Mallory's Camera

Dreamed that I decided to have a massive snit fit! Someone did something that ruffled my feathers (mildly), and I responded by ostentatiously bailing on some social plan.

Lee A______ kept trying to reason with me: It wasn’t that big a deal! Honestly! Why give them the satisfaction? while Diana D_____ (for some odd reason, Black in the dream) was crying. Diana D_____ loves me truly, but then Diana D______ loves a lot of people truly. She is honestly one of the nicest people in the world.

I remained obdurate: Nope, not coming.

And watched them all drive off together. With an odd sense of satisfaction but also a sinking feeling of FOMO.

###

What else?

Got the COVID & flu shots. As per expectation (and prior experience), I don’t feel sick at all. I guess I must have a really crummy immune system—although I’m among the few people I know who still hasn’t caught COVID (despite flying on planes filled with coughing, hacking people, standing on lines filled with coughing, hacking people, etc., etc.)

Last night, the Aurora Borealis reportedly wandered south and was supposed to be visible in northern Dutchess County (away from the light pollution.) I thought vaguely about driving somewhere to see it but fell asleep instead.

The client received my revisions gratefully—and noted I had gone above & beyond by doing them on a weekend.

I played The Sims! The new horse, goat, and lamb expansion pack is mega-cute.

That’s all I got!

Since the vaccinations didn’t make me sick, I have no excuse for not being productive today!

Did not finish the current Remunerative Project yesterday, but will finish it today. I’m at the point now where if Remunerative Projects were knitting projects, I’d be sewing the sweater together.

Plus, I gotta copyedit!

Commas must be in the right place, footnotes must be properly formulated, prose must be sprightly.

###

Evidence of the depth of The Sunken Place into which my soul has descended is the fact that the only thing that excited me at all yesterday was the news that the next Sims 4 action pack is gonna feature horses! And goats!



Just look at that! I can do my own Ponderosa! Or creepy Kevin Costner Yellowstone ranch!

###

To refresh my mind, I knocked off for a couple of hours in the afternoon and read Edith Wharton ghost stories.

One in particular bemused: The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.

It is filled with atmosphere.

The pacing is good.

The pieces are placed well on the board.

(The first-person protagonist’s voice is a little weak because she’s the titular character, and Wharton didn’t have much empathy with the serving class, but hey! You can’t have everything.)

But then… Nothing happens.

Like WTF?

In a way, this is almost more intriguing than if something did happen.

Anyway, it’s a good template for my story within a story: The thing that’s discovered in that Paris flea market may be a series of letters EW writes to her X-Husband in the lunatic asylum, but could just as easily be the draft of an unpublished ghost story.

Unreliable narrators!

Always my favorite kind of narrator.

###

Current events continue to divert and entertain because if they didn’t divert and entertain, they would appall and oppress.

Like Biden is sending cluster bombs to Ukraine—despite the fact that cluster bombs are “illegal weapons” in the U.S. and Biden is on record as declaring the use of cluster bombs “a war crime.”

And Asians are now White Supremacists—because when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, it also removed the de facto quota on Asian admissions into elite universities.

Also, the liberal New York Times is lashing out at the GOP for trying to curtail “a major warrantless surveillance program.” (GOP bad. Everything GOP does is bad. Warrantless surveillance must therefore be good.)

And, of course, progressives everywhere are lamenting the preliminary injunction issued by some judge in Louisiana. This judge apparently thinks freedom of speech is a good thing and wants the federal government to stop putting the screws on social media platforms that publish views that go contrary to the federal government’s Official Version of the Way Things Are.

But wait! There’s more! Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse now comes with trigger warnings.

Client behind the last two Remunerative Projects emailed me last night: They want to set up a phone call with me and their Head Honcho because they have big plans going forward and—quote—want to strengthen our partnership with you.

And my heart sank.

All I could think was No, no, no, because it sounds like they want to offer me an actual job, and an actual job is not what I want.

I want to go on freelancing.

True, freelancing is less secure.

But it is also more, well… free.

I’m gonna have to ponder that one.

###

Long ago, I stopped asking the Universe for the things I want.

Instead, my sporadic prayer became: Let me be a vessel for the Universe’s will.

This is because of The Monkey’s Paw Effect.

You remember the story The Monkey’s Paw? W.W. Jacobs? Late nineteenth century? Classic three-wishes horror story? Indian Fakir puts a spell on a dried-up piece of taxidermy, and it turns out that the thing really is magic, grants all your wishes—except those wishes come true at an incalculable personal cost that you never, ever suspected you’d have to pay when you made the wish?

I had years and years and years of wishes coming true at incalculable costs, and finally, I thought, You know what? It’s time to stop making wishes. Let the Universe flow in its own course, and learn to swim better.

Anyway, given that numinous-tological set-up, I’m not sure what my answer should be if they offer me a job.

###

What else?

Not much.

Three thousand more words written. Slow and steady. All the Gatorade you can drink at the finish line—whiplash! whiplash!—so keep writing, maggot!

I amused myself between bouts of compact economic analysis by daydreaming about the movie I want to make: The Passion of Anthony Bourdain as enacted by the Sims. An homage to Todd Bridges’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story! A musical ‘cause the Sims do sing, and I’ve been watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and it’s easy to subtitle videos (and Simlish is a foreign language, after all.)

I only got as far as writing a single verse for Tony’s final number:

I don’t want to talk to anyone
I don’t want to answer my phone
The sycophants want into my pants
But I want them to leave me alone
‘Cause I can only get it up for Asia…

I could be done tomorrow!

If I do 5,000 words today and 5,000 words tomorrow.

Naught to report.

I spent yesterday doing Absolutely Nothing and might have enjoyed it were it not for that irritatingly nagging little voice whispering in my ventrolateral frontal cortex, You should be Cleaning. You should be Cooking. You should be Tromping. You should be working on the Novel.

Eventually, I gave in to the little voice. It was too hot to tromp by that time, but I vacuumed approximately five pounds of cat hair from the carpet.

Then I read about 100 pages in No Man Knows My History. Fawn Brodie does an excellent job setting up the Burned-over District (which to this very day retains a scrim of strangeness over its desolate countryside and the empty streets of its dying towns), demonstrating how Joseph Smith conscripted its obsessions with thundering angels and buried treasure into the tenets of his new religion.

Then I proceeded to play Sims 4 for a few hours.

I’ve been playing the Sims since the game first came out. I mean, is there a game that could be more perfect for someone of my peculiar sensibilities? Miniature people, houses and towns that live in my computer with some simulacrum of free will that I can then proceed to tolerate or smash according to my whim.

Just like God!!!!

Periodically, I get bored with the Sims.

And then I stop playing for a couple of months. Or a couple of years.

But yesterday, they came out with a High School Expansion Pack, and I mean high school! I am so there!

Plus, I have downloaded every strange, off-color mod available and set them all to “autonomous,” so now all my SIMs and NPLs are always sneaking off to have oddly graphic sex with one another:



I have to say, the animations are mildly titillating. In the same way, I suppose, that if the Simpsons started having sex, it would be mildly titillating. Sure, they’re just cartoons, but, you’ve been watching them for years, you're psychologically invested.

The irritatingly nagging voice really disapproves of this.

###

And now I must toddle off to play Mother Teresa at the Food Bank and thence to tromp.

I played the Sims for four hours last night. First time I’ve played the Sims in more than a year. I wanted a safe little universe where people are programmed by cheerful algorithms over which I have absolute dominion. I’m tired of the – ha, ha, ha – real world in which people are programmed by algorithms that I suspect are no less simplistic but far more sinister and over which I have remarkably little agency.

I’m tired of politics. I’m tired of greed – and long before Black Friday was incorporated as an official part of the Thanksgiving holiday, I knew Thanksgiving was really all about greed not gratitude, and therefore the most hypocritical of all American holidays.

Most of all, I’m tired of being the reincarnation of some good German in the Weimar Republic who fucked up that first chance to thwart the Nazis.

I don’t want to thwart the Nazis.

I just want the Nazis to not be there.

A couple of years ago, some major public opinion institute decided to survey Americans on what superpower they’d most like to have – ‘cause, you know, that's a vital policy issue!

Interestingly, there was nothing close to consensus on American superpowers.

But the superpower that got the most votes – just under 10% – was time travel.

And do you want to know why 10% of all Americans would like to travel back in time?

So they can kill Hitler!

Seriously! I am not making this shit up.

I’m thinking, Hey! Now they’ll get their chance! And they won’t even have to wear tinfoil helmets or ride in a DeLorean.

###

I stayed in Trumansburg an extra day to watch the Gilmore Girls reboot.

Lorelei Gilmore is my spirit animal. Like Lorelei, I’m a big-boned, rangy girl. I don’t have her fashion sense – I’d be happy wearing the same Universal Suit every day of the year – and my voice is somewhat breathier and more drawling. But I do talk like her albeit much more slowly – my pop culture referents are processed approximately one every minute and a half as compared to Lorelei's one every 15 seconds. (Of course, I don’t have a writers’ table feeding me lines!) Like Lorelei Gilmore, I make absolutely no distinction between high culture and low culture. The vulgar and the sublime share the same narrow bandwidth in my universe.

This refusal to distinguish between turrets and kitchen middens is apparently a rare quality. Ben gets it, which is why he’s so irreplaceable. I have some online friends who get it – I’m thinking of yew-w-w-w, chezsci! But most people don’t get it.

###

T-burg is quirky in the same way that the fictional Stars Hollow is quirky. Not as pretty, though. Small towns with history in New York and New English points north have a tradition of disaster. Fires sweep through the old wooden buildings wiping out whole blocks of wooden Victorian houses. If the towns are built near water, the rivers or creeks rise and flood the brick and stone buildings, erected in the late 1800s and early 1900s to be banks, department stores, and the offices of prosperous merchants. And then there was the urban renewal craze of the 1960s.

T-burg is kind of skewed physically. A fire took out the entire north side of the commercial district in 1921, and 15 years later, Trumansburg Creek – which runs through the middle of town – burst its banks and took out much of the south side. The city fathers responded to the disasters by rerouting the Ithaca-Geneva Turnpike away from the ruined center of town. Enough of the old buildings are left to remind you: Hey! This place has history:



One of my favorite places in T-burg has always been the Rongovian Embassy, a club that featured great music, passable food, and a magnificent bar. An enchanted roadhouse filled with magical beings:



But when I walked down Main street to peer through the Rongo’s windows this trip, I found this sign on the front door:



The magical beings have all gone into the West…