Mallory's Camera

Magical Thinking

2026-06-14T12:07:19Z

One real problem with magical thinking is that one begins to blame oneself for everything. Like if life is going badly, it's because you're being punished for something you did. That kind of jumpstarts a conveyor belt of memories of all the horrible things you've ever done running through your mind...

Snort.

Like the Universe cares!

It may be time to turn off the magical thinking function for a while.

###

Drove up to the Catskills to pick up Brian's camping gear. Brian's house is only about 30 miles away, but down so many back roads that it takes an hour to get there. Gorgeous day, and I meandered through the forests with their sudden breaks into ancient farmhouses and empty barns as though I was driving through the last scene of a movie.

I will be back one more time to pick up the rest of Brian's CDs and two little Moroccan footstools I had my eye on.

But after that?

It's unlikely I will ever visit this part of the Catskills again.

Hung out with real-life Flavia and Betsy for a bit.

Came back and finished The Children's Book. Read it much too fast! I was curious to find out what happens. What happens is that the characters who are adults at the beginning of the book grow old & weird, and the characters who are children at the beginning of the book all die or are horribly maimed in WWI.

Started pondering, too, about what I need to do with my stuff. If I move to Michigan, I'm gonna have to get rid of most of it. It will be too expensive to move.

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Mental Health

2026-06-13T14:01:16Z

Yesterday was not a good mental health day.

Icky, in residence till Tuesday, has not said one word about Black Chicken's death. In fact, has barely said four words to me. It's very hard to share physical space in a house with someone who acts like you're invisible, even when said someone is a complete dick. I keep scampering off to the mirror to check: Do I exist? If I cast a reflection, I must exist, right?

Fortunately, I am spending today and tomorrow with People Who Love Me. And driving up to Ithaca some time this week to drop off Brian's enormous collection of camping gear with RTT.

###

Bad mental health for me always comes down to that small still voice within suddenly turning shrill and chanting, Failure, failure, failure! The small still voice may not be entirely wrong on that one: I have failed utterly in being happy, can't think of a single time in my life when I was simply, uncompromisingly happy.

That's on my upbringing.

But that is not what the small still voice is talking about.

No, the small still voice means I am low income, I have not published a novel (have published a lot of other stuff! I feel compelled to note here), have a broken dental veneer, am living in an awful place where I barely know a soul, and am generally not someone Elon Musk would want to impregnate.

It's a lot.

###

On the plus side:

Ten days or so of hot temperatures that kept me more or less housebound and immobile means my injured knee has all but recovered.

And I have finally found a book I enjoy: A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, about an eccentric E. Nesbit-like writer of magic tales for children in the early 20th century and her Bloomsbury-like coterie.

I have never been a big Byatt fan. There is an icy feeling to her perfect prose that has always put me off. I much prefer the gurgly chick-lit effusions of her sister, Margaret Drabble. But I am enjoying this book.

###

Funny. Yesterday, I kept thinking I would feel so much better if there was even one person I could call up and say, "Black Chicken died, and my heart is broken," who would understand—

And the only two people I could think of were Brian and (ulp) Ben. Who are both dead themselves.

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Umbrella

2026-06-12T10:38:23Z

Black Chicken is no more.

My Umbrella of Protection wasn't wide enough to keep her safe.

My Umbrella of Protection is barely wide enough to keep me and the kiskas safe these days. Tough times. Sigh.

I am sad but trying not to be sentimental about it. Nature red in tooth & claw, and all of that.

Still.

I dream of a universe where innocent creatures can frolic happily and carelessly. And maybe cynical creatures, too.

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Larry McMurtry at the Dollar Store

2026-06-10T15:51:22Z

Managed to cardboard and woodchip one little path.

Which I know doesn't sound very impressive.

But hey! It was 80° by 10am with a dew point of 70. Very humid. Very uncomfortable.

Doing any kind of garden work on days like this involves arriving there at 8am—which I gotta say, I do not like at all. I like to putter in the morning. Drink two cups of coffee. Catch up on emails and texts. Skim the news (uniformly awful). Read my pals' online journals—though it appears I'm one of only a few who writes with any degree of regularity anymore. Long-form writing really only appeals to Boomers and GenXers. I am the priestess of a dead religeon.

###

Work in Progress is progressing—but slowly.

Flavia is an architect, so I'm having to do deep dives into architect jargon.

In the chapter I'm writing now, Flavia does a project with the resident genius, starts sleeping with him, falls in love with him—he does not fall in love with her—reveals her dirty little secret to him (I'm rich!!!), gets used by him for her money, develops a cocaine habit.

None of this stuff happened to me, so writing it is... challenging.

Of course, all fiction writing is autobiographical to some degree—like method acting. The event you're describing in a fictional character's life may not have happened to you, but you draw on your own feelings to evoke the characters' emotional reactions. So, you know. It can get intense.

I have no idea if it's any good or not.

I started it; I'll finish it. That's all I know.

###

Rereading Tracy Dougherty's excellent biography of Larry McMurtry because I have run out of books! (I have also run out of streaming media to watch; absolutely nothing appeals.)

McMurtry is one of my favorite writers, and the fact that his ouevre contains so many out-and-out stinkers and clunkers is actually part of his appeal. The Last Picture Show is a perfect novel! So, how do you explain Cadillac Jack?

McMurtry lived a really extraordinary life. On his own terms (which could best be described as "episodic"). He made his own rules—up to the point where his own body felled him. In 1991, he had a heart attack and then quadruple-bypass surgery, and though he lived another 30 years, in a very real sense, his life ended in 1991.

###

One thing medical gatekeepers don't really tell you is that around 30% of all people who undergo bypass surgery experience significant personality changes.

Larry McMurtry was one of those people.

In his memoir, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry wrote:

...The violently intrusive nature of that operation – of any operation, really – was bound to dislocate one for a bit, I thought. Car metaphors seem to apply. I had had some serious engine work done and then been jump-started back into drivability. If there was a little sputtering at first, well, that was only to be expected.

In the fourth month matters worsened – the sense of grief for the lost self was profound. I didn’t feel like my old self at all, and had no idea where the old self had gone. But I did know that it, he, me was gone, and that I missed him. I soon came to feel that my self had been left behind, across a border or a canyon. Where exactly was I? The only real sign of the old self was that I could still connect with my grandson, Curtis McMurtry. Otherwise, I felt spectral – the personality that had been mine for fifty-five years was simply no longer there – or if there, it was fragmented, it was dust particles swirling around, only occasionally and briefly cohering. I mourned its loss but soon concluded that gone is gone – I was never really going to recover that sense of wholeness, of the integrity of the self.

That being the case, I began to put a kind of alternative self together, and the alternative self soon acquired a few domestic skills, on the order of loading the dishwasher or taking out the trash. But I still couldn’t read. I was at the time owner of perhaps two hundred thousand books and yet I couldn’t read.

