Notebook

Wendy’s has no meat for its burgers. The virus can change the color of your toes. People keep talking about a return to “normal,” as if there’s such a thing. Yesterday I went to a store that’s selling antibacterial wipes for $27.99.

As businesses begin reopening across the nation, the projections have swiftly been revised upwards to nearly 200,000 dead from this virus. America looks at these numbers and doesn’t blink. This country has always been fine with needless death, so long as it occurs in its own backyard. But imagine if twenty or even ten Americans died abroad from a mysterious illness in another country.

When I woke up this morning, a half-formed thought surfaced with the force of revelation: After suffering loss, the soul can go one of two ways: it can harden into something or… I’m not sure yet sure what the other option is, but I want to find it.

Five years ago today, I attended a funeral for my grandmother in the same church where she was baptized in 1918. “Her life was coherent,” said the priest. I did not know her as well as I would have liked, but I know she was tradition personified, a west side Polish Catholic who served Saturday night dinners of kielbasa and fried smelt. She had a succession of Scottish terriers, each named Mitsy. I think she left off at Mitsy V, maybe VI.

She had the same house with the same furniture arrangement for seventy years. I recently came across a snapshot of my mother and her brothers in 1959 and I recognized all of the furniture. The only thing that changed in the house was the television screen. On the back, my grandmother had written a note in pristine cursive: “The smudge is on the film, not the wall of my living room.”

My life is not coherent. I crave motion and flux, and I cannot tell if this reflects inner discomfort or a kind of ease with the world.

We live in a culture defined by putting on a mask before taking a selfie and then removing it again. Some people seem to take deep pleasure in scolding those who aren’t wearing masks, and some people flaunt their bare faces like a dare. I’m not sure which energy is more worrisome.

There are advertisements on street corners and bus stops for events that will never occur: festivals, fundraising walks, art exhibits, and summer concerts. The billboards for vacation destinations and airlines look like dispatches from another world.

DVA Damas – Half-Mask

Nightshade | Downwards, 2013 | Bandcamp

An uneasy combination of sunshine and masks, as if we’re afraid of a perfect spring day. Everyone at the park complains about how everyone is at the park. An old woman plays the tambourine and sings Simon and Garfunkel songs. I read Rachel Cusk’s Kudos while absorbing scraps of conversation from dog walkers and stroller pushers: “My therapist says I have nice feet” and “Of course the moon is high up in the sky, where else would it be?”

I almost doze off because I was awake until three in the morning last night, making a bolognese sauce. (I should remember to read the entire recipe in advance. Step 5: Simmer and stir for three hours.) “I just need to lie down for a second and make contact with the earth,” the tambourine woman says to nobody in particular. “I’m still a hippie.”

A man sprawls on the bench next to me, one of the few people without a mask. He has tasseled loafers and the shine of someone with a lot of money. He’s braying into his telephone, saying the virus is a media hoax. “Sixty-thousand dead in a country of three hundred million? Too bad, so sad, who cares? I’m a businessman, I’ll take those odds any day.” I want to grab his phone and yell fifty-thousand dead in a month. Instead, I move to another bench and he shouts after me: “Too bad you don’t like listening to me, buddy, but it’s a park.” Pretty soon he’s cleared out all the benches within earshot. There are many kinds of social distancing.

Aphex Twin – Grass

Selected Ambient Works Volume II | Warp, 1994 | More

You can never see further than your headlights—an old slice of trucker philosophy that makes more sense with each passing year, the way I move through life, pretending that I know where the road is heading even though I never have a clue. Time and again, I must learn that I can get ready for dinner and I can get ready for bed and not much else.

Alessandro Cortini – Scappa

Forse 3 | Important Records, 2015 | Bandcamp

One of the finest night-driving songs that I know.

Another grey day of rain, wind, and trying to ignore the news. I spent the afternoon outlining the nineteenth draft of the book I’ve been writing for the past five years, and I’m getting uncomfortably close to the optics of something that requires a conspiracy, a cartel, or a victim.

Why on earth did I try to tell a story that’s set in the near future? When I started this project in 2015, a subplot involving a game show host as the American president felt mildly clever. And in 2018, I liked the idea of a mysterious sound that kept people shuttered inside. I’m beginning to understand why so many novels and television shows are set in the past. But I’m determined to finish this thing so it’ll stop waking me up in the middle of the night and harassing me. This journal might become a space to house the killed darlings, orphaned ideas, and mental exhaust from the process.

Scene from last night’s dream: I told my beloved if she gave me a fork and a knife, I’d follow her straight to hell. She handed me a spoon.

