Mallory's Camera

Dreamed that Ben had died, or abandoned me, or something, and I was wandering around a campus—U.C.?—trying to figure out where I would go next.

“We”—unclear who that “we” was—were supposed to be traveling somewhere, like when “we” were with the circus—so I found Robin and asked him where we were supposed to meet up next.

He ducked his head away from me and said something unintelligible.

“What?”

He repeated it.

“What?”

“Carl,” he said.

“Carl? Where’s Carl?”

But he wouldn’t tell me, and I got pissed off. “Never mind!” I snarled and tromped off, knowing that I would never see him again.

I was supposed to be at that place, but then I thought, “Why bother?” Life would be a very different process now because I was single now, more than that, I was excess, the uninvited third party. No one was tracking me, and no one really cared what I did.

I walked around the campus a bit trying to figure out what I would do next. “This is freedom,” I told myself. “Well. You’ve always said you wanted to be free.”

I got into a vehicle driven by someone I know who’s an irascible old codger. We were driving to the meeting place, but we were going the back way, and the back way dipped down this incredibly steep, steep hill—

And then I awoke.

###

So, the stock market is poised to tumble another 600 points at opening.

The scale of the dip, like I’ve said, is all managed by computerized trading strategies, but the slope of the dip reflects massive disruption of global supply chains.

23,000 is the safe point in my mind. 23,000 ensures that Trump will not be reelected.

If the market falls much below that, then I’m afraid we’re looking at a real economic crisis.

The American government is carrying $23 trillion in debt.

Very little of this was invested in infrastructure or anything tangible. A good chunk of it has gone toward fighting Orwellian-style Forever Wars, which have not made any of us one iota safer.

The more frightening statistic, though, is that American households are carrying $52 trillion in debt.

These households live paycheck to paycheck because an increasingly large proportion of each paycheck goes toward servicing their debt. I don’t know what happens to these households if the whole thing goes bust. When supply chains falter, the demand for products and services goes down.

Of course, it’s not necessarily these households’ fault that they’re carrying all this debt. They simply shopped at the Kool-Aid stand. The cost of purchase debt seems low before you have to start paying it back. Can you say unsustainable? Mister Rogers thought you could!

The Trumpian surge of "prosperity" disincentivized any last remnants of prudent behavior that survived the Obama “recovery.” Just listen to all the chatter about negative Treasury rates: Negative treasury rates essentially mean you pay banks to keep your money there.

You’d be better off keeping your money in your mattress.

And in case you didn’t already realize this, Trump and his minions don’t have a clue how to deal with any of this.

###

In other news—

Finished Season 3 of Babylon Berlin.

Not quite up to Seasons 1 and 2. Not as tightly plotted for one thing, plus egregious Jo Jo Rabbit plot device borrowing.

Still. Worth seeing if only for the art direction, which is beyond fabulous and the acting, which is very, very good.

Woke up yesterday feeling just plain ill.

I’ve been a baaaaad girl. I have not been using the elliptical bike. And it’s been too cold to go outside.

This means that my body isn’t tired enough to make it through the night without waking up around one in the morning. Whereupon I watch bad movies, think black thoughts, and drink myself back to sleep. It’s like there’s a ledge you have to slip off to be unconscious, and getting buzzed rolls you closer to that edge.

I don’t drink huge quantities.

Night before last I drank one airplane mini of rum in a glass of ginger ale.

I’ve certainly drunk a lot more than that when I’m fully awake without ill effects.

But when I drink in the middle of the night, I almost always wake up feeling, I guess, hung over.

So it was yesterday.

###

Since I wasn’t good for anything that required any sort of effort, I surrendered myself entirely to multiple episodes of Babylon Berlin back-to-back. Talk about your total immersion! Such an interesting pocket of time, the Weimar Republic. Fourteen years when all the permissions were set to, Yes-s-s-s-s-ssss, and that “yes” was the sound of snakes rising to strike.

Around 5pm, I heard by name being called.

Frank the handyman.

Faithful readers may recall that I flirted a bit with Frank the handyman last year. He’s been here for the last 10 days remodeling L’s bathroom, and he was one of the consultants I called upon with my wooden box dilemma.

I trotted out from the Patriziatorium toward the sound of his voice.

“Would you like to have dinner this evening?” he asked.

Linda was smiling. The TV was on. Some kind of Oscar precast bullshit. I attended the Oscars two years in a row as a People Magazine reporter. 1997 and 1998. A lowly ranked courtier in the Great Mirrored Hall of Gossip, true, but still – I was all in. So my 180° spin here represents a true phase change. These days, I hate Hollywood: It’s an assembly line industry subordinate to the dictates of capital but without the balls to give out awards to any movie that actually makes money.

“Is Linda coming too?” I asked.

“Of course!” Frank said.

“Well, sure,” I said.

“Of course, you know, he only invited me so he could snag you,” Linda remarked on the drive over.

“You think?” I said.

Linda snorted and laughed.

###

Frank lives in Pleasant Valley, deep in the countryside. What was once a Quaker settlement. (Once upon a time, Dutchess County had the largest American Quaker community outside Philadelphia.) Seemingly every other house is an 18th century stone saltbox that used to be a stop on the local line of the Underground Railroad.

Frank doesn’t live in one of those houses. His house is one of those 50-year-old split ranch-houses that looks small on the outside but is vast on the inside.

He’s into gardening – I liked that. Beautiful magnolia trees, buds at that pussy willow stage. Tulips just coming up in their beds. (Poor tulips! Back-to-back killer storms are forecast for later this week.) In the summer he maintains a 50-foot vegetable garden.

The upstairs rooms in his house had that unused feel of a place whose sole inhabitant mostly hung out downstairs in the man-cave with the 64-inch HD television and the wood stove.

We ate in the upstairs dining room.

He’d done a roast in a crock pot with veggies and potatoes.

Conversation got lively after the first glass of wine.

He was telling us about a woman to whom he used to rent out his downstairs.

A perfectly lovely woman except his daughters didn’t like her.

(He’d been a single father; his wife fled the scene under mysterious circumstances, Linda told me on the drive over: “He told her, ‘You don’t like it here? Fine. Leave.’ And he bought out her share of the house.”)

“But Katherine“ – the younger daughter – “said, ‘Either she goes or I go, so –“ Frank shrugged and laughed. “She went.”

Ah! So more than a woman to whom he used to rent out his downstairs.

Both daughters’ bedrooms have been preserved intact, shrines to their girlhoods and adolescences, even though the daughters are long grown, have families of their own, and are living 100 miles away in Long Island.

“But don’t you get lonely living here all by yourself?” asked Linda whose penchant for asking potentially incendiary questions rivals my own.

“What’s to get lonely?” Frank asked. “I work all day. If I get lonely, I drive to the city and find a massage place with a happy ending.”

This was the second glass of wine talking.

He immediately blushed beet red.

But I thought it was pretty hilarious. I don’t mind sex as a commodity reduced to transactional elements so long as it’s clear, the terms of the contract are up front, and everybody gets what they negotiated for.

And it did loosen the conversation up considerably since thereafter “happy ending” became the buzz word of the night, repeated endlessly in many contexts and always to much hilarity.

We were all very jolly when we said good night.

###

I wouldn’t say I’m not interested in Frank.

What I would say is I’m not interested in anyone.

He doesn’t read except for back issues of Money Magazine (which he subscribes to.) That would be a major issue for me. Whatever would we talk about after the happy ending?

On the other hand, he comes from Malta. Wants to go back to Europe and spend six months living and traveling there. I think he’d be an awful lot of fun as a traveling companion.

Anyway, any time I want to pull the line in, there’s a fish on it.