mallorys_camera | Entries tagged with friends

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.

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.

Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed got a present they didn't want.

A birdfeeder. With a digital camera. Courtesty of a well-intended offspring.

It feeds blurry photographs to various nearby digital receivers and has some kind of AI hookup thing that gives you info about the blurry photographs.

"Well, that seems like a perfectly nice present!" I cried.

Mrs. Neighbor Ed made a face. "When the jays grab the sunflower seeds, they knock all the other seeds out of the feeder, and then the field mice grab them and begin invading the house!"

"When your cat was around, we never had any problems with field mice," she added—and I realized, with a pang, that she was talking about the Meezer, dead & gone these—what? seven years? The Meezer had been the mightiest of hunters!

I hoped the Meezer was eavesdropping from Cat Heaven, where presumably there is an endless parade of self-regenerating field mice and squirrels for her to slaughter. It's always nice to hear nice things about oneself.

And I also felt this almost palpable strand of connection. Veritably ectoplasmic! The Meezer had really been the last link to my old life in California, and when she died, that link snapped: I was no longer someone who'd once lived in California; I was only someone who lived here.

That's the reason why I liked living in Dutchess County more than I like living in Ulster County, I thought. In Dutchess County, there'd been... continuity.

And also, of course, in Dutchess County, I had friends.

###$

I prattled merrily with Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed for an hour, and our prattle was lively and hilarious and entirely without awkwardness, no long-time-no-see pauses or fumbles at all.

Neighbor Ed is almost as good at banter as Ben used to be!

I felt as though I was drinking water from a cool, sweet well.

Before that, I'd hung out with Loraine & Buff Ken & Rami on their back porch for an hour, watching the birds & talking about Buff Ken's latest bear sighting on his outdoor camera.

And before that, I'd got to play in the dirt in my garden for a few hours. There was a Claude sighting!

"When eet get hot last week, I water your garden," Claude told me.

"Thank you!" I said. Adding apologetically, "I can only get over here once a week—"

"I know, I know," Claude said, holding up a hand. "Eet is fine."

Everybody was glad to see me. Everybody liked me.

###

Icky was around this weekend. One of the Spawn managed to graduate from high school.

"He just totally ignored me!" Icky declared indignantly. "I came all the way from the City, and he ignored me! The only thing he said to me was how embarrassing it was that I was taking photographs of him!"

And you think I care exactly why? I wondered.

But I am well-trained in the art of making sympathetic sounds to people in distress.

Icky mistook my sounds for encouragement & began lamenting: It's hard, it's really fuckin' hard to be around the Spawn's mother, the Spawn's mother's new husband, the Spawn's mother's relentlessly cheerful father who'd been imported all the way from Texas—

"I was there all by myself!" Icky complained.

I clucked.

I would have expected him to head straight back to the City after this debacle. He's not supposed to be here till this coming Thursday! But, no. He stuck around. When I left for Dutchess County, he was sitting in front of his ginormous living room television screen, glaring at YouTube videos on how to sharpen knives. He had doused himself with cologne. I could smell it all the way from upstairs.

When I got back six hours later, he was still in front of the screen, watching what looked like the same YouTube video.

He saw me come in, jumped up, and immediately began doing pushups on the living room floor!

Like WTF???

He watched me cook my dinner. "That smells very good," he said, staring at my Cajun chicken.

No, fuckhead. I'm not offering you any.

Then he wanted to have a long conversation about changing propane canisters. He ushered me outside and handed me the wrench.

"I'm kind of a dummy about stuff like this," I admitted.

"Oh, no. Not you. You're a genius—"

Well, I am actually very smart, I thought. So you can can the fuckin' sarcasm. I didn't grow up using tools, so there's a learning curve involved.

But, you know. No need to prolong the conversation. And up close, that cologne was overpowering.

I thanked him for the tutorial, ran upstairs, and barricaded myself in the Patrizia-torium.

And eventually, he left.

###

In the past three days, three new place possibilities have popped up through my various real-life-people networks.

I don't really want to move until the fall, so I'm not sure how aggressively I should be following up the leads. But at the very least, they're a good auger, right?

lifeinroseland & fam braved the Holiday Catskills last weekend.

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

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

It was so good to see them!!!

###

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

An abandoned barn:

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

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

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be, Abraham Lincoln—a famous depressive—is reported to have once remarked.

To me, this sounds exactly like the type of quotation some late 19th-century journalist in St. Louis or Cleveland might have invented to spice up a gushing piece on New Year's resolutions.

But I admire it anyway. 'Cause I think it's true!

Though it does make me feel like a self-indulgent slob: My part of the world is going into its third solid day of rain and grey, and since three days = "perpetual," I am miserable. There is simply no reason to be alive.

###

Belinda has told me the True Tale of her Harrowing Childhood four times now.

Each time she tells me, her lower lip trembles and her eyes fill with tears. It is very evident that she is embarking upon a spontaneous recitation of something deeply personal and intimate and fraught. This being the case, I always wonder: How is it possible that she doesn't remember she told all this to me before?

Now, I repeat stories, too!

It's something old people do. I don't remember repeating stories to people when I was young or having them repeat stories to me, but maybe that's because young people's lives are brimming over with new experiences. Young people are interesting on their own; they don't really need to pull out set theater pieces to command attention—because that's really what these stories are: theater pieces. I know exactly which words to emphasize for maximum effect, where to raise my eyebrows archly, where to pause for audience reaction (laugher, sympathy.)

Thing is I know when I've told the story before!

I simply forget the audience I've told the story to.

Belinda really seems to believe she's telling the story for the very first time.

And no, it's not the onset of dementia.

I honestly don't know what it is.

