Mallory's Camera

Found this as I was cleaning the nettles and the Creeping Charlie out of the strawberry patch.

I would have noticed it if it had been there last year. So, it wasn't.

I am always on the lookout for messages from the Universe or any of its signatories. I spend most of my time in subways & waiting rooms willing my mind to be still, the better to pick up telepathic PingZ! from fellow passengers. Alas, I never have.

I have no idea why the Universe wanted to tell me yesterday, A great pilot can change sail even when his canvas is rent.

But apparently, it did. So, it must mean something, right?

###

Other than that, I had a pleasant enough, though extremely solitary, day yesterday.

Combination of sunshine & small amounts of cannabis seems to be keeping me emotionally balanced.

Trump's popularity is plummeting. If you look at the Daily Mail headlines as indicators—even I have given up reading the damn thing—they have backed down from All MAGALand! All the Time! and are now back to pedo step-Moms, Ozempic, Blake Lively (that cannot be her real name, can it?) and all the rest of their regular programming the way God intended.

I still feel as though I'm missing a critical piece of information, though.

Since true folk heroes who Sharpie bullets with enigmatic messages are in short supply, I was kinda-sorta hoping the United Healthcare CEO shooter would elude capture.

But, of course, he didn’t.

He turns out to be an Ivy League graduate who—get this!—belonged to RTT’s fraternity and bore a grudging admiration for Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, whose manifesto he gave a four-out-of-five-star review.

Maybe they can be cell mates or something.

Yeah, I think fraternities suck, too, but as RTT explained it, joining a frat gave him instant access to a social life when he first started university, and RTT—the most extroverted human on the planet—needs a social life.

Also, Ted Kaczynski was the cause of one of the worst fights I’ve ever had with Ichabod! I have a friend who used to refer—humorously!—to the house he bought in the Aptos woods as his “Kaczynski cabin,” a description of a hermit’s nest that I just ❤️LUV❤️ed.

So a couple of years ago, I referred to some place Ichabod was staying out in the forest as a “Kaczynski cabin,” and Ichabod just hit the ceiling. Accused me of accusing him of violent psychopath tendencies! Refused to believe me when I told him it was just a little in-joke that misfired.


Anyway. The Unabomber would certainly enjoy today’s weather! It is cold and dank and forboding; the ground mists are still swirling thick & impenetrable long after noon.

###

In the week or so since I’ve been back, I’ve been putzing & proactively sleeping enormous amounts—this in keeping with my theory that much of the time, people get sick because they’re looking for an excuse to loll about & do absolutely nothing, & illness is the only excuse most of us have for indolence.

Here I will note that one of the effects of having had the type of bizarre upbringing I had is that “normal” & “corny” seem exotic to me.

When I’m surrounded by mainstream America—as I am here in Wallkill, possibly more than in any place I have ever lived—I often feel like I’m skipping down the Hall of North American Mammals in some kind of cosmic American Natural History Museum.

Truck in the driveway: That’s the Trump Voters diorama. Suburu in the driveway: That’s the Harris Voters diorama. Flags = Veterans. Jesus Loves You signs = Christian fundamentalists; Plaster Marys = Catholics. Broken swing sets & 2001 Fords on cinderblocks = He’s-A-Drunk-&-She’s-Trying-To-Cover.

It’s all very strange.

And the rising tide of what I can only term “fundamentalism” makes it seem even stranger.

Maybe seven inches of Hideous White Stuff fell from the sky in all.

It’s still falling.



I’m behind on the Master Remuneration schedule, so that’s what I did all yesterday in between scanning The Daily Mail, just in case—you know—Taylor Swift comes out of the closet, or Prince Andrew decides to commit seppuku.

Israel is rumored to be contemplating a war on Hezbollah, which would mean launching a major military operation in Lebanon. That tasty news tidbit didn’t come from The Daily Mail—which is why it’s so much better to stick with reading The Daily Mail.

