Mallory's Camera

Deep feeling of lassitude throughout yesterday, like my bones were made of rubber bands or something. I was tired, but there was no reason for me to be tired.

Naturally, I took this to mean I have some lethal disease. Maybe multiple myeloma—Ben had multiple myeloma, it was one of the two diagnoses that may have killed him (the other being liver cancer).

Ben's multiple myeloma announced itself in a weird way.

For months & months, he'd been limping around with sciatica, which is basically one of those wait-and-heal things. His "sciatica," though, just kept growing more & more painful until eventually he went to see a doctor for X-rays—and lo & behold, his left pelvis was fractured. But he didn't remember injuring it!

They ran a slew of tests and found the malignant plasma cells that had eaten away his bones.

Multiple myeloma is not an automatic death sentence if it's managed.

But, of course, Ben's multiple myeloma had never been managed.

Between diagnosis and death rattle, it was something like seven short weeks.

I've had that on-again, off-again ache in my right shoulder for many weeks now.

It's gotta be multiple myeloma, right?

###

Since I was dying, I decided to treat myself.

Cruised into New Paltz and had eggs Benedict at my favorite Main Street café. (Breakfast is actually my favorite meal to eat out.)

Bought books. This actually turned out to be a bust: There was an author, David Liss, whom Ben & I had both liked. He wrote serious historical novels (meaning neither Regency romances nor Forever Amber). So, I plucked his latest off the Used Books shelf, something called The Twelfth Enchantment, which turned out to be a rather clunkily written adult fantasy novel. Terrible! I guess this is something that happens to people who make their living writing; at a certain point, you run out of ideas and interest in beautifully crafted sentences and just write for word count since you have a contract to fulfill.

Spent a couple of hours weeding but did not have the stamina to climb Mt. Dirt and cart away buckets of soil. Plus I ran into Phil, and he told me, the soil was great—but you have to sift it. How the hell do you sift soil?

I guess I'll find out when I'm back from Ithaca next week.

The tax law final was hard. Filled with questions like, Julius & Murgatroyd are a married couple under age 65. Julius is retired on permanent and total disability. What is their adjusted gross income limit to qualify for the hardly-ever-used (because never indexed for inflation) Credit for the Elderly or the Disabled?

But I got 94% on it, so you know: Go me.

###

Before I collapsed to watch endless episodes of The Real Housewives of Miami, Season 2—which is simply the best season of The Real Housewives ever made—I forced myself to tromp because exercise.

It was a very grey day.

It wanted to rain, but it did not rain, so the landscape was pregnant with a sense of thwarted desire. Not conducive to photography, so instead I offer you a photograph of golden grove unleaving during day-before-yesterday's drive through the Catskills:



Season 2 of The Real Housewives of Miami is iconic!!! So many vile people! So much bad behavior! What's worst? Aging Brazilian narcissist Adrianna punching foul-mouthed-but-seraphic-appearing model Joanna in the face at a lingerie party/charity event put on by Miami's Boob Doctor to benefit the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation? Or coked-out Nazi-cum-Real-Estate-Developer Thomas Kramer so perfectly blending misogyny & patriarchy at the Dinner Party from Hell?? (Shortly thereafter, Kramer was convicted on a RICO charge.)

Ben always maintained that the real reason Osama bin Laden took down the Twin Towers was because of The Real Housewives.

And you know, I think he just may have been right.

###

Anyway, I have carved out an entire day to play with the Work in Progress. So, that is what I'm gonna do.

So-o, apparently, if I work for H.R. Schlock, I can't be a TaxBwana.

I was mildly shocked that their non-compete clause applied to a nonprofit.

I also suspect if I didn't tell H.R. Schlock I was volunteering with TaxBwana and didn't tell TaxBwana I was selling my soul to H.R. Schlock for filthy lucre, it would all just work out fine.

But that's an extra complication, and my goal these days is to make my life uncomplicated.

