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 online. I was invited to parties on account of writing auto-flash-fiction and I was never declining invitations on account of the things I wanted being very low barrier to entry, and also having little-to-no-personality-but-eagerness at the time.
When Luke and I broke up, he ran our letters and texts through artificial intelligence chat bots because the situation was lacking clarity and he was taking a clinical lens to things in the aftermath. Claude says I have all sorts of pathologies, it’s crazy, he said. I lay on a Scandinavian couch in the greenhouse apartment while he listed out his diagnostics on the phone. The glass ceiling made everything bright and trapped the sun until the whole room began to boil. I was hot all the time, and the summer felt lethargic and hazy. Luke talked too fast and pressured, with a strange stilted laugh that I couldn’t really handle, and so I sat up straight on the Scandinavian couch, crossed my legs, and told him to stop saying “psychopath” and “antisocial personality disorder,” and to shut the fuck up, please shut the fuck up. It’s self-satisfied and sick for you to revel in these terms. You’re not perfect either, he told me. You like to narrativize the situation and be neurotic.
Obviously, I said, though I wasn’t feeling particularly neurotic, and the only mind I ever professed to narrativize was my own. In my non-neurotic life, I would wait until the high-in-the-sky sun made my greenhouse sunny and suffocatingly warm, and then I would invite the girls over to drink White Claw Surge on the terrace or the Scandinavian couch until I fell asleep. When I fell asleep, the girls would quietly leave. I was feeling fine and quite peaceful. I had one birthday cake in my freezer, and if my friends or I got hungry, I was happy to saw off a chunk. I want for nothing, I told my friends, and surveyed the vast apartment that was mine for only two more weeks. I was only really leaving for Luke’s one-hour apartment-custody visits by then. Weekly stints where he would text me: close, and here, and gone, and I would find a park bench somewhere far enough away that we would not risk a run-in while he passed through the kitchen in my absence, sweeping up gym clothes and pills and tennis racket and drawings from the fridge that I could have back if I wanted, he just thought I hadn’t really wanted them. This was two summers after I met Saoirse, via making short-form video content on the Upper East Side.
Cults are nice because it’s like: what if hanging out with your friends felt like world domination? Everything I do is in the pursuit of compulsive self-mythologizing.
It’s not that I wanted to self-mythologize more than I wanted anything else in the world, but I did not care to be so famous or even to be so skinny. The schizophrenic podcaster would call my friends “celebrities.” I think he was impressed that everyone in the world knew who they were. Everyone in the world was everyone who he followed on x-dot-com, which is a useful delusion of grandeur to settle on, as it allows for many spin-offs, along with opportunities for parallel play with the objects of your fascination. Later, everyone in the world was everyone who lived in his mind, and I was a pop star and a spy and an agent for a secret nation they were building out of San Francisco.
And all of this is just to say that this is how I met my friends. I walk thirty-seven minutes to the social club at eleven-pm and the night is windy and misty and sweet. It is cold again, and I am not too glad about the change in the weather, though I’m feeling a little happier than neutral. All the girls are sitting in a circle at the party when I arrive, and the space is really coming together. The ceiling is blue and it looks like it’s swimming with mermaids. There is a big glass chandelier and a gold plated mirror that used to live in the glass apartment in the sky that used to belong to Saoirse and then me and then Iris. The apartment was full of all sorts of slanted floors and dripping ceilings and drafts and curses, but I remember it fondly all the same.
MONDAY
It is two o’clock in the afternoon and I am sitting on the floor with Tashkent Market beef pelimi and cottage-cheese-protein bar and celsius and cool minty zyn. I’ve been wandering around because I have something to prove. I can have anything I want but I can’t have everything I want. I met up John and Jack last night after the play. Jack was firing off ‘posts’ all evening. Who wants to eat ice cream with two handsome boys in the East Village, he was asking. I did not want to eat ice cream in the East Village, but I also did not want to go to sleep and so I gave them happy-medium-suggestion of meet at nearest Bitcoin bar in the West Village. I wore a Lucis Trust pin and Brandy Melville slip and black Frye boots. Jack said he was glad that all the girls are getting it together and I said I sure hope so. At the Bitcoin Bar, they sell an orange-pill drink for 100 BTC. The sign by the drink says THIS MIGHT MAKE YOU LIVE FOREVER and THIS MIGHT KILL YOU RIGHT AWAY. They pump orange syrups and scents through the bathrooms for purposes of subliminal-advertising. 100 BTC is seventy-six-thousand-dollars because Bitcoin-is-down this season. I drank water-times-one-million, and the bartender kept on asking me if he could get me another round. I said why not times-one-million, and so the water kept on coming. Tomorrow, a task rabbit will come to haul this glass table on out of here and then I will have a floor-of-my-own. When I woke up this morning, I was elated to learn that I had finally fallen asleep. I opened my eyes, and I was shocked by the state of affairs. There is a bag of bananas on my soon-to-be-gone glass table, and there is clothing splayed out everywhere else. Who did this, I wondered. Fine. And who the heck is going to clean it up?
