Mallory's Camera

It rained. And rained. But mostly it blew. After I watched a 180 lb man get blown down at the gas station by a sudden gust of wind – okay, okay the ground was slippery from oil slicks. But still... – I decided not to go out until after the severe weather advisory was lifted. Four pm.

Ridiculous to open the store under these circumstances. Hot sauce is not one of those things you venture out for into hurricane force winds for. But closing the store threw me into a panic – the weather was going to cost me several hundred dollars. I wouldn't be able to pay all my bills this coming week. I rehearsed all the shit eating and foot shuffling I was going to have to do by phone come Monday and felt sick to my stomach.

I know we'll be fine in two months.

But I don't know if we'll be fine in five days.

I remember Jane exclaiming in horror one or two years back: "Patty, do you mean to tell me that you don't have a couple of thousand dollars stuck away in an emergency fund?"

And I wanted to say, how can I, Janie, when every day is an emergency?

And yet every day – no exaggeration – I have customers telling me how wonderful the store is – "This is the greatest store ever!" "This is the reason we come to Monterey!" – and I'm thinking if only I had a business partner, if only I wasn't battling with a mountain of usurious credit card debt incurred because I was cash poor but credit rich and so old nobody wanted to hire me –

It is what it is.

I'm too fatalistic for my own good sometimes.

After I finished the latest iteration of JDK's H-2B visa website – here for the curious – I was at loose ends. (Website is not great, I realize. Then again I only spent three hours on it.)

Tried to read Heat, Bill Buford's memoir about working in Mario Batali's kitchen. Did not like Heat. The writing is merely… competent. The informational content? Buford spends three pages describing how to braise meat as though this is some arcane practice, a National Geographic initiation rite with chef's whites instead of loincloths. Anyone with a quarter of a brain who's spent five seconds in a kitchen knows how to braise meat.

But Bill Buford is rich and I'm not. Even though Bill Buford slept in my attic once. This was some time in the early seventies, when I was living in a big, brown shingle commune on Benvenue Street in Berkeley. Reed Dasenbrock had referred him to me.

I don't remember much about him. If I'd known he was going to go on to start Granta, and edit fiction for The New Yorker, I would certainly have paid more attention.

Anyway, since I had nothing to read and it was still pouring, the only recourse was to watch movies. (I did think fleetingly of cleaning the kitchen, but I was in the wrong mood.) Watched The Prestige for the fifth time; watched 3:10 to Yuma for the first. Both are excellent. I was particularly struck by the Civil War subtext in Yuma – Charlie Prince wears a Confederate tunic throughout, and of course Dan Evans a/k/a Christian Bale is a member of the 19th century version of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' National Guard, conscripted against his will to protect the Capitol. Westerns are mythology but touches like these are an homage to the real economic contexts of the times. Cole Younger was a Confederate guerrilla before he became a train robber. Jesse James' family farm was seized by Reconstructionists.

I love it when my mind when puzzles together pieces of the Bigger Picture.

Some day someone will be puzzling together pieces of this Bigger Picture.

Or not.