The doom forebodings are strong.

I can’t tell whether they’re just a manifestation of my mood—always gloomy in December, but this year, gloomier than usual—or an accurate reading of the space/time continuum.

The war in Gaza has swept the war in Ukraine out of the headlines.

But if you’re curious enough to read beneath the fold, you learn that yesterday, Russia launched its biggest air attack on Kyiv since the beginning of the invasion, a mix of Kinzhal and cruise missiles and Shahed drones.

And that the Dutch commander-in-chief (wait! the Dutch have a commander-in-chief?) sez the Netherlands must prepare for war with Russia.

And that Unca Joe Biden sez the U.S. is at risk of war with Russia.

Personally, I do not want to go to war with Russia.

This is the Big Deal that nobody wants to talk about in relation to the upcoming U.S. election: As loathsome & disgusting as Trump is, if Trump is reelected, the U.S. is unlikely to go to war with Russia.

###

Also, yesterday, the Gaza headlines were doing everything they could to get those Group Hate juices flowing.

Hamas not only raped & killed women at the Nova Music Festival, they cut off their breasts while they were raping and killing them, they played frisbee with their breasts while they were raping and killing them—The New York Times saw photographs—

And I am thinking, Hmmmm. Has “The New York Times” not heard about deep fakes?

I mean, maybe these things happened. And maybe they didn’t.

I have no way of knowing.

Photographs are no longer proof of anything.

###

I kinda want to put a sign up in the front yard: No Lives Matter: Cthulu 2024

Meanwhile, I’m fairly certain that:

1. Trump is gonna be the next President of the U.S. (Unless something really drastic happens.)

2. Ukraine is never gonna win back its lost territory.

3. Israel doesn’t last more than another 30 years. The two-state solution is dead. After the October 7 attacks, the Israelis are not gonna tolerate a Palestinian state on its borders, and the Palestinians are never gonna forgive the atrocious, random slaughter of Gaza civilians and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

Israel exists at present through what one might describe as the noblesse oblige of the U.S.—and, to some extent, other Western powers.

But younger generations in the West have no great love for Israel. And in 30 years, the younger generation will be all grown up and determining foreign policy.

###

In happier news, kiska Mabel has finally decided to become a real human cat:

I donned my skeleton suit.

A dear friend texted me pix of her unbelievably enchanting offspring en costume.

I ate 6 ounces of Belgian chocolate.

But that was it for Halloween celebrations.

I felt very, very, very sorry for myself because Halloween is officially My Favorite Holiday, and once upon a time, I would have celebrated it in style. Gone to parades! Gone to parties! Gone to bars! Gotten drunk and made out with the Creature From the Black Lagoon! Created employment for innumerable dentists by giving out 50 pounds of refined sugar (disguised in various costumes itself!) to hoards & hoards of adorably masquerading little children.

###

Really, though, I was out of sorts because when I’m tunneling, social media becomes my primary source of social contact, and I was irritated by the phenomenon whereby Certain People, using Facebook as their diary, parade their insecurities to capture bulk “likes.”

Thus we have Amaryllis writing, Cloistered pretty hard today. Adult ADHD is Real! and garnering 50,000 likes plus paragraph after paragraph in replies from various sycophants slobbering for her attention: Oh, Amaryllis! You keep it so real! Your sharing is SO valuable to us in our own lives.

And I am thinking, WTF? I happen to know for a fact that this woman is beautiful, lives a charmed life in an enormous house with a rich husband who dotes on her, has a prescription for legal speed—she has no problems, okay???

And then, of course, I felt ashamed of myself because envy! The most contemptible of all emotions.

###

Today’s headlines bring the news that Israel has apparently wiped out the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza. No doubt, there was a veritable vipers nest of Hamas terrorists hiding in tunnels beneath the camp, but that doesn’t really matter because one innocent life is worth a thousand guilty ones plus PR.

