Burning Bright

Dreamed that N____ had come to visit California, and I was showing her the sights. Were we in San Francisco? Were we in Berkeley? Wherever we were, it was a place set on an Aetna-like mountain with extremely steep cliffs overlooking a sea—oh-so-familiar in the dream, not familiar at all now that I'm awake.

We were looking for a café. I'd decided this was the most representative California experience I could possibly offer N____.

We hopped a bus, but the bus was taking us away from the cliffs—

No, no, no, no, I said. The cool cafés will all be on a boulevard along the sea.

So we got off the bus and began walking.

At the same time I was dreaming this, I was dreaming a completely separate dream, about Ichabod & bel_ebat, who were both teenagers & madly in ❤️LUV❤️. bel_ebat kept morphing into Liza, a/k/a The-Future-Mother-of-My-Unborn-Grandchildren who is now the mother of two adorable toddlers who are not my grandchildren because when she & Ichabod broke up, she rather quickly married someone else.

(I must say, I was more upset than either Ichabod or Liza when they broke up!)

bel_ebat-cum-Liza was dancing hiphop en pointe. I was trying to dance hiphop en pointe, too, but finding it altogether impossible...

(I think I was dreaming of bel_ebat because I have recently been in touch with her crazy, stalker X-boyfriend, for whom I retain a certain degree of affection even though, it is true, he is way out there orbiting Neptune, but hey! I'm only sporatically in touch with bel_ebat on Instagram these days, so... :::SHRUGS:::)

###

The co-op KidZ got back to me.

The Cornell professor texted: Hi Patrizia, it was so nice meeting you last weekend. Just wanted to let you know we’re still sorting things out. We might take some time to do so — we want to take wallpaper off the walls and do aftershock and deal with the mold — but I don’t have a lot of time to deal with that because I start teaching Monday. So it might be a little while before we sort things out with the house. And we haven’t even had time to talk about the cat question yet. So I wouldn’t plan on a move by October one in any case. We can keep you posted as things move along but please don’t hold out on other options because of us. Sorry not to be able to provide a clear answer either way at this point! We all really enjoyed meeting you and thought you would be a lovely addition to the house.

I texted back: Hi Justine! I totally understand! I really enjoyed meeting you all as well—the time you, Caitlyn, Joannah, & I spent talking on the porch is a magical memory. I want to keep knowing you all. And I want to talk with Nelson about writing fiction! 😀

Yes, do keep me in the loop and let me know as things progress.. I will continue to look for other living options as I’m dissatisfied with the one I’m living in now, and I believe people should rejoice in their homes, not merely tolerate them. But my dream living situation really is an intentional community, & it looks like you are building one. If it’s all right with you, I will check in from time to time.

Justine texted back: 100% please do! And I absolutely agree with you that living should be joyful and communal. We want to keep knowing you as well in any case 😊

###

This is actually not a bad outcome.

For one thing, I will be starting HR Block's tax classes in two weeks.

I had been very resistant to taking HR Block's tax classes because I am very resistant to working for HR Block! They are an awful company, charge $100—maybe even more now—for every form they crank out & are continually upselling services that clients really don't need. People, even otherwise intelligent & rational people, get very anxious when it comes to taxes, so they almost always succumb to being hustled. It's a complete racket.

But there's no denying that I have to diversify—and hopefully expand—my income stream.

The clients who buy my white paper healthcare economics papers ❤️LUV❤️ me & AI shows no signs of diminishing that ❤️LUV❤️.

But I keep thinking it's only a matter of time.

So, yeah. Doing taxes for $$$ will be a profitable side gig.

I will continue TaxBwana-ing for free-eee-eeee, too, so those of you for whom I've been doing taxes all these years—you know who you are!—do not panic.

###

For another thing, if I'm serious about writing a Brian novel, interrupting it in the very earliest stages of composition with packing and moving and unpacking again would completely derail it.

Besides, my Spidey-sense is telling me I will probably be able to move into the T-burg co-op house in the spring. If I want to.

###

Viz the novel: I hammered out another 500 words last night.

A structure is suggesting itself to me: Three sections, each approximately 100 pages (or 25,000 words) from each of the three women protagonists' first-person POV, mixing past & present. Grazia, Flavia, Daria. How they met Brian. Their history with Brian. Their reactions to Brian's death.

Then a fourth section, another 100 pages, about the road trip they take to scatter Brian's ashes—one handful at a time!—at various wacky locations. I will have to foreshadow those locations.

And I think I'll have Mimi commit suicide.

This will no doubt irritate the real-life Mimi, assuming (a) the novel ever gets finished and (b) the novel ever gets published, but hey, you know: Art's gotta Art!

Drove 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.

Back from Ithaca.

I liked Justine, Nelson, Joannah, & Caitlyn—the residents of the co-op house.

And they liked me!

In fact, the three women and I had a pretty remarkable conversation, sitting out on the back porch overlooking the beautiful flower garden (wild flowers, echinacea and black-eyed Susans), sipping lemon water. We talked about conflict resolution and it evolved into a discussion of a highly toxic situation Joannah has been involved with at her chiropractic school where a horrible instructor had taken an extreme dislike to her and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it except stay calm & resolute & stay the course.

Of the three women, I liked Justine, the Cornell professor, best because she, too, has the Bread & Puppets Why Cheap Art Manifesto hanging in her bedroom:



But Joannah has this absolutely seraphic quality that I can't recall ever coming across before. If there are angels who occasionally have business dealings on earth, honestly, they'd manifest like Joannah.

She also has a rare blood cancer that requires monthly interferon infusions on a monthly basis. She walks with death. Literally. Maybe that accounts for her otherworldliness.

"I have a hard time with conflicts," I said. And explained that usually I let conflicts build until they reach some kind of critical mass & I can explode in anger.

"But I'm working on it," I added.

They were all very bemused by this. Why? they wanted to know. Was it because I was afraid people would stop liking me? Was it because I thought what was upsetting me was too ridiculous?

No, I said. It was because I thought the people who were upsetting me wouldn't care that they were upsetting me, that either they would laugh at me, or I would be invisible. Anger gave me the ballistic force to make sure I'd be taken seriously and that I'd be seen.

"Ah, childhood traumas," Joannah said gravely & gently.

###

At the end of the conversation—it went on for an hour and a half—Joannah said, "It's sort of like the future me is looking at the four of us and saying, Yes, we belong together."

And we embraced.

BUT there is a sticking point, and this is it: Nelson is somewhat allergic to cats.

I told him there is an anti-allergenic cat food that is quite successful. RTT, who is allergic to cats, uses it with the kitten he adopted a month ago and reports he is now completely asymptomatic:



And if that didn't work, I'd rehome the kiskas.

"I'll think about it," Nelson told me with a sweet smile.

And I believe he will.

###

Molly & Mabel, though, would actually be very difficult to rehome.

They are such mistrustful kiskas! They hiss at strangers! Not because they are aggressive, but because they scare so easily.

It's obvious they love me in their idiocyncratic kiska way, but occasionally, they will still hiss at me. They must have been abused or otherwise traumatized as young cats.

I'm fond of them.

I certainly don't love them the way I loved Sybyl or Rutger.

But I feel very strongly that the Universe assigned me to be their Protector, and it's a covenant I can't voluntarily break.

So!

What will be will be.

("But you did say you would rehome them if it doesn't work," said Joannah frowning slightly. I think she will advocate on my behalf.)

###

There's a lot more to write about, including the immensely beautiful Airbnb I stayed in and the absolute panic attack I worked my way into on the drive up to Ithaca.

I texted the BoyZ: House interview is tomorrow morning & I am having an anxiety attack a la “I’m such a loser, so who would want to live with ME?” Hopefully my self-esteem returns by tomorrow—

—and the two BoyZ offered reassurance in typically characteristic ways:

Ichabod: Don’t worry about being a loser. I think if this person was going to think you were a loser, they would already and you wouldn’t be going to visit. Also if she thinks you’re a loser it’s not where you want to live anyway so better get that out of the way.

RTT: Don’t be a pussy mom. You got this big dawg. You’re gonna come in there and impress her so much she questions whether SHE belongs there

But I have a huge amount to accomplish today and have already wasted too much time writing.

Hacked out 2,000 words yesterday, and I do mean "hacked:" Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, I had a fantasy that my life was a massive hunk of stone—well. not so massive anymore—from which I was whittling huge chunks in meaningless pursuit—well. not so meaningless—of filthy lucre.

Sigh...

As a palate cleanser between Remunerative bouts, I watched multiple documentaries on the life of Martha Stewart.

My horrible cousin went through a Martha Stewart phase sometime in her early 20s. Alicia was constantly pumping out gilded wreaths & sachet bunches that made me want to barf. Thing is, though, Alicia has horrible maudlin taste, which came across in all her crafty shit, whereas Martha Stewart has excellent taste. The gilded wreaths in these documentaries were really quite exquisite!

Of course, Martha Stewart comes across as a horrible human being. All the PR manipulation in the world can't scrub the taint of "cold abusive bitch" from her.

Apologists throughout the documentaries kept saying, "If she were a man, you wouldn't be calling her cold abusive bitch."

Right! I'd be calling her "cold abusive bastard"!

I don't value late stage capitalism's instruments of validation at all.

###

The magnitude of Martha Stewart's accomplishments is impressive, though.

She singlehandedly invented both the lifestyle industry ($6.3 trillion globally) and the DIY industry ($861 billion).

How did she do it???

Intelligence. Vision. Innate talent. Being in the right place at the right time.

Also, apparently, she only needs to sleep three hours a night.

This must be why I am a failure. If I don't sleep eight hours a night, it's hard for me to function.

Reddit is just filled with people who only wanna sleep three hours a night!!! Just think of all the stuff I could do if I had five more hours in the day!!!

What? Watch more True Crime documentaries on Netflix? Scroll on your phone more often? Play more video games?

Plus, if you don't sleep, you can't dream, and dreaming is the most fabulous thing there is.

###

Today, I must hammer out another 2,000 words. And bake a sour cherry pie for Flavia—Brian used to bake her one every year, & I went sour cherry picking in July with the express intention of making one for her.

I will bring the pie when I meet up with Flavia, Mimi, & Daria tonight.

I am in a prickley mood, so I am actually not looking forward to this.

The Women Brian Left Behind! UGH.

I mean, I loved Brian. I miss him. But what are we supposed to do? Build a suttee? Immolate ourselves on it?

I'm sure I'm just being unbecomingly contentious and will recover my equanimity by this evening.