Wednesday, April 1st.

I've been tending the neighborhood barroom for thirty years...  It wasn't a good idea, but what do you do after all that?

Get the phone call with mom out of the way.  Mary will be coming later.  And maybe Mary can help her find her Wayne's Drug Store brown bottle of little light blue pills...

Should I be looking for a job?  What should I be doing with this time?  What sort of a job?  What is happening in the world anyway...

1400 NYC police have tested positive, I read today in blurbs.  Trump with the governors...

Do I have more tea?  Bagged tea, out of loose leaf.  On order. Stachowski meat run, duck liver pate, two meatballs, bright red ground chuck, yesterday, biking down to Georgetown ghost town in the rain to check on my brother's house.   Now, the sun is almost through the cloud cover...

I don't know what to do with myself.  

I'm no writer if I have these problems...  True, there is a lot going on in my head, and in the world.

Complete isolation doesn't help.  You'd think it would be a great time for a writer.  Nope.  Complete restlessness.  Reliant on unemployment...  will things ever be the same...


It gets harder to write.  The blank open space of the day, the isolation.   The great feeling of being nothing but a great big bum.

Yesterday, what did I do?  I took a long walk down to the river, speaking to my aunt over earbuds.  Overcast.  A little spray of green through the trees, the slender sycamores down on the flood plain...

It's the anniversary of Dad's passing.   My brother calls me as I walking back along the path above the river.

Further along my old buddy Dan calls.  We catch up.  The state of old bicycles.  The shop.  Their landlord being easy on them in these hard times...

This should be a time of scholarship, I should be reading Thomas Merton, but I have to attend a webinar on DC unemployment compensation, arriving at it after a quick download of yet another app from Four to Five PM.

Later I go out, after cooking hamburgers, down to the picnic benches with my guitar.  I've become obsessed with Bob Dylan's new song, "Murder Most Foul."

"Life can be pretty grim," I remember my father telling me as we rode down to the get the newspaper.    As a boy his mother was dying of tuberculosis.  A teacher would ask how things were.  "I learned that at a young age."

But I go down with my bottle of wine and drink with my guitar slowly strumming the chords, sitting on a picnic table by the old trees.



Thursday.  I wake up feeling poisoned.  Too much ten dollar pinot, my tolerance level too high, my habit too large and steady, so it feels.


There are the bad voices, a legion of them.  Selfish.  A bum.  You had all these opportunities, and you just slacked off, you withdrew.  What are you going to do now, at fifty five?  Doors are closed.  And now the Coronavirus epidemic.  So how does one even know, what jobs are out there, what jobs will be left?

I get to the CVS.  Passport photos.  A vain attempt to find a replacement dish drying rack for the kitchen.  Chocolate bars on sale.  Allergy pills.  No, no masks, no gloves, no hand-sanitizer, we're all out, the young man in his blue shirt uniform tells me, after I ask him about the passport photo.  No drying rack.  Two young women take my photo.  Are you ready, sir?  I stand there with my blue Brooks Brothers button down shirt, blue blazer, my hair getting long, only going to get worse.  The sound system is playing the ultimate music of innocence, 50s rock stuff, "Fools Walk In..."  The manager, talking the younger woman, a cashier, through the process, asks if I am satisfied with the photo, taken on a little point and shoot camera.  It all feels like an adventure, surreal.

Back outside in the sunlight on the boulevard, the wind has picked up.  I'll walk back along the reservoir, and crows are gathered on the reservoir's stone bank, holding in the wind, and up in the budded tree tops of the elms along MacArthur.

As I look back, it's like a nice little New England town out there, the church steeples, the firehouse, the old movie theater now the CVS.

Should have been a college professor.  But that would have been a fantasy, given the kind of student job I was doing senior year.  My father, a professional, told me that these days that's only for the thoroughbreds.  Being an adjunct is not an easy life.


Fifty five and out of work.
Just in time to be the biggest creep,
isolated, all alone.
No end in sight.

Mom's phone is off the hook.  I get out and do some yoga while the sun is still out, but not for long as soon a damp dusk sets in.

I get through to her as I stand on the bluff, and she's not doing too badly after all that worry.