Collected Agenda Scene Wiki

Amtrak

56 min read

Amtrak

Article

Amtrak is a recurring brand in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between February 17, 2025 and January 08, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “took the lame amtrak back to lame lincoln”; “the trees are orange on the amtrak back to the city”; “I got an email regarding Amtrak tickets”. It most often appears alongside New York, Night Club 101, Confessions.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: February 17, 2025
  • Last seen: January 08, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

My lame blog
February 17, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Saturday, February 15 The cloud cover is interesting today; a translucent gray that stretches on and on and on. There was very little sleep last night: three hours maybe, but now that you are awake, standing on tiptoes on the edge of the bed sorting trinkets into the high up drawers and basking in this silver flickering light, now it feels like it was just enough. David is on the phone downstairs. I can hear the conversation trickling through the walls. "I haven't slept," he is saying. "I'm staying up just to support you, I'm staying up just to support you, I'm staying up just to support you." He says the last part many times, like he's the manic robot of Staying Up Late, or something. There is a sense of delirium in an early morning that follows a late night, but this is not too bad. I was worried, last night, briefly, about the two cocktails at dinner, the sleeping for an hour in the black dress and the makeup, the waking up suddenly, sitting horrified at the kitchen table with dimmed lamps and bright moon, etching out notes on topics like Discipline is Pleasure and My New Routines. I was concerned that sludge proceeds indulgence, but I see now that things remain precise. "I want to hang out with grasping freaks and take them at their word," David is telling his friend on the phone. "I'm going to auction your keys off to an insane man," he is saying. "This is part of my plan to leave it all behind." You don't remember the falling back to sleep, but you do remember waking up again. The cloud cover makes the day difficult to begin, and you do everything a person should do, yes - you pour serums on your skin and drink water and l-theanine and coffee and you go to the gym and you walk at a rapid pace at a steep incline and you walk on the treadmill closest to the sun, although there is not much sun to speak of today. Eventually, you go to the ocean. On the uptown C - I listen to the sort of music I liked in high school and I imagine a day of twirling in the hot summer light and then this cures me. Now, a day of swimming in the cold fog. another day on my lame blog in my lame life. went to a lame party where i had lame conversations and lame drinks. took the lame amtrak back to lame lincoln where there's a lame pony exhibition and a lame pond called walden. now i'm back in lame manhattan. yup.... today is tuesday and it's just as lame as before. i almost go to a lame party tonight, but instead im feeling tired so i spend my lame night in. have you heard about this lame restaurant called the knickerbocker. you can talk about lame things with your lame boyfriend while waiters serve you dishes. This is what it's like to be you, David tells me. There's that Georgia O'Keefe quote - "I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again." It's like this, but I've just been waiting all week. A new week, tomorrow. You will see me tomorrow. I'm looking forward to all of it, then. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, February 17 From 7:15pm at Metrograph — I have evening plans, but if I didn’t, I’d be here watching The Master. One of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s finest.
Inline links: The Master.
The Strangest Hotel in New York
April 21, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Saturday, April 12 I am back on the train to New York - I had to come and go and come and go again. It feels a little like wading through the muck, all this coming and going, particularly when there was this period of being all twitchy and discontent here, and particularly because now, this time, returning to the city this time unlike on some other occasions, I can suddenly remember all that there is here to miss here. It feels like Fall in New York. This is really throwing me for a loop - knowing that it is Spring but it could not feel more like Fall. Flying back into the city on Wednesday evening, the trees looked all orange and glowing as we circled in on them from above. My dad pulled over the car last night in Vermont to enjoy the snow. Do you appreciate things like when you’re lying on a porch and the air is so hot you can’t really move and you drink a beer with your friends and you feel drunk from it but you might just be drunk from the heat,” I ask my dad. “Or would you prefer to just always be in snow?” “You’re making that sound nice, but I would find the heat suffocating,” my dad says. Just like it was from the plane, the trees are orange on the amtrak back to the city, too. I’ve never noticed spring as orange like this before. I’m noticing it now because I’ve been surrounded by all green in the tropics. It’s just that there are still no leaves on these empty branches, and the air is getting brighter, the air is getting twinged with budding flowers and evening haze. It’s not autumn. There are optical illusions. Everything here will be coming to life, soon. This week, there is a lot to do. I realized that suddenly. The conclusion was to zoom on back towards the city. That is where I am now. The story is almost there. I haven’t worked on something to completion like this, before. It’s not a matter of length or time or even attention it’s more so, just, I’ll be breaking the habit of being all loose and touch and go about it. Sunday, April 13 After a day spent on your phone, you do wake up and it feels all gray. Sun, water, in my dreams I was swinging on a rope swing into a swimming hole in the jungle over and over and over again - a little ominous in energy but it was certainly very beautiful there. Anyways, you can bring things back into sharp focus if you latch onto momentum and if you view inertia with disdain and disregard. It's not too complicated. You go in circles sometimes, but this does not have to continue. A return to the pace of things: an hour of walking briskly on the treadmill at an upscale corporate gym. Walk faster; and then thoughts move faster. Edit and publish the diaries I culled from the Internet this week. Gem Home for trout toast. They had to get rid of the open seating plan because it was starting to feel like a WeWork, the waiter tells Natasha. Now it feels like Vermont in Nolita. Nice and sweet. I am not too cynical even if it is candlelit at noon, which feels like some sort of cosplay in the context of Nolita. I take the F to the 7 to the Whitney Claflin show at Moma Ps1 in the evening. I've never been here before, and I like that the museum feels all cavernous. Someone tries to spit on me on the subway - avoided with ease. Darby is looking at the New York Review of Books shelf in the gift shop. Is there anything you think David would like, I ask. Renaissance poetry, she suggests but she’s kind of half hearted with it. Nothing really speaking to me on the shelves. I’ll invent my own polemic. I just have to conjure some convictions, first. After the exhibitions, which are a little bit of Rookie Mag and Things Culled From Tumblr and Darby is telling me about the theory of The Internet where it all originated from Tumblr - after the Whitney Claflin and James Turrell (my favorite James Turrell) and Sol Lewitt in the basement boiler room and Yto Barrado in the lawn - we take the train home. Lavender and vodka. I meet David at a strange hotel. Cop cars are swarming the building. I wonder if it’s because of the helicopter that went down, David says, but the helicopter was days ago and I am getting the creeps and, I want to go inside, I say. My grandmother gave me some of her collection of Samuel Beckett books this weekend. In the books, all they do is wait and wait and wait. Missed happenstances. Restless. I’m not good at all this waiting. The books are in my bag and I fall asleep with a few back covers folded over on my lap. It’s a friend of a friend's hotel room. David’s been Co-Working. I’ve been sleeping. The windows are tall and glass and the room gets dark naturally. Fades with the sun. David doesn’t want renaissance poetry from Moma Ps1 for his birthday. David wants a mask of Bacchus like the one at my parents house and an 88 dollar overnight stay at the 88 Allen Street Hotel. Monday, April 14 The issue is, I am so disconnected from nature here. The wilderness, yes, but my own sense of instinct too. Yeah, intellectualize it. Drag it out step by step by step and then there are logical conclusions I can live with. Though, if removed from cold hard fact I would know very little here at all. I know nothing viscerally here. Sometimes, elsewhere, I can know things intrinsically from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. New York is good, though, and there is nowhere else for me, anyways. I woke up this morning and my whole body popped. It’s hard to explain it. Like my muscles all revolted and then I couldn’t really move. It’s not the worst thing in the world except I know this would not have happened if I was somewhere else. I am rock solid certain that this would only have happened here. So someone put a hex on me. And then I almost forgot that desperation reeks. I spend all day acting boxy and square and off-putting in my many Academic Classes on account of not being able to really move. Every time I start to feel nauseous about the future considering this sort of bodily degradation beginning at Age Twenty Four Years Old, I try to remind myself that I have probably just been hexed. My friend in Witch School sends me some guides for lying down realignment. She calls me. You can join my cult, she says. Too many cults, and none of seem very all immersive. If I am going to do this, I would like to go all in. David is back to coworking at his friends hotel and so I march my way through the Lower East Side for some company after school. One cannot wallow alone. They have a heating pad at the hotel. They have a Lush Ice Vape. David’s friend says that he’s been fasting and praying a lot. There’s a permanently skewed gold framed painting of a gold chalice of flowers and some thick tan curtains at the hotel. The curtains are pulled open so we can all see outside. David brought opera binoculars. I brought swedish candy. David goes to get some chinese food so I settle in to write, but he returns with his friend sooner than I would have liked. “Bro,” David says, “I might go get the Penthouse Balcony King Suite Deluxe.” “Hotel employees are better friends than 99% of people’s friends,” David’s friend says. David does get the suite, and so we decamp upstairs. The curtains are more ornate in this room, and the aura is more creepy. Everything is funnier when you’re sober, David’s friend is saying. Something about coming face to face with your own absurdity. Something about how when you’re drunk, you think your’ madness makes sense. Two bathrooms and the shared patio and the love seat and the dog bed and David is saying that instead of dinner, instead of ever wasting money on a dumb dinner again, we should splurge on staycations instead. I brush my teeth with the hotel provided tooth brush and I sit on the floor of the erratically tiled shower. I don’t totally get the bit and I feel bad because it’s frivolous but, I do love hotels. Suspended circumstance The safest and most secure sleep. Float me out somewhere I’ve never been before. It’s good for girls with night terrors like me. Tuesday, April 15 David stayed up all night making a borderline satanic short film. I think I’m manic, he says, which is probably why he got us the stay in the strange hotel in the first place. You’re not manic, I say. Not manic, like I need lithium, David says. Last night I was compulsively reading these decentralized networking protocol white papers, David says. David starts telling me about an opera he wants to see. Something about The Only Monotheistic Pharaoh. I walk home and I stop at Whole Foods to buy some Clear Headed Kombucha and Chicken Sausage and Cymbiotika Vitamin C. I feel really terrible. I make a list of affirming statements. I FEEL AMAZING. I HAVE NEVER FELT BETTER. I take a nap. Wakeup and, David and his friend are on the phone downstairs talking about a startup. Eavesdropping and, it sounds like they’re about to independently invent the concept of the Male Influencer. “Imagine believing yourself to be cunning and self-serving, and you're doing so by working for [redacted],” David is saying. “Anyone can learn to code,” David is saying. Tune out, tune in, and now they’re inventing the Vending Machine. They’re talking about Jon Raffman and Petra Cortright. They’re talking about LA. Evil Women. Tax Day. “Girls already invented being an influencer eons ago,” I tell David, when he gets off the phone. David pauses for a moment. “I think girls and guys invented being influencers at about the same time.” Friday, April 18 I haven't been able to fill in the blanks of the past few days. Becoming: utterly consumed. It was deeply unpleasant, honestly. I feel bad for me on Monday, thinking it would be easy to wrap up this thing I was working on and then almost losing my whole head instead. I stayed up all week. All through the very peaks of the night and then past that, even. At first it was all disjointed, but now it is making more sense. And the good news is, good for art and life - I can intuit things again! WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, April 21 From 8pm - late at Night Club 101 — I will be reading in the Domino Reading Series, alongside Jess Wolfe, Dani Narins, Ruby Hoffman, Gordon Glasgow, Jade Wootton, and Matthew Gasda. Gallipony x Solar System DJ set after the reading.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!i2kf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe2899bb7-1e22-4a8b-93bc-14bf7e6ffb02_892x444.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyqH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96641088-5f01-40d2-883f-cf79d91add2c_616x798.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CQwj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa8402160-9491-40d2-95e0-9dee6e25a00a_852x318.png, borderline satanic short film, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sXNu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2692d191-2567-4b52-ab49-e81eacdf528d_730x832.png, Night Club 101, Domino Reading Series
