Mallory's Camera

Saw The Way, a sweet but dramatically inept flick about a pilgrimage along El Camino de Santiago. Realized that I had made part of that same pilgrimage – quite unwittingly: The route runs through Gijon, that strange, gritty little seaport on the Iberian coast where Semana Negro takes place every year and I spent a week in 2007. Gijon is in Asturias, the Celtic part of Spain, a strange place, like a parallel universe where some Paleolithic butterfly died who didn’t die here. The effects of that one death ripple outward so that Gijon’s present tense is subtly different from the present tense in the rest of the world.

Movie exhausted me. Psychological effect, I know, I know. But I’m not sure why. I only know that though the temperatures are still unseasonably warm – in the 60s! at the end of November – I was freezing and I fell into a fitful sleep around 9pm after throwing together a desultory dinner for RTT.

Did not want to wake up this morning. The only safe and comfortable place these days is my imagination.

Holidays are going to be rough. All I can tell myself is that next year, things will be different. And begin implementing changes that will make them so.

I’m going to have to put Xena to sleep this week. The magical power of words: Almost as soon as I wrote about putting her to sleep, she began deteriorating – or I began noticing she had deteriorated. Her hind legs are quite shriveled, maybe she poops in the house because she can’t really control it. She sleeps 22 hours a day in the little bed I made for her. I never really liked Xena that much – I’m not a dog person at all – but it makes me very sad to have to do this. One less link with the family I once had, I suppose.

Apparently I have this reputation in the local Tibetan community as a rockin’, sockin’ English instructor. Baalorma talks me up. S____ tells me she gets requests for me all the time by name.

Of course I’m not actually all that good an instructor. I work well with Baalorma because I like her so much – the Kham warrior princess who, while she lived in India, went on smuggling trips to Nepal twice a month, riding buses past winding mountain roads strewn with corpses, camouflaged to look like the victims of motor vehicle accidents but really the victims of the Maoist guerillas. Nepal has changed very much from the hippie paradise it was when I was young.

Baalorma has lived a very interesting life. And now she’s a wife and mother, working at the Cornell Food Services department. I wonder if any of the undergrads chattering away on the food lines actually see the person behind the salad bar? Probably none.

I finally agreed to take another Tibetan student. Basically because she’s a coworker of Baalorma’s with the same schedule so I can teach them both at the same time. We meet at Baalorma’s house and just chatter away for an hour and a half about every topic under the sun, childbirth, the Cornell Food Services department, the recession, the political situation in Tibet which has deteriorated since 2008 and is receiving absolutely no press here. The new student’s name is Tenzin. She was born in India, came to the U.S. a year ago, speaks a stilted, accented English that she learned at the Dalai Lama’s compound. A hundred thousand or so Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama into exile according to the official roster. Baalorma and Tenzin put that number closer to a million but I’m not sure they’re in any position to know.

###



The political situation in Tibet has deteriorated significantly from what it was in 2008 when it was receiving all sorts of press here. It receives no press now. Presumably that’s because China owns the U.S. now and left-leaning press or no, we’re not in a position any longer to criticize China for human rights abuses.

The Ithaca Tibetan community held a candlelight vigil night before last. I went – basically to show my support for Baalorma who had helped organize it.

“When I am young, I do not care so much about Tibet,” Baalorma has told me. “But now I care very much.”

Maybe 40 people standing on the Commons in a heavy mist that was almost rain. Chanting. I’m not sure why Ithaca has such a large Tibetan population but it’s the largest in the U.S. outside NYC.

###

In other news, two reprieves from the desperate financial situation I’ve been in since Boring-Unremunerative-But- Hey!-It’s-a-Paycheck laid me off. (You know who you are and thank you.) Another book, another website. I’m extremely good at what I do but so demoralized in the present moment that it’s difficult to sell myself.

General dejection is giving me writers block on my own stuff which is bad. I came so-o close to the Stegner last year, and although it’s not something I can count on still it’s probably my best chance for the deus ex machina that would be a happy ending to this period of my life.

Else?

Finished Michael Korda’s excellent biography of Lawrence of Arabia.

Every morning RTT and I squabble over Xena the dog.

RTT wants to put her down.

I want to arrange for her to have a fabulous vacation in the Riviera Canine Grande Hotel where she’ll sleep in a silk-lined wicker basket, dine on kibble dipped in liver pate and quaff Perrier from a silver bowl.

Common denominator? Neither of us actually ever want to see Xena the Dog again.

