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This is basically a writing diary where I write all kinds of stuff that will be immensely boring to anyone who stumbles across it.

So you should go back to Facebook.

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly. ---- Harry Lime

Entry tags:

Catch Up

Brian's house was hard.

I brought lunch & bubbles. (Brian was a big fan of blowing bubbles. There's nothing he liked to do more at the end of a day than smoke ganja & sit out on his front porch blowing bubbles.)

But as far as any of the practical tasks that had to get done?

I was useless.

Fortunately Brian's excellent neighbors—an elderly and charmingly licentious gay couple—had already cleaned the kitchen. It was more spotless now than I had ever seen it when Brian was alive. I fed them lunch.

"We will miss Brian," Willie—the elder of the two—remarked. "Do you know how we became friends? Well, one time, we were entertaining a trick—"

"He wasn't really a trick!" interjected Eugene. "We just liked to call him that!"

"—and we ran out of lube. So, I walk across the road, bang on Brian's door, and say, 'Hey, do you happen to have any lube I could borrow?'

"And without missing a beat, he asks, 'Water or silicon-based?'"

###

As soon as I got to Brian's, I felt utterly fatigued. Denatured somehow—like all the protein in my body had turned to jellyfish protoplasm.

All I could do was collapse on Brian's front steps and prattle on & on, hopfully entertainingly—to Brian's gay neighbors (but they had already cleaned the kitchen—and since I was amusing them, that kinda meant that I had cleaned the kitchen, too, right?), to Flavia's friend Betsy who had dropped everything to support Flavia for four days even though she was not the biggest Brian fan. So I sat while Flavia and Mimi did the tour of the house, tackled the stuff in the fridge and the washing machine, went around the cottage unplugging appliances.

Then the four of use went out to the garden.

It was nowhere as big or various as it has been in past years. Which, of course, made me think, Huh! Did he...?

There are a couple of tomato plants and half a dozen chilis I could rehome. But that would mean spending an hour in that garden, and that garden was crawling with tics. Tiny deer tics, the ones that give you Lyme's disease. All but impossible to distinguish from dirt flecks.

Much of my entertaining conversation with Betsy had had to do with her two-year battle with Lyme's disease. It is not a disease I want to contract, so I don't want to be digging in Brian's garden.

I will go up & water it, though. On weeks that don't get much rain. I only live 25 miles away although the drive there takes me on backroads over the Shawanagunk Ridge and through the Catskills, so it's at least an hour's drive.

And I'll sauce the tomatoes when they're ripe.

###

The next day I had to get new tires and rear shocks for my car.

Mavis Automotive told me the work would take four hours at most to complete.

Belinda picked me up, fed me lunch, took me to see a really bad movie: Jurassic World Rebirth.

Dropped me back off at Mavis at the four-hour mark.

Looking up at the little Prius on its hydrolift with its wheels disassembled, was exactly like looking down at a surgical patient on an operating table. And I noticed the customer service people lied just as glibly as medical personnel: Oh, nothing's wrong! It's just taking a little longer than we...

Another hour, I was told. Ninety minutes, tops.

If they'd just fuckin' told me, It will be finished when it's finished. Leave it here. We'll call you tomorrow...

I must say, Belinda despite her Trumpishness was an excellent friend. When I texted her I was on the verge of a massive panic attack, she swooped down & took me to the local Dairy Queen (which she owns) for dinner. The DQ cheeseburger is Not Bad.

Then Belinda took me back to Mavis.

I wandered around to the back of garage and watched the mechanic thrashing about with my car.

The culprit was some sort of nut that could not be dislodged from some sort of bar.

Even with no mechanical aptitude whatsoever, I understood perfectly well that no amount of torque or elbow grease was gonna get that nut off that rod because that nut was stripped. That nut would only be removed with some kind of drill apparatus.

But the mechanic didn't understand this. He was growing more & more desperate to grip as he twisted his clamp round & round that nut.

And I thought, Uh oh. Because I have been a charge nurse, and I know that expression I saw on that mechanic's face! It was that panic that comes when you are trying to cover because you have made a potentially disasterous mistake.

Whenever I saw that expression as a charge nurse, I would try to take that nurse off an assignment as soon as possible—not because he or she was a bad nurse, but because once you get that rattled, you cannot do anything right, you will just keep making horrible mistakes!

By this time, it was 6pm, which is when Mavis officially closes.

They wanted to stay until the whole thing was fixed.

I figured that wouldn't be till midnight. So, I said, "Absolutely not! If you put the car together, will it be driveable?"

Well...yeah... but it will make an awful lot of noise.

And it did make noise. It sounded like the ghost of Keith Moon was beginning his world tour in my trunk.

But I got it back to the casa safely. And back to Mavis at 8 the next morning. Where it took them another two hours to fix it. Different mechanic!

###

Then I went off to the Hyde Park Community Garden, where I knew I'd be able to regroup. Tics are never seen in the Hyde Park Community Garden!

Weeded. Lay more straw.

Despite my massive neglect, tomatoes, cucumbers, & peppers are coming along quite! nicely:

Especially my wonderful volunteer California poppy:

Afterwards, under the cool shade of the Linden tree, I had my first conversation with Claude that was not about gardening.

We talked about growing old. Both of us had expected to die by 30.

And youthful mistakes. You expect to die by 30, if you make a lot of those.

I like Claude. He is very solid.

Thinking is hard.

Feeling is impossible. Except for anxiety.

(Wait! Is anxiety even an emotion?)

I haven't slept more than four hours a night since Brian died.

Sleeping would make me feel a whole lot better.

Entry tags:

death,
friends

A Determinate Point In the Future

They are dropping like flies!

Got the news through the Well network this morning that Mattu had dropped dead—also unexpectedly, also sitting in his favorite chair. Eerily like Brian.

Mattu was my boyfriend in the late '80s/early '90s.

We lived together for a couple of years in Oakland. The breakup was bitter.

Some years after, by a weird coincidence, he ended up living in Monterey just four blocks away from where I lived in Monterey. I walked Xena the Warrior Russell by his house twice a day; often, he would be sitting outside on his porch, and he would glare at me. I could have walked the dog on a different route, but I kind of enjoyed needling him.

He had married; he had procreated.

And then one day, his house burned down. No shit!

He smoked. And when I was living with him, would occasionally drink till he passed out. A vestige of his Midwestern Bad Boy past.

So, I always kind of assumed he had burned down his house by passing out drunk with a lit cigarette butt in his hand.

Many years later when we'd gotten back on civil terms—who remembers how?—he told me, no, it had been an electrical fire. Mattu was an electronics fanatic. The electrical systems in those old Monterey houses were not built to support three computers, two modems, a monitor, a plug-in boombox, and a printer on a single outlet.

###

Mattu had a habit of dropping in and out of online hangouts. For a month or so, he'd post up a storm & then he'd disappear. He was a really terrific writer. The bio he posted in his kamakazi Internet runs reads thus: Born some time back, dead at some indeterminate point in the future, everything else is now. Which I think is really quite terrific.

