Mallory's Camera

Temperatures dropped back to seasonal norms last night. Thank the Lord! Because I was able to sleep, deeply, lavishly, and because the swelling in my feet went away.

That's right! Swelling in my feet.

Oh, the weirdness of being old!

For the past couple of days, in the 90°+ temperatures, my feet had mild edema! My toes felt like little sausages in casings that were a tad too tight.

And this was upsetting because pedal edema is a symptom of congestive heart failure, and I wondered, How can I have congestive heart failure? I just had a perfectly normal EKG at the cardiologist's three months ago!

As I've said many times, I don't mind dying (I think), but I do mind a long, drawn-out process in which one by one, the systems falter.

###

Anyway, because of the heat and worries that my health was collapsing in a new, completely unexpected way, I did not have a good day yesterday. All day long, I kept applying the tips of my fingers to my ankles to time the fractional discoloration. Are they gonna have to replace my mitral valve? I wondered. How long have I got?

Irrational panic is not good for productivity.

Forced myself out for retail therapy. I actually don't like to shop, so I don't know why I thought retail therapy would improve my mood—maybe because it seems to work for everyone else? Dunno.

Went to the Ulster County version of a Deep Discounter I had frequented in Dutchess County, and that, even though I don't like to shop, had surprised me pleasantly in the past with the abundance of its reasonably priced hyaluronic acid face creams and surprisingly attractive leggings.

Place is ug-lee! Hideous overhead fluorescents. Wares crammed onto warehouse shelves with no effort at making stuff pretty. The employees, chatting with one another beside their mops and pails, didn't move out of the way for customers, and I got stalked by a guy in a wheelchair!

Left in a quasi-panic. Raced back to the casa and applied a full face of makeup, even foundation, which is something I have not done in months.

Throughout most of my life, I've been one of those people who look very, very different with and without makeup. Without makeup: typical Southern Italian features, very gaunt, big nose, cranial caverns. With makeup: a veritable Sophia Loren, exotic, exquisite, lovely!

This duality stayed with me most of my life.

But it kind of petered out last year.

Now, with makeup or without makeup, I just look like an old lady.

Aging! Not easy. I mean, sure, easy, in that all you have to do to achieve it is to remain Not Dead. But all the mental adjustments involved in accepting your new limitations? Very, very difficult.

###

Still reading Elizabeth Strout. Lucy Barton picks up toward the middle, though the ending falls apart. Now I'm on to Anything Is Possible. Elizabeth Strout has written a lot of books, so my reading is set till June.

Two things I'm conscientious about on a daily basis: making money and exercising.

I had to sign an ADA for the latest revenue-generating scheme, and the gig has no security: It could end tomorrow or maybe even after dinner tonight! (True of freelance writing, too, of course.)

But the work itself is so entertaining, I sometimes have a hard time pulling myself away from it. My years and years of Photoshop expertise finally paying off! And also a certain facility for what one might call imagination-casting, I suppose. I can make the nut in four hours a day—but I can also make extra. Ya gotta cut hay while the sun shines! I tell myself. True dat, but it does eat into time allocated to the Work in Progress.

###

I've increased my exercise tolerance: I'm now tromping three miles a day and will shortly return to the gym again to start working on upper-body strength. This was the year I finally started looking old to myself. No idea whether that's a real change or morbid self-consciousness. (I mean, I'm 74, of course I should look old.) I'm not talking wrinkles or crepe neck; I'm talking about the way my eyes seem to sink into their suddenly gaunt sockets: My face looks positively skull-like. Of course, I lost about 10 lbs working for Schlock, and as is always the case, I didn't lose it in my belly (where frankly I could afford to lose it); I lost it in my face and arms.

And there's also my clothes. I take an impish, almost perverse pleasure in dressing like a bag lady. (God knows why. I have an excellent eye for fashion.) But in the wake of all that weight loss, my pants are actually sagging, I have a hard time keeping them up. I look like some sort of low-rent rap star wannabe, MC Patty TaxBwana! Good grooming is a significator of mental health— as without, so within—so I really need to spruce up my image.