Sunday, April 13 After a day spent on your phone, you do wake up and it feels all gray. Sun, water, in my dreams I was swinging on a rope swing into a swimming hole in the jungle over and over and over again - a little ominous in energy but it was certainly very beautiful there. Anyways, you can bring things back into sharp focus if you latch onto momentum and if you view inertia with disdain and disregard. It's not too complicated. You go in circles sometimes, but this does not have to continue. A return to the pace of things: an hour of walking briskly on the treadmill at an upscale corporate gym. Walk faster; and then thoughts move faster. Edit and publish the diaries I culled from the Internet this week. Gem Home for trout toast. They had to get rid of the open seating plan because it was starting to feel like a WeWork, the waiter tells Natasha. Now it feels like Vermont in Nolita. Nice and sweet. I am not too cynical even if it is candlelit at noon, which feels like some sort of cosplay in the context of Nolita. I take the F to the 7 to the Whitney Claflin show at Moma Ps1 in the evening. I've never been here before, and I like that the museum feels all cavernous. Someone tries to spit on me on the subway - avoided with ease. Darby is looking at the New York Review of Books shelf in the gift shop. Is there anything you think David would like, I ask. Renaissance poetry, she suggests but she’s kind of half hearted with it. Nothing really speaking to me on the shelves. I’ll invent my own polemic. I just have to conjure some convictions, first. After the exhibitions, which are a little bit of Rookie Mag and Things Culled From Tumblr and Darby is telling me about the theory of The Internet where it all originated from Tumblr - after the Whitney Claflin and James Turrell (my favorite James Turrell) and Sol Lewitt in the basement boiler room and Yto Barrado in the lawn - we take the train home. Lavender and vodka. I meet David at a strange hotel. Cop cars are swarming the building. I wonder if it’s because of the helicopter that went down, David says, but the helicopter was days ago and I am getting the creeps and, I want to go inside, I say. My grandmother gave me some of her collection of Samuel Beckett books this weekend. In the books, all they do is wait and wait and wait. Missed happenstances. Restless. I’m not good at all this waiting. The books are in my bag and I fall asleep with a few back covers folded over on my lap. It’s a friend of a friend's hotel room. David’s been Co-Working. I’ve been sleeping. The windows are tall and glass and the room gets dark naturally. Fades with the sun. David doesn’t want renaissance poetry from Moma Ps1 for his birthday. David wants a mask of Bacchus like the one at my parents house and an 88 dollar overnight stay at the 88 Allen Street Hotel. Monday, April 14 The issue is, I am so disconnected from nature here. The wilderness, yes, but my own sense of instinct too. Yeah, intellectualize it. Drag it out step by step by step and then there are logical conclusions I can live with. Though, if removed from cold hard fact I would know very little here at all. I know nothing viscerally here. Sometimes, elsewhere, I can know things intrinsically from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. New York is good, though, and there is nowhere else for me, anyways. I woke up this morning and my whole body popped. It’s hard to explain it. Like my muscles all revolted and then I couldn’t really move. It’s not the worst thing in the world except I know this would not have happened if I was somewhere else. I am rock solid certain that this would only have happened here. So someone put a hex on me. And then I almost forgot that desperation reeks. I spend all day acting boxy and square and off-putting in my many Academic Classes on account of not being able to really move. Every time I start to feel nauseous about the future considering this sort of bodily degradation beginning at Age Twenty Four Years Old, I try to remind myself that I have probably just been hexed. My friend in Witch School sends me some guides for lying down realignment. She calls me. You can join my cult, she says. Too many cults, and none of seem very all immersive. If I am going to do this, I would like to go all in. David is back to coworking at his friends hotel and so I march my way through the Lower East Side for some company after school. One cannot wallow alone. They have a heating pad at the hotel. They have a Lush Ice Vape. David’s friend says that he’s been fasting and praying a lot. There’s a permanently skewed gold framed painting of a gold chalice of flowers and some thick tan curtains at the hotel. The curtains are pulled open so we can all see outside. David brought opera binoculars. I brought swedish candy. David goes to get some chinese food so I settle in to write, but he returns with his friend sooner than I would have liked. “Bro,” David says, “I might go get the Penthouse Balcony King Suite Deluxe.” “Hotel employees are better friends than 99% of people’s friends,” David’s friend says. David does get the suite, and so we decamp upstairs. The curtains are more ornate in this room, and the aura is more creepy. Everything is funnier when you’re sober, David’s friend is saying. Something about coming face to face with your own absurdity. Something about how when you’re drunk, you think your’ madness makes sense. Two bathrooms and the shared patio and the love seat and the dog bed and David is saying that instead of dinner, instead of ever wasting money on a dumb dinner again, we should splurge on staycations instead. I brush my teeth with the hotel provided tooth brush and I sit on the floor of the erratically tiled shower. I don’t totally get the bit and I feel bad because it’s frivolous but, I do love hotels. Suspended circumstance The safest and most secure sleep. Float me out somewhere I’ve never been before. It’s good for girls with night terrors like me. Tuesday, April 15 David stayed up all night making a borderline satanic short film. I think I’m manic, he says, which is probably why he got us the stay in the strange hotel in the first place. You’re not manic, I say. Not manic, like I need lithium, David says. Last night I was compulsively reading these decentralized networking protocol white papers, David says. David starts telling me about an opera he wants to see. Something about The Only Monotheistic Pharaoh. I walk home and I stop at Whole Foods to buy some Clear Headed Kombucha and Chicken Sausage and Cymbiotika Vitamin C. I feel really terrible. I make a list of affirming statements. I FEEL AMAZING. I HAVE NEVER FELT BETTER. I take a nap. Wakeup and, David and his friend are on the phone downstairs talking about a startup. Eavesdropping and, it sounds like they’re about to independently invent the concept of the Male Influencer. “Imagine believing yourself to be cunning and self-serving, and you're doing so by working for [redacted],” David is saying. “Anyone can learn to code,” David is saying. Tune out, tune in, and now they’re inventing the Vending Machine. They’re talking about Jon Raffman and Petra Cortright. They’re talking about LA. Evil Women. Tax Day. “Girls already invented being an influencer eons ago,” I tell David, when he gets off the phone. David pauses for a moment. “I think girls and guys invented being influencers at about the same time.” Friday, April 18 I haven't been able to fill in the blanks of the past few days. Becoming: utterly consumed. It was deeply unpleasant, honestly. I feel bad for me on Monday, thinking it would be easy to wrap up this thing I was working on and then almost losing my whole head instead. I stayed up all week. All through the very peaks of the night and then past that, even. At first it was all disjointed, but now it is making more sense. And the good news is, good for art and life - I can intuit things again! WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, April 21 From 8pm - late at Night Club 101 — I will be reading in the Domino Reading Series, alongside Jess Wolfe, Dani Narins, Ruby Hoffman, Gordon Glasgow, Jade Wootton, and Matthew Gasda. Gallipony x Solar System DJ set after the reading.