Mallory's Camera

A most fabulous visit to D.C.!

Alex is an epic hostess, so the two and two-half days felt like a mini-version of one of those fabulous house parties you read about in British novels: the adorable house that is just like a museum to Alex's quirky, interesting tastes, an enormous range of actual museums—we did the National Museum of African American History & Culture and Hillwood, the Marjorie Merriweather Post mansion where the Fabergé Eggs live—splendid weather; adorable felines; and non-stop conversation, perfectly timed so that the moment it began to pall was the morning I left to come back.

Alex also made it into The New York Times!



She had been to the Science Protest March just before I arrived.

Alex may be the only person in the world who's perfectly recognizable from the back of her head.

###

She & her husband live in the same house her husband was born & brought up in, & every inch is filled with the most delightful kitsch. Kitsch is very much my own design aesthetic, so I scampered 'round the domicile, taking Art Photos™ at every opportunity:





Alex adopts people—by which I mean if she sees an opportunity to help them thrive, she helps them thrive! I see this in the way she opens her house to young people—presently, she has a very adorable young Russian woman, Arina, living with her—and to some extent, I see it in her friendship with me. It is a really lovely quality—and a rare quality.



So, the African American Museum...

It is a great museum, but I had some issues with the way the permanent exhibition is designed.

The permanent exhibition recreates the history of slavery—which is not necessarily the history you think you know. The exhibits are arranged chronologically, starting with the journey from Africa and the Middle Passage in dark, narrow halls in the lowest concourse of the building and culminating with the contemporary experience of African Americans in the somewhat brighter higher concourse—although given that, ironically enough, D.C.'s Black Lives Matter Plaza was being dismantled the very weekend I was in town, the contemporary experience may not be that much brighter.

There is no escape from the permanent exhibition, no easy way to drop in and out of the pieces you might specifically want to see. The design immerses you in the entire experience—and while I understand the intentionality of that design, it does make it difficult for people like me whose attention span gives out after about an hour and a half, no matter how worthy I may deem the overall experience.

It's an exhibition crafted for first-time visitors, in other words.

Repeat visitors are going to have a difficult time with it.

And even this first-time visitor developed a mild headache—it was so dark, so claustrophobic! And, of course, I understood that this headache was a measure of the exhibit's success—the suffering of the enslaved translating physically into my own discomfort.

Except—I was in a position to terminate my discomfort.

And wandered out somewhere around the beginning of Reconstruction.





Hillwood, in contrast, was all opulence & comfort as befits the spring-&-fall mansion of one of the obscenely rich.

We had a delightfully enthusiastic & mildly wacky tour guide:



Marjorie Merriweather Post became a connoisseur of 20th-century Tsarist art, something by accident—her third husband was FDR's ambassador to Russia. And the pieces were absolutely magnificent:





But I couldn't help thinking that in essence, they were not all that dissimilar to the lovely whimsies scattered around Alex's house.

###


Alex said one other thing I want to remember.

Alex is a good cook. A comfortable cook. And we were talking about cooking, how challenging menu planning can be, & she said, "Well, of course, if you know your way around a kitchen, you don't see a loaf of bread, you see four sets of sandwiches, and one serving of French toast, and possibly bread pudding."

In other words, cooking isn't about recipes; it's about ingredients.

Words to live by.

On the night of my birthday, I dreamed I was staging some sort of circus performance for all the people who lived in the very small town in which I lived, only I hadn’t rehearsed the circus performance, so all of it was coming off like the play Briony stages in the opening pages of Atonement (on my mind because Ichabod & I listened to the novel’s opening chapters on the drive up to Ithaca.)

Simultaneously, as I was performing on the stage, I was also climbing up a steep rope ladder with a three-year-old RTT. Ah, dream physics!

From the stage, you can see how boring people are finding this, I thought—and indeed from my vantage point on the stage, I could see a sea of people stretching, yawning, talking to each other, doing everything but keeping their eye on the performance. One man was complaining to another, I loaned her my horse. And she isn’t even using it as part of the show!

I wasn’t using the horse because I had forgotten its name.

And somehow, it would be cringe-embarrassing to inquire its name!

Fuck that, I thought. And called out to the man, Tell me the name of the horse again, puleeze!

Toothpick Caravansary, he said.

So, I called out, Toothpick Caravansary! And instantly, the horse came galloping up to me, ready & eager to perform! It was a huge horse, snow-white, with wings like Pegasus.

And then I woke up.

###

I had a fabulous time chasing the eclipse though I can’t honestly say I found very much of it.

