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Washington Square Park

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Washington Square Park

Article

Washington Square Park is a recurring venue in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 17 times across 17 issues between June 06, 2024 and March 18, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “reading Toulouse-Lautrec: The Art of Cuisine in Washington Square Park”; “e through Washington Square Park and it’s so late but everything is just glowing”; “someone tried to interview me in Washington Square Park but I dogged them with ease”. It most often appears alongside Night Club 101, New York City, KGB.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 17
  • Issue count: 17
  • 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
I’m drinking Green Tea Peach Celsius at the gym and my days are starting to feel so much longer in a way that is so good. I’m getting so giddy thinking about how much a day can hold. I’m working on things that excite me and then I’m reading Toulouse-Lautrec: The Art of Cuisine in Washington Square Park and then I’m getting gelato in Little Italy and I’m getting the minestrone soup at De Gennaro in the rain and then I can sort of see the moon even through the light pollution and storm on my walk home and then I sleep early again.
Inline links: Toulouse-Lautrec: The Art of Cuisine, De Gennaro
Hot out today. I’m lying on the floor and I’m staring at the white arches on the ceiling and I’m not really helping with the packing situation. Nighttime is a rooftop party but I’m not staying long and I’m walking back alone through Washington Square Park and it’s so late but everything is just glowing. It seems like everyone in the world is in Washington Square Park, but I don’t run into anyone I know.
Ways to be sincere.
October 02, 2024 · Original source
WHAT I DID Thanks for reading Chloe Pingeon's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Monday, September 23 I drove back to the city from Vermont last night, slept early, ran a few miles in an empty gym this morning. I’m freezing. Today is freezing. This week, I vow to show up early. Starting now. It’s early. I’m the only one here. I bold one note in class today - “Aphorism like elegance, telegraphs authority. It creates a feeling of truthfulness, even if it is not actually there”. Later, my boyfriend and I go to lunch at Shanghai Villa. It’s foggy, someone tried to interview me in Washington Square Park but I dogged them with ease. We’re the only people in the restaurant, it’s not a nice day, it’s not the lunch time rush, I don’t think there is a lunch time rush here. We order jasmine tea, pork dumplings, chicken dumplings, soup dumplings, large soups on the side. Review from me is good, great! My boyfriend says fine, worse than average. In the GLOOM, today, I’m listening to the same three songs on repeat: Remember the Heart (Fine)
Inline links: Shanghai Villa, Remember the Heart (Fine)
kind of a dud socially
December 09, 2024 · Original source
From 5pm - 7pm — The Washington Square Park Annual Holiday Tree Lighting
January continues
January 19, 2025 · Original source
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: 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
Burn my diaries
January 23, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, January 19 Wet hair in the lobby at the gym. I am criticized only very slightly, and I am struck with nearly physical rage. I can’t walk anymore today. When I walk, I am compelled to think - then write - about myself. I have this huge body of work. I’ve written 364,133 unpublished words since my birthday in June, but they are all about myself, and the ugliest parts of myself at that. “You must be able to convert some of your journals into work you can use,” some of my friends say, but I don’t think anyone realizes just how bad they are. Any problem, the smallest problem, I can twist and chew and solve, often through written and rotating self deprecation and self congratulation that renders said problem irrelevant. I can do this over and over and over again, for hours daily, if I'm being honest. It’s not necessarily bad as a limited practice - churn out sludge so that it doesn’t live in your mind - but it becomes more and more excessive, nauseatingly so. I meet Madelyn at Shosh for dinner. The snowstorm has started. I texted David at the gym earlier: "big snowstorm coming." "Link me an article or you're full of shit," David said, but I wasn't, because it's here, and it's falling in big fat clumps. Shosh is lovely. It’s a new vegan wine bar in the West Village, which I would roll my eyes at as a concept, but Madelyn’s friends work there and I walk there in the blizzard - enter to a silver bar, an open kitchen, cream walls with a perfect archway cut into them that frames shades of glass wine bottles and assembled rows of thin wine glasses. We don’t get wine, but we do get gem salad, celeriac shawarma with fluffy bread, mushrooms, by which they mean every variety of mushroom you can imagine and a perfect green sauce to accompany. “Hummus is one of those things you think is all the same, but then you have good hummus…,” Madelyn’s friend who works there says, and he’s right, because the hummus here is determinately different. Better. Madelyn tells me she likes showing me good food, and I like this, too. Left to my own devices it’s all instant pistachio pudding and cold mashed potatoes eaten while standing up. This isn’t how one should live - slogging through the essential details of survival and routine like it’s something to get over with, not something to enjoy. At the very least, it’s something to be appreciated. I like meals like this. There’s the Casual Encounters reading later, the fundraiser for Los Angeles reading at that gallery in Tribeca, although all the galleries seem like they are suddenly in Tribeca these days. We’re there early. I can’t find the building, can’t get out of the snow. You do get out of the snow, eventually. You pick a few GoFundMe’s from the options laid out on the table, so many options on the table. You sit on the couch so you’re removed from the room, you have a birds eye view in that sense even though technically, you’re beneath, not above, it all. “You can see the social dynamics from here,” your friend says, kind of kidding, kind of not. You can see how the room clusters itself, at least. I stay for the readings, but not for long after. Walk home in the sleet and ice. It's a blizzard, but nothing is really sticking. Streets are mostly quiet - people in the windows of Lucia and Cipriani but otherwise it’s all empty. My reflection surprises me in the mirror when I get home. I only wear dresses, but today I’m wearing jeans. Mundanity, mundanity, mundanity. David says he wants to go to KGB, and at first I want to go too, but then I decide that I don’t. He leaves, walking into the storm as I’m coming out of it. I start to feel sick around eleven pm. I feel strange, falling asleep. Being sick really scares me. I hope it goes away. Monday, January 20 I expected to wake up sad this morning but I didn't. The snow didn't stick, but a thin layer of it did freeze. I'm sliding down the streets, and they aren't empty anymore. Bright, bright, icy light today. Coca Cola and muffin at the bodega for David. Celsius for me. Green tea mango and Cyanocobalamin. I need black coffee. Inauguration today. I walk and write for ninety minutes. I tried to join the David Lynch Meditation Live Stream at noon, but I got the time zones wrong and I was meant to join at three. It’s five now. Too late. Sitting in a steam room in a cloud of eucalyptus smog. The semester begins tomorrow, and other things, too. An end to my life of leisure, or more generously, an end to responsibility only as self directed. I feel like I was starting to figure it out. Non-fiction in the morning, fiction at night - my friend Grazie advised me of this schedule this summer. Being honest, though, I need more intensive direction. Natasha goes to take snow photos in Washington Square Park, but she says that Jill Stein is there and the park is so so so loud. The theme is: anti imperialism.. She sends me a photo of the birds in the snow. In an ironic twist, David is sick, but I am not. He orders sushi from Soho Sushi. He gives me five pieces from a california roll. I make cinnamon chai tea in the mug my dad got me from the ceramics shop near Mishaum. Every mug there is different. Mine has coarse leaves all over it, and a special rivet where your hand fits. “This apartment is pretty magical when it’s icy,” David admitted earlier, because it’s a greenhouse roof and so when you look up today it’s all like a snow globe. Icicles swirl in soft formations overhead, melting in morning light and then refreezing slightly differently as the sky turns hazy. I have my head under the cover. I’m reading other people’s diaries. Kafka, Anais Nin, I like the diaries I find online, too. I like the diaries I am sent. This isn’t my diary. I cannot stress that enough. My real diary is often quite ugly. This is one of the things I feel most guilty for. It’s strange, though. I wake up, I write in my secret diary, I walk for many miles, I write in my diary that I share online. It is good I will have less time, soon. Anya is staying with me tonight. David, in a friend's spare bedroom because I cannot, cannot, cannot get sick right now, too. It's so nice tonight. Anya and I have been friends since we were two weeks old. I used to tell people that as a child - "this is my best friend since I was two weeks old." Dimes in the snow. Clandestino in the snow. I really like sitting in the corner of a bar until the night reaches its bitter end. Not tonight, though. It's only ten. Tuesday, January 21 My first real responsibility in a month, and it's canceled - a whim of the weather. The snow has melted overnight and in its place is chalky salt stained pavement as far as you can see. It looks like marble. They turned Soho into marble in the night. I try to run outside, but it's too cold. Bitter cold, not pleasant cold. I'm coughing up the chalky air. It's the coldest day of the year. There's a man on the street and he's running towards the train, sloshing coffee all over his suit but he doesn't seem to even notice, certainly he doesn't care. The drops are freezing to the sleeves of his camel hair jacket before they reach the ground. He's covered in little coffee icicles. I doubt it will stain. I had nightmares last night. Everyone knew I was Actually Bad. I woke up saying "help me", but I used to wake up talking about rituals in rural places, so this is not a negative progression in the storyline of my possible possession. The chalky pavement has turned to ice in the afternoon. Walking under the Washington Square arch on the way to Tibet House and its icier than ever. The ground is all glazed over. It’s the latest installment of the Arden Wohl’s reading series at Tibet House; Inauguration Edition this time. Madelyn is wearing a pink sweatshirt when I get there. Madelyn is telling me about knowing your own mind. Alex Auder reads about cock sucking and brings up a friend to read with her who enjoys the act, because she doesn't "I feel demeaned when I suck dick. I feel demeaned when I teach yoga," she says. She reads a story about a life in servitude to someone famous who reminds her of Donald Trump. Tonight is a night where as soon as I have one glass of wine, I wish I didn’t. The haze sets in, and I want it to clear. Beckett arrives. The readings are mostly good, but I’m jittery. I sit in the lobby and I eat some grapes and cheese, replace the wine with water. “Over the years I noticed from my overlord that peasants were increasingly behaving like they were nobles,” Alex Auder is saying, when I return. “There are more cameras than there are people in the world,” Gideon Jacobs is reading, later. I can’t stop drifting in and out of the room. I’m worried about some things, about some people. I get like this sometimes, and I wish I could get it to stop. I go to the bathroom and I return again, to a reading about Courtney Love. “She used to do water ballet and she was getting into the grateful dead.” “She lied a lot and never listened directly but she was a sponge - she takes a word from an incidental periphery and works it into her trope in real time. She’s that fast.” “She said she was born on my birthday; July 1st, but she was born a week later; July 8th” This is my type of lie, I’m thinking. A lie to please. False enchantment. It’s a juvenile compulsion, you mostly outgrow it, and if it was Courtney Love partaking then perhaps it was charming, but my visceral reaction is one of repulsion. Lizzi Bougatsos reads about Gary Indiana. She sits on the floor and she clips her toenails. “We shall mark memory with reverence,” Arden is saying. Beckett is telling me that it’s cool to be at a reading that’s an older crowd, and it is, it’s wine and cheese, there’s no disco party to follow. Beckett introduces me to his acquaintance from Paris. They are talking about Godot and prison sentences. Samuel Beckett gave his Nobel Prize money to a jail org, or was it prisone.org One time, there was a prison break after a performance of Godot. Madelyn is making tape formations on her phone with the other Lacanians. Lacan as separated from psychoanalysis. Lacan as applicable to real life. I’m just gleaning sentences. These ideas aren’t mine. Cigarette outside and then a burger at the orthodox Jewish establishment nearby. We forgot they can only do vegan cheese on burgers here. A lychee martini instead. They’re playing pop music so loud Wednesday, January 23 I hear my neighbors door shut as I’m poised to leave this morning. Decide, instead, to hover in the kitchen. We don't really like each other, my neighbor and I. Nothing was ever said, but there’s an underlying hostility. I have friends over too late, too often. The walls are thin. I'm glad to be waking up at the same time as the rest of the world, though. Sometimes - up all night, becoming manic around five am, this can be nice, but it's usually not. Normal hours. Normal cycles of day and night. The ice has come and smoothed everything over. Too cold to listen to music on my walk to school. I'm peeling off layers in an office, at the gym, the hallway of our apartment is becoming salty and dusted with the chalky snowstorm residue that first coated the surface of everything, and that now is starting to settle. Nothing is volatile. Such placidity, suddenly, but I’m not bored. All the calm in the world. Thank god. It really was about time. And so, you eat two chalky protein pop tarts on the bench at the gym. There are two girls with thick french accents in the locker room parallel to you. "He's a fucking retard, he only calls me at three am and it's only because he wants to sleep with my friends," says one of the girls. She's wearing a sherpa jacket. KHRISJOY, it says, in big red dripping letters. Spray paint imitation. You look it up - $2145 online. It's so ugly, but you're vaguely impressed. Of course you are. You're wearing a Versace sports bra that you bought for a music festival in high school. Absurd. The people watching here is good. The girl is still talking. She's so furious. "And he would be calling to sleep with me, but he knows he can't, fucking retard," she is saying. This version of the narration makes more sense - her rage rooted in something adjacent to jealousy. You gather your things. You gather your tote bags. It's too cold for so many bags. Your hands get numb out there. You're in a humid basement now, but you can't stay here forever. There's an artists talk tonight, but do you have it in you to attend? Cheese and sausage for dinner at home. I forgot about the dishes and I left the sink running for an hour. I’ve never known how to dress for the weather, but that doesn’t mean I mind the extremes. Today - my mother’s gloves, a borrowed Urbit hat from David, a beanie really, it looks insane but it’s too freezing for me to mind. More isn’t always more. More is often so, intolerably, annoying. I don’t want to wear a coat. My books arrive today. Mostly for school, plus one Ruby recommended. I’ll read them all - I’m glad that I have reason to. Salvador - Joan Didion The Company She Keeps - Mary McCarthy The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin Confessions - Saint Augustine The Situation and the Story - Vivian Gornic A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf A Silent Woman - Janet Malcom Are You My Mother - Alison Bechdel The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson The Atrocity Exhibition - J. G. Ballard WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, January 23 From 6pm - 8pm at 61 Lispenard — Canada NY and Eighth House present Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude. Eighth House is “an interdisciplinary residency for artists and curators located in Central Vermont.” The exhibition serves as a benefit for this very special residency.
Inline links: fundraiser for Los Angeles, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1LMK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd6ba9ea7-5431-438d-968d-03f0204b83b3_1179x624.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TlLq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75d232d2-5720-42ad-a6bc-aafacf53eb67_560x562.jpeg, Tibet House, Alex Auder, Gideon Jacobs, Lizzi Bougatsos, Arden, KHRISJOY, Salvador -, The Company She Keeps, The Fire Next Time, Confessions, The Situation and the Story, A Room of One’s Own, A Silent Woman, Are You My Mother, The Argonauts, The Atrocity Exhibition, Canada NY, Eighth House, Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude.
Things I do like here
July 18, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, July 14 Dream Reflection - I was buying vintage workout wear and advancing down a very long corridor. Sweet summer heat. It is not too sticky or slow. There is a lot that begins all at once and so I: sleep til the afternoon and I decide that I'll still bear it. About to do something subversive could you call the police if you don’t hear from me in like four hours thanks, Amelia texts, an hour after Very Late Wake Up. Yes of course, I respond. I do follow up but it's the sort of thing where one probably shouldn't. An album a film a story a day and the letters are to my family now and clarity seems like the only thing that will probably become truly essential, though I do feel bored, going on in this way. The books at Sunlife Smoothie Shop do leave me feeling kind of repulsed - Think and Grow RICH and The Forrest Gump of Addiction Stories and, I would like to haul my blue and white and already kind of festering concoction to the street and up the stairs and home only, it's turning to sludge in even the flicker of daylight I've allowed it to meet. Lions main, spiralina, none of these words mean anything. I will remember how to write and read and confess my sins regarding flash floods and apocalyptic ideation, but for now, none of these words mean anything. Amelia comes over and we sit on the couch in mostly silence until it’s dark. Sorry for making you come over and sit in the dark, I tell Re. I used to have a lot of hobbies, Amelia tells me. Tuesday, July 15 Lie on the floor and dream about it. An illness came in the night and then faded by the afternoon. You should still reflect on it more, I was told. You should be less navel-gazing about it, I was told, later, a little bit after that. To recollect a life there is: red light therapy and lymphatic drainage, bone broth and dandelion tea in the morning. There are splotches of solitude in between, and now, I am trying not to fill it all up with slop. I pick up the laundry from the spot where the laundry man is always glowering or all smiles and never anything in between. I buy a water flosser, four gently used white linen dresses, a smoothie bowl that is too big and bright blue and I ponder how anyone could possibly consume the whole thing of something like that and then I finish it all in one go. What I Do In A Day In New York City. I vow to consume nothing ever again. Isabel sends over Life Studies by manic depressive poet Robert Lowell and some other writings by his wife that she thinks might correlate with My Situation. Saunter over to an awful summer show at a gallery that I feel bad to name and anyways my judgement is probably just a result of my messed up spirits. I shower at home now, not in the bright hallways of my weird-and-off-putting gym. I keep it dark inside for the sake of energy conservation and spiritual fortitude. Downtown, Bacaro is packed and the bald man at the table over is reluctant to tell his date his name. We light paper straws on fire at Bar Belly. SUBURBIA, the book above me is called. WAVES, says the next book over. The scene is dead, my friends are saying. Everyone is fat and happy. The subway is flooded. And you shouldn't have to self destruct in order to conjure up something interesting to say, but if you can successfully tow the line, well..... Everyone is smirking. The key of it though, is the towing of the line. So, I will go home and transcribe more platitudes. Your will to create beauty shapes your time. Wednesday, July 16 Air conditioner whirring at two in the morning and I have come to life again for the first time in my five-week-life. Thursday, July 17 They are perched inside the fountain in Washington Square Park painting blue hour landscapes on canvas behind the sheen of the fountain, and so of course the water is speckling the paint. I imagine the damage will settle in a nice sort of way. They are playing wind chimes and wearing micro shorts. Claudette is still closed for the season. They are stringing bungee cords across the street at West 10th. On the phone, I hold my breath. Did you go to the party, I am asked. No. Me neither. Iced mint tea in a hotel lobby that is kind of Scandinavian and cheerful in spirit. Back in the park; Where will I go, I could ask the tarot reader. Hopefully somewhere that is not here, the tarot reader could say. Staring down, embarrassing, out of it, but I still avoid walking into the incoming traffic. There are things I do like here: iced mint tea
washington square park fountain particularly in mid day in the summer
Drinking Dreams
September 04, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, August 24 Lay with filthy tangled hair hanging off the edge of the roof for a while last night, watching the Chase Clock Tower lit up too royal blue and the Empire State Building lit up the nicer sort of baby blue. I've been collecting shades of blue. Kind of navy blue Frankie's Bikini little number reflecting something sort of aqua off my Diet Pepsi on the D-line towards Coney Island. Screaming children on the D-line. Naked man running around trying to steal pedestrians pants on Coney Island. He keeps on saying to the other guy, Darby says - “I like those pants ! Gimme those pants!” And it was all these beautiful friends coming and going last night. Coming and going until it was late, really late, so taxi home and then I ate the toppings off a slice of pizza on the floor with a spoon. I spent the morning alone doing Rituals. Tretinoin before sleep and I did wake up screaming for the first time in a while. Red light therapy and copper multi peptides and avocado eye cream and mineral sunscreen and now I'm on the Subway. Kind of braindead on the subway. It sometimes takes it out of you. This sort of thing can really take it out of you. It's been summer for forever, now. I have a lot more friends now. Connectivity, connected tissue, I walk down Brighton Beach by myself, walk to Tashkent Supermarket for a towel and carrot salad and on the phone I'm saying it is not that I wish for death and even sometimes I fear it but things have become a lot less Risk Averse. I'm a lot less Risk Averse now. It would be better to be dead, someone was saying at the bar last night. She was looking at me eyes all intense and no one was really listening, I could tell no one was really listening but everyone was watching her all the same and I could see them all clenching their bodies and kind of pulling away.. Me particularly, pulling away. Perhaps I'm being self absorbed. It wouldn't be better to be dead, someone else said. He looked at me then, locked eyes which usually makes me kind of uncomfortable but I felt inclined to agree. It's definitely better when nobody is dead, I said. The bar was full of plants and glass. Like a glass jungle, I told my nameless friends at the bar.. That's not very astute, a nameless friend told me. Tonight, the cocktail menu is flavored and priced like a full course meal, and so tonight I order Cold Pizza for dinner. Cold Pizza in a crisp glass bottle, plus greasy fried chicken after that, which comes in thick paper cups. And everyone is so grateful to be alive, tonight. Everyone is so grateful for one more year of life for themselves and for their dear friends particularly. Purple sunrise if I hadn't slept through it. Yellow sunset if I hadn't gritted my teeth and clenched my eyes shut through it. Planted two feet firmly in the ground and screamed through it. First, I made one thousand promises I couldn't keep. Second, I sat on the stoop with an energy drink, water, cool minty menthol gum and the antiseptic kind of sore throat with some bodega spray gripped tight in my hand to heal all my problems. My ailments and the other things. My organs and my mind. Overjoyed to be alive again after leaving my apartment, I told Amelia. It does make things better again, Amelia told me. Tuesday, August 25 Bartending school feels kind of like an alcoholic's vision of a drinking dream. Like holograms of condensation, dim lighting, one takes a sip to the tune of disappointment. Water and food coloring dye. Bowery Park and Whole Foods and JPress nearby and inside; Christmas is coming. Smooth jazz. Everything has felt a bit the same for a time, but my room is clean. Summer is passing. Three months is not so long. Would a functional alcoholic lace up black ankle boots at seven in the morning with a clear mind and bright eyes to catch the train towards midtown towards Bartending School, at the top of the week, at the tail end of August? I am not so good at pretending like anything is changing. Like habits stack towards something greater. It might as well be yesterday, I sigh on the phone. For you, it might as well be yesterday, Amelia agrees. I do the things a person should. Cake for friends' birthdays and the waiter keeps stacking on fees at Union Square Cafe. Cut the cake fee, sit at the table fee, big group of people fee, bring your own food fee. There are other tables next to us all inhabited by people who all appear to be exactly the same, though perhaps I am being uncharitable. Imagine them as skeletons. Imagine them as children. My parents used to tell me this when I was little. Kind of a hack against boredom. I imagine myself as a psychic, looking out on things overpriced and people all exactly the same. You will have a small child and feed her nothing but buttered noodles. You will advance in age but stay exactly the same through invasive surgical facial intervention and stunted social development. You will spend evenings eating french fries with caviar for One Hundred Dollars despite a rich inner world and a childhood pumped full of extracurricular stimulation designed, specifically, to avoid a fate like this. You will fear God more than death and you will understand self destruction to be akin to suicide hence rendering you too, on a trajectory like this, a rather hellish creature. You will wake up in the middle of the night in a small box criss-crossed wood roof apartment in New York City to the sense that there are No Loopholes Left. You will go to bartending school. You will recognize that, while you can be cruel there were other factors at play. There were worse factors at play. Wednesday, August 26 Walking from Greenwich Village to Long Meadow in Prospect Park with a bag filled up with white linen and Thomas Pynchon and a plan to celebrate sweet Sylvie's birthday. A different sort of nostalgia in the air today. Nostalgia of all sorts being kind of a form of mental illness, of course but once - we were woodland fairies. Once, there were fall morning running races and cranberries that crunched under bare feet on Massachusetts roads. Once, there were rounds of Tom Collins in a kind of jazzy jungle garden restaurant in the tropics that my boyfriend who liked gender-roles enjoyed because they wouldn't let girls order their own drinks. Once, I went to the Yankees game in late August, blue and pink hazy skies, the sort of advertisements that blare out notes about Fast Food and Safe Driving in the stadium, and the sort of crowd that is so big it starts inspiring feelings of Life and Spirit rather than Homogoninity and Dread. Once, I walked from bartending school full of Tom Collins, Chambord, a sip of walnut martinini, frangelico liquor. Walked to Caffe Reggio for egg white omelet, toast, a creamy cannoli. Walking to Prospect Park a little bit tipsy. Thinking about the sort of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing about the sorts of things I used to pretend to care about. Writing it all down. Writing and walking. Writing it everywhere. Writing it on the walls. Though, I'm not so bad at keeping secrets anymore. Thursday, August 27 Amelia and I sat at Caffe Reggio until close last night, and now I have returned. Tomato soup and side grilled chicken and creamy cannoli and mint tea because things feel decadent again. Limited consumption. I haven’t really been limiting consumption. The waitress is complimenting the gray sweatpants on the boys at the table over from me, and the waitress seems to be vaguely annoyed with me, though I am trying to be pleasant. Thanks the sweatpants cost enough, the boys are saying, at the table over. Thanks we didn't realize we couldn't split the bill, Amelia and I were saying, last night, our tea was four dollars total and everything was starting to feel a little bit hazy. Sitting on the floor at sunrise, this morning, Amelia and I were watching videos from Miami. Videos from Bahamas. Videos from New York City, 2022, we'd been at all the same parties, but I hadn't known a soul. BAHAMAS, we are beaming, in one video, in the back of a taxi cab, streaking over MacArthur Causeway, Miami-Dade County, Florida, and so, as I recall, the driver was confused. I'm putting on makeup in the photo booth webcam on the floor of a hotel room and Amelia is talking in the background. It's Opposite Day in the background. Who had a mental breakdown, someone is saying in the background. From an outsider's perspective, who was it who had a mental breakdown? Friday, August 28 6:30pm, and I am back at IFC for my third viewing of Diva (1981) in twenty-four hours. I came to view Diva (1981) for the third time in twenty-four hours, because I became very sick of thinking about myself. This is a desirable alternative. The film is beautiful, and I wish to live in places like the apartments pictured. A large and wrecked studio in a car park with painted walls and recording equipment or, a hotel in Paris or, a castle by the sea or, the best one of all is a large blue flat full of puzzles and high ceilings and echoing sea sounds and an aqua glow and a man who wants to learn to stop the waves. They are fighting crime in the film. They are entrapping the criminals and they are doing it kind of like performance art. I don’t wish to spoil the ending. It really is the perfect little film. So; I will send out the recipe for zucchini (courgette) soup, and I will explain away the things I did in breathless optimism as things I did while bored. I will go to The Scratcher, Killarney Rose, Funny Bar, then Gospel then Caffe Reggio again - these are the decadent places to which I continue to return. I will draw my name with Riley on the table in crayon writing Best Friends Forever and listen to Feryquitous ft Sennzai and Sigur Rós and John Maus and think about Switzerland, Iceland, having a lot of dreams about places that are lush, lush, lush. Thinking about places that are quiet quiet quiet. Thinking about places that are green green green. Feels like Fall, outside, after church. Amelia woke me up in a living room that looked like a library and she was screaming that the air was poison. I was difficult to awaken, because it is my own delusions of poison air that wake me up screaming on other nights. Different from tonight. I was reminding myself of reality. I was reminding myself of delusions and keeping my eyes clenched shut while Amelia screamed. Well, the air wasn’t poison after all, just late night and late august and heavy with mosquitos and dust from renovations and revelations and; we walked back to the cafe. I walked through Washington Square Park at dawn. The doorman wished me good night at seven in the morning and the cycles repeated. It isn’t opposite day and we aren’t in hell, just working on things like bed time and emotional regulation. Working on archiving the things that happen outside of my head. It becomes good to have been an archivist all along. It becomes good to become sick of dealing with things mainly in repetition. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, September 4 From 6pm at Carinito — Saloon is throwing a party. Drinks from Dio. Dancing, DJ, tacos, etc
Inline links: Carinito, Saloon, throwing a party
Perfect Little Life
September 12, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, September 7 Woke up to something amazing happening. More rain outside and also, a message from Emma. How are you? Emma asks. Like no time has passed at all, though of course, years have. There are other things to think about first. Octopus and shrimp salad and some cicen cheese at Tashkent Market. Interrogate one’s own sincerity. I am certain that Emma lives a very full and rich life now. I am not sure where in the world she is. I will know this soon. The first time I met Emma, her mom drove her to my house as a friend of a friend on her sixteenth birthday. I made signs to welcome my new acquaintance. Strung up HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMMA and WE HEART EMMA on poster board in neon sharpie above the wooden porch to greet her when she arrived. Nice to meet you Emma, I remember saying. The formality was awkward because I really wanted Emma to already be my friend. Later, I posted a photo of Emma and I hugging on the beach. Happy birthday Emma, I posted. Like plastering our pseudo-friendship online would make it real. After Emma and I became friends, and after Emma got her learner’s permit a few months after that, she would drive around Natick, Massachusetts with me hidden in the back of her trunk looking for parties that we’d find posted on YikYak. We would come home disappointed, usually, drinking a few warm beers in her parents’ basement or sitting with people we didn’t really know on the outer edges of my parents back yard. A few years had passed that way, and then another year hitchhiking around the Balkans after high school. Emma had convinced me to come bartend in Budapest and so I’d lost or maybe gained another life, here, drinking liquor and taking pills from strange cups in hostel hallways. Hitching rides from strange women across the Montenegro border. We’d bought loaves of bread and tomato sauce and bottles of wine to drink in the backseat and we'd driven for quite some time along coastlines and corn fields. They burned brush to prevent forest fires in this part of the world, and so often the sides of the highway would be almost totally ablaze. Emma and I were always half asleep, half drunk, half larping as destitute and disassociated and developing an early onset case of Peter Pan syndrome as mostly mine but kind of our cerebral ambitions paled in comparison to the magical ephemerality of our alcoholic, older, nomadic, wandering compatriots. My best friend Emma was more solid than I was. She had traveled for a while longer while I washed up in a hotel room in Albania and then, a flight back to Boston. Emma sold coffee in Morocco and then attended Georgetown. Emma calls mid afternoon. Are you still in New York? Emma asks me. She’s in the car in San Diego and she’s driving home from the beach with her boyfriend. Emma and her boyfriend are laughing. The perfect little life. Sitting on the edge of my bed in my New York studio apartment and I’m feeling kind of giddy because here I am, suddenly, with this perfect little window into the perfect little life. It’s exactly as I suspected. I talk quickly at Emma for about twenty minutes when I pick up the phone, mostly recounting the events of the spring and summer, but there are other things, too. Sorry, I say when I finish my story. Sorry sorry sorry. Emma sighs, though she remains cheerful. I always thought you’d marry young, Emma says. Are you ok? Emma asks. You should talk about yourself now, I tell Emma. And so Emma tells me that she is in San Diego with her boyfriend. They have been there since the spring now, and they have started to make some friends. They are driving home from the beach. They are stopping for food. Emma is in a city on the Pacific coast of California known for its beaches, parks and warm climate. Emma is on the edge of a deep harbor that is home to a large active naval fleet. I imagine that it is misty there sometimes and sunny at other times and the houses are bright colored beach bungalows and they are always filled up with a little bit of sand. All my dreams this summer have been about California, I tell Emma. There is an OctoberFest party in San Diego, Emma tells me. Come to San Diego, Emma urges me. Do you surf a lot?, I ask Emma. Where are you getting food? Is everything made of wood and is everyone barefoot all the time and do you buy blue dresses at second-hand shops and wear them as you wander down the coast? Do you feed seagulls scraps of fish as they fly over your perfect white wooden balcony and do you go to the carnival and get massages at open air studios on the pier and is everything kind of pastel and creaky and at what pace does time pass? So, I will go to San Diego. Not in October but sometime soon. Sometime in the spring. Emma and Arthur will drive me around in their perfect little car and I will sleep on their perfect little couch and I will drink Corona with lime and wear a bikini in March and everything will be kind of pastel and creaky and I imagine I won’t be too aware of time passing at all. I will be embraced and absorbed by a life that does not belong to me. Maybe it’ll be like Never Land. Maybe I’ll stay forever. Monday, September 8 In New York City, people feed birds scraps of food and then grab them by their bare hands, too. In Washington Square Park, the tourists from Prague are doing this today. Washington Square Park, which is peppered with falling leaves and fountain mist and Bad Luck Spots, which I will never make the mistake of stepping on again. The park is still green but becoming less so. I’ve been praying for the cold, and now it is almost here. It is September 8th. It is Day One of being Cerebral and Ascetic and I am feeling very horrified that I ever thought it might be good to opt for any other alternative path. I am feeling regretful for my experimentations in self-abandonment and trying-on-new-personalities though, I suppose, this is where God comes in. And it was a God filled day yesterday, which is something I still hope to be somewhat watchful with and let things happen to me rather than intellectualize it all. The greatest thing is to Love and Know and Be Loved And Known, strangers kept on telling me yesterday. I already knew this, but I wrote it down anyway. Write it down and filter it through new contexts. Begin the day. It is Monday now. It is September 8th. I run into Emilia at Caffe Reggio, where I always sit and where she always finds me. You seem kind of volatile, she tells me. You should write about God if you are sick of writing about yourself. You should write about art. You should not write about politics. You should come to Slovenia. I was sitting in a church last night and someone was laughing outside. The laughter was reverberating inside. The laughter was distorting sound waves off the walls and causing interference with the incense and the air and with the silence. Because it was, otherwise, silent. Felt very frozen. Felt like fall. Felt like it was all beautiful even here in stupid NYC. Felt like I slowly noticed myself, shaking. What's your favorite book, a stranger asked me at the bar, later. V by Thomas Pynchon I said, because that's the book I read last and my mind was moving kind of slowly. What's your favorite film, the stranger asked. Diva by Jean-Jacques Beineix because that is the film I watched and liked last or also; Manhattan and Match Point, I said. What's your favorite book, I asked the stranger. The stranger smiled. I always say The Bible when people ask me that. Tuesday, September 9 In the criss-crossed wood-roofed apartment, the lights start to flicker around eight pm which is a good reminder, then, that one is never supposed to linger in the sort of place like this. One is supposed to live in a city like this so that one might pace around and wait for omens. It is Fashion Week which means even less to me this year than Art Week did the week before. It is energies and after parties and humiliation rituals when I'm wearing my cotton non-synthetic workout wear all around Soho at a time like this and; all of this of course, means nothing at all and so this week is just like any other. This summer passed kind of dusty and endless and I do not feel sorry for myself anymore because first of all there is no need for that it is just one life all at once and second of all, Accidie is the only truly mortal sin and so one must proceed with caution. I sat with Amelia in bars with sparkling water in June for a while because I just could not go home. I sat with other sorts of substances for a while after that and I took it too far. Day One (trying again) of being Ascetic and Cerebral tonight. September 9. 999. People on the Internet say that means something and I'm good at taking people at their word. Sitting in the basement of Night Club 101 at the AltCitizen show with Joe and Darby and a cup of Suju waiting for the after party to start. The basement of Night Club 101 feels kind of like a high school music room classroom particularly now, particularly empty. Joe and Darby and I are talking about the gap between self possession and self awareness and a Kinsey Scale sort of method of categorizing people this way. Self possessed people often lacking self awareness and vice versa. The lowest form of discourse being discourse on discourse. Smart people talking about ideas average people talking about events stupid people talking about other people; though, I sort of disagree with this concept. Other people are the root of all loftier things like "Ideas", I am saying. It's like The Backrooms down here, Darby is saying. It's like a kind of weird vibe but we don't want to leave. We're near the bathrooms and so others keep drifting by but they don't want to stay. Fabulous outfits. Rockstar Girlfriends. Los Angeles apparel unitard and big black boots lining up for the restroom or to buy socks that say I CAN DO ANYTHING ON DRUGS. Patchwork style neon dress and small gray loafers, silver ballet flats leather pants light green linen v neck top. Lots of girls with long and flowy and jet black hair here. Lace black dresses that look like spiderwebs paired with emerald necklaces. Lots of guys in jeans with long and curly hair or long and greasy hair and they all are carrying guitars. I'm perched in the bleachers in the basement with my one kind of SEC-school-style-tattoo and an A-line dress watching everyone kind of wistfully. So, there were a few different lives and now there is something else. Maybe in the next one, I will pick a life like the club kids. Micro-bangs and rock music. Fall asleep in Bushwick or in the back of a bus. Buy a bus and drive across the country with a lust for Music above all. Drive past things like diners in Wyoming or sacred hot springs in New Mexico or the haunted Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire or Motel 6s and 8s somewhere along the way. Drive to California wearing True Religion low rise jeans and shredded tees. Drive all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Can't stop thinking about the Pacific Ocean. Drive to San Diego. Wash up on Emma and Arthur's door. I would do fewer things each day in this life, but maybe each of them would matter more. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Friday, September 12 From 7:30pm - 9:00pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — It’s your last week to see ARDOR - a very special play following a group of nine artists and friends on an annual retreat to their aging patrons Vermont farmhouse. Nothing and everything has changed and will change.
Inline links: Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, ARDOR
Fever Dreams
November 05, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, October 26 Pale light through the small glass windows over which I have not bought curtains. Craving solitude and cleanliness and esoteric healing and then I get it; cocoon myself alone with MoonJuice potions and BlueLand Cleaning Supplies and three purple sweaters and four cream sweaters and all the silence in the world, courtyard facing windows, even the fan and the air conditioner are off and so the circumstances are exactly as I said I wanted. Tucked myself away to think about things here, and now the silence is starting to pool around me. Now, I am starting to feel upset. Chronic discontentment. There is really nothing more irredeemable than this. You wake up in a small room with a faux thatched roof and white sheets and a gold cross and minimal art and a sense that there is no air left. This is all right. The streets are still early morning empty. The shower is sparkling clean. You imagine that on the other side of these walls there are infinite other apartments, all better than this. I’ve been remixing the same story for a while now. I’ve been getting worse at writing and better at being by myself. The stranger and I walked through Washington Square Park where the autumn has come and swept the air muted and clean. Red berries crunch underfoot, and the grass has died and dried hazy and the buildings are brick and brown and the puddles are brown, too, though a brown of a brighter kind. The puddles reflect and remember things, the stranger says. The stranger is very dull like this. Like to observe something is to understand it. I’ve been getting better at clarity and worse at avoiding hedonism without being a bore. I sought forgiveness that I’ll never get. Now, it is time to seek other things: Living in a room that is sparkling clean
A good nights sleep Monday, October 27 I opened the window to let in the eerie and whistling wind after the reading last night and then I stayed up late, fallen leaves and pollen drifting past my headboard. Called Celia to talk about the same things all over again. Called Celia to request that she confirm my fears and delusions and certainties for the million billionth time. I’m getting a really creepy feeling, Celia said. Like a horror movie, Celia said. In my earliest memories, I recall walking around with this very deep self-assuredness. I would wake up everyday feeling so certain and blessed for the absolute pureness of my heart. So when he said he understood me as perfect, it was like oh someone finally understands me the way that I understand myself, Celia said It is important to always have pure intentions, I told Celia. I like when people share my aesthetic sensibilities and are unfazed about the things I worry hedge towards evil, I told Celia I’m starting to feel so creeped out, Celia told me. Tuesday, October 28 Nothing was so creepy. I was not scared of anything anymore. I could still hear the wind through my open window and in the daylight it was nice. The nicest, really. The nicest thing in the world. I slept through the afternoon half aware of this nice and floating wind and then I donned a black skirt, black top, black Ganni boots and I drifted through orange-hour Washington Square Park and a light fall rain towards the lobby of The Marlton Hotel. Where there was a fire and Celia perched by it, waiting for me. Nothing ever happens. I used to be so arrogant, I told Celia, at The Marlton. Arrogance is a good sort of thing to hold onto, sometimes. Celia told me. Celia said something about our friends being cancelled online, something about moral hierarchies, she was done feeling sorry for herself and love thy god with all thy heart and all thy might and acedia is the only truly mortal sin. The Marlton Hotel and God and Self Indulgence. French fries with garlic aioli and dirty martinis and tuna tartar and writers workshop without too much writing. I was sitting there kicking my feet around and feeling like I might die if I couldn’t break-the-pattern-today-so-the-loop-does-not-repeat-tomorrow. Do you remember what life used to feel like? Do you wish to live forever? Do you wish to never suffer? Do you wish to never suffer, forever? I’m sorry to be cryptic about it. Wednesday, October 29 In my fever dream, I was back on the Amtrak heading towards Florida, Massachusetts and everyone around me was screaming. We were traveling to record something regarding Esoteric Health. It was still October, and I knew the omens we were seeking to be somewhat evil. Everyone was furious at me, and this only bothered me because I did not know why. Woke up in New York City yelling, somewhere between a memory and a fugue state. A recurring dream I used to have where I was driving with my parents over the George Washington Bridge in a winter storm and an old woman was lurching at the vehicle, tugging at the door handles, talking about how it was almost too late. A train ride last winter where everyone was screaming at me because my ex-boyfriend was being abrasive and I was kind of in on the bit. A small faux-thatched-roof apartment in Greenwich Village where no one is angry because no one is here. I paid my dues in apologies and reparations in October, and now God has rewarded me with a real life fever and unpleasant news. A lot of things I loved became shrouded in delusion and vicious self-involvement. A lot of clarity and purity of heart became hard to access because my morning was shrouded in a fever. Kind of wanting to scream. Kind of wanting to take my Brown Prada Boots and Black Fry Boots and Grandmas Suede Ballet Flats to the cobbler. My Blue Pearl Necklace to the jeweler. My Sue Wang Dress and Red Vintage Slip to the tailor. Kind of have