Mallory's Camera

Another awful day.

###

In the morning, I took Sybyl the cat to the vet. They’ll be boarding her while I’m in Sicily, and she needed immunizations.

In the past, L has taken care of her while I’ve been gone, but I’m thinking L has become a bit old (and yes, infirm) for that.

I’d priced the immunizations. Around $150.

But they wanted to do something called a “senior cat checkup.” (Senior? Sybyl is only eight, which would make her middle-aged in cat years!). And then because she’d caught that awful herpes eye infection from Rutger when I first adopted her, they wanted to do an eye examination with special dye, and a couple of other procedures, and the total fee for all this stuff was $350, which made me ulp.

They wanted to do bloodwork, too.

“What is the bloodwork going to show?” I wanted to know.

“Well, it will show if she has kidney issues or thyroid issues,” they told me.

“And how is that treated?” I asked.

With a special diet and dietary supplements, I was told.

I vetoed the bloodwork. I can do a preemptive special diet and dietary supplements without spending an additional $350, thank you very much.

They also told me that Sybyl needed dental work.

And prepared a price sheet for me—$1,200. But quite possibly more.

“So, when should we schedule the procedure for?” they asked me gaily.

“I’ll have to think about that one,” I told them.

###

During the worst of the three years, I lived in abject squalor in the Cement Bungalow, I was certain I was going to become homeless.

I did not become homeless. But I’m still not sure how.

The kindness of strangers was a huge factor.

And also, I gave up being proud.

Pride was a luxury item. I simply could not afford it. I simply had to accept the fact that constant humiliation and whining and squirming were my lot because they were survival strategies.

If I wanted to survive, I was gonna have to whine and squirm.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to survive. I didn’t like whining and squirming. But I had RTT to get through high school. I was pretty certain if I wasn’t on the scene, if Ben became the custodial parent, that he’d let RTT drop out of high school, and RTT’s life would be ruined.

###

As a family, we’d had a lot of pets—two dogs and a cat. When Ben walked out on me, he left me with the pets.

And I couldn’t get rid of them. Or maybe, I wouldn’t get rid of them. It wasn’t the pets’ fault my world had imploded. I’ve always had this semi-mystic thing about pets you adopt into your family, that you make a kind of covenant with them. The covenant is that you’ll care for them. For better and for worse. Just like marriage!

The cat was the Meezer (about whom I’ve written so frequently in this journal that I don’t want to describe her again. Suffice it to say she was borderline feral.)

The Meezer was the one member of the family who thrived that horrible year.

My chief recreation once I’d dispatched RTT (after daily screaming matches) to school was wandering the countryside with Milo the dog at my side. I’d become obsessed with beavers! I’d follow the beaver streams, study the dams and the lodges. If I was having a lucky day, I’d spy the industrious little creatures themselves. I’d hike miles and miles and miles and miles, following the beaver streams, and more than once, I’d hear an unfamiliar rustle in the deep woods, twirl around—and there would be the Meezer! She’d stalked me and Milo. Five miles, ten miles. It was all the same to the Meezer.

###

Twice during that awful year, the Meezer sustained life-threatening injuries or illnesses.

The first time, she got sprayed in the face by a skunk. Developed a chemical pneumonia. And became really, really ill.

I didn’t want her to die.

But there was no way I could afford to take her to a vet.

So, I decided to treat her myself.

Went down the hill to the Big Box pet store. Spent $10—which was a lot of money for me back then—on tetracycline, which the Big Box pet store sold for cleaning tropical fishtanks.

Tetracycline is a potent antibiotic, which is no longer prescribed because it stains teeth. It works on both humans and animals.

I titrated the therapeutic dose for the Meezer based on a guess of her weight. Isolated her in a closet away from the dogs. Dosed her and syringe-fed—she was too weak to eat—and lo and behold: She recovered. Was back to being her surly, unpleasant self in a week.

The second time, she showed up after a couple of days’ absence with a huge gash on her head.

This one was harder to treat because I actually had to suture the gash—which I did by tying her up in a sack so she couldn’t struggle with only her head sticking out and sewing the wound up with dental floss. (I figured dental floss stitches would eventually fall out as the wound healed—and I was right.) Had some tetracycline left over and gave her that as an anti-infection prophylactic.

She recovered that time, too.

And died at the ripe old age of 20, just four years ago, here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.

###

I would have been proud of the results of my home veterinarian experiments except, like I say, pride was something I’d given up during that particular period in my life.

###

Anyway.

I did think of the Meezer as I was driving home from the vet with Sybyl.

I was crying—not hysterically enough to interfere with my driving. But still.

See, I don’t want to spend $1,200 plus on feline dentistry.

I mean, I probably could afford it, but let’s get real: I’d rather spend the money on a plane ticket to Edinburgh.

Does that make me a baaaaaaad cat custodian?

What did cats do before there were vets offering them trips to the dentist?

“Well, of course, you don’t want to spend $1,200 on a cat dentist,” L said when I got home, and we were discussing it. “I wouldn’t either. And that doesn’t mean we don’t love Sybyl.”

“I mean, even if I was making twice what I’m making, this is a world where there are people who are starving and doing without.” I was weeping again.

“You are not wrong,” L said cheerfully.

L has kind of a flakey affect but scratch that, and she is very sensible. Very grounding.

###

There was a tornado warning all day long. Mrs. Neighbor Ed was the one who informed me. She’s big in local emergency preparedness circles. “They’re sending all the kids home early from school.”

“Are there tornado sirens in Dutchess County?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said.

So, throughout the rest of the day, I stayed close to the casa. Remunerated. Watched the weather radar. Now the big thunderstorm cell was hunkering down in Delaware County. Now it was sidling over to Columbia County.

Hammered out a care plan for Sybyl: I’d invest in that high-tech litter that turns pink if the cat pee contains bad kidney cooties. I’d switch her preemptively to a safe-kidney diet. There are feline dental care solutions you can add to your cat’s water, and if she loses a couple of teeth before it starts working—well, then she loses a couple of teeth.

When the thunderstorm cell finally hit Hyde Park, it was anticlimactic. Half an hour of intense son et lumiere thunder and lightning. But no tornadoes.

###

This morning, it is sunny, bright, and not humid! Yay.

I’m still feeling a bit shaky. The world is a very insecure place.

But I can deal with it.

RTT has been doing carpentry jobs on and off all summer for Clinton. Clinton has been spending the last few weeks in Cooperstown.

Shortly after I got to Trumansburg on Monday, Clinton texted RTT, asked him to check on a roofing quote – which was somewhere in a notebook Clinton had left in T-burg.

RTT trotted off to do the errand. Returned 15 minutes later with a bemused look on his face.

“So, I had to look through the notebook,” RTT said. “Because I didn’t know where the quote was, right? I wasn’t spying on him! But the notebook was the weirdest thing! He kept writing all these weird things in it! Again and again and again.”

“Weird things like what?” I asked.

“Simple. Sexy. Rock-hard cock.”

Ben and I looked at each other and began to laugh.

“Over and over again!” said RTT.

“It’s an affirmation,” I said. “Like Angela Moss on Mr. Robot. ‘I am confident. I am powerful. My penis assumes the properties of granite whenever it is my wish!’”

“But why?” said RTT.

“Uh. Well… How old is this Clinton?”

“I dunno. Old. Like in his 50s.”

“Hmmm. As your mother, I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to have that conversation with you. Simple! Sexy! Rock-hard cock!”

The three of us explode in laughter.



I like T-burg. In Mississippi, the geezers congregate of a morning in front of the grocery store or a diner. In T-burg, they sit in front of Gimme Coffee, the ubiquitous Ithaca coffeehouse chain. Many of them are musicians or web designers. Often they have bicycles.

T-burg has two Masonic lodges – one of them active – and something called a “philomathic” library. It also has numerous churches, a small fairground, and many 19th century houses built of brick, stone, and wood, in the Victorian Italianate style. Many of the residential streets are still lined with old horse hitching posts.

T-burg is the place where digital music was invented. In the 1960s, an old brick building, just a few doors down from Gimme, was the Moog Factory where the original modular synthesizers were produced. Bob Moog and his family lived just a couple of miles away in an old house off Taughannock Falls (the highest single-drop waterfall in the United States outside Yosemite.) Bob Moog’s invention revolutionized popular music, but he went bankrupt in 1970. Today, the building is occupied by the Venice Cafe – one of five bars within a six-block walking tour of T-burg’s downtown.

Ben lives right on Main Street, right down the street from Gimme and the old Moog Factory. In an old mill that’s been converted into apartments. Frontenac Creek, which used to power the mill, is just a few yards from his porch. In the late fall and the early winter when the steelhead and salmon spawn, the river otters swim down the creek looking for them.



On Tuesday night, Ben and I went to the Trumansburg Fair.

It’s a very tiny event as rural fairs go. RTT thinks it’s dinky.

I like it.

The Tompkins County Fairgrounds once stood in what is now the Big Box Store Ghetto along Meadow Street in Ithaca. It hosted a typical late August country fair with farm animals and produce, a carousel, a racetrack and sideshows. Meadow Street is the flood plain, though, for Fall Creek, Cascadilla Creek and its canal, Six Mile Creek and all the other tributaries that flow into Lake Cayuga. Maybe that factored into the decision to tear the old Fairground down. Or maybe Ithaca got too counter-culture-y. I don’t know.

In the 1990s, 24 acres of Cayuga wetlands were sold to Walmart. It increased the city’s tax revenues but there was a Butterfly Effect from the roadwork and various zoning variances necessary to support a massive superstore. A lot of small local businesses shuttered and closed. You can no longer ride a bicycle from downtown Ithaca up Route 13 to Cayuga Heights.

The Trumansburg Fair, in its 160th plus year, is still going strong, though.

The Trumansburg Fair features harness races – one of the very last country fairs in New York State that does – as well as a demolition derby, a monster truck rally, egg tosses, three-legged races, pie-eating contests, 4-H exhibits of animals and vegetables, and, of course, the midway with its incredibly tacky rides, cotton candy, and fried dough. What’s not to love?



Ten bucks seemed like a lot of money to pay for grandstand tickets when I knew it would all turn into a reflection in a hollow mirror after half an hour or so, so we spied on the demolition derby through a chink in a makeshift wall of tarps.

“You know, I’ve never seen a demolition derby before,” I said.

“Well, your life is about to become complete then,” Ben said.

If you’ve ever wondered who actually buys those old Camrys with 300,000 plus miles that are listed on Craig’s List every now and then, now you know. It was awesome watching them crash into each other, total bloodlust. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“What do you think they’re thinking about when they're behind the wheels of those things whaling on each other?” I asked Ben.

Ben laughed. “Simple. Sexy. Rock hard cock,” he said.

###


I spent as much one-on-one time with RTT as he would allow. A couple of months of therapy have mellowed him considerably. He no longer seems to be looking for reasons to take umbrage. He’s sophisticated intellectually, but emotionally he’s kinda young for his age. He still expresses affection by roughhousing, which is hard on my knees and elbows, and hard on my physical possessions.

He accidentally broke my phone charger one night, which was certainly No Big Deal – except that it was one of those phone chargers that lights up with different pulsating colors, and I had liked it.

“RTT,” Ben said reproachfully.

“Yeah, right. It’s always my fault, isn’t it? I’m always the bad guy, aren’t I?” said RTT.

He’s kind of a master of deflection. He’ll fuck up and somehow, it’s always you that feels bad -- for calling him on it.

I didn’t call him on it, though. I merely excused myself and went off to bed.

Yes, yes: Very stupid to feel miffed over a phone charger that I can easily replace for fifteen bucks at Best Buy – except that I had liked that phone charger, and I didn’t see why I should be made to feel apologetic for liking my things.

Next morning when we awoke, though, it was all forgotten, and that alone was a major breakthrough since Before Therapy, little misunderstandings and miscommunications like this would have been magnified into a feud of epic proportions. He would have taken grave offense at my withdrawal from the social scene; I would have felt self-righteous and indignant because, goddam it, it was my property that had gotten trashed, and it’s natural to feel miffed over things like that. We would have stopped talking. Maybe for months.

I also spent one afternoon brainstorming with RTT on a novel. Well. Mostly, he brainstormed, and I played amanuensis, jotting his ideas down into 20 pages of notes. He has an excellent sense of plotting and story momentum, and he’s one of the most imaginative people I know. A natural writer; very, very talented. So we were able to talk shop about something we’re both passionate about, and that felt like a bonding experience, at least to me.



RTT and I had to drive through Freeville on the way to Syracuse when I dropped him off to start his last semester. A difficult place for me to be, Freeville. I was so very, very miserable the three years I lived there. The present tense was such a trap.

I’m always very interested in why places are where they are. Less interested in how they originally got to be where they are. That almost always has to do with how easily they were to protect from foreign invaders (pre-Industrial Revolution) or how practical they were for the distribution of resources (post-Industrial Revolution.)

But why do some places survive while others die? What’s up with that?

Take Trumansburg and Freeville, for example. Both approximately the same distance from Ithaca, the driving economic engine thereabouts. And Trumansburg is thriving.

Freeville did okay right up till the beginning of the Second World War. Population in the single digit thousands, mills, factories, several newspapers, five grocery stores, hotels, restaurants, even a library along its Main Street, but then whoosh! It didn’t even fall into ruin. It all just seemed to… vanish. There are hardly any buildings left. If a fire or a flood that destroyed them all, there are no records of that event.

One of the old mill dams is still in place, but there’s no sign of the mill. There’s a Factory Street, which I assume is the site of the old cinder block factory that produced 1,500 cinder blocks a day, but the street runs through an empty landscape. The Southern Central Railroad ran through town, but there are no signs of a depot or a roundhouse or a turntable anymore. There’s an old railroad bridge behind a No Trespassing sign just off Johnson Street. I used to ignore the sign and take Milo for long walks along what was once a rail route between Freeville and Dryden, the tracks now long since silted over and overgrown with grass.

