Mallory's Camera

Way back in the Cretaceous Period when I first began uploading my diary to this particular site, I had no idea it was a "community" site.

When random strangers began dropping stray comments, I was shocked.

Of course, I was delighted. When you put a message in a bottle, and somebody reads it on the alien shore where it washes up, you're always delighted. Isn't that the whole point of putting messages in bottles?

Over time, I developed a whole circle of readers, and of course, I read their diaries, too. I love other people's diaries! I love looking through other people's fence holes.

This diary is not promotional. I do many performative, transactional things online, of course. Social media is all about instilling as much FOMO as possible in one's readers. That's why social media sites call them "followers".

But I've rarely done that here. In fact, I'm a bit of a train wreck here. I don't think many people reading about my life here would want my life.

But I was never interested in amassing huge numbers of followers here. I'm a long-form writer, and one might say excessively literary, being a prodigious reader and having been steeped in the Great Western Literary traditions all my life. My diary is never gonna to appeal to large numbers of followers.

So, I didn't really notice when online journaling lost its popularity.

The people I liked still journaled. I read them, and they read me.

In the past couple of months, though, one by one, many of those people have stopped journaling.

This makes me sad.

I am not going to stop journaling, though. I've been keeping a diary since I was 12 years old and keeping it online sure beats hauling around 50 volumes of mouldering paper and barely decipherable ink. It's the delusion of immortality.

###

Meanwhile, anxiety over To Do lists, impending trips, and impending moves has seeped into every corner of my life.

Ichabod tends to call me when he's driving. He was driving up to San Francisco a couple of days ago when I spoke to him most recently. Dinner and a jazz club with his old RLS pal Josh.

"Are you driving back down after?" I asked nervously.

"I am!" he said.

"Oh, honey," I said. "Please don't. That's so late at night. Get a motel."

He laughed. "I'll be fine, Mom."

I realized how ridiculous I sounded, so I added, "In fact, I don't think you should ever go out at night. Just stay home and watch Netflix! And you know what? Don't go out during the day, either. I think you should start conducting your entire work life by Zoom!!! That way, you'll be safe!"

We both laughed, but I had a hard time falling asleep that night. I kept picturing Ichabod bleeding and dead on Route 17. (The Highway of Certain Doom, as I used to call it when I lived in Monterey.)

And then yesterday, I let Black Chicken out of her coop in the late afternoon—because honest to God, what kind of a life is being a solitary chicken alone in a coop day after day after day?—and I was a complete wreck until she tottled back into her coop at sundown. I kept picturing her—grabbed by a fox! nabbed by a hawk! on my watch!

I can't keep anything safe!

###

In a few minutes, I am off to help real-life Flavia clean out Brian's old place. I've proceeded to rehome almost all of Brian's books; I'm taking the last batch today. And Brian had this perfectly fine treadmill, which Flavia was gonna give to a scrap metal guy—

"Oh, don't do that!" I said. "Somebody will want that treadmill."

Flavia was dubious. "But it's so huge! And they're gonna have to dismantle it to get it out of the house—"

I was firm. "Somebody will want it."

So, she gave me permission to list it on craigslist, and within one hour, we had three takers—

She is also renting an enormous dumpster and is letting me use it, so I need to start going through my things and dumping every thing I don't want to move with.

So much work!