mallorys_camera | Entries tagged with work

For my birthday, I gave myself a fabulous gift: I called Schlock and told them I would not be finishing out the tax season.

I've spent the past four days decompressing.

Any job where you sit on your ass for eight plus hours a day without any opportunity to move is a bad job, but this was a particularly bad job, combined as it was with eye strain from computers and multiple documents that use tiny font, listless coworkers, and relentless pressure to service as many tense and anxious customers in as short a period of time as possible.

###

I came out of the experience with what I've self-diagnosed as mild PTSD. Writing is actually kind of a chore. (I'm used to nobody having the slightest interest in anything I have to say.) Walking two and a half miles winds me, and my lumbar muscles keep twinging because I've lost my core strength. It's difficult to concentrate because nothing really interests me.

I didn't burn any bridges when I resigned.

Who knows, right? I might be kidnapped by terrorists wielding cattle prods! Alhamdulillah! You MUST do our taxes—or else!

I might be yanked backward in time to a Nazi death camp, where the only thing standing between me and the showers is my ability to decode a W2 under corporate supervision.

In other words, there might be circumstances under which I would consent to work again at Schlock.

Might.

So my tone over the phone, as I was subsequently contacted by each and every one of the bureaucratic overlords, was regretful: Gosh! I love you guys! Everyone is so great! I just burned myself out!

And who knows? Maybe that's true.

Well, next year, you'll only work a few days a week, said one of the bureaucratic overlords.

Ha, ha, ha. Right.

For the most part, the clients I worked with loved me. I got all five-star reviews.

###

Talk about your dysfunctional business models: Schlock is like a Halloween Superstore dedicated to Uncle Sam's payday.

Will Schlock even be around in five years? I kinda doubt it.

There's a lot of competition for those IRS hostages. Chiefly from TurboTax (and if Schlock is Blockbuster, TurboTax is Netflix). But also from the dwindling number of other in-person tax prep services like Jackson Hewitt, multiple free online sites, high-end accountants, and, of course, my own alma mater, TaxBwana, which does 1.7 million returns a year.

TurboTax doesn't do in-person consultations, so no competition there. (Though one must wonder whether the operational costs of maintaining bricks and mortar are that much more than the revenue stream it yields.) And TurboTax is actually a bit more expensive for comparable online and downloadable products. But it's rooted in that ever-popular DIY ethos. And it's going after a more sustainable market.

Just contrast and compare the television commercials in which Schlock tax preparers, always depicted in identical green crew-neck sweaters, interact with middle-of-the-road Americans. Sure, there are such things as middle-of-the-road Americans, but that's an externally applied label; most Americans prefer to think of themselves as exceptional. Meanwhile, TurboTax preparers wear edgy black blazers and magenta button-down shirts as if they're dressing down for an elegant dinner party while catering to youthful folk with tattoos, piercings, and anime dance moves.

###

I haven't done very much since I stopped working. Talking to other people is an effort. What, after all, could I possibly have to say that other people might want to hear?

I make myself walk the two and a half miles I'm capable of walking. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll be able to walk three miles! Or, at least, two and three-quarters.

I forced myself to finish The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. If you look at the novel as a meditation on the aftermath of colonialism, it actually kinda works—particularly with its minor characters: the unlucky Mina Foi, the vain, self-involved Babita, the West-obsessed Dadaji. The status details and textures of everyday Indian life really sparkle.

But the main characters—the two lovers and Sonia's evil magus lover, Ilan—are mere paperweights used to keep pieces of the plot from flying away. Ilan's characterization, in particular, is irritating: Sonia's point of view is not established compellingly enough to determine why she would find this man the least bit attractive.

Plus, Kiran Desai uses Ilan to introduce a deeply lame magical realism arc—this despite bashing magical realism as a literary conceit in earlier pages of the book. (Sonia is a literature major and a writer, so the character is used as a conduit for many of Desai's theories on literature.) Was the author aiming for irony? If so, it was badly executed.

And the prose style felt syrupy. It never shifted rhythm. Momentum never built around important moments, so every moment was equally important and unimportant. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice on the author's part. I dunno.

###

I sit and read in a chair in the backyard, so I can let the two surviving chickens out of their dark little coop. Perhaps my human presence counts as vigilance. Maybe my presence will keep the predators off.

The chicken gurlZ come out greedy for tortilla treats. But then they take off and hide in the bushes. Do they have any specific memory of Grey Chicken's death? Who knows? Some birds (parrots) have excellent memories, so maybe they do. The chicken gurlZ sense something, and whatever that is, it's enough to make them cower. No more strutting around the acreage! Every animal would rather be safe than free, I suppose.

By the end of yesterday, I'd started to feel psychologically less like a worthless drone deservedly scorned by the Trump-voting Mister and Missus McGoo's of this world and more like, well, myself! Who, no doubt, is deservedly scorned by many, but for other reasons.

Physically, it's gonna take some time to snap back.

I haven't exercised in like three months.

I went out tromping yesterday and could only do two and a half miles before I tuckered out.

When you're old, you lose muscle tone very quickly. And I'm old! Turning 74 tomorrow.

Off to tromp now.

I will be attempting to return to Schlock for six more days this coming week if I can stand it.

But if I walk in and I can't stand it,, I will fly out that door.

I forget that when you're old, you don't have the resilience you once had: When the battery drains, it takes a long, long time to replete.

Best not to let it drain.

On Tuesday, my nervous system told my body, Babe you cannot do this anymore.

My hands started shaking while I was doing taxes in the Middletown office.

Shaking? That's actually an understatement: My hands thought they were conducting an invisible philharmonic orchestra.

Mister and Missus McGoo were sitting in my cubicle. My hands shook so hard, I couldn't input their driver's license numbers.

Oozing apologeticness, I ushered the McGoo's to another tax preparer, expressed remorse to Leslie, and took off.

Not sure which of the many, many straws was the one that broke the camel's back.

Was it panic over impending nuclear cataclysm? Open the fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!

Was it watching a fox break Grey Chicken's neck in the golden hour, the afternoon before?

Or knowing I wasn't going home in any true sense of the word "home," but only to some place where I'd parked my stuff and cats (I hoped) temporarily.

###

This episode happened following about 36 hours off, which I tried to turn into quality time by going to the New Paltz Community Garden and breakfasting with real-life Flavia.

I planted peas and put some strawberries and marigolds into one of the upraised beds the previous plot tenant had conveniently left behind:

Following morning, I motored up to Ellenville for breakfast with real-life Flavia, who may have found a good home for Brian's beloved piano:

It's sad that nobody seems to want Brian's beloved piano. It's an awfully good piano, though real-life Mimi's tenancy with its wood fires, clouds of marijuana smoke, dust, and Japanese beetle infestation has been hard on it. Still. It managed to plong in tune when the head of SUNY New Paltz's music department came up to play some notes.

And real-life Mimi surprised us both—pleasantly!—by actually finding a campsite where she can live in the camper Brian helped her buy, come May. That was a relief!

"So, I'm going to spend May cleaning out the house, and then I'll put the property on the market," Flavia said. "Tim seems to think I can get a lot of money for it?"

"How much?"

Flavia hesitated for a moment. But in the nine months since Brian's death, we have become intimate friends who can talk about money. "Million or so."

"And the first thing the new owners will do is pull down Brian's house," I said.

"Probably," said Flavia.

I had a Shlock shift in Montgomery after hanging out with Flavia. I didn't want to be there, but when I got back to the casa after work, I didn't want to be there either since Icky was in residence, and my antipathy toward Icky just grows and grows and grows. Icky marches around the house talking to people on the phone or alternately haranguing and cajoling the Spawn in a loud voice, pretty much ignoring me. It's like he thinks I'm invisible, and when I'm around him, I pretty much feel invisible. Fortunately, he's only up 10 days out of the month.

Anyway, I was keeping Sonia and Sunny company in the Patrizia-torium on the glorious couch Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed gifted me with when I left Dutchess County, when I heard loud squawking from the back lawn.

Looked out—

A fox had the grey chicken in its mouth.

Ran downstairs and out onto the porch.

Icky had heard the squawking, too, and had raced out onto the lawn. The fox dropped the chicken and leaped—its fur golden in the golden light of the late afternoon sun—before running into the small copse of trees that mark the property's boundaries. But either it had broken the chicken's neck, or Icky had broken it, carrying her back to the porch.

The grey chicken was the shyest of the chicken GurlZ. I liked her. I appreciated her hesitancy. So, this was very sad.

But fox is gonna fox. And I have told Icky at least 50 times: There are too many predators around here to let the chickens free-range! You have to build them a run!

He ignored me, of course. Like I say, I am completely invisible to him.

But that essentially means that Black Chicken and her sole surviving companion, an almost identical black chicken, are Dead Chickens Walking. It's a bad situation. And frustrating. Because I can't do a damn thing about it.

I didn't sleep well.

Is that why my hands started shaking so badly in the Schlock office?

I don't know.

###

Before Schlock, I did taxes for a handful of friends every year through TaxBwana. One of those friends is my good pal Tom, whom I first met on LJ back in the Jurassic. Anyway, Tom contacted me that evening: Could I...?

Yes, but Schlock won't let me do freebies, I said. So, I'd have to charge you.

He described his tax documents. They were pretty basic. But Schlock would have charged him a minimum of $250, which seemed like highway robbery to me. So, I snooped around online for a bit and found a site that lets you do and file your federal taxes for free-eee-eeee! and only charges you $20 for filing your state taxes.

"So, you'll set up the account," I said to him over the phone, "and then I'll use that account to input your tax stuff."

"Good show," he said. "But how are you? You sound down."

I described what had happened at the Schlock office that morning. How my hands started shaking, how I couldn't control them, how Mister and Missus McGoo had gawked at me in horror with their big, googly, cartoon eyes.

"Honestly, I couldn't blame them," I said. "I wouldn't have wanted me to do my taxes either at that point. But it would have been less embarrassing if I had taken a big dump and begun fingerpainting on the walls."

"God, that sounds awful," Tom said.

"It was," I said. "But working there has been awful from the start. What you won't do, you'll do for money."

"Has it been bad?" he asked.

"Really bad. And housing insecurity plays into that in a major way. You and I should be housemates! We'd have a good time and save a ton of money."

I said this in a random, joking way. But the minute the words came out of my mouth, I thought: Hmmmm... That's not a bad idea.

Tom has a house. Since his daughter moved out, he lives there alone.

Tom and I are very much in synch psychologically. We both subscribe to the Larry McMurtry ideal of friendship. We are not romantically attracted to one another. We are both more-or-less in the same financial situation.

The more we talked about it, the more appealing the arrangement sounded.

But there is one major caveat: Tom lives in Holland, Michigan. Where I have never been. Holland, Michigan, ranks high on Architectural Digest and Forbes lists of the prettiest small towns in the U.S. It's a college town. It has an arthouse cinema! But it is also Trumpy, plus it has brutal winters.

At any rate, I am probably gonna fly out for a visit sometime in the next couple of months.
If I like what I see, the plan becomes a possibility.

I'm also going to book a consultation with a neurologist. I've been assuming the hand tremors are stress-related. But who knows? Maybe I have Parkinson's disease.

The company is loathsome, but I do like the clients.

I wish I could write a complete novel about each & every one of them, but when I drag myself home at the end of the day, my brain is shot. I don't know how else to describe it: It's not fatigue exactly, since all I do all day is sit, applying ass to the base of a chair. My brain is perfectly capable of processing information. I just don't want to.

I've had to make adjustments to accommodate the job.

Chief among those adjustments: Stuff I did to control that hand tremor (which causes big problems when you're inputting data). Like I stopped drinking coffee on mornings I work. You'd think that one would be a biggie since caffeine is addictive and withdrawal is supposed to cause headaches & intense lassitude, but in fact, it caused neither of those things for me, and so, was surprisingly easy.

I also cut down on my Synthroid dose. I climbed on a scale for the first time in forever and found I had lost 10 pounds since I started working. (I am one of those people who gets anorexic with stress.) Drugs are typically administered per kilogram of body weight, so I figured the prescribed dose was now too high.

No Coffee + Less Synthroid did indeed banish the tremors.

Today being a Day Off, I am drinking coffee & taking the full dose, and yes, indeed, my hands are shaking.

###

A short list of clients over the past week: (None of their names are real.)

• Gary Stevens. Hippie-looking guy about my age with stringy white hair and an amiable manner. A retired nurse—so we chatted about that: He got his nursing training in the Navy, and, in his retirement, volunteers several times a week at a local homeless shelter.

"Any big changes this year?" I asked.

"Yeah, I got divorced," he told me ruefully. "You think you have a happy marriage, and then your wife informs you you don't."

He'd come to Schlock because he'd had to divide up his annuity and wasn't quite sure of the tax implications.

"Well, let's have a look," I said.

And Oh. My. Gawd.

Instead of engaging the services of an advisor who might have assisted him in drafting a financial instrument that could shield him from the division's tax implications, he merely withdrew $250,000 from the account and gave that money to his X-wife—

Leaving him with a $40,000 tax bill.

I have often read the phrase "the color drained from his face," but I'd never actually seen it before.

"What can I do?" he whispered.

"Well, first, you absolutely have to file this tax return," I said. "The penalties for not filing are much higher than the penalties for not paying. And then, you need to find yourself a tax attorney. You may be eligible for what they call 'an offer in compromise,' where the IRS agrees to settle for part of what you owe. But, I mean—why'd you do it this way? Why wouldn't you have the brokerage issue the check to her, which would have shifted the tax burden? Didn't your attorney—"

"I didn't have an attorney," he said miserably. "I figured I would try to keep things amiable."

• Marie de Faltay. Woman a few years younger than me with a definite sartorial flair that included rhinestone-studded glasses. She was trembling like a leaf.

The first thing she asked me: "Can I declare my dogs as dependents?"

I saw at once that she had been very, very beautiful in her youth. Blonde hair, Zsa-Zsa-Gabor-like features, and the most amazing eyes, violet and green at the same time. I supposed it had never occurred to her that there would come a time when she would not be beautiful. But beauty had been her only leverage, and with that gone, she had very little to fall back on. She supplemented her meager social security income with a shit job at Marshall's. Combined revenue streams left her with a taxable income of zero, so she got back the small sums withheld from the Marshall's check for federal & state taxes.

She hadn't filed her 2024 taxes. I talked her into making an appointment to do that, too. "If you're getting a refund, the IRS doesn't care if you file late." Her amazingly beautiful eye welled up with tears over the thought of a few hundred unanticipated dollars. And she'll definitely be getting a refund—no taxable income!

• Gilbert Specter. I was so relieved he lived in an apartment! Because he gave out strong I-have-a-dungeon-in-my-basement-where-I-chain-up-sex-slaves vibes.

(Probably, I am being mean here. Probably, he was developmentally delayed, or maybe he was just not very smart.)

Works as a custodian at a local high school. (Stephen King! White courtesy telephone.) Has a small stockpile of dividend-bearing stocks in addition to his salary. Also, a side gig selling tickets (to what? I wondered) for which he kept meticulous records, except the records were completely irrelevant because he'd somehow confused the business with what he was using the business to subsidize—which was a yearly trip to Oklahoma. (Is Oklahoma where they hold the annual I-have-sex-slaves-in-my-dungeon-basement convention?)

"It's all there, it's all there!" he kept shrieking at me, shoving 10 pages of notes in densely written spider scrawl at me. "I spent $910 in round-trip air tickets and $649 renting a car—"
"Right!" I said for the fourth time. "But the trip is different from the business, you see. The IRS only cares about the business—"

Fortunately, for me, I had been scheduled to work at two separate tax offices that day, so I got to say, "Oooops! Gotta run! Here's Rebecca! Rebecca will take care of you," before he drove me quite mad.

• Amber Meisen. Lovely young woman who'd been living the carefree artist's life (though supporting herself as a Trader Joe's cashier) in Brooklyn when she was hit by a car while riding her bicycle. Injuries plus medical bills forced her to return to (ugh) Middletown.

She'd earned enough to qualify for earned income credit! So, she got a refund of several thousand dollars that she did not expect! And her joy was a pleasure to behold.

###

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I mean, they're all interesting. Everybody has a story!

###

I should also briefly note the incredibly unpleasant exchange with a Remuneration client who sent me a string of 20 or so emails, each more incoherent, toxic, & insane than the last, claiming I was in arrears to him for work that I had already done.

I've been freelancing for many years, and I keep excellent books, so after each abusive email, I sent him back a calm, professional response with clear documentation of our original payment terms, my payment records, past invoices for completed work, and the remaining balance I showed under the advance I'd insisted upon because he's an overseas client, and we were working without an enforceable contract.

This seemed to inflame him even more. By the end, his emails were abusive.

I suspect the underlying issue is his own financial mismanagement. He has run out of money, and so has retro‑engineered a story for his money people to make him look like the one who “trusted” me too much. My careful, documented push‑back threatens that story, so he flooded me with veiled threats and hysterical accusations.

UGH.

Kudos to me for remaining professional.

I will finish up the work I owe him, but obviously, I will not accept any work from him in the future. In fact, I strongly suspect I will not be doing any freelancing in the future; freelancing is just too loaded with uncertainty and potentially toxic situations that I no longer have the stamina to deal with as the cost of doing business.

###

And now it is off to the New Paltz Community Garden to plant my peas and put in my strawberries.

Day off.

At some point, I am going to trek across the bridge to grab my tomato cages from the Hyde Park Community Garden & deliver them to the New Paltz Community Garden.

###

I'd had some vague thought of joining one of the numerous No Kings Marches today, but I'm not feeling it.

Besides! I gave at the office yesterday with my last two clients of the day, Fatimatou and Folasade (not their real names), who turned out to be from Guinea, which fact I extracted when I realized the impenetrable language they were trading with one another was actually a strangely accented French.

"Tu parle français?" I asked in my own execrable French.

"Ah, toi aussi, tu parles français?" asked Fatimatou, the more fluent of the two young women in English.

"Un peu," I said. "Un petit peu. Très mal. Tu viens du Sénégal?"

"On vient de Guinée," Fatimatou said.

Guinea!

I had no idea where Guinea actually was, except that most of France's former African colonies are on the west coast.

###

Fatimatou had come to this country as a child with her parents. Product of the Brooklyn public school system, she was bright and enterprising, and had earned a bachelor's degree in the rapidly obsolescing field of data management. This degree qualified her for a string of jobs at places like Sephora and Tori Burch. I had no idea why Fatimatou decided to move to Middletown, where there are far fewer Sephoras and Tori Burches.

When she'd worked at the Sephora in Brooklyn, Fatimatou had been vested in the company's 401(k), so when she left the company, they'd presented her with a check for several thousand dollars. Unfortunately, they'd neglected to instruct her about rollovers, so she'd spent the money and was now facing a tax penalty. Fortunately, she'd been conscientious filling out those W4s, so the tax penalty wasn't huge—

"Three hundred and seventy-three dollars," I said, switching back to English.

Fatimatou said something to Folasade in that weird French, and they both squealed with joy.

"I did it myself, and it showed I owed $10,000," she explained.

This, in fact, is why most first-time users come to Schlock: They fuck up their Turbotax return somehow.

###

Folasade was a more recent immigrant.

She had a green card, but I could feel the tension in the two women around that.

She was also in the unenviable position of understanding a lot more English than she could actually speak. But not quite enough English to understand what I was saying without Fatimatou's interpretation.

She'd had exactly one job in 2025—as a holiday worker at Tori Burch, where she'd made exactly $266. And they'd taken out nothing in federal taxes.

I grimaced when I saw that.

"I don't know what to tell you about this," I said. "We're going to charge you $164 for this return. It hardly seems worth it. On the other hand, with the situation here being what it is right now, it seems wise to make some sort of paper trail, establishing you as a law-abiding wannabe citizen."

The situation got even more complicated when it turned out that even the minute amount of money Folasade earned qualified her for a minute amount ($28!) of earned income credit. EIC kicks up the Schlock pricing structure by a hundred bucks.

I sat there for a couple of seconds and then shot an email to the district head of Schlock's mid-Hudson Valley operations: If I can get her a deal this year, we'll have a customer for life, blah, blah, blah—because that's the kind of logic that works on corporate asswipes.

And lo and behold! They called me back and gave me a coupon to take $100 off her fee.

I still feel like she was exploited, but you can only do what you can do.

###

I'm halfway through The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It should be a page turner—the story is very interesting, India is very interesting—and yet it is not a page-turner because each and every sentence has exactly the same metric beat, so the prose, even with the razzledazzle of unusual metaphors and similes, is actually pretty boring.

One of the novel's focuses is the plight of upper-caste Indian women, sent abroad to be overeducated in foreign schools but unable to catch a husband, and so, who end up living lives of genteel poverty.

That is not so very different from my own plight, no? I'm nothing if not overeducated! And I married twice, but neither marriage stuck.

In the end, there is no such thing as exceptionalism—national or not.

###

"Comment tu vas, uh, passer reste de la journée?" I asked Folasade in my terrible French.

"We are going to look for jobs," Fatimatou said in English. "But it is hard because she cannot speak..." Fatimatou shrugged.

"You might try looking for housecleaning jobs," I said. "Because then English wouldn't matter. I know it's a bit demeaning, rabaissant, but it pays okay—"

The ghost of Barbara Ehrenreich groaned at me from Heaven.

The world is a fuckin' mess.

I just broke up a fight in the Stewart’s parking lot. Guy parked in a handicapped space, another guy called him on it. They were actually exchanging blows. I got between them, screaming, "Stop it, stop it, stop it," (which was a really stupid thing to do), and when they saw that I’m an old lady, they backed down.

I’m still shaking.

###

This came on top of a brutal day.

Phillip Osario (not his real name) forgot one of his W2s yesterday.

He brought it in today.

Phillip Osario is working four jobs just to stay afloat, but the paltry amount he made at that fourth job shaved $2,000 off his refund.

He stared at me with blank, uncomprehending eyes: "So, don't put the fourth job in."

I sighed and shook my head. "Doesn't work that way. I have to."

"But I don't want you to!"

"I know," I said. "But if I know about the job, I have to put it in."

Phillip Osario glared at me through slitted eyes.

If I had to guess, I'd guess he was a reformed gangbanger. Beautiful face, Orpheus in the asphalt underworld, with a tattoo of a woman's name in ornate copperplate script veering alongside his left eye. I made up a bio for him: Something—the birth of a child?—had made him want to make an abrupt about-face in his life, but now he was struggling in a world that had no use for him, had no place for him. I felt every hour of the meaningless drudgery he put in to get by—a few hours in Walmart, a few hours at the Home Depot. An underling. The lowest of the low whose real job was to let other people order him around. I wanted to tell him, Take the $3,000 and enroll in a HVAC course at a community college! You'll make $100,000 a year. But I didn't. Because we didn't have a telepathic bond, much as I wanted to pretend we did.

So, instead, I lectured him on all the dire things that befall people who lie to the IRS about their revenue streams. "They impose interest and high penalties. They garnish your wages. And in this day of AI, nobody gets away with lying to the IRS anymore. It's impossible, they will find you out. It's just a matter of time."

Eventually, I talked him into filing.

But I felt like crying.

###

He left, and Angel Meduro (not his real name) came in.

Angel Meduro looked a lot like Angel Batista in Dexter, right down to the porkpie hat. And he made a shitload of money doing something for the U.S. Treasury.

Angel Meduro wanted to do Married Filing Separately.

"How long have you been separated?" I asked.

"Oh, we live together," he said. "But I got debts & things I want to protect her from."

"That's fine," I said. "We'll still need her social security number though."

"They didn't need it last year," said Angel Meduro.

"Really?" I said. "Then whoever did your taxes last year did them wrong. That's a hard and fast requirement for Married Filing Separately."

We went back and forth a little, and eventually, he started trying to call his wife to get her permission to use her social security number.

She answered the sixth time he called.

He had her on speaker phone.

"What the fuck are you calling me for?" she asked furiously. "I told you I was going to the acupuncture guy!"

"Sorry, mami. But I'm with the tax lady, and she says I need your social security number—"

"What are you, some kind of fucking moron? I am not giving my social security number—"
She said a bunch of other things, too, that I can't remember except that they were all pretty humiliating, and after she finally hung up the phone, he looked at me with haunted eyes: "Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I can't do this."

The light bulb had already gone off over my head by this time: She was falsifying her filing status! Probably filing as Head of Household so she could rake in the earned income and child tax credits, and didn't want him imperiling her scam!

Poor Angel Meduro.

I hope she gives good blow jobs.

Scary, scary, scary world.

Even before the Iran war, the U.S. was falling apart. In February, wholesale prices jumped 0.7%, twice the predicted inflation rate. When retailers pay more for goods, they pass those costs on to consumers through higher prices at the checkout counter.

And so far in 2026, there have been literally only slightly more than 18,000 new jobs created (in a nation of 365 million people).

The war adds a whole new level of economic misery, of course, since higher energy prices ripple through everything.

The cost of gasoline obviously hits consumers at the pump, but it also increases utility bills and transportation costs of goods, since so little of what we consume is produced close to where we live. The housing market is insane, and the world of imaginary money—the stock market with its more-or-less arbitrary valuations—is showing signs of unraveling: The Dow and Nasdaq are now in correction territory, meaning they’ve fallen more than 10 percent from their recent highs.

Nor will American exceptionalism be the only victim of Trump & Netanyahu's megalomania: The basis for almost all nonorganic fertilizers is ammonia, primarily manufactured from fossil fuels. Much of it is manufactured in places like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and, yes, Iran, and shipped through the Strait of Hormuz to places like India, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Pakistan. Without access to these fertilizers, agricultural production is going to plummet, so we can anticipate famine—which is going to increase the whole unwanted migration phenomenon.

It's a fuckin' mess, in other words.

How's a defenceless little mammal like me supposed to survive in this world of thundering dinosaur stupidity?

By scampering out of the way of their colossal footfalls, I suppose.

But just how exactly am I supposed to do that?

###

Anyway, this is the reason why though I loathe working for Schlock, I am determined to last out the season. Grimly determined, though I can see the toll that work is taking on both my physical & mental health. It is wise right now to position oneself as far ahead of that plunging economic curve as one can possibly get—though on my stumpy little mammal legs, that is not very far. The whole thing is gearing up to come crashing down very fast if Trump doesn't get bored enough with the Iran War to end it very fast.

###

When it happens, it happens very fast...

I remember thinking that after Sarajevo fell in 1996 because in 1970, when there was still Yugoslavia, I spent a couple of days in Sarajevo on my way to Greece, and unsophisticated little naif as I was back then, I remember marveling that Sarajevo was so much like Oakland, California. The same fading post-industrial architecture, and the sky wasn't orange or anything, it was blue!

How could a place that reminded me so much of another place I knew intimately be the site of a bloody civil war? My mind truly boggled.

And it was kind of like the Universe was whispering in my ear: When it happens, it happens very fast.

###

Schlock is truly awful. I like doing taxes, but I don't do a whole lot of those.

Mostly, I sit in a cubicle doing absolutely nothing beyond surreptitiously Googling Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell analyses. (Definitely the one book I would smuggle on to that desert island.) Doing nothing doesn't sound all that bad, but it's absolutely lethal. Boredom is not the worst thing in the world; the worst thing would be torture. But having the sort of mind that relishes facts & figures most other people find excessively dry, I am hardly ever bored, so boredom is a relatively unusual & unpleasant experience for me. It makes me feel invisible. It makes me feel... extinguished.

I did finally cop to the insanity of working every single day for 90 days straight, and thus carved out two days off in a row for myself.

I had all sorts of plans for yesterday, but found myself so exhausted that I did very little beyond vacuuming and refurbishing my purple hair. (...only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your purple hair)

Today, I have Big Plans to toddle off to the New Paltz Community Garden and begin weeding. Though if I don't, I will be gentle with myself.

Honestly, the most pressing dilemma I face at the moment is that the company that makes the hair dye I've been using for the past seven years has discontinued its production.

I'm pretty sure Schwarzkopf does not ship through the Strait of Hormuz, so what the hell is their problem, huh?

Yesterday morning, I went off for a plot showing at the New Paltz Community Garden.

I saw several lovely plots, but in the end I chose this one becawwwwwse the gardener before me had left me her hose! Plus, it has several upraised beds:

That's one thing I don't like about the New Paltz Community Garden: They make you water your garden with your own individually purchased hose. In fact, I dislike that so much that I argued the point with Phil, the extremely nice plot coordinator who was showing me around: "Hoses are not cheap! So by making that a requirement, you're essentially eliminating low-income gardeners who might really benefit from growing their own food."

Phil made a thoughtful face. "You're not wrong."

###

Afterwards, I had an hour and a half to kill, so I hung out at the Gardiner Bakehouse:

The Gardiner Bakehouse is the café part of a complex run by a local maker's guild. Wonderful coffee & excellent food. Pastries to die for! It's the last place Brian & I hung out in together; in fact, we actually had a date to do an open mike there Saturday night of the week he died.

I was so happy sitting there! Sipping coffee, people watching, dipping into my novel from time to time to read a few paragraphs.

This is how you need to live your life! I told myself. With ample access to the Gardiner Bakehouse. You need to move to New Paltz.

New Paltz, you see, is the last hippie enclave in the entire United States.

###

At Montgomery Schlock, I took on the task of doing taxes for an adorable kid who had started his own trucking business, but who had failed to draft a business plan or keep a single record of his business expenses.

After half an hour or so, I got up from my desk & toddled off to consult with the office manager.

"You can't do it?" she asked.

"Oh, I can do it," I said. "The question is whether I should do it, given the fact that I'm a first-year associate and this is going to require some intense forensic accounting. I'm not certified to do it, and that's going to raise some liability issues if the return is audited, which it almost certainly will be."

The office manager didn't seem to understand the difference between "can" and "should," which was mildly annoying but whatevs: I do not give a shit what these people understand or think so long as I get paid.

###

Back at the casa, I hunted down Icky. "The chickens... ?"

Icky looked grim. "Something got them. I found some feathers next to the coop. They got Little Nas—"

"Little Nas" is his name for Black Chicken.

Oh, my heart was broken. Black Chicken! Whom I'd taught to jump high and walk backwards when I first moved into this place. Whom I could have taken out on the road as a circus act, Patrizia and Her Performing Chicken.

I sat in the Patrizia-torium sobbing. Black Chicken! People are dying in Gaza! I reminded myself fiercely. It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one black chicken don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Half an hour later, Icky began calling my name. "Patrizia! Patrizia! Patrizia!"

I ran downstairs—

He was holding Black Chicken!!!

Black Chicken had survived!!!

"Where was she?"

"She was just standing there on the back porch when I opened the door—"

Clearly, something had tried to grab her: She was missing a whole bunch of feathers under her right wing. I visualized a fox's mouth.

But she had gotten away! I pictured her pecking furiously at the fox until he dropped her and then fluttering away to hide. Nobody's getting Black Chicken without a fight! Black Chicken is a survivor!!! Descendent of the mighty dinosaurs!

There are now three chickens left.

"You've got to build them some sort of run," I told Icky. "Free ranging is a nice concept, but it's simply not safe for them."

He is leaving to go back down to the city today, but I think he will build one next time he's up.

In the meantime, the chickens must be confined to their coop.

Sara Crewe is my spirit animal at the Middletown Schlock office.

Yesterday, one of my clients, an incredibly handsome man—another prison guard!—wanted his 2024 taxes done, but nobody told me he wanted his 2024 taxes done; in fact, Leslie, the dour & humorless assistant manager, actually scanned his tax documents into the 2025 folder.

I started a 2025 return.

And it wasn't until I picked up his W2 and noted that it had been issued in 2024 that I realized the mistake.

I abandoned the 2025 return and completed the 2024 return.

But there was no way for me to delete the 2025 return.

And Leslie made an error and processed his payment for the 2025 return.

Somehow this became my mistake!

Oh, the Leslie grumbles & side-eye!

Means to an end! Means to an end! I kept reminding myself.

I mean, who gives a shit what these people think? It's not as though they impinge upon my real life in the slightest. Schlock is not going to fire me; they need the asses in the seats. And I want the $$$$$!

T-34 days.

###

Also yesterday I had this muy disturbing neurological symptom.

My hands began to shake as soon as I arrived at that office.

I have what neurologists describe as an idiopathic tremor. My mother had it, too. Much of the time, my hands shake a little. Generally, the mild tremor does not interfere with anything else I'm doing (like typing or keying in data), but yesterday my hands were actually fluttering as though I was conducting an invisible orchestra.

I actually had to turn my first client of the day over to one of the other preparers and race off to the closest cannabis dispensary. Cannabis calms tremors. I prefer not to use it if I have to do mental acrobatics, but you know, you gotta do what you gotta do, and it worked to steady my hands so I could do my four other clients of the day.

But clearly, my body does not like going into that office.

###

The last few days have been an eerie faux spring. On Tuesday, temps actually hit 80!

I had the day partly off because I had a doctor's appointment in the afternoon. My doctor is still across the river because who wants to deal with finding a new primary care physician, right? So, I drove over to Hyde Park and after the appointment, I took off for my old tromping grounds, the Vanderbilt gardens:

Felt strange to see all those bare trees & fallow flower beds when the temperature and humidity were signaling high summer.

Plus, the Goddess of the Cell Phone was still surrounded by snow:

I came across four women sitting on a bench in the woods. And they were such a charming sight, I asked to take their portrait:

We all ended up chatting for half an hour. My new best friends!

And honestly, we could have been best friends.

Except we're not.

Absolutely slammed at Schlock Montgomery yesterday. Four returns in four hours, three of them relatively complicated returns. Miss Ramada Inn snarled at me: "You need to pick up the pace."

I did not snarl back, You need to go fuck yourself, though I smiled inwardly, thinking it.

There's hardly any light in the back of the Schlock Montgomery office where my desk is, and many W2 forms use 4-point font for entries like employer TINs and wages, all of which must be encoded precisely into the Schlock tax prep software. This meant many minutes spent attempting to study said documents with the magnifying app on my phone.

Plus, the Schlock tax prep software is really klugy compared to the tax prep software I was using as a TaxBwana. Hit the wrong key, and you are signing the client up for a Schlock payday loan at a 36% interest rate—which I did with the first set of clients, a heavily tattooed married couple, filing jointly. It took me 15 minutes to figure my way out of that because I was the only tax preparer in the office; there wasn't anybody else to ask. The clients were not amused.

You can rise from this desk at any moment, tell those clients, "Your tattoos are really ugly, and you suck", I reminded myself as I keyed frantically through solutions. That kept me amused.

And eventually, I found the solution.

My second client was a dapper man in a grey porkpie hat who used to be a correctional officer at Rikers Island.

Rikers Island correctional officers get really good pensions!

Mr. Trapper (not his real name) spends his retirement hanging out in the Newburgh Barnes & Noble reading edifying biographies of Black sports heroes. He could afford to buy those biographies, but I guess he likes being a regular in a crowded place.

I found myself flirting with him! And having fantasies of ambling down to the Newburgh Barnes & Noble, so we could fall in ❤️LUV❤️! Was it the pension? Or the porkpie hat?

My third and fourth clients were a couple in their late thirties, filing separately—she was still married to someone else, which made her claim to Head of Household dubious, but hey! Schlock tax preparers before me had approved it, so who was I to gainsay?

This couple had a combined income substantially less than mine, & I consider myself poor.

In fact, they personified America's white urban underclass. They seemed utterly miserable, and I thought, Well, this is really why the enlightened inhabitants of Alpha Centauri dispatched you to this planet, so you could report back on the desperate look in the woman's eyes: You're a field scientist!

The time did pass quickly.

Only 37 more days to go!

###

Daylight saving time has added enough hours to the day so that I can start going to the gym again. So, that's good.

And it finally stopped raining.

The sun came out yesterday, and temps soared into the 60°s, melting the snowbanks & turning the meadows around the casa into a muddy swamp.

This is not my beautiful wife.

Watch on YouTube

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.

The boys are throwing stones at the frogs; the frogs are dying in earnest...

But one of the reasons I know the Iran War is not WWIII—other than D's horary astrological chart—is that The Daily Mail only trumpeted Iran War headlines for three days.

Now DM's headlines are back to the news the American public actually cares about: mothers of three who poison their husbands, toddlers who die in backyard pools and come back to life five hours later, Kristen Bell's three-way marriage.

Can the Ayotollah's assassination really compare to Nick Reiner's life in prison?

I don't think so.

###

Meanwhile, I am working at two Schlock offices. One's in a strip mall in Middletown, the other's in a strip mall in Montgomery.

Middletown is just filled with hideous strip malls. I take periodic breaks to wander around this one, snapping photographs. This is my job, right? This is why the Universe plopped me down into this particular time/space continuum. I'm an archivist!

I'm particularly intrigued by the check-cashing place. It is right next door to Schlock, making this strip mall a veritable buffet of predatory financial services. (Schlock makes a sizeable portion of its revenues not from preparing taxes but from loan-sharking against anticipated tax refunds with exorbitant fees & interest rates.)

###

The people who work at the Middletown Schlock office are uniformly awful, rude, and completely disinterested in me. I pretend I'm Charlotte Bukowski and remind myself that I wouldn't recognize these people if I bumped into them on the street.

There is only one strip mall in Montgomery. Is that the reason why the people in that Schlock office are so much nicer? Maybe.

But one of my survival strategies is to tell myself I could walk out in the middle of a shift and never, ever have to think about Schlock again. Schlock has no hold on me. Schlock has no roots in my life. Schlock is only a revenue source.

###

I feel like such a drone, I've been isolating myself. Human contact, reaching out to friends, would actually make me feel better. But what do I have to offer?

"NEVER shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'
"But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.'
"I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair."

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...

My heart breaks for Sarah, a country girl in her mid-20s, single mother of a two-year-old she cannot control, whose sole joy in life is that jumbo-sized styrofoam container of microwaved Tater Tots drenched with ketchup that she buys at the Arco Quik-Serve every morning.

But she should not be doing tax returns.

I was horrified watching her do one over the weekend. Her stained pink top was riding up, and her sweat pants were sagging so you could see the crack of her ass as she sat there playing Maybe This Will Work at the computer.

The client was too busy trying to push through a questionable Head of Household filing status through to notice, and anyway, he had his own problems with tater tots or maybe with Pabst Blue Ribbon six-packs. His red-rimmed eyes were set in a head that was probably normal-sized but perched atop his vast bulk made him look microcephalic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know—it's Politically Incorrect to comment on people's weight. But I see what I see. And those jumbo-sized styrofoam containers of microwaved Tater Tots drenched with ketchup are a problem.

Anyway. I had been intimidated by the [hideous, soulless corporation's] tax preparation software, but after watching Sarah, I thought, There are no standards here, and thus I completed my first two returns as a tax professional yesterday.

One of my first two clients was Married Filing Separately. Back when I was an altruistic TaxBwana, I would have begged him to use a different filing status because MFS is absolutely the worst. It's totally worth it to make nice with that spouse you hate and want to divorce just so you can file jointly.

But now that I'm a predatory tax preparer circling the rubes so I can push product on them, I no longer offer advice. I just smile and input the boxes.

I cannot believe what people are willing to pay for this service. $170 per form! For a task that would literally take them 20 minutes in a library to do on their own. It isn't hard! I mean, we're not talking about complicated tax situations here; we're talking a single W2.

Survival is a rough, rough game. I'm just grateful I don't like tater tots.

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.

Where, oh where, did I go wrong?

I think by picking up the wrong travel brochure in Bardo.

Clearly, I was reaching for the glossy folder emblazoned, Enjoy your next incarnation as a veterinarian in the 1930s & 1940s Yorkshire Dales!

Instead, my astral fingers fumbled, & I picked up the one labeled, Be Cassandra while Western Civilization collapses around you! (Note: This material contains themes of intense sadness, depression, hopelessness, and emotional distress.)

###

Anyway, yesterday I did regain a modicum of sanguinity: It was a bright, sunshiney, though intensely cold day & I shot the shit with a couple of my fellow tax-preparing wage slaves at the Schlock office who laughed at all my jokes and told me they never peddled product unless the client was clearly on the verge of being swept up in a financial maelstrom. Their eyes widened with admiration when I went into my patented rant about how companies bloated with middle management always update their perfectly functional software & support documents every year because that's the only way middle management can justify its existence.

I am a mouse trained on scraps! The things that keep me happy are so small! All I really need is an audience for an hour & a chance to show off how much I remember from my university economics classes.

###

Came home & realized that Chapter 4 in the Work in Progress would be wayyyyyy too long if I followed my kinda/sorta outline. Really, I need to split it into a Chapter 4 and a Chapter 5!

And Chapter 4 has to end with an elliptical, evocative, & allusive conversation with the New Millennium Kingdom girl—

And here, I totally ran out of steam.

Because while it's staying light till 5pm now, it's still midnight at 6pm, and I can't work at night.

Which is weird because I'm perfectly capable of working at 4 o'clock in the morning when it's just as dark.

###

So! Notes for the final climactic Chapter 4 WiP scene, which hopefully, I can polish off before I toddle off to the gym:

Brief review of the revolving signage on the New Millennium Kingdom table: COVID is God's Down Payment, The Blood of the Lamb Works Better Than Purell, etc, etc, etc.

One time I asked her (your enigmatic question & response goes here)

Another time I asked her, "But what did you do before this?"

She laughed and said, "I was a broker at Goldman Sachs."

Work Buy the dip, short the godless index into the dialog somehow.

Has to be some ruminations about the Universe's plan & the very last line will be the girl laughing at Grazia, Didn't we already decide that?

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.

I read approximately 2 million pages of tax code yesterday. Only 998 million pages to go!

Truth be told, I don't want to read tax code! I don't want to do anything but sit on my fainting couch with my eyes slightly unfocused, thinking strange, dreamy thoughts. It's not as though this coming week is real time anyway, right? The week between Christmas and New Year's is an interstice, kinda like the one between the last chime of midnight & the beginning of a new calendar day. A portal, in other words.

###

Also, played a bit with the Work in Progress. I am writing now about a hospital during the COVID pandemic. I wasn't a nurse during the COVID pandemic, so this is something I know very little about. My imagination is getting a workout. And it's flabby!

Simultaneously, I'm trying to sneak in the Jesus cult. And when I say "sneak," I mean position it under the radar so that when Grazia joins, the reader is surprised—even though all the evidence is there.

Next scene is a telephone call between Neal & Grazia. Of course, they have to banter amusingly. It's surprisingly difficult to write amusing banter off the top of one's head. The call has to include some Mimi backstory, too. Mimi's narrative is breadcrumbs strewn throughout the rest of the novel; she is not one of the main characters. But in the third part of the book (Flavia's POV), Mimi is going to try to kill herself, and that needs to be set up.

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.

Shortly, I must toddle off to wildest, wooliest Walker Valley because twice a year, the Shawangunk Dems volunteer to pick up garbage along Highway 52.

I am not looking forward to it: Evidently, I wore the wrong shoes tromping yesterday because I woke up in the middle of the night with shin splints and am insufficiently rested this morning.

Beyond that, naught much to report.

I Remunerated (though, of course, never enough.)

I started reading The Great Believers, an epic novel about the AIDS pandemic. The novel is excellent and, moreover, written in a style that is so outside my personal stylebook, I won't find myself unconsciously plagiarizing from it. (That is an issue for me. Even in my dotage, I have an excellent memory for words, and quite often, I can't remember whether I wrote a sentence, or somebody else did.)

In the evening, I went vox with Ichabod who is getting a promotion in the PD universe which will allow him to defend people facing life sentences. The promotion comes with a hefty raise!

And for once, the kiskas are getting along and acting adorable.

Profile

Every Day Above Ground

April 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Fresh Cotton for Crisped by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Apr. 24th, 2026 08:07 pm

Mallory's Camera

Entries tagged with work

PTSD

Recharging

Fox Is Gonna Fox

Notes From the Front

Fatimatou and Folasade

The World Is Nuts

When It Happens, It Happens Very Fast

Patrizia and Her Performing Chicken

Faux Spring

This Is Not My Beautiful Wife

Distraction

From the Annals of Yellow-Haired Charlotte Bukowski

Self-Care

Microwaved Tater Tots Drenched In Ketchup

That and This

Be Cassandra While Western Civilization Collapses Around You!

Of Souless Corporations & Jessica Mitford

Portals

Recalibrating

Quotidian