October 25, 2020
Oh, gee. I’ve got these notebooks. For 25 years I have been keeping a journal. Since 1995. There were the bleak streetcar years when I rode San Francisco Muni’s N Judah, and then the L-Taraval, across the 7 miles from one side of the peninsula to the other every morning, grabbing the single seat and hunching over my notebook. Through my dark years as a minion at Chevron through the copy editor job at Salon and then the Advice column job at Salon, and afterwards.
Mead 100-page composition books, that later became Office Depot brand, Contech, Staples and others. I loved the Mead. That could be a Freudian slip, because I certainly did love the mead, the grog, the lager, the stout. But by the time I started the journals that was in the past. While enjoying the mead, the grog, the stout, etc., I would jot. But the journal was an escape, an oasis. And the settings in which I wrote in the journal made their way into the fiction, that fiction of that fictive world, that made-up place that seemed so real to me that its characters inhabited my commute.
Well, I wanted to recall the 2000 election in order to write a column about being poll workers, so I went down to the cantina to find the boxes of journals and brought them all up to the house. And I’ve been labeling their spines. I think there’s about five feet of them. (Remember the five-foot bookshelf?)
Anyway, it’s very encouraging to read them, except if I think to myself I was so much better then. But I was much more tortured. Oh, the torture. The accounts of therapist visits, the agonized self-analysis, the moral dilemmas, the death of my heroin addict sponsee, oh boy, the workplace dramas. There was a time I couldn’t stand to look at myself as represented in the journals, in the poems. Now I think they’re not half-bad, and I have some respect, some compassion.
So to the lockdown. As expected, Italy’s prime minister is announcing new measures to contain the coronavirus. Is that one word or two? I caught the New York Times magazine in a layout/copyedit type mistake this morning and it brought me back. Good times! Hyphens, commas, semicolons, hike!
I am really focusing on taking it one day at a time. We are so fortunate not to be suffering financially, because I am retired. I am an old retiree. Un pensionato. Speaking of pensionato, Renato, proprietor of Regiro, the pizza restaurant in the cavernous space that once hosted the fascist jail (my friend Luca Ghelli’s grandfather was thrown in there for not joining the fascist party, but then his landowner came and got him out the next day), may just quit running the place after 23 years. So we had the pizza Carosella last week, and after innumerable single slices of all types were laid before us one by one and we turned over the green-red coaster to red face up signaling basta, basta, he came with the baby carriage loaded with chocolate and we could not say no. For dessert, he pushes around a baby carriage loaded with chocolate. We could not say why. We do not know. It is lost in the lore of Renato, king of Regiro.
I may eventually see the damage this lockdown will bring, but for now I am just taking it in stride and trying to remain in good spirits. I have a lot to do in my office.
Oh, but restaurants will be closed. I think. I’m not sure. We haven’t seen the actual decree yet.
Oh, gee, I just sneaked a look at thelocal.it, which is not a half-bad news site. Gyms and swimming pools closed. Oh gee that hurts. Swimming has kept me sane the last few months. What will I do? Walk up Maesto Mami I guess. And bars and restaurants to close at 6pm. 6pm!
Ah, the pleasures of home.
