Treatment

Dec. 18th, 2025 11:47 am
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Scene 1 (Very vivid in my brain):

An outdoor tent at the fictional Wiltwyck Hospital under which people gather when they think they have COVID. The tent is pitched right outside the very oldest part of the hospital complex, the original building constructed in 1874, and it fronts a grove of very old trees (sugar maples? red oaks? white ash?) where birds sing and squirrels scamper, so the whole scene is very surreal, like a demented Hamptons garden party.

Since the pandemic went official, Grazia has barely been inside the hospital. Her job is to assess patients who score positive on the antigen test. Most of them are dispatched home. A few are culled from the herd and sent inside. It's kind of like a conveyor belt job in a donut factory. Simple. Mindless.

The 2020 summer in upstate New York was the hottest summer since they started keeping records. (That record has since been broken.) Inside her scrubs, beneath her full-isolation drag, Grazia is sweating like a pig and her breath rises up from her surgical mask & fogs the non-prescription glasses she's taken to buying at the Dollar Store because the hospital is too cheap to spring for protective eye gear.

She wants an N95 mask. The hospital won't spring for those, either. She even goes to a strip mall Home Depot for painter N95s though she knows they don't reliably protect against fluids.

She buys the last one anyway, wears it to work one day.

When she takes it off that night, her face is bruised.

###

Scene 2 (a jump):

The ER Director tells Grazia she is being floated inside the hospital because they're short-staffed. She objects to no avail.

Status detail about how the interior of the hospital where the ER once was is practically unrecognizeable—temporary space dividers cordoning off the space in weird ways.

###

Scene 3 (murky!):

The ICU. Six COVID patients. They look like extras in some weird science fiction movie about what happens after the aliens invade and start doing weird experiments on humans. Grazia is not taking care of the humans, she is taking care of their medical equipment. After all, the humans die. But the medical equipment can be reused!

Lots of grim medical status detail.

Grazia befriends a nurse named Julie. They do black humor banter.

###

Scene 4 (not thought out at all):

Julie gets COVID & ends up in the ICU, where she dies.

Grazia has a mental breakdown & ends up joining a religious cult.

Scene 5 (not thought out at all):

Neal rescues Grazia from the religious cult and nurses her back to mental stability.

Last bit has to be a conversation on Neal's front porch in the Catskills—so the prose can segue back to the opening scene of the novel when the five women are congregating there.

###

The religious interest is already pretty well foreshadowed, but I'll have to do some serious foreshadowing around the cult itself, plus decide: Is it a Christian cult or some weird Eastern Yoga cult?

When I first began tromping the local rail trail, I was flabbergasted to discover a Muktanada temple abutted it. Muktananda, an Indian yogic transplant, had a huge temple complex in Oakland; I once actually had a boyfriend who was a devotee. Muktananda's spiritual superpower apparently was the spontaneous awakening of kundalini in others. He particularly liked to awaken kundalini in underage female acolytes.

So, you know. A weird yoga cult appeals!

Except weird yoga cults are rarely evangelical, and I think Grazia must first become conscious of the cult because they set up some kind of recruitment station on the outskirts of the hospital's COVID tent.

But, hey! It's my party, and I can write what I want to. (Cue Leslie Gore.)

###

In other news...

Submitted a client invoice, which means I'm going to spend the next five days having massive anxiety attacks. (What if they never pay me???)

Also, the nearest train station to Betsy's house, where I will be spending the weekend, turns out to be on the Harlem Metro North line. Which means I'm gonna have to drive there.

At least the weather is temporarily warmer: Rumor has it temps will hit 50° today!

And RTT moderated a meeting between Ithaca's mayor & the downtown merchants last night. He looked spiffy:

Yucking My Yum

Dec. 16th, 2025 10:23 am
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My newest game involves pretending I am a researcher at the North Pole, in Antarctica, on the frozen surface of Mars. I am here to do field observations! (Today, Hideous White Stuff fell from the sky.) I am quite alone. I keep in close contact with a battalion of fellow scientists through phone & text, but I will continue to be isolated from all human contact until the thaw...

After all, this is the coldest December in many years. Or so we're being told.

###

RTT shared my sadness over Rob Reiner's death. "The Princess Bride was my favorite movie growing up!" he told me. Which I kinda don't think is true, but I appreciated the solidarity.

Ichabod, the implacable social justice warrior, was sniffier. I don’t want to yuck your yum, he texted, and it is sad…and I get that celebrities and rich people mean more to us as a culture than pretty much anybody else besides friends and family…but there’s just so much including death that feels sadder and more tragic to me right now.

(Yuck my yum??? I'm in ❤️LUV❤️)

I tried explaining it to him.

No, I'm not stanning. At least, I don't think I'm stanning.

I don't feel like I knew Rob Reiner. Though I do kinda feel like I stood next to him on an elevator once, and we exchanged pleasantries.

It's more like Reiner repped what I might call the consumate Boomer ethos. And I am a Boomer. His work spoke to me. It was a far less personal conversation than the one I might have with, say, Fellini (La Strada), or Joseph Losey (The Go Between), or Truffaut (Les quatre cents coups). Reiner didn't know anything about my soul. But he knew a lot about my circumstances.

Reiner was no auteur!

The only film of his that broke any kind of precedent was This Is Spinal Tap, which more-or-less invented the mockumentary genre.

He had no signature visual style. Cinematically, you could call him a Steven Spielberg wannabe.

His films were often humorous, but then, he directed scripts by funny screenwriters, William Goldman, Nora Ephron. (Though, reportedly, I'll have what she's having—the funniest line in When Harry Met Sally—was a Reiner ad lib.)

But his films—more craft than art, as I say—were kind of like a series of dioramas in some great museum of Boomer Life.

###

Take When Harry Met Sally..., which I watched last night.

I don't know whether Ichabod has ever seen When Harry Met Sally... but I'm certain he would dislike it. Its basic thesis—Discuss: Men & women cannot be friends!—would not strike him as mischievous or playful at all, but as abhorrent. He would sit patiently through the closing credits and then announce, Gender is an artificial concept. Which, of course, is true.

Attitudes change.

We are biased in favor of the attitudes that informed our youths (roughly defined as that time in our life when we first realized we could manifest our own opinions. For most people, that's the early 20s.)

But if personal growth is a goal, one realizes that the social/cultural matrix has evolved into a different thing than it was during our youth. And we change our attitudes.

Those early attitudes continue to survive, though—even thrive—in the music and movies we love.

Running Out of Dopamine

Dec. 15th, 2025 11:39 am
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Rob Reiner & wife stabbed to death in their Brentwood mansion...

This one made me very sad.

###

Rob Reiner was a mensch. The perfect representative for my particular cultural cohort. His movies had exactly the right blend of sentimentality & snark, his politics exactly the right blend of liberal bonhomie & a kind of Eisenhower presidency wholesomeness.

And he was Jewish. Which means he communicated in an unspoken language I know very intimately. Sigh...

Likely killer is one of their sons, which makes it all the sadder.

I've always had this theory about people who live what appear to be charmed lives, that their lives are kind of a trade-off, that their privelege comes with a karmic price tag. Of course, outcomes that seem obvious today were rarely obvious in the moment. Still. It always seems as though these lives contain at least one episode of catastrophic suffering so the Universe will maintain its implacable balance. As though the absolute value of all the positive things—the money, the fame—is refuted by the absolute value of the one horrifying thing—the pain, betrayal—so you die with a karma balance of zero.

I am picturing that office in Bardo where you sit in front of a blonde wood desk helmed by a reincarnation broker. So, says the broker. There's something opening up in the Orion-Cygnus sector. You'll make movies! You'll have all the freedom a $200 million fortune can buy! But in the last 12 hours of your life, a haploid DNA replicant will slit your throat—very painful—and loom over you, mocking, while you exsanguinate & strangle. Sound good? Should I sign you up?

###

And, too, there was the Bondi Beach massacre. That took place at a Chanukah festival.

Chanukah has been given a lot of attention in recent years. Traditionally, it was a minor holiday, but it's been elevated in prominence so that Jews will have parity with Xtains when it comes to repurposed solstice celebrations. It's a holiday that ostensibly celebrates miracles. What was the miracle here? That a Holocaust survivor died protecting his Holocaust survivor wife?

This one happened in Australia. Where everyone walks around upside down. Horrifying though it was, it had less of a personal impact. But still. I've started wondering again: Which friends will hide me in their attic?

###

I had lots of plans for the weekend, but in the end, I did very little. Motivation is just not there. Nothing seems to matter very much. I could just sit in a corner with my eyes unfocused for hours doing nothing. I wouldn't even get bored.

Is this depression? But I wasn't feeling particularly teary or sad till I read about Rob Reiner this morning.

I wonder if I'm still in some kind of refractory period from the Wellbutrin OD. Wellbutrin is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor; dopamine is the neurotransmitter that signals the brain when a task is worth doing. During the OD, my nervous system was awash and aslosh with excess dopamine! Maybe after something like that happens, you deplete all your dopamine and it takes those little cellular chemical factories a while to work the levels back up to normal.

Or maybe the world sucks, and I'm a Buddhist at last because finally, finally, I get that it's not worth doing anything except detaching.

Who knows?

###

This just in. Trump's response to the Rob Reiner murder:



I can't even...

Climate Change & Its Discontents

Dec. 13th, 2025 09:55 am
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Of course, just as I discovered the glories of the treadmill, the gym shut down for a week. I suspect to make it pretty for the hoard of healthy lifestyle wannabes who will be thronging the membership rolls come January 1.

So, I went for a tromp along a nearby road, which at least has the virtue of being plowed and salted.

The road leads to a 10-mile parcel that was once dairy farms and is now mostly houses. The ones closest to Albany Post Road, the main drag, are McMansions and not particularly attractive, thrown up without any effort to integrate them into the landscape. Architectural mushrooms! Constructed from the flimsiest materials.

Did not want to listen to music while I was walking on a road, so I entertained myself wondering what those houses will be like in 50 years, 100 years.

###

Population numbers around here are rising because even though a round trip to New York City by automobile takes four hours, that's still considered a do-able commute. Plus people with pensions (cops, firefighters) retire here. And younger people here still procreate.

But still.

Overall, populations are decreasing, so I kinda have to think these McMansions are oversupply. And thus, will fall into massive disrepair after relatively few decades.

Unless climate change makes life in the Big Apple so unbearable that real estate inflation shifts to Ulster County. Hey! It could happen. 25 to 30 percent of Manhattan is landfill. New York City's sea level rose by one foot over the last century and is projected to rise another foot by 2039. Battery Park and large swathes of the Upper East Side could easily revert to marshland by 2100. At a certain point, it is no longer economically advisable to sink vast sums of money into levees & seawalls.

New Orleans is kinda the test run for the abandonment of American cities due to climate change.

I am guessing that in 25 years, New Orleans will be no more.

It's gonna happen to Venice a lot sooner than that.

So book those tickets to Mardi Gras and Carnivale now.

Friendship

Dec. 12th, 2025 10:19 am
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I've always avoided treadmills, but as my customary outdoor tromping routes are frozen under a thin but lethal scrim of ice, I decided to hop on one yesterday at the gym.

I must say, I rather liked it!

You bliss off into whatever audiobook or podcast you're following—I'm currrently listening to Walter Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, a very strange novel—and then just pound away.

It's consistent. It's efficient. When I hopped off, I could feel my muscles had been exercised in a way they don't feel on the spinning bike—which is more a cardiovascular thing anyway.

I think I will add it to my three-times-a-week gym workouts.

###

From the gym in Middletown, I drove all the way to New Paltz to have lunch with Belinda. Long drives are de rigueur when you live in the boonies unless you want to hang out at a liquor store. (Wallkill does not have a single grocery store. In fact, the whole of Shawangunk Township does not have a single grocery store. I live in a food desert! But there are a lot of liquor stores.)

Belinda has started attending Jehovah's Witness bible classes.

She was very shy & soft, confiding this to me.

But, in fact, I approve—though I did tell her, "You know, I've always found Jay-Dubs to be very nice people. In fact, my favorite tax client year before last was a Jay-Dub reverend, a very intelligent, very eloquent man. But, you know, it is a cult, so if you start to convert, I will stage an intervention."

She laughed. Assured me: No chance of that.

But I wonder.

Still. After deep immersion in the Owning Manhattan ethos for two nights in a row, I'm all in favor of anything that makes people ponder the spiritual aspects of their sojourn in this time/space continuum. If you can't be kind to others because generosity is not one of your innate personality traits, then kindness is something that needs to be enforced through congregational edict. Kindness to other people is that important.

"You know, your friendship is very important to me," Belinda told me as we were saying goodbye. "I value it highly. I love you."

Which was nice to hear since I've been feeling so singularly repulsive lately.

And it made me ponder the nature of friendship.

###

In the end, friends are not necessarily the people you care about the most. They're the people who, for one reason or another, stick.

In Monterey, my best friend was Jeannie DeTomaso.

We became best friends because our children, RTT & Sydney, were besties. Jeannie was beautiful and luminous. "Saint Jeannie," Susan used to call her.

At the same time, I had an incredibly annoying neighbor named Heidi. Who was petty & vain and had a morbid fascination with true crime. Heidi and I were thrown together when I found out that she thought my cat Fritz was her cat Henry because he showed up at her house regularly at meal times.

Jeannie had a complicated family history. Her parents belonged to a weird, splinter Holy Roller cult. In fact, her earliest memories were of waking up in the middle of the night to hear her parents babbling loudly & incomprehensibly: They were speaking in tongues.

Jeannie's father was long dead by the time I knew her. Her mother, Elizabeth, was surviving on about $400 of social security a month but owned a house that was assessed at something like $2 million, Pacific Grove at that time being the capital of the Cash Poor But Land Rich.

Elizabeth developed Alzheimer's, and all of Jeannie's pals banded together to provide her with respite care. I watched Elizabeth one afternoon a week. I remember being quite fascinated by the way Elizabeth would sit and read the same back-to-back pages of a novel—ironically The Time Traveler's Wife—over and over and over again. Her entire memory—85 years!— compressed into the time it took her to read 500 words. It was like a Monkey's Paw version of the Ram Dass addage: Be Here Now.

Then Elizabeth died.

And Jeannie stopped talking to me.

I wasn't special, Jeannie's husband Tony assured me: Jeannie had stopped talking to everyone. "She's psychotic," he told me. (A year or so later, they divorced.)

Heidi had not stopped talking to me. Heidi was still feeding my cat. And meeting me on the back porch for coffee every other day. When in an overabundance of enthusiasm, I confided her one day that as a very young child, I'd had memories of a former life and that's why I believe in reincarnation, Heidi just looked at me appraisingly. "But that degree of splintering and dissociation is very common in abused children. You were an abused child, weren't you?"

Fast forward 20 years & Heidi and I are friends. I spent a lot of time with her when I was in Monterey a year ago.

Jeannie & I are not friends. A circumstance I still regret and blame myself for: What did I do? Though I know perfectly well I didn't do anything, that Jeannie had—as her husband told me—flipped out and that the only way she could find a center again (any center) was to weed out the people in her life who were guardians of certain untrustworthy memories.

Anyway, Belinda has become a friend in the same way Heidi is a friend.


Life can be unpredictable.

Au Courant Cultural Imperatives

Dec. 11th, 2025 08:52 am
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Baaaaad time of year. At this point in my life, I'd rather be savoring the moments, sprinkling them with imagination, stretching them out. But instead, all I can do is hunker down, stare out a window at the pitiless winter landscape, reassure myself, This, too, shall pass.

I'll want those moments back when I'm dying, that's for sure.

###

Meanwhile, it didn't snow all day yesterday, but it might as well have because the part of the day it didn't snow was spent reading the sky, testing the wind, waiting for it to snow.

I did a bit of Useful Work and a useless tax class on Zoom—hey! they're paying me. Played around some with the Work in Progress and unwittingly solved a transition problem before it could turn into awkward prose. Did not exercise, which is possibly why I could not break the gloomy mood.

###

Finished I Have Some Questions for You. Boarding school books must be an actual literary genre! This one is not near the top of the list. The protagonist is a celebrity because she helms a successful podcast. And I'm thinking, Really??? I mean, there are celebrity podcasters, but mostly they were celebrities before they became podcasters; they are leveraging their celebrity to carry the podcast, right?

The protagonist has this gurgley, chick-lit voice, which is wrong, wrong, wrong for a murder mystery. The basic conceit of the book (actually kinda interesting) is that the real murderer, the figure emerging from the shadows, is the teacher who had an affair with the murder victim, the same sympathetic teacher who devoted energy to bringing the protagonist out of her adolescent shell. Except this proves to be a misfire! So, what we're left with at the end of the book is that the titular You behaved... inappropriately. And those kinds of transgressions are less moral absolutes than violations of au courant cultural imperatives.

###

Speaking of au courant cultural imperatives...

In the evening, I watched multiple episodes of the real estate bling show, Owning Manhattan.

And fell into despair!

How do people end up spending $250 million on an apartment?

The $300 heating oil bill for me this month is gonna be tough to pay!

What kind of an abysmal, absolute failure am I that I can't spend $250 million on an apartment? That I can't even spend 50¢ on an apartment?

Why does money have so many zeroes in it now?

Plus, the Upper West Side that I grew up in is practically unrecognizable now. What did they have to tear down to build the great glass tower at 200 Amsterdam? I was scouring my memory. What used to be there? And suddenly this visual sense memory just rushed in: Annie's old apartment on W. 68th and the little diner next door to it, I could see the breakfast plates now, practically smell them: the sunny-side up eggs floating in a little pool of grease, the crunchy hashbrowns, the thick white china plates...

What will happen to that $250 million apartment in 100 years? Will it still be the apex of luxury living? It can't possibly be, right? The cycle is the Ozymandias Factor, boom then bust, palaces dissolving into tenaments.

But I can't even wrap my head around what comes next.

Active Listening

Dec. 9th, 2025 10:51 am
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And it's a bracing 5° F out there this morning. The cold air seems to sharpen the resolution: Suddenly, I can see the tiniest features across long distances in the greatest detail.

###

For about a week after the Wellbutrin OD episode, my hands shook.

I have a pretty noticeable idiopathic hand tremor anyway. I inherited it from my mother. It's one of the reasons why I've never been able to do any public speaking even though I'm a compelling speaker and quite articulate in extemporaneous comments I make in front of just about any audience. But when I stand up before a crowd with prepared remarks, my hands don't just shake, they actually flutter up & down. That's what happens when I get even a little nervous.

The way the various roving bands of docs explained it—and I was an exotic zoo animal at Cayuga Medical Center, visited by teams from practically every service, because apparently very few people are stupid enough to do what I did—the Wellbutrin had had a synergistic effect on my nervous system: It potentiated every innate physical inclination.

For a couple of days after I was discharged, I wondered whether I would ever be able to drive again! I was freaked! My hands were fluttering so hard, I didn't think I would be able to hold a steering wheel straight! I spent the first few days strategizing: How are you going to get yourself and your car back to the Hudson Valley? How are you even gonna be able to live in the Hudson Valley if you can't use a car?

Eventually, though, that side effect did resolve.


###

The second Wellbutrin side effect was that the words inside my head suddenly muted.

I mostly "hear" the words I write.

Or rather, what I write is a synesthesic byproduct of a process that fuses seeing and hearing in a way that's impossible to describe. It's like living in a word cave where what I write are the stalagmites and stalactites that project from the hot springs.

I had absolutely no desire to write!

And this was alarming—because so much of my self-identity is bound up in the idea of myself as a writer. But also not alarming because I no longer gave a shit about my self-identity, it was totally clear to me that I was not exceptional in any way, and that I really deserved no more than to plod to the end of every day, go to sleep, wake up, & plod on to the next one.

Not sure whether this side effect was neurological—in the same way the shaking hands were—or whether it was brought on by shame.

But fortunately, that, too, seems to be resolving.

Though the words aren't pouring out of me yet.

Chapter 4 of the Work in Progress has that artificially compressed sense to it you get when you're trying to cram a whole lot of figurative subtext into as few words as possible. This was one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's big problems, why he sat at his desk for eight hours a day chain-smoking, quaffing scotch, rearranging pencils, and trickling out a mere 200 words a day. It's why I find The Great Gatsby—for all the beauty of its individual sentences—practically unreadable.

First draft, I remind myself.

The words are there. They only grow louder if you actively listen for them.

Molly & Mabel

Dec. 7th, 2025 11:55 am
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If I'm braindead, so be it!

I'll spend the rest of my life watching movies.

###

Last night, I watched something called The Friend, in which Naomi Watts inherits a massive Great Dane from Bill Murray after he commits suicide, and it was the saddest movie ever because even though Naomi Watts eventually comes to love the dog, at the beginning of the movie she doesn't, she's just stuck with him because nobody else will take him, so the movie made me think of the fragility and ultimate unenforceability of the compacts we form with companion animals.
This hit home for me because I don't love the two cats currently my companion animals as much as I've loved companion animals in the past.

Molly & Mabel are not cuddly cats.

They don't sit on laps. They don't like to be picked up and... packaged, enfolded with affection. They will struggle if I try to do this. They are wary & guarded with everyone but me: Gus reported he did not see them once while I was away in Ithaca over Thanksgiving, and Icky reported that while Molly kiska would sit at the head of the stairs and stare down at him, she would never come down.

Sometimes, they are even wary & guarded with me.

Mabel will still hiss at me occasionally—not because she is an aggressive cat but because she is a very frightened cat. She has a scar on her head swooping down from her ear to her left eye, and I suspect she was badly used as a kitten, poor little girl.

Clearly, they love me in their own way.

Molly always trails me downstairs whenever I cook and at night, crawls into bed alongside me and kneads on blankets there; Mabel is forever flopping down on my feet and exposing her plump belly: Pet me please!



It's so odd the way both of them adore having their bellies rubbed but can hardly bear to be touched on any other part of their anatomy! Most cats of my acquaintance have been the other way around.

They are quite the most talkative cats I have ever been around. Molly will meow to me for 15 minutes straight if I keep asking her, "What, Molly? What?"

"It's good that you have the two cats," Brian told me. "They're like your little family. You need a little family."

###

But I am disloyal. I keep thinking, It would be easier to move if I didn't have the two cats. It would be easier to travel.

And I feel bad for thinking that because I take the animal/human compact very seriously. These kiskas are so eccentric and idiosyncratic that no one would ever want them except me—and I only half want them.

They trust me.

They hardly trust anything else outside their own bodies and instincts.

But they trust me.

Betraying that trust would be like betraying the universe somehow.

But I'm tempted to sometimes.

New Wave

Dec. 6th, 2025 06:19 pm
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When Ichabod called, I had this strong impulse not to answer the phone.

Because if I stop answering the phone when Ichabod calls, then I can pretend that nothing that happened to me last week when Ichabod was around actually happened!

I can reinvent myself as someone to whom embarrassing, humiliating things do not happen simply by cutting off every single person in my life who was around when the Embarrassing, Humiliating Thing did happen.

Easy peasy!

A simple & elegant solution!

Alas, I am not quite that crazy.

###

Honestly, I could not ask for a better son. I could not ask for two better sons. I should be on my knees thanking the Universe that my kids are so supportive and patient and protective.

But instead, I am filled with gall because the things that I like about myself are not the things my kids like about me, and thus, they will never know me as I want to be known. They will never see me as an artist. They will never see my life as a hero's adventure.

They will never see me.

So it goes.

###

Before Ichabod called, I forced myself to write 500 words on the Work in Progress. I hated every fucking word I wrote—Well. Not altogether true. The indefinite articles were okay—but that's all right because first draft, first draft, first draft, and the important things are momentum and consistency.

After Ichabod called, I hied over to New Paltz and spent a happy hour or so wafting from unspeakably adorable boutiquey shop to unspeakably adorable boutiquey shop, gift harvesting. It was a sunny afternoon, and I have acclimatized sufficiently to the colder temperatures to find 37° quite balmy.

###

Last night, I watched Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague, a film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.

When I was 14, I lied my way into a job as a candy girl at the Thalia movie house, and it was here I got my basic education in foreign films. Truffaut, Godard, Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, the Brit kitchen sink auteurs, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger—I loved them all passionately.

I wouldn't say Nouvelle Vague is a particularly entertaining movie, but it did make me nostalgic. Once upon a time, people were more passionate about creating art than they were about enhancing their brand.

In the post-Warhol world, of course, there is no such thing as art—only marketing categories and money-laundering schemes. (When a Van Gogh painting sells for millions & millions of dollars, that's a form of money-laundering.)

I've seen Breathless at least a dozen times, but it's not my favorite Godard film by a long shot. My favorite is Bande à part for purely egoistical reasons: As an 18-year-old, I bore a striking resemblance to Anna Karena:

Protocols

Dec. 5th, 2025 08:29 am
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Tentative opening of Chapter 4, Work in Progress:

Wiltwyck Hospital was a small community hospital. We didn't have a lot of sophisticated resources. We didn't have________. We didn't have________. We didn't have________. We didn't have ________. There wasn't much we could do for COVID patients, but the COVID patients kept coming in anyway.

Problemo is not having been an RN during COVID, I don't have the slightest idea what resources might or might not have been available to a small community hospital.

I've been calling all my nurse friends and putting the question to them. Except they don't have the slightest idea either, since all of them had managed to get out of hospital nursing by the time COVID hit.

Yesterday, I chattered with Barbara Angell for an hour and a half.

And it was a great conversation, except that it did not yield me the info I was after.

Barbara did remind me that during COVID, all hospitals looked like lawn parties in the Hamptons since they were surrounded by these enormous white open-air tents where people were tested for COVID and had their vitals done so that once they were admitted, they could be shunted off to the COVID only wards.

And also that once they were admitted, COVID patients were forced to rest prone on beds, face down, because some CDC sartrap had ascertained that, however uncomfortable and unrestful this position might be, it provided the best aeration for damaged lungs.

So, I guess I will work with that.

###

Meanwhile, it is a balmy 7° here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley. So cold, the chickens' water has been freezing over, so mornings start with me literally hammering through the ice scrim on the poultry fountain.

When the thermometer hits double digits, I will toddle off for my annual haircut. I am lucky, I have great hair. It always looks good until it hits that length where it begins to get weedy. It hit that length about a week ago.

I have the beginnings of a cold, which I'm trying to ignore. And now that I've restarted the gummie protocol, I am a bit braindead.

But better braindead than sleepless.

Plus the great thing about "braindead" is that you don't have enough battery charge to actually care that you're braindead!
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