On Saturday, over the course of twelve blissfully busy hours, I wrote two blog posts, added a couple pages to the short story, watched two movies (Fat City and High Plains Drifter), and, over the course of two sittings, read about 200 pages from two different books, a hundred from each, one of which was a thriller, Hannibal Rising, and the other a more ruminative and voice-fueled literary novel, Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago, and while I’m very delighted with all that I accomplished there, and all of the stories and themes I was able to take in and consider, I’m finding that, when I sit down to write one of these diary entries, I don’t seem to have much to say, on account of there isn’t a whole lot going on except for the pseudo drama of online dating.

And I think that this might be the focus of a post-quarantine epiphany: after living my dream life for a couple months, just reading and writing and watching movies all day in near-total isolation, I’ll realize that, wonderfully rewarding and enjoyable as this lifestyle may be, it isn’t much of a life–which reminds me of that line from Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing: “Life isn’t a support system for art, it’s the other way around.”

But then I wonder: what if I was getting paid for this shit? Would I allow it to become my whole life?

Which complicates the problem immensely–but the answer is still definitely Yes.