Mallory's Camera

That Magnet-Clink

2024-09-12T12:30:30Z

Felt out of it all day yesterday. Out of it almost to the point of feeling physically disoriented, sub-threshold dizzy.

When I went tromping in the early evening, I glanced at my FitBit & saw that I’d only gotten five hours sleep the night before. So maybe that was the reason I felt so weird? More than practically any other person I know, I need my sleep. If I don’t log at least seven hours, I feel dissociated like I’m going through the motions for reasons I can no longer remember.

In the morning, I met up with BB (always delightful.)

We talked a lot about sex.

I cut the crush on Iggy off at the pass since it was a guaranteed trip off the cliff.

But I’m interested in it phenomenologically since it was the first bona fide glimmer of limerence I’ve experienced in ever so long, a genuine rush that helped me feel more connected to the world around me.

Orgasms are healthy, so I make sure I have a lot of them.

But the crush was about something more than orgasms. Some of it was about pheromones: You share a house with someone, you become familiar with the way they smell—no, I’m not talking about body odor here but that rootier, all-permeating musk people give off when they’re clean & bathed. I kinda think that musk is the basis of all real sexual attraction. I mean, yes, you can learn to be sexually attracted to practically anyone, but that magnet-clink thing only happens with someone with the right musk (i.e. pheromones.)

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In addition to all that woo-woo mind meld stuff I shared with Ben—the ultimate X, right? ‘cause he’s a dead X—we had a very good sexual relationship.

Post-Ben, I think that’s actually worked to turn me off sex. Because unless you dissociate during sex—been there! done that! it can be fun, but you have more control with a vibrator!—good sex is intimate, which means you’ve got to have trust.

Clearly, trusting Ben was one of the worst things I’ve ever done in my life (although without Ben, there would have been no RTT, so the ultimate balance of the misalliance was a positive.)

So I wonder whether that particular crash & burn has worked to turn me off for the past decade to the prospect of sex with other people.

I mean, I have had sex in the past decade: I dated rather compulsively for the first few years after I left Ithaca. But neither the sex nor the humans involved in the act were particularly memorable.

All grist for the mill.

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Anyway, apart from BB-ing, tromping, & thinking about sex, I Remunerated some (but not enough) and felt like a failure because Molly is out there somewhere, & I can’t seem to rescue her.

Is that the same thing as missing Molly?

Maybe.

I must say Mabel—Molly’s ostensibly “bonded” sibling—doesn’t seem to miss her in the slightest.

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Puppets Never See Their Strings

2024-08-29T12:38:33Z

I’m kinda interested in what the fallout will be from Trump’s unauthorized photo op at that Arlington Green Beret gravesite.

Trump is very, very popular with the military & with veterans—a fact that largely goes unremarked upon in the mainstream press, which prefers to deluge us with stories about how rosy Kamala’s (never Harris’s) poll numbers are. No way but up, right?

I would prefer a less partisan press. One that focused on the realities of the political situation: To wit, the composition of the Electoral College currently favors Republican presidential candidates; to overcome that inherent bias, Democrats have to get at least 55% of the popular vote.

Will they on November 5?

Hard to say.

I really don’t understand how anybody can put any kind of reliance on polls—which are conducted entirely by phone, either phone call or text. Nobody I know picks up their phone when the number trying to make contact is unfamiliar. So, who exactly are those polls polling? People with no filters?

Also, if the Dems had attempted an unauthorized photo op at Arlington, I know full well the mainstream media would dismiss it as a minor mess-up: So her people forgot to read the fine print! Who cares?

I’m not entirely sure why the military ❤️LUV❤️s Trump so much. He was a flagrant draft dodger. Initially, in 2017, he did increase the DoD’s share of the national budget, but then, in 2018, in this—as in so much else—he made an abrupt about-face.

And, of course, there is his famous remark that Americans who die in foreign wars are “suckers” and “losers.”

I guess what it comes down to is that members of the military are convinced that Trump hates the same people they hate.

In the political sphere, hate is always a stronger glue than affinity.

And puppets never see their strings.

The Green Beret whose grave provided Trump with his photo op was a suicide, incidentally. That fact seems significant to me though I’m not exactly sure why.

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In other news, Iggy was such a dick yesterday I decided to uproot my crush. It wasn’t at the kudzu stage yet. It was still a guilty pleasure—like reading tabloids or watching The Real Housewives.

So, it’s back to living in a fabulous studio apartment with occasional forays down the stairs to a shared kitchen.

I shot texts out to a bunch of friends whose affection is a given—tentacles of telephonically mediated text: Long time, no… Wanna go vox? And ended up chattering for a couple of hours with Morgan & Tom respectively.

This did make me feel better!

Then in the evening, the former ER nurse with whom I exchanged phone numbers a couple of weeks ago texted: Short notice, I know. But I just won a radio contest for two tickets to hear a band at the Bla Bla Bla Winery tomorrow night. Wanna go?

Is this a date? I wondered. Because when we met those few weeks back, I thought I might have picked up ambivalent sexuality vibes from her—has adult children, was once married but now is not, and is at that age where a lot of women, no longer feeling the pressure of that heterosexual hustle, are re-evaluating their sexual preferences—

Don’t project, I chided myself sternly.

And said, Sure!

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Those two regression analyses I had to rerun are still not yielding the numbers I expected them to yield. I will rerun them one last time, and if they still misbehave, I may have to rewrite 1,000 or so Remunerative Words this morning.

UGH.

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DREAM of the Basho Exhibit Plus Meeting Tiresias

2023-02-28T13:58:30Z

Dreamed about The Most FABULOUS museum! This huge structure that from the outside looked vaguely like the Brooklyn Museum (a museum in which I spent a significant portion of my youth) but from the inside went on and on and on, with stained glass everywhere, and also the most remarkable painted statuary. The exhibits were completely immersive like holographs, and you’d have lifelike interactions with them that went on for centuries—like there was one exhibition on this poet called Basho¹ —

But on the sidelines, there was all this drama I had to deal with.

Like Ben was deliberately alienating RTT’s affections and undermining my relationship with RTT.

And I ran into John Simmons. “I really dislike you,” I told him. (“I don’t like you either,” he replied.)

And I ran into Marybeth and told her, “You should explore as much of this museum as you can because you won’t have the opportunity to do it again: This is only a dream”—which I hadn’t known (I mean that it was a dream) until I said the words—

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It might be interesting to ask Marybeth, Did you dream of me, too, last night?

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Meanwhile:

This is what I woke up to.

Not too terrible. Maybe four inches. Although, of course, I would prefer no Hideous White Stuff From the Sky at all.

And I don’t know why my iPhone camera made the sky blue. It’s grey. And the snow is continuing to fall. Teensy tiny flakes.

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TaxBwana has been officially canceled today.

Yesterday, there was only one client I cried over—Frederic Elkjer (not his real name), who was so ancient he no longer had a gender. His long grey hair made me think he was a woman when I first saw him. I was surprised when I saw his name.

Tiresias…

Frederic Elkjer is 89 years old. In full possession of his faculties. Physically fit. Survives on an $8,000 social security payout and the $500 or so he makes gardening for neighbors.

He had to get his taxes done to qualify for one of New York State’s property tax rebates.

I was absolutely shocked to see that they are taking out $2,000 a year to cover his MediCare Part A & B.

How can anyone survive in this country on $6,500 a year?

Let alone a very, very old person?

His only physical disability was that he was stone deaf, so I communicated with him by writing on a blank piece of paper. (I found myself writing very, very large—the graphological equivalent of shouting, I suppose.)

I am fairly certain you qualify to have your Medicare payments subsidized, I wrote. Would you be interested in some information on this?

He nodded his head eagerly.

Also, I think you qualify for food stamps.

He took the pen and wrote back, I thought I would just try to look for more work.

Oh, no, no, no, no, NO, I thought.

But I wrote: You deserve to enjoy more leisure. And printed him out reams of information on how to apply to the Qualified Medicare Beneficiary Program and SNAP.

All the while thinking, Why has no one suggested these things to Frederic Elkjer before? Why have they left him dangling so precipitously close to the cracks? In what universe is a nonagenarian left to survive on less than $7,000 a year?

Honest to God. I have his address (‘cause I poured over property taxes.) I’m seriously thinking about sending him an anonymous cashier’s check.

But I suppose that is just me being sentimental.

Anyway, I cried and cried on the drive home.

I just couldn’t get that one sentence—I thought I would just try to look for more work—out of my head.

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Came home and discovered that a new C.B. Strike had landed on HBO.

So, I cracked open the chocolate-covered cranberries and settled down for a binge.

If I were still into fancying people, I would have a crush on Tom Burke, the actor who plays Cormoran Strike. I’ve always had a thing for macho, secretly sensitive guys who wear fisherman sweaters.

But fortunately, I'm not.

¹ I must have known there is a Japanese poet named Basho, right? I mean, he’s very famous. But in the dream, I didn’t—

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