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Samuel Beckett

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Samuel Beckett

Article

Samuel Beckett is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 23, 2025 and May 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Samuel Beckett gave his Nobel Prize money to a jail org”; “My grandmother gave me some of her collection of Samuel Beckett books this weekend”; “I wrote about nihilism and absurdism and Samuel Beckett”. It most often appears alongside David, KGB, Natasha.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: January 23, 2025
  • Last seen: May 27, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

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

Burn my diaries
January 23, 2025 · Original source
The chalky pavement has turned to ice in the afternoon. Walking under the Washington Square arch on the way to Tibet House and its icier than ever. The ground is all glazed over. It’s the latest installment of the Arden Wohl’s reading series at Tibet House; Inauguration Edition this time. Madelyn is wearing a pink sweatshirt when I get there. Madelyn is telling me about knowing your own mind. Alex Auder reads about cock sucking and brings up a friend to read with her who enjoys the act, because she doesn't "I feel demeaned when I suck dick. I feel demeaned when I teach yoga," she says. She reads a story about a life in servitude to someone famous who reminds her of Donald Trump. Tonight is a night where as soon as I have one glass of wine, I wish I didn’t. The haze sets in, and I want it to clear. Beckett arrives. The readings are mostly good, but I’m jittery. I sit in the lobby and I eat some grapes and cheese, replace the wine with water. “Over the years I noticed from my overlord that peasants were increasingly behaving like they were nobles,” Alex Auder is saying, when I return. “There are more cameras than there are people in the world,” Gideon Jacobs is reading, later. I can’t stop drifting in and out of the room. I’m worried about some things, about some people. I get like this sometimes, and I wish I could get it to stop. I go to the bathroom and I return again, to a reading about Courtney Love. “She used to do water ballet and she was getting into the grateful dead.” “She lied a lot and never listened directly but she was a sponge - she takes a word from an incidental periphery and works it into her trope in real time. She’s that fast.” “She said she was born on my birthday; July 1st, but she was born a week later; July 8th” This is my type of lie, I’m thinking. A lie to please. False enchantment. It’s a juvenile compulsion, you mostly outgrow it, and if it was Courtney Love partaking then perhaps it was charming, but my visceral reaction is one of repulsion. Lizzi Bougatsos reads about Gary Indiana. She sits on the floor and she clips her toenails. “We shall mark memory with reverence,” Arden is saying. Beckett is telling me that it’s cool to be at a reading that’s an older crowd, and it is, it’s wine and cheese, there’s no disco party to follow. Beckett introduces me to his acquaintance from Paris. They are talking about Godot and prison sentences. Samuel Beckett gave his Nobel Prize money to a jail org, or was it prisone.org One time, there was a prison break after a performance of Godot. Madelyn is making tape formations on her phone with the other Lacanians. Lacan as separated from psychoanalysis. Lacan as applicable to real life. I’m just gleaning sentences. These ideas aren’t mine. Cigarette outside and then a burger at the orthodox Jewish establishment nearby. We forgot they can only do vegan cheese on burgers here. A lychee martini instead. They’re playing pop music so loud Wednesday, January 23 I hear my neighbors door shut as I’m poised to leave this morning. Decide, instead, to hover in the kitchen. We don't really like each other, my neighbor and I. Nothing was ever said, but there’s an underlying hostility. I have friends over too late, too often. The walls are thin. I'm glad to be waking up at the same time as the rest of the world, though. Sometimes - up all night, becoming manic around five am, this can be nice, but it's usually not. Normal hours. Normal cycles of day and night. The ice has come and smoothed everything over. Too cold to listen to music on my walk to school. I'm peeling off layers in an office, at the gym, the hallway of our apartment is becoming salty and dusted with the chalky snowstorm residue that first coated the surface of everything, and that now is starting to settle. Nothing is volatile. Such placidity, suddenly, but I’m not bored. All the calm in the world. Thank god. It really was about time. And so, you eat two chalky protein pop tarts on the bench at the gym. There are two girls with thick french accents in the locker room parallel to you. "He's a fucking retard, he only calls me at three am and it's only because he wants to sleep with my friends," says one of the girls. She's