Mallory's Camera

Christmas was the Big Fun.

Being completely neurotic, I had to talk myself into not canceling: Basically, I wanted to lie in bed for two days with the covers pulled up over my head since my client was never gonna pay me, and that meant this was the last Christmas I was even gonna have a bed, right? Next year, it was gonna be a couple of pieces of soggy cardboard in the Refrigerator Box Under the Bridge. Enjoy it while you can!

Plus, there would be Nazis. I wasn't sure how the Nazis were going to work their way in there, but I was sure they would.

Don't be ridiculous, I chided myself.

And drove to Poughkeepsie to hop the train.

###

The City was.... the City.

It is the environment that shaped me, and it is such an odd environment, sui generis, you know, so visiting is always a homecoming: It is the only place I 1,000% feel like I belong.

A good omen! When I got off the shuttle at Times Square, a Peruvian shaman was performing in front of my grandfather's mural!



(No, I mean the guy in the red tie is not my grandfather. I doubt very much the mural artist knew my grandfather. It just happens to look exactly like my grandfather.)

###

Real-life Flavia is very, very wealthy. She lives in a townhouse in the West Village on a meandering street that predates the grid that NYC planners imposed in 1811 when the city's population began to explode. Nearly two centuries later, a bunch of LA producers decided to lodge the fictional Phoebe from Friends on this street, though even in 2004, there is no way a waitress could ever have afforded it.

Real-life Flavia has simple tastes, so the townhouse does not scream ostentation. But the details are all the best—an incredible kitchen island of orange marble, wonderful art on the walls, exquisite appliances.

She has no supernatural beliefs about her own exceptionalism, either. Later on, while we were out tromping—I have been one acquainted with the night: oh, how I miss walking around cities at night!—she remarked out of nowhere, "I know how incredibly fortunate I am. And I wonder about it." A throwaway line: She wasn't being defensive, and I hadn't asked.

I shrugged. "Well, it's not as though your life has been bereft of tragedies." I listed a few. "But it's true. You are never going to go mad for a week after invoicing a client, wondering if they will pay."

"No," she said. "I never will."

"But then, I'm never going to have my home in Gaza City destroyed by IDF bombs," I said. "Prosperity is relative. Still, if you don't feel odd talking about it, I have a weird request."

"What?" she asked.

"Well, you know, I'm writing a novel. About Brian. And the fictionalized protagonists are me, you, & Daria. Alternating first-person POVs. And your first-person section is the last first-person section. I'd love to delve down deep with you some time about what it feels like to be rich."

"Sure," she said.

###

I'd carted along Mexican food from a place in Hyde Park—the best Mexican food I've found in the Mid-Hudson Valley, which, of course, is not saying much—so we ate and afterwards repaired to the media room to watch my very favorite Christmas movie of all times: 12 Monkeys. (Yes, boys & girls! Technically, 12 Monkeys is a Christmas movie.)

"Only good movie Terry Gilliam ever made," I said. "But what a movie."

"I don't like Brazil at all," Flavia said.

"I know, right? And The Fisher King is just this maudlin excercise in sentimentality."

"The Time Bandits is okay."

"You think? But 12 Monkeys is so fucking great—"

And it is!

Is fate predetermined? A man travels backward in time to look for ways to prevent the virus that will decimate humanity and drive it underground.

But it is only because the man traveled backward in time to describe the virus that the mad scientist hatches the plot to release the virus, and the 10-year-old boy who will grow up to be Bruce Willis watches, uncomprehending, his adult self die:



The movie dovetails so exquisitely. The use of wide-angle photography & canted angles to denote the Willis character's inner turmoil. Low-tech single cuts are only used when Willis is time-traveling—complete reversal of the common sci-fi film technique, which is to pull out the heavy special effects artillary when they are time traveling. The dark, dark shooting palette is only relieved by the bright pops of the red Army of the 12 Monkeys logo. The art direction so perfectly underscores the script: The only things that are worth looking at are the things that nobody looks at.

"The movie never changes," Bruce Willis tells Madeleine Stowe. "It can't change. But every time you see it, it seems different, because you're different. You see different things."



The next morning, we hopped the subway to venture forth to deepest, darkest Flushing. Little Beijing!

We rendezvoused with Betsy and then bopped around, staring at many wondrous things. In Little Beijing, Christmas Day is just a day like any other day. The sidewalk vendors were hawking their goods, the stores were crowded, the streets were thronged.









