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Coney Island

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Coney Island

Article

Coney Island is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 06, 2025 and September 09, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “it’s really far from here. it’s called Coney Island”; “it ends up at coney island with me and then i end up at home”; “Naked man running around trying to steal pedestrians pants on Coney Island”. It most often appears alongside Le Bain, Club Chess, Diet Pepsi.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: May 06, 2025
  • Last seen: September 09, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

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

mutually assured destruction
May 06, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, April 27 Sitting up in the middle of the night and saying things I don't mean and, it's not that I'm talking in my sleep exactly. More so, I've been trying to figure out if this harshness comes from being evil or if maybe it's more of a vindictive thing instead. Being vindictive implies, at least, that you are seeking some sort of equilibrium. Wrong and be wronged. You aren't just a gratuitous little freak about it. Causality is irrelevant, and I'm nauseous at the gym, playing high vibration Youtube videos in my headphones, standing on an electric plate that can jostle my insides, lymph nodes, drain me like a detox, and yes, there needs to be one of those soon. Making calls and making complaints, and then I'm like, oh sorry, I didn't mean it, I was drunk. And then I'm saying that I feel crazy instead. I feel insane. You don't understand. I have lost complete touch with my judgment. Costa Rica, in the rain I was kicking around mud with my feet and drinking too much and his friends were like oh you think you're in a teen movie or something because I was saying kind of nasty things, too. It's way worse in New York. That is the definitive thing and, also the fact that there is nowhere else. Something can be confusing and still not impossible to regulate. Sorry to be all obfuscated about it. I can control my consciousness. It's my consciousness after all. I go to church in the evening, which feels unbelievably affected - would a girl that is evil redeem herself on her knees before God? - though, that isn't really the question. You believe in good and evil, yet you have found yourself entirely incapable of distinguishing the difference between the two. Yes, then, prognosis, logical conclusion, you have lost your mind. I eat a cookie for breakfast and then the leftovers of the quiche for dinner that I fugue state ordered for my boyfriend at six am, which was a disaster in and of itself. I decided to do something nice, and then the delivery guy couldn't figure out the buzzer and so I stumbled down in my socks and Brandy Melville, I wasn't even very polite about it when he handed me my bag. I pointed to the buzzer and said that's the buzzer and then I called my boyfriend over and over because I realized, also, I'd forgotten to bring down keys. It's the type of day where I spend almost no time eating, but I still feel kind of full in a bad way. Everything I did eat is so calorically dense that it creates some kind of cognizant dissonance. I shouldn't feel this bogged down from just some stupid scraps. I don't want to say terrible things, I said. And yet you constantly are saying terrible things, he said. I wish we didn't do these things, I said. That's like saying you wish spiders weren't real, he said. People are vicious and awful. Then, I do pilates from the pilates app that they sent me for free on Instagram. I'm enough of an influencer these days that brands will send me spam mail disguised as PR. Like 20% off coupon codes to their clothing line personalized just for me, but I still have to pay them 80% if I want the clothes. This means, basically, that I am not an influencer at all, but I have just made things like my email address and my diary psychosis way too public. The pilates studio said - "share if you can!" but I'm sorry, I can't, I'm not really talking about me, I'm talking about something else. First name, last name, coupon codes, face to the name, you're ruining all my plausible deniability. I started sobbing by the window, and he said don't worry, you're sweet. I started thinking he was dead, and he said don't worry, I'm ok. I'm blurring the timelines a bit. He told me I could meet him on the steps of a Chinatown apartment a little bit after sunset. Inside, his friend took calls and let the bathtub-in-the-kitchen Chinatown apartment become a kind of neutral territory. I sat in the guest room and held my breath. Say the same things over and over, and because you mean it, they eventually stick. Viewing everything in black and white. They've told me that's my problem. That and being too suggestible, and also out of control. I started being all dramatic about it and yeah there's been too much partying, but I come to learn I'm pretty much like this sober, too. Things were really really really pure and sweet, and I keep on thinking in ninety days, ninety days of being pure again, and everything bad can be problems that belonged to someone else. I am trying to become like a Monk about it. It's not so much that my impulse towards reaction is wrong, but rather that I act purely on impulse, and impulse alone never did anything other than make a situation that much worse. Spring and Redemption, I say, on my dumb fucking TikTok. Spring and redemption, my boyfriend says. Yeah, that's cute, this one is cute. Did you spell synchronicity wrong for engagement or to be insane? my boyfriend asked. Insane, I said. He stopped to think about it. So stupid, he said. You aren't that insane. Order diet pepsi bean and cheese burrito nicotine gum and we're lying in the sun. So much sun through the windows that we have to keep the blinds shut or the light goes too crazy, the air conditioning fires up but not much can be done in the face of UV like this. Lucky, luck,y lucky. I spent the week talking to myself. Lying on the floor and I'm trying to seek cognizance in repetition. The same word three times. First, you remember what it means. Second, you determine what you think is true. You don't take it for granted. If you don't take it for granted, then you won't lose your mind. Monday, April 28 Eiverything gets better overnight. No more crying in my sleep. 2:22am and I’m not yelling. I see things more with precision than as if through angels and mystics. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be so transcendental about it. It’s really evil to try to mythologize something that is neither beautiful nor true. I stayed at Hudson Square until late last night. Black socks and black shoes and a tennis skirt that doesn’t match to be late to class today. The sun has rushed back and it’s iced tea no breakfast no lunch. David meets me at Cafe Reggio, where to our left, an awful woman is berating her husband to levels of borderline abuse, and to our right a lovely couple is talking about the difference between mere activity, and real fulfillment. You gain fulfillment from things like C-suite and making tv shows and real estate, the man is saying. Activity is something like going to Europe, he is telling his wife. These are the things that fulfill us, for others it might be different, the woman is saying. I am surprised to hear, that in referencing C-Suite, they are suggesting real fulfillment.. Materially, things are working themselves out. The rot has been first, material, and then secondly, spiritual. We go to Lupa for a lovely spring dinner. Sweet then sour then sweet. I am endlessly interested in reiterations, but that just makes things worse and worse. Homemade focaccia and olive oil and arugula salad and lobster corn ravioli and lamb chops and tartufo which is like a shell of hazelnut, ice cream, paper plane to drink and the restaurant is closing by the time we leave. Tuesday, April 29 You stop a night terror like this: creep down the ladder and say to your boyfriend, you need to turn off the projector right this second. The light was emitting vibes that were very off putting and I was concerned about scentless and odorless gas. My boyfriend makes me pasta and gives me a beer. You kind of briefly entered a state of psychosis, he tells me. I get super offended by that one. A bad dream doesn’t mean I need lithium or something, I say. I didn’t say you have schizophrenia, he says. I said you seemed to be under the impression that the projector light was toxic, poison, and evil, which is the very definition of a state of psychosis - the merging of reality with hallucination. No, I say, that’s the very definition of a bad dream. Anyways, I’ve been having sleep paralysis because I’ve been having insomnia. I’ve been much more normal about it. Run, coffee, iced tea, the world's worst sandwich back at Cafe Reggio in the afternoon. Do you have any favorite spots in New York, the tall man next to me is asking the short man across the table. “Well, it’s far from here,” the short man tells the tall man. "it's really far from here. it's called Coney Island." I pick out all the healthy bits of my dinner and eat just the bread instead. I’ve been feeling tempted to get really fucking skinny again. Being weird and off putting with my sandwich and then leaving my scraps with abandon. Feeling pretty sane today, I don't really want to get out of here