Priorities

Dreamed that RTT was a teenager, and we were living on some sort of campus. RTT was humiliating me in front of a dormitory of teenage boys, My mother is ____ & lobbing all sorts of other humorous insults—the other teenage boys were laughing—& I went berserk & screamed three insults at him, intending to wound him to the quick. The first insult was, And you're not very smart really. You have a derivative, follower intelligence. Can't remember the other two.

Part of me was telling the rest of me: Don't do this. Don't do this. You can't possibly outshout him & those boys. You'll only humiliate yourself further. Leave.

So, I did.

I had a vague sense of the campus building being very familiar, with long corridors & a really confusing system of elevators. It was very difficult to get out.

Outside the building, I ran into M_____ except M______ was a boy. What college are you going to? I asked M_____, and she answered, Pomona—but only because they accepted me early & offered me a full ride.

RTT, I remembered, had been accepted into something called Ambrose College. Ambrose College was decidedly second-rate. I wondered if RTT would even notice I was never going to speak to him again.

Then I was at the intersection of Lefforts & Washington Avenues in Brooklyn—the way it looked when I was a little girl. I was on my way to a babysitting appointment.

Did I stumble? Did I fall? Somehow I'd managed to drag my purse across the pavement so that it was now covered with drag marks. It had been a very expensive purse once, but nobody would ever mistake it for a luxury item again.

I had two babysitting appointments: one at 5:15, one at 7:30. It was going to be a tight squeeze, I realized. I had to optimize my movements, turn them into a kind of algorithm.

I was climbing the apartment stairs to the first appointment, wondering, Is this really the most efficient way?

It's not, I decided.

So, I ran back down the stairs.

But at the bottom of the stairs, I thought, It is. And I'd started going back up the stairs when I awoke.

###

In real life, RTT really was the most horrible of teenagers, and our battles were epic, though they never took place in front of third parties.

We're on good terms now, though, so I'm not really sure what pond this dream was dredging.

Also, it's hard to blame RTT for being a horrible teenager. As parents, Ben & I were pretty horrible ourselves. Deeply irresponsible.

###

Anyway...

Yesterday, I started Chapter 3.

I'd planned just to scribble a few plot notes, but ended up writing the first 1,000 words, even giving Icky a cameo as a fifth-string guitar-playing loser with erectile dysfunction. (That was fun!)

Chapter 3 is gonna be hard to write because I'm flying blind. It is not autobiography.

I am thinking it takes place at the hospital during the early days of COVID when Grazia is floated to one of the wards where she watches several people die in the course of one night—including one who could be her doppelganger—and experiences Existential Crisis, and runs off to a Catholic Church where she has a mental breakdown that could be God talking to her but also could be a psychotic episode.

And she calls Neal, and he takes her up to his Catskills cottage & takes care of her for a couple of days.

And she is left with faith. But not belief.

This will be a bit tricky to pull off without sounding like a Hallmark greeting card.

It would be good, too, to somehow segue into the events of the opening chapter: the sister wives on the porch after Neal's memorial.

###

The Work in Progress is my personal priority, but unfortunately, it can't be my top priority.

Money must be my top priority.

So, it's Remuneration & tax law for me today! Fortunately, it's raining, so I'm not tempted to go outside.