wearing a sherpa jacket. KHRISJOY, it says, in big red dripping letters. Spray paint imitation. You look it up - $2145 online. It's so ugly, but you're vaguely impressed. Of course you are. You're wearing a Versace sports bra that you bought for a music festival in high school. Absurd. The people watching here is good. The girl is still talking. She's so furious. "And he would be calling to sleep with me, but he knows he can't, fucking retard," she is saying. This version of the narration makes more sense - her rage rooted in something adjacent to jealousy. You gather your things. You gather your tote bags. It's too cold for so many bags. Your hands get numb out there. You're in a humid basement now, but you can't stay here forever. There's an artists talk tonight, but do you have it in you to attend? Cheese and sausage for dinner at home. I forgot about the dishes and I left the sink running for an hour. I’ve never known how to dress for the weather, but that doesn’t mean I mind the extremes. Today - my mother’s gloves, a borrowed Urbit hat from David, a beanie really, it looks insane but it’s too freezing for me to mind. More isn’t always more. More is often so, intolerably, annoying. I don’t want to wear a coat. My books arrive today. Mostly for school, plus one Ruby recommended. I’ll read them all - I’m glad that I have reason to. Salvador - Joan Didion The Company She Keeps - Mary McCarthy The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin Confessions - Saint Augustine The Situation and the Story - Vivian Gornic A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf A Silent Woman - Janet Malcom Are You My Mother - Alison Bechdel The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson The Atrocity Exhibition - J. G. Ballard WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, January 23 From 6pm - 8pm at 61 Lispenard — Canada NY and Eighth House present Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude. Eighth House is “an interdisciplinary residency for artists and curators located in Central Vermont.” The exhibition serves as a benefit for this very special residency.
Inline links: Tibet House, Alex Auder, Gideon Jacobs, Lizzi Bougatsos, Arden, KHRISJOY, Salvador -, The Company She Keeps, The Fire Next Time, Confessions, The Situation and the Story, A Room of One’s Own, A Silent Woman, Are You My Mother, The Argonauts, The Atrocity Exhibition, Canada NY, Eighth House, Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude.
The Strangest Hotel in New York
April 21, 2025 · Original source
Sunday, April 13 After a day spent on your phone, you do wake up and it feels all gray. Sun, water, in my dreams I was swinging on a rope swing into a swimming hole in the jungle over and over and over again - a little ominous in energy but it was certainly very beautiful there. Anyways, you can bring things back into sharp focus if you latch onto momentum and if you view inertia with disdain and disregard. It's not too complicated. You go in circles sometimes, but this does not have to continue. A return to the pace of things: an hour of walking briskly on the treadmill at an upscale corporate gym. Walk faster; and then thoughts move faster. Edit and publish the diaries I culled from the Internet this week. Gem Home for trout toast. They had to get rid of the open seating plan because it was starting to feel like a WeWork, the waiter tells Natasha. Now it feels like Vermont in Nolita. Nice and sweet. I am not too cynical even if it is candlelit at noon, which feels like some sort of cosplay in the context of Nolita. I take the F to the 7 to the Whitney Claflin show at Moma Ps1 in the evening. I've never been here before, and I like that the museum feels all cavernous. Someone tries to spit on me on the subway - avoided with ease. Darby is looking at the New York Review of Books shelf in the gift shop. Is there anything you think David would like, I ask. Renaissance poetry, she suggests but she’s kind of half hearted with it. Nothing really speaking to me on the shelves. I’ll invent my own polemic. I just have to conjure some convictions, first. After the exhibitions, which are a little bit of Rookie Mag and Things Culled From Tumblr and Darby is telling me about the theory of The Internet where it all originated from Tumblr - after the Whitney Claflin and James Turrell (my favorite James Turrell) and Sol Lewitt in the basement boiler room and Yto Barrado in the lawn - we take the train home. Lavender and vodka. I meet David at a strange hotel. Cop cars are swarming the building. I wonder if it’s because of the helicopter that went down, David says, but the helicopter was days ago and I am getting the creeps and, I want to go inside, I say. My grandmother gave me some of her collection of Samuel Beckett books this weekend. In the books, all they do is wait and wait and wait. Missed happenstances. Restless. I’m not good at all this waiting. The books are in my bag and I fall asleep with a few back covers folded over on my lap. It’s a friend of a friend's hotel room. David’s been Co-Working. I’ve been sleeping. The windows are tall and glass and the room gets dark naturally. Fades with the sun. David doesn’t want renaissance poetry from Moma Ps1 for his birthday. David wants a mask of Bacchus like the one at my parents house and an 88 dollar overnight stay at the 88 Allen Street Hotel. Monday, April 14 The issue is, I am so disconnected from nature here. The wilderness, yes, but my own sense of instinct too. Yeah, intellectualize it. Drag it out step by step by step and then there are logical conclusions I can live with. Though, if removed from cold hard fact I would know very little here at all. I know nothing viscerally here. Sometimes, elsewhere, I can know things intrinsically from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. New York is good, though, and there is nowhere else for me, anyways. I woke up this morning and my whole body popped. It’s hard to explain it. Like my muscles all revolted and then I couldn’t really move. It’s not the worst thing in the world except I know this would not have happened if I was somewhere else. I am rock solid certain that this would only have happened here. So someone put a hex on me. And then I almost forgot that desperation reeks. I spend all day acting boxy and square and off-putting in my many Academic Classes on account of not being able to really move. Every time I start to feel nauseous about the future considering this sort of bodily degradation beginning at Age Twenty Four Years Old, I try to remind myself that I have probably just been hexed. My friend in Witch School sends me some guides for lying down realignment. She calls me. You can join my cult, she says. Too many cults, and none of seem very all immersive. If I am going to do this, I would like to go all in. David is back to coworking at his friends hotel and so I march my way through the Lower East Side for some company after school. One cannot wallow alone. They have a heating pad at the hotel. They have a Lush Ice Vape. David’s friend says that he’s been fasting and praying a lot. There’s a permanently skewed gold framed painting of a gold chalice of flowers and some thick tan curtains at the hotel. The curtains are pulled open so we can all see outside. David brought opera binoculars. I brought swedish candy. David goes to get some chinese food so I settle in to write, but he returns with his friend sooner than I would have liked. “Bro,” David says, “I might go get the Penthouse Balcony King Suite Deluxe.” “Hotel employees are better friends than 99% of people’s friends,” David’s friend says. David does get the suite, and so we decamp upstairs. The curtains are more ornate in this room, and the aura is more creepy. Everything is funnier when you’re sober, David’s friend is saying. Something about coming face to face with your own absurdity. Something about how when you’re drunk, you think your’ madness makes sense. Two bathrooms and the shared patio and the love seat and the dog bed and David is saying that instead of dinner, instead of ever wasting money on a dumb dinner again, we should splurge on staycations instead. I brush my teeth with the hotel provided tooth brush and I sit on the floor of the erratically tiled shower. I don’t totally get the bit and I feel bad because it’s frivolous but, I do love hotels. Suspended circumstance The safest and most secure sleep. Float me out somewhere I’ve never been before. It’s good for girls with night terrors like me. Tuesday, April 15 David stayed up all night making a borderline satanic short film. I think I’m manic, he says, which is probably why he got us the stay in the strange hotel in the first place. You’re not manic, I say. Not manic, like I need lithium, David says. Last night I was compulsively reading these decentralized networking protocol white papers, David says. David starts telling me about an opera he wants to see. Something about The Only Monotheistic Pharaoh. I walk home and I stop at Whole Foods to buy some Clear Headed Kombucha and Chicken Sausage and Cymbiotika Vitamin C. I feel really terrible. I make a list of affirming statements. I FEEL AMAZING. I HAVE NEVER FELT BETTER. I take a nap. Wakeup and, David and his friend are on the phone downstairs talking about a startup. Eavesdropping and, it sounds like they’re about to independently invent the concept of the Male Influencer. “Imagine believing yourself to be cunning and self-serving, and you're doing so by working for [redacted],” David is saying. “Anyone can learn to code,” David is saying. Tune out, tune in, and now they’re inventing the Vending Machine. They’re talking about Jon Raffman and Petra Cortright. They’re talking about LA. Evil Women. Tax Day. “Girls already invented being an influencer eons ago,” I tell David, when he gets off the phone. David pauses for a moment. “I think girls and guys invented being influencers at about the same time.” Friday, April 18 I haven't