day 13

I must say I'm rather tired of COVID. I was on Paxlovid and thought I was getting better. And I was. But that elusive negative test I was chasing never came. A faint T line appeared without fail every time to dash my hopes of rejoining society. I felt great for almost a week. I even went for a run, and despite the alarming wheezing noises my lungs emitted toward the end, it was one of my best runs in a while. Ever since I put on a fuck ton of weight. But Friday evening I was feeling suspiciously under the weather again, to the extent that I drove thirty minutes to get a proper COVID test, since the two different home tests I took contradicted each other and afforded no peace of mind. That test came back positive on Saturday, as did another home test I took, on which I was decidedly -- mockingly, even -- positive. And so apparently I find myself among a minority of patients treated with Paxlovid for whom the illness, much like the Seahawks before last season, makes an astonishing second-half comeback. I feel as sick and discombobulated as ever, though the silver lining of course is that I got to take off from work for a few days before I succumbed to nihilism.

 

I finished reading another library book, bringing my total for the year up to an unprecedented 2 books, if I'm keeping count. (I'm not. It's less embarrassing.) This, like the first, was a novel by Garth Greenwell. His only other novel, as a matter of fact: What Belongs to You. It's not PWP, unlike the majority of Cleanness: I would call it PW[ith]P. Garth Greenwell's old-school prose elevates everything he writes about and turns it into high art. It's almost too poetic at times. But so fucking effective. I found it impossible to tear myself away from the 30-odd-page paragraph in the second section of the book that brought to mind a musical direction to perform a certain passage "breathlessly". I don't know to what extent the narrator's life story, as told in that paragraph, was autobiographical, but Garth Greenwell has a way of writing about feelings, impressions, and the little details of everyday things that make you -- or at least made me -- feel like I was reading a biography of myself. I wonder how it must feel to be able to articulate your feelings so beautifully. I haven't allowed myself the indulgence in a long, long time, mostly because of how destructive the habit has been in the past. As a result I've been unable to wring even a drop of artistic vindication from my sorrows. It's probably just as well, for one tends to blow the importance of things out of proportion when giving oneself over to self-pity. On the other hand, stripping himself naked is probably what allowed Garth Greenwell to produce such fine art. For all the pretty words and learnedness of his novels, he basically gave us a glimpse into the literary equivalent of his browser history. I have a hard time believing that anyone who can write about sex and kinks with so much verisimilitude is doing anything other than giving an honest account of their own predilections. As a reader, your experience of the book is mercifully private, unless you find yourself in the audience of a very public reading, such as the one that Garth Greenwell gave when he was invited to give a talk at Google, at which he very prudently chose to read "Mentor" from Cleanness rather than any of the S&M stuff; but as the author, you're laying it all out there. That's the price you pay for making great art these days, and it's not one that I'm willing to pay. Certainly not for the likes of FOWLNEWT or FOWLNEWT 2 or any of the number of pretentious things I've written over the years when I believed for some reason that I could write.