Traveling Companions

Who's winning the Iran War?

Russia!

Trump just suspended economic sanctions 'cause the U.S. needs that Russian oil!

If anything can convince you that war in particular and nationalism in general are nothing more than a lethal playground squabble, that particular bit of info should be it. No need for sophisticated analyses. The playground bully—that would be the Trump administration—is always arbitrary when it comes to enemy lists.

Between scarcity & price gouging, gas will be $5 a gallon by the end of March, and increases in the price of fuel will be baked into every good that relies upon transportation. In the consumer price index, what goes up does not go down, so we are looking at permanent price increases.

The economy was already struggling before Trump miscalculated Iran. Revised estimates for GDP growth during the last quarter of 2025 are just .7% while January inflation was 3.1%. We are running very fast just to stand in one place.

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Is any war a "good" war?

I would say military actions undertaken to quell forms of ethnic cleansing are probably justified. Genocide should be prevented. Thus, WWII was a "good" war; ditto the 1995 NATO airstrikes that ended the Bosnian War.

But what are we looking at exactly in Iran?

I am beginning to think the Universe would be much better off without human beings.

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

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

I started a 2025 return.

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

I abandoned the 2025 return and completed the 2024 return.

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

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

Somehow this became my mistake!

Oh, the Leslie grumbles & side-eye!

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

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

T-34 days.

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Also yesterday I had this muy disturbing neurological symptom.

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

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

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

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

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

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







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

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



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





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

And honestly, we could have been best friends.

Except we're not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He wants to ream me a new asshole.

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

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

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

Stories! I do love stories.

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

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

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

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

"Honey?" guessed Gary.

"Human breast milk," I told him.

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

I slept eight hours last night.

Eight hours!

Now I'm thinking the shoulder pain that was keeping me awake was not a statin side effect at all, but some kind of reaction to hyperextension that happened when I tried to grab something at a weird angle while I was lying down.

Anyway, it's resolving.

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And I wrote 500 words on the opening of Chapter 7.

Five hundred words!

I'm thinking the deal with Daria is that she deliberately mistranslates testimony in a court trial, although her exact motivation and the details of that court trial are hazy at the moment.

The voice that's emerging is quite distinct from Grazia's voice. More formal and reflective. Cooler. More analytical.

So, that's a good thing, too.

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Meanwhile, we are back at war with Eastasia.

What am I talking about?

We have always been at war with Eastasia!

It is impossible to have any sympathy for a murderous mullah who executed anywhere between 7,000 to 40,000 Iranian protesters between January 8th and January 10th of this year.

Nevertheless, I am completely opposed to American interference in what's essentially another sovereign nation's civil war, and I don't want to spend $5 for a gallon of gas.

Plus, of course, the Iran War is a classic wag-the-dog maneuver designed to distract the American public from the fact that the Department of Justice redacted all mentions of Trump's name from the Epstein files.

Disinformation aplenty is aflowin'. But my favorite factoid is that the Trump administration, despite telling Americans stranded in Dubai and Bahrain, Get out, get out, get out! Get out NOW, is refusing to provide them with any State Separtment-mediated assistance. That's my boy, The Donald!

I can't wait for the flood of influencer TikToks: Here's how to escape from Dubai! It's eZeeee! And you can do it, too!

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

He's wrong: I absolutely can do that.

But he's also right: It is insane.

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

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

That's self-care, right?

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

I make my life harder than it needs to be.

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The work itself is not difficult.

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

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

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

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

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

Is that so hard to understand?

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

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

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

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

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

I am getting paid for it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then she drops them.

I was consumed with envy!

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

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

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

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

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

But it never quite took.

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

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

Sigh...