I have been feeling more acutely the urge to do and to make, to participate in creative outlets. I don’t know why. It’s always come and gone for me on some kind of cycle. My theory there is that I need it and when I don’t have it after while I feel the absence - something hurts - and I take steps to correct it. It’s much like my need for physical exercise and mobility, the provision for which is similarly regulated by a rhythm of absence and neglect: my back feels tweaky again, I need to be better about moving around. That’s the ordinary cycle. I wonder if there’s something about this extraordinary time that also feeds this urge. Maybe it’s a need for distraction: when I draw and make music the rest of my brain eventually shuts off; the flow state is enjoyable in part because it’s a relief from any other state. Maybe it’s a need for meeting: so much feels pointless right now, having time...

Desperate for a metaphor, I seized on my having ground the coffee too fine. The problem here - inwardly I gave a knowing look - comes from excessive refining, leading to bitterness. And aren’t we all - I nod, with a weary and knowing cocked head - overground, in the crazy mixed up kitchen of the world? Midway through I became beset with the urge to use the term “human bean” and also to wonder if perhaps there is a problem of shoddy equipment and low grade raw materials - apparently one should use a burr grinder, and who knows how old these beans are - and maybe as well operator error in the application of the hot water to the grounds. I made a second cup, letting the water stand a while before pouring it into the cone. This one was better, a little less back of the mouth bitterness and I noticed more flavors elsewhere on my tongue. With diligent attention maybe we can all become an...

I keep finding myself pulled between wanting to write in order to think about the pandemic and wanting to write in order to stop thinking about the pandemic - in the rare moments when I want to write at all, of course. The same goes for reading. The lack of interest is, I think, normal for me in this life stage, though the pandemic scrambles the meaning of normality. Maybe normality was always scrambled, and it’s just scrambleder now and so the enscrambleding is more visible. I’m unsure.

It’s tempting to describe writing and reading as solitary pursuits but they’re social acts, acts of human contact, just at a remove and with an enscrambled temporality - you write it down, I read it later, maybe write a reply… It’s human interaction at a slow pace, sometimes glacial. I’m having thoughts now about live performance. Can the arts be divided into those that involve the lived simultaneity of...

When young I wore baseball hats and shaved my head, then aged into balding and kept wearing the hats. For a brief tragic period in the middle I wished for a quiff, Morrissey-style, but those tastes had come on too late and my follicles - true Smiths fans, I suppose - despaired too early. (There is a light and it shines off my scalp.) I live now, sartorially speaking, in the shaded overlap between a circle labeled ‘comfortable’ and another ‘underwhelming.’ Hoodies, mostly, and a hardware store baseball hat. As literal objects the hats cover the bald head. As textual objects the hats cover the dead mice. Any covering over the unsightly proves ultimately temporary, I suspect, and so, sighing (and, full disclosure, slouching), to rodents I now turn.

“I suppose though in a way it was hats again, metaphorically speaking,” that’s how I’d intended to start this second paragraph. Astute readers...

“How’s your dad?”
“What?”
“You called your dad on your way home from work, right?”
“What da-“
“Or maybe one of your brothers?”
“Nah I call my dad, yer righ’but how d’you know dat?”
“Your Illinois is really loud right now like when you’re on the phone with your mom or dad.”
“You can tell when I called my parents, like after I hang up?”
“Yes I can. Or your brothers.”
“Dat’s bananas.”
“I don’t want to make you self-conscious, I think it’s endearing how you sound when you talk to them.”
“No itsalrigh, I don’feel attacked or whatever. It’s jus a lil weird doe, jus cuz I don’really thinka myself as havin’ a Illinois accent. Like I guess I do, I guess I know dat but I’m not always aware of it.”
“You totally do but it kind of comes in and out, like when you call your parents like I said.”
“I think it’s kinda inneresting dat I do dat when I’m call’em. I ‘idn’really notice it ad all dat my accent...

I live in a mixed income neighborhood. “Mixed income” sounds like a euphemism to my ears but it’s not, at least not deliberately anyway. I don’t know what else to call it and I can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something in my lack of a better term. The income levels decline most of my bus commute to work, picking up at the end. On the first half of the trip there’s a shelter and a church that feeds people and one of those plasma joints - what’s the technical term? evil motherfuckers? - and some other spots where people in hard times congregate. The place where I get off the first bus and catch the connecting bus is another congregating point. I see a lot of people who look unwell, physically, and seem unwell mentally. I catch myself looking sometimes, as if I’m at the zoo or on some kind of tour.

Today one guy on the bus was slumped over and staring at the floor mumbling and...

The neighbors got a little puppy. Now he’s a big puppy. Black, shiny coat, wags his tail hard enough that it hurts when it whacks your legs. This fall they got a post in the backyard too, and some airplane cable, maybe ten feet long, and they tie him to it. He barks, I assume feeling cold and lonely. I went for a run today - it was in the low fifties! in February! - a short run, just 20 minutes, I’m trying to get back into it after too long off - because of too long never off my dumb job - and when I got home from the run my family was all in the backyard hanging out. “Go pet the dog” my wife said, pointing, and he was looping himself around the tree at the edge of my neighbor’s yard, at the very end of the airplane cable, his collar pulling tight on his neck, that tail just swishing away. I came over to pet him and he jumped up high by my face, reaching with his paws. I patted his head...

I worry I am losing my memories of my grandmother. Did she talk with her hands?

I can see her in my mind, sitting in a chair rolling her hand in the air - there should be a name for that gesture - her palm down parallel to the floor, forearm perpendicular to her torso, then sweeping her hand slightly toward her belly then back to forearm perpendicular while she flipped her palm face up, the gesture repeated to show repetition. “And more and more and more” “it goes on and on and on” “they just keep talking, get to the point.” Her other hand holds a lit cigarette that bobs slightly with the emphasis in her words.

This feels true. Is it? I could ask my mom. If I ask my mom, and if she says no, then… what? I won’t have anything to replace this idea of my grandmother’s mannerisms.

I didn’t go see her in the end, didn’t want the her with Alzheimers to stand in the way of the her I...

We’ve all been sick. The experience of all the members of our household taking ill in overlapping sequence has made it feel in my memory like all of us have all been sick for the entire year so far. That is not factually accurate but it feels true in a way that is all at once outrageous and deeply, self-pityingly satisfying.

I keep trying to find someone to blame. In my small, bitter heart I am sure it was those kids who came over to play with my kids two weeks ago last Friday. We started to get sick the very next day, I am sure of it. My wife disagrees, but then she’s friends with those kids’ parents and hates when I am right. I don’t know why I do this. It might be because I am angry - about being sick, but also just in general, as a default setting, and I want somewhere to hang that anger. But why get angry about being sick? I am slowly coming to admit, at least to some extent, that...

I learned today there is a difference between astronomical seasons and meteorological seasons. Astronomical winter has not yet begun, but meteorological winter may have, I don’t remember for sure. To be completely honest I only that a difference between these two kinds of seasons exists, but I do not know what the difference in fact is. I either didn’t learn that or I learned it temporarily and quickly forgot. Perhaps a bit of both. Perhaps I learned some of the distinction then got bored and quit learning, then forgot even that bit of learning. That sounds like me.

My wife told our children today that we are middle aged. I forget the context - again perhaps I got bored and quit paying attention. My oldest child is of the view that we are old because we are grown ups but we are not old for grown ups. Maybe we are meteorologically but not astronomically old? I’ll have to email the...