I worked from home for a good chunk of the 2010s, and eventually got very tired of it. I read sporadically, mostly as part of my job for Reason, though I primarily wrote for their blog. I lost the job in 2018, then my dad died, and soon after that I went back to work in midtown Manhattan.

  The new commute, about an hour door to door, gave me more time to read. Although I often enjoyed catching some sleep on the way in, other times I’d read, and on the way back too. The phone is always a distraction, but at least when taking the train out of Penn Station there was no reception, which helped focus on reading.

  I read a lot of Asimov’s at the time, picking them up at the Barnes and Noble. Occasionally I’d pick up a current affairs magazine. I used to read The Nation long ago, and actually first discovered Denis Johnson that way, because of their review of “Seek” that I read on a train back from DC when I was interning for my local Congressman.

  I was in college and it was my only trip down to DC for him and I felt very mature reading the magazine, which at the time came out in newsprint. I haven’t picked it up in a long time so I don’t know if it’s still that way.

  Sometimes in November of 2019, maybe for his birthday, I met with my friend Phil. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time, which was mostly my fault, but he always made an effort to reach out. We met somewhere near his place in Astoria. I remember there was a cute waitress there I thought was really into him. He didn’t think so, though I wonder if maybe they had a history.

  She certainly wasn’t interested in me. In any case, at some point my friend and I started talking about mental health, I guess. He was always health conscious in a holistic way. He started telling me about Bessel van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score” (2014), which he had read recently.

  I don’t remember what exactly we talked about or how it came up. I’d been having martial trouble at the time so maybe it was that. And while I’d been overweight since the age of 7, when I discovered soft pretzels in my six months at a Catholic school, I’d recently grown a lot bigger.

  I do remember distinctly that Phil asked me whether I would read the book if he got it for me. He’d pulled his phone out to order it. So I said sure, even though until that point there’d been maybe a 50-50 chance I’d have actually read it. It only occurs to me now that Phil knew that. He knew me really well.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The book showed up at my house sometime in December and I started reading it right away, mostly because of the promise I had made. I was pretty down on the book when I started it, even though I liked the cover.

  I’d assumed, maybe because of what I’d been talking about with Phil when it came up, that it was a self-help book. There was something about the author’s European attitude that rubbed me the wrong way too, although Phil, also from Western Europe, had a similar attitude and I always found it endearing enough.

  I wanted to finish the book by the end of the year but stopped reading it over the holidays. The new year gave me an impetus to keep my promise and keep on with the book. I’d also started thinking about my own traumas as I got deeper into the book.

  It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about actively. It was there on the peripheral, to acknowledge without acknowledging. It started that way when reading the book too. Eventually it was clear how it was about me, and how any reader could read it that way. Ben Franklin said only death and taxes were certainties.

  Avoiding taxes is possible but could lead to death. Ben didn’t have the language for trauma, but it’s certainly a certainty. Death and trauma. And isn’t death a trauma?

  I found “The Body Keeps the Score” intriguing, especially how it made me think about my own, but I didn’t put much more thought into that. I did enjoy having committed to reading a book, and a relatively thick one at that.

  I picked up Melissa Francis’ “Lessons from the Prairie” (2017) next, because I’d been working on her show at the time and she’d invited us to her house for a holiday party a few weeks before that. I may have even asked her for the copy. For sure she signed it for me.

  I still went to Barnes and Noble, and probably still picked up Asimov’s, but I also liked looking in the discount bin they had at the front. I bought Mark Garrison’s “Guts'n'Gunships” (2015) out of that bin.

  It was the book I had just started reading when I stopped commuting into midtown because of the pandemic and the state of emergency. I spent the first two weeks working from home because a coworker’s roommate had tested positive for COVID, and then started coming in with the skeleton crew.

  Our employer provided Ubers for us back and forth so I lost the commuting time I had for reading. I’d read in the building during quiet moments instead. “Guts’n’Gunships” went relatively quickly. I’d never read something like it before, a straightforward account of a conscript who flew helicopters in Vietnam. It may have been self-publishd.

  I’d never ordered a book on Amazon before, but a couple of days into the March shutdown I ordered a couple of books I’d read before but found myself curious about again, Albert Camus’ “The Plague” (1947) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez ‘s “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985).

  They took me the whole summer to read, a summer when I’d started losing weight without realizing it. The security guards were the first to notice. Maybe we were all a little more health conscious because of the global pandemic.