Mallory's Camera

Maintaining

2025-05-04T15:45:34Z

Grey day. Rain is predicted all week.

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

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

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

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On the phone with Ichabod, I had a revelation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Meditations on the Jonah Hill Texting Scandal

2023-07-14T12:53:48Z

The Most Fabulous Garden Store in All of Dutchess County did have spaghetti squash seedlings. And also cucumber, watermelon, and basil seedlings. So I bought all four.

By the time I got back to the garden to plant them, though, it was a hideously humid 90°.

And even though I guzzled an entire liter of water, I could only stick it out long enough in the garden to plant the spaghetti squash seedling before I felt like I was going to pass out.

So, I scampered back to the casa to refortify myself by sipping Gatorade (foul fuckin’ stuff!) and reading up on the Jonah Hill Texting Scandal.

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Jonah Hill occupies a significant place in my heart on account of having been straight man to Russell Brand’s insane rock star in the Funniest Movie Ever Made, Get Him to the Greek.

In that movie, Jonah Hill plays a schlub.

In subsequent films like Moneyball, he also plays a schlub.

Jonah Hill played schlubs well because he was a schlub.

And I guess this was hard on his ego because subsequently, Jonah Hill went on an extreme diet where he only ate sushi for a year ( See? Reading The Daily Mail religiously does pay off!) He lost a lot of weight. He joined a gym! He dyed his hair a very peculiar shade of blonde and grew a beard.

Still. Once a schlub, always a schlub.

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Anyway.

One of Jonah Hill’s X-Girlfriends has decided to demonstrate once again that Hell hath no Fury by publishing a bunch of their private text exchanges on her Instagram:

Now I think it’s bad manners to publish anyone’s private texts, but whatevs, people do it all the time.

But more significantly, I don’t see anything wrong with this text.

Jonah Hill is not telling the X-Girlfriend she can’t surf with men, have boundaryless friendships with men, model, etc.

He is saying that if she wants to do these things, he can’t be in a relationship with her.

Which I think is an entirely reasonable thing to say. I mean, they're not things I would object to. But those are his boundaries.

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Of course, I had to follow the story down various rabbit holes, which included Reddit and LJ’s very own OHNOTHEYDIDNT.

Millennial online hangouts, for the most part.

The collective verdict was Narcissist! Abuser! Manipulative male controller! Entitled prick! Asshole!

Which really kinda astonished me since it seemed so clear to me that all Jonah Hill was trying to do was to protect himself against that predatory species known as star-fuckers.

To wit, some beautiful woman who might insinuate herself into his affections (quite easy to do because he is a schlub) and then leverage his connections and magnetism (because even though he is a schlub, he’s still a movie star and, therefore a celebrity) to her own promotional ends.

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Is it a generational thing? This collective inability to read subtext on Millennials’ part?

And what the hell is up with the invariable follow-up in these celebrity cyber-forums where the most vituperative of the venom-spewers must then trot out their PTSD self-diagnoses for group tongue baths: I am so sorry this happened to you! You are so brave! Etc, etc.

It is just fuckin’ weird.

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I don’t know whether it’s due to parenting failures, failures with the school systems, forever chemicals in the water supply, the IQ-flattening effects of Internet immersion, post-9/11 angst, or what, but Millennials are off in some essential way.

And I say that as the parent of two Millennials whom I love dearly.

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I’m inclined to attribute that off-ness to parenting failures.

Helicopter parenting was the big thing when I was raising my kids.

But meddling in every aspect of your kids’ lives (instead of giving them the freedom to have their own kid lives away from adults) produces timid, fragile adults who can’t organize their own lives.

And trying to fix the anxieties and fears that all kids have to some degree (admittedly, some more than others, and yes, there is a threshold with that one when fixing is called for) imprints the message that the best way to get attention is by being anxious and fearful.

And, of course, the Internet immersion inclines them toward lock-step conformity.

No one dares venture an opinion that deviates too far from the majority opinion lest they be piled upon in the cyber-forums that increasingly are a substitute for all collective interactions for members of this age group.

I wonder what Millennials will be like when they get old?

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Get a Hobby!

2021-07-29T12:34:33Z

Simone Biles dominated the chatter of the people who live inside my computer yesterday.

This got frustrating because I don’t care about Simone Biles, I don’t care about the Olympics, I detest competition in all its manifestations, and I don’t think Millennials need yet another poster child to rationalize their generational obsession with mental health and narcissism.

Here’s a secret, Millennials: Everyone has mental health issues, and the best way to deal with those is to find a truly engrossing hobby.

Millennials don’t have hobbies because unfortunately for them, they grew up in an age where sitting in front of a computer with that delusionary sense of communion with all those other disembodied souls floating through social-media-land has supplanted all other interests and activities.

It’s sad.

They’re right: We failed them.

But not in the ways they think we failed them.

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Yes, yes, I know: I’m a horrible human being.

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Other than that, It was a beautiful day. Mrs. Neighbor Ed got a haircut I covet, so I took multiple photographs, and will shortly be trotting off to a hairdresser to have the look recreated on my head.

Loraine saw a bear in her backyard at two o’clock in the afternoon. (Technically, I live in a suburb. But it’s a suburb surrounded by deep woods.)

Humidity was way down so I was able to exercise after I finished my work for the day—Remunerative Project still not finished, but I have high hopes for today.

Politics continue to worry me. I look at current events the same way I used to look at a chess board—six moves out.

Matt Taibbi wrote a brilliant economic analysis of the 2020 election, looking at per capita income of the counties that went for Biden in the 2020 election versus the counties that went for Trump. He then extrapolated that to the current vaccine wars. (Unfortunately, the piece is only available to his substack subscribers, so I can’t link it here.)

Vaccine hesitancy is most closely correlated with lower income levels.

Seems like that piece of information could be used somehow to increase vaccination rates.

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Why Are You Dead, Jessica Mitford?

2019-12-10T14:04:44Z

That Chernobyl sky. That ghastly white ground mist that freezes, then precipitates when it bounces off the telephone poles. Despondent much? Me? Why yes, now that you mention it!

But what can you do except pop your Vitamin D, huddle under the light box, and repeat your mantra: It’s only brain chemistry. It’s only brain chemistry?

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Mrs. Neighbor Ed has gone off to be with the Providence grandchildren, which means Neighbor Ed spent the morning live-texting me the Impeachment Hearings.

I don’t care about the Impeachment Hearings!

I think the Impeachment is a huge mistake. Trump is sleazy and awful and horrifying, but the Senate is stacked for acquittal, so it’s a complete waste of time, money, and energy.

Plus the Ukraine situation is kind of ambiguous: Hunter Biden’s appointment to that gas company board absolutely was the sleaziest kind of influence peddling. And what are the Democrats saying here anyway? That no one who’s a Presidential candidate can ever be investigated for anything? That if you want to avoid a corruption charge, all you have to do is announce your candidacy?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Trumps are the very wizards of influence peddling!

Does that make it right for the ostensible good guys to do it?

If they want to go after Trump, much sounder grounds abound.

Like the small, throwaway story I read in some obscure media outlet yesterday: Trump apparently diverted $1.7 million in campaign contributions to defer operational costs at his privately owned powerbase, Manhattan’s Trump Towers.

Campaign fraud, no?

This, it seems to me, is much stronger grounds for impeachment.

But it lacks the narrative the Democrats want to push: Evil, orange Trump attempting to derail virtuous, beleaguered members of the Loyal Resistance.

The Democrats would rather run on that narrative than they would on Trump’s miserable record.

In fact, the Democrats want a complete do-over of the 2016 election. Another story yesterday was about some poll that shows the candidate that Democrats really want to vote for in the 2020 election is… Hillary Clinton.

I mean, fuck-k-k-k-k-k.

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Scuttled off to tutor Khadijah. I think I have problems? I don’t have problems! Khadijah has problems!

Got home and texted Neighbor Ed: Are you still watching the impeachment hearings? Do you want me to come over and shoot you?

Sure, he texted back.

But, of course, we didn’t watch the impeachment hearings, though they were on the little TV in the kitchen. Instead, we drank beer, nibbled almonds and pepperjack cheese, and babbled.

Usually, so long as I can babble, I am a happy camper. But yesterday, I was not. Not even babbling could alleviate the awful hovering sense of oppression.

Neighbor Ed did tell me one amusing story, though: His daughter Sarah went to pick up her one-year-old from the Progressive Day Care Center. The kid’s nose was running all over her face, so Sarah grabbed a Kleenex and wiped the kid down.

The Progressive Day Care Center Worker clutched her heart and gasped: “You don’t ask her for permission first?”

The thought of asking a one-year-old for permission to wipe her nose is fucking ludicrous and signifies everything that’s wrong with “woke” culture.

I went home, did some remunerative work, drank waaay too much apple brandy, read Sapiens—very good book!—and watched the first two episodes of the BBC's Love in a Cold Climate.

Not for the first time, I wondered what Jessica Mitford would make of this sorry mess of a world.

Why are you dead, Jessica Mitford?

Don’t you know I need you to be my bestest friend?

Especially this morning when I am mildly hung over from all that alcohol consumption?

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Just Take Out the Fucking Trash!

2019-12-05T16:43:10Z

Dreamed I was living in this glorious compound in (of course) Berkeley. It was partially embedded in an old tree that had become a kind of portal to all those magical extra rooms you only see in dreams. The compound had its own wonderful, crazy culture.

Then, the City of Berkeley evicted us and forced us to live in some kind of awful, utilitarian Section 8 housing.

I went wandering around the new digs and realized: These are actually the same digs; the City of Berkeley merely paved over the old place and made it into something much uglier but probably much safer in some practical sense.

Still, my heart was aggrieved. How would the old magical culture survive under the normative burden of harm reduction, I wondered? The only thing I can remember about the culture is that it involved making these huge old wonderful puppets out of paper mache…

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Well. You don’t have to be Dr. Fraud to figure that one out.

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I slept 12 hours last night, and so I’m feeling much better than I did yesterday. I can even suppose in some bizarre Millennial fashion that Max thinks he was improving our relationship, bringing us closer together with his Stalinist struggle session. After all, it’s the very essence of “woke,” right? Suitably chastened, I can now resume the all-important work of being Max’s mother, a benign parental puppet, sincerely regretful of that time back in 2004 when I didn’t let him host that all-night beer party with his RLS friends and all my many other misdeeds.

I am ready for my stint in the reeducation camp, Mr. DeMille!

“You know who’s one of the happiest people I know?” Max asked. “Nathan!”

“And you think that comes from his relationship with Celeste?” I asked weakly. Celeste is Nathan’s mother.

“I know it does! Did you know that Celeste and Nathan shared a bed until he was nine years old? She was very big on the family bed.”

That’s sick, I thought. But merely smiled wanly.

“Celeste helped Nathan feel absolutely safe,” Max said.

The implication being that I had not helped Max feel safe.

I don’t care if Max thinks I’m fucking Medea: Celeste is deeply creepy, kind of like the Dennis Hopper character in River’s Edge. I will never forgive Celeste for setting up a kind of Pleasure Island in that house off Ocean View Boulevard where Max and Nathan and Aaron and Fletcher and whomever else drank beer and smoked dope and dropped acid.

I was struggling to enforce an anti-drug policy until Max was 18. I let his girlfriend sleep over but I was absolutely Draconian about the drug use.

Underage drug use had fucked me up waaaaay too much.

For Celeste to deliberately undermine me here was completely unacceptable, and I read her the riot act when I finally found out. Not only was she behaving with utter contempt for my parental role, she was also undermining John, Nathan’s father, a prominent attorney on the Monterey Peninsula. If the cops had busted one of Celeste’s little parties, I could see John losing his legal license.

That Max thinks Celeste is a better mother than I am is a bitter pill to swallow. Celeste has been trading her entire life on her pedigree as the daughter of a Frank Lloyd Wright acolyte; she hardly ever worked a day after latching on to John L_______, Nathan’s wealthy father, in her 30s. And though they are long divorced, she still lives in John’s palatial house on Fountain Boulevard in Monterey though I have no idea whether they’re a couple or not. She’s manipulative, she’s stupid, and in these halcyon days of recreational legalization, she never draws a sober breath—

I sat there listening to Max extol Celeste’s many virtues, feeling as though I might choke.

