Mallory's Camera

The company is loathsome, but I do like the clients.

I wish I could write a complete novel about each & every one of them, but when I drag myself home at the end of the day, my brain is shot. I don't know how else to describe it: It's not fatigue exactly, since all I do all day is sit, applying ass to the base of a chair. My brain is perfectly capable of processing information. I just don't want to.

I've had to make adjustments to accommodate the job.

Chief among those adjustments: Stuff I did to control that hand tremor (which causes big problems when you're inputting data). Like I stopped drinking coffee on mornings I work. You'd think that one would be a biggie since caffeine is addictive and withdrawal is supposed to cause headaches & intense lassitude, but in fact, it caused neither of those things for me, and so, was surprisingly easy.

I also cut down on my Synthroid dose. I climbed on a scale for the first time in forever and found I had lost 10 pounds since I started working. (I am one of those people who gets anorexic with stress.) Drugs are typically administered per kilogram of body weight, so I figured the prescribed dose was now too high.

No Coffee + Less Synthroid did indeed banish the tremors.

Today being a Day Off, I am drinking coffee & taking the full dose, and yes, indeed, my hands are shaking.

###

A short list of clients over the past week: (None of their names are real.)

• Gary Stevens. Hippie-looking guy about my age with stringy white hair and an amiable manner. A retired nurse—so we chatted about that: He got his nursing training in the Navy, and, in his retirement, volunteers several times a week at a local homeless shelter.

"Any big changes this year?" I asked.

"Yeah, I got divorced," he told me ruefully. "You think you have a happy marriage, and then your wife informs you you don't."

He'd come to Schlock because he'd had to divide up his annuity and wasn't quite sure of the tax implications.

"Well, let's have a look," I said.

And Oh. My. Gawd.

Instead of engaging the services of an advisor who might have assisted him in drafting a financial instrument that could shield him from the division's tax implications, he merely withdrew $250,000 from the account and gave that money to his X-wife—

Leaving him with a $40,000 tax bill.

I have often read the phrase "the color drained from his face," but I'd never actually seen it before.

"What can I do?" he whispered.

"Well, first, you absolutely have to file this tax return," I said. "The penalties for not filing are much higher than the penalties for not paying. And then, you need to find yourself a tax attorney. You may be eligible for what they call 'an offer in compromise,' where the IRS agrees to settle for part of what you owe. But, I mean—why'd you do it this way? Why wouldn't you have the brokerage issue the check to her, which would have shifted the tax burden? Didn't your attorney—"

"I didn't have an attorney," he said miserably. "I figured I would try to keep things amiable."

• Marie de Faltay. Woman a few years younger than me with a definite sartorial flair that included rhinestone-studded glasses. She was trembling like a leaf.

The first thing she asked me: "Can I declare my dogs as dependents?"

I saw at once that she had been very, very beautiful in her youth. Blonde hair, Zsa-Zsa-Gabor-like features, and the most amazing eyes, violet and green at the same time. I supposed it had never occurred to her that there would come a time when she would not be beautiful. But beauty had been her only leverage, and with that gone, she had very little to fall back on. She supplemented her meager social security income with a shit job at Marshall's. Combined revenue streams left her with a taxable income of zero, so she got back the small sums withheld from the Marshall's check for federal & state taxes.

She hadn't filed her 2024 taxes. I talked her into making an appointment to do that, too. "If you're getting a refund, the IRS doesn't care if you file late." Her amazingly beautiful eye welled up with tears over the thought of a few hundred unanticipated dollars. And she'll definitely be getting a refund—no taxable income!

• Gilbert Specter. I was so relieved he lived in an apartment! Because he gave out strong I-have-a-dungeon-in-my-basement-where-I-chain-up-sex-slaves vibes.

(Probably, I am being mean here. Probably, he was developmentally delayed, or maybe he was just not very smart.)

Works as a custodian at a local high school. (Stephen King! White courtesy telephone.) Has a small stockpile of dividend-bearing stocks in addition to his salary. Also, a side gig selling tickets (to what? I wondered) for which he kept meticulous records, except the records were completely irrelevant because he'd somehow confused the business with what he was using the business to subsidize—which was a yearly trip to Oklahoma. (Is Oklahoma where they hold the annual I-have-sex-slaves-in-my-dungeon-basement convention?)

