Monday

The warm winds and full moons sent white flowers drifting into my turtle pond and now it’s just impounded. I keep on thinking about cupping my palms into a perfect heart shaped bowl and scooping all that pollen up with such great grip strength that the powder emerges dry and the drains are left all clear. I walk fast in the courtyard because there’s nothing left to be done. Hot wind and full moons is what people who believe in signs and symbols attribute to upswings in seasonal homicides. I keep on perching on the bathroom sinks at The Marlton Hotel and saying Bloody Mary five times. When the fire alarm goes off in the lobby, I clench my fists shut and I pray I didn’t make that happen with my mind. I study everyone’s blank faces over iced coffee and fluorescent sirens and feel like one of the nothing-ever-happens-guys-online or maybe Hera from The Iliad if she was less cunning and powerful. It has been a little bit like reaching the end of the road this week. It has been a little like falling off the edge of the earth.

Collecting oneself is like momentum breeds momentum. I follow my friends’ avatars like I’m the zodiac killer of hanging out. I go up and down the stairs for trashbags, celsius, helmut lang, turtle pond. I take twelve hours to fill twelve minutes. I sit on chipped white sink and meditate on: nothing in this room means anything. I listen to a voice on my phone that tells me to relinquish everything a-million-times. I want everything analog. I am an American. I manifest a physical reality.

Tuesday

I leave the house at three pm and stop on Canal Street for diet coke and cool minty zyn. The air is warm and the wind is warm too which is how I like it best. The spider on the sidewalk has a red-hour-glass underbelly, so I’m vindicated that the danger was real. Olivia lives one flight of stairs above New York City walk-ups legal limits, and I count the landings up to six. I sit on the edge of Olivia’s bed wearing her red dress while she looks for a tax info form and unearths old relics like; a portrait from a gallery show in Japan, and a flyer from the church where her parents got married, and a blessing or maybe a hex that a women made her at the Odeon and the film01 poster painted over with acrylic. At the reading last night, I stood on stage and read fiction. I did not know you write fiction, Olivia says. I write fiction, I affirm. Olivia sits on her floor and shows me old stories from old papers that she pulls out from drawers and floats down towards the ground. The papers pool around our feet and over the fabric of her dress that pools over the floor. Olivia shows me her old story from inside Numbers Mag.

Her insides so corroded with sin on such a variety of fronts, the story says.

Her insides so corroded with sin on such a variety of fronts, I sigh.

I used to type shit up, Olivia says. I used to be mad poetic, she says. We used to use words and letters and symbols and numbers and signs.

I leave to go to [redacted], I tell Olivia. Don’t go to [redacted] go to mass instead, Olivia tells me. I have to go to [redacted] I say. Okay, Olivia says. Okay whatever sure, she says. Olivia wonders if her tax documents are inside her copy of ‘Being and Time’ by Heidegger. Put this shit in your blog, Olivia says. Found, W2, inside Being and Time.

Wednesday

The M train is delayed and so I storm through Chinatown in brown Frye boots feeling pretty aware of the pollen in the air and in the water and, as if canaries in the coal mine, the turtles in my pond have taken to piling over each other on small stones in the sun to escape the flower dust that’s clogging up the drains. The animals are hoping to avoid suffocation and anaphylactic shock, too. I’m walking fast and everything’s become kind of like a game. In the game, I can’t be dyonisun anymore. In the game, I’m not allowed to go full Bacchus mode, Venetian mask mode, ruled by chaos and partying beautifully til option A: death or option B: it’s not beautiful anymore. The alleyways of Chinatown are long and narrow, and I thought I knew these streets like back-of-hand, but new wine bars keep on popping up in front of my eyes. Round the corner, and the stores articulate themselves one by one like pixels that clarify when your avatar goes fast. I’m so good at going fast. I only feel reactive when I feel full of rotted club sandwich and tequila sunrise. Otherwise, now, I feel totally sane.

Deli for dinner and it’s diet cherry coke. An old man in line looks at the sparkling copy of my untouched book in line and then he asks me if I’ve read The Iliad before. I nod before I can think better of it. He asks me how many times Ive read the book and I hold up fingers saying “two” which is a lie. I should have held up fingers in a fist saying “zero”, but I am feeling kind of meek. The old man whistles and he tells me that the book is great. He scrolls Hinge while waiting for his sandwich and he says he wishes my diet-cherry-cola was made with the real thing. Maybe she just likes it better her way, the deli guy behind the counter says. I like it better this way, I affirm. The deli is pale and kind of analog and just-the-way-I-like-it. I don’t know why the other characters are antagonizing-slash-defending me in my analog-world. I like that there are other characters. In every movie, something interesting happens when the protagonist is sliding open the frosted glass doors of the backlit fridge, and locking in to procure some bodega-beer.

The streets are still open around Le Dive, and I drink ginger beer while I wait for Talia to arrive. French fries and olives to wash down diet-cherry-cola dinner, and now it’s time to do more walking around. Talia wears a silk scarf top and has a good head on her shoulders. Talia is more perceptive than reactive with a cheerful disposition, which among other things, is what makes a person great. We trace the same triangles on foot, which goes like

twenty-thousand-steps between the hours of seven and three am every day. We go down Bowery and to Beverly’s and to brand-new-social club and the air is still warm, though the wind is cooling down and this part chills everyone out a bit. I used to only be able to write while walking fast, but recently the information intake has started to become a bit too rapid to jot down. None of the details are so interesting. It’s like in prestige-TV like Mad Men where they skip hours and days and months to articulate a life that ultimately does not get defined in details, but I’m still feeling so obsessed with filling in the dots. The game now is to make the pixels go kind of warp speed.

Thursday

Propped my iphone 5c on the white and plastic windowsill, and now it’s running b-roll. I film myself talking on front-cam so I can better understand the way my face moves and I decide I like things best stock-still. Iphone 5c glowing like a little star cast against plastic white windowsill and dark night, and I’m watching myself speak with one-second-lag like I’m Narcissus cursed by Nemesis and I can’t look away as punishment for chattering too loudly. I wish I used to understand everything that I understand now, but feeling smart is much more fun when one was feeling stupid for the months before. I’m staring out my window and all I can see is phone and face and so I guess I’m just staring at my own reflection because I keep on getting stuck there. Beyond my reflection, there is my phone. Beyond my phone, there is a window, and beyond the window there is a brick wall. Beyond the brick wall, well one can only imagine. Night sky and Hudson River. My window does not face the river and so I can’t really pacify myself with visions of everything crumbling down and revealing totally boundless horizons of wind and sky and water.

When my roof was glass, I would watch the planes fly in the sky overhead and imagine all their engines failing one by one. I would sit on the roof and imagine Jet Blue commercial flights as fighter jets and they were coming straight towards me. I kept flinching, in the rain, on the roof, last spring, every time a plane blinked overhead and Matthew was looking at everyone but me and saying; it’s too bad she’s so crazy. The glass apartment was cursed and the past and future occupants thought so too, which I think must have something to do with vantage points. Like if a helicopter plunged into the Hudson river, you’d be able to see it but not hear it and you’d watch it silently sink, which is a morbid yet inevitable thing to imagine if you’re floating in Soho skies. Seeing everything and hearing nothing. At the short film screening yesterday, I liked the one about suburbia and nine-eleven best. I liked how they depicted the explosion as a smokeless and quiet dissipation into dust, leaving some kids behind with no memories and a panopticoned apartment, and a hacker scheme vis-a-viz the White Castle website

Friday

Celia gets galleys of books for free, and she reads them voraciously and then gives them to me. She gives me a copy of Marlene Haushofer’s The Fifth Year, and I’m pleased to discover it’s a thin little book about a child in the mountains of Switzerland. Celia is partial to writing stories about children in mountains in Switzerland, and sometimes I am partial to doing the same, perhaps out of mimicry or maybe it’s just shared lived-experience. You’ll love this book, Celia says, and I’m glad to find I can tear right through it. The Fifth Year is the perfect book for girls-who-are-just-getting-back-into-reading. Marlen Haushofer is the perfect author for disappearing-girls on the cusp of whole-new-lives. In the novel, the child is concerned when her housekeeper tells her that dreams disappear because they are just made of froth. Someday, she decides, she will know what the word froth means. I decided to let this week descend basically into froth. This is fine. It is windy and warm and one cannot transform everything all at once.

Directory: The Illiad, Women’s Work (The First 20,000 years), The Fifth Year, Iphone 5c, The Marlton Hotel, Le Dive, Beverly’s, Ginger Beer, Diet Cherry Coke, Numbers Mag, Bloody Mary

Friday, April 24

• From 6pm - 8pm at Lomex Gallery — Yoshitaka Amano Time and Light opens - “a series of large scale works on panel alongside a selection of important lithographs. This exhibition coincides with a multi-month retrospective at The Warehouse Dallas Art Foundation.

• From 7pm at The Roxy — Pretty Ugly: The Story of The Lunachicks screens, with a Q&A with filmmaker Ilya Chaiken and Lunachicks members Theo Kogan, Syd Silver, Gina Volpe, Chip English & Sindi Benezra following the screening.

• LOS ANGELES - From 7pm at Rainbow Bar and Grill — Girl Insides reads alongside Worst Boyfriend Ever. Good and evil. The male and female id. A historic Los Angeles location. Etc. | RSVP here

Saturday, April 25

• From 6:30pm at Night Club 101 — Pleasure Seeking presents Plan B: Stories of Desire and Disruption. Ft readings by Camille Sojit Pejcha, Magdalene Taylor, Noelle Perdue, Sophia June, Emily Ceibert, Celina Reboyras, Alessandra Schade, and Mackenzie Thomas.

• From 10pm - late 6 Platt St… Don’t Ask Don’t Tell presents NK TURNS 24. Music by Bdgrlbklyn, Danny Cole, number1fairytale and more.

Sunday, April 26

• From 6pm at Night Club 101 — Bonzo Presents: Get Born Dance - a micropera by Body Liars. Opening reading by Zack Borzone. | Tickets here

Sunday

Before the Easter Vigil, my father recited the New Testament out loud in Greek at The Knickerbocker Bar and Grill, and he asked us about things like free will and theology and have we considered the new female translation of The Iliad and what is life like these days in N.Y.C. I ate caviar pie and no wine because it was important to be of sober mind for later. The caviar tinged the cream cheese in the dish neon blue, and we all talked longingly about this restaurant’s legendary ribeye-for-one, though no one was feeling particularly gluttonous that evening. After dinner, Joe and Quinn and I walked over to the church, and then my father followed a few minutes behind. The park was tinged in blue hour dusk, though it was more gray that evening on account of the rain. On the steps of the church, there was a big burning fire, and inside, the church was completely dark. Later, there was candle light and then brighter light. Everything can be born anew if you let it. I did not like the …

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Friday

Black coffee in blue ceramic mug flying in. Bermuda is not a place I think that I could live, but I would be good at staying for a while. Coral Beach feels pretty contained and pretty much like paradise, and it certainly seems like the sort of place that is good for coming back. An old man wearing white and pink met me with a smile outside of double-breasted big oak doors when I arrived and he was encased in tons of sun. First time here? he asked. Yes, I said. I’ve been coming here for thirty years, he said. I forgot to ask him where he’s from, which I did not regret until a few days later. Under normal circumstances, I’m so good at finding intrigue in mundanities. I’m so good at inserting myself in strangers’ lives.

My vacation logs from last year were all about staying for a while. Staying for forever. Boundless energy and lots of indignation. Last year, I was so addicted to going on vacation. Escapism. Voyeurism. Lock me and all my friends in a bookish hotel and see what gives. Miami-beach, two-week-life, abundance-mindset, manic-episode. Is this vacation for the sake of fun, or is this a vacation about being transgressive and weird, Amelia’s dad used to ask Amelia. Is this vacation for the sake of fun, or for the sake of being transgressive and weird, Amelia used to ask me

The end of March this year, and I was feeling so good at here-there-everywhere. I went to Washington DC to expedite the process and then I went to Atlantic City to find a new addiction. I went to Bermuda, to find everything old school and sweet. Dry out. Tennis lessons. Diet-ginger-beer-moscow-mule. Bluest-water-I-have-ever-seen. All windy on the Western Front.

I told my little sister that it’s harder to self mythologize family vacation. My mother called me twice to say she hoped I had a beautiful time. I packed a lot of resort wear before I went to Bermuda. I purchased purple Love Shack Fancy and white Tory Burch Sport at ninety-four percent markdown from TheRealReal.com. The dress code at Coral Beach and Tennis Club advised guests to dress in “smart” and “smart casual” and “beach” and “white-on-the-courts” attire. The dress code varied depending on your elevation at the club. It seemed that every time I ascended or descended a level on stairs built into ocean cliffs, the rules would change. I was feeling good at codes and symbols and numbers and rules, and so I liked the game-theory and paleo-conservative nature of these guidelines. I packed sandals and red-light-therapy and iodine and Ouai curl cream and The Iliad Companion, with intent to keep up with girl-book-club and social-norms and my-skincare-routine.

Bermuda is so close by, and JFK was so crowded and my little sister called at five-am to remind me I was running late. My friends and family had become so good at giving me reminders. I was feeling so zen in the airport because I’m so good at teleporting. I’m so good at closing my eyes in line. TSA-agents and taxi-drivers and my more-mature-than-me little sister told me where to go and what to do and how to drag a rolling suitcase through hordes of people and over lint-filled carpets and down runway plane aisles. Bermuda airlines. Resort wear collection. Barely-there cloud cover. I missed plane one and caught plane two. I still touched down in time for tea time, and with thirty minutes left to say hello to thirty-eight members of my friends and family. ¼ tea sandwich (ham, cheese, white bread), ¼ M&M cookie, black tea

Bermuda is so great. The water is brilliantly blue, and the pastel houses and narrow roads feel very self contained. I felt myself come back to life the moment that I landed. I was jumping up and down in the airport saying I’m-so-happy-I’m-so-happy, which is what I always do when I touch down in real-life spring-break. I was being subtle in my enthusiasm, because I was flying by myself. Bermuda didn’t smell like jungle, and I didn’t take a seaplane. I don’t know why I expect one thing to always remind me of another. It’s not tropical, my driver reminded me. Edwin held a sign with my name on it and he found me standing by the baggage carousel promptly.

Bermuda smelled like everything calm and warm and sweet. We tore out of the airport and then over the causeway, and I rolled down the windows for proximity to the rocks and tidepools and calm blue ocean that stretched out on either side. The water is very beautiful, I told Edwin. Thank you, Edwin told me. Then, he laughed to both me and himself. It’s like I made it myself, he said. Edwin told me about the place where one ocean becomes another, not due to land masses or geopolitical boundaries or even mounds of sand, but just as a result of currents that meet and tie themselves in knots and never change or cross. Like oil and water but it’s all just water, Edwin said. Water all the way down.

Bermuda smells like something I can’t quite place, which is probably why the island feels quite self contained. The rooms at Coral Beach and Tennis club are located in the wings of the clubhouse and though variable by size, all promise to exude the same Bermuda charm. The buildings are dark wood and sometimes open air and the grand pianos and parrot cages and traditional interiors contrast beautifully with the bright blue ocean, particularly when it is stormy. My little sister noticed many things in our small, precise and sweet room, like the crosses made of palm and the white robes and vanilla shampoo and sun drenched patio we had all to ourselves. I noticed the ceiling fan spinning round and round, and the small thatched windows looking out on all that ocean.

I kind of wish I brought [redacted], I told my little sister, after she climbed up from the beach and the rock cliffs and dripped salt all over the wooden doorstep and returned before sunset just so she could say hello. My sister started laughing really hard at that. I was facing towards the closet, but I could see her laughing hard behind me in the mirror. You say that like I kind of wish I brought my speedo, my little sister said. Then, I started laughing too.

I told my little sister that she was looking great. She wore a blue striped dress to the big chess board and struggled to lift pieces bigger than her. She led the way down pink stone steps to the tucked-away pool and tennis courts and the only place here from which we couldn’t see the ocean, and so we didn’t stay for long. She took me down to the rock cliffs by the water, where the steps carved into their interface give way to green brambles the higher up you go. When you’re high enough up, the water below starts to look so tempting. It starts to look like if you jumped, you’d make it. There’s a landing pad of sand and rock that separates the cliff from the water so of course, one cannot jump and one knows this if approaching the cliff from sea level, but I wonder what might happen if one approached these cliffs from the top. If you stumbled out of the brambles to find yourself right on the edge of this cliff, you’d look out over all that water and all that sky and you would see no landing pad at all. The water looked deep and blue and close from high up. I wished I could go cliff diving, but I was already wisened up about all those rocks.

At dinner, we say rose-bud-thorns and everyone’s rose is being-here-with-everyone-else, or returning to the same places again and again. It is my first time here, but I don’t have object permanence and so I keep on forgetting. I don’t have object permanence, and so I keep on wanting to talk about things I’ve seen before. There is a big meal and lots of stars and none of the forest or mythic or mysterious sounds that scared off the Spanish when they arrived here in 1505. Sip of sister’s rum punch. Lemon gimlet. buffet dinner with caesar salad, penne, gnocchi. White fish (uneaten). Deviled egg. Mini profiterole. Samples of bread pudding, berry tart.

Trivia night in the game room. Waves are loud outside. Sparkling water with lime. Leave early.

Saturday

Last year, I skipped family vacation to land in the jungle and self mythologize. The seaplane was smooth and the shrubbery was so thick. I salted my vodka sodas and rode through rivers on an ATV. I was taken to a huge glass house on the top of a big mountain where I had never been or even expected to go. The house was endless, with an open kitchen on the patio and a pool and peptides and a dog and stars on the horizon. Looking out at night when I arrived, I could not see where the ocean met the sky. There was lots of steak to grill and coconut water and vegetables and even built-in-friends. Suspended bridges connected all the guest rooms, and so I felt kind of magical walking around at night and floating over jungle thickets. The dog was cute, but he howled all night. No one else seemed to find the wild sounds and heavy air and constant buzz to be so transfixing. I spent most of the week walking the same stretch of road up and down, watching horses escape from pasture and fishermen take boats in and out of smooth-waved water at sunset, and I discovered a magical beach all for myself at dusk, one evening. I felt incredibly breathless, surrounded by all that humidity and all those sounds. A constant humming and it was all real life. A constant danger but I tried to not be scared of scorpions and going fast. They sent me photos from Bermuda while I was sitting in the jungle last year, and I remember feeling a little bit lonely and a little bit happy. In Bermuda, now, it smells like freesia and oleander and cedar wood and gentle salt, and the sounds of waves are distant and rhythmic and nothing is that naturally wide-eyed or wild. There are nice sorts of sounds, and it lulls me to sleep.

