Mallory's Camera

The company is loathsome, but I do like the clients.

I wish I could write a complete novel about each & every one of them, but when I drag myself home at the end of the day, my brain is shot. I don't know how else to describe it: It's not fatigue exactly, since all I do all day is sit, applying ass to the base of a chair. My brain is perfectly capable of processing information. I just don't want to.

I've had to make adjustments to accommodate the job.

Chief among those adjustments: Stuff I did to control that hand tremor (which causes big problems when you're inputting data). Like I stopped drinking coffee on mornings I work. You'd think that one would be a biggie since caffeine is addictive and withdrawal is supposed to cause headaches & intense lassitude, but in fact, it caused neither of those things for me, and so, was surprisingly easy.

I also cut down on my Synthroid dose. I climbed on a scale for the first time in forever and found I had lost 10 pounds since I started working. (I am one of those people who gets anorexic with stress.) Drugs are typically administered per kilogram of body weight, so I figured the prescribed dose was now too high.

No Coffee + Less Synthroid did indeed banish the tremors.

Today being a Day Off, I am drinking coffee & taking the full dose, and yes, indeed, my hands are shaking.

###

A short list of clients over the past week: (None of their names are real.)

• Gary Stevens. Hippie-looking guy about my age with stringy white hair and an amiable manner. A retired nurse—so we chatted about that: He got his nursing training in the Navy, and, in his retirement, volunteers several times a week at a local homeless shelter.

"Any big changes this year?" I asked.

"Yeah, I got divorced," he told me ruefully. "You think you have a happy marriage, and then your wife informs you you don't."

He'd come to Schlock because he'd had to divide up his annuity and wasn't quite sure of the tax implications.

"Well, let's have a look," I said.

And Oh. My. Gawd.

Instead of engaging the services of an advisor who might have assisted him in drafting a financial instrument that could shield him from the division's tax implications, he merely withdrew $250,000 from the account and gave that money to his X-wife—

Leaving him with a $40,000 tax bill.

I have often read the phrase "the color drained from his face," but I'd never actually seen it before.

"What can I do?" he whispered.

"Well, first, you absolutely have to file this tax return," I said. "The penalties for not filing are much higher than the penalties for not paying. And then, you need to find yourself a tax attorney. You may be eligible for what they call 'an offer in compromise,' where the IRS agrees to settle for part of what you owe. But, I mean—why'd you do it this way? Why wouldn't you have the brokerage issue the check to her, which would have shifted the tax burden? Didn't your attorney—"

"I didn't have an attorney," he said miserably. "I figured I would try to keep things amiable."

• Marie de Faltay. Woman a few years younger than me with a definite sartorial flair that included rhinestone-studded glasses. She was trembling like a leaf.

The first thing she asked me: "Can I declare my dogs as dependents?"

I saw at once that she had been very, very beautiful in her youth. Blonde hair, Zsa-Zsa-Gabor-like features, and the most amazing eyes, violet and green at the same time. I supposed it had never occurred to her that there would come a time when she would not be beautiful. But beauty had been her only leverage, and with that gone, she had very little to fall back on. She supplemented her meager social security income with a shit job at Marshall's. Combined revenue streams left her with a taxable income of zero, so she got back the small sums withheld from the Marshall's check for federal & state taxes.

She hadn't filed her 2024 taxes. I talked her into making an appointment to do that, too. "If you're getting a refund, the IRS doesn't care if you file late." Her amazingly beautiful eye welled up with tears over the thought of a few hundred unanticipated dollars. And she'll definitely be getting a refund—no taxable income!

• Gilbert Specter. I was so relieved he lived in an apartment! Because he gave out strong I-have-a-dungeon-in-my-basement-where-I-chain-up-sex-slaves vibes.

(Probably, I am being mean here. Probably, he was developmentally delayed, or maybe he was just not very smart.)

Works as a custodian at a local high school. (Stephen King! White courtesy telephone.) Has a small stockpile of dividend-bearing stocks in addition to his salary. Also, a side gig selling tickets (to what? I wondered) for which he kept meticulous records, except the records were completely irrelevant because he'd somehow confused the business with what he was using the business to subsidize—which was a yearly trip to Oklahoma. (Is Oklahoma where they hold the annual I-have-sex-slaves-in-my-dungeon-basement convention?)

"It's all there, it's all there!" he kept shrieking at me, shoving 10 pages of notes in densely written spider scrawl at me. "I spent $910 in round-trip air tickets and $649 renting a car—"
"Right!" I said for the fourth time. "But the trip is different from the business, you see. The IRS only cares about the business—"

Fortunately, for me, I had been scheduled to work at two separate tax offices that day, so I got to say, "Oooops! Gotta run! Here's Rebecca! Rebecca will take care of you," before he drove me quite mad.

• Amber Meisen. Lovely young woman who'd been living the carefree artist's life (though supporting herself as a Trader Joe's cashier) in Brooklyn when she was hit by a car while riding her bicycle. Injuries plus medical bills forced her to return to (ugh) Middletown.

She'd earned enough to qualify for earned income credit! So, she got a refund of several thousand dollars that she did not expect! And her joy was a pleasure to behold.

###

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I mean, they're all interesting. Everybody has a story!

###

I should also briefly note the incredibly unpleasant exchange with a Remuneration client who sent me a string of 20 or so emails, each more incoherent, toxic, & insane than the last, claiming I was in arrears to him for work that I had already done.

I've been freelancing for many years, and I keep excellent books, so after each abusive email, I sent him back a calm, professional response with clear documentation of our original payment terms, my payment records, past invoices for completed work, and the remaining balance I showed under the advance I'd insisted upon because he's an overseas client, and we were working without an enforceable contract.

This seemed to inflame him even more. By the end, his emails were abusive.

I suspect the underlying issue is his own financial mismanagement. He has run out of money, and so has retro‑engineered a story for his money people to make him look like the one who “trusted” me too much. My careful, documented push‑back threatens that story, so he flooded me with veiled threats and hysterical accusations.

UGH.

Kudos to me for remaining professional.

I will finish up the work I owe him, but obviously, I will not accept any work from him in the future. In fact, I strongly suspect I will not be doing any freelancing in the future; freelancing is just too loaded with uncertainty and potentially toxic situations that I no longer have the stamina to deal with as the cost of doing business.

###

And now it is off to the New Paltz Community Garden to plant my peas and put in my strawberries.

The world is a fuckin' mess.

I just broke up a fight in the Stewart’s parking lot. Guy parked in a handicapped space, another guy called him on it. They were actually exchanging blows. I got between them, screaming, "Stop it, stop it, stop it," (which was a really stupid thing to do), and when they saw that I’m an old lady, they backed down.

I’m still shaking.

###

This came on top of a brutal day.

Phillip Osario (not his real name) forgot one of his W2s yesterday.

He brought it in today.

Phillip Osario is working four jobs just to stay afloat, but the paltry amount he made at that fourth job shaved $2,000 off his refund.

He stared at me with blank, uncomprehending eyes: "So, don't put the fourth job in."

I sighed and shook my head. "Doesn't work that way. I have to."

"But I don't want you to!"

"I know," I said. "But if I know about the job, I have to put it in."

Phillip Osario glared at me through slitted eyes.

If I had to guess, I'd guess he was a reformed gangbanger. Beautiful face, Orpheus in the asphalt underworld, with a tattoo of a woman's name in ornate copperplate script veering alongside his left eye. I made up a bio for him: Something—the birth of a child?—had made him want to make an abrupt about-face in his life, but now he was struggling in a world that had no use for him, had no place for him. I felt every hour of the meaningless drudgery he put in to get by—a few hours in Walmart, a few hours at the Home Depot. An underling. The lowest of the low whose real job was to let other people order him around. I wanted to tell him, Take the $3,000 and enroll in a HVAC course at a community college! You'll make $100,000 a year. But I didn't. Because we didn't have a telepathic bond, much as I wanted to pretend we did.

So, instead, I lectured him on all the dire things that befall people who lie to the IRS about their revenue streams. "They impose interest and high penalties. They garnish your wages. And in this day of AI, nobody gets away with lying to the IRS anymore. It's impossible, they will find you out. It's just a matter of time."

Eventually, I talked him into filing.

But I felt like crying.

###

He left, and Angel Meduro (not his real name) came in.

Angel Meduro looked a lot like Angel Batista in Dexter, right down to the porkpie hat. And he made a shitload of money doing something for the U.S. Treasury.

Angel Meduro wanted to do Married Filing Separately.

"How long have you been separated?" I asked.

"Oh, we live together," he said. "But I got debts & things I want to protect her from."

"That's fine," I said. "We'll still need her social security number though."

"They didn't need it last year," said Angel Meduro.

"Really?" I said. "Then whoever did your taxes last year did them wrong. That's a hard and fast requirement for Married Filing Separately."

We went back and forth a little, and eventually, he started trying to call his wife to get her permission to use her social security number.

She answered the sixth time he called.

He had her on speaker phone.

"What the fuck are you calling me for?" she asked furiously. "I told you I was going to the acupuncture guy!"

"Sorry, mami. But I'm with the tax lady, and she says I need your social security number—"

"What are you, some kind of fucking moron? I am not giving my social security number—"
She said a bunch of other things, too, that I can't remember except that they were all pretty humiliating, and after she finally hung up the phone, he looked at me with haunted eyes: "Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I can't do this."

The light bulb had already gone off over my head by this time: She was falsifying her filing status! Probably filing as Head of Household so she could rake in the earned income and child tax credits, and didn't want him imperiling her scam!

Poor Angel Meduro.

I hope she gives good blow jobs.

Yesterday morning, I went off for a plot showing at the New Paltz Community Garden.

I saw several lovely plots, but in the end I chose this one becawwwwwse the gardener before me had left me her hose! Plus, it has several upraised beds:



That's one thing I don't like about the New Paltz Community Garden: They make you water your garden with your own individually purchased hose. In fact, I dislike that so much that I argued the point with Phil, the extremely nice plot coordinator who was showing me around: "Hoses are not cheap! So by making that a requirement, you're essentially eliminating low-income gardeners who might really benefit from growing their own food."

Phil made a thoughtful face. "You're not wrong."

###

Afterwards, I had an hour and a half to kill, so I hung out at the Gardiner Bakehouse:



The Gardiner Bakehouse is the café part of a complex run by a local maker's guild. Wonderful coffee & excellent food. Pastries to die for! It's the last place Brian & I hung out in together; in fact, we actually had a date to do an open mike there Saturday night of the week he died.

I was so happy sitting there! Sipping coffee, people watching, dipping into my novel from time to time to read a few paragraphs.

This is how you need to live your life! I told myself. With ample access to the Gardiner Bakehouse. You need to move to New Paltz.

New Paltz, you see, is the last hippie enclave in the entire United States.

###

At Montgomery Schlock, I took on the task of doing taxes for an adorable kid who had started his own trucking business, but who had failed to draft a business plan or keep a single record of his business expenses.

After half an hour or so, I got up from my desk & toddled off to consult with the office manager.

"You can't do it?" she asked.

"Oh, I can do it," I said. "The question is whether I should do it, given the fact that I'm a first-year associate and this is going to require some intense forensic accounting. I'm not certified to do it, and that's going to raise some liability issues if the return is audited, which it almost certainly will be."

The office manager didn't seem to understand the difference between "can" and "should," which was mildly annoying but whatevs: I do not give a shit what these people understand or think so long as I get paid.

###

Back at the casa, I hunted down Icky. "The chickens... ?"

Icky looked grim. "Something got them. I found some feathers next to the coop. They got Little Nas—"

"Little Nas" is his name for Black Chicken.

Oh, my heart was broken. Black Chicken! Whom I'd taught to jump high and walk backwards when I first moved into this place. Whom I could have taken out on the road as a circus act, Patrizia and Her Performing Chicken.

I sat in the Patrizia-torium sobbing. Black Chicken! People are dying in Gaza! I reminded myself fiercely. It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one black chicken don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Half an hour later, Icky began calling my name. "Patrizia! Patrizia! Patrizia!"

I ran downstairs—

He was holding Black Chicken!!!

Black Chicken had survived!!!

"Where was she?"

"She was just standing there on the back porch when I opened the door—"

Clearly, something had tried to grab her: She was missing a whole bunch of feathers under her right wing. I visualized a fox's mouth.

But she had gotten away! I pictured her pecking furiously at the fox until he dropped her and then fluttering away to hide. Nobody's getting Black Chicken without a fight! Black Chicken is a survivor!!! Descendent of the mighty dinosaurs!

There are now three chickens left.

"You've got to build them some sort of run," I told Icky. "Free ranging is a nice concept, but it's simply not safe for them."

He is leaving to go back down to the city today, but I think he will build one next time he's up.

In the meantime, the chickens must be confined to their coop.

Absolutely slammed at Schlock Montgomery yesterday. Four returns in four hours, three of them relatively complicated returns. Miss Ramada Inn snarled at me: "You need to pick up the pace."

I did not snarl back, You need to go fuck yourself, though I smiled inwardly, thinking it.

There's hardly any light in the back of the Schlock Montgomery office where my desk is, and many W2 forms use 4-point font for entries like employer TINs and wages, all of which must be encoded precisely into the Schlock tax prep software. This meant many minutes spent attempting to study said documents with the magnifying app on my phone.

Plus, the Schlock tax prep software is really klugy compared to the tax prep software I was using as a TaxBwana. Hit the wrong key, and you are signing the client up for a Schlock payday loan at a 36% interest rate—which I did with the first set of clients, a heavily tattooed married couple, filing jointly. It took me 15 minutes to figure my way out of that because I was the only tax preparer in the office; there wasn't anybody else to ask. The clients were not amused.

You can rise from this desk at any moment, tell those clients, "Your tattoos are really ugly, and you suck", I reminded myself as I keyed frantically through solutions. That kept me amused.

And eventually, I found the solution.

My second client was a dapper man in a grey porkpie hat who used to be a correctional officer at Rikers Island.

Rikers Island correctional officers get really good pensions!

Mr. Trapper (not his real name) spends his retirement hanging out in the Newburgh Barnes & Noble reading edifying biographies of Black sports heroes. He could afford to buy those biographies, but I guess he likes being a regular in a crowded place.

I found myself flirting with him! And having fantasies of ambling down to the Newburgh Barnes & Noble, so we could fall in ❤️LUV❤️! Was it the pension? Or the porkpie hat?

My third and fourth clients were a couple in their late thirties, filing separately—she was still married to someone else, which made her claim to Head of Household dubious, but hey! Schlock tax preparers before me had approved it, so who was I to gainsay?

This couple had a combined income substantially less than mine, & I consider myself poor.

In fact, they personified America's white urban underclass. They seemed utterly miserable, and I thought, Well, this is really why the enlightened inhabitants of Alpha Centauri dispatched you to this planet, so you could report back on the desperate look in the woman's eyes: You're a field scientist!

The time did pass quickly.

Only 37 more days to go!

###

Daylight saving time has added enough hours to the day so that I can start going to the gym again. So, that's good.

And it finally stopped raining.

The sun came out yesterday, and temps soared into the 60°s, melting the snowbanks & turning the meadows around the casa into a muddy swamp.

This is not my beautiful wife.

The boys are throwing stones at the frogs; the frogs are dying in earnest...

But one of the reasons I know the Iran War is not WWIII—other than D's horary astrological chart—is that The Daily Mail only trumpeted Iran War headlines for three days.

Now DM's headlines are back to the news the American public actually cares about: mothers of three who poison their husbands, toddlers who die in backyard pools and come back to life five hours later, Kristen Bell's three-way marriage.

Can the Ayotollah's assassination really compare to Nick Reiner's life in prison?

I don't think so.

###

Meanwhile, I am working at two Schlock offices. One's in a strip mall in Middletown, the other's in a strip mall in Montgomery.

Middletown is just filled with hideous strip malls. I take periodic breaks to wander around this one, snapping photographs. This is my job, right? This is why the Universe plopped me down into this particular time/space continuum. I'm an archivist!







I'm particularly intrigued by the check-cashing place. It is right next door to Schlock, making this strip mall a veritable buffet of predatory financial services. (Schlock makes a sizeable portion of its revenues not from preparing taxes but from loan-sharking against anticipated tax refunds with exorbitant fees & interest rates.)

###

The people who work at the Middletown Schlock office are uniformly awful, rude, and completely disinterested in me. I pretend I'm Charlotte Bukowski and remind myself that I wouldn't recognize these people if I bumped into them on the street.

There is only one strip mall in Montgomery. Is that the reason why the people in that Schlock office are so much nicer? Maybe.

But one of my survival strategies is to tell myself I could walk out in the middle of a shift and never, ever have to think about Schlock again. Schlock has no hold on me. Schlock has no roots in my life. Schlock is only a revenue source.

###

I feel like such a drone, I've been isolating myself. Human contact, reaching out to friends, would actually make me feel better. But what do I have to offer?

"NEVER shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'
"But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.'
"I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair."

It was snowing this morning—of course, it was!—while I reviewed my heating expenses for February: $440 for heating oil and $153 to Central Hudson.

That's only half the heating bill for the house.

Fuckin' insane.

Central Hudson needs to be taken over by the State of New York. But I don't know what one can do about the heating oil. Except move to a warmer place.

###

My good deed for yesterday:

One of my clients was a very feisty 87-year old. She appeared primordial to me, like an ancient Baba Yaga, which may have been the racial disparity—she was Black, and I am white—or may have been due to the fact that she'd neglected to put in her dentures.

Anyway, this lady had a Cadillac healthcare plan through the City of New York, her former employer, but Medicare was still taking out $220 a month from her Social Security.

"You might want to look into that," I told her granddaughter. "I mean, it's possible each healthcare provider is providing a different set of services, and she uses both. But it's also possible you're looking at redundant costs and can get an extra $220 a month by getting rid of that Medicare payment."

She's been going to Schlock for 20 years, and I was the first one to point this out to her.

###

In other news, I will be interviewing real-life Daria today after I scamper home from the tax trenches. Here are the questions I've prepared:

1. Can you tell me your five most vivid memories of Mexico?

2. What did it feel like in your body the first weeks after moving from Mexico City to the U.S.—were you more numb, anxious, exhilarated, something else?

3. Is there a specific moment from that first year—at school, in the street, at home—when you realized, “I am not in Mexico anymore,” and what happened?

4. When you think back to meeting Brian in the PD’s office, what are the first three sensory details that come up—what you saw, heard, or felt in your body?

5. What did you think Brian saw in you, and how did that perception change over the years you knew him?

6. How did the relationship move between friendship, mentorship, and sexuality over time, and did those roles ever feel like they were in conflict?

7. Were there specific conversations or arguments with Brian that you feel “made” you—changed how you think about law, justice, or yourself?

8. Did you ever feel a power imbalance because of age, profession, or life experience, and if so, how did you navigate or rationalize it at the time?

9. When you look back now, what do you wish your younger self had known about him—or about you?

10. How did being with Brian interact with your romantic life outside him—did he complicate other relationships, or make them easier to understand?

11. After Brian died, what was the strangest or most unexpected way your grief showed up (a habit, a dream, a physical sensation, a decision you made)?

12. If you had to describe your emotional “role” in Brian’s life in one sentence—as he might have described it—what would that sentence be?

13. When you first realized you were sexually attracted to Brian, what surprised you most about that feeling—his age, his role, your own response, something else?

14. Can you describe your very first sexual encounter with him in terms of mood and pacing—was it slow and negotiated, impulsive, awkward, inevitable?

15. What did Brian do in bed that made you feel particularly seen or desired—not just physically, but as a person?

16. Were there things you only did sexually with Brian and never with anyone else, and what about him made those feel possible or safe?

17. Did the fact that you worked in the same universe (courts, law, defendants) bleed into your erotic life together—role‑play, gallows humor, power dynamics?

18. How did sex with him feel in your body—grounding, explosive, dissociative, comforting, like coming home, like leaving?

19. Was there ever a moment during sex or after where you suddenly felt your age difference very sharply—either in a good way or as a jolt of discomfort?

20. How did your conversations immediately after sex usually go—jokey debrief, political talk, silence, tenderness, scheduling the next time?

21. Did you ever feel like his other lovers were in the bed with you emotionally—comparing, competing, imagining his history—and how did you manage that?

22. Was there ever a specific fight or rupture around sex—jealousy, boundaries, pregnancy scares, STI scares—that you remember as a turning point?

23. When you think of his body now, what are the 2–3 details that come back first (not necessarily erotic—could be scars, smells, textures, nervous habits)?

24. Did you ever notice a difference between “grief sex,” “reassurance sex,” and “just because” sex with him—and if so, how could you tell from the inside?

25. How did your bilingual/trilingual brain show up during sex—were there certain words or dirty talk that had to be in Spanish or French, and if so, why?

26. Did you two have any long‑running sexual jokes or coded phrases—things that would sound innocuous to others but were charged for you?

27. How did you end things physically—was there a clear “last time” you slept together, and did you know it was the last time while it was happening?

28. Looking back, is there anything you regret not doing with him sexually or emotionally—something you were curious about but held back from?

29. Has your body ever surprised you with a grief reaction—arousal at an unexpected reminder of him, or the opposite, sudden numbness with someone new?

30. In your fantasy life now, does he still appear, and if so, does he show up more as a lover, a friend, a ghost, a critic, or something stranger?

31. Imagine you are trying to explain the sexual part of the relationship to a skeptical friend—what is the one argument or image you would use to say, “This wasn’t just another older guy using me; it was this”?

32. How did your relationship to Spanish change after the move—did it feel like a refuge, a secret, a source of shame, a weapon?

33. When did English start to feel like something you could think and feel in, not just translate into, and was there a particular event that marked that shift?

34. Do you experience different “selves” in Spanish, English, and French—if so, how would you describe the personality or emotional color of each language?

35. In simultaneous translation, what does it feel like inside your head—are you ahead of the speaker, chasing them, or hovering in parallel?

36. Can you describe a moment on the job when the emotional weight of what you were translating nearly broke your professional neutrality? What did you do with that feeling?

37. Have you ever made a deliberate choice to soften, sharpen, or slightly alter someone’s words while interpreting because the literal translation felt emotionally or ethically wrong?

38. What does fatigue feel like for you after a long day of simultaneous interpreting—mental fog, physical tension, emotional overload—and how do you come down from that state?

39. Do you ever carry other people’s stories and emotions home with you through their words, and if so, how do you protect or “clean” your own inner voice?

My heart breaks for Sarah, a country girl in her mid-20s, single mother of a two-year-old she cannot control, whose sole joy in life is that jumbo-sized styrofoam container of microwaved Tater Tots drenched with ketchup that she buys at the Arco Quik-Serve every morning.

But she should not be doing tax returns.

I was horrified watching her do one over the weekend. Her stained pink top was riding up, and her sweat pants were sagging so you could see the crack of her ass as she sat there playing Maybe This Will Work at the computer.

The client was too busy trying to push through a questionable Head of Household filing status through to notice, and anyway, he had his own problems with tater tots or maybe with Pabst Blue Ribbon six-packs. His red-rimmed eyes were set in a head that was probably normal-sized but perched atop his vast bulk made him look microcephalic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know—it's Politically Incorrect to comment on people's weight. But I see what I see. And those jumbo-sized styrofoam containers of microwaved Tater Tots drenched with ketchup are a problem.

Anyway. I had been intimidated by the [hideous, soulless corporation's] tax preparation software, but after watching Sarah, I thought, There are no standards here, and thus I completed my first two returns as a tax professional yesterday.

One of my first two clients was Married Filing Separately. Back when I was an altruistic TaxBwana, I would have begged him to use a different filing status because MFS is absolutely the worst. It's totally worth it to make nice with that spouse you hate and want to divorce just so you can file jointly.

But now that I'm a predatory tax preparer circling the rubes so I can push product on them, I no longer offer advice. I just smile and input the boxes.

I cannot believe what people are willing to pay for this service. $170 per form! For a task that would literally take them 20 minutes in a library to do on their own. It isn't hard! I mean, we're not talking about complicated tax situations here; we're talking a single W2.

Survival is a rough, rough game. I'm just grateful I don't like tater tots.

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.

###

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.

###

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!