It’s been a pretty frustrating period – while on one hand I keep getting offers and there seems to be no shortage of work to be done, on the other hand a number of things that were supposed to be pretty straightforward suddenly got really complicated.

I am still trying to nail shut a job that’s been draining up my energies for two months now, and with no end in sight, it looks like in the end it will be really hard to get paid. Granted, it is all part of the learning process, but sometimes one would rather not go through the school of hard knocks.

The quarantine is not making things any easier. The general worries are nothing compared with the shortages in supplies in the supermarkets.
Granted, to attract those buyers that are avoiding crowded places for fear of the virus, there’s an awful lot of special offers, but foe every citizen that avoids the supermarket despite the offers, there’s three that are ready to loot the shelves to stockpile sugar, toilet paper and Nutella (no, really).
The trains do not run, a lot of places are closed, public offices can’t be reached.

In all this, I have been writing twelve hours per day, in the hopes I’ll be able to cover with side gigs the big hole that single non-paying client is likely to open in my finances. Which in turn has led to a state of affairs because of which I have been unable to sit down and read a book in over ten days.
And for a compulsive reader like me, this is very bad.
I have two great books waiting – a novel and a historical essay – but by ten thirty n the evening I simply crumble, hands in pain and headache, and I just watch half an hour of a movie or a TV episode, or listen to a record.
This is good because at least I am discovering new music – case in point, right now I am listening to Bobby Timmons’ 1964 record, Chun-King. Beautiful.

And yet, being unable to take time off to read is a torture.
But hey, I am in good health, I have a roof over my head and I am planning a supermarket run in two days, because all I have left in the refrigerator is a bag of frozen minestrone. I will also find the time to read, and to write for the fun of it and not to pay my bills.
Things will go back to normal.