WHAT I DID
Thursday, March 27
Midnight in New York, I'm taking stock of my glass apartment in the sky. I brought back nine dresses from El Salvador - eight old ones, one black tennis dress from El Tunco. All to be washed. Open the window. There is spring breeze now, all of a sudden, really, but I've been growing accustomed to real heat. These things I used to hate - dense hot air, beating sun, a day that stretches on under direct natural light, no end, no plans.... I would suddenly like to return to this, actually, over frigid and clipped stories about foggy northern coastlines and other things in that vein. Over stories about New York, and other things in that vein.
David has stayed in San Salvador, and then, Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. It would have been basically free for me to come and yes I have commitments here but not too many if we're being really honest. I would have become kind of a freak after three whole weeks in airbnbs that are calling themselves "hacker houses," though, is the main issue. And, I wanted to do laundry and stretch in the spring breeze, open the window, set an alarm. It would be so easy for me to untether the physical circumstances of my whole life, these days. It would be easy to have distance from New York, as the main thing, but distance from physicality more generally, too. I've done it before. Honestly, I'm not eighteen anymore, I don't think it makes sense for me to do it again.
I will probably stop being so strange and vague once I have even one conversation with my friends back in New York.
For now, it is very strange to be alone. Very strange to walk around even a small space, that even only temporarily, is belonging just to me. The past few weeks have been about eclipsing interiority with observation. Floating in realms that are foreign. Not El Salvador, even. The hacker house stuff more. The dialogue of it all, more.
The other reason I am here, home, abandoned visions of a hologram of Santa Teresa and also I already really miss my boyfriend - well there was responsibility and laundry and the reading and the stories to finish but also, the lunar eclipse played a role for sure. Something about the Earthquakes and Volcanoes. The floods and the fights. Seek less direct attention from that vivid piercing beaming beating sky. Seek solid ground, I saw someone say online. So, I did. I'm back in stupid dumb New York. Window open. You can barely feel all that fresh air.
Friday, March 28
I do go for a walk in the morning, and I do still love New York, I decide.
I want to have very delicate arms and boundless energy. I want to have tremendous discipline in a way so as to elicit joie de vivre, and also paths of clarity.
The brain fog is so bad today. In the middle of the night, the jet lag woke me up, and I hate sleeping alone in this apartment. I'm sorry, I know I’m being a child but I hate it, the emptiness, when I wake up from paralysis, there are often moments of brief delusion. Alone, glass house, I have to talk myself down.
I’ve tried to bring myself to life, today - long walk, two protein bars, slice of papaya, sushi roll for dinner, diet coke and cigarette, make a Vlog, make a Call.
David had sleep paralysis, too, last night, he tells me on the phone. This is weird, because usually, this is a plight that is just for me. In real life, there was a creepy elderly woman occupying the hacker house in El Salvador, too.
“I started a magazine last year,” she told me, when I told her I was a writer.
“Oh, cool, about what?,” I asked her.
“I don’t remember,” she told me. Blank gaze. Empty eyes. She would sometimes walk through our room while I slept, and one time I woke up to her passing by, vacant glance, I was obviously shocked, she looked obviously pleased. “How are ya, Love?” she said. The word “love” here, carrying a lot of the weight in making the indecent violation of space a lot creepier.
“It’s fun, isn’t it?,” she told David’s friend, while he was doing the dishes. “Turning the water on and off is fun, it’s all fun, isn’t it?”
She had referred to herself as a refugee, in El Salvador. From where, I had asked her. From Canada, she had said. A real eccentric freak, and in David’s dream, he wakes up to her sneaking up behind him, looming over him, it’s all fun isn’t it. She says sinisterly: “do you know what I think?” Then, in his dream, he felt her weight bend the bed springs and begin to smother him.
Lunar eclipse. New moon. I find this dream ominous enough that I begin to become very concerned. You have to get out of there, I tell David. I'm leaving tomorrow anyways, he reminds me.
Saturday, March 29
I spent the night last night reading at Tense and it was really lovely. Kansas Bowling reading and Valley Latini doing a hip hop show and Beckett Rosset on the Providence Hotel and me on half formed thoughts on the half complete piece I am writing on Techno Spirituality and El Salvador. I’m back in Real Life, and I don't regret it. I spent the morning by myself working on my edits. David is still traveling, and I am being more normal about it this time.
In jet lagged fugue state, I burned the kettle down to a lump of molten plastic, not on purpose, obviously. I called my dad who's moral judgment I trust in full, so this clarifies a lot of things. I forgot how much I like running really really really fast. Whenever I am craving the extremes, I should access them through lots of sprints.
The wind is crazy today. The wind has everyone whooping and hollering through the streets.
I'm making TikToks again. I don't care. There are worse evils or, rather, you can leverage anything for evil if you really want and honestly, I am just trying to have lots of fun. Some of you are awfully pretentious for being addicted to things like Ketamine and Feeld. Not me. I don’t like drugs, and I have a soulmate. It is just as bad if not worse to be addicted to your phone as it is to anything else, but I’m regulating my time, and I’m microdosing my slop - or so I tell myself.
Sunday, March 30
I order uber eats groceries at midnight, and then it's like celsius and chicken just washes up at my door. I don't like this. Chemicals, aspartame, the dissolution of the social fabric, really. How these things just materialize when you want to actualize some gross borderline animalistic whim. Craving. Diet Blackberry Pepsi. I would not like to live anywhere but New York City, or really anytime but now when I think it through on a very personal and very literal level. But there is something here that I increasingly am wary of as mere hallucination.
There is much to consider. I am trying to be very energetic which, really, is the feeling that I increasingly cast as synonymous with Health.
We went to Bacaro for dinner last night, then to Clockwork, later. “Do you know about how to get dinner for free,” some girl sitting next to my friend and me said. Then, she explained the concept of Club Promoters. Yeah I know, I said. I didn’t say it in a rude way. I just told her that I already knew, which I already did.
My energy feels back in a way that feels very True today. Before I left for El Salvador, I was getting in the habit of killing time. Looking at an hour and wishing it over. I don’t want to quantify anything. What would happen if I never rushed a second again? This is what I’m trying to figure out.
What would happen if I never rushed a second again? This is what I’m trying to figure out.
Monday, April 1
My mind was reeling so fast in my Irish Literature class this evening. I started flicking through Internet Web Applications at warpspeed. I made some calls. I didn’t go crazy. “Saying no is a far more reliable path to avoiding sin than saying yes”, I heard someone say, through my fog, through the haze - that snapped me out of it quite quickly.
“What if you literalize that, and just say no to everything?” a quiet girl across from me asked.
I wrote this part down - “JUST SAY NO TO EVERYTHING!!!!”
It was humid, heavy, soon-to-be-hot spring, today, in New York. I lost my head. Truly. I became very braindead very quickly, today. I recovered as best I could. It’s the way these things always go. Unmoored from the interactions you’ve been taking for granted, you’ve been alone with your thoughts and suddenly, you’ve found yourself thinking Nothing At All, and Saying A Lot Out Loud And Saying A Lot Online. You realize, suddenly, how wrong this all is, and then you become briefly concerned that maybe, suddenly, it is already too late for you.
Or maybe it isn’t too late after all.. Water on the windowsill. I remember spring two years ago, a taxi cab from Chelsea down to where the East River runs near the Lower East Side. I wore a yellow dress and I ran like the wind from the river to the hotel bar. The fires. The maggots. It was that day in New York when it felt like cosmically, biblically, something bad was probably about to happen. The Seven Plagues. The air was thicker and hotter, then.
I am thinking about that day because I was braindead on the Internet then, too. Celsius, protein bar, things had begun all thick and ugly and then I’d been whisked away into a big black car, shuttled to the bar at Nine Orchard, my friends convincing me to stick around and then I did, I stuck around for a while, I never really left after that, come to think of it.
“It’s Deep Tech Week in New York,” Shannon tells me, today - whatever that means.
She sends me an event as such, and I investigate the schedule for the rest of this week from there.
Deep Tech Week is a week of events about Tech, and they added the word Deep in front of it to make it seem more cool, I realize quickly.
“Turning Science Fiction into Reality,” the text on the website says, and I don’t really like the sound of that. I find that premise, as strictly a premise, material reality aside, even, to be nearly cartoonishly evil. But, I suppose I’ll try to be less pedantic.
I eat a sugar cookie (gluten free). Two protein bars from that new brand DAVID. A brand activation crispy sandwich from Joe And The Juice. The packaging is orange instead of that usual nice pastel pink. KEVIN DURANT, the packing says. It is nine pm, and I am suddenly ravenous. Good. Looks like I got my corporeality back.
I really was planning to go to the Deep Tech Party tonight, but the rain started in an instant, in the exact instant I was set to leave, really. Like it’s trying to communicate some form of serendipity, reason, warning, whatever. Monday is the day where I let myself get every last thing done on my phone. My eyes burn. It rots the soul. My week continues and I become much more particular with myself.
Tuesday, April 2
It’s not that I mind being kind of exhibitionist, even, but I can’t control the feedback loop and I start to drive myself mad. Taking stock of the state of the union like
THINGS THAT ARE "IN":
Swimming
Expressive function
found objects
open windows heavy air heavy humid first spring air
yellow dresses, cotton dresses
spending money like I have it, spending the last of my money on thrifted Sue Wong beaded dresses because they don’t make beads and dresses like that anymore and certainly not at this price point.
Having a soul mate, being in love, blah blah blah but this is the thing i know MOST in my life to be true
getting teary eyed because you found your joie de vivre again
rain on the glass roof that you listen to alone and enjoying the rain on the glass roof alone but not being alone really too often, not going mad
the tropics
the third spaces
off roading ATVs in unlikely places
I’m not writing a scene report
Irish music - Dougie Maclean, The Garden of Jane Delawney, The Secret of Roan Inish (film) (1994)
going to Shinsen sober
April fools
Salt water
Dawn Powell
A discerning eye when it comes to alchemy and potions
A VERY !!!! discerning eye when it comes to techno spiritualism because I don’t buy MOST of it but there is something to be said for electric currents and spells of any kind and
Red light and humid heat (never dry heat
Taking pleasure in appearing happy not morose
Being present but not listless
Rolling down hills in grassy knolls with your friends
Baking easter pie
Let’s go to a swimming hole
Shutting the fuck up about things that are obvious like CRAVING SINCERITY
Energy
Simple glassware, open windows, vanilla ice cream, orange wine for my friends (i'm allergic) so, something crisp for me. vodka. sparkling water. sleeping under a cool breeze when things start to get all starry. diet coke always propped on the shelf above the bed but throwing out the cans in the morning. rosehip oil. coconut oil. buckthorn oil. you sleep and wake up naturally, but the schedule aligns itself somehow. you keep the windows open. spring peepers in the fields outside. little planes blinking above New York. Dusk over a trampoline that is rarely frequented these days but not abandoned, really. a schedule, life, day to day, whatever, that really does kind of just sort itself out.
Circadian rhythm and the like.
Today feels very slow and languid. It's the sun that's starting to boil my greenhouse apartment, maybe. It's the solitude, maybe. Not that there has been that much solitude, even. Just today, really.
There’s this, from Virgina Woolfe’s Diary: “what a disgraceful lapse! Nothing added to my disquisition & life allowed to waste like a tap left running. Eleven days unrecorded.”
