Mallory's Camera

Line of cars at the Hyde Park Food Pantry was long, long, long yesterday.

Due to their ever-increasing numbers, the Pantry has cut down on the clients it serves every week. Now people can only come for food twice a month. We saw upwards of 50 cars yesterday. Fifty cars = 50 families; 50 families served every other week = 100 families.

There are approximately 5,000 families in Hyde Park, NY. And we see 2% of them. That’s a lot.

That shopping list you threw together in 2018? It would cost you 22% more to buy those things on it today. Inflation hits people in the lowest income rungs the hardest because necessities make up a disproportionate share of their expenditures.

So while affluent Americans are weathering inflation okay—the stock market is up, their equity in the homes they own is up—lower-income Americans are circling the drain.



Talked to Barbara for about an hour.

“I am just so fucking mad at myself for making that trip to California!” I said. “I hadn’t budgeted for it. And now, because I was such an idiot, I’m in a situation where I’m scrambling to marshal my resources—”

“That’s not how I see it at all,” Barbara said. “You had a friend who told you, I’m going to kill myself, and you stepped up to make sure she didn’t. That’s an incredibly wonderful thing to do.”

“But it wasn’t disinterested,” I said. “I mean, I had an agenda: I wanted to get back to California—"

“So what? Do you think all generosity has to be disinterested? Generosity rarely is; there’s always an agenda behind it, whether people want to acknowledge that or not. The point is you came through for her. You stepped up. You did a very good thing.”

Did I?

I feel that I got played for a chump.

Would Eleanor actually have killed herself on the appointed day when the crematorium had time to come for her corpse?

Hard to say.



Drove out to Woodstock after I got off the phone.

Woodstock is not a place I like.

It’s a place that leverages the reputation of an iconic music festival it had nothing whatsoever to do with to milk those tourist dollars.

And it’s one of the worst examples in the Hudson Valley of the innate hostility that exists between emigres from hipper places (for which read NYC) and people whose peoples have lived in the HV forever.

But who can resist the lure of a Cheez-It popup?

Apparently, not me!

And not 3,000 other people either—because that’s my rough estimate of the number of cars parked around the Cheez-It popup.

I finally found a place to stash the Prius and then hiked for about half a mile to the popup, past multiple clusters of locals shooting me the malaocchio.

There was no way I was gonna suck the straw of a tasty Cheez-It milkshake, not with a line of at least 500 people waiting to go inside!

But the High Concept was probably just as good as the milkshake. Maybe better!

###

Then last night I dreamed of my little grey Sybyl…

Woke up and thought, But she’s dead.

And I was so sad.

But I was also thinking, If AI steals your Remuneration clients, you can just do taxes for money.

Which is true. Though I don’t particularly want to do taxes for money.

But, of course, one of the big What Ifs that’s on my mind right now—that has to be on the mind of everyone who does writing or editing professionally right now—is Will AI render my services unnecessary?

So, the prospect of moving exacerbates an already existing insecurity.

My clients really like me. Lavish praise upon my services.

But, of course, if AI turned out to be better for their business model, they’d dump me.

So far, AI is a long ways off from that.

So far.

Such a strange dream!

I was talking to… Whomever/Whatever.

Whomever/Whatever was explaining to me that these lives we’re living, these corporeal existences, are actually a kind of prison system, or perhaps some kind of zoo, but definitely, some type of solitary confinement, designed to contain us, to clip our wings, to strip our senses, to stop us wandering the far ranges of stars and gas and dust and dark gravity on the other side of the Universe.

Designed by who? I asked Whom/What.

But to that, there was no answer.



I’m quite sure the dream was related to an hour-long phone conversation I had with Stew. (For someone who hates talking on the phone as much as I do, I sure spent an enormous amount of yesterday doing it!)

Annie can no longer hear, apparently.

I guess this is what spending a lifetime playing in rock bands will do to you.

“Wait a minute,” I said to Stew. “She has hearing aids. Didn’t you tell me that? Do you mean she can’t hear even with her hearing aids?”

“They lost the hearing aids,” Stew said—and this filled me with both impotent rage and despair. Impotent rage because goddam! Memory Gardens charges $10,000 a month, and they lose her fuckin’ hearing aids? Despair because it physically hurts to think of Annie, brilliant, creative, eccentric, inimitable Annie, locked inside her own brain with all escape routes to the outside world blocked.

How is it considered humane to keep someone in that situation alive?

###

I also had a long, really unpleasant phone conversation with Long Ago Eleanor—unpleasant because it made me feel really, really insecure and doubt the wisdom of living with her.

While I was visiting, we’d talked about which room would be turned into the Patrizia-torium for the short time we might be living in Fort Bragg.

Her house has two bedrooms; she sleeps in neither. She sleeps in an upright position on the living room couch.

Not entirely sure what’s up with that. She doesn’t have obstructive respiratory issues. Sleep apnea? Maybe! Anyway, people should sleep however they’re comfortable sleeping! Except that people shouldn’t sleep routinely in the living room of a shared house since that is a communal space.

So, we talked a bit about sleeping arrangements. Eleanor told me that she very seldom uses the larger of the two bedrooms, that she actively dislikes the larger of the two bedrooms—for reasons pertaining to the provenance of the bedroom set, which she then proceeded to tell me all about (Reconstruction Era antique) before her feverish diphthongized murmurings metamorphosed into a soliloquy about what a disappointment she’d been to her father because she’d never finished her graduate degree in Ancient Greek—

So, this would be the opportunity cost, I thought drily. Performing the uh-huh chorus for ongoing soliloquies like this one.

“Great,” I interrupted. “So, since you don’t like it anyway, I’d like that bedroom.”

###

Of course, the minute I decided I wanted the larger bedroom, she decided she wanted it.

This kind of reminds me of my cats!

I feed them exactly the same amount of wet food each day. But Mabel, the fat, sassy calico, always wants what’s in leaner and more virtuous Molly’s food bowl.

I thought we’d settled the matter while I was there, but yesterday, I got an email from Eleanor: Truthfully I'm stunned. It is actually a shock that you propose to move into my personal space, use my bedroom suite, and move me out…

WTF???

No Blanche-Dubois-Does-Email games for me! I reached for the phone.

“’Stunned’ is a strong word, Eleanor,” I told her in a mild voice. “It’s generally used to preface an accusation of really egregious behavior. It sounds as if you’re accusing me of bullying you.”

She sputtered.

“Well, you’ve done it before,” I said. “You once accused me of ‘extorting attention’ and then stopped talking to me for three years.”

This was when she first took up with Mark, my X-boyfriend, whom she eventually married.

She was jealous of Mark’s ongoing affection for me.

Despite the fact that I did nothing to encourage it.

“I don’t remember that,” she replied. “And you know I love you dearly.”

“And I love you,” I said. “But you have to realize that that entire house is your personal space, filled with your artifacts. And even though the plan is to move in a few months, it’s still going to be difficult for me. I suspect the real issue may be now that you no longer have the dementia thing hanging over your head, you may not really want to live with me—or anyone else for that matter. I think you need to give that one some serious thought.”

The rest of the conversation was a lot lighter and by the time it was finished, we were talking again about my moving to Fort Bragg as though it was a done deal—

But I am questioning the wisdom of that.

###

I do have to find a place to live. Though there is no looming timeline.

But I do have to find some place.

First Lois Lane, then Long Ago Eleanor.

I am so fuckin’ sick of the drama.

Clearly, I need to win Lotto!

According to Nate Silver, the Israel/Gaza War is wayyyyy down on the List of Things that Americans aged 18 to 29 really care about. (Silver uses a poll done by Harvard’s Institute of Politics for his stats.)

How, then, to account for the amazing amount of publicity that pro-Gaza demonstrations at various Big Name Universities are receiving?

It’s another one of those efforts by mainstream media to decide what we should be paying attention to.

Frankly, I don’t give a shit about student protests at Columbia University.

Although I totally believe what’s going on in Gaza right now amounts to genocide.

But if those students who are protesting so performatively really gave a fuck about the wretched of the earth, they would not be enrolled in elitist schools whose only real function is to groom their graduates for entitlement.

Back in the Jurassic, I participated in the 1969 People's Park protests in Berkeley. (Interestingly, this protest was sparked by the ongoing Arab/Israeli conflict but quickly diverged into homegrown issues.)

Of course, we all raised our fists and spouted the rhetoric in earsplitting rally cries, but behind the scenes, we were more swept up in a sense of adventure—kind of like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, except that we were smoking lots of reefer & having lots of clutch-&-claw-'cause-tomorrow-the-world-ends SEX.

I can't imagine it's all that different with the current round of protests except that social media does give people a heightened sense of their own importance.

###

Meanwhile…

I toddled off to the garden yesterday despite the fact that I am wayyyyy behind on the To Do List.

Put in three solid hours of weeding. It was very pleasant. You can tell I’m not a real gardener because I like to weed by hand; though slow, it is very meditative: Your thoughts clear out, and you are one with the twittering birds and the cloud shadows. So calming.

My peas are up and my garlic’s going strong. Also my little marsh irises are in full bloom!

Today, I’ll plant my lettuces.

###

Came home to a frantic text from Loraine—We have thousands of little caterillars from last years gypsy moths! They are all over everything!—

—and a frantic text from Long Ago Eleanor—doc denied she made dementia diagnosis. And CT scan shows normal brain with normal age-related shrinkage.

But that’s a good thing, no? I thought, staring at Long Ago Eleanor’s text. Something about the text was making me read into it that Eleanor was actually disappointed.

Eleanor definitely has something profound going on mentally. But it will be easier to deal with if it’s not dementia, I’m thinking.

Flying into Sacramento on Thursday.

Sacramento & the SF Bay Area are roughly equidistant from Fort Bragg, which is on the coast, in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere.

But the Sacramento freeways are easier to navigate.

###

The fabulous gracegiver has offered me her Sacramento guestroom for random comings and goings, so I’ll spend the night there and then take off for the coast early Friday.

I’ll spend four days with Old Pal Eleanor.

That oughta be enough time to sort out what’s really going on with her, right?

I’ll have to rely entirely on intuition—because one of the big issues on the Lost Coast is that access to healthcare is severely restricted.

Like when Eleanor first got her diagnosis, I asked, “Well, did you get a second opinion?”

But on the Lost Coast, there are no second medical opinions to be had.

###

Eleanor has always been very, very scattered. Exceptionally brilliant. But scattered.

Almost every place she’s ever lived in has been a total disaster housekeeping-wise because she gets involved with projects, then puts the projects down, does not go back to them, becomes involved with other projects, so the clutter layers on top of itself like some kind of adventure in entropic archeology.

Her second husband, Bill, bullied her out of this while they were living together—which she actually liked.

And I can kinda feel her setting me up to bully her, too, as when she calls to ask, Should I get rid of this antique dinner table for eight that was handed down from the plantation the Faulkners (not her real surname) owned either in pre-Civil War or Reconstructionist Alabama?

And I am thinking, I don’t fuckin’ know! How could I possibly know?

I am not much of a bully!

I prefer to deep-freeze my enemies.

But anyway, I am suspecting a lot of her mental anguish stems from an inability to navigate an increasingly disorganized living space and a total absence of any routine, since she doesn’t have to work.

Routines are good! Habits are good! Hanging your keys up on the same hook every time you come into the house is good since it establishes order and saves you countless hours searching for lost keys!

###

Anyway, my mission while I am there will be to sort out how much of what’s going on with her is due to her simply having become overwhelmed by entropy and isolation and living on the Lost Coast far away from civilization, and how much is organic decline.

###

Talked with Public Policy Eleanor for two hours on the phone yesterday.

(Yes, it is difficult having two close friends named Eleanor! Both claim they were not named after Eleanor Roosevelt, although given their age, who else could they possibly have been named after?)

I wanted to let her know that I will be in Berkeley on Wednesday & Thursday—

“Would you like to stay here?” she asked.

“Well, of course, I want to stay there!” I said. “Although being the über-polite person I am, I wasn’t gonna ask, I was gonna wait till you offered—”

Public Policy Eleanor is one of the most lucid people I know; her thought processes are like a textbook on optimal executive functioning.

“If you do decide to live with Eleanor,” this Eleanor said, “and she does, in fact, have dementia, and she wants the option to die with dignity, one of the things you’ll need to be very cognizant of—especially as it pertains to her financial resources, which are greater than your own—is the issue of elder abuse—”

Good thing the top elder law/estate planning attorney in Monterey County is the father of Ichabod’s best friend and a buddy of mine, too!

###

I’ll be back in Sacramento Thursday night, returning to NYC Friday morning.

I am feeling utterly overwhelmed.

Though most of the trip planning is actually done at this point, so really, it's just a matter of hopping on that conveyor belt.

The flight to Sacramento leaves at 6 in the morning, and I still have to figure out whether I want to stay overnight at a hotel near LaGuardia or take a town car from Hyde Park that leaves at three in the morning.

I don’t know!

Really, I just want to close my eyes, click my heels together, and be in California!

My lengthiest friendship is the one I have with Eleanor.

The blurry Kodachrome above was taken in 1976 when I was 24, and she was two years older.

Last week, she sent me a package.

I was in a Mood, so I didn’t open it.

Then yesterday, she called me.

###

I am (finally!) getting over my telephone phobia. Which I now believe was engendered during those Horrible Lost Years after my business went down the tubes, and I lost all my money, and my husband of 17 years dumped me after transplanting me 3,000 miles from every social support system, and each morning I’d wake up, wondering, Is this the day I finally become homeless?

Every phone call during those Horrible Lost Years was from a creditor threatening dire retribution. The smart thing to do would have been to file for bankruptcy, except I couldn’t afford a bankruptcy attorney, and I knew if I tried to do the bankruptcy paperwork myself, I’d have a mental breakdown even more complete than the one I was already having.

So, I just hid out for seven years. Stopped answering the phone.

###

Anyway, I’ve evolved now to the point where I will pick up the phone and talk to people—sometimes for hours!—though I’m still kind of a wimp about actually initiating phone calls.

I assumed Eleanor was calling to see if I’d received her package, so I hit the connect button and began merrily babbling—I was saving opening the package till I had the time to really appreciate it, and I know I’m a really a bad friend for not keeping in closer contact, but you’re always in my heart—

“Patrizia, no,” she said. “That’s not why I’m calling.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And you’re always in my heart, too. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

Cancer! I thought.

But, no, not cancer.

Dementia.

Not entirely unexpected. Both Eleanor’s parents had Alzheimer’s. And eventually died from it.

###

“How would you like it if I left you all my money?” she asked.

“What?” I said. “Eleanor, wait! It’s not a death sentence.”

“Patty, look. I took care of my parents those last few years. I watched Jacqueline—” her sister-in-law—“go. She had premature dementia. I’m not doing that to myself.”

“What does that mean, Eleanor?”

“I can’t tell you very much, Patty. I don’t want to compromise you in any legal sense—”

“But that’s fuckin’ insane, Eleanor! Did you see a doctor?”

“Yes. Managed care! She was happy to take my money and tell me what I already knew—”

“What you already knew?”

“Patty, I’ve had episodes—”

She described two of the episodes to me. They both involved the disappearance of time, five minutes, 10 minutes, wiped out from her memory, replaced by blank tape.

“Those could be transient ischemic attacks, Eleanor!” I said. “What they call mini-strokes. I mean, yes, TIAs may have a causal relationship to vascular dementia, but—”

“Patty,” she said. “It is extremely difficult for me even to talk to you the way I’m talking to you now. Do you remember television static? That random pattern of dots that used to happen when channels turned off for the night but somehow transmission signals were still being broadcast? That’s what it feels like inside my head.”



This is a photo of us in Paris. She’d come to visit me while I was doing one of my modeling gigs. 1972!!!

We had a huge falling out, I remember. There was a boy. Someone I had no intention of sleeping with but it amused me to dangle prospects: Someday. Maybe. When the horse chestnuts bloomed, when the moon was full, when he brought me chocolates for breakfast. Then I would sleep with him.

Eleanor, a bona fide Southern belle, born and raised in Alabama with an accent to match, stole this beau away.

I was pissed.



We ended up talking on the phone for an hour and a half.

It’s not like I disrespected her decision—in fact, I’ve had conversations with Ichabod where I’ve told him that the option of suicide was far more palatable to me than, say, residence in some Happy Memories care facility.

It’s just that I really don’t think she’s thought the issue through.

The vascular dementia associated with TIAs isn’t reversible. But susceptibility to TIAs is reversible.

Plus Eleanor lives in the middle of a forest in fuckin’ Mendocino County.

It’s dark. It’s cold. She’s completely isolated.

She’s depressed.

Would her quality of life improve if she had her high blood pressure or whatever it is that’s causing her TIAs (assuming that TIAs are the issue) treated? And if she didn’t live in cold dark Mendocino County? And had me to watch over her in a general sense?

Because, of course, that’s the thought that immediately came to me: That the Universe wanted me to move back to California to take care of Eleanor.

I mean, why not? She is like family.

We couldn’t swing a house in the SF Bay Area—which is just as well because I don’t think I could drive in the SF Bay Area. I have actual nightmares about that I-80/I-580 merge in Berkeley.

But we could probably swing a house in Santa Rosa or Sacramento.

Where I could drive!

###

“Do you have a timeline for what you say you want to do?” I’d asked.

Eleanor was reluctant to tell me at first.

But eventually, I wore her down.

“This coming Wednesday.”

“Why this coming Wednesday?”

She laughed. “I called the local cremation place. That’s the earliest they can cremate me.”

“What?” I screamed. “Eleanor, that’s nuts! What about all your stuff?”

“I won’t care about my stuff. I’ll be dead.”

“And the people who find the body— Eleanor, no. Listen to me. I one hundred percent support anything you decide to do but only if you’ve really thought through the decision. To me, it doesn’t sound as though you have.

“I can fly out to California in the middle of April. I’m not gonna ask you to promise me anything, but I hope you will wait until we can talk—”

###

I have been texting Eleanor pictures of my cats at two-hour intervals since yesterday. While I’m awake, that is.