been able to fill in the blanks of the past few days. Becoming: utterly consumed. It was deeply unpleasant, honestly. I feel bad for me on Monday, thinking it would be easy to wrap up this thing I was working on and then almost losing my whole head instead. I stayed up all week. All through the very peaks of the night and then past that, even. At first it was all disjointed, but now it is making more sense. And the good news is, good for art and life - I can intuit things again! WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, April 21 From 8pm - late at Night Club 101 — I will be reading in the Domino Reading Series, alongside Jess Wolfe, Dani Narins, Ruby Hoffman, Gordon Glasgow, Jade Wootton, and Matthew Gasda. Gallipony x Solar System DJ set after the reading.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gyqH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96641088-5f01-40d2-883f-cf79d91add2c_616x798.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CQwj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa8402160-9491-40d2-95e0-9dee6e25a00a_852x318.png, borderline satanic short film, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sXNu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2692d191-2567-4b52-ab49-e81eacdf528d_730x832.png, Night Club 101, Domino Reading Series
generative and godly secrets
May 27, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, May 18 On the first day of My New Life, I walk to the film shop, pour old windowsill tea down the drain, come to consciousness in the Infrared Sauna at Spa88. In the Russian Spa Cafe, you drink carrot juice in a bikini because Rebecca taught you what Fiber is yesterday, and now you are sure to get your fill. There is lox and seaweed and brown bread. There is a Caesar salad later, at Fairfax in The West Village, and they don't actually harvest your personality at the door. I journal a lot, I told my friend. I journaled the whole train ride in my mind, she said. I journal in Google Docs, I said. I don't know why I decided to say it like that. Like manic transcription of thought until it becomes more vibe than writing at all is some sort of one-up over mental assessment and determination. I have not been trying to one-up at all. I've been trying to be so honest about it, and I guess the concern remains that the truth will all surface and the roots will turn topsy turvy and inside out and then you’ll see that untangled, it was all kind of just midwit and ugly. I wrote about nihilism and absurdism and Samuel Beckett, but the piece turned out so simpleton that it makes me kind of queasy to return to. I wrote about the magazine release party on the roof where I felt kind of wobbly in this halter top dress tied way too tight. Then we walked to Casetta and I had wine and fish floating in tin and oil and then I lay here for a while when I got home. I lay very very still and when I twitched then rose again, there were packages at the door, a taxi cab and a friend on foot and his airtrain en route heading towards the apartment. I was standing in socks and hovering in the building's communal mudroom when he got home. Things are nice. I was talking not too quietly about all of it in the Spa 88 Wall Street Russian Baths Hot Tub. The most liminal space in New York with smooth warm aqua water and yellow kind of burnt light and chipped paint no windows. Dorito bags with Hebrew packaging usually stacked in the restaurant, today abandoned half eaten on the table by me. I could tell the fat guys in speedos were lingering sweaty just to listen, but I was doing no sort of performance for them. On the train, the girl on the phone kept glancing around to make sure others were listening. I felt sad for her. At the Spa88, I said my story all matter of fact in the hot tub and my Aunt said well, you really have your hands full and the fat guys looked away kind of bashful, and it was only then that I realized they were listening. You can disassociate away the concept of public space, too. Spilled coffee and voice echoing in this pool room with no windows so it becomes like time isn’t passing at all. I wasn’t talking to myself, but communication reverberates, and I was drifting all unaware of perception. Then I was in the cold plunge, in the infrared sauna which really does something nice to the fascia (the part that matters when it comes to things like Wim Hof and Heating Up and Cooling Down.) After the infrared, I began to gain awareness of my surroundings and movements and recollections of the sound of my own voice and things like the coffee my stray limbs sent flying off the shelf at Mille Feuille this morning and then I was there saying OMG Sorry and floating napkins towards the ground but also kind of just standing and blinking like some kind of dud. You wake up alone but there are people on the way. People already late. Keys and company and you are texting with an intensity that borders vitriol. The vitriol is what he’ll point out later. Before