alexkaufmann | Reading

TITLE

Part 1: Grazia

Chapter 1

I drove up to Neal's house to say goodbye to Daria, who was red-eyeing it back to California.

GPS decided to take me on an exciting tour of the eastern Catskills. It was a lovely day, so not unpleasant.

Thing about GPS in the Catskills is that there is no cell coverage. Like nil, nada, niente. And the narrow roads have unexpected forks that GPS does not account for, and the unexpected forks always seem more attractive than the straight & narrow path—do we all see the metaphor here?—so it is very, very easy to get completely lost, especially for people like me who were born with no sense of direction.

When that happens, one must simply trust that GPS will make the necessary adjustments and that eventually, one will get where one wanted to go.

GPS, in other words, is a lot like the Judeo-Christian God.

###

( But wait! There's more! )

mallorys_camera

The novel writes itself when I'm in the shower. Or driving in my car. Places where it's not easy to take dictation.

###

One of my favorite literary anecdotes of all time comes from Michael Chabon, talking about a block he encountered while writing a major scene in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

At the time, Chabon was enrolled in an MFA program at U.C. Irvine. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was his master's thesis.

The novel is about a young man who simultaneously falls in love with a man and a woman—very gaspworthy at the time (1988).

Chabon was writing about the moment his protagonist & the male objet du désir first have sex.

He didn't want to make it porn. (And then he unzipped his pants & unveiled his massive trouser trout...)

He didn't want to make it funny. (Ditto.)

He didn't know what to write and was afraid the novel was going to end right there.

So, he decided to go for a walk. It was some time past midnight.

Now! Anyone who has ever spent time in Southern California knows that nobody ever walks in Southern California. And especially nobody ever walks after dark.

In the comic I'm imagining, Chabon's this very, very tall man with seraphic wings of long, long hair and an antiquated waistcoat, chiaroscura-ed against the monotonous, endless, vapor-lit expanse of empty Irvine Center Road (though actually, Chabon's shorter than I am and doesn't have a Victorian sartorial fixation).

Chabon walked and walked and walked. And finally after a couple of hours passed another human being—a man holding a wad of tissue to his nose because he was having a nosebleed.

Eureka!

The perfect detail to denote the loss of a particular kind of virginity.

I love this anecdote because it demonstrates so perfectly how the Universe is always willing to collaborate with you if only you can keep yourself porous enough to be open to its suggestions.

###

Meanwhile, I trotted off to a craft fair yesterday.

It was a very bad craft fair filled with uninspired stuff and very high price tags. Bad people-watching, too. I suppose nobody uses the slang term "yuppies" anymore—invented by my pal Alice Kahn! And my X-boss Lanny Jones invented "Boomers"!—but that's what these craft fair goers were.

I passed a mirror and saw reflected in it an older woman with large strained eyes and a sagging jawline—and ohmyGAWD, that woman was me!

I tried to explain my shock on the phone to Ichabod afterwards: "No, honestly, it wasn't vanity! It was, well... This is really the first time I've noticed that my chin is starting to go. I'm finally getting what Marybeth used to call 'crepe neck.' I can't pass anymore."

"Pass as what?" Ichabod asked.

He loves me but finds me vaguely irritating—as the offspring of all parents with over-sized personalities do.

Pass as somebody younger? No, that's not it. I've never dissembled about my age.

"Pass as somebody who's not a caricature of themselves," is the best way I can describe it.

###

On the Work of Progress front: I have indeed come up with some very obnoxious behavior for Mimi. In fact, it may be too over the top for a chick lit novel. I blame David Foster Wallace.

But anyway, I can see the end of Chapter 1. Though I may not be able to finish it today because Remuneration.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

denise posting in

dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

mallorys_camera

Only, I did go tromping. It was too beautiful a day to stay inside. I laced my hiking boots very tightly.

My knee isn't hurting, but it is making a weird clicking sound when it articulates, so, yeah—something's out of alignment.

###

I Remunerated—1,500 words. I had somehow gotten it into my head that magically I would be able to crank out 4,000 Remunerative words, which would buy me a couple of days to give the Work in Progress my undiluted attention. But that ain't gonna happen, and when I got back from tromping, I was thinking too hard about David Foster Wallace to continue the Neal-Palooza scene.

###

The three great Post-Modernists whose works I've never had any great interest in cracking are David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.

