Entries tagged with brian

Entry tags:

Brian

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.

Entry tags:

Driving Away

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.

Entry tags:

Persiflage, Nancy Pelosi Impersonators, Plus Never Enuff AI Videos

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.

###

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.

###

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.

###

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.

Entry tags:

Maintaining

Grey day. Rain is predicted all week.

###

BB, Flavia, & I showed up yesterday at the mall where the Middletown demo was supposed to take place, only to discover it was one of those curbside protests where you stand valiantly at the side of the road, breathing in automobile exhaust for a couple of hours while drivers (mostly) ignore you.

As one, our eyes met: No-oo-ooo, thank you!

Not a total loss: We scurried off to Tranquili-Tea for an hour and enjoyed home-churned ice cream & thunderstorms on the drive home.

###

On the phone with Ichabod, I had a revelation.

Ichabod was saying something about always wanting to be his authentic self, & I was thinking, What a drag that would be—when it occurred to me that that might be because I spent so much time when I was slightly younger than Ichabod is now maintaining.

Maintaining was something you did when you were high on drugs & didn't want anyone else to know. But sometimes you maintained when you were feeling social anxiety or stage fright, or just had to be somewhere you did not want to be. You did not reveal (let alone exhibit) your inner quailings. There was a fair amount of honor involved in maintaining.

Of course, I don't know all that many Millennials except for my kids & their friends. And I know no Gen Z-ers.

But I do watch a lot of television with Millennial & GenZ characters, and if the representations are correct, they never maintain! Millennials & GenZ are constantly talking about how nervous they are or how incapable of functioning because of some incapacitating internal state. They have absolutely no concept of fortitude. Oversharing is their idea of virtue.

It's a manifestation of privilege when you think about it—(a) their belief that other people really care about what they feel and (b) that the world is a safe enough place that what you feel won't get you into trouble.

Maybe that's the true rift between Boomers & Millennials: We maintain; they don't.

###

Other than that, I tromped and read more Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Gotta say—Tess's passion for Angel Clare is rather annoying. Angel Clare has a big stick up his ass.

Alec Stoke-d'Urberville seems like he would be a lot more fun.

Entry tags:

The Rabbit Holes of Middletown

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!

###

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.

###

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.

###

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.

Entry tags:

Actionable Resistance

Here is the dinky little video I made of the April 5th protests in Middletown, New York:

Watch on YouTube

BB had the creeping crud plus it was raining, so we merely showed up for half an hour or so, long enough for our bodies to be counted (we hope!) before dashing off to a strange little café, apparently run by members of the Falun Gong sect that served passable chai lattes, brewed espresso drinks, and pastries like these adorable fish, filled with red bean paste:

The place was crammed! And the people at the various tables, dressed very differently as they were, all seemed to be signaling to each other with secret signs.

"I wonder what their stories are," I said to BB.

"I don't have a clue," BB said cheerfully. "And I'm not much interested. But that's what makes you a writer."

Every now & then, the protesters & their signs made the circuit of the shabby downtown street where the café was located. I studied the Falun Gong cult members' faces carefully to see if there was any sympathy. There wasn't. At the table kitty-corner to ours, a quartet of determined 30-ish women raised their eyebrows disparagingly, made remarks to one another that I couldn't quite hear.

Back in 2016, my beloved Summer explained to me why Trump is so overwhelmingly popular with Chinese expatriates in the U.S.: "They think he has luck. They think he is phenomenally lucky. And luck is the thing we revere and want above all else."

###

When we were done with our drinks & pastries, BB led me to a fabulous Chinese store where all sorts of fabulous groceries were for sale:

To think that all these wondrous things are a mere five-block walk from the Y where I work out two or three times a week and that I had never visited them before!

###

Back at the casa, I labored on Adrienne's website, aligning links & graphics and embellishing it with fulsome prose like, When Adrienne moved to Wallkill 16 years ago, she immediately looked for ways to support the hamlet she’d fallen in love with..
.
(Yes, I know, gag-worthy, but trust me: It will work for the voters of Wallkill.)

I should finish the damn thing today.

It is far from perfect, but the important thing is that it is.

If Brian the fresh-faced little campaign manager—who's actually getting paid—wants me to tweak stuff, I will simply tell him, Find someone else.

I never actually told Adrienne I would design her a website. I told her I would help her with social media. So, you know.

###

There's no accurate reporting yet on the number of protesters who turned out yesterday. 500,000 signed up in advance with the various Hands Off, Move On, etc. organizations, so I'm thinking probably twice as many showed up. Maybe more. The numbers will be underreported by the mainstream media who are all Trump suck-ups. Fuck the mainstream media.

###

Also, I am dead serious about launching an initiative whereby we help people obtain those documents (birth certificates, marriage licenses for women) that prove citizenship & thereby protect the right to vote.

Of course, this kind of stuff doesn't matter in New York State, which doesn't require proof of citizenship at the polls, but my old LJ friend

cah1470 actually lives in the North Carolina district where 65,000 votes are about to be tossed because North Carolina! Home to Mayberry, gerrymandering, and the Ku Klux Klan!

I totally believe that the next federal election will be lost unless we make sure our votes can't be thrown out. People in red states will need to vote early and in person, bring identification, voter cards, make sure their signatures are exactly the same as they are on the voter cards, etc, etc, etc.

I don't have the foggiest notion at this point how to liaise with organizations in the states that do require proof of citizenship at the polls. Plus we'd need money—obtaining govt documents costs. So maybe I need to figure out how to set up a 501 (c) (3)??? I dunno. This is all in a very preliminary stage in my head right now.

Anyway, I've got Adrienne talking to the heads of the Democratic Party here in New York—a thoroughly useless endeavor, I'm sure. Democrats are hopeless.

And I am gonna lean on RTT when I see him in NYC this week to try and set up some sort of meeting for me with the Soros-financed People for the American Way to see if they might be willing to be sponsors.

It's actionable resistance!

That means I'm gonna have to draft some sort of policy proposal in the next two weeks.

Busy, busy, busy!

Entry tags:

The Water Rises

I slept very, very poorly on account of reading this analysis from the redoubtable Heather Cox Richardson on NIH cuts, which will result in a loss of millions and millions for universities all across the nation, which in turn will have a trickle-down effect on college towns.

RTT lives in a college town—Ithaca.

His main gig right now is bartending & managing a popular brewery.

Breweries and bars depend upon disposable income, and there won’t be any disposable income in Ithaca in another year, and I am frightened to death for RTT—though he’s young & male & charismatic, and so has better chances of landing on his feet than many other people in that situation.

I am very, very scared right now.

I don’t know what to do about that fear because it’s not a psychological issue—it’s a rational response to the danger that’s rising slowly but implacably all around me. Exactly like flood water.

Meanwhile, I met up with the fabulous BB yesterday, & we bickered & chatted companionably about shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings. A good time was had.

And in the evening, I chatted on the phone for about an hour with TaxBwana Linda. First time we’ve talked in a year or so. The first part of our conversation was very studied on both sides: Everything is good. My, how good it is!

But as the conversation progressed, we grew more honest—no, it is not good. She has a Swiss passport, & is making a trip to Switzerland after TaxBwana season ends, ostensibly to see relatives but really to check out the viability of moving there—

“I’m 68 years old, Patrizia. I don’t really want to pick up stakes and start all over again at this point in my life,” she said.

But she is afraid that her diplomatic corps pension may be in jeopardy.

As for me, I need to get serious about pursuing that Italian passport. And start studying Italian again on Duolingo.