millysdaughter

Went sour cherry picking with the fabulous

rebeccmeister is (as my beloved Marybeth used to say) a real find. Sparkling, intelligent, humorous, plus she is the change she hopes to see in a completely nonperformative way. In a perfect world, she would live two blocks away from me so that on rainy days, I could race over to her house & watch her retool chair splines. Learn from her example how to use tools!

She wore the coolest dress, too. Its pattern was leaf ants!

The morning had gotten off to an inauspicious start on account of the propane running out before it could fuel the flames necessary to heat the water that makes my coffee.

I'd had to drive up to the Farmcart Coffee pop-up in town, where I splurged on a cappuccino & eavesdropped on a conversation between the ridiculously beautiful barista and two ridiculously beautiful young women, all of whom had recently (and most ridiculously of all) emigrated from the Deep South to fuckin' Wallkill, New York.

Why would anyone emigrate for any reason to Wallkill, New York?

"We're Jehovah's Witnesses," the beautiful barista explained with a radiant smile.

Oh, of course.

Wallkill is actually the center of the American Jehovah's Witnesses branch. They publish The Watchtower here! And also 17 million Bibles every year! Old Testament only. The JWs are not big on the New Testament.

The barista was just so lovely! We chattered about the differences between Italian and Spanish, how the two languages had practically identical grammars but differed in the way they were voiced, Spanish using various accent marks to signify pronunciation, while Italian relies on doubling up consonants—

I remembered then that my very favorite TaxBwana client of 2024 had been a Jehovah's Witness preacher. His house had burned down with all his tax documents. I'd used forensic accounting to rectify them. He was very elegant and intelligent, and we'd had a free-ranging conversation about all number of fascinating things, and it wasn't until the very end of our third meeting that he handed me a card with his JW ID.

Why don't I become a Jehovah's Witness? I wondered for 10 minutes or so.

They're not big on Jesus! They recognize that "infinity" is an impossible mathematical concept, not an architectural template for the afterlife: There is only room for 144,000 in the Jehovah's Witness Heaven. Best of all, they seem to take care of each other! Like if I was a Jehovah's Witness, even now 10 Jehovah's Witnesses would be showing up at the casa to swap out that propane tank! And I wouldn't be late for my meetup with Rebecca.

###

I picked six pounds of sour cherries. This is enough for three pies.

Originally, I had planned to pick enough for BB and me. BB was a talented cook & baker, and each year, he baked three special pies for Flavia, his long-term honey. Sour cherry pie was always the first.

This year, I guess, I will bake a sour cherry pie for Flavia. Though I am an indifferent baker; my pie crust in particular has the texture of shoe leather.

But it's the thought that counts, right?

I'll freeze it until I see her again.

###

It was 91° at Samascott by the time Rebecca & I bid adieu and 95° by the time I got back to Wallkill.

I swapped out the propane tank! Pretty easily! So, I no longer have to become a Jehovah's Witness.

I pitted the cherries.

I will bake my pies today.

###

Afterwards, I sat out on the backporch and read The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories. It grew dark. The fireflies came out.

There is a ghost story I'd like to write for BB though I don't think he'd like it very much.

He never even read Elliot Roosevelt's Motor Car, which I actually dedicated to him.

Back in 2018, I did a lot of canvassing and campaigning for a Congressional candidate called Jeff Beals.

Beals lost—but in the tradition of such things, his "victory" party went on, and I somehow managed to talk BB into accompanying me to it. BB absolutely hated parties! I wouldn't say I love them—love or hate depends on my mood—but I am generally pretty good at them since it doesn't trouble me in the least to walk up to perfect strangers & begin chattering away at them.

The party was in Woodstock.

And BB lived ostensibly in Kerhonksen but really in a remote settlement deep within the Catskills Park that was once called Riggsville—presumably after a 19th century tannery owner.

To get from Woodstock to Riggsville, you have to drive across the Ashokan Reservoir, which supplies New York City with its drinking water.

Twelve towns were drowned to create the Ashokan Reservoir!

Cottages, stores, church steeples, everything!

I suppose they relocated the cemeteries—or at least the ones they knew about.

We drove under a full moon. The reservoir tried to drown that, too! But the weirdest thing was the deer that had lined up along practically every section of the road! I kid you not! Like every single deer in the Catskill Mountains. It was like they had all come out to watch us, and, of course, we had to drive very, v-e-r-y slowly in case one came charging across the road.

Anyway, it gave me an idea for a story...

Suppose the deer were the metamorphosed inhabitants of the drowned villages?

And every four years they turn out to exercise their rights as American citizens to vote?

That would be the story backdrop. Not sure what the actual plot would be.

Except that the story would be called Neversink. There is also a Neversink Reservoir that supplies water to NYC, though we didn't drive along it that night, and what could be a better title about the enchanted inhabitants of a drowned village than Neversink?

mallorys_camera

Brian's house was hard.

