AlexPGP's Corner

I continue to be Svengali'd by Selling Sunset, a reality show that is so-o-o horrifyingly Pynchon-esque, I simply cannot take my eyes off it.

It's about an ultra-luxury Ellay real estate brokerage that's run by two identical twin dwarves (no, I am not making this up) whose top agent is named after a gas station.

Every single $50 million property that's being shown to D-List celebrities (Jo-Jo Sliwa anybody?) looks like some house I designed in The Sims 15 years ago.

So, now I'm beating my breast. Did I make the wrong midlife career move? Should I have become an architect instead of an entertainment journalist?

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In other news of the Deeply Horrible...

Steve Bannon is spot on in this analysis and the danger Mamdani represents to people who think like Bannon.

(Steve Bannon is another one of those things I get Svengali'd by occasionally because deeply as I disapprove of him, the guy is crackerjack smart about the Long View, such that the hackles on the back of my neck often rise when I read him.)

Fabulous Deecey-Virginia trip.

Trip down somewhat problematic as the Poughkeepsie train station was out of parking places, so I had to limp in the rain on mysteriously injured leg a mile and a half from adjunct street parking place to the train, plus my Penn Station train was an hour and a half late due to coastal New Jersey track flooding.

However:



Shaken! Not stirred.

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The next day was Halloween. We took a stroll around Alex's neighborhood.

Alex lives in a city that was founded in colonial times (though no traces remain of that). For the first 150 years or so, it remained a bucolic settlement surrounded by tobacco fields until time and proximity to the corridors of power in nearby Washington, D.C. transformed it—inevitably!—into a residential commuter hub. (I imagine in those early, pre-WWII days, the commuting was all done by trolley.)

Alex lives in a charming brick house that was built to house the earliest residential commuters. It is the house her husband grew up in.

Some of Alex's neighbors take Halloween very seriously:



https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BKox5nPBQ/

Then it was time for the main event: Trick or Treat!!!!

Skeleton costumes are like the Chanel suit or the little black cocktail dress of the Halloween universe, so I didn't have to pay much attention to my own plumage.

Other members of the household went far more elaborate—in particular, Alex's beautiful daughter H who could easily snag a job as a double when Chappell Roan makes her cinematic debut:





Even after (conservative estimate) 80 or so trick-or-treaters, the Bottomless Candy Bucket didn't give out. Though the stragglers had to make due with Dum-Dums.

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Most of the places people visit in the Deecey area are closed due to the government shutdown. (And you might think the Trump administration would have better taste than to host a Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago mere hours before food benefits lapsed for 14.2 million Americans due to said government shutdown. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong.)

The ones that are funded through their own foundations remain open, and among those is Gunston Hall, the ancestral home of Founding Father George Mason, whose name I vaguely remembered from the John Adams & Benjamin Franklin bios I devoured last summer.

Before the Gilded Age, American mansions were not particularly imposing:



But this one is located on magnificently beautiful grounds::

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1BYoVZJRwG/

Fun factoids learned at Gunston Manor:

(1) This (to me somewhat hideous) shade of green was the most popular for the houses of the ultra-wealthy in the late 18th & early 19th centuries because the pigment was made from copper verdigris, and thus the paint was very expensive:



(2) Alex is the great great great great great great great great grandaughter of George Mason. She learned this long after she started visiting Gunston Hall! I do not see the resemblance.



The next day, we went thrifting!

Alex is like the Queen of Thrifters, so this was very much like taking a master painting class from Rembrandt.





In the evenings, we watched the BBC's version of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I have seen before but could watch endlessly (even though it completely fucks up the ending), such a dithering fan girl am I.

I was convinced Alex would love it!

And either Alex did, or Alex is such a good hostess that she pretended to with a magnificent display of sincerity to please her guest.

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Anyway, terrific time. Which will give my heart resistance since the next two and a half weeks are promising to be quite the slog. Sigh...

The crane came back! And this time, I managed to snag a photo before I scared it off:



Other than that, yesterday was pretty sucky.

I couldn't shake the memory of that Middletown mall, those ugly, ugly storefronts, those ugly, ugly people, the certain knowledge that by swearing vassalhood to Big Soulless Tax Prep Company, I was now a part of this ecosystem, a cog in the machine, just as hopeless & desperate as any of those other inhabitants of that peculiar level of hell called End-Stage Capitalism. This revelation was deeply, deepy depressing.

To assauge this feeling of powerlessness, I decided to go on a tromp, and this was absolutely the wrong thing to do because gastrocnemius injury, which is still quite acute.

Yes, it throbbed while I tromped. Malingerer! I jeered at myself. Pick up the pace!

And when I got home, my left calf and my left ankle were swollen up like balloons.

I could barely walk.

This is an issue because I am leaving on a road trip tomorrow.

###

This morning, I am much, much better. Ankle swelling is gone. Calf swelling is almost gone. I still feel the knot of pain deep inside the calf when I move—although at this point, I have recontexturalized it as something other than pain, it is merely a neurological signal—but I can walk well if slowly.

I've got compression stockings on—they help—and I'm keeping the left leg elevated today. Limited movement is planned.

The weird things are (a) that I would ignore my body's signals so completely and (b) that I still don't know how I incurred the injury. I woke up four days ago, and there it was. I assume I slept on it funny. Bent the leg at a peculiar angle. For a little while, I wondered whether it was some kind of thrombosis—I do spend long hours sitting at my desk—but no red streaks, no hot spots, no shortness of breath. I'm confident the injury is mechanical, a gastrocnemius tendinopathy.

Rest it, and it will heal.

Pretend it isn't happening, and it will not heal.

Duh!

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Other than that, I wrote a few hundred words on the Work in Progress. We are now at March 14, 2020, the day before the COVID lockdown began in New York State, and I am trying to capture the peculiar liminal quality of the day. I am not succeeding particularly well—hint: If you have to use the word "liminal," you are not capturing the quality of liminality—but that's okay. It's a fuckin' first draft.

Also I got a large Remueration assignment and in response to my modest prodding, the client wrote, I am never going to use AI for these white papers.

So, that was reassuring.

Met up with my beloved Barbara at the Gardiner Bakehouse yesterday.

The beautiful Aemilia, fashion maven & Barbara's daughter, is marrying a man who grew up in High Falls, so Barbara has reasons to visit this part of the country periodically.

We talked politics for three hours.

Or rather—not politics but the culture wars around those politics.

Resolved: Why did people vote for Trump when it was clearly not in their best economic interests to vote for Trump?

"It's the trans sports issue," I said. "Time and time again, that's what I heard when I was out canvassing people with Trump banners in their yards. I don't want my little Brittney to have to play volleyball against boys."

"Well, but I mean, there was just as much opposition against same-sex marriage initially, wasn't there?" Barbara said. "And people came around."

"People came around because of media representation," I said. "Specifically, network TV shows with mainstream audiences like Will & Grace and Modern Family. I can think of a handful of shows with trans characters. Orange is the New Black. Transparent. Euphoria. But they weren't shows aimed at the mainstream."



Afterward, I drove her back halfway up the Shawangunk ridge over the remotest back roads you can possibly imagine to her future co-in-laws' place on six acres of dense forest along the edge of an abandoned quarry overlooking the long-defunct D&H canal.

Why do every single one of these remote country houses seem to have a derelict bathtub on the premises?



Barbara has some issues with Dylan's mother, a very smart, fast-talking Dominican who never shuts up. I could see how this could be utterly exhausting on any kind of long-term basis—literally! Christi barely pauses for breath!—but I really liked Christi for the hour or so we spent talking and moreover, I felt immensely sorry for her; she must feel even more isolated and alienated than I feel here in Trumplandia. If you didn't have to organize an expedition every time you went to her house, I would consider making Christi my new BFF.

Barbara & Christi told me the structure below was once some sort of a silo.

But I could see right away that it was a kiln. You don't make silos out of heat-resistant tiles, and besides: There have never been corn fields around here. No doubt the kiln was used by the house's previous owners to bake bricks out of pulverized stone mined from the abandoned quarry. Cement-making and brick-making were the two big industries in this part of the world right up through the 1970s.



From remotest, most rugged Ulster County, I had to traipse out to deepest, darkest Middletown Mall-World to get the PTIN # that will allow me to prepare taxes for money—Soulless Tax Company paid the fee—which depressed me so much I could barely function for the rest of the evening.

Soulless Tax Company's rented premises were right next door to a check-cashing operation, which tells you everything you need to know about that.

What have I gotten myself into?

But if I don't like it, I can quit, right?