Mallory's Camera

Nature v. Nurture

2025-01-22T15:14:39Z

And-d-d-d-d-d it is currently a balmy -2° Fahrenheit (-19° Centigrade) in my little corner of Trumplandia.

I did not go to the gym yesterday because I kept thinking about black ice and flat tires, both of which might have involved climbing out of the car and freezing to death in the scrub forest bordering NY 302, essentially a two-lane farm road far from civilization.

I will not be going to the gym today either.

But tomorrow is bikini weather, 20° F. Woo woo! Bring on those triceps presses!

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I Remunerated steadily throughout the day in between talking politics with the kiskas and trudging out to the coop to check on the chickens.

In the evening, I watched something called Six Schizophrenic Brothers, a luridly produced documentary based on a book called Hidden Valley Road that I’ve been wanting to read forever.

Both documentary & book chronicle the history of the Galvin family in Colorado Springs during the 60s, 70s, & 80s. Mr. & Mrs. Galvin had 12 children—six of whom had psychotic collapses in their teens & 20s.

Geneticists salivate over families like the Galvins!

My own dear friend Mark belonged to such a family: Four of the seven Conly kids were diagnosed with MS, and they were extensively studied by the NIH although the NIH didn’t raise one finger to help Mark as he lay dying in a squalid room in Portland a decade or so ago.

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Anyway, the geneticists did find a mutant gene in the schizophrenic Galvins, something called the SHANK2 mutation on chromosome 11. The gene is also linked to autism, and apparently, choline exerts enough of a protective effect so that the American Medical Association now recommends choline supplements for all pregnant mothers.

The gene was also detected in Mrs. Galvin’s DNA, so X-linked recessive.

The documentary failed to note whether the gene was found in any of the four brothers who did not develop schizophrenia, leading me to believe that it must have been, else the documentary would have emphasized the SHANK2 causality more forcibly.

So, we are back to that old question once again: Is it Nature or Nurture?

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From my perspective, even without the schizophrenia, the Galvins were a fuckin’ train wreck, a 1950s ideal of the Perfect Family Richard Yates might have written one of his intensely bleak novels about.

Absentee father. Domineering mother. Or rather—mother who controlled every aspect of the domestic routine but remained entirely oblivious to emotional subcurrents. The 10 brothers, crowded into two bedrooms, seemed to loathe one another. They were always beating the shit out of one another. I suppose this could have been a sign of incipient organic mental illness, but honestly? Even without organic brain illness, it was a major red flag signaling deep psychological dysfunction.

I’m the mother of two sons. I can tell the difference between normal fraternal rivalry & roughhousing, and psychological dysfunction.

I get that the theory of the “schizophrenogenic mother” has now been entirely debunked, but man, Mother Galvin really fit that shoe.

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The only schizophrenic person I know well is poor Cassie, who is very sweet and absolutely compliant with her medication regimen.

There is almost certainly a genetic component to her illness because her mother had the same symptoms. Though her sister does not.

Cassie used to tell me that her medication cocktail did very little to mute the voices. But it did make it easier to ignore them.

It is a very sad situation. Cassie was pretty & bright & a talented artist, and then one day, WHAM—“The Source” started talking to her.

A very, very, very difficult karma indeed.

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The Tibetans of Ithaca

2024-10-23T22:49:57Z

Hanging with RTT was good, but hanging in Ithaca was not good. Was it the mood I was in or the time of year, so close to Dia De Los Muertos?

Ithaca was filled with ghosts.

They weren’t quite strong enough to materialize, but I could feel them everywhere I walked (and I walked quite a bit)

A blur that might have been Justin, leaning against a church wall in DeWitt Park.

A bright banner, flapping in the wind outside the Unitarian Church on Cayuga Street where Janet had been the first African American deacon.

The 7/11 in whose parking lot, Jason—Justin’s brother, Janet’s grandson—pulled a gun on someone. (Jason’s still alive but a horrific childhood plus juvie destroyed him mentally. He’s a floater in the land of the living.)

Ben on that stretch of State Street between the Diner & Gimme Coffee the time I first realized, He’s very, very sick, isn’t he?

How did I know Ben was very, very sick?

Well, because I was walking down that stretch of State Street one day a couple of months before I moved away from Ithaca & I saw Mark Conly, beaming broadly, arms outstretched. And this was odd because Mark Conly had died from complications of his multiple sclerosis just six months before.

Mark didn’t coalesce into Ben until he got within two feet of me.

As a sidebar, I will note this is often the way visions work. They are rarely hallucinations created out of thin air. Most often, they build on something that’s already out there in the physical universe.

Which, of course, makes it difficult for the person who’s having the vision: Are you becoming mentally unhinged, or are you actually vibrating on a supernatural frequency?

There is no way to answer that question.

Another fallacy about occult visitations: People always think they’re most likely to occur in the dark.

In truth, prime time for the supernatural is preternaturally warm days when the wind is high, and yet, and yet: There is an uneasy feeling of stillness.

Which described the weather in Ithaca while I was there to a T.

Anyway, I was so creeped out by the ghosts I could almost (but not quite!) see in Ithaca that the morning before I took off back to the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley, I insisted on visiting the Namgyal Monastery to purify myself.

Long-term readers of this diary—I think there may be 1.8 of you—may remember that when I lived in Ithaca, I was the English-As-a-Second-Language tutor of choice for the surprisingly large Tibetan population living there.

They also all wanted me to do their taxes!!!!!!!

The student the Tompkins County Learning Center assigned to me was Lopsang. (I forget what name I referred to her by when writing about her so long ago.) She’d grown up in the province of Kham, home of the Tibetan warrior princesses. A Tibetan monk smuggled her out of Tibet to the Dalai Lama’s compound in Dharamsala, India, where she lived for some years before emigrating to the U.S. and marrying the man who’d rescued her, now a medical coder & Tibetan monk no longer.

I improvised my ESL lesson plans. I didn’t see much point in teaching Lopsang the finer points of English language grammar. Did it really matter if she knew how to conjugate the past tense of irregular verbs?

Instead, I went over to Lopsang’s house & played her three-minute clips culled from old episodes of Little House on the Prairie. Then I’d make her talk to me about them. Full court babble—that was my goal. It was not important that she speak grammatically; it was important that she overcome her self-consciousness about how badly she spoke English and just speak.

Little House on the Prairie was about life on a struggling homestead in a non-industrialized economy, right? Lopsang had grown up a struggling homestead in a non-industrialized economy. Maybe she could relate.

Pretty soon, we were joined by other Tibetans until 15 or so were showing up for my thrice-weekly lessons.

It seems to me Tibetan Buddhism is very unlike other types of Buddhism.

The Tibetan Buddhists I knew weren’t into detachment at all. They were very materialistic! They loved Black Friday above all other holidays and could hardly wait to describe to me (in broken English) all the fabulous things they’d bought at BestBuy for a discount! They loved electronics.

The one thing that seemed to differentiate their conversation from other people’s conversation was that they were constantly throwing in allusions to past lives.

So, if I’d describe something that happened to me over the weekend, Lopsang might nod vigorously & say, “You know something like that happened to me two lives before this one—”

They were very serious about past lives.

Anyway, Lopsang & her husband were instrumental in raising the funds to build this monastery complex, and I’d gone there that morning half in the hopes I’d run into her.

I’d run into her there several times in the past.

But today, there was no one there at the monastery at all though the gates were wide open.

Still, the place seemed to do its magic ‘cause when RTT & I went back to Ithaca, I didn’t sense the ghosts anymore.

The vehicle above is the Dalai Lama’s very own jeep!!! He used it to power along all the back trails of Tibet, Mustang, & Nepal back in the day.

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The Lesson Plan

2022-09-14T11:44:28Z

They’re dropping like flies, that cohort of mine and those figureheads that defined our moment.

Yesterday, I found out that Cliff F______ had died—someone I hardly knew at all personally, but someone who loomed large in the WELL creation myth. The WELL certainly played a significant role in my own creation myth.

And Ken Starr, the Clinton impeachment counsel, died.

When RTT was the tiniest of tiny boys, I used to make up stories about a trio of naughty creatures called Grumble Trumble, Wicky-Woo, and Ken Starr who were always doing the wickedest things—like trying to stick their fingers in electrical sockets, ripping pages out of books, and attempting to ride on the back of poor, beleaguered Sandinista the dog.

RTT actually shocked me a few months back when Ken Starr momentarily bobbed up in the news: “Wait! Didn’t you used to tell me stories about Ken Starr? You mean he was real?”

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I think about death a lot these days.

I suppose I am trying to get comfortable with the subject.

Mostly, I wonder how much it will hurt. Like how could it hurt worse than childbirth, which is the most excruciating pain I have ever felt? I don’t actually mind the prospect of extinction of this self; what I mind is that it’s gonna hurt unless I can arrange to die in my sleep or be completely zoned out on morphine.

Sometimes I wonder who’s gonna come out to greet me when I finally make it to the other side. Normal people are greeted by their families: Dad! My God! You’ve lost so much weight! And Mom! Your hair looks great!

But nobody in my family ever liked me very much. I doubt that any of them could be roused from their nectar quaffing or harp lessons to trot on over to that great shimmering, disturbingly womb-like tunnel of light and watch me emerge.

I’m kinda thinking after this most recent incarnation, I’m finally quits with the entity that coalesced as Ben this time round. He was an asshole; I was noble. If ever there was a debt, it’s settled. I never have to see him again. He won’t be there (praise Gawd.)

So, who will?

Maybe Mark?

Maybe my grandfather? (He was the only family member who liked me a little bit.)

Maybe Rik?

Maybe Tom?

Certainly, my companion animals—Sandinista, Fritz, Milo, the Meezer, Rutger.

They will be happy to see me.

And for the first time, we will be meeting as equals.

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Jean-Luc Godard, as it turns out, died by assisted suicide.

I guess he was in a hurry.

The dude was like 91 years old. It’s not like he was gonna last very much longer, right?

I’m ambivalent about assisted suicide.