I brought lunch & bubbles. (Brian was a big fan of blowing bubbles. There's nothing he liked to do more at the end of a day than smoke ganja & sit out on his front porch blowing bubbles.)

But as far as any of the practical tasks that had to get done?

I was useless.

Fortunately Brian's excellent neighbors—an elderly and charmingly licentious gay couple—had already cleaned the kitchen. It was more spotless now than I had ever seen it when Brian was alive. I fed them lunch.

"We will miss Brian," Willie—the elder of the two—remarked. "Do you know how we became friends? Well, one time, we were entertaining a trick—"

"He wasn't really a trick!" interjected Eugene. "We just liked to call him that!"

"—and we ran out of lube. So, I walk across the road, bang on Brian's door, and say, 'Hey, do you happen to have any lube I could borrow?'

"And without missing a beat, he asks, 'Water or silicon-based?'"

###

As soon as I got to Brian's, I felt utterly fatigued. Denatured somehow—like all the protein in my body had turned to jellyfish protoplasm.

All I could do was collapse on Brian's front steps and prattle on & on, hopfully entertainingly—to Brian's gay neighbors (but they had already cleaned the kitchen—and since I was amusing them, that kinda meant that I had cleaned the kitchen, too, right?), to Flavia's friend Betsy who had dropped everything to support Flavia for four days even though she was not the biggest Brian fan. So I sat while Flavia and Mimi did the tour of the house, tackled the stuff in the fridge and the washing machine, went around the cottage unplugging appliances.

Then the four of use went out to the garden.

It was nowhere as big or various as it has been in past years. Which, of course, made me think, Huh! Did he...?

There are a couple of tomato plants and half a dozen chilis I could rehome. But that would mean spending an hour in that garden, and that garden was crawling with tics. Tiny deer tics, the ones that give you Lyme's disease. All but impossible to distinguish from dirt flecks.

Much of my entertaining conversation with Betsy had had to do with her two-year battle with Lyme's disease. It is not a disease I want to contract, so I don't want to be digging in Brian's garden.

I will go up & water it, though. On weeks that don't get much rain. I only live 25 miles away although the drive there takes me on backroads over the Shawanagunk Ridge and through the Catskills, so it's at least an hour's drive.

And I'll sauce the tomatoes when they're ripe.

###

The next day I had to get new tires and rear shocks for my car.

Mavis Automotive told me the work would take four hours at most to complete.

Belinda picked me up, fed me lunch, took me to see a really bad movie: Jurassic World Rebirth.

Dropped me back off at Mavis at the four-hour mark.

Looking up at the little Prius on its hydrolift with its wheels disassembled, was exactly like looking down at a surgical patient on an operating table. And I noticed the customer service people lied just as glibly as medical personnel: Oh, nothing's wrong! It's just taking a little longer than we...

Another hour, I was told. Ninety minutes, tops.

If they'd just fuckin' told me, It will be finished when it's finished. Leave it here. We'll call you tomorrow...

I must say, Belinda despite her Trumpishness was an excellent friend. When I texted her I was on the verge of a massive panic attack, she swooped down & took me to the local Dairy Queen (which she owns) for dinner. The DQ cheeseburger is Not Bad.

Then Belinda took me back to Mavis.

I wandered around to the back of garage and watched the mechanic thrashing about with my car.

The culprit was some sort of nut that could not be dislodged from some sort of bar.

Even with no mechanical aptitude whatsoever, I understood perfectly well that no amount of torque or elbow grease was gonna get that nut off that rod because that nut was stripped. That nut would only be removed with some kind of drill apparatus.

But the mechanic didn't understand this. He was growing more & more desperate to grip as he twisted his clamp round & round that nut.

And I thought, Uh oh. Because I have been a charge nurse, and I know that expression I saw on that mechanic's face! It was that panic that comes when you are trying to cover because you have made a potentially disasterous mistake.

Whenever I saw that expression as a charge nurse, I would try to take that nurse off an assignment as soon as possible—not because he or she was a bad nurse, but because once you get that rattled, you cannot do anything right, you will just keep making horrible mistakes!

By this time, it was 6pm, which is when Mavis officially closes.

They wanted to stay until the whole thing was fixed.

I figured that wouldn't be till midnight. So, I said, "Absolutely not! If you put the car together, will it be driveable?"

Well...yeah... but it will make an awful lot of noise.

And it did make noise. It sounded like the ghost of Keith Moon was beginning his world tour in my trunk.

But I got it back to the casa safely. And back to Mavis at 8 the next morning. Where it took them another two hours to fix it. Different mechanic!

###

Then I went off to the Hyde Park Community Garden, where I knew I'd be able to regroup. Tics are never seen in the Hyde Park Community Garden!

Weeded. Lay more straw.

Despite my massive neglect, tomatoes, cucumbers, & peppers are coming along quite! nicely:

Especially my wonderful volunteer California poppy:

Afterwards, under the cool shade of the Linden tree, I had my first conversation with Claude that was not about gardening.

We talked about growing old. Both of us had expected to die by 30.

And youthful mistakes. You expect to die by 30, if you make a lot of those.

I like Claude. He is very solid.

Thinking is hard.

Feeling is impossible. Except for anxiety.

(Wait! Is anxiety even an emotion?)

I haven't slept more than four hours a night since Brian died.

Sleeping would make me feel a whole lot better.

bleodswean

That shattering glass, not a windshield but a doorway of shock and awe, into another place. As though she had left a place for the sole reason of arriving at another place. No wandering in between. She had never been good at telling a story, not like Daddy could be around a fire, but if she had survived then perhaps, she would have been able to say out loud those moments in a way that would capture the sheer impossibility of a human body in flight. Not falling but flying, the propulsion of her skeleton, all bone projectile, into the headlight lit darkness. The impact of her head with the windscreen was the killing blow, of course it was, yet she traveled onward still alive, through the glass, over the crumpled hood and into the forever night. Leaving both sneakers behind as she went. Did she see the stars in their firmament? In this strange leave-taking she lingered on a while, the air above and surround her insubstantial, the pavement solid beneath her, the summer scorched heat of it a small comfort to her cooling body, the bloody halo of her long blonde hair creating a vision of such suffering, such loss, hers a miraculous martyred death. Our Teenaged Lady of the Automobile Collision. The shattered shoulder bones, the leaking skull. The impossible sense of soaring passing through her nerve endings, dissipating through her pores. Simultaneous departure and arrival and departure. The touch and go of her short life.

The afternoon of the day had grown hot. Morning spent working in Daddy’s garden. It was time for the leafy branches to be snipped off close to the stem to allow the lengthening buds all the sunlight. He didn’t pay her out, they had nothing extra for allowances, but after the harvest late in the fall, just before winter, he could be generous with the crumpled bills that began to stuff his pockets. She’d walk her brothers to the store, cold winds blowing through them, and buy the boys candy bars and herself a fashion magazine.

Daddy had two other daughters before she was born. One lived up in Alaska with her own momma and the other one of them lived in an old camp trailer on Daddy’s property with her baby. She was her momma’s oldest, after her came four more, all boys and of course Daddy was partial to them on account that they were boys, but he was good to all his children and just the day before this day Momma said she was expecting another one come springtime. She whisper prayed that it would be a girl, a sister, another sister.

Now the day was bending open the bars that held her prisoner, soon she would be freed. It was just gone noon. She had made sandwiches for her brothers, cleaned the kitchen and Momma told her she was allowed to walk down the road to the swimming hole. She longed to go on her own and Momma said that was fine, too, but only on account that two of her brothers seemed to be suffering from the heat and Momma wanted to keep a closer eye on them. It was hot and had been hot for going on a week. They’d taken to sleeping out of doors on the wood slatted porch, but the night before a bear had woken them up pawing through garbage and the compost and Daddy said they had to be back inside the house until he either could get a decent shot off or someone else on the hill got him first. Dressed bear in the chest freezer would be a treat.

She was fourteen years old that summer day. Highschool in the fall and she couldn’t imagine what that would be like. Tried and failed. Thought she might be more than what she was, if such a thing was possible and even then, couldn’t tell you accurately what that more looked like. Knew that somewhere out there more was waiting to be had, one just needed to get to where it was at. Arrive with eyes wide opened and announce themselves with attention.

Cut off shorts and a bikini top, knock off Converse low tops, and her waist-length hair swinging over her shoulders, near white it was so light colored, and she swung it back and forth with a practiced toss of her head. Girl we known it was you from way down the road, he said to her when he pulled over. Driving his uncle’s truck leaning out the window at her diesel exhaust smelling so dangerously sweet and another boy she didn’t know jumped out and opened the passenger side door for her like they’d been expecting her and no one but her, and she climbed up into the cab and knew her daddy wouldn’t be at all happy because he said Levi’s family was one to steer clear of whenever mannerly possible. But Levi had his hair shorn short dagger sideburns delineating his jaw line and a swagger in his long-legged stride. On the bus, he sat way at the back while she had to sit in the front with her younger brothers, sometimes holding Caden’s hand to keep him from crying, which he was prone to doing because the only thing he wanted in the wide world was to be home in the kitchen with Momma. The high schoolers got off the bus first stop and when it came springtime, Levi started tapping her on the shoulder as he walked past and then that last week of school he sat himself down right behind her on the way home every day and caught the ends of her hair in his loose-fisted palms. Sometimes his fingers, dirty and sticky with cannabis oil would tap tap the knobs of her spine. You’re real skinny, he would tell her in a voice so quiet and low it could only be meant as a secret of some kind. And the nerves would explode across her shoulders and at night in her bed she would think about the heat of his fingers and roll over onto her stomach believing that wings could be coaxed out of the two thin blades in her back. Those shoulder bones were a storehouse inside her body for all that tingling sensation caused by his fingers on her flesh.