My little sister meets me on the terrace for breakfast. How are you doing, I ask. Good, she says. And you? Good. Were you drinking diet Moscow Mule? Yes. And you? Yes. We circle each other for a moment, and then we figure out that everything is fine. Pork sausage, bacon, fruit plate, coffee with cream.

Yesterday, Edwin told me about how Bermuda is built on a limestone cap and there is no natural water. The rain runs off white roofs and into filters, Edwin said. Every roof is white, and all the water is filtered. Edwin told me about how the Spanish found the island first but never colonized. They were brave, Edwin said. They were brave enough to get on boats and not know if they might fall off the edge of the Earth, but then they heard sounds at night. They heard tree frogs and Kahow birds that make mating sounds like a scream. They heard wild hogs running around and they got spooked. It wasn’t until the British were taking supplies to Jamestown, Virginia and ended up shipwrecked on reefs that Bermuda was truly colonized. 1609.

After breakfast, the others take the vespas to the sea-glass beach, and I stay put in black bikini, white sundress, big sunglasses. The patio is smooth stone or maybe concrete. The water over the edges of the cliffs really makes me feel transfixed, what with the way it keeps on changing color. Infinite shades of turquoise blue. The shower water is too hot to touch, so I rinse in the ocean and then wash my hair in steam. In the afternoon, I’m walking to the grocery store, and so I miss the family photos. The roads are winding and narrow and green. Cars go fast. I’m feeling fast. I’m feeling great. I remember seeing family photos from Bermuda trips in the years back while I was on a terrace somewhere else. Somewhere in the mountains. Hacker House. Health House. I wore cotton black shorts and amazon tank tops and I rarely changed outfits or daily routines. I’m so addicted to going back. I am not immune to cult indoctrination. I’m getting really good at living in the future. I never really feel left out.

Edwin told me about how George Somers decreed he wanted his heart buried in Bermuda because he loved it so much. They took his heart out and left it here when he died, and then they stuck the rest of his body in a bottle of brine and they sent it back to England. Have you ever heard the song; I left my heart in San Francisco?, Edwin asked.

My little sister shows me the even bigger rocks, and I can climb the highest. Piña colada. Do you think this pina colada is just a smoothie with rum in it, a man by the ocean asks. I think it’s blended, I say. I develop a routine that’s all about leaning-into-leisure. Patio, beach, patio. Everything smells really self contained.

Purple dress for tea time. A parrot says hello. Dark wood, green pillows. ¼ tea sandwich, black tea

At dusk, the terrace is lively. The sky is moving from blue to red to purple to almost night, but never fully dark over the ocean. Diet ginger beer with a maraschino cherry. Conversations about soulmates and psychedelics. Wearing high-heeled shoes, possibly out of dress code.Diet ginger beer with vodka x2. Tuna tartare. Scallops, grilled fish. White wine. Mini profiterole. The rest of my sister’s tiramisu.

I don’t make it down the hill for the moonlight swim. There is March Madness in the game room, and even at night, the water looks kind of psychedelic bright. Diet ginger beer with vodka #3 purchased, but left untouched at bedside. Moonlight, moonlight, moonlight. Things become cloudy.

Sunday

I remembering posting short-form-video content about how badly I wanted to be in a cult in the airport home from spring break last year, and then my friend called straight away and said you don’t mean that and be careful how much you’re willing to sacrifice in your trust that people who don’t care about you will give kindness for free. I drank beer on a seaplane and I drink diet moscow mules for days.

7am black iced coffee

1pm cocktail shrimp

2pm tennis lesson

6pm last night’s bedside diet ginger beer with vodka and a maraschino cherry. Little sisters says: are you kidding me, gross.

Roaring fire in the game room. Chicken pâté and toast. Salmon with gnocchi. White chocolate mousse. Martini, three olives. The bartender shows me how to make a perfect martini. He says: you didn’t learn a thing at bartending school!

Wearing my sister’s white dress and Tory Burch Sport and high-heeled shoes. Chocolate profiterole (spilled on dress). Diet Coke.

I added salt and splenda and whole milk to my Rock & Barrel bermuda hot coffee and now I’m feeling like a genius. I floated around and I did not write most of it down. I woke up beside the ocean. There are hundreds of islands here if we’re counting a rock as an island, and there are three churches on google maps that pop up first: The Cathedral of the Most Holy Trinity and St. Peter’s Church and the Unfinished Church, which again, means we’re counting rocks. I wrote it all out like a food diary, first.

DIRECTORY

APPENDIX: Diet ginger beer, Coral Beach and Tennis Club, Resort Wear

The week (and months) ahead live in full on a calendar curated by me on The Aleph, featuring art literature film tech and nightlife events throughout New York and beyond. A few selections below:

Some openings, closings, gallery parties to see this weekend:

• Friday, April 10

  • From 6pm - 8pm at Sitting Room — Cyril Mazard presents a new solo exhibition of paintings Observe the Absurd Show; “It started with apocalypse scenery followed by super models, technological progress, garbage landscapes, humoristic paintings, nature paintings, phone paintings, new burgers out of old masters.”

  • From 6pm - 8pm at Alex Berns Gallery —- I will W8 4 U opens; a group exhibition inspired by Michel Legrand song, I Will Wait for You, the key and final piece of music in the film, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964.

  • From 6pm - 8pm at Cristin Tierney — Peter Campus; What Dreams May Come True opens - a show of Campus’s recent video works, and his eighth solo show with the gallery. “The videographs neither romanticize nor dramatize the natural world, but examine it closely as a perceptual field.”

  • From 6pm - 8pm at Lyles & King — Aneta Grzesykowska solo exhibition Daughter opens. This will be a very beautiful show.

  • From 8pm - late at Lubov — Alex Barney celebrates his birthday with debauchery and fun in the gallery space and out on the roof

• Saturday, April 11 from 11am - 5pm at Blade Study — It’s Picture Day with Eric Helgas - “Everyone needs a headshot. Helgas’ photography explores desire, illusion and artifice. Helgas draws from popular culture’s constructed realities, staging his subjects with meticulous detail and deliberate artificial light.” | $5/session.

• Sunday, April 12 from 6pm - 8pm at Blade Study — Nick Fusaro closes solo exhibition Foreman - “”On the gallery’s floor are six blue-gray nodules, inspired by a found object the artist has since misplaced, an antique metallic otorhinolaryngologist’s tool used for measuring ear canals.

On April 13 from 7pm at TJ Byrnes — I’ll be reading at Patio, along with Mia Risher, Daniel Kolitz, Heather Mccalden, Sarah Wang, and David Nutt. Come for the fun, stay for the shepard’s pie.

On April 15 from 8pm at International Bar — I’ll be reading at Punisher, along with Cancel, Bernard Cohen, Brittany Deitch, Tom Ianelli, and Elena Waldman. “Nachos and lemonheads on my dads boat” - Hunter S. Thompson. I like this theme

Sunday

Dream Logic

3:46am. There is rain outside my open window and still no early morning light. I woke up in a glittering sort of nightmare. In my dream, I was hiding behind leather-upholstered seats on some jet that was about to take off somewhere along Naimisaranyam. Loma Linda Santa Teresa. Shimoda. The shoreline shimmered where silver sand met milky water. The jet engines were loud, and the ground all around me was carpeted and peppered with needles. Vials. Peptides. I was looking great and I was keeping secrets. I somehow knew that even if I was discovered on this jet, nothing technically bad would happen, and yet I also knew that it was imperative that I keep my presence secret all the same. From my vantage point on this vintage-jet-floor, I could see the outline of stilettos and sneakers and hear voices that laughed in chortles, oscillating between sinister and sweet. A shift in dreamland, and I was sitting up in the leather-upholstered seats. The ocean was salt-flat, placid, silver and empty, surface swooping and swooning like a simulation generated from my vantage point through the crystal-clear windows on this speed-of-light plane. I’m really tired, I was saying, out loud, to no one in particular, and blank faces all around me were nodding in response, so it was safe to assume that by this point, everyone else knew I was there. You’re not tired, someone was saying. You’re stoic. Your eyes are wide and happy. There was such a banality to their proclamations, but I knew that if I let their friendly tone seduce me, everything would go wrong.

Business Lunch

In the daylight, I realized it was all real life. My dreams all parallel real life. There is never so much to parse out.

Yesterday, a lady I met outside a natural wine bar said she’d send me a g-cal invitation and an Audi-pool uber to Blue Ribbon sushi. The Uber was scheduled for noon arrival, one departure, and so I knew our conversation would last for exactly one hour. I was feeling super good at counting down the seconds. The Nolita Blue-Ribbon floors were sparkling with freshly-mopped water, and the corners they’d missed really stood out. I perched on a stool over churned up sushi rice and wasabi and yellow #5 and imitation crab filler, and I tried not to notice the lady’s frozen face. I tried not to watch the clock. I tried to use the chopsticks to my left, but the lady asked for a metal fork, and though surprised by her bad manners, I decided it would be polite to follow suit. The lady asked me logistical questions, and I realized that I knew how to answer. The lady smiled sweetly, and I realized that I was learning how to treat this spring-time like playing-sims. She wore a colorful bandana, and I did not so much get the feeling that I was being sized up. The lady told me that I seemed-very-nice and I decided yes; yes this is what I will be. I am so nice in real life, I decided. If I’m not so nice, it’s because it’s not real life. The lady sipped sake negroni slowly and I tried to match her pace. She’s so delusional, the lady told me. I’d been tuning in and out, but I nodded nonetheless. And I’d kill myself if anyone ever said that about me, the lady beamed. I glanced up at this part. Me too, I said. We’ll get along great, the lady said. What do you write about? The lady asked me. Business expenses, I said. Art and technology. I’ll actually probably just write about this conversation right now. The lady looked confused. The lady wrote something down. I’m always joking around, she said. Me too, I said. Mango sticky rice for dessert. I’m convinced that things are going to go very well, the lady said. Inconceivably, this part caused me to seize with resentment and disdain.

Daylight, now. Dream analysis, now. There are still a few crosses to bear. I told my friends to call me ‘reactive’ not ‘crazy’ or I’m going to go totally nuts. My friends told me about a podcast about interior men who rarely make history. I told my friends that he promised me the world and all I got was one Marc-Andreessen-funded byline. My friends told me there is no such thing as secret interiority. I told myself that I’m so good at keeping secrets. I’m so fast at driving. Your rich inner world does not exist. I told myself I’ll stop saying things I don’t actually mean. Gray light starting to stream through the windows earlier and earlier every week. Iodine and ashwagandha and other tinctures every morning. I write down my dreams and diaries, first things first. Heavily edited. Written like I’m-so-sincere. Written like I’m eighth-grade-top-of-class.

New day, new day, new day, and this is always a nice sort of thing. Felt kind of tired and my stomach hurt at business lunch, but I wouldn’t become aware of this til later. Felt kind of self-assured because the table over was making bad jokes and the lady was promising that we don’t even speak that GenZ language. We speak Latin. French lessons. AGI. Biting my tongue. Kingdom of heaven. When the check came, I anticipated that the lady would pay and tell me that things went well. Evidently, things seemed to be going well. There’s such a banality to it. Things going well.

Iris wrote a story a few summers back about how Greenpoint is like fairyland in the summer. And I wrote stories one year back about Costa Rica in the spring. Rainforests and sea planes. Rocky shores. Cult indoctrination. Silver sands and milky water. Sushi dinner. Business lunch.

Concepts of Routine

I want to reduce inflammation at all costs. I want to view everything I consume as some sort of potion toward some sort of transformation. I want concepts of a routine.

Concepts of a routine

Everything I did today

I return to my apartment early. I lie on top of still-made-bed and retroactively-blog-my-day. I put on a suede black mini skirt and sheer black tights and a banana republic black top and brown Frye boots that are back-from-the-cobbler and ready-for-spring. I walk over to the church in the early morning sun. I feel like I am stuck somewhere between new-morning and lingering-night as the day begins. The church is beautiful, and I like the blue doors and light interior best. The incense makes me nauseous, but I believe everything in ways I could not before. Kaitlin arrives and she stands in the empty pew beside me. Kaitlin says that heaven and hell are real and every time you make a choice you are deciding to align with a hellish or heavenly creature. Tom arrives and he shows me a prayer book that he says has been a friend to him. I don’t know most of the words during mass, and so I stand with a cardboard prayer sheet in my palms and I read outloud, not quite robotically. Trying to make sure I remember what every sentence actually means.

Quinn has a story, and she tells it to us in the sunlight, on the steps of the church. Quinn was sitting in the back of the church when a beautiful girl in a tiny red dress walked in. The girl sat next to Quinn, and she played short-form-video-content on her phone. She laughed loudly, and she splashed holy water on her face. She took hard-ciders out of her purse, and she opened them one after another. Sparkling alcoholic cider overflowed. She sloshed all over the place. She did not leave early.

Quinn and Tom and Kaitlin and I walk across the street to Tashkent Market. Tashkent Market is the best place for budget-friendly shopping, smoked fish, cottage-cheese-cakes, and somewhat conspicuous consumption. My coffee comes in a small green cup and Kaitlin orders for me. I add almond milk and four splenda and say thank-you-very-much-for-coming to my friends and mean it. Kaitlin and I walk back to the white church with the blue doors, and we enter through the basement.

There is a lesson today about heaven and purgatory and hell. This is trivialized but it should not be, a priest is saying. His presence is warm and nice and I am writing-it-down-on-my-phone. Whatever is more true exists more, and whatever is less true exists less, he says. Whatever is less true is somehow weaker existentially. He talks about how people in hell live the bare minimum of existence. They are barely there. They can barely communicate. In Dante’s imagination of hell, people are frozen in something too evil to imagine in true form, he says. Things take a lighter turn. Have we talked about angels yet, the priest asks. No? HA! We are not alone in the universe, he says. We have angels and spirits and creatures everywhere!

Kaitlin wears a silver fairytale sheer shirt. She tells me that [redacted] is sick with anorexia, and [redacted] is sick with peptides and steroids and a manic disposition. I’m so jealous, a girl behind us says. We should read Dante’s Inferno in the summer, Kaitlin says. Dante’s inferno is such a good book to be reading in the summer.

I tell Kaitlin; I write about the weather online.

Kaitlin tells me; You write about a lot of things online.

No, I say.

You’re loud-online, Kaitlin says.

On the train platform waiting for the F to the L to zoom downtown for bookclub, Kaitlin and I start skipping, because we are so full of love for our community. I love our community so much, I say to Kaitlin. You’re an S-Tier friend, Kaitlin tells me. You’re one of those friends I never feel even a little bit annoyed with, I tell Kaitlin. Skipping is good for lymphatic drainage, Kaitlin tells me. Four-martinis are good for lymphatic drainage. Some drugs are low-vibrational, and other drugs are like nootropics. We should go to the Russian Spa, Kaitlin says. Kaitlin tells me that she has a guy at The Russian Spa. His name is A2K, she says. And he’ll let us go for free.

Sparkling water at book club. It is a rainy day, and all the girls are lovely and smart and the room feels like a Disney-channel-imagination-of-a-hunting lodge. Making notes in corners of books. HAVING FUN, and SOON I WILL DECIDE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

Monday

Atlantic City

I go to Washington DC and Weston, Connecticut and Atlantic City, even, and then back in New York it’s time for spring cleaning (spiritual and taking-out-the-trash). I find it easy to be forgiven. I find it easy to obfuscate things. I find it easy to ascribe meaning to vague symbols-and-numbers-and-seeing-patterns-in-everything.

Atlantic City is the type of place that’s so much nicer driving in than driving out. The casinos glitter against crystal-clear blue skies, and we’re driving at a pace that falls somewhere between “normal” and “fast.” I want to say that it’s freaking me out that there’s not a cloud in the sky. I want to remember that it’s just a nice day. I say, instead; maybe my new addiction will be gambling. I can always tell when I’m about to get a new addiction. I can always kind of be the one to decide. The drive into Atlantic City is slick and smooth, and I’m wearing the same variation of the same thing I wear every day. Brandy Melville dresses and they’re all stretched out because I can’t stop pulling the navy fabric over my knees. R/Atlantic City sends us to Oceans Resort, and good-luck sends us to the perfect-floor of a vast parking garage. The grime is kind of just beneath the surface, but everything seems to really shine heading off the highway. A laminated plastic sign quivers slightly under ceiling fans. WELCOME TO ATLANTIC CITY, the sign says We pull into the perfect floor of the parking garage. I have so much to figure out now, I say. The ocean looks cold and gorgeous through big glass observatory windows. The ocean stretches on and on and on. No land on the horizon. The Jersey Shore is kind of a vibeless place. Atlantic City is kind of a predictable place. Beautiful beach until you smell it, [redacted] says. I can’t smell it from here, I respond. Smell of bottled water and vodka and fruit syrup and starbucks and sports-betting and cleaning-supplies inside. Cocktail waitresses in crop-tops bringing me diet-coke inside. All the regulars wish me good-luck when I try my hand at roulette. Roulette is the best game, because it’s all about luck. Feeling so up-on-my-luck. Picking “red” and “evens” and liking my luck. Earlier, I was at the Miami-Beach in Chesapeake-Bay. I was at Waffle House. Oceans Casino. I called Amelia from a rest stop in Maryland. Because really predictably good things happen every time you decide to go on another freaking vacation, Amelia sighed.

The road out of Atlantic City is singular and long and they put less effort into the paint jobs now that you’re already one-foot-out-the-door. COME BACK SOON, the signs over the potholed roads say. Boarded up convenience stores and a lot of people loitering on the sidewalks. Monday morning. Atlantic City. Clear blue skies, and they stretch all the way down. Gambling addiction? All the billboards ask. They give you a number to call just in case. Not yet, I say. We’ll see you again soon, the billboards say.

Wednesday

Marlton Hotel

Back in my apartment, I call Amelia for an hour and speak quickly. Things are going well. It’s good to keep interpretations pretty surface-level. Rinse and repeat. They have cleaned the turtle pound and there is rain outside my open window and it is yet-another-new-day. In the shower, I prop my phone on cracked-white-ledge by the frosted-window, and I keep Amelia on the line while I talk about long-gone-times. I’m not sure it happened that way, Amelia says. You can’t say that, I say. You can’t beat me at the recollection game because I wrote it all down, I say. Time stamped. Signed, sealed, delivered.

Scrolling on my phone, and it’s glitching, splashed with drops of water. On my phone, a man at a homesteading institute in Wyoming is saying that he’s heard that I’m intrigued. On my phone, The Arcane School is saying that they’d love it if I come-by. Amelia is sending sweet photos. Elena is texting homages about book club. Thank you so much to Quinn for taking a lead on this and encouraging all of us to get together, the homages say. You’re going to be a good-fit, the lady from the business-lunch is saying. Square peg, round hole. I’m so good at culling mantras from-online. I’m so good at writing-it-all-down. We used to talk about the seven deadly sins and sometime around last spring, I really thought we’d got my strengths and weaknesses all sorted out.

Cool and foggy march afternoon. Kind of indicative of acedia to live in the past. I want to notice things that are nice. Pounding house music at the bodega. Clearly Canadian lemon essence water and Saratoga spring water and Red Bull sugar-free spring-edition cherry sakura flavor at the bodega.

I walk to The Marlton Hotel where they are playing techno-french music and the roaring fire feels less desirable now that it is warm. The people behind me are talking about ABC Kitchen. They are talking about all the Jean George Restaurants that have closed. We’re on our way, Amelia says. She arrives with her dog wearing skinny jeans, and she does not announce her presence, so I have to look up to notice she is here. I’m so jealous you’re a mother, I tell Amelia. You shouldn’t be, because my child will die before me, Amelia responds. I order smoked salmon and three pieces of toast and I eat everything very quickly. I order celery soda and ginger tumeric tea which I fill to the brim with splenda. I order diet coke, and I only realize that the woman in front of us is eavesdropping when I say that it is pouring, and she whirls her head around towards the windows to see for herself. Amelia and I start playing the game of good-person bad-person. This is a game rooted in instinct. It’s a game wherein you say a name, and then vocalize whether you think this person is a good-person or a bad-person.

It doesn’t matter so much if you judge people correctly, but you’ll always get along best with people who classify things the same way as you, I explain.

What did you classify me as, Amelia asks.

Good person, I say. But there are some people who have done awful-things on my good-person list, and some people who have done nothing-at-all on my bad-person-list.

Like [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted]? Amelia says. Yes, I say

I think I might just be coping, I say.

I think that’s probably what it is, Amelia says.

When I am done-for-the-day, the light outside the hotel has fallen and Amelia is gone and the rain is coming down harder-than-ever, and inside, around this time, they always turn the lights lower as the sun sets which creates a Vibe and also Cognitive Dissonance. Amelia affirmed how happy I was, today, before she left. You were so happy even at the worst of times, she affirmed. You were all like ‘hehehehehehe’ so happy all the time.

Thursday

Lifestyles

So the cosmic cycles are over, and you know because you never run into the people you’re not meant to meet again, even though you share the same morning-routine and drinking-friends and aesthetic proclivities. I storm over to Matt’s apartment after the play, and he shows me a catalog that chronicles drug-use and sex-acts in indie-nineties-films. He shows me a Catholic poster, and white-claw-surge. He tells me to stop self-mythologizing. He tells me that I’m just the right amount of religious. Everything that happened to you is pretty normal, he explains. It’s fine you don’t know iconography and prayers because if you were any more religious, you wouldn’t be able to stick with it for life. Matt lets me talk about myself for allocated-time-limit, and then when the time is up, I storm back out onto Chinatown streets.

The play today was interesting because an Alaskan conspiracy theorist presented Chekov’s Gun, but then it never went off, and because it starred a quiet girl in a yellow dress who liked to call-her-dad and have-a-victim-complex and follow-around-her-ex-boyfriend and be scapegoated-but-ultimately-kind.

You’re a genius, I told S. after the performance ended. And I liked the scapegoated girl in the yellow dress and I liked what the Alaskan-teachers were saying about everything having Cosmic Purpose, and I think that they were probably right, actually. I said. You should write an anonymous and personal and schizophrenic review of the play, S. told me. Ok, I said. The play took place in a warehouse, and afterwards, the floors were flooded with girls drinking Spindrift. The bathroom was enormous, with high ceilings, metal sinks and floors, riding boots clicking against tile, and I was relieved to find a big and quiet room to collect myself in out of force-of-habit, though I was not feeling so hungover, or even particularly sad.

Afterwards, Olivia and I walked along the Williamsburg waterfront, tracing sidewalks through fairylands and strip mall and it was still morning or maybe afternoon or fading light or even night. I hadn’t worked a real job in days or maybe months or even years. I hadn’t eaten adderall or even injected myself with psilocybin or tirzepatide or stopped drinking alcohol or quit nicotine or gotten baptized or learned to stop living in the past. Olivia was starting to get concerned that if she gave me too much advice, it would start going in-one-ear-and-out-the-next. But I still want to keep giving you advice. I just need you to take it, she said. You’re my best friend, we kept on saying to each other, all the time, all week.

Friday

El Sur (1983)

El Sur (1983) is a nostalgic and non-narrative and wild film. A film just like you, Kaitlin says. You’re my best friend, I say. We walk to Metrograph in the afternoon to catch the four-thirty-screening.

The house in the film is wooden and dark and shrouded in mist. The girl in the film is named Estrella. She wears plaid skirts and big sweaters and moves in big hops and leaps and bounds. She leaps off a swing and runs down a cobbled and ghostly-tree-lined drive. She’s so you, Kaitlin tells me. I love you so much, I respond. Once, I spent a summer in a stone house in a village in the south of Spain. Once, I learned to stop living in the past. In Spain, there was a wooden balcony, and desert air, and when we opened the wooden windows, golden hour light would pour in from beyond perfect blinds. The light in the film is yellow and sweet. In shots from attic windows, mysticism comes to fruition, and a pendulum starts to swing.

My dad could do things that others considered practically miracles, but to me, nothing seemed more normal, Estrella says.

A certain idea about my father died right then, Estrella says. It was like opening my eyes and realizing that I never knew anything about him. She burns the paper and her eyes are full of tears.

The house is illuminated in blue gray light. and Estrella sleeps in a wooden bed and a sweet dog barks on a sweet summer night outside the bounds of the home’s white curtains. The father leaves in the middle of the night without saying a word and smokes cigarettes in bed.

I grew up more or less like everyone else, Estrella says. Growing accustomed to being alone and never worrying too much about happiness.

Saturday

My-day-with-my-friend-Olivia

After barre-burn, Olivia salts her orange juice and she says she feels like a genius. I like how aristocratic those girls are, Olivia says, about a group of teenage girls sitting to the right of us. I like how the girl on the right looks like pre-plastic-surgery Bella Hadid. Olivia is good at reading people to the quick. Olivia is good at knowing everyone’s real intentions. Olivia is good at understanding the power-dynamics-of-an-interaction. Olivia knows everyone. Every time we go to a restaurant, Olivia says hi how are you to the people that work there, and the people that work there say so-good-to-see-you, in response. I order iced-black coffee and Olivia tells me that I need to fortify myself. Olivia says that I need to learn to be alone with my thoughts. I need to go to daily mass. When I take out my copy of Alice Bailey: The Unfinished Autobiography, Olivia asks me why I insist on taking that satanic book everywhere. I’m going to burn that book, Olivia says.

Amelia calls me on the street outside Fanelli Cafe and I tell her about everything that has gone right and everything that has gone wrong. Olivia and I walk through the misty afternoon towards the Lower East Side. Don’t go to rehab just hang out with girls and go to church, Olivia says. Hang around strong women. Hang out with Elena and read Homer.

We walk past Vital Climbing Gym. I need to find some new intensity in something like orthorexia, I tell Olivia. The west is going to fall because we’re all joining run clubs, Olivia tells me.

Olivia and I walk into an apartment with a lime green staircase on Stanton Street. We go up the stairs into the most perfect loft I’ve ever seen. High ceilings and pink blankets and metal heating pipes on the ceilings are decked with black velvet hangers and perfect clothes and two hairless cats are jumping around the apartment. I don’t like cats but I do like these cats, I tell Olivia. These cats are like dogs, I tell the owner of the apartment. These cats are so cute, I say. In the apartment, there is a metal bathtub and a collection of shoes and a beautiful stone countertop. The owner of the apartment tells Olivia and me that she has Criterion channel and HBO and we can come over and eat whatever we want, watch whatever we want, have anything-we-want but not everything-we-want. The owner of the apartment goes to Los Angeles, and she gives Olivia keys.

Olivia and I walk down Ludlow and stop for diet coke water 3mg wintergreen zyn and, teeth whitening gum.

Olivia and I walk up six-stories to her apartment. Olivia gives me a tour. Olivia’s roommate is unpacking groceries in the kitchen. I knew I recognized that voice, Olivia’s roomate tells me. I always wanted to be a working artist, Olivia’s roommate says. I never wanted to do cryptocurrency or aristocracy or lethargia. Olivia shows me her favorite nail polish (Essie Not-A-Phase) and she pours me some Evian water into a bright green cup.

I sit on Olivia’s floor while she listens to Youtube videos about Homer. Trigger warning, the voice in the video is saying. These stories are violent. Olivia paints her nails with Essie Not-A-Phase and I tell her that she looks like the perfect girl. The Homer-trigger-warning video plays in the background and provides mythic context. This mythic context video is what it’s like for me sitting at dinner with you and [redacted], Olivia says. Sorry I haven’t been inaugurated into your own personal Iliad, she says.

I borrow a red v-neck dress with flowers on it from Olivia, and I realize that I just lost my only-remaining-spring-coat. We’ll get your coat back, Olivia says. I sit with knees-tucked-to-my-chest and diet-coke and cool-minty-zyn by the radiator on Olivia’s floor. Why are you on the floor, Olivia’s roommate asks. I’m freezing, I respond. Olivia brings me tea made with Evian water in a bright green cup.

What are you writing on your phone, Olivia asks. A story about you, I say. You better change my name, she says. I change everyone’s name except for boys because names like Matt and Sam and Nick and John sound like aliases in-and-of-themselves, I say. All my friends have middle names like Rose, Olivia says. All my friends were almost named-names like Rose or Violet or Leaf, or Atreides.

Olivia wears a Penny Lane coat and she gives me a pale green puffer. I’m glad I could take care of you today, she says. You take such good care of me, I say. My mood today feels cold and quiet and sweet. Outside the window, it is blue-hour but looking more like gray-hour due to the rain. I am wearing Adidas sneakers and Olivia’s red dress and a Banana Republic black top and a green puffer over that and gray-socks-no-tights. Outside the window, I can see the neighbors pots-and-pans. Olivia walks faster than me, going down the stairs. Yay, Olivia keeps on saying. Olivia wears tall and beautiful brown boots. Yay Yay Yay, she keeps on saying.

I used to eat so many protein bars, Olivia says. It’s so unnatural. You’re killing yourself with that. It’s so anti-culture and anti-history and anti-beauty. It’s suicidal. It’s so sad.

The Metrograph Commissary has a kind of South-beach vibe. Palm trees and open air. Big group dinner. Intense girl dinner. All the girls except for me wear gray dresses to dinner.

Are you feeling calm or are you feeling reactive? Sam texts. Calm, I say. Why, I ask. Just wondering, Sam says.

It’s cold tonight. Steak tartare for dinner, which is a food that Matt says girls eat when they feel like picking a fight with their boyfriends, because after girls eat steak tartar, they like to say things like I-feel-like-im-going-to-throw-up. Feeling great, post steak tartar, tonight specifically. Feeling full and feeling great.

Feeling like I’m doing the things a person should, I tell Olivia. That’s good, Olivia tells me.

Talking out my Alice Bailey Unfinished Autobiography at dinner, and Olivia is not feeling big on the curses and symbols and signs that the covers contain. Shivers up my spine, everyone is saying. How many times do I need to tell you I am going to burn that book, Olivia says. Today is the first day of my life, I think.

DIRECTORY

The event calendar for the week ahead lives on The Aleph

Consumption: Diet ginger beer, La Roche Posay moisturizer, Acne jeans, Via Carota canned-negroni, red-bull sugar-free-spring-edition, Tory Burch Sport, Brandy Melville off-shoulder-slip, black Tod boots, Fanelli’s salted orange juice. Olivia’s red dress (vibe). Places: Spa 88, Via Carota, The Marlton Hotel, Vince’s cobbler, Derby Coffee, Bacaro, Bermuda. Read: The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis), Inferno (Dante) Watch El Sur (1983), Greek Mythic Comix Listen Viva Hate Ideas Prohibition, tennis lessons, fortification, book club

On April 13 from 7pm at TJ Byrnes — I’ll be reading at Patio, along with Mia Risher, Daniel Kolitz, Heather Mccalden, Sarah Wang, and David Nutt. Come for the fun, stay for the shepard’s pie.

On April 15 from 8pm at International Bar — I’ll be reading at Punisher, along with Cancel, Bernard Cohen, Brittany Deitch, Tom Ianelli, and Elena Waldman. “Nachos and lemonheads on my dad’s boat” - Hunter S. Thompson. I like this theme

Friday

I was supposed to go to a party-in-a-u-haul last night. Jack posted photos of metal folding chairs stacked inside the cold interior. Any room left in the uhaul, I texted Charley. There is standing room or sitting on the floor room, he replied. I walked home from the gym to expedite my getting-ready-process. At the gym, they were playing artificial-intelligence-generated videos of animals and plants. They were remixing pop songs. I told the pretty girl at the front desk that I’d like to never-come-back, and she told me that I’d have to journey-to-the-backrooms if I wanted them to take my credit-card-off-file. I said ok, and then I walked home, still a member of Equinox-Corp. Soho was humid and sweet and cold. The West Village was like a private equity firm. I realized I had spoken to no one all day, and I considered feeling guilty or lonely or high-on-life or all three. What is your ETA at the Uhaul, Matthew texted, as I was lying, later, in bed. Twenty-five-minutes, I lied. UHau…

Read more

Monday

Humanoid robots

Before the once-in one-hundred-years snow-storm, the air was soft and warm and not even that still, and so no one could believe what was about to come. I spent all day thinking about winter cleaning, but I did not spring into action until late. Then, I pulled on a black Gil Rodriguez dress, and I walked to buy Celsius, get on the train, drift over to downtown for a book launch, whilst feeling tired yet optimistic. Sam was sitting behind the bar next to a huge bison head and a lot of Olympic memorabilia, and he told me that Ellie was there and New-York-University girls were there and not Saiorse, yet, who is terminally late. Downstairs, the lounge was open and dark and I mixed myself a drink full of Campari syrup and ginger and gin. I went upstairs and I sat at the bar and Sam made me a Roy Rogers which is a Shirley Temple but for boys. Saiorse arrived in a gray dress and boots, and she made me a glass of melon juice. Lily arrived, and she told Sam that she only drinks diet coke. After that, we walked over through the still warm enough night to a penthouse party full of people who make robots. This, or a dive-bar. This, or Soho House. This or homeward bound. Choose your own adventure. Humanoid robots are designed to do physical things that humans do like serve food at restaurants, and to potentially also have superior intellect and perhaps become agentic-not-mimetic, Saiorse explained. She explained something of a sort of space-race to get this show-on-the-road. Cold War. I was thinking more in hypotheticals. I hadn’t really been invited. I have not had existential dread since summer, when I moved out of a glass apartment where I was always staring up at terminally blinking skies. I only ever said I was a nihilist when I didn’t know what that word meant. At the party, there were trays and trays of sushi and a spiral staircase and men carrying around platters of dumplings. Everyone from the Stanford class of twenty-two is here, Sam said. A lot of people flew in for this party, he explained. Saiorse and I maneuvered our way to the bar, and then towards a long counter top that appeared to be a buffet, but was totally untouched. Lily and Saoirse and I began to eat everything on display. Grabbing plates of salmon and being greedy. A girl standing in the center of the room was saying she felt dizzy. Does anyone else feel dizzy, she was asking. Yes, I decided. Yes indeed I do, and so I went to the bathroom but the door was just one big plywood sheath with no lock, and the music that was fired up throughout the whole huge vast apartment was pumping out from two small speakers that were located here. Blaring Ye so loudly from out of the bathroom ceiling and from under the sink. It felt kind of like a strange and architectural dream. Not like a bad dream, but like I had to go. The girl in the center of the room had reminded me that I was feeling dizzy. She disappeared by the time I came back to the party, and I tried to tell my friends about the strange and blaring bathroom music but they were absorbed in things that seemed hyper and happy and totally present. Nobody seemed too future-oriented despite the product at hand, but they never do at these sorts of things. The books on display all had colorful spines and recognizable titles. I did say goodbye, and outside, the snow had still not started.

Tuesday

Night Time Routine

I am not a robot. In the morning, I want to get sunlight in my eyes and I want to wear a Tankair black tank top and Rag and Bone green cargo pants and Petrucci ballet flats and big wired headphones. In the night, I want goat milk elixirs and Angelmoon dresses and answers and ideas to float through my phone. When it is nighttime, I love to play on my phone. It is night and the window is open and I am feeling quite happy with myself, though believe it-or-not I do have a tendency to let things ebb and flow. White noise meditation outside my window, but it’s just listening to the turtle pond churn day old water right below me in the courtyard, and listening to day-four-snow melt in big fast drops off the roof. Snow melts fast and then it’s no-longer-magic-outside. I am not totally ready for spring to begin. I am not totally ready to be old or even bored or to go to sleep most nights before the sun is high in the sky. This is why I leave the windows open. This is why I put on black silk eye mask. This is why I live in New York City, totally out of sync with nature, totally in sync with the dictations of my whims. I am lying with the lights off and I am totally ready for Pi (1998) to begin on my computer. My least favorite thing about myself is my tendency to let things ebb and flow. My favorite thing about myself is my ability to notice patterns and symbols and other sorts of interesting and mysterious and astral or perhaps just normal projections in everything everywhere and particularly in real life. While I wait for Pi (1998) to begin, my computer is flashing words and sounds and symbols about Cyriossis took my wings and winter drab and summer glam and being honest with your clients about the effects of their lifestyle. When Pi (1988) begins, a series of patterns and symbols and pumping rock music and black and white imagery will flash across my computer screen. When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun, so once when I was six I did, Sean Gullete will say. One-eight-one-eight-one-eight, he will say. He will walk past a tai chi class in the park and solve math problems with a small child in his building. If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge, he will say. He will talk about the stock market and the universe of numbers and he will live-blog-his-day. 11:52; personal note, he will say. 11:52: Not a pattern In the mornings, I like to live-blog-my-days, but it’s not so much the numerological sort of thing. I like to go on vacation. I like to give up vice. I am feeling totally thrilled about the trajectory of things. Failed treatments to date, they are saying in Pi (1998): beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, adrenaline injections, high doses of ibuprofen, steroids, trager mentastics, violent exercise, caffeine, acupuncture, marijuana, percodan, midrin, tenormin, sansert, and homeopathics. Failed treatments to date: rock climbing, chess, caution-to-the-wind, throwing everything out again-and-again-and-again. Numerology. Event calendar. 2016. IFC screening. Total isolation. Total consumption. Total sweetness policy. I’m not really treating anything. Moreso, I am just writing it all down.

Wednesday

Thai Diner

In the summer, when the air was sickly sweet and I was feeling ill but knew the day would be ok to pass in the sort of languid-and-waiting-for-it-to-end kind of way, we took a CitiBike over towards Thai Diner. We biked along the Hudson River, first. In Riverside Park, I stopped alongside the dinosaur playground and the firefighter memorial and I touched the shiny metal heads of all these structures left behind. My companions were irritated yet understanding of this divergence. We biked to the George Washington Square Bridge after that, and Jennifer jumped in the dirty water, and Riley vomited off the pier. Back downtown, the air was humid and heavy and the wait outside Thai Diner was long, which made everyone feel kind of claustrophobic if not necessarily physically worse. Not traditional not traditional not traditional, Ian kept on saying. Kicking rocks around Chinatown. He liked this place nonetheless. Thai Diner is cartoonishly bright and the greenhouse heats quickly and it is not the sort of place to visit during summer storms. When the rain started, Ian and I walked to the chocolate factory. At the chocolate factory, he bought me sweets painted like portraits and water colors and little mini worlds. Best chocolates in the world, he kept on saying. I unwrapped the chocolates like little parcels, and we both found them to be quite a delight. Thai Diner is kind of Michelin-star style. Really good food. Mango and coconut sticky rice. Curries and fried cod. Every bite delights, but all I can really remember is we were all too sick or maybe just too hot to eat. I ordered hot toddy because it’s good to drink warm things when warm, and it’s good to drink strong things when hands are shaking at the cedar wood counter of a nice restaurant, and friends are dripping Hudson River water all over the floor. Ian ordered a smoothie that was green and piled high with coconut-flakes. Get me out of here, he kept on saying. I love this place, he said. I feel so goddamn bad. Get me a cab right now. We went home after that, and the greenhouse roof at home made the whole place boil and so I fell asleep easily, even midday. I think I fell asleep for the rest of the year, or at least the afternoon.

Winter, now, and the snow is starting to come down fast and steep but it’s not yet sticking. It is dark outside mostly from the storm but a little bit from the normal evening setting in. I am in my room and I am listening to the turtle pond and also Tango In the Night (1987). The music and the water from the pond are loud, because the snow has made everything else quiet. Waiting for a taxi cab in the snow. Taxi cabs are like space ships in the sleet. One has to take a taxi cab, because the air and pavement have become too slippery to walk. Once one takes a taxi cab down the block, one wonders if one will be able to get home. Seems kind of silly to be going to Thai Diner in the snow, but I like how everything kind of hovers before the storm. At Thai Diner, there are purge alerts blaring on my phone. Apocalyptic ideation is such a narcissistic preoccupation. The greenhouse seating has been sheathed in plastic strips and heat lamps, and the restaurant looks even brighter in the dark. I wear a big black coat that I stole from a nightclub back when I was in the habit of going to nightclubs and stealing things. My philosophy with teenage-stealing was always an eye-for-an-eye. If someone took my coat, I would reach into the pile and take home whatever came up first. It’s not good to be transactional in this way. Never really sought redemption. Never really learned to drive in snow, and so wheels-on-ice and taxi-cabs sliding through stop lights are making me feel nostalgic. Teenage boys are taking photos in the snow. Crab fried rice and martini in the snow, because it’s good to drink cold-things-when-cold and because the weather and the cycles repeat and repeat and repeat. No chaos, except sometimes, out of the storm, a person walks along the street and I watch them through the plastic like I am watching T.V. Then, just when they are about to leave my line of vision, they fall or maybe fling themselves against the side of the building. Later, the trees outside will be weighed down with heavy snow. The branches won’t look like skeletons. Everything will look larger-than-life. When I look outside from a very certain angle, I will be able to imagine a forest. I will be able to imagine the Arctic. Don’t fucking ever do that again, the people at the table over are saying. They are talking to their phones. Purge alerts on everyone’s phone. Whatever.

Thursday

Quitting

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.

Things are becoming interesting again. Themes of my stories include: copying, rage, seven-deadly-sins, homesteading, wyoming, san salvador, lucis trust, morning routine, drinking routine, night time routine, hotel lobbies, five-star-hotels, spirit airlines, palm beach, network states, ballet flats, event calendar, patronage, patronage networks, geneva, venice biannale, canne, party hosting, weight lifting, rock climbing, publicity, st theresa de avila, underwater communication cables, oil rigs, satellites, social clubs, numerology, patterns and symbols, gnosticism, federal agents, effective altruism, rationalism, catholicism, weaponized incompetence, self obsession, self obsession, self obsession, self obsession, disassociation, disembodiment, embodiment, new york city, massachusetts, glass apartments in sky, gray rocky shores, los angeles california, carmel california, san diego california, ventura highway, silver springs, cults, friends, surfing, architecture

You called [redacted] a bitch at The Chelsea Hotel, I told Matthew, with glee, at The Bitcoin Bar, tonight. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that, he said. You did, you did, [redacted] told me, I said. Well all women are kind of bitches, he said. Not me, I said. You’re kind of a bitch, he said. I’m totally sweet, I said. You’re ok, he said. Then, he ate some of my beef-tallow-french-fries, though I polished most of them off all on my own. This is another thing that will have to go, now that I’m giving up vice. If I am going to have vice, it must certainly be vice that’s fun. No more things-I-want. No more french-fries and nicotine-pouches and pickle-martinis and inciting-conflict-at-the-detriment-of-myself-and-my-community.

Friday

Morning Routine

It is morning and the day feels kind of bright and nice. I am in my room and I am feeling sweet. I am in my room and it is feeling a little bit messy. I am listening to Drasticism which is the new album by a girl who’s playing a show tonight and I am thinking I would perhaps like to go. Listening to a sweet kind of diy soft music that reminds me of crystals. I kind of want to be by the water. I kind of want to learn guitar with my friends. I kind of want sunlight on my face first thing in the morning. I want everything I own to be from Angelmoon and Ebay and LoveThanksWorld. I’d like to be in salt water in Costa Rica or perhaps Brazil but I am trying not to want things outside the present so much. Listening to “Angelica” by Bella Litsa and “If You Were Around” by Celestine Manno and “Yellow House” by Satya and I never listen to new music but it all can’t stop reminding me of crystals. My morning routine is a fantasy land. My morning routine is real life. My window is open and I can say hello to the turtles swimming in the churning water beneath me. Smell of jasmine, orange trees, salted air the song is saying. Something about California. Sweet and lovely. I am thinking of everything on such sweet terms. My morning routine is Current Body LED red light mask and water out of a metal flask and ten minute guasha routine and walk to the Italian cafe for one little morning coffee. One little morning coffee because I just quit everything. I quit everything all at once. We will see what gives.

DIRECTORY

Reminder that the full event calendar now lives on The Aleph

Tonight – from 10pm at Night Club 101 — NK is throwing a rager. Hosted by Blizzy McGuire and Jacob Ace. Sounds by DJ Thank You, Ali RQ, Bruno Zero, DJ Kellen, and Sank. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Just show up.

Sunday, March 8 from 8pm at Night Club 101 — Nikoleta Juvnovic and Erina McSweeney present another iteration of Slide Show. I’m super excited about this - a Nan Goldin inspired gathering of photographs, conversation, and performance.

Monday, March 9 from 7pm at Night Club 101 — Narrative Party & calendar launch. Another fun one. Hosted by Narrative Warriors. I love Monday Night Parties and I love interesting calendars.

Appendix: Things Brandy Melville depop boatneck long sleeve dress, Zalt electrolyte zyn, Davolls tee-shirt, Angelmoon, Imperfaite, Prada boots, Monroe suede penny loafers, Frye leather riding boot Places Thai Diner, Vince’s Cobbler, The Manhattan Club, The Marlton Hotel, Tartinery, Caffe Reggio, Dr. Clark, Swan Room Read GirlInsides, The Masque of the Read Death, Fatherland (Victoria Shorr, 2026) Watch Pi (1988), The Biggest Sabotage in History (weird documentary youtube), A Place in the Sun (1951) Listen Gregarian Chants (via Health Gossip), Tango In The Night (1987), Drasticism (2026).

Monday

Preston, Connecticut

Everything in the woods is still and stone and snow, which is the sort of place that’s nice to be when there is Saturn going into Aries moon and the lent beginning and compulsions-to-be-writing-everything-down and some other omens, too, that I am hoping to believe in. Lots of sounds and smells to float in between, and best to be kind of light about it. Nothing so wrong with seeking purity in pure places. I am sitting by the fire pressed against a warm stone floor, and the clock just struck midnight. I was waiting for the clock to strike midnight, because I was waiting for a new week to begin. Nothing feels too different. A few days ago, when the clock struck midnight and it was Friday-the-thirteenth, I was sitting in a glass apartment in the sky surrounded by things that don’t belong to me. Kind of beige and huge place with stock-image-skyline views and a lot of rumors swirling regarding who the apartment belonged to, but no one famous ever actually shows up…

Read more

Friday, February 6

I am awake and I have been for one hour. All around me, everything is pale and still and one small room and one short hallway and one light left on. One of one. One of everything. Everything is just the same. Yesterday, when I woke up, it was yellow all around. I woke up in the country yesterday, and the first thing that I noticed was all that yellow all around. Pale yellow walls. Soft yellow light. Snow reflecting golden yellow rays off a white carriage house roof, but even that part was turned sort of yellow by the early morning sun.

The night before yesterday, I stayed up all night. There wasn’t much to do with all those hours, but I knew that in the morning, I’d be whisked away. Good at leaving when I remember all the things I hate. Good at coming back when I decide to get a hold of myself. I’d decided to let the night in my apartment sort of drift. I watched the sky turn dark, stay like that for a while, and then I watched it turn light again. It always kind of happens this way.

In the morning, I’d packed a book bag with a suede black mini skirt, black cotton long sleeve top, toothbrush, snow boots, notebook, Off-The-Farm brand caramel protein bar. I took the B-line to the 1-line and towards the Upper West Side. On the Upper West Side, there were big french windows and snowy streets and tree branches that scratch the side of buildings and in the summer coat the whole place green. Not so much this time of year. Empty whisper benches. Powdered sledding hills in Central Park. From the Upper West Side, Laura drove me to New Jersey. A simple enough drive, but we just could not stay on track. The Hudson River was frozen over. Big white ice blocks that solidified and fractured and split. We were trying to spot a bathhouse somewhere in the suburbs of New Jersey. Is this the place to swim? we kept on asking each other, any time we passed a warehouse, or a sign that said something like Pools and Baths and Plumbing.

When we got to the country, it was already dark. The driveway was lined with silver lights. I like to return to places where I have not been for years but which stay exactly the same. We lit a fire and we had salad and salmon and white wine and chocolate truffles. I was so excited to be somewhere where there was so much space. I liked the light and the quiet and the fact that there was more snow here than in the city, and I was pleased by how much I remembered. After dinner, I ran a bath in a big white bathroom. Big clear windows looking out at clear dark skies. I liked how everything felt very old, and very big, and very familiar, and very clean. I did not like how I felt a bit like a bull in a China Shop. Everything I touched returned a little less perfect than how I found it. Soap and towels left slightly off kilter. Clothes left in a pile on the floor. I fell asleep in a big white four poster bed, and I made sure to crease the comforter only slightly. I forgot to say goodnight, but no one really minded. I woke up surrounded by yellow all around.

Morning, and when I pulled open yellow sheer curtains I could look out at all those skinny barren trees and lots of ice and a long driveway that stretched on and on and on. Laura came into my room and said good morning, and then she told me that she would show me how to make coffee, downstairs, soon. On the landing, there were three bedrooms, and a long hallway with a window seat lined with stuffed animals and a big window that looked out over big snow. The stuffed animals on the landing were all like little lions and zebras and all kinds of pastel and nice faces, nothing creepy. The wallpaper was all mostly white, with little blue or pink or yellow flowers peppered in between but nothing too suffocating. The snow outside the window was silky and icy and pure white and frozen over. There was a sheen over the snow. I could see, even from here, that the snow had been solidified under a layer of crust. My hair was covered in static. When I brushed my hair, I could see it literally spark.

This week, I was documenting everything with compulsion. I went downstairs. Laura was working on a puzzle in the living room, where all the windows were long and clear and let the whole space flood with light. I looked out at perfect snow coated verandas. I learned how to make coffee in a chemex glass. Boiled water. Always becoming a bit bewildered in places that are quiet and beautiful and clear. I wouldn’t be friends with someone with bad aesthetic taste, my old friends used to say. My new friends, of late, had developed somewhat of a taste for conspicuous consumption.

Later, Laura drove me to the train station through snowy streets and snowy backroads. We pulled away from the house and down the snowy driveway and then we drove through suburbs where everything was all Blue Mercury Skincare and Sweetgreen and farmhouses reminiscent of Boston, Chicago, Connecticut, suburbs everywhere all the same. Ladies everywhere liking Blue Mercury and Pure Barre. Laura gave me white gloves to keep for good on the train platform towards New York. You are so cold, just take and keep these, she said. Are you sure, I said, but I was already slipping the gloves onto my hands.

Back in New York, I sat on a bench in Penn Station while I waited for the 1-train. Knees tucked up to chest and clothed in kind of filthy LuLu Lemon leggings. Drinking Dunkin Donuts almond milk latte with sugar free vanilla and almond and one cool-minty-zyn. Watching strangers and all sorts of scents drift by. It is the coldest winter in history or at least in recent memory, but due to sensory issues and the flattering nature of a-line skirts, all I have been wearing is sheer tights and mini dresses. When I got home, everything was very rushed, which is another thing that always tends to happen.

Saturday, February 8

Following Cassandra’s confirmation, we went to a bitcoin themed bar and then to a hotel lobby. We went to a cocktail bar after that, where the drinks were made of things like clarified basil and tasted bad. I have one statement, Sam told the waiter, at the bar. Then, he asked a question. Could I have another drink? This one is very not good. In the evening, we went to Bigelow’s to buy the hair bows just like the Kennedys wore, and after that, we went to a dinner in Soho and then a tech-week-party to end the night. At the tech week party all the girls were cute and unemployed. They all made videos on the Internet and all had long-distance boyfriends. We took photos on a digital camera and smoked cigarettes on the edge of the fire escape while the boys all talked about suicidal ideation. When they ran out of liquor, I took the elevator down without saying goodbye. On the street, in the snow, playing tetris with myself in the footholds that other boots had left behind in melting ice as I tried to claw my way into a cab, I ran into an Internet Curator. He appeared out of nowhere, though my vision was already blurry, so perhaps he had been there all along. I’ve never been somewhere with so many people from TikTok in real life, the man said. Usually, I post all these people online, but tonight there were all here in real life.

Made three notes in diary in yellow taxi cab home:

• Freedom of Indifference vs Freedom for Excellence

• Feeling kind of like Don Draper between Season 3 and 4 of Mad Men when Jon Hamm was fresh out of rehab.

• Feeling like I am kind of on a leash

Sunday, February 8

Now, I am in my room and I am feeling ok. I am lying under my big white comforter in a green cashmere sweater, black Amazon tights, tennis skirt, nothing is messy anymore. After today’s reading group, where the discussion was about Virtue and Vice, Cassandra and Olivia and some others and I walked over to Washington Square Diner. I used to frequent Washington Square Diner at night, but in the day everything was brighter and I liked it better this way. I ordered black coffee and lemon tea and was happy with this choice, as no one seemed particularly pleased with the sandwiches that they kept on trotting out. Dry chicken, huge bread. I’m a snob, I’m a snob, Olivia kept saying. Sorry, she was saying. Sorry but I just feel really fucking bored. I added splenda to my water kind of indignantly, and stirred it around feeling strange. Olivia was talking about how it’s fine to eat anything if you’re on a desert island. It’s fine to eat bacon if the desert island is the prison-of-your mind and it’s the-only-food-you-like. Cassandra was talking about how none of her friends were getting married anytime soon, and so perhaps she’d have to conjure up a wedding of her own. Yeah, sorry, I was saying. Why sorry? Cassandra asked. There was way too much food on the table, and I think that this was the part that was throwing off everybody’s vibe. There was a new Cool Sips soda shop where Pepsi is mixed with heavy cream in town, and so after lunch, there was talk of maybe we go. Maybe we go drink heavy cream and diet Pepsi. Maybe we go weightlifting. Maybe we buy cottage cheese which is calories-per-pound-per-protein-per - I never really understood these things - better than chicken. Maybe we all go home. Whilst talking about protein in ground beef and also cottage cheese and also high cholesterol versus heavy metals, Olivia reminded us that the number one health factor is joy.

At home, I am sitting on the edge of my bed in a black skirt and Lafayette striped cream sweater and brown snow and salt stained Prada boots. Thinking about self fulfilling prophecies. I will not drink and I will not look particularly pretty and I will not be socially offputting and strange. I don’t need to share every word of my google doc diaries. Twenty-five-thousand words written this week in google doc diaries because I just can’t cut myself off. Real-life-diaries. Real-life-compulsions. Fake-life-blog, maybe.

In the afternoon, I walk over to a kind of industrial style Japanese coffee shop to meet Lily for tea. I am wearing a thin spring coat, no gloves, and the wind chill is negative-fifteen. My face is sort of swollen as a product of bad habits, but I am hoping to blame expedited deterioration on wind burn. I run into my priest walking quickly, somewhere around West 4th. Are you crying, my priest shouts in my direction. Just cold, I say in response. I walk for twelve more minutes, and when I reach the Japanese Coffee shop, my hands are burning and there are tears streaming down my face. A product of the cold, no-emotion, I tell Lily. The coffee shop is lined with narrow benches, and Lily lets me occupy the one-free-seat because it is clear that I am feeling fragile. She hovers above me holding silver trays, pistachio milk, black coffee, chocolate chip cookies. I feel like maybe I shouldn’t move to Los Angeles, she sighs, when I finish telling her my week of whirling hotel stories. I feel like in Los Angeles, everyone pretends that they don’t care about nice things. I drink my coffee in a few big sips, and I am feeling better at talking than listening. Did you write anything down about the people my party last week, Lily asks me. I nod, and pull up my notes. Most of my friends call girls ‘girls’ I say, The people at the party called ‘girls’ ‘women.‘ Lily smiles. It’s a posture just the same.

At night, at the Superbowl party, in an apartment where the walls were recently washed a sort of deep-cloud blue, and the drinks are made with vodka and coconut water and grapefruit juice and on the side, some champagne, I arrive late. I’ve been making the drinks kind of strong, which I know you like, Savannah says. The advertisements this year are all made by Artificial Intelligence. The only advertisement not visibly made by Artificial Intelligence in an anti-hate ad wherein an antisemitic attack is covered up by a blue square, and two students walk off screen in redeemed solidarity. When this advertisement begins to play, Matt suggests that we all shut up. Everyone watch the ad, he says. The advertisement finishes, and then all the boys’ phones begin to buzz. Did you just see the ad, all the boys’ friends are asking the boys. They are all really into things like hot-ticket-cultural-discourse. What did you do last night? Matt asks me, later after everyone is already all a little drunk, and I am curled up on the couch, eating pistachios, staring at the screen. I hung out with my new friends, I tell Matt. I am feeling triumphant, and a little bit sad. Who are your new friends? Matt asks. Very nice and very promising people, I tell Matt. Don’t tell anyone that I’m making new friends, I tell Matt. I won’t, Matt responds. I won’t, because it doesn’t sound like you are.

Later, trying to leave, and everyone is stuck. I think your taxi is blocking mine, Matt texts. I think a cop car is blocking me. Everyone is trying to honk louder than the car before. I was playing tetris in the snow and now we’re playing tetris at the wheel. Tetris on Houston street. My taxi makes a fake-out breakaway left and I speed away.

Writing everything down in my apartment, back home. My moods are very predictable. I write about systems. I’m telling my computer that it’s never really about me. Watch how the patterns repeat. Could a human girl be so good at cycles? I’m telling my computer that I’m the best human girl at cycles. I’m the best at downward spirals. I’m the best at it’s happening over and over and over again. I’m not an evil genius. Writing like I’m top-of-class (fifth grade). Writing like I’m queen of staying up late. Window is closed tonight because outside it is just too cold. Drinking Perrier not Evian because I have ambitions of aesthetic cohesion. Dream logic. Magic logic. I am too tired to miss anything, and I am too caught up in self-surveillance to be really running on anything other than vibes.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Sunday, February 15

• From 8pm at Night Club 101 — Punisher returns with a post Valentine’s Day debrief. Readings by Megsuperstarprincess, Riley Mac, Nicole Sellew, Francesca D’Alessandro, Dove Ginsburg, and Ava Doorley. Party to follow with ​​The Heaven Forever. Mélange á seven. | RSVP here.

• From 8pm at Pubkey — It’s the New York premier of KIRAC Episode 29: Whore Dialects. - “After the death of God emptied the monasteries, and hollowed out Hollywood, where can whores go to find meaning? That is the question this episode confronts. Whores have found new ways to explore truth.” | RSVP here

• From 8pm at Cinema Village — Another New York screening of Me and My Victim; co-directed by Billy Pedlow and Maurane. | Tickets here

• From 8pm - late at Home Sweet Home — Silknode presents NY Fashion Week with Brat Star, ESP, bbpue, LADYBUG, Vendetta, and special guests. | RSVP here (waitlist)

• LOS ANGELES - From 6pm - late at Variety Arts Theater — Hard to Read presents a night of artist-led readings, performances, and activities hosted by author Fiona Duncan. Ft Bunny Rogers, Lexee Smith, Harmony Holiday, Maya Martinez, and more. “Interspersed throughout the vast multi-storied labyrinth of Variety Arts Theater, this event infuses the legacies of California performance art, punk music, activism, and socially-engaged literature.” |

Monday, February 16

• From 7pm at The Monroe — The Interzone Reading brings a night of international camaraderie to the East Village, ft Jean-Baptiste Chiara, Mike Crumplar, Padrote Drogado, Arielle Gordón, and Ellie Holbrook. Hosted by Nick Dove.

• From 7pm at Night Club 101 (upstairs) — Monthly Offline hosts a phone-free Gallery Exhibition. An evening for luddites celebrating the inaugural NYC cohort who just completed thirty days with a dumbphone. Leave phone at home, or place it in a pouch upon arrival. | RSVP here

• From 7pm - late at Night Club 101 (club)— Tactile Input presents Anschauuung Volume 1 - a night of DJ sets and sound artists revolving around “sense-perception.” Really good lineup; Televangelist, Inbio, Oslo, Power Object, Bunz, and Tactile Input. Magic!

• From 7pm - late at Dixon Place & 9pm - late at Ripple Room — D8time x Funny Valentine bring you a night to fall in love. First; a performance of Isabel Monk Cade’s new play Funny Valentine. Next, a party. Make a new friend, lover, or enemy.

Tuesday, February 17

• From 7pm at Night Club 101 — Bowery Review hosts Issue Three Release Party. - “New York’s best and only humor magazine is back with another issue packed with jokes, short stories, cartoons, and plenty more.” Ft former Playboy writer Tim Lattner, New Yorker contributor Eli Coyote Mandel, comedian and writer Abe Shapiro.

• From 7pm at KGB — Late To The Party Press hosts a reading, featuring Ariel Courage, Evan Lazarus, Taeler Kallmerten, Tom Ianelli, and Katy Allen.

• From 7pm at Elsewhere — Antics Mag hosts a fundraiser show, ft babehoven, katzpascale, trumanflyer, and talulahpaisley performing. Come support a quarterly, worker-run print music magazine based in New York City. | Tickets here

Wednesday, February 18

• From 6pm - 8pm at Half Gallery — Demetrius Wilson: Light in a Dark Mirror opens - a show of new abstract paintings exploring the liminal space of light.

• From 8pm - 11pm at The Center for Theatre Research — Matthew Gasda’s Doomers returns. “In humanity’s last act… who plays God?”

• From 8pm (after party at 10pm) at Night Club 101 — Aidan Lapoche presents a one-night-return of DENNIS (the play). DJ sets to follow with ilyclemmie, la posh, dj thank you, and mxkmercy.

Thursday, February 19

• There’s a Diane Keaton showcase at Walter Reade Theater, and it ends today! 1pm - Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978); 3:30pm - Shoot The Moon (Allen Parker, 1982); 6:15pm - Marvin’s Room (Jerry Zaks, 1996); 8:30pm - Something’s Gotta Give (Nancy Meyers; 2003). You can also see Reds, Annie Hall, Crimes of the Heart, Love and Death and more earlier in the week <3

• From 6pm - 8pm at Karma — Dike Blair opens a solo exhibition – “In Dike Blair’s observations of windowsills, elevators, airport lounges, construction scenes, and other precisely circumscribed settings, time is suspended”

• From 7:30pm - 10pm at ArtX — The Center for Theatre Research presents another performance of Pretend - a play by Tom Simmons. - “sometimes the only place you can tell the truth is inside a game.”

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 …

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WHAT I DID

Monday, January 12

I’m in my room and I’m feeling normal. Outside, the streets are winter-warm. Foggy and sweet. Different from El Salvador, which was humid-sweet. Tropics sweet. El Salvador was learning to understand things and also learning to let the wind blow in interesting directions and also learning to stand on my own two feet. On the flight home, I mapped out every day as a container. At JFK, I decided to treat the city like Vacation. Big Bar every Monday. Museums of Illusions. FDR themed social club. Procure activities on Partiful or Instagram or Yelp or through Word of Mouth. I call Amelia to announce my return and my vacation-forever plans. Is this vacation for the sake of transgression or fun? Amelia asks me.

New York is over, Matthew was saying, in El Salvador. New York is over, and Los Angeles is it. I suppose we’ll see, I was saying in response. I suppose we’ll see but for now I’ll take all the energy-whirling-back. The flight home was quiet and late. I sat in the very back row of the plane with lots of water and ambient dread. I dreamt of a rocky landing where Avianca (Boeing 787) (Flight 267) touches ground and then immediately takes back off. I dreamt of being robbed. I dreamt of turning around. Dreamt of being scammed. Dreamt of busy days and busy nights in N.Y.C

Back home, tonight, and it’s dinner at Lanterna di Vittoria with my friend whom I like because he offers me generosity kind of liminally. He presents a dangling sort of kindness that I did not have to accept or deny. I could accept his kindness later. I could pluck it from thin air, long after he has walked away. Maybe he is just generally cautious like that, or perhaps he intuits my inherent distaste towards drawing definitive conclusions. He is extremely helpful, but I never say thank you for the advice even though I am thankful. I never acknowledge I agree and I think it is better this way. I’m particularly grateful for the ease of it. He’s happy to know he’s right and also to feel useful without any of the misery that accompanies reliance.

The grid is blinking in and out today, and so we are all feeling anxious about nuclear war. You too?? my friend says, when I bring up the topic of nuclear war at dinner. Everyone is becoming so much stupider. Small grid means big problems. I am feeling uneasy, sitting in my apartment tonight, knowing all the best minds in the world are coming up short.

Later, cotton candy skies turning dark as we’re walking home. The city is freezing over, and hell along with it. Since I cleared my mind head-empty, I have become so much better at being perfect. Since I became religious, I have become so much faster at driving. Since I started telling all my friends that I want no-trouble, none-of-the-time, everything has started to really spiral out of control. I want to be good, I keep on telling Olivia. We go to the gym together every-other-day. She is the only girl with hair that is longer than mine. You are goodest, Olivia tells me. She says it with a smile, and she is very much not-devious so I believe that she believes this to be true.

How many millions of dollars do you think were lost when the grid went down? I ask my friend, walking home in the icy city that I just can’t quit. Trillions, he tells me. What do you mean millions? Jesus Christ. Do you know how the GRID works? He gives me a book. Elephants and economy. Something like that. I already have it. I am smug when I tell him so. They already gave me this book in El Salvador. This book is already mine. The grid has already never-existed. Nothing ever happens. New silk eye mask arrived by mail which means: big sleep incoming. Big sleep in mummy mode. Clean room. Room of a girl who respects herself. Every day is something new. This part has always been obvious.

Tuesday, January 13

The air is clear in my apartment, but somehow tinged a little bit blue this morning. Somehow kind of record-stretch hazy, which I suppose is what happens when I am tired and outside, it’s foggy. My friend texted while I slept: I am taking on your mannerisms. Texting back now: I don’t really have mannerisms. I could write a story this morning, but instead, I will write mantras in my mind.

It’s good to be quiet

It’s important to seize control over myself

God gives the world to girls who don’t get in their own way.

Black velvet hanger left off kilter. Last night, I purchased a blue dress that reminded me of dreams I already forgot. A blue dress to wear in a glass house in a place like Topanga. Bright blue dress to wear while making spring green soup. Purchased the dress with visions of next summer spinning through my mind. Visions of wearing a blue dress and standing barefoot on the wood floor of my parents’ house and making spring green soup.

Sitting on the edge of my bed in dark green lulu lemon leggings and black tank top this morning. Cool minty Zyn in mouth, and Celsius in hand. The apartment is a mess, and it has been for a while. Trees are barren and kind of sweet outside my window. I hate this apartment. I want my old apartment back. I want to get everything I’ve ever wanted. I want to get sober and mean it. I want two hours of dedicated time-writing-fiction per day, and two hours of dedicated time walking outdoors writing notes. I want to let no more hours drift.

I was not happy to come back to New York, but I do like the parts of the city that just are-what-they-are. Green turtle pond and freezing hands. Big buildings and tour groups. Windy streets. Bustling with people.

When I’m at pilates I don’t feel like I need to move to LA, I tell Saorise, in the studio. The toned and old gay man that owns Pilates People runs warm. He cracked the window to let in the frigid winter fog. All the girls are upset about this. The light is silver and bright like a beam. It is a foggy day. We have LA at home, Saiorse says. We have life-like-California, but it’s real-life and it’s right-here. We can stay right here. We can invent different schools of movement. We can even go to Sugarfish

Girls mass-exodus a friend group or even a whole entire life because of totally superficial reasons that are totally fake, Saoirse is saying, at Sugarfish. We acquire Saki. I pull my hair into a tight ponytail and I revel in my perfect day. I document my material reality meticulously. I have been training myself to become totally head empty. I have been training myself to gently accept gluttony, and also to be less subject to my whims. Sugar Fish has the sort of generic-upscale interior that reminds you of nothing, and thus reminds you of personal recollections of positive experiences in similar generic upscale interior restaurants. This is how they keep you coming back, I say. Girls couldn’t find a backbone if it hit them over the head, Saiorse says. Girls want to drown their enemies in buckets like kittens. Girls want to pray for you and ask to kiss you and pretend to be your friends. I am starting to feel some animosity, I tell Saorsie. Our meal is light but comes out in many courses. Saiorse is happy to hear about my budding proclivity for negativity. I’ve been telling you these things for years and knowing that it wasn’t yet time for you to listen, Sairse responds. You can pick something really good, or you can pick something that you really really want. Saiorse plays with her salmon sashimi and she doesn’t like soy sauce. Saoirse doesn’t ask me to tell her which one I pick: really good versus really wanted, that is. Do you remember Michael the explorer, Saoirse asks me. I have known Saoirse for a million billion years. We share a million billion strange friends. It’s nice to pour over these things. Internet friends. Federal agent friends. Friend who snuck over the Canadian border a few years ago and then washed up outside a fire pit in The Hamptons. Her explorer friend who we took to Round Swamp market for blueberry muffins after he got back from some place like Antarctica or maybe North Korea. He was not very risk-adverse. He was so worried about you, Saoirse says. Did you know that at the time? He said you seemed so nice.

Walking home in the crisp and cold afternoon feeling so nice. Walking through the farmers market. Curling up in bed half asleep half dressed half under covers. Half lonely and half at peace because I love when my apartment is so cold. Cassandra texts that she is going to the museum. Why, I ask? It is our duty to seek out all the latent beauty in the world. Cassandra responds.

At night, In Brooklyn, I can listen to Jeff Buckley Forget Her on repeat and think about what I actually want. Purification. Indulging my addictions. Freedom from vice. Sweet music and soft cover of winter fog and little green glass wind chimes hanging from the trees. I like wearing natural fibers and clothing I move easily in and having a uniform and following an obsession to its logical conclusion. I like knowing immediately and totally what it is that I could or could not love. Little dried leaves shivering across the pavement. They look like little rats except for the part where they are very beautiful.

I run into one friend smoking on the street in a velvet black jacket when I arrive at the reading. I like your suit, I say. It’s my only suit, he responds. I don’t want to drink but I do want a cigarette and I only like cigarettes when I’m drinking. There’s a glowing strawberry on the wall, and there are a lot of people I have never seen before or at least do not see often. Like the cool theater kids’ basement in college, the girl next to me is saying. Soft snow flurries outside, which serves as a nice reminder that it is still winter.

Reading out loud about Florida, Massachusetts and feeling reclusive.

Wednesday, January 14

Sweet Wednesday morning, but I’m going to treat it like a Monday. Still listening to Jeff Bukley Forget Her, which makes me want to be somewhere else. Somewhere very cold or very foggy or even, very sunny. Perhaps I should stop hedging and just commit to something. Last night, a boy was ordering a drink and talking about how he was so glad no one was doing dry January this year. He asked his friend what he was drinking. Soda water and cranberry, the friend said. Oh, he said. You’re doing dry January? I’ve been dry for six months, his friend said. I felt so jealous of his friend. So, I know what has to give. Need to take pleasure in denying myself the things I want, etc etc etc. Listening to Forget Her over and over and over again, and turning my head all the way upside down so I can get a look at the snow behind me, but the snow has mostly stopped. Just silver skies all the way, now. Silver skies all the way up and all the way down. Jeff Buckley died at thirty-years-old. Someone who destroyed himself early but at least he had something to show for it.

The desire to toss out everything I own becomes pervasive in the snow. The desire to get rid of all these things I wish were not mine. Gathering up all these clothes and throwing them in a big white trash bag. Thinking about the big smile on my face when my mother gave me a blue and shiny dress and then thinking about throwing it in a donation bin which pipelines to landfills, obviously. Hours can pass, percolating in guilt over what to do with this blue dress among other items. There are many more wasteful things than throwing out a dress. Buying and drinking alcohol for example. Buying and eating protein bars just to feel full by which I mean full of trash. Scrolling on my phone. Being cruel. The snow is both coming down and melting outside. Smells like ski racing. Nothing I am getting rid of is special. If the people whom I don’t want to see show up at a party, then I will leave.

My friends are in the basement of the party when I arrive. Another friend’s new bar. The wood has been stained dark brown and the place is starting to look formal and nice. My friends are vacuuming and putting away books. We all look like little elves putting the books away, Quinn says. Many interesting books. Esoterics of Health and something about Aliens, for example.

Thursday, January 15

Rinse and repeat. Blueish silver light in my apartment, where the sun barely penetrates, but at least nothing is artificial. Outside, everything is melting, melting, melting. White and chipped paint on the fire escape, and I can see the drops of water growing from the metal edges and then… drop! Leafless trees shimmering like they’re coated in gum drops. Each silver water droplet crystallized as its own little form, and then together, they are turning the whole tree silver. Since they turned down the central heating and then I turned off my air conditioner, a few days ago, everything has begun to feel quite quiet.

Should we do a dress exchange? I ask Cassandra. Should I bring you your bible and a book called The Elephant in the Brain and also your blue cashmere sweater in exchange for my polyester Aritzia slip? Yes! says Cassandra.

The West Village is wet and cold and the church is white and the doors are blue. The dining room of The Marlton Hotel is full of red velvet booths and gold lined mirrors and star shaped yellow lights. The mirrors and the lights make me feel a little bit like I am in a room full of sun, but I am not in a room full of sun. I am in a windowless hotel lobby full of mirrors. Cassandra takes out her Sunday Riley lipgloss. Girls at table over are taking out their Sunday Riley lipgloss. Girls everywhere are just the same. Olivia has her Rapunzel hair bundled up in her scarf like a baboushka. Cassandra is wearing a beautiful red scarf tied around her neck and wearing beautiful gold jewelry. The girls at the table over are talking about how we were created to have gentle souls. Why would anybody make it their mission in life to seek out… chaos? Cassandra interjects. To seek to degrade others, Olivia says. Cassandra teaches me a new word: Odoriferous. Cassandra tells me about her friend who lives in Northern California off the grid, farming salmon or maybe saving them, researching them, I can’t remember. A girl stumbles into the dining room to greet her friends at the table over. I can feel how cold you are, her friends say. I can’t wait to see the ocean again, Cassandra says. It feels really weird going so long without seeing the ocean. I guess I won’t see the ocean again for a while.

Thinking about feeling manic. Thinking about every other timeline. Thinking about pouring big glass of water and black coffee with five splenda because I am still glutenous. Getting right to the cusp of something means that in at least a few other timelines, you probably figured it out. Nice to assume you’re capable of that, at least. Nice to know that in another timeline, my diaries are probably anonymous and I can be less vague. Nice to know that in another timeline I can probably lie. I can probably say what I actually mean. Spraying perfume over green sweater and imagining myself as someone who moves more slowly. Ordered a glass of wine because I love relapsing on an empty stomach.

Telling Olivia about when my life was hot and cold and up and down and crazy all the time, because for the first time, I am realizing that she did not know me then. It’s hard to describe to someone who wasn’t there. Feeling a little bit nauseous and like I wish I hadn’t spoken. We could be living in the Midwest driving golf carts, Olivia says. Indiana is just corn and soy but not even produced for human production just animal feed or corn syrup, she says. I have a fondness for cornfields, Cassandra says. We could belong to country clubs, Olivia said. I wonder what that is like.

Friday, January 16

In my dreams, I am surrounded by water on all sides, Somewhere in El Salvador. Somewhere in Costa Rica. Somewhere with all my friends-from-the-internet, and they do not like my new boyfriend. It’s ok, because I don’t like my new boyfriend too much either. I am scheming with my internet-friends. We are scheming ways to get rid of new boyfriend. Everyone is happy about my plots to get him gone, and no one seems to clock that I am the one who invited him in the first place. We are deep sea fishing. I am hanging by my arms from the edge of the boat and my feet are running through the water while a girl I know to be my best friend fires up the boat faster and faster and faster. I am a little scared. I am having so much fun. Salt water. Earth water. Angel water. I wake up. One light left on, back in New York. Yellow glowing floor lamp, so at least there’s nothing shining overhead. Last night, I was walking through the winter snow sliding on ice and filled with energy and adoration and also two illicit drinks. Listening to music and wind and stopping for gum and diet coke and then washing up in a restaurant that was bustling and warm and dimly lit. Telling my friends not to wait outside. For a while, I wanted to show others the places that had always been mine. It had never been like that before. It had always been more of a self protective sort of thing. Back to letting myself be dragged to kind of nice places to which I have no attachment, now. Talking about myself like I am playing SIMS at dinner. Ordering one diet coke and one piece of fish. Dinner passing kind of assembly line cool. Chill and smooth. In the snow and the ice, everything is seamless and then I’m in a car home so that I do not slip. Things could be quiet and end early but I still just can’t stay put. I become more full of energy, later on. I have become very sick of interiority. I went to a small Italian cafe to pass the later night because when I don’t, I always wish I did. It was a snowy and beautiful night. The cafe was made for families and locals and tour groups and dark and lovely. My new friends were talking about things like art-of-business, so it felt kind of far from myself but I could bear it for some hours. A beautiful life. Trying to be more tender and less neurotic. This does not have to mean everything. A person can just be cautious and nice-for-now. Walked home in the snow. Woke up warm. Still can’t stay away from places that have always been mine. Yellow light emanates from the yellow lamp. Nothing fluorescent. A million things to write over a million times. A million things to consider. A million topics on which the thing to do now is to wait and see. Waiting and seeing. Text about finding a DJ for a party in San Francisco. Email about a party at The Mount Washington Hotel. All these very random things that feel so close to being in reach. Kind of want to go. Kind of want to languish in old and beautiful rooms at the Mount Washington Hotel and in the majestic magic pool and imagine that money flows like water by which I mean spend money like it is water. Opening the window, now. Letting it be morning, now. Have to be clear, now. Sober minded and clear. Time passes like water, too, so that is something else to be wary of.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Tuesday, January 27

• From 8pm at The River — Theme Trivia returns with Medieval Trivia.

• From 8:10pm at Metrograph — Another screening of Calendar (Atom Egoyan, 1993) - “It is as if Calendar has no beginning and no end. Structured like a hypnotic ellipse, it obsessively rotates, looping spectral memories that endlessly arrive and depart.”

• From 8:30pm at Film Forum — Conversation Piece (Luchino Visconti, 1974) - “ an intimate rendering of an aging professor whose solitude is interrupted when a rich family forcibly moves into the upper floor of his Rome palazzo.”

• From 9:30pm at Roxy Cinema — Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, 2025) screens in 35mm.

Wednesday, January 28

• From 6pm - 8pm at Vito Schnabel — Francesco Clemente Travel Diary opens - “reanimating Eastern and Western mystical traditions through personal experience.”

• From 7pm at Night Club 101 — Ani Tatintsyan presents Notes on Redemption. A reading; featuring Ann Manov, Cam Fateh, Em Brill, Isabel Timerman, Liam Ryan, Isabella Willms Jones, Layla Halabian, and Viven Lee. Fab lineup! Excited for this <3

• From 8pm at Tawny — Club Chess returns. Live music selections, wine. Back to the classics.

Thursday, January 29

• From 7pm at EARTH — Lisa Crystal Carver presents Rollerderby: an evening of readings, books, conversations, and re-enactments of interviews with Courtney Love, GG Allin, Yamatsuka Eye, Boyd Rice, and more. The evening marks the very first official 1-run reprint of 25-volume zine, ROLLERDERBY (1990-1998). (additional works here)

• From 8pm at Night Club 101 — Kathy Joyce and Chica Mob are throwing a Very Interesting Party (and book launch). Kathy will be reading from her debut book; 3 (Ristretto Books). It’s about Starbucks, baseball, and her dark past. DJ set by Maisy Swords. After party upstairs.

• From 8:50pm - 11:59pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — It’s the Final Night of Huron Street Party. Pay what you wish tickets but you should definitely donate. End of an era. | RSVP here.

Friday, January 30

• From 7pm - late at Mirror Bar — The Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation celebrates the legacy and birthday of publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano and the upcoming publication of Vices —a collection of his essays and interviews. Readings by foundation alumni, live jazz sets, and DJs. | Tickets here ($20 for entrance only, $50 for entrance, an early pre-release copy of the book)

• From 8pm - 12am at 243 Bowery — Offline Gallery presents New Media Expo, ft artists, theorists, and DJs Clay Devlin, Ocrnl, Wasegun Oyetunde, Ruby Justice Thelo, Muein, and more.

• From 8pm - late at Beverley’s — P R O V 🕯️ D E N C E opens, ft Anders Lindseth, Toussaint Rosefort, Michelle Rosenberg, Gregory Gangemi, and Alexander Perrelli. - “As beauty-seeking people, we scan the horizon for patterns of natural alignment, looking for what is right. These transcendental moments bring us to an understanding that our individual realities are part of a greater rhythmic whole.”

In Other News

• The Bowery Review is back. New York’s best and only humor magazine. Send pitches to theboweryreview@gmail.com

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 long…

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WHAT I DID

Monday, December 22

Where do your turtles go in the winter, Zoe asked me, a few nights ago. The pond is made of running water, I said. It doesn’t freeze over, and the turtles just stay put. Zoe leaned forward, then, and told me, in a low voice, not to be affected by the temper tantrums of others. I nodded. I said something about the wind. There’s just been something manic in the wind is all, I said. Zoe nodded. Bright winter light reflecting off the turtle pond like a beam this morning. No natural light in the apartment, and no one really left in the city at this point in the winter, but the courtyard is shimmering shimmering shimmering. Longest night of the year. Early morning. Packing up my bags and then I’ll leave for a while, or at least for one week.

The other girls at dinner a few nights ago were talking about the things that necessitate passivity, and the things that necessitate action. I’m thinking of moving to LA and getting super into my career, one of the girls was saying.

What sort of career?

Creative director.

I’ve been getting super into my career right here, one of the other girls chirped.

A career is a really important thing for a woman to have, her friend deadpanned.

The first girl looked surprised. That was so backhanded. She said. You know I don’t actually want one of those. That was so mean. I think that was the meanest thing anyone has ever said to me.

After dinner, I went back to my apartment and I stayed there for a while. For a few days actually, which I have never done before and never will again but the stories were flowing like water and I was drifting in and out of dreams where everyone was yelling around me. The apartment was empty and pale and I could see small objects fluttering slightly from the wind through the open windows every time I opened my eyes. The time passed quickly, like nothing at all, and now it is dusk and a full Winter Solstice cycle later. It’s not that I’ve ever been truly manic, or really even bored. It’s just that I found it easy to stay put, for once. There’s no snow on the walk to Caffe Reggio, but the streets are still white with cold. The order here is veggie soup with grilled chicken chopped up and placed at the bottom of a thick white ceramic cup, a neopolitan pastry, coffee with milk. The cafe is warm and full of cheer even though we are at the top of the Lost Week Of The Year. The goal now is to practice being quiet more. The goal is to distinguish between miracles and curses.

There are no curses on the Amtrak to Boston this year, though the light is kind of melancholy and the station is less full than I remember it. I get on the wrong train first, and then it’s eerie and first class all the way down. On the right train, pulling out of New York, there are flames like eternal torches burning outside the factories. and underneath the bridges. Listening to Morrissey and George Martin to remind myself of things that are beautiful. The ride is quick and quiet. No strange women throwing themselves at the side of the carriage. No thieves in New Haven, though I’m pretty sure train heists don’t happen anymore and haven’t for a while. Nobody yells or seems particularly cognizant of their surroundings, least of all of me. Last Christmas, it was chaos all the way to Massachusetts. In the dining car, a man is talking about Snow Days. He can’t help but like snow days, because he likes the way they make his daughter’s face light up. Train snacks come in little packages like secrets. Tinfoil and cardboard and many layers to unwrap. It’s just a hebrew-all-beef hotdog and a white claw inside, but the ordeal of it is nice all the same.

“Winter” by Johann Wofgang von Goethe is playing off the radio when I arrive. The drive from the train is dark and silent, except for Davey-the-dog jumping at the window.

The old magicians were poets,” the radio is saying. “Their art was not to turn one thing into another, but to seek the hidden form of a thing and put it into words. The essence of the thought is that true creative power lies in revealing the inherent, often unseen, nature of the world through art and language,” a woman is reciting on the radio. Her voice is soft and she speaks in a thick British accent. It’s still dark outside, and pine bows are strung over the wooden rafters, along with baby lights that flicker slowly, on and off. The fields are gray and hazy and soft and sheathed in a light fog so you can still see through the window, but not very clearly. “Everyone who saw her looked away quickly,” the reader is saying, on the radio. “as if what she had could be caught by being close. For her it was only winter. Inside and out. She would carry it with her, wherever she went.”

Welcome to Night Tracks, the radio says. Where the land is covered in a blanket of snow.

Tuesday, December 23

It did snow overnight. Three glass mason jars of water on the kitchen table, along with orange juice, cups of black coffee, and a lemon tart from the Concord Cheese Shop. The whole set up is glimmering in diamond and crystalline light. Everyone else is gone, for the day, and I know because I could hear them talking on their way out. Something about elevators and broken door knobs and all the horrible ways one can get trapped and then die. Someone my sister knew in a small apartment in Berlin sent the bathroom door knob tumbling out into the living room and thus sealed herself inside. Some friend of a friend got stuck in a careening elevator for hours on end, dropping up and down and lurching faster and faster between the twentieth floor and ground. She was about to make contact with the earth and splinter herself. Really, she was. It was about to happen when the elevator stopped. A fireman emerged with a master key. The friend was fine. One is aware, I could hear everyone saying as they all bundled up in winter coats, that when one dies of claustrophobia, the causation of one’s demise is directly correlated to one’s solitude. The doors slammed and in a rush of cold and morbid conversation and bright morning, everyone was gone.

I’m in the woods again, after all that energy. It’s just one week all at once. It’s just ten am and there are still small snow flurries blowing off the evergreen forest.

Wednesday, December 24

Christmas Eve - accounting for beautiful hours

• I went to the salon in the car park by the laundromat, where I used to make snow angels in the dead grass, while I waited as a child.

• Later, the antique stores in Concord, which is usually a quiet town, but bustling this morning.

• For dinner - nine people and roast duck, roast goose, roast parsnips, cranberry sauce and cranberry relish, salad, chocolate pie. Pine bows over rafters. Wine with homemade Christmas labels to replace the usual markers. I’m not so good at accounting for these things or at being helpful. Two fires in fireplaces and candles lit on the three. Nothing stray catches aflame.

Thursday, December 25

Driving home from the big house with the big blue hour dusk fades into full-on night. Can’t account for all the beautiful hours, and so I’ll default to accounting for beautiful things. Many beautiful hours, and many beautiful things.

• Books with unassuming covers. For example, on Christmas, my sister gives my father an old book with a cover on which an antique card sports a snowman, and inscribes, “Happy Christmas!” There is a debate on the matter of which one should say “Happy Christmas” or “Merry Christmas. Inside the book: various speeches by Abraham Lincoln.

• My sister gves me a cardigan from Talbots like the ones we usually find at the Quaker church sale but she found this one at the vintage store in Concord, MA instead.

• I found a beautiful old bible at the vintage store for Rebecca. I found two 1980s guide books to Switzerland with beautiful bindings and engraved wooden covers for my father

• Vintage stationary for my mother

• Buffalo tooth necklace

• Bungee cord wire found on the beach that has now been crafted into some sort of unassuming belt (homemade, and certainly a stylistic choice)

• Pearl necklace from estate sale

• Swiss music box from vintage store in Cape Code

• Blue ceramic pot with holes to strain water and salad and the like, I’m not so sure because I’m no good at cooking (from farm on Smith Neck Road)

• Gift certificate to Colonial Inn in Concord, Massachusetts (a gift certificate to most inns would do)

• A microphone

• A french lesson

• A self curated poetry anthology on a topic of your or your giftees choosing (my father chose “SNOW”

• Juniper Gin

• REDACTED resolutions for the benefit of oneself and others

Friday, December 26

I woke up to it like a snow globe outside. The type of storm that is hard to describe unless you are me, waking up surrounded on all sides by everything soft and quiet and shimmering in a room that has always been yours. Everything coated white and sweet and branches out my window still heavy from the fresh cover of the storm. Looking at the snow through the sheen of sheer white curtains in my window. Looking at dried wild flowers rising out of fields and the pine forest past the farm shivering kind of silver and the green of the shed and the barn creating pops of color against all that bright white. And all of this is just to say that I slept peacefully through the night and waking up this morning I do feel like I can access this place and this holiday and a sense of rootedness in myself, physical form, physical home, in a way that in the past few months I have not felt capable of understanding. Last year I spent every morning at home writing: cold crisp clear morning and everything it is better than I possibly could have imagined. Last year, I took the train back to a glass apartment in the sky and floated in infinite life for a few more weeks, and then I began to scream.

Laundry and writing in my google docs diary at the soapstone counter this morning. I can’t tell if the storm is silent, or if it sounds like ice and little bells. Amelia called last night to tell a different version of the usual story. I am getting so creeped out again, Amelia said. My room here is pale and quiet and blue. it is the only bedroom above which there is no attic, so I can really hear the wind. I’m not creeped out, I told Amelia. Everything about your story just feels kind of distant and strange.

Driving to get coffee in the old town center and I’m not hitting anyone’s bumper as I wheel around into Cumberland Farms. Toes cold in my Bean Boots. Extremities always cold from Raynod’s Disease and avoidance of contact with rough fabrics like “wool” out of delusional distaste for “overstimulation.” The town is kind of story book snowy, too, though less so than in the fields by the house, where everything is encased and total and like a picture and a dream and one scene all at once. The scene is less all encompassing here, by noon, in town, where the heaviest parts of the snow have already started to drip down and melt. It is strange to be alone here. Wind moving quickly outside my car and I did imagine something else. I’ve imagined everything a million times over, and so I guess it’s hard to pinpoint any one scenario. Things change very quickly. It used to take my breath away and now it doesn’t. I watch a woman running in place in a phone booth like a treadmill. I watch a young dad placing pennies on the train track with his kids where the commuter rail comes through. Sitting in my car watching the trains and mostly just holding my hands up to the heat. Everything is covered in a blanket of snow. In the car, I have; almond milk latte with peppermint and sugar free vanilla, vitamin D3, vitamin C, Inositol, fish oil, black seed oil. Taking it all in big huge gulps. Taking it all and then stuffing the wrappings in my bag and resuming watching everything around me.

Later, I am reading Alain de Botton Architecture of Happiness in blue hour dusk and I am in the passenger seat driving on the highway when I look up to find: it is dark. Crescent moon. The George Washington Bridge looks so beautiful, my aunt says. I’ve never seen it glow like that. It’s never been this dark, this early, on this drive, before. There’s never been a drive that was as fast and smooth and calm, as this one.

