moonbeam6612

One real problem with magical thinking is that one begins to blame oneself for everything. Like if life is going badly, it's because you're being punished for something you did. That kind of jumpstarts a conveyor belt of memories of all the horrible things you've ever done running through your mind...

Snort.

Like the Universe cares!

It may be time to turn off the magical thinking function for a while.

###

Drove up to the Catskills to pick up Brian's camping gear. Brian's house is only about 30 miles away, but down so many back roads that it takes an hour to get there. Gorgeous day, and I meandered through the forests with their sudden breaks into ancient farmhouses and empty barns as though I was driving through the last scene of a movie.

I will be back one more time to pick up the rest of Brian's CDs and two little Moroccan footstools I had my eye on.

But after that?

It's unlikely I will ever visit this part of the Catskills again.

Hung out with real-life Flavia and Betsy for a bit.

Came back and finished The Children's Book. Read it much too fast! I was curious to find out what happens. What happens is that the characters who are adults at the beginning of the book grow old & weird, and the characters who are children at the beginning of the book all die or are horribly maimed in WWI.

Started pondering, too, about what I need to do with my stuff. If I move to Michigan, I'm gonna have to get rid of most of it. It will be too expensive to move.

mallorys_camera

Yesterday was not a good mental health day.

Icky, in residence till Tuesday, has not said one word about Black Chicken's death. In fact, has barely said four words to me. It's very hard to share physical space in a house with someone who acts like you're invisible, even when said someone is a complete dick. I keep scampering off to the mirror to check: Do I exist? If I cast a reflection, I must exist, right?

Fortunately, I am spending today and tomorrow with People Who Love Me. And driving up to Ithaca some time this week to drop off Brian's enormous collection of camping gear with RTT.

###

Bad mental health for me always comes down to that small still voice within suddenly turning shrill and chanting, Failure, failure, failure! The small still voice may not be entirely wrong on that one: I have failed utterly in being happy, can't think of a single time in my life when I was simply, uncompromisingly happy.

That's on my upbringing.

But that is not what the small still voice is talking about.

No, the small still voice means I am low income, I have not published a novel (have published a lot of other stuff! I feel compelled to note here), have a broken dental veneer, am living in an awful place where I barely know a soul, and am generally not someone Elon Musk would want to impregnate.

It's a lot.

###

On the plus side:

Ten days or so of hot temperatures that kept me more or less housebound and immobile means my injured knee has all but recovered.

And I have finally found a book I enjoy: A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, about an eccentric E. Nesbit-like writer of magic tales for children in the early 20th century and her Bloomsbury-like coterie.

I have never been a big Byatt fan. There is an icy feeling to her perfect prose that has always put me off. I much prefer the gurgly chick-lit effusions of her sister, Margaret Drabble. But I am enjoying this book.

###

Funny. Yesterday, I kept thinking I would feel so much better if there was even one person I could call up and say, "Black Chicken died, and my heart is broken," who would understand—

And the only two people I could think of were Brian and (ulp) Ben. Who are both dead themselves.

mallorys_camera

Black Chicken is no more.

My Umbrella of Protection wasn't wide enough to keep her safe.

My Umbrella of Protection is barely wide enough to keep me and the kiskas safe these days. Tough times. Sigh.

I am sad but trying not to be sentimental about it. Nature red in tooth & claw, and all of that.

Still.

I dream of a universe where innocent creatures can frolic happily and carelessly. And maybe cynical creatures, too.

mallorys_camera

Managed to cardboard and woodchip one little path.

Which I know doesn't sound very impressive.

But hey! It was 80° by 10am with a dew point of 70. Very humid. Very uncomfortable.

Doing any kind of garden work on days like this involves arriving there at 8am—which I gotta say, I do not like at all. I like to putter in the morning. Drink two cups of coffee. Catch up on emails and texts. Skim the news (uniformly awful). Read my pals' online journals—though it appears I'm one of only a few who writes with any degree of regularity anymore. Long-form writing really only appeals to Boomers and GenXers. I am the priestess of a dead religeon.

###

Work in Progress is progressing—but slowly.

Flavia is an architect, so I'm having to do deep dives into architect jargon.

In the chapter I'm writing now, Flavia does a project with the resident genius, starts sleeping with him, falls in love with him—he does not fall in love with her—reveals her dirty little secret to him (I'm rich!!!), gets used by him for her money, develops a cocaine habit.