"It's all there, it's all there!" he kept shrieking at me, shoving 10 pages of notes in densely written spider scrawl at me. "I spent $910 in round-trip air tickets and $649 renting a car—"
"Right!" I said for the fourth time. "But the trip is different from the business, you see. The IRS only cares about the business—"

Fortunately, for me, I had been scheduled to work at two separate tax offices that day, so I got to say, "Oooops! Gotta run! Here's Rebecca! Rebecca will take care of you," before he drove me quite mad.

• Amber Meisen. Lovely young woman who'd been living the carefree artist's life (though supporting herself as a Trader Joe's cashier) in Brooklyn when she was hit by a car while riding her bicycle. Injuries plus medical bills forced her to return to (ugh) Middletown.

She'd earned enough to qualify for earned income credit! So, she got a refund of several thousand dollars that she did not expect! And her joy was a pleasure to behold.

###

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I mean, they're all interesting. Everybody has a story!

###

I should also briefly note the incredibly unpleasant exchange with a Remuneration client who sent me a string of 20 or so emails, each more incoherent, toxic, & insane than the last, claiming I was in arrears to him for work that I had already done.

I've been freelancing for many years, and I keep excellent books, so after each abusive email, I sent him back a calm, professional response with clear documentation of our original payment terms, my payment records, past invoices for completed work, and the remaining balance I showed under the advance I'd insisted upon because he's an overseas client, and we were working without an enforceable contract.

This seemed to inflame him even more. By the end, his emails were abusive.

I suspect the underlying issue is his own financial mismanagement. He has run out of money, and so has retro‑engineered a story for his money people to make him look like the one who “trusted” me too much. My careful, documented push‑back threatens that story, so he flooded me with veiled threats and hysterical accusations.

UGH.

Kudos to me for remaining professional.

I will finish up the work I owe him, but obviously, I will not accept any work from him in the future. In fact, I strongly suspect I will not be doing any freelancing in the future; freelancing is just too loaded with uncertainty and potentially toxic situations that I no longer have the stamina to deal with as the cost of doing business.

###

And now it is off to the New Paltz Community Garden to plant my peas and put in my strawberries.

Day off.

At some point, I am going to trek across the bridge to grab my tomato cages from the Hyde Park Community Garden & deliver them to the New Paltz Community Garden.

###

I'd had some vague thought of joining one of the numerous No Kings Marches today, but I'm not feeling it.

Besides! I gave at the office yesterday with my last two clients of the day, Fatimatou and Folasade (not their real names), who turned out to be from Guinea, which fact I extracted when I realized the impenetrable language they were trading with one another was actually a strangely accented French.

"Tu parle français?" I asked in my own execrable French.

"Ah, toi aussi, tu parles français?" asked Fatimatou, the more fluent of the two young women in English.

"Un peu," I said. "Un petit peu. Très mal. Tu viens du Sénégal?"

"On vient de Guinée," Fatimatou said.

Guinea!

I had no idea where Guinea actually was, except that most of France's former African colonies are on the west coast.

###

Fatimatou had come to this country as a child with her parents. Product of the Brooklyn public school system, she was bright and enterprising, and had earned a bachelor's degree in the rapidly obsolescing field of data management. This degree qualified her for a string of jobs at places like Sephora and Tori Burch. I had no idea why Fatimatou decided to move to Middletown, where there are far fewer Sephoras and Tori Burches.

When she'd worked at the Sephora in Brooklyn, Fatimatou had been vested in the company's 401(k), so when she left the company, they'd presented her with a check for several thousand dollars. Unfortunately, they'd neglected to instruct her about rollovers, so she'd spent the money and was now facing a tax penalty. Fortunately, she'd been conscientious filling out those W4s, so the tax penalty wasn't huge—

"Three hundred and seventy-three dollars," I said, switching back to English.

Fatimatou said something to Folasade in that weird French, and they both squealed with joy.

"I did it myself, and it showed I owed $10,000," she explained.

This, in fact, is why most first-time users come to Schlock: They fuck up their Turbotax return somehow.

###

Folasade was a more recent immigrant.

She had a green card, but I could feel the tension in the two women around that.

She was also in the unenviable position of understanding a lot more English than she could actually speak. But not quite enough English to understand what I was saying without Fatimatou's interpretation.

She'd had exactly one job in 2025—as a holiday worker at Tori Burch, where she'd made exactly $266. And they'd taken out nothing in federal taxes.

I grimaced when I saw that.

