Croneitude

Grass clippings turn out not to be good weed deterrents.

Here was the Hyde Park garden before I weeded it:



Okay. Ten days of neglect.

Here is the garden after I weeded it. My tomato plants shot up a foot in those 10 days.



I am thinking I will go back today, finish the weeding, & put down straw—which I know from experience is an effective weed deterrent.

###

I don't even want to think about what the New Paltz garden looks like. I may venture out there tomorrow.

Flavia, Mimi, & I are supposed to rendezvous at BB's Monday. I was thinking of rescuing some plants from his enormous garden and transplanting them in New Paltz—that is, if they are at all rescueable. They may not be. Their root systems may be too well established.

But BB has rows & rows of really nice heirloom tomatoes.

And it would be a pity to let them all perish.

###

Other than that... I got an enormous client assignment yesteray. The kiskas are pleased they will not starve.

I sat out on the back porch for a long while last night and watched the fireflies and Black Chicken strutting about. Black Chicken crows! Just like a rooster.

I am brain dead in a peculiar fashion: There is just nothing very much to think about because there is no one to tell what I think about to. Not here, at any rate.

The wedding weekend was very good because I just chattered away through it; there were lots & lots of wonderful conversations. Here, BB was literally the only person I had to talk to. Oh, I have lots of acquaintances! People I don't recognize are constantly coming up to me in supermarkets: "So good to see you again!" I suppose I must have done their taxes.

###

I did everything you're supposed to do to make connections in a new place when I moved here. I'm a member in good standing of all sorts of community organizations. But those community organizations did not yield friends. I met virtually no one I wanted to get to know better. I have no idea whether this is because I am too old to make new friends or whether the people here are shallow, conventional types who don't attract me, but vanity compels me to assume the latter.

So, Bad Fit to my current surroundings. DUH, right?

When I move, it should be a big move.

But I'm too brain dead to think about that very much now.

February 14, 2013! That's when I first met BB.

Here is what I wrote about him:

You May Think This Entry Is About Industrial Architecture, But Really It's About Sex

I spent a very interesting day with a very interesting guy doing one of my favorite things in the world – no, not making love, but walking around a postindustrial apocalyptic landscape and looking for architectural talismans, clues to transience, proof of what was once there and what will one day be there in its place. I don't know why I find this so fascinating, but I've been doing this since I was a very young kid, and mostly alone because the only other person in the world who shares my preoccupation with this is Ben. BB was very happy to tramp around with me, and I think he enjoyed himself but I suspect what he was really enjoying was me enjoying myself.

The Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn is utterly fascinating and filled with weird things – like this Russian sign over the nondescript door to this most unprepossessing little building. What the hell was this? We were close to the maritime reach, and Greenpoint was a big shipbuilding center well into the 20th century with light industry, satellite foundaries, glass factories, rope factories. I'm thinking at one time this must have been one of those bizarre little sailors' halls for Russian merchant marines far from home. But who the hell knows?

I liked BB a lot. I think he liked me, but the dynamic got more unsettling the farther we strayed from small talk. I'm a big fan of small talk. I don't actually like process-oriented conversations unless they're specific planning sessions about who is going to take out the trash, who is going to vacuum and who is going to cook dinner on Tuesday. I am of the opinion that real communication takes place in the interstices. It's not what is said, it's how it's said. I particularly don't like process conversations with people I've just met.

Of course, BB is someone from the Online Dating Site. He's also polyamorous, has lots of girlfriends including a primary. And of course, we talked a lot about sex.

We went back to his apartment, which is just a terrific apartment – converted industrial space with a large piano and tons of books and interesting art on the walls and this wire on which he had trained an ivy plant, which had obviously been there for years and years. Amazing view outside his front window of the water treatment plant which has four minarets just like a Russian Orthodox church. Or maybe they're stylized sculptures of giant garlic bulbs.

We sipped a very delicious port, and nibbled baguettes and prosciutto and a nice runny Camembert, and talked somemore about sex. Listen. I'm gonna have to get back on the bicycle sooner or later, right? So I told him I would probably end up having sex with him at some time in the future but that I would take it slow and then when it happened, I would make the moves. And I would have to say that this made him… nervous.

At a certain point, he started talking about his "super power." Which is apparently the ability to make women come merely by telling them to come.

BB is actually the second guy I've met in NYC who has this super power, by the way. I have no reason to doubt him. He's very charismatic. But this whole I-make-women-come-but-I have-to-masturbate-to-orgasm-myself thing squicks me out a bit. It's kind of like: I want you to lose control, but I'm not gonna lose control. The Dom thing, in other words.

The Dom thing is not my thing at all.

I crave mutuality.

The most times I ever came in a row was 11. I kept count. I think I was supposed to lose myself in the sheer rush of sensation, and to a large extent I did, but you know, I'm always observing. The perp in question is actually a middlingly famous guy so I won't name him. He pleasured me exactly as though he was winding a clock with a kind of clinical degree of interest that made the experience – despite the physical pleasure – rather… degrading, I suppose would be the word.

