I felt like myself yesterday when I walked to the river, spilling little brown drips of afternoon coffee on the outside of my mask each time I took I sip. It was snowing, again. I crunched and slipped on the sidewalk and down to the park, little pills of frozen white sticking to my hat.

I had this plan. I'm working on some new music right now, some tunes that will hopefully be out soon, and I'm in the middle of all the associated additional material you have to put together to successfully put out music these days. The writing, the artwork, the visuals. The record is spare, full of buzzing bugs, wet, late-summer heat, and a creaking baby grand piano. So I thought it would be just the perfectly opposite thing to film myself moving along to it in a snowstorm.

The riverside park had not yet been plowed or cleared in any way, and after weeks of successive percussive winter the snow reached up past my knees, but I pulled myself through it anyway, sweating while my fingers tingled in the cold. I found just the right spot - a big, untouched expanse of blanketed white up against a five story brick wall from the 1800s on one side and a half-demolished staircase on the other. And it seemed like no one would see me, there was no one around as far as I could tell. So I stuck my phone in the tripod just so and started removing layers. Then I hit record.

For five or so minutes I swayed gently back and forth, arms extended to heaven, feeling the frozen fluff of snowfall hitting my bare back and chest. It felt truly stupid to be there, writhing without a shirt, but the air was crisp and refreshing and I felt so deeply inside my weird and these days uncooperative body. It used to do what I wanted it to, now it feels like it has a mind of its own. My heart nearly stopped when I heard the aggressive sound of a snow plow approaching. I could feel the plowers - or so I imagined - watching me with concern or amusement, but I didn't want to ruin the shot, so I kept wriggling in the snow. I checked the footage and saw that the first attempt was completely blurry, you couldn't even make out my face, and so I took off my sweatshirt once again and lifted my jiggling arms skyward.

I felt like myself this past weekend when, in spite of everything, my deep and true friend came to visit. We welcomed him into our home. Seeing him was such a delicious relief, I felt exhalation and burden-lifting so profoundly. The loneliness is so heavy lately, it is a dozen heavy rocks in your coat, and the weight of it has been shouldered so long that I hardly even recognized its presence anymore. It was only when we cooked him dinner that I felt I had been carrying it. We set up our instruments and played boneheaded, exultant, primordial rock-adjacent music long and loud and late at night, things I never do anymore. We ripped shit a bit, we didn't think, we did that amazing thing that happens when everyone knows when to stop a song just based on how your point your head and raise your eyebrows, psychic connection. It felt so deeply good to be in the same room, it made me want to evangelize for actual friendship, shout it from the rooftops, which I suppose is what I'm doing now.

The best of it was the last night he was here. He told me he had energy he had to burn off, he wanted to drink a bunch of beers or break shit but we wound up dimming all the lights in our apartment and dancing with actual abandon to the trashiest, bass-drum heaviest dance music I could summon to the speakers. I can't remember a time in my life when I have previously done the movie cliche of dancing around the dining room table, but there we were, high-kicking and giggling to the Pet Shop Boys and hoping our downstairs neighbor didn't mind.

I felt like myself this morning when I once again entered virtual reality. Lately I have been deeply interested - really obsessed - with a kickboxing fitness video game my girlfriend bought for her VR headset, which she otherwise uses for making sculpture. This funny little video game - even though you are fully aware of how cheesy and terrible it is at all times - does an incredible job of making you feel like you are somewhere else. It has just enough transportive power to make you feel like you are, in fact, not in your living room, and then the bad pop music starts playing. These blue and yellow orbs fly at you, requiring you to punch or uppercut or dodge or squat in rhythm with the music. You compete against other VR headset wearers and each punch's strength is measured - in other words, it's deeply gamified, and every time I go to the lobby of this virtual gym I feel a deep and abiding urge to WIN which causes me - in a deep and abiding way - to SWEAT PROFUSELY. I often have to pause the game because I've fogged up the lenses. In other words, I sweat the way I used to before everything changed - grandly and profoundly, all the way through my clothes.