Mallory's Camera

In a Mood—chiefly because of the weather, which is all opaque white sky & rising ground mists. Since I know The Mood is entirely due to the weather, it seems to me I should be able to control it, force myself into a better mood, and the fact that I can't contributes to my general sense of failure: Like if I were a Real Human Girl, I would have planned better! I wouldn't be in this place I so clearly don't want to be.

Yesterday was filled with small frustrations. The propane tank ran out, & the wrench I've used before to change it didn't seem to want to fit over the joint—initiating a testy email exchange with Icky. At the gym, the spinning bikes were all occupied, so I didn't get to do a complete workout. Mabel has this enormous mat on her back near her tail, which she won't let me loosen with detangler & brush out even after I try calmly to explain to her that it will be a lot more traumatic if I have to take her to the vet to get it shaved off.

None of these things would bother me if it were sunny out.

###

RTT has been logging on to his father's FB account, which is weird because I see Ben's name popping up on the list of People Now Online, & I think, Wait! Aren't you dead? And haven't you been dead for—what? Six years now?

This inspired me to look back at some of the many, many Messenger chats I'd had with Ben, preserved for all eternity in Facebook amber.

We messaged each other often between 2009 and 2019. I'd forgotten all about that. And I suppose if I really wanted to go all archeological, I could exhume all our texts—I have the same phone account now that I had back then.

###

In 2010, I wrote him this letter:

Afterwards I turned on the radio. And you know what was playing? The end of Prekoviev’s Romeo and Juliet. That strange effect with the bassoon breaking through the violins that’s exactly like the sun rising after a night where you imagine everything’s changed but really nothing’s changed because there’s the plow horse, there’s the torturer’s dog and for them it’s just another day above ground.

I used to snoop around quite a bit when we were together. I never found out anything much. Once I ran across a letter you’d written to Shari. I will always love you, you’d written. Nothing’s changed for me. Words to that effect only much better written. It was a very romantic letter. That hurt. Not because you loved her – did you use the word "still?" I don’t remember. But because I didn’t know you loved her.

Another time I found an email you’d written to a friend describing an imaginary day we’d spent at the Skywalker Ranch. (Did you have a long conversation with George Lucas about cigars? I can’t remember now. Maybe I’m embellishing.) That one made me laugh. That one was more your garden variety confabulation, akin to your career as a keyboard player for Flipper.

It was Lucius who first used the word. “Ben,” he chuckled and shook his head. “That guy is just the King of Opaque.”

You remember different things than I remember. You remember me sinking into despair. Calling Cynsa. Calling Andrew. What should I do? She wants to kill herself. But that was after Reno, wasn’t it?

I remember driving to Reno. Your storyline unraveled bit by bit and each change in the script did things to my heart I didn’t know could be done. The cliché turns out to be the best description after all. Your heart literally sinks. The elevator stops and you get out. “Welcome to hell!” says the greeter.

I didn’t understand it. You were supposed to be my redemption. I was supposed to be yours.

And it kept happening.

It kept happening.

Kept happening.

Here’s the thing: you probably did me the biggest favor anyone’s ever done for me in my life to leave me. Because I was the man with my arm in the bear trap. The only way I was going to survive was by cutting off my arm. But I couldn’t. It was a part of me. I was miserable but I couldn’t cut off a part of me. So you did it for me. Surviving’s easier than being miserable. It’s hard to be that miserable.

I’ll never forget how you followed me into my labor with Robin. I don’t know what it was like for you really, I suppose, but for me it was like you were walking right there beside me listening to the wolves howling on the dark side of the moon.

But I could never trust you.

I couldn’t trust you because I knew you’d shaft me given the slightest opportunity. At first you’d shaft me just because you could, I suppose – the Reno thing with the stolen license, the novel contract you never bothered to pursue, that whole web of deception around the Time Warner remuneration.

