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 mortality is constantly on the table anyway, is it so bad to give the matter a little thought?

Waves of anxiety wash over me. They are regular enough to surf. Getting the coronavirus figures in many of the grimmest fantasies. I would rather not struggle to breathe, as I have been struggling to breathe for 50 years, the effects of paralyzed intercostals being what they are. In some bleak imaginings, I recover…only to find myself with kidney damage, chronically obstructed lungs or the odd heart attack. It’s a nasty virus.

Then there’s the whole other thing vis-à-vis leadership. Will the country even slightly climb out of its historical mess? What if we fumble badly in November? Or what if we don’t fumble all that badly and the new regime isn’t all that much better than the current one?

Out of the clear blue I got a call last night from an old friend and colleague from Berkeley. I have blogged about him, a retired physicist who used to get together with other researchers for monthly themed lunches at a Chinese restaurant. Since solar energy and energy storage figure prominently, I enjoy tuning in. That is to say, I listen, quite contentedly. The formulae, the equations, all the engineering principles that “everyone knows” but I don’t…never mind. These guys are trying to save the planet, and I can save an hour or two every month listen to them.

Anyway, my friend called, and the most important thing was that he called. I haven’t actually had coffee with a buddy for four months. A bit long. Even introverts are social.

My social isolation increases the general pressure cooker of news and fears and aging, and the planet turning itself into a hot lunch. Thus the greenhouse effect. Sitting in my garden greenhouse, which I have renamed the Conservatory, gets me out of the maritime climate, particularly the San Francisco wind, and allows me to read my escapist novels in not altogether wanted peace and quiet.

Susan Isaacs’ Compromising Positions is my latest mystery. The setting is suburban, Jewish, upper-middle-class Long Island in the late 1970s…a milieu I can only imagine. And in fact, everything about that time has become remarkably distant, a strangely lost suburban world. The detective mystery angle is completely subsumed by the marital life and times of the housewife heroine. Not to mention her southern belle sidekick. Definitely a good escape hatch.

I seem to need all I can get. At least things in the greenhouse are growing. There is positive evidence of photosynthesis. There is the aroma of well composted chicken manure. It’s all happening and all growing. Maybe I am too.