Mallory's Camera

So, the undercarriage of my 15-year old Prius is showing rust and corrosion, my auto mechanic tells me. To pass New York State Inspection, the undercarriage will have to be replaced, assuming it can be replaced—it's an old car, and I have no idea what parts availability is.

RTT's Cuban auto mechanic could probably just weld the old undercarriage more securely into place, but I'm thinking if it's showing corrosion on the exterior, it's almost certainly corroded internally as well, and safe driving argues for a complete replacement: I don't want to be driving down the road and have my engine fall out of my car.

It is an expensive fix. Sigh... But that's why God invented credit cards, I suppose. I'm not happy about it. But if you own an automobile, figure you're gonna drop around $5K a year on it one way or another whether you're making a monthly payment for a new car, or keeping up with necessary repairs on an old one.

Like everything else in life, it is what it is.

###

Exciting Update: So, I took the Prius to the local Honest Auto Body Shop, and after putting it on the lift, the Honest Auto Body Mechanic told me the first auto shop was wack, and that he would pass the Prius for inspection this year—but it almost certainly won't pass inspection in 2027. Because it's not the undercarriage, it's the floor pan that's corroded.

"It'll be bad then," he said. "And for a car that old, it can't be fixed."

"And there's nothing I can... ?" I asked. "I mean, what are my options?"

He snorted. "Buying another car."

Well, at least I have some time! Although I'm inclined to buy sooner rather than later since prices are going up, up, up.

Not happy. Not one little bit.

But altogether now: It is what it is.

###

In other news, Black Chicken apparently pecked the little white bantam to death. I suspect Icky threw the new little bantams in with her too quickly; there should have been a more gradual introduction and assimilation process.

I am trying not to get angry at Black Chicken—chickens gonna chicken, and T-Rex DNA lurks in every chicken's genetic code. The smaller the flock, the more viscious the pecking order. Black Chicken would peck me to death if I was six inches tall and covered with feathers. You can't anthropomorphize.

Still.

It made me sad.

Wouldn't it be great if evolution had favored cooperation rather than competition? But humans are the exception in the animal kingdom when it comes to empathy. And I wouldn't even say the majority of humans are empathetic.

Last two days felt as dismal as any two days can feel that did not culminate in the death or disfigurement of somebody dear or a meteorite crashing into the Empire State Building.

The kicker was my car needed an oil change.

In the bad old days, I would have ignored those plaintive dashboard warnings. Suck it up, car! I would have said. And driven the poor thing till the engine block cracked because maintenance & upkeep is for sissies.

Now that I'm a wise and responsible septugenarian, though, I always do what my car tells me to do.

So, I brought the car in.

Since I don't have anyone to pick me up or drop me off, I sat there in the auto mechanics' waiting room while the oil change was done, attempting to read Rebecca Makkai's latest, I Have Some Questions For You (which turns out to be a not-very-good book and thus a tremendous disappointment after the brilliance of The Great Believers.)

Auto repair shops put The Fear into me because they smell so awful—that horrible chemical rubber tire smell—and because I don't know anything about what the mechanics are doing, just that through the streaked window that looks into the repair bay, I can see my poor little car, helplessly dismantled into its component parts.

In a way, sitting in the auto mechanic's shop is exactly like sitting in an emergency room waiting room. I always have this fear that the parts manager is going to approach me, head down, eyes professionally somber: We tried everything we could, Mrs.—uh—Diloochey. But we couldn't save your car.

And, in fact, something of that sort happened yesterday except that there was something they could do to save my car—and that something cost a lot of money.

I mean, hey! It's an old car.

And the roads around here really are for shit.

So if a mechanic tells me that the wheels are gonna fly off the car while it's struggling to Little-Engine-That-Could its way up over one of those Shawangunk Mountain passes unless I get those wheel bearings replaced, then I am gonna get those wheel bearings replaced.

But I'm also gonna get PTSD from the sticker shock.

###

There were a bunch of other things, too. Fed Ex apparently was delivering my new snow boots to Madagascar. The current Remuneration client has been kidnapped by aliens—that's the only reason why he could be ignoring my emails & calls for three days, right? Soul-Sucking Tax Corporation's website was written by the ancient Babylonians when they were pissed off about the Rosetta Stone.

On our group chat, Ichabod texted RTT: Mom was an early adopter of being anti-woke and hating talking and thinking about identity especially when it comes to marginalized identities. (Which is an oversimplification, but yes, it is very true that I've never liked identity politics. I think they're a distraction, rooted in delusionary exceptionalism, from the real struggle, which is the 1% vs the 99%. Equitable resource allocation is what’s politically important to me. It's the great lesson in life, I think—disabusing oneself of that belief in one's own exceptionalism. Once you do it, though, I think you have more of an impact, paradoxical though that might seem. But hey! I always try to respect pronouns.)

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

By the time last night rolled around, I was such a wrought-up bundle of nerves that I could not fall asleep for anything, my brain just did not want to surrender control of my body. This is ridiculous, I chided myself. You are exhausted. And willed myself not to toss & turn. To lay there focusing on my breaths. Which was enough for my Fitbit to register sleep. Although very low-quality sleep.

###

Anyway. I am rested enough this morning to tackle the enormous pile of stuff I have to do before I caper up to Ithaca tomorrow.

And as I keep reminding myself: Money is a renewable resource.

When I rack up big auto repair bills, I am looking at doing more Remuneration. And I want to do less Remuneration because I want to do more writing on the Work in Progress. The two types of writing are just not compatible. The former sucks the marrow from the latter's bones.

But, hey! It is what it is. And I don't live in Gaza.

And in a way, my fictioneering is best when I'm stealing time to write around the margins of everything else I have to do.

###

It dawns on me that I could say to Ichabod: Pay this bill for me.

And he would do so quite happily, no questions asked, no damage done to his own finances. He makes a lot of money.

It also dawns on me that if I said to Real-Life Daria, I want Brian's car, she'd be happy to sell it or even give it to me. Since she's on the West Coast and Brian's car is on the East Coast, it will actually cost her money to get the car to where she is. Plus she already has a car she likes.

I'm not sure why approaching Ichabod or Daria about these two things fills me with such terror. If they say No, they say No. But they won't stop loving me.

I'll have to think a bit more on this.

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.

The little Prius’s air-conditioning has decided to give up the ghost. I haven’t gotten it repaired yet because (1) money and (2) air-conditioning systems in hybrid cars must be worked upon by hybrid car air-conditioning specialists, which means I would have to sit for four hours in the weird-smelling Toyota dealership in Kingston since I’d have no way to go home.

Anyway, around noon yesterday, I decided I had to go thrifting.

We were in the fifth straight day of a massive heat wave, & it was 96° out.

I don’t actually mind driving with the windows open, though I sweated off all my mascara.

I’ve been wearing lots of makeup recently.

I am one of those people who looks very different with makeup. With makeup: sassy, appealing! Without makeup: gaunt, haggard, pale.

###

New Paltz turns out to be not great for thrifting—weird because students, no?

But my peregrinations took me right by the dispensary, so I bought some gummies.

I am kinda reluctant to do gummies outside my winter SAD window because I have strong addictive tendencies, and cannabis is not my drug of choice. Why risk becoming addicted to something you don’t actually like all that much??

But then I figured, Why the hell not? What’s so wrong with being addicted so long as you don’t drive or operate heavy machinery? You can learn to love cannabis.

###

Almost as soon as I got home, there was a massive thunderstorm. Severe weather! It knocked out the electricity.

Central Hudson was prophesying eight hours before restoration, so I gummied up, restaked Iggy’s cucumbers, and sat down to read The Emperor of Ocean Park—which is not very good but is interesting as a means of discovering what rich black people really think about white people, rich, poor, & middle class. (Barack Obama, white courtesy telephone!)