anymore. Wednesday, April 30 Up all night just like last week, and I'm in class reading from my story like oh I'm probably not going to freak out but it's still a possibility. David turns older today. He's still asleep when I get home in the afternoon. Macarons and iced coffee on the table. We go to Vol de Nuit and I get promptly drunk on cider. It's bright and nice and I'm writing tipsy. This week won’t eb and flow in the way that I hate. Make yourself head empty and then see what happens. We go next door to Dear Stranger for dinner. Red snapper and jalapeno sauce and wedge salad and shrimp tostadas. Two martinis. David makes a scene in a scuffle with one of those guys on the streets who shill comedy shows on the way home. Then, I wake up and it feels like morning but it’s only just past midnight. I used to miss the things I have right now so much. I’d miss it through abstraction, really. All through hypotheticals because it had never really been mine in the first place. It shocks me when I see my life emerge unscathed from fits of self destruction. Playing fast and loose when it comes to the thing of redemption. I am trying not to be that way. First it is sour and then it is sweet. This is one of two directions that any progression of events can take. Obviously, I know the direction that I would like to pursue. Thursday, May 1 Everything has come alive again, though I'm not quite sure if it's solid yet. I almost step in a pool of blood on Rivington Street, and then we're talking about the uptick in dead bodies that people keep finding around town these days. I'm going to stop being so morbid. You can be thinking about one thing, and then you can decide to be thinking about something else. Yesterday evening felt sparkly and nice. David and I stayed at Vol de Nuit for a while, drinking cider, which makes me feel full but not that drunk, lots of sunshine and we bring in our own food. Peanut mayonnaise garlic sauce on french fries. I'm less disgusted by these things than I used to be. Yesterday's dinner felt nice but a little too drunk. I was drinking iced tea at two in the morning and then my boyfriend was throwing bottles across the room in a way that was funny, not crazy. I got an email asking me if I'd like to talk about Dimes Square for a German newspaper but I wouldn't like to do this and so I didn't respond. I got an email regarding Amtrak tickets. Things have been too whiplash lately. I got an email from my friend. I owe edits on some projects, and I like when big things happen quickly, though we are not quite there yet. The nature of how I am creatively always edges on narcissism - reflection and observation being more natural than imagination to me, I suppose. although the night terrors suggest some kind of imagination. People like to tell me that. I’m close to the mystics. On a literal level - clinical - the night terrors suggest nothing other than a flirting with psychosis, though my paranoia does not extend to fear over my mind. Nobody actually thinks I’m losing my mind Physically, a parasite cleanse can be dangerous because the heavy metals your parasites held will be dumped right back into your body. I do have paranoia surrounding being poisoned, though this is more a concern of the mind. April - I wrote 40,000 words in my secret diary that I do not share here. This is surely excessive. There are worse things. What I meant to say is: the narcissism has felt less like filtering observation and reflection through the self these days, and more like actually just kind of sloppy-like, thinking about Myself. The sun is nice, because it heats my greenhouse apartment so quickly - downstairs becomes for the daytime, and upstairs becomes so bright and burnt to a crisp that it has to only be for sleep. Sleeping in the day here is nice. It’s like somebody cast a spell on me. I am not someone to sleep in the day, but a greenhouse apartment is something like a potion this time of year. Friday, May 2 When I think about how to synthesize an idea into a quote or a meme, something pithy really, then the idea is immediately ruined. Even it was a good idea at the start. This makes me want to distance myself from the quote, meme, thing of posting more generally I suppose though, I’m still having fun. I’m so sure about things, now. I was feeling really really really unsure about things and I’m so sure now. I feel so bad for acting all ambivalent about it. I’m so certain. I have never been more certain and I have never been more sincere. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, May 6 From 7pm at Pete’s Candy Store — Mind Palace Poetry presents The Girls Room, with special guest host Sophie Appel. Featuring Sascha Cohen, Siena Foster-Soltis, Jude Lavelle, and Montana James Thomas.
Inline links: Pete’s Candy Store
Things I do like here
July 18, 2025 · Original source
spilling sand out of my one nice evening purse after it ends up at coney island with me and then i end up at home
Drinking Dreams
September 04, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, August 24 Lay with filthy tangled hair hanging off the edge of the roof for a while last night, watching the Chase Clock Tower lit up too royal blue and the Empire State Building lit up the nicer sort of baby blue. I've been collecting shades of blue. Kind of navy blue Frankie's Bikini little number reflecting something sort of aqua off my Diet Pepsi on the D-line towards Coney Island. Screaming children on the D-line. Naked man running around trying to steal pedestrians pants on Coney Island. He keeps on saying to the other guy, Darby says - “I like those pants ! Gimme those pants!” And it was all these beautiful friends coming and going last night. Coming and going until it was late, really late, so taxi home and then I ate the toppings off a slice of pizza on the floor with a spoon. I spent the morning alone doing Rituals. Tretinoin before sleep and I did wake up screaming for the first time in a while. Red light therapy and copper multi peptides and avocado eye cream and mineral sunscreen and now I'm on the Subway. Kind of braindead on the subway. It sometimes takes it out of you. This sort of thing can really take it out of you. It's been summer for forever, now. I have a lot more friends now. Connectivity, connected tissue, I walk down Brighton Beach by myself, walk to Tashkent Supermarket for a towel and carrot salad and on the phone I'm saying it is not that I wish for death and even sometimes I fear it but things have become a lot less Risk Averse. I'm a lot less Risk Averse now. It would be better to be dead, someone was saying at the bar last night. She was looking at me eyes all intense and no one was really listening, I could tell no one was really listening but everyone was watching her all the same and I could see them all clenching their bodies and kind of pulling away.. Me particularly, pulling away. Perhaps I'm being self absorbed. It wouldn't be better to be dead, someone else said. He looked at me then, locked eyes which usually makes me kind of uncomfortable but I felt inclined to agree. It's definitely better when nobody is dead, I said. The bar was full of plants and glass. Like a glass jungle, I told my nameless friends at the bar.. That's not very astute, a nameless friend told me. Tonight, the cocktail menu is flavored and priced like a full course meal, and so tonight I order Cold Pizza for dinner. Cold Pizza in a crisp glass bottle, plus greasy fried chicken after that, which comes in thick paper cups. And everyone is so grateful to be alive, tonight. Everyone is so grateful for one more year of life for themselves and for their dear friends particularly. Purple sunrise if I hadn't slept through it. Yellow sunset if I hadn't gritted my teeth and clenched my eyes shut through it. Planted two feet firmly in the ground and screamed through it. First, I made one thousand promises I couldn't keep. Second, I sat on the stoop with an energy drink, water, cool minty menthol gum and the antiseptic kind of sore throat with some bodega spray gripped tight in my hand to heal all my problems. My ailments and the other things. My organs and my mind. Overjoyed to be alive again after leaving my apartment, I told Amelia. It does make things better again, Amelia told me. Tuesday, August 25 Bartending school feels kind of like an alcoholic's vision of a drinking dream. Like holograms of condensation, dim lighting, one takes a sip to the tune of disappointment. Water and food coloring dye. Bowery Park and Whole Foods and JPress nearby and inside; Christmas is coming. Smooth jazz. Everything has felt a bit the same for a time, but my room is clean. Summer is passing. Three months is not so long. Would a functional alcoholic lace up black ankle boots at seven in the morning with a clear mind and bright eyes to catch the train towards midtown towards Bartending School, at the top of the week, at the tail end of August? I am not so good at pretending like anything is changing. Like habits stack towards something greater. It might as well be yesterday, I sigh on the phone. For you, it might as well be yesterday, Amelia agrees. I do the things a person should. Cake for friends' birthdays and the waiter keeps stacking on fees at Union Square Cafe. Cut the cake fee, sit at the table fee, big group of people fee, bring your own food fee. There are other tables next to us all inhabited by people who all appear to be exactly the same, though perhaps I am being uncharitable. Imagine them as skeletons. Imagine them as children. My parents used to tell me this when I was little. Kind of a hack against boredom. I imagine myself as a psychic, looking out on things overpriced and people all exactly the same. You will have a small child and feed her nothing but buttered noodles. You will advance in age but stay exactly the same through invasive surgical facial intervention and stunted social development. You will spend evenings eating french fries with caviar for One Hundred Dollars despite a rich inner world and a childhood pumped full of extracurricular stimulation designed, specifically, to avoid a fate like this. You will fear God more than death and you will understand self destruction to be akin to suicide hence rendering you too, on a trajectory like this, a rather hellish creature. You will wake up in the middle of the night in a small box criss-crossed wood roof apartment in New York City to the sense that there are No Loopholes Left. You will go to bartending school. You will recognize that, while you can be cruel there were other factors at play. There were worse factors at play. Wednesday, August 26 Walking from Greenwich Village to Long Meadow in Prospect Park with a bag filled up with white linen and Thomas Pynchon and a plan to celebrate sweet Sylvie's birthday. A different sort of nostalgia in the air today. Nostalgia of all sorts being kind of a form of mental illness, of course but once - we were woodland fairies. Once, there were fall morning running races and cranberries that crunched under bare feet on Massachusetts roads. Once, there were rounds of Tom Collins in a kind of jazzy jungle garden restaurant in the tropics that my boyfriend who liked gender-roles enjoyed because they wouldn't let girls order their own drinks. Once, I went to the Yankees game in late August, blue and pink hazy skies, the sort of advertisements that blare out notes about Fast Food and Safe Driving in the stadium, and the sort of crowd that is so big it starts inspiring feelings of Life and Spirit rather than Homogoninity and Dread. Once, I walked from bartending school full of Tom Collins, Chambord, a sip of walnut martinini, frangelico liquor. Walked to Caffe Reggio for egg white omelet, toast, a creamy cannoli. Walking to Prospect Park a little bit tipsy. Thinking about the sort of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing about the sorts of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing it all down. Writing and walking. Writing it everywhere. Writing it on the walls. Though, I'm not so bad at keeping secrets anymore. Thursday, August 27 Amelia and I sat at Caffe Reggio until close last night, and now I have returned. Tomato soup and side grilled chicken and creamy cannoli and mint tea because things feel decadent again. Limited consumption. I haven’t really been limiting consumption. The waitress is complimenting the gray sweatpants on the boys at the table over from me, and the waitress seems to be vaguely annoyed with me, though I am trying to be pleasant. Thanks the sweatpants cost enough, the boys are saying, at the table over. Thanks we didn't realize we couldn't split the bill, Amelia and I were saying, last night, our tea was four dollars total and everything was starting to feel a little bit hazy. Sitting on the floor at sunrise, this morning, Amelia and I were watching videos from Miami. Videos from Bahamas. Videos from New York City, 2022, we'd been at all the same parties, but I hadn't known a soul. BAHAMAS, we are beaming, in one video, in the back of a taxi cab, streaking over MacArthur Causeway, Miami-Dade County, Florida, and so, as I recall, the driver was confused. I'm putting on makeup in the photo booth webcam on the floor of a hotel room and Amelia is talking in the background. It's Opposite Day in the background. Who had a mental breakdown, someone is saying in the background. From an outsider's perspective, who was it who had a mental breakdown? Friday, August 28 6:30pm, and I am back at IFC for my third viewing of Diva (1981) in twenty-four hours. I came to view Diva (1981) for the third time in twenty-four hours, because I became very sick of thinking about myself. This is a desirable alternative. The film is beautiful, and I wish to live in places like the apartments pictured. A large and wrecked studio in a car park with painted walls and recording equipment or, a hotel in Paris or, a castle by the sea or, the best one of all is a large blue flat full of puzzles and high ceilings and echoing sea sounds and an aqua glow and a man who wants to learn to stop the waves. They are fighting crime in the film. They are entrapping the criminals and they are doing it kind of like performance art. I don’t wish to spoil the ending. It really is the perfect little film. So; I will send out the recipe for zucchini (courgette) soup, and I will explain away the things I did in breathless optimism as things I did while bored. I will go to The Scratcher, Killarney Rose, Funny Bar, then Gospel then Caffe Reggio again - these are the decadent places to which I continue to return. I will draw my name with Riley on the table in crayon writing Best Friends Forever and listen to Feryquitous ft Sennzai and Sigur Rós and John Maus and think about Switzerland, Iceland, having a lot of dreams about places that are lush, lush, lush. Thinking about places that are quiet quiet quiet. Thinking about places that are green green green. Feels like Fall, outside, after church. Amelia woke me up in a living room that looked like a library and she was screaming that the air was poison. I was difficult to awaken, because it is my own delusions of poison air that wake me up screaming on other nights. Different from tonight. I was reminding myself of reality. I was reminding myself of delusions and keeping my eyes clenched shut while Amelia screamed. Well, the air wasn’t poison after all, just late night and late august and heavy with mosquitos and dust from renovations and revelations and; we walked back to the cafe. I walked through Washington Square Park at dawn. The doorman wished me good night at seven in the morning and the cycles repeated. It isn’t opposite day and we aren’t in hell, just working on things like bed time and emotional regulation. Working on archiving the things that happen outside of my head. It becomes good to have been an archivist all along. It becomes good to become sick of dealing with things mainly in repetition. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, September 4 From 6pm at Carinito — Saloon is throwing a party. Drinks from Dio. Dancing, DJ, tacos, etc
Inline links: Carinito, Saloon, throwing a party
City Built on Crystals
September 09, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, September 1 On the train to Coney Island, my friends are talking about the motifs that keep occurring. It's the sort of thing that happens to you when you have a pure heart, one of my friends is explaining. It's the sort of thing that people try to do to Real Life Angels, my other friend is explaining. Real life angels aren't real, I am saying, though I understand her point. The train is streaking through open air with towns on both sides. Housing projects rising up beyond that. Fallen green leaves and gray pebbles on the edges of the tracks. I have had these concepts of destruction explained to me before, only then it was by my mother or my friends in Miami and they called it Evil Eye. Here, they call it Devils and Angels. Real life Demons. I have been spending a lot of time this summer, trying to parse out the difference. Later, we emerge onto the boardwalk to find Curtis Sliwa in his red barret at the edge of the Atlantic. Police officers and children and men with snake tattoos in the ocean. There is live music at Salt and Sizzle and a ferris wheel that is one-hundred-years-old-and-never-any-accidents and the sky turns blue and purple and they cancelled the fireworks last year on account of someone drowning and due respect. We miss them this year of our own accord. When I was in love I spent a lot of time thinking about the apocalypse and feeling kind of giddy and aloof in this anticipation, convinced that the best way to die was euphoria and so end times while the center held would be a relief above all. When I smoked cigarettes and was a teen I would spend a lot of time pondering pop-psychology notions of optimistic nihilism and watching reddit atheists evangelize online. Now, I'm on the F-train back towards block-party-bars and my friends are shooting photos of their merch line, standing in front of the train doors as they open and close and I prefer to stay seated. Mostly aware of how dehydrated I am, which is a relief insofar as it diminishes all less corporeal thoughts. At Time Again, we make new friends with rare and inquisitive souls, which is really what the end of summer is all about. Writing on my phone on the walk home. Scribbling with kind of blurry eyes like an ipad baby on Delancey Street about the things that one has left to lose. Scribbling kind of incoherently about Health and Strong and Pervasive Senses. Scribbling Mother Teresa’s Rules For Humility. Speak as little as possible of oneself and Yield in discussion even though one is right and; well - what else am I supposed to do besides accept and embrace a Strong and Pervasive sense that things are as they are? Things were one way and now they are another. Things are harsher now in some ways, and more gentle in others. Tuesday, September 2 Woke up feeling very concerned about the decay of my physical form as a result of my bad habits and also by my newfound sense of passivity which I hope is driven by surrender and not by cynicism but one can really not be too sure. Woke up to a brand new delusion. In my dreams, someone was knocking on the door. They woke me up screaming. I stayed very quiet in response. Sunlight through my windows that I cannot bring myself to drape with curtains. Looked through the peephole. No one was there. Here are things I need to do: email the priests at Saint Joseph's to join OCIA and consider becoming Catholic despite my generally waspy sensibility. Finish and publish my substack. Create publicity materials for the play, go to class tomorrow, go to screening at Anthology Film