Mallory's Camera

G4 geomagnetic sun storm in effect last night. Very, very, very dimly, my naked eyes espied the Aurora Borealis:



Like I said, I spent five hours yesterday getting my computer to do what it was doing perfectly well at the beginning of the day before I started fucking around with it, so I was in a pettish mood all day.

That mood was exasperated by the fact that I didn't do a good job saving for taxes last year and now am paying off the not-huge-but-still-significant amount I put on a credit card. Disposable income is down this month, in other words. I must ration my little treats!



Antonio Delgado is taking on Kathy Hochul in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Good!

He's a strong progressive candidate who believes in universal child care, expanded rental assistance, stronger investment in community health centers, higher minimum wage, all well and good things in themselves, but he also has the potential to beat Elise Stefanik, the rumored Republican candidate, who is creepy, creepy, creepy in every imaginable way. Delgado could carry New York City; I don't think Hochul could.

Delgado has done his prep work.

I don't think there's a county fair, volunteer fire department celebration, or Lion's Club picnic throughout the entire state—and New York State has some real backwaters—that Delgado hasn't shown up at over the past five years. The picture above of Delgado & io truly was taken at the 2018 Hyde Park Fourth of July parade.

###

Also, I watched the Pee-wee Herman documentary on HBO. It is very sad. It made me cry.

I am more of a fan of Paul Reubens as a conceptual artist than I am of his conceptual art. I prefer my kitsch with a lot of white space—which his didn't have. Pee-wee's Playhouse is a bit too frenetic for me.

But I do think Pee-wee's Playhouse captures two tendencies of childhood extremely well: (1) children's tendency to take metaphors & other figurative constructions very literally, and (2) children's tendency to anthropomorphize. (I well remember Mr. Light whom I got to talk to in the bathroom as a three-year-old whenever I had to have my hair washed.)

Pee-wee Herman is childlike, but he is not childish.

Big distinction.

Life has been boring placid, so there isn't really very much to talk about with my kids on the phone except television.

I watch a lot of television because these days, I'm too braindead to read in that hour or so before I fall asleep.

"So, White Lotus," I said to Ichabod on the phone. "I'm watching Season 2. Because Sicily."

"Do you like it?"

"I neither like it nor dislike it," I said. "It's like the fondant of the streaming video world. Very sugary. Slightly chewy. High production values. Ultimately bland. There was this one scene, though—"

Four of the protagonists visit the village where The Godfather was filmed. It's a tourist spot now, the car explosion that killed Apollonia—in my youth, I was constantly being told, You look like her!—on perpetual, grainy, cheap-VCR loop. The display is very brown.

The young female protagonist grimaces. "So violent!"

The 80-year-old protagonist says, "It's the greatest film ever made! Have you seen it?"

The young female protagonist says she's seen part of it.

Then there's an argument about whether the reason The Godfather is so beloved is because it so perfectly encapsulates the fantasy life of the patriarchy.

But this doesn't interest me.

No, what interests me is the fact that apparently there are people on the planet who haven't seen The Godfather!!!!

"I mean, do Millennials really think The Godfather is about the patriarchy? Do you really not love The Godfather?"

Ichabod snorted. "Of course, we don't. Why would we?"

###

Ah, the evanescence of cultural touchstones.

I remember about five years ago, I was driving a delightful young woman called Adrienne somewhere. Adrienne was around Ichabod's age. White Rabbit came on the radio.

Doing favors is a quid pro quo process. Adrienne gets to be delivered to a place she'd otherwise have difficulty getting to since she doesn't have a car; I get a captive audience for my insightful ramblings about the cultural significance of White Rabbit.

"Wait. What's White Rabbit?" Adrienne asked.

"This song. You've never heard of it before?"

"No-o-oo-o—"

How could Adrienne never have heard of White Rabbit before? It was practically the anthem of my entire generation!

I'd answered my own question, I realized.

###

"You know the first time I heard White Rabbit?" Ichabod asked. "It was part of the soundtrack for Jim Carrey movie called The Cable Guy. About this really sleazy, pathetic Boomer guy."

I sighed. "Yeah. I know these cultural touchstones are a kind of horizontal glue. They have no vertical reach. They're a kind of glitter on the present tense. A delusion of significance. Maya. Still. They seem to cast such a long shadow that when you find out they don't, you're left wondering: Does anything cast a long shadow?"

Ichabod was 3,200 miles away, driving from Monterey back to Santa Cruz—we generally speak on the phone when he is driving—so I had to imagine his shrug. "Define 'long.' Define 'shadow. Everything casts a long shadow. Or conversely, nothing does. You get to decide for yourself."

"You know what's crazy?" I asked. "When I was a kid, the 1920s seemed like the ancient past to me, an inconceivably long-ago time. But it was only really less than 25 years before I was born. The 1990s are longer ago to me now than the 1920s were then."

"That's really trippy when you start thinking about it," said Ichabod. "We're all such imperfect time travelers."

###

In other news: It rained heavily all day yesterday and I remained incredibly pissed off at myself that I can't just dash off 8,000 words in a single sitting but am forced to stretch the task over six days because I—Well. Just can't.

"Seems like there should be some drug I could take," I told Ichabod. "That's really what's wrong with the world today. There are no more good drugs!"

It was the day the Vision-of-Wallkill hamlet-wide yard sale was supposed to take place, but naturally the weather put a crimp in those plans.

I went out to the Lions Club pavillion by the river anyway because the Women's Club had set up a bunch of tables under the leaky rafters.

Mucho creepy stuff for sale:



I guess yard sales will be the new Dollar Tree now that we have always been at war with Eastasia.

In the parking lot, I saw this disturbing vehicle drive up:



It disgorged a male with long, straggling white hair and menacing mien and what I assume was his old lady, weatherbeaten but better preserved than he was.

Gotta say, I was a bit flabbergasted by the truck. I mean, really, you hate Biden enough to get (presumably) costly detailing on your ride? 'Cause you sure don't look like you got much spare bank! Plus, there's still some small part of me that still uses the complex signaling system of my youth when long hair meant "my side."

But signals ultimately are all just random noise.

And White Rabbit is just another version of Glen Miller's Stardust.

I keep thinking there must be something real, but it's hard to get a fix on exactly what that something could be.

Shortly, I must toddle off to TaxBwana, and after that, I must figure out how to swap out the propane tank—which I’m sure is a very simple operation except I have never done it before & it involves a wrench, so you know.

Anyway. Not much time for scribbling today, which is fine because I am giving up politics.

Politics makes me feel like Cassandra. Meaning I see what’s going on very clearly, and I have utter confidence in any prediction I am moved to make.

But what exactly is the point of seeing clearly? I can’t influence a damn thing.

As the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci once observed, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

I am a little mammal, & really, my only job is to stay out from under the plunging feet of the thunder lizards.

So long as they don’t start piping Zyklon-B into those Guantanamo cells where they'll be housing all those undocumented immigrants and whatevers, I’m good.

At least, this time round, I’m not the one praying someone will hide me in their attic.

###

(Antonio Gramsci, by the way, was a really interesting guy, and the originator of the theory of cultural hegemony—a polysyllabic way of saying, “Bread and circuses.” Bread & circuses is always the most effective ruling strategy—the one fly in its traditionally soothing ointment being that art often reflects the vision of individual artists, and individual artists often have antiregime tendencies.

Once AI starts writing and composing all humans’ distractions, though, regimes won’t have that problem anymore.)

###

I watched the first three episodes of the TV series The Count of Monte Cristo last night. It’s not a particularly good production, but it did kind of pull me back from the ledge.

Politics is a big theme in The Count of Monte Cristo. But the politics involves the Bonapartists and the royalists in Western Europe circa 1850.

Tell me truthfully, now: Whose side are you on? Do you give a shit about Bonapartists and royalists?

I didn’t think so.

Politics may cast a dark shadow, but it’s a brief shadow, and in the end, nobody cares about it 100 years out. What they continue to care about are the stories of individuals who lived during those times.

###

Dumas was one of my favorite authors when I was 10, 11, 12.

I have no interest in rereading him, but I do recall—with great affection—the final sentence of The Count of Monte Cristo: …all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,”Wait and hope.”

(Hope my elderly memory hasn’t mangled the quote too badly.)