None of this stuff happened to me, so writing it is... challenging.

Of course, all fiction writing is autobiographical to some degree—like method acting. The event you're describing in a fictional character's life may not have happened to you, but you draw on your own feelings to evoke the characters' emotional reactions. So, you know. It can get intense.

I have no idea if it's any good or not.

I started it; I'll finish it. That's all I know.

###

Rereading Tracy Dougherty's excellent biography of Larry McMurtry because I have run out of books! (I have also run out of streaming media to watch; absolutely nothing appeals.)

McMurtry is one of my favorite writers, and the fact that his ouevre contains so many out-and-out stinkers and clunkers is actually part of his appeal. The Last Picture Show is a perfect novel! So, how do you explain Cadillac Jack?

McMurtry lived a really extraordinary life. On his own terms (which could best be described as "episodic"). He made his own rules—up to the point where his own body felled him. In 1991, he had a heart attack and then quadruple-bypass surgery, and though he lived another 30 years, in a very real sense, his life ended in 1991.

###

One thing medical gatekeepers don't really tell you is that around 30% of all people who undergo bypass surgery experience significant personality changes.

Larry McMurtry was one of those people.

In his memoir, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry wrote:

...The violently intrusive nature of that operation – of any operation, really – was bound to dislocate one for a bit, I thought. Car metaphors seem to apply. I had had some serious engine work done and then been jump-started back into drivability. If there was a little sputtering at first, well, that was only to be expected.

In the fourth month matters worsened – the sense of grief for the lost self was profound. I didn’t feel like my old self at all, and had no idea where the old self had gone. But I did know that it, he, me was gone, and that I missed him. I soon came to feel that my self had been left behind, across a border or a canyon. Where exactly was I? The only real sign of the old self was that I could still connect with my grandson, Curtis McMurtry. Otherwise, I felt spectral – the personality that had been mine for fifty-five years was simply no longer there – or if there, it was fragmented, it was dust particles swirling around, only occasionally and briefly cohering. I mourned its loss but soon concluded that gone is gone – I was never really going to recover that sense of wholeness, of the integrity of the self.

That being the case, I began to put a kind of alternative self together, and the alternative self soon acquired a few domestic skills, on the order of loading the dishwasher or taking out the trash. But I still couldn’t read. I was at the time owner of perhaps two hundred thousand books and yet I couldn’t read.

The problem, I eventually realized, was that reading is a form of looking outward, beyond the self, and that, for a long time, I couldn’t do – the protest from inside was too powerful. My inability to externalize seemed to be organ based, as if the organs to which violence had been done were protesting so much that I couldn’t attend to anything else. I soon ceased to suppose that I would ever reassemble the whole of my former self, but I could collect enough chunks and pieces to get me by – as I have.

Such surgery, so noncommonsensical, so contradictory to the normal rules of survival, is truly Faustian. You get to live, perhaps as long as you want to, only not as yourself – never as yourself.

mallorys_camera

Quite the lovely day, yesterday. I spent a good chunk of it in the garden, where I have a long list of projects that never quite get finished because the Numbah One priority is weeding and the weeds grow so fuckin' fast! Yesterday, though, I was able to stay four hours, so in addition to weeding & watering, I got the pink dahlias in and trained the pea plants to climb the fence.

One of my cucumber plants didn't make it, so I replanted. (I never have much luck with cucumbers.)

The bell pepper plants are already fruiting, which cannot be good.

Ditto one of the Roma tomatoes.

More wood chips came in, so when I go tomorrow, I'm gonna put cardboard down on the paths (to kill the weeds) and then strew wood chips on top of them. That will be a lot of work.

Other than that...

The Schlock luncheon turned out to be more fun than I imagined it would be. The Montgomery crew are actually a nice group of people. It was the Middletown office that drove me batty.

And then when I got home, there was an Incident with Mabel. A CATastrophe, you might say. (Yuk, yuk, yuk.)

Mabel somehow got stuck in a polyethelene shopping bag and took off racing up and down the stairs for five minutes straight (poor frightened little beast) before finally settling in the deepest darkest recess under the fainting couch. Very difficult to reach, but I had to because the only way I could figure she'd get stuck in a bag is if the bag's handles were around her neck—which meant she was at high risk for strangling herself.

