Textual Healing

February 2021

Taylor Swift songs are making me cry.

That’s how shit is today.

The impulse to eat half a jar of chili crisp straight from its glass container with a spoon. That yearning is strong today. Why half, you ask? Because the jar in question is half-full.

The purchasing of an acupressure mat is among the highlights of the week. I will be disappointed if it isn’t the solution to Everything That Ails Me and Everyone Else.

I never want to wear business casual ever again.

Dreams of spreadsheet cells. What the fuck.

Even the dog is in a mood today.

My brother has taken to referring to the COVID vaccine as The Jab. It sounds like bad porn.

Have you gotten The Jab?

No. No, I have not.

I’m now the nightmare time manager I was once perplexed by back in those pre-pandemic days. At the same time that I feel measures of empathy, guilt, and solidarity, I also remain astonished and almost impressed by people who function in this delinquent state of being all the time; my anxious, eager-to-please, chased-by-The-Fraud-Police self never would have allowed it—and didn’t.

I can’t keep up with anything no matter what I do.

I’m now someone who cries all the time. I’ve never judged others who cry easily and freely. I’ve even envied them at times. I’ve just never been that person myself—before now. Not since adolescence, maybe even before then. For over 30 years, I was a sporadic, infrequent, private crier. I shed more tears in the creased pages of a novel or in the darkness of the movies, hearing stories about fictional people, than over my own sorrows. No more. I often have no idea when tears will hit or why. It’s—different from what I’m used to. I thought perhaps the wave of this new trend had passed after the new year because of a lull, but no. It’s back.

I can’t seem to answer emails, texts, calls. My ability to say anything has vanished.

Today was a crying day. 

I’m okay. I’m always okay.

I want to spend the rest of my life wearing either “come hither,” fuck-me hot outfits or comfortable house clothes or sports clothing. And sweaters that feel like hugs when it’s cold. That’s it.

I’m always okay.

Our strengths and weaknesses are the same qualities.

Sometimes I wonder if the habitual constancy of my own competence is killing me.

I have a bowling ball in my living room now. It’s got its own little pedestal.

That last morsel warrants some explanation. Random street treasures are one of the delights of New York City living. Some sidewalk finds are a joy to behold even if they never make it home. Sometimes, the bounty does come home; the items that make the cut usually have a clear function. I have no use for a bowling ball in my adult life. Except as a verbal reference, usually as an approximation for the size and shape of my head. Yet I was never more charmed than when my partner came home from a walk some weeks ago, carrying a bowling ball they’d found on someone’s stoop. Jen schlepped it back to the apartment because they thought I’d find it hilarious. They were right. My bowling ball—a phrase I never imagined I’d utter—is a dark purple and milky blue marbled color. Like a moody but intriguing planet with an atmosphere that might support life.

I’ve bowled perhaps twice since 1994. This will make for an unusual relationship.

I’m okay.

I made a music mix that began with the Wilco song “A Shot in the Arm.” I wasn’t being funny.

The snow outside looks hungover. Like the post-party ashtrays of the East Village sidewalks on a Sunday morning.

I read something several days ago that ended a sentence with the following phrase: “including the use of drugs during sex (known as chemsex in Europe) as well as traumatic sexual practices, such as fisting.” I was reading it for a work project. It’s heartening to get paid for such moments. Stuff like that makes me love my life.

I want a motorcycle.

I didn’t think it possible to disdain our loud upstairs neighbor more. What an asshole.

Every time the bowling ball enters my line of vision, it cracks me up.

I’m getting the hang of making pizza from scratch. De Roo: 1. Pandemic: 337. It’s like the damn 1970s Mets up in here. Still, I’m pleased about the pizza.

I struck up an email correspondence with an artist in Bristol who I’ve never met. It’s tapered off because the project that sparked it has ended, but I really enjoyed talking with her.

I’ve rediscovered that Journey song from the Vision Quest soundtrack. A bad song from a movie of even more questionable quality. They both fall firmly into the “it’s not good, but I love it anyway” category of aesthetic glee. We all have such songs and films. I don’t call mine “guilty pleasures” because I don’t feel a bit fucking guilty.

The fantasy road trips that take up miles of highway in my imagination. Healthy or not?

Since the bowling ball joined our small household, we have discovered that it has the word PERSEVERE etched into it, in all caps, along with a pair of wings underneath it. Unclear whether this is a brand name, but I think not. The etched lettering looks professional but customized, like monogrammed towels. In all my 1970s youth years of watching men’s bowling tournaments on Sunday afternoon TV and of going divorce bowling, I never came across PERSEVERE as a bowling ball manufacturer name. So. I have a bowling ball. Who can say why this strange object, of all things, passes the Marie Kondo test. The bowling ball is heavier, I believe, than our dog, who weighs just shy of 14 pounds. I have not yet tried to hold them both—one in each arm—to test this theory.

The phrase “divorce bowling” is my own. Divorce bowling was a real thing. In the 1970s and 1980s when it was too cold to go to the park, and your divorced dad had no clue how to fill the hours on visitation days, the solution was often bowling. Divorce and bowling. Like Gen X beans and cornbread. Activities that entail doing rather than talking and that play well with chain-smoking. Bowling, movies, diners, board games, pizza, bars with pool tables. And No Nukes rallies. Cigarette smoke cloaking everything.

I feel exactly the same way about Zoom as I did at the outset of pandemic lockdown. Zoom is a lifesaver and a gift and Zoom can suck it, in equal measure—often at the same time.

Pandemics may come and pandemics may go, but vanity about one’s hair remains. Even with no decent means or energy to rectify the ongoing travesty happening on my head.

The bowling ball doesn’t have any feelings about Zoom.

I am working on a joke about the black sheep and herd immunity.

I had a close friendship that ruptured abruptly some months ago, back in the fall and early winter. I don’t think it’s going to recover. My feelings about that possibility are oddly distant and frozen. Like so much in this year of stasis. I don’t seem to have any feelings, which is unnerving. I don’t think of the friendship much. When I do, the memory of it—both the friendship and the melodramatic way in which it imploded—is like something living in a lake that had the misfortune to get caught in a cold snap. Like something I come across in my heart by accident, a musty, old familiar in the attic that has been packed away for years that I know once moved me deeply but I can’t access that depth of investment anymore. I’m sure this is a sign of psychic distress and yet I can’t seem to muster any anxiety about it. I cannot tell if it’s because enough hurt made the rounds between us that I’m done with the friendship, sad as that is, or if it’s because it’s one grief too many amidst other louder, more immediate griefs. Perhaps it has to wait its damn turn. 

The horns in the Phoebe Bridgers songs that came to me last month are a soul healer. I’d have thought this even if I didn’t have to wear a mask outside. But I feel it more right now. With the bottom half of my face, my nose, my cheeks, my lips, my chin, always veiled, full of open secrets.

I miss no one.

I do not participate in karaoke with frequency or great abandon, as many others do. I love music and have a good ear, but I don’t have a knockout voice, and I’m not a performer so I can’t charisma my way through a song with attitude the way that, say, my partner can, and does. People like that, who can sing well or who perform singing well even if their voices aren’t great, have signature songs they do at karaoke. To get me to do karaoke requires enforced corporate/work fun or deep love and friendship. Something earlier today reminded me of that, and it made me recall the last time I sang karaoke. It was in 2018 for my friend Bill Seely’s 59^th birthday. Bill can sing and play guitar, and he can also perform, all wonderfully. I love Bill. For him, I will watch and even do karaoke all night long. So to usher in his 59^th, we did. We sang. It’s now one of my fondest karaoke memories. At some point during the evening, we belted out “Gypsy” by Fleetwood Mac as a karaoke quartet, us and our two spouses. It was fucking beautiful. Then I remembered that our mutual friend Bill Bish was there celebrating with us that night, too. Bish died a year later, in March 2019, by ending his own life. He’d been caught in a downward spiral for a long time, so in that way, no one who loved him was surprised—shocked and heartbroken, but not surprised, not really. Yet sometimes I still can’t believe he’s gone. It breaks my heart into tiny pieces: Not everyone makes it. Sometimes, “not everyone” is someone we know well and love. My god, Bish was funny.

Oh, world.  

I have a Christmas gift for my friend Amelia still sitting in my damn apartment. Easter gift! Scratch that. What says Christmas better than a winter gift during NYC Pride month in June?

I suspect that the lovely guy who does the guided meditations I participate in has a secret relationship with my therapist. The degree to which they dispense the same wisdom on different days every week is heartening and moving and eerie.

I’ve now become someone who has internet friends. Who is this person? Again, I know plenty of other people live this way with regularity, and I don’t judge that. But to me, it’s something the stranger I’ve become to myself does.

A year ago almost to the day, I was driving to the Berkshires with my friend Josie to spend a week at a winter mindfulness class in the woods. It was a hippie dippy drum circle of sorts, and it was exactly what I needed that February. We had no idea that in less than three weeks’ time, the whole nation would enter pandemic lockdown. The entire week up in Stockbridge was snowy and bright, the kind of invigorating, beautiful cold that has its own crisp smell and wakes you up with a cheering slap. Because I’m a lunatic New Yorker, forever addicted to seltzer, I brought a case of La Croix for our mini shared dorm room. Every morning, I’d set two cans out on the ledge outside our window. By the time we got back from class in the late afternoon, they were icy and bright, and we had a festive beverage, toasting to the small, mundane pleasures of being alive.

I can’t bring myself to write a condolence card to our friend and neighbor whose father died of COVID recently. What is the matter with me? If they ever do scan my body for health or kindness again, it’s possible they’ll discover a brain that’s mostly empty except for defunct passwords and a heart the size of a walnut. Fucking hell.

The pain and beauty of this world know no bounds.

I touch no one.

Live music. I miss it so much.

Math Problem 2021: If Tuesday is the February of the week, and February is the Tuesday of the year, and it’s almost 34 years to the day since my maternal grandfather died, which was also on a Tuesday night in February and I cannot fathom why I can pull that detail up, even as my mind draws a blank trying to recall what I did last week, and it’s a wintery Tuesday in February in the Year of Our Pandemic, will my ability to accept and even embrace all that is—the good, the bad, and all betwixt and between—arrive on the local track in the train station of my soul before or after my default self-protective rage takes out everyone in its radial blast, including me? Please show your work with your answers to receive full credit.

This question is not one that my ninth-grade math teacher Mr. Carr prepared me for.

PERSEVERE. Christ, even the stray bowling ball that snuck its way into my living room is trying to lift my spirits up. Why do I have a bowling ball?

Chili crisp is perfect.

I am okay.

I am not okay.

This is starting to read like the ending section of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable. Except not eloquent or brilliant or poetic.

I don’t know whose voice is writing this. I don’t know if this is the voice inside me that almost no one hears. I think perhaps this is the voice that lives next door to that one. They trade recipes. Check on each other when the daily newspaper deliveries stack up on the porch for more than a day or two. I am trying to allow myself to be curious about who those voices are and what they want. It occurs to me that they are every bit as frightened of me as I am of them.

I never loved bowling itself, but I loved all its paraphernalia. The shoes that needed to get sprayed with some toxic aerosol bullshit before you put them on. The slippery wood floors, all waxed and polished. The picking of the two or three balls to roll with during a given game. The satisfying clatter of felled pins. The darted markings on the lane floor. The waft of fried bar snacks. The little fan for drying or cooling off your bowling hand. The stubby pencils and forms we used to keep score before the alleys all went digital. The intimacy of silence, rather than talking, between two people. The sad shudder of a gutter ball. The jolting thrill of danger when I made a light bowling ball bounce or skip.

Even my sad, wounded little walnut heart contains so much love, I can hardly stand it.

You do not have to be loveable all the time in order to be loveable.

I do not have to be loveable all the time in order to be loveable.

Every day, I am learning what it means to carry all we love but cannot hold. I have a feeling this strange education will continue to stretch my heart even after I can sit again at a zinc bar sipping bourbon, watching to see what people’s full, unmasked faces do and don’t reveal.

I will be carrying all of it—all of this, all we have and haven’t said, all we did and didn’t do, all we feel, the loveable and unloveable, all my secrets and yours—in my quiet, full heart for the rest of my life.

I miss everyone.

I miss the smells of other places and humans. Even some of the less pleasant ones.

The problem with a year of stasis is that it isn’t stasis. We’ve all moved, however imperceptibly, somewhere inside ourselves, during this intense, reflective year of enforced solitude. We just may not know where or how we’ve moved because we haven’t found landmarks on the horizons of our selves to locate where we are now. It’s like navigating in spiritual fog. Fog is beautiful, but it’s always frightened me, too—a veil that appears benign because it’s not solid, giving the illusion that movement without injury is guaranteed. I’ve been lost in fog before. It isn’t benign. At a certain point, you cannot find your way out, unless the fog lifts, and until it does, it becomes impossible to discern which is the wiser choice or the greater danger: moving blind or staying still.

I am not worried that the fog won’t lift. Fog lifts—eventually. My fear is that when it does, the version of me that emerges will be this hobbled, wounded, snarling, impenetrable pandemic creature. I fear that like that ruptured friendship, parts of my self that I value, selves that have gone dormant or become inaccessible, will remain beyond recovery. I have a lot of feelings about this. They all look and smell like a Tuesday in February.

Fears are feelings, not facts.

We do not have to be okay all the time in order to be okay.

We can wait together in silent love for dear March to come in suitable, healing purples we never dreamed could be returned to us.

Yes, Reader, I’ll go on.

It’s snowing again now. I’m making mental lists of the grocery items I should have gone out to get yesterday. The bowling ball is winking at me again.

It’s only just now occurred to me.

Spontaneous, inexplicable laughter and joy. That’s it. That is the bowling ball’s function.