Eleanor likes cats. She has responded.

There is simply no one I can think of whom I could get to go hang out with her. Her two blood sisters are absolutely insane. Her brother isn’t insane, but he is an alcoholic. She has a niece of whom she’s very fond, and who—because it’s all just one big It’s-a-Small-World sweepstake, isn’t it?—used to work for Barbara Angell (another Inner Circle friend) at the Petrified Forest even though Eleanor & Barbara Angell have never met, but that niece is at Johns Hopkins finishing up a PhD.

Anyway, the whole thing has left me feeling very, very weird.

I can’t just jump on a plane now. TaxBwana is depending on me.

And after that comes the Eclipse trip.

But I’ll be flying to California on the 18th. I hope.

Hiking was fun.

I was always the person in the group who straggled farthest from the leader.

I couldn’t tell whether this was because I am old and out of shape or whether it was because I liked to take frequent breaks from the pummeling aerobic workout so I could look at scenery.

I certainly wasn’t the oldest in the group. There was one lady there—as nimble as a goat—who looked like she belonged to my great-grandmother’s Hadassah.

###

As recently as a century ago, these woods were all farmland. James Roosevelt (FDR’s father) acquired the family farms, had them planted with trees because the land hereabouts is quite barren with low crop yields; the only farms that prosper in this part of New York State are dairy farms.

The only sign that the farms were once there are the old stone walls:




Dutchess County is famous for these stone walls.

Drive north to Columbia County or south to Putnam County or across the river to Ulster, and you won’t find them.

I have no idea why that is.



Afterward, I toddled off to the garden to rehome the Japanese anemones and columbines Loraine gave me.

Autumnal gardens are kinda like the emotional equivalent of those ambiguous, reversible images, the rabbit that is also somehow a duck:



Either mournful or hopeful, depending upon how you process death and renewal, I suppose.

Me, I come down squarely in the Margaret-are-you-grieving camp, so autumnal gardens are always a bit melancholy.

One thing that always perplexes me a bit is how my pepper plants and tomatillos always take off in the fall. I love tomatillo sauce! So every year, I try to grow tomatillos. And every year, my tomatillos are little spindly things, besieged by insects, till the end of August when they take off:



See all those little yellow flowers? They are never gonna turn into tomatillos! We are maybe one month away from first frost.

It’s heartbreaking, really.

###

After that, I went food shopping. And saw this:




In case you can’t tell from the photograph, it’s not a child; it’s a creepy doll.

The woman whose shopping cart it was stashed in was tall and movie-star gorgeous.

I can’t imagine what her motives were.

Maybe she was afraid that without the doll, she wouldn’t get enough attention from strangers?

Who fuckin’ knows?

###

Once home, my friend of the bosom Eleanor called me.

I actually have two friends of the bosom called Eleanor. Both swear they were not named after Eleanor Roosevelt, but I have my doubts.

The Eleanor who called yesterday is someone I’ve known since I was 17:



I love her dearly, but she has always been quite eccentric and has continued to grow more and more eccentric as she’s gotten older plus, I dislike talking to people on the phone: I find phone conversations bumpy and disjointed.

Eleanor was in a chatty mood, so we ended up on the phone for an hour and a half, and by the time I got off the phone, I was so exhausted all I could do was go to bed and read up on the Russell Brand sex scandal.

###

I’m not what you’d call a Russell Brand fan, but I do rank Get Him to the Greek high in the pantheon of the World’s Greatest Movies.

I’m completely uninterested in Brand’s reinvention of himself as an alt-right guru.

Still, reading through all the bloviated press coverage, I couldn’t help thinking, Why now?

One of the women making rape allegations was treated at the Rape Treatment Center (RTC) at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center on the day of the alleged assault. (No paywall here: https://archive.ph/NwmVQ )

Gotta say, that is pretty damning.

(I take all the stuff about the 16-year-old off the table: Sixteen is the age of consent in the UK, and I think Americans are generally weird, Puritanical, and repressed when it comes to sexual relationships between people over 21 and people under 21, particularly given the degree to which MSM over-sexualizes children, young girls, and young women here.)

Brand is a self-confessed “sex addict,” so all this did make me wonder: What is “sex addiction” anyway? Did Brand even have any agency at all over his own behavior back then? Is sex addiction a compulsive behavior like OCD? Could Brand control himself?

Of course, Brand’s misadventures are dominating the news cycle. Brand is like a C-list celebrity at best! And really important things are taking place in the world right now.

But no, Brand is being forced into our collective consciousness.

Which is its own type of rape.