that, he is at the door and you are so happy to greet and be greeted. There is spilled coffee and Equinox Gym and Spa88 and Iced Tea, Sparkling Ice Soda, Cool Mint Zyns. I woke up and I waited around and I trapezed over to Equinox Gym and when I got upset later because told me he did not care about my story; it was then that he clarified he did not so much mean he did not care but more so that the story was full of vitriol. And so perhaps he was just feeling full of love and life. You can't get all rageful over something like that. I'm sorry I forget sometimes that you are not resilient, he said. My blood didn't boil. I went for a walk. You forget that all of this exists all the time, Natasha and I were saying by the Hudson River. In my glass apartment in the sky, I was alone for a while but now I am not. There is an Arabian rug and a Marble table that I hope someone will take off my hands for free. There is a CurrentBody LED mask and cocoa nibs and nothing in the fridge but the butter that I replaced with the wrong brand. I feel uncomfortable when I speak like this - about these little things that compose a life. Like I'm painting a picture in the details of routine, but there has been no routine. There have been a few false starts, and then now, a real one. I am conjuring an image of a morning with an empty fridge and an Arabian rug and the kind of person who reaches for different serums at different hours. If anything, we’ve been dealing more in potion than serums. But every potion certainly has its godforsaken limit, and so now - there is something else. Monday, May 19 I will take the rest of my youth as it is. He turns on the air conditioner for me and leaves to drink Non Alcoholic Beers while I stay put and read the Diaries of Girls Online. I walk ten miles and I do not really believe his friends who say there are worms at the Russian Spa. This is how rumors spread, I tell him. You are Married To The Truth, I tell myself. In the morning, there is light through my greenhouse roof and to start; I am the only one awake. It feels like this; I had one of the best weeks ever last week, where everything came rushing back into being as it should be and I was certain it would stay like this forever. Then there was sudden chaos on the phone, chaos on the train, serenity at Spa88 and then I was calling my mom muttering sentiments I knew she would find vaguely offensive, stomping around the financial district saying bad words like a child intent on proving herself lovable even if insufferable. He said it wasn't that I was so uninteresting, more that my story was bizarre, not really a story at all, full of vitriol. Everyone was running along the Hudson River and I had two or three diet cokes with dinner and I was up not all night but close. It goes like this: in the morning there is energy and a package thief filling a suitcase up with my boxes of celsius and fiber powder and whitening strips and dental floss. I crouch above him on the stairway and I scream HEY. He screams back HEY and so I let him have it. I turn on my heels and I run up the stairs. My favorite things are leaving the house in the morning and not coming back till late night, cool mint zyns, blackberry dr. pepper, turkey cold cuts with truffle mustard eaten in a kind of self-punishing way. I lie on the roof in my boyfriend's Adidas track shorts and a black tank top that I stole from the gymnastics locker room in highschool. The thing about New York is there is immense competition to be skinny, beautiful, successful, rich all in circumstances that are entirely unconducive to all these things, my friend is telling me on the phone. Circumstances like the package thief and your metabolism doesn’t even get a boost from the sun and also there are hard drugs and alcohol. I don’t feel above all of that, but I do feel distant from it now and so I suppose, with some plausible humility, this adds up to kind of the same thing. I wish I was a gentle person. I feel lazy today, but this is not the same thing. Tuesday, May 20 Last night, we went to Lucky's for dinner and I had something with tequila and Saint Germaine straight up and he had more non-alcoholic beer. Then, they brought us mountains of shoestring onion rings and a big wedge salad and it was good for a while, until I started to feel sick. I went to the bathroom to play on my phone while the scent of grease dissipated. The drinks were crisp and they brought the shaker right to our table. Lucky's was like a steakhouse, but with a smaller interior than your average We went to Matthew's house after, to sit in his barren family room while he hacked up a lung. I rolled up my Zara blazer that I stole from Paul's Casablanca lost and found after someone stole my blazer first and also back when I was an alcoholic. I curled up under my blazer on Matthew's tiny couch while Matthew and my boyfriend talked in code and made rankings of all their friends. Matthew's apartment was pretty empty except for a whiteboard with a list