Was it then that I became such a bitch? I suppose it was – our survival was at stake and that pronoun “our” included two dependent children. Once I became a bitch, there was a reason to lie to me, I suppose. I was such a soul-sucking bitch, wasn’t I? I probably deserved it.

Thing is, I still feel with the arm that’s been hacked off. I still hear your voice in my head. It stopped for a while. But it’s back now. Though I suppose you’ve found your next redemption. My guess is that you’ll marry The Girlfriend in another month or two, when the divorce comes through. What jolly trips the two of you will make in the Girlfriend-mobile – whoops! I mean the Spouse-mobile. And she’ll pay for you to get your teeth fixed too because otherwise how’s she gonna introduce you to all her family and friends?

You have some serious fence mending to do with Robin.

###

Whoa! I thought upon reading this letter. You wrote so good back then, girlfriend!

And that was really my only reaction.

I don't love Ben or his memory anymore, and the 17 years we spent together are actually an embarrassment. Like: What were you thinking? How damaged were you?

Which means, I suppose, I'm considerably less damaged now.

And that's a good thing.

lifeinroseland & fam braved the Holiday Catskills last weekend.

Is this not the most beautiful nuclear family you have ever seen?



My first time meeting her children in the flesh. Her little son has the most amazing vocabulary for an 18-month-old, and Princess Star is as fiery & independent as she is beautiful & intelligent—which I suspect presages difficult teenage years but a mega-successful adulthood:



It was so good to see them!!!

###

GPS decided to give me a complete tour of the Catskills on my way to Phoenicia. The Catskills were insanely beautiful on this, the unofficial first day of summer.

An abandoned barn:



The Ashokan Reservoir. They drowned 10 villages to make it when they dammed Esopus Creek in the early 19-aughts. My fantasy is that cottages, church spires, & apple orchards are floating around beneath its waters. (Probably not, though.) It supplies 40% of New York City's water:



Today, I have a shitload of errands to do in addition to the usual Remuneration & gym workout. And no desire to do any of them! But it is gorgeous out! So, you know. I'm cheerful.

Not only has it been raining for the past two days, it's been cold! It's not even supposed to break 50° F today. I've been forced to haul the space heater back out.

My life continues to be ver-r-r-r-ry quiet. I don't lack for friends, but few of them live here. There are days when this is a source of agita for me, but fortunately, today is not one of them.

NightCafe gets no ❤️LUV❤️ from the Kool Kids, but I like it since I prefer bringing animated illustrations to life to so-called photo realism. Fantasy R Us!!!

In the middle of the night, I dreamed that Ben had come back to tie up loose ends, shut down an apartment where (presumably) we'd lived together. He was cold, sardonic, demonic; I couldn't quite understand what was going on. RTT was a very young child, not present, but an issue between us.

Then I was in a bar with M____ S_______ (in real life, Ben's very pleasant cousin, the one who told me many years after: We all knew what Ben was. But what could we say to you? You'd made up your mind.)

M____ was very sympathetic: Let me buy you a drink.

And then I remembered the pets, our animals: the two dogs, Milo & Xena, and a cat of whom I was very, very fond—only I couldn't remember the cat's name or even what the cat looked like—

I've got to go back for them, I told M____. Someone's got to walk those dogs. I imagined the abandoned house filling slowly up with shit.

He didn't tell you? M____ asked. And then she described how Ben had poisoned the dogs. With a specially formulated dog food, evidently manufactured for the sole purpose of getting rid of no-longer-loved pets.

I believed her, but still I wanted to get back to the house—my cat would still be there. So, I started wandering through the streets of a city. (I think I've dreamed about this city before, though of course, dream cities always come packaged with extra echoes & deja vu.) The streets were wide and unfamiliar. I thought I saw the building—very grand, made of limestone with imposing pillars—and then I thought, No, that's where Rik lives—

###

Was that a nightmare? I wondered when I awoke. It lacked the grand guignol imagery, the horror movie ambiance.