###

This has been a bad time for farmers and gardeners in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley. About two weeks ago, during a brief run of 80° temps, all the fruit trees burst into blossom. Literally two days later, nighttime temperatures plummeted into the 20°s. The fruit blossoms' delicate pistils froze, which probably means that there won't be any apples, peaches, or cherries in the Hudson Valley this year. The celebratory marigolds and strawberries I planted died, too. Fortunately, I didn't plant very many of them.

It's still dropping into the 30°s at night here. Not frost, but difficult for tender seedlings. But by next week, we should be moving into night-time 40°s, and I'll plant some more. I sowed some peas along the fence two weeks ago—peas are hardy, cold-weather plants—but only a few of them sprouted. Peas and lettuce are the only things I grow from seeds. Usually, I buy baby plants from the nurseries—though this year, I scored a bunch of Roma tomato seedlings from a lady on Facebook.

In the meantime, I'm cleaning up my plot. Weeding, replacing the winter straw ground cover with wood chips. Nettles in particular seem to thrive in coolish weather, so it is a lot of work that involves much ferrying of laden wheelbarrels over long distances. (The New Paltz Community Garden is huge.) Ferrying laden wheelbarrels is hard on the back.

###

Dolores (not her real name), the lady who gifted me the seedlings, is a very nice lady struggling to maintain sobriety by posting on the New Paltz Page on Facebook 30 times a day, attempting to rally what she calls Community (with a capital C). She gives away seedlings, she gives away baked goods, she solicits donations on behalf of the battered cats who show up regularly at her door. She lives in what was once one of those old Dutch stone houses. Was there a fire? The house seems to have been extensively rebuilt, but that was a while ago. It has very low ceilings and very small rooms. I borrowed it to be Neal's house in the Work in Progress.

I could tell Dolores would be happy to hang out, but I don't want to hang out with her, I don't want to hang out with anyone. I've fully embraced my solitude; I no longer feel isolated. Talking to other people right now is an effort.

The novel writes itself when I'm in the shower. Or driving in my car. Places where it's not easy to take dictation.

###

One of my favorite literary anecdotes of all time comes from Michael Chabon, talking about a block he encountered while writing a major scene in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

At the time, Chabon was enrolled in an MFA program at U.C. Irvine. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was his master's thesis.

The novel is about a young man who simultaneously falls in love with a man and a woman—very gaspworthy at the time (1988).

Chabon was writing about the moment his protagonist & the male objet du désir first have sex.

He didn't want to make it porn. (And then he unzipped his pants & unveiled his massive trouser trout...)

He didn't want to make it funny. (Ditto.)

He didn't know what to write and was afraid the novel was going to end right there.

So, he decided to go for a walk. It was some time past midnight.

Now! Anyone who has ever spent time in Southern California knows that nobody ever walks in Southern California. And especially nobody ever walks after dark.

In the comic I'm imagining, Chabon's this very, very tall man with seraphic wings of long, long hair and an antiquated waistcoat, chiaroscura-ed against the monotonous, endless, vapor-lit expanse of empty Irvine Center Road (though actually, Chabon's shorter than I am and doesn't have a Victorian sartorial fixation).

Chabon walked and walked and walked. And finally after a couple of hours passed another human being—a man holding a wad of tissue to his nose because he was having a nosebleed.

Eureka!

The perfect detail to denote the loss of a particular kind of virginity.

I love this anecdote because it demonstrates so perfectly how the Universe is always willing to collaborate with you if only you can keep yourself porous enough to be open to its suggestions.

###

Meanwhile, I trotted off to a craft fair yesterday.

It was a very bad craft fair filled with uninspired stuff and very high price tags. Bad people-watching, too. I suppose nobody uses the slang term "yuppies" anymore—invented by my pal Alice Kahn! And my X-boss Lanny Jones invented "Boomers"!—but that's what these craft fair goers were.

