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

Icky came up unexpectedly last week to make sure he got his court-order-mandated time with his chattel kid. So far as I could tell, the kid spent every second he was in the house barricaded behind a closed bedroom door playing video games, while Icky moped furiously. But hey! Possession is possession, right?

I nagged him to order heating oil—and when I got back from Ithaca, a bill for $900 was sitting on the kitchen island. Half of it is my responsibility.

Ulp!

So, I will be spending the next few mornings watching a lot of AI slop.

Ichabod has already told me that he would pay my heating oil bill, but I would prefer not to take him up on that offer, and besides, I kinda like AI slop. It's QA checks on images and videos generated by users of a popular LLM and as such, a window into the preoccupations of Leetle Humans at this peculiarly fraught moment in the zeitgeist.

What are Leetle Humans preoccupied with?

Well.

Magic dogs that cast protective spells on the people who feed them.

Tourist destinations in Patagonia.

Gorillas that join Mexican drug cartels.

And corporate messaging! It's amazing how perfectly AI can mimic that empty corporate marketing lingo that fills your ears with polysyllables & says absolutely nothing.



Yesterday, after I put in my AI-slop-vetting hours, I toddled off to the garden. Which I have been resolutely avoiding for the past few weeks once I realized there was absolutely no way I would ever get a handle on the weeds.

I am sick of weeding!!!

I collected my gnomes, my pink flamingos, my cheap tin butterflys and frogs, and the solar lights R & J so kindly gifted me. They will journey (hopefully) to a new garden in Michigan. I'm leaving the tomato cages. Maybe the next person who works the plot will win the weed fight.

There are some tomatos and peppers that somehow survived the last two weeks' frosts, so I will go back to harvest them this weekend.

Afterwards, I marched around the Nyquist-Harcourt Wildlife Sanctuary for an hour or so. Very autumn-y looking. No real beauty in the autumn for me! Just a reminder that soon, all too soon, this will all be covered with Hideous White Stuff From the Sky.

The elevator pitch for Nathan Fiedler's You Can See Everything might be "Charlie Kaufman meets Vertigo."

The film did what I rely upon dark theaters, stale Raisenettes, and flickering images on a ginormous screen to do, namely a complete mental reset. Any movie will do that for me, actually. Something about sharing collective reactions in a dark theater with a multitude of strangers, each munching away at their treat of choice (Milk Duds, Juicy Fruits, popcorn), I suppose. In olden times, I expect this was the experience people had in church.

What I wasn't prepared for was how utterly brilliant the film is. Easily the best movie I've seen in years.

I've watched The Rehearsal and selected episodes of Nathan For You, so I already knew Fiedler was a genius, the ultimate Unreliable Narrator. Pairing him with Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is an act of such delicious audacity that I scarcely know how to describe it. The film becomes a meta exploration of truth, love, and sociopathology; the scene where Amanda Seyfried watches Elizabeth Holmes watching Amanda Seyfried playing Elizabeth Holmes is the cinematic equivalent of catching a glimpse of yourself in one of those arrangements of department store mirrors that seem to tunnel down into infinity. Very high concept. I was amazed & enthralled.

And left the theater with a clear head.

###

Came home to a text from RTT: So Simon & I are gonna go watch this 3-hour long documentary Monday. Wanna come? So, I guess the Ithaca trip is solid, and I'll be seeing You Can See Everything again.

Meanwhile, it is 29° F out there, and while I love llamas, and sheep, and the Rhinebeck Sheep & Wool Festival, I am very reluctant to march around loving them in the cold—plus this trip to Ithaca will be costly: I am staying at a hotel, and I bought RTT a new television as a b-day gift. Seems to be I'd be better off staying home to make some extra money & bone up on tax law. Though, of course, I could just be staying home 'cause I'm lazy.

Mom you should really not come up tomorrow and I'm sorry to say that, RTT texted at 5am this morning. I love you so much. I want nothing more than to see you, and I hope maybe next weekend could work out—

He'd spent the evening texting me pix of him & Willow—eating Chinese food, kissing in a place with some kind of fuchsia light with annotations: Mom we're in a really good spot right now—

Well, of course you are. It fits the pattern.

But if he's telling me not to come up, of course I won't come up.

My guess is that she's fixed the laser beam of her hatred on to me because I'm the only person who knows what's going on.

I bought him a TV as a b-day gift to replace the one she destroyed in her drunken maraud, and I'd like to get it to him before the return window is up--

How about if I come up Monday? I texted. And I'm happy to stay at a hotel.

You can only do what you can do, right?

If you did Monday you could watch my budget meeting Tuesday! he texted back.

Though, of course, on Monday I imagine there will be another text telling me not to come.

But on Monday, the hotel rates are back down—this is Cornell's homecoming weekend and hotel rates are sky high—so I'll come up anyway because I'll be able to stay in a hotel.

Go to sleep, I texted.

She'd kept him awake all night with some kind of wild, invented drama. He has to be at work at 2. If he starts missing work, the whole thing escalates into a new level of dysfunction.

###

I was thinking about Brian. Why are you dead? I wondered. I need your help.

And immediately this vision of real-life Mimi came floating in front of my eyes. Real-life Mimi is a real-life cannabis diva. If Willow really wants to plug into the local cannabis industry, Mimi is the resource to tap into.

Mimi and I ended up talking on the phone for an hour and a half.

And I must say I think I have misjudged her.

Now that she has her bipolar disorder regulated (through psilocybin micro-dosing and copious amounts of CBD; she hates the standard meds), she is sharp, insightful, and appears to have all her executive functioning back.

It was an excellent conversation.

Of course, I talked to her about helping Willow, which, if Willow has really decided to fixate her hatred on me, will be impossible to arrange.

But we also talked about Brian. And me—

"You know, I think you may be on the spectrum," she said towards the end of the conversation.

"I wouldn't be surprised," I said. "I've had some neurodivergent texture things going on since early childhood. And I doubt that any so-called normal person could survive the isolation I've dealt with for the past year or so. It would drive them quite mad. It's been a challenge for me to deal with it, but I remain quite sane. Other people aren't that essential for me. In fact, I often find other people and their perpetual obsession with social hierarchies and face-saving rituals rather tedious. Though I can form a tight bond with practically anyone on the one-to-one, feel what they're feeling—"

"Masking strategy," Mimi said. "You're mimetic. Not uncommon."

###

Now that I'm feeling sympathetic toward real-life Mimi, I realize I have to revise the Work in Progress outline and make her the fourth point-of-view character.

And it's probably just as well I'm not driving to Ithaca today. The weather is horrible.

Rain and blurge. ("Blurge"—probably not spelled that way—is what my pal A calls those illnesses whose chief symptom is persistent, exhausted malaise.)

The remnants of Hurricane Isaias dropped more rain than expected. The day was dark & cold, and I stayed inside, working desultorily, feuding with the cats, watching Broadchurch, and feeling Not Very Well—combination runny nose, cough, intestinal grumblings, and fatigue.

The To-Do List grows ever longer and Flavia remains poised at the entrance of that pre-war, Fort George apartment, waiting to launch a destructive romantic relationship with her coke dealer. The problem is that the scene requires witty dialogue, and blurge has deprived me of all wit.

###

In the evening, I wandered downstairs to make dinner. I weighed myself recently. I've lost another five pounds. I'm not skinny, but I didn't need to lose five pounds. Anxiety makes me anorexic, and all last week, I was very anxious over RTT, plus blurge makes eating unappealing. But I need to eat. I must force myself to eat.

Icky was in the kitchen. This holiday weekend, he's up here without the kids—Dante's in New Paltz, preparing to flunk out of school, and Gus is preparing for the entrance exam to Oxford University where he wants to study physics. He prefers to do that at Christine's house.

Thus, I got treated to a half-hour rant about how Christine is the biggest narcissist in the world! "So, she's had them for two weeks in a row!" Icky told me. "So, I said, That means I get them for two weeks in row! And she said, No—"

Kind of amazing to me that he thinks of his kids as objects to be traded back and forth in his never-ending battle with their mother.

Also, since he told me he halted all communication with Christine two weeks ago—no texts, no calls, no nothing—it's unclear how that most recent communication took place. Mental telepathy maybe?

