Mallory's Camera

Five things on today’s To-Do List; three of them can be pushed off until after I get back from D.C., but two of them must be done today.

Plus when I woke up this morning, this was the view out my bedroom window:



Hideous White Stuff From the Sky!!!!

I locked myself in the tower and remunerated all day yesterday, but I gotta say, it was hard to stay the course because I wanted to max out my credit cards and fly off to Sicily or some other island that’s warm and scenic, is littered with reminders of dead civilizations, has oranges on its trees.

Today, I’m trying to reign myself back into basic Clydesdale mode.

Don’t overthink it, I remind myself.

I’m not even gonna dignify these things with a genus name since they look absolutely nothing like what I had in my mind’s eye.

I suppose they could pass as hibiscus if hibiscus flowers had fleshy stems and tripart alternating with quadripart leaves.

These are the last tiny, imperfect polymer clay flowers I will create for a while.

In keeping with the Prime Directive—You must use everything you create!—they will be going into that first retablo (which will probably be a mess, but hey! Learning curve, blah, blah, blah), but I will probably stash them in a flower cart at the very back of the retablo where no one will look at them.

It did occur to me as I was staring at them mournfully (just prior to popping them into the oven for baking) that maybe I was limiting myself by sticking with real flora. That maybe I should give myself permission to make imaginary flowers!

But I like representational art. I’d prefer my fantasy elements to be introduced through design rather than happenstance.

Though, true: a highly stylized traditional art form like Peruvian retablos will never be representational art.

Still.

I got quite excited thinking about those imaginary flowers and all the other imaginary things I’m gonna try to put outside my head!

In addition to the political retablos I’m planning on making when I get a little good—the homeless tent encampment under I-80; the flight of the migrants across the Sonoma desert complete with snakes, scorpions, and ICE agents—maybe I could do a Cordwainer Smith retablo. He is my favorite science fiction writer. For many, many reasons.

I’d also like to do Station Eleven and The City & the City retablos—although that last would be very difficult: How do you translate China Mieville’s conceit—people who are legally forbidden to see what is there to see?—into a visual representation?

Also, I think I am gonna go with ¼-inch wood for the first retablo box.

It’s flimsier.

But easier to work with, I suspect.

###

Not much other news to report.

I did not speak to a single other human soul yesterday. (Fond though I am of L, her conversational repertoire is limited to food, counter stain removal techniques, the adventures of her Arizona cousins once they stashed their spouses in assisted living, and her hatred of Donald Trump. These are not topics that inspire me to dialogue.)

It was a bright, sunshiney, blue-sky day, but when I stepped out of my car at the tromping trailhead, the wind was high, and it was cold.

Fuck this, I thought.

And drove home.

Also—

This is something Neighbor Ed first brought to my attention:

“So, you know, a weird thing happened after I got my first vaccination,” he said.

“And that was…?”

“Well. The bursitis in my shoulder cleared up. Like immediately. I’d been dealing with the pain for a couple of weeks. But within 20 minutes of that shot—the pain was gone.”

Huh.

Then The Daily Mail printed a story about how a bunch of different people were experiencing symptom remediation after their first shots.

I know, I know. The Daily Mail! Not a peer-reviewed science journal! 😊

Still. The Daily Mail does not make shit up. It’s a news aggregator.

I searched and searched for the original source of this story.

But in vain.

However…

I’ve had one lesion from the autoimmune disease that’s been on my leg for four years.

And when I was showering last night, I noticed—it’s half-way disappeared.

It's been six days since my first shot.

Very strange.

I spent most of yesterday trying to track down that long defunct SnapChat filter that turned that Texas lawyer into a cat recently on a Zoomed court hearing.

This despite having a To Do list that (like the chain Joan Baez’s Daddy used to dangle hearts from in the 19th century ballad Silver Dagger) is five miles long.

I’m mostly ignoring that To Do list.

And I’m not even making excuses for ignoring it.

I did try to get out yesterday but I just can’t hack tromping when the wind chill factor brings temps down below 10°.





Lots more I could write, but all of it would be ranting

And ranting is what people do when they feel absolutely stripped of agency.

Warnock won Georgia, and Ossoff is projected to win, so you know: Happy Day!

Neighbor Ed woke me up this morning, texting, A Jew, a Black and a Catholic walked into the American government… Which is like the opening line of one of those jokes my grandfather—another old Jewish guy—used to like to tell.

Perdue and Loeffler are among the slimiest and most pernicious of the slimy, pernicious Republican Senators, so you know: Ass. Door. Slam. No, no, you’re walking down the wrong corridor—the whitecollar crimes prosecution unit is that way!

Trump must be up to 350 pounds. Good tailoring can disguise a lot, but it can’t disguise that chin.

###

Am I naïve for allowing myself to entertain the wispiest hope that (maybe, maybe, maybe) the political horror of the last four years is ov-ah?

##

Meanwhile, my bad mood abruptly vanished just before sunset.

Maybe it was John LeCarré’s prose, which had me so firmly under its spell that I added a mile to the customary tromp so that I could finish listening to Chapters 12 and 13 of The Honorable Schoolboy. Poor Jerry Westerby!

Maybe it was the letter I got from my beloved Barbara Angell, complete with photographs of her beautiful, lookalike daughters.



(That’s the Petrified Forest in Calistoga on the bottom, Barbara’s hereditary estate.)

Maybe it’s that one of my clients wants to placate me by paying me more money and that I am on the short list for the Stimulus Payout today.

Strictly speaking, I don’t need the Stimulus Payout, so I'll be donating most of it to the Hyde Park foodbank—after I buy a new vacuum cleaner.

The DEEBOT gave up the ghost! Well. I mean, I’ve had the thing for three years. It died so abruptly that I decided to take it apart to see if I could revive it simply by de-glomming the rotors. I took it apart, I did the deglomming—but then I couldn’t put back together. A part that should have lain flat kept not lying flat.

Of course, I have no mechanical aptitude whatsoever, that’s a given, so I called up Mrs. Neighbor Pat for a second opinion. She grew up on a remote Wisconsin farm and in consequence, knows everything there is to know about dissembling and reassembling machinery.

We stood fully masked and at a respectful 10-foot distance on her freezing porch while she tried jimmying the thing.

“No, can’t do it,” she said finally after 10 minutes.

Rather than storing the broken DEEBOT in a closet until such time—maybe just before the Rapture—it mysteriously fixes itself, I threw the thing away as soon as I got back to the house.

The DEEBOT was awfully cute, but, of course, it only did floors plus I could never train the cat to ride on it.

I think I’m gonna get a portable standup vacuum cleaner this time.

They made a miniseries out of The Name of the Rose, some of which I watched last night.

John Turturro was cast as William of Baskerville, and you know, Turturro’s much more like the William of Baskerville of the novel than Sean Connery was, being gaunt and hollow-eyed and hawk-eyed. And he’s not bad except he’s not Sean Connery who, despite being all wrong for the part, was completely riveting in the 1980 movie.

The plot elements in The Name of the Rose are infinitely dreamlike: the traveler from an impossibly foreign land; the abbey without a name; the library laid out like a labyrinth.

(I have dreams about that citadel of wisdom all the time, except in my dreams it’s always the Brooklyn Museum.)

###

When I saw the movie in 1980, I also read the novel, and I have to say, the novel went straight over my head. I suppose because the theme of the novel was semiotics, which is a discipline I’ve never been able to wrap my head around.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: Semiotics is the study of how meanings are derived from signs. I get that intellectually. But I am utterly incapable of stripping interpretation from signs or symbols; I can’t view them in the abstract.

The process is easier, I suppose, when I look at how semiotics functions in the biological realm. For example, a pheromone is a sign, but it’s also a collection of peptides; its function as a signal of sexual arousal is fairly easy to separate out from its molecular essence.

I can’t do that at all within the realm of human communication.

If I look at an image of a man hanging on a tree, I immediately see all the stories associated with that image—the Hanged Man, the Golden Bough, Christ; I can’t separate signs from their universe of meanings; interpretation is always an immediate given—which is why I would never be a good scientist. But also why I’m a good storyteller, I suppose.

###

Just before I went to bed, I slipped out for a few minutes to stare at the sky. No light pollution here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley!

Orion (which is one of only two constellations I can confidently identify) was spread across the heavens.

Once upon a time, it seems I could identify the individual pulsating stars in the Pleiades that dangle from his belt. But not anymore.

What does that mean?

In two weeks, Saturn and Jupiter move into conjunction in the sign of Aquarius. The cojoined star will be very bright, Star of Bethlehem-ish bright: It will dominate the sky.

What does that mean?

Very boring day.

I worked!

Very boring work.

I put in my five miles of tromping, which is all that stands between me and a starring role in a movie called, The Human Cream Cheese.

I listened to This American Life, and thought about how much I hate socially relevant journalism.

In fact, I hate social relevance in general and long to live in a world that’s organized just like endless episodes of The Real Housewives.

It is all just Too Much.



Which side am I on? The wrong side, obvs!

But you know what? FUCK IT.

In a Mood.

No excuses for it.

Weather still sunny, autumn at its most gently majestic. Went for another long tromp. Snagged a remunerative client for the winter lull when usually, there aren’t any clients. Even completed that Tedious Bureaucratic Task that’s been dangling over my head like Damocles’s sword since whenever was forever.

But I’m feeling disconnected.

Best I can figure is that the Mood is a response to two bits of gossip.

First, FMomUG’s marriage.

Second, Caro Snowdrop’s announcement—made on FB, of course!—that she’s pregnant.

Two people whose lives brushed up against mine for what in retrospect turned out to be the briefest of moments.

But, for whatever reason, I am staggering under the weight of connections severed and lives tranquilly meandering on even though I ME PATRIZIA am no longer a part of them.

I mean—how fucking dare they, right?

###

In other news, I have been an industrious little squirrel gathering my acorns! It’s all about the Benjamins! I’ve been using credit cards waaaaaaay too much plus the car needs work that should be done before there’s ice on the roads plus the cat likes to eat, plus… plus… plus…

So, I am hunkering down and generating revenue like mad. In between binge-watching Top Chef, which is kind of like Love Island for intellectual foodies.

I am supposed to go see Turandot in about an hour and show up at a dinner party later tonight.

These are two events I have absolutely no interest in participating in though I guess they sounded good when I accepted the invitations.

When I’m in a Mood, it’s difficult to mediate what comes out of my mouth. I’m afraid I’m going to be sarcastic, withering, and malicious if I utter a single word. That means I have to sentence myself to complete silence.

If I'm gonna be silent, I'd rather be alone.

###

Also, I went shopping at Adams Fairacre Farms yesterday, which is the upscale supermarket chain here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.

Every place has one of these supermarket chains. Grocery stores where the aisles are wide, where fluorescent light fixtures are verboten, where the produce is fresh and beautiful, where the meat and fish were yanked straight out of an illustration in Bon Appétit.

In Ithaca, this supermarket chain is Wegman’s.

Standing in Adams, suddenly I thought, You’ll never be able to go into Wegman’s in Ithaca again. It will remind you too much of Ben.

I wanted to cry.

How is it possible Ben is dead?

I want to stand on the porch of the Tburg flat and talk to him about America’s Food Network fetish.

Now, I’m the only guardian of those hundreds of memories, floaters from an increasingly irrelevant past.

It’s a really lonely feeling.

Torture by T-burg delayed till possibly tomorrow but possibly till some indeterminate point in the future, which is ducky with me ‘cause frankly, I love my kid, but if I could love him in some other geographical location, far from the weird, creepy drama, that would a Good Thing.

I texted with him late into the night. Consequently, this is two nights in a row in which I’ve slept very poorly.

BUT!

I did manage to do some revenue generation.

And I went for a run.

And I baked even more tomato pies (tis the season) and a banana cake.

And planned a couple of roadtrips for late August/early September.

###

I’ve been thinking a lot about karma.

I’ve also been thinking about the distribution of wealth.



This is a picture of a bunch of rich people on David Geffin’s yacht. I am thinking they are all a bunch of personally evil, slimy fucks—Geffen and Bezos in particular—and wondering why karma has been so remarkably lenient with them.

Maybe karma is just for poor people.

Fiftieth high school reunion on Sunday, so I must start the glamming today—hair, nails, outfit choices, etcetera. Do I wear The Fascinator, or is that too much in this group? (We are all overachieving crones! Except for me. I am more what you might call an underachieving crone.) Must do my hair! Shocking, I know, but my hair is not naturally aubergine!

BB took me out to lunch yesterday at that fabulous Indian restaurant in Rhinebeck, and I told him my La Belle et la Bête story, and we made it out of Oblong Books without buying a thing (though Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success did murmur sarcastic come-hithers.)

Did some writing on The Work in Progress.

Rudolph Valentino lunching with his mother in the Famous Players-Lasky commissary has inexplicably morphed into a group of Cantonese prostitutes advising June about the I Ching and Kagel exercises. Hey! I’m gonna go for it.

Continued my Jonathan Franzen reading blitz with Freedom, which is awfully good and moreover, actually has some likeable characters, one of whom is named (wait for it!) ...

PATRIZIA!

Though she’s always called “Patty.” (Sidebar: I, too, was called “Patty" until I was 25 or so and put my foot down.)

Franzen’s stream-of-consciousness inside the head of a female basketball star on the court is wondrous to read, and that interview between failed punk musician Katz and rich kid Zachary—I think it’s good for the honesty of rock and roll and good for the country in general to see Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop for what they really were: as manufacturers of wintergreen Chiclets—is genius.

Else?

Bush peonies are finally in bloom. I have huge vases of them clustered throughout the Patrizia-torium:




The Patrizia-torium itself is quite cluttered. I should try to organize it. After restoring my hair to full aubergine.

"These French fries are cold," BB told the waiter at Lola’s pleasantly enough when he brought our lunch. "Could you warm them up please?"

The waiter glared at BB, turned around, and marched away.

Ten minutes later, the waiter came back with a plate of French fries, slammed them on our table without a word.

The French fries were cold. What were we supposed to do? Eat cold French fries because Lola's is such an impossibly hip café?

"Do you want me to go back to the tip jar and fish out your tip?" I joked to BB. He'd left a generous one.

"No, that's okay," BB said.

BB is much nicer than I am.

###

It was good to hang out with BB because I am feeling fragile/fragile/fragile, and whenever I’m around BB, I feel enveloped in affection. BB likes me. BB enjoys me. When I’m around BB, I don’t feel any need to self-censor.

“So, put them on a Keyline trolley,” BB said when I described to him the absolute B|L|O|C|K I had arrived at with the Work in Progress. “You might have to do some research.”

“I’m pretty sure the Hudson Valley Library System has no information whatsoever on New York City transit systems in the 1920s,” I said.

“So, get a Brooklyn library card. Anybody who lives in the state of New York can get a Brooklyn library card.”

Ding! Ding! Ding!

I also discovered that BB spends huge amounts of time practicing the piano. I knew he played the piano—every time I visit him in his Catskills aerie, he gets up from his piano to let me in.

But I guess I hadn’t realized that occupied so much of his time.

It made me very happy to discover this.

He plays because he enjoys it.

He doesn't talk about it.

He has no ambitions to rent a concert venue and surprise the world with his expert fingering of Rachmaninoff and Debussy.

He just likes to play.

And now I have the image of BB sitting in his Catskills aerie on a winter night while the snow swirls all around him—or swoons if you want to go Joycean.

###

Else?

The car’s been diagnosed. If all goes well, if the catalytic converter I ordered shows up when it’s supposed to show up, the car should be discharged on Thursday. I managed to whittle 20% off the estimated price of repairs with my Internet sleuthing. So that was something.

And despite the maneuverings of my wonderful new IT fix-it guy, my printer is still not printing the way it should be printing, so I’m gonna need to figure out some other way to print the stuff that needs to be printed in order to finish the Robin Art Installation, which I will be carting up to Ithaca.

I also want to figure out some wonderful bday present for Susie.

Her father was actually Carlos Castenada’s thesis advisor. I was thinking that could be leveraged somehow into the bday present. But how?

I’m still sad. Really, really sad.

But I don’t know why.