“Is it raining yet,” Jane asks as I emerge from the office. I roll into the kitchen, drop my tea mug in the sink and consider the matter. Outside nothing is happening. The skies are gray, but the deck is dry.

I recall the morning’s radio forecast. Actually, I also recall the fact that the morning one-hour talk show on our local NPR station has promised a major storm, preparing everyone for power outages. In the late morning, Jane checked her iPhone weather app which warned of a deluge at 12 noon. She rushed out with the dog to go for a pre-storm walk in MacLaren Park, the vast hilltop acreage overlooking the center of San Francisco. And now we are home and waiting, still waiting for rain.

Bob Dylan said it best, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way etc. And you don’t have to be a terribly insightful person to understand what you need, moment to moment. Unfortunately, this very thing is quite elusive. But during the pandemic I have belatedly acquired a certain facility in this area. Which means something entirely different from the guiding principles from the rest of my life, which is to say, the previous seven decades. And that is to now follow something called the pleasure principle. I’ve heard of the damn thing, but the work ethic, self-disciplined whatever and general obsessiveness have consistently gotten in the way.

But right now, getting in the way has taken on an entirely new meaning. In the pandemic I am so routinely disturbed, find my emotions unpredictable…I have had to adopt a new way of being. And that is to go with the flow, as it were. Even if it weren’t. Wherever the flow is flowing, thither I goest.

Last night with bed approaching, I begin to feel nauseous. Why? I haven’t a clue, but the feeling overcame me, and after standing a little bit in the bathroom, literally standing and nothing else, the bathroom having the railings that enable me to do this safely…my system, my psyche, or whatever the hell it is, decided, what the hell. Things reverted to a healthy state. And I reverted to my usual state at that hour, vis-à-vis bed.

What was this about? Or what is anything about these days? I read a short quote from someone in The Guardian this very morning explaining that for more than one year everyone in the nation has been going through consistent emotional upset. It’s no small thing having a world leader who is evil and demented issuing endless edicts from the White House. It’s also no small thing having a deadly and mysterious disease circulating about the nation, having now killed more people than all lost in World War II. And it’s quite something to simply be confined at home, cut off from people, not being able to give a hug to someone who matters to you. Or even sit down across the table and have a bite to eat and discuss routine matters such as the price of fish in Hong Kong, whatever.

I guess what’s important here is that none of the things I mentioned are just physical. All basic human needs…money. food, clothing…haven’t been impacted. Shortages of sea salt or imported Tuscan olive oil or pumpernickel flour…all items currently in short supply at the local San Francisco food boutique at the base of our hill…this is not only nothing to sweat, it’s actually good for us.

But the invisible pressures on the human spirit, these have been so acute and so protracted, that I am finally learning to tune into them.

I spent much of the last two, even three, weeks writing one short opinion/editorial piece about Amtrak. How could something so simple take so long? Well, in the pandemic it took that long because I was on a sort of spiritual journey. By now, being a seasoned Amtrak supporter, I had learned an awful lot about the subject matter. And I learned even more reading and revising and reading and reading. Meanwhile, for whatever reason, my perspective kept changing. The basic facts didn’t shift at all. But I gradually got over my anger. And getting over the depredations of the Trump era is important, because some of them are actually in the past. A new day has genuinely dawned. And it is still a frightening day, and I believe the nation is in for a rocky few years, perhaps political violence and upheaval for the rest of my lifetime…. But still it is a new day.

Amtrak is not only a minuscule budget item in this vast country, but it is also well beneath the collective radar. People don’t understand passenger railroad operations anymore. Which means, simply put, they also don’t have an ax to grind. I do. Some of the things that have happened in the name of public transportation offend deeply. But the worst players are gone now. And, as I say, the public doesn’t care. So simply acknowledging the zeitgeist, enough already. So this attitude informed my writing, but it crept up on me slowly, And sank in gradually, so that it took a while. And by the end I had an entirely different piece. And damned if I wasn’t satisfied, for once. I sent my glorious essay off to Salon.com.

Been a long haul, the writing experience, and, in fact, this very morning felt like a long haul, particularly after a disturbed evening in which I occupied myself with thoughts of throwing up. Morning physiotherapy, stretching, and exercise take somewhere between two and three hours. After which I generally take a fairly short break and get into my Writing Life. After all, in conventional wisdom, serious writers need to sit down to the job at roughly the same time every day and put in roughly the same number of hours, and so on.

And fuck that. This very day guess what I did? I resumed watching what I had been watching on my exercycle, a George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez film. Which may, or may not, be called Break Out. It’s based on an Elmore Leonard novel, and captures the sleazy tone rather well, I thought. But that’s about all I thought. There’s not much time or necessity for thinking on the exercycle. Although repeated bursts of adrenaline are most useful. Which made this film most useful, filled as it is with occasional robberies, prison breakouts and so on, while the roguish hero and the sexy FBI agent work out their attraction.

The point being that at 11:30 AM this morning I began watching this film, and I’ve been watching it ever since, except for a break to wire write this blog. Because that’s what I needed to do. And in the pandemic I am learning that what I need to do I seriously need to do. By the way, the rain has seriously started, and let us hope it pours. The drought has been very bad. Whatever. It is entirely beyond my control, and that’s not the only thing these days.