Mallory's Camera

RTT got a terrific write-up in The Ithaca Voice.

And I have been scribbling, Remunerating, & avoiding Icky as much as I possibly can.

I'm isolated but not unhappy about it. It's as though the characters in my head are providing me with as much company as I could possibly need. I don't know whether that's creative inspiration or mental dysfunction. Maybe a little of both?

The Patrizia-torium is messy & disorganized, and I should probably do something about that because as Without, so Within.

The whole Israel/Iran 12-Day War thing is such a blatant piece of political theater.

When the dust settles, we will all find out that Bibi & the Khomini were burning up those back-channel phone lines, maneuvering to get Trump that Nobel Peace Prize he so covets.

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Meanwhile, yesterday was fairly productive, although it was really fuckin' hot and cat ownership disqualified me from a potential housing situation—to be honest, I know the housing situation owner through the Shawanagunk Dems, and he is kinda weird, so maybe the cats saved me.

Did the rest of the trip-related errands, had an unsatisfactory phone conversation with RTT, and shortly will be taking the car in for its oil change. I am on that conveyor belt! And it is just possible I will hit my Remuneration quota before I leave on the trip.

I have been bemoaning my own lack of agency: Why don't I have more control over my life?

But, of course, agency is a relative thing. However aggrieved I may feel about my own, I still probably have more of it than 85% of the people who live—or have ever lived—upon this planet.

Forward, little conveyor belt!

Spent a good chunk of yesterday in the garden, revising stone borders, reviving soil fertility, weeding, & such. My garlic is coming in nicely though it won’t be ready to harvest till July. (Scapes!)

I planted peas. We’re supposed to get another run of sub-freezing temps next week. Peas are the only things that will survive.

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In the evening, I felt overwhelmed by the To Do list. Such a fuckload of Stuff To Get Done before I drive up into the Finger Lakes; even more To Get Done before I go to California.

I just want to go to bed and pull the covers up over my head while my Personal Assistant does it all.

Oh, wait! I don’t have a Personal Assistant. 😥

As is my habit, I read a bunch of Perfect Days reviews after I saw the film:

The extraordinariness of the ordinary moment…being truly present in the now… Komorebi, a Japanese word meaning “sunlight shining through trees”…routine as freedom…

Well, yes. Except they weren’t “ordinary moments” to me since I don’t live in Tokyo, plus Hirayama reads books & listens to Lou Reed, which are both forms of distraction.

No, to me, what was interesting about the film was that it managed to tell a story without using any conventional forms of narrative. Story-telling without story-telling. Very post-modern!

By the time the film is finished, you have the history of the man—an incomplete history, perhaps, to the Western mind, which likes to have details about favorite brands of beer, and favorite baseball teams, and does Hirayama like Patricia Highsmith better than William Faulkner, and what exactly did Hirayama’s father do to Hirayama that caused him to run away to Tokyo and become a toilet cleaner—but an essential history, nonetheless.

Also, I recognized what Hirayama is doing with his camera.

It’s what I call taking Art Photos™.

One throws most Art Photos™ away because it’s virtually impossible to reconcile what one sees with what the camera captures.

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Only other two moments of note yesterday were (1) the stink bug and (2) the tromp.

A low-pressure front was trading places with a high-pressure front when I was out tromping the hills, and this created a wind so blustery, I almost turned back.

Then I remembered: As a girl, as a young woman, I just loved walking through windstorms! They made me feel so alive.

When had that changed?

I honestly can’t remember.

And I wish I could say that tromping through yesterday’s windstorm connected me somehow to that girl, to that young woman. Only it didn’t. I merely entertained that most tentative strand of memory and felt very cold.

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The stink bug had somehow managed to get through the screen of my bedroom window.

Now, I am one of those weird people who captures bugs and almost invariably walks them out the front door and releases them outside. Spiders, too!

They are living creatures after all.

But I refuse to do this with stink bugs, which I hate with a passion.

Stink bugs, I flush down the toilet!

Which is what I did with this fellow.

Buddha will forgive me, I thought. Or not.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday wondering what Mary Oliver used to do on her off days.

No, really.

Mary Oliver is the poet who famously wrote:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

But surely Mary must have had days when her life did not feel particularly wild or precious? When she felt caged and restless and distracted and unproductive, and it was raining out, and her political choices seemed like a bad joke, and she was appalled by the distraction choices available on Netflix, and she wondered when her sharp, incisive mind had turned into a checklist of now (when everything sucks) versus then (when everything was wonderful?)

So, how did she deal with it?

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Anyway.

It rained all day yesterday. A pounding, grey rain without a hint of romance.

I tried to buckle down and Remunerate, but my heart wasn’t really into it; I did much less than I had planned to do.

So, then I got to beat myself up over that.

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As I so often do when I’m feeling… what is even the name for what I was feeling?... I began worrying about the cats.

The cats cannot be happy!

The cats are sad because they don’t have enough toys to play with.

The cats are sad because I won’t play with them. But every time I pick up the laser beam or one of their stick danglies, their eyes immediately jump from the moving object to the hand (mine) moving it, and they get this disgusted look on their faces like, WTF, human? Do you think we’re so stupid that we can’t tell this is not a mouse or a bird?



I can barely keep up with my To Do list.

The issue isn’t time. The issue is that I don’t want to do anything on my To Do list.

If I think about what I really want to do, it usually boils down to, Buy two pounds of hazelnut truffles and eat them while you sit in a movie palace somewhere in Rome watching English-language rom coms.

But that takes up too much space on the To Do list.

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Anyway.

The sky is blue this morning. Prime tromping weather!

Plus, I still have a fairly large Remuneration quota to process. TaxBwana-ing is so exhausting and mentally draining that all I can do when I teeter home is collapse, though for some reason my clients don’t understand when I tell them, I can’t meet your deadline! I’m too busy being a saint.

Needs must, right?

Plus the cats may not like danglies, but for some reason, they have declared war on this fabric mouse I bought them. Take turns eviscerating it and spewing its spongy batting innards across the floor.

So, I must vacuum.

Remunerated furiously most of the day yesterday, but honestly, I’m not gonna get the present project done before I leave, and though I fantasize about finishing it on vacation—Take your computer! Wake up before dawn!—honestly, I don’t want to do that either.

For one thing, I find it almost impossible to work away from my workspace, even when I’m traveling alone. For another, I think it’s mentally healthy to cut the ties to clunky electronics from time to time.

Went for a long tromp. This photo was taken at three o’clock in the afternoon:



Continued to stew over my complex emotions in response to that Annie photo. Nobody seems to be able to understand them, and I cannot articulate them. Possibly such bursts of intense, incoherent rage are the first sign of dementia in me, and shortly Ichabod will have to move me into Happy Memories Acres as Annie's roommate or something.

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This morning, the NYT published a piece on assisted-living centers.

It’s long and depressing as hell for anyone over the age of 65. But worth reading.

I crunched some numbers.

Long-term care insurance or not, I’m not gonna be able to afford one of these places. The small mom-and-pop operations have all been gobbled up by chains, and the chains are owned by Wall Street equity firms, which operate them to maximize profit, no service left unbilled—$50 a month for daily reminders: Don’t forget to take your medications this morning, Mrs. Jones!; $26.67 for the half hour an aide might spend helping you change your clothes.

Assisted suicide really is a better option. Not just cheaper, but also… more dignified.

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Naturally, all this is depressing beyond words and difficult to contemplate rationally without feeling very, very sorry for oneself.

I don’t like thinking of myself as “old,” and resist thinking of myself as “old,” but, of course, I am old.

I suppose part of my reaction to that Annie photograph is the terrible, terrible grief I feel over the loss of someone who was once so vibrant, so alive. The utter usurpation of that person by some defanged hippie crone whose only joy in life comes when younger family members visit.

But it is never Goldengrove unleaving we weep for. It is always Margaret.

Unmistakable: The leaves are beginning to turn.



It’s happening early this year. But then, the weather has been crazy. Though maybe not so crazy in terms of the new normal.

I have this sense that I haven’t really taken advantage of summer this year. Like I wanted to spend at least one evening sitting outside some place very dark so I could watch the fireflies. But then I didn’t. And now the fireflies are gone.

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Meanwhile, I finished the (no longer current) Remunerative Project and dispatched it to the client, who sent it back to me with a 1,000-word email filled with—I can’t even figure out what it was filled with.

Not recommendations for improvements because he liked what I did.

Rambling thoughts. Like the Remunerative Project was the first phase of some personal conversation. Kinda weird.

But he sez he’ll be paying me today, and more assignments are on the way, so you know—if he needs my views on the Meaning of the Universe, hey! I’m happy to provide them.

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I also did laundry, went grocery shopping, performed a desultory cleanse-down of the personal space. Tromped, too: The hiking boots made an enormous (positive) difference. And ate a lot of pie—'tis the Season of Peach Pie here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley, and Mr. and Mrs. Neighbor Ed have formed a kind of Pie Club, which requires a lot of eating and socializing with neighbors and is, therefore, kinda exhausting.

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This leaves me now with a couple of Free Days (yayyyyy!) and only a minimum of maintenance-and-upkeep errandy things (like I really should do some gardening, pay some bills, etc.)

I should get back to the Edith Wharton ghost story! It’s been almost a month since I worked on it. But what happens when you stop working on a piece of fiction for any length of time is that you totally lose the rhythm of it.

Dax had just finished editing the first part of the manuscript when I stopped writing. The laws of narrative continuity dictate that Dax must now have Interactions with three throwaway characters mentioned earlier in the text and that those interactions must be a prelude to Something Meaningful that takes place in Part 5.

But I haven’t got a clue what those interactions should be.

Part 4 is clear enough: It’s the story of what happens when Edith and Teddy Wharton go to a house party at the Mills Mansion in 1904, and Edith almost allows herself to be seduced by Ogden Mills, and something about these interactions inspire her to write The House of Mirth.

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In the evening, I decided to rewatch Halt and Catch Fire, one of the very, very best TV shows of the past 20 years, even though it never found an audience.

Halt and Catch Fire is about the early days of the computer revolution, the first of the tech upheavals that completely upended Life As We Know It such that the world I live in today would be completely incomprehensible to the 20-something me who inhabited the 1970s.

It’s a deeply character-driven show, chronicling the bonds between four characters as the valencies between those individuals shift and spiral: the visionary and sociopathic Joe; the brilliant, mercurial punk Cameron; Gordon, the dogged, concretistic thinker; and Donna, Gordon’s brilliant and un-mercurial wife.

Through a brilliant act of story-telling that only happens towards the end of the narrative and isn’t apparent at all from the beginning, you come to realize that Gordon, the dullest and most prosaic of the characters, has been the main protagonist all along—and this is just such a crazy-beautiful bit of technique that even thinking about it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Anyway, Halt and Catch Fire on the rewatch is just as good as it was the first time around.

Since I will be birthdaying in Guatemala, L went out and bought me a birthday cake yesterday. For here:



It is a classic Italian rum cake with whipped cream frosting from the greatest of all classic Italian bakeries, La Deliziosa, and it is a veritable Medusa of cakes in that you only have to look at it to metamorphose into the Venus of Willendorf.

I ate two slices yesterday. Gotta consume that cake before I leave, or its feelings will be hurt!

But really, two slices of that cake is like 1.5 slices too much.



Other than that, it was a productive day.

I cleaned. The Patrizia-torium needed it.

I did a modicum of trip-related errands and will do some more today.

It’s raining now, but temps are supposed to go up to 70° this afternoon when it clears. Seventy degrees! So I will tromp and revel in the spring flowers, which are mainly daffodils and crocuses hereabouts.

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I’m still feeling a kind of—I don’t know what you’d call it. Anhedonia, I suppose. It’s difficult for me to take pleasure in anything. I feel very remote, and my dreams are filled with people and animals I’ve disappointed in some way, that I cared for very inadequately, that I ultimately could not protect.

Busy, busy, busy!

On Sunday, I had one of those nights when I could not sleep.

This happens to me from time to time, and I can never figure out why. I’d tromped five miles that afternoon in raw but not really cold weather, so lack of exercise was not a factor. I am scrupulous about curtailing caffeine intake after noon.

My best surmise is that these sleepless episodes take place on nights before days when I have to do something.

That something can be a thing I’m looking forward to!

That doesn’t matter. It’s the coercion factor somehow, You must do this; there is no way to avoid it.

Anyway, on no sleep whatsoever, I was quite the incompetent TaxBwana yesterday and made numerous mistakes, which fortunately, the various TaxBwanas QAing me picked up and corrected.

And I slept 12 hours last night, so I should be cooking with gas on all burners this morning.

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I’m volunteering three days a week.

Plus keeping up my rather strenuous Remuneration schedule because $$$ buys me travel, and I am looking at India, Vietnam, or Egypt for the early fall.

Plus helping various people with various projects they (naively) believe will benefit from my help.

It’s not as though I have any kind of social life in the wintertime anyway, right?

Though I am thinking of going down to the City next week to check out Guillermo del Toro’s puppets for Pinocchio at MOMA.

The world continues to deteriorate at an accelerated rate.

It’s scary.

But I gotta pretend it isn’t deteriorating.

‘Cause there isn’t a goddam thing I can do about the marginal futility function.

Fabulous dream last night, which I mostly can’t remember now on account of I woke up from it at 1:30 am in the morning and was so intent on falling back to sleep I didn’t write it down.

But I had finally gotten together with No-I’m-Not-Gonna-Mention-His-Name, who’s someone I’ve had a crush on for 10 years or more. NINGMHN lives some 750 miles away, so it’s never seemed particularly convenient to follow up on that crush.

The crush has continued to simmer. Low boil.

Maybe those are the best kinds of crushes? I dunno.

Anyway, we were kissing for the first time, and he was a dreamy kisser.

And it was obvious we were gonna stay together after that. A happily ever after based on a shared sense of humor and shared tastes in movies, books, and travel destinations.

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I offered to drive Linda up to Albany yesterday.

But no, she didn’t want to.

Have they diagnosed him yet? I asked.

No. But he’ll be going to rehab and—

Rehab? I thought. Why are they sending him to rehab if they don’t know what’s wrong with him?

I suspect Linda knew more than she was willing to share.

Linda is garrulous and chatty up to a certain point but surprisingly good at keeping secrets.

I knew she was in a sad mood because when she cooked herself dinner, she didn’t have her little kitchen TV on.

That little kitchen TV is generally on 14 hours a day, blaring cozy 90s-era mystery thrillers or Turner Classic Movies when Chris is visiting.

Sometimes the little kitchen TV is on when the radio is on so that NPR theme music is competing with Columbo’s wisecracks or Rosemary Boxer’s gardening tips.

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It snowed all day yesterday, so I was in a gloomy mood.

I Remunerated and thought nihilistic thoughts about how the world would be a much better place if only cats had evolved opposable thumbs.

I’m not feeling any more chipper today, but the sun is out though it’s cold, cold, cold, so I will force myself on an invigorating tromp.

Apparently, the earth’s molten metal core, having slowed down, is now changing direction.

Scientists suspect this happens fairly often, like every 60 to 70 years.

It’s gotta have some effect on humans, no? One would imagine it fucks with gravity and that, in turn, has an effect on how we feel—physically and emotionally.



Happy 89^th Birthday in Heaven, Mom.