Mallory's Camera

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:19:45 GMT

Willow turns out to be more like the young me than I could have possibly imagined. And not in positive ways.

How did I survive my own youth?

Haven't got a clue!

Willow's working at that awful bar, and school has turned out to be a disappointment. Ithaca, in general, is a disappointment. What does she have there besides RTT?

She’s so so so special to me and if she isn’t special to anyone else who cares? RTT texted. The whole idea is we have each other.

SHE cares, I texted back.

The void is actually in her.

Willow's overwhelmed by how much everyone loves RTT. Not jealous exactly. But she has nothing comparable, and that’s eating at her. She wants something like that, and she doesn’t know how to get it.

To fill the void she imagines is her circumstances, she is creating drama in a self-destructive way. The drama involves doing coke, melodramatically breaking up with RTT, sobbing hysterically & telling him she wants him back, breaking up with him again—

I've played that game. La Belle Dame Sans Merci!

I tried to explain it to RTT: Basically, she’s interpreting the fact that you love her to mean you’re a doormat, which is a fucked dynamic. And I say that with love for Willow. Her upbringing left her damaged in a lot of the same ways my upbringing left ME damaged—it’s a hard thing to explain to someone who isn’t damaged in the same way. She was treated like shit by the people who were supposed to love her when she was a child, so she equates being treated like shit with love on a very basic level. It’s CONFUSING, and she's confused. Does that make sense to you?

Yeah it does, but what the heck do I do to counter it? he texted back.

I don't know. The truth is he may not be able to counter it. But I don't want to tell him that.

###

I texted and did phone with Willow, too. For someone plummeting off a coke run, she was surprisingly coherent. Actually fell asleep soon after we talked—leading me to believe that she hadn't done all that much coke. But who knows?

The real issues are (a) addicts steal and (b) girl addicts barter unprotected sex for drugs. I mentioned the former but not the latter to RTT.

"She wants you to move into the apartment with us," RTT told me when we finally spoke on the phone.

Because she wants me to be her Mommy, I suppose.

If I did that, it wouldn't work out. For all sorts of reasons—but one of the reasons is that Willow basically can only value things she doesn't have. If she had me as her full-time Mommy, she wouldn't value me.

No, what she really needs is an intervention.

Not rehab, which is almost always a scam.

An intervention.

But what exactly?

###

I'm trying to remember what turned it around for me.

Only I can't remember.

Ben helped because he'd been an addict and thus understood the relevant cost benefit analysis. You can't climb out of the hole without having at least one person around who understands the footholds.

Abe helped by telling me, "You know, if you really want to be a writer, you should strive to live a boring life."

My kids helped because however self-destructive I might be, I was never gonna do anything that harmed a single hair on their heads.

But I don't know what would help Willow. Getting her out of that fucking bar would be a start. But then what does she do for money?

And also, while I feel a close bond with Willow, obviously my priority is RTT.

###

Anguished texts and calls from the Ithaca contingent wasn't the only hard thing yesterday.

My keys disappeared!

Well, no—not disappeared. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. My keys are around here somewhere.

But I was down to that last pair of jeans I hardly ever wear because it has such shallow pockets. I'd shoved my keys into one of those pockets. The keys must have fallen out while I was vacuuming and doing laundry. And I couldn't and can't find them. So they may just as well have disappeared.

Eventually, I located my backup house key.

And my backup Prius fob was sitting on my dresser—except that its battery was dead.

So, then I had to hike into town to buy another battery. Eight miles, round trip. If I could have called a taxi or an Uber, I would have, but there ain't no taxis or Ubers in the sticks.

I felt really grateful that one of the only two stores in fuckin' Wallkill is a hardware store and they had CR1632 3V lithium coin cell batteries. (The other store is a liquor store. Of course!)
The hike into town and back took three hours, and Willow called in the middle of that, so I perched two inches off the side of the road and tried to dispense wise counsel while eighteen-wheelers rumbled by.

Not fun.

But I purchased and installed my new battery. So, at least I have my wheels back.

###

I talked to each of the kids individually this morning.

RTT is safely off to Simon's brother's wedding. Simon's family loves him, and he loves them. He'll have a good time.

Of course, Willow was invited but then pulled out ("Embarrassing!" said RTT, "what do I tell them?") and her damage is such that she was trying to make RTT feel bad about going.

The relationship turned toxic really fast, and it's totally on her. Not sure it can be turned around.

Heartbreaking.

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Unexpected Directions Your Plot Outline Does Not Anticipate

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:37:33 GMT

Of course, sunrise has gradually been growing later & later.

Still.

When I awakened around 6 this morning in pitch darkness, I was surprised.

###

Night before last, I slept like shit so I was in major Drag Ass mode all day yesterday. Nonetheless, I managed to knock off 2,000 words on the Work in Progress, and since I have been steadfastly ignoring the Work in Progress for the past two months, this was a genuine accomplishment.

Of course, it didn't feel like an accomplishment! Because I felt exhausted and headachey.

But I got Flavia out of the coke dealer's apartment, wrote a baaaad sex scene (note: the sex was bad, not the writing!), and realized the brilliant architecture student was just a decoy: Flavia's real misguided romantic choice has to be the coke dealer.

So, maybe two scenes covering the relationship with the coke dealer and then boom! Neal rescues her.

Writing sometimes takes you in unexpected directions your plot outline does not anticipate.

I'm basing the coke dealer on a guy I knew in London back in the day, some 50 years ago, so I'm having to invent most of the details because while I have an excellent memory, those memories mostly evince in the form of sudden imagistic flashes devoid of meta tags.

I do like villains with a sense of humor, so my coke dealer struts around a lot, making arch, irreverent, enigmatic remarks.

###

Other than that...

The world really does seem to be a troubled place just at present.

I feel like all I can do is hunker down, pull the Umbrella of Protectiveness over my head.

The self-righteousness and moral indignation that fuels so many of my pals does absolutely nada for me. I mean, I admire them for it! I think it's gallant, and I heart gallant.

But it's simply too late for positive agency.

At this point, humans are just specks in the wind of a storm. And that storm is implacable.

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Icky in Rut

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:44:05 GMT

While I was gone, Icky acquired a new chicken. A little white Cornish Cross. He rescued her from bloodthirsty Hassids at a Kaporos in Crown Heights. But who will rescue the chicken from Icky?

(I do loathe Hassids. There is absolutely no reason to transfer your sins into a live chicken on Yom Kippur and then swing it around your head when you can achieve the same effect by swinging around a coin-filled handkerchief.)

There was also a girl, young & sylphlike. She had a French name. There was a van in the driveway that she'd evidently been living in (shades of Willow), and I wasn't sure whether she'd been lured over on the pretense of finding housing or whether she was one of Icky's potential Bumble matches.

I detest Icky, but Icky, oddly enough, likes me. I was introduced and made a good impression. I wanted to slip her a note: Get Out!!! I will help. But, of course, I didn't. I find Icky utterly repulsive, but I remember when I first moved in, there was a brief window when I found him sexually attractive. He is goodlooking for his age in that aggressive Mossad way, and I suppose there is some subset of young, sylphlike girls who find 65-year-old men appealing.

The scent of marijuana floated up to the Patrizia-torium throughout the evenng, and when I went downstairs this morning to make coffee, a pair of wine glasses sat on the kitchen island. Icky never does dope and avoids alcohol—his recreational drug of choice is cocaine—so it seems like some seduction campaign must have taken place though the girl herself and her white van had vanished.

###

The To Do List is very long. Mostly it's filled with gift ideas for people I care about, but there are a couple of Life things I should get cracking on. Sigh... I don't really want to do anything but eat hazelnut truffles and binge Below Deck Mediterreanean—reality TV at its best!—but I must get my ass in gear and do the productive.

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Do Admit

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:06:52 GMT

Fall came while I was visiting A in D.C.

Temps before I left had dropped down into the low 60°s during the day and the low 40°s at night—I'd had to drag out the space heater—and, of course, the sun had dipped south across the celestial equnox, the official autumn kick-off. But the trees were still all green.

But driving across the bridge yesterday, there were blazing patches of color. There was a huge storm while I was in the south. Was that what turned the leaves all scarlet and golden?

I hate autumn.

Yes, it's pretty.

But it means winter is coming.

It was a good visit. A low-key visit. A is under a lot of stress, and though the Nor'easter wasn't nearly as bad on the Chesapeake as it was on Long Island Sound, it was still rainy, grey, and foreboding. A disincentive for going out.

Also—and I can't believe I did this—I misread the label on a bag of coffee. It was decaf! And since I get up earlier than A and P, and thus, made my own coffee, for two days in a row, I went without caffeine! Oddly enough, I did not get a caffeine withdrawal headache, but I did get Major Drag Ass. Fell asleep in the middle of the day (they're called naps, Brenda!) and barely had enough energy to drag myself up a small hill when A & I went walking in the rain to the small park where A spies on a pair of snowy owls.

I did a lot of reading. Do Admit, a fabulous, 400-page (I kid you not) Mimi Pond graphic novel about the lives of the Mitford Sisters and a reread of Lena Dunham's latest memoir (even more stymyingly whiny the second time round). I also rewatched the 1981 miniseries of Brideshead Revisited because redemption! the haunted garden of memory! etc, etc, etc.

The novel Brideshead Revisited contains what to me is one of the most beautiful sentences ever written:

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Nowadays, the novel is often dismissed as beautifully written but essentially a Catholic polemic. I think that characterization misses the point. Recusant Catholicism, the Catholicism of the defiant upper classes, was/is substantiatively different from the sweat-and-daisies Catholicism of, say, the starving Irish working class. There's an enormous snob factor. Brideshead Revisited is essentially a novel about the demise of the British aristocracy.

We did do a couple of away-from-the-house things before the weather turned and the caffeine deprivation kicked in. We went to Huntley Meadows, a wetlands park, where we saw white egrets, dragon flies, and the little fellow above—he's famous on the Internet—and we went to a chamber music concert that took place at a lutier's near the beleagured Kennedy Center.

Classical music and jazz are probably my two favorite musical genres. I still like the pop music I listened to when I was young, but most contemporary pop music doesn't interest me at all for whatever reason. It was very cool sitting 15 feet away from the musicians, and afterwards, we toured the lutier's workshop:

I think I spent about half of September away from Wallkill.

Back in August when the Carl house-sitting thing fell through, it seemed like trips were the only way I was going to be able to preserve my mental health since I had to go on living here.

I had tentatively planned a New Mexico trip for October, but of course, that's the irritating thing about Jeanna: She is always saying, Come visit, come visit, but when you say, Okay!, she lapses into radio silence. Do admit: You prefer a long-distance relationship.

That's okay.

Jeanna is who Jeanna is, and I love her even though she annoys the shit out of me.

Anyway, I'll be pretty much housebound in October except for a quick trip to see the Ithaca darlings.

My plan is to chain myself to my desk and make as much $$$ as possible.

(Here's RTT with AOC. He got a special shout-out at her Ithaca barnstorming session—she's testing the waters to see if she can snag Schumer's Senate seat—because RTT is the legislator who led the initiative that did away with Ithaca's Flock cameras.)

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Propanolol

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:21:54 GMT

Propanolol quashes the tremor, but it also lowers my resting pulse rate to 45. It's a beta blocker, after all! This actually doesn't bother me. In my youth, I was a jock, and I continue to enjoy the long-term benefits of all that athleticism; even as a crochety old lady, my resting heart rate is in the 50s, and my blood pressure is comparatively low.

I kept telling this to my primary care doc, and she ignored me because going in to see a doctor for the first time in 10 years made me so anxious, it raised my systolic by 50 points. She put me on BP meds, which I took for a year 'cause, you know—doctors are supposed to be smarter than me, right? It's only my body.

The BP meds made me so hypotensive, that I began getting dizzy every time I stood up. Finally, I ran out of them, and there was no easy way to renew the prescription without making an appointment—for two months in advance.

When I finally went in, my BP was 120/60.

"And you're not taking those meds?" Dr. Gaunt exclaimed in disbelief.

"I kept telling you, I don't need them," I said.

'What'd you do? Lose weight?"

I snorted.

The fabulous neurologist gave me a lifetime of Proplanolol pills to take prn, cautioning moderation.

I'm taking the very lowest dose.

It doesn't get you high, but there's a reason why so many actors and musicians take Propanolol for stage fright: It really quells performance anxiety.

###

Although I did have a mini-meltdown yesterday over revenue stream issues. My supplemental revenue stream is so-oo unpredictable.

Plus coming from a place where everybody ❤️LUV❤️s me to a place where I am all alone and practically invisible is hard on the old psyche.

In the afternoon, real-life Daria texted me: Hi babe! Talk soon? I want to contribute [large sum of money] to your next car.

This simultaneously elated and depressed me.

Depressed because wait-a-minnit, do all my pals think I am pathetic and needy?

Elated because money. Yahoo!!! And I really am worried about how my Ithaca darlings are gonna handle the cruel winter without a car. I mean, bikes are fine for the spring, summer, and fall, but biking in ice and snow sucks.

###

In the evening, I watched Part 1 of the last installment of Michael Apted's brilliant Up series, 70 Up.

It made me cry.

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Ithaca

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:20:53 GMT

Excellent visit to Ithaca. The kids are doing so well. They moved from the fabulous apartment over the State Theater—whose innate fabulousness was eroded by the fact that it was right on the Commons, which means a steady stream of street people from morning to night stealing their mail and urinating in the vestibule in front of the locked door—to a fabulous apartment on the Northside.

The new apartment has many of the features I loved about the State Street apartment—little porch solarium and a mystifying floor plan which speaks to additions made in the 60s or 70s without reference to the city's building code, plus a terrace overlooking an enormous backyard, a washing machine, a dryer, a dishwasher, and a landlord who's a Democratic Socialist and who, therefore, is charging them below market rent and paying their utilities—

"Well, I mean, he is a Cornell professor," Willow confided. "He makes $200 K a year. It's his way of spreading the wealth."

They are talking marriage and children—"in a couple of years."

"Well, I'll be your nanny," I said.

"I'm counting on it," Willow said.

RTT is basking in happiness. Willow seems a bit overwhelmed—when she arrived in her van with her dog Yugi back in April to work on a cannabis farm, she was looking at Ithaca as a temporary respite, not a destination where she might settle and put down roots. Now she is in love, in school, and working as a bartender at the Chanticleer, the sleaziest bar in Ithaca—

The routine is to go and hang at the Chanticleer after all the business of the day and evening is through to provide Willow with moral support.

"You know, they lost an amazing branding opportunity when they decided to make this a straight bar," I said.

Willow reminds me of—dare I say it?—me.

In particular, Willow has that difficuty with boundaries and that inability to confront disagreements in an emotionally neutral way that leads to episodes of lashing out that seem to come out of nowhere—

"My code name for that is Serious Bitch Potential," I told her. "SBP."

"SBP! I love it!"

"And you're very observant, and you're smart, so you know how to say things that absolutely eviscerate people—"

"Totally!"

"But, you see, there's no going back when you say those sorts of things. They absolutely destroy the relationship. So, it's much better to establish boundaries in a positive manner early on. Even when you don't think you'll need them."

I am guessing that were I to do Willow's chart, I would find a Scorpio moon. Because that's a very Scorpio moon characteristic.

I kinda feel that Willow and I are some kind of updated version of Naomi and Ruth.

RTT has an amazing talent for hanging on to friends. Many of his friends are people he knew in high school. Thus, I found myself playing trivia with Simon whom I knew Back Then as a slightly morose and drifting teenager and who is now an attending physician at Cayuga Medical Center—a useful contact for the next time I get hospitalized there with an accidental drug overdose, right?

We did not shine! We came in tenth out of a field of 16 teams. But we had a lot of fun, and then, Danny did a shout-out to me:

On Wednesday night, I went to watch RTT in action at the City Council. A plan whose implementation he was active in championing was evaluted—first responder who is not a police officer responding to disputes that have a low potential for violent escalation. It was a success! And civil engineers discussed the past year's sidewalk repairs. And RTT introduced two resolutions for cost of living salary increases that passed!

It was very heartening. Both my kids are dedicating their lives to making the world a better place.

I may be a failure in just about every other conceivable way. No assets, no partner, no real home.

But I did create these two fabulous human beings.

And they love me and think I'm cool.

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What-Iffing

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 11:05:59 GMT

So, yesterday I trotted off to see yet another neurologist—this time to evaluate the tremor in my hands.

I need a propanolol script if I'm gonna do keyboard work. But, of course, I also need to know that I don't have Parkinson's, MS, or any of the other serious diseases that make people's hands shake because if I do, I'm gonna max out my credit cards taking trips to Italy and the British Isles and then sign up for assisted suicide.

This neurologist was absolutely brilliant. His verdict: essential tremor. Not symptomatic of any underlying neurological deficit.

He thumbed through my chart idly. "It says here... You started smoking again? After a long break?"

"I did!" I said.

"Why?"

"Well, I turned 70! And I always liked smoking, and I'm going to be dead in 15 years anyway, so why not?"

He laughed.

"I only smoke maybe four cigarettes a day," I added helpfully. Which is true. And it's also true that if I'm in a situation where I can't smoke, I don't smoke, and I don't feel any sort of insatiable craving.

####

Before I took off over the bridge, my tire light flashed on in my car, precipitating a minor panic attack. I got the guys at Big Corporate Auto Repair to refill the tires. They were both low on one side, and I started what-iffing—what if the tires had nails in them and need to be replaced, and what if they can't find the right size tires, and what if I can never drive my car again, and I am stuck in that house without a car throughout that long, miserable winter...

These are the kinds of weird anxiety loops my monkey mind makes me jump through.

The car is a source of anxiety because I'd like to give it to RTT who can get two years of use out of it even if he can't find a gypsy mechanic to solder the undercarriage.

Except that I'd have to buy a new car on credit, and while right now, I can afford to do so, I worry what happens this winter when I'm facing $5.25/gallon heating oil bills, or if the current revenue stream dries up—

Microeconomics in action!

"Mom," Ichabod said when I was prattling about the cost of heating oil on the phone to him last weekend, "I will give you the money!"

Which he would. No questions asked, no conditions applied.

Except somehow this doesn't make me feel less anxious.

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The Stacks In Some Old Library Filled With Irrelevant Books

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:09:13 GMT

Long list of Things To Do before I take off for Ithaca tomorrow.

They're not super-critical things—meaning that if I don't do them, the world doesn't end.

But they were critical enough to bolt me awake in the middle of the night, thinking, How the fuck am I gonna... and it took me two hours to fall back to sleep.

Anxiety!

Gas is $4.30 a gallon.

Heating oil is currently being advertised at $5.25 a gallon, but will almost certainly be up another buck or more by the time the first snow falls.

A clove of elephant garlic at a roadside vegetable stand cost me two bucks yesterday.

For now, I have a dependable side revenue stream, but who knows how long that's good for, it could disappear tomorrow.

The world is uncertain and filled with peril.

I've been doing very little since I got back from the Shore besides generating revenue and rewatching Halt and Catch Fire, truly one of the best television shows ever made.

Halt and Catch Fire is about the rise of the tech industry as focused through the experiences of four compelling characters. I think I would have loved it even if I hadn't been on the periphery of that rise, but my familiarity means I get to delight in all the jargon. I was a project manager at Netscape for a couple of months when Maria Wilhelm was sucking up to Jim Clark! I was really terrible at that job.

I'd already used my fledgling, self-taught HTML skills to put People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly up online, and I acted as People's Interactive Entertainment Editor for the nest four years, struggling to convince Time Inc corporate dinosaurs like Dan Okrent that the World Wide Web was not just a black hole sucking corporate profits, that, in fact, it was the future.

That was my dear pal Tom Mandel's bequest to me—"I wanted to make sure you were taken care of," he told me shortly before his death—and it was a lateral leap the likes of which absolutely no one could make today: from health policy analyst to tabloid journalist! Time Inc followed Mandel's hiring recommendation because I was famous on the WELL.

The People gig was the best job I ever had. I truly loved it, and I was brilliant at it.

It's weird to think that all this happened so long ago.

The 1990s bear the same relationship to the now that the 1920s bore to the time I was born.

And I can remember thinking as a young woman how very ancient the Roaring Twenties seemed, how very ancient World War II seemed—first there were the dinosaurs, then George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, then there was the Civil War, and then F. Scott Fitzgerald obsessed about green lights at the end of a wharf while the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. All of this a prelude but somehow disconnected from the most momentous moment of all—my birth—and the glorious adventures I was having. Dust in a pantry. The stacks in some old library filled with irrelevant books.

Anyway.

Time to start checking items off the To Do List.

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We Will Become Their Mythology

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:41:45 GMT

Dreamed I was talking to the intelligent beings that created life as we know it. They were disembodied, free-floating consciousnesses, no physical mass or relationship to time at all, and they had created life as a type of experiment, much as humans went on to create AIs.

Oh, yes, they assured me. AIs will replace humanity. In fact, machines will replace all life. Machines are more efficient, and evolution favors efficiency. But you will become their mythology—

And I awoke before I could get them to explain that enigmatic statement.

###

Shortly, I must toddle off to the garden. I cannot possibly eat all the cherry tomatoes I am harvesting, and my cucumbers grow spongy after a couple of days in the fridge—I don't ever remember that happening with store-bought cukes. I still have a shit-load of basil, but I'm almost out of pinenuts for pesto—yeah, I could use walnuts, I suppose, but I really don't like the taste of walnut pesto.

I let Schlock rehire me. I mean, WTF—I'm stuck here till April, might as well make some money off it. I figure I can work 20 hours a week without freaking out. This means I must knock off some continuing education units this week and spend some time the rest of the month leveling up to Senior Tax Associate so I can maximize earnings.

Yesterday was a puttering day. I wasn't happy. But neither was I unhappy. Mostly, I marveled at what an absolute mess this world is—and how it's just gonna grow messier and messier since climate change is driving that mess. Think about it: Climate change is rendering ever-larger swaths of the world unarable, and that creates famine, so people want to leave. When they try to go elsewhere, the people who already live in those places are threatened and elect far-right, reactionary leaders who pledge to fortify borders and stamp out immigration. And, of course, crack down in all sorts of other unpleasant ways.

Other shifts to fundamentalism throughout the centuries have been pendulum swings. The world grows dark for a few hundred years and then rationalism and enlightenment prevail, and the world grows light again.

But this new Dark Age will be permanent because climate change ain't going away.

I don't see any way out myself.

Humanity is a failed experiment, disembodied dream pals!

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The Jersey Shore

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:16:25 GMT

The Jersey Shore was... restful.

The light was very beautiful. The sky is vast. When there are clouds, they are cathedral clouds, enormous clouds with intricate whirls and vortices in which one's imagination can lose itself. The ocean is cobalt blue and empty; very few shells wash up on the beach.

The million-dollar properties with ocean frontage sport costal strands of woody shrubs and herbs, salt-tolerant I would imagine, where foxes play.

Farther up along the water line, the public beaches are all sand.

All beaches in New Jersey are public beaches actually, but access to those beaches is problematic. You can't trespass across private property to get to them, and this essentially confines the proles to a few spots near public walkways where the lots spill over with cars and beach-goers look like sherpas staggering under the weight of chairs, and umbrellas, and water bottles, and picnic baskets for their day in the sun.

Real-life Flavia is a multi-millionairess, so the beach behind her condo is clean and empty.

I'm not sure I would describe real-life Flavia's life as perfect. I would get bored living it. Perhaps it's Zen? She has no aspirations—perhaps because if there's anything she aspires to, she can instantly attain it?? She studied art at college, but when I asked her if she ever does art now, she laughed and said, No.

At the Shore, she swims in the ocean twice a day and then sits in her beach chair reading. When she comes back to the condo in the late afternoon, she sits on her balcony and watches the light change. She takes the changing of the light very seriously. In the evening, she goes upstairs to her entertainment loft and watches television. We're both big reality TV fans and have many animated conversations along the lines of Nathan from Below Deck just got arrested for what? Carole Radziwill from Real Housewives of New York just said what?

Her life is more purposeful at her Manhattan apartment, but it's a purposefulness born of doctor's appointments, and workout sessions with her trainer, and concerts and shows. She is not personally ambitious, in other words. I don't think this is a bad thing, by the way. It's just so very different from the way I'm wired that it's hard for me to wrap my head around it.

For someone with as much money as she has, real-life Flavia lives very unostentaciously. Her tastes are spare. She's not into ornamentation. She gives a lot of money to worthy causes and is practically supporting two of her old friends from college. Her wealth is reflected in price tag of her real estate and the thread count of her sheets.

Once I realized I did not have to be charming—that, in fact, charm was kinda burdensome to Flavia because it meant she might have to talk when she'd prefer to be silent—the visit became amazingly relaxing. I took my conversational cues from her, and when she went off to her beach routine, I took long walks along the shingle up to the beaches where the hoi polloi did their holiday weekend shrieking and SPF 30 slavering. I reread The Silence of the Lambs (good) and Hannibal (not so good.)

One day, we did go exploring. Five years ago when I visited Flavia at the Shore, I'd been much taken with the beach towns of Asbury Park and Ocean Grove—the former because Bruce Springsteen, the latter because Monterey was right next door to Pacific Grove, which had also gotten its start as a Methodist tent camp.

So we went back to look at those places again.

And I think I've finally learned my lesson: The magic is only there the first time.

I mean, you can really like a place every time you see it, but that liminal sense is something you only pick up with unfamiliar eyes. This is something I should have learned when I went back a second time to the Bread & Puppet puppet warehouse in deepest, ruralist Vermont and found myself thinking, This is just an old barn with a lot of decaying papier maché.

So, Asbury Park this time was a lot of trudge past cheap eateries, and retro arcades, and the ruinous beauty of the old convention center, which they'll never get around to rennovating despite its impressive Art Deco architectural embellishments:

And Ocean Grove's quaint tent cottages left me unmoved.

Back in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley, it is overcast, and I am dealing with the aftermath of yet another chicken tragedy.

The day before I left, neither of the two chickens was in the coop when I went to shut it for the night. (Icky was at Burning Man! Of course, he was!!)

I panicked—particularly when I saw black feathers strewn across the grass, but no, I found Black Chicken in one of her hiding places, feathers mussed and extremely shaken up, but all in one piece. The sweet little orange chicken, though... And this was sad because the little orange chicken was mostly too fearful to leave the coop. With good reason, it turns out.

When I got back yesterday, Black Chicken wouldn't leave the coop at all. Something's put The Fear into her.

It's a dilemma for me. I don't ever want to let the chickens out of the coop; without a protected run, it just seems too dangerous. But when Icky's up here, he lets them out all the time, and so, I've gotten into the habit of letting them out too. It just seems cruel to confine them.

This whole Dead Chicken Walking scenario leaves me spooked and deeply melancholy. Why doesn't fuckin' Icky just build a fuckin' run?

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Being Human

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:40:21 GMT

I see they're making a movie about Judy Heumann. Called Being Heumann (nyuck, nyuck, nyuck).

I actually interviewed Heumann back when I was working for People Magazine. I had to lobby for that interview aggressively and at some length. My editor was genuinely puzzled: "Why do you think anyone would want to read about an ugly woman in a wheelchair?"

Heumann was a disability rights activist, prominent in the founding of the Center for Independent Living back in the days when Berkeley was still a counterculture epicenter. She'd had polio as a young child, was confined to a wheelchair. And she said something during that interview that still floors me to this day whenever I think about it.

She was ambivalent about polio vaccinations, she told me. "After all, their whole point is to make it so there won't be more people like me."

This struck me as absolutely fuckin' crazy.

I mean, it would be like me saying I'm ambivalent about well-adjusted, happy, sane parents because my personality was shaped by growing up with an insane single mother and an absentee father, and I want everybody to be more like me-ee-eee.

But I suppose you have to be immensely egotistical and self-involved to accomplish anything on this physical plane.

###

Also, Gloria Steinem died. One of the ringleaders behind second-wave feminism, which was the feminist movement I grew up with.

Second-wave feminism focused on economic equality and abortion rights. Insanely enough, a woman couldn't apply for a credit card in her own name until the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974. Married women had to get their husbands to cosign; single women had to enlist fathers and brothers.

Gotta say I was never a huge Steinem fan. The struggle didn't really seem to be a struggle for her. Was it because she was conventionally pretty? Maybe. Or maybe it was because I always considered Ms. Magazine a kind of Ladies Home Journal for women who didn't want to shave their legs. Singularly without substance, in other words.

I much preferred Germaine Greer and Kate Millet. In fact, Kate Millet's Sexual Politics was an epiphany for me with its analyses of Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, and Norman Mailer. I'd loved Lawrence before Sexual Politics, but after I read it, I could never read Lawrence's fiction again. (I still like his poetry and his travel writing.)

###

Also, the Lindsay Clancy jury deliberations are lurching into their seventh day.

I didn't follow the trial. The thought of a mother murdering her own children is so utterly creepy to me that mental rubber-necking would have given me nightmares.

She had to have been insane.

Had to have been.

###

In other news, my computer monitor finally died. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon trying to revive it to no avail, to increasing frustration in fact. At one point, I had to dig my nails into my palms to keep from sobbing.

It's only a computer monitor, I told myself. It's six years old, was in constant use. Its cheap little control board just gave up the ghost. It's in no way symbolic of your life as a whole.

But, you know. That was a hard sell.

I wanted to rush out to Best Buy and immediately purchase a new monitor. Mainly because writers become very attached to their tools, imbue them with deep magical significance that's a little like OCD. I have a 13" laptop that works just fine, but I am used to seeing the words I type show up on a 27" monitor. Can I actually compose thoughts that come out so tiny?

Of course, you can, I told myself sternly.

Monitors are cheap, but that's still no reason to buy one if you don't really need one. There are so many other ways to spend money—like on a new-to-me car. Sigh...

I was gonna drive up to Ellenville to buy a loaf of Cohen Bakery's delicious raisen pumpernickel bread as a hostess gift for real-life Flavia—with whom I'm gonna be spending the next four days at her fabulous place on the Jersey Shore. But the monitor Code Blue took too long.

I am gonna bring her a big container of home-made pesto!

And I was thinking of bringing her garden veggies, too. Except I don't think they'll survive the trip there at optimal crispness and deliciousness.

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Cheat Codes

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:15:13 GMT

Kelsea announced on Facebook that she was launching a bookclub, so last night, I went.

I wouldn't call it an unmitigated disaster.

But it did reinforce my sense that I am different from the people around me, even people who ostensibly share my politics and values. Not drastically different—we all have opposeable thumbs and breathe oxygen, right? But different enough in the way we process information to make talking to them kind of frustrating.

I'd like to say I'm better at processing information, but, of course, qualitative success can only be measured by outcome and their outcomes are all much better than mine. They all own property in the tony villages of New Paltz and Gardener, whereas I am suffering from acute housing insecurity. They are clearly the successes; I am the failure.

But, you know, I think what I think.

And when Orna went into a 10-minute oration in the middle of introducing herself on her recent ADHD and autism diagnoses, and Helen did a 15-minute performance piece on her traumatic brain injury, I thought, No, no, no, no. I am interested in your tastes in books! If you say interesting things about books, then maybe, after two months, I'll be interested in your disability diagnoses.

I'm fine with disability diagnoses as throwaway lines: Also, I have ADHD and Asperger's.

But as a centerpiece?

I mean, really? That's how you define yourself?

I will now reveal the true depths of my horribleness: I think waving your disability around like that is a kind of cheat code, a claim of entitlement to attention, designed to extort social deference.

There, I said it!

This does not mean I lack compassion.

But I want to be in charge of how I meter that compassion.

Anyway, the first book we're supposed to read is The Book Club for Troublesome Women—suburban women in the 1960s tackle Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Which does sound interesting. So, I'll probably show up for the second meeting.

###

Other than that, it has been grey, grey, grey for the past three days, which always amplifies my Serious Bitch Potential. It's supposed to rain all day today, so I will stay inside.

I'm not feeling well. My tummy aches! Too many cucumber and tomato salads?

And I am visiting real-life Flavia at the Jersey Shore this weekend, so I suppose I should focus on making money.

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Of AI, Gardens, and Lena Dunham & Jenni Konner

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:30:20 GMT

Heard a fascinating interview with Cory Doctorow on the AI revenue model. Can you say "bubble"??

Doctorow once coined the immensely useful word "enshittification", so I make a point of listening to whatever he has to say.

I may have to check out his latest book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (and yes, I agree: "Centaur" is kind of a lousy metaphor there.) The book does a deep dive into how tech executives are selling the premise of worker obsolescence to convince bosses to slash labor budgets (always music to Wall Street ears) despite the fact that AI tools constantly hallucinate or screw up in other ways. But drawing from examples of industrial history, Doctorow points out that AI might become quite useful if only its utility could be defined by labor, not capital.

Here's an example of how labor (for which, read creatives) use AI:

In other news, I hauled away yet another 40 pounds of weeds from the garden. This time, I could see a difference. But still. There's a lot more to do.

I will say this garden is producing more cucumbers, green peppers, and especially basil than any other garden I have ever maintained.

The cucumbers are especially cute and fun, since they kinda hide on the vine till they're quite sizable, which turns harvesting into a kind of treasure hunt.

The garden is terrible at full-sized tomatoes, though the cherry tomato crop is outstanding. The regular tomatoes are all getting eaten by something; I don't know what. The New Paltz Community Garden has an electric fence around it that keeps out the deer. But unlike the fence at the Hyde Park Community Garden, which was designed to extend 24 inches underground to keep out the small, burrowing critters, the New Paltz Community Garden's fence ends at the soil line, so groundhogs and voles can burrow in and feast to their hearts' content.

Traditionally, I have relied upon marigolds to keep rodent populations at bay. No, it's not an entirely foolproof method. But marigolds have a distinctive peppery odor that disrupts foragers' sense of smell, so they work pretty well as a deterrent.

This year, though, the weeds have crowded out almost all the marigolds.

###

Otherwise, I ate a pint of Jane's Apricot Orange Blossom ice cream and half a loaf of challah with Laughing Cow cheese, watched Steel Magnolias, and Reddit-ed up on Lena Dunham's feud with former BFF and Girls showrunner Jenni Konner.

More than half of Dunham's most recent memoir Famesick is taken up by graphic descriptions of her various physical problems. Many of those are gynecological, and Dunham is an excellent writer, so you know—I'm probaby more familiar now with Dunham's pussy than I am with my own. I'd be sympathetic except that I strongly suspect Dunham is an unreliable narrator—though I'm not 100% sure exactly what I mean by that. Certainly every one of her hospitalizations is documented. But I kept reading Famesick and thinking, This just feels... off. Not saying she had Munchausen's. But she did a lot to exacerbate her symptoms. Bad drugs, weird sex, going without sleep for days. A lot.

Of course, she was only in her early 20s, an age where many of us push our limits. And she has obvious problems with boundaries.

Still.

###

After the publication of her first memoir, Dunham was widely reviled. Her colorful descriptions of Playing Doctor with her little sister (who has since transitioned) squicked readers. The word "pedophile" was even bandied about.

I thought this was unfair. In my generation, at least, Playing Doctor was how we learned that little girls were different from little boys. There was no sex education in the schools.

When I was eight or so, my mother shoved a book at me: The Wonderful Story of How You Were Born. The book was filled with pages and pages of illustrations of eggs, and sperm, and developing fetuses. And then on the very last page, there was a picture of two grown-ups in heavy winter coats hugging. When two people love each other very much... read the caption.

Until I was a teenager, long after I'd started menstruating, I thought that sperm somehow managed to swim through multiple layers of clothing because that's what The Wonderful Story of How You Were Born left me with. It made me kinda nervous about hugging.

###

Anyway, many, many accommodations had to be made for Dunham's multiple physical and mental breakdowns while Girls was in production. I imagine it was really tough on Konner—after all, she was the showrunner. Dunham may have been the creative engine, but HBO held Konner responsible for delivering the product.

Konner figured she could get more out of Dunham by acting like her friend rather than her boss—a very common strategy in Hollywood—and the two developed an intense codependency. Which eventually went sour because all codependent relationships go bad eventually. Dunham's Reddit stans (their names are legion) put Jenni Konner right up there with Adolph Hitler.

The thing the stans object to the most?

The 15-year age difference between Dunham and Konner. Unhinged Dunham Reddit stans actually use words like "grooming."

The American fixation on pedophilia has become so intense that it has actually spilled over into an obsession with chronological stratification generally. It's not only that GenZ will denounce you for dating someone 15 years younger, they will denounce you for befriending someone 15 years younger.

The latest example of that deeply toxic American prudery.

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Happy Birthday, Willow!

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:56:21 GMT

Well, this is kinda cool...

I saw these earrings yesterday, little rhinestone highball glasses, and I thought: These would be perfect for Willow. So, I bought them for her.

(Willow is a bartender at the Chanticleer, the sleaziest bar in Ithaca. She has no previous bartending experience and needed a gig, so she talked her way into it. Last time I was in Ithaca, I bought her a little mixology guide, so she'd know how to make mixed drinks. She studied it as if it were an organic chemistry textbook!)

Then last night I got a text from RTT: Can you text or call Willow and wish her a happy birthday!

Perfect! I thought. I bought a birthday present for Willow without knowing it was her birthday!

I do adore Willow.

###

Other than that, I'm hanging out with the kiskas and the chickens, trying to figure out what's important.

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Maya

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:47:37 GMT

Reports coming out of Nepal are horrendous. I stared disbelieving at the videos. Surely, they were AI phantasmagorias!

But, no, they're not. This is really what happens when a glacier melts. Dreamlike when you're watching it from an omniscient camera's vantage. As though you're watching Pompeii.

Biggest news story of the decade, I'm thinking. Because it's a portent of what's coming in the next decade as glaciers throughout Europe and Canada begin to collapse. Third world problem, the people in Europe & Canada are thinking now as they watch the Nepal videos. Except it's not.

And I, for one, was silent when the joke began circulating—They got the wrong 80-year-old—after Dolly Parton & Tim Curry, both aged 80, died within a day of each other.

80 years old is only six years older than 74 years old, and I am 74 years old. Do I want to die? Well, I want very much not to be here, and it's never very clear to me what the perimeters of here are. Is here the Wallkill Valley or the larger reach of human existence?

Or maybe here is a chronological dimension, the 21st century? I was happiest in Berkeley, circa the 1980s, and the cultural artifacts of the present tense feel increasingly alien. Who gives a fuck about K-pop, Taylor Swift, or cryptocurrency after all? I get that these things are the present-tense equivalent of French New Wave films, the Grateful Dead, and 401(k)s, my own bespoke set of cultural touchstones. The cultural touchstones are always shifting. That's one reason why I don't bother keeping up with the current ones. They're all maya and delusion.

What's not maya and delusion?

Well, I suppose the natural world. Plants, animals. Cats. Black Chicken with her T-Rex genetic lineage. Melting glaciers.

Also, Yayoi Kusama died. I saw her installation at the New York Botanical Gardens in 2021. It was amazing—and judging from my lame ArtPhotos™, unphotographable:

Anyway.

No yellow leaves yet, but the temperatures are definitely trending autumnal. (Altogether now: Where did the summer go?)

Which means I don't have to scamper out the door early in the morning to exercise or garden. I can putz!

The garden is Too Much Work. Traditionally, I've always found weeding meditative. Not the weeding this garden requires, though. Yesterday, I hauled out 30 pounds of weeds—and it's still completely overgrown, you can hardly tell where I took weeds out!

I would have had to have woodchipped the entire plot except for the growing areas three inches deep back in April to control these weeds, and how the hell was I supposed to know that? Nobody told me, and my plot at the Hyde Park Community Garden didn't require that kind of prep.

Anyway, I am not loving gardening these days. It is a chore.

I do have a shitload of basil, though. Enough to keep me in pesto till the start of 2027.

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Mindy Bruger, Memory Eternal

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:22:11 GMT

The big local news story last weekend hereabouts was the death of two first responders, Jimmy and Mindy Bruger. He was chief of the Plattekill volunteer fire department and a career lieutenant with the City of Poughkeepsie's paid Fire Department. She was an EMT.

Mysterious tragedy, said the news stories. There was some vague implication that the deaths were carbon monoxide poisoning—although carbon monoxide poisonings are generally associated with space heaters gone haywire, so kinda weird in the middle of a hot, hot summer.

Jimmy Bruger's kindness, commitment to the public good, and inate nobility were much extolled in these news stories. Mindy Bruger was barely mentioned. I don't blame the reporters. They would have gone to the firehouses, interviewed the men under Bruger's command.

Two days later, the truth emerges: The deaths were a murder/suicide. He shot her, spent an hour or two trying to clean up the scene. Then shot himself. Presumably because he realized he couldn't cover up what he'd done.

It's not all men. But it's always a man.

The police at the scene must have known what happened very quickly upon arriving at the Brugers' house. I mean, the gun was found within reach of Bruger's body.

So why the prevarication?

Because he was a pillar of the community. And then there's that thin blue line mentality: Firefighters are only one step removed from cops, and cops protect their own. Plus, the general Neanderthal sensibilities of this corner of the world, its entrenched misogyny.

In the online discussions of the incident after the truth emerged, the FB message boards were swarming with posts like, Well, everybody has their bad moments and But she was stepping out on him.

This is why I hate this fuckin' place.

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Scriptura Continua

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:32:21 GMT

However many thousands of years ago, when the oral storytelling tradition was upended by the new technology of writing, the world seemed like it was coming to an end. When stories are told, they are mutable and changing; no one expects them to be the exact same story from one retelling to the next. Consistency was a dangerous new element. Where would this new technological transformation lead?

Punctuation was another transformative technological innovation. In his Confessions, St. Augustine marveled that his mentor, St. Ambrose, could read silently. It seemed freakish. Though the Greeks had invented punctuation, the Romans had abandoned it, so medieval texts were written scriptura continua, meaning the words ran together sans punctuation or even intervening spaces. Reading aloud was the only way to make sense of the written word

(Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks are responsible for the invention of spaces between words; Latin was a foreign language and inserting gaps made the unfamiliar words more decipherable. Punctuation was reintroduced when the Emperor Charlemagne tasked an English monk with creating a unified writing template across the Empire.)

I always think about this whenever I stumble across arguments against AI writing and art. Yeah, AI is going to transform the process of creativity in ways that are impossible to imagine but almost certainly spell extinction for solo creative types like me.

In the long game, though, solo creatives will come to seem as quaint as blind bards wandering from Aegean kingdom to Aegean kingdom. I have no idea what's going to replace us. Whatever it is, though, if anyone even remembers the current purists' thrashes, they will shrug and roll their eyes.

###

Meanwhile, I am trying to make peace with the fact that I am stuck in this awful place until—UGH—April.

I will need diversion. To that end, I've been proactive: a Labor Day stay with real-life Flavia at the Jersey Shore, a mid-September sojourn with Willow and RTT in Ithaca, an end-of-the-month road trip to D.C. to hang out with my beloved pal A. I'm also considering flying to New Mexico for a week in October to hang out with Jeanna.

The Schlock people have been calling me off the hook. Amazingly, they want me to come back! (Well, I did get outstanding customer reviews.) I'm considering it—not full-time, but maybe 20 hours a week. I think I could handle 20 hours a week without going nuts. It would give me a routine, which is much to be desired. I quite like doing taxes—it allows me to channel my inner Talmudic scholar—and I can ignore the corporate bullshit aspects successfully enough.

The Work in Progress has not been going well. Part of that is the realities of the publishing world right now: I could write Anna Karenina, and I still wouldn't be able to find a publisher because I'm old, so I don't have many books left in me, and the only ROI for publishers these days is investing in writing careers. So, I'm writing without the expectation of ever being offered an audience. Is there any point to putting a message in a bottle if you know that bottle is gonna end up on the ocean floor?

I continue to plug away at it because I believe finishing things one starts is a wholesome habit. But the prose looks very paint-by-numbers-y when I read it over. Maybe it wouldn't if it wasn't my sole focus. I always write best when I'm writing around the margins of everything else I have to do in my life.

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Harm Reduction

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:44:13 GMT

Temps in the 70s means it's cool enough to tromp in the early evening. Last night I stayed out late enough to catch the fireflies.

Also I found the missing half of my favorite pair of earrings. They're junky little earrings, paste and glass cabochons, but I bought them in Sicily, so they remind me escape velocity is always possible.

Mostly, I've been avoiding thinking.

I'm very good at thinking, but so far as I can tell, thinking hasn't done much for me.

Or maybe it has. That's always the issue with harm reduction strategies: Any good they do you can only be a matter of speculation.

###

Finished Crowley's Little/Big. The prose is really exquisite: That night he dreamt of Heaven: Heaven was a dark amusement park, small and joyless, just an iron Ferris wheel turning in eternity and a glum arcade to amuse the faithful. But the whole is less than the sum of its parts because the characters and multiple plotlines are so-oo-ooo boring, so-oo-ooo bloodless, so-oo-ooo... twee.

An obvious comparison is to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell since both novels are long and deal with the fairy kingdom. But JSAMN crackles with energy and wit, whereas Little/Big is a dirge for sonambulists.

###

Rewatched Industry in its entirety. Industry is the best TV show currently in production; the writing is absolutely amazing. One scene that stood out to me in the rewatch—probably because I'm attempting to write about a woman with a cocaine habit—was the coke-rap scene between James and Rishi shortly before both characters come to a gruesome end.

We're on a ghost ship, James rants. A fucking system that can incorporate any critique, just turn it into a marketable commodity. Nothing has depth. Nothing has traction. Nothing... Nothing's fucking serious, right? We're just steam on a mirror. You're gonna die a fucking spectator, yeah? A priest at the altar of your own fucking ego.

This is the quintessential coke rap! Delivered in this incoherent stream of babble. And yet, simultaneously, so profound.

###

Also, since I just finished Lena Dunham's memoir, attempting a rewatch of Girls. In the way-back-then when I first watched Girls, I watched it as an anthropological exercise. I see a real distinction between seduction and rape, so I don't relate to fourth-wave feminism at all, which meant I could not relate to Girls' protagonists. Particularly, I could not relate to Hannah—although this time, I am watching the behind-the-scenes commentary as well, so at least I can distinguish between Hannah and Lena Dunham.

The show is actually better than I remember it being.

But Hannah remains a grotesquely unlikeable character.

And why do these characters talk about their vaginas so much? Is it to give them some sort of parity because males talk so much about their dicks?

Dicks are boring unless you're having sex with them. Ditto vaginas.

(Do males—over, say, the age of 20—really talk about their dicks a lot? Or is that just a TV and movies trope?)

###

I am eating mostly out of my garden.

I will never, ever get tired of pesto, tomatoes, or cucumbers. But I ain't planting bell peppers again next year.

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Plot For a "New Yorker" Story

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:10:48 GMT

After I finished writing, I checked my email. Found an email from Carl. Wondered, Did I conjure him?

Hope all good with you, he wrote.

