Collected Agenda Scene Wiki

Rose

58 min read

Rose

Article

Rose is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between June 09, 2025 and February 04, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “they told Rose at breakfast at The Social Club that she is getting sick”; ""It is funny when you two talk about raising children on gray rocky shores, because you sure have no problem creating rocky shores,” Rose told me in Miami”; “Rose was saying my denial was as deep as his was”. It most often appears alongside Gnosticism, Iris, Cassidy Grady.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: June 09, 2025
  • Last seen: February 04, 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.

A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again
June 09, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Saturday, May 31 I wake up at six am to Miami Beach hazy dawn, honey bear full of gummy bears, skinny pop popcorn and torres truffle potato chips and I believe this mini bar isn't motion-censored but if it is, well, is already to late because I am crouched over on the floor playing pharmacy with the sorting of cosmopolitan, candies, pretzels, aperol spritz. The sun is hot and already almost too bright outside. There's a kind of resignation to the physical exhaustion of today. I could pump myself full of junk food and sink into the hotel carpet disassociated, spinning, things have been oscillating in such extremes and I guess there is some solid ground now, but I am still so breathless and uncertain when I try to consider this as real. "What I like about a hotel is the idea that you can just completely change vibes," my boyfriend was saying. "Anonymity. Abandon your two week life.” I came to consciousness in my two week life sobbing in the morning. I came to consciousness with tears pouring down my face in the bluest water you have ever seen. There was cognizance while gasping for air at the coconut stand, warm liquor, a scene at The Standard. I plugged the story into chat gpt like someone evil or something all made up. Is the narrator likable, I asked. Is this genius, I begged. A whirling tale about wearing the wrong linens, said the robot. the narrator is kind of redeemable, unlike, clearly [redacted] I have lost all my vindication. I have promised not to beg. I reread the letter and they told Rose at breakfast at The Social Club that she is getting sick because of Central AC. You know you are in Miami right, they ask us. The servers beam big wide beams and only I beam back. I have been working on fiction a lot, but then I find it difficult to swing back here. I find myself very cold and with a lingering sense of maybe fatalism more than nihilism but regardless there is such removal in my made up language no matter how much I try to bring it down to earth. I am not removed at all, here. I learned quickly. I deleted my transcription of the other days so I could better tell you about the parts that Never Happened. I remember almost nothing but it's like I don't really drink anymore, so this was something else. My Miami Beach: The Standard, The Beachcomber, The Betsey, The Social Club. The coconut stand and the diet coke mini bar and the pleading about what happens now - a sunburn, a whole entire life, there was the mystic who was telling us about Gnosticism that summer. There was the quivering lady at the quaker church who was telling us about angels and destiny and if we became unaligned, then there would be nothing else. I did write a story of fiction and so you're getting the scraps, here. I came to consciousness already half in a dream. My consciousness has never faltered, before. We began in Connecticut. Things were bright and nice that weekend. All the green of Connecticut was very lush and it caught me by surprise. I did not feel much to prove nor a need to get all on the defensive. I wrote stories outside of myself, and I was pleased to find an escape. There was a castle over the river ferry in lush and luminous New England spring and it reminded me of somewhere further South and of a life that stretched out all human and endless. I didn't mean to leave again. I didn't mean to cycle on and on and on. We went further South. Bahamas then Miami. It wasn't so much a thing of irresponsibility or of being in a cult as it was, having lots of friends and being given a gift. Drops of water in a wave don't move with the wave, they simply jostle around in place with the wind. He read this aloud to me from my book like this was news and I was stupid. I'm not stupid, I said. His face became crestfallen like he was surprised to find me harsh. I'm sorry for being careless with the only thing in the world I know to be true, I said. My mind was moving too fast but it might have just been the sterile setting and the dehydration. I left New York and I landed in a place where I should never be. It was a bit of impulsivity and a bit of an exercise in absurdity and camp perhaps, though none of it is ever really my decision with these things and these trips. There Are Casinos Everywhere For Those With Eyes To See. There are golf cart highways and fake black marble lounge tables