The freelancer schtick is really hard on my psyche. Even assuming that all my clients don't switch to AI—an assumption that would be very foolhardy to make—waiting around for the money to appear in my bank account through direct deposit magic is crazy-making.

Deeply crazy-making.

Like check my bank account every 10 minutes and have impassioned one-way conversations with a God I don't actually believe in that always end in Please, please, please, crazy-making.

###

Is this residue from my unfortunate second marriage?

Ben was forever gaslighting me about money.

Like just before my dear, dear, dear pal Tom Mandel died, he set me up with a job at People Magazine. I took care of you, he told me on his deathbed.

And as a favor to me, he also set Ben up with a gig at Sports Illustrated's fledgling online operations.

At some point, Sports Illustrated's online operations were restructured.

And Ben's position was eliminated—a fact he hid from me for a good six months. Maybe longer.

Of course he was still on the payroll, he told me—with a furious scowl like how could I doubt him for a single moment. The overhaul had messed somehow with Time Inc's stream of payments to out-of-office employment. Then the checks were getting lost in the mail. Finally, Fed Ex was delivering the checks to the wrong address where somehow they had been cashed, and Time Inc would have to investigate (naturally) before they could reissue them—

On a couple of occasions, he actually came up with some money.

In retrospect, he probably jimmied that money out of his mother. Supplying her with some lie about me, no doubt. No wonder Ben's mother hated me.

Why did Ben do this? Good question. I asked him over & over again. In those days, I still loved him. (In some ways, I never stopped. Until he died, which broke the evil enchantment.) We had a child together. Our minds fit so well together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He was my writing partner. We had great sex.

Better question: Why did I put up with it?

Answer A: Because Ben was a sociopath.

Answer B: Because I was the only child of a mother who was a consumate liar herself, and so lying and loving are hotwired together in my psyche.

###

Anyway, the client payed my invoice—they always do!—and now my little bank account overrunneth, and all is good in the Patrizia-verse.

But it was three days of extreme, uncontrollable anxiety, and I am tired of feeling anxious.

Diversifying the revenue stream & having one of the sources be a predictable paycheck would skidoo that particular source of anxiety. It's a smart thing to do.

###

In Work in Progress news: I managed to get Daria & Grazia to finish their conversation, and then Dead Neal & Grazia had their own elliptical conversation—about God!—and now we're starting Neal's memorial.

Every time I read over what I had written yesterday, I wanted to throw up.

This is so fuckin' stilted, I told myself. So lame! So banal! What ever made you think you could... Throw it all out! NOW!!!!

In particular, the dialogue made me cringe.

Writing a novel: Not for the faint of heart.

Valentine’s Day is actually an ancient Roman fertility festival called Lupercal that the greeting card industry jacked up on steroids & mass-marketed.

I bought my vibrator a card, chocolates, & flowers.

I also slept the whole night through, which is practically unheard of. And whaddiya know—the sun is out today! That sepulchral Snowglobe of Doom hunkering down on us lo this week past is lifted! So I am feeling pretty chipper today. Though shortly I must go out & sprinkle salt on the vast sea of ice engulfing the driveway.

###

Ellen had to put her dog down yesterday.

I offered to go with her to the vet, but Ellen is even more of a No Whinging Allowed! type than I am, so of course, she wouldn’t hear of it.

So instead, I told Ellen all about Milo, the most wonderful dog ever…



Milo was originally RTT’s dog. But, of course, RTT was the most horrible teenage boy ever & completely neglected him, so I ended up as Milo's caretaker.

In Monterey, we lived five blocks away from one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and I took Milo down there two or three times a day where he ran & frolicked & had a particular obsession with large pieces of driftwood—bigger than he was!—which he would mouth merrily & try to drag home.

Milo journeyed with us all around the country when we traveled with the circus. And when we ended up in Ithaca & Ben walked out on me, Milo was the most faithful of companions.

