Mallory's Camera

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.