Mallory's Camera

The Invisible Woman

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 15:34:01 GMT

I went tromping on the Walkway yesterday. Views of messy little Poughkeepsie & the faraway turrets of the old Jesuit monastery that was taken over by the Culinary Institute of America. Some kind of carnival taking place in Waryas Park.

Happy-making!

Just looking at the world from the perspective of such familiar things catapulted me back into the far more sanguine mental space I occupied when I lived across the river!

There is still an old Jesuit cemetery at the CIA behind an overgrown wall with a locked gate, and in that cemetery, one of my personal Lares & Penates, Teilhard de Chardin, is buried. Mr Omega Point himself. The Jesuit paleontologist!

I am now at the end of my second week of quite literally talking to noone in the place I'm living besides clerks in stores and random people on jaunts or at the gym.

I know I'm not invisible because yesterday at the supermarket, some woman accosted me: "Do you have a dog?"

Turned out she wanted advice on dog food for her spoiled and pampered Shih Tzu.

Huh! I thought. Well, I can't be that repulsive if random dog-owners are hitting me up for advice.

We chatted for 15 minutes.

If we'd both been in the first grade, I would have asked her, So! Do you wanna be my friend?

This particular supermarket, by the way, is like the Hannafords-of-the-Dead. Shoppers, stockers, checkout staff, all wandering around with a crazed and hopeless stare as if, very shortly, they will be turning to cannibalism to meet their dietary needs.

###

A steady funnel of calls and texts streams in from outside the bubble. They're diverting.

But of course, this much here-and-now isolation is not psychologically healthy.

Like I say, though, there's not much I can do about it. Except focus on getting out.

I did all the things one is supposed to do when I moved here a year ago. Joined community organizations, volunteered up the wazoo. None of it panned out. I suppose I'm just too marginal in too many ways for this place.

###

This week actually picks up socially, which is a Good Thing.

And it's not as though I don't have a shitload of stuff to do. Remuneration, chores, errands. Carry water, chop wood. And figure out ways never to be in this kind of situation again.

###

Oh, yeah. And Neighbor Ed somehow stumbled across some of the investigative journalism I wrote a billion years ago and wrote me a fanboy letter!! So that was reaffirming!

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Economic Development, Russian Tanks

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 12:24:14 GMT

Dreamed I was going on a cruise. The ship was leaving from Tunisia. But the ship was nowhere near the sea; instead, it had to be dragged some miles to get to the water.

We passed through a savannah—This is what the Sahara Desert used to look like, we were told. We passed through the salt-strewn ruins of ancient Carthage. We passed through several other scenes of historical import.

It was kinda like a Disneyland ride.

We had a guide with us who was narrating the significance of the places we were passing through.

But all I could think was c’mon, c’mon, c’mon—I want to see that ocean.

###

Glorious day yesterday.

As drought and high-temperature statistics pile up from the rest of the world, I occasionally reflect upon how lucky I am to live in a place where it still rains, and if temperatures flirt with 90°, it’s because temperatures flirt with 90° every year.

In the morning, I did the tromp across the Walkway down into the forlorn little village of Highland and back.

Starting next week, they are closing the Walkway parking lot because finally they are rennovating the empty factory across the street from the parking lot:

I arrived in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley in 2013 at the behest of AmeriCorps Vista.

I’d always said that when RTT started college, I would enlist in the Peace Corps. Seemed appropriate: Breeding interrupted my humanitarian trajectory, you might say; I’d been on the verge of going overseas to volunteer at a Thai refugee camp in 1983 when I met the man who became my first husband.

In 2013, though, being an American Abroad doing Good Works didn’t seem like a very prudent choice.

No worries!

It’s not like there’s any dearth of poverty and suffering rooted in systemic injustice in the good ole U.S. of A.

And AmeriCorps Vista specializes in systemic poverty and injustice rooted in the U.S. of A.

###

AmeriCorps Vista sent me to Poughkeepsie.

I thought this was weird: My only association with Poughkeepsie at that time was that Vassar College was located there. Vassar College! Jackie Kennedy, The Group, right? So, I thought Poughkeepsie had to be upscale.

I was wrong.

Poughkeepsie, then as now, was a little slice of the South Bronx circa late 1970s, magically transported through time and space to the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.

###

I was assigned to head up a youth group that was operating under the auspices of a particularly slimy umbrella Christian organization.

As it happens, I have always been very good with teenagers, possibly because I never made a successful transition to adulthood.

The first thing I did was use up my minuscule operating budget on six battered and ancient Apple computers upon which I installed SimCity.

We were an after-school program. Teenagers like to play video games after school.

Why SimCity?

I was trying to nudge some sort of awareness that the reason why so many of them woke up in houses every morning where the only thing to eat was a half-empty bag of stale Dorritos wasn’t because That’s The Way Things Are but because of decisions made at a level they didn’t even know existed—decisions about land use, decisions about taxes, decisions about police deployment and supermarket locations and teachers’ salaries. That there were causes. That these causes had effects. That the effects couldn’t really be changed without going after the causes.

Maybe 10% of them got what I was hoping they would get.

But SimCity is a pretty compelling video game, so most of them liked to play it.

###

The second thing I did was to write a business plan for setting up a smoothie stall on the Walkway Over the Hudson.

In 2013, the Walkway attracted 450,000 visitors a year, but there was nothing in the way of tourist amenities. The entrance was surrounded by bombed-out-looking factories. There wasn’t a single food stall.

So, I thought, smoothies—ingredients cheap, easy to make.

I figured all the transport of stalls and fresh ingredients would have to be done with bicycles because even if some of the kids could drive, insuring them would cost too much. And I got a pal to design small stalls that could be pulled by bicycles.

And I started doing research on permits.

The kids were very excited!

I figured I’d give them “ownership” over stuff like uniforms and branding.

The smoothie menus, of course, would have to be determined by what fruits were in season. The pricing would have to leave us enough profit to bulk up the college funds I intended to set up for participating kids.

I costed the whole project out at around $12,000.

The slimy Christian umbrella organization wouldn’t give us the $12,000, but I figured, No problem! We’ll do a Kickstarter.

The kids were even more excited!

We started scripting the videos we would make for the Kickstarter.

Except then, the slimy Christian umbrella organization wouldn’t give us permission to do the Kickstarter.

And the whole thing fell apart.

###

Anyway. I am pleased and perhaps a trifle bemused to see the City of Poughkeepsie finally doing some Walkway economic development nine years after my AmeriCorps Vista experience.

###

In the afternoon, I drove up to Great Barrington to replenish my edibles supply.

Such a gorgeous day!

Such a benediction, the sun on this glorious green landscape!

I’ve been wanting to be stoned all the time recently. To offset that nagging sense that something is irremediably wrong.

I go back and forth about whether I should give in to that desire, but the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking, Why the hell not?

Because any moment now, Russian tanks are gonna invade the Hudson Valley, and you’ll need to drive to escape them! just doesn’t seem like a very compelling reason not to be stoned all the time, you know?

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You’d Never Know It Was There. Unless You Knew It Was There.

Sun, 09 May 2021 13:38:15 GMT

Kept waking up at intervals throughout the night. So, many, many dreams.

Over the past couple of weeks, my dreams seem to have evolved into something for which, quite literally, there are no words in the English language. Possibly, there are no words in any human language. I wake up, and they’re there in all their swirling, alien montage-hood, but then I instantly forget them because I can’t describe them.

Interspersed within the parts that defy description, there are bits that are recognizable.

Thus, last night BB and I got married—this despite the fact that while I love BB dearly, I’ve never felt the slightest attraction toward him that way. And I knew this in the dream. So, I couldn’t figure out why we were getting married.

Then I broke my phone. I crushed it in a little paroxysm of—oh, I don’t even know what you would call it. Part of the reason I’ve always suspected I’m not quite neurotypical is because I occasionally summon up these… spasms… where I’m transported into my internal landscape and everything around me disappears. The episodes are completely under my conscious control, so not pathology as such. I suspect some sort of willful dissociative phenomenon. Anyway, they’re always accompanied by a kind of somatic clench.