But it had certainly been disturbing enough so that I never fell totally back to sleep. Instead, I grazed on sleep, a little casual brain nourishment, so my Fitbit would register eight hours this morning.

###

And musing about the dream now, I'm thinking that of all the awful things Ben did—their names are legion, though to counterbalance that, he was the world's best banterer, & I love banter above all things—the absolute worst was reneging upon his offer to take Milo when I left Ithaca.

I absolutely knew the moment I left Ithaca, I would be perfectly fine.

But I also knew there was no way I was going to find a place to live closer to New York City with two cats (Rutger & the Meezer) and a dog.

So I begged Ben: Please, please, please take Milo.

And at first, Ben said he would.

But then he wouldn't.

And I didn't know what to do.

Except then I had to take Milo for a vet visit, & the vet told me, He has a very virulent form of cancer.

And I had to have Milo put to sleep shortly thereafter.

I knew Milo died to let me live.

###

I have a history of pets dying at critical turns in my life.

Like in 1993, a week before I left for Clarion, Dennis Hopper and Hedda Hopper—my two angora rabbits, whom I used to let run around all day long in my wild tangle of backyard—leapt so high, they broke their spines.

Me being me, of course, I entertained a fantasy: I would cancel Clarion! I would find a carpenter who would construct the bunnies little platforms on wheels that they could propel around on; I would pilfer tiny catheters from the NICU and once a day drain their urine. I would live out the rest of my life as the caretaker of my paraplegic rabbits!

Before the rabbits jumped and broke their spines, I had been agonizing: Who will take care of my bunnies while I'm gone???

And then I realized: The rabbits had broken their spines, so that I could get away.

###

Morbid morning thoughts!

Anyway.

Yesterday's Adrienne meet-and-greet was great fun, chiefly because it was held in a historic house built in 1750 by one of the minor Dutch patroons in these parts who threw in his lot with the rebel army.





The house is owned by a billion-year-old psychoanalyst who led multiple tours through its sumptuously appointed interior, regularly stopping at the little nook where he used to see patients & waving airily at the reclining couch: "If you squint hard enough, you can still see all their dark thoughts swirling towards the ceiling!"

All those rewatches of The West Wing have not been in vain! Pretending to be a staffer, I was a fuckin' rockstar!

Even the decidedly ungracious Adrienne texted afterwards, You were a gracious host and an awesome presence as so many people remarked!

Well. Not so many people, I'm thinking. The turnout was small. But the longest journey begins with but a single step, the winning campaign starts with but two people in a room, blah, blah, blah.

Here I am in my newly purchased, high-waisted, floral Pride & Prejudice garb looking suitably triumphant:

It was sunny & hot by the time I made it to the garden yesterday. And then Claude showed up! Prize-winning chef and former Culinary Institute professor, raised on a farm in post-war Normandy, to me, Claude represents everything that's earthy & solid.



I weeded very happily for a couple of hours, sowed my lettuce seeds.

And then something weird happened. I got suddenly and violently ill, the kind of ill that it involves bathrooms, of which there aren't any at the garden.

No embarrassing accidents, but close call.

###

In fact, my usually robust health hasn't been all that robust lately. My lungs feel congested. I find myself getting somewhat winded when I exercise, I cough up fluid, and when I breathe out, I can feel how stiff my lungs are. Classic asthma symptoms. I hate the way inhalers make me feel, so I never use them; I just cough disgustingly.

I've been backburnering a fantasy that I have some sort of fatal but painless disease! Next time I visit my primary care provider, she'll take one look at me and say, "Patrizia, I'm afraid you're suffering from Amaranthinitis. There is no known cure, but here! Let me write you a script for unlimited quantities of morphine!"

I don't care if I cough.

I do care if I feel winded and weak.

But I probably wouldn't if I had unlimited quantities of morphine.

