There are times you know aren’t going to be any fun; you just have to get through them. Maybe there’s a deadline ahead you know is going to take all your resources to meet. Maybe there’s a grief that needs moving through. Or some kind of addiction you’ve decided to tackle. Or perhaps the world just doesn’t seem to be cooperating with your happiness, and you can’t figure out what you’re doing to cause it or whether it has anything to do with your actions and decisions at all, but you figure it has to change eventually.

My long short story, “Inbox Zero,” came out in the August - November 2020 issue of The Scarlet Leaf Review and is available online here. Also, a mini-Corona Lecture I wrote over the summer in response to a call for work from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a fantastic arts organization in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where I was an associate artist working with Geoff Dyer back in 2013, has been released on the ACA YouTube channel and is available here. Many thanks to both of these organizations for the work they do supporting artists and giving them an opportunity to share their work.

You know things have been crazy when the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas feels like a breather. And that free time I imagined opening up, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, either hasn’t showed up or did and I immediately filled it with other things. So it’s not as if I am just luxuriating my way through my days here. And corona virus hasn’t resolved itself, however encouraging the news of the vaccines may be. But I think it speaks to precisely how much the shared inner life of the republic was infected by the psychic architecture of our soon-but-not-soon-enough to be former president just how differently I and I suspect a lot of others feel.

It’s the third of four November Wednesdays here in the year 2020. In Minneapolis, we already have the tentative beginnings of the snow dance. I believe we’ve had to shovel twice so far—nothing too bad—with a few other days of flurries. It’s not yet consistently cold enough that this particular snow will remain with us until March. Thus the dance. Can I still park in the back of the driveway? Will the ice on the walk be melted by the sun or does it need to be attacked more directly? Will we have more or less snow on the ground by the end of the day? For now it’s still a question. By late December, the answer is never less.

This month’s lecture is very nearly written, and maybe it only feels like I’m behind schedule because the last Wednesday in October was three days closer to the end of the month than the last Wednesday of November is. Or maybe it’s because I, like everyone, lost some time and used up a lot of energy thinking about the election and the fate of our republic. But either way, it’s the time in the cycle when I shift from verbal to visual thinking. Some months I have what might be interesting ideas about what kind of images I want to use, but this isn’t one of those ones.

What with all the excitement of recent days, I forgot to post to the blog yesterday. I’ve been busy, and the world has been a little insistent about demanding its share of attention. But I can report that I’ve been faithfully constructing the new Corona Lecture, which will be another Wave Machine. There were thoughts about waiting to write it until the election was decided, the election having been something I touched on in the previous Wave Machine, released at the end of October, but since it’s difficult to know when that will happen—when the ballots will finally be counted, and then when they’ll be accepted by enough people that we can move ahead with the life of the Republic—I decided to carry on.