Neversink

Jul. 12th, 2025 08:40 am
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Went sour cherry picking with the fabulous [personal profile] rebeccmeister.

[personal profile] rebeccmeister is (as my beloved Marybeth used to say) a real find. Sparkling, intelligent, humorous, plus she is the change she hopes to see in a completely nonperformative way. In a perfect world, she would live two blocks away from me so that on rainy days, I could race over to her house & watch her retool chair splines. Learn from her example how to use tools!

She wore the coolest dress, too. Its pattern was leaf ants!



The morning had gotten off to an inauspicious start on account of the propane running out before it could fuel the flames necessary to heat the water that makes my coffee.

I'd had to drive up to the Farmcart Coffee pop-up in town, where I splurged on a cappuccino & eavesdropped on a conversation between the ridiculously beautiful barista and two ridiculously beautiful young women, all of whom had recently (and most ridiculously of all) emigrated from the Deep South to fuckin' Wallkill, New York.

Why would anyone emigrate for any reason to Wallkill, New York?

"We're Jehovah's Witnesses," the beautiful barista explained with a radiant smile.

Oh, of course.

Wallkill is actually the center of the American Jehovah's Witnesses branch. They publish The Watchtower here! And also 17 million Bibles every year! Old Testament only. The JWs are not big on the New Testament.

The barista was just so lovely! We chattered about the differences between Italian and Spanish, how the two languages had practically identical grammars but differed in the way they were voiced, Spanish using various accent marks to signify pronunciation, while Italian relies on doubling up consonants—

I remembered then that my very favorite TaxBwana client of 2024 had been a Jehovah's Witness preacher. His house had burned down with all his tax documents. I'd used forensic accounting to rectify them. He was very elegant and intelligent, and we'd had a free-ranging conversation about all number of fascinating things, and it wasn't until the very end of our third meeting that he handed me a card with his JW ID.

Why don't I become a Jehovah's Witness? I wondered for 10 minutes or so.

They're not big on Jesus! They recognize that "infinity" is an impossible mathematical concept, not an architectural template for the afterlife: There is only room for 144,000 in the Jehovah's Witness Heaven. Best of all, they seem to take care of each other! Like if I was a Jehovah's Witness, even now 10 Jehovah's Witnesses would be showing up at the casa to swap out that propane tank! And I wouldn't be late for my meetup with Rebecca.

###

I picked six pounds of sour cherries. This is enough for three pies.

Originally, I had planned to pick enough for BB and me. BB was a talented cook & baker, and each year, he baked three special pies for Flavia, his long-term honey. Sour cherry pie was always the first.

This year, I guess, I will bake a sour cherry pie for Flavia. Though I am an indifferent baker; my pie crust in particular has the texture of shoe leather.

But it's the thought that counts, right?

I'll freeze it until I see her again.

###

It was 91° at Samascott by the time Rebecca & I bid adieu and 95° by the time I got back to Wallkill.

I swapped out the propane tank! Pretty easily! So, I no longer have to become a Jehovah's Witness.

I pitted the cherries.

I will bake my pies today.

###

Afterwards, I sat out on the backporch and read The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories. It grew dark. The fireflies came out.

There is a ghost story I'd like to write for BB though I don't think he'd like it very much.

He never even read Elliot Roosevelt's Motor Car, which I actually dedicated to him.

Back in 2018, I did a lot of canvassing and campaigning for a Congressional candidate called Jeff Beals.

Beals lost—but in the tradition of such things, his "victory" party went on, and I somehow managed to talk BB into accompanying me to it. BB absolutely hated parties! I wouldn't say I love them—love or hate depends on my mood—but I am generally pretty good at them since it doesn't trouble me in the least to walk up to perfect strangers & begin chattering away at them.

The party was in Woodstock.

And BB lived ostensibly in Kerhonksen but really in a remote settlement deep within the Catskills Park that was once called Riggsville—presumably after a 19th century tannery owner.

To get from Woodstock to Riggsville, you have to drive across the Ashokan Reservoir, which supplies New York City with its drinking water.

Twelve towns were drowned to create the Ashokan Reservoir!

Cottages, stores, church steeples, everything!

I suppose they relocated the cemeteries—or at least the ones they knew about.

We drove under a full moon. The reservoir tried to drown that, too! But the weirdest thing was the deer that had lined up along practically every section of the road! I kid you not! Like every single deer in the Catskill Mountains. It was like they had all come out to watch us, and, of course, we had to drive very, v-e-r-y slowly in case one came charging across the road.

Anyway, it gave me an idea for a story...

Suppose the deer were the metamorphosed inhabitants of the drowned villages?

And every four years they turn out to exercise their rights as American citizens to vote?

That would be the story backdrop. Not sure what the actual plot would be.

Except that the story would be called Neversink. There is also a Neversink Reservoir that supplies water to NYC, though we didn't drive along it that night, and what could be a better title about the enchanted inhabitants of a drowned village than Neversink?

Catch Up

Jul. 10th, 2025 03:09 pm
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Brian's house was hard.

I brought lunch & bubbles. (Brian was a big fan of blowing bubbles. There's nothing he liked to do more at the end of a day than smoke ganja & sit out on his front porch blowing bubbles.)

But as far as any of the practical tasks that had to get done?

I was useless.

Fortunately Brian's excellent neighbors—an elderly and charmingly licentious gay couple—had already cleaned the kitchen. It was more spotless now than I had ever seen it when Brian was alive. I fed them lunch.

"We will miss Brian," Willie—the elder of the two—remarked. "Do you know how we became friends? Well, one time, we were entertaining a trick—"

"He wasn't really a trick!" interjected Eugene. "We just liked to call him that!"

"—and we ran out of lube. So, I walk across the road, bang on Brian's door, and say, 'Hey, do you happen to have any lube I could borrow?'

"And without missing a beat, he asks, 'Water or silicon-based?'"

###

As soon as I got to Brian's, I felt utterly fatigued. Denatured somehow—like all the protein in my body had turned to jellyfish protoplasm.

All I could do was collapse on Brian's front steps and prattle on & on, hopfully entertainingly—to Brian's gay neighbors (but they had already cleaned the kitchen—and since I was amusing them, that kinda meant that I had cleaned the kitchen, too, right?), to Flavia's friend Betsy who had dropped everything to support Flavia for four days even though she was not the biggest Brian fan. So I sat while Flavia and Mimi did the tour of the house, tackled the stuff in the fridge and the washing machine, went around the cottage unplugging appliances.

Then the four of use went out to the garden.

It was nowhere as big or various as it has been in past years. Which, of course, made me think, Huh! Did he...?

There are a couple of tomato plants and half a dozen chilis I could rehome. But that would mean spending an hour in that garden, and that garden was crawling with tics. Tiny deer tics, the ones that give you Lyme's disease. All but impossible to distinguish from dirt flecks.

Much of my entertaining conversation with Betsy had had to do with her two-year battle with Lyme's disease. It is not a disease I want to contract, so I don't want to be digging in Brian's garden.

I will go up & water it, though. On weeks that don't get much rain. I only live 25 miles away although the drive there takes me on backroads over the Shawanagunk Ridge and through the Catskills, so it's at least an hour's drive.

And I'll sauce the tomatoes when they're ripe.

###

The next day I had to get new tires and rear shocks for my car.

