note november 28, 2021: i just found these diary entries in an old digital sketchbook. in march of 2020 i contracted some kind of severe acute respiratory infection and was quite sick for about a week and a half. this happened 16 days after i finished the whale fall prologue, so i was thinking my next project would be to turn these into highly-produced diary comics at a later date, and of course i never got back to them. it was while i was sick that america had its first official acknowledgements of COVID-19.

i coughed so much and so hard that i felt like my ribs were breaking by the end. after i "recovered", i had a chronic problem where i'd lose my breath when laying down flat on my back. this persisted for over a year. it's now been almost two years, and i think i'm feeling normal again. it's hard to tell!