Juice 7 trip report
You are, above all, really tremendously tired. Your job is on fire, your dating life was on fire and now is a bunch of ashes, and your friends’ lives are also all on fire. The only common thread is fire. You replaced your love life with 12 houseplants, and now you talk to the plants about the value of integrity. On balance, despite all this, you are doing fine, for some value of “fine.”
You go out 7 nights a week, as you promised two years ago. You know that the stupid virus takes two or three days to do its thing. After restaurants you’re fine. After bars you feel fine on the virus front and increasingly awful on the having-drank front, which is probably a sign that you should drink less, if at all. You’ve never felt anything after hanging 1-on-1 with anyone. Yoga is fine. After shows, however, it always seems to hit, despite the fact that you are always the only one with an N95 on in the whole crowd. Three days later, like clockwork, you’re fatigued all day, can’t smell so well, have trouble sleeping. You test negative every single time. You drink your body weight in white tea. By day 5 post-show you are fine.
This would all be more tolerable if you went to fewer than 70 shows a year. But this is & has always been your life. You met so many of your friends at shows. You met your longest-term relationship at a show. You’re not going to stop going to shows, because you are being marginally insane, like everyone. You have 14 shows booked for October, typically the busiest month of the year. You need the Juice.
The policy around the Juice has always been slapdash & tendentious. You have chronic pulmonary & heart issues, but are not immunocompromised, so you have always existed in this baffling gray area of do-they-or-don’t-they every time a new shot drops. Nobody can answer this for you. As a result, you white-guy-privilege your way through the process every time. Everybody shrugs. You get to feel gross about all of this in your weaker moments. This is your seventh Juice. You take the selfie, tell your friends. “SEVEN?!”, a few say. “King 🙏🏻,” they misgender.
You remember few things over the past few years. It feels like it all happened in the span of a week. But you always remember the Juice. There was the one where you melted into a feverish mess over the course of a seven-hour baseball game with one of the most infamous plays of the past 20 years. There was the one where nothing happened, and you just hung out with people. There was the one where your arm ached so badly that you wished you could cut it off. There was the one that you got in a military tent that was sponsored by Uber.
You have enough go-arounds in you that you can tease out how the ache happens. This one was a slow grower that got worse the next day. You drank water almost compulsively, and then got annoyed with yourself when you couldn’t stop going to the bathroom. One tries to do their job, but really the Juice is just a distraction that you have to choke back in order to keep living through late capitalism. This is us now. You get it every six months because you might die from the virus, or not. You learn new ways of fighting stuff off becuase you are gathering like your life depends on it, or not. Then you show up in a new room, microdose everybody else’s pandemic, and continue acting like everything is just fine.