Xena the dog was given to Max on his ninth birthday by Ben’s mother Nancy. That would make her 15 edging into 16. She’s not completely incontinent. She just vastly prefers pooping and peeing in the house. I couldn’t tell you how much Dollar Store carpet cleaner I go through in a single week and the house still has that really unpleasant albeit subliminal dog piss reek. Barely noticeable in the summer when the windows are open, but intense in winter when depression is always inviting me to cha cha.

I’m probably going to give in and have her put to sleep.

The ever perspicacious nihilistic_kid, writing a few weeks back on the topic of barriers to entry in Art As Livelihood, noted, Pretty much everyone who made it past third grade can write.

Exactly true.

And something I’ve been mulling over a great deal in my solitary, snowbound confinement here in not-quite-Ithaca, in the wake of J.D. Salinger’s death, a rather interesting LA Times series on Philip K. Dick’s days (or should that be daze) in Orange County, and my own attempts to supplement Idiot Job But Hey! It’s a Paycheck by signing up with various cut rate content brokers who make words to put on websites at a penny and a half per word.

It’s true what you’ve always suspected: everything you read on the web is actually cobbled together by a team of maybe two hundred people, blearily calibrating word count and inserting key words, often deliberately misspelled, at random intervals. My favorite technique is something called “article spin” where you write something that’s so bland, so generic, that you can actually insert any keyword into the blanks and it will scan like copy. It won’t read like copy, of course, because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But who reads anymore?

Yes, it’s possible to make money doing this though so far the Big Buck$ have eluded me – possibly because I just can’t bring myself to write badly no matter how hard I try. But I’m hopeful.

There’s actually a Wired article in all of this, I’m sure. I could probably even pitch it successfully if only I had the energy.

###

What else?

Well, there was the President’s Weekend Miracle-Except-It-Wasn't-A-Miracle: one day last week Xena disappeared. Xena is my geriatric Jack Russell. I inherited my dogs through attrition – my sons’ attrition actually: Xena was Max’s childhood pet; Milo is (nominally, at least) still Robin’s. I’m not actually a dog person at all, I much prefer cats – you can project all the personality you want on to them when you need comfort, something furry to squeeze, but the rest of the time, you can ignore them. They don’t mind. A dog does mind, they’re higher maintenance. A dog is a lot of work.

In her youth, Xena was the Cindy Crawford of the canine world, just this gorgeous little thing. Strangers were constantly stopping me on the street whenever I walked her: That is the cutest dog I’ve ever seen! But Max fell out of love with her the time we drove down to southern California. It was a perilous drive: it was 100 degrees, I blew a tire on I-5, I was very freaked; poor little psychic sponge Xena absorbed the tension, and behaved very badly at the Hares

By the time Max left for Deep Springs, Xena had become the Velveteen Rabbit – a discarded memento of a childhood that only existed as a handful of photographs and a few scattered memories, subject to revisionism depending upon the mood of whoever was doing the remembering.

For two years after Max left, Xena would run away regularly – looking for him, I always thought.
And then one day… she was old. Just a fat little dog, half blind, half deaf, with a funny looking cyst on her right flank. Nobody would ever think she’d once been Cindy Crawford.

Well, it happens to all of us, right? We get old, we get fat, we get incontinent.

In Monterey, I made a point of walking her for an hour on the beach every day. And that kept her relatively lively.

But here in two feet of snow, I haven’t been exercising her. Mostly she sleeps. She still enjoys her food. And she comes to the door every time I come home, wagging her little stumpy tail and dancing around, thrilled to see me.

Anyway, that Monday we’d been grocery shopping for the first time in ever so long. I am slowly pulling this family back up the socio-economic ladder, but it feels like I’m paying for it with my blood. I’d gotten a migraine at the supermarket – all that choice! Grape Nuts or Raisin Bran? Why, I could buy both! The guys brought the groceries in, I stayed in the kitchen, putting them away. And shortly after, staggered off to bed.

Two hours later, Ben wakes me, saying, “Is Xena in with you?”

“Huh? No-o-o-o. Why are you waking me up?”

“She’s gone,” Ben says, his mouth working furiously.

“What?”

“She’s not in the house. I’ve looked everywhere. That stupid fucking kid! He must have let her out while he was unloading the groceries.”

“I did not let her out!” says Robin.

“Well, how else could she have gotten out of the house –“

“Maybe you let her out –“

“Stop it! Both of you,” I say. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“When I fed her. Just before we brought the groceries in –“

“And how long ago was that?”

“Three hours ago.”

“Well, if she’s been out there for three hours then she’s probably dead,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” said Robin.

“Well, maybe she’s not dead. Not yet. But we need to find her fast.”

Outside the snow was falling, hard and fast. No tracks to show where a blind little Jack Russell might have trotted off to. She would have gone towards the light, I thought. And walked to the mercury lamp at the corner. And prowled around the neighbors’ houses. Kitchen lights switched on, switched off. From a distance, every small bank of dirty snow looked like a small white frozen corpse.

But no Xena.

No blood either – so it seemed unlikely the coyotes had gotten her.

“We may not even find her till spring,” Ben said.

The prospect of finding Xena’s bloated corpse under some bush – white gleam of bone, ants crawling out of her eye sockets – was a little too Lord of the Flies for me. “Maybe she’s the sacrifice,” I said.

“Sacrifice?”

“Things are finally turning around. And all magic comes with a price.”

He just looked at me.

We went to bed. Eventually, we fell asleep. I woke up and I heard him sobbing. “I was dreaming,” he said. “I can’t remember what I was dreaming but in the middle of the dream, somebody said, ‘It’s 2:35.’ And everybody in the dream put their heads down and began to weep. And I woke up and looked at my watch, and it was 2:35.”

###

Magic is the purview of the powerless. Children and Australian aborigines. And me. I’m constantly looking for magical intercepts. On a supermarket line, I cast my mind out, fishing for telepaths in the random crowd of strangers. I pore over numbers, trying to find arcane significance – my birthday is the number you dial on the phone when you want information; my social security number is a sequential range of digits. Surely this means I’m special somehow. That everything happens for a reason.

###

This story has a happy ending. Next morning, going through the motions, I put a missing dog notice on Craig’s List. And most improbably, a few hours later, somebody called me: Xena had been found. She was comfortably ensconced in the Homer animal shelter –

“Homer!” I said. “But that’s sixteen miles away!”

“The chief of police found her. He brought her here. Blind you say?”

“Yes. And she’s got this cyst on her right flank. And she’s wearing a red collar. And her tail’s a little weird – they docked it too short –“

“Gotta be the same dog.”

And it was.

Something of a miracle I would say. That a little white dog would wander out into a raging storm and not freeze to death.

Except I don’t believe in miracles.

Where did this summer go?

I'm fifty-six years old. I'm due to die on October 14, 2036. One of these days, I better start paying attention.

###

Anyway, it's been a bad week. With Robin in the mix, everything becomes undoable. This is not Robin's fault – obviously he should be my Numbah One priority, he's my kid, he's my boo and I ache for him having this crazy, frazzled pauper for a mother. "Oh trust me, Mom, you're not half as bad as ____'s mom," he tells me as though this is some kind of compensation. "____'s mom is always high! Or maybe she's drunk. How can you tell the difference?"

"Well, you can smell it," I say.

"Kind of like burning leaves?"

"She's high," I say.

He giggles. "I ran into her at Troia's and she's like all, 'Oh, Robin. Would you like to talk to ____? Here! Let's call him!' So then she gets on the phone and calls him up and gives me the phone. And he's like, 'Dude! What's this all about?' and I'm like, 'I don't know, man. It's your mom.'"

"She was probably just trying to relate to you," I say.

"But that's so whack!"

After our big blowout fight at the beginning of the week, Robin was very sweet and conciliatory. He spent his entire allowance on treats for me – chunks of English toffee, apricots, Pepsi, gum; he spread them out on the desk in my office, I saw him peering out the window as I drove home from the beach in the dark with the dogs. Not your average I-will-buy-Mommy's-love scenario, no; I think this may have been the first genuinely generous impulse of his young life: he's always been a rather pragmatic child has Robin, pragmatic and therefore selfish.

I made a show of appreciating it but honestly I was too out of it to feel much.

It had been a bad day, starting with the scream fest with Robin (before my first cup of coffee even) and ending with Xena getting lost at the beach.

My necklace broke at the beach. The gold chain with the New York subway Y token. I managed to snag the gold chain but the subway token – talismanic significance, my one link to the true NYC homeland through all diasporas – was lost in the sand. I climbed the bluffs looking for it, Milo followed. But when I got back down to the shoreline, Xena had vanished. Very rough surf and the sun had set, the dark was rapidly crowning.

So I was well and truly panicked.

Ran up the beach. If she'd gotten off the beach, wandered off on to the bike path, she'd survive – someone would find her, take her home or call Animal Control. She'd be okay.

But if she was on the beach…

What would a tiny Jack Russell terrier do in pitch black with a rough rising tide?

Well drown, most likely.

I jogged about a mile. The dying sun's rays caught on something every now and then, turning it (from a distance) into the simulacrum of a small white creature. But it was always just a rock when I caught up to it. Then about a quarter of a mile up I saw the only other two people on the beach crouching down for ninety seconds or so. Some enchanting shell formation? Or maybe Xena?

They were walking my way and in another five minutes they'd caught up to me.

"Are you looking for the dog?" the man asked. "Xena?"

"You read her collar?"

"She's moving pretty fast," the man said.

"I told you we should have picked her up and brought her with us," said the woman.

I started running even faster. I'm not in the best of shape for sprinting. I was calling her name but the surf was so loud I could barely hear my own voice. But there on the rocks just before the big hotel I finally saw her.

Put both dogs on their leashes and jogged two miles back to the car.

I was exhausted. And cold.

And here my child had prepared a big treat for me consisting of sugary, high caloric treats which he plainly expected me to consume while he watched.

I'm sure I've felt more horrible in my life. Childbirth – pretty dreadful. Cocaine crashes: not fun. That time I was coasting down Strawberry Canyon Road on my bike going 40 miles per hour without a helmet and I hit a rock – not pleasant.

I felt pretty fucking horrible though.

And the next day when I woke up I'd come down with the mother of all colds.

###

I don't know how it works for other people but for me it works like this: I get sick when my psychological defenses are down.

I mean, think about it. It does make sense. You're always surrounded by germs and pretexts for the most horrible kinds of accidents. It's when your resistance is down that you become vulnerable to them.

We had a date for dinner with Max that night in Santa Cruz. He wanted me to meet Molly with whom he has become very serious in the past few weeks. I couldn't cancel.

Plus I'd finally saved up the cash to get the red Veedub fixed – the only car I've ever loved – and I was happy to have an excuse to actually drive it.

But I felt horrible the whole evening. Was aware that I had become something of a buffoonish character to Max, he was showing me off to Molly as his eccentric mother and I was happy to play along. I was sure after we said goodbye and they drove back up to Palo Alto and the ivied Stanford halls, he would tell her how I'd been to Woodstock and then to Altamont and how I'd dropped more acid than Timothy Leary. And possibly even he'd misascribe Tim Ware's classic quote to me: I wish I'd bought real estate first and then dropped acid.

It really, really hurt to breath.

Over the next few days I stumbled through what needed to get done. I sold a very expensive mask to a doctor in South Carolina, there was a lot of auxiliary scut work around that. I edited my Secret Shopper reports. I tried to oversee Robin. I played wack-a-mole with the bills. I sold hot sauce. Lots of hot sauce – oddly enough we've been doing better during the week from the rich Europeans at the new hotel (which must be being promoted aggressively on some European version of Travelocity) than we do on weekends when the tourists are all sad sacks from the Central Valley whose houses are being foreclosed and who are paying three-quarters of their salaries on gas so they can keep commuting to work.

I stopped sleeping. My chest hurt so much that at night when I lay down I couldn't breath.

Finally Friday night I got this idea that I could drink myself into a stupor and that stupor would double as sleep. So I went out around ten o'clock in search of a six-pack.

I don't like alcohol all that much so I hardly ever drink. It fuzzes my mind and makes me have to pee – what's to like?

So searching for beer at ten o'clock at night was a very big deal.

Monterey has a nightlife! Who knew? Alvarado Street was crowded with all these beautiful twenty-somethings coming in and out of the converted adobe that used to be Viva's and is now something else except the music and the menu haven't changed. And I walked invisible amongst these gorgeous twenty-somethings and I wanted to weep – I so wanted to be one of them! I was one of them in my own mind, I mean – that's always been the problem with me as an adult, hasn't it? Developmentally I'm still around twenty-three, I never bought into this pair-off, get a job, get a mortgage, reproduce shit although I've done all those things. But really all I've ever wanted to do is float the night streets with the other vampires. And take notes.

I wanted to grab each and every one of those beautiful twenty-somethings by the shoulders. Look at me! I wanted to hiss. You'll grow old, you'll grow tired, twenty – no! even ten years from now, it will be someone else's turn to be young.

The cycle never stops.

But suddenly I was terribly, terribly tired of the cycle. I wanted out in the worst possible way.

Still do…

But the beer did help me sleep.