AlexPGP's Corner

I've always avoided treadmills, but as my customary outdoor tromping routes are frozen under a thin but lethal scrim of ice, I decided to hop on one yesterday at the gym.

I must say, I rather liked it!

You bliss off into whatever audiobook or podcast you're following—I'm currrently listening to Walter Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, a very strange novel—and then just pound away.

It's consistent. It's efficient. When I hopped off, I could feel my muscles had been exercised in a way they don't feel on the spinning bike—which is more a cardiovascular thing anyway.

I think I will add it to my three-times-a-week gym workouts.

###

From the gym in Middletown, I drove all the way to New Paltz to have lunch with Belinda. Long drives are de rigueur when you live in the boonies unless you want to hang out at a liquor store. (Wallkill does not have a single grocery store. In fact, the whole of Shawangunk Township does not have a single grocery store. I live in a food desert! But there are a lot of liquor stores.)

Belinda has started attending Jehovah's Witness bible classes.

She was very shy & soft, confiding this to me.

But, in fact, I approve—though I did tell her, "You know, I've always found Jay-Dubs to be very nice people. In fact, my favorite tax client year before last was a Jay-Dub reverend, a very intelligent, very eloquent man. But, you know, it is a cult, so if you start to convert, I will stage an intervention."

She laughed. Assured me: No chance of that.

But I wonder.

Still. After deep immersion in the Owning Manhattan ethos for two nights in a row, I'm all in favor of anything that makes people ponder the spiritual aspects of their sojourn in this time/space continuum. If you can't be kind to others because generosity is not one of your innate personality traits, then kindness is something that needs to be enforced through congregational edict. Kindness to other people is that important.

"You know, your friendship is very important to me," Belinda told me as we were saying goodbye. "I value it highly. I love you."

Which was nice to hear since I've been feeling so singularly repulsive lately.

And it made me ponder the nature of friendship.

###

In the end, friends are not necessarily the people you care about the most. They're the people who, for one reason or another, stick.

In Monterey, my best friend was Jeannie DeTomaso.

We became best friends because our children, RTT & Sydney, were besties. Jeannie was beautiful and luminous. "Saint Jeannie," Susan used to call her.

At the same time, I had an incredibly annoying neighbor named Heidi. Who was petty & vain and had a morbid fascination with true crime. Heidi and I were thrown together when I found out that she thought my cat Fritz was her cat Henry because he showed up at her house regularly at meal times.

Jeannie had a complicated family history. Her parents belonged to a weird, splinter Holy Roller cult. In fact, her earliest memories were of waking up in the middle of the night to hear her parents babbling loudly & incomprehensibly: They were speaking in tongues.

Jeannie's father was long dead by the time I knew her. Her mother, Elizabeth, was surviving on about $400 of social security a month but owned a house that was assessed at something like $2 million, Pacific Grove at that time being the capital of the Cash Poor But Land Rich.

Elizabeth developed Alzheimer's, and all of Jeannie's pals banded together to provide her with respite care. I watched Elizabeth one afternoon a week. I remember being quite fascinated by the way Elizabeth would sit and read the same back-to-back pages of a novel—ironically The Time Traveler's Wife—over and over and over again. Her entire memory—85 years!— compressed into the time it took her to read 500 words. It was like a Monkey's Paw version of the Ram Dass addage: Be Here Now.

Then Elizabeth died.

And Jeannie stopped talking to me.

I wasn't special, Jeannie's husband Tony assured me: Jeannie had stopped talking to everyone. "She's psychotic," he told me. (A year or so later, they divorced.)

Heidi had not stopped talking to me. Heidi was still feeding my cat. And meeting me on the back porch for coffee every other day. When in an overabundance of enthusiasm, I confided her one day that as a very young child, I'd had memories of a former life and that's why I believe in reincarnation, Heidi just looked at me appraisingly. "But that degree of splintering and dissociation is very common in abused children. You were an abused child, weren't you?"

Fast forward 20 years & Heidi and I are friends. I spent a lot of time with her when I was in Monterey a year ago.

Jeannie & I are not friends. A circumstance I still regret and blame myself for: What did I do? Though I know perfectly well I didn't do anything, that Jeannie had—as her husband told me—flipped out and that the only way she could find a center again (any center) was to weed out the people in her life who were guardians of certain untrustworthy memories.

Anyway, Belinda has become a friend in the same way Heidi is a friend.


Life can be unpredictable.

Baaaaad time of year. At this point in my life, I'd rather be savoring the moments, sprinkling them with imagination, stretching them out. But instead, all I can do is hunker down, stare out a window at the pitiless winter landscape, reassure myself, This, too, shall pass.

I'll want those moments back when I'm dying, that's for sure.

###

Meanwhile, it didn't snow all day yesterday, but it might as well have because the part of the day it didn't snow was spent reading the sky, testing the wind, waiting for it to snow.

I did a bit of Useful Work and a useless tax class on Zoom—hey! they're paying me. Played around some with the Work in Progress and unwittingly solved a transition problem before it could turn into awkward prose. Did not exercise, which is possibly why I could not break the gloomy mood.

###

Finished I Have Some Questions for You. Boarding school books must be an actual literary genre! This one is not near the top of the list. The protagonist is a celebrity because she helms a successful podcast. And I'm thinking, Really??? I mean, there are celebrity podcasters, but mostly they were celebrities before they became podcasters; they are leveraging their celebrity to carry the podcast, right?

The protagonist has this gurgley, chick-lit voice, which is wrong, wrong, wrong for a murder mystery. The basic conceit of the book (actually kinda interesting) is that the real murderer, the figure emerging from the shadows, is the teacher who had an affair with the murder victim, the same sympathetic teacher who devoted energy to bringing the protagonist out of her adolescent shell. Except this proves to be a misfire! So, what we're left with at the end of the book is that the titular You behaved... inappropriately. And those kinds of transgressions are less moral absolutes than violations of au courant cultural imperatives.

###

Speaking of au courant cultural imperatives...

In the evening, I watched multiple episodes of the real estate bling show, Owning Manhattan.

And fell into despair!

How do people end up spending $250 million on an apartment?

The $300 heating oil bill for me this month is gonna be tough to pay!

What kind of an abysmal, absolute failure am I that I can't spend $250 million on an apartment? That I can't even spend 50¢ on an apartment?

Why does money have so many zeroes in it now?

Plus, the Upper West Side that I grew up in is practically unrecognizable now. What did they have to tear down to build the great glass tower at 200 Amsterdam? I was scouring my memory. What used to be there? And suddenly this visual sense memory just rushed in: Annie's old apartment on W. 68th and the little diner next door to it, I could see the breakfast plates now, practically smell them: the sunny-side up eggs floating in a little pool of grease, the crunchy hashbrowns, the thick white china plates...

What will happen to that $250 million apartment in 100 years? Will it still be the apex of luxury living? It can't possibly be, right? The cycle is the Ozymandias Factor, boom then bust, palaces dissolving into tenaments.

But I can't even wrap my head around what comes next.

If I'm braindead, so be it!

I'll spend the rest of my life watching movies.

###

Last night, I watched something called The Friend, in which Naomi Watts inherits a massive Great Dane from Bill Murray after he commits suicide, and it was the saddest movie ever because even though Naomi Watts eventually comes to love the dog, at the beginning of the movie she doesn't, she's just stuck with him because nobody else will take him, so the movie made me think of the fragility and ultimate unenforceability of the compacts we form with companion animals.
This hit home for me because I don't love the two cats currently my companion animals as much as I've loved companion animals in the past.

Molly & Mabel are not cuddly cats.

They don't sit on laps. They don't like to be picked up and... packaged, enfolded with affection. They will struggle if I try to do this. They are wary & guarded with everyone but me: Gus reported he did not see them once while I was away in Ithaca over Thanksgiving, and Icky reported that while Molly kiska would sit at the head of the stairs and stare down at him, she would never come down.

Sometimes, they are even wary & guarded with me.

Mabel will still hiss at me occasionally—not because she is an aggressive cat but because she is a very frightened cat. She has a scar on her head swooping down from her ear to her left eye, and I suspect she was badly used as a kitten, poor little girl.

Clearly, they love me in their own way.

Molly always trails me downstairs whenever I cook and at night, crawls into bed alongside me and kneads on blankets there; Mabel is forever flopping down on my feet and exposing her plump belly: Pet me please!



It's so odd the way both of them adore having their bellies rubbed but can hardly bear to be touched on any other part of their anatomy! Most cats of my acquaintance have been the other way around.

They are quite the most talkative cats I have ever been around. Molly will meow to me for 15 minutes straight if I keep asking her, "What, Molly? What?"

"It's good that you have the two cats," Brian told me. "They're like your little family. You need a little family."

###

But I am disloyal. I keep thinking, It would be easier to move if I didn't have the two cats. It would be easier to travel.

And I feel bad for thinking that because I take the animal/human compact very seriously. These kiskas are so eccentric and idiosyncratic that no one would ever want them except me—and I only half want them.

They trust me.

They hardly trust anything else outside their own bodies and instincts.

But they trust me.

Betraying that trust would be like betraying the universe somehow.

But I'm tempted to sometimes.

Watch on YouTube

What happens when one feels humiliated & ashamed is that one loses the narrative thread of one's own life.

Because how can what happens to you be at all important?

You're an idiot!!!

And idiots don't deserve to have stories.

Serious recalibration is called for.

###

Anyhoo, the storm was dramatic but only dropped four inches of snow. While I watched the snow fall, I baked banana bread & prepared a complicated chicken Florentine dish. (See? I can cook! I just choose not to most of the time.)

All I wanted to do was read & watch mindless television, but no could do because I have approximately 1 billion pages of the U.S. tax code to memorize, plus all the usual Remuneration.

Betsy invited me to spend a weekend at her fabulous house in Westchester County.

Real-life Daria invited me to spend the winter at her house in California. She wants to give Brian's car to her son, but I suspect she has not thought that one through because she's also on the verge of trading in 30 years of freelance teaching & translation for a real job with benefits & security & everything, but also with only two weeks of mandated vacation per year—is she really gonna want to spend that precious two weeks transporting a car from New York to California?

If she does, we are chatting about me driving with her. Road trip! That would be mid-April.

If she doesn't, then I end up with Brian's car.

###

Somewhere around then, too, I must mastermind my own next move.

I've been going back and forth between whether I should relocate to Ithaca or back to Dutchess County.

Dutchess County has the advantage of being a short train ride away from New York City where I would very much like to spend more time. And I have pals in the area.

I know more people in Ithaca, though. Plus RTT is there. If last week's unfortunate mishap is any kind of foreshadowing of how I can expect my dotage to transpire, it would be best to be around family members upon whom I can endlessly presume.

###

I haven't gone near the Work in Progress in a couple of weeks.

I'm thinking I should start Chapter 4 today.

A large chunk of it takes place in a small-ish community hospital during COVID.

But I don't know anything about how small-ish community hospitals operated during COVID. And I'm not sure how to track that information down.

I guess I'm just gonna have to make it up.

The generic name for Wellbutrin is "bupropion," and to an addled brain that has been surviving on three hours of sleep per night for four days, "bupropion" does look like "ibuprofen." The pills look like ibuprofen, too.

Why the pills were in a pharmacy vial was something my exhausted brain was ill-prepared to reason through. (Lucid answer: They wouldn't be.)

Anyway, that's why I took them.

Sleepiness is not one of ibuprofen's on-label or off-label effects—except that ibuprofen does make me sleepy—and at that point, I would have done anything to sleep...

###

Afterwards, I thought about the actor Heath Ledger. Who died of a drug overdose at the age of 28 in 2008, not because he was trying to kill himself, but because he was trying to fall asleep.

"Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. ... I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going," he told a New York Times journalist shortly before his death.

I could relate.

Like me, Heath Ledger had lost the ability to fall into unconsciousness.

He could not let go.

More or less, this has been my ground state, too, since Brian died. I could not fall because I could not lose control. Brian was no longer there to have my back if I lost control. Brian had been my emotional lodestar, the only person who really, really knew me, the good and the bad, and loved me anyway. I did not have to tap dance to keep Brian's love; I only had to be.

After Brian died, I was in a great hurry to bundle up the grief and dispose of it, but, of course, grief does not work that way; it is that thing in the ghost story that's impossible to give away.

###

Anyway, it took me an hour or so to figure out what I had done. Poison control was alerted: I needed to go to the ER. It was too late to do activated charcoal, but I needed to be on a lactated Ringers IV to flush the poison out of my system, and I needed to be observed for 24 hours in case I had a seizure.

First time in my adult life I'd spent time as a patient in a hospital without giving birth. Hospitals are unpleasant environments. Every 15 minutes, someone is coming in to take your blood pressure or run an electrocardiogram or use you as a prop while they discuss your case with medical colleagues. Ironic! You won't die from the drug OD, but they won't let you sleep, and sleeplessness was my real issue.

Wellbutrin in high doses turns out to be a hallucinogen. Fortunately for me, I did so much LSD as a young 'un that I am perfectly comfortable with hallucinations. The drug also fucks with your short-term memory & cognition—and that was interesting: At one point, I was trying to explain something to someone, and they were staring at me with this absolute lack of comprehension, and I realized, I am not making any sense.

And I thought: This is what it must feel like to have dementia! Things that make perfect sense to you make no sense to anyone else, and when you express them, they look at you with a panicky expression on their faces.

###

I was released after 24 hours of observation.

Thank God I have health insurance!

Naturally, I am feeling deeply embarrassed, ashamed, & demoralized by the whole episode. What an absolutely fucking stupid thing to do.

But I decided I was not going to cover up the experience, humiliating though it was.

I mean, I'm not going to go up to random people on the street: Guess where I spent the day-before the day before Thanksgiving!

But I'm not going to hide it. And I'm writing about it here.

RTT left me a phone message while I was in the hospital: Silly things happen so don't beat yourself up. I feel like my biggest concern right now is that you're beating yourself up. I love you lots. You are amazing.

Ichabod was more circumspect. "I would like you to get some sort of cognitive testing through your primary care provider," he told me, and I agreed to because doing something like this was just so fucking dumb, and if I am beginning some sort of mental spiral, I need to know.

Jeanna was the one who understood what happened best. "That is absolutely the worst, isn't it? That moment when you realize you can't maintain."

###

On the way back to the AirBnB from the hospital, the BoyZ took me by a dispensary where I loaded up on CBD (anti-anxiety) and cannabis sleep aids.

They seem to be working.

We spent Thanksgiving at Allyn's.

Allyn was working at New Roots when RTT was a student there, so technically, I've known her for 15 years, but this was the first time I'd hung out with her at any length. She's a chef and put on quite the spread, and we all cozied up in her living room eating three differently prepped turkeys and five kinds of pie and watching mindless football.

She could not have been any warmer or more supportive. "I feel such a strong connection with you!" she told me. "When it's time for you to move, I will help you find a place up here." Allyn is very well connected.

Friday, the BoyZ & I went to the movies and then hung out at Personal Best and played board games where you ask questions like At a restaurant, I resist the free bread because I don't want to spoil my dinner and If I don't get enough sleep, my whole day is ruined (sic!) and then guess if the person the statement is about would say it is true or false.

Then Saturday, Ichabod & I departed, and RTT went back to real life.

I arrived back in the Hudson Valley just before it started to snow. The first serious snow of winter: Thanksgiving is the official “Welcome to Winter” calendar moment, after all. That snow didn't stick.

Today's storm will though. We're expecting seven inches.

I am (understandably) feeling very fragile. It will take me a while to recalibrate emotionally. And Brian is still dead. But at least I can sleep, which means I can take care of what needs to be taken care of. It would be nice if "self-care" were on that list, but in fact, it seldom is.