The more the world opens up in a pre-post-Covid way, the more I want to stay in bed. I’m a year deep into this routine of working from home, and while I understand how abnormal it is to only see people through electronic devices, I am also fine with it continuing. I am also also, possibly, actively dreading its end.
Do not let me buy any more secondhand Converse One Stars on eBay!
Do not let me fall into the trap set by the red leather-looking ones with the white stars. There’s only one picture of them (only one? — suspicious) and it’s definitely from a catalog, and even though it looks smooth like leather, the listing says this shoe is made out of “regular.”
I’m worried about my heart, and I’m worried that worrying about my heart will kill me. I went online over the weekend and I searched “how to have a healthy heart,” hoping I’d get a list of action items, do-able things I could integrate passively into my already-passive pandemic lifestyle. I would do everything it said except for eat kale.
How’s everybody’s pandemic going? In my house today it was Unscrew the Drain Cover and Fish Out Two Long, Wet Clumps of Hair So That the Tub Will Drain Properly and Everyone Can Shower Without Gray Water Rising to Their Ankles Day. A quarterly event, it’s a mild but emotional celebration, capped off with a ritual cleansing.
God help me, I’m committing to post once a month in 2021. Twelve months is as big a commitment as I can make right now, and “big a commitment” is not of grammar, I think? Not sure. Language! Am rusty.
Wow, I have not posted for a really long time! I guess after that last big one it got hard to swoop back in with a low-stakes follow-up. Well, I have to break through sometime so it might as well be while the world is in the midst of a deadly pandemic.
Jack was up at his friend Jim’s house when he died. They had a regular guys’ weekend twice a year where these four men would eat and drink and play music and laugh and talk for three days and then go home, wait six months, and then do it all again. It was good for him. He loved his friends.
The day before the last day I ever saw Jack, we went to Paseo Nuevo to see Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood. When we came out of it and walked back up State Street to his truck, I felt like I was in a trance, the pace and the length of the movie had overwhelmed my sense of time. I wasn’t sure if I even liked the movie, I had to read some reviews to help me figure out my ambivalence, but Jack had no qualms, he loved it. Looking back now, I understand why.
I guess by now it’s clear that if I don’t post for five months it’s because I have been head-down-and-go on yet another “final” draft of this novel I’ve been working on. I still can’t write “my novel” without wincing internally—I can’t claim ownership of the thing that contains every ounce of my inner life for the last seven years. Who would put all their spiritual eggs in one basket like that? Just who do I think I am?
I was walking to work one fresh morning between rains a week or so ago, enjoying my big warm coat and keeping the mist off my head with my fine fuchsia-colored umbrella, when I approached a man who was pushing a shopping cart full of some thoroughly damp belongings. And because I often deal with homeless folks at work I slowed down as I came up to him and I said, “Hey,” and he looked me in the eye to acknowledge my greeting, and the look in his eye told me he was fucking done with this rain shit.
This was the birthday that left my youth behind. I’m not sure what triggered that realization. Was it going to the DMV and finding I could only read the eye chart with my bad eye screwed shut? Or was it lying in bed and thinking of my pregnant mother waking up in bed fifty-five years ago, three weeks past her due date, putting her bare feet on the floor and wondering if this would be the day. Fifty-five years ago: that’s probably what did it. Fifty-four still had some pieces of youth clinging to it. But then it turned inside out and died.
The lead-up to Christmas this year was really fun. Nature wasn’t trying to murder us (compared to last year, when we had the Thomas Fire crawling up our butts and then the mud literally killing people), and we had enough money to throw around on superfluous things like fire wood and snacks, so we loaded up.