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Santa Teresa

16 min read

Santa Teresa

WHAT I DID Thursday, April 3 “The good thing about having a boyfriend who’s in a cult,” I tell my mother on the phone, “is you can always just go anywhere in the world where there will always just be a strange house full of strange people and you can always just stay a while.” “but he’s not in a cult,” my mother says. “He just works in tech with a lot of digital nomads.” “right,” I say, which is exactly what someone

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WHAT I DID Thursday, April 3 “The good thing about having a boyfriend who’s in a cult,” I tell my mother on the phone, “is you can always just go anywhere in the world where there will always just be a strange house full of strange people and you can always just stay a while.” “but he’s not in a cult,” my mother says. She sounds very sincere. “He just works in tech with a lot of digital nomads.” “right,” I say, which is exactly what someone who was being indoctrinated into a cult would say. I decided to leave again. I couldn’t quiet my mind here. That was a lot of it, at least. And yeah I mean, mostly the thing is I just want to walk and run and write and I think I should learn everything there is to learn about the disciplines that strike me the most. I want to really get into the syntax of it all. Get obsessive compulsive with it. There is the Big Thing I am working on, and I put it aside for a while to deal with triviality. A while being a week, really. The week where I performed at the party, took long walks then dinner then bar then I lent sheets to a friend who forgot to pick up her laundry and then I went to another party, the type of party that I usually would have been so resistant to attend but I went and I liked it this week. They read screenplays aloud the next day and I sat on the roof, I sat in the vintage market, I sat in the restaurant with negronis on tap which felt so foreign to me so Brooklyn instead of Manhattan and I felt pretty proud of myself for staying here all alone, actually. Then, I started dealing in triviality and my sense of pride was replaced with a sense of disgust. It wasn’t so bad. The issue was mostly, just - I couldn’t quiet my mind. But, it’s a sleepy rainy early morning nearing Newark Airport and as I leave, everything is becoming clear again. Like I’ve been so gluttonous - like with money and alcohol and my iPhone and the type of information I give away and the types of things I divulge, like sometimes I divulge a secret before I even know if I mean it, and sometimes I’m awfully quick to indulge myself, honestly, which is a pretty bad sin, one of the worst I think. Seeking: shock value, I guess. It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between Drama and Confession but sometimes you sit in a taxi cab and you draw very clear lines in the sand. I want: bread and water. Very simple things. I want to sit in a quiet room and write a story I am sure is true and if something is only good when diluted by glamor, drinks, you know the sort of things then, well, then I’d like to give it a fucking rest. Friday, April 4 It’s been such a haze since arriving in Costa Rica and at first I felt strange about it, like this isn’t Good Behavior, treating a Big Trip kind of glibly, feeling a bit pouty and out of sorts and letting myself just be whisked away like it’s nothing, when really it’s never nothing, when really it’s always touch and go and particularly something like this should make me feel ecstatic. Though, I kind of do feel ecstatic. I never really do become jaded. I quantify and calculate it all far too much to take anything for granted. You do kind of feel like you’re floating, though. Cold beer to clutch between my knees on the sea plane that starts up all shaky and then scares me less even than a commercial plane because I can see into the cockpit and I can get the sense of how these pilots are navigating this thing. A cloud is just a cloud. I’ve been using too many words to inadequately explain myself. Send some bizarre texts upon landing that I hope will be encoded with… what, exactly? But, you’re in the jungle when you land. The sea plane slipped over the rainforest and then slipped out to sea, into the clouds. This part made me a bit nervous because there was nothing to spot except the horizon ahead. The scary part didn’t last too long. Peninsula de Nicoya. Thick brambled forest by a single black tarmac. David sent me a video when he got here last week. The Jungle, he said, and now it’s like a hologram seeing it here myself. I really wasn’t going to come here. Two A.M. last night and the flights were so cheap that it felt like a glitch or something and then all I had to do was decide, ok, and then everything else was taken care of. There’s a driver at the gate for me. CHLOE, the sign says. That’s me, I say, and I point to the sign. I don’t know why I said it like that. It’s a different vibe at the house here than in El Salvador. Surfer spiritualism over techno spiritualism. The aura here makes me feel significantly calmer. Because I am someone who accounts for danger at every turn (neurotic) I can remember being twelve or thirteen somewhere around here, handed a stick to ward off snakes at night, warned that don’t you dare touch the frogs, the ants, they told me, fall screeching from the trees and it feels like a bullet wound when they bite you. But, “there is nothing actually scary here,” David’s friend tells me. “The main thing you have to worry about are these.” He shows me a picture of a scorpion. He tells me that the sting hurts a little, but after that the main thing is it makes your body feel all electric. “People sting themselves on purpose to get high,” David’s friends tell me. “They make you high???” I ask. One of the only things that scares me more than getting hurt is getting high. “No, not really,” David’s friend says. When I got here it felt kind of like I’d been teleported. David was there with an ATV where the car dropped me off, up a dirt road, by some stables and then he said - this might scare you but no backseat driving and then we roared up a mountain, nighttime already, I was left in a room in the hills in the jungle alone while the others offroad up and down and up and down until everyone was here for dinner. You can see the stars in a way that is so special here. I’d been told about this part, but it’s better to see for yourself. You couldn’t make out what parts were ocean and what parts were horizon but you could see that the darkness was placid and lovely and it stretched out quite some ways. You could see where there were villages, because lights close to the ground edged up against the stars in the sky but lacking any visual markers