###

To fill his empty evenings, Icky has been hanging out at Muktananda's ashram.

I remember how amazed I was when I first moved here to discover that ashram parked along the railtrail. Muktananda has a huge ashram in Oakland, and when I was in nursing school, I had a boyfriend who was one of his devotées there. Never had the slightest interest in visiting myself since Muktananda was the type of creepy guru who paid special interest to lissome young female disciples, but I certainly heard enough stories—I touched the hem of his garment and I had a mystical experience!!

The boyfriend was a pretty pragmatic type, so maybe this was true.

Mystical experiences are often catalyzed by assholes. Oddly enough, that doesn't seem to negate the power of the mystical experience.

Muktananda must be long dead by now. But I remember a big part of the acolyteship was olfactory: The nursing school boyfriend was always burning pungent incense, and last night, Icky was burning the same incense. I recognized the smell.

He set off all the fire alarms.

###

Today, the rain has stopped. I'm still feeling blurge-y, but here's the thing: I can never tell when blurge stops and indolence begins.

Hawks circling the crisp, blue autumn skies. Black Chicken has been confined to her coop for the past few days. (Icky's in NYC, so it's my watch.) I trot out there to feed her her tortilla treats. She's molting, so I think she may actually prefer to be coop-bound.

###

I called PB. No, RTT isn't working today—

But was he working yesterday and the day before yesterday?

I couldn't really ask. But I kept panicking.

True, he's 32 years old and all grown up. Still. I kept remembering how he spun out when he was 18 after Justin committed suicide.

I'll call Allyn, I thought. It was a sane thought! Allyn is very sane.

Yes, Allyn knew about the breakup. Everybody knows about the breakup. So, at least the social support system has been activated.

"Everybody knew she was crazy," Allyn said.

They did?

I didn't.

"I mean, when she was on, she was very, very on. I wondered if she was bipolar."

Oh.

Bless her heart, Allyn drove straight over to PB to interrogate the work mates. He'd requested a day off because he was in political meetings all day. Brian and Julie reported that he was okay. Sad. But okay.

"I'll tell him to text you," Allyn said.

And a few minutes later, he did: Love you. I'm sorry. Just been feeling down.

And today, he's back to shooting his Wordle scores to the group chat the boyZ and I maintain.

###

Night before last, I'd gotten exactly four hours of sleep because I was so anxious about RTT.

Intolerance of uncertainty is one of the classic symptoms of severe PTSD. I've always been resistant to considering I may have PTSD because I think PTSD is what soldiers get from battlefield experiences, not what ordinary humans get from unfortunate childhoods—but I suppose I must have it, my symptoms fit the diagnosis so well!

As soon as I heard from RTT, my cortisol levels dropped. I became exhausted. Fell asleep at 6pm. Woke up a couple of hours later & cooked myself dinner. Then went back to bed. In total, I slept 10 hours last night.

###

I also called Lew yesterday to see if he had heard from RTT. He hadn't—but told me about something that had happened in Indiana when RTT brought Willow to Sid's wedding—

Apparently, Maxwell, Griffin, RTT, & Willow went out drinking after the reception, and Willow ran away!

When they finally located her, she was hysterical and very drunk, saying she didn't want to go back to Ithaca, she hated Ithaca—

I already knew she didn't like Ithaca. She grew up on the Florida panhandle and has a dislike of "woke" that's as ferocious as my own. In fact, RTT had told me, she used my experiences living in Ithaca 15 years ago as evidence that Ithaca was a horrible place—

"She kept saying, 'Your mom was miserable here,'" RTT told me.

"Yeah, well, I was," I said. "But that was because my entire world had just fallen apart, and I had absolutely no money and no way of getting money till I left Ithaca. I was destitute."

So, why did I stay?

Because I was absolutely determined to make sure RTT graduated from high school, and I didn't trust Ben. I was sure Ben would let him drop out. My battles to get RTT to school every morning were epic screaming matches. Ben, oddly enough for such a duplicitous human being, was confrontation-adverse: If RTT wanted to skip school, hey! he could skip school.

Less than one week after RTT graduated from high school, I was gone from Ithaca.

###

These days, I quite like Ithaca.

And I seriously considered moving there.

The issue was basically that I do not drive at night, and I didn't think I'd be able to find a place I could afford in town. (I mean—I could afford to live in town with the revenue stream I have now, but that revenue stream is in no way secure. It could last forever; it could end tomorrow.) Living in the country in Ithaca is exactly like living in the country here—isolated. And I would end up paying as much if not more than I am paying here.

In Holland, Michigan, I will have easy access to restaurants, bookstores, movie theaters, brew pubs (which seem to function there the way coffee shops function here, people take their lap tops and work there for hours.) I could walk to them if I wanted. And my living expenses will be half what I'm paying here! Plus Tom is a fabulous human being who gets whatever that nebulous thing is that I get.

He has already gotten rid of the cat-infested carpets!

In fact, I did him a favor when I said, Ewwwwwww. When the floor remediation folk tore up the carpets, they found evidence of an ancient termite infestation. Termites are all long dead, so he didn't need an active extermination. But there was damage that unmitigated, would have undermined the house's infrastructure.

I probably increased his house's value by $30 K.

###

My heart is sore for Willow, fighting demons whose names she does not know. Is that disloyal? She really touched me on a deep level, and I wish I could help her—

Though, of course, I can't.

Yesterday was the reason why ultimately, Michigan is the better choice.

If I was living in Tom's house, I'd have Tom to talk to.

And I want someone to talk to.

As it was, I fumbled through the day, feeling very, very, very sad, focusing on making money—though not a huge amount of money and within that constraint, not as much money as potentially I could have made because AI testing is actually quite mentally taxing—and steeling myself to perform the little rituals of a well-maintained, organized life: You will exercise! You will cook dinner! If one of the cats hawks up a hairball, you will clean it up!

###

Work comes in 15-minute bouts. It's my habit to stream movies and TV shows in between bouts.

Reading an actual book would feel more virtuous, but like I say, the work is mentally draining, and I need my superficial palate cleansers.

Yesterday, I watched the new East of Eden miniseries.

Whenever that old debate Can you love the work and renounce the artist? rears its tired head, I always think of Elia Kazan, a film director whose work—East of Eden, On the Waterfront, A Face in the Crowd—meant a great deal to me.

Elia Kazan also sang like a canary for Joe McCarthy & his HUAC buddies.

I haven't stopped watching his movies. The way, say, I stopped reading Alice Munro's work when it came out that Munro knew her husband was molesting her daughter but refused to do anything about it. There is more room for ambiguity in political transgressions than in personal tragedies. But I wouldn't have dinner with Elia Kazan, assuming his ghost could be coaxed from the ether to read my RSVP. And I'm not sure I'd shake his hand.

Notwithstanding, Kazan's East of Eden is a very meaningful movie for me and had a lot to do with my decision in 1996 to move my family to Monterey. Monterey and Pacific Grove back then hadn't changed all that much from the sleepy little backwaters they'd been when John Steinbeck lived and wrote there, and I wanted a place for my boys to grow up where they could have a real boys' life with real boys' adventures that they didn't need some parent to helicopter them through.

I just loved the landscape! That blue, blue sky, those sere hills, the live oak trees and the bay laurels.

And it was James Dean's best performance. He was Cal Trask. I became moderately obsessed. My friend-of-the-heart MaryBeth lived in Pacific Grove, and one weekend, we did a James Dean Memorial Weekend, driving all the way down to Paso Robles to visit the crash site, touring the stations of the cross, having an Encounter at St. Mary’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church—at the time, we thought it was with James Dean's ghost; now, I'm not so sure, but it was definitely an encounter with something.

Elia Kazan's granddaughter wrote the Netflix screenplay. She's turned Cathy into the centerpiece—an interesting choice though I could have done without the revisionism that makes all of Cathy's abhorrent behavior a response to childhood sexual trauma. I mean, don't MeToo Cathy, just let her be a monster, 'kay?

Florence Pugh is good as Cathy, though not as good as Jo Van Fleet in the original movie. Hoon Lee as the Magic Chinaman is also decent. But the rest of the cast sucks and the miniseries was filmed in fuckin' New Zealand, which does not look anything like the Salinas Valley, so, you know—the miniseries is Not Great.

