I have never had fantastic luck with dentists, and it got worse when I moved here. I had a dentist in 1994 who, when drilling my tooth, hit a nerve and told me it shouldn't have been there and when I cried told me that Americans were babies. The dentist who (horrified) fixed that was great, then she left the practice. The next one I found was incredible, private practice and worth it; she emigrated with her husband. The person who took over her practice told me that a good way to lose weight was if you had to have your jaw wired shut and I should think about that. The dentist after her was clearly comparably better, because that was a pretty low bar, and also just a pleasant person.

But after about a decade of perfectly acceptable care, she got… sloppy? The nurse who had been with her since the beginning left a couple years ago, and it was a different one the next time, and the next time again. And I know that's a sign, but I just really couldn't bear to look for a dentist again. I got some fillings that didn't feel quite right, but I thought: maybe this is part of the aging process, that your teeth just start to fall apart. She fixed a cavity and when I told her I felt like the filling was too small, she drilled on the other side to make it match. And it did match, then, and I thought well maybe the previous tooth's filling had been too big? I can't see inside my mouth, and I don't have x-ray vision. I'm not a dentist; I have to trust she knows what she's doing. Before the first lockdown I had an appointment because I thought I needed a filling; I got there and told her my tooth felt really wrong, like the filling was loose in the hole, she refused to x-ray it and told me we'd get it next time because she was busy. It broke during lockdown.

So anyway I got a new dentist. They did an x-ray, which I obviously appreciated, and showed me that my last three fillings had not been exactly full, more like about halfway into the cavity. So those had to be pulled out and done again, plus I had a new cavity. In the last six months I have been to the new dentist I think six times and spent I don't even know how much on getting my teeth back to where they were three years ago. When I close my mouth, all my molars line up, my jaw sits comfortably without my having to jut it into place. And I remember that my teeth used to do that, but it had been such incremental shifts away from normal from that I hadn't noticed how far it had shifted (in fact, it was seeing myself talking on a zoom call when I realized how much my jaw was off).

Despite what you may have heard, if a frog is placed in a pan that is gradually heated until it reaches boiling, the frog will jump out at the point that the water becomes uncomfortably hot. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, the extent to which I adjust to situations. I don't want to be difficult, I don't want to be overly fussy, and I recognize that some things that matter to me don't matter to other people and sometimes we just need to get along with each other and with living. On the other hand, the point at which I jump out of the water, I turn around and stare at the pan, dumbfounded.  The feeling that I have been experiencing is threefold: one, I did not realize that the problem I had was possible to fix or worthy of being fixed; two, how the hell did I think not being able to close my mouth on both sides was a thing I should adjust to? What took me so long? How long could I have been comfortable, if I'd just acknowledged even to myself that I was uncomfortable?; and three, I am so happy to be able to chew properly again. And so now: is this a thing I have learned about dentists, or can I perhaps I apply it to other things?

It's 8:15 pm, New Year's Eve. It sounds like a war outside already, all the fireworks. I admit that I've somewhat lost my taste for small fireworks in the last few years (I still like the huge ones overhead, though I feel sorry about the damage they cause, now that I know. I still like them, it's just not unmitigated joy). Still, I'm glad that people are celebrating, however it brings them happiness. Supposedly at 9 pm we should all be safe in our houses, breathing only the air of the people we already live with. We'll see.

Strange year, no? I had a glorious vacation in California in January, loved up on my family and friends, had adventures on planes, trains, and automobiles. I felt loved. Then I came home for about five minutes, turned around and went back to the other side of the US for my aunt's funeral. She was important to me in my childhood and it was nice to see her husband, sons, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, cousins, all gathered. I still have a peppermint lifesaver to remember her by, but my memories are solid anyway.

Then I came home, Czech Theater put on a play, and the next week the whole country locked down in response to the pandemic. It was … I don't want to say "funny" but that's the word I have. I was so absolutely exhausted, like exhausted in my soul, and I needed a break. I didn't mean for the whole world to have a pandemic, I would have just stayed home quietly alone! I did not need existential dread for people in general while simultaneously being personally glad for the time out, and then the whiplash of guilt for that feeling.