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyqH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96641088-5f01-40d2-883f-cf79d91add2c_616x798.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CQwj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa8402160-9491-40d2-95e0-9dee6e25a00a_852x318.png, borderline satanic short film, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sXNu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2692d191-2567-4b52-ab49-e81eacdf528d_730x832.png, Night Club 101, Domino Reading Series
mutually assured destruction
May 06, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, April 27 Sitting up in the middle of the night and saying things I don't mean and, it's not that I'm talking in my sleep exactly. More so, I've been trying to figure out if this harshness comes from being evil or if maybe it's more of a vindictive thing instead. Being vindictive implies, at least, that you are seeking some sort of equilibrium. Wrong and be wronged. You aren't just a gratuitous little freak about it. Causality is irrelevant, and I'm nauseous at the gym, playing high vibration Youtube videos in my headphones, standing on an electric plate that can jostle my insides, lymph nodes, drain me like a detox, and yes, there needs to be one of those soon. Making calls and making complaints, and then I'm like, oh sorry, I didn't mean it, I was drunk. And then I'm saying that I feel crazy instead. I feel insane. You don't understand. I have lost complete touch with my judgment. Costa Rica, in the rain I was kicking around mud with my feet and drinking too much and his friends were like oh you think you're in a teen movie or something because I was saying kind of nasty things, too. It's way worse in New York. That is the definitive thing and, also the fact that there is nowhere else. Something can be confusing and still not impossible to regulate. Sorry to be all obfuscated about it. I can control my consciousness. It's my consciousness after all. I go to church in the evening, which feels unbelievably affected - would a girl that is evil redeem herself on her knees before God? - though, that isn't really the question. You believe in good and evil, yet you have found yourself entirely incapable of distinguishing the difference between the two. Yes, then, prognosis, logical conclusion, you have lost your mind. I eat a cookie for breakfast and then the leftovers of the quiche for dinner that I fugue state ordered for my boyfriend at six am, which was a disaster in and of itself. I decided to do something nice, and then the delivery guy couldn't figure out the buzzer and so I stumbled down in my socks and Brandy Melville, I wasn't even very polite about it when he handed me my bag. I pointed to the buzzer and said that's the buzzer and then I called my boyfriend over and over because I realized, also, I'd forgotten to bring down keys. It's the type of day where I spend almost no time eating, but I still feel kind of full in a bad way. Everything I did eat is so calorically dense that it creates some kind of cognizant dissonance. I shouldn't feel this bogged down from just some stupid scraps. I don't want to say terrible things, I said. And yet you constantly are saying terrible things, he said. I wish we didn't do these things, I said. That's like saying you wish spiders weren't real, he said. People are vicious and awful. Then, I do pilates from the pilates app that they sent me for free on Instagram. I'm enough of an influencer these days that brands will send me spam mail disguised as PR. Like 20% off coupon codes to their clothing line personalized just for me, but I still have to pay them 80% if I want the clothes. This means, basically, that I am not an influencer at all, but I have just made things like my email address and my diary psychosis way too public. The pilates studio said - "share if you can!" but I'm sorry, I can't, I'm not really talking about me, I'm talking about something else. First name, last name, coupon codes, face to the name, you're ruining all my plausible deniability. I started sobbing by the window, and he said don't worry, you're sweet. I started thinking he was dead, and he said don't worry, I'm ok. I'm blurring the timelines a bit. He told me I could meet him on the steps of a Chinatown apartment a little bit after sunset. Inside, his friend took calls and let the bathtub-in-the-kitchen Chinatown apartment become a kind of neutral territory. I sat in the guest room and held my breath. Say the same things over and over, and because you mean it, they eventually stick. Viewing everything in black and white. They've told me that's my problem. That and being too suggestible, and also out of control. I started being all dramatic about it and yeah there's been too much partying, but I come to learn I'm pretty much like this sober, too. Things were really really really pure and sweet, and I keep on thinking in ninety days, ninety days of being pure again, and everything bad can be problems that belonged to someone else. I am trying to become like a Monk about it. It's not so much that my impulse towards reaction is wrong, but rather that I act purely on impulse, and impulse alone never did anything other than make a situation that much worse. Spring and Redemption, I say, on my dumb fucking TikTok. Spring and redemption, my boyfriend says. Yeah, that's cute, this one is cute. Did you spell synchronicity wrong for engagement or to be insane? my boyfriend asked. Insane, I said. He stopped to think about it. So stupid, he said. You aren't that insane. Order diet pepsi bean and cheese burrito nicotine gum and we're lying in the sun. So much sun through the windows that we have to keep the blinds shut or the light goes too crazy, the air conditioning fires up but not much can be done in the face of UV like this. Lucky, luck,y lucky. I spent the week talking to myself. Lying on the floor and I'm trying to seek cognizance in repetition. The same word three times. First, you remember what it means. Second, you determine what you think is true. You don't take it for granted. If you don't take it for granted, then you won't lose your mind. Monday, April 28 Eiverything gets better overnight. No more crying in my sleep. 2:22am and I’m not yelling. I see things more with precision than as if through angels and mystics. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be so transcendental about it. It’s really evil to try to mythologize something that is neither beautiful nor true. I stayed at Hudson Square until late last night. Black socks and black shoes and a tennis skirt that doesn’t match to be late to class today. The sun has rushed back and it’s iced tea no breakfast no lunch. David meets me at Cafe Reggio, where to our left, an awful woman is berating her husband to levels of borderline abuse, and to our right a lovely couple is talking about the difference between mere activity, and real fulfillment. You gain fulfillment from things like C-suite and making tv shows and real estate, the man is saying. Activity is something like going to Europe, he is telling his wife. These are the things that fulfill us, for others it might be different, the woman is saying. I am surprised to hear, that in referencing C-Suite, they are suggesting real fulfillment.. Materially, things are working themselves out. The rot has been first, material, and then secondly, spiritual. We go to Lupa for a lovely spring dinner. Sweet then sour then sweet. I am endlessly interested in reiterations, but that just makes things worse and worse. Homemade focaccia and olive oil and arugula salad and lobster corn ravioli and lamb chops and tartufo which is like a shell of hazelnut, ice cream, paper plane to drink and the restaurant is closing by the time we leave. Tuesday, April 29 You stop a night terror like this: creep down the ladder and say to your boyfriend, you need to turn off the projector right this second. The light was emitting vibes that were very off putting and I was concerned about scentless and odorless gas. My boyfriend makes me pasta and gives me a beer. You kind of briefly entered a state of psychosis, he tells me. I get super offended by that one. A bad dream doesn’t mean I need lithium or something, I say. I didn’t say you have schizophrenia, he says. I said you seemed to be under the impression that the projector light was toxic, poison, and evil, which is the very definition of a state of psychosis - the merging of reality with hallucination. No, I say, that’s the very definition of a bad dream. Anyways, I’ve been having sleep paralysis because I’ve been having insomnia. I’ve been much more normal about it. Run, coffee, iced tea, the world's worst sandwich back at Cafe Reggio in the afternoon. Do you have any favorite spots in New York, the tall man next to me is asking the short man across the table. “Well, it’s far from here,” the short man tells the tall man. "it's really far from here. it's called Coney Island." I pick out all the healthy bits of my dinner and eat just the bread instead. I’ve been feeling tempted to get really fucking skinny again. Being weird and off putting with my sandwich and then leaving my scraps with abandon. Feeling pretty sane today, I don't really want to get out of here anymore. Wednesday, April 30 Up all night just like last week, and I'm in class reading from my story like oh I'm probably not going to freak out but it's still a possibility. David turns older today. He's still asleep when I get home in the afternoon. Macarons and iced coffee on the table. We go to Vol de Nuit and I get promptly drunk on cider. It's bright and nice and I'm writing tipsy. This week won’t eb and flow in the way that I hate. Make yourself head empty and then see what happens. We go next door to Dear Stranger for dinner. Red snapper and jalapeno sauce and wedge salad and shrimp tostadas. Two martinis. David makes a scene in a scuffle with one of those guys on the streets who shill comedy shows on the way home. Then, I wake up and it feels like morning but it’s only just past midnight. I used to miss the things I have right now so much. I’d miss it through abstraction, really. All through hypotheticals because it had never really been mine in the first place. It shocks me when I see my life emerge unscathed from fits of self destruction. Playing fast and loose when it comes to the thing of redemption. I am trying not to be that way. First it is sour and then it is sweet. This is one of two directions that any progression of events can take. Obviously, I know the direction that I would like to pursue. Thursday, May 1 Everything has come alive again, though I'm not quite sure if it's solid yet. I almost step in a pool of blood on Rivington Street, and then we're talking about the uptick in dead bodies that people keep finding around town these days. I'm going to stop being so morbid. You can be thinking about one thing, and then you can decide to be thinking about something else. Yesterday evening felt sparkly and nice. David and I stayed at Vol de Nuit for a while, drinking cider, which makes me feel full but not that drunk, lots of sunshine and we bring in our own food. Peanut mayonnaise garlic sauce on french fries. I'm less disgusted by these things than I used to be. Yesterday's dinner felt nice but a little too drunk. I was drinking iced tea at two in the morning and then my boyfriend was throwing bottles across the room in a way that was funny, not crazy. I got an email asking me if I'd like to talk about Dimes Square for a German newspaper but I wouldn't like to do this and so I didn't respond. I got an email regarding Amtrak tickets. Things have been too whiplash lately. I got an email from my friend. I owe edits on some projects, and I like when big things happen quickly, though we are not quite there yet. The nature of how I am creatively always edges on narcissism - reflection and observation being more natural than imagination to me, I suppose. although the night terrors suggest some kind of imagination. People like to tell me that. I’m close to the mystics. On a literal level - clinical - the night terrors suggest nothing other than a flirting with psychosis, though my paranoia does not extend to fear over my mind. Nobody actually thinks I’m losing my mind Physically, a parasite cleanse can be dangerous because the heavy metals your parasites held will be dumped right back into your body. I do have paranoia surrounding being poisoned, though this is more a concern of the mind. April - I wrote 40,000 words in my secret diary that I do not share here. This is surely excessive. There are worse things. What I meant to say is: the narcissism has felt less like filtering observation and reflection through the self these days, and more like actually just kind of sloppy-like, thinking about Myself. The sun is nice, because it heats my greenhouse apartment so quickly - downstairs becomes for the daytime, and upstairs becomes so bright and burnt to a crisp that it has to only be for sleep. Sleeping in the day here is nice. It’s like somebody cast a spell on me. I am not someone to sleep in the day, but a greenhouse apartment is something like a potion this time of year. Friday, May 2 When I think about how to synthesize an idea into a quote or a meme, something pithy really, then the idea is immediately ruined. Even it was a good idea at the start. This makes me want to distance myself from the quote, meme, thing of posting more generally I suppose though, I’m still having fun. I’m so sure about things, now. I was feeling really really really unsure about things and I’m so sure now. I feel so bad for acting all ambivalent about it. I’m so certain. I have never been more certain and I have never been more sincere. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, May 6 From 7pm at Pete’s Candy Store — Mind Palace Poetry presents The Girls Room, with special guest host Sophie Appel. Featuring Sascha Cohen, Siena Foster-Soltis, Jude Lavelle, and Montana James Thomas.