###

I'm still feeling kinda ill today, so I have tabled exercise plans. The day is sunny and bright, so I will lounge outside and read. The fabulous smokingboot sent me Hilary Mantel's memoir Giving Up the Ghost last Christmas; it promptly got lost in bedchamber rubble. Recently, though, I unearthed it again & began reading it.

The first two books of Mantel's Wollf Hall trilogy are among my favorite novels of all time. They have a distinctly mannered style that took me around 50 pages to get used to (50 pages during which I didn't like the novels at all), and I guess I was a little afraid that this mannered style was Mantel's voice—which works as a narrative style for novels set in medieval times because we have to assume that people living in those times thought very differently than contemporary people think. I wasn't sure, though, that it would work for a modern-day book.

Not to worry! Giving Up the Ghost does not use Wolf Hall as a style manual.

I'm also piqued because two separate subscribers to my substack told me my prose style reminds them of Hilary Mantel.

I don't agree, but I kinda, sorta see how they got the idea: I break the fourth wall in sort of the same way that Mantel does. In her prose and my prose, there is a very strong sense that the writer is talking to a specific someone (who is not necessarily you, gentle reader.)

###

And, of course, the AI video experiments continue.

Today, I animated the cat marginalia on a medieval manuscript:



I wouldn't say it works. Ideally, all the cats would chase the mice as the mice scamper off the page.

Is the limitation my clumsy prompt or the clumsy AI (NightCafe in this instance)?

Dunno, but I may try the same experiment in Sora tomorrow.

Here's how I've been wasting the time I should be devoting to Remuneration, exercise, & useful errands!



Making AI videos with any kind of narrative momentum is frustrating (to say the least!) This one's got a couple of artifacts, but I spoke sternly to the AI image generator about its hallucinations & promised to get it into therapy pronto.

It almost works.

Mother's Day!

I'm a hater. Hallmark Holiday, I sneer.

Though I do understand every holiday is the result of some sort of marketing campaign. It's not as though when God made the Universe, He equipped it with sparkly plastic slots for Christmas & Thanksgiving.

And, of course, if my own offspring fail to acknowledge Mother's Day, I cycle into the most terrible snit—which must be why Ichabod called me at six o'clock this morning California time to acknowledge my superiority to every single mammal that has ever given birth.

Way to go, Ichabod!

"And something from me & RTT should be delivered later today," he added.

Ohhhhhh! A large floral arrangement.

I ❤️LUV❤️ me some large floral arrangements.

The kids & I are getting on extraordinarily well these days. I must say, I am a lucky person indeed to have such fabulous offspring.



When I got up this morning, I went searching for a photo to illustrate my annual "My Poor Tragic Deluded Mother" essay.

Is my Apple photo archive magic? 'Cause I swear the photos in it metamorphose & change on a daily basis. Like this morning, the only photograph of my mother I could find was the one above, which I don't ever remember seeing before.

The nicest thing Rik ever said to me was, You are nothing like your mother.

Except in this photograph, my mother looks disturbingly like me. (Yes, I know, in truth I look like her, but precedents get very garbled when you're looking at old photographs.) The same exact face shape. It's... defining.

Giving full vent to her narcissism, my mother is staring poutily into a small compact mirror and raising one hand to caress her carefully premeditated flip coif. The photo is carefully posed, and she is pretending it's not posed.

Happy Mother's Day, Lynn, wherever you now may be! From the bottom of my heart, I hope you are having more fun in your present lifetime than you had in the lifetime before.



In other news, I actually ended up having the Big Fun herding children through the bounce house yesterday. Go figure.

A lot of that was because the high school senior volunteer who was assigned to assist me turned out to be lovely, intelligent & poised, and we actually had a real conversation about her life, her hopes, & her dreams, which restored my faith in teenagers—they're not all like the Icky Spawn!

Sadly, the actual Duck Derby event itself had to be canceled because the river was up too high:









Still, amazingly beautiful, no? Extremely pleasant way to loll away an afternoon.

###

Afterwards, I traipsed off to the monthly meeting of the Shawangunk Dems. I have volunteered to take over administering their website—which hasn't been updated in two years and needs a complete redesign.

"Democrat" is a dirty word in this part of Trumplandia, right up there with "cunt" and "Hilary Clinton."

So, I told the group that if they wanted maximum return on our Internet presence, we really need to deemphasize the Dem part of Shawangunk Dems. (And we'll need to do other social media outreach too, because down the line, if we want younger members—and we do: Nobody in our group is younger than 60—they care about Instagram & TikTok, not websites.)

The Shawangunk Dems run an outreach initiative called Neighbor to Neighbor, which consists of knocking on people's doors & giving them home-baked chocolate chip cookies as well as a newsletter chock full of curated local news & sponsored activities—Bingo! Board game nights! Drama classes! Art classes!

"Neighbor to Neighbor is a much stronger pitch than Shawangunk Dems," I argued. "It gives the illusion of non-partisanship. Win their hearts & minds, and then you'll win their votes!"

"But we're the Shawangunk Dems," one of the greybeards gasped, appalled.

"Sure, that's the umbrella organization," I argued cheerfully. "Think of the business analogy. Does Kraft Foods advertise itself? No! It advertises Jell-O and Heinz Ketchup and Kool-Aid!"

Alas, I got voted down.

And sadly—even though I know I'm right—I believe in majority rule when it comes to stuff like this.

These people know nothing about marketing!

There are logistical issues with the garden. Since I now live so far away from it, I have to plan going there—which has been difficult given the rainy weather of the last week or so.

We've had a break from the rain the last couple of days. But weather forecasters, modern-day variants on those white-bearded prophets of yore, say it's gonna start raining again tonight.

Which leaves me with a dilemma.

I've been trying to be very accountable with the various revenue-generating activities—not that I expect them to keep me safe from the various horrible geopolitical events that are taking place around the world or even from the pitchfork-wielding, torch-waving villagers in the small Trumpy town where I now live. But, you know. Money! The one true cure for FOMO.

So, I have been assigning myself a word quota.

And I don't leave the house until I complete that word quota.

Which doesn't usually take place until the early afternoon.

I'd like to drive straight over to the garden right this very moment! The sun is out; the freshly mowed grass and newly leafed trees are such a radiant green promise.

But I'm forcing myself not to.

And that is frustrating.

Of course, I can always traipse off to the garden when I stop working.

But by then I may not feel like it. The trip won't be spontaneous.. It will be just another pro forma thing on the pro forma list of things I must do because—Well. I just have to.

###

I've been in a mood.

It's nothing a little distraction wouldn't cure, but the world seems too scary right now to look away for a single moment.

When you're a passenger on an airplane, you gotta keep staring out that window—or the plane's gonna crash.

Magic!

It's the only way the truly powerless have to control things.

Rained all day yesterday, so I didn't leave the house except for a couple of car trips for provisions (half & half, McDonald's quarter pounder with cheese—I actually like MickyD's though I limit my consumption to every couple of months because so-oo unhealthy!)

I felt kind of ill in a subthreshold way that was difficult to get a handle on. My asthma has been acting up. THC, it turns out, is an effective bronchodilator, which is good though even in small quantities, THC makes me loopy, which I don't like—although I dislike it less than the inhalers they actually prescribe.

I kept sneezing and my nose was running—so maybe some virus?

And my insides felt off. (Before the MickeyD's, smartass! 😀) Like if I thought about it very much, I'd feel nauseated.

Basically, I suppose, I just do not like days without sunshine.

When I finally assume complete dominion over the known Universe, I'm gonna make it so that it only rains at night.

###
I was gonna garden today, but it is raining again.

I still have to go over the bridge. Belinda invited me over for lunch, and she is planning an elaborate menu (since we haven't seen each other for six weeks or so), and I don't want to hurt her feelings.

