Jeremy Bearimy

The night passes in a sleepless limbo of anxiety and dread. The soundtrack to this twilight toggles between an audiobook of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the roaring of the furnace, episodes of the Great British Baking Show, and the blustering night outside. It feels both as if the night will never end and as if morning is coming very, very quickly.

I get up to word from 45, extending social distancing at least four more weeks, combined with experts talking about a much longer disruption of social life, combined with hospitalizations ramping up in an already-strained New York City. Rain pounds the roof and streets.

Time feels off today, as if moving rapidly and not at all. I think of The Good Place, which my partner and I have been re-watching. At one point, the demon Michael explains to the four human heroes how time moves in the afterlife.

Are we in something like the dot? Tuesdays, and July, and also sometimes Never, the place where nothing never occurs. Jeremy Bearimy certainly seems as apt a description as anything of my sense of time this morning. I am embodying my inner Chidi. I have a stomachache.