Mallory's Camera

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.

Woke up yesterday with a throbbing—& slightly swollen (medial collateral ligament)—knee.

This is something that happens from time to time.

I'm fairly certain it's due to an ancient right ankle injury that causes me to pronate overly when I'm wearing the wrong shoes & not paying attention. I really should go to Montano's, which has a pedorthist on staff, to buy a pair of shoes that will correct for the pronation.

Anyway, because my knee was throbbing, I did not go to the gym, which, of course, was the sensible thing not to do. But I put myself through all sorts of mental punishment! Surely, if I were a real trouper, I'd soldier through the discomfort! I was just being lazy! Blah, blah, blah.

Thing is I am very lazy. Left to my own devices, I would lie around on my sofa all day long scarfing chocolate hazelnut truffles and watching Halt and Catch Fire on continuous loop—except for when I was reading some movie star or movie mogul autobiography. And I would thoroughly enjoy myself.

I'm not sure from whence this Calvinist sub-personality emerged that won't let me do what I like best.

###

Also, Mabel the kiska is really pissed off at me.

The enormous mat on her back is responding to the detangler solution, but she hates when it's sprayed on her and has begun running away or lashing out at me when I try to spray it on her. I now have a big scratch on my left arm.

Mabel the kiska is one distrustful cat.

I figure she was severely abused as a kitten. I am fond of her despite her intractable personality; I'm sure—just like the rest of us—she'd rather not be intractable—but she is, it's what her life has taught her to be. I'm one of those people who enter into covenants with companion animals, so however much I would prefer a cat with a more placid, loving personality—oh, Sybyl! I will always miss you!—I would never dump Mabel.

I guess I'm gonna have to end up taking her to the vet to get the mat shaved.

Which does seem like a waste of money—because, honestly, I could take care off it by myself if only she'd let me.

###

Other than that...

It rained all night, but the sky does seem to be lightening.

If it clears up by 2pm, I'll be able to make it over to Hyde Park to put the finishing touches on the self-sustaining garden.

Next week I'll tackle the New Paltz garden!

Hilary Mantel is a bit rich for bedtime consumption. All those unfamiliar vocabulary words! "Persiflage," anybody? I mean, it's a great word, a perfect word, but who wants to read in bed with a book and a dictionary?

So, I've been putting myself to sleep with an old favorite: Pride & Prejudice.

And in the spirit of Pride & Prejudice, I scampered off to Marshall's yesterday to buy some long, flowery dresses that no self-respecting Regency heroine would ever be caught dead in, but hey! they were cheap.

I say "scampered." I really mean "limped." Because once in Marshall's, I felt as though I was going to faint.

Maybe I have COVID, I thought.

I never did catch COVID back when everybody else was catching it. Or maybe I did catch COVID but I was one of those asymptomatic COVIDers the CDC warned us about, out there insidiously infecting everybody else.

I'm not running a fever. But all those other symptoms—shortness of breath, hacking cough, traveling body aches, headache, extreme fatigue—were a check.

So, I bought the first three things I shoved into my shopping cart—fortunately, they all fit—and raced back home to do a COVID test.

Nope! Not COVID.

Maybe it is the the mysterious malaise that leveled BB & Flavia for three weeks. They actually went to a doctor. Verdict: a rhinovirus. A nasty rhinovirus.

Since the three of us were inhaling each other's carbon dioxide in a car not too terribly long ago, I'm gonna assume I have what they had.

###

As a sidebar, I'll note that I do hate shopping for clothes, and I don't understand at all how anybody can possibly like it. I see loads of clothes I like, usually on actors on the various streaming entertainments I indulge myself with. But none of those clothes are ever for sale at the stores I can afford. The stores I can afford are filled with the most awful dreck in the most hideous colors and patterns, and the stores are lit up with migraine-inducing fluorescents, and the other shoppers are extras out of some colorized B-roll from Night of the Living Dead.

###

I went to bed early and slept nine hours, and feel maybe 85% this morning, but I expect that to fade.

The only going-out-of-the-house thing I have to do today is Adrienne's meet-and-greet, which I volunteered to help her with.

I wish I hadn't!

Adrienne has delusions of being Nancy Pelosi.

The other day, she was introducing me to someone: "And here's Patrizia who does... uh... social media—"

"I designed your website," I reminded her tartly.

She never even thanked me for designing her website!

And then yesterday, she emailed me some statistics about food stamp cutbacks in Ulster County (severe) with the note: Lets look into this.

You look into it, be-yatch! I thought. I am not your fuckin' staffer.

I remind myself that this is a networking opportunity. Networking has never been something I'm particularly good at, subscribing as I do to the naive notion that human connections should be sincere & spring from the heart.

But it's never too late to learn.

###

And speaking of learning...

Here's Today's Exciting AI Video!



Sora would not touch the medieval cats marginalia at all! I wonder if that's some weird kind of copyright hypervigilance?

So, it was back to NightCafe with some prompt tweaks. This prompt worked a bit more successfully than yesterday's, except that that the black cat is no longer turning pages and the strange hulking cat on the lower right keeps sprouting disturbing phantom limbs.

Rained all day yesterday, so I didn't leave the house except for a couple of car trips for provisions (half & half, McDonald's quarter pounder with cheese—I actually like MickyD's though I limit my consumption to every couple of months because so-oo unhealthy!)

I felt kind of ill in a subthreshold way that was difficult to get a handle on. My asthma has been acting up. THC, it turns out, is an effective bronchodilator, which is good though even in small quantities, THC makes me loopy, which I don't like—although I dislike it less than the inhalers they actually prescribe.

I kept sneezing and my nose was running—so maybe some virus?

And my insides felt off. (Before the MickeyD's, smartass! 😀) Like if I thought about it very much, I'd feel nauseated.

Basically, I suppose, I just do not like days without sunshine.

When I finally assume complete dominion over the known Universe, I'm gonna make it so that it only rains at night.

###
I was gonna garden today, but it is raining again.

I still have to go over the bridge. Belinda invited me over for lunch, and she is planning an elaborate menu (since we haven't seen each other for six weeks or so), and I don't want to hurt her feelings.

Does seem ridiculous to me that my moods—and possibly my physical wellbeing—are so absolutely predicated around the weather, But they are!

In my dream, I wrote four perfect sentences. They just came magically into my head.

Wow! the dream me thought. I better write these down before I forget them.

And I did write them down—in the dream.

But when I awakened, I had totally forgotten them.

###

On Tuesday, I came down with a cold. Non-stop snoozles, runny nose, inability to focus. I gave up on useful work, and napped on & off, and read.

That vanquished the cold but then yesterday, driving home from TaxBwana, I was infected with a melancholy so deep I burst into tears & kept crying on & off the rest of the day.

Don't ask me what that was about because I couldn't tell you.

My two TaxBwana clients hadn't made that much of an emotional dent except that they were both old—the one, a 90-year old woman, sharp as a tack & physically vital, living on the remains of an ancestral apple orchard her family had owned for more that 100 years; the other, a retired NYC cop.

"Wait!" I said to the cop. "You used to commute from New Paltz every day to the Bronx?"

He had!

Maybe the 90-year-old lady had made me sad because maybe I was seeing the beginnings of cognitive decline in her: She was very flustered, and had only brought in pages 7 through 11 of one form that I needed to see Page 1 of. But hey! It was a mistake that many people far younger than her can—and do!—make & having taxes done is nervewracking for most people.

Anyway, I was sad, sad, sad, when I got home though that didn't stop me from doing useful work.

This morning I woke up with a right-sided backache that won't stop me from doing useful work but may stop me from going to the gym.

I can't figure out why my back would ache. On Monday, I actually did heavy exercise designed to phuck up one's back, & I was fine; yesterday, I did nothing. The ways of the aging body are mysterious!

###

It is bitterly, bitterly cold out. Temps barely brush freezing! But bright & sunny, and the angle of the sun is higher in the sky, which means the sun actually sheds some warmth.

The local meadows and pastures are still frozen beneath enormous plates of white ice that shine like polished glass. And likely to remain so for the next few days.

It is an eerie sight: