Rats on the Subway

[mallorys_camera]

The deal with being abandoned by both parents multiple times as a young child is that you turn into a hologram! You exist only through the interference of light beams from a source! When that source flicks off, you cease to exist.

You grow up with this damage to your heart that’s impossible to fix.

I’m just not worthy of being loved the way other people are loved, you think.

Intellectually, you understand how completely ridiculous this sounds. But intellectual awareness is not emotional wisdom.

You don’t even recognize the feeling as pain. It’s like floating in an ocean. You’re a tiny speck tossed on waves that other people don’t even see.

Maybe the waves don’t even exist except for you.

If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll drown. Or drown yourself.

###

Meanwhile…

Borrowed a page from rosegardenfae's cookbook and made tomato pies! They came out very well, though I’m not sure I’d do them again: The filling prep is really labor-intensive.

Finally went to the eye doctor.

Guess what? I don’t have cataracts.

“Well,” said kindly Dr. Hikamoto, “you do have cataracts, but only because every person over the age of 50 has some thickening of the lens. I’d say yours is +1 on a scale of one to four. For your age, you have remarkably good eyesight.”

He thinks the halos I see around oncoming headlights are probably a refraction error and wrote me a prescription for long-distance glasses.

Also my car’s headlights are aimed too low. The Last Honest Mechanic told me he couldn’t adjust them because the screws are rusted out. So, I am looking around for headlight assemblies on eBay. My trusty anono-car was discontinued as part of the automobile manufacturers’ recall in 08—of course, it was! Because it is a car that was engineered to drive forever with proper automotive maintenance—but there are still plenty of aftermarket parts floating around on the great InternetZ.

Once I get the headlights fixed, I should have far less trouble driving at night.

And Little Megan had never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so yesterday I took her. We had a good time; the grown-up person she will one day be peeks out often enough from her 21-year-old sensibilities to make her excellent company, and of course, I’m good at that age-shifting thing, too.

We lasted four hours inside the Museum, which is some kind of record for me. We did Egyptology, armor, and the amazing Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, which was installed in the same exhibition hall as the Met’s priceless collection of medieval artifacts:



I took her to lunch at the museum cafeteria—way overpriced!— because I was once 21 with a healthy appetite and limited funding, too.

We gave out near Corot in the Hall of Lesser 19th Century Landscape Painters.

“That doesn’t mean we have to go back!” Megan said anxiously. She hates Hyde Park, thinks it’s the most boooring place on the face of the planet.

(She may be right.)

“Have you seen the High Line? Let’s go to the High Line,” I said.

Going to the High Line meant reconnoitering from East Side to West Side. We cut across the park. Two guys were hustling CDs—their own music. We tried to circumabulate them as politely as possible, but one of the guys said, “You shouldn’t be afraid to shake a black man’s hand!” so naturally I had to stop and prove I wasn’t afraid of shaking a black man’s hand. Effective sales ploy! I ended up “donating” three one dollar bills.

“What? That’s it?” asked one of the guys.

“I never carry cash!” I said.

“Don’t you got PayPal? What about Venmo?”

I laughed and moved forward.



The Museum had been crowded. Central Park was crowded. Not with people who lived there—who lives in Manhattan?—but with tourists, mostly Chinese and Middle Eastern tourists. It gave me the most peculiar feeling, like I was the inhabitant of some Third World country.

I logged another 7,000 steps on my FitBit, and then we were at the High Line, which was nice enough but also crowded. Plus now that the High Line has proven itself to be such an enormous tourist attraction, real estate developers are busily pulling down all the picturesque old four-story walkups that surrounded it—and that, one assumes, were at least part of the reason why the old subway El was converted into a park in the first place—and replacing them with 30-story steel towers that will completely block out the light. Progress! Always some kind of vicious cycle.

In the 14th street station on our ride back, I noticed this—



—which made me very happy.

Today, I really must make some money. And weed the garden, which was a mess when I peeked into it the day after I got back from T-burg.