Plotting the Incipient Doom

[mallorys_camera]

I'm grumpy because one of my clients just sent me a ginormous assignment. My favorite method of making money involves glancing down at the ground & picking up that $50,000-bill nobody else has noticed, not laboring over a keyboard.

However, I should be grateful since the U.S. is clearly in a recession, even if they haven't called it yet. Time to start stuffing money into that mattress! Although that dollar bill you stuff into your mattress today will only be worth 90¢ next week.

Recession plus inflation—just about the most horrible economic formula you can possibly imagine.

I'm cheering myself up by thinking thoughts like, Well, it's really not going to affect me! I'll be dead soon!

Which when you get right down to it is not a particularly cheerful thought.

###

Meanwhile, Adrienne had chided me—deservedly—for not updating the Shawangunk Dems' website for months & months & months, so I spent yesterday morning working on that.

Then Ichabod called & chided me for my insufficiently progressive views on the racial divide. Yes, I do believe in color blindness—say it loud & say it proud!—and you're gonna have to reset the starting marker for history at some point else the current (completely unacceptable) situation is just gonna go on & on & on. So why not do it now?

Then I trotted off to the Shawangunk Dems' monthly meeting where I learned that Trump's Big, Beautiful Bill cut all Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. Not just for abortions! But also for birth control and Pap smears. And this made me very upset indeed. There's not a single thing I can do about it, though.

In the evening, I watched a documentary about Charlie Sheen who ingested more drugs than any other single person on the planet, & I decided—Work in Progress alert!—to borrow his crack cocaine habit & give it to Flavia, since that's an ongoing motiff in the Work in Progress: Neal is gonna save each of the sister wives from some incipient doom. Flavia's doom will be drugs, Daria's doom will be some mountain hike, but I still haven't figured out what Grazia's doom is, and I need to come up with it before I can start Chapter 3.

Comments

[bleodswean]

Grazia's doom must be existential. Her un / dis belief in the power of human connection / friendship and then her Awakening upon Neal's death will be his saving of her.

[mallorys_camera]

You're absolutely right! The part of Chapter 1 that got the most reaction from the handful of perceptive readers I shopped it to was Grazia's throwaway line about the difference between belief & faith. They responded to it strongly enough so that I thought, Hmmmm... Theme!. Chapter 3 is the obvious place to get into that.

I can't think of any existential doom other than suicide, though. And Grazia can't attempt suicide because Mimi is gonna attempt suicide.

You need to immediately move in next door to me so we can discuss this at greater length! 😀

[bleodswean]

You need to immediately move in next door to me so we can discuss this at greater length!

*weeps* Yes, yes, yes. WHY aren't we living next door to one another??????????????????????