###

Other than lunch with Belinda and grocery shopping and being absolutely flummoxed by the price of seedling heat mats in the Upscale Supermarket's garden supply department—they are wayyyyy cheaper online, but perhaps I'm still seeing pre-China tariff prices?—I did very little of anything yesterday.

So, I will have to do a lot of something today.

Grey day. Rain is predicted all week.

###

BB, Flavia, & I showed up yesterday at the mall where the Middletown demo was supposed to take place, only to discover it was one of those curbside protests where you stand valiantly at the side of the road, breathing in automobile exhaust for a couple of hours while drivers (mostly) ignore you.

As one, our eyes met: No-oo-ooo, thank you!

Not a total loss: We scurried off to Tranquili-Tea for an hour and enjoyed home-churned ice cream & thunderstorms on the drive home.

###

On the phone with Ichabod, I had a revelation.

Ichabod was saying something about always wanting to be his authentic self, & I was thinking, What a drag that would be—when it occurred to me that that might be because I spent so much time when I was slightly younger than Ichabod is now maintaining.

Maintaining was something you did when you were high on drugs & didn't want anyone else to know. But sometimes you maintained when you were feeling social anxiety or stage fright, or just had to be somewhere you did not want to be. You did not reveal (let alone exhibit) your inner quailings. There was a fair amount of honor involved in maintaining.

Of course, I don't know all that many Millennials except for my kids & their friends. And I know no Gen Z-ers.

But I do watch a lot of television with Millennial & GenZ characters, and if the representations are correct, they never maintain! Millennials & GenZ are constantly talking about how nervous they are or how incapable of functioning because of some incapacitating internal state. They have absolutely no concept of fortitude. Oversharing is their idea of virtue.

It's a manifestation of privilege when you think about it—(a) their belief that other people really care about what they feel and (b) that the world is a safe enough place that what you feel won't get you into trouble.

Maybe that's the true rift between Boomers & Millennials: We maintain; they don't.

###

Other than that, I tromped and read more Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Gotta say—Tess's passion for Angel Clare is rather annoying. Angel Clare has a big stick up his ass.

Alec Stoke-d'Urberville seems like he would be a lot more fun.

Met up with the fabulous BB at Da Tang, the fabulous Chinese grocery store in Middletown.

Middletown is something of a Falun Gong hive, and judging from the number of Falun Gong brochures at the check-out counter, Da Tang is run by Gongers.

This is one of the reasons why I love grubby little cities in the middle of nowhere that are scrambling to keep up with the present tense: They're magnets for all kinds of weirdness!

###

Middletown is plopped down right in the middle of Farm Country. (This time of year, you can actually smell the manure they use to fertilize the fields before they sow the corn.) It developed as a distribution hub and processing center for farm products, and reached its mercantile heights between the late 19th century and the beginning of World War II when the Erie Railroad downtown yard bustled with freight cars. The big industries were tanneries and condensed milk. But there were myriad shops where the farm families bought their dry goods and shoes.

Then gasoline-fueled trucks became the distribution method of choice, and everything decentralized; the farmers bought automobiles and began shopping in more convenient stores on the edges of town, and those edges metastasized into strip malls that are now—ironically—harder to get to than the downtown.

In the late 1950s, practically every city in the U.S. caught Urban Renewal Fever and began tearing down the old historic structures, replacing them with ugly commercial buildings and parking lots, or not replacing them at all. Thus, downtown Middletown today is a veritable warren! The Da Tang grocery is just one of dozens of unexpected universes behind nondescript walls. BB goes shopping there several times a month.

###

Here are some of the things you can buy at the Da Tang grocery:

Quail eggs:

Delectably alien dried fruit:

Hello Kitty candy:

In fact, every one of the thousands of items in the store is deliciously strange and intriguingly provenanced.

###

Afterwards, we looked around for a place to drink caffeinated beverages and jaw. We didn't want to go back to the Falun Gong café!

We passed a sign in the window of a shabby once-industrial window: Tranquili-Tea: Calm Your Mind.

A calm mind is good, right?

We decided to go in.

And found ourselves in a strange little winding hall decorated with glittering lights and mucho eye-pleasing kitsch that led into this cavernous room:

A most delightful tea parlor! Where they bake their own extremely scrumptious scones and offer a dozen different kinds of tea, which they then let you brew to your own desired strength using these adorable miniature hourglasses:

What a find this place is! (As my beloved Marybeth used to say.) A secret garden.

Though I suspect it's not gonna stay in business very long because I can't imagine there's much demand for magical, down-the-rabbit-hole tea gardens in grubby little cities like post-industrial Middletown.

Bade farewell to BB and scurried off to the gym.

Good workout, and on the way home, I had one of those... what would you call them? experiences? episodes?... where all-of-a-sudden, the world seems to shimmer with a golden light and the fallow fields and ancient barns I drive through seem infused with heartbreaking beauty, and the world seems like a good place—even though I know it isn't.

It was a very grey day yesterday, so I was in a very grey mood.

Either I have become so susceptible to meteorologically induced mood changes that they've jumped the calendar, and depression is no longer just seasonal. Or my body is no longer capable of being a battery that stores up sunshine for cloudy days. Or the world right now is such an awful place that it is nearly impossible to revel in the joy of being alive. Take your pick!

###

Near the beginning of yesterday's TaxBwana debriefing, the head honchos announced that we are no longer being funded for new Chromebooks.

Which means that we can no longer give out equipment to new volunteer TaxBwanas. Not that there are very many of those.

The ranks of existing TaxBwanas are constantly thinning as TaxBwanas move to independent living communities in South Carolina, or undergo joint replacements that leave them immobile, or throw up their hands & say, Fuck this shit. (For whatever reason, there are no youthful TaxBwanas.)

But I don't think attrition is gonna shut down the program.

No, I think Trump's goons are gonna shut off the funding faucet.

We tax preparers all work for free-eee-eeee, but those Chromebooks cost money, and our modems & printers cost money, & in some places where no community agency will donate space to set up shop, we rent space. And all this money comes from a grant from the IRS. My guess is that the grant will be one of the "unnecessary" expenses the goons decide to toss.

Which is a pity. One of the New Paltz team leaders did the math, and assuming the clients we tax-prepared for free-eee-eeee this season had gone to paid tax preparers, we saved our clients about $250,000.

###

I carpooled with the extremely pleasant Steve W whose Parkinson's has gotten noticeably worse since January, the last time I carpooled with him.

For someone I barely know, I'm privy to a lot of details about Steve W's life. The professional trajectory that defied parental expectations. The problematic first marriage. The son who committed suicide. The son's children—Steve's grandchildren—now living abject, impoverished lives in the afore-mentioned South Carolina and other Red states.

"But that's awful!" I said when he finished describing one granddaughter's life. "Can't you bring her up here?"

"No," Steve said. "No. Even if I wanted to. She's got so many problems, and she's so..." He left the sentence unfinished. "My wife couldn't handle it. Jane's almost 80, you know."

Since I'm in the middle of that Larry McMurtry reading binge, Steve's family members reminded me a bit of the Greenway diaspora post-Aurora, which is a modern take on the old Tess of the D'Urbervilles scenario: a downward trajectory. Over the course of a century, very few families stay in the same economic/cultural stratum, but it's only in fiction or The Daily Mail that you get to view the contrails in living color.

Anyway, I was seized with an intense sadness for Steve W. Fundamentally, such a smart, decent guy. Drives people without cars to their medical appointments. Teaches drivers' safety for free-eee-eeee! TaxBwanas! Heavily involved in liberal politics (in the liberal enclave of Gardiner!)

And his personal life is just one long heartache.

This is ridiculous, I thought to myself as he dropped me off at my car. My eyes were actually filled with tears.

So I got in my car and I drove to the ganja store!

I had thought of putting myself on Saint John's Wort, but it turns out Saint John's Wort interferes with Synthroid metabolism.

But I gotta do something.

I'm sick of feeling other people's pain.

Ganja's great! I pop one gummy at night, and not only do I sleep like a hibernating bear, I wake up feeling jolly & utterly impervious!

Spending time in the garden was lovely. Stayed three hours. Got maybe half the 12' X 12' plot weeded? Will return to complete the task later this week. I may not even need to beg Claude to rototill this year: The earth is quite pliable.

###

Spring is more advanced in Dutchess County than it is in Ulster. Maple trees all sporting that tender green blur that, upon close examination, is not leaves at all but tiny tree flowers, lethal to anyone prone to allergies. The magnolias & weeping cherries are all in bloom, and the daffodils & forsythia seem to have staying power this year, so the roadsides are a riot of yellow & pink & spring green.

###

I drove by L's house where I used to live. It's shabbier than ever though the daffodils I planted are blooming in great clumps.

I was pretty happy for most of the time I lived at L's house, and I wondered—not for the first time—if L would have lost her mind if she hadn't had that knee replacement.

I warned her!

Good little libertarian that I am, I have a pretty hard & fast rule about never offering personal opinions about courses of action when it's clear the other person is bound & determined to see them through—except when I feel an emotional bond with the other person and the course of action runs straight through a disaster zone.

Surgery under general anesthetic is risk enough on its own for anyone over 80, but added to that, I'd seen L's chest X-rays! I knew how badly her lungs were compromised.

So over lunch at one of the Culinary's extravagant restaurants, I told Linda my concerns.

It was one of the few occasions I can remember that I ever saw Linda get angry.

I can't remember exactly what she said—I wrote about it at the time, so it's here somewhere—but the gist was that I was not the boss of her, so why didn't I just STFU.

I felt so badly about the encounter that I ended up paying for the lunch—$100 plus.

But shortly after the knee replacement, Linda began manifesting signs of dementia. I think she may have stroked out on the table. Or thrown a mini-clot. Or something.

###

Linda was never someone with whom I was going to forge a deep connection, but I was fond of her and grateful to her.

I haven't seen her since I moved out, but Belinda, whose grim sense of duty compels her to take Linda out every couple of weeks, tells me she's not doing well. She doesn't appear to bathe, smells faintly of urine. She prattles thoughtlessly. She eats half a dozen rolls at a sitting.

Neither one of her children like her, so they're not looking out for her.

Mrs. Neighbor Ed drops by for tea and takes her out shopping once a week, but Mrs. Neighbor Ed, though a kind person, has definite boundaries.

The house keeps getting shabbier and shabbier.

Sad.

And maybe I'm in complete denial, maybe this is just what happens to people when they get old, but I can't help thinking, It didn't have to be this way...

At that Jamaican restaurant in Brooklyn, I tasted a fabulous black bean soup and could not stop thinking about it, so yesterday had thoughts about recreating it—

Which I did not do! Ended up making a kind of vegetable soup with a lot of black beans.

Tasty nonetheless. But I guess I don't have a good enough palate for recreating dishes from scratch without a recipe.

###

That was my main activity yesterday: Making a ginormous batch of soup.

Otherwise, I Remunerated, went phone-vox with a bunch of folk, and watched endless episodes of The Pitt.

Back in the day, ER was one of my favorite television shows, so I liked The Pitt. It was nice to see Dr. John Carter all grown up and running an ED in the Rust Belt. But can emergency rooms really have changed all that much? Back in the Jurassic when I was an ER nurse, the nurses did most of the work. We'd do what needed to be done, and then we'd tell the interns & residents what orders to write.

And it was really boring a lot of the time! I worked at Highland Hospital in Oakland, at that time a very poor and mostly Black city. Highland Hospital bore the designation, Provider of Last Resort, so we got all the uninsured GSWs, stabbings, & assorted gangbanger mayhem.

But we also got the uninsured mothers of eight trotting their broods in for ringworm checks, and that could get pretty dull.

I did like one of the residents' throwaway observations: Anyone who works in an emergency room probably has undiagnosed ADHD.

Ring of truth!

###

I spoke for an hour with Public Policy Eleanor who will not have time to help me with The Project until the end of May—because she's going off for a week to Madrid and thence for another week to walk the Camino de Santiago.

I was green with envy. I want to walk the Camino de Santiago!

I spoke for another hour with Ellen whose head is bent out of shape by the Mean Girl antics of the VoW crowd. Civic involvement in small towns is so-oo weird.

Why do you care? I asked Ellen at one point.

She didn't really have a convincing explanation—except that she does care, so as a Loyal Friend, I said nasty, villainous things about all the VoW ladies and made her laugh. Tomorrow, she & I are going out canvassing local Wallkill businesses—there aren't very many of them!—to drum up sponsorships on behalf of the Duck Derby & village-wide flea market. Which should be a laugh riot.

Today I must finish this segment of the ongoing Remuneration and begin drafting the Project description—I'm thinking a nationwide network of volunteers at the granular county level who guide prospective voters through the process of attaining Enhanced IDs (cheaper than passports.) I need a punchy first sentence, though!

And, of course, I must hit the gym.

Here is the dinky little video I made of the April 5th protests in Middletown, New York:

Watch on YouTube

BB had the creeping crud plus it was raining, so we merely showed up for half an hour or so, long enough for our bodies to be counted (we hope!) before dashing off to a strange little café, apparently run by members of the Falun Gong sect that served passable chai lattes, brewed espresso drinks, and pastries like these adorable fish, filled with red bean paste:

The place was crammed! And the people at the various tables, dressed very differently as they were, all seemed to be signaling to each other with secret signs.

"I wonder what their stories are," I said to BB.

"I don't have a clue," BB said cheerfully. "And I'm not much interested. But that's what makes you a writer."

Every now & then, the protesters & their signs made the circuit of the shabby downtown street where the café was located. I studied the Falun Gong cult members' faces carefully to see if there was any sympathy. There wasn't. At the table kitty-corner to ours, a quartet of determined 30-ish women raised their eyebrows disparagingly, made remarks to one another that I couldn't quite hear.

Back in 2016, my beloved Summer explained to me why Trump is so overwhelmingly popular with Chinese expatriates in the U.S.: "They think he has luck. They think he is phenomenally lucky. And luck is the thing we revere and want above all else."

###

When we were done with our drinks & pastries, BB led me to a fabulous Chinese store where all sorts of fabulous groceries were for sale:

To think that all these wondrous things are a mere five-block walk from the Y where I work out two or three times a week and that I had never visited them before!

###

Back at the casa, I labored on Adrienne's website, aligning links & graphics and embellishing it with fulsome prose like, When Adrienne moved to Wallkill 16 years ago, she immediately looked for ways to support the hamlet she’d fallen in love with..
.
(Yes, I know, gag-worthy, but trust me: It will work for the voters of Wallkill.)

I should finish the damn thing today.

It is far from perfect, but the important thing is that it is.

If Brian the fresh-faced little campaign manager—who's actually getting paid—wants me to tweak stuff, I will simply tell him, Find someone else.

I never actually told Adrienne I would design her a website. I told her I would help her with social media. So, you know.

###

There's no accurate reporting yet on the number of protesters who turned out yesterday. 500,000 signed up in advance with the various Hands Off, Move On, etc. organizations, so I'm thinking probably twice as many showed up. Maybe more. The numbers will be underreported by the mainstream media who are all Trump suck-ups. Fuck the mainstream media.

###

Also, I am dead serious about launching an initiative whereby we help people obtain those documents (birth certificates, marriage licenses for women) that prove citizenship & thereby protect the right to vote.

Of course, this kind of stuff doesn't matter in New York State, which doesn't require proof of citizenship at the polls, but my old LJ friend

cah1470 actually lives in the North Carolina district where 65,000 votes are about to be tossed because North Carolina! Home to Mayberry, gerrymandering, and the Ku Klux Klan!

I totally believe that the next federal election will be lost unless we make sure our votes can't be thrown out. People in red states will need to vote early and in person, bring identification, voter cards, make sure their signatures are exactly the same as they are on the voter cards, etc, etc, etc.

I don't have the foggiest notion at this point how to liaise with organizations in the states that do require proof of citizenship at the polls. Plus we'd need money—obtaining govt documents costs. So maybe I need to figure out how to set up a 501 (c) (3)??? I dunno. This is all in a very preliminary stage in my head right now.

Anyway, I've got Adrienne talking to the heads of the Democratic Party here in New York—a thoroughly useless endeavor, I'm sure. Democrats are hopeless.

And I am gonna lean on RTT when I see him in NYC this week to try and set up some sort of meeting for me with the Soros-financed People for the American Way to see if they might be willing to be sponsors.

It's actionable resistance!

That means I'm gonna have to draft some sort of policy proposal in the next two weeks.

Busy, busy, busy!

Somehow, Ellen found out that my birthday is fast approaching, so the Girl Squad meetup last night turned into a birthday dinner.

