Jack

Article

Jack is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between March 18, 2026 and March 18, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Jack posted photos of metal folding chairs stacked inside the cold interior”. It most often appears alongside Ada Donnelly, Alex Bienstock, Amelia.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 1
  • Issue count: 1
  • First seen: March 18, 2026
  • Last seen: March 18, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

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

March 18, 2026 · Original source
Friday I was supposed to go to a party-in-a-u-haul last night. Jack posted photos of metal folding chairs stacked inside the cold interior. Any room left in the uhaul, I texted Charley. There is standing room or sitting on the floor room, he replied. I walked home from the gym to expedite my getting-ready-process. At the gym, they were playing artificial-intelligence-generated videos of animals and plants. They were remixing pop songs. I told the pretty girl at the front desk that I’d like to never-come-back, and she told me that I’d have to journey-to-the-backrooms if I wanted them to take my credit-card-off-file. I said ok, and then I walked home, still a member of Equinox-Corp. Soho was humid and sweet and cold. The West Village was like a private equity firm. I realized I had spoken to no one all day, and I considered feeling guilty or lonely or high-on-life or all three. What is your ETA at the Uhaul, Matthew texted, as I was lying, later, in bed. Twenty-five-minutes, I lied. UHaul will be gone by then, Matthew said. He sent me a photo of Charley standing in a suit in the Uhaul, looming over a crowd of people in black and illuminated by a fluorescent film light. Uhaul looks pretty great, I responded. You probably could have made it if you left immediately but you are dragging your feet, Matthew said. I know I know I’m leaving now, I lied. Last year, the images I culled from the internet were all of greenery and cut-off-jeans and in-ground-pools. This year, my favorite internet images are screenshots of warehouses and gray seashells and bike rides in midwestern or Scandinavian fields wearing gym shorts and white sweat shirts. Grass is always greener. My attention is kind of sporadic, and I keep on getting worse at throwing caution-to-the-wind. Plagiarized images of spring Saturday Everything in my room was quiet in a way that was a little bit like heaven and a little bit like hell. I lay down in bed with a Spring-2024 copy of American Affairs Magazine and I tried to read over an article about Tech Clusters and Stagnation but I ended up in AI psychosis instead. Affirm affirm affirm, my computer said. Your life seems to have solidified, my computer said. The point of it all isn’t really to be that pretty or even that kind, my computer said. The point of life isn’t love or hate, but understanding. The cycles repeat until they flip, and then they rarely return. You shouldn’t really try to understand yourself that well. You should try to resist the compulsion to share the mundanities of your everyday life and certainly of your rich-inner-world. I was supposed to shut my computer around six-pm, but the call came at five-fifty instead. The West Village was like l’heure bleue. The West Village was humid and sweet and warm and lovely. The trees were like silver skeletons, and Washington Square Park was full of teens hosting vigils for deceased foreign leaders and lookalike contests for girls with borderline-personality-disorder and presidential men. You’re in your spring coat, Max said. He had never heard that word before me. Some coats are heavy, and other coats are light, I explained. The outside of Babbo is somewhat unassuming, and the inside of Babbo is burgundy and warm and old school and sweet. The host stand is set back from the entryway and the bar is lively even at six. The whole place is basically windowless, which makes me feel like I am in a cave or on a ship or at a private party or in a nineteen-fifties-film or an architectural-dream. The menus come in small leather binders and a line drawing of a black cartoon jester carrying a bottle of wine is sketched on the first page. I am somewhat unable to typecast the demographic of the clientele here, which is interesting and somewhat rare. Everyone is quite well dressed but unassuming and of various ages though leaning-older. It is impossible to eavesdrop inside Babbo, which goes against my usual sensibilities, and aligns exactly with my dinner-sensibilities. The hostess was an older lady, because all the best restaurants have older-waitstaff-mostly. I’ll let you sit at a table and I won’t make you move, the hostess said. Everybody laughed politely and was very pleased. In the center of Babbo, there is a velvety staircase. This would be a good place for a private party, I said. The hostess led us up the velvet stairs. In the upstairs of Babbo, there is a burgundy room and a big bar and white-table-cloths and the waiter poured city-water out of metal-watering-pails and into glass-cups. The specialty martini is made very-dry. Can you make it very-dirty, I asked. We can do anything you want, the waiter said. The waiter was an old Italian man. He wrote down the martini order and our names on a napkin. MARTINI ORDER, the napkin read. You’ve been here before, the waiter said. Once, I said. You look familiar, he said. I’m not, I said. The waiter told a story about the time that all the old French restaurants closed and never returned. Only the Italian restaurant remained, he explained. You come as a child then perhaps on a date at eighteen then with family then a wedding, he said. Coming back and coming back and coming back over and over again. Anytime the water glass would run low, the waiter would appear with the metal watering pale, and the glass would be filled up. The bread came with ricotta and fresh olive oil and sea salt. Squid ink pasta and branzino and broccoli. Two martinis and a cappuccino after dinner and I melted the sugar cubes on the surface of the coffee and then I ate them with a spoon. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, all the staff said, when we left. The theme of the magazine launch was print revival and kosher pickle martinis. There were girls scout cookies on the counter, and the vibe was one of general mystique, though all I could make out when the editor spoke was something about “fiction” and “Elon Musk.” Saoirse and Olivia were behind the bar, and they were looking like angels wearing white and being kind. The late winter hadn’t really felt like real life, so it was nice and quite affirming to make eye contact with my friends. You’re the best contract employee in the world, the girls assured each other. You’re the best girlfriend ever. You’re the sweetest girl to ever walk this Earth. The magazine was free and so I helped myself and left by midnight. I can psyop myself, and then I can do whatever I want. My process is I write everything that happened and then I filter it into obfuscation one-million-times. My process is to invent my own school of movement and adopt a moral code. My process is totally against religious iconography as vague gestures towards false meaning, but totally pro iconography when one’s belief in something is complete. My self psyop sometimes looks like self experimentation, or bandaid-solution, or destruction and construction and being social-chair. I tread very lightly, and when I act according to things I hate or things I miss, it goes about exactly how you’d expect it to. Here is something: call up my parents and I read my diaries aloud on my phone. Everything seems like the end of the world in dizzy night, and: The boys hands were bloody in the morning, and; I ordered coffee and milkshake and breakfast sandwich in, and: everyone seems so fragile in the sunshine, and: One thing about being here, hazy in the sun is I feel less aggressive. In New York, the sun keeps coming back and going away and I love it when my friends and I talk about the weather. I order green juice and cold brew in the morning, and it’s quiet and cold-again. I order chopped-green-goddess-sandwhich and I seek intellectual-stimulation and I wear a brown-leather-jacket to the west-side-highway-dog-park. My process is everything-beautiful-all-the-time and iphone photography and whenever my perspective is called into question I can call up Amelia who can affirm how happy I really was all the time, there, and sometimes now. She’s totally straight-edge, and she always has a good sense of the way things were and are and are heading. Sunday Sitting on the couch in an empty apartment watching the gray sky turn light in the courtyard and listening to the garbage trucks fire up on the somewhat distant street. It feels like waking up in New York as a child, right now. Awake too early. Jet lagged, almost. At a magazine launch during evening fading night in a white house with framed art and long french windows and yellow trim, a man was telling me that the only good thing about not growing up in New York City is that you get to experience the thing that it is to understand the city for the first time and to let it consume you. If you grow up in New York, then you understand the city all along and this is mostly a great thing, he was saying, but what about that feeling when you arrive and you’re older and you understand a place like this for the very first time. There were daffodils all throughout the apartment, and carpeted floors over wood that stretched back into room after room like a maze. Everyone was calling each other “dear” and there was a sense of things as generally boisterous but not overblown. I like older people who love New York. I like people that are sober-minded, fun, and rarely cynical. The people at the party wore pearls and black and ballet flats and lived uptown and they kept on asking me about New York. Do you love New York, they kept on asking. And I said yes and I meant it and they seemed pleased The air conditioner is running. The sky is gray and sweet. I always am very aware of causation, and I know how to understand what makes something bad and what makes something good. I don’t think it’s narcissistic to try to understand your own intentions but one shouldn’t go too much deeper than that. I would never betray anyone I love. I want ginger beer for breakfast lunch and dinner. I want hydrangeas in the apartment. I want to fall asleep in a room sized bed and be airlifted into daylight and clothed in blue sweaters. I want to be dosed with soylent but not lobotomized. Last night, at the magazine launch, a man was telling me about the story of his life. I lived across from Jeffrey Epstein, he said. I’m a lawyer, he said. I know hundreds of people, he explained. Do you know any secrets, I asked. The girls never looked underage to me, he shrugged. Isabel pulled me away. We walked down the long and wooden hallway and we stood by open windows. The figures across the street looked almost cartoonish, running like shadowy stick figures down the paths in hazy dusk in Central Park. So winter is great until March comes around, and I am not so ready for spring equinox and abandon-interiority and things moving faster and faster and faster. Everything material feels kind of cartoonishly good. Everything on my computer feels kind of cartoonishly evil. Cassandra and I bought big blue books full of curses, and now we are going to open them on the floor of an apartment on the Upper West Side and wear cable-knit sweaters and assume invincibility until proven otherwise. Since Darby gave me a blue heart-shaped bowl and an evil-eye bracelet that I haven’t taken off since, I’ve realized that I need to hold my cards closer to my chest. I put myself to sleep at dusk tonight because there are colors flashing in front of my open eyes like hallucinations and signs of delirium. I wake up on the couch shivering under my spring coat. Little white dried flowers all around me. A new wooden toothbrush propped on one clean shelf in an otherwise crowded cabinet. I wait for midnight so the new day can begin, and then at twelve-oh-one I say thank you to God one million times. I go outside for a walk in humid winter air. I go inside, and I’m alone again. I go to a building that looks “new” in Tribeca, and I go to a building that looks “old”. I interrupted a meeting, and I was given plastic bottles of fireball behind the bar. My friends were all talking about picking up new hobbies. A boy outside told me about adult gymnastics. I told the girls about rock climbing. I considered aerial silks. I considered French lessons and online shopping and recommending books-to-buy-boys-who-are-just-getting-into-reading. I watched a video essay about how not to let the moon affect your moods. I watched a video essay about undersea cables. So, February was fine. Cold and a little bit dreary and Iris keeps on telling me that above all she considers herself to be pragmatic, which seems to be working out for her and so I’m taking notes. I keep on deciding to just become nihilistic about it, but even when I don’t set alarms, I always wake up in time to do the things I should. DIRECTORY Wednesday, March 18 from 4:45pm at Metrograph —El Sur (1983, Victor Erice) screens. I have a special fondness for the landscapes of Northern Spain and the only beer I like is estrella, per, my Galician friend Rebecca. This film is not about spanish beer, but rather a spanish girl by the same name. “it’s half a film that contains a whole world of wonders.” Thursday, March 19 evening plans: MANHATTAN: From 7:30pm at Night Club 101 — Lubov says THE INTERNET MADE ME DO IT. A night of readings and music with Ada Donnelly, Alex Bienstock, Marble Index, Kyle Sullivan Dobbs, Lorry Kikta, Melissa Seward, Angel Money, and Yuri NYC. | RSVP here
Plagiarized images of spring Saturday Everything in my room was quiet in a way that was a little bit like heaven and a little bit like hell. I lay down in bed with a Spring-2024 copy of American Affairs Magazine and I tried to read over an article about Tech Clusters and Stagnation but I ended up in AI psychosis instead. Affirm affirm affirm, my computer said. Your life seems to have solidified, my computer said. The point of it all isn’t really to be that pretty or even that kind, my computer said. The point of life isn’t love or hate, but understanding. The cycles repeat until they flip, and then they rarely return. You shouldn’t really try to understand yourself that well. You should try to resist the compulsion to share the mundanities of your everyday life and certainly of your rich-inner-world. I was supposed to shut my computer around six-pm, but the call came at five-fifty instead. The West Village was like l’heure bleue. The West Village was humid and sweet and warm and lovely. The trees were like silver skeletons, and Washington Square Park was full of teens hosting vigils for deceased foreign leaders and lookalike contests for girls with borderline-personality-disorder and presidential men. You’re in your spring coat, Max said. He had never heard that word before me. Some coats are heavy, and other coats are light, I explained. The outside of Babbo is somewhat unassuming, and the inside of Babbo is burgundy and warm and old school and sweet. The host stand is set back from the entryway and the bar is lively even at six. The whole place is basically windowless, which makes me feel like I am in a cave or on a ship or at a private party or in a nineteen-fifties-film or an architectural-dream. The menus come in small leather binders and a line drawing of a black cartoon jester carrying a bottle of wine is sketched on the first page. I am somewhat unable to typecast the demographic of the clientele here, which is interesting and somewhat rare. Everyone is quite well dressed but unassuming and of various ages though leaning-older. It is impossible to eavesdrop inside Babbo, which goes against my usual sensibilities, and aligns exactly with my dinner-sensibilities. The hostess was an older lady, because all the best restaurants have older-waitstaff-mostly. I’ll let you sit at a table and I won’t make you move, the hostess said. Everybody laughed politely and was very pleased. In the center of Babbo, there is a velvety staircase. This would be a good place for a private party, I said. The hostess led us up the velvet stairs. In the upstairs of Babbo, there is a burgundy room and a big bar and white-table-cloths and the waiter poured city-water out of metal-watering-pails and into glass-cups. The specialty martini is made very-dry. Can you make it very-dirty, I asked. We can do anything you want, the waiter said. The waiter was an old Italian man. He wrote down the martini order and our names on a napkin. MARTINI ORDER, the napkin read. You’ve been here before, the waiter said. Once, I said. You look familiar, he said. I’m not, I said. The waiter told a story about the time that all the old French restaurants closed and never returned. Only the Italian restaurant remained, he explained. You come as a child then perhaps on a date at eighteen then with family then a wedding, he said. Coming back and coming back and coming back over and over again. Anytime the water glass would run low, the waiter would appear with the metal watering pale, and the glass would be filled up. The bread came with ricotta and fresh olive oil and sea salt. Squid ink pasta and branzino and broccoli. Two martinis and a cappuccino after dinner and I melted the sugar cubes on the surface of the coffee and then I ate them with a spoon. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, all the staff said, when we left. The theme of the magazine launch was print revival and kosher pickle martinis. There were girls scout cookies on the counter, and the vibe was one of general mystique, though all I could make out when the editor spoke was something about “fiction” and “Elon Musk.” Saoirse and Olivia were behind the bar, and they were looking like angels wearing white and being kind. The late winter hadn’t really felt like real life, so it was nice and quite affirming to make eye contact with my friends. You’re the best contract employee in the world, the girls assured each other. You’re the best girlfriend ever. You’re the sweetest girl to ever walk this Earth. The magazine was free and so I helped myself and left by midnight. I can psyop myself, and then I can do whatever I want. My process is I write everything that happened and then I filter it into obfuscation one-million-times. My process is to invent my own school of movement and adopt a moral code. My process is totally against religious iconography as vague gestures towards false meaning, but totally pro iconography when one’s belief in something is complete. My self psyop sometimes looks like self experimentation, or bandaid-solution, or destruction and construction and being social-chair. I tread very lightly, and when I act according to things I hate or things I miss, it goes about exactly how you’d expect it to. Here is something: call up my parents and I read my diaries aloud on my phone. Everything seems like the end of the world in dizzy night, and: The boys hands were bloody in the morning, and; I ordered coffee and milkshake and breakfast sandwich in, and: everyone seems so fragile in the sunshine, and: One thing about being here, hazy in the sun is I feel less aggressive. In New York, the sun keeps coming back and going away and I love it when my friends and I talk about the weather. I order green juice and cold brew in the morning, and it’s quiet and cold-again. I order chopped-green-goddess-sandwhich and I seek intellectual-stimulation and I wear a brown-leather-jacket to the west-side-highway-dog-park. My process is everything-beautiful-all-the-time and iphone photography and whenever my perspective is called into question I can call up Amelia who can affirm how happy I really was all the time, there, and sometimes now. She’s totally straight-edge, and she always has a good sense of the way things were and are and are heading. Sunday Sitting on the couch in an empty apartment watching the gray sky turn light in the courtyard and listening to the garbage trucks fire up on the somewhat distant street. It feels like waking up in New York as a child, right now. Awake too early. Jet lagged, almost. At a magazine launch during evening fading night in a white house with framed art and long french windows and yellow trim, a man was telling me that the only good thing about not growing up in New York City is that you get to experience the thing that it is to understand the city for the first time and to let it consume you. If you grow up in New York, then you understand the city all along and this is mostly a great thing, he was saying, but what about that feeling when you arrive and you’re older and you understand a place like this for the very first time. There were daffodils all throughout the apartment, and carpeted floors over wood that stretched back into room after room like a maze. Everyone was calling each other “dear” and there was a sense of things as generally boisterous but not overblown. I like older people who love New York. I like people that are sober-minded, fun, and rarely cynical. The people at the party wore pearls and black and ballet flats and lived uptown and they kept on asking me about New York. Do you love New York, they kept on asking. And I said yes and I meant it and they seemed pleased The air conditioner is running. The sky is gray and sweet. I always am very aware of causation, and I know how to understand what makes something bad and what makes something good. I don’t think it’s narcissistic to try to understand your own intentions but one shouldn’t go too much deeper than that. I would never betray anyone I love. I want ginger beer for breakfast lunch and dinner. I want hydrangeas in the apartment. I want to fall asleep in a room sized bed and be airlifted into daylight and clothed in blue sweaters. I want to be dosed with soylent but not lobotomized. Last night, at the magazine launch, a man was telling me about the story of his life. I lived across from Jeffrey Epstein, he said. I’m a lawyer, he said. I know hundreds of people, he explained. Do you know any secrets, I asked. The girls never looked underage to me, he shrugged. Isabel pulled me away. We walked down the long and wooden hallway and we stood by open windows. The figures across the street looked almost cartoonish, running like shadowy stick figures down the paths in hazy dusk in Central Park. So winter is great until March comes around, and I am not so ready for spring equinox and abandon-interiority and things moving faster and faster and faster. Everything material feels kind of cartoonishly good. Everything on my computer feels kind of cartoonishly evil. Cassandra and I bought big blue books full of curses, and now we are going to open them on the floor of an apartment on the Upper West Side and wear cable-knit sweaters and assume invincibility until proven otherwise. Since Darby gave me a blue heart-shaped bowl and an evil-eye bracelet that I haven’t taken off since, I’ve realized that I need to hold my cards closer to my chest. I put myself to sleep at dusk tonight because there are colors flashing in front of my open eyes like hallucinations and signs of delirium. I wake up on the couch shivering under my spring coat. Little white dried flowers all around me. A new wooden toothbrush propped on one clean shelf in an otherwise crowded cabinet. I wait for midnight so the new day can begin, and then at twelve-oh-one I say thank you to God one million times. I go outside for a walk in humid winter air. I go inside, and I’m alone again. I go to a building that looks “new” in Tribeca, and I go to a building that looks “old”. I interrupted a meeting, and I was given plastic bottles of fireball behind the bar. My friends were all talking about picking up new hobbies. A boy outside told me about adult gymnastics. I told the girls about rock climbing. I considered aerial silks. I considered French lessons and online shopping and recommending books-to-buy-boys-who-are-just-getting-into-reading. I watched a video essay about how not to let the moon affect your moods. I watched a video essay about undersea cables. So, February was fine. Cold and a little bit dreary and Iris keeps on telling me that above all she considers herself to be pragmatic, which seems to be working out for her and so I’m taking notes. I keep on deciding to just become nihilistic about it, but even when I don’t set alarms, I always wake up in time to do the things I should. DIRECTORY Wednesday, March 18 from 4:45pm at Metrograph —El Sur (1983, Victor Erice) screens. I have a special fondness for the landscapes of Northern Spain and the only beer I like is estrella, per, my Galician friend Rebecca. This film is not about spanish beer, but rather a spanish girl by the same name. “it’s half a film that contains a whole world of wonders.” Thursday, March 19 evening plans: MANHATTAN: From 7:30pm at Night Club 101 — Lubov says THE INTERNET MADE ME DO IT. A night of readings and music with Ada Donnelly, Alex Bienstock, Marble Index, Kyle Sullivan Dobbs, Lorry Kikta, Melissa Seward, Angel Money, and Yuri NYC. | RSVP here