On average, I feel like I’m at least mildly losing my mind about once a day. The more acute freak-outs are maybe once a week these days, a real improvement from the early days when every morning felt like a siren. I don’t know if that means that things are any better—survey says they are, at least Covid-wise, they’re manifestly worse, but at least, I know that right now, for me, things are kind of […]
Recently I’ve been thinking about Richard the III, the play, not the historical character. Not so much for the political allegory (among other things our current, still-hopefully outgoing, overtly criminal tyrant-in-chief not only lacks the wit but the demented charm of the only great historical egomaniac/Shakespearean villain to have turned up buried under a Social Services parking lot, though I still holding out for more). Also I can’t imagine Donald Trump offering his kingdom for […]
A week ago Friday , about fifteen minutes after news broke of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, I was walking up and over the hill connecting my suburban neighborhood with the next one over where a friend lived. As a forty-something, flabby, puffy-eyed white woman with a four-pack of Guinness (medicinal, obvs) under an arm trying to navigate my way between streetlamps without using up the last 4% of battery life on my phone, I realized […]
I don’t remember when it started. All I know I woke up one Thursday morning in July? August? and found a bunch of workmen in crossing guard vests pulling up the peonies in my front yard. I dashed out in a disproportionate, apocalyptic-level panic, , because the peonies (a surprise when I bought the house) were this next level swoon of pink and white botanical tutus plopped down into the absolute dregs of spring 2020. […]
A couple eons, several millennia, four score and seven years, a hundred and sixty-odd days ago, when the world was new and we were all still so young and innocent, I ended my first full/real week of quarantine on a Facetime call with my best friend from her rooftop in Brooklyn. New York City was shutting down at end up day. My best friend had invited several people to join her on the rooftop for […]
Some people are extremely good at being grown-ups. They save money. They know how to fix things. They know what all the buttons do on their appliances. They can grow things and raise things and build things. They can iron. They can operate Saran Wrap without wasting a whole roll or nearly amputating a finger. At sign of a crisis, they seem to know exactly what to do. I am not one of those people. […]
For anywhere between ten minutes to six hours every day since roughly March 20, I’m pretty sure I have COVID. Sometimes I’m able to chase off this worry with a long walk, sometimes with a stiff gin and tonic, sometimes just with fretting and eventually going to sleep, during which I wake up throughout the night and try to figure out whether my throat is sore or my chest is unnaturally tight or the lingering […]
I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I wake up at 3 at 4. Sometimes unprovoked, sometimes when the neighbors across the street turn on their floodlight and my bedroom windows glow silver behind the curtains, crosshatched with the veiny limbs of the tree in the front yard. I rarely try to will myself back to sleep. Instead, I rise and read or write until I drift off again. I pet Walter, who snores or purrs […]
My social media is a blur of memes and reading lists, of heartfelt pleas to listen, to amplify, to defund, to abolish. I watch friends get in fights with their relatives, their neighbors, a friend of a friend in a comment section on Instagram. Most of the time those relatives don’t say the really awful, overt stuff—though the Nazis and the Confederate Flag wavers and whatever unctuous post-post-modern fusion of has been enjoying a bit […]
I had a hard time getting up this morning. I read the news in bed, so I could have the option of turning over and crying into my pillow, should the mood take me. I didn’t. Maybe I’m cried out, dried out, not so much toughened up as turned brittle by Events. Maybe I’m too far up on the knife age between fury and despair to wring out any weeping. My life is okay, but […]
