Mallory's Camera

The whole Israel/Iran 12-Day War thing is such a blatant piece of political theater.

When the dust settles, we will all find out that Bibi & the Khomini were burning up those back-channel phone lines, maneuvering to get Trump that Nobel Peace Prize he so covets.

###

Meanwhile, yesterday was fairly productive, although it was really fuckin' hot and cat ownership disqualified me from a potential housing situation—to be honest, I know the housing situation owner through the Shawanagunk Dems, and he is kinda weird, so maybe the cats saved me.

Did the rest of the trip-related errands, had an unsatisfactory phone conversation with RTT, and shortly will be taking the car in for its oil change. I am on that conveyor belt! And it is just possible I will hit my Remuneration quota before I leave on the trip.

I have been bemoaning my own lack of agency: Why don't I have more control over my life?

But, of course, agency is a relative thing. However aggrieved I may feel about my own, I still probably have more of it than 85% of the people who live—or have ever lived—upon this planet.

Forward, little conveyor belt!

So, maybe 400 people turned out for the Gardiner demonstration?

More impressive than it sounds! The entire population of the village is only aound 4,000.

I went alone, but I did not stay alone. A sizeable contingent of Shwanagunk Dems showed up & as it turned out, I knew all the parade monitors from canvassing or campaigning:



Plus bonus celebrity sighting! Fourteen second mark on yr screen! Still got my People Magazine chops!



This is quite possibly the worst photo of me EVER TAKEN.

When you are fighting fascism, I remind myself, you must be fearless and eschew vanity.



On my way back to the casa, I stopped at the transfer station to drop off two weeks' worth of garbage & recyclables. (Icky, you may recall, does not believe in paying for garbage disposal). I passed Ellen walking her daughter's dog, so I stopped to chat.

Now, I haven't seen Ellen in two months or so.

And that was kind of strange because I'd been seeing Ellen regularly for months before that. In fact, Ellen is one of only two real friends I have in this area.

Was she mad at me? Had I done something to offend her? Something absolutely unforgivable? Though I couldn't remember doing something absolutely unforgivable, and generally, I'm quite good at identifying examples of my own obnoxious behavior (even when I don't agree they're obnoxious.)

I'd called her a couple of times: No traction. I'd left her a goofy little gift in her mailbox: campfire sparkles! (She likes doing bonfires.) A pro forma thank you text.

Well, I thought, it's too bad, but apparently Ellen doesn't like you anymore, and what was the one useful thing that Jack Kerouak ever said? Number 19 on his list of "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose"?

Accept loss forever

(Works great for missing earrings, too!)

###

One look at Ellen's face, and I could see: It wasn't me, it was her. She looked like one of the walking dead. Deeply, terminally depressed. Heavy bags under her eyes.

Ellen is one of those people who likes to pretend she doesn't have emotions, doesn't have an inner life. When I tried to hug her that time after she dug my car out of the ice, she waved me off, embarrassed.

Now, as it happens, the one & only time I have ever been inside Ellen's house was around the time she stopped talking to me. We'd been selling Duck Derby tickets together at the post office. (Small town boosterism! Never Enuff Weird!) I was about to go off & investigate the Sherpa Festival that had magically appeared in an abandoned meadow, except that it was a hot day, I'd been drinking lots & lots of water, & I really had to pee!

"Well, you can pee at my house," Ellen said. Ellen's house was about a mile away from the magical Sherpa festival.

When I went inside Ellen's house, I was shocked to see it was kind of a hoarder house. Rooms & rooms crammed with furniture that nobody used & this general sense of profound neglect. I imagined it had been that way since Ellen's husband died five years ago.

I didn't say anything. I hid my shock.

But when Ellen stopped talking to me, I did wonder whether it was connected to the fact that I'd been inside her house. Whether she was ashamed I'd seen too much.

Anyway, it was good to reconnect. Even in such a small way.

I was on my best banter! I made her laugh!

And after 10 minutes, I said, "Well, darlin', you have my number. Call if you feel like it. I always have your back."

'Cause really. What else could I say?

###

In the evening, I went to a D&D meetup.

My regular D&D group hasn't met in several weeks—ostensibly because the DM is getting married in a couple of months & his weekends are now occupied with wedding-related events, but really—according to the DM of last night's game—because he is a Trump supporter & disliked all the fringe types in the original group.

I didn't pick that up from the original DM at all, and I mean, really: If he is a Trump supporter, so what? It didn't affect the game—which was a kind of Viking wayfarer adventure.

And I didn't like last night's game. I went because I'm still learning how to tell the various dice apart, & when to throw them, & why—if I have 18 charisma points—I'm supposed to keep subtracting four.

Last night's DM was very big on underground crypts strewn with vomit, crusty scabs, & mummifying guts. Imagery that does not appeal to moi!

The other players were gay males. They were all very nice to me, tolerant of my blunders. One of them—pink Galadriel hair and fabulously manicured hands, each nail painted a different color—was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America party, so in between dice rolls, we talked politics, utterly boring the other players. Apparently, No Kings Day conflicted with many prescheduled local Pride Day events, and that's why so many No Kings events had been shunted to out-of-the-way locations. The primo locales had been booked in advance! There was some bad blood twixt the No King-ers and the Pridies!

Last night's DM is a very bitter guy. And dark—without knowing he is dark, somehow. Growing up gay in a Hudson Valley backwater 40 years ago was a very different experience than growing up gay, say, in Berkeley, California. More akin to growing up gay next door to Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wisconsin. The Taliban itself would approve of Wallkill's heteronormative standards!!!

Still, I found myself not liking the guy, which meant it was difficult to sympathize with him.

Did my four wheelbarrows of thistles, brambles, bee balm, & loose ground cover at the New Paltz garden early-ish yesterday morning.

Then one of the garden elders came down the path, pushing a rototiller that does everything but make coffee. Nodded at the approximately one-third of the garden that still needs to be cleared. Asked, Would you like me to use this to...?

And I said, No, because beneath the thistles, brambles, & bee balm, I keep uncovering delicate plants that were once part of some previous occupant's ornamental garden, and I wanted to give those delicate plants a chance to thrive once more.

And the garden elder nodded as if I had passed some sort of test!

"You're doing it the right way!" he proclaimed. "Give a holler when you've finished clearing the big stuff & I'll come back with this & help you with the low weeds."

Which would indeed be a God send. I really hate digging with a shovel.

Shortly, I will be scampering out to log today's wheelbarrow quota before it gets hot.

###

Other than that, I have been feeling super-anxious about the political situation.

It has occurred to me—and to 50 million other armchair analysts—that Trump's vanity birthday parade this Saturday with all those tanks is really just a pretext to turn the White House into some kind of armored fortress for when Trump declares martial law. Which will also be on Saturday. I mean, Saturday is fuckin' Flag Day! Could the symbolism be any more flagrant?

And I am anxious, and I am scared, but I am also disgusted: All of this was outlined in exhaustive detail in Project 2025. It's like American voters failed an open book test.

Hoping I'm wrong.

But the dots seem to connect, and the picture is one we've seen before.

Humans are ridiculous and territorial, and they never, ever fuckin' learn.

The immigration demonstrations in LA right now are not the first time the National Guard has been called in to quell a protest.

I'm thinking about the People's Park protests in Berkeley. The National Guard advanced on us with rifles drawn & then the helicopters descended. Was it the National Guard or the helicopters that dropped the tear gas canisters? I can't remember.

I do remember fleeing across campus, pushing the then-toddler Alicia in her stroller, tears & snot streaming down my face. Maybe this is the reason why Alicia grew up to be such a bitch: Exposure to tear gas addled her unmylinated brain!

Still, it's always news when the gub'mint uses military-style force against white people.

And, of course, the People's Park incident happened in 1969. Which is to say a trillion million years ago. I was only 17, or I would have known better than to bring a toddler to a political protest. On account of skipping all those years of school, I actually started at UC Berkeley when I was sixteen.

###

Sadly, I will not be around for the NYC pride parade because it is Lew & Ed's wedding reception weekend, so I will be in Edinboro, Pennsylvania.

I avoided all those Pride demonstrations when they were just about marketing.

But this year, Pride has a political dimension so it has regained its gravitas. I'll go to as many Pride demonstrations as I can stuff into my schedule.



Anyway.

The Pinebush Alien Fair did take place yesterday—rather stupidly because yesterday it poured relentlessly whereas today, the scheduled Rain Day, it's not only dry but pleasantly balmy.

I grabbed an umbrella and drove on up.

The chief joy of the Pinebush Alien Fair is its costumes. But very few people wanted to wear costumes in the rain. I'm sure this dog didn't:



But its mean humans made it dress up anyway.

There were a couple of good window displays:



But mostly, it was just yr typical tacky upstate New York small town craft fair. Disappointing!

###

I went home & spent the rest of the day Remunerating. Because those fuckin' MacArthur Foundation people keep forgetting to send me my genius grant money.

Went for a looooong tromp—five miles!—when it finally cleared up at sunset.

Watched The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. (Excellent if you don't mind low production values.)

Abluted.

Slumbered.

And then at 3 in the morning, awakened with a bolt & decided to try and read myself back to sleep.

Grabbed the first book at hand from the stack on my night table—Tracy Dougherty's remarkable biography of Larry McMurtry.

Which is even more remarkable on second read:

Consciousness: the sense of self, the voice chattering at us in our heads, the apparent awareness of a presence, a spirit, a soul inside us, distinct from our bodies and the electrical firings in our brains. Scientists and philosophers fall all over themselves trying to explain, define, or locate consciousness. It is like searching for darkness with a flashlight...

“I have felt largely posthumous since [my open-heart] operation,” McMurtry said. “My old psyche, or old self, was shattered—now it whirls around me in fragments … The heart-lung machine allows for biologic survival, but my own feeling is that the person, as opposed to the body, dies anyway … For a certain period of time one is technically alive but in another, powerful sense, dead. Then one is jump-started back into life, but the Faustian Bargain has been made: you’re there, but not as yourself. That self, that personality, lies back beyond the time when you were on the pump. That gap, in my case at least, has proven unclosable.”

I have heard that from several other open-heart surgery survivors, too.

And sometimes you can just look at people like Bill Clinton who've had the surgery & know that's what happened to them.

###

Larry McMurtry wrote one perfect novel—The Last Picture Show—and several flawed novels I have deep affection for—Lonesome Dove, Moving On.

And a whole lot of dreck.

It occurs to me that McMurtry's biographer Tracy Dougherty is a much better writer than McMurtry ever was.

What gave McMurtry the edge, I suppose, was that he was actively elegizing a dying mythology (i.e. the American West.)

Humans revere their mythmakers.

G4 geomagnetic sun storm in effect last night. Very, very, very dimly, my naked eyes espied the Aurora Borealis:



Like I said, I spent five hours yesterday getting my computer to do what it was doing perfectly well at the beginning of the day before I started fucking around with it, so I was in a pettish mood all day.

That mood was exasperated by the fact that I didn't do a good job saving for taxes last year and now am paying off the not-huge-but-still-significant amount I put on a credit card. Disposable income is down this month, in other words. I must ration my little treats!



Antonio Delgado is taking on Kathy Hochul in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Good!

He's a strong progressive candidate who believes in universal child care, expanded rental assistance, stronger investment in community health centers, higher minimum wage, all well and good things in themselves, but he also has the potential to beat Elise Stefanik, the rumored Republican candidate, who is creepy, creepy, creepy in every imaginable way. Delgado could carry New York City; I don't think Hochul could.

Delgado has done his prep work.

I don't think there's a county fair, volunteer fire department celebration, or Lion's Club picnic throughout the entire state—and New York State has some real backwaters—that Delgado hasn't shown up at over the past five years. The picture above of Delgado & io truly was taken at the 2018 Hyde Park Fourth of July parade.

###

Also, I watched the Pee-wee Herman documentary on HBO. It is very sad. It made me cry.

I am more of a fan of Paul Reubens as a conceptual artist than I am of his conceptual art. I prefer my kitsch with a lot of white space—which his didn't have. Pee-wee's Playhouse is a bit too frenetic for me.

But I do think Pee-wee's Playhouse captures two tendencies of childhood extremely well: (1) children's tendency to take metaphors & other figurative constructions very literally, and (2) children's tendency to anthropomorphize. (I well remember Mr. Light whom I got to talk to in the bathroom as a three-year-old whenever I had to have my hair washed.)

Pee-wee Herman is childlike, but he is not childish.

Big distinction.

Yesterday was the second-most beautiful day in the history of the universe.

The most beautiful day?

Why today, of course.

###

In this country, we are all kinda sitting on the edge of a precipice. Grocery store shelves are still full, but the great China-facing ports like Long Beach & Oakland are empty, the giant gantry cranes (after which George Lucas modeled the Imperial Walkers in Star Wars) sit motionless.

