When I moved to NYC twenty-some years back, I landed in Manhattan, and I’ve been here (across a half-dozen apartments) ever since.

When I met Jess, however, she lived in Brooklyn. And though she soon thereafter moved in with me (due to a confluence of commute time reduction, increased square footage, and the addition of a Hudson River balcony view), she’s been at least partly rueing that borough swap ever since.

In my early NYC days—and even, though to a lesser degree, in my early days living with Jess—I could always dismiss Brooklyn as “Manhattan’s waiting room.” Sure, people started out there to capitalize on early-career-friendly rent prices, but the real center of gravity of the city was the island of Manhattan itself.

But, in the years since, that’s shifted. Now, for example, it’s the best new restaurants—not just the quirky hipster-coolest ones—that open in Brooklyn.

So, in the last few months, as we’ve been contemplating a move, we’ve been looking both here on the Upper West Side, and in several Prospect Park-adjacent stretches of Brooklyn. By now, the days of lower rents in those neighborhoods have long since passed. But, for the same (ridiculous) amount of money, you still do get at least a little more space.

And, honestly, sometimes it’s nice to start fresh, and to take on a new adventure. Which is why, in the past few weeks, I’ve started to think Brooklyn might actually—to the shock and dismay of my younger self—be my next stop.

Perhaps inevitably, that kicked off a counter from Jess. After lobbying for a Brooklyn move for the better part of a decade, things have suddenly inverted, and now she’s the one suggesting all of the great things about living on tree-lined streets wedged between Central and Riverside Parks.

Where this ends (and where we end up) is still totally unclear. But as we’re hoping to get out the door to new digs within the next month, it seems I’ll soon be finding out either way.

And, if nothing else, I’m glad all of the contenders still count as peak-Gotham NYC. The borough may be up in the air. But I’m as sure as ever that the Big Apple is where I’m supposed to be, and where I’ll be keeping at least one foot planted for the balance of my never dull life.

There’s an older woman who comes to the gym regularly—I think she’s about 70, and she’s in working out five mornings a week, like clockwork. Literally, like clockwork, in that she does the same exercises, at the same weights, on the same machines, in the same order, every single day. (From what I hear, she’s been doing so for about the past five years.)

Anyway, the first day the gym reopened in the fall, she was back to her morning loop, albeit heavily layered up with PPE. And even as the general understanding of COVID evolved (e.g., the low risk of fomite transmission), even as more and more people were vaccinated (I know she was back in February, and by now almost 100% of the members and staff are), she kept her precautions at full tilt. Beyond double-masking, she still wore latex gloves throughout her workout, still wiped down every piece of equipment she touched, before and after, with disinfectant wipes.

Then, last week, the CDC changed its indoor mask recommendations. This week, New York State policy followed suit. Today, the gym dropped its mask requirement. And all morning long, I was jarred by the sight of people squatting and jogging and generally walking around the floor with faces bared.

So when the regular lady showed up this morning (not surprisingly, in full protective regalia), I assumed there was inevitable conflict ahead. Another member, seeing her on the leg extension machine, went over to let her know that she was now allowed to work out without a mask if she wanted. And I literally cringed as he did, braving myself for her searing, ‘what an irresponsible abdication of safety precautions and collective responsibility’ response.

Instead, she just said, “oh, really?” And then, like it was the most natural thing in the world, peeled off the gloves, took off both masks, and headed over to the next machine in her daily circuit.

So, basically, that’s NYC in a nutshell at the moment. It’s nice to see all your faces again?

As of today, the COVID positivity rate in NYC is either 3.17% (according to the City, which calculates averages based on the day tests are performed) or 2.6% (according to the State, which calculates the average based on the day test results are reported). The former number is high enough – over the 3% threshold – to have warranted closing schools here about a week back. Whereas the second is just under the same 3% number that would push the city into Cuomo’s “orange zone” designation, leading to (among other things) gyms closing for a second time.

At this point, the short-term fluctuation of either average is tough to predict. A slew of people have lined up for COVID tests in the past few days, in preparation for holiday travel, and I’m unsure whether that will push rates way down (as more people at low risk have been getting tested) or slightly up (catching asymptomatic folks who otherwise wouldn’t have gone in for a test). Similarly, I’m not sure whether the rates will be higher or lower right around Thanksgiving (certainly fewer people will be getting tested, but perhaps skewing towards those already showing serious symptoms?), nor how long post-Thanksgiving it will take for travel and group-celebration transmission to reflect in the numbers. So, for at least the next two weeks or so, it’s all very much up in the air. But, barring a miracle, it certainly seems like crossing 3% is less a question of if and more of when. By mid-December at the latest, I’m virtually certain we’ll once again be back to gym-less life.

At which point, in-person A3 beta testing will be shutting down again, too. Fortunately, this time through, we at least sort of know what we’re doing, and can spin back up the at-home, virtual-only infrastructure we banged out over the spring and summer. Further, we also have a sense of how to reboot things – both logistically, and in terms of workouts least likely to wreck people as they return to weights for the first time in months – once gyms come back online a second time. So, mostly, we’ll be fine.

At some level, it’s even a bit of a relief. Without mandate from above, I’m forced to make hard trade-offs on my own. At what point does the danger to myself, my coaches, and our clients outweigh the fitness, business, and product-development gains? Whereas, if closing is Governor-decreed, I’m spared the choice. And, frankly, after these last couple of months of early mornings, multiple daily bike commutes, and fractured schedules, I’ll be happy for the relative ease of entire days working from the couch. This time, I even have unavoidable dog walks to make sure I don’t go full potato.