Back in New York City, it smells like caution to the wind and the mania of a week that exists in a void. Rushed back from dusty fields and Winter Break to find that no one else is here. You can tell that no one else is here, because the sidewalks on the Upper West Side are piled high with snow banks, no foot prints, yellow glow from the townhouses I pass in a yellow taxi cab on my way downtown, but perhaps the lights are simulated or at the very least on a timer, because there are no shadowy figures or even moving silhouettes visible past the windows. Central Park is pitch black, covered in snow that I can’t see but it makes the outlines of things kind of rough and cartoonish. It’s not that I actually believe nothing to be real. I’m just watching the shape of things kind of morph all around me.

On the last night of the Lost Week of the Year, I walk to Dr Clark for the sake of fresh air and doing the things I say I will. My apartment was quiet and clean, because I left it quiet and clean. I returned to everything totally unchanged. The quiet part was shocking, and then it was ok. The city was kind of like a winter wonderland, too, except for the snow that had already turned kind of black. On the Houston Street median strip, I was stranded amidst blurry traffic with a man in a blanket, rocking back and forth and drinking whisky from the bottle. HEY, he said. Hey, I responded. He seemed surprised, and I became immediately afraid. Whatever. Everything was normal. Cannot become cynical. Dr Clark’s is quiet, my friends texted, on my walk. I’m sorry we lied and said that Dr. Clark’s was lively, my friends said, when I arrived. You didn’t say it was lively, you said it was quiet, I responded. The bar was full of dried flowers and almost no people. Emilia brings everyone rounds of cheesecake and superba beers. Dried flowers everywhere I turn, these days. Dried flowers everywhere for those with eyes to see. Here are the things that are making me feel suspicious, I told my friends..

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Thursday, January 8

• From 12:15pm and 4:15pm at Film Forum — Last chance to see Peter Hujar’s Day - “The best film in Sundance is just two people talking.” - Vulture. | Tickets here

• From 6pm - 8pm at Film Forum — Last chance to see It Was Just an Accident (2025) - the first film by the provocative Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi since liberation from imprisonment and a filmmaking ban. | Tickets here

• From 6pm - 8pm a few good gallery openings tonight. At Blade Study; Adrienne Greenblatt I Wept at the Tomb of my Mother’s Tongue. At Broadway; Nightswimming is a group exhibition taking its title from R.E.M’s 1992 song “nightswimming” - hush, risk, and after dark clarity. At Half Gallery, Emily Ferguson In Paintings on Drawings opens.

• From 8pm at Night Club 101 — An evening of performances by Volta, Kyle Scheurich, and Tanguay. DJ set to follow by shoy-li. Volta is only in New York for one week, and I’m very excited about this one. Not to miss!! | Tickets here

• From 11pm at Paul’s Casablanca – Iris Simoe is hosting. DJ: Sofia D’Angelo + Rhett Bixler

Friday, January 9

• From 7:30 - 10pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — It’s stand up night. Tommy Bayer and Joan Flaherty are headlining. Also performing: Auryn Rothwell, Johnny Yan, Sam York, Adrienne Hunter. Potentially funny.

• From 10:10pm at Alamo Drafthouse — WWW.RACHELORMONT.COM screens - “Rachel doesn’t realize she has grown up in captivity working for an advertising agency where her job is to assess Mommy 6.0, her favorite pop star in the whole entire world.” Additional screenings at additional locations here.

• Los Angeles - From 7pm at Red Lion Tavern — Evan Laffer and Ruby Zuckerman present readings by Molly Crabapple, Robin Estrin, Eugene Kotlyarenko, Madeleine Kunkle, Joseph Moscow, and Sarah Wang.

Saturday, January 10

• From 7pm at Night Club 101 — Epoxy plays, alongside My Transparent Eye, Cleo Walks Through Glass, and Addie (computerwife) (DJ). Everyone’s favorite band!

• From 8:30 - 11:00pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — The 2026 fundraising party! Pay what you wish. Be generous!

• From 10pm - 4am at Rash — Fantasia is back with a techno musical composition in free form.

• Los Angeles — From 5pm - 8pm at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery — Jeans Generation opens. Curated by Ana Makharadze. - “Bringing together fifteen artists, the exhibition explores the psychology of daydreaming as a form of resistance and self-preservation, an interior space where imagination becomes both refuge and quiet defiance.”

Sunday, January 11

• From 7pm at Seventh Heaven — DOE reading. Many readers; Conor Hultman, Olivia Kan-Sperling, Anika Jade Levy, Manuel Marrero, John Padula, Sean Thor Conroe, and more.

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 t…

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WHAT I DID

Monday, December 1

Everyone is sick and dropping like flies but not me. I’m at a rooftop hot tub in Williamsburg tracing my hands through the water and watching the sun come up as I stare blankly ahead. I’m driving back to New York City squinting into the skeleton trees and the blue hour dusk that fills the space between them on the side of the road off the Mohawk Trail. Do you shop at Uniglo, my family members are asking? I am muttering something about Brandy Melville in response and then I am feeling vaguely nauseous. I am break the pattern today or the loop repeats tomorrow. I am imagining everything magical all the time. I am washing up on the Upper West Side where the streets are wide and quiet and sweet and winter rain has frozen everything shining. I am washing up in the Marlton Hotel Lobby, where I am telling Celia about my dream.

In my dream, a composite of every person I’ve ever met was calling me on my phone, I tell Celia. They kept on asking me to turn the call to Facetime instead. They kept on saying it was time to see each other’s faces. They were warm and not scary and I was crying and pleading a lot, though I don’t know what for.

Was it everyone you ever met, or just everyone you’ve ever cared for? Celia asks me.

Same thing, I say.

That is unequivocally untrue, Celia tells me.

Tuesday, December 2

In The Marlton Hotel lobby, I order black coffee, avocado, smoked salmon and sourdough toast with the perfect type of butter. The butter with salt water mixed in, and then a tall bottle of sparkling water on the side, too. Eavesdropping at The Marlton Hotel, where the bar room is decked in Christmas cheer and the fire, per usual, is roaring. The conversations on either side of me are increasingly hallucinogenic. Two chirpy and pretty girls to the right, and two middle-aged Jewish ladies to the left

This is how I feel with a lot of my relationships, one of the girls says. The first was not a provider, but I thought that I could fix that. The second was a psycho libertarian who got me health insurance as his sick way of trying to lock it down

The last man I dated told me I was full of shit, her friend responds. I said something in earnest, and he said that I was full of shit. I could never see past that. Me saying something in sincerity, and him saying I was full of shit.

On the other side, the middle-aged Jewish women are talking about pizza night. It’s pizza night and then it’s pepper night. They have no plans this week. These are the only plans they have made.

I’m getting dinner with a man who thought his whole family was dead, but then they weren’t, one of the women tells the other. He is so amazing. He taught me about exercise.

I get the zoomies, says her friend. We don’t work, and so we have to exercise.

I hate people who don’t.

Exercise?

Exercise.

When were things the best with him? The first girl is asking her friend.

I think, before we met, the friend responds.

Who was that coocoo-for-coco puffs lady that you got friendly with, the middle aged woman asks her friend. She is wearing a red amulet. We will call her Celine.

Oh, she was crazy. and the sister was out of her mind. she was very beautiful

You introduced her to me one week and we loved her. And then the next week you said; She Cannot. Come. Back. Here.

We pick up interesting people.

Everyone’s interesting

It is so weird when we think about relationships as two full selves coming together, one girl is telling the other.

They liked coats! Whole family of coat owners, Celine is telling her friend. I mean the father was GAY. The whole family was gay.

My first kiss was gay. Well… his brothers were gay. All his brothers were gay…” Celine’s friend says.

So he HAD to be!

They’re all gay!

As long as they’re happy….

Amongst the girls to the right, the conversation has turned to heaven and earth. Death and other realms. They are talking about Neurolink and how they were at a neurolink conference and they met a man who died for twenty minutes because he slipped and fell and chipped a tooth and affixated in his own blood.

Do you want to hear what happened when he died?, one girl asks another

Yes, the other responds.

He was floating in light. He was disembodied. He could hear sounds but they weren’t sounds he could describe in human terms. There was a God-like presence, and God asked the man if he would like to stay. The man started to feel a pull towards earth. It was like when you wake up from a dream. God said you have a choice. God said everyone has a choice. The man made the decision to go back to Earth. The man woke up in the hospital bed.

Her friend responds: I spoke with a psychiatry professor at Harvard who briefly died as part of a death-study, but he couldn’t tell me about it because he signed an NDA. He said he can’t say very much, but it’s going to be ok.

Girl 1: So what do you think about that?

Girl 2: I mean I definitely don’t believe in heaven or hell

Girl 1: The reason I never killed myself is because I want to see what happens

Girl 2: I mean I definetly do believe that consciousness is eternal…

Wednesday, December 3

What do I care about now? Write and read. Wait with pulsing anticipation but not too much anticipation, mostly just a sense that some things are at their tail end and others at their precipices. Something in Saturn, maybe, but I am trying not to play with fire in this way. After I played Kali Uchis off the tinny computer speakers and I read books by healers who possessed demons and I drank sparkling water and cleaned everything top to bottom and flirted with danger a bit, Celia came over to sit on my floor. I think I’m having a bit of a panic attack, Celia texted me. Would you like to come sit on the floor of my apartment, I texted Celia. She arrived in a gray sweater and a blue wool scarf and bearing a suitcase that belonged to me. Do you like the window open? I asked Celia. I am feeling a bit cold, Celia told me. I am feeling very excited and ambitious, I told Celia.

I have always had boundless energy and this is the only thing I know to be true.

There are magazines on the way to the apartment and I am realizing how nice it is when things are very clean.

I am going to go to The Marlton hotel now, Celia told me.

Thursday, December 4

Writing, like a list, the things I have that I can quantify, now.

• A blog

• One new job

• Maybe a second new job

• An esoteric health book club

• Some regret for lapses in things like kindness and self possession but this is fine because imagine how beautiful life could be without sin. Etc etc etc

• A communal turtle pond with a courtyard that has suddenly been strung with christmas tree lights and christmas cheer

• No sense of passive intrigue because if I don’t care about something times-one-million I don’t care at all

• 25 volumes of books written by Alice Bailey’s demon to use if I want to write more fiction or play with fire even more

• Concern about the things that swirl around forever when secrets or information or even stories are revealed even once

• Fresh memories of weekend in the woods (Florida, Massachusetts)

• Hotel lobby where I can come and go and come and go for only the price of ginger turmeric tea

• A writers Group

• Book recommendations from writers group: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, translated by Benedicta Ward; The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings Lives and Stories; translated by Laura Swan; The Interior Castle by Teresa d’Avila

• War themed (?) viewing recommendations from hotel lobby: The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci, 2017); Chernobyl (2019); Dark Tourist (2018)

• Tendency towards nostalgia which can be a mental illness but is not necessarily so

• Many things I miss and many things I don’t

Friday, December 5

All my friends think different things and want, for the most part, the same things. I try to teach Celia about adaptability, but she doesn’t like bossy people, and she doesn’t like it when I try to teach her anything at all. Anyways, it’s all been a more interior sort of thing. Alice-Bailey-The-Mystic is one crazy chica, but she does have some interesting things to say.

On her enemies - “they have done me no real harm, perhaps because I could never dislike them and could always understand why they disliked me.”

On thinking about yourself too much - “people’s profound interest in themselves and in their souls and all the intricacies of related experiences almost staggers me. I want to shake them and say, ‘Come outside and find your soul in other people and so discover your own.’”

In the evening, I walk to the first Christmas Party of the season, through the Washington Square Park archway that is lit up silver and glowing and then to an office in midtown with pine branches and lights that are warm and shimmering and then to the East Village, where the party feels like something from 2022. Something where everyone gets too drunk and asks you about your thoughts on technology and art and you respond with something like: oh I just moved here. Except I didn’t just move here, and so the party feels kind of nostalgic, too. Only one note from the afterparty. I wrote it on my phone, and I really hope it’s true.

THEY’RE SAYING I’M NOT EVIL Phew. What a relief.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Tuesday, December 9

• From 7pm at EARTH — Open Secret presents An Evening of Internet Cinema with Dana Dawud, Redacted Cut, Poorspigga, Zarina Nares, Carmen Llin, Onty, and Araya.

• From 7pm - 11pm at KGB — The Metropolitan Review hosts a Holiday Party. You must get a ticket to enter, and it appears to be sold out, but perhaps there will be availability at the door? Worth trying if you’re in the area. “Meet the editors and contributors, and have a rollicking night.”

• From 9pm in the Lower East Side (dm @Jackiearielle for location) — Painters Pool returns. A weekly party for painters and friends, Tuesday in New York and Thursday in LA. Gather your painter friends - that’s your ticket in.

• LOS ANGELES - From 7pm at Giovanni’s Room — Casual Encounters + On The Rag present Holiday Party: drinks, merriment, and super short readings from OTR archives, ft Suzy Exposito, Violetta Balkoff, Gabby Sones, Jonathan D’Aguilar, Sarah Wang, Ellis Kopple, Mia Culpa, Chantel Murphy, Zara Schuster, and Emma Camille Barreto. | BYOB, BYOFriends

Wednesday, December 10

• At 1pm, 3:50pm, and 9:35pm at IFC — It’s A Wonderful Life is screening. I cannot imagine a better midday-weekday viewing experience. Additional screenings throughout the week.

• From 7pm - 9pm at The River — D8 Time x Open Book Club presents a night of Literary Speed Dating. “Everyone meets everyone. Everyone gets a romance book.” | Tickets here ($15)

• From 7pm at Flux Lumina (132 Bowery 5th Fl) — Uncensored New York presents The Dinner Party: a one night only environment of works exploring themes of consumption, spectacle, surveillance, and humiliation. Entry is free, please tip your server!

Thursday, December 11

• From 6pm - 8pm (RSVP for location) — The New Criterion hosts their holiday party. “Join the editors, authors, Friends, and Young Friends of The New Criterion for cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and good cheer in celebration of the holiday season.” |

• LONDON - From 7pm at Rivoli Ballroom — Lost Property & Diet Quieter Please present “A Winter Ball” - A night of glitz, glamour, and miscellaneous lectures with Frankie Faccion, Will Kaye, Jaya Twill, and Ethan Joseph. Hosted by Letty Cole. Featuring music from My New Band Believe.

Friday, December 12

• From 7pm at Lomex Gallery — The Aleph & Lomex Books presents The Future of the Literary Thriller - a panel featuring Jordan Castro, Noah Kumin, August Lamm, and Hansen Shi. Moderated by Holiday Dmitri.

• LONDON - From 8pm - late at Lost Club Night — Lost x Soho Reading Series presents their debut, ft Geoff Dyer, Róisín Lanigan, Tanjil Rashid, Yoel Noorali, and Jodie Harsh. Hosted by Tom Willis. Music hall and cub night to follow.

Saturday, December 13

• From 12pm - 4pm at The Bench — Evie and Arden are hosting The Substack Holiday Closet Sale. I will be selling half my closet here, along with Evie, Arden Yum, Tina Zhang, Kate Snyder, Heather, Julianna Salguero, Cami Fateh, and Olivia Weiss .

• From 8pm - 11pm at Space LES — Magazine Non Grata celebrates their inaugural edition. A new print magazine that aims to, per their substack: “Give the rebels a platform. Get people off their phones. Spread beauty.” I’m excited about anything new in print. They also will be hosting launch parties in Paris and Brazil. Intriguing. | RSVP here

• From 8pm - 4am at Night Club 101 — Sex Mag x Burning Palace present Me And My Victim: The Online Release Celebration. Readings by Maddy Van Buren, Liv Archer, Annabel Gould, Billy Pedlow, and August Lamm. Additional hosts, DJ sets, performances, etc. This will be a fun one!

• LOS ANGELES - From 6pm - 9pm at Formas — Forever Magazine celebrates the launch of Inheritance Issue & Flat Earth.

Sunday, December 14

• From 6pm at Night Club 101 — It’s a X-Mass Xtravganza, ft Luke Rathborne, Matthew Danger Lippman, Rachel Coster (Boy’s Room), Sophie Becker, Elsie Fisher, and DJ Charlotte Ercoli.

WHAT I DID

Monday

7:45am and I am lying very still in my clean crisp bed like it’s a haven or a ship that will float me above and away from the clutter around me. Lying with my head pulled under white bamboo sheets, so I don’t have to see anything other than white noise and whatever I decide to fire up on my phone all around me. Reading Girl Insides live blogging her breakup on my phone this morning, and I do feel envious of the corporeal and anonymous ways in which her brand of compulsive documentation flows. Feeling kind of vague and emotionless after a weekend that was here there everywhere, and I let myself really be sucked into it which is always how it goes but one needs to be careful. I wore Cinq-a-Sept Christmas dress for a few days in a row, and there was dinner in a dark wood uptown apartment and there was a sunrise over the Hudson River and I kind of don’t want to write it like a sequence of events. I kind of hope to talk about the architectures of things and why they happen …

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WHAT I DID

Monday, November 17

After the summer passed and I started fresh one million billion times and nothing really happened all autumn which is always how it kind of goes this time of year, I realized I’d been trying to be a bit too ethereal about it. There were certain ways I actually spent my days, after all. One tried to become more private, and instead, one started to simply become a bit obtuse.

On Saturday, Lily invited me to the Philharmonic with friends, for example. Composed and conducted by John Adams to create “jazz-inflected take on film noir’s gritty sound world” as well as “a tribute to the Northern California coastline.” This was nice, because everything I’d been imagining for months now was all misty shores and temperate gray climates and so it was nice to hear the music and imagine kind of floating in that. Sat there kind of ignorant about it all, but liking the ideas that form in one’s subconscious in conjunction to classical music and the high ceilings and fancy rooms and watching the conductor move like a marionette. That was like drugs, Lily said, after. Phillip Glass was seated a few seats over the last time we were here, my new friends said, before. It was not quite midtown in Winter but Lincoln Center was still starting to glow, what with the horses and the Christmas trees and an older demographic of opera and film and philharmonic-goers all dressed up. Negronis in sippy-cups and vodka at the Russian Tea Room, and Lily’s artist boss had dressed her for the occasion and so she looked kind of sparkling in a long green skirt and a wool coat with a shoulder-hook for her purse. You look like a martini, I told Lily. I wore tights from the Internet and a dress from my ex-roomate and a falling-apart-purse from my ex-boyfriend and black shoes from my mother. You look like a whiteclaw, Lily told me, but she said it very kindly and so I didn’t take offense. After, our new friends showed us the lines in the road where the horse manure and hay had become indented to permanence, and they showed us a fountain where once an old woman was seen wrangling snakes, and they showed us an apple store they’d robbed, and they assisted the blind.

We followed the blind man onto the subway and then later I was at downtown bars where it’s the same thing over and over again. Matt and Matt perched in the corridor by the bathroom. Ran into a friend fresh off of working a Palantir-Party. It could have been so good in theory, she explained. They’d rented out multiple bars and catered Carbone and a martini tower, after all. But the dry ice was kind of glitching and San Francisco people all wear aura rings even on nights-out and on the bright side, they left behind thousands and thousands of dollars in parmesan cheese.

What else? Two dresses arrived in the night from resale Cinq de Sept and Gil Rodriguez and I laid them out on my perfectly made bed all black and christmas white. I wrote a small review about a book about a girl who idolizes the apocalypse because she does not desire to get old. I was paralyzed, for a while, which come to think of it, was what stirred all that talk about momentum. For breakfast, I am served a rotten egg at the gym on Prince Street. It emerges in a plastic cup and it is sheened in dark brown sludge. This egg is rotten, I cautiously tell the man who is working behind the counter. Oh, the man says, and then he opens his palms like he hopes for me to place the plastic box and rotting egg in them. We both seem unsure of what to do. Oh I’m sorry, he says. It’s ok, I say. And then he hands me a barbell bar in response. Like we are doing barter and trade.

Cassandra tells me a story about one of her favorite days of her life. We were all on the peninsula for the week, by the ocean, in the room with the big wooden bed and the canopy curtains and the patchwork quilts. We let Cassandra and Celia in around mid afternoon, and we were all watching the boats float by on the window.

And I was doing a rubix cube, Cassandra says. And you were getting so mad.

And the day went on forever, I tell Cassandra

Not forever, Cassandra says. I do remember writing down everything everyone said, though.

Now, everything hovering hovering hovering. New Moon, tomorrow. Grab all that crisp and frozen air that’s hovering so thin it could snap, and maybe it will. November snaps in half and all the other omens and things-that-could-happen come spilling out. All because of the New Moon. All because of the artificial intelligence apocalypse. All because I’m reading the book that Alice Bailey’s demon wrote. Not to get too new age about it...

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Wednesday, November 26

• From 7:00 - 9:00pm at The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — Hillsdale opened yesterday, and there’s another performance tonight! A play written by Roman D’Ambrosio and directed by Rabiah Rowther. “During homecoming weekend at the infamous conservative Hillsdale College, former fraternity brothers, and the women they love, reunite. As the weekend unfolds and the drinking increases, the alumni question their relationship with each other and the promises they were told. | This is a very unique play that I’m excited about. Definitely worth seeing. tickets here (additional performances Nov 28

• From 10pm - 3am at Jean’s — Alex Arthur hosts A Very Pussycat Thanksgiving. Celebrate Thanksgiving Eve with an open bar from 11-12pm + DJ Rex Detiger. Sa

Thursday, November 27

• I’m a creature of habit so I’m basically always going to recommend the same spots, but if you’re in the city for Thanksgiving – The Marlton would of course be a cozy place for a meal, as would Knickerbocker Bar and Grill. Both are serving Thanksgiving Dinner.

Friday, November 28

• LE HEIST FRANÇAIS is at Film Forum - “a two-week, 12-film festival of Gallic crime pictures.” Tonight; at 1:00pm - Le Bonne Année (Claude LeLouch, 1973) 5:30pm - The Sicilian Clan (Henri Verneuil, 1969), at 8:00pm - Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955).

• From 7pm at Stories — Triptych Reading returns with Tess Pollok, Charents Apkarian, and Coco Gordon-Moore. | RSVP here

• LONDON; From 8pm - 10pm — Soho Reading Series presents the launch of The Kingdom by Yoel Noorali. Readings from Yoel Noorali, Ella Frears, Ben Pester, Joe Dunthorne, Harry Tanner, Christian Lorentzen.

• LONDON: From 10pm - 3am — It’s Lost Night - “lost is occupying the historic saville theatre in soho for two months of underground parties in soho.”

Saturday, November 29

• A good day of screenings at Metrograph — From 2:30pm - That Day, On The Beach (Edward Yang, 1983); from 8pm Twentynine Palms Bruno Dumont, 2003); from t 10:30pm; Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1975),

• From 10pm at Baby’s All Right — It’s Baby Dance #013 - ft Le Keep and Catie Lausten live, DJs Donna Francesca, Sid Simons, and Sadie. Hosted by Lily Myrick, Alex Arthur, Callie Reiff, and London Yuji.

WHAT I DID

Monday, November 11

The first winter when I started to understand how things work here, I was crazy with momentum. Crazy like I was floating in air or maybe even made of it. It all started because it was too cold to walk slowly outside, and once we started picking up the pace - a quick clip in the night and the snow and it was a particularly windy winter - then everything else started to spiral a bit out of control. I wore velvet dresses to magazine offices for Christmas parties that winter and I was generally very uninhibited. I floated very warm and drunk off hot wine through a basement in Chinatown full of books and Arabian rugs for many nights in a row. In one night alone, I lost my voice and my phone and my sense of time passing all along. Sairose helped me wash up in the back of some night club, in a purple-lit party designed to simulate the void, at home and in love and in Los Angeles for a respite from the cold and all the can’t-stop-motion that came with it. Anyways, I slept on a floor under white arched ceilings pressed against a radiator for a few months after that. And I was certain I was not ready to be old yet and I’m still not, really, but there were other things too.

8am (present) - The first real day of winter, and so everything freezes over and then quiets in the soft start of snow outside. It’s fish and soup season, an old man at Caffe Reggio is saying. It reminds me of The Godfather (1972) in here, the old man is laughing. Stained glass lamps and the replicas of the Carvaggio paintings and white tiled ceilings and, since I gave up vice the goal has become to be a bit more quiet and clean about everything. Amelia wears Dries Van Noten jeans and a Calvin Klein black sweater and prada boots to meet me in the morning snow and read the things I wrote on paper. In the mornings, this time of year, it is good to brew things like bone broth, hot apple cider from the amish market, sardines in tomato sauce, your throat in black seed oil, your face in red light, and your thoughts in memories that resurface and ideas that reconstruct away from the architectures of unhappiness. Your aphorisms don’t make a ton of sense, Amelia tells me. I’m not writing aphorisms, I’m writing optimizations, I tell Amelia.

At the bar last night, we ordered Fernets and diet coke and asked our guests if they considered themselves well adjusted and if they had tips to share pertaining to Esoteric Health. Do you know about Ray Peat, our guests asked. Do you know about royal jelly and methalyn blue and red light chicken lamps? Do you know about making good decisions for the benefit of yourself and the people around you? Kind of dizzy from two fernets on an empty stomach, Celia made a joke about her life and how it overlapped with mine. Don’t ever make any comparison to your life as it pertains to mine, I snapped. The bar was loud and so no one heard the vitriol but her. Is this what you want more than anything in the world?, Celia asked. To be able to say and do whatever you want without consequence? Howling wind outside, and we’ve been working on temperance. I wanted a lot of things, but I mostly wanted that.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Wednesday, November 19

• From 7:00 - 8:30pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — Cabin Pressure opened yesterday, and there’s another performance tonight! A new play by Adi Eshman, directed by Jennesy Herrera. - “Set in a cabin at a ski resort, What begins as a light-hearted getaway spirals into a cocaine-and-beer-fueled disaster, with the groom’s sober brother-in-law as the unwilling witness to the chaos.” | tickets here (additional performances Nov 20, 21, 22)

• From 7pm - 9pm at Night Club 101 — D8 Time returns, just in time for cuffing season! Uncut Journal will be on site.

• From 7pm at Rodeo — The Bartender returns - a play about a bar, performed in a bar. DJ set by Jux to follow.

• From 8:00 - 10:15pm at 176 Delancey Street — A table read of The Last Days of Downtown (6th draft). Matthew Gasda’s third play in the Dimes Square and Afters trifecta. | tickets here

• From 11pm at Paul’s Baby Grande – There’s a new wedding themed party, and it’s back tonight.

Thursday, November 20

In art and openings…

• From 6pm - 9pm at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery — Flies by Hampton Fancher opens, curated by Tina Cutlery and Silas Borsos. - “From the writer of Bladerunner, a simple stamp brings characters to life across 22 unique pieces, collected as an art book object — each activated by a question.”

• From 6pm - 8pm at King Malingue (50 Eldrige)— From Being Jealous of a Dog’s Vein opens. A group show featuring many wonderful artists including Matthew Barney, Joan Jonas, Kyung-Me, Phillip Lai, and more.

• From 6pm - 8pm at The Hole (Bowery) — Staggered Paintings opens - British artist Matthew Stone’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. - “the painting stage of simulation and material co-author perception in digital image culture.”

• From 6pm - 8pm at Plato — Alex Sutcliffe Katabsis opens; the artists inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. I don’t know a ton about Sutcliffe’s work, but the images look very intriguing.

• From 6pm - 8pm at Canal Projects — Ian Cox presents their Automated Tarot Machine (ATM) - using a quartz crystal oscillator to deliver visitors a genuine tarot card reading experience. The installation is part of Downtown Art Night, where Canal Projects stays open until 8pm, along with 30+ other galleries, including Almine Rech, Anton Kern, James Fuentes, and The Swiss Institute.

• From 6:30pm at Olney Gleason — Artist Ali Banisadr and writer John Vincler are in conversation in conjunction with Banisadr’s solo exhibition Noble/Savage, now on view. - “The program will explore Banisadr’s current new body of work, his investigations into myth, memory, technology, and the perpetual tension between nature and civilization.”

In other news…

• From 7pm - 10pm at Tawny — Cellist Iratxe Ibaibarriaga presents her debut album “Preludes” alongside painter Ruben Landini’s latest body of work. Tawny is one of my new favorite spots! Very chic and cozy.

• From 10pm at Jean’s — It’s Girls Night with Mona Matsuoka and Donna Francesca.

• From 11:30pm - 4:00am at The Slipper Room — Club Chess presents Precious Renee Tucker live, with support from Quiet Luke, Crush Sahara, and sank50000. A midnight show with mini-chess boards strewn across two-tops.

• LONDON - From 7:30pm - late at Groucho Club — Soho Reading Series presents a reading with Sam Kriss, Sarah Thomas, Mariel Franklin, and Dean Kissick. Hosted by Tom Willis. Quest list only.

Friday, November 21

• From 4pm at Metrograph — My movie chat recommends Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)

• From 6pm - 8pm at IRL Gallery — Some Kind of Nature opens; “bringing together Ugo Schildge, Laura Benson, and Sunfish to explore how nature seeps into the built world – not just through materials, but through stories, symbols, and modes of making.

• From 7pm at Sony Hall — Ariel Pink performs! | tickets here

• From 10pm at 217 Nostrand Ave — ONOS presents Girls Gone Wild - a party in celebration of The Girl JT.

Saturday, November 22

• From 1pm - 6pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — There’s a garage sale! Come for furniture, decor, kitchenwares, and more.

• From 10:30pm at Roxy Cinema — Rachel Ormont screens.

• From 9pm - 3am at TelePhone — Stop1 celebrates their anniversary, bringing back every DJ and volunteer from their year of parties. | RSVP here

Sunday, November 23

• From 2pm - 6pm at Tawny — Clothing sale and music!

• From 4:45pm at Metrograph — My movie chat recommends Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1975)

• LONDON - From 7pm - 12pm at The George Tavern — Diet Quieter Please celebrates the launch of ISSUE 003: SILENT MASS. Featuring readings by Jane Dabate, Eeanor Tennyson, Ivory Pijin, Ellie Bleach, and The Last Male Poet. Performance by Die Choir. | tickets here.

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…

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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

• Assurance that I came to religion well past childhood because of a real belief in beauty and goodness and not so much because of seeking alleviation from hardship or guilt

• Book of prayer

• Crest whitening strips

• Alice Bailey The Beacon print archives

• Los Angeles Apparel blue tights

• Pseudonymous writing so I can document more lurid details of my life whilst still maintaining some healthy restraint

• Good health

• Sobriety

• Excursion to swim outdoors once it is cold enough to really make it worth it

• Club sandwich in the solarium at The Marlton with Rebecca and Amelia this afternoon

• Reading my fucked up little story in a very small very autumnal room in the East Village this early evening.

• Smoking one cigarette with my friends outside the Jaws themed bar in Soho this late evening

• 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

• From 8pm at Rodeo — Emmeline Clein celebrates the paperback release of Dead Weight. Ft readings by Eliza Barry Callahan, Cat Cohen, Rayne Risher Quann, and Rosa Shipley.

• From 10pm at Night Club 101— Stick around after the earlier screening and the party for Body Count.

• From 9pm - late at Home Sweet Home — Spielzeug NYC hosts the Opening Gala Afterparty to celebrate The End; an unnatural history museum of apocalyptic peculiarities.

• LOS ANGELES - From 8pm at Earth — Muscle Man event. A reading, conversation, and live scroll with Jordan Castro and Tao Lin. Music by Ross Simonini.

Thursday, November 6

• From 6pm (cocktails) 7:15pm (show) at 555 Greenwich Ave — Alyssa Vingan and The New Garde unpack The Year In Fashion with special guests Nicolaia Rips, Taylor Scarabelli, and Emily Kirkpatrick. | Tickets here

• From 6pm - 8pm — It’s a big night of openings in Chelsea. Joan Mitchell works on paper from 1960 - 1965 at David Zwirner, Richard Prince never-before-seen recent works at Gagosian, Alex Da Corte new sculptures at Matthew Marks.

• From 6pm - 8pm at Blade Study — “Treading Water” by Jiwoong opens - the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, having previously shown in “Epiphany”, 2023.

• From 7pm - 9pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — Another preformance of Little Murders opens - “Talks of dead son’s, fecal photography, Vogue, and the “Breather” are just a taste of what happens in this Norman Rockwell-painting-gone-awry.” | Additional showtimes 11/7, 11/8, 11/14, 11/15

• From 7pm - 10pm at The Bench — Partiful is throwing a party to celebrate the inaugural launch of new blog ‘The Guest List.” On principle, I’m opposed to brand-hosted-parties, but this one does admittedly look fun. - “the citizens of New York are hereby called to assemble and address urgent matters of social life.” Opening remarks from Matt Starr and Halle Robbe. Partiful Town Hall dresscode.

• From 9:30pm at Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research — Chill Mag hosts their Issue 5 Launch Party with editors Finn DeNeuf and Mira IRL, along with Chill contributors past and present.

• From 10pm - 1:30pm at Gitano NYC — Club Bohemia returns with The Muses. Dress for tropic noir. | RSVP here

• From 10:30pm - late at Clara’s — Karaoke with Meg returns. Meg Spectre is a star! Will you sing songs?

• LOS ANGELES - From 8pm - midnight at Earth — Jordan Castro and Cluny Journal present SILENCE. An evening of silence. No speaking, no phones.

Friday, November 7

• From 7pm - 10pm at KGB — Cracks In Pomo presents The Applesauce Ball. Celebrating three camp icons; Gaga, Warhol, and Ratzinger. I’ll be reading, along with others <3 | tickets here

• From 7pm - 11pm at Tawny — Petal Books hosts a book release and art show, ft Ayana Iyer, Ciff Gant, Cole Smith, Jackson Ebbin, Jacob Ortega, Matt Bvoinms, Nathan Fayyazuddin, Nico Jones, Poppy Silvermen, Romi Marckx, Stella Jarvis. Food by Roan Hutner. Piano by Jonah Trudeau.

• From 10pm - 1am at Jean’s — Alex Delany and Constantine Giavos return with Love Club. - “Righteous disco. Dance floor anthems. Diabolical bass. Beautiful people.” No RSVP necessary, but admission is at the discretion of the door.

• LONDON - From 6:30 - 9:30pm at The Royal Academy of Arts — Soho Reading Series presents an evening of reading, art, and music in the rooms of the Royal Academy. Hosted by Olivia Allen. Readings by Jaya Twill, Jane Debate, Lydia Eliza Trail, and Clara Wade. Tickets include entry to the Kerry James Marshall exhibition. | Tickets here

Saturday, November 8

• From 8pm - late at 220 Bogart St — Notch Magazine celebrates the release of Issue 003: CURRENTS. The evening will feature readings by Magdalene Kennedy and Quinn Adikes, an artist talk by Diego León, video installation, dj sets, and good conversation. | tickets here.

• LOS ANGELES - From 7pm at Earth — Viscose Journal x Montez Press Radio x Earth present FASHION AND SOUND. Ft reading by Ana Howe Bukowski, performance by Slipper, and DJs Jasmine Johnson & Avalon. Hosted by Jeppe Ugelvig.

• LONDON - From 7:30pm - 11:00pm— Soho Reading Series presents The Flat Earth Gala, celebrating Anika Jade Levy’s perfect debut novel. Hosted by Tom Willis. Readings by Madeline Cash, Dakotah Weeks Murphree, Andrew Durbin, Emily Bauer, Sophie Mackintosh, and Olive Parker.

Sunday, November 9

• LOS ANGELES - From 1pm at The Aster — Artillery Art Debates will get heated over topics including “Should we bring back gatekeeping” and “Does art have to look good?” Moderated by Sammy Loren.

• LOS ANGELES - From 7pm at Earth — Jordan Castro and Cluny Journal present a screening of Ordet (1955) - a film about faith.

• As always, Confessions at KGB.

WHAT I DID

Monday, October 20

Autumn storm of the nicest kind outside, and I think I’ll close my eyes and imagine something else. I’ve been letting the clutter pile up for a while now. The intention was to disappear the clutter by simply leaving it behind. Catch a train. The hurricane rolled in early. The Amtrak lost power. The taxi skidded on black ice on Delancey Street. I circled New York City a few times in the car and then on foot and then I decided to stay a while. It was supposed to be something more like; stack clothing miles high on the floor of a small-box-apartment and then leave it all behind. Watch the waves swell bigger and bigger along gray rocky shores. Watch the wooden dock come crashing down like it sometimes does in the biggest winds this time of year. Run around the tip of a peninsula amidst floods and tornadoes and wear a lifejacket when you fling yourself off the bridge and into the ocean because the currents, in October, have a proclivity for sweeping swimmers out…

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