Our last exchange:

Mattu: Hey, pdil! I’ve got a question that’s been tormenting me for decades now: remember the Mexican restaurant that we used to eat at in Berkeley, Max’s preschool days? As nearly as I can tell, we were just a few blocks from 924 Gilman, soon-to-be world famous as the launching pad of Fugazi, Operation Ivy, any number of terrific bands. I never once stepped foot in the place, alas. But a few years later, Mike Cowperthwaite was dating Ian MacKaye’s (Fugazi guitarist) sister, and they used to stay at our house in Monterey. Ach, the days.

(What’s the point? I honestly couldn’t say. My mind tends to be more focused at 3am than 10am. Maybe I should email you then,)

Me: Ah, yes, those 3am treasure hunts through ancient memories... I don't remember any Mexican restaurants on Gilman. I DO remember Juan's, which was on Carleton Street in southwest Berkeley (pretty near Max's daycare provider's house.) I had lunch there on a Berkeley trip maybe five years ago, so it may well still be there

Mattu: THAT’S the one. Sam and I went by there in…2015?, when we passed through. Wanted to pick up some coffee at my old place on College, but it had turned over (Coles?), so we went across the street and had some strawberries. Time to go back, I’m losing traction,

I didn't really feel sad when I heard Mattu had died. It was more like when I heard Bradburn had died. This picking off of the old gang just feels so random. Am I next?

###

In other news, I am meeting Flavia & Mimi up at BB's house in a couple of hours to clean the perishables out of the fridge & do whatever else needs to be done to lock the house down till Flavia decides what to do with it.

I am quite numb.

Utterly incapable of anything remotely resembling thought or emotion.

Entry tags:

Transplanting

Grass clippings turn out not to be good weed deterrents.

Here was the Hyde Park garden before I weeded it:

Okay. Ten days of neglect.

Here is the garden after I weeded it. My tomato plants shot up a foot in those 10 days.

I am thinking I will go back today, finish the weeding, & put down straw—which I know from experience is an effective weed deterrent.

###

I don't even want to think about what the New Paltz garden looks like. I may venture out there tomorrow.

Flavia, Mimi, & I are supposed to rendezvous at BB's Monday. I was thinking of rescuing some plants from his enormous garden and transplanting them in New Paltz—that is, if they are at all rescueable. They may not be. Their root systems may be too well established.

But BB has rows & rows of really nice heirloom tomatoes.

And it would be a pity to let them all perish.

###

Other than that... I got an enormous client assignment yesteray. The kiskas are pleased they will not starve.

I sat out on the back porch for a long while last night and watched the fireflies and Black Chicken strutting about. Black Chicken crows! Just like a rooster.

I am brain dead in a peculiar fashion: There is just nothing very much to think about because there is no one to tell what I think about to. Not here, at any rate.

The wedding weekend was very good because I just chattered away through it; there were lots & lots of wonderful conversations. Here, BB was literally the only person I had to talk to. Oh, I have lots of acquaintances! People I don't recognize are constantly coming up to me in supermarkets: "So good to see you again!" I suppose I must have done their taxes.

###

I did everything you're supposed to do to make connections in a new place when I moved here. I'm a member in good standing of all sorts of community organizations. But those community organizations did not yield friends. I met virtually no one I wanted to get to know better. I have no idea whether this is because I am too old to make new friends or whether the people here are shallow, conventional types who don't attract me, but vanity compels me to assume the latter.

So, Bad Fit to my current surroundings. DUH, right?

When I move, it should be a big move.

But I'm too brain dead to think about that very much now.

Entry tags:

brian

The Treaty of Friendship

February 14, 2013! That's when I first met BB.

Here is what I wrote about him:

You May Think This Entry Is About Industrial Architecture, But Really It's About Sex

I spent a very interesting day with a very interesting guy doing one of my favorite things in the world – no, not making love, but walking around a postindustrial apocalyptic landscape and looking for architectural talismans, clues to transience, proof of what was once there and what will one day be there in its place. I don't know why I find this so fascinating, but I've been doing this since I was a very young kid, and mostly alone because the only other person in the world who shares my preoccupation with this is Ben. BB was very happy to tramp around with me, and I think he enjoyed himself but I suspect what he was really enjoying was me enjoying myself.

The Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn is utterly fascinating and filled with weird things – like this Russian sign over the nondescript door to this most unprepossessing little building. What the hell was this? We were close to the maritime reach, and Greenpoint was a big shipbuilding center well into the 20th century with light industry, satellite foundaries, glass factories, rope factories. I'm thinking at one time this must have been one of those bizarre little sailors' halls for Russian merchant marines far from home. But who the hell knows?

I liked BB a lot. I think he liked me, but the dynamic got more unsettling the farther we strayed from small talk. I'm a big fan of small talk. I don't actually like process-oriented conversations unless they're specific planning sessions about who is going to take out the trash, who is going to vacuum and who is going to cook dinner on Tuesday. I am of the opinion that real communication takes place in the interstices. It's not what is said, it's how it's said. I particularly don't like process conversations with people I've just met.

Of course, BB is someone from the Online Dating Site. He's also polyamorous, has lots of girlfriends including a primary. And of course, we talked a lot about sex.

We went back to his apartment, which is just a terrific apartment – converted industrial space with a large piano and tons of books and interesting art on the walls and this wire on which he had trained an ivy plant, which had obviously been there for years and years. Amazing view outside his front window of the water treatment plant which has four minarets just like a Russian Orthodox church. Or maybe they're stylized sculptures of giant garlic bulbs.

We sipped a very delicious port, and nibbled baguettes and prosciutto and a nice runny Camembert, and talked somemore about sex. Listen. I'm gonna have to get back on the bicycle sooner or later, right? So I told him I would probably end up having sex with him at some time in the future but that I would take it slow and then when it happened, I would make the moves. And I would have to say that this made him… nervous.

At a certain point, he started talking about his "super power." Which is apparently the ability to make women come merely by telling them to come.

BB is actually the second guy I've met in NYC who has this super power, by the way. I have no reason to doubt him. He's very charismatic. But this whole I-make-women-come-but-I have-to-masturbate-to-orgasm-myself thing squicks me out a bit. It's kind of like: I want you to lose control, but I'm not gonna lose control. The Dom thing, in other words.

The Dom thing is not my thing at all.

I crave mutuality.

The most times I ever came in a row was 11. I kept count. I think I was supposed to lose myself in the sheer rush of sensation, and to a large extent I did, but you know, I'm always observing. The perp in question is actually a middlingly famous guy so I won't name him. He pleasured me exactly as though he was winding a clock with a kind of clinical degree of interest that made the experience – despite the physical pleasure – rather… degrading, I suppose would be the word.

Anyway, by the time I left BB's apartment I had decided I wanted to be his new best friend, but that I didn't want to have sex with him.

BB is just a terrific playmate. I could have real fun with BB, and who knows – maybe I will. But my favorite sex has always been very uncomplicated sex – the physical contact, the contours of someone's naked body fitting to my naked body, the smells, the tastes. The animal passion of it. I really don't want to be programmed to orgasm like Pavlov's dog. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It just ain't for me.

Now!

A very interesting thing happened after that: BB found my online diary. I have no idea how! I may have mentioned that I kept one, but I certainly would not have given him the link. In those days, I patrolled the boundaries between my—ha, ha, ha—real life and my online journal a lot more rigorously than I do today. I don't have to patrol the boundaries today! Absolutely no one is interested anymore in long form prose.

BB was aggrieved! The entry had sparked a somewhat lively debate. Resolved: BB is a jerk, Yea or Nay. I think the debate squicked him more than the actual entry.

He commented on the entry!

Can't say I'm enjoying this

So I'm the "narcissist" "Dom" etc. y'all are talking about. Patrizia spends 4 hours hanging out with me, and thinks she's got it all figured out. Fine with me, except it might be nice to be kept in the loop one-on-one.

I'm not going to 'answer' what has been said/surmised about me. I don't enjoy being the object of ill-informed (not necessarily wrong) projections about who I am, but since short of the Vulcan mind-meld, projection is all we have, I'll have to live with it.

I just would have preferred to have had some of this conversation directly.

BB

Then he called me. "Do you want to talk about this?"

Well, I didn't really. I would have much preferred him to remain an amusing character on the page. But I felt I kinda owed it to him, so we met. Can't remember much about the conversation except that a Treaty of Friendship came out of it, and thereafter, we would meet every couple of weeks to tramp around Greenpoint.

And a month or so later, something else happened that was pivotal:

If You're an Artist, Move to Pittsburgh or Detroit

Had a really fabulous time w/BB last night.

First we did the urban archeologist thing, traipsing around Greenpoint, which is just so filled with interesting things to see. The hipster scene is fully entrenched. The Yuppies are ju-u-ust beginning to tiptoe in behind the hipsters. In ten years, unless there's some kind of major economic collapse in NYC, Greenpoint will be fully condo-ized, filled with bright, hopeful little shops selling upscale, over-priced cheeses and kitchenware. So it's a kind of transient scene. In a way like strolling through a large, interactive Tibetan Buddhist sand painting with graffiti and secret gardens behind barbed wire. The wind blows gentrification.

If you're an artist, you want to move to Pittsburgh or Detroit. Not Brooklyn.

Back at his house, BB had prepared this truly scrumptious North Indian meal from scratch that included an amazing green mango curry and a rather wonderful peanut/habanero chutney followed by home-baked carrot cake and whipped cream. I gorged myself.

All the time, we kept up this fabulous conversation – about our respective lives, about the world around us –

The most fabulous thing actually happened after he drove me home, though, and I discovered… I had left my fucking purse at his loft.

Stupid, no? Muy, muy stupid.

999 guys out of 1,000 would have said, "Oh, too bad. Come by and you can pick it up on Friday. Unless you want to come back now and take the subway home." But BB just turned the car back toward Brooklyn and kept talking — I think we were discussing the history of repeating rifles in America on a parallel track with the Ganesh-ification of Lawn Guyland.

I couldn't tell if he was pissed off at me or not –

"I feel really, really stupid," I said.

"And guilty too?" BB asked.

"Oh. Well. Yeah! That's a prerequisite for feeling stupid, isn't it? I mean guilt and stupidity. They kind of go together like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr –"

"Well, good!" said BB. "I'm sure I can use your guilt to my material advantage at some point. If not in this lifetime, then the next. I don't really get too bent out of shape about stuff like this. Shit happens. You go with the flow. Of course, if it turns out you left your passport or green card at my house, you'll have to walk back from Brooklyn."

BB is like the most perfect playmate ever. Just loads and loads of fun. And this is really what I want in my life. Playmates. That's what's been missing.

That and the $126 million Lotto payoff.

I was totally blown away by how cool BB was about doing a U-turn on the Long Island Parkway & cruising back to get my purse!

Most people would have been far more begrudging. Not me, I will add. I'm always pretty cool about that kind of stuff, too. So, it was obvious that BB & I resonated to the same cosmic frequency.

Entry tags:

Brian

BB—Brian—died.

Very suddenly.

I'm not distraught because honestly, I can't believe it. A world without Brian is absolutely unfathomable to me.

###

Brian was the only person I knew who liked to go tramping through the seemy, unraveling parts of cities as much as I do it. The science of Why is THIS here, doncha know. "Economic geography," we called it.

Once, trudging along the Greenpoint waterfront, we happened upon the Hafiz poem above, scribbled like graffiti on a broken tide break.

"That may be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Brian said.

Of course, it was. The Hafiz poem described Brian to a T. Brian's love hit the whole sky. Brilliant, hilarious, generous, stubborn, iconoclastic. A bon vivant. A teddy bear. He'd say he hated all religion, but that was not entirely true. I'd say he was very religious. His religion was kindness.

###

He was a regular reader of my online journal. The only one of my real-life friends who was. (I have become real-life friends with a lot of the people who read my journal, but they didn't start out as friends.)

Sometimes, he commented on my journal, but more frequently he texted me, often reprovingly: We were firmly in the Sibling Zone, bickered and made up regularly like brother and sister.

The woo-woo aspects of my personality drove him quite mad. He was not a fan of the woo-woo.

In particular, he hated my theory that humans more or less choose their reincarnations.

I don't doubt that you had memories of a past life, and have no facts upon which to base a doubt that you had such a life, he texted furiously.

But saying you chose this life is an assertion that stands apart from reincarnation itself. Nothing about reincarnation implies that you get choices. So far as I've heard from others on this topic, it's the choices you make in this life and other past lives that determine the next life.

You remembered vividly a life lived in the past. What I was asking is what if anything you remember about the choice you made to live this one.

So let me give you my motivation. I HATE AND ABOMINATE the assertion that people chose to be rounded up, stripped naked, starved and shoved into gas chambers

###

The last time we hung out—little over a week ago—we talked almost exclusively about death, which of course being me, I'm inclined to see as prophetic (except how scary would that be?)

"Don't you think I'd rather be an atheist?" I asked him. "I'd much rather be an atheist! It would be a much better fit with my personality! It is a total fucking drag every time I drop a quarter on the sidewalk to have to think, Now how does this teensy-tiny action fit into the Universal Plan? But I can't—"

"'Cause you buh-leeeve!" Brian sang.

"No, that's what's interesting. I don't believe. I have faith. Belief and faith are qualitatively different. And there's nothing I can do to shake my faith. Believe me, I have tried."

"Well, we could always arrange to have ICE kidnap you," Brian remarked cozily. "Maybe a little waterboarding? Put you right!"

Brian was a funny guy!

###

We actually had a date this coming Saturday: The Gardiner Cafe is hosting a storytelling open mike á la that NPR show The Moth, and we signed up for it.

Part of me thinks I ought to go. As a tribute to Brian.

Another part of me thinks I would stand up in front of that microphone & cry hysterically for five long minutes until they dragged me off the stage.

Of course, that might not be a bad thing.

I haven't cried yet.

###

Meanwhile, I'm noticing all sorts of spectral disturbances in recent photos I took of Brian.

Like in this photo, he has a halo:

And in this photo, he has angel wings:

Brian himself would have rolled his eyes & made gagging sounds if I'd ever pointed anything like that out.

Entry tags:

Road Trip!

The reception was fun. And posh!!! Took place at the Dashings (not their real name) mega-ginormous Pennsylvania horse farm:

They'd pay someone $75,000 a year plus benefits just to mow all this, I thought. And the Dashings are only here one month out of the year now! Mostly they live in Santa Barbara these days.

The other guests were mostly people I'd known long ago and oh so far away when they were a lot unhappier and a lot more conflicted. But, of course, they'd had to be unhappy and conflicted then since they'd all been supporting players in the unhappy and conflicted Drama of Ben & Patrizia.

In this present tense, there was a strong sense that they were all actors at some kind of wrap party. They were all jovial and having a good time now.

People I didn't remember were positively overjoyed to see me.

Here's something I didn't remember:

Sixteen years ago, Lew got me a gig tutoring the Dashings' son, Tucker who did not know how to write a college essay & was on the verge of flunking his SATs. I tutored Tucker long distance via phone & email from the Squalid Cement Bungalow in Freeville, so I never actually met him or his parents in the flesh.

So at the reception, I am approached by a handsome young man in his early thirties who greets me by staring deep into my eyes and declaring, "You changed my life!!!"

"I did?" I said.

"Yes! And it's very rare to be able to identify the influence of a single person in those kinds of things, but without you, I would never have gotten into college. And college was the best thing that ever happened to me!"

It was Tucker.

Huh!

(That's Tucker on the right with mega-rich Pops)

I was also apparently the best dressed person there since various members of the catering staff kept scurrying up to me, trays of prosciutto-wrapped figs and steak crostini be damned, to exclaim, You! You look amazing!

It wasn't my clothes! I was wearing $20-dollar pants from Marshalls, an ancient bathing suit, an oversized man's white Oxford shirt, and a thrift-store leopard-spotted scarf:

So, I guess I've still got it. At least from a distance.

Excellent for my vanity!

###

The blessed couple were very sweet:

And very shy! They kissed behind Lew's baseball hat:

###

TSWSOITC and his wife stayed at the same hotel I did. They live in Georgia—Republic Of, not Last Train To—& I've always been rather fascinated by her since TSWSOITC disapproves of me, & yet I'd say Keti and I have more similarities than dissimilarities. (TSWSOITC saw me primarily as Ben's accomplice.)

I got to know her a little bit over the abysmal Comfort Inn coffee when she'd come out in the morning to smoke:

Keti is one of those women who is beautiful without being pretty. Very, very smart—an economist by training, speaks Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, English, & French. Has lived through three civil wars. Very knowledgeable about what's really going on with the Ukraine War.

During the time I'd known him best, TSWSOITC was first married to Rachel and then—as a newly divorced man—the harbor master of Rockland, Maine. I'd begun writing a novel about him: The Harbor Master! As near as I can remember now, the plot had something to do with smuggled Ukrainian sex slaves! (Prophetic? Keti is Ukrainian.) I think I had a wee bit of a crush on TSWSOITC.

Anyway, this was my first time meeting Keti, and I found her very intriguing, and went about ingratiating myself to the best of my ability because I longed to be her BFF For-EVAH!!! Although, of course, I won't be.

###

And I see I am wayyyy over the writing time I alotted myself this morning! I have a busy schedule today. Nothing fun! All draggy, practical shit that must get done.

But I would be remiss not to mention:

• Day after the reception I met up with

egg_shell:

We had a fabulous time chatting & sauntering about Edinboro in the sweltering heat, but the real magic was when

egg_shell let me look at one of her art notebooks.

Now! I happen to think

egg_shell is an artistic genius. The creative impulse is very, very strong in her. And looking through her notebook, I got the same sense I got when I visited that barn in Vermont where all those fabulous Bread & Puppet Theater puppets are stored or when I saw Michaelangelo's Prisoners In Stone at the Accademia in Firenzi so very long ago—that I was viewing the creative source, the pure, untrammeled heart of the creative process.

The hackles on the back of my neck actually stood up while I flipped through her pages.

• In Ithaca, I stayed in the most enchantingly beautiful AirBnB:

• And RTT & I had a really, really good time hanging out together:

Entry tags:

Heat Spell Breaks

Heat spell finally broke.

Hal-lay-LOOL-ya.

I have lived through heat spells before, but I can't remember any as bad as this past three days. (That's probably due to my incredibly bad memory more than climate change.)

Since yesterday was supposed to be marginally cooler than the two preceeding days, I went over to the New Paltz community garden to water the seedlings I'd planted last week.

I was expecting to find the seedlings had all died. And maybe some did, but not all: Dried grass clippings turn out to be a very effective mulch.

Place was like the asylum grounds of Hell—completely deserted with a kind of pitiless stark white HD light. It was weird to be the only person present in that vast garden! Maybe I walked 50 yards total, and so much sweat poured off me, I looked as though I'd just come out of a shower.

###

My stomach is still not 100%. I've been sleeping badly, and never more than five hours a night. I remind myself that it is these factors—and not the inherent Evil of the Universe—that are responsible for the pissy mood I'm in. And these factors are controllable. When DonkeyBody (

smokingboot™) is back to optimal functioning & I can sleep eight hours, the Universe will once more go back to being a pleasant place filled with laughter & magic.

At least, that's what I am telling myself.

Entry tags:

car,
politics

Gaskets

I would have voted for Cuomo.

Cuomo is an old-school Democrat and a loathsome human being by all accounts, but Cuomo is also an able administrator—and a city the size of NYC needs able administration. Weren't DiBlasio's two terms in office enough?

But hey! Maybe I would have been wrong.

Cuomo did kill a lot of old people who would have voted for him because they remember his father.

Plus, Zohran Mamdani is incredibly appealing, and I'd like to ride city buses for free-eee-eeee! Galvanizing 50,000 volunteer canvassers—Cuomo had to pay his—is no mean feat. Mamdani is like a male AOC or a younger, mega-photogenic Bernie Sanders. Mississippi Marsala is a lovely little movie. And I think it may be true that Mamdani is Trump's worst nightmare.

So, yeah: Zohran Mamdani.

The oil change yesterday went on forever, because I asked them to check the brakes and the suspension. The Prius is 14 years old & runs like a dream, but the roads in Ulster County are like one long Tourney of Potholes. If I don't rejuvenate my car's suspension system every year, one day it's gonna go over a bump and the wheels are gonna fly off.

Plus my mechanic stripped a gasket as he was finishing up, so all the new oil he'd just put into the Prius spilled all over the garage floor.

Even though I knew exactly what was happening—gasket! not a biggie—I could feel myself edging into a massive panic attack. I wanted to start sobbing. Like so many women of my age, I have Fear of the Big Box—basically because I wasn't taught about tools & engines & machinery growing up. Things with engines operate through a kind of magic that I am ignorant about! I was at the mercy of these alien priests in their grease-stained denim jumpsuits! All I could do was tremble in awe and fear—

Thankfully, I managed to talk myself out of the panic attack—because really, who wants to see an elderly lady get hysterics?

The verdict on the car: Back wheels need new shocks; car needs four new tires.

Cost will be about a grand.

Of course, I'd far rather spend $1,000 on hazelnut truffles and subscriptions to generative AI video services, but I must have a safe vehicle—my own driving abilities are wildcard factor enough on the roads.
###

My mechanic was horribly apologetic about the gasket when he brought the car out to me. He was an elderly gentleman with a very thick accent. I imagined him as a refugee from one of those countries in Africa beseiged by a gruesome civil war, Sierra Leone or Uganda or someplace.

"You know, stuff happens," I assured him. "You did a great job. Thank you so much!"

And I wrote him a five-star review, singling him out by the name embroidered over the breast pocket of his grease-stained denim jumpsuit.

Because I didn't want him to get fired over a gasket.

Entry tags:

politics,
quotidian

Conveyor Belt

The whole Israel/Iran 12-Day War thing is such a blatant piece of political theater.

When the dust settles, we will all find out that Bibi & the Khomini were burning up those back-channel phone lines, maneuvering to get Trump that Nobel Peace Prize he so covets.

###

Meanwhile, yesterday was fairly productive, although it was really fuckin' hot and cat ownership disqualified me from a potential housing situation—to be honest, I know the housing situation owner through the Shawanagunk Dems, and he is kinda weird, so maybe the cats saved me.

Did the rest of the trip-related errands, had an unsatisfactory phone conversation with RTT, and shortly will be taking the car in for its oil change. I am on that conveyor belt! And it is just possible I will hit my Remuneration quota before I leave on the trip.

I have been bemoaning my own lack of agency: Why don't I have more control over my life?

But, of course, agency is a relative thing. However aggrieved I may feel about my own, I still probably have more of it than 85% of the people who live—or have ever lived—upon this planet.

Forward, little conveyor belt!

Entry tags:

It Is What It Is

Not a great day, yesterday.

Getting ill—verifiably ill with no part of it due to some subliminal desire to feel sorry for myself—makes me feel fragile, and when I feel fragile, I get depressed, I get lonely.

But nobody I wanted to talk to wanted to talk to me.

J___ L_______ didn't pick up the phone. He probably saw it was me, I thought. And who would want to talk to me?

My other phone-buddy of choice may be dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Imagine! I thought. He's letting a cancer diagnosis interfere with talking to me.

I still wasn't feeling 100%: My stomach was lodgy, my appetite nil. I felt exhausted, and with that kind of exhaustion comes a deep brain fog. I had work to do, & I was doing it but neither happily nor easily.

And it was fuckin' hot out—like that Twilight Zone episode where everybody is melting because the Earth is veering into the Sun only it turns out they are hallucinating because the Earth is really veering away from the sun.

###

When I get depressed like that, I put off doing errands.

Like my car needs an oil change.

But what if in mucking around with the car, the mechanic finds that it needs $5,000 worth of work or it will explode on the Mid-Hudson Bridge tomorrow?

Under those circumstances, wouldn't it be better not to get the oil changed?

I mean, if they don't discover the car needs $5,000 worth of work, then it can't explode, right?

###

All afternoon long, I Remunerated gloomily away. Lew & Ed's wedding is this coming weekend, and I'm going to Ithaca & Edinboro for four days. Some details I took care of way in advance, but some are still dangling—like should I worry about the cats?

Four days is kind of the max for leaving cats untended with lots of food & water, and multiple litterboxes.

I never would have left Sybyl that long, but then, Sybyl loved me, and Mabel-Molly & Molly-Mabel do not. Never in my long history of animal companions have I ever had two who seemed so utterly indifferent. It's like adopting a waif from a Romanian orphanage & taking them home only to discover they have Psychotic Attachment Disorder.

(Well—Molly-Mabel may love me a little. She follows me around the house & often leaps up, meowing, for pets. But she dislikes snuggling & being picked up. Mabel-Molly has a memory like an elephant because she has never forgiven me for trying to condition & comb out her mats, and actually hisses at me every now & then—half-heartedly, true: a hiss of dislike not of aggression, but still.)

I don't really get a whole lot back from the kiskas.

When I am feeling upbeat, this is not a problem.

But I can't always feel upbeat.

###

In the late afternoon, Ichabod called.

We were both In a Mood.

Somehow, we started talking about RTT. "You know, every time I see him, we have at least one big fight," I complained to Ichabod. "And he tells me, 'I don't even feel like you're my mother. We hardly ever talk. You don't ever know what's going on in my life—' which isn't true, by the way. Everything that goes on in his life, he immediately posts to social media.

"So then I try to call him. And he never picks up the phone!"

"You & RTT need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.

"You think everyone should go to therapy," I said.

"That's true," Ichabod said.

"But I already know what the issue is. The real reason RTT doesn't feel like I'm his mother is because I'm so marginal. I don't have a home; I have a place where I'm staying for now. And he's ashamed of me because all his other friends have mothers with homes—"

"You really need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.

###

In the evening, J___ L_______ texted a starburst of photos:

Was sailing up in San Francisco all day! I'll call—

We'll talk SOON, I deferred hastily because by that point, I was utterly incapable of muttering a single word to another human being.

But the pictures of the glorious and presumably cool San Francisco Bay did make me feel a whole lot better.

###

In the end, it is what it is.

You sit at the table with the cards you're dealt, and sometimes you know the game you're playing, and sometimes, you don't, and sometimes by the time you figure out the game you are playing, they have changed the rules.

In the end, all you are really is a system of molecules whose coding has managed to defy entropy for 70 or 80 years. And the Universe is vast, filled with systems of molecules all doing their best to defy entropy. And so, gas clouds spin into stars and stars splinter into planets and things happen on those planets before the stars go all supernova, and nothing in your narrative can compare to those stories. Still, all stories have the same subtext: It is what it is.

Entry tags:

health,
iggy

Always Fuckin' Something

I ignored the mystery stomach ache & did errands. You're just being a slacker! I told myself.

Got back to the casa & began Remunerating. But in addition to the stomach ache, I felt... off.

Now, I never know when I feel off whether I really feel off or I'm just malingering. I'm incredibly lazy, & will seize every opportunity to do absolutely nothing—

But, no. I had a throbbing headache (& I don't usually get headaches), and I felt weak, and my insides were churning—and then I broke out in a fearful sweat just before my insides did what insides do when they churn—and I felt as though I could barely crawl back to my bed.

Food poisoning or norovirus?

Spent the rest of the day and the following night in bed in a semi-delerium, listening to a bizarre Netflix show called Ginny & Georgia, which is simultaneously good & baaaaaad. (I have a thing for teenage dramas.) I had to guess what the characters looked like 'cause I couldn't open my eyes.

Woke up this morning feeling more or less normal, so I guess it was food poisoning?

Still. I'm going to be sedentary today.

###

Drama this morning: The water in the house turned off!

Icky has this ancient Orbit digital timer on his irrigation hose. It keeps not timing, so the watering hose keeps not going on—and his little tomatoes were all parched & dying. I fiddled with the Orbit settings to give the the tomatoes a soak—and in doing so, somehow managed to fuck with the water pressure inside the house.

Icky berated me soundly for this over the phone, and, of course, he was not wrong—one really shouldn't fuck with machinery unless one knows what one is doing.

Still, I felt aggrieved—I thought I was doing a good thing! Shouldn't I get credit for that?

If it's not Icky being a dick, it's the U.S. starting World War III!

Always fuckin' something.

Entry tags:

dreams,
garden

The Fifteenth Floor of the Chateau D'Amboise

In the middle of the night, I woke from a really vivid, elaborate dream:

Ben had fallen in love with a girl from a hippie evangelist Christian sect.

In the dream's meta-tags, there'd been a lot of history: He'd left to be with her. He'd come back. He couldn't live without her & left again. He came back. He had to go back to the sect to get his stuff, and he'd only be gone for four days, and he was definitely coming back—but when he came back, he was very sorry, but his love for this woman was bigger than everything—

I wasn't hurt. I was furious. Get out now, I snarled, and pushed him out the door.

He was shocked, But-but—

I wasn't sad over Ben at all. The only thing that was on my mind was how was I going to handle my life on my own? Two kids and all these animals!

###

The girl Ben had fallen in love with was married to the leader of the hippie evangelist Christian sect, and I was hip to the fact that the leader was essentially pimping her out, and that's how the leader got recruits for his sect.

Not expecting to be kicked out, Ben had invited the girl, her husband, and their four impossibly platinum-haired kids to live with us.

I found them in one of the bedrooms.

OUT, I thundered.

The girl slit her eyes and looked at me haughtily. Of course, I was curious about her—she was short, slim, had chestnut hair and oddly tilted eyes. Nothing to look at. I was much better looking. She must be some kind of sexual goddess, I thought because that was one thing Ben was very, very good at, sex, and I often felt a little inadequate because my sexual needs and performance are on the simple side: Does not take much for passion to ignite in me.

I shoved the girl and her husband/leader out the door.

Felt a bit sorry for the children who were sweet and innocent, but no, they'd have to go, too.

###

(Again in the dream meta-tags.) Stephen Silverman had found me the apartment.

I'd gone to him in great distress, and he'd told me, This is a very special building. Chateau D'Amboise (?) Rent controlled: $1,500 a month. It's a very special building; only special people are allowed to live here.

The apartment was very messy, crowded with unpacked boxes and cages in which lived a number of cats—a large ginger female and a tiny translucent Bengal, no bigger than my fingernail, among others.

There were also several black and white puppies running around yipping.

You've got to get RTT to walk the puppies, otherwise they'll shit all over the place. And you've got to get the cats water—

Only in transferring the tiny snail-like Bengal to a cage with water, I somehow killed it. Felt an impulse to mourn and reminded myself sternly: You don't have time for that now.

Went out with the puppies. Somehow ended up at one of the outdoor cafeterias at U.C. Berkeley where I filled my pockets up with candy. Knew I had to get back to the Chateau, but didn't know which bus to take. Guessed I'd have to find a taxi, but could not find one.

###

Finally, I was back at the Chateau, only I couldn't remember which floor I lived on. Took the elevator to various floors. The floors all had various themes—I remember the tenth floor was Paris: You got out of the elevator, and you were in France.

Somehow I was in another family's apartment, & I recognized the family—You're Tamsin's mother, aren't you? But they did not recognize me. I did notice, however, that even though the family had lived in the apartment for years and years and years, it was almost completely empty. The interior decor of my apartment, as cluttered as it was, was actually more attractive.

Finally went back downstairs to the lobby and asked the concierge: Where do I live?

The concierge was a burly gentleman in elaborate livery with an elaborately curled mustache. He consulted an illuminated medieval scroll and told me, You live on the 15th floor—

And I awoke.

###

The heat dome had not yet descended yesterday, and so I spent four very pleasant hours playing in the dirt at the New Paltz community garden.

The New Paltz community garden is vast:

This morning I woke up with a mysterious stomach ache & kind of freaked because how am I gonna keep Black Chicken comfortable when the Heat Dome descends plus my car's AC isn't working—it's an expensive fix and requires sitting for an entire day at the dealership in Kingston—& suppose the Nazis invade, and I have to flee?

But I suppose it will all work out.

It almost always does.

Entry tags:

Driving Away

Met up with BB, back from Germany.

We caught up on gossip—more on his side than my side. I live an exceedingly quiet life.

And then we talked about death, which is something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently.

"Wait! You think about death?" I asked.

"Oh, only like every day for one or two hours," BB replied. "And have been since I was a kid."

##

Did I think about death when I was a kid? Only once that I can remember: I was three, maybe four years old, and sitting in the back of my grandfather's old Chrysler. (Even today, the smell of stale cigarette smoke is comforting to me because it reminds me of my grandfather!) We were parked at Coney Island. My mother, my two aunts, and my little cousin David were also crammed into the Chrysler, and my grandfather was expounding in his melifluous voice about how one day soon, the sea would rise up and swallow the land—

Four-year-old children have no sense of time, so I figured that my grandfather was saying that the sea would rise up in 10 minutes or so. And I would cease to be...

I didn't have any particularly negative associations with my own extinction. It was just something that was going to happen.

But I was practical. Clearly one should avoid extinction if one could. Why don't we just drive away? I chirped at my grandfather.

"Wait!" said BB. "You believe in reincarnation! So, didn't you think you would be reincarnated?"

"Well, I had very strong memories of having once been somebody else at that point in my life," I said. "But I don't think I was old enough to attach any system of causality. So, no. I didn't think about reincarnation. I only thought about the enormous wave that would wipe everything out—and me with it. It wasn't an unpleasant thought! But I figured if there were other options, we should take them."

We met at the oh-so-charming Gardiner Bakehouse: great coffee, interesting pastries, and an outstanding view of the Gunks, which unfortunately, no camera can separate out from the telephone wires:

The Gardiner Bakehouse is hosting some kind of storytelling event:

"You should enter," BB said.

"I should!" I said.

So, maybe I will.

###

Other than that, it was lots o' Remuneration. (I have a deadline coming up, which I have ignored successfully but which I should probably double up on.) And a trip to the gym through looming thunder clouds, which fortunately did not break till I was back from the gym. A good thing! The storms brought temperatures down by maybe 10 degrees, so that it's relatively cool this morning.

And now I must take advantage of the relatively cool temperatures to scamper off to New Paltz and do some gardening, even though I'd much rather sit here with my eyes slightly unfocused.

Entry tags:

The Zone

May and the first part of June were the coolest & wettest I can remember in a long while.

But some time in the middle of last night, a high-pressure dome descended upon the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley like a bell jar trapping taxonomic specimens.

