ANOTHER FRIDAY THAT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE IT. For 60 years I looked at the morning Friday paper to see what new movies were coming out that day. Some seemed so urgent you couldn’t wait to see them. I liked the ones in the small ads best. I didn’t get to all of them. But that Friday showcase was a big deal. Nothing Netflix does or Prime does to entice me entices me like those ads did. HBO either. There’s too much too many. I can’t tell which ones would have been in the small ads. I almost never could find one in Blockbuster either. The walls were filled with so much it was too much. After awhile all the shiny titles on the walls looked like ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’. An embarrassment of riches? You could say that.

I CAN HEAR PEOPLE at 7:00 every night clapping and hooting and whistling and cheering. I’m in the back of the building so I’m not a participant but I’ve been out on the sidewalk a couple times when it started and you find yourself clapping and you find your eyes watering.

        In bed reading. Again a little late.

IN THE DAYS HERE RIGHT AFTER 9/11, many of us in the East Village went to bars every night. You could still taste the destruction in the air and you didn’t wait till after your third pint to ask for a shot, you got one as soon as you sat down. You talked to strangers, your eyes watered. You watched CNN on all the screens. Regular programming was suspended. But later in the week you heard ESPN was coming back on and you were there in the bar to see it come on and when you looked up to see what they’d started with, they were showing highlights in slow motion of Michael Jordan and maybe I Believe I Can Fly was playing in the background. What you knew the network was showing him for and what we could see clearly even through our wet eyes was that he was the best embodiment of what we alone still had.

‘The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.’
                                                        -Virginia Woolf

AS THE WEEKS OF THIS ISOLATION UNFOLD, I’m reading more than I was when it started. Feels good. Reading will always feel like you’re doing something good. Binge-watching seems like you’re eating a whole bag of cookies. Even though people talk about their binge-watching as though they’d just hiked the Appalachian Trail.

Heading out to the bodega across the street to get a cup of coffee and some other stuff, maybe a black and white cookie. I had to check my phone when I got up to know for sure it was Friday which has always been the best day. Good luck everybody.