Screwed up

Forgive me if everything I’m about to write is redundant to you: if you follow pop news, you probably know all of this already.  Yet the overlap between the music press and mainstream media is not as great as those of us who spend our mornings reading Okayplayer and The FADER often imagine it is, so […]

Tumbling polyhedrons

Technically, I never stopped playing Dungeons & Dragons. My regular game with my childhood friends went on ice when my obsession with music swallowed all my other interests, but you could still find me on my Commodore 64 at night, bathing in the pixels of Telengard, or Bard’s Tale, or whatever other fantasy titles the […]

Interiors

On our trip back from the ocean, we stopped at a classic Jersey farm stand in the Monmouth County suburbs. It seemed like a decent bet. We’d been there before, and it had always been wide open and well ventilated. Very few people on the highway sidewalks (the farm stand, like so many south of […]

Operation shutdown

If you follow New Jersey news, you’ve probably encountered Gustavo Martínez Contreras. He’s a multimedia reporter for the Asbury Park Press, but he mostly covers Lakewood, and Lakewood is a place that regularly makes the news. There’s been more than a little virus in Lakewood, and Contreras has been on top of that story. His […]

Uprising

History suggests that pandemics are followed by civil unrest. I still didn’t think that the upheaval would arrive quite so soon, or quite as forcefully, as it has. Well before the first wave has passed, protesters, some masked and some extremely unmasked, are out in large numbers, shoulder to shoulder, shouting, engaging in activities that […]

Shore leave

A half block from the beach, the fog began. From the south side of Stockton Lake in Manasquan, the leading edge was visible, streaming through the branches of the shade trees and the low roofs of the buildings of the National Guard station in Sea Girt. Manasquan is renowned for its surf break, and beachgoers […]

Falling behind

I had a great cinderblock of business to contend with this morning and afternoon, and there wasn’t any way to get it rolling last night. No matter what I’m writing, I tend to lose myself in the struggle to string together the right words. That’s better than hours spent wondering if I’ve contracted the coronavirus. […]

The river

As has been pointed out to me by friend and foe alike, I’ve got a big nose. At this time of the year, it’s an itchy one. That makes the KN95 mask problematic for me. I find that no matter how I wiggle the little metal bar, it presses down hard on the bridge. I’ve […]

Spring cleaning

Hilary woke up and began to put the flat back together. She swept and washed the floors, cleaned the inside of the stove, applied a coat of polish to our table. She gently encouraged me to think about things that I hadn’t thought about in awhile; for instance, why has there been a big stack […]

Chloroquine revisited

It is hard to overestimate how wonderful it would be if hydroxychloroquine worked. The long search for a pharmaceutical intervention in the progress of the coronavirus would come to an end, not with a new compound that’s difficult to manufacture, but through the re-purposing of a fairly simple one that’s already in wide use. It […]