"hantavirus" is simply none of my business

respectfully

With my apologies, I am ignoring that new virus. As it is, the fact that I’m vaguely aware of it is making me mad. Yes, people have died, and to quote Vanessa Hudgens, I’m sorry about that, but I fear my brain is currently at capacity when it comes to new deadly diseases. It either is serious or it is not and if it is then I’ll be forced to find out one way or another and if it is not then I won’t have spent precious time spiraling about “hantavirus,” which you can’t convince me is the best name they could come up with, when I could be spiraling about something much more pressing, like how I probably don’t wear enough sunscreen, or how reading too much Modernist literature is probably ridding me of the few marbles I have left.

It’s not that I’m a bury-my-head-in-the-sand girlie. In fact, the only thing I have in common with ostriches is weirdly long legs for our height.¹ Frankly, I’m an overly observant person who loooves self-awareness. But I’ve learned to curb my destructive little habits, which is how I know that paying too close attention to the cruise industry will bring me nothing but grief. Therein lies madness, etc.

I say this as someone who has been on a cruise ship. In college, to be fair, so it comes very close to not counting, but still. I was there, I remember it.²

The truth is I do not think cruise ships should be real. Beyond the theoretical and the historical, I mean. There’s the Titanic situation, yes, that’s a big one, although I do think the “Rose had room for Jack on the door” engagement bait is a flashing sign of our crumbling literacy, but there’s also the Petri dish of it all. Like, there are people who don’t shower at night going on these cruises. Breathing in stale air like it’s Eden.³

These companies really said let’s get hundreds or thousands of people together in a steel cage for several days—weeks!—and hope for the best. And you know what, let’s offer them unlimited alcohol while we’re at it. Make it a real party. Let’s give germs a good chance to flourish and evolve. I love that. The optimism of it. Breathtaking.

*

Then there’s the fact that I don’t love going anywhere I can’t leave without a high chance of perishing. I still quake in fear when I think of the Scientology service I attended at sixteen to appease my curiosity, giggling with my summer camp friends as though we weren’t risking our chances of ever being prescribed anxiety meds. I mean, yes, I got a lot of mileage out of it, they still talk about the stories I told that July, but nevertheless—insane of me. Crazy, the things a person will do while waiting for their prefrontal cortex to finish cooking.

Do you see that? It’s the SHORE.

Do you remember the OceanGate submersible that exploded in the Atlantic back in 2023? At the time, I wrote,

That feeling of vastness we feel in the middle of the ocean isn’t peace—it’s the foreboding sense of being somewhere we don’t belong. There is a reason why very dramatic people (Virginia Woolf, Kendall Roy) are so attracted to the sea as a means to an end: as it repeatedly tries to tell us, it is not meant for us.

I stand by this.