Nothing exists but deadlines. The book is due. An article the next week. A lecture to be recorded. An abstract for a conference in Fall. Things will reopen by then, right? My wrists ache from typing. Sometimes with enough coffee all the world falls away and it’s just me standing in front of my computer living in another time and place. More hours of my day are devoted to the sixteenth century than the present. Despite the technology that makes up my every interaction, I seem to have regressed centuries. I feel at home among the natural historians writing about places they’ve never been. Imagine how dirty everyone was then, covered in perfume based in ambergris (i.e. whale vomit) that some distant sailor towed in from the sea. I avoid thinking about my partner, an ocean away in an Italian monastery, running a half marathon in circles around his house every day. For him, escape is physical exercise. For me, catharsis comes in the moment where the physical present falls away and invention beckons you in the form of a blinking cursor.

That catharsis is on a schedule. Its due to readers next week. No more uncertainty, thank you very much, I’ll abide my calendar notifications. I’ll keep to the schedule no matter how often my godmother coughs after returning from the hospital, filled with immunotherapy drugs that make her knuckles swell, slowing her typing to a steady drip as she fills Google classroom with Spanish homework. I’ll keep to the schedule no many times she asks for an explanation about how to upload an assignment to the drive. What is a drive? We drove together, both cloaked in masks to look at a house beside a lake in upstate New York. We imagined summers and kayaking and a garden filled with ferns without leaving the car. But that’s not the drive that we use to fill our time. Rather, we fill the drive with one document after another. For the students, nothing exists but deadlines. Lifelines of future meaning in a present infused with the constant realization of our own frail mortality.

[submitted on 4/18/2020]