Mallory's Camera

Maybe I am getting my writing mojo back. Maybe.

On the drive to the upscale supermarket in Middletown late yesterday afternoon, I could feel the words clicking into place like metal filings against a magnet: I bought it so I could save it...polluting the local cripple creeks... (Why "cripple"? 'Cause I was listening to The Band.)

Driving is good for that. It often puts me into a semi-fugue state.

And beyond that, I could feel the ideas drifting across my mind, like a time-lapse animation of clouds on a windy day: The opening paragraph will include Flavia explaining why she bought the Catskills property and a brief imagined history of Riggsville, the paragraph after that will explore Neal's introversion, and the one after that will set up the tension between Flavia and Mimi when Mimi starts twisting Flavia's arm because Mimi wants to move into the cabin. Much of Flavia's section explores her guilt over being so fabulously wealthy when her friends and acquaintances are all struggling, so it's a good idea to set that up early.

I was going to make Daria Part 2. But whatever ideas and momentum I had for that Part 2 evaporated in the three months I spent toiling in the Schlock tax mines.

Flavia has a much clearer narrative arc: Rich girl/recovering Daddy's little angel doesn't know what to do with herself -> dabbles in architecture school (Pratt) -> develops a cocaine habit -> meets Neal -> gets saved from cocaine habit ->has intense physical relationship with Neal (lotsa sex scenes!) -> Neal dies -> feels obligation to take care of Mimi, the most obnoxious and helpless of the Sister Wives.

I'm still not sure what Daria's narrative arc is. Something having to do with the many languages she speaks, the linguistic pastiche inside her head. But I'm hampered in that, since really, I only speak English. How am I going to get inside the head of someone who exists in multiple linguistic dimensions? Now I won't have to for another couple of months!

###

Other than that...

For some reason, I slept poorly last night. No idea why. I did not feel anxious; I was sufficiently exercised, and I was tired. But there didn't seem to be any pathway down into unconsciousness.

So, this morning, I'm feeling clunky and vaguely headachey. Bilgy tummy, too!

I did have plans to go off to New Paltz and garden. The issue with the New Paltz community garden, though, is that it's so vast that wheelbarrowing pulled-up weeds, raked winter ground cover, and such involves transversing significant distances, and I'm not sure I'm up for physical work on just five hours sleep.

They'll be turning the water on at the beginning of May. I have to wrestle with my garden hose! Unlike the Hyde Park Community Garden, the New Paltz Community Garden makes each gardener get their own individual hose. My plot is a good 30 feet away from the spigot, so there are actual logistics to be calculated in the use of said hose.

Meanwhile, seen yesterday on my tromp through the Harried Plateau:



I wanna foster-parent a beehive!!!!

Bad couple of days.

Having trouble with the "falling" part of "falling asleep."

I could physically register how tired my body was, but every time I began to drift off, I was flooded with bad neurochemicals that made me feel unsafe, a chemical lurch that pulled me back into hypervigilance.

Very exhausting.

This winter has been very, very difficult.

It's partly the brutally cold weather, partly the ghastly political situation, partly my sub-optimal personal situation, but also (I imagine) partly my age: Totipotence has always played a huge role in my delusions of my own uniqueness: I can do anything! Maybe not well! But I can do it!

But at 73, I am learning there are things I can no longer do, & moreover, that other people see those limitations and judge me for them. I am no longer really a unique & special person. I am just another aging Boomer.

It's a humbling process.

###

Had my cardiac consultation yesterday. Liked the cardiologist very much! Beautiful young woman of Indian extraction. Terrific bedside manner.

"Cholesterol is mostly a genetic thing," she told me. "Lower estrogen levels, particularly after menopause, lead to increased LDL and triglycerides, raising cardiovascular risk."

My LDL (a/k/a "baaaaad" cholesterol) is 160—literally one point into being high!

But my lentil-and-oatmeal-heavy diet & regular visits to the gym have not succeeded in budging that number.

She wants to start me on statins.

"What happens if I don't take them?" I asked.

She cocked her head & smiled quizzically. "Your chances of having a stroke in the next 10 years go up by 30%. Your heart's in good shape! Your EKG looks great. But, you know. There's plaque in your arteries, and plaque breaks off."

Now! I am not particularly scared of dying, but I am afraid of stroking out!

So, I am going to take those statins.

Sigh...

###

In other news, Remuneration client seems to be on the verge of sending me a new assignment, which would be great.

Between the smoke and the heat, yesterday was awful.

I could barely keep my eyes open.

My brain wouldn’t function. I couldn’t work at all.

Finally, I lay down, intending to read. Instead, I fell into a deep sleep.

Woke up four hours later—which means, of course, I was awake a good chunk of last night.

###

When I wake up in the middle of the night like that, I invariably wake up to a world where everyone is living a deep and meaningful life filled with deep and meaningful connections—everyone, that is, except for me-e-e-eeee.

And that means I have to track down a bunch of people I don’t like on FB —just so I can see how deeply and meaningfully their lives are transpiring in spite of my dislike, or maybe even because of my dislike: It’s entirely possible—right?—that I am such a toxic creature, my very dislike brings good fortune.

I’ll have to figure out the science behind that one later.

###

The middle of the night is for rabbit holes.

Mine last night was an obscure movie made in 1957 called Raintree County.

God knows why Raintree County has been bubbling up into my consciousness these past few days.

I was five years old when I saw it in a movie theater.

My mother couldn’t afford babysitters, so whenever she wanted to go to the movies, she ported me along with her. Watching all those movies while the boundary between real and imaginary was still so permeable shaped my mind in unusual ways, no doubt about it.

###

Anyway, Raintree County is a deeply weird movie—think mad, tragic Mrs. Rochester #1 plucked from Jane Eyre and dropped into Gone With the Wind. A kind of horror story, really.

It could never be re-released today despite its all-star cast (Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Lee Marvin), its massive budget (equivalent to $108 million today), and its pioneering use of a widescreen process called Ultra Panavision 70.

Basically, it’s all about Elizabeth Taylor going insane because she suspects she has (gasp!) Black blood.

If you ever need a gauge to measure how deeply racism was embedded into the pre-Civil-Rights-Movement American consciousness, let Raintree County be your go-to.

###

Here’s Liz Taylor doing her Scarlett O’Hara imitation:



And here’s her creepy doll collection with which Montgomery Clift must share a marital bed:




Raintree County is also deeply weird (and fascinating) because of its backstory —a glimmering green meta-narrative hovering over each and every scene.

It was while filming this movie that Montgomery Clift had the famous automobile accident that ruined the left side of his face.

Thereafter, Raintree County’s director had to go to great lengths only to film the right side of Montgomery Clift’s face.

But since movies are never filmed sequentially, right-sided Monty is sprinkled—seemingly at random—throughout the movie. The effect is really, really strange.

###

The accident took place in the Hollywood Hills.

Monty was driving home from a party at Liz Taylor’s place. Drove straight into a telephone pole.

Liz came running out. Saw Monty under the shattered dashboard. His face had blown up like a balloon because broken teeth were occluding his airway.

Like a trooper, Liz stuck her arm down his throat, pulled the teeth out.

When filming resumed in Natchez, Mississippi, Monty brought along a beautiful leather briefcase filled with pills, needles, and syringes and began subsisting on a diet of barely cooked steak smothered with salt, pepper, and butter. Also, he began running around Natchez naked in the middle of the night.

###

The movie is based on a novel that has its own weird backstory, a kind of reverse mirror image of the story behind A Confederacy of Dunces.

After the usual struggles to get a first novel published, Ross Franklin Lockridge Jr. finally hits paydirt. His manuscript is 600,000 words long and weighs 25 pounds. He gets a $3,500 advance—

MGM immediately pounces. Will pay him $150,000 for movie rights (equivalent to $3.5 million today), but only if he agrees to cut 100,000 words.

Self-editing proves to be such a torment that one night, he goes out into his garage, gets into his car, turns the key in the ignition lock, and poof! Dies.

In the suicide note he leaves for his wife, he writes, Whatever made me think I could get away with it?

I note the death of Judy Heumann (along with her intriguingly suggestive surname) whom I interviewed for People Mag sometime in the 90s and who shocked the hell out of me by telling me she was ambivalent about polio vaccines—“Well, their intent is to eliminate people like me, isn’t it?”

###

I had five completely pleasant TaxBwana clients yesterday (for a change):

• A lovely woman around my own age with whom I was able to do lots of planning viz impending RMDs

• Another woman around my own age, a breast cancer survivor, who replied, “Probably not—they’ve found brain metastases” to my cheery stock farewell: “See you next year!”

• A cute pair of newlyweds who ended up owing more than $10,000 to the IRS/State of New York after he withdrew $50,000 from his IRA and blew it on—ulp!—Ye (a/k/a Kanye West) sneakers. (I walked them through the Financial Literacy 101 course, which ended by telling them, “I know it doesn’t seem possible that one day you’re gonna be as old as me—but trust me, it is gonna happen! See all those old people walking around on the street who don’t have anywhere to live or anything to eat? You don’t want to be one of them.”)

• A smart, lovely woman who will be celebrating her 90th birthday this coming Friday who is in complete possession of her mental faculties, and who still drives (although she walks with a cane.). I was filled with admiration for her! Also hope for myself! 😀

###

Of course, I was absolutely knackered when I got home because of sleeping so poorly the night before.

Couldn’t concentrate well enough to remunerate.

Am between books, so couldn’t read.

And despite the fact that I subscribe to every streaming network known to man, there wasn’t a single thing I wanted to watch. Television and movies are one big wasteland.

Then—to add insult to injury—when I finally deemed it was okay for me to go to bed—I still couldn’t sleep.

Something is going on!

Some pervasive if low-level persistent anxiety.

It’s not connected to my daily life, which, as I say, is going along well.

I wonder what it is?

The California contingent in last night’s Family Zoom were muy concerned and sympathetic about what seems to be developing into a chronic insomnia. After a spirited discussion over the legal implications of using a federal mailing system, they volunteered to send me copious volumes of cannaboid products.

But I could drive over the border and get my own cannaboid products, I realized.

They’re legal in Massachusetts. They’re legal in New York. It’s just that they’re only so recently legal in New York that there’s no Dope R Us near me.

I’ve never been a big fan of THC, but ya do what ya gotta do.

It’s pretty awful being this exhausted all the time. Your consciousness constricts somehow. You’re only dimly aware that anything exists outside the periphery of your own psyche and soma.

I remember the feeling very well from the two years I spent working nights as a beginning nurse.

I did not enjoy it then, and I am not enjoying it now.



Not that insomnia has been totally without its perks.

At first, when I stopped being able to sleep, I followed all the advice for proper sleep hygiene. No electronic devices for a couple of hours before official sleepy time. No electronic devices when official sleepy time did not result in slumber. I exercised. I cut my caffeine intake down to one cup of coffee in the morning.

But after a couple of days, when none of it worked, I thought Fuck this, and began watching movies in the early hours of the morning. The Criterion Channel has out together a sampler of neonoirs; thus, I was able to become reacquainted with some of my very favorite movies from the late 70s and early 80s.

Chinatown: Still brilliant. Eerily prescient. Ichabod spent the first two years of college at Deep Springs, and to get to Deep Springs, you have to drive Route 395 through the Owens Valley, which is the place where Los Angeles steals its water from. A ghastly, arid, alkaline plain. A veritable moonscape. Every now and then, an underground spring turns quarter-mile patches fertile and green, the way it all once must have been. The effect is very strange.

Body Heat: A reimagining of Double Jeopardy. A bit dated—that’s mostly the fault of the over-the-top background music—but still loads of fun. Ted Danson’s assistant DA tapdancing in the moonlight. Kathleen Turner, giving sleazeball William Hurt the once over, and then remarking in her trademark throaty voice, “You aren’t too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” Mickey Rourke’s fast-talking firebug.

Cutter’s Way: This is a movie I’ve been trying to find again for many, many years. I don’t know how you’d describe it. Maybe, “What happened to the late 1970s when the 1960s had become a hangover.”

It takes place in Santa Barbara when Santa Barbara still felt like a small town. The neon signage of El Encanto appears at the end of the opening credits. (This was a hotel that I had actually written a short story about, recycling my obsession with H.G. Wells’ short story, The Door in the Wall: There is this bar that you go into once and where you have simply the most fabulous experience of your life; you always plan to go back, but the bar is a bit like the enchanted village of Brigadoon; it appears and disappears at random, and when it appears, you are simply too busy to step inside…)

The film’s plot is your typical California conspiracy theory. It’s incidental, but it does infuse the film with a necessary paranoia. The heart of the film is the shifting relationships between its three main characters: a physically and psychically scarred Vietnam vet; his luminous, ruined, alcoholic wife; and their housemate, a tarnished golden boy (played by my BF Jeff Bridges at the height of his physical perfection.)

This was one of Rikky’s favorite movies; he took me to see it when it first came out.

I was very, very happy to see it again. It is quite brilliant, and very few people have ever heard of it.



What else?

On Sunday, asakiyume and I met up at Samascott Orchards to pick cherries and blueberries, which was loads of fun although owing to me insomnia-addled brain, I can’t really describe the fun. We did take many pix, however:

Here’s asakiyume looking like a veritable cherry tree dryad:



And here’s me, looking—well. Addled.



The blueberries were not quite as photogenic as the cherries:



Picking is so much fun, that you invariably end up picking far more fruit than you can possibly use in the near present tense. Pitting cherries is incredibly labor-intensive. I will bake a cherry pie today and freeze the rest. And eat blueberries and yogurt for breakfast for the next week or so.

Also on today’s agenda is more incredibly boring Long Remunerative Project-hacking—hopefully, I can polish off the fucker today—and some gardening if it doesn’t rain.

Everywhere else in the U.S., it is freakishly hot and dry.

But here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley, we are drowning.

Woke up yesterday feeling just plain ill.

I’ve been a baaaaad girl. I have not been using the elliptical bike. And it’s been too cold to go outside.

This means that my body isn’t tired enough to make it through the night without waking up around one in the morning. Whereupon I watch bad movies, think black thoughts, and drink myself back to sleep. It’s like there’s a ledge you have to slip off to be unconscious, and getting buzzed rolls you closer to that edge.

I don’t drink huge quantities.

Night before last I drank one airplane mini of rum in a glass of ginger ale.

I’ve certainly drunk a lot more than that when I’m fully awake without ill effects.

But when I drink in the middle of the night, I almost always wake up feeling, I guess, hung over.

So it was yesterday.

###

Since I wasn’t good for anything that required any sort of effort, I surrendered myself entirely to multiple episodes of Babylon Berlin back-to-back. Talk about your total immersion! Such an interesting pocket of time, the Weimar Republic. Fourteen years when all the permissions were set to, Yes-s-s-s-s-ssss, and that “yes” was the sound of snakes rising to strike.

Around 5pm, I heard by name being called.

Frank the handyman.

Faithful readers may recall that I flirted a bit with Frank the handyman last year. He’s been here for the last 10 days remodeling L’s bathroom, and he was one of the consultants I called upon with my wooden box dilemma.

I trotted out from the Patriziatorium toward the sound of his voice.

“Would you like to have dinner this evening?” he asked.

Linda was smiling. The TV was on. Some kind of Oscar precast bullshit. I attended the Oscars two years in a row as a People Magazine reporter. 1997 and 1998. A lowly ranked courtier in the Great Mirrored Hall of Gossip, true, but still – I was all in. So my 180° spin here represents a true phase change. These days, I hate Hollywood: It’s an assembly line industry subordinate to the dictates of capital but without the balls to give out awards to any movie that actually makes money.

“Is Linda coming too?” I asked.

“Of course!” Frank said.

“Well, sure,” I said.

“Of course, you know, he only invited me so he could snag you,” Linda remarked on the drive over.

“You think?” I said.

Linda snorted and laughed.

###

Frank lives in Pleasant Valley, deep in the countryside. What was once a Quaker settlement. (Once upon a time, Dutchess County had the largest American Quaker community outside Philadelphia.) Seemingly every other house is an 18th century stone saltbox that used to be a stop on the local line of the Underground Railroad.

Frank doesn’t live in one of those houses. His house is one of those 50-year-old split ranch-houses that looks small on the outside but is vast on the inside.

He’s into gardening – I liked that. Beautiful magnolia trees, buds at that pussy willow stage. Tulips just coming up in their beds. (Poor tulips! Back-to-back killer storms are forecast for later this week.) In the summer he maintains a 50-foot vegetable garden.

The upstairs rooms in his house had that unused feel of a place whose sole inhabitant mostly hung out downstairs in the man-cave with the 64-inch HD television and the wood stove.

We ate in the upstairs dining room.

He’d done a roast in a crock pot with veggies and potatoes.

Conversation got lively after the first glass of wine.

He was telling us about a woman to whom he used to rent out his downstairs.

A perfectly lovely woman except his daughters didn’t like her.

(He’d been a single father; his wife fled the scene under mysterious circumstances, Linda told me on the drive over: “He told her, ‘You don’t like it here? Fine. Leave.’ And he bought out her share of the house.”)

“But Katherine“ – the younger daughter – “said, ‘Either she goes or I go, so –“ Frank shrugged and laughed. “She went.”

Ah! So more than a woman to whom he used to rent out his downstairs.

Both daughters’ bedrooms have been preserved intact, shrines to their girlhoods and adolescences, even though the daughters are long grown, have families of their own, and are living 100 miles away in Long Island.

“But don’t you get lonely living here all by yourself?” asked Linda whose penchant for asking potentially incendiary questions rivals my own.

“What’s to get lonely?” Frank asked. “I work all day. If I get lonely, I drive to the city and find a massage place with a happy ending.”

This was the second glass of wine talking.

He immediately blushed beet red.

But I thought it was pretty hilarious. I don’t mind sex as a commodity reduced to transactional elements so long as it’s clear, the terms of the contract are up front, and everybody gets what they negotiated for.

And it did loosen the conversation up considerably since thereafter “happy ending” became the buzz word of the night, repeated endlessly in many contexts and always to much hilarity.

We were all very jolly when we said good night.

###

I wouldn’t say I’m not interested in Frank.

What I would say is I’m not interested in anyone.

He doesn’t read except for back issues of Money Magazine (which he subscribes to.) That would be a major issue for me. Whatever would we talk about after the happy ending?

On the other hand, he comes from Malta. Wants to go back to Europe and spend six months living and traveling there. I think he’d be an awful lot of fun as a traveling companion.

Anyway, any time I want to pull the line in, there’s a fish on it.

I desperately need a vacation. The kamikaze strike on Disneyland with Robin, Kodiak, Griffin and Grandma Nancy planned for early next week is not the vacation I need (nor, as it turns out was Mortal Love which loses it big time in the last 100 pages) but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

When the smoke cleared, the store’s gross sales for the month of September were well over five figures, down 25% from the halcyon months of summer – you loved the sleeping pill, now thrill to the onset of the actual weather conditions! – but much higher than I feared they would be in those last listless days of August. Cash flow numbers are not quite as reassuring: I had to wring quite a bit of money out of the business to pay Max’s tuition. After a couple of months of sleeping like I was dead, I’ve resumed bolting awake at 2 AM when infomercials sing their siren song.

As always, I’m really impressed by the infomercials’ ingenuity. How To Make A Million Dollars While Sitting Around At the Kitchen Table In Your Dirty Underwear. (Unclear how dirty your underwear has to be before the Big Buck$ start rolling in – are we talking skid marks or just a little ring-around-the-elastic?) Why You Should Pay $160 A Bottle For An OTC Weightloss Pill That Doesn’t Contain Amphetamines. (Presumably the secret here is that you’re so fucking embarrassed about how much you paid for them that you can’t bring yourself to open your mouth.)

This sense of kitchen midden is growing stronger and stronger. Just so fucking much to do, lists to maintain, piles to sort, important papers to file, figures to extract from one set of coffee-stained documents and enter into another. I feel overwhelmed.

Still, a guy drove all the way from Atwater yesterday, two and a half hours in the rain, just to come to the store.

“You’re going to the aquarium too, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“But the baby shark –“

“If I want to see a shark, I’ll rent Jaws,” he said.

“You’re going out to lunch?”

“Nope. I mean maybe I’ll grab a burger at MacDonalds. But I came here to check out the hot sauce store.”

“And…? I mean – do you like it?” What I wanted to say was does it meet your expectations? but I figured a word like “expectations” might label me as a pointy-headed intellectual, not the Mad Dog-packin’ Mama of chilehead fantasy. Festively, I readjusted a fallen bra strap and beamed.

He grinned back. “It’s great. Outstanding. I’m definitely gonna spread the word.”

Jesus couldn’t have given the Sistine Chapel ceiling a better review.

One of those weeks.

Hell.

One of those months…

We coasted downhill into February, fumes-city, each day an adventure in Will-we-generate-enough-cash-flow-to-pay-the-rent-and-sales-tax-in-February? This meant I was fully awake and functional to critique endless series of informercials at three in the morning, but not so functional when it was time to dodder down to the store. (Though I’ve given up even fantasizing about buying Ronco PastaMakers on late night channels since my second-favorite store on Cannery Row is one called As Seen On TV.) At four in the morning, MTV starts running its public service programming – hour-long shows with titles like Girl Power: it’s okay to be a slut! Well, that’s reassuring. Although not as reassuring the following morning when I’m peering into the bathroom mirror. I could be a tree! You could calculate my age, figuring the ratio of the bags under my eyes to the lines joining my nose to my mouth. Those youthful prodigals have such flawless faces. Did I really look like that once? Why does pop culture spend so much time teaching women how to be young, and so very little time teaching them how to be middle-aged?

Anyway, it’s clear to me that we need some kind of safety net. Plus I can’t get an SBA loan without a job. Happens that there are two well-known media valuation firms in Carmel. So last week I revised my resume, typed up a cover letter – "If you’re looking for a writer and researcher with a strong vertical understanding of the digital entertainment field, who grasps both its emerging technologies and the challenges that new distribution patterns present to traditional media companies, and who has the communication skills to convey this understanding effectively to analysts and clients alike, please consider what I have to offer." Bla bla bla bla.

Anyway, one of them emailed back immediately. Interview on Thursday. Would be a very short commute, allowing me to go on managing the store effectively though I suppose I’d have to hire a college student for part-time counter work, and that means payroll shit. Plus I’ll have to cut my hair which is very wild and wooly, and dredge my dress uniforms, still in their plastic drycleaner bags, from the back of the closet.

Life. It’s a bitch. But what’s the alternative?

Also this week, I watched a lot of high school basketball from the ringside, and stumped for Wesley Clark at the Farmer’s Market in the rain. That was a real trip. Really, my favorite candidate is ABB – Anyone But Bush. So it’s difficult to generate that partisan fervor. Clark is preferable to Kerry, I think, because Kerry is a push-over: yeah, he breathed flame like a veritable dragon on all those network news shows, but when it came down to it, he voted for Bush’s war resolution anyway. What was with that? Still, if he gets he nomination, I’ll campaign for him cheerfully. But Clark has a certain gravitas that I enjoy, and I like how he handled Kosovo.

"You like him because he’s a Republican in Democrat’s clothing," Ben accused.

I shrugged. "So? So am I."

Loved Janet Jackson's nipple thing. Wish they made them for sluts without piercings.