"I don't know what to tell you about this," I said. "We're going to charge you $164 for this return. It hardly seems worth it. On the other hand, with the situation here being what it is right now, it seems wise to make some sort of paper trail, establishing you as a law-abiding wannabe citizen."

The situation got even more complicated when it turned out that even the minute amount of money Folasade earned qualified her for a minute amount ($28!) of earned income credit. EIC kicks up the Schlock pricing structure by a hundred bucks.

I sat there for a couple of seconds and then shot an email to the district head of Schlock's mid-Hudson Valley operations: If I can get her a deal this year, we'll have a customer for life, blah, blah, blah—because that's the kind of logic that works on corporate asswipes.

And lo and behold! They called me back and gave me a coupon to take $100 off her fee.

I still feel like she was exploited, but you can only do what you can do.

###

I'm halfway through The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It should be a page turner—the story is very interesting, India is very interesting—and yet it is not a page-turner because each and every sentence has exactly the same metric beat, so the prose, even with the razzledazzle of unusual metaphors and similes, is actually pretty boring.

One of the novel's focuses is the plight of upper-caste Indian women, sent abroad to be overeducated in foreign schools but unable to catch a husband, and so, who end up living lives of genteel poverty.

That is not so very different from my own plight, no? I'm nothing if not overeducated! And I married twice, but neither marriage stuck.

In the end, there is no such thing as exceptionalism—national or not.

###

"Comment tu vas, uh, passer reste de la journée?" I asked Folasade in my terrible French.

"We are going to look for jobs," Fatimatou said in English. "But it is hard because she cannot speak..." Fatimatou shrugged.

"You might try looking for housecleaning jobs," I said. "Because then English wouldn't matter. I know it's a bit demeaning, rabaissant, but it pays okay—"

The ghost of Barbara Ehrenreich groaned at me from Heaven.

Night before last, I couldn't sleep. I lay all night in that strange hypnagogic state where you're completely aware of the external world beyond your closed eyelids, but the passage of time is very distorted.

I hadn't had any caffeine since 8 am the previous morning.

I hadn't had any alcohol.

I was anxious, but anxiety is the matrix in which all of us humans live nowadays. Being alive right now is anxiety-provoking! Nothing is going unusually wrong in my little life, & there was no Horrible Thing awaiting me the very next day that I wanted to avoid.

So, my sleeplessness was a great mystery.

When the first light broke around 6 am, I got up from my bed.

You will simply call them at 9 & tell them you can't come in today, I told myself.

I was amazed by how guilty this made me feel! I mean, it's not like I owe Schlock anything but my labor while my ass is in their chair.

But I did feel guilty! What a horrible failure you are, said the little voice in my head. What a perpetual disappointment to all & sundry.

###

This sleeplessness has happened before. Not often—but often enough so that I'm familiar with its manifestation. Usually it happens on nights when I'm anxious about performing the next day.

Thus, it happened during a trip to Baltimore a few years back with a person I didn't know very well at the time (but subsequently became a good friend). Thus, it happened in Ithaca last Thanksgiving when I was about to be trotted out on a round of holiday parties.

It's one of the banes of old age.

Old people just don't sleep very well.

###

Anyway, I managed to have a fairly productive day with my ass not in the chair.

In the morning, I polished off Remuneration for one client & got a modest assignment from another. If I'm diligent about husbanding resources, I may actually be in better financial shape this year than I was last.

In the afternoon, I scampered off to the New Paltz Community Garden & puttered. My plot is in surprisingly good shape. Whoever had it before me stayed on top of the weeds, and the soil in those raised boxes looks surprisingly good.

In the late afternoon, I dropped by the Gardiner Bakehouse and spent an hour or so nibbling chocolate chip cookies and reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which is the Big New Novel of the season.

I want to like Sonia and Sunny more than I actually like it. It has some surprisingly good insights:

An arranged marriage story, even one that ended six months later in divorce, felt true and false. True because it happened. False because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East. The audience made it false. Lifting this one story out of all the others made it false.

But I'm finding Kiran Desai's much-praised writing style a bit banal. Her metaphors are pretty word strings but they don't make much sense. And her non-Indian characters make no sense at all.



Claude sent me an email: Are keeping your garden this year . Hope you fine , spring is rite there . Lmk

Claude's spoken English is very good (though it preserves Gallic word order), but he never saw the slightest utility in learning how to write English.