Gonna be hot.

Gonna be uncomfortable.

I'm gonna have to be out of the house by 6 am each morning to avoid getting heat stroke when I garden.

###

Meanwhile, I did not leave the house yesterday despite good intentions.

I Remunerated virtuously throughout the day and when I met my quota—1,500 words—reluctantly slid on my leggings and prepared to leave for the gym.

But it was raining when I got into my car and raining even harder when I got to the turn-off for Highway 52, and I reminded myself: You don't like driving in the rain!

In fact, I don't like driving anywhere! I grew up in New York City where there's a perfectly wonderful public transportation system and as far as I'm concerned, no reason at all to have anything to do with automobiles.

I was nearly 30 by the time I learned to drive. I was living in California by then, and you cannot live in California without driving. Learning to drive was one of the bravest things I've ever done because honestly—when I think about zooming down a highway at 60 mph in a contraption of metal & plastic, it seems fraught with danger to me. But I did it because I had to—look at me! Pioneer woman! Laura Ingalls Wilder ain't got nothin' on me-ee-eee!—and I'm glad that I did. But I've never been particularly comfortable driving.

###

Also, I'm not big on exercising for exercise's sake.

I raced bicycles for many years, and I used to love that. And as recently as when I lived in Ithaca, I was riding 20 miles a day.

But here even though I live in the country, the roads teem with automobiles, and their drivers seem pretty feckless. Riding a bicycle seems like it would be pretty dangerous for an old lady like me.

So, it's the occasional tromp and gym sessions that keep old Donkey Body (

smokingboot™) strong.

###

Anyway, I used the rain as an excuse not to exercise!

I wasn't sorry.

But I did feel guilty.

###

Back at the casa, I started futzing with an AI video generator.

I had an idea! Enchanted castle, magical cats, mouse l'orange served on golden plate. Warrior princess about seven years old comes to visit.

It was around 7 pm when I started futzing.

And then the AI video generator shot me a message: You are running out of computing seconds! Would you like to invest [$ize of $um goes here. Not huge by the way! But probably more than I should be frittering away regularly] in more computing seconds?

I glanced at the clock.

It was 11 pm. I had spent four hours blissfully in The Zone!!!!

###

Now, I'm not claiming to be particularly talented at generating AI videos.

Nor am I claiming that anything I produce has the slightest artistic merit.

But I must say, The Zone's a wonderful place! Playing with this technology completely absorbs me & is lots of fun! Yes, it is a lot like playing the funnest video game you can possibly imagine.

And the apres-glow carries over.

I'm in fine spirits this morning.

Despite the (soon-to-be oppressive) heat.

Entry tags:

When the World Is Running Down

I was actually really proud of how corny my promo AI video for the upcoming pet parade event I'm producing came out!!!

So, I texted a link to Ichabod.

He texted back: I like it! But I wouldn’t describe it as corny. It’s very creepy…the faces at the beginning, the disembodied dragon head floating next to the body…. And maybe most of all the juxtaposition of the weirdness with the wholesomeness

Uh oh, I asked. Is it TOO creepy to use as a promo?

It might be, he said. I appreciate the video as experimental art though 😀

Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

###

In other news, I installed the airconditioner in the Patrizia-torium window.

Yes, I do disapprove of the environmental impact of AC.

But this coming weekend, it's supposed to hit 95° F here in the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley. And a fan ain't gonna cut it for comfort in 95° heat.

As my favorite '80s band The Police reminds us:

When the world is running down
You make the best of what's still around

Entry tags:

dreams,
ripley

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Dreamed I had been drafted and was about to be flown off to a war in a foreign land, only I couldn't find my purse & was panicking because how could I fly if I didn't have any ID?

Somehow I knew, though, that this was only a dream and kept telling myself, Don't worry, your purse is where you always stash it—near your desk!

(Editorial note: I have a tendency to misplace things and waste hours looking for them, so over the years have trained myself to put logistical stuff—keys, bills, purse—in specific spots to track them. It's what passes for organization in my world.)

But knowing where my purse was in the woke world did not solve my quandary in the dream world. Where was my purse? And if I could not find it, what would they do to me?

Frantically, I began calling people I'd seen the night before to see if they knew.

Then, as the first soldiers in my squadron were lining up to board the plane, Mrs. Neighbor Ed showed up with my purse!

She put it down.

I tried to pick it up—but a filigree gold chain spilling out of the purse had somehow gotten caught in whatever she'd put the purse down on, so I couldn't move it. And I was getting frantic—Should I break the gold chain? But the gold chain is so beautiful!—when I woke up.

###

Decided yesterday to pretend that exercise is really, really baaaaad for you and that lolling around on the lounging couch watching every Ripley movie ever made & eating cookies is what scientists recommend for disease prevention and wellness promotion.

The Criterion Channel—Ichabod kindly gifted me a subscription—is doing a marathon.

My favorite Ripley is actually the recent Netflix The Talented Mr. Ripley. It's the truest to the novel. Most viewers hated it because it was shot in black and white—lush, colorful Italy? In black and white?—but I actually thought that was a brilliant choice in a film about deception because it emphasized the shots' composition, allowing you to see the bones of the piece. And Andrew Scott is very, very good in it, although the rest of the cast is uniformly awful.

The popular favorite is Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon—fresh from Good Will Hunting!—in the title role. The gay undercurrents in this one are pushed from subtext to declamative, but I personally think that's too easy an out: Ripley does what he does and is who he is not because he is tortured by his own sexuality but because he's a complete sociopath.

And then, of course, there's Plein soleil whose Ripley is Alain Delon, the most beautiful human male ever born. Adonis only wishes he looked like Alain Delon in his youth! This one holds a special place in my heart because I first saw it when I was eight years old—my mother was too poor to be able to afford babysitters, so she always brought me with her when she went to see the foreign movies she so loved. This is the only Ripley in which Ripley is brought to justice—I suppose because it was made in 1960 and back in 1960, people hadn't yet started rooting for the sociopaths.

###

This YouTube video provides an excellent compare-and-contrast of Minghella's Ripley and Plein soleil:

Watch on YouTube

Entry tags:

Heavy Mental Lifting

Went over the bridge to poke around in the Hyde Park garden yesterday.

Grass clippings seem to be doing their job of keeping the weeds down, plus my lettuce is harvestable. I took home enough of it to keep me in salads for the rest of the week:

Also, most mysteriously, a California Golden Poppy had popped up out of nowhere, and this made me very happy because it made me think I might figure out a way to get back to California one of these days. The augers just keep coming!

Afterwards, I toddled off to visit with Belinda.

We talked about the Israel/Iran situation.

"But Hamas!" she said. "It's a terrorist organization!"

I shrugged. "How do you define 'terrorist'? A political organization that uses violence & fear to achieve political ends?"

She nodded vigerously. "Yeah! That!"

"Well, by that definition, Israel is a terrorist organization."

She stared at me, shocked.

"Here's the thing. For hundreds of years, the people who eventually coalesced to form the nation state of Israel were under Ottoman Turk rule. And then for 30 years, it was a British protectorate. And during that entire time, any organization that lobbied for sovereignty or self-rule for the area was outlawed and so naturally turned to violence to achieve its ends.

"It gets complicated, of course, because the majority of Israelis today are descendants of Ashkenazis who migrated after World War II.

"Still. If you look at the history of the area—the future Israelis were once in exactly the same position as the people of Gaza. That should give them—well. Not sympathy for Hamas. But at least an understanding of why Hamas might seem attractive. And that understanding is key to defusing Hamas's attractiveness.

"Instead, they are acting exactly like the Ottomans & the Brits who opppressed them—"

I could see the rusty wheels start turning in Belinda's head.

Whether or not she ends up agreeing with me is irrelevant.

But I think people need to get into the habit of doing heavy mental lifting on their own.

###

Then we toddled off to the movies!

We saw Materialists. I was curious about Celine Song's follow-up to Past Lives.

Materialists is pretty awful.

But you know, the Hyde Park Roosevelt Theater has stale Raisinettes! And heated recliners. So, I had a good time.

Entry tags:

Accept Loss Forever

So, maybe 400 people turned out for the Gardiner demonstration?

More impressive than it sounds! The entire population of the village is only aound 4,000.

I went alone, but I did not stay alone. A sizeable contingent of Shwanagunk Dems showed up & as it turned out, I knew all the parade monitors from canvassing or campaigning:

Plus bonus celebrity sighting! Fourteen second mark on yr screen! Still got my People Magazine chops!

This is quite possibly the worst photo of me EVER TAKEN.

When you are fighting fascism, I remind myself, you must be fearless and eschew vanity.

On my way back to the casa, I stopped at the transfer station to drop off two weeks' worth of garbage & recyclables. (Icky, you may recall, does not believe in paying for garbage disposal). I passed Ellen walking her daughter's dog, so I stopped to chat.

Now, I haven't seen Ellen in two months or so.

And that was kind of strange because I'd been seeing Ellen regularly for months before that. In fact, Ellen is one of only two real friends I have in this area.

Was she mad at me? Had I done something to offend her? Something absolutely unforgivable? Though I couldn't remember doing something absolutely unforgivable, and generally, I'm quite good at identifying examples of my own obnoxious behavior (even when I don't agree they're obnoxious.)

I'd called her a couple of times: No traction. I'd left her a goofy little gift in her mailbox: campfire sparkles! (She likes doing bonfires.) A pro forma thank you text.

Well, I thought, it's too bad, but apparently Ellen doesn't like you anymore, and what was the one useful thing that Jack Kerouak ever said? Number 19 on his list of "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose"?

Accept loss forever

(Works great for missing earrings, too!)

###

One look at Ellen's face, and I could see: It wasn't me, it was her. She looked like one of the walking dead. Deeply, terminally depressed. Heavy bags under her eyes.

Ellen is one of those people who likes to pretend she doesn't have emotions, doesn't have an inner life. When I tried to hug her that time after she dug my car out of the ice, she waved me off, embarrassed.

Now, as it happens, the one & only time I have ever been inside Ellen's house was around the time she stopped talking to me. We'd been selling Duck Derby tickets together at the post office. (Small town boosterism! Never Enuff Weird!) I was about to go off & investigate the Sherpa Festival that had magically appeared in an abandoned meadow, except that it was a hot day, I'd been drinking lots & lots of water, & I really had to pee!

"Well, you can pee at my house," Ellen said. Ellen's house was about a mile away from the magical Sherpa festival.

When I went inside Ellen's house, I was shocked to see it was kind of a hoarder house. Rooms & rooms crammed with furniture that nobody used & this general sense of profound neglect. I imagined it had been that way since Ellen's husband died five years ago.

I didn't say anything. I hid my shock.

But when Ellen stopped talking to me, I did wonder whether it was connected to the fact that I'd been inside her house. Whether she was ashamed I'd seen too much.

Anyway, it was good to reconnect. Even in such a small way.

I was on my best banter! I made her laugh!

And after 10 minutes, I said, "Well, darlin', you have my number. Call if you feel like it. I always have your back."

'Cause really. What else could I say?

###

In the evening, I went to a D&D meetup.

My regular D&D group hasn't met in several weeks—ostensibly because the DM is getting married in a couple of months & his weekends are now occupied with wedding-related events, but really—according to the DM of last night's game—because he is a Trump supporter & disliked all the fringe types in the original group.

I didn't pick that up from the original DM at all, and I mean, really: If he is a Trump supporter, so what? It didn't affect the game—which was a kind of Viking wayfarer adventure.

And I didn't like last night's game. I went because I'm still learning how to tell the various dice apart, & when to throw them, & why—if I have 18 charisma points—I'm supposed to keep subtracting four.

Last night's DM was very big on underground crypts strewn with vomit, crusty scabs, & mummifying guts. Imagery that does not appeal to moi!

The other players were gay males. They were all very nice to me, tolerant of my blunders. One of them—pink Galadriel hair and fabulously manicured hands, each nail painted a different color—was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America party, so in between dice rolls, we talked politics, utterly boring the other players. Apparently, No Kings Day conflicted with many prescheduled local Pride Day events, and that's why so many No Kings events had been shunted to out-of-the-way locations. The primo locales had been booked in advance! There was some bad blood twixt the No King-ers and the Pridies!

Last night's DM is a very bitter guy. And dark—without knowing he is dark, somehow. Growing up gay in a Hudson Valley backwater 40 years ago was a very different experience than growing up gay, say, in Berkeley, California. More akin to growing up gay next door to Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wisconsin. The Taliban itself would approve of Wallkill's heteronormative standards!!!

Still, I found myself not liking the guy, which meant it was difficult to sympathize with him.

Entry tags:

politics

Never Enuff Dying Frogs!!!!

Of course, the real reason Israel bombed Iran was not to curb the Iranian threat to Israel's continuing survival but to curb the parliamentary threat to Netanyahu's continuing survival: In the days leading up to Israel's attack, Netanyahu was widely reported to be on the ropes after his opposition submitted a bill to dissolve parliament, with his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners threatening to support the measure and force early elections.

This is just so fucking craven, I want to scream.

The boys throw stones at the frogs for sport
But the frogs die in earnest...

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Meanwhile, I'm gonna go to the demonstration in Gardiner today.

It'll probably be the smallest of the Hudson Valley No Kings events, and, of course, Gardener is a liberal enclave so any marching around and "Fuck Trump!" screaming I do will be virtue signaling.

But I actually looked at the maps of the various demonstrations throughout the Hudson Valley, and it looks as though the only parade permits they could get were in out-of-the-way parks or half-empty strip malls far from Hustle & Bustle Central.

If I'm gonna demonstrate where nobody can see me, I might as well demonstrate where nobody can see me close to my house where the parking is manageable.

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Apart from that...

I Remunerated & went to the gym yesterday in a kind of fugue state.

This living through a momentous time in history shit is very exhausting.