More Americans have died from the coronavirus in two months than in the Vietnam War. Because we measure everything in war: crime, terror, drugs, poverty, and disease. There was news about a possible medical breakthrough this afternoon, a promising trial study that boosted the stock market. I keep thinking about 9/11, how one terrible day was compounded into trillions spent, tens of thousands dead, and a new surveillance state. Even if this pandemic fades soon, what will it leave in its wake?

Night walk to the corner bodega and I nearly forgot to wear my bandana. A man on the corner said nobody knows the pain of rejection like Jesus.

A clear and warm day at last. The park was crammed with people sunning themselves while wearing surgical masks, an unsettling sight that renders so many dystopian visions into documentary. I’ve never seen so many people at the park. Runners clipped old ladies doing tai chi. A mother pushing a stroller hissed at a man who wandered too close. A woman said to no one in particular, “It’s so weird how all of this turned out.” Even though we’re weary and prickly, it’s nice to hear unfamiliar voices.

In these masked days, two factoids come to mind: 1) the smile is the expression that can be seen from farthest away, and 2) a smile without contracted muscles around the eyes can “unmask the false friend.”

At noon a flock of military jets flew over New York City as a tribute to America’s healthcare workers because we apply the logic of war to everything. As of today, over one million Americans have been infected with the virus and fifty thousand are dead.

The Sight Below – A Fractured Smile

Glider | Ghostly, 2008 | Bandcamp

Tonight I miss sitting in diners and listening to people murmur and jive, scraping their forks and stirring their coffee. I miss the mumble of humanity punctuated by a stray phrase.

Maybe the magnolias.
Some kind of crazy.
What she doesn’t understand.
Starving.
Ate too much.

I miss the sound of old men talking about trout and tackle, or a short-order cook bitching about the weather. I miss the energy of the third shift in some far-flung Waffle House when the night owls and long-haul truckers would arrive. The souls living by their own clocks, these men and women with tics and rituals drinking bottomless cups of coffee in front of personal chess sets and notebooks packed with manifestos and promises. Most of all, I miss sitting among strangers and feeling irritated and fascinated.

John Maus – The People Are Missing

From Screen Memories | Ribbon Music, 2017 | Bandcamp

A rainy Sunday that underscores these days of suspension. New York is reporting fewer dead each day, and there’s a sense of exhalation at last, although nobody knows what the future holds. Will there be a second wave? Will there be a depression?

My projects and plans for the year have been scrapped, and I feel as though I should invent a new life. Maybe I should work on my resume. Instead, I press on with reading The Plague, dropping the book every few pages to marvel at its resonance: “Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

When Camus describes the town’s refusal to recognize the reality of the disease, it feels like an indictment of those late February days when I still rode the subway, still made plans, and believed a complimentary bottle of hand sanitizer would protect us all. “They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views,” Camus writes. “How should they have a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views.”

The future is not ruled out, but it’s more difficult to imagine.

Flying Saucer Attack – Rainstorm Blues

Further | Drag City, 1995 | More

Strange how something you’ve heard a thousand times can suddenly knock you over. Maybe it’s a shift in the light, a stray fragment of head chatter, or a lack of sleep, but a familiar phrase can become vital and brand new. Tonight I sat by the window trying to rewrite my novel for the eighteenth time, but I was mostly staring into the middle distance and questioning my life choices while Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche” played across the room. I’ve had this song in rotation for years because I admire how its spare guitar sounds like pure dread. Tonight this lyric in the fifth verse finally hit me:

I have begun to long for you, I who have no creed. I have begun to ask for you, I who have no need.

Those two simple lines capture what I’ve been trying to express in an 80,000-word manuscript. They describe my yearning to believe in something greater, some cosmic ethic or godhead. Is such a belief even possible in 2020? I’ve insulated myself with so many diversions that I wouldn’t know where to begin. What would it feel like to believe in the otherworldly? If someone truly believed in a hereafter or radiant glory, wouldn’t they go mad? Or at least struggle with answering emails or giving a damn about selecting the best dental plan?

But the logistics of belief aren’t nearly as interesting as the craving.

Leonard Cohen – Avalanche

Songs of Love and Hate | Columbia, 1971 | More

The internet says the lyrics are I who have no greed although one source says it’s creed, which makes more sense. I stopped pursuing the question after I glimpsed the insistent interpretations that say Cohen is singing about everyone from Christ to a serial killer. I worry my sense of the song would be destroyed if I tried unpacking it like an academic text—and to what end?