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New England

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New England

Article

New England is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between December 28, 2024 and June 09, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “I have the hearty puritanical roots of a New England Jewish Wasp”; “the hearty puritanical roots of a New England Jewish Wasp”; “it reminded me how cozy New England can be”. It most often appears alongside David, Annabel, Boston.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: December 28, 2024
  • Last seen: June 09, 2025

Appears In

None.

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.

Christmas Stories
December 28, 2024 · Original source
Christmas Eve Dinner is my favorite meal of the year, but David convinces me to stop at the alcove at Main Street Cafe around three pm. It's like a diner but cozier, he says. The alcove is tucked away down a driveway, near a parking lot, the real restaurant faces the street and it's decked in pine wreaths and dried chains of cranberry and orange. Upstairs, it's bustling. There's a long wait by the pastry shelf. To bring you your food here, in the alcove, the waiter comes outside, walks down the driveway, the door bursts open, we're the only ones left inside. Sitting at the hidden little bar, David convinces me to share corn clam chowder and onion rings - fantastic but now I'm full. I still eat at dinner later. Roast duck and roast goose and cranberry sauce and pie. It feels sweet, and not gluttonous. The season doesn’t feel gluttonous this year. I used to be so averse to this sin - gluttony, that is. Overindulgence hasn’t crossed my mind too much these past few weeks, I suppose a natural conclusion if you believe overdoing it to be a product of self destruction, and not pleasure. This year, I can access Christmas in a way that I can’t recall experiencing similarly since childhood. I like when winter is visceral. A visceral winter is my favorite season. I would like to feel the cold in my bones this year. I would like to feel nostalgia in bursts that are sharp when I walk around certain corners at dusk. I get everything I would like this year. It doesn’t unsettle me. It just means my memories are more precise. It’s a strange thing, to come back into yourself that is. Thursday We sleep til ten, light candles on the Christmas tree, polar swim in Walden Pond. Breakfast is maple butter on toast. Linner is cranberry moscow mules and cocktail shrimp. Later - an icy woods behind the house. The boardwalk over the swamp is caked with snow. I can see Saturn in the sky, even in the early afternoon. There's a Christmas Tree in the woods; a pine strung with ornaments, red and green ornaments, no lights because it's too deep in the forest to power them. We only see one other group on our walk; a family pulling a child in a snowsuit on a sled. Old friends come over for Christmas. You wonder, with these things, if there will still be things to say but then it seems, there always is. I feel grateful to have grown up in the presence of characters. People whose aesthetic and ethical sensibilities remain solid and unique and admirable. We have lasagna and salad by the fire and then pie made from a special type of sweet squash with homemade sweet cream. My mom is telling a story about the sheep farmer across the street and the fist fight she got into at the town swap exchange (the scavenging table at the dump) that got the whole operation shut down for years. The swap exchange was getting out of hand. My mother was being solicited for two hundred dollars in the parking lot to relinquish the neighbor's china that she'd spotted abandoned only five minutes before. The swap exchange was a nice thing though, environmentally friendly. You wouldn't believe the age of the women throwing hands over discarded silver. The dinner table conversation turns to strength of heart. "She has a good heart, they are saying, re the elderly women prone to physical blows over perfectly good silver. “She has a good heart but she has common sense too, and if you are not doing the common sense thing, then she will not withhold harshness.” My parents and their friends are shrugging. Sensibility does come with age. I've been learning this more lately. Level headedness when appropriate, too. Discretion when it comes to suffering fools, gladly or otherwise. We have many special items from the swap table around the house, and I used to find trinkets more of an inconvenience than a joy but I like the red table cloth with the little green and silver pine trees, the metal stars and chimes candle that spins and jingles when lit, the field of rocking horses always growing and dwindling by one or two but remaining a herd of sorts in my parents backyard. I can't stay here very long. The sense of interiority, quiet, the pale beauty of shifting light marking hours and time... it is lovely but it's also in conflict with my sensibility. This is symptomatic of some rot, likely. In another life I am endlessly entertained in the birch trees. Going to bed, it’s been dark for a while now. Here, you see one star first every night. The sun has been setting in a special shade of pale blue this winter. It was dark out the windows by dinner time. You could still see the shadows in the fields. Friday I consider changing my train back to New York, staying here a bit longer, sinking into hazy dusks and evenings by the wood stove and the fires. There was a gas leak in the furnace and so now the gas is off. We've been using the wood stove and the fires a lot. I don't change trains because it's too last minute. I'll become too