Mallory's Camera

Felt out of it all day yesterday. Out of it almost to the point of feeling physically disoriented, sub-threshold dizzy.

When I went tromping in the early evening, I glanced at my FitBit & saw that I’d only gotten five hours sleep the night before. So maybe that was the reason I felt so weird? More than practically any other person I know, I need my sleep. If I don’t log at least seven hours, I feel dissociated like I’m going through the motions for reasons I can no longer remember.



In the morning, I met up with BB (always delightful.)

We talked a lot about sex.

I cut the crush on Iggy off at the pass since it was a guaranteed trip off the cliff.

But I’m interested in it phenomenologically since it was the first bona fide glimmer of limerence I’ve experienced in ever so long, a genuine rush that helped me feel more connected to the world around me.

Orgasms are healthy, so I make sure I have a lot of them.

But the crush was about something more than orgasms. Some of it was about pheromones: You share a house with someone, you become familiar with the way they smell—no, I’m not talking about body odor here but that rootier, all-permeating musk people give off when they’re clean & bathed. I kinda think that musk is the basis of all real sexual attraction. I mean, yes, you can learn to be sexually attracted to practically anyone, but that magnet-clink thing only happens with someone with the right musk (i.e. pheromones.)

###

In addition to all that woo-woo mind meld stuff I shared with Ben—the ultimate X, right? ‘cause he’s a dead X—we had a very good sexual relationship.

Post-Ben, I think that’s actually worked to turn me off sex. Because unless you dissociate during sex—been there! done that! it can be fun, but you have more control with a vibrator!—good sex is intimate, which means you’ve got to have trust.

Clearly, trusting Ben was one of the worst things I’ve ever done in my life (although without Ben, there would have been no RTT, so the ultimate balance of the misalliance was a positive.)

So I wonder whether that particular crash & burn has worked to turn me off for the past decade to the prospect of sex with other people.

I mean, I have had sex in the past decade: I dated rather compulsively for the first few years after I left Ithaca. But neither the sex nor the humans involved in the act were particularly memorable.

All grist for the mill.

###

Anyway, apart from BB-ing, tromping, & thinking about sex, I Remunerated some (but not enough) and felt like a failure because Molly is out there somewhere, & I can’t seem to rescue her.

Is that the same thing as missing Molly?

Maybe.

I must say Mabel—Molly’s ostensibly “bonded” sibling—doesn’t seem to miss her in the slightest.

Dreamed about The Most FABULOUS museum! This huge structure that from the outside looked vaguely like the Brooklyn Museum (a museum in which I spent a significant portion of my youth) but from the inside went on and on and on, with stained glass everywhere, and also the most remarkable painted statuary. The exhibits were completely immersive like holographs, and you’d have lifelike interactions with them that went on for centuries—like there was one exhibition on this poet called Basho¹ —

But on the sidelines, there was all this drama I had to deal with.

Like Ben was deliberately alienating RTT’s affections and undermining my relationship with RTT.

And I ran into John Simmons. “I really dislike you,” I told him. (“I don’t like you either,” he replied.)

And I ran into Marybeth and told her, “You should explore as much of this museum as you can because you won’t have the opportunity to do it again: This is only a dream”—which I hadn’t known (I mean that it was a dream) until I said the words—

###

It might be interesting to ask Marybeth, Did you dream of me, too, last night?

###

Meanwhile:



This is what I woke up to.

Not too terrible. Maybe four inches. Although, of course, I would prefer no Hideous White Stuff From the Sky at all.

And I don’t know why my iPhone camera made the sky blue. It’s grey. And the snow is continuing to fall. Teensy tiny flakes.

###

TaxBwana has been officially canceled today.

Yesterday, there was only one client I cried over—Frederic Elkjer (not his real name), who was so ancient he no longer had a gender. His long grey hair made me think he was a woman when I first saw him. I was surprised when I saw his name.

Tiresias…

Frederic Elkjer is 89 years old. In full possession of his faculties. Physically fit. Survives on an $8,000 social security payout and the $500 or so he makes gardening for neighbors.

He had to get his taxes done to qualify for one of New York State’s property tax rebates.

I was absolutely shocked to see that they are taking out $2,000 a year to cover his MediCare Part A & B.

How can anyone survive in this country on $6,500 a year?

Let alone a very, very old person?

His only physical disability was that he was stone deaf, so I communicated with him by writing on a blank piece of paper. (I found myself writing very, very large—the graphological equivalent of shouting, I suppose.)

I am fairly certain you qualify to have your Medicare payments subsidized, I wrote. Would you be interested in some information on this?

He nodded his head eagerly.

Also, I think you qualify for food stamps.

He took the pen and wrote back, I thought I would just try to look for more work.

Oh, no, no, no, no, NO, I thought.

But I wrote: You deserve to enjoy more leisure. And printed him out reams of information on how to apply to the Qualified Medicare Beneficiary Program and SNAP.

All the while thinking, Why has no one suggested these things to Frederic Elkjer before? Why have they left him dangling so precipitously close to the cracks? In what universe is a nonagenarian left to survive on less than $7,000 a year?

Honest to God. I have his address (‘cause I poured over property taxes.) I’m seriously thinking about sending him an anonymous cashier’s check.

But I suppose that is just me being sentimental.

Anyway, I cried and cried on the drive home.

I just couldn’t get that one sentence—I thought I would just try to look for more work—out of my head.

###

Came home and discovered that a new C.B. Strike had landed on HBO.

So, I cracked open the chocolate-covered cranberries and settled down for a binge.

If I were still into fancying people, I would have a crush on Tom Burke, the actor who plays Cormoran Strike. I’ve always had a thing for macho, secretly sensitive guys who wear fisherman sweaters.

But fortunately, I'm not.





¹ I must have known there is a Japanese poet named Basho, right? I mean, he’s very famous. But in the dream, I didn’t—

Feel almost as though I’m living a double life – garrulous extrovert by day, but in the wee hours of the night (in which I invariably awaken) suffering from a kind of spiritual isolationism. Dover Beach breaches the Sea of Faith, yes? See, I did too benefit from my 12th grade English class even though I was zonked on 1000 micrograms of Osley Orange each and every fourth period.

Last night at two o’ clock in the morning, I amused myself by reading through Abe’s collected online San Diego Reader pieces. Boy, that man can write. We’d chattered away for an hour and a half on the phone earlier that day, first time in several months. Things are going very well for him – New York editors love him, Gourmet is sending him to Italy for a week on a story, he is upbeat and vibrant. When I hung up the phone, I went for a twenty mile bike ride and tried to ponder why though I’ve been 49% in love with Abe for years, I’d never let myself slip over that five or ten percent that would give the emotion a firm margin.

On the last night I was there last summer, we went out drinking. After several rounds of Manhattans, he turned to me and said, "You know the problem with me? I’m always falling in love with women like you."

Tricky moment.

"Oh, you don’t want to do that," I said. "I’m shopworn. I’m emotionally dysfunctional. You want a nice young woman who’s a blank slate, maybe a Phillipino catalog bride or an editorial assistant at Writers House, fresh from Wellsley."

If I’d gone dewy-eyed and trembling, mumbled the right incantory response, we would have staggered back to his house, fucked like bunnies, woken the next morning with scratches on our backs. And I would be writing this morning from an apartment in Sheepshead Bay. Because Abe would never be content with an affair, no, no, it would have to be a marriage, a deep emotional and spiritual communion, and frankly that kind of intimacy with someone who’s so physically charismatic – think Gerard Depardieu in Le Retour de Martin Guerre – scares the shit out of me. Where do you find room for your own thoughts when you’re around someone who’s determined to take up that much space?

The best mates are the ones who’re invisible until you want to see them.

Came back from the bike ride, collected the kids and drove to the karate studio. Robin’s green belt test. Sidney testing too. Jeannie and I sat next to each other, gossiping like school girls. "We got two long letters from Jeff in jail," said Jeannie. "I should ask Tony to show them to you. He mentions you and Lucius."

"He mentions me? What mean things did he say?"

"Oh, nothing mean –"

"You know, we were email buddies for a while. But the thing is that he expected me to write his book for him. I told him that while I’d be very happy to help edit his book and do the agent poke, if he wanted me to ghost it for him, he’d have to pay me vast sums of money. That shut him right up."


Robin looked amazing during the test. Really, his improvement has been exponential this past year. He’s kicking over his head, his punches and blocks are clean and strong. Still a little wobbly on his stances. I suppose we will have to put his overactive imagination to the task: You are rooted like a tree. You are immovable as a mountain range. His forms looked beautiful to me, and when Matt awarded the green belts, Robin got a handshake. (Nobody else did.) "I came down extra hard on you," said Matt. "I wanted to see if you could work around that, overcome that obstacle. And you did. Beautifully."

After the test, Robin morphed back from an apprentice warrior into a nine year old, and I took the boys to Ghiradelli’s for a celebratory sundae. They ordered something called an Earthquake which was eight separate flavors of ice cream and eight individual toppings. Robin ordered chocolate mint to forestall the Mommie Tax, so there was nothing left to do but wander next door to the shop and take over the cash register from Ben.

