Of Milagros, Dollar Stores, the Apocalypse, and the Book of Knowledge

[mallorys_camera]

I had plans yesterday, but I canceled them. It was too rainy, too gloomy, too cold.

Instead I spent the day making… what would you call those things in the photo? Milagros? They’re a fairly minor feature of the Art Installation: I’m going to glue then to the vast, blue, starry firmament overarching Carmel Valley Road. But they took a helluva long time to make! I had to (A) hunt down a grocery store that sold Jarritos; (B) paint the damn things; (C) glitter the damn things; (D) hunt about my immense photo archives for precisely the right shots of Max’s face; (E) Photoshop out the right shots and size them so they’d fit in the bottle caps.

May I just say here that Photoshop has become a complete pain in the ass?

I used to be quite the Photoshop whiz back in the day when I ran People Magazine online since my duties included not only creating written content but also photo editing.

Since then Photoshop has become bloated and well-nigh unusable.

I dedicate one of my more ancient laptops to art programs like Photoshop 6 – a program that became obsolete six years ago – simply because I refuse to “upgrade” to more recent software. Why should I? I know how to make Photoshop 6 do what I want.

Apparently, most people aren’t interested in figuring out artful workarounds and need the whole process to be automated.

I only wish I’d saved the even more ancient laptop on which I’d installed Photoshop 4.0. That was the best Photoshop ever!

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Hunting down Jarritos took me to the shithole that is downtown Poughkeepsie.

There’s a great Jamaican supermarket there filled with all sorts of weird things:



Who knew tumeric was some kind of weird pinecone-y thing?

When I was doing my AmericaCorps Vista stint and living on $850¹ a month, I bought my groceries at the dollar store next door to the Jamaican supermarket.

So I decided to take a peak into the dollar store. For old times sake:



Not every dollar store is bleak and depressing. Some dollar stores are quite pleasant.

But Poughkeepsie’s dollar store, as you can see, was expressly designed to humiliate everyone who walks through the door. It is ugly. It is only utilitarian in that it sells those items without which everyday life is impossible, but those things are all jumbled up on shelves with very little of that organizational mania that’s the hallmark of up-end stores. You’ve gotta hunt down what you want at the Poughkeepsie dollar store.

It’s a big Fuck You to the poor.

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Visiting the Poughkeepsie dollar store did little to improve my mood, which proceeded to grow more and more detached throughout the day. An unemotional variant of depression, I suppose. A mood John Barth once characterized as “without weather.”

I vacillate on the question of whether this is the most awful time to be alive.

On the one hand, we have all these terrific improvements in public heath and healthcare in general. I’m one of those women who would have died in childbirth had I given birth prior to circa 1950 or so.

Plus, you know, access to an endless stream of movies and books. And vibrators!

On the other hand…

Well. I think we may have reached what you’d have to call an information apocalypse. Absolutely nothing you absorb over any kind of digital medium – the Internet, your smartphone – is verifiably true anymore, and that includes these very words you’re reading here since while I claim to be an old lady living in the Hudson Valley, I could just as easily be a Pakistani operative subtly inciting you to go to Walmart, buy a gun, and shoot up your local high school. (Those creepy kids! They deserve to die!! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!)

Increasingly few people relate to their physical environments.

I mean, maybe, they take their eyes off the phone while they’re on one of the DisneyWorld rides.

But their eyes are locked to the phone while they’re standing on line, and they spend ten times longer standing on line than they do enjoying the ride.

I just don’t see how humanity gets out of this one without dismantling the Internet.

And there’s no way the Internet gets dismantled at this point.

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While I was rooting around for Max pix yesterday, I stumbled across this:



Remember how I mentioned those Books of Knowledge lying around in the hideous, mildewy basement of the House of Usher a couple of days ago?

This was something I apparently scribbled on the flyleaf of one of the volumes of the Book of Knowledge. Jane gave me the book while I was living in Ithaca some years back; I have no idea why she saved it because, as I say, she had little or no use for me.

I don’t think I still have the book, but that’s okay: I took a photograph.

An incredibly weird thing, this, for an eight-year-old to write, but then, I was a pretty weird little kid.

Note than many of my adult preoccupations are neatly foreshadowed here!

I take my own inconsequence for granted! All the glory is going to go to my cousin David – Was David a man with a lot of fame… Apparently, I hadn’t learned about question marks yet.

I am talking to posterity! Much as I do in this journal.

And I’m really, really curious about posterity! I want to open up a dialogue with posterity! Time and space? Unimportant barriers to entry for the eight-year-old moi!

RTT, acting as posterity’s proxy, very sweetly obliged his T-35-years mother by signing his name.

¹This was some kind of weird thought on the part of program administrators that we would serve the needs of the urban poor more effectively if we could enjoy the experience of urban poverty firsthand for ourselves! Ha, ha, ha!