MONDAY

Christopher came over to tour my summer-fortress yesterday and I was careful not to misplace anything at all; no touching of the ship in a bottle or the vines climbing up the edges of stone building or the relics in the meditation room or the light that floats through the trifecta of arches upstairs. Light filtering through the kitchen and the living room and the studio and my garden suite. Christopher dozed off on a pollen-coated bench in my very hidden garden, and I smeared eyeliner over my eyelids in a mirror somewhere deep inside the creaking house. The drip from the flowers outside turned the whole place congested and emerald. I fell asleep on the daybed, silent and warm. Christopher scrolled on his phone outside, and when I woke up, he was pacing around my apartment, pollen tracking over wood floors and open windows. We brought the outside in. Very good here, Christopher said. Lonely, I replied. Men need to suffer for four years before they can live some fun life working in party publicity, Christopher said. I’m not a man, I replied. Christopher shrugged. You should still learn to be alone with yourself.

6-train down to Bleecker, and when we emerged it had started to rain. Real summer monsoon. Christopher gave me this OnlyFans-size XXXL sweatshirt, first to wear and then to keep. For your birthday, he said. I swung my soaked suede Prada boots over the railings on the subway, and I tugged on the sleeves of my new sweatshirt, feeling very protective. We ducked into the bodega for strawberry sweet bread and a drunk lady pointed at Christopher’s shirt. Started screaming CHINATOWN CHINATOWN CHINATOWN, and then she was like I’m not asking for money but I am asking for triple-A batteries.

I did my makeup after the monsoon on Petra’s floor. Christopher slept on the Lower East Side. I went to a new loft for the launch of some new audio-AI. Opening night at the offices themed around Al Gore, baggy jeans, lava lamps. The Sopranos season finale, 2007. I stood on the fire escape with a cigarette, my friends, all that rain. Not scared of heights. Aestheticizing everything at the expense of my hope, optimism, and sincerity, when I’m not feeling anxious. Lillian sat on the fire escape with me and she asked how I deal with feeling anxious. Well, all the things I used to be anxious about actually happened, and so now I kind of don’t care.

Nihilism?

No, not at all, more like resignation toward some degree of resilience.

I didn’t light my cigarette, and I only drank water. Sitting on this metal stoop high in the sky, flirting with vertigo, twirling my hair and picking at my nails. Lillian nodded. She’d just be reluctant to do anything that would make the anxiety worse. Yeah, I get that, I just don’t relate anymore. Yellow taxi cab home. Summer descended quickly.

The birds outside my window sound like gunshots at five a.m. Game-theory gunshots. Pew pew pew. Kind of cartoonish and quiet like that. The morning passes like water. I wander through the house and feel underwater with the space of it. I look at my phone and realize that one year ago today was my last day of life living in a greenhouse in the sky, and I feel a little sad for a moment, and then a little glad. I’ve moved three times since and the transience of now and the chaos of before makes it feel a little bit like a life that happened to someone else. I consider calling Christopher. Crazy how time flies. I consider how he might be a little annoyed by the proclamations, so I say nothing at all.

It is silent and pale in this house this morning. My house for the summer. Summer house. I pace around the garden and home and look at the supplements and oils and stairs that appear in front of me like pixels and then all clear. The stairs go up and up and up alongside tree-lined windows, city-forest, the home stretches up higher than I can see, and alone here, it occurs to me that I am living a life that belongs to someone else. Subsume my doubts.

I’m one hour late to play rehearsal and I take photos on a disposable camera from the back of the theater when I arrive. It’s kind of like how when you see extreme gore in real life it’s nothing like you imagined, Annabel says. Outside, “Union Square” is “hot” and “nauseous” and “tech week” is “over” and with it, the money and the longevity and the terrifying, all-consuming vibes. CHOOSE A JOB. CHOOSE DIY AND JUNK FOOD. CHOOSE LIFE. CHOOSE DRUGS. It’s like that poster that outlines your options. I have a headache from supplements and sun. The restaurants around here are all basically branded as simulacra of their own proof of concept. A smashburger place called “Smashy” or a pizza place called “Pizzaz.” I settle for water and a sugar-free vanilla almond milk latte at Starbucks, where all the pastries look like paint.

I walk from Union Square to Sammy’s Photo Lab and then past Olivia at work. We wear the same red dress and have much to discuss. There’s a hot wind outside and only a little bit of fog. I tell Olivia about how one year ago today was when everything was very different and about to change, and Olivia says I didn’t know you then. I tell Olivia I was way more highstrung and I’m healthier now which is the main thing and Olivia says thank God. Olivia says they hate you because you’re healthy. I imagine myself healthy. Diet Coke with lime in a bikini on some shimmering ocean floor. I buy zero-calorie Japanese gummy bears and I deliver them to Christopher’s door. Here you go.

A huge geomagnetic storm is incoming tonight. Massive sun explosion expected to hit the earth. My eyes go wide. I can’t sleep alone on the Upper East Side in a vast and empty monastery during the geomagnetic storm. I walk back to Sunday to Sunday and I sit there while Olivia closes shop and “Can’t Stand Losing You” by The Police plays on repeat. The air conditioning makes it kind of like a tomb or a cave here. You can’t sleep alone during the geomagnetic storm, Olivia affirms. She slides me a cold ham and cheese croissant on a plate, and a big almond cookie to go. Wine in a hot-coffee styrofoam cup and Diet Coke and then her coworkers come inside to take shots and mix drinks in plastic bottles while the sky turns dark and the wind picks up. Olivia and I walk to Christopher’s stoop and we do not go inside. I tell Olivia a story, the one about gang-stalking and delusions, and Olivia gasps. This is a much better story than anything on your blog, she says. The wind makes everyone crazy, but I am feeling a little bit subdued. I tell Olivia another story and she says, I probably would have died if I were you, and I roll my eyes and say I mean I almost did. We’re sitting in the wind and we’re talking about the sorts of things it’s worth giving it all up for. I think we both understand life to operate in pretty singular terms. What best friend activities should we do this summer? Olivia asks. I know this isn’t really your thing, but this song reminds me of us. And then she plays me Travis Scott’s “Topia Twins,” and she gestures toward our matching red dresses and brown boots and laughs. The wind torpedoes branches and leaves and drops of water in the sort of cyclones that make everyone mad, and I think about my life a year ago and my life now and this endless cast of characters in these endless archives that cycle and churn and will eventually be outgrown, and when Olivia hugs me goodbye and prances away down the street, I feel a little bit happy and a little bit of nothing at all.

TUESDAY

I wake up on a futon couch in a semi-blacked-out room. The geomagnetic storm stayed brewing high up in the atmosphere and never hit earth, and so my fears remain unfounded. I shower in the kitchen, because every apartment has its quirks. I read over the blog and I consider the problem: too many names in my soon-to-be-aesthete life. La Colombe vanilla latte and fizz-free Celsius, b2b. I consider a cool minty Zyn, and then I consider the pleasures of denying myself the things that I want. Christopher says, what is your plan today? Take calls with no headphones on my floor for ten hours?

“Heart of Glass” is playing in Sephora. It’s mostly just the years tracing over each other. Three hundred sixty days of diaries, which is very many or nothing at all, depending on the day and the way you’re thinking about it and what you do with the hours. I buy mineral sunscreen and a rose quartz gua sha. I buy a little gold cross and a little dress and hair band at Brandy Melville next door. Blue, for New York Knicks. At Stone Street Cafe, I buy avocado toast and sparkling coconut water and consider my trouble. Sleep deprivation and a pathological aversion to isolation, mostly.

Christopher says, I am going to play John Cale, so that you’ll talk to people and say “have you ever heard of John Cale,” and they will say “oh, that’s the guy who was just on Charli XCX’s album cover,” and then they’ll think you just learned about John Cale, and then they’ll think you’re such a fucking poser. He looks at me and laughs and I say ok and I press publish on my blog. I close my eyes and turn technology off. Psychic resistance to exposure-psychosis. My prison of my own creation. Christopher comes back from this meeting and he says put this in your blog. He says there’s this evil group of effective altruists in San Francisco and they’re trying to bring back Prohibition. Christopher says you would hate that and I roll my eyes. I lie on the floor in my new blue Brandy Melville dress and turn my technology back on.

[Redacted] is so lame, I say. Totally void of interests, and you can tell because he just globs onto whatever might seem surface-level subversive and interesting.

Mmm. Yeah, Christopher says. And that’s why he’s famous, and you have a blog.

My eyes are burning from the pollen in the garden. I get an odd text and think I don’t want to relate to people on these terms. Christopher still wants to know my plan. I mention the text and I don’t mention my response, which was unfeeling but a response no less, and then I consider my plan. For the next five years and the next five days. I think about my plan for the next five weeks and there is a fracture in my anhedonia. I say I am going to miss you. Christopher says, that’s what I was about to say.

In the basement at work, Andrew reads about getting kicked out of poetry class. Because I have fascistic fantasies and I’m a bitch. He reads about how he got this autism diagnosis in high school and then he started hitting himself in the head when he got upset and still does sometimes. There is a smooth sunset and an Adderall shortage that I guess is getting worse, because it’s all that anyone can talk about, not just me. Outside, there are more people congregating, a big New York night incoming, and for the first time since I can remember, I leave early. Walk home early feeling nothing at all. I tell Talia and Romy I will go to Christopher’s for one hour to write my story, and Romy says like he’s a library or something, and then I laugh a little and feel nothing at all. I’m listening to Indie Rockers, New Slang, Kate Bush, no emotion no soul. There’s this thing about the way the days of every month align with the months present and months past cosmically, and not entirely linearly, in themes and signs and symbols, so I could reminisce if I wanted. There’s this photo that always pops up as this automated cover image of dinners throughout the years, and it’s [redacted] holding grapefruit soda and making a silly face like a little grinning kid before a summer dinner party almost two years back. Aluminum dishes and floor pillows and herbs all around, and then a few hours later there had been grapefruit soda on the floor and shattered glass and trouble all around, and it had been kind of, if not totally, my fault, though everyone blamed him. Crushed spirits and the like. For a while I had a Pavlovian sob response to that sort of thing. Crushing an evening full of childlike wonder with my palm for no reason, and things that were kind-of-if-not-totally-my-fault. A muted sunset tonight, and I couldn’t conjure up a Pavlovian sob response if I tried. The point of nostalgia is that it’s compulsive. You shouldn’t have to try.

I write down every word of Christopher’s evil phone conversation like a play, and then, for the first time in a long time, I write a story. I evaluated the flaws and the seven deadly sins and the most nefarious pitfalls of all. I identified my weak points, and I really thought them through.

WEDNESDAY

Someone is screaming outside the window. Howling at the moon. Christopher says, I’ll protect you. From slander and from people on the street who are screaming at the moon. I eat sushi slowly by the window. Most of an avocado salmon roll, and then I start to feel sick. One White Claw, normal, not surge.

I do not sleep till past dawn and then I wake up early. My face looks inflamed like the moon. To create something you have to destroy something. Sleep again. Awake again. I’m manic over email. All my neglect demands bursts of energy. Playing catch up and the like. Christopher says, you are not hungry at all!? I eat handfuls of Reese’s-flavored cereal to protest.

We’re going to Kellogg’s Diner, Christopher says. Very sure of himself. They are playing Katy Perry and Edward Sharpe at Kellogg’s Diner, where everything is bubblegum pink and clean and my iced coffee comes out in a cup that looks like a milkshake. I post a photo of the diner, and Romy texts to say I can’t picture you in Brooklyn. I can’t picture myself anywhere. Feeling a little bit insane. Christopher says, I like coming to a diner, and I particularly like coming to the diner in the middle of the night. Middle of the day now, and I am holding my eyes open with useless obedience. We are sitting in front of piles of pork sausage and mozzarella sticks and egg white California omelette and mac and cheese, which Christopher samples with a silver metal fork and then pushes away in disgust. They added mayonnaise, but we’re here for the ambiance. We’re here to make it feel like California. Going out west is a sign of success. Gold rush and the like.

I fall asleep in an instant back uptown, in my garden, in Eden. I dream of political operatives, and a gala on the twenty-seventh floor full of interlopers and fire hoses, and I am there a little bit lost, only invited as a guest of Christopher’s or something. The interlopers at the dream gala don’t understand that we are all so aligned. They’re smashing those cakes with the dip-and-dot sprinkles on top as an act of protest, just like me eating Reese’s cereal puffs.

I wake up in a silent afternoon, and the light outside my green metal windows is twinkling shades of fast-moving emerald. I wonder what is coursing through my veins. I’m stuck in the computer on my computer. I’m not listening to music. Turn on the shower and stand under scalding water for a while, bad at leaving.

Gallery walkthrough in a luxury building. I can see all of the city’s water towers and luxury pools and all the way across the East River and to New Jersey. Everything is glass. You can see through the glass kitchen to the glass living room. Glass white bathroom. Christopher says, in Wisconsin this would be three hundred dollars a month to rent. In Wisconsin, they don’t have views like this, baby. The seasteading guy from Austin is here, and the gallerist, and some people from San Francisco. Talking about hyperbaric chambers. HBOT is really good for you, but you need to find nineteen minutes in your day three times a week, which can be hard. There’s this lawyer there and he’s working on public-domain events. Christopher tells me that the man is working on finding spaces that you can ask to rent and the venue has to say ok, and it’s free. I say ok and then I say, I kind of don’t believe you. Errands spawning before my eyes and I’m feeling petulant. I like the artwork that looks kind of like the token word-art that references cocaine at every fair these days, except it’s not bro-y or douchey like that. Not with the context.

I take the train uptown. I spend one hour in my monastery and call my father and Christopher, feeling fearful. Dark green light outside, in the garden. And then I pack my suitcase and keys and something like twenty-nine summer dresses for something like twelve days. Maya reads my birth chart online. EMOTIONAL EMOTIONAL EMOTIONAL LIKE SOOOO EMOTIONAL. I run into Sara on Lexington Ave and she says it seems like you are always on vacation. Seems like you’ve been pretty go-with-the-flow about it. Christopher is podcasting on his computer back downtown, so I mouth I’m going to go to KGB Bar now with no sound. At KGB Bar, Caroline tells me to fix my posture. Fix my posture, get a cat, and be cool about it. We make a note of my prerogatives on my phone and she takes a picture. For Instagram! She’s good at this. Instagram and also being a good listener. We identified my weak points, and we really thought them through. Paris, tomorrow. Vacation from my vacation. Then, I’ll write another story and I’ll move a little differently.

THURSDAY

I click the wellness tab fast on my flat-screen airplane TV as I take off toward Paris. The girl to my left wears a Free Palestine tee and gray socks. The man to my right wears a Rolex and all black clothing. There’s all these meditations in the wellness tab.

Take Off! — Overcoming Your Fear of Flying. Décollage!: Vaincre sa peur..., and etc etc etc.

I fill this paper cup with 177ml of white wine on the plane and then I drink it in one sip on an empty stomach and now I’m euphoric and I’m really drunk and pretty happy. They go hand in hand occasionally, I think. It’s shocking and pleasing, the effects of this 177ml of wine.

Paris never underwhelms. I don’t like it when people talk about their syndromes. I was in Paris when I was seven, back when I more belonged to the mountains, and I was in Paris at eighteen with my father in between these bartending jobs in far-east Europe, and then at twenty-two with Sylvie, Riley, Julia, Annie, Andrew, at this pied-à-terre and on the Seine and drinking gimlets in this restaurant where a wardrobe opens up to reveal a smoking room. Anyway, none of these names mean much anymore. I was almost in Paris a winter before this one, and I guess I’d oscillated back and forth. To go or stay or go or stay, and ultimately I’d stayed, I didn’t go to Paris then and I haven’t been since. The ontology doesn’t run that deep. I spent a while oscillating, this whole year actually, and then I told Christopher that I was going to Paris and I would come back to New York more beautiful, and Christopher said long trip. Christopher said it’s all the same to me. The plane air is kind of thick and cold and grimy. I listen to New Slang by The Shins and more of these placating Kate Bush songs and Forget Her by Jeff Buckley, over and over and over. I listen to Tin Man by America and then I start to cry a little. I can’t say why, and my face is still a little puffy like the moon, and I can’t see out the windows from my seat in the middle of this plane. Can’t see the moon or the stars or the signs and symbols in the sky that say what comes next if you know how to read them. But I don’t know how to read them, so it doesn’t really matter. I’m going to France and my mother will collect me at Charles de Gaulle and then after that it will be quiet, and we’ll go to the country. I have been awake for days, really, wide awake and chasing the bright sun across the Atlantic on this red-eye flight now, so I’ll go to baggage and my mother and the taxi and Malpais and the country, and when I get to the country, I think that I will sleep.

APPENDIX: Places Sammy’s Photo Lab, Sunday to Sunday, Kellogg’s Diner, KGB Bar Potions strawberry sweet bread, triple-a batteries, La Colombe vanilla latte, fizz-free Celsius, COOL MINTY ZYN Reese’s-flavored cereal Use mineral sunscreen, rose quartz gua sha, Wear Only Fans XXXL sweatshirt, suede prada boots, Music Can’t Stand Losing You by The Police, Heart of Glass by Blondie, Topia Twins by Travis Scott New Slang by The Shins, Forget Her by Jeff Buckley, Tin Man by America

CALENDER:

Tuesday, July 7

• From 6pm - 9pm at Susan Alexandra — Polyester Zine celebrates the launch of The Besties Issue. Bracelet making, drinks, readings, performances, and friendship!

• From 7pm at Night Club 101 — Patio presents the paperback launch party of Adelaide Faith’s Happiness Forever. With therapy readings from KJ Rothweiler, Harold Rogers, Nicola Maye Goldberg, Mackenzie Thomas, Sean Thor Conroe, Caveh Zahedi, and Megan Nolan. Plus 1:1 Love Advice from Adelaide.

• From 8pm at The Center for Theatre Research — It’s your last chance to see Love in America - Written by Eric Faris, directed by Annabel Boardman. “The play follows a single day in the lives of six young seekers in the summer of 1968. Can their spiritual idealism withstand the pressure of desire, drugs, and dueling egos? Perhaps the only way out is through…” | Tickets here.

• After, from 8:30pm at Alter Space (63 N 3rd St alter space, Brooklyn, NY) — Soirée au Théátre! Celebrate The Center for Theatre Research and the closing of Love in America. Donation Ticket

Wednesday, July 8

• From 7pm at Night Club 101 — Escorpion and 99 Minutes presents a special screening of Kiro Russo’s DARK SKULL (80 minutes) - a drunken descent into the mines of Western Bolivia. Followed by a live DJ set from HEAVY FLOW. | 99 Minutes is always free!

• From 7pm - 11pm at Spring Bar — Hard Pack celebrates the launch of Issue 07. I’m excited about this one, “a new type of ski magazine that combines edgy reportage with cerebral writing to create a new lexicon for the sport that is weird, philosophical, and dangerously fun.

• From 10pm - 1am at Oberon — Club Chess hosts an Art Star themed night at Oberon; new restaurant inside The New Museum from the team behind Rucola, Rhodora, Anais, and June. The restaurant is “conceived as a freestanding box.” Looks interesting. | RSVP here

Thursday, July 9

Some openings…

• From 6pm - 9pm at Parent Company — Joey Gonella Love Will Return in a Different Way opens - solo show drawing on a story of Kafka writing letters as the lost doll of a little girl he encountered in Germany, Edmund Burke concepts of infinity, and that which is so small it risks being forgotten. Parent Company is one of my favorite galleries right now. Always showing very special work.

• From 6pm - 9pm at George Adams Gallery — Maya Brodsky New Paintings opening reception. Three small scale oil paintings: “Sam and I,” 2025 and “Sam, Birthday” 2025 relating to the birth of her son, and “Window at Cuttyhunk, Sunset,” 2026 depicting sunlight shores and oceans on Cuttyhunk Island, one of the most special places in the world.

• From 6pm - 9pm at The Locker Room — Summer Wagner The Pulse of Grass and Screen opens. Wanger is a director of Rituals. Youth in the face of apocalypse. Solitude in the wake of singularity. Beauty in the fallout of abstraction. A show about skin to skin to grass to vape contact.

Left to Right: Joey Gonnella “Canis Major” 2026 | Maya Brodsky “Window at Cutthunk, Sunset” 2026 | Summer Wagner The Pulse of Grass and Screens

And launches + readings + parties

• From 7pm at DSK Brooklyn — New York Review of Architecture hosts a summer party at a lovely beer garden in Fort Greene; one of the very best places to be in the heat. Door prizes giveaway, new posters, and copies of hit guide to New York City | Tickets here

• From 7pm - 10pm at Cafe Studio — Field Mag celebrates Issue 2 launch with free drinks, new friends, and good times. First thirty people get a magazine.

• From 8pm at Night Club 101— SCENE REPORT. Readings from the underbellies of downtown, and from the theater. Party reporters read fiction (me, Georgia McCann, Brock Colyar, Izzy Casey) along with monologues by Chloe Margot and Dylan Pitanza. Plus a special excerpt from CRUSH by Christopher Paul Richards. | Tickets on sale for Crush from July 16. The reading is free

Friday, July 10

Openings:

• From 6pm - 9pm at IRL Gallery — Galatée Martin Let Us Start at the Beginning opens. Dreamlike scenes primarily on raw linen, moving between fable, illustration, myth, and memory.

• From 6pm - 8pm at Palo Gallery — Lily Burgess Beginning of the Birth Pangs opens, featuring thirteen new prints. Burgess draws on film, ritual, iconography, and religious forms. Her news series “illuminates the many ways the human spirit searches for sanctity amid pain.”

• From 6pm - 9pm at Blank Mag Books — Celebrate the release of ‘six letters four numbers’ by Jim Joe and opening accompanying group show - “a limited edition photobook by Jared Orellana serving as a visual archive of graffiti made by JIM JOE across New York City from 2016 to 2026”

• From 9:30pm at Night Club 101 — Cast Celebration of the Project Runway S22 Premiere. Many surprises in store with this one <3

Saturday, July 11

• From 2pm - late — Jenkem Mag Block Party! Skate clinic, drinks, music, loitering in Tompkins Park, and then after party at Night Club 101.

• From 9pm - late at 6 Platt Street — Birthday party for Sofia and Julian hosted by Sofia Leilai, Sephira Street and Veronica Faye. DJ sets from Sank, Joe Endo, Zane Kind, and DJ Brina.

Monday

I moved again, and it happened for no reason, like packing boxes and now I’m counting breaths and days and years in this garden letting thoughts float by like clouds, or whatever it is they say to do to fix a closed throat chakra, clogged up mind. Closed throat chakra meaning you talk a lot but about all the wrong things. Barefoot in the garden and gregorian chants because you know when to be quiet and also honest with yourself and others and bring it all together and the like. The move has been strange because it’s for no reason, really, though it’s not the coming and going and staying that creates this crawling-out-of-skin sensation and more so, just; you can have anything you want and it’s worse because you can’t have that one thing. You can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want. Rose visited me at work last night and she told me that she saw something in the West Village that made her heart stop, and then she asked me if I’ve been happy since it all went down and I said no, a little bit unthinking, but I like it more euphoric than nice so perhaps I’m not being fair. Rose said she gets what I mean and she means it too. Rose said she wants to move to Europe but then she’d just be doing-it-for-no-reason in Berlin or Paris or Oregon, even. Someplace like that. I told Rose that I’d been watching the sun bounce off the Hudson River on the drive uptown and downtown and uptown and downtown and thinking about doing-it-for-no-reason until it became a little like acidy the one-most-deadly-sin and then Rose said she gets what I mean. This guy introduced this other guy to me and Rose then he said Rose and C**** are each others muses and then I said I forgot we told you that and then he said what are you two communicating about telepathically and then Rose said we’re talking in our heads about conversations that we’ve already had out loud.

Ten am and hot and sunny, now. I’m in this fuzzy too-warm sweater with this Alice-Bailey-Esoteric-Health-pin on the chest on this 6-train uptown home, lurching, lurching, lurching. All the way up to the top of the world. All the way up to my new and secret garden.

Six pm and so the day passes like water. A woman appears in the hallway around sunset and says it is so lucky to meet you. I say I like your earrings and I like your bracelet and she says would you believe I bought them both in different markets in Japan? I leave the back door open, to the forest, in the city, and the voices on the calls today feel a little bit disparate and far away. It feels a little bit like a secret, being here. No one knows how far away I am. I read over an old journal entry, the one from this time last year and think; I used to be so indignant. There’s a sweetness to stubbornness, and it makes me a little bit sad. Kicking my feet in the mud and the like.

I bring Eleanor to my backyard-forest-church-and-temple around dusk, and she surveys the heart shaped stones and nice wood and viney starlit ceiling, and says this place is made-for-me. It’s tech week, and the bender will soon be over.

I’m sitting on a bench at the internet art party and it’s a kind of nice vibe. Plenty of light and places to sit. Diet coke in plastic cup and things seem to be wrapping up. I’m glad things are wrapping up, Mira says. Wrapping up?, I say. Mira is wearing a perfect tan slip dress and a little gold belt. She just moved uptown and she doesn’t like to really party. I’ve been so great, Mira says, and I believe her, which, in turn, makes me feel pretty tender, and a tiny bit bittersweet sad. Mira’s boyfriend is on the other side of the bench at the bench, and he is reading Napoleons letters out loud from a big gray book. Mira tells me that her boyfriend likes my last name because it reminds him of birds. Different pronunciation, I say, and Mira says well, I know. Mira tells me that everything is wrapping up. She smiles and she tells me that things seem sweet and almost over, and thank God. I smile and I say something about; I hope so. I hope that things are wrapping up, and I hope that things are sweet.

I’m on the street outside The River with a sparkling water and my o.k. mood. I’m going uptown, soon. I’m going to Paris. I’m going to the Brimfield vintage market in the summer. I’m going to the third celestial ring and when they ask me about final purification in purgatory I’ll say that thing about that time we got that girl an uber when she was lost and crying on the street. I’ll say I pretty much ultimately owned up to it every time I told a lie.

I’m sitting at the bar at The River and Olivia is laughing and wearing two long blonde braids. You are so docile, Olivia tells me. Thanks, I say and mean it. I say thanks and I am flooded with relief. You’re like a deer or a bird, Olivia says. Who me? Olivia and I and her boyfriend walk down the street. Walk all the way towards Congee Village. All the lights are out in all the fifth floor walk up buildings and I’m not feeling all that high-alert. We can’t find the car keys and I can’t spot the moon. Olivia’s boyfriend leans against his car door and laughs. And so it’s all my fault, he says. Olivia tells me to hail a cab. I love it when you hail cabs, she says. I’m hailing a cab. Olivia’s bounding through the streets.

Tuesday

Alone again after all those sounds. I can fill the silence. Blue by Anais Setarah and New Tank Playboi Carti and Reckless Crystal Castles and Never Feel Again. I can fill a room. Making turkey sausage from amish market and eating melting oreo popsicle from seven-eleven on the fire escape in morning light. Texting the event girl for events. Dreading party-photography-film. We got to Dr Clarke last night and Romy was like ohhh, here comes the twitterinas. Once a gallerina always a gallerina. The internet is mostly just embarrassing if it’s mimicry. If you do it first it’s fine. It’s embarrassing when it’s copying. I’m not copying you. I’m not losing my mind. I say I’m not copying you three-times-fast. On the street outside last night, Romy said that all the girls are wasting-away. She said it with her nose scrunched up in distaste because Romy has a strong sense of God, His will, who was it who said all that stuff about natural law? Romy has better proof of concept for this stuff. Christopher stood on the street and he said you gotta stay a little bit hungry for it. He said you should always be a little bit hungry and feeling like you could take a nap but won’t. I got home late and it’s warm in my room. I miss Miami. I miss hot humid heat and city beaches full moon night swim central air conditioning that makes you cough and empty and sick. I always miss the end of things so much that I could die. I miss Costa Rica and El Salvador, France and Miami black sand beaches, languid heat, and leaving. I miss surfing the-ultimate-form-of-anti-intellectualism. I miss sleeping, honestly. I miss when it was winter; dark and cold and easy like a cloud. I used to give a lot of thought to the seven deadly sins. It helped when they would spell it out for me. Gluttony and rage, etc etc etc. We identified my weak points, and we really thought them through.

This guy gave me his business card on the street and he was like what do you write about and Jack answered for me like: twenty-thousand-words-per-week about herself. I said hey kind of indignant and Jack said something about drunken rampage and I said hey again and Jack said sorry you’re a friend I can talk to like a boy and I said thanks and really meant it.

Hazy and cold in the morning. Noon. I am feeling like it is time for everything to give. I call my father and I say just so you know I decided that it’s time for everything to give. My father says how was your night and I stretch my fingers wide across the glass table and say; beautiful.

Aria’s dance is kind of about growing and shedding hair and fur and a little bit about Artemis, and we meet at The Marlton Hotel to discuss. One spicy margarita and one lychee martini and we split french fries and then it’s afternoon. I like the way she talks about her craft. She’s connected by all this aligned and spiraling thread, so she knows things like the emotional cords that will end in an injured ankle. She knows when someone is in a prison of their own psychosomatic making, and when one becomes lucky to have escaped or to have never been imprisoned in the first place. Aria leaves and I eat salmon tartare at The Marlton Hotel and think about what I could make that’s kind of outside of myself, too. The waiter waits till I’m alone to tell me welcome back, and I wait till I’m alone to order soda water and crusty bread. I tell him I’m working on the same story I’ve been working on for a while, neglecting for a while. I like writing about cults and maybe someday about this guy who stalked me after he robbed a Jimmy John’s and then became subsumed by subcultures. Subculture psychosis. Aria found the whole tale to be vaguely Lynchian. I hold court at The Marlton Hotel and I call my dad just to say I’m happy. I drink diet coke with this other girl whose star is ascendant and she’s going to be famous in two weeks and I say I’ll try to make the parts I can happen and then I call my dad again to say I hope my star’s ascendant too.

I haven’t been home in what feels like days but I’m not in the mood to go counting. Celia meets me in the dusky evening in a patterned colored slip dress, and she veers away somewhere before Avenue A on account of my bad vibes and bodyweight psychosis. At the fashion fiction reading I admire Lily’s social graces. Like she’s the center of every room but she’s always listening more than she speaks. I call Christopher just to say hi. To say I was just at this party where I was feeling a little bit more off-putting than generatively shy. Once there was this girl who lived in a yellow house in a very green forest. A stone house of an oasis in Manhattan. A glass apartment in the sky. I had this stalker and he robbed a Jimmy John’s and I moved in with this boyfriend and I had this stint in Serbia. I don’t consider things in third person, it’s not like I imagine myself being watched or something.

This guy from the internet whose real name I can never remember stops me at the doors when I roll up to this tech week party, it was supposed to be something about robots and defense surveillance. Come to this party at Adam’s instead, he says. Who’s Adam? Political operative. Ok, I say. The stairs are long and narrow and green at Adam’s apartment. The loft is huge and the floors are lined with pillows and stackable blocks like these tetris-piece self-inflating couches that Christopher keeps showing me on tiktok shop, though I bet these ones are more expensive. They are playing The Knicks on projectors first, and if you asked me what I thought about the state of affairs in New York I would not-say-tired, and if you asked me if I thought it was too late I would say probably-not-yet, and if you asked me about convictions I would say they’re a necessary evil to conjure up before you die. Later they are playing avatar-ai-animations on the tv and Jared says look away it’s mind control and I can’t look away, can’t stop being all transfixed. There’s a fort in one of the corners of this loft, and alien sculptures and colored lights and my friends keep walking in the door, waving hi, all these friends from all these different social worlds. Liv takes me to the bathroom to give me research-chemicals and make-me-live-forever, and I hold this needle over my stomach and I say ok go and she says you have to do it yourself and I say I can’t and she says well I can’t and I say I really can’t and so she injects me with peptides and I say look, now I’m immortal. I meet Christopher back on the tetris couch and I say I like this party because it’s lots of lying down. I tell him about my newfound immortality and I say I made Liv inject me with these research chemicals because I was too scared to do it myself and Christopher shrugs and says that was a weird thing to make her do, hopefully now you two will be very good friends.

It’s four am and I’m trying to write and I’m not yet immortal and I don’t want to be. Everything I’ve ever wanted is obfuscated under a really good stack: cerebrolysin or beta blockers or inositol, I don’t really know the words for these things. Christopher plays this song by Belle and Sebastian and then he starts to laugh hard. What? I say. This is what music sounded like in two-thousand-eight, he replies. I’m lying on the couch and the sun will come up soon. I wasn’t there, I say. You missed it, he says. You were busy being born or something. He plays Indie Rokkers by MGMT and I think that this will be a song I will listen to for a while now. He plays Future Games by Fleetwood Mac and I shut my eyes on this couch. You can have everything you want if you don’t want anything at all.

Wednesday

Seven-thirty-am awake again after all that light. I think it will be better once I get away from it, honestly. I can’t write about my dreams anymore because of evil eye and psychic warfare. And here is what happens after that: evening time and when Jennifer says we will both take the smoked salmon at The Marlton Hotel I say kind of quiet, no I will take an apricot crepe and also celery soda. Apricot crepe all folded up and tastes like sponge just-the-way-I-like-it. Fire still on at The Marlton Hotel which is making spring time feel kind of enflamed and stifling and bloated just like I expected it. Not to be a complainer or anything. Jennifer says thirty minutes of sleep! Thirty minutes! Must be like-a-zombie-or-something. And then she tells me this story about highway-hypnosis. Her trouble is highway-hypnosis. My trouble is: no trouble at all. My trouble is all this light, AI psychosis, too many events and not enough inositol and no-research lately, none-at-all. Olivia is at Tatiana in Brighton Beach. My apartment is kind of like a zoo, and so this is the part that I think that I will miss. Blue bird out the window and the cat that eats the mice and doesn’t really like pets at least from me and the turtles are in the courtyard.

Nine-pm alone again in my room for old times sake, windows open looking out over my zoo; blue bird, turtles, cat that doesn’t like pets etc. Christopher texts and says you should go to the party. My phone subsumes me. It’s phone by day event by night. I would like it to be story by day, and something different by night. I play Fishtails by Lana del Rey and Some Things Seem to Never Work by Solange. The first song says You wanted me sadder and the second song says I’ve seen you with the lights off and also: remember when you kissed me at Jimmy Johns when I was seventeen???? And then it’s later, open window, self indulgent and sweet summer breeze and so I play on Forget Her. Tell yourself over and over….

Thursday

I used to walk for one hour every morning and write out all-the-things-not-fit-for-print, and this was what I called my semblance-of-routine. The momentum has been slower lately. An object in motion, or whatever that cliche and/or rule is. I used to be opaque about it, and then I decided I wanted clarity. It’s good to let things go in waves. The current wave is pro-opaque, I think.

I’m lying on [redacted’s] couch on a transient and too hot morning and I’m saying that I feel so transient. Feel so laid-out-like-in-psychoanalysis. Type of couch they’d lay you out on and preform analysis, I say, and then [redacted] tells me that it’s probably more the empty room than the couch that is contributing to this clinical-vibe. Ever since he put his H.P. Lovecraft Halloween and Remilia Rave and Spy Magazine posters under the bed and now the floors are clean. Ever since they resurrected this concrete wall out the window that stretches up and down so high that the eye can’t see where it starts and where it ends. If the curious mind did not know how these things tend to go, well then the curious mind might be tempted to lean too far outside the window and fuck around and find out. Not in a death drive way. More so, just, inquiring mind would like to know what they do with the starts and the ends of all this concrete wall. I am lying supine on [redacted’s] concrete couch and I am telling [redacted] that there is nothing clinical about it all. The couch or analysis or certainly this heat. Too hot for anything but linen in New York. Cotton shorts and white sheer curtains. I think I’d like to pick a topic and explore it deeply every week, and then the stories will start to take more shape.

I’m at the Posterati Museum with Christopher and the mood is great. Too hot outside for anything but Brandy Melville black skirt sticking to red-leather couch. We took a slow and metal elevator up four stories beyond a non descript door to get here and when I said it feels like Los Angeles, Christopher said because of day-time-activities? No. Because it’s all about the movies. I am sitting on a red-brown leather couch and there is a book titled Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde in my lap. Russia! I say. I like when it’s more classical than Avant Garde. Christopher has already discovered a computer archive and so I am saying the-things-out-loud, no reply, speaking like the words are all still-in-my-head. It’s a little eerie and pretty cheerful in here. Pride by Grace Jones is playing on repeat, and the elevator opens up into an empty room. All that music, no attendants. All that cheerful sound in empty space. As you examine the film posters in this book, try to imagine Moscow or Leningrad in the 1920s, the streets filled with people attending to their daily affairs, the book says. Imagine workers leaving their jobs at the end of the day, running to catch their streetcars. They would glance up and be confronted by these startling posters looming overhead. It has been quiet for a few minutes save for Pride by Grace Jones, but now Christopher looks up and looks at me and says You don’t like the Avant Garde??? Yeah, yeah you prefer that socialist realism.

I’m at lunch at Sunday to Sunday, and the cokes and diet cokes and french fries are coming out free. Christopher holds a glass bottle of soda to his face to cool down, no central AC and I say ew at all that perspiration. I eat the french fries slowly and one by one and then they are all gone. Christopher squints at the empty cone and then back at me and he says: where did they go?

We go to this apartment on Allen Street. All roads lead to Allen Street. Christopher walks with me to tour the spot and when I see the realtor on the steps I say sorry I brought my manager. We’re sitting on the steps of this apartment on Allen Street, and the realtor is talking about UFOs. The realtor is like you know the UFOs are actually just people. Something about The Epstein Files. Something about how whales (apex predator of the sea) view air as a mystical-life-force and humans on ships as the aliens and angels and demons of this surface-realm. There’s this AI competition to learn the language of whales, he is saying. No one has ever heard whale translated before. Inside the apartment, the hallway walls are clinical for-real. White flashing lights and red buttons in this elevator. Space is so liminal. I manifested my dream life. I imagined getting into this red elevator and pressing number five. I asked for this apartment, and you said yes. I imagine some morning in some autumn getting into this elevator alone and I start to feel a little bit queasy. I imagine every day in this elevator, and a lot of them all alone. Some girl walks by through the hallway in a little red dress with a little brown dog. Christopher shrugs. If it’s good enough for her then it’s good enough for you.

Christopher tells me to tell your dad you have to go to the photobooth museum. Christopher takes me to Economy Candy and then he points to a bubble-gum-blue-raspberry plastic-bottle soda and says: watch you track down some poor clerk here and ask if they have the blue-raz-bubble-gum soda in diet. Pacific Aquarium on Delancey is a pretty one-of-one and great vibe. All the best finds are unexpected. I tell Christopher that Pacific Aquarium has a pretty good grift going on. Same as the Posterati Movie Poster Gallery when you think about it. Call your store a show. Come in and see. Like what you see? Come back and make a purchase. They’re selling tanks and electric wires inside Pacific Aquarium. I’m buying what they’re selling. The plant section is towards the back of the aquarium, through a corridor of four-by-one tanks full of golden barba, male fancy guppy, a rope fish (long), cat fish, honey gourami (very nice). The plant tanks look kind of terrestrial. And then beyond that is the section of the aquarium where everything is blue. Man on the moon and cold air. The fishes are neon and turquoise and spooky and otherworldly and my favorite fishes are over here. Terrestrial. The fishes that look kind of like space plants. You think they are plants and then you see them move. Fish like the purple sea anemone. You are going to become Fish Girl, Christopher says. And then he takes me over to another aisle, this place way in the back, and he points at a stack of plastic square fishtanks full of water and pebbles and plants and a little bit of grime. Look, he says. This is where they keep all the fish who are dead.

APPENDIX: Places The Bench, The River, Brimfield Vintage Market, Dr Clark, The Marlton Hotel, Sunday to Sunday, Congee Village, Posteratati Museum, Photo Booth Museum, Economy Candy, Pacific Aquarium, Potions Gregorian chants, turkey sausage, oreo popsicle, spicy margarita, french fries, salmon tartare, cerebrolysin, beta blockers, inositol, avatar-ai-animations, AI whale song competition Wear Alice Bailey Esoteric Health Pin Music Blue by Anais Setarah New Tank by Playboi Carti, Reckless by Crystal Castles, Never Feel Again by Edward Skeletrix, Sleep the Clock Around by Belle and Sebastian, Indie Rokkers by MGMT, Future Games by Fleetwood Mac, Fishtails by Lana del Rey, Some Things Seem to Never Work by Solange, Pride by Grace Jones Read Fashion Fiction, H.P. Lovecraft Halloween, Spy Magazine, Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde

CALENDER:

Friday, June 26

• From 6pm - 8pm at Alex Berns Gallery —Ben Brock: Lightening Bolts of Love opens.

• From 7pm at Night Club 101 — Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation hosts a reading celebrating the spring residents, ft Maeve Barry, Jimmy Cajoleas, Izzy Casey, Aziz Kasumov, Stacy Skolnik, and Thomas Thatcher. Copies of VICES edited by Jonathan Smith will be on sale.

• From 8pm - close at Pubkey — Farthest Heaven Presents Rhymes with Tom Will, ft Tom Will, Dustin Cole, Calvin Atwood, Garth Miro, and Will Ballard. Reading, book sales, book signing, Q&A, meet & greet, general partying and carousing.

• From 11pm - 4am at Baby’s All Right — Silknode presents Blog Hause; the official start of summer! Ft Deer Park, B7lanket, Massi, Cicada. Cohosts: Lola Dement Myers, Sexemo, Julian Ribeiro, Myles Underwood, Biz Sherbet, K, Kendricky. Photos, Djs, more. This is not one to miss. | Tickets here

Saturday, June 27

• From 6pm - 8pm at 504 Grand St — David Lindsay presents Satydrat Nite Live, ft Fiona Alison Duncan, Gia Gonzales, and Noa Wesley.

Sunday, June 28

• From 5pm - 7pm at 1832 West Sunset Blvd — Angel Moon is having a closing party. I love this brand. Hand dyed fabrics meant to be worn over and over again, and a really witchy and special vibe. They also recently had a summer solstice rave, and clothing is available in store at Retail Pharmacy.

Monday

Early morning and it’s still gray and green outside. I empty out the corners and the center and the closets of this room until it feels like a tomb or a dance studio. Pilates on West 8th Street where the green out the windows and the wood under the chicken lamps appears unique and more interesting from upside-down. Lactoferrin, iodine, black seed oil, red light. Magnesium chloride in the water in the shower. Minerals in the waters in the glass bottles to drink. Big-6-lymphatic drainage, six mg zyn, celsius, ritalin, one album front-to-back every morning. Analog camera. Bible. This is the sort of thing I think I’ll think about now. The new year can start whenever you want it to be, like, for example, the new year can start today. You can’t abuse this trick more than once a seven-year-cycle, however, or it loses all its power.

Christopher says; of course I’m annoyed. You were two-hours-late because you were buying three ill-fitting-and-unfashionable-dresses and now you’re in a bad …

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FRIDAY

I’d rather that my face not be all over it anymore. And you know the cosmic cycles are over because you never run into the people you never want to see again despite geographic proximity and shared social worlds. I filled up another google document diary right to character limits which is what always tends to happen when it’s time for a totally new leaf, and I want to be sober for religious reasons among other things. If the apartment in the Upper East Side with all the light and space and empty floors comes through then that means things will give much sooner than I anticipated. Then that means some more answered prayers and more grace given that I shouldn’t be asking for but keep accepting in heapfulls, cupped palms, nonetheless.

I manifested my dream life. I asked for it, and you said yes. I manifested days to fill all on my own and a chinese digi cam and a ritalin script and an esoteric book club and a Sandy Liang dress. I manifested enough signs and symbols to make me feel all like a mystic when things happen the way they always would. God rewards goodness, I think. God rewards girls who don’t get in their own way.

I’ve been looking at a lot of things on my phone. Like that image of a Blank Street black coffee’s transformation into a green and white and pink iced drink in a plastic cup a la Baudrillard simulacra simulation; stage one the sign is a basic representation of reality stage four the sign bears no relation to reality etc etc etc.

This image is circulating because as of today you can no longer buy drip coffee at Blank Street which, frankly, is totally one shotting everyone as a concept. There have been more pressing and obvious signs of end times and when I’m eating chinese food in the back of a bar with my more-religious-than-me friends and they are talking about the rapture I am nodding up and down like, I’m feeling really inclined to agree. A VC backed iced matcha shop sells iced matcha. I wear a burlap sack and I walk around whilst playing on my phone. I am so easily impressed. Who was it who said that thing about “decision” “fatigue.” Anyways, I don’t believe you.

There are so many things I can do on my phone. Zoom in on photos of my legs at marginally different BMIs spliced side by side, or photos of my face at eighteen and now and then it’s like stage one the sign is a basic representation of reality stage four the sign bears no relation to reality etc etc etc.

It’s late and I’m sitting in a brown suede reverse conversation-pit. It is warm inside, and I am sitting in a conversation pit in the sky. I walked up some stairs and then I walked down some more and now I am sitting on brown suede benches in a conversation pit in the sky. I am wearing my brown suede prada boots, about which everyone is being very nice. Where did you get those boots, this guy keeps asking. He’s being vulgar and I make a face and he says why the face isn’t this what you talk about on the blog, and then Petra says C**** has never been vulgar on her blog and then I’m nodding, nodding, nodding. Nodding my head up and down.

There’s this guy at this party and he’s talking about politics and honor and money. I’ve never felt enthused about these things except right now, this very second, I respond. Are you being facetious, he asks. No, no, I’m being sincere. I’m being sincere, I tell him. I’m being sincere because you’re talking about this stuff and you have this glimmer in your eye. There’s this glimmer in his eye. It seems exciting, I say. You’re excited about politics?, he asks. I mean he really had this glimmer in his eye. All vengeful and hopeful.

Olivia says that she’s been giving a lot of thought into how she’d introduce me. C**** P****** has the longest hair in the world, she says. I’m so easily flattered. My opinions are your opinions because I love you. My opinions are the opposite of your opinions because I love you. Tonight, I think I am the center of the world. I didn’t say it. You heard it from Olivia first. I’m the center of the world because it’s foggy and magic and the streets are full of mist and friends. When I hold my hand in front of my face, all I can see is my hand. When I stand in the misty streets, all I can see is mist.

Warm, in my room, in the morning and I’m talking about how it’s quiet here. I’m near McDougal but there’s a courtyard so it’s quiet. It’s a sweet little artists loft. The cleaners will come tomorrow and then I’ll be in a bedroom full of mystical books for a few weeks, and my sister will be in a bedroom full of books in translation down the hall. I will swim in rivers in the morning and walk up hills in the evening, and then I will be back in New York and I will go somewhere else, somewhere further downtown with more light and floor space to stretch out in. There’s this other girl who needs this apartment now in the same way I did one-year-ago. That’s who will be living in my little artists loft instead.

When it’s hot and humid and green outside, I don’t think so much about moving to Los Angeles. I don’t want to drive West. I’m at core-burn-pilates and the tree branches brush against the window and turn the whole place upside down and green. I’m at LifeThyme market which smells like health food stores from when I was a little kid. Smells a little bit like dirt and a little bit like water. The clientele here is silvery and old. Their skin is a little leathery from sun but still stretched pretty tight over their bones, which I suppose is how you age with morning light and meditation and lactoferrin, sardines and veggies, coconut-oil-carrot-salad. Twenty-one-ninety-five-dollars for chlorophyll water, one apple, pan seared chicken with ginger sauce, rise oat milk vanilla latte.

I meet Christopher at six-twenty-five at four-rutherford-place and dress nice. Probably just hardcore hypebeast twenty-one-year-olds and it will be terrible let’s go though, he texts. Oh shit it’s the Protestant mega church, he texts again, upon arrival. Tricked by the party flyer for the Protestant mega church. I would go to the opening of an envelope, etc. I’m wearing a little blue dress and a little blue pearl and a red leather belt and some brown suede Prada boots. Christopher updates from inside the church. There are televisions everywhere and they are playing videos of little girls for mother’s day and the girls are saying I love when mom makes spaghetti and everyone is tenderly laughing and let’s go to KFC instead, he says. I don’t eat KFC, I say and Christopher says let’s go to Funny Bar and I say ok. At Funny Bar, I sit in the coat check and call five times. Christopher answers call number five and says chill the fuck out bitch and I say ok. I sit in the coat check and I call grandma and she tells me about biking to the seashore to collect fish and mussels and building one boat, sell it, building another boat, selling it. Things are very warm inside and out. Christopher and I sit at the bar. Christopher says order some french fries and I say I don’t eat french fries and Christopher says what the fuck do you eat and I say sweet potato fries, and so, now, Christopher and I are walking to ForgetMeNot to eat sweet potato fries and it is raining on Essex, soft warm big rain no thunder. I hope you don’t want to go to ForgetMeNot to create arguments, Christopher says, and I say no, I do not want to go to ForgetMeNot to create arguments, I want to go to ForgetMeNot to eat sweet potato fries and drink spicy salty margarita and or maybe lemonade.

SATURDAY

Quiet in the kitchen with my La Colombe EVERYDAY LATTE. The everyday latte is espresso roast themed. Frothy, creamy, lactose free, the bottle says. Gross copy. Gray and green outside. Weather that is made for me.

Christopher is spinning me around and around and around and around in the office chair in the kitchen. The floors are tan and the roof is white. I’m going to close my eyes, or else I am going to throw up, I say. I tell Christopher that I used to like six flags and roller coasters and rides. The pitch of my voice raises high and low and up and down as the chair spins. I would map out the distance between every ride at Six Flags, I say. I would maximize my fun. My knees are pulled close to my chest so as to maximize my small-ness and velocity, and my eyes are closed so as to not throw-up. So autistic, Christopher says. So addicted. I’m not surprised you would do that. And then he grabs onto the back of my chair stop-motion and says; that’s enough spinning for now.

I’m asking Christopher about who said what and what it means and I’m trying to parse out the parts that are a little bit true and totally true and not true at all. And why would [redacted] say [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted] and if you talk to [redacted] can you affirm [redacted]??? Christopher is looking over at me and sighs. Too many words. Not everyone ascribes as much meaning to words as you do.

Olivia calls while I am using paper towels to wipe down the sink. I love you so much and I will see you as soon as possible, she says. I love you so much and I think you are the center of the Earth, I respond. Love you bye. We both say love-you-bye a few-times-fast. I spray eucalyptus synthetic scent all over the apartment and then I gag a little bit, because the cleaners never came, and I have to have something to show for this place when Caroline arrives.

I’m looking around my crowded and silent apartment and I am trying to imagine how all these things will appear. All these dresses and cards and old sailing maps from dad and maybe his dad before that. There’s this blog I like called Ten-Today. They chronicle ten things, any things, in some category that they pick for today. 10 Ways to Minimize Psychic Damage While Walking Around The City. Things like that. What would I pick if I could only pick ten things? I think about how I would like to be forced-at-gunpoint-or-something to pick only ten things, and then I press purchase on approximately ten new cheap-gold-belts.

Caroline and I are soul bonded for life. She brings me expensive stolen gin and fills my one mug with a half whole lemon and poppi sparkling water and suntori roku gin. She wears two braids and flowers on her coat and we spill all over my glass table. Next time, I will bring you a cup, she says, and I say you’re so sweet and she says why do you keep saying that!!! Caroline says to just take everything when I go. She will fill the fireplace with candles. She will fill the cabinets with cups and conceal the closet with a door. She leaves in a flash like a fairy, and now the window is open and I am playing Solange and Kali Uchis and I am seeing my room as if through other people’s eyes for the first time. Dusty and pale blue and cleaner than it’s ever been and a little bit unreal like a story book.

Christopher stands in the center of my room and I say that I can offer suntori roku or sparkling water. I can offer one mug and it’s full of gin, but I don’t have anything else. There is an emerald tree and a turtle pond out the window, and dusk is turning the whole place a little bit pale and a little bit blue. Like a storybook, huh, I say. Cute room, good room for a girl, Christopher replies. Like a story book, huh, I repeat. I lie on my pale white bed in the pale blue light and I point up at the ceiling. Thatched roof, I say. That’s not a thatched roof, Christopher says. If your roof was thatched it would mean your house was made of straw.

SUNDAY

I fall asleep so easily. I’m not miserable in New York City. I bring the cleaners in to sweep for ritalin. I eat french fries in the hotel lobby. I’m not-a-robot. I’m not-a-millionaire. I-want-to-feel-like-an-angel. I slept for fourteen hours. I wear the same blue dress all day and night. I stand in front of Christopher’s smooth-cement-wall-facing-window and I start to laugh. The wall is gray, and it stretches down so far you can’t see to the bottom. No sunlight here. It’s morning and this is as bright as it gets. There’s some impossible graffiti scrawled on the side. Something about juice, I think. If you die in the game, you die in real life?? Christopher looks at me and squints. Please dont kill yourself out my window.

I stand in Christopher’s living room and I make the chillest proclamations. Christopher laughs and says yeah ok and you remember that too. Of course I remember it, I invented it. I buy cold brew and apple cider vinegar in the sun and the heat and the busiest street in the world. I got a hair cut and now I have the second longest hair in the world.

DIRECTORY: Upper East Side, Chinese digi-cam, esoteric health book club, Sandy Liang dress, Blank Street Coffee, lactoferrin, coconut carrot salad, blue dress, blue pearl, red belt, brown prada boots, KFC, Funny Bar, Forget Me Not, La Colombe Every Day Latte, Six Flags, Ten Today, eucalyptus synthetic scent, psychic damage, ten gold belts, poppi sparkling water, suntori roku gin, solange, kali uchis

Monday, June 8

• From 6:45pm and 8:30pm at Anthology Film — The Allen Ginsberg Centennial begins; a collaboration between Anthology and Allen Ginsberg Estate. At 6:30pm, a screening of Fried Shoes and Cooked Diamonds (Costanzo Allione, 1979) – “A most playful film and one very much worth watching.” At 8:30pm, a screening of The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (Jerry Aronson.

• From 7pm at 13 w 17th Street — Center for Theatre Research presents Signs and Wonders - A one act play by Matthew Gasda about faith tested by family, the line between revelation and delusion, and the terror of being called to account. Additional performances on June 9 and 10th. Tickets here

• From 7pm at Night Club 101 — E.M. James and Annabel Gould present Go Ask Alice: Down The Rabbit Hole. A literary event in upside-down-world, featuring Sierra Armor, Chris Bray, Quinn Butterfield, Katherine Drapala, Annabel Goul, Cassidy Angel Grady, E.M. James, Anna Mezebish, Chloe Wheeler, and Anonymous.

• From 8:30pm at Night Club 101 — Cat Marnell x Cookies Hoops host Knicks Game 3 Watch Party. Obviously, this is where I’ll be.

• From 8:30pm at Baby’s All Right — Another option for Knicks Game 3 screening (plus bands to follow) - $24 bucket of beer, $10 frozen pineapple dream, $10 margs, $ bondi shot

Tuesday, June 9

• From 6pm (RSVP for location) — The New Criterion hosts a book party for Nicholas O’Connell, the author of Crush: My year as an Apprentice Winemaker (Potomac Books)

• From 7:30pm at Seventh Heaven — Rinse & Repeat reading, ft Noel Barrera, Elliot Sky Cure, Flema, Serena Devi, and Zoey Greenwald.

• From 8pm at Alter Space — The Center for Theatre Research hosts a summer fundraiser party. A beautiful evening supporting independent theater and some wonderful upcoming productions. I’ll be there, as will many of my favorite people. | RSVP here

Wednesday, June 10

• From 6pm - 8pm at 303 Gallery — Two shows open that I’m excited about. Unravel - an exhibition of paintings by Charlotte Fox “living at the intersection of seduction, estrangement, ecstasy, and unease” and Kim Gordon’s third solo exhibition with the gallery comprised of a single film installation where Gordon plays her red guitar in contact with piled up cars and junkyard debris.

• From 6pm - 8pm at Perrotin — Holly Lowen Colosseum opens. “Through rhythmically charged compositions, she interrogates the line between instinct and control.” I’m very much looking forward to seeing this one.

• From 7pm at KGB Bar — Straight Girls returns with Angel Money, Esmé Numes-Givens, Gutes Guterman, Luke Gralia, and Payton Gatewood.

• From 7:30pm - 12am at Gosh — Club Chess hosts an afterparty celebrating the premiere of Grandmasters. Gosh is good! RSVP required for entry.

• From 9:30pm at Baby’s Alright — Perfectly Imperfect presents a killer bill; Blaketheman1000 with Oberhofer (solo) and Saudi Oil. Game 4 will be broadcast on a projector at Baby’s, and the show will double as a Knicks Finals afterparty.

SUNDAY

It is past midnight and I am in the back of Carter’s car weaving down Ludlow. I am feeling full of chicken tacos from ForgetMeNot and there are goosebumps running up and down my legs. You are so cold, Olivia says, and then she clasps her hands on my freezing knees. We are really micro-dosing every establishment tonight, Romy says.

I am at Beverly’s feeling like a shark in a fishbowl because the bar is empty, just us, purple lights, disco ball, video art. N.O. Block Party by DJ Jubilee & Partners-N-Crime is playing. Romy is clasping her hands on the faded black suede of my broken Prada purse. I am clasping my face in my hands and I can feel where my eyes are trying to stay open with useless obedience. Is that [redacted] I ask Romy, and now Romy is whipping her head around to stare towards the street. I wish that was [redacted] Romy says. Ever since I became mentally stable, I really feel like stirring the pot, I say.

I am in my room and the disarray is starting to become a little b…

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MONDAY

I am in the shower at The Roosevelt Hotel and I am letting the water run too hot and fill up the room with steam and burn my legs a little bit. Outside, I can hear Christopher in the suite and he is talking on the phone. And I think I or someone should get involved with the church of scientology, Christopher is saying. They have all this incredible real estate all around Los Angeles, and a publishing house with a literary prize that I’m sure that no one enters. We would just have to say; ‘let us throw hipster parties’ and we would tell them to talk about the aliens a little bit less.

I am moving rose quartz guasha up and down my face, and there is a wound on the side of my neck that I worry is about to open up and start gushing blood. Yesterday, I was sitting in the grass at Hollywood Forever overlooking peacocks and fountains and a river and David Lynch’s grave and I was moving my long hair over my shoulders and I was asking Olivia; do you want to see where I got stabbed? I showed Olivia where I got stabbed and Olivia gasped and then I said I didn’t actually get stabbed. I said I curled my hair and I called my dad and I talked with my hands on the phone and I burned my neck and now it looks like I got stabbed. That’s sweeter, Olivia said. That’s a sweet story. I am at The Roosevelt Hotel now, but I won’t be for long, and I can hear Christopher’s voice crystal clear even over the sound of the rainforest shower. I can hear when he laughs or has an idea or starts to talk louder and faster to usurp his friend on the other line. Actually, the scientologists can still talk about the aliens that’s fine, Christopher says. The scientologists already actually don’t talk about the alien part that much, and girls don’t really care about cults. If you throw cool hipster parties at your cool Los Angeles estate then actually no one really cares about your weird religion. Your weird religion is actually fine.

I am sitting on the edge of the bed at The Roosevelt Hotel wearing blue brandy melville dress and blue I-Love-LA sweatshirt and wet hair and I am thinking about what I actually want. Fifteen dollar diet coke from mini bar, maybe. Hydrangeas in my apartment. A house in topanga where it’s always misty and sweet and the wild fires don’t scare me because I can always drive away down the canyons one long road when summer comes. Money problems and perfect health and a cheap room in a kind of on-the-edge house in deep Brooklyn where I can learn to garner up some grit and self-assurance. Esoteric health book club. A trip to Eastern Europe. Contentedness because my parents taught me how to be happy.

I’m at Mel’s Drive In with Christopher and I am telling him how my problem is I give it all up for things that aren’t even fun. Your problem is you give it all up for like... fifteen minutes of fun, Christopher says. Your problem is you have some blurry recollection of something that might have once been fun, you think it was fun, you don’t really remember, you aren’t really sure, and then you give it all up. Christopher asks me if I want to go walk around Mel’s Drive In diner while we wait for our food and I say yes. I want to play Lana del Rey on the jukebox at Mel’s diner and I want to buy a breakfast burrito for me and mozzarella sticks and chicken tenders for Christopher because I’m feeling like I want to say I’m-sorry and thank-you by purchasing him finger-foods again. There is a big white dog tied behind the bar at Mel’s diner and a man with long blonde hair and bare feet holding the leash and I am still in my Hollywood, California five-dollar sweatshirt and Prada boots that I’ve been wearing for days. I am walking towards the dog because I want to give it pets and Christopher is laughing and telling me don’t try to pet the homeless dog. I tell Christopher that I think the man is just a hippy and the dog is just a friend and Christopher is telling me ok, ok, ok. Christopher is shepherding me back towards our table and he says that man has that dog so that he can’t get arrested and I say that man also probably has the dog so that he can have a friend.

I’m in a toyota corolla gray cross hybrid and an uber driver named Nelson is taking me to LAX. I am wearing blue Brandy Melville dress and Los Angeles, California navy sweater and brown Prada boots and my hair is dark and matted, so I am wearing an I Love Hollywood hat over all of that. Nelson tells me I’m sorry I rushed you into the car but there was traffic all around. I was standing on the edge of North-Highland-Avenue outside of Mel’s drive-in. Christopher had just said goodbye and the wind was blowing at the hem of my tiny dress and at the ends of my matted hair and then Nelson showed up, and he rushed me into the car, and now he is saying sorry, and he is saying it kind of like a question. He is saying it like he’s asking me what I was thinking, standing teetering on the edge of North-Highland-Avenue with all that traffic all around.

I’m calling my dad from the back of Nelson’s car to tell him that it’s kind of like I’m floating. I love having a million-billion-friends but I think that it’s kind of just transient, I say. What, my father says. I don’t make so many calls to New York when I am in LA. My father is telling me you need to be true to yourself and I am saying I need to decide, I need to decide, I need to decide. I say I need to decide three times. My father does not ask me what I need to decide, but if he did, I would say I don’t know.

Christopher texts me a photo of bright green grass and trees and says hanging at the Griffith Park Golf Course with Tyler and I say I’m super jealous. I say I’m waiting to get on my plane and I’m writing stories about our week in Los Angeles.

Writing stories like for example, at Mel’s Drive-In, I was eating the insides of my breakfast burrito with a fork and then I was eating the tortilla like toast with cilantro crema and my hands and Christopher was saying that everything seems to be turning out fine. Christopher told me about how years ago, I never would have never been swept up and chauffeured down Hollywood Boulevard. I would never have been at The Roosevelt with him, would never have been in the back of the Internet Perverts van and at Erewhon and Mel’s Drive In and laughing and included. Except it’s not years ago, Christopher said. It’s now and it’s amorphous and everything is fine. He said it kind of like a warning, and he said it kind of like everything is fine. Christopher squinted at me and said it helps to be normal, just be normal. Ok, I said. Very good, Christopher said. He said very good very good very good three-times-fast.

Earlier, Christopher was pacing around my room at The Hollywood Roosevelt and I was staring out the window towards the gray landing pad of Galaxy-Press-Building. Christopher said did you remember to pack up your good-luck-charm and I said yes and he said it would be a disaster if you forgot the good luck charm and I said yes and he said what’s the good-luck-charms name again and I said [redacted] and he said I knew that. I pulled [redacted] out from in my suitcase and I said see, not forgotten and he said is [redacted] a monkey and I said [redacted] is a lion, and I have had [redacted] since the day I was born, because my parents taught me how to be happy.

[redacted] is in my suitcase and I am in an uber and I am zooming towards LAX and then NYC and I am praying for all the luck in the world, I think. I am feeling like I hope I get lucky and I am thinking that I will soon, probably.

TUESDAY

I started drinking again first on Thursday night in New York because I thought I could use it kind of like a potion in California. I drank one diet-coke with vodka at the social club with the blue mermaid ceilings, and then I drank one more. Quinn pulled me onto a bench underneath a coat closet of sorts when I got to the party and she told me that [redacted] knew about what [redacted] had said to me, and [redacted] had told [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted] so now maybe, she wasn’t sure but maybe everyone and certainly more than one person knew about what [redacted] had said. I said ok so I should probably leave and Quinn said no it’s fine and stay and then [redacted] walked by and said is everything ok with a lot of tender concern and I said yes to [redacted] and I said he definitely knows what we’re talking about to Quinn and then I said I think that I should definitely leave. Quinn said come outside and talk to [redacted] and so I did go outside, and I stood on the street and I smoked one cigarette and [redacted] told me that nobody thinks I did anything wrong at all. New York was misty and warm and sweet and I’d been feeling good and bright and happy enough to forget about what it’s like when it’s sad, and so then I went inside and I ordered two diet-cokes and said with-vodka-please

Quinn and Joe drove me to Middle Village and Quinn made me up the couch like a bed. Quinn made me a bowl of beef fried rice and I made myself some promises I could not really keep. I slept for two hours and then it was Friday. I texted Christopher and I said what is the plan for when I get to California, and Christopher said just let me know when you arrive at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel is old school and kind of like a maze. I knew about the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel already because of my real-life-friends who have art-fairs there and my Internet-friends who spend Valentines-Day there, but I had never frequented this local myself. The hotel is known to be haunted, and when they told Quinn and I we were in room-606 I said angel numbers and the girl at the front desk said yes

I texted Christopher when I got to The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. I said this hotel is old school and kind of like a maze. I said where are you and Christopher said I’m at Motel Six and then, when I looked up again, Christopher was standing right here, giving me a hug, in the lobby, at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Later, Christopher and Quinn and I were sitting poolside and I was saying I definetly should not drink alcohol tonight because everyone is going to be live-blogging and live-streaming and also because I definitely am not someone who should drink alcohol ever, in life, and Christopher was saying do you really want to try to be a gonzo writer who doesn’t fucking drink and I was saying yes, yes this is really what I want to try to do and Christopher was saying ohhh kayyy.

I wore a blue Brandy Melville dress and a gold belt and my good Prada boots to order a Shirley Temple poolside and when the waitress said do you want that dirty I said yes. I direct-messaged Indy and I said we just got to The Roosevelt Hotel and Indy direct-messaged me and said I’m Indy and my phone number is *** *** ***. I said do you want to come to The Roosevelt Hotel and she said sure and I said yayyyy. Christopher and Quinn said do you want to go to in-and-out and I said ok. I texted Indy and I said: I’m going to go to In and Out and then I’m going back to The Roosevelt Hotel.

In-and-out smelled like grease but in kind of a nice way, though the wait was too long inside, and the sun too hot in the parking lot. Christopher told Tyler that he can use my hotel room to shower but he didn’t tell me. Christopher told Quinn that she should probably let Tyler into the hotel room and supervise the shower situation in case we didn’t want strangers alone in our room. Christopher told me that isn’t it a shame that after waiting so long for my in-and-out I probably wanted to be able to say it was bad and not worth it but it actually was so-delicious and I said yeah and then I texted Indy that I was so excited to meet her at The Roosevelt Hotel.

Indy looked so pretty in a little white dress and black shoes by the Hockney Pool and I said I’m so obsessed with you when she arrived. Indy said you’re so cute and I said no you and she said you and Christopher rolled his eyes but just a little bit and then he said would you like me to get you girls drinks and we said yes. I was a little concerned about introducing Indy to Christopher, as he has a very one-of-one vibe, but everything seemed to be sorting itself out fine.

On Hollywood Boulevard, Tyler said I’m sorry for making you late and I said it wasn’t really your fault and he said it kind of was my fault and I said yeah I guess it kind of was your fault but now I’m drunk and so now I don’t really mind. I was mostly feeling excited to see Marina over margaritas. I was excited to see the purple flowers and basil sauerkraut and lazy acre sesame noodles at Indy’s bungalow. I was excited to roar down the freeway in the back of a big blue van. In California, when you’re driving, there are five wide lanes stretching out outside the vehicles side windows, and to the back and the front you are zooming respectively away and towards open road. There are palm trees all around and the sun is bright and the weather is temperate and earlier, I was asking Christopher what music he was listening to and he was saying California-70s-music but not in a lame we’re in Los-Angeles way, and I was saying same. So I was mostly feeling excited to ask Christopher, who would be riding passenger side in the big blue van, to please play America. I was excited to say can you please play Tin Man and Ventura Highway and Silver Springs and Thrown Down and Christopher would say ok and then the 70s California songs would start to play, but not in the lame we’re-in-Los-Angeles-way.

When I was little, my babysitter named Lydia told me that when you die there is one day of life that you get to choose and relive. Lydia was a neat-freak and middle-aged and not particularly a mystic, but at least she gave me that. The one day do-over that I’d get to relive and choose. I spent a lot of time thinking about these days growing up: how I’d choose between spending one last day with my boyfriend or my mother, and how I’d decide which day was normal and special and self-contained-enough that I could pick it and feel like I was living-life-twice. There was one day of early spring at summer ski camp and then eating watermelon feta salad and playing barefoot in the grass with my aunt and sister and parents and friends that I’d considered for a while. And then there was the last time I was flying to California, and I was with Christopher and Luke and I was just laughing a lot on the plane. I was listening to California-songs but not in a lame we’re in Los Angeles kind of way. There had been strange internet friends then, too, and I’d been hoping to drive north after the main events, drive to Tahoe with Luke but there’d been more of a life to return to in New York, then, I think. I’d said goodbye to Los Angeles and Luke in a road side diner where Liam had said Luke and I look like orphaned twins who never got over our parents early-demise, and I’d said hello to Los Angeles beach side in Santa Monica, somewhere small and sweet by the sea and I’d considered this, at the time, to be the day that I’d choose. Which all is just to say that I’d been thinking about California in a way that lived kind of fossilized and fondly in my mind and I was excited to be driving fast. I was excited for other things too, like Indy’s words, and some new places and initially the concept of gonzo-writing-sober but this was going out the window and quick. Mostly, I was excited about California-songs-but-not-in-lame-we’re-in-LA-way, and also I was excited to be driving fast.

WEDNESDAY

Christopher’s party was at a bar in the Sunset Strip known for its punk rock vibe. The party was pretty good, but I was pretty drunk and everyone was pretty much already talking about the party to death and so all there was to say is I read a story and stayed pretty removed from overall vibe and kind of bludgeoned poor Indy with too much praise, stood in a circle and did a flip in the road and in the morning, I asked Christopher: do you think I was being mean to anyone last night? Yes, Christopher said. You were being kind of mean to me. I’m sorry, I said. Are you mad at me? I asked. We were sitting at the bar at The Roosevelt Hotel and I was about to buy us french fries and iced coffee and diet and regular coke to say sorry vis-a-viz: kids menu. Christopher paused for a moment, and then his face broke out into a big wide grin and he started to laugh hard. Christopher was looking at me and laughing and I was feeling a little bit happy and a little bit scared. I was saying what, what, tell me what and Christopher was pointing at me and laughing and then Christopher said: You really are a mess! Everything you’ve been saying about yourself really is true!

Christopher and I walked to the wax museum. Have you ever been to Madame Tussaud’s wax museum? he asked. I hadn’t, before, and I thought that all the wax-figures were paid-actors and not-inaminate-obects. Stop standing so close to the actors, you’re being rude, I kept on telling Christopher. The wax museum was three stories high and Christopher kept on taking photos of me looking ‘happy’ or ‘scared’ or pretending to ask the gallery attendee, excuse me I’m looking for the statue of [redacted], and then we’d just say one of our mid-tier actor friends’ names.

After, we stumbled kind of bleary-eyed onto Hollywood Boulevard, and Christopher said he was going to take me to the Scientology Church against his better judgment because I’m gullible, and he was concerned it was a mistake to indulge my curiosity in this way. You’re going to start a book club and you’re going to be making all the girls read L Ron Hubbard ‘Dianetics’, Christopher says. You’re going to walk around Clandestino telling everyone ‘I’m auditing today.’ Telling everyone ‘I feel so clear.’

A small Latino man serving as private security at the small Scientology center knocked on the door a few times when Christopher asked about a personality test on my behalf, but no one came to let us in. They just lost their lowest-hanging fruit, Christopher said. You would have done the free personality test and said, ‘I feel so clear. You would have said ‘yeah, it’s expensive, but I feel so clear’. You would have said ‘please, take all of my millions-and-millions-and-millions-of-dollars.’

Hollywood Boulevard is like if Times Square actually was good and also if it went on and on and on. At the wax museum gift shop, everything was five dollars. A pretty blonde girl stood in the doorway and said everything is five dollars. She said that everything is five dollars a million times. Christopher held a blue basket as my coupon and we filled it up with pink Hollywood hat and Hollywood sweatshirt in color classic blue. They are going to tear you to shreds at the Scientology center, Christopher said. They are going to say ‘look at this tourist’ and tear you to shreds.

Christopher explained scientology to me like this: a religion and pyramid scheme invented by science-fiction-author L. Ron Hubbard that believes there are ancient alien particles in your soul, and you have to eradicate them in order to become clear. You only learn that part after you’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars though, Christopher explained. And when you pay those hundreds of thousands of dollars too, you have to do confession, but instead of confessing to a priest you confess all the worst things you’ve ever done on camera, to the Scientology officials, who you are also paying hundreds of thousands of dollars. Christopher grinned. It’s a good scheme. I wish they were less off putting about it. Blackmail confession. That’s such a good scheme.

Christopher got us a black uber and we flew up into Griffith Park. Griffith Park is misty and nice and I was talking to Christopher while he played on his phone and so mostly I was talking to myself. Griffith Observatory is all cream and pale green. It’s the perfect structure to be built into these hills, where everything in nature is foggy and prickly and cream and green, too. The flowers are orange and purple and Los Angeles sprawls and sprawls and sprawls. Los Angeles is not like a grid. Christopher circled the statue of astrologers and read out their names. I know who that is, and I know who that is, and I know who that is, and oh, I don’t know that one, he said.

A group of Japanese tourists asked me kind of bluntly if I can take their photo. I said ok and then I started to say one and two and then I started to feel really embarrassed and so I trailed off. That felt really embarrassing, I told Christopher. Christopher looked at me kind of like he was looking at me for the first time. You’re a good person, he said. You’re a good person, you’re a good person. He said it twice, just like that. The first time, he said it like he was deciding, and the second time, he said it like he was sure.

Christopher and Quinn and I went back to El Compadre for dinner and I drank diet coke and ate half a chicken. There aren’t places like this in New York, we said. This would be a good place for a party, we said. The margaritas come out flaming

Later, I was sitting in Isaac’s garden under a lemon tree drinking mineral water while the sky turned hazy blue. Little black cats ran around under the lemon tree, and there were little metal stars and twinkle lights and Arabian rugs under the trees, too. A man was talking about how anytime he’d tried to pour his heart and soul into something it hurt so much it made him want to die to even talk about, and so now, he just wrote books that said meow meow meow over and over and over again, and they were produced in many languages and he made a killing from the business. ‘Honestly Ok’ by Dido and ‘Hummingbird’ by Wilco and ‘Sex Drugs Etc’ by Beach were playing and little golden lightbulbs were starting to turn on cast against the now gray sky. Were you sad all day, Olivia asked Quinn. Were you in the hotel all by yourself? She put on red lipstick and wore black wears ballet flats and she rested her head on my shoulder.

Later, I was sitting on the stoop under the wisteria flowers while the Mishima soundtrack played and Christopher said that one of the four people who claims to have coined the term ‘vibe shift’ just walked in. Olivia came outside in black ballet flats holding gin and Saratoga sodas. I love Los Angeles, she said. This city rocks.

THURSDAY

In the morning, I was sitting in the sun by the pool at The Roosevelt Hotel in my new Hollywood, California sweatshirt and I-love-los-angeles hat from the five-dollar-sale at the ten-dollar-store. I was drinking iced coffee with almond milk and diet coke with loads of lime and we are waiting for our meals to arrive. I feel like you tricked me into getting breakfast, Christopher says. Why would we trick you into getting pancakes for yourself, Quinn asked. So C**** can write about it in her blog, Christopher said. Stupid fucking retard locked himself out and then he ordered a bunch of pancakes.

Christopher couldn’t help but to create some problems for all of us the night before, though I had been in the business of creating problems for everyone, all the time, this whole year, actually and so I was not feeling too in the business of getting upset about these things.

We were sitting on the steps of Isaac’s fairytale house in Glendale and the girls that sublet the upstairs were running in and out in silver dresses and micro shorts and leaping lithely over cups of gin and water and hard seltzers. The girls kept calling things swag and I was feeling quiet that night and so the girls kept on talking to Quinn a lot and not really to me. The girls kept running off into the night and talking about drug safety and Wi Spa and saying it-is-so-lucky-to-meet-you, and they were saying that later, soon, there would be a girls-and-gays-only cocaine-saloon somewhere inside the upstairs secret room. I was kicking the pebbles around with my feet and feeling reactive. I was feeling reactive and then Quinn said you know it would be o.k. if you wanted to leave, though she said it pretty kindly. She said it like she was giving me permission, not asking for my exit. I said yeah, actually, ok, yes I’m going to leave. Christopher followed me into the car and I knew that if I asked him to diagnose my trouble he would, and it would be very precise and quick and honest and sincere, and then it would be over with. But I was feeling pretty certain about the roots of my trouble as is and resistant against any immediate form of taking-action, and so I did not ask questions about my troubles and we we drove away and I focused on the silvery night and I said, to Christopher, instead; thank you for keeping me company.

Anyways, later, the party was long over and we’d all been drinking some Jack Daniel’s in the room. Christopher had left his phone behind, and I guess he made kind of a thing about it at The Roosevelt. I left my phone in these girls rooms, and I know how it probably seems but the girls are not prostitutes they are my friends, and I am not homeless I am staying at the motel six, Christopher said, at the desk at The Roosevelt Hotel. And then I guess he’d stuck around all night, tracing the perimeter of the lobby of The Roosevelt Hotel after they would not let him in because he had not made a very convincing case for his normalcy, and then tracing the long strip of Hollywood Boulevard between the Hollywood Roosevelt and Hollywood Motel 6 after that. And when the front desk finally reached Quinn and I and we came downstairs, neither of us were pleased with Christopher and the front desk was not pleased with either Christopher or with Quinn or with me. So anyways we’re at breakfast and Olivia is looking between me and Christopher and she is laughing hard as I tell this story. Why wouldn’t you just say I left my phone at my friend’s after party?, Olivia asks Christopher. She squeezes my arm and she smiles in my direction. C**** and Quinn are such nice girls! Why would you do this to them? Christopher shrugs and he says you try being me and we all agree ok, ok, you try that, and then I start to feel a little bit tender, and then I start to feel a little bit sad.

An internet anon from Newport Beach picked us up in real life in a 2013 Porsche with tan interiors and took us to mass. Olivia said it was important that I come to mass. The internet anon introduced himself as Alex: his real name! Gay Alex or straight Alex? Christopher asked. Gay Alex, Alex said. Very good, Christopher replied. I sat in the back of Alex’s Porsche with Olivia and Cameron, while Christopher introduced us by name to our new friend Alex. These Zoomers love the lord, Christopher said

Mass was in a red adobe church in Pasadena, and it was full of children in double dutch braids who talked quietly and sweetly throughout the service

And then later I was sitting in Hollywood Forever Cemetery and there was not a cloud in the very blue sky. Christopher was telling me that Hollywood Forever has only been named Hollywood Forever for twenty years. We’d gone looking for peacocks and turtles and Judy Garland, Rudolph Valentina, David Lynch in the Massolium, and now I was sitting in my suede Prada boots and red Brandy Melville dress and sunshine all around and we were waiting for Tyler to come pick us up in his van. Olivia and I had been skipping and holding hands and Christopher had stopped us and sat with me and he’d asked if I would like to be buried here someday, too. I thought about it for a minute and then I said; Los Angeles is not my ancestral home. I told Christopher I would like to be buried in Massachusetts. I would like to be buried in New York City. I asked Christopher where he would like to be buried and he hesitated and then said probably New York too. New York Forever, I said, and Christopher corrected me: Hollywood forever.

Olivia and I turned on Kreayshawn Gucci Gucci on our phones and we agreed that nothing comes for free. We smiled a lot because at Hollywood Forever there were peacocks everywhere. The male peacocks are royal blue and the female peacocks are brown. When the peacocks want to flirt, they make a spooky kind of screech that merges with the sound of wind chimes and real wind, and above all that, a silent sky and a big silver moon.

FRIDAY

At Chaa-Chaa Lounge, I showed Tyler my diary, and he said you should just command f and write about this. And then he highlighted the parts that were interesting enough to hit with command f and write about this. He called my filtered blog writing ‘boring’ but he was being very nice about my diary, and I was kind of being ‘on one’ and appreciated that he was being patient and kind. Christopher came over and was making jokes like ‘love you’ and ‘I’m going to fight you’ and he was maybe talking to the group or maybe just to Tyler or maybe just to me. Are you religious, I asked Tyler, and Tyler said something about no or at least not yet. Are you creative, I asked Christopher, and then Christopher told me about how he used to make a lot of drawings as a child, and then they put him on ritalin and then he started making lists.

DIRECTORY: Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Rose Quartz guasha, Scientology, Hollywood Forever, David Lynch’s grave, I-Love-La Sweatshirt, Mel’s Drive In, Blue brandy melville dress, brown Prada boots, Griffith Observatory, El Compadre, The Red Lion Tavern, Cha Cha Lounge, Galaxy Press, The Rainbow Bar & Grill, Motel Six Hollywood, Honestly Ok by Dido and Hummingbird by Wilco and Sex Drugs Etc by Beach, and Mishima by Phillip Glass, Tin Man and Ventura Highway and Silver Springs and Thrown Down a-la California-but-not-in-a-lame-way.

TO DO -

Sunday, May 17

• From 7:30pm at 151 Lafeyette Street Floor 4 — The Whitney Review of New Writing celebrates the launch of Issue 007. - “The night features comedian, clown, and recovering art critic Christina Catherine Martinez presenting the New York premiere of her hilarious multimedia satire Modern Times, alongside a program of video art curated by Molly Soda on view throughout the night.”

• From 8pm - midnight at Tawny — Bernard Cohen celebrates the release of Magpie; a book of poetry.

• From 11pm at Night Club 101— PLEASURE; with DJ sets by Nation, JeteXpresso, John Ripple, Fakethias.

Monday, May 18

• From 8pm at The River — Theme Trivia returns with Spring Trivia. 7 people per team max as per usual. Prizes for top three teams.

Tuesday, May 19

• From 6pm - 9pm at Inanna Gallery — Echo opens: , a photography group show at Inanna Gallery in support of the Heart of Dinner Foundation. Echo is an exploration of photography as a medium through which the past, present, and future are future are collapsed into a single artifact. Works on view by Taryn Segal, Olivier Zahm, and Zach Sokol, among others.

• From 7pm at KGB Bar — Late to the Party Press celebrates their anniversary with readings from Harold Rogers, Adam Vorth, Madeline Porsella, Mabel Capability Taylor, Alec Gewirtz, Kenneth Schultz, and Lilianna Christie.

• From 7pm - 11pm at KGB Bar — The Metropolitan Review’s famed reading series returns for spring. “Hear from the best literary talent around, party with editors and writers, and have a grand old time.” It’s a bit of a literary brawl situation ie, pick your poison. Upstairs: late to the party, theater: met review. Or, go to both! | RSVP here

• From 7pm at Night Club 101 — Groupie, Endearments, and Evil Adeline play Swang Song single release show | tickets here

Wednesday, May 20

• From 7pm at Poetry Society of America — New Directions presents a celebration of Fernando Pessoa. Poets John Keene, Idra Novey, Mónica de la Torre, and Vijay Seshadri will read, introduced by translator Patricio Ferrari. | RSVP here

• From 8pm at Spring Bar — Nastygongzhu hosts Mah Jong Madness. A special night of games, karaoke, and small bites. One of my new favorite spots. Persimmon negroni, lychee colada, plum tonic, fried taro, etc.

• LOS ANGELES - From 7pm at Silverlake Lounge — On the Rag hosts Issue 02 Launch Party. Super short readings by Petra Cortwright, Jasmine Johnson, Murphy Pen, Yaz Archer, Diva Corp, Tee Park, Lily Lady, and special guests.

Thursday, May 21

• From 7pm - 10pm at KGB Bar — Cracks in Pomo celebrates the launch of Zine Vol. 4. Readings by Matthew Gasda, Sean Thor Conroe, Jonah Howell, Chris Marino, and Carlos Egana. All attendees get a free copy of the zine! | tickets here

SUNDAY

Here is how it started: Two and a half years ago I had just moved to the Lower East Side, and I met Saoirse for a drink at Lovers of Today. I was optimistic, newly employed at blue-chip gallery, sweet in retrospect, starry-eyed, with no understanding and strong opinions loosely held. We had one or maybe two drinks at the bar, and I do think I’d been almost reluctant to even go that night. After a few drinks at Lovers of Today, Saiorse asked if I’d like to head over to the bitcoin bar called Pubkey to say hello to her boyfriend and his friends. I remember sitting in the corner of the courtyard, sleepy, unsure, there were things to do and autumn air and getting drunk quickly. I still did not understand the geography of downtown, what was East and West and The Lower East Side, but I said ok.

Saoirse was a friend I’d met through making short-form video content on the Upper East Side. The schizophrenic podcast was a job I got through algorithmic serendipity due to people I orbited onl…

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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…

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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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