Mallory's Camera

In the middle of the night, I woke from a really vivid, elaborate dream:

Ben had fallen in love with a girl from a hippie evangelist Christian sect.

In the dream's meta-tags, there'd been a lot of history: He'd left to be with her. He'd come back. He couldn't live without her & left again. He came back. He had to go back to the sect to get his stuff, and he'd only be gone for four days, and he was definitely coming back—but when he came back, he was very sorry, but his love for this woman was bigger than everything—

I wasn't hurt. I was furious. Get out now, I snarled, and pushed him out the door.

He was shocked, But-but—

I wasn't sad over Ben at all. The only thing that was on my mind was how was I going to handle my life on my own? Two kids and all these animals!

###

The girl Ben had fallen in love with was married to the leader of the hippie evangelist Christian sect, and I was hip to the fact that the leader was essentially pimping her out, and that's how the leader got recruits for his sect.

Not expecting to be kicked out, Ben had invited the girl, her husband, and their four impossibly platinum-haired kids to live with us.

I found them in one of the bedrooms.

OUT, I thundered.

The girl slit her eyes and looked at me haughtily. Of course, I was curious about her—she was short, slim, had chestnut hair and oddly tilted eyes. Nothing to look at. I was much better looking. She must be some kind of sexual goddess, I thought because that was one thing Ben was very, very good at, sex, and I often felt a little inadequate because my sexual needs and performance are on the simple side: Does not take much for passion to ignite in me.

I shoved the girl and her husband/leader out the door.

Felt a bit sorry for the children who were sweet and innocent, but no, they'd have to go, too.

###

(Again in the dream meta-tags.) Stephen Silverman had found me the apartment.

I'd gone to him in great distress, and he'd told me, This is a very special building. Chateau D'Amboise (?) Rent controlled: $1,500 a month. It's a very special building; only special people are allowed to live here.

The apartment was very messy, crowded with unpacked boxes and cages in which lived a number of cats—a large ginger female and a tiny translucent Bengal, no bigger than my fingernail, among others.

There were also several black and white puppies running around yipping.

You've got to get RTT to walk the puppies, otherwise they'll shit all over the place. And you've got to get the cats water—

Only in transferring the tiny snail-like Bengal to a cage with water, I somehow killed it. Felt an impulse to mourn and reminded myself sternly: You don't have time for that now.

Went out with the puppies. Somehow ended up at one of the outdoor cafeterias at U.C. Berkeley where I filled my pockets up with candy. Knew I had to get back to the Chateau, but didn't know which bus to take. Guessed I'd have to find a taxi, but could not find one.

###

Finally, I was back at the Chateau, only I couldn't remember which floor I lived on. Took the elevator to various floors. The floors all had various themes—I remember the tenth floor was Paris: You got out of the elevator, and you were in France.

Somehow I was in another family's apartment, & I recognized the family—You're Tamsin's mother, aren't you? But they did not recognize me. I did notice, however, that even though the family had lived in the apartment for years and years and years, it was almost completely empty. The interior decor of my apartment, as cluttered as it was, was actually more attractive.

Finally went back downstairs to the lobby and asked the concierge: Where do I live?

The concierge was a burly gentleman in elaborate livery with an elaborately curled mustache. He consulted an illuminated medieval scroll and told me, You live on the 15th floor—

And I awoke.

###

The heat dome had not yet descended yesterday, and so I spent four very pleasant hours playing in the dirt at the New Paltz community garden.

The New Paltz community garden is vast:



This morning I woke up with a mysterious stomach ache & kind of freaked because how am I gonna keep Black Chicken comfortable when the Heat Dome descends plus my car's AC isn't working—it's an expensive fix and requires sitting for an entire day at the dealership in Kingston—& suppose the Nazis invade, and I have to flee?

But I suppose it will all work out.

It almost always does.

Damn.

Well, yesterday started out well enough.

I pulled out the last six wheelbarrels of thistles, brambles, bee balm, & other assorted weeds from my New Paltz community garden plot.

Before:



After:



I deserved a treat!

So, I trotted over to Hudson Valley Chocolates, and found Stephanie hard at work:



Stephanie is the French-born choclatier who supplies bonbons for the Mohonk Mountain House and various other upscale venues around the Hudson Valley. She has a small shop here in town that keeps whimsical hours: It's open when she feels like being open.