The problem, I eventually realized, was that reading is a form of looking outward, beyond the self, and that, for a long time, I couldn’t do – the protest from inside was too powerful. My inability to externalize seemed to be organ based, as if the organs to which violence had been done were protesting so much that I couldn’t attend to anything else. I soon ceased to suppose that I would ever reassemble the whole of my former self, but I could collect enough chunks and pieces to get me by – as I have.

Such surgery, so noncommonsensical, so contradictory to the normal rules of survival, is truly Faustian. You get to live, perhaps as long as you want to, only not as yourself – never as yourself.

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Feline Differential Diagnosis

2026-06-09T12:29:17Z

Quite the lovely day, yesterday. I spent a good chunk of it in the garden, where I have a long list of projects that never quite get finished because the Numbah One priority is weeding and the weeds grow so fuckin' fast! Yesterday, though, I was able to stay four hours, so in addition to weeding & watering, I got the pink dahlias in and trained the pea plants to climb the fence.

One of my cucumber plants didn't make it, so I replanted. (I never have much luck with cucumbers.)

The bell pepper plants are already fruiting, which cannot be good.

Ditto one of the Roma tomatoes.

More wood chips came in, so when I go tomorrow, I'm gonna put cardboard down on the paths (to kill the weeds) and then strew wood chips on top of them. That will be a lot of work.

Other than that...

The Schlock luncheon turned out to be more fun than I imagined it would be. The Montgomery crew are actually a nice group of people. It was the Middletown office that drove me batty.

And then when I got home, there was an Incident with Mabel. A CATastrophe, you might say. (Yuk, yuk, yuk.)

Mabel somehow got stuck in a polyethelene shopping bag and took off racing up and down the stairs for five minutes straight (poor frightened little beast) before finally settling in the deepest darkest recess under the fainting couch. Very difficult to reach, but I had to because the only way I could figure she'd get stuck in a bag is if the bag's handles were around her neck—which meant she was at high risk for strangling herself.

Somehow I managed to reach in and cut the damn thing off her—my hands are covered with small scratches this morning.

Then for another three hours, I kept popping under to do neuro checks on her eyes while she hissed & batted at me. Were her pupils equal & reactive? I mean, cat's eyes are so different from human eyes. Would neuro checks even be a part of feline differential diagnosis?

But she's fine now, though it took her several hours to settle down.

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Missing Little Green Men; Feuding Cats

2026-06-07T12:43:25Z

Whaddiya know. The cheap weed wacker did exactly what I needed it to do once I reassembled it so the retaining cap didn't keep falling off.

Of course, the feature I really wanted—six little green men who crawl out of the box, fall to their knees, and begin weeding out stumps and roots—was not available. That still needs to be a by-hand shovel job. Hey! You get what you pay for.

###

The kiskas are hating heavily on each other this morning. They spend about 30% of their time grooming each other and 40% hissing and batting at one another. (The other 30% they spend sleeping obliviously on opposite corners of the Patrizia-torium.) But this morning, they were going after each other tooth and nail with such fury, I had to get out the spray bottle.

What set them off, I wonder?

Mabel was so pissed off about something that she actually woke me up around 5—leaving me under-rested for the Schlock alumni luncheon that I have somehow agreed to go to later today.

When I went downstairs, I found the front door wide open.

This is another one of the peculiarities of the House of Icky: The front door does not stay closed when it's windy out.

Fortunately, the house is in a remote rural area. Unless a serial killer has recently escaped from one of the local prisons, an open front door is unlikely to endanger me.

However! Molly likes to think of herself as an indoor-outdoor cat, and I have found her wandering outside a couple of times after the door has blown open. That is worrisome because if a hawk will go after a chicken, it will also go after a cat.

Did Molly wander outside last night?

Did Mabel wake me up to tattle on her?

###

Chatted a little with Ichabod last night.

Realized that while I was quite good at keeping myself occupied and productive when I lived on the other side of the river, I am miserable at it here. Though I did try when I first moved here.

Really not much I can do about that: It is the place; it is not me.

But, of course, it feels as though it's me.

I'm part of an epidemic! Isolated senior citizens.

If I were more of an egomaniac, the Work in Progress would sustain me. I would think of this isolation as a kind of literary retreat and funnel all of my energy into words.

But my ego is simply not strong enough for that kind of role-play game. Yes, the words are important. To me. But I have no idea if they'll ever be important to anyone else, and I need involvement in stuff that is important to everyone else to round out my resume as a Real Human Girl.

Anyway.

I'll book the Michigan trip today.

If that doesn't work out... It's Ithaca.

One way or another, I need to start thinking about packing and moving logistics (ugh).

I was thinking I might hire Sarah to help me pack. Sarah is the sweet, over-burdened single mother who appalled me that one time at Schlock by dressing so the crack of her ass showed when she sat with a client. (She was actually a reasonably competent tax preparer.) I am probably going to need someone to help me pack. I'm really going to that luncheon today to get her contact info.

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Minders

2026-06-06T11:54:24Z

The knee brace is helping. Maybe.

The weed wacker is useless. Probably. The weeds I need to wack are thick and tall, and this is a very low-end piece of equipment, designed primarily to edge lawns. It would cost around $400 to buy a piece of equipment specifically designed for taking out weeds like mine, and I ain't blowing that kind of money on a weed wacker.

I got to the garden around 11 yesterday. It was already 82°, so I only lasted 20 minutes or so. The older I get, the less I can stand up to heat. I remember biking around Sicily with my first husband before Ichabod was born; we would routinely bike 100 miles a day in 100° heat. How did I manage to do that?

Anyway, I took the weed wacker to some weeds, and it promptly fell apart.

It was wayyyyy too hot to continue weeding by hand.

So, I went home and watched YouTube videos—had I put it together the right way when I was assembling the damn thing? I have no intuition whatsoever when it comes to mechanical stuff. Was I using it the right way?

No one recommends using it for heavy weeds!

But if you must use it for heavy weeds, then you should tackle them from the top down.

Which, of course, I hadn't been doing.

But which I will shortly attempt to do today when I toddle out to the garden at 8.

If that doesn't work, I'll return the damn thing.

###

My weed wacker misadventures made me feel very pathetic.

Honestly, I wanted to curl up in a little ball and cry.

Why don't I have someone in my life who can do this kind of shit for me?

Because you don't! snapped the small, still voice within, which tends to get angry whenever I wallow in self-pity. And nobody wants to watch a 74-year-old lady cry. Particularly not the 74-year-old lady herself.

I was discussing the details of my July trip with Tom and mentioned the BoyZ were coming round to why I might want to move: "Their big objection is around the potential for physical decrepitude!!! 'What if you need help?'

"I explained it thusly: 'Well, I'm pretty sure Tom would be willing to drive me to the cataract doctor & pretty sure he wouldn't be willing to give me a bed bath if I went into a coma on his couch.'"

Tom laughed. "Did you tell the boys I'm a simple midwesterner with no serial killer tendencies and that I keep my sexual predation to a minimum around roomies? I haven't broached anything with Zoe and Rudy - they are used to me just springing things on them. But they'll be fine and have the same questions the boys do. I think Zoe will be a little relieved that someone will be around keeping an eye on me. She believes I need a minder."

