Daria
Aug. 19th, 2025 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraDrove up to Brian's house yesterday to say goodbye to Daria who is red-eyeing it back to California tonight.
GPS decided to take me on an exciting tour of the eastern Catskills. It was a lovely day, so not unpleasant.
Thing about GPS in the Catskills is that there is no cell coverage. Like nil, nada, niente. And the narrow roads have unexpected forks that GPS does not account for, and the unexpected forks always seem more attractive than the straight & narrow path—do we all see the metaphor here?—so it is very, very easy to get completely lost, especially for people like me who were born with no sense of direction.
When that happens, one must simply trust that GPS will make the necessary adjustments, and that eventually, one will get where one wanted to go.
GPS, in other words, is a lot like the Judeo-Christian God.
###
Brian's old house was having a Prius convention.
'Cause the one unifying characteristic of Brian's sister wives—let's call it like it is!—seems to be that we all drive hybrids.
Daria, Flavia, & Mimi were there, of course. And also Frigg—who, before she retired, wrote every single developmental disability regulation currently extant in the state of New York. Frigg is a rather lovely person, soft-spoken, & as we are both policy wonks, I was immediately drawn to her.
###
I would have invited myself up for a sleepover this week if it had been only Flavia & Daria up at the house.
But I will confess to having a hard time with Mimi, who is a bitter person though it's kinda hard to separate that out from the rest of her bipolar diagnosis. Mimi does not take meds for her bipolar diagnosis; she self-medicates by smoking copious quantities of weed.
I try not to be judgy about that, though naturally, I don't succeed 'cause c'mon: When am I not judgy?
I do know the standard pharmaceutical cocktail for bipolar disease is very, very hard on the body.
But I kinda have to wonder whether Mimi's self-medicating is actually working.
For one thing, she continues to make a lot of really bad executive decisions that have a negative impact on her life.
For another, she is constantly erupting into torrents of the most vituperative rage against people whose transgressions seem pretty minor to moi.
For example: Two of Brian's X-lovers came to Brian-Palooza. They'd stopped wanting to have sex with him—hey! that happens!—one of them because she wanted to invest more energy into her marriage, the other because of some random Ick Factor. We've all experienced that random Ick Factor. One day you wake up, and this person with whom you've been having the hottest sex imaginable just isn't doing it for you anymore. Who knows why? I mean, yeah, sure, there are proximal causes if you care to spend the time analyzing. But why bother? The salient thing is you don't want to fuck them anymore!
Brian was upset by these two rejections.
Brian cried; the sister wives comforted & distracted.
Brian got over it.
At the time of his death, he was great friends with these two X-lovers—Cathy & Kathy as they are! 😀—so why Mimi decided to stalk around in a black cloud, making dramatic proclamations like, How dare those cunts show their faces? is a great mystery to me.
###
"She tried to come up to me," Mimi said as we were all sitting on Brian's porch.
She was talking about Kathy—who is actually a very nice woman if a bit woo-woo even for my rarified woo-woo sensibilities. When she isn't practicing astral projection, Kathy is an educational consultant. She recently set up a computing, code-writing camp for underprivileged girls in Alabama, so I'd say the net impact of Kathy has on this planet is a positive one.
Vinnie had shoved a bag with about fifty cucumber & chicken salad sandwiches at me as I departed from the Palooza the day before. I'd brought about a dozen up to the Catskills; they were sitting on a plate in the middle of the porch. Nobody wanted to eat them.
"She wanted to bond," Mimi said. "I just turned my back. Turned my back! And if she had kept it up, I would have turned around and screamed at her—"
No, you would not, I thought. Because had you, I would have taken you by the scruff of your neck and booted you out the door.
Brian's memorial was an event that I had organized. There isn't any of that at my events.
But no need to waste energy over things that never happened! So, I went on smiling serenely while shooting the sandwiches some nervous side-eye.
Surely, I wouldn't have to take the sandwiches home again! Or would I?