I’m beginning to think Netanyahu is just as crazy as Putin.

And that both are maybe just as crazy as Hitler.

It really does seem to me that WWIII is inevitable.

The contemplation of which makes me physically sick.

Here I am worrying about my own petty problems when really, I should be worrying about the world’s much larger ones.

###

Or maybe I should just stop worrying.

There is remarkably little I can do about any of it, after all.

On the personal level, I will have to jump eventually, but I have remarkably little control over whether that landing is hard or soft.

On the collective level, I am the most inconsequential, insignificant, and unimportant of motes.

I should just stop paying attention to any of it, all of it.

Unplug.

###

One last amusing note before I totter off to tromp, Remunerate, & tackle today’s To Do List:

China has succeeded in wiping Israel off the map! Literally: E-commerce giants Baidu and Alibaba no longer demarcate Israel on online digital maps.

See? You don’t need soldiers! You don’t need hydrogen bombs! You don’t need WWII!

All you need are compliant cartographers.

Spent yesterday almost entirely outside.

Which was good.

More eerie faux spring.

My delusional tomatillo plant, a spindly little thing all summer long, thinks right now is prime growing season. Poor little thing believes it has a future! It’s flowering and producing like mad:



Doctor Joe’s late-season lettuces are flourishing, too:



Marigolds are the mid autumnal showoffs. You can always count on marigolds for a memorable last hurrah:



I was ruthless. I uprooted everything in the lower garden but the tomatillo, and then raked compost into the soil:



Still to do: the upper garden plot. Today is supposed to be the last day of this eerie, unseasonably warm weather, so I need to finish this project today.

Why does everything always take longer than you think it will take?

###

The photos coming out of Gaza are absolutely gut-wrenching:





I cannot bear to look at them.

I cannot bear not to look at them.

###

Meanwhile, it’s becoming clearer that moving can no longer be a long-range plan.

It doesn’t have to be a short-term plan.

But I do need to start thinking about moving seriously and strategizing accordingly.

When I got home after gardening, Mrs. Neighbor Ed was out putting her little garden patch to sleep. When she saw me, she trotted over.

After we exchanged pleasantries, she asked, “So, how does Linda seem to you these days?”

In truth, L seems off and has seemed off for some time.

And I suppose if one were looking for a definite marker, one could use L’s knee operation as the start of her seeming “off.”

“I spoke to her on the phone yesterday,” Pat said. “She was looping quite a bit. And she didn’t seem to be remembering things. Simple things. Like I asked her whether she’d gotten her RSV vaccine yet, and she asked, ‘What’s RSV?’ I know she knows what RSV is; we’ve talked about it.”

Looping. Is that a medical term? (Pat's a nurse practitioner.) If so, it’s not one I’m familiar with. Though I did know exactly what behavior Pat was referring to.

“She may not know what RSV is,” I said.

“But we’ve talked about it!”

“Right. But she’s always been scattered. I kinda think she’s undiagnosed ADD and has been all her life. She’s been forgetting at least half of the things I say to her for the entire 10 years I’ve known her.”

“Then we started talking about leaf removal and snow removal. ‘The same guy does both for you, right?’ I asked. And she didn’t know who I was talking about!”

“Huh!” I said. “That could be significant. She actually spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Oscar. How hard-working he is in comparison with other Mexicans.”

Pat and I made faces at each other.

“She reflects the prejudices of her upbringing,” I said, shrugging. “She’s had this cold—”

“Right. That’s why I haven’t been over to check on her. I have that cataract surgery coming up.”

“Well, the cold has lasted for three weeks,” I said. “Except she has no upper respiratory symptoms. Apparently, she did test positive for Strep A when she first visited Urgent Care, and they’ve now prescribed two rounds of antibiotics. But she’s not getting better.

“ 'What exactly are your symptoms?’ I asked.

“And she said she just was very, very tired all the time. She has that underlying heart murmur. And Strep A can affect the heart. So I told her she should get checked out by a cardiologist—”

“You’re a good diagnostician,” Pat said.

“Linda got so pissed off, she stopped talking to me,” I said. “And she’s pretty socially isolated, too, these days; her best buddy just got carted off by the kids to be warehoused in Texas. I daresay Linda’s very lonely.”

“Linda’s kids are useless,” Pat said.

“Oh, I know. Kurt visited her exactly once for ten minutes when she was recovering from surgery. And the one in California is just waiting for her to croak so the cash register drawer will open. Kaching! Kaching! Chris still comes down faithfully every weekend, so at least that’s something. But it’s kind of awful the way he expects her to wait on him hand and foot. The situation is not sustainable.”

Pat looked at me directly with her pale blue eyes. “What are you going to do?” she asked. Which surprised me a little.

I sighed. “Well, Linda absolutely will not be able to live here if I'm not living here. I’m her de facto caretaker. When I move out, she’ll have to leave the house. And she loves the house. So, there are some timing issues around that one. Plus, I really like living here, too. But yeah, I need to start looking.”

The problem with breaking any kind of fast—media, chocolate chip cookies, The Real Housewives—is that if you do it one day, you’re inclined to do it the next.

How can it hurt? you reason. I’ll stop tomorrow. Etc, etc, etc.

Thus this morning, I found myself reading all about the latest mass shooting. Twenty-two dead. As many as 60 injured.

That’s a lot. Even for a mass shooting.

###

Happens that it took place in a part of Maine I kinda/sorta know: Ben’s brother, The Spy Who Stayed Out In the Cold, was the harbor master in Rockland during one of his periodic attempts to warm up, and TSWSOINC had a girlfriend who lived in Lewiston. We stayed with her once.

(After they broke up, the girlfriend actually read this journal for a while. But I digress.)

I vividly remember that afternoon we drove to her house and somehow stumbled upon Bates College, this bonsai Ivy League university rising up out of the jungle that is the Maine countryside in deep summer.

Maine has a deeply weird terroir.

I haven’t visited all the states, but of the ones I’ve visited, Maine and New Mexico are the weirdest.

Not necessarily a bad thing, this: New Mexico actually lives up to its license plate motto (Land of Enchantment), and Maine in the summertime can stagger your heart with its sheer physical beauty.

But let’s just say Stephen King isn’t a horror novelist; he’s a regional novelist.

###

The shooter appears to be a schizophrenic Army Reservist (ulp). Who loved Donald Trump.

I use Stephen King-ish tropes when I play out the scene—from the shooter’s POV—inside my head. Those kids in that bowling alley? sez the voice of Donald Trump inside the shooter’s head. They’re gonna grow up to do some very, very bad things. They’re gonna get abortions. They’re gonna try to change their sex. They believe the Bible says it’s Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve.

POW!!!!!!
POW!!!!!!
POW!!!!!!

Doesn’t help that Maine has the laxest gun control laws in the nation.

I mean, I think they don’t even do background checks for mental illness or prior felonies.

###

Oh, and that thing in the Middle East?

Still happening.

That thing in Sudan, too.

Plus, a Category 5 hurricane took out a big chunk of western Mexico.

In good news, Choupette (Karl Lagerfeld’s cat) did her best to take out Kim Kardashian.



Meanwhile, I did as little as possible yesterday.

Finished the Remunerative Project, did laundry, did grocery shopping, but did not work in the garden and one mile out on my tromp, thought, Fuck this, went home, ate Terry’s chocolate orange slices and watched Bodies on Netflix, which is actually a halfway decent science fiction/time travel story, though its central paradox is big enough to drive a fully armored IDF tank through.

I do love time travel stories!

Though given the opportunity to travel through time myself, I’d turn it down.

With all its shortcomings, 21st-century America is clearly the best time and place there’s been so far on this planet to be a woman.

Managed to stay away from DUH NEWS yesterday.

Mostly.

Did the five-mile loop over the Walkway down into Highland Village and back. Trees seem to have accelerated their color-changing:



Continued putting my garden plots to sleep. The Big Dilemma: Do I dig up the canna lily bulbs in the pollinator garden?

I think I won’t. There are simply scores of canna lily patches in late summer around here, and I can’t imagine they all get dug up.



In the evening, I got some whimsical news:

The Whole Earth Catalog and all its various spinoffs are finally online—for free-ee-ee-eeeeeeee!!!

I wrote extensively for the Catalog. And the very first piece I ever published under my own byline in 1993 was in the Whole Earth Review. (Birthtales! Some of you have already read it.) I got the cover!!! Jon Carroll was my editor.



Yeah, yeah. It is an absolutely hideous cover. Presentation was never Whole Earth’s strong point.

Still.

Now my place as a minor footnote to 20th Century history is absolutely assured!!!!!!!

The Catalog sold well over 2.5 million copies and had an absolutely phenomenal pass-along since we little Earth hippies invented recycling.

###

This morning I allowed myself one half-hour of Current Events Porn.

The big news is that Bad People bombed a hospital in Gaza City, killing more than 500.

The Israelis are denying culpability, blaming Hamas rockets. They have wiretaps of jihadists on the ground to back them up. Of course, in the era of the Deep Fake, audio tapes mean absolutely nothing.

Still, I’m inclined to believe them.

Politically, Hamas had the most to gain from a hospital explosion, as evidenced by tens of thousands of chanting protestors last night in Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and other parts of the Middle East.

###

But I also see that in the West, at least, attention spans are already waning.

Brittney Spears’ upcoming memoir is snaring at least as many headlines as war in the Middle East.

So, who fuckin’ knows what’s really happening?

Except that the boys keep throwing those stones, and the frogs keep dying.

poliphilo quoted my favorite poet Auden:

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Well. We must tolerate one another or die.

But that doesn’t scan as well.

###

We must love one another or die is a difficult formula to live by, given the present state of the world.

Ichabod keeps texting me links to podcasts that will explain what’s going on in Gaza to me, much the way helpful Protestant missionaries used to disseminate Bible tracts to the heathen Chinese.

The Big Bad, it seems, is zionism.

I have a hard time separating out historical “Zionism” from the contemporary (small-z) “zionism.” I always thought Zionism was the movement to establish a Jewish homeland. Mission accomplished, and trust me: I have no interest in living in Israel (although true, I have some vague notion that I should visit Israel some day.)

I still have only the vaguest notion of what “zionism” is. Apparently, it has something to do with conflating Judaism with Israel.

It’s kinda difficult not to conflate Israel with being a Jew when the main chant at a recent pro-Palestinian rally in London was, “Gas the Jews.”

###

The history of that part of the world is famously fraught with conflict.

Palestine was an Ottoman territory that the League of Nations placed under UK administration following the end of World War I. British oversight continued between 1922 and 1947.

The Brits supported turning Palestine into a homeland for the Jewish people.

Neighboring Arab states did not agree.

Nevertheless, there was an enormous amount of mostly Ashkenazi immigration into that area. (Cue theme from Exodus.)

In 1947 the Brits threw up their hands and turned the whole mess over to the United Nations, which partitioned Palestine into two states: one Palestinian Arab, the other Jewish Israel.

The Palestinian state was never established; Jordan and Egypt annexed the territory.

Ensued a 25-year conflict during which Israel expanded its boundaries to include 77% of the original Palestine territory.

This resulted in lots and lots of refugees—approximately half the Palestinian Arab population. Thus was born The Right of Return—the political position that first-generation Palestinians (and second-generation Palestinians, and N¹⁰⁰⁰-th generation Palestinians) had the right to reclaim the property they’d left behind.

To make sure Palestinians were all in on the Right to Return, Jordan and Egypt refused to allow large-scale immigration into their countries. Much better for the cause to keep Palestinians living in wholescale misery in refugee camps along the borders, right?

During this time, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—a Palestinian nationalist coalition—led by Yassar Arafat arose. The PLO averred that Palestine, as it existed under British control, was an indivisible territorial unit and that the Jewish state was, therefore, illegal.

###

Now.

I’m not big on theocracies.

I can actually get behind the notion that a “Jewish homeland” is not a great idea.

I can also get behind the notion that Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, and Afghanistan (Islamic theocracies) and Vatican City (Christian theocracy) are not a great idea.

But I digress.

###

In 2000 and 2001, a series of negotiations between Arafat and I-forget-the-name-of-the-Israeli-prime-minister took place (the two I remember were at Camp David under Clinton and at Taba; I think there were others, too), and both turned down the best deal they were ever likely to get.

At this point, there is no obvious way forward.

But nothing justifies Hamas’s horrific terrorism.

###

Anyway.

I should just stop consuming media.

I can’t do anything about what’s going on.

So what's the point of knowing anything about it?

Here’s the collective garden crew receiving our awards from the Hyde Park Beautification Commission:



(I’m the one in the straw hat in the back row.)

We got two: One for landscaping and one for Green Environments (since the garden is a certified National Wildlife Habitat.)

We’re all so fuckin’ old.

###

And those hors d'oeuvres must have been very bad indeed because I woke up around 1 a.m. and [TMI about awful symptoms goes here.]

I was wretchedly ill!

And the most dramatic symptom of all was that I started sweating so hard I literally felt as though I’d been standing in a shower. Textbook cholinergic response!

On second thought, though, maybe it wasn’t the FDR Library hors d'oeuvres; maybe it was that piece of pizza I scarfed down when I got back from the FDR Library—I’d neglected to refrigerate it.

At any rate, it was an awful couple of hours, but the body did what bodies do, and eventually, I fell back asleep.

This morning I feel more-or-less fine most of the time. But still not entirely copacetic.

I don’t think I’m going to ingest anything but chocolate and lots and lots and lots of water today. It’s the closest thing I have in the house to a glucose solution.

###

The boys throw stones at the frogs for sport
But the frogs die in earnest…

Israel is now warning 1.1 million civilian residents of Gaza City to evacuate.

But where can they go?

Egypt is certainly not gonna let them in.

Is there a point to all this pain and suffering?

There is no point.

My mind loves narrative: It wants to see a point.

I’m having to keep a tight rein on my mouth—everywhere but here ‘cause, you know: It’s my diary, and I’ll rant if I want to.

###

On the one hand, the Hamas massacre was barbarous. (Though I’m still agnostic on the baby-beheading issue: Supposedly, there are confirmations from multiple sources, but I’m not sure I believe any of those sources.)

Plus I gotta break it to you, Millennials who are going all out on the Palestinians are our brothers front: Hamas doesn't respect your pronouns.

###

On the other hand…

I don’t think it’s really fair to say, They voted for Hamas, so they’re culpable.

In a culture that has no democratic tradition whatsoever but a long tradition of authoritarianism, “voting” means something quite different than it does in the West. There have been no elections in the Gaza Strip since Hamas was elected in 2006. And while I don’t know very much about that election, I do have a dim memory that Palestinians weren’t voting for Hamas in that election so much as they were voting against the irredeemably corrupt Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Fatah.

Then there’s the math: If there’s some established ratio of Palestinian dead to Israeli dead that will placate the Israelis, surely 1.1 million: 1,200 should not be it.

###

There is no solution to this one that I can see.

People are going to die horrible, brutal, terrifying deaths. Lots and lots and lots of people.

There’s nothing whatsoever that I can do except bear witness and try hard not to be pulled into tribal thinking—hard to do since I’m Jewish.

I kinda miss the days when Trump was my biggest worry.