If anything, the town is even more decayed and creepy-looking than it was the last time I saw it. The little farm-to-table restaurant that some enterprising soul started the last year I lived there is now shuttered and closed. Though I understand economic development of a sort has returned to Freeville: It’s become Tompkins County’s number one location for meth labs.

I suppose since real estate prices in Ithaca are now so high and growing higher every day, inevitably developers will build houses here and within 10 years, it will become a tract development.

###

On the drive to Syracuse, RTT and I talked about the latest rape case making headlines – another white college athlete who molested two sleeping girls at a frat party and was let off with a slap on the wrist.

“That’s disgusting,” RTT said. “He should have been punished. He should be put on the sex offenders registry.”

“He should definitely have been fined and jailed,” I said. “I dunno about the sex offenders registry.”

“That’s unfeminist of you, Mom,” RTT said.

“The way I see it is that the sex offenders registry was originally set up because certain types of sex crimes have a recidivism rate that’s practically 100%. Those are mostly sex crimes that involve young children. People who do those things are mentally ill. They’re never going to change. They’re predators, and it makes sense to warn parents about them.

“Someone who rapes two girls at a party, though. That’s not a psychological crime; that’s a social crime. It’s symptomatic of a toxic male culture. Toxic masculinity and male privilege.”

“So?”

“Well, the thing is this kid can change. He can learn to stop acting from a position of male privilege. He can redeem himself. I certainly think he should be punished for his actions and punished severely. But I also think he can learn to be a better person. And if you put him on some kind of permanent list, you’re essentially taking that opportunity for redemption away from him.”

RTT snorted. “Well, you’re just wrong, Mom.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. How do you deal with drunk sex?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you have sex with someone if you were drunk, and she was drunk?”

“That depends,” said RTT. “If it was the first time I met her, and we were both drunk, then no. But if I already knew her, and we were both drunk…”

“Well, then, you could be setting yourself up for a rape charge,” I told him. “Because she can’t give consent if she’s drunk. And for that matter, neither can you. Do you explicitly ask for consent before you have sex?”

“Mom!”

“Do you?”

“No! When you know, you know!”

I shook my head. “Not good enough. No one ever knows what they think they know. Simple. Sexy. Rock-hard cock!”

“Can we please change the subject please?” RTT said.

So we did.

Except now more things are going wrong with the car.

On Friday, it lurched and slowed on the way back to the cement bungalow. I was just grateful that the malfunction happened on an isolated country road and not in town. Clogged oil filter, I thought. Or maybe the new fuel pump was too healthy – like transplanting Jeremy Lim’s heart into the ancient, sagging carcass of Rupert Murdoch: the pressure differential was simply too much for the old girl. Old automobiles achieve a kind of functional homeostasis, you know. If you do too much maintenance, it fucks the balance up.

But no. Yesterday when I took it for a test drive, the “check engine” light started blinking. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. Also fuck.

My research pointed in the direction of something called a coilpack, part of the ignition system. Will attempt to get the poor old girl to NAPA auto supply in Dryden tomorrow to get the codes scanned and proceed from there.

Automotive dysfunction comes at exactly the wrong time what with anxiety attacks over the pending move, and all the things that have to get done, and all the $$$ that has to get made.

To cheer myself up, I think happy thoughts like:

Hey! You’re not taking a shower at Auschwitz!

Hey! Your clitoris wasn’t surgically removed at birth!

Hey! You have more fashion choices than, “Beige burka or khaki burka?”

Hey! You weren’t recently diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, nor was your husband just in a horrible bike accident that destroyed half his brain. Several of my acquaintances actually are in these situations.

Who are these people for whom life is easy? I mean, I see them on the street all the time. But I don’t know any of them. I’m forced to conclude that they’re robots deployed to provide background clamor.

###

Then there was the Facebook IPO. Personally, I think the Facebook IPO was a huge success, given that the company doesn’t actually have a product it’s selling. I mean – what? How many billions of dollars did the company raise from snake oil alone? Lots and lots of billions. That is success.

I’m not sure how one goes about monetizing Facebook frankly. The killer apps in this context, obviously, are apps that would let you spy on old lovers and celebrities. But there’s absolutely no legitimate way to do that, of course.

One of the smartest things FB ever did was to become a gaming platform. In another decade, the digital revolution is going to shake out into just two electronic devices: game consoles and smartphones. I suspect the smartphones will be closer in size to today’s digital tablets and the clothing pockets will change to accommodate them.

###

Two scenes I will always think of years from now if my mind happens to wander back to my time in this place. The fairy dell that for two weeks every spring is alive with spring flowers – are they phlox or Dame’s Rocket, I wonder? And the swamp with the drowned forest. I think the beavers drowned the forest, but I’m not sure.

Cassandra and Allan coming up this weekend. I’m so-o-o excited to see them!

And RTT got into the Syracuse Environmental Science program.

Originally, he’d been waitlisted but the Dean of the Syracuse Public Policy School, to whom he’d presented his senior project on smokeable incense, apparently pulled some strings on his behalf. The Dean of Admissions called RTT personally, adding, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you hear from the Policy School in the near future.”

Sort of amazing how smart he’s become.

I mean, I’ve always known he was brilliant, but he was such a slacker for so long that I figured his intelligence was kind of like a radio he kept in the back of the closet -- sometimes, he’d turn it on; mostly, it stayed off.

What’s really interesting is how focused he is. The creative writing stuff (Purchase) is fun but it’s like a video game. RTT wants to go to law school, an Ivy League law school, and he wants to get rich. In this, the invisible specter of big brother Max is very apparent: Max hasn’t been much of an actual presence in RTT’s life this past three years but I guess he still casts a long shadow. Max went to Stanford. RTT has been reviewing his college options using that yardstick.

In other news, I’d be really surprised if my obnoxious next door neighbor makes it another week. Stage 4 liver cancer is a death sentence from the start, but he didn’t know that, and the doctors did what the doctors always do: “We’ll take out the diseased part of your liver -- we’ll give you a special kind of chemo --” None of it would have worked. Craig figured he’d do what he had done his entire life -- make ‘em wait until he was ready. He went to Florida. He stayed in Florida past the date they’d scheduled the liver surgery for, and by the time he came back, the .02 percent chance of survival, or whatever it was, had slipped to zero. No operation. No chemo. Bang, bang. You’re dead.

When he heard that, he crumpled.

He’d had this long wrangle with doctors over pain medication. He wasn’t really in pain, he just liked getting high. Why the hell not? But one of his docs wrote a letter that went into his chart: “… drug seeking behavior…” And then no doctor would give him pills. And then one doctor finally agreed to give him pills. And bam! just like that he started needing them for the pain.

I don’t like Janis particularly but you can’t help feeling sorry for her. This was love and redemption late in life. I’ve mentioned before that Craig wasn’t -- isn’t -- stupid, at his best had a kind of vitality and charisma. Poor Janis, drab as dishwater her entire life, figured she’d got herself a catch. Never mind that she had to support him. And now she figures it’s Love Story with herself in the Ryan O’Neal role.

Every morning and every night, precisely five minutes before the sun goes up and five minutes after the sun goes down, a hundred birds gather in the tree directly in back of my house for a noisy convocation.

They don’t gather anywhere else in the neighborhood.

The tree is completely unremarkable, doesn’t have leaves, fruit, pollen, anything, so far as I can see, that would attract the birds.

They cheep loudly for five minutes.

And then they leave.

They’ve been doing this every spring, summer and fall since I’ve lived here.

It’s the weirdest thing.

There is quite a bit I will miss about this area, and one of those things is how incredibly beautiful it is. These swamps do something to my heart.

So yesterday at VITA, I got this kid $1,000 extra dollars as a tax refund by finding an educational credit that no one else picked up. He was eligible for it last year as well so he can come back in and get his 2010 taxes amended and pick up another grand.

His parents are Cambodian. Having just seen The Killing Fields, I naturally put together a complicated scenario in my head of how they got out of Cambodia, their many years in a refugee camp on the Thai border. They were intellectuals, I decided. That means they probably spoke English when they came over but probably didn’t read it well enough to pick up the professions they were trained for – doctor, nurse, my imagination decided – so picked up jobs as food service employees. I flashed briefly on the Serbian gentleman I met while I was working for the census.

In my fantasy, the kid I got the money for goes back to Cambodia, becomes involved in politics there, and somehow manages to improve life for the citizenry. A hundred years in the future they all eat more protein, they’re taller, they live longer, and all because I was able to get this kid a thousand extra dollars on his 2011 tax return!

Thus do the ripples in the stream push time and human betterment forward…

I love doing this VITA stuff. It’s useful work. And I’m really good at it.

Being really good at something useful has been sadly missing from my life these two and a half years past. Feels really, really good to reconnect with that. Corny but true.

My landlord informed me yesterday he’s putting the cement bungalow on the market. “When it sells, you’ll have 30 days to leave.”

No love lost there.

