Mallory's Camera

One real problem with magical thinking is that one begins to blame oneself for everything. Like if life is going badly, it's because you're being punished for something you did. That kind of jumpstarts a conveyor belt of memories of all the horrible things you've ever done running through your mind...

Snort.

Like the Universe cares!

It may be time to turn off the magical thinking function for a while.

###

Drove up to the Catskills to pick up Brian's camping gear. Brian's house is only about 30 miles away, but down so many back roads that it takes an hour to get there. Gorgeous day, and I meandered through the forests with their sudden breaks into ancient farmhouses and empty barns as though I was driving through the last scene of a movie.

I will be back one more time to pick up the rest of Brian's CDs and two little Moroccan footstools I had my eye on.

But after that?

It's unlikely I will ever visit this part of the Catskills again.

Hung out with real-life Flavia and Betsy for a bit.

Came back and finished The Children's Book. Read it much too fast! I was curious to find out what happens. What happens is that the characters who are adults at the beginning of the book grow old & weird, and the characters who are children at the beginning of the book all die or are horribly maimed in WWI.

Started pondering, too, about what I need to do with my stuff. If I move to Michigan, I'm gonna have to get rid of most of it. It will be too expensive to move.

On Tuesday, my nervous system told my body, Babe you cannot do this anymore.

My hands started shaking while I was doing taxes in the Middletown office.

Shaking? That's actually an understatement: My hands thought they were conducting an invisible philharmonic orchestra.

Mister and Missus McGoo were sitting in my cubicle. My hands shook so hard, I couldn't input their driver's license numbers.

Oozing apologeticness, I ushered the McGoo's to another tax preparer, expressed remorse to Leslie, and took off.

Not sure which of the many, many straws was the one that broke the camel's back.

Was it panic over impending nuclear cataclysm? Open the fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!

Was it watching a fox break Grey Chicken's neck in the golden hour, the afternoon before?

Or knowing I wasn't going home in any true sense of the word "home," but only to some place where I'd parked my stuff and cats (I hoped) temporarily.

###

This episode happened following about 36 hours off, which I tried to turn into quality time by going to the New Paltz Community Garden and breakfasting with real-life Flavia.

I planted peas and put some strawberries and marigolds into one of the upraised beds the previous plot tenant had conveniently left behind:



Following morning, I motored up to Ellenville for breakfast with real-life Flavia, who may have found a good home for Brian's beloved piano:



It's sad that nobody seems to want Brian's beloved piano. It's an awfully good piano, though real-life Mimi's tenancy with its wood fires, clouds of marijuana smoke, dust, and Japanese beetle infestation has been hard on it. Still. It managed to plong in tune when the head of SUNY New Paltz's music department came up to play some notes.

And real-life Mimi surprised us both—pleasantly!—by actually finding a campsite where she can live in the camper Brian helped her buy, come May. That was a relief!

"So, I'm going to spend May cleaning out the house, and then I'll put the property on the market," Flavia said. "Tim seems to think I can get a lot of money for it?"

"How much?"

Flavia hesitated for a moment. But in the nine months since Brian's death, we have become intimate friends who can talk about money. "Million or so."

"And the first thing the new owners will do is pull down Brian's house," I said.

"Probably," said Flavia.



I had a Shlock shift in Montgomery after hanging out with Flavia. I didn't want to be there, but when I got back to the casa after work, I didn't want to be there either since Icky was in residence, and my antipathy toward Icky just grows and grows and grows. Icky marches around the house talking to people on the phone or alternately haranguing and cajoling the Spawn in a loud voice, pretty much ignoring me. It's like he thinks I'm invisible, and when I'm around him, I pretty much feel invisible. Fortunately, he's only up 10 days out of the month.

Anyway, I was keeping Sonia and Sunny company in the Patrizia-torium on the glorious couch Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed gifted me with when I left Dutchess County, when I heard loud squawking from the back lawn.

Looked out—

A fox had the grey chicken in its mouth.

Ran downstairs and out onto the porch.

Icky had heard the squawking, too, and had raced out onto the lawn. The fox dropped the chicken and leaped—its fur golden in the golden light of the late afternoon sun—before running into the small copse of trees that mark the property's boundaries. But either it had broken the chicken's neck, or Icky had broken it, carrying her back to the porch.

The grey chicken was the shyest of the chicken GurlZ. I liked her. I appreciated her hesitancy. So, this was very sad.

But fox is gonna fox. And I have told Icky at least 50 times: There are too many predators around here to let the chickens free-range! You have to build them a run!

He ignored me, of course. Like I say, I am completely invisible to him.

But that essentially means that Black Chicken and her sole surviving companion, an almost identical black chicken, are Dead Chickens Walking. It's a bad situation. And frustrating. Because I can't do a damn thing about it.

I didn't sleep well.

Is that why my hands started shaking so badly in the Schlock office?

I don't know.

###

Before Schlock, I did taxes for a handful of friends every year through TaxBwana. One of those friends is my good pal Tom, whom I first met on LJ back in the Jurassic. Anyway, Tom contacted me that evening: Could I...?

Yes, but Schlock won't let me do freebies, I said. So, I'd have to charge you.

He described his tax documents. They were pretty basic. But Schlock would have charged him a minimum of $250, which seemed like highway robbery to me. So, I snooped around online for a bit and found a site that lets you do and file your federal taxes for free-eee-eeee! and only charges you $20 for filing your state taxes.

"So, you'll set up the account," I said to him over the phone, "and then I'll use that account to input your tax stuff."

"Good show," he said. "But how are you? You sound down."

I described what had happened at the Schlock office that morning. How my hands started shaking, how I couldn't control them, how Mister and Missus McGoo had gawked at me in horror with their big, googly, cartoon eyes.

"Honestly, I couldn't blame them," I said. "I wouldn't have wanted me to do my taxes either at that point. But it would have been less embarrassing if I had taken a big dump and begun fingerpainting on the walls."

"God, that sounds awful," Tom said.

"It was," I said. "But working there has been awful from the start. What you won't do, you'll do for money."

"Has it been bad?" he asked.

"Really bad. And housing insecurity plays into that in a major way. You and I should be housemates! We'd have a good time and save a ton of money."

I said this in a random, joking way. But the minute the words came out of my mouth, I thought: Hmmmm... That's not a bad idea.

Tom has a house. Since his daughter moved out, he lives there alone.

Tom and I are very much in synch psychologically. We both subscribe to the Larry McMurtry ideal of friendship. We are not romantically attracted to one another. We are both more-or-less in the same financial situation.

The more we talked about it, the more appealing the arrangement sounded.

But there is one major caveat: Tom lives in Holland, Michigan. Where I have never been. Holland, Michigan, ranks high on Architectural Digest and Forbes lists of the prettiest small towns in the U.S. It's a college town. It has an arthouse cinema! But it is also Trumpy, plus it has brutal winters.

At any rate, I am probably gonna fly out for a visit sometime in the next couple of months.
If I like what I see, the plan becomes a possibility.

I'm also going to book a consultation with a neurologist. I've been assuming the hand tremors are stress-related. But who knows? Maybe I have Parkinson's disease.

So, I got contacted by a recruiter for H.R. Shock. Apparently, TaxBwanas are a hot commodity in the exciting world of tax preparation. Did I want to submit my application now? Did I want to have an interview this morning?

"I haven't even taken your class yet," I protested feebly. "I don't know anything about depreciation."

But with all the swirling anxiety around an invoice submitted and not yet paid—will they actually pay the invoice? or will the kiskas & I end up in a washing machine box underneath the bridge?—prudence argued answering, Yes!, to both those questions.

###

In other news, I trekked across the River That Flows Both Ways yesterday.

Tromped happily through my old tromping ground, the Vanderbilt Park:





I note that I am doing the circuit much more s-l-o-w-l-y than I used to despite my more-or-less regular trips to the gym. I suppose that makes sense: I'm 73, after all, and even if there is a 93-year woman in Padua who can run the 200-meter in 51.47 seconds, at 73, you expect to slow down.

But it did kind of make me feel like a loser and then when I popped in at the Community Garden, that feeling was reinforced.

I've really neglected the garden this year. It's just so far to drive!

Though I did harvest enough tomatoes for a tomato pie:



Then I went to see Weapons, which is an awfully funny horror movie. (I like horror movies when they're pointed social satires; Jordan Peele and Ari Aster are among my favorite directors.) Scariest witch since Anjelica Houston in Witches.

Plus picked up take-out at my favorite Mexican restaurant.

A good day all in all, right?

So, I have no idea why I woke up at 2 am and thought, Danger! Danger! Darkling Plain alert! Your life is meaningless.

I mean, by that 2 am metric, just about everybody's life is meaningless, and I know this, and keep telling myself this. Meaning is where you choose to find it.

But I still couldn't fall back asleep.

####

This morning I found the Dream Apartment in Ithaca!!!

So, I texted my enthusiasm—only to get answered by a bot that wanted to know my credit score.

It took me about three rounds of texts to figure out this was one of those craigslist scams Ichabod keeps warning me about. Apparently, 90% of the listings on craigslist are scams.

Here's an ad that's not a scam: You have to be alone but a dog or two is ok. cats might be a problem. My dogs kill cats.. fact... this ain't no luxury hotel. Man women black white or brown or green I don't care what your race is or anything like that just don't be an alcoholic drug addict or phyco.

Phyco? What the hell is a phyco?

How does one find a place to live anyway?

###

Through it all, I continue to plug away at the Work In Progress. We are now up to 3,000 words. Grazia and Daria are having a Deeply Signficant Conversation.

This is kind of the way it happened in real life except Daria (not her real name) & I talked about why her X-husband had never liked Brian, and that reason is the Reveal with which I'm gonna start Chapter 2, so I can't really use it here, and anyway, X-husbands never like Once & Future boyfriends.

So, I can either spend hours trying to come up with meaningful dialog & action, or I can insert five paragraphs of All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and move along to writing Chapter 2.

Decisions!

fuzzilla made a sage observation on that last entry: God, this would all make for such a fascinating novel... the theme of alternative relationship models and what are the traditions when it gets disrupted by something as huge as a death is a killer theme for a novel.

I thought: She's right.

Very, very commercial. I can see the film adaptation now.

And I wouldn't even have to write very much. It would mostly be editing existing TMI diary entries & generating some connective tissue to string them all together into a narratively cohesive whole.

I figure I could knock the thing off in eight weeks.

Of course, I'd have to shave 20 years off the real-life protagonists: People will read about alternative romantics in their late 30s/early 40s, but no one wants to read about women in their 50s, 60s, or 70s.

There would only be one chapter I'd have to write—and that would be the very last chapter where Flavia, Daria, and... let's call her Grazia, the Patrizia interject...go off on some kind of mad road trip together, sprinkling Brian's ashes one handful at a time at various wacky roadside attractions.

The style would be easy, peasy, cash (as in "short for casual.") Middle-aged Dolly Alderton, in other words.

(I am a Dolly Alderton fan. There are times when she can be remarkably profound.)

###

With that in mind, I whipped off 1,500 words last night.

###

In other news, it's back to All Remuneration, All of the Time. (Except when I am exercising & working on the New Writing Project, which will obviously be my ticket to Fame & Fortune, right? 😀)

And it is supposed to rain all day, and the sky is grey, so naturally I am in a melancholy mood.

Icky announced he is materializing today—one day earlier than his usual schedule.

I see from my constant monitoring of craigslist postings both in the Hudson Valley and in Ithaca that Icky is trying to rent out the college-bound Spawn's room. Naturally, he did not bother to inform me of this. Altogether now: What a DICK.

In the posting header, he described the room as a "studio apartment." Which did make me laugh.

And he is charging a significantly higher rent for it than he is charging me.

I can't imagine there are hordes of people wanting to move to fuckin' Wallkill, but what do I know?

Oh! And the posting talked about chickens. And fresh eggs!

Poor Black Chicken! Having to lay for three!

If someone else moves in, I will install a lock on the Patrizia-torium.

###

No word from the T-burg Co-op KidZ, which I am interpreting to mean the answer is, "No."

I am imagining their off-the-record conferences: But she's so old! What if she strokes out on the couch???

Oh, well. "No" doesn't kill you, & you still gotta try.

I dislike being here, but I really have to be selective about where I jump next. I jumped without doing thorough due diligence last time, & that's why I ended up here.

Interview with the T-burg household is now a definite for 8/16.

Which makes me feel somewhat less invisible.

I mean, feeling invisible 'cause you're emotionally distraught is all kinds of crazy! For one thing, it makes you even more emotionally distraught; for another, it's not a useful kind of invisibility that might allow you, say, to rob a bank or slash the tires of your enemies.

No, one must strive to keep distraught emotions in check. Stay the course! Do the prep work! Chop wood, carry water—or is it the other way around?

###

Anyway, yesterday was rough because I entered into my eighth straight day of Not Hanging Out With Anyone In the Flesh because there is absolutely no one to hang out with here (Brian is dead, Brian is dead) though my little tentacles stretch wide with texts & phone calls throughout the virtual universe.

The kiskas are good girls though not what I would call good company in times of emotional duress because they are not snuggly in the slightest—though Molly follows me all around the house & spent an hour and a half last night, meowing plaintively while I sat outside, chattering on the phone, counting the fireflies and watching a pine tree pin a blood-orange crescent moon. (There is a lot of smoke in the air.)

And Black Chicken has developed Horrible Habits! She has become a Welfare Chicken! Instead of ranging freely across the property when I let her out of her coop in the morning, she runs to the house & sits on the porch & clucks at me: Feed me tortillas! If I sit on the porch reading, she pecks at my toes!

###

The gym is a great solace. Endorphins, doncha know. And I suppose it's just possible I'm getting physically stronger (though I think it's more likely I am merely slowing down entropy.)

And books—I just reread Gone Girl and read Sharp Objects for the first time. Interestingly enough, Sharp Objects is the more accomplished novel. (That's interesting because it was Gillian Flynn's first novel, and usually, first novels are not as good as the ones that follow.)

And phone conversations—chattered away last night with a good friend who is recovering from Major Medical Issues. He will recover in full, but omyGAWD, what he went through, plus the conversation evolved into a discussion of assisted suicide—possibly not the most tactful conversational segue on my part—and from there into non-assisted suicides: We started talking about that man my friend knew who'd committed suicide in the parking lot of the Grand Rapids airport—

And the phone went dead.

Just like that!

It took a couple of minutes to reestablish the connection.

"Well, I guess he doesn't want us talking about him," I said.

"No shit!" said my friend.

So we started talking about Larry McMurtry instead. Who wrote lots of books. And didn't kill himself.

Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed got a present they didn't want.

A birdfeeder. With a digital camera. Courtesty of a well-intended offspring.

It feeds blurry photographs to various nearby digital receivers and has some kind of AI hookup thing that gives you info about the blurry photographs.

"Well, that seems like a perfectly nice present!" I cried.

Mrs. Neighbor Ed made a face. "When the jays grab the sunflower seeds, they knock all the other seeds out of the feeder, and then the field mice grab them and begin invading the house!"

"When your cat was around, we never had any problems with field mice," she added—and I realized, with a pang, that she was talking about the Meezer, dead & gone these—what? seven years? The Meezer had been the mightiest of hunters!

I hoped the Meezer was eavesdropping from Cat Heaven, where presumably there is an endless parade of self-regenerating field mice and squirrels for her to slaughter. It's always nice to hear nice things about oneself.

And I also felt this almost palpable strand of connection. Veritably ectoplasmic! The Meezer had really been the last link to my old life in California, and when she died, that link snapped: I was no longer someone who'd once lived in California; I was only someone who lived here.

That's the reason why I liked living in Dutchess County more than I like living in Ulster County, I thought. In Dutchess County, there'd been... continuity.

And also, of course, in Dutchess County, I had friends.

###$

I prattled merrily with Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed for an hour, and our prattle was lively and hilarious and entirely without awkwardness, no long-time-no-see pauses or fumbles at all.

Neighbor Ed is almost as good at banter as Ben used to be!

I felt as though I was drinking water from a cool, sweet well.

Before that, I'd hung out with Loraine & Buff Ken & Rami on their back porch for an hour, watching the birds & talking about Buff Ken's latest bear sighting on his outdoor camera.

And before that, I'd got to play in the dirt in my garden for a few hours. There was a Claude sighting!

"When eet get hot last week, I water your garden," Claude told me.

"Thank you!" I said. Adding apologetically, "I can only get over here once a week—"

"I know, I know," Claude said, holding up a hand. "Eet is fine."

Everybody was glad to see me. Everybody liked me.

###

Icky was around this weekend. One of the Spawn managed to graduate from high school.

"He just totally ignored me!" Icky declared indignantly. "I came all the way from the City, and he ignored me! The only thing he said to me was how embarrassing it was that I was taking photographs of him!"

And you think I care exactly why? I wondered.

But I am well-trained in the art of making sympathetic sounds to people in distress.

Icky mistook my sounds for encouragement & began lamenting: It's hard, it's really fuckin' hard to be around the Spawn's mother, the Spawn's mother's new husband, the Spawn's mother's relentlessly cheerful father who'd been imported all the way from Texas—

"I was there all by myself!" Icky complained.

I clucked.

I would have expected him to head straight back to the City after this debacle. He's not supposed to be here till this coming Thursday! But, no. He stuck around. When I left for Dutchess County, he was sitting in front of his ginormous living room television screen, glaring at YouTube videos on how to sharpen knives. He had doused himself with cologne. I could smell it all the way from upstairs.

When I got back six hours later, he was still in front of the screen, watching what looked like the same YouTube video.

He saw me come in, jumped up, and immediately began doing pushups on the living room floor!

Like WTF???

He watched me cook my dinner. "That smells very good," he said, staring at my Cajun chicken.

No, fuckhead. I'm not offering you any.

Then he wanted to have a long conversation about changing propane canisters. He ushered me outside and handed me the wrench.

"I'm kind of a dummy about stuff like this," I admitted.

"Oh, no. Not you. You're a genius—"

Well, I am actually very smart, I thought. So you can can the fuckin' sarcasm. I didn't grow up using tools, so there's a learning curve involved.

But, you know. No need to prolong the conversation. And up close, that cologne was overpowering.

I thanked him for the tutorial, ran upstairs, and barricaded myself in the Patrizia-torium.

And eventually, he left.

###

In the past three days, three new place possibilities have popped up through my various real-life-people networks.

I don't really want to move until the fall, so I'm not sure how aggressively I should be following up the leads. But at the very least, they're a good auger, right?

Sue was short & plump with a nimbus of curly white hair and what I would characterize as a fairly advanced case of adult ADHD. She is also quite deaf, has only one hearing aid—there was a story behind that; I didn't listen to it—& the hearing aid she does have had rolled beneath her bed so she didn't bring it. So, communication in the flesh was difficult.

On the other hand, she is obviously bright & has numerous close friends. And she made one extremely astute observation when we were discussing electricity bills: "Your monthly bill is that high? But, of course, if you keep your computer on most of the time, that is going to drive up electricity costs."

Very, very true!

And something I have completely overlooked.

Henceforth, I will be turning my computer off when I'm not using it.

###

The house itself turns out to be historic: It is the Benjamin & Maria Hasbrouck House' c. 1798-1800. One of its original fireplaces was actually stripped out and is now on permanent display in the Fine Arts Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



The landlord will be taking me on a tour of it at 11:30 a.m.

###

In other news, TaxBwana-ing yesterday was exhausting, plus I forgot to eat before I ran out of the house in the morning—these days, I rarely get hungry & can go days without eating, though I do get lightheaded and shaky.

I was very shaky yesterday plus that stranger-in-a-strange-land vibe was going on all day—like Who are these people? Why am I here? How can I get out?

My first client of the day was absolutely wonderful, an 86-year-old woman in full possession of her mental faculties who seemed to sense something of what was going on with me internally & kept trying to feed me her sandwiches. She literally had 12 1099-Rs and 18 interest statements—all pittance amounts—so I was with her three hours.

"The housing situation is crazy," she said. "If I didn't own my own house, I don't know what I'd do."

And told me the story of her hairdresser who lived in a tiny apartment above her shop except her landlord was now selling the building—what was the hairdresser going to do? Her income was miniscule; she had no children & she didn't drive.

"And that story is being retold a thousand times all over the place," my client sighed.

Maybe I should just kill myself, I thought.

And that thought made me very happy.

Nonexistence!

But, of course, if I killed myself, it would be devestating for my children, and I can't destroy them that way.

I suppose I'm just very, very sad over Annie.

So, I decided to be a Real Human Girl & spread the word among my various local social networks: I am looking for a new place to live; if you hear of anything...

(This is harder than you may think since I feel intense shame that, at my advanced age, I am still experiencing housing insecurity.)

One of the people I told was Adrienne when I was over at her house Friday going over some stuff for the political website I'm designing for her. Adrienne is what Malcolm Gladwell would call a connector.

I didn't think anything would come of it, but you know—ya gotta shake the trees.

###

Then yesterday, I got a text: This is BlaBla's good friend Sue. She mentioned you are looking for a place to live?

The Adrienne connection! Thank you, Shawangunk Dems!

Sue & I texted for an hour and a half. She has found an amazing house in New Paltz! (She texted me the Zillow listing.) She loves cats! The landlord allows cats!

What can you tell from texts? Well, you can tell if you have sympatico conversational styles, if the same things make you laugh.

We have sympatico conversational styles. The same things make us laugh.

We will be meeting up in person tomorrow after I TaxBwana.

Several potential thorns in the rose—beyond the obvious, which is we could meet each other & just go, Ick:

First thorn: She wants to move by April. I told her regretfully that the earliest I could possibly move is May; she thought maybe she could negotiate with the landlord for a rent reduction for April & carry the rest of the rent herself for that month.

OmiGAWD. Somebody who's not too cowed to negotiate!

Second thorn: I cannot possibly afford the house if the rent is split two ways. I can afford it if the rent is split three ways, and it would be fabulous if the rent could be split four ways. (The house has four bedrooms.)

So, if we like each other in person & think we could be compatible housemates, we will have to scramble for other compatible housemates—by the 1st of May.

I suspect that is eminently doable. But, of course, there is a risk factor.

###

I am afraid to hope. I am utterly convinced that anything I let myself want, I will not get.

So, I need my peeps to help manifest this for me. (lifeinroseland, I am looking at you!)

###

In other news, I did a bunch of tax returns yesterday. I have around 15 friends & family members for whom I do tax returns every year. I will finish everyone's tax returns up today.

I didn't leave the house. It was cold & miserable out. Foreboding. And I'm trying to adhere to an every-other-day exercise schedule because aging body, refrain from the over-do! blah-blah-blah. So no gym.

###

The political news is making me absolutely sick to my stomach.

Thirty Democrats voted to end cloture! And ten voted in favor of Trump's awful budget bill.

Democrats are only slightly less smelly pieces of shit than Republicans.

Somehow, we've got to figure out a way to get through this.

I hate shopping. Ever mindful of the brown cardboard boxes Ichabod & RTT will be shuffling my worldly possessions into in the not-so-distant future, I try not to acquire stuff.

But every once in a while, I see something that I must have.

One such something was this NYC-inspired tarot deck:



And the 72 other cards in the Major & Minor Arcanas.

I don’t even do Tarot anymore.

I just thought the artwork & the associations were very, very good.

I mean, a yellow cab as the Chariot!

That’s inspired!

###

I’d also ordered a bookshelf, which arrived the very same yesterday. Much of my small collection of objets d’art is still in boxes because there is a particular space I want to put this bookshelf in, & I couldn’t find a bookshelf that would fit the space.

This bookshelf doesn’t actually fit the space either, but at a certain point, I decided, Fuck it, you’re never gonna find something with the perfect measurements.

I will make this one work.

It’s just odd that the bookshelf arrived on the day when I found myself thinking for the very first time, This place may not actually work long-term: It’s wayyyyyyy too isolated during the winter.

###

Other than that, it’s even colder today than it was yesterday. At this point, freezing would seem like bikini weather.

I have a shitload of stuff to do.

How stupid does the Democratic Party think American liberals are?

For several years, it’s been evident that Biden is in cognitive decline. Mental acuity was never his strong point in the first place; no, what Biden had going for him was shmoozability, a kind of fixer mentality. Which is not to be disparaged, of course. And the Biden administration has done many good things: expanded overtime, OTC birth control pills, anti-redlining regulations on the mortgage industry, a crackdown on bank overdraft fees and other junk charges. The list is long.

I would vote for the Biden administration again.

But not for Biden.

Because by continuing to back this out-and-out lie—He’s sharp as a tack! He just had a really bad cold—it kinda makes you wonder, What else are they lying about?

I mean, even assuming Biden is firing on all cylinders—which clearly he’s not—this is a man with a long history of fabricating demonstrably false and self-serving narratives. He’s lucky to be running against Trump—whose fabricated narratives are even more self-serving and equally false.

How did American politics come to this?

This Orwell quote has been making the FB rounds: The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.



Meanwhile…

Sunday was a baaaaad day, filled with small discouragements and setbacks, the chief of which of which was my inability to assemble the desk that had come with a billion Amazon reviews promising, Even a toddler could put this together! Why, even a chimp working with a banana and a sharp rock could put this together!

I couldn’t!

The problem seemed to come down (once again) to the size of the screws.

The screws they specified for attaching the side-pieces to the frame seemed to be much too short!

And yet there they were in the instructions: Piece A!

The longer screws worked to put the pieces together!

I demonstrated this to my satisfaction by putting the longer screws in and taking them out again several times.

You don’t know enough about this to improvise, I chided myself sternly.

Finally, I drove off to a hardware store in the woe-begotten hamlet of Pine Bush to get the opinion of a real, live hardware store employee.

He was around 22 years old with long, beautiful black hair down past his shoulders who must have thought I was more demented than Joe Biden.

“Yup, he’s definitely using short screws,” the beautiful 22-year-old said after I forced him to watch Amazon’s So-Easy-to-Assemble! video for the fourth time.

###

It took me till the following morning to say, Fuck this! and make an appointment with Task Rabbit.

I think I had some vague notion when I went to sleep that I would just live with the unassembled desk! Who needs a desk anyway, right? Desks are overrated! Anyway, maybe, if I left the desk alone, some obliging fairy would come along and assemble the desk for me. I’d have to leave out a saucer of milk and some cookies, of course…

Needless to say, I slept very poorly! The FitBit sez I slept four hours, but I think it was a lot less.

No way I was driving across the Great Water to finish cleaning and disinfecting the erstwhile Patrizia-torium on four-hours-but-probably-less sleep, so I have to do that today.

Instead, I drove to Newburgh and did some shopping for the almost-exclusively-mine bathroom. Tar-jay! When I lived in Monterey, I used to shop a lot at the Tar-jay in Sand City, and the floorplan and signage had not changed at all, which made me nostalgic. I also passed the Short Line bus terminal where I’d picked up Ben several times when he’d come from Ithaca to visit me in the Hudson Valley, and that made me nostalgic. We are coming up on the 31st anniversary of the day I fell in love with Ben—which I can’t regret because without Ben, there would be no RTT…

I’m always impressed by how well-designed stuff at Tar-jay is. Inexpensive but aesthetically pleasing. Unlike, say, Wamart.

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The main problem with the new digs at this point is that it will take me another week (at least) to unpack all the boxes and organize, so I am constantly putting essential items down (keys, phone chargers, etc) and then forgetting where I put them.