Mallory's Camera

Damn.

Well, yesterday started out well enough.

I pulled out the last six wheelbarrels of thistles, brambles, bee balm, & other assorted weeds from my New Paltz community garden plot.

Before:



After:



I deserved a treat!

So, I trotted over to Hudson Valley Chocolates, and found Stephanie hard at work:



Stephanie is the French-born choclatier who supplies bonbons for the Mohonk Mountain House and various other upscale venues around the Hudson Valley. She has a small shop here in town that keeps whimsical hours: It's open when she feels like being open.

Wallkill is a place where the men walk around in teeshirts that say, Unvacinated, Unmasked, Republican, Straight. In the spring, summer, & fall, Wallkill is an intensely beautiful place, but it is filled with the most horrible people, so there's no reason to go anywhere near it.

But if there was a reason to go near Wallkill, that reason would be to visit Stephanie's shop, Hudson Valley Chocolates:



Got home. Nibbled chocolate. Began Remunerating. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Remunerating is dry stuff. I have to keep wiping my brain clean of excess jargon in between those weighty bouts of regression analysis. To do that, I surf the web—journal entries (and y'all do not write enough!), blogs, celebrity scandals, and when I'm really hard up, news.

Yesterday, the news was unrelentingly horrible.

From Ice Barbie's press conference at which a United States Senator—a Senator!—was handcuffed and brutalized to Israel's massive bombing of Iran.

This is all so fuckin' NUTS.

###

I can't remember the name of the podcast I sometimes listen to that once did a show about superpowers. Specifically: What superpower do people most wish they had?

I do remember that time travel was the most popular superpower—though not by a huge margin.

And if you drilled down into the sample of people who wanted to be able to time travel, they all wanted to be able to time travel for the same reason—so they could kill Hitler!

Well, now we all have the chance to kill Hitler.

That must be the silver lining in the current cloud, right?

Cool car I saw in the parking lot at the gym:



Shortly, I must toddle off to the New Paltz garden for more weeding as it's supposed to get hot this afternoon.

Yesterday, I did very little of anything except tromp (Winding Hills, steep) and start rereading Tracy Daugherty's biography of Joan Didion—which is not as good as Tracy Daugherty's bio of Larry McMurtry.

I suspect Didion simply did not engage Daugherty as much: She is an excellent prose writer, but comes across as an unsympathetic human being, unspontaneous, unlikeable, studied to an extreme. One gets the impression that Didion hovered over her words like a vulture hovering over a skull, wondering, Did I miss anything the first time I picked this clean? It probably took her half an hour to write a single sentence.

McMurtry, in contrast, was a kind of mad, slapdash writer. Every morning of his life, he was up and at that typewriter by 7:30 a.m., typing away like a maniac. By 9 a.m., he'd have produced 10 pages. And then he'd stop.

Ten pages in an hour and a half! That's crazy fast!

And probably accounts for his uneven output: Easily half of what McMurtry wrote is really baaaaad.

But McMurtry draws the reader in in a way that Didion is simply not capable of doing. One must parse Didion's sentences. And that is exhausting when one is reading for pleasure. Hence, one never reads Didion for pleasure.

Interestingly, both Didion and McMurtry are ultimately what you might call regional writers. Didion's region was California; McMurtry's region was Texas. And each writer's finest output amounts to kind of a harvest of regional tropes: Didion's basket is "the pioneer," while McMurtry's is "the American West."

Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed got a present they didn't want.

A birdfeeder. With a digital camera. Courtesty of a well-intended offspring.

It feeds blurry photographs to various nearby digital receivers and has some kind of AI hookup thing that gives you info about the blurry photographs.

"Well, that seems like a perfectly nice present!" I cried.

Mrs. Neighbor Ed made a face. "When the jays grab the sunflower seeds, they knock all the other seeds out of the feeder, and then the field mice grab them and begin invading the house!"

"When your cat was around, we never had any problems with field mice," she added—and I realized, with a pang, that she was talking about the Meezer, dead & gone these—what? seven years? The Meezer had been the mightiest of hunters!

I hoped the Meezer was eavesdropping from Cat Heaven, where presumably there is an endless parade of self-regenerating field mice and squirrels for her to slaughter. It's always nice to hear nice things about oneself.

And I also felt this almost palpable strand of connection. Veritably ectoplasmic! The Meezer had really been the last link to my old life in California, and when she died, that link snapped: I was no longer someone who'd once lived in California; I was only someone who lived here.

That's the reason why I liked living in Dutchess County more than I like living in Ulster County, I thought. In Dutchess County, there'd been... continuity.

And also, of course, in Dutchess County, I had friends.

###$

I prattled merrily with Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed for an hour, and our prattle was lively and hilarious and entirely without awkwardness, no long-time-no-see pauses or fumbles at all.

Neighbor Ed is almost as good at banter as Ben used to be!

I felt as though I was drinking water from a cool, sweet well.

Before that, I'd hung out with Loraine & Buff Ken & Rami on their back porch for an hour, watching the birds & talking about Buff Ken's latest bear sighting on his outdoor camera.

And before that, I'd got to play in the dirt in my garden for a few hours. There was a Claude sighting!

"When eet get hot last week, I water your garden," Claude told me.

"Thank you!" I said. Adding apologetically, "I can only get over here once a week—"

"I know, I know," Claude said, holding up a hand. "Eet is fine."

Everybody was glad to see me. Everybody liked me.

###

Icky was around this weekend. One of the Spawn managed to graduate from high school.

"He just totally ignored me!" Icky declared indignantly. "I came all the way from the City, and he ignored me! The only thing he said to me was how embarrassing it was that I was taking photographs of him!"

And you think I care exactly why? I wondered.

But I am well-trained in the art of making sympathetic sounds to people in distress.

Icky mistook my sounds for encouragement & began lamenting: It's hard, it's really fuckin' hard to be around the Spawn's mother, the Spawn's mother's new husband, the Spawn's mother's relentlessly cheerful father who'd been imported all the way from Texas—

"I was there all by myself!" Icky complained.

I clucked.

I would have expected him to head straight back to the City after this debacle. He's not supposed to be here till this coming Thursday! But, no. He stuck around. When I left for Dutchess County, he was sitting in front of his ginormous living room television screen, glaring at YouTube videos on how to sharpen knives. He had doused himself with cologne. I could smell it all the way from upstairs.

When I got back six hours later, he was still in front of the screen, watching what looked like the same YouTube video.

He saw me come in, jumped up, and immediately began doing pushups on the living room floor!

Like WTF???

He watched me cook my dinner. "That smells very good," he said, staring at my Cajun chicken.

No, fuckhead. I'm not offering you any.

Then he wanted to have a long conversation about changing propane canisters. He ushered me outside and handed me the wrench.

"I'm kind of a dummy about stuff like this," I admitted.

"Oh, no. Not you. You're a genius—"

Well, I am actually very smart, I thought. So you can can the fuckin' sarcasm. I didn't grow up using tools, so there's a learning curve involved.

But, you know. No need to prolong the conversation. And up close, that cologne was overpowering.

I thanked him for the tutorial, ran upstairs, and barricaded myself in the Patrizia-torium.

And eventually, he left.

###

In the past three days, three new place possibilities have popped up through my various real-life-people networks.

I don't really want to move until the fall, so I'm not sure how aggressively I should be following up the leads. But at the very least, they're a good auger, right?

Oh, this is sad! 😢

The Pine Bush UFO Fair & parade is scheduled for today, and it is raining.

In the mid-1980s, Pine Bush, New York, was the UFO Capital of the Western World. Hundreds of reports described a V-shaped craft adorned with colored lights that hovered slowly and silently in the sky, a sighting that became known as "the Westchester Boomerang" 'cause I guess it was sighted in Westchester County, too.

Of course, Pine Bush is relatively near what was, in the mid-80s, a military base, Stewart Airfield.

I remain agnostic on the subject of UFOs.

And will probably toddle off to Pine Bush anyway in a few minutes 'cause short drive.

###

Meanwhile, despite the humid, hot, sticky weather of the past few days, I have been trying to hold off on AC because AC is terrible for the environment (energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions 'cause refrigerants.)

So, yesterday I bought myself a portable DREO fan, which I gotta say, is just amazing 'cause it keeps me cool even when the Patrizia-torium is a sauna.

DREO is made in China, which I don't like. I've been boycotting goods made in China since forever for a reason nobody really cares about anymore: Tibet.

But sometimes ya gotta buy what ya gotta buy.

A breeze came up yesterday morning & the sky was blue again by noon. And I stopped feeling that air hunger thing—so it really was my lungs not anxiety.

Also, the moon is not full, so that blood-red orb I saw hovering in the West—a very strange position for the moon now that I think about it—was actually the sun setting.

I have a shitload of stuff to do and as per usual, very little interest in doing any of it.

But first I must scamper off to the New Paltz garden to put in a couple of hours of weeding before the temps rise to heat stroke levels.

Slow & steady. Slow & steady. Slow & steady.

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.

Except that it never did stop raining yesterday.

All day long, I registered the raindrops hitting the mud puddles in Icky's garden. The raindrops slowed down in the afternoon. But they did not stop.

Me being me, I castigated myself: If you weren't such a wimp, you'd go out tromping in this!!! What's a little water???

But, no. I may not have much sense, but I do have enough sense to come in out of the rain.

This morning, the sun is herding puffy, pastel clouds across a blue sky, though it is extremely soggy. Good day for gardening.

###

I was diligent yesterday. Got a lot of Remuneration done and mostly staved off the feelings of worthlessness and impending doom that accompany every day without full-spectrum sunlight for me.

My knee is almost back to normal. So, since I am the pivot around which the Universe revolves, it's very clear to me that the Universe made it rain to enforce another of rest & recuperation for my knee.

###

The world at large continues to horrify. Ukraine. Gaza. All those people dying. Wars—with the possible exceptions of World War II & the Vietnamese annihilation of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 — are beyond senseless. Fifty years after every war that's ever been fought, enemies are allies again, boundaries have been renegotiated by treaties, trade is brisk. So what exactly is the point? Is the blind territorial instinct some sort of failsafe on Mother Nature's part to periodically kill off millions of potential sperm donors and keep the global population down?

###

In the here & now of Trump's America, Trump is a fulminating piece of shit, of course, but his economic policies are pretty easy to understand if you see them as a game of cost-shifting: Trump promised to cut individual taxes, and cut individual taxes he shall (probably), but, of course, the U.S. needs that money. So, now instead of extorting it from individual citizens via an IRS 1040 form, he is extorting it from individual consumers via specialized excise taxes (i.e. tariffs).

One could make a strong argument, in fact, that that second way of funding the government is actually fairer since the individual has no choice over whether or not they pay income taxes, but they do have a choice over whether or not they buy a made-in-China washing machine, or a new Hyundai, or an avocado at the supermarket.

And actually, I support Trump's plan to shift millions in funding for colleges & universities to trade schools.

Some years ago, I had a conversation with a beautiful chemistry teacher in the Detroit area. She told me bluntly that the reason why so many high schools had shifted their curricula to college prep was not because their administrations had become more aspirational about student intelligence. No! It's because the college prep curriculum is significantly cheaper than shop classes and what they used to term "home economics."

Given the dismal reality of massive student debt that has turned vast numbers of college graduates into indentured servants and the fact that AI is rapidly replacing all those entry-level, white-collar jobs (that barely pay $45,000 a year with no health insurance) college prepared these poor babies for, I'd say the higher education system in the U.S. is pretty much a scam these days. It needs gutting.

###

Enough blather! Off to the garden.

One of Icky's side hustles is dog-sitting.

He showed up here yesterday with an absolutely adorable spaniel mix, an eager-to-please guy named Tofu.

Pity the poor animal that is abandoned to Icky's care! Think puppy version of Oliver Twist at the orphanage or a canine Jane Eyre at Lowood.

I felt so sorry for poor Tofu that I volunteered to take him for a walk.

We hit the rail trail in a drizzle. But practically the moment we got out of the car, the sun burst from the clouds & within five minutes, the sky was blue & in my red sweater, I was overdressed for the heat!

My mood-o-meter swung from bleak to benificent in a heartbeat.

Which makes me think I do not have Seasonal Affective Disorder.

I have Angst-When-the-Sun-Isn't-Shining Affective Disorder.

I really should move to Nevada or Arizona or something.

###

Otherwise, I spent the day Remunerating & reading Barry Diller's autobiography, which I found quite fascinating.

When Who Knew first came out, it racked up huge amounts of press because Barry Diller is gay but Barry Diller is also Mr. Diane von Fürstenberg. (I must note here that back in the Jurassic when I was modeling, my two DVF wrap-around dresses were my proudest possessions, & I just love Diane von Fürstenberg to death!)

For years, the assumption was that Diane von Fürstenberg was a beard.

But, no, sez Diller in his autobiography. The two met & fell in love back at the dawn of time. They had passionate sex just like any other two people in love. And in between dates, Diller continued to have sex with guys.

Forty years later, they got married.

I don't understand why this is so hard for the maintream media—I am pointing my finger at yew-w-w-w-w, Daily Mail!—to comprehend.

Personally, genitalia has never been the determining factor in who I fall in love with.

I fall in love with men, I fall in love with women. And anyone I fall in love with, I want to have sex with.

(Although it occurs to me that I probably should have written that in the past tense because I doubt very much I am capable of falling in love with anyone anymore.)

Obviously, sexual desire is a spectrum.

But more than that, terms like "gay" and "cis" are essentially marketing categories—"gay" considerably more than "cis" because show me a marginalized group, & I'll show you a business development opportunity!

But anyway, Barry Diller's sexuality & love life don't interest me.

No, Barry Diller's horizontal leap from Hollywood mogul to digital tycoon is what interests me.

Today, Diller owns InterActiveCorps (IAC), a media fleet that used to include Match.com & Tinder, and still owns a lot of B-list cyber-publications. (People! Barry Diller owns People! I used to work there!) Diller also owns Expedia & all its subsidiary vassals like Tracelocity, OrbitZ, Hotwire, etc.

How do you end up owning all these companies?

Well, you start out in the William Morris mailroom, just like everybody else. And you devote the first 10 years of your career swinging from salary-star to higher salary-star, spending relatively little on status details.

And after you accumulate a stake, you start buying the little pieces of the Rube Goldberg machine that the tastemakers ridicule or overlook but that you see potential in because you have vision. Barry Diller bought the decidedly low-rent QVC because when he looked at it, he immediately understood that screens could be used for purposes other than telling stories.

That was genius-level insight.

I was around during the early days of the Internet, too, & I never had that insight! Although, of course, today—a mere 35 years later—it seems so-o-ooo obvious.

Also, Barry Diller refused to feel bad about his own failures. I mean, he registered them and felt disappointment, sure. But he refused to dwell on them. Describing a mega-deal-fallen-through to someone, he commented, They won. We lost. Next.

Which I think is a demonstration of extraordinary emotional intelligence.

The Wall Street Journal has an absolutely fantastic article on AI movie-making this morning (which I think I am offering to you unlocked!)

Apparently, on VEO & Runway, you can get AI to model video characters after real-life people if you subscribe at the very highest tier ($200 a month.) As someone whose disposable income is prone to disappearing acts, I have been experimenting with the lower subscription tiers that don't offer all the features, so I always assumed there was a blanket prohibition against using real-life people. As a safeguard against Deep Fakes & revenge porn!

I am very tempted to splurge for a single month, though, to see what I might be able to create!

Maybe I should have a long talk with the cats: Do you really need to eat? And what's up with all those catnip toys? They always end up under the sofa!

###

Meanwhile, the sky is rapidly darkening even as I type, and a quick look at the weather forecast affirms we are in for five fuckin' days of rain! So! Do I kill myself now, or do I subject all 4.3 of my faithful readers to five days of angsty rants before I step in front of that speeding bus?

