AlexPGP's Corner

About six weeks ago, I saw a craigslist posting for a collective household in T-burg: Someone had just bought a Big Old House; they wanted sympatico people to move into it to form a sympatico household. Numerous photos of the house, of the grounds. They liked animals! They wanted people with pets!

I immediately dashed off a reply: Here are my many virtues. Blah, blah, blah.

I was disappointed when I did not hear back.

Okay, I thought. Well, not everyone wants to live with a septuagenarian. Or maybe they had all the residents but one lined up, and I was just not that one.

Three days ago, I saw the listing again and replied again—a tad more plaintively.

And did not hear back.

This irked me.

I mean, my reply had been a masterpiece! Flash fiction of the highest order! Sprightly yet subtle! Informative without the cringe factor!

Maybe I'm just repulsive! I thought. Back in the days of the Little Store, on days when we made practically no sales, I would often wonder about my own repulsiveness. I figured it was sort of like a radio beacon; depending on the weather or the white noise, it would pulse strongly or erratically, but it was always there, and people sensed it, and that's why they didn't flock to the Little Store to buy dozens of bottles of my own trademarked Monterey hot sauces Beast of Eden & The Chilis of Wrath!

Brian was very good at quelling this particular anxiety loop.

"Repeat after me," he'd say. "Say it loud, say it proud: 'I Am a Real Human Girl'."

He also found it extremely hilarious, which is exactly the right reaction for someone like me. I need to be laughed out of my own psychic contortions. The "Poor you" schtick doesn't work on me because even at my most self-pitying, I am perfectly cognizant of the fact that my life is better than 90% of the lives on this planet.

###

Anyway, the woman who bought the house finally emailed me yesterday, enormously apologetic that she hadn't contacted me sooner: I've been in the process of moving! My mom came to town to help!

We Zoomed this morning. And were amazingly sympatico.

She is an untenured professor at Cornell, proud member of the SDA (Social Democrats of America), writing a book on the history of child care labor in the U.S., how various stakeholders (labor unions, immigrant rights advocacy groups, federal agencies, municipal task forces, nanny and domestic worker placement agencies) value child care labor. She is also drop-dead gorgeous, so naturally, my mamala mind began sizing her up as a potential Ichabod mate. I restrained myself from asking how wide her hips are, though.

Next step will be a meeting with the other house residents and a tour of the house. Conflicting schedules have pushed that meeting into August.

If all goes well, I'll give one month's notice at the beginning of September and move in October.

Fingers crossed!

###

Other than that...

I have been going through the motions simply because one must, but the spark is not there.

I remind myself: Good habits take a long time to make, so it's unwise to break them. If you stop doing all the beneficial things—exercise! self-care! make-up! cooking dinner! laundry!—you fall into a kind of mental swamp from which it becomes increasingly difficult to hoist yourself out. Those little habits are grounding. Grounding is something I have issues with having no earth signs whatsoever in my astrological chart.

###

I harvested my first cucumber from the Hyde Park garden:



The tomatoes still have a month or so before they come in.

###

Yesterday afternoon, I wandered over to the New Paltz garden for the first time in three weeks. The garden was hosting a mid-harvest potluck. I took one look at all the cheerful, earnest, handsome gardeners with their endless variations on cucumbers in yogurt dressing, and thought, Yes! Babbling affably to strangers is my one Great Superpower, but I cannot do this.

And ran away.

But not before I checked out my plot. It is once more overgrown with weeds, but the weeds are not unmanageable—I could get rid of them in a single day now that the heat wave is broken. Plus there is one little tomato plant! I grew it a peat cup from seed and planted it with a bunch of other seedlings, and they all died but this tomato plant survived my neglect! Surely, it deserves other vegetables! Basil, I'm thinking. I didn't plant any basil in the Hyde Park garden this year, and I miss my pesto.

###

However much of a struggle human company and good habits are, I am still able to lose myself if the distraction is right.

I've been speed-reading my way through the complete works of Jennifer Haigh. Finished Baker Towers, her first novel about the small Pennsylvania coal mining town where she grew up.

Kinda interesting to see how Haigh's literary chops have evolved. Baker Towers, written in 2004, is kinda your straight-up Kristin Hannah-style novel, simple declarative sentences, not much in the way of thematic connective tissue between the various characters' POV sections. Heat and Light, on the other hand, written in 2016, is extremely ambitious from a literary point of view with a rather complex figurative subtext and a surprising end point. I sense the Jennifer Egan influence.

###

I also watched Andrea Arnold's American Honey.

American Honey is a road trip film, an odyssey. Eighteen-year-old Texas girl living in squalid conditions with an abusive father runs off with an itinerant magazine crew. High jinx ensue.

It won the Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and though Sean Baker's The Florida Project came out only one year after, it's difficult not to imagine that American Honey didn't have a profound influence on Baker's movie. They are both describing the same phenomenon, how youth transforms otherwise harsh & unforgiving environments where people stuggle for survival into wild adventures filled with promise.

It's a long movie, nearly three hours, but I was transfixed throughout.

Two-thirds of the reviews I read afterwards complained that the movie just went on and on and on, but nothing happened! I think those reviewers have spent too much time in the Marvel Universe. This kind of story best is told by seamless integration of the music, the character acting, the improvised dialogue, the way locations are shot, the vibes in short. It would be poorly served by a linear narrative grid.

Finished Heat and Light.

Such an ambitious novel!

Has at least 15 POV characters who are rotated through the novel in 10-page bursts, giving the reader a multi-dimensional view of a dying town. None of the views are particularly sympathetic.

The town was modeled after the author's hometown of Barnesboro.

Barnesboro is a prime example of one of those places that if you end up in it (somehow), you think, Why is this here?

It's the fundamental question in economic geography.

Well. It's here because of its history. History is like gravity: You can't see it, you're mostly unaware of it, but it glues people to particular places. When they're young, they want to leave. But then they forget why they want to leave, and they stay.

###

Other than that, I did very little, though I did tromp—early in the morning, but not early enough to beat the heat. It's 80° here by 8 a.m. and very, very humid. This quashes any interest I might have in vacating the air-conditioned, kiska-and-plant-filled Patrizia-torium. (And let's not forget the Italian masks! Woo-woo!)

I'm still trying to come up with some kind of plot for the Neversink story.

But today, I really must Remunerate.

I started sleeping again. Monday night I actually slept 10 hours!

I have been tromping and going to the gym. Some days, both.

Flavia sez she ❤️LUV❤️s the idea of doing Brianpalooza at the Middletown tea house, so you know, good. Brianpalooza must have Flavia's blessing.

Apart from tromping, I have been pretty much a lazy slob. The Patrizia-torium looks like Atilla has been quartering some time-tripping Huns here.

And I haven't done anything in the way of serious revenue generation in about a week.

Instead, I have been watching an awful Lena Dunham show all about her breakup with Jack Antonoff and her hasty rebound marriage. And reading a book called Heat & Light by Jennifer Haigh, which is all about the intergenerational effects of fracking on a small town in southcentral Pennsylvania. It's very well written! And manages to connect coal mining, fracking, and Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania's three big dalliances with environmental disaster.

###

Environmental disasters fascinate me. I once wheedled Brian into doing a short road trip to Carbon County, Pennsylvania just so that I could see the culm banks, black mountains of anthracite coal waste, with my own eyes:




Meanwhile, Pennsylvania didn't do so good with fracking. Twenty years after the first wells were driven into the Marcellus shale, job creation has been just about nil, the water table is polluted, and residents wander around like characters in an H.P. Lovecraft story, complaining of nausea, headaches, nosebleeds, livestock that drop dead suddenly with no reason. Asthma is up; birth weights are down.

Somebody is clearly making money. Doubt it's the landowners, though.

I'm bored with grieving.

Brian would have thoroughly sympathized.

Brian was one of the least sentimental humans I've ever met.

###

Daria & I are sentimental enough to want to do a memorial. Flavia is not interested at all in doing a memorial, says Brian wouldn't have cared one way or another, which may or may not be true, but anyway, even if it is true, is entirely irrelevant: Memorials are for the survivors.

Flavia's reluctance does raise some issues, though. Like is she reluctant because she is too prostrate with grief to participate in anything? As the kinda/sorta Official Grieving Widow, will she resent it—consciously or unconsciously—if two survivors lower down on the Grief Ladder seize the initiative here?

No real plans have been made other than a vague commitment to the third or fourth week in September, a date far enough ahead in an indeterminate future to seem doable.

But if we really want to do it, we're gonna have to begin to make some concrete plans sooner rather than later. Pin down an actual date; pin down a venue. New Paltz is the obvious venue, but I've also been wondering about Norma's, BB's & my favorite cafe in Wappingers Falls, or Tranquili-Tea, that adorable little rabbit hole in (of all bizarre places) Middletown that we stumbled across that day:



I had a busy weekend: Democratic Committee meeting, D&D with the Boneyard BoyZ, & a tea party that doubled as a Democratic fundraiser. Also I baked a sour cherry pie:



The aesthetics are off. As I say, I am just terrible with crusts! But the pie tastes great.

I hadn't exercised in 10 days, but yesterday I trotted off to the gym and today I plan to tromp before it gets too hot.

###

I've been trying to think of a plot to graft on to the Neversink backstory.

Of course, it should focus on the animosity between the folks who've been farming in these parts for three or four generations and the recent emigrants from the Big City, 'cause that's a very real dynamic in these parts plus the whole water theft—They drowned our homes so their city could have water!—demands it.

Possibly a young, idealistic Brooklyn immigrant runs for the village planning board? Maybe there's still some arcane zoning law that she opposes that allows stores to be built in the middle of the reservoir? (But why would she oppose it? There are tons of arcane laws dating back centuries in every town in these parts! People just ignore them.) And, of course, on the actual night of the election, the reservoir recedes so you can see the chimneys & spires & mercantile towers of the drowned town.

Writing style I'm aiming for is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Susanna Clark does a most excellent job of integrating fantasma into everyday.

I will mull it over some more.

But not too much. Some things just naturally work themselves out while you're writing.

Went sour cherry picking with the fabulous rebeccmeister.

rebeccmeister is (as my beloved Marybeth used to say) a real find. Sparkling, intelligent, humorous, plus she is the change she hopes to see in a completely nonperformative way. In a perfect world, she would live two blocks away from me so that on rainy days, I could race over to her house & watch her retool chair splines. Learn from her example how to use tools!

She wore the coolest dress, too. Its pattern was leaf ants!



The morning had gotten off to an inauspicious start on account of the propane running out before it could fuel the flames necessary to heat the water that makes my coffee.

I'd had to drive up to the Farmcart Coffee pop-up in town, where I splurged on a cappuccino & eavesdropped on a conversation between the ridiculously beautiful barista and two ridiculously beautiful young women, all of whom had recently (and most ridiculously of all) emigrated from the Deep South to fuckin' Wallkill, New York.

Why would anyone emigrate for any reason to Wallkill, New York?

"We're Jehovah's Witnesses," the beautiful barista explained with a radiant smile.

Oh, of course.

Wallkill is actually the center of the American Jehovah's Witnesses branch. They publish The Watchtower here! And also 17 million Bibles every year! Old Testament only. The JWs are not big on the New Testament.

The barista was just so lovely! We chattered about the differences between Italian and Spanish, how the two languages had practically identical grammars but differed in the way they were voiced, Spanish using various accent marks to signify pronunciation, while Italian relies on doubling up consonants—

I remembered then that my very favorite TaxBwana client of 2024 had been a Jehovah's Witness preacher. His house had burned down with all his tax documents. I'd used forensic accounting to rectify them. He was very elegant and intelligent, and we'd had a free-ranging conversation about all number of fascinating things, and it wasn't until the very end of our third meeting that he handed me a card with his JW ID.

Why don't I become a Jehovah's Witness? I wondered for 10 minutes or so.

They're not big on Jesus! They recognize that "infinity" is an impossible mathematical concept, not an architectural template for the afterlife: There is only room for 144,000 in the Jehovah's Witness Heaven. Best of all, they seem to take care of each other! Like if I was a Jehovah's Witness, even now 10 Jehovah's Witnesses would be showing up at the casa to swap out that propane tank! And I wouldn't be late for my meetup with Rebecca.

###

I picked six pounds of sour cherries. This is enough for three pies.

Originally, I had planned to pick enough for BB and me. BB was a talented cook & baker, and each year, he baked three special pies for Flavia, his long-term honey. Sour cherry pie was always the first.

This year, I guess, I will bake a sour cherry pie for Flavia. Though I am an indifferent baker; my pie crust in particular has the texture of shoe leather.

But it's the thought that counts, right?

I'll freeze it until I see her again.

###

It was 91° at Samascott by the time Rebecca & I bid adieu and 95° by the time I got back to Wallkill.

I swapped out the propane tank! Pretty easily! So, I no longer have to become a Jehovah's Witness.

I pitted the cherries.

I will bake my pies today.

###

Afterwards, I sat out on the backporch and read The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories. It grew dark. The fireflies came out.

There is a ghost story I'd like to write for BB though I don't think he'd like it very much.

He never even read Elliot Roosevelt's Motor Car, which I actually dedicated to him.

Back in 2018, I did a lot of canvassing and campaigning for a Congressional candidate called Jeff Beals.

Beals lost—but in the tradition of such things, his "victory" party went on, and I somehow managed to talk BB into accompanying me to it. BB absolutely hated parties! I wouldn't say I love them—love or hate depends on my mood—but I am generally pretty good at them since it doesn't trouble me in the least to walk up to perfect strangers & begin chattering away at them.

The party was in Woodstock.

And BB lived ostensibly in Kerhonksen but really in a remote settlement deep within the Catskills Park that was once called Riggsville—presumably after a 19th century tannery owner.

To get from Woodstock to Riggsville, you have to drive across the Ashokan Reservoir, which supplies New York City with its drinking water.

Twelve towns were drowned to create the Ashokan Reservoir!

Cottages, stores, church steeples, everything!

I suppose they relocated the cemeteries—or at least the ones they knew about.

We drove under a full moon. The reservoir tried to drown that, too! But the weirdest thing was the deer that had lined up along practically every section of the road! I kid you not! Like every single deer in the Catskill Mountains. It was like they had all come out to watch us, and, of course, we had to drive very, v-e-r-y slowly in case one came charging across the road.

Anyway, it gave me an idea for a story...

Suppose the deer were the metamorphosed inhabitants of the drowned villages?

And every four years they turn out to exercise their rights as American citizens to vote?

That would be the story backdrop. Not sure what the actual plot would be.

Except that the story would be called Neversink. There is also a Neversink Reservoir that supplies water to NYC, though we didn't drive along it that night, and what could be a better title about the enchanted inhabitants of a drowned village than Neversink?