A letter from the author
Dear reader,
If you’ve spent enough time on social media, you’ve no doubt seen a video, probably captured by a security camera, of a person driving toward a patch of woods. The car stops. The person gets out. They open the back door, and an excited dog jumps out, thinking he's going for a walk.
And then something dark happens. The owner jumps back into the driver’s seat, puts the car in reverse, and pulls away. The dog watches at first, stunned, confused, then tries to chase their owner – the human he's loved and trusted for as long as he can remember. But he can’t keep up, so he stops running, looks around at his new surroundings.
You feel the weight of what you just witnessed. The dog has been abandoned.
It's hard to watch. And in the comments below the video, everyone is angry. They have a lot to say about what an unforgivable betrayal it is. There’s always an outpouring of sympathy for the dog. No one is there to celebrate this cruelty.
And yet when the Covid-19 pandemic began, the mantra that carried us through those dark, early days of 2020 was “we’re all in this together."
We found out just a couple of years later that wasn’t really the case.
In August of 2023, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared in a televised interview about the state of the Covid-19 pandemic. He told us "the vulnerable will fall by the wayside," meaning those at highest risk for the most severe outcomes would be left to fend for ourselves. We'd been left behind in a world that had chosen to accept exposure to a pathogen that had already claimed the lives of more than 7 million, and had disabled countless more.
Many of us watched in horror as the people we've loved, trusted, and respected all our lives gave up on mitigations.
They pulled over, let us out of the car, and kept driving.
Those of us who were left by the wayside took to social media to scream into the void about our pain and struggles in this cruel new normal.
But then a beautiful thing happened.
We found each other.
And we found hope in each other. These past few years, we’ve been busy making connections and building virtual communities in those spaces.
More recently, we’ve been dreaming about what it would be like to come together and build a community in a physical space, offline, in the real world. A home of our own, where we’d still be at war with a virus, but not with our neighbors.
The actual definition of wayside is "the edge or side of a road, path or highway, including the immediately adjacent land."
Immediately adjacent land.
The idea of that intrigued me, that there could be a place for us in the world… parallel to the world, where we could live by our own rules. We could shield each other from avoidable harm, not because we were forced to by mandates, but because we’d chosen to as a community.
What if we fell by the wayside… and then rose by the wayside, and claimed it as our home?
That was the premise of this novel, which I began writing in late 2024.
At the time I had an idea in my head of the story I wanted to tell, and the characters I wanted to be a part of the journey. They’re all inspired by people like you – people I’ve met in spaces like Twitter and Bluesky. I had a vague idea of who they were, but the more I wrote these characters to life, the more real they became to me. The more I felt genuine love for them.
I wanted those who’d been harmed to find justice, those who’d been abandoned to find family, and those who’d been lost, to be found. I wanted to see good things happen for these people.
And when I thought about where it would happen? For some reason, a shuttered amusement park made sense. Maybe it’s the image of a roller coaster – one of the most visible and defining fixtures within an amusement park, and how perfectly it represents the journey we’re on.
Or maybe it’s because amusement parks are built like little stand-alone cities – and, fun fact – there are shuttered amusement parks all over the world.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand in North America alone.
Many of them are currently for sale.
Just sayin’….
Several years ago, I took part in a therapeutic writing group. I remember when a fellow participant raised her hand and said “I don’t know how I’m supposed to write when I can’t even see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
The facilitator said "you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. You just have to close your eyes. Imagine it. Create it in your mind and when you open your eyes, write about it. That’s how you keep moving forward, even when you can’t see where you’re headed.”
I believe it’s the same for us. I want to encourage you to close your eyes and see the light at the end of the tunnel. Think outside of the box, dream big dreams, and imagine the ending you want to see for the story we’re living through right now, no matter how outrageous it may seem. It might just be the direction we should be heading. Tune out anyone who tells you it isn't possible, and that nothing will ever change.
Because you already are the change you wish to see in the world.
You are the humble, tenacious miracle holding the front lines, fighting to protect public health, defending what’s left of our broken social contract.
And you are the reason why everyone in my home wakes up each morning and makes a conscious choice to keep going. Our community may be small, but together we are mighty.
In the words of late anthropologist Margaret Mead, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Wayside is my love letter to the Covid Conscious and Long Covid communities. It’s my dream of a better world for us, and a brighter future for everyone.
Love,
Mo
P.S.
That video I mentioned, about the dog that was abandoned by his owner? If you keep watching, you’ll learn that a rescue saved the pup and found him a new home, and there’s a bunch of video clips that come after it, showing the dog eating ice cream and sitting by the Christmas tree in an ugly sweater with his dog siblings and chasing children around his new back yard. What started out as the darkest moment of that dog’s life was just the first chapter of a beautiful story.
Who knows?
Maybe we’re just at the beginning of a beautiful story of our own.
Return to list of episodes
Author: Who is Guiness Pig?
You can support my work by signing up for a membership to The Guiness Pig Diaries, by sending me a tip, or buying me a coffee.