Mallory's Camera

Stayed too long w/the erstwhile Terri Gordon in Evanston. By the time I finally hit Minnesota Sunday, it was nine o’clock at night, the sun was setting. Possibly the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen: some trick of the upper latitudes made the sky seem convex; microscopic ash from a volcano eruption in the faraway Philippines bent the dying light into a magenta dome.

As soon as it grew dark, I got lost. Naturally. I have no sense of direction and a basic distrust of maps – I mean, what if “they” are trying to confuse me by falsifying the documentation, huh? Ya ever think of that?

So I drove around the black country roads of rural Minnesota for close to four hours, amusing myself by thinking up new titles to add to the great John Sandford oeuvre. Stupid California Driver Prey. Middle Aged Woman With Extremely Poor Night Vision Prey. Sandford’s a Minnesota homeboy. If you believe Sandford, the black country roads of rural Minnesota are teeming with serial killers.

I also solved the health care crisis.

First I had to listen to a lot of radio, NPR, alternating with Glenn Beck. Both seemed whack. In retrospect the last presidential election no longer seems like a choice between a good candidate and a bad candidate, it seems like a choice between two bad candidates. Obama’s stimulus plan is horrifying beyond belief, and his health care revision was so unworkable that not even the House of Representatives is considering it. Instead they have recycled Mitt Romney’s hugely unpopular Massachusetts program.

Hel-lo, Obamber! Access is not the most important health care issue. Escalating costs are the most important health care issue! See, if you controlled the costs – slowed inflation – people might be able to afford health insurance without a gun to their head. This isn’t really that difficult a concept. Or it shouldn’t be.

Escalating health care costs are a four-pronged phenomenon:

Numero One: Malpractice insurance premiums, particularly in specialties, keep going up and up. Solution? Tort reform.

Numero Two: The number of unnecessary procedures – i.e. procedures that are done not strictly as part of the diagnostic process but to rule some highly esoteric possibility out – keeps going up and up. See Numero One. Additionally, enact legislation that prohibits diagnosticians and insurance companies from owning cath labs, MRI distributorships, etc, etc. There’s a whole lotta double dipping going on here, and nobody addresses that.

Numero Three: It’s axiomatic that some huge percentage of all medical costs throughout a person’s lifetime (estimates run between thirty-three and sixty percent) are incurred in the twelve months before he or she finally dies. As a society, we can’t afford that – particularly when Medicare and Medicaid are picking up the tab. We need to convince the American consumer that death is a natural process, that the trip across the river is a bee-yoo-tee-full part of the journey. Hey! If government propagandists can sell the evils of tobacco, they can sell that.

Numero Four: Finally… there are too many doctors! Note that American medical schools tacitly acknowledge this – they graduate approximately 18,000 baby MD’s per year. But before these doctors can start steamrolling your wallet, they have to put in a few years of indentured servitude as hospital interns and residents. There are around 30,000 hospital intern/resident slots, and the difference is made up by graduates from foreign medical schools who tend to stick around once that residency is over.

Do we really need all those doctors?

In large urban centers, you have an over-representation of doctors, most of them specialists. Oddly enough – in direct contradiction to basic laws of supply and demand – this has had the effect of driving the price of their services higher. (Is this because health care becomes a luxury item? Or is this just the classic supplier-induced demand scenario?) Meanwhile, in huge portions of the country where the population is not as concentrated, there is an under-representation of physicians; outside a hospital you may wait months for an appointment with a cardiologist.

Get rid of all those fucking doctors! What are most of them doing anyway? Writing scripts for Michael Jackson? Advising you to lose 10 pounds and get more exercise? A physician’s assistant can do that at one-third of the cost! Hell, a nurse practitioner can do that at one-quarter of the cost!

Cutting labor costs works for every other industry, why not health care?

Reached the circus by 1am.

Took me an hour or so more to fall asleep.

Up by five to drive to wherever Today’s Town (now Day Before Yesterday’s Town) was.

I was a zombie for a couple of days, and it wasn’t until this morning that I felt halfway human again.

I’m old.

I forget that sometimes.

My version of Bruegel’s Death of Icarus, rainbow standing in for Daedelus’s dead son. (I was thinking of sneaking a unicorn in there too, but, well – I didn’t.) Pencil sketch of a photo I took of the Monterey harbor from the bike path, watercolor over that, cray pas over that, more watercolor. Making visual art is very soothing. I don’t really have to think about anything except, is this paint dry enough so I can crayon over it?

I listened to the audio book of Dreams of My Father while I drew. Barack Obama reads his own work. Book was better than I thought it would be – kind of a modern day version of the myth of Theseus, only instead of sandals and a sword, Aegeus leaves his son a skin color. Or maybe it’s Moses, the hero who chooses to marginalize himself. Anyway it’s obvious that Obama’s empathy for the poor, for the downtrodden – those whom the lottery of birth left empty-handed – is genuine compassion and not political expediency. His meditations on family and community are arresting, almost profound. Plus, you know, it’s always fun to hear the POTUS say “shit.”

Simultaneously reading Alison Weir’s Mistress of the Monarchy (a biography of Katherine Swynford) and Dennis Lehane’s Given Day in hard copy. Liking the former better than the latter.

Playing lots of Scramble on FB although it seems my high score of 183 was a complete fluke, never to be topped.

Watching a lot of TV…

What else? Oh! Right. Chain-smoking really cheap cigarettes that leave a yellow nicotine mustache. Not eating.

I flinch every time my cell rings. I wake up in the middle of the night and cry – very silently – for hours. The cat licks the tears from my face. I don’t delude myself this is affection, clearly she likes the salt.

I have a shitload of stuff to do and I don’t want to do any of it. I can’t even write substantiatively.

I’ve given up on life – for this week at least.

I WUV Obama. But I still think his new stimulus bill is whack. Current stimulus approaches aim to fix the inherent Ponziness of money-as-debt by issuing more money as debt. How smart is that? The dark side of Keynesian economics.

Just looking at it on a practical level… I’m too lazy to do the research but I venture to guess that more than half of those 11.1 million jobs lost as of January 1, 2009 were white collar jobs. I’m not sure the people who lost those jobs are well suited for the physical labor of building and repairing roads and bridges. Not to mention the fact it’s a government initiative so we’ll be lucky to see any of those implemented before 2012.

Plus small business’s problem right now is liquidity. I’m not sure how decreasing small businesses' tax burden increases liquidity. I mean, sure, theoretically, you’re supposed to withhold the money you pay in taxes in a separate fund, but how many do? If you need to spend it and the money’s there, you spend it, figuring – or hoping – or praying – that there’ll be more there for taxes when you need to pay that bill. (If you think this is irresponsible, just look what the state of California did with the excess state income taxes it collected in 2008.)

The government deficit is truly alarming. Essentially we are trading the standard of living for future generations for a shot -- not a guarantee -- at greater economic stability in the present tense. Frankly, I think that’s immoral.

There is such an easy and obvious way out of the current economic mess! I’m really surprised that nobody’s proposed it:

Legalize marijuana.

In one fell swoop this establishes a potential tax revenue base of 6.2 billion dollars, gives the U.S. a hot export product, and shaves 7.7 billion dollars off state and federal operational expenditures. (These are 2005 figures – I imagine they’re considerably higher now.)

In other news I was saddened to learn of John Updike’s death. He was an amazing short story writer, and his command of language was amazing, though often it created a kind of cognitive dissonance because his favorite fictional subject matter – American suburban life in the second half of the 20th Century – is so extraordinarily banal.

Consider this one sentence plucked from the NYT obit: He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.

Context: shooting birds reaffirms teenage boy’s belief in his own immortality.

The choice of that deliberate verb robed echoes the sentiment of divine right which, of course, is the essence of the sentence: after all, kings wear robes and so do prophets; you and I do not (unless they’re bathrobes, and then we spill coffee on them like I just did.) Even Updike’s verbs are conscripted into telling the story. This is the best kind of writing.

Dropped B off at the airport – he is off to Hugo to doctor Ali the Camel who would otherwise have to be put down on account of he’s developed rheumatoid arthritis. We are all big Ali the Camel fans in this house – Ali is so sweet-natured when he’s not in rut, eats cookies out of your hand, gives camel kisses. (Camels have the most fetid breath imaginable which is odd since they’re not carnivores. Must have something to do with their fluid metabolism.) If B’s efforts are successful then Ali can retire to John Ringling North’s ranch.

I’m not looking forward to spending four days alone with the Resident Teenager…

Well, he's certainly got a lock on all three of Delaware's electoral votes, doesn't he?

Sheesh.

Ben spent yesterday fielding phone calls from various circuses. Try Booth called in tears – not only are the authorities sending Congo and Kimba, the bad elephants, back to Texas, they're also taking Francis! But Try isn't offering as much money as Hullsalt & Jollyornot.

He's mulling the gig over. It would be for three weeks. The money's not huge, but it's not insignificant. God knows we need the money – the Little Store just had its worst week since January.

And Robin could join him after the first week. Robin could make the big bucks cleaning out the tiger cages before he goes off to horse camp! Maybe he could learn to ride a unicycle!

I finally finished the Scott McClelland book. Abysmally written – the fact that George Bush hired a guy who writes this badly to be a communications point person tells you an awful lot about George Bush.

I suppose I should read Dreams From My Father next.

I'm reluctant to. I identify with Obama's mother, another quirky white lady, and I've finally copped to the fact that my visceral dislike of Obama springs from this projection: I think Obama gives his mother very short schrift. In the one excerpt from the book I've read, Obama denigrates a chick he wants to make because she tells him with tears in her eyes that she's not black, she's multiracial.

And I'm thinking, Right! Multiracial, that has to be our inheritance in the twenty-first century, no more white and no more black.

Obama wasn't buying.

Pseudospeciation is the worst problem that confronts us. Obama's no antidote.

In other news, I'm dreadfully behind on projects I was supposed to have completed weeks ago. Dr. H would tell me I've set myself up for failure by taking on too much. But really, what are my alternatives?

As you can see, I'm not striking. I'm a businesswoman, the new owners -- be they Russian or American -- have to be able to monetize the business somehow. Twenty dollars a year is actually cheap for a paid account.

Anyway...


Richard Price has a new book out. If I survive the next two weeks, I intend to buy it for myself.

I felt conflicted about The Speech.

On the one hand, it was absolutely brilliant, the most beautifully sung lullaby to the Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla you could possibly imagine, every syllable of it palpably, demonstrably true.

On the other hand, truth doesn't make it in politics and you'd think Obama would know better than to talk about the black man's rage during an economic downturn. Nobody wants to hear about anybody else's entitlement theories when money is going south.

The Speech won my heart, but I also think it made Obama unelectable. He won't win against McCain – unlike Kennedy, the last politico who rode a wave of "change," Obama doesn't have a rich daddy to buy him the election.

And what's up with the Obama campaign releasing that photo of Wright and Slick Willy? Strictly amateur hour, that.

In other news, the Last Homeless Guy On Cannery Row held court in the local Starbucks today, terrorizing the barristas. "You're out of half and half," he would snarl, walking the pitcher up to the counter. He sat at a table near the door, eating sugar packs and reading the newspaper.

This is the one guy whose story I've always wondered about because he's not an alcoholic or overtly nuts the way the rest of them are. I'm not going to ask him what his story is, of course. I'm just going to make one up for him. His life mushroomed out of control. Maybe he owned a hot sauce store once.

Speaking of hot sauce stores, this week has been very much like a pleasure cruise on the Titanic. Iceberg to starboard! Whoa, Nellie! Turn that wheel, pilot! But, wait! Who's that on port? Why, a band of human flesh-eating pirates led by Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp seems to have filed his teeth to sharp points and his eyes are twisting pinwheels. Aiuto!

I've lined up about 4 K of outside projects that I can bill for throughout the coming month. So if only the plucky phone calls work and I don't die from overwork and despair, I oughta be able to get the sucker under control. It's tough though.