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End of the Cold Front

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End of the Cold Front

WHAT I DID Thursday, January 23 It was past midnight and there would be a morning tomorrow, an early one for once, I set an alarm. I was walking past KGB and it was still bitter cold. No one milling on the steps so the place felt desolate but there was no way to really tell for sure without entering.

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WHAT I DID Thursday, January 23 It was past midnight and there would be a morning tomorrow, an early one for once, I set an alarm. I was walking past KGB and it was still bitter cold. It hadn’t gotten any warmer yet. No one milling on the steps so the place felt desolate but there was no way to really tell for sure without entering. You’d be out of your mind to loiter in this weather. The people were probably all inside. Everyone I know in New York, clustered in the Red Room like sardines. The KGB sign was all red and lit up, frost and ice crystallizing around it at a slight distance from the letters. The letters themselves were clear - incandescent heat off their light melting the ice in direct contact before it could solidify. Riley texted me when I was just too far from her apartment to turn back last night: “You left your Urbit hat. Do you want it?” “I do but later,” I said. “lol,” I said I didn’t even consider stopping. Not last night. The hat isn’t even mine. Later, I’ll retrieve it later. Each day that the cold front continues, I am enjoying it more and more. The tundra is so visceral. I hope we can stay like this, for a while at least. And so, it is morning. You’re up early. David is still sick but you’ve continued to avoid whatever he’s come down with this time. Leftover cookies on the counter. Cold brew in the fridge. You call a car because you lost track of time. You would have taken the F to the L, but it’s too late now. You aren’t used to having to track your mornings. It’s good, though, having some sense that the days progress linear-like. Good things keep happening to me, and I’m very grateful and; I’m very happy too. I try not to quantify too much. If I choose this, then imagine I lose that. I don’t want to do everything all at once. I’ve never possessed this desire. There is paralysis, though, sometimes, when I think about what I’m doing and therefore, by default, what I’m not. First day of my internship today. I like it a lot. First day of the semester yesterday. Very good. I take the subway home. I run a few miles. Thawing in the steam inside, but I’m sick of talking about how cold I’ve been, and particularly of how much I’ve been enjoying it. Writing a lot - maybe too much, honestly. Out of my head and into my body. I spend too much time alone and I become very dissociative. Vision blurring on the treadmill. Self indulgent. I yell a lot when I get home. It’s not important. There are worse things. Natasha and I go to Bar Veloce for drinks and a panini. “One second,” I say on the phone when we’re making plans, and then I hang up to yell, and then I am calm again and then I’m walking back through the frozen air, light and breastless in its dry frigidity. Inside Veloce it’s warm, orange lamps, thin and laminated menus, I get two martinis - extra dirty extra dry,” I say. I used to order it “vodka martini no vermouth with lots of olive juice”, but I’ve been trying the abridged version most people use lately, and it works just as well. I forget how many hours we’re at Veloce. Nice night. Quiet night. I tell Sophia I can bring her zyns for the opening of Doomers . I’ve been zyning lately. My bag is chock full of them. They make me dizzy in an unpleasant way. Even thirty minutes on the subway alone, and I start to feel disembodied and strange. It’s strange how many more people are reading my public diary now, even though I wrote it for this reason - to be public. I’m trying to write in a way that is honest, but I’m becoming too ethereal in my descriptions. This isn’t really true — me being ethereal that is. Natasha asks me what I think about transcendental meditation at dinner. “David Lynch’s cult?,” I ask. “They make you pay for it,” she says. “But their whole thing is clarity.” I perk up when I hear this bit. “I would pay,” I say. “Clarity has been your buzzword,” she says. “Where did you get that?,” she asks. “I realized I just didn’t have clarity and I wanted it,” I say. I still don’t have it, not really. Eating fontana truffle prosciutto grilled cheese with my