Mallory's Camera

I have to do nothing a certain number of hours each day.

I mean that quite literally. I essentially sit with my eyes unfocused. Sometimes, there's a book on my lap; sometimes, there's a yellow legal pad and a pen on a desk in front of me. But those are props. Really, I am just sitting there, & my mind is a complete blank.

Is this laziness? Is this some metabolic form of meditation? Who knows? But this is what I have to do to stay sane, & just because I'm toiling in the tax mines 10 hours a day, doesn't mean I can stop.

This cuts down on the number of hours I have available for Useful Work since added to the tax mine & the hours I sit with my eyes unfocused is the time I must spend on distraction. Books & movies! ("Movies" there is an umbrella term that includes television shows.) Dangling strands of narrative. Stories!

Long way of saying the Patrizia-torium is an absolute mess, and I've had the same basket of laundry waiting to be folded sitting in my bedroom for four days now. Though I did remember to get my Synthroid prescription refilled.

What I'm hoping is that I can fill the coffers high enough to buy me four uninterrupted weeks of work on the Work In Progress.

Three thousand extra dollars is not gonna float down in small, easily negotiable bills from the sky! Manifesting does not work for me.

No, I'm gonna have to sweat for it.

###

Shortly, I will be going into the Montgomery Schlock office to sit down with a client who somehow thinks it's my fault that he owes $2,000 on his federal income taxes.

He wants to ream me a new asshole.

Hey! I wasn't the one making out the W4 that only takes out 8% for federal taxes when he's clearly in the 12% bracket!

But like most people, he thinks tax refunds are a type of Lotto. And that I have cheated him out of his golden ticket.

The Montgomery office is far more tolerable than the Middletown office. I actually like the people who work there. Yesterday, I learned the entire life history of the office's manager, a pugnacious 74-year old, born & raised in Newburgh during its tenure as the murder capital of the U.S. The high point of her life? In 1981, she was Miss Ramada Inn!

Stories! I do love stories.

The day before, I studied up on Gary (not his real name), a sweet & super-smart guy who plays D&D, smokes lots of dope, & weighs 350 pounds—down from 550 pounds three years ago.

When people are seriously obese, of course, that is the primary thing you notice about them—though political correctness dictates you pretend otherwise.

Eventually, the conversation grew real enough so that Gary began talking to me about his weight, why it happened. Though I think the real reason was that when everything else in your life is starving you, you nurture yourself the best way you can.

"Here's an interesting factoid," I said. "Do you know the only food in nature that contains sugars and fats in the same proportions that they're found in processed cakes and candies and ice cream?"

"Honey?" guessed Gary.

"Human breast milk," I told him.

His mouth fell open. And I could actually see the light bulb forming over his head.

When I mentioned to Ichabod that I was scheduled to work at Schlock every day between now and April 15, he told me, "You can't do that. That's absolutely insane," and began talking to me about self-care.

He's wrong: I absolutely can do that.

But he's also right: It is insane.

Thing is "self-care" is kind of an alien concept to me. New Age fluffle. I mean, my idea of self-care involves eating a gallon of coffee ice cream and vegging out for 12 hours straight to Season 3 of The Gilmore Girls. Which any therapist worth his/her salt would characterize as "self-destruction."

But when I woke up this morning, I absolutely did not want to go into the office. Even before it began to snow! So I called in sick.

That's self-care, right?

I was surprised to feel a twinge of bona fide guilt when I called in. Because Schlock doesn't care if I show up in their office or not. To Schlock, I am simply another ass in an office chair. I have no actual supervisor.

I make my life harder than it needs to be.

###

The work itself is not difficult.

I actually enjoy doing taxes. Doing taxes is not so very different from reading someone's tarot cards.

Yesterday, for example, I got to counsel a 75-year-old woman whose 50-year marriage had suddenly fallen apart.

"Has your husband filed yet?" I grilled her.

Her husband, still living in what was the family home, pays property taxes, mortgage interest, etc. The woman had never taken the slightest interest in the family taxes but had some vague notion they had always itemized.

"See, the thing is, if you're married filing separately, you both need to use the same type of deductions," I told her. "So if he itemizes his deductions, you'll have to as well. Except you don't have as much to itemize. So, you'll have a smaller deduction to protect you against tax liability if he files first and itemizes. Whereas if you file first, you can use the standard deduction, which for you is $17,250—"

Is that so hard to understand?

I didn't think so, but she had a hard time following my logic.

She wanted to do was to talk about what an absolute prick her husband was.

And, of course, I wanted to talk about that too! Girlfriend! He did what with his secretary? And she's how old? Does his secretary not understand that Viagra script or no Viagra script, he's essentially recruiting her to change his Depends?

Except talking about the piggish X was not what this woman was paying me to do.

###

Most of the time, though, I do absolutely nothing.

I am getting paid for it!

But sitting in that office day after day puts me in a Mood.

All I am is a drone, I think darkly. Nothing about me is vibrant or interesting. I've led a bleak life, entirely bereft of the intimacies and adventures that characterize other people's lives.

This is making it very hard for me to interact in a positive way with other people right now.

Like on the phone with real-life Daria the other night, I found myself hugely turned off.

She's Anaïs Nin! Everything she says is pretentious and self-serving. By strength of personal magnetism, she has managed to construct a world in which she is forever the consummate objet du desir; it's the one constant in her life: Everybody wants me!

She uses people! She picks them up by the wing! She tells them, You fascinate me! I want to know everything about you!

Then she drops them.

I was consumed with envy!

This is not an accurate assessment of real-life Daria, whom I don't know all that well, but who's never been anything but 100% supportive, open, and affectionate toward me. No, I was projecting my own negative mood onto Daria.

But even understanding that, it was impossible for me to shake the negativity.

Anyway, the real-life Daria biographical details are not enough to center Part II around. Her relationship with Brian turns out to be not so very different than my relationship with Brian. Closer, definitely. More physical: They slept in the same bed when they visited one another. They cuddled. He would spend hours stroking her back, which was one of the single most thrilling physical experiences she could ever remember; she dissolved in the touch of his fingers trailing down her spine.

But their explicitly sexual relationship ended after the first year or so.

Periodically, over the course of the 35-year friendship, they would try to have sex again from time to time.

But it never quite took.

So, I can't use "sex" as the Big Theme in Part II.

I'm gonna have to come up with a whole fresh subtext as well as a plot.

Sigh...

I was planning to hit the gym & do a Big Shop this morning. But I had neglected to check the weather forecast.

And when I woke up this morning, Hideous White Stuff was falling from the sky! More is expected. Not a lot of inches, but "heavy banding" (ugh!), which will make driving perilous.

The prestidigitators had augured a break in the snowfall around 7am, so I made an expedition to the Hannaford's of the Living Dead at that early hour to pick up enough provisions to tide me over till Monday. I was a kind of parade marshal for a cavalcade of trucks, all of which wanted to be going 50 mph. The roads were unplowed: I wanted to go 30 mph. The truck drivers were not happy with me. FUCK 'em.

Don't think I'll be going to the transfer station or the gym today! It's snowing again.

###

I had a conversation with the Big Remuneration Client. We have no plans to wind down, Big Remuneration Client said, but acknowledged that they are indeed reprioritizing. So my anxiety on that front is not all PTSD. Big Remuneration Client asked me to give him "a little time" to respond to my concerns.

If I had to guess, I'd say I will continue working for the client. In fact, my responsibilities may even increase—I made the bold suggestion that he let me start picking my own topics for analysis.

But I could be entirely wrong about that, so (a) it's a good thing I have another revenue stream till mid-April and (b) I need to start looking at alternative revenue streams after that.

Retirement subsidies cover my basic expenses, but if I want to do anything beyond enjoying a roof over my head, using utilities, and eating, I need other sources of cash flow.

###

Chapter 5 of the WiP has to open with some pontifications on the nature of friendship.

Then I kill off Debbie Reynolds. Debbie Reynolds catches COVID (of course!), and ends up in the ICU, where Grazia is her nurse & so, has to code her. Code is a failure, Debbie Reynolds dies. This precipitates Grazia's full-scale breakdown; Grazia follows the flaxen-haired girl back to the decrepid decaying mansion where the cult shelters, spends a week doing Cult Things & eventually gets rescued by Neal, who nurses her back to health at his Catskills cottage during which they have some sort of Significant Conversation on Neal's porch—which Grazia then remembers as she is standing on the porch again with Flavia & Daria the day after Neal's memorial for that full-circle effect. End Part 1.

This means I have to start with some Grazia/Neal phone conversations during which Grazia describes the cult & Neal senses her developing attraction to it. Or else Neal won't know where to look when Grazia disappears.

I don't much feel like writing today.

I don't much feel like doing anything today.

But I'm gonna write anyway.

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.

What happens when one feels humiliated & ashamed is that one loses the narrative thread of one's own life.

Because how can what happens to you be at all important?

You're an idiot!!!

And idiots don't deserve to have stories.

Serious recalibration is called for.

###

Anyhoo, the storm was dramatic but only dropped four inches of snow. While I watched the snow fall, I baked banana bread & prepared a complicated chicken Florentine dish. (See? I can cook! I just choose not to most of the time.)

All I wanted to do was read & watch mindless television, but no could do because I have approximately 1 billion pages of the U.S. tax code to memorize, plus all the usual Remuneration.

Betsy invited me to spend a weekend at her fabulous house in Westchester County.

Real-life Daria invited me to spend the winter at her house in California. She wants to give Brian's car to her son, but I suspect she has not thought that one through because she's also on the verge of trading in 30 years of freelance teaching & translation for a real job with benefits & security & everything, but also with only two weeks of mandated vacation per year—is she really gonna want to spend that precious two weeks transporting a car from New York to California?

If she does, we are chatting about me driving with her. Road trip! That would be mid-April.

If she doesn't, then I end up with Brian's car.

###

Somewhere around then, too, I must mastermind my own next move.

I've been going back and forth between whether I should relocate to Ithaca or back to Dutchess County.

Dutchess County has the advantage of being a short train ride away from New York City where I would very much like to spend more time. And I have pals in the area.

I know more people in Ithaca, though. Plus RTT is there. If last week's unfortunate mishap is any kind of foreshadowing of how I can expect my dotage to transpire, it would be best to be around family members upon whom I can endlessly presume.

###

I haven't gone near the Work in Progress in a couple of weeks.

I'm thinking I should start Chapter 4 today.

A large chunk of it takes place in a small-ish community hospital during COVID.

But I don't know anything about how small-ish community hospitals operated during COVID. And I'm not sure how to track that information down.

I guess I'm just gonna have to make it up.

There is one good thing about this time of year: I sleep more deeply & I dream more vividly. Like last night, I dreamed I had developed a forecasting tool based on Daily Mail headlines. Each day is a number based on a ratio derived from the number of headlines devoted to each topic. A typical ratio might read:

Meghan Markle (5) : Donald Trump (4): Cosmetic Surgery Nightmares (3): Toddlers Dying in Parked Cars (2): Ozempic Horror Stories (11) = Daily index of 0.189.

Which means a pretty good day! Only 11 Gazans will die; Trump will only collapse three times off camera, coming down those passenger airstairs, and the New York Giants will beat the Kansas City Chiefs.

That's a pretty good idea! I thought when I woke up.

###

Other than that, I did very little but Remunerate yesterday.

My mood is still perky from socializing & accomplishing writing goals so I didn't feel particularly oppressed by Remunerating, although naturally I wish it were more like automatic writing, or that a $50,000 bill would waft down from Heaven, or that the MacArthur Foundation folk would stumble across my diary & realize what a great genius I am.

###

Chapter 4 of the Work in Progress begins with a description of how lame the backwater community hospital is dealing with COVID patients. I haven't been an RN since 1992, and I have no idea what a non-lame way of dealing with COVID patients might be. So, I have emails & texts in to all my medical pals:

How many ventilators they would have. Would they have an ECMO machine? Would they have (or need) access to dialysis? They WOULDN'T have a negative pressure room, right? So what might their isolation precautions look like? How might they handle something like the ER waiting room? Would they make people wait outside in their cars & then just call them in one at a time?

I guess they call that research.

There was a crane standing in back of the house yesterday. (Avian, not construction).

A crane!!!!

I'd never seen one before, and of course, I did not have my phone on me to snap a pic.

Sandhill crane, I think, though it could fly—and did when Icky scared it off. He was afraid it was stalking the young chickens.

Are crane sightings good luck or bad luck?

I can't remember.

###

Another thing I couldn't remember...

After I cranked out 2,000 words of Remuneration, I went tromping on the railroad trail. On the railroad trail, I was accosted by a beautiful woman who smiled at me radiantly: "So nice to see you again! And your hair is still so beautiful!"

I smiled back, but I was thinking, Who the fuck are you?

The present tense is narrowing its beam...

###

Despite being innundated with scut work, I remained in an effortlessly happy mood all day. So maybe the crane was good luck.

Two interesting news stories stand out from this morning's disastrous barrage of current events:

• Trump is considering passing along a $2,000 tariff dividend to potential voters: This is both good news & bad news. Good because it suggests that there will at least be an election; bad because Americans are just dumb enough to sell themselves cheap for two grand, which means Trump or his surrogate will be reelected.

• 28% of Americans report that they have had some sort of romantic relationship with an AI. This puts Spike Jonez right up there with Jules Verne 'cause Jonez predicted this in the ever-so-brilliant movie Her.

###

Else? I spent yesterday plugging away at Remuneration & lambasting myself because I'm not a lean, green, statistics-analysis machine that can churn out 7,000 words a day instead of a mere 2,000.

I also have seven chapters of dense, illogical tax law mocking me.

Plus all those routine activities of daily life: brushing my teeth, washing my hair, placating the kiskas, cleaning the kiskas' litter box, exercising, cooking lentils, oatmeal, & salmon, eating lentils, oatmeal & salmon...

And, oh yeah—I'm writing a novel.

At least the All lentils, oatmeal, & salmon, all of the time! diet is cheaper than my previous grocery runs.

A few social things planned. That I won't enjoy 'cause I'm so freaked about the amount of work I have to accomplish.

Which I better get started on pronto.