In the supermarket after the game. There’s no such thing as pretzel rods anymore. Ever since the pandemic. You can buy a bag of black truffle sea salt potato chips but no pretzel rods. I dropped a couple things trying to carry them away from the checkout counter and the guy ahead of me apologized profusely like it was him who knocked them out of my arms. Then the cashier offered me a bag and didn’t make me pay.

It was a quiet time at the bar. Just a few of us out back, a few inside. A man with long white hair and a goatee sat at the table in the corner of the yard, smoking a cigar that never seemed to get small. Not paying attention to the game. But there just the same.

Day 2

In one of my last dreams of the night I had a strong feeling it was 1:07 in the afternoon and I felt the requisite guilt of oversleeping, wasting half the day. When I awoke and asked Sara the time it was seven something. I lay in bed awhile trying to remember. 

A jogger ran past on the beach, winding up and delivering in a cricket bowler’s motion every ten paces or so.

Supply chain disruptions have made odd things scarce. At the supermarket there was no beer in cans. No plain Red Stripe, only apple, melon. Someone told us we’re lucky, they couldn’t find chlorine for the pool until a couple days ago. I lie back under the sun drinking Guinness Foreign Extra, twice the usual ABV. I guess the Irish can’t handle it.

I got up out of the hammock to watch the sunset and caught the three seconds when it goes from a sliver to nothing. 

I finished my short book about the end of the world. 

A lot of whining sirens all day today, and into the night. Just like a year ago when we were hunkered up inside wondering what the fuck. Lots of wind too, slamming bedroom doors.

I stood in line for vegetables at the corner farmer’s market. It wound and stretched around the stand, off the pavement onto the grass, over a path, almost into the woods. But six feet apart, it wasn’t that long after all. Everyone peering down over their masks at their phones. I thought about the beginning of this in March and how life was the same of course but different in weird, small ways: we favored an Italian restaurant for delivery back then but we haven’t ordered since and I can’t remember why or if there was a reason why. Our hallway was cluttered with different things. We had no cats. It’s as though years had been condensed into months. It was forever ago. You could just about trace the time in the lines of your face.

The fireworks begin at dusk and go on late into the night, sometimes in quick bursts, sometimes every few minutes, no rhyme or reason. Of course they’re in honor of nothing this year. Each concussion is an anti-celebration, an assertion of how fucked we all are and everything is. Boom, boom, boom, boom, bang.

9:23. It’s always 9:23.

At seven o’clock from our roof there was the usual commotion down below, claps and honks and sirens, but almost no one else up on top. A neighbor to the right clapped gamely but inaudibly with garden-gloved hands before lying down to fuck around with the vines curling up around his deck. New Jersey glimmered far away. What would the guys from WBGO in Newark say tomorrow morning when my clock radio goes off at 7:30? It’s going to be a hot one.

I flipped through the channels and landed on a tennis match. Was it a replay from years back? It didn’t seem to be. Anonymous players and no crowd. Not even empty stands. No stands. A plywood barrier where they would start. Mask-clad figures hovered just off court, watching vaguely, attending to some thing or other. So it was current, I thought. But then I looked again and wondered whether it was a video game. There was a vague stiffness in the movements, of the players but especially of the others, and of the leaves on the nearby trees and everything else. There was a suspicious emptiness in the grassy area adjacent to the court. No people or cars parked or infrastructure—why bother coding it? The gleam of the sun on the players’ shirts seemed too real—so unreal, really. The match proceeded a while and a more frightening thing became clear: it was real.