Nobody asked me but...

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:

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...

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.

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.

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: