Google Docs
Article
Google Docs is a recurring brand in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 13, 2025 and December 02, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Time stamp it in Google Docs and you know I meant this before I even knew”; “I was so addicted to writing in my google docs journal this weekend”; “I journal in Google Docs”. It most often appears alongside Los Angeles, New York, KGB.
Metadata
- Category: Brands
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: May 13, 2025
- Last seen: December 02, 2025
Appears In
- Panopticon-ing Everyone
- Total Nightmare Policy
- generative and godly secrets
- A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again
- Florida, Massachusetts (03)
Related Pages
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- Los Angeles (5 shared issues)
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- New York (5 shared issues)
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- KGB (3 shared issues)
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- Paul’s Baby Grand (3 shared issues)
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- Peter Vack (3 shared issues)
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- Rebecca (3 shared issues)
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- TJ Byrnes (3 shared issues)
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- Allie Rowbottom (2 shared issues)
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- Bronwen Lam (2 shared issues)
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- Callie Reiff (2 shared issues)
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- Callie Reiff (2 shared issues)
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- Cassidy Grady (2 shared issues)
External Links
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.
WHAT I DID Thursday, May 8 I've been panopticon-ing everyone here, and you have asked me to stop. Ok. I'm sorry I have already told about what happened on Wednesday. Not here. Imagine it's all fantasy. I mean it when I say that I am really not talking about myself. Being all confessional and then I feel kind of gross about it. Being kind of glib about the parts I thought were most sincere. I've been neglectful, most of all. Right now, I am most sorry about that. In the end, you'll be lying on a Japanese floor mattress and you'll be thinking about the parts that are still the same. Tonight, I went to the party that I usually avoid. I went home before the parts that come next. Another flight tomorrow, and I wish there wasn't more travel though, I am glad for where we are going. An old school hotel, Sue Wong beaded dress, borrowed shoes and sharing the different details of my life like oh it's been all grad school and true love and self surveillance - this part will be nice. My friend suggests at dinner - I don't have insomnia, I live in an environment of psychological torture sleep depravation. I could latch onto this. Psychological torture. My friend says - New York vs LA; you can find nuance in uglier things here and she cites me as the example of nuance as if I am something like resilient or tough. I have never been described as either of these things before, and I hope I haven't been plying myself in victimhood too heavily, because really - my circumstances are wonderful. It is a sweet description, though. I'm glad I'm not a fraud, at least. Lots of parties this week and those were nice while they lasted. You can't be indignant without clarity, which - I am working on having more of. I set up the summer so as to have the days stretching endlessly in front of me. This concerns me a bit. I will need to read for two hours every morning. There is a novel forming mostly beneath my writing here, and I will need to finish that. All at once it's like everyone has drawn the same conclusions about good and evil. Everyone was all like this is so good, and then everyone snapped at once and it was like: this is evil. I have briefly wondered where this change would map out cosmically, though, I have tried to be a mystic about it, and my basic impulses revolt. I was culling chapters from my Secret Diary a while back. Here, I was saying. Time stamp it in Google Docs and you know I meant this before I even knew I would need to show you it was true someday. None of it was really so long ago. So, I wonder, for example - what July will be like? I wonder about June. You could be a bartender or a DJ. Sounds like something someone who has lost their intuition would say. I'm talking in hypotheticals because I mean it when I say that I am not, really, talking about myself. Friday, May 9 Rebecca and I sat at Bar Belly in the rain for a while last night. Shannon made me cauliflower rice and avocado for lunch. I did circle around to my boyfriend's culty and evil type hang later in the night. There was chicken from the street, there. Rebecca will stay at our place while we're gone. She stayed at ours for a while last night. Everyone went to KGB, later, but I am being more regulated about it. Making pasta at nine am because I was up all night in spite of new efforts. Pouring rain and then we're driving towards Laguardia. In retrospect, I still do not think I was being dramatic about things, but it feels distant and small now. Short term memory maybe, or, the present is often quite extreme and so; wherever I am, it absorbs me. I like his brown leather bag, cufflinks, it's been to and fro this airport all spring which serves to dividend the chaos a bit. Anyways, everything is fine. I have a life in New York that I will still feel so lucky to return to. "You guys are in love!" a girl in micro-shorts told us at the party last night. "How long have you been in love for?" "Almost two years," he said. This is the pragmatic answer and also this is true. The girl beamed. "I've been in love for ten days," she said. I need to hold things closer to my chest. Not here - I am obfuscated enough about it here, so it's hard to do much damage. It's different in the real world. I say things that I know to be true, but I say them before I really understand what they mean. I am more protective of the things that are good, and I am quick to give away all that is bad. This is not how a person should be. Happy Mother's Day, the light and water show at the airport is saying. Elderly couple to my left devouring fried chicken. I feel incredibly ill, come to think of it, but some of this stays sweet. Darling darling darling, he keeps telling me. Are you ready to fly in a plane in the sky? Artificial Intelligence will come to destroy the earth and you will be like twenty-five years old and on your phone and talking badly about your friends behind their back and forgetting to call your family and drinking to disgust. Artificial Intelligence will come to destroy the world and you will call your sister, call your mom, lie under the open window with your boyfriend. You will be making up stories and praying over a glass of sparkling water. You will be listening to music and sound and language from real life. You will picture a relic of yourself still human, and you will be pleased. Saturday, May 10 I have decided to return to Photos. It is funny how these things work. I felt quite repulsed by images for a moment, but even just a few days of speaking out loud how much the equilibrium has been missing and how much now, it is time to get it back - I said this out loud along with other things, and now I can face the physical form again. And so much of the physical form is so pretty. I do like when things are ethereal and kind of between realms - it is why I have always liked to be very thin, although I’m pretty Normal in Body these days - and this is the most boring of boring things to discuss, anyways. My tendency is to archive and hoard. It is comically wrong to suggest that I seek to leave behind no trace. My point is, for a while now, I could not bear the traces. Something has shifted. There is a gold framed photo of a palm tree across from the bed in this hotel, and it’s the kind that is old school not tacky. Everything is art deco here. The ceilings at the bar are ten stories high, he told me, before dinner. There was salad and a cosmopolitan and such nice conversation and, I do always get whisked away when the time is right. I’m feeling pretty even keeled. If April happened again, it wouldn’t happen like this. The day has been so good so far. The hotel is old, classic, and art deco. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, May 13 Doors at 7pm, reading at 8pm at TJ Byrnes — Bronwen Lam & David Dufour present Patio, an evening of reading. This rendition features Martina Mendoza, Mark Iosifescu, Myles Zavelo, Stephanie Wambugu, Babak Lakghomi, and Steve Anwyll.
WHAT I DID Monday, May 12 At the Holiday Inn, there are Yakisoda noodles and banana cream pie snack pack jellos and krabby patties gummy candies and lances cream cheese and onion dip crackers. All the most disgusting snacks imaginable, and kind of perverted, too. I’m so particular and annoying with my sleeping issues that I always find myself at depressing hotels, even when there is a wonderful home down the road where I am welcome. I need a Big Bed and Isolation. I need Temperature Control. As a child, I liked things such as camping in birch forests and cramped little stone cottages in some village where my parents would find someone on the Internet to swap houses with. Unfortunately, I grew up into someone with severe and undiagnosable sleep disorders, and a taste for adventure that is rooted more in hedonism and less in fresh air. I feel really full and sleepy heading back to New York. Well, things are better than they were. Total nightmare policy. Total, blow up your life brother, policy. I was so addicted to writing in my google docs journal this weekend and now I have a lot of annoying slop to show for it. I call my dad in the sun outside the Starbucks in a Strip Mall. Stop thinking about things in such eternal terms, they tell me. You wouldn’t get in a car crash and say When Can I Go 100 Again, they remind me. Fiction, again - they are talking about somebody else. The idea of compromise no longer makes your blood boil. It’s an unsavory trait that it ever did in the first place. "The other alternative is that I just become a nightmare and you become perfect," I told him. "That is certainly an alternative," he told me. It is 11:30pm, and I am thinking about getting a job. I am thinking about the Current Body Red Light Mask and the Ayede heels from ssense.com. "What