Also, the New Paltz Community Garden finally offered me a space! After I'd already started gardening again at the Hyde Park Community Garden.

I drove to New Paltz to check the garden out. It is really spectacular: five acres, 150 plots, right along the Wallkill River, which floods the garden regularly, providing the garden with that ultra-rich river silt. The whole garden is surrounded by an electric deer fence & an obliging hawk keeps the vole population in check:



There are something like 200 gardeners, a real community. So, I thought, Okay! If you really want to connect with other humans in the real-life here & now, this is your chance! New Paltz reminds me so much of Berkeley circa the 1980s, I figure it's gotta be teeming with sympatico souls.

The extremely nice Plot Coordinator showed me around. The full plots are huge, 20' x 10', and the three he showed me were completely overgrown with (ugh!) deep-rooted nettles that would take me a solid week of hard labor to clear out. So, I settled for a half-plot:



This one, I estimate, will take me three days to clear out. That's doable.

Because of the driving distance involved, I'd already set up the Hyde Park garden to be as labor-free as possible. Planted tomatoes & chili peppers inside a marigold border. Piled on lawn-mowings over the plot to reign in moisture & keep down weed growth. Self-sustaining was my goal!

This garden I'll use for veggies that require a bit more nurturing. Basil! (Gotta guard against premature bolting & aphid infestations!) Cucumbers! (There's a weird kind of fungus that always seems to attack mine.) Flowers! (I ❤️LUV❤️ bouquets in the Patrizia-torium, so consider flowers an essential crop.)

It'll be a summer of hard physical work.

Assuming it ever stops raining.

Apart from all these mundane happenstances of a small existence, I have this sense that things are changing very fast. Planetary collapse? Nuclear annihilation? Dunno. But something.

I can't do anything about what might be going to happen.

So, the feeling is unsettling.

This was a difficult week.

It rained every single day, & then my only two pals in the area were MIA for various reasons.

And I ended up experiencing SOCIAL ISOLATION (intoned with a kind of echo chamber effect), which is different from garden variety lonesomeness: Lonesomeness feels like a temporary condition that is not your fault; SOCIAL ISOLATION is a disease of the elderly brought on by their own bad habits. Socially isolated people do not proactively build social connections! They do not join clubs, volunteer, wave the Stars & Stripes at community events! They don't strike up conversations with the harried checkout clerk at the Shop-&-Drop. If they do finally manage to capture the attention of a real human person, they natter on & on about some obscure rock star from the 1970s or their bursitis or how much stuff has changed in the last 50 years.

The absolute worst habit of the elderly, though, is that they are old.

###

I suppose no one ever feels old, though when you look at them, you wonder: Why the hell not?

That person I catch a glimpse of in the mirror when I'm not mugging it up self-consciously? That's not me, that's my grandmother.

And I'm one of those old people who's in pretty good shape.

Thing is I probably have more friends than most people. Friends with whom I resonate on an intimate level and who have my back.

They just don't live here.

But, of course, I live here.

I make my most important social connections online, which is kind of an ageless milieu. My prose is sprightly; sprightly signals "young." I meet a lot of the people I bond with online, and those meetings often turn into friendships. I won't say "age" doesn't influence those friendships, but it's just one factor in a whole lot of factors: I am X years older than you, and now let's chatter about books and movies and music and the meaning of the Universe, your children and my children, shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages.

But here, I must make social connections the old-fashioned way, face-to-face. And whatever delusions I may have about my age-defying demeanor, I am clearly a member of the pariah tribe, the Senior Citizens.

###

The irony about SOCIAL ISOLATION is that it feels like something you oughta be ashamed of, which, of course, is even more isolating. SOCIAL ISOLATION is sticky and heavy, and that weight makes it difficult to cleave to all those wholesome routines—exercise, engagement, good nutrition—that make you feel good about yourself.



All moot points today because (finally!) it's gorgeous & sunny out. And warm! And so, I am perfectly content.