Wallkill is a place where the men walk around in teeshirts that say, Unvacinated, Unmasked, Republican, Straight. In the spring, summer, & fall, Wallkill is an intensely beautiful place, but it is filled with the most horrible people, so there's no reason to go anywhere near it.

But if there was a reason to go near Wallkill, that reason would be to visit Stephanie's shop, Hudson Valley Chocolates:



Got home. Nibbled chocolate. Began Remunerating. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Remunerating is dry stuff. I have to keep wiping my brain clean of excess jargon in between those weighty bouts of regression analysis. To do that, I surf the web—journal entries (and y'all do not write enough!), blogs, celebrity scandals, and when I'm really hard up, news.

Yesterday, the news was unrelentingly horrible.

From Ice Barbie's press conference at which a United States Senator—a Senator!—was handcuffed and brutalized to Israel's massive bombing of Iran.

This is all so fuckin' NUTS.

###

I can't remember the name of the podcast I sometimes listen to that once did a show about superpowers. Specifically: What superpower do people most wish they had?

I do remember that time travel was the most popular superpower—though not by a huge margin.

And if you drilled down into the sample of people who wanted to be able to time travel, they all wanted to be able to time travel for the same reason—so they could kill Hitler!

Well, now we all have the chance to kill Hitler.

That must be the silver lining in the current cloud, right?

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?

The smoke from the fires in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and northwestern Ontario has hit upstate New York.

The rising full moon last night was blood red.

And the sky this morning looks like a diffractionless opal, a whitish translucent wash with the barest undercoat of blue through which the sun just glowers. I'd planned on taking it easy today anyway, because I kinda knocked myself out weeding the New Paltz plot yesterday.

Before:



After:



Doesn't look like I did a lot, does it? But it was four full wheelbarrows of brambles and other assorted weeds.

Harder work than I thought it would be, & I was kinda achey from all that squatting & pulling. So I figured I'd go easy on myself today. Resume weeding tomorrow, but get there while it's still cool out.

And that turns out to be a good decision because today I'm feeling a kind of generalized air hunger, some shortness of breath with exertion. Though whether that's from the smoky air or generalized anxiety I can't quite tell.

###

Said anxiety is due to Icky being even more of a dick than usual.

Last fall, after I closed down my garden in Hyde Park, I brought all my gardening stuff back here & stashed it in the shed because I thought I'd be gardening here this summer.

Then, six weeks or so ago, Icky announced that he didn't want to garden with me. Was it my breath? My ineffective underarm deodorant? My generally displeasing personality? No! It was that Icky does not like to work or play with others.

Fortunately, the good folk at the Hyde Park garden had just written me a love note: We miss you!

So, I decided to go back & garden there again. (And, of course, the New Paltz Community Garden just found some open spots, so now I'm juggling two gardens!) And I transported all my gardening stuff back to Hyde Park.

###

Then yesterday, Icky went on a tear because he decided all the gardening stuff in the shed belonged to him.

All day long, he fusillaged me with text: Those tomato cages are mine. I’ve had them since before I moved here. I put them all back there after the season

I texted back, As I said, I brought the 10 cages I used in my garden last year to your shed in October last year because I thought I was going to be gardening here this year. After you told me you’d prefer to garden alone, I took those same 10 cages—they were stacked on the left side of the shed—back to Hyde Park. That’s all I know, Iggy.

He texted: Where are my cages then? I put all the cages I used all of last summer in that shed. There are no cages now. I never saw yours in there.

###

This is the kind of petty hammering he does relentlessly & he is so fucking relentless that he usually gets his own way—because who in their right mind wants to spend hours texting about fucking tomato cages?

Finally, he called.

"Look," I said. "We're at an impasse. And I'm at a disadvantage in all my transactions with you since you own the house, so you have the power. Are you interested in some kind of compromise or should we just keep up the text chain till I move out?"

This was said with more bravado than I actually have, of course.

Moving out would be difficult at this point.

I'm an elderly cat lady and the rental situation hereabouts is not exactly clamoring for elderly cat ladies.

On the other hand, I'm an excellent tenant, and Icky doesn't want the house sitting empty for the 20 days of each month he's not on the premises.

And I suppose it's possible that I did grab some of Icky's tomato cages without thinking about it—though I'm certainly not going to admit that to him.

The compromise?

I'll bring back any extra tomato cages and check the slag heap at the Hyde Park garden where old tomato cages go to die. Bring him those.

###

The situation is highly anxiety-provoking because it reminds me how little control I have over my life.

Of course, because of the way I was brought up, it never occurred to me that one could control one's life simply by making wise choices. I was a waif bufffeted about by forces I couldn't control! And then as an adult, I kind of mythologized that choicelessness! Turned it into a philosophy. Became fatalistic.

I don't know what the answer is.

I do know many people who have organized their lives around making wise choices, and for many of those people life has worked out well, but for just as many, life hasn't.

The random factor is very, very powerful.

The Wall Street Journal has an absolutely fantastic article on AI movie-making this morning (which I think I am offering to you unlocked!)

Apparently, on VEO & Runway, you can get AI to model video characters after real-life people if you subscribe at the very highest tier ($200 a month.) As someone whose disposable income is prone to disappearing acts, I have been experimenting with the lower subscription tiers that don't offer all the features, so I always assumed there was a blanket prohibition against using real-life people. As a safeguard against Deep Fakes & revenge porn!

I am very tempted to splurge for a single month, though, to see what I might be able to create!

Maybe I should have a long talk with the cats: Do you really need to eat? And what's up with all those catnip toys? They always end up under the sofa!

###

Meanwhile, the sky is rapidly darkening even as I type, and a quick look at the weather forecast affirms we are in for five fuckin' days of rain! So! Do I kill myself now, or do I subject all 4.3 of my faithful readers to five days of angsty rants before I step in front of that speeding bus?

Also, the New Paltz Community Garden finally offered me a space! After I'd already started gardening again at the Hyde Park Community Garden.

I drove to New Paltz to check the garden out. It is really spectacular: five acres, 150 plots, right along the Wallkill River, which floods the garden regularly, providing the garden with that ultra-rich river silt. The whole garden is surrounded by an electric deer fence & an obliging hawk keeps the vole population in check:



There are something like 200 gardeners, a real community. So, I thought, Okay! If you really want to connect with other humans in the real-life here & now, this is your chance! New Paltz reminds me so much of Berkeley circa the 1980s, I figure it's gotta be teeming with sympatico souls.

The extremely nice Plot Coordinator showed me around. The full plots are huge, 20' x 10', and the three he showed me were completely overgrown with (ugh!) deep-rooted nettles that would take me a solid week of hard labor to clear out. So, I settled for a half-plot:



This one, I estimate, will take me three days to clear out. That's doable.

Because of the driving distance involved, I'd already set up the Hyde Park garden to be as labor-free as possible. Planted tomatoes & chili peppers inside a marigold border. Piled on lawn-mowings over the plot to reign in moisture & keep down weed growth. Self-sustaining was my goal!

This garden I'll use for veggies that require a bit more nurturing. Basil! (Gotta guard against premature bolting & aphid infestations!) Cucumbers! (There's a weird kind of fungus that always seems to attack mine.) Flowers! (I ❤️LUV❤️ bouquets in the Patrizia-torium, so consider flowers an essential crop.)

It'll be a summer of hard physical work.

Assuming it ever stops raining.

Apart from all these mundane happenstances of a small existence, I have this sense that things are changing very fast. Planetary collapse? Nuclear annihilation? Dunno. But something.

I can't do anything about what might be going to happen.

So, the feeling is unsettling.

Everybody I know is going to Europe.

I am filled with FOMO because Europe! Culture! Museums! Ancient palazzi! Civilization balanced on crumbling plinths! The Camino de Santiago! Rivers flowing past castles! People you can't eavesdrop on in cafés because they are speaking in strange inflections with uvular "r"s!

###

Well...

Not quite everyone.

There is that one extremely nice woman I know, 20 years younger than me, who was just diagnosed with a progressive neuromuscular disease that no amount of PT is ever gonna help her compensate for.

And, of course, all those people I read about in the paper—the Gazans being starved & driven from their homes, yes, and that steady torrent of Central American migrants at the southern borders.

But if you want to limit the sample pool to people who share my accent: all those once-highly paid computer programmers struggling to make ends meet by doing DoorDash because by September 2025, 90% of all computer coding will be done by AI. Those senior citizens in their 70s and 80s whose Social Security checks are being garnished because they owe on student loans, and Trump is relentless. (That planned $45 million birthday parade ain't gonna pay for itself!)

Those two last items have an odd kind of synchrony: Colleges & universities are still pushing computer programming as a career, and the best & brightest STEM students are still enrolling in that curriculum—and in the process, accumulating staggering amounts of student debt. Not putting two plus two together, these best and brightest!

I look at these things to remind myself: You have it pretty fuckin' good, girlfriend. And you don't have to fly out of Newark Airport!!!

###

Anyway.

The creative high from making my little Mabel-the-Cat-meets-Aslan-the-Lion video lasted two full days. Not coincidentally, those two full days were also sunny & beautiful.

Ah, the thrill of pure imagination! Willie Wonka sings about it.

Then day before yesterday, it began to rain, and it's stayed grey and overcast ever since. The planet needs water, upstate New York is still officially in a drought, blah, blah, blah, but fuck this shit! STOP RAINING.

###

I'm obsessed with the idea of making a successful AI movie.

Malcolm Gladwell's observation that you have to put 10,000 hours into something to get really good at it rings true to me.

So far, I have put maybe 30 hours into making AI videos, so it is not surprising my second attempt at AI video production was far less successful than my first.

Although when I put it up online, a singularly creative person I esteem highly texted me: What in the world is this ?? I ❤️❤️❤️ it!!!!!!

We Pure Imaginationists love our fanbase!

I've started playing with AI video generators! I texted back. 'Cause, you know: I don't waste enough time, so I need NEW ways to waste time.

For this one, I took an old 1920s photograph of the Lower East Side and tried to prompt the AI to show a woman walking down the street into the 2020s. What I REALLY wanted to do is turn the color up gradually as she enters the future—but AI won't colorize so I had to do that key frame by hand (rather garish.) Getting the gradual colorization would have required hand-coloring each of the frames: Wayyyyy too labor-intensive! Also, I couldn't find Yiddish street sounds, so I had to use Turkish street sounds.



My first two AI videos were done on NightCafe.

When I woke up last night at 2 a.m., I decided to play with Sora because I read somewhere that director Tyler Perry was so impressed by Sora that he canceled a planned $800 million expansion of his Atlanta-based film studio. He figured that within one year, Sora would have completely transformed the filmmaking industry.

The prompts I gave Sora tried to recreate a scene from my ongoing Work In Progress in which June Miller (better known to Henry Miller aficionados as Mara/Mona) walks away from the Orpheum Dance Hall in Times Square one night in 1932.

I couldn't get the time period at all! I don't know whether this is me being unequal to the task of making good prompts or the limitations of the AI.

But what's kinda interesting is that the character bears a marked resemblance to Uma Thurman who played June Miller in Philip Kaufman's 1990 movie, Henry & June.


This brings me up to 32 hours of AI video practice. Just 9,968 hours to go before I become a PRO! 😀

###

Anyway, it is off across the bridge today to weed and plant tomato seedlings at the Community Garden. True, it is coolish. But I think we are done with the frost for the season.

There are logistical issues with the garden. Since I now live so far away from it, I have to plan going there—which has been difficult given the rainy weather of the last week or so.

We've had a break from the rain the last couple of days. But weather forecasters, modern-day variants on those white-bearded prophets of yore, say it's gonna start raining again tonight.

Which leaves me with a dilemma.

I've been trying to be very accountable with the various revenue-generating activities—not that I expect them to keep me safe from the various horrible geopolitical events that are taking place around the world or even from the pitchfork-wielding, torch-waving villagers in the small Trumpy town where I now live. But, you know. Money! The one true cure for FOMO.

So, I have been assigning myself a word quota.

And I don't leave the house until I complete that word quota.

Which doesn't usually take place until the early afternoon.

I'd like to drive straight over to the garden right this very moment! The sun is out; the freshly mowed grass and newly leafed trees are such a radiant green promise.

But I'm forcing myself not to.

And that is frustrating.

Of course, I can always traipse off to the garden when I stop working.

But by then I may not feel like it. The trip won't be spontaneous.. It will be just another pro forma thing on the pro forma list of things I must do because—Well. I just have to.

###

I've been in a mood.

It's nothing a little distraction wouldn't cure, but the world seems too scary right now to look away for a single moment.

When you're a passenger on an airplane, you gotta keep staring out that window—or the plane's gonna crash.

Magic!

It's the only way the truly powerless have to control things.

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...