March 14. King of Prussia is a ghost town. The hotel is almost empty. Room service is only available if you specifically ask for it. It’s always been the usual urban sprawl of conduit roads and giant parking lots, but almost no one comes into the office now except those who show up for my visit. The woman at the front desk sits alone behind freshly installed glass dividers with nothing to do. Even here, at the client to whom I make my only business trips at this time, there is almost nothing left worth traveling to. The hours in the meeting room in the otherwise empty building help and could not be completely replaced by video, but it would not have been worth building the building for that.

March 13. Total reset of the digestive system and all is well again. Took 36 to 48 hours.

From Newburgh to King of Prussia. The roads are a foreign transportation dimension situated over the country. I was on the road for three hours. I have a hard time imagining how things would have happened in these landscapes, which must be gigantic on foot or horseback – the Declaration of Independence, for example, or the winter of Washington’s troops at Valley Forge.

First session with a therapist. It’s a live chat, with no video. I’m not sure yet if this can work. The chat is live by the letter, so you can see unfiltered what the other person writes, with no real opportunity for correction. There’s nothing you can’t have said. This is interesting. First session naturally long descriptions of the facts, punctuated by infrequent, brief follow-up questions. I feel less accused than usual.

March 12. Sick.

March 11. This obvious thought actually occurred to me for the first time today: that reading music must be like writing with ten fingers. I think words and my fingers turn them into letters without me having to think about it. And it’s fast. I figured when I was eighteen or nineteen and had my first job at a keyboard that I would be writing on keyboards for the rest of my life, so it would make sense to learn it now once and for all – which I did. I wish I had decided the same thing about reading music when I was younger, but fine. I’m learning it now. Yesterday first beginnings of the notes getting into my fingers by themselves. I’m right at the threshold.

March 10. For example, that humankind not only separated into two unpredictable parts, but that those parts have been indicting each other for two years, constantly. (It is actually my feeling that only one of the parts indicts the other, fiercely, but being aware of my own biases I’ll assume it is both ways.)

March 9. Dissatisfied. I’ve let the other blog slide for almost a year, haven’t written anything except the entries here. I say it’s because of the pandemic. There’s nothing I think about as much. Every day, every time I look into my newsfeed, every map, every purchase, every mask encounter. I’ve thought everything there is to think about it, written it all down, and see no further need to write anything about it. But maybe I should, just to break the deadlock.

March 8. The note is in the space below the line that I know is an F, so it’s an E. I last played an A with my index finger, so I have to splay my thumb just enough to hit the E. – From those thoughts, I have to get to where my eye sees the note, and my hand plays it. My eye knows what the note is, and my hand knows where it is. I just have to trust my eye and my hand, but that takes these incredible amounts of practice.

March 7. In the waxing salon, says L, they did indeed consider hiring male employees. But since there are very few male customers, those employees would never be utilized to capacity, because no woman would ever let a man serve her in this process. So women do it. There’s only a few of them, because they have to explicitly agree to it, and most don’t. I have so far been served by two women. They differ in whether they touch my penis or ask me to touch it and hold it such that it is not in the way. I assume that is a matter of experience.

March 6. Temperature rises, without any preparation, to sixty-eight degrees. A kind of theoretical spring, because there is nothing of it anywhere else. The trees are completely bare.

March 5. The articles about how the pandemic will proceed read like autogenerated stock market reports. If the quarterly numbers are good, the stock will go up, but it could also go down. And if the quarterly numbers are bad, the stock will go down, unless it goes up.