mallorys_camera | Entries tagged with brian

One real problem with magical thinking is that one begins to blame oneself for everything. Like if life is going badly, it's because you're being punished for something you did. That kind of jumpstarts a conveyor belt of memories of all the horrible things you've ever done running through your mind...

Snort.

Like the Universe cares!

It may be time to turn off the magical thinking function for a while.

###

Drove up to the Catskills to pick up Brian's camping gear. Brian's house is only about 30 miles away, but down so many back roads that it takes an hour to get there. Gorgeous day, and I meandered through the forests with their sudden breaks into ancient farmhouses and empty barns as though I was driving through the last scene of a movie.

I will be back one more time to pick up the rest of Brian's CDs and two little Moroccan footstools I had my eye on.

But after that?

It's unlikely I will ever visit this part of the Catskills again.

Hung out with real-life Flavia and Betsy for a bit.

Came back and finished The Children's Book. Read it much too fast! I was curious to find out what happens. What happens is that the characters who are adults at the beginning of the book grow old & weird, and the characters who are children at the beginning of the book all die or are horribly maimed in WWI.

Started pondering, too, about what I need to do with my stuff. If I move to Michigan, I'm gonna have to get rid of most of it. It will be too expensive to move.

Yesterday was not a good mental health day.

Icky, in residence till Tuesday, has not said one word about Black Chicken's death. In fact, has barely said four words to me. It's very hard to share physical space in a house with someone who acts like you're invisible, even when said someone is a complete dick. I keep scampering off to the mirror to check: Do I exist? If I cast a reflection, I must exist, right?

Fortunately, I am spending today and tomorrow with People Who Love Me. And driving up to Ithaca some time this week to drop off Brian's enormous collection of camping gear with RTT.

###

Bad mental health for me always comes down to that small still voice within suddenly turning shrill and chanting, Failure, failure, failure! The small still voice may not be entirely wrong on that one: I have failed utterly in being happy, can't think of a single time in my life when I was simply, uncompromisingly happy.

That's on my upbringing.

But that is not what the small still voice is talking about.

No, the small still voice means I am low income, I have not published a novel (have published a lot of other stuff! I feel compelled to note here), have a broken dental veneer, am living in an awful place where I barely know a soul, and am generally not someone Elon Musk would want to impregnate.

It's a lot.

###

On the plus side:

Ten days or so of hot temperatures that kept me more or less housebound and immobile means my injured knee has all but recovered.

And I have finally found a book I enjoy: A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, about an eccentric E. Nesbit-like writer of magic tales for children in the early 20th century and her Bloomsbury-like coterie.

I have never been a big Byatt fan. There is an icy feeling to her perfect prose that has always put me off. I much prefer the gurgly chick-lit effusions of her sister, Margaret Drabble. But I am enjoying this book.

###

Funny. Yesterday, I kept thinking I would feel so much better if there was even one person I could call up and say, "Black Chicken died, and my heart is broken," who would understand—

And the only two people I could think of were Brian and (ulp) Ben. Who are both dead themselves.

So, there was supposed to be some kind of work day at the New Paltz Community Garden yesterday. I showed up at the brutal hour of 9am, and nobody was there! No apologetic emails or texts either. Not then and not since.

You're supposed to do one of these work days each season, & this one was mine. (I believe in getting this kind of chore out of the way early.)

Anyway, they had their chance, and I ain't signing up for a work day again.

###

Also, mega-snark from the usual suspects when I posted the news about Alpha Male's passing to the Well group on FB.

I have heard from various sources... I wrote.

That's just a rumor!

You don't know that!

Snark! Snark! Snark!

Well, I do know that, and since Alpha Male basically saved the Well—a tottering horseshoe crab of a social media site that has been around since the 1980s—by scraping up and leading a team of investors to buy the damn thing and run it as a type of coop, I thought they might want to know too.

But no, they'd rather activate moldering feuds from 30 years ago, so I took the post down.

I fumed!

Then I chastized myself: These people are irrelevant! Why do you let yourself care?

But it took me a good half hour to stop caring.

###

Apart from that, it was a pleasant if melancholy day. Real-life Flavia was once again up at Brian's old house. "Do you want anything? Come up and see what you might want."

So I drove up to the Catskills through the Shawangunk Mountains:

Claimed Brian's really high-end Ninja blender and an excellent portable mixer with many fabulous whisk attachments. And two Moroccan end tables.

Also took more boxes of books to disseminate among various local libraries (all of which raise money with periodic book sales).

And promised to find a good home for Brian's voluminous collection of camping gear. I am hoping RTT wants it. There are bags & bags of it.

It was good to see Real-life Flavia. The house itself, though, was... sad. I'm still shocked by how much I miss Brian. I've weathered the deaths of people who were closer to me with far less emotion. Though it wasn't just Brian's ghost that made me feel sad, it was also the horrible state of neglect the house was in. There were mouse turds everywhere and dust and filth and smoke grime.

How could real-life Mimi (who showed up to take a shower) have lived with this for 10 months?

###

Calling Betsy has been on the To Do list for over a week now, so I did that last night.

I actually like Betsy, but she is exceedingly high maintenance, which means I've gotta ration my exposure, plus I am not a big phone person.

Betsy has had a recurrence of her Lyme disease except maybe it's not Lyme disease, maybe it's just a complete physical & mental breakdown. (I can relate: That's exactly what happened to me with the Schlock gig).

Towards the end of the call, though, it occurred to me that in addition to all that, Betsy is really quite nuts.

She was ranting about some sort of penalty she had to pay on her 2023 taxes, which was all due to some TurboTax snafu.

"Well, if you don't really owe it, don't pay it," I said. "Amend your 2023 return."

No, no. She couldn't be bothered.

"You don't have to do it. I'll file the amendment for you."

No, no. It was too much work.

"Betsy," I said. "If you don't correct the underlying mistake, they will keep charging you more penalties. Do you not get that? I am happy to do this for you—"

No, no. She just couldn't deal with that.

It occurred to me then that she liked the fact that she was being targeted unjustly. She enjoys thinking of herself as persecuted. She will actually go out of her way to create situations where she can feel persecuted.

This is one of those insights you wish you hadn't had.

On a sunny morning when I've slept decently, there's no such thing as existential angst. Sure, the world is going to hell. Hasn't the world always been going to hell? It's only the versions of hell that differ.

Anyway, today is a day when the sky is blue, and the Fitbit—a minor household god—tells me I logged seven hours of "fair" rest. (I have no idea how Fitbit differentiates between "poor," "fair," and "good.")

Yesterday, however, was not: I felt fuckin' awful, like a vegetarian zombie or something: Yes, I should eat someone, but I don't feel like it!

I made the money I needed to make and then took off on errands. Got lost in the strip mall sprawl that is commercial Middletown. (Farmland just 20 years ago.) Found myself in front of a gigantic Goodwill, which I took to be a sign from God. (And behold! Esau thrifted.)

Then real-life Mimi texted me. I had helped her with her tax return, and she wanted to know where her EIC-enhanced refund was. Like how the fuck would I know, girl?

The IRS maintains a website called, conveniently enough, Where's My Refund? I directed her there, adding, If you’re listed as owing money to the IRS, though, they’ll apply any refund toward that. Do you owe? Because I'd told her she should let me do her 2024 taxes at the same time I did her 2025 taxes since, of course, she hadn't filed those. But she wouldn't let me.

Turns out she owed money, and the IRS was withholding her refund until one of its few remaining human employees could find time to do the arithmetic.

Okay so I just shouldn't count on anything then. I give up! she texted.

Thing with real-life Mimi is that one can never be quite sure whether she's just being rhetorically melodramatic or her extreme emotional volatility is steering her in the direction of self-harm (which would be a cause for alarm).

I know she was counting on that tax money to fund her move from Brian's cabin where she has been staying rent-free for the last nine months. Real-life Flavia (who owns the deed to the place) has been the soul of generosity here, but behind the scenes, Flavia's BFF Betsy & I had been agonizing over New York State's squatter laws because it's never easy to predict what real-life Mimi is going to do, just when she's going to turn hostile.

Standing in front of the Middletown Goodwill (where I fully expected to harvest an entire summer wardrobe for the low, low price of under $100), I had the crazy notion that I would just give Mimi $1,000 to finance the move. After all, this is what Brian's ghost would want me to do, right?

It's the same feeling that prompted Flavia to let Mimi stay in the cabin: Brian loved her, Brian would have wanted her to be cared for.

But if Brian loved her and wanted her to be taken care of so much, he should have left her some money in his will, right?

I must channel my inner Mick Jagger!

It's just. I make so little money right now. I'm trying my best to make this work, she texted, and if someone else had said this to me, my heart would have gone out to them—poor gallant, valiant soul! Yes, times are incredibly tough, and there but for the grace of God etc, etc, etc. Who knew then there would ever come a time when we would all be old and limited?

But the thing is I don't actually like real-life Mimi.

You could start a GoFundMe, I texted.

What the hell! I'd kick in twenty bucks!

Or I could sell some of my ceramics, she texted back.

No-oo-ooo, don't do that! I thought. Because I'd feel compelled to buy some, and I hate your bloody ceramics.

###

In garden news, I weeded out 40 pounds or so of nettles day before yesterday. It was a cloudy, cold day, which, while excellent for avoiding sunstroke, is not the kind of day I enjoy gardening. However, work that must be done is work that must be done.

Shortly, I will wander back over to finish the job. Since it's sunny today (though decidedly cool), I should enjoy the work more.

###

In Work in Progress news, I thought of a comic scene that would work well inserted into the opening section of Chapter 7: Flavia, who scrupulously avoids introductions to Neal's other poly partners, somehow gets dragooned into going out to dinner with one (plus Neal). Polly Partner starts revealing awful sexual secrets: How Neal had to teach her how to have vaginal orgasms again after her episiotomy; how after a lusty bout of anal sex, she had several days of plopping small poops—did that happen to Flavia, too?

Only yesterday, I was in the throes of sleep-&-sunshine-deprived existential despair and could not write anything—which doubtless meant that I would never be able to write anything ever again, especially not comedy, which requires a light touch.

I'll give it another whirl today.

Slipped off into The Zone for many hours last night while hammering away at a climactic scene near the end of Part I in the Work In Progress.

The Zone is a kind of oneness with the act of creation that can best be likened to a benign psychotic episode. You climb so far inside what you're creating that all your critical faculties disappear. Your brain is tracking imaginary events the same way it tracks real (ha, ha, ha!) events! It's wild. It's fun!

But you have no idea whether what you're writing is good or bad.

And it's a kind of mania, so it's physically unhealthy. When you fly that near the sun, your wings can get burned. Last night, for example, I didn't fall asleep till 1 a.m., but I still got up at 6—it's almost impossible for me to sleep in—so I'm feeling quite brain dead right now.

And I still haven't yet dared sneak a peek at what I wrote last night: Neal's rescue of Grazia just before she's about to be ~~waterboarded~~ baptized by spooky apocalypse cult. What if it's terrible, overly melodramatic drivel? It very easily could be.

###

Plus, we're heading into the fifth consecutive day of grey, impenetrable sky and blank white snow. A grey and white world is hard on the eyes. No doubt, that's compounding my addled, sleep-deprived mind set. Right now in this present moment, there's barely anything that's happened to me in my everyday-a-little-bit-longer life that I don't regret in some way. I line my pillows with regret!

My financial situation is in flux. Schlock isn't giving me the hours I want, and the current Remuneration client stopped communicating with me after making the current Remunerative assignment, leading me to wonder whether this isn't some kind of augury of how they're gonna react when I present my invoice. Shitty behavior! Do I ignore it & keep on working, figuring: Of course, they'll pay me! Or do I cut bait now and keep the retainer?

The Patrizia-torium is an utter mess.

And I'm living in a geographic location I dislike, where I have no friends to commune with or even activity partners to hang out with casually. I have plenty of friends, of course, with whom I communicate through phone calls, texts, & email & at some point during each and every one of those phone calls, texts, & emails, both parties invariably lament: I wish we lived closer...

But the only reason I'm not dying of loneliness is that I'm pathologically self-involved, and thus can survive for looooong periods of time entertaining myself.

Maybe that's all resilience really is: a pathological level of self-involvement.

###

I miss Brian.

The fact that he was so supremely self-confident in his choices, and that one of his choices was to love me, made him a grounding force.

Without him, I feel neither grounded nor lovable.

Invoice still has not been paid.

Client has responded to my tactful emails by saying (a) accountant has received the invoice and (b) things are slow due to the holiday season and most of the staff are off.

Do I believe them?

No.

I think they are having cash flow issues.

I am trying not to see this as a referendum on my worth as a human being on Planet Earth, but I gotta say it's difficult: Their cash flow situation has now become my cash flow situation! The interconnectness of all human beings is not always a blessing (cf. bubonic plague & corona virus epidemics.)

Resilience! I counsel myself. 80% to 90% of all freelance invoices get paid—eventually. (I made that number up.)

Resilience is a hard sell, though. I've always had such a hard time with uncertainty that often, I find myself sabotaging situations because a negative outcome feels better than an uncertain outcome.

It's a good thing I took that tax position with Soul-Sucking Company.

I was hoping it was going to supplement my freelance income, but this morning I am thinking it will have to replace my freelance income: Assuming the invoice does get paid (which is still the most likely outcome), I don't think I can deal with the post-invoicing anxiety anymore. When I lived in Dutchess County, my living expenses were a lot lower, and I had a small savings account that gave me some peace of mind in situations like this. Now, I don't.

###

Anyway, I must figure out a way to offset the anxiety because I have about 500 pages of the U.S. tax code to memorize—well nigh Talmudic in its abstruseness—& then I will be toddling off to the gym, and thence, to NYC for Flushing Chinese and Hamnet with Flavia & Betsy. Chinese food & movies are the traditional Jewish Xmas celebration.

I really, really miss Brian. He is the one person I could talk to about this. He would enfold me in his warm and magnetic personality and give me wise counsel. Instead I am writing it here & picturing invisible people shaking their heads: Gawd! She's such a trainwreck.

Real-life Daria bailed on the trip east to pick up Brian's car (which she inherited).

It's all good since real-life Flavia didn't really want to do a road trip to California with her. Can you imagine? Neither of them really likes road trips!

But this meant that Flavia had to go up to Brian's old house to pick up the car. She was gonna Uber from New Paltz to the deepest, darkest Catskills. How much was that gonna cost? $150???

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "I'll drive you."

So, I did.

###

Flavia & I bonded on my recent NYC sojourn. We have spent a fair amount of time together over the past decade, and I've always liked her, but our styles are quite different. She is reserved, and I am—Well. Me. I could sense that, however much she might have liked me, she found me rather exhausting. But last weekend, we really clicked, took the leap forward into intimacy.

She was not looking forward to spending the night at Brian's old house. Mimi is staying at Brian's old house.

"Oh, God," I said. "I wish I could invite you to stay at my place. But honestly? You'd hate my place—" Trying to imagine Flavia & Icky in close proximity.

Flavia laughed. "It's okay. It's just for one night."

###

Mimi is a problem that's getting bigger.

Mimi has bipolar disorder but refuses to take the standard psychiatric medications for the condition, preferring to self-medicate by smoking massive quantities of cannabis.

This would not be an issue if smoking massive quantities of cannabis was working.

But clearly, it is not working.

Her house in Peekskill got repossessed; she got fired from her job.

Brian helped her buy a kinda/sorta camper, which she parked on some property in Sullivan County, right outside Bethel Woods, owned by a couple who wanted to establish a cannabis spa.

The couple separated; the property is gonna be sold. (In fact, Brian spent the last 10 days of his life installing a new plumbing system in the main house on the property. "I want to help Mimi establish some sort of equity," he explained to me.)

Mimi had a key to Brian's house, and Flavia—who actually owns the house—told her she could keep coming up to the house whenever she wanted to (presumably to commune with the spirit of dead Brian).

Turns out that since the kinda/sorta camper Mimi bought is not really a mobile home, there is absolutely no public property in the State of New York where she can live in it during the winter months. And even if there were some place physically to park it on the Catskills property, Brian's old place is not zoned for it.

So, Mimi promptly moved into the house.

She assumed she would be inheriting Brian's arrangement with Flavia—Brian didn't pay any rent, & Flavia paid the property taxes & utilities. And Flavia is going along with this because (a) Brian did love Mimi, so Flavia feels some obligation to care for her and (b) Flavia has some guilt over being wealthy.

Mimi did snag a new job—at a dispensary in Woodstock. I don't see that lasting through the winter. Woodstock is a tourist town; it shuts down in the winter. Plus the country is on the verge of another recession—$1 trillion added to the national debt in the last two months alone!—& I kinda think dispensaries are gonna be dropping like flies.

###

"I said she could stay till April," Flavia told me over the weekend.

"Ummm," I said. "I don't think she'll last that long. I mean, the Catskills in the wintertime? A house that's only heated by a woodburning stove? I don't see Mimi out there splitting lumber in the snow. Do you?"

"Where else does she have to go?" asked Flavia.

"I wish Brian had just left her some money," I said. "Then you wouldn't feel like she was your responsibility."

"I know," sighed Flavia.

###

Flavia took the Trailways bus up from Manhattan. I picked her up at the terminal in New Paltz—which also functions as a taxi depot and the Village Grounds coffeehouse where they make an excellent cappucino. (New Paltz's taxi fleet is one of the things that make it an exceptionally cosmopolitan village!)

And no sooner had Flavia stepped off the bus when she got a text from Mimi: Brian's car won't start.

The one thing Flavia had asked Mimi to do was start Brian's car every week or so, so the battery wouldn't run down.

"Oh, my God," I said. "I hope it's the battery! If you have to get the car towed for actual repairs, you might be stuck there for days."

We stared at each other in horror.

We'd had plans for a leisurely drive up, but these, of course, these plans were short-circuited.

The drive itself, though, was spectacular. Peak foliage moment on edges of the Minewaska Preserve and the Catskills Park, the sugar maples scarlet and all the other trees golden. I recited Gerard Manly Hopkins as we circled higher & higher.

"Listen," I said. "I'm going to stay with you at least until we're sure the car will start. If it doesn't, I'm entirely at your disposal. I do not want you getting stuck there."

###

Roadside assistance had been summoned from Kingston and was on its way, Mimi informed us as we stepped out of the car. She looked horrible. Unkempt. Has gained at least 20 pounds since July.

The house...

I cannot describe how appalling the house was. It was like a hoarder house.

I'd had a hard time being in that house in July because it reminded me so much of Brian, but no vestige of Brian remains—except his books, which I have volunteered to take to a used bookstore in Middletown just as soon Mimi gets it together to pack them in boxes.

The kitchen island where Brian used to prepare gourmet meals was loaded with boxes of Cheese Nips and half-empty bags of candy. The only chair in the house that was not piled high with Mimi's stuff was permanently occupied by Mimi's ancient cat, Mojo, who seems to me to be actively dying, so there was no place for Flavia and me to sit while Mimi launched into her monologue. We cowered in corners.

¬"—and I am paying $500 a month on that camper! Can you believe it? $500 a month! And another hundred for storage in Peekskill. And I'm only making $2,000 a month! So, I'm gonna transfer my storage up here and sell the camper—"

"Do you really think selling the camper is a good idea?" asked Flavia diplomatically. Meaning: You are going to need another place to live come April.

"It's a great idea," snarled Mimi. "And fuck Nick—" the male half of the cannabis spa couple. "—he's a horrible human being. I hope his dick falls off."

"Moving out," in other words, does not appear to be on Mimi's list of options. And I am a little worried about that.

###

I felt awful leaving Flavia there after roadside assistance started the Prius.

"I'll be fine," she assured me. "I'm going to take the car out for a nice long drive to charge up the battery. And I'll be out the door at the crack of dawn tomorrow."

She texted later that evening: It’s only 7 pm, but I’m in bed in the bug room because there’s no place to sit downstairs.

The "bug room" is the cottage's second bedroom, which even during Brian's lifetime was infested with Asian lady beetles.

Oh my God, Flavia, I felt so HORRIBLE leaving you there. Will you be able to sleep?

It’s really fine. I did everything I needed to do, and will happily head out in the morning
(although I did cry when I saw the garden, which looks like it misses Brian as much as we do).

I do miss Brian. Though I can't help thinking his involvement with Mimi was a considerable lapse in judgment.

Yep, exercise makes the difference to sleep and full-spectrum sunlight makes the difference to jocularity—though God knows, we need the rain: The Hudson's salinity point is now up to Poughkeepsie; they are actually warning people on low-salt diets not to drink tap water. And algae blooms are blossoming on every tidal inlet up through Garrison.

I have been toying with the idea of visiting Jeanna in New Mexico over Christmas.

Christmas is generally the holiday that makes me the most lachrymose. I often spent it with Brian doing the Jew thing, Chinese restaurants & movies. Last year when Brian was off visiting the real-life Daria in California, I moped about & felt very sorry for myself.

Of course, visiting Jeanna might make me feel even more sorry for myself, 'cause you know—I'd be visiting Jeanna! 😀

Anyway, no deep thoughts on tap this morning.

But if I get the next big chunk of Remuneration out of the way this morning, I can spend the afternoon puttering with the Work in Progress. Those boring landscape descriptions of the tiny, historic city of Kingston won't write theselves!

Mostly yesterday I wrote.

In the afternoon, I toddled off to the gym & did something to my peroneal tendons on the right side. So that last night, I started to have one of those weird cramping episodes that start off in the lateral malleolus—which is that little thing on the side of your ankle you can flex and is actually your fibula—and travel up your leg into your knee. Excruciatingly painful. But I managed to head it off at the pass by tramping down hard & doing some stretching exercises.

Still. Probably wise to lay off the exercise today.

###

The weather has turned cool. There was a frost warning last night on the other side of the Poconos. Two mountain ranges off, but you know—low mountains.

I have yet to see any yellow in the trees but the sumac is all shades of scarlet.

Where did this summer go?

Honestly, I don't know.

I suppose it all went to Brian being dead. And panicking about money—although I could have done that easily enough when Brian wasn't dead. I just didn't.

###

Word count on the Work in Progress is hovering just below the 5,000-word mark, which will be the end of Chapter 1. Still need to write one more Ain't-Mimi-awful section, but must be careful it doesn't descend into parody: Mimi needs to make a suicide attempt in Chapter 9, and the reader must be sympathetic.

###

But today I must do some Remuneration. This month's bills are paid, but more bills will come next month.

It's hard to go back & forth between Remuneration & fiction-writing. They use different parts of my brain, & they both are quite exhausting in their own way (though creative effort also brings that little rush of exhilaration. It would be cool to see what neurotransmitters are involved.)

But somehow I gotta figure out a way to do it.

Drove up to Brian's house yesterday to say goodbye to Daria who is red-eyeing it back to California tonight.

GPS decided to take me on an exciting tour of the eastern Catskills. It was a lovely day, so not unpleasant.

Thing about GPS in the Catskills is that there is no cell coverage. Like nil, nada, niente. And the narrow roads have unexpected forks that GPS does not account for, and the unexpected forks always seem more attractive than the straight & narrow path—do we all see the metaphor here?—so it is very, very easy to get completely lost, especially for people like me who were born with no sense of direction.

When that happens, one must simply trust that GPS will make the necessary adjustments, and that eventually, one will get where one wanted to go.

GPS, in other words, is a lot like the Judeo-Christian God.

###

Brian's old house was having a Prius convention.

'Cause the one unifying characteristic of Brian's sister wives—let's call it like it is!—seems to be that we all drive hybrids.

Daria, Flavia, & Mimi were there, of course. And also Frigg—who, before she retired, wrote every single developmental disability regulation currently extant in the state of New York. Frigg is a rather lovely person, soft-spoken, & as we are both policy wonks, I was immediately drawn to her.

###

I would have invited myself up for a sleepover this week if it had been only Flavia & Daria up at the house.

But I will confess to having a hard time with Mimi, who is a bitter person though it's kinda hard to separate that out from the rest of her bipolar diagnosis. Mimi does not take meds for her bipolar diagnosis; she self-medicates by smoking copious quantities of weed.

I try not to be judgy about that, though naturally, I don't succeed 'cause c'mon: When am I not judgy?

I do know the standard pharmaceutical cocktail for bipolar disease is very, very hard on the body.

But I kinda have to wonder whether Mimi's self-medicating is actually working.

For one thing, she continues to make a lot of really bad executive decisions that have a negative impact on her life.

For another, she is constantly erupting into torrents of the most vituperative rage against people whose transgressions seem pretty minor to moi.

For example: Two of Brian's X-lovers came to Brian-Palooza. They'd stopped wanting to have sex with him—hey! that happens!—one of them because she wanted to invest more energy into her marriage, the other because of some random Ick Factor. We've all experienced that random Ick Factor. One day you wake up, and this person with whom you've been having the hottest sex imaginable just isn't doing it for you anymore. Who knows why? I mean, yeah, sure, there are proximal causes if you care to spend the time analyzing. But why bother? The salient thing is you don't want to fuck them anymore!

Brian was upset by these two rejections.

Brian cried; the sister wives comforted & distracted.

Brian got over it.

At the time of his death, he was great friends with these two X-lovers—Cathy & Kathy as they are! 😀—so why Mimi decided to stalk around in a black cloud, making dramatic proclamations like, How dare those cunts show their faces? is a great mystery to me.

###

"She tried to come up to me," Mimi said as we were all sitting on Brian's porch.

She was talking about Kathy—who is actually a very nice woman if a bit woo-woo even for my rarified woo-woo sensibilities. When she isn't practicing astral projection, Kathy is an educational consultant. She recently set up a computing, code-writing camp for underprivileged girls in Alabama, so I'd say the net impact of Kathy has on this planet is a positive one.

Vinnie had shoved a bag with about fifty cucumber & chicken salad sandwiches at me as I departed from the Palooza the day before. I'd brought about a dozen up to the Catskills; they were sitting on a plate in the middle of the porch. Nobody wanted to eat them.

"She wanted to bond," Mimi said. "I just turned my back. Turned my back! And if she had kept it up, I would have turned around and screamed at her—"

No, you would not, I thought. Because had you, I would have taken you by the scruff of your neck and booted you out the door.

Brian's memorial was an event that I had organized. There isn't any of that at my events.

But no need to waste energy over things that never happened! So, I went on smiling serenely while shooting the sandwiches some nervous side-eye.

Surely, I wouldn't have to take the sandwiches home again! Or would I?

Then Mimi wanted to read us a long drawn out text exchange from somebody named Ruth who had not been at the event yesterday and whose connection to Brian seemed tenuous at best.

"Whoa! This is some real-life Housewives shit!" said Lindsey.

Lindsey is Flavia's cousin and a real-life reality TV producer. She'd shown up half an hour after I had. She does not drive a Prius.

I fell instantly in love with Lindsey after discovering that she, too, had been urging Flavia to watch The Real Housewives of Miami.

"I keep telling her," Lindsey said to me, "Miami this season is everything!"

"OmyGAWD!" I said. "Larsa & Lisa!"

"She won't stop following my X-boyfriend on Instagram!!!" we crowed in unison.

###

Daria had slipped off the porch and into the house to sort more through Brian's books.

In the car afterwards, she confided to me that she had issues with Mimi, too. "This is the fourth time she's told that Ruth story, and it gets longer every time."

Daria is an extremely beautiful & intriguing woman. Kind of an Anaïs Nin prototype:

She was born in Mexico City. Her father was a Basque priest who fled from Franco's Spain! She speaks five languages!

And she's just immensely charming. Seductive, one might say.

We want to be friends because we were both so close to Brian, and I think we have the potential to be friends. But, of course, there has to be a basis for friendship other than the fact that we both loved Brian. And it is that basis we are trying to discover.

Should we do a writers group together? Daria asked.

Well, I would guess that I am a much better writer than Daria. No puffing or posturing there: Writing happens to be the one thing I do exceptionally well.

And writing is one of the few things I take very seriously. I suspect more seriously than Daria.

So I suspect if we do the writing group thing and the writing group falls apart really fast because neither of us is particularly invested in the other's actual writing, it might actually be deleterious to our burgeoning friendship.

So, I think instead, I am going to join her Finnegan's Wake reading group. It meets once a week on Zoom.

And we will grow the intimacy from there.

In the meantime, we tromped around a weird little Ukrainian summer camp and shared backstories:

Gotta say, Daria's backstory may even be more interesting than mine!

And I have an interesting backstory.

Finished David McCullough's extraordinary biography of John Adams.

Actually cried at the scene where the old curmudgeon opens his eyes on his deathbed for the last time & croaks, Thomas Jefferson survives! before expiring.

This one I didn't read; I listened to the audiobook on innumerable drives to Middletown, and then back & forth & around in Ithaca. I'd been wanting to tackle the book since I watched the excellent HBO miniseries John Adams, but it was the kind of book I knew I wouldn't be able to read as it contains hundreds of pages on John Adams's theories of governance, & I mean, Zzzzzzzzz.

But I also figured those theories of governance are relevant—particularly to the political situation today—& that if I were driving, I wouldn't fall asleep while parsing them.

###

Literally speaking, John Adams was wrong: Jefferson died about five hours before Adams did.

Figuratively speaking, though, Adams was right: Jefferson (despite the business with Sally Hemings) remains far more influential today than Adams—a bit weird when you think about it because Adams was a fanboy of iron-fisted federal control, all the rage right now, whereas the Rosseau-influenced Jefferson was an ardent supporter of individual rights & frequent revolution. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, Jefferson once wrote in a letter to Adams's son-in-law.

On the other hand, Donald Trump only wishes he'd legislated John Adams' Alien & Sedition Acts.

###

In other news, Brian-Palooza went well. Good in-person turnout; people driving from as far away as Boston, Vermont, & Pennsylvania; a respectable Zoom contingent.

Brian's niece turned up! A lovely, 30-ish young woman. I was so glad to see her.

I spent most of the time I wasn't emceeing chattering with Brian's neighbor Willie (not his real name) who turns out to have been the chairman of Manhattan's Democratic Party for 15 years. We talked politics! Why are Democrats such losers? And he asked me for my phone number—no, nothing like that! He is a billion years old and very, very gay; in fact, he retold his story about knocking on Brian's door to borrow lube when it came time for us to share remembrances. (Water-based or silicon-based? was Brian's reply)—because, "You have such an inventive mind!"

If only I weren't planning to be cremated! She Had Such An Inventive Mind would look so good on a tombstone.

###

Tranquili-Tea put on a good spread!

Just look how adorable & The-Importance-of-Being-Ernest-ish these cucumber sandwiches are!

Vinnie, the husband of the woman who runs the tea shop, stood listening to our Brian remembrances with tears in his eyes.

Mind you, Vinnie is a very conventional guy who's lived a totally conventional life.

I was actually rather terrified that he & his wife Vicki would recoil in horror at some of the stories that were being shared.

But afterwards, Vinnie sought me out. "I felt so privileged that you chose us to be a part of this," Vinnie said.

And that was Brian's great gift, you know. He saw the multiplicity of dimensions that people exist on and he focused them into something singular and beautiful through the generosity of his own enormous heart.

Brian, I will miss you...

Hacked out 2,000 words yesterday, and I do mean "hacked:" Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, I had a fantasy that my life was a massive hunk of stone—well. not so massive anymore—from which I was whittling huge chunks in meaningless pursuit—well. not so meaningless—of filthy lucre.

Sigh...

As a palate cleanser between Remunerative bouts, I watched multiple documentaries on the life of Martha Stewart.

My horrible cousin went through a Martha Stewart phase sometime in her early 20s. Alicia was constantly pumping out gilded wreaths & sachet bunches that made me want to barf. Thing is, though, Alicia has horrible maudlin taste, which came across in all her crafty shit, whereas Martha Stewart has excellent taste. The gilded wreaths in these documentaries were really quite exquisite!

Of course, Martha Stewart comes across as a horrible human being. All the PR manipulation in the world can't scrub the taint of "cold abusive bitch" from her.

Apologists throughout the documentaries kept saying, "If she were a man, you wouldn't be calling her cold abusive bitch."

Right! I'd be calling her "cold abusive bastard"!

I don't value late stage capitalism's instruments of validation at all.

###

The magnitude of Martha Stewart's accomplishments is impressive, though.

She singlehandedly invented both the lifestyle industry ($6.3 trillion globally) and the DIY industry ($861 billion).

How did she do it???

Intelligence. Vision. Innate talent. Being in the right place at the right time.

Also, apparently, she only needs to sleep three hours a night.

This must be why I am a failure. If I don't sleep eight hours a night, it's hard for me to function.

Reddit is just filled with people who only wanna sleep three hours a night!!! Just think of all the stuff I could do if I had five more hours in the day!!!

What? Watch more True Crime documentaries on Netflix? Scroll on your phone more often? Play more video games?

Plus, if you don't sleep, you can't dream, and dreaming is the most fabulous thing there is.

###

Today, I must hammer out another 2,000 words. And bake a sour cherry pie for Flavia—Brian used to bake her one every year, & I went sour cherry picking in July with the express intention of making one for her.

I will bring the pie when I meet up with Flavia, Mimi, & Daria tonight.

I am in a prickley mood, so I am actually not looking forward to this.

The Women Brian Left Behind! UGH.

I mean, I loved Brian. I miss him. But what are we supposed to do? Build a suttee? Immolate ourselves on it?

I'm sure I'm just being unbecomingly contentious and will recover my equanimity by this evening.

Firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics—he didn't like the new jobs numbers!—may be the worst thing that Trump has done yet, because it moves us right into that 1984 reality: The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

In 1937, Stalin ordered the execution of census officials for statistics showing population declines due to famine & purges.

During China's Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962), Mao Tse Tung (who somehow changed his name to Mao Zedong while I wasn't looking) sent statisticians to reeducation camps for reporting true famine & crop failure statistics.

Henceforth, you cannot believe a single number coming out of the Trump administration. Not the jobs numbers, not the inflation numbers, not the number of voters casting their election ballots.

Moral of the story: Statistician! Not a safe job.

###

Meanwhile, chattered to Ichabod on the phone for about an hour yesterday & texted with Daria.

Hearing Ichabod's voice took me straight out of the rather awful & claustrophobic here-and-now into some happy place where I felt whole and competent & reasonably together.

In the less than satisfactory here-&-now, I use cheap, flimsy Scotch tape to keep myself together.

At one point, I was talking about my conversation with Public Policy Eleanor, how impressed I had been by her remarks on her marriage to Glenn, and Ichabod said, "Right! And that's why I don't want to be in a relationship until I'm feeling more emotionally self-sufficient. I am so over this co-dependency thing!"

And the little lightbulb floating over my head pinged into high beam!

Right!

My entire life, my definition of a successful romantic relationship has always been another voice in my inner dialogue. Telepathic communion. One soul with two hearts. The very definition of codependency.

And that just does not work.

In fact, it's destructive.

It's too bad I'm learning all these Important Life Lessons too late in life to actually do anything with them.

But at least I'm learning.

###

With Daria, I talked about Brian.

Brian had a real gift for friendship, and in particular, a gift for friendship with women.

His friendship with Daria may have had a sexual component. (Mine did not.) I've never pried. But it was essentially friendship, not some strawberry flavor of codependency.

I’ve had a couple very rough days, Daria texted. A lot of the time I feel that my heart resists the reality (the finality) of it, as if I had compartmentalized the understanding and mostly can’t face it. At moments it hits me in full force, the gates open, and I feel bereft and confused

...as if I had compartmentalized the understanding, I repeated. Excellent phrasing. Yes, the grief has escaped from its box.

OMG, I had a total breakdown yesterday, for the first time, Daria said. I sobbed like a fucking animal. Was with my girlfriend, thank god. Oddly, the only words I could get out were “where is he, where has he gone? I still feel him but he’s so silent.”

Then she added, Don’t know why I say animal, animals don’t sob, I felt like an animal because I was unmoored from my reason. All I felt was the incomprehension of death.

The incomprehension of death...

###

Brian read my journal every day. Brian talked to me about what I wrote. Brian really saw me.

Brian's death doesn't render me invisible exactly, but the reflection in the mirror has lost detail somehow. It's like Corinthians 13:12 sez!

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

About six weeks ago, I saw a craigslist posting for a collective household in T-burg: Someone had just bought a Big Old House; they wanted sympatico people to move into it to form a sympatico household. Numerous photos of the house, of the grounds. They liked animals! They wanted people with pets!

I immediately dashed off a reply: Here are my many virtues. Blah, blah, blah.

I was disappointed when I did not hear back.

Okay, I thought. Well, not everyone wants to live with a septuagenarian. Or maybe they had all the residents but one lined up, and I was just not that one.

Three days ago, I saw the listing again and replied again—a tad more plaintively.

And did not hear back.

This irked me.

I mean, my reply had been a masterpiece! Flash fiction of the highest order! Sprightly yet subtle! Informative without the cringe factor!

Maybe I'm just repulsive! I thought. Back in the days of the Little Store, on days when we made practically no sales, I would often wonder about my own repulsiveness. I figured it was sort of like a radio beacon; depending on the weather or the white noise, it would pulse strongly or erratically, but it was always there, and people sensed it, and that's why they didn't flock to the Little Store to buy dozens of bottles of my own trademarked Monterey hot sauces Beast of Eden & The Chilis of Wrath!

Brian was very good at quelling this particular anxiety loop.

"Repeat after me," he'd say. "Say it loud, say it proud: 'I Am a Real Human Girl'."

He also found it extremely hilarious, which is exactly the right reaction for someone like me. I need to be laughed out of my own psychic contortions. The "Poor you" schtick doesn't work on me because even at my most self-pitying, I am perfectly cognizant of the fact that my life is better than 90% of the lives on this planet.

###

Anyway, the woman who bought the house finally emailed me yesterday, enormously apologetic that she hadn't contacted me sooner: I've been in the process of moving! My mom came to town to help!

We Zoomed this morning. And were amazingly sympatico.

She is an untenured professor at Cornell, proud member of the SDA (Social Democrats of America), writing a book on the history of child care labor in the U.S., how various stakeholders (labor unions, immigrant rights advocacy groups, federal agencies, municipal task forces, nanny and domestic worker placement agencies) value child care labor. She is also drop-dead gorgeous, so naturally, my mamala mind began sizing her up as a potential Ichabod mate. I restrained myself from asking how wide her hips are, though.

Next step will be a meeting with the other house residents and a tour of the house. Conflicting schedules have pushed that meeting into August.

If all goes well, I'll give one month's notice at the beginning of September and move in October.

Fingers crossed!

###

Other than that...

I have been going through the motions simply because one must, but the spark is not there.

I remind myself: Good habits take a long time to make, so it's unwise to break them. If you stop doing all the beneficial things—exercise! self-care! make-up! cooking dinner! laundry!—you fall into a kind of mental swamp from which it becomes increasingly difficult to hoist yourself out. Those little habits are grounding. Grounding is something I have issues with having no earth signs whatsoever in my astrological chart.

###

I harvested my first cucumber from the Hyde Park garden:

The tomatoes still have a month or so before they come in.

###

Yesterday afternoon, I wandered over to the New Paltz garden for the first time in three weeks. The garden was hosting a mid-harvest potluck. I took one look at all the cheerful, earnest, handsome gardeners with their endless variations on cucumbers in yogurt dressing, and thought, Yes! Babbling affably to strangers is my one Great Superpower, but I cannot do this.

And ran away.

But not before I checked out my plot. It is once more overgrown with weeds, but the weeds are not unmanageable—I could get rid of them in a single day now that the heat wave is broken. Plus there is one little tomato plant! I grew it a peat cup from seed and planted it with a bunch of other seedlings, and they all died but this tomato plant survived my neglect! Surely, it deserves other vegetables! Basil, I'm thinking. I didn't plant any basil in the Hyde Park garden this year, and I miss my pesto.

###

However much of a struggle human company and good habits are, I am still able to lose myself if the distraction is right.

I've been speed-reading my way through the complete works of Jennifer Haigh. Finished Baker Towers, her first novel about the small Pennsylvania coal mining town where she grew up.

Kinda interesting to see how Haigh's literary chops have evolved. Baker Towers, written in 2004, is kinda your straight-up Kristin Hannah-style novel, simple declarative sentences, not much in the way of thematic connective tissue between the various characters' POV sections. Heat and Light, on the other hand, written in 2016, is extremely ambitious from a literary point of view with a rather complex figurative subtext and a surprising end point. I sense the Jennifer Egan influence.

###

I also watched Andrea Arnold's American Honey.

American Honey is a road trip film, an odyssey. Eighteen-year-old Texas girl living in squalid conditions with an abusive father runs off with an itinerant magazine crew. High jinx ensue.

It won the Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and though Sean Baker's The Florida Project came out only one year after, it's difficult not to imagine that American Honey didn't have a profound influence on Baker's movie. They are both describing the same phenomenon, how youth transforms otherwise harsh & unforgiving environments where people stuggle for survival into wild adventures filled with promise.

It's a long movie, nearly three hours, but I was transfixed throughout.

Two-thirds of the reviews I read afterwards complained that the movie just went on and on and on, but nothing happened! I think those reviewers have spent too much time in the Marvel Universe. This kind of story best is told by seamless integration of the music, the character acting, the improvised dialogue, the way locations are shot, the vibes in short. It would be poorly served by a linear narrative grid.

I'm bored with grieving.

Brian would have thoroughly sympathized.

Brian was one of the least sentimental humans I've ever met.

###

Daria & I are sentimental enough to want to do a memorial. Flavia is not interested at all in doing a memorial, says Brian wouldn't have cared one way or another, which may or may not be true, but anyway, even if it is true, is entirely irrelevant: Memorials are for the survivors.

Flavia's reluctance does raise some issues, though. Like is she reluctant because she is too prostrate with grief to participate in anything? As the kinda/sorta Official Grieving Widow, will she resent it—consciously or unconsciously—if two survivors lower down on the Grief Ladder seize the initiative here?

No real plans have been made other than a vague commitment to the third or fourth week in September, a date far enough ahead in an indeterminate future to seem doable.

But if we really want to do it, we're gonna have to begin to make some concrete plans sooner rather than later. Pin down an actual date; pin down a venue. New Paltz is the obvious venue, but I've also been wondering about Norma's, BB's & my favorite cafe in Wappingers Falls, or Tranquili-Tea, that adorable little rabbit hole in (of all bizarre places) Middletown that we stumbled across that day:

I had a busy weekend: Democratic Committee meeting, D&D with the Boneyard BoyZ, & a tea party that doubled as a Democratic fundraiser. Also I baked a sour cherry pie:

The aesthetics are off. As I say, I am just terrible with crusts! But the pie tastes great.

I hadn't exercised in 10 days, but yesterday I trotted off to the gym and today I plan to tromp before it gets too hot.

###

I've been trying to think of a plot to graft on to the Neversink backstory.

Of course, it should focus on the animosity between the folks who've been farming in these parts for three or four generations and the recent emigrants from the Big City, 'cause that's a very real dynamic in these parts plus the whole water theft—They drowned our homes so their city could have water!—demands it.

Possibly a young, idealistic Brooklyn immigrant runs for the village planning board? Maybe there's still some arcane zoning law that she opposes that allows stores to be built in the middle of the reservoir? (But why would she oppose it? There are tons of arcane laws dating back centuries in every town in these parts! People just ignore them.) And, of course, on the actual night of the election, the reservoir recedes so you can see the chimneys & spires & mercantile towers of the drowned town.

Writing style I'm aiming for is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Susanna Clark does a most excellent job of integrating fantasma into everyday.

I will mull it over some more.

But not too much. Some things just naturally work themselves out while you're writing.

Went sour cherry picking with the fabulous

rebeccmeister.

rebeccmeister is (as my beloved Marybeth used to say) a real find. Sparkling, intelligent, humorous, plus she is the change she hopes to see in a completely nonperformative way. In a perfect world, she would live two blocks away from me so that on rainy days, I could race over to her house & watch her retool chair splines. Learn from her example how to use tools!

She wore the coolest dress, too. Its pattern was leaf ants!

The morning had gotten off to an inauspicious start on account of the propane running out before it could fuel the flames necessary to heat the water that makes my coffee.

I'd had to drive up to the Farmcart Coffee pop-up in town, where I splurged on a cappuccino & eavesdropped on a conversation between the ridiculously beautiful barista and two ridiculously beautiful young women, all of whom had recently (and most ridiculously of all) emigrated from the Deep South to fuckin' Wallkill, New York.

Why would anyone emigrate for any reason to Wallkill, New York?

"We're Jehovah's Witnesses," the beautiful barista explained with a radiant smile.

Oh, of course.

Wallkill is actually the center of the American Jehovah's Witnesses branch. They publish The Watchtower here! And also 17 million Bibles every year! Old Testament only. The JWs are not big on the New Testament.

The barista was just so lovely! We chattered about the differences between Italian and Spanish, how the two languages had practically identical grammars but differed in the way they were voiced, Spanish using various accent marks to signify pronunciation, while Italian relies on doubling up consonants—

I remembered then that my very favorite TaxBwana client of 2024 had been a Jehovah's Witness preacher. His house had burned down with all his tax documents. I'd used forensic accounting to rectify them. He was very elegant and intelligent, and we'd had a free-ranging conversation about all number of fascinating things, and it wasn't until the very end of our third meeting that he handed me a card with his JW ID.

Why don't I become a Jehovah's Witness? I wondered for 10 minutes or so.

They're not big on Jesus! They recognize that "infinity" is an impossible mathematical concept, not an architectural template for the afterlife: There is only room for 144,000 in the Jehovah's Witness Heaven. Best of all, they seem to take care of each other! Like if I was a Jehovah's Witness, even now 10 Jehovah's Witnesses would be showing up at the casa to swap out that propane tank! And I wouldn't be late for my meetup with Rebecca.

###

I picked six pounds of sour cherries. This is enough for three pies.

Originally, I had planned to pick enough for BB and me. BB was a talented cook & baker, and each year, he baked three special pies for Flavia, his long-term honey. Sour cherry pie was always the first.

This year, I guess, I will bake a sour cherry pie for Flavia. Though I am an indifferent baker; my pie crust in particular has the texture of shoe leather.

But it's the thought that counts, right?

I'll freeze it until I see her again.

###

It was 91° at Samascott by the time Rebecca & I bid adieu and 95° by the time I got back to Wallkill.

I swapped out the propane tank! Pretty easily! So, I no longer have to become a Jehovah's Witness.

I pitted the cherries.

I will bake my pies today.

###

Afterwards, I sat out on the backporch and read The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories. It grew dark. The fireflies came out.

There is a ghost story I'd like to write for BB though I don't think he'd like it very much.

He never even read Elliot Roosevelt's Motor Car, which I actually dedicated to him.

Back in 2018, I did a lot of canvassing and campaigning for a Congressional candidate called Jeff Beals.

Beals lost—but in the tradition of such things, his "victory" party went on, and I somehow managed to talk BB into accompanying me to it. BB absolutely hated parties! I wouldn't say I love them—love or hate depends on my mood—but I am generally pretty good at them since it doesn't trouble me in the least to walk up to perfect strangers & begin chattering away at them.

The party was in Woodstock.

And BB lived ostensibly in Kerhonksen but really in a remote settlement deep within the Catskills Park that was once called Riggsville—presumably after a 19th century tannery owner.

To get from Woodstock to Riggsville, you have to drive across the Ashokan Reservoir, which supplies New York City with its drinking water.

Twelve towns were drowned to create the Ashokan Reservoir!

Cottages, stores, church steeples, everything!

I suppose they relocated the cemeteries—or at least the ones they knew about.

We drove under a full moon. The reservoir tried to drown that, too! But the weirdest thing was the deer that had lined up along practically every section of the road! I kid you not! Like every single deer in the Catskill Mountains. It was like they had all come out to watch us, and, of course, we had to drive very, v-e-r-y slowly in case one came charging across the road.

Anyway, it gave me an idea for a story...

Suppose the deer were the metamorphosed inhabitants of the drowned villages?

And every four years they turn out to exercise their rights as American citizens to vote?

That would be the story backdrop. Not sure what the actual plot would be.

Except that the story would be called Neversink. There is also a Neversink Reservoir that supplies water to NYC, though we didn't drive along it that night, and what could be a better title about the enchanted inhabitants of a drowned village than Neversink?

Brian's house was hard.

I brought lunch & bubbles. (Brian was a big fan of blowing bubbles. There's nothing he liked to do more at the end of a day than smoke ganja & sit out on his front porch blowing bubbles.)

But as far as any of the practical tasks that had to get done?

I was useless.

Fortunately Brian's excellent neighbors—an elderly and charmingly licentious gay couple—had already cleaned the kitchen. It was more spotless now than I had ever seen it when Brian was alive. I fed them lunch.

"We will miss Brian," Willie—the elder of the two—remarked. "Do you know how we became friends? Well, one time, we were entertaining a trick—"

"He wasn't really a trick!" interjected Eugene. "We just liked to call him that!"

"—and we ran out of lube. So, I walk across the road, bang on Brian's door, and say, 'Hey, do you happen to have any lube I could borrow?'

"And without missing a beat, he asks, 'Water or silicon-based?'"

###

As soon as I got to Brian's, I felt utterly fatigued. Denatured somehow—like all the protein in my body had turned to jellyfish protoplasm.

All I could do was collapse on Brian's front steps and prattle on & on, hopfully entertainingly—to Brian's gay neighbors (but they had already cleaned the kitchen—and since I was amusing them, that kinda meant that I had cleaned the kitchen, too, right?), to Flavia's friend Betsy who had dropped everything to support Flavia for four days even though she was not the biggest Brian fan. So I sat while Flavia and Mimi did the tour of the house, tackled the stuff in the fridge and the washing machine, went around the cottage unplugging appliances.

Then the four of use went out to the garden.

It was nowhere as big or various as it has been in past years. Which, of course, made me think, Huh! Did he...?

There are a couple of tomato plants and half a dozen chilis I could rehome. But that would mean spending an hour in that garden, and that garden was crawling with tics. Tiny deer tics, the ones that give you Lyme's disease. All but impossible to distinguish from dirt flecks.

Much of my entertaining conversation with Betsy had had to do with her two-year battle with Lyme's disease. It is not a disease I want to contract, so I don't want to be digging in Brian's garden.

I will go up & water it, though. On weeks that don't get much rain. I only live 25 miles away although the drive there takes me on backroads over the Shawanagunk Ridge and through the Catskills, so it's at least an hour's drive.

And I'll sauce the tomatoes when they're ripe.

###

The next day I had to get new tires and rear shocks for my car.

Mavis Automotive told me the work would take four hours at most to complete.

Belinda picked me up, fed me lunch, took me to see a really bad movie: Jurassic World Rebirth.

Dropped me back off at Mavis at the four-hour mark.

Looking up at the little Prius on its hydrolift with its wheels disassembled, was exactly like looking down at a surgical patient on an operating table. And I noticed the customer service people lied just as glibly as medical personnel: Oh, nothing's wrong! It's just taking a little longer than we...

Another hour, I was told. Ninety minutes, tops.

If they'd just fuckin' told me, It will be finished when it's finished. Leave it here. We'll call you tomorrow...

I must say, Belinda despite her Trumpishness was an excellent friend. When I texted her I was on the verge of a massive panic attack, she swooped down & took me to the local Dairy Queen (which she owns) for dinner. The DQ cheeseburger is Not Bad.

Then Belinda took me back to Mavis.

I wandered around to the back of garage and watched the mechanic thrashing about with my car.

The culprit was some sort of nut that could not be dislodged from some sort of bar.

Even with no mechanical aptitude whatsoever, I understood perfectly well that no amount of torque or elbow grease was gonna get that nut off that rod because that nut was stripped. That nut would only be removed with some kind of drill apparatus.

But the mechanic didn't understand this. He was growing more & more desperate to grip as he twisted his clamp round & round that nut.

And I thought, Uh oh. Because I have been a charge nurse, and I know that expression I saw on that mechanic's face! It was that panic that comes when you are trying to cover because you have made a potentially disasterous mistake.

Whenever I saw that expression as a charge nurse, I would try to take that nurse off an assignment as soon as possible—not because he or she was a bad nurse, but because once you get that rattled, you cannot do anything right, you will just keep making horrible mistakes!

By this time, it was 6pm, which is when Mavis officially closes.

They wanted to stay until the whole thing was fixed.

I figured that wouldn't be till midnight. So, I said, "Absolutely not! If you put the car together, will it be driveable?"

Well...yeah... but it will make an awful lot of noise.

And it did make noise. It sounded like the ghost of Keith Moon was beginning his world tour in my trunk.

But I got it back to the casa safely. And back to Mavis at 8 the next morning. Where it took them another two hours to fix it. Different mechanic!

###

Then I went off to the Hyde Park Community Garden, where I knew I'd be able to regroup. Tics are never seen in the Hyde Park Community Garden!

Weeded. Lay more straw.

Despite my massive neglect, tomatoes, cucumbers, & peppers are coming along quite! nicely:

Especially my wonderful volunteer California poppy:

Afterwards, under the cool shade of the Linden tree, I had my first conversation with Claude that was not about gardening.

We talked about growing old. Both of us had expected to die by 30.

And youthful mistakes. You expect to die by 30, if you make a lot of those.

I like Claude. He is very solid.

Thinking is hard.

Feeling is impossible. Except for anxiety.

(Wait! Is anxiety even an emotion?)

I haven't slept more than four hours a night since Brian died.

Sleeping would make me feel a whole lot better.

February 14, 2013! That's when I first met BB.

Here is what I wrote about him:

You May Think This Entry Is About Industrial Architecture, But Really It's About Sex

I spent a very interesting day with a very interesting guy doing one of my favorite things in the world – no, not making love, but walking around a postindustrial apocalyptic landscape and looking for architectural talismans, clues to transience, proof of what was once there and what will one day be there in its place. I don't know why I find this so fascinating, but I've been doing this since I was a very young kid, and mostly alone because the only other person in the world who shares my preoccupation with this is Ben. BB was very happy to tramp around with me, and I think he enjoyed himself but I suspect what he was really enjoying was me enjoying myself.

The Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn is utterly fascinating and filled with weird things – like this Russian sign over the nondescript door to this most unprepossessing little building. What the hell was this? We were close to the maritime reach, and Greenpoint was a big shipbuilding center well into the 20th century with light industry, satellite foundaries, glass factories, rope factories. I'm thinking at one time this must have been one of those bizarre little sailors' halls for Russian merchant marines far from home. But who the hell knows?

I liked BB a lot. I think he liked me, but the dynamic got more unsettling the farther we strayed from small talk. I'm a big fan of small talk. I don't actually like process-oriented conversations unless they're specific planning sessions about who is going to take out the trash, who is going to vacuum and who is going to cook dinner on Tuesday. I am of the opinion that real communication takes place in the interstices. It's not what is said, it's how it's said. I particularly don't like process conversations with people I've just met.

Of course, BB is someone from the Online Dating Site. He's also polyamorous, has lots of girlfriends including a primary. And of course, we talked a lot about sex.

We went back to his apartment, which is just a terrific apartment – converted industrial space with a large piano and tons of books and interesting art on the walls and this wire on which he had trained an ivy plant, which had obviously been there for years and years. Amazing view outside his front window of the water treatment plant which has four minarets just like a Russian Orthodox church. Or maybe they're stylized sculptures of giant garlic bulbs.

We sipped a very delicious port, and nibbled baguettes and prosciutto and a nice runny Camembert, and talked somemore about sex. Listen. I'm gonna have to get back on the bicycle sooner or later, right? So I told him I would probably end up having sex with him at some time in the future but that I would take it slow and then when it happened, I would make the moves. And I would have to say that this made him… nervous.

At a certain point, he started talking about his "super power." Which is apparently the ability to make women come merely by telling them to come.

BB is actually the second guy I've met in NYC who has this super power, by the way. I have no reason to doubt him. He's very charismatic. But this whole I-make-women-come-but-I have-to-masturbate-to-orgasm-myself thing squicks me out a bit. It's kind of like: I want you to lose control, but I'm not gonna lose control. The Dom thing, in other words.

The Dom thing is not my thing at all.

I crave mutuality.

The most times I ever came in a row was 11. I kept count. I think I was supposed to lose myself in the sheer rush of sensation, and to a large extent I did, but you know, I'm always observing. The perp in question is actually a middlingly famous guy so I won't name him. He pleasured me exactly as though he was winding a clock with a kind of clinical degree of interest that made the experience – despite the physical pleasure – rather… degrading, I suppose would be the word.

Anyway, by the time I left BB's apartment I had decided I wanted to be his new best friend, but that I didn't want to have sex with him.

BB is just a terrific playmate. I could have real fun with BB, and who knows – maybe I will. But my favorite sex has always been very uncomplicated sex – the physical contact, the contours of someone's naked body fitting to my naked body, the smells, the tastes. The animal passion of it. I really don't want to be programmed to orgasm like Pavlov's dog. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It just ain't for me.

Now!

A very interesting thing happened after that: BB found my online diary. I have no idea how! I may have mentioned that I kept one, but I certainly would not have given him the link. In those days, I patrolled the boundaries between my—ha, ha, ha—real life and my online journal a lot more rigorously than I do today. I don't have to patrol the boundaries today! Absolutely no one is interested anymore in long form prose.

BB was aggrieved! The entry had sparked a somewhat lively debate. Resolved: BB is a jerk, Yea or Nay. I think the debate squicked him more than the actual entry.

He commented on the entry!

Can't say I'm enjoying this

So I'm the "narcissist" "Dom" etc. y'all are talking about. Patrizia spends 4 hours hanging out with me, and thinks she's got it all figured out. Fine with me, except it might be nice to be kept in the loop one-on-one.

I'm not going to 'answer' what has been said/surmised about me. I don't enjoy being the object of ill-informed (not necessarily wrong) projections about who I am, but since short of the Vulcan mind-meld, projection is all we have, I'll have to live with it.

I just would have preferred to have had some of this conversation directly.

BB

Then he called me. "Do you want to talk about this?"

Well, I didn't really. I would have much preferred him to remain an amusing character on the page. But I felt I kinda owed it to him, so we met. Can't remember much about the conversation except that a Treaty of Friendship came out of it, and thereafter, we would meet every couple of weeks to tramp around Greenpoint.

And a month or so later, something else happened that was pivotal:

If You're an Artist, Move to Pittsburgh or Detroit

Had a really fabulous time w/BB last night.

First we did the urban archeologist thing, traipsing around Greenpoint, which is just so filled with interesting things to see. The hipster scene is fully entrenched. The Yuppies are ju-u-ust beginning to tiptoe in behind the hipsters. In ten years, unless there's some kind of major economic collapse in NYC, Greenpoint will be fully condo-ized, filled with bright, hopeful little shops selling upscale, over-priced cheeses and kitchenware. So it's a kind of transient scene. In a way like strolling through a large, interactive Tibetan Buddhist sand painting with graffiti and secret gardens behind barbed wire. The wind blows gentrification.

If you're an artist, you want to move to Pittsburgh or Detroit. Not Brooklyn.

Back at his house, BB had prepared this truly scrumptious North Indian meal from scratch that included an amazing green mango curry and a rather wonderful peanut/habanero chutney followed by home-baked carrot cake and whipped cream. I gorged myself.

All the time, we kept up this fabulous conversation – about our respective lives, about the world around us –

The most fabulous thing actually happened after he drove me home, though, and I discovered… I had left my fucking purse at his loft.

Stupid, no? Muy, muy stupid.

999 guys out of 1,000 would have said, "Oh, too bad. Come by and you can pick it up on Friday. Unless you want to come back now and take the subway home." But BB just turned the car back toward Brooklyn and kept talking — I think we were discussing the history of repeating rifles in America on a parallel track with the Ganesh-ification of Lawn Guyland.

I couldn't tell if he was pissed off at me or not –

"I feel really, really stupid," I said.

"And guilty too?" BB asked.

"Oh. Well. Yeah! That's a prerequisite for feeling stupid, isn't it? I mean guilt and stupidity. They kind of go together like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr –"

"Well, good!" said BB. "I'm sure I can use your guilt to my material advantage at some point. If not in this lifetime, then the next. I don't really get too bent out of shape about stuff like this. Shit happens. You go with the flow. Of course, if it turns out you left your passport or green card at my house, you'll have to walk back from Brooklyn."

BB is like the most perfect playmate ever. Just loads and loads of fun. And this is really what I want in my life. Playmates. That's what's been missing.

That and the $126 million Lotto payoff.

I was totally blown away by how cool BB was about doing a U-turn on the Long Island Parkway & cruising back to get my purse!

Most people would have been far more begrudging. Not me, I will add. I'm always pretty cool about that kind of stuff, too. So, it was obvious that BB & I resonated to the same cosmic frequency.

BB—Brian—died.

Very suddenly.

I'm not distraught because honestly, I can't believe it. A world without Brian is absolutely unfathomable to me.

###

Brian was the only person I knew who liked to go tramping through the seemy, unraveling parts of cities as much as I do it. The science of Why is THIS here, doncha know. "Economic geography," we called it.

Once, trudging along the Greenpoint waterfront, we happened upon the Hafiz poem above, scribbled like graffiti on a broken tide break.

"That may be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Brian said.

Of course, it was. The Hafiz poem described Brian to a T. Brian's love hit the whole sky. Brilliant, hilarious, generous, stubborn, iconoclastic. A bon vivant. A teddy bear. He'd say he hated all religion, but that was not entirely true. I'd say he was very religious. His religion was kindness.

###

He was a regular reader of my online journal. The only one of my real-life friends who was. (I have become real-life friends with a lot of the people who read my journal, but they didn't start out as friends.)

Sometimes, he commented on my journal, but more frequently he texted me, often reprovingly: We were firmly in the Sibling Zone, bickered and made up regularly like brother and sister.

The woo-woo aspects of my personality drove him quite mad. He was not a fan of the woo-woo.

In particular, he hated my theory that humans more or less choose their reincarnations.

I don't doubt that you had memories of a past life, and have no facts upon which to base a doubt that you had such a life, he texted furiously.

But saying you chose this life is an assertion that stands apart from reincarnation itself. Nothing about reincarnation implies that you get choices. So far as I've heard from others on this topic, it's the choices you make in this life and other past lives that determine the next life.

You remembered vividly a life lived in the past. What I was asking is what if anything you remember about the choice you made to live this one.

So let me give you my motivation. I HATE AND ABOMINATE the assertion that people chose to be rounded up, stripped naked, starved and shoved into gas chambers

###

The last time we hung out—little over a week ago—we talked almost exclusively about death, which of course being me, I'm inclined to see as prophetic (except how scary would that be?)

"Don't you think I'd rather be an atheist?" I asked him. "I'd much rather be an atheist! It would be a much better fit with my personality! It is a total fucking drag every time I drop a quarter on the sidewalk to have to think, Now how does this teensy-tiny action fit into the Universal Plan? But I can't—"

"'Cause you buh-leeeve!" Brian sang.

"No, that's what's interesting. I don't believe. I have faith. Belief and faith are qualitatively different. And there's nothing I can do to shake my faith. Believe me, I have tried."

"Well, we could always arrange to have ICE kidnap you," Brian remarked cozily. "Maybe a little waterboarding? Put you right!"

Brian was a funny guy!

###

We actually had a date this coming Saturday: The Gardiner Cafe is hosting a storytelling open mike á la that NPR show The Moth, and we signed up for it.

Part of me thinks I ought to go. As a tribute to Brian.

Another part of me thinks I would stand up in front of that microphone & cry hysterically for five long minutes until they dragged me off the stage.

Of course, that might not be a bad thing.

I haven't cried yet.

###

Meanwhile, I'm noticing all sorts of spectral disturbances in recent photos I took of Brian.

Like in this photo, he has a halo:

And in this photo, he has angel wings:

Brian himself would have rolled his eyes & made gagging sounds if I'd ever pointed anything like that out.

Met up with BB, back from Germany.

We caught up on gossip—more on his side than my side. I live an exceedingly quiet life.

And then we talked about death, which is something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently.

"Wait! You think about death?" I asked.

"Oh, only like every day for one or two hours," BB replied. "And have been since I was a kid."

##

Did I think about death when I was a kid? Only once that I can remember: I was three, maybe four years old, and sitting in the back of my grandfather's old Chrysler. (Even today, the smell of stale cigarette smoke is comforting to me because it reminds me of my grandfather!) We were parked at Coney Island. My mother, my two aunts, and my little cousin David were also crammed into the Chrysler, and my grandfather was expounding in his melifluous voice about how one day soon, the sea would rise up and swallow the land—

Four-year-old children have no sense of time, so I figured that my grandfather was saying that the sea would rise up in 10 minutes or so. And I would cease to be...

I didn't have any particularly negative associations with my own extinction. It was just something that was going to happen.

But I was practical. Clearly one should avoid extinction if one could. Why don't we just drive away? I chirped at my grandfather.

"Wait!" said BB. "You believe in reincarnation! So, didn't you think you would be reincarnated?"

"Well, I had very strong memories of having once been somebody else at that point in my life," I said. "But I don't think I was old enough to attach any system of causality. So, no. I didn't think about reincarnation. I only thought about the enormous wave that would wipe everything out—and me with it. It wasn't an unpleasant thought! But I figured if there were other options, we should take them."

We met at the oh-so-charming Gardiner Bakehouse: great coffee, interesting pastries, and an outstanding view of the Gunks, which unfortunately, no camera can separate out from the telephone wires:

The Gardiner Bakehouse is hosting some kind of storytelling event:

"You should enter," BB said.

"I should!" I said.

So, maybe I will.

###

Other than that, it was lots o' Remuneration. (I have a deadline coming up, which I have ignored successfully but which I should probably double up on.) And a trip to the gym through looming thunder clouds, which fortunately did not break till I was back from the gym. A good thing! The storms brought temperatures down by maybe 10 degrees, so that it's relatively cool this morning.

And now I must take advantage of the relatively cool temperatures to scamper off to New Paltz and do some gardening, even though I'd much rather sit here with my eyes slightly unfocused.

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Entries tagged with brian

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