The Parkview has decent cheeseburgers, so that's what I always order.

I like the Parkview. Maybe it's because I'm deep in my various Larry McMurtry reads, but it occurs to me that Wallkill is a lot like McMurtry's mythical West Texas Thalia—a lot of deeply weird individuals pretending to be walkin' that Law-and-Order highway. I would actually kinda like them if their xenophobia was not a strain of rabies. But as it is, they're dangerous.

###
Anyway, Ellen knows absolutely everyone in Wallkill, so absolutely everyone came up to our table—from Joe, the former Wallkill Town Board member who lives in a 19th-century boarding house still decorated with the original daguerreotypes to Steve, who runs the local transfer station (where I haul my weekly garbage since Icky is too cheap to spring for a garbage service) & who never charges me: Jest don't tell them people down at City Hall, 'kay darlin'?

###

Ellen and I have an unlikely friendship. She doesn't read & I'd say she doesn't actually hear about 50% of what comes out of my mouth, but then, I don't really care if people hear what I say since I'm mostly saying it for the benefit of an invisible audience that lives in my head.

She won my fealty & devotion 4-Evah by coming to dig my car out of the ice last winter and rolling down her car window on her way out to tell me, "I got your back."

Apparently, I did something similar for her—though I can't remember what it was. Maybe offering to go with her to the vet when she had to put her much-loved dog down?

Anyway, we are bonded.

And we both hate Trump—a rarity in Wallkill.

So, maybe that's part of it.

I was 20 minutes late to TaxBwana yesterday—got stuck behind a tow truck that was chugging along hilly 44/55 at 20 miles an hour—and so missed Moira, the totally delightful 86-year-old whose taxes I did at Highland a couple of weeks back. She came in at 9 with an enormous box of treats! (TaxBwanas can't take money, but we can take treats!)

"Patrizia, Patrizia, Patrizia," Steve the site coordinator grinned. "That's all she kept saying. You have a fan."

This was particularly touching to me because I know exactly how much disposable income Moira has, and it's not much. The treats outlay was a significant expenditure for her.

Then later in the day, one of the TaxBwanas approached me: "They're my friends, so I really don't feel comfortable doing their taxes. Too much information, you know! But I really want to make sure they get someone good. Will you do them?"

So, you know: Ego validation!

###

My mood turned to meh as the day wore on. The political news is really quite awful, and I find myself preoccupied by the question: Why exactly did you choose to be born in this time & this place?

Because I am quite convinced: Choose I did.

What am I supposed to do? Personally, I see the world in shades of grey, but the world defies me by shaping up into some kind of Manichean battle: Good Guys versus Bad Guys. Belinda, my Trump-voting pal, all but admitted to me when we went out for Himalayan food last week that she regrets her vote. (And, no, I didn't prod her. I deliberately steer away from political discussion when I am around Trump-voting pals.)

But how do I know that I'm not one of the Bad Guys?

Life! The ultimate role-playing game!

###

The only real talent I have is writing.

But I'm not under the illusion that anybody reads much of what I write.

###

Meanwhile, I am wayyyyy behind on my Remuneration goals & Adrienne's website is still not done.

Icky & his ill-mannered spawn have vamoosed for the next 10 days, leaving me in solitary possession of the casa. So, that's a good thing.

(Minor showdown with Icky last week. He complained the kitchen was dirty. I told him that I was perfectly willing to clean up after myself, but I'd be goddamned if I was gonna clean up after him & the Spawn. I did clean up after him & the Spawn a couple of times when I first moved in, in an effort to ingratiate myself, which doubtless gave him the wrong idea.

And I get the feeling you want me to move out, & I am looking for another place to live, I added.

I don't want you to move out, said Icky. And cleaned the kitchen.)

Black Chicken seems a bit more chipper. And tonight, I will be hanging with the Girl Squad at the Parkview, which should be fun.

Strange, strange, strange, strange dreams....

In the middle of the night, I dreamed I'd been just horrible. Acting out in the most destructive, self-centered ways. Till finally the people around me grew tired of it and locked me in a room.

I managed to escape & went to find BB. Railing at the injustice of it all. BB received me cooly. Yes, I could stay in his apartment, if I promised not to misbehave. But no, I could not accompany him to dinner with his three lady companions. I was simply too much of a liability.

Woke up to pee. Staggered back to bed.

And dreamed some more.

I was playing video games on my computer. Three, maybe four video games simultaneously. When I went to check the time widget—I had to be some place—I couldn't find it; in its place were these strange, cryptic hieroglypics. And then I noticed the computer was very hot, so hot that it had, in fact, melted, turned into this great mass of grey rubber. Oddly enough, I wasn't that panicked: I had backed it up not so terribly long ago & of course, my entire diary is online. I would just have to eat the $1,500 or so a new computer would cost.

I ran off to find Ben in the apartment we shared—a variant of one of my first Oakland apartments, the one over the Indendent Driving School that occasionally turned into a dirty video store, only located on upper Flatbush Avenue where my dreams frequently misplace it.

Do you want to break up? I demanded.

No, he didn't want to break up—but he, too, was off to dinner with three ladies and distracted.

###

I think dreams are meaningful, so I'm glad to be remembering mine again.

###

The Larry McMurtry bio continues to be an utter delight. Every paragraph so rich, studded with brilliant language & reflections. McMurtry is what I would describe as a flat writer. Not uninflected! But short on the figurative. Daugherty plugs McMurtry into a mythic landscape I want to wander through.

###

In other news...

On Sunday, Belinda took me out to lunch at a Himalayan restaurant in Beacon as a thank-you for doing her taxes. We had momos:

Food was delicious & Belinda told me stories about her dysfunctional relations.

