Up the River

When the Internet went down this morning, at first I was all WTF! Then a profound sense of relief settled over me. Free at last!

Squeam never dies. It just mutates and migrates to new territory. The good news: I haven’t worried about bedbugs or scabies or lice for nearly a year—where would I get them anyway? The bad ews: I’m now morbidly squeamish about aerosolization and fomite contamination and breached distances—the new invisible threats.

During the pandemic, as humanity teetered on the edge of demise, the rest of the natural kingdom appeared to be on the rise. At least that’s the way it looked in the parks of the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  As the pandemic flattened and people emerged from lockdown, the great lawns grew intensely, surreally green. Gardens bloomed in brighter-than-normal profusions that lingered longer on the stem than usual; deep into autumn, new blossoms continued to erupt. Throughout the summer and early fall, cardinals and scarlet tanagers flashed their brights, boldly posing like models for photographs. Chipmunks, once rarely seen in New York City, scampered across the dusty paths of Central Park just missing sandaled feet. In Riverside Park, obese squirrels, bellies hanging over their fleshy thighs, strode confidently up to pedestrians, rose on their haunches like dogs, and begged for treats. Rats the size of spaniels sunned themselves on the paving stones of the upper pedestrian walkway in...

Recently I caught up with a really old TV drama series—The Newsroom, from 2012. I don’t know how I missed it when it aired, because it has one of the great rousing speeches of TV-dom. In the first episode, a college student asks a star newscaster what he thinks makes America the greatest country in the world. Excerpts from his rant: “And with a straight face, [you’re saying] that America is so star-spangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The U.K. France. Italy. Germany. Spain. Australia ... Belgium! has freedom ... 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of ‘em have freedom … “Just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know. One of them is: There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality...

 Why do men like to tweet their dicks and force women to watch them masturbate?

You would think having a superior sense of smell would be a good thing. Like having a brilliant brain or an athletic gift. But no.  Having a really great nose is like having a psychosis. You sense dangers where nasonormative people don’t. You recoil from stinks to which they are oblivious. You’re distracted by their expensive perfumes, their body odor, the cooking smells on their clothes. Everyone thinks you’re hallucinating—and kind of annoying. But consider the facts. A year ago, I smelled a rat—literally. My concerns were brushed aside, but the odor lingered. Lo and behold, a few days later, the super pointed out mouse turds and urine under the kitchen sink when he came to fix a pipe.  Natural gas is an unrelenting curse. I smell it often, and there’s always a reason, if I’m rude enough to investigate; sometimes a neighbor’s pilot light has guttered out, sometimes our own. Don’t even get me started on the water. About once a year it smells—exactly—like dirt. My husband...

According to the Mayo Clinic website, insomnia is the inability to fall asleep or stay asleep or the propensity to wake up too early. Insomnia that lasts days or weeks is acute. Insomnia that lasts more than a month is chronic.  Hmm, I’ve struggled with all three types of insomnia, sometimes simultaneously, my entire life. The only time I’ve slept well is when I had pneumonia my senior year of college. I was so sleepy, and it was so blissful to be so sleepy, that I delayed going to the infirmary until it was “almost too late,” according to the doctor who saw me. What do I do during those long wakeful hours? I go over all the mean and horrible things I did that day, all the things I said that I shouldn’t have, all the things I didn’t say but wished I had. (There’s never a lack of material—each day brings new misbehaviors and missed behaviors.)  I do 4-7-8 breathing. (Inhale through the nose for 4 counts, hold for 7, exhale forcefully through pursed lips for 8; repeat 4 times. Y...