martini. They kick us out at closing. Midnight, it’s still early. They froze our pipes about three hours ago. The ice fairies, I mean. The building will restore the pipes soon. “EMERGENCY” the email says. “Hello, Thief”, the flyers in Riley’s lobby say. You want to end things on a good note, but then the night goes awry. Friday, January 24 You think you will wake up in a haze, but you don’t. Bright light this morning. It is still morning, not yet early afternoon, although close enough. They turned the water back on in the night - sent the ice fairies flying back through the streets. The faucet lurches and then starts to spew all rust colored. All the drama of the evening becomes silly in the light of day, obviously. You put smooth serum on your face - sea buckthorn , La Roche Posay , Embryolisse . The rusty water has turned all clear again. Warmer today - weaving in and out of sanity, if I’m being honest. I decide to go to Massachusetts and then I decide against it. David brings me a white chocolate bear from Lil Lac. I run into him and the bear on the way back from the gym. “I got you a really stupid present,” he says. I call with the people in El Salvador in the afternoon - talking about things like The Art of The State. Red Light Therapy. I need to write my story. I need to start doing things like eating fresh fruit, drinking lots of water with things like added drops of Maldon sea salt. There’s the reading everyone is going to at EARTH tonight, but the line is too long. I hear that through the rumblings of people who are there before me. The line is way too long, and there are other things to do too but I stay put which is depressing, and rare for me, and I don’t do anything with the solitude except I am asleep the earliest I’ve been in years. Saturday, January 25 I knew I was going to get sick. It was only a matter of time, and I’m a little relieved that it’s finally here. It’s not too bad. My eyes sting, and I slept twelve hours. I slept peacefully though, no nightmares, a fever dulling whatever tripwires my mind most nights and so in this sense it’s kind of nice - the being sick. Someone asks me to write a story about ANTI REALITY - “I think of your writing as a sense of unreliability of perception,” they say. And so of course, I want to write about my nightmares, but I’ve been having fewer nightmares lately, and now I’m sick. I’ll have to think about this more, later. Honestly, I feel strange about putting these event calendars here, now that the other parts have for real become my public diary. I feel weird about putting up paywalls, but I don’t want SEO to find my Secret Thoughts. I started writing this in May, and I started writing about Everything I Did and Everything You Should Do, but now I kind of want to be doing less, or I want to be going to things because I know no one and not because I know everyone. I still feel so grateful to have places to go where I know everyone, and I do think you should go to these things, too. Creative things. Special things. Isolation is so sad and so lonely and I am so grateful that my life is mostly devoid of it. It’s like a fluke - not being isolated, I mean, but I’m not, and I feel very lucky for this. I go to a reading in Union Square tonight. Something for Casual Encounters and a new newspaper called Ummm. My illness dissipated as quickly as it arrived. I think I made myself sick because I cried a lot, if I’m being honest. But I’m fine now. I’m really relieved this happened, because it was only a matter of time, and because now it’s all fine. The reading is wonderful. I’m so happy all night. It’s in a beautiful apartment, dazzling, really, and I’m there early, embarrassingly early, and so be it out of pity or mistaken identity, I am given a tour. Here is the roof. Here is the room where the reading will be. Here is the artist’s studio. Here are fifty sculptures above the hallway, each sculpture is by a different artist, interpreting the same person in a different way, can you guess who the person is? Sam arrives during this part. “Hillary Clinton,” he guesses. He’s right. I like readings like this. One glass of orange wine and then water. I’ve been so cynical lately, but this feels lovely. Natasha arrives. Others, too. It’s a nice mix of people I know and people I don’t. It feels so easy for things to go wrong, but sometimes a night hovers just right. Sitting on the windowsill with David later, surveying the room. Up on a basketball court later, but I’m not smoking cigarettes these days. Sometimes glamor is just glamor