Collected Agenda Scene Wiki

David

336 min read

David

Article

David is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 29 times across 29 issues between November 05, 2024 and June 09, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “David gets a flight of mini lasagnas”; “David keeps whispering that I should get off my phone and keep eavesdropping”; “David materializes inside Bar Valentina. David was at Bar Oliver. David orders strip steak”. It most often appears alongside New York, KGB, Chloe Pingeon.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 29
  • Issue count: 29
  • First seen: November 05, 2024
  • Last seen: June 09, 2025

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.

Playing With Glass
November 05, 2024 · Original source
At the restaurant, they seat us in a garden where I’ve never been but which I recognize from the pictures. It’s dark inside. Glowy. I can hear the wind rattling over the glass roof. I order duck salad. A passion fruit martini. David gets a flight of mini lasagnas. The people next to us are on a first date, and they’re rapid fire spitting out their own highly specific dating criteria and then countering each other in quick succession. It’s an insane conversation, but they both continue and continue and continue to let it play out.
I don’t want to get drunk, but I do kind of want another drink. I don’t like the dual vulgarity and sterility working in conjunction at that table one over. The restaurant is nice, but the tables are a little close together. The restaurant is very nice. We order bread pudding. I have to make a cognizant effort to eavesdrop. It doesn’t come naturally to me. David keeps whispering that I should get off my phone and keep eavesdropping. The conversation is fun. The conversation is a little sad. You can listen to things like this and diagnose some malaise of the age so easily, but when people become caricatures it all becomes so obvious, and I kind of want to leave our neighbors in peace.
The sky is gray and orange this morning. It’s raining as I walk to class, big fat globs that only fall occasionally, the type of rain that you might not notice at all until it hits you squarely. I’ve been listening to only one song all week; Life on Mars by David Bowie. They played it in the screening at Rave New World last week and it made me feel dizzy in a kind of nice way. It’s a nice day, but the air is too heavy. I feel combative. I feel overwhelmingly happy.
Counterculture in America
November 12, 2024 · Original source
Lydia and I go to Bar Valentina. It seems like everyone in the world is milling about outside. Someone gives me five dollars in cash for a cigarette. It’s ok, I say. She puts the cash on top of my bag. David materializes inside Bar Valentina. David was at Bar Oliver. David orders strip steak.
Inline links: Lydia, Bar Valentina, Bar Oliver
From 7pm - 9pm at Spring Place — Rolling Stone journalist David Browne will be in conversation with Matt Weinberger. Performances by Beau and Louis B Middleton.
Inline links: Spring Place, David Browne, Beau, Louis B Middleton
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence
November 19, 2024 · Original source
WHAT I DID Chloe Pingeon's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Monday, November 10 It feels very important to parse through things very carefully today. I write down what I value: truth and beauty. mental and physical clarity. But then, there are other things, too. I don't experience life as this ethereal. Making big lists. Having big fun. Making big points. I write down: This is the thing I dislike about myself most; not experiencing things as this ethereal and wanting to make things like big points. I write down: when was the time you felt most transcendent? Remember: I'm not writing auto fiction. I'm writing my diary. It's weird - picking up the pieces of things. I feel disdain when I see people exercising bad habits. You cannot imagine my horror as I self destruct. Picture This: on the Upper West Side, things are quiet. The stone walls on the edge of the park are lined with trimmed hedges in the summer, but the branches are bare now, and so, you see, now, that the skeletons have always been jagged. The subway has been nicer lately, better to step inside when the warm air is a relief and nothing is steaming. I like the uptown F, the cars with the orange seats, the stations where there's no one there so you can hear the doors whoosh. Picture this: you go to The Central Park Zoo, you wear a Christmas dress, you go to Sarabeth's for lunch, pancakes, toast. After, you don't go window shopping but you do walk home. Not your home, it belongs to someone else, but it's familiar. You make tea by big French windows. The trees are bare already, remember, and so picture the precision with which you can watch the people on the street below. They don't look like little ants, you aren't that high up, they just look as they are - little people in and out. People looking for something. It’s like they are on a little treasure hunt. Imagine you would wish them the best. You wouldn't close the windows - not for a while, at least David told me I smelled like winter when I got home today. I didn't. I smelled like eucalyptus. You would too after a few minutes in that steam room in SoHo. I can’t stop spending money the instant that I make it. I can’t stop spending money like I have it. I have stopped purchasing stuff. I like to wear the same thing most days. I like to sort TheRealReal Black Blazers prices low to high and buy five at once, eight dollars each. When they arrive, they are still nice material and still from places like Armani or at least Theory and you spend little and you can sell them for more when it’s time to declutter. It’s been so wonderful to declutter lately. I’ve gotten rid of almost all of it - stuff, I mean. In the new place, there are no closets. I’ve gotten rid of all my storage space. I’ve gotten rid of all my streams of income. My Stuff is still in storage somewhere. Not in New York. I’ll sell it soon. You can have some but not all my earthly possessions if you want them. You can have the ones I’ve packed away. I like this idea – “Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence” Tuesday, November 11 My new favorite blog is this - Health Gossip. It’s an old school newsletter. The health advice is very Pure and True, but more than this, it is beautiful to consume. Health Gossip is my favorite thing on the Internet this week. Very rarely does something in digital form elicit a real sense of calm in me. Usually, things in digital form make me feel kind of manic and bad. I’m not sure why this project strikes me so profoundly. Today, I spend multiple hours reading Health Gossip. A writer texts me after last week's letter - “your writing is always “good” ie flashy/ineffable… but this one bummed me out.” I’m not sure if he’s referring to the happenings of the week, or to the passivity, lethargy, dare I say gluttony and sludge… with which I’ve been diluting my descriptions of it all. I don't ask him to clarify. Regardless, his assessment of the piece in some sense parallels my own, and an attempt to dredge out an opinion from an acquaintance I admire that might placate my own sense of shame does not feel like an endeavor of any significance. “it bummed me out to write… ”, I say. We’re at a large group dinner at Olive Garden Times Square tonight. The host picked this place with a genuine fervor, nothing snidely ironic about it, and so I am more good humored in this venture than would be my usual inclination. It's less kitschy here then I l expected, anyways. Wall to wall carpeting, lots of families, lazy susan’s, the color schemes of muted Americana. I have a healthy appreciation for Times Square Charm. I have a healthy Relationship With Capitalism. I can't really eat the food here but isn't some of it just so fun to look at. I'm drifting in and out of focus at dinner - preoccupied by unrelated concerns of wavering integrity and petty betrayal, not important, not interesting. When I do tune in, a girl across the table is talking about Politics. “My grandma is spending her time so worried about school shooters because it's an obsession of the news,” she says. “It makes me angry and so sad for her. She shouldn't be spending her time thinking about this.” I get her sentiment a little bit. A sensationalist sense of doom that makes my skin crawl at some family dinners. Sometimes, there is frost on the grass just outside the window and when it catches my eye during these conversations - look at the dew, look at the mist, there are fawns in the field - then I just want to scream. But then, I worry sometimes that I am not very empathetic. I am envious, sometimes, of people who become utterly consumed by suffering that for the most part, they could simply look away from. Nihilism is something I am trying to avoid for the main reason of - its been breeding cruelty more than healthy removal, lately. Walking through Times Square after, David asks me if I am ok. I guess my eyes have glazed over. I realize this now, that it's been called to my attention. “Of course,” I say. “I worry that everything in my life is going to very suddenly fall apart,” I say. I am reassured. The night passes peacefully. Thursday, November 14 I take the Q to the end of the line today. It's something I've always wanted to do - take the train until the cars stop and I'm the last one left on board and a voice comes on and says please exit the train for cleaning, this is the last stop on this train, please exit the train so the train can be cleaned. I'm in Bay Ridge to shoot a music video today. To be an extra in a music video, that is. I'm exceptionally bad at acting. I'm bad enough that I am even bad as an extra. I'm not particularly bad at lying, but I am bad at having an expressive face. The neighborhood at the end of the Q is nice. I've been taken to other places in New York like this before. Places where you feel like you're by the seaside, where you're under the bridge, where the architecture is more brick, more limestone, more instances of art deco. The Hudson widens into the open ocean somewhere not too far from here and so of course the air feels different. It's strange, even if anticipated, to take the subway ninety minutes to a place where the air feels different, to walk down strange streets and into an unfamiliar gothic building, to open the door to a room where I have never been, and to find it filled with people I mostly already know. The past few years have given me many instances like this. This is something I am very grateful for. The music video is for DDM / Uncensored New York. It's a cool concept. It's cool to watch things come to life. The shoot is outside, and I am the coldest I have ever been. I'm still having fun. I'm thinking about things like how monks orient their consciousness and focus towards the cause of their suffering, and then I am trying to think only about the cold. I am not able to transcend myself, but even freezing, I don't wish I was elsewhere. In the afternoon, I sit in a warm car and I thaw my hands. I have miso soup, tea, and cheese sticks. There is still a chill in me even once inside, which is simultaneously unpleasant and cozy. I'd been wanting a day like this very badly. Friday, November 15 Beckett's Tense comes together with serendipity. There was a crisis with the headliners, Lucy Sante was sick. Beckett ran into Penny Arcade outside of Madame Matovu on 10th. Now, Penny is the headliner. The unsalvageable is always salvaged. The bar can serve real liquor tonight. There's a lot of people here and it's a different crowd than usual. Tense is back in Manhattan. Penny says she’s here because she wants to see what the new New York is doing. I give Beckett a hug at Sovereign House. I say hi to Chris and Adeline. Chris and Adeline are drawing big Tense bubble letters on the chalkboard. The seats are already mostly full. I climb to the top of a ladder and I sit up there. From up there, I have the best view in the house. Tense is not just a reading series, Tense is a show, and this distinction is important. There is a program, an order of events, a flow of new and old. The serendipity with Penny’s arrival lies in this - she seems to understand exactly what Beckett is doing, and while she didn’t write her piece specifically for TENSE (she describes it as “cultural criticism you can dance to”), it speaks with exaction to the spirit of things. Here are some things that Penny Arcade says: I’d rather put a stick in my eye than go somewhere where everyone is the same age. When I was young, if I went to a party and everyone was under thirty I thought... I'm at the wrong party.”
Inline links: Health Gossip, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BqEq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8d9f96c9-96e5-4a0b-9813-061226dc9197_3024x3775.jpeg, DDM, Uncensored New York, Beckett's, Tense, Lucy Sante, Penny Arcade, Madame Matovu, Chris, Adeline
From 6:30pm at Tibet House — Arden Wohl presents another installment of the reading series “The Relentless Shadow Where The Light Surrenders”; featuring David Rimanelli - one of my favorite writers (and also my favorite Instagram account to follow). As supplemental reading, might I recommend his 1994 piece in Frieze on Mike Kelley and The Career Retrospective (here)
Inline links: Tibet House, Arden Wohl, “The Relentless Shadow Where The Light Surrenders”, David Rimanelli, (here)
Florida, Massachusetts
December 03, 2024 · Original source
Florida, Massachusetts WHAT I DID Before I go to Massachusetts, I go to the ExPat Press Party, I go to Holy Cow for fries and grilled chicken, I go home and David makes me pistachio pudding, I wake up, I go on the roof. The roof is all torn up on account of the rain. The railings were lined with little pine trees when we moved in, but the trees have died and we ripped up all the paneling to fix a leak. Now, it's all potholes and fallen brown branches. I'm doing yard work at the top of Manhattan. I can't imagine how I'll ever get the trees back down. Other things: I think I might be thinking about myself too much. At the gym again. In earnest writing things like OUT OF YOUR HEAD INTO YOUR BODY again. What if something drastic happened? I hope it doesn't. Before I go away for Thanksgiving, I go to dinner at Decibel with Madelyn. We go to Pardon My French for a martini. We go to KGB. I go to the Lower East Side, I go to a going away party, I go to the bodega, I go home. At a party in the Lower East Side, a girl is talking about censorship, the age of censorship, how liberated she feels by the passing of This Terrible Era. "So what do you want to say?" Her friend is asking. "What?" the girl says. "What were you waiting to be free to say?" The girl rolls her eyes. "It's the principle" "Yes," her friend is saying. "The principle is important, but you can be free to do whatever you want and still be entirely uninteresting." At a party in the Lower East Side, people are talking about The Internet. "Everything you say is regurgitated from The Internet," the girl is telling her friend. Before I leave New York for only a few days, I go to Franz Kafka at The Morgan Library. It's not a very nice exhibition. They've put pop up walls and bright colors and crowded superfluous exhibition text all over the whole place. I write a review, but then I think it's kind of snarky. It's ok to be mean, but it's not ok to be cheap. "Why are you afraid of being mean," someone asked me a few weeks ago. "Because I don't want to say things that hurt people close to me," I said in response. What I should have said is - because what if I'm mean for nothing? What if I'm mean and I'm wrong and it's cheap. I get a martini at Moynihan Station. David cuts the Amtrak line. “What are they going to do?” he says. This infuriates a woman near us. Afterwards, I think I see this woman everywhere. She's sitting next to me at The Tunnel Cafe. I book a dermatology appointment for when I'm back in New York City. Select any provider, I say. I receive my confirmation email shortly after and I swear to god - the doctor they assigned me is the woman from the train. I cancel the appointment quickly. If this is fate, then it stems from nothing good. God‘s hand has nothing to do with it. Someone is simply playing tricks. the Amtrak Some things that happen in Massachusetts are: I behave very badly. I can't find my keys. It's raining. I can't go outside. I'm in an airbnb where I have never been before and It's so cold and these walls are gray, nothing like home, a lot like the kind of walls that one could imagine closing in. I start shaking by the window and I think about how I could probably be someone who does something like punch a hole through the glass. I wouldn't do this, but it's strange to feel capable of it. I think about how I should probably just go outside. It's objectively strange to spiral. I never crash out. I don't know why gray wall to wall carpeting and people talking too loudly and vicinity to an unknown suburban street freaks me out so much. I wish I could scream at the sky and the rain would stop just like that. I calm down. I don't actually wish I could control the weather. That would be no kind of a life. I go to a hotel I can't afford and I try to break into their gym to use the treadmill. I can't get into the gym, but no one stops me in the lobby. I drink their lemon water. I drink almost the whole pitcher. I call my dad and I say can you please come pick me up now. In a different house, a house that is familiar, a house that I have always known - I sit by the fire, I sit by big glass windows, I watch Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), I drive to the snow. "I'm driving to Florida to drive to the snow," I say. Welcome to Florida, Massachusetts the sign on turnpike says. It's a white sign flanked by plaster palm trees. A little snowman with yellow hands and feet throws his hands in the air. Troop 76 Pack 76, the sign says. It's a blizzard up the turnpike. It's snowing in thick wet sheets. It's the type of snow that's fast and heavy, almost like rain but it's opaque and it's sticking. Everyone gets out of the car but me. I'm too cold, I say. My sister is throwing snowballs. I get out of the car too. We drive down the mountain. My dad plays Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. We play all twenty-five minutes of it and then we play it again. We pick up David. Do you want to hear Alice's Restaurant?, I ask him. Alice’s Restaurant, Album Cover Things are nice, from here. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, December 3 From 5:30 - 7:30pm at Il Bisonte — Yolo Journal celebrates the new Fall/Winter issue. I love few things more than a beautiful travel journal (something that has become few and far between). Yolo Journal, however, fits this bill to exaction. Wine provided by Franciacorta. RSVP to ilbisonte@novellapagherapr.com
Inline links: ExPat Press, Holy Cow, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VRXh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa510d062-c847-4fe9-ae3e-dc6b21176f8e_177x285.jpeg, Decibel, Pardon My French, KGB, Franz Kafka at The Morgan Library, The Tunnel Cafe, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ir9V!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbd04dfd6-f357-422e-a521-9d17731dfe1b_4032x3024.jpeg, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Alice's Restaurant, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WxiA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe78658ae-4123-4810-ad03-f0e13a55cd31_316x316.jpeg, Il Bisonte, Yolo Journal, Franciacorta
Before I go away for Thanksgiving, I go to dinner at Decibel with Madelyn. We go to Pardon My French for a martini. We go to KGB. I go to the Lower East Side, I go to a going away party, I go to the bodega, I go home. At a party in the Lower East Side, a girl is talking about censorship, the age of censorship, how liberated she feels by the passing of This Terrible Era. "So what do you want to say?" Her friend is asking. "What?" the girl says. "What were you waiting to be free to say?" The girl rolls her eyes. "It's the principle" "Yes," her friend is saying. "The principle is important, but you can be free to do whatever you want and still be entirely uninteresting." At a party in the Lower East Side, people are talking about The Internet. "Everything you say is regurgitated from The Internet," the girl is telling her friend. Before I leave New York for only a few days, I go to Franz Kafka at The Morgan Library. It's not a very nice exhibition. They've put pop up walls and bright colors and crowded superfluous exhibition text all over the whole place. I write a review, but then I think it's kind of snarky. It's ok to be mean, but it's not ok to be cheap. "Why are you afraid of being mean," someone asked me a few weeks ago. "Because I don't want to say things that hurt people close to me," I said in response. What I should have said is - because what if I'm mean for nothing? What if I'm mean and I'm wrong and it's cheap. I get a martini at Moynihan Station. David cuts the Amtrak line. “What are they going to do?” he says. This infuriates a woman near us. Afterwards, I think I see this woman everywhere. She's sitting next to me at The Tunnel Cafe. I book a dermatology appointment for when I'm back in New York City. Select any provider, I say. I receive my confirmation email shortly after and I swear to god - the doctor they assigned me is the woman from the train. I cancel the appointment quickly. If this is fate, then it stems from nothing good. God‘s hand has nothing to do with it. Someone is simply playing tricks. the Amtrak Some things that happen in Massachusetts are: I behave very badly. I can't find my keys. It's raining. I can't go outside. I'm in an airbnb where I have never been before and It's so cold and these walls are gray, nothing like home, a lot like the kind of walls that one could imagine closing in. I start shaking by the window and I think about how I could probably be someone who does something like punch a hole through the glass. I wouldn't do this, but it's strange to feel capable of it. I think about how I should probably just go outside. It's objectively strange to spiral. I never crash out. I don't know why gray wall to wall carpeting and people talking too loudly and vicinity to an unknown suburban street freaks me out so much. I wish I could scream at the sky and the rain would stop just like that. I calm down. I don't actually wish I could control the weather. That would be no kind of a life. I go to a hotel I can't afford and I try to break into their gym to use the treadmill. I can't get into the gym, but no one stops me in the lobby. I drink their lemon water. I drink almost the whole pitcher. I call my dad and I say can you please come pick me up now. In a different house, a house that is familiar, a house that I have always known - I sit by the fire, I sit by big glass windows, I watch Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), I drive to the snow. "I'm driving to Florida to drive to the snow," I say. Welcome to Florida, Massachusetts the sign on turnpike says. It's a white sign flanked by plaster palm trees. A little snowman with yellow hands and feet throws his hands in the air. Troop 76 Pack 76, the sign says. It's a blizzard up the turnpike. It's snowing in thick wet sheets. It's the type of snow that's fast and heavy, almost like rain but it's opaque and it's sticking. Everyone gets out of the car but me. I'm too cold, I say. My sister is throwing snowballs. I get out of the car too. We drive down the mountain. My dad plays Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. We play all twenty-five minutes of it and then we play it again. We pick up David. Do you want to hear Alice's Restaurant?, I ask him. Alice’s Restaurant, Album Cover Things are nice, from here. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, December 3 From 5:30 - 7:30pm at Il Bisonte — Yolo Journal celebrates the new Fall/Winter issue. I love few things more than a beautiful travel journal (something that has become few and far between). Yolo Journal, however, fits this bill to exaction. Wine provided by Franciacorta. RSVP to ilbisonte@novellapagherapr.com
Inline links: Decibel, Pardon My French, KGB, Franz Kafka at The Morgan Library, The Tunnel Cafe, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ir9V!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbd04dfd6-f357-422e-a521-9d17731dfe1b_4032x3024.jpeg, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Alice's Restaurant, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WxiA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe78658ae-4123-4810-ad03-f0e13a55cd31_316x316.jpeg, Il Bisonte, Yolo Journal, Franciacorta
the Amtrak Some things that happen in Massachusetts are: I behave very badly. I can't find my keys. It's raining. I can't go outside. I'm in an airbnb where I have never been before and It's so cold and these walls are gray, nothing like home, a lot like the kind of walls that one could imagine closing in. I start shaking by the window and I think about how I could probably be someone who does something like punch a hole through the glass. I wouldn't do this, but it's strange to feel capable of it. I think about how I should probably just go outside. It's objectively strange to spiral. I never crash out. I don't know why gray wall to wall carpeting and people talking too loudly and vicinity to an unknown suburban street freaks me out so much. I wish I could scream at the sky and the rain would stop just like that. I calm down. I don't actually wish I could control the weather. That would be no kind of a life. I go to a hotel I can't afford and I try to break into their gym to use the treadmill. I can't get into the gym, but no one stops me in the lobby. I drink their lemon water. I drink almost the whole pitcher. I call my dad and I say can you please come pick me up now. In a different house, a house that is familiar, a house that I have always known - I sit by the fire, I sit by big glass windows, I watch Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), I drive to the snow. "I'm driving to Florida to drive to the snow," I say. Welcome to Florida, Massachusetts the sign on turnpike says. It's a white sign flanked by plaster palm trees. A little snowman with yellow hands and feet throws his hands in the air. Troop 76 Pack 76, the sign says. It's a blizzard up the turnpike. It's snowing in thick wet sheets. It's the type of snow that's fast and heavy, almost like rain but it's opaque and it's sticking. Everyone gets out of the car but me. I'm too cold, I say. My sister is throwing snowballs. I get out of the car too. We drive down the mountain. My dad plays Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie. We play all twenty-five minutes of it and then we play it again. We pick up David. Do you want to hear Alice's Restaurant?, I ask him. Alice’s Restaurant, Album Cover Things are nice, from here. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, December 3 From 5:30 - 7:30pm at Il Bisonte — Yolo Journal celebrates the new Fall/Winter issue. I love few things more than a beautiful travel journal (something that has become few and far between). Yolo Journal, however, fits this bill to exaction. Wine provided by Franciacorta. RSVP to ilbisonte@novellapagherapr.com
Inline links: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Alice's Restaurant, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WxiA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe78658ae-4123-4810-ad03-f0e13a55cd31_316x316.jpeg, Il Bisonte, Yolo Journal, Franciacorta
kind of a dud socially
December 09, 2024 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, December 1 Mental and physical clarity is the thing that is the prerequisite for everything else. This is the thing to which I have returned. It happened suddenly. It happened in a hotel in Western Massachusetts. I'm not enlightened, but now I can breathe. I like to run every day. It doesn't have to be for lengths of times that feel like eternity. Just a few minutes is fine. The uptown B is late. I’m sitting in the subway station with plenty of time to Make Big Plans. I'm going to Be A Hostess. I'm going to Be A Tutor. I'm going to be a Professional Rock Climber. The truth of it is, my stint in bohemia is becoming unsustainable. "If you need money, you should be a pilates instructor," says Shannon. "Oh, true." I say The truth of it is, this idea sounds as good as any. I've tried to stop correlating monetary concerns with any sense of my creative ambitions. In a mirror world, I ghost write letters for my friends. I teach strangers how to scale buildings and to make their limbs long. In New York, I am better. I crave the forest and the snow and the pine trees by the window and particularly the ocean. I crave all this more than anything. When I arrive in the country, the expanse always shocks me. I don't know what to do with all that space. After class, I go to the dermatologist. It’s decorated for Christmas. They tell me everything is fine. This is the part I like the best: where I brace myself for terror, and then they tell me everything is fine. Uptown, I go to my aunt’s office. We have sushi and tea. We go the AMC. I like Wicked. It’s very sweet. I saw someone say they like Wicked in the way you like Barbie, but I like Wicked more. I like the soda machines and the supersized cups and the reclining red seats and the nerd clusters at the AMC. I like uptown. I could live here. I did live here, once. Wicked feels like a movie in the way a movie-in-the-theater should. Afterwards, David asks me three times if I liked Wicked. Yes, I say three times. He asks me if I can give a full review, but I can’t, not really. I liked it, I say. In the car home, I am cruel on a phone call that I made with the express purpose of being kind. I meet David at Cassidy’s house, where a lot of people are watching Spy Kids. Do you want a white claw, someone asks. No, I say. I am crying a little on account of my cruelty in place of kindness. David tells me something I should remember about being kind. I don’t, ultimately, remember what he says, but after this, everything is good. Tuesday, December 2 Riley and I go to Fanelli’s for dinner. Club sandwich and martini. I haven't felt removed from social activity or the desire for extroversion lately. To the contrary, I've been wanting very suddenly to connect very deeply with old friends. I want to go to Florida and drink Virgin Pina Coladas. I did that in college. I had so much fun when I did that in college. Can I come if you go to Florida this year, I ask Riley. Yes, she says I think we should go. I make a vlog with David. It's so much fun. David says I can't post the vlog, but then I edit it with Slavic music and then he says ok fine. I've felt an aversion to parties that place themselves at things like The Intersection Of Culture and Nightlife lately. I don't like when people who immerse themselves in these things express cynicism or borderline disgust towards a Scene. I feel immensely grateful for a community with adjacency to and/or aspirations towards art. I like readings. I like gestures towards intimacy, even false intimacy, even social climbing intimacy. I like that these things stem from something other than voyeurism, despite their tendencies towards voyeuristic or pseudo intellectual descent. But, I can't bring myself to attend. You haven't seen me in weeks. Not that anyone is counting. Not that I'm even counting, except it's hard to find things to comment on outside of Myself when I'm keeping close quarters. So bored by brooding. I could do something like Get Arrested. I could do something like Make A Gift Guide. David's friend calls him. "Do you want to go to KGB," he asks. "No," says David. "I'll go," I say. "Do you want to take Chloe to KGB for me?” David asks. “No,” his friend says, “she's kind of a dud socially." David takes his headphones out. "He says you're kind of a dud socially," "I'll see her six days in a row and it’s just her, and when I finally don’t see her, Chloe has a party with all her beautiful friends," he says. Then he lists out all my beautiful friends. We don't go to KGB. Wednesday, December 3 I stay inside for most of the day, that's what I assume you do when there's a man hunt. I remember the Boston Marathon bombing. I’d canoed there on the Charles River with my dad, and after we left the race safe and sound we learned that no one was allowed outside for days. They eventually found the guy in the hull of someone else's boat. Some different suburb. I assume that it’s the same today, but the UnitedHealthcare Assassin proves to be less of a threat to public safety. I go outside around two pm. SoHo is booming. Back inside, it starts to snow. I can see it through the greenhouse ceiling. David reads me transcripts of conversations he’s overheard in coffee shops. It would be hard to fake real coffee shop gossip, we both agree. There's a strangeness, a nonsense almost, in the overheard familiarity of conversations among people you don't know. The snow has come with wind, and I can see an umbrella on the roof above swinging wildly. I worry it will come crashing through. I worry that wind and icy pebbles of snow and shattered glass and the sphere of the umbrella stick are all about to crash down on me. The snow is thick and icy, but it’s melting as it lands on the glass and so there is no noise. I kind of think the snow looks like nuclear fallout. I almost say this out loud, but then I think that wouldn’t be very pleasant. David gets a text that “It’s snowing!!” and he rolls his eyes. “I don’t find whimsy in snow,” he says. “I do,” I say. Of course I do. Thursday, December 4 It's a strange week. I keep grasping for some concrete sense of how things make sense. I was acting insane last week, but now I am not. I was floating in space last week, but now I have mental and physical clarity. Things are never that simple. Acting Insane tends to happen in waves. The truth of it is, my sense of stagnation comes largely from the fact that I am acting very stagnant. It also stems from my phone and from things like staying up all night. We go to Sarabeth’s for dinner. They have happy hour now. I don't like to eat or drink early, and while I’m quite familiar with the concept of happy hour, I feel like I'm discovering it for myself for the first time. I'd like to order all the eight dollar cocktails, the shrimp, the deviled eggs. We’re sitting at the bar and it's cozy even though it smells slightly like cleaning supplies. Sterile in an old school way. This is not something I hate. The Greenwich Village Sarabeth’s just opened down the street. I like the Upper West Side Sarabeth’s because I would go every year on my half birthday as a child. We would go to The Central Park Zoo and then to Sarabeth’s. It wasn't as spoiled or superfluous as it sounds. It was just a nice tradition. Today, Sarabeth’s is nice until it isn't - a slow crescendo into an unhappy hour as the three to five pm menu is swapped out for normal prices. So, I stay up all night and reconsider if I have rediscovered mental and physical clarity after all. I call my friend and she says I have literally no idea what you mean by that. But I don't think I'm just using buzzwords. Clarity is the prerequisite to everything else. This makes sense to me. Next week is all the holiday parties in the world. I like this time the best. I'll go to the tree at Rockefeller tonight. I'll go to The Central Park Zoo. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO It’s the busiest week of the year… choose your ventures wisely. Monday, December 9 From 7:30pm — The Thing Is returns to Jean’s. This month's show (It’s A Wonderful Life) will star Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, and Rebounder.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6r7b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F46b17e6b-abf9-4738-96fe-3836b061abc3_1334x872.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CEI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe956e9be-2073-42ec-8943-74e226bc24bf_1518x850.png, The Thing Is, Jean’s, It’s A Wonderful Life, Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, Rebounder
Tuesday, December 2 Riley and I go to Fanelli’s for dinner. Club sandwich and martini. I haven't felt removed from social activity or the desire for extroversion lately. To the contrary, I've been wanting very suddenly to connect very deeply with old friends. I want to go to Florida and drink Virgin Pina Coladas. I did that in college. I had so much fun when I did that in college. Can I come if you go to Florida this year, I ask Riley. Yes, she says I think we should go. I make a vlog with David. It's so much fun. David says I can't post the vlog, but then I edit it with Slavic music and then he says ok fine. I've felt an aversion to parties that place themselves at things like The Intersection Of Culture and Nightlife lately. I don't like when people who immerse themselves in these things express cynicism or borderline disgust towards a Scene. I feel immensely grateful for a community with adjacency to and/or aspirations towards art. I like readings. I like gestures towards intimacy, even false intimacy, even social climbing intimacy. I like that these things stem from something other than voyeurism, despite their tendencies towards voyeuristic or pseudo intellectual descent. But, I can't bring myself to attend. You haven't seen me in weeks. Not that anyone is counting. Not that I'm even counting, except it's hard to find things to comment on outside of Myself when I'm keeping close quarters. So bored by brooding. I could do something like Get Arrested. I could do something like Make A Gift Guide. David's friend calls him. "Do you want to go to KGB," he asks. "No," says David. "I'll go," I say. "Do you want to take Chloe to KGB for me?” David asks. “No,” his friend says, “she's kind of a dud socially." David takes his headphones out. "He says you're kind of a dud socially," "I'll see her six days in a row and it’s just her, and when I finally don’t see her, Chloe has a party with all her beautiful friends," he says. Then he lists out all my beautiful friends. We don't go to KGB. Wednesday, December 3 I stay inside for most of the day, that's what I assume you do when there's a man hunt. I remember the Boston Marathon bombing. I’d canoed there on the Charles River with my dad, and after we left the race safe and sound we learned that no one was allowed outside for days. They eventually found the guy in the hull of someone else's boat. Some different suburb. I assume that it’s the same today, but the UnitedHealthcare Assassin proves to be less of a threat to public safety. I go outside around two pm. SoHo is booming. Back inside, it starts to snow. I can see it through the greenhouse ceiling. David reads me transcripts of conversations he’s overheard in coffee shops. It would be hard to fake real coffee shop gossip, we both agree. There's a strangeness, a nonsense almost, in the overheard familiarity of conversations among people you don't know. The snow has come with wind, and I can see an umbrella on the roof above swinging wildly. I worry it will come crashing through. I worry that wind and icy pebbles of snow and shattered glass and the sphere of the umbrella stick are all about to crash down on me. The snow is thick and icy, but it’s melting as it lands on the glass and so there is no noise. I kind of think the snow looks like nuclear fallout. I almost say this out loud, but then I think that wouldn’t be very pleasant. David gets a text that “It’s snowing!!” and he rolls his eyes. “I don’t find whimsy in snow,” he says. “I do,” I say. Of course I do. Thursday, December 4 It's a strange week. I keep grasping for some concrete sense of how things make sense. I was acting insane last week, but now I am not. I was floating in space last week, but now I have mental and physical clarity. Things are never that simple. Acting Insane tends to happen in waves. The truth of it is, my sense of stagnation comes largely from the fact that I am acting very stagnant. It also stems from my phone and from things like staying up all night. We go to Sarabeth’s for dinner. They have happy hour now. I don't like to eat or drink early, and while I’m quite familiar with the concept of happy hour, I feel like I'm discovering it for myself for the first time. I'd like to order all the eight dollar cocktails, the shrimp, the deviled eggs. We’re sitting at the bar and it's cozy even though it smells slightly like cleaning supplies. Sterile in an old school way. This is not something I hate. The Greenwich Village Sarabeth’s just opened down the street. I like the Upper West Side Sarabeth’s because I would go every year on my half birthday as a child. We would go to The Central Park Zoo and then to Sarabeth’s. It wasn't as spoiled or superfluous as it sounds. It was just a nice tradition. Today, Sarabeth’s is nice until it isn't - a slow crescendo into an unhappy hour as the three to five pm menu is swapped out for normal prices. So, I stay up all night and reconsider if I have rediscovered mental and physical clarity after all. I call my friend and she says I have literally no idea what you mean by that. But I don't think I'm just using buzzwords. Clarity is the prerequisite to everything else. This makes sense to me. Next week is all the holiday parties in the world. I like this time the best. I'll go to the tree at Rockefeller tonight. I'll go to The Central Park Zoo. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO It’s the busiest week of the year… choose your ventures wisely. Monday, December 9 From 7:30pm — The Thing Is returns to Jean’s. This month's show (It’s A Wonderful Life) will star Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, and Rebounder.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CEI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe956e9be-2073-42ec-8943-74e226bc24bf_1518x850.png, The Thing Is, Jean’s, It’s A Wonderful Life, Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, Rebounder
Wednesday, December 3 I stay inside for most of the day, that's what I assume you do when there's a man hunt. I remember the Boston Marathon bombing. I’d canoed there on the Charles River with my dad, and after we left the race safe and sound we learned that no one was allowed outside for days. They eventually found the guy in the hull of someone else's boat. Some different suburb. I assume that it’s the same today, but the UnitedHealthcare Assassin proves to be less of a threat to public safety. I go outside around two pm. SoHo is booming. Back inside, it starts to snow. I can see it through the greenhouse ceiling. David reads me transcripts of conversations he’s overheard in coffee shops. It would be hard to fake real coffee shop gossip, we both agree. There's a strangeness, a nonsense almost, in the overheard familiarity of conversations among people you don't know. The snow has come with wind, and I can see an umbrella on the roof above swinging wildly. I worry it will come crashing through. I worry that wind and icy pebbles of snow and shattered glass and the sphere of the umbrella stick are all about to crash down on me. The snow is thick and icy, but it’s melting as it lands on the glass and so there is no noise. I kind of think the snow looks like nuclear fallout. I almost say this out loud, but then I think that wouldn’t be very pleasant. David gets a text that “It’s snowing!!” and he rolls his eyes. “I don’t find whimsy in snow,” he says. “I do,” I say. Of course I do. Thursday, December 4 It's a strange week. I keep grasping for some concrete sense of how things make sense. I was acting insane last week, but now I am not. I was floating in space last week, but now I have mental and physical clarity. Things are never that simple. Acting Insane tends to happen in waves. The truth of it is, my sense of stagnation comes largely from the fact that I am acting very stagnant. It also stems from my phone and from things like staying up all night. We go to Sarabeth’s for dinner. They have happy hour now. I don't like to eat or drink early, and while I’m quite familiar with the concept of happy hour, I feel like I'm discovering it for myself for the first time. I'd like to order all the eight dollar cocktails, the shrimp, the deviled eggs. We’re sitting at the bar and it's cozy even though it smells slightly like cleaning supplies. Sterile in an old school way. This is not something I hate. The Greenwich Village Sarabeth’s just opened down the street. I like the Upper West Side Sarabeth’s because I would go every year on my half birthday as a child. We would go to The Central Park Zoo and then to Sarabeth’s. It wasn't as spoiled or superfluous as it sounds. It was just a nice tradition. Today, Sarabeth’s is nice until it isn't - a slow crescendo into an unhappy hour as the three to five pm menu is swapped out for normal prices. So, I stay up all night and reconsider if I have rediscovered mental and physical clarity after all. I call my friend and she says I have literally no idea what you mean by that. But I don't think I'm just using buzzwords. Clarity is the prerequisite to everything else. This makes sense to me. Next week is all the holiday parties in the world. I like this time the best. I'll go to the tree at Rockefeller tonight. I'll go to The Central Park Zoo. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO It’s the busiest week of the year… choose your ventures wisely. Monday, December 9 From 7:30pm — The Thing Is returns to Jean’s. This month's show (It’s A Wonderful Life) will star Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, and Rebounder.
Inline links: The Thing Is, Jean’s, It’s A Wonderful Life, Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, Rebounder
Moral Framework
December 16, 2024 · Original source
Monday, December 9 A busy day. One quickly finds this to be the solution to all malignant indulgences. Before a comedy show at Jean’s, Natasha and I go to Altro Paradiso for dinner. It’s an early dinner in the rain. Madelyn works here, and I’ve been meaning to visit for a while. I’ve been meaning to apply for a job here, too, but the list of things I’ve been meaning to do on that front continues to pile up. We order many things on the menu. The house specialties that we did not order somehow seem to keep materializing on our table as well. It’s like magic. It’s a special night. Rumor has it: Marina Abromovic was dining here this afternoon. Rumor has it, she’s dined here twenty times. Altro Paradiso is a well lit restaurant - I read something I liked about well lit restaurants this week and now I can’t recall where. The premise was: enough of this haze. Some people want to see their food. Some people want to see and be seen. Tonight, I drink Ciro Picariello. It’s like white wine but it sparkles. I drink a cocktail with peach purée and peach liquor. I drink a dirty martini. I eat olives, bread and ricotta, finocchio, another salad with fig and orange, mushroom pasta shaped like pillows, lemon pasta shaped like thick noodles, branzino, gelato. It’s a winter feast. I haven’t had a feast like this in my recent recollection. After, the rain has stopped but the evening is still misty. We hail a cab. We’re too late for Jean’s. Natasha is good at spotting famous people. Rebecca Black walks by. EmRata’s ex husband. Some other people, too. We go the The Nines, which is very festive, but where everyone is very rude. We go back to Jean’s. The show is over, they let us in, but there's no point in lingering now. I loved tonight, I say when I get home. A sign of mental stability is drinking alcohol and not hating every second of it. I know for some people, it's the opposite, but this is how it works for me. Tuesday, December 10 The line to get into the Richard Kern book launch is too long and it's raining. I see Annabel and Ellie outside. I see that Berlin blogger who only wears all black or all white and her TikTok DJ boyfriend. "I need to become someone who's 'list me or miss me'", a girl in line sighs. We're still waiting in the rain. She said this in a way like she was kidding, but I repeat the sentiment with no humility to David later. "We should become 'list me or miss me’,” I say. David has a tendency to bludgeon his way through lines. "We should become 'list me or i'm going to fucking kill you’,” David says. After I abandon the Richard Kern line, I go to Lucien. I run into a few people there. The expected and the unexpected. There are things I'm very excited about these days. Excitement is risky - it's unwise to tempt fate and it's destructive to celebrate accomplishments you are yet to achieve, but I am excited. Full of ideas again. Everyone at Lucien is an actor. That must be so cool, I say. I'm so full of sincerity, I think. This time of year can be so full in general that it begins to feel uneasy. This type of luxury isn't mine to claim and it's certainly not sustainable. The hedonism feels truly hedonistic today, though. It's energetic, not coated with something darker. I'm having so much fun. David wants to go to Frog Club for banana chiffon pie. "Why am I so broken up about Frog Club closing?” asks David. "You've never been to Frog Club," I say. "Yeah, that's probably why," says David. Risotto David made for me + prints from Paris Wednesday, December 11 I went to the Russian Baths on Wall Street on my first day in New York. I still go often now. It’s not really of my own volition. It’s a family tradition. It’s still pouring today. It’s been pouring all week. I used to think the Russian Baths were all liminal space and Russian mob, but now it feels less secret. The Doritos are from Israel. Russian Jews and Russian Gentiles, I hear someone explaining in line behind me. The building is huge. The pool area does feel kind of like The Backrooms. I have night terrors every night. In my dreams, I am never stuck in places like this. My aunt likes the cold plunge. She can stay in it for seven minutes, far beyond the recommended time of three. The Wim Hof method recommends rapid bursts of breath coupled with exposure to the extreme cold. I’m in the Infrared Sauna. On Christmas, I will swim outside in Walden Pond. Wim Hof (the man) lost a finger, an ear, something detached in the retina of his eye… I can’t recall the specific injury but something bad happened swimming across an icy lake. He took it too far. When I get back to New York, I will swim off Orchard Beach. There’s a group that goes every morning. My aunt tells me you have to go to Orchard Beach in the winter. It’s like Siberia in the Winter. It’s finally getting cold enough to swim. On my Wednesday at the Russian Baths, I lose my keys. I lose the big rubber slippers that they give you on arrival. I can’t last very long in the extreme heat or the extreme cold. An actor in the infrared sauna is talking about how he can only memorize lines in the cold plunge. I’m thinking about how I’m in an infinite feedback loop where everyone I meet keeps being actors. We go to dinner at the Russian Restaurant at the spa. It’s called Matryoshka like the dolls. I only learn this later David and I split potato pancakes, salad olivier which is the one with mayonnaise and egg and chicken (delicious), beef stroganoff, steamed chicken pelmeni. More stroganoff and borscht and red wine is also passed around the table. I can’t drink red wine, so I drink ginger juice and ginger vodka instead. Afterwards, too full to continue. There are other plans tonight - a film, a party, I promised I would go and I never cancel plans but sometimes I do just neglect to show up. A very bad habit. Inertia ultimately breeds pure evil! Time doesn’t pass at Spa 88. Still pouring but dark now, when we emerge from the underground. Thursday, December 12 My abridged review of Dimes Square (revival) today. I didn’t see it the first time around - I wasn’t here. I was in Boston. I was in a sorority. I arrived in this godforsaken ecosystem after it was already dead. I’m kind of being facetious. I think people try to qualify eras too concretely. Concretely: Dimes Square (the play) is indeed a period piece. In the vein of all Matthew Gasda’s plays, it is emotionally rich, lucid, kind of yearning, which catches me off guard but I think adds depth. The thing I like most about Dimes Square is this: it’s not self serious but also it is not sneering. The best satire is actually quite sincere. This is why most satire is generally and particularly in contemporary culture, bad. Dimes Square (the play) is excellent. I will be publishing a stand alone review of the play here shortly. I already wrote the review but then I realized I was far too stuck on historical accuracy and far too personally tortured. In the meantime (from my notes) -- “The main fault of the characters in the play is that they are cruel, but the main critique of this scene in real life is that it is (was?) (is?) full of people who are pathetic”
Inline links: Richard Kern, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gXs4!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5a0a08cc-f0bf-4529-82bd-40b8e59712aa_4284x5363.jpeg
Risotto David made for me + prints from Paris Wednesday, December 11 I went to the Russian Baths on Wall Street on my first day in New York. I still go often now. It’s not really of my own volition. It’s a family tradition. It’s still pouring today. It’s been pouring all week. I used to think the Russian Baths were all liminal space and Russian mob, but now it feels less secret. The Doritos are from Israel. Russian Jews and Russian Gentiles, I hear someone explaining in line behind me. The building is huge. The pool area does feel kind of like The Backrooms. I have night terrors every night. In my dreams, I am never stuck in places like this. My aunt likes the cold plunge. She can stay in it for seven minutes, far beyond the recommended time of three. The Wim Hof method recommends rapid bursts of breath coupled with exposure to the extreme cold. I’m in the Infrared Sauna. On Christmas, I will swim outside in Walden Pond. Wim Hof (the man) lost a finger, an ear, something detached in the retina of his eye… I can’t recall the specific injury but something bad happened swimming across an icy lake. He took it too far. When I get back to New York, I will swim off Orchard Beach. There’s a group that goes every morning. My aunt tells me you have to go to Orchard Beach in the winter. It’s like Siberia in the Winter. It’s finally getting cold enough to swim. On my Wednesday at the Russian Baths, I lose my keys. I lose the big rubber slippers that they give you on arrival. I can’t last very long in the extreme heat or the extreme cold. An actor in the infrared sauna is talking about how he can only memorize lines in the cold plunge. I’m thinking about how I’m in an infinite feedback loop where everyone I meet keeps being actors. We go to dinner at the Russian Restaurant at the spa. It’s called Matryoshka like the dolls. I only learn this later David and I split potato pancakes, salad olivier which is the one with mayonnaise and egg and chicken (delicious), beef stroganoff, steamed chicken pelmeni. More stroganoff and borscht and red wine is also passed around the table. I can’t drink red wine, so I drink ginger juice and ginger vodka instead. Afterwards, too full to continue. There are other plans tonight - a film, a party, I promised I would go and I never cancel plans but sometimes I do just neglect to show up. A very bad habit. Inertia ultimately breeds pure evil! Time doesn’t pass at Spa 88. Still pouring but dark now, when we emerge from the underground. Thursday, December 12 My abridged review of Dimes Square (revival) today. I didn’t see it the first time around - I wasn’t here. I was in Boston. I was in a sorority. I arrived in this godforsaken ecosystem after it was already dead. I’m kind of being facetious. I think people try to qualify eras too concretely. Concretely: Dimes Square (the play) is indeed a period piece. In the vein of all Matthew Gasda’s plays, it is emotionally rich, lucid, kind of yearning, which catches me off guard but I think adds depth. The thing I like most about Dimes Square is this: it’s not self serious but also it is not sneering. The best satire is actually quite sincere. This is why most satire is generally and particularly in contemporary culture, bad. Dimes Square (the play) is excellent. I will be publishing a stand alone review of the play here shortly. I already wrote the review but then I realized I was far too stuck on historical accuracy and far too personally tortured. In the meantime (from my notes) -- “The main fault of the characters in the play is that they are cruel, but the main critique of this scene in real life is that it is (was?) (is?) full of people who are pathetic”
Christmas Stories
December 28, 2024 · Original source
Selection from Toulouse-Lautrec’s Table I intend to qualify nothing. This is always my intention, but sometimes I follow my own rules more closely than others. Do you feel self satisfied when you say that one year changed everything? I would, which is why I’m not going to say it. The train to Boston is late, and then I later learn, cursed. Stopped at New Haven, pulling out of the station, there's a loud thump on my window and then I see a young woman staggering back along the platform. She gears herself up and then hurdles at the train again, slamming her body into another window a few seats down, but now the train is beginning to pick up speed. She starts sobbing as it leaves the station. Her bags are by her side. David is getting whisky and hotdogs at the dining car, but I tell him when he returns. I think you're hallucinating again, he says. Again being the pivotal word, because he suggested I was hallucinating when I saw a jaguarundi in the back garden of an urban hotel in San Salvador, too. The other passengers seem unfazed. Almost inhumanly so. And so, of course, I also wonder if the oddities might be a simple trick of the mind. The train stops again later on. They lost their crew, someone says on the loudspeaker. They will start the train again when they can, but as of now, there is no one to start the train, what with the missing crew and all. There are footsteps running up and down the car halls but I'm in the inner seat and I can't see anything. There are shadowy figures sprinting on the platform. I wonder if we should get off - are train robberies still a thing? - but then we're moving again and then we're in Boston, the oddities unexplained, the hex apparently dissipating in the car ride to the country. Snow and clear skies, here. It’s amazing how quickly the platform in suburbia can fade into a sense that you are the only ones around for hours. Moon over the fields. Pesto pasta for dinner reheated. Far from the backroom haze of a train ride where something was amiss. Tuesday On Christmas Eve Day, we drive to town. Happy Christmas Eve, I tell David. David tells me that he doesn’t consider Christmas Eve to begin before evening. As a matter of semantics, I can’t disagree. It’s a bright morning. Piercing. There’s snow over the fields and I drive slowly round the bends. I prefer when people say happy Christmas to merry, I tell David, and he wrinkles his nose. That's the traditional way, I say. That's the very British way. I'm not being didactic, I'm just being a snob. In the rendition of “A Night Before Christmas” that we read in the evening - there are a few copies around the house but I like the 1870 illustrated paperback copies best - they say Happy Christmas To All. I can't remember all the lines, but I do remember this one. David wants to know if the pond we like to swim in will be frozen. The little ponds are, but the big one - Walden - isn't. I drive faster the further I get from home. You can see the surface churning even from the road. Ripples in gray black water. The surface is moved by wind, not yet stabilized by cold. Christmas Eve Dinner is my favorite meal of the year, but David convinces me to stop at the alcove at Main Street Cafe around three pm. It's like a diner but cozier, he says. The alcove is tucked away down a driveway, near a parking lot, the real restaurant faces the street and it's decked in pine wreaths and dried chains of cranberry and orange. Upstairs, it's bustling. There's a long wait by the pastry shelf. To bring you your food here, in the alcove, the waiter comes outside, walks down the driveway, the door bursts open, we're the only ones left inside. Sitting at the hidden little bar, David convinces me to share corn clam chowder and onion rings - fantastic but now I'm full. I still eat at dinner later. Roast duck and roast goose and cranberry sauce and pie. It feels sweet, and not gluttonous. The season doesn’t feel gluttonous this year. I used to be so averse to this sin - gluttony, that is. Overindulgence hasn’t crossed my mind too much these past few weeks, I suppose a natural conclusion if you believe overdoing it to be a product of self destruction, and not pleasure. This year, I can access Christmas in a way that I can’t recall experiencing similarly since childhood. I like when winter is visceral. A visceral winter is my favorite season. I would like to feel the cold in my bones this year. I would like to feel nostalgia in bursts that are sharp when I walk around certain corners at dusk. I get everything I would like this year. It doesn’t unsettle me. It just means my memories are more precise. It’s a strange thing, to come back into yourself that is. Thursday We sleep til ten, light candles on the Christmas tree, polar swim in Walden Pond. Breakfast is maple butter on toast. Linner is cranberry moscow mules and cocktail shrimp. Later - an icy woods behind the house. The boardwalk over the swamp is caked with snow. I can see Saturn in the sky, even in the early afternoon. There's a Christmas Tree in the woods; a pine strung with ornaments, red and green ornaments, no lights because it's too deep in the forest to power them. We only see one other group on our walk; a family pulling a child in a snowsuit on a sled. Old friends come over for Christmas. You wonder, with these things, if there will still be things to say but then it seems, there always is. I feel grateful to have grown up in the presence of characters. People whose aesthetic and ethical sensibilities remain solid and unique and admirable. We have lasagna and salad by the fire and then pie made from a special type of sweet squash with homemade sweet cream. My mom is telling a story about the sheep farmer across the street and the fist fight she got into at the town swap exchange (the scavenging table at the dump) that got the whole operation shut down for years. The swap exchange was getting out of hand. My mother was being solicited for two hundred dollars in the parking lot to relinquish the neighbor's china that she'd spotted abandoned only five minutes before. The swap exchange was a nice thing though, environmentally friendly. You wouldn't believe the age of the women throwing hands over discarded silver. The dinner table conversation turns to strength of heart. "She has a good heart, they are saying, re the elderly women prone to physical blows over perfectly good silver. “She has a good heart but she has common sense too, and if you are not doing the common sense thing, then she will not withhold harshness.” My parents and their friends are shrugging. Sensibility does come with age. I've been learning this more lately. Level headedness when appropriate, too. Discretion when it comes to suffering fools, gladly or otherwise. We have many special items from the swap table around the house, and I used to find trinkets more of an inconvenience than a joy but I like the red table cloth with the little green and silver pine trees, the metal stars and chimes candle that spins and jingles when lit, the field of rocking horses always growing and dwindling by one or two but remaining a herd of sorts in my parents backyard. I can't stay here very long. The sense of interiority, quiet, the pale beauty of shifting light marking hours and time... it is lovely but it's also in conflict with my sensibility. This is symptomatic of some rot, likely. In another life I am endlessly entertained in the birch trees. Going to bed, it’s been dark for a while now. Here, you see one star first every night. The sun has been setting in a special shade of pale blue this winter. It was dark out the windows by dinner time. You could still see the shadows in the fields. Friday I consider changing my train back to New York, staying here a bit longer, sinking into hazy dusks and evenings by the wood stove and the fires. There was a gas leak in the furnace and so now the gas is off. We've been using the wood stove and the fires a lot. I don't change trains because it's too last minute. I'll become too suspended in time if I stay. There's a pink sunset over salt marshes in places like Mystic, Connecticut on the ride back to the city. I've been trying to work on the things I've put off for too long. I'm been trying to think about the way people talk about culture as I try to write a few reviews. I wrote this sentiment before Christmas -- I know that there are things I'm supposed to be scandalized by, and I'm not really scandalized, but I also remain defensive - it's the worst of all worlds. I have the hearty puritanical roots of a New England Jewish Wasp. It's difficult for me. God it feels good to agree with whatever the person speaking is saying. Now, the truth of it becomes -- morality as a simulacra is so dull. I can spend two seconds in real life and it hits me so starkly how much imitations of reality pale in its contrast. The diagnostics of the times suggests that the individual life becomes more and more disconnected from the collective life, your sphere of influence shrinks as the mirror world of technology gives you every reason to believe it grows, the word of the times isn't nihilism so much as absurdism. One symbol is easily swapped out for its opposite - they bear little material or spiritual significance. You know you don’t mean it. After the terrible Bob Dylan biopic, we're driving on the highway towards the train station and my dad is asking me if there are examples of contemporary genius, what that would look like, and I'm saying that the thing is you have to make a concerted effort to even engage with art at all now, or sometimes to engage even with real life at all and it's an effort that goes against most of the forces in your day to day and so the thing is I think genius is unlikely, although there are contemporary artists I admire and genius implies some innate transcendency of the general malaise anyway, so maybe these issues are irrelevant in the face of genius. A conversation at a coffee shop a few weeks ago - a younger man of the Monarchy school of thought is saying that an ideal society would not ask people to deal in the realm of public good and ruling provenance. Your sphere of influence is yourself and those around you, the best thing that can be done is we drop the illusion. An older man is saying but I've seen you be hugely influenced by the teachings of people you've never met. He's saying that now more than ever, we are living in an age that is cruel. I appreciate his point because - I appreciate learned wisdom and practicality only earned through time. And because, isn't it strange to say that now, more than ever, we live in real life? Finding pure purpose in interiority- this is something that can be learned. It's not something I've learned yet, though. Pure Purpose in Interiority WHAT YOU SHOULD DO This week is prone to slip into oblivion of the sort where you won't really know what you did at all. There is not a ton going on in New York – it's hard to throw a party during a week that doesn't exist. But, you needn't become senselessly bored! Sunday, December 29 From 7pm at KGB – Cassidy and Annabel present The Last Confessions of 2024
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ipqy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F61f8c38c-c101-44a5-aaa1-17218317525b_4284x5363.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!anOr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F19fb445b-fa79-478c-9e16-cc4b74362148_4284x5363.jpeg, Cassidy, Annabel
Christmas Eve Dinner is my favorite meal of the year, but David convinces me to stop at the alcove at Main Street Cafe around three pm. It's like a diner but cozier, he says. The alcove is tucked away down a driveway, near a parking lot, the real restaurant faces the street and it's decked in pine wreaths and dried chains of cranberry and orange. Upstairs, it's bustling. There's a long wait by the pastry shelf. To bring you your food here, in the alcove, the waiter comes outside, walks down the driveway, the door bursts open, we're the only ones left inside. Sitting at the hidden little bar, David convinces me to share corn clam chowder and onion rings - fantastic but now I'm full. I still eat at dinner later. Roast duck and roast goose and cranberry sauce and pie. It feels sweet, and not gluttonous. The season doesn’t feel gluttonous this year. I used to be so averse to this sin - gluttony, that is. Overindulgence hasn’t crossed my mind too much these past few weeks, I suppose a natural conclusion if you believe overdoing it to be a product of self destruction, and not pleasure. This year, I can access Christmas in a way that I can’t recall experiencing similarly since childhood. I like when winter is visceral. A visceral winter is my favorite season. I would like to feel the cold in my bones this year. I would like to feel nostalgia in bursts that are sharp when I walk around certain corners at dusk. I get everything I would like this year. It doesn’t unsettle me. It just means my memories are more precise. It’s a strange thing, to come back into yourself that is. Thursday We sleep til ten, light candles on the Christmas tree, polar swim in Walden Pond. Breakfast is maple butter on toast. Linner is cranberry moscow mules and cocktail shrimp. Later - an icy woods behind the house. The boardwalk over the swamp is caked with snow. I can see Saturn in the sky, even in the early afternoon. There's a Christmas Tree in the woods; a pine strung with ornaments, red and green ornaments, no lights because it's too deep in the forest to power them. We only see one other group on our walk; a family pulling a child in a snowsuit on a sled. Old friends come over for Christmas. You wonder, with these things, if there will still be things to say but then it seems, there always is. I feel grateful to have grown up in the presence of characters. People whose aesthetic and ethical sensibilities remain solid and unique and admirable. We have lasagna and salad by the fire and then pie made from a special type of sweet squash with homemade sweet cream. My mom is telling a story about the sheep farmer across the street and the fist fight she got into at the town swap exchange (the scavenging table at the dump) that got the whole operation shut down for years. The swap exchange was getting out of hand. My mother was being solicited for two hundred dollars in the parking lot to relinquish the neighbor's china that she'd spotted abandoned only five minutes before. The swap exchange was a nice thing though, environmentally friendly. You wouldn't believe the age of the women throwing hands over discarded silver. The dinner table conversation turns to strength of heart. "She has a good heart, they are saying, re the elderly women prone to physical blows over perfectly good silver. “She has a good heart but she has common sense too, and if you are not doing the common sense thing, then she will not withhold harshness.” My parents and their friends are shrugging. Sensibility does come with age. I've been learning this more lately. Level headedness when appropriate, too. Discretion when it comes to suffering fools, gladly or otherwise. We have many special items from the swap table around the house, and I used to find trinkets more of an inconvenience than a joy but I like the red table cloth with the little green and silver pine trees, the metal stars and chimes candle that spins and jingles when lit, the field of rocking horses always growing and dwindling by one or two but remaining a herd of sorts in my parents backyard. I can't stay here very long. The sense of interiority, quiet, the pale beauty of shifting light marking hours and time... it is lovely but it's also in conflict with my sensibility. This is symptomatic of some rot, likely. In another life I am endlessly entertained in the birch trees. Going to bed, it’s been dark for a while now. Here, you see one star first every night. The sun has been setting in a special shade of pale blue this winter. It was dark out the windows by dinner time. You could still see the shadows in the fields. Friday I consider changing my train back to New York, staying here a bit longer, sinking into hazy dusks and evenings by the wood stove and the fires. There was a gas leak in the furnace and so now the gas is off. We've been using the wood stove and the fires a lot. I don't change trains because it's too last minute. I'll become too suspended in time if I stay. There's a pink sunset over salt marshes in places like Mystic, Connecticut on the ride back to the city. I've been trying to work on the things I've put off for too long. I'm been trying to think about the way people talk about culture as I try to write a few reviews. I wrote this sentiment before Christmas -- I know that there are things I'm supposed to be scandalized by, and I'm not really scandalized, but I also remain defensive - it's the worst of all worlds. I have the hearty puritanical roots of a New England Jewish Wasp. It's difficult for me. God it feels good to agree with whatever the person speaking is saying. Now, the truth of it becomes -- morality as a simulacra is so dull. I can spend two seconds in real life and it hits me so starkly how much imitations of reality pale in its contrast. The diagnostics of the times suggests that the individual life becomes more and more disconnected from the collective life, your sphere of influence shrinks as the mirror world of technology gives you every reason to believe it grows, the word of the times isn't nihilism so much as absurdism. One symbol is easily swapped out for its opposite - they bear little material or spiritual significance. You know you don’t mean it. After the terrible Bob Dylan biopic, we're driving on the highway towards the train station and my dad is asking me if there are examples of contemporary genius, what that would look like, and I'm saying that the thing is you have to make a concerted effort to even engage with art at all now, or sometimes to engage even with real life at all and it's an effort that goes against most of the forces in your day to day and so the thing is I think genius is unlikely, although there are contemporary artists I admire and genius implies some innate transcendency of the general malaise anyway, so maybe these issues are irrelevant in the face of genius. A conversation at a coffee shop a few weeks ago - a younger man of the Monarchy school of thought is saying that an ideal society would not ask people to deal in the realm of public good and ruling provenance. Your sphere of influence is yourself and those around you, the best thing that can be done is we drop the illusion. An older man is saying but I've seen you be hugely influenced by the teachings of people you've never met. He's saying that now more than ever, we are living in an age that is cruel. I appreciate his point because - I appreciate learned wisdom and practicality only earned through time. And because, isn't it strange to say that now, more than ever, we live in real life? Finding pure purpose in interiority- this is something that can be learned. It's not something I've learned yet, though. Pure Purpose in Interiority WHAT YOU SHOULD DO This week is prone to slip into oblivion of the sort where you won't really know what you did at all. There is not a ton going on in New York – it's hard to throw a party during a week that doesn't exist. But, you needn't become senselessly bored! Sunday, December 29 From 7pm at KGB – Cassidy and Annabel present The Last Confessions of 2024
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!anOr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F19fb445b-fa79-478c-9e16-cc4b74362148_4284x5363.jpeg, Cassidy, Annabel
The End Of The Year
January 03, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Tuesday, December 30 I struggle with specificities of Resolution - there are things I care about in the new year, but these feel more like seasonal ideals, wrought in the empty clarity of colder months and then you hope, adapting gently and seamlessly as time passes. Health, reverence, the discipline to resist the slop of it all until you cease to desire things of excess and rot in the first place. I return to New York today. I start my New Year today, too. I feel too bogged down by too much to wait. I am trying to feel pure again. I write big letters in my planner - First Week Of The Year. I write in little letters below - I am trying to feel pure again. Back in the city means there's a party and I'm feeling really sick of talking about these things. I'm feeling like a scene as defined as "social circle" is a wonderful thing to have, but a scene as in "microcosm of politics and culture and the malaise and dreams of our times" is something that I shouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. David is telling me about everyone who's going to the party and he's listing off so many names and then he says oh wait it's actually just three people and he says oh they want us to bring beer and then he says do you want to split an uber with some other friends I didn’t know were in town and then I feel like I'm being absolutely ripped off and so I absolutely refuse to attend. Instead, another Party, I trail David to his friend's house. Mostly people I don't know, but I'm feeling pleasant. The boys are playing on a vintage video game console that someone got for free, and I find solitude in the hallway - surprisingly long and isolated for a Chinatown apartment. I pace up and down the hallway like it's a treadmill and I play on my phone. It's kind of dark. I would be an eerie sight walking up and down by myself here, but no one can see me. David tells me later that everyone could hear my thumping footsteps going an and and on. I didn't know this at the time, though. I walk two miles in the hallway. A really weird thing to do, but it's raining outside and the night feels quietly spooky in a way I want to embrace. Now and then someone on their way to the freezer to replenish the jäger crosses my path, but I avoid collision with ease. I'm listening to music that sounds particularly sweet. I want to bunch it all together. I make a list. Winter Dinner, I call it. It's a fittingly cheesy name. A playlist title should sound cheap. These are some songs in a playlist. If someone actually played this at a dinner it would probably be a little bit much. Playlists probably shouldn’t even exist. We should probably only listen to albums. The titles of sloppy curation shouldn’t make sense. Winter Dinner Elliott Smith - Rose Parade
Joan Baez - It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue Later, someone puts on After Hours (1985), and so I cease my pacing in place and I go rejoin the group. "Maybe this is just a movie about guys who are lost in like... New York and girls who are scary and incomprehensible," someone is saying. "I hate to make everything political, I'm self conscious about making everything political, but there are no movies except for this about men and the weird, weird, weird ass shit women put them through," says someone else. Later, I go back to the hallway and I practice leaping and twirling. David tells me my twirls would be very impressive if I was like… eleven years old. Later, we go to The Scratcher. It’s a bar in the East Village. "They have onion and cheese sandwiches," David says. He says this three or four times. I ask the bartender about the sandwiches when we get there. It's a suspiciously small bar. No kitchen in sight. I broach the topic gently. "My boyfriend is wondering if you... have a kitchen?" I ask. The bartender shakes his head. "Onion and cheese sandwiches?" I say. The bartender shakes his head. So don't come here for the food, is the lesson, but it's a nice vibe. I get a terrible moscow mule. I get two vodka sodas. I liked the night better before the drinks. Intentional haziness intuitively goes against everything I have recently been craving. Tonight, the first half of the evening is best. Wednesday, December 31 Rebecca asks me about my Resolutions at Clandestino. Give me three, she says. Avoid being cruel and prioritize mental and physical clarity, I say. My sister rolls her eyes, because these sentiments are kind of just My Talking Points lately. One more, says Rebbeca. Be really healthy, I say. This seems to satisfy everyone. Morning - I walk for an hour and I write on the treadmill. I do this every day. It's the only element of "routine" that I can honestly claim as consistently mine. The main thing to consider is this: I have a life now, that I fundamentally thought I was too half formed and unstable to access maybe ever, least of all soon. I cherish this more than anything. There is so much beauty now. It happened suddenly. A fundamental conflict comes in an occasional residual desire to destroy it all in ways that are very cruel. This is the fundamental conflict, I suppose. The main thing to fix. If you remember how much you cherish all you have, then the desire to destroy it fades. Things like this are often very simple. I'm walking at a quick pace and I'm writing about how much there is that I cherish. I'll be less confessional this year. New Moon yesterday. This is the last of it. The last of purging my sins in broad vague strokes, I mean. Afternoon - purging my apartment. The roof is leaking and they're saying it needs to be replaced. I love this apartment. It's far too small for two people, but I hope we can stay. I'm getting rid of all the excess in the meantime. I want to wake up to empty floors and sparkling windows. Evening - a beautiful dinner party. New Years downtown, after. Six am. Everything feels very fresh. There's always more to say, but I shouldn't. Nihilism doesn't cure paranoia, but absurdism does. I want to walk outside for hours and write by hand in little notebooks. It's time to stop musing. Days of self indulgence. Sick of it. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Happy New Year. Things are still picking back up in New York… Friday, January 3 From 6pm - 9pm at Harkwaik — Exene Karros solo show Spirit opens. These paintings look really beautiful, and the exhibition seems interesting – “the ubiquity and ambivalence of corporate iconography, the banality of violence and pleasure, the vacancy of identity articulated through narrow registers, and the thrill of transgressive appropriation linger.”