Well. I did read The Crying of Lot 49. And I didn't dislike it! But neither did it fill me with any great desire to read anything else by Pynchon. Authors who saddle characters with names like "Oedipa Maas" are not my cup of tea.

And I have read a couple of Wallace's short stories and non-fiction. I was mildly impressed. Also, I'm a big fan of Wallace's protege and self-styled BFF, Jonathan Franzen.

Plus I've read Wallace's biography, the evocatively titled Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. (In general, I am more interested in Great Writers' bios than their actual books. Not sure what that sez about me.) In it, Wallace comes across as someone who was hideously depressed by his own physical repulsiveness. Like if some doctor had only prescribed him Botox for those overactive sweat glands and a really effective acne medication, he wouldn't have needed all those antidepressants. Caliban would have metamorphosed into Ariel!

All of this is by way of a preamble: I've decided to read Infinite Jest.

To try to read Infinite Jest!

Like I'll commit to reading the first 200 pages, and if I don't like it, I'll stop.

Reading is what I do. I spend at least two hours a day reading. And it's unrealistic to ban fiction entirely during the next six months—which, reasonably, is about the time it will take me to knock out a first draft of the Work in Progress. Assuming I keep up with it: I'm a true Aries in the sense that I'm great at starting things, not so great at finishing things.

The trick will be to read fiction that is sufficiently unlike my own writerly voice that I'm not unconsciously plagiarizing from it.

I don't write anything like David Foster Wallace!

###

The Neal-Palooza scene is mostly written except for a couple of speeches & some character business. So next, I have to wrap up the chapter with Mimi being obnoxious on the porch.

Kinda at a loss, though, at coming up with suitably obnoxious action & dialogue.

I suppose I could always type in red font: Mimi is obnoxious.

Move on to Chapter 2.

Fill in the details of Mimi's obnoxiousness when I do the second draft.

mallorys_camera

Mostly yesterday I wrote.

In the afternoon, I toddled off to the gym & did something to my peroneal tendons on the right side. So that last night, I started to have one of those weird cramping episodes that start off in the lateral malleolus—which is that little thing on the side of your ankle you can flex and is actually your fibula—and travel up your leg into your knee. Excruciatingly painful. But I managed to head it off at the pass by tramping down hard & doing some stretching exercises.

Still. Probably wise to lay off the exercise today.

###

The weather has turned cool. There was a frost warning last night on the other side of the Poconos. Two mountain ranges off, but you know—low mountains.

I have yet to see any yellow in the trees but the sumac is all shades of scarlet.

Where did this summer go?

Honestly, I don't know.

I suppose it all went to Brian being dead. And panicking about money—although I could have done that easily enough when Brian wasn't dead. I just didn't.

###

Word count on the Work in Progress is hovering just below the 5,000-word mark, which will be the end of Chapter 1. Still need to write one more Ain't-Mimi-awful section, but must be careful it doesn't descend into parody: Mimi needs to make a suicide attempt in Chapter 9, and the reader must be sympathetic.

###

But today I must do some Remuneration. This month's bills are paid, but more bills will come next month.

It's hard to go back & forth between Remuneration & fiction-writing. They use different parts of my brain, & they both are quite exhausting in their own way (though creative effort also brings that little rush of exhilaration. It would be cool to see what neurotransmitters are involved.)

But somehow I gotta figure out a way to do it.

mallorys_camera

Went out canvassing with Adrienne yesterday.

Up the porch steps & down the porch steps. Up the porch steps & down the porch steps. I must have done the equivalent of half an hour on the Stairmaster.

It was a gorgeous day, & we found plenty of people who would talk to us, listen to Adrienne's spiel. Some people took her seriously, some people thought she was an endearing but batty grandmother, but the overall reaction was positive. Her stump speech includes medical scarcity, food deserts, a farmer's market.

The question is: How can we translate these benign reactions into votes?

People don't take local elections very seriously. The extra half hour it takes to drive to the firehouse in a non-Presidential year is just not a priority.

I was pleased to see, though, that Adrienne is taking my advice and downplaying the Democrat affiliation. "Don't wear blue!" she told me.

A Democrat is not going to win an election in Wallkill.

A friendly, civic-minded lady who schmoozes well & just happens to belong to the Democratic party might win an election in Wallkill.

###

Came home. Baked tomato pies.

Once again was foiled by Icky's malfunctioning oven:

Oh, well. They actually taste okay. But no blue ribbon from the county fair for me!

###

Icky was out while I was baking, but came home while the pies were cooling. "Well, obviously, you are leaving them in too long or you have the oven temperature turned up too high," he told me.

If you say so, Icky. Of course, I have only made this particular recipe eight billion times before, and it has always come out perfectly except in your fucking oven. But hey! What do I know?

Icky was dressed to the nines. "I just took Gus out to dinner," he told me. "To a really good restaurant. It's his birthday."

I hadn't asked.

"Now, I'm going over to his mom's house. For cake."

###

When I woke up this morning, Icky had packed up and gone.

He left two days early.

No complaints from me!

I figure something must have gone down at Christine's house. Probably nothing more than Gus allowing himself to be doted upon by Christine in a way he doesn't allow himself to be doted upon by Icky. Icky is easily aggrieved.

Get used to that outsider feeling, Icky! Your kids love you. Hey! I loved my mother. Even though by any definition that doesn't include juvenile corpses shoved into dumpsters, she was a terrible mother. But they don't like you. And as teenagers mature into young adults, like becomes more important than love.

###

On the Work in Progress front: I am about a third of the way into the memorial scene. I just have to think of a few more rousing speeches from Neal's eclectic assortment of pals.

Plus status detail—I'm setting the memorial in Newburgh (Must QUASH impulse to include 5,000 words on the history of Newburgh, which is actually very interesting because Newburgh went from being the playground of the very rich to Amerika's murder capital in the space of about 100 years, and has some very beautiful architecture).

It can't be at a bar—Neal-cum-Brian doesn't drink; he smokes massive quantities of dope.

So... a hookah shop? A VFW canteen? What?

We'll still have Vinnie listening to the speeches, obviously moved.

And Grazia will put together a photo montage, leading to a disproportionate number of photos of her & Neal being inserted into the montage, so there can be some comic business where Neal's professional colleagues who didn't know about the polyamory can ignore the other sister wives & tell Grazi, I'm so sorry for your loss.

From there, we segue into a brief section about Neal-cum-Brian's ocular migraines. And reveal he died of a brain aneurism. (In real life, Brian had a heart attack. But that's not gonna fly now that I've downshifted everyone's ages 30 years.)

And then we're back out on the porch for some more obnoxious Mimi business, and the chapter ends!

Chapter 2 should be easier to write since I can crib more from my diary.

mallorys_camera

Cash infusion made me merry & lazy. Though I did tromp: The weather could not be more perfect. As is my wont, I am simultaneously reading and books-on-taping. The work is Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin biography. (It's nonfiction for me until I either hammer out or give up on this first draft.)

Benjamin Franklin does remind me a bit of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; he had a surprisingly 20th-century mind for an 18th-century-er.

###

Viz that first draft: The next section will be 1,000 words or so on the Memorial.

I have morphed the dead guy sufficiently from Brian so that I can't just use my own recollections of Brian's memorial.

I figured nobody wants to read about the Romantic Life of an Old Guy, so I shifted everybody's age down 30 years. All the characters are now in their early 40s, and that means they all have to have jobs—Brian-cum-Neal is a public defender! 😀—and some people from Neal's job have to turn up at the memorial.

I am thinking one of those people could provide comic relief by being one of Neal's disreputable clients that he saved from a 20-year prison sentence or something.

But, of course, I need a backstory on that one—in addition to the usual peerless prose and scintillating dialogue.

Ichabod takes client confidentiality very seriously, so I can't ask him for public defender backstories.

mallorys_camera

So-o, apparently, if I work for H.R. Schlock, I can't be a TaxBwana.

I was mildly shocked that their non-compete clause applied to a nonprofit.

I also suspect if I didn't tell H.R. Schlock I was volunteering with TaxBwana and didn't tell TaxBwana I was selling my soul to H.R. Schlock for filthy lucre, it would all just work out fine.

But that's an extra complication, and my goal these days is to make my life uncomplicated.

The freelancer schtick is really hard on my psyche. Even assuming that all my clients don't switch to AI—an assumption that would be very foolhardy to make—waiting around for the money to appear in my bank account through direct deposit magic is crazy-making.

Deeply crazy-making.

Like check my bank account every 10 minutes and have impassioned one-way conversations with a God I don't actually believe in that always end in Please, please, please, crazy-making.

###

Is this residue from my unfortunate second marriage?

Ben was forever gaslighting me about money.

Like just before my dear, dear, dear pal Tom Mandel died, he set me up with a job at People Magazine. I took care of you, he told me on his deathbed.

And as a favor to me, he also set Ben up with a gig at Sports Illustrated's fledgling online operations.

At some point, Sports Illustrated's online operations were restructured.

And Ben's position was eliminated—a fact he hid from me for a good six months. Maybe longer.

Of course he was still on the payroll, he told me—with a furious scowl like how could I doubt him for a single moment. The overhaul had messed somehow with Time Inc's stream of payments to out-of-office employment. Then the checks were getting lost in the mail. Finally, Fed Ex was delivering the checks to the wrong address where somehow they had been cashed, and Time Inc would have to investigate (naturally) before they could reissue them—

On a couple of occasions, he actually came up with some money.

In retrospect, he probably jimmied that money out of his mother. Supplying her with some lie about me, no doubt. No wonder Ben's mother hated me.

Why did Ben do this? Good question. I asked him over & over again. In those days, I still loved him. (In some ways, I never stopped. Until he died, which broke the evil enchantment.) We had a child together. Our minds fit so well together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He was my writing partner. We had great sex.

Better question: Why did I put up with it?

Answer A: Because Ben was a sociopath.

Answer B: Because I was the only child of a mother who was a consumate liar herself, and so lying and loving are hotwired together in my psyche.

###

Anyway, the client payed my invoice—they always do!—and now my little bank account overrunneth, and all is good in the Patrizia-verse.

But it was three days of extreme, uncontrollable anxiety, and I am tired of feeling anxious.

Diversifying the revenue stream & having one of the sources be a predictable paycheck would skidoo that particular source of anxiety. It's a smart thing to do.

###

In Work in Progress news: I managed to get Daria & Grazia to finish their conversation, and then Dead Neal & Grazia had their own elliptical conversation—about God!—and now we're starting Neal's memorial.

Every time I read over what I had written yesterday, I wanted to throw up.

This is so fuckin' stilted, I told myself. So lame! So banal! What ever made you think you could... Throw it all out! NOW!!!!

In particular, the dialogue made me cringe.

Writing a novel: Not for the faint of heart.

mallorys_camera

So, I got contacted by a recruiter for H.R. Shock. Apparently, TaxBwanas are a hot commodity in the exciting world of tax preparation. Did I want to submit my application now? Did I want to have an interview this morning?

"I haven't even taken your class yet," I protested feebly. "I don't know anything about depreciation."

But with all the swirling anxiety around an invoice submitted and not yet paid—will they actually pay the invoice? or will the kiskas & I end up in a washing machine box underneath the bridge?—prudence argued answering, Yes!, to both those questions.

###

In other news, I trekked across the River That Flows Both Ways yesterday.

Tromped happily through my old tromping ground, the Vanderbilt Park:

I note that I am doing the circuit much more s-l-o-w-l-y than I used to despite my more-or-less regular trips to the gym. I suppose that makes sense: I'm 73, after all, and even if there is a 93-year woman in Padua who can run the 200-meter in 51.47 seconds, at 73, you expect to slow down.

But it did kind of make me feel like a loser and then when I popped in at the Community Garden, that feeling was reinforced.

I've really neglected the garden this year. It's just so far to drive!

Though I did harvest enough tomatoes for a tomato pie:

Then I went to see Weapons, which is an awfully funny horror movie. (I like horror movies when they're pointed social satires; Jordan Peele and Ari Aster are among my favorite directors.) Scariest witch since Anjelica Houston in Witches.

Plus picked up take-out at my favorite Mexican restaurant.

A good day all in all, right?

So, I have no idea why I woke up at 2 am and thought, Danger! Danger! Darkling Plain alert! Your life is meaningless.

I mean, by that 2 am metric, just about everybody's life is meaningless, and I know this, and keep telling myself this. Meaning is where you choose to find it.

But I still couldn't fall back asleep.

####

This morning I found the Dream Apartment in Ithaca!!!

So, I texted my enthusiasm—only to get answered by a bot that wanted to know my credit score.

It took me about three rounds of texts to figure out this was one of those craigslist scams Ichabod keeps warning me about. Apparently, 90% of the listings on craigslist are scams.

Here's an ad that's not a scam: You have to be alone but a dog or two is ok. cats might be a problem. My dogs kill cats.. fact... this ain't no luxury hotel. Man women black white or brown or green I don't care what your race is or anything like that just don't be an alcoholic drug addict or phyco.

Phyco? What the hell is a phyco?

How does one find a place to live anyway?

###

Through it all, I continue to plug away at the Work In Progress. We are now up to 3,000 words. Grazia and Daria are having a Deeply Signficant Conversation.

This is kind of the way it happened in real life except Daria (not her real name) & I talked about why her X-husband had never liked Brian, and that reason is the Reveal with which I'm gonna start Chapter 2, so I can't really use it here, and anyway, X-husbands never like Once & Future boyfriends.

So, I can either spend hours trying to come up with meaningful dialog & action, or I can insert five paragraphs of All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and move along to writing Chapter 2.

Decisions!

denise posting in

dw_news

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

mallorys_camera

Again, two dreams, strangely overlain in the same dream space...

In Dream 1, I was the custodian of two little boys. One of them was my son, though whether it was the six-year-old Ichabod or the six-year-old RTT I could not say. I had arranged a playdate, though I'd neglected to tell the parents of the little boy who wasn't mine about the playdate.
I was driving that little boy to his parents' house.

I was driving a school bus, and I was very nervous because we had to go over a bridge that was kind of like the San Francisco Bay Bridge in that it had the craziest set of on ramps.

Except I was driving the bus through a field. It was night, very dark. I suddenly realized: The school bus's headlights aren't on!!! Didn't crash but careened on the grass to a stop. And wondered: Am I going to be arrested?

In Dream 2, I was a courtesan, and my client was an extremely old, extremely rich man. Very pleasant man! I enjoyed talking and flirting with him, and I did not have to have sex with him because he preferred to pleasure himself while I watched: In his right hand, he held a volume of Thucydides (I kid you not!) from he read aloud, while with his left hand, he touched himself.

I wondered whether I should sidle up to him and give him a blow job. How would that work, exactly? Would he even get hard? How would the dick of a really, really, really ancient man look anyway?

And then I woke up.

###

I did phone & text a lot yesterday—with Jeanna, who now that I'm not in my snit anymore, wants to check in once a week 'cause that, apparently, is what sisters do; with Booter, who'd found an archival 19th century photograph of the part of Oakland where her house now sits. With others—you know who you are.

I finished one Remunerative project & sent the invoice.

So, now I can spend the next week having anxiety attacks: What if they don't pay the invoice? This is ever the plight of the freelancer! Though there's no reason to think they won't pay the invoice: They've been paying them for the past six years.

I managed to get Grazia off the front porch and into the house where she is now sitting next to Daria on Neal's piano bench having an enigmatic conversation about Rachmaninoff that does absolutely nada to advance the plot.

It was a grey, grey day, so naturally, I was in a grey, grey mood.

There are patches in the clouds today through which the sun is streaming weakly, so I'm in a happier place.

mallorys_camera

I carved out yesterday to play with the Work in Progress.

Except the way that works is that I actually write better when I'm stealing moments to write from other obligations. Scribbling around the edges of things, as it were.

Confronted with an untenanted vista of time that I have to fill up somehow with words is daunting. You think you're gonna summon Shakespeare! He's gonna dictate from the other side of the ectoplasm, and you will effortlessly transcribe!

But the way it works is that you scribble a cluster of sentences (40 seconds), and then you sit there staring at them (20 minutes). Wouldn't that comma look better in another place? you ask yourself. So you move it. (Another 20 minutes.) Except it does not look better. So, you move it back. (Ten minutes.)

For fuck's sake! I scream at myself. This is a first draft. It doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be done.

###

Yesterday's quandary: Backstory for the awful Mimi involved making up several OKStupid exchanges with clueless but innocent swains, and it had to be funny, plus Mimi had to be presented as simultaneously sympathetic and unsympathetic. (Tricky maneuver.)

Plus, then we must segue from backstory to present-tense scene on the porch.

