Mallory's Camera

Twenty-five hundred words into Chapter 6.

Fifteen hundred to go.

I have no idea whether it's any good or not. Fictioneering like this is uncharted territory for me. But writing is definitely engrossing, so if nothing else, the Work In Progress will have gotten me through a brutal winter, relatively psychologically unscathed. Which is a good thing.

###

Ichabod asked me point-blank if I wanted him to start giving me a set monthly amount toward living expenses.

I said, No: "Not right now. We both know the financial burden of my support is going to fall on you at some point in the future because my fixed income from social security & pensions is not enough to support me. But I'd like to delay that moment as long as possible. You work hard for your money, and you deserve to enjoy it. I can work the Rube Goldberg side-hustle gigs for a while longer. I'll know when I can't."

Jeanna asked if I wanted her BF to fly me out to New Mexico some time this summer. I said, Sure. Though it's inconceivable to me that this winter is ever going to end: The landscape is buried beneath seven inches of snow, and the sky is unrelentingly grey & overcast. Temps this week are gonna flirt with 40° but drop again next week. I honestly do not know how humans managed to survive these kinds of living conditions back when they relied on wood-burning stoves for heat and horses for transportation.

I'm lucky to have a sense of humor and an obsessive creative project that functions as a background process. Otherwise, life would seem pret-ty grim and absolutely meaningless just about now.

At least, it's warmer! Temps have been above freezing for the past few days and are forecast to be in the 40°s all next week.

On Monday, when it was -4° overnight, I woke up to a freezing cold house because Icky, once again, had neglected to order heating oil, and the furnace had run out of fuel.



Yes, again.

Icky, in NYC, was not answering his phone, so I called the Ulster County Sheriff's Dept to come and do a welfare check—hey! A 73-year-old woman, alone in a 36° house during sub‑zero weather??? Not safe!!!

I mean, I had a space heater, struggling to keep the ambient temps in ny bedroom in the 50°s, so with a coat and a hat, I wasn't gonna expire imminently of hypothermia, but c'mon.

The Ulster County Sheriff's Dept dispatched two officers who were very nice but could do nothing.

"You could try seeing if an oil company will do an emergency one-time delivery," one of the officers suggested.

"And call social services," suggested the other.

I sighed and said, "I didn't think you would be able to do anything. I just wanted this on record in case I die of hypothermia and you need to find the perp to accuse of negligent homicide."

"I will personally pull the electric chair switch on that one," said the first officer. "What a prick your landlord is. The rent market around here is horrifying."

I was due to go into Schlock, but of course, going into Schlock would have meant turning off the space heater because you cannot leave a space heater untended; the risk of house fires is just too great. And turning off the space heater would have meant returning to a bedroom that was 37°.

So, instead, I spent the morning calling around to 10 different heating oil companies and every Ulster County social services department that seemed vaguely relevant to my needs. Interspersed with calls & texts to Icky.

The heating oil companies were downright hostile. Heating oil deliveries? Get on line, be-yatch! And put down a $1,000 deposit! The Ulster County social services departments were bored, dismissive, & condescending. They too wanted me to get on line.

Finally, Icky called back. Wonder of wonders! He was even vaguely apologetic. And arranged a delivery with his regular provider. By mid-afternoon, the house was back up to a chilly but habitable 60°—which is where I keep the thermostat because heating oil is expensive but sweaters and sweatshirts are cheap.

###

The experience took its toll emotionally.

'Cause this is the third time it's happened, and fool me twice... So, I felt like a moron: I should have moved, right? Except if I had moved, I would not have had access to the Schlock revenue stream, which is coming in useful.

But more, I felt brutalized because I was old, scared, and met with a tone that said, You’re just one more annoyance. I grokked the bureaucratic flatness was more about their overload than my worth or legitimacy. Still. I felt very marginalized & hopeless & as if I was of no importance to anyone.

Didn't help that I had to trudge out 100 yards through the snow twice to bring the chickens water. Icky still hasn't dealt with that. No, the chickens are not my responsibility, but I'm not gonna have innocent animals suffering on my watch.

You can read Chapters 1 through 4 here.

CHAPTER 5

Over the phone, Neal said, "Always trust evangenitals to make God seem unattractive."

"Look," I said, "I know it's ridiculous. But talking to her is very—I dunno. Comforting. She has a coherent worldview."