But it got me through the afternoon and early evening.

Willow turns out to be more like the young me than I could have possibly imagined. And not in positive ways.

How did I survive my own youth?

Haven't got a clue!

Willow's working at that awful bar, and school has turned out to be a disappointment. Ithaca, in general, is a disappointment. What does she have there besides RTT?

She’s so so so special to me and if she isn’t special to anyone else who cares? RTT texted. The whole idea is we have each other.

SHE cares, I texted back.

The void is actually in her.

Willow's overwhelmed by how much everyone loves RTT. Not jealous exactly. But she has nothing comparable, and that’s eating at her. She wants something like that, and she doesn’t know how to get it.

To fill the void she imagines is her circumstances, she is creating drama in a self-destructive way. The drama involves doing coke, melodramatically breaking up with RTT, sobbing hysterically & telling him she wants him back, breaking up with him again—

I've played that game. La Belle Dame Sans Merci!

I tried to explain it to RTT: Basically, she’s interpreting the fact that you love her to mean you’re a doormat, which is a fucked dynamic. And I say that with love for Willow. Her upbringing left her damaged in a lot of the same ways my upbringing left ME damaged—it’s a hard thing to explain to someone who isn’t damaged in the same way. She was treated like shit by the people who were supposed to love her when she was a child, so she equates being treated like shit with love on a very basic level. It’s CONFUSING, and she's confused. Does that make sense to you?

Yeah it does, but what the heck do I do to counter it? he texted back.

I don't know. The truth is he may not be able to counter it. But I don't want to tell him that.

###

I texted and did phone with Willow, too. For someone plummeting off a coke run, she was surprisingly coherent. Actually fell asleep soon after we talked—leading me to believe that she hadn't done all that much coke. But who knows?

The real issues are (a) addicts steal and (b) girl addicts barter unprotected sex for drugs. I mentioned the former but not the latter to RTT.

"She wants you to move into the apartment with us," RTT told me when we finally spoke on the phone.

Because she wants me to be her Mommy, I suppose.

If I did that, it wouldn't work out. For all sorts of reasons—but one of the reasons is that Willow basically can only value things she doesn't have. If she had me as her full-time Mommy, she wouldn't value me.

No, what she really needs is an intervention.

Not rehab, which is almost always a scam.

An intervention.

But what exactly?

###

I'm trying to remember what turned it around for me.

Only I can't remember.

Ben helped because he'd been an addict and thus understood the relevant cost benefit analysis. You can't climb out of the hole without having at least one person around who understands the footholds.

Abe helped by telling me, "You know, if you really want to be a writer, you should strive to live a boring life."

My kids helped because however self-destructive I might be, I was never gonna do anything that harmed a single hair on their heads.

But I don't know what would help Willow. Getting her out of that fucking bar would be a start. But then what does she do for money?

And also, while I feel a close bond with Willow, obviously my priority is RTT.

###

Anguished texts and calls from the Ithaca contingent wasn't the only hard thing yesterday.

My keys disappeared!

Well, no—not disappeared. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. My keys are around here somewhere.

But I was down to that last pair of jeans I hardly ever wear because it has such shallow pockets. I'd shoved my keys into one of those pockets. The keys must have fallen out while I was vacuuming and doing laundry. And I couldn't and can't find them. So they may just as well have disappeared.

Eventually, I located my backup house key.

And my backup Prius fob was sitting on my dresser—except that its battery was dead.

So, then I had to hike into town to buy another battery. Eight miles, round trip. If I could have called a taxi or an Uber, I would have, but there ain't no taxis or Ubers in the sticks.

I felt really grateful that one of the only two stores in fuckin' Wallkill is a hardware store and they had CR1632 3V lithium coin cell batteries. (The other store is a liquor store. Of course!)
The hike into town and back took three hours, and Willow called in the middle of that, so I perched two inches off the side of the road and tried to dispense wise counsel while eighteen-wheelers rumbled by.

Not fun.

But I purchased and installed my new battery. So, at least I have my wheels back.

