moonbeam28

Minor frustrations this final day of the year.

The driveway is drivable. But slippery. 'Cause I shoveled all the slush, but the standing water froze, so there are multiple ice patches.

The nail place overbooked. I waited 15 minutes yesterday afternoon, & then walked out. Will try another place Friday, I guess.

Post office label printer was out when I tried to mail packages.

Today, I was gonna work on the Work in Progress, but the Schlock people offered to pay me to get small business-certified and money, money, money, money, money.



When I was hanging out with Flavia last week, I found myself reminiscing about my childhood in the City, how my best friend Roberta & I used to spend every Saturday walking through Central Park, making up elaborate stories about the people we passed.

"You mean like The World of Henry Orient?" Flavia asked.

"Yes, exactly like The World of Henry Orient!" I said, delighted.

It's an obscure movie.

So last night I tracked it down & watched it again.

Some thoughts:

First, the concert scene where Peter Sellers is presumably playing an atonal Precoviev piano concerto is absolutely hilarious, especially when Sellers keeps hitting the wrong note, and the conductor refuses to let the orchestra start playing, & Sellers keeps getting more & more exasperated until finally the conductor silently mouths, "B Flat."

Second, there is a fair amount of what would be considered racism today in the film. Inspired by the titular character's surname, the girls stalk Peter Sellers wearing coolie hats and performing "Ah so" bowing rituals.

Is this offensive?

Most people under 60 would find it so.

Aging Boomer that I am, I guess what I would say is that playing with stereotypes in this way is a form of teasing, & I wish more people did it. Specifically, I wish that white people were teased this way in movies—except, though, what exactly are stereotypic white people behaviors?? Double parking? Collecting refrigerator magnets? Inability to dance?

I suppose "white people" in the United States is a synonym for "people of European descent," and most of us identify with country of origin.

Still. I think gentle humor is a step toward demystification. And demystification is the only real way to end the Fear of the Other & related xenophobias.

I know, I know. It's off to the Reeducation Camp for Aging Boomers for me.

Temps rose just high enough last night so that snow turned to freezing rain.

Morning came. The rain continued to fall, the temps continued to rise.

By noon, the driveway was coated in three inches of slush.

So, this afternoon, I spent two and a half hours shoveling slush. And another hour sprinkling 50 pounds of rock salt along the layer of brittle ice (impervious to shovels) that had formed on top of the frozen ground.

Hey! It's a long driveway, & fuckin' Icky—who just bought a Tesla—is too cheap to spring for asphalt. Once upon a time, the driveway was a gravel track, but now it's kind of a drove road (thank you, puddleshark!) Temperatures are going to plummet back down again tonight. And I don't want to have to deal with a skating rink whenever I drive the car home.

Slush is heavy, & it was a lot of work. Thank God, I've been going to the gym! Even so, I'm gonna feel it tomorrow.

I suppose I should congratulate myself on being physically up to the task.

But instead, I blamed myself for not being able to outsource. I'm flush for the moment & would cheerfully have hired someone—but who do you hire? This ain't plowing. Inherently lazy, I guess. C'est moi.

Christmas was the Big Fun.

Being completely neurotic, I had to talk myself into not canceling: Basically, I wanted to lie in bed for two days with the covers pulled up over my head since my client was never gonna pay me, and that meant this was the last Christmas I was even gonna have a bed, right? Next year, it was gonna be a couple of pieces of soggy cardboard in the Refrigerator Box Under the Bridge. Enjoy it while you can!

Plus, there would be Nazis. I wasn't sure how the Nazis were going to work their way in there, but I was sure they would.

Don't be ridiculous, I chided myself.

And drove to Poughkeepsie to hop the train.

###

The City was.... the City.

It is the environment that shaped me, and it is such an odd environment, sui generis, you know, so visiting is always a homecoming: It is the only place I 1,000% feel like I belong.

A good omen! When I got off the shuttle at Times Square, a Peruvian shaman was performing in front of my grandfather's mural!



(No, I mean the guy in the red tie is not my grandfather. I doubt very much the mural artist knew my grandfather. It just happens to look exactly like my grandfather.)

###

Real-life Flavia is very, very wealthy. She lives in a townhouse in the West Village on a meandering street that predates the grid that NYC planners imposed in 1811 when the city's population began to explode. Nearly two centuries later, a bunch of LA producers decided to lodge the fictional Phoebe from Friends on this street, though even in 2004, there is no way a waitress could ever have afforded it.

Real-life Flavia has simple tastes, so the townhouse does not scream ostentation. But the details are all the best—an incredible kitchen island of orange marble, wonderful art on the walls, exquisite appliances.

She has no supernatural beliefs about her own exceptionalism, either. Later on, while we were out tromping—I have been one acquainted with the night: oh, how I miss walking around cities at night!—she remarked out of nowhere, "I know how incredibly fortunate I am. And I wonder about it." A throwaway line: She wasn't being defensive, and I hadn't asked.

I shrugged. "Well, it's not as though your life has been bereft of tragedies." I listed a few. "But it's true. You are never going to go mad for a week after invoicing a client, wondering if they will pay."

"No," she said. "I never will."

"But then, I'm never going to have my home in Gaza City destroyed by IDF bombs," I said. "Prosperity is relative. Still, if you don't feel odd talking about it, I have a weird request."

"What?" she asked.

"Well, you know, I'm writing a novel. About Brian. And the fictionalized protagonists are me, you, & Daria. Alternating first-person POVs. And your first-person section is the last first-person section. I'd love to delve down deep with you some time about what it feels like to be rich."

"Sure," she said.

###

I'd carted along Mexican food from a place in Hyde Park—the best Mexican food I've found in the Mid-Hudson Valley, which, of course, is not saying much—so we ate and afterwards repaired to the media room to watch my very favorite Christmas movie of all times: 12 Monkeys. (Yes, boys & girls! Technically, 12 Monkeys is a Christmas movie.)

"Only good movie Terry Gilliam ever made," I said. "But what a movie."

"I don't like Brazil at all," Flavia said.

"I know, right? And The Fisher King is just this maudlin excercise in sentimentality."

"The Time Bandits is okay."

"You think? But 12 Monkeys is so fucking great—"

And it is!

Is fate predetermined? A man travels backward in time to look for ways to prevent the virus that will decimate humanity and drive it underground.

But it is only because the man traveled backward in time to describe the virus that the mad scientist hatches the plot to release the virus, and the 10-year-old boy who will grow up to be Bruce Willis watches, uncomprehending, his adult self die:



The movie dovetails so exquisitely. The use of wide-angle photography & canted angles to denote the Willis character's inner turmoil. Low-tech single cuts are only used when Willis is time-traveling—complete reversal of the common sci-fi film technique, which is to pull out the heavy special effects artillary when they are time traveling. The dark, dark shooting palette is only relieved by the bright pops of the red Army of the 12 Monkeys logo. The art direction so perfectly underscores the script: The only things that are worth looking at are the things that nobody looks at.

"The movie never changes," Bruce Willis tells Madeleine Stowe. "It can't change. But every time you see it, it seems different, because you're different. You see different things."



The next morning, we hopped the subway to venture forth to deepest, darkest Flushing. Little Beijing!

We rendezvoused with Betsy and then bopped around, staring at many wondrous things. In Little Beijing, Christmas Day is just a day like any other day. The sidewalk vendors were hawking their goods, the stores were crowded, the streets were thronged.









We ended up driving to Kew Gardens for Christmas lunch. Betsy's old nabe, I think she was feeling nostalgic. The restaurant where we ate was one of her old haunts. The people who run it know her, watched her kids grow up, & the kids still come in some time. (For various reasons too complicated to go into here—except to observe that while I like her, she is what you would have to call a Difficult Person—Betsy is completely estranged from her kids, so it was sweet & strange listening to Betsy quiz the waitress: "Natalia came in? What was she wearing?")



Then we went to hang out at this tiny café that had just opened!!! The proprietor was from Paris, and why his life's ambition was to open a café in fuckin' Queens on Christmas day and force his beleagured baristas to wear berets is beyond me, but hey! Why not? The cappucinos were delicious and the mocha slices sublime.



Then Betsy took off and Flavia & I went to see a movie where Hugh Jackman played a Neil Diamond impersonator. Theater was packed. Not a single member of the audience was under 60! Perfect movie to round out Jewish Christmas! Schmaltzy, but undeniably heartwarming.



Subway-ed back to Flavia's casa. The tromp through the West Village took us past a couture shop designed to resemble a thrift store so that $1,000 dresses were strewn on wire hangers along bare metal racks. The City's premier bagel & cheese emporium had constructed this delightful whimsy in its front window:



My heart was so light! I felt so happy!

Even the certain knowledge that the very next evening I would be dealing with awful stuff once again—12 ground inches (ugh!) of Hideous White Stuff From the Sky and life in the Refrigerator Box Under the Bridge—did not quash the sheer joy of the moment. I am alive! I thought. The night is beautiful, and I am alive to see it!

####

And whaddiya know? Five miles up the road in Pine Bush, they got 14 inches of snow last night! But we only got six. We dodged the bullet. And in a miraculous display of un-dickish behavior, Icky actually dug my car out for me.

Plus the client paid me.

I'm tempted to qualify that as "the client finally paid me," but the truth is the invoice did not actually take that long to process. It is me who is absolutely insane & neurotic about all of this. If I am going to continue freelancing—& I mean, I am very good at doing the actual work demanded of the role—I have got to think of some way to prevent myself from going all borderline over the billing process.

I do not think I have borderline personality disorder. My mother, though, was a Grade AAA borderline. I was raised by her; it was just the two of us till I was 16 & old enough to escape. And I have what I would characterize as a mimetic personality: Put me in a room with people who have an accent, and within an hour, I'll start channeling their inflections. I don't do it by design! It's an unconscious behavior, a kind of protective mimicry. My personality is porous—which serves me well as a writer but not as a human being. I have weak ego boundaries.

This past week, I was channeling my crazy borderline mother.

And it was not a pleasant feeling.

Flavia sent me the perfect solstice sunrise:



And RTT got sworn in this morning:

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: