We are here, in Astoria, in the beautiful fall. Daisy has finished her college essay, Wyatt is super tall and enjoying high school, and Calvin just made a big move at work. I am 9 pounds too heavy and dreading the diet but the holidays are coming and so is my mother, so I need to shed these pounds ASAP.

But you want to know about Maggie.

She is here. She came back to her house and lives there now but I think it’s pretty rough in there, like a toilet but maybe just a shower and no bath. She talks a lot about needing to take many baths on Twitter and she posts on NextDoor, where the truly angry people post, about getting shaken down by evil real estate brokers.

The house is so wrecked that she shouldn’t be living there, but when you’re a crazy smoking Paul McCartney stalker, it’s hard to find an apartment for rent.

That is why she haunts NextDoor, to find a place in the neighborhood to live. She’s even taken on the pro-development, moved-out-of-the-area broker who loves to internet duel with affordable housing advocates.

I had a tiny little breakdown—very small

The first weekend Maggie was home was okay at first. She was quiet. But I could hear her in our bedroom. It wasn’t that loud but it was constant, the low buzzz-thump of classic rock via Spotify. I sat in my bed trying to do my brain killing internet time in which I smoke weed and watch quality cable while playing a video game and the time just glides onward like smooth jello, and I heard her miserable soundtrack and I fell a p a r t.

My breakdowns are very contained lately. I used to try to spread discomfort as far as I could when I felt threatened. I would snap at strangers—so easy to find strangers to snarl at in pre-pandemic NYC—and pull crazy stunts at work. Now I just vibrate and skulk and so that weekend I spent the non-eating time in bed, occasionally putting my ear to the wall and listening to Paul McCartney playing through the wall.

I really cracked up and cried on and off for days, and so I made an appointment with a psychiatrist and I told Calvin we were building the sound proof wall and that was it. He agreed, probably because I was sleeping in the basement every night and looked like hell.

Then I went to therapy and informed my therapist that I was going on drugs because I was having a problem. She said that was a good idea, which I appreciated. I had thought about waiting to see her before getting on drugs, which is what I would have done with my former therapist, but why wait? I was very clear that I needed more help and didn’t need a second opinion.

The drugs helped and also forced me into a reckoning with my migraine drugs. I take an old tricyclic anti-depressant/anti-psychotic called amyltripline, which was known as Elavil before its patent lapsed. It really works on migraines but now I take a big dose and it’s kind of zombifiying. It also interacts with Lexapro, so I had to halve the dose so I wouldn’t get serotonin syndrome.

I am getting more migraines and my insurance won’t approve a different migraine prophylactic drug.

I am forced to witness Maggie’s fights with bureaucracy and thus you must endure mine. It’s called justice, okay?

She’s having some cash-flow issues and she posts screenshots of letters from financial institutions refusing to pay out her weird claims. But every time I think she’s at the door of the poorhouse, she’s not. She then buys a new car. Right now she’s also buying tickets to a Broadway play.

Still, we all enjoy the updates as we slumber behind our soundproof wall. I cannot hear her. It is wonderful. And the Lexapro has soaked through me and I am mostly not mad at myself every second of the day.

David Remnick slid a knife right into my chest cavity

Does the world need an 8000 word article about Paul McCartney? No, not at all. But yet there it was and I read it and as usual, I kind of liked Paul and I acknowledge that The Beatles have permeated every corner of life.

But still Maggie’s obsession with him irks me. She’s so possessive of him and acts like she’s playing hard to get. Lately she’s decided she’s Dorothy Parker and just refuses to have sex with Paul McCartney. Did Dorothy Parker have affairs with musicians? I cannot remember a single Dorothy Parker piece of writing except for Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.

There was a delicious day in which we read on Twitter and Facebook that Maggie had been given a ticket to the Indigo Girls concert because one of them was a childhood friend, and she got kicked out of the theater for being bad at masking. We all enjoyed that.