It made me very sad to write back that no, I would not be coming back. I really love the Hyde Park Community Garden, it's just such a beautiful, serene place, and I really like all my fellow gardeners there:



But it's utterly insane to plan on driving across the bridge multiple times each week. The time sink, sure, but also, I don't like driving.

I still haven't decided where I want to move. Ithaca is attractive, but the problem with Ithaca is that just five miles outside the city limits, you're in Alabama except with snow. The Southern Tier is a Trumpy place & getting to anywhere else I might want to hang out (for which read New York City) is a real ordeal from there. Yes, RTT is there, and RTT loves me—but it's not as though RTT would want to hang out with me.

So, I'm also contemplating maybe moving back to Dutchess County. Where I know people. Where I'll be close to Metro-North train stations that can deposit me in Grand Central Station in just under two hours. My old friend Carl A has told me I can stay overnight in the guest room of his apartment on the upper West Side anytime. I should probably take him up on the offer.

Claude wrote me back: It’s sad that u leavin us but we ll keep u in mind for next year u decide to come back . I don’t ve a à person to replace u right now . Stay in touch

Scary, scary, scary world.

Even before the Iran war, the U.S. was falling apart. In February, wholesale prices jumped 0.7%, twice the predicted inflation rate. When retailers pay more for goods, they pass those costs on to consumers through higher prices at the checkout counter.

And so far in 2026, there have been literally only slightly more than 18,000 new jobs created (in a nation of 365 million people).

The war adds a whole new level of economic misery, of course, since higher energy prices ripple through everything.

The cost of gasoline obviously hits consumers at the pump, but it also increases utility bills and transportation costs of goods, since so little of what we consume is produced close to where we live. The housing market is insane, and the world of imaginary money—the stock market with its more-or-less arbitrary valuations—is showing signs of unraveling: The Dow and Nasdaq are now in correction territory, meaning they’ve fallen more than 10 percent from their recent highs.

Nor will American exceptionalism be the only victim of Trump & Netanyahu's megalomania: The basis for almost all nonorganic fertilizers is ammonia, primarily manufactured from fossil fuels. Much of it is manufactured in places like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and, yes, Iran, and shipped through the Strait of Hormuz to places like India, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Pakistan. Without access to these fertilizers, agricultural production is going to plummet, so we can anticipate famine—which is going to increase the whole unwanted migration phenomenon.

It's a fuckin' mess, in other words.

How's a defenceless little mammal like me supposed to survive in this world of thundering dinosaur stupidity?

By scampering out of the way of their colossal footfalls, I suppose.

But just how exactly am I supposed to do that?

###

Anyway, this is the reason why though I loathe working for Schlock, I am determined to last out the season. Grimly determined, though I can see the toll that work is taking on both my physical & mental health. It is wise right now to position oneself as far ahead of that plunging economic curve as one can possibly get—though on my stumpy little mammal legs, that is not very far. The whole thing is gearing up to come crashing down very fast if Trump doesn't get bored enough with the Iran War to end it very fast.

###

When it happens, it happens very fast...

I remember thinking that after Sarajevo fell in 1996 because in 1970, when there was still Yugoslavia, I spent a couple of days in Sarajevo on my way to Greece, and unsophisticated little naif as I was back then, I remember marveling that Sarajevo was so much like Oakland, California. The same fading post-industrial architecture, and the sky wasn't orange or anything, it was blue!

How could a place that reminded me so much of another place I knew intimately be the site of a bloody civil war? My mind truly boggled.

And it was kind of like the Universe was whispering in my ear: When it happens, it happens very fast.

###

Schlock is truly awful. I like doing taxes, but I don't do a whole lot of those.

Mostly, I sit in a cubicle doing absolutely nothing beyond surreptitiously Googling Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell analyses. (Definitely the one book I would smuggle on to that desert island.) Doing nothing doesn't sound all that bad, but it's absolutely lethal. Boredom is not the worst thing in the world; the worst thing would be torture. But having the sort of mind that relishes facts & figures most other people find excessively dry, I am hardly ever bored, so boredom is a relatively unusual & unpleasant experience for me. It makes me feel invisible. It makes me feel... extinguished.

I did finally cop to the insanity of working every single day for 90 days straight, and thus carved out two days off in a row for myself.

I had all sorts of plans for yesterday, but found myself so exhausted that I did very little beyond vacuuming and refurbishing my purple hair. (...only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your purple hair)

Today, I have Big Plans to toddle off to the New Paltz Community Garden and begin weeding. Though if I don't, I will be gentle with myself.

Honestly, the most pressing dilemma I face at the moment is that the company that makes the hair dye I've been using for the past seven years has discontinued its production.

I'm pretty sure Schwarzkopf does not ship through the Strait of Hormuz, so what the hell is their problem, huh?

The chicken flock waits beneath the porch to say goodbye to me when I trudge off to the office because I always give them tasty tortilla treats.

Only yesterday, when I went out, there were only three of them instead of four.

I went back inside and asked Icky, "Do you know where the other black chicken is?"

Icky shrugged, unconcerned. "She probably wandered off somewhere on her own."

When Icky is in residence, I leave the chicken wrangling to him. They are his chickens after all.

Still, this was weird. The chickens travel in their flock of four. Icky had only let them out of their coop about an hour earlier when presumably, there had been four. I hadn't noticed any feathers around, as one might have had a predator grabbed the other black chicken.

###

I went off to the Montgomery Schlock office where I literally spent three hours gabbing to Gary, my 350-pound coworker, and doing absolutely nothing else because there were no clients. Gary showed me the journal in which he chronicles his weight-loss journey and his financial transactions. He is 29 years old and has already accumulated $40,000 in investments, working Schlock and another job as a residential counselor at a home for adults with developmental disabilities. Gary is very, very smart—and very, very sweet.

"By the time you're 35, you'll have your life entirely where you want it to be!" I told him. "You'll have lost the rest of that weight, and you'll have someone who loves you and a house—"

###

Back at the casa, I puttered. And when twilight came around, I looked out the window and thought I espied all four chickens pecking for insects just outside their coop.

Icky was out.

So, I waited another 15 minutes and then went outside myself to shut the chickens up for the night—

Except there were no chickens at all in the coop.

I left the coop door open, ran back to the house, and began one of my weird, atavistic prayer rituals: Please, Universe, please! Make the chickens be okay!!!

How could this be?

Where could they have gone?

Frantically, I texted Icky.

When he got back an hour later, I accosted him equally frantically: "Did you get my text?"

"No. What?"

"The chickens!"

He went back outside, returning five minutes later, frowning. "Only two are in the coop."

Two?

But that was two more than had been there when I'd checked.

So maybe the other two were still around somewhere? Nesting on a brood of eggs they'd laid in some underbrush?

###

I spent the night reading up on Reddit on True Tales of Amazing Poultry Runaways & Returns. There are a lot of them.

Molly ran away for an entire month shortly after you moved here, I reminded myself. And you didn't see any evidence that a predator got the chickens.

Still, my heart feels broken this morning.

I don't hold up The Umbrella of Protection very well.

I can't take sufficient care of innocent little creatures that depend upon me.

I can barely take care of myself.

Why can't I live in a Universe where innocence & a pure soul are valued? Surely, in an infinity of parallel universes, such a Universe exists! Why am I trapped here in a world where competitiveness is baked into the evolutionary process so that only implacable indifference and occasional cruelty prosper?

###

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Sara Crewe is my spirit animal at the Middletown Schlock office.

Yesterday, one of my clients, an incredibly handsome man—another prison guard!—wanted his 2024 taxes done, but nobody told me he wanted his 2024 taxes done; in fact, Leslie, the dour & humorless assistant manager, actually scanned his tax documents into the 2025 folder.

I started a 2025 return.

And it wasn't until I picked up his W2 and noted that it had been issued in 2024 that I realized the mistake.

I abandoned the 2025 return and completed the 2024 return.

But there was no way for me to delete the 2025 return.

And Leslie made an error and processed his payment for the 2025 return.

Somehow this became my mistake!

Oh, the Leslie grumbles & side-eye!

Means to an end! Means to an end! I kept reminding myself.

I mean, who gives a shit what these people think? It's not as though they impinge upon my real life in the slightest. Schlock is not going to fire me; they need the asses in the seats. And I want the $$$$$!

T-34 days.

###

Also yesterday I had this muy disturbing neurological symptom.

My hands began to shake as soon as I arrived at that office.

I have what neurologists describe as an idiopathic tremor. My mother had it, too. Much of the time, my hands shake a little. Generally, the mild tremor does not interfere with anything else I'm doing (like typing or keying in data), but yesterday my hands were actually fluttering as though I was conducting an invisible orchestra.

