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Riley

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Riley

Article

Riley is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between December 09, 2024 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Riley and I go to Fanelli’s for dinner”; “Riley texted me when I was just too far from her apartment to turn back last night”; “the flyers in Riley’s lobby say”. It most often appears alongside El Salvador, Los Angeles, Massachusetts.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: December 09, 2024
  • Last seen: March 06, 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.

kind of a dud socially
December 09, 2024 · Original source
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
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
Drinking Dreams
September 04, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, August 24 Lay with filthy tangled hair hanging off the edge of the roof for a while last night, watching the Chase Clock Tower lit up too royal blue and the Empire State Building lit up the nicer sort of baby blue. I've been collecting shades of blue. Kind of navy blue Frankie's Bikini little number reflecting something sort of aqua off my Diet Pepsi on the D-line towards Coney Island. Screaming children on the D-line. Naked man running around trying to steal pedestrians pants on Coney Island. He keeps on saying to the other guy, Darby says - “I like those pants ! Gimme those pants!” And it was all these beautiful friends coming and going last night. Coming and going until it was late, really late, so taxi home and then I ate the toppings off a slice of pizza on the floor with a spoon. I spent the morning alone doing Rituals. Tretinoin before sleep and I did wake up screaming for the first time in a while. Red light therapy and copper multi peptides and avocado eye cream and mineral sunscreen and now I'm on the Subway. Kind of braindead on the subway. It sometimes takes it out of you. This sort of thing can really take it out of you. It's been summer for forever, now. I have a lot more friends now. Connectivity, connected tissue, I walk down Brighton Beach by myself, walk to Tashkent Supermarket for a towel and carrot salad and on the phone I'm saying it is not that I wish for death and even sometimes I fear it but things have become a lot less Risk Averse. I'm a lot less Risk Averse now. It would be better to be dead, someone was saying at the bar last night. She was looking at me eyes all intense and no one was really listening, I could tell no one was really listening but everyone was watching her all the same and I could see them all clenching their bodies and kind of pulling away.. Me particularly, pulling away. Perhaps I'm being self absorbed. It wouldn't be better to be dead, someone else said. He looked at me then, locked eyes which usually makes me kind of uncomfortable but I felt inclined to agree. It's definitely better when nobody is dead, I said. The bar was full of plants and glass. Like a glass jungle, I told my nameless friends at the bar.. That's not very astute, a nameless friend told me. Tonight, the cocktail menu is flavored and priced like a full course meal, and so tonight I order Cold Pizza for dinner. Cold Pizza in a crisp glass bottle, plus greasy fried chicken after that, which comes in thick paper cups. And everyone is so grateful to be alive, tonight. Everyone is so grateful for one more year of life for themselves and for their dear friends particularly. Purple sunrise if I hadn't slept through it. Yellow sunset if I hadn't gritted my teeth and clenched my eyes shut through it. Planted two feet firmly in the ground and screamed through it. First, I made one thousand promises I couldn't keep. Second, I sat on the stoop with an energy drink, water, cool minty menthol gum and the antiseptic kind of sore throat with some bodega spray gripped tight in my hand to heal all my problems. My ailments and the other things. My organs and my mind. Overjoyed to be alive again after leaving my apartment, I told Amelia. It does make things better again, Amelia told me. Tuesday, August 25 Bartending school feels kind of like an alcoholic's vision of a drinking dream. Like holograms of condensation, dim lighting, one takes a sip to the tune of disappointment. Water and food coloring dye. Bowery Park and Whole Foods and JPress nearby and inside; Christmas is coming. Smooth jazz. Everything has felt a bit the same for a time, but my room is clean. Summer is passing. Three months is not so long. Would a functional alcoholic lace up black ankle boots at seven in the morning with a clear mind and bright eyes to catch the train towards midtown towards Bartending School, at the top of the week, at the tail end of August? I am not so good at pretending like anything is changing. Like habits stack towards something greater. It might as well be yesterday, I sigh on the phone. For you, it might as well be yesterday, Amelia agrees. I do the things a person should. Cake for friends' birthdays and the waiter keeps stacking on fees at Union Square Cafe. Cut the cake fee, sit at the table fee, big group of people fee, bring your own food fee. There are other tables next to us all inhabited by people who all appear to be exactly the same, though perhaps I am being uncharitable. Imagine them as skeletons. Imagine them as children. My parents used to tell me this when I was little. Kind of a hack against boredom. I imagine myself as a psychic, looking out on things overpriced and people all exactly the same. You