Mallory's Camera

I ended up in the Hudson Valley because I did a stint with AmeriCorps Vista in 2013, and they assigned me to run a youth group in Poughkeepsie.

What did I know about Poughkeepsie? Nada! Except that Jackie Kennedy had gone to college at Vassar, so I figured it had to be an upscale town.

Ha, ha, ha!

Poughkeepsie turned out to be a little slice of the South Bronx in the middle of the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley. Something of a time warp, too: The South Bronx has been in rapid gentrification mode over the past 15 years. The burned out lots, the junkies nodding off in every vacant doorway, the complete desolation throughout the 70s and 80s that followed the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway? Gone, baby. Gone.

But still here in Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie is something of an urban decay theme park! It was a rare day when I didn’t step on and crunch at least one crack pipe on my way to my AmeriCorps Vista gig. (That was back when I didn’t have a car and walked everywhere.) I mean, who did crack in 2013? Crack is so retro! But they still smoked it—and how!—in Poughkeepsie.

And they continue smoking crack to this very day!

The kids in my youth group were what you might imagine kids struggling to survive an environment like Poughkeepsie might be. I was supposed to teach them stuff like Breakfast is the most important meal of the day! But many of them lived in houses where the only foodstuffs in the pantry were a dented tin of Vienna sausages and a half-empty bag of Fritos with a two-year old Sell By date.

So, I decided to abandon the public health education and focus on economic development.

Elsewhere in this journal, I’ve chronicled (extensively!) the brilliant plan I came up with for a business coop that would be run by my kids.

But I don’t think I ever wrote about how I honed their business acumen.

What I did was beg a couple of funky, outdated computers from pals who were anxious to upgrade to the newest shiny Mac model and install Sim City on those computers.

Kids love video games.

And they luvved Sim City.

Playing Sim City was the first time many of the kids realized that the environment they lived in was not just some random assortment of fucked up circumstances over which nobody had had any control but the inevitable consequences of terrible planning decisions. I could stand in that cramped and ugly clubhouse room the nonprofit sponsoring my youth group had assigned us and practically see the light bulbs popping up in balloons over the kids’ heads!

Of course, the business plan never went anywhere: Even the most modest business launch involves operational costs, and the nonprofit baulked at letting me start a Kickstarter. Kids had always dropped in and out of the program anyway as they were assigned to faraway foster homes, as their parents competed prison sentences and moved back to the City, or as they entered the criminal justice system themselves. Shortly after the nonprofit dropped the ball on the Kickstarter, the youth group disbanded.

(I did run into one of “my” kids on the street several months ago. I was kinda shocked to find that (a) she remembered me and (b) that she didn’t have a passel of kids. “You the Sim City lady!” Dayana chirped, offering an elaborate high five, which, of course, klutz that I am, I could not follow. “Hell, no, I ain’t got kids. I remember what you told me about getting an education. I’m at Dutchess! Gonna be a dental hygienist.”)

But Sim City pales before the wonder that is Tropico!

I think if Tropico were incorporated into every high school curriculum, it would teach kids all the financial literacy skills they’d ever need to know. In particular, it would teach kids the difference between cash liquidity and revenue streams, which seems to be a particularly hard lesson for not only for private individuals and businesses of all shapes and sizes, but also for the U.S. government whose national debt now tops a staggering $16 trillion.

Tropico is the perfect teaching tool.

But educators seldom think outside the box. And they are deeply wedded to conventional (which is to say didactic) teaching methods.

So I’ve become a total Words With Friends slut, stalking sulphuroxide for games, wantonly propositioning FB friends I haven’t seen in a dozen years, trawling the Internets late at night for random strangers. I dunno. There’s something about the basically Confucian philosophy of the game that appeals to me deeply. In Words With Friends, often the best move is the ingeniously placed single letter tile. It’s a game that’s not played linearly but algorithmically, and in this the strategy is more reminiscent of poker, say, than it is of Scrabble. And of course my boyfriend Alec Baldwin gets kicked off planes for playing it so, you know, there’s the loyalty angle. My boyfriend Alec Baldwin, by the way, is not the bloated Jack Donaghy of 30 Rock, a show I watched once thinking, This isn‘t funny, but the slender, psychopathic Fred Frenger from Miami Blues. Charles Willeford, vastly underrated.

Been using that same algorithmic strategy as I line edit the first half of the novel, thinking non-linearly in terms of foreshadowing and beefing up the supernatural elements. You figure the ability to see or sense a creature whose existence is for the most part outside the realm of sensory apparatus is something akin to temporal lobe epilepsy. There would be an aura. Windchimes? Glenn Miller Orchestra? Shimmering and thickening of the light? Lingering sense of jasmine? Something. And this is not the rewriting process but the reorganization process, so everything gets encapsulated in MS Word 2007’s convenient annotation system. Should be done with this process today. Next I overhaul the treatment. Then I start the forward march on Part 2 of the novel.

The novel is so much better written than I remembered it being. That’s a relief! I remembered it as being incredibly clunky, pedestrian prose, but it’s not. It’s really quite lyrical in places, the dialogue is snappy, it’s got a dozen or so laugh-out-loud moments. I always hate everything I write until I put it away for a while, forget that I wrote it, lose that sense of ownership.

The characters are well drawn, particularly Steinbeck and Ricketts. Recognizably the historical John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts. Joseph Campbell is probably not as good a portrait. Who knows what he was like anyway? I wanted to paint him as a benign psychopath, incapable of real emotion towards other human beings – except for Alice, his sister – capable of being moved only by the highly abstract and numinous. That’s a tricky characterization.

One thing I did extraordinarily well was the sense of place. Monterey really breathes on the page for me. You can smell the iodine and the salt.

So all in all, good show, although of course that, $1.99 and a Membership card will buy me a cup of coffee at Barnes & Noble.

In other news, my kitchen pipes are frozen again.