hurrying, anyway, toward the reward of the crossword

I got reading glasses last week. I’m not happy. I like the reading glasses fine and my eyes feel less like they are desiccating inside my skull while I look at the computer. The sunset creeps earlier. I see it starting from the window down the hall when the workday’s not quite over. The bus is late. The bus is always late. The bus is so crowded and it’s always late. All is well and I’m nervous. For three weeks I didn’t work out and yesterday I did. I’m not happy. In a crouch below my desk to stretch my clam hips which stubbornly cry and spit and will not give I bounce I bounce and there is however briefly a lightness, a promising sort of ache. Certain things are incredibly good. Mornings in bed together. Peanut sauce. F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences. Body oil. Walking, walking. Laughing into and next to my beloved’s neck. Bubbly water and Fox’s confounding reality competition show Crime Scene Kitchen hosted by a largely disinterested and sometimes antagonistic Joel McHale. The NBA on TNT guys. Certain winds. Loving. Tommy Edman NLCS MVP. Sorry that I’m just typing letters. I love living. I worry COVID made me stupid. I worry I was stupid already and am only just noticing because the blade of my memory’s dulled. I’m terribly afraid. When I face the horrors of the world I am ashamed of myself when I distract myself from the horrors of the world I am ashamed of myself when I think about what I have done in my life to contribute to the strange and silvery web of us all here together I am ashamed of myself and then I am ashamed for being ashamed because really none of it is of great consequence I am only barely here and even then not for long. Has anybody read a good novel lately?

I am wearing those reading glasses and looking at the computer as I type this and I know that I am fine and all will be well. I wrote in my journal this morning that I am facing a strange—for me— disinclination to say anything at all. Perhaps this is maturing. Could I really dare to imagine that I’ve finally run out of and away from the most primal urge of my life, the driving force of all my years, that death drive toward saying shit incessantly and with no true thought of apology? No. Likely not. Probably, dully, I am just a little depressed. Writing (“writing” “vomiting”) these newsletters has made me feel at times more engaged with some real version of myself long lost. Some real version of myself possibly only imagined. I used to be a person who wrote daily, constantly, merrily or mournfully but at a great clip. Or I used to think I was a person who wrote only because I was a person and I was writing but possibly, probably, that was just something I told myself. If I wanted to write, really, I would. It’s not worth all this moaning. Some warped egoism has me convinced that I should be doubly disappointed in my failure to make of my life what I had wanted because I believe I am capable of better though at the same time lack the confidence to turn that belief into action and therefore make it real. What am I saying? I’m a self-satisfied whiner who isn’t satisfied at all. The worry the threat the knife hanging over my head is that I could become a person I like if I was not afraid to do it wrong. The nightmare is I’m the fucking husband from Anatomy of a Fall, a striving dunce made pathetic by the compulsive fear of becoming just that.

I am at my safe and quiet office and even if I am sometimes here disappointed and degraded, I am at least also free to read decades deep into The New Yorker archive and drink many kinds of tea and no one has tried to shoot me ever though occasionally I imagine what it would be life if someone did. I have an easy life and this is what allows me the freedom of such unhappiness. I really do get that. I am lucky to be physically well, or to at least think that I am and only during those periods where I am not instead thinking that I most likely have a cancer growing in me from head to toe. I want to give myself a pickaxe lobotomy but emerge from it unscarred and still me but only better. Is this why I didn’t like The Substance? Too close to the bone. I did find it somewhat pointlessly mean-spirited but, no, the main problem is it’s pretty dumb. That’s all fine. Food does often repulse and frighten me. That French woman was right. I don’t wish for a younger version of myself, but I have caught my needy brain indulging before in lurid fantasies of different paths my life might have taken if one or two things here and there had gone differently. Had I by luck avoided certain blows which knocked me off course. This is a useless way to spend time but I also, when not doing this, watch a lot of random videos of women making school lunches for their children on Instagram so it’s hard to say what difference it really makes. If we are alive we will waste time. You can only waste time when you’ve got some. Is this anything? I want to be good. My vision is clearer. I look and try to see.

on the bright side i’m not bronny