Mallory's Camera

The Political Plot Thickens

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 15:58:28 GMT

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, feminist icon and possibly, no probably, more of a trailblazer than the very first female Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, whom practically no one remembers.

But I find myself absolutely incandescent with rage this morning that Ginsburg didn’t resign in 2014 when Obama asked her to. She was 82 at the time.

What?

Did she think she was going to live forever?

Or did she honestly believe Democrats had an unshakeable grip on the executive branch?

Really shortsighted bullshit.

This shakes up the Presidential election in ways I really don’t want it to be shaken up because Ted Cruz is rumored to be the top pick on the Republicans’ list of potential replacements. One anticipates that Republicans will push aside all those petty squabbles over who’s to blame for all those dead coronavirus victims to unite behind gun rights and overturning Roe v. Wade.

Democrats are never at their best during contentious confirmation hearings, which are a complete waste of time anyway ‘cause elected representatives seldom if ever break ranks with their party’s line.

I, for one, found the Brett Kavanaugh hearings an outrage. Even if the guy did put the make on the hapless psychology professor when both were 17—so fucking what? In my generation, everyone was a dick at 17.

(Presumably, virtuous Millennials have since reversed that trend, but you know what? I kinda doubt it.)

So, within the next 50 days, we are bound to be treated to the spectacle of Democrats at their most shrill, canting, and self-righteous, and that is gonna turn off voters whose distaste for Biden and Pelosi is only marginally less than their distaste for Trump.

I wish I could score some Quaaludes! I’d like to go to sleep on the night of November 2 and wake up two weeks later when the dust has settled.

###

In other news, the weird spectral smoke strata has finally burned off, and we are back to having beautiful, bright blue skies.

I didn’t expect to be working for the National Counting Project again, but they kept texting me, and I was going over to the other side of the river anyway for brunch with BB, so I said, Sure.

They assigned me a bunch of houses along Route 209.

Now, Route 209 is a major thoroughfare where cars whiz along at 55 miles per hour, so looking for mailbox numbers and careening off into spottily sighted driveways was not a lot of fun.

However, brunch with BB was fun!

Behold our adorable Bento Boxes from trendy restaurant!

The purple stuff is black beans with spiced beets. Tastier than it sounds, though I must say, a little goes a long way. And will continue to go a long way from my refrigerator over the next few days.

BB and I talked of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and the Nature of True Luv. So a fabulous time was had by all.

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The Hunt for Small Adventures

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 13:12:38 GMT

So, it looks like the National Counting Project has finished counting everyone in Dutchess and Ulster counties who’s willing (however reluctantly) to be counted.

Gotta say: I enjoyed counting—even when I didn’t. And I’ve been in a great mood these five weeks past, more-or-less consistently.

Interesting Life Lesson for me: I feel like my most authentic self when I’m engaged in small adventures.

So, in order to continue to feel like my most authentic self, I must continue to be engaged in small adventures.

How does one pull that off in a time when there are so many cultural pressures to hunker down in the home fort with all hatches drawn and barricades raised?

I’m not sure.

I have my imagination, of course.

But imaginations are like campfires: They have to fed the right kind of fuel, and you have to shuffle the embers around from time to time.

One of the reasons I’m feeling so sanguine, I’m sure, is that I have almost entirely stopped paying attention to current events.

I’m voting for Biden. And getting trained as a polling inspector. In fact, I’ve been assigned to be the Official Sanitizing/Social Distancing Coordinator at the Cardinal Road Firehouse polling site! That basically means I will be scurrying about in a space suit on the day of the presidential election, scrubbing down voting machines with Agent Orange.

So, you know. I haven’t sunk into some vacant, apolitical torpor.

But this constant beating of the drums?

On our left, ladies and gentlemen, we have the Army of the Angels led by Unca Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—who kills it with not just one (African American!) but two (South Asian) minority demographics! And on our left, we have the Legion of Darkness, led by Orange Man Trump and his VP Mike Pence who squeezes his legs tight whenever he has to be around a woman who his not his wife!!!!

Uh-uh.

NO.

I ain’t playing.

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The Landscape Detective

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 14:21:29 GMT

There are two 26 Egbert Streets (address changed to confuse the innocent) in Kingston.

Two!

So, I spent an hour of what, all in all, was a frustrating day yesterday trying to figure out which one the National Counting Project wanted me to count.

There were also numerous addresses that turned out to be abandoned junkyards, deserted marinas, ruined shacks up unapproachably steep dirt roads, etc. etc. about which the enumerators who’d come before me had cheerfully written in their notes, Nobody home! Left Notice of Visit!

Snort.

I’ll bet.

The National Counting Project is just the most inefficient gub’mint operation ev-ah!

But like I say, it gives me an excuse to do what I like to do anyway—which is basically to knock around weird little places that are so mired in a sense of the past that walking around in them is like wading through muck. A landscape detective!

And I get paid for it.

###

I started the morning back in Rosendale, knocking on doors up and down the lengths of the scrappy little roads that sprout off Creek Locks Road. None of these roads have signage, so it’s a matter of driving the same stretch of Creek Locks three or four times until you sight the turn-off that’s not the driveway to some white supremacist’s home.

On Constable Lane (I kid you not), I met a drop-dead gorgeous blonde in full police uniform and her dead-eyed male consort.

“Hi, my name is Patrizia! I work with the National Counting Project! Is this 6666666 Constable Lane?” I chirped in my best ingratiating puppy-dog voice.

“Who wants to know?” said the man. But it was more of a statement than a question.

Wait! I thought. She’s police. Shouldn’t she know what the National Counting Project is?

But maybe she wasn’t really police! Maybe this was some kind of cosplay the couple did to spice up their sex life! Maybe inside this rather forbidding looking house—constructed entirely of logs, by the way—they had a dungeon where he’d strip her except for that hat with the visor, string her up on pulleys, and fuck her from behind.

In fact, the dungeon was probably filled with sex slaves, hapless National Counting Project enumerators all, that the couple had plucked from the road during survey attempts.

Or maybe what the blonde was wearing wasn’t a police uniform but the uniform of the local militia!

Whatev-ah, girlfriend! I braced myself and quickly rifled through my mental gallery of Explanations to Give Whenever a Respondent Casts Aspersions on the Sanctity of the National Counting Project.

“It’s in the Constitution!” I said. “Article 1, Section 2!” I wished I had prepared a little statement about how the work the National Counting Project does is vitally important to the support of the Second Amendment.

Eventually, I did manage to wheedle them into giving me occupancy information. Nothing else, though.

“We don’t give out personal information to the government,” sneered the blonde.

###

Throughout the day, I was on the lookout for glimpses of the old D&H Canal bed and its locks. May have sighted them several times while I was driving. But there was no place to pull over and snap pix.

I did take pix where there was room to pull over:

This is Roundout Creek near what was once the village of Rosendale (which voted itself out of existence some 50 years ago.) To my eyes, the waterway looks too straight not to have been engineered.

This pic was taken from one of the mobile home parks. Again, the waterway looks too straight and unobstructed to be a natural creek. But, of course, what do I know?

###

I saw lots of old pre-colonial houses, too. Some of them had historical markers:

But most of them were just Places Where People Live:

By the way, the whitewash is probably truer to the way these places actually looked during the time of Dutch and early English colonial rule than the plain stone of the Hurley houses.

###

I worked my way down Creek Locks Road and its subsidiaries, gloomy under dense clouds, and found myself on Rte 213, which styles itself “Abeel Road” as it passes into Kingston. This was the cause of some hilarity as the National Counting Project addresses all say “Rte 213” while my GPS concierge kept insisting “Abeel Road.”

I think “Abeel Road” may be some kind of holdover from the mid-19th century when this part of the Kingston marina was still an independent village called Roundout. Johannes Abeel was apparently some early 17th century mayor of Albany who was deposed by (of course!) a member of the eeee-vil Livingston dynasty.

I had a much better time counting in the Kingston inner city than I did in the hostile White-People-Lands surrounding it, I must say. Respondents were more respectful and much, much friendlier.

I have no control over where they send me, of course.

But I definitely do not want to go back to Ulster County’s white supremacist strongholds. It was a challenge to remain polite.

So that may be it for me and the National Counting Project.

I’ll see how I feel in a couple of days.

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You Dismiss a Place as Ordinary and Boring, But Mysteries Abound

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 13:47:30 GMT

The National Counting Project sent me across the river yesterday.

Ulster County is poorer than Dutchess County. And seems wilder. The deer stand their ground when you approach. The low stone walls that crisscross everything on the eastern bank of the Hudson, demarcating every defunct boundary and patent, every old churchyard and farmer’s pasture, every historic roadway and grand estate, are entirely absent on the west bank.

