We're old enough by now to take care of each other

Adam Schlesinger died today. He was 52 and coronavirus took him away. That’s brutal. The papers will inevitably call him ‘the Stacey’s Mom hitmaker’ which is fair enough I suppose. That was the song that made his band, Fountains of Wayne, popular. At least for a while. But there was a lot more to him - soundtrack work, songs for other people, collaborations with John-friendly people like Steve Van Zandt, The Monkees and Stephen Colbert. And now he’s gone at 52. Oh - he didn’t have an underlying condition either so that’s great. yesterday I started hearing lots of stories about young people dying from Covid-19. And I don’t mean young the way people like me in their late 40s refer to people in their early 40s, I mean early 30s and younger. This is really starting to get very very serious - as if it wasn’t already.

So what have I been doing while all this is getting serious? I’ve been managing a fundraising campaign for a Dublin hospital that mostly involved me repeatedly telling folks on Facebook that the thing they’ve said “their sister got stung with this - it’s definitely a scam” is in fact very real and not at all fraudulent. So I spent most of my time posting comment after comment to people who refused to accept it was real. Honestly, if real scams go to this much trouble to try to appear genuine, I have a new sense of admiration for them. It. Was. Exhausting. Still, for the time being, at least it’s a living and who am I to complain about that?

If you've noticed that these updates are starting to be spaced out a bit more, well. what can I say? There’s nothing going on. Things have settled into a strange kind of routing. We wake up every morning, very reluctantly do a Joe Wicks 20 minute workout congratulated ourselves for doing it, shower and sit down at 9 am. At about 10 we’ll have breakfast and move in and out of the office while we take calls. We try to stop at lunchtime to take Arlo for a walk around the block. Then back to work, grab some lunch and work for the afternoon. Generally, I roll on til 7 or 8 checking things. We’ll try to get out for another walk around the block and then it’s back to base and dinner. And I’ll get online some more after that. We might have a drink, we might not. We could watch some tv but if we do it’s with phones in hand. We try to read, we text friends. We put on a record and try to convince ourselves that our evenings are normal. We try not to think about how long this will go on. June? July? Longer? 14 people died today. Over 400 new cases. Yeah, probably longer.

But that’s a typical day right now. The two of us pottering around each other. Doing a wash, painting a wall, checking the news, that’s about all. All the same, Adam Schlesinger was 52. Things could be worse.