Now she was sitting on the bench seat right up next to him. Don’t be shy girl he laughed. Bet you ain’t brave enough to jump off that high rock. The other boy had his window rolled down open too and he craned his body out of it and whooped loud. Levi gunned the big truck and black exhaust rolled out of the dual pipes and he fishtailed a bit and she gasped but the boys laughed. And soon she was laughing too.

They raced one another down to the swimming hole but the boys veered up the narrow path to the high rock. She kept on down to the rocky beach, looking up. Can you see me from there? He called down to her and she nodded. What? He yelled. I can, I can see you! She visored both hands over her eyes and watched him watching her as he leaped off the rock.

There was no way not to be alive that afternoon.

She felt no pain outside the hurt of leaving. She couldn’t close her eyes as though to sleep; her soul was exiting through her vision itself. What’s the time, she asked. Her world spinning now, the dizziness of the calling fade. No more thought everything a retinal remembering.

That day in the rain when I was almost turned sixteen telling him I had missed that month and he began to speed down and down the winding dirt roads? Or later while we raised up three young’uns and he had a bad spell with liquor and somehow it all came to a screaming head that afternoon in the truck? Or was it only the two of us again, that morning of such sadness, driving in the snow back from the hospital? Or before all that, the first sweltered day of summer when he drove us down to the swimming hole, before ditching his friend because he said he had something he wanted to show me, just him and me, and I knew without knowing how that this was my arriving.

mallorys_camera

They are dropping like flies!

Got the news through the Well network this morning that Mattu had dropped dead—also unexpectedly, also sitting in his favorite chair. Eerily like Brian.

Mattu was my boyfriend in the late '80s/early '90s.

We lived together for a couple of years in Oakland. The breakup was bitter.

Some years after, by a weird coincidence, he ended up living in Monterey just four blocks away from where I lived in Monterey. I walked Xena the Warrior Russell by his house twice a day; often, he would be sitting outside on his porch, and he would glare at me. I could have walked the dog on a different route, but I kind of enjoyed needling him.

He had married; he had procreated.

And then one day, his house burned down. No shit!

He smoked. And when I was living with him, would occasionally drink till he passed out. A vestige of his Midwestern Bad Boy past.

So, I always kind of assumed he had burned down his house by passing out drunk with a lit cigarette butt in his hand.

Many years later when we'd gotten back on civil terms—who remembers how?—he told me, no, it had been an electrical fire. Mattu was an electronics fanatic. The electrical systems in those old Monterey houses were not built to support three computers, two modems, a monitor, a plug-in boombox, and a printer on a single outlet.

###

Mattu had a habit of dropping in and out of online hangouts. For a month or so, he'd post up a storm & then he'd disappear. He was a really terrific writer. The bio he posted in his kamakazi Internet runs reads thus: Born some time back, dead at some indeterminate point in the future, everything else is now. Which I think is really quite terrific.

Our last exchange:

Mattu: Hey, pdil! I’ve got a question that’s been tormenting me for decades now: remember the Mexican restaurant that we used to eat at in Berkeley, Max’s preschool days? As nearly as I can tell, we were just a few blocks from 924 Gilman, soon-to-be world famous as the launching pad of Fugazi, Operation Ivy, any number of terrific bands. I never once stepped foot in the place, alas. But a few years later, Mike Cowperthwaite was dating Ian MacKaye’s (Fugazi guitarist) sister, and they used to stay at our house in Monterey. Ach, the days.

(What’s the point? I honestly couldn’t say. My mind tends to be more focused at 3am than 10am. Maybe I should email you then,)

Me: Ah, yes, those 3am treasure hunts through ancient memories... I don't remember any Mexican restaurants on Gilman. I DO remember Juan's, which was on Carleton Street in southwest Berkeley (pretty near Max's daycare provider's house.) I had lunch there on a Berkeley trip maybe five years ago, so it may well still be there

Mattu: THAT’S the one. Sam and I went by there in…2015?, when we passed through. Wanted to pick up some coffee at my old place on College, but it had turned over (Coles?), so we went across the street and had some strawberries. Time to go back, I’m losing traction,

I didn't really feel sad when I heard Mattu had died. It was more like when I heard Bradburn had died. This picking off of the old gang just feels so random. Am I next?

###

In other news, I am meeting Flavia & Mimi up at BB's house in a couple of hours to clean the perishables out of the fridge & do whatever else needs to be done to lock the house down till Flavia decides what to do with it.

I am quite numb.

Utterly incapable of anything remotely resembling thought or emotion.

mallorys_camera

Grass clippings turn out not to be good weed deterrents.

Here was the Hyde Park garden before I weeded it:

Okay. Ten days of neglect.

Here is the garden after I weeded it. My tomato plants shot up a foot in those 10 days.

I am thinking I will go back today, finish the weeding, & put down straw—which I know from experience is an effective weed deterrent.

###

I don't even want to think about what the New Paltz garden looks like. I may venture out there tomorrow.