I open my CoStar application at The Marlton Hotel, because if I’m giving up everything all at once then at least I get to relapse on false-Gods. From now on, you only enter into partnership with someone if you consider them your equal, the CoStar says. It advises me on DON’TS: lost love, packed bags, YA novels. My phone is so authoritative.
Later, I will read my Catholic Surrender prayers that Joe gave me and repent. The girls next to me at the Marlton Hotel are doing influencer-marketing, and outside it is sunny and bright. All the girls at The Marlton Hotel these days have been working on influencer-marketing, and increasingly, outside, it has always been sunny and bright. I am feeling hungry for almond milk latte and fruity-tums. Feeling hungry for calcium and semi-pasterized-milk from the nearest Based butcher.
Walking through Washington Square Park towards the Upper West Side and all the 4/20 signs are inexplicably Israel-themed. Holding my breath in Washington Square Park on 4/20 like: If I breath I die if I breath I die if I breath I die.
I take the C-train to the book party is on the Upper West Side and Jennifer and I stand against big french windows and try to identify familiar landmarks cast against the bluest sky. The book party stories are about Joan of Arc and Mary Shelley and how one writes a life from a daughter’s point of view. I have a friend who once said to me that divorce is the death of a small civilization, the talk begins. I am presented with sparkling water in wine glass on silver platter upon arrival because God is looking out for me, and later, puff pastry pig-in-blanket and raw brussels sprouts with hummus. There’s a line in the book where the husband calls years later and he says ‘we would have had it all,’ the author says. And I hate that kind of aphorism, but they would have had it all.
I walk from West 87th street all the way down to the Lower East Side after everyone asks, later, if they can perhaps check out my blog. I want to say no, but because my blog is unfortunately published under first-name last-name, the obvious answer is yes.
TUESDAY
I ring every bell on the door of my old apartment building three times over between the hours of eleven and eleven-forty-five-am but no one bites and so now I’m worried that I look insane. If I were a package thief I would move a lot differently. The task rabbit never came for the glass antique table and the old Prada boots are still held captive at Vince’s and Capezio polyester dance shorts are still trapped inside the corridors of 4** [Redacted] Place because “Shopify” has a hard time keeping up with local, and I have a hard time limiting my conspicuous consumption. Every time I ring 2A 3A 3B 4A 4B 4CD a British ladies voice says calling home. If the door would open, the British ladies voice would chirp: door is open, please close the door behind you. I have heard this door open times-one-million, but today, the British lady will not speak.
I take my polyester Capezio dance shorts to Soho Sushi and I sit alone by the street facing window. The window is like a one-way mirror and it’s decked in twinkle lights that do not let the sunshine through. The restaurant is full of art world people talking on the phone about Wilfredo Lam show at Moma and the Joan Semmel show at The Jewish Museum and their escape to the mountains of Mexico and nuclear war. Tyranny around the world, an older woman is saying. She has dull eyes and boxed-dye red hair and a high pitched voice. I order half a grapefruit and sushi combo plate and hot tea that refills before I finish my cup. Don’t leave before we refill your tea, my waitress says, and then we both laugh. It reminds me a bit of Fung Wan in here, I think. Where Big takes Carrie in Season 1 when he wants to not be seen in. What with the mostly takeout vibe and the personal conversations happening loudly on the phone and elevator music that is making me transfixed. Earlier, Amazon delivery unearthed Capezio polyester shorts from underneath a stack of 4CD’s Princess Polly in the corridor of the glass-apartment-in-the-sky, and yet I didn’t get to hear the British lady chirp. I am taking notes and nodding, now. I nod kind of subconsciously, and I think I blink a bit too much, too.
Parties these days are always under blue ceilings that swim with mermaids and glass chandeliers, and I am so full of boundless energy when I arrive that I don’t even notice anything out of sorts. My friends sweep me up into circles like bees, and I am never alone, not even for one second. I sit at the bar with [redacted] and he asks me how I decide what to include in my blog. [Redacted] asks me the same questions over and over and over because he is drunk and I am not. [Redacted] says I thought you’d be twenty-three forever, and I say Im not and I wish.
WEDNESDAY
My dream last night was all about nuclear reactors. Genevieve and Cassandra and Thomas had all done well for themselves at Oxford, and now they were nuclear energy engineers. I drove a blue jaguar to the facility while all my friends got suited up. The graduates donned hazmat suits in locker rooms and Genevieve apologized about the smell. Things have been heating up around here, she said. I never knew you wanted to work in oil and gas, I said, and then everybody shot me evil glances. We do NOT work in OIL or GAS, they said. Amber was working at the facility’s snack shack and Genevieve was wearing latex and metal head to toe and approaching the nerve center. And me? I was being brought on as kindergarten-teacher for the children-of-facility. I sat high in the sky on the metal floor of a trembling observation deck and Thomas told me that two weeks ago, when things were really hot, I would have really felt the trembling even more. Should I be scared, I asked Thomas. No, he said. Ok, I said. I called my dad and said I’m on an oil rig. I called my dad and said I’m in the South Pacific. I called my dad and said I can’t keep the Old Testament and the New Testament straight, and my dad was humiliated on my behalf. My dad was happy about my foray into clean energy and defense technology. It seems like things keep getting better and better for you, he said. There were long stone tunnels that connected the snack shack and the prison and the classroom and the nerve center and the bar. The tunnels were full of foxes and lynxes and workers wearing masks and carrying axe picks and stopping me in all that darkness to tell me that the children had been very badly behaved. Genevieve made me eggs I could not eat because I’d purchased protein bar on the way in. And later? Later, there was a ball. Everyone was invited. I was so glad to be invited. Thomas said it was ok if I went home for a bit, and we both agreed, respectively, that it was just important that I made it back in time to party.
