Well-known outside of California for his participation in ESPN’s nightly sports media competition Around the Horn, the likable Los Angeles journalist Bill Plaschke is in the national news this week because he caught a case of the national news a few weeks before. And lived to tell. And told.
A self-described quarantine honor student who practiced Covid precaution book and letter for four months, withdrawing hermetically and seeing no one, the 61-year-old Plaschke says he let his guard down twice and ventured two outdoor, distanced, and compliant dinners with friends over the course of a single weekend. And then boom.
He dipped his toe in shark-infested waters: California, where the virus and wildfires seem to be involved in some Act-of-God oneupsmanship before they recognize the brand synergy and merge to form ViralFire Diversified Apocalyptic Strategies, a subsidiary of The Los Angeles End Times. Not funny.
There is not a sportswriter among us who doesn’t express his “takes” with at least a little vox populi moral bombast. Sanctimonious bluster is the stock voice of the craft. You correct for it and move on. But Plaschke keeps it light this time and resists the lowest-hanging platitudes about the age in which we are living and the human spirit.
He really just wants us all to know what a mild and short-lived case of Covid-19 felt like, and then to ask some tough questions about the wisdom of returning to much of anything right now.
Worked for me. You?
Read more installments of Village Voices by John Burdick.