All relation are dysfunctional, right? And everybody is a relation! So how is it that the people who tell the stories are always the sane ones?

###

Then yesterday, I TaxBwana-ed. Three of my clients were recent emigres from Haiti, and only one spoke English, so I struggled by in my execrable French.

You don't have problems, I thought midway through the first return. These people have problems.

It was a grey & rainy day, which maybe was why I was filled with loathing for my fellow TaxBwanas. One of my rules for getting by is that in any situation I find myself in, I always look around for someone I can conscript into the role of Situational Best Friend—it just makes being in a group a whole lot easier. But there is no one in this group I can conscript: I don't like them, but more importantly, they don't like me. They don't dislike me; they just don't like me.

I suppose it's kinda like the deal with DNA: You share 95% of your DNA with snapping turtles, and yet when you look at snapping turtles, you think: We don't have very much in common!

The other TaxBwanas breathe oxygen. So do I! The other TaxBwanas have opposeable thumbs. Me too! The other TaxBwanas have larynxes they use to make sounds that are equivalent to the sounds I make & that I can interpret.

And yet, when I look at them, I think, We have nothing in common.

And that makes me feel lonely. And sullen.

A most fabulous visit to D.C.!

Alex is an epic hostess, so the two and two-half days felt like a mini-version of one of those fabulous house parties you read about in British novels: the adorable house that is just like a museum to Alex's quirky, interesting tastes, an enormous range of actual museums—we did the National Museum of African American History & Culture and Hillwood, the Marjorie Merriweather Post mansion where the Fabergé Eggs live—splendid weather; adorable felines; and non-stop conversation, perfectly timed so that the moment it began to pall was the morning I left to come back.

Alex also made it into The New York Times!

She had been to the Science Protest March just before I arrived.

Alex may be the only person in the world who's perfectly recognizable from the back of her head.

###

She & her husband live in the same house her husband was born & brought up in, & every inch is filled with the most delightful kitsch. Kitsch is very much my own design aesthetic, so I scampered 'round the domicile, taking Art Photos™ at every opportunity:

Alex adopts people—by which I mean if she sees an opportunity to help them thrive, she helps them thrive! I see this in the way she opens her house to young people—presently, she has a very adorable young Russian woman, Arina, living with her—and to some extent, I see it in her friendship with me. It is a really lovely quality—and a rare quality.

So, the African American Museum...

It is a great museum, but I had some issues with the way the permanent exhibition is designed.

The permanent exhibition recreates the history of slavery—which is not necessarily the history you think you know. The exhibits are arranged chronologically, starting with the journey from Africa and the Middle Passage in dark, narrow halls in the lowest concourse of the building and culminating with the contemporary experience of African Americans in the somewhat brighter higher concourse—although given that, ironically enough, D.C.'s Black Lives Matter Plaza was being dismantled the very weekend I was in town, the contemporary experience may not be that much brighter.

There is no escape from the permanent exhibition, no easy way to drop in and out of the pieces you might specifically want to see. The design immerses you in the entire experience—and while I understand the intentionality of that design, it does make it difficult for people like me whose attention span gives out after about an hour and a half, no matter how worthy I may deem the overall experience.

It's an exhibition crafted for first-time visitors, in other words.

Repeat visitors are going to have a difficult time with it.

And even this first-time visitor developed a mild headache—it was so dark, so claustrophobic! And, of course, I understood that this headache was a measure of the exhibit's success—the suffering of the enslaved translating physically into my own discomfort.

Except—I was in a position to terminate my discomfort.

And wandered out somewhere around the beginning of Reconstruction.

Hillwood, in contrast, was all opulence & comfort as befits the spring-&-fall mansion of one of the obscenely rich.

We had a delightfully enthusiastic & mildly wacky tour guide:

Marjorie Merriweather Post became a connoisseur of 20th-century Tsarist art, something by accident—her third husband was FDR's ambassador to Russia. And the pieces were absolutely magnificent:

But I couldn't help thinking that in essence, they were not all that dissimilar to the lovely whimsies scattered around Alex's house.

###

Alex said one other thing I want to remember.

Alex is a good cook. A comfortable cook. And we were talking about cooking, how challenging menu planning can be, & she said, "Well, of course, if you know your way around a kitchen, you don't see a loaf of bread, you see four sets of sandwiches, and one serving of French toast, and possibly bread pudding."

In other words, cooking isn't about recipes; it's about ingredients.

Words to live by.

It was (GirlSquad - 1) + (1 non-GirlSquad): Becky was off in the Bronx recuperating from a Bad Domestic Situation & Ellen brought along her neighbor, Mary, who, despite being named after Jesus's mother, is of Ukrainian Jewish descent and was very high up in some NYC-based government financial organization before her retirement.

"I've met you several times before," Mary told me.

I didn't remember.

We had fun character-assassinating everyone we knew! In a tiny hamlet like Wallkill, mostly filled with stupid people—hey! they voted for Trump!—the same 30 people rotate through every civic organization: the Library Board, the Volunteer Fire Department Board, Vision of Wallkill, the Shawangunk Dems, the Wallkill Woman's Club—

"So what's up with this Woman's Club anyway?" I asked. "Do they host consciousness-raising meetings about taking down the patriarchy? Do they teach you how to find—& stimulate!—yr own G-spot?"

"No, silly," Ellen said. "They hold raffles! For quilts! And then they donate the money to civic causes—"

"What civic causes?"

"Who knows? Maybe keeping Wallkill safe from supermarkets."

"Well, hey! Wallkill has a liquor store! Who needs groceries?"

###

Other than that, I Remunerated all day & didn't accomplish nearly enough.

My To-Do list is five miles long.

Woke up in the middle of the night and could not go back to sleep for anything. At first, I was anxious about all the things that I've invited to go wrong in my life—Come on in! Fuck right up!—and then I was anxious about being anxious.

But finally I zeroed in on the proximal cause of my anxiety:

One of Annie's novels that I'd ordered for Max's birthday had been delivered to Linda's house, and I had asked Belinda to pick it up from Linda and deliver it to me when she met me over lunch to drop off her tax documents. (Belinda is one of about 15 friends & family members for whom I do taxes regularly.)

We met at the fabulous Hudson Taco.

"I want you to see this," said Belinda about five seconds after we were seated.

"This" was a long text she'd sent to Mrs. Neighbor Ed about Linda.

Bla bla bla... and when I went to pick up Patrizia's book, Linda started raving about how wonderful Patrizia was. But then when she answered the earlier phone message I'd left, she didn't remember I'd been over, & when I mentioned Patrizia's book, she began saying what an awful person Patrizia is and how she didn't trust her... Bla bla bla.

"Of course, that's her disease talking," Belinda added eagerly.

I sighed. "Belinda, why are you showing me this? I know Linda doesn't like me—"

"It's the disease—"

"I know that. But it's hurtful just the same because I was never anything but nice to Linda. I bought her little gifts, I stocked the refrigerator with food when I knew she couldn't go out shopping, I arranged parties for her. I nursed her for 10 days when she had that knee replacement—"

"She's never been the same since that knee replacement—"

"Please do not tell me the mean things Linda says about me. It just makes me sad. And why were you texting that to Pat of all people?"

"I thought I should document Linda's behavior."

Huh?

###

I don't think Belinda was intending to be mean. I think this was just some kind of vestigial behavior left over from her adolescence. Belinda is only a couple of years older than me, but she is of another generation, having grown up in the middle of nowhere where that kind of reflexive, petty, ingrained female spite took a long time to evaporate. Is dew on the morning grass still, in fact.

Linda's dislike is not something I would pay any attention to at all in the daytime.

It's only something that could make me anxious in the middle of the night.

And it does that because it whispers the things I was told throughout my childhood: You're dishonest, you're untrustworthy, you're worthless. Nobody could love you.

My mother's whisper.

###

My mother took about three days to die, and for most of those three days, I sat by her bedside.

Once, she sat straight up. Stared straight ahead with wild, indignant eyes. "I am not a bad girl!" my mother cried.

I wonder who she was talking to.

I wonder if I will do the same thing on my deathbed.

If I do, I will be talking to her.

Adrienne was happy to accept my offer of assistance to do social media for her campaign.

(Readers who obsessively track every pearl that falls from my keyboard may recall that Adrienne has decided to run as a Democrat for Ulster County Legislature for District 13: Hamlet of Wallkill. The nomination will come tomorrow, and she will make the official announcement next week.)

"You've got to have a website up & running when you make that announcement," I told her. "Even if it's only a placeholder. The announcement will garner press coverage & you’ll want to promote that URL—"

Can you do the placeholder? she asked and then began telling the group chat about the recent emigré from NYC she'd met a couple of days ago who was a big techie and could probably do the website—only she'd only played Ain't It Awful with him for 10 minutes and had not approached him about a website, so she didn't know.

Yes, I can do the placeholder and probably, I could do the website—though if she can get New Tech Friend to do the website, that is absolutely fine with me.

It's been years since I've designed or uploaded a website, & I've forgotten everything I ever knew about WordPress—which is the best platform for comparatively small websites.

But even a placeholder has to have basic elements—a couple of good photos (that need to be shot originally in high resolution that I can tweak in Photoshop), links for About, Calendar, Events, Donations, Facebook, etc.

In other words, even a placeholder involves work.

The Shawangunk Democrats actually have a website that nobody has updated in a year.

I am thinking that means they have extra server space that we can glom on to—because if Adrienne doesn't win in November, she will not want a one-year server contract.

But apparently, nobody knows anything about the Shawangunk Democrats' website! It is just sitting there, a small & petulant satellite spinning in cyberspace.

So, the placeholder work must also involve tracking down the former Shawangunk Dem sysop.

###

Also, for Ichabod's birthday this year, I have decided to send him all the novels Annie wrote during the 1970s.

Annie & Ichabod were close before Annie got carted away to Dementia Guantanamo in fuckin' Bend, Oregon—about a million miles away from friends she loved well enough to ping those last collapsing filaments of memory.

So, I have been tracking the novels down on eBay.

A bittersweet endeavor, to be sure.

###

Apart from that, I have a billion other things I gotta do but, highest on that list, is REMUNERATION 'cause I have been a lazy slouch, listening to those phantom melodies only we feckless grasshoppers can hear!

Thank GAWD, this horrible cold spell is forecast to break tomorrow.

So yesterday morning, I trekked down to the car feeling exactly like little Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, leaping from ice floe to ice floe—

A politically incorrect joke, I realize. Trump’s reelection has brought politically incorrect jokes back into the mainstream. I am a big fan of politically incorrect jokes, so I intend to take full advantage since this may be the only positive thing associated with Trump’s reelection.

But lo & behold! When I started the car, it would not move!

And that’s because the left front tire was frozen into the ice.

I then proceeded to do exactly the wrong thing: Namely, I stepped down hard on the gas pedal—which only succeeded in getting the right front tire stuck in the mud where it, too, promptly froze since temperatures were in the low teens.

So! Go to the Gardiner Library to be a TaxBwana, or stay home & deal with the car? What to do, what to do…

I opted to TaxBwana! Called Steve, the very nice Gardiner TaxBwana site coordinator who very kindly drove out to Wallkill to pick me up.