Ben looked testy.

"What’s wrong?" I said.

"Nothing’s wrong," he said but it turned out he was in a funk because sales were only nibbling at the $200 mark.

"Lots of people have been coming into the store," he said. "And everybody’s saying how cute the store is. But nobody’s buying. Oh – early this morning, we got two firemen from Fresno who drove all the way up here for two things – to buy French fried artichokes in Castroville and to buy hot sauce here. They were here the first week the store opened. They love the store."

"Repeat visitors," I said. "That’s what retail is all about."

"They’re not carrying bags," said Ben. "The people milling around out there on Cannery Row. That’s a bad sign. That means they’re not here to buy."

"It goes in cycles," I said, but indeed, our material fortunes are very tied up in the store even though I know it won’t turn a profit until the end of its first summer. There will be a peak at Xmas and then will come the three lean months, January, February, March, the three lean kine. I need to get that web site up. And I may need to get a real job to tide us over financially.

Mister Kim came to visit the sign yesterday. Trailing an entourage – funny, I hadn’t really thought of Mister Kim as the type to have an entourage but there they were, an impeccably dressed dark-haired woman about my age in a collar with a fur coat and slinky black books, a guy who bore a spooky resemblance to Richard Brautigan, a few others.

Despite the rain, business was very brisk. Mister Kim stood on the threshold for several moments, staring at me mournfully. I don’t think he expected me to recognize him.

“My artist!” I said. We grasped hands, went out together to survey the artwork.

“Wonderful,” said the Richard Brautigan lookalike. “The detail. Look at the chili peppers on the boxer shorts.”

“Wow,” I said. “You know I hadn’t noticed this before but you actually painted in the fillings in the old lady’s teeth.”

Mister Kim fretted over some guano on the old lady’s painted purple dress. “You need to wash. With mild soap and water.”

“Oh, I do,” I said. “This sign is my favorite thing on the planet.”

Then Mister Kim began fretting over me. “Things on yr sweater –“

“Dog hair?” I said. “God, I’m such a slob –“

“Paint on yr sweater –“

“Paint! Surely not. Black cashmere and paint! Two things that don’t belong together – “

I was babbling. I was nervous. I wanted to ask him: how’s John?

A few yards away, Ernesto was braving the elements with his guitar and Pipes of Pan.

“So beautiful,” said the be-booted lady. “So soulful.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Ask Ernesto if he’d rather be a hammer than a nail. I dare you.”

They gawked at me.

Mister Kim followed me back inside the store. He had a peculiar expression on his face when he looked at me, Caesar first realizing Hey! That Gaul is pretty neat. Maybe I should plan an invasion…

“You remind me of a friend,” he said, advancing closer. “Same face. Your eyes. My friend, Russian – “ And then he started to talk very fast, his accent so thick and impenetrable that I couldn’t understand a word of it so I just stood there smiling and nodding along with the rhythm of his words. It hit me then as it sometimes does – this human being has a complex history and an inner life, probably one that’s a lot more interesting than my own. Maybe this Russian was instrumental in extricating him from North Korea. Possibly they spent a doomed, tragic, romantic week on the Trans-Siberian railway, riding together in the same car that ran over Anna Karenina.

Had a pleasant domestic evening at home. Cooked pork chops with a complicated lavender ginger sauce that was wasted on the kids, baked a dozen mini-chocolate bundt cakes for Marybeth’s soireé this evening. Nathan came over, Max’s Eddie Haskell. They hung out in the living room, playing Madden 2003. Robin kept trying to join in: “Why can’t I be a teenager?”

Retired to my bed around nine to read sleazy tabloids. Michael Jackson near death, Anna Nicole Smith drops eighty pounds. Annie called: “So, how’s the crush?”

“I’m a complete blithering idiot,” I said. “I’m totally besotted. I keep bumping into furniture.”

“Well, can’t you conscript Ben to, uh, perform manly duties in proxy?”

“No, no, no,” I said. “The smell is all wrong.”

“I see,” said Annie. “Well, you know, whenever I’m feeling particularly neurotic, I think about Liza Minelli. And I realize: damn, maybe I’m not so crazy after all. I pass this wisdom on to you.”

My Friends pages are fucked for some reason -- displaying laterally, not vertically. I suspect somebody linked to a quiz with fucked up tabular coding. Since I don't have that many LJ friends and most of the ones I do seem to be on writing hiatus, it's gonna take a while for the problem to resolve. Can't read it till it does.l

In other news, JC delivered the sign. And kissed me. Twice. I'm all in a dither. Where's Dover Beach when you really want to take that midnight stroll?