Mallory's Camera

Autumn is my least favorite season. I hate it even more than I hate winter.

Winter has, at least, the virtue of being one note, maybe F minor (hello-o-o-o-o Vivaldi!)

In contrast, autumn is just one long dalliance in minor keys, a veritable immersion in saudade: The trees flare up in one last defiant burst of color, the light—the beautiful light—seeps away, & you wonder, What did I do last summer, & why didn’t I do more of it?

In just a couple of weeks, they’re gonna end daylight savings time. It will get dark at 4:30 p.m.. Life will hardly be worth living…



Last five days were action-packed.

Atlantic City was weird, but then I knew it was gonna be weird, and anyway, the days I spent there were less about Atlantic City & more about spending time with Belinda, the myriad ways my chameleon-like persona essentially bent and folded to accommodate Belinda.

Don’t get me wrong: I like Belinda.

But she thinks we are closer friends than we are, a pattern with people that has repeated itself multiple times throughout my life mainly because I am positively geisha-like in my ability to mold myself to other people’s expectations. I am the best interviewer you’ll ever meet because people like to tell me all their secrets! Go figure, right?

Belinda has had a hard life. What I like best about her, in fact, are those glimpses of potential that reveal what she might have been like had her life not been so hard.

As it is, her difficult life has made her very managerial; thus, she was filled with advice about things I hadn’t asked for her advice on. You need to eat protein in the morning so your hands won’t shake, she told me. You can’t put leggings in the dryer! You need to go through yr credit card bills & other financial transactions at least twice a week to make sure no one’s trying to pull a fast one on you.

Did I mind her advice?

No, not really.

Though that doesn’t mean I listened to it.

I kinda figured it was mostly prompted by an unconscious desire to show off her survivor skills & perhaps a smidgeon of affection because on the drive home, she began reeling off all the fun things we could do in the future.

I thought (but did not say), Probably not.



I was kinda disappointed Atlantic City wasn’t seedier. The place is merely ugly.

All the old buildings have been torn down; in their stead are featureless stucco-façade anono-structures where I guess members of the service industry live & shop. The famous boardwalk is hardly worth strolling, though I suppose that could just have been the time of year, late September when the ambient light isn’t right for boardwalk strolling.

The beach was just awful. A dingy grey strip fronting the loudest & most charmless of the casinos, Hard Rock.

Of course, I’m not a big fan of casinos anyway since I don’t gamble and honestly don’t understand why anyone gambles, at least on slot machines since you can get exactly that same rush—flashing lights, goofy sound effects—playing Kandy Krush or Bejeweled Blitz on your phone. But the casinos in Vegas are interesting from a design vantage while the casinos in Atlantic City are just… tawdry.

Only one casino, the Tropicana, put any kind of energy at all into its décor. I do find this faux sky and cheesy colonial architecture kinda charming:



On the second night I was there, Iggy called in a fury: Mabel the cat had shat on the carpet.

Mabel has a strong vindictive streak and was obviously displeased her slave had disappeared.

Really, Iggy? I thought. You are calling me over this kind of—pun intended—petty shit?

It was clear he wanted penitence & remorse, so, of course, I gave it to him: You have the right as a property owner to be angry over incidents that jeopardize the integrity of yr property, blah, blah, blah.

The phone call stressed me out. Elevated cortisol levels make you pee a lot, hence I did not sleep well since I was hitting the bathroom every couple of hours.

Then the next morning, Iggy sent me an email with pix of the offending shit from every conceivable photographic angle.

This was actually pretty funny.

Really, Iggy? Are you out of your fucking mind? You had me at the phone call. Is your life with those demon-child spawn & their mother, whom you are still obviously in love with, so-o-o-o frustrating that you find the need to take your frustration out on someone you deem to have less power?

I wrote him back an eloquently crafted note, using the word “gratuitous” & detailing all the ways in which I am the most exemplary housemate he could possibly imagine.

I'm not pissed or anything and I know the tone of email is not the best way to convey ideas so don't think I'm angry, Iggy wrote back. I’m not. I do think you are a good housemate.

Then shove it, asshole, I thought.



Saturday, I presided over the petting zoo & the pony ride at the Weekend of Wallkill, the cutest little country fair you could possibly imagine. I made a great little video of the Doggie Costume Contest, which sadly, YouTube will not allow me to post here because copyright infringement. (I used Who Let the Dogs Out as the background track.)



Yesterday, I had coffee with my beloved Barbara Angell, who is upstate visiting the parents of her unbelievably gorgeous daughter Aemilia’s BF.

Here are Barbara & I when we were young & gorgeous ourselves:



And here we are 45 years later:



After that, I went out Harris/Walz canvassing in Ellenville, a strange little town on the outskirts of what was once the Borscht Belt.



And now—sigh!!!—I must work.

Unmistakable: The leaves are beginning to turn.



It’s happening early this year. But then, the weather has been crazy. Though maybe not so crazy in terms of the new normal.

I have this sense that I haven’t really taken advantage of summer this year. Like I wanted to spend at least one evening sitting outside some place very dark so I could watch the fireflies. But then I didn’t. And now the fireflies are gone.

###

Meanwhile, I finished the (no longer current) Remunerative Project and dispatched it to the client, who sent it back to me with a 1,000-word email filled with—I can’t even figure out what it was filled with.

Not recommendations for improvements because he liked what I did.

Rambling thoughts. Like the Remunerative Project was the first phase of some personal conversation. Kinda weird.

But he sez he’ll be paying me today, and more assignments are on the way, so you know—if he needs my views on the Meaning of the Universe, hey! I’m happy to provide them.

###

I also did laundry, went grocery shopping, performed a desultory cleanse-down of the personal space. Tromped, too: The hiking boots made an enormous (positive) difference. And ate a lot of pie—'tis the Season of Peach Pie here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley, and Mr. and Mrs. Neighbor Ed have formed a kind of Pie Club, which requires a lot of eating and socializing with neighbors and is, therefore, kinda exhausting.

###

This leaves me now with a couple of Free Days (yayyyyy!) and only a minimum of maintenance-and-upkeep errandy things (like I really should do some gardening, pay some bills, etc.)

I should get back to the Edith Wharton ghost story! It’s been almost a month since I worked on it. But what happens when you stop working on a piece of fiction for any length of time is that you totally lose the rhythm of it.

Dax had just finished editing the first part of the manuscript when I stopped writing. The laws of narrative continuity dictate that Dax must now have Interactions with three throwaway characters mentioned earlier in the text and that those interactions must be a prelude to Something Meaningful that takes place in Part 5.

But I haven’t got a clue what those interactions should be.

Part 4 is clear enough: It’s the story of what happens when Edith and Teddy Wharton go to a house party at the Mills Mansion in 1904, and Edith almost allows herself to be seduced by Ogden Mills, and something about these interactions inspire her to write The House of Mirth.

###

In the evening, I decided to rewatch Halt and Catch Fire, one of the very, very best TV shows of the past 20 years, even though it never found an audience.

Halt and Catch Fire is about the early days of the computer revolution, the first of the tech upheavals that completely upended Life As We Know It such that the world I live in today would be completely incomprehensible to the 20-something me who inhabited the 1970s.

It’s a deeply character-driven show, chronicling the bonds between four characters as the valencies between those individuals shift and spiral: the visionary and sociopathic Joe; the brilliant, mercurial punk Cameron; Gordon, the dogged, concretistic thinker; and Donna, Gordon’s brilliant and un-mercurial wife.

Through a brilliant act of story-telling that only happens towards the end of the narrative and isn’t apparent at all from the beginning, you come to realize that Gordon, the dullest and most prosaic of the characters, has been the main protagonist all along—and this is just such a crazy-beautiful bit of technique that even thinking about it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Anyway, Halt and Catch Fire on the rewatch is just as good as it was the first time around.

So!

After the third email I got from the Dem Board of Elections pleading for poll workers on Election Day (November 8), I began wondering what might happen if they don’t get any poll workers. Do they cancel the election?

And when I got the fourth email, I volunteered.

I must be a masochist.

###

Not a whole lot else going on.

I continue to Remunerate.

Remuneration gives me an excuse not to do anything else.

Those boots with the broken zipper?

Still haven’t made it to the cobbler.

###

Since the weather has continued to be very good—high 60°s in the afternoon and dreamy—I continue to tromp.

Autumn is accelerating its pace:





This ginkgo tree was planted in 1799. Apparently, it is the largest in New York State and one of the largest in the U.S.



Started reading The of Monte Cristo and about 100 pages in, realized I don’t care about Bonapartism or any of the political intrigues adhering thereto any more than I care about Trumpism (Trumpery?), Biden-ism or any political figurehead-ism.

It is interesting that what survives 180 years are the stories about the political events—not any ripples of the political events themselves. Why, I suspect there isn’t a single Bonapartist left on the planet!

But now I don’t have a book to read.

And that’s a crisis.

###

I almost didn’t have any TV to watch either—but then I stumbled across The Peripheral, which is Not Bad.

I remember reading Neuromancer back in the early 80s. And not understanding much of it. What the hell was “cyberspace”?

Now, of course, we spend the majority of our waking lives in cyberspace.

Fast-forward 30 years, and I was sitting in the Russian Tea Room with katestine, and she was telling me that she had tried to read Neuromancer but that it was just too predictable and boring.

Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

###

Oh, but the most interesting news story I read yesterday was about how genetic resistance to Bubonic plague is probably tied in to autoimmune diseases.

In other words, the human race survived the Black Death in the 14th century only to succumb to lupus, psoriasis, and rheumatoid arthritis in the 21st.

Weird, weird, weird dreams…

In the first, I was being held captive by a tribe of feral children. The children looked totally normal, but their lives depended upon this long yellow tubing that snaked out of some part of their bodies.

The most vicious of the children was this one little girl.

I decided I had to kill her.

The only means at my disposal for killing her—I had no weapons—was to stand on her yellow tube.

So, that was what I did.

It took her quite a while to die because the tubing was very thick, and it was hard to get the standing pressure right.

All the while I kept standing on the tubing, I kept telling the other feral children, Now, I won’t to this to you, but you have to let me go. I’m sorry I have to do this at all, but you have to let me go.

And then I realized that the other feral children could not have cared less that I was killing their ringleader.

They were completely affectless. They had no feelings—for each other, for the world around them—whatsoever.

So, I wasn’t sure whether they would let me go.

###

Woke up. It was 2 in the morning. Watched several episodes of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I was wrong about Season 2: It’s as good, possibly even better than Season 1.

Fell back asleep.

And—

Dreamed I was living with Ben in this incredibly dilapidated and horrible house. We did not share a bedroom. I did not know what time it was, but I smelled coffee, so I thought, It must be time to wake up.

I figured Ben had made the coffee, so it would be all right if I got some. But when I opened the door to his bedroom, he was still asleep in his bed—it was a large double bed, and somehow I knew it was more comfortable than my bed, and the shades were drawn down tightly over his windows, which meant that it was dark in the room. Dark enough to sleep as long as he likes! I thought enviously.

But how was I going to explain my presence in his room if he did wake up?

I thought I’d tell him that I wanted to have a conversation.

What I would tell him was that it was time to reassess our marriage! We were basically living together as friends, I’d tell him, not as marital partners, so why didn’t we just acknowledge the fact?

I edged out of the room, and in the hall, right outside the room, an elderly woman who looked like Angela Lansbury (memory eternal) was drying the four-year-old RTT off after a bath.

She was making drying him off into a game, with silly, little songs and a tweak to the nose, and RTT was just lapping it up, and watching them, I was filled with such a profound sadness: Why hadn’t I been a better mother? Why hadn’t I realized it goes so fast?

Then I was standing on a cliff, watching the yearly ritual of the town: All the women in the town would get dressed up in the best party clothes they owned—high heels, girdles for the old ones, Spanx for the young ones, foundation-lipstick-false-eyelashes all around—and the men would run after them, catch them by the hair, and drag them back to their houses. By the hair. All in good fun!

I was absolutely appalled to be watching this.

But I knew if I said anything, no one would listen to one word I said.

Woke up.

###

Of course, I knew the Bourdain bio was the reason I was dreaming of Ben.

The pre-fame Tony was so much like Ben. The verbal brilliance, the writing brilliance, the various dalliances with high-ranking members of the pharmacological pantheon, the talents for gas-lighting and compartmentalization that could make him seem honest even when he was lying his head off…


###

Anyway, seventy degrees returned for two days of encores.

And since I knew that temperature was unlikely to last, I spent most of the past two days outside.

(I was right. It’s just beginning to rain now, and the temps are in the low 40°s.)

The garden is down to flowers, Swiss chard, and chili peppers:









Improbably enough, the chilis are still flowering. And so are the strawberries:



And fall this year is seismically gorgeous:











That little violet was a big surprise. Violets hereabouts are April flowers. I guess they’ve been enjoying the faux springtime as much as the rest of us.

###

Also, I had that phone call with The Client. They didn’t offer me a job, but they did want to put me on exclusive retainer, which I explained to them (as charmingly and as eloquently as I could) would be in neither of our best interests.

Not in their best interests because they do a particular sort of economic analysis, and my chief talent as a writer in their eyes—because let’s face it, anyone who’s taken a statistics class can do regression analysis—is my ability to make dry prose interesting while not fucking with its accuracy or specificity. I explained to them that part of the reason I was able to do this is precisely because I write about other things for other clients. I cleanse my palate between courses, in other words.

Not in my best interests because if you’re a freelancer, you definitely want to diversify your revenue stream. What if an asteroid falls and takes out Medical Economic Analysis Central? If I were on exclusive retainer, if I’d stopped buffing and shining and adding to my Other Clients list, I would be back in that refrigerator box under the bridge.

I did negotiate a 25% rate raise (and another 10% rate raise beyond that in March), so go me.

Dreamed I couldn’t find the car I’d parked on a street that was half Bancroft Avenue on the south side of the U.C. Berkeley campus and half a familiar street in a hilly city that I think I’ve dreamed many times before, but, of course, you never know with dreams; they have this way of implanting the thought, You have dreamed this many times before! in your sleeping brain.

Should I call the cops? I wondered. Surely, other people have had this problem before! How have they dealt with it?

I was also babysitting for a chubby little kid, maybe six years old.

We were supposed to be in constant contact with his mother, but the kid’s smartphone was lost.

So, I rigged up a substitute—oh, the cleverness of dream me!—involving a magenta crystal about the size of a thumbnail. If you scratched a phone number on the crystal, then you could call that number.

It was very hard scratching a phone number on a crystal that tiny, even in a dream.

###

True Autumn may finally be breaking here:



There is actually color in the trees along the Hudson’s western banks. At least the two-thirds of the trees that didn’t lose their leaves a month ago.

###

Neighbor Ed wrote me a kind of whiny email, complaining that the Chicago Art Institute had shut down one of its volunteer programs.

What are not so old overeducated older people supposed to do who probably will be retired as many years as they worked and want to contribute to their community? Neighbor Ed ranted.

I wrote back that he could always create his own volunteer opportunities!

Like, for example, for years, I have been wanting to start some kind of nonprofit that would make financial counseling services easily available to people who can't or don't want to pay the Big Buck$ to financial advisors. Only, I don’t have a clue how someone goes about setting up a nonprofit. Maybe he would like to brainstorm…?

Man, listen to you, Neighbor Ed wrote back. You can always make your own opportunities. New age capitalist porn.

“Capitalist porn?”

How does taking some kind of initiative translate into “capitalist porn”?

I don’t see you out there tilling the collective garden patch with night soil primed from the Comrades’ own collective assholes, Neighbor Ed.

Fuck you, Neighbor Ed!

###

Neighbor Ed must have known he’d overstepped some boundary because all evening long, he kept texting me, and all evening long, I ignored him.

This was very easy to do because I seem to have flipped into the Zone a/k/a what the Australian aboriginees call "Dreamtime", which is the very best headspace for any creative endeavor.

The only downside to the Zone is that you don’t want to talk to anyone.

But maybe that’s not a downside?

Fitful night’s sleep.

At first, I thought that was responsible for my mood, but now I’m thinking, No, what you’re feeling is Early Onset Seasonal Affective Disorder. This complete lack of mental engagement. This belief in my own irrelevance. This revelation that any sort of relevance is only busy work designed to muffle the steady tick-tick-tick of the doomsday clock.

You kinda have to ignore it.

You kinda have to force yourself to turn on the Happy Light, force yourself to pop the vitamins, force yourself to exercise.

Because what’s the alternative?

But damn! Seasonal Affective Disorder is checking in early this year.

###

I read somewhere that climate change is actually affecting autumn.

Leaves around here have not begun changing color yet, though I’ve noticed many trees have leaves with dry, dead edges. The leaves are going brown, not orange.



Anyway, since I can’t afford to become catatonic, I went to the movies yesterday.

Movies have aways provided a reliable reset button for me.

Not watching them on a monitor or TV. But going into an actual movie theater and watching them them on a large screen in a big, black room, preferably while gobbling a big bag of Raisrnets.

I saw The Many Saints of Newark.

I liked it! Though I think it would be more-or-less incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t seeped in Sopranos canon.

It’s the story of Dickie Moltosanto, Christopher’s father, though a young Tony Soprano—played by James Gandolfini’s son—plays a prominent role.

Despite the film’s disjointedness, I think it does answer an important question that many of us have when we watch The Sopranos—namely: Why do we continue to feel such sympathy, even affection, for Tony when he’s such a monster?

Young Tony in Many Saints is a smart kid who’s more-or-less normal except for the fact that he’s growing up around psychopaths and mirroring their behavior.

In contrast, characters like Dickie and (later) Christopher are not normal. There’s something inside them that causes them to go from pleasant to psychopathic rage in something under a second. They accelerate like human Ferraris!

We feel sympathy, affection, and ultimately compassion for Tony because even before Many Saints, we sensed his bad behavior was rooted in nurture, not nature.