My Unique Destiny—Redacted

It was freakishly warm yesterday morning. Fifty-five degrees! Early December!

Supposed to rain. Not raining yet.

So, I decided that exercise trumped everything else on the To Do list, and thus got to see something I have never seen before in more than a decade of living in this place: river mists completely obscuring the Hudson.



Mists are different here than they were in California.

There they were detached pieces of the sky.

Here they are obviously generated by the earth. They look like what I imagined glaciers would look like when I was a little girl first hearing stories about how thick, white, impenetrable sheets of ice once covered the planet.

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Got home, and my new Fitbit had arrived.

Christmas present from Ichabod and RTT.

They asked me what I wanted, and this was it.

In theory, I am completely against generating data that then gets fed into the great data-crunching Google machine, but in practice, I find the numbers very useful. Resting heart rate: 55. Miles walked: 6.5. Time asleep: 8 hours 3 minutes; REM: 18%.

I never go to doctors unless I figure I need antibiotics for something.

Whenever I get sick, as in this week’s creeping intestinal crud, I always think, Yes, that’s colon cancer! and then I indulge in a detailed fantasy in which I refuse all treatment—chemotherapy, radiation—because I mean, why would I want treatment? I’m 70 years old, for Christ’s sake. True, I feel like I’m 30, but I’m not 30. Increasingly, this is not my world, and to tell you the truth, I don’t much like the people whose world this is. Why would I want to continue hanging out with them?

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I did manage to produce some Remunerative Work, but not as much as I should have. Exercising in the mornings throws my rhythms off.

The To Do List is reproachful.

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In the evening, I watched an awful miniseries called Fleishman Is in Trouble, which further accentuated my drifty mood of amiable detachment.

The show is about a group of deeply unpleasant 40-something malcontents in New York City. Kinda like the characters in a Sally Rooney novel on the other side of that first divorce except much, much richer. Whiny characters. Oddly spark-less and lacking in humor. Like Woody Allen after he stopped making funny movies.

It got good reviews!

And I watched in a kind of amazement, thinking, Really? This is what the cabal in charge of human programming thinks people want to be entertained by? Rich people living in an incredibly ugly city—‘cause New York City is often beautiful but never was in this show—whingeing about their problems?

It made me want to run out and vote for Donald Trump!!

It also made me think, Girlfriend, there is absolutely no market for the kind of stuff you write!

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Earlier in the day, I’d come to the conclusion that I just don’t write very well after reading the first three chapters of A Visit From the Goon Squad, which are exquisitely written.

Also, Goon Squad opens with a scene between a compulsive kleptomaniac and her therapist, and of course, in If You See This, June is a compulsive kleptomaniac, which makes my character seem derivative—although I hadn’t yet read Goon Squad when I was channeling June.

The Fleishman/Goon Squad combo made me feel very out of it.

Not necessarily in an unpleasant way.

But it’s quite possible that I don’t have a Unique Destiny after all—despite the fact that my Social Security number is so symmetrical, that my birthday is the numeric for information, and that I was born on my father’s birthday even though my father abandoned me when I was three months old.