I am guessing we are about 10 days away from panic-inducing shortages.

It'll start with toilet paper.

Because for some reason, it always starts with toilet paper!

Not sure how this is gonna affect moi. I can survive very nicely on beans & rice, except if there isn't any rice (because we import it all from China) & there aren't any beans (those come from China, too. And Africa), I'm not sure what my imaginary Sustenance in Times of Privitation diet should be.

Plus, there's the added absurdity that one must continue on with one's life as though none of this is happening. Business as usual! Because it hasn't happened yet.

###

I note one beneficial effect of Trump's total assholery: Carney & the Liberals won in Canada.

I quite like Carney! The whispers on the street is that it was Carney who was behind the great American T-bill sell-off. He did it in closed-door sessions with Japanese & European leaders. Really, really smart move.

Meanwhile, fuckin' Trump is so obviously in the mid-stages of dementia that I wonder how any of his keepers underlings can keep a straight face.

Yesterday, he issued an executive order that henceforth, Columbus Day... is Columbus Day!

Today he decreed that truck drivers may only speak English!

###

Meanwhile, I'm gonna hammer out 1,500 words or so of Remunerative prose & then toddle out to weed the other half of the garden.

(I just blew my topsoil budget on a GoFundMe donation for croneitude, who has been diagnosed with a singularly awful-sounding autoimmune disease. But I gotta figure that those Reichstag wheelbarrels filled with paper money are a renewable resource, right?)

So, Ty my old EW editor is on board, and his wife, the corporate lawyer, will help draft the 501(c)(3) (if it comes to that) and Cat is on board, and Public Policy Eleanor is on board.

In a couple of hours, I am scampering off to NYC for birthday celebrations with the BoyZ—Happy Birthday to Me-e-e-e-e!!! 73! Ugh. I am fuckin' old.

Tonight, we're going to an immersive theater production called Life & Trust, which should be The Big Fun—I ❤️LUV❤️ immersive theater—and then tomorrow, the Actual Day, I want to go to the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens to see the cherry blossoms. Even though it will be raining.

And I will also, of course, be conscripting Ichabod to help with the project since he, too, is a public policy wonk and even graduated from his Mama's august public policy school.

When I get back, I will get to work on some kind of (brief) position paper while PP Eleanor does a background check. If there's already some organization or initiative that has the infrastructure in place to franchise voters, why reinvent the wheel? I will just throw my support to them.

But if there isn't...

It feels like an enormous, daunting task.

But if not us, who????

###

Meanwhile, yesterday—since I sat in front of my computer all day Remunerating—I was treated to the headlines in Real Time, which was kind of awful.

Did Trump blink because China—and Japan, according to Reddit rumor—began dumping their U.S. treasuries? Or was this a dump then pump, insider-trading scheme from the start designed to make the grifting cronies even richer? Impossible to say.

And how do all those stealth bombers massed along Iran's borders factor into this?

###

One nice thing: Someone who reads my Substack told me my writing reminded her of Hilary Mantel. An enormous compliment. And this is a stranger! Someone who does not know me personally. So that created a warm little glow.

Hooray, hooray, it's Tariff Day!
Dig deep in your pockets & prepare to pay!

Early this morning came the news that in response to Trump's 104% tariff on Chinese goods, China is now slapping a tariff of 84% on American goods.

Of course, it's all political theater.

Still.

I am reminded once again of Bion of Borysthenes:

The boys throw stones at frogs in sport
But the frogs die in earnest

###

At what point do people start jumping off buildings?

At what point does China decide to dump its approximately $759 billion in U.S. treasury notes? If and when they do, the value of the debt would plunge, yields would soar, & US government borrowing costs would escalate sharply, which will have a highly destabilizing effect. That's a really bad scenario.

Although, of course, there are so many bad scenarios at present—like apparently the biggest single deployment of stealth bombers ev-ah in U.S. history is currently massed at Iran's borders—that we should tell it to take a number, I guess.

###

Meanwhile, we all have to pretend, Nothing to see here. Move along! and get on with our lives as though it's just business as usual. Which in most real senses is true.

Like the sun rose at 6:26 a.m. this morning.

And will set at 7:31 p.m.

And the robins are back from their annual migration! They have been for a few weeks now; I just didn't notice.

###

In my copious—ha, ha, ha!—amounts of free time, I am moving ahead with my voter empowerment scheme (though, at this point, it's still mostly a jumble inside my brain.)

My thoughts at present are that it's kind of a five-prong process:

(A) Some kind of punchy (& brief) position paper
(B) Finding smart people to brainstorm with
(C) Searching for other initiatives & organizations that are doing similar things
(D) Compiling a list of voter repression methods that are currently being used in other states (like Arizona is weird because if you use your license as your photo ID to vote at the polls, and your address differs from what your license shows—even if what's online is correct—you need 2 other pieces of mail with your name on them as proof of residency in order to vote.)
(E) Tracking down sponsors with the Big Buck$ because I'm assuming we'd need to figure out how to set up a 501 (c) (3) plus obtaining govt documents costs & the whole point of this endeavor would be to subsidize the costs of those govt documents.

We shall see!

Here is the dinky little video I made of the April 5th protests in Middletown, New York:



BB had the creeping crud plus it was raining, so we merely showed up for half an hour or so, long enough for our bodies to be counted (we hope!) before dashing off to a strange little café, apparently run by members of the Falun Gong sect that served passable chai lattes, brewed espresso drinks, and pastries like these adorable fish, filled with red bean paste:



The place was crammed! And the people at the various tables, dressed very differently as they were, all seemed to be signaling to each other with secret signs.

"I wonder what their stories are," I said to BB.

"I don't have a clue," BB said cheerfully. "And I'm not much interested. But that's what makes you a writer."

Every now & then, the protesters & their signs made the circuit of the shabby downtown street where the café was located. I studied the Falun Gong cult members' faces carefully to see if there was any sympathy. There wasn't. At the table kitty-corner to ours, a quartet of determined 30-ish women raised their eyebrows disparagingly, made remarks to one another that I couldn't quite hear.

Back in 2016, my beloved Summer explained to me why Trump is so overwhelmingly popular with Chinese expatriates in the U.S.: "They think he has luck. They think he is phenomenally lucky. And luck is the thing we revere and want above all else."

###

When we were done with our drinks & pastries, BB led me to a fabulous Chinese store where all sorts of fabulous groceries were for sale:







To think that all these wondrous things are a mere five-block walk from the Y where I work out two or three times a week and that I had never visited them before!

###

Back at the casa, I labored on Adrienne's website, aligning links & graphics and embellishing it with fulsome prose like, When Adrienne moved to Wallkill 16 years ago, she immediately looked for ways to support the hamlet she’d fallen in love with..
.
(Yes, I know, gag-worthy, but trust me: It will work for the voters of Wallkill.)

I should finish the damn thing today.

It is far from perfect, but the important thing is that it is.

If Brian the fresh-faced little campaign manager—who's actually getting paid—wants me to tweak stuff, I will simply tell him, Find someone else.

I never actually told Adrienne I would design her a website. I told her I would help her with social media. So, you know.

###

There's no accurate reporting yet on the number of protesters who turned out yesterday. 500,000 signed up in advance with the various Hands Off, Move On, etc. organizations, so I'm thinking probably twice as many showed up. Maybe more. The numbers will be underreported by the mainstream media who are all Trump suck-ups. Fuck the mainstream media.

###

Also, I am dead serious about launching an initiative whereby we help people obtain those documents (birth certificates, marriage licenses for women) that prove citizenship & thereby protect the right to vote.

Of course, this kind of stuff doesn't matter in New York State, which doesn't require proof of citizenship at the polls, but my old LJ friend cah1470 actually lives in the North Carolina district where 65,000 votes are about to be tossed because North Carolina! Home to Mayberry, gerrymandering, and the Ku Klux Klan!

I totally believe that the next federal election will be lost unless we make sure our votes can't be thrown out. People in red states will need to vote early and in person, bring identification, voter cards, make sure their signatures are exactly the same as they are on the voter cards, etc, etc, etc.

I don't have the foggiest notion at this point how to liaise with organizations in the states that do require proof of citizenship at the polls. Plus we'd need money—obtaining govt documents costs. So maybe I need to figure out how to set up a 501 (c) (3)??? I dunno. This is all in a very preliminary stage in my head right now.

Anyway, I've got Adrienne talking to the heads of the Democratic Party here in New York—a thoroughly useless endeavor, I'm sure. Democrats are hopeless.

And I am gonna lean on RTT when I see him in NYC this week to try and set up some sort of meeting for me with the Soros-financed People for the American Way to see if they might be willing to be sponsors.

It's actionable resistance!

That means I'm gonna have to draft some sort of policy proposal in the next two weeks.

Busy, busy, busy!

So, Trump announced his tariffs.

If you have a 401(K) or an IRA invested in EFTs, you immediately lost another 15% of your net worth.

Quite a few of my TaxBwana clients erroneously assume I am some kind of financial whiz—even the Trumpish ones who believe the current economic shitstorm is some kind of Rapture from which they will ascend in a few short months' time, richer than ever. They constantly pepper me for financial advice.

Of course, TaxBwanas are not allowed to give financial advice, which is a Good Thing because it allows me to maintain my air of inscrutable knowledgeability while not knowing a goddam thing.

Frankly, I don't know what I would do if I had anything resembling real money.

Over a 20-year window, staying in equities is the smartest move—except most of the people peppering me with questions will be dead in 20 years.

Liquidating to cash will make them vulnerable to inflation—which is about to rise dramatically.

And it's too late to buy gold. Gold is presently hovering somewhere near $3,100 an ounce.

###

The tariffs are so-called "reciprocal tariffs" that include duty taxes on uninhabited islands near Antarctica because, you know, those fuckin' penguins...

They're intended to pay for Trump's income tax cuts, I suppose. There is a Mad Tea Party logic to them: If you do the arithmetic, it looks like they took the U.S. trade deficit with every one of its trade partners, divided that sum by the dollar value of each trade partner's exports to the U.S. & slapped the resulting fraction on as a tariff.

This is just bizarre.

For example: Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in Africa, has just been hit with a 47% tariff. That's because Madagascar is one of the few places on the planet where vanilla beans grow. Madagascar can't afford to buy stuff from the U.S., so, of course, they don't, hence trade deficit. Tariffs are gonna drive up the cost of vanilla astronomically—but that's not gonna make anyone in Madagascar buy more American goods.

###

There are some exceptions to this methodology, of course: The 10% tariff on U.K. exports, for example, is clearly a gift and will go down if King Charles III can figure out a way to knight Trump. It clears the way for Britain to become a gateway for EU goods, and as the designated middleman, the U.K.'s economic prospects are bound to bounce higher. Maybe I should be telling all those troubled TaxBwana clients, Invest in DHL Supply Chain and UK FedEx!

Tariffs are kind of the equivalent of sales taxes. Tennessee, for example, may have no state income tax—but it has an across-the-board state sales tax of nearly 10%, and when you add that to county & municipality sales taxes, you get a hefty sum that is equivalent to if not higher than the income taxes charged by a state like New York.

Caesar is gonna get rendered unto one way or another, in other words.

I wish all those idiots—for which read half the population of Wallkill—forever whining about New York State taxes would just fuckin' move to Tennessee. Ass! Door! Slam!

Anyway. I'm not buying anything but food in the foreseeable future. And no food that has vanilla in it!

###

In other news...

Forsythia has started blooming:



In these parts, forsythia is the true harbinger of spring.

###

Yesterday was my last day TaxBwana-ing at St. Joe's in New Paltz. My clients included:

• A lovely and clearly overwhelmed young woman whom the site greeter and the site coordinator, both of whom have been shits to me, complained loudly about before her arrival because she'd been a bit too forceful on the phone.

She was eager to learn the rudiments of financial literacy. "What's a dividend?" she asked. I explained.

She was also the daughter of a Sicilian immigrant, speaks fluent Italian, & has visited the Old Country many times, so we had a long conversation about Palermo.

• A retired airforce veteran who talked to me about the twice he'd been kidnapped by aliens.

• A disgruntled couple about my own age who I had to work hard to charm. I succeeded! By the end of our tax session, they were showing me photos of their dog. But man! I had to work hard.

She had about 50 IQ points on her husband, so naturally, I wanted to travel backwards in time, to the point where they first hooked up, & ask her, What are you doing?

Since they were both old, they were both lawn furniture—as am I, of course! Impossible to ascribe properties like "attractiveness" to.

But I think once upon a time, he was a whole lot more attractive than she was, and thus, she struck a very bad bargain, which has turned her into a sour bitch in her declining years.

###

I have a shitload of stuff to accomplish today. Sigh...

If only there were 36 hours in a day, and 24 of those hours were daylight.