I apologize sincerely if you expected me to do something interesting in this space–or, at a minimum, something passable but consistent. I won’t proffer excuses; while I’m still working full-time (and immensely grateful to be so), that doesn’t account for the long nights and weekends when I could have, should have been putting my thoughts down on the page, for my own benefit if no one else’s. My Brooklyn-dwelling professor friend wakes up every day and posts a poem/progress report to Facebook, and while it’s often one of the most bleak and heart-wrenching things you’ll ever read before coffee (he does live near the epicenter of America’s worst outbreak; also, as I said before, he is a poet), at least he’s doing the fucking work. He has a Castalian Spring of black ink pooling in his soul, sure, but he’s putting it to sound artistic and even therapeutic use. Meanwhile, I have played Animal Crossing a whole lot.

It’s a matter of what I can bring myself to do. I can always sit down and write: I have supported myself as a working writer for nearly 25 years, and while I don’t have any novels, nonfiction volumes or even an appreciable number of short stories to show for that quarter-century of solitary commitment—nor the small, but intensely-focused celebrity that follows that kind of work—I would favorably compare my seesaw ego and worrisome consumer debt to the authors of such material. No, the reasons I haven’t written you a document of My Life in the Lockdown are two: I’ve been too depressed to write anything beyond what I need to write to earn a paycheck, and because there’s a small, but insistent part of me that wants to simply give up.

This is a hard time to be in the world. Just to be here. No one is in a place of equilibrium: not me, not you, not even the roly-poly armed shitheads protesting for “liberty and the pursuit” outside the closed Dave & Buster’s. I feel beaten down and exhausted ten minutes after waking. Reading the newspapers makes me want to cry; seeing clips from CNN or Fox makes me want to throw hands; looking at Twitter makes me want to jump into a jet engine. There are many things I could be writing about this world we live in, but it’s a big goddamn connected world, and statistically, I know that there’s a strong chance that whatever I want to say has been expressed by someone else, with more clarity of thought or in a more florid prose, a full day before I even thought to say it. Sometimes I even find that writing and say to myself, “Well, that’s three hours I can give back to Animal Crossing. Excelsior.”

Who knows what to do, now. I’m not about to run out and hit half-capacity Restaurant Row; I’m close to too many immunocompromised folk, including myself. Life is losing its flavor by the day. Television and movies just happen in front of me, oblivious and glib. Books are painful reminders of a living world. And the living world is slowly becoming an abstraction, something viewed through car windows between masked retail escapades and curbside pickups.

I can write about this stuff, but that writing won’t have a lick of substance to it; it won’t be “art,” if I’ve ever come close to such a thing. So I don’t do it. I’m glad others do it—mostly glad, anyway; I thought that “The bread is over” essay was overwrought and too precious by half—and goddamn if some of my favorite artists aren’t doing unexpectedly great work under lockdown. (Who knew the Rolling Stones had one left in them?) But I can’t join them, or feel buoyed by their good work, because the part of me that is satisfied by the creation and consumption of art is slowly falling asleep, like a pinned leg.

A few weeks ago I began reading from my journals, aloud, on Facebook Live. A devoted handful of good friends tune in week after week to watch me cringe at the ignorance and misogyny of G. Carter 1994. Back then, I could scarcely have imagined a world that is willingly setting itself on fire and blaming the third-degree burns on scientists, teachers, gays, immigrants and kids who like a nice piece of avocado toast. Back then, in my selfishness, I thought that the world was as cruel as it would ever get. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to get perspective on these times, and what I’ll make of all this whiny, self-defeating shit I just wrote.