Ben abandoned me with all the animals—two dogs, two cats, and a disabled box turtle. I was so destitute, having lost my business, my house, all my possessions, & all my savings, I could barely feed myself & RTT during the half-the-time I played custodial parent, let alone the pets. There was simply nothing I could do for money in Ithaca.

I knew the moment I left Ithaca, I would be able to find work again—except I couldn’t leave Ithaca because I didn’t trust Ben not to let RTT drop out of school. I had to get RTT through high school.

I’d found a house in a village called Freeville, 10 miles outside of Ithaca. The Cement Bungalo! Freeville was the Meth Capital of Tompkins County, but it was situated in a landscape of almost unearthly beauty, and so, my chief recreation—since I couldn’t afford anything else—became hiking miles & miles & miles every day.

I liked following the creeks to spy on the beavers. I became utterly obsessed with beaver civilization. Beaver lodges! Beaver dams!

Milo accompanied me, ever faithfully at my side. And the Meezer, my all but feral cat, would stalk us, trailing unfaithfully at a distance of 10 yards or so.



One thing about the companion animals in my life: They tend to die at moments just before my life is about to make an enormous change.

Thus, Edward Hopper and Dennis Hopper, my two angora bunnies, leapt so high they broke their spines in 1993, just a few days before I was to drive up to Clarion in Seattle.

Clarion in Seattle is where I met Ben.

Being me, I had some notion that I would cancel Clarion, hire a carpenter to make little bunny wheelchairs, & devote the rest of my life to caring for my little lagamorphian paraplegics.

But I got talked out of it.

###

I left Ithaca in 2012, less than a week after RTT finally graduated from high school.

All sorts of other things were happening, too.

Like Ben collapsed into an encephalitic coma, which turned out to be related to a virulent case of heretofore undiagnosed Hep C.

For a couple of days, it looked like Ben was going to die right then & there, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do because RTT was not starting at Syracuse University until the fall. Was I gonna have to drag RTT down to the NYC metro for three months? What a nightmare that would be! Because one thing I was absolutely determined was happening: I was gonna get the hell out of Dodge.

But Ben recovered (after a fashion), so phew! Crisis averted.

###

RTT found a home for Nimoy, the disabled box turtle.

I was going to take the two cats—Rutger & the Meezer—with me. But I knew I would never find a place to live with two cats and a dog.

So, I’d tried to get Ben to take Milo. And first, Ben said he would, but then in typical Ben fashion, he weaseled out of it. And I didn’t know what I was gonna do. I couldn’t abandon Milo! But neither could I stay in Ithaca.

But then, Milo was diagnosed with cancer.

I had no money to buy him chemotherapy, and anyway, it was unlikely the chemotherapy would have worked. The cancer was very aggressive.

So, the very last thing I did in Ithaca the morning I left was to have Milo put to sleep.
I had to do it alone. RTT & I, at that point, were barely speaking: I guess he blamed me for his father abandoning me. Ben was the parent who never said, No; I was the parent who attempted—unsuccessfully—to impose some kind of order & discipline on his life. Naturally, RTT always preferred Ben.

Milo lay in my arms as the vet injected the euthanasia, and I stroked him & told him all about Doggie Heaven, which is an enormous beach filled with big sticks to drag, and other dogs to scamper & play with, and the beautiful crystal-clear ocean to swim in.

Milo’s eyes were closed.

But just before he died, he opened his eyes, looked deep into my soul, so lovingly & compassionately that I could feel him blessing me.

###

The NDE description of heaven is a long white tunnel, filled with light, that you kinda wiggle through like a kid in one of those McDonald’s play areas.

When you make it through to the other side, all your dead family are supposed to be waiting with a big picnic lunch.

My family hated me. None of them are gonna be there on the other side of the white light with a basket lined in red and white checked cloth filled with celestial deviled eggs!

But Milo will be there. And the irascible Meezer. And pawky Rutger. And Dennis Hopper & Edward Hopper.

And together, we will all go to visit the beavers—-who in Heaven live in golden dams and speak English in the most mellifluous voices that resonate like the finest W.H. Auden poetry.

Clarion West posted this photo of Lucius & the 1993 Clarion class.

I think the 1993 class was quite the disappointment to the Clarion higher-ups: Louise is the only one of us who got famous, and she is only modestly famous.

I was there on a full scholarship that covered room & board as well as six weeks of workshops.

That’s Lucius smirking in the doorway & Ben lolling insolently at my feet. You can really see the changeling thing full bore in Ben’s face in this shot.

Clarion really taught me how to write, and for that, I will always be grateful. I mean, I definitely had an aptitude for words before I did Clarion, and often I was able to sling words together in an engaging manner, but that was hit-or-miss, I knew nothing of technique.

It was Clarion that taught me technique.

Dreamed Dolly Alderton had been a production assistant on Fresh Meat, and this made me ❤️LUV❤️ her more than ever ‘cause Vod plus Fresh Meat is one of the funniest TV shows ever. Somehow I’d been talking to DA and revealed the complicated backstory of my cousin Alicia—well, not so complicated really: Alicia is a bitch—and DA had written about Alicia in her latest book!

I ran into Alicia and told her, You know, you really oughta buy this book ‘cause you’re in it.

And Alicia said to me, I’m really a different person now, kinder & more compassionate—

And I thought, No. You’re not.

###

Anyhoo, I was in a funk yesterday, and I’m in a funk again today ‘cause the first of the new month is creeping up, which means bills need to be paid, which makes me panic about the old cash flow.

If the U.S. government can run at a deficit of $35 trillion, why, oh why, can’t I???

Nobody ever thinks that’s a serious question.

I know perfectly well that life doesn’t have to be a hamster wheel where you work just so you can afford to work. But turning it into something other than a hamster wheel requires some effort—and I am really short on effort at the moment.

Times like these are when I really start to wonder: Why don’t I have a partner??

I suppose because my idea of a partner is someone with whom I share deep quasi-telepathic communion, and that is impossible; in instances where it appears to be possible, it’s because the other person is a sociopath, a trickster, a hustler—someone like Ben.

I was brought up to be so secretive about anything I really want that now, it’s almost impossible for me to express those things—hence my need for someone to whom I don’t need to express those things because he/she can read my mind.

Plus I’m not even sure what I want anymore. Except I know I want money! Money is always good.

###

And the house is mine and mine alone for a week—also good! If I knew anyone but BB around here, I’d plan a dinner party with an elaborate menu.

###

Wallkill turns out to have one historic site:



Unprepossessing, no?

It’s the Andre Dubois House. The Dubois’s were one of New Paltz’s original Huguenot families. Originally built in the mid-1700s and then burned down, so was rebuilt and remodeled—the little historical marker sez “in the Greek Revival style,” though it sure doesn’t look Greek to me.
I also got a library card since Wallkill is not part of the Mid-Hudson library system but the Ramapo Catskill library system. (Kinda weird.)

I took out Kate Atkinson’s not new but new-to-me Shrines of Gaity and also discovered there is a four-part miniseries of Atkinson’s Life After Life available via Ramapo Catskill’s Kanopy system—which I promptly checked out.

I would have thought Life After Life was unfilmable.

But the miniseries is surprisingly good.

Plus the actress who plays Ursula looks amazingly like my kinda, sorta cousin Katherine—which is probably why I dreamed of her sister Alicia.

Dreamed I was in a foreign land, some place very exotic & enticing, and I was collecting addresses from everyone I knew so that I could write them long, fascinating letters.

The first thing I did when I got to this foreign land was shop for something to wear! I found these two dresses—enchanting, flimsy things of rose silk and lace. One of them had long sleeves; the other had straps. I put the long-sleeved one on and then tried to look for price tags. (I knew I was gonna buy the dress however much it cost, but I also knew I had to agonize over the price.) Since I couldn’t find the price tag, I looked around for a salesperson—

And the salesperson came toward me wearing a really hideous clown mask with a long pointed nose!

Everyone who shops in this store must wear a mask! the salesperson told me sternly. Put on a mask, or I won’t sell you anything.

I looked around. True, there were a lot of shoppers in masks. But there were also a lot of shoppers who were not wearing masks—and they were all men. From this I deduced that only women were being made to wear masks, and I was about to say something angrily about this when I woke up—

###

I think this dream arose from a phone conversation I had yesterday with my medical provider’s office. I’d contacted them via their proprietary online system because I needed a refill on my thyroid medication; they called me back: My own doctor was on vacation; the physician covering for her wanted me to come in so that they could decide whether to do blood draws—

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said. “You just did bloodwork in March. I mean, if you need to do bloodwork, I’ll come in for bloodwork. Though I don’t see why you would need to. Just read my chart! But why should I have to make an extra trip so that you can decide to do bloodwork? Are you changing my physician?”

“No-o-ooooo—”

“Because that’s fine, too,” I said. “Only you need to be transparent about it. Otherwise, all this is is an extra visit so you can bill Medicare—”

Stunned silence on the other end of the phone.

Better watch it, Patrizia, I cautioned myself. Or you’ll get a reputation as a difficult patient, and that’s not good.

###

Otherwise…

I did not finish everything I had to do yesterday, and it was incredibly murky when I went out to tromp:



Last night, I watched Le Retour de Martin Guerre for the first time in a billion years.

I didn’t marry my first husband because he looked like Gerard Depardieu in Martin Guerre, but I went out with him for the first time because he looked like Gerard Depardieu in Martin Guerre. Bill had—how can I describe it?—that same level of physical presence:



(I’ve also been watching Moonlighting, since Hulu is one of the few streaming services I haven’t canceled, and realized that Bruce Willis’s David Addison is kind of a prototype for Ben—)



In Oakland, I saw Barbara Angell, Public Policy Eleanor, and Booter in quick succession, all of whom were overjoyed to see me and enveloped me in ❤️LUV❤️.

How nice it felt to be enveloped in ❤️LUV❤️!!!!





And then I hopped the train back up to Sacto and spent a totally fabulous day at the Railroad Museum and exploring Old Town and the river with Deb & Ky:



And now I’m back in the quaint & scenic HV where there are Decisions To Make.

Woke up in the middle of the night from what I guess was a bona fide nightmare.

Dreamed I’d stashed Sybyl in a house somewhere in Berkeley, but I couldn’t remember which house, so I was wandering around trying to find it by sight. Except nothing looked familiar.

She’s gonna starve to death if I can’t find her! I thought, and the horror of what my carelessness had wrought overwhelmed me, my poor little Sybyl, my poor Little Grey, starving to death, & I was responsible.

“Berkeley” in this dream was a gritty, grey, blighted city, kinda like downtown Syracuse or downtown Oakland before the techie gentrification. I knew what the house where I’d left her looked like, and I kept thinking, It’s down this street—only it wasn’t.

I kept running into people I knew, and I had to lie about what I was doing because I didn’t want anyone to know about this awful thing I’d done, losing Sybyl.

And then I ran into Ben.

One thing about Ben—in real life as in dreams—we both knew each other’s darkest secrets, and this always made Ben—even when the shit slammed into various fans—an oddly comforting person to be around because since he had all the info, he could give the soundest advice & support.

Oh, there, you are, said Ben. I’ve been thinking. I want you to make a movie about me.

I noticed that Ben was missing most of his lower teeth.

I told Ben I had lost Sybyl.

Well, that wasn’t smart, he said. But he said it in a nonjudgmental way and began helping me look for her.

This street looks familiar, I said. Yes, I think the house where I left her is on this street—

And I began running down the street, looking for the house.

Only it wasn’t there.

###

Woke up.

It actually took a few seconds to reorient myself to this time/space continuum. Sybyl—alas!—dead. I was not to blame. I had two new cats now: Molly-Mabel & Mabel-Molly.

Fell back to sleep.

###

What’s the point of complaining about the weather? The weather is… the weather. You can’t do anything about it.

But it’s my diary, and I’ll complain if I wanna, complain if I wanna (repeat chorus…)

And the weather yesterday sucked.

The weather this morning is equally hulking, grey, & forbidding, but at least it’s not snowing or raining, temps are above freezing, so presently, I shall tromp.

###

Yesterday was kind of a wash. Client wants revisions on a piece I turned in last week; mistakes were due to bad instructions on their part, so they are giving me extra $$$. Still. Kind of a drag.

World War III has started in Jordan, but the Big NewZ is that the 49ers beat Detroit and thus will be facing off against Taylor Swift’s BF in the Super Bowl.

Not that I care about football, but both the BoyZ are super-jocks & big 49ers fans. Thus, at various points throughout the day, I felt compelled to tell them I was rooting for Detroit: “Gritty industrial town rising like a phoenix from the American Automobile Industry Apocalypse? It’s a better narrative.”

Plus—though I didn’t tell them this—Tom Mandel’s father once owned the Detroit Lions.

Quite the fabulous mini-vacay!

From the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley, I traveled to the NYC Botanical Garden to see the miniature trains. Very cunning & adorable they were:





Though even more cunning & adorable was the strange & wondrous New York City some arboreal-minded miniaturist had conjured out of found materials like branches, acorns, bark, and leaves:





Neil Gaiman’s Christmas Carol was excellent.

Gaiman didn’t read from the published version of A Christmas Carol.

And, apparently, neither did Dickens.

Instead, Dickens went through the tale, took out all the long-winded, expostulatory passages, and prepared a kind of read-aloud version with stage directions—Stand up here. Gasp & hold finger up here. Pull beard reflectively here. Etc, etc—which he called a “prop book.”

The New York City Library somehow came into possession of Christmas Carol’s prop book, and Gaiman used it to guide his performance:



Gaiman has a remarkably pleasant public persona. It was just so interesting to watch how this evolved into his relationship with the audience. Because in the end, it’s not the material that makes a performance—it’s the delivery that makes the performance, and Gaiman can turn two sentences that lie flat on a page into a laugh fest. You see it most clearly when he is performing his own stuff:



###

As always, I remain intrigued by the secret life of New York City rooftops, which can only be viewed from the windows of certain magical hotels—



—and mystified by biznesses that occupy upper stories in Midtown buildings:



I mean, that barbershop. Gotta be a money-laundering operation, right?

###

In the morning, I took my coffee at one of the many kiosks in Grand Central Station.

Grand Central Station right now is surrounded by homeless people, struggling to sleep over subway gratings that might keep them warm. I struggled mightily with my desire to document this phenomenon and my respect for other people’s privacy. In the end, respect for privacy won out: If I were sleeping on a subway grate outside Grand Central Station, I wouldn’t want anyone taking photos of me.

But I feel like I’m seeing more homeless than ever before, and if I can’t document it, then how do I prove that?

###

After coffee, I toddled off to J.P. Morgan’s old mansion, which is now a small museum.

The museum was staging an exhibition on medieval money, merchants, & morality.

Will money damn your soul?

Clearly, Hieronymus Bosch thought so:



Clearly, the 9th century monarch who owned this bible did not:



Of course, the great jewel of J.P. Morgan’s old mansion is its library:



Whimsical statuary had been installed up & down Park Avenue, and the Yuletide buskers this year mostly seem to be horn players:





I liked Manhattan much better on this visit than I had over Thanksgiving.

I’m old, so I’m invisible.

But being invisible seemed more like a superpower this time round.

###

As soon as I got back, I immediately felt weighted down by a very physical sense of apprehension—

It’s because you don’t feel safe, thought I to myself.

Sadly, this is an all too familiar feeling.

I can remember feeling just this way at three years old when I had to deal with my mother’s insane, capricious moods, and of course, it was an intermittent beacon—Danger, Will Robinson!!!—flashing throughout all the long years of my relationship with Ben.

I’m feeling it now with Lois Lane. She’s been very flakey on the responding-to-communications front. Which does not auger well given that we have plans to set up housekeeping together.

Flakiness has ever been friendship’s burden with Lois Lane. There’s a deep bond there, felt and acknowledged on both sides, but also that flakiness on her part.

Thing is, I never know how much I can rely on my gut when I start feeling this particular species of anxiety. You’re overreacting, some logical part of my brain counsels.

And in many cases, that would be true.

But it wasn’t true in my relationship with Ben where, if anything, I underreacted because I simply couldn’t believe I loved and trusted someone who was such a sociopath.

My kids tell me I am constantly over-anxious for no good reason.

And every time they do, I secretly think, Good! If you think it’s over nothing, that means I protected you from seeing the very real situations that caused that anxiety.

###


Owning this feeling in precisely these words—I do not feel safe—is actually pretty helpful.

It makes asking the corollary question automatic: What do I need to feel safe?

And that inspires agency.

I need to start working on a Plan B. And a Plan C. And maybe even a Plan D.

That is a bit daunting because it widens the circles on the map again.

The current living situation has settled down. L seems to have largely bounced back from Whatever It Was, leading me to believe that Whatever It Was was what they call a transient ischemic attack, a TIA, a kind of mini-stroke. To the best of my knowledge, she never sought medical follow-up. And she could have another TIA at any time, of course.

But the Universe seems to have granted me a stay until spring on the moving front.

I wouldn't want to try the Universe’s generosity beyond that point, though.

I’m out of love with John le Carré.

On account of I’m reading The Secret Life of John le Carré, Adam Sisman’s follow-up to his massive biography of the author.

I did kinda wonder why nothing very interesting ever happened to Cornwell/le Carré in the original Sisman bio after, say, 1987 or so.

I assumed Cornwell/le Carré went to ground as great writers are wont to do when they feel unappreciated. If the world won’t see that I am more than just a genre writer, I shall turn my back on it! That kind of thing.

But in fact, a great deal happened to him after 1987. He evolved into a rather dictatorial and somewhat cruel man who delighted in picking up lesser beings by the wing and then dropping them when he got tired of looking at them. And became driven by libido though in Cornwell/le Carré, libido manifested neither as a desire for love nor a desire for sex but rather as a desire to lie: He couldn’t exist without multiple layers of duplicity.

In this, he rather reminded me of my dead X-husband, Ben.

The compulsiveness with which he stalked his romantic prey, though. That reminded me of Rik.

Katherine, Rik’s other daughter—the one I still talk to—once told me (bitterly) that Rik had precipitated both his dementia and his death by taking massive doses of testosterone. So his dick would stay hard during his numerous dalliances with younger women.

I actually don’t know if it’s true that testosterone has those kinds of health effects, and I wasn’t moved to research it, because as soon as Katherine told me this, I tried my very hardest to unhear it. I didn’t like thinking about Rik that way. I preferred thinking of Rik as the closest thing to a father surrogate I ever had in my extreme youth and then as my pal on the Berkeley party circuit circa 1970s:



Anyway, yesterday was an okay day. Meaning the sun came out, so I got to spend some hours outside. The trees are almost all bare now.

Wrote 750 words on the fiction project & hated every single fucking one of them, but as I tell myself, It doesn’t matter that you hate them; it only matters that you write them.

Started the next Remunerative Project.

It would be wonderful if I could finish this one by the time I leave on Monday—for me-me-me-ME time in NYC and then Destination Thanksgiving: Washington D.C. with Lez BoyZ. I’ll be gone for a week.

Dunno what will happen to L in my absence. She goes in & out of being bonkers and was having a particularly bonkers day yesterday. I am—however reluctantly—her de facto caretaker. But I suppose her useless boyfriend Chris will be down for a good chunk of those days, and anyway, it’s not really my problem.