Thus, in the dream, I clenched, and the phone shattered.

I threw it away.

Now, you’ll never be able to talk to anybody you know again, I thought. Because all your contact information was on your phone.

The thought did not displease me.

###

In honor of the day, here’s my mother in 1956:

To me, she looks much older than 22 in this photo.

I can’t figure out whether that’s because she really does look older or because the styling in the black and white photo—the pageboy haircut, the mid-calf skirt, and above all else, the weird placement of the feet—reminds me of what middle-aged ladies used to look like in my childhood.

###

What else?

As per plan, I did nothing but read all day yesterday. I finished the Kellerman novel (Serpentine). Most ridiculous plot ev-ah! But great fun nonetheless, and I was very proud of myself for not pausing mid-paragraph to go off and discover a cure for cancer out of cat food and Arm & Hammer washday detergent, or score Adderall on the Dark Web and write the Great American Novel in 36 hours, or some such.

Oh, wait.

Scratch that.

I did do one errand: I picked up L’s bday cake.

The line at La Delicioza was very long, so I amused myself by going into into full Art Photo™ mode and also by making up a story about a world run by vegan totalitarians where bakeries like this one are strictly verboten, and I am risking 20 years in the Reeducation Camp by standing in this line:

The exterior of La Delicioza is deliciously shabby. You’d never know it was there. Unless you knew it was there.

It is gloriously sunny and blue-skyed this morning, so I must reactivate the To Do list.

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The George Bailey Theory of Interconnectivity Plus Walter Tevis

Fri, 07 May 2021 13:23:02 GMT

As my bae Jessica Mitford once wrote, What it boils down to is putting one’s feelings on a special plane; most unwise, if you come to think of it. Because the bitter but true fact is that the only person who cares about one’s own feelings is ONE.

###

I’ve been floating through this week with a strong sense of disconnect. Neither pleasant nor unpleasant, it just is.

But yesterday was very productive!

The sun was out. Always a good thing.

I gardened.

Behold my strawberry patch, which last autumn was just two straggly orphan runners, donated by Claude:

I don’t actually like strawberries, so I will be donating all the berries to the Hyde Park food bank.

I went tromping.

The day was so clear, you could see all the way to the mountains of the Hudson Highlands:

I ordered a birthday cake for L at the fabulous La Deliziosa Bakery and stumbled across this statue:

You may not think it’s weird to find a statue of the 2nd Earl of Limerick, a former colonial Governor of New York, standing in a shabby little park in the forgotten backwater of Poughkeepsie long after the sun has set on the British Empire. But I certainly do.

I went over to Literacy Connections to meet up with Christine. The Lola handover is happening next week, and Christine has done such a good job teaching Lola English, I wanted continuity.

Good news on the ESL front by the way! Nafisa passed her USMLE exam on the third try!

I was the first person she called, even before her husband (who is still working in Virginia five days a week.)

“I could not do this except for you,” Nafisa repeated again and again.

So that felt reaffirming.

Nafisa is now a real live doctor, and assuming she saves even one person’s life, I am somewhere on that causality chain, which makes my own life worth having lived, at least according to the George Bailey Theory of Interconnectivity.

Came home. Polished off a short cost/benefit report on the effects of giving nurse practitioners the right to practice autonomously in North Carolina. The North Carolina Medical Society, she is a strong labor union.

Then I grabbed The Hustler and headed back to the garden for a couple of hours of reading.

The garden has this fabulous public space with wooden lounge chairs and picnic tables right outside the fenced growing area. It is so peaceful:

I’m rereading The Hustler because I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. It’s been growing on me, particularly the dialogue, and the way Tevis wrote the scene where Fast Eddie gets his thumbs broken, and the little meditative exegeses sprinkled throughout the text on the differences between winning and losing.

These are all a lot finer and more subtle than I had initially given Tevis credit for. In particular, it is very, very difficult to write about violence in any but the most banal descriptive terms.