will have a small child and feed her nothing but buttered noodles. You will advance in age but stay exactly the same through invasive surgical facial intervention and stunted social development. You will spend evenings eating french fries with caviar for One Hundred Dollars despite a rich inner world and a childhood pumped full of extracurricular stimulation designed, specifically, to avoid a fate like this. You will fear God more than death and you will understand self destruction to be akin to suicide hence rendering you too, on a trajectory like this, a rather hellish creature. You will wake up in the middle of the night in a small box criss-crossed wood roof apartment in New York City to the sense that there are No Loopholes Left. You will go to bartending school. You will recognize that, while you can be cruel there were other factors at play. There were worse factors at play. Wednesday, August 26 Walking from Greenwich Village to Long Meadow in Prospect Park with a bag filled up with white linen and Thomas Pynchon and a plan to celebrate sweet Sylvie's birthday. A different sort of nostalgia in the air today. Nostalgia of all sorts being kind of a form of mental illness, of course but once - we were woodland fairies. Once, there were fall morning running races and cranberries that crunched under bare feet on Massachusetts roads. Once, there were rounds of Tom Collins in a kind of jazzy jungle garden restaurant in the tropics that my boyfriend who liked gender-roles enjoyed because they wouldn't let girls order their own drinks. Once, I went to the Yankees game in late August, blue and pink hazy skies, the sort of advertisements that blare out notes about Fast Food and Safe Driving in the stadium, and the sort of crowd that is so big it starts inspiring feelings of Life and Spirit rather than Homogoninity and Dread. Once, I walked from bartending school full of Tom Collins, Chambord, a sip of walnut martinini, frangelico liquor. Walked to Caffe Reggio for egg white omelet, toast, a creamy cannoli. Walking to Prospect Park a little bit tipsy. Thinking about the sort of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing about the sorts of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing it all down. Writing and walking. Writing it everywhere. Writing it on the walls. Though, I'm not so bad at keeping secrets anymore. Thursday, August 27 Amelia and I sat at Caffe Reggio until close last night, and now I have returned. Tomato soup and side grilled chicken and creamy cannoli and mint tea because things feel decadent again. Limited consumption. I haven’t really been limiting consumption. The waitress is complimenting the gray sweatpants on the boys at the table over from me, and the waitress seems to be vaguely annoyed with me, though I am trying to be pleasant. Thanks the sweatpants cost enough, the boys are saying, at the table over. Thanks we didn't realize we couldn't split the bill, Amelia and I were saying, last night, our tea was four dollars total and everything was starting to feel a little bit hazy. Sitting on the floor at sunrise, this morning, Amelia and I were watching videos from Miami. Videos from Bahamas. Videos from New York City, 2022, we'd been at all the same parties, but I hadn't known a soul. BAHAMAS, we are beaming, in one video, in the back of a taxi cab, streaking over MacArthur Causeway, Miami-Dade County, Florida, and so, as I recall, the driver was confused. I'm putting on makeup in the photo booth webcam on the floor of a hotel room and Amelia is talking in the background. It's Opposite Day in the background. Who had a mental breakdown, someone is saying in the background. From an outsider's perspective, who was it who had a mental breakdown? Friday, August 28 6:30pm, and I am back at IFC for my third viewing of Diva (1981) in twenty-four hours. I came to view Diva (1981) for the third time in twenty-four hours, because I became very sick of thinking about myself. This is a desirable alternative. The film is beautiful, and I wish to live in places like the apartments pictured. A large and wrecked studio in a car park with painted walls and recording equipment or, a hotel in Paris or, a castle by the sea or, the best one of all is a large blue flat full of puzzles and high ceilings and echoing sea sounds and an aqua glow and a man who wants to learn to stop the waves. They are fighting crime in the film. They are entrapping the criminals and they are doing it kind of like performance art. I don’t wish to spoil the ending. It really is the perfect little film. So; I will send out the recipe for zucchini (courgette) soup, and I will explain away the things I did in breathless optimism as things I did while bored. I will go to The Scratcher, Killarney Rose, Funny Bar, then Gospel then Caffe Reggio again - these are the decadent places to which I continue to return. I will draw my name with Riley on the table in crayon writing Best Friends Forever and listen to Feryquitous ft Sennzai and Sigur Rós and John Maus and think about Switzerland, Iceland, having a lot of dreams about places that are lush, lush, lush. Thinking about places that are quiet quiet quiet. Thinking about places that are green green green. Feels like Fall, outside, after church. Amelia woke me up in a living room that looked like a library and she was screaming that the air was poison. I was difficult to awaken, because it is my own delusions of poison air that wake me up screaming on other nights. Different from tonight. I was reminding myself of reality. I was reminding myself of delusions and keeping my eyes clenched shut while Amelia screamed. Well, the air wasn’t poison after all, just late night and late august and heavy with mosquitos and dust from renovations and revelations and; we walked back to the cafe. I walked through Washington Square Park at dawn. The doorman wished me good night at seven in the morning and the cycles repeated. It isn’t opposite day and we aren’t in hell, just working on things like bed time and emotional regulation. Working on archiving the things that happen outside of my head. It becomes good to have been an archivist all along. It becomes good to become sick of dealing with things mainly in repetition. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, September 4 From 6pm at Carinito — Saloon is throwing a party. Drinks from Dio. Dancing, DJ, tacos, etc
Inline links: Carinito, Saloon, throwing a party
City Built on Crystals
September 09, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, September 1 On the train to Coney Island, my friends are talking about the motifs that keep occurring. It's the sort of thing that happens to you when you have a pure heart, one of my friends is explaining. It's the sort of thing that people try to do to Real Life Angels, my other friend is explaining. Real life angels aren't real, I am saying, though I understand her point. The train is streaking through open air with towns on both sides. Housing projects rising up beyond that. Fallen green leaves and gray pebbles on the edges of the tracks. I have had these concepts of destruction explained to me before, only then it was by my mother or my friends in Miami and they called it Evil Eye. Here, they call it Devils and Angels. Real life Demons. I have been spending a lot of time this summer, trying to parse out the difference. Later, we emerge onto the boardwalk to find Curtis Sliwa in his red barret at the edge of the Atlantic. Police officers and children and men with snake tattoos in the ocean. There is live music at Salt and Sizzle and a ferris wheel that is one-hundred-years-old-and-never-any-accidents and the sky turns blue and purple and they cancelled the fireworks last year on account of someone drowning and due respect. We miss them this year of our own accord. When I was in love I spent a lot of time thinking about the apocalypse and feeling kind of giddy and aloof in this anticipation, convinced that the best way to die was euphoria and so end times while the center held would be a relief above all. When I smoked cigarettes and was a teen I would spend a lot of time pondering pop-psychology notions of optimistic nihilism and watching reddit atheists evangelize online. Now, I'm on the F-train back towards block-party-bars and my friends are shooting photos of their merch line, standing in front of the train doors as they open and close and I prefer to stay seated. Mostly aware of how dehydrated I am, which is a relief insofar as it diminishes all less corporeal thoughts. At Time Again, we make new friends with rare and inquisitive souls, which is really what the end of summer is all about. Writing on my phone on the walk home. Scribbling with kind of blurry eyes like an ipad baby on Delancey Street about the things that one has left to lose. Scribbling kind of incoherently about Health and Strong and Pervasive Senses. Scribbling Mother Teresa’s Rules For Humility. Speak as little as possible of oneself and Yield in discussion even though one is right and; well - what else am I supposed to do besides accept and embrace a Strong and Pervasive sense that things are as they are? Things were one way and now they are another. Things are harsher now in some ways, and more gentle in others. Tuesday, September 2 Woke up feeling very concerned about the decay of my physical form as a result of my bad habits and also by my newfound sense of passivity which I hope is driven by surrender and not by cynicism but one can really not be too sure. Woke up to a brand new delusion. In my dreams, someone was knocking on the door. They woke me up screaming. I stayed very quiet in response. Sunlight through my windows that I cannot bring myself to drape with curtains. Looked through the peephole. No one was there. Here are things I need to do: email the priests at Saint Joseph's to join OCIA and consider becoming Catholic despite my generally waspy sensibility. Finish and publish my substack. Create publicity materials for the play, go to class tomorrow, go to screening at Anthology Film tomorrow, write write write. Conjure up some sort of novel-like plot out of my hundreds of thousands of words of musings I keep in secret online documents. Make final edits on El Salvador piece and hope for the best. Conjure up some sort of plausible plot for my novel about gnosticism and also schizophrenia in people who seek to approximate the feeling of being famous by having friends online. Drop off laundry. Workout a lot. Maybe go sober. Certainly be sober-for-today. Today I am Cleansing. Today I am proud of myself in some ways and disappointed in others. Over plates of octopus and shrimp in lemon mustard sauce and pita and eggplant dip, Iris asks if she can treat me. Treat me to what, I asked. Do treatments for you, Iris explains. Treat me with iodine and thyroid and hypnosis. Treat me with methods opposite to my own. My own being mostly, a hysterical dipping in and out of notions of asceticism. Ok to some treatment, I say. Iris and I walk to the shops. The sky is still light but it is getting colder now. Iris buys dish soap and I slip sea kelp spray into my pocket. I have become quite destabilized by my afternoon visit to the glass apartment in the sky with the revolving doors. Not my apartment. No one's apartment. I am less like an orphan now. Iris and I walk back outside and down towards Seward Park. Iris says Sam knows a good aura cleanser. Not that I think the aura in the glass apartment in the sky is necessarily dark or doomed, Iris clarifies. I’d been telling Iris about some theories on the aura of things as dark and doomed. An invisible string but it was most of all bad. Ultimatums of gnosticism but they were delivered with nefarious intent.. Narcissistic to assume spiritual implications in the everyday, obviously. But how does one explain why they feel like they are floating by the time they are drifting up the stairs? On the Internet, they are making up real life retreats to enter the void. On the internet, they will take you to the Real Life House where you can Understand Real Life Consciousness. On the Internet, you can't live forever. Everyone realized that a few years back and I realized too, a few years after that. In Real Life you can maybe live forever, though. Everyone hopes so. I have been worrying, lately, that I hope so too. Wednesday, September 3 It’s Art Week in New York, which means less to me than it used to, besides for a pleasant rise in energies and things whirling back to life. I go to the first installment of the Marjorie Cameron series at Anthology Film Archive on account of Emillia’s recommendation and a slightly uneasy interest in the occult, tonight. An interest in witches who used to dance in a ring of rocking horses by my childhood home and a drive through Lily Dale with Riley in other lives, a few lives before this one. All that greenery and a long road alongside a lake towards the Psychic Capital Of The World. Hub of Mediums. Salmon Rushdie had been stabbed nearby a few years back. A psychic in Rhode Island had told me things would happen as I wanted them too but it would be first a thing of waiting, and secondly a thing of new architectures and spaces given that I’d been dealing in impossible conditions for awhile. Trying to make something stick in an Architecture of Unhappiness for a while. I stayed up til dawn over the weekend. Awoken to a Providence necklace placed around my neck and a burning desire to remove myself from the organ donor registry just in case. I worried about the morality of seeking loopholes as it pertained to the Providence Necklace, but a few days have passed and now it is Wednesday, early evening, tuck the tag under the collar of my shirt and began my hovering walk towards things that happen. The screening shows a Curtis Harrington film called Night Tide (1961), and it is about a girl who is a siren or perhaps it is just about Psychological Warfare, the ending leaves things a bit unclear. I've been nostalgic for the kind of California where I've never really been before. Nostalgic for things that never happened which I think is less a thing of clairvoyance and more a sense of how it all slips away but regardless; the shots are all of witchy Venice Beach and an apartment over the carousel that overlooks the sea and there is a bonfire on the rocks and some dancing that becomes a bit possessed due to dark forces - pulling my hair over my eyes like a blindfold for these parts - but I am thinking I could live in a place like this in spite of perhaps some evil. I have always thought I could float around it. I have always been arrogant in this way Thursday, September 4 Last night, I turned off the air conditioning and spilled Diet Pepsi on the baby pink rug in my sleep. Mom has shipped out baby blue curtains with white stripes and New York (the place where all my problems are) is starting to become a place that oscillates into something more calm. Sophie suggested baby pink curtains, and so I am making compromises in my mind. Compromising my own opinions and the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in things improving drastically through the help of water in glass bottles and red light therapy and self hypnosis and religious conversion and swapping out the Cool White Linear Fluorescent Light Bulbs for something warmer. Everything becomes warm and still and the air is kind of heavy. I can lie very still for a while. Not forever, but definitely for now. You should just become one of those sociopathic writers who does insane things for the sake of writing, Iris advised me a few days ago. Yeah, I said. Like go to consciousness school in Argentina or conduct strange experiments with materiality on myself and others. Adopt a regiment of strange injections or move to Venice Beach to become Catholic and fight the occult there, too. Sitting on the edge of my bed in my New World in New York City. Closing my eyes and imagining Venice Beach as a magical little enclave with a witchy apartment over the carousel by the sea and arched doorways and conch shells and a jazz club and massage parlors and psychics on the piers. If I became a ruthless psychopath, what could I do in a place like this? In New York City (the city built on crystals). I am not feeling so ruthless. Self-experimentation without self-possession mostly leading towards destruction of a pretty boring variety. At least we don't live boring lives, I used to be told. There is nothing more boring than this, I used to say in response. Friday, September 5 Come in, come in, three psychics beckon on Sullivan Street, but I am pretty clear about how things have been and where they are going, and I would prefer to look for motifs in patterns and symbols and psychosomatic symptoms which reach a peak and then; abandon your whole entire life. That is one thing the psychics could tell me to do. Abandon your whole entire life. They could tell me to buy a whole new personality. I could buy a good fortune swimming in tea leaves and an aura cleansing from the psychics on Sullivan Street. I could buy a membership to witchcraft school and a flat in Venice Beach and a conflicted conscience when it comes to forces of good and evil and certainly, to things like health, sobriety, longevity. It's enticing to create pseudo intellectual or pseudo spiritual explanations for bad behavior when in reality things are obviously much more simple. Most actions are much too plain to qualify as any sort of performance or definitely any art. I'm working on becoming stupider, I told Iris. Will I become stupider? I asked the psychics. Will the apocalypse come sooner or later if the collective consciousness ideates on it or tries to stave it off? Is it better to be witchy but self protective, or ascetic but operating with self abandon. Where can one buy self possession? Taking the C-Train to Fort Greene Summer Fairyland where my dad and Sylvie wait for me at Aita and so everything is better. Plums and peaches and ricotta and octopus which the girls behind us are saying they don't eat after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020). Girls love to say they don't eat octopus after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020) but perhaps I am heartless, and I mostly just found the documentarian in that film to be kind of deranged and unreliable. Beef tartar and potato chips and Sylvie is talking about how she's aware of the balance of power in every single conversation and I'm saying I'm literally never aware of that I'm literally always just seeking equilibrium in any interaction that matters because conversation exists to reach understanding and Sylvie is saying no you are just always making sure that you are the one with the power in every conversation. I say no and she says yes and I say can we seek some equilibrium and she says you make sure that won't ever happen. The combat stops. My dad is asking Sylvie's boyfriend why he seeks intellectual inquiry. Sylvie's boyfriend is pointing out the famous people peppered around the bar. Goodbye you power hungry beast, I am telling Sylvie. My dad drives me back towards Manhattan. Animal skulls are scattered around his mini van and he says I can have a deer jaw for my new place if I want. Wrong turn through the Hubert Tunnel. Twenty-two dollar toll. Drop me off at the most Satanic Nightclub in New York to sulk soberly at the edge of an indoor pool and really lean into nihilism insofar as - what if we stayed for a while? I don't stay for a while. Manhattan night is teeming with people and the city is built on crystals. Good or bad ones? I haven't decided yet. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, September 9 From 7pm - 11pm at Night Club 101 — AltCitizen 15 Year Anniversary Show series launches with The Kickoff. Hosted by Brittany Marino. Featuring Lulu Van Trapp, Suo, D. Treuit. From 10pm - late, after party downstairs | Tickets: $15 advance, $20 doors
Inline links: Night Club 101, AltCitizen, The Kickoff
Humanoid-Robots
March 06, 2026 · Original source
In the summer, when the air was sickly sweet and I was feeling ill but knew the day would be ok to pass in the sort of languid-and-waiting-for-it-to-end kind of way, we took a CitiBike over towards Thai Diner. We biked along the Hudson River, first. In Riverside Park, I stopped alongside the dinosaur playground and the firefighter memorial and I touched the shiny metal heads of all these structures left behind. My companions were irritated yet understanding of this divergence. We biked to the George Washington Square Bridge after that, and Jennifer jumped in the dirty water, and Riley vomited off the pier. Back downtown, the air was humid and heavy and the wait outside Thai Diner was long, which made everyone feel kind of claustrophobic if not necessarily physically worse. Not traditional not traditional not traditional, Ian kept on saying. Kicking rocks around Chinatown. He liked this place nonetheless. Thai Diner is cartoonishly bright and the greenhouse heats quickly and it is not the sort of place to visit during summer storms. When the rain started, Ian and I walked to the chocolate factory. At the chocolate factory, he bought me sweets painted like portraits and water colors and little mini worlds. Best chocolates in the world, he kept on saying. I unwrapped the chocolates like little parcels, and we both found them to be quite a delight. Thai Diner is kind of Michelin-star style. Really good food. Mango and coconut sticky rice. Curries and fried cod. Every bite delights, but all I can really remember is we were all too sick or maybe just too hot to eat. I ordered hot toddy because it’s good to drink warm things when warm, and it’s good to drink strong things when hands are shaking at the cedar wood counter of a nice restaurant, and friends are dripping Hudson River water all over the floor. Ian ordered a smoothie that was green and piled high with coconut-flakes. Get me out of here, he kept on saying. I love this place, he said. I feel so goddamn bad. Get me a cab right now. We went home after that, and the greenhouse roof at home made the whole place boil and so I fell asleep easily, even midday. I think I fell asleep for the rest of the year, or at least the afternoon.

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