Anyway, by the time I left BB's apartment I had decided I wanted to be his new best friend, but that I didn't want to have sex with him.

BB is just a terrific playmate. I could have real fun with BB, and who knows – maybe I will. But my favorite sex has always been very uncomplicated sex – the physical contact, the contours of someone's naked body fitting to my naked body, the smells, the tastes. The animal passion of it. I really don't want to be programmed to orgasm like Pavlov's dog. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It just ain't for me.


Now!

A very interesting thing happened after that: BB found my online diary. I have no idea how! I may have mentioned that I kept one, but I certainly would not have given him the link. In those days, I patrolled the boundaries between my—ha, ha, ha—real life and my online journal a lot more rigorously than I do today. I don't have to patrol the boundaries today! Absolutely no one is interested anymore in long form prose.

BB was aggrieved! The entry had sparked a somewhat lively debate. Resolved: BB is a jerk, Yea or Nay. I think the debate squicked him more than the actual entry.

He commented on the entry!

Can't say I'm enjoying this

So I'm the "narcissist" "Dom" etc. y'all are talking about. Patrizia spends 4 hours hanging out with me, and thinks she's got it all figured out. Fine with me, except it might be nice to be kept in the loop one-on-one.

I'm not going to 'answer' what has been said/surmised about me. I don't enjoy being the object of ill-informed (not necessarily wrong) projections about who I am, but since short of the Vulcan mind-meld, projection is all we have, I'll have to live with it.

I just would have preferred to have had some of this conversation directly.

BB

Then he called me. "Do you want to talk about this?"

Well, I didn't really. I would have much preferred him to remain an amusing character on the page. But I felt I kinda owed it to him, so we met. Can't remember much about the conversation except that a Treaty of Friendship came out of it, and thereafter, we would meet every couple of weeks to tramp around Greenpoint.



And a month or so later, something else happened that was pivotal:

If You're an Artist, Move to Pittsburgh or Detroit

Had a really fabulous time w/BB last night.

First we did the urban archeologist thing, traipsing around Greenpoint, which is just so filled with interesting things to see. The hipster scene is fully entrenched. The Yuppies are ju-u-ust beginning to tiptoe in behind the hipsters. In ten years, unless there's some kind of major economic collapse in NYC, Greenpoint will be fully condo-ized, filled with bright, hopeful little shops selling upscale, over-priced cheeses and kitchenware. So it's a kind of transient scene. In a way like strolling through a large, interactive Tibetan Buddhist sand painting with graffiti and secret gardens behind barbed wire. The wind blows gentrification.

If you're an artist, you want to move to Pittsburgh or Detroit. Not Brooklyn.

Back at his house, BB had prepared this truly scrumptious North Indian meal from scratch that included an amazing green mango curry and a rather wonderful peanut/habanero chutney followed by home-baked carrot cake and whipped cream. I gorged myself.

All the time, we kept up this fabulous conversation – about our respective lives, about the world around us –

The most fabulous thing actually happened after he drove me home, though, and I discovered… I had left my fucking purse at his loft.

Stupid, no? Muy, muy stupid.

999 guys out of 1,000 would have said, "Oh, too bad. Come by and you can pick it up on Friday. Unless you want to come back now and take the subway home." But BB just turned the car back toward Brooklyn and kept talking — I think we were discussing the history of repeating rifles in America on a parallel track with the Ganesh-ification of Lawn Guyland.

I couldn't tell if he was pissed off at me or not –

"I feel really, really stupid," I said.

"And guilty too?" BB asked.

"Oh. Well. Yeah! That's a prerequisite for feeling stupid, isn't it? I mean guilt and stupidity. They kind of go together like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr –"

"Well, good!" said BB. "I'm sure I can use your guilt to my material advantage at some point. If not in this lifetime, then the next. I don't really get too bent out of shape about stuff like this. Shit happens. You go with the flow. Of course, if it turns out you left your passport or green card at my house, you'll have to walk back from Brooklyn."

BB is like the most perfect playmate ever. Just loads and loads of fun. And this is really what I want in my life. Playmates. That's what's been missing.

That and the $126 million Lotto payoff.

I was totally blown away by how cool BB was about doing a U-turn on the Long Island Parkway & cruising back to get my purse!

Most people would have been far more begrudging. Not me, I will add. I'm always pretty cool about that kind of stuff, too. So, it was obvious that BB & I resonated to the same cosmic frequency.

The reception was fun. And posh!!! Took place at the Dashings (not their real name) mega-ginormous Pennsylvania horse farm:





They'd pay someone $75,000 a year plus benefits just to mow all this, I thought. And the Dashings are only here one month out of the year now! Mostly they live in Santa Barbara these days.