Mavis Automotive told me the work would take four hours at most to complete.

Belinda picked me up, fed me lunch, took me to see a really bad movie: Jurassic World Rebirth.

Dropped me back off at Mavis at the four-hour mark.

Looking up at the little Prius on its hydrolift with its wheels disassembled, was exactly like looking down at a surgical patient on an operating table. And I noticed the customer service people lied just as glibly as medical personnel: Oh, nothing's wrong! It's just taking a little longer than we...

Another hour, I was told. Ninety minutes, tops.

If they'd just fuckin' told me, It will be finished when it's finished. Leave it here. We'll call you tomorrow...

I must say, Belinda despite her Trumpishness was an excellent friend. When I texted her I was on the verge of a massive panic attack, she swooped down & took me to the local Dairy Queen (which she owns) for dinner. The DQ cheeseburger is Not Bad.

Then Belinda took me back to Mavis.

I wandered around to the back of garage and watched the mechanic thrashing about with my car.

The culprit was some sort of nut that could not be dislodged from some sort of bar.

Even with no mechanical aptitude whatsoever, I understood perfectly well that no amount of torque or elbow grease was gonna get that nut off that rod because that nut was stripped. That nut would only be removed with some kind of drill apparatus.

But the mechanic didn't understand this. He was growing more & more desperate to grip as he twisted his clamp round & round that nut.

And I thought, Uh oh. Because I have been a charge nurse, and I know that expression I saw on that mechanic's face! It was that panic that comes when you are trying to cover because you have made a potentially disasterous mistake.

Whenever I saw that expression as a charge nurse, I would try to take that nurse off an assignment as soon as possible—not because he or she was a bad nurse, but because once you get that rattled, you cannot do anything right, you will just keep making horrible mistakes!

By this time, it was 6pm, which is when Mavis officially closes.

They wanted to stay until the whole thing was fixed.

I figured that wouldn't be till midnight. So, I said, "Absolutely not! If you put the car together, will it be driveable?"

Well...yeah... but it will make an awful lot of noise.

And it did make noise. It sounded like the ghost of Keith Moon was beginning his world tour in my trunk.

But I got it back to the casa safely. And back to Mavis at 8 the next morning. Where it took them another two hours to fix it. Different mechanic!

###

Then I went off to the Hyde Park Community Garden, where I knew I'd be able to regroup. Tics are never seen in the Hyde Park Community Garden!

Weeded. Lay more straw.

Despite my massive neglect, tomatoes, cucumbers, & peppers are coming along quite! nicely:



Especially my wonderful volunteer California poppy:



Afterwards, under the cool shade of the Linden tree, I had my first conversation with Claude that was not about gardening.

We talked about growing old. Both of us had expected to die by 30.

And youthful mistakes. You expect to die by 30, if you make a lot of those.

I like Claude. He is very solid.

Thinking is hard.

Feeling is impossible. Except for anxiety.

(Wait! Is anxiety even an emotion?)

I haven't slept more than four hours a night since Brian died.

Sleeping would make me feel a whole lot better.
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They are dropping like flies!

Got the news through the Well network this morning that Mattu had dropped dead—also unexpectedly, also sitting in his favorite chair. Eerily like Brian.

Mattu was my boyfriend in the late '80s/early '90s.

We lived together for a couple of years in Oakland. The breakup was bitter.

Some years after, by a weird coincidence, he ended up living in Monterey just four blocks away from where I lived in Monterey. I walked Xena the Warrior Russell by his house twice a day; often, he would be sitting outside on his porch, and he would glare at me. I could have walked the dog on a different route, but I kind of enjoyed needling him.

He had married; he had procreated.

And then one day, his house burned down. No shit!

He smoked. And when I was living with him, would occasionally drink till he passed out. A vestige of his Midwestern Bad Boy past.

So, I always kind of assumed he had burned down his house by passing out drunk with a lit cigarette butt in his hand.

Many years later when we'd gotten back on civil terms—who remembers how?—he told me, no, it had been an electrical fire. Mattu was an electronics fanatic. The electrical systems in those old Monterey houses were not built to support three computers, two modems, a monitor, a plug-in boombox, and a printer on a single outlet.

###

Mattu had a habit of dropping in and out of online hangouts. For a month or so, he'd post up a storm & then he'd disappear. He was a really terrific writer. The bio he posted in his kamakazi Internet runs reads thus: Born some time back, dead at some indeterminate point in the future, everything else is now. Which I think is really quite terrific.

Our last exchange:

Mattu: Hey, pdil! I’ve got a question that’s been tormenting me for decades now: remember the Mexican restaurant that we used to eat at in Berkeley, Max’s preschool days? As nearly as I can tell, we were just a few blocks from 924 Gilman, soon-to-be world famous as the launching pad of Fugazi, Operation Ivy, any number of terrific bands. I never once stepped foot in the place, alas. But a few years later, Mike Cowperthwaite was dating Ian MacKaye’s (Fugazi guitarist) sister, and they used to stay at our house in Monterey. Ach, the days.

(What’s the point? I honestly couldn’t say. My mind tends to be more focused at 3am than 10am. Maybe I should email you then,)


Me: Ah, yes, those 3am treasure hunts through ancient memories... I don't remember any Mexican restaurants on Gilman. I DO remember Juan's, which was on Carleton Street in southwest Berkeley (pretty near Max's daycare provider's house.) I had lunch there on a Berkeley trip maybe five years ago, so it may well still be there

Mattu: THAT’S the one. Sam and I went by there in…2015?, when we passed through. Wanted to pick up some coffee at my old place on College, but it had turned over (Coles?), so we went across the street and had some strawberries. Time to go back, I’m losing traction,

I didn't really feel sad when I heard Mattu had died. It was more like when I heard Bradburn had died. This picking off of the old gang just feels so random. Am I next?

###

In other news, I am meeting Flavia & Mimi up at BB's house in a couple of hours to clean the perishables out of the fridge & do whatever else needs to be done to lock the house down till Flavia decides what to do with it.

I am quite numb.

Utterly incapable of anything remotely resembling thought or emotion.
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Grass clippings turn out not to be good weed deterrents.

Here was the Hyde Park garden before I weeded it:



Okay. Ten days of neglect.

Here is the garden after I weeded it. My tomato plants shot up a foot in those 10 days.



I am thinking I will go back today, finish the weeding, & put down straw—which I know from experience is an effective weed deterrent.

###

I don't even want to think about what the New Paltz garden looks like. I may venture out there tomorrow.

Flavia, Mimi, & I are supposed to rendezvous at BB's Monday. I was thinking of rescuing some plants from his enormous garden and transplanting them in New Paltz—that is, if they are at all rescueable. They may not be. Their root systems may be too well established.

But BB has rows & rows of really nice heirloom tomatoes.

And it would be a pity to let them all perish.

###

Other than that... I got an enormous client assignment yesteray. The kiskas are pleased they will not starve.

I sat out on the back porch for a long while last night and watched the fireflies and Black Chicken strutting about. Black Chicken crows! Just like a rooster.

I am brain dead in a peculiar fashion: There is just nothing very much to think about because there is no one to tell what I think about to. Not here, at any rate.

The wedding weekend was very good because I just chattered away through it; there were lots & lots of wonderful conversations. Here, BB was literally the only person I had to talk to. Oh, I have lots of acquaintances! People I don't recognize are constantly coming up to me in supermarkets: "So good to see you again!" I suppose I must have done their taxes.

