elevations_unknown

One of the other New Paltz Community Gardeners.

Just look at that gorgeous garlic and those gorgeous beets!

Here's a close-up:



I had to take an ArtPhoto™!!

Nature's bounty, indeed.

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Other than that, I spent a few hours weeding and putting down grass clippings. I have an astonishing number of incoming tomatoes:



It wasn't hot but it was so humid that I felt as though I was working in a sauna. The sweat poured off me.

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Once back at the casa, I didn't have the slightest interest in working on the Work in Progress. I didn't have the slightest interest in doing anything except passively watching TV. My life is very dull. I am a dull person!

I ended up watching Widow's Bay, which is actually pretty good—particularly the weird board games at the haunted hotel:



But I knew perfectly well that watching Widow's Bay was just a way to pretend that creaky conveyor belt was moving faster than it really is.

###

Meanwhile, in the never-ending saga of the unemployment application, I finally reached somebody in the claims department—who told me the claims department can't do anything until the fraud department completes its investigation—

"But when I spoke to the fraud department, they told me they're not going to complete a fraud investigation," I said. "Because the State of New York didn't lose any money. So, technically, it's not fraud. Please let me speak to a supervisor."

The claims supervisor said, "Of course, it's fraud. Any time someone uses your social security number—"

"But they didn't use my social security number," I said. "That's one of the issues. They made up a social security number. And a mother's maiden name. Way back at the beginning of this process, I spent three hours on the phone with tech support before they could recouple my name to my correct social security number—"

Finally, the claims supervisor said she would send an email to the fraud investigation department, urging them to either process or close out my file—"It is fraud," she insisted—so I can move on with my claim.

Best anyone has been able to do for me so far.

I got her employee number to pass on to the snippy staffer at the Assembly critter's office.

The left bureaucracy's hand doesn't know what the right bureaucracy's hand is doing.

Same as it ever was.

This heat wave hasn't produced any local thunderstorms, which means shortly I must toddle out and water my garden. Ugh! It's 6am and already 75° F.

Yesterday, it was so hot even with the AC unit running that my feet swelled up like an elephant's. (They're fine now.) I suppose part of that is that it's impossible to exercise in this heat, so I spend enormous amounts of time on my ass sitting.

Spent the day reading Caroline O'Donoghue's charming The Rachel Incident and scribbling away at the Work in Progress.

Did have some kind of writing breakthrough: 1,500 words! Finished the Montclair scene where Flavia's father asks her to go to "Germany" with him. (Quotes because "Germany" is Metz, currently in France, but part of Nazi Germany in WW2.)

Currently working on the scene where Flavia's father tells her how he avoided being carted off to the camps.

Two more scenes after that—Flavia's introduction to her blond, Aryan-looking half-brothers, and Leo Decker giving Flavia cocaine so she can finish the library project—and then Chapter 8 is done, done, done!

I have no idea if any of it is any good. I'm trying not to think that way. In a first draft, the important thing is not that it's good but that it's done.

###

Today is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Sometime in the past two years, I read David McCullough's excellent biography of John Adams, so I have some idea what a remarkable accomplishment that was.

And I am always aware how remarkably lucky I am to have been born an American.

Is that the same thing as being proud of being an American? Or grateful for being an American? That I don't know.

On the whole, I dislike group identities. Group memberships tend to bring out the worst in human beings. Groups are mobs, and mobs tend to represent the lowest common denominator. I'm with E.M. Forster on this one: If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

And then, of course, there's the Trump administration.

But it is very, very true that as an American, I enjoyed/enjoy opportunities that would be available to me no place else, and it's not really America's fault that I didn't/don't take full advantage of them.

Once again, two medications I've been taking regularly for the past three years have disappeared from my patient portal.

That means if I want to refill the prescriptions, I'm gonna have to camp on the phone for an hour and a half because that's what it takes to talk to a real live human being at that doctor's office.

The prospect made me burst into tears.

Why am I so insignificant? Why is my time deemed so unimportant? Why didn't I focus on acquiring a modicum of power or influence in this lifetime while that was still an option? WTF is wrong with me?

I know, I know, I know. First-world problem. I am not in Gaza. I am not in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I am not in Bangladesh.

Still. One calibrates one's life according to available lifelines, and since I'm so isolated here, the lifelines I track all come from The Daily Mail. Fucking Taylor Swift's medications never disappear from her patient portal, I bet.

All this is complicated by the fact that two other phone calls have been on my To Do list for over a week now. And I keep blowing them off because they, too, involve hours of camping on the phone.

At what point did the human definition of work change from sweating in the cornfield to sitting on hold in an air-conditioned room, waiting for some underpaid human being to acknowledge your existence?

###

Meanwhile, it is already 80°F at 7am in the morning. The "Feels Like" index says it's 90°.

Clearly, I am not going anywhere today.

Had the most fabulous time hanging out with Carl at the Morgan Library on Sunday though we could have just met up at Dunkin' Donuts & saved the price of admission because we hardly paid attention to the tarot exhibition at all. Basically, we just gabbed nonstop for five hours straight.

Carl, like me, is a People Mag vet, someone I met after the Very Unfortunate Time Inc/AOL merger—which absolutely nobody remembers today, but which signaled the first death throes of a brand that dominated the cultural life of the English-speaking world throughout the second half of the 20th century.

He was hired by my boss, the singular Maria Wilhelm, ostensibly to write movie reviews but really to accompany me & ET's brother (Dirk) to dismantle Entertainment Asylum, the world's first interactive broadcast studio, a wildly creative Internet shop that had been cobbled together by the visionary TV executive Brandon Tartikoff as he was dying of Hodgkin Lymphoma. (Tartikoff today is probably best remembered as the guy who saved Seinfeld from cancellation during its disastrous first four years while the show struggled to find its audience.)

"You know, Maria broke up my marriage," Carl confided.

"How?" I asked. "Did you have an affair with her? Did your wife have an affair with her?"

Carl laughed. "Nothing like that. My father had just died, and I was reeling with grief. Nothing about my life made sense to me. And out of the blue, Maria calls me one day—like we were best friends who spent hours every day on the phone—"

"Oh, yes. When Maria fixes you with the laser-like beam of her attention, there are no other people in the Universe!"

"—and she says, 'Dirk and I were just talking. And we've decided you have to be our movie reviewer!' So I moved from Larchmont to Los Angeles. And I never went back. Even after she dropped me."

"Sounds like Maria," I said. "Do you know what she's doing now?"

"James Cameron."

"James Cameron's COO," I said.

"You know, Dirk doesn't talk to her anymore," Carl said.

"Really!" I said.

"She screwed him on that Avatar book."

I shrugged. "Both their names are on it. His under hers, to be sure. I take it he did all the actual writing?"

Here is Maria winning her Emmy for a documentary about whales.

I'm guessing the blonde in the white dress did all the actual work.



Carl is nuts, I suppose, but then it could be argued so am I. Both of us living in some kind of prolonged afterlife: We were once a part of Momentous Events as the world judges such things, but somehow we lost that momentum, and are now drifting aimlessly, waiting to do—what exactly? I suppose the answer would be "to die," except I don't feel like I'm waiting to die, I feel like there are rabbits and penguins still to be drawn from the magician's top hat.

I don't know what Carl feels exactly.

He texted me three times and called me once yesterday, which made me un peu uneasy. I'm not sure why. I don't think he's romantically interested, which would make me very nervous indeed. I think he's lonely, and, of course, I am, too, and we speak the same dialect, and it's always amazing to happen upon someone who speaks your language when you're used to translating all your basic life needs into other-people-ese.

One of the things we did was exchange book lists. We are both prodigious readers. I recommended Bernard Malamud, particularly The Magic Barrel, which is the best English-language short story ever written, and Larry McMurtry, specifically The Last Picture Show, a perfectly structured novel, and Lonesome Dove, which is the most engaging English-language novel ever written.

Also, Tracy Daugherty's staggeringly fine Larry McMurtry bio.

The Larry McMurtry model of True Friendship has much to recommend it, and perhaps that is something Carl and I could strive for.

(One of the reasons I'm contemplating living in Michigan is that I have the Larry McMurtry model of friendship with Tom.)



The tarot exhibition itself was not so great.

The Morgan Library itself is impressive and filled with treasures—Gutenberg Bibles, Charlemagne's Bible, George Washington's death mask—but the curators don't know very much about putting on a show. The various tarot card decks, including a very beautiful 15th-century card deck, were merely mounted on cardboard backgrounds. The effect was underwhelming.

If I'd been designing this exhibition, I would have had animatronic gypsies and steampunk machines doing digital fortunes. The way the Morgan staged this exhibition made the arcana seem dull.



"You know, I always figured you'd go back to the church towards the end of your life," I told Carl.

Carl is LDS. In fact, his father is a pretty famous LDS elder.

"Oh, I never left the church," he told me.

"Really?"

He shrugged and smiled. "In the sense of formally renouncing my membership? No. Of course, I don't go to services. Or wear the underwear. Do you know about the underwear?"

"Of course, I know about the underwear. It's an object of intense fascination for us heathen."

He laughed. "It's really just a union suit. Very uncomfortable in summer."

"So you're a Jack Mormon?"

"I more or less define the term 'Jack Mormon.'"

"Well, there are a lot of things I really like about LDS," I told him heartily. "They have a really strong sense of community, which I admire."

He laughed again. "Oh, yes. Us and the Hasids."

"It's the belief system that's impossible to stomach."

"You know, I did my mission in Bolivia for two years. I think that kind of backfired—once I figured out, You know, you can get away, I never went back. But I would tell the Bolivians about the Angel Moroni, and their eyes would light up when I got to the part about the gold tablets. You could see them reaching for the pick ax! And where are those gold tablets now? they would ask. Well, the Angel Moroni swept down and took them back to heaven, I'd tell them."

"And did that make them lose interest?"

"Oh, no," Carl said. "They don't really distinguish LDS from any other Protestant sect. For Central and South Americans, Protestantism is correlated with upward mobility. It's Catholicism and all its superstitions that hold you back."

Cataclysmic earthquakes, apocalyptic heatwaves... For native woo-woo speakers like myself, it's hard to shake the thought that Gaia is finally striking back: Bye-bye, homo sapiens! Extinction now.

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In News of the Here & Now: My thyroxine prescription disappeared from my patient portal for some reason so that I could no longer refill it without camping on the phone with the doctors's office on hold for a fucking hour. This made me feel so humiliated & insignificant that right now, I am literally digging my nails into the palms of my hands to keep from bursting into tears. Like if I had more money, I could go to a doctor who cared about me as something more than a Medicare reimbursement.

An over-reaction?

Sure.

But I feel as though I am totally unimportant and dismissible.

Like the only people who care whether I live or die are Democrats dunning me to contribute money to their campaigns in remote places I do not care about.

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Of course, that feeling is abetted by the fact that Icky is presently in residence. Icky hardly bothers to acknowledge my existence except to email me new charges he wants to add to my rent.

I told him I wasn't going to let Black Chicken out anymore. "It's too dangerous," I said. "I can't take responsibility. I've been visiting her every day, bringing her treats. But she's lonely in that coop."

Icky's solution?

He brought Black Chicken into the house!

Where she strutted around for a couple of hours, clucking piteously.

In particular, the mirror confused her!



I need to shake this mood so I can do something productive.

But I don't know how.