Mallory's Camera

Had a good time playing in the dirt at the garden yesterday. My strawberries are coming in:



I'm fairly sure Claude is the source of everything that's earthy and solid on this planet:



Neighbor Ed turned out to be in Providence, so my impromptu plan to ring his doorbell and shriek Hi-ii-iiii! was for all for naught.

Instead, I went tromping. Some dead Vanderbilt had a thing for Liriodendron tulipiferae, and I'm so glad they did! The tulip trees were all in bloom yesterday. Though I guess not being real flowers but specialized leaves, "bloom" is the wrong operative verb there:










And the peonies hadn't bloomed yet:



One assumes there must be peonies in Ulster County, but I have yet to see a single one, so I was very pleased to see these:



When I woke up this morning, my computer had come down with a display glitch that irritated the hell out of me, so I started banging systems settings randomly, and in doing so managed to fuck up my computer even more!

It took me five hours to track down & undo whatever random thing I did: It was something under "Accessibility." "Accessibility" is filled with all sorts of deeply weird functionalities.
In the future, I must remember to write down whatever small changes I make to the computer's operating system. My memory just isn't keyed in to retaining random shit like that, even though random shit like that turns out to be absolutely essential to the smooth, background functioning of said tool. I managed to right the most obvious problems, but the damn thing still isn't working well enough for the perfect spontaneous heart dump.

Two of my Social Encounters with Real Live Human Beings this week got canceled. But it really doesn’t matter because the New Computer arrived yesterday.

It took me two hours to figure out how to install the 32-bit Steam app on to a 64-bit Catalina IOS, but once I did, I started playing Tropico 6, which is sufficiently unlike Tropico 5 so that I think it will take months and months before ho-hum factor sets in.

I can now also send all my Sims to the University!

So, you know. Overwhelmed by life’s beauty and magic…



I thought long and hard about whether I was going to buy a Mac or a PC. In the end, I went with the Big Fruit Company (trademark: rebeccmeister) mostly because I wanted access to the upgraded version of iMovie though if I don’t start taking more videos, if I keep on using still photographs, I might as well have stuck with the antiquated Mac because let’s face it, iMovies of still photos are only PowerPoint presentations set to music.

It dawns on me that I should probably start stockpiling power supplies for my old computer as well. I continue to love my old computer, which works perfectly despite having been manufactured in 2009 in the days before tech companies got smart to the fact that obsolescence is a feature not a bug.

I would never have bought the new one if it weren’t for the fact that the video games I want to play won’t work on the old one.

Playing video games may seem like a really trivial reason to buy an expensive piece of equipment. But you know what? The coming winter is really gonna be hard. I mean—I think my life is hard now, and compared to 90% of the other inhabitants in this particular time/space continuum, I have it pretty damn good. I need to do whatever it takes to keep bouncy through the coming winter

Come winter, it’s gonna be horrible: Bad weather, economic depression, escalating inflation.

You’re gonna start seeing some major cracks in the supporting infrastructure come winter.

Plus I’m not at all sure American voters are gonna oust Trump despite what the polls predict.

Trump is such a suppurating boil on the fat and sagging ass of America that you wonder how voters could not oust him. But I suspect there is a fair amount of backlash to the ongoing violence in cities like Portland and Chicago that people are not talking about but certainly will be voting about. (According to polls, something like 60% of all Americans are nervous about confiding their real thoughts on politics. What “real thoughts” could they possibly be harboring, and who should they be “confiding” them to? Pollsters?)

I suspect it’s time to start loading up on pasta, peanut butter and toilet paper again.

Jeff Beals was the centerpiece of a This American Life piece that did an excellent job summarizing fissure lines in the Democratic party.

You can listen to that piece here:

https://idahostatejournal.com/opinion/columns/meowtoo-movement-agrees-cat-park-would-be-purr-fect/article_3d324031-2504-5767-94f5-7f20be7c0fc9.html

###

Here’s the deal: If I vote for a Democrat, for the most part I’ll be voting out of expedience. Getting rid of Trump and Trump minions is a high priority.

But I’ll be counted as part of a Democratic “blue wave.”

And I’m not.

Because as far as I can tell, the Democratic party has sold its soul to the one-percenters. They’re indistinguishable from Republicans in that regard. And that is the biggest issue for me.

My left-leaning friends get hysterical about “dark money.” The Koch Brothers are minor royalty in hell! Didn’t Satan used to date Rebekah Mercer?

But, of course, the Democratic party has its own sources of “dark money” from Soros et al.

Beals summarizes the situation very neatly: “There’s a way bigger axis out there that people with a lot of money don’t want us organizing on, and it’s the economic axis. That’s an axis where you got 1% on one-side, and you got more than 90% on the other side, and you really change politics in America, because you’re built on the axis of income inequality and a rigged economy.”

###

Else?

My two workhorse laptops have been slowly dying the Death of a Thousand Spinning Rainbow Balls for several months now, so I finally decided to replace them.

I bought an iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard, which essentially hook up to form a compact unit on which I can word-process, read The Daily Mail, and watch movies.

I’m keeping one of the ancient laptops because I have all my art stuff on it. Since I’ve owned it, I’ve never updated its operating system. Why should I? So far as I can tell, the only reason technology companies keep updating operating systems is to force me to buy newer, more expensive enterprise software and/or subscriptions. And I don’t want to. The enterprise software I already laid out hundreds of dollars for works just fine, thank you.

The iPad is a slick little machine, but I don’t love it. Yet.

Maybe I will come to love it.

Right now, the interface just seems weird to me. Like my iPhone. But not like my iPhone.

But it is incredibly lightweight.

Of course, I couldn’t afford it, but no problem, right? Since that credit card company saw fit to give me a credit limit with so many zeroes twinkling like little zircons!

###

Also, Sparky Snowdrop and I crept out late last night to see Hereditary. We are both aficionados of horror films.

Hereditary is extremely scary. The type of scary, though, that won’t translate to the streaming video market, I fear, because the plot is quite implausible. In a darkened theater, you get sucked in by superb acting and the moody atmospherics, but between those countless interruptions and that bag of Cheetos in the privacy of your own living room, you are likely to think, I don’t get it. Why doesn’t Gabriel Byrne just pack Toni Collette off to a mental hospital?

The movie uses horror as a type of metaphor for extreme familial dysfunction. You recognize that dysfunction from movies like We Need to Talk About Kevin, In the Bedroom, and practically the entire mise-en-scene oeuvre of Gus Van Sant. This dysfunction even has its own cinematic signature: a beat that goes on just a fraction of a second too long so even dynamic scenes seem bathed in preternatural stillness.

Hereditary – not a movie for everyone. But I liked it very much.

So-o-o, the hard drive on my relatively new-to-me computer crashed yesterday, and I spent a merry 12 hours or so running every diagnostic test, quick repair, and hint in discussion.apple.com’s vast archives of geek talk. To no avail.

It’s a disk0s2 error. Which could mean: (A) Invalid node structure. (DiskWarrior could probably fix that. If I owned DiskWarrior) or (B) the hard drive is fucked. New hard drives cost approximately $100 and once upon a time, I could do that repair – Well. Not easily. But I could do it.

Not a crisis since Ben replaced the screen on the broken computer he gave me, from which I type merrily away to y’all now.

But it does make me wonder why I bought another Mac.

This computer – 2009 vintage – has a very useful technology called Firewire, which allowed me to hook up with ease in something called Target mode to other similarly endowed Firewire computers.

The new-to-me computer – 2010 vintage – has something called Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt and Firewire don’t talk to each other.

Just like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak didn’t talk to each other.

Well, Steve Jobs, you’re an asshole. (Were an asshole.) Fuggetabout me going to your movie! There’s an impressive tech term for Apple’s disdain for allowing cross-compatibility in product lines. I forget what the term is because I’m old, and my mind is Swiss cheese, and any moment now, I’m gonna be hauled off to the human recycling dump. But. But… Real elegance involves facilitating communication.