The other guests were mostly people I'd known long ago and oh so far away when they were a lot unhappier and a lot more conflicted. But, of course, they'd had to be unhappy and conflicted then since they'd all been supporting players in the unhappy and conflicted Drama of Ben & Patrizia.

In this present tense, there was a strong sense that they were all actors at some kind of wrap party. They were all jovial and having a good time now.



People I didn't remember were positively overjoyed to see me.

Here's something I didn't remember:

Sixteen years ago, Lew got me a gig tutoring the Dashings' son, Tucker who did not know how to write a college essay & was on the verge of flunking his SATs. I tutored Tucker long distance via phone & email from the Squalid Cement Bungalow in Freeville, so I never actually met him or his parents in the flesh.

So at the reception, I am approached by a handsome young man in his early thirties who greets me by staring deep into my eyes and declaring, "You changed my life!!!"

"I did?" I said.

"Yes! And it's very rare to be able to identify the influence of a single person in those kinds of things, but without you, I would never have gotten into college. And college was the best thing that ever happened to me!"

It was Tucker.

Huh!

(That's Tucker on the right with mega-rich Pops)



I was also apparently the best dressed person there since various members of the catering staff kept scurrying up to me, trays of prosciutto-wrapped figs and steak crostini be damned, to exclaim, You! You look amazing!

It wasn't my clothes! I was wearing $20-dollar pants from Marshalls, an ancient bathing suit, an oversized man's white Oxford shirt, and a thrift-store leopard-spotted scarf:



So, I guess I've still got it. At least from a distance.

Excellent for my vanity!

###

The blessed couple were very sweet:



And very shy! They kissed behind Lew's baseball hat:



###

TSWSOITC and his wife stayed at the same hotel I did. They live in Georgia—Republic Of, not Last Train To—& I've always been rather fascinated by her since TSWSOITC disapproves of me, & yet I'd say Keti and I have more similarities than dissimilarities. (TSWSOITC saw me primarily as Ben's accomplice.)

I got to know her a little bit over the abysmal Comfort Inn coffee when she'd come out in the morning to smoke:



Keti is one of those women who is beautiful without being pretty. Very, very smart—an economist by training, speaks Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, English, & French. Has lived through three civil wars. Very knowledgeable about what's really going on with the Ukraine War.

During the time I'd known him best, TSWSOITC was first married to Rachel and then—as a newly divorced man—the harbor master of Rockland, Maine. I'd begun writing a novel about him: The Harbor Master! As near as I can remember now, the plot had something to do with smuggled Ukrainian sex slaves! (Prophetic? Keti is Ukrainian.) I think I had a wee bit of a crush on TSWSOITC.

Anyway, this was my first time meeting Keti, and I found her very intriguing, and went about ingratiating myself to the best of my ability because I longed to be her BFF For-EVAH!!! Although, of course, I won't be.

###

And I see I am wayyyy over the writing time I alotted myself this morning! I have a busy schedule today. Nothing fun! All draggy, practical shit that must get done.

But I would be remiss not to mention:

• Day after the reception I met up with egg_shell:



We had a fabulous time chatting & sauntering about Edinboro in the sweltering heat, but the real magic was when egg_shell let me look at one of her art notebooks.

Now! I happen to think egg_shell is an artistic genius. The creative impulse is very, very strong in her. And looking through her notebook, I got the same sense I got when I visited that barn in Vermont where all those fabulous Bread & Puppet Theater puppets are stored or when I saw Michaelangelo's Prisoners In Stone at the Accademia in Firenzi so very long ago—that I was viewing the creative source, the pure, untrammeled heart of the creative process.

The hackles on the back of my neck actually stood up while I flipped through her pages.

• In Ithaca, I stayed in the most enchantingly beautiful AirBnB:



• And RTT & I had a really, really good time hanging out together:

Heat spell finally broke.

Hal-lay-LOOL-ya.

I have lived through heat spells before, but I can't remember any as bad as this past three days. (That's probably due to my incredibly bad memory more than climate change.)

Since yesterday was supposed to be marginally cooler than the two preceeding days, I went over to the New Paltz community garden to water the seedlings I'd planted last week.

I was expecting to find the seedlings had all died. And maybe some did, but not all: Dried grass clippings turn out to be a very effective mulch.

Place was like the asylum grounds of Hell—completely deserted with a kind of pitiless stark white HD light. It was weird to be the only person present in that vast garden! Maybe I walked 50 yards total, and so much sweat poured off me, I looked as though I'd just come out of a shower.

###

My stomach is still not 100%. I've been sleeping badly, and never more than five hours a night. I remind myself that it is these factors—and not the inherent Evil of the Universe—that are responsible for the pissy mood I'm in. And these factors are controllable. When DonkeyBody (smokingboot™) is back to optimal functioning & I can sleep eight hours, the Universe will once more go back to being a pleasant place filled with laughter & magic.

At least, that's what I am telling myself.