I've always avoided treadmills, but as my customary outdoor tromping routes are frozen under a thin but lethal scrim of ice, I decided to hop on one yesterday at the gym.

I must say, I rather liked it!

You bliss off into whatever audiobook or podcast you're following—I'm currrently listening to Walter Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, a very strange novel—and then just pound away.

It's consistent. It's efficient. When I hopped off, I could feel my muscles had been exercised in a way they don't feel on the spinning bike—which is more a cardiovascular thing anyway.

I think I will add it to my three-times-a-week gym workouts.

###

From the gym in Middletown, I drove all the way to New Paltz to have lunch with Belinda. Long drives are de rigueur when you live in the boonies unless you want to hang out at a liquor store. (Wallkill does not have a single grocery store. In fact, the whole of Shawangunk Township does not have a single grocery store. I live in a food desert! But there are a lot of liquor stores.)

Belinda has started attending Jehovah's Witness bible classes.

She was very shy & soft, confiding this to me.

But, in fact, I approve—though I did tell her, "You know, I've always found Jay-Dubs to be very nice people. In fact, my favorite tax client year before last was a Jay-Dub reverend, a very intelligent, very eloquent man. But, you know, it is a cult, so if you start to convert, I will stage an intervention."

She laughed. Assured me: No chance of that.

But I wonder.

Still. After deep immersion in the Owning Manhattan ethos for two nights in a row, I'm all in favor of anything that makes people ponder the spiritual aspects of their sojourn in this time/space continuum. If you can't be kind to others because generosity is not one of your innate personality traits, then kindness is something that needs to be enforced through congregational edict. Kindness to other people is that important.

"You know, your friendship is very important to me," Belinda told me as we were saying goodbye. "I value it highly. I love you."

Which was nice to hear since I've been feeling so singularly repulsive lately.

And it made me ponder the nature of friendship.

###

In the end, friends are not necessarily the people you care about the most. They're the people who, for one reason or another, stick.

In Monterey, my best friend was Jeannie DeTomaso.

We became best friends because our children, RTT & Sydney, were besties. Jeannie was beautiful and luminous. "Saint Jeannie," Susan used to call her.

At the same time, I had an incredibly annoying neighbor named Heidi. Who was petty & vain and had a morbid fascination with true crime. Heidi and I were thrown together when I found out that she thought my cat Fritz was her cat Henry because he showed up at her house regularly at meal times.

Jeannie had a complicated family history. Her parents belonged to a weird, splinter Holy Roller cult. In fact, her earliest memories were of waking up in the middle of the night to hear her parents babbling loudly & incomprehensibly: They were speaking in tongues.

Jeannie's father was long dead by the time I knew her. Her mother, Elizabeth, was surviving on about $400 of social security a month but owned a house that was assessed at something like $2 million, Pacific Grove at that time being the capital of the Cash Poor But Land Rich.

Elizabeth developed Alzheimer's, and all of Jeannie's pals banded together to provide her with respite care. I watched Elizabeth one afternoon a week. I remember being quite fascinated by the way Elizabeth would sit and read the same back-to-back pages of a novel—ironically The Time Traveler's Wife—over and over and over again. Her entire memory—85 years!— compressed into the time it took her to read 500 words. It was like a Monkey's Paw version of the Ram Dass addage: Be Here Now.

Then Elizabeth died.

And Jeannie stopped talking to me.

I wasn't special, Jeannie's husband Tony assured me: Jeannie had stopped talking to everyone. "She's psychotic," he told me. (A year or so later, they divorced.)

Heidi had not stopped talking to me. Heidi was still feeding my cat. And meeting me on the back porch for coffee every other day. When in an overabundance of enthusiasm, I confided her one day that as a very young child, I'd had memories of a former life and that's why I believe in reincarnation, Heidi just looked at me appraisingly. "But that degree of splintering and dissociation is very common in abused children. You were an abused child, weren't you?"

Fast forward 20 years & Heidi and I are friends. I spent a lot of time with her when I was in Monterey a year ago.

Jeannie & I are not friends. A circumstance I still regret and blame myself for: What did I do? Though I know perfectly well I didn't do anything, that Jeannie had—as her husband told me—flipped out and that the only way she could find a center again (any center) was to weed out the people in her life who were guardians of certain untrustworthy memories.

Anyway, Belinda has become a friend in the same way Heidi is a friend.


Life can be unpredictable.

Baaaaad time of year. At this point in my life, I'd rather be savoring the moments, sprinkling them with imagination, stretching them out. But instead, all I can do is hunker down, stare out a window at the pitiless winter landscape, reassure myself, This, too, shall pass.

I'll want those moments back when I'm dying, that's for sure.

###

Meanwhile, it didn't snow all day yesterday, but it might as well have because the part of the day it didn't snow was spent reading the sky, testing the wind, waiting for it to snow.

I did a bit of Useful Work and a useless tax class on Zoom—hey! they're paying me. Played around some with the Work in Progress and unwittingly solved a transition problem before it could turn into awkward prose. Did not exercise, which is possibly why I could not break the gloomy mood.

###

Finished I Have Some Questions for You. Boarding school books must be an actual literary genre! This one is not near the top of the list. The protagonist is a celebrity because she helms a successful podcast. And I'm thinking, Really??? I mean, there are celebrity podcasters, but mostly they were celebrities before they became podcasters; they are leveraging their celebrity to carry the podcast, right?

The protagonist has this gurgley, chick-lit voice, which is wrong, wrong, wrong for a murder mystery. The basic conceit of the book (actually kinda interesting) is that the real murderer, the figure emerging from the shadows, is the teacher who had an affair with the murder victim, the same sympathetic teacher who devoted energy to bringing the protagonist out of her adolescent shell. Except this proves to be a misfire! So, what we're left with at the end of the book is that the titular You behaved... inappropriately. And those kinds of transgressions are less moral absolutes than violations of au courant cultural imperatives.

###

Speaking of au courant cultural imperatives...

In the evening, I watched multiple episodes of the real estate bling show, Owning Manhattan.

And fell into despair!

How do people end up spending $250 million on an apartment?

The $300 heating oil bill for me this month is gonna be tough to pay!

What kind of an abysmal, absolute failure am I that I can't spend $250 million on an apartment? That I can't even spend 50¢ on an apartment?

Why does money have so many zeroes in it now?

Plus, the Upper West Side that I grew up in is practically unrecognizable now. What did they have to tear down to build the great glass tower at 200 Amsterdam? I was scouring my memory. What used to be there? And suddenly this visual sense memory just rushed in: Annie's old apartment on W. 68th and the little diner next door to it, I could see the breakfast plates now, practically smell them: the sunny-side up eggs floating in a little pool of grease, the crunchy hashbrowns, the thick white china plates...

What will happen to that $250 million apartment in 100 years? Will it still be the apex of luxury living? It can't possibly be, right? The cycle is the Ozymandias Factor, boom then bust, palaces dissolving into tenaments.

But I can't even wrap my head around what comes next.