###

I did everything you're supposed to do to make connections in a new place when I moved here. I'm a member in good standing of all sorts of community organizations. But those community organizations did not yield friends. I met virtually no one I wanted to get to know better. I have no idea whether this is because I am too old to make new friends or whether the people here are shallow, conventional types who don't attract me, but vanity compels me to assume the latter.

So, Bad Fit to my current surroundings. DUH, right?

When I move, it should be a big move.

But I'm too brain dead to think about that very much now.

Brian

Jul. 3rd, 2025 11:57 am
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BB—Brian—died.

Very suddenly.

I'm not distraught because honestly, I can't believe it. A world without Brian is absolutely unfathomable to me.

###

Brian was the only person I knew who liked to go tramping through the seemy, unraveling parts of cities as much as I do it. The science of Why is THIS here, doncha know. "Economic geography," we called it.

Once, trudging along the Greenpoint waterfront, we happened upon the Hafiz poem above, scribbled like graffiti on a broken tide break.

"That may be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Brian said.

Of course, it was. The Hafiz poem described Brian to a T. Brian's love hit the whole sky. Brilliant, hilarious, generous, stubborn, iconoclastic. A bon vivant. A teddy bear. He'd say he hated all religion, but that was not entirely true. I'd say he was very religious. His religion was kindness.

###

He was a regular reader of my online journal. The only one of my real-life friends who was. (I have become real-life friends with a lot of the people who read my journal, but they didn't start out as friends.)

Sometimes, he commented on my journal, but more frequently he texted me, often reprovingly: We were firmly in the Sibling Zone, bickered and made up regularly like brother and sister.

The woo-woo aspects of my personality drove him quite mad. He was not a fan of the woo-woo.

In particular, he hated my theory that humans more or less choose their reincarnations.

I don't doubt that you had memories of a past life, and have no facts upon which to base a doubt that you had such a life, he texted furiously.

But saying you chose this life is an assertion that stands apart from reincarnation itself. Nothing about reincarnation implies that you get choices. So far as I've heard from others on this topic, it's the choices you make in this life and other past lives that determine the next life.

You remembered vividly a life lived in the past. What I was asking is what if anything you remember about the choice you made to live this one.

So let me give you my motivation. I HATE AND ABOMINATE the assertion that people chose to be rounded up, stripped naked, starved and shoved into gas chambers


###

The last time we hung out—little over a week ago—we talked almost exclusively about death, which of course being me, I'm inclined to see as prophetic (except how scary would that be?)

"Don't you think I'd rather be an atheist?" I asked him. "I'd much rather be an atheist! It would be a much better fit with my personality! It is a total fucking drag every time I drop a quarter on the sidewalk to have to think, Now how does this teensy-tiny action fit into the Universal Plan? But I can't—"

"'Cause you buh-leeeve!" Brian sang.

"No, that's what's interesting. I don't believe. I have faith. Belief and faith are qualitatively different. And there's nothing I can do to shake my faith. Believe me, I have tried."

"Well, we could always arrange to have ICE kidnap you," Brian remarked cozily. "Maybe a little waterboarding? Put you right!"

Brian was a funny guy!

###

We actually had a date this coming Saturday: The Gardiner Cafe is hosting a storytelling open mike á la that NPR show The Moth, and we signed up for it.

Part of me thinks I ought to go. As a tribute to Brian.

Another part of me thinks I would stand up in front of that microphone & cry hysterically for five long minutes until they dragged me off the stage.

Of course, that might not be a bad thing.

I haven't cried yet.

###

Meanwhile, I'm noticing all sorts of spectral disturbances in recent photos I took of Brian.

Like in this photo, he has a halo:



And in this photo, he has angel wings:



Brian himself would have rolled his eyes & made gagging sounds if I'd ever pointed anything like that out.
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Not a great day, yesterday.

Getting ill—verifiably ill with no part of it due to some subliminal desire to feel sorry for myself—makes me feel fragile, and when I feel fragile, I get depressed, I get lonely.

But nobody I wanted to talk to wanted to talk to me.

J___ L_______ didn't pick up the phone. He probably saw it was me, I thought. And who would want to talk to me?

My other phone-buddy of choice may be dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Imagine! I thought. He's letting a cancer diagnosis interfere with talking to me.

I still wasn't feeling 100%: My stomach was lodgy, my appetite nil. I felt exhausted, and with that kind of exhaustion comes a deep brain fog. I had work to do, & I was doing it but neither happily nor easily.

And it was fuckin' hot out—like that Twilight Zone episode where everybody is melting because the Earth is veering into the Sun only it turns out they are hallucinating because the Earth is really veering away from the sun.

###

When I get depressed like that, I put off doing errands.

Like my car needs an oil change.

But what if in mucking around with the car, the mechanic finds that it needs $5,000 worth of work or it will explode on the Mid-Hudson Bridge tomorrow?

Under those circumstances, wouldn't it be better not to get the oil changed?

I mean, if they don't discover the car needs $5,000 worth of work, then it can't explode, right?

###

All afternoon long, I Remunerated gloomily away. Lew & Ed's wedding is this coming weekend, and I'm going to Ithaca & Edinboro for four days. Some details I took care of way in advance, but some are still dangling—like should I worry about the cats?

Four days is kind of the max for leaving cats untended with lots of food & water, and multiple litterboxes.

I never would have left Sybyl that long, but then, Sybyl loved me, and Mabel-Molly & Molly-Mabel do not. Never in my long history of animal companions have I ever had two who seemed so utterly indifferent. It's like adopting a waif from a Romanian orphanage & taking them home only to discover they have Psychotic Attachment Disorder.

(Well—Molly-Mabel may love me a little. She follows me around the house & often leaps up, meowing, for pets. But she dislikes snuggling & being picked up. Mabel-Molly has a memory like an elephant because she has never forgiven me for trying to condition & comb out her mats, and actually hisses at me every now & then—half-heartedly, true: a hiss of dislike not of aggression, but still.)

I don't really get a whole lot back from the kiskas.

When I am feeling upbeat, this is not a problem.

But I can't always feel upbeat.

###

In the late afternoon, Ichabod called.

We were both In a Mood.

Somehow, we started talking about RTT. "You know, every time I see him, we have at least one big fight," I complained to Ichabod. "And he tells me, 'I don't even feel like you're my mother. We hardly ever talk. You don't ever know what's going on in my life—' which isn't true, by the way. Everything that goes on in his life, he immediately posts to social media.

"So then I try to call him. And he never picks up the phone!"

"You & RTT need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.

"You think everyone should go to therapy," I said.

"That's true," Ichabod said.

"But I already know what the issue is. The real reason RTT doesn't feel like I'm his mother is because I'm so marginal. I don't have a home; I have a place where I'm staying for now. And he's ashamed of me because all his other friends have mothers with homes—"

"You really need to go to therapy," Ichabod said.

###

In the evening, J___ L_______ texted a starburst of photos:



Was sailing up in San Francisco all day! I'll call—

We'll talk SOON, I deferred hastily because by that point, I was utterly incapable of muttering a single word to another human being.

But the pictures of the glorious and presumably cool San Francisco Bay did make me feel a whole lot better.

