OK. Ok, we’ll see how this goes. So many of my friends, acquaintances and colleagues are out there (safely inside!) making the most of this forced interval–creating art, making podcasts, dancing to snake jazz on the tiky-tok. I have devoted the first week of my coronavirus lockdown to doing my job–very grateful to have it, for however long–playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on the Switch and not-so-quietly freaking the fuck out. I have some legal marijuana and enough gin for a few weeks’ worth of specialty cocktails; once that’s gone, it’s just me against the void. Don’t tell me about your deep-breathing exercises; I’ve tried them and they don’t work.

I don’t do well with uncertainty, and that’s all this is: a perfect, one-hundred-percent communicable strain of mortal uncertainty. So much about our adversary is unknown–not just scientifically, but morally. There are scientists, pragmatic and experienced observers of viruses such as this one, telling us to stay underground for at least another month or a whole lot of people are going to die; I believe them. And there are economists, who I respect half as much as the scientists but fear twice as much, saying that if we don’t get our businesses open, we’re going to suffer terribly; I believe them, too.

(This paragraph was going to be all about my sadness, my anger, my fears. I’ve decided not to go into it, because I don’t know what good it would do. It won’t make me feel better, venting about this shit; I’ve a suspicion it won’t make you feel better, either. Tabling it for another day, when that pressure has no option but to blow out.)

I am trying, though. I shower, I shave, I set deadlines and try to hit them. I’m trying to tidy up this stucco biosphere so that Laura, Gigi and I can live in it until, like, Exodus 12:31. (I think that happens about two hours into The Ten Commandments? It’s the shit with the sheep’s blood and the doors. Been so long since I touched a bible that I had to Google it.) Maybe, in a week from now, I’ll have the urge to pick up the revisions on my novel, unless K.K. Slider shows up in Animal Crossing. Really looking forward to that.

I don’t know what else to say here. It’s been a long while since I’ve written anything like this. Last time was way, way before LiveJournal was owned by Russian oligarchs. But I told myself that I would do this, that I needed to do this, and here we are, today, tomorrow and until the end of the world, which may or may not happen shortly after Easter, depending on the vagaries of the Trump Administration. Maybe I should pick up that bible again just to get a sense of the playbook America’s working from.

I miss you. I wish I could hug you and tell you “It’s good to see you,” or “It’s been too fucking long” or “I’m tempted to go for the reacharound.” All of these things are true.