###

I talked to each of the kids individually this morning.

RTT is safely off to Simon's brother's wedding. Simon's family loves him, and he loves them. He'll have a good time.

Of course, Willow was invited but then pulled out ("Embarrassing!" said RTT, "what do I tell them?") and her damage is such that she was trying to make RTT feel bad about going.

The relationship turned toxic really fast, and it's totally on her. Not sure it can be turned around.

Heartbreaking.

While I was gone, Icky acquired a new chicken. A little white Cornish Cross. He rescued her from bloodthirsty Hassids at a Kaporos in Crown Heights. But who will rescue the chicken from Icky?

(I do loathe Hassids. There is absolutely no reason to transfer your sins into a live chicken on Yom Kippur and then swing it around your head when you can achieve the same effect by swinging around a coin-filled handkerchief.)

There was also a girl, young & sylphlike. She had a French name. There was a van in the driveway that she'd evidently been living in (shades of Willow), and I wasn't sure whether she'd been lured over on the pretense of finding housing or whether she was one of Icky's potential Bumble matches.

I detest Icky, but Icky, oddly enough, likes me. I was introduced and made a good impression. I wanted to slip her a note: Get Out!!! I will help. But, of course, I didn't. I find Icky utterly repulsive, but I remember when I first moved in, there was a brief window when I found him sexually attractive. He is goodlooking for his age in that aggressive Mossad way, and I suppose there is some subset of young, sylphlike girls who find 65-year-old men appealing.

The scent of marijuana floated up to the Patrizia-torium throughout the evenng, and when I went downstairs this morning to make coffee, a pair of wine glasses sat on the kitchen island. Icky never does dope and avoids alcohol—his recreational drug of choice is cocaine—so it seems like some seduction campaign must have taken place though the girl herself and her white van had vanished.

###

The To Do List is very long. Mostly it's filled with gift ideas for people I care about, but there are a couple of Life things I should get cracking on. Sigh... I don't really want to do anything but eat hazelnut truffles and binge Below Deck Mediterreanean—reality TV at its best!—but I must get my ass in gear and do the productive.

Propanolol quashes the tremor, but it also lowers my resting pulse rate to 45. It's a beta blocker, after all! This actually doesn't bother me. In my youth, I was a jock, and I continue to enjoy the long-term benefits of all that athleticism; even as a crochety old lady, my resting heart rate is in the 50s, and my blood pressure is comparatively low.

I kept telling this to my primary care doc, and she ignored me because going in to see a doctor for the first time in 10 years made me so anxious, it raised my systolic by 50 points. She put me on BP meds, which I took for a year 'cause, you know—doctors are supposed to be smarter than me, right? It's only my body.

The BP meds made me so hypotensive, that I began getting dizzy every time I stood up. Finally, I ran out of them, and there was no easy way to renew the prescription without making an appointment—for two months in advance.

When I finally went in, my BP was 120/60.

"And you're not taking those meds?" Dr. Gaunt exclaimed in disbelief.

"I kept telling you, I don't need them," I said.

'What'd you do? Lose weight?"

I snorted.

The fabulous neurologist gave me a lifetime of Proplanolol pills to take prn, cautioning moderation.

I'm taking the very lowest dose.

It doesn't get you high, but there's a reason why so many actors and musicians take Propanolol for stage fright: It really quells performance anxiety.

###

Although I did have a mini-meltdown yesterday over revenue stream issues. My supplemental revenue stream is so-oo unpredictable.

Plus coming from a place where everybody ❤️LUV❤️s me to a place where I am all alone and practically invisible is hard on the old psyche.

In the afternoon, real-life Daria texted me: Hi babe! Talk soon? I want to contribute [large sum of money] to your next car.

This simultaneously elated and depressed me.

Depressed because wait-a-minnit, do all my pals think I am pathetic and needy?

Elated because money. Yahoo!!! And I really am worried about how my Ithaca darlings are gonna handle the cruel winter without a car. I mean, bikes are fine for the spring, summer, and fall, but biking in ice and snow sucks.

###

In the evening, I watched Part 1 of the last installment of Michael Apted's brilliant Up series, 70 Up.

It made me cry.