I’m also feeling much too lazy to write it all up.

On trips, I don’t do long-form writing (which requires solitude, coffee, & the ability to scratch myself without the fear that somebody’s watching.) Instead, I do Instagram Stories. (And speaking of audiences—see dream above—on Instagram Stories, I have quite a different audience. A much larger audience! 😀 )

So herewith is my Instagram story. Laid out like Tarot cards! With annotations.



I’ve been using Airbnb for 10 years now. And never had any bad experiences. Until this trip!!!!!

Did I allow this to interfere with my determination to have a fabulous trip? No, I did not!

Exceeding escape velocity! Always fabulous! You just roll when the space shuttle rolls.



I mean, like WTF??????

Scuzzball Georg had canceled because he claimed the shower had broken. We assume you’ll want to take SHOWERS while you’re here, right? he wrote cattily.

Okay, granted, I don’t know what kind of injury the shower had sustained. Possibly the Hand of God had reached down from the sky and snapped the shower in half!!! Or perhaps the space aliens who had Airbnb’ed the flat just before we were due to arrive had vaporized it. I don’t know!

But given the extreme difficulty of all my previous communications with Georg and given the fact that once, long ago, while I was living in the Cement Bungalow, absolutely destitute, and the shower broke, I fixed it myself—it took exactly two and a half hours and a trip to the hardware store for $20 worth of parts—I strongly suspected that Georg was fucking us over. That some of his creepy friends wanted to use this flat as Eclipse Base Camp, and he decided we were expendable. Because honestly—if I can fix a shower, anybody can fix a shower.

The second asshole Airbnb host had made some kind of out-of-system arrangement with a current guest and had forgotten to take her place off automatic confirmation. She thought it was important to explain this to me at exhaustive length as if in this way, she could win my sympathy and my agreement that, in fact, she was really the victim here. FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!

Airbnb really needs to vet its hosts better.



Unfortunately, none of the video Instagram Stories I uploaded will transfer here as videos, so you will not truly experience lovely Cascadilla Creek, with all its ducks and other assorted wildlife, flowing by the really palatial Airbnb where we ended up. But it was quite lovely. And when I win Lotto, I’m gonna live out the remainder of my life in that Airbnb.

###


It was mostly cloudy at Lake Canandaigua on Eclipse Day itself. RTT’s delightful pal Maddie accompanied us; she works for the Fish & Game Department, and was actually on call throughout the day, so we got to eavesdrop on her many exciting work-related calls—That’s not really the way to lick beavers when they infest! said very earnestly—on the drive up.

Once there, we got to nibble the luscious picnic kindly provided by lookfar while we waited to see which would come first: the eclipse or the rain. I wandered around the rapidly filling parking lot, asking random strangers: Do you think it’s gonna clear up???

One couple who had driven up all the way from Scranton, Pennsylvania—shoutout to Office fans!—assured me that they had been studying cloud maps for days and that Lake Canandaigua had the best prediction for cloud-free skies!

Another couple assured me that at the exact moment of the eclipse, the skies would part—

How do you know that? I asked.

Because that’s science, they told me.

The clouds did break for one brief instant during the pre-game warmup, allowing me one quick snap of the Dragon Eating the Sun.

But the skies were one large cloud at the moment of totality, so no corona, no diamond ring, no night sky beaming unfamiliar constellations.

However.

It got dark. Really, really dark. And cold.

Even though all around us, we could see that it was still light:



And that was really spectacular.

And then, the moment totality had passed, it got bright again with no crepuscular transition.

And that was really spectacular, too.



Moosewood Restaurant is famous on account of the Moosewood Cookbook franchise.

The food was excellent.

But the waitstaff acted as if they were doing us an enormous favor to let us eat there.

So, I don’t think I would ever go back.

Friendly waitstaff are an enormous part of my eating out experience.



The Corning Glass Museum is truly one of my very favorite fine arts museums. And seeing it was fabulous.

But this visit wasn’t anywhere as magical as the visit Carol & I made in 2019—which made me realize that much of the magic of that visit was actually an actualization of Carol’s and my friendship.

Sadly, our plan to meet up twice a year for exciting roadtrip adventures was derailed by COVID. It seems unlikely we will ever kickstart it again.

###

When we got back from Corning, there was yet another Airbnb misadventure—not my story to tell—but anyway, lookfar & her party judged it prudent to head back to D.C.

Fortunately, it proved very easy to score another Airbnb, really cheap and perfectly adequate.

This was good because I was feeling overstimulated, desperately in need of retiring to the Sunken Place where I could watch endless episodes of The Real Housewives of the Potomac.

That Robyn!!!! What a bitch!!!

###

The next morning, I got up very early and saw these guys in front of the house:



“They call ‘em ‘ghetto deer’,” said the guy who had stopped next to me to watch them, too.

“Kind of an offensive term, don’t you think?” I asked pleasantly.

The guy was black.

He blinked a few times before replying slowly, “You know, you’re right.”

###

Ichabod & I jiggedy-jigged back to the Hudson Valley, whence I put him on a train for a few nights of age-appropriate fun in the Big City.

The kiskas not seem to have suffered overly in my absence but were pleased to have their Ambulatory Can-Opener back.

And today is my 72nd birthday. It is raining, but all the pink trees are in full bloom.

###

Here’s what I look like as I am composing and uploading Instagram Stories:

My go-to garden store has decided planting season is over. (Unless you want to plant broccoli, cabbage, or cauliflower. Which I don’t.)

Not a squash seedling to be had.

So in a little while, I’ll trek on over to the Most Fabulous Garden Store in All of Dutchess County to see if they have any spaghetti squash seedlings.

And if they don’t, I’ll give up on the Spaghetti Squash Project for this year.

###

Also, Newport, Rhode Island, is definitely out so far as upcoming road trips are concerned.

I priced lodging: Three nights comes to $1,200. For an Airbnb or a hotel.

I like old mansions.

But I don’t like them that much.

###

This puts a return trip to the Bread & Puppets Theater at the top of my road trip list.

Assuming there still is a Bread & Puppets Theater.

The torrential rains that washed out Highland Falls in the Hudson Valley stalled over Vermont. The photos are crazy. This was Montpelier two days ago:



Glover, home of the Bread & Puppets Theater, is 50 miles north of Montpelier.

Who knows whether its thousands upon thousands of magnificent puppets survived, housed as they were in an ancient ramshackle barn?

Peter Schumann, the Theater’s creator, doesn’t approve of art as a commodity and therefore doesn’t care whether or not the puppets survive.

I care whether or not the puppets survive.

I’ve been combing the Internet for any crumbs of info.

But, of course, there aren’t any. It’s the type of human interest story that makes it into the second section of The New York Times maybe three weeks afterward: One of the casualties of the recent storm…

###

Even if the puppets did survive this time, they won't next time. (Or maybe the time after that.)

These rains are the New Normal. Climate change, doncha know.

Plus, their creator believes in transience.

A philosophy I admire when it comes to sand mandalas.

But not when it comes to puppets.

Mostly we had the Big Fun on the road trip.

We hit the dope parlors of Great Barrington on the drive up—which allowed us to enjoy Vermont in a happy daze.

We stayed in a strange little town called St. Johnsbury, close to the Canadian border, which had a heavy but not unpleasant Stephen King vibe.

St. Johnsbury is ancestral home to the Fairbanks Bros who ran Vermont for about 70 years back in the 19th century. Thirty years before the Civil War, one of the bros invented something called the platform scale. The platform scale immediately revolutionized railroad transportation since the weight of mercantile goods transported by rail could now be determined with accuracy. The bros earned a shitload of money, some of which they cycled into cultural improvements for the town.

They built a natural history museum. Kind of like a bonsai version of the American Museum of Natural History. It even uses the same kind of Gothic brick, imported from the Southlands at considerable expense, one assumes:



They also built an atheneum, which is a fancy word for “library.” It’s stocked with artworks from (deservedly) obscure and forgotten Hudson River School painters. Of course, the Fairbanks would collect bad Hudson River School artwork!



We arrived in St. Johnsbury on Easter. Easter doesn’t really enter my brain very much. It’s like, Oh. That’s a real holiday?

But because it was Easter, everything was closed. We drove around and around for close to an hour following Yelp reviews, passing the one single open restaurant again and again.

It was a Chinese restaurant.

“I’ve had really bad experiences with ethnic restaurants in small towns,” Ichabod would tell me, driving past. He didn’t want to use the term “Chinese restaurant.”

Finally, when it became apparent we weren’t gonna find any place else, I remarked, “You know, my people have a long history with Chinese restaurants on Christian holidays.”

And we stopped.

And the food wasn’t bad.

###

Next morning, we drove to Glover, site of the Bread & Puppets museum:



After that, we drove across a covered bridge and down a long, twisty, narrow country road to Montpellier, the state capital, and tromped around for a bit. Montpellier has a population less than 8,000; it’s the smallest state capital in the U.S., and it was so weird tromping around this tiny village and thinking, This is Vermont’s citadel of power!

Vermont is filled with old hippies who migrated here from New York City sometime in the late 20th century. I imagine it’s also filled with native-grown Live Free Or Die types and that the two demographic pools try to ignore each other. That’s the way it works here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley except the interlopers (of whom I am one) are of more recent vintage.

On the way back to St. Johnsbury, we stopped in at a maple sugar farm. We missed the harvest by just one week:



That night we went down to the local brewpub, got companionably smashed, and talked, as we almost always do when we spend significant one-on-one time together.

Mostly, Ichabod talks.

About his childhood.

Which it’s always difficult for me to hear because he tells me he didn’t have a very happy childhood, and I can remember going out of my way to provide him with a happy childhood, trying so desperately, desperately hard—

“I never felt safe,” Ichabod told me. “I mean, you and my Dad are very much alike in certain ways. And one of those ways is that you and he are the only two people I know who consistently question the fiber of reality in a profound way—”

“Right,” I say. “I always figure that I’m really at a New Jersey garden club meeting, and at any moment, I’ll finally be able to see that. You can blame that on my mother, your Grandmother Lynn. She took me to see The Manchurian Candidate when I was nine years old. And, you know: There’s a reason I married your father.”

“I never felt safe,” Ichabod repeated.

Break my heart a little harder, I thought.

But of course, this isn’t about me. This is about him.

###

But I think that’s the reason why I subsequently had such a bad night.

It was one of those nights when I could not fall asleep.

Oh, I must have slept. I didn’t toss or turn.

But my consciousness did not recede into the blissful void. I never left the room.

Consequently, I did not feel fit to drive the next morning.

Which meant poor Ichabod had to drive us all the way back to the Poughkeepsie train station. A 300-mile drive.

We stopped in White River Junction—“White People Junction,” Ichabod quipped, and I gotta say, Vermont is the whitest place I’ve ever seen: I saw one Black person the entire 36 hours I was there—to have brunch with one of his old Stanford pals who had relocated there:



Thing is it’s obvious how Not Happy Ichabod is right now. I blame it on his job—his workload is unbelievable; his management—in terms of getting help or mentorship—nonexistent.

And the job forces him to live in a small town where he does not feel at home and which is very limited in terms of making cultural or social resources available to him.

So, he’s depressed.

Exogenous reasons for depression are very much Not a Thing right now.

No, if you’re depressed, it’s gotta be because of some deep internal psychological issue—like you didn’t feel “safe” as a child.

Anyway, because he’s feeling depressed, he’s not taking care of himself in fundamental ways like diet and exercise. And I saw this, and my heart broke for him, but I didn’t say anything because any word from a mother to adult children on matters like these immediately translates into reproach, or harsh criticism, or an attempt to guilt-trip.

And besides—it’s not like he doesn’t know he’s not taking care of himself around diet and exercise. What possible new information would I add to the equation by pointing this out?

But the drive home was a slog. Didn’t help that the weather had abruptly turned: It was fuckin’ snowing! In late April! So not even the passing landscape was fun to look at.

In retrospect, I probably should have decided to stay home when Ichabod called me to tell me he wanted to come out for my birthday.

It’s not like there aren’t dozens of great things to sight-see here. And that way he could have slept 14 hours a night. He needs to do that! When he’s prepping for trials, he only gets four hours sleep a night.

But I really wanted to see those puppets! That desire had been simmering away on one of the mind’s back burners for months, so when he asked me, What would you like to do…?, I blurted it out.

Oh, well.

We did have that one great day.

Madeleine is now living in Queens, so he was off to hang out with her another day until he headed home.

I cried after I let him off at the train station.

I wish I’d been a better mother.

But you can never be a better mother. Because as a mother, what you focus upon is not repeating your own mother’s mistakes. And that only leaves you more room to make your own mistakes.



Yesterday, I finally toddled off to the garden. (I think that’s it for the snow this spring. I hope that’s it for the snow this spring.)

I dug up half of my lower plot, cleared the strawberry patch, and replanted the strawberry trailers.

The D.H. Lawrence bio had arrived in the mail while I was gone, so I took to my bed with that and spent a low-key evening in bed, reading, nibbling grapes and cheese, and attempting to watch the second season of Russian Doll.

The second season of Russian Doll is not very good.

And now I must commence the next Remunerative Project before toddling off to the garden to dig up the other half of the lower plot.

Dreamed I was in a very strange industrial city with Jeana and a little girl who was somehow related to me. Some paternal relative or another had just had a baby, and they wanted to show me a photo except the photo display technology, while ostensibly an iPhone camera, had evolved into something deeply weird, and they couldn’t get it to show the picture, which was somehow my fault.

She doesn’t like us, Jeana told the little girl. (True enough in the non-dream life.)

Then I ran into Bill Hare who told me Jim Breece was vacationing in the city. We met up with Jim who was eating a strange carnivore meal that consisted completely of oversized turkey legs. More stage business with the weird camera, which had a filter consisting of an enormous oversized yellow crystal through which I was trying to snap pictures of Jim eating his meal.

You know, Jim always had an enormous crush on you, Bill told me.

I was somewhat dumbfounded by this info.

And then I woke up.



(Click for full size image)

I had a fabulous time at the Jersey Shore, just fabulous.

Forty-eight hours filled with all the things I like best. Namely: Lying out in the sun, reading, interesting cuisines, murals, economic geography, wild life, moon rises, ice cream, bourbon, reality TV, and Art Photos™. My friend Flavia spent a significant chunk of her childhood here, so I caught that fascinating dual perspective of The Way Things Were Then vs. The Way Things Are Now.

The Atlantic Ocean has a very different sense to it than the Pacific. It’s a different color, for one thing. A much darker, more somber blue:



The first night, we had fabulous Ethiopian food:



And then we went to the World’s Best Ice Cream Place and scored five pints of the world’s best ice cream:



Next morning, we set forth on a tour of the Asbury Park boardwalk.

Now, I only knew Asbury Park from Bruce Springsteen, and I am not—rare among Americans of my vintage, I know, I know—a big Bruce Springsteen fan.

But I fell utterly in love with the Asbury Park boardwalk:







The old convention center cum Grand Arcade is still partially in use. It has this amazing faience exterior embellished with all sorts of architectural whimsies, now in disrepair:







The inside with its rows of oversized windows has something a Gare de Lyons feel. (Photo above.)

On the other side of the Asbury Park boardwalk is the old casino, a cavernous space that’s currently being used for some really interesting art installations, including Great Paintings reimagined as modern scenes:



(Click for full-sized image)



On the far end of the casino, a lone musician played his sax:

Watch on YouTube

From Asbury Park, we tromped into Ocean Grove, a village that started out as a Methodist Bible camp, and—get this!—still has hundreds of little tent cottages, clustered around an enormous, gloomy Methodist meeting hall known as the Great Auditorium:





Deeply fascinating to me because Pacific Grove, the little town right next to Monterey where I lived for 12 years, also started out as a Methodist Bible camp, though in Pacific Grove, the tent dwellings eventually evolved into tiny jewel-box Victorians.

Until 40 years ago, it was illegal to drive a car in Ocean Grove on Sundays! That's how Methodist the town is.

I could go on writing about the fabulousness of the Jersey Shore for days, but if I did, I wouldn’t get any work done, and my cat would starve.

Two other things worth noting:

Just after the sun set, I said to Flavia, “Oh, look! There’s a cat in the dunes!”

But it wasn’t a cat, it was a fox! Three foxes, in fact—they’re crepescular animals. Must have been juveniles, probably littermates, because they were clearly playing with each other. Adult foxes are solitary animals. We watched, entranced, for 15 minutes or so:



Then, after it was dark, we went down to the beach and watched the Harvest Moon rise out of the ocean. I have never seen a full moon rise out of the ocean before! The photo doesn’t capture the complete optical illusion, unfortunately. The bright planet to the right and above the moon line is Jupiter:



Anyway, the Jersey Shore. I am a fan!

In my dream, I wasn’t human; I wasn’t even a carbon-based life form. I don’t know what I was, except I was playing some sort of game, and the squares of the game were placed over water, and I knew if I fell into that water, that would be the end of my—well, no, not life. But consciousness. So I had to strategize my next move very, very, very carefully.

###

Woke up and felt sad. Then I read this story and started to weep and couldn’t stop for 15 minutes.

###

Life is fine. I’ve completed all the prep for Friday’s road trip and most of the prep for the California trip. Must decide whether I want to visit Aimee in Vermont after I get back from Baltimore. Generally, road trips are my favorite things, but recently, it seems like all I really want to do is sit and space out, and I can’t decide whether that’s torpor I should fight or some kind of natural meditation impulse I should indulge.

More than most other people I know, I have a real need to sit with my eyes unfocused, staring out windows, for an hour or so every day. It’s like a physiological need or something.

The garden in late summer is beautiful in its colors and terrible in its reminders that this, too, is passing:

Spent all day yesterday in a deep, depressive funk – which had nothing to do with the awfulness of Everyday Above Ground and everything to do with the rain, which just would not relent!

It rained, and it rained, and it rained. And then it rained some more. And so, I spent all day thinking about those poor people living in Lagos and Somalia, or dying of slow, painful, wasting diseases in other parts of the world. Or dying of quick, murderous assaults.

Any way you slice it, life is suffering and pain. There really is no payoff for being alive.

This morning, though, shafts of wan sunlight are going mano a mano with the cloud cover, and I’m feeling 10,000% better. Life may be marginally endurable. (That’s a highly qualified conditional.) Because without life, there would be no ripe peaches or crème brulee. Without life, there would be no Real Housewives of New York!

###

Sometime during the fever pitch of yesterday’s anomie, I got into a political argument with an acquaintance. That sort of thing nearly always results in self-reproach and yep, even a little bit of self-hatred the following morning. I mean, honestly! Did I really think I could change his mind? (Snort!) No, I just love the mellifluous sounds that come out of my throat when I open my mouth. I have such a large vocabulary. I enjoy showing it off.

“So, you really think there’s a difference between Republicans and Democrats?” I sneered.

And I would have won the argument, too, except my acquaintance wasn’t in the least bit interested in arguing; all he was interested in was venting his immense hatred for Donald Trump.

See, I’m not entirely sure I hate Donald Trump.

I mean – in a way, it’s as if some Borscht Belt comedian has been elected President, you know? Donald Trump is such an endless source of laughs; it's hard to hate someone responsible for so much mirth.

I know, I know -- I probably should hate him. Legislative failures notwithstanding, he has managed to do a fair amount of damage in his short term of office, notably in the fields of consumer, worker, and environmental protections.

Here’s the thing, though: You know the most effective way to combat rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Plant more trees.

It really is that simple.

But such a low-tech prescription would make no money for anyone, which is probably why no one on the Left is touting in as a solution. No, the solution clearly must involve Expensive Technology and carbon taxes that will inevitably shift the costs of cleaning up the planet onto the shoulders of the poor.

(Meanwhile, that Expensive Technology is waiting impatiently in the wings for the current tech bubble to pop so that it can become the next economic bubble.)

Ever wonder why the Democratic Party – then in power – did so little to change Wall Street after the 2008 housing crash? It’s because Remocrats, Depublicans – they both like money! And they view periodic breakdowns of the financial system kind of like forest fires – necessary so that new little bubbles will grow! So that they can make more money!

###

But anyway, who gives a shit about this kind of stuff? Certainly not me.

I’m too busy trying to solve the mystery of the strange little town of Windsor, New York where I espied this strange little shop a year or so ago:



Here’s a close-up of that front window:



Look at all those amazing dead things! Don’t you want them in your living room? I know I do!

Who is Amanda April June, why does she have a shop in Windsor, and why is that shop always closed? Also why is there a shop completely dedicated to Lionel toy trains in Windsor? These are the real mysteries. Not the rise and (inevitable) fall of Donald Trump.

This may be one of my favorite pictures of Max ev-uh:



“Saudi Arabia is set to execute some kid today,” said B. “A Shiite kid. Eighteen years old. You know what his crime was? Two years ago, when he was going to school in Michigan, he attended a rally that was critical of the Saudi government.”

“And the moral of that story is: Never go to school in Michigan,” I said. “That is just insanely barbaric. And stupid.”

“Humans have been executing other humans for insanely barbaric and stupid reasons for thousands of years,” B said.

“Yeah. Right. Well. That’s why I never get too bent out of shape whenever I’m confronted by the prospect of human extinction,” I said. “Human beings are obviously a failed experiment. Sometimes I wake up, and I think, It’s all just too beautiful – this sky, these trees, these wonderful sunsets. And then I remind myself: This is sentimentality wished on you by the limitations of your sensory receptors. If you could perceive these phenomena as they really are, you wouldn’t think they were beautiful, you wouldn’t think they were horrible. They would just be. Frankly I think it would be a good thing if some Stephen King mutation virus wiped out the human race.”

“Not me,” said B. “I think it would be a good thing if the aliens invaded. And the human race learned to work together against a common enemy.”

###

On Thursday, I took RTT out driving. And he did reasonably well. Although clearly, he didn’t like it much.

After that, I chauffeured him around on various errands and slowly watched his mood darken for no appreciable reason – much as my own mood occasionally darkens for no appreciable reason.

We are very much alike, RTT and I. Although he is much more charismatic and therefore extroverted than I am.



In the evening, B and I went to the Zerbini Family Circus at the T-burg Fairgrounds. Quite the nostalgic little circus, and one does wish all those animal rights protestors and PETA people would go fuck themselves. I traveled with a circus for seven months; I’m in a position to know. Circus people don’t mistreat their animals: For one thing, they’re tied to those animals by strong bonds of affection; for another, those animals are their livelihood, which for practical reasons, they’re not going to undermine.



Yesterday, the BoyZ were both at work, so I went exploring. Well. Not New World exploring. I drove to Montour Falls where I hadn’t been for at least 20 years.



See this house? Twenty years ago, I wanted to buy it. Twenty years ago, I was actually in a position to buy it. The problem, though, is that it was in Montour Falls! What the hell do you do in Montour Falls?

The falls after which the town is named are directly in back of the house:



Twenty years later, the town is slowly, slowly gaining a little prosperity on account of its proximity to Ithaca, which has become a hot real estate market.

The Montour Falls library has real Tiffany windows:



In the evening, RTT’s girlfriend came to town, specifically to accept my invitation to take them out to dinner.

(I’m afraid I couldn’t take them out anywhere fancy since that asshole still hasn’t paid me my money, and it’s looking like Small Claims Court is in my future.)

The RTT gf is extremely beautiful and extremely thin, so thin, in fact, that I wondered about anorexia. But no – I saw her put actual food in her mouth and chew it. And her teeth are flawless, so no bulimia.

Her name is Marissa, and she seems very sophisticated! She just got back from a month in France studying at the Sorbonne – she and RTT Skyped for hours every day! I like her, and, of course, I love RTT. Still, watching them last night – RTT had invited several members of the crew over, so the house was like the set of Entourage – I wondered how she could put up with this: RTT was forcing her to watch multiple episodes of Wet Hot American Summer as a testament of LUV.

“Don’t you think Marissa would rather be watching the original Breathless with Jean-Paul Belmondo?” I asked.

“Nah, she is loving this!” said RTT, and Marissa laughed. Of course, she’s only 20. Maybe she doesn’t know what she’d rather be doing yet.

Spent the first part of Mothers Day in a snit because the offspring were pretty late with those adulatory phone calls plus neither of them appears to have the slightest inclination to tattoo “Mom” in a big heart on their Popeye muscles.

###

Went running – and almost literally ran into Donnelly Paulson, himself running for the Dutchess County Legislature. Although, unfortunately, not from my district.

I suspect Donnelly spends so much time walking his dog on the grounds of the Vanderbilt Estate because he sees it as a way to connect with potential voters. He’s not shy about introducing himself: “Hi! I’m Donnelly Paulson, and I’m running for…”

When I encountered him yesterday, though, he was a bit shaken up.

“I’ve just spent 20 minutes talking to a couple of Trump voters,” he told me. “And they don’t seem to care one whit that Trump has broken practically every one of his campaign promises.”

I shrugged. “Even Nixon after his impeachment managed to maintain a 28% approval rating. You figure Trump’s gonna retain about 30% of his base no matter what. They didn’t vote for him because of his campaign promises. They voted for him because he pisses off the right people. They voted with their middle fingers, you might say.”

Donnelly shook his head. “I just don’t understand it.”

“Well,” I said. “You can’t afford to alienate them. Just because they voted for Trump doesn’t mean they won’t vote for you. In local elections, people tend to vote for candidates they know and like personally. Politics is really secondary. Most people know Jack Shit about local issues.”

Indeed.

Donnelly is waaaaaay hunky. Hunky to the point that were I 15 or 20 years younger, I might seriously entertain a crush. Tall, dark-haired. Did I mention tall? Tall! Looks a bit like George Mallory after whom my LJ is named. A social studies teacher at Poughkeepsie High School, which has got to be one of the noblest and hardest jobs ever invented.

In the evening, Pat and Ed invited me over for dinner. And that was nice, too. Excellent food, stimulating conversation.

So all in all, a good day.

Except at one in the morning, I woke up in a complete panic.

I was actually so freaked that I had to drink myself back to sleep, which is always problematic.

The panic seems to be revolving around my planning for my Memorial Day trip. Except there’s no reason for me to be panicking over my Memorial Day trip. I like Carol; I’m certain I will have a good time hanging out with her. I like Chicago; I’m certain I will have a good time hanging out there. Whistler’s Mother is back at the Chicago Art Institute! Plus Toulouse-Lautrec and Sunday on the Isle of Grant Jatte! And the Thorne dollhouses!

There’s some part of me, though, that’s getting more and more and more reclusive. Like really, I’ve got my living space configured precisely the way I like it, so why should I ever leave?

I suppose that’s the part of me that’s raising all that fuss at one in the morning.

The Biggest Buddha in the Western Hemisphere lives about 15 miles outside Cold Spring.

Cold Spring was literally a boomtown back in the 1860s. The West Point Iron Company and Foundry, right on the riverfront, manufactured something called Parrott Canons, early precursors of AK47s, field rifles towed around on little platforms. Think of them as the quadriplegics of the munitions world. They won the Civil War!

Today, the mansions of the mining moguls and munitions manufacturers lining Main Street have been repurposed for tourism. It’s a delightful collection of antique stores and restaurants, moderately priced, too, in comparison with the inflated price tags in the antique stores that line Warren Street in Hudson a/k/a Williamsburg-on-the-River, 70 miles to the north. I still beat myself up for not jumping on the genuine Dior blazer I saw there last summer, raspberry shade with only slightly torn lining, on sale for $50. True, the sleeves stopped four inches or so before my wrists, and I wouldn’t have been able to move my shoulders in it. But hey! Dior!



A huge vein of iron extends all the way from Connecticut down into central Pennsylvania, running right through the Hudson River Valley. Present-day Fahnestock State Park was home to more than a dozen mines, and if you wander off-trail there today, you’ll run into hundreds of adits and winzes and inclines that nobody has bothered to guardrail off. Sixty percent pure black magnetite but lying under Precambrian granite gneiss, it was hard to extract. When iron was discovered in Michigan and Minnesota in the 1880s, the New York iron mines were largely abandoned, though Thomas Edison tried to revive them by inventing a magnetic ore separator. Didn’t work.

The Chuang Yen Monastery lies right in the heart of the old iron-mining country.



Buddhism is like Communism in some respects. There’s a huge difference between the way the religion is practiced in various countries, and those differences reflect what one might be tempted to call a national character. Thus, Buddhism in India is a kind of ritual magic show while in Tibet, it’s a nutty ongoing party that’s invited all the gods and gods of the animistic Bon religion it superseded, and in Japan, it’s a somber faith based on self-abnegation and asceticism.

Chinese culture above all else is pragmatic, so Chinese Buddhism is very concretistic. The Chinese are focused on the here-and-now; they’re not all that concerned with the hereafter – note that they don’t have specific past or future tense verb conjugations. The lessons of a religion like Buddhism, so strongly rooted in transience, were difficult to convey without an army of visual aids; hence most of those statues of Buddha and his pals you’ll see in the Metropolitan Museum come from China or from Chinese schools of Buddhism that had migrated some place else.

Chuang Yen is a Chinese Buddhist installation. The name “chuang yen” actually translates as “majestically adorned,” so it contains lots and lots of statutes and drawings – including the Grand Buddha who is three stories high. I preferred the ancient, 1,000-year old Buddha, who has his own building:



I think the 1,000-year old Buddha may actually be the china Buddha in the cabinet, which, of course, you can’t actually see in this photo. But, remember, it’s all about insubstantiality and transience, so who cares, right?

Yes, yes – I meditated.

No one ever taught me to meditate, so I’m not sure I’m not sure I do it the right way.

I focus on my breathing… But more than that, I try to deconstruct the sensory stimuli: Can you ever get to a point where you recognize those patterns you see not as colors or spatial markers but as brain signals? Electricity running up and down neurons? Anyway, being a big fangirl of dissociation in general, this is the ultimate detachment experience I crave, and I did it for about half an hour.



The grounds were quite lovely too. I spent an hour or so hiking through them. Numerous little trails. Birds and frogs galore. And who do I have to ask to get permission to have my ashes interred on the Thousand Lotus Memorial Terrace? ‘Cause this is definitely where I’d like the corporeal remains from this time round the block to end up.

But I have to have to say the most interesting thing on the grounds is the koi in the Seven Jewel Lake. I've never seen so many fish in one place before. They’re like sharks. Despite signs cautioning visitors, This is an ecologically balanced lake: Please Don’t Feed the Fish, someone’s feeding them because as soon as they spot you at the pagoda, they teem toward the shore. And they’re hideous. Most of the them seemed to have devolved back into being common, ugly, ground-feeding carp, the kind that you don’t want in Lake Michigan. Maybe that’s what ecological balance does. And they're telling you that's a good thing?