if I hadn’t simply crashed out," he said. "There would have been pros and cons to that," I said. There is a fire alarm and mauve curtains and two weird arched doorways because we booked a suite and so the architecture suggests some simulacra of something vaguely Roman. Marble. Plaster cut to look like marble. I go to buy water and they have turned off the creepy lights at the creepy pool. Tuesday, May 13 I was feeling really terrified, if I’m being honest about it. I was sitting on the sidewalk picking at my nails and drinking hot coffee in the hot sun, eight splenda, curdled almond milk. I was voicing concerns in a high pitched voice and I was losing track of the distinguishment between ideas imagined and conversations regurgitated. God forbid I have an original thought of my own - that part wasn't even on the table. It isn’t so dark and depressing anymore. Walk in the rain and everything is so green here. I’ll be back in the city tonight and there are better omens in the astrology these days around things like planes, the return, glass apartments in the sky. He leaves my keys on the bedside table at the hotel, and he’s still asleep when I pack up my things and leave to eat black coffee, turkey deli meat, garlic aioli, marcona almonds. We drive to his parent’s house and he gives me drumstick vanilla ice cream. Working on this laptop, surrounded by all this green. You know that every time you hit this vape it coats your lungs in sweet thick paste, I am telling him, as I hit his vape. The last time I wrote about hitting a vape I received an infuriating pseudo intellectual email about the verbiage "hit" as suggesting a sado-masochistic impulse in our digital age. "I wonder if soon, you'll be saying you 'Beat' or 'Pummeled' your vape?" the idiot email writer wrote. The email made me so mad. You're so stupid, I wanted to write back. We go for a walk in the bright green forest. There is a sweetness here. A coming-back-into-control that makes the out-of-control-ness feel so distant. Escape from Evil and two days later you mistake reprieve for salvation. Unless, you are not mistaken. It really could be that simple. What was it they were saying on The Internet? Break The Pattern Today Or The Loop Will Repeat Tomorrow. What was it I've been saying online? Edit Artificial Intelligence robot voice over text to speech words - "Taking My Party Boy Boyfriend On A Walking Tour Of The Cotswolds." I clarify that I've been defending his honor. We're crushing up the plastic water cups, and the hill is steep up the road. I clarify that there are people of extremes. It was very bad, but now it is very good, I am texting my mother. Honestly, I'm so sick of clarifying anything at all. You're a little more sober with it. You're a little more gentle about it. It transformed in two days. Imagine two weeks. Imagine a year. Imagine rushing even one second. I can control my consciousness. Though, it isn't my consciousness, really, that I've been concerned about. I'm glad we share a frame of mind. This plane is basically empty. Wednesday, May 14 We went to KGB late last night. Thursday, May 15 The woman who does yoga on her fire escape is out there with a cigarette, today. I’m not in a bad mood today. The apartment is a mess and I am concerned about my past. Things become steady, and then even bright. Friday, May 16 Well, I didn't write because I have been busy in real life. I've been imagining an identity rooted in delusions in the secret diary that stays offline. It is not so delusional. I am feeling so sincere. Rebecca is here. My sister is here. We went to KGB Bar and Fanelli Cafe and Funny Bar where we met a Gagosian guy turned AI guy, which I guess has kind of been my career arch too though I am not so pleased about that direction. We went to the party at Bowery where the waiter from Fanelli Cafe was the DJ and I had two vodka sodas then soda water with lime which might be all I do soon, though I keep on having all these cyclical conversations with myself about these things - consumption and gluttony - and there is little that more dull, so I will not bring it up again. I went to the sleep specialist and she giggled when I said I don't scream in my sleep if I am in the company of strangers. That's different but great, she said. Do I control my subconscious, I said. Stupid idiot, she said. I did actually go to all these parties, and I did call him from the bathroom. He'll be back in New York soon, making film and code and learning banjo. It's way better than the alternative, and I do feel very proud this week which is something I have not been able to say in a good long while. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, May 21 From 7pm - 8:30pm at The Flea Theater (20 Thomas St) — I’ll be seeing Revolution: The Play. Sophia Englesberg is associate producer, and everything she touches is wonderful. Written and produced by Brett Neveu, directed by Rebecca Harris. The theater is next to The Odeon, so you can get my favorite martini before or after the show. - “Who celebrates their 26th birthday in the alley outside of her hairdressing place o’ work? Revolution interrogates and celebrates the very nature of creating community and building friendships in our ever-evolving, ever disconnecting world.”