People kept saying that Now We Have Learned and Now We Know and When This Is Over We Will Be Different. Will we? I think that some of us already knew that about half of the people around us, many in positions of power, are selfish and horrible. Let's say a third. Maybe some of us learned that another third already understand deeply and intrinsically what community means, the needs of the many are entwined with the needs of the one. I don't think I learned anything I hadn't learned four years ago. I'm glad if somebody did. When this is over, we will go back to how we were before, is what I think, though I'd be delighted to be wrong on that.

In the summer there was a moment where it seemed like this country had made it through by shutting down early and hard. I took a lovely vacation in Greece, where I ate my body weight in feta cheese and swam in the ocean and read and slept and laughed until my sides hurt.

Then we came back and schools reopened and we went back to something like normal and now we're shut down again. If I knew I had a week, a month, a year, it would be easier to just buckle in and sit, see where we go. I try to guess but nobody really knows.

What have I processed this year? I am afraid of being unwanted and of being useless. I've seen how I respond to situations where I feel that way and it's not how I want to be; I've seen it before but now maybe with greater clarity. It feels like I may eventually get to the point where I respond in a way that pleases me; I'm not there but it's a thing I can imagine. I think I've gotten better at accepting people where they are and arranging myself accordingly. I find it difficult to say what's changed when a lot of the things that were hard for me (social gatherings, for example) haven't been a presence, but I think I've gotten a little better at being in the moments I am in, whatever they are. 

I worked a lot. I meditated more. I watched a ton of movies, which mostly made me happy. I slept more than usual but still not as much as I would like. I remember in my 20s if I could sleep I did, for hours, I would spend a day in bed drifting between books and thoughts and writing and dreams. I can't seem to do that anymore. Still, I slept more than usual. My cooking got a little better. Squire and I settled into a pretty pleasant roommate routine. I got better at standup and did ok with shifting to online. I adapted and performed a play with some friends. I increased contact with some people, regular phone calls or longer letters, knowing that we wouldn't see each other in person for who knows. I am sometimes profoundly lonely, but that was always true.

Anyway, it's 8:45. I'm going to go stand on the balcony and look at the moon. It's midnight somewhere. Happy New Year. 

I am the kind of person who likes things to be done properly. I feel that there is a right way and a wrong way to do many, many things and I get quite distressed when people do it a different way. This makes me really good at my job, which is to make things correct in agreement with a host of very specific rules. It probably makes me a little annoying in person sometimes. As I've gotten older I've tried to channel most of this energy into things where there are objective rights and wrongs (and to recognize that not all the things that seem objective to me in fact are).

Here are some things that people get wrong that annoy me:the words to songs, historical costumes, fictional costumes, quotes of any kind but especially movie quotes, sidewalk behavior, traffic rules, spelling, historical facts, facts related to me, correct words for things esp but not only when they get it wrong on purpose, behavior related to public transportation (both official and common sense), manners when there's no cultural excuse, how to break rules, grammar, the use of the word Nazi.
That took me exactly 2 minutes. I'm trying to say that I not only understand this feeling of low-level annoyance, I BREATHE it. 

But some of these things are really gatekeeping — deciding who deserves access. So I am trying really hard to dial back my annoyance not in terms of whether there is an objective right or wrong, but in terms of whether the person could know better, and more importantly in terms of whether the wrong does actual harm. Grammar mistakes from people not lucky enough to have had my education? No harm. Factual errors from non-famous strangers on social media? No harm but maybe avoid those people because they are tedious. A dog off leash at a children's park? Potential harm. A dress with a zipper at a Jane Austen ball? No harm.

I'm not trying to say that people who experience irritation at other people who are not on their level are WRONG because that's too meta even for me. I'm just saying I don't think it's making me better in any way to be so irritated by people who don't care as much as I do, and if you're like me, maybe you would benefit from that perspective.

Yesterday I met a Czech woman who doesn't pay any attention to international news or news in general, and she doesn't speak much English, so she likes social media but only for the pictures. She had been surprised on Tuesday when instagram seemed broken, and all the artists that she follows had black profiles. She looked into it, learned about it, was shocked. She wouldn't have known. 

So if all you did was black out your profile photo, I personally don't think that's enough. But I don't think that's nothing. And I don't think you're doing it wrong, if you're trying. And I think that — just like correctly quoting Monty Python and not standing in doorways — I'm gonna keep working on just doing it right myself, as well as I can.

The problem with talking about seeing the light at the end of a tunnel is that it presumes that you are in a tunnel, a unpleasant place, dark, and that you will see, at the end of this, something hopeful, an end to your suffering, light. A light you will want to go to. Emerging, blinking, dumbfounded, into a new fresh bright reality. Well that’s not really the problem; the problem is that it leaves out my father’s joke about the light being an oncoming train. But I digress.

When I have emerged from darkness, blinking, as I say, dumbfounded into a new fresh bright reality, my main feeling is that there has been a revelation, that I have learned something, which something I promptly forget when I plunge back into darkness again. My life in this way feels less like a nice straightforward journey by train, from tunnel to light, and more like a carousel, going in circles. A noisy circus ride, endlessly up and down on the same horse and then a moment when I catch a glimpse of myself in one of the mirrors on the center pole and I see everything with sudden clarity. Then the horse keeps going, the alignment breaks, I lose sight of that moment, epiphany glides into memory, is gone. The cacophony of calliope music, the pre-recorded organs of hell, until at some point we align again and I remember: Oh, right, this clarity, I knew this once, here it is again. At this point all I’m hoping for is that when the ride grinds to a halt I’ll be in a bright spot, though in any case the ride will have ended.

I was in therapy last week gazing at my kind therapist’s kind face. He has a terrible haircut, the balding ponytail look and on the greasy side usually. I can’t take him entirely seriously because of that but when I’m talking he looks at me full in the eyes like he has nowhere he’d rather be and I appreciate that. Also sometimes he looks genuinely moved by stories I tell him and sometimes I’d pay for that, so I do. I was telling him a story about how I was working on believing I was loved whether or not people said it out loud, and it felt like a great insight was coming on except I could see that he saw it coming because he’d seen it before, I’d seen it before, nothing new. Turkey in the Straw.

Okay but what if I think of it as a train ride? What if I imagine the revelation that I told Dr. Anton last week as being a train ride through a tunnel, to the light at the end. What if I imagine a train. A compartment. You and I in a train compartment, two people sitting across from each other. What if I imagine we are traveling somewhere, somewhere we have never traveled, gladly beyond, so to speak. The train is central European, the seats the cheap but durable wine-red vinyl of every train seat, forty plus years of sausages and lard-smeared bread eaten by people sitting here, forty plus years of beer cans bought at the train station and popped once the train is in motion, forty plus years of children who didn’t want to sit still, grandmothers whose support hose constricted at the waist and inevitably sagged at the ankles, couples trying to lessen the monotony of their relationship by taking it on a trip. We have already run out of things to say and we are sitting in what I like to imagine is a companionable silence though I’m not looking at your face in case anything there contradicts me.

I see the tunnel as we approach it and I see my chance. Before we go in, I force my eyes into yours. “Why won’t you just say that you love me sometimes?” I ask, and then we are plunged into darkness. My plan, to the extent that I have one, is that you will tell me the truth in the dark. This is why I have always preferred darkness: because that’s where the truth is. Late at night, the house will tell you where it hurts; the tiniest wind and it creaks and moans. People whisper the best secrets in the dark. And even my own darkness is so much more true to me than my own light. So we will enter the tunnel now. You will tell me the truth. Here, in the darkness.

But the tunnel is too short. I always forget that European tunnels are shorter than their Asian counterparts. As if they know that what can happen in the dark is more trouble than they want. A scream. A murder. So we’re plunged into the light at the end of the tunnel in no time, and I haven’t even shifted my eyes from your face yet. I have the full brunt of your gaze when you say it.

“I won’t say I love you because I don’t.”

That’s it then, the light. The revelation. The moment of blinding, absolute clarity. The thing I could have seen coming, if I’d looked.

*joined a writing group and this was the prompt

So how are you doing? I can't quite pin down how things feel; some days completely normal, others so suffused with strangeness that I can't breathe (and then I think: am I sick? is this what difficulty breathing feels like?). I find that I have very strong opinions, which I guess I usually do, but I mean even stronger. And then sometimes I have an opinion that barely even feels like anything, a thought that could be blown over by the least wind. 

On March 8, the play I was organizing closed after three sold-out amazing performances. I was socially exhausted and made a note to myself that I needed to dial it back a bit. A group of friends was planning a trip to New York and I decided not to go, partly because I'd been in the US twice already in 2020, partly for financial reasons, partly because I needed some quiet time. On March 12, the Czech government announced that as of March 13 restaurants would be closed from 8 pm. I went out for a drink with some friends and it felt so strange I couldn't stay, though I wasn't sure at the time and am not sure in retrospect whether it felt like we were being risky or whether it was part of my needing to be away from people. 

On the 14th and 15th, we held auditions for the next play in my apartment because the club we normally have them in was closed. I wiped everything down with disinfectant before and after each audition. We were mostly quiet; somber I guess. I still can't say whether it was my existing social exhaustion or whether I felt it then, what was coming. I remember one man going through the cabinets in the kitchen looking for tea, and I felt like screaming stop touching my things, and that was either when I started being afraid or realized I was already afraid. On the 16th, everything except food stores closed down, gatherings of more than 2 people were forbidden, masks were required, boom. Nobody on the street but dog walkers. Little sound other than birds and ambulances. 

Between March 12 and April 17 I think I left the house once. One person came over. I sat on the balcony sometimes, watching people in masks go to or from the grocery store or walk their dogs, women with a widening gray stripe in the center of their hair, men really expressing themselves with their mask choices. I thought for a while that everyone looked worried, but then I decided to think they looked neutral and they looked that way. Now I imagine them happy. When your face is hidden it's really hard to tell. 

I filled out a map form to mark where I usually go and where I go now, and my apartment and most of the places I go are in the same square so nothing's changed. I was already working from home so nothing's changed. I used to see people on video calls that I couldn't see in person so nothing's changed. I helped translate some political stuff for free and I donated money to local causes so nothing's changed. 

I've watched a lot of television and I love television so that makes me happy. I wanted to start exercising when the play finished and I've started exercising and I don't love it but I do it every day anyway. I wanted to take a break from alcohol and I mostly have though since I haven't been in situations where I wanted it that doesn't seem so impressive. I did standup and an open mic night online and both of those were pleasant experiences, though they were also the only time I felt that I missed people in general. 

The shutdown was thorough and people were pretty compliant. In the last week so few people have died here. They're reopening businesses here, letting groups hang out again, removing a lot of restrictions. Masks still required in public. I honestly feel like they're trying to increase the infection rate a little so they can shut things down again. Like all governments I see a T-Rex, incompetence in the comically tiny arms and ravenous cruelty in the teeth. Even if this one is more benevolent than the one I come from, it's ultimately self-serving and whenever I feel like I don't know what it's doing, I believe it's doing something to feed itself.

I don't know, I feel okay. I just wanted to write this down, so I wouldn't forget how it felt. Sometimes it felt like a lot. Sometimes it didn't feel like anything. Maybe what is unusual isn't how it feels, but that I've had so much time to think about how it feels? I guess that's a good thing, generally.  

I'm fine. I mean, I'm fine. Solitude and self-reflection has always been kind of my default state, you know. Staring at walls. I was saying I need a break a long time before this happened. Already said which day would be my last day in a group of more than three people. So the government said two but that's okay. I mean it's fine. More than fine really, because now there are phones and the internet so I don't even have to miss anybody. Well of course I do, intensely, but I don't have to. Sure I think about death but I think about death all the time anyway. Maybe this is a living abroad thing, that you become keenly aware at some point that you will die far away from where you were born, not only far from the place but the people, far away from the girls you played hopscotch with, if you played hopscotch, the boys you kissed in empty classrooms during recess, if you kissed boys at all, the people you once had long phone conversations with, kinking and straightening the phone cord's coils as the conversation lagged, lifted, fell silent, back when we said goodbye before we left the conversation. We used to tell people to stop talking by clipping imaginary scissors in the air, as if to cut the cord; now we slash our own throats. All far away now. The first time I moved nobody died but we never spoke again anyway and the second time I moved a lot of people died and the third time I moved I was gone so long that whether or not they died a lot of people disappeared. Of course, some disappearances are a relief, a blessed silence. And some conversations continue in my head still. My fingers make a tentative snip in the air but I'm not ready to end those conversations. Sometimes you don't even have to move and the conversation ends anyway and I guess that's okay. Dragging my fingers across my throat, the words can't come out now, can they? I miss them, of course I miss them, but they aren't there anymore, not the way I miss them. One night I dreamed I was talking to a person about someone I had lost and they were the same person. See this is why I needed a break anyway. I mean I'm fine. One thing I did in addition to work which continues to roll in and insist on being so ordinary and normal and lovely, thank you work, you've always been there for me, anyway one thing I did was read through a virtual stack of letters looking for patterns. I look at the person I was and I think how was I that person. I see myself there like some caged animal where I am trying so hard to be myself and to be right and natural, a representative of myself in my own habitat, more or less, and I am also throwing shit at the bars of my prison, the spectators, zoos are terrible and it was myself put me in there. Do you know how hard it is to stay authentically yourself when part of that authentic self wishes more than anything to be loved. How many conversations have you had in which you translated your words from your own rich native language into a formula by which you hoped to be understood. I'm honestly not sure I know how to communicate any other way anymore. Consciously or otherwise, what's my goal here, that's what I'm moving towards. Sometimes I forget to ask what your goal is but sometimes everybody's goals are so damn clear. The last time I went out in public there were so many people, speaking and speaking, and each of them was saying listen to me like me admire me, nothing more, over and over, and they shouted over each other and I couldn't hear anything but their shouting and I left because I'm not sure I'm different. I would like to be.

In 1989, I moved to Japan. This was seven years after AIDS was first clinically reported in the United States, after Reagan's press secretary had laughed about it, after Rock Hudson. But it was before things got really bad, before I understood how bad they would get. My move was not connected, but it is related to my perception of things. I moved to Japan, and as this was obviously before facebook, before the internet, I lost contact with a lot of my friends in what felt like a natural way. People change, their priorities change, we move away, move on. When I came back three years later, it seemed to me that about a third of the people I'd known were dead. Frankly, considering my friend circles, it's a very low number. Some friends, like me, got scared and careful early. Some of my friends are HIV positive and taking medication and surviving well. Some of us are just ridiculously lucky, I guess. This feels to me like a dark time I lived through, because I have suffered some of the repercussions of it (Michael, who introduced me to Cocteau Twins, dead; Tim, who loved movies, dead; Jason, who just wanted to be loved so badly, dead…). But I didn't, I wasn't there, I only heard about it, I saw the art and felt profoundly moved, read in the paper about the loss and knew the world was shifting but I didn't live through it like my friends who stayed on the ground tending sores and making phone calls to estranged families and the bleak and terrible humor of San Francisco real estate prices.

Every World AIDS Day (other days, too, of course) I think about this. I know the epidemic is going on still, which is just impossible to fathom for me. But I think particularly about where I was when I became aware of it. It's not my pain being commemorated. I don't have a right to speak. But I also think about what world we are in now, the loss of those voices, we are all still suffering. Some of my friends would have done nothing interesting. Some would have turned out to be people I didn't talk to anyway. Surely this is true of the population at large. Not every loss needs to be tragic to be a loss. The powerful play goes on, though, and they might have contributed a verse. What would art be like now, what would politics be, if those voices hadn't been silenced.

I don't know. I looked away for a minute and the landscape shifted. Sometimes I wonder if my focused extreme attention on people who don't necessarily appreciate it is related to that, to the fear that if I blink I might lose them. If you lost someone to AIDS, I am so sorry for your loss.