The National Counting Project sent me to the area around the old D&H (Delaware and Hudson) Canal, originally constructed to carry Pennsylvania anthracite to New York City.

The canal was dug into the narrow valley that separates the Shawangunk Ridge from the Catskill Mountains, leveraging and widening Roundout Creek, following the course of the Old Dutch Mine Toad (now Route 209.)

(The Old Dutch Mine, by the way, is a complete fantasy that never existed!)

While the capitalists who thought transporting coal by canal was a great idea were digging up the landscape, they discovered that the limestone in these parts makes great natural cement!

Rosendale Cement soon became the most sought-after cement in the country! It was used in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the U.S. Capitol, and the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal.

The capitalists realized they could make scads more $$$$ owning product rather than mode of distribution, so they abandoned the canal. By the end of the 19th century, the old locks had become a quaint relic, and today many mobile home parks crowd their banks whose inhabitants have no knowledge of or interest in its history.

###

This late in the National Counting game, the "respondents" are a mixed bag of disinterested and hostile. I had one woman scream at me yesterday, Get off my fucking porch! Get off my fucking porch! till her eyes practically popped out of her skull.

I wanted to tell her, This is almost certainly not your fucking porch because no financial institution in the world would approve you for a loan, not even Countrywide Financial Corporation in 2008 at its most sub-prime desperate. It is your landlord’s porch, and he likes to make nice with the gub’mint.

But instead, I just stood there and smiled at her. Pecked notes on the substandard iPhone the National Counting Project issued me v-e-r-y slowly: Get off my fucking porch! says Respondent. Repeats six times.

I should really stop doing that because one of these times, the Respondent is almost certainly gonna have a gun.

###

What else? I had a number of addresses in the hamlet of Bloomington, which is a village straight out of an unaired Twilight Zone episode.

Why is there even a town here? you wonder.

There is a 19th century church that was rebuilt on the site of a 17th century church that burned down.

Did the fire take out the entire town along with it?

And did people just rebuild because they couldn’t conceive of “home” being anywhere else?

You dismiss a place as ordinary and boring, but mysteries abound!

Bloomington has no commerce. The church graveyard is the town’s centerpiece. Every lawn had a “Trump/Pence 2020” sign on it.

Depressing.

###

Then I got lost and whoops! I found myself in Hurley.

Where I have been several times before, but I had no idea I was anywhere near. So that was disconcerting.

Hurley is home to one of the best collections of old Dutch houses in New York State. The village lets visitors tour the houses one day a year, and summer before last, I did the tour. The doors still have their original iron hinges! The Dutch iron-workers were that skilled.

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In the Time of Covid, We Must All Get Used to Living in a Kafkaesque Nightmare

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:46:52 GMT

The DMV refused to register the new car because my middle name was on my driver’s license but not on my insurance card.

This is just crazy.

I have a highly unusual name, with or without the middle name. There is only one of me living in the entire U.S. of A!!!!

I wanted to cry or go on a DMV-shooting spree, but you know: What good would that do?

In the time of covid, we must all get used to living in a Kafkaesque nightmare.

So, I called my insurance people, requisitioned a new insurance card, and took the registration back to the mysterious Drop Box. It will take another three weeks for them to find something wrong with this application, I’m sure.

###

I did a lot of errands yesterday, in fact, but of course, there are always more errands to do. Errands metastasize.

In the late afternoon, I had to scurry down to the mall, always a disheartening proposition even in times when mankind is not facing a devastating plague.

I’d say roughly 40% of the storefronts are empty plus at least one of the anchor tenants is going out of business:

Too bad I don’t want any ugly polyester clothing, designed by Kim Kardashian and made in a Vietnamese sweatshop, right?

I’d come to the mall to buy new shoes. I actually wore my sneakers out, pounding the pavements on behalf of the National Counting Project, and there is this one mall shoe store that must send me five emails a day, promising fabulous discounts and an endlessly enticing array of shoes that will turn my feet into objects of adoration for every podophile in a five-mile radius.

I have very big feet. Size 11—the same size as Jackie Kennedy! They were smaller once, but they went up a full size with each pregnancy I brought to term.

Anyway, the shoe store was a complete disaster with absolutely nothing in stock, and I was forced to visit three separate stores before I could find a pair of shoes that did not make my feet look like something clowns use to extort laughs from Mennonites and that actually fit.

I also ducked into Best Buy and bought a (cheap) 24-inch monitor.

My heart was pounding.

You are spending money on yourself without any practical reason for doing so!, scolded the savage little voice that lives inside my head.

Yes, it’s true. I bought the monitor for my own entertainment. So, I could play video games.

Baaaaaaaaaad dog!

###

It’s supposed to rain all day today, so I could play video games all day long, I suppose. Except there are some items on the Never-Depleting List of Errands that can be accomplished rain or shine plus my living space looks like the entire cast of Hoarders has been crashing here, and my writing clients are getting pushy.

Also, I got a text from someone called Jessica.

I’m your new National Counting Project CFS! it said. Let’s touch base tomorrow!

I am not signed up to work tomorrow, I thought. In fact, I may never sign up to work again.

But why be difficult?

What-evah. Sure. Let’s be BFF!

It’s sad to think they’ve gotten rid of Huck, whom I had come to like. He actually turns out to live only a mile away from me in the Historic District, and I would see him out walking his dog, a skinny little man in bright purple sneakers who looked like Andy Warhol in a covid mask, only with better skin and his own hair.

I don’t like him enough to give a shit about the story behind his separation from the National Counting Project, however.

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Dahlias and Plague Doctor Masks

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 13:05:11 GMT

It was the charger.

Of course, it was the charger.

I knew it was the charger, and the company even obligingly delivered the new charger a day early.

But like I say, knowing absolutely that it was the charger did not keep me from having a massive anxiety attack that followed me around all day yesterday.

Which means it was not the charger but a general sense of spinning in space, out of control.

More than any other person I’ve ever met in my life, I seem to have a physiological need to sit around doing nothing for four or five hours every day.

“Doing nothing” is perhaps a misnomer: I can read, I can play video games, I can watch TV, I can dabble with art projects. Interestingly, I can’t write. And I certainly can’t do errands or any other practical stuff.

Oh, I mean, I can. But I always feel… off. And the longer I go without unstructured downtime, the more off I feel. Anxious. Nervous. Intimidated.

So, I resolved to take a few days off from the National Counting Project.

Of course, the National Counting Project may not be there when I’m ready to go back.

But, you know, that’s okay.

My regular clients have begun to send me plaintive notes: Why haven’t you been working on our white paper analyses of ancillary medical staff availability in the time of Covid?

They LUV me, but luv is fickle!

And they’re my bread and butter. I don’t want to play too hard to get.

###

Meanwhile, back in the garden, my tomatoes, basil and peppers continue to run riot:

Much as I love peppers, I cannot possibly eat them all, so I have been busily identifying pepper lovers among my friendship circle. If you are one, and would like a care package of jalapenos, habaneros, Thai peppers and banana peppers, Private Message me your address.

My dahlia finally bloomed!

With the promise of many more flowers to come.

I was actually gonna pick this flower, but I would have had to evict this fellow:

Not knowing much about insects, I couldn’t figure out whether he was a grasshopper (benign!) or locust (Biblical plague!), but I liked his looks, so I decided to let him stay.

###

What else?

Oh, yeah, I’ve been looking over my mask collection and wondering whether this one would be suitable for wearing to the supermarket when the Second Wave hits (soon, soon, soon):

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Why I Wouldn't Make a Successful Assassin

Sun, 06 Sep 2020 13:25:56 GMT

People were just fuckin’ nuts yesterday. Driving crazily, and more irate and abusive than usual.

I’d finally coaxed this one guy into talking to me—an old style fringe hippie who discovered the Joy of the Second Amendment relatively late in life.

A woman he described as “the mother of my child” was part of his household.

I always find that an interesting description.

In the copious writings on Ben’s computer that I rifled through after his death, I found sentimental essays about practically everyone he’d ever known. Not just friends and family. Random people he sat next to at bus stops! But the few times he ever referred to me, he described me sans name as “the mother of my son.”

This confirmed my impression that Ben heartily disliked me by the time he died.

Anyhoo, Second Amendment Hippie was okay with giving me his demographic details and his son’s demographic details, but didn’t want to say anything about “the mother of his child.” This was just fine with me: The Constitution mandates a count but doesn’t say anything about the collection or aggregation of personal information.