and a DJ saying Let's Get It Started with no irony. There is plenty of sun, too but the rejuvenative qualities of light become quite negated when filtered off of all this pale concrete. Ancestral memory or something of the sort, but I was really craving foggy pine forests by the gray ocean. What was it they were saying in El Salvador? The teachings on light and life from the Bitcoin Doctor in El Salvador were proven to be true because Las Vegas was so palpably optimized to be terrible. They were saying a lot of things in El Salvador, but I did feel like there is something almost nefarious in the Casino-Desert air, here. We took the plane to Miami after that. I'm obscuring the timelines, a bit, again. I rediscovered Privacy and Fiction at right about the same time. I rediscovered golf course concrete roads and mind numbing sun and privacy and fiction and now I'd like to write what happens next but it all begins to feel a bit stilted. The Beachcomber was kind of party party party and bottomless brunch in the lobby and windows that opened onto all that green jungle Miami swim week bottle service ceviche room service drifting around the paths outdoors taking short sharp breaths. The Betsey was more colonial, like a maze, they considered themselves to be bookish and we moved there for the purpose of manufacturing stability and more cheer. Iris came over in the afternoon. I picked her up in the lobby. I dove for my boyfriend's lost coral in the pool downstairs. The skin off my chest burned easily. I lay on the deck of the pool on the roof with a virgin bloody mary for electrolytes, and a spicy watermelon margarita for a self destructive haze. How are you doing, Iris asked. What are your favorite foods, Iris asked. Octopus, apples, apple pie lamb chops with mint jelly, creamed spinach, a certain type of barbeque salmon, a whole roast chicken. It was funny to say Best Day Of My Life because I cried a million billion tears and now we’re swimming in the moonlight off Miami Beach. I like the club scene pulsing behind all the crescent moon glow and waves. It’s a shame about that night and that day. The resurrection has been unsteady but it’s like Kygo and a palm grove and a cityscape behind me, and all blue dark ocean and saturns return to the front. There was a moment there where I lost every piece of everything good. Gulps of water and air. I pull it all back. 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/$s_!ZjW-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67ecce3d-02cd-4260-91aa-07adc92be735_1052x484.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$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
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
Bad Luck Spot
July 06, 2025 · Original source
Sunday, July 6 Summer storm of the nicest kind outside, and I think I’ll leave the lights off. I don't have so much to say about the time back in New York. I came back to the ocean because, of course, this is the sort of place where summer storms are nicer. And I have spent a while, so long really, quivering in this assurance that it would be ok; cling onto this one thing so tightly and then it will be ok, for the sake of this, to lose everything else. Well, there was a two-year-life and now there is everything else. It is not so much that I value peace. I value many, though not all, things before peace. It is not so much that I am gracious or really even care to be. I am being opaque. I was a guest there, for a lot of it. My old life, I mean. And it is not so much that I was too gentle for things like wild dogs and self surveillance. It is just, there were things that were mine first too. Summer storms and lace curtains on the edge of the bed. I did not always view things as possessed in this way though, I realize, now - it's been a few months, at least, of starting to think in terms of what belongs to me. "It is funny when you two talk about raising children on gray rocky shores, because you sure have no problem creating rocky shores," Rose told me in Miami. We'd been up all night,. Poured the liquor from the mini fridge down the drain and stood barefoot in the hotel hallway with a coconut juice, short quick breath. A baseball team had marched down the corridor at sunrise, and it was strange, even then, to watch myself become so shameless. My father video called me from New York, after. His hands made a downhill slope, steep then level, then steep and dropping and; “at a certain point you will not be able to stay,” he had told me. “At a certain point he will deem you problem no matter how determined you are to remain some sort of martyr.” At the end of the world there is a warplane over the graduation and a psychic in Rhode Island and he is screaming about cocks and his mother at a wedding in Michigan and he is screaming because I am opening my own doors at the hotel in South Beach and he is screaming at me in the apartment, later, it did all blur together. He was taking the art. He was taking his ShitCoin passkeys. He was taking his copy of Generative Energy and I was taking cigarettes, a sweater. I was trying not to be so voyeuristic about it. He was trying to use