Mallory's Camera

About six weeks ago, I saw a craigslist posting for a collective household in T-burg: Someone had just bought a Big Old House; they wanted sympatico people to move into it to form a sympatico household. Numerous photos of the house, of the grounds. They liked animals! They wanted people with pets!

I immediately dashed off a reply: Here are my many virtues. Blah, blah, blah.

I was disappointed when I did not hear back.

Okay, I thought. Well, not everyone wants to live with a septuagenarian. Or maybe they had all the residents but one lined up, and I was just not that one.

Three days ago, I saw the listing again and replied again—a tad more plaintively.

And did not hear back.

This irked me.

I mean, my reply had been a masterpiece! Flash fiction of the highest order! Sprightly yet subtle! Informative without the cringe factor!

Maybe I'm just repulsive! I thought. Back in the days of the Little Store, on days when we made practically no sales, I would often wonder about my own repulsiveness. I figured it was sort of like a radio beacon; depending on the weather or the white noise, it would pulse strongly or erratically, but it was always there, and people sensed it, and that's why they didn't flock to the Little Store to buy dozens of bottles of my own trademarked Monterey hot sauces Beast of Eden & The Chilis of Wrath!

Brian was very good at quelling this particular anxiety loop.

"Repeat after me," he'd say. "Say it loud, say it proud: 'I Am a Real Human Girl'."

He also found it extremely hilarious, which is exactly the right reaction for someone like me. I need to be laughed out of my own psychic contortions. The "Poor you" schtick doesn't work on me because even at my most self-pitying, I am perfectly cognizant of the fact that my life is better than 90% of the lives on this planet.

###

Anyway, the woman who bought the house finally emailed me yesterday, enormously apologetic that she hadn't contacted me sooner: I've been in the process of moving! My mom came to town to help!

We Zoomed this morning. And were amazingly sympatico.

She is an untenured professor at Cornell, proud member of the SDA (Social Democrats of America), writing a book on the history of child care labor in the U.S., how various stakeholders (labor unions, immigrant rights advocacy groups, federal agencies, municipal task forces, nanny and domestic worker placement agencies) value child care labor. She is also drop-dead gorgeous, so naturally, my mamala mind began sizing her up as a potential Ichabod mate. I restrained myself from asking how wide her hips are, though.

Next step will be a meeting with the other house residents and a tour of the house. Conflicting schedules have pushed that meeting into August.

If all goes well, I'll give one month's notice at the beginning of September and move in October.

Fingers crossed!

###

Other than that...

I have been going through the motions simply because one must, but the spark is not there.

I remind myself: Good habits take a long time to make, so it's unwise to break them. If you stop doing all the beneficial things—exercise! self-care! make-up! cooking dinner! laundry!—you fall into a kind of mental swamp from which it becomes increasingly difficult to hoist yourself out. Those little habits are grounding. Grounding is something I have issues with having no earth signs whatsoever in my astrological chart.

###

I harvested my first cucumber from the Hyde Park garden:



The tomatoes still have a month or so before they come in.

###

Yesterday afternoon, I wandered over to the New Paltz garden for the first time in three weeks. The garden was hosting a mid-harvest potluck. I took one look at all the cheerful, earnest, handsome gardeners with their endless variations on cucumbers in yogurt dressing, and thought, Yes! Babbling affably to strangers is my one Great Superpower, but I cannot do this.

And ran away.

But not before I checked out my plot. It is once more overgrown with weeds, but the weeds are not unmanageable—I could get rid of them in a single day now that the heat wave is broken. Plus there is one little tomato plant! I grew it a peat cup from seed and planted it with a bunch of other seedlings, and they all died but this tomato plant survived my neglect! Surely, it deserves other vegetables! Basil, I'm thinking. I didn't plant any basil in the Hyde Park garden this year, and I miss my pesto.

###

However much of a struggle human company and good habits are, I am still able to lose myself if the distraction is right.

I've been speed-reading my way through the complete works of Jennifer Haigh. Finished Baker Towers, her first novel about the small Pennsylvania coal mining town where she grew up.

Kinda interesting to see how Haigh's literary chops have evolved. Baker Towers, written in 2004, is kinda your straight-up Kristin Hannah-style novel, simple declarative sentences, not much in the way of thematic connective tissue between the various characters' POV sections. Heat and Light, on the other hand, written in 2016, is extremely ambitious from a literary point of view with a rather complex figurative subtext and a surprising end point. I sense the Jennifer Egan influence.

###

I also watched Andrea Arnold's American Honey.

American Honey is a road trip film, an odyssey. Eighteen-year-old Texas girl living in squalid conditions with an abusive father runs off with an itinerant magazine crew. High jinx ensue.

It won the Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and though Sean Baker's The Florida Project came out only one year after, it's difficult not to imagine that American Honey didn't have a profound influence on Baker's movie. They are both describing the same phenomenon, how youth transforms otherwise harsh & unforgiving environments where people stuggle for survival into wild adventures filled with promise.

It's a long movie, nearly three hours, but I was transfixed throughout.

Two-thirds of the reviews I read afterwards complained that the movie just went on and on and on, but nothing happened! I think those reviewers have spent too much time in the Marvel Universe. This kind of story best is told by seamless integration of the music, the character acting, the improvised dialogue, the way locations are shot, the vibes in short. It would be poorly served by a linear narrative grid.

I started sleeping again. Monday night I actually slept 10 hours!

I have been tromping and going to the gym. Some days, both.

Flavia sez she ❤️LUV❤️s the idea of doing Brianpalooza at the Middletown tea house, so you know, good. Brianpalooza must have Flavia's blessing.

Apart from tromping, I have been pretty much a lazy slob. The Patrizia-torium looks like Atilla has been quartering some time-tripping Huns here.

And I haven't done anything in the way of serious revenue generation in about a week.

Instead, I have been watching an awful Lena Dunham show all about her breakup with Jack Antonoff and her hasty rebound marriage. And reading a book called Heat & Light by Jennifer Haigh, which is all about the intergenerational effects of fracking on a small town in southcentral Pennsylvania. It's very well written! And manages to connect coal mining, fracking, and Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania's three big dalliances with environmental disaster.

###

Environmental disasters fascinate me. I once wheedled Brian into doing a short road trip to Carbon County, Pennsylvania just so that I could see the culm banks, black mountains of anthracite coal waste, with my own eyes:




Meanwhile, Pennsylvania didn't do so good with fracking. Twenty years after the first wells were driven into the Marcellus shale, job creation has been just about nil, the water table is polluted, and residents wander around like characters in an H.P. Lovecraft story, complaining of nausea, headaches, nosebleeds, livestock that drop dead suddenly with no reason. Asthma is up; birth weights are down.

Somebody is clearly making money. Doubt it's the landowners, though.

Went sour cherry picking with the fabulous rebeccmeister.

rebeccmeister is (as my beloved Marybeth used to say) a real find. Sparkling, intelligent, humorous, plus she is the change she hopes to see in a completely nonperformative way. In a perfect world, she would live two blocks away from me so that on rainy days, I could race over to her house & watch her retool chair splines. Learn from her example how to use tools!

She wore the coolest dress, too. Its pattern was leaf ants!



The morning had gotten off to an inauspicious start on account of the propane running out before it could fuel the flames necessary to heat the water that makes my coffee.

I'd had to drive up to the Farmcart Coffee pop-up in town, where I splurged on a cappuccino & eavesdropped on a conversation between the ridiculously beautiful barista and two ridiculously beautiful young women, all of whom had recently (and most ridiculously of all) emigrated from the Deep South to fuckin' Wallkill, New York.

Why would anyone emigrate for any reason to Wallkill, New York?

"We're Jehovah's Witnesses," the beautiful barista explained with a radiant smile.

Oh, of course.

Wallkill is actually the center of the American Jehovah's Witnesses branch. They publish The Watchtower here! And also 17 million Bibles every year! Old Testament only. The JWs are not big on the New Testament.

The barista was just so lovely! We chattered about the differences between Italian and Spanish, how the two languages had practically identical grammars but differed in the way they were voiced, Spanish using various accent marks to signify pronunciation, while Italian relies on doubling up consonants—

I remembered then that my very favorite TaxBwana client of 2024 had been a Jehovah's Witness preacher. His house had burned down with all his tax documents. I'd used forensic accounting to rectify them. He was very elegant and intelligent, and we'd had a free-ranging conversation about all number of fascinating things, and it wasn't until the very end of our third meeting that he handed me a card with his JW ID.

Why don't I become a Jehovah's Witness? I wondered for 10 minutes or so.

They're not big on Jesus! They recognize that "infinity" is an impossible mathematical concept, not an architectural template for the afterlife: There is only room for 144,000 in the Jehovah's Witness Heaven. Best of all, they seem to take care of each other! Like if I was a Jehovah's Witness, even now 10 Jehovah's Witnesses would be showing up at the casa to swap out that propane tank! And I wouldn't be late for my meetup with Rebecca.

###

I picked six pounds of sour cherries. This is enough for three pies.

Originally, I had planned to pick enough for BB and me. BB was a talented cook & baker, and each year, he baked three special pies for Flavia, his long-term honey. Sour cherry pie was always the first.

This year, I guess, I will bake a sour cherry pie for Flavia. Though I am an indifferent baker; my pie crust in particular has the texture of shoe leather.

But it's the thought that counts, right?

I'll freeze it until I see her again.

###

It was 91° at Samascott by the time Rebecca & I bid adieu and 95° by the time I got back to Wallkill.

I swapped out the propane tank! Pretty easily! So, I no longer have to become a Jehovah's Witness.

I pitted the cherries.

I will bake my pies today.

###

Afterwards, I sat out on the backporch and read The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories. It grew dark. The fireflies came out.

There is a ghost story I'd like to write for BB though I don't think he'd like it very much.

He never even read Elliot Roosevelt's Motor Car, which I actually dedicated to him.

Back in 2018, I did a lot of canvassing and campaigning for a Congressional candidate called Jeff Beals.

Beals lost—but in the tradition of such things, his "victory" party went on, and I somehow managed to talk BB into accompanying me to it. BB absolutely hated parties! I wouldn't say I love them—love or hate depends on my mood—but I am generally pretty good at them since it doesn't trouble me in the least to walk up to perfect strangers & begin chattering away at them.

The party was in Woodstock.

And BB lived ostensibly in Kerhonksen but really in a remote settlement deep within the Catskills Park that was once called Riggsville—presumably after a 19th century tannery owner.

To get from Woodstock to Riggsville, you have to drive across the Ashokan Reservoir, which supplies New York City with its drinking water.

Twelve towns were drowned to create the Ashokan Reservoir!

Cottages, stores, church steeples, everything!

I suppose they relocated the cemeteries—or at least the ones they knew about.

We drove under a full moon. The reservoir tried to drown that, too! But the weirdest thing was the deer that had lined up along practically every section of the road! I kid you not! Like every single deer in the Catskill Mountains. It was like they had all come out to watch us, and, of course, we had to drive very, v-e-r-y slowly in case one came charging across the road.

Anyway, it gave me an idea for a story...

Suppose the deer were the metamorphosed inhabitants of the drowned villages?

And every four years they turn out to exercise their rights as American citizens to vote?

That would be the story backdrop. Not sure what the actual plot would be.

Except that the story would be called Neversink. There is also a Neversink Reservoir that supplies water to NYC, though we didn't drive along it that night, and what could be a better title about the enchanted inhabitants of a drowned village than Neversink?

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.