It's 9 PM and I began knocking things off shelves. Inadvertently. I don't mean to do it, but it keeps happening. An elbow hitting a book, the wheelchair bumping into the bedside table and hurling allergy pills on the carpet. As it happens, I get increasingly angry. And small red warning lights are going off in the psyche. I have had it. Another day is coming to an end and maybe my life as well. The latter being a safe bet, lives having a universal way of coming to an end. But mortality seems Read more [...]

These days everything impinges on me. I resent all commitments. Yet I have almost none. In short, this is a time of madness. I am mad in every sense of the word. At times I think, "is this it? The way it ends?" Meaning that if it doesn't end intubated on the coronavirus ward of a local hospital, will my last days be spent at home, staring at the tomatoes in my greenhouse? And if tomato-staring death is to be mine, does it really matter? And from another, doubtless better, perspective…since Read more [...]

What is to be done? Or is anything to be done? This is the dilemma of an old retired guy, tearing out what's left of his hair, after the usual bout of morning exercise and morning news. Surely something must be done. Too much is going wrong to ignore. So, let's take action. And what does action look like? Hard to say. Which is why at times like this, with the San Francisco sky in its summer gray, the only thing is to repair to the greenhouse. It is wonderful there. A glassed in world where Read more [...]

I woke up from a recent nightmare…to find myself back in the other one. Let me explain.  The dream was curiously simple and devoid of detail. Some oppressive pain was building within me. Like a pressure cooker it was mounting, my distress growing. Yet it was an emotional pain, a mixture of dread and fear and general heartbreak. Nonspecific. No cause and no object. But in the nightmare, it seemed to grow in magnitude and intensity until I was almost obliterated. That's it. And it's particularly Read more [...]

I don't have any time. This is one of the strangest thoughts a person could have right now when time is all there is. Consider that I have no job. Consider that I am home, forcibly, 24/7. And now tell me that I don't have any time. Thing is, I have way too much, course. And finally, having gotten involved in a thing or two, I have less. This is good. Everyone needs a schedule or, if not a schedule, a larger purpose or at least a task. And larger purposes are pretty thick on the ground these days. Read more [...]

When we got to the base of the trail something in me was almost crying. Jane had been talking about this for some time, a path that leads from the commercial center of our neighborhood, then through a park and finally a canyon, which in turn…if you block out the four-lane presence of Portola Boulevard…takes a serious hiker to the summit of Twin Peaks. I am not a serious hiker, of course. I am a serious shut in, let us say. For this is my first adventure in the exterior coronavirus world. Read more [...]