WHAT I DID Sunday, May 18 On the first day of My New Life, I walk to the film shop, pour old windowsill tea down the drain, come to consciousness in the Infrared Sauna at Spa88. In the Russian Spa Cafe, you drink carrot juice in a bikini because Rebecca taught you what Fiber is yesterday, and now you are sure to get your fill. There is lox and seaweed and brown bread. There is a Caesar salad later, at Fairfax in The West Village, and they don't actually harvest your personality at the door. I journal a lot, I told my friend. I journaled the whole train ride in my mind, she said. I journal in Google Docs, I said. I don't know why I decided to say it like that. Like manic transcription of thought until it becomes more vibe than writing at all is some sort of one-up over mental assessment and determination. I have not been trying to one-up at all. I've been trying to be so honest about it, and I guess the concern remains that the truth will all surface and the roots will turn topsy turvy and inside out and then you’ll see that untangled, it was all kind of just midwit and ugly. I wrote about nihilism and absurdism and Samuel Beckett, but the piece turned out so simpleton that it makes me kind of queasy to return to. I wrote about the magazine release party on the roof where I felt kind of wobbly in this halter top dress tied way too tight. Then we walked to Casetta and I had wine and fish floating in tin and oil and then I lay here for a while when I got home. I lay very very still and when I twitched then rose again, there were packages at the door, a taxi cab and a friend on foot and his airtrain en route heading towards the apartment. I was standing in socks and hovering in the building's communal mudroom when he got home. Things are nice. I was talking not too quietly about all of it in the Spa 88 Wall Street Russian Baths Hot Tub. The most liminal space in New York with smooth warm aqua water and yellow kind of burnt light and chipped paint no windows. Dorito bags with Hebrew packaging usually stacked in the restaurant, today abandoned half eaten on the table by me. I could tell the fat guys in speedos were lingering sweaty just to listen, but I was doing no sort of performance for them. On the train, the girl on the phone kept glancing around to make sure others were listening. I felt sad for her. At the Spa88, I said my story all matter of fact in the hot tub and my Aunt said well, you really have your hands full and the fat guys looked away kind of bashful, and it was only then that I realized they were listening. You can disassociate away the concept of public space, too. Spilled coffee and voice echoing in this pool room with no windows so it becomes like time isn’t passing at all. I wasn’t talking to myself, but communication reverberates, and I was drifting all unaware of perception. Then I was in the cold plunge, in the infrared sauna which really does something nice to the fascia (the part that matters when it comes to things like Wim Hof and Heating Up and Cooling Down.) After the infrared, I began to gain awareness of my surroundings and movements and recollections of the sound of my own voice and things like the coffee my stray limbs sent flying off the shelf at Mille Feuille this morning and then I was there saying OMG Sorry and floating napkins towards the ground but also kind of just standing and blinking like some kind of dud. You wake up alone but there are people on the way. People already late. Keys and company and you are texting with an intensity that borders vitriol. The vitriol is what he’ll point out later. Before that, he is at the door and you are so happy to greet and be greeted. There is spilled coffee and Equinox Gym and Spa88 and Iced Tea, Sparkling Ice Soda, Cool Mint Zyns. I woke up and I waited around and I trapezed over to Equinox Gym and when I got upset later because told me he did not care about my story; it was then that he clarified he did not so much mean he did not care but more so that the story was full of vitriol. And so perhaps he was just feeling full of love and life. You can't get all rageful over something like that. I'm sorry I forget sometimes that you are not resilient, he said. My blood didn't boil. I went for a walk. You forget that all of this exists all the time, Natasha and I were saying by the Hudson River. In my glass apartment in the sky, I was alone for a while but now I am not. There is an Arabian rug and a Marble table that I hope someone will take off my hands for free. There is a CurrentBody LED mask and cocoa nibs and nothing in the fridge but the butter that I replaced with the wrong brand. I feel uncomfortable when I speak like this - about these little things that compose a life. Like I'm painting a picture in the details of routine, but there has been no routine. There have been a few false starts, and then now, a real one. I am conjuring an image of a morning with an empty fridge and an Arabian rug and the kind of person who reaches for different serums at different hours. If anything, we’ve been dealing more in potion than serums. But every potion certainly has its godforsaken limit, and so now - there is something else. Monday, May 19 I will take the rest of my youth as it is. He turns on the air conditioner for me and leaves to drink Non Alcoholic Beers while I stay put and read the Diaries of Girls Online. I walk ten miles and I do not really believe his friends who say there are worms at the Russian Spa. This is how rumors spread, I tell him. You are Married To The Truth, I tell myself. In the morning, there is light through my greenhouse roof and to start; I am the only one awake. It feels like this; I had one of the best weeks ever last week, where everything came rushing back into being as it should be and I was certain it would stay like this forever. Then there was sudden chaos on the phone, chaos on the train, serenity at Spa88 and then I was calling my mom muttering sentiments I knew she would find vaguely offensive, stomping around the financial district saying bad words like a child intent on proving herself lovable even if insufferable. He said it wasn't that I was so uninteresting, more that my story was bizarre, not really a story at all, full of vitriol. Everyone was running along the Hudson River and I had two or three diet cokes with dinner and I was up not all night but close. It goes like this: in the morning there is energy and a package thief filling a suitcase up with my boxes of celsius and fiber powder and whitening strips and dental floss. I crouch above him on the stairway and I scream HEY. He screams back HEY and so I let him have it. I turn on my heels and I run up the stairs. My favorite things are leaving the house in the morning and not coming back till late night, cool mint zyns, blackberry dr. pepper, turkey cold cuts with truffle mustard eaten in a kind of self-punishing way. I lie on the roof in my boyfriend's Adidas track shorts and a black tank top that I stole from the gymnastics locker room in highschool. The thing about New York is there is immense competition to be skinny, beautiful, successful, rich all in circumstances that are entirely unconducive to all these things, my friend is telling me on the phone. Circumstances like the package thief and your metabolism doesn’t even get a boost from the sun and also there are hard drugs and alcohol. I don’t feel above all of that, but I do feel distant from it now and so I suppose, with some plausible humility, this adds up to kind of the same thing. I wish I was a gentle person. I feel lazy today, but this is not the same thing. Tuesday, May 20 Last night, we went to Lucky's for dinner and I had something with tequila and Saint Germaine straight up and he had more non-alcoholic beer. Then, they brought us mountains of shoestring onion rings and a big wedge salad and it was good for a while, until I started to feel sick. I went to the bathroom to play on my phone while the scent of grease dissipated. The drinks were crisp and they brought the shaker right to our table. Lucky's was like a steakhouse, but with a smaller interior than your average We went to Matthew's house after, to sit in his barren family room while he hacked up a lung. I rolled up my Zara blazer that I stole from Paul's Casablanca lost and found after someone stole my blazer first and also back when I was an alcoholic. I curled up under my blazer on Matthew's tiny couch while Matthew and my boyfriend talked in code and made rankings of all their friends. Matthew's apartment was pretty empty except for a whiteboard with a list of girls he likes and a Chinese new year banner and a huge pile of hats that said I'M IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA. “Jesus, she is combative. you're right, she's so combative,” Matthew told my boyfriend, talking about me. "It's possible that Canne after dark was something that happened in the daytime," he said. "she'll get mad if I ask her why she won't play anagrams," he said. "The activation triggers a chain of events leading to increased dopamine release," he said. Sometimes, when I am with my boyfriend's friends I feel like I am in a video game, or maybe in an orphanage. You don't want to be someone who is contorting your face and yelling. It is morning now. I don't really know what happened there. Being at these parties more sober is strange, because there is nothing else but me and yet I still don't really understand. I am listening to sweet and gentle music, and I feel a total surrender. S - i do feel bad i was not so gentle and kind about this. i get myself trip wired and lose it. but it is always better to be gentle and kind and i understand new york can kill the soul and there is something beautiful in a peaceful house alone and that is why you left which is innocent and pure and it's not fair to be rageful to you for that. Wednesday, May 21 There were two cigarettes and two glasses of wine at Voile de Nuit. This becomes some sort of Diary of Consumption. I met Ellie at a tall house on a wooded street in the West Village where she works on things pertaining to design and then we spent the hours in the courtyard of Voile de Nuit, which I adore because it’s reminiscent of Summer and Reality. I behaved badly the last time I was here. My boyfriend comes by to drop off fries. We run into friends at Caffe Reggio and it's raining by the time we reach home. My boyfriend says: Spreading secrets is entropic Keeping your mouth shut is static Spreading misinformation is generative and godly I do think he is mostly kidding. It's Simone Weil who says about rage - “To be able to hurt others with impunity—for instance to pass our anger on to an inferior who is obliged to be silent—is to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make.” And I wonder which character I am in this story and it's not always the good one. I was thinking about all of that in the novel. That and the self surveillance of it all. Unfortunately, my thought experiments are ruining my life and also, the novel is ending up being All About Me LOL, too. The play tonight (Revolution at Flea Theatre ) is nice, because I walk through the rain to get there and smoke cigarettes outside The Odeon after, and because its depiction is of genuine weirdos, not like Quirked Up, not like the girls my friend texts me about after the party, “have you met them? so spacey!” not like, becoming strange because of course there is some desire to conjure up some personality and if you’re pretty then it’s fine and even appealing to be off-putting. The play is like grocery store clerk alcoholic, gun in the purse grocery store clerk alcoholic, therapy speak coping mechanisms like count up then down then up and it’s employed in the play as the coping mechanism not as an ironic tactic. Drinking beers on a birthday in the back alley and the play is disaffected from glamor in a way that I’m realizing not many things are. Like even most depictions of poverty in a lot of media, at least media coming out of New York at least certainly media surrounding youth culture and a narrative surrounding a party, goes like; we have nothing but we’re slippery adjacent to everything as a result of our charm and good looks and happenstance. The play is like, leftover charcuterie from her husband’s weird mega church and splurging at the liquor store and old cocaine shoved into a bowling ball but there’s an innocence and almost childlike wonderment to the way they tackle the expired drug situation, and the play is not about drugs. There’s a genuine kind of earnest stiltedness to the conversation that lends itself to sincerity. Thursday, May 22 May is quivering right before me; I'm not letting it lapse like April did but there are still smokescreens, silkscreens, my fingers are sleeping right through it. The Club, last night. The Play then The Club. It was smokey and sweet. My lungs felt coated in something sour by the end. The smoking patio was wet with dew and I was kind of floating, not in a bad way. Not hungover, it's something way more visceral but still hazy. I could feel it all start to slip, and so I held onto myself quite tightly. My boyfriend's screen time is 102 hours a day across devices. My face is encased in sheaths of plastic that keep you young, but they're not the temu kind that's weird and freaky. The light I use is Science Backed. I'm thinking of getting into vintage workout wear. I'm thinking of getting into Vlogging. I'm thinking of getting into filling out paid surveys online for luxury perfume sellers that require you to swear your spending habits are High and you like perfume from MiuMiu and you Hate Balenciaga and what perfume means to me is; I think sometimes scents can bring up... nostalgia? I say. Do you own a Prada dress? they ask. We leave the party early - I'm sick and he buys me chicken caesar salad pizza. Aren't you glad we left early so we could dance a little at home, he says. In the living room, the windows are all a little frosted from the rain. There are lights in the neighbors windows across the courtyard but it's thursday night, the rain has stopped. You couldn't have expected everyone to just stay home, really. I notice the people in the windows if he is spinning me across the room. Exhibitionism. I catch myself in the peripheries. The windows. The back of my mind. And I never shut the blinds but that is just no Executive Function or Detail Orientation. I am not some sort of voyeur. Friday, May 23 10:45am, and they are playing some kind of staticy electric classical mashup of music from the Fedex truck outside. "Even as a grad student, I felt they were looking down on chaos," one young man at the Yemeni coffee shop is telling another. Buying: coffee and chicken quiche but none of that is for me. Buying: peanut butter perfect bar and celsius and my boyfriend's screen time is up to 316 hours since midnight since he's doing things indiscernible to me but which he clarifies are Not Fraudulent. I am trying not to write so much in the google doc diaries. It is like I have learned these diaries as a trick, and now I am addicted to it. Now, I can’t do anything else. I must release all thoughts, but to release one thought I must go through, again and again, everything else. And so I go through it all, again and again and again. The thought, and then everything else. We were going to talk more about Spirituality today, but the tripwire keeps happening - stuck on: Vanity and Careerism. I make subheadings to keep myself in check. VANITY. CAREERISM. CAREERISM: Here is where I am: I have the substack for now which is nice this is something that I suppose in some ways is a defining thing I have done but it does not feel like so much it does not feel like it culminates to anything just proof of existence, yes, but everyone has some sort of proof of existence and it is nice to write the story behind something. The story itself cannot just be the story of writing about yourself. And for a minute I was very very very sad and so that plotline became dependable, but that is no sort of thing to rely on. And this is why it cannot all just be the writing of the self. It hasn’t been. [redacted] felt like something different, investigation, beginning middle end, it was not just here I am, it was like a puzzle it was like being very precise with it and it was the biggest thing I have done so far and I sat with it for such a long time. And perhaps I am being dramatic because there are other projects I could start in the meantime but I can’t sit down and make myself think oh what would be an interesting and pithy thing to talk about for somewhere glossy, I cannot do it. I think about doing it and my stomach rises into my throat with how little I care. And so it has to be a story that bursts out of me. There was one, and I can tell there is almost something else too but it’s like David said yes, it’s difficult while you are in the waiting room. Since beginning writing this, my fever got higher, and we are hanging the Bacchus masks around the apartment plus yellow golden softlight and, now I feel more peaceful about it. I wasn’t having so much humility. Nevermind. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, May 27 From 6pm (show at 7pm) at Baby’s All Right — Baby’s Presents a benefit concert for the Immigrant Defense Project with Palehound, The Ophelias, and Grumpy. Dj set by WeTakeManhattan. - “All proceeds from the show will go towards supporting the IDP’s 20+ year mission of fighting for the rights of immigrants targeted for imprisonment and mass deportation via advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.” | GA (18+) $38.86, Ticket and Bonus Donation $49.69
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RaEX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7945ab16-c051-4062-8d64-a0fd574c3968_1106x420.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rmSM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe8f3b744-fe77-4a40-b032-304d78f13ff1_428x548.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zRlU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5106c642-5b7c-4f8f-a799-c60b10039a5d_488x486.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QlxV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9c5eb95-81d2-4503-852b-4bdc513730dd_698x434.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0g1m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3da24e28-0d39-4802-abf2-53116dd83b00_308x392.png, Baby’s All Right, Palehound, The Ophelias, Grumpy, WeTakeManhattan
Friday, May 23 10:45am, and they are playing some kind of staticy electric classical mashup of music from the Fedex truck outside. "Even as a grad student, I felt they were looking down on chaos," one young man at the Yemeni coffee shop is telling another. Buying: coffee and chicken quiche but none of that is for me. Buying: peanut butter perfect bar and celsius and my boyfriend's screen time is up to 316 hours since midnight since he's doing things indiscernible to me but which he clarifies are Not Fraudulent. I am trying not to write so much in the google doc diaries. It is like I have learned these diaries as a trick, and now I am addicted to it. Now, I can’t do anything else. I must release all thoughts, but to release one thought I must go through, again and again, everything else. And so I go through it all, again and again and again. The thought, and then everything else. We were going to talk more about Spirituality today, but the tripwire keeps happening - stuck on: Vanity and Careerism. I make subheadings to keep myself in check. VANITY. CAREERISM. CAREERISM: Here is where I am: I have the substack for now which is nice this is something that I suppose in some ways is a defining thing I have done but it does not feel like so much it does not feel like it culminates to anything just proof of existence, yes, but everyone has some sort of proof of existence and it is nice to write the story behind something. The story itself cannot just be the story of writing about yourself. And for a minute I was very very very sad and so that plotline became dependable, but that is no sort of thing to rely on. And this is why it cannot all just be the writing of the self. It hasn’t been. [redacted] felt like something different, investigation, beginning middle end, it was not just here I am, it was like a puzzle it was like being very precise with it and it was the biggest thing I have done so far and I sat with it for such a long time. And perhaps I am being dramatic because there are other projects I could start in the meantime but I can’t sit down and make myself think oh what would be an interesting and pithy thing to talk about for somewhere glossy, I cannot do it. I think about doing it and my stomach rises into my throat with how little I care. And so it has to be a story that bursts out of me. There was one, and I can tell there is almost something else too but it’s like David said yes, it’s difficult while you are in the waiting room. Since beginning writing this, my fever got higher, and we are hanging the Bacchus masks around the apartment plus yellow golden softlight and, now I feel more peaceful about it. I wasn’t having so much humility. Nevermind. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, May 27 From 6pm (show at 7pm) at Baby’s All Right — Baby’s Presents a benefit concert for the Immigrant Defense Project with Palehound, The Ophelias, and Grumpy. Dj set by WeTakeManhattan. - “All proceeds from the show will go towards supporting the IDP’s 20+ year mission of fighting for the rights of immigrants targeted for imprisonment and mass deportation via advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.” | GA (18+) $38.86, Ticket and Bonus Donation $49.69
