She is not in good shape. I don’t think she has heat or hot water. We are petitioning for a restraining order in state supreme court (which is basically civil court, rather than criminal) and that is putting pressure on her. She has called the police pretending to be me for the last few nights. She has ordered us emergency NYC food, which I cancelled. It took us two weeks to realize the food was actually for us.

And her Facebook feed is a mess. She tags people who don’t respond. She proclaims her potential—”I got a story you could write in a book!”—while bewailing her fate of being ignored, and is ignored.

Regularly it occurs to me that I am her most faithful audience. Entire weeks pass where I check her social media sources at least three times a day–Insta, Facebook on my fake profile for spying, and Twitter. I also check NextDoor, the paranoid hyperlocal Facebook where I found most of my contractors and the cleaning ladies. I literally hang on her every word.

When I did the original data threshing of her internet life, it was very, very painful. I spent weeks with her inside my mind, with all her delusions, her vanities, her ego, her crushed dreams. As a pharmaceutical copywriter (my actual money-making career), I regularly spend hours in my mind with professional, mule-headed criticizers who comment and change work I have done. Hours upon hours with those people in my mind, telling me what I did wrong and how I should rewrite passages to be more boring and unclear. They hold all the power.

It’s so grim that I force the youngest account executive to mark up the comments with me so I’m not alone for hours upon hours with just those voices.

But that is nothing compared to spending time with Maggie in my head. Maggie is a hellish version of myself, so even as the content is marginally more interesting than multiple sclerosis treatment, it leaves me worn out and self hating.

I have more in common with Maggie that I like to admit

I relate to her. I’m bitter too! No one has noted my giftedness and my special talents, and I am also over 50 years old and not where I’d hoped I would be. I get it totally. Why can’t she just figure out what is fun and pleasant and try to do those things? Get a nice, soft cat for a friend. Order a cheap rug from rugsUSA.com. Take a goddamn walk to the East River and figure out which way the river is going, uptown or downtown. Eat ice cream. Smoke pot. Smoke pot while listening to a podcast and playing a video game—a delicious way to ignore the painful passage of hours. My god, there are so many things one can do to have a nice day.

Maggie knew some famous people and loves to drop their names. Paul McCartney. On-air personalities from Good Morning America. Others I had to google. Recently she has been dropping names of people she doesn’t know but thinks she should have. It worries me, but I’m not sure why.

Meanwhile, I have vowed to never drop another name again [Once Calvin and I saw Liza Minelli flirting with a cop on 5th avenue and 59th street. Sorry. I had to get that out of my system]. Maggie was on the fringes of historical days. This means she was awake during 9/11. That’s the low-hanging fruit of boring New York stories. I actually slept through the part of 9/11 when the planes hit the towers, although I felt my apartment shake when the second one hit, so I am a little bitter about her reminiscences.

So I beat on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into my own character flaws.

Some things one should not do

Say, when a person is running for public office and that person has shared their social media log ins with others, like, say, me, one should not use that public person’s log in to check on one’s crazy neighbor’s account. I know I shouldn’t do this, but another fake social media account… really? I have so many.

But I have come around/matured/wrestled with my demons and now YogaIsLifeandLove23 is a new account with 8 new follows today, and that person can check Maggie’s Insta. No more furtive candidate identity searching. God, life is rough!

Maggie and I, locked together in a death spiral

I read all her posts and I try to understand her. it’s hard lately because, as I said before, she’s not in good shape. But if I don’t follow her mental meanderings in the quasi-crazy zone, I end up with multiple meals from the City of New York that are meant for starving people, not our garbage. Had I just known she was cooking again with nasty plans for us, maybe I wouldn’t have to trash a lot of food.

But no such luck. Two cardboard boxes were on our stoop full of plastic containers of meals. I ordered Wyatt to bring those 2 boxes meals over to Maggie’s, and I forbade him from vandalizing her (fucking) windchimes. She has hung two gigantic metal windchimes on her sad, sad stoop and they are really, really loud. Then he brought the bananas and apples from those boxes to the food cabinet/pantry.

I’ve been ordering around the kids lately, and they just do what I ask. It’s the strangest thing. There is too much to do and I cannot do all the bullshit of the house, but if I don’t order them about, I do all the damn work.

A classic recent Facebook post from Maggie

9/11 was a very long day to work. I did it, while breastfeeding.