Typhoon over Portland

A good day to be inside, catching up on computer-based tasks: emails, uploading photos to a Google drive so others can use them, communicating with family and loved ones in South Africa, thank you texts to some of those who reached out to me after Palesa's death, and cheering for Aimee as she turns her book into an e-book that people can actually buy for a reasonable price. In order to do that, she had to use software owned by a certain trillionaire she would have preferred not to deal with, but such is his control of the marketplace that she couldn't find an alternative route to publication.  

I wrote a review for Aimee's book, as follows: 

Invited by a disabled friend recovering from surgery to be his care-taker in New York City in June and July, 2021, the author takes her cat and a keyboard and keeps a journal of the two months, complemented by photos in the style of Mary Ellen Mark. Imagine a mashup of Patti Smith, Jack Kerouac, and “Bridget Jones” with a touch of Miranda July. She’s a photographer and conceptual artist feeling her way in a world that is laugh-out-loud hilarious but punctuated by heartbreak, depression, dazzlement, and never enough money for a safety net.

She gawks, she cringes, she has longings, she’s depressed, emotionally unmasked and unpretentious. “Everything is older here and the raindrops are fatter. I feel like I’m in the movies because I’ve only ever seen New York in places like Seinfeld and NYPD Blue or Die Hard…. I try to look mean when I walk down the street so nobody fucks with me.” 

She spends eight to ten hours a day caring for her patient, plays with dosages of her medications for ADHD and Borderline Personality Disorder, and she’s wonderfully, tenderly sane, truthful to a fault. “I made myself go out today. I mean I made myself. I felt like I was covered in tar, in a pool of tar trying to stretch myself out onto a sidewalk made of tar…. So I slipped out the door leaving bits of tar on the door handle. I struggled to unstick my hands and drudged my feet along the tar painted hallway to the elevator doors. I was going to the Village. I had been trying to get myself there for days." 

She gets lost, fights with the subway pass system, meets a fortune teller, sits on the grass to watch a street performer, and has to pee. She attracts a streetwise mentor named Sully, and she takes her phone with her and makes photographs of all she sees. Marvelous photographs. It’s the journal we all wish we could write, but we’re not brave or feral enough to be this honest.