Mallory's Camera

Mais Où Sont Les Keith Richards D'antan?

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:04:34 GMT

Didn't make it to the garden yesterday (and likely won't today either, since temps are not forecast to rise to 60°). Instead, I devoted the morning to making money, went for an abbreviated tromp, and then settled down in a lawn chair on the back forty to chaperon the chickens and read Bob Spitz's The Rolling Stones: A Biography.

I do love me some celebrity dish, except I can't really relate to many current celebrities—their faces are indistinguishable, their names unmemorable, their ostensibly flagrant behavior mere bouts of exaggerated narcissism. Mais où sont les Keith Richards d'antan?

I saw the Stones in concert a couple of times in my late teens and early twenties. In fact, I went to the infamous Altamont Concert—although that wouldn't count as "seeing the Stones," I suppose, since I was at least a mile from the concert stage and very high on LSD. At that distance, we couldn't know anything that was happening near the stage, though the vibes wafting our way were bad enough to make us decide to pack up & leave long before sundown when the Stones were scheduled to perform. I was so high, my pals had to force-feed me a quarter of a jug of Red Mountain to get me into the car. Red Mountain, the vilest of the vile! I remember thinking at the time that it tasted like every human effluvia combined, like blood and sweat and tears and sperm and gastric spit-up all mixed up into one alcoholic beverage.

But mostly, I wasn't into the Stones' music as much as I was into their bad behavior. This was back when the beauty standards of the 1950s still weren't being challenged very much. The dolly girls of Swinging London with their bangs and long, straight, center-parted hair still had faces defined by the Golden Ratio, and Paul McCartney & George Harrison were the handsome Beatles. Meanwhile, I was struggling in the modeling industry because while I photographed well, my skin was too dark and my features too exotic for anything but lingerie catalogs and the middle of the runway.

And yet, here was Jagger, with his exaggerated simian features, the biggest Lothario of them all! And there was Keith Richards, doing lots and lots of heroin! Proving that it was perfectly possible to live a productive life doing heroin if only you had the money to pay for it! (I did not, which is why I gave it up before I developed the habit.)

Spitz describes the excesses of the 60s and 70s at exhaustive length, but crams the last 40 years of the band's career into only a handful of chapters.

You have to hand it to Jagger! He is completely unfazed by those feelings of personal responsibility that so often bedevil the rest of us. Does he care that the Stones turned Altamont into a shit show? He does not! Brian Jones drowns in a pool one month after Jagger kicks him out of the band? So what! His official girlfriend, L'Wren Scott, hangs herself after he takes up with a ballet dancer 25 years younger? Well, that's really sad, but not sad enough to stop him from parading said ballet dancer on a hotel balcony a couple of days after Scott's death.

No, Mick Jagger only cares about two things: making money and physical fitness. Maybe not in that order.

I am thinking I should have been more like Mick Jagger!

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Mojo

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:44:25 GMT

Maybe I am getting my writing mojo back. Maybe.

On the drive to the upscale supermarket in Middletown late yesterday afternoon, I could feel the words clicking into place like metal filings against a magnet: I bought it so I could save it...polluting the local cripple creeks... (Why "cripple"? 'Cause I was listening to The Band.)

Driving is good for that. It often puts me into a semi-fugue state.

And beyond that, I could feel the ideas drifting across my mind, like a time-lapse animation of clouds on a windy day: The opening paragraph will include Flavia explaining why she bought the Catskills property and a brief imagined history of Riggsville, the paragraph after that will explore Neal's introversion, and the one after that will set up the tension between Flavia and Mimi when Mimi starts twisting Flavia's arm because Mimi wants to move into the cabin. Much of Flavia's section explores her guilt over being so fabulously wealthy when her friends and acquaintances are all struggling, so it's a good idea to set that up early.

I was going to make Daria Part 2. But whatever ideas and momentum I had for that Part 2 evaporated in the three months I spent toiling in the Schlock tax mines.

Flavia has a much clearer narrative arc: Rich girl/recovering Daddy's little angel doesn't know what to do with herself -> dabbles in architecture school (Pratt) -> develops a cocaine habit -> meets Neal -> gets saved from cocaine habit ->has intense physical relationship with Neal (lotsa sex scenes!) -> Neal dies -> feels obligation to take care of Mimi, the most obnoxious and helpless of the Sister Wives.

I'm still not sure what Daria's narrative arc is. Something having to do with the many languages she speaks, the linguistic pastiche inside her head. But I'm hampered in that, since really, I only speak English. How am I going to get inside the head of someone who exists in multiple linguistic dimensions? Now I won't have to for another couple of months!

###

Other than that...

For some reason, I slept poorly last night. No idea why. I did not feel anxious; I was sufficiently exercised, and I was tired. But there didn't seem to be any pathway down into unconsciousness.

So, this morning, I'm feeling clunky and vaguely headachey. Bilgy tummy, too!

I did have plans to go off to New Paltz and garden. The issue with the New Paltz community garden, though, is that it's so vast that wheelbarrowing pulled-up weeds, raked winter ground cover, and such involves transversing significant distances, and I'm not sure I'm up for physical work on just five hours sleep.

They'll be turning the water on at the beginning of May. I have to wrestle with my garden hose! Unlike the Hyde Park Community Garden, the New Paltz Community Garden makes each gardener get their own individual hose. My plot is a good 30 feet away from the spigot, so there are actual logistics to be calculated in the use of said hose.

Meanwhile, seen yesterday on my tromp through the Harried Plateau:

I wanna foster-parent a beehive!!!!

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Yesterday

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:39:50 GMT

Now that I think about it, Ben really is Childermass from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. The same archetype—what would you call it? Vagabond spellcaster? Autodidact magician? Loki? But anyway, I dreamed about him last night, and as happens every time I dream about Ben, the connection was strong enough to throw me out of my everyday life entirely. I woke up thinking, This world is an odd place to be.

In the dream, there were a lot of people and some kind of Renaissance Faire-y setup through which Ben and I were circling each other. At the very end of the dream, he made a clumsy, unexpected sexual advance—and I remember thinking, This isn't fun! No, wait—maybe it is, 'cause I could feel my body beginning to loosen and orgasm.

I haven't thought about Ben for months.

And I can't imagine why my psyche booked him a ticket to last night's dream world.

Except maybe he's still the sphinx that guards the entrance into the Temple of Writing.

He was the best writing partner I ever had—and I like having writing partners, that other voice in the inner dialogue you can bounce ideas off. We worked together very, very well in that capacity, seamlessly you might say, so that it was impossible to tell where my ideas left off, and his began. A world-class banterer, too! And very, very smart. I find myself wondering this morning what his take on artificial intelligence and diminishing human returns might be.

And, of course, I recognized the changeling streak in him from the very beginning. Did not have enough self-preservation instincts to steer clear. But on some level, I knew what I was getting. Though when I met him, I was brokering in mere verisimilitude: I didn't have a whole lot to give up. It never occurred to me that over time, I would acquire those things that would make the deal I struck with him a bad one in hindsight.

Whatever, I am thinking the karma between us is resolved, and I'll never have to encounter him again in subsequent lifetimes. I mean, I may see him from a distance. I'll smile. I'll wave. But I won't circle closer for conversation.

###

On his deathbed, he struggled out of his coma to grasp my fingers and croak, "I love you."

"I love you, too!" I chirped. But I was lying.

Whatever the thing between us was, it wasn't love.

But you don't lay ambivalence on a dying man.

###

In other news, I finished approximately half the things on my To-Do list yesterday.

The stuff that didn't get finished was all the housecleaning shit.

My bathroom is absolutely disgusting, so much as I hate housecleaning, I really must tackle that today. And vacuum!

I also have a couple of bananas that got overly ripe overly fast, so I thought I might hunt down a banana pudding recipe. I do ❤️LUV❤️ me some banana pudding!

In the late afternoon, I tromped back up Malloy Road. I wish I had a name for the old farm acreage up there! It's Harrier Ridge so maybe Harried Plateau? Right across from one of the super-deluxe five-zero-price-tag McMansions (with its own gazebo and faux corral), I saw this:

Photo doesn't allow you to read the fading paint letters, but apparently it was once a packing house for an ancient apple orchard whose ghost haunts the McMansions and whose last few gnarled trees still struggle to put out blooms (all blighted by last night's frost, no doubt). This part of upstate was once famous for its apple orchards.

A few yards to the right of the packing house sat the trashiest trailer you've ever seen. I saw movement in its window when I looked at it—somebody lived there still. I made up an elaborate fantasy: It was the great-great-grandscion of the original apple orchard owners who, for some strange reason, will not sell out to the McMansion developers. (Attachment to ancestral lands? Tax problems? Tertiary syphilis?)

When was the last time this building had been painted?

Probably, in the 1980s.

And I realized that's what's wrong with today: Everybody thinks the 1980s is "long ago," but it isn't 'cause I was young and gorgeous in the 1980s.

The 1930s were long ago!

The 1980s were yesterday.

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Real Human Girl-ing

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:15:37 GMT

This was the day I red-circled on my calendar: TODAY you will become a real human girl again!!

I made a To-Do list!

And I am checking items off my To-Do list. Ping! Ping! Ping!

But I'm seriously thinking, Being a real human girl is overrated, 'cause I can't say I actually want to do any of the things on my To-Do list, nor would the consequences be particularly severe if I blew them all off, if I did what I actually want to do, which is to sit by a window with my eyes slightly unfocused.

The garden is the only To-Do with a time stamp on it.

But I already murdered a bunch of marigolds and strawberry plants by putting them in the ground way too early, and frost is forecast for tonight. True, I could always weed and rake up mulch, but it's like 47° out there, cold, so I don't want to.

Supposed to warm up by Thursday.

I'll garden then.

###

Real-life Daria texted me yesterday to gush over Chapter 6 of the Work in Progress.

I had forgotten all about the Work in Progress!

Even though I took the Schlock job to earn enough cash to give me some time to work on it without worrying about money.

After I talked to real-life Daria, I took out the manuscript and stared at it.

The manuscript said nothing to me.

Words on a page. As if there aren't enough pages with words on them already.

So, I put it away & went for a walk.

###

Malloy Road, the road behind my house, goes up a hill that the property developers around here have named Harrier Ridge. (I see no evidence that anyone ever called it "Harrier Ridge" before the Age of McMansions.) As recently as five years ago, this was all dairy farms and the cornfields that fed the cows during the long upstate New York winters, but now there are a dozen or so of the ugliest fuckin' houses you have ever seen on that hill, all with a price tag of $799,000 according to Zillow. It's amazing to me that people will spend that kind of money to live in Wallkill in a shit-ugly house, but apparently, they will.

The newish housing on top of the hill actually made an effort to blend in with the countryside, with cunning little water features and ornamental coppices of weeping cherry. These houses were constructed 15 years ago when property developers had better taste.

There are still a number of the old farmhouses up there, too, and a handful of farms—though many of those have branched out beyond dairy cattle into other livestock. The people at the upper end of Malloy Road keep llamas!

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Spring

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:06:45 GMT

Willows are always the first to green up.

Then, for two weeks or so before the first leaves appear on the other trees, when you drive past those trees, the trees seem... hazy: Their branches are bare, but there's a difference in hue you can only sense with your peripheral vision.

Then, boom! The twigs have sprouted tiny flowers, and boom! again, those flowers have become leaves.

The whole process takes place very fast in maples and poplars; tree flower to tender green leaf only takes about three days. Oak trees are slower. But anyway, it's spring!

I continue to be very, very lazy.

And isolated: Communication is actually a bit of a chore. Every word that comes out of my mouth, every sentence that materializes from my keyboard, feels clumsy somehow. Stilted. The prosody is off. Or something. Whatever it is, it makes me not want to talk to anybody. Or write.

And apolitical: World War III may well be incubating, but I find I do not have the energy to care.

And inert: I force myself to tromp because it's the only way to build up physical strength. But I'm not enjoying it much. That might well be because there really aren't as many pleasant tromping paths in Ulster County as there were in Dutchess County.

###

I have been reading a lot. Just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which is am amazing novel, particularly when you contrast the simplicity, even banality, of its prose with its emotional impact. Ostensibly science fiction, it's the type of science fiction whose speculations are filled with small holes—But why didn't they just run away? But why didn't they just grow laboratory organs?—but which somehow paints a compelling portrait from the inside out of what it feels like to be the Other. It's the accretion of all those small, seemingly unimportant details, I suppose. Ishiguro did something very similar in his earlier The Remains of the Day, a novel whose subject matter could not be more unlike Never Let Me Go.

I cried for ten minutes after I turned the last page. Kathy H's solitiquy about plastic bags stuck on a fence, flapping in the wind! Of course, I am primed to cry these days.

And now I need something else to read!

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PTSD

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:43:40 GMT

For my birthday, I gave myself a fabulous gift: I called Schlock and told them I would not be finishing out the tax season.

I've spent the past four days decompressing.

Any job where you sit on your ass for eight plus hours a day without any opportunity to move is a bad job, but this was a particularly bad job, combined as it was with eye strain from computers and multiple documents that use tiny font, listless coworkers, and relentless pressure to service as many tense and anxious customers in as short a period of time as possible.

###

I came out of the experience with what I've self-diagnosed as mild PTSD. Writing is actually kind of a chore. (I'm used to nobody having the slightest interest in anything I have to say.) Walking two and a half miles winds me, and my lumbar muscles keep twinging because I've lost my core strength. It's difficult to concentrate because nothing really interests me.

I didn't burn any bridges when I resigned.

Who knows, right? I might be kidnapped by terrorists wielding cattle prods! Alhamdulillah! You MUST do our taxes—or else!

I might be yanked backward in time to a Nazi death camp, where the only thing standing between me and the showers is my ability to decode a W2 under corporate supervision.

In other words, there might be circumstances under which I would consent to work again at Schlock.

Might.

So my tone over the phone, as I was subsequently contacted by each and every one of the bureaucratic overlords, was regretful: Gosh! I love you guys! Everyone is so great! I just burned myself out!

And who knows? Maybe that's true.

Well, next year, you'll only work a few days a week, said one of the bureaucratic overlords.

Ha, ha, ha. Right.

For the most part, the clients I worked with loved me. I got all five-star reviews.

###

Talk about your dysfunctional business models: Schlock is like a Halloween Superstore dedicated to Uncle Sam's payday.

Will Schlock even be around in five years? I kinda doubt it.

There's a lot of competition for those IRS hostages. Chiefly from TurboTax (and if Schlock is Blockbuster, TurboTax is Netflix). But also from the dwindling number of other in-person tax prep services like Jackson Hewitt, multiple free online sites, high-end accountants, and, of course, my own alma mater, TaxBwana, which does 1.7 million returns a year.

TurboTax doesn't do in-person consultations, so no competition there. (Though one must wonder whether the operational costs of maintaining bricks and mortar are that much more than the revenue stream it yields.) And TurboTax is actually a bit more expensive for comparable online and downloadable products. But it's rooted in that ever-popular DIY ethos. And it's going after a more sustainable market.

Just contrast and compare the television commercials in which Schlock tax preparers, always depicted in identical green crew-neck sweaters, interact with middle-of-the-road Americans. Sure, there are such things as middle-of-the-road Americans, but that's an externally applied label; most Americans prefer to think of themselves as exceptional. Meanwhile, TurboTax preparers wear edgy black blazers and magenta button-down shirts as if they're dressing down for an elegant dinner party while catering to youthful folk with tattoos, piercings, and anime dance moves.

###

I haven't done very much since I stopped working. Talking to other people is an effort. What, after all, could I possibly have to say that other people might want to hear?

I make myself walk the two and a half miles I'm capable of walking. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll be able to walk three miles! Or, at least, two and three-quarters.

I forced myself to finish The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. If you look at the novel as a meditation on the aftermath of colonialism, it actually kinda works—particularly with its minor characters: the unlucky Mina Foi, the vain, self-involved Babita, the West-obsessed Dadaji. The status details and textures of everyday Indian life really sparkle.

But the main characters—the two lovers and Sonia's evil magus lover, Ilan—are mere paperweights used to keep pieces of the plot from flying away. Ilan's characterization, in particular, is irritating: Sonia's point of view is not established compellingly enough to determine why she would find this man the least bit attractive.

Plus, Kiran Desai uses Ilan to introduce a deeply lame magical realism arc—this despite bashing magical realism as a literary conceit in earlier pages of the book. (Sonia is a literature major and a writer, so the character is used as a conduit for many of Desai's theories on literature.) Was the author aiming for irony? If so, it was badly executed.

And the prose style felt syrupy. It never shifted rhythm. Momentum never built around important moments, so every moment was equally important and unimportant. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice on the author's part. I dunno.

###

I sit and read in a chair in the backyard, so I can let the two surviving chickens out of their dark little coop. Perhaps my human presence counts as vigilance. Maybe my presence will keep the predators off.

The chicken gurlZ come out greedy for tortilla treats. But then they take off and hide in the bushes. Do they have any specific memory of Grey Chicken's death? Who knows? Some birds (parrots) have excellent memories, so maybe they do. The chicken gurlZ sense something, and whatever that is, it's enough to make them cower. No more strutting around the acreage! Every animal would rather be safe than free, I suppose.

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Recharging

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:05:19 GMT

By the end of yesterday, I'd started to feel psychologically less like a worthless drone deservedly scorned by the Trump-voting Mister and Missus McGoo's of this world and more like, well, myself! Who, no doubt, is deservedly scorned by many, but for other reasons.

Physically, it's gonna take some time to snap back.

I haven't exercised in like three months.

I went out tromping yesterday and could only do two and a half miles before I tuckered out.

When you're old, you lose muscle tone very quickly. And I'm old! Turning 74 tomorrow.

Off to tromp now.

I will be attempting to return to Schlock for six more days this coming week if I can stand it.

But if I walk in and I can't stand it,, I will fly out that door.

I forget that when you're old, you don't have the resilience you once had: When the battery drains, it takes a long, long time to replete.

Best not to let it drain.

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Fox Is Gonna Fox

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:20:38 GMT

On Tuesday, my nervous system told my body, Babe you cannot do this anymore.

My hands started shaking while I was doing taxes in the Middletown office.

Shaking? That's actually an understatement: My hands thought they were conducting an invisible philharmonic orchestra.

Mister and Missus McGoo were sitting in my cubicle. My hands shook so hard, I couldn't input their driver's license numbers.

Oozing apologeticness, I ushered the McGoo's to another tax preparer, expressed remorse to Leslie, and took off.

Not sure which of the many, many straws was the one that broke the camel's back.

Was it panic over impending nuclear cataclysm? Open the fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!

Was it watching a fox break Grey Chicken's neck in the golden hour, the afternoon before?

Or knowing I wasn't going home in any true sense of the word "home," but only to some place where I'd parked my stuff and cats (I hoped) temporarily.

###

This episode happened following about 36 hours off, which I tried to turn into quality time by going to the New Paltz Community Garden and breakfasting with real-life Flavia.

I planted peas and put some strawberries and marigolds into one of the upraised beds the previous plot tenant had conveniently left behind:

Following morning, I motored up to Ellenville for breakfast with real-life Flavia, who may have found a good home for Brian's beloved piano:

It's sad that nobody seems to want Brian's beloved piano. It's an awfully good piano, though real-life Mimi's tenancy with its wood fires, clouds of marijuana smoke, dust, and Japanese beetle infestation has been hard on it. Still. It managed to plong in tune when the head of SUNY New Paltz's music department came up to play some notes.

And real-life Mimi surprised us both—pleasantly!—by actually finding a campsite where she can live in the camper Brian helped her buy, come May. That was a relief!

"So, I'm going to spend May cleaning out the house, and then I'll put the property on the market," Flavia said. "Tim seems to think I can get a lot of money for it?"

"How much?"

Flavia hesitated for a moment. But in the nine months since Brian's death, we have become intimate friends who can talk about money. "Million or so."

"And the first thing the new owners will do is pull down Brian's house," I said.

"Probably," said Flavia.

I had a Shlock shift in Montgomery after hanging out with Flavia. I didn't want to be there, but when I got back to the casa after work, I didn't want to be there either since Icky was in residence, and my antipathy toward Icky just grows and grows and grows. Icky marches around the house talking to people on the phone or alternately haranguing and cajoling the Spawn in a loud voice, pretty much ignoring me. It's like he thinks I'm invisible, and when I'm around him, I pretty much feel invisible. Fortunately, he's only up 10 days out of the month.

Anyway, I was keeping Sonia and Sunny company in the Patrizia-torium on the glorious couch Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed gifted me with when I left Dutchess County, when I heard loud squawking from the back lawn.

Looked out—

A fox had the grey chicken in its mouth.

Ran downstairs and out onto the porch.

Icky had heard the squawking, too, and had raced out onto the lawn. The fox dropped the chicken and leaped—its fur golden in the golden light of the late afternoon sun—before running into the small copse of trees that mark the property's boundaries. But either it had broken the chicken's neck, or Icky had broken it, carrying her back to the porch.

The grey chicken was the shyest of the chicken GurlZ. I liked her. I appreciated her hesitancy. So, this was very sad.

But fox is gonna fox. And I have told Icky at least 50 times: There are too many predators around here to let the chickens free-range! You have to build them a run!

He ignored me, of course. Like I say, I am completely invisible to him.

But that essentially means that Black Chicken and her sole surviving companion, an almost identical black chicken, are Dead Chickens Walking. It's a bad situation. And frustrating. Because I can't do a damn thing about it.

I didn't sleep well.

Is that why my hands started shaking so badly in the Schlock office?

I don't know.

###

Before Schlock, I did taxes for a handful of friends every year through TaxBwana. One of those friends is my good pal Tom, whom I first met on LJ back in the Jurassic. Anyway, Tom contacted me that evening: Could I...?

Yes, but Schlock won't let me do freebies, I said. So, I'd have to charge you.

He described his tax documents. They were pretty basic. But Schlock would have charged him a minimum of $250, which seemed like highway robbery to me. So, I snooped around online for a bit and found a site that lets you do and file your federal taxes for free-eee-eeee! and only charges you $20 for filing your state taxes.

"So, you'll set up the account," I said to him over the phone, "and then I'll use that account to input your tax stuff."

"Good show," he said. "But how are you? You sound down."

I described what had happened at the Schlock office that morning. How my hands started shaking, how I couldn't control them, how Mister and Missus McGoo had gawked at me in horror with their big, googly, cartoon eyes.

"Honestly, I couldn't blame them," I said. "I wouldn't have wanted me to do my taxes either at that point. But it would have been less embarrassing if I had taken a big dump and begun fingerpainting on the walls."

"God, that sounds awful," Tom said.

"It was," I said. "But working there has been awful from the start. What you won't do, you'll do for money."

"Has it been bad?" he asked.

"Really bad. And housing insecurity plays into that in a major way. You and I should be housemates! We'd have a good time and save a ton of money."

I said this in a random, joking way. But the minute the words came out of my mouth, I thought: Hmmmm... That's not a bad idea.

Tom has a house. Since his daughter moved out, he lives there alone.

Tom and I are very much in synch psychologically. We both subscribe to the Larry McMurtry ideal of friendship. We are not romantically attracted to one another. We are both more-or-less in the same financial situation.

The more we talked about it, the more appealing the arrangement sounded.

But there is one major caveat: Tom lives in Holland, Michigan. Where I have never been. Holland, Michigan, ranks high on Architectural Digest and Forbes lists of the prettiest small towns in the U.S. It's a college town. It has an arthouse cinema! But it is also Trumpy, plus it has brutal winters.

At any rate, I am probably gonna fly out for a visit sometime in the next couple of months.
If I like what I see, the plan becomes a possibility.

I'm also going to book a consultation with a neurologist. I've been assuming the hand tremors are stress-related. But who knows? Maybe I have Parkinson's disease.

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Notes From the Front

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:50:03 GMT

The company is loathsome, but I do like the clients.

I wish I could write a complete novel about each & every one of them, but when I drag myself home at the end of the day, my brain is shot. I don't know how else to describe it: It's not fatigue exactly, since all I do all day is sit, applying ass to the base of a chair. My brain is perfectly capable of processing information. I just don't want to.

I've had to make adjustments to accommodate the job.

Chief among those adjustments: Stuff I did to control that hand tremor (which causes big problems when you're inputting data). Like I stopped drinking coffee on mornings I work. You'd think that one would be a biggie since caffeine is addictive and withdrawal is supposed to cause headaches & intense lassitude, but in fact, it caused neither of those things for me, and so, was surprisingly easy.

I also cut down on my Synthroid dose. I climbed on a scale for the first time in forever and found I had lost 10 pounds since I started working. (I am one of those people who gets anorexic with stress.) Drugs are typically administered per kilogram of body weight, so I figured the prescribed dose was now too high.

No Coffee + Less Synthroid did indeed banish the tremors.

Today being a Day Off, I am drinking coffee & taking the full dose, and yes, indeed, my hands are shaking.

###

A short list of clients over the past week: (None of their names are real.)

• Gary Stevens. Hippie-looking guy about my age with stringy white hair and an amiable manner. A retired nurse—so we chatted about that: He got his nursing training in the Navy, and, in his retirement, volunteers several times a week at a local homeless shelter.

"Any big changes this year?" I asked.

"Yeah, I got divorced," he told me ruefully. "You think you have a happy marriage, and then your wife informs you you don't."

He'd come to Schlock because he'd had to divide up his annuity and wasn't quite sure of the tax implications.

"Well, let's have a look," I said.

And Oh. My. Gawd.

Instead of engaging the services of an advisor who might have assisted him in drafting a financial instrument that could shield him from the division's tax implications, he merely withdrew $250,000 from the account and gave that money to his X-wife—

Leaving him with a $40,000 tax bill.

I have often read the phrase "the color drained from his face," but I'd never actually seen it before.

"What can I do?" he whispered.

"Well, first, you absolutely have to file this tax return," I said. "The penalties for not filing are much higher than the penalties for not paying. And then, you need to find yourself a tax attorney. You may be eligible for what they call 'an offer in compromise,' where the IRS agrees to settle for part of what you owe. But, I mean—why'd you do it this way? Why wouldn't you have the brokerage issue the check to her, which would have shifted the tax burden? Didn't your attorney—"

"I didn't have an attorney," he said miserably. "I figured I would try to keep things amiable."

• Marie de Faltay. Woman a few years younger than me with a definite sartorial flair that included rhinestone-studded glasses. She was trembling like a leaf.

The first thing she asked me: "Can I declare my dogs as dependents?"

I saw at once that she had been very, very beautiful in her youth. Blonde hair, Zsa-Zsa-Gabor-like features, and the most amazing eyes, violet and green at the same time. I supposed it had never occurred to her that there would come a time when she would not be beautiful. But beauty had been her only leverage, and with that gone, she had very little to fall back on. She supplemented her meager social security income with a shit job at Marshall's. Combined revenue streams left her with a taxable income of zero, so she got back the small sums withheld from the Marshall's check for federal & state taxes.

She hadn't filed her 2024 taxes. I talked her into making an appointment to do that, too. "If you're getting a refund, the IRS doesn't care if you file late." Her amazingly beautiful eye welled up with tears over the thought of a few hundred unanticipated dollars. And she'll definitely be getting a refund—no taxable income!

• Gilbert Specter. I was so relieved he lived in an apartment! Because he gave out strong I-have-a-dungeon-in-my-basement-where-I-chain-up-sex-slaves vibes.

(Probably, I am being mean here. Probably, he was developmentally delayed, or maybe he was just not very smart.)

Works as a custodian at a local high school. (Stephen King! White courtesy telephone.) Has a small stockpile of dividend-bearing stocks in addition to his salary. Also, a side gig selling tickets (to what? I wondered) for which he kept meticulous records, except the records were completely irrelevant because he'd somehow confused the business with what he was using the business to subsidize—which was a yearly trip to Oklahoma. (Is Oklahoma where they hold the annual I-have-sex-slaves-in-my-dungeon-basement convention?)

