Mallory's Camera

Hilary Mantel is a bit rich for bedtime consumption. All those unfamiliar vocabulary words! "Persiflage," anybody? I mean, it's a great word, a perfect word, but who wants to read in bed with a book and a dictionary?

So, I've been putting myself to sleep with an old favorite: Pride & Prejudice.

And in the spirit of Pride & Prejudice, I scampered off to Marshall's yesterday to buy some long, flowery dresses that no self-respecting Regency heroine would ever be caught dead in, but hey! they were cheap.

I say "scampered." I really mean "limped." Because once in Marshall's, I felt as though I was going to faint.

Maybe I have COVID, I thought.

I never did catch COVID back when everybody else was catching it. Or maybe I did catch COVID but I was one of those asymptomatic COVIDers the CDC warned us about, out there insidiously infecting everybody else.

I'm not running a fever. But all those other symptoms—shortness of breath, hacking cough, traveling body aches, headache, extreme fatigue—were a check.

So, I bought the first three things I shoved into my shopping cart—fortunately, they all fit—and raced back home to do a COVID test.

Nope! Not COVID.

Maybe it is the the mysterious malaise that leveled BB & Flavia for three weeks. They actually went to a doctor. Verdict: a rhinovirus. A nasty rhinovirus.

Since the three of us were inhaling each other's carbon dioxide in a car not too terribly long ago, I'm gonna assume I have what they had.

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As a sidebar, I'll note that I do hate shopping for clothes, and I don't understand at all how anybody can possibly like it. I see loads of clothes I like, usually on actors on the various streaming entertainments I indulge myself with. But none of those clothes are ever for sale at the stores I can afford. The stores I can afford are filled with the most awful dreck in the most hideous colors and patterns, and the stores are lit up with migraine-inducing fluorescents, and the other shoppers are extras out of some colorized B-roll from Night of the Living Dead.

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I went to bed early and slept nine hours, and feel maybe 85% this morning, but I expect that to fade.

The only going-out-of-the-house thing I have to do today is Adrienne's meet-and-greet, which I volunteered to help her with.

I wish I hadn't!

Adrienne has delusions of being Nancy Pelosi.

The other day, she was introducing me to someone: "And here's Patrizia who does... uh... social media—"

"I designed your website," I reminded her tartly.

She never even thanked me for designing her website!

And then yesterday, she emailed me some statistics about food stamp cutbacks in Ulster County (severe) with the note: Lets look into this.

You look into it, be-yatch! I thought. I am not your fuckin' staffer.

I remind myself that this is a networking opportunity. Networking has never been something I'm particularly good at, subscribing as I do to the naive notion that human connections should be sincere & spring from the heart.

But it's never too late to learn.

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And speaking of learning...

Here's Today's Exciting AI Video!



Sora would not touch the medieval cats marginalia at all! I wonder if that's some weird kind of copyright hypervigilance?

So, it was back to NightCafe with some prompt tweaks. This prompt worked a bit more successfully than yesterday's, except that that the black cat is no longer turning pages and the strange hulking cat on the lower right keeps sprouting disturbing phantom limbs.

Met up with the fabulous BB at Da Tang, the fabulous Chinese grocery store in Middletown.

Middletown is something of a Falun Gong hive, and judging from the number of Falun Gong brochures at the check-out counter, Da Tang is run by Gongers.

This is one of the reasons why I love grubby little cities in the middle of nowhere that are scrambling to keep up with the present tense: They're magnets for all kinds of weirdness!

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Middletown is plopped down right in the middle of Farm Country. (This time of year, you can actually smell the manure they use to fertilize the fields before they sow the corn.) It developed as a distribution hub and processing center for farm products, and reached its mercantile heights between the late 19th century and the beginning of World War II when the Erie Railroad downtown yard bustled with freight cars. The big industries were tanneries and condensed milk. But there were myriad shops where the farm families bought their dry goods and shoes.

Then gasoline-fueled trucks became the distribution method of choice, and everything decentralized; the farmers bought automobiles and began shopping in more convenient stores on the edges of town, and those edges metastasized into strip malls that are now—ironically—harder to get to than the downtown.

In the late 1950s, practically every city in the U.S. caught Urban Renewal Fever and began tearing down the old historic structures, replacing them with ugly commercial buildings and parking lots, or not replacing them at all. Thus, downtown Middletown today is a veritable warren! The Da Tang grocery is just one of dozens of unexpected universes behind nondescript walls. BB goes shopping there several times a month.

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Here are some of the things you can buy at the Da Tang grocery:

Quail eggs:




Delectably alien dried fruit:



Hello Kitty candy:



In fact, every one of the thousands of items in the store is deliciously strange and intriguingly provenanced.

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Afterwards, we looked around for a place to drink caffeinated beverages and jaw. We didn't want to go back to the Falun Gong café!

We passed a sign in the window of a shabby once-industrial window: Tranquili-Tea: Calm Your Mind.

A calm mind is good, right?

We decided to go in.

And found ourselves in a strange little winding hall decorated with glittering lights and mucho eye-pleasing kitsch that led into this cavernous room:



A most delightful tea parlor! Where they bake their own extremely scrumptious scones and offer a dozen different kinds of tea, which they then let you brew to your own desired strength using these adorable miniature hourglasses:



What a find this place is! (As my beloved Marybeth used to say.) A secret garden.

Though I suspect it's not gonna stay in business very long because I can't imagine there's much demand for magical, down-the-rabbit-hole tea gardens in grubby little cities like post-industrial Middletown.



Bade farewell to BB and scurried off to the gym.

Good workout, and on the way home, I had one of those... what would you call them? experiences? episodes?... where all-of-a-sudden, the world seems to shimmer with a golden light and the fallow fields and ancient barns I drive through seem infused with heartbreaking beauty, and the world seems like a good place—even though I know it isn't.