Or, at least, that’s the glass half-full (or, possibly, 10% full) story I’ve been telling myself. At this point, I put the over/under date for gym closings at about December 7th. Until then, I’ll be refreshing the statistics, trying to make the best of gym time that I can, and muddling ahead, one pandemic day at a time.

Though we haven’t been baking sourdough or whipping coffee, Jess and I aren’t entirely immune to COVID food trends. We’ve made The Stew, The Cookies, and countless pizzas from scratch. Plus, about two months back, driven by Instagram posts featuring the idea, Jess talked me into regrowing scallions and celery from scraps.

Doing so is remarkably easy: you take the bottom inch or two of a scallion or celery plant, submerge it about halfway deep in water, and set it by your window. Et voila, the scallion will begin to grow inch after inch of new stalk, and the celery root will quickly bloom new leaves.

We started out with a rubber-banded bunch of five scallions in a narrow glass, and a celery root in a shallow glass bowl – Jess named them Scarlet and Cecilia, respectively. And, over the course of three or four weeks, they shot up fast enough that the change was obvious day by day. Although my (public, but still rather hippie) California elementary school had a farm on the campus that the students tended, it had been years since I’d grown vegetables, and I’d forgotten how thrilling it is to watch new floral life unfold.

About a month in, however, Scarlet and Cecilia stalled out. Planted in water, they could only draw on the nutrients they already embodied, after which they were stuck, short on the raw materials for further growth. So, we picked up a bag of soil – more expensive than Scarlet and Cecilia had been in the first place – and moved the ladies to two small vases, Cecilia in one, the sisters Scarlet (now spaced out by an inch or two each to give them room for their own roots) in the other.

And, immediately, both started growing again. Somewhere along the way, we also picked up a basil plant, which Jess named Basilio. And, between them all, we had an excellent little window garden going.

In the past week or so, however, we’d seen a couple of flies in our apartment – a rarity in a New York high-rise. And then, last night, Jess realized the source: fruit flies were hatching from the vegetables’ soil, a small swarm surrounding their bases. I briefly Googled for solutions – a layer of gravel atop the soil, traps nearby. But, in the end, we realized that there’s probably a reason most people don’t grow vegetables inside their apartments.

Still, having named the plants, and having watched them sprout, we couldn’t quite bear to just toss them down the floor’s trash compactor chute. We were like the proverbial farmer’s kids, unable to slaughter the pig they’d named and treated as a pet as it grew. So, instead, we transferred the plants to Solo cups, brought them downstairs, and left them on the edge of a planter in front of our building:

Up and down our street – even more so during the pandemic – people regularly leave out books and clothing and household decor they’re getting rid of, for passersby to grab if they’d like. And though, in the end, I realize Scarlet and Cecilia and Basilio are still likely to end up at the bottom of a trash bag, we at least told ourselves that maybe some intrepid neighbor – perhaps one of the many in townhouses with backyards along our block – would take the trio home to their own garden. Hope, like replanted vegetable scraps, springs eternal.

After a first month and change of blazing lockdown productivity, this past week I went a bit off the rails. I didn’t make any real progress on work, dropped the ball on most of my side-projects and habits, and generally just listlessly pissed away my days. Today, I regrouped, and am ready to get back to it full bore in the week ahead. But, at the same time, the huge amount of uncertainty continues to weigh on me.

Outside, the weather is amazingly beautiful, and New Yorkers seem to be heading in droves to the two parks (Central and Riverside) right by my apartment. Yet, at the same time, one of the restaurants across from my window just emptied out their tables and chairs yesterday, and papered over their windows this morning, apparently closing for good.

In theory, New York’s stay-at-home order expires at the end of next week. But Cuomo has already suggested he’s likely to extend that, at least in hard-hit part of the state like NYC. And, as I’ve written before, I’m not entirely sure how much the city is likely to bounce back even once those orders lift.

Recently, I’ve been puzzling through what COVID means for the specific logistics of gyms, in-person training, and therefore the ongoing Composite beta test. How, exactly, is a busy gym supposed to operate under the constraints of social distancing? Sure, you can rope off every other cardio machine, but how do you handle barbells and dumbbells and kettlebells and everything else? Mark out 10’x10′ individual zones with tape on the floor? If so, where do trainers go? And how do you deal with the vastly reduced total occupancy that entails? Pre-COVID, at peak times, attendance was probably two to threefold greater than social distanced layouts would allow. So even if you strictly enforce capacity limits by allowing members to sign up for slots, you’ll still wildly piss off the 50-65% of them who are paying for monthly memberships but being told they can’t actually use the gym. And all of that doesn’t begin to account for the likely far greater droplet ‘blast radius’ when people are huffing and puffing mid-workout; based on research I’ve seen, there’s good reason to believe six feet of separation may not be nearly enough.

During odd moments of the day, I’ve therefore been running napkin numbers in my head for what an extremely scaled back version of things might look like. What if my ‘gym’ was a small 500 sqft space, where I just trained one person at a time? Would people be more likely to return to something like that? And, even if so, how quickly could I get things set up and outfitted? In Midtown Manhattan, for example, it would be tough to run even a tiny boutique without showers and similar amenities.

So, lots to puzzle through. Though all of it still rather abstract. At this point, I have no idea what, exactly, comes next – the timing, the regulations, the attitudes of my fellow New Yorkers. I’ll be doing my best to keep pushing forward day by day, to lay groundwork as effectively as I can. But, in the end, I suspect I won’t have much choice but to wait for it all to actually play out.