suspended in time if I stay. There's a pink sunset over salt marshes in places like Mystic, Connecticut on the ride back to the city. I've been trying to work on the things I've put off for too long. I'm been trying to think about the way people talk about culture as I try to write a few reviews. I wrote this sentiment before Christmas -- I know that there are things I'm supposed to be scandalized by, and I'm not really scandalized, but I also remain defensive - it's the worst of all worlds. I have the hearty puritanical roots of a New England Jewish Wasp. It's difficult for me. God it feels good to agree with whatever the person speaking is saying. Now, the truth of it becomes -- morality as a simulacra is so dull. I can spend two seconds in real life and it hits me so starkly how much imitations of reality pale in its contrast. The diagnostics of the times suggests that the individual life becomes more and more disconnected from the collective life, your sphere of influence shrinks as the mirror world of technology gives you every reason to believe it grows, the word of the times isn't nihilism so much as absurdism. One symbol is easily swapped out for its opposite - they bear little material or spiritual significance. You know you don’t mean it. After the terrible Bob Dylan biopic, we're driving on the highway towards the train station and my dad is asking me if there are examples of contemporary genius, what that would look like, and I'm saying that the thing is you have to make a concerted effort to even engage with art at all now, or sometimes to engage even with real life at all and it's an effort that goes against most of the forces in your day to day and so the thing is I think genius is unlikely, although there are contemporary artists I admire and genius implies some innate transcendency of the general malaise anyway, so maybe these issues are irrelevant in the face of genius. A conversation at a coffee shop a few weeks ago - a younger man of the Monarchy school of thought is saying that an ideal society would not ask people to deal in the realm of public good and ruling provenance. Your sphere of influence is yourself and those around you, the best thing that can be done is we drop the illusion. An older man is saying but I've seen you be hugely influenced by the teachings of people you've never met. He's saying that now more than ever, we are living in an age that is cruel. I appreciate his point because - I appreciate learned wisdom and practicality only earned through time. And because, isn't it strange to say that now, more than ever, we live in real life? Finding pure purpose in interiority- this is something that can be learned. It's not something I've learned yet, though. Pure Purpose in Interiority WHAT YOU SHOULD DO This week is prone to slip into oblivion of the sort where you won't really know what you did at all. There is not a ton going on in New York – it's hard to throw a party during a week that doesn't exist. But, you needn't become senselessly bored! Sunday, December 29 From 7pm at KGB – Cassidy and Annabel present The Last Confessions of 2024
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!anOr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F19fb445b-fa79-478c-9e16-cc4b74362148_4284x5363.jpeg, Cassidy, Annabel
I really loved my week at home as described above, and it reminded me how cozy New England can be. My three minute off the top of my head suggested itinerary for a similar week would include — stay at Concord's Colonial Inn; historical, quaint, gets the job done. Swim in Walden Pond if it’s half frozen. Get coffee at Haute Coffee, get breakfast at Main Streets Cafe, get lunch at Helen’s, get dinner at Woods Hole Table. I don’t have that much affection for Boston, but Cafe Vittoria in the North End is great for coffee and desserts and a pre/post dinner cocktail, and Mamma Maria in the North End is the best restaurant there. Good winter hikes (really more like walks) include Fruitlands, Drumlin Farm and the surrounding woods, and Walden Pond.
Inline links: Concord's Colonial Inn, Haute Coffee, Main Streets Cafe, Helen’s, Woods Hole Table, Cafe Vittoria, Mamma Maria, Fruitlands, Drumlin Farm, Walden Pond
January continues
January 19, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, January 12 Ruby and I go to Bar Belly for dinner. Can we move to a table away from the bar, Ruby asks the waitress. Sitting at the bar is bad for your posture and alignment, she explains. This is another thing she's been learning at witch school. It seems that at witch school, you learn to sit and stand and then by proxy, to eat and sleep and breathe and think. Fruit and honey for breakfast, feet on the ground when you are seated with an unsupported spine. I am craving spiritual guidance, and so I soak this up like a sponge. I want to be taught how to be. This is how you wake up. This is how you shift your feet out of bed, this is how you land on the wood floor, toes first, the arches of your feet, then heels. The truth of it is my movements are products of my best but often misguided judgment. Guesses, really. For all I know, you should wake up in the morning upside down. Palms on the ground first. Heels then arches then toes. I want to learn how to be divine, but there are so many shamans and they all know best. God forbid I become sacrilegious. I certainly know myself to be fringing on this at times. Even the mention of shamans.... Ruby and I were going to go to El Salvador on Tuesday, but then I’m thinking about how I should read more before I continue my research on the ground. I visited El Salvador this summer. Later, halted my story about