And Daria has gone back inside the house, which somehow I feel moved to describe in a complete paragraph of French-existentialism-inspired prose that draws heavily on Jean-Paul Sartre's theories about the potential for nothingness.

For fuck's sake again, I scream at myself. This is a first-person narrative. You can break the fourth wall in any way you want to! That's the beauty of the first-person POV!

Anyway, the day was rather frustrating.

And I only wrote 800 words.

###

Because I can never not read, only I can't read fiction while I'm writing fiction—I have a semi-photographic memory and well-turned phrases will embed themselves in my brain so deeply I forget I didn't write them, and that, my friends, is a recipe for plagiarism—I am reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin.

Once upon a time, Walt Isaacson was my boss!

This was when he was the head of New Media at Time Inc., and I had just been hired to put People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly online.

I was not a direct report.

I remember feeling horribly intimidated by him at one rooftop party at the old Time Life Building in Rockefellar Center. The party was launching Pathfinder, which was what Time Inc was calling the browser they'd developed that they hoped would rival Yahoo!'s portal. Yes, Time Inc. named its flagship digital product after a sports utility vehicle.

If only I'd known Walt Isaacson was a history buff, I could have wormed my way into his attention.

mallorys_camera

Apparently, Adrienne was serious about our text exchange of a couple of weeks back.

Because she had an extra ticket for a Shadowlands production of the musical Waitress, & she invited me-ee-eee. For free!

She wants me to feel befriended.

###

Shadowlands is a 1920s vaudville theater, built when Ellenville was at the height of its Borscht Belt glory.

It was scheduled to be demolished in 1985 until a group of theater people pooled their funds & bought the building. A lot of NYC theater luminaries have summer homes in these parts.

Dunno what I was expecting exactly. Shadowlands is the kind of theater that attracts actors who got their Actors Equity union card 'cause their grandfathers are the dentists who work on Hugh Jackman's veneers. Talent is a consideration. But not a big one.

I enjoyed the production, though.

Indifferent score but witty lyrics & libretto. Performers could sing, but they couldn't phrase.

On the plus side, it's a small theater, so you got to get up close & personal with the performers, which is always a lot of fun.

###

We got to Ellenville early, so we explored this dynamite thrift store—which meant I got to stalk around & take ArtPhotos™!!!!!!!

Adrienne & I will never be besties, but I like her well enough when she's not running hard for political office. She's such a Queens girl! Shrewd & tough. And I know the reason she's running hard for political office is because she lost her husband a year & a half ago & is keeping herself distracted by filling up every single minute of every single day.

Adrienne's husband died a particularly awful death. Liver cancer. And he died at home where she was taking care of him.

###

We'd avoided it throughout most of the evening, but on the drive home, we began talking politics.

"Not that I give a shit about John Bolton, you understand," I said. "Creepy guy, creepy policies. But, you know. Setting the FBI on political enemies. Bad portent."

"Not good," Adrienne said.

"The National Guard in D.C. is just performative right now. But it's gonna get real when Trump's minions lose the 2026 midterm elections, & he ends up declaring martial law. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna plan for that? 'Cause you know. It's a civil war."

"I agree 100 percent," Adrienne said. "If I had an incurable disease, the answer would be clear: Get as close as you can; take as many of them out as you can get. But I don't have an incurable disease."

It actually shocked me to hear Adrienne talking like this.

Though not in a bad way necessarily.

mallorys_camera

Yesterday's high point was a two-hour gab fest via phone with my beloved Barbara Angell.

We mostly chattered about the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce-like legal case Barbara has been embroiled with for the past (I kid you not) 50 years.

Barbara's family history is a bit d'Urbervilles-ish: She and her four sisters and two first cousins are the scions of a one-time rich & powerful San Francisco tugboat dynasty.

Their last remaining land holding is the Petrified Forest in Calistoga.

Two of the sisters and the two first cousins just want to sell it to some real estate developer & bank the Big Buck$.

Barbara wants to sell it to a nonprofit who will preserve its environmental value.

One of the sisters is dead. (Barbara inherited her share of the forest.)

One of the sisters couldn't care less about the forest, but wants to go after one of the lawyers who forged her signature on one of the innumerable pieces of paper this familial dispute has generated. (Although, almost certainly, the statute of limitations on that one has passed.)

The other lawyers are raking in approximately $2.4 million a year.

###

Here are Barbara & me when we were young & gorgeous:

Other than that, I Remunerated, grocery-shopped, worked out at the gym, dashed off another 500 words on the Brian novel—

As an example of Mimi's vituperative tendencies, I want to cite one of the text exchanges she had with guys who were—rather innocently, in my opinion—trying to flirt with her. She posts them all on Facebook! So, naturally, the temptation is to plagiarize! But That would be Wrong.

—and watched endless episodes of White Collar.

How did I miss this show when it first came out a million years ago?

It is utterly delightful!

And stars Matt Bomer, who must be the most handsome male human ever to be spawned and who, moreover, can do this thing with his eyes, make them get all enormous or squinty, without moving his eyebrows at all!

So, all in all, a pur-ty good day.

mallorys_camera

Dreamed that N____ had come to visit California, and I was showing her the sights. Were we in San Francisco? Were we in Berkeley? Wherever we were, it was a place set on an Aetna-like mountain with extremely steep cliffs overlooking a sea—oh-so-familiar in the dream, not familiar at all now that I'm awake.

We were looking for a café. I'd decided this was the most representative California experience I could possibly offer N____.

We hopped a bus, but the bus was taking us away from the cliffs—

No, no, no, no, I said. The cool cafés will all be on a boulevard along the sea.

So we got off the bus and began walking.

At the same time I was dreaming this, I was dreaming a completely separate dream, about Ichabod &

bel_ebat, who were both teenagers & madly in ❤️LUV❤️.

bel_ebat kept morphing into Liza, a/k/a The-Future-Mother-of-My-Unborn-Grandchildren who is now the mother of two adorable toddlers who are not my grandchildren because when she & Ichabod broke up, she rather quickly married someone else.

(I must say, I was more upset than either Ichabod or Liza when they broke up!)

bel_ebat-cum-Liza was dancing hiphop en pointe. I was trying to dance hiphop en pointe, too, but finding it altogether impossible...

(I think I was dreaming of

bel_ebat because I have recently been in touch with her crazy, stalker X-boyfriend, for whom I retain a certain degree of affection even though, it is true, he is way out there orbiting Neptune, but hey! I'm only sporatically in touch with

bel_ebat on Instagram these days, so... :::SHRUGS:::)

###

The co-op KidZ got back to me.

The Cornell professor texted: Hi Patrizia, it was so nice meeting you last weekend. Just wanted to let you know we’re still sorting things out. We might take some time to do so — we want to take wallpaper off the walls and do aftershock and deal with the mold — but I don’t have a lot of time to deal with that because I start teaching Monday. So it might be a little while before we sort things out with the house. And we haven’t even had time to talk about the cat question yet. So I wouldn’t plan on a move by October one in any case. We can keep you posted as things move along but please don’t hold out on other options because of us. Sorry not to be able to provide a clear answer either way at this point! We all really enjoyed meeting you and thought you would be a lovely addition to the house.

I texted back: Hi Justine! I totally understand! I really enjoyed meeting you all as well—the time you, Caitlyn, Joannah, & I spent talking on the porch is a magical memory. I want to keep knowing you all. And I want to talk with Nelson about writing fiction! 😀

Yes, do keep me in the loop and let me know as things progress.. I will continue to look for other living options as I’m dissatisfied with the one I’m living in now, and I believe people should rejoice in their homes, not merely tolerate them. But my dream living situation really is an intentional community, & it looks like you are building one. If it’s all right with you, I will check in from time to time.

Justine texted back: 100% please do! And I absolutely agree with you that living should be joyful and communal. We want to keep knowing you as well in any case 😊

###

This is actually not a bad outcome.

For one thing, I will be starting HR Block's tax classes in two weeks.

I had been very resistant to taking HR Block's tax classes because I am very resistant to working for HR Block! They are an awful company, charge $100—maybe even more now—for every form they crank out & are continually upselling services that clients really don't need. People, even otherwise intelligent & rational people, get very anxious when it comes to taxes, so they almost always succumb to being hustled. It's a complete racket.

But there's no denying that I have to diversify—and hopefully expand—my income stream.

The clients who buy my white paper healthcare economics papers ❤️LUV❤️ me & AI shows no signs of diminishing that ❤️LUV❤️.

But I keep thinking it's only a matter of time.

So, yeah. Doing taxes for $$$ will be a profitable side gig.

I will continue TaxBwana-ing for free-eee-eeee, too, so those of you for whom I've been doing taxes all these years—you know who you are!—do not panic.

###

For another thing, if I'm serious about writing a Brian novel, interrupting it in the very earliest stages of composition with packing and moving and unpacking again would completely derail it.

Besides, my Spidey-sense is telling me I will probably be able to move into the T-burg co-op house in the spring. If I want to.

###

Viz the novel: I hammered out another 500 words last night.

A structure is suggesting itself to me: Three sections, each approximately 100 pages (or 25,000 words) from each of the three women protagonists' first-person POV, mixing past & present. Grazia, Flavia, Daria. How they met Brian. Their history with Brian. Their reactions to Brian's death.

Then a fourth section, another 100 pages, about the road trip they take to scatter Brian's ashes—one handful at a time!—at various wacky locations. I will have to foreshadow those locations.

And I think I'll have Mimi commit suicide.

This will no doubt irritate the real-life Mimi, assuming (a) the novel ever gets finished and (b) the novel ever gets published, but hey, you know: Art's gotta Art!

mallorys_camera

fuzzilla made a sage observation on that last entry: God, this would all make for such a fascinating novel... the theme of alternative relationship models and what are the traditions when it gets disrupted by something as huge as a death is a killer theme for a novel.

I thought: She's right.

Very, very commercial. I can see the film adaptation now.

And I wouldn't even have to write very much. It would mostly be editing existing TMI diary entries & generating some connective tissue to string them all together into a narratively cohesive whole.

I figure I could knock the thing off in eight weeks.

Of course, I'd have to shave 20 years off the real-life protagonists: People will read about alternative romantics in their late 30s/early 40s, but no one wants to read about women in their 50s, 60s, or 70s.

There would only be one chapter I'd have to write—and that would be the very last chapter where Flavia, Daria, and... let's call her Grazia, the Patrizia interject...go off on some kind of mad road trip together, sprinkling Brian's ashes one handful at a time at various wacky roadside attractions.

The style would be easy, peasy, cash (as in "short for casual.") Middle-aged Dolly Alderton, in other words.

(I am a Dolly Alderton fan. There are times when she can be remarkably profound.)

###

With that in mind, I whipped off 1,500 words last night.

###

In other news, it's back to All Remuneration, All of the Time. (Except when I am exercising & working on the New Writing Project, which will obviously be my ticket to Fame & Fortune, right? 😀)

And it is supposed to rain all day, and the sky is grey, so naturally I am in a melancholy mood.

Icky announced he is materializing today—one day earlier than his usual schedule.

I see from my constant monitoring of craigslist postings both in the Hudson Valley and in Ithaca that Icky is trying to rent out the college-bound Spawn's room. Naturally, he did not bother to inform me of this. Altogether now: What a DICK.

In the posting header, he described the room as a "studio apartment." Which did make me laugh.

And he is charging a significantly higher rent for it than he is charging me.

I can't imagine there are hordes of people wanting to move to fuckin' Wallkill, but what do I know?

Oh! And the posting talked about chickens. And fresh eggs!

Poor Black Chicken! Having to lay for three!

If someone else moves in, I will install a lock on the Patrizia-torium.

###

No word from the T-burg Co-op KidZ, which I am interpreting to mean the answer is, "No."

I am imagining their off-the-record conferences: But she's so old! What if she strokes out on the couch???

Oh, well. "No" doesn't kill you, & you still gotta try.

I dislike being here, but I really have to be selective about where I jump next. I jumped without doing thorough due diligence last time, & that's why I ended up here.

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Alexander Kaufmann

November 2015

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Page generated Sep. 3rd, 2025 01:09 am

Nobody asked me but...

Reading

Untitled Chick Lit Novel

Porous

Code deploy happening shortly

Mississippi site block, plus a small restriction on Tennessee new accounts

First Draft Problems

Scarlet Sumac; Green Trees

Local Politics & Burned Crusts

Anyone Got a Funny Public Defender Story?

Plugging the Anxiety Hole

Darkling Plain Alert

Mississippi legal challenge: beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

Advancing the Plot

Tricky Maneuvers

Performances

Jarndyce v. Jarndyce

Art's Gotta Art

My Ticket to Fame & Fortune

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November 2015

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