Mallory's Camera

Grey day. Rain is predicted all week.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Simone Biles dominated the chatter of the people who live inside my computer yesterday.

This got frustrating because I don’t care about Simone Biles, I don’t care about the Olympics, I detest competition in all its manifestations, and I don’t think Millennials need yet another poster child to rationalize their generational obsession with mental health and narcissism.

Here’s a secret, Millennials: Everyone has mental health issues, and the best way to deal with those is to find a truly engrossing hobby.

Millennials don’t have hobbies because unfortunately for them, they grew up in an age where sitting in front of a computer with that delusionary sense of communion with all those other disembodied souls floating through social-media-land has supplanted all other interests and activities.

It’s sad.

They’re right: We failed them.

But not in the ways they think we failed them.

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Yes, yes, I know: I’m a horrible human being.

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Other than that, It was a beautiful day. Mrs. Neighbor Ed got a haircut I covet, so I took multiple photographs, and will shortly be trotting off to a hairdresser to have the look recreated on my head.

Loraine saw a bear in her backyard at two o’clock in the afternoon. (Technically, I live in a suburb. But it’s a suburb surrounded by deep woods.)

Humidity was way down so I was able to exercise after I finished my work for the day—Remunerative Project still not finished, but I have high hopes for today.

Politics continue to worry me. I look at current events the same way I used to look at a chess board—six moves out.

Matt Taibbi wrote a brilliant economic analysis of the 2020 election, looking at per capita income of the counties that went for Biden in the 2020 election versus the counties that went for Trump. He then extrapolated that to the current vaccine wars. (Unfortunately, the piece is only available to his substack subscribers, so I can’t link it here.)

Vaccine hesitancy is most closely correlated with lower income levels.

Seems like that piece of information could be used somehow to increase vaccination rates.

Dreamed I was living in this glorious compound in (of course) Berkeley. It was partially embedded in an old tree that had become a kind of portal to all those magical extra rooms you only see in dreams. The compound had its own wonderful, crazy culture.

Then, the City of Berkeley evicted us and forced us to live in some kind of awful, utilitarian Section 8 housing.

I went wandering around the new digs and realized: These are actually the same digs; the City of Berkeley merely paved over the old place and made it into something much uglier but probably much safer in some practical sense.

Still, my heart was aggrieved. How would the old magical culture survive under the normative burden of harm reduction, I wondered? The only thing I can remember about the culture is that it involved making these huge old wonderful puppets out of paper mache…

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Well. You don’t have to be Dr. Fraud to figure that one out.

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I slept 12 hours last night, and so I’m feeling much better than I did yesterday. I can even suppose in some bizarre Millennial fashion that Max thinks he was improving our relationship, bringing us closer together with his Stalinist struggle session. After all, it’s the very essence of “woke,” right? Suitably chastened, I can now resume the all-important work of being Max’s mother, a benign parental puppet, sincerely regretful of that time back in 2004 when I didn’t let him host that all-night beer party with his RLS friends and all my many other misdeeds.

I am ready for my stint in the reeducation camp, Mr. DeMille!

“You know who’s one of the happiest people I know?” Max asked. “Nathan!”

“And you think that comes from his relationship with Celeste?” I asked weakly. Celeste is Nathan’s mother.

“I know it does! Did you know that Celeste and Nathan shared a bed until he was nine years old? She was very big on the family bed.”

That’s sick, I thought. But merely smiled wanly.

“Celeste helped Nathan feel absolutely safe,” Max said.

The implication being that I had not helped Max feel safe.

I don’t care if Max thinks I’m fucking Medea: Celeste is deeply creepy, kind of like the Dennis Hopper character in River’s Edge. I will never forgive Celeste for setting up a kind of Pleasure Island in that house off Ocean View Boulevard where Max and Nathan and Aaron and Fletcher and whomever else drank beer and smoked dope and dropped acid.

I was struggling to enforce an anti-drug policy until Max was 18. I let his girlfriend sleep over but I was absolutely Draconian about the drug use.

Underage drug use had fucked me up waaaaay too much.

For Celeste to deliberately undermine me here was completely unacceptable, and I read her the riot act when I finally found out. Not only was she behaving with utter contempt for my parental role, she was also undermining John, Nathan’s father, a prominent attorney on the Monterey Peninsula. If the cops had busted one of Celeste’s little parties, I could see John losing his legal license.

That Max thinks Celeste is a better mother than I am is a bitter pill to swallow. Celeste has been trading her entire life on her pedigree as the daughter of a Frank Lloyd Wright acolyte; she hardly ever worked a day after latching on to John L_______, Nathan’s wealthy father, in her 30s. And though they are long divorced, she still lives in John’s palatial house on Fountain Boulevard in Monterey though I have no idea whether they’re a couple or not. She’s manipulative, she’s stupid, and in these halcyon days of recreational legalization, she never draws a sober breath—

I sat there listening to Max extol Celeste’s many virtues, feeling as though I might choke.

Could I travel back in time and just not have sex with Bill on that fateful night when Max was conceived? I closed my eyes and began mentally feeling around for an escape hatch.

“And that’s another thing,” Max railed. “I want you to tell me you’re sorry for withdrawing emotionally whenever you get angry! It makes me feel as though I don’t exist!”

Now, it is true that my way of dealing with anger is to withdraw.

If I didn’t withdraw, I’d feel compelled to say what’s on my mind, and as I am articulate and withering in my scorn, what’s on my mind would feel quite toxic to the person to whom I’m expressing my true thoughts.

Would Max really want to hear my honest opinion of Celeste?

Or the fact that I think his girlfriend fits the Jewish American Princess stereotype in every respect except for the fact that she’s half Chinese?

I don’t think so!

So, I just shut up about these things till I can run off and decathect! Often by writing in my diary! And then can go back to feeling amiably disposed toward the perps in question.

This is a quandary.

I’m not going to give up thinking what I think.

Max seems to think that I ought to.

It’s a generational thing, I suppose. Millennials are as big on policing thoughts as they are on policing behavior. Why wouldn’t they be? They grew up with social media and sophisticated surveillance techniques, after all; they’re very collectivity-minded. The simplest fucking transaction with Millennials is a complicated negotiation:

Mia (Max’s girlfriend): I think I’m going to take out the trash.
Max: Do you want to take out the trash?
Mia: Not really. But you can’t take out the trash because you hurt your foot.
Max: Does that make you feel like I’m taking advantage of you?
Mia: Kind of. Even though I know you’re not.
Max: If you take out the trash, I’ll clean the bathroom sink.
Mia: Okay, babe. I’m gonna write that on the whiteboard.
Max: Okay, babe.
Mia: Thanks, babe.

Just take out the fucking trash! I’m thinking.

It would have taken you exactly one minute to take out the trash, and it has taken you three minutes to have this inane, pointless, mutually masturbatory conversation that has added in no way to the quality of discourse upon this planet!

But what do I know?

I’m old. I’m gonna die soon.

Okay, Boomer.

Watched both Fyre Festival documentaries last night.

I’m sure not all Millennials are as entitled, delusional and self-involved as the crowd orbiting the Fyre Festival, but man, those Millennials were obnoxious: I was kinda rooting for them to have an even more awful time there than they had there.

Influencers.

Brand Ambassadors.

They were all little lemmings just begging to be led off a cliff.

Tiny fangless rodents desperately searching for a Pied Piper.

I guess Instagram—which I like a lot, by the way—has evolved into a kind of ultimate “Perky Pat” alternate reality (thank you, Phil K. Dick!), which is far more involving than anything their real lives have to offer.

I see some of that at work in my youngest son whose surface is all effortless charm and bravado but who, when I apply Neighbor Ed’s dictum—“I look at what they do”—is obviously deeply depressed.

Sadly, there’s absolutely nothing I can do for RTT.

I mean, I tried to pay for driving lessons, I tried to buy him a car, I tried to interest him in financial investing—

He was simply not interested.

I love him very much, but I don’t have the same relationship with him that I have with his older brother. I can say just about anything to his older brother, and while his older brother gets very pissed off at me from time to time, still, I know he understands that I have his best interests at heart.

I fear with RTT, I will always be the Mommy Loch Ness Monster, rising up from time to time from the bottomless depths of childhood hopes and fears to gnash my teeth and paralyze him with my gimlet eye. So, I have to weigh my words carefully lest they wreak irreparable psychic damage.

The relationship he has with his father is just deeply creepy. Codependence at its most awful.

I just don’t understand it at all.

I got out from under parental influences as soon as I possibly could. At age 16!

I guess RTT just doesn’t want to be independent. Oh, he pays mouth service to independence, but at heart, he wants to be infantilized.