Mallory's Camera

Whaddiya know? I'm not sore at all this morning except for some tightness in the tendons behind my knees. I maintained crouching tiger stance the whole time I was shoveling 'cause you know, ergonomics. I guess I need to do more squat thrusts.

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Finished Schlock customer training. I start showing up in their office this coming Monday.

I'm not sure Schlock makes much revenue off the financial products we're supposed to hawk so relentlessly to unwitting clients desperate to square their tax statuses with the IRS. I guess that puts Schlock a notch above, say, check-cashing operators & payday loan providers, the carrion eaters in the predatory foodchain that feeds upon American poverty. Their customer base is not the wretchedly destitute but the struggling poor.

Schlock offers refund advances, various types of loans that use your refund as collateral, & debit cards for individuals whom various life circumstances have conspired to make wary of banks. These products are the nectar in the Venus flytrap's hairy sack: Once you wander close enough to sip, it is very difficult to extricate yourself, so you will wander back year after year after year to be overcharged on yr taxes. They're retention mechanisms, in other words!

Would love to do some serious muck-raking here á la Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel & Dimed) or Jessica Mitford (The American Way of Death). Taxes and the whole tax industry are deeply interesting; this is why tragic genius David Foster Wallace was working on a novel about the IRS before he ambled off one bright autumn day to hang himself on his back porch.

I'm fairly certain, though, that amidst the contractual verbiage that I scrolled past & signed without bothering to read was some sort of NDA. Ah, well! It's not as though I don't have a dozen other writing projects on my plate.

Must remember to get manicure!

I know from experience that tax clients stare at the hands that are entering their financial data!



Speaking of Jessica Mitford, I am currently reading Carla Kaplan's Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.

Jessica Mitford is a particular heroine of mine. Partly because I find the Mitford sisters utterly fascinating, and partly because she lived in my old North Oakland nabe, but mostly because she is an utterly hilarious writer whose critiques invite you to find the absurdity in the seriously objectionable. For me at least, it's easier to reject something because it's ridiculous than because it's morally reprehensible.

I met her once.

I was invited over to the Rockridge house by her son Benji's then wife. Some kind of coffee klatch. It would have been the mid-70s. What the pretext was, what the wife's name was, I can no longer remember. What I do remember is Decca, with her regal demeanor and air of perpetual bemusement, sweeping down the stairs in a shabby bathrobe. And I remember Decca's voice. Think Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

She joined us in the living room, waved her china coffee cup about and chatted away. Whatever was in the coffee cup had been liberally doused with what smelled like bourbon. I had no idea who she was, but I was enchanted.

Years later, she wrote me a charming postcard after I reviewed her book The American Way of Birth for The Whole Earth Review.



Years later still, when I became a Mitford fan-girl, I realized Decca was easily the most tragic of the sisters. She inhabited her droll, acerbic persona so thoroughly & magnificently that it was easy not to look beyond it.

First husband, the quixotic Esmond Romilly, with whom she ran off to the Spanish Civil War at age 19, was lost at sea flying home from a bombing raid of Nazi Germany. First child, Julia, died of measles at the age of four months; first son, Nicholas died at age 10 when his bike was hit by a bus while he was doing his paper route.

Esmond & Julia only got footnotes in Decca's memoir Hons & Rebels.

And she could never, ever bear to speak of Nicholas.

Years later, she wrote in a letter to someone, "What it boils down to is putting one’s feelings on a special plane; most unwise, if you come to think of it. Because the bitter but true fact is that the only person who cares about one’s own feelings is ONE." One of my favorite quotes of all time.

You can only deduce the immensity of Jessica Mitford's pain by her steadfast refusal to acknowledge it. That no-whinging-allowed credo, of course, was part of her indoctrination as a blood member of Britain's aristocratic class. As was a certain airy disregard for the feelings of the laboring classes that survived her membership in the Communist party and immersion in America's civil rights struggle.

It is very difficult indeed to deduce the existence of something by its complete absence from the official record.

Still. I think I would be enjoying this biography more had its author intuited its subject's tragic essence.

Met up with my beloved Barbara at the Gardiner Bakehouse yesterday.

The beautiful Aemilia, fashion maven & Barbara's daughter, is marrying a man who grew up in High Falls, so Barbara has reasons to visit this part of the country periodically.

We talked politics for three hours.

Or rather—not politics but the culture wars around those politics.

Resolved: Why did people vote for Trump when it was clearly not in their best economic interests to vote for Trump?

"It's the trans sports issue," I said. "Time and time again, that's what I heard when I was out canvassing people with Trump banners in their yards. I don't want my little Brittney to have to play volleyball against boys."

"Well, but I mean, there was just as much opposition against same-sex marriage initially, wasn't there?" Barbara said. "And people came around."

"People came around because of media representation," I said. "Specifically, network TV shows with mainstream audiences like Will & Grace and Modern Family. I can think of a handful of shows with trans characters. Orange is the New Black. Transparent. Euphoria. But they weren't shows aimed at the mainstream."



Afterward, I drove her back halfway up the Shawangunk ridge over the remotest back roads you can possibly imagine to her future co-in-laws' place on six acres of dense forest along the edge of an abandoned quarry overlooking the long-defunct D&H canal.

Why do every single one of these remote country houses seem to have a derelict bathtub on the premises?



Barbara has some issues with Dylan's mother, a very smart, fast-talking Dominican who never shuts up. I could see how this could be utterly exhausting on any kind of long-term basis—literally! Christi barely pauses for breath!—but I really liked Christi for the hour or so we spent talking and moreover, I felt immensely sorry for her; she must feel even more isolated and alienated than I feel here in Trumplandia. If you didn't have to organize an expedition every time you went to her house, I would consider making Christi my new BFF.

Barbara & Christi told me the structure below was once some sort of a silo.

But I could see right away that it was a kiln. You don't make silos out of heat-resistant tiles, and besides: There have never been corn fields around here. No doubt the kiln was used by the house's previous owners to bake bricks out of pulverized stone mined from the abandoned quarry. Cement-making and brick-making were the two big industries in this part of the world right up through the 1970s.



From remotest, most rugged Ulster County, I had to traipse out to deepest, darkest Middletown Mall-World to get the PTIN # that will allow me to prepare taxes for money—Soulless Tax Company paid the fee—which depressed me so much I could barely function for the rest of the evening.

Soulless Tax Company's rented premises were right next door to a check-cashing operation, which tells you everything you need to know about that.

What have I gotten myself into?

But if I don't like it, I can quit, right?

This tax law stuff is hard.

Total immersion would be my style. Like throw yourself into it and do absolutely nothing else for 48 hours.

Except I think that's psychologically and physically unhealthy, so at a certain point in the afternoon—earlier & earlier now that the dark is creeping in earlier & earlier—I break to exercise.

And after I come back from exercising, it's extremely difficult to get my mind back into work mode.

Hence, I am behind schedule on the tax law stuff.

Not hopelessly behind. But enough behind so that it seems like my time is never my own.

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Apart from that.

Adrienne got snippy with me yesterday because apparently I am not updating the Shawangunk Dems website quickly enough. If you can't do it, I'll find someone else...

Good luck with that, girlfriend!

I only volunteered to do it because no one else would. The website is hosted on Squarespace, a GUI template site, which I didn't know at all and so had to teach myself. And the person who had been doing the site disappeared more than a year ago, so there was nobody to onboard me plus it hadn't been updated in over a year.

I did briefly contemplate telling Adrienne, Go fuck yourself, beyatch, but didn't. She's under stress. I think some part of her knows she's not gonna win this campaign she's invested so much time & energy into. I mean, maybe she will! I've been wrong before. But my gut is saying, No.

Plus basically, I like Adrienne.

So, I did a little shit & Shinola dance, remarking mildly, Well, Adrienne, it's a lot of work, and you can't see the backend where most of the work is going on.

I must be as kind to and tolerant of others as I would have them be kind to and tolerant of me-ee-eee!