crypto-charter-state-red-light-therapy-benevolent-dictatorship etc etc etc. A result of overstimulation and laziness - I should deepen my roots before I return to them. Later, I'll go later. David sends me an X Post: “Wish we lived in 1970s media economy so esquire or playboy could fly me to El Salvador and publish my 10,000-word marginally-coherent slice-of-life coverage of the crypto convention that ends with a guy in a hot tub saying something accidentally zeitgeisty.” Ruby and I go to Forgetmenot. There’s a dog behind me, a big white husky, I hold out my hand to pet him and he gives me his paw. He does this a few times. He’s trained, I’m sure, to expect a reward in response but we’ve ordered a grill plate, there’s only halloumi left, I don’t want to poison the poor thing. Ruby posts a picture of me with the dog, but I’m in my big puffy jacket, and it mostly becomes just a picture of the dog. She tags my name on the screen. David sends me a screenshot of the picture. “DID YOU TURN INTO A DOG???” he asks. I order David ice cream from Figo when I get home. I ate half his bread and butter even though I've been so Ray Peat and even though after, I’ve been so Keto. I've been drinking again, hence the bread. Not a lot, but I was sober for a week, and the three drinks feel jarring. I've decided to stop causing problems. I've decided to get a job at a restaurant. I like the service industry, because the job is intensely exterior. There are many things so close to me of true significance, and I'm sick of ignoring them in favor of acting like a grasping freak. Monday, January 13 And so, you decide to redecorate again. Look at the layout of this place. There’s so much potential. There’s a big marble table and it’s cramping every corner. It’s cramping the light from the window. It’s cramping the yellow golden light that is framing our mirror. I go downstairs quickly, the light will be gone soon. I want to get a flight tomorrow, leave with my friends and find clarity in the hot humid heat, but it doesn’t feel like I'll be absorbing myself in something more - it feels like escape, and I haven’t earned this decadence. I’ve been deliberating all day. I’ve been clutching my evil eye in case I do decide to travel. All my friends wear evil eyes, too. It’s a strange coincidence - something most people I'm drawn to share, not intentional. I'm not religious, but this is different. Adele keeps a drawer in her apartment full of evil eyes, stocked to the brim in case one charm coincidently shatters. She'll never have to go unprepared. I take a test today. Sent, received, complete, returned. It’s so thrilling to do something I’m supposed to do. If we got rid of the marble table…. If we lined the walls with floor pillows below the windows, their tufted fabric landing well lower than the horizon line even when stacked…. I can imagine the furniture gone. Me, staring clearly across the room, one wall to another. I'm imagining all the clutter dissipated. I imagine it would erase some sense of static. I can imagine my hypothetical week in El Salvador, but I need to learn how to think about something outside of myself, even when I’m here. It would be better there. I can picture the airbnb in San Benito, the eight or so bedrooms, the open air layout that big homes in warm climates often share, arches bleeding into courtyards, steps built into hills, unclear where one room becomes another, wind and heat lightning swirling around you and raising your hair as your walking, even through the kitchen, even ostensibly inside. I want to swim in a big clear pool over a city that is now vaguely familiar but still, not really mine. I want to finish the story I started. New England Winter. I need to learn how to sort things through while staying put. David and I go to Estela for dinner. It’s our anniversary. He tells me not to say anything online about it. Private life should stay private, he says, but I’m writing it anyway. Estela is nice. It’s the sister restaurant of Altro Paradiso. My friend, Madelyn works there. Estela is smaller, cozier, you have to buzz to get into the building and then it’s up some steps, it feels like you’re in an apartment, it feels like you’re in Berlin. I’ve never been to Copenhagen, but I imagine it feels a bit like Copenhagen, too. “I like more old timey restaurants,” David says. “Me too,” I say. “But sometimes isn’t it nice to be in a restaurant that feels like Copenhagen? David agrees. He’s never been to Copenhagen either. Altro Paradiso is brightly lit, whereas Estela is dim. Stella - Latin for Star. Etc. The distinction feels a little obvious, but then, I’m being a little particular. Estela is small plates. Romantic. You can tell because you have to buzz the door to get in, and because the lighting is really dark. They put us in a little alcove by the shelves and shelves of wine. We order iberico ham, bread and butter, endive salad, crab with celery root (the best dish), squid ink fried rice with little bits of squid, steak with elderberry sauce. I order a Tito's martini, but I’m told they don’t serve Titos here. I’m told they have one martini with vodka that “tastes like smirnoff” ($22) and another with vodka that’s way better and far preferable (paraphrased) ($30). Our waitress is peppy. “We’ll take the Smirnoff,” David says. “She’s nice,” I say, later. “Domineering,” David says. Later, the waitress rolls her eyes a little when she asks me how my martini is. She smiles when I say good. I believe she is sincere in her hope that I’m happy as I guzzle up the fruits of my lowbrow taste. It really is a lovely meal. I don’t mean to be cynical. I tell David he should tell them it’s our anniversary so we can have something free, and he