The Thunder From Distant Storms That Never Quite Materialize.

Dreamed that I’d come from the City to upstate NY to visit a strange little store. Was the store run by Eleanor? Maybe. The store was dark and filthy, dottering strings of dying ivy dangling from every shelf, in the manner of strange little stores everywhere. But it also sold things that were magic.

Anyway, unbeknownst to me, a team led by Amaryllis Pellegrino had arrived to do a makeover on the store, á la that Gordon Ramsay restaurant show. My job was to lure Eleanor out and distract her while they did the makeover.

When we got back, the store had been entirely repainted in pink and blue, and the Amaryllis Pellegrino-led team clustered around Eleanor, saying, “Isn’t this great?” while Eleanor looked around in mounting horror.

Truth be told, I, too, preferred the store in its original state.

But I felt as though I ought to like in better in its new nursery school colors. And it certainly was cleaner!

“Well, you will get more customers!” I told Eleanor.

She looked at me with a look of absolute reproach.

###

I’m thinking this is a writing dream!

Amaryllis Pellegrino is a writer I know, an old Well-ie, who writes stuff for Salon and that awful New York Times feature Modern Love. She’s very talented but at the same time, everything she writes is kind of glib and… predictable. You can see the epiphany she embeds in each of these pieces coming a mile off. It’s the kind of modern writing style that bores the shit out of me, actually.

Amaryllis has like a billion acolytes on FB! She’s constantly posting stuff like, “Covid chronicles would not be complete without me dying my roots to Springsteen!” complete with pix and a million follow-up responses: Bruuuuuuuce! You look so cuuuuuuute!

Still preaches the same edgy values she espoused back when she was the Mitchell Brothers’ only punk rock stripper even though these days she has a McMansion in Beacon and a handsome husband who makes a lot of money so she never has to worry about hustling. She frequently chronicles her battle with Depression, although honestly: What does Amaryllis Pellegrino have to be depressed about?

Meow, meow!

###

RTT got his unemployment. They back-paid him from March so that he now has close to $10,000 in his bank account. Plus he’s starting a contracting job today, and all on his own, without maternal prodding, he signed up for therapy.

Of course, I would like some explicit acknowledgement: And I owe it all to yew-w-w-w-w, Most Angelic Mother, for explaining the difference between Regular Unemployment and Pandemic Unemployment to me!

But I’m never gonna get that. So, you know: I’m happy for him.

###

Also, I’ve been binge-watching Shtisel, which may be the best television series since The Sopranos in terms not just of its storyline and the vividness of its characters but also in terms of its amazing ability to tie symbolic motifs together. It’s really, really, really an amazing show. I’m completely in love with it.

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Other than that, life is just work and eating potatoes and listening to the thunder from distant storms that never quite materialize.