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Upper West Side

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Upper West Side

Article

Upper West Side is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between June 06, 2024 and March 18, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I’m back in the Upper West Side throwing oreo cakesters in the trash”; “on the Upper West Side, things are quiet”; “I like the Upper West Side Sarabeth’s because I would go every year on my half birthday as a child”. It most often appears alongside New York, Night Club 101, Washington Square Park.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: June 06, 2024
  • Last seen: March 18, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

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

COLLECTED AGENDA #3
June 06, 2024 · Original source
Early evening I’m back in the Upper West Side throwing oreo cakesters in the trash of my aunt's apartment that reminds me of childhood and also of first moving to New York and also of always coming back from the coast when it’s always late May and everything is always this green and humid.
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence
November 19, 2024 · Original source
WHAT I DID Chloe Pingeon's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Monday, November 10 It feels very important to parse through things very carefully today. I write down what I value: truth and beauty. mental and physical clarity. But then, there are other things, too. I don't experience life as this ethereal. Making big lists. Having big fun. Making big points. I write down: This is the thing I dislike about myself most; not experiencing things as this ethereal and wanting to make things like big points. I write down: when was the time you felt most transcendent? Remember: I'm not writing auto fiction. I'm writing my diary. It's weird - picking up the pieces of things. I feel disdain when I see people exercising bad habits. You cannot imagine my horror as I self destruct. Picture This: on the Upper West Side, things are quiet. The stone walls on the edge of the park are lined with trimmed hedges in the summer, but the branches are bare now, and so, you see, now, that the skeletons have always been jagged. The subway has been nicer lately, better to step inside when the warm air is a relief and nothing is steaming. I like the uptown F, the cars with the orange seats, the stations where there's no one there so you can hear the doors whoosh. Picture this: you go to The Central Park Zoo, you wear a Christmas dress, you go to Sarabeth's for lunch, pancakes, toast. After, you don't go window shopping but you do walk home. Not your home, it belongs to someone else, but it's familiar. You make tea by big French windows. The trees are bare already, remember, and so picture the precision with which you can watch the people on the street below. They don't look like little ants, you aren't that high up, they just look as they are - little people in and out. People looking for something. It’s like they are on a little treasure hunt. Imagine you would wish them the best. You wouldn't close the windows - not for a while, at least David told me I smelled like winter when I got home today. I didn't. I smelled like eucalyptus. You would too after a few minutes in that steam room in SoHo. I can’t stop spending money the instant that I make it. I can’t stop spending money like I have it. I have stopped purchasing stuff. I like to wear the same thing most days. I like to sort TheRealReal Black Blazers prices low to high and buy five at once, eight dollars each. When they arrive, they are still nice material and still from places like Armani or at least Theory and you spend little and you can sell them for more when it’s time to declutter. It’s been so wonderful to declutter lately. I’ve gotten rid of almost all of it - stuff, I mean. In the new place, there are no closets. I’ve gotten rid of all my storage space. I’ve gotten rid of all my streams of income. My Stuff is still in storage somewhere. Not in New York. I’ll sell it soon. You can have some but not all my earthly possessions if you want them. You can have the ones I’ve packed away. I like this idea – “Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence” Tuesday, November 11 My new favorite blog is this - Health Gossip. It’s an old school newsletter. The health advice is very Pure and True, but more than this, it is beautiful to consume. Health Gossip is my favorite thing on the Internet this week. Very rarely does something in digital form elicit a real sense of calm in me. Usually, things in digital form make me feel kind of manic and bad. I’m not sure why this project strikes me so profoundly. Today, I spend multiple hours reading Health Gossip. A writer texts me after last week's letter - “your writing is always “good” ie flashy/ineffable… but this one bummed me out.” I’m not sure if he’s referring to the happenings of the week, or to the passivity, lethargy, dare I say gluttony and sludge… with which I’ve been diluting my descriptions of it all. I don't ask him to clarify. Regardless, his assessment of the piece in some sense parallels my own, and an attempt to dredge out an opinion from an acquaintance I admire that might placate my own sense of shame does not feel like an endeavor of any significance. “it bummed me out to write… ”, I say. We’re at a large group dinner at Olive Garden Times Square tonight. The host picked this place with a genuine fervor, nothing snidely ironic about it, and so I am more good humored in this venture than would be my usual inclination. It's less kitschy here then I l expected, anyways. Wall to wall carpeting, lots of families, lazy susan’s, the color schemes of muted Americana. I have a healthy appreciation for Times Square Charm. I have a healthy Relationship With Capitalism. I can't really eat the food here but isn't some of it just so fun to look at. I'm drifting in and out of focus at dinner - preoccupied by unrelated concerns of wavering integrity and petty betrayal, not important, not interesting. When I do tune in, a girl across the table is talking about Politics. “My grandma is spending her time so worried about school shooters because it's an obsession of the news,” she says. “It makes me angry and so sad for her. She shouldn't be spending her time thinking about this.” I get her sentiment a little bit. A sensationalist sense of doom that makes my skin crawl at some family dinners. Sometimes, there is frost on the grass just outside the window and when it catches my eye during these conversations - look at the dew, look at the mist, there are fawns in the field - then I just want to scream. But then, I worry sometimes that I am not very empathetic. I am envious, sometimes, of people who become utterly consumed by suffering that for the most part, they could simply look away from. Nihilism is something I am trying to avoid for the main reason of - its been breeding cruelty more than healthy removal, lately. Walking through Times Square after, David asks me if I am ok. I guess my eyes have glazed over. I realize this now, that it's been called to my attention. “Of course,” I say. “I worry that everything in my life is going to very suddenly fall apart,” I say. I am reassured. The night passes peacefully. Thursday, November 14 I take the Q to the end of the line today. It's something I've always wanted to do - take the train until the cars stop and I'm the last one left on board and a voice comes on and says please exit the train for cleaning, this is the last stop on this train, please exit the train so the train can be cleaned. I'm in Bay Ridge to shoot a music video today. To be an extra in a music video, that is. I'm exceptionally bad at acting. I'm bad enough that I am even bad as an extra. I'm not particularly bad at lying, but I am bad at having an expressive face. The neighborhood at the end of the Q is nice. I've been taken to other places in New York like this before. Places where you feel like you're by the seaside, where you're under the bridge, where the architecture is more brick, more limestone, more instances of art deco. The Hudson widens into the open ocean somewhere not too far from here and so of course the air feels different. It's strange, even if anticipated, to take the subway ninety minutes to a place where the air feels different, to walk down strange streets and into an unfamiliar gothic building, to open the door to a room where I have never been, and to find it filled with people I mostly already know. The past few years have given me many instances like this. This is something I am very grateful for. The music video is for DDM / Uncensored New York. It's a cool concept. It's cool to watch things come to life. The shoot is outside, and I am the coldest I have ever been. I'm still having fun. I'm thinking about things like how monks orient their consciousness and focus towards the cause of their suffering, and then I am trying to think only about the cold. I am not able to transcend myself, but even freezing, I don't wish I was elsewhere. In the afternoon, I sit in a warm car and I thaw my hands. I have miso soup, tea, and cheese sticks. There is still a chill in me even once inside, which is simultaneously unpleasant and cozy. I'd been wanting a day like this very badly. Friday, November 15 Beckett's Tense comes together with serendipity. There was a crisis with the headliners, Lucy Sante was sick. Beckett ran into Penny Arcade outside of Madame Matovu on 10th. Now, Penny is the headliner. The unsalvageable is always salvaged. The bar can serve real liquor tonight. There's a lot of people here and it's a different crowd than usual. Tense is back in Manhattan. Penny says she’s here because she wants to see what the new New York is doing. I give Beckett a hug at Sovereign House. I say hi to Chris and Adeline. Chris and Adeline are drawing big Tense bubble letters on the chalkboard. The seats are already mostly full. I climb to the top of a ladder and I sit up there. From up there, I have the best view in the house. Tense is not just a reading series, Tense is a show, and this distinction is important. There is a program, an order of events, a flow of new and old. The serendipity with Penny’s arrival lies in this - she seems to understand exactly what Beckett is doing, and while she didn’t write her piece specifically for TENSE (she describes it as “cultural criticism you can dance to”), it speaks with exaction to the spirit of things. Here are some things that Penny Arcade says: I’d rather put a stick in my eye than go somewhere where everyone is the same age. When I was young, if I went to a party and everyone was under thirty I thought... I'm at the wrong party.”
Inline links: Health Gossip, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BqEq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8d9f96c9-96e5-4a0b-9813-061226dc9197_3024x3775.jpeg, DDM, Uncensored New York, Beckett's, Tense, Lucy Sante, Penny Arcade, Madame Matovu, Chris, Adeline
kind of a dud socially
December 09, 2024 · Original source
Wednesday, December 3 I stay inside for most of the day, that's what I assume you do when there's a man hunt. I remember the Boston Marathon bombing. I’d canoed there on the Charles River with my dad, and after we left the race safe and sound we learned that no one was allowed outside for days. They eventually found the guy in the hull of someone else's boat. Some different suburb. I assume that it’s the same today, but the UnitedHealthcare Assassin proves to be less of a threat to public safety. I go outside around two pm. SoHo is booming. Back inside, it starts to snow. I can see it through the greenhouse ceiling. David reads me transcripts of conversations he’s overheard in coffee shops. It would be hard to fake real coffee shop gossip, we both agree. There's a strangeness, a nonsense almost, in the overheard familiarity of conversations among people you don't know. The snow has come with wind, and I can see an umbrella on the roof above swinging wildly. I worry it will come crashing through. I worry that wind and icy pebbles of snow and shattered glass and the sphere of the umbrella stick are all about to crash down on me. The snow is thick and icy, but it’s melting as it lands on the glass and so there is no noise. I kind of think the snow looks like nuclear fallout. I almost say this out loud, but then I think that wouldn’t be very pleasant. David gets a text that “It’s snowing!!” and he rolls his eyes. “I don’t find whimsy in snow,” he says. “I do,” I say. Of course I do. Thursday, December 4 It's a strange week. I keep grasping for some concrete sense of how things make sense. I was acting insane last week, but now I am not. I was floating in space last week, but now I have mental and physical clarity. Things are never that simple. Acting Insane tends to happen in waves. The truth of it is, my sense of stagnation comes largely from the fact that I am acting very stagnant. It also stems from my phone and from things like staying up all night. We go to Sarabeth’s for dinner. They have happy hour now. I don't like to eat or drink early, and while I’m quite familiar with the concept of happy hour, I feel like I'm discovering it for myself for the first time. I'd like to order all the eight dollar cocktails, the shrimp, the deviled eggs. We’re sitting at the bar and it's cozy even though it smells slightly like cleaning supplies. Sterile in an old school way. This is not something I hate. The Greenwich Village Sarabeth’s just opened down the street. I like the Upper West Side Sarabeth’s because I would go every year on my half birthday as a child. We would go to The Central Park Zoo and then to Sarabeth’s. It wasn't as spoiled or superfluous as it sounds. It was just a nice tradition. Today, Sarabeth’s is nice until it isn't - a slow crescendo into an unhappy hour as the three to five pm menu is swapped out for normal prices. So, I stay up all night and reconsider if I have rediscovered mental and physical clarity after all. I call my friend and she says I have literally no idea what you mean by that. But I don't think I'm just using buzzwords. Clarity is the prerequisite to everything else. This makes sense to me. Next week is all the holiday parties in the world. I like this time the best. I'll go to the tree at Rockefeller tonight. I'll go to The Central Park Zoo. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO It’s the busiest week of the year… choose your ventures wisely. Monday, December 9 From 7:30pm — The Thing Is returns to Jean’s. This month's show (It’s A Wonderful Life) will star Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, and Rebounder.
Inline links: The Thing Is, Jean’s, It’s A Wonderful Life, Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, Rebounder
Summer Break
July 15, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, July 7 On the upper west side there are big french windows. green branches outside and you can’t see the street. There is a gray townhouse across the way, marble framing, air conditioning in the attic. I have crashed here before. I have been to the central park zoo. I have whispered on the whisper bench. I took cigarettes from the apartment before I left. I moved to Berlin once. I came back and I came here. I got a job at a gallery. I was given a life the next winter. There was a life before. I am not vindictive at all. I am waiting for a collapse that has not come. 12.23.24 - Today; a crisp clear morning of ice and snow and dreamy clarity at home. I haven't felt this at peace in the country in so long, I haven't felt able to access this place in forever. Now, something shifts. 12.28.24 - The idea being of course, that once you realize the shortness of the time you have, you become paralyzed of wasting it. 1.17.25 - After I floated through the kitchen for a while I remarked, oh this is a lazy morning. You consider jumping around with your soulmate all day lazy?, I was asked. 1.21.25 - I screamed my lifemylifemylifemylife too and then I put a towel in my mouth in the bathroom and I bit down hard. 1.26.25 - we talk about values — which we mostly share I went to Fanelli Cafe The Roxy Hotel and The Party and then who knows. I took a North Face backpack all about town. I took a Prada purse. I took a call. I took a meeting. I took beet juice at lunch. I took water with dinner. I forgot how to write. Artificial Intelligence remembered how to tell me about psychosis. Artificial Intelligence remembered how to affirm. I remembered my humility. I remembered how to recite advice. It is not that things are good. Where is my spiral? I have been checking my notes. If all adds up, then there should have been some spiral. It’s spiraling all around me. I wrote a letter. I didn’t tell everyone. There is nothing really left to write. The end was not so much the artistic sort of thing. I am still still still. I have heard the news. I have heard the latest. Split screen. Split personality. I used to write it like performance art. It is insane, at a certain point, to insist it is performance art. Queen of the Fairies, the signs say in Bushwick. They're talking on the phone on the street and so they seem schizophrenic, my dad says in Bushwick. Schizophrenic is not always as it seems, I am smirking in Bushwick. No one is laughing. Everyone is graceful. I keep on ruining the vibe. I was told once that I thought that I was something like Mother Theresa. You write like this and so you ruin what is sacred. Some things are sacred. Artificial Intelligence cut me off. Artificial Intelligence caught a whiff of my vibe. Tuesday, July 8 There is a fire by the ocean and gray gray gray dusk and I had wine against my own best interest. I thought I would say, here is what I recall. I recall nothing. There is so much I could distinguish from the wreck of it all. I'm ok but you are not so in this world today, Iris is saying on the beach. I recall we went to The Folly. I closed the door in the bathroom up the stairs. I ate Chicken and Rice, Joe's Pizza, Springbone Kitchen, Two Martinis. Throw the butter from the fridge in the trash because it really smells like rot. I was not always convinced that everything was about to rot, but I was always pretty sure about the butter. It all becomes a bit trite in writing. Not in recollection. I wish I could recall so much of anything at all. What are your favorite furniture items in memory, my dad asks Iris after the beach. Iris says a yellow ottoman. My dad lights a fire. My dad is on StreetEasy. I'm on that artificial intelligence wave in a big way. You can tell I've developed the habit because I sound abruptly so much stupider. You can tell I have little ground to stand on because, absence, no memory, relinquish nostalgia and I have nothing to say. I liked the little wooden chairs by the fire in Massachusetts. I like my map of Buzzards Bay. I liked the wooden table at a house surrounded by all that green. I did first like the Bacchus mask in New York, though I am learning to be cautious with symbolism and the thing of what you may conjure. My dad liked the bed he built into his cabin. There are people who build cabins. There are people whose whims don't dictate their attacks. There are people who are just one person all at once. The dog chased the coyote up the beach and I chased the crab apple path up towards the house and there is a paisley blanket and an oil painting of a woman in a long pleat white dress and a black hat with a black bow and a small child with his hand clutched in hers. Wednesday, July 9 Lying on the speckled blue sheets under a canopy of white veil thinking about how I’m going to get the fuck back to the city. Thinking about where I am going to live. I am going to need to pull a lot of favors. I will not be listless. Wander around my all new neighborhood in a daze of self abandon. Abandon limbo. It will be interesting to see what happens when I abandon limbo. I suspect that it'll be nothing good. Were you so addicted to the chaos? Iris asks me. Will you need to manufacture new situations to respond to? It’s just that, reckless abandon doesn't really bother me, I say. It’s not so much that this is necessarily what I crave. There is a music box and I am noticing my initials on the inside. There are mussels in coconut milk and bluefish on the porch and I was quiet quiet quiet today, though I get the sense that suddenly all around me, it is beginning to happen fast fast fast. Thursday, July 10 I stopped with all the quiet and then I regretted it in an instant. There are gray walls like paper maché and a white wooden canopy bed frame and a toy boat all tan and teal green propped up on the bookshelf. You have been lying in every bed in the house, Iris said. Rotate them like musical chairs. I was not so sure where I should land. I was lying on a yellow bedspread, then. Dusk, then. The curtains were drawn but they were light and sheer and easy to imagine what was just on the other side. Friday, July 11 New York is pulsing pulsing pulsing summer and I am glad to be back even just, to do little with it. Dinner at Lure Fishbar which is lovely and a clarity summit on the terrace which is less rotten in its final days, smog over the railing and the lights are blinking on and off in dusk haze across the river and then, everyone leaves. I leave too. Bring drinks in plastic bottles to the bar. Starting my days earlier and ending them later. There will be other things. I could handwrite it next time. I could use lugger.com or the nice neighbor from May or the generosity from others that I worry I do not return or deserve to move the couch. So, nothing ever happens. Stay up until seven in the morning and then it's taking down the fir wreaths because those are becoming a fire hazard too. Taking down the buoy and the copper pot because those are coming with me. The terrace has become all clogged with cigarettes and I notice it only now, plastic tarnished wood and the cracks are all stuffed with tar and rainwater and dead branches. So, I could do yard work I suppose. Or, I could just leave. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, July 15 From 8pm - 12pm at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — a one night only reading of an AI generated play trained on all Matthew Gasda’s plays. Error 404: Play Not Found. Tickets are free but donations are encouraged. - “This will be done with ample drinking and unseriousness--but the experiment may also be interesting on a philosophical level.”
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-s02!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa0eebadf-a2d7-4370-aa2c-ff5b1e6112ba_756x424.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5VsE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa28d040d-b3a0-4770-82bd-6e231622df77_632x410.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UYwU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F46ea23c2-0020-4017-9cf8-fb844593afb0_1536x2048.jpeg, The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, Error 404: Play Not Found
Big Huge World
October 06, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, September 22 On the Upper West Side, there are stone townhouses and quiet streets and nice branzino and diet coke with lemon and they bring us baskets of red pesto and baguette and memories both good and bad become holographic quite quickly. New York is not all rotten. There are the last days of summer to take care of. Last days of gluttony. Last days of Reading Series. In a cab downtown to meet Lily with a stomach ache, Lily tells me that she is at a bar meeting boys. I meet her on the street. She’s wearing a white dress and she looks sparkling. There are others, on the steps, out here, and we all do the whole charade of all pretending like we have all never met. Lily met a boy at the bar who wants to take her on a road trip with his dogs, she tells me. You’re too young for me, but it’ll be fun while it lasts, the boy tells Lily. He sends each individual word as a separate message and then shares a video of two pitbulls sparing on a field of plastic turf. Lily lays her phone flat in her hand and we loom over it in the orange September sort of night. The video plays on an infinite loop. The dogs unhinge their massive jaws and aim to swallow a basketball whole. You’ll go upstate and get mauled to death by this guy’s pitbulls, I tell Lily. I’m not going upstate, Lily tells me. We walk further downtown, trace the usual path to a magazine launch in a night club that I thought would be more crowded. We sit in the backroom, and you can hear the readings better here than if you claw your way to the front like everyone else, but we probably appear to be kind of checked out. I’m going to save you, Lily tells me. We walk to Funny Bar where Sam is smoking outside. Am I safe to go inside, I ask Sam. He nods and flicks his hand towards the door. His friends are all from The Internet, and they introduce themselves by alias. Standing by the bar and Sam is saying that Los Angeles is it now. I stand a little halfway outside the conversation circle with my shirt pulled pretty tight around me and contribute a few half hearted sentiments about how Los Angeles can’t be it. The cars, the sprawl, the niceties, the plastic surgery. It’s got to be Austin, Sam’s friend is saying. It’s the same stale conversation topic as usual. How New York is over. Culture is over. Sam is listing a few mid to low tier Los Angeles based Internet personalities around which a new and transgressive art scene could revolve. I am dead sober, and therefore relieved to notice that I do not float out of my body and watch myself say something annoying and off-beat, like I inevitably would if I were drunk. None of those people have a mass fanbase of beautiful women, I point out to Sam. In Los Angeles, you’d find fifteen e-girls and they’d have to take Ubers. Sam agrees that this could potentially be a problem. If it’s uninteresting here, then it’s uninteresting everywhere, but I understand why everyone is seeking renewal. Like The