Inline links: Harkwaik, Exene Karros
Life before inositol
January 13, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, January 6 The day opens with an alarm on the roof - one of that variety that marks “intruder”, not “fire”. I’ve been easily frightened lately. David likes to play with flames. He likes to ignite the matchbooks I get at restaurants in one stroke and then shake the charring cardboard until the flames swell with air and then burn out. I live in a greenhouse. Sometimes, I mistake the planes overhead for a meteor or a falling star, the revving of an engine outside as a sign that it’s all coming crashing down, through the glass overhead, it’s all going to explode soon and I’ll half know what hit me because I’ve been expecting it for so long, but there still will remain a deeply unpleasant element of surprise. There are things that breed pure terror - usually things like these, usually things in the mundane. You’re zero to eleven lately, David tells me and he isn’t wrong, but I suspect my neurosis to be a product born more of boredom than of anything else. The intruder on the roof doesn’t really scare me. The alarm goes on for a while, but the shadow of a figure over the greenhouse ceiling dissipates quickly. The roof has been caving in. This is something I know to be true. The landlord has told me so. I’ve seen the falling plaster in the living room. The intruder is probably just there to help. I eat wild herring for breakfast. I get the one from Bar Harbor online, preserved in salt water with lots of pepper. If I eat breakfast, it’s always something strange. Sometimes, David makes me a french omelette. If David makes me a french omelet, then I eat that. I’ve been sleeping better. Eating better, too. The two are very connected for me. Ruby recommends inositol. It arrives today. If it can cure me, that’s a miracle, but I’ve been getting a little better on my own, anyways. A walk to the gym through SoHo - it begins to snow. Blizzard, almost. They're sprinkling salt in big clumps all over the sidewalk by Corner Bar. This is the first winter I can recall since childhood where there's been snow and lots of it. It's nice. There's whimsy in the air. I could stay here for hours. I’ve been praying for the calm, and now it is here. Sterility is nice in few regards - an empty and cavernous gym being one of them. I go to see Babygirl with Natasha and some of her friends at Angelika East in the evening. It’s a nice evening of cinema, but sometimes a theater can enclose you, and this is not one of those times. We’re too close to the screen, everyone around us keeps squealing, the movie is just really pretty overall bad. It’s like Nicole Kidman’s second Eyes Wide Shut, I keep on hearing people say but it’s not, really, at all actually. Perhaps thematically - both delving into female sexuality and desire - but you can like the topics a film explores and still sense that there is absolutely no coherence to the plot, nor to the flailing illogical actions of the characters - actions of which at no point are genuinely sold as being driven by desire. Tuesday, January 7 After briefly losing one's mind, simple tendrils of thought that gesture towards sanity become disproportionately lovely. I’m reading Kafka, still - my godforsaken piece on Kafka coming out next week and then I can abandon these stories for good. It’s been nice to delve deeply into a topic, nice to hate everything I have to say so much that I rephrase it over and over again, nice to consider language with an eye towards cognizance, towards if it actually makes any sense. Most of the time, I write and speak out of necessity, or even, desperation. Clearing the mind. Purging the soul. I am a diarist - self indulgent. Or perhaps, it’s just something else entirely. It’s something different than an artistic practice. Criticism and fiction necessitate at least grasping towards some idealized form of clarity. Writing about writing - awful, boring, should never be done. For now, it’s like I'm in highschool. Reading “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” under the comforter with a reading lamp turned all the way up. It’s still early afternoon but it’s too cold, too windy, the draft is vicious through the greenhouse roof. I have my head under the blankets and so it’s like a simulation of evening. David keeps the reading lamp set to soft orange light, and so it’s like a simulation of candlelight, too. I’m exhausted and so I’m stretching reality. I’m stretching a story out of thin air. Now, I’ll go to pilates and stretch on an empty floor. I’ll go get nail polish remover from the boxes on the highest shelf or, if missing, from the CVS next door. Kafka’s Josephine is a wretched character. She possesses a firm belief in her own entitlement to a life of leisure on account of her artistic talents, but of course she lives in a time where wretched conditions have rendered real artistic talents inconceivable. She is not only un-talented, but also a fraud. There are notes that could be made about self-recognition in this spoiled, awful, regrettable character, but I’m sparing myself. We go to Big Bar in the evening. I've never been before, but it seems to be a spot that people know about. I knew it would be these people here, my friend says when we walk in. I don’t really recognize anyone, but that's often how these things go. The bit with Big Bar is that it's actually an extremely small bar. It's all drenched in red light and there’s a tiny DJ booth by the front window and it's cash only, the drinks are not terribly strong, but they are cheap. Someone has a small dog in a carrier in their arms, but no one seems to notice aside from us. This seems like a spot for old heads - of which I am not, but I enjoy the company of. Wednesday, January 8 Meeting with Beckett and Jonah this morning at Caffe Reggio to discuss Tense - Reggio is full and so Beckett suggests Dante. It’s not like he remembered it, now. It’s a coffee shop, he says, but it’s a cocktail bar now. Expensive green and red martinis in thin glasses whirling through the room even now, at two pm. They still let us sit for coffee. I have an interview after. Madelyn texts me. At Altro Paradiso at 3pm, they are saying goodbye to the head chef. I’ve gone to Altro Paradiso a few times recently, because Madelyn works there mostly, although even independent of that it’s the best food I’ve had in New York in a while. Today, I was in a rush, the plans were last minute. I'm still wearing my workout clothes and their ‘archival lululemon’ - hand-me-downs from a closet of a friend of my mothers when I was about thirteen years old. The shirt is striped and black and white and a small band bearing slogans like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” folds up or down at the hem, depending on how flagrantly antisocial you feel like being on that particular day. I’m keeping the band folded under today. I’m wildly underdressed but it’s afternoon, the restaurant isn’t even technically open yet. There’s a toast to the chef and I’m the only outsider in attendance and so I stay at the bar while the group of staff and friends and family assemble. It’s very special, even to bear witness to as someone uninvolved. There’s a heart and soul to food and drink and service that other industries, even creative industries, really don’t have in the same way. I’m a tiny bit tipsy, now. I need to start hostessing again. I make this note on my phone: “NEED TO START HOSTESSING AGAIN!!!!” We stay at Altro Paradiso til dinner starts, and we continue to stay till it feels like dinner is about to end. Everything is magical - the alla prima cocktail, wine, dirty martini, pane e ricotta, salad with figs and dates, octopus, olives, oysters under beds of thinly sliced veggies, malfatti (which is pasta that is like little pillows), linguine al nero (which is pasta with squid ink and cuttlefish and basil), a few deserts - pistachio ice cream and the pear cake. The afternoon turns to a sparkling evening. I walk home. I go elsewhere, after - fun too, but I probably shouldn’t have. I should probably learn when to call an evening. Decadence in excess, turns all that sparkles sour. Thursday, January 9 It's been the same day on repeat so far this year. The same three days, really. Rinse and do it again. The year has only held nine days. I can't view my stagnation with too much harshness. Decadence, in contrast, should be viewed with harshness. Los Angeles is burning up and it feels uncouth to talk about this here as this tragedy is not my life, but I can't stop watching. Most emotions are triggered through all five senses - it's a strange feeling of muted horror to see destruction of places and lives you know on a screen, detached from your physical experience but visible in real time in your cognizant mind - peripheral vision. I accidentally get stuck in the Louis Vuitton x Murakami line in SoHo. I accidentally steal a pair of Split sweatpants from the gym. I accidentally read all the books on the 4chan 2024 Top 100 Lit Board list. I'm on tiktok watching videos of the apocalypse overlaid with Lana del Rey audio. I’m browsing r/lainfluencersnark and they have a lot to say about the way their parasocial relationships are handling the apocalypse. I tried to write something about phones and chaos and end times but it was silly. These are resources / writing from people in LA. The Angel - L.A. Fires — How to Help
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T-Gq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9d114bf9-797d-4dd1-95d1-c158c577681b_1600x1200.jpeg, Bar Harbor, inositol, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VYl0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08cd7020-7ebc-489e-b243-209ab1d83d20_906x606.jpeg, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, Big Bar, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wp05!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a23d264-68fb-4db9-aada-e135b8a1ffb2_1200x1600.jpeg, Tense, Altro Paradiso, The Angel - L.A. Fires — How to Help
I eat wild herring for breakfast. I get the one from Bar Harbor online, preserved in salt water with lots of pepper. If I eat breakfast, it’s always something strange. Sometimes, David makes me a french omelette. If David makes me a french omelet, then I eat that. I’ve been sleeping better. Eating better, too. The two are very connected for me. Ruby recommends inositol. It arrives today. If it can cure me, that’s a miracle, but I’ve been getting a little better on my own, anyways. A walk to the gym through SoHo - it begins to snow. Blizzard, almost. They're sprinkling salt in big clumps all over the sidewalk by Corner Bar. This is the first winter I can recall since childhood where there's been snow and lots of it. It's nice. There's whimsy in the air. I could stay here for hours. I’ve been praying for the calm, and now it is here. Sterility is nice in few regards - an empty and cavernous gym being one of them. I go to see Babygirl with Natasha and some of her friends at Angelika East in the evening. It’s a nice evening of cinema, but sometimes a theater can enclose you, and this is not one of those times. We’re too close to the screen, everyone around us keeps squealing, the movie is just really pretty overall bad. It’s like Nicole Kidman’s second Eyes Wide Shut, I keep on hearing people say but it’s not, really, at all actually. Perhaps thematically - both delving into female sexuality and desire - but you can like the topics a film explores and still sense that there is absolutely no coherence to the plot, nor to the flailing illogical actions of the characters - actions of which at no point are genuinely sold as being driven by desire. Tuesday, January 7 After briefly losing one's mind, simple tendrils of thought that gesture towards sanity become disproportionately lovely. I’m reading Kafka, still - my godforsaken piece on Kafka coming out next week and then I can abandon these stories for good. It’s been nice to delve deeply into a topic, nice to hate everything I have to say so much that I rephrase it over and over again, nice to consider language with an eye towards cognizance, towards if it actually makes any sense. Most of the time, I write and speak out of necessity, or even, desperation. Clearing the mind. Purging the soul. I am a diarist - self indulgent. Or perhaps, it’s just something else entirely. It’s something different than an artistic practice. Criticism and fiction necessitate at least grasping towards some idealized form of clarity. Writing about writing - awful, boring, should never be done. For now, it’s like I'm in highschool. Reading “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” under the comforter with a reading lamp turned all the way up. It’s still early afternoon but it’s too cold, too windy, the draft is vicious through the greenhouse roof. I have my head under the blankets and so it’s like a simulation of evening. David keeps the reading lamp set to soft orange light, and so it’s like a simulation of candlelight, too. I’m exhausted and so I’m stretching reality. I’m stretching a story out of thin air. Now, I’ll go to pilates and stretch on an empty floor. I’ll go get nail polish remover from the boxes on the highest shelf or, if missing, from the CVS next door. Kafka’s Josephine is a wretched character. She possesses a firm belief in her own entitlement to a life of leisure on account of her artistic talents, but of course she lives in a time where wretched conditions have rendered real artistic talents inconceivable. She is not only un-talented, but also a fraud. There are notes that could be made about self-recognition in this spoiled, awful, regrettable character, but I’m sparing myself. We go to Big Bar in the evening. I've never been before, but it seems to be a spot that people know about. I knew it would be these people here, my friend says when we walk in. I don’t really recognize anyone, but that's often how these things go. The bit with Big Bar is that it's actually an extremely small bar. It's all drenched in red light and there’s a tiny DJ booth by the front window and it's cash only, the drinks are not terribly strong, but they are cheap. Someone has a small dog in a carrier in their arms, but no one seems to notice aside from us. This seems like a spot for old heads - of which I am not, but I enjoy the company of. Wednesday, January 8 Meeting with Beckett and Jonah this morning at Caffe Reggio to discuss Tense - Reggio is full and so Beckett suggests Dante. It’s not like he remembered it, now. It’s a coffee shop, he says, but it’s a cocktail bar now. Expensive green and red martinis in thin glasses whirling through the room even now, at two pm. They still let us sit for coffee. I have an interview after. Madelyn texts me. At Altro Paradiso at 3pm, they are saying goodbye to the head chef. I’ve gone to Altro Paradiso a few times recently, because Madelyn works there mostly, although even independent of that it’s the best food I’ve had in New York in a while. Today, I was in a rush, the plans were last minute. I'm still wearing my workout clothes and their ‘archival lululemon’ - hand-me-downs from a closet of a friend of my mothers when I was about thirteen years old. The shirt is striped and black and white and a small band bearing slogans like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” folds up or down at the hem, depending on how flagrantly antisocial you feel like being on that particular day. I’m keeping the band folded under today. I’m wildly underdressed but it’s afternoon, the restaurant isn’t even technically open yet. There’s a toast to the chef and I’m the only outsider in attendance and so I stay at the bar while the group of staff and friends and family assemble. It’s very special, even to bear witness to as someone uninvolved. There’s a heart and soul to food and drink and service that other industries, even creative industries, really don’t have in the same way. I’m a tiny bit tipsy, now. I need to start hostessing again. I make this note on my phone: “NEED TO START HOSTESSING AGAIN!!!!” We stay at Altro Paradiso til dinner starts, and we continue to stay till it feels like dinner is about to end. Everything is magical - the alla prima cocktail, wine, dirty martini, pane e ricotta, salad with figs and dates, octopus, olives, oysters under beds of thinly sliced veggies, malfatti (which is pasta that is like little pillows), linguine al nero (which is pasta with squid ink and cuttlefish and basil), a few deserts - pistachio ice cream and the pear cake. The afternoon turns to a sparkling evening. I walk home. I go elsewhere, after - fun too, but I probably shouldn’t have. I should probably learn when to call an evening. Decadence in excess, turns all that sparkles sour. Thursday, January 9 It's been the same day on repeat so far this year. The same three days, really. Rinse and do it again. The year has only held nine days. I can't view my stagnation with too much harshness. Decadence, in contrast, should be viewed with harshness. Los Angeles is burning up and it feels uncouth to talk about this here as this tragedy is not my life, but I can't stop watching. Most emotions are triggered through all five senses - it's a strange feeling of muted horror to see destruction of places and lives you know on a screen, detached from your physical experience but visible in real time in your cognizant mind - peripheral vision. I accidentally get stuck in the Louis Vuitton x Murakami line in SoHo. I accidentally steal a pair of Split sweatpants from the gym. I accidentally read all the books on the 4chan 2024 Top 100 Lit Board list. I'm on tiktok watching videos of the apocalypse overlaid with Lana del Rey audio. I’m browsing r/lainfluencersnark and they have a lot to say about the way their parasocial relationships are handling the apocalypse. I tried to write something about phones and chaos and end times but it was silly. These are resources / writing from people in LA. The Angel - L.A. Fires — How to Help
Inline links: Bar Harbor, inositol, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VYl0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08cd7020-7ebc-489e-b243-209ab1d83d20_906x606.jpeg, “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, Big Bar, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wp05!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a23d264-68fb-4db9-aada-e135b8a1ffb2_1200x1600.jpeg, Tense, Altro Paradiso, The Angel - L.A. Fires — How to Help
Tuesday, January 7 After briefly losing one's mind, simple tendrils of thought that gesture towards sanity become disproportionately lovely. I’m reading Kafka, still - my godforsaken piece on Kafka coming out next week and then I can abandon these stories for good. It’s been nice to delve deeply into a topic, nice to hate everything I have to say so much that I rephrase it over and over again, nice to consider language with an eye towards cognizance, towards if it actually makes any sense. Most of the time, I write and speak out of necessity, or even, desperation. Clearing the mind. Purging the soul. I am a diarist - self indulgent. Or perhaps, it’s just something else entirely. It’s something different than an artistic practice. Criticism and fiction necessitate at least grasping towards some idealized form of clarity. Writing about writing - awful, boring, should never be done. For now, it’s like I'm in highschool. Reading “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” under the comforter with a reading lamp turned all the way up. It’s still early afternoon but it’s too cold, too windy, the draft is vicious through the greenhouse roof. I have my head under the blankets and so it’s like a simulation of evening. David keeps the reading lamp set to soft orange light, and so it’s like a simulation of candlelight, too. I’m exhausted and so I’m stretching reality. I’m stretching a story out of thin air. Now, I’ll go to pilates and stretch on an empty floor. I’ll go get nail polish remover from the boxes on the highest shelf or, if missing, from the CVS next door. Kafka’s Josephine is a wretched character. She possesses a firm belief in her own entitlement to a life of leisure on account of her artistic talents, but of course she lives in a time where wretched conditions have rendered real artistic talents inconceivable. She is not only un-talented, but also a fraud. There are notes that could be made about self-recognition in this spoiled, awful, regrettable character, but I’m sparing myself. We go to Big Bar in the evening. I've never been before, but it seems to be a spot that people know about. I knew it would be these people here, my friend says when we walk in. I don’t really recognize anyone, but that's often how these things go. The bit with Big Bar is that it's actually an extremely small bar. It's all drenched in red light and there’s a tiny DJ booth by the front window and it's cash only, the drinks are not terribly strong, but they are cheap. Someone has a small dog in a carrier in their arms, but no one seems to notice aside from us. This seems like a spot for old heads - of which I am not, but I enjoy the company of. Wednesday, January 8 Meeting with Beckett and Jonah this morning at Caffe Reggio to discuss Tense - Reggio is full and so Beckett suggests Dante. It’s not like he remembered it, now. It’s a coffee shop, he says, but it’s a cocktail bar now. Expensive green and red martinis in thin glasses whirling through the room even now, at two pm. They still let us sit for coffee. I have an interview after. Madelyn texts me. At Altro Paradiso at 3pm, they are saying goodbye to the head chef. I’ve gone to Altro Paradiso a few times recently, because Madelyn works there mostly, although even independent of that it’s the best food I’ve had in New York in a while. Today, I was in a rush, the plans were last minute. I'm still wearing my workout clothes and their ‘archival lululemon’ - hand-me-downs from a closet of a friend of my mothers when I was about thirteen years old. The shirt is striped and black and white and a small band bearing slogans like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” folds up or down at the hem, depending on how flagrantly antisocial you feel like being on that particular day. I’m keeping the band folded under today. I’m wildly underdressed but it’s afternoon, the restaurant isn’t even technically open yet. There’s a toast to the chef and I’m the only outsider in attendance and so I stay at the bar while the group of staff and friends and family assemble. It’s very special, even to bear witness to as someone uninvolved. There’s a heart and soul to food and drink and service that other industries, even creative industries, really don’t have in the same way. I’m a tiny bit tipsy, now. I need to start hostessing again. I make this note on my phone: “NEED TO START HOSTESSING AGAIN!!!!” We stay at Altro Paradiso til dinner starts, and we continue to stay till it feels like dinner is about to end. Everything is magical - the alla prima cocktail, wine, dirty martini, pane e ricotta, salad with figs and dates, octopus, olives, oysters under beds of thinly sliced veggies, malfatti (which is pasta that is like little pillows), linguine al nero (which is pasta with squid ink and cuttlefish and basil), a few deserts - pistachio ice cream and the pear cake. The afternoon turns to a sparkling evening. I walk home. I go elsewhere, after - fun too, but I probably shouldn’t have. I should probably learn when to call an evening. Decadence in excess, turns all that sparkles sour. Thursday, January 9 It's been the same day on repeat so far this year. The same three days, really. Rinse and do it again. The year has only held nine days. I can't view my stagnation with too much harshness. Decadence, in contrast, should be viewed with harshness. Los Angeles is burning up and it feels uncouth to talk about this here as this tragedy is not my life, but I can't stop watching. Most emotions are triggered through all five senses - it's a strange feeling of muted horror to see destruction of places and lives you know on a screen, detached from your physical experience but visible in real time in your cognizant mind - peripheral vision. I accidentally get stuck in the Louis Vuitton x Murakami line in SoHo. I accidentally steal a pair of Split sweatpants from the gym. I accidentally read all the books on the 4chan 2024 Top 100 Lit Board list. I'm on tiktok watching videos of the apocalypse overlaid with Lana del Rey audio. I’m browsing r/lainfluencersnark and they have a lot to say about the way their parasocial relationships are handling the apocalypse. I tried to write something about phones and chaos and end times but it was silly. These are resources / writing from people in LA. The Angel - L.A. Fires — How to Help
Inline links: “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, Big Bar, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Wp05!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a23d264-68fb-4db9-aada-e135b8a1ffb2_1200x1600.jpeg, Tense, Altro Paradiso, The Angel - L.A. Fires — How to Help
January continues
January 19, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, January 12 Ruby and I go to Bar Belly for dinner. Can we move to a table away from the bar, Ruby asks the waitress. Sitting at the bar is bad for your posture and alignment, she explains. This is another thing she's been learning at witch school. It seems that at witch school, you learn to sit and stand and then by proxy, to eat and sleep and breathe and think. Fruit and honey for breakfast, feet on the ground when you are seated with an unsupported spine. I am craving spiritual guidance, and so I soak this up like a sponge. I want to be taught how to be. This is how you wake up. This is how you shift your feet out of bed, this is how you land on the wood floor, toes first, the arches of your feet, then heels. The truth of it is my movements are products of my best but often misguided judgment. Guesses, really. For all I know, you should wake up in the morning upside down. Palms on the ground first. Heels then arches then toes. I want to learn how to be divine, but there are so many shamans and they all know best. God forbid I become sacrilegious. I certainly know myself to be fringing on this at times. Even the mention of shamans.... Ruby and I were going to go to El Salvador on Tuesday, but then I’m thinking about how I should read more before I continue my research on the ground. I visited El Salvador this summer. Later, halted my story about crypto-charter-state-red-light-therapy-benevolent-dictatorship etc etc etc. A result of overstimulation and laziness - I should deepen my roots before I return to them. Later, I'll go later. David sends me an X Post: “Wish we lived in 1970s media economy so esquire or playboy could fly me to El Salvador and publish my 10,000-word marginally-coherent slice-of-life coverage of the crypto convention that ends with a guy in a hot tub saying something accidentally zeitgeisty.” Ruby and I go to Forgetmenot. There’s a dog behind me, a big white husky, I hold out my hand to pet him and he gives me his paw. He does this a few times. He’s trained, I’m sure, to expect a reward in response but we’ve ordered a grill plate, there’s only halloumi left, I don’t want to poison the poor thing. Ruby posts a picture of me with the dog, but I’m in my big puffy jacket, and it mostly becomes just a picture of the dog. She tags my name on the screen. David sends me a screenshot of the picture. “DID YOU TURN INTO A DOG???” he asks. I order David ice cream from Figo when I get home. I ate half his bread and butter even though I've been so Ray Peat and even though after, I’ve been so Keto. I've been drinking again, hence the bread. Not a lot, but I was sober for a week, and the three drinks feel jarring. I've decided to stop causing problems. I've decided to get a job at a restaurant. I like the service industry, because the job is intensely exterior. There are many things so close to me of true significance, and I'm sick of ignoring them in favor of acting like a grasping freak. Monday, January 13 And so, you decide to redecorate again. Look at the layout of this place. There’s so much potential. There’s a big marble table and it’s cramping every corner. It’s cramping the light from the window. It’s cramping the yellow golden light that is framing our mirror. I go downstairs quickly, the light will be gone soon. I want to get a flight tomorrow, leave with my friends and find clarity in the hot humid heat, but it doesn’t feel like I'll be absorbing myself in something more - it feels like escape, and I haven’t earned this decadence. I’ve been deliberating all day. I’ve been clutching my evil eye in case I do decide to travel. All my friends wear evil eyes, too. It’s a strange coincidence - something most people I'm drawn to share, not intentional. I'm not religious, but this is different. Adele keeps a drawer in her apartment full of evil eyes, stocked to the brim in case one charm coincidently shatters. She'll never have to go unprepared. I take a test today. Sent, received, complete, returned. It’s so thrilling to do something I’m supposed to do. If we got rid of the marble table…. If we lined the walls with floor pillows below the windows, their tufted fabric landing well lower than the horizon line even when stacked…. I can imagine the furniture gone. Me, staring clearly across the room, one wall to another. I'm imagining all the clutter dissipated. I imagine it would erase some sense of static. I can imagine my hypothetical week in El Salvador, but I need to learn how to think about something outside of myself, even when I’m here. It would be better there. I can picture the airbnb in San Benito, the eight or so bedrooms, the open air layout that big homes in warm climates often share, arches bleeding into courtyards, steps built into hills, unclear where one room becomes another, wind and heat lightning swirling around you and raising your hair as your walking, even through the kitchen, even ostensibly inside. I want to swim in a big clear pool over a city that is now vaguely familiar but still, not really mine. I want to finish the story I started. New England Winter. I need to learn how to sort things through while staying put. David and I go to Estela for dinner. It’s our anniversary. He tells me not to say anything online about it. Private life should stay private, he says, but I’m writing it anyway. Estela is nice. It’s the sister restaurant of Altro Paradiso. My friend, Madelyn works there. Estela is smaller, cozier, you have to buzz to get into the building and then it’s up some steps, it feels like you’re in an apartment, it feels like you’re in Berlin. I’ve never been to Copenhagen, but I imagine it feels a bit like Copenhagen, too. “I like more old timey restaurants,” David says. “Me too,” I say. “But sometimes isn’t it nice to be in a restaurant that feels like Copenhagen? David agrees. He’s never been to Copenhagen either. Altro Paradiso is brightly lit, whereas Estela is dim. Stella - Latin for Star. Etc. The distinction feels a little obvious, but then, I’m being a little particular. Estela is small plates. Romantic. You can tell because you have to buzz the door to get in, and because the lighting is really dark. They put us in a little alcove by the shelves and shelves of wine. We order iberico ham, bread and butter, endive salad, crab with celery root (the best dish), squid ink fried rice with little bits of squid, steak with elderberry sauce. I order a Tito's martini, but I’m told they don’t serve Titos here. I’m told they have one martini with vodka that “tastes like smirnoff” ($22) and another with vodka that’s way better and far preferable (paraphrased) ($30). Our waitress is peppy. “We’ll take the Smirnoff,” David says. “She’s nice,” I say, later. “Domineering,” David says. Later, the waitress rolls her eyes a little when she asks me how my martini is. She smiles when I say good. I believe she is sincere in her hope that I’m happy as I guzzle up the fruits of my lowbrow taste. It really is a lovely meal. I don’t mean to be cynical. I tell David he should tell them it’s our anniversary so we can have something free, and he tells them “it’s our anniversary, can we have dessert on the house.” Then, I’m embarrassed, but they bring us dessert (with a price) and champagne (on the house). Tuesday, January 14 I’ve been working on maintaining constant motion. “An object in motion will stay in motion,” I’ve been telling anyone that will listen. I walk in place all day, and then I walk through Washington Square Park at night, freezing. I make sure to do an extra lap to circle under the arch, all sparkling and illuminated and icy. I’m thirty minutes late to the Post-Doomerism talk at Gonzo’s, and this feels like an important one to me because I used to base my entire framework of thought around mitigating dread through a surrender to the inevitability of fates worse than death. It’s a terrible way to view the world - juvenile if nothing else, but also aesthetically and morally barren, limiting, a nihilistic obsession with the present does lead to destruction (yourself and others), no matter how many delusions you harbor about enlightenment, and about time and therefore preservation as false constructs. You can’t be nihilistic if you believe in good and evil, and I do believe in good and evil, so it was never going to hold up. Post Doomerism The lecture is just starting when I exit the elevator. The talk is between Chris Small (founder of Amazon Labor Union), PradaHorseShoe (founder of Russian Cosmism Circle NYC), Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll Podcast), and Geo Yankey (Comedian) “Russian Cosmists think that Marx doesn't take it far enough,” Amana explains. “Marxism wants to abolish capitalism, religion, the family…. but what about abolishing the OG bummer - death.” The point of the talk seems to be to present a sort of leftist vision of tech accelerationism. Capitalist Realism, the parts of the industrial revolution deemed actually good, nuclear fusion (clean and limitless energy which imitates the sun) instead of nuclear fission, fossil fuels , etc etc etc. The audience, on the other hand, is mostly composed of people I recognize from other downtown events - this one taking on an uncharacteristic and somewhat academic sincerity. “Hypothetically, heat death could occur before we run out of fuel,” a girl sitting next to me murmurs at one point, evidently at least somewhat convinced by technology’s capacity for limitless good. I try to conjure a sense of what she’s imagining in my mind's eye - create enough clean energy, and you could be driving your car one day when the whole universe just implodes. This isn’t aspirational to me. Longevity even, has never been particularly aspirational to me, although increasingly moreso, I’m increasingly less cynical. I appreciate the sincerity of the lecture. I appreciate some of the ideas they put forward, too. It’s an irony-pilled audience and they're sitting in a deeply earnest room. I slip out during the Q&A - overwhelmed, honestly, and I’m late to another function. I’m handed a gin and tonic in the Lower East Side. I’m talking about the Russian Cosmism lecture. “Lenin tried that and 20 million people died,” I am told. “I don’t really know enough,” I say. I’m sent a documentary about The Tyranny of Scientism. I order some things like the books by Nick Zurnig and Mark Fisher. It’s good to be objective. The night slips onward. It’s rude to talk about accelerationism at a party. Wednesday, January 16 It's slightly warmer in New York today. It's still cold, but it's less frigid, I'm walking through Soho typing, I'm walking to Equinox, I'll finish writing this on the treadmill, I had such a fun night last night although I do feel terribly guilty about squandering my health and my beauty and my soul every time I get drunk. I was such a good drunk, though. I adore my friends so deeply. I adore my new friends. I think they are my best friends. I’m trying not to quantify everything. There are names of people I love spinning through my mind, now. Why order things. Some people exhaust me, and then there are other people who don’t. I’ve found new friends who live artfully while occupying a natural state that is absorbed with the physical world, recently. How lucky for me. I don’t want to use my volatility as a bludgeon with which to bend people to my whims. Good thing I don’t feel particularly volatile this week. It’s best to consider these while outside of them. Objective introspection: am I doing a good job? WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Gofundme + LA Fire Resources here. Sunday, January 19 From 6pm - midnight at EARTH — Jordan Castro and Cluny present SILENCE. An evening of silence. No speaking, no phones.