Inline links: Pete’s Candy Store
Early August
August 21, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, July 29 It was a hot dog and white claw and blue hour over the marshes on the Amtrak last night. I took inventory of things when I arrived by night. The road was dark and it is August. My wrists were swollen from the heat and the city and there were lights around the bend and then only the sound of pebbles and tires and Davey-the-dog at the door and; it’s too late in the season for spring peepers. I haven’t been home in August in a few summers. It’s usually somewhere further down the coast this time of year. There was a pull towards this place sometime around noon on Wednesday. A pull towards cornfields specifically, and the way suburban heat would hit me heavy and hard when I would come back from the ocean as a child. In New York, I dreamt of a small house somewhere in someplace that felt like Topanga and wood floors and glass windows and a blue dress that looked like Leslie Van Houten’s in court, only the implications were less evil. I dreamt of palm trees and ferocious winds and sunrise over a cliff over volcanoes over the mountains over San Salvador. It was a mix of dreams. Some places where I have been before, and some places where I haven’t. I decided to play it safe. So, everything is exactly as I left it. There are farm fresh eggs and strawberries in the fridge. The empty April whisky bottle is still in the drawer where it was left after the eclipse. I am thinking of getting less into gnosticism and more into God. I have not been thinking very much lately at all. 2:09am - eating salted caramel gelato out of a plastic container in bed and vitamin water zero and cool smooth minty menthal zyn. My father stopped at the Cumberland Farms outside the train station so I could restock up on zyns. He is so nice. Everyone is so nice. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, August 21 From 7pm at St Lydia’s — Label NYC and Doxy Mag present SERVICE #2 - the second group chat reading. Featuring Mike Crumps, Dan Mancini, Scott Litts, Maxwell Foley, and more. Photos by Nick Dove. | Free
Inline links: St Lydia’s, Label NYC, Doxy Mag, SERVICE #2
Florida, Massachusetts (03)
December 02, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday 7:45am and I am lying very still in my clean crisp bed like it’s a haven or a ship that will float me above and away from the clutter around me. Lying with my head pulled under white bamboo sheets, so I don’t have to see anything other than white noise and whatever I decide to fire up on my phone all around me. Reading Girl Insides live blogging her breakup on my phone this morning, and I do feel envious of the corporeal and anonymous ways in which her brand of compulsive documentation flows. Feeling kind of vague and emotionless after a weekend that was here there everywhere, and I let myself really be sucked into it which is always how it goes but one needs to be careful. I wore Cinq-a-Sept Christmas dress for a few days in a row, and there was dinner in a dark wood uptown apartment and there was a sunrise over the Hudson River and I kind of don’t want to write it like a sequence of events. I kind of hope to talk about the architectures of things and why they happen as they do. On my phone, Girl Insides is in Hollywood and breathing in jasmine and perfect fog and smog and panzanella crackers. All of a sudden everything that happens in my life is up to me, Girl Insides says. Well, me too for the first-time-ever, but it becomes more difficult this way. Perhaps I’ll go to surf in San Diego with Emma. Perhaps I’ll go to Kazakhstan or Tbilisi, Georgia or at least commit myself to no more losing days following wherever the wind blows me. I’ll be in Florida, Massachusetts, anyways this week. A spooky little town. They cursed the Amtrak towards Western, Massachusetts last year. Strangers yelling at me as we sat in dark seats hurdling through the night with train snacks of hot dog and coca cola and chips that came in perfect little packages that one unboxes in the dining car. A girl threw herself at the walls of the train on the platform as it pulled out of Moynihan Station. She bounced off the train and was removed unscathed. The conductor announced that they’d lost the crew somewhere around Albany. I walked into a doctors office and I recognized the dermatologist’s twisted and frozen face as the woman who’d been screaming on a night train heading out of New York. And all of this is just to say that everything was kind of cursed and still is sometimes, but I am trying to find omens in the more beautiful and serendipitous sorts of patterns and symbols and signs. In the hotel lobby, Celia told me to be less vague about it. Either say what you mean or don’t. So I do believe everything that I have ever been told. Which is mostly just to say that before I believed everything bad, I believed everything good. Tuesday We drove from New York to The Berkshires this morning. I stopped at Broadway Bagels and then at a farmstand and now we are here. So, these are the things that have happened. No curses and no omens. The house we can see outside the long glass window got painted green and now it totally fades into the woods. That’s nice, everyone says. That’s so much nicer, now. It’s brilliant blue-gray outside the long glass windows now that the snow has stopped and it is settling into very early afternoon dusk. I am lying by the fire that is crackling louder when the furnace is on and quieter when it isn’t. The Eames chair is empty behind me and the lamps overhead are big yellow orbs, hanging from the slanted wooden ceilings. There are things I could do here. Mass MoCA museum and my favorite James Turrell works there that change with morning and evening light. Or, The Clarke Art Museum and I can hear whispers of a textile show that others are bundling up to go see downstairs, but I think I would prefer to just stay put. There is a Tourists Hotel by the North Adams airport, which is a motel that turned fancy, with individual bungalows looking out at the river and a restaurant that looks like a home inside, all fireplaces and craft drinks and lots of little rooms. There is the alpaca farm up the road and there is Hopkins Forest and Pine Cobble and the Appalachian Trail and the sauna room by the river and trees like skeletons waving in the fading daylight just past my peripheral vision. I drove to Graylock Works when we got here to do ballet and yoga in an old mill and then I drove to the gas station and then to the local hotel lobby where I sat incognito for a moment watching families in autumn dresses and long jackets filter in and out and in and out and then I drove home. I’ve been here for a while. It’s nice to find a house that I can float through. It’s nice that when I look around I see something aside from four small walls. A blizzard just began. It is strange, because the snow is flying horizontally in the Southbound wind, but the trees suddenly appear to be standing perfectly still. Wednesday Field Notes from Florida, Massachusetts and my Google Docs Diary: I woke up this morning and I cleansed my face and put on toner and then guasha with rose oil and then red light therapy while stretching.
Inline links: Girl Insides
Lost Week
January 08, 2026 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, December 22 Where do your turtles go in the winter, Zoe asked me, a few nights ago. The pond is made of running water, I said. It doesn’t freeze over, and the turtles just stay put. Zoe leaned forward, then, and told me, in a low voice, not to be affected by the temper tantrums of others. I nodded. I said something about the wind. There’s just been something manic in the wind is all, I said. Zoe nodded. Bright winter light reflecting off the turtle pond like a beam this morning. No natural light in the apartment, and no one really left in the city at this point in the winter, but the courtyard is shimmering shimmering shimmering. Longest night of the year. Early morning. Packing up my bags and then I’ll leave for a while, or at least for one week. The other girls at dinner a few nights ago were talking about the things that necessitate passivity, and the things that necessitate action. I’m thinking of moving to LA and getting super into my career, one of the girls was saying. What sort of career? Creative director. I’ve been getting super into my career right here, one of the other girls chirped. A career is a really important thing for a woman to have, her friend deadpanned. The first girl looked surprised. That was so backhanded. She said. You know I don’t actually want one of those. That was so mean. I think that was the meanest thing anyone has ever said to me. After dinner, I went back to my apartment and I stayed there for a while. For a few days actually, which I have never done before and never will again but the stories were flowing like water and I was drifting in and out of dreams where everyone was yelling around me. The apartment was empty and pale and I could see small objects fluttering slightly from the wind through the open windows every time I opened my eyes. The time passed quickly, like nothing at all, and now it is dusk and a full Winter Solstice cycle later. It’s not that I’ve ever been truly manic, or really even bored. It’s just that I found it easy to stay put, for once. There’s no snow on the walk to Caffe Reggio, but the streets are still white with cold. The order here is veggie soup with grilled chicken chopped up and placed at the bottom of a thick white ceramic cup, a neopolitan pastry, coffee with milk. The cafe is warm and full of cheer even though we are at the top of the Lost Week Of The Year. The goal now is to practice being quiet more. The goal is to distinguish between miracles and curses. There are no curses on the Amtrak to Boston this year, though the light is kind of melancholy and the station is less full than I remember it. I get on the wrong train first, and then it’s eerie and first class all the way down. On the right train, pulling out of New York, there are flames like eternal torches burning outside the factories. and underneath the bridges. Listening to Morrissey and George Martin to remind myself of things that are beautiful. The ride is quick and quiet. No strange women throwing themselves at the side of the carriage. No thieves in New Haven, though I’m pretty sure train heists don’t happen anymore and haven’t for a while. Nobody yells or seems particularly cognizant of their surroundings, least of all of me. Last Christmas, it was chaos all the way to Massachusetts. In the dining car, a man is talking about Snow Days. He can’t help but like snow days, because he likes the way they make his daughter’s face light up. Train snacks come in little packages like secrets. Tinfoil and cardboard and many layers to unwrap. It’s just a hebrew-all-beef hotdog and a white claw inside, but the ordeal of it is nice all the same. “Winter” by Johann Wofgang von Goethe is playing off the radio when I arrive. The drive from the train is dark and silent, except for Davey-the-dog jumping at the window. The old magicians were poets,” the radio is saying. “Their art was not to turn one thing into another, but to seek the hidden form of a thing and put it into words. The essence of the thought is that true creative power lies in revealing the inherent, often unseen, nature of the world through art and language,” a woman is reciting on the radio. Her voice is soft and she speaks in a thick British accent. It’s still dark outside, and pine bows are strung over the wooden rafters, along with baby lights that flicker slowly, on and off. The fields are gray and hazy and soft and sheathed in a light fog so you can still see through the window, but not very clearly. “Everyone who saw her looked away quickly,” the reader is saying, on the radio. “as if what she had could be caught by being close. For her it was only winter. Inside and out. She would carry it with her, wherever she went.” Welcome to Night Tracks, the radio says. Where the land is covered in a blanket of snow. Tuesday, December 23 It did snow overnight. Three glass mason jars of water on the kitchen table, along with orange juice, cups of black coffee, and a lemon tart from the Concord Cheese Shop. The whole set up is glimmering in diamond and crystalline light. Everyone else is gone, for the day, and I know because I could hear them talking on their way out. Something about elevators and broken door knobs and all the horrible ways one can get trapped and then die. Someone my sister knew in a small apartment in Berlin sent the bathroom door knob tumbling out into the living room and thus sealed herself inside. Some friend of a friend got stuck in a careening elevator for hours on end, dropping up and down and lurching faster and faster between the twentieth floor and ground. She was about to make contact with the earth and splinter herself. Really, she was. It was about to happen when the elevator stopped. A fireman emerged with a master key. The friend was fine. One is aware, I could hear everyone saying as they all bundled up in winter coats, that when one dies of claustrophobia, the causation of one’s demise is directly correlated to one’s solitude. The doors slammed and in a rush of cold and morbid conversation and bright morning, everyone was gone. I’m in the woods again, after all that energy. It’s just one week all at once. It’s just ten am and there are still small snow flurries blowing off the evergreen forest. Wednesday, December 24 Christmas Eve - accounting for beautiful hours I went to the salon in the car park by the laundromat, where I used to make snow angels in the dead grass, while I waited as a child.