Flavia, Mimi, & I are supposed to rendezvous at BB's Monday. I was thinking of rescuing some plants from his enormous garden and transplanting them in New Paltz—that is, if they are at all rescueable. They may not be. Their root systems may be too well established.

But BB has rows & rows of really nice heirloom tomatoes.

And it would be a pity to let them all perish.

###

Other than that... I got an enormous client assignment yesteray. The kiskas are pleased they will not starve.

I sat out on the back porch for a long while last night and watched the fireflies and Black Chicken strutting about. Black Chicken crows! Just like a rooster.

I am brain dead in a peculiar fashion: There is just nothing very much to think about because there is no one to tell what I think about to. Not here, at any rate.

The wedding weekend was very good because I just chattered away through it; there were lots & lots of wonderful conversations. Here, BB was literally the only person I had to talk to. Oh, I have lots of acquaintances! People I don't recognize are constantly coming up to me in supermarkets: "So good to see you again!" I suppose I must have done their taxes.

###

I did everything you're supposed to do to make connections in a new place when I moved here. I'm a member in good standing of all sorts of community organizations. But those community organizations did not yield friends. I met virtually no one I wanted to get to know better. I have no idea whether this is because I am too old to make new friends or whether the people here are shallow, conventional types who don't attract me, but vanity compels me to assume the latter.

So, Bad Fit to my current surroundings. DUH, right?

When I move, it should be a big move.

But I'm too brain dead to think about that very much now.

mallorys_camera

February 14, 2013! That's when I first met BB.

Here is what I wrote about him:

You May Think This Entry Is About Industrial Architecture, But Really It's About Sex

I spent a very interesting day with a very interesting guy doing one of my favorite things in the world – no, not making love, but walking around a postindustrial apocalyptic landscape and looking for architectural talismans, clues to transience, proof of what was once there and what will one day be there in its place. I don't know why I find this so fascinating, but I've been doing this since I was a very young kid, and mostly alone because the only other person in the world who shares my preoccupation with this is Ben. BB was very happy to tramp around with me, and I think he enjoyed himself but I suspect what he was really enjoying was me enjoying myself.

The Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn is utterly fascinating and filled with weird things – like this Russian sign over the nondescript door to this most unprepossessing little building. What the hell was this? We were close to the maritime reach, and Greenpoint was a big shipbuilding center well into the 20th century with light industry, satellite foundaries, glass factories, rope factories. I'm thinking at one time this must have been one of those bizarre little sailors' halls for Russian merchant marines far from home. But who the hell knows?

I liked BB a lot. I think he liked me, but the dynamic got more unsettling the farther we strayed from small talk. I'm a big fan of small talk. I don't actually like process-oriented conversations unless they're specific planning sessions about who is going to take out the trash, who is going to vacuum and who is going to cook dinner on Tuesday. I am of the opinion that real communication takes place in the interstices. It's not what is said, it's how it's said. I particularly don't like process conversations with people I've just met.

Of course, BB is someone from the Online Dating Site. He's also polyamorous, has lots of girlfriends including a primary. And of course, we talked a lot about sex.

We went back to his apartment, which is just a terrific apartment – converted industrial space with a large piano and tons of books and interesting art on the walls and this wire on which he had trained an ivy plant, which had obviously been there for years and years. Amazing view outside his front window of the water treatment plant which has four minarets just like a Russian Orthodox church. Or maybe they're stylized sculptures of giant garlic bulbs.

We sipped a very delicious port, and nibbled baguettes and prosciutto and a nice runny Camembert, and talked somemore about sex. Listen. I'm gonna have to get back on the bicycle sooner or later, right? So I told him I would probably end up having sex with him at some time in the future but that I would take it slow and then when it happened, I would make the moves. And I would have to say that this made him… nervous.

At a certain point, he started talking about his "super power." Which is apparently the ability to make women come merely by telling them to come.

BB is actually the second guy I've met in NYC who has this super power, by the way. I have no reason to doubt him. He's very charismatic. But this whole I-make-women-come-but-I have-to-masturbate-to-orgasm-myself thing squicks me out a bit. It's kind of like: I want you to lose control, but I'm not gonna lose control. The Dom thing, in other words.

The Dom thing is not my thing at all.

I crave mutuality.

The most times I ever came in a row was 11. I kept count. I think I was supposed to lose myself in the sheer rush of sensation, and to a large extent I did, but you know, I'm always observing. The perp in question is actually a middlingly famous guy so I won't name him. He pleasured me exactly as though he was winding a clock with a kind of clinical degree of interest that made the experience – despite the physical pleasure – rather… degrading, I suppose would be the word.

Anyway, by the time I left BB's apartment I had decided I wanted to be his new best friend, but that I didn't want to have sex with him.

BB is just a terrific playmate. I could have real fun with BB, and who knows – maybe I will. But my favorite sex has always been very uncomplicated sex – the physical contact, the contours of someone's naked body fitting to my naked body, the smells, the tastes. The animal passion of it. I really don't want to be programmed to orgasm like Pavlov's dog. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It just ain't for me.

Now!

A very interesting thing happened after that: BB found my online diary. I have no idea how! I may have mentioned that I kept one, but I certainly would not have given him the link. In those days, I patrolled the boundaries between my—ha, ha, ha—real life and my online journal a lot more rigorously than I do today. I don't have to patrol the boundaries today! Absolutely no one is interested anymore in long form prose.

BB was aggrieved! The entry had sparked a somewhat lively debate. Resolved: BB is a jerk, Yea or Nay. I think the debate squicked him more than the actual entry.

He commented on the entry!

Can't say I'm enjoying this

So I'm the "narcissist" "Dom" etc. y'all are talking about. Patrizia spends 4 hours hanging out with me, and thinks she's got it all figured out. Fine with me, except it might be nice to be kept in the loop one-on-one.

I'm not going to 'answer' what has been said/surmised about me. I don't enjoy being the object of ill-informed (not necessarily wrong) projections about who I am, but since short of the Vulcan mind-meld, projection is all we have, I'll have to live with it.

I just would have preferred to have had some of this conversation directly.

BB

Then he called me. "Do you want to talk about this?"

Well, I didn't really. I would have much preferred him to remain an amusing character on the page. But I felt I kinda owed it to him, so we met. Can't remember much about the conversation except that a Treaty of Friendship came out of it, and thereafter, we would meet every couple of weeks to tramp around Greenpoint.

And a month or so later, something else happened that was pivotal:

If You're an Artist, Move to Pittsburgh or Detroit

Had a really fabulous time w/BB last night.

First we did the urban archeologist thing, traipsing around Greenpoint, which is just so filled with interesting things to see. The hipster scene is fully entrenched. The Yuppies are ju-u-ust beginning to tiptoe in behind the hipsters. In ten years, unless there's some kind of major economic collapse in NYC, Greenpoint will be fully condo-ized, filled with bright, hopeful little shops selling upscale, over-priced cheeses and kitchenware. So it's a kind of transient scene. In a way like strolling through a large, interactive Tibetan Buddhist sand painting with graffiti and secret gardens behind barbed wire. The wind blows gentrification.

If you're an artist, you want to move to Pittsburgh or Detroit. Not Brooklyn.

Back at his house, BB had prepared this truly scrumptious North Indian meal from scratch that included an amazing green mango curry and a rather wonderful peanut/habanero chutney followed by home-baked carrot cake and whipped cream. I gorged myself.

All the time, we kept up this fabulous conversation – about our respective lives, about the world around us –

The most fabulous thing actually happened after he drove me home, though, and I discovered… I had left my fucking purse at his loft.

Stupid, no? Muy, muy stupid.

999 guys out of 1,000 would have said, "Oh, too bad. Come by and you can pick it up on Friday. Unless you want to come back now and take the subway home." But BB just turned the car back toward Brooklyn and kept talking — I think we were discussing the history of repeating rifles in America on a parallel track with the Ganesh-ification of Lawn Guyland.

I couldn't tell if he was pissed off at me or not –

"I feel really, really stupid," I said.

"And guilty too?" BB asked.

"Oh. Well. Yeah! That's a prerequisite for feeling stupid, isn't it? I mean guilt and stupidity. They kind of go together like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr –"

"Well, good!" said BB. "I'm sure I can use your guilt to my material advantage at some point. If not in this lifetime, then the next. I don't really get too bent out of shape about stuff like this. Shit happens. You go with the flow. Of course, if it turns out you left your passport or green card at my house, you'll have to walk back from Brooklyn."

BB is like the most perfect playmate ever. Just loads and loads of fun. And this is really what I want in my life. Playmates. That's what's been missing.

That and the $126 million Lotto payoff.

I was totally blown away by how cool BB was about doing a U-turn on the Long Island Parkway & cruising back to get my purse!

Most people would have been far more begrudging. Not me, I will add. I'm always pretty cool about that kind of stuff, too. So, it was obvious that BB & I resonated to the same cosmic frequency.

mallorys_camera

BB—Brian—died.

Very suddenly.

I'm not distraught because honestly, I can't believe it. A world without Brian is absolutely unfathomable to me.

###

Brian was the only person I knew who liked to go tramping through the seemy, unraveling parts of cities as much as I do it. The science of Why is THIS here, doncha know. "Economic geography," we called it.

Once, trudging along the Greenpoint waterfront, we happened upon the Hafiz poem above, scribbled like graffiti on a broken tide break.

"That may be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Brian said.

Of course, it was. The Hafiz poem described Brian to a T. Brian's love hit the whole sky. Brilliant, hilarious, generous, stubborn, iconoclastic. A bon vivant. A teddy bear. He'd say he hated all religion, but that was not entirely true. I'd say he was very religious. His religion was kindness.

###

He was a regular reader of my online journal. The only one of my real-life friends who was. (I have become real-life friends with a lot of the people who read my journal, but they didn't start out as friends.)

