A college friend of mine named Carlos who’s almost annoyingly handsome and who’s gone on to have what appears to be a pretty successful career as a photographer in New York (this is the conclusion I’ve reached on the basis of his Instagram profile, but who can ever tell?) did a shoot a couple years ago where he posed as the mournful-looking model for an Onion article titled something like, “Blogger Sincerely Sorry for Having Been Away So Long”–which comes to mind now as I’m writing what feels like the third or fourth such post in a year.

To apologize for having been gone a while feels gross because it presupposes that the blogs have been missed, which maybe they have and maybe they haven’t, but the person I guess I’m really apologizing to is myself, cuz I’m disappointed for how the Project has been left to languish over the past three months—I’m glad, however, to report that the reason for its languishing is that I was working on another novel, called Various Positions, which is now blessedly complete (the first draft of it, at least) and my time and attention are now freed to re-visit the Project and its iterations: the diary posts, the movie responses, social media, podcast, letter-writing.

I’ve also been working a lot between the restaurant and the college, and not making much money. As I mention in the forthcoming podcast: I’m working roughly fifty hours a week and earning roughly two thousand dollars a month.

Small beans.

Now the coronavirus is here in the United States, though, and as it spreads we find that schools and businesses are closing and while this won’t be very good news for my finances, which are already pretty emaciated, it’d be nice to think that I might have a week or two off from work where I can sit sequestered in my bedroom and write blog posts, record podcast episodes, watch movies.

Catch up with my Project.

Anyway. Happy to commence with another burst of daily blog posts. Here’s hoping it lasts a long while before the next hiatus.