Mallory's Camera

So-oooo, last night, in D.C., in front of assembled NATO members, Unca Joe Biden introduced Ukraine’s President Zelensky as “Vladimir Putin.”

But wait! There’s more!

He also referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump”!

###

There is no coming back from this.

Not only should Biden abandon his presidential campaign immediately, he should resign from office this very second.

It’s the only way Democrats reestablish any kind of procedural integrity.

A number of people of my acquaintance—including my Social Justice Warrior son Ichabod—intend to vote for Biden even if he’s hooked up to a life support system with flat-lining brainwaves because the issues associated with this upcoming election—abortion, Christian nationalism, but most of all the environment (‘cause Biden’s handlers at least believe in climate change and Trump’s handlers don’t)—are so critical.

But I don’t think I can vote for Biden.

And I’m fuckin’ sick of the doublespeak: You’re not voting for the candidate, you’re voting for the platform.

If that’s the case, then why the obstinacy around sticking with this particular candidate?

###

In this context, it’s worth reporting that possibly a bigger story than Biden’s no less pathetic for being a Shakespearianly tragic finger-clutching at power, happened this week, and that is this: 85% of Houston’s power grid went down following Hurricane Beryl.

This story got virtually no national coverage.

Houston is the fourth-largest metropolis in the United States. One million people remain without power. That means traffic signals aren’t working, and half the city’s population has no AC, with temperatures hovering in the 90°s at night.

(It would be interesting to map just what parts of Houston remain without electricity. I can practically guarantee that every house in River Oaks got their electricity back within hours.)

Climate change’s effects on a vast, decaying infrastructure.

And the American public is not being informed about this, but instead is being forced to watch a squabble between two old, demented white guys. (Admittedly, Biden is much further down the dementia trail than Trump, but I have a feeling once he’s elected, Trump will catch up.)

Welcome to late-stage capitalism!

Judge for yourself how little your consumption-driven, capitalist education has prepared you for these types of exigencies.

###

Meanwhile, in my own tiny corner of the universe, yesterday was a stressful day because the washing machine went on the fritz, & Landlord Iggy—still in residence—wasn’t taking this seriously enough for my satisfaction.

Iggy has a very new washing machine, a top-of-the-line smart washing machine with more wash choices than Starbucks has cappuccino options.

So, the first time the wash cycle got stuck on “rinse,” I assumed I had done something wrong.

The second & third time, I still wasn’t convinced it wasn’t me, but I decided that was irrelevant. You really shouldn’t need a degree in Advanced Washing Machine-ology to wash clothes.

“Yeah, yeah, well I can’t do anything about it now,” Iggy said the third time I talked to him about it last night. “I’ll call a tech. Meanwhile, there’s a laundromat in Walden—”

Working appliances is in the lease, asshole! I wanted to scream at him. It’s fully written out as the landlord’s responsibility! And you fuckin’ wrote the lease!

But it’s quite clear screaming is not a great strategy with Iggy.

For one thing, he’s Israeli, and I don’t think I’ve ever met an Israeli—of either gender—who wasn’t a complete dick.

Screaming is not a tactic that works with dicks.

For another, it was now 10 o’clock at night, and it wasn’t as though I didn’t have plenty of clean stuff to wear in my closet. He’d get around to having the washing machine repaired some time this week. I knew that. No need to get obsessive.

He was much more apologetic this morning because, apparently, the non-functioning washing machine had non-functioned all night long, causing a small flood in the basement.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m calling the tech—”

I smiled an inscrutable sphinxlike smile and drank all the rest of the coffee.

###

Yesterday morning, I’d gone over to my garden in Hyde Park because it wasn’t supposed to hit 90°, which meant I could get enough gardening hours in to justify the trip across the bridge.

I harvested my garlic:



I did an aggressive weeding on my lower plot.

Before:



After:



Behold my adorable jalapeno peppers:



Behold my multiple green tomatoes:



But this, this, is the crown jewel of the garden: a volunteer watermelon vine whose characteristic leaves I recognized so that I did not weed it out and that right now, at least, has multiple flowers:



It made me a bit sad to be on the eastern side of the Hudson.

I prefer it to the western side of the Hudson.

That may change, of course.

UPS showed up with the new toy around 10pm.

Honestly, I’d given up on them, was preparing for sleep. In the morning, I was gonna get up and scream at UPS customer service staff on the phone.

One of the least attractive parts of my personality is that I kinda like screaming at people. When they don’t have any connection whatsoever with my real life.

I have this really strong bellicose streak. It’s why I was so good at martial arts.

Of course I’d spent the day obsessively checking the UPS tracker every 10 minutes. The truck with my new phone had left Kingston at 8:45 in the morning. It’s exactly 38.62 miles between Kingston and Hyde Park. Less if you swim across the river! So why wasn’t the new phone here yet?

First world problems!

Otherwise, it was just a hideous grey day. It rained and rained and rained. I told myself I was lucky it was raining— because (a) look what happens when it doesn’t rain (California firestorms!) and (b) three degrees colder, and it would have been snowing.

First snowstorm of the season is supposed to take place tomorrow.

###

Phone is living up to my expectations. I really like it. Though the cats won’t sit still long enough to pose for dramatic photo portraits.

“I’ve been thinking about you all week,” Barbara said. “I was gonna call you. ‘Cause what’s up with that, right?”

That would have been the same week I was thinking about her ‘cause I want to stay in her palatial mansion in Piedmont next week when I materialize in the Bay Area.

I’d been putting off and putting off calling her.

I don’t know why.

I absolutely knew there would be no issue whatsoever about staying at her house.

I guess I just really, really hate talking to people on the phone.

Although God knows, I’ve been doing a lot of it lately.

###

Barbara was my best friend in nursing school.

My running partner.

Also my runaway partner because, periodically, we would pile into her ancient, battered 1962 Porsche and drive eight hours to some outpost in the Los Padres National Forest where we would hike for three hours before piling back into her Porsche to drive eight hours back to the Bay Area.

We could not have been more unalike.

Back then, I was even louder and brasher and more hyperkinetic than I am today. Also much, much bossier: I loved telling people what to do! I was pretty good at it, too, because horrifying childhoods create the kind of hypervigilism that’s really good at identifying everything people are doing wrong in their lives.

Barbara was silent. As though those great wings of chestnut hair were a type of fog, a magical mist that hid her like the heat distortions of a mirage. She had—still has—this incredibly otherworldly quality. In my mind, she was Tess of the D’Urbevilles, and indeed, she is the scion of a famous San Francisco pioneering family that made its fortune with the boats that ferried passengers to and from San Francisco and the East Bay and the little islands dotting San Francisco Bay, which in those days—the late 19th century—were inhabited.

They owned a lot of real estate in San Francisco and Sonoma County.

These days, the only property that’s left is The Petrified Forest outside Calistoga. Home to the largest petrified trees in the world!

I still remember the first time Barbara took me up to her family home in Santa Rosa.

It was this huge, dilapidated Spanish-style house with an enormous swimming pool, filled with murky water on which dead leaves floated, with this fleet of rusting Mercedes lining the driveway.

Barbara had four sisters, each more beautiful and fucked up than the last.

As the oldest, it fell to Barbara to be their caretaker. Their Cinderella.

These days, Barbara doesn’t talk to the sisters.

“Oh, Patrizia,” she said. “Life is too short. All I want is to be happy in the time I have left. You know?”

###

When I first knew her, Barbara was the most beautiful woman I had ever met. She looked just like Ingrid Bergman.

She’s still striking.

But, you know.

We’re old.

###

Barbara is actually going to be in Belize for the first week I’m in CA, so I’ll be the solo occupant of the palatial Piedmont mansion.

The accommodations are looking like this:

Nov 19: AirBnB
Nov 20-Nov 24: Barbara’s
Nov 25-Nov 26: Mendocino (Eleanor H)
Nov 27-Nov 28: Eleanor B

It’s all coming together.

###

Yesterday, also, I had a bizarre thing happen: For a four-hour period, my phone stopped making phone calls. Max tried to call me, and then RTT tried to call me. Neither call went through. Then I tried to call them and got that weird beep-beep-beep. I did every software reset imaginable, no luck, so I figured it either had to be a carrier issue or a hardware issue. But I could text just fine without WiFi.

My carrier is AT&T, which has the worst customer service you can possibly imagine plus they’re shutting down FilmStruck. So, you know: Fuck AT&T.

If it was a hardware issue, I was gonna replace the phone. Which I’ve had for a really long time. Little Megan had an iPhone 8 Plus that I absolutely fell in love with, coveted and craved with every quark and lepton of my soul. But how could I justify spending mega-$$$$$ on a phone, right? Especially since the phone I had worked perfectly fine.

But if my phone was broken…

As I was on my way to the AT&T store, the phone rang!

Connectivity restored.

I am still fantasizing about that iPhone 8 plus, though.

I take a lot of pictures. A lot of pictures.

And the camera on my present phone is not great: Even with Photoshop post-production, the pictures I take never turn out the way I see those images in my mind.

I would like to be able to take the photographs I see.

###

In other Little Megan news, the club she and her sisters hang out in when they’re home with their parents in Thousand Oaks got shot up last night by one of those anonymous, incel, black-trench-coated guys. Twelve dead. More supposed to be dead soon.

I imagine this will be the incident that shatters Little Megan’s innocence.

America, America, America.

Something’s got to change.

Sunday night is a biiiiiig TV night. Thus, I was up until the wee hours of the morning. Watching Reza use Liquid Ass on the gang! Catching up with the adventures of Jon Snow, Cersai, and Tyrion. Wondering whether Eli will ever snag another political consulting job since he’s failed so miserably in keeping Peter from being indicted.

After that, it seemed very important that I watch Ghost World for the 40th time.

It dawned on me that video on demand is actually the fourth major technological revolution of my lifetime.

###

The first three major technological revolutions of my lifetime were (in chronological order) computers, the Internet, and smart phones.

###

Rik was the first person I knew with a computer. He won it at an Apple trade show. When would this have been? I have no idea, actually: My memories aren’t anchored to a timeline.

But by 1987, I would have owned one, too. I would have needed it for grad school.

Computers, in those days, weren’t for communicating. They were strictly word processors or data compilers. They were very clunky and slow. And there was a Holy War going on between Microsoft (the Catholic Church) and Apple (the Gnostics.) I came down on the side of the Gnostics. It had nothing to do with design and usability – two concepts, which to this very day, more-or-less sail right over my head. It would have had to do with the fact that Rik had an Apple.

###

In graduate school, I amused myself by doing things like inventing the Marginal Futility Function, counterpoint to the Marginal Utility Function, which is the utility a consumer gains or loses by increasing or decreasing the consumption of a good or service. The basic unit of microeconomics. Economics is an exceedingly dry subject.

Somewhere toward my third year, pounding away on my Mac Plus keyboard at a paper on water regulation, I thought to myself: I’m sick of talking to my computer! I want my computer to talk back.

And this turned out to be well within the realm of possibility.

I’d read about this… thing… that let you talk to other people using your computer. Well. Write to other people, anyway. Kind of like typing a letter, putting it in a bottle, throwing the bottle into the ocean, and waiting a couple of hours for the bottle to wash back up with a letter inside it from someone else.

This thing was called the Well.

I joined the Well, and thus became what they now call An Early Internet Adopter.

The Well exerted a disproportionate amount of influence considering its tiny, tiny size. Chiefly because journalists then, like journalists now, greatly prefer sitting in their bedrooms, guzzling Diet Coke, eating Cheezits, and reading about stuff to actually going out and doing investigative legwork.

I became moderately famous on the Well due to my propensity for hilarious quips and blood feuds.

As I became moderately famous, I, too, began to exert a disproportionate amount of influence! I’m in books! Thankfully, they're out of print. But the best thing about being famous on the Well was that it attracted the interest of Time Inc., leading to a job at People Magazine. I became People’s Interactive Entertainment Editor, which meant I got to sit in my bedroom, guzzling Diet Coke, eating Cheezits, and interviewing Real Live Celebrities on the phone! Best job evah!

Well.

Twice a month I had to show up in New York, and more often than that, I had to be in Los Angeles where I had to interview Real Live Celebrities in person and go to functions like the Oscars. Believe it or not, this was actually boring and depressing. The Oscars are not the fun fest the television cameras would have you believe, and Real Live Celebrities quite often look and behave like ferrets.

###

Though I was an Early Internet Adopter, I came late to smartphones.

I can remember tromping around downtown San Francisco in the early oughts and wondering about the epidemic of schizophrenia that seemed to be hitting well-dressed young professionals in their mid-20s to mid-30s. They all seemed to be rushing around the city talking to themselves.

Took me a while to understand they were actually talking on tiny phones.

I had an enormous clunky portable phone that I hardly ever used.

I’d gotten it because I was away from home so much, and I needed it to keep communication lines open with the family in case something went wrong.

Eventually, I got portable phones for the kids, too.

One day, Max and RTT ambushed me. “We hate these phones! We want iPhones!”

I resisted. For a couple of hours.

I was shocked/shocked/shocked by how much I loved my iPhone! Chiefly for its camera and texting functions. Texting on an iPhone took me right back to my haydays on the Well when I would write screens and screens of the most brilliant, ephemeral elucidations!

It still shocks me, though, to walk down a street and see that no one is paying any attention at all to the world around them. They’re all scowling and focusing on that tiny, tiny screen in front of them. Like that wonderful scene in the movie Her when Theodore walks into a crowd of people, just emerging from a subway, each immersed in the phantom world their personalized operating system has crafted for them.

Though, of course, I’m one of those people who makes eye contact on the subway.

###

I’ve been torrenting for years – information wants to be fr-e-e-e-e-e! – but it was only a year ago that I signed up for Netflix and Hulu.

###

Nielsen says the average American consumes 3.5 hours of entertainment programming every day, but I’m quite sure the actual number is higher than that. Nielsen’s representative sampling includes cats, right? And dead people.

I have no idea how much entertainment programming I consume in the course of any given day, but the figure is quite high. I know more about Reza and the unresolved issues that drive him to use Liquid Ass than I do about just about any human being in my – ha, ha, ha! – real life. And Jon Snow’s journey reveals itself to me with the Technicolor clarity of Stations of the Cross.

I think I should feel bad about this.

But actually, I don’t.

If it makes me happy to be a voyeur spying on the intimate lives of imaginary people, who's to judge?

And who’s to say that Reza or Jon Snow aren’t more "real" than four-fifths of the “people” on my Facebook “friends” list?

Only George “1984” Orwell and Aldous “Brave New World” Huxley?

They got it wrong.

The real future is the future of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops.

iPhones arrived yesterday. Steep learning curve associated with them – as for example: I couldn’t figure out how water had gotten into the new phone, kept waiting for it to evaporate. Finally RTT said, “Mom? That’s a screensaver.”

Duh.

Also my big sausage-like fingers were designed to play Rachmaninoff, not type on some miniscule micro-keyboard, so using the Internet at this point is a drag.

At some future point I can see how the thing might be fun, but it’s going to take a week or so of playing with it which I can’t spare right now: I have something like 8,000 words to pound out over the next two days. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. Boring subject matter but they are paying me a lot. In the meantime, my life is on hold.