Dear Diary: Already?
This is what it comes to in the end: each week day lasts as long as an episode of Masterpiece Theatre did, forty years ago. Time becomes businesslike, and gets you where you’re going (death) with a dispatch that you didn’t appreciate when you were younger. And you can’t tell anybody who’s still “younger” to be on guard. They’re too — younger.
When I look back on the day, this Thursday that is about to come to an end, I see, if not progress exactly, then a certain advancement of the story so far. There was a very upsidey visit to the dermatologist. Since almost anything that a dermatologist tells you is TMI as regards the rest of the world, I’ll reduce it to one word: “Moisturizer!” Which, you’ll note, requires no prescription. So that was good. I got a haircut — which really means that my beard was trimmed. I showed up impromptu, after the doctor’s appointment. I could have waited, but the proprietor, who always takes care of me, was getting ready to take care of another gent, and it was he who suggested that I submit to his second-in-command. The result was that I look a bit too much like Gianni Versace — but the young man promised that, next time, he won’t take so much off. It’s all good: it will all grow back. The proprietor, I soon gathered, wanted to talk futbol with his client, a thirty-something man of Romance-language background who spoke with the slightest accent. Brazilian, perhaps? Because he was less comfortable in the barber’s Spanish than he was in English. The two of them were still chatting when I was walking out the door. Would sport exist as we know it, if it weren’t for barber shops?
Now, I hadn’t expected to get a whole paragraph out of the hour between one and two, and it’s true that, during that time, I felt that time had slowed down a bit. But it speeded up again at lunch, which — can it really have done so? — took an hour and a quarter. It’s because I was reading. The corollary to the rule that time flies when you’re an antique is that it takes aeons to read anything. Before the club sandwich was set before me, I knocked off the “last of Prince Albert” chapter in Strachey’s Queen Victoria — a desert-island book if ever there was one. Chalk one up for me! But then, over lunch, I read about rape in American prisons. The NYRB piece was really about impunity in American prisons — for the staff — so it wasn’t really all that contradigestive. But I had to re-read many sentences.
After a few more errands, I sat down to write up The Wolfman, which I saw last Friday. Time really flew during that project. It seemed that I could work no faster than four words per hour. At one point, I fell asleep with my finger on the ‘k’ key.
Then it was time to make dinner. I wasn’t at all ready. There were messes all over the apartment, and piles that needed sorting and putting away. And I wasn’t in the mood; I was “too tired.” But I gone with it like a manly man. We had a chicken sauté — by which I mean that chicken legs, browned in clarified butter, were simmered, along with shallots and mushrooms, in a broth that was finished with thickening cream — served over cavatappi, with a stir-fry of snow peas and green onions (nothing remotely Chinese about the seasoning). For dessert, Eli’s palmiers, which please Kathleen during the chocolate ban of Lent.
Tomorrow, time will really slow down for a few hours. I’ll be at the Hospital for Special Surgery, being examined by my Facebook friend, rheumatologist Steven Magid, and absorbing a Remicade infusion. Time will stop altogether next week, for a few hours on Wednesday, when I have my umpteenth you-know-what. Don’t listen to old people when they tell you that time flies by in a blur. Just remind them of what it’s like to visit their many doctors.