Opinion

After a few days of the new regimen, you may begin to start wondering what’s going to kill you first, the coronavirus or being in such close proximity for so long.

For me, boredom has always exerted a siren pull — to the extent that once, inspired by a spate of entropic films coming out of Europe in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I dreamed of heading up my own film studio dedicated to producing the kind of profoundly listless screenplays that I couldn’t get enough of.

Watching a live stream of the East Hampton Town Board’s Tuesday meeting, I began to think about the tattletale impulse.     

The similarities between Covid-19 and climate change are striking. In both cases, it isn’t too late to make it less bad than if we do nothing, and “less bad” is as good as it gets.

During our walk with O’en (I used to complain that our neighborhood was comatose, now I’m grateful that it is), Mary said she might reconsider the popovers she’d planned to make. “Ah, flattening the curve?” I said.

We call and write our friends more now that there is a glimpse of mortality on the horizon and the time to think about it. But the paradox to this newfound closeness is that we cannot express our connection in the physical world.

I am not one to induce panic when it could be argued that panic is appropriate, but many of my friends and college classmates are as concerned as I am that this virus has the potential to do a lot more economic damage to the country than we realize.

Passover week found me leafing through a big file folder of my mother’s old recipes, along with a few cook-booklets from days gone by. My goodness, what a time capsule she had squirreled away.

The Tibetan horoscope foretold “sudden change or obstacle,” and here it is. The present planetary alignment is said to “force a more spiritual outlook by causing material loss.”

The guaranteed way to get through the Covid-19 era is distraction. Here an accomplished physicist diverts you from thinking about the coronavirus with puzzles, problems, wisdom, and humor.

Whether you qualify it as “social” or “physical,” dis­tancing is not how any of us anticipated spending the spring of 2020. This week, the actual and psychological distances we have to travel to get through this thing just seemed to keep growing.     

The news about the city folk emptying the South Fork supermarkets is frightening.