BurleyBoar

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!

fuzzilla made a sage observation on that last entry: God, this would all make for such a fascinating novel... the theme of alternative relationship models and what are the traditions when it gets disrupted by something as huge as a death is a killer theme for a novel.

I thought: She's right.

Very, very commercial. I can see the film adaptation now.

And I wouldn't even have to write very much. It would mostly be editing existing TMI diary entries & generating some connective tissue to string them all together into a narratively cohesive whole.

I figure I could knock the thing off in eight weeks.

Of course, I'd have to shave 20 years off the real-life protagonists: People will read about alternative romantics in their late 30s/early 40s, but no one wants to read about women in their 50s, 60s, or 70s.

There would only be one chapter I'd have to write—and that would be the very last chapter where Flavia, Daria, and... let's call her Grazia, the Patrizia interject...go off on some kind of mad road trip together, sprinkling Brian's ashes one handful at a time at various wacky roadside attractions.

The style would be easy, peasy, cash (as in "short for casual.") Middle-aged Dolly Alderton, in other words.

(I am a Dolly Alderton fan. There are times when she can be remarkably profound.)

###

With that in mind, I whipped off 1,500 words last night.

###

In other news, it's back to All Remuneration, All of the Time. (Except when I am exercising & working on the New Writing Project, which will obviously be my ticket to Fame & Fortune, right? 😀)

And it is supposed to rain all day, and the sky is grey, so naturally I am in a melancholy mood.

Icky announced he is materializing today—one day earlier than his usual schedule.

I see from my constant monitoring of craigslist postings both in the Hudson Valley and in Ithaca that Icky is trying to rent out the college-bound Spawn's room. Naturally, he did not bother to inform me of this. Altogether now: What a DICK.

In the posting header, he described the room as a "studio apartment." Which did make me laugh.

And he is charging a significantly higher rent for it than he is charging me.

I can't imagine there are hordes of people wanting to move to fuckin' Wallkill, but what do I know?

Oh! And the posting talked about chickens. And fresh eggs!

Poor Black Chicken! Having to lay for three!

If someone else moves in, I will install a lock on the Patrizia-torium.

###

No word from the T-burg Co-op KidZ, which I am interpreting to mean the answer is, "No."

I am imagining their off-the-record conferences: But she's so old! What if she strokes out on the couch???

Oh, well. "No" doesn't kill you, & you still gotta try.

I dislike being here, but I really have to be selective about where I jump next. I jumped without doing thorough due diligence last time, & that's why I ended up here.

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.

Finished David McCullough's extraordinary biography of John Adams.

Actually cried at the scene where the old curmudgeon opens his eyes on his deathbed for the last time & croaks, Thomas Jefferson survives! before expiring.

This one I didn't read; I listened to the audiobook on innumerable drives to Middletown, and then back & forth & around in Ithaca. I'd been wanting to tackle the book since I watched the excellent HBO miniseries John Adams, but it was the kind of book I knew I wouldn't be able to read as it contains hundreds of pages on John Adams's theories of governance, & I mean, Zzzzzzzzz.

But I also figured those theories of governance are relevant—particularly to the political situation today—& that if I were driving, I wouldn't fall asleep while parsing them.

###

Literally speaking, John Adams was wrong: Jefferson died about five hours before Adams did.

Figuratively speaking, though, Adams was right: Jefferson (despite the business with Sally Hemings) remains far more influential today than Adams—a bit weird when you think about it because Adams was a fanboy of iron-fisted federal control, all the rage right now, whereas the Rosseau-influenced Jefferson was an ardent supporter of individual rights & frequent revolution. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, Jefferson once wrote in a letter to Adams's son-in-law.

On the other hand, Donald Trump only wishes he'd legislated John Adams' Alien & Sedition Acts.

###

In other news, Brian-Palooza went well. Good in-person turnout; people driving from as far away as Boston, Vermont, & Pennsylvania; a respectable Zoom contingent.

Brian's niece turned up! A lovely, 30-ish young woman. I was so glad to see her.

I spent most of the time I wasn't emceeing chattering with Brian's neighbor Willie (not his real name) who turns out to have been the chairman of Manhattan's Democratic Party for 15 years. We talked politics! Why are Democrats such losers? And he asked me for my phone number—no, nothing like that! He is a billion years old and very, very gay; in fact, he retold his story about knocking on Brian's door to borrow lube when it came time for us to share remembrances. (Water-based or silicon-based? was Brian's reply)—because, "You have such an inventive mind!"

If only I weren't planning to be cremated! She Had Such An Inventive Mind would look so good on a tombstone.

###

Tranquili-Tea put on a good spread!

Just look how adorable & The-Importance-of-Being-Ernest-ish these cucumber sandwiches are!



Vinnie, the husband of the woman who runs the tea shop, stood listening to our Brian remembrances with tears in his eyes.

Mind you, Vinnie is a very conventional guy who's lived a totally conventional life.

I was actually rather terrified that he & his wife Vicki would recoil in horror at some of the stories that were being shared.



But afterwards, Vinnie sought me out. "I felt so privileged that you chose us to be a part of this," Vinnie said.

And that was Brian's great gift, you know. He saw the multiplicity of dimensions that people exist on and he focused them into something singular and beautiful through the generosity of his own enormous heart.

Brian, I will miss you...