Somehow I managed to reach in and cut the damn thing off her—my hands are covered with small scratches this morning.

Then for another three hours, I kept popping under to do neuro checks on her eyes while she hissed & batted at me. Were her pupils equal & reactive? I mean, cat's eyes are so different from human eyes. Would neuro checks even be a part of feline differential diagnosis?

But she's fine now, though it took her several hours to settle down.

mallorys_camera

Whaddiya know. The cheap weed wacker did exactly what I needed it to do once I reassembled it so the retaining cap didn't keep falling off.

Of course, the feature I really wanted—six little green men who crawl out of the box, fall to their knees, and begin weeding out stumps and roots—was not available. That still needs to be a by-hand shovel job. Hey! You get what you pay for.

###

The kiskas are hating heavily on each other this morning. They spend about 30% of their time grooming each other and 40% hissing and batting at one another. (The other 30% they spend sleeping obliviously on opposite corners of the Patrizia-torium.) But this morning, they were going after each other tooth and nail with such fury, I had to get out the spray bottle.

What set them off, I wonder?

Mabel was so pissed off about something that she actually woke me up around 5—leaving me under-rested for the Schlock alumni luncheon that I have somehow agreed to go to later today.

When I went downstairs, I found the front door wide open.

This is another one of the peculiarities of the House of Icky: The front door does not stay closed when it's windy out.

Fortunately, the house is in a remote rural area. Unless a serial killer has recently escaped from one of the local prisons, an open front door is unlikely to endanger me.

However! Molly likes to think of herself as an indoor-outdoor cat, and I have found her wandering outside a couple of times after the door has blown open. That is worrisome because if a hawk will go after a chicken, it will also go after a cat.

Did Molly wander outside last night?

Did Mabel wake me up to tattle on her?

###

Chatted a little with Ichabod last night.

Realized that while I was quite good at keeping myself occupied and productive when I lived on the other side of the river, I am miserable at it here. Though I did try when I first moved here.

Really not much I can do about that: It is the place; it is not me.

But, of course, it feels as though it's me.

I'm part of an epidemic! Isolated senior citizens.

If I were more of an egomaniac, the Work in Progress would sustain me. I would think of this isolation as a kind of literary retreat and funnel all of my energy into words.

But my ego is simply not strong enough for that kind of role-play game. Yes, the words are important. To me. But I have no idea if they'll ever be important to anyone else, and I need involvement in stuff that is important to everyone else to round out my resume as a Real Human Girl.

Anyway.

I'll book the Michigan trip today.

If that doesn't work out... It's Ithaca.

One way or another, I need to start thinking about packing and moving logistics (ugh).

I was thinking I might hire Sarah to help me pack. Sarah is the sweet, over-burdened single mother who appalled me that one time at Schlock by dressing so the crack of her ass showed when she sat with a client. (She was actually a reasonably competent tax preparer.) I am probably going to need someone to help me pack. I'm really going to that luncheon today to get her contact info.

mallorys_camera

The knee brace is helping. Maybe.

The weed wacker is useless. Probably. The weeds I need to wack are thick and tall, and this is a very low-end piece of equipment, designed primarily to edge lawns. It would cost around $400 to buy a piece of equipment specifically designed for taking out weeds like mine, and I ain't blowing that kind of money on a weed wacker.

I got to the garden around 11 yesterday. It was already 82°, so I only lasted 20 minutes or so. The older I get, the less I can stand up to heat. I remember biking around Sicily with my first husband before Ichabod was born; we would routinely bike 100 miles a day in 100° heat. How did I manage to do that?

Anyway, I took the weed wacker to some weeds, and it promptly fell apart.

It was wayyyyy too hot to continue weeding by hand.

So, I went home and watched YouTube videos—had I put it together the right way when I was assembling the damn thing? I have no intuition whatsoever when it comes to mechanical stuff. Was I using it the right way?

No one recommends using it for heavy weeds!

But if you must use it for heavy weeds, then you should tackle them from the top down.

Which, of course, I hadn't been doing.

But which I will shortly attempt to do today when I toddle out to the garden at 8.

If that doesn't work, I'll return the damn thing.

###

My weed wacker misadventures made me feel very pathetic.

Honestly, I wanted to curl up in a little ball and cry.