been like a bull in a china shop with all my beautiful things, and now there is so much to fix. Kind of feeling indignant. I should really focus on believing in something. I believe in hotel lobbies, superficially. I believe in other things, too, but I am trying to have a bit more discretion about it. Thursday, October 30 Here is what has happened: I am sitting at The Marlton hotel now where everything is cast in a kind of olive glow and the fire place is roaring and I ordered a cheese board with camembert, comté, manchego, six grapes, two halfs figs, spoon of truffle honey and spoon of jam by myself. Ordered chamomile tea and sat with Rebecca and Dory in the sunroom with my fever, earlier. Now, I am sitting by the fire with my fever by myself. I am not ready to go home. I am not really ready to think or write about the sort of things that have happened. A small beautiful blond child and her brother a bit older just walked in both wearing sweet striped shirts. Their father just finished the marathon. Their mother is all smiles, pulling apples from her canvas bag and polishing them on the hotel napkins before placing the fruit in the beautiful children’s outstretched hand. I am green with envy. I am so overjoyed to be looking in on their Beautiful Life. An insufferable duo on a first date next to me is talking about how much they hate parades and how their work is industry agnostic. Their flirting is so nauseating. Bad voice physiognomy. They are flirting with each other in the most insufferable and sexless way and you can tell, so clearly, that they met on The Internet. I am starting to consider forgoing The Internet. There is a soulless kind of song and dance these people are doing. He is listing out his favorite types of Pasta Shapes and numbering his rankings on his stubby fingers. She is talking about food poisoning. Neither of them are religious. I am trying to stomach my distaste. If you have ugly thoughts they will seep through your skin and stomach and long black sleeves of your long black Brandy Melville dress and they will seep up through your mind and out of your pours and intermingle with the rancid scent of your fever that will become a deeper sort of illness and start to rot and fester in you forever. Your bitter and ugly thoughts will start to turn your face all ugly and ruined. I am trying to wish them grace and good will. I am trying to sip my tea and choke down fruit truffle honey and crackers. Twist my hair into two very tight braids. I want to find myself a little less repulsed. I want to look at these strangers’ pale forms and imagine them replaced by orbs of light. I want to look inside their rich inner worlds. I want to look into strangers’ eyes and not be afraid of staring or back holes. I want to wish them well. I want to hope they find a beautiful life. I want to hope they buy a beautiful life. Friday, October 31 Here is what has happened. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. Once; I lived in a glass apartment in the sky. I am not sure how things can oscillate in extremes, to that degree, with that level of hot and cold and up and down and everything cruel, like it became. I used to lie on the floor to feel close to things. Lie on the floor and dream about it. The past has been orbiting in ways that make me queasy along with the illness in the air, today and yesterday, since the eve of Halloween, really. At the Halloween Party in Chinatown I wore a black hat and milled about amongst red flowers, plum tart, candles and courtyards. Went bolting up the stairs to catch a car. Went walking under the Washington Square Park archway where the air was very crisp and I was very feverish. The park was overwhelming me with street performers and noise and light and stimulation. And then in the shadows and the grass and tucked away beyond the benches there are figures in sweatshirts and denim and long sweeping hair and interlaced hands and fallen leaves and everything sweet all around the edges. I was sitting at the edge of the park in June with my fingers interlaced and the beating sun fading into dusk and the summer stretching kind of hazy and breathless ahead. It is strange to try to remember anything. Strange all the stories I am hearing in the wind and the autumn and the fever dreams and another passing season. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, November 5 From 7pm at Night Club 101 — 99 Minutes or Less returns with Maison du Bonheur (2017, 62 minutes). 99 Minutes or Less is a new free film screening showing films that are (you guessed it) 99 minutes or less. This evening’s screening is guest programmed by Elissa Suh of Movie Pudding. After party to follow with sounds by Dj Kyle and Paradise by Replica
Inline links: Night Club 101, 99 Minutes or Less, Maison du Bonheur, Elissa Suh, Movie Pudding, Dj Kyle, Paradise by Replica
Things that Happened Once I Gave Up Vice
November 12, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, November 3 And so everything kind of begins to hover as November sweeps in. The in between weeks. One can leave the city and then one can return. I call Amelia and ask if she’d like to go on another vacation for the aim of seeking things that are transgressive and weird, but the heat and the restlessness and the Miami sun of late-may is long gone, we never did visit the falconry like we planned, everyone would probably prefer to just stay put. Boil bone broth, go to a film, seek employment, write at the gym, braid and unbraid my hair three to four times before I decide to give it a rest. Do you really hate staying put that much?, Amelia asks. I go to the West Village Bitcoin Bar past ten pm in response. Still feverish from the last few days, but the wind outside is nice and the walk along Washington Square Park is quiet, tracing the streets along the park’s West edges past the brownstones and the Washington Square Hotel and the Marlton Hotel and then Pubkey Bar. It is not so much a thing of hating to stay put, but more of feng shui, four small walls, wind and water through my open window and I think most people dislike solitude of a certain kind, which can easily be mistaken for stillness. Pubkey Bar is always lit up kind of like an arcade. They sold some sign about crypto for one million dollars here, once. They sold the president’s autograph. They made me pickletinis and diet coke and seed-oil-free nachos and I used to be kind of manic here, drunk and yelling in the wind and on the street. It is such a desperately quiet night tonight. My friends are seated in the back rooms talking softly about the most valuable parts of a whole whale, their most favorite things about the people close to them, the best sound to elicit tears, the best cherry liqueur, the best ideas for how a person should be. It all comes at me kind of underwater, anyways. It’s all felt kind of shadowy as this year writes over the year before. Tuesday, November 4 And so all the energy came swirling back in an instant. They are playing sweet music like some of the My Fair Lady and the Mad Men soundtrack and J’ai 18 Ans and Zou Bisou Bisou at the hotel lobby with the roaring fireplace and the Cecily Brown mural and the young couples wearing cream slacks and red sweaters and holding newspapers and crinkled baskets of pastries. I have loved winter in New York the most of anything these past few years, and I’d been worried this one would not hold quite the same magic. Walk through the park while it is still early. Wear mostly skirts and tights and thin strapped tops and ballet flats, all black. Order ginger turmeric tea and almond milk cappuccino and write stories by the fire. Disavow hedonism. Disavow becoming the sort of person who does the certain types of things. There’s an order to these things. I tell Amelia; it is good to be mostly quiet. It is good to go to mostly the same places a million times over if the places one chooses are good. Wednesday, November 5 Did you notice everyone became very pleased that you were becoming exactly who you were meant to be when they first put you on Adderall?“ Ellie asked me at the party last night. The night was very warm and the party was very quiet and I was pleased with myself for my relative self possession that evening, which was the goal of the fall and the winter and the days that stretched out kind of breathless. Secret-keepers and Promise-Keepers and finding equilibrium between Self-Possession and Self-Awareness. These were the vaguely worded goals of the winter. No I didn’t really find that, I told Ellie. But I never got the chance to live out my potential on stimulants because I took it too far right away. Ellie nodded with sincere interest. My friends these days were very sincere. And the party was strange because the seating was in bleachers instead of tables and the music was jazz and my friends were very well dressed, decked in corsets and ballet flats and beaded belts and hair with ribbons and holding sparkling drinks with lime and aperol and smiling very broadly. I noticed that time had been passing all along sometime in early November. and so the following fervor came spurred by the sense that something might finally happen. The air got barely perceptively colder and ghosts washed up in dreams or in my courtyard or in signs and symbols like the strange numbers I’d been seeing on the sidewalk. It had been five months to the day since the start of summer and the lurching of my life in unexpected and nefarious though perhaps ultimately necessary ways, which I suppose just goes to show that some sort of momentum was required for time to do anything aside from idly tick on. I remembered that it is just one or two or three promises I make myself and others, though it becomes one million promises if you break one promise a million times. Thursday, November 6 I did nothing in the day yesterday besides watch the clouds make shadows out of various shades of light and dusk across my walls and then I pulled on a small black dress and black Ganni crumbling boots and walked through the quiet night towards Chinatown. The air was too stale and tight inside the sports bar where my friends were all smiles and drinking water and vodka and asking me about fun and faith and so then I walked further downtown to the new wine bar on Henry Street. Here, everyone was very drunk and cast in red light and our table was set in a hallway that resembled a kindergarten classroom and an eclectic group of acquaintances I knew from the Internet or Birthday Parties or Religious Magazines were sharing bottles of wine. To sleep very little means a dream state in the gray morning, which is nice because November Ninth marks the first real distance from the summer for me. The cycles repeated. The cycles grinded to a halt. I woke up to gray morning light through my still open window with a spiral bound notebook and an idea for transcription on the blank page: THINGS THAT HAPPENED ONCE I GAVE UP VICE. Friday, November 7 Listening to Chopin Nocturne op.9 no.2 while the sound of rain mixes with the sound of the turtle pond out the window and I swim in all the visions of where I’ve heard this song before. Like twirling around on brown wood floors during summer storms in the dining room at the house by the ocean while my parents cook fish stews in the kitchen and the floors turn yellow linoleum when you approach the stove and the pouring rain outside streams through the windows and all over the counters. The memory of twirling around and the smell of rain is always the most vivid of all. Like I’m always hurdling towards something or lying very still in all my recollections of things. Obsessed with motion. Arrested by motion! So the main thing now is momentum, I suppose. My Computer keeps on queuing up Chopin the The Nutcracker and Philip Glass Mishima based on past listening habits, but these two scores are both a bit too much to bear right now and so I’m hitting Skip Skip Skip. Not too much has happened since I gave up vice yesterday. Just; Rebecca told me that I look well rested, and the story about El Salvador and network states and techno-spirituality is off to print so I will soon be able to hold it in my hands and then relinquish any narrativization of past events and, it would be nice for energy drinks and nicotine to be coursing through my veins right now but there is something more beautiful and languid in self-induced timeout over microplastics and mind altering substances. Moonless night. Moon hidden behind the rainstorm. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, November 12 From 6:30pm at Night Club 101 — Free reading series Reading 101 launches, ft Swati Sudarsan, Adrienne Raphel, Jessica Lynne, Aurora Huiza, and James Barickman. Music by Solex Yoghurt.
Inline links: Night Club 101, Reading 101
Hotel Lobby Gossip
December 09, 2025 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
The social experiment is now over
December 22, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, December 15 Woke up to snow feeling self possessed, self determined, and ill, and so I’ll hold onto this for a while, I think. Everyone keeps on telling me what I should do next, to which I say: o.k. Everything is kind of medium levels of certain, these days. Lying on the floor last night at the after party and I could tell that people’s visions were kind of starting to spin but I have needed, personally, to be more solid about it. I have needed, personally, to keep my own vision clear. You can look at her face and see she’s not a good writer, the boys were saying, last night, about someone, can’t remember who. Can we just talk about pretty girls who are good writers?, the boys were asking the group. I wasn’t fishing for compliments. Just kind of sitting there watching everything because my only real goal here is to be observational and not prescriptive. There’s not a role to be filled if you want God to love what you do, someone was saying. If you want the angels to sing you have to eat the script. Angels weren’t really on the mind as I drifted home, more consumed with things like self improvement and hand selecting a new addiction and a caution to the wind sort of impulse. Potions washed up at my doorstep this morning. Sparkling ICEE water and Advil and fever chills which come as blessings when one reads them as signs. Anyways, magical blue hour snowy dusk over Washington Square Park on the way uptown tonight, and since everything changed this summer or really three days ago in a way that is true, I have started to imagine something else. The Christmas party was in an apartment around the corner from Saint Vincent Ferrer Roman Catholic Church off Lexington Ave, last night. The apartment was open-concept with big windows and a pine tree and roaring fire, poached salmon, chocolate chip cookies and a beautiful bed on which everyone lay their beautiful coats. I wanted to stay there forever, as I always do in places that I like. I wore the Cinq-a-Sept holiday dress and the big wool coat I’ve been donning for weeks now, and I wore pearls, too, which is something new. Everything was slippery and bright and better and kind of like a dream, but I don’t want to get complacent. When I moved to New York, I lived in Yorkville where I could not sleep and where the streets were too muted and it made me uneasy. In the Lower East Side, in an apartment I hated, I was given a whole new life, and there, nothing was muted and everything was windy and cold. The wind made me kind of crazy, as wind tends to do. I was airlifted out of that apartment, ultimately, which I suppose is what I’ve kind of been praying for, here, in a space that is my own and good except for; the bed faces a fluorescent hallway and there is no room for a couch or even really a trash can. I’m seeking clarity for kind of selfish but partly religious reasons. And I’m sick of writing about the things I own or once did. On the end of the year; it is kind of pointless to say anything at all when things were fast then slow then impossible to recall, and all of this is just to say that I hope I’ve been sincere. Almost midnight, and so I go to Caffe Reggio, where things are small and precise and decked in holiday cheer, cozier even than the hotel lobby. Resolutions are: everything beautiful. And more stories that flow like water, obviously. The night is crisp and cool and I care to be extremely alert. Tuesday, December 16 Celia left the scene because she was good at noticing when things became embarrassing, and I resonated with the principle but still could not help but to hover. Nothing was embarrassing, anymore, Matthew reminded me, because everything was dead in the water and then it wasn’t and then it was and now, he suspected a new wave. Last year at this time I had to beg girls to come to parties, Matthew sighed. He gestured around the very crowded and warm bar and towards the people standing and sitting in circles and filtering in and out and the elderly Italian birthday party in the backroom. This is nothing like last year, he insisted. In the Financial District, everything was FAKE. Fake little streets and old-timey bars and I only realized the facade of it all because I walked by a Christmas Tree and the sign at its edges sent the whole charade tumbling down. EVEN THE CHRISTMAS TREE IS FAKE, the sign said. In the freezing cold, the most freezing day of the year so far, Celia and I got burgers at a small and new seafood spot. Celia wore three pops of red (bag, tights, gloves), and I wore all black. After the reading, where the stories were good and where more and more people kept materializing as if out of dust by the door, I bought three books and then sat on what seemed to be a bike rack in the back of a van driving towards the Lower East Side. Ducked my head so it wouldn’t slam into the van ceiling on every bump. The views became Real again, driving out of toy-house-town simulation FiDi, and then the bridges were glowing and the streets were full of snow and I was writing on my phone, kind of just humming to myself and mostly just saying the same things in my head over and over and over again; everything clear and everything sweet. Cold and windy winter where the elements make me kind of lose my mind. Sober minded mania. I am drawn to these kinds of things. The thing about this winter is that everyone has been going crazy. Me first, but then I learned how to put a stop to it. Sophia gave me a white rose at the Marlton Hotel in the morning, and then I found it kind of crumpled in the recesses of my bag. Petals floating everywhere and we’d moved to a different bar by then, somewhere kind of velvety and sleek and my friends and I were the only people there. Matthew was talking about people who fabricate enemies out of neutral acquaintances who just didn’t want to be their friends. A sad sort of thing, but you can’t feel too bad about someone who decides to turn evil. Dimes Square was a two year operation to get [redacted] laid, Matthew was saying. The experiment is now over. The social experiment is now over, and now you can all go home. Wednesday, December 17 I have decided to take the rest of the winter floating and soaring. Orange leaves turning brown outside the open window. Little gold watch and swan and cross and green Dartmouth Tercentenary tile and white Lake Neuchatel winter landscape postcard propped against the windowsill. So, if clarity is the thing that is most important above all, then you know what has to give. I will play “Garden Botanum” and “Come Undone” and “When Autumn Leaves” and everything by Dougie Mcclean and watch as things become crisper and more into focus. It’s important to only make a promise once and then keep it. It’s important to not be so vague about all of it going forward. Very precise and very discerning. That can be what a winter is like. I watch the light and shadows shift and shudder off my walls and bad-feng-shua hallway for some hours. I walk to the gym and I feel normal. Water and hyperpop music and images of faces sheathed in light or maybe armor all around. The television is falling off its hinges at the gym, and so the mantras on the walls are all skewed. COMMIT TO SOMETHING. REACT TO NOTHING. I’ve been culling mantras from the internet. I’ve been making lists of all my friends and everything kind I have to say about them. I’ve been making lists of all the ways I’ve maybe wronged others but have never been wronged myself. Sitting in a basement that’s illuminated blue watching films last night. Sitting in a conversation pit all day and all night for most moments of this week. Sitting under holly and cranberry and splintering wood and dried wasps nests and flowers and everything sparkling and snowy outside, soon, next week. There’s a few more dinners before that. The last days of gluttony but everyone seems over it. Sitting around dimly lit tables and everyone keeps talking about the ways we used to be. We used to wake up with crumbling Prada purses at the foot of our beds, overflowing with candy and mascara and all the things we didn’t remember stealing the night before. We used to be at the gym before dawn. I used to get along with people who viewed things as linear. I’ve always known the happiest days of my life to be exactly what they are, even as they are happening. Slipping away. There are other things, too. What do you think your new addiction will be?, Celia asks me. Something unrelated to consumption, I tell Celia. Something kind of manic and empty?, Celia asks me. It’s not so bad to think about what you want in strictly material terms, I tell Celia Thursday, December 18 THINGS I PROCURED THIS YEAR IN STRICTLY MATERIAL TERMS Silk long sleeve Ganni top
Inline links: Silk long sleeve Ganni top
How To Break Paralysis
January 14, 2026 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, January 5 Start the year at Cassandra’s apartment, and then a few days pass kind of breathless and stranded in this way. Her bedroom looks over St Vincent’s Ferrer, and it is light filled and sweet. Cards and paper star cut outs hung on red ribbon stream down the edges of the cream walls. A seashell necklace, Mary Magdalene portrait, books of Adorno and Mary Gaitskill. The bible. When my friends leave for the day, I do not. Rush of opening doors and boots on wood and winter air, and then they are gone. Cassandra’s apartment is very clean. It strikes me, somewhat uneasily, that everything I touch appears slightly less precise when I’m the one returning it to its proper place. Face oil left off kilter and kind of dripping. A little bit bad at treading gently in this place where I am a guest and everything is delicate and gorgeous. Wearing my friend’s Adidas pajamas and drinking water and taking Advil in thick blue translucent pill form. Writing down the things I no longer care to reflect on. A lot can happen in a year, I tell Cassandra, but then again, a lot can happen in one day or one hour or one minute, even, so best to be kind of chill about it. We go to Heidelberg for herring and brown bread and hot raspberries in ice cream and apple strudel at night. We go to CVS for baby food and tooth brushes and nicotine gum. The evenings uptown are more sparkling and quiet. Back at the apartment, and I can’t stop talking about all the things I want to do or places I want to move. California, Switzerland, El Salvador. Uptown, to a four bedroom apartment with my four best friends. Lying on Cassandra’s couch wearing a blue sweater under a gray blanket and drinking flower power kombucha this morning. Cassandra gets ready for work and offers general hospitality. Eat any fruits and vegetables you want, Cassandra tells me. She lists them like a game. Ad libs. She was teaching me how to type cast a person as “Lego” or “Dust Bowl” or “Victorian Orphan,” last night. Blueberries, shallots, pickles, seeded mustard from the Amish farm stand. I tell Cassandra that she’ll come home to find I have devoured all of her arugula with my bare hands. Later, I wear Cassandra’s blue sweater and black ballet flats and take my own belongings clutched in my arms in a cab downtown. Am I crazy, or did you take my black ballet flats, Cassandra texts, that evening. We discuss an exchange. Tomorrow’s plans. My polyester black gown bartered for Cassandra’s blue sweater and black ballet flats. We’ll meet at mass, lunch, The Frick, The Met, the play, the party. The light is blue gray in my apartment, and all the windows steam over when the hot water is on. All the windows steam over because my apartment is very small, and because the bathroom has no doors. A New Year should feel psychedelic, not sluggish, one of my friends said, a few days back. Psychedelic??? I said. What about crisp and clear???? After my dream where there is No Air Left, I come to consciousness with concerns about redemption. Something about bad habits and something omnipresent left unsaid. Sun and light and real sort of detox incoming and yes this has all happened or is happening or needs to happen soon. Sirens outside the foggy window. Gentle winter sunrise. Watching Darling (1965) on my computer as it gets light outside. The Schlesinger film where Julie Christie whirls about all thrilled to find it’s not too late, even though, of course, it is. Back on my phone, I’m checking prediction markets and trackers and fortune tellers and all the things I’m trying to avoid for religious and also paranoid reasons. My fears are all confirmed. Reading the stars. That voice in your head telling you everything will work out fine is wrong, they say. Sound of shattering glass crystallizing outside my open window this morning. I can sense, therefore, more than see, bright morning light starting to seep through. Thank God. It was a few days of gluttony last week. Last days of bohemia, but it was different from the bohemia of before. Different from the times that we were all manic from the wind and cold and early January where everything or nothing happens all at once. Everything used to be reeling. I miss Butterfly Club. Ex-best friends are forever. I’ve been talking about being ascetic for reasons of necessity, and also because simulated intensity can only do so much when it comes to keeping a life pure. Morning, now, and I don’t remember my dreams but I jolted awake ready to chase the same thoughts in circles. Washington Square Park is bright and feeling like spring today, because the snow is melting and the trees and lights are coming down. Pine piles looking a little lonely under the park archway. Something a bit melancholy about it. Dead and gone. Nothing to overthink. Cassandra comes downtown for mass and black ballet flat retrieval, and then she goes uptown to clean her apartment and do good things so she can be a good person. Your apartment is already so clean, I want to tell Cassandra. Cassandra is telling me about the only girl in the world who are funny. I went to tell Cassandra about someone who said me and one other girl and one specific nun are only girls who are funny, but the conversation moves on before I can assert my piece. And I think I’m mostly funny when I’m being mimetic, anyway. Better at knowing funny than at being funny myself. Cassandra is telling me about childlike wonder. Washed my face with La Rouche Possay cleanser and Japanese milk toner and did Big 6 Lymphatic drainage which is supposed to do things like give you the whites of your eyes back and also cleanse your insides through and through, this morning. Procured a Celsius and cool minty zyn from the fridge. Procured green juice and cliff bar and sat in Prada boots, for a while, on the edge of my bed. I do feel confident things will work out in the end, Cassandra texts me. Only if no spiritual blockage with vice or isolation, I text her in response. What if we had seven more hours of daylight, my friend said tonight, but I like it when it is four pm and I’ve completed my day of obligations and the fading daylight matches a sense of completion. I wore a tan skirt with no tights because they all keep running and a black long sleeve tee and sneakers to do venue tours and other obligations. I thought you were coming from the gym when I saw you wearing shorts, my friend said, after I ran into him on the street. I’m not wearing shorts, but I am wearing sneakers because I keep on procuring mysterious injuries, I said in response. It was a strange December and then a good January, incoming. Good, because it is quiet. Good, because I think I sense things picking up. Can I see a menu, I asked the bartender, at a dive bar, later that night. There is no menu, because this is a dive bar, the bartender told me. Can I get something warm, I asked. The bartender fired up the kettle. Imagine seeking out attention to get only the negative aspects of fame like stalkers and rage, my friends were saying, at the dive bar. Imagine selling out your friends to cloy for low hanging fruit. Imagine turning twenty-six. Imagine playing pool. Imagine moving to Los Angeles, California, or San Salvador, El Salvador, or Geneva, or even Austin I would move anywhere, I was saying to my friends. I would move across the country or even the world and become very sweet or even very bored. My friends were talking about people for whom spectacle is just real life. You assume that everyone is excited to go back to real life, and then you realize that they have no real life. So these are the people that you’re supposed to avoid. And then after that, everyone was talking about religion again. Which is sort of crystallizing to be the topic these days, or even this year. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, January 14 A few good downtown art openings tonight (6pm - 9pm) — At 56 Henry; works by Yifan Jiang and Sareh Imani. At Entrance; Seth Cameron’s first New York exhibition in six years. At Post Times; Elberto Muller solo show.
