Mallory's Camera

It’s very frustrating that the citizens of Tropico don’t see what a beneficent dictator I am and are constantly launching attacks on my banana plantations.

It’s equally frustrating that this is such a grey spring. The sun hasn’t come out in a week! Yeah, yeah, the risk of acquiring squamous cell skin cancer is reduced. The risk of endogenous depression, though, is high since it’s sunshine that fuels all those little cellular Vitamin D factories.

And one final frustration: Today, I have to hammer out 2,000 words on the yield curve, a difference between short-term and long-term Treasury returns that holds arcane significance for day-traders and economists alike.

Ugh.

After that, though, I will be free. Free! Free-ee-eeeeeeeeee! For eight whole days, which I plan to spend hanging out, socializing, and adventuring!

I haven’t done one thing with the garden since temperatures have been so unseasonably cool that I’ve been reluctant to plant.

And I need to finish the Art Installation for RTT before I go up to Ithaca. It’s been frozen at this stage for several months:



Finished Peter Straub’s If You Could See Me Now. You know the old saying about how it’s impossible to parody pornography because every parody of porn is actually pornographic?

I think the same conventional wisdom may hold true for horror—at least for horror written by someone who knows their way round the English language.

If You Could See Me Now is a prime example of the Don’t go into that basement, Jamie Lynn! school of horror. The alienated New York protagonist, (surrounded by creepy yokels who foreshadow Trump’s rise to power by 40 years) does every single stupid thing you’re screaming at the pages for him not to do. There’s a whole lot of moving characters around on the board for no purpose other than to have one of the local mouth-breathers menacingly rumble, Why’d you come back here inyhow, Miles? You ain’t changed!, and fill another 20 pages. (I guess “Miles” was the most effete intellectual male name Straub could think of.)

At a certain point, though, I gave up any thought that this was a straightforward example of the genre and surrendered myself to the novel’s excesses. And it was hilarious. I mean, laugh out loud stuff!

So, yeah. I recommend it.