Mallory's Camera

I am inordinately proud of myself this morning on account of having beaten off my pissy mood yesterday.

The pissy mood was on account of feeling ill—not one of those alone and palely loitering illnesses where you get to lie on your bed all day, read Tutor porn, drink hot tea, and fantasize about what a beautiful corpse you’ll make, but one of those illnesses that require you to make frequent trips to the bathroom and recollect the agonies of childbirth.

Also, despite my hopeful prognostics, the Remunerative Project still wasn’t done because I realized an accurate economic analysis of the relationship between certification and payscale as it pertains to ancillary medical personnel would require 10,000 words beyond those I had initially given it. Plus there was all that copyediting to do because the goddamn thing was now 74 pages long.

UGH.

What to do?

I thought briefly about going online and insulting strangers.

Then I thought (the need for bathroom proximity having subsided) No, you idiot! Go outside and enjoy the day!

So I went outside.

###

The first thing I saw was one of my neighbors, a guy called Kurt, standing near a clump of trees on the edge of Mr. and Mrs. Neighbor Ed’s property line.

Kurt appeared to be talking animatedly to himself.

Kurt is a pleasant enough guy but held in a certain amount of disdain throughout the neighborhood on account of his refusal to pay the private company that does the trash hauling around here.

Instead, he makes the rounds from neighbor to neighbor on the day before the trash is scheduled to be picked up to ask whether they have any empty space in their garbage cans.

But what was he doing talking to himself?

I trotted over as discreetly as I could to investigate.

And, of course, there was Neighbor Ed himself! Chattering merrily away to Kurt! Hiding in that little copse so that Mrs. Neighbor Ed wouldn’t see he was talking to someone instead of raking leaves as he had been ordered to do.

Neighbor Ed is a brilliant talker! This is both his biggest blessing and his greatest curse.

So then I got to chatter away for 45 minutes or so!

First, we all chattered away about neighborhood gossip.

And then we started chattering away about politics.

“So, Patrizia,” asked Kurt. “What do you think is gonna happen with the midterms?”

“I think the Republicans are gonna win back the House and the Senate,” I said. “And then they’re gonna impeach Joe Biden.”

“House, yes,” said Neighbor Ed. “Senate, no.”

“House and Senate,” I repeated. “The pump price of gasoline is going back up. That’s the prognosticator. Also, the current inflation is back over 8%, and the Feds have run out of options. Not that 19 people out of 20 know what that means.”

“Five bucks says you’re wrong about the Senate,” said Neighbor Ed.

“You’re on,” I said. “And I have just two words to say to you: John Fetterman.”

###

After 45 minutes of pleasant chatting, I excused myself and set forth on the expedition I had planned for myself—which was an Art Photo™ excursion to the big Jamaican supermarket in Poughkeepsie.









What I like best about the big Jamaican supermarket is that even when they are familiar products, they are totally unfamiliar brands, and thus, I can fantasize to myself about being in a foreign land.

###

Afterward, Ichabod called. We chatted for 45 minutes or so.

He steadfastly refuses to be drawn into Annie Dementia Drama, which I find very disappointing because however gratifying it may be to get total agreement on what a fucking bitch Alicia is when I describe her in these pages, how much more gratifying it would be to get total agreement from someone who actually knows Alicia!!!!

Then I went home and watched more episodes of The Anthony Bourdain Show—the title permutates from A Cook’s Tour to No Reservations to Parts Unknown as it leaps from cable channel to cable channel, but it’s always made by the same production company.

I’m prepping for the release of the fabulous, scandalous, unauthorized Anthony Bourdain bio on Tuesday!!!

You bet I’m gonna be first on line at Barnes & Noble to buy that book.

I can’t really tell whether my knowledge of Bourdain’s ultimate fate affected my viewing.

But in those last few shows, the dude looked like an alcoholic.

I mean, yeah, sure.

The Anthony Bourdain Show ran for like 20 years, so the Tony who hosted that first show in Tokyo is not gonna look like the Tony complaining about an uphill hike in Asturias.

Even so.

Humans are not trees. Aging does not add rings under your eyes.

Tony was four years younger than I am and much skinnier.

No, that kind of under-eye pouching comes from alcoholism-related dehydration. When you’re chronically dehydrated, the skin beneath your eyes becomes flabby and weak, so bags form.

Also, his entire production team was flagging. Because the single most interesting thing about Asturias is that it's Celtic Spain. And the show doesn’t mention that. Not even once.

This photograph almost works for me. I like the composition – the symmetry of the men's profiles, the twinned gestures. But I dunno. Something about the focus is off. Is it that their faces are turned the wrong way from the camera? Or maybe the color of the squid isn't vibrant enough. Does Annie Liebowitz Photoshop?

I continue in my putzy mood. I described the mood at great length to a friend yesterday, and he remarked, "Sounds generative to me. Like you're about to give birth to something." Which is why he's my friend!

Yesterday a perfect sentence came into my mind, something about how the purest expression of So-and-So's love was that he'd begun smoking his beloved's brand of cigarettes even though they gave him a terrible cough. I was driving at the time in heavy traffic, couldn't pull over to write it down.

It's almost time for my annual rejection at the hands of the Stegner Fellowship admissions committee, please to note.

Saturday Night In the Sky would work actually if I made the one, true Maximon mask the McGuffin, endowed it with special woo-woo, hoodoo power and merged Briskind and Hazzard into one central POV character, no longer a screenwriter but a journalist. It's topical, God knows. The Mayan End of the World scenario is coming up fast. Better make those reservations now!

Plus there's an entertaining Ten Little Indians-style mystery waiting to be written about Semana Negra. Dowdy little protagonist/heroine writes a mystery that unexpectedly becomes a bestseller. She's a nurse, she dreams up a detective who's dying from Hodgkin's Disease, occupying his time between bone marrow transplants by solving various hospital based murders – did you know that you can actually kill someone who's in kidney failure by feeding them enough orange juice? Mr. Rogers didn't think you did! Heroine gets invited to prestigious Spanish literary festival that no one in the US has ever heard of with a bunch of other authors, one of who dies mysteriously. Heroine channels her detective, goes from dowdy to doughty (yuk, yuk!), solves the mystery, finds true love and lives happily ever after.

( Huh. The photograph actually works if it's larger. )

Dreamed about J__B_____ last night, friend of my bosom, mainstay of my mental health during those last difficult days of my first marriage. In the dream, J__ told me he was gay. "Well, I kind of knew that," I said in the dream.

"I didn't know that," the dream J__ told me.

But I didn't really know it because when I woke up first I thought, "Huh," and only then, "Of course." And wondered whether J__ had drifted so downstream on the river of time that it really would be impossible to find him again.