservations about taking the vaccine even though I had been praying for the existence of one ever since the declaration of emergency early last year. AIDS, to quote a perhaps problematic example, has been a public health menace since the early-middle 1980s, and yet we still have no vaccine -- and ,according to experts, may not have one until at least 2035. It similarly took decades of continuous effort to create a safe and effective vaccine for polio, once the scourge of the First World. So the idea that, barely a year after the unwelcome discovery of Covid-19, we all ought to cheerfully allow ourselves to get pumped full of who-the-hell-knows-what in the hopes of avoiding the dreaded Coronavirus does involve a certain amount of trust, faith and, well, perhaps fatalism, too.

Armed with these things, as well as a burning desire to resume what we all refer to as "normal life," I went to a local Rite-Aid at six o'clock on Friday, April 9, 2021, to get "the jab." The line was not overly long, but it was slow-moving, and once the paperwork was completed, I had to wait ten or fifteen minutes before a tired and somewhat grim-looking pharmacist's assistant told me to roll up my sleeve. While I may box from a southpaw stance, I'm a rightie, so I elected to sacrifice my left arm to the needle. I'd been told that "you'll barely feel it" but this was definitely not the case. I have no especial fear of syringes or needles nor any especial sensitivity to them, and I have also been tattooed twice, but the insertion was surprisingly painful. The nearest analog I can come up with is being stuck hard with the neck of a broken bottle. The pain didn't last too long, but it surprised and disappointed me, as I cannot remember a vaccine ever having caused me much more than a momentary prickling of discomfort.

I waited the obligatory fifteen minutes to see if I'd have a negative reaction, and having none, drove home. Ordinarily, on a Friday, I'd have polished off a beer or two or a glass of whiskey to celebrate the conclusion of another week's work in the salt mines of the district attorney's office, but I'd been told not to take any alcohol. What's more, I'd been told to keep my body hydrated. I wasn't worried about side-effects, since the first of the Pfizer shots was reputed to have few if any. And this was indeed my experience...on Friday. The next three or four days were something of another matter.

On Saturday morning I awoke knowing I had to drive to Atlantic City. This is a three-hour drive from where I live, and I was expected around one o'clock, so I left at ten. I had no issues in the morning, during the drive or for the first hour or two after my arrival. Upon conclusion of my first meal of the day, however, I felt distinctly nauseous. It came upon me suddenly and did not last long, but when the nausea passed I found myself feeling drained and somewhat weak. This condition became more pronounced on Sunday, and persisted until Tuesday afternoon, a full three and a half days after I took the jab. I was always tired and sluggish, though my mind was clear and I did not feel feverish, sick, nauseous or in any pain. At this time I heard anecdotal evidence to the effect that anyone who'd had Covid before would suffer more from the first dose of the vaccine than anyone who had not been infected. I have no proof that I was ever infected, but I suspect that I was, early in the pandemic, albeit mildly and with unusual symptoms. If this was true, then it made more sense to me that I would be sensitive to the first dose, though again, this is mere speculation.

Once the side-effects faded, they were gone and I went about my life until last Friday, when I returned to Rite-Aid for the second jab. This time there was no line and almost no waiting. Nor was there any appreciable pain from the insertion of the needle, a fact I found most curious because the same woman who'd dosed me the first time dosed me on this occasion as well. Different needle? Different technique? Different mood? I have no idea. I waited the perscribed ten minutes to check for a bad reaction, and then, having none, drove home.

This time the effects were felt the same night as the jab, but they were very different than I had expected. Many had said the second dose was a real bastard, and would leave me flat on my ass for as long as three days, wracked by chills, fever and body aches. In point of fact, what I experienced was a feeling strongly reminiscent of my time on Oxycontin. I felt warm, sleepy, and completely at peace with the universe. This sensation grew more powerful as the night wore on, and I went to bed and slept quite well for a good eight or nine hours. I awoke in the same "morphine-high" state and found it very difficult, not to get out of bed, but to want> to get out of bed. Indeed, the entire morning, I felt as if the physician's assistant must have screwed up and shivved me with the wrong syringe. Clearly, instead of Pfizer #2, I'd gotten some kind of happy juice. The only negative effect was quite a sore arm. But when you've blocked as many punches as I have with your shoulder, one more owwie doesn't make much difference.

Around noon, the effects of the happy juice began to wear off. I remained sluggish, but my skin, especially along my back, took on a raw feeling, as it does when I have influenza or use the wrong detergent. I also noticed a throb over my left temple which eventually graduated into a full-blown headache. A friend of mine and I went for coffee, and I felt curiously cold despite modest temperatures, and very, very tired. In fact I had difficulty staying awake and had to rest my chin in my hand to support my head. Later, my headache got worse, necessitating a pill. I continued to drink lots of water as everyone had cautioned me to do, and I did notice a higher level of thirst than usual considering my lack of exercise; but whether this helped or not I have no idea.

In the evening, I went to dinner with two friends. At first I had no appetite at all, a condition which had affected me all day, but as I began eating I found I was somewhat hungry and cleaned my plate. My headache grew worse but then gradually recded, due to the pill or the food or something else -- human contact? -- I don't know. By the time we finished and said our goodbyes, I actually felt much better. It had now been somewhat more than 24 hours since I took the second dose, and I was cautiously optimistic that the worst was behind me and had not been very bad. Indeed, I felt a little restless and wished I could get some exercise, though I decided against it, just as I had decided against drinking any alcohol during my meal.

I went to bed that night as per usual, reading a book (The Bridge over the River Kwai) , and slept well. In the morning -- we're at Sunday now -- I felt perfectly fine. Just a bit wrung out, the way you feel the day after, say, a long day of travel. I got up, went through the normal morning routines, and then for coffee. Occasionally I felt a touch feverish but it caused me no distress. It's now been 36 hours or better since I had the shot, and there is nothing more to report. Unless I get clobbered out of the clear blue by more symptoms, I can report that I am now fully on the other side of the line drawn more than a year ago.

I set all of this down because the Pandemic is one of a small handful of events which have forcibly reshaped the world during my lifetime. I am just old enough to remember, as a small child, the enormous lines for gas during the Oil Crisis of the late 70s. I remember the Cold War and its climax, the Gulf War, and of course, 9/11 and its seemingly endless aftermath. When the Pandemic initially struck, I remember feeling as if I were experiencing either an extended bad dream or the business end of one of those end-of-the-world mini-series (you know, like The Stand). Shit like this, I assured myself, only happened in the minds of (ahem) overheated television writers, not in the actual world, and especially not in what we refer to as The First World. And once reality sunk in, once masks and social distancing and lockdowns and Zoom everything became the new normal, I felt a sulky, entitled, furious impatience with that monolithic body we simply refer to as "Science." Surely "Science" would get off its collective ass and deliver us a cure so we could go back to a time when masks were for Halloween and the thought of going to a concern or a movie theater didn't fill us with trepidation and dread.

Well, Science has done its job, and in record time, too. I can't think of any human endeavors, except the development of the atomic bomb in the early-mid 40s, and the space race of the 50s-60s, which saw such concentrated effort upon a single daunting task, and ended with such decisively affirmative results. Doubtless this first wave of vaccines are primitive, rather like the fighter planes and tanks our factories churned out in huge numbers immediately before and in the opening stages of World War Two; doubtless booster shots and 2.0 and 3.0 vaccines will emerge in the coming years, and we will all have to submit to further "jabs" as Science and the Virus battle it out for the lead spot in this particular race. This is not really what people want to hear, but the "novel coronavirus" is not going anywhere. Like influenza, it is now a part of human life and we will have to deal with it as we deal with the flu and the common cold. ​But we seem, for the moment anyway, to be getting a handle on the bastard. And having gotten that handle, it's only normal to want to return to normal life. But -- and I must stress this fact -- there will be no actual return. As Herman Wouk pointed out, wars draw dividing lines through history and separate one era from another. But "war" is a curious thing and not always fought on a military plane. Any great struggle can constitute a war. The Great Depression killed the Jazz Age. World War Two killed the Depression. The Oil Crisis ushered in a whole new polito-economic reality for the First World. The end of the Cold War altered the very raison d'etre of the post-WW2 "free world" and destroyed an entire political system and ideology which had ruled a huge part of the planet for 70-plus years. 9/11 maked a sea change in America's relationship with the world and itself. And this Pandemic will alter many aspects of our ways of living even after it itself is just a bad memory. Many of the "temporary" changes, like having people work from home and employ Zoom or Microsoft Teams to do their jobs, are hardening into permanency already. Brick and mortar offices are now taking the same hit that brick and mortar buildings have been taking since Amazon became the dominant retail force in this nation. Carrying a mask -- something literally everyone hates or at least dislikes doing -- will now probably become as normal as having a cell phone on one's person: we may not use them, but we will probably feel we have to have one handy for years to come.

The future that is coming is different than the one we imagined in 2019, and in some ways very much more unwelcome. In a macro sense, are reaping what we -- ourselves, our forefathers -- have sewed since industrialism began. This virus was one manifestation of our environmental policy as a species, which is to plunder and rape everything in sight for short-term gain without thought of future consequence. We have been at this for 200 years or more, and the world is finally telling us, in its own ways, that it has bloody well had enough. Those who insist everything will return to "normal" in 2022 or 2023 might want to consider that there is at present no vaccine for the huge fires, sweeping droughts and destructive storms of every type which have now become normal features of weather in much of the world. There is no vaccine for crop failure, shortages of fresh water, spiking cancer rates. We all want, on some level or other, to live a life of comfortable materialism on the one hand, and on the other, know that "nature" is out there for us to play with when we're in the mood to get our feet dirty. That was the world we grew up in. But it is not the world we live in, as anyone who lives in California or the Midwest, or the Gulf Coast now nows. You can now get a jab for Covid, if you want it; you cannot get a jab for 110 degree temperatures in November.

My point here is that life's insistence on changing, on taking our familiar ways and traditions and sense of normalcy and smashing them or twisting them into something still recognizable and yet definitely different, is never going to be easy to swallow. The folks who lived in the Jazz Age and were of the economic class which was capable of enjoying that decadence to its fullest, were no doubt dismayed to see it all fly to pieces in 1929. I know that September 11, 2001 put a definite and terrible end to my belief that 80s-90s prosperity could be sustained indefinitely, or that democracy had already won the worldwide struggle against totalitarianism and religious fanaticism. The truth is, we all have a peculiar and particular definition of "normal life" and "the way things ought to be," and this viewpoint colors much of our conduct and attitude, even in daily life. But life by definition is unstable and constantly attacks and chips away at our sense of normalcy. We can only shift our slang, our clothing style, our technology, etc., so much before daily life becomes an exasperating game of musical chairs and we begin to experience waves of nostalgia for the past -- waves which, if they crash into us enough, tend to lead to a type of social and sometimes a political conservatism. Whether this is "good" or "bad" is not the issue: the issue is that outward change creates inward change, often whether we want it or not. In the end, our success as human beings -- success meaning happiness, not material wealth or social position -- rests largely on our ability to adapt. And this, in closing, brings me back to the virus.

The success of viruses on this planet is not merely due their genetic simplicity (many scientists do not consider viruses as living things but rather organic androids, since they do not meet hardly any of the critera we assign to life), but their propensity for mutation. As the animal body adapts its defenses to kill an invading virus, the virus shifts its own genetic definition and becomes something else, something against which the animal has lesser defense. The immune system then adapts in turn, or tries to, and a game is inaugurated which is in a sense without an ending. And this grim contest is a microcosm of our human lives. Life keeps chucking changes at us, large and small, welcome and unwelcome and ambiguous, and we keep trying to come to a sense of normalcy amid the hailstorm. It ain't easy, but neither is staying alive and sane and happy; so when someone comes along with a needle and a solution, however stopgap and temporary, it's best to take a moment to be remember how adaptable our species truly is, and what remarkable feats we are capable of achieving if only we'd stop fighting each other and, like Gatsby, looking backward into the past.