Neal said, "Of course, she does. So did the Nazis. So do Scientologists."

"Well, I mean, it is refreshing. You have no idea what it's like in there. Nobody has any idea. It's fuckin' chaos, but somehow, we're supposed to normalize it. It's demoralizing."

Neal said, "I know when I'm demoralized, I always look to the Old Testament for the wisdom of barely literate scribes who knew that the sun revolved around the earth and thought goat sacrifice protocols were the apex of moral philosophy. That must be why today's Christianists are so forward-looking."

"You know what?" I said. "I can talk to whomever I want without your permission."

"But, see, you don't always do what's best for you. Just an observation."

“Maybe you and my therapist could just start talking to each other directly,” I said. “Circumvent the middleman. Leave me out of it.”

"You don't have a therapist."

"That's right! I don't!"

And then we started bickering about whether the N95 masks you could buy at Home Depot used the same filtering mechanism as the ones they distributed to nurses in the ICU.

###

That was one kind of friendship. Debbie Reynolds was another—situational, impersonal, the other end of the spectrum from the highly personal connection I had with Neal.

You can feel a great deal of affection for the people with whom you have impersonal relationships. But the essence of the relationship is transactional, the boundaries are clearly marked. You walk away from these interactions with a pleasant glow and no particular urgency to repeat them. Once we finished wrecking our lungs for the afternoon, I never thought about Debbie Reynolds, and if I were to quit my job suddenly, she would never, ever cross my mind again, except maybe as a tag to an amusing anecdote I'd find myself telling to someone I got stuck next to at a continuing education seminar.

We were work best friends. Everybody needs a work best friend, right? Somebody you can roll your eyes at during staff meetings when middle managers justify their employment by droning on and on about CYA disguised as new protocols. Someone with whom you can indulge in forbidden pleasures at the end of a long shift.

As spring turned to summer, the days grew longer, and work seemed to get harder. Any other year, the summer would have been luminous, but now it just stretched aimlessly in front of us like house arrest. After a claustrophobic day in the ICU, we scuttled home, locked the door, pulled down the shades, as though somehow that would keep COVID at bay.

At the end of our ICU shifts, Debbie Reynolds and I had taken to chain-smoking. Two cigarettes back-to-back instead of one. We'd light that second cigarette from the still-flaming butt of the first, almost as if we saw our matching smokers' coughs as an act of defiance, a Fuck You to COVID: You want coughing? I'll give you coughing.

One afternoon, Debbie Reynolds exhaled smoke, began coughing, and couldn't stop. Brought her hand up to her throat, gasped for air. Coughed some more. I watched, wondering whether there was something I should do. I couldn't think of what that something might be.

She reached into her Marlboro pack and fished out a third cigarette.

"Maybe you shouldn't," I remarked pleasantly.

She shot me a WTF look and clicked her lighter.

"Ever think of giving up smoking?" I asked.

She was coughing again. Dry cough this time. She held her hand up, motioning, Wait. Took a deep breath. Held it.

"Why the fuck would I want to do that?" she asked finally.

I shrugged.

"I don't want to be old," she said. "I can't think of anything less appealing than living past 70."

"No?"

"Why? So I can become more and more invisible? So I can break my hip, get diagnosed with lung cancer? Develop dementia, get shut up in some Memory Acres where, if I'm really lucky, they'll serve red, green, and orange Jello and one of the staff will speak English? No, thank you!"

So much for my career as a motivational smoking cessationist.

Next day, she wasn't at work. I didn't think anything of it. We may have been BFF in the Land of Code Blue, but we weren't joined at the hip. We didn't go out of our way to sign up for the same shifts, and we seldom shared details about our lives outside of work. If Debbie Reynolds decided to go on vacation, I'd only know about it if I noticed a tan under her PPEs when that vacation was over.

###

Three shifts passed with no Debbie. At the end of each shift, I'd wander over to the NO SMOKING sign, but found I had no real desire to smoke alone.

Then I had three days off in a row. I spent them binging the first three seasons of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" and doomscrolling celebrity deaths on Facebook. My apartment smelled like old coffee and stale food delivered cold in paper takeout boxes, but Dead Pool options were practically limitless, thank you, COVID!

She still wasn't back when I returned to work. The charge nurse intercepted me before I could push through the ICU's double doors. "You didn't get the email?"

"What email?"

The charge nurse sighed. "I told them they should call you. You shouldn't be inside the hospital. Go to the ER and take a COVID test. Phone me with the results."

"Why?" I asked.

"Just do it," she said.

I knew better than to make a face. There was only one reason they sent ICU staff back outside.

Ten minutes later, my nose was burning, and the test was negative. I called the charge nurse and was summoned back to the unit. She watched me in the dressing room while I gowned and gloved.

"When's Debbie back here?" I asked.

The charge nurse sighed and looked grim. "I'm not supposed to say this because medical confidentiality, but you guys are pals, that's why we needed that COVID test. Debbie's here. In the hospital. As a patient. She's got it."

When I got done with work that day, habit took me wandering toward the New Millennium Kingdom table. Today's sign read Pestilence Brings Hope For the Faithful, and the flaxen-haired girl had backup: the tall, stooped man I'd seen a couple of times before.

Her eyes brightened when she saw me. "This is the one I told you about," she said to the man as though I wasn't there. "The one the Lord keeps guiding our way."

"Not the Lord," I said. "My Prius. I walk past you because my car's in the lot behind you."

But the man's eyes had fixed upon mine. "The Lord is as likely to work through the random placement of an automobile as He is through a burning bush."

I supposed that could be true, assuming one believed in the Lord.

"What you're seeking to discover is a thing you've always known," the man continued. "There are no coincidences. There are only signs. Signs that lead to the one true destination if you follow them. I know you know that—" he leaned over to peer at the name badge still pinned to my scrubs—"Grazia." He mispronounced it.

"Signs, huh?" I said. "The universe needs clearer handwriting."

"Hard day?" the girl asked sympathetically. "You work in the ICU. They all must be hard."

And suddenly, my eyes welled up with tears.

"You need fellowship," the girl said softly. "I'm Sister Penury. This is Brother Malachi. We have dinner every night. We break bread together at a big table, like a family. We laugh. We talk about what God is doing. You don't have to go back to your empty rooms. You don't have to be alone."

"Thanks," I said, "but I have a frozen pizza and a clinically significant relationship with Bravo waiting for me at home."

Brother Malachi's smile was pitying. “You hide behind jokes. It's a dissociative behavior. Did you know that? I used to be a therapist. I recognize it." He leaned in closer. "You joke because you’re afraid. You know that, don't you? You see death every day. You know the world is ending. And that's the world you picked to be in.”

"I have to go now," I said.

It was all I could do not to weep.

This is the difference between crying and weeping: When you cry, you're enjoying it; when you weep, you're not.

###

"What if they're right?" I said to Neal on the phone that night.

"What do you mean, 'What if they're right?'" he snapped. "They're not right."

"But what if they are?" I said. "What if we choose the lives we lead?"

Neal snorted. "You mean, back in Bardo? 'Gee', you tell that reincarnation broker, 'what I'd really like to be is a veterinarian in the Yorkshire Dales circa 1938!'

"'Nah,' she says. 'You should consider becoming Cassandra while Western civilization collapses around you! But mind the trigger warning: This material contains themes of intense sadness, depression, hopelessness, and emotional despair.'"

"You weren't there," I said. "You didn't see his face—"

"And I'm glad I wasn't," Neal said, "because I probably would have slugged the asshole, and then the Bar Association would have to put me on probation. Let me preemptively explain my motivation: I hate and abominate the assertion that people chose to be rounded up, stripped naked, starved, and shoved into gas chambers."

"You didn't hear his voice," I said. "The absolute certainty in his voice—"

"Oh, for God's sake." Neal sounded really angry. "He's a hustler, Grazia. That's what hustlers sound like. He's got your number. What? You think all hustlers are Nigerian princes writing flowery emails?"

"Don't you dare condescend to me!"

"I will condescend to you if you persist in letting assholes crawl into your head—"

Very coolly, very gently, I depressed the disconnect button on my phone.

For the first hour and a half, I was determined not to pick up the phone when he called back.

At the two-hour mark, I decided I'd pick up the phone, but I'd be icy, punctiliously polite.

After three hours, I decided he was my best friend. When best friends hurt your feelings, you're up front about it. You clear the air, so communication can improve.

Only he didn't call back.

Not that night.

Or the next night.

Or the next night.

Or the next.

###

I started parking my Prius two blocks away so I wouldn’t have to walk past the New Millennium Kingdom table. Without a work best friend to commune or commiserate with, even telepathically through layers of PPE, the hours in the ICU dragged. Each moment felt like Sisyphus's rock. Suction, prone, re-diaper, hang IVs. Repeat. Talk to anxious loved ones on the phone. Come up with fifty ways to say, "Gee, I don't know," when someone asks, "But they are improving, right? Aren't they?"

Debbie Reynolds was on the third floor. Visitors were not allowed, not even visitors who worked elsewhere in the hospital. I talked to her a couple of times on the phone. Mostly, she was pissed because there was no way she could smoke. She could barely speak a complete sentence without spasming into strange, raspy, COVID coughs.

"This sucks," she'd say. "They're not doing anything for me—" And then her words would sputter into coughing.

"Well, they must be doing something—"

"Remdesivir." The final "r" of the word rode out on one long wheeze. "So they have to check my creatinine fifty times a day. Fuck this place. They keep trying to force me to drink Ensure—"

"Nine grams of protein in an eight-ounce bottle!" I'd say.

Then we'd run out of things to talk about.

One morning, I tried to call Debbie Reynolds, but I couldn't get through. "Transferred. She's being transferred," the third-floor charge nurse told me fretfully.

Thirty seconds later, the motorized doors swung open, and Debbie Reynolds was being wheeled into the ICU on a gurney. Her skin was grey. Her eyes had that panic of someone who has forgotten how to inhale.

"Pulse ox 89% with rebreather on 15 liters. Acute hypoxic respiratory failure," shouted the ICU attending. The crash cart was right by the double doors. He reached for the tray.

Rapid sequence intubation. I knew the drill—and so did Debbie Reynolds. Between wheezes, I could hear her gasping: "Hail Mary, full of grace—" in time with the cardiac monitor's beeps.

The overhead lights exploded into full brights. The attending hesitated for a moment, laryngoscope in hand: "Anyone know her MOLST status?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Pellegrini," I hissed. "She doesn't want to die."

The intubation seemed to go smoothly. At first. Nurses shot her up with etomidate and succinylcholine; Pellegrini slid the tube between the cords and into her trachea on the first try. I was the team member charged with monitoring vitals and pulse oximeter stats: "Heart rate 130. Pressure 150 over 90. Sats 92% on 100%—"

Then her pressure tanked. MAP in the 60s and falling.

"Fuck," said Pellegrini softly.

Monitors exploded into alarms. Pellegrini barked orders. The nursing brigade scrambled with pressors and fluids.

It took us an hour and a half to stabilize her, and when we were finally done, I looked down at Debbie Reynolds shrunken within a tangle of tubes and lines, motionless except when the ventilator moved her chest, jaw slack, mouth taped open around that endotracheal tube, the sour funk of antiseptics radiating off her, and I asked Pellegrini, "She's not going to make it through the night, is she?"

He glared at me. This was one of those questions you're never supposed to ask.

But as it turned out, I was wrong about making it through the night. She didn't even last through the end of the shift.

###

The charge nurse made me leave early.

"But my shift doesn't end till 4," I said.

"Just go," she told me.

I couldn't tell whether this was compassion or disapproval.

Outside the hospital, it was the most beautiful day in the history of the universe. Lambent blue skies. Birds singing. Purple butterfly bushes and lavender hibiscus trees perfuming the air. Squirrels on treasure hunts scampered across the lawns that bordered Wiltwyck Hospital's historic old wing. Even the patients in the makeshift ER tent waiting to be processed for COVID seemed to be having a good time, their voices wafting merrily on sun-kissed summer breezes. Someone was laughing too loudly at a punchline I couldn't hear.

The details of this glorious present tense tried to paint a mural on my brain, only my mind was a no-stick surface, everything was sliding and jumbling. I'd forgotten where I'd parked the Prius. I found myself walking past the New Millennium Kingdom table.

Today's sign: Everyone Thinks They Have More Time. But Are You Sure You Do?

"There you are," Sister Penury said as if this chance encounter was a rendezvous we'd set up earlier that morning.

I knew then instantly that the universe had organized the entire day around this moment. The entire day? My entire life. I had paused in front of the table because pausing in front of that table was inevitable; it was going to happen, it was happening, it had already happened. Time was no longer a factor.

Sister Penury had been packing up the pamphlets as though she'd already known I would be the last customer of the day. Brother Malachi materialized at her shoulder, holding out a crinkled paper cup filled with a pale liquid he had poured from a thermos. "Chamomile tea," he said. "You look like you could benefit from some soothing."

"It's lasagne night!" Sister Penury bubbled. "I do love lasagne. When I prayed to God to divest me of all human alliances, He left me with lasagne! Funny, huh? He works in mysterious ways!" She chuckled and shook her head fondly.

"Our house is a sanctuary where warriors rest," Brother Malachi said. "No cell phones. No computers. No televisions. No alarms. A break from the battlefield. A place for sleep, and when you're ready, fellowship with other warriors. When you're ready."

The chamomile tea tasted good. Sister Penury had rolled up the banner; still laughing, she struggled to fold the table's legs.

"I want to go home," I said. Though when I pictured my apartment—the unwashed dishes, the wilting plants, the bed I hadn't made in three days—I wasn't sure I wanted to go there.

"Of course, you do," Sister Penury said. "Of course, you do."

"But what about my car?" I asked.

Sister Penury's laughter was heartier than ever. "Pick it up tomorrow."

The car Sister Penury loaded the displays into was a silver Honda hatchback with a mismatched hubcap, maybe 10 years old. There was half a case of bottled water on the back seat and two rickety-looking folding chairs bungee‑corded in the cargo area. SpongeBob stickers from another life decorated the dash, and behind the steering wheel sat Brother Malachi. "It's a short ride," he told me as though that was the main reason to get into the car.

The sun slid lower as we left the hospital grounds. Two sharp turns and then we were on Broadway, where Neal and I had tromped together so often. We passed the Old Dutch Church. "Calvin Vaux designed that," I said.

"Calvin Klein?" said Sister Penury. "I didn't know he was an architect."

The car angled right onto a side street. I recognized the crumbling Italianate row houses. We were in the Roundout District, where the ghost of the old canal still haunted evenings with the unmistakable scent of brackish water.

When the car finally stopped, I recognized the house it had pulled up in front of, too. The derelict mansion with the steeply pitched roof and the wraparound porch. That day in October when I'd seen it first was the day I'd first met Neal. Then it had been grim and bare. Now vines threaded the decaying balusters, and nettles, briars, and crabgrass choked the formal garden. It was still grim, though.

Brother Malachi made an elaborate pantomime of opening my side of the car.

"Welcome home," he said.

We had a brief respite from the punishingly cold temperatures: Last few days, temps actually broke freezing. But today, the polar vortex is bearing back down again. The National Weather Service has issued a Severe Weather Alert: Dangerously cold wind chills as low as 20 to 35 below zero expected throughout the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley.

This disinclines me to leave the house 'cause what if—minute chance, but still—my car breaks down on the way to the gym? Frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes.

###

In Work in Progress news: We are up to the Debbie Reynolds death scene, which occurs during an ICU code, so I am wracking my tiny brain for status detail.

Then Grazia ends up going to the creepy New Millennium Kingdom mansion, where she spends 18 hours a day praying as the initial prep work for dismantling her personality begins.

Neal rescues her!

Big dilemma: Does Neal rescue her before or after the creepy mansion bursts into flame from a faulty electrical connection? (Decisions, decisions!)

Then Neal & Grazia have to have some sort of Meaningful Conversation on the front porch of Neal's Catskills cabin.

And magically, perspective swirls so that we are back at the very first scene of Part 1 when Grazia drives up there following Neal's memorial.

It would be great if I could tweak the closing prose too, so it mimics the chick lit cadence of that opening chapter, but I'm not sure I have the writing chops to pull that one off.

But after that, we start with Part 2: Daria.

###

I have my own Bad Cult memories, though I'd have to do some serious excavating to access them since they're buried under many decades of petrified protective amnesia.

As a teenager, I had dealings with a cult called Synanon.

Synanon didn't eat me, but it ate some people I cared about back then—most notably, Michael Garrett whom I still wonder about sometimes late at night.

I'm not sure how many of those Bad Cult memories I can repurpose. They're awfully immersive, and immersion is only of questionable usefulness in a passage that's supposed to be 1,500 words or so in length max. Don't really want to distract from the essential story, which is Neal & Grazia.

Here is Michael Garrett and me in 1968:

Bad couple of days.

Having trouble with the "falling" part of "falling asleep."

I could physically register how tired my body was, but every time I began to drift off, I was flooded with bad neurochemicals that made me feel unsafe, a chemical lurch that pulled me back into hypervigilance.

Very exhausting.

This winter has been very, very difficult.

It's partly the brutally cold weather, partly the ghastly political situation, partly my sub-optimal personal situation, but also (I imagine) partly my age: Totipotence has always played a huge role in my delusions of my own uniqueness: I can do anything! Maybe not well! But I can do it!

But at 73, I am learning there are things I can no longer do, & moreover, that other people see those limitations and judge me for them. I am no longer really a unique & special person. I am just another aging Boomer.

It's a humbling process.

###

Had my cardiac consultation yesterday. Liked the cardiologist very much! Beautiful young woman of Indian extraction. Terrific bedside manner.

"Cholesterol is mostly a genetic thing," she told me. "Lower estrogen levels, particularly after menopause, lead to increased LDL and triglycerides, raising cardiovascular risk."

My LDL (a/k/a "baaaaad" cholesterol) is 160—literally one point into being high!

But my lentil-and-oatmeal-heavy diet & regular visits to the gym have not succeeded in budging that number.

She wants to start me on statins.

"What happens if I don't take them?" I asked.

She cocked her head & smiled quizzically. "Your chances of having a stroke in the next 10 years go up by 30%. Your heart's in good shape! Your EKG looks great. But, you know. There's plaque in your arteries, and plaque breaks off."

Now! I am not particularly scared of dying, but I am afraid of stroking out!

So, I am going to take those statins.

Sigh...

###

In other news, Remuneration client seems to be on the verge of sending me a new assignment, which would be great.

The 100-yard electrical relay to the chickens' water has failed again. The extension cords are buried beneath a foot and a half of snow, and I'm not even going to fantasize about digging them out because that would be impossible. I'm just gonna have to haul fresh water out to the chickens every day and hope they can drink enough in the 20 minutes or so before that water freezes—the temps at night have been going down to -7°F (real feel: -15°F) and barely graze 20°F (real feel: 5°F) during the day—not to die of thirst.

I don't know what else to do.

This Arctic front has been brutal. My share of the electric & heating oil bills this month came to $500, and honestly? I don't know how I am gonna pay it. I suppose since I will be out of here come spring (please, please, please, Universe), the smart thing would be to tell Icky to take it out of the rental deposit. I mean, there are certainly many folk I could plead my story to who would be happy to help me out, I suspect, but how humiliating is that? Come rescue me! I can't take care of myself!

If Brian were alive, this would not be an issue. He would give me the money & tell me to shut up when I tried to thank him.

###

In more amusing news, Facebook has decided to give me a professional account because many, many years ago, when I first signed up for FB, I facetiously gave my profession as "Cat News Aggregator" and started a regular posting feature called "Today's Exciting Cat News." Apparently, that little daily posting feature attracts some threshold number of eyeballs. An FB professional account gives one access to all sorts of interesting user-tracking info.

And my Substack attracts more (free) subscribers every day, though it's a long way away from being monetizable.

###

Life is just very stressful right now. A real slog. I remind myself that it won't be that way forever, but one thing about me: I live very fully in the present tense; in fact, Ichabod told me once I was the most existential person he had ever known. When things suck, it's very hard for me to envision a future point in which things will not suck, and that renders mobilizing future options for non-suckitude solely an intellectual exercise. Emotionally, I just want to curl up somewhere & cry.

We ended up getting about two feet of snow.

Brandi couldn't have been nicer when I finally connected with her, and her husband is out there plowing the driveway now. I will have to go out & shovel the bits that couldn't be plowed and also salt the bits that could be plowed since it's sleeting now, and it's only 20°F, which means every surface is going to ice over. Also, I want to check on the poor chickens. Their coop is a good 100 yards from the house. 100 yards under two feet of snow.

The electricity did not go out, for which I am deeply grateful. The Internet went down, but it is back up now.

I feel mentally exhausted. I do not like this Little House on the Prairie shit at all.

But ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

So onward, fellow humans.