of girls he likes and a Chinese new year banner and a huge pile of hats that said I'M IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA. “Jesus, she is combative. you're right, she's so combative,” Matthew told my boyfriend, talking about me. "It's possible that Canne after dark was something that happened in the daytime," he said. "she'll get mad if I ask her why she won't play anagrams," he said. "The activation triggers a chain of events leading to increased dopamine release," he said. Sometimes, when I am with my boyfriend's friends I feel like I am in a video game, or maybe in an orphanage. You don't want to be someone who is contorting your face and yelling. It is morning now. I don't really know what happened there. Being at these parties more sober is strange, because there is nothing else but me and yet I still don't really understand. I am listening to sweet and gentle music, and I feel a total surrender. S - i do feel bad i was not so gentle and kind about this. i get myself trip wired and lose it. but it is always better to be gentle and kind and i understand new york can kill the soul and there is something beautiful in a peaceful house alone and that is why you left which is innocent and pure and it's not fair to be rageful to you for that. Wednesday, May 21 There were two cigarettes and two glasses of wine at Voile de Nuit. This becomes some sort of Diary of Consumption. I met Ellie at a tall house on a wooded street in the West Village where she works on things pertaining to design and then we spent the hours in the courtyard of Voile de Nuit, which I adore because it’s reminiscent of Summer and Reality. I behaved badly the last time I was here. My boyfriend comes by to drop off fries. We run into friends at Caffe Reggio and it's raining by the time we reach home. My boyfriend says: Spreading secrets is entropic Keeping your mouth shut is static Spreading misinformation is generative and godly I do think he is mostly kidding. It's Simone Weil who says about rage - “To be able to hurt others with impunity—for instance to pass our anger on to an inferior who is obliged to be silent—is to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make.” And I wonder which character I am in this story and it's not always the good one. I was thinking about all of that in the novel. That and the self surveillance of it all. Unfortunately, my thought experiments are ruining my life and also, the novel is ending up being All About Me LOL, too. The play tonight (Revolution at Flea Theatre ) is nice, because I walk through the rain to get there and smoke cigarettes outside The Odeon after, and because its depiction is of genuine weirdos, not like Quirked Up, not like the girls my friend texts me about after the party, “have you met them? so spacey!” not like, becoming strange because of course there is some desire to conjure up some personality and if you’re pretty then it’s fine and even appealing to be off-putting. The play is like grocery store clerk alcoholic, gun in the purse grocery store clerk alcoholic, therapy speak coping mechanisms like count up then down then up and it’s employed in the play as the coping mechanism not as an ironic tactic. Drinking beers on a birthday in the back alley and the play is disaffected from glamor in a way that I’m realizing not many things are. Like even most depictions of poverty in a lot of media, at least media coming out of New York at least certainly media surrounding youth culture and a narrative surrounding a party, goes like; we have nothing but we’re slippery adjacent to everything as a result of our charm and good looks and happenstance. The play is like, leftover charcuterie from her husband’s weird mega church and splurging at the liquor store and old cocaine shoved into a bowling ball but there’s an innocence and almost childlike wonderment to the way they tackle the expired drug situation, and the play is not about drugs. There’s a genuine kind of earnest stiltedness to the conversation that lends itself to sincerity. Thursday, May 22 May is quivering right before me; I'm not letting it lapse like April did but there are still smokescreens, silkscreens, my fingers are sleeping right through it. The Club, last night. The Play then The Club. It was smokey and sweet. My lungs felt coated in something sour by the end. The smoking patio was wet with dew and I was kind of floating, not in a bad way. Not hungover, it's something way more visceral but still hazy. I could feel it all start to slip, and so I held onto myself quite tightly. My boyfriend's screen time is 102 hours a day across devices. My face is encased in sheaths of plastic that keep you young, but they're not the temu kind that's weird and freaky. The light I use is Science Backed. I'm thinking of getting into vintage workout wear. I'm thinking of getting into Vlogging. I'm thinking of getting into filling out paid surveys online for luxury perfume sellers that require you to swear your spending habits are High and you like perfume from MiuMiu and you Hate Balenciaga and what perfume means to me is; I think sometimes scents can bring up... nostalgia? I say. Do you own a Prada dress? they ask. We leave the party early - I'm sick and he buys me chicken caesar salad pizza. Aren't you glad we left early so we could dance a little at home, he says. In the living room, the windows are all a little frosted from the rain. There are lights in the neighbors windows across the courtyard but it's thursday night, the rain has stopped. You couldn't have expected everyone to just stay home, really. I notice the people in the windows if he is spinning me across the room. Exhibitionism. I catch myself in the peripheries. The windows. The back of my mind. And I never shut the blinds but that is just no Executive Function or Detail Orientation. I am not some sort of voyeur. Friday, May 23 10:45am, and they are playing some kind of staticy electric classical mashup of music from the Fedex truck outside. "Even as a grad student, I felt they were looking down on chaos," one young man at the Yemeni coffee shop is telling another. Buying: coffee and chicken quiche but none of that is for me. Buying: peanut butter perfect bar and celsius and my boyfriend's screen time is up to 316 hours since midnight since he's doing things indiscernible to me but which he clarifies are Not Fraudulent. I am trying not to write so much in the google doc diaries. It is like I have learned these diaries as a trick, and now I am addicted to it. Now, I can’t do anything else. I must release all thoughts, but to release one thought I must go through, again and again, everything else. And so I go through it all, again and again and again. The thought, and then everything else. We were going to talk more about Spirituality today, but the tripwire keeps happening - stuck on: Vanity and Careerism. I make subheadings to keep myself in check. VANITY. CAREERISM. CAREERISM: Here is where I am: I have the substack for now which is nice this is something that I suppose in some ways is a defining thing I have done but it does not feel like so much it does not feel like it culminates to anything just proof of existence, yes, but everyone has some sort of proof of existence and it is nice to write the story behind something. The story itself cannot just be the story of writing about yourself. And for a minute I was very very very sad and so that plotline became dependable, but that is no sort of thing to rely on. And this is why it cannot all just be the writing of the self. It hasn’t been. [redacted] felt like something different, investigation, beginning middle end, it was not just here I am, it was like a puzzle it was like being very precise with it and it was the biggest thing I have done so far and I sat with it for such a long time. And perhaps I am being dramatic because there are other projects I could start in the meantime but I can’t sit down and make myself think oh what would be an interesting and pithy thing to talk about for somewhere glossy, I cannot do it. I think about doing it and my stomach rises into my throat with how little I care. And so it has to be a story that bursts out of me. There was one, and I can tell there is almost something else too but it’s like David said yes, it’s difficult while you are in the waiting room. Since beginning writing this, my fever got higher, and we are hanging the Bacchus masks around the apartment plus yellow golden softlight and, now I feel more peaceful about it. I wasn’t having so much humility. Nevermind. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, May 27 From 6pm (show at 7pm) at Baby’s All Right — Baby’s Presents a benefit concert for the Immigrant Defense Project with Palehound, The Ophelias, and Grumpy. Dj set by WeTakeManhattan. - “All proceeds from the show will go towards supporting the IDP’s 20+ year mission of fighting for the rights of immigrants targeted for imprisonment and mass deportation via advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.” | GA (18+) $38.86, Ticket and Bonus Donation $49.69
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RaEX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7945ab16-c051-4062-8d64-a0fd574c3968_1106x420.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rmSM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe8f3b744-fe77-4a40-b032-304d78f13ff1_428x548.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zRlU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5106c642-5b7c-4f8f-a799-c60b10039a5d_488x486.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QlxV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9c5eb95-81d2-4503-852b-4bdc513730dd_698x434.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0g1m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3da24e28-0d39-4802-abf2-53116dd83b00_308x392.png, Baby’s All Right, Palehound, The Ophelias, Grumpy, WeTakeManhattan

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