We ended up driving to Kew Gardens for Christmas lunch. Betsy's old nabe, I think she was feeling nostalgic. The restaurant where we ate was one of her old haunts. The people who run it know her, watched her kids grow up, & the kids still come in some time. (For various reasons too complicated to go into here—except to observe that while I like her, she is what you would have to call a Difficult Person—Betsy is completely estranged from her kids, so it was sweet & strange listening to Betsy quiz the waitress: "Natalia came in? What was she wearing?")



Then we went to hang out at this tiny café that had just opened!!! The proprietor was from Paris, and why his life's ambition was to open a café in fuckin' Queens on Christmas day and force his beleagured baristas to wear berets is beyond me, but hey! Why not? The cappucinos were delicious and the mocha slices sublime.



Then Betsy took off and Flavia & I went to see a movie where Hugh Jackman played a Neil Diamond impersonator. Theater was packed. Not a single member of the audience was under 60! Perfect movie to round out Jewish Christmas! Schmaltzy, but undeniably heartwarming.



Subway-ed back to Flavia's casa. The tromp through the West Village took us past a couture shop designed to resemble a thrift store so that $1,000 dresses were strewn on wire hangers along bare metal racks. The City's premier bagel & cheese emporium had constructed this delightful whimsy in its front window:



My heart was so light! I felt so happy!

Even the certain knowledge that the very next evening I would be dealing with awful stuff once again—12 ground inches (ugh!) of Hideous White Stuff From the Sky and life in the Refrigerator Box Under the Bridge—did not quash the sheer joy of the moment. I am alive! I thought. The night is beautiful, and I am alive to see it!

####

And whaddiya know? Five miles up the road in Pine Bush, they got 14 inches of snow last night! But we only got six. We dodged the bullet. And in a miraculous display of un-dickish behavior, Icky actually dug my car out for me.

Plus the client paid me.

I'm tempted to qualify that as "the client finally paid me," but the truth is the invoice did not actually take that long to process. It is me who is absolutely insane & neurotic about all of this. If I am going to continue freelancing—& I mean, I am very good at doing the actual work demanded of the role—I have got to think of some way to prevent myself from going all borderline over the billing process.

I do not think I have borderline personality disorder. My mother, though, was a Grade AAA borderline. I was raised by her; it was just the two of us till I was 16 & old enough to escape. And I have what I would characterize as a mimetic personality: Put me in a room with people who have an accent, and within an hour, I'll start channeling their inflections. I don't do it by design! It's an unconscious behavior, a kind of protective mimicry. My personality is porous—which serves me well as a writer but not as a human being. I have weak ego boundaries.

This past week, I was channeling my crazy borderline mother.

And it was not a pleasant feeling.

I've always avoided treadmills, but as my customary outdoor tromping routes are frozen under a thin but lethal scrim of ice, I decided to hop on one yesterday at the gym.

I must say, I rather liked it!

You bliss off into whatever audiobook or podcast you're following—I'm currrently listening to Walter Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, a very strange novel—and then just pound away.

It's consistent. It's efficient. When I hopped off, I could feel my muscles had been exercised in a way they don't feel on the spinning bike—which is more a cardiovascular thing anyway.

I think I will add it to my three-times-a-week gym workouts.

###

From the gym in Middletown, I drove all the way to New Paltz to have lunch with Belinda. Long drives are de rigueur when you live in the boonies unless you want to hang out at a liquor store. (Wallkill does not have a single grocery store. In fact, the whole of Shawangunk Township does not have a single grocery store. I live in a food desert! But there are a lot of liquor stores.)

Belinda has started attending Jehovah's Witness bible classes.

She was very shy & soft, confiding this to me.

But, in fact, I approve—though I did tell her, "You know, I've always found Jay-Dubs to be very nice people. In fact, my favorite tax client year before last was a Jay-Dub reverend, a very intelligent, very eloquent man. But, you know, it is a cult, so if you start to convert, I will stage an intervention."

She laughed. Assured me: No chance of that.

But I wonder.

Still. After deep immersion in the Owning Manhattan ethos for two nights in a row, I'm all in favor of anything that makes people ponder the spiritual aspects of their sojourn in this time/space continuum. If you can't be kind to others because generosity is not one of your innate personality traits, then kindness is something that needs to be enforced through congregational edict. Kindness to other people is that important.

"You know, your friendship is very important to me," Belinda told me as we were saying goodbye. "I value it highly. I love you."

Which was nice to hear since I've been feeling so singularly repulsive lately.

And it made me ponder the nature of friendship.

###

In the end, friends are not necessarily the people you care about the most. They're the people who, for one reason or another, stick.

In Monterey, my best friend was Jeannie DeTomaso.

We became best friends because our children, RTT & Sydney, were besties. Jeannie was beautiful and luminous. "Saint Jeannie," Susan used to call her.

At the same time, I had an incredibly annoying neighbor named Heidi. Who was petty & vain and had a morbid fascination with true crime. Heidi and I were thrown together when I found out that she thought my cat Fritz was her cat Henry because he showed up at her house regularly at meal times.

Jeannie had a complicated family history. Her parents belonged to a weird, splinter Holy Roller cult. In fact, her earliest memories were of waking up in the middle of the night to hear her parents babbling loudly & incomprehensibly: They were speaking in tongues.

Jeannie's father was long dead by the time I knew her. Her mother, Elizabeth, was surviving on about $400 of social security a month but owned a house that was assessed at something like $2 million, Pacific Grove at that time being the capital of the Cash Poor But Land Rich.

Elizabeth developed Alzheimer's, and all of Jeannie's pals banded together to provide her with respite care. I watched Elizabeth one afternoon a week. I remember being quite fascinated by the way Elizabeth would sit and read the same back-to-back pages of a novel—ironically The Time Traveler's Wife—over and over and over again. Her entire memory—85 years!— compressed into the time it took her to read 500 words. It was like a Monkey's Paw version of the Ram Dass addage: Be Here Now.

Then Elizabeth died.

And Jeannie stopped talking to me.

I wasn't special, Jeannie's husband Tony assured me: Jeannie had stopped talking to everyone. "She's psychotic," he told me. (A year or so later, they divorced.)

Heidi had not stopped talking to me. Heidi was still feeding my cat. And meeting me on the back porch for coffee every other day. When in an overabundance of enthusiasm, I confided her one day that as a very young child, I'd had memories of a former life and that's why I believe in reincarnation, Heidi just looked at me appraisingly. "But that degree of splintering and dissociation is very common in abused children. You were an abused child, weren't you?"

Fast forward 20 years & Heidi and I are friends. I spent a lot of time with her when I was in Monterey a year ago.

Jeannie & I are not friends. A circumstance I still regret and blame myself for: What did I do? Though I know perfectly well I didn't do anything, that Jeannie had—as her husband told me—flipped out and that the only way she could find a center again (any center) was to weed out the people in her life who were guardians of certain untrustworthy memories.

Anyway, Belinda has become a friend in the same way Heidi is a friend.


Life can be unpredictable.

Last two days felt as dismal as any two days can feel that did not culminate in the death or disfigurement of somebody dear or a meteorite crashing into the Empire State Building.

The kicker was my car needed an oil change.

In the bad old days, I would have ignored those plaintive dashboard warnings. Suck it up, car! I would have said. And driven the poor thing till the engine block cracked because maintenance & upkeep is for sissies.

Now that I'm a wise and responsible septugenarian, though, I always do what my car tells me to do.

So, I brought the car in.

Since I don't have anyone to pick me up or drop me off, I sat there in the auto mechanics' waiting room while the oil change was done, attempting to read Rebecca Makkai's latest, I Have Some Questions For You (which turns out to be a not-very-good book and thus a tremendous disappointment after the brilliance of The Great Believers.)

Auto repair shops put The Fear into me because they smell so awful—that horrible chemical rubber tire smell—and because I don't know anything about what the mechanics are doing, just that through the streaked window that looks into the repair bay, I can see my poor little car, helplessly dismantled into its component parts.

In a way, sitting in the auto mechanic's shop is exactly like sitting in an emergency room waiting room. I always have this fear that the parts manager is going to approach me, head down, eyes professionally somber: We tried everything we could, Mrs.—uh—Diloochey. But we couldn't save your car.

And, in fact, something of that sort happened yesterday except that there was something they could do to save my car—and that something cost a lot of money.

I mean, hey! It's an old car.

And the roads around here really are for shit.

So if a mechanic tells me that the wheels are gonna fly off the car while it's struggling to Little-Engine-That-Could its way up over one of those Shawangunk Mountain passes unless I get those wheel bearings replaced, then I am gonna get those wheel bearings replaced.

But I'm also gonna get PTSD from the sticker shock.

###

There were a bunch of other things, too. Fed Ex apparently was delivering my new snow boots to Madagascar. The current Remuneration client has been kidnapped by aliens—that's the only reason why he could be ignoring my emails & calls for three days, right? Soul-Sucking Tax Corporation's website was written by the ancient Babylonians when they were pissed off about the Rosetta Stone.

On our group chat, Ichabod texted RTT: Mom was an early adopter of being anti-woke and hating talking and thinking about identity especially when it comes to marginalized identities. (Which is an oversimplification, but yes, it is very true that I've never liked identity politics. I think they're a distraction, rooted in delusionary exceptionalism, from the real struggle, which is the 1% vs the 99%. Equitable resource allocation is what’s politically important to me. It's the great lesson in life, I think—disabusing oneself of that belief in one's own exceptionalism. Once you do it, though, I think you have more of an impact, paradoxical though that might seem. But hey! I always try to respect pronouns.)

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

By the time last night rolled around, I was such a wrought-up bundle of nerves that I could not fall asleep for anything, my brain just did not want to surrender control of my body. This is ridiculous, I chided myself. You are exhausted. And willed myself not to toss & turn. To lay there focusing on my breaths. Which was enough for my Fitbit to register sleep. Although very low-quality sleep.

###

Anyway. I am rested enough this morning to tackle the enormous pile of stuff I have to do before I caper up to Ithaca tomorrow.

And as I keep reminding myself: Money is a renewable resource.

When I rack up big auto repair bills, I am looking at doing more Remuneration. And I want to do less Remuneration because I want to do more writing on the Work in Progress. The two types of writing are just not compatible. The former sucks the marrow from the latter's bones.

But, hey! It is what it is. And I don't live in Gaza.

And in a way, my fictioneering is best when I'm stealing time to write around the margins of everything else I have to do.

###

It dawns on me that I could say to Ichabod: Pay this bill for me.

And he would do so quite happily, no questions asked, no damage done to his own finances. He makes a lot of money.

It also dawns on me that if I said to Real-Life Daria, I want Brian's car, she'd be happy to sell it or even give it to me. Since she's on the West Coast and Brian's car is on the East Coast, it will actually cost her money to get the car to where she is. Plus she already has a car she likes.

I'm not sure why approaching Ichabod or Daria about these two things fills me with such terror. If they say No, they say No. But they won't stop loving me.

I'll have to think a bit more on this.

Fabulous Deecey-Virginia trip.

Trip down somewhat problematic as the Poughkeepsie train station was out of parking places, so I had to limp in the rain on mysteriously injured leg a mile and a half from adjunct street parking place to the train, plus my Penn Station train was an hour and a half late due to coastal New Jersey track flooding.

However:



Shaken! Not stirred.

###

The next day was Halloween. We took a stroll around Alex's neighborhood.

Alex lives in a city that was founded in colonial times (though no traces remain of that). For the first 150 years or so, it remained a bucolic settlement surrounded by tobacco fields until time and proximity to the corridors of power in nearby Washington, D.C. transformed it—inevitably!—into a residential commuter hub. (I imagine in those early, pre-WWII days, the commuting was all done by trolley.)

Alex lives in a charming brick house that was built to house the earliest residential commuters. It is the house her husband grew up in.

Some of Alex's neighbors take Halloween very seriously:



https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BKox5nPBQ/

Then it was time for the main event: Trick or Treat!!!!

Skeleton costumes are like the Chanel suit or the little black cocktail dress of the Halloween universe, so I didn't have to pay much attention to my own plumage.

Other members of the household went far more elaborate—in particular, Alex's beautiful daughter H who could easily snag a job as a double when Chappell Roan makes her cinematic debut:





Even after (conservative estimate) 80 or so trick-or-treaters, the Bottomless Candy Bucket didn't give out. Though the stragglers had to make due with Dum-Dums.

###

Most of the places people visit in the Deecey area are closed due to the government shutdown. (And you might think the Trump administration would have better taste than to host a Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago mere hours before food benefits lapsed for 14.2 million Americans due to said government shutdown. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong.)

The ones that are funded through their own foundations remain open, and among those is Gunston Hall, the ancestral home of Founding Father George Mason, whose name I vaguely remembered from the John Adams & Benjamin Franklin bios I devoured last summer.

Before the Gilded Age, American mansions were not particularly imposing:



But this one is located on magnificently beautiful grounds::

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BYoVZJRwG/

Fun factoids learned at Gunston Manor:

(1) This (to me somewhat hideous) shade of green was the most popular for the houses of the ultra-wealthy in the late 18th & early 19th centuries because the pigment was made from copper verdigris, and thus the paint was very expensive:



(2) Alex is the great great great great great great great great grandaughter of George Mason. She learned this long after she started visiting Gunston Hall! I do not see the resemblance.



The next day, we went thrifting!

Alex is like the Queen of Thrifters, so this was very much like taking a master painting class from Rembrandt.





In the evenings, we watched the BBC's version of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I have seen before but could watch endlessly (even though it completely fucks up the ending), such a dithering fan girl am I.

I was convinced Alex would love it!

And either Alex did, or Alex is such a good hostess that she pretended to with a magnificent display of sincerity to please her guest.

###

Anyway, terrific time. Which will give my heart resistance since the next two and a half weeks are promising to be quite the slog. Sigh...

Had an absolutely fabulous time in NYC.

But as soon as I crossed the bridge into Ulster County on the way back to Wallkill, I immediately reverted to feeling anxious & despairing & helpless.

So, that was interesting.

###

But anyway, NYC.

Real-life Flavia & I had completely forgotten that October 18 was the day of the massive No Kings march when we signed up for Open House New York.

"Do you feel guilty about missing the protest?" I asked Flavia.

"Yes," she said. "Do you?"

"Yes," I lied.

But in fact, I did not.

The truth is I am sick of political protests. I am sick of living in a state of perpetual seige. I can't keep up the pressure that's ceaselessly being demanded of me. If one more Democratic candidate in fuckin' Oklahoma texts me If you don't send me money right now, Trump is gonna dissolve the Supreme Court!!!!! just because I once contributed $50 to Antonio Delgado, I am gonna stop voting altogether.

I don't think we're trapped in some awful Third Reich remake; I think we're living through the collapse of an empire with obvious parallels to 1st century AD Rome. Trump is as bitter & vengeful as Tiberius, but Suetonius and the possibly apocryphal pisciculi notwithstanding, there were millions of people who managed to live perfectly pleasant & reasonable lives as Caligula sodomized his sister & made his horse the Secretary of Homeland Security, thereby hastening the Republic's fall.

History's gonna do what history's gonna do. And it's very clear the great cosmodemonic pendulum is swinging into Dark Ages territory. I can't do anything about it! The center is not holding. The dark beast is struggling to be born, and I am just fuckin' tired of telling its mother, Don't push!!!!

No doubt, this is just temporary burnout, & in a couple of days I will be ready to rejoin the army of the angels.

###

Flavia lives in the most gorgeous West Village apartment you can possibly imagine, right next door to Emily Ratajkowski and three doors down from Sofia Coppola. As Flavia & I left her apartment, I kept hoping the celebs would be leaving their apartments, too, so I could snap covert iPhone pix and sell them to The Daily Mail for large sums of money.

It was also the most gorgeous October day you could possibly imagine, so we walked to our first OHNY venue, which was the Players off Grammercy Park. We tromped through Washington Square Park, scene of so many high school misadventures, which I hadn't visited in years—



—and thence through Union Square, which has the most wonderful Saturday Farmers market where every conceivable seasonal vegetable & fruit is on display. Behold the artisnal tomatoes:



Grammercy Park is the only private park in New York City. You have to have a key to enter. Its high black wrought-iron gate is surrounded by beautiful upscale buildings that have either retained their 19th century facades or been artfully remodeled. Flavia regaled me with stories about her eccentric aunt who once lived there while we waited for our date with the Players. The eccentric aunt was once painted by Alice Neel!



The Players is a club founded in 1888 by Edwin Booth, the famous 19th century American stage actor.

Edwin Booth's career took a nosedive after his brother John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Edwin Booth had a bitterly contentious and competitive relationship with his brother since they were both rivals for the same pot of fame, and attention, after all, is a fiat currency. After Lincoln's assassination, he was overcome with guilt: Had his relationship with his brother somehow driven his brother to commit the murder? Abraham Lincoln's assassin was gonna be way more famous than any Hamlet!

The most poignant thing in the Players Club was Edwin Booth's open letter to the People of the United States, which he arranged to have printed in as many newspapers as possible:



The letter saved his career. He opened Booth's Theater on Twenty-third Street in 1869 and for thirteen years maintained the most popular revivals of Shakespeare's tragedies ever known in the city. One imagines part of his popularity was the frisson of terrified delight theatergoers experienced at beholding a Hamlet who'd once shared a womb with a great man's assassin.

###

Fun factoid: Edwin Booth bought the mansion from Valentine Hall—the same Valentine Hall whose widow and granddaughter, Eleanor Roosevelt, I wrote about in my very first Hudson Valley supernatural Big House story.