REDACTED resolutions for the benefit of oneself and others Friday, December 26 I woke up to it like a snow globe outside. The type of storm that is hard to describe unless you are me, waking up surrounded on all sides by everything soft and quiet and shimmering in a room that has always been yours. Everything coated white and sweet and branches out my window still heavy from the fresh cover of the storm. Looking at the snow through the sheen of sheer white curtains in my window. Looking at dried wild flowers rising out of fields and the pine forest past the farm shivering kind of silver and the green of the shed and the barn creating pops of color against all that bright white. And all of this is just to say that I slept peacefully through the night and waking up this morning I do feel like I can access this place and this holiday and a sense of rootedness in myself, physical form, physical home, in a way that in the past few months I have not felt capable of understanding. Last year I spent every morning at home writing: cold crisp clear morning and everything it is better than I possibly could have imagined. Last year, I took the train back to a glass apartment in the sky and floated in infinite life for a few more weeks, and then I began to scream. Laundry and writing in my google docs diary at the soapstone counter this morning. I can’t tell if the storm is silent, or if it sounds like ice and little bells. Amelia called last night to tell a different version of the usual story. I am getting so creeped out again, Amelia said. My room here is pale and quiet and blue. it is the only bedroom above which there is no attic, so I can really hear the wind. I’m not creeped out, I told Amelia. Everything about your story just feels kind of distant and strange. Driving to get coffee in the old town center and I’m not hitting anyone’s bumper as I wheel around into Cumberland Farms. Toes cold in my Bean Boots. Extremities always cold from Raynod’s Disease and avoidance of contact with rough fabrics like “wool” out of delusional distaste for “overstimulation.” The town is kind of story book snowy, too, though less so than in the fields by the house, where everything is encased and total and like a picture and a dream and one scene all at once. The scene is less all encompassing here, by noon, in town, where the heaviest parts of the snow have already started to drip down and melt. It is strange to be alone here. Wind moving quickly outside my car and I did imagine something else. I’ve imagined everything a million times over, and so I guess it’s hard to pinpoint any one scenario. Things change very quickly. It used to take my breath away and now it doesn’t. I watch a woman running in place in a phone booth like a treadmill. I watch a young dad placing pennies on the train track with his kids where the commuter rail comes through. Sitting in my car watching the trains and mostly just holding my hands up to the heat. Everything is covered in a blanket of snow. In the car, I have; almond milk latte with peppermint and sugar free vanilla, vitamin D3, vitamin C, Inositol, fish oil, black seed oil. Taking it all in big huge gulps. Taking it all and then stuffing the wrappings in my bag and resuming watching everything around me. Later, I am reading Alain de Botton Architecture of Happiness in blue hour dusk and I am in the passenger seat driving on the highway when I look up to find: it is dark. Crescent moon. The George Washington Bridge looks so beautiful, my aunt says. I’ve never seen it glow like that. It’s never been this dark, this early, on this drive, before. There’s never been a drive that was as fast and smooth and calm, as this one. Back in New York City, it smells like caution to the wind and the mania of a week that exists in a void. Rushed back from dusty fields and Winter Break to find that no one else is here. You can tell that no one else is here, because the sidewalks on the Upper West Side are piled high with snow banks, no foot prints, yellow glow from the townhouses I pass in a yellow taxi cab on my way downtown, but perhaps the lights are simulated or at the very least on a timer, because there are no shadowy figures or even moving silhouettes visible past the windows. Central Park is pitch black, covered in snow that I can’t see but it makes the outlines of things kind of rough and cartoonish. It’s not that I actually believe nothing to be real. I’m just watching the shape of things kind of morph all around me. On the last night of the Lost Week of the Year, I walk to Dr Clark for the sake of fresh air and doing the things I say I will. My apartment was quiet and clean, because I left it quiet and clean. I returned to everything totally unchanged. The quiet part was shocking, and then it was ok. The city was kind of like a winter wonderland, too, except for the snow that had already turned kind of black. On the Houston Street median strip, I was stranded amidst blurry traffic with a man in a blanket, rocking back and forth and drinking whisky from the bottle. HEY, he said. Hey, I responded. He seemed surprised, and I became immediately afraid. Whatever. Everything was normal. Cannot become cynical. Dr Clark’s is quiet, my friends texted, on my walk. I’m sorry we lied and said that Dr. Clark’s was lively, my friends said, when I arrived. You didn’t say it was lively, you said it was quiet, I responded. The bar was full of dried flowers and almost no people. Emilia brings everyone rounds of cheesecake and superba beers. Dried flowers everywhere I turn, these days. Dried flowers everywhere for those with eyes to see. Here are the things that are making me feel suspicious, I told my friends.. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, January 8 From 12:15pm and 4:15pm at Film Forum — Last chance to see Peter Hujar’s Day - “The best film in Sundance is just two people talking.” - Vulture. | Tickets here
Inline links: Film Forum, here

Graph View

Backlinks