fewer slurs on the phone. I was doing front flips on the bed at the Holiday Inn and yelling: I can’t wait for our dry wedding, dry wedding, dry wedding. And he was saying that he drinks with the intention to forget and so it wouldn't come to all of that. Bad habits, strip mall parking lot and Rose was saying my denial was as deep as his was though, there had always been this thing of performance art. I want to party beautifully until we die, he used to tell me. I want to live like Match Point (2005), After Hours (1985), Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Later, we were walking up spring green hills and he was saying it would be easier, all of it, getting better, getting kinder, getting sober, getting bored, getting pregnant, if I stayed for a while. He wore gym shorts to the airport and returned in a rage. Later, on the floor, tuck my knees close to my chest by the open window and say I love you but my life is so much better when you are not in it and then he'd said how could you. Lie on the floor and he would say I orbit you. Summer storm and I'm texting him like I'm sorry. Because there were many letters and they kept on getting worse. Summer storm in early July and I was texting him even now like, I orbited you too. Iris came over in the afternoon in Miami. I picked her up in the lobby. I dove for his lost coral in the pool downstairs. The skin on my chest burned easily. I lay on the deck of the pool on the roof with a bloody mary that he bought me and that South Beach vibe, sunglasses, beady eyes. Ok intense girl, he said. How are you doing, Iris said. I didn't like the way he was holding you at dinner after everything he did, Iris said. In Rhode Island, last summer, we'd still been talking about things like soulmates last summer and we'd been driving in the rain. There had been a quaker church house, red Talbot sweater, a copper pot that we'd hang in New York but not till later and a little old lady. “You were a soldier wounded in the war in a past life,” the little old lady had told him. She had grabbed my shoulders, all shivering. “And it is a beautiful journey for you and him,” she had told me. “If you are ever pulled apart it will be a difficult and dark journey, but it is a beautiful journey for you and him.” “And so you cannot leave him,” Iris said in Miami. We liked hotels because of anonymity and aesthetic cohesion. He liked me because of blue eyes and devotion. He liked Miami because everyone was packing heat and I liked symbolism, numerology, gnosticism. “I like when things are fun,” I wrote him. “I like when things are fun and sweet.” And I showed up late to some basement apartment back in New York. The funny thing is, I had begged him not to go to that final party. I had begged him not to beg me to come. “My wife should think it's hot if I fight someone at a party,” he said later. “I want to get sober and treat you with the affection you deserve,” he had said, first, a few weeks before all of that. Once, we lived in a glass apartment in the sky. Central air conditioning but the greenhouse roof still made things boil and we'd call it the Boat House like some sort of joke, because floors slanted and careened and because of course, it was the only house. But so quickly, I am taken in as if I’m some sort of orphan. So quickly there are other houses. "He called and sounds like a horror movie, so you should get the fuck out of the apartment," Rose said in the aftermath. And it was Isabel who screamed first and so I did snap then. He is not a horror movie, just a shark or an orca whale or mostly a boy who is not here. Get out if you want to act scared. And so we did take some things and get out. And I did drive down the coastline because I still just could not stay put. It had always been a thing of kind of here, there, everywhere with us. High spring humid heat and there'd been no crocodiles in the river, no liquor at the hacker house, just warm beer and tall trees and broken glass and, “I'm looking forward to being very sweet to each other.” he had said. In the end, it wasn't me who lost my mind. So you were speaking as you two in one when you said you had the real sort of breakdown, the other party goers said, at that last party. I nodded. The party goers patted my shoulders. The party goers wanted no part. The texts were warm and made me ill. They took him out. They took me home. Blue paisley sheets at the home where I grew up and I remind him, for the first time, of the parts of it that were first all mine. Pull the blinds shut tight. Thunder and acid rain. He never bought into ideas of living forever in quite the way his friends did and, “your ideas of eternity become quite juvenile,” he says. Staring at cinched shut cream white shades and, “I’m looking at the ocean right now,” I say. “Don't you want to look at that ocean again?” The rot hits all at once. It smells like sickness and cruelty I did not know could be true. Lying on the bathroom floor - not my bathroom, I have been taken in like I am some sort of orphan, though I feel strangely less orphaned than ever before. I said I will not leave the party with him and so he said he will not ever come home again. There was discretion and bringing in reinforcement and he’d call first, before anyone else, stilted voice, some sort of laugh, he would like to be the one to break the latest news. He would like to be the one to make me guess. “Everyone heard you say that when she was your age you were nine,” he tells me on the phone, later. “That is because when she was my age, I was nine," I tell him on the phone, too. I talk a lot about decadence and gluttony and our no-beliefs-but-pleasure dumb lives but; for me it has not always been rotten. For me it was the opposite or; I could always see all the rot just drifting around in piles of money and provocation and drugs and alcohol and I do think there were the years of just floating, I've been floating alongside all of this rot and shock of all shocks it got sick. For me it has not always been rotten, though. It is very important that I make that clear. I did feel I could float around it. I have always been arrogant in a way. I did sit on the floor by an open window and I did lie in the rain in the night on the terrace. I remember laughing very quietly on the terrace. I remember trying to laugh as quietly as we could. At the end of the world I am working on ontology. Because you always did like to ontologize things, he is laughing on the phone. Because I think six hours in the future and you think in terms of forever, he is saying on the phone. The end of the world is something like an extinction event, abandon your whole entire life, chinook fighter plane carrier streaking over the graduation and, after the quaker church burned down I decided to get out of town. There were other things too. I threw up lobster and vodka after dinner. The dog bit the neighbor. He called because I asked him to and also to say; he missed the dog, and my family, and a little bit me. Psychosis felt like dancing, he tells me on the phone. And you felt like tells me what to do and she feels like take it to the internet, he never had a problem, kicked out of the bar, and then it’s have another baby while there's still precious time. Once, it all felt like lie on a Japanese floor mattress, white arched doorway and we wanted to remember it here and, “I wish I could start it all over before you,” he said. You wake up in the middle of the night in a hotel in the midwest to the sense that you are on the seven hundredth floor and there is no air left. You wake up. But you were already awake then, weren't you? You go to the bathroom, a normal bathroom, normal for a hotel like this. Small, compact, gray, windowless. You close the door, press your back hard against its now steady frame. You imagine that if you opened it again, you would be met with another bathroom just like this. You imagine a million identical bathrooms extending beyond every wall. In the car the next day, you tell him that it’s opposite day. On opposite day, you ask him if he loves you over and over again. You revel in hearing him say no. The charade is comforting. He’s driving recklessly. You drive for hours. The land is flat, his hand is on your thigh, he’s saying things he doesn’t mean and then he’s smirking because you're both in on the joke. He tells you to take her feet off the dash. In case there’s a wreck, he says. You tell him that opposite day is over. “Do you love me?” you ask. “Yes,” he says. “Is it opposite day,” you ask? “No,” he says. “But if it was you’d never know because no means yes and yes means no and…” He finishes explaining the word play. He explains it well. You get it. “Do you get it,” he asks. “Yes,” you say. You don't like these new rules. You are driving too fast, through a field of sunflowers. You think about how you could ask if the sky is blue and if he said yes then she could know that today was a day for telling the truth. You think about what you left behind. “I did not mean to leave those drawings behind at the apartment,” I am saying. The cartoons that he made me and I de-magnetized the fridge on accident and could the drawings be for me, and, “that's ok,” he says. Storm out of another party. He threw cash at me at dinner. Tip over his chair and say the issue is perhaps he never cared and so, it becomes good I was an archivist all along. It is good that nothing bad has ever really happened. He and I walked to the park. The fountain was spraying droplets mixed with rain. The air was sheened rainbow. The bench was covered in packets of ketchup that he was pushing off and down to the ground. He cleared me a seat. We were sitting not in silence, but in conversation that I did not recall even as it happened. “He keeps on taking really somber videos of me like he's already eulogizing me as his Dead Wife," I told Rose on the phone. "Do you know how we could make this even worse?" I asked him. Walk to a circle of wet chalk on the wet pavement. Bad Luck Spot, the writing on the ground says. Plant my feet firmly in the middle, and I wait for the curse to hit. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Sunday, July 6 From 7pm at KGB Bar — I will be reading at Confessions along with Mara Stoner, Sarah Fradkin, John Padula, Cassidy Grady, Annabel Boardman, and more.
Inline links: Confessions
Apocalyptic Ideation
September 26, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, September 15 Joe and Darby drove me back all the way from Washington DC to New York City yesterday. Me, nauseous sort of hungover laid flat in the back seat, shoes pressed up against the already smudged glass window and the September sun reflecting off the highway and the hood of the car and the tar black pavement turning everything so warm inside. A long warm drive where time passed somewhere between not at all and all at once. Too lethargic to really notice. We turned on a tape. The Shirley Jackson story based on all those girls wearing distinct raincoats that were disappearing into the woods around Bennington, Vermont in the 40s and 50s. In the story, nineteen year old Louisa Tether runs away from her beautiful old white wood Massachusetts home and nice-enough family on account of mostly a sense of ambient contempt and a desire for a whole new life. As it turns out, one can get a whole new life without too much trouble. All it takes is swapping out your nice blue jacket for your old rain jacket and retreating to a town that is not too-big but still-big-enough. Three years later, Louisa Tether is Lois Taylor. In the story, Lois Taylor tries very hard to act in accordance to the stories she is telling herself. This, Lois Taylor learns quickly, is what it takes to be a good liar or maybe just a new person, the two are kind of the same in this case. I doze in and out of sleep, but the sound of the audio-book is nice and I am curious what will happen when Louisa decides to come home. “Louisa Please Come Home”, the story is called. It ends with a chance encounter, a change in whims after three years, and the realization, too, that it is just too late. By that point, it is just too late. A three-years-older Louisa washes up at her three-years-older family home and her three-years-older parents and sister look into her just slightly aged face and irrevocably changed eyes. It’s just been too many years of playing pretend. You shouldn’t pretend to be our Louisa, Louisa’s parents say. You have a family who loves you, and you should go home to them. We hope that someday, our Louisa comes home, like you should go home to your parents. Our Louisa was younger than you, Lousia’s father explains. In my own small and strange apartment things are still a bit cluttered but at least nothing is sterile. I made a call and I imagined a big white Massachusetts home. A stone patio in the back and still-green trees and hobby horses in the front. Windows that I could stare in and a door that I could still walk through because I have never run away. An old car and quiet roads and little red berries that crunch underfoot this time of year. Three years is quite some time. This part of the story made me uneasy. The emphasis on how much older all these should-be happy and youthful people look after only three long years. New York City is still so steaming hot. I weigh my options, and decide to stay for a while. Tuesday, September 16 In my life where I am staying for a while, Celia sends me mantras in the night. Today is a good day to become harder to kill and easier to love, Celia says. I have already seen this mantra on Health Gossip, but I appreciate it all the same. I wake up in a room that is small now, and so it is easy to take quick stock of things. The light and the white bedspread and a little gold swan and gold watch and gold cross and black Orca stone of Protection clustered on the edge of the table. Celia is joking I presume, but most things do come down to energy and integrity. Volatility is what emerges when there is energy without integrity. So; I am working on things. In the morning, there are mantras from Celia and there is sludge and dirty water seeping through my ceilings from the bathroom of my always-yelling-upstairs-neighbors. This is not so much a thing of patterns and symbols everywhere for those with eyes to see, and more an indicator that people who are very loud often also live kind of disgusting lives. One kicks into gear. Call the people one should call. Say thank you very much and the anonymity of these things still feels strange. I am very easy to kill like most people are and I don’t really believe in quantifying or even speaking on things like easy to love. There is lymphatic drainage and athletic resistance and pyrogenics and snake oil face tape and blue multi peptide serums and red light therapy and real sort of detox incoming because yes, there needs to be one of those soon. I sat at Dr. Clarke’s with snake venom filled saki and martini and free champagne til late enough last night to say goodbye to friends who come and go in and out in this city and then I wandered home through the remnants of the never-ending-San-Gennaro fair, where teens were scrambling on the ferris wheel and a nice seeming man was shilling free fried oreos. I sat at The Odeon which is really just the perfect restaurant til almost sunset tonight, perched at the bar alone for a while waiting for Celia to arrive, old school vibe, pink and green glowing clock, men walking in straight from the plane carrying luggage. I ran into an architect and an editor and there was talk about throwing a party. Celia arrived full of stories about design and plans that made me full of energy and a night and life that could stretch endlessly if I could find it in me to not flee shortly after dinner. Are we going to an after party, Celia asked me. I presume I’m un-invited because of an incident where I was acting hard to love and easy to kill, I told Celia. That’s ok, Celia told me. We went to a reading instead, where the lamps were stained glass and the stories were about people who are too bored to cook but still need to eat. We went to a party then, too, which is always how these things go and then I wandered home through quiet streets of the Financial District and up a ways and it was too late for anyone to still be out shilling anything or too quiet for me to stop if they were, regardless. The windows were left open at my new and strange apartment and I counted the turtles in the clean water in the pond outside and back inside the water had stopped dripping through the floors of my horrible neighbor’s disgusting and loud apartment. Dirty water, clean water, everything dripping out all over the floor and the pavement and then someone cut the supply and so; the cycles repeated nine million times. The cycles repeated and then they grinded to a halt. Wednesday, September 17 There was the idea of thinking about oneself until one invented an entirely new self. There was the idea of finding the place between past and future which of course logically concludes with present but, definitionally becomes hard to sort out. Something like wading through mud which these rooms often seem to be full of these days. I am reading a story about the Organ Donor Registry and why one should remove oneself at my party on Saturday. You will know you are ready to have a child when you are tired of taking care of yourself, Veronica says, in the story, and she said it to someone else in real life, because this part of the story is true, though it is not a true story. One can think about nostalgia and how to fill a day and right from wrong and if one is sincere or not and how to tell based on things like your own sense of your own soul and the cadence of your voice and often based on things you can kind of just see in the faces of yourself and others. I realized a long time ago that I live a life that people are interested in reading about, K said on the Internet. How to fill a day? I could have been far more voyeuristic about all of it. Instead, I talk about how to fill a day. I could have been far more interesting. If I am going to think about something besides myself it should be something fun like art not physics, Amelia says. I am going to think about: buy a Sony camera and make some flat-lay videos and join Raena Health to figure out the root of things and become very strong from all the climbing and write the story about Gnosticism or what happens when people seek meaning in signs and symbols when it’s all just randomness and is it a form of nihilism to turn towards religion if you are really still not sure? I am skeptical when people are very certain about things, Iris says. You’ve been learning to withhold your opinions but I hope it’s not just because you have none, Celia says. At the party - another party - everyone is very well dressed in things like linen, and I fit right in by coincidence because I am wearing a blue linen shirt. Are you bored yet because I am, Rose says. I am endlessly entertained, I tell Rose. But there were other problems too. Thursday, September 18 You don’t need anything but this, the waiter tells me at 9 Orchard. It is 2pm and hot. He brings me a Tequila espresso martini listed simply on the menu under; Day Drinking. He brings me a salad that is chock full of thin gray hairs so he removes it from the bill. Saoirse joins me. We are here to write in the Blue Room, but both our laptops are dead on arrival which is evidence, really, that neither of us were really here to write at all. We are here to hang, Saoirse keeps on saying. It is productive, really, because there were many things that had to be said at some point, and if a task necessitated completion at some point, well, now is as good a time as any. The bar at Nine Orchard is full of business people and weekday leisure. Wearing sunglasses. Drinking diet coke. I’ve been trying to be less gluttonous about it. Everyone is hoping to take advantage of the last dredges of sun, and so Saoirse gives me a hotel tour and then suggests we go outside. New ownership at the hotels around here. New blazing hot fires in the blue rooms at the hotels where the shades are pulled shut against the still blazing hot autumn resistant summer heat. We do cartwheels in the ballroom. We aren’t asked to leave. Before there was Dimes Square, there was The Metrograph, a German walking tour guide is saying, back on the street. No way that is real, I am saying to Saoirse. I see them all the time, Saoirse is saying to me. We walk to Le Dive. The hours tick onwards and so today is the last day of it. Last days of gluttony. My second-to-last-day in my-gluttenous-life. Saoirse is showing me a free library web application. Saoirse is showing me a free web application to read The Bible a little bit each day and then all at once in one year. Saoirse wants to sit outside. Saorise wants to drink wine. Saoirse wants to remind me how much better my life is now and I want to say; I’m not sure if I agree, I can’t drink sulfates, I am kinder now certainly, I am happy in this moment, I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry. I am so sorry for how I used to be and how I’ve been. I walk home as the sun fades. Plans for self improvement. Plans to revel in solitude (the thing I hate most). Plans to stay for a while. I don’t want to, really. I have been talking about how the apartment is clean but I still won’t let anyone else come inside. I imagine a winter where I was the happiest I’d ever been. You will be that happy again, Saoirse says. It’s ok if I’m not, I say. I imagine it is just one life all at once. I imagine what I think about when I pray. I imagine somewhere else. A place full of wind and desert and proverbial change that wouldn’t come. So, there is nowhere else but here. I decide to stay again. I decide this every day. Friday, September 19 An Aristotelian tragedy requires the tragic figure to be a hero, which is why it is particularly disappointing to suffer while you are feeling irredeemable. Apocalyptic ideation is when you’re thinking about how good you’d be at the apocalypse. Relentless optimism is when you’re challenging your friends just to see if they challenge you back. I wear a black dress to go ballroom dancing. I eat meatballs and gem salad and drink sparkling water at home. What are you doing today, Iris asks. Throwing a party, I respond. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Friday, September 26 From 7pm at EARTH — Patrick McGraw, JT LeRoy and Meg Superstar Princess open for Laura Albert.
Inline links: Health Gossip, EARTH, Laura Albert
Hotel-Life-For-Life
February 04, 2026 · Original source
Monday, January 26 On the first day of the clearest week of the year, I vow to be meticulous about it. As hell and even heaven and all of New York City freezes over in the cold, Olivia keeps on asking if I’m sick of it. Impossible to feel lonely when my opinion on the benchmarks of the weather is demanded at the start of every day. Are you still happy about this? Olivia keeps on asking. It got colder and colder and colder for one week or maybe more. Soon, I expect the cold will break. Soon, there will be something to talk about besides the arctic winds. Although I do find it thrilling and even telling, really, to see how everyone reacts to extremity. I am only being a little bit factious. It is icy and hazy and pale and like playing tetris with myself, finding footholds in the snow banks, this week. Creep past the frozen turtle pond, shut the open window, position my salt stained boots in the divots in ice piles that other passerby’s have left behind. Hidden little trails and maps and loopholes in treacherous places. Exciting places. Game theory in the blizzard. Do you still feel ‘manic’ and ‘energized’ by this, Olivia wants to know. Are you still wearing sheer tights and a-line skirts and enjoying how the wind chill makes everything feel empty? Are you still seeking redemption in the spaces left barren while everyone rushes through tundra streets? Are you still feeling pretentious or maybe just autistic standing stock still and underdressed in courtyards that have never really been yours? This week, I have decided to just say what I really mean. Listening to Dark But Just A Game by Lana del Rey while the sun comes up this morning. Not a new song, but new to me. They are talking about Video Games album anniversary on The Internet this morning. Thank you for my mental illness, girls are saying on the Internet. I tell Olivia that what I remember from this album is before I knew much on the Internet. I remember my mentally ill friend turning on Video Games in a wall to wall carpeted suburban room encased in sunlight and green branches that brushed against wide windows when I was something like thirteen or maybe younger. Turn that stuff off, I remember telling my friend. Turn off those sad and strange songs before we all start to get freaked out. Playing Dark But Just A Game over and over and over again, this morning. Breathing kind of shallow breaths and making calls of confession or maybe complaints. I vowed to be more private about it and then I vowed to make my blog more true. If I cannot speak about something clearly, then I think I will not speak about it at all. In the morning, there is salt stained mirror and la Roche Posay cleanser and peptide moisturizer and mineral sunscreen and amazon tights and a call from Maria saying hotel lobby for lunch, maybe. Rituals like magic. Compulsive documentation. Live-blogging for my live-diary which is mostly just an event calendar plus some but not-so-many lurid life details because I have never been so good at keeping it all so private. The truth of it is, one can return to oneself quite quickly, but this should only have to happen once or maybe twice. In the hotel lobby, a beautiful girl walks in. She is a model, clearly. You are twenty-nine, a horrible man is saying to her, across the table. Good genes, he is saying. He is saying things about a girl like you and you can leave if you want. He is complimenting her grotesquely and it is very understandable why she would feel extremely annoyed. She is very articulate and pretty, though, and seems to know this game. Girls like you have hobbies, the man is saying. Do you have hobbies like art collecting or acoustic music or perhaps even ice skating? The girl is good at modulating her voice, and so my eavesdropping is abruptly cut off. Order: almond milk cappuccino, almond milk matcha, ginger tea, diet coke at Hotel Lobby. Too many beverages . Too many things I want. Discipline is pleasure. Restraint enhances desire. Reading something true on Health Gossip about the things a person must do before they lick the candy wrapper of success and then im thinking o.k perhaps time to cut myself off of this sort of thing for a little bit. Maria wears a red sweater and black pants and orders only two drinks: (1) black coffee and (2) greens juice. I ask Maria to read my diaries and she obliges and then, even highlights the parts she likes best. Too much to say? I ask Maria. No, she says. No and I think your instincts would stop you before you really said anything too uncouth. Too panopticoned? I ask. It’s fine to talk about faux-purity, Maria says. Nightfall in the hotel lobby, where the lights are yellow and glowing and dark and my computer screen is starting to look fluorescent and bright and bad, in contrast to the low-light and well-curated vibe they have fired up in here. A friend group I was eavesdropping on in rather nefarious and uncouth ways have gone silent, now. The man across the couch from me is talking about working on a film pilot in Malaysia and a need-for-speed and also thirty-million-dollars. He could never do what you are doing, two of the girls in the friend group were telling the third, earlier, as she sobbed. Do what you’re doing, being: sobbing in hotel lobby. Radical vulnerability in hotel lobby. I am feeling nefarious and busy body and a little bit mean. We’re your friends so we sure are going to be kind to you, the two girls had been telling the third. Just because our mothers were born in the wrong generation, does not mean they can’t listen-and-learn. Ordered tonic water and avocado and adopted vaguely negative vibe towards; people who did not know they were being panopticoned. Girls whose conversation I could have just let flow around me like water. There’s stagnation in judging harshly, particularly in judging people with whom I am totally uninvolved. No one in the world knows where I am right now, but anyone who wanted to could probably guess. And it’s not that I think it’s particularly good or even beneficial to be cultivating mystique, but once secrets are in the air they swirl around forever, and so one might want to hold some things a bit closer to one’s chest. Pitch black outside, which makes it even more warm or silver in here, depending on where I look. Lily texts me - I would like to spend a day like you did. We can recreate my whole day, I respond. We can recreate the good days. We can eradicate all slush. I can tell you all about what actually happened. Soon, I will walk home in the freezing and sparkling night in my black and soleless ballet flats. I will slip on ice and look at the moon and Washington Square Park archway and the dark and getting even darker sky. I’ve been feeling kind of desperate to chronicle the things that are mine, if I’m being honest about it. Hold onto the things I never lost. This is different from grasping onto things that never were or no longer are, yours. Parties last week, but I don’t really remember. Party last weekend, but full of people I didn’t want to see. Party tonight, and I wear athleisure to the bar and make a friend who shares my name and also my sensibilities. We’re here because of your blog, someone tells me, at the bar. We’re here because we just made a film in Nigeria and now we’re moving to Rome to work for Vatican II. We’re here because of an article that everyone hates. Birthday party. Renaissance themed karaoke. Did you just meet and become best friends, someone asks me and my new friend. We all go outside to smoke a cigarette. Duh, I respond. This is always how it goes with new and fast friends. In my room, tonight, and I’ve been feeling good and normal. The cleaner my room gets, the more I remember. At the bar tonight, I met someone who lives in a hotel-for-life. Is everything perfect-all-the-time? I asked the hotel-inhabitant. Is everything clean and contained and curated and beautiful and taken care of? Do you order room service for dinner? If you develop a problem, is it immediately fixed? In my room, there is a computer and also a wooden music box that plays Silent Night when opened. Inside the box, there are blue little blue pearls and letters and a ballerina that spins. Above my bed, there are lace white curtains newly pinned over courtyard-facing open windows. The curtains are there to keep out ice and possibly fire-escape intruders. The unearthed music box is the reward for cleaning my room. Thinking about rabbit holes I’d like to really delve into next. Getting texts from friends from online who go by names after celestial objects. Thinking about Saorise’s brand new robot that sends her pilates-training-packets. Thinking about Esoteric Health Book Club. Saint Teresa de Ávila. Thinking about no more vice. Everything has frozen over and hovered and smoothed itself thin in the months that came in between. Descents into madness happen very quickly, my new friend was saying, today, at the bar, where everything was more lovely than I could possibly have imagined. We were talking about cults, because the topic does arise even in beautiful places. Talking about posture. Talking about cult leaders. Matchmakers. Scammers. Beautiful lives. The Places To Be.. Hours later, now. Home, now. Still listening to Jeff Buckley “Forget Her” and Lana del Rey “Dark But Just a Game” on repeat because I love pleasure in excess. So addicted to everything. I can get addicted to good things too, I think. Tomorrow, I will fall asleep in a snowy white house in the woods. We will get vanilla milkshakes on the drive down. Many rooms. Plans to cook dinner. Last summer, I wanted very badly to drive to this house in July. I wanted to find secret waterfalls and secret gardens, too. It’s a house just an hour or so from the city where I used to go often, and I remember the surroundings as very green. I remember fighter jets over Celia’s graduation. I remember Rose writing her social security number up and down her arms in sharpie, last summer, because chaos was kind of the objective everyone was seeking, then. Enough reminiscing. Same songs, over and over and over again. Opening my window because it is time for bed. Tell yourself over and over and over, Jeff Buckley keeps saying. He died early with something to show for it. Addicted to repeating myself. Addicted to new beginnings and no more false starts. Working on getting addicted to continuity now, I think. I will become totally obsessed with continuity. What a relief. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, February 4 From 6pm - 8pm at Latitude Gallery — Unbridled: Horsin Around opens; a salon-style group exhibition celebrating the Year of the Horse.
Inline links: Latitude Gallery, Unbridled: Horsin Around

Graph View

Backlinks