What is to be done? Or is anything to be done?

This is the dilemma of an old retired guy, tearing out what’s left of his hair, after the usual bout of morning exercise and morning news. Surely something must be done. Too much is going wrong to ignore. So, let’s take action. And what does action look like? Hard to say.

Which is why at times like this, with the San Francisco sky in its summer gray, the only thing is to repair to the greenhouse. It is wonderful there. A glassed in world where even if the sun is obscured by fog, which it is today, a certain amount of heat still accumulates. It really accumulates when the occasional blue bursts through overhead. Okay, this doesn’t last long, but the thermal effects do linger. Honest. You can pretend it’s summer.

Furthermore there is the benefit of being surrounded by urban agriculture. Inside my greenhouse it’s all humus and damp stone and swaying waves of spinach, flutters of lettuce and jalapeno peppers dangling. This is nothing to shake a stick at. And if you want a stick, you’ll find a bundle in the corner.

But this is just the setting. What’s really happening in the greenhouse is what might be called the literary greenhouse effect. Verbiage gets pleasantly amplified. And the reader gets pleasantly transported. Because transport is the one thing that is currently in short supply. No one is getting transported anywhere these days, lockdown being what it is. So the best thing is escape.

I guess under normal circumstances, reading for escape is only an occasional pleasure. I get bored. After all, froth is what goes on top of something. Like whipped cream. You want the main dish, as it were. But not now. Normal circumstances are so abnormal that any form of relief is actually lifeblood. Let me out of here, imaginatively, so that I don’t go berserk and kill a few things or people.

Toward this end, I can only recommend a good thriller by John le Carré, and his ‘The Little Drummer Girl’ is more than good. Actually, when one considers that its plot unfolds over 500 pages, and I just couldn’t wait to see what would happen next….

Next, off to Miami, and coincidentally in more or less the same time period, the mid-1980s. ‘Tourist Season’ by Carl Hiaason is almost as diverting. This takes us to a sleazy, but comically sleazy, underworld of Miami criminals and cops, newspaper reporters and Chamber of Commerce boosters, failed football players, aspiring terrorists and, of course, tourists. I’ve never been to Florida. Somehow I think this version is more enjoyable.

There are lots of things I should be doing. Saving Amtrak is one of the top priorities for me these days. Which takes us back to the initial problem, about what is to be done. And halfway there, we come to another problem, only slightly related, which has to do with serious matters. Serious art. Workshops on serious topics like gun-control, transportation or housing. Serious people holding forth on important matters like education. Seriously, I’m just not that serious these days. I used to be. But I used to be a lot of things.

I used to be a guy who wasn’t desperate to get as far away as Half Moon Bay, barely 25 miles south of San Francisco, a journey which will be the longest undertaken in many months. Jane and I are planning an outing next week. Complete with all fresco lunch, socially distanced of course. More as it unfolds.