Mallory's Camera

This is basically a writing diary where I write all kinds of stuff that will be immensely boring to anyone who stumbles across it.

So you should go back to Facebook.

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly. ---- Harry Lime

First three chapters can be read here.

CHAPTER 4

Wiltwyck Hospital was a small community hospital. We didn't have a lot of sophisticated resources. We only had nine ventilators. We didn't have a negative pressure room or a single ECMO machine. We barely had enough reserve oxygen tanks for our regulars with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

There wasn't much we could do for COVID patients, but the COVID patients kept coming in anyway.

At first, we'd try to transfer the sickest patients to one of the bigger, better-equipped hospitals in Albany, Poughkeepsie, or Westchester County. But pretty soon, those hospitals were all filled up. And then we had to admit the patients.

There wasn't enough space for everyone pouring into the ER waiting room. Plus, even if there had been, the Wiltwyck management team had decreed the hospital a COVID-free zone—except for those patients diagnosed with COVID who required hospitalization. So far as I could tell, they all had COVID—there were no longer any other types of patients in the hospital—so this new directive was yet another example of the Cover Your Ass school of administrative strategy. CYA! Always best practices at Wiltwyck Hospital.

###

Once the pandemic got underway, they pitched a huge white open-air tent over the visitor parking lot where anyone who imagined they might have had the slightest contact with the virus was herded. To the side stood the original hospital building and a grove of old trees, sugar maples and white oaks, where birds sang, and squirrels frolicked. The effect was almost festive, like a demented lawn party in the Hamptons where the guests arrived in dirty bathrobes and ratty slippers.

The original building, erected in 1874, was a National Historic Landmark with prescriptive easement, designed by Calvert Vaux in the high Victorian Gothic style so beloved by remote country lunatic asylums. Pre-COVID, various street ministries had tabled on the sidewalk there, Jesus freaks, Chabadniks, yoga nuts, flying saucer cults. You could stagger out from the bedside of a dying relative and choose your own religious conversion experience. Only one of the apocalyptic Jesus cults was brave enough to stand up to the virus, though. The New Millennial Kingdom.

We had a protocol. First thing was a digital thermometer touch to the forehead.

Temperature over 100.4°? You were escorted to a VIP section, where long cotton swabs would be maneuvered up your nasal cavities, and the residue mixed with an extraction buffer. If, half an hour later, the solution made little pink lines appear on a test cassette, then tag, you had it.

Most of those people were sent home with instructions. You have tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we told them. Take Tylenol. Stay hydrated. Most importantly: Do not come into contact with another living soul! Barricade yourself behind closed doors! Disinfect everything you touch with an alcohol-based disinfectant! Wear a mask at all times! More CYA verbiage! We printed it out as a discharge summary. We knew perfectly well these instructions did little to help control their symptoms and absolutely nothing to allay their desperate fear that a positive test meant they were going to die.

Some people we admitted. These were the ones with spiking fevers, or blue lips, or persistent chest pains, or who were so disoriented, they had no idea where they were.

These people, or more precisely, the flustered family members who'd carted them off to emergency services, had perfect faith that we were going to save them. They were not frightened at all.

That was okay because I was frightened enough for all of them. I no longer had access to the world behind the sliding doors, so I had no idea what happened to them once they were admitted to the hospital. I suspected, though, it was Not Good.

###

COVID was just a cold, right? Okay, a bad cold. But it wasn't the bubonic plague. It wasn't polio. You didn't die from it.

Your throat got sorer, you had a headache even if your sinuses were not stuffed, and then there was that cough, that eerily distinctive cough, that sounded like a car that had run out of fuel, only the driver keeps stamping down furiously on the gas pedal. Okay, some people died from it, true, but then, some people died from colds, too, if they were old, if something else was seriously wrong with them, if it traveled to their lungs and became pneumonia. I wasn't going to die from a cold.

No, the scariest thing about COVID was what happened to some people afterwards. A profound fatigue, an absolute inability to think, joint pains, heart palpitations, some inner battery draining that could never be recharged that cycled you into perpetual exhaustion, helplessness, disorientation. This was long COVID. Nobody knew what triggered it or why some people got it, and some people didn't.

I didn't want to get long COVID.

The hospital was responsible for providing us with personal protective equipment, or "PPE," they liked to call it, as if acronymizing masks, gloves, and paper isolation gowns imbued these items with supernatural powers of preservation. But they were useless. The virus survives on latex, and when your surgical mask slips under your nose and your gloved hand reaches to pull it back up—a thoughtless reflex, but you're too exhausted to remember the warnings—you contaminate yourself. Isolation gowns are open-backed; if you sit or squat, your back is exposed. A surgical mask might stop you from expectorating virus particles onto people you talked to, but it did nothing to protect against the aerosols those people shed when they talked to you.

The surgical masks bugged me the most.

N95 masks were the most effective. Everybody knew that. Even the CDC.

###

Hospital administrators were everywhere in the tent under the old-growth trees, standing apart from the conveyor lines of patients and practitioners. Watching the action, tapping furious notes on their POC tablets. To what end? More CYA directives? Who knew? Most of them wore N95 masks. Every shift, Noah, the ER Director, planted himself in a spot 10 feet away from the nose-swabbing station and stood there with his arms folded for half an hour or so. Noah wore an N95 mask.

One afternoon, I confronted him. "When will the hospital be providing us with N95 masks?"

A couple of patients turned around to gawk.

"We're not having that conversation here," he said.

"We're damn well going to have that conversation somewhere," I said.

He looked at me a couple of seconds too long, then exhaled loudly enough so that I could hear the sigh through his mask. Beckoned me: Follow.

We walked to the little patch of public-access lawn near where the New Millennial Kingdom table stood. Behind it stood a tall, stooped man and a plump woman with flaxen hair and a radiant smile. They were not wearing masks. Covid Is God's Down Payment, read the banner taped to the table.

Noah grimaced and moved a few steps farther away. "We've put in an order for N95 masks. It should be approved very soon. Till then, surgical masks are what we have to use. Back up, please. You're standing closer than six feet—"

"We are actually being told to reuse these masks—"

"It's perfectly safe. Do you know the protocol? It's on the website."

"The protocol tells us to put them in brown paper bags labeled for days of the week—"

"Right. The virus dies after 72 hours. So when you take your mask off on Monday, put it in the Friday brown paper bag, and on Friday, it will be safe to wear again!"

"Oh, right! And the brown paper bag will magically eliminate all the snot that dripped from your nose and the sweat that poured from your skin. You know I had underwear labeled with the days of the week when I was six. My mother still did the laundry."

"It is a temporary supply chain issue," Noah said. I could tell he was working hard to sound reasonable. "We're working as hard as we can to resolve it. But I'm glad we're having this opportunity to talk, just the two of us, because there's something else I need to discuss with you."

"What's that? You're writing me up because I prefer N95s to martyrdom?"

"We're floating you to the ICU."

"What? You can't do that!"

"We can," Noah said. "It's in your contract." He quoted from memory: "The Hospital reserves the right to require the Employee to float or be temporarily reassigned to other units or departments within the hospital as needed to meet patient care demands and operational requirements."

I was speechless. I was stunned. My heart began to beat fast.

The ICU is the place where failing organs are plugged into chargers, and quality of life is measured by the hiss of ventilators, the beeping of intravenous pumps, the drip of urine into catheter bags. Apart from the ER, I hated every ward in the hospital, but the ICU was the absolute worst.

In the ICU, nurses were handmaidens to biomedical equipment that needed constant calibration, monitoring, resetting; the patients' needs were really secondary to the needs of the machines. Patients remembered their ICU stays, if at all, as a bad acid trip, or a prolonged episode of sleep paralysis, or a sojourn in hell. Sure, it extended some patients' lives, but a significant percentage of them would be dead in six months anyway, and another sizeable fraction would wish they were, so what exactly was the upside?

"I won't work in the ICU," I said flatly.

Noah sighed again. "Grazia, you're being wasted here. A nurse with no skills whatsoever can stick a Q-tip up someone's nose. You are a skilled practitioner. You're valuable. You've worked with ventilators. You know how to read an EKG. We need nurses with your level of skills to work with actual patients on the inside."

"I am not an ICU nurse."

"You'll get the necessary training."

"You can't make me do it."

"I can't force you, true. But your job description will be changing. And it's not just my decision. It's the hospital administration's decision. You know as well as I do that an emergency room runs on the principle of triage. Now we are having to triage our nurses. Not a best case scenario, I agree. But we all have to make sacrifices. Look on the bright side: ICU nurses get N95 masks."

Noah's laugh had always had a strange quality, like a barking dog being slowly strangled. I'd always tried not to take it personally. That was hard to do right now.

"Fear is the real infection," the young woman with the flaxen hair called over to me pleasantly from the New Millennium Kingdom table.

###

That night, it was Neal's turn to call me.

Neal wasn't a frontline essential worker exactly, but even in times of pestilence, the wheels of justice must keep grinding, albeit more slowly, though not particularly more finely. He was still down at the city jail three times a week, visiting clients and prospective clients. He was conducting other work-related meetings by Zoom, though, and dealing with all required paperwork from the computer in his bedroom. Which left him with a lot of time on his hands.

He had endless hours to practice his fingering on Missy Quat. He'd joined a "Finnegan's Wake" discussion group over Zoom whose members included a psychiatrist in India and a librarian in Iceland. He was flirting heavily with the librarian in Iceland, though who knew if anything would come of that: “Mispronounce Eyjafjallajökull once and it's through, right?"

He was also gardening, listening to epidemiology podcasts, mediating a war between the finches and the bluejays over his birdfeeder, overdoing his treadmill, and smoking a lot of dope. Oh, and Mimi was staying with him—

"When does 'staying with you' become 'living with you'?" I asked.

"Staying with me never means living with me," Neal said. "I have sworn off cohabitation. But her house got foreclosed. She needs a safe place to regroup. And when your world falls apart, I'll do the same thing for you."

"Funny you should bring that up," I said and recounted my conversation with Noah.

"You didn't know your contract included a float clause?"

"I'm allergic to fine print."

"And that's why the world is full of lawyers. So, what are you gonna do?"

"I don't think there's anything I can do. I am totally powerless here."

"Well, that's not true. In any situation, you always have three choices. You can say, 'Yes'. You can say, 'No'. Or you can walk away."

I thought about that one for a moment. I was a grasshopper: I had a lot of debt and no savings. That's because, in the words of "Chicago's" Roxie, I was older than I ever intended to be.

"I mean, you could find a rich guy and marry him," Neal said.

"I don't dream about marrying a rich guy," I said. "I dream about divorcing one."

"Or I could pitch a tent behind the house if you quit your job and need a place to stay. You'll need to get rid of that great couch—it won't fit. And you'll have to fight Mimi for the shower. That's Mimi's favorite thing in the world, taking long, hot showers that steam up the mirror. I think she likes it even better than when I go down on her—"

"Too much information!" I said.

###

Sometimes I wondered what it was like to be a patient in a hospital. It was an exercise in powerlessness, I supposed. An exercise in acceptance of powerlessness. A good patient is one who suffers quietly, is always cheerful, always friendly. A good patient is one who keeps demonstrating how little they really need. Says, "Thank you!" often. Gratitude was the engine grease!

A bad patient, on the other hand, was one whose excessive demands threw you off schedule. If they were conscious, they were always riding the nurse's call button. They hurled invective and verbal abuse. They pulled out IVs, struggled to get out of bed when you told them not to. Threatened lawsuits. If they were unconscious, their various organ systems were always staging general strikes so that their monitors were perpetually alarming. They always tried to die at precisely the moment you had finally gotten to the break room for your first cup of coffee after a night when you'd only gotten three hours of sleep.

By that metric, the COVID victims in Wiltwyck Hospital's ICU were all bad patients.

"They code at four o'clock in the morning, regular as clockwork," Debbie Reynolds told me. "Just when you've finally gotten a chance to crank up that bedside recliner and put your feet up."

Debbie Reynolds was the nurse charged with orienting me to the ICU, a large-boned woman with full-sleeve tattoos and short platinum hair that she spiked with gel. She reminded me of a cowgirl, somehow.

"How many of them actually survive?"

"Oh, maybe 20%. The odds are not good. I wanted to start a betting pool. But the other nurses told me that was too morbid."

"Does it bother you to be named after Princess Leia's mother?" I asked.

"Hell, no," she said. "It's a good way to estimate somebody's demographic cred. Like now I know you're a Millennial. If you were a Boomer, you'd be asking me about Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher. If you were GenX, you'd start humming 'Singing In the Rain' and trying to tap dance."

"How long have you worked here?"

"Oh, girl. A long time. Why I remember back to the days of heart attacks and septic shock, 'cause some girls couldn't remember to take out their tampons. BC in other words—Before COVID."

Wiltwyck Hospital's ICU was an open bay, all one big room. Seven beds and their attendant machines arranged in a semi-circle. An intimate space—but not in a good way: Every patient was on a ventilator, which meant all of them were paralyzed, all of them on heavy doses of fentanyl and morphine. Many of them were wrapped up like mummies, the better to flip them on to their stomachs, a procedure known as "proning."

"But nobody sleeps on their stomachs," I said.

"Well, we don't care about their comfort," said Debbie Reynolds. "We care about their O2 saturation. Which increases by 10% when they're proned, P/F ratio be damned!"

Mostly, though, Debbie Reynolds wanted to orient me to the personal protective equipment. There was a ceremonial aspect to putting it on, a kind of ritual Yoroi wo kiru as though we were medieval Samurai warriors girding for battle.

First, you pulled paper booties over your shoes. (Weekly staff meetings always included at least 15 minutes of heated debate as to whether or not we should also be removing our shoes.)

Next, you donned the isolation gown, a blue smock made from some kind of cheap, woven paper material that covered your torso from the neck to the knees and your arms to the wrists. The isolation gown would always slide from your shoulders at exactly the wrong time—when you were suctioning a patient, maybe, or when you were reaching down to dislodge a diarrhea-heavy Depends—because no matter how tightly you secured them, the ties on the back always came loose.

Then came the N95 mask, which wasn't a mask at all, really, but a respirator that was supposed to filter out airborne pathogens like viruses, bacteria, and dust. The N95 mask was heavy; it felt like what it did best was to filter out oxygen.

The hospital didn't supply eye protection. Each nurse was tasked with providing their own, so no two face shields or pairs of goggles looked alike, as though each was a helmet, denoting kinship in its own hereditary warrior clan.

"So, does this stuff actually protect nurses from getting COVID?" I asked Debbie Reynolds.
Debbie Reynolds shrugged. "Define 'protect.'"

"Do ICU nurses get COVID?"

"ICU nurses get COVID."

The rest of orientation consisted of trotting around in Debbie Reynolds's steps as she tended her two patients. They were both on ventilators.

"Wait," I said. "I thought the rules say you can only take care of one ventilated patient at a time."

Debbie Reynolds shrugged. "We're short-staffed. Can you believe that at a time when the healing profession needs martyrs on the ground the most, there are actually nurses who'd rather quit patient care and get cushy office jobs doing insurance utilization review?"

It was late afternoon by the time I finally left the hospital. The golden light made the white ER party tent look more festive than ever. When I walked by the New Millennium Kingdom table, I saw a new banner: Turn to Jesus While There's Still Time.

The flaxen-haired girl was standing behind it alone. "Hello! Good to see you again!" she called over.

I doubted very much she remembered seeing me before.

A stack of pamphlets lay near the banner. The pamphlet's cover displayed an illustration of a hearty-looking Savior using a massive wooden cross to batter what appeared to be a green balloon studded with red spikes. "Is that Jesus fighting COVID?" I asked. "Get a lot of takers for those?"

"Not a whole lot," the flaxen-haired girl admitted cheerfully.

"Can I ask you something that's always bothered me?"

"Sure!"

"Jesus knows everything, right? Knew everything. So why did he allow Judas to betray him?"

The girl's smile widened. "Jesus allowed it so the prophecy could be fulfilled. Judas was part of God's plan. God uses everything to help us ascend to redemption, even betrayal. Even COVID."

"Wait. You think this—" the wide arc I made with my hands encompassed both the white tent still crowded with potential COVID patients and the hospital where confirmed diagnoses were processed—"is all part of God's plan?"

The girl was positively beaming now. "Matthew 24:7: 'For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.'"

Then she gasped, brought her hand to her mouth. "Your face," she said.

It wasn't until I had driven home and stood in front of my bathroom mirror that I figured out what she was talking about. The N95 mask had left its imprint in the form of huge blue bruises on my cheeks. Your very own stigmata. Neal's voice in my brain! Customized. 'Cause you're such a cheeky bitch.

###

The work itself was not tremendously challenging. In fact, it was boring. Rote. Monotonous. As though you were somehow trapped inside an algorithm. We plied patients with corticosteroids to reduce the edema in their inflamed lungs. We injected patients' IV bags proactively with antibiotics so they wouldn't succumb to secondary bacterial infections. You had to suction respiratory gunk out of the patients' ET tubes every two hours, or the gummy phlegm would occlude their ventilators. You had to pry their eyelids open and shine your flashlight in their eyes to make sure their pupils still dilated. You had to stay current on their Pavulon and morphine schedules so they'd be paralyzed and stupefied, wouldn't fight the ventilator.

Occasionally, patients started coming out of paralysis and began fighting the ventilator; this made a terrible racket as the high-pressure alarms, low-volume alarms, and apnea alarms began going off simultaneously.

We had to keep a close eye on oxygen sats, too, because if a patient's oxygen saturation dropped below 90, then it was all hands on deck for the proning maneuver. It generally took all five nurses on shift to prone a patient. That was the other thing about the ICU in the time of COVID. Until the shift ended, we were like astronauts marooned on a space station. No nurses aides, no respiratory therapists. We did everything ourselves.

Visitors were no longer allowed in the ICU, and the worst thing was talking to those families on the phone because, really, what was there to say? The best thing was to snow them with medical jargon they couldn't possibly understand: We have him on assist-control volume at a tidal volume of 400 milliliters and a respiratory rate of 20. Moderate to high PEEP but low pressure so his lungs don't get injured further—

But what does that mean? the agonized love one might ask. Is he going to make it?

"How the fuck would I know?" I complained to Debbie Reynolds as we stood outside smoking once the shift was through. We smoked defiantly, right in front of a large sign that said, Wiltwyck Hospital is a smoke-free premises.

"You don't bring your Tarot cards to work?" Debbie Reynolds asked.

"I assumed there was a Ouija board in the break room."

"Tsk, tsk. Next time, just tell her, 'God's not answering His pages."

"Too busy doing that sparrow count in Iceland."

Sometimes, we would stand there chain-smoking for an hour. We never took smoke breaks during shift; struggling in and out of that PPE was too much of a pain in the ass.

Gradually, I extracted Debbie Reynolds' story: After saddling her with a moniker in homage to her mother's favorite movie—not "Singing In the Rain," but "Tammy and the Bachelor"—her blue-collar family had kicked her out of the house at age 16 for being gay. Since then, though, her life had been peachy. "Plus, you know, my brothers are always trying to borrow money."

"Do you lend it to them?"

"Fuck, no. MAGA asswipes. Though sometimes I like to pretend that I will just to see how low they'll grovel."

I'd stopped answering my phone unless it was Neal. At first, I responded to texts, but then I stopped responding to those, too. Neal complained: "You're not updating your LiveJournal anymore. You know, I bookmarked it! I read it every day." But there was nothing I wanted to write about.

Debbie Reynolds and Neal were really my only social contacts—unless you wanted to count the flaxen-haired girl at the New Millennium Kingdom table with whom I'd gotten into the habit of stopping and chatting every day.

I'd say goodbye to Debbie Reynolds, recycle my cigarette butts into a napkin in my pocket—moral corruption begins with littering, after all—and trot on over to the New Millennium Kingdom table. Offer marketing advice on the day's banner. "The Blood of the Lamb Works Better Than Purell? That's not gonna go over too well in a healthcare environment."

The girl just laughed. I had the idea that I could say anything—Aliens have landed! A 9.0 earthquake just took out Australia! You are a piece of shit preying on hapless human fears and insecurities!—and she would just laugh.

One time, I asked her, "What did you do before you got into the saving souls biz?"

Right on cue, she laughed merrily. "I traded at Goldman Sachs."