Did absolutely nothing yesterday through a combination of lassitude, political despair, distracting phone calls, & Icky on the premises. Waiting for a Major Weather Event shares a lot in common with standing on line at the DMV; you see that processing is gonna take a lonnnnnng time, and you know you'd be better off doing something useful during the wait, but you can't because your skitterish mind won't let go of the countdown.

###

Alex Pretti's murder hit me hard.

An ICU nurse who worked with wounded veterans, his last action on this planet was to try and help a woman border patrol agents had tear-gassed. He was trying to record the incident with a phone in one hand. He also had a gun on his person that he had a permit to carry, and Minnesota is a permit-to-carry state. He was pushed to the ground, the gun was taken, and then he was shot 11 times through the back. Execution style.

###

Later on the phone with a friend, I said, "It's a civil war, isn't it?"

"Pretty much," my friend said.

"I wish I knew about some communication method that couldn't be spied on," I said. "Because the time has come for an organized response."

"There isn't anything that's 100% reliable. The closest thing is Signal. Open source & encrypted on both the sending and receiving end."

"You know, I almost wish I had a terminal cancer diagnosis," I said. "I would go full-on Charlotte Corday and take out Marat—"

"Careful, careful, careful," said my friend. "This is not a protected communication channel."

"Oh, my good buddy at the Department of Homeland Security knows I was just kidding about that," I said. "Don't you, Ice Barbie?"

###

Icky was up here for two full weeks, the longest amount of time he's ever spent in Wallkill since I began my tenancy. He finally left last night.

Part of his prolonged stay was due to the fact that he wanted to exercise his custody rights over the oldest Spawn. Dante dropped out of the University of Utah (I called it!) and had to be reenrolled at SUNY New Palz. New Paltz didn't start classes till the middle of last week.

Dante is not a bad kid. He's friendly, cheerful, & polite. Engaging, even. He's been diagnosed with ADHD and takes Adderall. But I often find myself wondering whether he has a neurodevelopmental disorder at all, or whether his lack of attention to the world around him isn't the psychological consequence of having a father who is so toxic that Dante's had to invest vast quantities of psychic energy into blocking that father out. There is no such thing as selective obliviousness at that age; kids can't compartmentalize. So Dante is oblivious to things he shouldn't be oblivious to.

Like he took out a good portion of the property's fence the other day by making an ill-considered turn onto the driveway, wreaking considerable & expensive damage to Icky's leased Chevy Equinox. Icky stayed past the start of New Paltz classes to argue with the Chevy dealer about that.

###

Speaking of driveways...

The storm is living up to its hype. Snow is coming down fast and furious. Before Icky left, I'd asked him to make arrangements with Brandi, the neighbor across the street, to plow the driveway once the storm was through (which I figured would be Monday around noon). I didn't get a straight answer about whether he had done so.

Icky texted me this morning: I would strongly suggest that you not wait for Brandi to try driving your car in and out of the driveway. I would try driving back and forth and clearing a path with the car before it gets too deep.

The snow on the driveway was already five inches deep at this point. I didn't see much point in trying to drive a path. It would be filled faster than I could drive it. But I am a marshmallow, so I figured, What the hell, and actually followed his suggestion—not once but twice.

The second time, the driveway snow was eight inches high, and I got stuck in it. It took me half an hour of frantic shoveling in 12° temperatures to inch my way back to the quasi-protection of the house.

Were u able to drive a path? Icky texted.

Kind of, I texted back. But I won't be able to do it again.

If you keep up with it you will be fine.

I don't think so. It's a 24 hour event. I'm not going to be driving my car up & down that hill in the dark.

Don’t rely on getting dug out if you can take proactive steps, Icky texted primly.

Excuse me? I AM relying on the driveway being plowed tomorrow, I texted. Can Brandi plow the driveway tomorrow after the snow is predicted to stop? If she can’t, let me know & I’ll find someone else. But the driveway WILL need to be plowed.

Whereupon Icky went beserk. Called me up and screamed at me over the phone! Called me vituperative names. Hung up on me.

WT-living-FUCK???

I stared at the phone for a second and then immediately called Christine, the Spawns' mother: "Christine, I need a reality check—"

She couldn't have been nicer.

"Oh, no, no, no, no, no," she said when I reported Icky's driveway-clearing plan. "You can't do that unless you have four-wheel drive. He's delusional."

About Icky's bizarre phone call: "It's not you. It's him. He's mentally ill. Borderline or bipolar or something. My advice? Make your own arrangements for getting plowed, do not depend on him. You don't have to answer his texts, you don't have to pick up the phone when he calls."

"I mean, I figured I wouldn't be able to get out of the house till tomorrow," I said. "Or maybe even Tuesday, so I don't get why..."

"Listen," Christine said. "You are a lovely person, and I am sorry you had to deal with that."

"It's like he's toxic character in a Stephen King novel!"

"I will be your lifeline," Christine said. "I have four-wheel drive. If you have to get out of the house for any reason, just give me a call. I will be right over."

Icky is even more insane than I realized.

Justine finally emailed me, so I can take being snubbed off my list of grievances and give my full attention to the coming snow-pocalypse—which is now up to 18 inches in every forecast, predicted to be light, fluffy, Currier-and-Ives snow, which is better than ice because there is less chance the power grid will go down.

I nagged Icky to get driveway plowing lined up when the storm finally ends.

I'll still have to dig out my car, which will be a pain in the ass, but doable.

The storm should be manageable, so long as we're not looking at a prolonged interval where the power fails.

I told the kiskas they needed to draw lots to see which one of them I'm going to sacrifice to the Power Grid Gods. But they are ignoring me.

###

Other than that, got all my errands done yesterday. I am more likely to eat myself to death than to starve during the Coming Storm. Worked out very strenuously in an effort to exhaust all those Noradrenaline-secreting neurotransmitters! Came home, did a speed reread of Mary Lovell's The Mitford Girls and watched movies: Rental Family & Sentimental Value.

Rental Family is a very slight film, but it's about the social stand-in biz, a Japanese business model that deeply intrigues me. So I enjoyed it.

Sentimental Value is Ingmar Bergman for the 21st century a/k/a the Age of Infinite Content & Zero Attention Span. I kinda/sorta enjoyed it.

Tried to watch Marty Supreme & failed: I liked Uncut Gems a lot, so I was willing to forgo my strong, visceral aversion to Timothée Chalamet, whose head is so undersized for his body that he reminds me of those shrunken-head football players in the original Beetlejuice. But I just couldn't get into it.

The Mitford Girls is an unsatisfactory biography, but it's the only Mitford bio that's still in print. As previously noted, I am a huge Decca fan-girl, and I quite understand why Decca completely froze out the Hitler-loving Diana for 50 years. Mary Lovell does not. Mitford biographers in general seem to go very easy on Diana. Was it because she was so physically beautiful?



Dunno, but I fuckin' loathe her.

"How lovely it is to be lovely one," Diana once remarked, a comment her novelist sister Nancy promptly snagged & incorporated into The Pursuit of Love.

###

I did absolutely no useful work whatsoever yesterday.

But I should try to advance Chapter 5 today.

We are in the midst of a severe solar storm, the magnitude of which has not been seen since 2003. The Aurora Borealis is supposed to be visible to the naked eye at my latitude, but I had to use the night settings on my iPhone camera to snap this:



And the Arctic blast is back. It is cold out. Very, very, very cold. Not supposed to rise above 18° F for the next three days.

###

As above, so below.

Trump is literally sundowning—a thing that happens to many people with dementia. They may seem coherent during the day, but at night, they lose it entirely, hence Trump's late-night social media posting mania: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace!

The historical comparison is no longer strictly to Nazis anymore—though ICE is the Gestapo.

No, the historical comparison is more to Caligula.

Assuming human history continues past 10 years—to my mind, not a safe assumption at all—historians are going to be asking the same question over & over again, WHY didn't they DO something? He was so obviously insane.

Honestly, I do not know.

This is very, very difficult to live through.

Because, I mean, what do we do?

Ignore it? Keep living our lives as though it isn't happening?

There's a core of physical dread inside of me; I walk around, trying to ignore it, trying to maintain, but that's increasingly hard to do.

###

I have a bunch of errands to do today, plus the gym—bad weather has kept me away from the gym since Thursday last—but I have very little interest in doing them, very little interest in doing anything. Even parking myself in front of a screen & watching mindless television would not distract me from the mind monkey sitting on the Bodhi Tree's branch & chittering.

But ya gotta do what ya gotta do, so I guess I'll force myself to do those errands. As the I Ching reminds us: Perseverance furthers.