Mallory's Camera

Very long, intricately plotted dream, which I mostly can’t remember except that it involved some sort of elaborate heist, a merry caper á la those old Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn movies.

But at the end, I looked up at the sky at the moon—and the moon looked like a perfectly fried egg!!!!

Which, I know, sounds prosaic except, in the dream, this moon was a thing of rare, unparalleled beauty…

###

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, I’d say we are roughly six months away—if that—from all of Europe becoming engulfed in the Ukraine War, which will make it officially World War III.

Plus, some doofus California congresscritter—a Democrat, if that matters—has introduced legislation regulating Artificial Intelligence. The punchline: The legislation was written by ChatGBT.

So, you know. Humanity is trying its very, very hardest to become extinct.

I’m split between scrambling to find a bullhorn through which I can bellow, Get away from that cliff, you morons! and standing on the sidelines snickering, Try harder!!!

###

After clear skies at dawn, yesterday rapidly devolved into what the brilliant rebeccmeister has dubbed “the slop.”

Not cold. But so grey, so uninviting with that 10 mph wind torturing the tops of the bare trees, that I could not motivate myself to go on that invigorating tromp even though I knew said tromp would make me feel a hundred times better.

So, instead, I bought my plane ticket to Guatemala.

###

Flights to Guatemala are mostly an afterthought on the part of participating airlines. Like, you know, if I want to go to Guatemala, I should do the illegal migrant thing, right? Only in reverse! I should hop a Greyhound to El Paso and then hire a coyote to ferry me across the Rio Grande in the opposite direction of the fleeing migrant caravans! We can wave to each other in the middle of the river.

Flights to Guatemala tend to take off and arrive at inconvenient hours.

Since I do not want to arrive in Guatemala City at 3 am, it took some maneuvering and finessing to find flights that would actually get me to and from at a decent hour.

Those flights were considerably more expensive than the other flights, so by the time I was done booking, I was trembling and cold and reaching for what the brilliant lookfar calls “video nepenthe” (which, in yesterday’s case consisted of endless episodes of the original Law & Order.)

I wanted to let the boys know about my plans, which meant I had to have a tactful conversation with RTT: I know that since you’ve been laid off, money is an issue, so you may be having second thoughts about the trip. I’d be happy to help you with the plane ticket, and I know Ichabod would, too—

And this precipitated a longish conversation—

He is anxious.

He is depressed.

His erstwhile boss wants to bring him back but Americans For Truth, Justice, and Superman’s Way is scrambling to come up with the $$$ to fund his position, and meanwhile, a scuzzy roommate stiffed him on January rent (RTT’s name is on the lease—)

###

Over the course of my colorful working career, I was laid off twice from jobs I was very, very good at.

The first time was because Dan Okrent (may his hemorrhoids be bothering him this blustery morning) thought the Internet had no future.

The second time was because my boss Maria stopped schtupping the head of a then-powerful and celebrated international talent agency, and in retaliation, he pulled the plug on the division she was helming.

I can’t tell you how awful it feels to be laid off from a job you are very, very good at.

Time went on to prove that the two fuckheads who instigated my layoffs were wrong, wrong, wrong.

Time Inc and People Magazine were early, early Internet adopters, and I was working hard to allow them to take full advantage of that. I mean, I did a complete 50-page five-year plan!!! Instead, today, Time Inc and People Magazine are the flimsiest of scraps at the bottom of the bits-and-bytes waste bucket.

And say what you want about Maria—and I do!—she was absolutely, Steve-Jobs-level visionary, and all her whiteboard skying about the future of digital media has come to pass.

All this, by way of saying I knew exactly how RTT was feeling.

He was feeling bad.

###

I must have boundary issues.

Whenever my kids are feeling bad, I feel bad.

And yesterday, while I was talking to RTT, I felt terrible.

I Venmo-ed him money. It was the only tangible assurance of my affection that I figured would mean anything.

And then when I got off the phone, I did a job search for jobs similar to the one he got laid off from.

And what do you know? There are dozens and dozens of them! And they pay the Big Buck$$$.

But they all require people to know how to drive.

And they all require people with a college degree.

RTT is one class short of his degree. In these days of George Santos, you can no longer get away with saying you have a college degree if you don’t have a college degree. Even if you’re only one class short.

And he has absolutely, resolutely, refused to get his driving license—even though I used to offer and offer to pay for driving lessons and nag him ceaselessly about that one remaining chemistry class.

Self-sabotage on his part, in other words.

I know a lot about self-sabotage, too.

###

Anyway, it is frustrating and heartbreaking to see him so miserable when relatively EZ fixes are at hand.

But he is an adult.

You wish you could somehow pass your own hard-learned lessons to your children.

But you can’t.

Everyone has to make their own mistakes, apparently.

So where was I again? I forget. Oh, right – in the opening days of the twenty-first century, one of those strange little towns that's outlived its usefulness, and so is forced to prey parasitically on a past that never happened. At least not the way they pretend it did.

(Please don't ask me who "they" are. I told you the first time: I don't know.)

Here's Max at the feet of one of those giants of the past, a sardine fisherman. The Poet writes how one morning the sardine fisherman rose his fist and cursed the gods over having to pay dues to the Cannery Row Business Improvement District equal to the amount he was charged in municipal taxes. (The Cannery Row Business Improvement District is a consortium of deep-pocketed businessmen who collect money, sit on their fat asses and do nothing to improve the economic climate of this dead little town.) The gods heard this blasphemy and turned the fisherman into stone! Well… not stone exactly. A fog-resistant, rustproof metal alloy actually.

This is why I confine all outcries against municipal ineptitude to this tiny little cul de sac in cyberspace.

Here is an Edsel! It really has no bearing on your life, or mine either, but I thought it was cool to see one of the most spectacular failures in the history of the American automotive industry parked across the street from me – so lovingly restored too! It's not all that ugly. Why did it fail? Ah, the mysteries of the tipping point…

Anyway, it's been kind of a blah week. Business at the Little Store fell off sharply after Labor Day – to be expected, of course, but still a bit unsettling. Max has been headquartering here for the past three weeks. It's been terrific to have him here, I just enjoy the hell out of the kid, but all his friends have already started school so he's been kind of at loose ends.

"I'm not all that good at amusing myself," he told me drily yesterday. That was his excuse for watching the entire Beauty and the Geek marathon on VH1.

Every 15 minutes or so he would murmur plaintively, "I really need to get my orientation reading done." (Orientation at Stanford starts tomorrow.)

I did manage to drag him out in the early afternoon on a glass bottom boat tour of the Monterey harbor. Here are two sea lions hiding out under the commercial wharf:

Also I spent three hours looking for Alabama 3's cover of These Boots Are Made For Walking which used to be on my hard drive and now mysteriously isn't. And I went to ____ ________'s birthday party, redeemed from awfulness by the presence of an old blues singer, Broadway John Tucker, who is just a totally amazing performer.
Here he is, a little out of focus, wondering why his wife and his woman can't get along. More men should wear porkpie hats.
###
So. Maria.

By the time I met her I was over my Lesbian phase – meaning I still fantasized but the objets of my fantasies were always girls about the same age I was myself at the height of my Sapphic experimentations.

But there's no denying that I had an intellectual crush on her.

Me and everyone else.

After some downward negotiation of salary expectations, I was duly hired by People Magazine and flown to the great glass Time Life building in NYC for orientation. I carted Robin along in an infant car seat.

Robin was two weeks old, only recently discharged from the Intensive Care Nursery where he'd been rushed mere seconds after birth, a casualty of meconium aspiration. In the hospital he'd developed a mild aversion to being touched which made cuddling problematic. Also when they finally started feeding him by mouth, they'd used bottles – against my objections – which meant he'd also developed an aversion to latching on to my breast.

During the meetings with my new corporate masters, I attempted – unsuccessfully – to breastfeed him.

The corporate masters were actually cooler about this then you would have guessed. It was the week that the Susan Smith story first broke. I guess everyone was especially sensitized to the demands of motherhood.

The meetings lasted for four days. Every meeting began with Jim Kinsella striding purposefully up to the whiteboard, scribbling a bunch of illegible words on it and then scowling at us meaningfully while Maria beamed from the front row.

I'd never seen a whiteboard before.

"Get used to them," murmured Hala, sitting next to me. "You'll be seeing a lot of them."

Hala was the ambassador to People Online from the publishing side of the magazine. She was fabulous and more than a little scary. Hard-working, chain-smoking, bullshit detectors set on high. There was an interesting backstory that I never became privy to – her father some kind of rags-to-riches business tycoon, a Polish emigrant who made good. Of his four children – two daughters, two sons – only Hala seemed to have inherited ruthless drive and ambition. She'd been on the fast track for a Time Inc corporate vice presidency – high priestess in the pantheon of brands! – when she'd jumped ship to join People Online because she saw clearly that the Internet was the future of publishing.

She didn't have much use for Maria. And even less for Jim Kinsella.

This was the first time I'd been back in New York City in many, many years and I was loving it – the crowds on the streets! so many lives engulfing mine that I would never touch! – and I was so enthralled by the endless possibilities of the new job, so pleased that this was a realm I knew more about than the highly paid executives who had hired me.

"The most interesting thing about the Internet is the way it gives the lowliest web publisher near parity with corporate image wranglers," I told them. "With less than two thousand dollars of equipment, anyone can make their own stab at defining the cultural zeitgeist."

Kinsella peered at me with disdain. "But we have the brand name," he said.

Every night in my expensive hotel room I would have marathon phone conversations with my best friend Tom Mandel back in California during which I'd deconstruct the day's events in great detail. Tom was a brilliant strategist, used to living his life over telephone wires – he was the Well's most notorious addict after all – a tendency only heightened and rarified by his recent medical diagnosis with Stage IV lung cancer.

The diagnosis had come the day before Robin's baby shower, two months prior. I'd been sitting in front of my computer, logged on to the Well (naturallement!) when Tom "sent" me – arcane jargon for the system's IM technology: Very bad news. The worst possible.

He'd shown up at the shower the next day anyway, and I remember feeling so touched, so moved, by this show of support.

I couldn't imagine the world without Tom then and find it hard even now though it's coming up on thirteen years.

Tom also fancied himself in love with Maria, so in addition to reporting on corporate strategy, I would also do fashion reports and up-to-the-minute breaking stories on goo-goo eyes with Kinsella.

Kinsella was openly gay so that was safe.

"He's such a prick," Tom would say. "An arrogant prick. Who knows nothing. Who's not even interested in making love to her. I don't get it."

Then it was time to go home.

Car services were another new thing and I was all country mouse over the shadowy black limosine that dropped me off at JFK. They'd bought me a business class plane ticket too!

Something weird happened on the flight home though.

I was cradling Robin, unsuccessfully trying to interest him in my left breast when two air marshals strode purposefully into the business section.

They stopped right in front of us.

"That baby," one of them said. "Can you prove that it's yours?"

Gotta love that "it."

Well, I didn't have a birth certificate. Alameda County hadn't even issued one yet. And the baby was squirming, obviously annoyed with my tit. And I was 42 years old and still enough of a hippie to disdain coloring my hair which had started to go grey in my early thirties.

No, I couldn't prove that it was my baby. Unless…

"Well, I draw the line at showing you my episiotomy," I told them. "But I can squeeze some milk out if you want to watch. Here –"

"That won't be necessary," said the taller of the two hastily. They turned tail and fled.

Later one of the stewardesses told me there'd been a kidnapping scare in the airport. I suppose the air marshals were just doing their job.

But I felt as though the universe was saying, You're too old to be a mother.

As soon as I got off the plane I booked an appointment with a hair colorist.