A minder!

Yes, that's exactly it.

Someone who tracks you. Someone who is noticing the small victories & defeats of your day-by-day.

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You're Either On the Bus or Off the Bus

2026-06-05T14:07:47Z

Multiple errands took me to the other side of the river yesterday—which I like so much more than this side of the river. I have fond memories of living in the sleepy little town of Hyde Park. The local cottage industry is Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

Though that may be changing. Hyde Park is also the home of the Culinary Institute of America, which has become pretty famous with the rise of food content programming across streaming networks. No fewer than three enormous resort-style hotels are going up in Hyde Park, all scheduled to open in the next three years. I can't help thinking that those investors misread the economic signals: Is anyone gonna want to blow five grand on a luxury vacation in fuckin' Hyde Park, NY, in three years? Is anyone gonna have five grand to blow on a luxury vacation anywhere in three years? I mean, apart from the one-percenters?

But I've been plenty wrong about those things before.

###

Among the useful things I bought yesterday were a knee brace and a weed wacker. I'm trying both of them out today.

I went across the river to have a fasting blood sugar drawn—so maybe that's why I felt so weak while I was shopping. I ate a banana, but honestly, I thought I might collapse at Home Depot. Of course, Home Depot—this cavernous warehouse with weak flurescent lighting, no air conditioning, and aisles and aisles and aisles of machinery and building materials—is one of my least favorite places in the world, so maybe that played into it.

Anyway, when I got home, I more-or-less collapsed. Yes, idleness is bad. But sometimes...

Rewatched Ghost World, which continues to be a brilliant movie.

That bus Norman waits for throughout the film. That finally comes for him at the end of the film, even though Enid knows the route was discontinued more than two years ago.

The bus is analogous to the symbol of the door in the wall in H.G. Wells' story of the same name. It's a story that's been a great favorite of mine since childhood. The door in the wall is what's in modern parlance called a portal. Ah! But a portal to where?

Is the bus a modern parallel to the mythological ferry over the River Styx? When Enid finally boards it at the end of the film, is this a code for her suicide? Is it a metaphor for the end of childhood? Or is it just a weird thing in a movie filled with weird things?

I still get goosebumps at that throwaway flash of a scene when Norman actually gets on the bus.

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This and That

2026-06-04T11:31:05Z

Down once again to one chicken—the indominable Black Chicken.

Happened on Icky's watch—I never let the chickens out unless I can sit outside watching out for them for a couple of hours. Not that that matters, I suppose—Nature red in tooth and claw, predators are gonna do what predators are gonna do. Without a chicken run, they were dead chickens walking.

But it feels better to have someone to blame, and I blame him.

I think it was some kind of raptor.

Icky had let the chickens out and then taken off.

When it was near dark, I went down to shut them in their coop—only they weren't in their coop.

So, I took off calling for them: "Chickens! Chickens!"

And eventually found Black Chicken, sitting dazed by the compost heap, with a big (thankfully superficial) wound on her back. I'm thinking the only way she could have gotten that is if some large raptor bird had swooped down on her & tried to carry her off.

Somehow, she managed to get away! Black Chicken is a survivor.

The other black chicken wasn't as lucky.

The other black chicken had just begun trusting me enough to take bits of tasty tortilla treats out of my hand. I was almost comfortable enough with her longevity prospects—almost—to make up a silly nickname for her. She was a very cautious chicken.

Icky did take Black Chicken to a vet—the wound will heal, she'll recover.

But she won't be fine without a companion: Chickens are very social little creatures.

I wish I could just kidnap Black Chicken and smuggle her to egg_shell! The Underground Chicken Railroad! egg_shell knows how to take care of chickens!

But she's not my chicken.

I am sad, though I accept the inevitability. This is what life is. Since animals can't photosynthesize, eventually all of us are on the cafeteria menu. In the end, we all get eaten, whether that be by lions and tigers and bears or bacteria.

###

The garden is driving me a bit nuts because the weeds are growing so fast, particularly those fuckin' nettles. The weeds are thriving! My vegetables, not so much.

It's a very different environment than the Hyde Park Community Garden. For one thing, it's in full sunlight. Since we are now in full summer—not by the calendar but meteorologically—I've been watering the garden every other day, but possibly I'm overwatering it? The cucumber leaves have yellow spots, the basil pinkish spots.

Traditionally, I've always found weeding by hand meditative. But not this much weeding! So today, I'm gonna go over to the Home Depot to see if I can pick up a cheap, portable weed wacker.

###

Finished Chapter 7. It was difficult to write: I really wanted a different authorial voice than I used in Part 1. I think I succeeded in that. But Flavia is just not as interesting a character as Grazia was. Plus I am now in the realm of pure fictioneering, since Flavia is not a Patrizia interject. Whole cloth fictioneering carries a special set of challenges that involve plotting as well as style.

###

My knee is still a problem. Some days it improves; some days, it's Not Good. It's not the patella—it's some ligament behind the patella. Although it affects the patella because if that ligament is hurting, I use the leg in a particular way that puts weird stress on the patella.

It was bad yesterday, very achey, so after I watered the garden, I just lay on my fainting couch icing it all day and reading (Chaim Potok's The Promise, which is a treasure trove of useful Hasid information should I ever go back to my June Miller novel.)

It feels 100% better today, so maybe that's what I need to do for a couple of days. Nothing

But I always feel so guilty when I do nothing.

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Chapter 7: The Real Sister Wives of the Quaint & Scenic Hudson Valley

2026-06-02T11:17:06Z

Chapters 1 through 6 are here.

Part 2: Flavia

Chapter 7

If I had it to do over again (famous last words!), I would have torn the place down. It was one of the older dwellings on the Cherrytown loop—roads that had never seen a single cherry, but which, once upon a time, were overrun with feral crab apple trees. Hard little crab apples might pass for cherries if you weren’t paying attention. The tanners who settled this part of the Catskills probably used them for hard cider. By the 1930s, though, when the place went up, the tanners were long gone. They’d stripped the bark off the native hemlocks, polluted the streams, and moved on.

I bought it to save it: two hundred acres of mostly untouched woods plus a residential structure, more shack than house. The man who’d been living there since the Depression was one of those mountain hermit types, but he'd had distant relatives who'd waited out probate and were being courted by developers. You wouldn’t expect a developer to be interested in a parcel some hundred miles from New York City at the end of a twisting road, but you’d be wrong. There's always someone willing to bulldoze a hillside if the survey looks promising. So I decided I’d make the relatives rich instead and then donate the land to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development.

Except they didn’t want it.

“What am I going to do with it?” I moaned.

“I’ll live there,” Neal said.

And within two months of the day I signed the deed, he'd moved in.

Hardly anyone who knew him understood why he would leave the small but bustling city of Kingston, where he had so many friends, where everyone knew his name, where he was one of the cocks of the walk, for the isolation of a mountainside.

But I understood.

And now he didn’t live here anymore. He didn’t live anywhere. He was dead. I’d been with him here most weekends for the past five years—and in plenty of other places besides, of course—but those other places weren’t imprinted with him the way this one was. Here was the kitchen where he cooked for me, the garden where he grew me kale and heirloom tomatoes, the bed where he brought me to sweet moan.

( But wait! There's more! )

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Insights You Wish You Hadn't Had

2026-05-31T13:31:01Z

So, there was supposed to be some kind of work day at the New Paltz Community Garden yesterday. I showed up at the brutal hour of 9am, and nobody was there! No apologetic emails or texts either. Not then and not since.

You're supposed to do one of these work days each season, & this one was mine. (I believe in getting this kind of chore out of the way early.)

Anyway, they had their chance, and I ain't signing up for a work day again.

###

Also, mega-snark from the usual suspects when I posted the news about Alpha Male's passing to the Well group on FB.

I have heard from various sources... I wrote.

That's just a rumor!

You don't know that!

Snark! Snark! Snark!

Well, I do know that, and since Alpha Male basically saved the Well—a tottering horseshoe crab of a social media site that has been around since the 1980s—by scraping up and leading a team of investors to buy the damn thing and run it as a type of coop, I thought they might want to know too.

But no, they'd rather activate moldering feuds from 30 years ago, so I took the post down.

I fumed!

Then I chastized myself: These people are irrelevant! Why do you let yourself care?

But it took me a good half hour to stop caring.

###

Apart from that, it was a pleasant if melancholy day. Real-life Flavia was once again up at Brian's old house. "Do you want anything? Come up and see what you might want."

So I drove up to the Catskills through the Shawangunk Mountains:

Claimed Brian's really high-end Ninja blender and an excellent portable mixer with many fabulous whisk attachments. And two Moroccan end tables.

Also took more boxes of books to disseminate among various local libraries (all of which raise money with periodic book sales).

And promised to find a good home for Brian's voluminous collection of camping gear. I am hoping RTT wants it. There are bags & bags of it.

It was good to see Real-life Flavia. The house itself, though, was... sad. I'm still shocked by how much I miss Brian. I've weathered the deaths of people who were closer to me with far less emotion. Though it wasn't just Brian's ghost that made me feel sad, it was also the horrible state of neglect the house was in. There were mouse turds everywhere and dust and filth and smoke grime.

How could real-life Mimi (who showed up to take a shower) have lived with this for 10 months?

###

Calling Betsy has been on the To Do list for over a week now, so I did that last night.

I actually like Betsy, but she is exceedingly high maintenance, which means I've gotta ration my exposure, plus I am not a big phone person.

Betsy has had a recurrence of her Lyme disease except maybe it's not Lyme disease, maybe it's just a complete physical & mental breakdown. (I can relate: That's exactly what happened to me with the Schlock gig).

Towards the end of the call, though, it occurred to me that in addition to all that, Betsy is really quite nuts.

She was ranting about some sort of penalty she had to pay on her 2023 taxes, which was all due to some TurboTax snafu.

"Well, if you don't really owe it, don't pay it," I said. "Amend your 2023 return."

No, no. She couldn't be bothered.

"You don't have to do it. I'll file the amendment for you."

No, no. It was too much work.

"Betsy," I said. "If you don't correct the underlying mistake, they will keep charging you more penalties. Do you not get that? I am happy to do this for you—"

No, no. She just couldn't deal with that.

It occurred to me then that she liked the fact that she was being targeted unjustly. She enjoys thinking of herself as persecuted. She will actually go out of her way to create situations where she can feel persecuted.

This is one of those insights you wish you hadn't had.

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Memory Eternal

2026-05-30T10:52:32Z

Heard from various sources that Alpha Male has died.

No official announcement (which is odd), but he hasn't been seen in any of the old familiar places, and this morning, I noticed that his FB has been deactivated.

Alpha Male was not what you would call a personal friend, but he chose me to be second-in-command of the Seekrit Private Political Group he started back when Trump was first elected, and I had a lot of affection & respect for him. He was very smart and very jolly. What you might call an old-school Republican—big capitalism fanboy but with a heart, always looking for solutions to social problems that would empower the marginalized so they wouldn't need to be caught by safety nets.

Also, he was younger than me, so you know—there was that.

Alpha Male was always talking about hosting a camp at his farm in Virginia to teach us all to shoot.

I shall miss him.

###

Other than that...

Some younger people I know had a falling out about Zionism.

The history here is interesting.

Zionism is an Ashkenazi phenomenon. Sephardic Jews had been living more or less peaceably in Palestine for hundreds of years, but it was the German death camps and the cry "Never again!" that crystallized the push for a Jewish homeland and the formation of the state of Israel.

Can you dislike Israel and still be a good Jew? Is rejection of Israel, or indeed any criticism at all, a form of antisemitism?

There are a lot of Jews who are not crazy about Israel—most notably, the Haredi who number about 2.1 million worldwide and who take the Biblical dictate that only the Messiah will establish a homeland for the Jews ver-r-ry seriously.

There are also many Jews who are so disgusted by Israel's political behavior, specifically with respect to Gaza, that they have come to question its existence.

The young person I know falls into that latter camp.

He had a very close friend who is religious in that strange way that people who reject their religious upbringing but then gradually find their way back to it are religious.

The two friends fell out over Israel and will probably never speak again. Friendship severed!

Anyway, this narrative imbued me with a deep desire to reread Chaim Potok's The Chosen, which I did yesterday since my knee was acting achey breaky once again. I also watched the movie.

The only reason I am at all interested in living forever is that I am very interested in how these political situations are gonna work themselves out.

Will Israel even be around in 50 years?

I kinda doubt it.

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Does Not Work & Play Well With Others

2026-05-29T19:21:45Z

I was in a fretful mood all day yesterday for a totally banal and superficial reason: Big Fruit Company updated my phone IOS without my permission, leaving me with a whole bunch of weird-looking icons and alien camera settings.

FUCK THIS.

And yeah, I know—first world problems.

###

In the early evening, I had to do a New Paltz Community Garden volunteer stint (they're not really volunteer stints since you have to do them), which involved painting new plot number signs so the Border Patrol that does those awful monthly rounds can know who to send their ding messages to. (Dear Patrizia, Ding! we noticed you have a single black garbage bag on your premises Ding! As you know, we are a 100% organic garden with no tolerance for plastics of any sort Ding! PLUS you need General Tidying of odds & ends not actively being used in gardening Ding!)

It was a Montessori session for grownups. Cans of poster paints! Brushes! Cans of water! Twenty or so progressive gardeners, trending toward the female geezer range but with a few non-threatening males and a scattering of be-nose-ringed and be-eyebrow-piercing-ed Gen Z-ers thrown in for the sake of diversity. Herbal teas and non-gluten cupcakes.

I was filled with righteous hatred for these people!

I wanted to slap every last one of them!

Of course, I knew I was reacting outrageously, so immediately clamped down on all feedback loops 'cause just the sight of them brought out my inner MAGA, and I was afraid of lashing out.

Amazing how strong my reaction was, honestly. I mean, all they're trying to do is make the world a better place, right? True, they are utterly humorless and bland, but is humor really the hill I'm prepared to die on?

Maybe it was just the fretful mood and the I-fuckin'-hate-this-phone-IOS fallout.

###

Meanwhile, good things are happening—like yesterday, I wrote my way out of a major conundrum in the Work in Progress, and the light at the end of the Chapter 7 tunnel is so bright, I may actually finish the rough draft of that chapter today.

My knee feels better.

And also, this morning, the first of Ichabod's garden gnomes arrived. (One more is coming next week plus a couple of pink flamingos.) And a selfie stick! 'Cause I was whining pathetically on Tuesday about my inability to take good selfies.

If I practice enough, I may even learn to do selfies without my neck veins popping!

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Belle da Costa Greene & "Starlet"

2026-05-28T13:08:36Z

Hung out with the kiskas and the chickens yesterday, staying as horizontal and on ice as possible. The kiskas have forgiven me for my brief road trip. (They are very odd kiskas, as I have written before; they don't like to be picked up and snuggled, even though I explain to them: This is how you earn your Friskies! I do think they love me after their odd kiska fashion but it's hard to judge that boundary between love and tolerance.) But the chickens were pissed! I had to offer them three corn tortillas before they would deign to take them from my hand.

###

I read a very trashy novel about JP Morgan's librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, who was a very fascinating woman:

JP Morgan's library is now a small museum well worth visiting, with its enormous collection of illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance paintings, drawings, & prints, original manuscripts of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Keats' Endymion (among others), and three Gutenberg Bibles, but its chief attraction, in my eyes at least, is the library itself, which is like every fantasy you ever had about a fabulous library in an old mansion:

It is just fuckin' amazing.

And Belle da Costa Greene put it all together.

She was a Black woman (who claimed to be Portuguese) and expert both in illuminated manuscripts and the evasion of custom duties. She and Morgan were very, very close. When asked once whether she'd been Morgan's mistress, she laughed and replied, "We tried!"

(For such a straightlaced capitalist pig—he is said to have inspired Mr. Monopoly in the game Monopoly—Morgan kept some outré company. He was similarly close to the astrologer Evangeline Adams and paid her handsomely for merger and acquisition consultations. And he never signed contracts while Mercury was in retrograde!)

###

In the evening, I noticed that Criterion had some early movies by my director boyfriend Sean Baker.

I watched Starlet.

Starlet is very, very good, and it was very interesting to note how even that early in Sean Baker's career (2012), his signature style was fully intact. Baker makes movies about how innocence prevails in contexts that mainstream culture condemns as morally repugnant. I find his films intensely moving.

Starlet is about the unlikely friendship between a young porn actress and an 86-year-old woman. It stars Ernest Hemingway's great-granddaughter and Sean Baker's actual dog.

At one point, the dog runs away—and I immediately began crying and ran to Doesthedogdie.com to check and see if the dog comes back because if the dog didn't, I would have to stop watching the movie.

Alas! Starlet flies too far under the radar for Doesthedogdie.com!

So, I steeled myself and kept watching—and the dog does come back, and the film has the most beautiful, luminous, poignant ending...

###

My knee feels much better today though it is still far from 100%. In a few hours, I will toddle off to the garden, finish my planting, and put up the solar-powered lamps kindly gifted me by R & J.

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Memory

2026-05-27T17:20:54Z

R & J have the type of kids one is immediately inspired to write a children's book about.

You know—the types of stories where the children find some sort of magic creature in the green hollow behind the pool that must be kept secret from the grownups and that grants Wishes That Come True With a Twist (Five Children & It, Half Magic). R & J's kids are just the most winsome, brilliant, beautiful children ever.

They were definitely the high point of an action-packed Memorial Day weekend during which I also hung out with real-life Flavia in the Catskills and Ichabod in Cold Springs.

Real-life Flavia told me our mutual pal Betsy has had a recurrence of her Lyme disease, necessitating a medical leave from her job. And I felt like such an awful friend because Betsy has reached out to me a few times in the last four months, and I just ignored her. Why? Because Betsy requires effort. And I like Betsy, but I just didn't have the energy, the Schlock job drained me so completely & left me feeling so...extinguished... as though there was nothing remarkable or special about me at all: I was just a colorless cog in an awful machine.

I was actually pretty lonely during that time. But I couldn't deal with anybody else's problems, and Betsy always has problems. I was lonely for someone who would be solicitous about my problems.

Sigh...

I will call Betsy sometime this week.

Watching R & J's enchanting children made me ponder the nature of childhood memory. The baby is the baby; her hippocampus still hasn't laid down neural connections with most of her other cortical structures. She doesn't even have enough neural connections for a personality yet, although she does have a temperament—remarkably serene, observant, easily delighted.

The two older children (ages 4 and 2½) are old enough to have personalities. Princess Star is independent, smart, choosy about the objects of her affection, with more than a touch of fire. Prince Fire Engine is a total charmer, extroverted, and possesses the largest vocabulary (words and syntax) I have ever observed in a 2½-year-old. They are lively, interactive children whose lives are filled with adventures—but in all likelihood, they won't remember a single one of them when they are older.

I saw this with my own children, too, of course.

When Ichabod was 2½, I threw a cup at his father. I missed! I'm a lousy thrower. But Ichabod, sitting on his father's lap, understandably got very, very upset.

His father & I got divorced about a year later, and in my defense, Mrs. Hare 2.0 subsequently threw an answering machine. Bill really was that infuriating! But the cup got mythologized, and the answering machine did not. Maybe because there were no kids present when the answering machine was hurled? I dunno.

All throughout his childhood, for years, whenever Ichabod & I fought over anything, there would alway come a moment on the downside of the argument when Ichabod would sigh dramatically and stage a pensive look, which would prompt me to ask, "What's up, Boo?" And he would tell me, "I am remembering the cup."

This naturally made me feel awash with guilt.

Last Thanksgiving, I asked him: "Do you still remember the cup?"

"Huh?" he asked.

And when I explained, he said, "Oh, that. I think I can remember remembering it. If that makes sense. But the actual event itself?" He squinched up his face.

Yesterday, since I'd just spent time around the remarkable H________ children and was curious about memory, I asked him again.

This time, he said, of course, he remembered it.

"But you didn't last time we talked about it!"

"Yes, I did!" he replied indignantly.

No, he did not.

But I let it slide. Because what would be the point of arguing?

Of course, it was fabulous spending time with Ichabod. It's always fabulous spending time with Ichabod. Ichabod & RTT are my two favorite people on the planet.

But Dia Beacon turned out to be closed.

And Cold Spring turned out to be very different than I had remembered it. I hadn't been there since before the pandemic. Back then it was filled with the most fabulous antique shops—there must have been a dozen of them on Main Street—including the wonderful Doll Hospital where I would stand for hours and watch the proprietor do restoration on vintage dolls.

But there was maybe one antique store open on Main Street yesterday.

And Ichabod was out of it because he hadn't gotten enough sleep, and I was out of it because my knee was really throbbing, and I'd rather stupidly parked my car at the top of a steep hill, hiked down to meet him at the Metro North Station, and thus faced the prospect of hiking back up the hill. (Of course, he volunteered to get the car and come back for me, but I said, No, because I am either (a) macho, (b) a masochist, (c) dumb, (d) all of the above.)

We had lunch at a Mexican restaurant in the non-quaint-and-charming village outside Cold Spring where all the real people live, and then drove up to the Chuang Yen Monastery—which was not the same as I remembered it, either. The Largest Sitting Buddha in the Western Hemisphere was behind locked doors, and we spent a long time searching for the pond with the carnivorous goldfish, and when we finally found it, there weren't any goldfish, just a few brownish-green carp, and they no longer stormed the little landing when people gathered to look at them.

I could tell Ichabod felt bad that he was not "fully present" as his therapist would have put it.

This morning, he texted me apologizing again: I haven't been sleeping well.

And then he told me he had ordered a whole bunch of gnomes and pink flamingos for my garden—I think because he kept asking me yesterday what he could buy me, and I kept saying, Nothing. The only things I want are garden ornaments.

###

I had been thinking about gardening today, but I think instead I'm gonna stay sedentary & ice my knee.

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Slow Burn

2026-05-23T15:25:46Z

I got a perfect score, 30 out of 30, on the MoCA cognitive assessment test.

The NP administering the test blinked several times rapidly and shook her head. "I've never seen a patient do that before."

So, I am compis mentis.

###

Maybe it was the fear of being not compis mentis that put me in such a black mood yesterday.

Or maybe it was Memorial Day.

Back when I had the Little Store, Memorial Day was the first opportunity to make Significant Bank after a long, harsh, belt-tightening winter. The Little Store was a tourist operation, just a few hundred yards away from Ed Rickets' old laboratory in Monterey, California; the cash flow was seasonal. Memorial Day wasn't just a chance to make some dough; it was also a harbinger of sorts, a portent, an omen: If I could push 10 bottles of Dave's Insanity Sauce over the four-day holiday, then my business would survive, and my family would not starve.

But came that day in 2008 when nobody had any disposable income anymore, so nobody bought hot sauce or delightful chili-themed pottery or fabulous masks or charming retablos anymore.

And the Little Store died...

Slow Burn. That was the name of the store. Slow Burn.

I can barely look at that photo without tearing up.

Fuck Obama anyway.

At least, when COVID hit, Biden understood the recessionary forces it would unleash and mobilized the Small Business Administration to provide a small business safety net.

Obama did absolutely nothing for small businesses when the 2008 recession hit; he just utilized Dubya Bush's economic team to maintain the plutocracy. Slow Burn was just another business that was too small not to fail.

###

I also managed to fuck up my left knee. A pain in the back side of the knee, and because you can't stop moving, and your body must accommodate somehow, has managed to spread to other parts of your knee.

Did I do it gardening? I kneel a lot when I'm gardening.

Last time I did this was last fall when I was off to visit my good pal A in D.C., and she sent me home with the world's best icebag, which I am utilizing this morning to good effect.

Shortly, I must amble out to do errands. Maybe one of those errands should be going to the drugstore to score some kind of knee brace.

It's supposed to rain rather furiously, so I won't feel obligated to move very much the rest of the day. But the next three days include a lot of social activities, so I will be moving around.

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Dragons' Teeth

2026-05-22T12:15:06Z

Did an enormous amount of weeding yesterday, and 15 minutes of wrestling with the hose, since the sky, though grey, showed little intention of actually raining. Very little actual planting, and planting is the fun part.

Fuckin' nettles are like those mythological dragons' teeth sown by Cadmus! If you're not nimble enough to pull out the entire root, a thousand new nettles spring up overnight from the mutilated stump of the original nettle.

###

Today I am off to the neurologist for a cognition test.

This is something I promised Ichabod I would do after the Wellbutrin overdose debacle in Ithaca last Thanksgiving.

No, I don't think my cognition is hovering anywhere near the dementia zone, but of course, I wouldn't, would I?

And I am at risk, I suppose: Both Jane and Annie, my mother's two sisters, had severe dementia at the end of their lives, and my maternal grandmother (whom I never met) was picked up smeared in feces wandering the trashcan circuit in Miami Beach a few decades back. My mother didn't have dementia, but she was definitely wayyyy eccentric, and maybe she would have developed it had she lived longer.

It's probably not a bad idea to have some sort of baseline here.

###

Also, apparently, RTT can perform marriages within the City of Ithaca.

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The Weirdness of Being OLD

2026-05-21T15:34:03Z

Temperatures dropped back to seasonal norms last night. Thank the Lord! Because I was able to sleep, deeply, lavishly, and because the swelling in my feet went away.

That's right! Swelling in my feet.

Oh, the weirdness of being old!

For the past couple of days, in the 90°+ temperatures, my feet had mild edema! My toes felt like little sausages in casings that were a tad too tight.

And this was upsetting because pedal edema is a symptom of congestive heart failure, and I wondered, How can I have congestive heart failure? I just had a perfectly normal EKG at the cardiologist's three months ago!

As I've said many times, I don't mind dying (I think), but I do mind a long, drawn-out process in which one by one, the systems falter.

###

Anyway, because of the heat and worries that my health was collapsing in a new, completely unexpected way, I did not have a good day yesterday. All day long, I kept applying the tips of my fingers to my ankles to time the fractional discoloration. Are they gonna have to replace my mitral valve? I wondered. How long have I got?

Irrational panic is not good for productivity.

Forced myself out for retail therapy. I actually don't like to shop, so I don't know why I thought retail therapy would improve my mood—maybe because it seems to work for everyone else? Dunno.

Went to the Ulster County version of a Deep Discounter I had frequented in Dutchess County, and that, even though I don't like to shop, had surprised me pleasantly in the past with the abundance of its reasonably priced hyaluronic acid face creams and surprisingly attractive leggings.

Place is ug-lee! Hideous overhead fluorescents. Wares crammed onto warehouse shelves with no effort at making stuff pretty. The employees, chatting with one another beside their mops and pails, didn't move out of the way for customers, and I got stalked by a guy in a wheelchair!

Left in a quasi-panic. Raced back to the casa and applied a full face of makeup, even foundation, which is something I have not done in months.

Throughout most of my life, I've been one of those people who look very, very different with and without makeup. Without makeup: typical Southern Italian features, very gaunt, big nose, cranial caverns. With makeup: a veritable Sophia Loren, exotic, exquisite, lovely!

This duality stayed with me most of my life.

But it kind of petered out last year.

Now, with makeup or without makeup, I just look like an old lady.

Aging! Not easy. I mean, sure, easy, in that all you have to do to achieve it is to remain Not Dead. But all the mental adjustments involved in accepting your new limitations? Very, very difficult.

###

Still reading Elizabeth Strout. Lucy Barton picks up toward the middle, though the ending falls apart. Now I'm on to Anything Is Possible. Elizabeth Strout has written a lot of books, so my reading is set till June.

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Elizabeth Strout & Her Discontents

2026-05-20T15:09:04Z

Mother Nature is supposed to be watering the garden today, thereby ushering in cooler, more seasonable temps that will allow me to finish the major plantings tomorrow.

Other than that, not much on the agenda. I will continue chipping away at the Work in Progress and making money.

###

I've been reading Elizabeth Strout, who is kinda the American Alice Munro.

(I had to stop reading the genuine Alice Munro after the news broke that she'd been complicit in her second husband's sexual abuse of her youngest daughter. The abuse started when the girl was nine years old. And I will never forgive Munro.)

I can't tell whether I like Strout or not, but up to a certain point, she is compulsively readable, her short, structurally straightforward sentences create pointilist fictional characterizations, simple detail layering on to simple detail. She uses a lot of repetition, and though her language is utterly humorless, sometimes she will position a sentence within a paragraph in an arch way.

But her characters ultimately bore me. Once I figured out (fairly early in the book) that—Spoiler! Spoiler! Spoiler!—the father sexually abused the protagonist in My Name Is Lucy Barton, I kinda lost interest in reading any further.

I guess I'm not really interested in the basic humanity of all people.

I'm only interested in the basic humanity of interesting people.

###

As a side note, I'll add that abuse is abuse and never to be tolerated.

But in general, I am more forgiving than is sanctioned by current American morality of consensual sexual relationships between underage but postpubescent teenagers and adults. Pedophilia is to 21st-century America what communism was to the U.S. in the 1950s. Wasn't too terribly long ago that Gigi and Summer of '42 were box office hits.

The scientific rationale behind the current morality is that minors' frontal lobes are undeveloped, implying that on the evening before one's 18th birthday, there's some sort of time-lapse flurry of neurological activity so that frontal lobes magically mature, thereby rendering consent legal (if still ill-advised) the following morning. Which is patently ridiculous.

And anyway, the pre-frontal cortex doesn't stop developing until some time between the ages of 25 and 30.

Philippe Aries maintained that adolescence was an invention of post-industrial society, designed to keep an entire class of people off the job market.

I'm inclined to agree.

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Playing the Old Lady Card

2026-05-19T17:31:07Z

Went out at the crack of dawn to soak the garden this morning since today's Day 3 of the heatwave, and temps were projected to be 80° F by 8am. (They were actually 82°!)

Yesterday, I didn't make it out till noon when temps had already topped 90°, and the hose got hopelessly tangled. My plot is a good 20 yards or more away from the nearest water spigot, so my hose is very long. And very heavy! I would have bought something much more lightweight and flexible myself, but I didn't buy this hose, I inherited it.

Unraveling that heavy, heavy hose in that horrible, horrible heat was just fuckin' awful!
Just as I was giving myself a stern pep talk—Do not burst into tears! It will use up most of your strength and accomplish nothing—a studly young Millennial came wandering down one of the paths. I am not above playing the helpless old lady card. I threw myself at him. Fortunately, he was kind-hearted.

But depending upon the kindness of strangers is not a sustainable strategy.

I'm gonna have to research some way of dealing with the hose. I imagine there's some piece of specialized equipment that would do the trick, and it probably ain't cheap.

The community garden is right by the Wallkill River and the Nyquist-Harcourt Wildlife Sanctuary, so, you know—bee-yewwww-tee-full! But I've got a date with my air conditioner for the rest of the afternoon.

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In Defense of Transgressive Humor

2026-05-18T15:30:44Z

As loopy and long as it was, the hose turned out to be manageable. I gave the baby cukes, marigolds, basil, & chili peppers a good soaking, but at 10 o'clock in the morning, it was simply too hot to do any transplanting or serious weeding. Jungle heat is serious heat, and in faux-summer, the Hudson Valley is a jungle.

Shortly, I will toddle forth to water today.

This garden is a bit more of a commitment than my Hyde Park Community Garden plot because it's 12 miles away from where I live.

Fortunately, temps are expected to sink down to a far more seasonal 70° range by the end of this week, so I can finish planting the rest of the lettuce, spinach, radishes, beans, & tomatoes without courting heat stroke.

###

Other than that, I did 1,000 more words on the Work in Progress.

The Flavia character is in no way, shape, or form a fictional projection of me, so I can't lift passages straight from my diary. I worry that the serviceable prose I'm manufacturing anew is not very interesting to read. (This assumes that my actual diary is interesting to read, which may not be the case.)

I keep telling myself: That doesn't matter. Just write something that moves the plot along and relays the necessary character info. You can edit the damn thing later once it actually exists!

###

I also fought with Icky throughout most of the day. He was being a dick about installing the window AC unit in the Patrizia-torium. So, what's new, right?

I would have installed it myself except that (a) during the winter, the AC unit lives in a closet with a door that has no doorknob and thus is impossible to open without professional lock-picking tools, and (b) the goddamn thing weighs 50 pounds, and I can't lift it.

Icky had decided to spend the day on the phone, ranting about genocide. I couldn't tell by eavesdropping whether he was for genocide or against it, or whether it was a single long conversation with one person or multiple short conversations with many people, but at a certain point, after I'd asked him nicely five times in five hours—the Patrizia-torium hoards heat when exterior temps rise much over 75° and that makes working very uncomfortable—I remarked, "You know, for someone who professes to care about world injustice, you certainly care very little about helping people inside your own orbit."

This elicited an Icky temper tantrum, but fuck it. He did install the AC unit.

###

Since there is absolutely nothing new in the entire streaming universe, I have been watching Malcolm In the Middle reruns. The BoyZ and I absolutely loved this show back in the day. Brian Cranston is right up there next to Dick Van Dyke as a brilliant physical comedian, and the satire ranges from goofy to sophisticatedly transgressive.

In the clip below, Lois decides to get rid of her horrible mother by exploiting the horrible mother's racism. To that end, Lois recruits the help of her Black neighbors. The clip incorporates every trope in the racist's toychest of fears except maybe drinking from the same water fountain:

You absolutely could not script something like this in the current climate. Humor today is tightly policed.

Thing about humor is that when you get a joke, it is a moment of absolute enlightment, a flash of intuitive awakening, a satori. And quite frankly, everyone can benefit from laughing at themselves from time to time.

This is why, even though I agree with the progressive left on the majority of issues, I have a hard time identifying as part of that pack. I hate political correctness & identity politics—I am flipping my middle finger at yew-ww-www, Robin DiAngelo and Ta-Nehisi Coates—is the prime source of political correctness.

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All's Fair in Pursuit of a Strong Narrative

2026-05-17T12:22:20Z

• Water's finally on at the New Paltz Community Garden. Just in the nick of time, too, since temps are soaring: The thermometer is supposed to hit 95° on Tuesday. Shortly, I must toddle forth to crack the logistics of the hose since one figures there will be great demand for water later this afternoon when the temperatures rise & the gardeners gather.

• Fitbit sez I am sleeping "poorly"—meaning long intervals of light sleep and comparatively few intervals of REM or deep sleep. I blame the warm weather. And (of course) aging.

• Finished Flavia's forensic reconstruction of the Last Weekend She Spent With Neal, and must now proceed to the Day After Neal-Palooza. Meaningful interactions with the Sister Wives!

• In Real Life Sister Wife news, real-life Mimi was supposed to be out of Brian's old house on May 1. Real-life Flavia let Mimi stay in the house for 10 months for free! But when Flavia arrived at the house yesterday (driving all the way from the Jersey Shore), Mimi was still there, frantically loading stuff into a U-Haul, which means real-life Flavia can't do any of the things she specifically drove up to do and essentially made the 420-mile round trip for nothing.

Real-life Mimi feels entitled to infinite slack because she has bipolar disorder.

Rather than take prescribed psychiatric medications, Real-Life Mimi has elected to treat her disorder by smoking massive quantities of dope, and from where I'm sitting, it ain't working. Mimi is functional. But barely.

If I were a nicer person, I wouldn't be so judgmental, I suppose.

But I'm not a nicer person.

One of the issues that comes up with writing about people you kinda/sorta know is that your narrative always clashes with their narrative to a greater or lesser degree. Feelings get hurt.

I'd been toying with the idea of making a Mimi suicide attempt one of the sub-motifs in Part 2, but balking because if the novel actually gets finished & published, a fictional Mimi suicide attempt might really devastate real-life Mimi.

Now, I'm thinking, The hell with that. All's fair in pursuit of a strong narrative.

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Beds 2 & 3

2026-05-15T13:09:09Z

Beds 2 & 3 in. (Cucumbers, basil.) There's room for some more plants in the basil bed, so I'm gonna put in a couple of heirloom tomatoes, too.

It was a cool, dank day, poised on the brink of rain but never quite spilling over. The amphibians were out full force.

In the middle of the night, I woke up with a horrendous stomach ache. I made a poki bowl for dinner, and I think the fish I used was not fresh.

I willed myself back to sleep 'cause, I mean, what the hell are you gonna do with yourself at 2:30 in the morning with a bad stomach ache? I feel somewhat better this morning, but still not 100%; if there was any way I could go back to bed and sleep for 24 hours, I would.

###

Very slowly implementing Chapter 7 of the Work in Progress—Flavia is going over the events of the last weekend she spent with Neal to figure out if there were clues to his imminent demise that she missed. I am writing very much inside the box, and that's kind of boring. But I have to trust that at this point, "boring" is an avoidance mechanism. I have to believe that I know my craft as a writer, so even if it reads (for a multitude of reasons, none of them strictly definitional) "boring" to me, it won't be to an audience.

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First Bed In

2026-05-13T13:57:49Z

Yesterday was gorgeous, so I spent the afternoon in the garden.

One bed planted. (Chili peppers.)

Five to go. (Lettuce, carrots, green onions, tomatoes, tomatillos, basil, cucumbers, and I guess—even though I don't like them much—squash. Maybe even more chili peppers. And flowers, of course, though those don't have to go in upraised beds.)

The general rule of thumb for gardens is to plant veggies that aren't so easy to find in the supermarket, although, of course, in the U.S., you can find anything in the supermarket. The specific rule of thumb this year is to keep costs down—fresh tomatoes are up 25% in the past year. I am planting mostly sauce tomatoes (Romas), which is a bit ridiculous as I'm unlikely to remain in this area, and probably won't want to move with 10 jars of spaghetti sauce even if it is Grandma Fiore's recipe. I'll try to find the sauce a good home.

I spent a lot of time kneeling, so my knees are sore this morning.

Ah, the joys of aging!

I didn't believe it when I went to a doctor for the first time in a looooong while couple of years back, and they told me I was now 5'8" tall after a lifetime of being 5'10". But when I was in Ithaca, it was obvious that RTT—5'8 ½"—is now taller than me. You're like a compressed Slinky when you get old; your spinal discs compress.

###

It's supposed to rain all day today, which now that I have plants in, is a good thing—saves me from watering!

I'm gonna make money, chip away at the Work in Progress, and reread Cloud Atlas.

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Octopuses and Gardens

2026-05-12T14:53:29Z

Spent much of yesterday trying to parse how Flavia will react to the news of Neal's death, since I don't want to repeat the Mimi phone call even from a Rashomon view.

Maybe she replays the events of the weekend they just spent together, wondering what she didn't see? I dunno. It irks me that I'm so removed from the creative source that these kinds of plot details aren't flowing! I blame the Schlock gig.

###

In other news, there was frost last night! You can't really plant while frost still rules the night. Hopefully, that will be the last of it.

Also, the New Paltz Community Garden Row Check Committee dinged my garden, citing "Needs general tidying of odds & ends."

What the fuck does that mean?

The garden is vast, which is why they rely on ridiculous bureaucratic measures like a Row Check Committee I suppose, but still. There are no authoritarians like left-wing progressive types who are suddenly put in charge of something.

You have to join a committee, too. I joined the Events Committee. It's filled with the Queen Bee types that 20 years ago, as the mother of a high school jock (Ichabod!), I spent my days avoiding. There's a text thread. The text thread is where these women vie with one another over which delicious treat they will be bringing to the next event—

I will bake cupcakes! 🧁 🧁🧁

I will bring hibiscus, elderberry, and mint tea so we can do an herbal tea tasting! 🍵🍵🍵

I will bring wholesome muffins! (No emoji. She lost points.)

I will not bring a goddam thing!

###

They've made a movie from Remarkably Bright Creatures, which was one of my favorite books a couple of years back, so last night I watched it.

Surprisingly good!

I mean—not a cinematic masterpiece or anything. But Sally Field and Lewis Pullman are excellent in the leading roles, the evocation of life as usual in a pretty little town in the Pacific Northwest was engaging, and the CGI octopus was awesome. It's a sentimental movie without being cloying. I cried buckets!

Octopuses have always fascinated me as the prime example of convergent evolution. For example: Their eyes have a cornea, lens, iris, and retina, the same system humans and other vertebrates use, and yet humans and octopuses diverged from their common ancestor 500 million years ago, long before the development of ocular organelles in either phylum.

They are extremely intelligent, but their neurons aren't myelinated (i.e. insulated) the way vertebrate neurons are. These neurons are able to transmit signals rapidly because they are so thick. Most of an octopus's neurons are not centralized into a brain but spread among their tentacles, which are not mere arm analogs but sophisticated sensory organs.

And despite Remarkably Bright Creatures' remarkably appealing Marcellus, octopuses are not social in the slightest. They have no equivalent to cultural learning. Both males and females die shortly after a reproduction cycle is complete, which makes for short lifespans, typically between one and five years. This is really fascinating to me because, as far as I can tell, vertebrate intelligence evolved as a tool for managing social interactions. I mean, what other function does intelligence perform? So, if they're not social, why did octopuses become intelligent?

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