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
never stop filling in the dots