So-o-o, I do do backup files every once in a while. There isn’t anything too, too irreplaceable on the sick machine. Mostly my notes for the June novel. I can do those over without too much hurt.

I can’t fix it myself at this point – although I would be able to fix it if I had access to another Thunderbolt machine. (Gr-r-r-r.)

My options are (1): Either to drive to Kingston on Monday (where the only Mac guy in the Hudson Valley has his shop), spend $100 or so to fish those few files out of the glub-glub-glubbing hard drive. (2) Drive to Ithaca Monday where Ben will fix everything for free-e-e-ee! Or (3) To eat the June files, erase the hard drive, and reinstall the OS. Of course, if there’s something physically wrong with the hard drive, that won’t work. But for whatever reason, I don’t think there’s something physically wrong with the hard drive.

I will, of course, write a civil but hostilely toned note to the bozo who sold the machine to me. One really ought to be able to get more than two and a half months use out of “refurbished” machine.

###

Yesterday was the day where I was going to do absolutely nothing.

Not that my life is particularly demanding on the day-to-day level anyway, you understand, but yesterday I wanted to watch bad television all day and sink mindfully into the abyss of absolute sloth and self-indulgence.

Which I suppose is exactly what I did. Minus the bad television.

###

This has been the most beautiful autumn you can possibly imagine. I mean, just breathtakingly gorgeous.

Like living inside a Gerard Manly Hopkins snowglobe.

Margaret, are you grieving?...

(Click on the pix and then click with the handy magnifying tool for bigger views!)







Aurora is moving on to her new life in the Big City today. It’s time. She’s interested in media, fashion, and publishing jobs, and she's done an impressive job of tracking down such listed employment opportunities, but in the end, I fear New York City media, fashion, and publishing employment opportunities are mostly a function of networking, so she’s gotta be somewhere where she can network effectively, go to the launch parties and gallery openings where such deals actually get made. That somewhere is not the sleepy Hudson Valley.

She took L and I out to dinner Friday night. We hit Crave.

Wonderful restaurant. I had a cocktail made from fig vodka, ginger beer, and lime, and this amazing Brussels sprout dish. Fresh Brussels sprouts do not taste at all like Brussels sprouts that are even two days old, and these were sautéed with tiny chips of pork belly and something else I forget now. So-o-oo good! And a slightly less amazing gnocchi with a deep, complex sauce. You can fuck up gnocchi, but you can’t really make them gourmet food. I mean – you can; trendy, expensive restaurants do it all the time, but that’s really an affectation. Gnocchi are peasant food. What gnocchi live or die by is the sauce, and this sauce was rich, filled with meat that had simmered all day and fallen off the bone, and hints of cinnamon and cardamom. To die for.

On the drive home, we started talking about serial killers.

Poughkeepsie has its own!

Kendall Francois who offed at least eight hookers during a four-year stretch in the mid-90s.

“Well, Kathy and I are such ghouls that naturally, we had to check out the house where he lived with his parents,” L said cozily. “It was all cordoned off with yellow police tape. Near where Kathy lives. We went by there every day for about a year.”

“Creepy!” I said. “Did they pull it down?”

“No, no. Of course, the family moved. And it was empty for years. But eventually, it sold. Someone’s living there now.”

“I wouldn’t want to live in a house where a serial killer once lived,” I said. “He was a very large man, wasn’t he? A morbidly obese serial killer!”

“Well, I heard – from someone who worked inside the jail where they kept him – that he had an absolutely enormous penis –“

“Linda!” Aurora shrieked. She began laughing hysterically.

“Aurora’s never heard the word ‘penis’ before, Linda,” I said. “Perhaps you ought to explain what it means.”

“A very large penis,” Linda continued, unperturbed. “So I was thinking maybe, you know, he had to go to prostitutes because normal women couldn’t handle his needs. And then he got mad at them because they couldn’t handle him!”

“Oh, I rather doubt that, Linda,” I said. “Serial killers have a rather well-developed and well-defined pathology. Circumstance does not transform one into a serial killer!”

“And that would be… ?”

“Well, there’s a triad of behaviors they display as kids. They kill animals. They wet their beds. And they set fires! If you notice your kid doing these things, you don’t have to waste time taking him to a vocational aptitude counselor. ‘Cause you know that when he grows up, he's gonna be a serial killer.”

Crise du jour dernier soir: My computer stopped holding a charge. I’m fairly conscientious about backing it up on a regular basis and we live in the Age of Redundancy so there’s a battered old iBook lying around somewhere that if worst came to worst, I could always promote to Numbah One but you know, what a drag. I really can’t afford to purchase another computer what with Xena’s death duties hanging over me. Other people celebrate the holiday season with gifts for loved ones; I plot ways to euthanize dogs inexpensively.

Turned out to be the DI-in board which is a fix I’ve done before, so here we are up and merrily running again after 12 hours of taking the damn thing apart, misplacing several of the tiny, itty-bitty screws for several hours, and visiting ravages of hysterical despair upon myself until I took myself bluntly in hand – Ubermind to Id: THIS IS NOT PRODUCTIVE BEHAVIOR – but dear God, what a drag. Of course, the computer is my livelihood. But more than that, it’s my connection to a social universe since all my pals live far so far away.

I’d given B my old iBook G4 which had conveniently died thus allowing me to ravage it for parts. He also had the tools. He also volunteered to do it for me, which I probably should have taken him up on since he’s a much better mechanic than I am, but you know pride, pride, pride.

Anyway, it was not a fun experience. And I don’t particularly feel pride in the accomplishment. Think I would have felt far more pride if I’d been able to toss the damn thing and buy a shiny new toy, done my part for the consumer economy.

###

Did you know 40 percent of New York City residents get foodstamps now? Forty percent! And they’re living in the most expensive real estate in the world. And the stock market keeps going up and up and up. There’s a serious dysfunction at some very basic level right now. Same as it always was, I suppose, and yet, and yet, and yet…

###

The Xena stuff is making me very sad. Turns out it will cost upwards of $150 to euthanize her humanely and cremate her tiny body since I really don’t want to bury her in the back yard. True, there’ve been no frosts so the ground is still fairly diggable. People are complaining that there won’t be a white Christmas this year. Fuck ‘em.

But I really don’t want to spend $150 on killing Xena when I have so many other bills that take precedent, like auto insurance, like auto repairs if it comes to that. I’m tempted to take out an ad on Craigslist: Are you a sadist? Come shoot my dog!

And just looking at her, knowing what I have in mind, makes me very sad. Look deep into my eyes, little creature! Do you see your own mortality there? You should.

“I’m afraid that anything I do to Xena will be done to me!” I blurted out to B. “I suppose it’s a crazy superstition. But I can’t get my head off it.”

“Well, it will,” he laughs.

“They don’t euthanize people. Yet.”

“Oh, sure they do. Just look at that place where Robin works. They euthanize them with boredom. And bad food.”

So true. Last time I picked Robin up, he was late and I had to hang out in the empty auditorium for ten minutes or so. During that time, two or three Shortview residents came shuffling by with their attendants. The attendants were all bored lowlifes from Groton, their elderly charges all people who’d had lives, at least part of those lives interesting or at least so one assumes. And those people walking with them couldn’t have been less interested. And all I could do watching was think, Dear God! Let me live forever or kill me before it comes to this.

There’s lots more to write but I must scuttle off and teach the Tibetans how to apply for unemployment.

In Heaven, a little blind Jack Russell will be barking furiously to keep me from entering its Pearly Gates.

How many Obamas does it take to change a light bulb?” Robin asked.

“I give up.”

“None,” he said. “Obama can’t change anything.”

I’m going to have to start hiding that section of the paper with the Young Republicans meetings.

In other news the power supply on my Mac laptop abruptly fizzled and died last night. Bummer – I can’t really budget a replacement until after the twenty-first. B is trying to MacGyver together a workaround that will get me through till then but I don’t have high hopes. Wondering how bad the hypergraphia withdrawal will be. Hey! Do the starving drag queens in Uganda worry about logging on to LiveJournal? I don’t think so…