Grinding on

Passed out on the couch last night as I was watching an episode of 30 Rock, which is rather atypical for me. Partially it's because that couch is so comfortable and its blanket so cozy, partially because I was just zonked, I don't know why, but I woke with a start around 10:30, certain for a split second that it was because I have coronavirus. I have left the house several days in a row now and gone to various places, stores, tennis courts, doing things subjectively "necessary" and in a careful fashion, but by god is it hard to be perfectly disciplined. Now I will need to sequester here in the home for a few days, likely through the weekend.

Though I do have to deliver the Birthday Hat to Drake on Saturday. It had been on my shelf for several years till I finally remembered to drop it on Crabes a couple of months ago, then he jammed it in my mailbox on my birthday -- and very nearly destroyed a perfectly good gift bag in the process, earning a rebukeful glare from Mary (I fixed it with some tape!).

And I will probably need to go pick up some take out, because it seems like that's my job.

Just finished James McBride's The Color of Water, his memoir growing up in Brooklyn and Queens in the 60s-70s as the son of a Jewish woman and a black man. Really it's his mom's memoir too, though he clearly wrote that in conversation with her, and her story is the more remarkable of the two, how she grew up Jewish in a small town in the South, the daughter of a complete asshole and a mom who spoke only Yiddish, but then fell in love with a series of black men (the southern gentiles wouldn't look at her) and ended up living her life almost entirely in African-American communities in New York. This book was a great lockdown pick-up, because I was reading a review of a newer novel of his in an old New Yorker I had archived on my chest of drawers (as is my practice). I was just about to recycle the thing, then I read the review and it referenced this older book and I was like "wait, I bought a used copy of that at Flyleaf." So I looked on my shelf, found it, and read it. Proof yet again that one's shelves are the greatest stores of wealth.