"For real?"

"Buy the eternal, short the godless."

Another time, I asked, "If God loves humanity so much, then why is He ending the world?"

She shook her head in amused disbelief at the depth of my incomprehension. "If a building is collapsing, do you think about redecorating? No! You get your loved ones out. God isn't ending the world. The world is ending itself. God is building us a new world."

"Why didn't God plan the original world better so that it wouldn't collapse?"

She shrugged. "Free will turns out to be a dangerous illusion."

"Wait! You're saying free will is an illusion? So human suffering is—what? God watching an experiment go bad?"

"It's not an experiment going bad. It's a patient refusing treatment."

"I've had patients refuse treatment. I didn't phone a bomb threat into the hospital."

"That's because you just work there," she said.

"And I don't really care," I said. "I'm just covering my ass."

The flaxen-haired girl chuckled heartily at that one. "Didn't we already decide that?"

Way back in mid-December, the Quinnipiac University Poll, widely considered the gold standard in polls, was reporting Trump approval rates at 35% and disapproval rates at 57%. Quinnipiac hasn't done a poll since, but other subsequent polls are roughly in this range, too.

Does this mean Democrats will win the midterm elections?

Honestly, I don't know.

Most people vote from their wallets. And recently, Trump has floated two proposals in his unmedicated, late-night social media rants that, if implemented, could save these prospective voters a whole lotta bank: (1) banning private hedge funds from buying residential homes and (2) capping credit card debt at 10%.

Neither of these ideas will be implemented, I suspect. But that second one in particular is aimed straight at the populist base.

###

Also, the average American taxpayer will be saving on taxes this year. The standard deduction is going up by $750 for everyone, by $1,500 if you're married filing jointly, and by $6,000 if you're over 65. The child tax credit is increasing by $200. Tip income up to $25,000 is protected from taxation; ditto $12,500 in overtime income—particularly interesting if you think of the type of workers (construction workers, nurses, first responders, HVAC workers) who typically earn overtime, i.e. highly skilled workers who, despite the mythologies surrounding them, aren't culturally respected enough to be salaried employees.

If their own taxes drop by a couple of grand, will any of these people really care that billionaires are saving a whole lot more?

I suspect not.

On the other hand, 31% of U.S. tax filers paid no federal income taxes at all. This is the segment targeted by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party because this is the segment that benefits most from cheaper housing and subsidized healthcare. So maybe progressives are on to something from a strictly strategic point of view, as well as a humanitarian point of view. I dunno. The Delphic oracle is on hiatus.



Anyway, I remained hideously depressed all day yesterday.

The gym was crowded with New Year's Resolutioners, and supermarket prices are up by at least 25%, no matter what the official inflation rate is telling you. I bought some stuff at the ShopRite next door to the Schlock office, and I swear to God, their prices were higher than the non-discount grocery store 'cause why not gauge the rubes if they're wandering into your marketing trap, right?

Considering how down I'm feeling, the Work in Progress is going remarkably well. I mean, I have no idea if the prose is any good, but (first draft, first draft, first draft), it is materializing on the page.

I'm currently writing the second of the Hospital in the Time of COVID sections. Scene has to develop relationships with Debbie Reynolds & the New Millennium Kingdom girl, and also explore Grazia's ideas of what being a Good Person entails—picking up random garbage on the street, returning shopping carts to their rightful bin, liking Lost Pet notifications on Facebook, etc, etc, etc. At some point, as she gets nuttier, Grazia will begin anthropomorphizing her relationship with the universe, such that Neal notices and becomes alarmed in the phone conversation that fades out the section.

Mostly, I keep depression at bay through counseling myself, Resilience!

Life has always been a slog for the majority of souls incarnated upon this planet, and happiness (or at least contentment) comes from figuring out ways to put a positive spin on that slog. When the sun rises over that garbage dump, see the luminescent peach-colored sky, not the rotting bags of trash!

Yesterday, though, I kinda lost the thread on that one, and ended up feeling quite miserable throughout the day.

Not entirely sure what was up with that.

I put in four hours at the Schlock office in Montgomery, a creepy little village in Orange County, New York, filled with the type of people who eat at Latino food trucks but plaster their own Ford F-150s with "I Stand With ICE” and “Report and Deport” bumper stickers. Trump ran on mass deportations, and Orange County is a Trump stronghold. It's no good telling myself that most Americans don't vote, that only 22.7% of eligible American voters supported Trump. Trump won, so mass deportations are the will of the people.

While I was at the Montgomery office, an ICE thug shot a Minneapolis woman three times in the face. She was exercising her First Amendment right to bear witness. She died.

Here's the video:

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1Jqr3UTSqn/

The most horrifying thing about this video actually is not the video but Trump's explanation of the incident: The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.

This is very obviously not the case, and so, we are left once more regretting that George Orwell evidently is the 21st century's Nostradamus: The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Final Dickensian touch: The surname of the woman who got shot was "Good".

Maybe that's what depressed me yesterday. Straw + camel's back. I dunno.

Anyway, when I came back to the house from Montgomery, I was too depressed to do a goddamn thing.

I mean, I was too depressed to watch reality TV, even! And that is saying something.

###

Sleep knits the raveled sleeve of care, etc, etc, so this morning I am back in the saddle, riding that To Do list.

Miraculously, the mental logjam broke, and I have been generating that 1,000-words-a-day + on the Work in Progress with little or no effort. I have no idea whether it's any good or not. My present mood inclines me to think not. But I persevere.

Grazia is currently in the ICU being oriented to the care of COVID patients by cowgirl Debbie Reynolds. (Brian actually had a girlfriend named Debbie Reynolds, and I just couldn't resist.) We need a couple of scenes to establish banter and bonding, & then I will kill off Debbie Reynolds so that Grazia can have her breakdown. I also have to work in Grazia's growing familiarity with the New Millennium Kingdom folk, not sympathy exactly, more Sure, what the fuck as her sense of the permissible breaks down. Needs to have one more phone conversation with Neal, too: And how are your Evangenitals doing anyway?

I have another 1 million pages of tax code to memorize. Depreciation and capital loss carryover stuff, which was out of scope for me when I was a TaxBwana.

There's Remuneration, too!

And shortly, I will be toddling off to the gym.

Still. I'm lonely.

I keep in touch with the People Who Matter through phone, text, & email, but I crave real-time banter. And discounting Neighbor Ed—a champion banterer but unreliable for various reasons—I live 100 miles away from anyone who can provide good banter.

Life seems pointless & grim.

It's on me to change that.

But my recontextualizing superpower appears to be on hiatus.

###

Here's a happy-making photo, though:

Only managed to crank out 600 words on the WiP yesterday.

Making things up is hard. There's a momentum memories have that one's imagination does not have.

In particular, writing dialogue is hard. You have to do a lot of talking to yourself.

I'm facing two scenes right now that are dialogue-heavy. First is a bantering telephone conversation with Neal. Has to be sprightly & amusing. What plot-critical info does the conversation need to include? Possibly Neal's developing relationship with Mimi since Mimi's suicide attempt will be an important plot point in Part 3. But I'm really throwing the conversation in there to denote the intimacy of Neal & Grazia's relationship, since shortly he will be rescuing her from the New Millennium Kingdom.

Second is a bantering exchange between Grazia and Debbie Reynolds, the nurse who orients her to the care of COVID patients in the ICU. This has to establish instant, strong rapport: Debbie Reynolds' death is what catalyzes Grazia's breakdown. The two nurses share a very black sense of humor. This scene also has to be chock-full of gruesome ICU status detail. A challenge!

###

Other than that, I did very, very little yesterday.

It's bright & sunny outside! It may even break freezing today!

But I'm a wimp. Freezing or below is generally too cold for me to contemplate solo outdoor activities.

Crumwold Hall on fire in Hyde Park.

Crumwold Hall was built by Archibald Rogers, a minor railroad tycoon, in 1886, making it one of the few local Gilded Age mansions without a Livingston family connection. It's named for Crum Elbow Creek, which flows into the Hudson hereabouts.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor considered moving there once. FDR's mansion is right next door; he played there as a boy, and the soldiers assigned to protect him on his trips home during WWII were garrisoned there.

New York was not interested in adding Crumwold Hall to the state's portfolio of historic landmarks, so once the original doyenne croaked, the mansion passed from hand to hand, eventually ending up in the possession of an obscure religious cult called the Millennial Kingdom Family Church.

Belinda's house is part of the subdevelopment that was built on the original 5,000-acre estate, so I've often viewed the mansion from afar.

Here's what the mansion looked like in its prime:



Practically nothing is known about the Millennial Kingdom Family Church. They have a Facebook Page, but it hasn't been updated since 2015. Belinda thinks there couldn't have been more than 12 people living in the 75-room house. Their water had recently been turned off since they stopped paying their bill a year ago, which made the firefighters' job all the more difficult.

Anyway, I am thinking: Perfect! Grazia will join the Millennial Kingdom Family Church! And Neal will rescue her after the building catches on fire!

###

Shortly, I must gird up and hike out to check in on the chickens. Their coop is about 500 feet from the house. Icky rigged up a network of extension cords to power their fountain, but that grid has failed, and the water in their fountain is frozen solid, so I have been trekking in every day with bowls of fresh water, hoping this will keep them from dying of thirst.

I tested the outlets with my phone charger: The extension cord relay is charging at its source in the basement, but not at its destination at the coop.

The culprit is likely a dead extension cord segment, currently buried under eight inches of snow.

Fond though I am of the chickens, the prospect of spending half an hour narrowing down the dead extension cord does not attract: It is 20° out there with a "real feel" of 8° 'cause there's wind raising mini-snow squalls.

Maybe when the temps rise back to seasonal (supposedly Tuesday).

###

Frigid temperatures also kept me from my New Year's Day plan: a vigorous tromp across the Walkway!

I have this superstition that the way you spend New Year's Day is a template for how you are going to spend the year, so naturally, I wanted to fill my New Year's Day with as many wholesome activities as possible!

But an hour and a half in the cold?? With Hideous White Stuff all around me?

No, thank you!

I did remain happy & occupied all day long, reading, delighting, communicating with friends. So, perhaps that will be the auger. Had a marathon phone conversation with my pal Tom in Michigan that was quite entertaining.

Didn't do a single scrap of useful work, though. And didn't exercise.

Those would be unfortunate augers.

Off to the gym as soon as I deal with the chickens.

Minor frustrations this final day of the year.

The driveway is drivable. But slippery. 'Cause I shoveled all the slush, but the standing water froze, so there are multiple ice patches.

The nail place overbooked. I waited 15 minutes yesterday afternoon, & then walked out. Will try another place Friday, I guess.

Post office label printer was out when I tried to mail packages.

Today, I was gonna work on the Work in Progress, but the Schlock people offered to pay me to get small business-certified and money, money, money, money, money.



When I was hanging out with Flavia last week, I found myself reminiscing about my childhood in the City, how my best friend Roberta & I used to spend every Saturday walking through Central Park, making up elaborate stories about the people we passed.

"You mean like The World of Henry Orient?" Flavia asked.

"Yes, exactly like The World of Henry Orient!" I said, delighted.

It's an obscure movie.

So last night I tracked it down & watched it again.

Some thoughts:

First, the concert scene where Peter Sellers is presumably playing an atonal Precoviev piano concerto is absolutely hilarious, especially when Sellers keeps hitting the wrong note, and the conductor refuses to let the orchestra start playing, & Sellers keeps getting more & more exasperated until finally the conductor silently mouths, "B Flat."

Second, there is a fair amount of what would be considered racism today in the film. Inspired by the titular character's surname, the girls stalk Peter Sellers wearing coolie hats and performing "Ah so" bowing rituals.

Is this offensive?

Most people under 60 would find it so.

Aging Boomer that I am, I guess what I would say is that playing with stereotypes in this way is a form of teasing, & I wish more people did it. Specifically, I wish that white people were teased this way in movies—except, though, what exactly are stereotypic white people behaviors?? Double parking? Collecting refrigerator magnets? Inability to dance?

I suppose "white people" in the United States is a synonym for "people of European descent," and most of us identify with country of origin.

Still. I think gentle humor is a step toward demystification. And demystification is the only real way to end the Fear of the Other & related xenophobias.

I know, I know. It's off to the Reeducation Camp for Aging Boomers for me.

Temps rose just high enough last night so that snow turned to freezing rain.

Morning came. The rain continued to fall, the temps continued to rise.

By noon, the driveway was coated in three inches of slush.

So, this afternoon, I spent two and a half hours shoveling slush. And another hour sprinkling 50 pounds of rock salt along the layer of brittle ice (impervious to shovels) that had formed on top of the frozen ground.

Hey! It's a long driveway, & fuckin' Icky—who just bought a Tesla—is too cheap to spring for asphalt. Once upon a time, the driveway was a gravel track, but now it's kind of a drove road (thank you, puddleshark!) Temperatures are going to plummet back down again tonight. And I don't want to have to deal with a skating rink whenever I drive the car home.

Slush is heavy, & it was a lot of work. Thank God, I've been going to the gym! Even so, I'm gonna feel it tomorrow.

I suppose I should congratulate myself on being physically up to the task.

But instead, I blamed myself for not being able to outsource. I'm flush for the moment & would cheerfully have hired someone—but who do you hire? This ain't plowing. Inherently lazy, I guess. C'est moi.

Christmas was the Big Fun.

Being completely neurotic, I had to talk myself into not canceling: Basically, I wanted to lie in bed for two days with the covers pulled up over my head since my client was never gonna pay me, and that meant this was the last Christmas I was even gonna have a bed, right? Next year, it was gonna be a couple of pieces of soggy cardboard in the Refrigerator Box Under the Bridge. Enjoy it while you can!

Plus, there would be Nazis. I wasn't sure how the Nazis were going to work their way in there, but I was sure they would.

Don't be ridiculous, I chided myself.

And drove to Poughkeepsie to hop the train.

###

The City was.... the City.

It is the environment that shaped me, and it is such an odd environment, sui generis, you know, so visiting is always a homecoming: It is the only place I 1,000% feel like I belong.

A good omen! When I got off the shuttle at Times Square, a Peruvian shaman was performing in front of my grandfather's mural!



(No, I mean the guy in the red tie is not my grandfather. I doubt very much the mural artist knew my grandfather. It just happens to look exactly like my grandfather.)

###

Real-life Flavia is very, very wealthy. She lives in a townhouse in the West Village on a meandering street that predates the grid that NYC planners imposed in 1811 when the city's population began to explode. Nearly two centuries later, a bunch of LA producers decided to lodge the fictional Phoebe from Friends on this street, though even in 2004, there is no way a waitress could ever have afforded it.

Real-life Flavia has simple tastes, so the townhouse does not scream ostentation. But the details are all the best—an incredible kitchen island of orange marble, wonderful art on the walls, exquisite appliances.

She has no supernatural beliefs about her own exceptionalism, either. Later on, while we were out tromping—I have been one acquainted with the night: oh, how I miss walking around cities at night!—she remarked out of nowhere, "I know how incredibly fortunate I am. And I wonder about it." A throwaway line: She wasn't being defensive, and I hadn't asked.

I shrugged. "Well, it's not as though your life has been bereft of tragedies." I listed a few. "But it's true. You are never going to go mad for a week after invoicing a client, wondering if they will pay."