Could I travel back in time and just not have sex with Bill on that fateful night when Max was conceived? I closed my eyes and began mentally feeling around for an escape hatch.

“And that’s another thing,” Max railed. “I want you to tell me you’re sorry for withdrawing emotionally whenever you get angry! It makes me feel as though I don’t exist!”

Now, it is true that my way of dealing with anger is to withdraw.

If I didn’t withdraw, I’d feel compelled to say what’s on my mind, and as I am articulate and withering in my scorn, what’s on my mind would feel quite toxic to the person to whom I’m expressing my true thoughts.

Would Max really want to hear my honest opinion of Celeste?

Or the fact that I think his girlfriend fits the Jewish American Princess stereotype in every respect except for the fact that she’s half Chinese?

I don’t think so!

So, I just shut up about these things till I can run off and decathect! Often by writing in my diary! And then can go back to feeling amiably disposed toward the perps in question.

This is a quandary.

I’m not going to give up thinking what I think.

Max seems to think that I ought to.

It’s a generational thing, I suppose. Millennials are as big on policing thoughts as they are on policing behavior. Why wouldn’t they be? They grew up with social media and sophisticated surveillance techniques, after all; they’re very collectivity-minded. The simplest fucking transaction with Millennials is a complicated negotiation:

Mia (Max’s girlfriend): I think I’m going to take out the trash.
Max: Do you want to take out the trash?
Mia: Not really. But you can’t take out the trash because you hurt your foot.
Max: Does that make you feel like I’m taking advantage of you?
Mia: Kind of. Even though I know you’re not.
Max: If you take out the trash, I’ll clean the bathroom sink.
Mia: Okay, babe. I’m gonna write that on the whiteboard.
Max: Okay, babe.
Mia: Thanks, babe.

Just take out the fucking trash! I’m thinking.

It would have taken you exactly one minute to take out the trash, and it has taken you three minutes to have this inane, pointless, mutually masturbatory conversation that has added in no way to the quality of discourse upon this planet!

But what do I know?

I’m old. I’m gonna die soon.

Okay, Boomer.

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Bike Accident in San Francisco

2019-03-14T13:16:02Z

The end of a long day spent ranking financial advisors in Cleveland, Ohio.

You have a choice!

You can either watch The Third Man, which is simply the Greatest Movie Ever Made.

OR you can watch Teen Witch.

It’s the same choice you face when you contemplate making deep, soulful, connected love with a dearly loved partner of many years versus fucking the brains out of some little twink you just picked up in a biker bar.

Naturally, I went for Teen Witch.

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Also Tess died in a biking accident in San Francisco on Friday.

One of the Virtuous Millennials who lived with Max in the Northbrae Nookery.

The Virtuous Millennials all blur together in my mind into a single androgynous (of course!) figure who lives on sprouts. Which one was Tess? I’m trying to remember, but I can’t.

This is an ism but not racism. Ageism? As a rule, I don’t like Millennials—no, you self-righteous ants, the Boomers did not fuck up the planet: It was already fucked up by the time we inherited it!—but, of course, it’s a great tragedy when someone so young loses her life, and I am thoroughly ashamed of myself for these glib thoughts.

The victim could just as easily have been Max.

Fly with the angels, Tess! You didn’t deserve to be defeated by a car door.

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Tiny Fangless Rodents Searching for a Pied Piper

2019-01-23T14:19:04Z

Watched both Fyre Festival documentaries last night.

I’m sure not all Millennials are as entitled, delusional and self-involved as the crowd orbiting the Fyre Festival, but man, those Millennials were obnoxious: I was kinda rooting for them to have an even more awful time there than they had there.

Influencers.

Brand Ambassadors.

They were all little lemmings just begging to be led off a cliff.

Tiny fangless rodents desperately searching for a Pied Piper.

I guess Instagram—which I like a lot, by the way—has evolved into a kind of ultimate “Perky Pat” alternate reality (thank you, Phil K. Dick!), which is far more involving than anything their real lives have to offer.

I see some of that at work in my youngest son whose surface is all effortless charm and bravado but who, when I apply Neighbor Ed’s dictum—“I look at what they do”—is obviously deeply depressed.

Sadly, there’s absolutely nothing I can do for RTT.

I mean, I tried to pay for driving lessons, I tried to buy him a car, I tried to interest him in financial investing—

He was simply not interested.

I love him very much, but I don’t have the same relationship with him that I have with his older brother. I can say just about anything to his older brother, and while his older brother gets very pissed off at me from time to time, still, I know he understands that I have his best interests at heart.

I fear with RTT, I will always be the Mommy Loch Ness Monster, rising up from time to time from the bottomless depths of childhood hopes and fears to gnash my teeth and paralyze him with my gimlet eye. So, I have to weigh my words carefully lest they wreak irreparable psychic damage.

The relationship he has with his father is just deeply creepy. Codependence at its most awful.

I just don’t understand it at all.

I got out from under parental influences as soon as I possibly could. At age 16!

I guess RTT just doesn’t want to be independent. Oh, he pays mouth service to independence, but at heart, he wants to be infantilized.

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Unicorns and Dark Platoons

2017-12-06T14:31:26Z

We’re veering into our fourth day of grey skies with nary a flicker of sunlight. This whole nine-hours-of-daylight thing is very hard on me, but the absence of sunlight makes it even worse. All I want to do is sleep.

I had to decline a festive weekend invitation because the party is in Hudson, and I don’t drive at night.

I suspect I may be up to driving at night once I (a) have my eye operation and (b) get a newer car, so why I am dragging my feet on those two projects, I don’t know.

I suspect it’s my antipathy for breaking everything I have to do into small manageable parts and hopping on the conveyor belt.

My eyesight should just magically cure itself! Someone should give me a car! That’s how life should happen!

You know I’m right.

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The political news just gets worse and worse and worse.

While liberals were allowing themselves to be distracted by unicorns – I mean, 25-year-old sex scandals! What the fuck do you think you can do about these things now? – the dark platoons were massing. The current team of scam artists and grifters managed to pass one of the worse tax laws on record. Not content with unbundling the Obama legacy, they’re also going after the LBJ and FDR legacies. Medicare and Social Security are both in the crosshairs. It won’t affect me, but if you’re reading this and you’re under 40, it will affect you – because despite what you think, you will be old some day.

Why there were not massive protests against this tax bill clogging every major and mid-sized city in the U.S. is beyond me because this legislation is out and out class warfare. But again – liberals and progressives allowed themselves to be distracted. Yes, of course, sexual harassment in the workplace is an objectionable thing. But Garrison Keiller getting fired for touching a woman’s bare back one fucking time by mistake? That woman getting enraged by John Hockenberry because he sent her mash notes by email? I wouldn’t call either of those incidents sexual harassment, and yet they commanded headlines for days.

Cases involving forcible rape need to be dealt with as criminal offenses.

The big boss who makes remarks about employee vaginas? He needs to get fired.

But the rest of it?

Signals do get crossed in the workplace. People who work under highly tense conditions do let out steam by acting in questionably appropriate ways – particularly in a culture that’s as two-faced about sex as ours is. When you commodify sex, when you use it as an ingredient in the secret sauce that’s driving marketing and consumer demand, you can hardly be surprised when it bubbles up into the workplace.

I see no evidence that anyone’s planning to change the ingredients in the secret sauce.

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It was interesting staying in Max’s house for a few days. A Boomer spy in the House of Millennials! His housemates are all very politically correct. And I have to say, pretty fucking boring, too.

Like one morning I heard one of the earnest vegan girls talk about the benefits of oatmeal for half an hour to an earnest vegetarian boy. Half an hour! In response to the question, “How are you?”

I think she was trying to convert him to veganism.

They’re nice.

Very nice.

But it does make me wonder. In order to be nice, do you really have to be dull?

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