Inline links: X Post, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!C7a6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b47129c-0bc4-49be-9951-68a8a3f58ac6_1179x1372.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RkCJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb4a64bf-f664-428e-854a-221b40a26109_1536x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XxFb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F59a8c887-c1bc-4090-9568-92185cc4e0c1_1412x1420.png, Amazon Labor Union, PradaHorseShoe, Russian Cosmism Circle NYC, Doomscroll Podcast, Geo Yankey, Capitalist Realism, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kDE6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7220533-39ee-4944-a185-b7983b1500e9_1600x1066.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!abSY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12cd88-f058-4032-ba7f-a91514034d33_1600x1066.jpeg, here, EARTH, Jordan Castro, Cluny
David and I go to Estela for dinner. It’s our anniversary. He tells me not to say anything online about it. Private life should stay private, he says, but I’m writing it anyway. Estela is nice. It’s the sister restaurant of Altro Paradiso. My friend, Madelyn works there. Estela is smaller, cozier, you have to buzz to get into the building and then it’s up some steps, it feels like you’re in an apartment, it feels like you’re in Berlin. I’ve never been to Copenhagen, but I imagine it feels a bit like Copenhagen, too. “I like more old timey restaurants,” David says. “Me too,” I say. “But sometimes isn’t it nice to be in a restaurant that feels like Copenhagen? David agrees. He’s never been to Copenhagen either. Altro Paradiso is brightly lit, whereas Estela is dim. Stella - Latin for Star. Etc. The distinction feels a little obvious, but then, I’m being a little particular. Estela is small plates. Romantic. You can tell because you have to buzz the door to get in, and because the lighting is really dark. They put us in a little alcove by the shelves and shelves of wine. We order iberico ham, bread and butter, endive salad, crab with celery root (the best dish), squid ink fried rice with little bits of squid, steak with elderberry sauce. I order a Tito's martini, but I’m told they don’t serve Titos here. I’m told they have one martini with vodka that “tastes like smirnoff” ($22) and another with vodka that’s way better and far preferable (paraphrased) ($30). Our waitress is peppy. “We’ll take the Smirnoff,” David says. “She’s nice,” I say, later. “Domineering,” David says. Later, the waitress rolls her eyes a little when she asks me how my martini is. She smiles when I say good. I believe she is sincere in her hope that I’m happy as I guzzle up the fruits of my lowbrow taste. It really is a lovely meal. I don’t mean to be cynical. I tell David he should tell them it’s our anniversary so we can have something free, and he tells them “it’s our anniversary, can we have dessert on the house.” Then, I’m embarrassed, but they bring us dessert (with a price) and champagne (on the house). Tuesday, January 14 I’ve been working on maintaining constant motion. “An object in motion will stay in motion,” I’ve been telling anyone that will listen. I walk in place all day, and then I walk through Washington Square Park at night, freezing. I make sure to do an extra lap to circle under the arch, all sparkling and illuminated and icy. I’m thirty minutes late to the Post-Doomerism talk at Gonzo’s, and this feels like an important one to me because I used to base my entire framework of thought around mitigating dread through a surrender to the inevitability of fates worse than death. It’s a terrible way to view the world - juvenile if nothing else, but also aesthetically and morally barren, limiting, a nihilistic obsession with the present does lead to destruction (yourself and others), no matter how many delusions you harbor about enlightenment, and about time and therefore preservation as false constructs. You can’t be nihilistic if you believe in good and evil, and I do believe in good and evil, so it was never going to hold up. Post Doomerism The lecture is just starting when I exit the elevator. The talk is between Chris Small (founder of Amazon Labor Union), PradaHorseShoe (founder of Russian Cosmism Circle NYC), Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll Podcast), and Geo Yankey (Comedian) “Russian Cosmists think that Marx doesn't take it far enough,” Amana explains. “Marxism wants to abolish capitalism, religion, the family…. but what about abolishing the OG bummer - death.” The point of the talk seems to be to present a sort of leftist vision of tech accelerationism. Capitalist Realism, the parts of the industrial revolution deemed actually good, nuclear fusion (clean and limitless energy which imitates the sun) instead of nuclear fission, fossil fuels , etc etc etc. The audience, on the other hand, is mostly composed of people I recognize from other downtown events - this one taking on an uncharacteristic and somewhat academic sincerity. “Hypothetically, heat death could occur before we run out of fuel,” a girl sitting next to me murmurs at one point, evidently at least somewhat convinced by technology’s capacity for limitless good. I try to conjure a sense of what she’s imagining in my mind's eye - create enough clean energy, and you could be driving your car one day when the whole universe just implodes. This isn’t aspirational to me. Longevity even, has never been particularly aspirational to me, although increasingly moreso, I’m increasingly less cynical. I appreciate the sincerity of the lecture. I appreciate some of the ideas they put forward, too. It’s an irony-pilled audience and they're sitting in a deeply earnest room. I slip out during the Q&A - overwhelmed, honestly, and I’m late to another function. I’m handed a gin and tonic in the Lower East Side. I’m talking about the Russian Cosmism lecture. “Lenin tried that and 20 million people died,” I am told. “I don’t really know enough,” I say. I’m sent a documentary about The Tyranny of Scientism. I order some things like the books by Nick Zurnig and Mark Fisher. It’s good to be objective. The night slips onward. It’s rude to talk about accelerationism at a party. Wednesday, January 16 It's slightly warmer in New York today. It's still cold, but it's less frigid, I'm walking through Soho typing, I'm walking to Equinox, I'll finish writing this on the treadmill, I had such a fun night last night although I do feel terribly guilty about squandering my health and my beauty and my soul every time I get drunk. I was such a good drunk, though. I adore my friends so deeply. I adore my new friends. I think they are my best friends. I’m trying not to quantify everything. There are names of people I love spinning through my mind, now. Why order things. Some people exhaust me, and then there are other people who don’t. I’ve found new friends who live artfully while occupying a natural state that is absorbed with the physical world, recently. How lucky for me. I don’t want to use my volatility as a bludgeon with which to bend people to my whims. Good thing I don’t feel particularly volatile this week. It’s best to consider these while outside of them. Objective introspection: am I doing a good job? WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Gofundme + LA Fire Resources here. Sunday, January 19 From 6pm - midnight at EARTH — Jordan Castro and Cluny present SILENCE. An evening of silence. No speaking, no phones.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XxFb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F59a8c887-c1bc-4090-9568-92185cc4e0c1_1412x1420.png, Amazon Labor Union, PradaHorseShoe, Russian Cosmism Circle NYC, Doomscroll Podcast, Geo Yankey, Capitalist Realism, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kDE6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7220533-39ee-4944-a185-b7983b1500e9_1600x1066.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!abSY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12cd88-f058-4032-ba7f-a91514034d33_1600x1066.jpeg, here, EARTH, Jordan Castro, Cluny
From 7pm at KGB — Confessions is back, New Regime addition + tribute performances for David Lynch. Readings by Cassidy and Annabel, plus Jonah Howell, Christian Cail, Paul Iaacono, and Page Garcia.
Inline links: Confessions, Cassidy, Annabel, Jonah Howell, Christian Cail, Paul Iaacono, Page Garcia
Burn my diaries
January 23, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, January 19 Wet hair in the lobby at the gym. I am criticized only very slightly, and I am struck with nearly physical rage. I can’t walk anymore today. When I walk, I am compelled to think - then write - about myself. I have this huge body of work. I’ve written 364,133 unpublished words since my birthday in June, but they are all about myself, and the ugliest parts of myself at that. “You must be able to convert some of your journals into work you can use,” some of my friends say, but I don’t think anyone realizes just how bad they are. Any problem, the smallest problem, I can twist and chew and solve, often through written and rotating self deprecation and self congratulation that renders said problem irrelevant. I can do this over and over and over again, for hours daily, if I'm being honest. It’s not necessarily bad as a limited practice - churn out sludge so that it doesn’t live in your mind - but it becomes more and more excessive, nauseatingly so. I meet Madelyn at Shosh for dinner. The snowstorm has started. I texted David at the gym earlier: "big snowstorm coming." "Link me an article or you're full of shit," David said, but I wasn't, because it's here, and it's falling in big fat clumps. Shosh is lovely. It’s a new vegan wine bar in the West Village, which I would roll my eyes at as a concept, but Madelyn’s friends work there and I walk there in the blizzard - enter to a silver bar, an open kitchen, cream walls with a perfect archway cut into them that frames shades of glass wine bottles and assembled rows of thin wine glasses. We don’t get wine, but we do get gem salad, celeriac shawarma with fluffy bread, mushrooms, by which they mean every variety of mushroom you can imagine and a perfect green sauce to accompany. “Hummus is one of those things you think is all the same, but then you have good hummus…,” Madelyn’s friend who works there says, and he’s right, because the hummus here is determinately different. Better. Madelyn tells me she likes showing me good food, and I like this, too. Left to my own devices it’s all instant pistachio pudding and cold mashed potatoes eaten while standing up. This isn’t how one should live - slogging through the essential details of survival and routine like it’s something to get over with, not something to enjoy. At the very least, it’s something to be appreciated. I like meals like this. There’s the Casual Encounters reading later, the fundraiser for Los Angeles reading at that gallery in Tribeca, although all the galleries seem like they are suddenly in Tribeca these days. We’re there early. I can’t find the building, can’t get out of the snow. You do get out of the snow, eventually. You pick a few GoFundMe’s from the options laid out on the table, so many options on the table. You sit on the couch so you’re removed from the room, you have a birds eye view in that sense even though technically, you’re beneath, not above, it all. “You can see the social dynamics from here,” your friend says, kind of kidding, kind of not. You can see how the room clusters itself, at least. I stay for the readings, but not for long after. Walk home in the sleet and ice. It's a blizzard, but nothing is really sticking. Streets are mostly quiet - people in the windows of Lucia and Cipriani but otherwise it’s all empty. My reflection surprises me in the mirror when I get home. I only wear dresses, but today I’m wearing jeans. Mundanity, mundanity, mundanity. David says he wants to go to KGB, and at first I want to go too, but then I decide that I don’t. He leaves, walking into the storm as I’m coming out of it. I start to feel sick around eleven pm. I feel strange, falling asleep. Being sick really scares me. I hope it goes away. Monday, January 20 I expected to wake up sad this morning but I didn't. The snow didn't stick, but a thin layer of it did freeze. I'm sliding down the streets, and they aren't empty anymore. Bright, bright, icy light today. Coca Cola and muffin at the bodega for David. Celsius for me. Green tea mango and Cyanocobalamin. I need black coffee. Inauguration today. I walk and write for ninety minutes. I tried to join the David Lynch Meditation Live Stream at noon, but I got the time zones wrong and I was meant to join at three. It’s five now. Too late. Sitting in a steam room in a cloud of eucalyptus smog. The semester begins tomorrow, and other things, too. An end to my life of leisure, or more generously, an end to responsibility only as self directed. I feel like I was starting to figure it out. Non-fiction in the morning, fiction at night - my friend Grazie advised me of this schedule this summer. Being honest, though, I need more intensive direction. Natasha goes to take snow photos in Washington Square Park, but she says that Jill Stein is there and the park is so so so loud. The theme is: anti imperialism.. She sends me a photo of the birds in the snow. In an ironic twist, David is sick, but I am not. He orders sushi from Soho Sushi. He gives me five pieces from a california roll. I make cinnamon chai tea in the mug my dad got me from the ceramics shop near Mishaum. Every mug there is different. Mine has coarse leaves all over it, and a special rivet where your hand fits. “This apartment is pretty magical when it’s icy,” David admitted earlier, because it’s a greenhouse roof and so when you look up today it’s all like a snow globe. Icicles swirl in soft formations overhead, melting in morning light and then refreezing slightly differently as the sky turns hazy. I have my head under the cover. I’m reading other people’s diaries. Kafka, Anais Nin, I like the diaries I find online, too. I like the diaries I am sent. This isn’t my diary. I cannot stress that enough. My real diary is often quite ugly. This is one of the things I feel most guilty for. It’s strange, though. I wake up, I write in my secret diary, I walk for many miles, I write in my diary that I share online. It is good I will have less time, soon. Anya is staying with me tonight. David, in a friend's spare bedroom because I cannot, cannot, cannot get sick right now, too. It's so nice tonight. Anya and I have been friends since we were two weeks old. I used to tell people that as a child - "this is my best friend since I was two weeks old." Dimes in the snow. Clandestino in the snow. I really like sitting in the corner of a bar until the night reaches its bitter end. Not tonight, though. It's only ten. Tuesday, January 21 My first real responsibility in a month, and it's canceled - a whim of the weather. The snow has melted overnight and in its place is chalky salt stained pavement as far as you can see. It looks like marble. They turned Soho into marble in the night. I try to run outside, but it's too cold. Bitter cold, not pleasant cold. I'm coughing up the chalky air. It's the coldest day of the year. There's a man on the street and he's running towards the train, sloshing coffee all over his suit but he doesn't seem to even notice, certainly he doesn't care. The drops are freezing to the sleeves of his camel hair jacket before they reach the ground. He's covered in little coffee icicles. I doubt it will stain. I had nightmares last night. Everyone knew I was Actually Bad. I woke up saying "help me", but I used to wake up talking about rituals in rural places, so this is not a negative progression in the storyline of my possible possession. The chalky pavement has turned to ice in the afternoon. Walking under the Washington Square arch on the way to Tibet House and its icier than ever. The ground is all glazed over. It’s the latest installment of the Arden Wohl’s reading series at Tibet House; Inauguration Edition this time. Madelyn is wearing a pink sweatshirt when I get there. Madelyn is telling me about knowing your own mind. Alex Auder reads about cock sucking and brings up a friend to read with her who enjoys the act, because she doesn't "I feel demeaned when I suck dick. I feel demeaned when I teach yoga," she says. She reads a story about a life in servitude to someone famous who reminds her of Donald Trump. Tonight is a night where as soon as I have one glass of wine, I wish I didn’t. The haze sets in, and I want it to clear. Beckett arrives. The readings are mostly good, but I’m jittery. I sit in the lobby and I eat some grapes and cheese, replace the wine with water. “Over the years I noticed from my overlord that peasants were increasingly behaving like they were nobles,” Alex Auder is saying, when I return. “There are more cameras than there are people in the world,” Gideon Jacobs is reading, later. I can’t stop drifting in and out of the room. I’m worried about some things, about some people. I get like this sometimes, and I wish I could get it to stop. I go to the bathroom and I return again, to a reading about Courtney Love. “She used to do water ballet and she was getting into the grateful dead.” “She lied a lot and never listened directly but she was a sponge - she takes a word from an incidental periphery and works it into her trope in real time. She’s that fast.” “She said she was born on my birthday; July 1st, but she was born a week later; July 8th” This is my type of lie, I’m thinking. A lie to please. False enchantment. It’s a juvenile compulsion, you mostly outgrow it, and if it was Courtney Love partaking then perhaps it was charming, but my visceral reaction is one of repulsion. Lizzi Bougatsos reads about Gary Indiana. She sits on the floor and she clips her toenails. “We shall mark memory with reverence,” Arden is saying. Beckett is telling me that it’s cool to be at a reading that’s an older crowd, and it is, it’s wine and cheese, there’s no disco party to follow. Beckett introduces me to his acquaintance from Paris. They are talking about Godot and prison sentences. Samuel Beckett gave his Nobel Prize money to a jail org, or was it prisone.org One time, there was a prison break after a performance of Godot. Madelyn is making tape formations on her phone with the other Lacanians. Lacan as separated from psychoanalysis. Lacan as applicable to real life. I’m just gleaning sentences. These ideas aren’t mine. Cigarette outside and then a burger at the orthodox Jewish establishment nearby. We forgot they can only do vegan cheese on burgers here. A lychee martini instead. They’re playing pop music so loud Wednesday, January 23 I hear my neighbors door shut as I’m poised to leave this morning. Decide, instead, to hover in the kitchen. We don't really like each other, my neighbor and I. Nothing was ever said, but there’s an underlying hostility. I have friends over too late, too often. The walls are thin. I'm glad to be waking up at the same time as the rest of the world, though. Sometimes - up all night, becoming manic around five am, this can be nice, but it's usually not. Normal hours. Normal cycles of day and night. The ice has come and smoothed everything over. Too cold to listen to music on my walk to school. I'm peeling off layers in an office, at the gym, the hallway of our apartment is becoming salty and dusted with the chalky snowstorm residue that first coated the surface of everything, and that now is starting to settle. Nothing is volatile. Such placidity, suddenly, but I’m not bored. All the calm in the world. Thank god. It really was about time. And so, you eat two chalky protein pop tarts on the bench at the gym. There are two girls with thick french accents in the locker room parallel to you. "He's a fucking retard, he only calls me at three am and it's only because he wants to sleep with my friends," says one of the girls. She's wearing a sherpa jacket. KHRISJOY, it says, in big red dripping letters. Spray paint imitation. You look it up - $2145 online. It's so ugly, but you're vaguely impressed. Of course you are. You're wearing a Versace sports bra that you bought for a music festival in high school. Absurd. The people watching here is good. The girl is still talking. She's so furious. "And he would be calling to sleep with me, but he knows he can't, fucking retard," she is saying. This version of the narration makes more sense - her rage rooted in something adjacent to jealousy. You gather your things. You gather your tote bags. It's too cold for so many bags. Your hands get numb out there. You're in a humid basement now, but you can't stay here forever. There's an artists talk tonight, but do you have it in you to attend? Cheese and sausage for dinner at home. I forgot about the dishes and I left the sink running for an hour. I’ve never known how to dress for the weather, but that doesn’t mean I mind the extremes. Today - my mother’s gloves, a borrowed Urbit hat from David, a beanie really, it looks insane but it’s too freezing for me to mind. More isn’t always more. More is often so, intolerably, annoying. I don’t want to wear a coat. My books arrive today. Mostly for school, plus one Ruby recommended. I’ll read them all - I’m glad that I have reason to. Salvador - Joan Didion The Company She Keeps - Mary McCarthy The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin Confessions - Saint Augustine The Situation and the Story - Vivian Gornic A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf A Silent Woman - Janet Malcom Are You My Mother - Alison Bechdel The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson The Atrocity Exhibition - J. G. Ballard WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, January 23 From 6pm - 8pm at 61 Lispenard — Canada NY and Eighth House present Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude. Eighth House is “an interdisciplinary residency for artists and curators located in Central Vermont.” The exhibition serves as a benefit for this very special residency.
Inline links: fundraiser for Los Angeles, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1LMK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd6ba9ea7-5431-438d-968d-03f0204b83b3_1179x624.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TlLq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75d232d2-5720-42ad-a6bc-aafacf53eb67_560x562.jpeg, Tibet House, Alex Auder, Gideon Jacobs, Lizzi Bougatsos, Arden, KHRISJOY, Salvador -, The Company She Keeps, The Fire Next Time, Confessions, The Situation and the Story, A Room of One’s Own, A Silent Woman, Are You My Mother, The Argonauts, The Atrocity Exhibition, Canada NY, Eighth House, Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude.
The chalky pavement has turned to ice in the afternoon. Walking under the Washington Square arch on the way to Tibet House and its icier than ever. The ground is all glazed over. It’s the latest installment of the Arden Wohl’s reading series at Tibet House; Inauguration Edition this time. Madelyn is wearing a pink sweatshirt when I get there. Madelyn is telling me about knowing your own mind. Alex Auder reads about cock sucking and brings up a friend to read with her who enjoys the act, because she doesn't "I feel demeaned when I suck dick. I feel demeaned when I teach yoga," she says. She reads a story about a life in servitude to someone famous who reminds her of Donald Trump. Tonight is a night where as soon as I have one glass of wine, I wish I didn’t. The haze sets in, and I want it to clear. Beckett arrives. The readings are mostly good, but I’m jittery. I sit in the lobby and I eat some grapes and cheese, replace the wine with water. “Over the years I noticed from my overlord that peasants were increasingly behaving like they were nobles,” Alex Auder is saying, when I return. “There are more cameras than there are people in the world,” Gideon Jacobs is reading, later. I can’t stop drifting in and out of the room. I’m worried about some things, about some people. I get like this sometimes, and I wish I could get it to stop. I go to the bathroom and I return again, to a reading about Courtney Love. “She used to do water ballet and she was getting into the grateful dead.” “She lied a lot and never listened directly but she was a sponge - she takes a word from an incidental periphery and works it into her trope in real time. She’s that fast.” “She said she was born on my birthday; July 1st, but she was born a week later; July 8th” This is my type of lie, I’m thinking. A lie to please. False enchantment. It’s a juvenile compulsion, you mostly outgrow it, and if it was Courtney Love partaking then perhaps it was charming, but my visceral reaction is one of repulsion. Lizzi Bougatsos reads about Gary Indiana. She sits on the floor and she clips her toenails. “We shall mark memory with reverence,” Arden is saying. Beckett is telling me that it’s cool to be at a reading that’s an older crowd, and it is, it’s wine and cheese, there’s no disco party to follow. Beckett introduces me to his acquaintance from Paris. They are talking about Godot and prison sentences. Samuel Beckett gave his Nobel Prize money to a jail org, or was it prisone.org One time, there was a prison break after a performance of Godot. Madelyn is making tape formations on her phone with the other Lacanians. Lacan as separated from psychoanalysis. Lacan as applicable to real life. I’m just gleaning sentences. These ideas aren’t mine. Cigarette outside and then a burger at the orthodox Jewish establishment nearby. We forgot they can only do vegan cheese on burgers here. A lychee martini instead. They’re playing pop music so loud Wednesday, January 23 I hear my neighbors door shut as I’m poised to leave this morning. Decide, instead, to hover in the kitchen. We don't really like each other, my neighbor and I. Nothing was ever said, but there’s an underlying hostility. I have friends over too late, too often. The walls are thin. I'm glad to be waking up at the same time as the rest of the world, though. Sometimes - up all night, becoming manic around five am, this can be nice, but it's usually not. Normal hours. Normal cycles of day and night. The ice has come and smoothed everything over. Too cold to listen to music on my walk to school. I'm peeling off layers in an office, at the gym, the hallway of our apartment is becoming salty and dusted with the chalky snowstorm residue that first coated the surface of everything, and that now is starting to settle. Nothing is volatile. Such placidity, suddenly, but I’m not bored. All the calm in the world. Thank god. It really was about time. And so, you eat two chalky protein pop tarts on the bench at the gym. There are two girls with thick french accents in the locker room parallel to you. "He's a fucking retard, he only calls me at three am and it's only because he wants to sleep with my friends," says one of the girls. She's wearing a sherpa jacket. KHRISJOY, it says, in big red dripping letters. Spray paint imitation. You look it up - $2145 online. It's so ugly, but you're vaguely impressed. Of course you are. You're wearing a Versace sports bra that you bought for a music festival in high school. Absurd. The people watching here is good. The girl is still talking. She's so furious. "And he would be calling to sleep with me, but he knows he can't, fucking retard," she is saying. This version of the narration makes more sense - her rage rooted in something adjacent to jealousy. You gather your things. You gather your tote bags. It's too cold for so many bags. Your hands get numb out there. You're in a humid basement now, but you can't stay here forever. There's an artists talk tonight, but do you have it in you to attend? Cheese and sausage for dinner at home. I forgot about the dishes and I left the sink running for an hour. I’ve never known how to dress for the weather, but that doesn’t mean I mind the extremes. Today - my mother’s gloves, a borrowed Urbit hat from David, a beanie really, it looks insane but it’s too freezing for me to mind. More isn’t always more. More is often so, intolerably, annoying. I don’t want to wear a coat. My books arrive today. Mostly for school, plus one Ruby recommended. I’ll read them all - I’m glad that I have reason to. Salvador - Joan Didion The Company She Keeps - Mary McCarthy The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin Confessions - Saint Augustine The Situation and the Story - Vivian Gornic A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf A Silent Woman - Janet Malcom Are You My Mother - Alison Bechdel The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson The Atrocity Exhibition - J. G. Ballard WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, January 23 From 6pm - 8pm at 61 Lispenard — Canada NY and Eighth House present Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude. Eighth House is “an interdisciplinary residency for artists and curators located in Central Vermont.” The exhibition serves as a benefit for this very special residency.
Inline links: Tibet House, Alex Auder, Gideon Jacobs, Lizzi Bougatsos, Arden, KHRISJOY, Salvador -, The Company She Keeps, The Fire Next Time, Confessions, The Situation and the Story, A Room of One’s Own, A Silent Woman, Are You My Mother, The Argonauts, The Atrocity Exhibition, Canada NY, Eighth House, Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude.
End of the Cold Front
January 27, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Thursday, January 23 It was past midnight and there would be a morning tomorrow, an early one for once, I set an alarm. I was walking past KGB and it was still bitter cold. It hadn't gotten any warmer yet. No one milling on the steps so the place felt desolate but there was no way to really tell for sure without entering. You'd be out of your mind to loiter in this weather. The people were probably all inside. Everyone I know in New York, clustered in the Red Room like sardines. The KGB sign was all red and lit up, frost and ice crystallizing around it at a slight distance from the letters. The letters themselves were clear - incandescent heat off their light melting the ice in direct contact before it could solidify. Riley texted me when I was just too far from her apartment to turn back last night: "You left your Urbit hat. Do you want it?" "I do but later," I said. "lol," I said I didn't even consider stopping. Not last night. The hat isn't even mine. Later, I'll retrieve it later. Each day that the cold front continues, I am enjoying it more and more. The tundra is so visceral. I hope we can stay like this, for a while at least. And so, it is morning. You're up early. David is still sick but you've continued to avoid whatever he’s come down with this time. Leftover cookies on the counter. Cold brew in the fridge. You call a car because you lost track of time. You would have taken the F to the L, but it's too late now. You aren't used to having to track your mornings. It's good, though, having some sense that the days progress linear-like. Good things keep happening to me, and I'm very grateful and; I’m very happy too. I try not to quantify too much. If I choose this, then imagine I lose that. I don't want to do everything all at once. I've never possessed this desire. There is paralysis, though, sometimes, when I think about what I'm doing and therefore, by default, what I'm not. First day of my internship today. I like it a lot. First day of the semester yesterday. Very good. I take the subway home. I run a few miles. Thawing in the steam inside, but I'm sick of talking about how cold I've been, and particularly of how much I've been enjoying it. Writing a lot - maybe too much, honestly. Out of my head and into my body. I spend too much time alone and I become very dissociative. Vision blurring on the treadmill. Self indulgent. I yell a lot when I get home. It’s not important. There are worse things. Natasha and I go to Bar Veloce for drinks and a panini. “One second,” I say on the phone when we’re making plans, and then I hang up to yell, and then I am calm again and then I’m walking back through the frozen air, light and breastless in its dry frigidity. Inside Veloce it’s warm, orange lamps, thin and laminated menus, I get two martinis - extra dirty extra dry," I say. I used to order it “vodka martini no vermouth with lots of olive juice”, but I’ve been trying the abridged version most people use lately, and it works just as well. I forget how many hours we’re at Veloce. Nice night. Quiet night. I tell Sophia I can bring her zyns for the opening of Doomers. I’ve been zyning lately. My bag is chock full of them. They make me dizzy in an unpleasant way. Even thirty minutes on the subway alone, and I start to feel disembodied and strange. It’s strange how many more people are reading my public diary now, even though I wrote it for this reason - to be public. I’m trying to write in a way that is honest, but I’m becoming too ethereal in my descriptions. This isn’t really true — me being ethereal that is. Natasha asks me what I think about transcendental meditation at dinner. “David Lynch’s cult?,” I ask. “They make you pay for it,” she says. “But their whole thing is clarity.” I perk up when I hear this bit. “I would pay,” I say. “Clarity has been your buzzword,” she says. "Where did you get that?,” she asks. “I realized I just didn’t have clarity and I wanted it,” I say. I still don’t have it, not really. Eating fontana truffle prosciutto grilled cheese with my martini. They kick us out at closing. Midnight, it’s still early. They froze our pipes about three hours ago. The ice fairies, I mean. The building will restore the pipes soon. “EMERGENCY” the email says. “Hello, Thief”, the flyers in Riley’s lobby say. You want to end things on a good note, but then the night goes awry. Friday, January 24 You think you will wake up in a haze, but you don’t. Bright light this morning. It is still morning, not yet early afternoon, although close enough. They turned the water back on in the night - sent the ice fairies flying back through the streets. The faucet lurches and then starts to spew all rust colored. All the drama of the evening becomes silly in the light of day, obviously. You put smooth serum on your face - sea buckthorn, La Roche Posay, Embryolisse. The rusty water has turned all clear again. Warmer today - weaving in and out of sanity, if I'm being honest. I decide to go to Massachusetts and then I decide against it. David brings me a white chocolate bear from Lil Lac. I run into him and the bear on the way back from the gym. "I got you a really stupid present," he says. I call with the people in El Salvador in the afternoon - talking about things like The Art of The State. Red Light Therapy. I need to write my story. I need to start doing things like eating fresh fruit, drinking lots of water with things like added drops of Maldon sea salt. There's the reading everyone is going to at EARTH tonight, but the line is too long. I hear that through the rumblings of people who are there before me. The line is way too long, and there are other things to do too but I stay put which is depressing, and rare for me, and I don't do anything with the solitude except I am asleep the earliest I've been in years. Saturday, January 25 I knew I was going to get sick. It was only a matter of time, and I’m a little relieved that it’s finally here. It’s not too bad. My eyes sting, and I slept twelve hours. I slept peacefully though, no nightmares, a fever dulling whatever tripwires my mind most nights and so in this sense it’s kind of nice - the being sick. Someone asks me to write a story about ANTI REALITY - “I think of your writing as a sense of unreliability of perception,” they say. And so of course, I want to write about my nightmares, but I’ve been having fewer nightmares lately, and now I’m sick. I’ll have to think about this more, later. Honestly, I feel strange about putting these event calendars here, now that the other parts have for real become my public diary. I feel weird about putting up paywalls, but I don’t want SEO to find my Secret Thoughts. I started writing this in May, and I started writing about Everything I Did and Everything You Should Do, but now I kind of want to be doing less, or I want to be going to things because I know no one and not because I know everyone. I still feel so grateful to have places to go where I know everyone, and I do think you should go to these things, too. Creative things. Special things. Isolation is so sad and so lonely and I am so grateful that my life is mostly devoid of it. It’s like a fluke - not being isolated, I mean, but I’m not, and I feel very lucky for this. I go to a reading in Union Square tonight. Something for Casual Encounters and a new newspaper called Ummm. My illness dissipated as quickly as it arrived. I think I made myself sick because I cried a lot, if I’m being honest. But I’m fine now. I’m really relieved this happened, because it was only a matter of time, and because now it’s all fine. The reading is wonderful. I'm so happy all night. It's in a beautiful apartment, dazzling, really, and I'm there early, embarrassingly early, and so be it out of pity or mistaken identity, I am given a tour. Here is the roof. Here is the room where the reading will be. Here is the artist's studio. Here are fifty sculptures above the hallway, each sculpture is by a different artist, interpreting the same person in a different way, can you guess who the person is? Sam arrives during this part. “Hillary Clinton,” he guesses. He's right. I like readings like this. One glass of orange wine and then water. I've been so cynical lately, but this feels lovely. Natasha arrives. Others, too. It's a nice mix of people I know and people I don't. It feels so easy for things to go wrong, but sometimes a night hovers just right. Sitting on the windowsill with David later, surveying the room. Up on a basketball court later, but I'm not smoking cigarettes these days. Sometimes glamor is just glamor and you don't have to feel jaded to it. The theme of the newspaper is good - umm… exercise. And this is really the root of it all, isn't it? You run, you write, there are other things, too, but this has always been the crux of things for me. This, and then hedonism, sometimes. “I'm going to make you a french omelette with parsley and guanciale and three eggs,” David tells me at home. “And it's going to be the best omelette you've ever had.” “Was the omelette pretty decent,” David asks later. Davids’s Decent Omelette Suddenly, all my music is new. The things we’re playing over and over again - they're songs I've never heard before. This means my nostalgia for this time will be different - new emotions recollected when I revisit images of now, as compared to in the months before. I feel silly and cheap reflecting on things like this - future nostalgia, imagining the contemporary as a memory. It's a slightly drunken conversation. There is no feasible counter culture anymore, no zeitgeist to seize in a think piece, interest draws towards the interior. This doesn't have to be narcissistic if done well. It's a little narcissistic, in my case. I keep on listening to these songs, over and over and over again. Home - Kinlaw
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LqrH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb418313f-a9c0-4483-adfe-52a23d42c656_1179x624.jpeg, Bar Veloce, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!54KV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba999c41-1577-4575-8943-285aaa6064b7_1600x1200.jpeg, sea buckthorn, La Roche Posay, Embryolisse, EARTH, Casual Encounters, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vpvu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8d8030ea-1dab-4e47-8fa8-9689c3704780_1124x1492.png, Home - Kinlaw
Good things keep happening to me, and I'm very grateful and; I’m very happy too. I try not to quantify too much. If I choose this, then imagine I lose that. I don't want to do everything all at once. I've never possessed this desire. There is paralysis, though, sometimes, when I think about what I'm doing and therefore, by default, what I'm not. First day of my internship today. I like it a lot. First day of the semester yesterday. Very good. I take the subway home. I run a few miles. Thawing in the steam inside, but I'm sick of talking about how cold I've been, and particularly of how much I've been enjoying it. Writing a lot - maybe too much, honestly. Out of my head and into my body. I spend too much time alone and I become very dissociative. Vision blurring on the treadmill. Self indulgent. I yell a lot when I get home. It’s not important. There are worse things. Natasha and I go to Bar Veloce for drinks and a panini. “One second,” I say on the phone when we’re making plans, and then I hang up to yell, and then I am calm again and then I’m walking back through the frozen air, light and breastless in its dry frigidity. Inside Veloce it’s warm, orange lamps, thin and laminated menus, I get two martinis - extra dirty extra dry," I say. I used to order it “vodka martini no vermouth with lots of olive juice”, but I’ve been trying the abridged version most people use lately, and it works just as well. I forget how many hours we’re at Veloce. Nice night. Quiet night. I tell Sophia I can bring her zyns for the opening of Doomers. I’ve been zyning lately. My bag is chock full of them. They make me dizzy in an unpleasant way. Even thirty minutes on the subway alone, and I start to feel disembodied and strange. It’s strange how many more people are reading my public diary now, even though I wrote it for this reason - to be public. I’m trying to write in a way that is honest, but I’m becoming too ethereal in my descriptions. This isn’t really true — me being ethereal that is. Natasha asks me what I think about transcendental meditation at dinner. “David Lynch’s cult?,” I ask. “They make you pay for it,” she says. “But their whole thing is clarity.” I perk up when I hear this bit. “I would pay,” I say. “Clarity has been your buzzword,” she says. "Where did you get that?,” she asks. “I realized I just didn’t have clarity and I wanted it,” I say. I still don’t have it, not really. Eating fontana truffle prosciutto grilled cheese with my martini. They kick us out at closing. Midnight, it’s still early. They froze our pipes about three hours ago. The ice fairies, I mean. The building will restore the pipes soon. “EMERGENCY” the email says. “Hello, Thief”, the flyers in Riley’s lobby say. You want to end things on a good note, but then the night goes awry. Friday, January 24 You think you will wake up in a haze, but you don’t. Bright light this morning. It is still morning, not yet early afternoon, although close enough. They turned the water back on in the night - sent the ice fairies flying back through the streets. The faucet lurches and then starts to spew all rust colored. All the drama of the evening becomes silly in the light of day, obviously. You put smooth serum on your face - sea buckthorn, La Roche Posay, Embryolisse. The rusty water has turned all clear again. Warmer today - weaving in and out of sanity, if I'm being honest. I decide to go to Massachusetts and then I decide against it. David brings me a white chocolate bear from Lil Lac. I run into him and the bear on the way back from the gym. "I got you a really stupid present," he says. I call with the people in El Salvador in the afternoon - talking about things like The Art of The State. Red Light Therapy. I need to write my story. I need to start doing things like eating fresh fruit, drinking lots of water with things like added drops of Maldon sea salt. There's the reading everyone is going to at EARTH tonight, but the line is too long. I hear that through the rumblings of people who are there before me. The line is way too long, and there are other things to do too but I stay put which is depressing, and rare for me, and I don't do anything with the solitude except I am asleep the earliest I've been in years. Saturday, January 25 I knew I was going to get sick. It was only a matter of time, and I’m a little relieved that it’s finally here. It’s not too bad. My eyes sting, and I slept twelve hours. I slept peacefully though, no nightmares, a fever dulling whatever tripwires my mind most nights and so in this sense it’s kind of nice - the being sick. Someone asks me to write a story about ANTI REALITY - “I think of your writing as a sense of unreliability of perception,” they say. And so of course, I want to write about my nightmares, but I’ve been having fewer nightmares lately, and now I’m sick. I’ll have to think about this more, later. Honestly, I feel strange about putting these event calendars here, now that the other parts have for real become my public diary. I feel weird about putting up paywalls, but I don’t want SEO to find my Secret Thoughts. I started writing this in May, and I started writing about Everything I Did and Everything You Should Do, but now I kind of want to be doing less, or I want to be going to things because I know no one and not because I know everyone. I still feel so grateful to have places to go where I know everyone, and I do think you should go to these things, too. Creative things. Special things. Isolation is so sad and so lonely and I am so grateful that my life is mostly devoid of it. It’s like a fluke - not being isolated, I mean, but I’m not, and I feel very lucky for this. I go to a reading in Union Square tonight. Something for Casual Encounters and a new newspaper called Ummm. My illness dissipated as quickly as it arrived. I think I made myself sick because I cried a lot, if I’m being honest. But I’m fine now. I’m really relieved this happened, because it was only a matter of time, and because now it’s all fine. The reading is wonderful. I'm so happy all night. It's in a beautiful apartment, dazzling, really, and I'm there early, embarrassingly early, and so be it out of pity or mistaken identity, I am given a tour. Here is the roof. Here is the room where the reading will be. Here is the artist's studio. Here are fifty sculptures above the hallway, each sculpture is by a different artist, interpreting the same person in a different way, can you guess who the person is? Sam arrives during this part. “Hillary Clinton,” he guesses. He's right. I like readings like this. One glass of orange wine and then water. I've been so cynical lately, but this feels lovely. Natasha arrives. Others, too. It's a nice mix of people I know and people I don't. It feels so easy for things to go wrong, but sometimes a night hovers just right. Sitting on the windowsill with David later, surveying the room. Up on a basketball court later, but I'm not smoking cigarettes these days. Sometimes glamor is just glamor and you don't have to feel jaded to it. The theme of the newspaper is good - umm… exercise. And this is really the root of it all, isn't it? You run, you write, there are other things, too, but this has always been the crux of things for me. This, and then hedonism, sometimes. “I'm going to make you a french omelette with parsley and guanciale and three eggs,” David tells me at home. “And it's going to be the best omelette you've ever had.” “Was the omelette pretty decent,” David asks later. Davids’s Decent Omelette Suddenly, all my music is new. The things we’re playing over and over again - they're songs I've never heard before. This means my nostalgia for this time will be different - new emotions recollected when I revisit images of now, as compared to in the months before. I feel silly and cheap reflecting on things like this - future nostalgia, imagining the contemporary as a memory. It's a slightly drunken conversation. There is no feasible counter culture anymore, no zeitgeist to seize in a think piece, interest draws towards the interior. This doesn't have to be narcissistic if done well. It's a little narcissistic, in my case. I keep on listening to these songs, over and over and over again. Home - Kinlaw
Inline links: Bar Veloce, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!54KV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba999c41-1577-4575-8943-285aaa6064b7_1600x1200.jpeg, sea buckthorn, La Roche Posay, Embryolisse, EARTH, Casual Encounters, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vpvu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8d8030ea-1dab-4e47-8fa8-9689c3704780_1124x1492.png, Home - Kinlaw
Friday, January 24 You think you will wake up in a haze, but you don’t. Bright light this morning. It is still morning, not yet early afternoon, although close enough. They turned the water back on in the night - sent the ice fairies flying back through the streets. The faucet lurches and then starts to spew all rust colored. All the drama of the evening becomes silly in the light of day, obviously. You put smooth serum on your face - sea buckthorn, La Roche Posay, Embryolisse. The rusty water has turned all clear again. Warmer today - weaving in and out of sanity, if I'm being honest. I decide to go to Massachusetts and then I decide against it. David brings me a white chocolate bear from Lil Lac. I run into him and the bear on the way back from the gym. "I got you a really stupid present," he says. I call with the people in El Salvador in the afternoon - talking about things like The Art of The State. Red Light Therapy. I need to write my story. I need to start doing things like eating fresh fruit, drinking lots of water with things like added drops of Maldon sea salt. There's the reading everyone is going to at EARTH tonight, but the line is too long. I hear that through the rumblings of people who are there before me. The line is way too long, and there are other things to do too but I stay put which is depressing, and rare for me, and I don't do anything with the solitude except I am asleep the earliest I've been in years. Saturday, January 25 I knew I was going to get sick. It was only a matter of time, and I’m a little relieved that it’s finally here. It’s not too bad. My eyes sting, and I slept twelve hours. I slept peacefully though, no nightmares, a fever dulling whatever tripwires my mind most nights and so in this sense it’s kind of nice - the being sick. Someone asks me to write a story about ANTI REALITY - “I think of your writing as a sense of unreliability of perception,” they say. And so of course, I want to write about my nightmares, but I’ve been having fewer nightmares lately, and now I’m sick. I’ll have to think about this more, later. Honestly, I feel strange about putting these event calendars here, now that the other parts have for real become my public diary. I feel weird about putting up paywalls, but I don’t want SEO to find my Secret Thoughts. I started writing this in May, and I started writing about Everything I Did and Everything You Should Do, but now I kind of want to be doing less, or I want to be going to things because I know no one and not because I know everyone. I still feel so grateful to have places to go where I know everyone, and I do think you should go to these things, too. Creative things. Special things. Isolation is so sad and so lonely and I am so grateful that my life is mostly devoid of it. It’s like a fluke - not being isolated, I mean, but I’m not, and I feel very lucky for this. I go to a reading in Union Square tonight. Something for Casual Encounters and a new newspaper called Ummm. My illness dissipated as quickly as it arrived. I think I made myself sick because I cried a lot, if I’m being honest. But I’m fine now. I’m really relieved this happened, because it was only a matter of time, and because now it’s all fine. The reading is wonderful. I'm so happy all night. It's in a beautiful apartment, dazzling, really, and I'm there early, embarrassingly early, and so be it out of pity or mistaken identity, I am given a tour. Here is the roof. Here is the room where the reading will be. Here is the artist's studio. Here are fifty sculptures above the hallway, each sculpture is by a different artist, interpreting the same person in a different way, can you guess who the person is? Sam arrives during this part. “Hillary Clinton,” he guesses. He's right. I like readings like this. One glass of orange wine and then water. I've been so cynical lately, but this feels lovely. Natasha arrives. Others, too. It's a nice mix of people I know and people I don't. It feels so easy for things to go wrong, but sometimes a night hovers just right. Sitting on the windowsill with David later, surveying the room. Up on a basketball court later, but I'm not smoking cigarettes these days. Sometimes glamor is just glamor and you don't have to feel jaded to it. The theme of the newspaper is good - umm… exercise. And this is really the root of it all, isn't it? You run, you write, there are other things, too, but this has always been the crux of things for me. This, and then hedonism, sometimes. “I'm going to make you a french omelette with parsley and guanciale and three eggs,” David tells me at home. “And it's going to be the best omelette you've ever had.” “Was the omelette pretty decent,” David asks later. Davids’s Decent Omelette Suddenly, all my music is new. The things we’re playing over and over again - they're songs I've never heard before. This means my nostalgia for this time will be different - new emotions recollected when I revisit images of now, as compared to in the months before. I feel silly and cheap reflecting on things like this - future nostalgia, imagining the contemporary as a memory. It's a slightly drunken conversation. There is no feasible counter culture anymore, no zeitgeist to seize in a think piece, interest draws towards the interior. This doesn't have to be narcissistic if done well. It's a little narcissistic, in my case. I keep on listening to these songs, over and over and over again. Home - Kinlaw
Inline links: sea buckthorn, La Roche Posay, Embryolisse, EARTH, Casual Encounters, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vpvu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8d8030ea-1dab-4e47-8fa8-9689c3704780_1124x1492.png, Home - Kinlaw
Dream Logic
February 03, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, January 26 Lying under red light at Ruby's apartment. The light here is all good - hanging infrared wires, silver orbs, all the lights seem incandescent. It's warmer today - walking through Little Italy there's a man on the fire escape looking down on the street with his dog, a big golden retriever, I like looking into other peoples lives like this. Earlier, lying on the couch in my own apartment, looking in our neighbors windows and at first it's absentminded but then I start to be intrigued. David says stop staring, they can see you staring, but I don't think they can. They can see me, sure, but the distinction between simply looking out the window or looking at them; impossible. You can't perceive eye movements from even a slight distance and anyways, if they see me looking at them, they admit they were looking at me, the gaze goes two ways, and so on... The last conference in El Salvador was all about Light, they told me on the phone on Friday. This year, it will be all about Earth. Ruby orders magnesium, orange juice, she swooshes coconut oil. These are good remedies. I take Advil, very rarely Adderall these days but still sometimes. I should be taking aspirin instead - this is what everyone says online, and what some people say in real life, too. I'm reading St Augustine's Confessions - mostly reading it for school, although I've been invited to discuss it on a Podcast as well. My track record with Podcasts is bleak, scary, and abysmal. My track record with Catholicism is - I never really went through that phase. I struggle to separate vanity from philosophy and prayer. I'm drawn to this part of Confessions most, things like "there is no pleasure in eating or drinking unless it is preceded by the discomfort of hunger and thirst.” Things like "Drunkards eat salty things to make their throats dry and painful, so that they may enjoy the pleasure of quenching their thirst.” Drawn to these, of course, because they elicit reflection on my own actions in the most vain and superficial sense of it all. Simone Weil Food Diary. Aliens and Anorexia. Like Grimes has been tweeting things like she found God to quit vaping. Hypnotize me instead, perhaps - it seems vulgar to attempt contemplation, and to end up here. Ruby and I walk to Flower Power in the East Village for; Wild Oat bromus ramosus (green). It does things like; “work as an expression of inner calling, manifestation of one’s true goals and values, work experiences motivated by a clear life purpose and conviction.” We go to Bar Oliver for vermouth tonic. Ruby makes me steak. David calls. Ruby and I watch Mulholland Drive - the first time for me. Only eleven pm and I usually sleep late, much later, but this red light casts a different glow. I'm closer to the ground in my friend’s apartment, no planes overhead and melting ice. I get homesick easily. In hours, really. But then, you can always go back. Monday, January 27 Perhaps you theme your days. On Health, you say. L-theanine with my coffee. Not really, but I’ll plan for this down the line. Bar Oliver is all lit up in piercing morning sun. I walk outside early this morning. Chinatown fruit market coming alive so quickly. There was a cemetery outside the window where I slept last night. I kept on looking out and seeing icy branches overhead that framed the building like a second roof, the cemetery like a courtyard. It scared me once, I screamed once in my sleep, but I woke up other times too, and it wasn't too bad then. Mostly, the sky outside just looked all pale blue and clear, the same pale blue all night in my memory, although this doesn't make sense in a logical way, what with the night passing and the becoming dark and the me being asleep for it all. Dream Logic. A recollection of slippery silvery vines forming an outline of a roof over a gravestone. You wake up, and there is no roof, the trees were never shaped like that at all. Tahini chocolate cookie because Ruby told me sugar is actually ok. Whole milk cappuccino and I'm adding honey instead of Splenda. Enough is enough. I'm not going to crash out, but days are different now that my hours don't float on and on in pacing and typing that becomes like a trance. I felt like I was floating yesterday. Not today. That's probably ok. Tuesday, January 28 Tea with Madelyn Grace and then hot apple cider and Jameson whiskey at Cafe Reggio last night. David and his friends came by and acted abrasive. I was annoyed, but then I wasn’t. I walked the Williamsburg Bridge this morning - all the way from The West Village to Brooklyn. Delancey street was crazy at that hour, but everything after that was nice. I’d never done this before - walk the bridge, I mean - and it went on for so much longer than I expected. At first it was all windy and it made me scared, how once you got on the bridge you really couldn’t get off, how in the center the only exit was to finish the walk or perhaps to blow over, and I was the only one there, people were biking by so fast but no one else was walking, so then I started to run, and so then it got all warm, the water in the Hudson looked nice and wild and churning and distant from up here. The thing is, this winter was mostly a practice in what I’m recalling like a meditation now, with even the slight perspective - now that it’s late January, that is. Everything was present, so hyper present, and all I did was walk and think and walk and walk and walk and write down what I was thinking about and sometimes I yelled a lot, and I know it’s still the depth of winter, but this time starts to feel like it is passing. I freaked out last week, I thought about what if I couldn’t keep my days like that, but my days still hold all of this, only now, they hold more too. At the gym, I write about how it is ok to just do things like - go for a walk, go to work, lie by the window with David, go to the gym, write a story, and these days can be good and even better than the other ones, the ones that snap you into fierce exteriority. After the gym, Cassidy texts me. “Are you at KGB?,” and I’m not, but I think, well, I would go. Augustine says - “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Etc etc etc. I feel better when almost all my time is spent with people, and I think my mind is better like this, too. At KGB, I am dressed all in Pilates and Going-For-A-Jog type clothing. At KGB, Matthew is telling a girl about how Blade Runner the movie is based on a very antisemitic book. I've heard him tell this story before, and the gist varies each time, but there are a few lines that consistently resurface. I zone out after I hear the first line that I am sure I have heard before. When I zone back in, he's talking about religion more generally. "Really?," the girl he's with is saying. "Yes, YES," Matthew is saying “I looked up the history of the Blade Runner movie, and it said it was made around World War II," the girl is saying. “No, not at all," Matthew says “Oh,” the girl says “How did you like the rape scene?" Matthew asks “What rape scene?" the girl says “Oh that's good," Matthew says. There is new art on the wall of KGB. A rendition of Vermeer’s Girl With Pearl Earring, except in this case, the girl is a dog. “Do you like the new art?,” David asks. “Yes,” I say. “I don’t,” David says. I am picking at the wax on the candle, because everyone is talking and because I don’t have much to say. “Stop playing with fire,” the bartender tells me. “Act like you are at your mothers house.” Except - I mishear her. I think she says you aren’t at your mothers house, because she is right, I am not, but if I was; I would play with the flames as much as I liked. Wednesday, January 29 I would like to put away this phone, I think. Warmer, today. They’ve left the windows open at the coffee shop. I told you it was starting to feel like spring. I told you it would be all spring-like in the depth of winter, soon. Sunlight filtering, filtering, filtering, through the roof at home. The roof and the windows. It’s all one and the same. It’s a new moon tonight. Lunar New Year tonight. You put your head under the covers and filter out the sun. You like it because it is warm but also - the blue light of your phone can absorb your entire vision at any hour, here, in this makeshift tent. I am not of the Escape The Internet train of thought. It’s designed to addict you but then, well, having some fucking discipline. On my phone, I see people saying things like - “there is no ‘on your phone’, just another layer of constant consciousness”. And in real life I think things like - you should separate it if you can, you should know real life if you can but, to leave it all behind - impossible, because it will always be right there, and you could still do things like walk down the street and understand the street as purely physical but then, look around you, look at the other people, look at the surroundings they are absorbing and none of them are real, none of them are there, and so you can’t just stand on this street and get it, understand it, all offline. I don’t really want to get it anymore. My mornings could be real, they could be with just a little discipline and a touch of joie de vivre. They aren’t real, really, because I’m making makeshift Blue Light tents to filter out the sunlight, but then, I’m working on this. Blue, blue, blue sky today. Doomers previews, tonight. Biohacker meetup tonight. Bryan Johnson in Interview Magazine tonight. I like to do things like drink six teas with six Splenda each, and then I like to act very harsh with myself and others regarding the principles of a life well lived. Year of the snake. What do you think about that...? All this talk about discipline, and my afternoon is all drop off a few Depop packages and refresh, refresh, refresh the stats on a piece that I didn’t even write. There’s a hazy little run in the afternoon. There’s some bad news, or, news that is more irritating, really. Ruby spreads the word: "do not take my advice about eating lots of honey," she says. Ok. Ok, it's all protein now, then. David takes me to a strange party tonight. An interloper arrives, and he is chased out at sword point. It is insane how quickly the tides turn. You said the things that you didn’t mean, again. It wasn't supposed to happen like this, but then, it never is. You wrote today, earlier, about how - things were good, better, but you didn't want to get too cocky because remember what you were capable of really not too long ago, it was only a few weeks back, but it felt so distant. And then, tonight, again... Thursday, January 30 And then it's ok. Well, it's not, but it can be. You’ve been taking for granted that it will be ok, if it has to be ok. That if you care about something so, so, so deeply then it cannot possibly be destroyed, but it could, you are capable of this. It feels foreign sometimes, this force, this capacity for destruction, like it can’t belong to you, but it does, it’s no one else’s. It becomes simple, then. You can’t just say I crossed my fingers, you can’t just say I take it back. And so, no more. I'm working the door at Tense tonight, which is my favorite - both TENSE, and working doors, that is. It’s a beautiful night, and this, after everything, is a relief. Christian Lorentzen reads emails with Gary Indiana. “I now believe you can tell if the writer is part of a writing program, by looking at their teeth,” Gary told Christian. "Why does everybody love Downton Abbey?" Gary asked Christian, in another email. "Well, what's not to love? The series construction is so glibly subscribed that you know what will happen before the writers do." In another, he lamented the logistical problems surrounding his writings on Cuba - the travel ban, his lover there, etc etc etc. It's a good format for a reading - the emails thing. Correspondences brought to life. Not quite a diary, but close, more intimate, often, because one isn't writing into the void of one's own neurosis in a correspondence. Madelyn writes me an email, after. I am working on my own correspondence back, still. Mania delays the process. It's good to have a long form conversation to return to. I hope this email finds you well. This email finds me almost incapacitated, but I won't be, soon. Beckett's reading is full of empathy and wit as always. He's lamenting the narcissism of our times in his introductory speech, and his own gut impulses and the stories that follow give him the proper wherewithal to do so. I see Sean Lynch and others outside. Sean writes something nice on the evening. I see Doomers the next day - the dream logic of my thoughts following this production requiring another letter altogether WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, February 4 From 7pm at Heaven Can't Wait — Cynosure presents the first of a two night fundraiser for Los Angeles, featuring Alex Arthur, Precious Human, Truman Flyer, and more.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x0cE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F026ee05a-c657-489d-aa34-250f7bb7d7e5_1144x1394.png, St Augustine's, Simone Weil Food Diary, Aliens and Anorexia, Flower Power, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_dvK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff3b06e0c-2cb1-4c11-b33e-544c9ef7c39b_1182x1308.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cTIp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe004f5e9-d687-454c-a636-8a531bd50877_1162x1422.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QvaR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4e1cff43-2649-4fd5-b2c0-12597c68d64c_1179x639.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SwKw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb9eb097-5814-48e3-9eee-e66c559d15b5_1200x1600.jpeg, Bryan Johnson in, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EgQz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1cb85ea0-de00-4d10-b03e-ae375da5ddef_1179x642.jpeg, something nice on the evening, Heaven Can't Wait, Cynosure
We go to Bar Oliver for vermouth tonic. Ruby makes me steak. David calls. Ruby and I watch Mulholland Drive - the first time for me. Only eleven pm and I usually sleep late, much later, but this red light casts a different glow. I'm closer to the ground in my friend’s apartment, no planes overhead and melting ice. I get homesick easily. In hours, really. But then, you can always go back. Monday, January 27 Perhaps you theme your days. On Health, you say. L-theanine with my coffee. Not really, but I’ll plan for this down the line. Bar Oliver is all lit up in piercing morning sun. I walk outside early this morning. Chinatown fruit market coming alive so quickly. There was a cemetery outside the window where I slept last night. I kept on looking out and seeing icy branches overhead that framed the building like a second roof, the cemetery like a courtyard. It scared me once, I screamed once in my sleep, but I woke up other times too, and it wasn't too bad then. Mostly, the sky outside just looked all pale blue and clear, the same pale blue all night in my memory, although this doesn't make sense in a logical way, what with the night passing and the becoming dark and the me being asleep for it all. Dream Logic. A recollection of slippery silvery vines forming an outline of a roof over a gravestone. You wake up, and there is no roof, the trees were never shaped like that at all. Tahini chocolate cookie because Ruby told me sugar is actually ok. Whole milk cappuccino and I'm adding honey instead of Splenda. Enough is enough. I'm not going to crash out, but days are different now that my hours don't float on and on in pacing and typing that becomes like a trance. I felt like I was floating yesterday. Not today. That's probably ok. Tuesday, January 28 Tea with Madelyn Grace and then hot apple cider and Jameson whiskey at Cafe Reggio last night. David and his friends came by and acted abrasive. I was annoyed, but then I wasn’t. I walked the Williamsburg Bridge this morning - all the way from The West Village to Brooklyn. Delancey street was crazy at that hour, but everything after that was nice. I’d never done this before - walk the bridge, I mean - and it went on for so much longer than I expected. At first it was all windy and it made me scared, how once you got on the bridge you really couldn’t get off, how in the center the only exit was to finish the walk or perhaps to blow over, and I was the only one there, people were biking by so fast but no one else was walking, so then I started to run, and so then it got all warm, the water in the Hudson looked nice and wild and churning and distant from up here. The thing is, this winter was mostly a practice in what I’m recalling like a meditation now, with even the slight perspective - now that it’s late January, that is. Everything was present, so hyper present, and all I did was walk and think and walk and walk and walk and write down what I was thinking about and sometimes I yelled a lot, and I know it’s still the depth of winter, but this time starts to feel like it is passing. I freaked out last week, I thought about what if I couldn’t keep my days like that, but my days still hold all of this, only now, they hold more too. At the gym, I write about how it is ok to just do things like - go for a walk, go to work, lie by the window with David, go to the gym, write a story, and these days can be good and even better than the other ones, the ones that snap you into fierce exteriority. After the gym, Cassidy texts me. “Are you at KGB?,” and I’m not, but I think, well, I would go. Augustine says - “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Etc etc etc. I feel better when almost all my time is spent with people, and I think my mind is better like this, too. At KGB, I am dressed all in Pilates and Going-For-A-Jog type clothing. At KGB, Matthew is telling a girl about how Blade Runner the movie is based on a very antisemitic book. I've heard him tell this story before, and the gist varies each time, but there are a few lines that consistently resurface. I zone out after I hear the first line that I am sure I have heard before. When I zone back in, he's talking about religion more generally. "Really?," the girl he's with is saying. "Yes, YES," Matthew is saying “I looked up the history of the Blade Runner movie, and it said it was made around World War II," the girl is saying. “No, not at all," Matthew says “Oh,” the girl says “How did you like the rape scene?" Matthew asks “What rape scene?" the girl says “Oh that's good," Matthew says. There is new art on the wall of KGB. A rendition of Vermeer’s Girl With Pearl Earring, except in this case, the girl is a dog. “Do you like the new art?,” David asks. “Yes,” I say. “I don’t,” David says. I am picking at the wax on the candle, because everyone is talking and because I don’t have much to say. “Stop playing with fire,” the bartender tells me. “Act like you are at your mothers house.” Except - I mishear her. I think she says you aren’t at your mothers house, because she is right, I am not, but if I was; I would play with the flames as much as I liked. Wednesday, January 29 I would like to put away this phone, I think. Warmer, today. They’ve left the windows open at the coffee shop. I told you it was starting to feel like spring. I told you it would be all spring-like in the depth of winter, soon. Sunlight filtering, filtering, filtering, through the roof at home. The roof and the windows. It’s all one and the same. It’s a new moon tonight. Lunar New Year tonight. You put your head under the covers and filter out the sun. You like it because it is warm but also - the blue light of your phone can absorb your entire vision at any hour, here, in this makeshift tent. I am not of the Escape The Internet train of thought. It’s designed to addict you but then, well, having some fucking discipline. On my phone, I see people saying things like - “there is no ‘on your phone’, just another layer of constant consciousness”. And in real life I think things like - you should separate it if you can, you should know real life if you can but, to leave it all behind - impossible, because it will always be right there, and you could still do things like walk down the street and understand the street as purely physical but then, look around you, look at the other people, look at the surroundings they are absorbing and none of them are real, none of them are there, and so you can’t just stand on this street and get it, understand it, all offline. I don’t really want to get it anymore. My mornings could be real, they could be with just a little discipline and a touch of joie de vivre. They aren’t real, really, because I’m making makeshift Blue Light tents to filter out the sunlight, but then, I’m working on this. Blue, blue, blue sky today. Doomers previews, tonight. Biohacker meetup tonight. Bryan Johnson in Interview Magazine tonight. I like to do things like drink six teas with six Splenda each, and then I like to act very harsh with myself and others regarding the principles of a life well lived. Year of the snake. What do you think about that...? All this talk about discipline, and my afternoon is all drop off a few Depop packages and refresh, refresh, refresh the stats on a piece that I didn’t even write. There’s a hazy little run in the afternoon. There’s some bad news, or, news that is more irritating, really. Ruby spreads the word: "do not take my advice about eating lots of honey," she says. Ok. Ok, it's all protein now, then. David takes me to a strange party tonight. An interloper arrives, and he is chased out at sword point. It is insane how quickly the tides turn. You said the things that you didn’t mean, again. It wasn't supposed to happen like this, but then, it never is. You wrote today, earlier, about how - things were good, better, but you didn't want to get too cocky because remember what you were capable of really not too long ago, it was only a few weeks back, but it felt so distant. And then, tonight, again... Thursday, January 30 And then it's ok. Well, it's not, but it can be. You’ve been taking for granted that it will be ok, if it has to be ok. That if you care about something so, so, so deeply then it cannot possibly be destroyed, but it could, you are capable of this. It feels foreign sometimes, this force, this capacity for destruction, like it can’t belong to you, but it does, it’s no one else’s. It becomes simple, then. You can’t just say I crossed my fingers, you can’t just say I take it back. And so, no more. I'm working the door at Tense tonight, which is my favorite - both TENSE, and working doors, that is. It’s a beautiful night, and this, after everything, is a relief. Christian Lorentzen reads emails with Gary Indiana. “I now believe you can tell if the writer is part of a writing program, by looking at their teeth,” Gary told Christian. "Why does everybody love Downton Abbey?" Gary asked Christian, in another email. "Well, what's not to love? The series construction is so glibly subscribed that you know what will happen before the writers do." In another, he lamented the logistical problems surrounding his writings on Cuba - the travel ban, his lover there, etc etc etc. It's a good format for a reading - the emails thing. Correspondences brought to life. Not quite a diary, but close, more intimate, often, because one isn't writing into the void of one's own neurosis in a correspondence. Madelyn writes me an email, after. I am working on my own correspondence back, still. Mania delays the process. It's good to have a long form conversation to return to. I hope this email finds you well. This email finds me almost incapacitated, but I won't be, soon. Beckett's reading is full of empathy and wit as always. He's lamenting the narcissism of our times in his introductory speech, and his own gut impulses and the stories that follow give him the proper wherewithal to do so. I see Sean Lynch and others outside. Sean writes something nice on the evening. I see Doomers the next day - the dream logic of my thoughts following this production requiring another letter altogether WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, February 4 From 7pm at Heaven Can't Wait — Cynosure presents the first of a two night fundraiser for Los Angeles, featuring Alex Arthur, Precious Human, Truman Flyer, and more.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cTIp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe004f5e9-d687-454c-a636-8a531bd50877_1162x1422.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QvaR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4e1cff43-2649-4fd5-b2c0-12597c68d64c_1179x639.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SwKw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb9eb097-5814-48e3-9eee-e66c559d15b5_1200x1600.jpeg, Bryan Johnson in, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EgQz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1cb85ea0-de00-4d10-b03e-ae375da5ddef_1179x642.jpeg, something nice on the evening, Heaven Can't Wait, Cynosure
Monday, January 27 Perhaps you theme your days. On Health, you say. L-theanine with my coffee. Not really, but I’ll plan for this down the line. Bar Oliver is all lit up in piercing morning sun. I walk outside early this morning. Chinatown fruit market coming alive so quickly. There was a cemetery outside the window where I slept last night. I kept on looking out and seeing icy branches overhead that framed the building like a second roof, the cemetery like a courtyard. It scared me once, I screamed once in my sleep, but I woke up other times too, and it wasn't too bad then. Mostly, the sky outside just looked all pale blue and clear, the same pale blue all night in my memory, although this doesn't make sense in a logical way, what with the night passing and the becoming dark and the me being asleep for it all. Dream Logic. A recollection of slippery silvery vines forming an outline of a roof over a gravestone. You wake up, and there is no roof, the trees were never shaped like that at all. Tahini chocolate cookie because Ruby told me sugar is actually ok. Whole milk cappuccino and I'm adding honey instead of Splenda. Enough is enough. I'm not going to crash out, but days are different now that my hours don't float on and on in pacing and typing that becomes like a trance. I felt like I was floating yesterday. Not today. That's probably ok. Tuesday, January 28 Tea with Madelyn Grace and then hot apple cider and Jameson whiskey at Cafe Reggio last night. David and his friends came by and acted abrasive. I was annoyed, but then I wasn’t. I walked the Williamsburg Bridge this morning - all the way from The West Village to Brooklyn. Delancey street was crazy at that hour, but everything after that was nice. I’d never done this before - walk the bridge, I mean - and it went on for so much longer than I expected. At first it was all windy and it made me scared, how once you got on the bridge you really couldn’t get off, how in the center the only exit was to finish the walk or perhaps to blow over, and I was the only one there, people were biking by so fast but no one else was walking, so then I started to run, and so then it got all warm, the water in the Hudson looked nice and wild and churning and distant from up here. The thing is, this winter was mostly a practice in what I’m recalling like a meditation now, with even the slight perspective - now that it’s late January, that is. Everything was present, so hyper present, and all I did was walk and think and walk and walk and walk and write down what I was thinking about and sometimes I yelled a lot, and I know it’s still the depth of winter, but this time starts to feel like it is passing. I freaked out last week, I thought about what if I couldn’t keep my days like that, but my days still hold all of this, only now, they hold more too. At the gym, I write about how it is ok to just do things like - go for a walk, go to work, lie by the window with David, go to the gym, write a story, and these days can be good and even better than the other ones, the ones that snap you into fierce exteriority. After the gym, Cassidy texts me. “Are you at KGB?,” and I’m not, but I think, well, I would go. Augustine says - “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Etc etc etc. I feel better when almost all my time is spent with people, and I think my mind is better like this, too. At KGB, I am dressed all in Pilates and Going-For-A-Jog type clothing. At KGB, Matthew is telling a girl about how Blade Runner the movie is based on a very antisemitic book. I've heard him tell this story before, and the gist varies each time, but there are a few lines that consistently resurface. I zone out after I hear the first line that I am sure I have heard before. When I zone back in, he's talking about religion more generally. "Really?," the girl he's with is saying. "Yes, YES," Matthew is saying “I looked up the history of the Blade Runner movie, and it said it was made around World War II," the girl is saying. “No, not at all," Matthew says “Oh,” the girl says “How did you like the rape scene?" Matthew asks “What rape scene?" the girl says “Oh that's good," Matthew says. There is new art on the wall of KGB. A rendition of Vermeer’s Girl With Pearl Earring, except in this case, the girl is a dog. “Do you like the new art?,” David asks. “Yes,” I say. “I don’t,” David says. I am picking at the wax on the candle, because everyone is talking and because I don’t have much to say. “Stop playing with fire,” the bartender tells me. “Act like you are at your mothers house.” Except - I mishear her. I think she says you aren’t at your mothers house, because she is right, I am not, but if I was; I would play with the flames as much as I liked. Wednesday, January 29 I would like to put away this phone, I think. Warmer, today. They’ve left the windows open at the coffee shop. I told you it was starting to feel like spring. I told you it would be all spring-like in the depth of winter, soon. Sunlight filtering, filtering, filtering, through the roof at home. The roof and the windows. It’s all one and the same. It’s a new moon tonight. Lunar New Year tonight. You put your head under the covers and filter out the sun. You like it because it is warm but also - the blue light of your phone can absorb your entire vision at any hour, here, in this makeshift tent. I am not of the Escape The Internet train of thought. It’s designed to addict you but then, well, having some fucking discipline. On my phone, I see people saying things like - “there is no ‘on your phone’, just another layer of constant consciousness”. And in real life I think things like - you should separate it if you can, you should know real life if you can but, to leave it all behind - impossible, because it will always be right there, and you could still do things like walk down the street and understand the street as purely physical but then, look around you, look at the other people, look at the surroundings they are absorbing and none of them are real, none of them are there, and so you can’t just stand on this street and get it, understand it, all offline. I don’t really want to get it anymore. My mornings could be real, they could be with just a little discipline and a touch of joie de vivre. They aren’t real, really, because I’m making makeshift Blue Light tents to filter out the sunlight, but then, I’m working on this. Blue, blue, blue sky today. Doomers previews, tonight. Biohacker meetup tonight. Bryan Johnson in Interview Magazine tonight. I like to do things like drink six teas with six Splenda each, and then I like to act very harsh with myself and others regarding the principles of a life well lived. Year of the snake. What do you think about that...? All this talk about discipline, and my afternoon is all drop off a few Depop packages and refresh, refresh, refresh the stats on a piece that I didn’t even write. There’s a hazy little run in the afternoon. There’s some bad news, or, news that is more irritating, really. Ruby spreads the word: "do not take my advice about eating lots of honey," she says. Ok. Ok, it's all protein now, then. David takes me to a strange party tonight. An interloper arrives, and he is chased out at sword point. It is insane how quickly the tides turn. You said the things that you didn’t mean, again. It wasn't supposed to happen like this, but then, it never is. You wrote today, earlier, about how - things were good, better, but you didn't want to get too cocky because remember what you were capable of really not too long ago, it was only a few weeks back, but it felt so distant. And then, tonight, again... Thursday, January 30 And then it's ok. Well, it's not, but it can be. You’ve been taking for granted that it will be ok, if it has to be ok. That if you care about something so, so, so deeply then it cannot possibly be destroyed, but it could, you are capable of this. It feels foreign sometimes, this force, this capacity for destruction, like it can’t belong to you, but it does, it’s no one else’s. It becomes simple, then. You can’t just say I crossed my fingers, you can’t just say I take it back. And so, no more. I'm working the door at Tense tonight, which is my favorite - both TENSE, and working doors, that is. It’s a beautiful night, and this, after everything, is a relief. Christian Lorentzen reads emails with Gary Indiana. “I now believe you can tell if the writer is part of a writing program, by looking at their teeth,” Gary told Christian. "Why does everybody love Downton Abbey?" Gary asked Christian, in another email. "Well, what's not to love? The series construction is so glibly subscribed that you know what will happen before the writers do." In another, he lamented the logistical problems surrounding his writings on Cuba - the travel ban, his lover there, etc etc etc. It's a good format for a reading - the emails thing. Correspondences brought to life. Not quite a diary, but close, more intimate, often, because one isn't writing into the void of one's own neurosis in a correspondence. Madelyn writes me an email, after. I am working on my own correspondence back, still. Mania delays the process. It's good to have a long form conversation to return to. I hope this email finds you well. This email finds me almost incapacitated, but I won't be, soon. Beckett's reading is full of empathy and wit as always. He's lamenting the narcissism of our times in his introductory speech, and his own gut impulses and the stories that follow give him the proper wherewithal to do so. I see Sean Lynch and others outside. Sean writes something nice on the evening. I see Doomers the next day - the dream logic of my thoughts following this production requiring another letter altogether WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, February 4 From 7pm at Heaven Can't Wait — Cynosure presents the first of a two night fundraiser for Los Angeles, featuring Alex Arthur, Precious Human, Truman Flyer, and more.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QvaR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4e1cff43-2649-4fd5-b2c0-12597c68d64c_1179x639.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SwKw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb9eb097-5814-48e3-9eee-e66c559d15b5_1200x1600.jpeg, Bryan Johnson in, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EgQz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1cb85ea0-de00-4d10-b03e-ae375da5ddef_1179x642.jpeg, something nice on the evening, Heaven Can't Wait, Cynosure
February Dining.
