Traveling Companions

In the middle of the night, I woke from a really vivid, elaborate dream:

Ben had fallen in love with a girl from a hippie evangelist Christian sect.

In the dream's meta-tags, there'd been a lot of history: He'd left to be with her. He'd come back. He couldn't live without her & left again. He came back. He had to go back to the sect to get his stuff, and he'd only be gone for four days, and he was definitely coming back—but when he came back, he was very sorry, but his love for this woman was bigger than everything—

I wasn't hurt. I was furious. Get out now, I snarled, and pushed him out the door.

He was shocked, But-but—

I wasn't sad over Ben at all. The only thing that was on my mind was how was I going to handle my life on my own? Two kids and all these animals!

###

The girl Ben had fallen in love with was married to the leader of the hippie evangelist Christian sect, and I was hip to the fact that the leader was essentially pimping her out, and that's how the leader got recruits for his sect.

Not expecting to be kicked out, Ben had invited the girl, her husband, and their four impossibly platinum-haired kids to live with us.

I found them in one of the bedrooms.

OUT, I thundered.

The girl slit her eyes and looked at me haughtily. Of course, I was curious about her—she was short, slim, had chestnut hair and oddly tilted eyes. Nothing to look at. I was much better looking. She must be some kind of sexual goddess, I thought because that was one thing Ben was very, very good at, sex, and I often felt a little inadequate because my sexual needs and performance are on the simple side: Does not take much for passion to ignite in me.

I shoved the girl and her husband/leader out the door.

Felt a bit sorry for the children who were sweet and innocent, but no, they'd have to go, too.

###

(Again in the dream meta-tags.) Stephen Silverman had found me the apartment.

I'd gone to him in great distress, and he'd told me, This is a very special building. Chateau D'Amboise (?) Rent controlled: $1,500 a month. It's a very special building; only special people are allowed to live here.

The apartment was very messy, crowded with unpacked boxes and cages in which lived a number of cats—a large ginger female and a tiny translucent Bengal, no bigger than my fingernail, among others.

There were also several black and white puppies running around yipping.

You've got to get RTT to walk the puppies, otherwise they'll shit all over the place. And you've got to get the cats water—

Only in transferring the tiny snail-like Bengal to a cage with water, I somehow killed it. Felt an impulse to mourn and reminded myself sternly: You don't have time for that now.

Went out with the puppies. Somehow ended up at one of the outdoor cafeterias at U.C. Berkeley where I filled my pockets up with candy. Knew I had to get back to the Chateau, but didn't know which bus to take. Guessed I'd have to find a taxi, but could not find one.

###

Finally, I was back at the Chateau, only I couldn't remember which floor I lived on. Took the elevator to various floors. The floors all had various themes—I remember the tenth floor was Paris: You got out of the elevator, and you were in France.

Somehow I was in another family's apartment, & I recognized the family—You're Tamsin's mother, aren't you? But they did not recognize me. I did notice, however, that even though the family had lived in the apartment for years and years and years, it was almost completely empty. The interior decor of my apartment, as cluttered as it was, was actually more attractive.

Finally went back downstairs to the lobby and asked the concierge: Where do I live?

The concierge was a burly gentleman in elaborate livery with an elaborately curled mustache. He consulted an illuminated medieval scroll and told me, You live on the 15th floor—

And I awoke.

###

The heat dome had not yet descended yesterday, and so I spent four very pleasant hours playing in the dirt at the New Paltz community garden.

The New Paltz community garden is vast:



This morning I woke up with a mysterious stomach ache & kind of freaked because how am I gonna keep Black Chicken comfortable when the Heat Dome descends plus my car's AC isn't working—it's an expensive fix and requires sitting for an entire day at the dealership in Kingston—& suppose the Nazis invade, and I have to flee?

But I suppose it will all work out.

It almost always does.

Met up with BB, back from Germany.

We caught up on gossip—more on his side than my side. I live an exceedingly quiet life.

And then we talked about death, which is something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently.

"Wait! You think about death?" I asked.

"Oh, only like every day for one or two hours," BB replied. "And have been since I was a kid."

##

Did I think about death when I was a kid? Only once that I can remember: I was three, maybe four years old, and sitting in the back of my grandfather's old Chrysler. (Even today, the smell of stale cigarette smoke is comforting to me because it reminds me of my grandfather!) We were parked at Coney Island. My mother, my two aunts, and my little cousin David were also crammed into the Chrysler, and my grandfather was expounding in his melifluous voice about how one day soon, the sea would rise up and swallow the land—

Four-year-old children have no sense of time, so I figured that my grandfather was saying that the sea would rise up in 10 minutes or so. And I would cease to be...

I didn't have any particularly negative associations with my own extinction. It was just something that was going to happen.

But I was practical. Clearly one should avoid extinction if one could. Why don't we just drive away? I chirped at my grandfather.

"Wait!" said BB. "You believe in reincarnation! So, didn't you think you would be reincarnated?"

"Well, I had very strong memories of having once been somebody else at that point in my life," I said. "But I don't think I was old enough to attach any system of causality. So, no. I didn't think about reincarnation. I only thought about the enormous wave that would wipe everything out—and me with it. It wasn't an unpleasant thought! But I figured if there were other options, we should take them."



We met at the oh-so-charming Gardiner Bakehouse: great coffee, interesting pastries, and an outstanding view of the Gunks, which unfortunately, no camera can separate out from the telephone wires:



The Gardiner Bakehouse is hosting some kind of storytelling event:



"You should enter," BB said.

"I should!" I said.

So, maybe I will.

###

Other than that, it was lots o' Remuneration. (I have a deadline coming up, which I have ignored successfully but which I should probably double up on.) And a trip to the gym through looming thunder clouds, which fortunately did not break till I was back from the gym. A good thing! The storms brought temperatures down by maybe 10 degrees, so that it's relatively cool this morning.

And now I must take advantage of the relatively cool temperatures to scamper off to New Paltz and do some gardening, even though I'd much rather sit here with my eyes slightly unfocused.

I was actually really proud of how corny my promo AI video for the upcoming pet parade event I'm producing came out!!!



So, I texted a link to Ichabod.

He texted back: I like it! But I wouldn’t describe it as corny. It’s very creepy…the faces at the beginning, the disembodied dragon head floating next to the body…. And maybe most of all the juxtaposition of the weirdness with the wholesomeness

Uh oh, I asked. Is it TOO creepy to use as a promo?

It might be, he said. I appreciate the video as experimental art though 😀

Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

###

In other news, I installed the airconditioner in the Patrizia-torium window.

Yes, I do disapprove of the environmental impact of AC.

But this coming weekend, it's supposed to hit 95° F here in the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley. And a fan ain't gonna cut it for comfort in 95° heat.

As my favorite '80s band The Police reminds us:

When the world is running down
You make the best of what's still around

Dreamed I had been drafted and was about to be flown off to a war in a foreign land, only I couldn't find my purse & was panicking because how could I fly if I didn't have any ID?

Somehow I knew, though, that this was only a dream and kept telling myself, Don't worry, your purse is where you always stash it—near your desk!

(Editorial note: I have a tendency to misplace things and waste hours looking for them, so over the years have trained myself to put logistical stuff—keys, bills, purse—in specific spots to track them. It's what passes for organization in my world.)

But knowing where my purse was in the woke world did not solve my quandary in the dream world. Where was my purse? And if I could not find it, what would they do to me?

Frantically, I began calling people I'd seen the night before to see if they knew.

Then, as the first soldiers in my squadron were lining up to board the plane, Mrs. Neighbor Ed showed up with my purse!

She put it down.

I tried to pick it up—but a filigree gold chain spilling out of the purse had somehow gotten caught in whatever she'd put the purse down on, so I couldn't move it. And I was getting frantic—Should I break the gold chain? But the gold chain is so beautiful!—when I woke up.

###

Decided yesterday to pretend that exercise is really, really baaaaad for you and that lolling around on the lounging couch watching every Ripley movie ever made & eating cookies is what scientists recommend for disease prevention and wellness promotion.

The Criterion Channel—Ichabod kindly gifted me a subscription—is doing a marathon.

My favorite Ripley is actually the recent Netflix The Talented Mr. Ripley. It's the truest to the novel. Most viewers hated it because it was shot in black and white—lush, colorful Italy? In black and white?—but I actually thought that was a brilliant choice in a film about deception because it emphasized the shots' composition, allowing you to see the bones of the piece. And Andrew Scott is very, very good in it, although the rest of the cast is uniformly awful.

The popular favorite is Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon—fresh from Good Will Hunting!—in the title role. The gay undercurrents in this one are pushed from subtext to declamative, but I personally think that's too easy an out: Ripley does what he does and is who he is not because he is tortured by his own sexuality but because he's a complete sociopath.

And then, of course, there's Plein soleil whose Ripley is Alain Delon, the most beautiful human male ever born. Adonis only wishes he looked like Alain Delon in his youth! This one holds a special place in my heart because I first saw it when I was eight years old—my mother was too poor to be able to afford babysitters, so she always brought me with her when she went to see the foreign movies she so loved. This is the only Ripley in which Ripley is brought to justice—I suppose because it was made in 1960 and back in 1960, people hadn't yet started rooting for the sociopaths.

###

This YouTube video provides an excellent compare-and-contrast of Minghella's Ripley and Plein soleil:

So, maybe 400 people turned out for the Gardiner demonstration?

More impressive than it sounds! The entire population of the village is only aound 4,000.

I went alone, but I did not stay alone. A sizeable contingent of Shwanagunk Dems showed up & as it turned out, I knew all the parade monitors from canvassing or campaigning:



Plus bonus celebrity sighting! Fourteen second mark on yr screen! Still got my People Magazine chops!



This is quite possibly the worst photo of me EVER TAKEN.

When you are fighting fascism, I remind myself, you must be fearless and eschew vanity.



On my way back to the casa, I stopped at the transfer station to drop off two weeks' worth of garbage & recyclables. (Icky, you may recall, does not believe in paying for garbage disposal). I passed Ellen walking her daughter's dog, so I stopped to chat.

Now, I haven't seen Ellen in two months or so.

And that was kind of strange because I'd been seeing Ellen regularly for months before that. In fact, Ellen is one of only two real friends I have in this area.

Was she mad at me? Had I done something to offend her? Something absolutely unforgivable? Though I couldn't remember doing something absolutely unforgivable, and generally, I'm quite good at identifying examples of my own obnoxious behavior (even when I don't agree they're obnoxious.)

I'd called her a couple of times: No traction. I'd left her a goofy little gift in her mailbox: campfire sparkles! (She likes doing bonfires.) A pro forma thank you text.

Well, I thought, it's too bad, but apparently Ellen doesn't like you anymore, and what was the one useful thing that Jack Kerouak ever said? Number 19 on his list of "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose"?

Accept loss forever

(Works great for missing earrings, too!)

###

One look at Ellen's face, and I could see: It wasn't me, it was her. She looked like one of the walking dead. Deeply, terminally depressed. Heavy bags under her eyes.

Ellen is one of those people who likes to pretend she doesn't have emotions, doesn't have an inner life. When I tried to hug her that time after she dug my car out of the ice, she waved me off, embarrassed.

Now, as it happens, the one & only time I have ever been inside Ellen's house was around the time she stopped talking to me. We'd been selling Duck Derby tickets together at the post office. (Small town boosterism! Never Enuff Weird!) I was about to go off & investigate the Sherpa Festival that had magically appeared in an abandoned meadow, except that it was a hot day, I'd been drinking lots & lots of water, & I really had to pee!

"Well, you can pee at my house," Ellen said. Ellen's house was about a mile away from the magical Sherpa festival.

When I went inside Ellen's house, I was shocked to see it was kind of a hoarder house. Rooms & rooms crammed with furniture that nobody used & this general sense of profound neglect. I imagined it had been that way since Ellen's husband died five years ago.

I didn't say anything. I hid my shock.

But when Ellen stopped talking to me, I did wonder whether it was connected to the fact that I'd been inside her house. Whether she was ashamed I'd seen too much.

Anyway, it was good to reconnect. Even in such a small way.

I was on my best banter! I made her laugh!

And after 10 minutes, I said, "Well, darlin', you have my number. Call if you feel like it. I always have your back."

'Cause really. What else could I say?

###

In the evening, I went to a D&D meetup.

My regular D&D group hasn't met in several weeks—ostensibly because the DM is getting married in a couple of months & his weekends are now occupied with wedding-related events, but really—according to the DM of last night's game—because he is a Trump supporter & disliked all the fringe types in the original group.

I didn't pick that up from the original DM at all, and I mean, really: If he is a Trump supporter, so what? It didn't affect the game—which was a kind of Viking wayfarer adventure.

And I didn't like last night's game. I went because I'm still learning how to tell the various dice apart, & when to throw them, & why—if I have 18 charisma points—I'm supposed to keep subtracting four.

Last night's DM was very big on underground crypts strewn with vomit, crusty scabs, & mummifying guts. Imagery that does not appeal to moi!

The other players were gay males. They were all very nice to me, tolerant of my blunders. One of them—pink Galadriel hair and fabulously manicured hands, each nail painted a different color—was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America party, so in between dice rolls, we talked politics, utterly boring the other players. Apparently, No Kings Day conflicted with many prescheduled local Pride Day events, and that's why so many No Kings events had been shunted to out-of-the-way locations. The primo locales had been booked in advance! There was some bad blood twixt the No King-ers and the Pridies!

Last night's DM is a very bitter guy. And dark—without knowing he is dark, somehow. Growing up gay in a Hudson Valley backwater 40 years ago was a very different experience than growing up gay, say, in Berkeley, California. More akin to growing up gay next door to Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wisconsin. The Taliban itself would approve of Wallkill's heteronormative standards!!!

Still, I found myself not liking the guy, which meant it was difficult to sympathize with him.

Damn.

Well, yesterday started out well enough.

I pulled out the last six wheelbarrels of thistles, brambles, bee balm, & other assorted weeds from my New Paltz community garden plot.

Before:



After:



I deserved a treat!

So, I trotted over to Hudson Valley Chocolates, and found Stephanie hard at work:



Stephanie is the French-born choclatier who supplies bonbons for the Mohonk Mountain House and various other upscale venues around the Hudson Valley. She has a small shop here in town that keeps whimsical hours: It's open when she feels like being open.

Wallkill is a place where the men walk around in teeshirts that say, Unvacinated, Unmasked, Republican, Straight. In the spring, summer, & fall, Wallkill is an intensely beautiful place, but it is filled with the most horrible people, so there's no reason to go anywhere near it.

But if there was a reason to go near Wallkill, that reason would be to visit Stephanie's shop, Hudson Valley Chocolates:



Got home. Nibbled chocolate. Began Remunerating. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Remunerating is dry stuff. I have to keep wiping my brain clean of excess jargon in between those weighty bouts of regression analysis. To do that, I surf the web—journal entries (and y'all do not write enough!), blogs, celebrity scandals, and when I'm really hard up, news.

Yesterday, the news was unrelentingly horrible.

From Ice Barbie's press conference at which a United States Senator—a Senator!—was handcuffed and brutalized to Israel's massive bombing of Iran.

This is all so fuckin' NUTS.

###

I can't remember the name of the podcast I sometimes listen to that once did a show about superpowers. Specifically: What superpower do people most wish they had?

I do remember that time travel was the most popular superpower—though not by a huge margin.

And if you drilled down into the sample of people who wanted to be able to time travel, they all wanted to be able to time travel for the same reason—so they could kill Hitler!

Well, now we all have the chance to kill Hitler.

That must be the silver lining in the current cloud, right?

The most interesting geopolitical analysis comes from Peter Turchin who sees political instability as a 50-year cycle, driven by stagnating wages, a growing wealth gap, a surplus of educated elites (without corresponding elite jobs), and accelerating fiscal deficit.

His extraordinarily prescient Nature piece was actually published 15 years ago at the height of the Obama Hope & Change hype.

###

I keep reminding myself that it's nuts to fixate on the stuff that's happening in LA because there's absolutely nothing I can do about the stuff that's happening in LA.

I've never seen the slightest utility in signing petitions or petitioning elected officials. And at this point, I'm wondering about continuing to participate in those rah-rah, feel-good demonstrations too. (Although I probably will. There's a big demonstration in Kingston this weekend.)

I want to turn myself into a cypher so I can slip into the deep underground as effortlessly as possible.

Though there's always the issue of how do you identify the deep underground? Do they advertise on NYC subway ads? As an ad flash at the end of Words With Friends games? On billboards along remote highways? Do they post notices on the backs of cereal boxes? Is there some secret tic or flash hand signal I can do while I'm walking around the Galleria that will validate me as prime recruitment material? It's so very Thomas Pynchon!!

And what exactly would this deep underground do?

Smuggle Hispanic workers from Home Depot parking lots in the States to Home Depot parking lots in Canada like an underground railroad?

###

Okay, I'm being facetious & obnoxious.

I think the political situation in much of Central America is appalling, and I completely sympathize with immigrants who are seeking asylum. I also sympathize with many of the folk who are up here for economic reasons: There are plenty of jobs that most Americans don't want to do; if immigrants want to do them, that's a good thing, right?

I also suspect in fewer than 15 years, American citizens will be desperately applying for asylum in various places around the world. Hello! My great-great-great-great grandfather migrated XXX years ago! Take me back!!!! PULEEEEEZE!!!!!

###

Anyway...

It's raining. It's been raining. The New Paltz garden is partially flooded, so no weeding for me today.

I couldn't figure out whether or not I was sick yesterday. My nose was running & I felt utterly exhausted, but it seemed to me that that could have been completely psychosomatic. Malingering, in other words!

So, I toddled off to the gym.

And I'd like to write, And going to the gym made me feel a whole lot better! Except going to the gym did not, in fact, make me feel a whole lot better. Though it did not make me feel a whole lot worse.

While I worked out, I thought about manifesting.

Like if I had this prompt thing down, I could materialize a wish that would net me $15 million—my neeeeeeeds are modest!—without imperiling the welfare of anyone I care about, or causing the destruction of some fabulous place I love, or adding to the misery of some beaten-down population segment.

I'll keep working on it.