Towards the end of the interview, the mother of his child wandered out. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“The National Counting Project is the basis for the federal government’s matching grants to the states!” I explained brightly. “It’s used to determine everything from road repairs to food stamps and Medicaid.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said with deep contempt. “I was talking to him. You’re very rude, aren’t you? You should learn to keep your trap shut.”

I snapped.

Gave her my best Sicilian malocchio. Smiled. “I get it,” I said. “Look at your life! You feel so powerless. The only thing that makes you feel powerful is dishing out shit to people you think have no recourse except to take it. Have a great day!”

Their mouths fell open.

And then I sprinted to my car and got the hell out of there before they could see the name on my name badge or the license plates on my car!

My hands were shaking.

Adrenalin rush!

I’d never make a successful assassin.

I was right around the corner from the Union Cemetery, so I ducked in there and sat staring at the graves for 10 minutes or so while I gained my composure.

People are such assholes.

And yet, they all die and the same sky arches over them, blue, magnificent, half-obscured by fairy-castle clouds.

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The Type of Person Whom Other People Like To Talk To

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 12:57:55 GMT

So, yesterday, as I was wandering around a utilitarian apartment complex, I ran into another National Counting Project employee!

Whoa!

It was like being an astronaut exploring the lost canals of Mars and suddenly happening upon a fellow Earthling!

We chattered for a few minutes.

She absolutely loathes the job: “They have me mostly up in Salt Point and Pleasant Valley. The people are nasty and rude. There is a pervasive and deep distrust of the government right now. Doesn’t really matter who you want to vote for in the coming election. Everybody hates the government. But the pay is great, especially considering it’s a job without educational requirements.”

Since she’s a single Mom with two kids, and approximately two-fifths of her weekly check goes to paying babysitters, I wasn’t exactly sure how that works out for her.

###

Earlier that morning, I’d had to meet up with Huck, my field supervisor. He's a slender, Puckish man, and I could tell he was torn between the rigid exactitudes of a bureaucratic job and the certain knowledge that more than half the job consists of complete bullshit.

He asked me how it was going.

“It’s hard,” I said. “You know, I’m the type of person whom other people like to talk to.”

“I can tell,” he said.

“So, when people don’t want to talk to me, when they slam doors in my face, it’s disconcerting. I try not to personalize it, but a certain amount of personalization is unavoidable.”

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but you have the highest conversion rate on the team,” Huck said. “You’ve gotten the most interviews.”

“How many people are on the team?”

“We started with 28. We’re down to eight.” He laughed ruefully. “And I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

Like I say. I’m the type of person whom other people like to talk to.

###

Late, late, late in the afternoon, I had a bunch of addresses in what turned out to be the erstwhile Livingston Motel.

Albany Post Road near the FDR Presidential Library is lined with these old cottage-style motels. As time passes, and fewer and fewer people come to worship at the great white sarcophagus that holds the remains of FDR and Eleanor, the demand for motel services has fallen precipitously. Thus, many of the motels have been repurposed. A week ago, I counted people at a motel that had been turned into a kinda Mad Max hostel for aging hippies.

The Livingston Motel has become emergency housing for the homeless.

In the parking lot, a group of kids were chattering animatedly, and one of them ran over to me, “Look what we found!”

Crum Elbow creek runs near the back of the property, and they’d found a little orange newt, which they’d captured and put in a little plastic container with some water.

They were so excited!

And so bright, and so happy, and filled with such limitless potential that it made me want to weep. They deserved so much better than this! But they didn’t know it yet.

The deal with the National Counting Project is that they don’t count people as of right this moment of time, no. They count people as of April 1. (April Fool’s!)

So, it was kind of ridiculous to knock on doors and ask, “Were you living here on April 1?”

Since most of them weren’t.

Emergency housing is by its very nature temporary.

So, I wandered down to the office and enlisted the aid of the resident support specialist in supplying me with the April 1 info I needed.

All the while thinking, The children. The children. Something has to be done to help them.

But what?

Honestly, I don’t know.

The walls of the cramped little office were lined with sheets of paper blurrily printed with helpful homilies like, Most American families are one paycheck aways from homelessness and Homelessness can happen to anyone—

Which, of course, it can.

It happened to Beau.

It almost happened to me.

Anyway, it dawned on me that I could investigate donating the Saturn Ion to this emergency shelter.

It’s so weird how the whole Donate Your Car thing has turned into a marketing ploy for car-auction houses. In most cases, when you donate a car to a charity, the charity will only get like 15% of what the vehicle brings at auction.

All I want is for the Saturn Ion to find a new home where it can actually help someone.

I don’t know why that’s so difficult to arrange.

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The Horse Worshippers of Hollow Road

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 12:58:08 GMT

Yesterday’s Big Laugh, courtesy of the National Counting Project: Are you interested in enumerating in southern states for the rest of the month?

What, I ask you, could be more fun than getting doors slammed in your face throughout Alabama and Mississippi where the morning humidity index hovers near 83%?

Let’s see…

Getting splinters forced into your fingernail beds?

Listening to Justin Bieber?

Having sex with Donald Trump?

I didn’t bother responding to the text.

###

Yesterday’s adventures took me to places I’d never been before—like the strange hill settlements along Hollow Road where, apparently, they worship horses:

Then it was off to Staatsburg. Parts of Staatsburg I’d never seen before! Parts of Staatsburg that apparently are inhabited by two tribes: people who’ve lived there all their lives and rich New York City-ites, squatting in their second homes ‘cause covid. The former live in mobile homes; the latter in much-renovated 19th century fairy palaces.

The tribes fly the flags of their distant gods, Trump and Biden, and do not like each other much at all.

###

If only the National Counting Project would keep sending me to places I’ve never seen before, I’d do it forever.

Alas! They keep sending me back to the—ugh—Section 8 housing tracts, which fill me with existential despair.

Confidential to the National Counting Project! These mooks are never gonna grant me that 10-minute interview that will complete their National Counting Project surveys! No matter how much I entreat, cajole or try to explain that their food stamps and Medicaid—yes, yes, a presumption on my part! But a presumption with fair betting odds—depends upon it.

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One Last Spin in the Velveteen Rabbit

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 13:25:11 GMT

Fall gardens belong to the squash and the peppers. And I’m not a big fan of squash, so…

Behold my perfect banana peppers:

Behold my voluptuous jalapenos:

Behold my fiery habaneros and my tiny, vicious Thai peppers:

My ghost pepper actually fruited, too—it’s a tiny round pepper, striped red and orange.

###

The guy who tried to give me all those tomatoes the other day—it was a nice gesture, but the one thing I do not need right now is more tomatoes!—asked me if I minded if he smoked while he answered the National Counting Project questions.

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m one of those X-smokers who enjoys the smell of cigarettes. I didn’t give up smoking for health reasons; I don’t see any particular advantage to living to 85. I gave it up because it got too expensive.”

“Was it hard to stop? I’ve been using patches. They’re really not working for me.”

“Well, I did it in a particular way,” I said. “I really wouldn’t recommend this method to anyone. But it worked for me. Whenever I’d get a craving, I’d eat a pepper. Completely took away the craving! Also a kind of negative reinforcement, you know. Because—burning hot! Although, I do like peppers. But I generally don’t eat them raw.”

I did not tell him that this method also worked to end my brief flirtation with heroin many, many years earlier.

###

I took yesterday off from the National Counting Project, and I’m taking today off, too. I have considered not returning to the National Counting Project at all, in fact: Those awful people on Sunday kinda freaked me out.

But it’s only ongoing for a few more weeks. I have other revenue sources, of course, but squeezing words and ideas out of my brain is exhausting too, albeit in a different way.

Shortly, I must toddle down to Mavis and cajole them into removing the license plates from the Saturn Ion, which I am donating today to a worthy nonprofit that serves local veterans. I suppose I could remove the license plates myself to prove how macha I am, but you know what? It would take me hours.

I am sad to part with the Saturn Ion. It’s been very good to me. It gets good mileage, and its engine will hold up forever with proper upkeep and maintenance. (I have been very conscientious about proper upkeep and maintenance.) And I like driving a stick shift. But its chassis is old; there are structural parts that are hard to order. Plus, I am in love with the Prius.

Still. I find myself sentimental this morning. As though the Saturn Ion were the Velveteen Rabbit. Or maybe one of the minor characters in Black Beauty: Will the Saturn Ion find a forever home, or is it off to the knackers with it?

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On Assholes, Restraining Orders, and the Parallel LJ/DW Comics Universes

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 13:18:15 GMT

The assholes are the ones you remember.

I wonder why that is?

For example, yesterday.

I tromped about, mostly encountering doorbells that echoed into empty hallways or folks who begrudgingly gave me 10 minutes of their time.

But one woman kept offering me coffee and pastries. One man wanted to give me five pounds of tomatoes from his garden. Another woman invited me to join her birthday celebration: “When you get to be my age, it’s just another day. But I’m grilling burgers.”

Those aren’t the people I remember, though.

No, I remember the house where the woman stared coldly at me and said, “A man came here and did this already.”

“Really?” I said. “Huh. I wonder why you’re on my list. In the last few days?”

“A couple of months ago.”

I knew she was lying because the National Counting Project was not doing door-to-door a couple of months ago. But I wasn’t about to call her on it. That’s not in the job description.

“Huh. Well, I can leave you this Notice of Visit with your code, and maybe you can look it up, see where the irregularity is—“

“Fine.”

The National Counting Project identifies every address with a complicated alphanumeric designator. It takes a couple of minutes to page through the various scripted screens to arrive at that designator. It takes another couple of minutes to write the required note: Respondent says she was already enumerated “a couple of months ago"—

The inside door opened and another woman came out, older and harder looking than the first.

“Why are you still standing here? We told you: We don’t want the bullshit you’re selling. Get out of here. Go Trump!”

Go Trump?

Huh! Did she really think the National Counting Project was something invented by Obama-worshipping leftists?

Her venom was stunning.

I wished I were on better terms with God, so I could hit God up for a favor: Could you smite this bitch with a painful form of rectal cancer, pretty please?

But I got out.

###

This was actually my second incredibly unpleasant encounter of the day. The first had occurred back at those awful, squalid white cottages where the NCP had dispatched me for follow-up.

Sidebar: I did find out what the cottages were from a pleasant resident. Apparently, they were built to house FDR’s Secret Service retinue back in World War II. And have not been renovated since.

The residents recognized me.

“Look! We have our own personal National Counting Project taker,” drawled a man I had talked to the day before. (When I got to the part of the NCP script that asks about race, he said, “Put down ‘Teutonic.’”)

“Hi!” I said, compressing as much canned delight as I could into that monosyllable. “Hi! I’m looking for [unit number goes here.] I can’t seem to find it…”

“Oh, he ain’t here—“

“He’s probably out looking for crack,” said the Teutonic man.

“Nah. He got arrested yesterday—“

The unit next door to Crack Boy was also on my list.

My knock was answered by a woman who had all the signs of tardive dyskinesia. Amazingly, she agreed to do the survey but got more and more agitated as the interview progressed. When we got to the question that reads, Are you White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian etcetera, etcetera, she snarled, “Kind of fuckin’ question is that? I’m white, and I’m proud.” She began to chant: “White lives matter! White lives matter!”

“Well, that’s it!” I said. “The survey is complete! Thank you for your time and courtesy!”

“Wait a minute! How I know you ain’t a scammer? How I know you ain’t scamming me? Give me a receipt!”

“I don’t have any receipts—“

“I want a receipt!” she screamed. And proceeded to advance into my personal no-fly zone with her hands poised in an attempt to throttle me.

I skipped toward my car while she lurched toward me, staggering like Frankenstein’s monster with her hands in the air, bellowing, “I want a receipt! I want a receipt!”

I didn’t perceive myself as being in any actual danger.

It was just so fuckin’ sad.

###

In the evening, someone on the DW flist decided to berate me for my moral repugnance in refusing to be polarized over Jacob Blake.

This is someone who apparently has never had to file a restraining order.

Well, I have had to file a restraining order.

And I’ll be goddamned if some asshole is going to lecture me about moral equivalence and restraining orders.

The reason you file a restraining order is because you’re deeply, deeply afraid that someone is going to do you grievous physical harm.

“Grievous physical harm” includes rape and, yes, murder.

And if that someone decides to ignore the restraining order, and something happens to that someone while he’s ignoring that restraining order—well. The use of excessive force is always wrong, but the situation is—shall we say—nuanced.

###

Anyway, I ended up doing a purge of the flists in the parallel LJ/DW universes. (I always think of the parallel LJ/DW universes as the online diary equivalent of the Marvel/DC comics universes!)

Thing is I read a lot of journals written by people whose political opinions I do not agree with.

There is a vetting process: I like journals that are well written, and there must be a mutual accordance of good faith.

If someone writes something that I strongly disagree with, and I care about that person—because, if you read someone’s inner thoughts over a number of years, how can you not end up caring about them?—I will try to engage them. Otherwise? No. It’s interesting to me to have multiple windows onto the world, and I always remember that in 25 or 50 or 100 years time, all the issues that seem so polarizing now will be as dust.

Bullies can just go fuck themselves. Both the Trump-loving and progressive flavors.

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Narratives

Sun, 30 Aug 2020 13:34:50 GMT

Yesterday’s National Counting Project adventures took me back to the place where the Confederate flag-waving, swastika-tattooed bikers live.

I assume the ducks are the neighborhood watch. They’re very white!

These cottages are in the most advanced state of dereliction and decay you can possibly imagine, and I think it’s reprehensible that the village of Hyde Park allows someone to turn a profit by renting them out.

What were these cottages? Shacks where agricultural workers once lived? What agricultural workers? What farms?

The other possibility, I suppose, is that they’re vacation cottages, but why would anyone want to vacation here? They do butt up against the Union Cemetery. (I wouldn’t want to drink their well water!) Is this where the Dutchess County chapter of Fans of the Civil War used to hold their annual conventions?

Also, when I read about the Hyde Park hoarder who died and had his corpse eaten by his 47 cats, I’ll know where that is! I had to knock on his door!

On the plus side, I made a new BFF— a woman whose tailor shop on Violet Avenue I have probably passed a thousand times without wondering what it was. Very interesting woman! A find, as my beloved MaryBeth used to say. After I surveyed her, we chatted animatedly for 15 minutes or so, and I will definitely seek to extend the acquaintance in another few weeks when the National Counting Project is through.

###

The most interesting part of the day, though, was probably the long, episodic conversation I had with Neighbor Ed about narratives.

I pop back to the casa every couple of hours or so to pee. The National Counting trail is very hot and humid, and I drink gallons of lemon tea while I’m driving around. I certainly am not gonna risk coronavirus or other diseases by peeing in unknown gas station restrooms.

So, every couple of hours, I would return to the casa to find Neighbor Ed out on his lawn doing some kind of upkeep, and we would pick up our conversation, essentially where it had left off two hours before.

The subject of that conversation?

How neither of us can bear to read the news anymore because the “news” has become all narrative/no fact.

Examples?

Jacob Blake, the guy who got shot in Kenosha.

If you connect the dots one way, this is yet another unjustified shooting of a Black man by a white cop. Blake was shot seven times. In the back. In front of his three kids.

But if you connect the dots another way, the cops had been called to the scene because Blake was violating a restraining order filed by a woman who alleged third-degree felony sexual assault. That's one step down from rape. Blake had a knife, put one of the cops in a headlock, and for whatever reason, could not be tasered.

These two narratives compete for attention: The event was not justified; the event was justified.

Chances are, the narrative you believe will have very little to do with any analysis of the facts, and everything to do with which mob you identify with.

The problem is that so-called media are no longer reporting facts. They are reporting narratives. For left-leaning media, Jacob Blake is yet another martyr; for right-leaning media, Jacob Blake is criminal scum.

I find this a very dangerous state of affairs, and so does Neighbor Ed.

We are both, I suppose, old school liberals. I’m somewhat more left-leaning than he is, but I’d never describe myself as progressive.

I cannot buy into either Jacob Black narrative.

I would like to have more facts.

Also, the more people in Kenosha either “protest” or “riot” (depending upon your narrative), the greater the chance that Donald Trump will be reelected.

And that is fuckin’ terrifying.

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What I've Learned From Section 8 Housing Complexes

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 12:00:02 GMT

Yesterday, the National Counting Project put me on Section 8 Housing detail.

I fuckin’ hate Section 8 Housing detail.

By this point, we’ve papered practically all the Section 8 Housing complexes up and down East Market so that when you knock on occupants’ doors, they start screaming at you: You were here yesterday! And the day before! Fuck you! You’re a pain in the ass.

And we’ll be back tomorrow, I think grimly. (Although hopefully not me personally.) And we’ll keep on coming back for another month because sadly, that’s the law. And all you have to do to stop us from coming back is to talk to us for five minutes.

A sizeable percentage of the tenants in these places must be on food stamps and Medicaid. And the National Counting Project is the way the federal government figures out how much to allocate in matching grants to help subsidize these assistance programs.

I would just love to deliver a little civics lesson to each and every one of these yahoos but that’s wayyyy above my pay grade plus I don’t think they’d understand it.

The Section 8 people have a very childlike idea of money: I think they think the government just prints money, and when the government runs out, they just print more. (Of course, these days, they’re not entirely wrong.)

They hate the government.

Of course, the National Counting Project also determines Congressional representation, but I’m fairly certain no one in these Section 8 Housing blocks votes although I did espy a couple of Trump stickers on cars:

The great delusion of the Democrats seems to be that if you focus voter turnout activities on populations like these, you will increase the likelihood that Democrats will be elected.

I wonder if that’s true?

My own feeling, of course, is that America’s two political parties are practically interchangeable in terms of moral corruption, ineptitude and general creepiness, but LBJ is the one who pushed through all that social legislation in the early 60s, so “The War on Poverty” is forever associated with the Democrats.

Arguably, Democrats do more for the poor than Republicans do.

If people bother to vote at all, though—and that’s a big “if”—a sizeable portion of them will not vote according to their own economic best interests.

Here’s the deal:

Uneducated people like bullies. And poor people are the ones most likely to be uneducated.

Particularly, they like bullies who are going after individuals that the uneducated people would like to be going after themselves—which is to say, people with education.

Uneducated people identify with these bullies.

There’s an even division between Black and white in these Section 8 Housing complexes. Maybe the Trump stickers were all on cars owned by whites. Again, I don’t know. I wasn’t doing political canvasing.

What I do know is that there was no sign of Black Lives Matter. Knots of Black young men gathered on cracked cement porches, puffing on cigarettes, gesticulating madly at one another, eyeing me warily—but I didn’t get close enough to eavesdrop on their conversations.

Only one person said anything even remotely political to me. He was a burly Black guy who opened his door after my second round of vigorous rapping and glared at me.

“You tell me why I should do this,” he sneered.

I decided to look upon this as an invitation to recite the many virtues of the National Counting Project!

“Yeah?” he said. “Yeah? But, see, here’s the deal—I don’t vote.”

And he slammed the door in my face.

Leaving me to wonder whether he didn’t vote by choice, or he didn’t vote because he’s an X-felon.

New York actually does let former felons vote. I wondered if I should knock again on his door to inform him of this.

But decided against it.

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Art Day on the National Counting Project Circuit Plus A Magnet for Fires

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 13:38:32 GMT

Yesterday was Art Day on the National Counting Project circuit.

I got lost in the woods and ran into the Blues Brothers:

A woman created an entire Magic City on the granite outcropping behind her suburban home:

This man makes sculptures:

This lady gives away food:

Later in the afternoon, I was dispatched to what passes as Hyde Park’s historic downtown.

Hyde Park has always looked weird to me.

It has just enough 19th century buildings and storefronts to make me think that at one time, it looked like every other small town in this part of upstate New York. But everyone I’ve asked about it has said, Oh, no. It’s always been like this—meaning great breaks in the Victorian architecture, and empty lots, and a general sense of barren suburbia.

They’ve got to be wrong, I thought

So yesterday as I was tooling around—Sorry, National Counting Project: Nobody lives in the 19th century firehouse that serves as the Hyde Park Historical Museum—I ran into the guy who owns Cranberry’s, a café that’s located inside Tilley Hall, which, in the late 19th century, was the lodge operated by International Order of Odd Fellows.

I haven’t set food in Cranberry’s since the Former Democratic Congressional Candidate died—was it three years ago now? Seems longer.

She and I were occasional movie buddies. Not close friends really, but her death affected me more than one might expect the death of a not-close friend to affect one.

I hadn’t seen her for a few months before she died. She had rectal cancer—which is not only painful and debilitating but also humiliating, and I wanted to spare her that humiliation.

One afternoon, I was running in the Vanderbilt Park when I noticed this large black car—it looked like one of those Crown Victorias that police used to commandeer—gliding along besides me with the Former Democratic Congressional Candidate sitting in the driver’s seat. This was very odd because (a) I knew she was wayyyy too sick to leave her home and (b) though she was sitting in the driver’s seat, she was not driving.

Weird! I thought, but didn’t spend too much time thinking it.

A few days later, I found out that she had died on that very day.

For a few months afterwards, I felt the Former Democratic Congressional Candidate’s presence strongly, and it was a benign presence—interested in helping me, sheltering me, doing me good.

Anyway, Cranberry’s was the place where we used to meet up for the occasional coffee, and I just could not bear to go inside it. It made me so sad to think I wouldn't see her sitting at her regular table.

Roger, Cranberry’s owner, was very pleased to see me again, and we spent 20 minutes or so chatting about Hyde Park history.

“Oh, no. You’re right,” he said. “There was once much more to Hyde Park's downtown than there is today. A big hotel stood right over there. See that little house over there? It was once a photographer’s studio. And the nail salon, Pretty Nails? There was once a really famous bakery there.

“But most of the buildings here burned down.

“I don’t know why, but Hyde Park has always been kind of a magnet for fires.”

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Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 13:52:50 GMT

How long ago is “long ago?” Fifty years, 70 years, 100 years? A thousand years?

Of course, “long ago” is relative. In the cosmic sense, a billion years is hardly a bat of the eyelashes, and the sun is practically a newborn.

In the geological sense, “long ago” refers to fossils. There aren’t very many of those here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley because of all that drifting, mashing, uplifting and submersion: The Ramapo Mountains were once as high as Mount Everest, but 200 million years has a leveling effect.

In this part of the world, too, “long ago” is complicated by the fact that the humans who lived here the longest had no illusions about the permanence of any structures they might build.

I’ve settled on 100 years for my definition of “long ago” as I tromp around on the National Counting Project’s errands.

In the middle of a Section 8 housing complex—erected most likely some time in the mid 60s—I came across this old farmstead, camouflaged by hideous green siding; a newish, utilitarian roof and a cellblock listing, but still recognizable, thanks to its irregularly shaped windows:

The super lives there. He has a lot to answer for on account of huge portions of the Section 8 housing complex are being used as a dump, which I suspect is strictly illegal not to mention a genuine public health hazard since the Section 8 housing complex is crawling with kids:

In a trailer park off Violet Avenue (so named because long ago, greenhouses lining this obscure little road supplied all of America’s vast and insatiable lust for African violets), I discovered an old barn:

I have to be surreptitious when I take photographs. The National Counting Project would not approve of my prowling!

###

Yesterday was very hot, and people were not particularly polite.

In the afternoon, I had three addresses that turned out to be trailheads on the Winnakee Nature Preserve. I had to hike in. Mailboxes were standing right there in the middle of nowhere. Very bizarre!

There was one house maybe 50 yards outside the nature preserve that was truly the most awful place I have ever seen. I think maybe Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and Jason are all roommates there. The house was up this long and crumbling flight of cement steps that were covered in at least a year’s worth of dead and decaying leaves and branches, and the front door was positively festooned in black mold.

Nobody could possibly live here, I thought, but gave the door a sharp rap because I am such a conscientious National Counting Project contractor.

I was busily filling out my Notice of Visit—for a good time, call the National Counting Project!—when I heard a loud creak, and the door slowly began to drift open.

It was a man! With long, stringy grey hair that went down past his shoulders and completely naked except for a pair of very garish pink panties.

But that wasn’t the weirdest thing.

No, the weirdest thing was that with the door open, I could hear the radio, and it was tuned to a station that was playing 80s hits:

Don't leave me hanging on like a yo-yo
Wake me up before you go-go

“Umm—you don’t have time to complete a National Counting Project survey, right?” I asked. “Here! Take this!”

And fled.

###

When I checked a map later, I found that the Winnakee Nature Preserve is actually on the other side of the dense woods that encircle the house I presently live in. You’d have to drive five miles to get there, but if you cut through the woods, you’d only walk two miles.

I generally like hiking, but these particular woods have never held the slightest enchantment for me. They are dark. And spooky. And trail-less.

Apparently, they were once owned by a Colonel Archibald Rogers. A close friend of Sara Delano Roosevelt!

It was from Rogers that FDR learned about forestry and other manly pursuits, says the only history of the place I have been able to unearth.

Ho-kay!

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Or Maybe Never

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 12:58:05 GMT

Very long and labyrinthine dream but at the end of it, I was a teacher at some sort of school for gifted students. The students were doing art projects. My favorite student wanted to do a very earnest, un-ironic fan portrait of Tom Cruise, which I knew was going to be a complete disaster because fan portraits of Tom Cruise—ugh. But I didn’t know how to stop him.

I was sitting at some sort of meeting with the other teachers. We were discussing how we were going to critique the students’ art projects. It’s going to be like when we critiqued their singing, said one of the teachers—They are so good, there will be nothing to criticize.

And I thought of my favorite student, anticipating all the derision and hostility he was going to incur with his un-ironic portrait of Tom Cruise. And felt bad for him.

Does this house look like it’s occupied?

Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler!

It's not!

Yesterday’s National Counting Project adventures took me on a tour of the abandoned properties up and down Crum Elbow Road, which at one time—not so very long ago—was a vast marsh.

Then—maybe 30 years ago?—the younger brother of one of the men I garden with ran his car off the road and was so drunk that he actually drowned in about four inches of water.

He was the scion of a locally famous restaurant family, and the restaurant family actually paid to have the marshes drained. Now, up and down Crum Elbow Road, there are signs: In memory of Claudio C______.

Cooler than a headstone, I guess.

###

One address, which took me half an hour to track down, finally turned out to be on the other side of this one-quarter-mile-long dirt path off Violet Avenue. You would never in a million years find it if you didn’t know to look.

When I finally tracked it down, there was another vehicle there—a shiny new truck with ginormous wheels. Two guys with multiple tattoos and really bad teeth were nosing around the structure, which turned out to be an abandoned golf clubhouse: Rusting signs, overgrown by strange flowering weeds—Reserved for the World’s Best Golfer!— lined what had once been a parking lot.

The two guys were perfectly civil to me, but I had the idea they were scouting locations for their next meth lab.

###

What else?

In the middle of a boring Hyde Park housing development, I discovered a “Potter’s Lane” with a Poughkeepsie address.

A little piece of Poughkeepsie in the middle of Hyde Park!

It reminded me of how for the 40 years of so just after the Revolutionary War, this part of New York was filled with non-contiguous bits of Massachusetts and Connecticut.

However suburban and boring it looked now, I thought, Potter’s Lane must be a really old address. There was probably a ceramics factory here once upon a time. In the early 19th century, maybe.

###

Also, I ran into a wedding. It was at a rare upscale apartment complex on E. Market: 30 or so people, happily getting drunk together sans masks or social distance.

That one gave me some pause.

I never thought lockdown was sustainable, but I do think wearing masks is sustainable.

If I could wear one all day yesterday, a 68-year old woman tramping around in 95° heat, anyone can wear them.

I don’t think masks make a single bit of difference when you’re 10 or more feet away from other people. For example—I think they’re ridiculous when I’m tromping around the Vanderbilt Park though I always have one slung around my neck so I can hike it up in case I run into anyone who’s sensitive on that point.

But when you’re literally rubbing shoulders with other people whom you do not know…

Anyway, I expect to see a peak in Hyde Park covid stats within the next 14 days.

###

What else?

This purports to be an unretouched photo of last night’s sunset in San Francisco:

I have my doubts about the “unretouched” part, but there’s no denying that things are very, very bad in the Greater SF Bay Area—which ranges from the wine country in Napa and Sonoma counties to the beaches of Santa Cruz.

Spoke with Annie and Stew.

Stew is a smart cookie: He packed Annie up and whisked her away to a friend’s acreage near Watsonville.

The fires are still a good five miles away from the house, and no evacuation orders have been issued, but I had been thinking, She has a broken hip; you are gonna have a real issue if you have to evacuate in a hurry.

So, I was relieved that they were out plus now he can spend his time emptying the house of valuables like Annie’s violin collection, his Martin guitar collection, the equipment in his recording studio.

Terrible, terrible, terrible times these.

I do my Scarlett O’Hara schtick: I will think about it tomorrow.

Or maybe next week.

Or maybe never,.

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Places Where People Used to Live

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 15:21:09 GMT

Dreamed I was part of this huge group of travelers. Were we fleeing from something? Migrating toward something? Or possibly in some sort of court progression? I knew everyone.

RTT was there—not the RTT of now, but the enchanting child with supernaturally long eyelashes he once was, dashing about, weaving in and out of the group’s slowly moving forward motion like some sort of contrapuntal melody. It was annoying!

In exasperation, I kept trying to rein him in. Finally got fed up. Too hell with you! I thought. (Baaaaaad mother.) He saw the change of mood and immediately tried to woo me back, hanging the coat he was wearing up on a peg instead of dropping it on the floor. See? I’m a good boy.

It was a fur coat of some sort. Mink. Ben had given it to him, and I thought, That’s an entirely inappropriate thing for a 6-year-old boy to be wearing.

We were arranging some sort of huge ceremonial meal, and I was busy doing prep work, greeting everyone, making sure everyone had enough to eat.

I saw a woman I knew slightly. (I knew her husband better.) She was an artist; I’d seen her work, and it was good.

By reputation, she was a very dynamic, self-assured person, so I was shocked when I said, “Hello, Mary,” and she burst into tears.

“My name is Mikayela Lisa,” she sobbed.

“Oh! I got your name wrong! I’m so sorry,” I said.

And she sobbed even louder. Because I hadn’t remembered her name!

What an incredibly stupid thing to cry over, I thought—but began to try to pacify her anyway. We’ve been marching so long, I’m so tired, I’m forgetting everything! And, I’m a really awful person with names, but I’d never forget your work, it’s so wonderful.

Finally, I said, I understand why you’re crying. I have an unusual first name, too, and everybody mispronounces it constantly, even though it’s not really that hard to pronounce—

And she said in a strangled voice, “Yes.”

The fact that I had finally gotten her to stop sobbing and say something shocked me.

And, of course, I had to pretend to be sympathetic and everything. But really I was thinking, The world has some major, major problems right now, your survival is at stake—and this is what you choose to cry about? Goddam, you are a fucking idiot.

###

The coat RTT was wearing in the dream was this one:

(He’s the one in the middle with the cap, pointing.)

From a stage production of Peter Pan his elementary school did. He was one of the Lost Boys.

###

I woke up in the middle of the night.

(I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night for the past 10 days or so. It is very annoying.)

And I did that thing you are never supposed to do: I turned on my computer.

The former Future Mother of My Unborn Grandchildren lost her childhood home in Boulder Creek. Burned to the ground.

Susie posted her emergency evacuation list:

Susie’s husband, Jon, spent the day helping friends in Davenport evacuate. He shot these two videos:

You figure the fire will stop when it hits the Pacific Ocean but maybe, the winds just shift south, and it hits Santa Cruz.

They’ve already evacuated the UC Santa Cruz campus.

Annie and Stew live three miles away from the UC Santa Cruz campus.

I love California beyond words, and most especially, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Central Coast, but I don’t think I could ever live there again.

The reality—that these firestorms are now a yearly phenomenon—is too brutal.

###

I spent yesterday chasing down National Counting Project renegades up and down Haviland Road.

I think Haviland was once its own town. A farming community. I haven’t been able to discover any history.

I know that in 1999, a family who lived on the outer edge of the web of suburban developments that now occupy the site of those vanished cornfields and apple orchards decided to dredge the pond sitting on the back of their property. They hired a backhoe. And dug up an enormous bone—which turned out to be a mastodon humerus.

The rest of the mastodon’s skeleton was dug up, too, and is now on display at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca where I visited it a couple of years ago:

No mastodons in evidence yesterday. But an awful lot of abandoned houses. And I kept thinking I was hearing roosters crowing. Although, how could I have been?

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A Phenomenon Familiar to All X-Smoker/Public Transportation Users

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 11:55:05 GMT

Busy, busy, busy, as Bokonon says.

(I find it difficult to believe that I am the only Bokononist out of all of Facebook’s vast hoard of 2.7 billion monthly users, but last time I tried to look it up, that’s what they said.)

Who knew there were so many swastika-tattooed, Confederate flag-wielding bikers right here in FDR’s hometown?

Not the National Counting Project!

Which is why they hired me to get the lowdown!

To extract the required demographic info from people whose lives have been marked by complicated relationships with law enforcement and other forms of gub’mint, I adapt my Harmless Old Lady persona. That means I wear a dress and dither a lot. It works! One of my superpowers is that I can always be anybody’s BFF if I need to be. Given that I am a person with Serious Bitch Potential (which I exercise often!), this always shocks me a little.

Along with tracking swastika-tattooed, Confederate flag-wielding bikers, I am also discovering a lot of addresses that do not exist.

Did they ever exist?

That’s the great mystery.

In the summertime, hot and humid, the Hudson Valley turns into a jungle. If there was ever a residence between the Last House on Violet Avenue and creepy Kreutzers Food Store where everything they sell is some form of grease (cunningly reconfigured into potato chips, gum, lotto tickets etc), it has long since disappeared into an underbrush of Ailanthus, dogwood, marsh willow, McDonald’s wrappers.