Sometimes, he commented on my journal, but more frequently he texted me, often reprovingly: We were firmly in the Sibling Zone, bickered and made up regularly like brother and sister.

The woo-woo aspects of my personality drove him quite mad. He was not a fan of the woo-woo.

In particular, he hated my theory that humans more or less choose their reincarnations.

I don't doubt that you had memories of a past life, and have no facts upon which to base a doubt that you had such a life, he texted furiously.

But saying you chose this life is an assertion that stands apart from reincarnation itself. Nothing about reincarnation implies that you get choices. So far as I've heard from others on this topic, it's the choices you make in this life and other past lives that determine the next life.

You remembered vividly a life lived in the past. What I was asking is what if anything you remember about the choice you made to live this one.

So let me give you my motivation. I HATE AND ABOMINATE the assertion that people chose to be rounded up, stripped naked, starved and shoved into gas chambers

###

The last time we hung out—little over a week ago—we talked almost exclusively about death, which of course being me, I'm inclined to see as prophetic (except how scary would that be?)

"Don't you think I'd rather be an atheist?" I asked him. "I'd much rather be an atheist! It would be a much better fit with my personality! It is a total fucking drag every time I drop a quarter on the sidewalk to have to think, Now how does this teensy-tiny action fit into the Universal Plan? But I can't—"

"'Cause you buh-leeeve!" Brian sang.

"No, that's what's interesting. I don't believe. I have faith. Belief and faith are qualitatively different. And there's nothing I can do to shake my faith. Believe me, I have tried."

"Well, we could always arrange to have ICE kidnap you," Brian remarked cozily. "Maybe a little waterboarding? Put you right!"

Brian was a funny guy!

###

We actually had a date this coming Saturday: The Gardiner Cafe is hosting a storytelling open mike á la that NPR show The Moth, and we signed up for it.

Part of me thinks I ought to go. As a tribute to Brian.

Another part of me thinks I would stand up in front of that microphone & cry hysterically for five long minutes until they dragged me off the stage.

Of course, that might not be a bad thing.

I haven't cried yet.

###

Meanwhile, I'm noticing all sorts of spectral disturbances in recent photos I took of Brian.

Like in this photo, he has a halo:

And in this photo, he has angel wings:

Brian himself would have rolled his eyes & made gagging sounds if I'd ever pointed anything like that out.

mallorys_camera

The reception was fun. And posh!!! Took place at the Dashings (not their real name) mega-ginormous Pennsylvania horse farm:

They'd pay someone $75,000 a year plus benefits just to mow all this, I thought. And the Dashings are only here one month out of the year now! Mostly they live in Santa Barbara these days.

The other guests were mostly people I'd known long ago and oh so far away when they were a lot unhappier and a lot more conflicted. But, of course, they'd had to be unhappy and conflicted then since they'd all been supporting players in the unhappy and conflicted Drama of Ben & Patrizia.

In this present tense, there was a strong sense that they were all actors at some kind of wrap party. They were all jovial and having a good time now.

People I didn't remember were positively overjoyed to see me.

Here's something I didn't remember:

Sixteen years ago, Lew got me a gig tutoring the Dashings' son, Tucker who did not know how to write a college essay & was on the verge of flunking his SATs. I tutored Tucker long distance via phone & email from the Squalid Cement Bungalow in Freeville, so I never actually met him or his parents in the flesh.

So at the reception, I am approached by a handsome young man in his early thirties who greets me by staring deep into my eyes and declaring, "You changed my life!!!"

"I did?" I said.

"Yes! And it's very rare to be able to identify the influence of a single person in those kinds of things, but without you, I would never have gotten into college. And college was the best thing that ever happened to me!"

It was Tucker.

Huh!

(That's Tucker on the right with mega-rich Pops)

I was also apparently the best dressed person there since various members of the catering staff kept scurrying up to me, trays of prosciutto-wrapped figs and steak crostini be damned, to exclaim, You! You look amazing!

It wasn't my clothes! I was wearing $20-dollar pants from Marshalls, an ancient bathing suit, an oversized man's white Oxford shirt, and a thrift-store leopard-spotted scarf:

So, I guess I've still got it. At least from a distance.

Excellent for my vanity!

###

The blessed couple were very sweet:

And very shy! They kissed behind Lew's baseball hat:

###

TSWSOITC and his wife stayed at the same hotel I did. They live in Georgia—Republic Of, not Last Train To—& I've always been rather fascinated by her since TSWSOITC disapproves of me, & yet I'd say Keti and I have more similarities than dissimilarities. (TSWSOITC saw me primarily as Ben's accomplice.)

I got to know her a little bit over the abysmal Comfort Inn coffee when she'd come out in the morning to smoke:

Keti is one of those women who is beautiful without being pretty. Very, very smart—an economist by training, speaks Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, English, & French. Has lived through three civil wars. Very knowledgeable about what's really going on with the Ukraine War.