###

In the end, it is what it is.

You sit at the table with the cards you're dealt, and sometimes you know the game you're playing, and sometimes, you don't, and sometimes by the time you figure out the game you are playing, they have changed the rules.

In the end, all you are really is a system of molecules whose coding has managed to defy entropy for 70 or 80 years. And the Universe is vast, filled with systems of molecules all doing their best to defy entropy. And so, gas clouds spin into stars and stars splinter into planets and things happen on those planets before the stars go all supernova, and nothing in your narrative can compare to those stories. Still, all stories have the same subtext: It is what it is.
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Met up with BB, back from Germany.

We caught up on gossip—more on his side than my side. I live an exceedingly quiet life.

And then we talked about death, which is something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently.

"Wait! You think about death?" I asked.

"Oh, only like every day for one or two hours," BB replied. "And have been since I was a kid."

##

Did I think about death when I was a kid? Only once that I can remember: I was three, maybe four years old, and sitting in the back of my grandfather's old Chrysler. (Even today, the smell of stale cigarette smoke is comforting to me because it reminds me of my grandfather!) We were parked at Coney Island. My mother, my two aunts, and my little cousin David were also crammed into the Chrysler, and my grandfather was expounding in his melifluous voice about how one day soon, the sea would rise up and swallow the land—

Four-year-old children have no sense of time, so I figured that my grandfather was saying that the sea would rise up in 10 minutes or so. And I would cease to be...

I didn't have any particularly negative associations with my own extinction. It was just something that was going to happen.

But I was practical. Clearly one should avoid extinction if one could. Why don't we just drive away? I chirped at my grandfather.

"Wait!" said BB. "You believe in reincarnation! So, didn't you think you would be reincarnated?"

"Well, I had very strong memories of having once been somebody else at that point in my life," I said. "But I don't think I was old enough to attach any system of causality. So, no. I didn't think about reincarnation. I only thought about the enormous wave that would wipe everything out—and me with it. It wasn't an unpleasant thought! But I figured if there were other options, we should take them."



We met at the oh-so-charming Gardiner Bakehouse: great coffee, interesting pastries, and an outstanding view of the Gunks, which unfortunately, no camera can separate out from the telephone wires:



The Gardiner Bakehouse is hosting some kind of storytelling event:



"You should enter," BB said.

"I should!" I said.

So, maybe I will.

###

Other than that, it was lots o' Remuneration. (I have a deadline coming up, which I have ignored successfully but which I should probably double up on.) And a trip to the gym through looming thunder clouds, which fortunately did not break till I was back from the gym. A good thing! The storms brought temperatures down by maybe 10 degrees, so that it's relatively cool this morning.

And now I must take advantage of the relatively cool temperatures to scamper off to New Paltz and do some gardening, even though I'd much rather sit here with my eyes slightly unfocused.
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Went over the bridge to poke around in the Hyde Park garden yesterday.

Grass clippings seem to be doing their job of keeping the weeds down, plus my lettuce is harvestable. I took home enough of it to keep me in salads for the rest of the week:





Also, most mysteriously, a California Golden Poppy had popped up out of nowhere, and this made me very happy because it made me think I might figure out a way to get back to California one of these days. The augers just keep coming!



Afterwards, I toddled off to visit with Belinda.

We talked about the Israel/Iran situation.

"But Hamas!" she said. "It's a terrorist organization!"

I shrugged. "How do you define 'terrorist'? A political organization that uses violence & fear to achieve political ends?"

She nodded vigerously. "Yeah! That!"

"Well, by that definition, Israel is a terrorist organization."

She stared at me, shocked.

"Here's the thing. For hundreds of years, the people who eventually coalesced to form the nation state of Israel were under Ottoman Turk rule. And then for 30 years, it was a British protectorate. And during that entire time, any organization that lobbied for sovereignty or self-rule for the area was outlawed and so naturally turned to violence to achieve its ends.

"It gets complicated, of course, because the majority of Israelis today are descendants of Ashkenazis who migrated after World War II.

"Still. If you look at the history of the area—the future Israelis were once in exactly the same position as the people of Gaza. That should give them—well. Not sympathy for Hamas. But at least an understanding of why Hamas might seem attractive. And that understanding is key to defusing Hamas's attractiveness.

"Instead, they are acting exactly like the Ottomans & the Brits who opppressed them—"

I could see the rusty wheels start turning in Belinda's head.

Whether or not she ends up agreeing with me is irrelevant.

But I think people need to get into the habit of doing heavy mental lifting on their own.

###

Then we toddled off to the movies!

We saw Materialists. I was curious about Celine Song's follow-up to Past Lives.

Materialists is pretty awful.

But you know, the Hyde Park Roosevelt Theater has stale Raisinettes! And heated recliners. So, I had a good time.
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So, maybe 400 people turned out for the Gardiner demonstration?

More impressive than it sounds! The entire population of the village is only aound 4,000.

I went alone, but I did not stay alone. A sizeable contingent of Shwanagunk Dems showed up & as it turned out, I knew all the parade monitors from canvassing or campaigning:



Plus bonus celebrity sighting! Fourteen second mark on yr screen! Still got my People Magazine chops!



This is quite possibly the worst photo of me EVER TAKEN.

When you are fighting fascism, I remind myself, you must be fearless and eschew vanity.



On my way back to the casa, I stopped at the transfer station to drop off two weeks' worth of garbage & recyclables. (Icky, you may recall, does not believe in paying for garbage disposal). I passed Ellen walking her daughter's dog, so I stopped to chat.

Now, I haven't seen Ellen in two months or so.

And that was kind of strange because I'd been seeing Ellen regularly for months before that. In fact, Ellen is one of only two real friends I have in this area.

Was she mad at me? Had I done something to offend her? Something absolutely unforgivable? Though I couldn't remember doing something absolutely unforgivable, and generally, I'm quite good at identifying examples of my own obnoxious behavior (even when I don't agree they're obnoxious.)

I'd called her a couple of times: No traction. I'd left her a goofy little gift in her mailbox: campfire sparkles! (She likes doing bonfires.) A pro forma thank you text.

Well, I thought, it's too bad, but apparently Ellen doesn't like you anymore, and what was the one useful thing that Jack Kerouak ever said? Number 19 on his list of "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose"?

Accept loss forever

(Works great for missing earrings, too!)


###

One look at Ellen's face, and I could see: It wasn't me, it was her. She looked like one of the walking dead. Deeply, terminally depressed. Heavy bags under her eyes.

Ellen is one of those people who likes to pretend she doesn't have emotions, doesn't have an inner life. When I tried to hug her that time after she dug my car out of the ice, she waved me off, embarrassed.

Now, as it happens, the one & only time I have ever been inside Ellen's house was around the time she stopped talking to me. We'd been selling Duck Derby tickets together at the post office. (Small town boosterism! Never Enuff Weird!) I was about to go off & investigate the Sherpa Festival that had magically appeared in an abandoned meadow, except that it was a hot day, I'd been drinking lots & lots of water, & I really had to pee!

"Well, you can pee at my house," Ellen said. Ellen's house was about a mile away from the magical Sherpa festival.

When I went inside Ellen's house, I was shocked to see it was kind of a hoarder house. Rooms & rooms crammed with furniture that nobody used & this general sense of profound neglect. I imagined it had been that way since Ellen's husband died five years ago.

I didn't say anything. I hid my shock.

But when Ellen stopped talking to me, I did wonder whether it was connected to the fact that I'd been inside her house. Whether she was ashamed I'd seen too much.

Anyway, it was good to reconnect. Even in such a small way.

I was on my best banter! I made her laugh!

And after 10 minutes, I said, "Well, darlin', you have my number. Call if you feel like it. I always have your back."

'Cause really. What else could I say?

###

In the evening, I went to a D&D meetup.

My regular D&D group hasn't met in several weeks—ostensibly because the DM is getting married in a couple of months & his weekends are now occupied with wedding-related events, but really—according to the DM of last night's game—because he is a Trump supporter & disliked all the fringe types in the original group.

I didn't pick that up from the original DM at all, and I mean, really: If he is a Trump supporter, so what? It didn't affect the game—which was a kind of Viking wayfarer adventure.

And I didn't like last night's game. I went because I'm still learning how to tell the various dice apart, & when to throw them, & why—if I have 18 charisma points—I'm supposed to keep subtracting four.

Last night's DM was very big on underground crypts strewn with vomit, crusty scabs, & mummifying guts. Imagery that does not appeal to moi!

The other players were gay males. They were all very nice to me, tolerant of my blunders. One of them—pink Galadriel hair and fabulously manicured hands, each nail painted a different color—was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America party, so in between dice rolls, we talked politics, utterly boring the other players. Apparently, No Kings Day conflicted with many prescheduled local Pride Day events, and that's why so many No Kings events had been shunted to out-of-the-way locations. The primo locales had been booked in advance! There was some bad blood twixt the No King-ers and the Pridies!

Last night's DM is a very bitter guy. And dark—without knowing he is dark, somehow. Growing up gay in a Hudson Valley backwater 40 years ago was a very different experience than growing up gay, say, in Berkeley, California. More akin to growing up gay next door to Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wisconsin. The Taliban itself would approve of Wallkill's heteronormative standards!!!

Still, I found myself not liking the guy, which meant it was difficult to sympathize with him.
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Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed got a present they didn't want.

A birdfeeder. With a digital camera. Courtesty of a well-intended offspring.

It feeds blurry photographs to various nearby digital receivers and has some kind of AI hookup thing that gives you info about the blurry photographs.

"Well, that seems like a perfectly nice present!" I cried.

Mrs. Neighbor Ed made a face. "When the jays grab the sunflower seeds, they knock all the other seeds out of the feeder, and then the field mice grab them and begin invading the house!"

"When your cat was around, we never had any problems with field mice," she added—and I realized, with a pang, that she was talking about the Meezer, dead & gone these—what? seven years? The Meezer had been the mightiest of hunters!

I hoped the Meezer was eavesdropping from Cat Heaven, where presumably there is an endless parade of self-regenerating field mice and squirrels for her to slaughter. It's always nice to hear nice things about oneself.

And I also felt this almost palpable strand of connection. Veritably ectoplasmic! The Meezer had really been the last link to my old life in California, and when she died, that link snapped: I was no longer someone who'd once lived in California; I was only someone who lived here.

That's the reason why I liked living in Dutchess County more than I like living in Ulster County, I thought. In Dutchess County, there'd been... continuity.

And also, of course, in Dutchess County, I had friends.

###$

I prattled merrily with Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed for an hour, and our prattle was lively and hilarious and entirely without awkwardness, no long-time-no-see pauses or fumbles at all.

Neighbor Ed is almost as good at banter as Ben used to be!

I felt as though I was drinking water from a cool, sweet well.

Before that, I'd hung out with Loraine & Buff Ken & Rami on their back porch for an hour, watching the birds & talking about Buff Ken's latest bear sighting on his outdoor camera.

And before that, I'd got to play in the dirt in my garden for a few hours. There was a Claude sighting!

"When eet get hot last week, I water your garden," Claude told me.

"Thank you!" I said. Adding apologetically, "I can only get over here once a week—"

"I know, I know," Claude said, holding up a hand. "Eet is fine."

Everybody was glad to see me. Everybody liked me.

###

Icky was around this weekend. One of the Spawn managed to graduate from high school.

"He just totally ignored me!" Icky declared indignantly. "I came all the way from the City, and he ignored me! The only thing he said to me was how embarrassing it was that I was taking photographs of him!"

And you think I care exactly why? I wondered.

But I am well-trained in the art of making sympathetic sounds to people in distress.

Icky mistook my sounds for encouragement & began lamenting: It's hard, it's really fuckin' hard to be around the Spawn's mother, the Spawn's mother's new husband, the Spawn's mother's relentlessly cheerful father who'd been imported all the way from Texas—

"I was there all by myself!" Icky complained.

I clucked.

I would have expected him to head straight back to the City after this debacle. He's not supposed to be here till this coming Thursday! But, no. He stuck around. When I left for Dutchess County, he was sitting in front of his ginormous living room television screen, glaring at YouTube videos on how to sharpen knives. He had doused himself with cologne. I could smell it all the way from upstairs.

When I got back six hours later, he was still in front of the screen, watching what looked like the same YouTube video.

He saw me come in, jumped up, and immediately began doing pushups on the living room floor!

Like WTF???

He watched me cook my dinner. "That smells very good," he said, staring at my Cajun chicken.

No, fuckhead. I'm not offering you any.

Then he wanted to have a long conversation about changing propane canisters. He ushered me outside and handed me the wrench.

"I'm kind of a dummy about stuff like this," I admitted.

"Oh, no. Not you. You're a genius—"

Well, I am actually very smart, I thought. So you can can the fuckin' sarcasm. I didn't grow up using tools, so there's a learning curve involved.

But, you know. No need to prolong the conversation. And up close, that cologne was overpowering.

I thanked him for the tutorial, ran upstairs, and barricaded myself in the Patrizia-torium.

And eventually, he left.

###

In the past three days, three new place possibilities have popped up through my various real-life-people networks.

I don't really want to move until the fall, so I'm not sure how aggressively I should be following up the leads. But at the very least, they're a good auger, right?
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[profile] lifeinroseland & fam braved the Holiday Catskills last weekend.

Is this not the most beautiful nuclear family you have ever seen?



My first time meeting her children in the flesh. Her little son has the most amazing vocabulary for an 18-month-old, and Princess Star is as fiery & independent as she is beautiful & intelligent—which I suspect presages difficult teenage years but a mega-successful adulthood:



It was so good to see them!!!

###

GPS decided to give me a complete tour of the Catskills on my way to Phoenicia. The Catskills were insanely beautiful on this, the unofficial first day of summer.

An abandoned barn:



The Ashokan Reservoir. They drowned 10 villages to make it when they dammed Esopus Creek in the early 19-aughts. My fantasy is that cottages, church spires, & apple orchards are floating around beneath its waters. (Probably not, though.) It supplies 40% of New York City's water:



Today, I have a shitload of errands to do in addition to the usual Remuneration & gym workout. And no desire to do any of them! But it is gorgeous out! So, you know. I'm cheerful.
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Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be, Abraham Lincoln—a famous depressive—is reported to have once remarked.

To me, this sounds exactly like the type of quotation some late 19th-century journalist in St. Louis or Cleveland might have invented to spice up a gushing piece on New Year's resolutions.

But I admire it anyway. 'Cause I think it's true!

Though it does make me feel like a self-indulgent slob: My part of the world is going into its third solid day of rain and grey, and since three days = "perpetual," I am miserable. There is simply no reason to be alive.

###

Belinda has told me the True Tale of her Harrowing Childhood four times now.

Each time she tells me, her lower lip trembles and her eyes fill with tears. It is very evident that she is embarking upon a spontaneous recitation of something deeply personal and intimate and fraught. This being the case, I always wonder: How is it possible that she doesn't remember she told all this to me before?

Now, I repeat stories, too!

It's something old people do. I don't remember repeating stories to people when I was young or having them repeat stories to me, but maybe that's because young people's lives are brimming over with new experiences. Young people are interesting on their own; they don't really need to pull out set theater pieces to command attention—because that's really what these stories are: theater pieces. I know exactly which words to emphasize for maximum effect, where to raise my eyebrows archly, where to pause for audience reaction (laugher, sympathy.)

Thing is I know when I've told the story before!

I simply forget the audience I've told the story to.

Belinda really seems to believe she's telling the story for the very first time.

And no, it's not the onset of dementia.

I honestly don't know what it is.

###

Other than lunch with Belinda and grocery shopping and being absolutely flummoxed by the price of seedling heat mats in the Upscale Supermarket's garden supply department—they are wayyyyy cheaper online, but perhaps I'm still seeing pre-China tariff prices?—I did very little of anything yesterday.

So, I will have to do a lot of something today.

Maintaining

May. 4th, 2025 11:23 am
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Grey day. Rain is predicted all week.

###

BB, Flavia, & I showed up yesterday at the mall where the Middletown demo was supposed to take place, only to discover it was one of those curbside protests where you stand valiantly at the side of the road, breathing in automobile exhaust for a couple of hours while drivers (mostly) ignore you.

As one, our eyes met: No-oo-ooo, thank you!

Not a total loss: We scurried off to Tranquili-Tea for an hour and enjoyed home-churned ice cream & thunderstorms on the drive home.

###

On the phone with Ichabod, I had a revelation.

Ichabod was saying something about always wanting to be his authentic self, & I was thinking, What a drag that would be—when it occurred to me that that might be because I spent so much time when I was slightly younger than Ichabod is now maintaining.

Maintaining was something you did when you were high on drugs & didn't want anyone else to know. But sometimes you maintained when you were feeling social anxiety or stage fright, or just had to be somewhere you did not want to be. You did not reveal (let alone exhibit) your inner quailings. There was a fair amount of honor involved in maintaining.

Of course, I don't know all that many Millennials except for my kids & their friends. And I know no Gen Z-ers.

But I do watch a lot of television with Millennial & GenZ characters, and if the representations are correct, they never maintain! Millennials & GenZ are constantly talking about how nervous they are or how incapable of functioning because of some incapacitating internal state. They have absolutely no concept of fortitude. Oversharing is their idea of virtue.

It's a manifestation of privilege when you think about it—(a) their belief that other people really care about what they feel and (b) that the world is a safe enough place that what you feel won't get you into trouble.

Maybe that's the true rift between Boomers & Millennials: We maintain; they don't.

###

Other than that, I tromped and read more Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Gotta say—Tess's passion for Angel Clare is rather annoying. Angel Clare has a big stick up his ass.

Alec Stoke-d'Urberville seems like he would be a lot more fun.
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Met up with the fabulous BB at Da Tang, the fabulous Chinese grocery store in Middletown.

Middletown is something of a Falun Gong hive, and judging from the number of Falun Gong brochures at the check-out counter, Da Tang is run by Gongers.

This is one of the reasons why I love grubby little cities in the middle of nowhere that are scrambling to keep up with the present tense: They're magnets for all kinds of weirdness!

###

Middletown is plopped down right in the middle of Farm Country. (This time of year, you can actually smell the manure they use to fertilize the fields before they sow the corn.) It developed as a distribution hub and processing center for farm products, and reached its mercantile heights between the late 19th century and the beginning of World War II when the Erie Railroad downtown yard bustled with freight cars. The big industries were tanneries and condensed milk. But there were myriad shops where the farm families bought their dry goods and shoes.

Then gasoline-fueled trucks became the distribution method of choice, and everything decentralized; the farmers bought automobiles and began shopping in more convenient stores on the edges of town, and those edges metastasized into strip malls that are now—ironically—harder to get to than the downtown.

In the late 1950s, practically every city in the U.S. caught Urban Renewal Fever and began tearing down the old historic structures, replacing them with ugly commercial buildings and parking lots, or not replacing them at all. Thus, downtown Middletown today is a veritable warren! The Da Tang grocery is just one of dozens of unexpected universes behind nondescript walls. BB goes shopping there several times a month.

###

Here are some of the things you can buy at the Da Tang grocery:

Quail eggs:




Delectably alien dried fruit:



Hello Kitty candy:



In fact, every one of the thousands of items in the store is deliciously strange and intriguingly provenanced.

###

Afterwards, we looked around for a place to drink caffeinated beverages and jaw. We didn't want to go back to the Falun Gong café!

We passed a sign in the window of a shabby once-industrial window: Tranquili-Tea: Calm Your Mind.

A calm mind is good, right?

We decided to go in.

And found ourselves in a strange little winding hall decorated with glittering lights and mucho eye-pleasing kitsch that led into this cavernous room:



A most delightful tea parlor! Where they bake their own extremely scrumptious scones and offer a dozen different kinds of tea, which they then let you brew to your own desired strength using these adorable miniature hourglasses:



What a find this place is! (As my beloved Marybeth used to say.) A secret garden.

Though I suspect it's not gonna stay in business very long because I can't imagine there's much demand for magical, down-the-rabbit-hole tea gardens in grubby little cities like post-industrial Middletown.



Bade farewell to BB and scurried off to the gym.

Good workout, and on the way home, I had one of those... what would you call them? experiences? episodes?... where all-of-a-sudden, the world seems to shimmer with a golden light and the fallow fields and ancient barns I drive through seem infused with heartbreaking beauty, and the world seems like a good place—even though I know it isn't.
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It was a very grey day yesterday, so I was in a very grey mood.

Either I have become so susceptible to meteorologically induced mood changes that they've jumped the calendar, and depression is no longer just seasonal. Or my body is no longer capable of being a battery that stores up sunshine for cloudy days. Or the world right now is such an awful place that it is nearly impossible to revel in the joy of being alive. Take your pick!

###

Near the beginning of yesterday's TaxBwana debriefing, the head honchos announced that we are no longer being funded for new Chromebooks.

Which means that we can no longer give out equipment to new volunteer TaxBwanas. Not that there are very many of those.

The ranks of existing TaxBwanas are constantly thinning as TaxBwanas move to independent living communities in South Carolina, or undergo joint replacements that leave them immobile, or throw up their hands & say, Fuck this shit. (For whatever reason, there are no youthful TaxBwanas.)

But I don't think attrition is gonna shut down the program.

No, I think Trump's goons are gonna shut off the funding faucet.

We tax preparers all work for free-eee-eeee, but those Chromebooks cost money, and our modems & printers cost money, & in some places where no community agency will donate space to set up shop, we rent space. And all this money comes from a grant from the IRS. My guess is that the grant will be one of the "unnecessary" expenses the goons decide to toss.