Maybe I should become a Walter Tevis compleatist.

When I got home, I decided to watch the movie adaptation of another Walter Tevis novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth.

That is certainly one weird fuckin’ movie.

Nicolas Roeg commands adoration among a certain, small, devoted circle of cinephiles, but I’ve never been one of them because hello! Fangirl of straight-forward narrative! C’est moi!

But who doesn’t want to watch David Bowie for two and a half hours?

Then I got an email from Ichabod: What do you want for Mother’s Day?

For Mother's day, I want reverential adoration, I wrote back. But if that costs too much, I'll take flowers.

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As a Cure for Boredom and Bad Luck

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 15:04:53 GMT

John LeCarré died.

One of my favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite writers.

He was old. Eighty-nine. So, you know. It wasn’t a life untimely shortened or anything.

Still. I feel like a companion soul has been snatched from me.

Other than that, it was kind of a perfect day, temperature flirting with 60°, filled with things that I like doing.

I was in full Art Photo™ mode:

The Goddess of the Cell Phone in her winter desolation:

A meetup with BB:

Valkill, four miles after it wends its way from Eleanor Roosevelt’s hideaway:

La Deliziosa, an Italian bakery that makes the most mouthwatering cookies:

An incredible vintage truck:

Strange murals with indecipherable meanings:

Urban squalor:

Someone’s reaction to urban squalor:

Scenes from my favorite Jamaican supermarket:

The little CIA graduation party we organized for Anton. I’ve gotten pretty tight with Anton since he’s been living here here. He’s leaving for Seattle on Tuesday.

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Urban Blight and Thrifting

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 14:49:24 GMT

Went thrifting with Lois Lane yesterday.

Lois Lane has fabulous clothes sense, playful and arch. She also has fun with makeup.

I actually like clothes and makeup, too, but they’re so much work! Compounded by the fact that I am a big girl, so stuff that’s designed to look fabulous on smaller frames does not look fabulous on me, since fashion is not one of those things that scales.

If I were a size 6, I’d have an entirely new all-designer wardrobe after yesterday’s trip!

As I am a size 12—I’m not overweight; I’m tall and big-boned—it’s easier to dress like a bag lady.

Although I did score a pair of Ralph Lauren jeans and a rather natty linen/silk Nehru jacket-type thing that’s just retro enough to be stylish. Ten bucks total at the cash register!

Afterwards, we sloshed around downtown Poughkeepsie in the grey, icy rain for a couple of hours, Lois Lane being one of those rare individuals who shares my obsession with economic geography—meaning, like me, she enjoys looking at those old, hideously rundown buildings, trying to imagine why they’re here, what they looked like when they were new and represented somebody’s dreams of progress.

Downtown Poughkeepsie—which not so very long ago was a real human town but today is a den of drug deals, shootings, and miscreance of all sorts—is just filled with buildings like that.

This building, for example, with its ornate faience trim was once pretty fucking gorgeous. What the hell happened to Poughkeepsie that turned this beautiful building into an abandoned shithole?

Lois Lane was born and raised on the east Mid-Hudson riverbank, and even she’s unclear about the etiology. “Well, IBM pulled out. So Poughkeepsie lost its middleclass base. And then, I guess, other people moved in.”

Apparently, Poughkeepsie’s downtown is about to undergo a huge urban renewal within the next year or so, so Lois Lane and I have a date to march around the city and do Art Photos of the blight before it all disappears.

###

“So. Can you see a difference?” Lois Lane asked.

She was talking about her Welbutrin and her therapy.

A couple of months ago, Lois Lane decided to take advantage of her veterans benefits—she was once a Marine!—to get healthy.

Her question, of course, was a loaded one.

When I first met Lois Lane, I thought immediately—in my beloved MaryBeth’s exact inflection—She’s a find.

So smart! So funny! So nice!

But obviously gun-shy for reasons I didn’t understand.

As I got to know her better and she opened up to me, I began to understand. I’ve known a lot of people with horrific childhoods. My own childhood was pretty Grande Guignol! But Lois Lane has all beat. It’s amazing that she survived her childhood.

“Well. It wasn’t for lack of trying to do otherwise,” she laughs.

Her adult life has been filled with the kind of interludes you honestly think people can never come back from.

That she did bounce from them is testimony to awesome reserves of psychological and spiritual strength.

“Well, you’re more accessible,” I answered cautiously. “Of course, it’s difficult to say whether that’s because we’ve known each other now for a longish time, so we’re more comfortable around each other.”

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The Poughkeepsie Pride Parade

Sun, 09 Jun 2019 21:12:47 GMT

To understand how completely weird it is for Poughkeepsie to be having its first gay pride parade, you’d have to know something about Poughkeepsie.

And trust me. You don’t want to know anything about Poughkeepsie.

I showed up to take pictures.

Despite being one of the letters in the LGBT acronym, I’ve never been a big fan of pride parades as a political statement. I don’t like the St. Patrick’s Parade either. I think all sexual and cultural taxonomies are marketing categories, and I object to marketing categories on moral grounds.

But, hey! As a venue for costumes and ornamentation, pride parades are great.

I’d been there five seconds before I ran into the Hyde Park Democrats! They assumed I was there to march with them and shoved a sign at me:

Okay! This photo convinced me: I will never leave the house without makeup again!

“Poughkeepsie is a weird place to have a pride parade,” I remarked conversationally to the Councilman from Ward 1.

He raised his eyebrows frostily. “Why would you say that?”

Quite a few politicos in attendance, including Mark Molinaro, the guy who drew the short straw when New York State Republicans were deciding which one of them had to run against Andrew Cuomo in the 2018 gubernatorial election. He’s the one on the right, and I must say, if I’d realized how hunky he was, I might have voted for him. I’m shallow that way.

The woman is Hyde Park Supervisor Aileen Rorh, pal to Neighbor Ed. Life in a small town! Everyone knows everyone!

The parade organizers had plotted the parade’s progress to avoid that part of Main Street where half the stores are vacant, the sidewalks are littered with empty crack vials, and there’s a drive-by shooting every two days. I thought that was chickenshit. I mean, if you’re celebrating Poughkeepsie, celebrate Poughkeepsie! Crack vials and all!

There were some great-looking people:

And the Marist College mascot finally came out!

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A Modest Proposal for Improving High School Education

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 17:36:33 GMT

I ended up in the Hudson Valley because I did a stint with AmeriCorps Vista in 2013, and they assigned me to run a youth group in Poughkeepsie.

What did I know about Poughkeepsie? Nada! Except that Jackie Kennedy had gone to college at Vassar, so I figured it had to be an upscale town.

Ha, ha, ha!

Poughkeepsie turned out to be a little slice of the South Bronx in the middle of the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley. Something of a time warp, too: The South Bronx has been in rapid gentrification mode over the past 15 years. The burned out lots, the junkies nodding off in every vacant doorway, the complete desolation throughout the 70s and 80s that followed the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway? Gone, baby. Gone.

But still here in Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie is something of an urban decay theme park! It was a rare day when I didn’t step on and crunch at least one crack pipe on my way to my AmeriCorps Vista gig. (That was back when I didn’t have a car and walked everywhere.) I mean, who did crack in 2013? Crack is so retro! But they still smoked it—and how!—in Poughkeepsie.

And they continue smoking crack to this very day!

The kids in my youth group were what you might imagine kids struggling to survive an environment like Poughkeepsie might be. I was supposed to teach them stuff like Breakfast is the most important meal of the day! But many of them lived in houses where the only foodstuffs in the pantry were a dented tin of Vienna sausages and a half-empty bag of Fritos with a two-year old Sell By date.

So, I decided to abandon the public health education and focus on economic development.

Elsewhere in this journal, I’ve chronicled (extensively!) the brilliant plan I came up with for a business coop that would be run by my kids.

But I don’t think I ever wrote about how I honed their business acumen.

What I did was beg a couple of funky, outdated computers from pals who were anxious to upgrade to the newest shiny Mac model and install Sim City on those computers.

Kids love video games.

And they luvved Sim City.

Playing Sim City was the first time many of the kids realized that the environment they lived in was not just some random assortment of fucked up circumstances over which nobody had had any control but the inevitable consequences of terrible planning decisions. I could stand in that cramped and ugly clubhouse room the nonprofit sponsoring my youth group had assigned us and practically see the light bulbs popping up in balloons over the kids’ heads!

Of course, the business plan never went anywhere: Even the most modest business launch involves operational costs, and the nonprofit baulked at letting me start a Kickstarter. Kids had always dropped in and out of the program anyway as they were assigned to faraway foster homes, as their parents competed prison sentences and moved back to the City, or as they entered the criminal justice system themselves. Shortly after the nonprofit dropped the ball on the Kickstarter, the youth group disbanded.

(I did run into one of “my” kids on the street several months ago. I was kinda shocked to find that (a) she remembered me and (b) that she didn’t have a passel of kids. “You the Sim City lady!” Dayana chirped, offering an elaborate high five, which, of course, klutz that I am, I could not follow. “Hell, no, I ain’t got kids. I remember what you told me about getting an education. I’m at Dutchess! Gonna be a dental hygienist.”)

But Sim City pales before the wonder that is Tropico!

I think if Tropico were incorporated into every high school curriculum, it would teach kids all the financial literacy skills they’d ever need to know. In particular, it would teach kids the difference between cash liquidity and revenue streams, which seems to be a particularly hard lesson for not only for private individuals and businesses of all shapes and sizes, but also for the U.S. government whose national debt now tops a staggering $16 trillion.

Tropico is the perfect teaching tool.

But educators seldom think outside the box. And they are deeply wedded to conventional (which is to say didactic) teaching methods.

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Head Banging

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 15:31:40 GMT

Met up with BB at the Caffe Aurora for a cappuccino and a quick tromp through what used to be Poughkeepsie’s Italian district.

(The neighborhood was gutted when IBM enticed Poughkeepsie into tearing down most of its historic old houses so that Route 9 could be turned into an urban thoroughfare. This is why Poughkeepsie has no waterfront to speak of.)

Caffe Aurora would need to be vacuumed thoroughly before it could be charming. Still. There were old Italian gentlemen seated at its tables, and as we left, we passed a heated conversation, not in Italian but in the dialetto stretto, the old Sicilian dialect, which I retain a kind of ghost understanding of—

Sabbinidica! Comu si senti?

Little Italy was a mixed use residential/industrial neighborhood around the turn of the 20th century. The old tobacco factory is still standing, transformed into apartments. Here’s where it used to pollute Fall Kill:

I keep wondering: When is Poughkeepsie gonna turn itself around?

It’s such an obvious gentrification target.

But so far, very few takers.

If I were younger…

###

Afterwards, I forced myself to go running. Because it was cold but not brutally cold.

Second-earliest sunset of the year! (Today is actually the earliest sunset.) Clocks are imperfect instruments when it comes to measuring the ecliptic.

When I think about the imperfection of clocks, I naturally start brooding about the imperfection of logic, the rational system of analysis that has been beaten into us since the Enlightenment. According to this system of analysis, no phenomenon is a real phenomenon unless it is an observed phenomenon, and yet, if quantum mechanics teaches us anything, it’s that many if not most phenomena cannot be observed.

It’s a real head banger

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A Weird Agoraphobia

Fri, 13 Oct 2017 19:54:44 GMT

I always find it deeply weird that Poughkeepsie’s Social Services Dept is housed in this white marble, Renaissance revival building.

The building is so decorative!

And Social Services are so... utilitarian.

Of course, Poughkeepsie is just filled with things that are deeply weird.

Nobody ever notices because nobody ever looks up from their cell phones.

###

So, I went running right after I met with Samir yesterday. Early-ish in other words. On the Walkway, not on the grounds of the Vanderbilt estate.

And a weird thing happened.

I mean – not an unprecedented thing, it’s happened before. But one second, I was running from the trees onto the bridge and the next, I was running from the bridge into the trees.

I had totally stopped thinking!

And I ran fast, too. Well. Fast for me. Which is probably super-slow for most people, but hey! I’m old.

It’s good for me to stop thinking.

My mind has just been going round and round and round the past few days. My thoughts are like socks in the drier. Mismatched socks.

###

Dinner with the Prospective Squeeze Wednesday night. He is very good looking: Your basic Sam Elliott template with a touch of George Clooney and a Mephistophelean beard. And we had a pleasant time and agreed to go touring the local slave graveyards together at some unspecified future time. (My idea of a Hot Date! Which is probably why my phone is not ringing off the hook.) He walked me to my car in the rain. We embraced.

I couldn’t help feeling nervous, though, the whole time we were together.

Like I was a disappointment in some way.

Not a major disappointment. But somehow, I wasn’t pretty enough. Or I wasn’t conventionally liberal enough. I knew I was smart enough because at some point in the conversation, he leaned back on his side of the booth and chuckled, “You’re really smart, aren’t you?” So maybe I’m too smart?

This whole dating thing is just a colossal drag.

I can’t tell if I’m attracted to him – I mean, he is attractive, I do like him, but no little ember has yet announced, Yoo-hoo! I’m burn-ning! Nothing is threatening to catch fire.

Could it catch fire?

Oh, I don’t know. These days I suspect I’m made of asbestos.

###

Also, I’m supposed to be going to Connecticut tomorrow for a house party at Nathan’s. Nathan and his fiancée are actually flying Max in for the occasion! Nathan and John visited Max in Alaska last summer and that kicked the friendship back into high gear. Nathan and Max were official BFFs all through middle school and high school, and Max spent a lot of time with Nathan over at Nathan’s mother’s house – although I suspect a lot of that had to do with the fact that Celeste let Max get drunk and stoned over there, which I did not permit at my house.

Celeste always had this group of high school boys hanging out at her house. She palled around with them, which I found a little creepy. Kind of like the Denis Hopper character in The River’s Edge.

When I finally found out about Celeste’s permissiveness, I was furious and confronted her about it.

“They’re gonna do it anyway,” Celeste said. “I’m giving them a safe place to do it.”

“It’s illegal, Celeste,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not in San Francisco. Monterey is a bastion of punitive conservatism. If one of the kids talks – and by the way, that’s how I found out about it: One of the kids wrote about it on a public Internet forum – you could be looking at serious charges. If they figured John was involved too, he could get disbarred.”

I did not add, Plus there’s no fuckin’ way I’m gonna let you imperil Max’s chances of getting hit by a dope charge so he can’t get into a really, really good college – not after all the sacrifices I’ve made.

And, yes. This is the same Celeste who approached me about ghostwriting her Taliesen memoir. About which I haven’t heard anything in weeks. Ball in her court etc. I think the memoir has real commercial potential, but I’m not gonna invest the slightest bit of energy in any project unless I get some assurance that it’s being taken seriously by all participants.

I don’t dislike Celeste, but I do think she’s a complete flake. And I always have to fight off the temptation to slap complete flakes.

Celeste will be at the party, too. As I imagine John will be. After the demise of John’s second marriage, John and Celeste started living together again although I don’t think they’re a couple; I think it’s more that John has this ginourmous house, and Celeste needed a place to live.

But really, who knows?

###

All this week, I kept thinking, I should be booking hotel rooms or something.

But I kept putting it off.

And then this morning I realized there’s a very real possibility that Max will not be at the party since apparently carriers are canceling flights out of SFO left and right due to poor visibility in the wake of the Napa and Sonoma fires.

So it’s a good thing I didn’t commit $$$$ since if Max can’t come, there’s no real reason for me to go.

It’s a weird kind of agoraphobia I seem to be developing. I’ll leave my house. But I get panicky at the thought of going very far. Though I generally have fun after I talk myself through the initial reluctance.

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