Does seem ridiculous to me that my moods—and possibly my physical wellbeing—are so absolutely predicated around the weather, But they are!

I went to see Sinners at the neighborhood movie complex in New Paltz. The Raisinettes were not stale, and the movie was not very good—which kinda shocked me because the Reddit-ors were all This. Is. The. BEST. Movie. EVAH!

There were interesting things about the movie. I do like the idea of vampyric musicians, and of course, the idea that a blues guitarist could be so slick that he summons the ghosts of musicians past & present to play with him is a wonderful conceit. There were also some great shots of Mississippi's endless cotton fields, a panopticon shot in that kinda dark your eyes see when the actual light is overwhelmingly bright & dazzling.

But on the whole, no.

An unexpectedly boring movie.

###

When I got home, I dashed off a couple of pages of my own vampire story! Resolved: All vampire stories should take place in Indian casinos!

----

THE ECOLOGY OF ISLANDS

The thing about an island is it's a long way from home, and you have to go over a bridge to get to one.

###

On Techuma Bridge, Pellegrino was held hostage in his car. A van had gone crazy on white lines slick with rain; it had taken thirty-five minutes for the police and ambulances and the guys with the fish-hooks to show up. The reflection of red brake lights spilled across two lanes of stopped traffic. Pellegrino watched as the twisted doors of the van were pried open and the bodies extracted. There was a lot of blood.

Pellegrino felt the old reflexive tightening—incisors somehow hard-wired to groin.

Well what the hell, he figured. He was on vacation.

He hadn't made reservations at the casino motel and they overcharged him for the room. The girl jotting down his license plate number didn't seem surprised at all that Pellegrino was three thousand miles from home. "Room 72," the girl told him without looking up.

The motel rooms had doors opening up on to a veranda. Convenient for midnight strolls.

In the casino, Pellegrino sipped espresso and searched for a victim. They didn't serve alcohol on Indian reservations. Pellegrino liked that; it kept things quiet. It was two o'clock in the morning, but that had never seemed to matter when there were mirrors and indirect overhead lighting. The casino was small, two connected rooms and a coffee bar. The usual faces clustered around the low-end tables, the $2 and $5 limit blackjack games. Men in polyester shirts, pointed and grim. Strangers on their third day of desperation. Hustle and rush.

Pellegrino wanted a woman.

Pellegrino found one. She was Chinese and middle-aged; the pai gao table at the end of the room had baited the trap. She clutched a small jade medallion which she shook furiously for luck. She appeared to be alone.

Pai gao appeared to be a high/low game. The dealer flipped the cards fast with practiced indifference. The dealer was also a woman, one of the very few Caucasians working at the casino, her blonde hair angrily moussed back. Her name tag said Janine. Her salary, it would seem, was a good investment for the house; the pile of chips at her side of the table grew larger and larger.

After a while, the Chinese woman gave up on Janine's table and wandered over to the dice.

Soon, she gave up on that one, too, and wandered toward the door.

Pellegrino followed her.

Outside it had stopped raining but clouds haloed the moon, an effect, Pellegrino noted, not unlike an X-ray. Time slows down when you're about to score: Pellegrino had plenty of time to reflect not just about the moon's discreet radience, but also about the Chinese woman's screams, the way she shuddered and convulsed in his arms when he grabbed her, stainless steel file to her neck; the way her blood tasted when it pulsed out of her wound as she lay dying and he stood waiting to come alive. The Chinese woman ate a lot of garlic.

Pellegrino dumped the body in the Sound.

Afterwards, Pellegrino returned to the casino. Afterwards, it was always particularly sweet to pass.

He bought another espresso. He circled back idly to the pai gao table.

The blonde pai gao dealer, Janine, was staring at him.

Pellegrino looked down.

On the collar of his white shirt was the imprint of the Chinese woman's good luck medallion, outlined in blood.

------

Today, BB, Flavia, & I are off to a protest march in Middletown.