Inline links: 56 Henry, Yifan Jiang, Sareh Imani, Entrance;, Seth Cameron’s, Post Times, Elberto Muller
Hotel-Life-For-Life
February 04, 2026 · Original source
Monday, January 26 On the first day of the clearest week of the year, I vow to be meticulous about it. As hell and even heaven and all of New York City freezes over in the cold, Olivia keeps on asking if I’m sick of it. Impossible to feel lonely when my opinion on the benchmarks of the weather is demanded at the start of every day. Are you still happy about this? Olivia keeps on asking. It got colder and colder and colder for one week or maybe more. Soon, I expect the cold will break. Soon, there will be something to talk about besides the arctic winds. Although I do find it thrilling and even telling, really, to see how everyone reacts to extremity. I am only being a little bit factious. It is icy and hazy and pale and like playing tetris with myself, finding footholds in the snow banks, this week. Creep past the frozen turtle pond, shut the open window, position my salt stained boots in the divots in ice piles that other passerby’s have left behind. Hidden little trails and maps and loopholes in treacherous places. Exciting places. Game theory in the blizzard. Do you still feel ‘manic’ and ‘energized’ by this, Olivia wants to know. Are you still wearing sheer tights and a-line skirts and enjoying how the wind chill makes everything feel empty? Are you still seeking redemption in the spaces left barren while everyone rushes through tundra streets? Are you still feeling pretentious or maybe just autistic standing stock still and underdressed in courtyards that have never really been yours? This week, I have decided to just say what I really mean. Listening to Dark But Just A Game by Lana del Rey while the sun comes up this morning. Not a new song, but new to me. They are talking about Video Games album anniversary on The Internet this morning. Thank you for my mental illness, girls are saying on the Internet. I tell Olivia that what I remember from this album is before I knew much on the Internet. I remember my mentally ill friend turning on Video Games in a wall to wall carpeted suburban room encased in sunlight and green branches that brushed against wide windows when I was something like thirteen or maybe younger. Turn that stuff off, I remember telling my friend. Turn off those sad and strange songs before we all start to get freaked out. Playing Dark But Just A Game over and over and over again, this morning. Breathing kind of shallow breaths and making calls of confession or maybe complaints. I vowed to be more private about it and then I vowed to make my blog more true. If I cannot speak about something clearly, then I think I will not speak about it at all. In the morning, there is salt stained mirror and la Roche Posay cleanser and peptide moisturizer and mineral sunscreen and amazon tights and a call from Maria saying hotel lobby for lunch, maybe. Rituals like magic. Compulsive documentation. Live-blogging for my live-diary which is mostly just an event calendar plus some but not-so-many lurid life details because I have never been so good at keeping it all so private. The truth of it is, one can return to oneself quite quickly, but this should only have to happen once or maybe twice. In the hotel lobby, a beautiful girl walks in. She is a model, clearly. You are twenty-nine, a horrible man is saying to her, across the table. Good genes, he is saying. He is saying things about a girl like you and you can leave if you want. He is complimenting her grotesquely and it is very understandable why she would feel extremely annoyed. She is very articulate and pretty, though, and seems to know this game. Girls like you have hobbies, the man is saying. Do you have hobbies like art collecting or acoustic music or perhaps even ice skating? The girl is good at modulating her voice, and so my eavesdropping is abruptly cut off. Order: almond milk cappuccino, almond milk matcha, ginger tea, diet coke at Hotel Lobby. Too many beverages . Too many things I want. Discipline is pleasure. Restraint enhances desire. Reading something true on Health Gossip about the things a person must do before they lick the candy wrapper of success and then im thinking o.k perhaps time to cut myself off of this sort of thing for a little bit. Maria wears a red sweater and black pants and orders only two drinks: (1) black coffee and (2) greens juice. I ask Maria to read my diaries and she obliges and then, even highlights the parts she likes best. Too much to say? I ask Maria. No, she says. No and I think your instincts would stop you before you really said anything too uncouth. Too panopticoned? I ask. It’s fine to talk about faux-purity, Maria says. Nightfall in the hotel lobby, where the lights are yellow and glowing and dark and my computer screen is starting to look fluorescent and bright and bad, in contrast to the low-light and well-curated vibe they have fired up in here. A friend group I was eavesdropping on in rather nefarious and uncouth ways have gone silent, now. The man across the couch from me is talking about working on a film pilot in Malaysia and a need-for-speed and also thirty-million-dollars. He could never do what you are doing, two of the girls in the friend group were telling the third, earlier, as she sobbed. Do what you’re doing, being: sobbing in hotel lobby. Radical vulnerability in hotel lobby. I am feeling nefarious and busy body and a little bit mean. We’re your friends so we sure are going to be kind to you, the two girls had been telling the third. Just because our mothers were born in the wrong generation, does not mean they can’t listen-and-learn. Ordered tonic water and avocado and adopted vaguely negative vibe towards; people who did not know they were being panopticoned. Girls whose conversation I could have just let flow around me like water. There’s stagnation in judging harshly, particularly in judging people with whom I am totally uninvolved. No one in the world knows where I am right now, but anyone who wanted to could probably guess. And it’s not that I think it’s particularly good or even beneficial to be cultivating mystique, but once secrets are in the air they swirl around forever, and so one might want to hold some things a bit closer to one’s chest. Pitch black outside, which makes it even more warm or silver in here, depending on where I look. Lily texts me - I would like to spend a day like you did. We can recreate my whole day, I respond. We can recreate the good days. We can eradicate all slush. I can tell you all about what actually happened. Soon, I will walk home in the freezing and sparkling night in my black and soleless ballet flats. I will slip on ice and look at the moon and Washington Square Park archway and the dark and getting even darker sky. I’ve been feeling kind of desperate to chronicle the things that are mine, if I’m being honest about it. Hold onto the things I never lost. This is different from grasping onto things that never were or no longer are, yours. Parties last week, but I don’t really remember. Party last weekend, but full of people I didn’t want to see. Party tonight, and I wear athleisure to the bar and make a friend who shares my name and also my sensibilities. We’re here because of your blog, someone tells me, at the bar. We’re here because we just made a film in Nigeria and now we’re moving to Rome to work for Vatican II. We’re here because of an article that everyone hates. Birthday party. Renaissance themed karaoke. Did you just meet and become best friends, someone asks me and my new friend. We all go outside to smoke a cigarette. Duh, I respond. This is always how it goes with new and fast friends. In my room, tonight, and I’ve been feeling good and normal. The cleaner my room gets, the more I remember. At the bar tonight, I met someone who lives in a hotel-for-life. Is everything perfect-all-the-time? I asked the hotel-inhabitant. Is everything clean and contained and curated and beautiful and taken care of? Do you order room service for dinner? If you develop a problem, is it immediately fixed? In my room, there is a computer and also a wooden music box that plays Silent Night when opened. Inside the box, there are blue little blue pearls and letters and a ballerina that spins. Above my bed, there are lace white curtains newly pinned over courtyard-facing open windows. The curtains are there to keep out ice and possibly fire-escape intruders. The unearthed music box is the reward for cleaning my room. Thinking about rabbit holes I’d like to really delve into next. Getting texts from friends from online who go by names after celestial objects. Thinking about Saorise’s brand new robot that sends her pilates-training-packets. Thinking about Esoteric Health Book Club. Saint Teresa de Ávila. Thinking about no more vice. Everything has frozen over and hovered and smoothed itself thin in the months that came in between. Descents into madness happen very quickly, my new friend was saying, today, at the bar, where everything was more lovely than I could possibly have imagined. We were talking about cults, because the topic does arise even in beautiful places. Talking about posture. Talking about cult leaders. Matchmakers. Scammers. Beautiful lives. The Places To Be.. Hours later, now. Home, now. Still listening to Jeff Buckley “Forget Her” and Lana del Rey “Dark But Just a Game” on repeat because I love pleasure in excess. So addicted to everything. I can get addicted to good things too, I think. Tomorrow, I will fall asleep in a snowy white house in the woods. We will get vanilla milkshakes on the drive down. Many rooms. Plans to cook dinner. Last summer, I wanted very badly to drive to this house in July. I wanted to find secret waterfalls and secret gardens, too. It’s a house just an hour or so from the city where I used to go often, and I remember the surroundings as very green. I remember fighter jets over Celia’s graduation. I remember Rose writing her social security number up and down her arms in sharpie, last summer, because chaos was kind of the objective everyone was seeking, then. Enough reminiscing. Same songs, over and over and over again. Opening my window because it is time for bed. Tell yourself over and over and over, Jeff Buckley keeps saying. He died early with something to show for it. Addicted to repeating myself. Addicted to new beginnings and no more false starts. Working on getting addicted to continuity now, I think. I will become totally obsessed with continuity. What a relief. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, February 4 From 6pm - 8pm at Latitude Gallery — Unbridled: Horsin Around opens; a salon-style group exhibition celebrating the Year of the Horse.