I passed a mirror and saw reflected in it an older woman with large strained eyes and a sagging jawline—and ohmyGAWD, that woman was me!

I tried to explain my shock on the phone to Ichabod afterwards: "No, honestly, it wasn't vanity! It was, well... This is really the first time I've noticed that my chin is starting to go. I'm finally getting what Marybeth used to call 'crepe neck.' I can't pass anymore."

"Pass as what?" Ichabod asked.

He loves me but finds me vaguely irritating—as the offspring of all parents with over-sized personalities do.

Pass as somebody younger? No, that's not it. I've never dissembled about my age.

"Pass as somebody who's not a caricature of themselves," is the best way I can describe it.

###

On the Work of Progress front: I have indeed come up with some very obnoxious behavior for Mimi. In fact, it may be too over the top for a chick lit novel. I blame David Foster Wallace.

But anyway, I can see the end of Chapter 1. Though I may not be able to finish it today because Remuneration.

This was a difficult week.

It rained every single day, & then my only two pals in the area were MIA for various reasons.

And I ended up experiencing SOCIAL ISOLATION (intoned with a kind of echo chamber effect), which is different from garden variety lonesomeness: Lonesomeness feels like a temporary condition that is not your fault; SOCIAL ISOLATION is a disease of the elderly brought on by their own bad habits. Socially isolated people do not proactively build social connections! They do not join clubs, volunteer, wave the Stars & Stripes at community events! They don't strike up conversations with the harried checkout clerk at the Shop-&-Drop. If they do finally manage to capture the attention of a real human person, they natter on & on about some obscure rock star from the 1970s or their bursitis or how much stuff has changed in the last 50 years.

The absolute worst habit of the elderly, though, is that they are old.

###

I suppose no one ever feels old, though when you look at them, you wonder: Why the hell not?

That person I catch a glimpse of in the mirror when I'm not mugging it up self-consciously? That's not me, that's my grandmother.

And I'm one of those old people who's in pretty good shape.

Thing is I probably have more friends than most people. Friends with whom I resonate on an intimate level and who have my back.

They just don't live here.

But, of course, I live here.

I make my most important social connections online, which is kind of an ageless milieu. My prose is sprightly; sprightly signals "young." I meet a lot of the people I bond with online, and those meetings often turn into friendships. I won't say "age" doesn't influence those friendships, but it's just one factor in a whole lot of factors: I am X years older than you, and now let's chatter about books and movies and music and the meaning of the Universe, your children and my children, shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages.

But here, I must make social connections the old-fashioned way, face-to-face. And whatever delusions I may have about my age-defying demeanor, I am clearly a member of the pariah tribe, the Senior Citizens.

###

The irony about SOCIAL ISOLATION is that it feels like something you oughta be ashamed of, which, of course, is even more isolating. SOCIAL ISOLATION is sticky and heavy, and that weight makes it difficult to cleave to all those wholesome routines—exercise, engagement, good nutrition—that make you feel good about yourself.



All moot points today because (finally!) it's gorgeous & sunny out. And warm! And so, I am perfectly content.

All those hours at the gym? They're paying off. Six months ago, it was hard for me to carry a 20-lb cannister of kitty litter. Now, I can tote one with no effort at all. Effortlessly toss it from hand to hand!

Take that, Entropy!

###

In general, though, this will not be the trend—as Ichabod reminded me in a longish phone conversation yesterday.

I am a grasshopper; Ichabod is an ant.

Periodically, we have Discussions About the Future: What are you going to do when you begin peeing on yourself?

Sometimes, RTT is inducted into these conversations—though RTT is a grasshopper, too, and thus not terribly helpful.

Fact: I will be 73 years old next month, so I am looking at a future where I will grow weaker & less competent & at some indeterminate point dependent instead of independent.

What do I plan to do about that?

Ichabod, God bless him, is big on plans. I was never taught how to plan and have not a single earth sign in my astroloogical natal chart; thus preparing for unpleasant inevitabilities is not my strong point. Though I do recognize the necessity of planning for unpleasant inevitabilities.

Does anyone ever imagine they'll grow old when they're young?

I sure didn't.

###

Meanwhile, on the venue today: Remuneration & Adrienne's website!

I kinda want to see Mickey 17, Bong Joon Ho's followup to Parasite (which I ❤️LUV❤️ed) but that would require driving home in the dark—which I know longer feel is quite safe for me to do (see lamentation above on getting old.)

Day 3 of non-functioning furnace.

The Patrizia-torium is close to becoming non-toasty because a space heater can’t really prevail against 40° temperatures, and it is 40° inside the house.

I am mad at myself at not being madder at Iggy—who is still in NYC. Does this signal (cue the echo machine) Low Self Esteem? I suppose it must, although what I’m feeling more is irritation—Iggy! What a dick!—& also some amusement. Of course, being amused by things that are not particularly amusing is my primary coping mechanism.

I was out of the house a large chunk of yesterday. Iggy & I texted back & forth. He sent me detailed instructions: Check the oil level. Push the red button on the furnace. Are you sure there was five inches of oil when you measured the stick? Sounds like it’s run out of oil.

This was pretty hilarious to me. I mean, I don’t actually have much experience measuring furnace oil levels with a dipstick. In fact, I have no experience measuring furnace oil levels with a dipstick. But the fact that Iggy was reframing the narrative so that the furnace failure was my fault because my dipstick measuring was ineffective rather than his fault for not ordering heating oil in a timely fashion seemed absolutely hilarious.

Blame shifting is Iggy’s primary coping mechanism! Iggy is never wrong! Iggy will stand his ground & argue the point relentlessly on every conceivable issue till the other person, exhausted, stops arguing. And then, Iggy will mistake that exhaustion for victory.

Of course, I have been busily researching implied warranty of habitation and asking Siri: If my landlord doesn’t provide adequate heating, can I get a hotel room & deduct it from my rent? I have always wanted to stay at the Mohonk Mountain House!

But I think Iggy will deal with the furnace today. The spawn are coming back from their Twixmas holiday.

###

The Ulster County TaxBwana squad is much better at Adult Education than the Dutchess County TaxBwana squad was. Most of the training is being done by Zoom, & the training sessions are actually interesting. But they couldn’t avoid having one F2F meeting, and that meeting was yesterday.

I carpooled into Kingston with Stephen W., who will be my coordinator—presuming I pass the IRS certification exam—at the TaxBwana Gardiner Library site.

Stephen W. was shambling and nice, and also one of those rare people in their 60s/70s/80s whom I could look at and see not just the man he’d been 30 years ago but also the boy he’d been 60 years ago.

Mostly, you can’t do this with older people. Age has this odd ubiqutizing effect, and all old people look alike If I wasn’t tall with purple hair, I’d look like any other Italian grandmother. I mean, I guess you can fight it with Botox and cosmetic surgery, but in the end, it happens to everyone.

We chatted casually over four hours or so. Nothing intense. But I extracted a detailed narrative: He’d been born in Brooklyn, joined the Air Force, earned a Bachelor’s in Physics and a Master’s in Business Administration, did something relatively high up in the logistical operations sector of New York City’s government, divorced, remarried. Had a son who died—

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I said. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question—”

“Morbid obesity,” he said, and from that, I knew everything about the failure of his first marriage.

Stephen W. also has Parkinson’s. I kind of thought he might from his odd, shambling gait—gait is the primary diagnostic symptom for Parkinson’s; people walk with odd, boxy steps. He confirmed my diagnosis when we were talking about Biden.

“From the looks of it, he has Parkinson’s—” I said.

“So do I,” said Stephen. “My doctors say it’s a mild case as of yet. But, of course…” He shrugged.

Anyway, he seemed very sympathetic to my standard complaint: I don’t know anyone here. That’s hard. And invited me to join the New Paltz/Gardiner Senior Club: “Lot of activities. Lots of events. Lots of events.” Which I think I will do. Even though I hate the word “senior.”

###

At home, I finished my first book of the year—Lily King’s Writers and Lovers, which is mostly delightful and funny, but which also kinda planged those An aged man is but a paltry thing heartstrings: It’s the story of a 31-year-old woman who finally publishes her first novel, and it’s filled with hilarious and finely observed scenes of her horrible waitressing job, her insomnia, her disastrous love life, her adventures in writing.

I hate old people, she remarks somewhere in the middle of the novel. Or maybe she doesn’t say “hate.” Maybe she says “don’t like.”

And she rejects the 48-year-old suitor she spends half the book with in favor of a suitor her own age. Of course, lots of reasons are given for the rejection—the suitor is self-involved, moody, doesn’t ask to read her novel. But the real reason was age: They first have sex when he invites her over to his house for dinner, and he brushes his teeth before they have sex—which strikes her as odd.

Good oral hygiene standing in for “too old to have spontaneity & passion?”

Interesting authorial choice!

What’s even more interesting is that the author herself was in her 50s when she wrote the novel.

###

Anyway, I do understand the universal revulsion of the young toward the old. I had it, too, when I was young. I never expected to die old. I would die young! Only it would take me 85 years to die young.

This is the popular new campaign sign on the Walker Valley canvassing trail:



It joins these two standbys:



I don’t quite get the controversy surrounding Tim Walz’s military service. I mean, at least he has military service—unlike Trump, who was a draft dodger.

Apparently, Walz misrepresented something?

People do have a tendency to tell small lies about themselves & their experiences that often don’t stand up to the more scrupulous fact checks of the data superhighway.

At least he’s not on record saying soldiers who die in wars are suckers & losers.

Anyway, we—the few, the proud, the brave Shawangunk Dem canvassers—soldier (heh, heh, heh) on.



Nancy, my weekend canvassing partner, casually remarked she runs four and a half miles every morning.

“May I ask you a personal question?” I said. “How old are you?”

“Seventy-five,” Nancy said.

Seventy-five!

I stopped running—if you could even call it running—at 69.

Of course, Nancy is built like one of those Cretan bulldancers out of The King Must Die whereas evolution designed me to give birth in ditches & sub for the donkey when the donkey was feeling too indisposed to pull the cart to market. I’m a great big hulking peasant lass. I’m not really designed for activities that put too much weight on joints.

Still.

Nancy did put The Shame in me. (Inadvertently, of course! Nancy is the nicest person in the world.)

I really must exercise more.

###

But I didn’t exercise more yesterday!

Instead, I came home from canvassing & promptly fell asleep.

I don’t much like taking naps. When I wake up from them, I always feel groggy & extremely out of it.

So, all I did yesterday after I awakened, was Remunerate (inefficiently) and mediate cat disputes.

At this point, I think Molly would be quite happy to drop territorial disputes, but Mabel is still angry at having her Only Cat status yanked.

The Fellliway is scheduled to arrive today.

It was so humid yesterday, the air felt heavy, the way it does after you step out of a shower in a bathroom with a closed door when every step you take feels like you’re displacing your own weight in water.

The thunderstorms hit in the afternoon.

I was merry enough, watching sci-fi noir classics Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor, texting with far-away friends, making lists, unpacking boxes. I had previously unpacked just enough boxes to set up a kind of field station, comfortable, attractive even, but minimal. So every box I unpacked was kind of like opening a Christmas present: Wow! I own this? But where should I put it?

You have friends, I reminded myself. It’s just that none of them live here!

It’s so odd that whenever I give myself a pep talk, I always revert to the second person!

###

In the Hudson Valley sub-Reddit, someone had posted, New to this area! Looking for friends!

I will be your friend! I wanted to respond.

(Remember back in the playground when you were six years old and friendship was that simple?)

Except that the poster was 35 years old, and I bet a 72-year-old pal wasn’t exactly what she had in mind.

I don’t think I am yr typical 72-year-old, although, of course, that raises the question: What is the typical 72-year-old? or more specifically, What do 35-year-olds think the typical 72-year-old is?

###

I am always flummoxed by the Millennial preoccupation with chronological stratification.

If you read the various celebrity sub-Reddits or even the ONTD annals, they are filled with righteous Millennials screeching over 50-year-old stars dating 20-somethings as if this were some crime against nature.

And I think, Buh??

‘Cause in my 20s I dated 50-somethings—and I also dated 18-year-olds.

And I befriended 50-somethings and 18-year-olds.

Age just wasn’t an important significator to me. I guess because I was never that into pop culture except as an anthropological curiosity, so the phases of my life were never defined by the bands I listened to.

Cue Steely Dan—ironically, of course:

Hey Nineteen
That's 'Retha Franklin
She don't remember the Queen of Soul
It's hard times befallen
The sole survivors
She thinks I'm crazy
But I'm just growing old
Hey Nineteen
No, we got nothing in common...

###

There is a really sad story on AP this morning about a rising phenomenon in India: elders being abandoned by their children.

TaxBwana Linda who spent five years in S. Korea working for the state department told me the same thing is happening there. The suicide rate in Korea is wayyyy up: Old people dying in despair by their own hand.

Of course, it is a completely predictable phenomenon: We are living in a time when resources are suddenly growing scarce, so deeply embedded systems of resource allocation are abruptly shifting.

Personal narratives don’t matter a hell of a lot when the universe they exist in is changing so rapidly.

My new Favorite Commercial of All Time is definitely this one:



So fuckin’ true!!!!

My big mistake: Throwing good money after bad money when the Little Store was failing because I couldn’t separate out my emotions from my business decisions, and so lost everything—business, house, deadbeat husband (although that was probably a blessing ‘cause I wouldn’t have left him), life…

Millennials and GenZers who somehow stumble across these words:

Learn from my mistakes!!!!!

You spend more time being old than you do being young.

###

The next six weeks are gonna be an ordeal because that California trip—and how I wish now I hadn’t made it!—was expensive and moving is gonna be expensive.

Gotta make that money!

Which will involve a lot of tunneling down & isolation.

And I am very much a creature of the present tense. Ichabod told me once I was the most existential person he’d ever known because, in the emotional sense, whatever’s going on in the Right Now is the only thing that’s ever gone on for me. It never was any different. It never will be very different.

Don’t listen to all that Be Here Now Zen master garbage! The past and the future exist for a reason: the past to give you pleasure, the future to give you hope.

###

Anyway.

Felt curiously weak when I tromped yesterday, a really strange feeling of lassitude, which I attributed to the fact that it was so damn hot, and I was probably dehydrated.

Felt the same lassitude when I went out to water the garden in the early evening, and then I started thinking Some deadly disease!, which didn’t alarm me, which actually made me happy! Wow! I only have to stick around in this world for another six months or so!

Huck Finn planning his funeral!

Psychologically unhealthy, I know, I know, I know.

But very representative of the mood I’m in—and probably will continue to be in for the next six weeks or so.

###

Meanwhile, the tree tulips were in high bloom!





And the peonies will be blooming next week.

So, there is still beauty…

###

And now I must tromp before it hits 80°.

The kiskas continue to be ambivalent.

Meaning they do trust things like flop on their backs to expose their tummies and butt up against my legs mewing & nuzzling, but they scamper away if I reach down too quickly to pet them and, of course, I must admire their tummies at a distance.

Behold the splendiferous Mabel-Molly tummy!



I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cat with calico markings on her tummy before!

###

Meanwhile, I realized last night that most likely, I am going to have to make my peace with suicide.

Assisted suicide: I’m not about to off myself in a fit of angst.

And presumably, that suicide will be 10 or 15 years in the future.

Not soon. But also not sometime in a future so remote that I can’t wrap my mind around it.

###

I’m deep into general budgeting and goal-setting calculations one does at the beginning of each year. If all goes according to plan (which almost certainly all won’t) I will have X amount of money distributed over X number of weeks & months to do X amount of things beyond the quotidian everyday-above-ground stuff.

This presumes my clients continue to love me because I certainly can’t afford to live on social security & pensions alone.

When the time comes that my clients stop loving me, or I become too mentally addled to think lucidly and produce the kind of work my clients want, I will no longer afford to be able to stay alive.

That’s just a fact.

I don’t find it personally depressing.

I do find it fascinating as an observation on the culture generally.

In the bitter generational Boomer versus Millennial battle, Boomers are oft excoriated for monopolizing all that capital that Millennials need to buy houses & shit. But see, that complaint only applies to a subsection of Boomers. And for every Boomer who spent his/her productive years as an industrious ant, you have at least two other Boomers who spent them hopping around from glittering leaf to glittering leaf as a mad grasshopper.

I was one such Boomer grasshopper!

Which is kinda weird, given that I have such a good intellectual grasp of the significance of capital in the abstract.

###

The American healthcare industry has been gearing up for its deluge of broken-winged—-and broken-hipped and cardiovascularly challenged and dementia-addled—-Boomer geezers for at least two decades.

From an economist’s point of view, this is kind of a mistake because that deluge will only last 30 years at most before Boomers die off entirely, and then the American healthcare industry is gonna be left with all this useless excess capacity.

(Expect to see a lot more recommendations for useless “preventative” tests: They’re gonna have to monetize that excess capacity somehow.)

I don’t see any public or private sector gearing up for the coming deluge of indigent Boomers, though.

And there are going to be vast numbers of those.

Housing is the big thing, of course. Affordable rental housing doesn’t exist anywhere in the U.S. anymore. REITs are buying up huge swathes of apartment buildings & one-family homes and turning them into financial instruments.

The decennial U.S. census attempts to count the number of the homeless. And I am guessing that in 2030, the census will reveal that at least 50% of the homeless are old people. Boomers!

###

Of course, I have children who love me, who will want to help me.

But I hate the idea of making my kids sacrifice anything just because I was too much of an idiot to plan prudently.

TaxBwana Linda tells me S. Korea is seeing a suicide epidemic among its senior citizens. (She spent three years in S. Korea as part of the U.S. diplomatic corps and keeps up with their news.) This is because, traditionally, younger generations cared for their parents and elders. But this generation, influenced by the West, is telling parents & elders, Take care of yourselves! We want to spend our money on us!

###

I’m not and never have been particularly attached to the idea of being alive. My consciousness is deeply rooted in this body—but it seems to me that there’s never been a time in my life when I wouldn’t have been perfectly content for that consciousness to soar through space like a balloon, to take off, to be somewhere else. Assuming that disentanglement of psyche from soma could be accomplished without too much physical pain.

Of course, once it’s loose, that consciousness, that psyche, will no longer be the me me. But it still will be me.

No, the big deal about suicide for me is actually that I believe it’s kinda the equivalent of dropping out of the karmic classroom without finishing the current class.

You’ll get an incomplete in the class!

You'll have to take it over.

I don’t think I want to repeat the life lessons I was supposed to learn this time around in any future incarnation.

So, I must ponder the full karmic implications of assisted suicide.

Assuming my health holds up or World War III doesn’t finish us all off—sketchy assumptions both.

###

What else happened yesterday?

I Remunerated. I studied up on the tax code.

I’m gonna take the IRS certification exam on Thursday.

The snow knocked off around 3. I thought about tromping. I decided against it.

But I must tromp today. Just as soon as the black ice melts.