Which is a pity. One of the New Paltz team leaders did the math, and assuming the clients we tax-prepared for free-eee-eeee this season had gone to paid tax preparers, we saved our clients about $250,000.

###

I carpooled with the extremely pleasant Steve W whose Parkinson's has gotten noticeably worse since January, the last time I carpooled with him.

For someone I barely know, I'm privy to a lot of details about Steve W's life. The professional trajectory that defied parental expectations. The problematic first marriage. The son who committed suicide. The son's children—Steve's grandchildren—now living abject, impoverished lives in the afore-mentioned South Carolina and other Red states.

"But that's awful!" I said when he finished describing one granddaughter's life. "Can't you bring her up here?"

"No," Steve said. "No. Even if I wanted to. She's got so many problems, and she's so..." He left the sentence unfinished. "My wife couldn't handle it. Jane's almost 80, you know."

Since I'm in the middle of that Larry McMurtry reading binge, Steve's family members reminded me a bit of the Greenway diaspora post-Aurora, which is a modern take on the old Tess of the D'Urbervilles scenario: a downward trajectory. Over the course of a century, very few families stay in the same economic/cultural stratum, but it's only in fiction or The Daily Mail that you get to view the contrails in living color.

Anyway, I was seized with an intense sadness for Steve W. Fundamentally, such a smart, decent guy. Drives people without cars to their medical appointments. Teaches drivers' safety for free-eee-eeee! TaxBwanas! Heavily involved in liberal politics (in the liberal enclave of Gardiner!)

And his personal life is just one long heartache.

This is ridiculous, I thought to myself as he dropped me off at my car. My eyes were actually filled with tears.

So I got in my car and I drove to the ganja store!

I had thought of putting myself on Saint John's Wort, but it turns out Saint John's Wort interferes with Synthroid metabolism.

But I gotta do something.

I'm sick of feeling other people's pain.

Ganja's great! I pop one gummy at night, and not only do I sleep like a hibernating bear, I wake up feeling jolly & utterly impervious!
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Spending time in the garden was lovely. Stayed three hours. Got maybe half the 12' X 12' plot weeded? Will return to complete the task later this week. I may not even need to beg Claude to rototill this year: The earth is quite pliable.

###

Spring is more advanced in Dutchess County than it is in Ulster. Maple trees all sporting that tender green blur that, upon close examination, is not leaves at all but tiny tree flowers, lethal to anyone prone to allergies. The magnolias & weeping cherries are all in bloom, and the daffodils & forsythia seem to have staying power this year, so the roadsides are a riot of yellow & pink & spring green.

###

I drove by L's house where I used to live. It's shabbier than ever though the daffodils I planted are blooming in great clumps.

I was pretty happy for most of the time I lived at L's house, and I wondered—not for the first time—if L would have lost her mind if she hadn't had that knee replacement.

I warned her!

Good little libertarian that I am, I have a pretty hard & fast rule about never offering personal opinions about courses of action when it's clear the other person is bound & determined to see them through—except when I feel an emotional bond with the other person and the course of action runs straight through a disaster zone.

Surgery under general anesthetic is risk enough on its own for anyone over 80, but added to that, I'd seen L's chest X-rays! I knew how badly her lungs were compromised.

So over lunch at one of the Culinary's extravagant restaurants, I told Linda my concerns.

It was one of the few occasions I can remember that I ever saw Linda get angry.

I can't remember exactly what she said—I wrote about it at the time, so it's here somewhere—but the gist was that I was not the boss of her, so why didn't I just STFU.

I felt so badly about the encounter that I ended up paying for the lunch—$100 plus.

But shortly after the knee replacement, Linda began manifesting signs of dementia. I think she may have stroked out on the table. Or thrown a mini-clot. Or something.

###

Linda was never someone with whom I was going to forge a deep connection, but I was fond of her and grateful to her.

I haven't seen her since I moved out, but Belinda, whose grim sense of duty compels her to take Linda out every couple of weeks, tells me she's not doing well. She doesn't appear to bathe, smells faintly of urine. She prattles thoughtlessly. She eats half a dozen rolls at a sitting.

Neither one of her children like her, so they're not looking out for her.

Mrs. Neighbor Ed drops by for tea and takes her out shopping once a week, but Mrs. Neighbor Ed, though a kind person, has definite boundaries.

The house keeps getting shabbier and shabbier.

Sad.

And maybe I'm in complete denial, maybe this is just what happens to people when they get old, but I can't help thinking, It didn't have to be this way...
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At that Jamaican restaurant in Brooklyn, I tasted a fabulous black bean soup and could not stop thinking about it, so yesterday had thoughts about recreating it—

Which I did not do! Ended up making a kind of vegetable soup with a lot of black beans.

Tasty nonetheless. But I guess I don't have a good enough palate for recreating dishes from scratch without a recipe.

###

That was my main activity yesterday: Making a ginormous batch of soup.

Otherwise, I Remunerated, went phone-vox with a bunch of folk, and watched endless episodes of The Pitt.

Back in the day, ER was one of my favorite television shows, so I liked The Pitt. It was nice to see Dr. John Carter all grown up and running an ED in the Rust Belt. But can emergency rooms really have changed all that much? Back in the Jurassic when I was an ER nurse, the nurses did most of the work. We'd do what needed to be done, and then we'd tell the interns & residents what orders to write.

And it was really boring a lot of the time! I worked at Highland Hospital in Oakland, at that time a very poor and mostly Black city. Highland Hospital bore the designation, Provider of Last Resort, so we got all the uninsured GSWs, stabbings, & assorted gangbanger mayhem.

But we also got the uninsured mothers of eight trotting their broods in for ringworm checks, and that could get pretty dull.

I did like one of the residents' throwaway observations: Anyone who works in an emergency room probably has undiagnosed ADHD.

Ring of truth!

###

I spoke for an hour with Public Policy Eleanor who will not have time to help me with The Project until the end of May—because she's going off for a week to Madrid and thence for another week to walk the Camino de Santiago.

I was green with envy. I want to walk the Camino de Santiago!

I spoke for another hour with Ellen whose head is bent out of shape by the Mean Girl antics of the VoW crowd. Civic involvement in small towns is so-oo weird.

Why do you care? I asked Ellen at one point.

She didn't really have a convincing explanation—except that she does care, so as a Loyal Friend, I said nasty, villainous things about all the VoW ladies and made her laugh. Tomorrow, she & I are going out canvassing local Wallkill businesses—there aren't very many of them!—to drum up sponsorships on behalf of the Duck Derby & village-wide flea market. Which should be a laugh riot.

Today I must finish this segment of the ongoing Remuneration and begin drafting the Project description—I'm thinking a nationwide network of volunteers at the granular county level who guide prospective voters through the process of attaining Enhanced IDs (cheaper than passports.) I need a punchy first sentence, though!

And, of course, I must hit the gym.
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Here is the dinky little video I made of the April 5th protests in Middletown, New York:



BB had the creeping crud plus it was raining, so we merely showed up for half an hour or so, long enough for our bodies to be counted (we hope!) before dashing off to a strange little café, apparently run by members of the Falun Gong sect that served passable chai lattes, brewed espresso drinks, and pastries like these adorable fish, filled with red bean paste:



The place was crammed! And the people at the various tables, dressed very differently as they were, all seemed to be signaling to each other with secret signs.

"I wonder what their stories are," I said to BB.

"I don't have a clue," BB said cheerfully. "And I'm not much interested. But that's what makes you a writer."

Every now & then, the protesters & their signs made the circuit of the shabby downtown street where the café was located. I studied the Falun Gong cult members' faces carefully to see if there was any sympathy. There wasn't. At the table kitty-corner to ours, a quartet of determined 30-ish women raised their eyebrows disparagingly, made remarks to one another that I couldn't quite hear.

Back in 2016, my beloved Summer explained to me why Trump is so overwhelmingly popular with Chinese expatriates in the U.S.: "They think he has luck. They think he is phenomenally lucky. And luck is the thing we revere and want above all else."

###

When we were done with our drinks & pastries, BB led me to a fabulous Chinese store where all sorts of fabulous groceries were for sale:







To think that all these wondrous things are a mere five-block walk from the Y where I work out two or three times a week and that I had never visited them before!

###

Back at the casa, I labored on Adrienne's website, aligning links & graphics and embellishing it with fulsome prose like, When Adrienne moved to Wallkill 16 years ago, she immediately looked for ways to support the hamlet she’d fallen in love with..
.
(Yes, I know, gag-worthy, but trust me: It will work for the voters of Wallkill.)

I should finish the damn thing today.

It is far from perfect, but the important thing is that it is.

If Brian the fresh-faced little campaign manager—who's actually getting paid—wants me to tweak stuff, I will simply tell him, Find someone else.

I never actually told Adrienne I would design her a website. I told her I would help her with social media. So, you know.

###

There's no accurate reporting yet on the number of protesters who turned out yesterday. 500,000 signed up in advance with the various Hands Off, Move On, etc. organizations, so I'm thinking probably twice as many showed up. Maybe more. The numbers will be underreported by the mainstream media who are all Trump suck-ups. Fuck the mainstream media.

###

Also, I am dead serious about launching an initiative whereby we help people obtain those documents (birth certificates, marriage licenses for women) that prove citizenship & thereby protect the right to vote.

Of course, this kind of stuff doesn't matter in New York State, which doesn't require proof of citizenship at the polls, but my old LJ friend [personal profile] cah1470 actually lives in the North Carolina district where 65,000 votes are about to be tossed because North Carolina! Home to Mayberry, gerrymandering, and the Ku Klux Klan!

I totally believe that the next federal election will be lost unless we make sure our votes can't be thrown out. People in red states will need to vote early and in person, bring identification, voter cards, make sure their signatures are exactly the same as they are on the voter cards, etc, etc, etc.

I don't have the foggiest notion at this point how to liaise with organizations in the states that do require proof of citizenship at the polls. Plus we'd need money—obtaining govt documents costs. So maybe I need to figure out how to set up a 501 (c) (3)??? I dunno. This is all in a very preliminary stage in my head right now.

Anyway, I've got Adrienne talking to the heads of the Democratic Party here in New York—a thoroughly useless endeavor, I'm sure. Democrats are hopeless.

And I am gonna lean on RTT when I see him in NYC this week to try and set up some sort of meeting for me with the Soros-financed People for the American Way to see if they might be willing to be sponsors.

It's actionable resistance!

That means I'm gonna have to draft some sort of policy proposal in the next two weeks.

Busy, busy, busy!

Ellen

Apr. 2nd, 2025 08:45 am
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Somehow, Ellen found out that my birthday is fast approaching, so the Girl Squad meetup last night turned into a birthday dinner.

The Parkview has decent cheeseburgers, so that's what I always order.

I like the Parkview. Maybe it's because I'm deep in my various Larry McMurtry reads, but it occurs to me that Wallkill is a lot like McMurtry's mythical West Texas Thalia—a lot of deeply weird individuals pretending to be walkin' that Law-and-Order highway. I would actually kinda like them if their xenophobia was not a strain of rabies. But as it is, they're dangerous.

###
Anyway, Ellen knows absolutely everyone in Wallkill, so absolutely everyone came up to our table—from Joe, the former Wallkill Town Board member who lives in a 19th-century boarding house still decorated with the original daguerreotypes to Steve, who runs the local transfer station (where I haul my weekly garbage since Icky is too cheap to spring for a garbage service) & who never charges me: Jest don't tell them people down at City Hall, 'kay darlin'?

###

Ellen and I have an unlikely friendship. She doesn't read & I'd say she doesn't actually hear about 50% of what comes out of my mouth, but then, I don't really care if people hear what I say since I'm mostly saying it for the benefit of an invisible audience that lives in my head.

She won my fealty & devotion 4-Evah by coming to dig my car out of the ice last winter and rolling down her car window on her way out to tell me, "I got your back."

Apparently, I did something similar for her—though I can't remember what it was. Maybe offering to go with her to the vet when she had to put her much-loved dog down?

Anyway, we are bonded.

And we both hate Trump—a rarity in Wallkill.

So, maybe that's part of it.
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I was 20 minutes late to TaxBwana yesterday—got stuck behind a tow truck that was chugging along hilly 44/55 at 20 miles an hour—and so missed Moira, the totally delightful 86-year-old whose taxes I did at Highland a couple of weeks back. She came in at 9 with an enormous box of treats! (TaxBwanas can't take money, but we can take treats!)

"Patrizia, Patrizia, Patrizia," Steve the site coordinator grinned. "That's all she kept saying. You have a fan."

This was particularly touching to me because I know exactly how much disposable income Moira has, and it's not much. The treats outlay was a significant expenditure for her.

Then later in the day, one of the TaxBwanas approached me: "They're my friends, so I really don't feel comfortable doing their taxes. Too much information, you know! But I really want to make sure they get someone good. Will you do them?"

So, you know: Ego validation!

###

My mood turned to meh as the day wore on. The political news is really quite awful, and I find myself preoccupied by the question: Why exactly did you choose to be born in this time & this place?

Because I am quite convinced: Choose I did.

What am I supposed to do? Personally, I see the world in shades of grey, but the world defies me by shaping up into some kind of Manichean battle: Good Guys versus Bad Guys. Belinda, my Trump-voting pal, all but admitted to me when we went out for Himalayan food last week that she regrets her vote. (And, no, I didn't prod her. I deliberately steer away from political discussion when I am around Trump-voting pals.)

But how do I know that I'm not one of the Bad Guys?

Life! The ultimate role-playing game!

###

The only real talent I have is writing.

But I'm not under the illusion that anybody reads much of what I write.

###

Meanwhile, I am wayyyyy behind on my Remuneration goals & Adrienne's website is still not done.

Icky & his ill-mannered spawn have vamoosed for the next 10 days, leaving me in solitary possession of the casa. So, that's a good thing.

(Minor showdown with Icky last week. He complained the kitchen was dirty. I told him that I was perfectly willing to clean up after myself, but I'd be goddamned if I was gonna clean up after him & the Spawn. I did clean up after him & the Spawn a couple of times when I first moved in, in an effort to ingratiate myself, which doubtless gave him the wrong idea.

And I get the feeling you want me to move out, & I am looking for another place to live, I added.

I don't want you to move out, said Icky. And cleaned the kitchen.)

Black Chicken seems a bit more chipper. And tonight, I will be hanging with the Girl Squad at the Parkview, which should be fun.

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