to ground them, these villages appeared to be hovering, unmoored. “You’ll be able to see the ocean in the morning,” David told me. So, in the morning, I thought, I will be able to distinguish which parts are ocean, and which parts are sky. Saturday, April 5 In the morning, there is a gecko on the ceiling and a dog outside my door. Chat GPT got way better overnight, I am told. It’s harder for me to suss out the vibe here. They are bullish on AI, but they are hesitant about some of the other stuff. We’re not really doing much of the hacker house stuff anyways, this time, though. Back down the mountain, and we’re in a hotel, and there’s surfer girls with pretty hair in pretty dresses dancing barefoot in all the nightclubs here. The heat makes a run in the morning unbearable. Even the walk to the shop is heavy and thick but I don’t mind this. The only thing I do every single morning is walk for an hour and write while I walk, but the heat makes this hard. It’s ok, because I can float instead. Yerba mate and corona extra and white claw and paloma in a can and redbull green and coconut water all stacked side by side in the shop, but I leave empty handed. Before, we got cold brew mixed with orange juice and a cashew avocado tart at a cafe run by the girlfriend of one of David’s friends. Since I tried it out and basically just became an alcoholic bartending my way around Eastern Europe at eighteen, I have kind of found the whole nomad thing to be spiritually ugly. Like it’s something for mid thirties men that look older from the partying who stop you in back alleys in Croatia and tell you things like the key to it all is to never buy a couch. And they would say it like you were supposed to really get it. And you did get it, you got what they meant by it at least, but the thought was just a bit half baked and unconvincing. Ok, so, I wouldn’t buy a couch but then what? Then what would I do? What should I do? I didn’t want to stay listless and skimming the surface forever. New York is kind of empty too when you aren’t living at least a little bit gently, and so these are the different pieces I am trying to parse out. I would stay here for a while with a project. David drops a chip on the beach lined with hermit crabs and he creates this huge commotion. Anarchy, really. All the little crabs begin to rip each other to shreds. “I hope the big one comes in and destroys them all,” David says, regarding the hermit crab pile-on situation. There’s not really any metaphor here, he’s just being vaguely sadistic. It does happen as you would expect. One big hermit crab sees its opportunity, identifies his leg up in this whole situation or perhaps, they aren’t the brightest creatures, perhaps it just wants to try its lot at the prize like all the others and is surprised to find itself emerge victorious. He makes a clean break with the chip down the beach. The crabs kind of look like spiders from my vantage point. A mass of little tendrils for legs chasing after someone six times their size. They all have the death drive, because when they do catch up, it’s not good news for any animal involved. An underdog swoops in and gets the chip. I don’t know, I lose sight of it all. You have a target on your back when carrying the bounty though. If I was a hermit crab, I wouldn’t risk it. I put my head underwater in the ocean to get myself sorted. I walk back through a little bit of jungle and then past the fishermen in Malpaís while David turns around the ATV. Soles of my shoes are all sticky on the pavement. Herd of goats in the road. The heat makes all my thoughts become all slippery and smooth. If I spent a month here, I could learn how to become all tan and bendy and strong. Sometimes, I become slippery and smooth. I could spend the first part of my month learning how to notice when my mind becomes like this, and I could spend the second part learning how to make the feeling last. I would stay here for a while with a project… WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, April 10 - From 6pm - 8pm at Blade Study — Clare Koury presents the opening of solo exhibition Scaling Laws For An Open EnTrainment Structure . With this installation, Clare Koury is addressing the part of the color spectrum that eyes don’t see. - From 6pm at Susan Inglett Gallery —- On The Rag launches issue 003: Manifesto. Featuring readings by Courtney Connolly, Maya Kotomori, Qingyuan Deng, and Becket Gourlay. Attendees will also be invited to orate an original manifesto or read a personal favorite! - From 8pm - late at Ella Funt — Club Chess returns - going Classic Mode - From 9pm at Chico Grande — Meg Spectre hosts Karaoke with Meg! Friday, April 11 - From 6pm - 8pm at 24 Rutgers Street – Foreign Domestic and Alyssa Davis Gallery present a solo exhibition by Genevieve Goffman , featuring the artist’s most ambitious work to date - “ all the words that came down to meet the body that came up from the ground .” - From 6pm - 9pm at Howl! Happening — Tom Murrin “The Alien Comic” opens with a Full Pink Moon reception. Howl is a very cool beatnik era gallery, one of the last remaining relics of the Pyramid Club days. Very worth visiting. - From 8pm at 131 E. 10th Street — The Poetry Project presents Psychoanalysis and Poetry with Hannah Zeavin and Jamieson Webster - “What is psychoanalysis as a mode of linguistic experimentation? What is poetry as an engagement with the unconscious, desire, madness, and treatment?” | the event will be live-streamed if you (like me) cannot make it in person that evening. - From 9pm - late at Shinsen —To The Floor Launch Party, hosted by Sam Besca, Leg5, Page Garcia and more. Sounds by Charlie Dunn, Olivia Jones, Phantaseaaa and more. Photos by Anna Robertson and more. - The Suede Hello will be live on a Chinatown rooftop! DM thesuedehello for address. Saturday, April 12 - From 7pm - 9:30pm at Williamsburg Art & Historical Center — A Bath of Approbation performs - the latest collaboration between Roman D’Ambrosio and Peter Dizozza. - “This haunting and thought-provoking drama unfolds across two time periods—1891 and 2023—within the same lakeside cottage on Lake Bodensee. The play explores the legacy of a renowned writer who once lived—and mysteriously died—in the cottage. More than a century later, four new visitors arrive, unknowingly stepping into parallel roles across time.” Sunday, April 13 - From 7pm at KGB — Nefarious Russians (Evgenia Kovda & Yasha Levine) host Against Nihilism - “Evgenia and Yasha discuss the nihilism that’s on the rise in the USA today and how it does not signify any sort of cultural or political renewal. Rather it is a sign of decline, like it was in the late USSR.” - It’s not Sunday without Confessions

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