I’ve had ice cream at the end of the night two days in a row and I haven’t been to the gym all week. I have also allowed morning carbs back into my life, in the form of a thin slice of decent bread with some fine jam. Thus far I am not wobbling around like Mr. Creosote, because I think I’m on the Eventual Certain Divorce Diet, where you shed a lot of calories having racking sobs listening to Mahler’s 5th symphony while rearranging the spice rack, because what the eff else are you going to do at 5:12 PM except watch Judge Judy and you’ve seen that one. It's the one where she gets impatient.

But. Gym tomorrow, no doubt. Can’t lose what I built. Although why is a good question. I crafted a pretty good Self for a 67-year old guy, and I dare say I cut a trim, vigorous, and well-styled figure, even though I am short and hence it all looks silly and overcompensating. Fat fargin’ lot of good that did me, but! you say: consider that you’re going to be on the market again. Best foot forward, good first impressions, all that.

First of all, I do not want to be on the market. I want to stay in my house with my wife whom I love and walk my dog in the neighborhood I love and go on, as before, but that page was redirected on October 10 and will 404 next March. Second, I feel old and gnomish, my substack illustration being my reverse Dorian Gray. All the helpful hopeful friends tell me that there’s lots of possibilities in my future! Eh. I haven’t asked anyone out on a date since Miami Vice’s third season, and I married her. I’ve no doubt I couldn’t try, but I’ll be old.

ETBF was moving summer / fall clothes from one room to the other tonight, from one bureau to another, mostly shorts. I mentioned that I should toss my resort wear, because, well, the tennis trips are a thing of the past. (I loved those. We had hit the point in our lives where we could go down to this beautiful place once or twice a year, relax, enjoy the sunset together in the bar overlooking the sea, dine every evening in nice clothes, have a drink by the canal, walk back to the room through the elegant grounds. This is our place, she said last time. I'd made reservations for this year at Thanksgiving time, as usual, but a few months ago she had cancelled because she wanted to go have Thanksgiving with her elderly mother. Okay. Well, maybe in February, when the world is cold and we need the warmth of our place.

Hah!

I'll have to write a letter to the resort informing them with regret that it is no longer our place. They'll be crushed. They were so happy to see us.

Anyway, I was informed I should not throw out my resort wear because there’s no reason I can’t go to Cancun, or take a cruise! Okay yeah maybe but first of all I'm not going back to our place, by myself, and sit there in my white finery like a sad tanned thumb chopped off a hand and stuck in a chair on a two-top table back by the kitchen.

As for going with someone else, this presumes a sequence of events that fills me with immense fatigue. If I’m lucky I get to cruise again with someone when I’m almost 70, factoring in the six-month period we have in the house, six months of settling into the Final Resting Place, a year of being on the market, a year of finding someone else on whom to inflict my popinjay personality, and then maybe taking a cruise, and then it’s happy selfies in San Juan you put on Facebook to let everyone know you’re living your best life, and a month later she says “I don’t like that racket” and you say “But it’s Mahler” and that’s the end of that.

ETBF came home from a CLE (continuing legal education class) while I was cleaning out the spice rack and getting up the tacky adhesive gunk on the shelf with the oils and vinegars, and I was wet-faced from THINGS, which Mahler can certainly produce. The second movement of the 5th in particular is a classic Mahler Hero’s Journey, except in Mahler the hero always takes it in the neck. I was pacing around the kitchen, gesturing and conducting, looking out the window at the beautiful fall vistas I would never see again, and the convulsive sobs were so intense they gave me abdominal cramps, and I could feel every line of the abs I had worked so intently to define seizing up. In the worst moments of your life you understand Mahler. In the greatest and final transcendent moments of your life you understand Bruckner. In the daily scrum of life it’s everyone else.

Anyway I was at the end of the Sudden Ocular Discharge Spasm, or SODS, not in medias res, so dinner was fine. It was Mexican -seasoned chicken with rice and some pepper jack and some spices I bought in Cancun, in the airport. They had a particular bright aspect. It wasn't my best but she was kind enough to say it was fine.

Everything around here is civil but I feel like a lead feather shed by a black bird, spiraling slowly down to the thin ice atop a deep lake.

Anyway I didn’t go to the gym but I did leave the house because I had to, and went to Target to see if there were any dishes I liked. There was some flatware I could see buying, and a nice lamp. But that’s half a year away. It’s an odd thing to be impatient to start the thing you do not wish to do.

Alden, the town whose newspaper we studied yesterday.

That is a damned fine fire station.

If you’re worried about how they get the trucks out, there’s two bays next door.

A perfect example of the way people devalue the past because it seems old and tired, and slap up something that will look older and more tired in just a few years.

Or at least look boring.

That’s some careful work.

The flowers and pots and decorations indicate that someone cares, today - unlike the people who filled in the glass, slapped on some faux rock, and put up a buckaroo’d overhang.

Barely visible. Farmers and Merchants Bank, I think.

There was a lot of that ground-floor “improvement” going around in Alden. I wonder if anyone thought was a step in the right direction, or whether they were resigned and indifferent.

The State Bank, with its wonderful arched window blinded.

It must have been a bank for a long time; still has the robbery alarm over the door.

It’s hitching its skirt right up to its hips:

Oh dear. Well. A big building, town’s pride - and it doesn’t have much to say anymore.

11 Two friends, ready to head out on an adventure. The artist and the Boy Scout.

It has to be an old gas station, but it’s big - the building extends down the side street, indicating it had a thriving garage trade.

People today wouldn’t think “that’s a startlingly modern building,” but it was! The type of brick, the blankness, the sign over the door - that was right up to the times..

A lake, a ballpark, a little downtown, the streets where people live. One example out of a 100,000.