Then Mimi wanted to read us a long drawn out text exchange from somebody named Ruth who had not been at the event yesterday and whose connection to Brian seemed tenuous at best.
"Whoa! This is some real-life Housewives shit!" said Lindsey.
Lindsey is Flavia's cousin and a real-life reality TV producer. She'd shown up half an hour after I had. She does not drive a Prius.
I fell instantly in love with Lindsey after discovering that she, too, had been urging Flavia to watch The Real Housewives of Miami.
"I keep telling her," Lindsey said to me, "Miami this season is everything!"
"OmyGAWD!" I said. "Larsa & Lisa!"
"She won't stop following my X-boyfriend on Instagram!!!" we crowed in unison.
###
Daria had slipped off the porch and into the house to sort more through Brian's books.
In the car afterwards, she confided to me that she had issues with Mimi, too. "This is the fourth time she's told that Ruth story, and it gets longer every time."
Daria is an extremely beautiful & intriguing woman. Kind of an Anaïs Nin prototype:
She was born in Mexico City. Her father was a Basque priest who fled from Franco's Spain! She speaks five languages!
And she's just immensely charming. Seductive, one might say.
We want to be friends because we were both so close to Brian, and I think we have the potential to be friends. But, of course, there has to be a basis for friendship other than the fact that we both loved Brian. And it is that basis we are trying to discover.
Should we do a writers group together? Daria asked.
Well, I would guess that I am a much better writer than Daria. No puffing or posturing there: Writing happens to be the one thing I do exceptionally well.
And writing is one of the few things I take very seriously. I suspect more seriously than Daria.
So I suspect if we do the writing group thing and the writing group falls apart really fast because neither of us is particularly invested in the other's actual writing, it might actually be deleterious to our burgeoning friendship.
So, I think instead, I am going to join her Finnegan's Wake reading group. It meets once a week on Zoom.
And we will grow the intimacy from there.
In the meantime, we tromped around a weird little Ukrainian summer camp and shared backstories:
Gotta say, Daria's backstory may even be more interesting than mine!
And I have an interesting backstory.
GPS decided to take me on an exciting tour of the eastern Catskills. It was a lovely day, so not unpleasant.
Thing about GPS in the Catskills is that there is no cell coverage. Like nil, nada, niente. And the narrow roads have unexpected forks that GPS does not account for, and the unexpected forks always seem more attractive than the straight & narrow path—do we all see the metaphor here?—so it is very, very easy to get completely lost, especially for people like me who were born with no sense of direction.
When that happens, one must simply trust that GPS will make the necessary adjustments, and that eventually, one will get where one wanted to go.
GPS, in other words, is a lot like the Judeo-Christian God.
###
Brian's old house was having a Prius convention.
'Cause the one unifying characteristic of Brian's sister wives—let's call it like it is!—seems to be that we all drive hybrids.
Daria, Flavia, & Mimi were there, of course. And also Frigg—who, before she retired, wrote every single developmental disability regulation currently extant in the state of New York. Frigg is a rather lovely person, soft-spoken, & as we are both policy wonks, I was immediately drawn to her.
###
I would have invited myself up for a sleepover this week if it had been only Flavia & Daria up at the house.
But I will confess to having a hard time with Mimi, who is a bitter person though it's kinda hard to separate that out from the rest of her bipolar diagnosis. Mimi does not take meds for her bipolar diagnosis; she self-medicates by smoking copious quantities of weed.
I try not to be judgy about that, though naturally, I don't succeed 'cause c'mon: When am I not judgy?
I do know the standard pharmaceutical cocktail for bipolar disease is very, very hard on the body.
But I kinda have to wonder whether Mimi's self-medicating is actually working.
For one thing, she continues to make a lot of really bad executive decisions that have a negative impact on her life.
For another, she is constantly erupting into torrents of the most vituperative rage against people whose transgressions seem pretty minor to moi.
For example: Two of Brian's X-lovers came to Brian-Palooza. They'd stopped wanting to have sex with him—hey! that happens!—one of them because she wanted to invest more energy into her marriage, the other because of some random Ick Factor. We've all experienced that random Ick Factor. One day you wake up, and this person with whom you've been having the hottest sex imaginable just isn't doing it for you anymore. Who knows why? I mean, yeah, sure, there are proximal causes if you care to spend the time analyzing. But why bother? The salient thing is you don't want to fuck them anymore!
Brian was upset by these two rejections.
Brian cried; the sister wives comforted & distracted.
Brian got over it.
At the time of his death, he was great friends with these two X-lovers—Cathy & Kathy as they are! 😀—so why Mimi decided to stalk around in a black cloud, making dramatic proclamations like, How dare those cunts show their faces? is a great mystery to me.
###
"She tried to come up to me," Mimi said as we were all sitting on Brian's porch.
She was talking about Kathy—who is actually a very nice woman if a bit woo-woo even for my rarified woo-woo sensibilities. When she isn't practicing astral projection, Kathy is an educational consultant. She recently set up a computing, code-writing camp for underprivileged girls in Alabama, so I'd say the net impact of Kathy has on this planet is a positive one.
Vinnie had shoved a bag with about fifty cucumber & chicken salad sandwiches at me as I departed from the Palooza the day before. I'd brought about a dozen up to the Catskills; they were sitting on a plate in the middle of the porch. Nobody wanted to eat them.
"She wanted to bond," Mimi said. "I just turned my back. Turned my back! And if she had kept it up, I would have turned around and screamed at her—"
No, you would not, I thought. Because had you, I would have taken you by the scruff of your neck and booted you out the door.
Brian's memorial was an event that I had organized. There isn't any of that at my events.
But no need to waste energy over things that never happened! So, I went on smiling serenely while shooting the sandwiches some nervous side-eye.
Surely, I wouldn't have to take the sandwiches home again! Or would I?
Then Mimi wanted to read us a long drawn out text exchange from somebody named Ruth who had not been at the event yesterday and whose connection to Brian seemed tenuous at best.
"Whoa! This is some real-life Housewives shit!" said Lindsey.
Lindsey is Flavia's cousin and a real-life reality TV producer. She'd shown up half an hour after I had. She does not drive a Prius.
I fell instantly in love with Lindsey after discovering that she, too, had been urging Flavia to watch The Real Housewives of Miami.
"I keep telling her," Lindsey said to me, "Miami this season is everything!"
"OmyGAWD!" I said. "Larsa & Lisa!"
"She won't stop following my X-boyfriend on Instagram!!!" we crowed in unison.
###
Daria had slipped off the porch and into the house to sort more through Brian's books.
In the car afterwards, she confided to me that she had issues with Mimi, too. "This is the fourth time she's told that Ruth story, and it gets longer every time."
Daria is an extremely beautiful & intriguing woman. Kind of an Anaïs Nin prototype:
She was born in Mexico City. Her father was a Basque priest who fled from Franco's Spain! She speaks five languages!
And she's just immensely charming. Seductive, one might say.
We want to be friends because we were both so close to Brian, and I think we have the potential to be friends. But, of course, there has to be a basis for friendship other than the fact that we both loved Brian. And it is that basis we are trying to discover.
Should we do a writers group together? Daria asked.
Well, I would guess that I am a much better writer than Daria. No puffing or posturing there: Writing happens to be the one thing I do exceptionally well.
And writing is one of the few things I take very seriously. I suspect more seriously than Daria.
So I suspect if we do the writing group thing and the writing group falls apart really fast because neither of us is particularly invested in the other's actual writing, it might actually be deleterious to our burgeoning friendship.
So, I think instead, I am going to join her Finnegan's Wake reading group. It meets once a week on Zoom.
And we will grow the intimacy from there.
In the meantime, we tromped around a weird little Ukrainian summer camp and shared backstories:
Gotta say, Daria's backstory may even be more interesting than mine!
And I have an interesting backstory.