tells them “it’s our anniversary, can we have dessert on the house.” Then, I’m embarrassed, but they bring us dessert (with a price) and champagne (on the house). Tuesday, January 14 I’ve been working on maintaining constant motion. “An object in motion will stay in motion,” I’ve been telling anyone that will listen. I walk in place all day, and then I walk through Washington Square Park at night, freezing. I make sure to do an extra lap to circle under the arch, all sparkling and illuminated and icy. I’m thirty minutes late to the Post-Doomerism talk at Gonzo’s, and this feels like an important one to me because I used to base my entire framework of thought around mitigating dread through a surrender to the inevitability of fates worse than death. It’s a terrible way to view the world - juvenile if nothing else, but also aesthetically and morally barren, limiting, a nihilistic obsession with the present does lead to destruction (yourself and others), no matter how many delusions you harbor about enlightenment, and about time and therefore preservation as false constructs. You can’t be nihilistic if you believe in good and evil, and I do believe in good and evil, so it was never going to hold up. Post Doomerism The lecture is just starting when I exit the elevator. The talk is between Chris Small (founder of Amazon Labor Union), PradaHorseShoe (founder of Russian Cosmism Circle NYC), Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll Podcast), and Geo Yankey (Comedian) “Russian Cosmists think that Marx doesn't take it far enough,” Amana explains. “Marxism wants to abolish capitalism, religion, the family…. but what about abolishing the OG bummer - death.” The point of the talk seems to be to present a sort of leftist vision of tech accelerationism. Capitalist Realism, the parts of the industrial revolution deemed actually good, nuclear fusion (clean and limitless energy which imitates the sun) instead of nuclear fission, fossil fuels , etc etc etc. The audience, on the other hand, is mostly composed of people I recognize from other downtown events - this one taking on an uncharacteristic and somewhat academic sincerity. “Hypothetically, heat death could occur before we run out of fuel,” a girl sitting next to me murmurs at one point, evidently at least somewhat convinced by technology’s capacity for limitless good. I try to conjure a sense of what she’s imagining in my mind's eye - create enough clean energy, and you could be driving your car one day when the whole universe just implodes. This isn’t aspirational to me. Longevity even, has never been particularly aspirational to me, although increasingly moreso, I’m increasingly less cynical. I appreciate the sincerity of the lecture. I appreciate some of the ideas they put forward, too. It’s an irony-pilled audience and they're sitting in a deeply earnest room. I slip out during the Q&A - overwhelmed, honestly, and I’m late to another function. I’m handed a gin and tonic in the Lower East Side. I’m talking about the Russian Cosmism lecture. “Lenin tried that and 20 million people died,” I am told. “I don’t really know enough,” I say. I’m sent a documentary about The Tyranny of Scientism. I order some things like the books by Nick Zurnig and Mark Fisher. It’s good to be objective. The night slips onward. It’s rude to talk about accelerationism at a party. Wednesday, January 16 It's slightly warmer in New York today. It's still cold, but it's less frigid, I'm walking through Soho typing, I'm walking to Equinox, I'll finish writing this on the treadmill, I had such a fun night last night although I do feel terribly guilty about squandering my health and my beauty and my soul every time I get drunk. I was such a good drunk, though. I adore my friends so deeply. I adore my new friends. I think they are my best friends. I’m trying not to quantify everything. There are names of people I love spinning through my mind, now. Why order things. Some people exhaust me, and then there are other people who don’t. I’ve found new friends who live artfully while occupying a natural state that is absorbed with the physical world, recently. How lucky for me. I don’t want to use my volatility as a bludgeon with which to bend people to my whims. Good thing I don’t feel particularly volatile this week. It’s best to consider these while outside of them. Objective introspection: am I doing a good job? WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Gofundme + LA Fire Resources here. Sunday, January 19 From 6pm - midnight at EARTH — Jordan Castro and Cluny present SILENCE. An evening of silence. No speaking, no phones.
Inline links: X Post, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!C7a6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b47129c-0bc4-49be-9951-68a8a3f58ac6_1179x1372.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RkCJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb4a64bf-f664-428e-854a-221b40a26109_1536x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XxFb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F59a8c887-c1bc-4090-9568-92185cc4e0c1_1412x1420.png, Amazon Labor Union, PradaHorseShoe, Russian Cosmism Circle NYC, Doomscroll Podcast, Geo Yankey, Capitalist Realism, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kDE6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7220533-39ee-4944-a185-b7983b1500e9_1600x1066.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!abSY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12cd88-f058-4032-ba7f-a91514034d33_1600x1066.jpeg, here, EARTH, Jordan Castro, Cluny
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

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