tomorrow, write write write. Conjure up some sort of novel-like plot out of my hundreds of thousands of words of musings I keep in secret online documents. Make final edits on El Salvador piece and hope for the best. Conjure up some sort of plausible plot for my novel about gnosticism and also schizophrenia in people who seek to approximate the feeling of being famous by having friends online. Drop off laundry. Workout a lot. Maybe go sober. Certainly be sober-for-today. Today I am Cleansing. Today I am proud of myself in some ways and disappointed in others. Over plates of octopus and shrimp in lemon mustard sauce and pita and eggplant dip, Iris asks if she can treat me. Treat me to what, I asked. Do treatments for you, Iris explains. Treat me with iodine and thyroid and hypnosis. Treat me with methods opposite to my own. My own being mostly, a hysterical dipping in and out of notions of asceticism. Ok to some treatment, I say. Iris and I walk to the shops. The sky is still light but it is getting colder now. Iris buys dish soap and I slip sea kelp spray into my pocket. I have become quite destabilized by my afternoon visit to the glass apartment in the sky with the revolving doors. Not my apartment. No one's apartment. I am less like an orphan now. Iris and I walk back outside and down towards Seward Park. Iris says Sam knows a good aura cleanser. Not that I think the aura in the glass apartment in the sky is necessarily dark or doomed, Iris clarifies. I’d been telling Iris about some theories on the aura of things as dark and doomed. An invisible string but it was most of all bad. Ultimatums of gnosticism but they were delivered with nefarious intent.. Narcissistic to assume spiritual implications in the everyday, obviously. But how does one explain why they feel like they are floating by the time they are drifting up the stairs? On the Internet, they are making up real life retreats to enter the void. On the internet, they will take you to the Real Life House where you can Understand Real Life Consciousness. On the Internet, you can't live forever. Everyone realized that a few years back and I realized too, a few years after that. In Real Life you can maybe live forever, though. Everyone hopes so. I have been worrying, lately, that I hope so too. Wednesday, September 3 It’s Art Week in New York, which means less to me than it used to, besides for a pleasant rise in energies and things whirling back to life. I go to the first installment of the Marjorie Cameron series at Anthology Film Archive on account of Emillia’s recommendation and a slightly uneasy interest in the occult, tonight. An interest in witches who used to dance in a ring of rocking horses by my childhood home and a drive through Lily Dale with Riley in other lives, a few lives before this one. All that greenery and a long road alongside a lake towards the Psychic Capital Of The World. Hub of Mediums. Salmon Rushdie had been stabbed nearby a few years back. A psychic in Rhode Island had told me things would happen as I wanted them too but it would be first a thing of waiting, and secondly a thing of new architectures and spaces given that I’d been dealing in impossible conditions for awhile. Trying to make something stick in an Architecture of Unhappiness for a while. I stayed up til dawn over the weekend. Awoken to a Providence necklace placed around my neck and a burning desire to remove myself from the organ donor registry just in case. I worried about the morality of seeking loopholes as it pertained to the Providence Necklace, but a few days have passed and now it is Wednesday, early evening, tuck the tag under the collar of my shirt and began my hovering walk towards things that happen. The screening shows a Curtis Harrington film called Night Tide (1961), and it is about a girl who is a siren or perhaps it is just about Psychological Warfare, the ending leaves things a bit unclear. I've been nostalgic for the kind of California where I've never really been before. Nostalgic for things that never happened which I think is less a thing of clairvoyance and more a sense of how it all slips away but regardless; the shots are all of witchy Venice Beach and an apartment over the carousel that overlooks the sea and there is a bonfire on the rocks and some dancing that becomes a bit possessed due to dark forces - pulling my hair over my eyes like a blindfold for these parts - but I am thinking I could live in a place like this in spite of perhaps some evil. I have always thought I could float around it. I have always been arrogant in this way Thursday, September 4 Last night, I turned off the air conditioning and spilled Diet Pepsi on the baby pink rug in my sleep. Mom has shipped out baby blue curtains with white stripes and New York (the place where all my problems are) is starting to become a place that oscillates into something more calm. Sophie suggested baby pink curtains, and so I am making compromises in my mind. Compromising my own opinions and the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in the opinions of others. Putting a lot of stock in things improving drastically through the help of water in glass bottles and red light therapy and self hypnosis and religious conversion and swapping out the Cool White Linear Fluorescent Light Bulbs for something warmer. Everything becomes warm and still and the air is kind of heavy. I can lie very still for a while. Not forever, but definitely for now. You should just become one of those sociopathic writers who does insane things for the sake of writing, Iris advised me a few days ago. Yeah, I said. Like go to consciousness school in Argentina or conduct strange experiments with materiality on myself and others. Adopt a regiment of strange injections or move to Venice Beach to become Catholic and fight the occult there, too. Sitting on the edge of my bed in my New World in New York City. Closing my eyes and imagining Venice Beach as a magical little enclave with a witchy apartment over the carousel by the sea and arched doorways and conch shells and a jazz club and massage parlors and psychics on the piers. If I became a ruthless psychopath, what could I do in a place like this? In New York City (the city built on crystals). I am not feeling so ruthless. Self-experimentation without self-possession mostly leading towards destruction of a pretty boring variety. At least we don't live boring lives, I used to be told. There is nothing more boring than this, I used to say in response. Friday, September 5 Come in, come in, three psychics beckon on Sullivan Street, but I am pretty clear about how things have been and where they are going, and I would prefer to look for motifs in patterns and symbols and psychosomatic symptoms which reach a peak and then; abandon your whole entire life. That is one thing the psychics could tell me to do. Abandon your whole entire life. They could tell me to buy a whole new personality. I could buy a good fortune swimming in tea leaves and an aura cleansing from the psychics on Sullivan Street. I could buy a membership to witchcraft school and a flat in Venice Beach and a conflicted conscience when it comes to forces of good and evil and certainly, to things like health, sobriety, longevity. It's enticing to create pseudo intellectual or pseudo spiritual explanations for bad behavior when in reality things are obviously much more simple. Most actions are much too plain to qualify as any sort of performance or definitely any art. I'm working on becoming stupider, I told Iris. Will I become stupider? I asked the psychics. Will the apocalypse come sooner or later if the collective consciousness ideates on it or tries to stave it off? Is it better to be witchy but self protective, or ascetic but operating with self abandon. Where can one buy self possession? Taking the C-Train to Fort Greene Summer Fairyland where my dad and Sylvie wait for me at Aita and so everything is better. Plums and peaches and ricotta and octopus which the girls behind us are saying they don't eat after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020). Girls love to say they don't eat octopus after watching My Octopus Teacher (2020) but perhaps I am heartless, and I mostly just found the documentarian in that film to be kind of deranged and unreliable. Beef tartar and potato chips and Sylvie is talking about how she's aware of the balance of power in every single conversation and I'm saying I'm literally never aware of that I'm literally always just seeking equilibrium in any interaction that matters because conversation exists to reach understanding and Sylvie is saying no you are just always making sure that you are the one with the power in every conversation. I say no and she says yes and I say can we seek some equilibrium and she says you make sure that won't ever happen. The combat stops. My dad is asking Sylvie's boyfriend why he seeks intellectual inquiry. Sylvie's boyfriend is pointing out the famous people peppered around the bar. Goodbye you power hungry beast, I am telling Sylvie. My dad drives me back towards Manhattan. Animal skulls are scattered around his mini van and he says I can have a deer jaw for my new place if I want. Wrong turn through the Hubert Tunnel. Twenty-two dollar toll. Drop me off at the most Satanic Nightclub in New York to sulk soberly at the edge of an indoor pool and really lean into nihilism insofar as - what if we stayed for a while? I don't stay for a while. Manhattan night is teeming with people and the city is built on crystals. Good or bad ones? I haven't decided yet. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, September 9 From 7pm - 11pm at Night Club 101 — AltCitizen 15 Year Anniversary Show series launches with The Kickoff. Hosted by Brittany Marino. Featuring Lulu Van Trapp, Suo, D. Treuit. From 10pm - late, after party downstairs | Tickets: $15 advance, $20 doors
Inline links: Night Club 101, AltCitizen, The Kickoff

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