Date: I forget… This could have been any day this April…
5:05 am—Wake up. See text from the middle of the night informing me yet another person I know has tested positive for the virus. Not the best way to wake up. Then the pissing, and the day.
5:15 am—With the coffee machine sufficiently gurgling, I step outside on the balcony. Nope. It’s chilly. Time to write. This morning I’m processing notes from an interview about how the PFLAG scholarship program got started. Distilling the relevant details from pages and pages of notes and grafting them into the book manuscript is gratifying. A professor in graduate school once told me, “Write every day, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes. It’s like putting money in the bank; before long it adds up.” He was right.
6:50 am—Balcony break and salutation to the dawn. Looking down St. Ann toward the river, I see the lights of Café du Monde. The sun is just beginning to rise over the river, its first rays of the day reflecting off the puddles in the middle of an empty St. Ann Street.
7:28 am—Rupee hops in my lap and helps me type.
10:35 am—Time for brunch. I have always found chopping and sautéing the trinity relaxing. For today’s omelet, I’m adding crawfish and a diced Portobella mushroom. And as an auxiliary to a slice of American yellow cheese, I’m grating fresh Parmesan into the eggs. Chris and Rupee approve. More writing.
1:45 pm—A bit of normalcy on the one block walk to Rouses. Five women on bikes wearing pastel-colored tutus and neon unicorn horns are parked on Royal Street (sufficiently socially distanced) exchanging gossip as a deranged homeless woman lounges in the gutter nearby pontificating to no one in particular about how the valley of Gehenna will be filled with blood at the Second Coming. I ask her when that will happen. “Sometime next week,” she says. At Rouse’s, Tom, my neighbor who was once abducted by aliens, opens the door for me.
4:20 pm—Snack time. Brownie.
5:15 pm—Random thought: Do the Trumpers know their MAGA hats are made in China?
6:15 pm—Vegetating on the couch listening to Scarlatti and scrolling through Facebook. Chalk this up to educational time. I learn “The Pillow Guy,” the one who spoke at the President’s daily press briefing/freak show about the Coronavirus, is a former wife-beating, crackhead ex-convict. Between that news and all the Tiger King memes and Trump’s latest outrages, I am convinced the girl in the gutter may be onto something—we may be in the end times, certainly the Twilight Zone.
