Mallory's Camera

Hanging with RTT was good, but hanging in Ithaca was not good. Was it the mood I was in or the time of year, so close to Dia De Los Muertos?

Ithaca was filled with ghosts.

They weren’t quite strong enough to materialize, but I could feel them everywhere I walked (and I walked quite a bit)

A blur that might have been Justin, leaning against a church wall in DeWitt Park.

A bright banner, flapping in the wind outside the Unitarian Church on Cayuga Street where Janet had been the first African American deacon.

The 7/11 in whose parking lot, Jason—Justin’s brother, Janet’s grandson—pulled a gun on someone. (Jason’s still alive but a horrific childhood plus juvie destroyed him mentally. He’s a floater in the land of the living.)

Ben on that stretch of State Street between the Diner & Gimme Coffee the time I first realized, He’s very, very sick, isn’t he?

How did I know Ben was very, very sick?

Well, because I was walking down that stretch of State Street one day a couple of months before I moved away from Ithaca & I saw Mark Conly, beaming broadly, arms outstretched. And this was odd because Mark Conly had died from complications of his multiple sclerosis just six months before.

Mark didn’t coalesce into Ben until he got within two feet of me.

As a sidebar, I will note this is often the way visions work. They are rarely hallucinations created out of thin air. Most often, they build on something that’s already out there in the physical universe.

Which, of course, makes it difficult for the person who’s having the vision: Are you becoming mentally unhinged, or are you actually vibrating on a supernatural frequency?

There is no way to answer that question.



Another fallacy about occult visitations: People always think they’re most likely to occur in the dark.

In truth, prime time for the supernatural is preternaturally warm days when the wind is high, and yet, and yet: There is an uneasy feeling of stillness.

Which described the weather in Ithaca while I was there to a T.



Anyway, I was so creeped out by the ghosts I could almost (but not quite!) see in Ithaca that the morning before I took off back to the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley, I insisted on visiting the Namgyal Monastery to purify myself.

Long-term readers of this diary—I think there may be 1.8 of you—may remember that when I lived in Ithaca, I was the English-As-a-Second-Language tutor of choice for the surprisingly large Tibetan population living there.

They also all wanted me to do their taxes!!!!!!!

The student the Tompkins County Learning Center assigned to me was Lopsang. (I forget what name I referred to her by when writing about her so long ago.) She’d grown up in the province of Kham, home of the Tibetan warrior princesses. A Tibetan monk smuggled her out of Tibet to the Dalai Lama’s compound in Dharamsala, India, where she lived for some years before emigrating to the U.S. and marrying the man who’d rescued her, now a medical coder & Tibetan monk no longer.

I improvised my ESL lesson plans. I didn’t see much point in teaching Lopsang the finer points of English language grammar. Did it really matter if she knew how to conjugate the past tense of irregular verbs?

Instead, I went over to Lopsang’s house & played her three-minute clips culled from old episodes of Little House on the Prairie. Then I’d make her talk to me about them. Full court babble—that was my goal. It was not important that she speak grammatically; it was important that she overcome her self-consciousness about how badly she spoke English and just speak.

Little House on the Prairie was about life on a struggling homestead in a non-industrialized economy, right? Lopsang had grown up a struggling homestead in a non-industrialized economy. Maybe she could relate.

Pretty soon, we were joined by other Tibetans until 15 or so were showing up for my thrice-weekly lessons.



It seems to me Tibetan Buddhism is very unlike other types of Buddhism.

The Tibetan Buddhists I knew weren’t into detachment at all. They were very materialistic! They loved Black Friday above all other holidays and could hardly wait to describe to me (in broken English) all the fabulous things they’d bought at BestBuy for a discount! They loved electronics.

The one thing that seemed to differentiate their conversation from other people’s conversation was that they were constantly throwing in allusions to past lives.

So, if I’d describe something that happened to me over the weekend, Lopsang might nod vigorously & say, “You know something like that happened to me two lives before this one—”

They were very serious about past lives.



Anyway, Lopsang & her husband were instrumental in raising the funds to build this monastery complex, and I’d gone there that morning half in the hopes I’d run into her.

I’d run into her there several times in the past.

But today, there was no one there at the monastery at all though the gates were wide open.

Still, the place seemed to do its magic ‘cause when RTT & I went back to Ithaca, I didn’t sense the ghosts anymore.

The vehicle above is the Dalai Lama’s very own jeep!!! He used it to power along all the back trails of Tibet, Mustang, & Nepal back in the day.

On the way to and from the Finger Lakes last week, I listened to Barbara Ehrenreich’s provocative Natural Causes.

I am an Ehrenreich fan girl: It would not be an exaggeration to say Nickel and Dimed changed my life.

In fact, you might say the existence of contrarians like Ehrenreich gives me some small faith that the invention of humans on the part of that Great Cosmic Gamer was not a hideous mistake.

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Anyway, Natural Causes is an exceedingly eccentric volume in which Ehrenreich basically talks trash about healthcare for 218 pages.

Interestingly, she is not talking trash about access to health care or how to fix the broken healthcare insurance industry. Nope. Ehrenreich is talking about the quality of healthcare itself; the book’s subtitle is An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.

Ehrenreich starts the book by announcing she is done with the invasive health screenings expected of a responsible person with health insurance. No more colonoscopies! No more mammograms! “I will seek help for an urgent problem,” Ehrenreich writes, “but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me.”

If you’re tempted to write Ehrenreich off as a crackpot here, there are two things you should know:

First, Ehrenreich has a PhD in cellular immunology from a reputable university.

Second, Ehrenreich is a breast cancer survivor. “What sustained me through the ‘treatments,’” she writes, “is a purifying rage, a resolve, framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter, along with, say, the last smug health-insurance operative, strangled with the last pink ribbon … I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm.”

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An entire chapter of Natural Causes is dedicated to a scathing critique of “mindfulness,” one of the big, big buzzwords in Silicon Valley boardrooms right now.

Ehrenreich describes mindfulness as “Buddhism sliced up, commodified, and drained of all reference to the transcendent” that’s intended to help little worker bees in the vast technological complexes of Google, Facebook, Apple et al become perfect self-correcting machines. Artificial Intelligence is not a symbolic extrapolation of human beings in other words; human beings are a symbolic extrapolation of Artificial Intelligence.

I was reminded of this yesterday because one of my clients wanted an analysis of Sam Harris’s business model.

Sam Harris is widely referred to as one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. (The other three are Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.) Harris has absolutely no use for religion, viewing it—perhaps correctly—as the source of much of the mad sectionalism in the contemporary political climate.

But as he went through the usual GenX maturational experiences—MDMA, meditation retreats, advanced degrees—Harris is in a perfect position to monetize mindfulness. Which he has through an app called Waking Up. He clears approximately $200 K a month through this app. He also has a podcast that gets approximately a million downloads a month, which he monetizes through a subscription option. You can listen to the podcast for free, but if you want to have access to any of those deep, profound insights that only Sam Harris can provide, you will have to pony up. It’s impossible to get figures on that one, but say 10 percent of Sam’s podcast listeners go for the bait. That’s a nice chunk of cash.

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Sam Harris is not a complete snake oil salesman. I share his repudiation of identity politics, as a matter of fact, and his contention that Islam is quite the most dangerous of religions because it suppresses free expressions with explicit threats of violence. (Practically all organized religions squelch free expression, but no other, in the 21st century at least, has incorporated an overt mechanism like jihad.)

But Harris’s monetization model kinda smacks of PT Barnum-ry: There’s another sucker—er—seeker of enlightment born every second.

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In another news, started popping Zicam again. Stopped sneezing. Still feeling woozy and wasted and weak. Since I am incapable of thinking outside the present moment, it is clear to me that I will never feel strong enough to step outside the house again.

Neighbor Ed kept trying to make me talk about the impeachment.

He is very excited about the impeachment!

Alas! I have nothing to say about the impeachment.

Is impeachment warranted? Probably. The very use of a word like “favor” implies a quid pro quo.

Is it gonna get Trump out of office?

Absolutely not. The Senate will never vote for it.

So the whole thing seems like a waste of time and other resources.

Plus it reduces the chances of a Democratic win in 2020. Despite how giddy and excited the Democrats are, I suspect the majority of independent voters agree with my assessment and will punish the Democrats by not voting.

Weather has been so wiggy recently that it's hard to imagine there's no supernatural agency behind it.

Two nights ago the thermometer dropped to -10 degrees. Yesterday morning, it was 60. Today it's six degrees again. Are 50 degree fluctuations in a single 24 hour normal? Honestly, I don't know. I remember thinking when I first met Ben, a native to these parts, that he had a kind of unnatural preoccupation with the Weather Channel. Now, though, I understand it perfectly. Discussing the weather isn't small talk around here; it's a survival tactic.

I think the scientists who coined the term "global warming" need a PR lesson. The net result in climate change may be a rise in the average temperatures of the earth's climate system overall, but when average temperatures throughout the U.S. hover around 15 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks at a time during winter (in a country that includes Florida, California and Arizona), most people aren't gonna buy any scientific theory that includes the term "warming" to describe it.

Presumably the current "polar vortex" -- great term! P.T. Barnum would approve ! -- is one of those extreme weather events that accompany global warming along with heat waves and heavy rainfall. The warming of the poles is disrupting the normal currents of the Arctic winds, I reckon. Too lazy to look it up.

I didn't start believing in global warming myself until a couple of years ago when I heard an NPR story about some very clever research a couple of Colorado scientists had done using the growth cycles of thousand-year-old trees. It's totally a fact, although it's not clear how much man-made technologies are contributing to the phenomena.

What do you do about it?

Absolutely nothing, says me.

Flux is the matrix we live and breathe. Let the change come.

One of the reasons I've never been able to get 100 percent behind any environmentally-related movement is because I see them as manifestations of class struggle. Right! The environment movement is a protest movement for rich people who've finally woken up to the fact that they share the planet with the rest of us jerks. You know what? Fuck 'em. Let them go down with the ship.

In Philadelphia one morning, I had a long chat with Dan about Tibetan Buddhism, how strange it is, how utterly unlike the more ascetic forms of Buddhism practiced in Japan and other parts of southeast Asia. I told him stories about my Ithaca Tibetans – I miss them – reminiscing about their utter materialism – they were Black Friday's biggest fans! -- and the casual way they would introduce reincarnation into ordinary conversations: Something just like that happened to me in my last past life...

"You know something I don't get?" I said to Dan. "Tibetan nationalism! All those upper middle class activists with Free Tibet bumper stickers. Even the Dalai Llama when he goes on tour. Because, honestly, what's the lesson of all those Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas after all if it's not the impermanence of all things? Why should they care if China swallows up Tibet? Someday, in the not too distant future, something will swallow up China. It's the way of the universe."

"That's a very unpopular opinion," Dan said. "But I couldn't agree with you more.