The challenge appeals to the urban archeologist in me. I would love to investigate; discover the remains of an old foundation, dig up some Styrofoam shards.

But the National Counting Project has me on a tight schedule.

###

The National Counting Project is not the big news, though.

The big news is this:

When I look at these pictures, all I can see is that the 15 pounds I’ve put on during the pandemic all seem to have migrated into my upper arms and stomach. (No amount of tromping can counteract the effects of non-stop comfort eating!)

But that’s not what you are supposed to be seeing, Dear Reader.

You are supposed to be looking at the car!

My car.

2011 Prius. Everybody should immediately run out and buy a Prius! It’s not just their beneficial environmental impact; it’s also because they make no noise and are fabulously well designed with an enormous windshield that gives an effortless 180° view of any landscape you’re driving through plus controls for everything you might need to do while driving neatly engineered onto the steering wheel.

Driving this car is an absolute pleasure. I can’t wait to take it on road trips!

I think maybe the deal isn’t that I developed a phobia about driving over the last few years; I think maybe the deal is that I didn’t like driving the Saturn Ion. The Saturn Ion has very limited visibility, so I really can't scan my surroundings effectively; plus it is a manual transmission, so I am always scared it will stall out in the middle of busy intersection.

The Prius acquisition has been in the cards for a while, but I didn’t know exactly when it would take place. I needed a ride that was safe to take on my National Counting Project adventures, and the Saturn Ion needed brake and strut work—expensive, expensive, expensive. But the work had to be done. So last week, I ended up spending an inordinate amount on Saturn Ion repairs.

The whole thing is highly reminiscent of a phenomenon familiar to all X-smokers who, once upon a time, depended on public transportation.

You’ve been waiting at the bus stop for 20 minutes. The bus schedule says the bus should have been here 10 minutes ago!

How do you get the bus to come?

You light a cigarette.

How do you get a fabulous new (to you) car?

You sink a grand into repairs on your clunky old car.

Oh, well.

Money. Theoretically, at least, it’s a renewable resource.

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The Siren Song That Combination Scorpio Moon and Sicilian DNA Is Singing.

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 16:56:46 GMT

I tromped.

I wear a mask around my neck when I tromp, and if I see anyone at 20 paces who is coming toward me and wearing a mask, I pull mine up. Not because I believe in the effectiveness of masks because I don’t. But because I want to signal: I am a good person! Not like those people who ride motorcycles to South Dakota, listen to heavy metal, and sport offensive tattoos.

I think I should get mucho points for my civic-minded behavior.

Instead, I tromped up to this one woman yesterday who scolded, “You are wearing the wrong type of mask.”

WHAT?

“Your mask loops behind your ears. It should fasten around the back of your head.”

Listen, you fucking mask-Nazi, you’re lucky I don’t rip off this mask and spit on you, I thought.

But did not say.

Instead I smiled vaguely—which, of course, she could not see because… mask!—and went on tromping.

And tried to rationalize her behavior.

Everybody is going nuts, I told myself. Everybody wants to act out. You want to act out by going all Sicilian and Scorpio moon; she wants to act out by being a big Bossy Pants. But really it is the same impulse.

This hardly assuaged me at all, though.

I gardened! I made the acquaintance of this merry fellow! (That sinister, blurry presence on the far left is an evil cabbage worm that in the space of less than 24 hours turned one of my collards into a lace doily.)

We’re in high tomato harvest mode now:

Then I got in my car and took off to Pawling where the National Counting Project has set up its regional office.

My drive took me through Union Vale and Freedom Plains, once Quaker settlements, big names on the underground railway, now just dreary little hamlets—a single auto repair garage with peeling paint; a cluster of mobile homes peeking out from behind an Ailanthus grove. En route, I rehearsed insults: Should I tell them to shove their fucking smartphone up their ass, or should I tell them to sit on it and twirl?

The receptionist wouldn’t let me resign, though. “You need to see IT,” she said.

I need to punch you in the face, I thought, but I realized I was dangerously close to going postal, and that is a step off the flat edge of the earth one never wants to take no matter what siren song that combination Scorpio moon and Sicilian DNA is singing.

The IT guy said, “Oh. You need a new phone?”

And gave me one.

So, I guess I am still one of the feet on the ground in that glorious patriotic endeavor, the National Counting Project.

I do feel better having gotten that resolved. Plus I’ll get paid for that round trip to Pawling. And there’s approximately 60 hours of—ha, ha, ha—training modules I get paid for before I ever have to leave the Patrizia-torium.

###

What else?

I’ve been listening to an audio version of The Go-Between while I’ve been tromping. It’s a book I deeply love it, but I’ve read it so many times, I didn't want to read it again.

Listening to audiobooks is often an excellent complement to reading a book just because voice actors often emphasize different things than your eyes do when you’re reading, and this gives the book whole new strata of meanings.

The Go-Between is read in a plummy high-U accent, which for the first 10 minutes or so put me off, but then I fell in love with it because at its heart, after all, the novel is an almost Proustian meditation upon memory propounded by a man in his early 60s. It follows the stream of consciousness of the 12-year-old boy the narrator once was so closely that it’s easy to be misled into thinking that it’s the 12-year-old boy’s words that you’re reading. But it isn’t!

Anyway, a truly terrific book and an excellent audio adaptation.

The universe can’t be all horrible if it produced a novel as wonderful as The Go-Between, can it?

But I’m still crying. Maybe that’s my New Normal.

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A Kafka-esque Take on Your Basic Clusterfuck

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:56:03 GMT

I could not figure out why I’ve been feeling so terrible.

Yes, people suck, and the Extinction Event cannot come soon enough, but of course, that was true last week as well, and last week, I felt perfectly jolly.

Yes, poor Beau, but of course, I haven’t spent much time around Beau in the past 25 years or so.

###

Late yesterday, it finally dawned on me: It’s the National Counting Project that’s harshing my mellow.

Every day, I get emails from National Counting Project Central in Washington, D.C., begging me to enumerate more people for an ever-escalating cash bounty! This is because the Powers That Be in their infinite wisdom have decided to lop a whole month off the National Counting Project’s actual counting.

Meanwhile, it’s been a week now, and the National Counting Project still hasn’t issued me useable equipment.

Every morning I call that insane IT hotline.

Every morning the insane IT hotline’s mailbox is full.

There is absolutely no one I can reach out to, say, Help me with this, please.

My field supervisor has stopped answering my texts. Did he quit? Did he decide that I’m too annoying?

By some strange psychological alchemy, the fact that no one is available to help me with this problem makes the problem my fault. Cue Chris Isaak:

I’d been telling myself, It will resolve when it resolves.

And if it doesn’t resolve, no skin off my ass: I signed up for the job because I actually had fun doing it back in 2010.

But there is every indication that I will not have fun doing it in 2020.

It is just this increasingly Kafka-esque take on your basic Clusterfuck.

Patience and waiting for all things to reveal themselves in the fullness of time have never been my strong suits, so it’s making me anxious. Additional sources of anxiety beyond the usual When will I catch coronavirus and die an agonizing and terrible death? and What kind of life will my poor children lead in the New Normal? are not things I want to deal with or should have to deal with.

Should I give it a couple more days?

Or should I just resign?

Thing is, I wouldn’t even know how to resign.

I don’t even know who to turn the defective equipment in to while snarling, Shove this up your ass!

Your tax dollars at work!

###

You’d think figuring out that I can blame the National Counting Project for my angst would make me feel better, but it hasn’t.

Life still seems very pointless, very grim.

And somehow—again, that weird psychological alchemy—it’s my fault.

I have Social Encounters with Real Live Human Beings lined up this week. That should improve my mood. But honestly, I’m feeling so whacked that I’m not even sure I can do Social Encounters with Real Live Human Beings. I’m afraid all I can do is snivel.

It is all too much.

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Blue Trees. Orange Skies.

Sun, 09 Aug 2020 13:27:42 GMT

Feeling marginally better today in that uncontrollable sadness has given way to a deep contempt for all things human.

I can handle contempt without bursting into tears!

Human beings really fucking suck, and nowhere is that more evident than in their collective behaviors.

On a one-on-one level, humans can be quite pleasant. Interesting, inventive, even kind.
Amass them together into any kind of group, and they are stupid, petty, mean, and filled with vindictiveness toward anyone who floats more than one standard deviation from the straight line down the middle of the normal curve.

Of course, that normal curve varies historical moment to historical moment, giving the illusion that things change.

