"My mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." Yeah, I'll go with that, but 'til it's safe to touch books outside your personal collection again, I'm gonna talk about my wardrobe upgrade.

I spent last year ordering black t-shirts for every mood, printed with everything from Caravaggio to bootleg images of Gadget Hackwrench and Lola Bunny, from jokey portraits of Freud and John Locke to the wisdom of Rick Astley, from Whitman, Austen, and Byron to, inevitably, Shakespeare (my VILLAIN, I HAVE DONE THY MOTHER t-shirt went over big at the last Washington Historical Society book promotion). Point is, pop fashion is fun, but who cares what you wear now, besides a mask and gloves? It's hard to read the text on a t-shirt from six feet away.

See, there's nothing to dress for. Even if you're out of lockdown, no one wants to be near you, and if you're stuck at home, why bother even wearing pants? (Facetime is up, but NO ONE looks good on a webcam.) So my wardrobe upgrade enters a new phase, one of finding more gloves and of finding some face masks that don't fog up my glasses quite as much.

Sorry we didn't have much of a chance to step out together, beloved t-shirts, but maybe there'll be a place for you in the calmer, quieter dystopia to come. That is, I HOPE we're not gonna devolve into roving bands of cannibalistic brigands. A world that's forgotten Rick Astley would be a world too gruesome to live in.