"It's all there, it's all there!" he kept shrieking at me, shoving 10 pages of notes in densely written spider scrawl at me. "I spent $910 in round-trip air tickets and $649 renting a car—"
"Right!" I said for the fourth time. "But the trip is different from the business, you see. The IRS only cares about the business—"

Fortunately, for me, I had been scheduled to work at two separate tax offices that day, so I got to say, "Oooops! Gotta run! Here's Rebecca! Rebecca will take care of you," before he drove me quite mad.

• Amber Meisen. Lovely young woman who'd been living the carefree artist's life (though supporting herself as a Trader Joe's cashier) in Brooklyn when she was hit by a car while riding her bicycle. Injuries plus medical bills forced her to return to (ugh) Middletown.

She'd earned enough to qualify for earned income credit! So, she got a refund of several thousand dollars that she did not expect! And her joy was a pleasure to behold.

###

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I mean, they're all interesting. Everybody has a story!

###

I should also briefly note the incredibly unpleasant exchange with a Remuneration client who sent me a string of 20 or so emails, each more incoherent, toxic, & insane than the last, claiming I was in arrears to him for work that I had already done.

I've been freelancing for many years, and I keep excellent books, so after each abusive email, I sent him back a calm, professional response with clear documentation of our original payment terms, my payment records, past invoices for completed work, and the remaining balance I showed under the advance I'd insisted upon because he's an overseas client, and we were working without an enforceable contract.

This seemed to inflame him even more. By the end, his emails were abusive.

I suspect the underlying issue is his own financial mismanagement. He has run out of money, and so has retro‑engineered a story for his money people to make him look like the one who “trusted” me too much. My careful, documented push‑back threatens that story, so he flooded me with veiled threats and hysterical accusations.

UGH.

Kudos to me for remaining professional.

I will finish up the work I owe him, but obviously, I will not accept any work from him in the future. In fact, I strongly suspect I will not be doing any freelancing in the future; freelancing is just too loaded with uncertainty and potentially toxic situations that I no longer have the stamina to deal with as the cost of doing business.

###

And now it is off to the New Paltz Community Garden to plant my peas and put in my strawberries.

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Iran: Win/Win Option!!!!

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:48:59 GMT

At this point, the only win/win option available to Trump is converting to Islam. 😀

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Fatimatou and Folasade

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:07:31 GMT

Day off.

At some point, I am going to trek across the bridge to grab my tomato cages from the Hyde Park Community Garden & deliver them to the New Paltz Community Garden.

###

I'd had some vague thought of joining one of the numerous No Kings Marches today, but I'm not feeling it.

Besides! I gave at the office yesterday with my last two clients of the day, Fatimatou and Folasade (not their real names), who turned out to be from Guinea, which fact I extracted when I realized the impenetrable language they were trading with one another was actually a strangely accented French.

"Tu parle français?" I asked in my own execrable French.

"Ah, toi aussi, tu parles français?" asked Fatimatou, the more fluent of the two young women in English.

"Un peu," I said. "Un petit peu. Très mal. Tu viens du Sénégal?"

"On vient de Guinée," Fatimatou said.

Guinea!

I had no idea where Guinea actually was, except that most of France's former African colonies are on the west coast.

###

Fatimatou had come to this country as a child with her parents. Product of the Brooklyn public school system, she was bright and enterprising, and had earned a bachelor's degree in the rapidly obsolescing field of data management. This degree qualified her for a string of jobs at places like Sephora and Tori Burch. I had no idea why Fatimatou decided to move to Middletown, where there are far fewer Sephoras and Tori Burches.

When she'd worked at the Sephora in Brooklyn, Fatimatou had been vested in the company's 401(k), so when she left the company, they'd presented her with a check for several thousand dollars. Unfortunately, they'd neglected to instruct her about rollovers, so she'd spent the money and was now facing a tax penalty. Fortunately, she'd been conscientious filling out those W4s, so the tax penalty wasn't huge—

"Three hundred and seventy-three dollars," I said, switching back to English.

Fatimatou said something to Folasade in that weird French, and they both squealed with joy.

"I did it myself, and it showed I owed $10,000," she explained.

This, in fact, is why most first-time users come to Schlock: They fuck up their Turbotax return somehow.

###

Folasade was a more recent immigrant.

She had a green card, but I could feel the tension in the two women around that.

She was also in the unenviable position of understanding a lot more English than she could actually speak. But not quite enough English to understand what I was saying without Fatimatou's interpretation.

She'd had exactly one job in 2025—as a holiday worker at Tori Burch, where she'd made exactly $266. And they'd taken out nothing in federal taxes.

I grimaced when I saw that.

"I don't know what to tell you about this," I said. "We're going to charge you $164 for this return. It hardly seems worth it. On the other hand, with the situation here being what it is right now, it seems wise to make some sort of paper trail, establishing you as a law-abiding wannabe citizen."

The situation got even more complicated when it turned out that even the minute amount of money Folasade earned qualified her for a minute amount ($28!) of earned income credit. EIC kicks up the Schlock pricing structure by a hundred bucks.

I sat there for a couple of seconds and then shot an email to the district head of Schlock's mid-Hudson Valley operations: If I can get her a deal this year, we'll have a customer for life, blah, blah, blah—because that's the kind of logic that works on corporate asswipes.

And lo and behold! They called me back and gave me a coupon to take $100 off her fee.

I still feel like she was exploited, but you can only do what you can do.

###

I'm halfway through The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It should be a page turner—the story is very interesting, India is very interesting—and yet it is not a page-turner because each and every sentence has exactly the same metric beat, so the prose, even with the razzledazzle of unusual metaphors and similes, is actually pretty boring.

One of the novel's focuses is the plight of upper-caste Indian women, sent abroad to be overeducated in foreign schools but unable to catch a husband, and so, who end up living lives of genteel poverty.

That is not so very different from my own plight, no? I'm nothing if not overeducated! And I married twice, but neither marriage stuck.

In the end, there is no such thing as exceptionalism—national or not.

###

"Comment tu vas, uh, passer reste de la journée?" I asked Folasade in my terrible French.

"We are going to look for jobs," Fatimatou said in English. "But it is hard because she cannot speak..." Fatimatou shrugged.

"You might try looking for housecleaning jobs," I said. "Because then English wouldn't matter. I know it's a bit demeaning, rabaissant, but it pays okay—"

The ghost of Barbara Ehrenreich groaned at me from Heaven.

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The World Is Nuts

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:35:37 GMT

The world is a fuckin' mess.

I just broke up a fight in the Stewart’s parking lot. Guy parked in a handicapped space, another guy called him on it. They were actually exchanging blows. I got between them, screaming, "Stop it, stop it, stop it," (which was a really stupid thing to do), and when they saw that I’m an old lady, they backed down.

I’m still shaking.

###

This came on top of a brutal day.

Phillip Osario (not his real name) forgot one of his W2s yesterday.

He brought it in today.

Phillip Osario is working four jobs just to stay afloat, but the paltry amount he made at that fourth job shaved $2,000 off his refund.

He stared at me with blank, uncomprehending eyes: "So, don't put the fourth job in."

I sighed and shook my head. "Doesn't work that way. I have to."

"But I don't want you to!"

"I know," I said. "But if I know about the job, I have to put it in."

Phillip Osario glared at me through slitted eyes.

If I had to guess, I'd guess he was a reformed gangbanger. Beautiful face, Orpheus in the asphalt underworld, with a tattoo of a woman's name in ornate copperplate script veering alongside his left eye. I made up a bio for him: Something—the birth of a child?—had made him want to make an abrupt about-face in his life, but now he was struggling in a world that had no use for him, had no place for him. I felt every hour of the meaningless drudgery he put in to get by—a few hours in Walmart, a few hours at the Home Depot. An underling. The lowest of the low whose real job was to let other people order him around. I wanted to tell him, Take the $3,000 and enroll in a HVAC course at a community college! You'll make $100,000 a year. But I didn't. Because we didn't have a telepathic bond, much as I wanted to pretend we did.

So, instead, I lectured him on all the dire things that befall people who lie to the IRS about their revenue streams. "They impose interest and high penalties. They garnish your wages. And in this day of AI, nobody gets away with lying to the IRS anymore. It's impossible, they will find you out. It's just a matter of time."

Eventually, I talked him into filing.

But I felt like crying.

###

He left, and Angel Meduro (not his real name) came in.

Angel Meduro looked a lot like Angel Batista in Dexter, right down to the porkpie hat. And he made a shitload of money doing something for the U.S. Treasury.

Angel Meduro wanted to do Married Filing Separately.

"How long have you been separated?" I asked.

"Oh, we live together," he said. "But I got debts & things I want to protect her from."

"That's fine," I said. "We'll still need her social security number though."

"They didn't need it last year," said Angel Meduro.

"Really?" I said. "Then whoever did your taxes last year did them wrong. That's a hard and fast requirement for Married Filing Separately."

We went back and forth a little, and eventually, he started trying to call his wife to get her permission to use her social security number.

She answered the sixth time he called.

He had her on speaker phone.

"What the fuck are you calling me for?" she asked furiously. "I told you I was going to the acupuncture guy!"

"Sorry, mami. But I'm with the tax lady, and she says I need your social security number—"

"What are you, some kind of fucking moron? I am not giving my social security number—"
She said a bunch of other things, too, that I can't remember except that they were all pretty humiliating, and after she finally hung up the phone, he looked at me with haunted eyes: "Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I can't do this."

The light bulb had already gone off over my head by this time: She was falsifying her filing status! Probably filing as Head of Household so she could rake in the earned income and child tax credits, and didn't want him imperiling her scam!

Poor Angel Meduro.

I hope she gives good blow jobs.

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Sleepless Night

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:14:28 GMT

Night before last, I couldn't sleep. I lay all night in that strange hypnagogic state where you're completely aware of the external world beyond your closed eyelids, but the passage of time is very distorted.

I hadn't had any caffeine since 8 am the previous morning.

I hadn't had any alcohol.

I was anxious, but anxiety is the matrix in which all of us humans live nowadays. Being alive right now is anxiety-provoking! Nothing is going unusually wrong in my little life, & there was no Horrible Thing awaiting me the very next day that I wanted to avoid.

So, my sleeplessness was a great mystery.

When the first light broke around 6 am, I got up from my bed.

You will simply call them at 9 & tell them you can't come in today, I told myself.

I was amazed by how guilty this made me feel! I mean, it's not like I owe Schlock anything but my labor while my ass is in their chair.

But I did feel guilty! What a horrible failure you are, said the little voice in my head. What a perpetual disappointment to all & sundry.

###

This sleeplessness has happened before. Not often—but often enough so that I'm familiar with its manifestation. Usually it happens on nights when I'm anxious about performing the next day.

Thus, it happened during a trip to Baltimore a few years back with a person I didn't know very well at the time (but subsequently became a good friend). Thus, it happened in Ithaca last Thanksgiving when I was about to be trotted out on a round of holiday parties.

It's one of the banes of old age.

Old people just don't sleep very well.

###

Anyway, I managed to have a fairly productive day with my ass not in the chair.

In the morning, I polished off Remuneration for one client & got a modest assignment from another. If I'm diligent about husbanding resources, I may actually be in better financial shape this year than I was last.

In the afternoon, I scampered off to the New Paltz Community Garden & puttered. My plot is in surprisingly good shape. Whoever had it before me stayed on top of the weeds, and the soil in those raised boxes looks surprisingly good.

In the late afternoon, I dropped by the Gardiner Bakehouse and spent an hour or so nibbling chocolate chip cookies and reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which is the Big New Novel of the season.

I want to like Sonia and Sunny more than I actually like it. It has some surprisingly good insights:

An arranged marriage story, even one that ended six months later in divorce, felt true and false. True because it happened. False because it was feeding the West what it wanted to consume about the East. The audience made it false. Lifting this one story out of all the others made it false.

But I'm finding Kiran Desai's much-praised writing style a bit banal. Her metaphors are pretty word strings but they don't make much sense. And her non-Indian characters make no sense at all.

Claude sent me an email: Are keeping your garden this year . Hope you fine , spring is rite there . Lmk

Claude's spoken English is very good (though it preserves Gallic word order), but he never saw the slightest utility in learning how to write English.

It made me very sad to write back that no, I would not be coming back. I really love the Hyde Park Community Garden, it's just such a beautiful, serene place, and I really like all my fellow gardeners there:

But it's utterly insane to plan on driving across the bridge multiple times each week. The time sink, sure, but also, I don't like driving.

I still haven't decided where I want to move. Ithaca is attractive, but the problem with Ithaca is that just five miles outside the city limits, you're in Alabama except with snow. The Southern Tier is a Trumpy place & getting to anywhere else I might want to hang out (for which read New York City) is a real ordeal from there. Yes, RTT is there, and RTT loves me—but it's not as though RTT would want to hang out with me.

So, I'm also contemplating maybe moving back to Dutchess County. Where I know people. Where I'll be close to Metro-North train stations that can deposit me in Grand Central Station in just under two hours. My old friend Carl A has told me I can stay overnight in the guest room of his apartment on the upper West Side anytime. I should probably take him up on the offer.

Claude wrote me back: It’s sad that u leavin us but we ll keep u in mind for next year u decide to come back . I don’t ve a à person to replace u right now . Stay in touch

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Fahrenheit 451 Was Actually a Survival Guide

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:46:12 GMT

Remarkable how quickly one loses muscle tone & wind at my age.

The Schlock job requires a lot of sitting on my ass. And I haven't really had the time to exercise formally. I noticed that yesterday, when a stroll up New Paltz's hilly Main Street left me breathless.

Yes, I should make exercise a priority.

But honestly?

It's all I can do to force myself not to quit the Schlock job.

Adding more "must"s to the list would be ill-advised at this time because I won't, and then I'll feel very guilty, worthless, & inadequate.

###

Meanwhile, by the time I made it to the New Paltz Community Garden, clouds were coming in, and the temperature had dropped. Weeding was not going to be fun. So I contented myself by circling back to the casa and weeding the Patrizia-torium instead, which is now a veritable dell of enchantment and clean! So clean.

I had quite a good time doing errands in New Paltz, tromping dyspnea notwithstanding:

Banner off somebody's porch:

Front window at the Cat Café mit bonus reflected Portrait of the Artist:

Solar power-operated Frida. Tough battle, but somehow I convinced myself I could live without it:

I splurged on books instead. Hard covers! When I closed up the house in Monterey, I swore I would never buy hardcover books again, since I had a library of something like 3,000 of them; I loved them all, but transporting them to the East Coast was completely out of the question, and nobody else wanted them, nobody! I did try. On the West Coast, libraries don't do periodic book sales to raise cash the way they do on the East Coast.

I do read digitally, but truth be told, I prefer physical books. I like the heft of them, I love the faint smell of bookbinding glue and the texture of paper pages.

My extravagant expenditure sparked a momentary tizzy. Books! Great! You can burn these for heat & light when an Iranian drone takes out all the power plants. Fahrenheit 451 was actually a survival guide!

###

On the way to New Paltz, I took a wrong turn & ended up on an unfamiliar road. But, of course, there are no such things as wrong turns; you are always exactly where the Universe wants you to be, and the Universe clearly wanted me to enjoy spectacular views of the Shawangunk ridge:

Plus bonus view of dead-seeming orchard, longing to become a symbol of spring & rebirth when it jumpstarts those pink blossoms in the next month or so—always assuming the brutal winter that now finally seems to be ending didn't murder it:

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When It Happens, It Happens Very Fast

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:36:42 GMT

Scary, scary, scary world.

Even before the Iran war, the U.S. was falling apart. In February, wholesale prices jumped 0.7%, twice the predicted inflation rate. When retailers pay more for goods, they pass those costs on to consumers through higher prices at the checkout counter.

And so far in 2026, there have been literally only slightly more than 18,000 new jobs created (in a nation of 365 million people).

The war adds a whole new level of economic misery, of course, since higher energy prices ripple through everything.

The cost of gasoline obviously hits consumers at the pump, but it also increases utility bills and transportation costs of goods, since so little of what we consume is produced close to where we live. The housing market is insane, and the world of imaginary money—the stock market with its more-or-less arbitrary valuations—is showing signs of unraveling: The Dow and Nasdaq are now in correction territory, meaning they’ve fallen more than 10 percent from their recent highs.

Nor will American exceptionalism be the only victim of Trump & Netanyahu's megalomania: The basis for almost all nonorganic fertilizers is ammonia, primarily manufactured from fossil fuels. Much of it is manufactured in places like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and, yes, Iran, and shipped through the Strait of Hormuz to places like India, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Pakistan. Without access to these fertilizers, agricultural production is going to plummet, so we can anticipate famine—which is going to increase the whole unwanted migration phenomenon.

It's a fuckin' mess, in other words.

How's a defenceless little mammal like me supposed to survive in this world of thundering dinosaur stupidity?

By scampering out of the way of their colossal footfalls, I suppose.

But just how exactly am I supposed to do that?

###

Anyway, this is the reason why though I loathe working for Schlock, I am determined to last out the season. Grimly determined, though I can see the toll that work is taking on both my physical & mental health. It is wise right now to position oneself as far ahead of that plunging economic curve as one can possibly get—though on my stumpy little mammal legs, that is not very far. The whole thing is gearing up to come crashing down very fast if Trump doesn't get bored enough with the Iran War to end it very fast.

###

When it happens, it happens very fast...

I remember thinking that after Sarajevo fell in 1996 because in 1970, when there was still Yugoslavia, I spent a couple of days in Sarajevo on my way to Greece, and unsophisticated little naif as I was back then, I remember marveling that Sarajevo was so much like Oakland, California. The same fading post-industrial architecture, and the sky wasn't orange or anything, it was blue!

How could a place that reminded me so much of another place I knew intimately be the site of a bloody civil war? My mind truly boggled.

And it was kind of like the Universe was whispering in my ear: When it happens, it happens very fast.

###

Schlock is truly awful. I like doing taxes, but I don't do a whole lot of those.

Mostly, I sit in a cubicle doing absolutely nothing beyond surreptitiously Googling Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell analyses. (Definitely the one book I would smuggle on to that desert island.) Doing nothing doesn't sound all that bad, but it's absolutely lethal. Boredom is not the worst thing in the world; the worst thing would be torture. But having the sort of mind that relishes facts & figures most other people find excessively dry, I am hardly ever bored, so boredom is a relatively unusual & unpleasant experience for me. It makes me feel invisible. It makes me feel... extinguished.

I did finally cop to the insanity of working every single day for 90 days straight, and thus carved out two days off in a row for myself.

I had all sorts of plans for yesterday, but found myself so exhausted that I did very little beyond vacuuming and refurbishing my purple hair. (...only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your purple hair)

Today, I have Big Plans to toddle off to the New Paltz Community Garden and begin weeding. Though if I don't, I will be gentle with myself.

Honestly, the most pressing dilemma I face at the moment is that the company that makes the hair dye I've been using for the past seven years has discontinued its production.

I'm pretty sure Schwarzkopf does not ship through the Strait of Hormuz, so what the hell is their problem, huh?

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Patrizia and Her Performing Chicken

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:21:06 GMT

Yesterday morning, I went off for a plot showing at the New Paltz Community Garden.

I saw several lovely plots, but in the end I chose this one becawwwwwse the gardener before me had left me her hose! Plus, it has several upraised beds:

That's one thing I don't like about the New Paltz Community Garden: They make you water your garden with your own individually purchased hose. In fact, I dislike that so much that I argued the point with Phil, the extremely nice plot coordinator who was showing me around: "Hoses are not cheap! So by making that a requirement, you're essentially eliminating low-income gardeners who might really benefit from growing their own food."

Phil made a thoughtful face. "You're not wrong."

###

Afterwards, I had an hour and a half to kill, so I hung out at the Gardiner Bakehouse:

The Gardiner Bakehouse is the café part of a complex run by a local maker's guild. Wonderful coffee & excellent food. Pastries to die for! It's the last place Brian & I hung out in together; in fact, we actually had a date to do an open mike there Saturday night of the week he died.

I was so happy sitting there! Sipping coffee, people watching, dipping into my novel from time to time to read a few paragraphs.

This is how you need to live your life! I told myself. With ample access to the Gardiner Bakehouse. You need to move to New Paltz.

New Paltz, you see, is the last hippie enclave in the entire United States.

###

At Montgomery Schlock, I took on the task of doing taxes for an adorable kid who had started his own trucking business, but who had failed to draft a business plan or keep a single record of his business expenses.

After half an hour or so, I got up from my desk & toddled off to consult with the office manager.

"You can't do it?" she asked.

"Oh, I can do it," I said. "The question is whether I should do it, given the fact that I'm a first-year associate and this is going to require some intense forensic accounting. I'm not certified to do it, and that's going to raise some liability issues if the return is audited, which it almost certainly will be."

The office manager didn't seem to understand the difference between "can" and "should," which was mildly annoying but whatevs: I do not give a shit what these people understand or think so long as I get paid.

###

Back at the casa, I hunted down Icky. "The chickens... ?"

Icky looked grim. "Something got them. I found some feathers next to the coop. They got Little Nas—"

"Little Nas" is his name for Black Chicken.

Oh, my heart was broken. Black Chicken! Whom I'd taught to jump high and walk backwards when I first moved into this place. Whom I could have taken out on the road as a circus act, Patrizia and Her Performing Chicken.

I sat in the Patrizia-torium sobbing. Black Chicken! People are dying in Gaza! I reminded myself fiercely. It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one black chicken don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Half an hour later, Icky began calling my name. "Patrizia! Patrizia! Patrizia!"

I ran downstairs—

He was holding Black Chicken!!!

Black Chicken had survived!!!

"Where was she?"

"She was just standing there on the back porch when I opened the door—"

Clearly, something had tried to grab her: She was missing a whole bunch of feathers under her right wing. I visualized a fox's mouth.

But she had gotten away! I pictured her pecking furiously at the fox until he dropped her and then fluttering away to hide. Nobody's getting Black Chicken without a fight! Black Chicken is a survivor!!! Descendent of the mighty dinosaurs!

There are now three chickens left.

"You've got to build them some sort of run," I told Icky. "Free ranging is a nice concept, but it's simply not safe for them."

He is leaving to go back down to the city today, but I think he will build one next time he's up.

In the meantime, the chickens must be confined to their coop.

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Chickens

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:25:03 GMT

The chicken flock waits beneath the porch to say goodbye to me when I trudge off to the office because I always give them tasty tortilla treats.

Only yesterday, when I went out, there were only three of them instead of four.

I went back inside and asked Icky, "Do you know where the other black chicken is?"

Icky shrugged, unconcerned. "She probably wandered off somewhere on her own."

When Icky is in residence, I leave the chicken wrangling to him. They are his chickens after all.

Still, this was weird. The chickens travel in their flock of four. Icky had only let them out of their coop about an hour earlier when presumably, there had been four. I hadn't noticed any feathers around, as one might have had a predator grabbed the other black chicken.

###

I went off to the Montgomery Schlock office where I literally spent three hours gabbing to Gary, my 350-pound coworker, and doing absolutely nothing else because there were no clients. Gary showed me the journal in which he chronicles his weight-loss journey and his financial transactions. He is 29 years old and has already accumulated $40,000 in investments, working Schlock and another job as a residential counselor at a home for adults with developmental disabilities. Gary is very, very smart—and very, very sweet.

"By the time you're 35, you'll have your life entirely where you want it to be!" I told him. "You'll have lost the rest of that weight, and you'll have someone who loves you and a house—"

###

Back at the casa, I puttered. And when twilight came around, I looked out the window and thought I espied all four chickens pecking for insects just outside their coop.

Icky was out.

So, I waited another 15 minutes and then went outside myself to shut the chickens up for the night—

Except there were no chickens at all in the coop.

I left the coop door open, ran back to the house, and began one of my weird, atavistic prayer rituals: Please, Universe, please! Make the chickens be okay!!!

How could this be?

Where could they have gone?

Frantically, I texted Icky.

When he got back an hour later, I accosted him equally frantically: "Did you get my text?"

"No. What?"

"The chickens!"

He went back outside, returning five minutes later, frowning. "Only two are in the coop."

Two?

But that was two more than had been there when I'd checked.

So maybe the other two were still around somewhere? Nesting on a brood of eggs they'd laid in some underbrush?

###

I spent the night reading up on Reddit on True Tales of Amazing Poultry Runaways & Returns. There are a lot of them.

Molly ran away for an entire month shortly after you moved here, I reminded myself. And you didn't see any evidence that a predator got the chickens.

Still, my heart feels broken this morning.

I don't hold up The Umbrella of Protection very well.

I can't take sufficient care of innocent little creatures that depend upon me.

I can barely take care of myself.

Why can't I live in a Universe where innocence & a pure soul are valued? Surely, in an infinity of parallel universes, such a Universe exists! Why am I trapped here in a world where competitiveness is baked into the evolutionary process so that only implacable indifference and occasional cruelty prosper?

###

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

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The Iran War

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:13:30 GMT

Who's winning the Iran War?

Russia!

Trump just suspended economic sanctions 'cause the U.S. needs that Russian oil!

If anything can convince you that war in particular and nationalism in general are nothing more than a lethal playground squabble, that particular bit of info should be it. No need for sophisticated analyses. The playground bully—that would be the Trump administration—is always arbitrary when it comes to enemy lists.

Between scarcity & price gouging, gas will be $5 a gallon by the end of March, and increases in the price of fuel will be baked into every good that relies upon transportation. In the consumer price index, what goes up does not go down, so we are looking at permanent price increases.

The economy was already struggling before Trump miscalculated Iran. Revised estimates for GDP growth during the last quarter of 2025 are just .7% while January inflation was 3.1%. We are running very fast just to stand in one place.

###

Is any war a "good" war?

I would say military actions undertaken to quell forms of ethnic cleansing are probably justified. Genocide should be prevented. Thus, WWII was a "good" war; ditto the 1995 NATO airstrikes that ended the Bosnian War.

But what are we looking at exactly in Iran?

I am beginning to think the Universe would be much better off without human beings.

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Faux Spring

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:19:21 GMT

Sara Crewe is my spirit animal at the Middletown Schlock office.

Yesterday, one of my clients, an incredibly handsome man—another prison guard!—wanted his 2024 taxes done, but nobody told me he wanted his 2024 taxes done; in fact, Leslie, the dour & humorless assistant manager, actually scanned his tax documents into the 2025 folder.

I started a 2025 return.

And it wasn't until I picked up his W2 and noted that it had been issued in 2024 that I realized the mistake.

I abandoned the 2025 return and completed the 2024 return.

But there was no way for me to delete the 2025 return.

And Leslie made an error and processed his payment for the 2025 return.

Somehow this became my mistake!

Oh, the Leslie grumbles & side-eye!

Means to an end! Means to an end! I kept reminding myself.

I mean, who gives a shit what these people think? It's not as though they impinge upon my real life in the slightest. Schlock is not going to fire me; they need the asses in the seats. And I want the $$$$$!

T-34 days.

###

Also yesterday I had this muy disturbing neurological symptom.

My hands began to shake as soon as I arrived at that office.

I have what neurologists describe as an idiopathic tremor. My mother had it, too. Much of the time, my hands shake a little. Generally, the mild tremor does not interfere with anything else I'm doing (like typing or keying in data), but yesterday my hands were actually fluttering as though I was conducting an invisible orchestra.

I actually had to turn my first client of the day over to one of the other preparers and race off to the closest cannabis dispensary. Cannabis calms tremors. I prefer not to use it if I have to do mental acrobatics, but you know, you gotta do what you gotta do, and it worked to steady my hands so I could do my four other clients of the day.

But clearly, my body does not like going into that office.

###

The last few days have been an eerie faux spring. On Tuesday, temps actually hit 80!

I had the day partly off because I had a doctor's appointment in the afternoon. My doctor is still across the river because who wants to deal with finding a new primary care physician, right? So, I drove over to Hyde Park and after the appointment, I took off for my old tromping grounds, the Vanderbilt gardens:

Felt strange to see all those bare trees & fallow flower beds when the temperature and humidity were signaling high summer.

Plus, the Goddess of the Cell Phone was still surrounded by snow:

I came across four women sitting on a bench in the woods. And they were such a charming sight, I asked to take their portrait:

We all ended up chatting for half an hour. My new best friends!

And honestly, we could have been best friends.

Except we're not.

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This Is Not My Beautiful Wife

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:01:59 GMT

Absolutely slammed at Schlock Montgomery yesterday. Four returns in four hours, three of them relatively complicated returns. Miss Ramada Inn snarled at me: "You need to pick up the pace."

I did not snarl back, You need to go fuck yourself, though I smiled inwardly, thinking it.

There's hardly any light in the back of the Schlock Montgomery office where my desk is, and many W2 forms use 4-point font for entries like employer TINs and wages, all of which must be encoded precisely into the Schlock tax prep software. This meant many minutes spent attempting to study said documents with the magnifying app on my phone.

Plus, the Schlock tax prep software is really klugy compared to the tax prep software I was using as a TaxBwana. Hit the wrong key, and you are signing the client up for a Schlock payday loan at a 36% interest rate—which I did with the first set of clients, a heavily tattooed married couple, filing jointly. It took me 15 minutes to figure my way out of that because I was the only tax preparer in the office; there wasn't anybody else to ask. The clients were not amused.

You can rise from this desk at any moment, tell those clients, "Your tattoos are really ugly, and you suck", I reminded myself as I keyed frantically through solutions. That kept me amused.

And eventually, I found the solution.

My second client was a dapper man in a grey porkpie hat who used to be a correctional officer at Rikers Island.

Rikers Island correctional officers get really good pensions!

Mr. Trapper (not his real name) spends his retirement hanging out in the Newburgh Barnes & Noble reading edifying biographies of Black sports heroes. He could afford to buy those biographies, but I guess he likes being a regular in a crowded place.

I found myself flirting with him! And having fantasies of ambling down to the Newburgh Barnes & Noble, so we could fall in ❤️LUV❤️! Was it the pension? Or the porkpie hat?

My third and fourth clients were a couple in their late thirties, filing separately—she was still married to someone else, which made her claim to Head of Household dubious, but hey! Schlock tax preparers before me had approved it, so who was I to gainsay?

This couple had a combined income substantially less than mine, & I consider myself poor.

In fact, they personified America's white urban underclass. They seemed utterly miserable, and I thought, Well, this is really why the enlightened inhabitants of Alpha Centauri dispatched you to this planet, so you could report back on the desperate look in the woman's eyes: You're a field scientist!

The time did pass quickly.

Only 37 more days to go!

###

Daylight saving time has added enough hours to the day so that I can start going to the gym again. So, that's good.

And it finally stopped raining.

The sun came out yesterday, and temps soared into the 60°s, melting the snowbanks & turning the meadows around the casa into a muddy swamp.

This is not my beautiful wife.

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Distraction

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:52:57 GMT

I have to do nothing a certain number of hours each day.

I mean that quite literally. I essentially sit with my eyes unfocused. Sometimes, there's a book on my lap; sometimes, there's a yellow legal pad and a pen on a desk in front of me. But those are props. Really, I am just sitting there, & my mind is a complete blank.

Is this laziness? Is this some metabolic form of meditation? Who knows? But this is what I have to do to stay sane, & just because I'm toiling in the tax mines 10 hours a day, doesn't mean I can stop.

This cuts down on the number of hours I have available for Useful Work since added to the tax mine & the hours I sit with my eyes unfocused is the time I must spend on distraction. Books & movies! ("Movies" there is an umbrella term that includes television shows.) Dangling strands of narrative. Stories!

Long way of saying the Patrizia-torium is an absolute mess, and I've had the same basket of laundry waiting to be folded sitting in my bedroom for four days now. Though I did remember to get my Synthroid prescription refilled.

What I'm hoping is that I can fill the coffers high enough to buy me four uninterrupted weeks of work on the Work In Progress.

Three thousand extra dollars is not gonna float down in small, easily negotiable bills from the sky! Manifesting does not work for me.

No, I'm gonna have to sweat for it.

###

Shortly, I will be going into the Montgomery Schlock office to sit down with a client who somehow thinks it's my fault that he owes $2,000 on his federal income taxes.

He wants to ream me a new asshole.

Hey! I wasn't the one making out the W4 that only takes out 8% for federal taxes when he's clearly in the 12% bracket!

But like most people, he thinks tax refunds are a type of Lotto. And that I have cheated him out of his golden ticket.

The Montgomery office is far more tolerable than the Middletown office. I actually like the people who work there. Yesterday, I learned the entire life history of the office's manager, a pugnacious 74-year old, born & raised in Newburgh during its tenure as the murder capital of the U.S. The high point of her life? In 1981, she was Miss Ramada Inn!

Stories! I do love stories.

The day before, I studied up on Gary (not his real name), a sweet & super-smart guy who plays D&D, smokes lots of dope, & weighs 350 pounds—down from 550 pounds three years ago.

When people are seriously obese, of course, that is the primary thing you notice about them—though political correctness dictates you pretend otherwise.

Eventually, the conversation grew real enough so that Gary began talking to me about his weight, why it happened. Though I think the real reason was that when everything else in your life is starving you, you nurture yourself the best way you can.

"Here's an interesting factoid," I said. "Do you know the only food in nature that contains sugars and fats in the same proportions that they're found in processed cakes and candies and ice cream?"

"Honey?" guessed Gary.

"Human breast milk," I told him.

His mouth fell open. And I could actually see the light bulb forming over his head.

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From the Annals of Yellow-Haired Charlotte Bukowski

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:00:56 GMT

The boys are throwing stones at the frogs; the frogs are dying in earnest...

But one of the reasons I know the Iran War is not WWIII—other than D's horary astrological chart—is that The Daily Mail only trumpeted Iran War headlines for three days.

Now DM's headlines are back to the news the American public actually cares about: mothers of three who poison their husbands, toddlers who die in backyard pools and come back to life five hours later, Kristen Bell's three-way marriage.

Can the Ayotollah's assassination really compare to Nick Reiner's life in prison?

I don't think so.

###

Meanwhile, I am working at two Schlock offices. One's in a strip mall in Middletown, the other's in a strip mall in Montgomery.

Middletown is just filled with hideous strip malls. I take periodic breaks to wander around this one, snapping photographs. This is my job, right? This is why the Universe plopped me down into this particular time/space continuum. I'm an archivist!

I'm particularly intrigued by the check-cashing place. It is right next door to Schlock, making this strip mall a veritable buffet of predatory financial services. (Schlock makes a sizeable portion of its revenues not from preparing taxes but from loan-sharking against anticipated tax refunds with exorbitant fees & interest rates.)

###

The people who work at the Middletown Schlock office are uniformly awful, rude, and completely disinterested in me. I pretend I'm Charlotte Bukowski and remind myself that I wouldn't recognize these people if I bumped into them on the street.

There is only one strip mall in Montgomery. Is that the reason why the people in that Schlock office are so much nicer? Maybe.

But one of my survival strategies is to tell myself I could walk out in the middle of a shift and never, ever have to think about Schlock again. Schlock has no hold on me. Schlock has no roots in my life. Schlock is only a revenue source.

###

I feel like such a drone, I've been isolating myself. Human contact, reaching out to friends, would actually make me feel better. But what do I have to offer?

"NEVER shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'
"But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.'
"I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair."

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Wagging the Dog

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 12:10:39 GMT

I slept eight hours last night.

Eight hours!

Now I'm thinking the shoulder pain that was keeping me awake was not a statin side effect at all, but some kind of reaction to hyperextension that happened when I tried to grab something at a weird angle while I was lying down.

Anyway, it's resolving.

###

And I wrote 500 words on the opening of Chapter 7.

Five hundred words!

I'm thinking the deal with Daria is that she deliberately mistranslates testimony in a court trial, although her exact motivation and the details of that court trial are hazy at the moment.

The voice that's emerging is quite distinct from Grazia's voice. More formal and reflective. Cooler. More analytical.

So, that's a good thing, too.

###

Meanwhile, we are back at war with Eastasia.

What am I talking about?

We have always been at war with Eastasia!

It is impossible to have any sympathy for a murderous mullah who executed anywhere between 7,000 to 40,000 Iranian protesters between January 8th and January 10th of this year.

Nevertheless, I am completely opposed to American interference in what's essentially another sovereign nation's civil war, and I don't want to spend $5 for a gallon of gas.

Plus, of course, the Iran War is a classic wag-the-dog maneuver designed to distract the American public from the fact that the Department of Justice redacted all mentions of Trump's name from the Epstein files.

Disinformation aplenty is aflowin'. But my favorite factoid is that the Trump administration, despite telling Americans stranded in Dubai and Bahrain, Get out, get out, get out! Get out NOW, is refusing to provide them with any State Separtment-mediated assistance. That's my boy, The Donald!

I can't wait for the flood of influencer TikToks: Here's how to escape from Dubai! It's eZeeee! And you can do it, too!

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Self-Care

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:07:23 GMT

When I mentioned to Ichabod that I was scheduled to work at Schlock every day between now and April 15, he told me, "You can't do that. That's absolutely insane," and began talking to me about self-care.

He's wrong: I absolutely can do that.

But he's also right: It is insane.

Thing is "self-care" is kind of an alien concept to me. New Age fluffle. I mean, my idea of self-care involves eating a gallon of coffee ice cream and vegging out for 12 hours straight to Season 3 of The Gilmore Girls. Which any therapist worth his/her salt would characterize as "self-destruction."

But when I woke up this morning, I absolutely did not want to go into the office. Even before it began to snow! So I called in sick.

That's self-care, right?

I was surprised to feel a twinge of bona fide guilt when I called in. Because Schlock doesn't care if I show up in their office or not. To Schlock, I am simply another ass in an office chair. I have no actual supervisor.

I make my life harder than it needs to be.

###

The work itself is not difficult.

I actually enjoy doing taxes. Doing taxes is not so very different from reading someone's tarot cards.

Yesterday, for example, I got to counsel a 75-year-old woman whose 50-year marriage had suddenly fallen apart.

"Has your husband filed yet?" I grilled her.

Her husband, still living in what was the family home, pays property taxes, mortgage interest, etc. The woman had never taken the slightest interest in the family taxes but had some vague notion they had always itemized.

"See, the thing is, if you're married filing separately, you both need to use the same type of deductions," I told her. "So if he itemizes his deductions, you'll have to as well. Except you don't have as much to itemize. So, you'll have a smaller deduction to protect you against tax liability if he files first and itemizes. Whereas if you file first, you can use the standard deduction, which for you is $17,250—"

Is that so hard to understand?

I didn't think so, but she had a hard time following my logic.

She wanted to do was to talk about what an absolute prick her husband was.

And, of course, I wanted to talk about that too! Girlfriend! He did what with his secretary? And she's how old? Does his secretary not understand that Viagra script or no Viagra script, he's essentially recruiting her to change his Depends?

Except talking about the piggish X was not what this woman was paying me to do.

###

Most of the time, though, I do absolutely nothing.

I am getting paid for it!

But sitting in that office day after day puts me in a Mood.

All I am is a drone, I think darkly. Nothing about me is vibrant or interesting. I've led a bleak life, entirely bereft of the intimacies and adventures that characterize other people's lives.

This is making it very hard for me to interact in a positive way with other people right now.

Like on the phone with real-life Daria the other night, I found myself hugely turned off.

She's Anaïs Nin! Everything she says is pretentious and self-serving. By strength of personal magnetism, she has managed to construct a world in which she is forever the consummate objet du desir; it's the one constant in her life: Everybody wants me!

She uses people! She picks them up by the wing! She tells them, You fascinate me! I want to know everything about you!

Then she drops them.

I was consumed with envy!

This is not an accurate assessment of real-life Daria, whom I don't know all that well, but who's never been anything but 100% supportive, open, and affectionate toward me. No, I was projecting my own negative mood onto Daria.

But even understanding that, it was impossible for me to shake the negativity.

Anyway, the real-life Daria biographical details are not enough to center Part II around. Her relationship with Brian turns out to be not so very different than my relationship with Brian. Closer, definitely. More physical: They slept in the same bed when they visited one another. They cuddled. He would spend hours stroking her back, which was one of the single most thrilling physical experiences she could ever remember; she dissolved in the touch of his fingers trailing down her spine.

But their explicitly sexual relationship ended after the first year or so.

Periodically, over the course of the 35-year friendship, they would try to have sex again from time to time.

But it never quite took.

So, I can't use "sex" as the Big Theme in Part II.

I'm gonna have to come up with a whole fresh subtext as well as a plot.

Sigh...

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Questions For Daria

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:19:45 GMT

It was snowing this morning—of course, it was!—while I reviewed my heating expenses for February: $440 for heating oil and $153 to Central Hudson.

That's only half the heating bill for the house.

Fuckin' insane.

Central Hudson needs to be taken over by the State of New York. But I don't know what one can do about the heating oil. Except move to a warmer place.

###

My good deed for yesterday:

One of my clients was a very feisty 87-year old. She appeared primordial to me, like an ancient Baba Yaga, which may have been the racial disparity—she was Black, and I am white—or may have been due to the fact that she'd neglected to put in her dentures.

Anyway, this lady had a Cadillac healthcare plan through the City of New York, her former employer, but Medicare was still taking out $220 a month from her Social Security.

"You might want to look into that," I told her granddaughter. "I mean, it's possible each healthcare provider is providing a different set of services, and she uses both. But it's also possible you're looking at redundant costs and can get an extra $220 a month by getting rid of that Medicare payment."

She's been going to Schlock for 20 years, and I was the first one to point this out to her.

###

In other news, I will be interviewing real-life Daria today after I scamper home from the tax trenches. Here are the questions I've prepared:

1. Can you tell me your five most vivid memories of Mexico?

2. What did it feel like in your body the first weeks after moving from Mexico City to the U.S.—were you more numb, anxious, exhilarated, something else?

3. Is there a specific moment from that first year—at school, in the street, at home—when you realized, “I am not in Mexico anymore,” and what happened?

4. When you think back to meeting Brian in the PD’s office, what are the first three sensory details that come up—what you saw, heard, or felt in your body?

5. What did you think Brian saw in you, and how did that perception change over the years you knew him?

6. How did the relationship move between friendship, mentorship, and sexuality over time, and did those roles ever feel like they were in conflict?

7. Were there specific conversations or arguments with Brian that you feel “made” you—changed how you think about law, justice, or yourself?

8. Did you ever feel a power imbalance because of age, profession, or life experience, and if so, how did you navigate or rationalize it at the time?

9. When you look back now, what do you wish your younger self had known about him—or about you?

10. How did being with Brian interact with your romantic life outside him—did he complicate other relationships, or make them easier to understand?

11. After Brian died, what was the strangest or most unexpected way your grief showed up (a habit, a dream, a physical sensation, a decision you made)?

12. If you had to describe your emotional “role” in Brian’s life in one sentence—as he might have described it—what would that sentence be?

13. When you first realized you were sexually attracted to Brian, what surprised you most about that feeling—his age, his role, your own response, something else?

14. Can you describe your very first sexual encounter with him in terms of mood and pacing—was it slow and negotiated, impulsive, awkward, inevitable?

15. What did Brian do in bed that made you feel particularly seen or desired—not just physically, but as a person?

16. Were there things you only did sexually with Brian and never with anyone else, and what about him made those feel possible or safe?

17. Did the fact that you worked in the same universe (courts, law, defendants) bleed into your erotic life together—role‑play, gallows humor, power dynamics?

18. How did sex with him feel in your body—grounding, explosive, dissociative, comforting, like coming home, like leaving?

19. Was there ever a moment during sex or after where you suddenly felt your age difference very sharply—either in a good way or as a jolt of discomfort?

20. How did your conversations immediately after sex usually go—jokey debrief, political talk, silence, tenderness, scheduling the next time?

21. Did you ever feel like his other lovers were in the bed with you emotionally—comparing, competing, imagining his history—and how did you manage that?

22. Was there ever a specific fight or rupture around sex—jealousy, boundaries, pregnancy scares, STI scares—that you remember as a turning point?

23. When you think of his body now, what are the 2–3 details that come back first (not necessarily erotic—could be scars, smells, textures, nervous habits)?

24. Did you ever notice a difference between “grief sex,” “reassurance sex,” and “just because” sex with him—and if so, how could you tell from the inside?

25. How did your bilingual/trilingual brain show up during sex—were there certain words or dirty talk that had to be in Spanish or French, and if so, why?

26. Did you two have any long‑running sexual jokes or coded phrases—things that would sound innocuous to others but were charged for you?

27. How did you end things physically—was there a clear “last time” you slept together, and did you know it was the last time while it was happening?

28. Looking back, is there anything you regret not doing with him sexually or emotionally—something you were curious about but held back from?

29. Has your body ever surprised you with a grief reaction—arousal at an unexpected reminder of him, or the opposite, sudden numbness with someone new?

30. In your fantasy life now, does he still appear, and if so, does he show up more as a lover, a friend, a ghost, a critic, or something stranger?

31. Imagine you are trying to explain the sexual part of the relationship to a skeptical friend—what is the one argument or image you would use to say, “This wasn’t just another older guy using me; it was this”?

32. How did your relationship to Spanish change after the move—did it feel like a refuge, a secret, a source of shame, a weapon?

33. When did English start to feel like something you could think and feel in, not just translate into, and was there a particular event that marked that shift?

34. Do you experience different “selves” in Spanish, English, and French—if so, how would you describe the personality or emotional color of each language?

35. In simultaneous translation, what does it feel like inside your head—are you ahead of the speaker, chasing them, or hovering in parallel?

36. Can you describe a moment on the job when the emotional weight of what you were translating nearly broke your professional neutrality? What did you do with that feeling?

37. Have you ever made a deliberate choice to soften, sharpen, or slightly alter someone’s words while interpreting because the literal translation felt emotionally or ethically wrong?

38. What does fatigue feel like for you after a long day of simultaneous interpreting—mental fog, physical tension, emotional overload—and how do you come down from that state?

39. Do you ever carry other people’s stories and emotions home with you through their words, and if so, how do you protect or “clean” your own inner voice?

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