April 4, 2020

I took a stand-up workshop over Zoom with Alex Falcone, and performed a set about my quarantini, online therapy, and how anti-depressants have stripped me of my sex drive but not my ability to get pride-boners when I exercise. Whenever I’m reading and pumping on the recumbent bike, I get aroused just by the idea of self-care.

The class was great. One my favorites was a middle-aged Jewish lady who translated strap-on factoids into Yiddish aphorisms. One guy joined halfway through, at 1:30, and announced that he had just woke up, and proceeded to brush his teeth, leave and lock up his house, and started up his car, and drove to a food bank. Someone is working on a deadpan character with depression, and said they weren’t sure they could get it across over Zoom.

“Harry did it just fine,” Alex said to coax him.

Someone else mentioned that they are enforcing their social distancing bubble through a tactical abandonment of physical hygiene. I’m not going that far with it, but I have somehow lost the motivation to bathe despite a ruthlessly open schedule. Who do I have to impress? My girlfriend who shares my bed and cleans her face every night? Yeah right, she loves me for me, which is why she has lost all aesthetic and sexual expectations of me (hopefully).

I was reading about Tai Chi instead of doing it today, browsing through Wolfe Lowenthal’s There Are No Secrets, a biography of his Tai Chi teacher and mentor Professor Cheng Man-Ching. There certainly aren’t any secrets with the author, demonstrated about eight pages into the book when he shares that “the old man” deduced his having syphilis by the position of a pimple on Wolfe’s head. But who does he have to impress?