Monday, June 2 I read some GirlInsides on the airtrain back from JFK who I think is just like me if I were more honest and precise about it, or maybe whom my stories would echo more precisely if I did not have this sick need to put my face all over everything. Anyways, GirlInsides was talking about how summer would bring things like long long long hair and farmers market plums eaten over the sink in underwear and writing and reading all over the place, and her ideas made me feel like I was melting and going to cry. Then I wrote what I wanted summer to bring, all - getting off the subway because it's too hot and walking in sandals sticking to my feet until i find somewhere that glows right and then its morning and we're sitting first then lying down on the terrace in sun that becomes unbearable drinking sparkling water out of glass bottles dripping it over my chest opening the door for the blast of air conditioning and to let the friends that come by in and out people floating by in and out and come and go and then at dusk i put on something green and i drink cold cider cold diet coke or spicy watermelon margarita outside at kikis in swan room away from the heat at vol de nuit with fries and garlic sauce on the roof, on my roof, in the backyards and basements and i walk out and walk everywhere when it is time to leave i leave and sometimes it is time to leave and so then I take the train and there’s the coast and then I’m putting laundry on the line in a black bikini and drinking diet coke with lemon in my black bikini and driving to the ocean down the driveway at night headlights breaking through june gloom fog and jumping off the dock where the sharks don't eat us but any summer now they could, or then it's morning and i'm sober writing in my google docs journal walking outside, writing in my greenhouse apartment in new york, writing along the overgrown pond and field and it always smells thicker there outside of boston, writing by foggy shores and rocky shores and sometimes the air becomes thick too and my dad plays dougie mclain and we make pesto pasta mozzarella chicken sausage in yellow china bowls on yellow placemats the meal gets kind of hazy through the sheen of blue hour rain coming through the window and then i'm pacing and writing down ocean drive in Miami because I can't decide where i want to be anymore and i like flashing lights i like coming back to the very nice very cold hotel that we're staying in because he's Sorry but I don't want any more apologies i want this summer to be Being very very very in love because i really have been anticipating extinction events or at least things become robotic sterile i used to think id be pretty good at both being in love like this and at not being robotic and sterile and i have become slightly above average at both these things in practice i guess though, it's nice to have the most human thing in the world, it's nice for me all the time, even then, even when it isn't for him i think it's nicer for me then it would be to not have this all the time and I don't know why i keep sabotaging the only thing i know to be true and human and so i am hoping for a summer of all that, hands pressed against the plane window greenhouse window train window glass mirror glassy water plunging my face underwater no more eb and flow. Anyways, none of that made any sense and then shock of all shocks it did eb and flow again last night. Everyone was so nice to me about my story and I wore the Nasseau, Bahamas shirt he bought for me all Life Is Better In FlipFlops and he wanted me to wear the sunglasses too, to exacerbate the bit but I thought that would be a little bit too far. He said “you know why I’m mad at you” when we got home, and I didn’t know, I had no idea actually, and so then I got sad, but the story was fiction. This is fiction too. I’m not being facetious when I say that. This isn’t even autofiction. This is literally all made up. “they seem lost and completely clueless,” he is saying now, downstairs, on the phone, he is talking about some forty year old woman and an awful charleton and some guy who does RedPill posting online and some guy he personally has a strong dislike for who has a lot of medical malpractice suits against him. Maybe he’s a genius, he is saying. I don’t know, he is saying. These people are so strange, he is saying. Tuesday, June 3 His friend rubs my head like i'm a dog or something when i walk into his stupid fake exclusive evil party that i'm not invited to and then my heart swells with rage. I'm so mad, I was telling everyone. I'm so sorry I didn't mean to say that I guess I had one too many, I was saying. I didn't have one too many, I had just right, I was telling him. I like The Sweet East, he is telling me. I like Yeats and social norms. Yes and, I say; I hope that you get everything you have ever wanted. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, June 9 A quiet night in the realm of events. Consider; dinner at The Marlton’s new restaurant Chez Nous followed by a screening of Buffalo 66 at Metrograph (10pm). I have historically liked The Marlton because it is vaguely past its prime and also a five minute walk from my apartment, and a place where no one ever tells you that you’ve stayed too long. The food at the old restaurant was terrible (so I’ve heard) (I only went for tea), but the recently refurbished Chez Nous is chic and fun and has maintained all of the hotel's original charm. The shrimp salad is very good, as is the martini. I’ll report back after my second visit (possibly tonight). Otherwise - 10pm on a Monday evening is the perfect time to see a film bar none, besides, possibly 1pm on a Friday.
Inline links: GirlInsides, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!grTj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0d8950da-492c-4aea-8f52-bfae799e190d_968x440.png, Chez Nous, https://metrograph.com/film/?vista_film_id=9999002294, recently refurbished Chez Nous, 1pm on a Friday
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