Don’t know why I feel so decent this day. I don’t deserve this. I dreamed quite strenuously about circumstances beyond my control. I was supposed to give a concert at a concert hall but there was no piano and the hall had been booked for another performer or ensemble. My high school piano teacher was to blame. She had gotten too old to bother with this stuff and did not care. As the audience formed it became clear to me that this was not my audience. The quantity and the sartorial appointments of this crowd was beyond my reach. Out of my league. I woke wide awake at exactly midnight. On a hunch I opened the front door and found a new computer keyboard I had ordered the day before. It will replace a long-used Logitech wireless backlit that no longer is backlit and which has lost several keys. I am tabbing on a white plastic nub where the tab key used to be, as well as the CAPS LOCK. It’s been interesting improvising ways around the computer with a keyboard that has become a sort of lipogram.

I got a pneumonia vaccine yesterday. I did not think a pneumonia vaccine existed. I thought it was incurable and that pneumonia kills everybody when nothing else will. It’s ultimately what killed my mother, though her ailments were numerous. Now I’m told I can never get pneumonia. Does this mean I live forever with every other known ailment trying to silence me, get rid of me, put me out of this misery.

I don’t know why but at the doctor’s office yesterday I felt death encroaching, though I have no reason to believe the end is nigh. I will likely die poor, penniless even. Potters Field would suit me but I have other options. The new doctor who replaced my previous PCP (I think he retired) is young and confident. She is Bangladeshi-American, as I learned from her Instagram page. I wasn’t staking her out, just looking for reviews or whatnot. I only found two reviews. One was 5-star, the other 1-star. It reminded me of the first time I ever looked up a doctor online. A gastroenterologist who was going to perform a procedure. The dude had a 1-star rating on Yelp, which seemed ominously humorous at first, but the lone reviewer was obviously an asshole. As my bartender friends used to say, “Yelp is where the assholes go.” 

Feeling decent but distant. The dreams were very mind-intensive. They were squeezing my brain and stuffing me into a deeper sleep than usual, or so it seemed in the moment.

Looking around this work space. The carpeting, I am told, is all squares. Each square is removable. Genius. They look like tetris pieces in the patterns they form. They make me feel like I’m a falling piece in a game that never ends. Ceilings are mostly exposed. Wires and pipes and I don’t know what else. Surveillance cameras, I suppose. It’s taken some time but I think I’m all-in on this new schedule, warts and all. I miss a lot by being out the middle days of the week. Communication is not this group’s strong suit. So when I miss something I don’t even know enough to ask about it. I think about going back to my previous life but I know it will never materialize. I was lying to myself about my so-called business. It was never successful. I wasted a lot of years on it. In many ways I feel like a failure in life. But these are not doleful thoughts. Just thoughts.

Thinking again about the woman I was with most of last year, the epic of it all. Should I give her another chance? I don’t even know. One of the real bummers about this job is how it’s basically impossible to make friends here. I had my eye on a few women at various times but it’s just too awkward and unlikely to make a connection. God, there’s one woman I see who is so beautiful I feel an ache inside when I look away from her. Another woman is cute and funny but on further experience she’s bitter, and evidently not interested in anything beyond pleasantries. The one woman I hit on most directly disappeared. I had no idea she was pregnant until she took leave and never came back. Her name was Crystal, which is the same name of a woman I hooked up with after meeting over one of those free chatlines. We’d been calling those lines for years but that was not enough to maintain a connection or a relationship. She was black and virtually everything she had to say about anything somehow came back to race. I get it. Race is a powerful motherfucker. She lived in Cypress Hills and in a sing-song kind of voice called me her white meat. I thought that was kinda ick.

Another reason it’s hard to make friends at this job is the churn. One woman was openly flirtatious as hell with me. One day she just disappeared. Fired? Quit? “Disappeared?” I don’t know. I don’t get into gossip much. I tried to connect with her via social media but that went nowhere.

It’s surprising to me what the woman from last year does not remember. She had no memory of saying I was a black man in a white body. She made that comment several times. Like seemingly every other woman I dated in my early 20s, she was white but only dated black men, except for me.

Today is dragging along. I wore a jacket for the AM constitutional to the subway. It’s late May already and this weather just blows.

Now THIS is a backlit keyboard. First one I’ve ever known that is articulately visible in low light.