When the electricity blinked back on just an hour later, I was too stoned to do any useful work. So, I was forced to watch endless episodes of Wire in the Blood, which is a very good show, though decidedly kinky. Think Hannibal meets Monk: the ever-appealing Robson Green plays Dr. Tony Hill, a psychologist/profiler with no social skills whatsoever though possessed of considerable emotional intelligence.

Wire in the Blood was one of my fallbacks during those awful Cement Bungalow days, but those are now so long ago that I can’t remember anything about the show. Except that I liked it.

It’s pretty graphically violent. Tony gets tortured on camera by the Eeee-vil Serial Killer (who defies present-day standards of Political Correctness by being a trans woman.)

Somewhere in my digital collection, I have a recording of a conversation between Raymond Chandler & Ian Fleming discussing the art of writing thrillers.

Raymond Chandler has a trilling, high-pitched voice. Well, of course, you have to have a torture scene, he sing-songs to Fleming. Readers love torture scenes.

Then he and Fleming chortle.

I guess that’s still true!

So, maybe the deal with To Do lists is that you only have to write them down for the items to start checking themselves off.

###

The kiskas are getting along better—



And apparently, I did change their names.

A New Year’s text exchange with their original humans revealed that the black & white kiska was originally “Mabel” while the calico was “Molly.”

Too funny!

###

Also, Lois Lane finally wrote back.

After I wrote her a final note: Bla, bla, bla. If I did something to offend you, please forgive. And if you’ve had second thoughts about getting a house together, I need to know (obviously), and our friendship will survive. But if you’re ghosting me, our friendship will NOT survive because that’s hurtful. Bla, bla, bla.

Sorry, Lois Lane wrote back, the holidays are bad time for me and I'm just trying to get thru it nothing else wrong just ghosts and family stuff.

I believe her.

Lois Lane had the most ghastly childhood of anyone I’ve ever met—culminating with the time her father shot her dog right in front of her after the dog pulled one of those Homeward Bound things and found his way back to Red Hook after being ditched (by the evil father) in the wilds of Connecticut. This was retaliation: She’d called Child Protective Services on her father after he began sexually molesting her younger sister. (She’d endured her own sexual molestation without doing anything.)

Lois Lane was 12 when she called CPS. She ended up in foster care till she was 18 and then joined the Marines.

Anyway, Lois Lane comes by her flakiness honestly.

And I can certainly understand how it takes every ounce of her resilience to maintain at her high-stress, high-paying, Real Human Job.

When she gets home, she crawls into a hole.

###

Also, it turns out the Prius has Bluetooth! (But the Bluetooth is set up only to work for phone calls & Siri—not music or audiobooks. Which seems perfectly ridiculous to me. I’m thinking there must be a workaround.)

And the NP got sick! So, the appointment I was not looking forward to today has been rescheduled for next week!

This leaves only passing the IRS certification exam and getting the broken veneer repaired on the current To Do list.

###

What else?

It was grey & overcast yesterday, but it's sunny & sparkly today.

My heart is ever bright when it’s sunny & sparkly.

So, the Forever War is straining its bubble in a second spot.

This spot, I’m thinking, the fresh one in the Gaza Strip, is far more likely to go nuclear than that other one, the one in Ukraine, which at this point—at least, at this remove from the front lines—seems to have devolved into a waiting game: When Putin finally drops dead, all will be well.

It was a sad, sad day for Israel when Rabin was assassinated. And they keep installing fuckin’ Netanyahu as prime minister.

Woke up in the middle of the night just seized with anxiety over the situation.

Although, in the interests of full disclosure, yesterday kinda primed me for anxiety.

###

Like most women my age, I have Fear of the Black Box—which is my code phrase for any problem involving machines and equipment.

The way I listen to music in my car is by plugging my phone into an auxiliary jack.

And yesterday, the module the auxiliary jack plugs into somehow wiggled loose from the spot it was supposed to be in.

So, I took a deep breath. Worked the plastic top sheltering the actual module off—obvious to you, maybe; difficult for me—shined my flashlight down on the thing. Spied the green top of the module. Okay! So, it just needs to kinda be lifted.

Took another deep breath.

Even you can do this, girlfriend! reassured myself.

Grabbed my needle-nosed pliers and attempted to lift the damn thing.

And succeeded in knocking it on its side.

Ensued frantic hours of Googling. There’s remarkably little out there on solving this particular challenge, though if I wanted—say—to find out why Taylor Swift is the ultimate pop phenomenon (fuck you, Beyonce), I would have been rewarded with 1.3 billion websites.

I don’t want to take the whole center console apart is the thing. Even assuming that I could.

Because even if I could take the whole thing apart, I would never be able to put it back together.

###

What an absolutely pedestrian, boring problem, right?

But driving without something to listen to is no fun at all.

Plus it kinda underlined how absolutely alone I am in the world. And therefore vulnerable.

Women with male partners can just shunt this kind of thing on the resident male. It’s the tacit division of labor in most male/female relationships.

###

I can’t even know if I have to replace the damn unit until I can actually see the damn unit!

But anyway.

Buff Ken said he would look at it after pickleball. So, maybe he has the right tool (and manual dexterity) to fish it out.

And somewhere in the midst of my Googling, I discovered Best Buy’s Geek Squad, which maybe can deal with stuff like this—my Biggest Dilemma having been, If I can’t do it myself, who do I take it to? An auto body shop (because they would know about dismantling the console if that’s what has to be done) or an audio sound shop (because they would know about auxiliary jack modules.)

I’m sure there is a solution, and the solution is not as hard as my frantic imagination makes it out to be.

But such attempts by the more rational parts of my brain to calm the lizard brain’s clicking and squeaking don’t really work well. I feel helpless. Vulnerable. Superfluous.

Primed for anxiety in the middle of the night.

###

Back to geopolitics:

Seems pretty obvious that the two-state solution is the only one that works. At least temporarily.

But we are living in an increasingly accelerated world. If “temporarily” only extends for the next 25 years, that’s a win.

Not the Netanyahu version of the two-state solution, of course.

Though it should be obvious to everyone that the misery of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip is equaled if not surpassed by the misery of Yemen’s inhabitants (perpetuated by Saudi Arabia.)

That you hear so much squawking from the American progressive left about Palestine but hardly a squeak about Yemen is evidence of antisemitism in my mind.

War means failure to me.

Failure of anything that makes humans worthy of admiration—ethics, compassion, intelligence, imagination.

What does the sacrifice of lives ever accomplish?

Not a fucking thing.

Though part of me—it’s true—totally supports Israel in slaughtering every last man, woman, and child in the Gaza Strip and nuking Tehran.

That part of me is the same lizard brain that gets hysterical and goes to pieces when the auxiliary jack in my car goes on the fritz.

A very brown day yesterday.

I did the River Tromp—across the Walkway, down into the forgettable little village of Highland—and the Hudson was completely brown. The air seemed dingey, too.

Elsewise, I Remunerated and played the Sims—which I hadn’t played in over a year, but hey! they have horses, goats, cows, and chickens now, plus adorable babies with developmental milestones, plus all sorts of cool mods so that the Sims can now have porny sex, develop heroin and gambling addictions, join gangs, go to church, go to marriage counseling, get credit cards, and do all those other things that make playing God truly fun and meaningful.

I saw what might be the first sign of autumn: a tree with yellow leaves:



Ichabod suggested that the three of us get together over Thanksgiving, so I won’t be going to India in November, which, you know, is fine: I was only in the earliest planning stages of the trip, and I’d rather hang out with my kids than do anything else on the planet.

###

I called the vet. They were very nice. Told me some 70% of senior cats get muscle and/or ligament sprains from time to time—a fact which evidently is unknown to Google since when you search “cat rear leg weakness,” you immediately come up with a thousand entries for life-threatening thrombosis and fly into a panic.

We decided that if Sybyl is still draggy on Friday, I’ll bring her in.

But Sybyl is a lot more sprightly. Still a little wobbly but scampering up and down flights of stairs of her own volition.

So, I’m thinking, Crisis passed.

###

Also, RTT and I never did get around to gluing down that Prius back fender panel several months back. The postal tape held it together for a couple of months. Until it didn’t.

I noticed the panel was really coming loose when I got back from Buffalo.

This time I used black electrical tape on it.

I love the Prius, but it’s a 12-year-old car, and I’m reluctant to drop serious bank on cosmetic fixes.

There are a ton of YouTube videos on how to glue it back together. A few of them actually break the process down in such EZ steps that even a complete mechanical idiot like moi could do it.

But when I was looking at the narrow strip of black tape yesterday, I thought, Hmmmm! Art Car!

Why not just glue a subtle band of twinkly, shiny beads on the black electrical tape and call it a fix?



Of course, you don’t see a lot of art cars in the Northeast, which I imagine is because of the winters here.

Black electrical tape and twinkly, shiny beads probably don’t stand up too well to snow.

So, I am researching and pondering.

UGH.

So, I made an appointment to bring the car into the garage today.

But then the garage called and asked me to bring it in yesterday: “The shop is always empty whenever it snows.”

Fine.

The Prius is 12 years old. The engine is in excellent shape. The suspension system, though. And because the foot bone's connected to the leg bone; the leg bone's connected to the knee bone, etc, etc, the brakes. Those needed work.

Major work, as it turned out. Expensive work.

Well, ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I, of course, think the only things I should ever have to spend money on are airplane tickets to exotic lands and tips for the guy who helps me board the camel.

But that is not the way the world works, and of course, I am lucky, lucky, lucky to be flush enough these days to afford major car repairs.

There is no way you live where I live without a car.

But then, around 4 pm, I got a call: The flibxterkrans was fused to the blaskinkrans; that meant the whole thing had to be sprayed with a solution concocted from the gall bladders of virgin turkey vultures captured during the gibbous phase of the waxing moon, so the Prius wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow (meaning today)—

“But you will be able to fix it?” I cried.

“Of course!” said the guy.

Was there a .005 second of hesitation before that hearty “of course”?

What did that .005 second of hesitation mean?

###

As soon as I got off the phone, I spun into a maelstrom of despair.

They will not be able to fix the car!!!!!!!!

That means I will not have a car anymore, and the Big Snow is coming Thursday, and what am I going to do????

This, of course, was patently ridiculous because even supposing the old flibxterkrans could not be extracted from the blaskinkrans so a new one could be placed, the Prius would still be in the same shape it was in before I took it to the garage. Meaning essentially drivable. Though probably not on long trips.

But logic and reason had been banished from my internal flist.

I was shaking with anxiety.

###

It’s always sort of amazing to me how quickly I can spin out into borderline personality territory.

Borderline personalities are famous for being able to maintain so long as they exercise control over day-to-day events. But when something comes up that they have no control over, they totally decompensate.

Just like I was decompensating.

Though I don’t actually think I am a borderline personality.

I think reactions like this are a kind of monkey-see/monkey-do imprinted on me at an early age by my mother who was such a classic borderline that had the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce decided to invest in a Miss Borderline Contest back in 1956, she would have won out over Marilyn Monroe.

Knowing this, however, did not quell my anxiety in the slightest.

###

Thank God for gummies!!!

I popped an extra and slept luxuriously.

Sleep is a rose! as Vladimir Nabokov quotes Humbert Humbert quoting the Persians as saying.

This morning I’m not particularly panicked.

They’ll fix the car, or they won’t fix the car—but I’d say the odds are they’ll fix it. After all, the mere existence of that magic virgin turkey vulture gallbladder solution argues that the problem they encountered with the old flibxterkrans is a common one. And fixable.

