April 9, 2020

We’re watching Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Labs on Netflix. Betty Dodson looks great, and the host’s wisdom continues to humble and floor me.

“People are just looking for a more natural way to age,” she says to her esthetician, who responds by continuing to use her handheld needle-tipped jackhammer to inject Gwynny with her plasma platelets, leaving her face with a light fuscia patina of her own blood.

It’s Thursday today, and someone I need legal documents from has an automated email reply that reads “our office is currently closed in observance of Good Friday.” You will not have a Good Friday on the heels of a Dishonest Thursday.

It was The Shark’s birthday yesterday, and we surprised him with balloons and blue blow-up letters reading “HAPPY BIRTHDAY.” I wanted to rearrange them into something more fun like “HAY BIRD,” or “HIT DA PP,” but I was outvoted. We ate molten dumplings from Kackha and a double-decker chocolate baked by The Shark’s romantic partner, the ambassador of Iran themself. We ended the night by playing poker, an endless attention deficient game with nine players that finally ended when I crushed them all underneath the mighty gauntlet of my two-pair hand.

This morning, T and I practiced Tai Chi in the yard and tried to convince ourselves that we would do Yoga. The Shark ate cake and mocked us, spitting and guffawing, wiping from his chin a smear of whip cream and my Zen along with it.

I have been wanting to see people, but with the quarantine and all I haven’t really gotten the chance. Walking across the street from and with chums is alright, but I wish people could still come over and hang. As a compromise, I have taken up role of creator in these harrowing times, and have erected life in my living room. Life, I made life out of five leftover balloons, a couple of party hats, and a sharpie. Our five new friends are hidden throughout the house, and I hope we all get along.

“I’ve been studying things like magnet therapy for a few years now,” says Miss Paltrow’s latest guest, explaining that he was qualified to definitively prove that the pain in a woman’s foot was the harbored trauma of her parent’s divorce.