A Walk Between Two Poutines with Scaachi Koul by Isaac Fitzgerald Aug 7, 2021
"Everyone I know is a different person and, I don’t know—are we all still going to like each other?"
SK: Listen. I think everyone is fucking kidding themselves. I swear to you, November—November in particular because it’s such a hard month—November and February. Winter. I mean winter. I think everyone is going to have a fucking mental breakdown this winter. You can’t do a year—and in some countries a year and a half or in other countries two years—of incredible isolation, massive collective death with no real sense of communal mourning, no changes to the policies that made all those deaths happen, debt, job loss, the loss of community centers and neighborhood haunts and places that bring you comfort closing down, the entertainment industry folding in on itself three or four times, the books industry changing dramatically over and over again—and, for example, you sit in a bar and statistically there’s a pretty good chance that most people in said bar lost somebody to COVID—or something else—and didn’t even get to go to a funeral. Myself included.
You can’t have all of that happen for a year or two years and everyone is simply going to climb out of it? And want to party? Or celebrate? This is not hot girl summer. This is the desperate wanton acts of people who are trying so hard to tamp down the unbearable crushing depression that has been choking them since the beginning of 2020.