"No," she said. "I never will."

"But then, I'm never going to have my home in Gaza City destroyed by IDF bombs," I said. "Prosperity is relative. Still, if you don't feel odd talking about it, I have a weird request."

"What?" she asked.

"Well, you know, I'm writing a novel. About Brian. And the fictionalized protagonists are me, you, & Daria. Alternating first-person POVs. And your first-person section is the last first-person section. I'd love to delve down deep with you some time about what it feels like to be rich."

"Sure," she said.

###

I'd carted along Mexican food from a place in Hyde Park—the best Mexican food I've found in the Mid-Hudson Valley, which, of course, is not saying much—so we ate and afterwards repaired to the media room to watch my very favorite Christmas movie of all times: 12 Monkeys. (Yes, boys & girls! Technically, 12 Monkeys is a Christmas movie.)

"Only good movie Terry Gilliam ever made," I said. "But what a movie."

"I don't like Brazil at all," Flavia said.

"I know, right? And The Fisher King is just this maudlin excercise in sentimentality."

"The Time Bandits is okay."

"You think? But 12 Monkeys is so fucking great—"

And it is!

Is fate predetermined? A man travels backward in time to look for ways to prevent the virus that will decimate humanity and drive it underground.

But it is only because the man traveled backward in time to describe the virus that the mad scientist hatches the plot to release the virus, and the 10-year-old boy who will grow up to be Bruce Willis watches, uncomprehending, his adult self die:



The movie dovetails so exquisitely. The use of wide-angle photography & canted angles to denote the Willis character's inner turmoil. Low-tech single cuts are only used when Willis is time-traveling—complete reversal of the common sci-fi film technique, which is to pull out the heavy special effects artillary when they are time traveling. The dark, dark shooting palette is only relieved by the bright pops of the red Army of the 12 Monkeys logo. The art direction so perfectly underscores the script: The only things that are worth looking at are the things that nobody looks at.

"The movie never changes," Bruce Willis tells Madeleine Stowe. "It can't change. But every time you see it, it seems different, because you're different. You see different things."



The next morning, we hopped the subway to venture forth to deepest, darkest Flushing. Little Beijing!

We rendezvoused with Betsy and then bopped around, staring at many wondrous things. In Little Beijing, Christmas Day is just a day like any other day. The sidewalk vendors were hawking their goods, the stores were crowded, the streets were thronged.









We ended up driving to Kew Gardens for Christmas lunch. Betsy's old nabe, I think she was feeling nostalgic. The restaurant where we ate was one of her old haunts. The people who run it know her, watched her kids grow up, & the kids still come in some time. (For various reasons too complicated to go into here—except to observe that while I like her, she is what you would have to call a Difficult Person—Betsy is completely estranged from her kids, so it was sweet & strange listening to Betsy quiz the waitress: "Natalia came in? What was she wearing?")



Then we went to hang out at this tiny café that had just opened!!! The proprietor was from Paris, and why his life's ambition was to open a café in fuckin' Queens on Christmas day and force his beleagured baristas to wear berets is beyond me, but hey! Why not? The cappucinos were delicious and the mocha slices sublime.



Then Betsy took off and Flavia & I went to see a movie where Hugh Jackman played a Neil Diamond impersonator. Theater was packed. Not a single member of the audience was under 60! Perfect movie to round out Jewish Christmas! Schmaltzy, but undeniably heartwarming.



Subway-ed back to Flavia's casa. The tromp through the West Village took us past a couture shop designed to resemble a thrift store so that $1,000 dresses were strewn on wire hangers along bare metal racks. The City's premier bagel & cheese emporium had constructed this delightful whimsy in its front window:



My heart was so light! I felt so happy!

Even the certain knowledge that the very next evening I would be dealing with awful stuff once again—12 ground inches (ugh!) of Hideous White Stuff From the Sky and life in the Refrigerator Box Under the Bridge—did not quash the sheer joy of the moment. I am alive! I thought. The night is beautiful, and I am alive to see it!

####

And whaddiya know? Five miles up the road in Pine Bush, they got 14 inches of snow last night! But we only got six. We dodged the bullet. And in a miraculous display of un-dickish behavior, Icky actually dug my car out for me.

Plus the client paid me.

I'm tempted to qualify that as "the client finally paid me," but the truth is the invoice did not actually take that long to process. It is me who is absolutely insane & neurotic about all of this. If I am going to continue freelancing—& I mean, I am very good at doing the actual work demanded of the role—I have got to think of some way to prevent myself from going all borderline over the billing process.

I do not think I have borderline personality disorder. My mother, though, was a Grade AAA borderline. I was raised by her; it was just the two of us till I was 16 & old enough to escape. And I have what I would characterize as a mimetic personality: Put me in a room with people who have an accent, and within an hour, I'll start channeling their inflections. I don't do it by design! It's an unconscious behavior, a kind of protective mimicry. My personality is porous—which serves me well as a writer but not as a human being. I have weak ego boundaries.

This past week, I was channeling my crazy borderline mother.

And it was not a pleasant feeling.

Flavia sent me the perfect solstice sunrise:



And RTT got sworn in this morning: