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That dog ��� called aptly Dog ��� has a status that���s uncertain. He was dumped two years ago at the homeplace of a neighbor some few hundred yards away. Because the neighbor neither ran him off nor shot him, Dog counts in the calculus round here as belonging to that man. Dog accedes to this some days and patrols the yard around the neighbor���s trailer, but he is more usually just a rambling presence, a creature mysterious in his ways and unaccountable to any. Some days no one sees him, some days he never leaves our porch. Most days, he likes some petting, but some days, not ��� he once showed up carrying a slice a pizza and kept his distance lest I try to steal it. One day he cornered an armadillo only to sniff it with disdain and walk away. On another he tortured a groundhog, mortally wounding it but declining to finish what he started. I then went for my rifle and did the work he wouldn���t. Every night they���re near and howling, he answers the coyotes with his voice ��� in this at least, Dog is reliable. I suspect he is unsure if he wants to count himself as feral or as tamed. He is, in short, about what someone might expect from a dog that has learned Zhuangzi.--Amy Olberding

In order to save my marriage, and to get some research done, I rented a small office -- yeah don't cry for me -- in a different part of town a few weeks ago. I go there every day, and when I am not needed in zoom meetings, I work on my Newton's Metaphysics manuscript. The tube runs on a frequent schedule and the ride is under fifteen minutes.  Most of the time it's very easy to social distance inside the carriages. 

I found an excellent espresso bar a seven minute walk from my new office in the heart of Fitzrovia. It's one stop on the tube, but because the weather has been so nice, as it has been this whole pandemic year, it's a lovely amble through the back streets of the neighborhood. I enjoy the blue plaques with the names of former (mostly nineteenth century) prime ministers and (mostly twentieth century) authors and social reformers. Sometimes I first get a wrap at a very fine middle eastern hole in the wall on Goodge street.

On Tuesday, at my favorite espresso bar I noticed he had no sweets on offer. When I asked about the lack of brownies, the barista/owner mentioned that his supplier had stopped delivering because his orders fell below the minimum. I quietly wondered whether there were payment issues. I said that must cut into your profit margins. Behind his face mask I guessed a dry smile, because I was told that he just broke even. Emboldened by the small talk, I asked the barista whether the landlord had offered a discount. Indeed he had, 50%. But this had been declined because it was supposed to be added to next year's rent. The purpose behind this offer struck me as a bit dubious, too. I wondered if his rolex was a fake.

I mentioned the story about the brownies to the building manager on the way back. In response she told me the Pret around the corner had stopped selling her favorite tuna mayo sandwiches. She had complained to the store-manager, who informed her they stopped selling it because too few people were coming into the store. 

Anyway, today, i walked through the rain, to find the espresso bar closed. (This will not have surprised you, my perceptive reader.) I looked around and suddenly I realized the street was near empty. I checked my watch (no, not a rolex). It was 3:15pm. On the way back to my office I started counting closed bars and shops. Many were, in fact, boarded up; I stopped at two dozen. I found a bakery near Warren St. with decent espresso. On my way back to the office, on Euston Road, I registered the half a dozen homeless people hiding in front of a (closed) furniture store.

One of my son's favorite classmates' step-dads drives a real London black cab. It has the largest sky roof I have ever seen in a taxi. Anyway, recently he told me (the cabbie, not the son) that he was doing one third the business he did last year. This is no surprise: London is a city that thrives on international travel (tourism and business), and wealthy expats for a lot of its traffic.

A few weeks ago the official unemployment rate in the UK was 4,1% (that was up  to July). All kinds of temporary measures have ended since then. In August 2020 "the number of employees in the UK on payrolls was down around 695,000 compared with March 2020." It's getting worse. 

Let me change tack for a second. 

A few novelists -- Arnon Grunberg, Zadie Smith, and Ni��a Weijers -- tell the story of my social habitat especially well. (I leave you to guess who have satirized me effectively,) But during this pandemic I have been drawn to Amy Olberding and her epic Ozark Stoics. While I once commented on one of her papers, and am proud she has guest-blogged for me, I have never met Olberding. But as my life has closed in on itself, I have grown needy of her story-telling. 

I imagine her in her pick-up truck in the parking lot of a giant Wallmart, stealing wifi; after she has responded to student emails, and has uploaded her lecture, she writes up her intellectual diaries, with her rifle and her laptop on her lap. One of my favorite passages is this one:

The region around our farm is a lacework of gravel roads that trace through hill country, and what happens when families like ours just can���t keep it all going is told everywhere upon these roads.  Abandoned farmhouses sit in fields given over to elaborate beef cattle operations held by wealthy ranchers who buy up old places when a family can no longer keep them.  In these places, the fencing is bright and taut, well maintained but by people who live elsewhere.  The tarpaper and rock homes that once sheltered families working the land become just bits of a landscape, too much trouble to tear down when the elements will eventually do the work for you.  Some old homeplaces don���t even have the care of wealthy ranchers but instead sit nested in trees that have come up since the families left, the houses now effectively forested.  Bereft of the people who kept the houses whole, they become home to all manner of wildlife, though given the area, some also come to host meth cookers.  But the most haunted examples, I find, are the old family farms where no house at all still sits.  On spring���s arrival they emerge like ghosts across the landscape, as vast armies of yellow daffodils arise to tell of what once was.  The daffodils stand in fragile, temporary signal, their patterns marking out where a house once stood ��� now lining a path where no path sits or surrounding where a porch once stood.  The daffodils stubbornly outlast the ones who planted them and abide as the only sign of what was once a homeplace. 

Without thinking, I turn left to the tube station. It's slightly longer that way in the shadow of the BT tower. On the sidewalk I evade two boys  on their electric step-scooters who seemed indifferent to the possibility of running me over. It's pouring.

It's been a decade since Lehman. I see myself reflected in the window of another abandoned shop. I am clean-shaven today; not quite an old man yet, but when I look around I see an older man shuffling in a Zimmer-frame. He is drenched. I know I see the dreary future staring at me. He smiles. It's the first maskless smile from a random stranger in months.

As I walk to the entry of the station, all I can think of are those vast armies of yellow daffodils filling Fitzroy Square.