Overlooked amidst the noise, but still significant: New Jersey and New York visitors to Florida must now go through a fourteen-day quarantine before entering the state. This decision was made by the governor of Florida, who has been criticized for his refusal to close the beaches. Yesterday’s order felt like a compensatory move — a […]
Author Archives: tris
Pharmacy
I’m afraid to go to the pharmacy. But we knew we had to do it: we had to get medicine for Hilary. She’d tried to get the doctor to mail it to us, but his office called in the prescription instead. I suppose if we’d really been paranoid, we could have asked the pharmacy to […]
Uneasy Sunday
A guy, outside the liquor store at the intersection of 4th Street and Newark Ave.: “they’re not going to put you in jail for being outside.” Policemen would have their hands full. Lots of foot traffic on Jersey and Newark yesterday — people getting provisions, walking dogs, talking to friends from the safety of the […]
Spring forward, lock down
At 1 p.m. the Governor delivers the order we all knew was coming. All businesses defined by the state as nonessential must close for the duration at 9 p.m. tonight. How many of those businesses will reopen is anybody’s guess. Sit-down restaurants will still be allowed to do takeout and delivery, but realistically, that’s no […]
Rights and wrongs
By now, you’ve probably seen the interactive world map through which Johns Hopkins is charting the spread of COVID-19. It’s part video game UI, part stock report, and all alarming. The Hopkins tally reinforces something that’s been widely reported: the number of deaths in Italy now exceeds those in China, even though twice as many […]
On Zoom
I’ve never used Zoom before tonight. I’m not sure I ever want to do it again. But for forty-five minutes or so, I got to see my sister and her children, my brother-in-law, a pair of sibling cousins of mine who were central to my youth and remain important to me, my mother, and three […]
Five day count
We woke up to the news that the University will remain online-only for the rest of the semester. We knew this was coming, but it’s still dispiriting. The original plan, which was sent last Wednesday, was to reconvene classes on March 30. That seemed optimistic to us, a real long-shot, but as long as it […]
Slightly past the ides
I’ve put this off long enough. Everything I’ve done for a long time has been governed by superstition, so I must believe that journals bring bad luck. But I wish I’d kept a daily record in the wake of the destruction of the Twin Towers, and along with that collapse, the loss of the sense […]
About 2019: Albums
My very favorite album of 2019 contains the following stanza: The day my daddy died/I was down the street/I lost my only friend/people don’t grow on trees. This awkward, guileless verse was not artfully muffled, or hidden in an outro, or ‘verbed out and tucked into the mix. It is, like all of the other […]
About 2019: Singles
The Song That Shook The World At the risk of stating the obvious, 7 is by no means a good set. Then again, it’s not like the principals were trying to make one. If you were in Lil Nas X’s position, you probably wouldn’t sweat the details, either: you’d figure the sell-by date was coming at […]