Today was so recognizable it hurt. Wyatt had school pictures so he put on a button-down shirt and jeans. There are a couple of extraordinary things about Wyatt right now, the first being that he is tall, like a man. He is 5 foot eleven inches and he is 13 years old. He’s also a lot of fun, and very responsible seeming. Now, I may be seeing what I want to be seeing but he did go with me to the NEW SUPERMARKET, which I’ll call Ludl.

Let me be candid. Ludl is a disappointment. It’s not a real supermarket. It’s a random place with a booming coupon trade, so if you need a bushel of leeks or giant bags of frozen scallops, then it is the place for you. The produce is, in short, bizarre. The bakery is a disappointment. I love the fish selection but that is simply because I am into fish because I am on a diet.

Wyatt and I visited Ludl and he made cheeseburgers on the grill Friday night. Calvin was stuck at the studio with the puppets and the people, and I’ve been working too hard on too many tedious emails. You know those totally boring marketing emails you get, and if you’re a physician you get them about drugs? Well, I write those emails and it is hard work.

Finally Wyatt admitted that he had been banned by Minecraft because he built a world in the shape of a penis bouncing on a trampoline for a contest, and he had won but someone had complained. Thus he was with me at Ludl because his online friends were off limits.

Does it make me a bad mother that I thought, Oh well, good for me. He’s such a pleasure that I will take a bouncing penis scandal to get a few hours of hangout time? Oh well, so be it.

Today he got up early, put regular clothes on and went to get his picture taken. Then I exercised and Calvin puttered around, muttering complaints about the state of things–in the world, his upper back, the goddamn BIRDS.

Oh, the birds are a thing this year

Birds are building a nest on our porch light. Every day, all day, all week. I didn’t tune into birdland until yesterday. Sure, I saw the twigs and crap on our front stoop but I had no idea that it was an extended battle between Calvin and one very stubborn bird.

[NOTE: I write this blog as Nemesis the cat leans heavily on my left arm, exhausting me. She’s giving me carpal leaning tunnel syndrome, which is asymetrical carpul tunnel syndrome, which I got in the late 1990s and necessitated me taking a leave from freelance writing and getting a gig as a photographer’s assistant at the New York Times. I hung out with this photographer all day for 3 weeks and had what I now can pinpoint of one of the times of my life.]

Back to the birds. They have a thing for the top of our light under the little stoop canopy. Calvin tears their nest down every few hours. It’s heartbreaking and very messy and Calvin is always washing his hands now. Birds do carry disease, you know.

Back to the day at hand—today

Then I left to go canvass for The Candidate. Knocking on doors handing out literature is exhausting, but during pandemicland, it is fucking complicated. You have your hat and your double mask and you’re wearing contacts because your glasses will fog up with the mask, so you need reading glasses. And you need your app with the voter file, the app that the boyfriend of AOC developed. And you have the clipboard. And a partner, who is a person you’ve never met.

So we knocked on doors and I dropped my pen. And again. And then again. My partner picked it up for me. It was horrible. And it was fun, as it is always fun to talk to strangers about politics. Which is rare. I did chat up the cutest guy with beautiful eyes and a dog with delightful whiskers. I never found out if he was single, because I would love to set that guy up. Canvassing is just sanctioned flirting.

Daisy is not happy about tomorrow’s plan of action

She is not thrilled about coming with me to canvass and hold my pens and read the list. I don’t blame her but I need help! She has nothing better to do.

Like rust creeping up your bumper, my diet continues

It’s so painful. I had salmon every day for lunch this week, with BROWN rice and boiled asparugus. I fell for cheap marketing gimmicks and bought frozen sockeye salmon and it sucked. The fillets are so much nicer. I ordered halibut for next week’s lunches.

Was it payback tonight, for the Eagles?

Today I finished my day in a posture of wounded broke-evenness. I had a not-bad week. I finished most of my work in a timely manner, announced I had too much work and then got actual help, got the sink drain snaked, had a friendly chat with the NY Department of Sanitation Executive, who would not give me the phone number associated with Maggie’s call to Sanitation ostensibly from me about the neighbor on the other side of her, and had a wrenching time with my family of origin. The Sanitation executive is Irish, which I cannot get over. Can you be not an American and be a garbage man? It seems crazy! But why?

The point that I can’t seem to get to is that this week nothing ended in flames but nothing ended in ice cream. I broke even, and frankly that’s a victory.

So I shut down my computer and accepted I would have to work Sunday, and I would bill the shit out of it. I came upstairs and put the kitchen back together again, and on the turntable I put on The Eagles (wait for it): the Hotel California album. I played it really loud. When that song, The Last Resort, came on, I cranked it way up. I love that song the way I love Dire Strait’s Telegraph Road–does that mean I like place songs? The Last Resort is about Aspen, or Telluride, but probably not Crested Butte.

The point is that I turned the Eagles way up and made dinner, and maybe Maggie heard?

And now, as I chill out in my bedroom writing this, trying to feel proud and okay about not losing my shit all week, I’m listening to our neighbor Maggie blast the uninteresting Paul McCartney through the wall. Had she heard the Eagles, and decided I needed to be exposed to another clueless white guy?*

The point is that tomorrow is Saturday and Daisy will come with me to door knock, and if all goes reasonably well I’ll buy her ice cream at the end.

Have a great weekend.

*I put Justin Bieber on my phone as I wrote this to drown out Maggie’s ick music. I like the stuff that came before the uberChristian him but way after the straight outta YouTube stuff.