During the time I'd known him best, TSWSOITC was first married to Rachel and then—as a newly divorced man—the harbor master of Rockland, Maine. I'd begun writing a novel about him: The Harbor Master! As near as I can remember now, the plot had something to do with smuggled Ukrainian sex slaves! (Prophetic? Keti is Ukrainian.) I think I had a wee bit of a crush on TSWSOITC.

Anyway, this was my first time meeting Keti, and I found her very intriguing, and went about ingratiating myself to the best of my ability because I longed to be her BFF For-EVAH!!! Although, of course, I won't be.

###

And I see I am wayyyy over the writing time I alotted myself this morning! I have a busy schedule today. Nothing fun! All draggy, practical shit that must get done.

But I would be remiss not to mention:

• Day after the reception I met up with

egg_shell:

We had a fabulous time chatting & sauntering about Edinboro in the sweltering heat, but the real magic was when

egg_shell let me look at one of her art notebooks.

Now! I happen to think

egg_shell is an artistic genius. The creative impulse is very, very strong in her. And looking through her notebook, I got the same sense I got when I visited that barn in Vermont where all those fabulous Bread & Puppet Theater puppets are stored or when I saw Michaelangelo's Prisoners In Stone at the Accademia in Firenzi so very long ago—that I was viewing the creative source, the pure, untrammeled heart of the creative process.

The hackles on the back of my neck actually stood up while I flipped through her pages.

• In Ithaca, I stayed in the most enchantingly beautiful AirBnB:

• And RTT & I had a really, really good time hanging out together:

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

bleodswean

If it’s any …

It isn’t.

I just thought …

Don’t. Your thoughts are. Hesitation. Rudimentary. But sincere. I recognize that.

Well. For most …

Stop. Please. I’m not most.

Silence, broken then with.

There is no comfort, no consolation, you see? There is only a letting go. My releasing. Mine. It is a great sluicing of water from off the skin when surfacing out of the depths. A leprosy in which the body sheds its recognizable humanity. Akin to fire, flooding, all the great equalizers of the human spirit is loss.

No pain can be endless.

Time lessens, nothing heals. Perhaps the final loss, the dissolution of self. There is that momentary pause in which the soul tells the self rest rest rest now. With those strange urgent shushings the mind exhales and closes an interior eye and the soul sighs and the body relaxes.

Always with the most extreme of analogies.

It’s how I process. How I’m formed. The shape of me in this incarnation is allegorical. I admit it. Is it unbearable of me to explain a poetic inclination?

Of course not.

Catch me in one of those expirations then. That numbing prelude to a sleep brought on by the physical and existential exhaustion of the quivering small beast caught in the snare incapable of the final severing of the trapped limb. Perhaps, between respirations I will show gratitude for whatever platitude you long to utter. With such kindness in the dulcet tones of your compassion.

So insulting. But I forgive you.

It is no kindness to me. I’m admitting this to you now so that there can be no misunderstanding between us afterwards. In the quiet of acceptance, in the weaking of the bleeding out. You offered me not a ligature, not even a bandage, only the word bandage. Followed by an expectation of a deed done well. Yet, I will nod and listen insomuch as I am able before the next suck breath moment in which I am once again filled with not a gain but a loss. Filled with loss, if you can imagine such a thing. You who have been unlucky to suffer not. Yes, I say unlucky, yes, I call you cursed for your wholeness, your innocence of these mortal woundings, of the soul’s agonies.

And you, I suppose, are blessed by this devastation?

Confounded and cast out by the privilege of cataclysmic injury yet I finger the beads and whisper the prayers and allow my eyes to roll back in their sockets from the sheer unknowingness of meaning, the definition of absolutes. Our mother, our father. All these soulful beings arting in their heavens. There is a consecration in catastrophe.

I disagree. You are martyring yourself to this.

Martyr? Laughing. This laying on of hands while the blade is hidden in the sleeve, dropped into the palm, the knife snicking out plunging into the heart between the ribs through the lungs a great sucking sound when its pulled back out. Taking life itself with it. The body heartbeating to death through the collapsing arteries.

All this because I wanted nothing more than to offer succor.

Are you familiar with the consolation prize, my friend?

Certainly, narrowly failing to win.

No, finishing last.

Yet recognized!

I don’t want to be recognized for my wounding. Your sympathy is of no value to me. Only to you. So, in an earnest effort to be brotherlike, to recognize that you too will one day bleed, I bite my tongue at refusing your solace. Give it here. In great bucketloads. Pour it out and over me. I’ll hold my breath to keep from drowning in your mollification. It offers some respite, admittedly, to others.

It’s that you can’t bear to be likened to others.

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millysdaughter

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Reading

Neversink

Catch Up

LJ Idol - Wheel of Chaos - Wk 3 - Ecco

A Determinate Point In the Future

Transplanting

The Treaty of Friendship

Brian

Road Trip!

Rebuilding journal search again

LJ Idol - Wheel of Chaos - Wk 2 - If It's Any Consolation

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March 2022

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