Drawing on the diary as a medium of both confessional interiority, and visceral engagement with the physical world - guest edits ask creative people to share What They Did and What You Should Do.
Introducing Brittany Deitch (The Internet Is Dead) (Substack) (Instagram)
I invited Brittany Deitch to contribute a guest edit after a friend sent me a screenshot from her interview with Matthew Gasda posted in the r/nycinfluencersnark - post titled “can someone please explain Dimes Square to me??” This is not a corner of the Internet in which I had high hopes of stumbling upon anything good, but in the interview in question, Brittany and co-host Sameera did, indeed, Unpack Dimes Square, along with questions ranging from the decline in literacy due to the internet, and how to fix the education system. Brittany describes the formation of The Internet Is Dead as rooted in stan culture, in growing up in stan culture, and in an interest in the way influences and interests formed through Growing Up Online become nearly inextricable from influences gleaned from Real Life. The Internet is Dead uses conversations with artists and creatives as a jumping off point to unpack what it means to be online, and through the human, unique, and often strange perspectives provided by these conversations, a snapshot of art and the internet emerges that is impressive in its ability to approximate a Full Picture. Brittany has also been accused of Killing Liam Payne (more on that in Byline soon)
Brittany is a writer with clips in Paste, Maudlin House, Rejection Letters, and No Bells. She writes the Substack the worst person in the world. She edits independent music press Ratpie Friends.
WHAT BRITTANY DEITCH DID
Monday, Feb 10th
I really miss you. I feel like everyone assumed that the Eagles were going to win the Super Bowl with no question and then they did. The waking up part after the Super Bowl was hanging over my head the whole last night. That I'd have to wake up after and accept that the day was behind me and I really did feel that awful. The Super Bowl makes me sad the way that Christmas does. And my birthday. My work gave us off today because of the great beloved Eagles, the christ-like saviors of the city. It's a good thing they weren't the ones born back then.
Everyone was celebrating the win and all I wanted was to be in there, happy and loved too but I couldn't get my body to move. The whole time it felt like I was just watching everybody else. And I couldn't stop checking Instagram for live updates on all the people I know but don't know enough anymore to physically be with. My ex hanging out with his 5 year on-and-off situationship.
Marielle and I go out in the morning so I can get Heather a Valentine's Day gift because she's taking me out to the expensive dinner that she was supposed to be taking her broke boyfriend to, who was supposed to plan the holiday's festivities himself— but he took too long, she chose the place, and they broke up. Two broke things there. Three now that I'm going with her.
I get a picture frame at Philly Aids for a picture of our bonded cats that I took and printed. It reminds me of my ex. And a pretty handmade heart mobile at Garlands of Letters. Outside the second store there's this spot to write prayers. A worn down gel pen and heart sticky notes with a bunch of wishes on them. I write the same thing that my ex once wrote for me at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, a Buddhist Temple we visited in the Catskills. Then Marielle writes for me what I wrote for him that he wrote for me. So then I write for Marielle what she wrote for me that I wrote for him that he wrote for me. Puncturing right through the heart to the wall with a thumb tack to stake it there. I like how someone can tell you one thing then it travels throughout the world and back, and then you're out there in places you never could've imagined. Hovering over the world somewhere. Like if you were hanging from the ceiling, putting everyone right to sleep.
We go to get warm in Chapterhouse Cafe on our way to our true destination. Then I see the girl he probably just had his dick inside sitting there at the exact table I normally take (when I tell the barista the next day he's like And At Your Table?!). Guys never run out of pretty girls to stick their dick inside. I get the feeling, seeing her, that I probably need to stop trying to find things out. I wish I didn't know everything with the click of a story post but I think I wanted to find out and probably wouldn't have stopped until I did. The more I think about him and worry what he is doing now without me— the more he's probably taking it the wrong way. Whatever way he is taking it, I'm sure it's the wrong one. She seems nice though. We look at each other for a second. There was a 20% chance it wasn't her.
To get my mind off it I read the script that has been sitting in my inbox since last Wednesday. It's "Zoomers," the play by Matthew Gasda, featured in The New York Times and Interview Magazine. He wants to do it in my living room. Or he doesn't. Later he reveals he wants me to do it in my living room with his virtual guidance, assembling my own cast and crew. I politely decline in our future emails due to conflicting commitments.
Tuesday, Feb 11th
It's my second therapy appointment with this new girl who my friend told me about. You lay on a table, she touches points of your body and tries to get you to be there, and you cry.
Sometimes you explain why. Sometimes you don't. There's a lot of silence.
She tells me that I need to think more about myself because everything I say is completely enmeshed in my connection to others and I tell her my ex thinks I'm selfish and she just gives me a look.
After the session I take out my laptop in the car and use my hotspot to respond to an email from Byline Byline. I've been trying to find a home for my essay How I Killed Liam Payne but I think all the publications are scared. They accepted it (I'm still scared they'll take it back, the way I always think they will until it actually goes live). I copy my Pages file into a Google Doc and fill out an author's profile with them and cling to the laptop with its palms facing up, and resting in it, a tiny silver key to the bracelet around my ankle. It's been hanging open since the new year, I keep having to adjust it every so often to keep it from falling off. Now it will finally be secure, enough to lock me in and submit me to the earth— finally grounding me.
I later sit at the same cafe I saw Dom's situationship at and end up playing checkers with the baristas and talking about religion until close with the one who said he was going to destroy me and I win every game. I kept saying how checkers was like a shrine. We walk to get pizza and I tell him how it seems unreal visually to see him outside of the cafe— like his body doesn't belong there because the cafe is the only location I've ever registered him. When we get back, I give the other barista, Zack, my pizza crust. We joke about how it looks fucked up and I post a picture to my Instagram story. My friend Spencer replies, later, when I'm home with Heather and my best friend Sameera, and says something about the crust and we go on for a few messages. So we call him on Instagram's ragged FaceTime and are like Can You Fuck Marry Kill Us? and he says no because he respects us too much and we all start sticking our fingers down our throats and making gagging noises. I say we have to go watch a movie and hangup. Then we hate-watch Claudia Sulewski's January vlog. I say I Hate How She's Always Making Stuff.
After all of this I carry my cat upstairs and shut my door and turn off all the lights. The snow stuck to the trees out my window and is a natural light to the pitch black. I'm not sure I ever noticed it so much before, when it snowed. It didn't snow last year in this house and this year I must have been busy. I hold my cat up so she can see out the window and say Look Bug, Isn't That Pretty? And then we fall asleep together.
Wednesday, Feb 12th
I wake up earlier than usual to mull over the same interview questions I've been looking at for the past week. In this time I sacrifice what it would normally take for me to eat and sustain myself with two protein bars. I get on a zoom call where Sameera and I will be talking to Eugene Kotlyarenko (director of Spree, Wobble Palace, The Code) about his internet movies for The Internet Is Dead Podcast. Once the call connects my co-host/best friend/Sameera and I yell at each other, in a quick attempt to say the craziest thing we can think of and piss the other off, then he logs on and we pretend it never happened (we do this every week). We're cool, like we were sitting patiently in the call for those five minutes. It goes well. He enters the call talking and leaves the call talking, first about the AI background he generated for a Mattel Pitching Craze where he tried to get them to let him do Magic 8 Ball but they thought he should do Jack-In-The-Box and then he was left with nothing in the end. I tell him how I found his movies when I was a teenager because of Spree's unique marketing campaign that I was obsessed with then, and he shares that it's something he did for his teenage self, who was obsessed with movies and would've died to see something like that. Addressing his now-self, he talks of the impact of the online space: "I feel like someone my age is the most damaged by this stuff— an older millennial. You have all these different reference points for experientially inside your consciousness and so you don't really know what sector of expectation to use." The full interview will go up on March 4th, 2025 on our YouTube channel.
I get a psychic reading with Nott later in the day, over text, and she helps me come back to myself a little bit. To remember what year it is and who I am and my tendency to sacrifice the way I'm seeing the world if someone I love tells me that it's wrong, because I rush to adapt. To quickly agree so that it can work. At some point in my past relationship, I began praying every night asking angels to rearrange my life for my highest good.
"I don't think you're codependent. I feel like you wanted your friend back," she says, explaining from her perspective that my ex boyfriend has grown bitter in order to magnify anything I did wrong, to hopefully balance out any negatives I saw in him. She says that he's projecting and acting on a defense mechanism. Despite my willingness to see him grow, she thinks that he left because the narrative in his head held no space for growth and he didn't like having to face the issues that were coming up. If I were to improve the relationship on my end and he didn't, "he'd have to admit it's a Him problem and not a You problem. He can't admit that, not even to himself— he is not ready to grow up. You question yourself on whether you’re doing the right thing or not, which is what he should be doing on a regular basis as well lol." I can't ever think she's right all the way. Because I was there too and if you were there then you were probably half of it. But Nott's perspective was helpful. It's easy to blame yourself when someone gives up so easily, and reason that they must've left because you fucked up big time. Or that the relationship became invaluable. It's easy to totally forget the things you knew were real while it was happening. So you hate me because you love me?
He used to always ask if we could cook something together, and I didn't really want to because I don't really like cooking. I wish they'd make little squares that you can swallow instead of eating but it does the same thing. Like there's no way I'm going to survive this life if I have to continue cooking for myself every single day. Yesterday I think if he asked me, I'd run inside the oven and let myself get eaten for dinner. Now, I'm not sure. At least I can be conflicting. At least I can be two things at once.
He texted me once that "love is like if something happened." I asked what he meant by it and then he said he didn't— that he just thought I'd like it.
Thursday, Feb 13th
Valentine's Day dinner with Heather at Emmett's at 9 o'clock at night. I haven't eaten since breakfast (I'm boycotting cooking again, sustaining myself on leftovers as often as possible as to maximize time). Most expensive place we've ever been so it's one with a real candle sitting on the middle of the table. Heather tries to make it go out with her eyes and then we both try together. I say we should visualize it going down into itself. It wobbles and cries and gets closer to that point when we decide to stop and do impressions of people we know. The girl serving us tells us it's nice to see that we've been laughing all night because everyone else who comes in is boring and rich.
After we pay, I go to post a photo of Heather with a song to my Instagram story, search for the best one, noticing that Spotify suggests a jam to join. Our Uber is one minute away so I click join and play a Dead Love Triangle song as we quickly put on our coats, gagging and hold back tears. We've been playing their music since 2022 because they're our favorite people to talk about (along with the entire rest of the city). We have never gotten over anything in our lives.
Friday, Feb 14th
I wake up feeling a little different today. Like I can get up and not think about what I'm missing. Besides when I cry because the stupid cop won't let me across the street at the Eagles Parade to get to my friend but then I bring myself to a nearby area of separate reign and get through behind a different group of people with a different cop and am able to reach Noah. I'm not sure I'm crying for what I am missing though. I kinda just break out with it for a minute. Because it always feels like someone is trying to keep me from something. The energy to go against drips out of me and I become it for a second. But inevitably, if you try to suppress a girl, she'll burst in every direction and become the feminine integration of global warming, surging the tides and making the city swimmable through a pool of rage. She can tread faster than she can walk. I've been thinking a lot about who I've become.
Once I get over there me and his friend talk about Neoliberalism for a while. The friend tells me about how the production of ice impacted capitalism and how refrigeration is supportive to a rise in class consciousness because it allows middle class people to make for themselves what rich people can get first-hand. He's all about class consciousness. I say that I feel like when people talk about this stuff they're all getting at the same idea but actually unable to touch at the exact goal to head towards and sum it up. I say it's psychotic that I can know what you know by listening to a podcast (he's in grad school). And I say that I feel like the Internet space and how people's perceptions work feels like one thing I can grasp (since politics itself is wider-spanning) so I learn a lot from online politics and where exactly the view is coming from and why someone is saying it (and, when they're saying something without fleshing out the point or why it matters) and he doesn't seem to care. Three hours later we watch a few buses pass by.
It's special how happy people get. I don't see people happy like that super often, and I understand deeply as I see it that people need things like this. Even though the parade is kinda like the cop parade. And the drunk corporate men parade, who get paid a ridiculous amount of money, like Taylor Swift (she's somebody's home too) except she doesn't beat her girlfriend. She occupies space with jet emissions but she told people to vote for Kamala (and to be fair, she's a girl who has had to constantly go against, too).
The friend says that the Eagles feel like the working class team at least.
At night there's Micah's dance recital. He gets me a free ticket because I think he knows I'm losing my mind right now. It would've been $30 but he says don't worry about it. He has talked about dancing for years, and it's often the default for his body when we are alone. When we'd take acid in 2021, he'd stimulate me and my first boyfriend by moving his body like fluid.
His mom tells me how she had taken him to see the same dance company perform at the same Annenburg Center for Penn Live Arts when he was eight. I have never gotten to fully understand what he had been talking about all those years or why his body was so quick to fall into those movements on random hangouts or psychedelic trips but now I realize that he has an entire architecture with thousands of buildings and landmarks and bodies of waters— reference points for something I have no idea about— creating him all the time. It's nice to see what he always meant.
There is an act within the full performance where the group of ten dancers are formed in a diagonal cluster, with one person as the forefront and the others a step back, and then another step on each side, and another, water-falling to an inner place. The shape is if you cut a diamond in half, so only the front, but it isn't a triangle because you know something is back there. They were possessed by something, each person taking a turn to run to the front of the cluster and seemingly trying to break free and reach something. The entire formation of ten is pulling on one another, hand in hand. The visual grasp towards something is what I think we were like at some point before we were taught to control our impulses. As the front person tugs and aches, the back keeps them restrained only to run to the front and become the one who needs something badly. I like how everyone has the same impulse inside them that's easy to help and disconnect from as an outer member until maddened by it themself, everyone equally subjected to the need once it's their turn.
Two people eventually pair off after this section. They pair off and hold each other and everyone else is gazing in amazement, drawn toward the sight of them flowing together and slithering against one another like bonded caterpillars or entangled rubber bands or scissors. Slowly walking off stage, defeated almost, the others droop their shoulders and stare at the single point (the temporary couple) as if it's making their mouth water. It feels like guidance, like a guiding force. And yet they walk away.
The dance choreography is by the Montreal company RUBBERBAND, which blends street dance with contemporary. It's dedicated to the research work of choreographer Victor Quijada. I go alone in my red ballet heels so that I can do something pretty by myself on Valentine's Day.
A lot of people are here for Micah. I tell him when he comes out to hug everyone at the end that it's obvious he is really loved. I can tell he hears this. What I witness makes me jealous but it's not dirty. It's beautiful.
I ask him if he and the other dancers laugh in secret during the performance. He tells me that they do. That sometimes he makes a joke and someone's lips quiver but they force themselves back into a straight face. I thought I saw Micah smiling up there for a split second but I couldn't tell if I was hallucinating it. He flung forward with this grin on his face, held by his arms and constrained backwards by the temporary partner in movement. I wondered if he was up there somehow laughing at me, that no matter how I wake up, I'll always go to sleep different.
Gavin's show afterwards where he's DJing and so is a podcast guy who he likes from Seeking Derangements. He pays me to take pictures and it gives me an excuse to go off on my own and approach people. Munroe, Sameera, and Heather are there with me. Gavin might be the first man in Philadelphia to take me seriously (He's the first one to actually pay me for photography work at a DIY show. Hopefully we'll become friends forever). It's probably because he knows the Perfectly Imperfect guy and The Dare.
Near the coat rack, Neil and I have a conversation about new internet and the crypto rave he went to on Inauguration Day. Dasha Nekrasova and Grimes were there. He tells me if I write a think-piece about his company then they'd notice me. Later I find these four people sitting in the corner under the stairs and three of them are jewish so we all celebrate. The girl and I go to the bathroom together. The brunette boy touches my leg and goes to Harvard for grad school. He smiles like my first boyfriend and he asks me a lot of questions. He asks what I've learned from writing about people and I'm drunk and he stares longingly into my eyes when I say that a general acceptance towards everyone would probably benefit humanity and I ask what he's learning in International Studies and he says that a general acceptance towards everyone would probably benefit humanity and he smiles softly. Heather makes a joke that I should move closer to the blonde boy so that we can flirt and he looks excited, then tells me he's been wanting to talk to me all night. I tell him There's No Way That's True, You Literally Just Saw Me. And he claims it's true. The girl asks me if I'm looking for a boyfriend and I wait a while to say I don't know, Maaaybeeee, even though I mean #NeverAgain.
WHAT BRITTANY DEITCH THINKS YOU SHOULD DO
Write about your relationships publicly.
Ask someone for their number at a bar then prank call them from the bathroom.
Pick a new favorite word (mine is "screener link").
Change your wifi password to the name of some guy you know vaguely from your local music scene and then when you see his girlfriend at the coffee shop whisper to your friend and say "sometimes you see a girl at coffee shop and she doesn't even know that her boyfriend's name is the name of your wifi and also a lot of your passwords for things." Sameera did this to me.
Pray.
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