###

The Players is shabby, musty & fusty, its walls covered with not-very-good art, portraits of people who used to be famous long ago. But utterly fascinating the way all such repositories of long-ago fame are fascinating and apparently, still a hangout for moderately famous Broadway actors today. Mostly the basement bar with its billiards table.



After that, Flavia and I scampered off for a tour of the Woolworth Building lobby.

That's the Woolworth Building in my opening photograph. I've always thought it's the most beautiful skyscraper in all of New York City, and architecturally interesting, too, as explained to us in our docent tour—but I see I have exceeded my diary-scribbling time alottment for today, & so must compress the rest my fabulous weekend into expired Instagram story outtakes:

Dreamed I was on an airplane, but instead of the standard safety spiel—Please secure your oxygen mask before assisting others—the attendant advised us on what self-help books we should be reading in flight.

These books are absolutely life-changing, she assured us.

The first was a book called So What? dedicated to the proposition that when someone close to you does something reprehensible, you should just shrug and wash your hands of that person forever. Surgically remove yourself from their life.

The second was a book called Fuck You Forever, which was a list of all the horrible things that had ever happened or were going to happen to anyone who'd ever crossed you in any way. Each copy is personally customized! the flight attendant told us in a cheerful voice.

###

Yesterday, I pored over tax law. It's complicated! And the IRS actually fines tax preparers who let taxpayers use the Head of Household status when they're not eligible.

In the midafternoon, I began organizing stuff for the Big Halloween Fun I will be having when I visit my pal A___ in Deecie that weekend.

A___ invited me back in August. For weeks, Get Amtrak ticket had been at the top of my To Do list, and yet I was seized with a curious lassitude whenever I contemplated actually purchasing one.

Finally, day before yesterday, I got more explicit directions from my hostess: Arrive at such-&-such an hour!

Okay! So, that's why I had been putting buying the ticket off!

So yesterday, I booked the ticket and began searching around for my fabulous skeleton costume:



Alas! it seems to have disappeared in the move.

Which meant I was gonna have to make a trip to Spirit Halloween.



I have always been absolutely fascinated by the business model behind Spirit Halloween. Traditionally, it's been a seasonal popup retailer, opening in August, shuttering promptly on November 2.

In April, they begin booking 1,500 storefronts in distressed malls all across the nation. Malls love 'em—Spirit Halloween pays a 20% to 30% premium to use commercial space in a short-term contract.

In July, they hire 50,000 seasonal retail associates. Their inventory is bulk shit from China that gives the impression of scarcity (if Reddit is to be believed) because instead of passing along unsold merchandise to liquidators, they trash it all, actually breaking animatronics so potential customers can't dumpster dive.

Here's something hilarious: Spirit Halloween runs its own dodgy charity called "Spirit of the Children." Customers become hostages at checkout: Don't you want to contribute to the poor unfortunate children??? They could donate their unsold merchandise to their own charity, right? But they don't. And, of course, the charity is a tax write-off.

This is capitalism at its end-stagiest.

And it's an environmental issue as well because when that plastic unsold merchandise is trashed, it ends up in landfills.



In 2023, Halloween was a $12.2 billion industry. And Spirit Halloween has played a significant role in turning Halloween into a mega-retail event because there is a ripple effect: Even if you don't buy from them, you see those inflatable Frankenstein monsters on your neighbors' lawns, and you start thinking, Well, I gotta buy something...

And it's an industry that's comparatively immune to online competition because you don't know how you want to decorate your lawn until you see the perfect thing, right? You want inspiration, so you've got to look around.

Sales at Spirit Halloween didn't even dip during the COVID pandemic.



One other interesting (to me at least) thing of note:

Bad TV is my comfort food. Not on a television—I don't own one—but on my computer.

In particular, I'm a big, big fan of the various Law & Order franchises.

The new seasons have started!!!

And you know, I have Issues with Law & Order SVU, particularly with Olivia's creepy kid Noah and the way they keep trying to push a starcrossed romance with Stabler (Christopher Meloni was so much more attractive before he started taking steroids when he still had hair.)

But I was very pleased to see that Dick Wolfe made ICE the Big Bad in the opening episode of the new season.

Because this is actually how attitudes change. Not through protests! Not through Facebook posts! Certainly not through letter or telephone campaigns to your useless Congressional representatives.

But when your favorite TV character stares directly into the camera and says, ICE. BAD.

Kudos, Dick Wolfe!