Canada! You hate their geese! Now chill to the frozen horror of their polar vortex!

It’s like 7° out there, and tiny particles of Hideous White Stuff are falling from the sky despite the pale and ominous light of a frozen sun. I think the particles are actually the nebulized essence of the Human Will to Live because who wants to be alive when it’s this fucking cold?

I dreamed about Eleanor, my best Berkeley friend for many, many years:



A long narrative dream that I mostly can’t remember except at the very end of it, I was attending a play in some sort of theater, I thought with Eleanor except there she was in the front row, and she hadn’t saved me a seat.

“What’s up with this, Eleanor?” I wanted to know.

“Patrizia, you and I need to have a long talk,” she said.

Oh, God, I thought. This is gonna be a talk about all the ways that I’m not a very good friend.

I’ve had a few of those over the years. Mostly people wanting more attention from me than I can deliver. I am very self-involved, you know. And from time to time, busy.

“No talks, Eleanor,” I said in the dream. “Let’s just end the friendship.”

And walked away.

Except when I walked away, I discovered that I had picked up her shabby cloth satchel instead of my own sleek leather bag, and it was filled with all the sorts of weird things that one might imagine would fill a tote owned by Eleanor: frayed feathers; tiny, overwritten snips of paper; half-eaten, tasteless, and gluten-free cookies—and her phone, which was this flip-phone dealie made of neon blue plastic.

Where’s my phone? I wondered. And could feel myself begin to get frantic.

Superimposed on top of this, I was walking down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, staring at all the vacant storefronts. One storefront in particular I remembered: There used to be a giant rollercoaster inside it whose terminus was Coney Island.

Gosh! They don’t make stores like that anymore, I thought.

And woke up.

###

The 2020 tax code is much harder than the 2019 tax code. Phase 2 of the Trump revisions, doncha know, plus multiple patches designed to ease pandemic pain—like that 10% tax you used to have to pay for early IRA withdrawals? You don’t have to pay it for early IRA withdrawals in 2020.

I spent the day studying tax law, but I think the info is simply too much and too disorganized for an 8-hour cram—which is all I’m willing to devote to it given that I will not get a damn thing in return except for the altruistic joy of selflessly serving others—and, you know: Gag me on that one.

Shortly, I will take the certifying exam.

I am fairly certain I will not pass it.

Tant pis.

###

I also watched The Fabulous Baker Boys, which is a movie I deeply, deeply, deeply loved in 1989 when it first came out:



I firmly believe that a life solely spent watching each of my celebrity boyfriend Jeff Bridges’ movies over and over and over again would be a life well lived.

A couple of years ago, I started an art project that I only told one other person about.

The art project was this: I floated the labels off interestingly shaped bottles, and then I decorated those bottles with glitter, wrote a note on a kind of parchment-y stationery, stuck the note in a bottle and then stashed the bottle behind rows of books in various libraries up and down the Hudson Valley. Most of those bottles were empty liquor bottles, but a few had once been salad dressing containers.

This was not a mass production project! I completed maybe eight bottles over as many months.

The note I wrote was always uplifting. I assumed eventually some person would run across those bottles. You are a special person, I wrote to that person. Good things will come to you! Variations on that theme.

In a very real sense, this was a kind of prep for the novel I’ve been writing (and not finishing) lo, these two years past. My protagonist, June, goes quite mad two-thirds of the way through the novel; she’d been a thief her entire life, but after she goes mad, she starts giving back the weird scavenged things she’d been stealing and collecting all her life! She does this by leaving them in weird places around New York City. In fact, the name of the novel is actually If You Find This, Take It: It Was Meant For You, so you might say this reverse scavenger hunt is actually the heart of the novel.

June is a character quite unlike me! Her motivations are almost inscrutable, as the motivations of people in whom madness simmers before it boils over almost invariably are. In the end, she kind of heals herself by giving away this treasure trove of small, purloined valuables she’s collected over the years.

I knew this about the character from the moment I started writing her, but it was hard to get an emotional fix on it.

Hence, the art project.

The only person I told about the project was my beloved but deeply, deeply crazy friend Eleanor H. whose life had tendrilled closely with my own between the ages of 19 and 40.

I did not tell her about its connection to the novel because believe it or not, though I blab about my writing incessantly in my journal, I never, ever mention it in Real Life.

Eleanor thought the bottles were the greatest thing in the world! I had to forcibly stop her from giving me a thousand-dollar Michael’s gift card, which would keep me in enough supplies to spend the remainder of my life making little gilt-covered bottles and writing smarmy notes.

(I need to call Eleanor. I haven’t spoken to her since the pandemic began. I’ve thought of her, but I’ve also thought that her level of crazy would drive me straight over the edge. And it’s already hard enough to maintain any balance.)

###

Anyway. I thought of that art project when I ran across the above picture again.

It hangs on a signpost at the base of the Walkway Across the Hudson.

But the post has no other sign.

How cool would it be, I wondered, to start making collages like this, frame them, graffiti the frames, and then start hammering them up on anonymous signposts up and down the Hudson Valley?



I did the Walkway instead of Vanderbilt Park yesterday. It was more crowded, but not so crowded that it wasn’t perfectly easy to maintain a 10-foot distance from the other walkers, runners and cyclists.

About half the people were wearing masks. I didn’t—but I did make a point of carrying one so I could put it on in a hurry it in case anyone shot me a dirty look.

No one did.

Masks have become the latest Facebook controversy! I don’t understand it in the slightest.

Wearing a mask isn’t supposed to protect me, after all. It’s supposed to protect other people from me! And I’m 99.9% convinced that I am not infected, since I’m extremely careful about social distancing when I’m out and about.

So, you know: I see it as a form of social signaling. And I'm happy enough to comply as a matter of civic duty. But am I convinced of the necessity? No. And do I think that people who aren't wearing masks are ruthless murderers who want me to die of novel coronavirus? No.

The controversy is really raging.

Of course, divide and conquer is the oldest dirty trick in the book. Whether the dirty trick is engineered or coincidental, it has the same effect.

###

Different flora growing this close to the river:

First day of summer.

It’s cold. It’s raining.

###

gracegiver took a bunch of fabulous photos of the Mad Colusa Ave sculptor’s latest art installations that made me so nostalgic, I almost burst into tears.

Berkeley.

One might conjecture that what I’m really nostalgic for is lost youth.

But no, I think it’s for the place itself, that beautiful golden mirage of a town, rolling gently down the hills into San Francisco Bay. Its pretty architecture; its lively, engaged populace; the quality of its light.



###

More old photos:

Doing yard work with Marolyn. Some time in the mid-1970s.

Would this have been My Texas Millionaire’s Colby Street House?

Marolyn had a very difficult backstory of alcoholic parents and foster care and eventual adoption by family members who lived in Victorville, a blighted town on the edge of the San Bernardino Mountains. Victorville is one long, dusty Main street filled with bail bondsmen’s offices, deserted diners, and gas stations, long shuttered.

Two types of people leave places like Victorville: Deeply damaged people who succumb to alcoholism, drug abuse, and/or psychosis; or super-ambitious overachievers.

Marolyn was one of the latter.

She went on to get a psychology PhD, open her own clinical psychology practice and marry a handsome, personality-less doctor.

When I divorced my first husband, I got a very stern note from her about how the marital bond is sacrosanct particularly when children were involved, and how I was making a big mistake.

But when I met up with her again many years later, it was easy to see how dissatisfied she was with her own marriage. She dealt with the dissatisfaction by focusing on her practice—middlingly successful—and channeling her luv into her kids, a son and a daughter, both attractive and personable, both musical but both not quite talented and/or resourceful enough to turn music into a profitable livelihood.

Both in a real hurry to put as much geographical distance between Marolyn and themselves as they possibly could.

Marolyn and I met up in Chautauqua. Her grandmother had been a psychic in nearby Lily Dale in the 1930s; she still had family in the area. Every summer she rented a house in Chautauqua for a week.

Thirty years, and Marolyn seemed hardly to have changed at all! She was still spunky, tough, resilient. She still had that accent—very New Yawk, which was strange since she hadn’t grown up or spent any time at all in the City. She’d taken good care of her skin, and she hadn’t gained weight.

I could tell she was appalled by the changes she saw in me: 2009 was my absolute nadir; I was struggling desperately hard to keep my head above water.

I suppose I terrified Marolyn. Or maybe disgusted her.

We did not stay in touch.

###


This was definitely Colby Street.

My Texas Millionaire owned the house, which he’d bought on a lark after he decided to leave Houston for Berkeley so he could be a hippie.

My Texas Millionaire himself. I believe this photo was taken that same night. Same rose!

This picture would also have been taken that night since I am wearing the same teeshirt.











The Girl Squad again: Me, Linda Goodwill, and Eleanor.

Linda was obsessively in love with a guy named Bob Howard who was one of the smartest human beings I have ever met but alas! afflicted with profound agoraphobia. He literally could not take one step beyond the yard of the house he rented on 5th and Channing.

This was a phenomenon that interested me deeply, so I would pry: “So! What exactly happens to you if you try to go out on to the street?”

And Bob Howard would look at me and scowl as though no one as colossally stupid as me had ever popped up from his floorboards before.

He supported himself as an auto mechanic. He did the work in his yard.

He was an excellent auto mechanic; I went to him for years.

This was at a time when every single service provider in Berkeley had secret ambitions of becoming a therapist. Any plumber you talked to, any carpenter, any mechanic, they were all enrolled in master’s programs that, once completed, would enable them to hang a framed certificate with the Governor’s signature on their walls and begin shrinking heads! In the meantime, they were quite happy to begin shrinking your head for free, which meant that a simple procedure like replacing the washer in a leaky faucet always turned into an all-day affair.

But Bob Howard did not want to be a therapist.

Bob Howard had nothing but disdain for therapists.

Bob Howard once uttered one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard in my life, a pronouncement that even half a century later continues to ring in my ears and to inform many of my actions.

I’d brought my ancient Mercedes over for a new set of brakes and was ranting and raving about how nobody appreciated me, how not a single one of my pals would acknowledge all the wonderful things I was constantly doing for them.

Bob Howard lifted a single ironic eyebrow.

(This was another one of the things that fascinated me about Bob Howard: He had remarkable control of his pyramidal muscles!)

“We feel unloved when we ourselves are most unloving,” he told me flatly.

True dat!

###

Bob Howard was also a sexual aficionado. I had to rely upon Linda for that information because even though I often slept with my girlfriends’ boyfriends in those days, I never did so without my girlfriends’ explicit permission, and Linda would never have given permission.

Over tea in the Benvenue Street flat, Eleanor and I would grill her for the latest escapades.

“So, last night, he made me sit in front of a mirror,” Linda would say. “He told me to touch myself. At first, he just sat there and watched. And then he began touching me. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to bed!’ But he wouldn’t. He said he wasn’t in the mood. He just kept making me come and making me come. I must have come six times!”

I was taking avid notes because despite My Texas Millionaire’s many sterling qualities—handsome, intelligent, attentive, and all that money!—he was pretty boring in bed.

And this was becoming an Issue.

A weird triptych dream. Like the three ghosts of Christmas in A Christmas Carol, or one of those terrible 70s anthologies movies with segments from three different directors:

Part 1: I had been conscripted – most reluctantly – on to Tai Kwon Do tournament sparring team. We lost – to a team of eight-year-olds.

(Tai Kwon Do and cycling were my two sports throughout my late 20.s and early 30s. I gave up Tai Kwon Do when I got pregnant with Max, and never had time to take it up again once Max was born. New mom, and I was in graduate school. I was halfway to a Black Belt when I gave up Tai Kwon Do. It was a good sport for me since there’s an aggressive edge to my personality, and I do occasionally feel like bashing people. Completely socially unacceptable, but there it is!)

Part 2: I was taking care of signorinakatina's baby. Only, he was really, really tiny – like maybe an inch and a half in length – and had to be carried around in a kind of capsule (like the plastic container TicTacs come in) to which all this odd equipment was attached. How am I supposed to change his diaper? I thought. He was a very sweet baby with an enchanting smile, but I was beside myself with anxiety.

Part 3: I was getting married, and my cousin Alicia insisted upon planning my wedding. Only wait – maybe she wasn’t planning my wedding; maybe she was only offering me a venue for my wedding: a cabin in the middle of fucking nowhere that could only be reached by driving up a torturous, twisty road that was covered with snow.

There was an image of that road in the dream – and implicit in that image was the thought, You have dreamed of this road many times before…

Although when I woke up, I thought, No, I haven’t.

Alicia and I were at some sort of famous barbecue ribs cookoff. Alicia was annoying the hell out of a famous African American check by peppering him with all sorts of irrelevant questions. Which would be typical behavior for Alicia.

###

In other news, the weekend was pleasant, quiet, and sunny. Cold, too, but I dragged myself out on the running path anyway because, you know, exercise.

The air was very clear. Look at those Catskills:



Communicated with both kinder and had a long phone conversation with E who was certain she had offended me irretrievably when she’d told me she didn’t want an Art Installation for her birthday like the one I made for Max because it was too big.

“Oh, of course, I’m still making you one,” I said. “Only I’m making you a very, very small one.”

“Good,” she said.

I’m not sure whether she didn’t want an Art Installation like the one I made for Max because it was too big or because she thought it was clumsily done.

But that is one of the prices we must pay for friendship, mes amis! We must pretend to like our friends’ inexpertly done art projects!

I also checked enormous numbers of items off the My God, This Is Boring, But Life As You Know It Really Does Depend Upon Completing It list.

Amazing how many things end up on that list!