Mallory's Camera

I went tromping on the Walkway yesterday. Views of messy little Poughkeepsie & the faraway turrets of the old Jesuit monastery that was taken over by the Culinary Institute of America. Some kind of carnival taking place in Waryas Park.

Happy-making!



Just looking at the world from the perspective of such familiar things catapulted me back into the far more sanguine mental space I occupied when I lived across the river!

There is still an old Jesuit cemetery at the CIA behind an overgrown wall with a locked gate, and in that cemetery, one of my personal Lares & Penates, Teilhard de Chardin, is buried. Mr Omega Point himself. The Jesuit paleontologist!



I am now at the end of my second week of quite literally talking to noone in the place I'm living besides clerks in stores and random people on jaunts or at the gym.

I know I'm not invisible because yesterday at the supermarket, some woman accosted me: "Do you have a dog?"

Turned out she wanted advice on dog food for her spoiled and pampered Shih Tzu.

Huh! I thought. Well, I can't be that repulsive if random dog-owners are hitting me up for advice.

We chatted for 15 minutes.

If we'd both been in the first grade, I would have asked her, So! Do you wanna be my friend?

This particular supermarket, by the way, is like the Hannafords-of-the-Dead. Shoppers, stockers, checkout staff, all wandering around with a crazed and hopeless stare as if, very shortly, they will be turning to cannibalism to meet their dietary needs.

###

A steady funnel of calls and texts streams in from outside the bubble. They're diverting.

But of course, this much here-and-now isolation is not psychologically healthy.

Like I say, though, there's not much I can do about it. Except focus on getting out.

I did all the things one is supposed to do when I moved here a year ago. Joined community organizations, volunteered up the wazoo. None of it panned out. I suppose I'm just too marginal in too many ways for this place.

###

This week actually picks up socially, which is a Good Thing.

And it's not as though I don't have a shitload of stuff to do. Remuneration, chores, errands. Carry water, chop wood. And figure out ways never to be in this kind of situation again.

###

Oh, yeah. And Neighbor Ed somehow stumbled across some of the investigative journalism I wrote a billion years ago and wrote me a fanboy letter!! So that was reaffirming!

Kept waking up at intervals throughout the night. So, many, many dreams.

Over the past couple of weeks, my dreams seem to have evolved into something for which, quite literally, there are no words in the English language. Possibly, there are no words in any human language. I wake up, and they’re there in all their swirling, alien montage-hood, but then I instantly forget them because I can’t describe them.

Interspersed within the parts that defy description, there are bits that are recognizable.

Thus, last night BB and I got married—this despite the fact that while I love BB dearly, I’ve never felt the slightest attraction toward him that way. And I knew this in the dream. So, I couldn’t figure out why we were getting married.

Then I broke my phone. I crushed it in a little paroxysm of—oh, I don’t even know what you would call it. Part of the reason I’ve always suspected I’m not quite neurotypical is because I occasionally summon up these… spasms… where I’m transported into my internal landscape and everything around me disappears. The episodes are completely under my conscious control, so not pathology as such. I suspect some sort of willful dissociative phenomenon. Anyway, they’re always accompanied by a kind of somatic clench.

Thus, in the dream, I clenched, and the phone shattered.

I threw it away.

Now, you’ll never be able to talk to anybody you know again, I thought. Because all your contact information was on your phone.

The thought did not displease me.

###

In honor of the day, here’s my mother in 1956:



To me, she looks much older than 22 in this photo.

I can’t figure out whether that’s because she really does look older or because the styling in the black and white photo—the pageboy haircut, the mid-calf skirt, and above all else, the weird placement of the feet—reminds me of what middle-aged ladies used to look like in my childhood.

###

What else?

As per plan, I did nothing but read all day yesterday. I finished the Kellerman novel (Serpentine). Most ridiculous plot ev-ah! But great fun nonetheless, and I was very proud of myself for not pausing mid-paragraph to go off and discover a cure for cancer out of cat food and Arm & Hammer washday detergent, or score Adderall on the Dark Web and write the Great American Novel in 36 hours, or some such.

Oh, wait.

Scratch that.

I did do one errand: I picked up L’s bday cake.

The line at La Delicioza was very long, so I amused myself by going into into full Art Photo™ mode and also by making up a story about a world run by vegan totalitarians where bakeries like this one are strictly verboten, and I am risking 20 years in the Reeducation Camp by standing in this line:








The exterior of La Delicioza is deliciously shabby. You’d never know it was there. Unless you knew it was there.

It is gloriously sunny and blue-skyed this morning, so I must reactivate the To Do list.

John LeCarré died.

One of my favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite writers.

He was old. Eighty-nine. So, you know. It wasn’t a life untimely shortened or anything.

Still. I feel like a companion soul has been snatched from me.



Other than that, it was kind of a perfect day, temperature flirting with 60°, filled with things that I like doing.

I was in full Art Photo™ mode:

The Goddess of the Cell Phone in her winter desolation:



A meetup with BB:



Valkill, four miles after it wends its way from Eleanor Roosevelt’s hideaway:



La Deliziosa, an Italian bakery that makes the most mouthwatering cookies:



An incredible vintage truck:



Strange murals with indecipherable meanings:



Urban squalor:



Someone’s reaction to urban squalor:



Scenes from my favorite Jamaican supermarket:







The little CIA graduation party we organized for Anton. I’ve gotten pretty tight with Anton since he’s been living here here. He’s leaving for Seattle on Tuesday.

To understand how completely weird it is for Poughkeepsie to be having its first gay pride parade, you’d have to know something about Poughkeepsie.

And trust me. You don’t want to know anything about Poughkeepsie.



I showed up to take pictures.

Despite being one of the letters in the LGBT acronym, I’ve never been a big fan of pride parades as a political statement. I don’t like the St. Patrick’s Parade either. I think all sexual and cultural taxonomies are marketing categories, and I object to marketing categories on moral grounds.

But, hey! As a venue for costumes and ornamentation, pride parades are great.

I’d been there five seconds before I ran into the Hyde Park Democrats! They assumed I was there to march with them and shoved a sign at me:



Okay! This photo convinced me: I will never leave the house without makeup again!

“Poughkeepsie is a weird place to have a pride parade,” I remarked conversationally to the Councilman from Ward 1.

He raised his eyebrows frostily. “Why would you say that?”

Quite a few politicos in attendance, including Mark Molinaro, the guy who drew the short straw when New York State Republicans were deciding which one of them had to run against Andrew Cuomo in the 2018 gubernatorial election. He’s the one on the right, and I must say, if I’d realized how hunky he was, I might have voted for him. I’m shallow that way.



The woman is Hyde Park Supervisor Aileen Rorh, pal to Neighbor Ed. Life in a small town! Everyone knows everyone!

The parade organizers had plotted the parade’s progress to avoid that part of Main Street where half the stores are vacant, the sidewalks are littered with empty crack vials, and there’s a drive-by shooting every two days. I thought that was chickenshit. I mean, if you’re celebrating Poughkeepsie, celebrate Poughkeepsie! Crack vials and all!

There were some great-looking people:











And the Marist College mascot finally came out!

Met up with BB at the Caffe Aurora for a cappuccino and a quick tromp through what used to be Poughkeepsie’s Italian district.

(The neighborhood was gutted when IBM enticed Poughkeepsie into tearing down most of its historic old houses so that Route 9 could be turned into an urban thoroughfare. This is why Poughkeepsie has no waterfront to speak of.)

Caffe Aurora would need to be vacuumed thoroughly before it could be charming. Still. There were old Italian gentlemen seated at its tables, and as we left, we passed a heated conversation, not in Italian but in the dialetto stretto, the old Sicilian dialect, which I retain a kind of ghost understanding of—

Sabbinidica! Comu si senti?

Little Italy was a mixed use residential/industrial neighborhood around the turn of the 20th century. The old tobacco factory is still standing, transformed into apartments. Here’s where it used to pollute Fall Kill:



I keep wondering: When is Poughkeepsie gonna turn itself around?

It’s such an obvious gentrification target.

But so far, very few takers.

If I were younger…

###

Afterwards, I forced myself to go running. Because it was cold but not brutally cold.

Second-earliest sunset of the year! (Today is actually the earliest sunset.) Clocks are imperfect instruments when it comes to measuring the ecliptic.

When I think about the imperfection of clocks, I naturally start brooding about the imperfection of logic, the rational system of analysis that has been beaten into us since the Enlightenment. According to this system of analysis, no phenomenon is a real phenomenon unless it is an observed phenomenon, and yet, if quantum mechanics teaches us anything, it’s that many if not most phenomena cannot be observed.

It’s a real head banger

The MH17 crash threw me into a panic. Uh oh, I thought. We’re entering into serious Franz Ferdinand territory with this one.

The plane was packed with scientists on their way to Melbourne, Australia for an International Aids Conference. So much for getting continuing education credits for frolicking with the penguins and the kangaroos, right?

We’re probably living in the most peaceful time ever. I mean, us – not other people. They’re living in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Somalia, Central America. We’re living here – where a school shooting that nets 26 victims is Big News. I’m not saying that a school shooting isn’t a tragedy; I’m saying that in terms of body counts, 26 victims is a drop in the bucket.

We continue to implement ever more stringent security measures and safety precautions to decrease those body counts or at least, to help ensure the victims aren’t white or (second best) middle class people of color.

My own theory is that these security measures aren’t designed to protect us necessarily so much as they’re designed to lay the foundations of a service industry that will take up the slack from the manufacturing base that the United States essentially gave away. You can take your global economy and shove it up Bill Clinton’s hairy ass.

Much in the same way as the commoditization of higher education – that insane insistence that every McDonald’s fry pusher and janitor needs a college education – has resulted in an entire generation of indentured servants. Why are Millennials so politically apathetic? School loans, baby. You can’t stick it to Da Man when Da Man holds your bank note.

###
For the past year, I’ve been living in Poughkeepsie, which is like Ground Zero for urban blight. Came the news yesterday that IBM is pulling its remaining workforce out of Dutchess County.

Long-time readers will remember that I’ve wasted quite a bit of time wondering how Poughkeepsie turned from this –





-- into this:



I’ve come to the conclusion that it really was the deal with the devil Poughkeepsie’s municipal administrators made with IBM in the ‘80s. Combined with various NYC municipal clean-up measures. I mean, when NYC got rid of its “undesirables”, they had to come somewhere, right?

At IBM’s behest, Poughkeepsie essentially razed quaint historic neighborhoods to make way for a traffic arterial designed to disgorge commuters at the IBM campus. IBM also finagled a deal with the Town of Poughkeepsie – and forgive me, but I find this whole NY State designation of “cities,” “Towns,” “villages,” and “counties” awfully confusing – whereby IBM paid very little in terms of local taxes. Of course, public schools and other municipal services depend on those taxes. So the public school system essentially fell apart and they stopped plowing snow off most of the streets in the winter.

Dunno what the city fathers thought they were buying. Maybe they were just getting paid off. You gotta think this is a place where municipal corruption runs rampant. I mean, it’s absolutely absurd that Poughkeepsie has a white, Republican mayor.

Anyway, here in the ghetto, security measures and safety precautions are noticeably lacking. Random violence ends in death every once in a while, but it’s more likely to manifest as road rage or screaming matches on the corner of Main and Academy:

Yo, bitch, touch me again, I’ma blow yo fuckin head off!

I’m only a temporary citizen of the ghetto, of course, and I must say I’m looking forward to moving in two weeks. Yeah, yeah, I love walking around blighted urban landscapes. But even I have limits.

If I were 30 years younger, though, I would really try to do something about Poughkeepsie. Get involved in the municipal government. Try to get Seraphina to run for Mayor or something, manage her campaign. I would be a fucking awesome political operative.

Anyway, between Russians nonchalantly shooting passenger airlines out of the sky and the ground war in Gaza, the world seems like a seriously scary place just at present.

I’m working my way methodically through my To Do list. A guy at my gym asked me out so we are doing the coffee thing Saturday; seeing a sculptor from the Internet Dating Site on Sunday. Neither assignation fills me with excitement, and I’m wondering: What is wrong with me?

I find myself missing Tom, and wondering what he would make of this brave new world. I can almost hear his voice.

For five years of so after he died, I could still feel Tom hovering around me, taking care of me. Five years is much longer than ghosts generally hover. He must have loved me a lot. But eventually, of course, he left. More important things to do.

When I was taking my clothes out of the drier at the laundromat the other day, I noticed that someone had actually piled clothes in on top of mine. Skinny young woman with pop eyes and a nose ring. “Whatch you doin’ with my machine?” she hissed.

“Those are my clothes,” I said politely.

“Those are my clothes and you better keep away,” she said.

I ignored her and opened the drier door, and she proceeded to shove me. Hard.

Wow, you are certainly going to great trouble for half a dozen pairs of old lady panties, I thought.

And then I thought, I can take you, bitch.

Apparently, I didn’t look as though I could because the laundromat owner came running up to me, screaming, “Are you okay? Do you want me to call the police?”

The skinny girl looked nervous. Like she was gonna have to bolt without her still dripping wet Trovata knockoffs.

“Police?” I said. “Why? I just want to get my clothes out of the drier.”

Funny thing is that this was not one of the laundromats in the heart of the ghetto but the one on South Street near the library. While I was driving home, I tried to imagine why anyone would pile clothes into a drier that was already being used. Clearly it was not my wardrobe she was after! Maybe she just didn’t have the $$$ to spring for a drier, I thought. And for a moment, I felt very bad for her. Because if she’d stood outside the Laundromat with a tin cup and a little sign: Please Help! My designer knockoffs are filthy, I might have given her a few quarters. I give money to panhandlers all the time.

Equally interesting to me was how quickly I’d transitioned to, I am going to punch you in your fucking face, beyatch.

I mean, we have to imagine that I was being completely delusional there: I am, after all, 62 years of age. At one point, I was pretty proficient at Tai Kwon Do and many years ago, I broke the nose of an assailant who tried to steal my purse in a parking lot with a roundhouse kick.

But that was then.

Plus really – what’s the attraction of violence? Violence is bad. I mean, I really do deplore it on an intellectual level. Yet from time to time, I find myself thinking, Wouldn’t it be fun to take that [your annoying person goes here] and shove his fucking head into a concrete wall?

Maybe it's genetic. I am half Sicilian after all.

###

I think some more about my violent impulses in the frame of reference loaned by the saga of Elliot Rodgers, whom the media has now dubbed “The Virgin Killer.” (Why not “The Aspergers Killer?” Why not “The Hollywood Brat Killer?”)

Rodgers has gotten rather more sympathy than you’d think a spree killer should be able garner. The founder of some website called Rap Genius with a ridiculous business plan (angel investors are funding user-generated content? Really? Then how come Television Without Pity went broke?) published an annotated version of Rodgers’ 141-page manifesto, praising his prose style.

I can recall the first time I said the name on my lips… wrote the soon-to-be killer.

Beautifully written… writes the Rap Genius founder.

(Uh, no, asswipe. On my lips is like totally redundant.)

Various men of my acquaintance have also expressed guarded sympathy for the chap as though being rejected by a woman is actually grounds – maybe not for homicide, but for some justifiable retribution.

I used to have an LJ friend – a very handsome, intelligent musician of about my own age – whose wife stopped fucking him. Even if she hadn’t stopped fucking him, he didn’t actually like the type of sex they were having and would have stepped out on her sooner or later.

(Note please that monogamy isn’t something I feel deeply about. I was monogamous in each of my own two marriages, but that decision was mostly about time management. I do think that when you stop having sex with your spouse or romantic other, the relationship is essentially dead as a marriage although it can continue as a successful domestic partnership.)

Anyway, for whatever reason, he was entirely unsuccessful trolling for sex – I suspect because he was looking primarily for partners who were younger than he was. He became quite resentful about it, too. He seemed to think he was entitled to casual sex with whatever sexual partner took his fancy. His sexual preferences were pretty violent, too, so, of course, his retribution fantasies were violent as well. I didn’t fault him on that. What I faulted him on was his need to share those retribution fantasies with me. This, I had to assume, was his version of foreplay since I (he’d confided in me) was one of the few older women who’d “kept herself up.”

O-kay, asswipe.

It’s true I like to exercise. But I don’t do it for you.

Male entitlement. Fu-u-u-u-ck.


###

And, of course, the incident took place over the Memorial Day weekend, which is a holiday that extols and commemorates violence. Institutionalized violence. Violence at the hands of the state.

I have a hard time with patriotism. Which is not to say I don’t appreciate being an American or understand how privileged I am to have been born here. It’s just that I've always subscribed to that E.M. Forster quote: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

The United States of America is not my friend.

###

In other news, guy was shot couple of blocks from where I live. Apparently, he went after a female officer with a box cutter – tore her up good – and another cop car drove by and shot him. Seventeen times. Bystanders described the guy as “dusted.”

Life in fucking Poughkeepsie!

Muffled conversations half-heard through walls have always filled me with a peculiar, irrational terror. In the whispers, I always hear the pronoun "she" and then I start straining for the mention of my own name, sitting very, very still, never moving a muscle.

For a long time I thought this was latent paranoia or perhaps some perverse expression of narcissism – like every conversation I overhear is really about me, right? Wasn't until I watched What Maisie Knew -- an emotionally wrenching and mostly overlooked film that came out last year – that I finally recognized the behavior for what it was, a kind of conditioning licensed by the hyper-vigilism that all neglected children are forced to develop, struggle as they might to remain oblivious.

Kind of a Come to Jesus moment.

I wasn't raised like the Maisie character in the movie. I mean, I was a city kid, true, but my mother had no money. Plus she didn't feel compelled to pay lip service continually to her great, overweening LUV for me. I think she did love me in her way, but she was very young when she had me, barely 17. And having me more-or-less ruined her life – at least in her own mind – so she had mountains of resentment, which she attempted to bury me under. I was the suitcase that was never unpacked, lugged around in the background of her life until I finally got out when I was 15.

She was 32, still pretty young. And she did kind of reinvent herself. True, it was too late for Julliard and the professional violinist career for which her own insane mother had groomed her, but she ended up becoming a fiddler for a number of San Francisco bands, one or two of which were on the fringes of breakthrough success in the early 1970s. She was never as successful as Annie, the self-taught musician, and that kind of poisoned the well for my mother, she became insanely jealous of Annie.

But my mother was someone who was easily moved to jealousy.

I remember sitting with her once sometime in the early 1970s, flipping through a magazine to show her one of my modeling shots. I mostly did catwalks as a model. Although my face was extremely photogenic, the stylemasters thought I was too fat and too ethnic-looking for camerawork. At the time, I weighed 120 pounds. I'm 5'10".

This modeling shot was an ad for a bra. You were allowed to use ethnic-looking models in underwear ads because, you know, we're dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-skinned, and that obviously meant we liked sex more than your standard issue virginal blonde Grace Kelly lookalike.

"Doesn't look like you at all," sniffed my mother. "I guess they had to airbrush the shit out of you to get a good shot, huh?"

###

I've been in kind of a funk for the past week or so. Weather-related in part. I don't like gyms, so in the wintertime, my main exercise is walking. I can't walk, though, when it's 15 degrees outside and the sidewalks are coated with ice. I'm at the age when one slip on ice could end up fracturing a hip. I mean, I'm big-boned and my fingernails are as strong as daggers, which is generally a sign my calcium levels are good. I don't think I have osteoporosis. But One Never Knows.

Without exercise, I get testy, maudlin. I worry that my cats are depressed. I cry when I overhear hustlers talking big on the street, knowing that their schemes are doomed to come to naught. I cry when I see unloved children, skipping through snow in inadequate coats behind their grim-faced mothers.

I almost cried at the mall last night when I went into a store that sells gourmet treats because they used pretzel sticks to sample the products, and my Little Store used to use pretzel sticks to sample products. The store was completely empty as it had been during that grim week l'il Jeremy and I tried to do a giftwrap benefit to raise funds for our smoothie cart. No way this little store survives, I thought and the thought made me very, very sad. The old retail model is dying. In the future, all you will have is these megalithic brands disseminated by global corporations.

It is the blight that man was born for
It is small business capitalism you mourn for

Last week, we did our event at the nursing home in conjunction with the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of National Service. (Betcha didn't even know there was a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Day of National Service! Oh, MLK is a big brand for nonprofits!)

Surprisingly, the event was a success. I'd been hitting the phones and the pavements for weeks trying to drum up volunteers from the local colleges, high schools and churches, and whadiya know, I was actually successful.

The volunteers were charged with mingling with the inmates – whoops! I mean residents. I kept strictly away from that. I'm only 25 years younger than those folks, and it's absolutely my worst fear that I'll end up in a place like this. In fact, I stockpile suicide techniques as a kind of precaution. ("Dry ice?" scoffed BB? "That won't work. I mean – yeah, it will work, but the thing is human beings have a panic reaction when they breathe in carbon dioxide. The best thing is to go into an airtight room with a couple of tanks of helium, you know, the stuff you use to blow up party balloons.")

I had a long talk with one of the volunteers who's also on our advisory board. Keisha was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension in 2008 and given exactly one year to live. Six years later, an oxygen tank trails her everywhere she goes, but she's not dead. She is exhaustingly upbeat and chirpy, but I might be that way too if every morning was another fabulous WIN! in the Beat-the-Reaper game. I seem to recall that Mark was similarly upbeat and chirpy in the early stages of his MS.

We talked about Poughkeepsie, of course. A source of unending fascination to me: Why is Poughkeepsie the way it is? In particular, why does Poughkeepsie have a white, Republican Italian mayor when half the population is black or Hispanic, and 50 percent of the population is on food stamps and other types of social welfare?

Keisha doesn't know.

Since I kept away from the residents for the most part in the meet-and-greet portion of the facility, I got to listen to the nursing home's receptionist do the phones all day. She was a moon-face woman with alopecia, around my age. She was in a foul mood, had cultivated a neat trick of hanging up on people so that they didn't actually realize they'd been hung up on. I admired that about her.

Towards the end of the day, she suddenly became more beneficent, and we started talking.

"What did you do before you did this?" I asked.

"I was the City of Poughkeepsie's Director of Urban Development," she said.

Oh.

Turns out she was responsible for getting those large swathes of houses on Academy Street, Balding Avenue and the intersection of Dwight and Hooker put on the National Register of Historic Places. There are quite a few Poughkeepsie buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, in fact, which is just one of many reasons why the abject squalor of this place amazes me. Honestly? It has all the ingredients for an urban renaissance in place – beautiful architecture, tourist attractions, cultural events, fairly good restaurants. It's only lacking one thing: Residents that care.

Storm was something of a bust. Yes, there was snow. No, there wasn't half a foot of it. Poughkeepsie Celebration of Lights and fireworks display hastily postponed to today. There's also a scavenger hunt in Old Poughkeepsie. (Of course, much of the central core of Poughkeepsie is what you might call "Old Poughkeepsie." Much of it is also what you might call "Deep Urban Ghetto and Squalor Poughkeepsie." The scavenger hunt will take place in the tamer areas.) I do love scavenger hunts, so shortly I will be trotting down to Cafe Aurora and signing up.

Bardavon showed the 1951 Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sims last night. I went. Have seen the movie a million times – and as corny as it is, it never fails to spook me out – but never on a big screen with the mighty Wurlitzer before.

I continue to be in an odd mood. Reading Alice Munro, which is part of it. When you read Alice Munro, you naturally start thinking of yourself as a character in an Alice Munro short story, which is to say, as someone whose life can be encapsulated in 35 pages of beautiful prose. You may rage against this. You may think, Damn! It really should have been PHILIP ROTH who won the Nobel Prize, because he would have devoted a whole damn novel to me! But it is what it is.

But the odd mood...

Like I flew into an absolute fury last night texting with PT because he started asking me about buying a car, andI told him I thought I'd have the $$$ saved by February. I don't envy you YOUR task! he texts and then starts going on and on about how virtually impossible it is to buy a used car, and how I'm never going to be able to find one: Victimization at the hands of unscrupulous individuals is my inevitable fate.

And I'm thinking, Damn! I'm not marrying the thing. I know perfectly well in my price range, there are going to be some mechanical issues with anything I buy and I'm gonna have to sink $2,500 a year into keeping a car roadworthy for the two or three years I own it. It's not like I'm looking for a Cadillac to be buried in.

And then I thought, You have some gall talking down to me when your life is falling to pieces.

Which it is.

PT was the one guy at the VISTA orientation who was in my age bracket. We hung out a few times. He chose VISTA not because any of the job descriptions appealed to him, but because his life was falling apart. Without VISTA, it seems to me his life is really in pieces and he's moving back to Ithaca – Ithaca! -- which is not where his life began to disintegrate, but is where the downward spiral really accelerated through an X-girlfriend and a restraining order.

I couldn't tell if I was over-reacting or if he really was being obnoxious.

Also, B sent me another laptop – a really beautiful machine, perfect for writing in coffee shops.

("Really" appears to be adjective of the day! Must watch those jejune qualifiers.)

Three views of the same subject.

Main Street, Poughkeepsie, circa 1906:



Main Street, Poughkeepsie, circa approximately 1956:



Main Street, Poughkeepsie, today:



This last one isn't such a great photo because it doesn't really show the decay, and you can't really snap shots of lost looking people shuffling slowly down a street, occasionally erupting into screaming matches with the imaginary people who live in their phones.

This is the interesting thing about modern life. Doesn't matter how down or out you are. You have a high tech telephone.

Still it's quite a triptych.

###

I've written before about a trip I took when I was in my late teens to Sarajevo, a prosperous city in what was then Yugoslavia. When was it? Oh, probably 1970 or 1971. Before the Olympics.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that casual trip to Sarajevo was to become one of the defining points of my life.

Twenty years later during the Bosnian War of Independence when this completely modern, sparkling, attractive city was turned into a war zone, when everything was destroyed, I felt completely unhinged.

If it could happen in Sarajevo, it really could happen anywhere. When I was there, the place looked like a prosperous American city.


Sarajevo became kind of a metaphor in my own mind. Mao Tse Tung sez change must come, sings Alabama 3 in one of my very favorite songs off "Exile on Coldharbor Lane." Change must come from the barrel of a gun.

I suspect, though, change more often comes from the fallout of natural disasters. From the shifting of major transportation routes. From whatever cracks in the social facade that make people abandon one place and move on to the next, a decision that people naively believe is personal but, of course, is never personal.


The older I get, the more I realize there is no such thing as a personal decision.

A fair summary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The only constant is change.

Change seems to happen gradually, incrementally, while your back is turned. But it will happen, and it will happen within your lifetime. Sarajevo is the exception, of course. Most change takes place along the fringes – which is as good a reason as any to avoid those fringes, I suppose.

Except some of us are drawn to the fringes.