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Western Massachusetts

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Western Massachusetts

Article

Western Massachusetts is a recurring place in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 09, 2024 and December 02, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “It happened in a hotel in Western Massachusetts”; “They cursed the Amtrak towards Western, Massachusetts last year”. It most often appears alongside Florida, Izzy Casey, Madeline Cash.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 09, 2024
  • Last seen: December 02, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

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

kind of a dud socially
December 09, 2024 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, December 1 Mental and physical clarity is the thing that is the prerequisite for everything else. This is the thing to which I have returned. It happened suddenly. It happened in a hotel in Western Massachusetts. I'm not enlightened, but now I can breathe. I like to run every day. It doesn't have to be for lengths of times that feel like eternity. Just a few minutes is fine. The uptown B is late. I’m sitting in the subway station with plenty of time to Make Big Plans. I'm going to Be A Hostess. I'm going to Be A Tutor. I'm going to be a Professional Rock Climber. The truth of it is, my stint in bohemia is becoming unsustainable. "If you need money, you should be a pilates instructor," says Shannon. "Oh, true." I say The truth of it is, this idea sounds as good as any. I've tried to stop correlating monetary concerns with any sense of my creative ambitions. In a mirror world, I ghost write letters for my friends. I teach strangers how to scale buildings and to make their limbs long. In New York, I am better. I crave the forest and the snow and the pine trees by the window and particularly the ocean. I crave all this more than anything. When I arrive in the country, the expanse always shocks me. I don't know what to do with all that space. After class, I go to the dermatologist. It’s decorated for Christmas. They tell me everything is fine. This is the part I like the best: where I brace myself for terror, and then they tell me everything is fine. Uptown, I go to my aunt’s office. We have sushi and tea. We go the AMC. I like Wicked. It’s very sweet. I saw someone say they like Wicked in the way you like Barbie, but I like Wicked more. I like the soda machines and the supersized cups and the reclining red seats and the nerd clusters at the AMC. I like uptown. I could live here. I did live here, once. Wicked feels like a movie in the way a movie-in-the-theater should. Afterwards, David asks me three times if I liked Wicked. Yes, I say three times. He asks me if I can give a full review, but I can’t, not really. I liked it, I say. In the car home, I am cruel on a phone call that I made with the express purpose of being kind. I meet David at Cassidy’s house, where a lot of people are watching Spy Kids. Do you want a white claw, someone asks. No, I say. I am crying a little on account of my cruelty in place of kindness. David tells me something I should remember about being kind. I don’t, ultimately, remember what he says, but after this, everything is good. Tuesday, December 2 Riley and I go to Fanelli’s for dinner. Club sandwich and martini. I haven't felt removed from social activity or the desire for extroversion lately. To the contrary, I've been wanting very suddenly to connect very deeply with old friends. I want to go to Florida and drink Virgin Pina Coladas. I did that in college. I had so much fun when I did that in college. Can I come if you go to Florida this year, I ask Riley. Yes, she says I think we should go. I make a vlog with David. It's so much fun. David says I can't post the vlog, but then I edit it with Slavic music and then he says ok fine. I've felt an aversion to parties that place themselves at things like The Intersection Of Culture and Nightlife lately. I don't like when people who immerse themselves in these things express cynicism or borderline disgust towards a Scene. I feel immensely grateful for a community with adjacency to and/or aspirations towards art. I like readings. I like gestures towards intimacy, even false intimacy, even social climbing intimacy. I like that these things stem from something other than voyeurism, despite their tendencies towards voyeuristic or pseudo intellectual descent. But, I can't bring myself to attend. You haven't seen me in weeks. Not that anyone is counting. Not that I'm even counting, except it's hard to find things to comment on outside of Myself when I'm keeping close quarters. So bored by brooding. I could do something like Get Arrested. I could do something like Make A Gift Guide. David's friend calls him. "Do you want to go to KGB," he asks. "No," says David. "I'll go," I say. "Do you want to take Chloe to KGB for me?” David asks. “No,” his friend says, “she's kind of a dud socially." David takes his headphones out. "He says you're kind of a dud socially," "I'll see her six days in a row and it’s just her, and when I finally don’t see her, Chloe has a party with all her beautiful friends," he says. Then he lists out all my beautiful friends. We don't go to KGB. 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6r7b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F46b17e6b-abf9-4738-96fe-3836b061abc3_1334x872.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CEI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe956e9be-2073-42ec-8943-74e226bc24bf_1518x850.png, The Thing Is, Jean’s, It’s A Wonderful Life, Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, Rebounder
Florida, Massachusetts (03)
December 02, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday 7:45am and I am lying very still in my clean crisp bed like it’s a haven or a ship that will float me above and away from the clutter around me. Lying with my head pulled under white bamboo sheets, so I don’t have to see anything other than white noise and whatever I decide to fire up on my phone all around me. Reading Girl Insides live blogging her breakup on my phone this morning, and I do feel envious of the corporeal and anonymous ways in which her brand of compulsive documentation flows. Feeling kind of vague and emotionless after a weekend that was here there everywhere, and I let myself really be sucked into it which is always how it goes but one needs to be careful. I wore Cinq-a-Sept Christmas dress for a few days in a row, and there was dinner in a dark wood uptown apartment and there was a sunrise over the Hudson River and I kind of don’t want to write it like a sequence of events. I kind of hope to talk about the architectures of things and why they happen as they do. On my phone, Girl Insides is in Hollywood and breathing in jasmine and perfect fog and smog and panzanella crackers. All of a sudden everything that happens in my life is up to me, Girl Insides says. Well, me too for the first-time-ever, but it becomes more difficult this way. Perhaps I’ll go to surf in San Diego with Emma. Perhaps I’ll go to Kazakhstan or Tbilisi, Georgia or at least commit myself to no more losing days following wherever the wind blows me. I’ll be in Florida, Massachusetts, anyways this week. A spooky little town. They cursed the Amtrak towards Western, Massachusetts last year. Strangers yelling at me as we sat in dark seats hurdling through the night with train snacks of hot dog and coca cola and chips that came in perfect little packages that one unboxes in the dining car. A girl threw herself at the walls of the train on the platform as it pulled out of Moynihan Station. She bounced off the train and was removed unscathed. The conductor announced that they’d lost the crew somewhere around Albany. I walked into a doctors office and I recognized the dermatologist’s twisted and frozen face as the woman who’d been screaming on a night train heading out of New York. And all of this is just to say that everything was kind of cursed and still is sometimes, but I am trying to find omens in the more beautiful and serendipitous sorts of patterns and symbols and signs. In the hotel lobby, Celia told me to be less vague about it. Either say what you mean or don’t. So I do believe everything that I have ever been told. Which is mostly just to say that before I believed everything bad, I believed everything good. Tuesday We drove from New York to The Berkshires this morning. I stopped at Broadway Bagels and then at a farmstand and now we are here. So, these are the things that have happened. No curses and no omens. The house we can see outside the long glass window got painted green and now it totally fades into the woods. That’s nice, everyone says. That’s so much nicer, now. It’s brilliant blue-gray outside the long glass windows now that the snow has stopped and it is settling into very early afternoon dusk. I am lying by the fire that is crackling louder when the furnace is on and quieter when it isn’t. The Eames chair is empty behind me and the lamps overhead are big yellow orbs, hanging from the slanted wooden ceilings. There are things I could do here. Mass MoCA museum and my favorite James Turrell works there that change with morning and evening light. Or, The Clarke Art Museum and I can hear whispers of a textile show that others are bundling up to go see downstairs, but I think I would prefer to just stay put. There is a Tourists Hotel by the North Adams airport, which is a motel that turned fancy, with individual bungalows looking out at the river and a restaurant that looks like a home inside, all fireplaces and craft drinks and lots of little rooms. There is the alpaca farm up the road and there is Hopkins Forest and Pine Cobble and the Appalachian Trail and the sauna room by the river and trees like skeletons waving in the fading daylight just past my peripheral vision. I drove to Graylock Works when we got here to do ballet and yoga in an old mill and then I drove to the gas station and then to the local hotel lobby where I sat incognito for a moment watching families in autumn dresses and long jackets filter in and out and in and out and then I drove home. I’ve been here for a while. It’s nice to find a house that I can float through. It’s nice that when I look around I see something aside from four small walls. A blizzard just began. It is strange, because the snow is flying horizontally in the Southbound wind, but the trees suddenly appear to be standing perfectly still. Wednesday Field Notes from Florida, Massachusetts and my Google Docs Diary: I woke up this morning and I cleansed my face and put on toner and then guasha with rose oil and then red light therapy while stretching.
Inline links: Girl Insides

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