Why don't I have someone in my life who can do this kind of shit for me?

Because you don't! snapped the small, still voice within, which tends to get angry whenever I wallow in self-pity. And nobody wants to watch a 74-year-old lady cry. Particularly not the 74-year-old lady herself.

I was discussing the details of my July trip with Tom and mentioned the BoyZ were coming round to why I might want to move: "Their big objection is around the potential for physical decrepitude!!! 'What if you need help?'

"I explained it thusly: 'Well, I'm pretty sure Tom would be willing to drive me to the cataract doctor & pretty sure he wouldn't be willing to give me a bed bath if I went into a coma on his couch.'"

Tom laughed. "Did you tell the boys I'm a simple midwesterner with no serial killer tendencies and that I keep my sexual predation to a minimum around roomies? I haven't broached anything with Zoe and Rudy - they are used to me just springing things on them. But they'll be fine and have the same questions the boys do. I think Zoe will be a little relieved that someone will be around keeping an eye on me. She believes I need a minder."

A minder!

Yes, that's exactly it.

Someone who tracks you. Someone who is noticing the small victories & defeats of your day-by-day.

mallorys_camera

Multiple errands took me to the other side of the river yesterday—which I like so much more than this side of the river. I have fond memories of living in the sleepy little town of Hyde Park. The local cottage industry is Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

Though that may be changing. Hyde Park is also the home of the Culinary Institute of America, which has become pretty famous with the rise of food content programming across streaming networks. No fewer than three enormous resort-style hotels are going up in Hyde Park, all scheduled to open in the next three years. I can't help thinking that those investors misread the economic signals: Is anyone gonna want to blow five grand on a luxury vacation in fuckin' Hyde Park, NY, in three years? Is anyone gonna have five grand to blow on a luxury vacation anywhere in three years? I mean, apart from the one-percenters?

But I've been plenty wrong about those things before.

###

Among the useful things I bought yesterday were a knee brace and a weed wacker. I'm trying both of them out today.

I went across the river to have a fasting blood sugar drawn—so maybe that's why I felt so weak while I was shopping. I ate a banana, but honestly, I thought I might collapse at Home Depot. Of course, Home Depot—this cavernous warehouse with weak flurescent lighting, no air conditioning, and aisles and aisles and aisles of machinery and building materials—is one of my least favorite places in the world, so maybe that played into it.

Anyway, when I got home, I more-or-less collapsed. Yes, idleness is bad. But sometimes...

Rewatched Ghost World, which continues to be a brilliant movie.

That bus Norman waits for throughout the film. That finally comes for him at the end of the film, even though Enid knows the route was discontinued more than two years ago.

The bus is analogous to the symbol of the door in the wall in H.G. Wells' story of the same name. It's a story that's been a great favorite of mine since childhood. The door in the wall is what's in modern parlance called a portal. Ah! But a portal to where?

Is the bus a modern parallel to the mythological ferry over the River Styx? When Enid finally boards it at the end of the film, is this a code for her suicide? Is it a metaphor for the end of childhood? Or is it just a weird thing in a movie filled with weird things?

I still get goosebumps at that throwaway flash of a scene when Norman actually gets on the bus.

mallorys_camera

Down once again to one chicken—the indominable Black Chicken.

Happened on Icky's watch—I never let the chickens out unless I can sit outside watching out for them for a couple of hours. Not that that matters, I suppose—Nature red in tooth and claw, predators are gonna do what predators are gonna do. Without a chicken run, they were dead chickens walking.

But it feels better to have someone to blame, and I blame him.

I think it was some kind of raptor.

Icky had let the chickens out and then taken off.

When it was near dark, I went down to shut them in their coop—only they weren't in their coop.

So, I took off calling for them: "Chickens! Chickens!"

And eventually found Black Chicken, sitting dazed by the compost heap, with a big (thankfully superficial) wound on her back. I'm thinking the only way she could have gotten that is if some large raptor bird had swooped down on her & tried to carry her off.

Somehow, she managed to get away! Black Chicken is a survivor.

The other black chicken wasn't as lucky.

The other black chicken had just begun trusting me enough to take bits of tasty tortilla treats out of my hand. I was almost comfortable enough with her longevity prospects—almost—to make up a silly nickname for her. She was a very cautious chicken.

Icky did take Black Chicken to a vet—the wound will heal, she'll recover.

But she won't be fine without a companion: Chickens are very social little creatures.

I wish I could just kidnap Black Chicken and smuggle her to

egg_shell! The Underground Chicken Railroad!

egg_shell knows how to take care of chickens!

But she's not my chicken.

I am sad, though I accept the inevitability. This is what life is. Since animals can't photosynthesize, eventually all of us are on the cafeteria menu. In the end, we all get eaten, whether that be by lions and tigers and bears or bacteria.

###

The garden is driving me a bit nuts because the weeds are growing so fast, particularly those fuckin' nettles. The weeds are thriving! My vegetables, not so much.

It's a very different environment than the Hyde Park Community Garden. For one thing, it's in full sunlight. Since we are now in full summer—not by the calendar but meteorologically—I've been watering the garden every other day, but possibly I'm overwatering it? The cucumber leaves have yellow spots, the basil pinkish spots.

Traditionally, I've always found weeding by hand meditative. But not this much weeding! So today, I'm gonna go over to the Home Depot to see if I can pick up a cheap, portable weed wacker.

###

Finished Chapter 7. It was difficult to write: I really wanted a different authorial voice than I used in Part 1. I think I succeeded in that. But Flavia is just not as interesting a character as Grazia was. Plus I am now in the realm of pure fictioneering, since Flavia is not a Patrizia interject. Whole cloth fictioneering carries a special set of challenges that involve plotting as well as style.

###

My knee is still a problem. Some days it improves; some days, it's Not Good. It's not the patella—it's some ligament behind the patella. Although it affects the patella because if that ligament is hurting, I use the leg in a particular way that puts weird stress on the patella.

It was bad yesterday, very achey, so after I watered the garden, I just lay on my fainting couch icing it all day and reading (Chaim Potok's The Promise, which is a treasure trove of useful Hasid information should I ever go back to my June Miller novel.)

It feels 100% better today, so maybe that's what I need to do for a couple of days. Nothing

But I always feel so guilty when I do nothing.

mallorys_camera

Chapters 1 through 6 are here.

Part 2: Flavia

Chapter 7

If I had it to do over again (famous last words!), I would have torn the place down. It was one of the older dwellings on the Cherrytown loop—roads that had never seen a single cherry, but which, once upon a time, were overrun with feral crab apple trees. Hard little crab apples might pass for cherries if you weren’t paying attention. The tanners who settled this part of the Catskills probably used them for hard cider. By the 1930s, though, when the place went up, the tanners were long gone. They’d stripped the bark off the native hemlocks, polluted the streams, and moved on.

I bought it to save it: two hundred acres of mostly untouched woods plus a residential structure, more shack than house. The man who’d been living there since the Depression was one of those mountain hermit types, but he'd had distant relatives who'd waited out probate and were being courted by developers. You wouldn’t expect a developer to be interested in a parcel some hundred miles from New York City at the end of a twisting road, but you’d be wrong. There's always someone willing to bulldoze a hillside if the survey looks promising. So I decided I’d make the relatives rich instead and then donate the land to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development.

Except they didn’t want it.

“What am I going to do with it?” I moaned.

“I’ll live there,” Neal said.

And within two months of the day I signed the deed, he'd moved in.

Hardly anyone who knew him understood why he would leave the small but bustling city of Kingston, where he had so many friends, where everyone knew his name, where he was one of the cocks of the walk, for the isolation of a mountainside.

But I understood.

And now he didn’t live here anymore. He didn’t live anywhere. He was dead. I’d been with him here most weekends for the past five years—and in plenty of other places besides, of course—but those other places weren’t imprinted with him the way this one was. Here was the kitchen where he cooked for me, the garden where he grew me kale and heirloom tomatoes, the bed where he brought me to sweet moan.

( But wait! There's more! )

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

Profile

moonbeam6612

September 2022

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

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 15th, 2026 05:53 am

Reading

Magical Thinking

Mental Health

Umbrella

Larry McMurtry at the Dollar Store

Feline Differential Diagnosis

Missing Little Green Men; Feuding Cats

Minders

You're Either On the Bus or Off the Bus

This and That

Chapter 7: The Real Sister Wives of the Quaint & Scenic Hudson Valley

(no subject)

Profile

September 2022

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags