This one is so 1970s it has sideburns, a fu manchu mustache and bellbottoms! It’s also blazing hot in so many ways and hard to fathom that its the soundtrack to a television documentary about the lives of animals in petting zoos and circuses. The odd back story is that the film was written and directed by Riccardo Fellini, whose career in moving pictures didn’t go quite as far as his brother. If the surname sounds familiar, there’s a reason. Little Ricky had moved into films after his career as a singer went nowhere and his brother’s fame started to climb. How weird it must be to be working with circus critters while your successful brother is hanging out with models and Euro Royalty in Cannes. We all have these crosses that we must bear, I suppose. No famous people in my family in centuries so life has its little blessings as well.

This rabbithole is deeper than originally expected also, so don’t expect to me to find my way out any time soon. I’ll come up for air when it stops being interesting. There is just so much happening down there though. It trumps anything going on elsewhere, or seems to. There are always interesting things happening somewhere but the key that unlocks the doors to new universes comes along in its own time. I’m happy here for now.

The weekend is here again, nearly a full week of March evaporated already. The passage of time is insane. Last March seemed to last for years. It felt like limbo in the final days before everything started to shut down. It seems a decade ago, and also just like yesterday, that I was standing on an empty subway platform at rush hour, fully expecting it was a brief glitch in The Matrix and that everything would resume as usual before anyone had a chance to acclimate to the weirdness of all of it. No, it just got weirder as time passed. March seemed to last forever, like a long suspended animation. I left the office in the middle of the month telling everyone that I’d see them in a couple weeks. Nobody was in disagreement. We laughed, tapped toes (The Wuhan Shake) and headed home. We are moving right up on the anniversary of the shutdown, less than two weeks away. The pace of the vaccination process appears to be picking up. A few states announced that they are re-opening immediately, not because there has been any significant change, but because it’s politically expedient in a climate where everyone is burned the fuck out from feeling no sense of order and control. There is plenty of order and control, at least as much as there ever was. Perceptions, my friend. They are deciding that we are used to the horrific death toll, and maybe we’ve become inured to it. It probably won’t sink in until everyone goes back to their routines and they look around and there are people missing. With the sheer numbers, everyone must know someone whom Covid-19 killed, whether they realize it yet or not.

Have I become inured? No, I don’t think so. It’s more than I ever expected, but it’s not exactly unexpected if that makes sense. All of this was always a possibility; the pandemic, the political climate, the Capitol Hill attack and more were no surprise. It was all just a question of when and not if. The impact has been no less for me but it’s not exacerbated by surprise. And life is very tenuous and very short under the best of circumstances. It’s not left me overcome with shock and that’s to my advantage. No new coping mechanisms were needed. I just dug deeper into by bag of tools that I used regularly anyway. C’est la vie. C’est la mort.

Unlike Riccardo, I’ve never had anyone I felt I had to catch up to. There is nobody else’s success to envy and chase. That’s a bigger blessing than you can imagine.

More coffee for me. More coffee, please. Yes, please.