Mental health! Always an adventure!

Went to the Most Fabulous Garden Store in Dutchess County.

It’s nowhere near the end of summer, but it is near the end of the growing season. I was shocked at how few plants were available. The plants that were available had all gone to flower and fruit in their shallow, black plastic containers.

No lettuce. (I’ll have to sow seeds.). A few cucumbers, a few collard greens. A bunch of fading petunias. Some weedy-looking basil that I copped for Loraine.

###

Went to the garden to plant the plants.

It was 90°, but somehow I didn’t feel it. (Go figure.). Stayed in the garden for a couple of hours.

###

Came home, showered. Trotted across the road to give Loraine her basil.

Stayed for lunch and a couple of hours of gab.

Loraine doesn’t banter, which means she will never be more than a situational pal, but within that restriction, I quite like her, and it’s always relaxing to talk about inconsequentials—the weather; the local pickleball craze; the negligence of Ruby-the-dog’s owner; Buff Ken’s tomatoes—which befitting any vegetables Buff Ken might pay attention to are six-feet tall, bushy, and covered with baby green tomatoes.

###

Anyway, I didn’t start remunerating until dinner time, which means I didn’t finish the Current Project until well after midnight.

Was up at my usual hour. (You don’t want to know.)

Dropped the car off for an oil change and maybe brake work because it shimmies at high speeds when I brake—even though it just had brake work done a mere three months ago.

###

So, at the present instant, I have two items on the maintenance and upkeep conveyor belt: Remunerative Project invoice and Prius oil change.

What is it about maintenance and upkeep issues that fills me with such visceral anxiety?

Because, of course, I’m thinking: The client will never pay you. And no other client will ever want to hire you again, and you’ll end up ruined and living in a refrigerator box under the bridge!

And I’m also thinking, Something is hideously wrong with the car, that will cost thousands of dollars to fix!

I am 99% certain that neither of these predictions will turn out to be true.

They are merely evidence of some deep-rooted neurosis, some sort of horror I have over even the most banal types of uncertainty that’s so strong that the only way I can appease it is to allow myself to become engulfed in worse-case scenarios. It’s like if I can imagine them with such intensity that I’m suffering as much as if they were true, then I can stave them off.

Dysfunctional mojo. Total waste of energy.

Well-l-l-l-l-l, I did get Xmas presents for Marissa and her boy.

Modest presents.

Wool muffler and glove set for Marissa; sturdy children’s art set for the boy.

In terms of boundary enforcement, this may not have been the wisest thing to do. But I just could not bear the mental image of Marissa and the kid sitting alone inside that Battered Women’s Shelter—or even worst, forced to participate in some grim collective gaity (I can practically see that plastic Xmas tree)—while the world around her erupts in fruitcake and a retail hangover…

###

Since I spent the day remunerating, and I’m in complete denial about what time the sun sets these days—4:30pm! UGH!—the sky was dim by the time I got to the mall, and it was completely dark by the time I drove home. It was also raining. skullandboners had put me in mind of the brilliant Nas album Illmatic, so I had it on super-loud in the car with the bass turned all the way up:

I’m out for dead presidents to represent me (Say what?)
Whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours

Red and green reflections from the traffic lights were sliding all over the wet roads, making it absolutely impossible to figure out which lane was which, so you know, I was driving on hope and a prayer. Plus, I dunno—I have this persistent visual hallucination whenever I drive in the dark that I’m about to drive into some long dark tunnel.

Those visual distortions were putting me in one of those dissociative headspaces. I really felt like I could see everything that will happen to humanity in the next 1,000 years! I had to keep reminding myself, You are not Nostradamus!, in order to arrive home safely.

But arrive home safely, I did.

###

Nothing much else to report.

An old pal invited me to her wedding in January.

But that wedding is taking place in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In an ordinary year, I might think going to Charlotte, North Carolina was a great adventure!

Not this year, though.