Mallory's Camera

I was in a fretful mood all day yesterday for a totally banal and superficial reason: Big Fruit Company updated my phone IOS without my permission, leaving me with a whole bunch of weird-looking icons and alien camera settings.

FUCK THIS.

And yeah, I know—first world problems.

###

In the early evening, I had to do a New Paltz Community Garden volunteer stint (they're not really volunteer stints since you have to do them), which involved painting new plot number signs so the Border Patrol that does those awful monthly rounds can know who to send their ding messages to. (Dear Patrizia, Ding! we noticed you have a single black garbage bag on your premises Ding! As you know, we are a 100% organic garden with no tolerance for plastics of any sort Ding! PLUS you need General Tidying of odds & ends not actively being used in gardening Ding!)

It was a Montessori session for grownups. Cans of poster paints! Brushes! Cans of water! Twenty or so progressive gardeners, trending toward the female geezer range but with a few non-threatening males and a scattering of be-nose-ringed and be-eyebrow-piercing-ed Gen Z-ers thrown in for the sake of diversity. Herbal teas and non-gluten cupcakes.

I was filled with righteous hatred for these people!

I wanted to slap every last one of them!

Of course, I knew I was reacting outrageously, so immediately clamped down on all feedback loops 'cause just the sight of them brought out my inner MAGA, and I was afraid of lashing out.

Amazing how strong my reaction was, honestly. I mean, all they're trying to do is make the world a better place, right? True, they are utterly humorless and bland, but is humor really the hill I'm prepared to die on?

Maybe it was just the fretful mood and the I-fuckin'-hate-this-phone-IOS fallout.

###

Meanwhile, good things are happening—like yesterday, I wrote my way out of a major conundrum in the Work in Progress, and the light at the end of the Chapter 7 tunnel is so bright, I may actually finish the rough draft of that chapter today.

My knee feels better.

And also, this morning, the first of Ichabod's garden gnomes arrived. (One more is coming next week plus a couple of pink flamingos.) And a selfie stick! 'Cause I was whining pathetically on Tuesday about my inability to take good selfies.




If I practice enough, I may even learn to do selfies without my neck veins popping!

When I mentioned to Ichabod that I was scheduled to work at Schlock every day between now and April 15, he told me, "You can't do that. That's absolutely insane," and began talking to me about self-care.

He's wrong: I absolutely can do that.

But he's also right: It is insane.

Thing is "self-care" is kind of an alien concept to me. New Age fluffle. I mean, my idea of self-care involves eating a gallon of coffee ice cream and vegging out for 12 hours straight to Season 3 of The Gilmore Girls. Which any therapist worth his/her salt would characterize as "self-destruction."

But when I woke up this morning, I absolutely did not want to go into the office. Even before it began to snow! So I called in sick.

That's self-care, right?

I was surprised to feel a twinge of bona fide guilt when I called in. Because Schlock doesn't care if I show up in their office or not. To Schlock, I am simply another ass in an office chair. I have no actual supervisor.

I make my life harder than it needs to be.

###

The work itself is not difficult.

I actually enjoy doing taxes. Doing taxes is not so very different from reading someone's tarot cards.

Yesterday, for example, I got to counsel a 75-year-old woman whose 50-year marriage had suddenly fallen apart.

"Has your husband filed yet?" I grilled her.

Her husband, still living in what was the family home, pays property taxes, mortgage interest, etc. The woman had never taken the slightest interest in the family taxes but had some vague notion they had always itemized.

"See, the thing is, if you're married filing separately, you both need to use the same type of deductions," I told her. "So if he itemizes his deductions, you'll have to as well. Except you don't have as much to itemize. So, you'll have a smaller deduction to protect you against tax liability if he files first and itemizes. Whereas if you file first, you can use the standard deduction, which for you is $17,250—"

Is that so hard to understand?

I didn't think so, but she had a hard time following my logic.

She wanted to do was to talk about what an absolute prick her husband was.

And, of course, I wanted to talk about that too! Girlfriend! He did what with his secretary? And she's how old? Does his secretary not understand that Viagra script or no Viagra script, he's essentially recruiting her to change his Depends?

Except talking about the piggish X was not what this woman was paying me to do.

###

Most of the time, though, I do absolutely nothing.

I am getting paid for it!

But sitting in that office day after day puts me in a Mood.

All I am is a drone, I think darkly. Nothing about me is vibrant or interesting. I've led a bleak life, entirely bereft of the intimacies and adventures that characterize other people's lives.

This is making it very hard for me to interact in a positive way with other people right now.

Like on the phone with real-life Daria the other night, I found myself hugely turned off.

She's Anaïs Nin! Everything she says is pretentious and self-serving. By strength of personal magnetism, she has managed to construct a world in which she is forever the consummate objet du desir; it's the one constant in her life: Everybody wants me!

She uses people! She picks them up by the wing! She tells them, You fascinate me! I want to know everything about you!

Then she drops them.

I was consumed with envy!

This is not an accurate assessment of real-life Daria, whom I don't know all that well, but who's never been anything but 100% supportive, open, and affectionate toward me. No, I was projecting my own negative mood onto Daria.

But even understanding that, it was impossible for me to shake the negativity.

Anyway, the real-life Daria biographical details are not enough to center Part II around. Her relationship with Brian turns out to be not so very different than my relationship with Brian. Closer, definitely. More physical: They slept in the same bed when they visited one another. They cuddled. He would spend hours stroking her back, which was one of the single most thrilling physical experiences she could ever remember; she dissolved in the touch of his fingers trailing down her spine.

But their explicitly sexual relationship ended after the first year or so.

Periodically, over the course of the 35-year friendship, they would try to have sex again from time to time.

But it never quite took.

So, I can't use "sex" as the Big Theme in Part II.

I'm gonna have to come up with a whole fresh subtext as well as a plot.

Sigh...

Craziest stretch of executive power I’ve maybe ever seen, RTT texted to our group chat channel.

That's because you weren't alive in 1990 when the U.S. invaded Panama & took out Noriega, I texted. I don't think there's gonna be huge unrest over Maduro's removal. At least not in the short run.

I think U.S. citizens who don't like Trump, Canada, and maybe Europe are the only ones who will care about it, Ichabod texted.

Oh, I’m pretty sure the relatively recently elected leftist govt of Colombia cares about it, I said. And Mexico.

This is all a psy-op to take attention away from the real war, said RTT. 49ers versus Seahawks in 7 hours and 10 minutes.

I suspect Trump’s solution to the economic slowdown, thanks to his tariffs, is to float the economy with much cheaper Venezuelan oil, I said. That’s how he’ll lower the skyrocketing consumer prices that have made his approval ratings plunge.

Insane to do that when he could simply print 30 trillion dollars and bet it all on the 49ers tonight, said RTT. We would solve our deficit in one day.

###

But my major life crisis at the moment has to do with how to navigate three-point turns on the icy driveway so the front of the car points toward the road when I get in it to drive anywhere.

It's hard. It's stressful.

Everything else is kind of secondary.

Last two days felt as dismal as any two days can feel that did not culminate in the death or disfigurement of somebody dear or a meteorite crashing into the Empire State Building.

The kicker was my car needed an oil change.

In the bad old days, I would have ignored those plaintive dashboard warnings. Suck it up, car! I would have said. And driven the poor thing till the engine block cracked because maintenance & upkeep is for sissies.

Now that I'm a wise and responsible septugenarian, though, I always do what my car tells me to do.

So, I brought the car in.

Since I don't have anyone to pick me up or drop me off, I sat there in the auto mechanics' waiting room while the oil change was done, attempting to read Rebecca Makkai's latest, I Have Some Questions For You (which turns out to be a not-very-good book and thus a tremendous disappointment after the brilliance of The Great Believers.)

Auto repair shops put The Fear into me because they smell so awful—that horrible chemical rubber tire smell—and because I don't know anything about what the mechanics are doing, just that through the streaked window that looks into the repair bay, I can see my poor little car, helplessly dismantled into its component parts.

In a way, sitting in the auto mechanic's shop is exactly like sitting in an emergency room waiting room. I always have this fear that the parts manager is going to approach me, head down, eyes professionally somber: We tried everything we could, Mrs.—uh—Diloochey. But we couldn't save your car.

And, in fact, something of that sort happened yesterday except that there was something they could do to save my car—and that something cost a lot of money.

I mean, hey! It's an old car.

And the roads around here really are for shit.

So if a mechanic tells me that the wheels are gonna fly off the car while it's struggling to Little-Engine-That-Could its way up over one of those Shawangunk Mountain passes unless I get those wheel bearings replaced, then I am gonna get those wheel bearings replaced.

But I'm also gonna get PTSD from the sticker shock.

###

There were a bunch of other things, too. Fed Ex apparently was delivering my new snow boots to Madagascar. The current Remuneration client has been kidnapped by aliens—that's the only reason why he could be ignoring my emails & calls for three days, right? Soul-Sucking Tax Corporation's website was written by the ancient Babylonians when they were pissed off about the Rosetta Stone.

On our group chat, Ichabod texted RTT: Mom was an early adopter of being anti-woke and hating talking and thinking about identity especially when it comes to marginalized identities. (Which is an oversimplification, but yes, it is very true that I've never liked identity politics. I think they're a distraction, rooted in delusionary exceptionalism, from the real struggle, which is the 1% vs the 99%. Equitable resource allocation is what’s politically important to me. It's the great lesson in life, I think—disabusing oneself of that belief in one's own exceptionalism. Once you do it, though, I think you have more of an impact, paradoxical though that might seem. But hey! I always try to respect pronouns.)

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

By the time last night rolled around, I was such a wrought-up bundle of nerves that I could not fall asleep for anything, my brain just did not want to surrender control of my body. This is ridiculous, I chided myself. You are exhausted. And willed myself not to toss & turn. To lay there focusing on my breaths. Which was enough for my Fitbit to register sleep. Although very low-quality sleep.

###

Anyway. I am rested enough this morning to tackle the enormous pile of stuff I have to do before I caper up to Ithaca tomorrow.

And as I keep reminding myself: Money is a renewable resource.

When I rack up big auto repair bills, I am looking at doing more Remuneration. And I want to do less Remuneration because I want to do more writing on the Work in Progress. The two types of writing are just not compatible. The former sucks the marrow from the latter's bones.

But, hey! It is what it is. And I don't live in Gaza.

And in a way, my fictioneering is best when I'm stealing time to write around the margins of everything else I have to do.

###

It dawns on me that I could say to Ichabod: Pay this bill for me.

And he would do so quite happily, no questions asked, no damage done to his own finances. He makes a lot of money.

It also dawns on me that if I said to Real-Life Daria, I want Brian's car, she'd be happy to sell it or even give it to me. Since she's on the West Coast and Brian's car is on the East Coast, it will actually cost her money to get the car to where she is. Plus she already has a car she likes.

I'm not sure why approaching Ichabod or Daria about these two things fills me with such terror. If they say No, they say No. But they won't stop loving me.

I'll have to think a bit more on this.

I'm grumpy because one of my clients just sent me a ginormous assignment. My favorite method of making money involves glancing down at the ground & picking up that $50,000-bill nobody else has noticed, not laboring over a keyboard.

However, I should be grateful since the U.S. is clearly in a recession, even if they haven't called it yet. Time to start stuffing money into that mattress! Although that dollar bill you stuff into your mattress today will only be worth 90¢ next week.

Recession plus inflation—just about the most horrible economic formula you can possibly imagine.

I'm cheering myself up by thinking thoughts like, Well, it's really not going to affect me! I'll be dead soon!

Which when you get right down to it is not a particularly cheerful thought.

###

Meanwhile, Adrienne had chided me—deservedly—for not updating the Shawangunk Dems' website for months & months & months, so I spent yesterday morning working on that.

Then Ichabod called & chided me for my insufficiently progressive views on the racial divide. Yes, I do believe in color blindness—say it loud & say it proud!—and you're gonna have to reset the starting marker for history at some point else the current (completely unacceptable) situation is just gonna go on & on & on. So why not do it now?

Then I trotted off to the Shawangunk Dems' monthly meeting where I learned that Trump's Big, Beautiful Bill cut all Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood. Not just for abortions! But also for birth control and Pap smears. And this made me very upset indeed. There's not a single thing I can do about it, though.

In the evening, I watched a documentary about Charlie Sheen who ingested more drugs than any other single person on the planet, & I decided—Work in Progress alert!—to borrow his crack cocaine habit & give it to Flavia, since that's an ongoing motiff in the Work in Progress: Neal is gonna save each of the sister wives from some incipient doom. Flavia's doom will be drugs, Daria's doom will be some mountain hike, but I still haven't figured out what Grazia's doom is, and I need to come up with it before I can start Chapter 3.

The novel writes itself when I'm in the shower. Or driving in my car. Places where it's not easy to take dictation.

###

One of my favorite literary anecdotes of all time comes from Michael Chabon, talking about a block he encountered while writing a major scene in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

At the time, Chabon was enrolled in an MFA program at U.C. Irvine. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was his master's thesis.

The novel is about a young man who simultaneously falls in love with a man and a woman—very gaspworthy at the time (1988).

Chabon was writing about the moment his protagonist & the male objet du désir first have sex.

He didn't want to make it porn. (And then he unzipped his pants & unveiled his massive trouser trout...)

He didn't want to make it funny. (Ditto.)

He didn't know what to write and was afraid the novel was going to end right there.

So, he decided to go for a walk. It was some time past midnight.

Now! Anyone who has ever spent time in Southern California knows that nobody ever walks in Southern California. And especially nobody ever walks after dark.

In the comic I'm imagining, Chabon's this very, very tall man with seraphic wings of long, long hair and an antiquated waistcoat, chiaroscura-ed against the monotonous, endless, vapor-lit expanse of empty Irvine Center Road (though actually, Chabon's shorter than I am and doesn't have a Victorian sartorial fixation).

Chabon walked and walked and walked. And finally after a couple of hours passed another human being—a man holding a wad of tissue to his nose because he was having a nosebleed.

Eureka!

The perfect detail to denote the loss of a particular kind of virginity.

I love this anecdote because it demonstrates so perfectly how the Universe is always willing to collaborate with you if only you can keep yourself porous enough to be open to its suggestions.

###

Meanwhile, I trotted off to a craft fair yesterday.

It was a very bad craft fair filled with uninspired stuff and very high price tags. Bad people-watching, too. I suppose nobody uses the slang term "yuppies" anymore—invented by my pal Alice Kahn! And my X-boss Lanny Jones invented "Boomers"!—but that's what these craft fair goers were.

I passed a mirror and saw reflected in it an older woman with large strained eyes and a sagging jawline—and ohmyGAWD, that woman was me!

I tried to explain my shock on the phone to Ichabod afterwards: "No, honestly, it wasn't vanity! It was, well... This is really the first time I've noticed that my chin is starting to go. I'm finally getting what Marybeth used to call 'crepe neck.' I can't pass anymore."

"Pass as what?" Ichabod asked.

He loves me but finds me vaguely irritating—as the offspring of all parents with over-sized personalities do.

Pass as somebody younger? No, that's not it. I've never dissembled about my age.

"Pass as somebody who's not a caricature of themselves," is the best way I can describe it.

###

On the Work of Progress front: I have indeed come up with some very obnoxious behavior for Mimi. In fact, it may be too over the top for a chick lit novel. I blame David Foster Wallace.

But anyway, I can see the end of Chapter 1. Though I may not be able to finish it today because Remuneration.

Firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics—he didn't like the new jobs numbers!—may be the worst thing that Trump has done yet, because it moves us right into that 1984 reality: The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

In 1937, Stalin ordered the execution of census officials for statistics showing population declines due to famine & purges.

During China's Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962), Mao Tse Tung (who somehow changed his name to Mao Zedong while I wasn't looking) sent statisticians to reeducation camps for reporting true famine & crop failure statistics.

Henceforth, you cannot believe a single number coming out of the Trump administration. Not the jobs numbers, not the inflation numbers, not the number of voters casting their election ballots.

Moral of the story: Statistician! Not a safe job.

###

Meanwhile, chattered to Ichabod on the phone for about an hour yesterday & texted with Daria.

Hearing Ichabod's voice took me straight out of the rather awful & claustrophobic here-and-now into some happy place where I felt whole and competent & reasonably together.

In the less than satisfactory here-&-now, I use cheap, flimsy Scotch tape to keep myself together.

At one point, I was talking about my conversation with Public Policy Eleanor, how impressed I had been by her remarks on her marriage to Glenn, and Ichabod said, "Right! And that's why I don't want to be in a relationship until I'm feeling more emotionally self-sufficient. I am so over this co-dependency thing!"

And the little lightbulb floating over my head pinged into high beam!

Right!

My entire life, my definition of a successful romantic relationship has always been another voice in my inner dialogue. Telepathic communion. One soul with two hearts. The very definition of codependency.

And that just does not work.

In fact, it's destructive.

It's too bad I'm learning all these Important Life Lessons too late in life to actually do anything with them.

But at least I'm learning.

###

With Daria, I talked about Brian.

Brian had a real gift for friendship, and in particular, a gift for friendship with women.

His friendship with Daria may have had a sexual component. (Mine did not.) I've never pried. But it was essentially friendship, not some strawberry flavor of codependency.

I’ve had a couple very rough days, Daria texted. A lot of the time I feel that my heart resists the reality (the finality) of it, as if I had compartmentalized the understanding and mostly can’t face it. At moments it hits me in full force, the gates open, and I feel bereft and confused

...as if I had compartmentalized the understanding, I repeated. Excellent phrasing. Yes, the grief has escaped from its box.

OMG, I had a total breakdown yesterday, for the first time, Daria said. I sobbed like a fucking animal. Was with my girlfriend, thank god. Oddly, the only words I could get out were “where is he, where has he gone? I still feel him but he’s so silent.”

Then she added, Don’t know why I say animal, animals don’t sob, I felt like an animal because I was unmoored from my reason. All I felt was the incomprehension of death.

The incomprehension of death...

###

Brian read my journal every day. Brian talked to me about what I wrote. Brian really saw me.

Brian's death doesn't render me invisible exactly, but the reflection in the mirror has lost detail somehow. It's like Corinthians 13:12 sez!

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Grey day. Rain is predicted all week.

###

BB, Flavia, & I showed up yesterday at the mall where the Middletown demo was supposed to take place, only to discover it was one of those curbside protests where you stand valiantly at the side of the road, breathing in automobile exhaust for a couple of hours while drivers (mostly) ignore you.

As one, our eyes met: No-oo-ooo, thank you!

Not a total loss: We scurried off to Tranquili-Tea for an hour and enjoyed home-churned ice cream & thunderstorms on the drive home.

###

On the phone with Ichabod, I had a revelation.

Ichabod was saying something about always wanting to be his authentic self, & I was thinking, What a drag that would be—when it occurred to me that that might be because I spent so much time when I was slightly younger than Ichabod is now maintaining.

Maintaining was something you did when you were high on drugs & didn't want anyone else to know. But sometimes you maintained when you were feeling social anxiety or stage fright, or just had to be somewhere you did not want to be. You did not reveal (let alone exhibit) your inner quailings. There was a fair amount of honor involved in maintaining.

Of course, I don't know all that many Millennials except for my kids & their friends. And I know no Gen Z-ers.

But I do watch a lot of television with Millennial & GenZ characters, and if the representations are correct, they never maintain! Millennials & GenZ are constantly talking about how nervous they are or how incapable of functioning because of some incapacitating internal state. They have absolutely no concept of fortitude. Oversharing is their idea of virtue.

It's a manifestation of privilege when you think about it—(a) their belief that other people really care about what they feel and (b) that the world is a safe enough place that what you feel won't get you into trouble.

Maybe that's the true rift between Boomers & Millennials: We maintain; they don't.

###

Other than that, I tromped and read more Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Gotta say—Tess's passion for Angel Clare is rather annoying. Angel Clare has a big stick up his ass.

Alec Stoke-d'Urberville seems like he would be a lot more fun.

Birthday trip was fabulous.

Rendezvoused with the BoyZ on Stone Street, which, back in 1658, became the first cobblestoned avenue in New Amsterdam:



Had dinner at a Cuban salsa bar & RTT paid! (An exciting new development. 😀) I was expecting the food to be touristy & pedestrian, but in fact, it was very tasty:



Our fourth at table was Brian, Madeleine's very pleasant BF. (Madeleine herself is in Tustin.)

Brian was exceedingly impressed that I play D&D! Amusingly so. I could have told him, Why, yes, I did cure cancer, and last year when I was in Oslo accepting the Nobel Prize for literature... and still the most impressive thing about me would be that I play D&D!

After dinner, we went to NYC's hottest production, Life and Trust, which is an immersive event that takes place in a bank, one block away from Wall Street. The bank was originally built in 1931—a bad time for building banks—and subsequently overlaid by a 59-story skyscraper so that the original bank is now underground.

Now, I ❤️LUV❤️ immersive events because they combine all the best elements of theater and museums.

And Life and Trust did not disappoint—although I will say my ❤️LUV❤️ was not entirely unreserved.



Life and Trust centers on a Faustian deal. The action itself takes place on October 23, 1929—the day before the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression.

At some indeterminate point in the past, a man named J.G. Conway sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a recipe for some kind of magical green and highly addictive liquid, which he then mass markets as cough medicine. (This segued into a private Family Joke: I have been telling the BoyZ since they were kids that they were heirs to the DiLucchio Cough Drop Millions.)

Then, in the only spoken part of the show, the devil invites the paying audience to travel back into the Past and watch Bad Things transpire.

Since the paying audience are wraiths in that past, we had to wear these incredibly uncomfortable masks. Mine gave me a headache! Plus it was impossible for me to fit my glasses under it! Plus it was really fuckin' hot and my face sweated buckets!

We also had to do an incredible amount of running around—my FitBit logged more than 10,000 steps—including up and down an incredible number of stairs. My 73-year-old body was barely up to the challenge. (Pretend Nazis are chasing you, I counseled myself at the two-and-a-half hour mark.)

###

The sets were unbelievably wonderful! Bedrooms, parlors, business offices, bank vaults, Dr. Caligari-like labs filled with vials of sinister green liquid & Weird Science specimens, ballrooms, secret gardens, a forest, a lake, a livery stable, a movie theater, a burlesque stage, a boxing ring! All of them meticulously designed and outfitted in the most amazing detail. Dreamlike! You could pick every object up and study it. You could sit in the chairs and lie in the beds. You could work out with the boxing bag! This was my favorite part.

###

I don't know how many characters there were that you could follow around. Dozens & dozens. J.G. Conway. His sister (who is having a Lesbian affair with her maid.) A mad scientist. Many Bohemians, bankers, politicians. A tarot card reader. Several clowns. Cameo appearances from Gilded Age celebrities like Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit. Mephisto and his various demonic adjutants.

But here's the thing: The characters didn't talk. They danced.

And I'm not that into dance.

And the dance was pretty repetitive. I mean, none of the individual Life and Trust characters had an individual mode of dancing that distinguished their unique personalities or backstories. It was all your basic Martha Graham arm-flinging and back-bending.

And I got—well. Bored. Philistine that I am.

###

Our airbnb was in Brooklyn, and Ichabod had to go back to Brian-and-Madeleine's place in Queens to pick up a suitcase he'd left there (long story), so RTT and I subway-ed alone and got into the Customary Big Fight ('nother long story), which we always seem to get into at least once on every family vacay.

I always forget that as innocuous & defenseless as I seem to myself, in RTT's eyes, I am the Loch Ness Monster, dripping with the kind of deep-water archetypal power that only parents possess!

Anyway.

We resolved the fight, but before we did, we were treated to one of those awful late-night-NYC-subway vignettes that are so massively depressing—namely a homeless guy, crawling with lice, sprawled on one of the hard, fused-plastic subway seats, ostensibly trying to sleep but unable to sleep—the subway car was brightly lit—so he reached down into the crotch of his pants and began to masturbate—

"How's that for immersive theater?" I murmured to RTT.

And we began to laugh.

This guy was once somebody's little pink innocent baby, I reminded myself.

But it was a hard sell.

###

RTT had to leave at the crack of dawn to accept the Working Families Party endorsement back in Ithaca on the Day itself. It meant so much to me that he went to all that trouble to make the trip down for such a short time!

"What do you want to do on your birthday?" Ichabod asked.

What I wanted to do on my birthday was visit the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which is a touchstone in my personal mythology, a place where I spent many happy, happy hours when I was a kid.

So, that was what we did.









We had lunch at a Jamaican restaurant that had the best mac 'n' cheese I have ever tasted. It had a texture like kugel! Except... It was mac 'n' cheese!



And absolutely amazing banana pudding ice cream at the Ample Hills Creamery.

And then went back to the airbnb and watched all six episodes of the just-dropped seventh season of Black Mirror.

###

Yesterday was hard, hard, hard because saying good-bye to my kids is always so hard. I love them both so much! Not just because they're my kids but because of the people they are. It's like when I'm with them, the world is in color.

There are other people who turn on color for me, too (one or two of whom may actually be reading this.) But I have to say, most of the time, I float in a world that, if not exactly grey, is deeply unsaturated.

And also—WT-fuckin'-F???—it was snowing in the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley! Hideous White Stuff From the Sky!!! I passed six accidents on the country roads as I wended my way home. The roads in Ulster County were unplowed and covered with about three inches of slippery slush. I drove with my knuckles in my mouth, absolutely convinced I was gonna end up in a ditch.

But I didn't.

And today, I have an enormous amount of work to do and very little interest in doing any of it.

What else is new?

Busy, busy, busy.

Also anxious, anxious, anxious.

###

I was doing Mrs. Baldoni's tax return when I snuck a peek at my email. Mrs. Baldoni (not her real name!) is a cheerful 97-year-old widow who was led into the TaxBwana sanctum by a caretaker. She was with it mentally but completely deaf. Her only sources of income were social security and interest on multiple bank accounts.

EZ/Peazy, thought I.

Except that each of the interest statements was for $15,000 or so, and no federal or state income tax payments had been set aside for any of them.

Wow! I thought. Interest is—what? At best, 4% of a total deposit? Who keeps that much cash around in a time of inflation?

I was not about to give financial advice to a 97-year-old woman with $750,000 sitting around in various bank accounts, though. No, no, no, no! She should be giving financial advice to me!

I'd just delivered the bad news about the accumulated tax liability—a hefty sum—which I was relying on the companion to relay to Mrs. Baldoni.

My phone pinged: New email!

I looked: Icky sending me January's electric bill, which, according to Central Hudson, was in excess of $1,000.

WTFUCK???

Interestingly, I did not freak out.

Instead, I completed Mrs. Baldoni's return and then dashed off an email to Icky, typing very clumsily because my phone has an itty-bitty keyboard & my fingers are quite big.

We need to sit down and have a conversation about this, I wrote. If the high electricity bill does not represent a mistake on Central Hudson’s part, then it represents the use of the space heater after you did not order heating oil in a timely manner. I do not want to be penalized for your error – – particularly as next month’s electric bill will also reflect this.

If the bill was accurate, my part of that conversation was going to be, Fuck you, I am taking you to court.

As it turned out, the Central Hudson bill was not accurate: Central Hudson had tacked on 1,000 additional kilowat hours. This was rectified.

But the incident did bring to the forefront how deeply I dislike this guy.

I do like my space! And he's only up here for 10 days out of every month.

Still, I really do need to think about not being here next winter.

Sigh...

###

Other than that... I spent the morning—which I should have devoted to Remuneration—working on Adrienne's campaign. There are a lot of tedious details that need to be CC'd and BC'd to God knows who. It's massively time-consuming.

Also, RTT did get the Working Families Party endorsement, which practically makes him a shoo-in for the Ithaca City Council seat.

We are quite the political little family!

At least, we are not fulminating in futile rage over Trump. We are trying to do something constructive.

And it's Max's birthday today! I could not love him more or be prouder of the person he is and what he's accomplished.



Shortly, I am scampering off for lunch with Belinda, my Trump-loving pal.

And after that, I must get my windshield wipers replaced.

But when I get back from that, I must sit down & make some money.