Even in an up market, this place with its leaks, its awful plumbing and its unlivable floor plan would be a very hard sell at the price he’s asking. I live here because the crash and burn of the Little Store left my credit rating in the toilet and I have animals. Yes, yes, I should file for bankruptcy. I read Do-It-Yourself bankruptcy books all the time. The problemo is I have a full scale panic attack every time I think of calling creditors up and asking, “So – how much do I owe you again?” And I can’t afford to hire a lawyer.

So I live this subterranean financial life. Sigh.

It’s very unlikely the landlord will sell the place before I leave in June. But, of course, the possibility exists. And what would I do? What would happen to the animals, poor Milo who is such a good dog, but old now. Who would want him? Who would take care of him? He’s got those awful tumors on his rump that I haven’t been able to get checked out by a vet because I can’t afford $1,000 in vet bills. RTT actually said to me the other day, “Oh, he isn’t my dog anymore. He’s a family pet,” and I wanted to slap the shit out of him. Though, of course, it’s true. At least – I’m the one who feeds him. I’m the one who takes him for long walks in the countryside. I suppose he’s my dog. Except I never wanted a dog and I won’t be able to take him with me, even in June when I go –

Milo stares at me hopefully from the floor and wags his tail when my eyes meet his, even as I write this.
That horrible summer when the store was starting to go under and fucking Ben had run away with the circus, it was Milo who kept me connected to the idea that joy was possible. I would take Milo and Xena to the beach every day, and Milo would always get so excited, prance, run in and out of the waves. And I would stare at him, thinking, See? Joy exists. You don’t feel it. But Milo feels it. Therefore, it is theoretically possible that you will feel it again.

Oh, Milo! I have failed you miserably. I ought to have worked hard, made lots of money so I could buy you your own herd of cattle.

Of course, my problems are nothing compared to mcarp’s problems.

What do you call a relationship with someone you’ve never met but whose philosophical ramblings and narrative misadventures have diverted and entertained you for years and years and years?

I call it a friendship.

Mcarp’s present tense blog is a gift. He has an equally interesting and entertaining past since he used to be an Oklahoma City anchor guy.

The sun hasn’t been out in over a week. I suppose the unrelenting grey is part of the reason I feel the way I do.

George Washington and Julius Caesar, living 2,000 years apart, received information in exactly the same way: slowly, as it traveled via messenger on horse or on foot over hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles. This had an impact on the nature of war, and the nature of peace.

The invention of the telegraph in 1838 changed all that.

Arguably, the telegraph is the invention that changed human life more than any other has before or since.
I suppose many might argue the Internet is the more influential invention or development, since it more or less makes information reception instantaneous. I would say no: There’s always a refractory period between receiving information and acting on it, so it doesn’t really matter whether you receive that information now or an hour from now.

Something else about the Internet… Something about the nature of the medium tricks people into believing that Internet information is afferent information, information culled from their own sensory organs. Many have written about the peculiarly subjective quality of Internet information, how it seems more real in some essential way than information you read; how it seems so personal, like voices in your head – a recent survey found that most adults would actually rather text to someone than talk to that person in a room. Internet information feels qualitatively like something you see with your own eyes or hear with your own ears. Internet information is perceived rather than observed, and that, of course, is what makes it so seductive, and so dangerous: Your inherent bias is the message…

###

So, I have been sick. Caught a cold – either from Jeanna on the phone or from Rutger, the cat, who is still unsocialized and after a month still hisses at me at least half the time whenever I go near him. He came back from the ASPCA after being neutered and vaccinated quite ill with some kind of respiratory thingy, that’s progressed to deep wheezes in his chest. He’s quite miserable and I’m worried about him, but don’t have the money to take him to the vet. Today I’m going to go to PetSmart and score some of the tetracycline they sell for cleaning reptile cages and figure out the correct dosage for a cat and feed it to him.

Do viruses jump species? All I know is I woke up two days ago and I was miserable. Doubly miserable because the evil dentist still hasn’t made the referral to the oral surgeon. You can kind of view poverty as an amusing game when you’re healthy, but when you’re not, you begin to understand what a victim you are…

###

Also, sordid goings on at the neighbors next door. I wish they’d move. A few days ago, Craig came stumbling out to my car in the rain as I was pulling out of the driveway, off on some errands. It was 10 in the morning and he was shit-faced, open can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in his fist. “Can you give me a ride over to Lower Creek Road?” he drawled. “Janice won’t let me use the car.”

Janice isn’t as stupid as she looks, I thought.

“I can’t drive with an open can of alcohol in the car,” I said.

“I’ll get a cup.”

I could have said, No, of course. Instead I said, Yes because Lower Creek Road was on my way, because I borrow flour from Janice occasionally and she once brought me over a quarter of a lasagna.

“Talked to my wife on the phone,” Craig said in the car. “Thought I didn’t love her anymore. But now I know I still love her. I mean, we spent 30 years together. Thirty years! And four kids. That don’t go away. Her boyfriend just went to prison for robbing a bank so she ain’t with him anymore. I think I still love her, man. I mean, I love Janice too but I still love my wife.”

Sort of amazes me that Craig naturally believes this story is interesting and compelling to other people. Is Jerry Springer a cause or an effect? Craig is in his early 50s and looks like he was run over by a tractor. I can’t look at him and even see what he looked like 30, 20 or 10 years ago but he has the ebullience, swagger and natural self-confidence of a guy who used to be good looking so I suppose he was. A Florida redneck, a good ole boy. Not stupid. But totally racist, ignorant and drug and alcohol addled.

I drop him off at his designated assignation, do my errands, return home.

Hesitate for a couple of seconds.

Knock on Craig and Janice’s door.

Janice, when she answers, has obviously had the shit beaten out of her. Recently. Her right eye is blackened, she has bruises all face and arms.

“Um – Janice, I just wanted to let you know that I took Craig where he was going because, you know, it was raining and he was drunk and I thought he might get hit by a car – did he do that to you?”

“This? Oh, no. I was drunk. I fell.”

“I see,” I said.

And I did.

What do you do in a situation like that? I knew damn well that she was lying but I also knew that I didn’t really like her well enough to intervene further. Maybe if she’d started crying, said, Yes, he beat me up. But not if she was denying it.

“Well, okay, then,” I said brightly.

“What? You think he hit me?”

“It’s an obvious question, Janice,” I said with that big, bright smile. “Just making sure you’re okay.”

I go about my life for the next 23 hours and then the next morning, there’s Craig in more or less the same condition, waiting for another ride to the same place.

“Okay,” I said wearily. “The beer needs to go in a can though.”

“Sure! No problem. Want one?”

“No.”

The story had gotten even more sordid. His buddy Clay’s girlfriend had confided in Craig that Clay didn’t like to eat pussy. “And you know, if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s eat pussy! I love to eat pussy! And Clay, man, he won’t go near pussy. He don’t even like to touch it! So Shanti’s shoving up against me, and man, what can I say? I mean, the chick’s coming on to me! So we drive two hours to Locke to score an eightball, Clay’s driving, and I’m going down on his chick, I got my fingers up her ass. And Clay just takes off. Moves right back in with his parents –“

“Do I turn here?” I ask.

“No, next road, next road. Don’t go telling Janice none of this –“

“I won’t,” I said.

“Shit. I don’t know what to do. I love Janice but I love my wife. She wants me to come back to her in Florida. But I love Janice. And now there’s Shanti, I went down on her for two hours –“

“Here we are!” I say gaily.

Our destination is a trailer home. An elderly woman whose trailer is planted all around with bright purple zinnias stares at me suspiciously as I maneuver my car into the narrow turn-around.

Shanti – at least I assume it’s Shanti – is waiting for Craig’s arrival with her hands on her hips. She’s a large, lusty looking lady who would not be out of place in a R. Crumb comic.

Well, that is that, I think, driving away. I will never give him a ride anywhere every again, and I won’t eat Janice’s lasagna. I will say, “Hello, how are you?” and that will be the extent of my communications with my next door neighbors.

Except that night there is a knock on my door, and it is Craig, drunker than ever.

“What do you want, Craig?” I say wearily.

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“Well, I wanna say, I didn’t beat up Janice, I would never beat up Janice –“

“Right. That’s what she said.”

“But fuckin Lee, man –“ Lee being the psoriasis-afflicted neighbor who was recently stalking me, “fuckin’ Lee comes over and sees her and calls the state troopers!”

“Lee did?”

“Well. They said they got an anonymous tip but it was fuckin’ Lee.”

“Well, if you have issues with Lee, maybe you ought to talk to him about it,” I said. “Listen, Craig, I don’t feel well, I really have to go –“

“I did talk to him about it! I called him, got his fuckin’ answering machine. Called him again. He told me Janice told him I hit her! I told the motherfucker he could come over here and say that lie to my face while I was holding my shotgun –“

Oh, great, I thought. Guns are involved.

“Wait, Craig?” I said. “You have a shotgun?”

“Well, he don’t know if I have a shotgun or not. So I come over here to tell you – I know you’re friends with the guy –“

“I’m not friends with the guy,” I said. “He’s a nice guy, and I know him.”

“Well, if he comes around here and I see him, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Just saying.”

“Taken under advisement. I need to go –“

“Fuckin’ State Troopers come around twice –“

Good for Lee, I think. At least when the homicide occurs, all this will be a matter of public record and Janice’s daughter, a struggling local chiropractor, can sue the State of New York for the big bucks.

“Craig, I really need to go,” I say. “Have a great evening.” And I close the door in his face.

That was three days ago. Fortunately I haven’t had to talk to them since, though I do see Janice out in the backyard walking her dog.

I suspect they will be moving soon.

Every time it rains, really rains, the plumbing goes out and the toilet stops flushing – something to do with hydrostatic pressure I suppose, well and septic tank pipes filling up with ground water. From time to time I hear this ominous, Glug, glug, glug coming from the drains like Pennyworth the Clown communicating with Cthulu in Morse code.

I have some specialty orders to write– descriptions of Turkish villages on the Turquoise Coast plus two scare pieces on the dangers of plagiocephaly, or flat-headedness in children, apparently a worldwide epidemic. Plus the house is a mess – I need to clean the kitchen, vacuum.

The date was… interesting. That’s all I’m going to commit myself to. I’ll go on one more date and see if it is similarly… interesting. Guy is pretty cool but likes pushing my buttons as a way of showing affection – kind of like we’re still in 5th grade. Plus I’m way prettier than he is. Looks are not important so far as I’m concerned, and never have been: The only thing I’m looking for in a potential romantic partner/fuck buddy is whether or not he or she gets my obscure movie and literary references. But this guy is self-conscious about his weight issues. You can only tell someone once that John Goodman is on your list of the Ten Sexiest Men, y’know?

Reuben’s barbecue was similarly… interesting: I was the only female, English speaker and, indeed, guest; a great deal of meat was served, very tasty meat, but at the best of times, I’m not much of a meat eater – when I’m not cooking for RTT I mostly subsist on salads, grilled cheese sandwiches and Greek yogurt. Reuben pressed huge amounts of meat on me to take home, which the Petsers enjoyed.

Behold, meat and Reuben through a scratched iPhone camera lens – one more thing to get repaired because I can’t take care of my own stuff, sigh.

The big news, I suppose, is the menagerie addition: Ben worked with a guy called Dave at the movie theater; Dave was diagnosed with a brain tumor about six months ago. Dave’s personal history moved me for various reasons: Once owned the Elmira Drive-in Movie Theater, sold it for cash 20 years ago, took all the cash and put it into a safety deposit box, became increasingly forgetful as rapidly progressing glioma turned frontal lobes to Swiss Cheese so that now cannot remember name of the bank where $60,000 in 1990 is parked. Has no family; had the big terminal seizure last week.

Dave had a cat…

Dave called him “Maxx” which for obvious reasons won’t work.

I named him “Rutger” – he has kind of buff-colored fur and kind of a Flemish look to him. I’m not sure Dave liked the cat particularly. Rutger has that kind of miserable, aggressive behavior of a cat that’s deeply timid, deeply confused but innately kind of affectionate except no one has ever really petted him much. He was described to me as a neutered male but his boy parts look to be intact so Rutger has a date with the ASPCA spay team on 9/13.

So far Rutger just hangs out in the bathroom and hisses. The other pets ignore him.

As I was trying to figure out where to go and vote this morning, I happened upon a history of Freeville.

Freeville was quite the booming metropolis back in the 19th century. There was a furniture factory, a coal business, a feed business, several blacksmiths, a forging and wagon shop, a cinder block factory that produced 500 – 1200 blocks per day, two lumber yards, hardware stores, hotels and restaurants. A famous juvenile reformatory called George Junior Republic. A spiritualist camp in the summertime!

Today, there’s… nothing. I am one of exactly 517 remaining residents.

I suppose Freeville’s fortunes, like the fortunes of so many of these small New York towns hovering on the border of the Midwest, were tied to the trains. Once trains were no longer an important commercial force, all the businesses relocated to the corridor alongside the highways.

I can’t say I have strong feelings for the place, but there’s no denying Freeville is packed with terroir, that indefinable quality that binds you – or at least me – to a geographical location; that sense of human coral reef and the slow accretion of human lives over centuries, and the traces those lives leave. Sometimes when I walk Milo on the path that leads past where two of the old mills were, I swear I can see the ghosts of the lumbermen.

Winter is definitely here. I’m not ready for it.

On the plus side, my little ghostwriting biz seems to be really taking off. Of course it’s a flawed business model being that I am the sole provider of a service which means the limiting factor is me, and how fast I can write, and whether I can summon enough interest to write convincingly. But I am beginning to think that this most difficult stretch of my life may be drawing to a close and that there are good things on the horizon – financial security, and friends, and self-worth and – who knows? – maybe even love if I can open myself to it.