I mean, I totally think people have the right to kill themselves. Not even the option to kill themselves. The right.

I don’t get why suicide prevention is such a big institutional push in this culture.

It’s not like there’s any analogous institutional push to help people get more out of their lives.

But you’re just gonna have to repeat the lifetime if you kill yourself.

The metaphor I use for reincarnation is school—like each lifetime is a class where you’re supposed to learn something, and if you kill yourself, you’re gonna have to take the class over, and who wants to do that?

Suffering is hard karma. But it’s part of the lesson plan, no?

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Plus on the strictly legal end of things, assisted suicide is the first step down a slippery slope. It sets a precedent for taking a life when the right types of red tape are applied. Once that precedent has been set, red tape can be applied in any number of interesting ways. (Yes, I have seen Soylent Green! Why do you ask?)

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What else?

I came within 3,000 words of finishing the Remunerative Project yesterday, and then my mind went Pftzzz, and little sparks started coming out of my mouth.

I should finish it this morning.

It is presently 27,000 words long. Sixty-two pages!

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Of LUV and the Sameness of Snow

2021-02-04T12:33:08Z

Dream with a complex narrative, most of which I can’t remember: I had written some sort of play without realizing the play was actually the fulfillment of some kind of college assignment.

The people who were supposed to be performing the play didn’t like me. So, I didn’t know whether they would actually perform the play.

If they didn’t perform, I would flunk the class.

I was explaining all this to Barbara Angell, and she was infinitely sympathetic, but had no advice to offer beyond the obvious: It’s probably not as bad as you think it is.

Then somehow, I was talking to Rick R_______. A very young Rick R_______. He was finishing up college finally—was very gung-ho about it, wanted to apply to medical school. Like your brother and sister, I said—although in real life, only his brother Steve—my one-time True LUV—was a doctor; his sister Susan—my one-time Best Friend and still Ichabod’s godmother—is a lawyer.

I couldn’t tell Rick about the play because Steve and Susan were two of the people who were supposed to put it on but who didn’t like me.

Then I met up with a homeless woman who’d found a place to crash—with Mark!

(I think this might be the first time I’ve ever dreamed about Mark.)

Mark was living on the top floor of this incredibly bombed-out-looking apartment building. Implicit in the dream was the thought: You have dreamed about this building many, many times before. Only I don’t know whether I have dreamed it really. The building lay on the farthest point of a mythical Flatbush Avenue.

Mark had been very ill but he seemed to have recovered to some extent. At least, now he could walk. His relationship with the homeless woman was unclear. Are they lovers? I wondered. But Mark was ever reticent about his personal life, his personal feelings.

He’d had his bathroom remodeled! He was very proud of it. He showed it off to me, and it was hideous—all cinder blocks and ugly, cheap, utilitarian fixtures. But, I supposed, an improvement over what had been there before.

I woke up…

“Thing about snowy landscapes is they all look the same,” Ben said to me once.

We were driving through a white-out landscape near Trumbull Corners, named for some Revolutionary War ancestors of Ben’s who had not yet simplified the spelling of their name. Some time during that first awful winter before he walked out on me.

“Ever notice? Snow is supposed to be this magical Currier & Ives ingredient. Whereas, in fact, just add snow and everything looks the same. Everything looks tedious and identical. You can’t tell one landscape from another.”

I don’t think he got that one right, actually. I suspect it depends entirely upon what landscape details one focuses upon.

But certainly he was correct about the landscape details I focus upon.

I’ve been thinking a bit about Ben the past couple of days because I heard through the grapevine that Francis died.

Ben was one of Francis’s keepers:

I remember very little about my time with the circus.

Which is kinda too bad because the circus was one of the more remarkable episodes in my life.

Partly that’s because I have a terrible memory—which is why I keep a diary although my diary for the six months I traveled with the circus mostly consists of histories of the strange little midwestern towns we journeyed through.

But partly that’s because my mind censors all memories tagged Ben.

I was a sucker for LUV, I think. And he never LUVVED me.

I think maybe that’s because I’m just not very LUVVABLE.

What else?

I did remunerative work.

I went tromping.

Kinda remarkable how one acclimatizes: Temps were just over freezing and that felt tropical to me. I stripped off my hat and gloves; I wanted to strip off my coat: It felt that warm.

Neighbor Ed must have sensed my psychic forlornness: He telephoned while I was tromping so I got to argue about AOC and third-party politics over WiFi while I marched through the chilling uniformity of the Snow Queen’s frozen kingdom.

And in the evening, the head Tax Bwana doyenne, Barbara ______, called. She wanted to thank me for being a Tax Bwana this year and to ask whether I would take on an additional shift.

“It’s been so awful this year!” she cried. “Practically no one has volunteered! I’m afraid they’re going to defund the grant that runs the program!”

“Well, that would be a pity,” I said. “Tax Bwana does good work.”

“It’s all so depressing,” she said. “Every day is just worse than the last.”

Depressing, I thought. Good heavens: That’s a word I don’t let myself use. Could it be that Barbara ______ is a real human girl after all?

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