I actually had to turn my first client of the day over to one of the other preparers and race off to the closest cannabis dispensary. Cannabis calms tremors. I prefer not to use it if I have to do mental acrobatics, but you know, you gotta do what you gotta do, and it worked to steady my hands so I could do my four other clients of the day.

But clearly, my body does not like going into that office.

###

The last few days have been an eerie faux spring. On Tuesday, temps actually hit 80!

I had the day partly off because I had a doctor's appointment in the afternoon. My doctor is still across the river because who wants to deal with finding a new primary care physician, right? So, I drove over to Hyde Park and after the appointment, I took off for my old tromping grounds, the Vanderbilt gardens:







Felt strange to see all those bare trees & fallow flower beds when the temperature and humidity were signaling high summer.

Plus, the Goddess of the Cell Phone was still surrounded by snow:



I came across four women sitting on a bench in the woods. And they were such a charming sight, I asked to take their portrait:





We all ended up chatting for half an hour. My new best friends!

And honestly, we could have been best friends.

Except we're not.

I have to do nothing a certain number of hours each day.

I mean that quite literally. I essentially sit with my eyes unfocused. Sometimes, there's a book on my lap; sometimes, there's a yellow legal pad and a pen on a desk in front of me. But those are props. Really, I am just sitting there, & my mind is a complete blank.

Is this laziness? Is this some metabolic form of meditation? Who knows? But this is what I have to do to stay sane, & just because I'm toiling in the tax mines 10 hours a day, doesn't mean I can stop.

This cuts down on the number of hours I have available for Useful Work since added to the tax mine & the hours I sit with my eyes unfocused is the time I must spend on distraction. Books & movies! ("Movies" there is an umbrella term that includes television shows.) Dangling strands of narrative. Stories!

Long way of saying the Patrizia-torium is an absolute mess, and I've had the same basket of laundry waiting to be folded sitting in my bedroom for four days now. Though I did remember to get my Synthroid prescription refilled.

What I'm hoping is that I can fill the coffers high enough to buy me four uninterrupted weeks of work on the Work In Progress.

Three thousand extra dollars is not gonna float down in small, easily negotiable bills from the sky! Manifesting does not work for me.

No, I'm gonna have to sweat for it.

###

Shortly, I will be going into the Montgomery Schlock office to sit down with a client who somehow thinks it's my fault that he owes $2,000 on his federal income taxes.

He wants to ream me a new asshole.

Hey! I wasn't the one making out the W4 that only takes out 8% for federal taxes when he's clearly in the 12% bracket!

But like most people, he thinks tax refunds are a type of Lotto. And that I have cheated him out of his golden ticket.

The Montgomery office is far more tolerable than the Middletown office. I actually like the people who work there. Yesterday, I learned the entire life history of the office's manager, a pugnacious 74-year old, born & raised in Newburgh during its tenure as the murder capital of the U.S. The high point of her life? In 1981, she was Miss Ramada Inn!

Stories! I do love stories.

The day before, I studied up on Gary (not his real name), a sweet & super-smart guy who plays D&D, smokes lots of dope, & weighs 350 pounds—down from 550 pounds three years ago.

When people are seriously obese, of course, that is the primary thing you notice about them—though political correctness dictates you pretend otherwise.

Eventually, the conversation grew real enough so that Gary began talking to me about his weight, why it happened. Though I think the real reason was that when everything else in your life is starving you, you nurture yourself the best way you can.

"Here's an interesting factoid," I said. "Do you know the only food in nature that contains sugars and fats in the same proportions that they're found in processed cakes and candies and ice cream?"

"Honey?" guessed Gary.

"Human breast milk," I told him.

His mouth fell open. And I could actually see the light bulb forming over his head.

I slept eight hours last night.

Eight hours!

Now I'm thinking the shoulder pain that was keeping me awake was not a statin side effect at all, but some kind of reaction to hyperextension that happened when I tried to grab something at a weird angle while I was lying down.

Anyway, it's resolving.

###

And I wrote 500 words on the opening of Chapter 7.

Five hundred words!

I'm thinking the deal with Daria is that she deliberately mistranslates testimony in a court trial, although her exact motivation and the details of that court trial are hazy at the moment.

The voice that's emerging is quite distinct from Grazia's voice. More formal and reflective. Cooler. More analytical.

So, that's a good thing, too.

###

Meanwhile, we are back at war with Eastasia.

What am I talking about?

We have always been at war with Eastasia!

It is impossible to have any sympathy for a murderous mullah who executed anywhere between 7,000 to 40,000 Iranian protesters between January 8th and January 10th of this year.

Nevertheless, I am completely opposed to American interference in what's essentially another sovereign nation's civil war, and I don't want to spend $5 for a gallon of gas.

Plus, of course, the Iran War is a classic wag-the-dog maneuver designed to distract the American public from the fact that the Department of Justice redacted all mentions of Trump's name from the Epstein files.

Disinformation aplenty is aflowin'. But my favorite factoid is that the Trump administration, despite telling Americans stranded in Dubai and Bahrain, Get out, get out, get out! Get out NOW, is refusing to provide them with any State Separtment-mediated assistance. That's my boy, The Donald!

I can't wait for the flood of influencer TikToks: Here's how to escape from Dubai! It's eZeeee! And you can do it, too!

It was snowing this morning—of course, it was!—while I reviewed my heating expenses for February: $440 for heating oil and $153 to Central Hudson.

That's only half the heating bill for the house.

Fuckin' insane.

Central Hudson needs to be taken over by the State of New York. But I don't know what one can do about the heating oil. Except move to a warmer place.

###

My good deed for yesterday:

One of my clients was a very feisty 87-year old. She appeared primordial to me, like an ancient Baba Yaga, which may have been the racial disparity—she was Black, and I am white—or may have been due to the fact that she'd neglected to put in her dentures.

Anyway, this lady had a Cadillac healthcare plan through the City of New York, her former employer, but Medicare was still taking out $220 a month from her Social Security.

"You might want to look into that," I told her granddaughter. "I mean, it's possible each healthcare provider is providing a different set of services, and she uses both. But it's also possible you're looking at redundant costs and can get an extra $220 a month by getting rid of that Medicare payment."

She's been going to Schlock for 20 years, and I was the first one to point this out to her.

###

In other news, I will be interviewing real-life Daria today after I scamper home from the tax trenches. Here are the questions I've prepared:

1. Can you tell me your five most vivid memories of Mexico?

2. What did it feel like in your body the first weeks after moving from Mexico City to the U.S.—were you more numb, anxious, exhilarated, something else?

3. Is there a specific moment from that first year—at school, in the street, at home—when you realized, “I am not in Mexico anymore,” and what happened?

4. When you think back to meeting Brian in the PD’s office, what are the first three sensory details that come up—what you saw, heard, or felt in your body?

5. What did you think Brian saw in you, and how did that perception change over the years you knew him?

6. How did the relationship move between friendship, mentorship, and sexuality over time, and did those roles ever feel like they were in conflict?

7. Were there specific conversations or arguments with Brian that you feel “made” you—changed how you think about law, justice, or yourself?

8. Did you ever feel a power imbalance because of age, profession, or life experience, and if so, how did you navigate or rationalize it at the time?

9. When you look back now, what do you wish your younger self had known about him—or about you?

10. How did being with Brian interact with your romantic life outside him—did he complicate other relationships, or make them easier to understand?

11. After Brian died, what was the strangest or most unexpected way your grief showed up (a habit, a dream, a physical sensation, a decision you made)?

12. If you had to describe your emotional “role” in Brian’s life in one sentence—as he might have described it—what would that sentence be?

13. When you first realized you were sexually attracted to Brian, what surprised you most about that feeling—his age, his role, your own response, something else?

14. Can you describe your very first sexual encounter with him in terms of mood and pacing—was it slow and negotiated, impulsive, awkward, inevitable?

15. What did Brian do in bed that made you feel particularly seen or desired—not just physically, but as a person?

16. Were there things you only did sexually with Brian and never with anyone else, and what about him made those feel possible or safe?

17. Did the fact that you worked in the same universe (courts, law, defendants) bleed into your erotic life together—role‑play, gallows humor, power dynamics?

18. How did sex with him feel in your body—grounding, explosive, dissociative, comforting, like coming home, like leaving?

19. Was there ever a moment during sex or after where you suddenly felt your age difference very sharply—either in a good way or as a jolt of discomfort?

20. How did your conversations immediately after sex usually go—jokey debrief, political talk, silence, tenderness, scheduling the next time?

21. Did you ever feel like his other lovers were in the bed with you emotionally—comparing, competing, imagining his history—and how did you manage that?

22. Was there ever a specific fight or rupture around sex—jealousy, boundaries, pregnancy scares, STI scares—that you remember as a turning point?

23. When you think of his body now, what are the 2–3 details that come back first (not necessarily erotic—could be scars, smells, textures, nervous habits)?

24. Did you ever notice a difference between “grief sex,” “reassurance sex,” and “just because” sex with him—and if so, how could you tell from the inside?

25. How did your bilingual/trilingual brain show up during sex—were there certain words or dirty talk that had to be in Spanish or French, and if so, why?

26. Did you two have any long‑running sexual jokes or coded phrases—things that would sound innocuous to others but were charged for you?

27. How did you end things physically—was there a clear “last time” you slept together, and did you know it was the last time while it was happening?

28. Looking back, is there anything you regret not doing with him sexually or emotionally—something you were curious about but held back from?

29. Has your body ever surprised you with a grief reaction—arousal at an unexpected reminder of him, or the opposite, sudden numbness with someone new?

30. In your fantasy life now, does he still appear, and if so, does he show up more as a lover, a friend, a ghost, a critic, or something stranger?

31. Imagine you are trying to explain the sexual part of the relationship to a skeptical friend—what is the one argument or image you would use to say, “This wasn’t just another older guy using me; it was this”?

32. How did your relationship to Spanish change after the move—did it feel like a refuge, a secret, a source of shame, a weapon?

33. When did English start to feel like something you could think and feel in, not just translate into, and was there a particular event that marked that shift?

34. Do you experience different “selves” in Spanish, English, and French—if so, how would you describe the personality or emotional color of each language?

35. In simultaneous translation, what does it feel like inside your head—are you ahead of the speaker, chasing them, or hovering in parallel?

36. Can you describe a moment on the job when the emotional weight of what you were translating nearly broke your professional neutrality? What did you do with that feeling?

37. Have you ever made a deliberate choice to soften, sharpen, or slightly alter someone’s words while interpreting because the literal translation felt emotionally or ethically wrong?

38. What does fatigue feel like for you after a long day of simultaneous interpreting—mental fog, physical tension, emotional overload—and how do you come down from that state?

39. Do you ever carry other people’s stories and emotions home with you through their words, and if so, how do you protect or “clean” your own inner voice?

UGH. It's snowing again. And I'm gonna have to drive in it.

###

On the bright side, I may have negotiated my way out of a problematic situation with a Remuneration client who has been bawking about paying me half up front. May have, being the operative phrase there.

But that's standard in work-for-hire arrangements, I told him, which is true enough.

Also on the bright side: I slept eight hours last night.

A few days ago, I did something to my back. It was a very weird pain, right between my shoulder blades at the very spot from which my wings would sprout if only I were an angel.

I have no idea what I actually did to produce this pain. And it has partially resolved, but also partially not—now, it's a right-sided ache just below my right scapula with some nerve involvement because I can feel it in my right arm & hand.

It's not heartstoppingly painful.

But when I lie on my right side, it's a dull, steady message from the interior. And I sleep mostly on my right side. So, the ache has been screwing with my sleep. Yesterday, I was absolutely brain-dead but managed to get through the top five items on my To Do List—becawse ya gotta do what ya gotta do. But I didn't enjoy any of it.

###

In Work In Progress news, I tried to start writing Part II but failed to make headway.

For this visit, we'd formulated an agenda, I wrote. Storm King for the Calders, Olana for the Persian arches and views of the Hudson River's tidal inlets (this year blooming with algae). Teilhard de Chardin is buried at the Culinary Institute of America—who knew?—so we were going to pay our respects to the Omega Point and afterwards dine on truffle soup and braised cuisse de canard Bourguignon at the student-staffed French restaurant. Mostly, though, we planned to fuck.

I mean, it's a good cheap laugh, and it sets the stage for chronicling Neal's erotic encounters—but it is not grounded in anything that actually happened: Real-life Daria and real-life Neal did not have a particularly workable sexual relationship.

But since I do want this part of the novel to be erotic, I spent some time last evening reading the rather horrible chick lit writer Emily Henry's rather horrible Funny Story. It was loaded with bad sex scenes! This filled me simultaneously with horror—the sex scenes are baaaaaaaaad—but also hope—because Funny Story was a bestseller, and I could toss off sex scenes like that in my sleep. On the nights I get some.