Mallory's Camera

Found myself thinking fondly of Gore Vidal yesterday since Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair is the spitting image of the original dust jacket for Myra Breckinridge:



Was this the first time Vanity Fair ever put a crotch shot on its cover? They really wanted you to get a close look at the missing goods.

One might wish that the new poster child for a marginalized cohort was a little less of a publicity ‘ho, but then again, really, why not? By all means, Caitlyn, objectify those tits. Never mind that the history of women in the latter part of the 20th and 21st centuries has been all about the struggle not to be identified so strongly with our bodies. That’s just us being fractious when we don’t get enough attention. It’s all about girl talk and sharing makeup tips.

Since yesterday was a revenue-generating day, I spent lots and lots of time on Facebook where I got myself into lots and lots of trouble by writing that I think – have always thought – that everyone has the right to do whatever they want to her/his body, and that personally, I don’t see the slightest difference between gender reassignment surgery, tattoos, piercings, and cosmetic surgery.

This really riled the faithful who want gender reassignment surgery to be a good thing, and boob jobs and nose jobs to be a bad thing.

Oh, the scorn they lavished upon me!

I’ve never seen gender as binary, so I suppose I have a blind spot where gender dysmorphia is concerned. As a very tall girl in an all girls’ high school, I spent a good chunk of my adolescence playing the male role; I don’t have strong gender preferences in sexual partners; and in my dreams, I am sometimes male and sometimes female.

Really, though, I can’t help thinking that in 20 years, Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair is gonna seem so-o-o 2015! Assuming ISIS does not conquer the planet and put us all under Sharia Law, gender will become a free-floating zone with more and more biologically male/biologically female persons drifting between the extremes. The more available this marginal state becomes, the less acute the need will be to identify oneself with either extreme of the spectrum. And in the end, it is gonna turn out to be all about body mods, fetishes, cosmetic surgery, which, in turn, will turn out to be far less trivial than many assume them to be now.

Because why stop with gender? What about all those people who were born human but know, deep in their hearts, that they are really cats?

Cordwainer Smith, your future awaits.

Way back when I was a sweet young thing, the quintessence of beauty was Jean Shrimpton. I loved everything about the way Jean Shrimpton looked. Jean Shrimpton was the prettiest thing that ever lived!

So naturally, I was interested in what Jean Shrimpton looks like now:



I am officially Better Looking than Jean Shrimpton!

Of course, beauty is transient; grave mold, the most popular of all eye shadows; vanity and narcissism, the most ridiculous of emotions. Bla, bla, bla.

It really shouldn't matter what Jean Shrimpton looked like then or looks like now.

So, why does it?

###

Meanwhile, back at Pollyanna Human Services, times are tough. Reverend Cal rallied the troops for an hour and a half long meeting last week.

Afterwards, Charlotte came up to me in the bathroom, put her hand on my arm. "Do you think he has Alzheimer's?" she asked.

Actually, I'd found Reverend Cal's discourse quite fascinating. He rambled some more about the state cutbacks; the eventual extinction of the group home model; the rise of its inevitable successor, something called "family care" wherein some licensed health care professional presumably assumes the role of patriarch or matriarch and gathers five or six developmentally disabled individuals under his or her commodious wing. TLC might want to do a reality TV show about one of these little makeshift families, no? The model as described by Reverend Cal was that adorable.

I imagine the realities of the situation as it plays out will be quite different.

Do economies of scale work for or against people with developmental disabilities? I'm inclined to say "against," but I'm thinking here of people with autism, whom I suspect do better with fewer people because fewer people = less stimulation. Honestly, though? I don't know.

Reverend Cal opined darkly that more layoffs were in the pipes, which did not do much to raise the already low-low-low morale among staff members. Charlotte is one of those whose job is on the cutting block, but she's also my age, which means she has Social Security and a pension, so I grabbed her hand in the bathroom. "Listen: You'll be fine," I said. And gave her the patented Svengali stare: I vill make you believe it vill be ho-kay!!!!!!

Oddly enough, the only positive words to come out of Reverend Cal's mouth during the entire disjointed ramble were in conjunction with the project l'il Jeremy and I are doing. Our smoothie cart on the Walkway Over the Hudson biz plan got 3 (three) shout-outs, testifying to my foresightfulness when we were first doing our business presentation for Reverend Cal.
L'il Jeremy had prepared a PowerPoint introduction that used terms like "community building" and "let's do it for the kids."

"No, no, no, no!" said I. "You begin every conversation like the one we're about to have with the words, Here's how I'm gonna make you money!"

One interesting linguistic or, perhaps, semiotic tidbit: Agencies now call members of the developmentally disabled populations they work with consumers. Clients, I could understand. But consumers? I mean, they're not consumers in the strict economic sense of the word since they're not paying for services. Very weird lingo.

Then on Friday, the VISTA supervisor from Albany came down to pay a site visit. Faithful readers will remember we called her up a month go to tell her that the project was going very badly because we were receiving absolutely no support from Pollyanna. We're looking to get the capital start-up costs from Kickstart, but we need to do some kind of community event in conjunction with the Kickstart campaign and we've costed that out at about $1,000 for venue, food and entertainment.

We're not getting a grand from Reverend Cal for a Kickstarter launch, I can tell you that.

The VISTA supervisor is supposed to be having a conversation with Reverend Cal this week along the lines of, Give them some sort of operational budget or we're pulling the plug.

If they pull the plug, l'il Jeremy will be scampering back to St. Louis, but I'm not entirely sure what I'll do. I have an idea for a business model Pollyanna can use for family care that will incorporate an entrepreneurial component. Pollyanna would be delighted to have me draft it, but I'm not sure VISTA would be willing to pay since VISTA is pretty strict about supporting initiatives aimed at eradicating community poverty. My business model might help eradicate Pollyanna's poverty, but it wouldn't do a fucking thing for the community.

I got a feeler about the tiny Catskill village of Schoharie, which is looking for someone with my particular skill set to help reify its downtown, completely washed out and destroyed by Hurricane Irene back in 2011. The work sounds very interesting. I'm not sure I want to go back to living in the country, though. I'm not really a country gal.

Then there are various places in Ulster County including Newburgh, less than 10 miles away and the murder capital of New York State.

After April, money becomes considerably less of a scramble since I can begin drawing on my various pensions if I want to. Truthfully though? I think I do better when I'm employed. I'm much happier this year than I was last, and while part of that is because I like the Hudson River Valley way better than I liked Ganeshopolis, much of that is because I'm feeling genuinely useful.

We didn't end up going to Coney Island. Max was feeling too wasted from cumulative effects of life in the fast lane and the imminence of his trip's ending. Instead we hung out, chatted about various projects he has percolating, got wasted. Ate the rest of the vegetarian chili I'd made the night before.

Then he played Sims and I wrote stuff for money, and the stuff I was writing for money was so boring and so unremunerative and moved so slowly that I felt like a seamstress in a sweatshop.

I remembered Tim Ware's quip from so long ago: "I should have bought real estate first and then dropped acid."

Except I would change the quip to: "I should have figured out about passive income first and then dropped acid."

For the most part, we got along really, really well. I could feel myself go a little dinky when Max made remarks like, "Liza really liked you! She said you weren't nearly as embarrassing as I'd said you were –"

"What do you mean, I'm embarrassing?"

"Oh, come on, Mom. Every person finds their parents embarrassing –"

"But, I mean, what specifically?"

"Mom—"

Don't go there, my better self warned me. I'd been about to personalize it, about to assume that he was ashamed of me because I'm Such a Failure when it fact it was the generic embarrassment and ambivalence that every kid feels about every parent.

More than once I apologized: "I really wish I'd had the money to take you guys out to dinner at a great restaurant and a show –"

"Well," he said, "I mean we didn't have the money to take you out either. We don't care about that stuff."

We had one bristly moment about the famous Cup Incident: When I was separating from Bill back in the Paleolithic Era, I got so mad at him once that I threw this huge over-sized ceramic cup at Bill's head. Max was about two and a half or three at the time, in the room and much traumatized. In my defense, Bill back then could be the type of person who was so infuriating you had to throw things at him. MaryAnn, Bill's second wife, has thrown many, much heavier things at him over the years like telephone answering machines. But I guess there were no kids in the room at those times.

Anyway, The Cup became one of the defining incidents of Max's childhood. I have no doubt that it was traumatizing, but it also became the negotiating point in every childhood wrangle that we had well into adolescence. If I made Max do something he didn’t want to do, his lower lip would begin to tremble. Then if I didn't rise to the bait and ask him, he'd announce in a portentous voice: "I'm thinking about The Cup."

It became an ongoing joke between Ben and I.

"What's your earliest memory?" I asked Max last night.

"Oh, probably The Cup," he said.

I laughed. "You were so-o manipulative about The Cup –"

And he bristled. "I was not! Little kids aren't manipulative like that!"
And I thought: OmiGawd – clearly you have not been around a lot of little kids since you stopped being one.

But then I thought about it some more as we drifted back into slightly uneasy parallel play. Little kids are definitely manipulative. But not manipulative in the same sense that adults are manipulative, true. And maybe they don't realize they are being manipulative. If you don't know you're being manipulative, are you being manipulative? Or are you being something else?

Later he said, "I don't even know if The Cup is my first memory. It's like the memory of a memory, you know? It's that remote."

I found out a lot of stuff about his life that I hadn't learned during our regular phone calls. Like he's been collecting unemployment since he was laid off so he really hasn't been dipping into his capital. And he wants to do environmental law. And he has a part time job working for a judge – Buzz! Law school recommendation! – and he has been networking with a Boalt Law School professor who's a Deep Springs alum, and may do some pro bono work for – Buzz! Another law school recommendation!

So while Max is not as competitive as he used to be back in middle school and high school, say, he is still quite the strategic thinker and planner.

He also fiinally finished reading Infinite Jest.

"Would I like that book?" I asked.

"Probably not," he said. "It's very structured. You have to read it exactly the way it was written. You don' read books like that –"

"No," I said. "I read novels like hypertext. I frequently start at the end and work my way forward. Or I'll dip into the book and read random chapters at a time. I'm much better with short stories."

I'll be heartbroken when I say good bye to him this afternoon. Overcome with that bittersweet feeling that is just too poignant for words, the gist of which is that damn it! it all goes so fucking fast and yet each individual moment presses down on you like an eternity –

But I have a plan now. Do the at-risk teens Poughkeepsie gig till August 2014. Get the bankruptcy shit dealt with during this coming year – I found a lawyer I want to work with so it's a matter now of saving up that cash.

If I can figure out this shit with the missing Vdub pink slip – and one way or another, I'll have to figure that out – I can sell the Vdub and probably squirrel away enough money to buy a replacement vehicle in October. I've got the budget set up to pay back money I owe, meet outstanding obligations and still save a little. It's just a matter of not fucking off but doing the work I need to do on a regular basis to make that money. I am a little seamstress in a Taiwanese sweatshop!

Write the three Stegner stories. Find people who can help me fine tune the three Stegner stories before I send them in.

Go back to the Bay Area in the fall of 2014. The thing to do might be to find another AmeriCorps-type job in that area. Since I begin collecting TW pensions and what not on my next birthday, from between what I make at the copywriting, the AmeriCorps stipend and the old person payout, I'll be comfortably back in the middle class again.

Also had a long phone conversation with Jeanna who is having major problems with employees. She lives in remote New Mexico where management is not a science. She also let this situation evolve where she was flirting with the one security guard all last year. Entirely inappropriate – he is so much younger than she is. On Friday night, she confronted him and he stared at her coldly and said, "Know what you need? A good fucking –"

"Jeanna!" I said. "You should have fired him on the spot. That violates every employment-related sexual harassment code on the books. I mean, even in New Mexico –"

She sighed. "He's got the keys to everything on the property. And then when I was telling him I was seriously thinking of letting him go, he said, 'I wouldn't do that if I were you. I know all your secrets.'"

"What secrets?" I asked. "Is the ghost of Osama bin Laden doing tickets for the drive-in?"

She sighed. "I guess he means he could sabotage the place," she said weakly.

I realize my role here is to listen and make comforting noises. I mean every time I give practical advice, she says, "You don't get it, Patty. This isn't Berkeley. It's New Mexico."

Forget about it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

All day long I did the texting thing with B. The smartphone umbilical cord thing. I kept wishing and wishing he were in my physical space so I could talk to him about something more concrete than NSA spying rings and Stephen King's final capitulation to editing. I miss Ben still so much sometimes. Like he is the only person who has the history and the understanding to be sympathetic toward the stuff that's really in my head. Except demonstrably, he's not sympathetic. That ship sailed.

It's kind of like the theme music from To Kill a Mockingbird is on a perpetual radio loop in my mind. I'm in the poignance overload zone.

An inch of snow on the ground this morning. Next few days may not be winter per se – temps, for the most part, still bearable – but are definitely a flirtation with it. Sigh… I suppose winter held off for as long as it reasonably could and I shouldn’t complain, although, of course, I do. I took Milo for a fantastically long walk through the woods and gloom yesterday and realized what I may miss most are the birds and their sounds. Only birds left are the finches, sparrows, chickadees and carrion creatures like crows, and they don’t sing.

Well. Fourteen weeks of this shit. Less than 100 days, right? But who’s counting?

In other news, after reviewing my situation with as close to an objective eye as I could muster – which is to say, not very – I decided the two things I should check out are tax preparation and notary public-ship. So I signed up to take a tax prep class at my credit union, prerequisite for becoming a volunteer tax preparer – you get an IRS certificate and everything! If I prove to have any kind of aptitude for it, I’ll sign up for the HR Block course. The notary public thing will have to wait until I’m back in CA, since those things are mandated by state legal codes. But I knew a woman in Monterey who made $35 an hour as a mobile notary. There is a demand for it, and I imagine an even greater demand in the Bay Area than Monterey.

I remain incredibly distractible and… flat inside. My own creative life doesn’t interest me in the slightest right now. Novel on hold. Not a good thing. Part of me thinks, Who cares? Just write. Write anything at all. The other part of me remembers Jack Nicholson’s stint at the Overlook Hotel: All drudgery and no play makes Patrizia a dull girl. I suppose I’ll take another stab at it today. I seem to be stalled on the scene where Joe and Carol meet at the beach to talk about their relationship. You’re not Guinevere, Joe tells Carol somewhat brutally. And I’m not Lancelot, and John isn’t King Arthur.

But real people never talked like that, did they? Not even in the 1930s.