But things don’t change. Not really.

In fact, historical cycles repeat.

###

Given the insect crawl of a single lifetime, though, things appear to change. In fact, often they appear to change wayyyyy too fast. Because the pendulum can’t accumulate enough momentum in the space of a mere 80 years or so to start swinging back in the opposite direction.

Talked to Ichabod for more than an hour yesterday.

When it changes, it changes quickly!

That’s what I wanted to tell him as though this was some distilled elder wisdom, the punch line to some koan starring a wise Buddhist monk and a clueless young acolyte.

Ichabod, of course, is neither clueless nor (let’s face it) particularly young, being in his mid-30s. I’m sure by now he’s familiar with his own version of When it changes, it changes quickly!

But I ranted on for breathlessly for 20 minutes or so. (Fortunately, Ichabod has seemingly limitless supplies of filial forbearance.)

That van trip I took in the early 70s.

I’d just done a runway show in Milan, and I wanted to go to Greece before I had to return to the States and resume my U.C. Berkeley studies.

I could easily have flown to Athens.

But I’d met these young Brit guys and decided to join them on the overland trip in a van through the country-formerly-known-as-Yugoslavia.

In Sarajevo, the van broke down. So we ended up having to spend a couple of days there.

The thing that has always disappointed me about foreign travel is that when you get to that foreign place, everything looks much the same!

I want the trees to be blue when I’m in a foreign country!

I want the sky to be orange, and the sea to be purple, and the buildings to be ornate rococo palaces.

Instead, Sarajevo looked remarkably like Brooklyn. Same dirty brownstone municipal buildings, same pollen-and-pollutant haze choking the air. Sarajevo was so ordinary. Sarajevo was so boring.

In the early 1990s, when Sarajevo became the site of the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, I was absolutely flummoxed: How could this have happened in boring, banal Sarajevo?

But I think that’s what started this particular obsession of mine. If things could change that drastically in Sarajevo, they could change anywhere. They could change here.

Since that time, I have been imbued with this sense of the absolute evanescence of it all.

You think it’s real because you see it, you breathe it.

But in another second, you could very easily not be seeing it or breathing it.

###

What else?

The National Counting Project still hasn’t given me a working phone.

But they’re deluging me with desperate emails: We’re offering bonuses! Bonuses! Hundreds of dollars for every name counted!

You’d think with that kind of desperation, they’d be eager to provide me with working equipment.

But you’d think wrong.

I’ve been feeling so awful that I haven’t generated any revenue at all in several days.

That must change!

And Sybyl wishes you a Happy National Cat Day.

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Clusterfuck Day, the National Counting Project, and Death in Venice

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 13:06:14 GMT

Is Clusterfuck Day a global holiday like Earth Day or merely a regional Hudson Valley celebration like Rip van Winkle’s birthday or the reenactment of the burning of Kingston?

Whatever.

Yesterday was it.

The hurricane took out Optimum’s cable. Or something. Internet here has been out for more than 24 hours. In fact, Optimum-enabled Internet is out over the entire New York City metropolitan area.

The only way I know this is through checking various Optimum Internet hate sites with my phone because Optimum has issued no customer service updates at all, and the outage isn’t being reported as a news story despite the fact that an Internet outage in America’s largest and most densely populated metropolitan region has the potential to get very hairy indeed.

Not only is the Internet out but also all television and VOC-enabled landlines.

Yo! Terrorists! Wondering about the timing of your next attack? Well, wonder no more!

No Internet is an inconvenience for me, but I know how to set up a hotspot. After I tromp and garden, I will mosey down to the library to see if the head librarian was smart enough to sign a deal with FIOS (underground cable!) Which will allow me to put in a couple of hours on client work.

And if the Internet is down in the library, not a biggie. My clients will just have to wait.

It’s a complete disaster, though, for all those people with real jobs who work from home and for all their young kids who assume that no TV means they’re being punished for something they can’t remember doing.

And then there is the National Counting Project, which I am enjoined from mentioning by name because I took an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution from all its enemies, real and imaginary, and apparently mentioning the National Counting Project by its true name weakens the National Counting Project’s mojo.

I’d gotten a phone call from National Counting Project central last week, instructing me to show up on the third floor of the Civic Center at 10 o’clock on Tuesday morning.

So, I drove into deepest, darkest Poughkeepsie on Tuesday morning. Hurricane minus 4 hours.

The city of Poughkeepsie is not a pleasant place to begin with, but it’s gotten a whole lot less pleasant since the Plague began.

I began circling the Civic Center looking for entrances, and I immediately stumbled across two very scabby looking syringes. People aren’t even disposing syringes in the bushes anymore; they’re tossing them in the street like gum wrappers.

On my third trip around the Civic Center, it began to dawn on me that the Civic Center didn’t have any entrances. I mean, once upon a time, it did! But they’d all been boarded up with plywood.

This presented me with a problem: How was I supposed to get to the third floor of the building?

And assuming I did get to the third floor, who was actually doing the training? A bunch of vampires?

I trotted around to the front of the building, which at one time, somebody had tried to turn into a kind of plaza with trees—half of them dead now—and blocks of concrete in case any itinerant masochists wnadered by and needed a place to sit.

Then I began assailing random passer-bys: Excuse me! Are you going to the training for the National Counting Project?

How crazy do you think they thought I was?

But finally, someone said, Yes!

She, too, had been stymied by the lack of entrances to the Civic Center!

Then I had an idea! “Hey, there’s a hotel over there, right?”

“Yes-s-s-s-s-s.”

“Maybe they know how to get in.”

So, we asked the desk clerk.

“Oh, no. That place has been closed for the past five months.”

Oh.

“But wait. You’re looking for the National Counting Project?”

We were!

“I think that’s at the courthouse two blocks down the street.”

He thought right.

Most of the National Counting Project training is being done online except for the first two hours—one hour of which was devoted to filling out two official National Counting Project forms, line by line, while the other hour was an orientation to our spanking new National Counting Project phones!

Except my spanking new National Counting Project phone did not have any of the proprietary National Counting Project apps downloaded on to it.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” I asked the trainer.

“I don’t know.”

“But, I mean, this phone is like useless—“

“That’s correct.”

In the end, most reluctantly, he gave me the number for National Counting Project IT, which I called as soon as I got home.

The national IT number turfed me to the regional IT help line, which had a recorded message that ran something like this: YOU are a fucking idiot for calling this help line. Leave a message with your name, phone number, the geographical coordinates of the place you were at when Elvis died, and the final four numbers on the bar code of the last case of toilet paper you purchased. Do NOT leave more than one message. Someone will get back to you in the next year or so.

Beep!

Whereupon a cheerful AI voice announced: This mailbox is full!

O-kayyyyyyy!

I was not gonna get bent out of shape about this, I decided, because this was really not an emergency.

Worst case scenario? The National Counting Project could shove the phone it gave me up its collective ass, and I wouldn’t work for them.

But it is pretty amazing to think that these are our tax dollars at work!

And not only that, but our tax dollars at work deciding highway improvement funding and federal education matching grants and how many congressional critters the State of New York should have in the next decade.

Else?

I watched Visconti’s Death in Venice.

For whatever reason, I have been thinking about Death in Venice for at least a month!

Criterion’s streaming service finally picked up my telepathic signal.

I wouldn’t call Death in Venice a good film although Visconti and Thomas Mann shared enough obsessions in common to make the film a fairly faithful rendition of the novella.

Here’s a fun factoid: The impossibly beautiful boy actor who played Tadzio also played one of the commune elders who commits suicide by leaping off a cliff in Midsommar 50 years later.

If you believe—as I do—that actors are always really starring in one long film, the same film, just mysteriously segmented up to confuse audiences, then this is pretty weird since in Death in Venice, this actor is the incarnation of impossibly gorgeous youth while in Midsommar, he is the incarnation of impossibly gruesome old age.

And then there is the issue of the Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th Symphony, which I will grant you is a stirring, soaring piece of music the first 25 times you hear it.

But the 26th time you hear it, you think, Enough.

Dirk Bogarde, who is my boyfriend even across the vast gender preference divide, is fabulous as Aschenbach, but then of course, when has Dirk Bogarde ever not been fabulous?

And Visconti has a good eye for that moment just before opulence turns into decadence. Which is a very tricky pivot.

Aschenbach’s makeover leaves much to be desired, though. As this is the seed moment of the entire narrative, it’s a glaring weak spot. The whole movie is kind of a Douglas Sirk wet dream, so I guess it would be too much to expect subtlety there. But it certainly would have worked more effectively.

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