The Hard Taco song for March is a twist-filled mini-adventure called, "The Wrong Side of History." I will always remember recording this song, because Lauren and I both sang our parts right before losing our voices because of this:
If you don't have the manual dexterity to zoom in on those test strips, I'll spell it out: the whole London family got COVID19 this week, and it has been a bummer on many levels.
I was the one who brought it home, and I know exactly how it happened. Lauren and I were down in Florida for a wedding the prior weekend. It was a beautiful event and both the ceremony and the reception were outdoors in spacious circus tents. I felt very safe overall, but I made one crucial mistake that I've been beating myself up about ever since... I ordered the raw cave bat as my entree.
Obviously, I should have known better. The judgement you cast upon me will never be as harsh as that I cast upon myself. I'm a health care worker, for goodness sakes! I've been around hundreds of COVID19 patients over the last two years, but I've always been very careful about hand-washing, masking, and other standard infection precautions. Then I go down to a wedding in Miami and think it's okay to have a cheat day and ask the caterers to bring me the wet market cave bat filet?
But these are confusing times, and it's just so hard to have realistic assessments of actual risk. The infection rates have been coming way down since mid-January. And then the CDC changed their recommendation from "don't eat raw cave bat" to "talk to your PCP about whether it is okay to return to eating raw cave bat." Can you blame me for thinking that maybe we could return to some semblance of normalcy? I got my vaccines, I got my booster, and for one night, I wasn't in the mood for fish or steak, okay?
I also ate the fruit bat salad and the bats-in-blankets. More lessons learned!
Maybe I was subconsciously influenced by our surroundings. We were down in Florida, home of the recent Bat-to-School Programs which reintroduced raw cave bat to school lunch programs before any other state was even considering it. And look, I sort of get it, especially in elementary schools. Some kids just can't learn or develop normal social relationships when they are stressed out by government-imposed dietary restrictions. I'm not saying there isn't a cost to keeping raw bat meat off the cafeteria menu or out of the school vending machines. But this illness hit me harder than "just a cold," and I wouldn't wish it on anyone! If I had known the repercussions, I never would have gorged myself on beer-battered bat bladders before the ceremony. (I don't think that is what made me sick, but it totally spoiled my dinner.)
There was also a really amazing charcuterie table with cheese, toast, and over 600 species of insectivorous chiroptera. And there were caterers walking around with trays of hot wings, and they weren't chicken wings, if you know what I mean. But trust me, as delicious as it all was, it was not worth it.
I guess the good news is that once we recover, we are probably going to have natural immunity for at least a few months. And you know what that means... guano Milano cookies!
With warmest regards,
Zach