Inline links: Latitude Gallery, Unbridled: Horsin Around
Life-in-a-lab
February 25, 2026 · Original source
Tuesday Life-in-a-lab In my dream, the house was a lab. I woke up to light not just streaming no, but flooding, absolutely pouring through the long glass windows in front of me. I knew that once the light cleared, I would be staring into the heart of this lab. I knew it was a problem that I was anticipating waking up in a lab, because I knew that I should have been anticipating a morning waking up at home. Instead, I was finding myself totally nonplused about waking up in a lab. The important thing, I knew, as I woke up with a sense of increasing urgency, was to conjure up an image of a home, not a lab. You have been in a lab for so long that you have forgotten about home, a very confident voice inside my head was saying. A picture of my childhood bedroom appeared in a few frames. Different versions. Big white bed and blue wooden floors and presently frosty fields behind the house. Little twin bed yellow walls, carpeted floors, and hot summer cornfields outside. I couldn’t get it straight. If I was in a lab, then I needed to remember. You need to remember a place that actually exists, the lab-attendants were saying in my dream. Saying in my head. Glass apartment in the sky. Room at The Marlton Hotel. I’ve been eating vegetables and collecting things like dried flowers and books on Esoteric Health and buying wash-and-fold laundry service and being swept away to places like nice restaurants with no menus and nice-apartments-with-no-owners. I woke up in Connecticut. Can’t wake up in a lab if you never go to sleep. In the morning, I woke up at close to noon. I shared photos on The Internet of a very aesthetically-cohesive and un-lab-like home. I went to the bathroom to wash my face and collect myself as best I could. The house was beautiful, and I was unsure as to why I was watching things unfold from as if I was somewhere else. I made lists of things that were special, being places like this most of all. I made lists of things that compose self respect, and then I made lists of things that compose a life that is bright and white and full of light. The country is quiet and sometimes difficult for me, though I sleep through the night now and this changes everything. Downstairs, the dogs and Celia and the other were sitting under high lofted ceilings. There was a magical and silvery presence that mediation gives to a person. I asked about coffee and they told me there was coffee in the pot and I could heat it up in a silver bowl on the stove. The stove was green and handmade and you turned it on by flicking little metal burner switches. The bowl was nice and very small. I poured the coffee in the bowl and I waited for everything to begin to boil. I added vital proteins collagen and also oat milk creamer and also lots of white sugar because the esoteric health advice of the age says this is fine. There were homemade mini muffins from The Smith Bakery down the street on the counter (blueberry, morning harvest, strawberry corn, and chocolate chip) and so I cut each muffin in half, and then I had one-half-of-each. Two mini muffins total. I put two of the halves in the toaster, and I had two of the halves cold. Everyone started telling me about gnosticism and buddhism and catholicism. They recommended to me a friend who writes about God and married into a famous band. They recommended I come to meditate in places like New York, too. You look ready, Celia said, as I packed up my north face back-pack and changed out of split-sweatpants and banaa-republic-black-top. I’m not, I snapped, in response. Do you actually want to meditate more, Celia asked. I don’t say I want to do things I don’t actually want to do, I replied. I could not stop with all this harshness. Wednesday Grand Central Station Back in New York City and I am totally covered in dog hair. Shoes untied in Grand Central Station but there is nowhere for me to stop and tie them without risking some sort of stampede or at least massive inconvenience and so onward we go. A man just walked towards me rapidly and I flinched and then felt kind of bad. Then, he shouted; young lady can I ask you a question and so now I do not feel bad. My instincts were correct, and now I do not feel bad at all. Ok, fine, whatever. I used to love arriving back in New York and hearing all the music and the lights and I would twirl through this place nonpulsed. Then, I would twirl home. I used to get drunk-before-christmas at the midtown Cipriani and then giggle when people called my ex-boyfriend and I bad-people-for-cutting on the trains toward Albany, but I’m not allowed to move like that anymore. I used to sink into sixty-dollar taxi-cabs because I found the subway over-stimulating. My Prada purse used to be lined with shiny leather, but I got fidgety somewhere tropical and I ripped it all off so now we’re working with something more flattened and matte. Teenage girls used to fling themselves at the side of the train platforms, and conductors used to lose their whole crew in Boston and train heists used to happen. I used to consider everything to be pretty taken-care-of. I think I never used to notice when sometimes, problems would arise. On the train ride back to New York, tonight, the tracks were icy and slick and it was already kind of blue hour dusk. When I said goodbye, I told Celia I love you I love you I love you a million times over because I felt slightly neurotic about a weekend full of being slightly late and slightly harsh. I am smart enough to know that the only thing complaining makes you better at is complaining, so I decided to stop. In Grand Central Station, they are playing live music, and I watch a man propose, though no one else around the soon-to-be newlyweds reacted. No photos or energy. Sad. I am wearing beat up Ganni knee high boots and Brandy Melville long sleeved dress, and Zara blazer that I stole from Paul’s Baby Grande back when I was in the practice of going lots of places and stealing lots of things. I miss my Max Mara coat that I left at “tech week” and I miss “drinking” and I am suddenly desperate to be out the door. I imagine that when the subway doors fly open and I burst out free and all-in-one piece, I will see the Washington Square Park arch, and it will be glowing silver in mid-winter light. I imagine that the city will feel warm with soon-to-be-spring-humidity. I imagine that since groundhog day has come and gone the tides will change soon, and I imagine I will relinquish my Groundhog Day (1993) fantasies of nothing-ever-happens at some point down the line, when it all becomes a bit too much to take. Tomorrow, I will be taking my shoes to the tailor and then the next day, I will have a totally fresh new crop of things to wear. I imagine that soon, I will have a fresh new crop of things to consider. Thursday Whore Dialectics Greenwich Village’s bitcoin bar sports a libertarian clientele and taxidermy and a podcast studio and beef-tallow-fries. Tonight, it sports a projector screen from my old apartment that looks sad and small propped on stage, and a big audience in metal chairs, and a birthday party in the front room, and plenty of opportunities to make myself feel useful as I tinker with film equipment and fire off texts regarding “promotional material.” I am sitting at Pubkey Bar drinking a diet coke while I wait for the screening of “Whore Dialects” to begin. When I ordered my diet coke at the bar, a strange man made a strange joke about NA beer, and I felt immediately irritated and restrained by my self imposed limits. I am listening to a group of young men discuss the career path of “Internet Pervert” as one of the only viable post-AI jobs. Monetize your self destruction, they are saying. Male prostitution. Buying plushies is to women as buying porn is to men. There’s a strange pseudo-intellectual glare to it all and I am enjoying listening in. They are talking about Brian Kaplan, but they keep on mispronouncing his name. They are talking about scientists, rationalists, and flexible proposals. When they talk about Internet Perverts, there are stars in their eyes, less because of the sex, it seems, and more because the internet perverts are able to get some money and get some attention. The male influencer. That seems to be what they are starry eyed about. They are thrilled to be in the same extended universe as someone who might be able to garner some vague attention. This is a bar that usually makes me feel kind of hazy. This is a bar where I used to make scenes. Enough reminiscing, because I am here to watch a film that is all about auto-documentarians, which is in sharp contrast to the maladjusted forms of auto-diary or auto-fiction. In the film, a beautiful girl is in the back of a car with the wind in her face and she is drinking an Erewhon smoothie and talking about how Hollywood is dead and the monasteries are empty and you can’t be a nun or get a phd because you question what truth is, and these institutions just won’t let you get at it. After that, the film cuts to a scene where the girl is in a white dress being play-drowned in the ocean by a right-wing provocateur. The film crew sent the provocateur to stay with the girl, and it was kind of the perfect setup, a voiceover explains. The provocateur describes how when he arrived, the girl was in a state of almost total abjection. Like how kids who are sexually assaulted don’t shower to make themselves totally disgusting and unappealing, he explains. I find the provocateur slightly less interesting as a character than both the girl, and the disgraced art-advisor (another prominent character in the film) but I like when he argues about politics and then reconciles on a personal level with those around him in places like California. I like the scenes about the professionally fraught yet personally friendly relationship between the art advisor and his not terribly successful clients, ie the clients are disappointed but still use the advisor’s pool for summer swims. The client still dreams of having an eighteen person studio because this means tremendous success, and because this is just how men dream. When the provocateur is described but not depicted as losing control, it is explained that the jig is kind of up, because it’s no triumph of power to reign over somebody who is not even in control of themselves. I only watch the film once and I am not taking notes, really, during the public screening at the Bitcoin Bar, but I like it because it is auto-documentary not auto-fiction or auto-diary and as such, it is very precise. The film says, for someone like me in the conditions like the ones I occupy, here is what life is like. This is more matter of fact and less indulgent than saying; here is what life is like for me. At a party last month that was also all about art whores, the filmmakers wrote a few lines about a few of my friends. The women present were on average quite a bit younger than the men and looked fresh. Perhaps because of their age, or perhaps because of the care they put into their bodies and minds, but the vibe among the women was optimistic and exuberant. I thought this was nice. Nice, too, to catch purity in unexpected places while staying totally true. 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: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1h49!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd95f9aef-d112-4dd9-a0fb-1610ba693067_1536x2048.jpeg, 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
Humanoid-Robots
March 06, 2026 · Original source
I have decided to quit vice because unless I take my self-experimentation seriously, nothing interesting is going to happen. I don’t take so much pleasure in denying myself the things that I want. At The Marlton Hotel lobby, I was two hours late to meet my aunt for lunch and hungover and she called my father and asked if I was maybe in El Salvador again or perhaps just kidnapped. Small box apartment. No greenhouse roof. I wore an A-line skirt and Banana-Republic-black-top and picked my way across sunlight-streaming in Washington Square Park to arrive late and empty handed. I ran into Olivia in the hotel lobby, and she was glowing with discipline-of-lent and the sign of the cross in black ash on her forehead. I can’t become religious because I can’t even deny myself the things I want, I’d told Joe, a few days earlier. I hadn’t been drinking that night. Well you know what they say about failure rendering humility, he had said, in response, with a smile. And he’d admired my sincerity. And I’d admired his generosity. He’d recommended some literature. This Tremendous Lover (Eugene Boylan, 1946). I’d purchased the texts on ThriftBooks.com and then I’d fallen to sleep listless. Things became worse and then better. In The Marlton Hotel lobby, my aunt asked me if I liked when bad things happened because bad things help my writing. I HATE when bad things happen, I said in response. I HATE when I suffer. I do not WANT to be resilient. I cited a few of my favorite authors who-never-suffered. I like early Babitz and Fanny HOWE, I decreed. I like the-architecture-of-happiness and feng shui and feeling observational. Fanny Howe is kind of sad, my aunt shrugged in response. I hate her POETRY, I said. I picked at my avocado and smoked salmon and did not do so well at modulating my voice. Anyways, it’s more fun though sometimes risky to view measures of necessity as measures of languid experimentation. But nothing interesting happens when nothing gets better or nothing gets worse. And as already mentioned, I hate when things get worse.
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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