THURSDAY
We went to JG Melon for dinner last night, which is the perfect old-school New-York spot. I ate a cheeseburger on an open bun with dijon mustard and cottage fries and diet coke while a girl from tiktok with shiny hair flipped her ponytail into Talia’s chair over and over and we laughed a little more each time. I was looking out the windows towards the turtle pond til sunrise after that, and the songs were simple and reminded me of crystals and went like Nothing’s Changed Chris Isaak and Like A Rolling Stone Bob Dylan and Hurricane Bob Dylan and Forget Her Jeff Buckley; and Back to Black Amy Winehouse, one-hour-per-song, approximately and then it was morning. La colombe triple shot latte for breakfast Starburst flavored ICE for lunch, and for dinner? Reese’s zero sugar miniature peanut butter cups. Making notes about how your routines are who you are. Making notes about how there is no rich inner world. Making notes like your souls in there your souls in there your souls in there. I’m eyes-wide-open twenty-four-seven. I’m the same-amount-of-sober all-of-the-time. My room is never changing. My life is one-thing-all-at-once.
FRIDAY
Things I’m packing in my North Face Backpack to go to Los Angeles with my friends-from-online
Orca stone of protection
Swiss passport
American Passport
Marlton Hotel branded red pen
Officine Universelle Buly perfume (Eau Triple Peruvian Heliotrope)
Brandy Melville black long sleeve off-the-shoulder-slip
Brandy Melville navy long sleeve off-the-shoulder-slip
Brandy Melville black nightgown
Lelet swirl gold necklace
The Sunday Standard silk shell belt
Lululemon leggings (2)
Banana Republic long sleeve top (2)
Brandy Melville boy shorts (2)
Amazon tight black tank top (2)
Brown suede prada boots (on feet)
Copy of Alice Bailey Unfinished Autobiography
Toothbrush, toothpaste, small toiletries bag with minimal makeup
Current body LED mask
Cards that have lived at bottom of bag for a while that say: NOWHERE and THIS MIGHT MAKE YOU LIVE FOREVER and i give you three more months (crossed out) lifetimes
My note that says TO DO: [redacted] [redacted]
My note that says THINGS IM PACKING FOR LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
DIRECTORY: Lovers of Today, Pubkey, Tashkent Market, Costar, Blue Jaguar, Capezio dance shorts, Alice Bailey Unfinished Autobiography, Lelet swirl gold necklace, Brandy Melville navy long sleeve off-the-shoulder-slip, Officine Universelle Buly perfume, Orca stone of protection, Current body LED mask, Nothing’s Changed Chris Isaak and Like A Rolling Stone Bob Dylan and Hurricane Bob Dylan and Forget Her Jeff Buckley and Back to Black Amy Winehouse
Friday, May 8
From 6pm - 10pm at 195 Henry St — ProblemChild Advisory & SittingRoom Gallery present Belle Chase: a new group exhibition recontextualizing vintage work from the 1980s/90s -2000s amongst contemporary fair.
From 6:30pm at Night Club 101 — Ok Cowgirl plays a single release show with Elora and Carol. A beautiful indie evening. Tickets here
From 7pm - 10pm at 63 N 3rd — Another performance of Last Days of Downtown (BK) - Matthew Gasda follows up Dimes Square with a night that might be the end of an era: film director Terry’s 40th birthday… | Tickets here
From 9pm - late at Golden Wuish — Reunion hosts an unofficial Cannes send off party for filmmakers. Celebrating a bunch of the film teams with movies at Cannes before they all head out.
Saturday, May 9
Alyssa Davis Gallery presents N24B at Renzo’s Piano (565 Broome) — “a speculative biography of an unknown inhabitant. Marking the gallery’s first collaboration with a high-end residential development, the exhibition brings contemporary works into a staged private residence, a setting typically defined by neutrality and display.” | visits by appointment only
From 12pm - 8pm at Inanna Gallery — The Botique is open. Clothes, books, knick knacks, poems and more, from Kim Schell, Theo Levy, Meg Superstar Princess, Noelia Madison, Dea Avdulla, Katya, and more. I <3 this new spot. Ancient Future Art Gallery.
From 7pm - 10pm at 63 N 3rd — Another performance of Last Days of Downtown (BK) - Matthew Gasda follows up Dimes Square with a night that might be the end of an era: film director Terry’s 40th birthday… | Tickets here
From 9pm at Baby’s Alright — Baby’s Dance returns with Or Best Offer, Retail Drugs, Lily Piette (live music) Perna, Yelena, Boxxer (DJs) Samantha Vogel Arly Scott (personalities) | RSVP here
