to everyone who had a good pandemic

Track twenty-six on KŌAN, the LP closer, fourth movement only (after Miss Disinformation). Not on the KŌAN A/B/C chapters. Luke solo. The record ends not on an answer but on an address, to the people who thrived while others didn’t.

It opens on absence as sound: it’s quiet here without you / I listen to a podcast to fill the noise you left behind, grief measured in empty hours, with background audio standing in for a person. Then the search engine as oracle, I Google my life expectancy / how do you expect me to live another 40 years without you hearing how I’m doing. The dead don’t get updates.

The title refrain isn’t envy: I hope that you won’t dance and sing about it, a plea against performative recovery, sharpened on the last pass to I sure hope that you wouldn’t brag about it. Around it, return-to-office horror, everybody’s joking now / it’s just a cold / it’s over now, where you laugh because they are my boss after all, same boss energy as a song to quit your job to and No Worries, Yes Worries. The bridge turns that complicity over and over (oh why’d I laugh along), I’m an Idiot’s social fake-laugh with a moral hangover after loss.

It closes KŌAN, which opened with Think About It and passed through pandemic-era Boardwalk, on one plain line: some people didn’t get a good pandemic. Pairs with Pandemic Blues and A Good Life on Masks and Monsters, and with Miss Disinformation: one lies about facts, one dances over graves.