Internet isn’t alive and everyone isn’t talking about the same things everywhere. Like Sam and his crew could wash up on Hollywood Boulevard and say the same things five years later, to a five years younger crop of wonderful young girls, fresh eyed and eager, they’d spawn out of nowhere, they would never have heard all of the things that have already been said before. Tuesday, September 23 Watching the gray light filter through the windows of a studio where everything is tan or cream or pale blue or gold. Watching a waiter at a cafe down the street bring over black coffee, cannoli, and strawberries in a chalice. Start the day with solitude. I have never lived like this before. A smooth and slick kind of woman across from me is talking about her sister who broke up with her boyfriend after meeting a Danish stone carver who believes in hard work and apprenticeship and not necessarily general education. The sister became repulsed by her boyfriend after spending time with the stone carver because she felt her boyfriend had too pragmatic a view on life. The sister left her passport at her ex’s place for one whole week and needs an ego death. She needs a concrete understanding of the next couple years. She wants to continue to go to school for forever, though this part, the whole family agrees is fine. The girl across from me is practically dripping gel from her slicked back bright red bun. She’s cloaked in business casual and a bad attitude. She’s drinking a cappuccino and she’s off to pilates. I am wondering if I would find her smug and didactic demeanor less off putting if she were more beautiful. She is wearing a stripped shirt and she gestures a J-Crew sleeve towards me and my own striped shirt as she leaves. It’s like a movie, she says. My shirt is softer and thinner and I want to coil the sleeves up and climb inside. It’s like mimes, I respond. Mimes? she asks. I do not mime. I hope she knows what that word means. It is not so much a thing of feeling out of place. I have worlds of characters and oddities at my fingertips. I like characters and oddities, which, along with a desire driven by ennui and terror to remain right at the very center of things, is why I am still here. I tend to like when people are abrasive, because it means they are fixated on just one thing. I watch the woman leave and I know for certain that I do not like her but it is not a thought that troubles me too much. It is a thought that passes like a cloud. Wednesday, September 24 Later, the air conditioning is off, and I’m pacing through empty health food aisles, drawing signs of the moon in class; waxing crescent moon, Libra moon, PLS GO FETCH ME THE MOON. Later, someone is talking about bio weapons at another party downtown. The genomes, the rapture, the clarity, the apocalyptic ideation. Please do not stress me out right now, the man on stage at the party is saying. I do not like that question. A different question. Could someone in the audience please ask one precise and better question? I see Iris and her blond hair bobbing up and down across the traffic stop as I stand outside the ice cream shop taking stock of my day and my night. Iris is carrying bright-blue-epson-salt and she is walking back towards a glass apartment in the sky. Do you want to sit, Iris asks? Inside? The rotating apartment in the sky. One rotation used to be mine. I can survive going inside. No, outside. We sit on the benches at the edge of the street as the ice cream shop closes, and I tell Iris all about how much things have improved. I have not been home all day, I tell Iris. I throw up my hands. Performative exhaustion. The whole ordeal is pleasant. Iris is very buoyant today. You should write aphorisms, Iris tells me. Passivity responds to harshness. Lethargy responds to good metabolic function. Have you noticed how all the energy here has come whirling-back-to-life? Iris starts telling me about the state of things. She has figured out where she stands when it comes to her positioning in the state of things. She has surmised who will be left behind. I nod. I clarify my own positions and I mean it. So we agree, Iris says. Good! I tell Iris about how I was at a French Cafe in Chinatown drinking matcha with almond milk which surprised my friends because they would have presumed that someone becoming Catholic would take coffee and drink it with whole milk, preferably raw. I tell Iris about how a lot has changed but I am still not so sure. I tell Iris about how culture isn’t dead but a lot of people have just decided not to be a part of it. I don’t say all of this out loud. I am still not so sure. Every apartment I go to is full of relics. Every party I go to is the same. Thursday, September 25 Sitting at Bar Oliver with Celia and it’s all red leather booths, light jazz music, non alcoholic beer which can be good for estrogen levels in women and black coffee and my eyes keep following the ceiling fans in circles. The rain has come and washed everything clean. I can have anything I want. I hang my purse on the metal arm of the tableside lamp. Incandescent bulbs. Write a note on the top of my planner. I CAN HAVE ANYTHING I WANT BUT I CAN’T HAVE EVERYTHING I WANT. Chinatown in the rain is cinematic and less like the land of leggings and small dogs that is increasingly stretching its grimy tendrils out and expanding all over downtown Manhattan. Celia turns her laptop around to show me a photograph of a light wood living room, checkered yellow table cloth, soft and warm armchair. This looks like your parents house, Celia says. Where did you find that, I ask. I found it on Tumblr, Celia says. We go for a walk along the East River, where the rain and the heat have turned everything kind of the same shade of fairytale gray. Celia tells me stories as we walk. Sylvia was an heiress and her dad was an inventor. Camilla was a tragic figure. Lucy was a ghost. I can imagine there were a lot of inventors coming out of that part of the world, I tell Celia. Why do you imagine that?, Celia asks me. Because there’s little to do but the temperament of the area is less mundane and passive than in neighboring states, I explain. The opioid crisis never hit, Celia agrees. There was no heroin, and so people invented things. We walk past the Governors Island Ferry and a kind of dilapidated and green Casa Cipriani. This is where the art fair was, Celia says. I have brain fog, I say. I go home, cheerful and ill. I go to an album release party where the singer is shaking with tears streaming down his face as the songs play, and then very cheerful and calm as he greets his wife and friends. I go to a Right Wing magazine launch and then to a celebration for a zine about ETHICS. I listen to the same song until I can’t bear it anymore. Take the M to the end of the line. Take photos of the tennis courts here, because they’re glistening in the rain and night. I show the bartender at Gotscheer Hall my passport from Switzerland and he beams. You should work here, he says. I beam back. I should work here, I say. Gotscheer Hall is huge and cavernous and covered with murals of fairytales. It’s like a whole huge world here. The world of Gotscheer Hall, and then the world of the fairytales that line its walls. It’s a Whole Huge World, I say. I say this over and over again. I took the train to the end of the M line, and then I remembered that it’s a whole huge world. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, October 6 From 4:40pm at Film Forum — Bresson’s Four Nights Of A Dreamer (1972) screens. - “Third filming (following Visconti’s) of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, transposed to ’70s Paris.” Worth seeing before it closes.
Inline links: Film Forum, Four Nights Of A Dreamer
Hotel Lobby Gossip
December 09, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, December 1 Everyone is sick and dropping like flies but not me. I’m at a rooftop hot tub in Williamsburg tracing my hands through the water and watching the sun come up as I stare blankly ahead. I’m driving back to New York City squinting into the skeleton trees and the blue hour dusk that fills the space between them on the side of the road off the Mohawk Trail. Do you shop at Uniglo, my family members are asking? I am muttering something about Brandy Melville in response and then I am feeling vaguely nauseous. I am break the pattern today or the loop repeats tomorrow. I am imagining everything magical all the time. I am washing up on the Upper West Side where the streets are wide and quiet and sweet and winter rain has frozen everything shining. I am washing up in the Marlton Hotel Lobby, where I am telling Celia about my dream. In my dream, a composite of every person I’ve ever met was calling me on my phone, I tell Celia. They kept on asking me to turn the call to Facetime instead. They kept on saying it was time to see each other’s faces. They were warm and not scary and I was crying and pleading a lot, though I don’t know what for. Was it everyone you ever met, or just everyone you’ve ever cared for? Celia asks me. Same thing, I say. That is unequivocally untrue, Celia tells me. Tuesday, December 2 In The Marlton Hotel lobby, I order black coffee, avocado, smoked salmon and sourdough toast with the perfect type of butter. The butter with salt water mixed in, and then a tall bottle of sparkling water on the side, too. Eavesdropping at The Marlton Hotel, where the bar room is decked in Christmas cheer and the fire, per usual, is roaring. The conversations on either side of me are increasingly hallucinogenic. Two chirpy and pretty girls to the right, and two middle-aged Jewish ladies to the left This is how I feel with a lot of my relationships, one of the girls says. The first was not a provider, but I thought that I could fix that. The second was a psycho libertarian who got me health insurance as his sick way of trying to lock it down The last man I dated told me I was full of shit, her friend responds. I said something in earnest, and he said that I was full of shit. I could never see past that. Me saying something in sincerity, and him saying I was full of shit. On the other side, the middle-aged Jewish women are talking about pizza night. It’s pizza night and then it’s pepper night. They have no plans this week. These are the only plans they have made. I’m getting dinner with a man who thought his whole family was dead, but then they weren’t, one of the women tells the other. He is so amazing. He taught me about exercise. I get the zoomies, says her friend. We don’t work, and so we have to exercise. I hate people who don’t. Exercise? Exercise. When were things the best with him? The first girl is asking her friend. I think, before we met, the friend responds. Who was that coocoo-for-coco puffs lady that you got friendly with, the middle aged woman asks her friend. She is wearing a red amulet. We will call her Celine. Oh, she was crazy. and the sister was out of her mind. she was very beautiful You introduced her to me one week and we loved her. And then the next week you said; She Cannot. Come. Back. Here. We pick up interesting people. Everyone’s interesting It is so weird when we think about relationships as two full selves coming together, one girl is telling the other. They liked coats! Whole family of coat owners, Celine is telling her friend. I mean the father was GAY. The whole family was gay. My first kiss was gay. Well… his brothers were gay. All his brothers were gay…” Celine’s friend says. So he HAD to be! They’re all gay! As long as they’re happy…. Amongst the girls to the right, the conversation has turned to heaven and earth. Death and other realms. They are talking about Neurolink and how they were at a neurolink conference and they met a man who died for twenty minutes because he slipped and fell and chipped a tooth and affixated in his own blood. Do you want to hear what happened when he died?, one girl asks another Yes, the other responds. He was floating in light. He was disembodied. He could hear sounds but they weren’t sounds he could describe in human terms. There was a God-like presence, and God asked the man if he would like to stay. The man started to feel a pull towards earth. It was like when you wake up from a dream. God said you have a choice. God said everyone has a choice. The man made the decision to go back to Earth. The man woke up in the hospital bed. Her friend responds: I spoke with a psychiatry professor at Harvard who briefly died as part of a death-study, but he couldn’t tell me about it because he signed an NDA. He said he can’t say very much, but it’s going to be ok. Girl 1: So what do you think about that? Girl 2: I mean I definitely don’t believe in heaven or hell Girl 1: The reason I never killed myself is because I want to see what happens Girl 2: I mean I definetly do believe that consciousness is eternal… Wednesday, December 3 What do I care about now? Write and read. Wait with pulsing anticipation but not too much anticipation, mostly just a sense that some things are at their tail end and others at their precipices. Something in Saturn, maybe, but I am trying not to play with fire in this way. After I played Kali Uchis off the tinny computer speakers and I read books by healers who possessed demons and I drank sparkling water and cleaned everything top to bottom and flirted with danger a bit, Celia came over to sit on my floor. I think I’m having a bit of a panic attack, Celia texted me. Would you like to come sit on the floor of my apartment, I texted Celia. She arrived in a gray sweater and a blue wool scarf and bearing a suitcase that belonged to me. Do you like the window open? I asked Celia. I am feeling a bit cold, Celia told me. I am feeling very excited and ambitious, I told Celia. I have always had boundless energy and this is the only thing I know to be true. There are magazines on the way to the apartment and I am realizing how nice it is when things are very clean. I am going to go to The Marlton hotel now, Celia told me. Thursday, December 4 Writing, like a list, the things I have that I can quantify, now. A blog
Lost Week
January 08, 2026 · Original source
REDACTED resolutions for the benefit of oneself and others Friday, December 26 I woke up to it like a snow globe outside. The type of storm that is hard to describe unless you are me, waking up surrounded on all sides by everything soft and quiet and shimmering in a room that has always been yours. Everything coated white and sweet and branches out my window still heavy from the fresh cover of the storm. Looking at the snow through the sheen of sheer white curtains in my window. Looking at dried wild flowers rising out of fields and the pine forest past the farm shivering kind of silver and the green of the shed and the barn creating pops of color against all that bright white. And all of this is just to say that I slept peacefully through the night and waking up this morning I do feel like I can access this place and this holiday and a sense of rootedness in myself, physical form, physical home, in a way that in the past few months I have not felt capable of understanding. Last year I spent every morning at home writing: cold crisp clear morning and everything it is better than I possibly could have imagined. Last year, I took the train back to a glass apartment in the sky and floated in infinite life for a few more weeks, and then I began to scream. Laundry and writing in my google docs diary at the soapstone counter this morning. I can’t tell if the storm is silent, or if it sounds like ice and little bells. Amelia called last night to tell a different version of the usual story. I am getting so creeped out again, Amelia said. My room here is pale and quiet and blue. it is the only bedroom above which there is no attic, so I can really hear the wind. I’m not creeped out, I told Amelia. Everything about your story just feels kind of distant and strange. Driving to get coffee in the old town center and I’m not hitting anyone’s bumper as I wheel around into Cumberland Farms. Toes cold in my Bean Boots. Extremities always cold from Raynod’s Disease and avoidance of contact with rough fabrics like “wool” out of delusional distaste for “overstimulation.” The town is kind of story book snowy, too, though less so than in the fields by the house, where everything is encased and total and like a picture and a dream and one scene all at once. The scene is less all encompassing here, by noon, in town, where the heaviest parts of the snow have already started to drip down and melt. It is strange to be alone here. Wind moving quickly outside my car and I did imagine something else. I’ve imagined everything a million times over, and so I guess it’s hard to pinpoint any one scenario. Things change very quickly. It used to take my breath away and now it doesn’t. I watch a woman running in place in a phone booth like a treadmill. I watch a young dad placing pennies on the train track with his kids where the commuter rail comes through. Sitting in my car watching the trains and mostly just holding my hands up to the heat. Everything is covered in a blanket of snow. In the car, I have; almond milk latte with peppermint and sugar free vanilla, vitamin D3, vitamin C, Inositol, fish oil, black seed oil. Taking it all in big huge gulps. Taking it all and then stuffing the wrappings in my bag and resuming watching everything around me. Later, I am reading Alain de Botton Architecture of Happiness in blue hour dusk and I am in the passenger seat driving on the highway when I look up to find: it is dark. Crescent moon. The George Washington Bridge looks so beautiful, my aunt says. I’ve never seen it glow like that. It’s never been this dark, this early, on this drive, before. There’s never been a drive that was as fast and smooth and calm, as this one. Back in New York City, it smells like caution to the wind and the mania of a week that exists in a void. Rushed back from dusty fields and Winter Break to find that no one else is here. You can tell that no one else is here, because the sidewalks on the Upper West Side are piled high with snow banks, no foot prints, yellow glow from the townhouses I pass in a yellow taxi cab on my way downtown, but perhaps the lights are simulated or at the very least on a timer, because there are no shadowy figures or even moving silhouettes visible past the windows. Central Park is pitch black, covered in snow that I can’t see but it makes the outlines of things kind of rough and cartoonish. It’s not that I actually believe nothing to be real. I’m just watching the shape of things kind of morph all around me. On the last night of the Lost Week of the Year, I walk to Dr Clark for the sake of fresh air and doing the things I say I will. My apartment was quiet and clean, because I left it quiet and clean. I returned to everything totally unchanged. The quiet part was shocking, and then it was ok. The city was kind of like a winter wonderland, too, except for the snow that had already turned kind of black. On the Houston Street median strip, I was stranded amidst blurry traffic with a man in a blanket, rocking back and forth and drinking whisky from the bottle. HEY, he said. Hey, I responded. He seemed surprised, and I became immediately afraid. Whatever. Everything was normal. Cannot become cynical. Dr Clark’s is quiet, my friends texted, on my walk. I’m sorry we lied and said that Dr. Clark’s was lively, my friends said, when I arrived. You didn’t say it was lively, you said it was quiet, I responded. The bar was full of dried flowers and almost no people. Emilia brings everyone rounds of cheesecake and superba beers. Dried flowers everywhere I turn, these days. Dried flowers everywhere for those with eyes to see. Here are the things that are making me feel suspicious, I told my friends.. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, January 8 From 12:15pm and 4:15pm at Film Forum — Last chance to see Peter Hujar’s Day - “The best film in Sundance is just two people talking.” - Vulture. | Tickets here
Inline links: Film Forum, here
Yellow-all-around
February 15, 2026 · Original source
Friday, February 6 I am awake and I have been for one hour. All around me, everything is pale and still and one small room and one short hallway and one light left on. One of one. One of everything. Everything is just the same. Yesterday, when I woke up, it was yellow all around. I woke up in the country yesterday, and the first thing that I noticed was all that yellow all around. Pale yellow walls. Soft yellow light. Snow reflecting golden yellow rays off a white carriage house roof, but even that part was turned sort of yellow by the early morning sun. The night before yesterday, I stayed up all night. There wasn’t much to do with all those hours, but I knew that in the morning, I’d be whisked away. Good at leaving when I remember all the things I hate. Good at coming back when I decide to get a hold of myself. I’d decided to let the night in my apartment sort of drift. I watched the sky turn dark, stay like that for a while, and then I watched it turn light again. It always kind of happens this way. In the morning, I’d packed a book bag with a suede black mini skirt, black cotton long sleeve top, toothbrush, snow boots, notebook, Off-The-Farm brand caramel protein bar. I took the B-line to the 1-line and towards the Upper West Side. On the Upper West Side, there were big french windows and snowy streets and tree branches that scratch the side of buildings and in the summer coat the whole place green. Not so much this time of year. Empty whisper benches. Powdered sledding hills in Central Park. From the Upper West Side, Laura drove me to New Jersey. A simple enough drive, but we just could not stay on track. The Hudson River was frozen over. Big white ice blocks that solidified and fractured and split. We were trying to spot a bathhouse somewhere in the suburbs of New Jersey. Is this the place to swim? we kept on asking each other, any time we passed a warehouse, or a sign that said something like Pools and Baths and Plumbing. When we got to the country, it was already dark. The driveway was lined with silver lights. I like to return to places where I have not been for years but which stay exactly the same. We lit a fire and we had salad and salmon and white wine and chocolate truffles. I was so excited to be somewhere where there was so much space. I liked the light and the quiet and the fact that there was more snow here than in the city, and I was pleased by how much I remembered. After dinner, I ran a bath in a big white bathroom. Big clear windows looking out at clear dark skies. I liked how everything felt very old, and very big, and very familiar, and very clean. I did not like how I felt a bit like a bull in a China Shop. Everything I touched returned a little less perfect than how I found it. Soap and towels left slightly off kilter. Clothes left in a pile on the floor. I fell asleep in a big white four poster bed, and I made sure to crease the comforter only slightly. I forgot to say goodnight, but no one really minded. I woke up surrounded by yellow all around. Morning, and when I pulled open yellow sheer curtains I could look out at all those skinny barren trees and lots of ice and a long driveway that stretched on and on and on. Laura came into my room and said good morning, and then she told me that she would show me how to make coffee, downstairs, soon. On the landing, there were three bedrooms, and a long hallway with a window seat lined with stuffed animals and a big window that looked out over big snow. The stuffed animals on the landing were all like little lions and zebras and all kinds of pastel and nice faces, nothing creepy. The wallpaper was all mostly white, with little blue or pink or yellow flowers peppered in between but nothing too suffocating. The snow outside the window was silky and icy and pure white and frozen over. There was a sheen over the snow. I could see, even from here, that the snow had been solidified under a layer of crust. My hair was covered in static. When I brushed my hair, I could see it literally spark. This week, I was documenting everything with compulsion. I went downstairs. Laura was working on a puzzle in the living room, where all the windows were long and clear and let the whole space flood with light. I looked out at perfect snow coated verandas. I learned how to make coffee in a chemex glass. Boiled water. Always becoming a bit bewildered in places that are quiet and beautiful and clear. I wouldn’t be friends with someone with bad aesthetic taste, my old friends used to say. My new friends, of late, had developed somewhat of a taste for conspicuous consumption. Later, Laura drove me to the train station through snowy streets and snowy backroads. We pulled away from the house and down the snowy driveway and then we drove through suburbs where everything was all Blue Mercury Skincare and Sweetgreen and farmhouses reminiscent of Boston, Chicago, Connecticut, suburbs everywhere all the same. Ladies everywhere liking Blue Mercury and Pure Barre. Laura gave me white gloves to keep for good on the train platform towards New York. You are so cold, just take and keep these, she said. Are you sure, I said, but I was already slipping the gloves onto my hands. Back in New York, I sat on a bench in Penn Station while I waited for the 1-train. Knees tucked up to chest and clothed in kind of filthy LuLu Lemon leggings. Drinking Dunkin Donuts almond milk latte with sugar free vanilla and almond and one cool-minty-zyn. Watching strangers and all sorts of scents drift by. It is the coldest winter in history or at least in recent memory, but due to sensory issues and the flattering nature of a-line skirts, all I have been wearing is sheer tights and mini dresses. When I got home, everything was very rushed, which is another thing that always tends to happen. Saturday, February 8 Following Cassandra’s confirmation, we went to a bitcoin themed bar and then to a hotel lobby. We went to a cocktail bar after that, where the drinks were made of things like clarified basil and tasted bad. I have one statement, Sam told the waiter, at the bar. Then, he asked a question. Could I have another drink? This one is very not good. In the evening, we went to Bigelow’s to buy the hair bows just like the Kennedys wore, and after that, we went to a dinner in Soho and then a tech-week-party to end the night. At the tech week party all the girls were cute and unemployed. They all made videos on the Internet and all had long-distance boyfriends. We took photos on a digital camera and smoked cigarettes on the edge of the fire escape while the boys all talked about suicidal ideation. When they ran out of liquor, I took the elevator down without saying goodbye. On the street, in the snow, playing tetris with myself in the footholds that other boots had left behind in melting ice as I tried to claw my way into a cab, I ran into an Internet Curator. He appeared out of nowhere, though my vision was already blurry, so perhaps he had been there all along. I’ve never been somewhere with so many people from TikTok in real life, the man said. Usually, I post all these people online, but tonight there were all here in real life. Made three notes in diary in yellow taxi cab home: Freedom of Indifference vs Freedom for Excellence
Life-in-a-lab
February 25, 2026 · Original source
Friday Upper West Side Later, I am uptown and I am thinking about how I can become more self-disciplined so I can become more interesting. I am watching Pierre Le Fou at Lillian’s apartment on the Upper West Side and all the girls are dressed like characters in the film. Lilian keeps leaning out the window with a long skinny cigarette and I am drinking a glass of Sancerre because I just can’t quit. In this film, a very small man is holding a gun to a very beautiful girl’s head while she cuts her hair. The beautiful girl has a brunette bob, and she is wearing a red dress. The film is full of primary colors and very bright paint. When a man is stabbed, he bleeds red paint. Before a man explodes himself in dynamite at the end of the film, he paints himself blue. I like the film because the colors of the gore are all bright and fake like paint, and the colors of the scenery are all pastel and muted and lovely like real life. Summer in The Riviera. Beautiful people living a simple and crime-filled life. I have not watched very many films this year because I’ve been busy writing thirty-thousand-words-about-myself-per-week. In the last film I watched, a Japanese cat was exploded by a grenade, and when gore and guts spilled everywhere, I flinched and clenched my eyes shut. Do you want to leave, my friend asked, and what I wanted was to be resilient, but what I said was I don’t really care. Now, a girl in the film is sitting on a boat with a man, and she is talking about how the two have only known each other for a few million seconds. She’s such a stupid girl, Lillian says. I would say something like that, I respond. One-million-billion-seconds and one-million-billion-words. I am feeling bubbly when I am not feeling sick or shy. I am feeling like it’s time to be more light about it. When I look to my left, I see beautiful stained glass lamps and a defense surveillance tech-branded throw blanket. When I look to my right, I see an open window and all my friends leaning too far outside smoking skinny vogues. On the Internet, people are talking about how things are only interesting if they are true. Determinative reasoning then says, one should make what is true more interesting. Everything just became crystal clear. By which I mean, everything is operating on material terms now. DIRECTORY The full event calendar is now going to live on The Aleph - an exciting new platform by Noah Kumin of The Mars Review of Books. The Aleph is a marketplace and membership club for the arts, with an emphasis on supporting in-person events, production, and funding for artists. Programming featured will be intentional and curated, and include more opportunities for early-access and invitation-only events. If you would like to submit an event for consideration, please email me at chloegpingeon@gmail.com. Apply to join The Aleph here I will still be featuring select events on the blog, along with more eclectic or personal recommendations, news, and guest features. To start: David Rimanelli is perhaps my favorite person to follow on Instagram, as well as one of my favorite critics. Tonight, from 6:30pm at Tibet House, he will be reading, along with Kiely Sweatt and Sean Fabi. Tickets here.
Inline links: The Aleph, chloegpingeon@gmail.com, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!m6hb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5452bedc-f504-4cc0-a6f3-349820bdb9a3_1156x1138.png, David Rimanelli, here
West-side-highway-dog-park
March 18, 2026 · Original source
Plagiarized images of spring Saturday Everything in my room was quiet in a way that was a little bit like heaven and a little bit like hell. I lay down in bed with a Spring-2024 copy of American Affairs Magazine and I tried to read over an article about Tech Clusters and Stagnation but I ended up in AI psychosis instead. Affirm affirm affirm, my computer said. Your life seems to have solidified, my computer said. The point of it all isn’t really to be that pretty or even that kind, my computer said. The point of life isn’t love or hate, but understanding. The cycles repeat until they flip, and then they rarely return. You shouldn’t really try to understand yourself that well. You should try to resist the compulsion to share the mundanities of your everyday life and certainly of your rich-inner-world. I was supposed to shut my computer around six-pm, but the call came at five-fifty instead. The West Village was like l’heure bleue. The West Village was humid and sweet and warm and lovely. The trees were like silver skeletons, and Washington Square Park was full of teens hosting vigils for deceased foreign leaders and lookalike contests for girls with borderline-personality-disorder and presidential men. You’re in your spring coat, Max said. He had never heard that word before me. Some coats are heavy, and other coats are light, I explained. The outside of Babbo is somewhat unassuming, and the inside of Babbo is burgundy and warm and old school and sweet. The host stand is set back from the entryway and the bar is lively even at six. The whole place is basically windowless, which makes me feel like I am in a cave or on a ship or at a private party or in a nineteen-fifties-film or an architectural-dream. The menus come in small leather binders and a line drawing of a black cartoon jester carrying a bottle of wine is sketched on the first page. I am somewhat unable to typecast the demographic of the clientele here, which is interesting and somewhat rare. Everyone is quite well dressed but unassuming and of various ages though leaning-older. It is impossible to eavesdrop inside Babbo, which goes against my usual sensibilities, and aligns exactly with my dinner-sensibilities. The hostess was an older lady, because all the best restaurants have older-waitstaff-mostly. I’ll let you sit at a table and I won’t make you move, the hostess said. Everybody laughed politely and was very pleased. In the center of Babbo, there is a velvety staircase. This would be a good place for a private party, I said. The hostess led us up the velvet stairs. In the upstairs of Babbo, there is a burgundy room and a big bar and white-table-cloths and the waiter poured city-water out of metal-watering-pails and into glass-cups. The specialty martini is made very-dry. Can you make it very-dirty, I asked. We can do anything you want, the waiter said. The waiter was an old Italian man. He wrote down the martini order and our names on a napkin. MARTINI ORDER, the napkin read. You’ve been here before, the waiter said. Once, I said. You look familiar, he said. I’m not, I said. The waiter told a story about the time that all the old French restaurants closed and never returned. Only the Italian restaurant remained, he explained. You come as a child then perhaps on a date at eighteen then with family then a wedding, he said. Coming back and coming back and coming back over and over again. Anytime the water glass would run low, the waiter would appear with the metal watering pale, and the glass would be filled up. The bread came with ricotta and fresh olive oil and sea salt. Squid ink pasta and branzino and broccoli. Two martinis and a cappuccino after dinner and I melted the sugar cubes on the surface of the coffee and then I ate them with a spoon. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, all the staff said, when we left. The theme of the magazine launch was print revival and kosher pickle martinis. There were girls scout cookies on the counter, and the vibe was one of general mystique, though all I could make out when the editor spoke was something about “fiction” and “Elon Musk.” Saoirse and Olivia were behind the bar, and they were looking like angels wearing white and being kind. The late winter hadn’t really felt like real life, so it was nice and quite affirming to make eye contact with my friends. You’re the best contract employee in the world, the girls assured each other. You’re the best girlfriend ever. You’re the sweetest girl to ever walk this Earth. The magazine was free and so I helped myself and left by midnight. I can psyop myself, and then I can do whatever I want. My process is I write everything that happened and then I filter it into obfuscation one-million-times. My process is to invent my own school of movement and adopt a moral code. My process is totally against religious iconography as vague gestures towards false meaning, but totally pro iconography when one’s belief in something is complete. My self psyop sometimes looks like self experimentation, or bandaid-solution, or destruction and construction and being social-chair. I tread very lightly, and when I act according to things I hate or things I miss, it goes about exactly how you’d expect it to. Here is something: call up my parents and I read my diaries aloud on my phone. Everything seems like the end of the world in dizzy night, and: The boys hands were bloody in the morning, and; I ordered coffee and milkshake and breakfast sandwich in, and: everyone seems so fragile in the sunshine, and: One thing about being here, hazy in the sun is I feel less aggressive. In New York, the sun keeps coming back and going away and I love it when my friends and I talk about the weather. I order green juice and cold brew in the morning, and it’s quiet and cold-again. I order chopped-green-goddess-sandwhich and I seek intellectual-stimulation and I wear a brown-leather-jacket to the west-side-highway-dog-park. My process is everything-beautiful-all-the-time and iphone photography and whenever my perspective is called into question I can call up Amelia who can affirm how happy I really was all the time, there, and sometimes now. She’s totally straight-edge, and she always has a good sense of the way things were and are and are heading. Sunday Sitting on the couch in an empty apartment watching the gray sky turn light in the courtyard and listening to the garbage trucks fire up on the somewhat distant street. It feels like waking up in New York as a child, right now. Awake too early. Jet lagged, almost. At a magazine launch during evening fading night in a white house with framed art and long french windows and yellow trim, a man was telling me that the only good thing about not growing up in New York City is that you get to experience the thing that it is to understand the city for the first time and to let it consume you. If you grow up in New York, then you understand the city all along and this is mostly a great thing, he was saying, but what about that feeling when you arrive and you’re older and you understand a place like this for the very first time. There were daffodils all throughout the apartment, and carpeted floors over wood that stretched back into room after room like a maze. Everyone was calling each other “dear” and there was a sense of things as generally boisterous but not overblown. I like older people who love New York. I like people that are sober-minded, fun, and rarely cynical. The people at the party wore pearls and black and ballet flats and lived uptown and they kept on asking me about New York. Do you love New York, they kept on asking. And I said yes and I meant it and they seemed pleased The air conditioner is running. The sky is gray and sweet. I always am very aware of causation, and I know how to understand what makes something bad and what makes something good. I don’t think it’s narcissistic to try to understand your own intentions but one shouldn’t go too much deeper than that. I would never betray anyone I love. I want ginger beer for breakfast lunch and dinner. I want hydrangeas in the apartment. I want to fall asleep in a room sized bed and be airlifted into daylight and clothed in blue sweaters. I want to be dosed with soylent but not lobotomized. Last night, at the magazine launch, a man was telling me about the story of his life. I lived across from Jeffrey Epstein, he said. I’m a lawyer, he said. I know hundreds of people, he explained. Do you know any secrets, I asked. The girls never looked underage to me, he shrugged. Isabel pulled me away. We walked down the long and wooden hallway and we stood by open windows. The figures across the street looked almost cartoonish, running like shadowy stick figures down the paths in hazy dusk in Central Park. So winter is great until March comes around, and I am not so ready for spring equinox and abandon-interiority and things moving faster and faster and faster. Everything material feels kind of cartoonishly good. Everything on my computer feels kind of cartoonishly evil. Cassandra and I bought big blue books full of curses, and now we are going to open them on the floor of an apartment on the Upper West Side and wear cable-knit sweaters and assume invincibility until proven otherwise. Since Darby gave me a blue heart-shaped bowl and an evil-eye bracelet that I haven’t taken off since, I’ve realized that I need to hold my cards closer to my chest. I put myself to sleep at dusk tonight because there are colors flashing in front of my open eyes like hallucinations and signs of delirium. I wake up on the couch shivering under my spring coat. Little white dried flowers all around me. A new wooden toothbrush propped on one clean shelf in an otherwise crowded cabinet. I wait for midnight so the new day can begin, and then at twelve-oh-one I say thank you to God one million times. I go outside for a walk in humid winter air. I go inside, and I’m alone again. I go to a building that looks “new” in Tribeca, and I go to a building that looks “old”. I interrupted a meeting, and I was given plastic bottles of fireball behind the bar. My friends were all talking about picking up new hobbies. A boy outside told me about adult gymnastics. I told the girls about rock climbing. I considered aerial silks. I considered French lessons and online shopping and recommending books-to-buy-boys-who-are-just-getting-into-reading. I watched a video essay about how not to let the moon affect your moods. I watched a video essay about undersea cables. So, February was fine. Cold and a little bit dreary and Iris keeps on telling me that above all she considers herself to be pragmatic, which seems to be working out for her and so I’m taking notes. I keep on deciding to just become nihilistic about it, but even when I don’t set alarms, I always wake up in time to do the things I should. DIRECTORY Wednesday, March 18 from 4:45pm at Metrograph —El Sur (1983, Victor Erice) screens. I have a special fondness for the landscapes of Northern Spain and the only beer I like is estrella, per, my Galician friend Rebecca. This film is not about spanish beer, but rather a spanish girl by the same name. “it’s half a film that contains a whole world of wonders.” Thursday, March 19 evening plans: MANHATTAN: From 7:30pm at Night Club 101 — Lubov says THE INTERNET MADE ME DO IT. A night of readings and music with Ada Donnelly, Alex Bienstock, Marble Index, Kyle Sullivan Dobbs, Lorry Kikta, Melissa Seward, Angel Money, and Yuri NYC. | RSVP here
Inline links: Metrograph, El Sur, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j-tT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0957633a-b82a-41e1-80ef-d921967efdf4_1512x1008.png, Night Club 101, Lubov, here

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