and you don’t have to feel jaded to it. The theme of the newspaper is good - umm… exercise. And this is really the root of it all, isn’t it? You run, you write, there are other things, too, but this has always been the crux of things for me. This, and then hedonism, sometimes. “I’m going to make you a french omelette with parsley and guanciale and three eggs,” David tells me at home. “And it’s going to be the best omelette you’ve ever had.” “Was the omelette pretty decent,” David asks later. Davids’s Decent Omelette Suddenly, all my music is new. The things we’re playing over and over again - they’re songs I’ve never heard before. This means my nostalgia for this time will be different - new emotions recollected when I revisit images of now, as compared to in the months before. I feel silly and cheap reflecting on things like this - future nostalgia, imagining the contemporary as a memory. It’s a slightly drunken conversation. There is no feasible counter culture anymore, no zeitgeist to seize in a think piece, interest draws towards the interior. This doesn’t have to be narcissistic if done well. It’s a little narcissistic, in my case. I keep on listening to these songs, over and over and over again. - Home - Kinlaw - Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. - Simon & Garfunkel - Perfect Stranger - FKA Twigs - Starburned and Unkissed - Caroline Polachek - The Mechanic - Kinlaw - Visions of Salome - Archibald Joyce WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, January 27 - From 7pm at The Sanctuary @ St Mark’s Church — The Poetry Project presents Gary Indiana: Memorial Celebration. - From 7pm at Pubkey — Notch Magazine hosts an artist / writer / music workshop surrounding ISSUE 002: GRAVITY. Prompts will be provided, with an option to submit for publication. Finalists (and one lucky winner) will be selected. - From 7:30pm at Seventh Heaven — A week of David Lynch continues, with a screening of Lost Highways (1997). Last night was Mulholland Drive (2001) night, and while I was not in attendance, I watched at home and made me want to continue the Lynchian Streak. Come pay tribute. Tuesday, January 28 - From 6pm at Rizzoli Bookstore — Charlie Engman and Gideon Jacobs discuss Engman’s new book Cursed - using the text as a springboard from which to discuss AI, images, visual culture, etc. - From 7pm at Sovereign House — One Man Army presents Paradise SHREDition Vol 7 - a steamy, sultry, celebration of erotic films, and a mixer to follow. - From 8pm at GONZO’S — Alex Arthur hosts Karaoke Hero. It looks like this might become a recurring event - “Tuesdays, when we feel like it.” - From 8:30pm - 12am — Whitney Museum of Art celebrates Art Party 2025 , as The Whitney is transformed into Studio 99. Theme is disco (it’s a disco heavy week), and the host committee includes Emmeline Clein , Sarah Harrelson , Kit Keenan , Lily Lady , Matt Weinberger , and more. - From 11pm - 3am — Kiki Kramer is hosting at Paul’s Cocktail Lounge Wednesday, January 29 - From 7pm at McNally Jackson Seaport — After Hours Book Club ” discusses Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo . This is sold as “a party where everyone has read the same book.” It seems that at most parties these days, most people have read this book, but if you’re looking for an opportunity to talk about it… - From 7pm - 9pm at Mood Ring — FSG x MCD and Document Journal present The Wickedest book launch ; “a chronicle of one unforgettable night at a legendary South London house party.” - From 8pm at Nublu — Free Dimensions hosts a concert with Warren Trae, Crudup + Chris Williams, Universal Space Jam, and Jadalareign. Free Dimensions is “a new collaborative concert series of dedicated curator-artists seeking to form a space for consistent creativity.” Thursday, January 30 - From 6:30 at McNally Jackson Seaport — One Story , Epiphany , The Drift , Lampblack , The Paris Review and A Public Space come together for A Lit Mag Mixer . “Stay for a drink, talk books, meet the editors, and flip through the magazines’ most recent issues.” - From 6:30 - 9:30 at Olfactory Art Keller — Viscose Journal celebrates the NYC launch of Issue N° 7 “SCENT”, with contributes Jessica Murphy, Whitney Mallet, Olivia Kan-Sperling, Andreas Keller, Ro Mille, and more. - From 8pm at KGB — TENSE returns with the event of the winter - WINTER DISCO DRAMA . Readings and performances by Christian Lorentzen, Nico Walker, Magdalene Taylor, Beckett Rosset, and more. Disco dance party

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