They asked me to contribute to a time capsule. What is the purpose of archiving? When does archiving become hoarding? I skipped over these questions. I answered the questions about Nostalgia instead. You aren’t nostalgic for your phone, I said, or it was something different than that, there was more to it than that. I don’t mean to be so self-effacing.
I almost bought a blood thickening potion at The Alchemy Kitchen, but I felt thick blood might bog me down. I felt that this whole potion thing, here, in this situation, was probably a scam. The other girls in the store were carrying Princess Polly Bags. The other potions were things like Build Your Own Concoction: Serenity and Joy.
Matthew used to be Enemy Number One, but now he is my friend, and so I make plans to meet him at the April Fools Party tonight.
Halfway through the walk to the party I get overwhelmed at the thought of going to a Party. I was wearing my Elene Velez Gray Jacket. I was wearing my Ganni Boots. It was all a bit much, then, wasn’t it? Reroute my walk towards the tip of downtown. That bar that’s way too cavernous, too expensive, full of Internet Superstars and I like it none-the-less.
“I went to a party at my friend's house and she's kind of famous so they sent us five million free margaritas,” the girl at the table next to me is saying. It sounds like a quote that is fake, but this is what she actually said.
The night turns all sloshy and sparkly. Yeah, it was a lot of fun and then later, the apartment is still a mess and yeah, yes, I have to get out of here.
There are certain habits I’ve been struggling to break. I am not bored, I am not thinking that everything that happens here is suddenly stale and stilted and I am not, even, very disappointed in myself. More so, I think I should have left when I had the chance. And then the chance presents itself again and so off I go, then. I didn’t mean to be too self indulgent. It’s not escapism, really. Who said that thing about square pegs and round holes? Anyways, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
Friday, April 3
Two shows opened yesterday. If you missed the openings, you should go today – Parent Company — Stewart Bird Amberweight opened. - “The image machine turns out an indeterminate cloud of images based on its experiences seeing more images than anyone but the image machine could ever see.” Parent Company is one of my favorite galleries around these days, and this looks to be a very special exhibition. | on view through May 24 and Psychic Readings — Stacy Kranitz and Chris Verene “The Safety Net” opened , curated by Ani Cordero. - “' a two-person exhibition that examines life in today's American small towns, through the work of acclaimed documentary photographers.” .
From 7pm - 9:30 at BCTR — Soonest Mended has its second ever performance - “dissecting the ultimate millennial relationship experiment.”
From 9:30pm at Roxy Cinema — WWW.RACHELORMONT.COM screens again. Plus the Roast of Peter Vack (feat. The Ion Pack and Special Guests)
Saturday, April 5
From 3:30pm - 6pm BCTR — Soonest Mended continues.
From 6:30pm at The Shop at Addison Pest Control — Matt Weinberger is hosting A HAPPENING (super secret private event). Readings by Matt Starr, Annabel Boardman, Alexi Wasser, and more. Music by Ludwig, Bec Lauder, Arsun, and more. Dance by Lena Drake.
From 8pm - 2am at 247 Varet — JM Kettle hosts the second rendition of Stop 1. This is a good parry for those who might want to ease themselves into something like the rave scene. A liminal space somewhere between the vibes of Dimes Square and Bushwick, so to speak. Come early for chiller energy, the party will pick up by the end of the night.
From 10pm - late at 154 Scott Ave — Features presents Volume 2, featuring Devil’s Workshop, Isadora + Henry Casson, Ana Racks, No Strings, and more. This is a new party series I’ve heard only very good things about.
Sunday, April 6
From 7pm at KGB — SPASM vs ETHICS battle it out. Readings by Alice Aster, Madi Bean, Logan Wolfe, Whitney Mallett, and Megsuperstarprincess. Hosted by True & Zoey Greenwald.
From 9pm at KGB — Confessions hosts another late night open mic. If you want to read arrive at 9pm, a prompt will be assigned to you and you will have about an hour to write.
I too love delicate limbs and energy