thisnewday

Cool car I saw in the parking lot at the gym:



Shortly, I must toddle off to the New Paltz garden for more weeding as it's supposed to get hot this afternoon.

Yesterday, I did very little of anything except tromp (Winding Hills, steep) and start rereading Tracy Daugherty's biography of Joan Didion—which is not as good as Tracy Daugherty's bio of Larry McMurtry.

I suspect Didion simply did not engage Daugherty as much: She is an excellent prose writer, but comes across as an unsympathetic human being, unspontaneous, unlikeable, studied to an extreme. One gets the impression that Didion hovered over her words like a vulture hovering over a skull, wondering, Did I miss anything the first time I picked this clean? It probably took her half an hour to write a single sentence.

McMurtry, in contrast, was a kind of mad, slapdash writer. Every morning of his life, he was up and at that typewriter by 7:30 a.m., typing away like a maniac. By 9 a.m., he'd have produced 10 pages. And then he'd stop.

Ten pages in an hour and a half! That's crazy fast!

And probably accounts for his uneven output: Easily half of what McMurtry wrote is really baaaaad.

But McMurtry draws the reader in in a way that Didion is simply not capable of doing. One must parse Didion's sentences. And that is exhausting when one is reading for pleasure. Hence, one never reads Didion for pleasure.

Interestingly, both Didion and McMurtry are ultimately what you might call regional writers. Didion's region was California; McMurtry's region was Texas. And each writer's finest output amounts to kind of a harvest of regional tropes: Didion's basket is "the pioneer," while McMurtry's is "the American West."

Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed got a present they didn't want.

A birdfeeder. With a digital camera. Courtesty of a well-intended offspring.

It feeds blurry photographs to various nearby digital receivers and has some kind of AI hookup thing that gives you info about the blurry photographs.

"Well, that seems like a perfectly nice present!" I cried.

Mrs. Neighbor Ed made a face. "When the jays grab the sunflower seeds, they knock all the other seeds out of the feeder, and then the field mice grab them and begin invading the house!"

"When your cat was around, we never had any problems with field mice," she added—and I realized, with a pang, that she was talking about the Meezer, dead & gone these—what? seven years? The Meezer had been the mightiest of hunters!

I hoped the Meezer was eavesdropping from Cat Heaven, where presumably there is an endless parade of self-regenerating field mice and squirrels for her to slaughter. It's always nice to hear nice things about oneself.

And I also felt this almost palpable strand of connection. Veritably ectoplasmic! The Meezer had really been the last link to my old life in California, and when she died, that link snapped: I was no longer someone who'd once lived in California; I was only someone who lived here.

That's the reason why I liked living in Dutchess County more than I like living in Ulster County, I thought. In Dutchess County, there'd been... continuity.

And also, of course, in Dutchess County, I had friends.

###$

I prattled merrily with Mr. & Mrs. Neighbor Ed for an hour, and our prattle was lively and hilarious and entirely without awkwardness, no long-time-no-see pauses or fumbles at all.

Neighbor Ed is almost as good at banter as Ben used to be!

I felt as though I was drinking water from a cool, sweet well.

Before that, I'd hung out with Loraine & Buff Ken & Rami on their back porch for an hour, watching the birds & talking about Buff Ken's latest bear sighting on his outdoor camera.

And before that, I'd got to play in the dirt in my garden for a few hours. There was a Claude sighting!

"When eet get hot last week, I water your garden," Claude told me.

"Thank you!" I said. Adding apologetically, "I can only get over here once a week—"

"I know, I know," Claude said, holding up a hand. "Eet is fine."

Everybody was glad to see me. Everybody liked me.

###

Icky was around this weekend. One of the Spawn managed to graduate from high school.

"He just totally ignored me!" Icky declared indignantly. "I came all the way from the City, and he ignored me! The only thing he said to me was how embarrassing it was that I was taking photographs of him!"

And you think I care exactly why? I wondered.

But I am well-trained in the art of making sympathetic sounds to people in distress.

Icky mistook my sounds for encouragement & began lamenting: It's hard, it's really fuckin' hard to be around the Spawn's mother, the Spawn's mother's new husband, the Spawn's mother's relentlessly cheerful father who'd been imported all the way from Texas—

"I was there all by myself!" Icky complained.

I clucked.

I would have expected him to head straight back to the City after this debacle. He's not supposed to be here till this coming Thursday! But, no. He stuck around. When I left for Dutchess County, he was sitting in front of his ginormous living room television screen, glaring at YouTube videos on how to sharpen knives. He had doused himself with cologne. I could smell it all the way from upstairs.

When I got back six hours later, he was still in front of the screen, watching what looked like the same YouTube video.

He saw me come in, jumped up, and immediately began doing pushups on the living room floor!

Like WTF???

He watched me cook my dinner. "That smells very good," he said, staring at my Cajun chicken.

No, fuckhead. I'm not offering you any.

Then he wanted to have a long conversation about changing propane canisters. He ushered me outside and handed me the wrench.

"I'm kind of a dummy about stuff like this," I admitted.

"Oh, no. Not you. You're a genius—"

Well, I am actually very smart, I thought. So you can can the fuckin' sarcasm. I didn't grow up using tools, so there's a learning curve involved.

But, you know. No need to prolong the conversation. And up close, that cologne was overpowering.

I thanked him for the tutorial, ran upstairs, and barricaded myself in the Patrizia-torium.

And eventually, he left.

###

In the past three days, three new place possibilities have popped up through my various real-life-people networks.

I don't really want to move until the fall, so I'm not sure how aggressively I should be following up the leads. But at the very least, they're a good auger, right?

The immigration demonstrations in LA right now are not the first time the National Guard has been called in to quell a protest.

I'm thinking about the People's Park protests in Berkeley. The National Guard advanced on us with rifles drawn & then the helicopters descended. Was it the National Guard or the helicopters that dropped the tear gas canisters? I can't remember.

I do remember fleeing across campus, pushing the then-toddler Alicia in her stroller, tears & snot streaming down my face. Maybe this is the reason why Alicia grew up to be such a bitch: Exposure to tear gas addled her unmylinated brain!

Still, it's always news when the gub'mint uses military-style force against white people.

And, of course, the People's Park incident happened in 1969. Which is to say a trillion million years ago. I was only 17, or I would have known better than to bring a toddler to a political protest. On account of skipping all those years of school, I actually started at UC Berkeley when I was sixteen.

###

Sadly, I will not be around for the NYC pride parade because it is Lew & Ed's wedding reception weekend, so I will be in Edinboro, Pennsylvania.

I avoided all those Pride demonstrations when they were just about marketing.

But this year, Pride has a political dimension so it has regained its gravitas. I'll go to as many Pride demonstrations as I can stuff into my schedule.



Anyway.

The Pinebush Alien Fair did take place yesterday—rather stupidly because yesterday it poured relentlessly whereas today, the scheduled Rain Day, it's not only dry but pleasantly balmy.

I grabbed an umbrella and drove on up.

The chief joy of the Pinebush Alien Fair is its costumes. But very few people wanted to wear costumes in the rain. I'm sure this dog didn't:



But its mean humans made it dress up anyway.

There were a couple of good window displays:



But mostly, it was just yr typical tacky upstate New York small town craft fair. Disappointing!

###

I went home & spent the rest of the day Remunerating. Because those fuckin' MacArthur Foundation people keep forgetting to send me my genius grant money.

Went for a looooong tromp—five miles!—when it finally cleared up at sunset.

Watched The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. (Excellent if you don't mind low production values.)

Abluted.

Slumbered.

And then at 3 in the morning, awakened with a bolt & decided to try and read myself back to sleep.

Grabbed the first book at hand from the stack on my night table—Tracy Dougherty's remarkable biography of Larry McMurtry.

Which is even more remarkable on second read:

Consciousness: the sense of self, the voice chattering at us in our heads, the apparent awareness of a presence, a spirit, a soul inside us, distinct from our bodies and the electrical firings in our brains. Scientists and philosophers fall all over themselves trying to explain, define, or locate consciousness. It is like searching for darkness with a flashlight...

“I have felt largely posthumous since [my open-heart] operation,” McMurtry said. “My old psyche, or old self, was shattered—now it whirls around me in fragments … The heart-lung machine allows for biologic survival, but my own feeling is that the person, as opposed to the body, dies anyway … For a certain period of time one is technically alive but in another, powerful sense, dead. Then one is jump-started back into life, but the Faustian Bargain has been made: you’re there, but not as yourself. That self, that personality, lies back beyond the time when you were on the pump. That gap, in my case at least, has proven unclosable.”

I have heard that from several other open-heart surgery survivors, too.

And sometimes you can just look at people like Bill Clinton who've had the surgery & know that's what happened to them.

###

Larry McMurtry wrote one perfect novel—The Last Picture Show—and several flawed novels I have deep affection for—Lonesome Dove, Moving On.

And a whole lot of dreck.

It occurs to me that McMurtry's biographer Tracy Dougherty is a much better writer than McMurtry ever was.

What gave McMurtry the edge, I suppose, was that he was actively elegizing a dying mythology (i.e. the American West.)

Humans revere their mythmakers.

A breeze came up yesterday morning & the sky was blue again by noon. And I stopped feeling that air hunger thing—so it really was my lungs not anxiety.

Also, the moon is not full, so that blood-red orb I saw hovering in the West—a very strange position for the moon now that I think about it—was actually the sun setting.

I have a shitload of stuff to do and as per usual, very little interest in doing any of it.

But first I must scamper off to the New Paltz garden to put in a couple of hours of weeding before the temps rise to heat stroke levels.

Slow & steady. Slow & steady. Slow & steady.

The smoke from the fires in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and northwestern Ontario has hit upstate New York.

The rising full moon last night was blood red.

And the sky this morning looks like a diffractionless opal, a whitish translucent wash with the barest undercoat of blue through which the sun just glowers. I'd planned on taking it easy today anyway, because I kinda knocked myself out weeding the New Paltz plot yesterday.

Before:



After:



Doesn't look like I did a lot, does it? But it was four full wheelbarrows of brambles and other assorted weeds.

Harder work than I thought it would be, & I was kinda achey from all that squatting & pulling. So I figured I'd go easy on myself today. Resume weeding tomorrow, but get there while it's still cool out.

And that turns out to be a good decision because today I'm feeling a kind of generalized air hunger, some shortness of breath with exertion. Though whether that's from the smoky air or generalized anxiety I can't quite tell.

###

Said anxiety is due to Icky being even more of a dick than usual.

Last fall, after I closed down my garden in Hyde Park, I brought all my gardening stuff back here & stashed it in the shed because I thought I'd be gardening here this summer.

Then, six weeks or so ago, Icky announced that he didn't want to garden with me. Was it my breath? My ineffective underarm deodorant? My generally displeasing personality? No! It was that Icky does not like to work or play with others.

Fortunately, the good folk at the Hyde Park garden had just written me a love note: We miss you!

So, I decided to go back & garden there again. (And, of course, the New Paltz Community Garden just found some open spots, so now I'm juggling two gardens!) And I transported all my gardening stuff back to Hyde Park.

###

Then yesterday, Icky went on a tear because he decided all the gardening stuff in the shed belonged to him.

All day long, he fusillaged me with text: Those tomato cages are mine. I’ve had them since before I moved here. I put them all back there after the season

I texted back, As I said, I brought the 10 cages I used in my garden last year to your shed in October last year because I thought I was going to be gardening here this year. After you told me you’d prefer to garden alone, I took those same 10 cages—they were stacked on the left side of the shed—back to Hyde Park. That’s all I know, Iggy.

He texted: Where are my cages then? I put all the cages I used all of last summer in that shed. There are no cages now. I never saw yours in there.

###

This is the kind of petty hammering he does relentlessly & he is so fucking relentless that he usually gets his own way—because who in their right mind wants to spend hours texting about fucking tomato cages?

Finally, he called.

"Look," I said. "We're at an impasse. And I'm at a disadvantage in all my transactions with you since you own the house, so you have the power. Are you interested in some kind of compromise or should we just keep up the text chain till I move out?"

This was said with more bravado than I actually have, of course.

Moving out would be difficult at this point.

I'm an elderly cat lady and the rental situation hereabouts is not exactly clamoring for elderly cat ladies.

On the other hand, I'm an excellent tenant, and Icky doesn't want the house sitting empty for the 20 days of each month he's not on the premises.

And I suppose it's possible that I did grab some of Icky's tomato cages without thinking about it—though I'm certainly not going to admit that to him.

The compromise?

I'll bring back any extra tomato cages and check the slag heap at the Hyde Park garden where old tomato cages go to die. Bring him those.

###

The situation is highly anxiety-provoking because it reminds me how little control I have over my life.

Of course, because of the way I was brought up, it never occurred to me that one could control one's life simply by making wise choices. I was a waif bufffeted about by forces I couldn't control! And then as an adult, I kind of mythologized that choicelessness! Turned it into a philosophy. Became fatalistic.

I don't know what the answer is.

I do know many people who have organized their lives around making wise choices, and for many of those people life has worked out well, but for just as many, life hasn't.

The random factor is very, very powerful.

G4 geomagnetic sun storm in effect last night. Very, very, very dimly, my naked eyes espied the Aurora Borealis:



Like I said, I spent five hours yesterday getting my computer to do what it was doing perfectly well at the beginning of the day before I started fucking around with it, so I was in a pettish mood all day.

That mood was exasperated by the fact that I didn't do a good job saving for taxes last year and now am paying off the not-huge-but-still-significant amount I put on a credit card. Disposable income is down this month, in other words. I must ration my little treats!



Antonio Delgado is taking on Kathy Hochul in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Good!

He's a strong progressive candidate who believes in universal child care, expanded rental assistance, stronger investment in community health centers, higher minimum wage, all well and good things in themselves, but he also has the potential to beat Elise Stefanik, the rumored Republican candidate, who is creepy, creepy, creepy in every imaginable way. Delgado could carry New York City; I don't think Hochul could.

Delgado has done his prep work.

I don't think there's a county fair, volunteer fire department celebration, or Lion's Club picnic throughout the entire state—and New York State has some real backwaters—that Delgado hasn't shown up at over the past five years. The picture above of Delgado & io truly was taken at the 2018 Hyde Park Fourth of July parade.

###

Also, I watched the Pee-wee Herman documentary on HBO. It is very sad. It made me cry.

I am more of a fan of Paul Reubens as a conceptual artist than I am of his conceptual art. I prefer my kitsch with a lot of white space—which his didn't have. Pee-wee's Playhouse is a bit too frenetic for me.

But I do think Pee-wee's Playhouse captures two tendencies of childhood extremely well: (1) children's tendency to take metaphors & other figurative constructions very literally, and (2) children's tendency to anthropomorphize. (I well remember Mr. Light whom I got to talk to in the bathroom as a three-year-old whenever I had to have my hair washed.)

Pee-wee Herman is childlike, but he is not childish.

Big distinction.