Mallory's Camera

May and the first part of June were the coolest & wettest I can remember in a long while.

But some time in the middle of last night, a high-pressure dome descended upon the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley like a bell jar trapping taxonomic specimens.

Gonna be hot.

Gonna be uncomfortable.

I'm gonna have to be out of the house by 6 am each morning to avoid getting heat stroke when I garden.

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Meanwhile, I did not leave the house yesterday despite good intentions.

I Remunerated virtuously throughout the day and when I met my quota—1,500 words—reluctantly slid on my leggings and prepared to leave for the gym.

But it was raining when I got into my car and raining even harder when I got to the turn-off for Highway 52, and I reminded myself: You don't like driving in the rain!

In fact, I don't like driving anywhere! I grew up in New York City where there's a perfectly wonderful public transportation system and as far as I'm concerned, no reason at all to have anything to do with automobiles.

I was nearly 30 by the time I learned to drive. I was living in California by then, and you cannot live in California without driving. Learning to drive was one of the bravest things I've ever done because honestly—when I think about zooming down a highway at 60 mph in a contraption of metal & plastic, it seems fraught with danger to me. But I did it because I had to—look at me! Pioneer woman! Laura Ingalls Wilder ain't got nothin' on me-ee-eee!—and I'm glad that I did. But I've never been particularly comfortable driving.

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Also, I'm not big on exercising for exercise's sake.

I raced bicycles for many years, and I used to love that. And as recently as when I lived in Ithaca, I was riding 20 miles a day.

But here even though I live in the country, the roads teem with automobiles, and their drivers seem pretty feckless. Riding a bicycle seems like it would be pretty dangerous for an old lady like me.

So, it's the occasional tromp and gym sessions that keep old Donkey Body (smokingboot™) strong.

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Anyway, I used the rain as an excuse not to exercise!

I wasn't sorry.

But I did feel guilty.

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Back at the casa, I started futzing with an AI video generator.

I had an idea! Enchanted castle, magical cats, mouse l'orange served on golden plate. Warrior princess about seven years old comes to visit.

It was around 7 pm when I started futzing.

And then the AI video generator shot me a message: You are running out of computing seconds! Would you like to invest [$ize of $um goes here. Not huge by the way! But probably more than I should be frittering away regularly] in more computing seconds?

I glanced at the clock.

It was 11 pm. I had spent four hours blissfully in The Zone!!!!

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Now, I'm not claiming to be particularly talented at generating AI videos.

Nor am I claiming that anything I produce has the slightest artistic merit.

But I must say, The Zone's a wonderful place! Playing with this technology completely absorbs me & is lots of fun! Yes, it is a lot like playing the funnest video game you can possibly imagine.

And the apres-glow carries over.

I'm in fine spirits this morning.

Despite the (soon-to-be oppressive) heat.

In the morning, I picked up a battered copy of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and then I spent the day reading it—which I hadn't intended to do.

I do love me some Thomas Hardy.

Part of that is because I'd read so many of his novels by the time I was 16.

But part of that is because Hardy was a Victorian neorealist: Despite sometimes ungainly language & syntax choices, he really knew how to create vivid characters & settings, and he has a rare ability to shift between exterior landscapes & geographies of the heart, seemingly effortlessly.

Tess lives on Hardy's pages—and she could so easily have become a caricature of the Maiden Despoiled (as so many girls in similar circumstances do on Dickens' pages.) The rape scene is almost painful to read, laid out as it is with a kind of Victorian Me Too specificity. And the death of Sorrow: So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman’s shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.

"Conjecturally damned"!

Be still, my beating heart.

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At this point in the novel, I noticed the light had shifted, and it was now—ulp!—two o'clock, and I l had yet to do a single Useful Thing.

So, I scurried off to the Walkway and tromped.

My tromping stamina is wayyyyyyy down. The gym sessions have certainly toned my body, and you'd think that since I do spinning for half an hour at the end of them, my cardiovascular endurance would be up, too, but that hasn't been the case. Five miles is hard for me to tromp. Three miles is really what I feel comfortable with.

Lazy! my mind scolds my body. Undisciplined!

But then I remind myself: Girl, you're old now! Three miles is not bad for a septuagenarian.

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The evening was the evening.

I can never do Useful Work in the evenings, so I made dinner, explained the Romantic tradition in English literature to the kiskas, and watched more White Lotus.

White Lotus is not a show that binges very well.

One gets bored with the cliches.

I started with the second season 'cause Sicily plus RTT told me it was the best. The second season was okay.

And then I tried to watch the first season and had to give up because the characters were monumentally uninteresting.

And then I tried to watch the third season (because I'm too brain-dead to read at night) and gave up because the characters were repulsive.

I don't know what I'm gonna watch now!

Somebody really needs to do a reality TV show based on Tess of the d'Urbervilles: The Real Milkmaids of the Vale of Blackmore. Or something.

Terrible Oscars—female red carpet looks were dishwater dull, though some of the male looks were okay. Also Conan O'Brien is Not Funny, & I don't understand why he has a career.

But Tom & I snarked our way through it, which was the Big Fun, plus Anora won big, & I really loved Anora.

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I went to the Oscars twice as People Magazine's Interactive Editor. 1997 & 1998. This was back when the Internet was still the red-headed stepchild that Hollywood ignored, so I had a hard time wrangling interviews.

The press had to dress up in full evening dress regalia so that we'd look like guests if we got caught on live camera. The whole evening was kinda like that—a lot of bored people lolling around, then turning on the juice when the cameras started whirring. I remember the canapes—they were not very good. I remember catching Ashley Judd smoking in the ladies' room: She leaned very far over the sink so as not to burn spark holes in a rather lovely nude gauze dress appliqued with white flowers, and we actually bantered, but this was not the kind of thing I could report on.

Before I worked for People, I used to give Oscar parties every year where I required all my guests to dress up in evening garb & smoke out in the backyard. When I went back to Monterey last Thanksgiving, several people remembered those parties fondly to me.

These days, I am mostly out of the gossip reporter mentality. The celebrities I followed all got old, and I wasn't at all interested in the celebrities that replaced them. The classic Corvette was manufactured in 1967. Who gives a fuck about any of the Corvette models manufactured in the years after?

One thing I do like to do still is thumb through those Where Are They Now pix of the Great Beauties of my youth. They were so unbelievably gorgeous then! Unreachably gorgeous! But now, I look better! Why I should get a ping out of that—Vanity, vanity, all is vanity—I do not know. But I do.

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Before that, I went to the gym—where gasp! I noticed several guys checking me out. (I am back to having a perfect hourglass figure in leggings and teeshirt, and all those overhead presses have firmed up my bust noticeably.)

And after that, I went to a D&D meetup where I was the pet septuagenarian. The D&D group is mostly high school students, with one 50s-ish eccentric I kinda know from around town, and one amazingly handsome, eloquent guy in his 30s who is driving a schoolbus until his rock 'n' roll career takes off. The D&D meetup was the Big Fun, too! What I liked about the group was how absolutely unabashed everyone was about having an imagination and inviting other people in to explore it!!!

It almost doesn't matter how that imagination manifests!

It's just such a sweet, sweet thing in these grim, souless times, to be around genuine imagination!

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All in all, a good day.

Thank you, Jaysus! I needed a good day. I was getting very tired of staring out that airplane window just so that plane would stay up in the sky on its flight to nowhere.