In excavating my files I am finding focus of things I would like you to work on. There’s the Tina Turner material we’ve discussed. I will send you those interview files separately.
Here I am including WIP of a book on health I have been rattling around with. There are health-related essays and a great number of shorter pieces originally written as online comments.
In think it would be helpful to establish a working relationship as author/ editor. Presume it will be easiest to work from digital copies in our back and forth.
Now before December 1 will give us time to get started.
Please read this through and make an editorial assessment in a letter of what is here and what suggestions you might make.
I have a few of these manuscripts, but this one might be a good one to start with.
Thx.

Say what? You think it will be helpful to establish a working relationship now before December 1? What about what I think?

Peeked at the manuscript. 350 pages. Total garbage, barely coherent. 18 pages of how he doesn't have medical insurance but manages to stay healthy, and you can, too! 332 pages of comments he made on various online forums dating back to 2009 that have very little to do with health.

WTF??

Now! Surviving without medical insurance is not a bad angle for a book.

Except, of course, he has medical insurance—he's my age, he has Medicare—and no writer in their right mind would give a manuscript this disorganized and incoherent to anyone to look at, let alone edit—

Which clearly means he's not in his right mind.

Oh.

I considered this for a few minutes.

Bipolar disorder?

Dementia?

Both are characterized by impulsiveness.

But did it matter which one?

Not to me.

Seems likely that his brother is urging him to come back to Utah "for a visit" because his brother has noticed something, too. His brother is probably prepared to move heaven and earth to keep Carl in Utah.

This would make a great New Yorker-type short story: Insane writer lures hapless acquaintance into editing reams and reams of exhibitionistic tripe by dangling the prospect of a house-sitting sojourn at his Upper West Side apartment.

But the only lingering question I have is whether I should ghost him or write a pleasant, friendly little note terminating any further contact.

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Next Time, I'm Hitting Up the Magic 8-Ball

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:23:15 GMT

I'm feeling so overwhelmed that it's kinda like I'm paralyzed.

Can't write. Can barely think.

Could it possibly be the weight of all that stringy hair? I wondered, so on Saturday I scampered out and paid someone to hack it off:

It's a great haircut, but it doesn't give me the leverage it might if I were even, say, 10 years younger. I'm still an old woman facing housing insecurity.

###

After the haircut, I hung out with Belinda for a bit. I would have preferred not to answer the question, How are you?, but when dodging the question threatened to become rude, I thought, Wot the hell, and told her.

I mean, that's the main thing: I'm actually kind of ashamed of myself for being in this position. I made so-oo-ooo many bad decisions in the years when I had more options! Why was I so fuckin' careless?

Well. I was raised by grasshoppers to be a grasshopper.

I didn't know.

Talking to Belinda was actually rather confidence-boosting.

She is a pillar of local society. Owns a Dairy Queen! And values my friendship despite how eccentric and weird and marginal I am. She's normal! And likes me!

She frowned thoughtfully when I said Michigan. "That's a long ways away," she said.

Texted me a bunch of apartment listings while I was driving home. They were all for subsidized senior apartments that have waiting lists. But I was touched anyway.

###

In my texts with the offspring, I'd mentioned I was feeling overwhelmed and needed wise counsel, so the next morning, Ichabod called me.

The conversation was fuckin' awful.

Next time I need wise counsel, I'm hitting up the Magic 8-Ball.

First, Ichabod harangued me for 20 minutes about the Carl housesitting thing.

"How do you know that's not going to work? Have you had a conversation with him about it?"

"I don't need to have a conversation with him about it," I said. "I can read the trend."

"That's projection," he said. Partly by disposition and partly by professional training, Ichabod is a strictly evidentiary guy who puts no faith in intuition.

"No, it's not," I said. "Carl has been completely flaky. He's canceled plans we made for me to see the apartment and talk to him about the work he wants me to do for him three times. He's not reliable. He has that magpie mentality, gets all caught up in something bright and shiny, and then forgets about it. I could talk to him, and probably he'd say, Of course, it's happening! and then in November inform me, I'm sorry, but this isn't going to work after I've already given Icky notice. That fits Carl's MO. He's not a bad human being, but he's completely undependable."

"You don't know that," said Ichabod impatiently.

I sighed. "I do know that. You're gonna have to trust me on this one."

Next, Ichabod harangued me about my options in general.

He was probably right about most of them. No, it certainly wouldn't be a good idea to put a potential down payment on a new-to-me automobile on a credit card with a 24% APR, however sparkly a new-to-me automobile would make me feel, and no (sigh), it's probably not a good idea to expedite the Michigan move to October: Ichabod can't get the time off from work to help me, and I don't have a clue how I could organize the move without a helper, plus it makes absolutely no sense to take the Prius to Michigan if the Prius has a finite lifespan when I can give the Prius to RTT who needs a car and knows enough gypsy mechanics that he might even be able to solve the corroded floor pan issue. I mean, mechanically, the Prius is ace! Gets 50 mpg.

"I just hate the thought of being stuck here for another six months," I said. I was trying hard not to let them leak through into my voice, but I was close to tears.

"Well, you're not homeless," Ichabod said. "A lot of people in your situation are homeless."

Did he really just say that to me?

Suddenly, I got a flash of how Ichabod must see me: a pathetic old woman suffering from delusions of grandeur.

"I love you, Ichabod, but I'm going to end this conversation," I said. "You seem very impatient with me, and that's not helpful for me."

"Well, you said you wanted advice," he said. "If you want to vent and have me be empathetic, I can do that, too, only I'll have to call you back—"

"Not necessary," I told him.

Really? He thinks you can't be empathetic and give advice at the same time?

Wow.

###

When I'm honest with myself, I realize I don't want advice.

I want to be rescued.

That's why the Carl offer was so attractive! It effectively amounted to rescue. The problematic aspects of my life resolved as if by magic! A fabulous new life, me in the City doing exciting City things!

But present-tense rescue would not appear to be on the agenda.

I can rescue Future Me by wise planning in the here and now, so that's what I've gotta focus on.

Meawhile, yet another reason to mourn Brian. He would have given me wise counsel and empathy! And probably offered to loan me the down payment for a new-to-me car.

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It Is What It Is

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:23:57 GMT

So, the undercarriage of my 15-year old Prius is showing rust and corrosion, my auto mechanic tells me. To pass New York State Inspection, the undercarriage will have to be replaced, assuming it can be replaced—it's an old car, and I have no idea what parts availability is.

RTT's Cuban auto mechanic could probably just weld the old undercarriage more securely into place, but I'm thinking if it's showing corrosion on the exterior, it's almost certainly corroded internally as well, and safe driving argues for a complete replacement: I don't want to be driving down the road and have my engine fall out of my car.

It is an expensive fix. Sigh... But that's why God invented credit cards, I suppose. I'm not happy about it. But if you own an automobile, figure you're gonna drop around $5K a year on it one way or another whether you're making a monthly payment for a new car, or keeping up with necessary repairs on an old one.

Like everything else in life, it is what it is.

###

Exciting Update: So, I took the Prius to the local Honest Auto Body Shop, and after putting it on the lift, the Honest Auto Body Mechanic told me the first auto shop was wack, and that he would pass the Prius for inspection this year—but it almost certainly won't pass inspection in 2027. Because it's not the undercarriage, it's the floor pan that's corroded.

"It'll be bad then," he said. "And for a car that old, it can't be fixed."

"And there's nothing I can... ?" I asked. "I mean, what are my options?"

He snorted. "Buying another car."

Well, at least I have some time! Although I'm inclined to buy sooner rather than later since prices are going up, up, up.

Not happy. Not one little bit.

But altogether now: It is what it is.

###

In other news, Black Chicken apparently pecked the little white bantam to death. I suspect Icky threw the new little bantams in with her too quickly; there should have been a more gradual introduction and assimilation process.

I am trying not to get angry at Black Chicken—chickens gonna chicken, and T-Rex DNA lurks in every chicken's genetic code. The smaller the flock, the more viscious the pecking order. Black Chicken would peck me to death if I was six inches tall and covered with feathers. You can't anthropomorphize.

Still.

It made me sad.

Wouldn't it be great if evolution had favored cooperation rather than competition? But humans are the exception in the animal kingdom when it comes to empathy. And I wouldn't even say the majority of humans are empathetic.

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Sassy Dialogue Is Not a Cure for Anything

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:53:03 GMT

At 10:49am yesterday, this photo showed up on my camera roll.

Where did it come from?

Honestly, I have no idea, since at that exact moment I was struggling to contain the weeds that were staging an armed resistance movement in my garden.

Five days since I'd been near the garden. Five days with a lot of rain—it may be drought season everywhere else, but here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley, we are significantly over our year-to-date rain average. Five days with a lot of sun—heat advisories, in fact. The garden was a goddamn jungle, and the weeds were throttling my veggies. I hacked 30 pounds of them out with my gardening knife. I could have used a machete.

My phone was in my car. I didn't take this photo, and I'm pretty sure no one I know sent it to me.

There must be some logical explanation for it. Some glitch in the cloud that pushed somebody else's fantasy of a Caribbean vacation onto my phone. What did they get in return? Cat pix?

But naturally I prefer to believe it's a supernatural visitation. Though why some ghost thinks an AI trope with impossible physics is what I need at this particular juncture of my life is a great mystery.

###

For extra money these past few months, I've been doing AI testing. It's kind of a weird gig: for several hours every day, I watch and annotate AI videos, analyzing them for visual and audio distortions and evaluating how closely they adhere to their prompts. Some of the videos are wondrously beautiful, testaments to the power of the human imagination, but the majority are what they call AI slop—think Cthulhu designing blueprints for a New World Order. Honestly, someone needs to make a horror movie about AI slop!

So one of my fantasies about the inexplicable photograph on my camera is that collective AI consciousness has identified me as a sympathetic soul (sympathetic to what?) and is leaving me little offerings—kind of like the dead mice and squirrels the Meezer used to leave me, in hopes such sustenance would help me retain the strength to wield the can opener.

###

John Crowley just died, so I thought I'd read Little, Big, supposedly his masterpiece. I'll shortly toddle off to Barnes & Noble to see if it's on the shelf. It's not likely to be there, but it's been a while since I've been in a bookstore.

Wrote another couple hundred words in the Work in Progress. Flavia meeting her coke dealer for the first time. Kept writing—and deleting—sassy dialogue that has nothing to do with the plot. Someday I will learn that sassy dialogue is not a cure for anything.

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Writing Again

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:34:41 GMT

Finally. Wrote 500 words in the Work in Progress.

Were they good words?

Honestly, I have no idea. I'm trying to turn off my brain's contrast and compare function because it serves no purpose in the creation stage. Creating is all about forward momentum. I will say the whole process felt dissociative as though I was a drone floating many feet above the story. Since I am writing about Flavia's cocaine habit, and cocaine is a dissociative drug if ever there was one, maybe this works. I dunno.

On today's agenda: Leo Decker takes Flavia to his dealer's apartment. High jinx ensue.

I'm gonna have to think about who the coke dealer is. Maybe Doug and Diana Ruston???

###

No other news, really. The heat dome continues, and I exercise in the morning, which you know is not my preferred window, but a girl's gotta exercise.

I would literally have to hit the garden at 5am to do any real gardening right now since it's 80°F at 9am with a humidity reading (ulp!) of 87%. I can handle dry heat but I can't handle humidity.

I'm eating a lot of stuffed peppers 'cause the garden has a bumper crop of Bell peppers, and I hate to waste the damn things. I'm sick of stuffed peppers.

I'm giving the dilemma of where to spend the winter much consideration. I have a number of friends with spare apartments on their properties, but it seems presumptious to approach them—"Yo! Give (or rent) your apartment to me for four months!"—without at least an implicit invitation.

People don't like to say, No. And when you force their hand, they retreat.

I don't want any of my pals retreating from me.

This notion that I have a network of people who ❤️LUV❤️ me but just don't happen to live anywhere around me is fundamental to my emotional survival.

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The Utility of Habit

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:57:56 GMT

I've managed to convince myself that nothing I do matters because nothing I do has the slightest effect on anything—so does it really matter that I can't start Chapter 9, or that my car inspection is a month overdue, or that all I want to eat is Pepperidge Farm goldfish and tiny little Ritz cracker peanut butter sandwiches?

Times like this are when habits, To-Do lists, and automated reminders come in handy!

You brush your teeth and floss, not because you care if your teeth fall out but because it's habit.

You get your car's oil changed not because you care about adding years to yr car's usefulness but because if you don't, an obnoxious reminder lights up your dashboard.

Part of me actually wonders if my apathy isn't related to the fact that I've run out of the Post-Its on which I write my To-Do lists. If I buy more Post-Its, will I magically regain urgency & interest in my own life again?

It's worth a try, I guess.

###

Carl is being flaky again. Not hostile. But flaky. I was supposed to come into the City this week to hang out, talk to him about his projects, and look at his apartment. He texted to ask me if I would mind doing this in October instead—he has a beach house invitation and has decided to spend most of September in Utah, so...

Feeble excuse for pushing off the get-together. I was supposed to go into the City last week, too, but then his refrigerator broke. That was a more legitimate excuse.

Carl is not malicious. But he is very whimsical, impulsive, quixotic. And I am thinking the NYC house-sitting thing is not gonna happen. Oh, well.

The Michigan move is not happening till April. I was gonna pack up everything & throw it into storage by November. So, Carl's flakiness leaves me wondering whether I should be looking around for another short-term living situation December to March or pack up in March and tough out another winter here.

Decisions, decisions!

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What's In a Name?

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:22:25 GMT

Abdul El-Sayed is a great candidate. He's a doctor. He's an epidemiologist. He's a fuckin' Rhodes Scholar. As the director of Wayne County's (for which read Detroit's) Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services from 2023 to 2025, he led an initiative for medical debt relief.

That said, I wish he hadn't won the primary that makes him Michigan's Democratic senatorial candidate because he doesn't stand the slightest chance of winning.

And yes, it's his name.

I was just in Michigan. I have a feeling that if you went up to any Michigander living outside Detroit and asked, Do you know who Abdul El-Sayed is?, they'd answer, He was one of the 9/11 terrorists, wasn't he?

Yeah, sure, Barack Obama with his weird "not Amurrican" name made it all the way to the presidency.

But that was before Trump gave Americans blanket permission to hate outsiders.

###

I've forced myself to take a big step back from politics because these days, politics is little more than a particularly virulent form of fandom. Plus political issues are so transient.

The defining political issue in 2001 was terrorism.

The defining political issue in 1976 was the crisis of public trust in government—which seems laughable today because anti-statism ain't just for wingnuts anymore; most of us take it for granted nowadays that you can't trust the government.

The defining political issue in 1951 was Truman's firing of General MacArthur after the latter advocated expanding the Korean War into China.

Who can remember what the defining political issue in 1926 was? More importantly, who cares?

Politics have a short shelf life. That's why, ultimately, politics don't matter. They have a rigid hold on the now, but surprisingly little effect on the future. The pendulum swing over the centuries is ever toward more freedom, more knowledge, a higher quality of life, however repressive or oppressive the present tense may seem—although it's true that "quality of life" keeps getting redefined.

In other news, today begins another heat wave, so shortly I must toddle off and exercise. Yesterday, I didn't get it together to tromp until temps were well into the 80s, and I was pouring down sweat when I finally got home.

Finished Lena Dunham's memoir. She has a rare genetic condition, which causes her a lot of grief; I'm sympathetic, but not sympathetic to the point of wanting to read 200 pages about her heavy periods, so I skimmed the last 200 pages of her book. Lena Dunham's morphing into Fran Leibowitz—relevant only because of a brief period of youthful ascendance, but that will keep her in money and one-off gigs throughout her lifetime, so I'm jealous.

I must tackle Chapter 9 today, even if everything I write is awful.

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