Mallory's Camera

Day off.

At some point, I am going to trek across the bridge to grab my tomato cages from the Hyde Park Community Garden & deliver them to the New Paltz Community Garden.

###

I'd had some vague thought of joining one of the numerous No Kings Marches today, but I'm not feeling it.

Besides! I gave at the office yesterday with my last two clients of the day, Fatimatou and Folasade (not their real names), who turned out to be from Guinea, which fact I extracted when I realized the impenetrable language they were trading with one another was actually a strangely accented French.

"Tu parle français?" I asked in my own execrable French.

"Ah, toi aussi, tu parles français?" asked Fatimatou, the more fluent of the two young women in English.

"Un peu," I said. "Un petit peu. Très mal. Tu viens du Sénégal?"

"On vient de Guinée," Fatimatou said.

Guinea!

I had no idea where Guinea actually was, except that most of France's former African colonies are on the west coast.

###

Fatimatou had come to this country as a child with her parents. Product of the Brooklyn public school system, she was bright and enterprising, and had earned a bachelor's degree in the rapidly obsolescing field of data management. This degree qualified her for a string of jobs at places like Sephora and Tori Burch. I had no idea why Fatimatou decided to move to Middletown, where there are far fewer Sephoras and Tori Burches.

When she'd worked at the Sephora in Brooklyn, Fatimatou had been vested in the company's 401(k), so when she left the company, they'd presented her with a check for several thousand dollars. Unfortunately, they'd neglected to instruct her about rollovers, so she'd spent the money and was now facing a tax penalty. Fortunately, she'd been conscientious filling out those W4s, so the tax penalty wasn't huge—

"Three hundred and seventy-three dollars," I said, switching back to English.

Fatimatou said something to Folasade in that weird French, and they both squealed with joy.

"I did it myself, and it showed I owed $10,000," she explained.

This, in fact, is why most first-time users come to Schlock: They fuck up their Turbotax return somehow.

###

Folasade was a more recent immigrant.

She had a green card, but I could feel the tension in the two women around that.

She was also in the unenviable position of understanding a lot more English than she could actually speak. But not quite enough English to understand what I was saying without Fatimatou's interpretation.

She'd had exactly one job in 2025—as a holiday worker at Tori Burch, where she'd made exactly $266. And they'd taken out nothing in federal taxes.

I grimaced when I saw that.

"I don't know what to tell you about this," I said. "We're going to charge you $164 for this return. It hardly seems worth it. On the other hand, with the situation here being what it is right now, it seems wise to make some sort of paper trail, establishing you as a law-abiding wannabe citizen."

The situation got even more complicated when it turned out that even the minute amount of money Folasade earned qualified her for a minute amount ($28!) of earned income credit. EIC kicks up the Schlock pricing structure by a hundred bucks.

I sat there for a couple of seconds and then shot an email to the district head of Schlock's mid-Hudson Valley operations: If I can get her a deal this year, we'll have a customer for life, blah, blah, blah—because that's the kind of logic that works on corporate asswipes.

And lo and behold! They called me back and gave me a coupon to take $100 off her fee.

I still feel like she was exploited, but you can only do what you can do.

###

I'm halfway through The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It should be a page turner—the story is very interesting, India is very interesting—and yet it is not a page-turner because each and every sentence has exactly the same metric beat, so the prose, even with the razzledazzle of unusual metaphors and similes, is actually pretty boring.

One of the novel's focuses is the plight of upper-caste Indian women, sent abroad to be overeducated in foreign schools but unable to catch a husband, and so, who end up living lives of genteel poverty.

That is not so very different from my own plight, no? I'm nothing if not overeducated! And I married twice, but neither marriage stuck.

In the end, there is no such thing as exceptionalism—national or not.

###

"Comment tu vas, uh, passer reste de la journée?" I asked Folasade in my terrible French.

"We are going to look for jobs," Fatimatou said in English. "But it is hard because she cannot speak..." Fatimatou shrugged.

"You might try looking for housecleaning jobs," I said. "Because then English wouldn't matter. I know it's a bit demeaning, rabaissant, but it pays okay—"

The ghost of Barbara Ehrenreich groaned at me from Heaven.

Remarkable how quickly one loses muscle tone & wind at my age.

The Schlock job requires a lot of sitting on my ass. And I haven't really had the time to exercise formally. I noticed that yesterday, when a stroll up New Paltz's hilly Main Street left me breathless.

Yes, I should make exercise a priority.

But honestly?

It's all I can do to force myself not to quit the Schlock job.

Adding more "must"s to the list would be ill-advised at this time because I won't, and then I'll feel very guilty, worthless, & inadequate.

###

Meanwhile, by the time I made it to the New Paltz Community Garden, clouds were coming in, and the temperature had dropped. Weeding was not going to be fun. So I contented myself by circling back to the casa and weeding the Patrizia-torium instead, which is now a veritable dell of enchantment and clean! So clean.

I had quite a good time doing errands in New Paltz, tromping dyspnea notwithstanding:

Banner off somebody's porch:



Front window at the Cat Café mit bonus reflected Portrait of the Artist:



Solar power-operated Frida. Tough battle, but somehow I convinced myself I could live without it:



I splurged on books instead. Hard covers! When I closed up the house in Monterey, I swore I would never buy hardcover books again, since I had a library of something like 3,000 of them; I loved them all, but transporting them to the East Coast was completely out of the question, and nobody else wanted them, nobody! I did try. On the West Coast, libraries don't do periodic book sales to raise cash the way they do on the East Coast.

I do read digitally, but truth be told, I prefer physical books. I like the heft of them, I love the faint smell of bookbinding glue and the texture of paper pages.

My extravagant expenditure sparked a momentary tizzy. Books! Great! You can burn these for heat & light when an Iranian drone takes out all the power plants. Fahrenheit 451 was actually a survival guide!

###

On the way to New Paltz, I took a wrong turn & ended up on an unfamiliar road. But, of course, there are no such things as wrong turns; you are always exactly where the Universe wants you to be, and the Universe clearly wanted me to enjoy spectacular views of the Shawangunk ridge:



Plus bonus view of dead-seeming orchard, longing to become a symbol of spring & rebirth when it jumpstarts those pink blossoms in the next month or so—always assuming the brutal winter that now finally seems to be ending didn't murder it:

If only I had some kind of Bluetooth app for my brain when I'm in the shower or driving along a deserted back-country road, it wouldn't take me six weeks to write a single chapter of the Work in Progress!

I was in such deep reverie when I took off from the gym yesterday that I missed the turn and found myself in an unfamiliar place I'd never seen before. GPS didn't work here; we were too far from the towers.

Of course, I could have turned around, retraced my steps, found the right road.

But that would have added another 15 minutes to the trip, and darkness was rapidly falling. How hard can it be? I wondered. Up is the Shawangunk mountains; down is the Wallkill River Valley.

And in another 10 minutes found my way back to familiar territory.

But oh, what a wild 10 minutes! The back country around here is very wild indeed. So many abandoned homesteads.

###

I did not do useful work at all yesterday. Instead, I finished reading The Great Believers for plot. I will now reread it for subtext & structure.

It's a very, very good novel. Alternating chapters; one set starts in 1985, the other in 2015. The chapter sets could almost stand alone as separate novels except the 2015 chapters assume a certain familiarity with & affection for the characters in the 1985 chapters.

The novel is about the AIDS crisis, a historical moment that few remember anymore.

I remember it quite vividly: The AIDS crisis played a major role in my decision to get out of nursing.

Before the AIDS crisis, you could draw blood without wearing gloves; afterwards, you had to sheath up in heavy latex, and I had a helluva time feeling veins. (I always poked on feel, not touch.) Also, I'm pretty clumsy. The third time I poked myself with a needle that had been used to deliver an injection to a patient, HIV status unknown, and was forced to go on protocol (HIV tests at regular intervals plus the option to take prophylactic AIDS drugs), I thought, No, no, no, girl! Do something else for money.

###

Gay was sassy & fun for 15 years after Stonewall.

Then came AIDS.

Was AIDS the first time that Big Pharma realized they had a captive audience, could monetize despair and fear, and jack up the price of life-saving drugs???? I honestly don't know.

Anyway, post-AIDS, gay—repurposed as LGBTQ—seems like just another lifestyle marketing category to me. Which is very politically incorrect of me, no doubt, and another one of the reasons why my kids might describe my political sensibilities as slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun. This is ironic since as a B, I am a member of the tribe.