My mind is just buzzing along lately, thinking about everything. I’m dying to see people all the time but when I do, it’s exhausting. I try to nap whenever I can.

It feels like things are bubbling and there is hope in the air. Nearly all the trees are budding. It’s the time of year I think of as nest season, when you can really spot nests in the bare, clean trees just about to explode with leaves. Once Wyatt and I were late to his elementary school because we got distracted by nest spotting on the way to school.

I loved walking Wyatt to school in those days. I said wild things to him. I talked to him about my work life, which I loathed. I rehearsed crazy conversations with him. I warned him in elaborate, scientific ways about the dangers of opiodes (he was eight). It seemed smart to explain to him how drugs worked in the brain and why it was a risk not worth taking. We talked a lot about ancient history, which I was just beginning to be obsessed with. Was he interested? I don’t know. Will it protect him against becoming addicted to something destructive at an early age? The jury is still out.

I had to talk to him about those thing. I had no choice. If I didn’t set the topic of conversation, Wyatt would talk about Pokémon. That was not endurable so I chose the topics, and one spring morning it was nest spotting.

Look up at the trees right now, before the leaves come and when they’ve been washed clean of last year’s leaves by the winter, and spot the nests. You’ll get a kick out of them.

A wild improv morning in a fleeting rain storm

An old friend I met at improv classes ten year ago now runs her own in her backyard, so I’ve been going to her one-offs. This one was great, just as the last one had been, but I leave all stirred up and anxious. Intensely interacting with strangers is still scary, even though it shouldn’t be. I intensely interacted with strangers when I canvassed all last spring, knocking on people’s doors and trying to get them to vote for my candidate.

That didn’t seem to affect how scary I found improv, STILL. My friend the teacher said there was a moment she just wasn’t afraid anymore and I need to ask her when that moment was and why she thinks she had it, and how can I have it.

In other news, Daisy got the wolf hair cut, with the bangs. Intense. I have been hassling vets all over Queens to let me send them a stool sample. There has to be something wrong with this cat! His poop is just awful. TMI? Okay. I’m sorry.

Maggie is going bonkers. She was in a frenzy last week, awake and posting around the clock and then stomping around her house yelling as these oil heating guys worked on the house. I hope the house isn’t going to blow up.

Madness is contagious, so I’m vigilant about my own thoughts

This is something I think about a lot since all this stuff began. The first time she went crazy, I went crazy too, and it was hard recovering from that. The second time I went less crazy but still I became unhinged. The last time she blasted music for days and nights through the bedroom wall, I built a soundproof wall, which has not been tested by her yet because she immediately moved out.

Now she’s back in motion and I am trying not to to be drawn into chaos. So my plan of phoning the contractor she used on the oil heating and seeing if he’ll talk to me about whether the house is dangerous to my house—I’m not sure that’s a great plan or a mad plan.

I’ll run it by Calvin and then some other people. It’s really hard to tell.

She has divorce things coming up (she posted calendar screenshots—why? why?) and that is also bothering her. Every time I am about to feel sorry for her I think, just sign the papers and move on!

There was a night where firefighters thundered up her stairs a few times and then left and Calvin saw the fire truck. That was at 3 AM and was the MOST mysterious.

We did hear there is pressure on her to sell the house. She is taking photos of her HELOC bank balance and posting them to social media. I don’t save those in my file. They don’t seem relevant. But it’s clear she is churning with both madness and life decisions. She is smart enough in so many ways but she is so hell bent on something I don’t understand.

Can we talk about Mark Morris?

Do you know who Mark Morris is? Do you know what Jacobs Pillow is? Before Maggie, I really didn’t. Tonight I realized I don’t know anything about Mark Morris. In my mind, building a Mark Morris identity solely from Maggie’s tweets, I came up with: Mark Morris lived in Connecticut, was an adjunct dance professor at Yale, had a wife named Nancy, and was a good family friend of our neighbor, Maggie, when she was a child. Maggie’s mother, you know, ran the daycare at Yale University Seminary.

(What kind of unassailable background is that? I mean, your mom took care of the children of holy Yale graduate students? Have I interpreted this correctly? Does it not confer a biblical cast upon Maggie’s childhood?)

Maggie performed at Jacobs Pillow, where Mark Morris was the choreographer/coach and was creepily nice to Maggie.* Then Mr. Morris moved to Brooklyn and had a studio there, where Maggie would take her daughter to random dance classes and post about them on social media.

I just did a very fast internet search about Mark Morris and now understand that Mark Morris is nothing like what I thought. There is no wife named Nancy. He did one stint at Jacobs Pillow. He was never at Yale. Who is Nancy?

It reminds me that the Maggie madness is madness and I have to be a little more careful with how much I think about it.

*Jacobs Pillow lacks an apostrophe. Where is it? Who was Jacob?