Had a very busy day. Four clients in five hours, including two prison guards at the Wallkill Correctional Facility, penitentiaries being the only local industry in this part of Ulster County. He was a Vietnam special ops guy who in retirement has become an expert on the types of weapons used in the Spanish-American War; she was an expert quilter.

Then, I did this incredibly irritating woman who just would not shut up—mucho distracting when you’re trying to concentrate on the finer points of entering 1099-R forms into the tax-computing software. She was nattering on & on & on about the horrible drive in from High Falls down ice-covered roads, but I, who had my own automotive perils to deal with, did not want to hear about ice-covered roads.

"Did you grow up around here?" I asked brightly in an attempt to stave off more road horror tales.

"Oh, I did, I did. But I lived most of my adult life in the City."

"And what did you do in the City?"

"Oh, the usual. Worked humiliating jobs for shit wages, and realized my life was going nowhere." She grinned mirthlessly.

###

Around 2 pm, I went outside to call Ellen. "Hey, would you be able to take me shopping tomorrow so I can buy some groceries?"

"Sure," Ellen said, "but what's going on with your car?"

"Oh, it's frozen into the ground. But the temps are supposed to be going back up in 10 days, so I'll be able to drive it again then—"

"Patrizia, don't be ridiculous! You can't go 10 days without a car! Not here."

After listening to my car story, she announced that she was going straight over to my house to dig out my car. "What time are you finished with the tax thingy?"

"Around 3:30—"

"Great! So, I'll be around to give your car a little push if you need it, and you'll be able to start your car."

###

Three-thirty came and went. No end in sight to the poor, the anguished, the taxpayers.

I called Ellen.

"Well, I've got you dug out," she announced cheerfully. "But your two front tires are still pretty frozen into the ice. I don't want to dig too hard around them 'cause I don't want to damage them. But I'm thinking with a little push—"

"You can push my car?" I asked doubtfully. Priuses may look little, but they're deceptively heavy."

"Easy, peasy. I'm gonna go home now to warm up. Call me when you get home."

###

Four o'clock came & went. Then it was 4:30, and the last taxpayer was fixing their John Hancock to the 1040.

I called Ellen.

"Thank you, Ellen, for everything you've done for me today. I am so incredibly grateful! But I am really exhausted, & all I want to do is go to bed and watch Law & Order—"

"Patrizia," she said, "tonight the temp is going down to 7°. And that means the tires are gonna freeze again. The sun was out today even though it was cold, so the car is kinda sitting in a pool of water. I mean, you should do whatever you want to do, of course, but you are a strong lady, and you can do this—"

So, when I got back home, I called Ellen to come back, and together we tackled the car.

It took us another hour and a half of rocking the damn thing, and then chiseling and hammering more ice from the tires.

But finally, we got it to drive.

It is now parked at the head of the driveway, near the house, and shortly, I'm gonna drive to the store and buy kiska feed all on my very own.

"You are my hero!!" I cried, embracing her. "I am so very, very grateful—"

Physical demonstrations of affection make Ellen uncomfortable.

"I got your back, Sis," she said, wiggling backwards out of my arms.

I went inside the house where—thanks to Icky forgetting to order heating oil once again—the thermostat was registering a frigid 34°.

Raced upstairs to the Patrizia-torium to switch on the space heater.

The space heater labored mightily, but its brave efforts weren't able to bring the temperature of the Patrizia-torium much above 56°.

I was so exhausted I had to force myself to eat.

And though I piled on the blankets so I was warm enough, I had a hard time sleeping. PTSD, I suspect.

###

This morning, the heating oil guy showed up early. He had to tromp through 20 yards of solid ice to get to the oil outlet, and then he came inside to bleed the line and start the furnace.

"I don't understand why your landlord can't do what every other homeowner around here does and get a contract so we monitor your oil usage and deliver more oil before it runs out," he said.

"He doesn't get a contract because he is a dick," I explained.

And really, that is all that can be said about that.

###

It Is What It Is.

Life is good except when life is bad, and the good and the bad are wrapped around one another like that Escher print of the hand drawing the hand.

Adrienne has decided to run for Ulster County Legislature for District 13 ( hamlet of Wallkill) with the backing of the local Democratic syndicate.

I just volunteered to help her with social media.

I’m not entirely sure she’ll take me up on it: Adrienne is 75 years old & not entirely convinced of the utility of social media.

But honestly? She should take me up on it: I am actually talented at creating quasi-personalized relationships over the ether, & that mock personalization has drawing power, which can be useful, particularly in an election that can probably be won by 500 votes.

True, Adrienne is running as a Democrat, & I am not a fan of the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party at present is the only opposition we’ve got, & so, the only opportunity I have to channel my anger & frustration into something positive.

My current social media strategy: I am hoping Big Balls—who right now is carrying out President Elon Musk’s directions to dismantle the IRS—emails every taxpayer but CCs instead of BCCs all 138 million of us, so I can REPLY-ALL: Vote for Adrienne!

###

In other news: Yesterday’s snowstorm only dropped a couple of inches of the Hideous White Stuff, but then there were hours of sleet & freezing rain, so now, Albany Post Road looks like somebody polished it—black ice!

Temps today are supposed to get into the 40°s—which should turn the glacier encasing the driveway into a sea—which should make it easy to salinize so it won’t refreeze with the 50 pounds of rock salt I went out & bought yesterday.

Of course, all that salt will be very bad for the driveway, but hey! ain’t my property!

I spent yesterday Remunerating & also making headway on my life’s work—namely, watching all 618 episodes of Law & Order.

Life is good, Allah!

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Every Day Above Ground

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