February 10, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, February 3 I think I will spend some nights alone in the apartment, actually, this week. I think I will give myself some peace, then. Yes, this is good, this is what you should do. And I will call David who will be in Paris, and I will see my friends and I will go to school, I will walk across the Williamsburg Bridge by myself in the mornings, I will run sometimes, and write sometimes, and I will be all alone but I will have my friends to see, David to call, and on the weekend there will be my family, and it will all reset me in a way that is pure and nice and I am craving. Ok, tomorrow, then. So, today, then, you begin the morning with the collecting of the self. You have been doing everything one should do, yes - water, lemon, ginger, avocado, salmon, the apartment is messy but not too bad, you are mostly on time, liquor sometimes in excess but you are not a child anymore, not mostly, mostly it's ok. You stay up late, but this is not too bad. You have never spent the night in a house alone before, never, not even once, in a hotel a few times but never in a place that you must enter, unlock, remember to lock again behind you. I'm terrified of many things, really. You might not know this meeting me but then, I give away a lot. I said I had no object permanence. I said this for a while, but I stopped meaning it around April. I stopped saying it around then, too. I have so much object permanence these days. You know this, because you notice how one detail is not as you remember it, and suddenly all you want is for everything, everything, everything to be restored. There was a wonderful dinner last night. The best in a while, really. We returned to The Knickerbocker, and you wonder, then, why you ever go anywhere else - the quiet dark wood dining room, not quite cavernous but certainly not small, the liquor on the grand piano, that huge t-bone steak, enough to serve a family, creamed spinach, french fries with the sauce from the meat au poivre, jazz on Sundays, tea, coffee, no martinis tonight but those are excellent too. Why did we ever go out for small plates? It is so much more special here. Raining, outside. The rain turns to snow. Yellow cab home. It feels nice, yes, to leave things on terms like these. Tuesday, February 4 Silver light in the morning. Ruby say’s - “it’s spring outside,” and I haven’t been waiting for things to melt, but I am not too sad now that this defrosting has started. I am really not too sad today. You wake up, you see silver light, you see curtains, the apartment felt eerie and so you walked over here, there are friends to call, you did not sleep too well but the paralysis has stopped and even this, the drama of it all, the sleep paralysis has stopped, and so this dread of isolation becomes absurd. Bright morning. You walk to get coffee. This spot is called Dreamer, Ruby says. You walk the Williamsburg Bridge. It's warmer this time, busier this time. David calls - there is mayhem in Paris, but he will be ok. Green tea. Lemon loaf. Protein bar. You have stopped being cruel, now you must stop eating sugar. I am very tired today. I don’t mean it to sound all like I’m disassociated. I was, for a moment. I came back down to Earth. I called my dad after Doomers last week. “This is what I'm afraid of,” I said. Then, I told him what I was afraid of. “There's a great show called The Twilight Zone,” my dad said. “I know,” I said. “In The Twilight Zone, there is an episode with a preserved floating brain,” my dad said. “And you watch this disembodied consciousness preserved and stuck forever, and you think, well this is the worst thing imaginable.” “Yes,”I said. “This is what I am afraid of.” It is less the AI of it all being preserved forever in the absence of animal beings that is so scary, I think. More so, it’s this merging with humanity, this always merging merging merging with humanity, and then you are stuck, and then the possibilities become limitless. Wednesday, February 5 Deep familiarity is many different things at many different moments, I am told today. I kind of disagree. I think there is a core of things. Actually, I really disagree. I really think that there is a core of things. New album by Desire today. New dress on my doorstep. I wake up in an apartment that is briefly all mine. Where were you a year ago today, my friends were asking at dinner yesterday. It's a reasonably interesting thing to consider. I like it best when a year ago feels very distant. Me - I was at KGB Bar. A stranger took the photo. I look very morose. In my memory I was very nervous, and also, I was very pleased. On a walk, trying to write, trying to pour out the sludge, seeking clarity - "I do not feel like writing a whole fucking retrospective every time I try to journal," I write. I am sorry all my details seem crude today. Rules for solitude are - pace in circles, pace on the treadmill, do not be combative in conversation with strangers, do not eavesdrop, sometimes you will not like what you hear. They are talking about murder suicide at pilates, the girl at pilates owned an animal shelter and her star employee murder suicided himself and his girlfriend. You know that cute blonde blogger, she is saying. She was the girlfriend. The guy seemed nice. You never know. Rules for solitude are do not listen to these things, stop listening to these things, you’re going to freak out if you keep on listening to these things. Later, I'm only here to pick up a phone charger, but there's a whole wall of people reading poems about bitter cynicism in this conference room. I apologize for my bitter cynicism, the woman reading is saying, and I hate being in these buildings after dark, I hate the corporate flair to these things. Powerade Zero on the desks. I would like to go lurk in a Chinatown basement. I would like to write an Alt Lit Novel. I would like to be very, very rude. "Would you like to read a list of people who have been censored," a woman at this strange event asks me. "Have you seen a phone charger?" I ask the women. "Now is not the time to be nihilistic," Madelyn’s friend told her yesterday, and I’m not nihilistic, and I'm sorry, and I'm really sorry, and I really really really need to leave now. Thursday, February 6 Ice and snow over my glass house this morning. I heard the sharp rain in the night. I am not surprised it froze over. I am enjoying waking up with - nowhere to go, no one to see. I wouldn't enjoy it for long, but it’s not too bad for now. Walking through this empty apartment and the only sound is me, and then ice falling off the roof overhead. It’s not a big deal, really, and I'm acting a little delusional and insane about the weight of it all, but it's just that I have never done this before - woken up in a building with no one to greet me. And I have tucked my phone far away so that the solitude can feel more complete. And I have cleaned the apartment, top to bottom. I've wrapped an old scarf all around my face and then I've gone for a walk - no matter that the streets are frozen. I do like the ice. I'm sorry. I do. I hope it lasts. The night is swirling and nice. I forgot to take note. Friday, February 7 My parents are here, and I am glowing with the happiness of it. Start the day slowly. I’ve become a bit reckless. I’ll do the dishes. I’ll take out the trash. Intrinsically sloppy, and I wish I wasn’t. When left to my own devices, a descent into chaos is not entirely inevitable. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, February 10 From 7pm - 9pm at Virginia’s — Date Time thinks it’s not too late to find a valentine. The three girls behind a new Feed Me featured speed dating endeavor present their second event, featuring two 45 min rounds of mingling. - “Everyone meets everyone, so get ready to meet a lover, a friend, or perhaps an enemy.” $5 ticket required for entry (proceeds to Direct Relief in LA), and 1 drink minimum to date.
Inline links: The Knickerbocker, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jT0J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa10ab1b7-6b48-4c06-bc6b-0fb7469a4168_1179x652.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!P3e1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb447089e-a6d6-4835-9402-c87fbc6be315_1200x1600.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!uWjI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd9c23aa1-399d-4139-beee-26b409d77757_909x608.jpeg, Virginia’s, Date Time, Feed Me featured
Meditations
February 14, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, February 10 I woke up in a storm today. Stormed around the apartment a bit, all mad about who knows what, stormed to the gym for self actualization, skipped all the fashion week stuff last night, the show I was so excited for, the after parties too. I was sick, after all, though I didn’t realize it then. You only realize it now, sunroof windows, all this energy, the contrast visible now that you’re flooded with Being Well. “It’s funny how you live off the provisions David and the world throw at you,” Lara texts me. “Having a hard time articulating a reason/framework to start taking care of yourself more sometimes that isn’t cheesy,” Lara says. “It will be good for your writing because you’ll get more information from the environment and have more energy,” Lara determines. “I actually do care about health, vanity skin etc, I just have cognitive dissonance," I say. And I do. I ordered collagen, after all. This is not so bad. None of it is so bad, really. I am thinking of joining David in Paris. It's a bit of an act of fleeing, though, and it's no good to leave out of some desire for escapism. I am treading very cautiously this morning. A matcha with almond milk and the oatmeal with apples and cinnamon and raisins. The bright sun is melting all the bright snow. They are talking about Aristotle's Ethos Pathos Logos in class today. The only one that matters to me is the Ethos of it all. I believe everything I’m told if I trust the authority of the person telling it to me. I’m all swallowed up in the undiscerning masses. It would be nice to leave New York, yes, but it will be nice to stay here, too. It'll be nice to come back to life right where I've been sleeping. In the evening, my friends arrive. They sit at my kitchen table, and they tell me crazy stories about staying up late and everything that happened in between. I was lonely for a moment, or really, I was just struck by the the being alone of it while he is still away, but then my friends arrived, and the stories were all sparkling and shocking. I know secrets again, now. It's more fun when I have things to hold. Wrapping my hair twice in towels by the open window before bed. It's too cold to keep the window open, but the space heater was drying everything out. Lara left some cocktail shrimp in the fridge, and I drop the tails into the empty Sephora box on the floor. I'll still take out the trash, I am not more disgusting than average. Tuesday, February 11 Coconut oil, beef bone broth, muscovado sugar on a silver spoon for breakfast. There is reason to think this kind of thing will make me become better. I would be very easily indoctrinated into a cult based on the certain determining factors, I forget the exact formula of each trait but I know my balance of each fits the bill; agreeability, desire to belong, etc. I have to stay vigilant. Left to my own devices and I’m half asleep and I’m making potions. I wrote a story in the night. Hologram Girls, I called it. Stupid title but I think this one, yes particularly this one, I imagine I could turn this into a book with just some discipline and a little joie de vivre. Natasha comes over just as I am starting to lose my mind. Just as the snow is starting, too. Snow in the evening, and Natasha is taking photos of me on film. Usually, I wouldn’t like this. Me, at home, on film. Madelyn would have something to say about Lacan and the image of it all. I would have something to say about; I’ve been addicted to deciphering the angles of my face in my mind until they become shapes and forms and pieces beyond recognition. Vanity is so obviously self indulgent, so blatant in its gluttony that it avoids interpretation, becomes silly to give voice to, turns omnipresent. Out Of Your Mind And Into Your Body. You will walk on the treadmill and you will write this sentence until it becomes true. I don’t function well in my own company. That’s the truth of it. Even the most basic things. On film, I wear a dress from Brandy Melville, black tights, barefoot or, the Prada boots my mother found for me cheap at a vintage store in Vermont. The snow hasn’t started yet. I like taking photos at home, and I trust Natasha with the camera. I can’t see my own reflection. It’s fading to blue hour in the greenhouse windows. We will see how this turns out. At drinks, later, with old friends, their Colleague came, and he's talking about how if you are not early you are late. He works in Revenue Recovery, he explains. Like if someone ordered a burger and fries but they forgot to pay for the fries, he would recover that, but for bigger things. For things like a scalpel when they’re doing surgery. “If they lose the scalpel?” I ask. “If they lose the revenue,” he says. I’ve felt very defensive lately. I’ve felt an annoying need to emphasize things like I know what Deloitte is, but barely. I’ve felt an intolerable need to explain things like where a Reading ends and a Party begins. This is the greatest bar in the world, I am told. You can tell, because my vodka soda is actually full of clarified juice. I say something insufferable about how I prefer hotel lobby bars and martinis. We could all go to DCP (Double Chicken Please), someone suggests. Because this, in truth, this DCP is actually the greatest bar in New York. Outside, it’s snowing now. Inside, there are big red orbs on the ceiling and the bartenders keep swinging them around in big sweeping circles. I thought they did it on the hour, I thought they did this like a clock, but the time keeps passing and the orbs keep being set in motion, seemingly at random. There is talk of vulgarity in comedy at our table. There is talk of a probiotic soda brands marketing scandal and the colleague hates influencer marketing, he thinks its immoral, and I’m asking things like the dumbest questions in the whole world like oh but do you think that any marketing really is moral though, and oh but do you think that brands are people, though, and oh my god you can hear your own echos sometimes and you can just want to scream. Outside, the snow is making the street and all its lights become dizzy-like. They pulled the shades down behind me in the window in the restaurant due to the draft, and I wished they hadn’t, but I like it better coming out into this quiet night covered in snow like a quiet surprise. Yellow cab fringed with ice. This will always be lovely. I’ve felt a little more lyrical in my writing lately, and there is nothing wrong with this at times, only at times. Except, the repetition I think, feigns a kind of spirituality I don’t actually have when I am doing things like being on my phone and eating protein heavy processed snacks. Later, returning home, reading more of Augustine’s Confessions to penetrate these skin deep musings. I put the space heater on the floor and I do feel sad now, overwhelmingly so, when I think about how terrible things could come to pass so quickly and how I could just be caught off guard, somewhere on a long walk, somewhere being vain. I sleep downstairs tonight, because I do feel very small, and because there are no shades upstairs to cover all that glass. Lying under all that night sky, you begin to think that it might suck you right in. Wednesday, February 12 After I walk outside this morning, where the thin branches of the trees are still coated in these thin smooth layers of snow even in this early morning sun, and after I go to The Standard for the latte with almond milk, after Libra for the small cookie with tahini and chocolate chips, after class and then the walk home and then the dropping off of laundry and the grocery store and the run in the cold sun, after all of this; David returns from Paris bringing a hairbrush and perfume from Officine Universelle Buly. We are going to go out, but then there's ginger beer and vodka on the kitchen table and the caesar salad pizza from La Vera and then, it's nicer to just stay here. Thursday, February 13 I’m back to listening to the interviews today. I’m not sure what these will become, but there’s a lot of wisdom in other people's words, and a lot of hesitation in my own voice when recorded. There is some existential dread these days, but David says it’s all just math I don’t understand at all, and the apocalypse is not imminent. I disagree sometimes, but I am trying to worry more about things like the State Of My Soul. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Friday, February 14 If I was looking for a last minute dinner reservation tonight, here is where I would go… Knickerbocker Bar and Grill is my favorite restaurant in New York and I’ve lauded it many times before. Classic, old school, not too many frills but still feels tasteful and nice, great t-bone, liquor on the grand piano, jazz on the weekends, etc etc etc. I like this description best - Beckett Rosset on his father dining here: “My father went here for lunch for god knows how many years. He probably consumed hundreds of gin martinis and rum and cokes there. When he died, after the memorial at Cooper Union, the family and close friends, a good thirty or forty people, went there. The owner comped everything. I thought it would not survive covid but clearly it has. Glad to know a new generation has taken to it.”
Inline links: Officine Universelle Buly, Knickerbocker Bar and Grill
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.
From 7pm at Sovereign House — Magdalene Taylor hosts an Arcade Publishing Event, featuring Bruce Wagner, Noah Kumin, Matthew Davis, Emmalea Russo, and David Fishkind. Excellent writers, free drinks, and “something to offend everyone.”
Inline links: Sovereign House, Magdalene Taylor, Arcade Publishing Event
My Glass House
February 25, 2025 · Original source
From 6pm - 8pm at David Peter Francis — ‘Adriana Ramic. Beetle’ opens. A solo exhibition ‘influenced by machine learning, computational ephemera, non-human cognition, and linguistics.’
Inline links: David Peter Francis
WHAT I DID Sunday, February 16 The rain continues turning everything muted and gray, but I am bursting with energy, and I am bursting with the feeling like myself again. Early afternoon - the morning gentle sleet turns to a downpour. David bought a basil plant and he put it by my flowers. Do you notice what is by the flowers, he asks. There are firehook crackers with dill and double cream for lunch. Then, a few more of the same with sliced turkey for dinner. You could be a rock climber, if you wanted. You could be an artist in a really useless and abrasive sense, too. You could spend all your time making art and it could all just pertain to yourself. Only make the most incoherent shit imaginable, and then write some really fire press releases and float on by with that, with obfuscation and with stylish sentiments that conceal your vacancy and lack of meaning. I read an interview that snaps me out of it so quickly. The author is talking about how monks are maybe missing something. If you’re meditating all the time, then you’ve kind of lost a grip on reality. It’s enlightened, maybe, but you lose something if you go so deep into interiority that you turn off exterior reflection altogether. If spiritual leaders have lost the plot, then so too, certainly, have I. I’m going monk mode but it’s just Playing On My Phone. I’m going monk mode but it’s just Publishing My Diaries.1 I walk to Le Dive in the evening. I talk for many hours with my brilliant friend who has much clarity in what she is actually saying when she writes. We talk about how to withhold or not withhold pieces of yourself, and she asks me something about how I reveal so much of myself without worrying about things like people who hate you, or worse, people who stalk you. It’s easy to reveal a lot of your thoughts on things like ice on the window when you have no convictions, I think. I do have some convictions, but I won’t reveal myself here. “It’s a scary wind outside,” David says when I get home. “And we’re in this scary apartment in the sky.” “It’s not too scary,” I say. Monday, February 17 In my dreams last night, they take me to Spring Street Dermatology and they give me a chemical peel, microneedling, they shake me up with electrical currents and I leave feeling burned and new. In real life, the wind is whistling even more in the morning. Bright sun, howling wind. David is starting to think about going to bed for the night just as I am waking up for the morning. David spreads orange marmalade and double cream on toast. “What a wonderful thing,” David says. At the party at Jeans, I get a lychee martini, a cosmopolitan, a vodka soda... it's kind of gross sloshing around a nightclub on a monday night, but after I decided to stop doing things like this, I decided again, to stop hindering all my own fun. They’ve packed us like sardines in this basement tonight, and so I don’t linger long. There is a song, a show, and it’s a good lineup of performers and I’m sorry that I didn’t really pay attention, but I was quite busy and I was sloshing around. I was talking about publishing with a famous Twitter Anon friend of a friend who I ran into at the bar, I was looking for service, I was looking for wifi, I was sitting by coat check because I hate standing at these things, I become extremely untethered standing at these, so I was sitting in the hallway, and I was missing the show. Tuesday, February 18 Asleep by eleven, awake by six, this is all very new for me. There is such hazy blue gray sky lighting up the room through the panes of my glass roof. There is David on the terrace with a cigarette. I have a busy day today, and thank god for that. I've been waiting for momentum, and now it is here. Erin tells me about dinner with the most beautiful girl you know. She lives only off of sponge cake, and she was nicer this time. I’m going to read an Irish gothic novella,” I tell David. “Wait one second,” David says. “I just want to reassure you about the plane crashes.” The reassurance is something all about the role of the dice. The gothic novella is all about the moon and untempered desire. I wasn’t too worried about the plane crashes, really, but it is nice nonetheless to be reminded of Rationalism and Randomness. The gothic novella is supposed to be interesting because it was reinterpreted into a Lesbian Dorm Room Drama in a 2014 Web Series. The gothic novel is interesting to me, because it reads like a fairytale. I like the insularity. I, too, have been possessed by demons in my sleep. I am going to write out my Food Diary now, because I am trying to take stock of these things: celsius, apple, peanut gomacro bar, almond gomacro bar, salmon sushi roll, some bites of David's steak with the crust piece of the baguette and then mint tea and then the dandelion tea too, before I go to sleep. You can talk yourself in circles, but of course the only solution is to consistently live well and to consistently live in a way that you can stand behind. Such a life does not require all this talk talk talk on the topic. Carmilla by Sheridan La Fenu. Illustration from The Dark Blue by D. H. Friston, 1872 Wednesday, February 19 I do not want to write you an essay about what happened. I want instead, to write you a story about the parts I made up. After class and then after lunch, and then after a few other things, because there were a few other things, it is not like I did nothing, but the momentum didn’t really last. After just these few things, there is the space heater and the protein bar and the playing on my godforsaken phone and the rereading of all the fairytales, Carmella, The Wind Boy, I have all these hazy spring stories on my mind. I like the photographs Natasha took of me. In these photographs, I am in my room, and I feel like myself. I think I look like myself, too, and this has never happened before, not really at least, never in a photograph, or at least not since I was very young. It is only seven in the evening. It's not too late to run outside in crystal dusk. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, February 25 From 6pm - 8pm at Hauser & Wirth 18th Street: ‘Dieter Roth. Islandscapes’ opens. I like the looks of this - “Featuring a selection of graphic works, monoprints, multiples and unique pieces spanning from the early 1960s to 1975, ‘Islandscapes’ focuses on Dieter Roth’s printmaking, which accompanied every phase of his life and practice.”
Inline links: 1, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WqgA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F222d6d61-af1b-420c-815d-f55ad052cdc1_1600x1098.jpeg, Natasha, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!s_qb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1cf40838-57f9-4c68-a834-ad4a65ecf108_1600x834.png, Hauser & Wirth
David says: “reading this I do start asking "what is wrong with this girl? What happened? Things seemed great in the last one”
Your Favorite Grifters Favorite Grifter
February 27, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Saturday, February 22 And then, it was a nice few nights. Nothing ever tends to actually go wrong on these nice and glittering nights. And the weekend was nice, and not over yet, even, though I'm being terribly lazy this Saturday morning, acting like I could let the momentum of the past few days carry me for a while, descending into half asleep fog lying on the floor because in my mind I am content, very content, with having already done enough of it all. Everything feels a bit inflamed today or, the day is just slow to start or, there is the clean laundry on the floor that's been overdue to put away and it's starting to spread across the room like clutter or, David says the way that I've been writing about Purity and Routine is a bit Strange and Off Putting or, at least kind of Mentally Ill. "Do you want to be famous," the manager asked me at the party last night and then, before I could respond, "if you want to be famous you should write gossip, not esoteric thoughts on bullshit." "Well I don't really want to do reporting," I had said, which threw the manager for a loop, because I know this manager does not really like reporters very much and here I was suggesting he was implicating me as a journalist, and then he said "not reporting. I’ve been telling Poppy this too, not reporting just gossip and then you'll be famous, dumb bitch!!" "People already do that," I think I said, but then the manager had already walked away. Later, you were telling me those stories about In-Group Feudalism, and I was thinking this is probably what he means by things of gossip, but it wasn't a very good story, and nobody new gets famous anymore, and this isn't something I actually ever wanted in a real sense, or maybe I used to want this, but I have always kind of known myself to be very bad at the sorts of things that people become famous from. And, I disagree that you'll get famous from gossip, anyways. I disagree that these stories are any good at all. Another light snow has started by the afternoon. I thought it might be spring soon, but there's a grayness to this week's frigidity that feels uniquely never ending. a young couple roller bladed on by me on this gray and snowy street on the walk to the bar. Sunday, February 23 "Whenever I see a guy in a Yankees cap I assume it's a cop," David said, of the clearly undercover officer observing the turnstiles at the Bleecker St station.” At the bar, I was playing journalist. They were celebrating an AI software that marketed itself as undetectable as AI, good for cheating in school, or in screenwriting, code, whatever you want, and it was clear they thought more people would be at the party, they bought raspberry lemon Svedka, I was fighting these Florida tech guys for proximity to the only small space heater in the room. "Do you have any moral qualms about what you do?," Allison asked one of the founders; and he said "no, we're building a tool. you can use a hammer to build a house or to kill someone." Then Alison said something like yes but you aren't building artificial intelligence you are building explicitly undetectable artificial intelligence with the express purpose of cheating and then the founders started talking about the overton window and you're in or you're out and they called my boyfriend over to tell him that he needs to work specifically and only in web app development if he wants to survive the AGI and ASI apocalypse. David was all ehh about it, humoring them a bit but then like oh excuse me I'm going to get a drink and never came back, and then the founder said to me, I like him he's disagreeable and not effeminate unlike most of these N-Y-C guys man, but he needs to listen to me about being a web developer because of the overton window and AGI and ASI coming fast. Then I said why do you work in this industry if you think AI development will only have bad implications and the founder said because it's an arms race and you don't want to land on the wrong side of the glass wall. I didn't ask but thought of this later - do you really think AI will respect its creator? Or, does working on an anti academic artificial intelligence cheating software save you from apocalyptic doom? Later, the founders were telling everyone that the next step of their plan is a pivot to building a game connected to some NFT about mentally ill women called SSRI-wives. Later, a few people kept telling me you should talk to the Gen-Z kid, there's a Gen Z kid here and this program does all his homework, and I didn't meet this kid until late in the night when the founder called him over and said "do you know what Urbit is," and the kid said yes, and the founder sighed and said "he's very online." And then they brought in some girls from Miami off the street because they needed more heads, and then these girls on the street were talking about being from Miami and so the founders said want some free drinks and they pulled them into the room, and then the girls were talking to me about Dinner At Kikis and Quitting Her Server Job Even Though She Loves All The Friends She Made. Then, David sent me the company's TrustPilot reviews and it was all things like “TOTAL SCAM” and “took $6000 from my bank account” and he said this is clearly a total grift even from my preliminary research. Then, there was dinner at Forgetmenot, and there was never returning to the Strange Grift Party, and I was going to write a story. I was going to tell you about grifts and technology, but then, well, I am not sure if there is too much left to add. And I’m not sure if I like to think about these things, although the doomerism fades when you quickly find that the cartoonishly evil project was just a hologram all along. Monday, February 24 When I was eighteen years old, I lived in a hostel in Prague by myself in the springtime, and I was so lonely. I would walk to the park everyday and I would lie in the april grass and I would close my eyes and imagine that when I opened them, I would be surrounded by company. I would imagine that I would laugh and grab someone's hand and we would twirl down the streets towards the old town that reminded me of a fantasy land, a true fantasy land because everything there was all made up. McDonalds were housed in historic old buildings and I didn’t understand why the others I worked with would go on runs every morning just to drink more beer on their returns. Prague was a hologram to me too. I liked the people I met and I liked that they were never going to grow up. I had no friends there. Eventually, I did, but in April I was always alone. These days, I am never alone. I was so sleepy yesterday and not in a nice way. I would like to avoid these things. I will drink green tea on the terrace this morning. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO After reading Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1872 novella Carmilla for my Irish Lit class last week, I’ve been feeling big on fairytales and magic. My sister Sylvie is the most magical girl in the world, as well as the most well read. She has offered her list of recommended fairy tales for this letter: Fairy Tales (by Sylvie Pingeon) I try to read a section of Lady Jane Francesca Wilde’s Ancient Legends of Ireland: Music Charms & Superstitions of Ireland with Sketches of the Irish Past every night before I go to bed. It’s a truly magic book that brings fairytales into daily life with spells, remedies, and little bits of fairy advice: “People ought to remember that egg-shells are favorite retreats of the fairies, therefore the judicious eater should always break the shell after use, to prevent the fairy sprite from taking up his lodging therein.” A fairytale self-help book, and I love it. As a child, my favorite book was House Above the Trees by Ethel Cooke Eliot. Everything by Eliot is so special: she writes of wind creatures who look like the wind feels and tree girls who wear skirts made from the leaves of their trees (green in the summer, red in the fall), and the humans who can see these forest people have the clearest eyes around. All her books are like this, but House Above The Trees is my favorite: an eight year old orphan follows a Wind Creature into the forest and is taken in by Tree Mother, who lives in the treetops. A wonderful, fairy adventure ensues. Brothers Grimm is also always great, although Bluebeard gave me nightmares as a child that still sometimes come back. My mom gave me a beautiful copy of Aesop’s Fables for Christmas this year. It’s beautiful but I haven’t read it yet. A lot of second-wave feminists wrote retellings of fairy tales, and I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but I found Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber to be a truly beautiful read. On the topic of AI Grifts, Gabriel Hollis (of Margin for Thought and Microculture) recommends the following articles on Technology and God and Our End Times. All ideas that fall under near debilitatingly large banners, and all topics which Gabriel explores well. To be honest, I need to dive into these pieces with more intensity before I offer any original thoughts, but I will leave you with the links: Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley by Emma Goldberg, for NYT
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!y7LO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff4a60216-3a6a-4640-99b1-3e95af177324_1600x927.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JTRE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03385ed5-b5ac-4cc9-8d10-8542c7ed383e_1600x873.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Yfjy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2217312-7969-4c84-bcb5-e2f349100218_1600x855.png, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1872 novella, Sylvie, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde’s, House Above the Trees, Aesop’s Fables, Angela Carter’s, Margin for Thought, Microculture, Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley
Sunday, February 23 "Whenever I see a guy in a Yankees cap I assume it's a cop," David said, of the clearly undercover officer observing the turnstiles at the Bleecker St station.” At the bar, I was playing journalist. They were celebrating an AI software that marketed itself as undetectable as AI, good for cheating in school, or in screenwriting, code, whatever you want, and it was clear they thought more people would be at the party, they bought raspberry lemon Svedka, I was fighting these Florida tech guys for proximity to the only small space heater in the room. "Do you have any moral qualms about what you do?," Allison asked one of the founders; and he said "no, we're building a tool. you can use a hammer to build a house or to kill someone." Then Alison said something like yes but you aren't building artificial intelligence you are building explicitly undetectable artificial intelligence with the express purpose of cheating and then the founders started talking about the overton window and you're in or you're out and they called my boyfriend over to tell him that he needs to work specifically and only in web app development if he wants to survive the AGI and ASI apocalypse. David was all ehh about it, humoring them a bit but then like oh excuse me I'm going to get a drink and never came back, and then the founder said to me, I like him he's disagreeable and not effeminate unlike most of these N-Y-C guys man, but he needs to listen to me about being a web developer because of the overton window and AGI and ASI coming fast. Then I said why do you work in this industry if you think AI development will only have bad implications and the founder said because it's an arms race and you don't want to land on the wrong side of the glass wall. I didn't ask but thought of this later - do you really think AI will respect its creator? Or, does working on an anti academic artificial intelligence cheating software save you from apocalyptic doom? Later, the founders were telling everyone that the next step of their plan is a pivot to building a game connected to some NFT about mentally ill women called SSRI-wives. Later, a few people kept telling me you should talk to the Gen-Z kid, there's a Gen Z kid here and this program does all his homework, and I didn't meet this kid until late in the night when the founder called him over and said "do you know what Urbit is," and the kid said yes, and the founder sighed and said "he's very online." And then they brought in some girls from Miami off the street because they needed more heads, and then these girls on the street were talking about being from Miami and so the founders said want some free drinks and they pulled them into the room, and then the girls were talking to me about Dinner At Kikis and Quitting Her Server Job Even Though She Loves All The Friends She Made. Then, David sent me the company's TrustPilot reviews and it was all things like “TOTAL SCAM” and “took $6000 from my bank account” and he said this is clearly a total grift even from my preliminary research. Then, there was dinner at Forgetmenot, and there was never returning to the Strange Grift Party, and I was going to write a story. I was going to tell you about grifts and technology, but then, well, I am not sure if there is too much left to add. And I’m not sure if I like to think about these things, although the doomerism fades when you quickly find that the cartoonishly evil project was just a hologram all along. Monday, February 24 When I was eighteen years old, I lived in a hostel in Prague by myself in the springtime, and I was so lonely. I would walk to the park everyday and I would lie in the april grass and I would close my eyes and imagine that when I opened them, I would be surrounded by company. I would imagine that I would laugh and grab someone's hand and we would twirl down the streets towards the old town that reminded me of a fantasy land, a true fantasy land because everything there was all made up. McDonalds were housed in historic old buildings and I didn’t understand why the others I worked with would go on runs every morning just to drink more beer on their returns. Prague was a hologram to me too. I liked the people I met and I liked that they were never going to grow up. I had no friends there. Eventually, I did, but in April I was always alone. These days, I am never alone. I was so sleepy yesterday and not in a nice way. I would like to avoid these things. I will drink green tea on the terrace this morning. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO After reading Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1872 novella Carmilla for my Irish Lit class last week, I’ve been feeling big on fairytales and magic. My sister Sylvie is the most magical girl in the world, as well as the most well read. She has offered her list of recommended fairy tales for this letter: Fairy Tales (by Sylvie Pingeon) I try to read a section of Lady Jane Francesca Wilde’s Ancient Legends of Ireland: Music Charms & Superstitions of Ireland with Sketches of the Irish Past every night before I go to bed. It’s a truly magic book that brings fairytales into daily life with spells, remedies, and little bits of fairy advice: “People ought to remember that egg-shells are favorite retreats of the fairies, therefore the judicious eater should always break the shell after use, to prevent the fairy sprite from taking up his lodging therein.” A fairytale self-help book, and I love it. As a child, my favorite book was House Above the Trees by Ethel Cooke Eliot. Everything by Eliot is so special: she writes of wind creatures who look like the wind feels and tree girls who wear skirts made from the leaves of their trees (green in the summer, red in the fall), and the humans who can see these forest people have the clearest eyes around. All her books are like this, but House Above The Trees is my favorite: an eight year old orphan follows a Wind Creature into the forest and is taken in by Tree Mother, who lives in the treetops. A wonderful, fairy adventure ensues. Brothers Grimm is also always great, although Bluebeard gave me nightmares as a child that still sometimes come back. My mom gave me a beautiful copy of Aesop’s Fables for Christmas this year. It’s beautiful but I haven’t read it yet. A lot of second-wave feminists wrote retellings of fairy tales, and I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but I found Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber to be a truly beautiful read. On the topic of AI Grifts, Gabriel Hollis (of Margin for Thought and Microculture) recommends the following articles on Technology and God and Our End Times. All ideas that fall under near debilitatingly large banners, and all topics which Gabriel explores well. To be honest, I need to dive into these pieces with more intensity before I offer any original thoughts, but I will leave you with the links: Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley by Emma Goldberg, for NYT
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JTRE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03385ed5-b5ac-4cc9-8d10-8542c7ed383e_1600x873.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Yfjy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc2217312-7969-4c84-bcb5-e2f349100218_1600x855.png, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1872 novella, Sylvie, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde’s, House Above the Trees, Aesop’s Fables, Angela Carter’s, Margin for Thought, Microculture, Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley
52 Notifications From Hell
March 07, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, February 24 David's friend wore a shirt that said RESIST COCAINE last night, and he made us steak, spinach, cashews, wine. It was lovely, imbibing on the floor in this smokey room. And there are many grand plans, and I believe most of them will come true, and I was struggling to begin the day but now the evening floats on and on all weightless. "C. said the best thing about living with me was the blade runner type atmosphere created by all the smoke from my steak fixation," David's friend says. And there is a lot of smoke, and it is in a nice way. A cozy night and I was home not too late in truth although it felt later than it was, slipping onto the couch and falling into black sleep the second we arrived back at the apartment. The falling asleep was nice too, and more annoying was waking up at two, four, six am and then you decide it's late enough. The day begins. I was writing by hand during this wistful restless sleep last night - notes of little coherence, notes of: I am so lucky to have been raised in environments of normalcy. not regarding aesthetics even but regarding, having normal fucking morals, seeking to live a life that is good, avoiding the gamble of turning insane or, evil. The guidelines that compose a moral compass are blurrier in general these days, but I should seek more of this, the normalcy that is. I should not crave chaos in this way. I should not resent anyone who seeks tranquility, politeness, who seeks to sleep and wake early. But I like this other thing too, this sense of a fugue state, flow state, whatever. It's utterly consuming. In the real world, I am trying to articulate how detached I am sometimes. Either that, or I'm trying to make sure you don't catch on. I'm not sure if all of this is good or bad. I'm becoming smarter and more Serious and I'm very sincere in wanting to make good works and be conscious of the state of my body and soul and the state of yours too and also, and I hope I'm not becoming too annoying. Tuesday, February 25 I tried to work with video this morning, a return to my roots as a health and wellness vlogger, but it mostly made me want to kill myself. I smoked my last cigarette ever last night by the open window, by the basil plant, David didn’t get home until late and I was having fun with my old canon G7X and with my cigarette and then I tried to film a conversation this morning, and it made the whole conversation so stilted and dull, I think it ruined the conversation, really, and so now I never want to document anything visually ever again. I thought I was going to pass out at the gym, but I didn’t. I thought I was going to scream because David keeps borrowing that wonderful yellow and navy rain jacket that my dad found washed up in the beach, and I don’t want my boyfriend parading all around New York in my special jacket, even though it doesn’t fit me, even though I never wear it, I don’t care, I was feeling possessive. And then the sun comes out, and so Natasha and I spend the morning at Fanelli Cafe in the sun. Coffees until I feel even more sick but it’s not in the worst way, And then at night, there is the birthday at Kenka. Oh, David says, the BDSM Japanese place in the East Village, and it’s true, yes, that when you arrive, there are the automatic shopping mall style sliding doors and the mannequin of the woman bound and gagged and the cotton candy machine. And it's on that crazy street in the East Village with all the halloween stores. The girls next to me are talking about shooting their movie. And we'll need skeletons, they are saying, where are we going to get skeletons? I think about my fathers collections of strange bones, wondering if I can find anything to contribute, but (most) of those bones are not human, and he comes by them in strange and obscure places regardless, and then I think about suggesting the strange halloween stores down the street, but I’m eavesdropping, really, and they come to these conclusions all on their own. Party City, they are saying. We can just get the skeletons at Party City. Wednesday, February 26 I wish I was a bit more consistent in keeping the promises I make. The promises to myself mostly but there are promises to others, sometimes, too. And there is this duality of desire for nostalgia and acceleration and I find them both repugnant on the larger level but then I see them both in myself, so strongly in myself, all these distance edges of extremities so rawly on display within my own mind, which I have been trying to have integrity with, btw. And it hasn't been so bad, really. There was walking eight miles in sunshine today. The schoolyard animal cookie ice cream from Morgensterns and I order it with the lemon jam and sometimes cherries. There have been a few false starts. Which is why, I think, I've been ranting so much about the ebb and flow of it all, but there is equilibrium, too. Some proximity to this equilibrium, at least. Thursday, February 27 Matthew imagines a situation and he tells it to David wherein; David is in heaven, and I am in hell, but in this version of hell, they let me keep my phone. “and she’ll ruin heaven,” Matthew tells David, because she’ll just keep texting you, “it’s so warm down here David, they made it too warm down here!!!” The other part of this joke, Matthew explains to David, is that in this heaven, “you’ll be surrounded by beautiful, adoring, women, but there will just be this barrage of texts from Chloe, constant, never ending, about how awfully terribly warm it is down there in hell.” The cosmic joke of it all, of course, is that our varyingly unpleasant respective situations in this hypothetical story will both, unfortunately, be utterly eternal. Last night was the night for Being Freaked Out. Tonight is the night for Being Calm As Can Be. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Friday, March 7 I missed the Foreign Domestic opening this week, but I am planning to visit God alone loves all things and he loves only himself before the festivities of the evening. Works by Alex Both, Joan Dillon, Kylie Mitchell, TINMANTIS.
Inline links: Foreign Domestic, God alone loves all things and he loves only himself
Rules for Clarity
March 12, 2025 · Original source
And I acted a little crazy last week and there's the tendency to come to gasping for air, make all things new, make all things pure, I'm walking quickly on the treadmill and I am telling you how soon we'll find all things transformed. In the afternoon, in the street, my friend says my name and I jump. We’ve been floating all around hologram world today, you see, and you don’t see me, and I don’t see you, and then so it goes. We begin to walk along, my friend and I, and she tells me about the visions, delusions, the hypothesis, the fish market. My friends are very lucid when they tell me very strange stories. They are very lucid when I respond all high strung. "My Confession is that I removed myself from the organ donor registry," I told my table mates at the Cracks and Pomo dinner. They've seated me with the astrologers, a nice young writer who also knows very few people here, a few friends of David's, a few friends from the orbit of KGB Bar, and they are enthusiastic about my proclamation. This is a good evangelizing cause, one of my table mates says, and I say oh well I'd feel a bit bad if I evangelized people off the organ donor registry, but I was just thinking about the purgatory of the soul and I can't risk it. My table mates reassured me; most people don't think about this enough. Monday Everything was chaos, really, and I got nothing done for days and then I sprung to life on Sunday all I’m-All-New-Like, and what a whirling Sunday it was, stretching gently running fast confessing not at Church but confessing lots at KGB Bar, becoming, no, reverting back to I’m-All-Exactly-The-Same by the time it was past midnight. And I should have gone home earlier, obviously. And there’s some decadence in these worlds I immerse myself in, or not the worlds so much as in me, me within these worlds, the way I react to them. And so there’s no one but myself to blame, really. But I do blame myself. And I am Actually new today. Or, at least, I Know things now. They are talking about songbird soup in my Irish Literature class. I’m zoning out, honestly, and then I zone back in because I hear them talking about “songbird soup” and it sounds so beautiful, I really perk up when I hear this thing about Songbird Soup. But then the next thing they say is songbird soup was where they would literally net three hundred song birds and boil them all up, and it was a symbol of indulgence, it was a symbol of grotesque decadence and a symbol of ounee. Songbird soup was the illness, and wild whimsical lovely Ireland was the cure. And here I was only perking up because I wanted to guzzle down some songbird soup. And here I am thinking about myself again. Tuesday Rules for clarity are: a long walk and methylene blue and if you have vertigo then just go home, because you can’t fight through vertigo, storming through manhattan, all these bright lights will just make you spin. I like alcohol when it is like a potion. You drink an elixir and then things become a bit brighter and more glimmering and shiny and light but, I think how the body reacts to alcohol can be indicators of other things. I’m trying to treat this like a blessing . If I drink alcohol and the potion works opposite and I become sleepy and forlorn and my face turns all red, then it’s like a hack to knowing things about the state of myself. You can know these things by noticing reactions more generally, but I have not been too perceptive. And reactions are only a hack if you act accordingly. I am trying to think of things in very simple terms like, I am reacting to this potion badly these days so, I will try different forms of alchemy, instead. I get to the party early today and the plan is: I will help wash the fruits before the guests arrive. "you going to wash those fucking vegetables or not?" M. says, when I arrive. "very wifey. Is that the most you've ever cooked?" He's right, really. I ordered avocados on this app on my phone right to my doorstep today. You eat foods whole. You try to walk in the sun to collect these ingredients, though it isn't always possible. It really is that simple. Sunday And then, there are other things too. Another party, this one in an Italian restaurant that is far too crowded for the occasion but fun nonetheless. The opera later, the opera this weekend which is good, nice, the set design of the Moby Dick opera is quite impressive but the whole ordeal is a bit much, the ushers and the $27 bad champagne and I was kind of a bitch because David got a double shot of whisky and the opera people thought he said double shot of espresso because who does that at an opera, and then he said no I meant whisky, and then I said oh my god David, in a really bitchy way. Standing in this weird room being weird and judging everyone else. But we stayed for the second act on principle, no one really wanted to, but we can't become people who chug whiskey and leave the opera early. We can't become, in other words, deeply unpleasant people. And it’s deeply pleasant in the morning. And I’ll find myself back at godforsaken KGB Bar in a few days, I presume. I'll find myself back in sparkly sunny strange El Salvador in a week or two. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, March 12 From 6pm - 8pm at Anton Kern Gallery — Love Poems opens; a group exhibition curated by Chris Martin.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bekJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F22c1b498-e1f2-4d4d-b66b-eee5819a1478_1200x1600.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7YdW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5e9e1a90-d265-49f9-b56f-d6dced143170_1200x1600.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_0z5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F907d5a08-6aa8-4ad3-b62c-ae867e723c74_1600x1200.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cDBt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70c27da6-5588-4b2c-a1dd-e0113a11f50f_1600x1200.jpeg, Anton Kern Gallery
Sunday And then, there are other things too. Another party, this one in an Italian restaurant that is far too crowded for the occasion but fun nonetheless. The opera later, the opera this weekend which is good, nice, the set design of the Moby Dick opera is quite impressive but the whole ordeal is a bit much, the ushers and the $27 bad champagne and I was kind of a bitch because David got a double shot of whisky and the opera people thought he said double shot of espresso because who does that at an opera, and then he said no I meant whisky, and then I said oh my god David, in a really bitchy way. Standing in this weird room being weird and judging everyone else. But we stayed for the second act on principle, no one really wanted to, but we can't become people who chug whiskey and leave the opera early. We can't become, in other words, deeply unpleasant people. And it’s deeply pleasant in the morning. And I’ll find myself back at godforsaken KGB Bar in a few days, I presume. I'll find myself back in sparkly sunny strange El Salvador in a week or two. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, March 12 From 6pm - 8pm at Anton Kern Gallery — Love Poems opens; a group exhibition curated by Chris Martin.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cDBt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F70c27da6-5588-4b2c-a1dd-e0113a11f50f_1600x1200.jpeg, Anton Kern Gallery
Here, There, Everywhere
March 17, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, March 9 I’ve been here, there, everywhere but there’s been no conviction to it. Yes, yes, take me to the opera now. I don’t pretend to think the things I don’t believe, but you rewire your brain away from nihilism, you spend a few years working on this task, really, and when all is said and done, resuscitation complete, you find in its place… an alarming passivity. That can’t be right. This week, I’ll be drawing new conclusions. Lying in bed and David is saying “I think giving up drinking is the solution and I think I’m ready to do that and, I might also take up eastern meditation.” “We're doing all this shit because we’re insincere swindling motherfuckers, we have no beliefs, our only beliefs are pleasure,” David is also saying. And I’m saying uh uh. And now David is saying, “put that in your substack, put in ‘i think i'm going to take up eastern meditation as well.” And now he shows me all these photos of his strange friends from the strange Decentralized Networking Platform stuff, or maybe these are just friends from parties or maybe, really, there is not much difference. But the friends are wearing big T-Shirts and flipping each other off, and David introduces me to the friends in the images like a cast of characters in a movie, or maybe like you introduce people in Real Life. Here is M. Here is C. and I say I know, I know, I know who these people are but no, I haven’t seen the photos yet, and so I let him scroll. You should also know: the sun returned today. Monday, March 10 In my Dialectics of NightLife piece that the new-ish magazine asked me to write, I am not sure how much of it all to include. "I don't include things like throwing things across the room and screaming," I told the girl at a party last week when she asked me how to be intimate online. "The throwing things and screaming is the most interesting part though," she said, which is what people always say when I share a disturbing detail from my life as an example of something I don't write about. I read something recently that has been making me reconsider my approach. Not to the nightlife piece. The approach to El Salvador, more. The approach in general, really. I am intrigued by things because they are strange. I find myself in a lot of situations as such. I don't want to cast judgments - this is bad or, this is good. But I think too, one can say yes, this part is good and this part is bad but I am not here because of good or bad, I am here because I was intrigued because this is strange. You are pretending that you just woke up and found yourself here one day, lying in the palm grove, lying on bitcoin beach, surrounded by red light and zyn and mastic gum of the gods. And maybe you were just kind of placed here. In another sense, you kind of sought this out. In another sense, you exercised a tremendous amount of agency and borderline being a stalker sometimes to then find yourself where you are now. Once I arrived, I was asked to stay, and then what was there left to say? Yes, ok I suppose I will then. This among other things is why I would be easily indoctrinated into a cult. I am not at present, in a cult. I've tried my luck with a few, but nothing quite has made the cut. Not the cut of Drawing Me In. The cut of Qualifying As A Cult. I'm going to a crypto conference tonight, David tells me and as if by instinct, as if like a child, residual panic at being left behind, at being left all alone in the first spring breeze, knees tucked up to my chest, watching the sunset on the terrace and being struck in a visceral way by how much time I continue to have - as if all of this would be so bad I pipe right up: "can I come??" And David says "are you interested in {technical stuff i don't understand} and I say no but I'm interested in crypto culturally, for the El Salvador piece. The guy giving the lecture is wearing a shirt that says something like "hey nerds" "what's up nerds" something like that, but I forgot to write it down. Sometimes, these conferences are fun because there are lots of characters and drinks and sometimes sparkly little powders though I don't like to really take these but it's fun when others are. This conference is a real conference capital C though. Or, a "meet up”, they say. Soho WeWork location and all. Sugar free red bull and gatorade and pizza and all. There is no fun to be had here. And so we make our way all through shiny Nolita instead. Tuesday, March 11 The things I overhear begin the process of reconsidering all over again. You confess that the knee jerk reaction is one of possession over things you do not even want. You confess that you do not want to tell that story even if this particular story is one that has always been yours. We go to Tiny Bar, and then the Odeon. Earlier, it was like they were doing a character study in the things you overheard. Wednesday, March 12 I went to St Dymphna tonight, but I didn't hear a single reading and I didn't watch Heat (1995) when I got home, even though David had it playing on the projector, even though he kept on playing scenes of significance over and over and over again. This is me and you, he kept saying, when some girl in some house with some glistening pool in Los Angeles calls her husband names like gambling addict and child the years keep passing by, and then the husband screeches off through Hollywood in a nice sleek car. It's not us, really, but this wouldn't be so bad. I want to party beautifully forever, David said a while ago. The key part being: beautifully. Maybe this is how people party in Los Angeles. This isn't really how people party in New York. And I should have gone to Poetry Project, to the after party for the Anne Imhoff show which I am guilty to admit I never saw in the first place and now it's too late, to the club, maybe. It's not that I worry what I missed, it is just that time passes faster when I am not here there everywhere, and I like it best when time slows down. In my dreams, my consciousness can take one second and turn it into one year. Here are the songs tonight. And the shoes are the shearling style cowboy boots my grandmother gave me from her closet last thanksgiving. Love For Sale - Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4_QR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F600419e6-7163-4b25-809e-9aeb40bb7501_1179x658.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!v5mw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F84a58846-8c13-47c2-82bf-a7773d53ae96_1179x653.jpeg, Love For Sale - Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga
Tuesday, March 11 The things I overhear begin the process of reconsidering all over again. You confess that the knee jerk reaction is one of possession over things you do not even want. You confess that you do not want to tell that story even if this particular story is one that has always been yours. We go to Tiny Bar, and then the Odeon. Earlier, it was like they were doing a character study in the things you overheard. Wednesday, March 12 I went to St Dymphna tonight, but I didn't hear a single reading and I didn't watch Heat (1995) when I got home, even though David had it playing on the projector, even though he kept on playing scenes of significance over and over and over again. This is me and you, he kept saying, when some girl in some house with some glistening pool in Los Angeles calls her husband names like gambling addict and child the years keep passing by, and then the husband screeches off through Hollywood in a nice sleek car. It's not us, really, but this wouldn't be so bad. I want to party beautifully forever, David said a while ago. The key part being: beautifully. Maybe this is how people party in Los Angeles. This isn't really how people party in New York. And I should have gone to Poetry Project, to the after party for the Anne Imhoff show which I am guilty to admit I never saw in the first place and now it's too late, to the club, maybe. It's not that I worry what I missed, it is just that time passes faster when I am not here there everywhere, and I like it best when time slows down. In my dreams, my consciousness can take one second and turn it into one year. Here are the songs tonight. And the shoes are the shearling style cowboy boots my grandmother gave me from her closet last thanksgiving. Love For Sale - Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga
Inline links: Love For Sale - Tony Bennett, Lady Gaga
Caledonia - Dougie MacLean It is blue hour dusk and we are having a dinner party. And my life has never been sweeter. There are other things too, but this is the thing to return to. David is going to make a brilliant green extract, he tells me. This is not for tonight (tonight is potato leek soup) but this is for later. This is for when he makes the halibut and the fingerling potatoes WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, March 17 From 6pm - 10pm at Jean’s — Loser’s returns, with guinness chocolate cake, irish cocktail specials, green cinnamon rolls, and stuffed cabbage. You better wear green!!!
Inline links: Caledonia - Dougie MacLean, Jean’s, Loser’s
El Salvador
March 31, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Thursday, March 26 El Salvador has taken me out of myself, and I'm glad for that. It's been a different type of writing, too. Exacerbated proximity, and my notes have nothing to do with Me. I’m going to tell you something about Network States. Not here, though. Different forms. I don't want to write too much, now because I am writing something different about all of this. I am doing some reporting, for once. In San Salvador, there is the hacker house - it was other things before, but this is what it is now. Orange art deco, white car at night streaking down the highway, coconut stands and pupuseria and low visibility closer to the airport. “The fast foods signs here remind me of idiocracy (2006),” David is saying, as we near Zona Rosa, a reference to the cartoonish nature of this one low strip, though we pass through the land of the Big Food Boom quickly, then it’s moss and hills and dewy air, quiet night. Then, there's the turn through San Benito, the roads up through El Escalón, the guards at the gate but there's not much need for that anymore, and you could blow right through those flimsy gates anyways, on foot or, with a car if that is what you really set your mind to. It's mossy roads up Calle Norte, plants on the side of the road that are pink and vibrant green. Like animations, almost, I tell David. It's like a compound when we get to the house. Smooth high walls mountainside compound or, it could be like a compound if it wasn't all so opened up. An open air compound and it's all built into the hills. The living room opens up onto the terrace. Stone fountain wall beneath the arched stairway, stone stairway into the hill. I can drift into the pool that extends out over all of it, over the edge of the garden, yes, but it feels like it extends over the whole of San Salvador too. Drift into the pool and you can think about spilling over the edge. You can think about what would happen if the tile walls levitated away and water merged with air; you were taken out too far. Logical conclusion in these moments over ridden by a very strong feeling of; there would be no splattering on those rocks below. The strong feeling suggesting: you could just float away. "There was heat lightning last summer over the volcano," I tell David's friend. "Heat lightning isn't real," David's friend says. "Distant lightning from storms over the volcano that you could see in the dry heat," I corrected myself. No heat lightning now, but you can see the population density of San Salvador, even the areas beyond San Salvador, quite clearly from here. It's mapped out in clusters of light, they become more sparse and shimmery the further away you look. They disappear entirely by the mountain's eventualities and then, it's a big moon hovering above all the rest of it. You can still see the outline of the mountains cast in the glow of the moon. And then the rest is my journalism. I’m sorry. The rest is still secret, the rest until we’re on the coast. On the coast - and I am on the coast now, it's diet coke and coconut water and ceviche at Le Garten. We go to the Bitcoin Farmers Market first. They're keeping all Quiet Tension contained in Tecoluca now. El Zonte is coming to life. Hippy Dippy Crypto Optimism. Even Bitcoin Berlin is evangelizing here. There are kittens up for adoption, and a small dutch woman selling lemonade except it's just butterfly flower and water and lime. No seed oils here. No network spirituality once we sneak past the restaurant and down to the black sand beach. The currents here are crazy. The undertow could sweep you up and spit you right back out somewhere in the Pacific, somewhere down the coast, it could turn in a U-shaped formation and it could grind you into pulp on the rocks. From the black sand shore, the rocks are shrouded in mist. It's like a fairytale, really. David marched right into a pack of wild dogs last night and they all lunged viciously. Stem Cell therapy at Mizata down the coast, and we just might go. They had their first conference here, also, I am told. There will be people to talk to. There will be people who can tell me how to make things last forever. How to become a genius. I don't want to be immortal but if I did, it wouldn't be so I could act in opposition to all the forces of bodily and neurological degradation and come out unscathed. In my immortality purgatory, things just stagnant, then. Complete harmony with the powers that be and in the place of time you find: stasis. I missed the book club in New York. The book club on the seven volume Danish series wherein, time freezes but our lady continues on. The same day over and over and over but our protagonist's hair and nails grow and, presumably, she could even get wrinkles. Aspirations towards a journey towards immortality feel very combative, to me. Test fate when you can and emerge victorious. This feels like an urge I can understand, one I would understand better if I were a boy but I still get it now. You won't win, though, and in the meantime, my hedonism, hedonism for me, makes me feel very very sad. After they told me at Garten Hotel that the cabana was not for me, we moved to Boca Olas. Boca Olas in El Tunco. El Tunco being, where you party. I ordered a blue margarita at the swim up bar. I am on vacation now. My notes are good. The sculptor liked the concepts of Palestra last summer, because when weird people seek exile together, then special things happen. He liked these concepts too, because he is a futurist, and because he says he was cancelled on the premise of prejudice against force and form. David's friend says that the second anyone starts showing delusional and insane tendencies you need to cut them loose along with anyone who doesn't see things clearly. He speaks in language that is intentionally obfuscated sometimes. I am unsure what clarity means to him. On vacation, after I order a blue margarita, David says, "that's a real drunk bitch drink to get.” I say, “it’s just that I like anything that’s blue. This is a weird entry. I am omitting too many details and then randomly inserting others and I’m sorry if this all seems crass. I was not writing in this way this week. I was writing something else. Bitcoin missionaries. I was writing about The Network State. It’s the end of the high season. Plane back to New York. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO In El Salvador In San Salvador, I stayed at a hacker house in the hills, except for one night, where we stayed at Il Buongustaio. Il Buongustaio is where we stayed the whole time in August - Roman looking white marble arches in a sweet garden, and a formal-ish dining room that bleeds into the open air, humid breeze. The rooms are very nice, each one quite spacious and sparse in a chic way, and each one opening up to a private garden. I saw a jaguarundi here. Nature is healing, they told me back at the airbnb, when I first relayed this jaguarundi story.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!X6Vn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa62329cf-e1a7-472f-a34e-611826574e2e_1600x1200.jpeg, Il Buongustaio
Live Diary.
April 04, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Thursday, March 27 Midnight in New York, I'm taking stock of my glass apartment in the sky. I brought back nine dresses from El Salvador - eight old ones, one black tennis dress from El Tunco. All to be washed. Open the window. There is spring breeze now, all of a sudden, really, but I've been growing accustomed to real heat. These things I used to hate - dense hot air, beating sun, a day that stretches on under direct natural light, no end, no plans.... I would suddenly like to return to this, actually, over frigid and clipped stories about foggy northern coastlines and other things in that vein. Over stories about New York, and other things in that vein. David has stayed in San Salvador, and then, Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. It would have been basically free for me to come and yes I have commitments here but not too many if we're being really honest. I would have become kind of a freak after three whole weeks in airbnbs that are calling themselves "hacker houses," though, is the main issue. And, I wanted to do laundry and stretch in the spring breeze, open the window, set an alarm. It would be so easy for me to untether the physical circumstances of my whole life, these days. It would be easy to have distance from New York, as the main thing, but distance from physicality more generally, too. I've done it before. Honestly, I'm not eighteen anymore, I don't think it makes sense for me to do it again. I will probably stop being so strange and vague once I have even one conversation with my friends back in New York. For now, it is very strange to be alone. Very strange to walk around even a small space, that even only temporarily, is belonging just to me. The past few weeks have been about eclipsing interiority with observation. Floating in realms that are foreign. Not El Salvador, even. The hacker house stuff more. The dialogue of it all, more. The other reason I am here, home, abandoned visions of a hologram of Santa Teresa and also I already really miss my boyfriend - well there was responsibility and laundry and the reading and the stories to finish but also, the lunar eclipse played a role for sure. Something about the Earthquakes and Volcanoes. The floods and the fights. Seek less direct attention from that vivid piercing beaming beating sky. Seek solid ground, I saw someone say online. So, I did. I'm back in stupid dumb New York. Window open. You can barely feel all that fresh air. Friday, March 28 I do go for a walk in the morning, and I do still love New York, I decide. I want to have very delicate arms and boundless energy. I want to have tremendous discipline in a way so as to elicit joie de vivre, and also paths of clarity. The brain fog is so bad today. In the middle of the night, the jet lag woke me up, and I hate sleeping alone in this apartment. I'm sorry, I know I’m being a child but I hate it, the emptiness, when I wake up from paralysis, there are often moments of brief delusion. Alone, glass house, I have to talk myself down. I’ve tried to bring myself to life, today - long walk, two protein bars, slice of papaya, sushi roll for dinner, diet coke and cigarette, make a Vlog, make a Call. David had sleep paralysis, too, last night, he tells me on the phone. This is weird, because usually, this is a plight that is just for me. In real life, there was a creepy elderly woman occupying the hacker house in El Salvador, too. “I started a magazine last year,” she told me, when I told her I was a writer. “Oh, cool, about what?,” I asked her. “I don’t remember,” she told me. Blank gaze. Empty eyes. She would sometimes walk through our room while I slept, and one time I woke up to her passing by, vacant glance, I was obviously shocked, she looked obviously pleased. “How are ya, Love?” she said. The word “love” here, carrying a lot of the weight in making the indecent violation of space a lot creepier. “It’s fun, isn’t it?,” she told David’s friend, while he was doing the dishes. “Turning the water on and off is fun, it’s all fun, isn’t it?” She had referred to herself as a refugee, in El Salvador. From where, I had asked her. From Canada, she had said. A real eccentric freak, and in David’s dream, he wakes up to her sneaking up behind him, looming over him, it’s all fun isn’t it. She says sinisterly: “do you know what I think?” Then, in his dream, he felt her weight bend the bed springs and begin to smother him. Lunar eclipse. New moon. I find this dream ominous enough that I begin to become very concerned. You have to get out of there, I tell David. I'm leaving tomorrow anyways, he reminds me. Saturday, March 29 I spent the night last night reading at Tense and it was really lovely. Kansas Bowling reading and Valley Latini doing a hip hop show and Beckett Rosset on the Providence Hotel and me on half formed thoughts on the half complete piece I am writing on Techno Spirituality and El Salvador. I’m back in Real Life, and I don't regret it. I spent the morning by myself working on my edits. David is still traveling, and I am being more normal about it this time. In jet lagged fugue state, I burned the kettle down to a lump of molten plastic, not on purpose, obviously. I called my dad who's moral judgment I trust in full, so this clarifies a lot of things. I forgot how much I like running really really really fast. Whenever I am craving the extremes, I should access them through lots of sprints. The wind is crazy today. The wind has everyone whooping and hollering through the streets. I'm making TikToks again. I don't care. There are worse evils or, rather, you can leverage anything for evil if you really want and honestly, I am just trying to have lots of fun. Some of you are awfully pretentious for being addicted to things like Ketamine and Feeld. Not me. I don’t like drugs, and I have a soulmate. It is just as bad if not worse to be addicted to your phone as it is to anything else, but I’m regulating my time, and I’m microdosing my slop - or so I tell myself. Sunday, March 30 I order uber eats groceries at midnight, and then it's like celsius and chicken just washes up at my door. I don't like this. Chemicals, aspartame, the dissolution of the social fabric, really. How these things just materialize when you want to actualize some gross borderline animalistic whim. Craving. Diet Blackberry Pepsi. I would not like to live anywhere but New York City, or really anytime but now when I think it through on a very personal and very literal level. But there is something here that I increasingly am wary of as mere hallucination. There is much to consider. I am trying to be very energetic which, really, is the feeling that I increasingly cast as synonymous with Health. We went to Bacaro for dinner last night, then to Clockwork, later. “Do you know about how to get dinner for free,” some girl sitting next to my friend and me said. Then, she explained the concept of Club Promoters. Yeah I know, I said. I didn’t say it in a rude way. I just told her that I already knew, which I already did. My energy feels back in a way that feels very True today. Before I left for El Salvador, I was getting in the habit of killing time. Looking at an hour and wishing it over. I don’t want to quantify anything. What would happen if I never rushed a second again? This is what I’m trying to figure out. What would happen if I never rushed a second again? This is what I’m trying to figure out. Monday, April 1 My mind was reeling so fast in my Irish Literature class this evening. I started flicking through Internet Web Applications at warpspeed. I made some calls. I didn’t go crazy. “Saying no is a far more reliable path to avoiding sin than saying yes”, I heard someone say, through my fog, through the haze - that snapped me out of it quite quickly. “What if you literalize that, and just say no to everything?” a quiet girl across from me asked. I wrote this part down - “JUST SAY NO TO EVERYTHING!!!!” It was humid, heavy, soon-to-be-hot spring, today, in New York. I lost my head. Truly. I became very braindead very quickly, today. I recovered as best I could. It’s the way these things always go. Unmoored from the interactions you’ve been taking for granted, you’ve been alone with your thoughts and suddenly, you’ve found yourself thinking Nothing At All, and Saying A Lot Out Loud And Saying A Lot Online. You realize, suddenly, how wrong this all is, and then you become briefly concerned that maybe, suddenly, it is already too late for you. Or maybe it isn’t too late after all.. Water on the windowsill. I remember spring two years ago, a taxi cab from Chelsea down to where the East River runs near the Lower East Side. I wore a yellow dress and I ran like the wind from the river to the hotel bar. The fires. The maggots. It was that day in New York when it felt like cosmically, biblically, something bad was probably about to happen. The Seven Plagues. The air was thicker and hotter, then. I am thinking about that day because I was braindead on the Internet then, too. Celsius, protein bar, things had begun all thick and ugly and then I’d been whisked away into a big black car, shuttled to the bar at Nine Orchard, my friends convincing me to stick around and then I did, I stuck around for a while, I never really left after that, come to think of it. “It’s Deep Tech Week in New York,” Shannon tells me, today - whatever that means. She sends me an event as such, and I investigate the schedule for the rest of this week from there. Deep Tech Week is a week of events about Tech, and they added the word Deep in front of it to make it seem more cool, I realize quickly. “Turning Science Fiction into Reality,” the text on the website says, and I don’t really like the sound of that. I find that premise, as strictly a premise, material reality aside, even, to be nearly cartoonishly evil. But, I suppose I’ll try to be less pedantic. I eat a sugar cookie (gluten free). Two protein bars from that new brand DAVID. A brand activation crispy sandwich from Joe And The Juice. The packaging is orange instead of that usual nice pastel pink. KEVIN DURANT, the packing says. It is nine pm, and I am suddenly ravenous. Good. Looks like I got my corporeality back. I really was planning to go to the Deep Tech Party tonight, but the rain started in an instant, in the exact instant I was set to leave, really. Like it’s trying to communicate some form of serendipity, reason, warning, whatever. Monday is the day where I let myself get every last thing done on my phone. My eyes burn. It rots the soul. My week continues and I become much more particular with myself. Tuesday, April 2 It’s not that I mind being kind of exhibitionist, even, but I can’t control the feedback loop and I start to drive myself mad. Taking stock of the state of the union like THINGS THAT ARE "IN": Swimming
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!d8Mb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e326f20-1685-4e59-8b0e-e29ce386a22e_950x406.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Yntp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F160f61ba-48c8-4c23-92f8-600a970e8eb0_708x484.png
Monday, April 1 My mind was reeling so fast in my Irish Literature class this evening. I started flicking through Internet Web Applications at warpspeed. I made some calls. I didn’t go crazy. “Saying no is a far more reliable path to avoiding sin than saying yes”, I heard someone say, through my fog, through the haze - that snapped me out of it quite quickly. “What if you literalize that, and just say no to everything?” a quiet girl across from me asked. I wrote this part down - “JUST SAY NO TO EVERYTHING!!!!” It was humid, heavy, soon-to-be-hot spring, today, in New York. I lost my head. Truly. I became very braindead very quickly, today. I recovered as best I could. It’s the way these things always go. Unmoored from the interactions you’ve been taking for granted, you’ve been alone with your thoughts and suddenly, you’ve found yourself thinking Nothing At All, and Saying A Lot Out Loud And Saying A Lot Online. You realize, suddenly, how wrong this all is, and then you become briefly concerned that maybe, suddenly, it is already too late for you. Or maybe it isn’t too late after all.. Water on the windowsill. I remember spring two years ago, a taxi cab from Chelsea down to where the East River runs near the Lower East Side. I wore a yellow dress and I ran like the wind from the river to the hotel bar. The fires. The maggots. It was that day in New York when it felt like cosmically, biblically, something bad was probably about to happen. The Seven Plagues. The air was thicker and hotter, then. I am thinking about that day because I was braindead on the Internet then, too. Celsius, protein bar, things had begun all thick and ugly and then I’d been whisked away into a big black car, shuttled to the bar at Nine Orchard, my friends convincing me to stick around and then I did, I stuck around for a while, I never really left after that, come to think of it. “It’s Deep Tech Week in New York,” Shannon tells me, today - whatever that means. She sends me an event as such, and I investigate the schedule for the rest of this week from there. Deep Tech Week is a week of events about Tech, and they added the word Deep in front of it to make it seem more cool, I realize quickly. “Turning Science Fiction into Reality,” the text on the website says, and I don’t really like the sound of that. I find that premise, as strictly a premise, material reality aside, even, to be nearly cartoonishly evil. But, I suppose I’ll try to be less pedantic. I eat a sugar cookie (gluten free). Two protein bars from that new brand DAVID. A brand activation crispy sandwich from Joe And The Juice. The packaging is orange instead of that usual nice pastel pink. KEVIN DURANT, the packing says. It is nine pm, and I am suddenly ravenous. Good. Looks like I got my corporeality back. I really was planning to go to the Deep Tech Party tonight, but the rain started in an instant, in the exact instant I was set to leave, really. Like it’s trying to communicate some form of serendipity, reason, warning, whatever. Monday is the day where I let myself get every last thing done on my phone. My eyes burn. It rots the soul. My week continues and I become much more particular with myself. Tuesday, April 2 It’s not that I mind being kind of exhibitionist, even, but I can’t control the feedback loop and I start to drive myself mad. Taking stock of the state of the union like THINGS THAT ARE "IN": Swimming
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Yntp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F160f61ba-48c8-4c23-92f8-600a970e8eb0_708x484.png
Santa Teresa
April 10, 2025 · Original source
Friday, April 4 It's been such a haze since arriving in Costa Rica and at first I felt strange about it, like this isn't Good Behavior, treating a Big Trip kind of glibly, feeling a bit pouty and out of sorts and letting myself just be whisked away like it's nothing, when really it's never nothing, when really it's always touch and go and particularly something like this should make me feel ecstatic. Though, I kind of do feel ecstatic. I never really do become jaded. I quantify and calculate it all far too much to take anything for granted. You do kind of feel like you're floating, though. Cold beer to clutch between my knees on the sea plane that starts up all shaky and then scares me less even than a commercial plane because I can see into the cockpit and I can get the sense of how these pilots are navigating this thing. A cloud is just a cloud. I've been using too many words to inadequately explain myself. Send some bizarre texts upon landing that I hope will be encoded with… what, exactly? But, you’re in the jungle when you land. The sea plane slipped over the rainforest and then slipped out to sea, into the clouds. This part made me a bit nervous because there was nothing to spot except the horizon ahead. The scary part didn't last too long. Peninsula de Nicoya. Thick brambled forest by a single black tarmac. David sent me a video when he got here last week. The Jungle, he said, and now it’s like a hologram seeing it here myself. I really wasn’t going to come here. Two A.M. last night and the flights were so cheap that it felt like a glitch or something and then all I had to do was decide, ok, and then everything else was taken care of. There’s a driver at the gate for me. CHLOE, the sign says. That’s me, I say, and I point to the sign. I don’t know why I said it like that. It's a different vibe at the house here than in El Salvador. Surfer spiritualism over techno spiritualism. The aura here makes me feel significantly calmer. Because I am someone who accounts for danger at every turn (neurotic) I can remember being twelve or thirteen somewhere around here, handed a stick to ward off snakes at night, warned that don't you dare touch the frogs, the ants, they told me, fall screeching from the trees and it feels like a bullet wound when they bite you. But, “there is nothing actually scary here,” David’s friend tells me. “The main thing you have to worry about are these.” He shows me a picture of a scorpion. He tells me that the sting hurts a little, but after that the main thing is it makes your body feel all electric. “People sting themselves on purpose to get high,” David’s friends tell me. “They make you high???” I ask. One of the only things that scares me more than getting hurt is getting high. “No, not really,” David’s friend says. When I got here it felt kind of like I’d been teleported. David was there with an ATV where the car dropped me off, up a dirt road, by some stables and then he said - this might scare you but no backseat driving and then we roared up a mountain, nighttime already, I was left in a room in the hills in the jungle alone while the others offroad up and down and up and down until everyone was here for dinner. You can see the stars in a way that is so special here. I’d been told about this part, but it’s better to see for yourself. You couldn’t make out what parts were ocean and what parts were horizon but you could see that the darkness was placid and lovely and it stretched out quite some ways. You could see where there were villages, because lights close to the ground edged up against the stars in the sky but lacking any visual markers to ground them, these villages appeared to be hovering, unmoored. “You’ll be able to see the ocean in the morning,” David told me. So, in the morning, I thought, I will be able to distinguish which parts are ocean, and which parts are sky. Saturday, April 5 In the morning, there is a gecko on the ceiling and a dog outside my door. Chat GPT got way better overnight, I am told. It’s harder for me to suss out the vibe here. They are bullish on AI, but they are hesitant about some of the other stuff. We’re not really doing much of the hacker house stuff anyways, this time, though. Back down the mountain, and we’re in a hotel, and there’s surfer girls with pretty hair in pretty dresses dancing barefoot in all the nightclubs here. The heat makes a run in the morning unbearable. Even the walk to the shop is heavy and thick but I don't mind this. The only thing I do every single morning is walk for an hour and write while I walk, but the heat makes this hard. It's ok, because I can float instead. Yerba mate and corona extra and white claw and paloma in a can and redbull green and coconut water all stacked side by side in the shop, but I leave empty handed. Before, we got cold brew mixed with orange juice and a cashew avocado tart at a cafe run by the girlfriend of one of David’s friends. Since I tried it out and basically just became an alcoholic bartending my way around Eastern Europe at eighteen, I have kind of found the whole nomad thing to be spiritually ugly. Like it's something for mid thirties men that look older from the partying who stop you in back alleys in Croatia and tell you things like the key to it all is to never buy a couch. And they would say it like you were supposed to really get it. And you did get it, you got what they meant by it at least, but the thought was just a bit half baked and unconvincing. Ok, so, I wouldn't buy a couch but then what? Then what would I do? What should I do? I didn't want to stay listless and skimming the surface forever. New York is kind of empty too when you aren't living at least a little bit gently, and so these are the different pieces I am trying to parse out. I would stay here for a while with a project. David drops a chip on the beach lined with hermit crabs and he creates this huge commotion. Anarchy, really. All the little crabs begin to rip each other to shreds. "I hope the big one comes in and destroys them all," David says, regarding the hermit crab pile-on situation. There's not really any metaphor here, he’s just being vaguely sadistic. It does happen as you would expect. One big hermit crab sees its opportunity, identifies his leg up in this whole situation or perhaps, they aren't the brightest creatures, perhaps it just wants to try its lot at the prize like all the others and is surprised to find itself emerge victorious. He makes a clean break with the chip down the beach. The crabs kind of look like spiders from my vantage point. A mass of little tendrils for legs chasing after someone six times their size. They all have the death drive, because when they do catch up, it's not good news for any animal involved. An underdog swoops in and gets the chip. I don't know, I lose sight of it all. You have a target on your back when carrying the bounty though. If I was a hermit crab, I wouldn’t risk it. I put my head underwater in the ocean to get myself sorted. I walk back through a little bit of jungle and then past the fishermen in Malpaís while David turns around the ATV. Soles of my shoes are all sticky on the pavement. Herd of goats in the road. The heat makes all my thoughts become all slippery and smooth. If I spent a month here, I could learn how to become all tan and bendy and strong. Sometimes, I become slippery and smooth. I could spend the first part of my month learning how to notice when my mind becomes like this, and I could spend the second part learning how to make the feeling last. I would stay here for a while with a project… WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, April 10 From 6pm - 8pm at Blade Study — Clare Koury presents the opening of solo exhibition Scaling Laws For An Open EnTrainment Structure. With this installation, Clare Koury is addressing the part of the color spectrum that eyes don’t see.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yrdc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F78d590ff-7675-437a-bec3-6777487c94e1_916x372.png, Blade Study, Clare Koury, Scaling Laws For An Open EnTrainment Structure
[REDACTED] is awful
April 15, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Saturday, April 5 My boyfriend is in Costa Rica posting photos of Mel Gibson's house down the hill and playing me recordings of Mel Gibson verbally abusing his wife. I'm lying on a small thin bed in Costa Rica and I'm mostly tuning this out, along with mostly tuning out the other things - horses and howler monkeys outside. Quieter, the buzz of insects and even, distantly, the roaring waves. These are the types of things I should really tune in. Everything just clicked these past few weeks. I know how to be now, but I don't know how to vocalize it yet. We took the ATV over the mountain to the chocolate shop this afternoon. We bought iberico ham and we ate it in the forest along with melted chocolate in ceramic cups, vegan pear cake, espresso, cocoa husks. SUPER DAVID, the sign on the convenience store said. Tsunami evacuation route, all the signs on the side of the road said. I am getting better at sitting on the back of the ATV. I haven't tried the driving part, because I don't know how to drive stick shift and because they told me there is some correlation between the two. I am getting better at being very focused, and sometimes, at being very removed. There is a crash outside, and my boyfriend opens the door to tell me it was just because he fell out of the hammock. I tell him I am going to go for a walk. There's a beach close by, and if I pace this stretch of road a few times over I can catch the sunset at all its different stages. I can catch myself surprised each time I round the bend and I see how the colors have just barely shifted. There is going to be a lot more routine once I am back in New York. I have a lot of plans, and there will be a lot more staying put. My fingernails are filthy from the dust. I have decided that, going forward, I am going to be significantly more removed from all the things I used to seek. Sunday, April 6 Watermelon slushie for breakfast and I woke up all feverish which means the sea plane isn't an option anymore so we'll be lingering here for at least a little longer. Dinner was nice last night - left the hotel in hazy dusk and we hit a storm surf side almost as soon as we were on the road. "It's pouring," said the friends we were meeting for dinner, and I said oh really it's not raining for us and then shortly after we were barreling through the downfall. David drives too fast but I haven't been being too difficult about it. There is very little in today, then. Shivering down the secret path at sunset and there's something kind of nice about being very ill in very intense heat. My boyfriend is unenthused by the sunset. “We'll watch the sunset here tomorrow," he says. He makes up a rhyme about me to compensate for his lack of appreciation in the magic of the view. REDACTED is awful. REDACTED is stupid. REDACTED is going to choke on ceviche and get put in an unmarked grave. With full sincerity, I find the rhyme kind of sweet. It's sweet like its opposite day, and like he's grinning ear to ear and so I know that he actually really hopes that none of that stuff actually happens to me. I haven't been reading anything that's not for school because the heat has made me not just languid but also feverish and with all that - hyper impressionable. I've been absorbing anything I consume and taking on the tone like it's my own. I read some novella that I don't even like and then I write a nasty little short story about what I imagine it is like to be my friend. I don't know why the story is so nasty, because I think I am a pretty good friend. A better friend than I am a daughter or certainly a sister or even a girlfriend and, it's either all this useless contemplation or it's taking off-brand medication to quell the fever and now I can go to the party. I go to the type of party where it's on the beach and the tourists are making a congo line and my boyfriend and I are eating things like ceviche and fish skewers and Coco Loco and I say please give me the BAD rum when the waitress asks which one i want (bad, medium, and great are the options, price differences to match and i am totally out of money). The rain has come way too early this year. Something about Climate Change. Something about Climate Change is accelerating once in 1000 year weather cycles here to once in one year. I sit under a straw hut at this conga line party in the acid rain storm and I carve out the inside of my coconut drink with a spoon which makes everyone, particularly my boyfriend very annoyed. A river full of hermit crabs forms in the sand under my feet, and I prop my beat up sneakers on my boyfriend's lap which makes everyone, particularly him, even more annoyed. Anyways, I'd been trying to be more gentle about it. I will try even harder tomorrow. Monday, April 7 Me Being More Gentle About It: Little spiders climb up and down my arms as I sit in the yoga tent and go to school on my Computer. The men are back at the horses stables this morning, brushing the animals off and dust goes flying, red flower petals keep blowing down from the trees and creating a sort of storm of pollen in the dusty air. Something great happened last night. At first, I was worried about it, but things turned out fine and so in retrospect, it was something great. Driving back from dinner on the ATV, there had been a storm on the beach and so we’d been stuck there for a while, getting a little drenched even huddled under the tent and finally we were driving back, open air, wet road, bright moon and suddenly there was a little black colt standing lost in the middle of the street. I got off the ATV, moonshine shimmering off all the puddles, the animal was not concerned, it was just standing in the street looking up at me and then we walked together, across the wet pavement and into wet dirt, down the dark dirt road and then I left it by the stable - we couldn't find the gate but it wasn’t looking to wander more. Today, the horse is fine, and I knew that it would be. I think it was some kind of omen, maybe. A reminder to consult with the stars, and particularly, lately, to check on the tides. I'll be back in New York tomorrow - having strange flashbacks to being a gallery girl intern and waking up all bright eyed and opportunistic with the sun. When I think about that, I get all excited to be back in the city. I could be a Permafreelance assistant for a prestige publication and make $9.77 an hour this summer if I wanted. Permafreelance is their word, not mine. It means you work full time but you don't get benefits or vacation. You can’t, with any self respect, be nearly twenty five years old and still reveling in an exploitative half job lugging garment bags around New York but if you could, then you probably still would. I could spend the summer reading The Greats and I could spend the fall reading everything Semiotext(e) has ever published. I could start a strange project called [REDACTED] that is sure to be a hit. Yeah, it's time to go back to New York though. David and I watched the sunset for real tonight. I found the Secret Beach. Yeah, it is pretty magic, David said. Tuesday, April 8 I had too many yuca fries before the beef stew dinner last night and so I wasn’t too hungry, went to bed early, didn't sleep a wink and now it's dawn. We eat dinner at Ritual most nights in Malpais. Ritual is the cafe that David’s friend's girlfriend owns. It is full of wonderful things like a tart made of avocados and cashews and coconut oil, or espresso mixed with orange juice, or, last night was stew from the meat we grilled over the weekend, and last night the restaurant was closed, just accessible for us, I went to bed too early. Fog at sunrise today. I pack up and I tiptoe out of the hotel. David finds me by the horses in the morning dew making scratch marks on paper. I tell him that I don't take any of it for granted, and I mean it when I say it. I get in a taxi, and then I am by myself again. At the airport, I am too tired to even be on edge. I text Sylvie and Rebecca about the project idea that is sure to be a hit. Do you want to be a part of [new hit project] I say. Yes, they both say. At the airport, I kind of want to go slump over in a booth, and so I go and sit inside an awful place called GastroPub and I order one of those awful salads with the canned black olives and the dried mushrooms and cranberries and shaved almonds and some generic seed oil filled dressing, you know the type. I order a black coffee, too. The seed oil dressing on the side comes dangerously close to sloshing all over my coffee. I pick the chicken out of my salad with some care and eat only that, while the rest of the whole soggy heap of food kind of collapses in on itself. I spend twenty one dollars. Then, I spend nineteen dollars on some coffee and electrolytes and macaroons from Starbucks. I make sure to time my macaron consumption to end at twelve noon exactly, and then I set a timer for 36 Hours. A Monk Fast. This is the sort of thing that can be done when one is at the airport feeling bogged down. Obviously, I am not actually going to join a cult. It's mostly just aesthetic fixation. Style over substance. The real issue intellectually is if you can't truly distinguish yourself from something like the plastic tray on the plane in front of you. I haven't even really tried too hard to find a God. I'm sorry. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, April 15 From 8pm - late at (RSVP for location) — Terms Eccles is throwing another tax day party!! - “talking broadly about money and art and downtown and midtown, all at once. the only thing that will make tax day worth celebrating.”
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Q9U2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5cd9b963-4230-4508-8b2a-e1eb27f1bdce_1600x882.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j6Cp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb33657e9-0216-4c78-a2b9-25d2e1c66ed3_1600x1200.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5KHr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08e93783-43a6-4b3f-90ab-827d6d614ce1_1200x1600.jpeg, Terms Eccles
Monday, April 7 Me Being More Gentle About It: Little spiders climb up and down my arms as I sit in the yoga tent and go to school on my Computer. The men are back at the horses stables this morning, brushing the animals off and dust goes flying, red flower petals keep blowing down from the trees and creating a sort of storm of pollen in the dusty air. Something great happened last night. At first, I was worried about it, but things turned out fine and so in retrospect, it was something great. Driving back from dinner on the ATV, there had been a storm on the beach and so we’d been stuck there for a while, getting a little drenched even huddled under the tent and finally we were driving back, open air, wet road, bright moon and suddenly there was a little black colt standing lost in the middle of the street. I got off the ATV, moonshine shimmering off all the puddles, the animal was not concerned, it was just standing in the street looking up at me and then we walked together, across the wet pavement and into wet dirt, down the dark dirt road and then I left it by the stable - we couldn't find the gate but it wasn’t looking to wander more. Today, the horse is fine, and I knew that it would be. I think it was some kind of omen, maybe. A reminder to consult with the stars, and particularly, lately, to check on the tides. I'll be back in New York tomorrow - having strange flashbacks to being a gallery girl intern and waking up all bright eyed and opportunistic with the sun. When I think about that, I get all excited to be back in the city. I could be a Permafreelance assistant for a prestige publication and make $9.77 an hour this summer if I wanted. Permafreelance is their word, not mine. It means you work full time but you don't get benefits or vacation. You can’t, with any self respect, be nearly twenty five years old and still reveling in an exploitative half job lugging garment bags around New York but if you could, then you probably still would. I could spend the summer reading The Greats and I could spend the fall reading everything Semiotext(e) has ever published. I could start a strange project called [REDACTED] that is sure to be a hit. Yeah, it's time to go back to New York though. David and I watched the sunset for real tonight. I found the Secret Beach. Yeah, it is pretty magic, David said. Tuesday, April 8 I had too many yuca fries before the beef stew dinner last night and so I wasn’t too hungry, went to bed early, didn't sleep a wink and now it's dawn. We eat dinner at Ritual most nights in Malpais. Ritual is the cafe that David’s friend's girlfriend owns. It is full of wonderful things like a tart made of avocados and cashews and coconut oil, or espresso mixed with orange juice, or, last night was stew from the meat we grilled over the weekend, and last night the restaurant was closed, just accessible for us, I went to bed too early. Fog at sunrise today. I pack up and I tiptoe out of the hotel. David finds me by the horses in the morning dew making scratch marks on paper. I tell him that I don't take any of it for granted, and I mean it when I say it. I get in a taxi, and then I am by myself again. At the airport, I am too tired to even be on edge. I text Sylvie and Rebecca about the project idea that is sure to be a hit. Do you want to be a part of [new hit project] I say. Yes, they both say. At the airport, I kind of want to go slump over in a booth, and so I go and sit inside an awful place called GastroPub and I order one of those awful salads with the canned black olives and the dried mushrooms and cranberries and shaved almonds and some generic seed oil filled dressing, you know the type. I order a black coffee, too. The seed oil dressing on the side comes dangerously close to sloshing all over my coffee. I pick the chicken out of my salad with some care and eat only that, while the rest of the whole soggy heap of food kind of collapses in on itself. I spend twenty one dollars. Then, I spend nineteen dollars on some coffee and electrolytes and macaroons from Starbucks. I make sure to time my macaron consumption to end at twelve noon exactly, and then I set a timer for 36 Hours. A Monk Fast. This is the sort of thing that can be done when one is at the airport feeling bogged down. Obviously, I am not actually going to join a cult. It's mostly just aesthetic fixation. Style over substance. The real issue intellectually is if you can't truly distinguish yourself from something like the plastic tray on the plane in front of you. I haven't even really tried too hard to find a God. I'm sorry. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, April 15 From 8pm - late at (RSVP for location) — Terms Eccles is throwing another tax day party!! - “talking broadly about money and art and downtown and midtown, all at once. the only thing that will make tax day worth celebrating.”
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j6Cp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb33657e9-0216-4c78-a2b9-25d2e1c66ed3_1600x1200.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5KHr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08e93783-43a6-4b3f-90ab-827d6d614ce1_1200x1600.jpeg, Terms Eccles
Tuesday, April 8 I had too many yuca fries before the beef stew dinner last night and so I wasn’t too hungry, went to bed early, didn't sleep a wink and now it's dawn. We eat dinner at Ritual most nights in Malpais. Ritual is the cafe that David’s friend's girlfriend owns. It is full of wonderful things like a tart made of avocados and cashews and coconut oil, or espresso mixed with orange juice, or, last night was stew from the meat we grilled over the weekend, and last night the restaurant was closed, just accessible for us, I went to bed too early. Fog at sunrise today. I pack up and I tiptoe out of the hotel. David finds me by the horses in the morning dew making scratch marks on paper. I tell him that I don't take any of it for granted, and I mean it when I say it. I get in a taxi, and then I am by myself again. At the airport, I am too tired to even be on edge. I text Sylvie and Rebecca about the project idea that is sure to be a hit. Do you want to be a part of [new hit project] I say. Yes, they both say. At the airport, I kind of want to go slump over in a booth, and so I go and sit inside an awful place called GastroPub and I order one of those awful salads with the canned black olives and the dried mushrooms and cranberries and shaved almonds and some generic seed oil filled dressing, you know the type. I order a black coffee, too. The seed oil dressing on the side comes dangerously close to sloshing all over my coffee. I pick the chicken out of my salad with some care and eat only that, while the rest of the whole soggy heap of food kind of collapses in on itself. I spend twenty one dollars. Then, I spend nineteen dollars on some coffee and electrolytes and macaroons from Starbucks. I make sure to time my macaron consumption to end at twelve noon exactly, and then I set a timer for 36 Hours. A Monk Fast. This is the sort of thing that can be done when one is at the airport feeling bogged down. Obviously, I am not actually going to join a cult. It's mostly just aesthetic fixation. Style over substance. The real issue intellectually is if you can't truly distinguish yourself from something like the plastic tray on the plane in front of you. I haven't even really tried too hard to find a God. I'm sorry. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, April 15 From 8pm - late at (RSVP for location) — Terms Eccles is throwing another tax day party!! - “talking broadly about money and art and downtown and midtown, all at once. the only thing that will make tax day worth celebrating.”
Inline links: Terms Eccles
The Strangest Hotel in New York
April 21, 2025 · Original source
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
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/$s_!CQwj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa8402160-9491-40d2-95e0-9dee6e25a00a_852x318.png, borderline satanic short film, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$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
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: 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
From 8pm at Beverly’s — Blade Study presents a night of video by friends & family. David and I are showing video art from The Strangest Hotel in New York. Other videos by Drew Zeiba, Emily Janowick, Joshua Citarella, Sophia Giovannitti, Webb Allen, and more. Music by Dreamer, Skype Williams, and Umfang. See you there <3
Inline links: Beverly’s, Blade Study, The Strangest Hotel in New York.
generative and godly secrets
May 27, 2025 · Original source
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: Baby’s All Right, Palehound, The Ophelias, Grumpy, WeTakeManhattan
A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again
June 09, 2025 · Original source
Sunday, June 1 The flight back from Miami is gray and swift. I spent the evening on the rooftop at The Betsy yesterday. Iris asked me for the list of my favorite foods. Octopus, apples, apple pie, lamb chops with mint jelly, creamed spinach, a certain type of barbeque salmon, a whole roast chicken. The concrete by the pool bar was hot and steamy and we didn’t bring identification and we would not be served. David bought us bloody marys and we drank them behind the tarp where the bartenders couldn’t see. I swam laps up and down and up and down the length of this pool that was mostly for drinking. I found Chanel sunglasses while standing barefoot in the bathroom and I returned them to the French girl. It’s like I’ve been immune to the permanence of ramifications of the things that are really bad, these days. I keep forgiving and I keep on being forgiven. They gave me free Pina Colada samples in little plastic cups. Ok Intense Girl, he was saying, because every time I would pop my head out of the water to say the things I thought, it would be with beady eyes and a determined stare. I like ice cream particularly matcha ice cream and I like lamb, Iris told me. Iris taught me about Gnosticism, and I believe this is somewhat aligned with the situation with me and him, though he thinks it's kind of sacrilegious when I equate my nightmares with mysticism, or when I attribute the interest that people who are kind of half of this world and half of another take in me to anything other than high agreeability and openness. Iris and I walked along Ocean Drive to Kalamata way down South Beach, and then we walked back along the water. A writing retreat, a rave, apocalyptic undertones. You can’t choose solitude and practicality at the edge of an extinction event, is one of many roots of it. I walked barefoot along the boardwalk. I met him for a second dinner. The ribeye was bloody and it came with a gross side of pasta alfredo. I woke up screaming. I woke up all smiles. I took photos of our hands on the plane Just In Case. I showed him a song. The Message. Is this a good song, or is this a secret message, he asked. It’s just a good song, I said. The frat guys in front of us on the plane are reading A Court of Thorns and Roses smut novels and buying tickets to Jake Shane's comedy tour. The guy on my boyfriend's phone intercom is stealing all my LA Apparel underwear from our lobby. I'm eating the Worst Sandwich Ever and Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. I am taking pictures of our reflections in the clouded plane window and I am thinking about how impossible it feels right now, flying like this, to imagine that so often, we become something else. 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S7lB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F14d7d73e-4a99-4bc0-ad57-1dae414e4c21_1018x416.png, 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
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: Chez Nous, https://metrograph.com/film/?vista_film_id=9999002294, recently refurbished Chez Nous, 1pm on a Friday
From 7pm at TJ Byrnes — Patio returns for an evening of reading, featuring Nik Slackman, Jon Lindsey, Shae, Sennett, Dylan Smith, Harris Lahit, and Allie Rowbottom. Hosted by Bronwen Lam and David Dufour. This will be incredible | Doors at 7pm, reading at 8pm.
Inline links: TJ Byrnes, Patio

Graph View

Backlinks