Traveling Companions

Mother's Day?

Completely bogus!

A "holiday" invented by Hallmark cards and the struggling florist industry.

Did any revolution ever take place on the second Sunday in May? Did some pious prioress have her breasts hacked off so she could apotheosize to the Church's top saintly sales team?

No!

But I'm willing to cut an enormous amount of slack to any holiday that involves floral tributes and chocolates for moi. And the BoyZ came through! A magnificent bouquet, a lifetime supply of those ultra-rich Lindor chocolate truffles. And phone calls!

###

In other news, I hit three garden supply stores yesterday, and none of them had sieves, so I guess I'm gonna have to order one online. I did make it to my garden, too, where I had time to replant some of the peas I first put in a month ago (out of a whole pack of seeds, only six or so seedlings sprouted) and take out approximately 10 lbs of nettles (damn those little motherfuckers grow fast!) before it began to pour.

This has been a very, very cold spring with frosty nights well into May. But Mother's Day is the official end of the frost season, so I'm gonna start planting in earnest. I have a couple of plucky baby cucumbers ready to go and a plastic bin of tomato seedlings looking for a good home. (The woman who gave them to me told me they came from a supermarket Roma tomato that she forgot about and one day exploded into seeds—so I don't know how hardy they are. Supermarket vegetables are not bred for their propagative properties.)

Elmore Leonard is one of those writers who occupies the demilitarized zone between genre writing and high literature.

I don't read him myself, but I take his Rules For Writing very seriously! Particularly #10: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Except... How do you know which parts readers tend to skip? Different readers skip different parts, right? Plus when you reread a book, the parts you skipped the first time may be the parts you linger over the second time around! It's so confusing!

Anyway, Elmore Leonard's adage was much on my mind as I labored on the Work in Progress yesterday. Did I write three sentences? Maybe. I am describing Flavia's reaction to Neal's death, which she learns through a phone call from Mimi. The problem is that I've already described Mimi's phone call to Flavia—as imagined by Grazia. As imagined amusingly by Grazia!

Grazia is an amusing character.

Flavia is not.

But the novel's structure alternates between points of view from different characters. Flavia's POV focuses on the nitty-gritty of maintaining a poly relationship, plus what it feels like to be super-rich and embarrassed about it, so it's not without its own fascination.

Still.

I have to set up Neal dropping dead and all the busy work that entails for Flavia.

Is there new information I can include about the phone call in its second evocation? I mean, how would you feel if you got a phone call telling you the person you loved most in the world was suddenly gone?

This has never happened to me, so I'm a bit at a loss.

###

Apart from struggling and failing to get anywhere on the Work In Progress, I made money and did a mini-Taylor Hackford film festival, An Officer and a Gentleman and Against All Odds.

It was a rainy day, so I didn't have to torture myself: Really, you should go outside and do something useful.

Against All Odds stars my movie boyfriend, Jeff Bridges. We have grown old together, and I must say, my health has maintained considerably better than his! In his youth, Jeff Bridges was the kind of adorably blurry, blue-eyed blond boy I lusted after—not dumb exactly but not intellectual in the way that I (for better or worse!) am intellectual. Very physical. Our bond would be sexual! Very wholesome athletic sex, lotsa orgasms but lite on kink.

Jeff Bridges was never more adorable than he was in Against All Odds—unless it was in Starman (be still my beating heart!)

I mean, don't get me wrong! Jeff Bridges could also be louche (c.f. The Fabulous Baker Boys and the brilliant, under-rated Cutter's Way), but that was a Sydney Carton kinda thing, doncha know, the romantic who's so-oo-ooo sensitive he has to hide it behind a wall of cynicism.

And the first part of Against All Odds is actually quite good, though it falls apart into total plot incoherence at the halfway mark. I mean, Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward having hot, sweaty, naked sex in Chichén Itzá! Does it get any better? I believe they actually got permission to film in Chichén Itzá!

Of particular interest to me was the way Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward kissed, taking nibbles of each other's lips. This is not my preferred way of kissing, which involves mouth flowering into mouth deep soul kissing, but I figure in my next reincarnation, I will teach Jeff Bridges how to kiss properly—which is something I had to do with my first husband! I mean, it's ridiculous to give up on someone just because their sexual rhythms don't match yours; teach them your sexual rhythms!

Anyway, it was a fun day. Guiltless sloth!

But today, it is not raining, and moreover, temps are supposed to hit 70°, so I must harken out to my garden and figure out the soil sieve situation.

It was great seeing RTT, but I could tell I wasn't in prime Road Trip mode in Ithaca because I kept seeing things in terms of obstacles.

Not Alynn invited us to dinner, how fabulous is that.

But Alynn invited us to dinner. Fuck! That means I'm gonna have to drive in the dark and figure out the parking situation in Collegetown in the dark, and —

I wasn't game in other words. I kept seeing everything as a dreary algorithm with onerous conditions.

In fact, I think you could legitimately call it borderline depression, a headspace that's been following me around since the end of the Schlock gig. Either borderline depression or an actual illness, because I have so little physical energy. Do I have cancer? Lyme disease? Long COVID? Anemia? I keep thinking, If only I could sleep for 12 hours, sleep and dream, it would all be okay, that nascient headache always threatening to bloom just behind my eyes would finally go away...

Brain fog seems to lift to some extent when it's sunny & warm out, which inclines me to think it's primarily psychological (though, of course, psyche and soma do not have a clear demarcation). It rained practically the entire time I was in Ithaca. And it was cold. I didn't pack for rain & cold! Maybe that's why I felt so Not Good.



I like Alynn, and I did have dinner with her one-on-one first night I was there at a not-terrible Mexican restaurant. (Good Mexican food is difficult to come by in New York state outside the City.) She is very smart, blunt, no-nonsense. When I first met her, she was the suffer-no-fools head of the farm-to-table lunch program at RTT's high school, New Roots. I was a parent, so one of the fools by default! Now she's New Roots' operational head, and since RTT dragged me over to her house on Thanksgiving, we are thick as thieves. She was really kind to me that night, and I was in baaaaaad shape, so her kindness was deeply appreciated.

We did the things that would have resulted in bonding had I been in a better headspace. Parsed romantic histories, talked about our kids, shared confidences about our favorite drugs. But I was going through the motions. Alynn was great, the food was great, but I didn't want to be there—although if you'd quizzed me, I couldn't have told you where I did want to be.

In penance for my dissociative state, I picked up the tab for dinner.



RTT is as good as I've ever seen him. The apartment looks great, which I suspect may be due to the domestic talents of new roomie Willow, whom I liked enormously. With three humans, two dogs, one cat, and one snake, it is now the Peaceable Kingdom: Always someone to cuddle! RTT continues to have lots of fun at his Personal Best day job and is taking his City Council responsibilities very seriously.

I went to his weekly City Council meeting. Issue under discussion: Cement spalling at one of the city-owned parking garages that services Ithaca's downtown. Cement has a half-life, and the garage is more than 50 years old. It's very valuable property that could be repurposed in a hundred interesting ways, but the business community wants those parking spaces. Retrofitting the garage would take $3 million, and the repair wouldn't last for more than five years. What should the City of Ithaca do?

It's amazing to me that my kid has a say in that decision.

I'm proud of him!

He's so charismatic! And he's of a generation that, for the most part, is politically disaffected, so he's an excellent role model for his cohort. All politics are local politics!

Interesting sidebar: The mayor is Justine's boyfriend...

When you're in a karass, you're in a karass.

Deep feeling of lassitude throughout yesterday, like my bones were made of rubber bands or something. I was tired, but there was no reason for me to be tired.

Naturally, I took this to mean I have some lethal disease. Maybe multiple myeloma—Ben had multiple myeloma, it was one of the two diagnoses that may have killed him (the other being liver cancer).

Ben's multiple myeloma announced itself in a weird way.

For months & months, he'd been limping around with sciatica, which is basically one of those wait-and-heal things. His "sciatica," though, just kept growing more & more painful until eventually he went to see a doctor for X-rays—and lo & behold, his left pelvis was fractured. But he didn't remember injuring it!

They ran a slew of tests and found the malignant plasma cells that had eaten away his bones.

Multiple myeloma is not an automatic death sentence if it's managed.

But, of course, Ben's multiple myeloma had never been managed.

Between diagnosis and death rattle, it was something like seven short weeks.

I've had that on-again, off-again ache in my right shoulder for many weeks now.

It's gotta be multiple myeloma, right?

###

Since I was dying, I decided to treat myself.

Cruised into New Paltz and had eggs Benedict at my favorite Main Street café. (Breakfast is actually my favorite meal to eat out.)

Bought books. This actually turned out to be a bust: There was an author, David Liss, whom Ben & I had both liked. He wrote serious historical novels (meaning neither Regency romances nor Forever Amber). So, I plucked his latest off the Used Books shelf, something called The Twelfth Enchantment, which turned out to be a rather clunkily written adult fantasy novel. Terrible! I guess this is something that happens to people who make their living writing; at a certain point, you run out of ideas and interest in beautifully crafted sentences and just write for word count since you have a contract to fulfill.

Spent a couple of hours weeding but did not have the stamina to climb Mt. Dirt and cart away buckets of soil. Plus I ran into Phil, and he told me, the soil was great—but you have to sift it. How the hell do you sift soil?

I guess I'll find out when I'm back from Ithaca next week.

On a sunny morning when I've slept decently, there's no such thing as existential angst. Sure, the world is going to hell. Hasn't the world always been going to hell? It's only the versions of hell that differ.

Anyway, today is a day when the sky is blue, and the Fitbit—a minor household god—tells me I logged seven hours of "fair" rest. (I have no idea how Fitbit differentiates between "poor," "fair," and "good.")

Yesterday, however, was not: I felt fuckin' awful, like a vegetarian zombie or something: Yes, I should eat someone, but I don't feel like it!

I made the money I needed to make and then took off on errands. Got lost in the strip mall sprawl that is commercial Middletown. (Farmland just 20 years ago.) Found myself in front of a gigantic Goodwill, which I took to be a sign from God. (And behold! Esau thrifted.)

Then real-life Mimi texted me. I had helped her with her tax return, and she wanted to know where her EIC-enhanced refund was. Like how the fuck would I know, girl?

The IRS maintains a website called, conveniently enough, Where's My Refund? I directed her there, adding, If you’re listed as owing money to the IRS, though, they’ll apply any refund toward that. Do you owe? Because I'd told her she should let me do her 2024 taxes at the same time I did her 2025 taxes since, of course, she hadn't filed those. But she wouldn't let me.

Turns out she owed money, and the IRS was withholding her refund until one of its few remaining human employees could find time to do the arithmetic.

Okay so I just shouldn't count on anything then. I give up! she texted.

Thing with real-life Mimi is that one can never be quite sure whether she's just being rhetorically melodramatic or her extreme emotional volatility is steering her in the direction of self-harm (which would be a cause for alarm).

I know she was counting on that tax money to fund her move from Brian's cabin where she has been staying rent-free for the last nine months. Real-life Flavia (who owns the deed to the place) has been the soul of generosity here, but behind the scenes, Flavia's BFF Betsy & I had been agonizing over New York State's squatter laws because it's never easy to predict what real-life Mimi is going to do, just when she's going to turn hostile.

Standing in front of the Middletown Goodwill (where I fully expected to harvest an entire summer wardrobe for the low, low price of under $100), I had the crazy notion that I would just give Mimi $1,000 to finance the move. After all, this is what Brian's ghost would want me to do, right?

It's the same feeling that prompted Flavia to let Mimi stay in the cabin: Brian loved her, Brian would have wanted her to be cared for.

But if Brian loved her and wanted her to be taken care of so much, he should have left her some money in his will, right?

I must channel my inner Mick Jagger!

It's just. I make so little money right now. I'm trying my best to make this work, she texted, and if someone else had said this to me, my heart would have gone out to them—poor gallant, valiant soul! Yes, times are incredibly tough, and there but for the grace of God etc, etc, etc. Who knew then there would ever come a time when we would all be old and limited?

But the thing is I don't actually like real-life Mimi.

You could start a GoFundMe, I texted.

What the hell! I'd kick in twenty bucks!

Or I could sell some of my ceramics, she texted back.

No-oo-ooo, don't do that! I thought. Because I'd feel compelled to buy some, and I hate your bloody ceramics.

###

In garden news, I weeded out 40 pounds or so of nettles day before yesterday. It was a cloudy, cold day, which, while excellent for avoiding sunstroke, is not the kind of day I enjoy gardening. However, work that must be done is work that must be done.

Shortly, I will wander back over to finish the job. Since it's sunny today (though decidedly cool), I should enjoy the work more.

###

In Work in Progress news, I thought of a comic scene that would work well inserted into the opening section of Chapter 7: Flavia, who scrupulously avoids introductions to Neal's other poly partners, somehow gets dragooned into going out to dinner with one (plus Neal). Polly Partner starts revealing awful sexual secrets: How Neal had to teach her how to have vaginal orgasms again after her episiotomy; how after a lusty bout of anal sex, she had several days of plopping small poops—did that happen to Flavia, too?

Only yesterday, I was in the throes of sleep-&-sunshine-deprived existential despair and could not write anything—which doubtless meant that I would never be able to write anything ever again, especially not comedy, which requires a light touch.

I'll give it another whirl today.