Drew Spielvogel
in progress, edited in real-time
I strap my mattress to my back so it’s not snatched up by a friend.Bouquets under the train bridge must have been dyed these holiday colors. The flowers are bright like rays on my day. The flowers are real and gaudy in their wrappings. I wander like a pilgrim, the murderers. I make my settlement on someone else’s lot. My bed is my lot transposed on another’s. I lay my cream mattress down. This sidewalk square is mine.I sing to the rusty bridge with a train bumping over it: "Wish there could be wild overgrowth on Williamsburg, mutant money trees, and fauna with cash petals cupping pearls. Flower lockets. I wish money could rain across the borough for all in debt to collect. Selfish sadists love to run a country, stockpile its resources and get money for their friends, what the big boys are doing. I spray my tag on a domed bank, white in the sun. Crime is an appropriate response to bad government. Government is a diffuse entity. Grime men in power. Crime them, the grime aristocrats. Rapists and exploiters in power. Paint big eyes all over their palaces and banks, I am watching you, too, big brother. Big brother, big brother, I am watching you." I raise my arms to the pigeons. "I’ll write my tag big in a green scrawl, Fallen Princessa. You'll see. I want to blast confetti off a balcony, and get a group together to dance-storm the capital, the capital, the capital, you'll see. I will."10 o' clock, uniformed guy is walking with a crew cut. "Hey you," I cup my hands to my face and shout. He ducks his head and scurries over Broadway. "You, you, fuck, look at me. Why don't you look at me?" I slam my fists on the ground. "Oh well," I say to the pigeon at my toes, who is grey and white with a mustard streak. I say, "flowers could be real beneath the holiday petal dye."
My earbuds play a happy mix as I polish the marble. Looking after monument ruins, I polish Lincoln’s nose. The edges of an ivory obelisk are a faraway blur. What do you stand for?Mottled reds, whites, and blues on Don's chest used to be tattoos of an eagle and a flag. They are bruises beneath the salt and pepper hair on my veteran's chest now. Once upon a time, we were happy to sit in a jacuzzi with martinis up in the Poconos, even the jacuzzi was martini-shaped. We sat high up looking down through the coned glass at the wooden lodge floor below. Flowers burst outside for the fourth. The hot tub boils us to bone broth. I am lucky to have my position, to be able to move through the grey spools, sloshing my cleaning bucket. I leave a trail of tears. I am a trail of tears.
I see you through a window with old youth group friends. I used to go to youth group with you. You would talk to my friends, while I watched. I sit on a bench near the high school football stadium. Someone gave a portion of their life to make this bench. We met at youth group. You DMed me songs. I lied and said I loved Nicki Minaj and Beyonce like you did. We exchanged photos with the puppy dog filter. In high school class, I imagine what I would do if a shooter came in and started spraying bullets. Would I risk everything to kiss you one last time? Would I run to you, and kiss you while everyone screams and huddles under their desks? They would find us nestled like the Pompeii lovers on bloody tiles. It would be an iconic image on Time magazine. You burned my temple down like you said you would. I penned your name in my journal repeatedly, in black ink. I drew a heart over and over your name to obliterate it. I threw my YA posters away. You had hair like a Nike swoop. The hairs came from the back to crest at the front. You were always running your hands through your hair and looking at it on your phone camera. I dreaded seeing you at school with your church clique, and seeing you now is dreadful.
To: shattered beer bottle, trampled beer can, and crushed soda cup with plastic petals extending off the bottom, creating a flower shape.I am describing to you my "hometown," the place I lived for five years. It's called State College. It is the residence of Penn State. It is located in Happy Valley.Greasy pizza slice drips oil into a drain and the runoff travels out to the mountains. Valedictorians come in from mountain towns to study and drink. Amish horse-drawn carriages trot alongside pickup trucks on highways bordered by car dealerships, silos, old houses, and strip malls. Small towns in Central Pennsylvania possess a trademark architectural style--red brick, yellow-beige block, or chipped wood siding. Functional early to mid-twentieth-century farmhouses with new updates in some places. Sleek Penn State University, with charming red brick and functional steel, interfering with the quaintness.Clouds muffle stadium cheers. The sky is different every day. Shifty shapes change.Donald Trump visited recently, and the town turned red with blue-and-white accents. Babies are bornin jubilation. Babies are reared for Greek life and game day.A bus goes past me and Huggies sit in a window, waiting for a baby. Across the street, a couple fights. The girl is in cut-off jeans with pockets hanging out. There was a game today—flatscreens on the porches and lawns, with students out, drinking, and shouting in the aftermath.
autofiction
WINTERA gargantuan piece of hail broke my father's windshield, and he repaired it with duct tape. Black tape kept the glass pieces in place.He drove an hour on I-94 to work at a Christian liberal arts college and an hour home—he trailed behind plow trucks in the blizzards. He shoveled the driveway each morning before he left. He watched the road through tortoise-shell glasses and a cracked glass barrier, which wipers cleared of snowflakes.Snow filled the window wells outside our basement: iron lattices prevented us from falling in accidentally.I was head to toe in snow gear: a puffy coat, snow pants, my hat, neck warmer, mittens, ski socks, and boots.I looked around with my hat on and stared at the red, white, and blue stitches on my mittens, which vibrated into light purple.In the cul-de-sac's center, an iceberg shimmered.I shook white crystals off my hat, and they melted on the tile floor. I stomped my boots out in the garage, before entering the house.Owls hit our glass windows, killing themselves. The animals lay still on the grass. They blended into the snow, which made their bodies surprising. My dad cried once, seeing this.School, like work, home, and church, was off the highway. We settled cross-legged on the world map rug. The teacher pointed to the lower left corner of her left hand and said: you are here.SPRINGI tossed caterpillars in the wheelbarrow when the snow melted, because they covered the driveway, smooshing all over our feet and tires, then attached the wheelbarrow to my electric car and dragged it around.Caterpillars launched off the back like a denser exhaust cloud. We built suburban developments for the remaining caterpillars.Regardless of whether or not we interfered in their lives, the caterpillars knitted mittens around themselves and turned into moths, not butterflies.The projector was tilted. A virtual fire glowed in a projected parallelogram shape on the flooding basement’s wall. Water spilled down into the basement through boxes dug out in the lawn. We bailed the basement out with buckets and tore up the carpet. The concrete floor was covered in black mold.I breathed the pollution from the highway without smelling it, and scrubbed the grout lines between manmade stones on the fireplace, dialed the flame on, and stared at the 2D flicker.Three trees were equally spaced on a chartreuse lawn next to the squirming driveway. A man circled the cul-de-sac and stepped out of his car to pick cherries off our trees, then eyed us children and got back in his car.At the top of a hill, with its fraternal twin next door, our house regarded the cul-de-sac.SUMMERI dug my finger in the creek and pulled it out with a leech attached. I ran home screaming and pulled it off in the shower.I stared at the ceiling, dizzy on Midrin, and it was grainy with floating caterpillars.We jumped off yards held up by rocks. The yards were tiered like cakes. And a snake slithered out, from the rocks.FALLThe gym teacher is a lesbian, a mother gossiped while sipping wine at 5 PM, and her child overheard, and spread the news. My teacher said people should live how they want to live. I wrote my name, tidy, in my bound notebook with a granite-pattern cover. The f was a vertical infinity symbol with a line protruding between the ovals.Children gave snakebites by twisting with two hands forearm skin in different directions. In class, we learned about another snakebite, AIDS, and to practice abstinence.The kitchen table was a square made of glass with foam on the corners. We sprayed it down with Windex to keep it crystal. Foam corners on the fireplace prevented us from smacking our heads, and car locks prevented children from accidentally falling out of the mini vans, which had windows covered in Disney stickers, that obscured the view of the highway sound-wall, behind which our cul-de-sac was. Later, my father scraped the stickers off, using the same scraper he used to clear the windshield of ice. Unlike the ice, the stickers left a pilly residue, which did not trickle off or disappear like the ice water did. The stickers left a snakeskin.An air-freshener tree hung from the curved rectangular mirror of the car, where I sat in the backseat. The mirror reflected a squished face with curved rectangular frames. The Honda Odyssey door opened automatically with a mechanical groan and some beeps. I hopped out and chipped my tooth on a curb.To buy school lunch meant you were of a lower class. In the middle school cafeteria, boys could not sit with girls or they were gay. White kids could not sit with Black kids, or the parents with Pure Michigan bumper stickers would say the Black child was a bad influence, and not invite the child over. One half of the cafeteria ate packed lunch, and the other, school lunch: a line cut down the middle like a tug-of-war rope. When dating began in middle school, a white girl began dating Black men in succession, and behind her back, we said this was "inappropriate." The girl, herself, called femme dogs gay. Her Catholic father watched drivers from a highway billboard which advertised his law practice with a 1(800) number.Snakes wriggle across the satellite map. Now, the cul-de-sac is a curled gardner snake. The snake swallows Americana-genre mash-up houses, crashes through the sound-wall, and eats highway pile-ups for miles.A yellow Volkswagen Beetle sits, still on the cul-de-sac, with a curb indenting its tire.From a Facebook post, we learn, the car's owner has died.WINTER, LATERI dreamt I was a man returning to the neighborhood. I see my parents grow older, and try to assemble details into a mosaic.The light shines through the mosaic, and onto the cul-de-sac. In the highway town, creatures weave about mud and rock and glass and vinyl siding, and trail over laminate floors. We looked at artificial lights and maintained traditions. Still, the creatures complete tasks behind the sound wall hedge. I looked at other places, then, other fantasies, from my family computer on 1225 Holiday Lane. The builder was an evangelical Christian and 12/25, his favorite date.Caterpillars persist in becoming moths despite human attempts to organize or kill them. Caterpillars and snakes were never lesser things, though the snake is something to be afraid of.As a child, I was "free," to move along the roads closest to me. I was free to circle the cul-de-sac and explore the neighborhood with little supervision.I see other lives now: escorts and artists, who cobble together incomes, and gay couples with open relationships. In elementary school, we learned how to create a family home on a game called "Building Homes of Our Own," and I wanted to make one someday: a home of my own.A close-up of a couple holding hands on a billboard with a number underneath: what could that banal image be?For the caterpillar lives we assembled, and for the virtual families, too, which we made on our gaming consoles and iPods, we played within the operating system, assigning gendered tasks to the animals and forming straight couples with our animals and toys. We role-played the explorers we celebrated on days off like small carriers of disease. We sat on the world map and learned our state was our hand. My childhood picture is a pristine hallucination.
creative nonfiction
Buildings in the downtown area are pale brick or vinyl siding—white or blue, flaking off. Chipped murals with smiling faces of community members fall off the walls, too. On the main street mural, a young girl smiles mid-pirouette. A chip revealing the original grey color of the building is where her tooth was. She was the muralist's daughter. I got to know him. He was haunted by her early passing. He’d call me late and ask if everything was okay. He has a tattoo of a bird on the area between the pointer finger and thumb. I spent many nights in the basement with dust all over the floor, hanging out with the muralist. Ash fell off our mouths. His wails echoed around the unfinished studio cave, which was filled with his daughter's image. She was painted all over town, in many roles: ballerina, hawk, and graduating student.
I longed for you obsessively. I wrote poetry and posted it online to perform my obsession. I could not cope with a life I perceived to be dead-end. You suggested a handsome escape. I made all your attributes charming and looked for a star-crossed narrative. I attached every feeling to a trope and half-saw that I was doing so. Eventually, I lost sight of where you and the trope differed. I would erase most recollections of my time with you. I edit extractions from the old ramblings and cut them together. I thought it might be interesting to be met in times of lust and marital dysfunction. With a straight family like everyone wants, I am the real one you want to see. I dreamed you would remove me from Iowa. And I wandered the streets while typing rants and messages after you flew home to Saudi Arabia. I lay in a field drunk and crying at 4 AM, pulling out the grass. I wandered the town; sat on curbs. Second time I saw you, you said, when you touched me last night, I died. Now I am the dead one. I stay in bed making spam posts of my break-up thoughts, losing a follower every two minutes, checking the follower count like a spasm. Smoking in the basement of a sports bar, I tell my friend I need to be with you, feel more alone. Men play their darts, play their pool. Cups of gold and brown fluid are consumed. In NYC Chinatown bar, I ran into someone who knew you back in Iowa and he said: oh yeah, we hooked up. Caustic. Salt. Round hairy shape in fantasy, old doll on the couch, Oldboy on the TV. Green chintz duvet and green eyes mean nothing, though I wrote letters with lines like: I had the most wonderful night with you at the Iowa State duck pond. And, and every time I vape now, I'll think of you. Fortunately, I do not. A realization: you are different from how I made you. I returned to you repeatedly over time. Yet, when the charming mask fell off, I did not like you. You were nasty, mean, controlling one night, accusing me of stealing. Now, you sit cross-legged on the floor while looking in my eyes and I know this is the last time I will greet you. In the bathroom of the sports bar, I made a post on my story, a selfie with the caption: love is an attempt to bridge an unbridgeable gap (single tear crying emoji) and love is the feeling of bridging it. Did I love you or love that you could take me away?
Addicts on Broadway Junction have eyes like knives through glazed donuts. I saw something piercing his eyes, too, black pain stabbing through the irises. It was a nondescript jewelry chain place close to the Broadway Junction stop, where I met Jeff working. I was browsing for earrings to wear to a friend’s wedding. Jeff helped me try on earrings and select a good pair. He pierced my ears and hung the dangles on my lobes. Depression made me feel like I was looking through a donut at more donuts far away. I saw Jeff initially as a nice man with a customer service voice and red slick outfit like a Chaim Soutine bellhop posing—mannered, dignified, squished, and cute through the holes. The world was smaller before he strolled on the scene, took the donuts off my eyes and ate them. My lobes are so weary of jewelry now and drooping. It's the future. I’m old upstate and talking to my dog. I tell her I like eyes that I can connect to. Laying on my favorite couch, with the dog lapping at his bowl, I circle my tongue around my dry mouth.Holding hands, eye-contact in the store with those fucking donut eyes, “I feel that” was the link between two chains, me, and him. I send a message out, don’t know where he is now, I say, meet me where the two yellow arches make an M.Jeff brings me new earrings that are bigger than the last ones. I loop my arms around his shoulders and pull him to me. I loop his remaining hairs around my fingers tightly. I like the open smile on his face, still same under high yellow glowing arches. We meet again next week at a bakery. Families and loners are sitting on picnic tables in the black night. I buy a donut. I hold it up to my eye. I close the other eye.One week later, we meet again. I pluck a strand from his head, and loop it around my finger. I take another strand and loop it around my finger, and pluck four more strands from his head, making rings and earrings for us both. Jeff, you are the ear holes in my head and the earrings that fit them. You are a ring I want to link with. Will we break up or stay together like two rings on a highway billboard next to a slogan about promise and forever? I always wondered if we might make it, after that first eye contact in the store. I don’t remember the name of the store brand, but I remember the store brand jingle. My ears hurt remembering the earworm and the earring. I want to show you what I’ve wanted all along. It’s not the gold jewelry. I pull out a needle and make a hole in each of his ears. I string the hair earrings through his lobes. I place the hair ring around his finger.The act undos the commodification of union, asserting an equitable and genderless non-exchange, a passing of one person's non-essential to another, a give and receive that is unbound, spaceless, timeless,
in death or dream,
in death do us merge.
She felt something; now it’s gone. She is opioid happy, made a picture, wrote a song, she is opioid happy, all her children went away, she is skating in blisses, and I do not think it’s wrong to paint pictures of missed kisses like Miss Catherine all the time. I know it may be right to remove her from the circumstances, but she does not think it’s wrong to spiral out laughing, all alone, writing a song, painting a picture. All her children left, and she pretends she doesn’t miss them, but she knows she does. She says while she’s laughing that her daughter brought a stray back home from Meatpacking. Her stray was fucked up, it would bark all night and pee itself, but the dog ran away too. Miss Catherine was out for days on snowflakes, and it is very upsetting, to see all the creatures outside her house, but there is nothing she can do. Once, her mama did tell her that the children might outlast her, and she did not believe her mother thinking her daughters might fall off one by one, on similar benders. Her mama doesn’t like her in her blisses. Her mama doesn’t think that its right for Miss Catherine to abandon the girls, to seal herself off, in the bathroom, or leave for days, but there’s nothing she can do for her dear girl Catherine baffling, yeah Miss Catherine is a baffling one, Miss Catherine’s surely laughing, by herself all alone now, 4 AM and Miss Catherine’s got her napkin, where she writes her fucking tunes, and they are sure not read by anyone, a real Bob Dylan. I ran into Miss Catherine at the Home Depot, and she looked better and brighter now in her orange vest, all smiley with that vacant look removed. She swiped my items across the bar code scanner, and we went our separate ways.
I routinely pass a fake hopeful image of a child with a smiling face on the side of a school in the projects, holding hands with other smiling perfect children. A more hopeful image or image sequence is a child holding their mother’s hand on the way to school or the movie enjoyed on the flight above. Hope is the gesture and light beneath the image.
I start my day with a reel sequence and a Megan Thee Stallion Tiny Desk Concert. I watch a reel with a strip club called Xscape, which advertises itself with chicken wings. The wings drip red oil off sticky fingers clutching leg bones. I can’t leave the bed, though I will try, I am done with Dumbo. I will lay, until you open up my heart latch and remove the organ, clutching it like that chicken wing. I sip my sugary coffee with the to-do reminders like the background music. Some white hipsters clap along to Megan. I sip my black coffee with sugar and plan to clean, housewife behavior. He said: you’re lazy. I said: today, while we were walking, I hated you. But hate is the opposite of love, so I also love you. I was addicted to destruction in the past, walking between aliveness and Xscape latch. I said he villainizes me as a fuck-up, only seeing my failures. He agrees, wanting me to perform better as a robo-cleaner. x x letter to x x you did hurt me so what I forget you x x heart beats, heart of a chicken with its leg cut off. Drenched in sauce, a wing glistens. I scrub away. TV song is bright and alluring. She is doing it. I finish cleaning and typing, so we are not late for the function. I sure know how to be sad and abstract like a Rothko. Happiness is available and attainable. The light comes from far away, touching what I touch, bright dancer on the TV.
Dark stab, mop hair, I don't mop the floor. White specks on a black comforter, my head's snowfall. Don't brush teeth. No tear. Tear open eye and gash the gash. Dying frog in muck mud is smiling through the Collapse. I laugh at the fridge, bed, microwave, and shower. Lol microwave and lol fridge, I laugh at the apathetic devices. Hair on the shower drain and dandruff on the bed. Fluorescent lights don't care, but I personify them as kind. Frog on the creek shore. Water lapping, water restricted by the shore edge. Water is not deep but expansive. The frog makes a wall to the sky. Brooklyn Mirage overlays decrepit Real. Dying visions at hyper speed earlier, like reels, like the image of a frog, pinned in mud. Frog hops to Lily pad.
Pair the vest with the mini skirt. Stare at the sun from a faraway perspective. Burn cigarette holes. Dogs trot past. Walk to the park. Runners circle round a dance circle. I enter the circle to be one of the dancers, polka dot on a halo. Shake like a free bird for Bacchus and all the shit saints. Shit saints didn’t get a raise. Shit saints are burnt out and blacked out of blasted portraits. Shit saints were never depicted.Sienna left the old party and did not return. I went to bed thinking it was alright. In the end, I am drinking the sloshed music without her. Sienna overlay on a dancer winks hi, and I burst like a blueberry under tongue pressure. Sienna is brown beneath the illuminations. Sienna is the brown illumination. Sienna is the face on an anonymous face. Sienna is November Fourth of July fireworks, today’s underpainting, and a saint in a shrine dedicated to grunge. Sienna would have interpretive-twerked while tweaking. I twerk now in the slosh. This is life. Sienna was my best friend. She would like it here. Sienna’d lick this shit up. Heaven. Heaven in a circle. I scrape the edge of the dance circle. I scrape the edge of the infinite line.I stare at a Byzantine icon who is arrogant in his spiritual achievement. I prefer alternatives. I prefer Sienna.
Abs in the mirror, above black Calvin Kleins from the 99-cent store. Small hairs from my razor are piled on the white counter, thin black lines. Slurp spaghetti with extra-garlic canned pasta sauce, getting red all over my mouth.Self expands.Power is stupid. Slash power construct, yet peace in practice? Strong men are weak as death. No neoclassical worship or canonical crooning. No inheritance or veneration. White temple turn to sandstone dust on a purple podium. We celebrate with Target pride flags and sip snake venom, chanting, We Love Collapse, We Are Collapse, We Will Collapse.From temple dust, blooms a new kind of creature: unnecessary, unfinished, non-gendered, and non-financial. The new creature has no body. The new creature is not new at all, the new creature has always been there beneath Lux and Debris.The black sun blares its trumpet and stabs its rays across the universe, jubilating in the collapse of Order, Power, and Reign. The plants sing too, and stretch and twirl up toward the black sun, whose light is cold and unfeeling, but not unwelcome.
When body is gone, there is soul. When soul is gone, there is money. Make your money, make your bling. I can be that face, moving how you want, elastic. I grind and grit my teeth. I spit on a tower, build hair towers instead of real ones. Body can morph, body can stack. Body stretch like plastic, gummy like snack. I make my body old, I make my body fat. I make my body skinny. I snap my fingers; I snap my bones. The hairs stand on each other. Every hair on my head, I use to make the flexible ascending line. I build it until it touches the clouds. I make my hair a tower. Thin tower, wind will break it down. Body made to labor. Body made to help. What am I without money. Only money I have is yours. To think I loved an Equinox-er.I could fall into a hole and be satisfied to lay there with a broken leg. Hate was the bedsheet on hurt. I lie in the bed, totaling feelings to subtraction. You snapped at me every time I woke you up accidentally. In a barely lucid state, you hated me. I watch the movie Arctic with Mads Mikkelsen to remind me of the desire to survive. Heartbreak drama, raw feeling, I attempt to compress to something of worth, but fail, but try anyway. I think of the few times we danced at Animal, the dusky, sleek gay bar/club, and kissed, and I think of when you stopped wanting to dance, instead, sitting at a table and pouting with arms crossed like a obstinate child. Next time, leaving early, do what you want, I'm heading out you said, which to me approximated, I don't care what you do, which to me approximated, I don't care about you. I followed you out the exit, trailing past you through the red doorway.Bataille writes:
You are the horror of the night
I love you like we laugh
You are weak as deathOn Reddit, I search: what to do if we are incompatible, but I love him? What to do if we fight all the time, with temporary resolutions? In the half-awake state, you hated me. Love ya, I redact the I and you. I am I. You are you. Not together in a phrase that confirms attachment. The desire to disappear passively, instead of orchestrate destruction. Mads Mikkelsen with a broken leg drags a dying girl across the Arctic, I can surely breathe and be good in my warm-climate room. When I woke up, the other day (not sure which, it is all slosh) I dragged myself to the birthday party, felt shaky fingers on the table at Walker's. I am tree hit with ax for a sec again. I cook an egg in chili crisp and garnish with cilantro. At your party, a guy you hooked up with long ago, maybe recently, who knows, you grabbed his hand at the party you hosted like a bigshot, you grabbed his hand when we were fighting, anyways, when I was ignoring you 'cause you were being mean. He kept patting me and looking sadly at me, while taking photos of me and you, me and then-boyfriend kissing performatively. He took the photos and smiled sadly like he knew something I did not. The photos looked convincing like nothing was wrong. Did your best friend tell him we were bad?I return to my door stoop, and there is the sad pimpled smoker outside again who never says hi, just stares at the ground, with his grunge music blaring. He is me again.I did not want to be a smiling face with a clown nose, honked for entertainment in a service-relationship, where I am a product-person, being conscripted into a life where one person does something for another, expecting something in return. I don't want to be a good investment, or prove to be one. I want to be a frowning clown, still loved.
A couple fights in the apartment next door. I wake up to them through my window, and it sounds like they are talking in my ear. The woman is a “starving artist” and the man is yelling at her for being one, though they both are stoned I think, or smoking while arguing. They keep taking pauses to cough. The man sounds like a frog on amphetamines and downers. He says: I’m not telling you to take Walmart commissions, I think you can do something though. I think your work would translate well to tarot cards.I can tell she is offended by this, but she says: yeah true.He is also yelling at her for her Instagram take on buying from Walmart. She is creating a micro-stir on social media by defending individuals who shop at stores we are supposed to boycott. She says: what are they supposed to do, these people in the middle of nowhere with Walmart and Target as their only store options? They have no choice.He talks about being a starving musician too, and refers to a friend who is surprised they make no money from gigs, and questions why the friend is surprised by this.He drones on and on about corporations.She responds: yeah, yeah, yeah, mmhmm, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, mhmm, yeah, yeah, yeah.He says: you’ve been a starving artist ever since I met you fifteen years ago.She says: yeah.Below them, another conversation floats up between a girl with a podcaster voice and a guy with a shy skater voice. They are exchanging thoughts on Fahrenheit 451. It is cute.My alarm sounds and the older couple pauses to listen to it and then continues arguing.I don’t really remember what else he said or think it matters. I was impressed by the woman’s persistence in saying yes in an agreeable voice, while her husband spewed nonsense. Agree to let the steamer steam.The woman and man justify their starvation by hating the man, hating corporations. He tells her again and again: I’m not telling you to sell out to Walmart, but you need to make money somehow.Why does he keep referring to Walmart? Stoners do this--make cloudy connections.--I participate in a forty-minute conversation about Equinox with my boyfriend and his friends and the luxury sounds very luxurious, Kiehls in the bathroom. I contribute to the conversation by saying the only gym I’ve ever been to is YMCA, but I am curious about the Equinox lifestyle.The fighting couple might be happier if they went to Equinox, but happiness is not the goal for them, suffering is. Suffering for suffering and suffering for art, age-old Kirchner classic.I tell myself I am suffering for something besides suffering, but I won’t be starving for much longer. I remark to my boyfriend that people seem happier in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Money makes people happy, he responds. I guess it does.I return to my door stoop, and there is the sad pimpled smoker outside again who never says hi, just stares at the ground, with his grunge music blaring. He probably uses cheap face wash, good for him. I have never seen him smile or notice my existence, the sad smoker on the stoop in ratty black and green clothes. Archetypal male blows smoke out his mouth all day and all night, making meaning in the cigarette self-harm.Help me diagram the differences between Equinox-ers suspended in fragrant viscosities, the old wealthy and the new, the formerly wealthy cast-off self-flagellaters, and the always poor poor. Individuals scatter across the money-pain-status diagram like streetwalkers on and off the city grid. To think I love an Equinox-er who is so much more than the face soap, formerly minimum wage working PhD drop-out, attends Equinox and is stunned by the luxury, lists it off like a beloved list. American Dream beneficiary, you worked hard to get where you are and make me want to believe in the steps to reach the Ultimate fantasy and wear the Kiehls face soap myself, though I remain on the stoop and its miserable smoke haze, which can provide a transcendence semblance. Whipping oneself and making watercolors from the red outpourings, I believe in this too, devotion to pain-expression to fill up sparse space, with no prettiness except for a bleak snowscape kind.I don’t know how or who to be. I am proud of the hard-working winners; I am sad for the losers and “self-identified” losers. I don’t believe in scales of measurement. It is a privilege to fail and a privilege to win. The glory in losing and winning, obviously, we keep trying at survival.
Every week, I magic-erase the grime from my boots. Parents came to visit and say it’s remarkable here like the world isn’t happening, with toned and bejeweled guests chewing in the Greenpoint dark box. I forget what it is to be mad here, yet the delusion croissant flakes off its moon shape, sometimes. Next week, I will wash the grime off my boots in the shower, then polish them. Domestic rituals in glass enclosures like washing and polishing my boots, help me forget grime and crimes against humanity. Escapist behaviors in enclosures create the sensation of release. Routine behaviors in enclosures approximate release. Erase, wash, polish. Produce glamour illusion and create disaffected mask. Eat pastry, peel dough flake off croissant. I escape into ecstasy, the pale yellow folds. I erase myself to join the totality which is ecstasy also or blankness, like post-death. What is the moonlight exactly besides photons, I’ve never liked science. What is the pleasure of the dough? I think it is more than hollow consumption, or can be. Memory eating croissant with you creates light I hold onto. Light warps pastry flakes. Back to the boots, I am glad my rubbings will scar and degrade them. Go to the trash, boots. Go to the landfill and incinerator, so I can walk barefoot on the flat earth. I’m no flat-earther. Is delusion necessary to maintain happiness? Escape sets reality closer and further, like fleeing the earth for the moon and seeing the place behind you, a cliche about reckoning with one’s own smallness in the context of the cosmos. The earth is not a perfect circle, but it appears to be. I only know what I experience and take away. I take away pastry. I take pastry to space.
I am sad watching American Psycho while he sleeps. Tender tan bald spots are visible. Tender tan bald spots I tried to cover up earlier, tried to move your hair to cover, and then you told me I had bad breath so I dragged us to get gum, and then you ran into your friend you used to do coke with and described your rock and roll friendship and it reminded me of my old rock and roll friendships which always shattered. Little hurts tally up, we are working on being nicer to each other, replicating a polite dynamic that reminds me of marriage. It feels nice, but more staged than before, when we were our worst selves openly. I listen to old Sharon Van Etten albums after American Psycho finishes, with a black t-shirt over my eyes. This morning I said: this the end or a new beginning. He agreed. I am staying awake during the day for him and me because I was turning miserable never seeing daylight. Earlier, I felt like abandoning my desire for Eternal Relationship. Now, I feel good with him in the other room—no weird air. I remind myself of our loving basis, so non-toxic and ecstatic—it could replay. I won’t have to listen to Sharon while he sleeps. The sound of him scrubbing the dirt off his cleats in the background mixes with Venice Bitch. Hopeful for eternity, we are testing old pens together, on the pages of a dream journal. He gives me socks with the words babe on them, from his old rock and roll friend, and we head out, separating after a kiss. Every kiss begins with K. Every kiss begins.Delusion drapes me in fantasy. Hope bookends the dream journal. I build a life to actualize my dreams, which are informed by pop lyrics and slogans, examples of success. Relationships cover the sun, can be the sun, provide hope, and sublimate despair. TikTok pop psychology would tell me to work on myself. I go to sleep and dream to kiss you on the sunset marriage advertisement, dating app picture of success, we could be assimilationist queers. There is nothing but the black t-shirt on my eyes creating a barrier between light and me, light I step into when the day is done, 'nother cliche, or Catholic comfort. Hope creates despair, yet without hope I'm dead. Hope does not have to relate to fulfillment of desire. Was he my projection? His bald spots should have been loveable too, love doctrine would dictate. And my quirks should have been charming. Imperfections deteriorated the bond. I am ideological information. Without belief system, I have nothing to believe. I believe in shattering trope, yet without trope and pop music, what is there? Laborious repetition, dirty streets. No meaning. I miss trees. Trees are equal in forests like a Socialist fantasy. No murder. No genocide, I SHOUT! To be separate and spiralling is privilege. I am a hegemonic winner. And so, I shatter all belief in Love, and turn to Greater Advocacy.
Longing turns to surprise, then empties. Repeat. Silent night. Difficulty to reach, difficult to reach. The fuck pain of different bedrooms. Painting chairs arranged not touching. I don’t care and beautiful solitude. No celebrate. I am happiest with you and at night listening to Sharon Van Etten.White o on a black notes page, could inspire something.
O
Oh
void and ring,
Surprise and disappointment
O face
Vape ring o
Glass cup with o rim full of creamy beverage.
Piss off.
Piss you off.
My stomach is killing me. I ate a can of beans because that’s the only grocery here.
I don’t think I need anything but yoh.
Me is okay too. I would be O K.
White circle on a black page, just the outline , O
o
O.
Like a Sharon Van Etten sigh-exhale, O O
O
What else? But O? Release O, I don’t know.
Nothing to lose, I haven’t lost anything but a job again.
I am O. And No. I don’t know.
I don’t know.
Oh
They slip into sleep.
The O face
Oh of surprise, disappointment. Oh with a frown.
O is void and ring.
I am happiest with you and at night listening to Sharon Van Etten.
Circle mouth say O
Longing turns to surprise, then empties say O
Silent night say O o
Difficult to reach say O
Painted chairs arranged not touching say O in silence
Only feel the need to cry when I’ve realized what I've lost
I want to fade to silence, be the O, getting smaller, O O o o o o o o
Vape ring o
Glass cup rim, o, full of creamy beverage
I had a great night, say O!
It’s the sadness in the morning that is the saddest.
Ooh!
Be hopeful and grateful for the Os and silent breaths.
O of relief.
I added a black O to my painting which is rather conventional otherwise, with small subversions. Scroll past.
I felt the love for humanity and apples for a while, now it’s white O on black, or white O on white. That’s fine. I am oh, nothing more or less!
I think I can do anything, be anything and tolerate it, or change it or not. Materials provide the illusion of something besides body, death, and empty room.I thought the flickering light in my mildewed shower was God when I was sad, with my wet arms crossed over my naked body, like a mummy, ready to be lifted up at the time, yet staring at the grey squares on the shower wall after thinking/feeling this, and deciding to compose myself and be normal.Not normal like a grey square, but fine and not experiencing the collapse of my world and beliefs, composing myself, putting the grey blocks together, building the wall back up, my ego, and personality, dressing up in self-conscious removal again. There is a yellow block in the ego assemblage that I colored with a highlighter.You are everywhere like wallpaper.
The sky is orange above the hay cylinders.Blonde children play hopscotch outside a white pillared building.Militaristic trucks carry earth. They are the largest trucks I have ever seen.Exercise machines sit lonely across from slumped medieval houses.Cats curl around blue flowers at dusk.Halved buildings rot next to new ones. Chairs sit on sagging floors.I hear and see a car far away. I walk to a bridge covered in grass and trees for animals to go over a highway. It turns into hills. I try to walk over the hills, but they are naturally overgrown. In my shiny blue Dickies, I see: disordered cabbage fields, and hooded benches raised high for hunters to aim at far deer. I sit in the floating cubby. A bullet train with hidden passengers traces a single long line from my right periphery to my left.In the evening, each leaf becomes a defined shape that is dark against lighter blue.With my emerald Calvin bag I reach: calendar hay rolls, a frozen crescent jacket, and long-trunked trees with branches that begin high up.The trees are tight together and uniformly thin. In other areas, they widen.The moss is a steel wool pad.My black boots accumulate dirt. Their waffle cone bottoms are caked brown. My blue pants turn dusty.Wood piles sit unused. Spirals in their cut ends look like children’s faces.Wind turbines are always in the distance—spinners grow and shrink on the horizon, the closer and further I walk or bike.I bike to a nearby hunting lodge. I’m taking photos of a mirrored gazebo. I realize two women are kissing inside.A horse with collar bells escapes, and the neighbor must rescue it by following its bell sound.Small holes are scooped out of the shed wall.I cower in the corner of a chicken coop and selfie it. I make myself scared and small in the corner, like someone is forcing me to be there.A car factory in Karstädt is an eyesore. Identical houses line the street leading up to it. Few people are outside. I ride my bike on the road, which stops before a dirt zone. How do the workers access the factory? Lollipop trees muralize former Communist housing. I buy vodka at the store.A man sees me riding my bike on a highway. We are the only ones. He stops his car and reverses it slowly.A glass door has an orchid Fathead. A garage door has its door removed. In the absence of the door are wood planks surrounding a jeep tail, which hovers above the ground. A white pug sits statuesque in a lawn pot.I pee on the roadside next to discarded cigarette packets. Rain starts pouring when I am drawing a creek in a horse field, and thundering while I am speeding home. I miss the bulk of the storm, though I saw the sky grey gradually. I saw grey on the dome edge near small spinning turbines. Grey envelops the blues, pinks, and pale yellows.I walk along the train tracks. The bullet train announces itself with a sailing sound that increases in volume. The passengers are flashes.No one is out here. No one lives here. Have I ever been to a place so unwatched?I spill pastels on the ground. Pastels crumble in my hands, making rainbow mud.This place is too beautiful to draw, I tell the married couple. What's the point in drawing what is a perfect study? I'm not longing for anything here; I have it. I don't have longing.A mail truck passes by me in the woods. The driver is the same woman who served me at the gas station. She has a shaved head. The van recedes and drops off the picture plane.New blue flowers on the wide field, and blue-beige pointillism when I zoom in on the fields.In an off-trail wooded segment that frightens me with its unruliness, I find a trailer with a bed set for one, which I take a selfie video next to. The trailer window is behind me, and the video pans up to the netted sky.They blindfolded me and said draw the trees from touch alone. Now, draw the moss. Bugs crawled across my hand and weaved through my fingers.I screamed in the forest alone: "AGGGHHHHHAAA." I had the thought to burn it down—if all this beauty were to incinerate.I feared insects, ticks, and infection from nature.Fifty residents per township. They were separated by fields of flowers and connected by cobblestone or gravel paths, bridges, tire pile mountains, and haystacks. Tire piles are black snakes wriggling on steamrolled trees.There are many flattened sections; low square fields, with no crops sometimes. The low field is an empty cube cut-out with hair on the bottom plane. What is he for? Who am I? A white van traces the side of the flattened field and disappears. A white van is parked at a neighbor's house. I video it with some trash techno overlaid and camera shakes.Eroded gravestones and memorials, and dog-walkers looked fearful. I talked to myself aloud and thought I felt past souls in flowers.Pinwheels are planted in the lawn next to farm machines with spinning blades on metal circles behind a fence. Betreten verboten! The farm machines are spider-webbed. Turbines line the backdrop horizon, echoing the motion of the candy rainbow pinwheels.I bike into a ditch to see if I can get out.Why do we price sprouts from dead bodies? I'm in the kitchen cooking all alone with a wine bottle stolen from the communal closet.In Grabow, ein Kino has a zebra-print in the window.I eat a German meal cooked by Danish friends who arrange potato plates and sausages on a wooden table in the shed with holes scooped out the walls. I scoop potatoes on my plate and find an ant on a brown chunk.Ants weave between the planks of a picnic table outside, too.I go ten hours without speaking to anyone except myself. I don't text or call that month. I mutter while clutching the tire-patterned handlebars, and blow smoke over my shoulder. I carry groceries ten miles in a backpack, when the car isn't available.There are no street cameras. There are no humans, except stout men with gun slings sometimes, or rail-thin men riding bikes in groups.I sat and drew the river clouds. What was the shed used for? What is making me sad, and what is making me fearful?One night, I got lost out there. It was all dark. I had no phone. I made it back because the sky had a little slate in it. And I saw the slate in between black trees. The ground was black too, like space. I saw two headlights as far away as stars fallen to earth, grow larger and shine toward me. They could take me here. I trip over a log and sink my teeth into a bush.Back in Grabow, which had ein Backerei with a twisted pastry, I zoom in on a bright-green sports car with blood-red handprints on the hood. Broken glass in a brick-rimmed window reflects the church. I cross the old checkpoint. They tell me it's where fascists stayed. It is here, I see the gazebo couple. They look startled I am photographing the gazebo. I didn't see them inside. It was a one-way mirror from their perspective.I am present tense in absence.In the car on the way to the grocery store, which is a respite from troubled domesticity, the Danish woman tells me her mother lived here. She explains melancholia and repression are linked. Paranoia persists in a changed political landscape, despite growing up in a more enclosed and distrusting one. Not much industry here. The skies and bushes provide a respite.I've been filming myself, though it's not so fun. I'm an intruder. My bad family was from here. My good family was brought here. I record a boomerang video approaching turbines. Close up, the cylinders are as wide as my yellow house.
Body lying on the bed, one parenthesis next to another. Trucks and cars are outside and shoveling in quiet Williamsburg. A shovel scrapes across a diamond-studded sidewalk. Salt flakes melt snow. Parenthesis shifts beside me, moving spaces over. I was eating some Club Crackers but stopped. I claw my foot, scraping my trimmed toenails against the comforter. It’s been snowing all night. I listen to the conversations between neighbors. Car drives outside the other window. I shouldn’t have eaten so many Club Crackers. Comforter resting on bodies and an air pocket. I breathe air into my lung pockets. Breaths of men outside I cannot hear, the breathing of late-night early-morning walkers on a Tuesday. Pointless to experience small notices and do nothing with them, string them together like the bracelet you gave me and reclaimed, so poetic when it broke, you commented on the meta-qualities of the break: see it's like us. It’s so nice to be comfortable in Williamsburg, it is the charm square. There is a stream in Williamsburg made of melting snow, and I fall into it, going out to the Hudson. A man sits on an orange tube in the water, legs hanging off it. The sun is cold. The shoveler continues to shovel, making scraping sounds. Reaper polishing a scythe. Asleep parenthesis next to me for a long time. The photograph of a dog in his room—preserved with black eyes, stares down from heaven, missing its earth-bone. The scraper scrapes. The heater keeps rattling like a cobra who doesn’t rattle. The parentheses have their backs against each other. A leg hangs off questioning shoes. A parenthesis hangs off the bed like a toenail-clipping seesaw.
Puff Ball
I.The sound of a marble on a circular track spiraling down a circular track to hell, faces peer out of square cells on Instagram. Sorrow fails to arouse any feeling but sorrow. I fear reality will peel off like a sticker soon. I am flying avatar in Second Life, derealized in a sim world made of products and signifiers. When reality peels, I will be awake in hell, surrounded by users, perusers, sodomites, and misers, who are better than the saintly-types.I had a flying dream, says a customer at the bar. I want to add, me too, pouring the waters, pouring the drip. Alcohol is the IV. The service-worker is an actor, butler, secret anthropologist. Sameness was the trend in PA mountain town, but individuals were nice and I enjoyed my conversations.Serendipitous encounters occurred recently, man I served in small PA mountain town turned out to be a gallery artist, and I went to his painting show and the afters. He was rude to me as a waiter, and not sure if he recognized me, drinking at his open bar. This was back when I was boozing heavy, now, no more. He ordered me around like a butler, yet treated me kindly as a fellow artist. Little does he know, I draw caricatures in the park, the faces of Millenial Williamsburgers are undone by graphite smears and erasures, which see I hope the human below the shell, the shadow of the shell. Peanut shells around peanut meat. Portraits for fifteen dollars a pop. His friend was there, at the opening, from PA town too, who I also served. The man called me his "comrade," working class ally. I'm not like you. After working so much, I decided I prefer destitution to consumption, because hard-work is miserable with no redeeming qualities, besides the potential for observation. Republicans here were nice. This was my takeaway, nice to your face, friendly, familiar, though I was so miserable carrying trays that I was rude, and acting out sometimes, kicking doors, swearing loudly, and being sarcastically friendly, like a chipper bot, tip-sucker on my knees, you can ply me. You can drain me. I trace the circular track to hell again: the sky last night and the air relaxed the humans on picnic benches, sipping their sweet drinks, sitting around in costumes, dressed up for shows and events, playing roles we have been trained to play, acting proper for situations.Cool, not humid, romantic night, all of us floating and flirtatious as the sun speckled the clouds, puff balls on a lilac gold dome with green mountains hugging the township.Beverages with spice and basil syrup. Rose, apertif, seductive intoxicants.II.The air puts the human-animals in a good mood. The air puts the dogs’ dogs at ease too, they lap at their bowls as clientele sip drinks. "Dogs" is mean and dehumanizing, but I can't help but dehumanize my clients. They take my service, though I do not like to provide it. In saying "dog," I am also referring to a kind of domesticated stupor, many feel, or exist in. I miss free wandering, wolf-like prowl. Domesticated creatures in middle space. To fight, and play, and kill, and drink, and fuck in middle space, animalistic behavior. If only I could be a wing-ed dog for real, fly up like a golden retriever angel. Consumers on the grass; many friends of mine are grass consumers, lappers, treat-eaters. At work, I make up sing-song stories like Björk in Dancer in the Dark, who constructs a musical fantasy in which she is the star actress, to maintain morale at her factory job. The songs she creates are escape paths to another dimension. My stories are darker:Rose leaps across the backseat and slams herself into a window, mimicking the deer they hit; Azalea is distracted by the charade and drives off the bridge accidentally, hair strands floating in suspense, and Aster prays for his mama. The children are intertwined with the car smashed on the icy river. Children meeting an end. The bouquet rots by spring. Their namesakes grow overtop their embrace with the vehicle. The rosy snow melts into the river, which carries some car parts to a nearby town. Aster’s mama finds a wheel she recognizes. A search party is constructed and spreads across the region, like a plague. No one finds the children with flower names. A deer sidles up to the river and finds the scent of its mama intermingled with the few car/children parts remaining by the stream. The deer is the original dead deers’ baby. The mothers and fathers in the town down the river have no flower children, but the deer knows who the culprits are for her mama’s killing and nibbles some of the leftovers off a metal bar.III.I sweep leaves off the floor, I pick up fallen cups. After a night of being sweet, I feel drained. A night with a floating cast of characters, like my coworker Sandy (fake-name) who is hoping to get promoted, go to kink clubs in Berlin, on Xanax. She cooks Gochujang shrimp for dying farmers. I inhabit the consciousness of Sandy, spacing out of my own to join with her headspace. My dog is my girl, my dog makes me happy, lapping blood off my leaky cuts, cleaning me up. If I can work with bandages on my arms, you can too. My shaggy lady keeps me sane. I think I will get out of here someday, but I'd miss my parent-farmers and the wide-open skies and plains, and I'd miss all these cheerful and respectful regulars who tip well. Why am I so sad? I tell men about my anxieties, and they tell me to go outside more. Whatever this problem is, I will get it sorted out. Whatever, this problem is, I will fix it. The workers hate the uppers, use the uppers to work harder. Work harder to fly, go to Disney, work hard to go Soarin' in the clouds, the ladies up there, all the angels up in heaven, we'll get there. Dehumanizing the dehumanized, white Trump supporters all, in all likelihood, who worked extra to save for Disney trips for his wife and kid, works at the Hilton to get a deal on $40 hotel rooms anywhere in the world by Hilton, dream to be a band caterer so she can travel the world, on tour, convert her parents' farm to a horticulture therapy retreat. Ginger with a prison guard husband. She is trying to get him special shoes because he spends so much time standing on the concrete. She was a drug and alcohol counselor at state facilities. Coworker breathes fire, chews tobacco. Coworker who sings karaoke three nights a week, saw him out, red-faced and happy. Nice people, nice to me, with the constituents that I perform sameness and similarity, acting like an echo vessel. The queer is an expert mimic. To soar with a band. To fly through the roof of the dive bar. To wash so many cups that doing so becomes automatic, to turn on a smile in despair, style a Great Clips haircut, I hate that some have to struggle so hard to survive while others spend so frivolously. Trump gave them hope, feel bad, he never meant to do much for 'em, never was going to, stoked their hatred and stroked their resentment for self-gain.I was attempting in the previous paragraph to inhabit the evil collective-consciousness without identifying or aligning myself with the hateful clan spirit. To pass as one, one can understand one. I am not one, a hater, I was trying to inhabit a hater perspective. Suffering can create hatred. Reduce suffering. Stop caricaturizing evil; evil is nuanced and faceted.To have a Disney daydream, to infinity and beyond. All the valor of hard work, there must be valor in a dead life, a hard life.
Poor Bot
I.In New York, many humans become bots composed of their status markers and desires for wealth or power, consciously or unconsciously. Some would benefit from faith or belief in something other than gain and accumulation. Life is not a ladder made of human rungs. What is at the top? Is it possible to ascend when class and regional cultural habits are so deeply ingrained and performed? Does one have to unsocialize and resocialize oneself to do so? The mythos of hard work is fed to non-elites, passed from parent to child, to save the child from a life of repetitive labor and hardship. Humans are seduced by a desirable image without realizing it is constructed. An image can be cute or desirable without being real. People become their images without realizing, and then are perplexed by their own misery and desires which emerge from behind the front image.My stomach turns due to sleeplessness and the fixation on it. A green leaf lays on the bench. The side of a bench is blackened. I am tired of performing success, happiness, irony, or humor, because, it is not natural to me. Honesty and sincerity are natural, though perhaps uncool. Misery is comforting, and pain is present often. My sunglasses reflect light in a convex. Leaves lay, detritus of life. I must not be scared or consumed by fears. I am a reverberating amalgamation. Conversation is a meeting of paths. How can a painting release persuasion? Many in Bushwick scope. It is fun to play along. Cigarette smoke drifts up to the leaf overhang. I must become a non-bot, though it is fun to customize myself with clothing and tattoos--still I have minimal assets to do so, so I try my best with objects from the 99-cent store, and india-ink stick and pokes. The only articles I relate to are non-articles, or tinfoil maybe. Tinfoil body-fit may be interesting. The plastic "wifebeater" (not my term) sunglasses, and lighter, and beer glass form a cheap and harrowing still life, reminding me of an outdated bohemian lifestyle, and arrangement on a plastic table at a taco salad family reunion in the coal-mining town without coal-mining-industry outside Pittsburgh.To be a bohemian-type today, one must be destitute. Slightly above the rung of houseless with no social capital, and I have decided to do this. Poverty is a fact of my life, in Expensive Place, and many of my thoughts are related to financial concerns. There is no pressure to be anything now, I have the luxury to be selfish, choosing, sort-of not choosing to be poor, potentially for the rest of my life, with a useless degree, and few attachments to wealth, capital, or influence, I think soon, I may disappear from spheres of "influence." Perhaps I would be happier as a plumber in Kansas, though trade school is costly. For now, I treat poverty and relative unemployment, like a difficult adventure, flaneuring myself around the city, hungry all the time, and using the same few objects I have owned for years, wearing the same dirty shoes, two pairs of jeans, and rotating between two dollar solid-color shirts. I miss being able to buy $6 coffees or meals. Now I buy expired fruits and vegetables and mix them with the same discount sauces, alternating this dish with oatmeal and spoonfuls of Jif peanut butter.When I dated the corporate worker in Williamsburg, I had a taste of a high-spending lifestyle, but it was not for me. Buying makes one want to buy more. The relationship created a power imbalance, almost a "sugar daddy" and "sugar baby" dynamic, which is not what I was after. The dynamic emerged because I was too poor to buy anything myself. He decided he wanted to stop paying for me, but then we couldn't go to the oyster bars and two-hundred dollar dinners. We realized we only liked each other when we were drinking or spending money. It is better to be poor, finding satisfaction in restraint, and rare treats. I don't want to look like or be a gentrifier, living in a tech-compound like Williamsburg, spending $60+ dollars in one night, at a themed bar. Now I spend 60 dollars in five days. This is an exaggeration, of course it varies; I don't check my account until my card is declined. I will see how long I tolerate poverty. Life so far has been a class sampler, tasting taco salads and caviar. Caviar tastes like oatmeal in time.II.My ex broke up with me partially because he thought, I was too poor and lazy, for his lifestyle; embodying a quote "bus stop lifestyle" he was uncomfortable appearing associated with. After the breakup, I decided to embody the image of the drifter he critiqued (not in a romantic hegemonic sense, but something anti-archetypal). The upper classes do not want their illusions ruptured by Real depictions of marginal life, yet it must be ruptured, without being violently unlikable or it will be dismissed outright. To be dismissed is okay for some, but to others it means they must continue to live in undesirable circumstances; this creates an impossible dilemma for the poor artist between pandering to achieve a glimpse of upward mobility, and remaining stuck in abject poverty, yet staying to true to oneself. The hope is that staying true to one's vision will result in a honey spoonful of success. Bad and pandering objects are often wildly popular in the market, which creates frustration and mangles self-conviction. The “true artist” does not pander; yet the notion of “the true artist” is also a construction, and unavailable to those separated from, or tentatively linked to power. "Abject poverty" is a commonly used phrase. Rereading the previous passage, I have realized it deals with abjection. I was taught to hate the poor—their teeth, their cigarette odors, stereotyping them as lazy substance abusers. Were you? The poor person has the option of caricaturizing their poverty for elite consumption, reinforcing negative stereotypes. Yet, to the poor artist, romantic or beautiful depictions are often more appealing--the impulse to romanticize one's experience or worldview results from a sorrow, or lack. There is a desire to fill the dirt ditch with gold. Yet to the rich, romanticized depictions of impoverished experience appear "romanticized" and thus "seemingly inauthentic" or problematic (in an art school critique, a friend of mine was told her morbid paintings of drugged little girls romanticized violence. Yet to the victim of violence, these paintings embody a kind of reclamation or rewriting of negative experience). The problematizing of her "problematic" depictions silenced her traumatized expression. An unbridgeable chasm exists between a poor authentic expression and the desire to be in "good taste" or unproblematic. "Good taste" is a tool embodied by the enforcers and maintainers of power. To make high art in bad taste--infused with genuine and feeling bad taste, and not "bad taste" presented with humor or a downward-looking irony-- is difficult to pull off. I saw a video of a rich influencer saying she would only recommend approaching Bushwick with a body guard (I say the word rich because poor people, service workers especially are taught to only see others through a lens of rich versus poor, client-other versus server-us). Parts of Bushwick are pristine. The street I live on bordering the Myrtle Broadway MJ Train is badly maintained, yet still safe. It is littered with shit piles that do not get cleaned up. Meanwhile in gentrified Williamsburg, it is immaculate. The bathrooms in Prospect Park do not smell like the shit they contain.Related observations:Art world elites who dress themselves in minimalist clothing punctuated by spare and tasteful high-class signifiers, are highly skilled detectors of wealth and taste, trained to distinguish potential buyers and insiders from non-insiders.New money is often drawn to displays which signifiy high class or status. Old money views these displays as garish.I own a faux-metal plastic bracelet. I think the bracelet is beautiful, as it represents an impossible strife, an impossible and tender trying-to-be, and appear, as a person in different conditions; a person trying to become, or escape. The glittering plastic bracelet embodies the desire for transcendence. The bracelet betrays me as a "faker."The color yellow is tremendous, glimpsed among greys and browns, flittering yellow brochures on the street.There is a dissonance between the taste of the poor artist and the taste of the elites. The poor are often drawn to glittering colorful and beautiful objects, whereas the rich often relish images of abjection, sterility, etc. which to them feel exotic, as their living spaces are already highly aestheticized.I would include more personal examples, of living amongst “new money” and their class aesthetics, but have been barred from discussing aspects of my upbringing. To not be able to talk about the ache at the center of my life is hard. The justice system sides with whoever has the most money, and I had none. I write here about money, because I think, especially in New York City, the extreme class discrepancy is repugnant. Money should not be so taboo to discuss in highbrow circles. Unfortunately, money is the spirit of our nation. How many times can I say the word "money" to neutralize its aura and strip currency of its violence?
My earbuds play a happy mix as I polish the marble. Looking after monument ruins, I polish Lincoln’s nose. The edges of an ivory obelisk are a faraway mirage. I forget what this dick stands for. Tattoos of an eagle and a flag are faded beneath the hair on Don's chest, the veteran's skin. I pair the sexy image of Don's chest with a happy song. Remember the time we were happy to sit in a jacuzzi with martinis? We looked at fireworks, big, flashy floral explosions, while the water bubbled around us. Donny wrapped me to him, and I sipped a martini. Jets fire water at my backside, and I shift my position, maneuvering out of the embrace. The hot tub boils us to bone broth. To take care of someone I don’t care about. I thank Abraham for my job-position. I am lucky to have my position, to be able to move through the grey spools, sloshing my cleaning bucket. I leave a trail of teary liquid. My earbuds sit cupped in my hand. They are my prized possessions. I bump my cleaning bucket, and it sends a flood across the dais. I put my earbuds in. My knees hurt, like my back as I bend over to soak the flood with a rag. Songs on my music mix are sparklers on a grey humid slab. I scrub and I scrub, producing more bubbles on the stone. I am responsible for creations: bubbles in a hot tub, bubbles on Abraham Lincoln’s feet, bubbles from a magic wand in a green childhood summer. A far-off heel in the distance--I go to it. A politician may have lost a shoe (no tourists allowed on the mall since the attacks, and the attacks after that). Not made of glass, this slipper is synthetic material. It is waterproof, heatproof, and fireproof, I guess. I try the shoe on. Possible endings: It fits, and I fly back to Donny before his illness and the stroke. I fly back to the clear-aired hot tub. The shoe fits, and I wear it home, limping all the way. The shoe doesn’t fit, and I relegate it to the trash can. I ditch the shoe; I fly away.
My body is made of all the things that I’ve bought, too expensive at the grocery store.Everyone dress in equal clothing which costs the same. Get new uniform when the old one is frayed. That could be okay.Someone would have to distribute the uniforms. Someone would have to penalize the people wearing different clothing.The uniform would have to be adaptable and customizable, picked at birth, still individual. The uniform would have to account for cultural differences. The uniform would have to be open to change, accounting for different life phases. Individuals change religions, body types, genders, group identifications, and preferences.The uniform would inevitably represent the dominant preferences of the group, but couldn’t be a fit too reminiscent of Western traditions. A concerted effort could be made to create a uniform that represents all peoples in this country. Clipping representations from every group, no no.If the dominant uniform represented a Eurocentric tradition, yet individuals were still allowed to wear other clothing, those in different clothing or alternative uniforms might become outcasts, unless a concerted effort is made to educate those wearing the dominant outfit on the alternatives to the dominant fit and the problems of the dominant fit, and unlearn their outcasting, and othering tendencies, discovering why some may not want to wear the same outfit they wear. But many of those in the dominant outfit may not want this education, may reject it, and try to erase all traces of it from school curriculums and government programs.If everyone wore the same uniform, except those who did not identify with it or felt discriminated against by it, then those in the different alternative uniforms would not feel a kinship with those dressed in the clothes that represent to them an oppressive Imperial tradition. They would feel separate. They may dislike outsider status and try to wear the clothing they associate with the oppressive Imperial tradition and may find they are more successful wearing the clothing. But they shouldn’t have to do so.Queers with wild customizations would become outcasts unless they market their outfits as quirky options for those in the dominant fit to ape. If they do not do so, yet insist upon acceptance and seamless integration into the dominant mass, they may be refused. They may in turn refuse to wear the uniform altogether as protest, shocking those in the dominant clothing with their nudity.The uniform would have to be completely new to avoid creating all of these problems. The uniform may have to be no uniform at all, nudist colony. How do we account for the weather?Working less, less factories and mines, and abundant laziness. I may be naive but I don’t see why we need what we have. I do like my diamond bracelet, but I don’t need another, would probably buy another if I had the cash.To make less, be more lazy. From ‘laziness’ comes music, food, paintings, lackadaisical purposelessness, lying around with someone you love.Fruit trees could grow out of potholes in the street—fruits for all to pick. But someone would come with a big bag and grab more than they need—Social Darwinists would think that may occur. Some may be trampled in the scramble to grab fruit, with factory production ceased mostly, and food off the shelves. Some may be too hungry to be lazy, too preoccupied with their hunger and malnutrition to make love, music, or paintings.Don't like being told what to do, I would probably hate these world sketches. I would probably get stabbed or shot because I can’t defend myself, and I might miss the free market, reminiscing with friends about a time where we believed anyone could become a CEO if they worked hard enough. We really believed that.The inability to imagine a utopian alternative, I investigate more options for my personal wellbeing.I scavenge for nubs in the fridge to cook with and herb sprigs. Life is great, I take inspiration from a positive emoticon. Never settle in too comfortably to a flow I fear may cease. Sour dour times.Whenever I am in studio late at night, all the anger physically hurts me. Next morning, refresh and look up to the sky. I wish there was no pain or torture in the world, so naive.I wish Americans could be comfortable, not out of work. Do you think a conman has duped his supporters by making false promises of jobs opening up, by preying on fears and biases and utilizing groupthink strategy to create a unified group, like a stadium crowd, cheering for the defeat of a common enemy? So harmless the selections for the team his supporters don’t like. For the most part, harmless, though they may defy the conservative values and sit outside the patriot’s sphere of like and understanding. If there is an enemy, it may be those who fell prey to a conman’s manipulative tactics, and voted for him. But those are just desperate and biased people who like traditions and the same-old implicit and explicit discrimination. If there is an enemy it may be those in the sealed boxes up above, with thousand dollar wine bottles and buffets. But those are just people with money and many have nicely curated art on their walls and good hearts. Who knows who to target, maybe remove the target entirely and demolish the stadium. Humans need games? Do all games need winners? I want to forfeit the game, I try my best to do so. Yet, I’ve been taught to try to win and see life as a playing field.This essay is all claims and questions with no data or warrant. Is there a proper way to write? I’m not making an argument here or pushing a point. Don’t agree, hard to envision better solutions to mass depression, paranoia and hatred of the Other, massive economic inequality, discriminatory policy, etc.To protest is important. To write and create is important. To think about other worlds is important, even if the worlds may not be better than the current one. I care desperately about economic inequality. Who likes to party on a budget?
Greys and blues and rotten violets. I want to be with the you that doesn’t have disdain for me. You convinced your friends to disdain me; I felt the interrogating looks, and you confirmed they disdained me. Chop my hair off, and delete every image of us. The I that exists is the typing I.Closed-eye hallucinations of you, you hover above me with a smile stretched wide over a skeleton. The fantasy decayed in real-time. The smiling face turned dotted and static.I drown feeling like a puppy. I am the cold dead-eyed puppy hanging in a photograph on your wall, preserved for you to see in its happiest state, with a wagging tail. Delirious in the windowless room, I move to the light-filled kitchen to cook pasta. I walk into the hallway to eat some yogurt briefly, then return to the pasta. I tried to mirror your behavior by one-upping you the way you do with me. I wanted to demonstrate to you how you act to me--show and tell. It led to us both acting nice. The chocolate Buzzball is silk. I sip it while police cars drive past. I add hurried strokes to paintings, that complete or ruin them, providing a final solemnity, coffining the paintings. I am myself when I am crying instead of a self-observer. Empty streets remind me how empty streets are without you. Alone, I experience the rats, trash, architecture, and big eyes peering at me from the sides of buildings. A rat smacks into my foot, creating full body revulsion. Hyperrealistic big eyes of children are spray painted everywhere, peering emptily. Quirky coffee shops remind me of every place we never went and did. We didn't fight at Nook; we fought later that day when you kept painting my dirty studio floors white even though I said not to. I'm doing this for you, you said. I said, I'm telling you not to. I am going on a date with the guy I was seeing when I first met you. He has black lines tattooed on his ears and recommended Acid Communism. Your eyes will watch us make out on the ceiling.
I could fall into a hole and be satisfied to lay there with a broken leg. Hate was the bedsheet on hurt. I lie in the bed, totaling feelings to subtraction. You snapped at me every time I woke you up accidentally, with vitriol. In a barely lucid state, you hated me. I will paint from a tree’s perspective. I watch the movie Arctic with Mads Mikkelsen to remind me of the desire to survive.Heartbreak drama, raw feeling, I attempt to compress to something of worth, but fail, but try anyway.I think of the few times we danced at Animal, the dusky, sleek gay bar/club, and kissed, and I think of when you stopped wanting to dance, instead, sitting sullenly at the table, and the next time, leaving early, do what you want, I'm heading out you said, which to me approximated, I don't care what you do, which to me approximated, I don't care about you. I followed you out the exit, trailing past you through the red doorway.Bataille writes:
You are the horror of the night
I love you like we laugh
You are weak as deathOn Reddit, I search: what to do if we are incompatible, but I love him?What to do if we fight all the time, with temporary resolutions?Reading the book I read while you lay next to me is too sad, so I start Paradise Rot, a transgressive Jenny Hval novel.In the half-awake state, you hated me. Love ya, I redact the I and you. I am I. You are you. Not together in a phrase that confirms attachment. The desire to disappear passively, instead of orchestrate destruction. I think like a tree.Mads Mikkelsen with a broken leg drags a dying girl across the Arctic, I can surely breathe and be good in my warm-climate room. When I woke up, the other day (not sure which, it is all slosh) I dragged myself to the birthday party, felt shaky fingers on the table at Walker's, chic Tribeca joint with old New York charm, sight of a Woody Allen romance scene, interesting.I am tree hit with ax for a sec again. I don't know why I am so sad to be honest, it's not like we were good, to the end, been miserable for weeks with nice moments, I'd say. That's love. I cook an egg in chili crisp and garnish with cilantro.At your party, a guy you hooked up with long ago, maybe recently, who knows, you grabbed his hand at the party you hosted like a bigshot, you grabbed his hand when we were fighting, anyways, when I was ignoring you 'cause you were being mean. He kept patting me and looking sadly at me, while taking photos of me and you, me and then-boyfriend kissing performatively. He took the photos and smiled sadly like he knew something I did not. The photos looked convincing like nothing was wrong. Did your best friend tell him we were bad?
I wonder why I can’t sleep, wonder why I tear burst randomly, like I did after the cat got shoved into a box and its little head tried poking out, and its paw grasped desperately at the air, finding an exit in the box folds we were stapling and taping. We were trying to trap him in for a long car ride.I hit my shoulder against the wall as the tears burst out; I couldn’t hold them in, so I collapsed against the closest upright thing, a wall which had no hold to hold me. I was so surprised the tears fell out—I was trying to hold them back while scrubbing and cleaning with a grimace.A red dot on the smiley face button on the computer touch screen bar is right where the nose of a smiley face should be. It is taunting to me, like the dot gives the smiley face a red squishable clown nose, that makes a honking sound.The cat screams as the roommates try to shove it in the crate. They debate whether or not to give him a Xanax sliver, or wait it out for him to enter the crate of his own accord, or shove him in the crate—but then he’ll kick and scratch them. They take the cat into the shower and try to corner him in the crate, and he’s crying the whole time, like a wailing baby, like the cat outside my window mewing as I try to sleep. But the cat getting shoved into the crate earlier today was making sounds at a way higher pitch. When the cat resists the crate, we drop him in a box, and close the box flaps over him, sealing him in.
And we were all thinking it was funny, but also holding back tears.Then I got a splinter in my foot.
Then my roommates said goodbye, and that was when I fell into the wall, saying, this is too much for me. My remaining roommate said, It’s hard when people leave, and that about captures it. It’s hard to see a creature in pain too.When I look in your eyes, on casual Instagram stories, on a face getting slimmer with retinol-enhanced skin, I look for the pain as evidence that you cared—but I only see happy smiling face, with an engaging poll beneath. Are you happy? Do you feel free?Byung-Chul Han writes: "Freedom is felt when passing from one way of living to another..."
We are in the transitional phase, constructing independent ways of living.Han writes that this freedom is experienced "until this too (freedom) turns out to be a form of coercion. Then, liberation gives way to new renewed subjugation."The cat used to be wild and free in Kentucky. Then the cat got tamed to be a house cat in Brooklyn, providing a new, more comfortable type of life with additional comforts and freedoms and freedom-restrictions. It can no longer wander with no direction, but food is provided. Bed is provided.The cat has no choice but to exist in a box for a set amount of time, the car ride. Once the cat exits the box, he will stretch his legs and then be coerced to serve as good companion, in exchange for food, shelter, and attention. Life is exchange.When I paint, I feel free, even if I am not. I am not working for anyone.I went on a date with a finance bro last night in Midtown, who was a little older, with neat hair combed to the side like the hairstyle of a clip-art nerd. I sipped my drink with a maraschino cherry while he talked about how dry January turned into dry February and March. My cherry. I miss my Maraschino.Han writes: "As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose."
I act very invested and interested, waiting for the finance bro to finish speaking and pay for the bill, so I can leave. The date purpose is to listen and be paid for.Han also writes: "…we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: refashioning and reinventing ourselves."I am not a project to be worked on.
Though I told him “I am working on myself,” I hate that healing is framed as work. I am working on healing. I am leaning into healing, a therapist would phrase it this way.Once he—ex in photo—started viewing me as a project, it collapsed.
He acknowledged that he did so: “I think I started seeing you as a project, a person to work on. A person to help and fix."He meant well, trying to clean me like a kitchen, and organize me like a pantry.I don't want to be organized. I don’t want a capital relationship. I don’t want to be power-gays. I don’t want to improve or be made to, or turn into, or become, to be wanted.I want to be, like the letter B.I don’t want to be a smiling face with a clown nose, honked for entertainment in a service-relationship, where I am a product-person, being conscripted into a life where one person does something for another, expecting something in return. I don't want to be a good investment, or prove to be one. I want to be a frowning clown, who is unconventional in appearance—maybe displeasing, or repulsive, but loved anyways.I take the wrong train into Dumbo and reverse-take it back into Manhattan, so I can take it into my sector of Brooklyn.I felt great on the date, the finance bro was nice actually, until I talked about something that reminds me of my ex, and then started talking about him to the date, which created awkwardness, which ruptures the construction of a “fine date," and it is broken.Let us acknowledge collapse instead of self-deceiving that all is right, good, clean, and organized, inside the box, that opens into another box,
and another, beneath a sky with clouds we try to sort and categorize,
though they resist, because they are fundamentally fluid and changing, non-commodities, we could harness, we do harness their water, but they remain decisive of their own shapes; or unawares, changing according to the logic or non-logic of a non-capital force--we can call it God, we can call these forces Laws, scientific laws. Laws cannot fix clouds into place. Clouds are unfixable and free in their state of permanent post-ness, permanent transition until they are coerced to be fixed, which will not occur. Clouds will be clouds. Clouds will B.
I am happy to be dying to you; you are dying to me. I am not dying for me, I am not dying. I shave my mustache and transform into a naked mole rat kinda creature. Disposable slime on Clementine peel, pee slime on cilantro, green onion gloss. I rinse slime from green vegetables and chop away, toss rot into the pot with on-sale fish.I misread the spine of a book, thinking it says, slow death for slow swan. Fast bird, efficient pigeon is better than slow swan, better for economy. You were my Hilda Af Klint mirror swan image. Circumcised feathers on your upper lip grated my belly skin, grated my pork fat. Silver grate grates carrot, slicing it through pincered holes. Pork belly and great carrot, orange slivers, great dressing on a Chopt salad. Chef Rat makes his own. My fur is shaved so I do not resemble you, my fur mustache is gone, accentuating the thinness of my upper lip. The mustache made it fuller. I am thin now. I am my upper lip. My upper lip is thin and naked. He had a furry upper lip like a predator-pornstar, my ex. I had a furry upper lip like a rat and a pointy snout-like wolf face. My ex four years ago said I looked like a wolf, so I snarl at suits on the train; job-searched in Williamsburg today. Williamsburg is good money. Gentrification experience, I can profit. Nail polish on precise, round nail, I can apply polish with care, polish and clip like a sentence, pour cappuccino foam with flair. I will do the best job for M’lady and M’sir, Monsieur would you like another? My name is Miser Me, Miserly, Misery, by the way, what can I assist you with today? A thing liked; I’d like to be a thing. Slippery like slime, rat, wolf, and thinned oat milk foam. Sniffing white on a lip. Crystal balls, by the roadside, Crystal, by the roadside, Common Name I Name My Daughter-Son.Crystal is the sparkling disco-globe-ball, my world, she-he would be, if I am impregnated, I may abort Crystal? Crystal is the dream for upward mobility, to name my son-daughter Crystal, is to christen he-her "to-be-rich," is to divine financial fullness. Be full with plenty, plenty of fish. Shake like a Doll, I shake for the Doll erz. I am a Doll er. I went to Am herst. I am the trash trash for Elon Mutt to gobble, like some cobbler, I am Disgusting Peach, sent like a child to the boarding school landfill.I am the corn dog stick stabbing a one dollar bill, and I am the one dollar bill. Corn dog stick is slippery with hot dog traces. I do my corn dog dance. He pets my dog. I harvest ants from the corner of my room. I wipe ants from my nose, I serenade them. I toss ants in chocolate and upcycle as salad garnish, resale, upcharge for more than ants are worth. I upcycle the useless black three-dots with legs and antennae.I dance with jabs by the subway stop, briefcase open on the pavement, I do my good ditty dance for the Doll erz. I am my crystal ball.In reality, I am a cool man on a bed, sipping songbirds from a glass, sipping swans I still believe in. The swan circles the trashed swamp. While the others snatch fish in their beaks, this swan is vegetarian. This swan is on hunger strike, bleeding like Romeo-Juliet from a cut-wound, which spreads like an oil spill on the swamp water, Gulf of America, no.I wish the swan could be beautiful and not bleeding, but we love to kill swans or allow swans to exist in parks, majestically framing the opposite side of the pond, these swans kiss and make a heart, which frames green trees. Zeus transformed into a swan, to rape Leda. Kill Zeus, kill that swan.Better swans kiss to make a heart, to make the enclosure pretty, like fuck. A swan is beautiful on the pond, let it be beautiful and unpoisoned by filth, yet, filth, like art, is life. Art is filth and filth is beautiful.Do you like me crazy or composed? I de compose, trash pain the bills, free trash. Free all. All should be free, for poor, and costly for rich!
EVIL: Fraying rope, fraying hair strand, fry, fries on a plate, fry cash, we’re fried. Fried hair strand on Suzan’s head, bleached hair looks fried. Cash, I’m strapped for. How strapped are we, Su asks. Strapped for what? Strapped for cash. I got a few pennies. Few pennies can add up to a dollar. She, me, provide very little for each other, pennies. I insert a president’s head into my mouth, to make Su laugh, I put the coin on my tongue. Tonight, Su, we dance on the roof, then booze and drive ourselves across state lines to bad states. Tomorrow, I’ll drive the muscle car, blaring trash, smacking trash, smacking across bumps. I lean on the engine hood at the pit stop, twiddle legs hugged by denim fabriqué. Suzan, what would you like from the curb store–some M&Ms? Milk chocolate, or strawberry milk? Peanuts? Let’s hit this store, crash into it like a cymbal. Dusted the peanuts are with Cajun seasoning, or is it old bay, same shit. I don't know you or like you, Su sighs. When cattle surprise us by crossing the highway, we’ll go flying, through glass veneer to Better Place. Su smiles, big grin looped around by berry lips. Su, how bout we black out the sun, Su, or go halfway, gray it out. Down the eye drains, we'll go down the pupil drains, in his head-face, in her big eyes, god devil god damn. Hit the gas, hit the Gods, no icon is stable or invincible, all representations are fucked. I spring us to springtime. Let’s sniff the flowers here, Su, or some glue. Yellow abdomens with white limbs, centrifugal, centripetal. Want some more? I offer peanuts. I offer the peanuts in my palm. Su says, I can’t take this shit anymore. Keep driving without Su, I’ll keep driving without you. Fucking Albert. Albert deserves a sleep. I’ll meet you in a warmer state like Florida. Su answers with an eye roll surrounded by black sludge penciled on strawberry milk skin around big eyes. In Shitsville, we danced to the trance, haha, stupid fucks all ‘round, Suzan pouts, pours me a drink, drank it. We intertwine, fuck on the car hood, which is still driving across the canyon now, or desert, which is still driving to Georgia somehow, we’re in Georgia, eating peaches. I’m drooling on the steering wheel, beige lumps with black edges coat the circle. Burger lumps, haw. Serves you right, mama says, while I fall asleep, falling into some loving arms. Oh, Su won't you stay with me? We'll go stomping off to Canada some day, when the pennies stack to towers. BETTER: I take the wheel, knocks Albert's head off it, take it in my lap, stroking his wet forehead, so sweaty. I braid his hair. I take the wheel. Albert's slumped over, breathing raggedly, fucking annoying, got to go. I put my foot on the pedal, start the car, jet-set off. Red and green landscape, we drive over mountains, take winding paths, to snow caps, America, haw. I turn the radio on, classical static. Albert's stirring, sludge in a pot he is, a crusted and loveable pot, like her mother's. Her mother's kitchen, white with peeling walls and rusty silver, rusty grates for pots and pans, cooking mackerel fireside, choking on cherry pits, she's not sentimental for the past, course not, future is road? Sentimental Americana, not like her childhood at all, which was much darker. Future is salvageable, future with Albert, po-ten-tially. She'd been punk-ish before. Black Flag shirts with long vertical rips worn at Mechanicsburg concerts, small town home to mechanics, where they stomped and jumped to the thumping music, elbowing bum hicks out the way. In those times, he took the drugs at concerts only. Look at the bird fly there, she points it out to a stirring Albert, acknowledging the small thing. Goofy goofball, swat him. Silly back then, they'd laughed with each other, then chugged beers the whole ride home, swerving nicely.
Vulgar Marxism, Theatre of Cruelty, détournement of the commodity-world-simulacrum, and further queering of Salomé
Born 2001, Kalamazoo, MI
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New YorkEDUCATION2024
BFA Painting, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RISOLO EXHIBITIONS2024
Destiny hope despair alistair, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, CanadaGROUP EXHIBITIONS2024
NADA Miami with Afternoon projects, Miami, FLArt Toronto with Afternoon projects, Toronto, CanadaNADA New York with Afternoon projects, New York, NYGaleria Café, Noakowskiego 16, Warsaw, PolandGroup show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI2023
Bliss Information, Gelman Gallery at RISD Museum, Providence, RIGroup show, RISD Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RIGroup show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RIGroup show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI2022
Identity as Context; Memory as Content, Granoff Center, Brown University, Providence, RI2021
Group show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RIOnline Blush, Online Playroom2020
National YoungArts Week, YoungArts Campus, Miami, FL2019
National YoungArts Week, Sotheby’s, New York, NYRESIDENCIES2024
Peter Bullough Foundation, Winchester, VA2023
KuBA: Kulturbanhof, Klein Warnow, GermanyWORKSHOPS2024
Intuitive painting workshop at Peter Bullough Foundation, Winchester, VA2024
Intuitive painting workshop at Penn State University Woskob Family Gallery, State College, PAPRESS2024
“Drew Spielvogel at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver,” Art Viewer, 26 Sept. 2024.AWARDS2019 - 2024
Honors at RISD, Providence, RI2023
Fellowship with Curator of Contemporary Art, Dominic Molon, at the RISD Museum, Providence, RI2020
Finalist in Visual Arts, YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL
autofiction
Sam and I shared SunChips. We got red and orange dust on our fingers. Sam smiled and licked the dust off her thumb.In the cafeteria window, the small statue of liberty stood in water next to a highway.I used to drive by that every time we went to Philly, or anywhere.Oh really, Sam laughed, and ate a chip.Yeah.--Me, Sam, and the others walked in a v, lined by cloudy windows, in what reminded me of a public school hallway with glossy tile floors and a low foam-core ceiling.Behind us was an older woman who said her son was coming to get her.Earlier, she stood talking on the black phone with a thick metal shoelace going back into a box. She wore these baggy gray sweatpants every day.My son won't pick me up.I'm sorry, I said. How long have you been here?Four weeks. And they won't let me go, because I keep having an issue with the head doctor. He has these scanner eyes.Think of the most normal person you know, I told her. Model that person's behavior.--A woman confessed her husband abused their child and said: in court, I'm telling them I never laid a fucking finger on her.I nodded with a smile.I drew the woman with big eyes and hair springing out from her head.--In the v-formation, the older woman trailed behind with a woman who said she murdered her ex husband, and told the far-fetched murder story with arms scrambling around, and trying to pull something in.She said: I lined him up, after I stole the bag and then I shot him there. Dead.Later that night, the older woman, Gwen, sang Hit Me With Your Best Shot for karaoke, while the murderer, Reesha, drew a picture.Later, I drew a picture too, of the older woman singing karaoke.--Gwen wanted more time to get ready and do her hair first. She walked toward me in the sweatpants with an ethereal smile, and wavy grey hair.I drew it quickly, and handed it to her.She passed it back and said: make me look younger.So I did.I drew their portraits with a yellow number two pencil. I gave them all the drawings on computer paper. I drew Reesha too, though she was restless in the chair. I drew the women and their tattoos. Never the men. There were no queers at the facility, except me and my roommate, so I never had the chance to draw any.--She felt something; now it’s gone. Made a picture, wrote a song. All her children went away, she is skating in blisses. All her children left, and she pretends she doesn’t miss them, but she knows she does. Her stray was fucked up. Drunk with one eye, it lapped some liquor out a glass. It would bark all night and pee itself, but the dog ran away too. And then Gwen is truly alone. It is very upsetting, to see all the creatures outside her house, but there is nothing she can do.4 AM and Gwen has got her napkin, where she writes her story.It was me and my dog.I saw Gwen six years later at Home Depot.She was checking out my purchases.She said: do you remember me?I said: no.She leaned up closer to my ear: the hospital.How are you? I asked, stunned.Good, I'm here. And you?I'm having an exhibition. I pointed at the nails and spray paint. These are for it.I have your drawing on my bedroom wall. And now, you're having an exhibition.Wryly, she grinned.She talked with a monotone. I talk the same, or I do now. What irons feeling out of speech? I saw the graphite eyes watching from her wall.Your drawing is better than the show. You are better than any show, I wanted to say, but I left, after saying nothing. I held one bag in each hand and stared at the cold parking lot.I put my bags down and smoked, then looked at the cars. Evergreen trees were past them on a grey road island. I laughed and kept the encounter to myself.--The men were nice, but I knew it could get more hostile if I made a misstep.One day I wore a tight Zara shirt and the Altoona guys glared me down, so I changed. I wore something plainer and looser and the glaring stopped.--To be too nice to a guy may be perceived as flirtatious, and lead to aggression or sexual coercion attempts.The first day, I arrived hazy. I saw my roommate and thought: my roommate is a ginger, around my age, nineteen.Our beds were side by side in curved plastic bed frames like a summer camp.We talked about our outside lives, and he told me he had sex with men, and they gave him a bed to sleep in. He showed me a tattooed A encircled on his soft stomach. The A's horizontal ran into his belly button, rode the divot down, and kept running. The circle was sloppy, more like a beer bottle cap. I showed him my recent stick and poke, and he asked: is that an ax?No, I said, it's abstract.It's sexy.I flexed the arm and turned my wrist in and out.A later night, he said: let me see your body. Lift up your shirt, please. Join me in the shower.I said, no, another time.Another night, he said: I'm taking a shower. Get in it with me.No, I don't want to.Later when I was pretending to sleep, I heard scraping in the bathroom. My roommate, Max, stood over me, holding a toothbrush he’d sharpened into a point.--Before he got moved, Max introduced me to Sam, who laughed, when I told her about the bed incident, and said: he's weird.I told her: he was fine; it also may have been a nightmare. I don't remember, but I think it's real. The standing over my bed part at least. And the toothbrush couldn't have been that sharp.Through glass, I saw Max walking with two nurses on either side—their eyes were trained on clipboards.With my roommate gone, the sunlight was brighter and the fluorescent lighting was less oppressive.--In the cafeteria, the women circled their hips and slashed the air. They slapped their stomachs. They jumped up and down and clapped their sneakers on the floor. Women in hairnets watched.The dancers showed me their tattoos: faces and names of their children and the dead, marriage dates and birth dates, flowers, semi-colons, and heavy-black-line crosses I made zig-zag lines to fill in. I pressed the pencil into the paper, hard. I showed them my tattoos.SunChips hung around the side of the tray. We ate mashed corn next to a black pudding cup, and sloppy Joes with Hawaiian rolls. The meat was a syrupy pile with soft pork strings.Sam said: I want a better burger, and poked the damp roll.I pictured us breaking out of there, like a scene in a cartoon, and showing up to a Wendy's with guns. Give us all your burgers.--Sam accompanied me to smoke at the break time. The branches reached up to the sky outside the courtyard's small recorded rectangle.Sam, I said, Gwen—she's not crazy, just distressed, but unfortunately, crazy and distressed are viewed as clinically similar. I am crazy.I'm crazy too.This is an evil place. It's training me how to be normal again. I want to leave and don't want to come back here.Tell me about it.Observed subjects take on the qualities ascribed to them. Are we subjects under an umbrella?Yeah, obviously. Umbrella and rain.So it's just pretending to be fine? It's just pretending for the rest of my life?Yeah. And then you, she said. Will be.
Psychological states and attachments exist in precarious palimpsests. Atonal disruptions destabilize reality-constructions. The works untangle subjects from state ideologies and classed hierarchies. Contradictions and uncertainties braid into a perceptual realism. An interior-state camera roll evokes what queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich termed “an archive of feelings."
Black sun/ Purple slab, 44 x 36 inches, oil on canvas
The works adopt a queer 'peasant gaze,' where aspirational symbols degrade into relics and unknowns are preserved as self-styled failures, who embrace earnest effort and potential failure as a non-normative and anticapitalist way of being—a form of deliberate Camp. Oil paint seeps into the screenshot print-outs. Human paint gestures and genuine sentiment rupture pictorial and imagistic orders. Fusing high and low language, the poems echo strategies used by John Berryman in his work, The Dream Songs, which is written from the POV of a disintegrating alter-ego. Delusion collapses into rage. In the fleeting container—the poor image and "poor painting"—illusion and reality are one; the separation between life and art is nonexistent. The painting depicts an Epcot ball behind a phantom of success and a hallucination of queer "becoming" defaced by a profane self-confidence mantra. Queer becoming is deadened by and within capital logic. The figures hallucinate self-actualization, while trapped in a downward cycle, or "poverty loop." A rejection of traditional success actualizes into a destitute reality. The individual cosplays Other within a degraded loop. The Tiktok figure's angel wings and attempt at online virality could help her escape the frame, or find joy costuming within it. The Epcot ball decays in mass production and circulation; the souvenir is a cheap keepsake of a degraded American construction.
Lost coat tries to drift outside it/ complacency versus defiance, 24 x 36 inches, oil on canvas (work-in-progress)
Grandma's red coat, 8 x 10 inches, oil on panel
People turn like Earth. When did I become so plotter, plotting sun's course? Course there is a scorched cookie in my stomach. Course today, I was smiling in Prada shades. This morning, I was smiling at everyone in SoHo, feeling half-decent. Crying tonight with cigarette, bleeping out, shielding face. Salty waters, these are, boyfriend problems, I tell cashier, smacking gum. Yeah, all the water is fucking salty, he say, girl. I thought water was clean for once, I thought water was drinkable. He says: cut the shit, talk straight. Okay, shrug. Shrug like pastor with no faith. Stomach growl, light on headphones flashes, the beeper. Are you a c-c-cookie, like me, stuttering, and sugar sweet 'till you get to know me, my best friend was right, give it three months. Then I got sad and said, no way Jean, bleep is different. Unwashed dirty jeans, I changed my clothes today in the coffee shop bathroom. Too sad to launder. Short time 'comes a long time, turns long, sun turns. Bought new underwear at TJ’s, bought new socks, changed them in front of a government building, the sox. And guard thought I was houseless 'till he saw my Prada shades, atop badly clipped hair, Prada confuses. Yes I did smile at the guard, apologetically. Yes I did smile at the cashier and he smiled back. TJ Maxx bag in the mirror, who does a bag love? Who does a cookie love? Cookie loves who buy it. Who buys cookies? Who will buy me? I love my eater, who consumes me. I love my Prada shades. Am I a strain, drain, or vain? Shopper be the judge. Like a bag waiting for clothing, I am Katy Perry lyric, plastic bag. Does a cookie love who eats it? Does a bag love who throws it away? Sun don’t care, sun revolves like a door. Handle sunshine with care, sun go way soon turn to night, cry. Bag don’t cry, stop. Be bag, O, be bag, oh cool, Bag mutter, they all see past me. Bag for landfill, Destiny says. Destiny lies, but she is my friend.
diary essay
The mythos of hard work is fed to non-elites, passed from parent to child, to save the child from a life of repetitive labor and hardship. Humans are seduced by a desirable image without realizing it is constructed. An image can be cute or desirable without being real. People become their images without realizing, and then are perplexed by their own misery and desires which emerge from behind the front image. How can a painting release persuasion? Perhaps recursiveness and contradiction can allow for something more realistic, as opposed to persuasive.In The Melancholia of Class, Cynthia Cruz writes: "... to be working-class or poor and to have leisure time is to warrant suspicion..." The upper classes do not want their illusions ruptured by depictions of a "bus stop lifestyle," yet it must be ruptured, without being violently unlikable or it will be dismissed outright. To be dismissed is okay for some, but to others it means they must continue to live in undesirable circumstances; this creates an impossible dilemma for the poor artist between pandering to achieve a glimpse of upward mobility, and remaining stuck in abject poverty, yet staying "true to oneself." The hope is that staying true to one's vision will result in a honey spoonful of success. Bad and pandering objects are often wildly popular in the market, which creates frustration and mangles self-conviction. The “true artist” does not pander; yet the notion of “the true artist” is also a construction, and unavailable to those separated from, or tentatively linked to power. I was taught to hate the poor—their teeth, their cigarette odors, and crassness. Were you? The poor person has the option of caricaturizing their poverty for elite consumption, reinforcing negative stereotypes. Yet, to the poor artist, romantic or beautiful depictions are often more appealing--the impulse to romanticize one's experience or worldview results from a sorrow, or lack. There is a desire to fill the dirt ditch with gold. To the rich, romanticized depictions of impoverished experience appear "romanticized" and thus "seemingly inauthentic" or problematic (in an art school critique, a friend of mine was told her morbid paintings of drugged little girls romanticized violence. Yet to the victim of violence, these paintings are a reclamation or rewriting of negative experience). There is no proper expression of violence for someone who has suffered it; the labelling of her expression as romanticized, and thus improper, according to bourgeois standards, dismissed her minority experience. The problematizing of her "problematic" depictions silenced her traumatized expression, and was more implicitly violent than any violence she could have depicted. Why did we (largely) neglect to address class at an institution that feigns interest in rejecting hegemony? Why did we eat at dining halls, where the staff was underpaid? Why did we think what we were making was somehow above the tastes or sensibilities of the service workers and custodians who surrounded us, and cleaned our studios? They should have participated in our critiques. Why did we think we were above the poverty and abject suffering that occurred three blocks away at Kennedy Plaza? Why were we not trying to bring the people there into our classrooms and provide them with art tools that could provide some relief from their suffering? Why did we hoard all our resources, and allow houseless people to starve and die outside our classrooms and libraries without even a second glance? Why were our dining halls stocked with unlimited food, while the houseless person outside our gated compound could not even get a sandwich? Did we think we had no responsibility to help, when we were so able to do so? Why did we not consider opening our classrooms up to him? To elite individuals, these may sound like absurd questions, as belonging to an elite class depends upon the self-belief and collective-reinforcement of an "us" that is inherently superior. The questions I ask may also indicate an unsavory "saviourism," that may only exist amongst elites to absolve them of the responsibility to be altruistic, or share their wealth. Why do we allow the rich to dictate what the poor can or cannot express? Why do we need their money or validation? We depend on their money and validation for survival. Being an artist is not unlike being a service worker; it reminds me of being a waiter. To disobey the elite client you are serving means they will stop providing you financial rewards, yet one has to express themselves accurately, and without pandering, to be an artist. An artist should not make work for a patron, though the patron-artist system is age-old. Contradictions express the poor experience; masking and unmasking proper and improper selves and presentations, encapsulates what it is like to depend on elite morsels for survival, and tailor oneself to be tipped better. If one makes an error in their food presentation, the server is dropped or not paid. The artist can decide if they want to make work outside the market, and forgo an interest in elite tastes. An artist can serve at a dive bar.A gap exists between a poor authentic expression and the desire to be in "good taste" or unproblematic. "Good taste" is a tool embodied by the enforcers and maintainers of power. To make high art in bad taste--infused with genuine and feeling bad taste, and not "bad taste" presented with humor or a downward-looking irony is difficult to pull off. In his "9.5 Theses on Art and Class," Ben Davies writes: "Artistic quality is not something that can be judged independently of questions of class and the present balance of class forces, because different classes have different values for art that imply different criteria of success." I own a faux-metal plastic bracelet. The glittering plastic bracelet marks my place on the class hierarchy--I know who I am and I do not seek to transcend my class, or role-play as something I am not. What does it mean to take pride in one's poverty and disinterest in consumption or transcendence? The color yellow is tremendous, glimpsed among greys and browns. There is a dissonance between the taste of the poor artist and the taste of the elites. The poor are often drawn to glittering colorful and beautiful objects, whereas the rich often relish images of abjection and sterility which to them feel exotic, as their living spaces are already highly aestheticized. We are not our status markers and desires for wealth or power. Money is violence. Davies continues: "Art’s current definition as a luxury good, or the primary concern of a specific professional sphere, is a problem. Programs should be launched and supported that offer venues for artistic activity that are not necessarily aimed at the rich or already-initiated... Contemporary art suffers from a narrow audience, and access to art education is largely (and increasingly) determined by income-level and privilege; art education should be defended and made universal." Davies characterizes artists who produce for the art world as predominantly middle class, yet I see artists become increasingly subsumed into the elite class, or not subsumed. Artists not subsumed are left poorer than ever and may find they have more in common, politically and sensibility-wise, with people who share their class level, than with individuals in an out-of-touch elite sphere--who seek to preserve their power and class status, while virtue-signaling an aesthetic interest in revolutionary politics. My friend and I went to a Zoe Leonard opening recently, and he commented that it was "giving Balenciaga." I told him to cheer up, drink more, and have fun. "Pretend you're at a fashion show, or fancy party." We waited in line to receive plastic cups full of ice and tequila served by a person who looked at our shabby clothes and shrunken bodies with suspicion, and then we left.
short fiction
At Christmas, Gunnar gave me an extra small hunting jacket. I keep my hunter jacket clean and iron the creases. Mud and shot birds leave marks. I pick the red and brown scabs off.Gunnar’s face is in the yearbook grid with mine—he’s in an upper left rectangle, and I’m in a low row.When I am seven, he teaches me how to hunt.—I’m a pudgy child munching chocolate pucks. I get chocolate on my designer jeans, imported from Europe. When the jeans stain, I toss them in a hamper and put on new ones.Crumbs fall out of my mouth and onto the grass below, where birds eat the cookie dots, and hunters shoot the birds later.Later, the hunters say it was terrible to kill or see killing occur.I slip under Gunnar’s checkered arm. I get dirt on my jean knees, so I take them off and walk around.Gunnar sits swinging on a ferris wheel carriage. Gunnar says: one day we’ll go tenting around and kill off thousands.For now, we aim at whatever birds show around us.He circles a dead bird’s belly with a sticky finger: aim here on a live one.When he nails a bird, his eyebrows raise, he shows wolf teeth, and his cheeks sphere up.Aqua clouds obscure the ferris wheel. The ferris is taped to a grass field—it grows mossy with Gunnar still armed in the chair. Gunnar sits with his gun up while nights turn to day in fast motion. He eyes his scope and crosshairs and picks off birds. Sped up, over time, it is like machine gun fire, though he only holds a rifle.
Ride the carriage of regret. Security watches my cage. Secured the restraints, too. Christmas cookies under the tree, I was a pudgy child, munching on snacks in designer clothing. Child looks down from his carriage at fair-goers in the mud. Security notes disobedient speech and disorganized behavior. Outbursts may lead to prolonged entrapment. The participant rounds the circle in his cage and is reliant on the ferris' ruleset and the rulesets of the fairground. He can play the fair games, providing Owners change.The fairground was not theirs to take.Mobile stasis. Expressive explosion of BIRDSHIT is the spray on GREY LIFE, white box, grid-organizations.Hunters stole the fairground.The fairground was not theirs to take. He is from a family of hunters. Walking grey streets, the streetwalker strolls the mechanism's pipework, scavenger-patroller of its colon, cruising pockets for spare change and crumpled dollars.Families die in front of Prada Stores.
Individuals are removed from the fairground if they do not align with its participatory criteria, racialism.If he prefers to see what he misses, a pigeon can glimpse it through a glass pane. Pigeon steals a bag. Pigeon rides the subway, from High Manhattan back to BK. Pigeon rides the roof. Sunlight is bright to enlarged pupils. The sunlight reminds him of the ward's fluorescence.Individuals are normalized to be good fairground participants; the voice is neutralized by the state.The individual constructs outburst spectacles.Pigeons and rats, the abject.Beauty is pigeon. Grey bird of grey life
wheel.
Abstract state of being, out of time, I wander the prolapse into past. Past and speculation fuck.
First, most recently was the blonde man I wrote poems about:
Contour lines the mattress twink
with a bleach crown.
Skin on triangle
beneath shirt collar,
denim flaps.I don't know how tender; he has me.
He is open like a pantry
door.
The smiling light of mydoor,The smile is the lightning on the shore.
The smile is the
bleach.
The smiling light he spills
on the floor.
Hook stuck to door and time passes.
Push him off mattress to the floor,
he enjoying it,
says back is hurting,
stuck to wood floor.
You-me, hooks are hyphens.
pit sprouts. One bleary imprint from us two.
Salt rim.
back lick,
I am red mark on your chest.
You are the dot on my ditched sweater.Double pink hooks
Arousal puncture time wheel. AwkwardInvisible acts turn to
disintegrating information
swallowed by
a pinhole.
And a year ago, it was K, who I exoticized:
I longed for you obsessively. I wrote poetry and posted it online to perform my obsession. I could not cope with a life I perceived to be dead-end. You suggested a handsome escape. I made all your attributes charming and looked for a star-crossed narrative. I attached every feeling to a trope and half-saw that I was doing so. Eventually, I lost sight of where you and the trope differed. I would erase most recollections of my time with you. I edit extractions from the old ramblings and cut them together. I thought it might be interesting to be met in times of lust and marital dysfunction. With a straight family like everyone wants, I am the real one you want to see. Camille Paglia writes: “We can never embrace (sexually or otherwise) a single person, but embrace the whole of her or his family romance” (I am not quoting Paglia because I endorse her politics, I am using the reference as an unexpected rupture, an intrusive thought). I could have embraced yours totally, your reenactments of familial dynamics, the possessiveness of your father, your impulse to break us and let me back, if only you would have let me. I would have come back. I dreamed you would remove me from Pensylvania. And I wandered the streets while typing rants and messages after you flew home to Saudi Arabia. I lay in a field drunk and crying at 4 AM, pulling out the grass. I wandered the town; sat on curbs. You said: when you touched me last night, I died. Now I am the dead one. I stay in bed making spam posts of my break-up thoughts, losing a follower every two minutes, checking the follower count like a spasm. Smoking in the basement of a sports bar, I tell my friend I need to be with you, feel more alone. Men play their darts, play their pool. Cups of gold and brown fluid are consumed. At a bar in Chinatown, I ran into someone who knew you back in Pennsylvania and he said: oh yeah, we hooked up. Caustic. Salt. Round hairy shape in fantasy, old doll on the couch, Oldboy on the TV. Green chintz duvet and green eyes mean nothing, though I wrote letters with lines like: I had the most wonderful night with you at the Penn State duck pond. And, and every time I vape now, I'll think of you. Fortunately, I do not. A realization: you are different from how I made you. I returned to you repeatedly over time. Yet, when the charming mask fell off, I did not like you. You were nasty, mean, controlling one night, accusing me of stealing. Now, you sit cross-legged on the floor while looking in my eyes and I know this is the last time I will greet you. In the bathroom of the sports bar, I made a post on my story, a selfie with the caption: love is an attempt to bridge an unbridgeable gap and love is the feeling of bridging it. Did I love you or love that you could take me away?
I go slack on the mattie,
he go soft.
Ego hard on the tease.Like the hops of my
doe on the mattress,
gone soft.
The milky color of his skin was mixed with caramel and his eyes were like burnt chocolates; same with his hair, chocolates burnt and melted twisted in and into flames; the flames burned his eyes too. They were too hot to look at, it was almost painful, making my face warm in an overheated way. The hair on his legs was twisted curly, and the shorts, dark denim hugged his crotch, making the lump there look alien, yet nice. To touch it would send pleasure across his legs, through my hand, up my arm, down through my torso and into my groin. I had this thought when I saw him the first time in the apartment doorway, in the forgettable red brick building late at night. I had tapped on the door, felt my skeletal fingers rap against the hard speckled door.The dark hairs on his legs looped in clusters. A bunch of hairs pressed together and made many circles that grew denser the closer you got to his groin. The hairs got lighter further down his legs, close to his feet and ankles. The hair furred down his neck and then vanished, becoming soft skin, with small finer, almost invisible hairs that one couldn’t see unless they were looking very close. His eyebrows grew towards each other; the hairs reached out across the long ridge to greet each other, like we did, when the door opened and I slipped inside the dimly lit place. Lamps everywhere and a clean, yet heavy incense smell, like a heavy curtain. His eyes looked at me through the curtain of hair on his forehead; the chocolates exposed themselves to me, his eyes and the other seductive features. I wanted to stroke his soft slightly wet eyelids and trace the bridge of the sharp nose, so I did so, feeling the lotioned face, follicles with prickly sprouts extended towards my fingers, creating a fuzz between us.
Most recent "blondie" again (the gay male uses straight "objectifying" language--"blondie"--and plays an abject/desperate role). E is the genderfluid pronoun; he is shortened to e, because what does it matter, we are we:
white pillows tinted yellow, damp legs with hair glued down, snotty congestion. e likes me when I’m fake e likes to comb his hair in the mirror while i confess suicide urge. nilla coins on the floor, nilla wafers, blood flag on my door. black lion started on me let the fuckers come and watch him finish is meal. white pillows tinted yellow, the saliva turned it, e leaves some blood clumps left on the floor, dayquil sticky on foot. i hang a chandelier, string up crunchy white ribbons from my illness, stick my tongue out a fat mouth, tin cries and a pewter wheeze stretch my legs out fuck the floor. e doesn't like me when i'm real e doesn't like my sick room.e goes fishing when life gets hard. holds the reel over the wide cool pond, lowers the string down into a hole cut into the pond’s top ice layer, and catches a fish. yes before like me he want to carve, yet when he catches the fish, he’s fine, he is reeling it up. alone on the rowboat, summer, fall, spring, winter, alone with his thoughts which are quieter. fishing is the closest act to a death-hug, reeling it up. He is reeling me up, and he is reeling me in.
I realize this is a picture of my despair, in part. And obsessions. In Black Sun, Kristeva writes: "Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus, the face that is to bear him away into death, but of which he is unaware while he admires himself in a mirage." There is no self-admiration. Only the reluctant indulgence of the black backdrop which is all-consuming and self-indulgent when I am in it. In a way, it is also a survival diary--writing through the despair that makes my limbs and body feel greasy and heavy and my lungs slimy and tar-ful, like every breath is sucking oxygen through a mucous veil. She continues: "I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, death, or grief over someone or something that I once loved." Perhaps this is that, tracing the ghost loops for an explanation forSorrow
Dead and Black
Hollow Egg
Sedates meAnd I find it more comforting to sit with, than Reject or Overlay, manicure the mirage of me.
And perhaps it is "the eroticization of suffering" as described by Kristeva, which saves me from my Death Drive. Pain is just pain without the eroticization of it. Pain kills. Pain is terrible.The erotic other, who is both hated, loved, and admired, incorporated into one's being, then Spit Out--semen onto stomach or chin.The lover incorporated into the body, Melancholy Cannibalism:
"Melancholy cannibalism, which was emphasized by Freud and Abraham... accounts for this passion for holding within the mouth (but vagina and anus also lend themselves to this control) the intolerable other that I crave to destroy so as to better possess it alive. Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested . . . than lost. The melancholy cannibalistic imagination is a repudiation of the loss’s reality and of death as well. It manifests the anguish of losing the other through the survival of self, surely a deserted self but not separated from what still and ever nourishes it and becomes transformed into the self—which also resuscitates—through such a devouring."Am I a devourer? All I try to do is LOVE, SEDATE, and ABATE the Death Drive which propels me to self-destruct and die. Rather than cannibalize, I wanted to Conjoin, two rings linking forevermore. PROMISE of ATTACHMENT. Is that not marriage? Pure and sanctified marriage, so beautiful, the white veil which cloaks the snarling face, and the tuxedo which hides the hairy body of the animal. Marriage is the organizational veil on our animal being; the veil made of interlocking white lines, perfectly organized to form a screen between the bride and his/their/her bride/groom.Kristeva writes: "Depressed persons do not defend themselves against death but against the anguish prompted by the erotic object."The depressed person defends themself against death anguish and anguish caused by the erotic object. The depressed person ensnarls themself within bed-fabrics, creating a shroud. A pre death-shroud. The depressed person is already dead, living in deadness until the melancholy abates. I saw marriage to you, as an escape from the shroud (I was going to get married at age 20 to an ex); I tethered myself to your vantage point which was not like mine, seeing a small hole of lightness at the end of the shabby black blankness. I was swimming in the drugged pool, like a DORY. You saw light everywhere like you were traipsing round a prairie all the fucking time. The Imperial male urge to own a prairie; the Imperial male urge to own a manic-pixie prairie-dancer. Disgusting. I wanted to build a house on the prairie with you, is that so bad? It is. The Wilders were colonizers.Marriage is a core tenet of Western Civilization, an organizational strategy, marriage under state law, perhaps better to reject it, and reject the Male (?) Urge to Possess, Own, and Control--turn the human companion into a commodity, a fetish-object, to be worked on, traded in when the fetish-object disappoints. The fetish-object must maintain its aura, like a car that stays polished, must continue to make its consumer desire it, or it will be onto the next partner! Onto the next marriage!I am the marketer of myself. I am the maintainer of myself. If I stop maintaining myself, I will be junkyard material. So be it...The toxic tenets of our Civ, still so embedded within MY fabric, the fabric of my personhood; so I try to remove my very DNA and yours. I remove DNA from each cell. I remove all traces of you and me, my programming, our togetherness. I die on the text to spite my body and its container.
Tangle of relationships now; the past leaps forward and fractures my present; every fragment is assigned a reminding person, now Object, Thing. Family stories too. What are they doing now? Abstract blocks. Blocked quite literally on socials. What are they doing?
Sour cream bedsheet is a rope around my neck. I take the noose off. I fray the rope. The relationship between EVIL and BETTER, swiped into by two males. We stepped into the roles constructed for us. Destitute in a rural place, what else was there?EVIL: Fraying rope, fraying hair strand, fry, fries on a plate, fry cash, we’re fried. Fried hair strand on Suzan’s head, bleached hair looks fried. Cash, I’m strapped for. How strapped are we, Su asks. Strapped for what? Strapped for cash. I got a few pennies. Few pennies can add up to a dollar. She, me, provide very little for each other, pennies. I insert a president’s head into my mouth, to make Su laugh, I put the coin on my tongue. Tonight, Su, we dance on the roof, then booze and drive ourselves across state lines to bad states. Tomorrow, I’ll drive the muscle car, blaring trash, smacking trash, smacking across bumps. I lean on the engine hood at the pit stop, twiddle legs hugged by denim fabriqué. Suzan, what would you like from the curb store–some M&Ms? Milk chocolate, or strawberry milk? Peanuts? Let’s hit this store, crash into it like a cymbal. Dusted the peanuts are with Cajun seasoning, or is it old bay, same shit. I don't know you or like you, Su sighs. When cattle surprise us by crossing the highway, we’ll go flying, through glass veneer to Better Place. Su smiles, big grin looped around by berry lips. Su, how bout we black out the sun, Su, or go halfway, gray it out. Down the eye drains, we'll go down the pupil drains, in his head-face, in her big eyes, god devil god damn. Hit the gas, hit the Gods, no icon is stable or invincible, all representations are fucked. I spring us to springtime. Let’s sniff the flowers here, Su, or some glue. Yellow abdomens with white limbs, centrifugal, centripetal. Want some more? I offer peanuts. I offer the peanuts in my palm. Su says, I can’t take this shit anymore. Keep driving without Su, I’ll keep driving without you. Fucking Albert. Albert deserves a sleep. I’ll meet you in a warmer state like Florida. Su answers with an eye roll surrounded by black sludge penciled on strawberry milk skin around big eyes. In Shitsville, we danced to the trance, haha, stupid fucks all ‘round, Suzan pouts, pours me a drink, drank it. We intertwine, fuck on the car hood, which is still driving across the canyon now, or desert, which is still driving to Georgia somehow, we’re in Georgia, eating peaches. I’m drooling on the steering wheel, beige lumps with black edges coat the circle. Burger lumps, haw. Serves you right, mama says, while I fall asleep, falling into some loving arms. Oh, Su won't you stay with me? We'll go stomping off to Canada some day, when the pennies stack to towers.BETTER: I take the wheel, knocks Albert's head off it, take it in my lap, stroking his wet forehead, so sweaty. I braid his hair. I take the wheel. Albert's slumped over, breathing raggedly, fucking annoying, got to go. I put my foot on the pedal, start the car, jet-set off. Red and green landscape, we drive over mountains, take winding paths, to snow caps, America, haw. I turn the radio on, classical static. Albert's stirring, sludge in a pot he is, a crusted and loveable pot, like her mother's. Her mother's kitchen, white with peeling walls and rusty silver, rusty grates for pots and pans, cooking mackerel fireside, choking on cherry pits, she's not sentimental for the past, course not, future is road? Sentimental Americana, not like her childhood at all, which was much darker. Future is salvageable, future with Albert, po-ten-tially. She'd been punk-ish before. Black Flag shirts with long vertical rips worn at Mechanicsburg concerts, small town home to mechanics, where they stomped and jumped to the thumping music, elbowing bum hicks out the way. In those times, he took the drugs at concerts only. Look at the bird fly there, she points it out to a stirring Albert, acknowledging the small thing. Goofy goofball, swat him. Silly back then, they'd laughed with each other, then chugged beers the whole ride home.
Tangle of relationships now; the past leaps forward and fractures my present; every fragment is assigned a reminding person, now Object, Thing. Family stories too. What are they doing now? Abstract blocks. Blocked quite literally on socials. What are they doing?
There was a bee last night buzzing at the mirror. I hit it, trying to kill it. It just wouldn't die. Great Aunt Lala was like this, too, resilient. Her husband places a finger on the red-smeared lips. He coos shh. I hit the bee with a paper towel roll, and the end of the umbrella, and finally, I use a candlestick to smush it. I think of Lala, who loved candlesticks and would have commanded her husband to take care of the bee for her. And he’d have put it under a cup and slid a piece of paper beneath the cup to contain the bee. Lala said: go take that bee outside to release it. Lala was quiet in death like the bee.
Rural red sea
fish iron
their red hats.
I serve him fish,
pray bone catch in his cut throat.
Abstract blocks. Blocked quite literally on socials. What are they doing?
I see you through a window with old youth group friends. I used to go to youth group with you. You would talk to my friends, while I watched. I sit on a bench near the high school football stadium. Someone gave a portion of their life to make this bench. We met at youth group. You DMed me songs. I lied and said I loved Nicki Minaj and Beyonce like you did. We exchanged photos with the puppy dog filter. In high school class, I imagine what I would do if a shooter came in and started spraying bullets. Would I risk everything to kiss you one last time? Would I run to you, and kiss you while everyone screams and huddles under their desks? They would find us nestled like the Pompeii lovers on bloody tiles. It would be an iconic image on Time magazine.You burned my temple down like you said you would. After, I searched: what is consent? I penned your name in my journal repeatedly, in black ink. I drew a heart over and over your name to obliterate it. I threw my YA posters away. You had hair like a Nike swoop. The hairs came from the back to crest at the front. You were always running your hands through your hair and looking at it on your phone camera. I dreaded seeing you at school with your church clique and seeing you now is the same.
The friendly-faced Corp saw me across the room, dressed in dirty clothing, with a broken iPhone. I didn't even know how to navigate home. The Corp was down on the floor of the Corp store. It was a chance meeting between us (like fate) my second week in NYC. He helped me fix my iPhone. He became a star I loved for how bright it shone high up; I wanted to fly to the star and stay with it (trash behavior). I leashed myself to the star. Debris is lassoed around. But the object is drawn into the orbit slowly. And once the object is in the orbit, it is there.I was willing to submit to the orbit, until I lost my personhood. He also stopped being a star to me: he became pathetic. He shrank and fell into an ocean on a planet and his illumination was quenched.A small part of me resisted the orbit. The part caught fire in orbit, and the star kicked it away to float aimlessly for a while. Debris realized floating is better. Debris is better than star in the ocean, trying to shove its star shards through water. You were extinguished to me; you were nothing when I realized you had constructed yourself to be a star, organized your life to take you higher. You chose money over passion. I could have respected you for succeeding in the corporate world if you'd respected me for pursuing my passion. But I reminded you too much of what you had given up. I reminded you too much of being poor and alive.It took a while for you to dim. I am no longer transfixed by Starpower Images. Starpower Images are images. Starpower Images are attractive. Starpower Images are seductive auras, that's it. Starpower Images are not stars. They are star-toys. They are CGI stars produced by the companies they work for. CGI stars simulate effect. CGI stars lack real affects. Many important people are CGI stars. Idols are CGI stars. Men with good jobs, money, and power are seductive but often dead inside. They are the Bright Humongous Stars on movie screens. Behind the image on the screen is a black wall.Prior to the screen and the image projected on it is the machinery that constructs it, the image-distraction. The machinery is desperate to create an appealing front; because the machinery is just machinery. And machinery needs to produce a likable product, to prove its societal utility.
A shovel scrapes snow off a sidewalk outside. My parenthesis shifts beside me, moving spaces over. I claw my foot, scraping my trimmed toenails against the comforter. Pointless to make observations and do nothing with them, string them together like the bracelet you gave me and reclaimed, so poetic when it broke, you commented on the meta-qualities of the break: see it's like us. There is a stream in Williamsburg made of melting snow. I float out on an orange floatation ring. My legs are in the water. The sun is cold. The shoveler continues to shovel. Asleep parenthesis has been asleep for a long time, snoring. The photograph of a dog in his room—preserved with black eyes, stares down, missing its earth-bone. The shoveler scrapes the sidewalk. The heater keeps rattling like a cobra who doesn’t rattle. The parentheses have their backs against each other. A leg hangs off questioning shoes. A parenthesis hangs off the bed like a toenail-clipping seesaw.
Robo-cleaner starts his day with a reel sequence and Megan Thee Stallion on Youtube. I watch a reel with a strip club called Xscape, which advertises itself with chicken wings. The wings drip red oil off sticky fingers clutching leg bones. I can’t leave the bed, though I will try, I am done with Dumbo. I will lay, until you open up my heart latch and remove the organ, clutching it like that chicken wing. I sip my sugary coffee with the mental to-do reminders. Plodding keys in Megan's Piano. I sip my coffee and plan to clean, housewife behavior. He came back to a filthy apartment and said: you’re lazy. I said: today, while we were walking, I hated you. I was addicted to destruction in the past, contemplating Xscape. x x letter to x x you did hurt me so what I forget you x x heart beats, heart of a chicken with its leg cut off. Drenched in sauce, a wing glistens. I scrub away. TV song is bright and alluring. She is doing it. I finish cleaning and typing, so we are not late for the function. The light comes from far away, touching what I touch, bright dancer on the TV.
I watch American Psycho while he sleeps. His scalp shows through his thinned hair. I tried to comb your hair, cover the bald spots earlier, and you told me I had bad breath so I dragged us to get gum. We are working on being nicer to each other, replicating a polite dynamic that reminds me of marriage. I listen to music and cry silently with a black t-shirt over my eyes. This morning I said: this the end or a new beginning. He agreed. I am staying awake during the day for him and me because I was turning miserable never seeing daylight. Earlier, I felt like abandoning my desire for an eternal relationship. Now, I feel good with him in the other room. The sound of him scrubbing the dirt off his cleats in the background mixes with music. We are testing old pens together, on the pages of a dream journal. He gives me socks with the words babe on them, and we head out, separating after a kiss. Every kiss begins with K. Every kiss begins.Delusion drapes me in fantasy. Hope bookends the dream journal. I build a life to actualize my dreams, which are informed by pop lyrics and slogans, examples of success. Relationships cover the sun, can be the sun, or cloak despair. TikTok pop psychology would tell me to work on myself. I go to sleep and dream to kiss you on the sunset marriage advertisement, dating app picture of assimilationist success. There is nothing but the black t-shirt on my eyes creating a barrier between light and me. His bald spots should have been loveable. And my absent-mindedness should have been charming.I miss trees. Trees are equal in forests like a Socialist fantasy. I am a hegemonic winner. And so, I shatter all belief in Love, and turn to Greater Advocacy.
Greys and blues and rotten violets. I want to be with the you that doesn’t have disdain for me. You convinced your friends to disdain me; I felt the interrogating looks, and you confirmed they disdained me. Chop my hair off, and delete every image of us. The I that exists is the typing I.Closed-eye hallucinations of you, you hover above me with a smile stretched wide over a skeleton. The fantasy decayed in real-time. The smiling face turned dotted and static.I am still posted on your Instagram. I am the cold dead-eyed puppy hanging in a photograph on your wall. I am preserved for you and others to see in my happiest state, with a wagging tail. Delirious in the windowless room, I move to the light-filled kitchen to cook pasta.I tried to mirror your behavior by one-upping you the way you do with me. I wanted to demonstrate to you how you act to me--show and tell. It led to us both acting nice. I add hurried strokes to paintings, that coffin them, casket you. They are paintings of you. Empty streets remind me how empty streets are without you. Big eye murals stare at me. A rat smacks into my foot. Quirky coffee shops remind me of every place we never went and did. We didn't fight at Nook; we fought later that day when you kept painting my dirty studio floors white even though I said not to. I'm doing this for you, you said. I said, I'm telling you not to. I am going on a date with the guy I was seeing when I first met you. He has black lines tattooed on his ears and recommended Acid Communism.Your eyes will watch us make out on the ceiling. Not yours, Yours. You know who you are and I hope you die without adornment very soon.
When body is gone, there is soul. When soul is gone, there is money. Make your money, make your bling. I can be that face, moving how you want. I grind and grit my teeth. I spit on a tower, build hair towers instead of real ones. Body can morph, body can stack. Body stretch like plastic, gummy like snack. I make my body old, I make my body fat. I make my body skinny. I snap my fingers; I snap my bones. The hairs stand on each other. Every hair on my head, I use to make the flexible ascending line. I build it until it touches the clouds. I make my hair a tower. Thin tower, wind will break it down. Body made to labor. Body made to help. What am I without money. Only money I have is yours.I could fall into a hole and be satisfied to lay there with a broken leg. Hate was the bedsheet on hurt. I lie in the bed, totaling feelings to subtraction. You snapped at me every time I woke you up accidentally. In a barely lucid state, you hated me.I watch the movie Arctic to remind me of the desire to survive.I think of the few times we danced at Animal, the gay club, and kissed, and I think of when you stopped wanting to dance, instead, sitting at a table and pouting with arms crossed like a obstinate child. Next time you said: I'm leaving, do what you want. I followed you out the exit, trailing past you through the red doorway.On Reddit, I search: what to do if we are incompatible, but I love him?Mads Mikkelsen with a broken leg drags a dying girl across the Arctic, I can surely breathe and be good in my warm-climate room.I cook an egg in chili crisp and garnish with cilantro. At your party, a guy you hooked up with long ago, maybe recently, who knows, you grabbed his hand at the party you hosted like a bigshot, you grabbed his hand when we were fighting. I was ignoring you 'cause you were being mean. He kept patting me and looking sadly at me, while taking photos of me and you, me and then-boyfriend kissing performatively. He took the photos and smiled sadly like he knew something I did not. The photos looked convincing like nothing was wrong. Did your best friend tell him we were bad?I return to my door stoop, and there is the sad pimpled smoker outside again who never says hi, just stares at the ground, with his grunge music blaring. He is me again.I did not want to be a smiling face with a clown nose, honked for entertainment in a service-relationship, where I am a product-person, being conscripted into a life where one person does something for another, expecting something in return. I don't want to be a good investment, or prove to be one. I want to be a frowning clown, still loved.
Now, it is back to the beginning with the Blondie who was after the Corp. This is the ending with the Blondie. Sorry for dehumanizing men.
The vegetable dumpling tasted bad, fetid. What is this shit? It reminds me of Midwest takeout from the yellow storefront on beige street where everyone was drunk. Drunk, the now-dead people played with each other and yelled at their children. I push the dumplings around, beige lumps on soy sauce-stained paper plates. Rorschach residue. Repressed homicidal urge. Now I repress heartbroken feeling. Scrape plastic utensils against the paper pulp and small white pills appear. I sigh. Why are you sighing? I sigh--trying to calm down. Why are you trying to calm down? We took the J to Manhattan instead of Brooklyn, more time with you. We waited for the train back while police patrolled the 2 AM station. I always blow it out big, you tell me to try and ghost it, while I touch the tattoo on your arm, and ask the significance though I already know. Maintain the fracturing allure. Sweet coffee and a snotty nose the next day. I waited for your vibration all the time. You think I enjoy my own pain and maybe I do. City of sads, city of adderalled workers. How do you distance suffering? We are one screen away from child murder, three stops away from goodnight. Phone screens merge with city lights in the window. Empire state building is still pretty to me. I smacked your ass in front of shady police. No eye contact because to do so would arouse me. Perfume advertisement is muddled by piss. Dead people had a cupid statue on the marble mantle next to an urn. Dead people fly around the marble island. We take the wraparound train back to Myrtle, gimme a kiss. See you tomorrow for cheap Chinese, last time I may look at you across a table. Back in Midwest state, winged arms catch takeout containers. I scrape the dumplings into the marble trash hole with control. Cupid flies off the mantle, crashes through a high window, and returns to Rome. The lump dumpling ascends my esophagus and exits my mouth, plopping on the dalmatian plate.
I kept myself from stalking your Instagram, until morning, I had to. From my ghost account, I stalked your story and noticed that it was a repost of your concert post, noticed that I was cleaned off your feed and reels.You drove me to Queens to see a concert in the rain. I might flirt with other guys, I joked. You said, you know what go ahead. I danced beside ensnared couples alone. In the car, you wore the glasses I liked, knock-offs from a chain, and they reminded me of our early dates, when you would wear them in the car and I would tell you I liked them, then tear them off your face. We made out at corroded stoplights; drops on the windshield made shadows on your face. Red glow around the teary shadows. Same frames you wear while driving now, though your demeanor is different. You are preoccupied, yet I am focused on you. I say: I'm getting sentimental for early on. You say: I feel like we weren't together long enough for sentimentality.You were obsessed, I was disinterested. Too touchy in the movie theater, but then I decided to give in.Driving in the rain, orange and navy lights, your face is splitting. Before, I waved at roommates who looked at me like I was a cat being readied to get put down. You said: take your grey sweatshirt, said we would be better off friends, driving in the rain, though I disagreed. I am reminded of all the guys who only wanted a boyfriend-mirror. Do I show them who they are? Do I become what they want?Smiles turn to sneers. With an old ex, I felt there was a devil underneath, though it took months to see through the front. Devil is a money-hungry man with skin creamed to look younger.You rejected the you I reflected, and the true self I revealed. I paint your profile into my painting, a curly-haired smudge feathers out like a parlor room curtain. The painting of you on the domestic overlay is a hopeless vision of prosperity. You looked at your phone while stoned on my bare bed. You talked about mainstream concerts and read favorite lyrics. I was interested because I loved you. You become a soft memorial icon, love is dissolved by a turpentine soaked rag.Gone person fades. The lover is absorbed into the mire of profiles. Each successor is more and less significant.7:29 turns to 7:30, and soon I will ride a Coney Island ferris wheel. I focus on the wheel's creak. Children scream and seagulls squawk. I eat a bowl of butter rice.
I undo the squeaky bottle cap while waves shush on the shore. A man stands with the water up to his knees looking at the grey hotels and buildings on the horizon. Percocet large-pond with bleach-tipped curls. Green blips on the horizon and an archway of lights, maybe planes. Arch like the St. Louis one. Arching blips on a black sky. I arched his back on my bed which floated on the sky or water. I take the subway back. Phone dies. Wander through the Hasidic neighborhood and fry rice at home. Hiss and crackling on the hush. Lifeguard chair watched the whole time and held me. Lifeguard chair under the St. Louis archway is made of plywood, no matter. The lifeguard's chair was safe.
The present distinguishes itself from the past once again, theorizing the document:
Byung Chu-Han writes: "Without hope, we remain trapped in beenness or in the badly existing. Only hope generates meaningful actions that bring the new into the world." Most of this text was written pre-Hope, in despair. The final paragraphs are the bridge outside of the dark slip, I looked into in my solitary room. I looked into a black slip fabric and saw no change possible; only the past there, "the beenness" as I breathed in a musty odor, reminding me of something that had already happened, I strained to find potentials between the threads I looked at, but I was too close to be able to distinguish between them; it was a black mass. The writings are in the voice of the acrid black despair, which made me feel that no change or hope is possible--that the future would be a further burrowing into the black slip, and that a black orchid might still emerge from that slip, even though black orchids cannot grow without sunlight and sustenance, which provide possibilities of upward momentum, flourishing, etc.
Sword in despair, apathy. I swear I will be the sword (or try, though I have no $ and hate this sh*t).
The Resolution (Narrator leaves room-cave, laptop-cave, reenters the Moral Order):
Pots and pans swim in water in the sink, dirty water made up of food stuffs. What is at the end of the tunnel? A coin? Were you my coin? Of course you were not a coin; it was L.O.V.E. Have you ever experienced it in your life? Have you ever felt what it is like to love a human being or are we just experiencing the gamification of everything; dating, love, sociality, art? Do you only love who will take you higher? Humans are assigned a place on the game hierarchy. Life is not Chutes and Ladders; why are we like this? Break the ladders, break the chutes. I walk all night because I cannot sleep or sit still. I end up on a dead-end street. The sky lightens. We are no better than the pigeons and rats. Dead-end zone. Our leaders hack away at the remains, eating bodies--trans people, immigrants, children who did nothing wrong. Children are born only to die because of where they are born. And these "leaders" eat each other, too, thinking there can only be one winner. Why are we cannibals? Why do the rich patriarchs need more than they have already? Coin on the horizon. Reach coin. Coin on the horizon. Reach coin. The coin is the sun. The sun is not a coin. And you already have PLENTY. W.H.Y. are you doing this? W.H.Y. are you exploiting the vulnerable? Inhumans dehumanizing humans; greed takes us down a chute.
Sword in melancholy, in despair. I swear I will be a sword (or try).
The vegetable dumpling tasted bad, fetid. What is this shit? It reminds me of Midwest takeout from the yellow storefront on beige street where everyone was drunk. Drunk, the now-dead people played with each other and yelled at their children. I push the dumplings around, beige lumps on soy sauce-stained paper plates. Rorschach residue. Repressed homicidal urge. Now I repress heartbroken feeling. Scrape plastic utensils against the paper pulp and small white pills appear. I sigh. Why are you sighing? I sigh--trying to calm down. Why are you trying to calm down? We took the J to Manhattan instead of Brooklyn, more time with you. We waited for the train back while police patrolled the 2 AM station. I always blow it out big, you tell me to try and ghost it, while I touch the tattoo on your arm, and ask the significance though I already know. Maintain the fracturing allure. Sweet coffee and a snotty nose the next day. I waited for your vibration all the time. You think I enjoy my own pain and maybe I do. City of sads, city of adderalled workers. How do you distance suffering? We are one screen away from child murder, three stops away from goodnight. Phone screens merge with city lights in the window. Empire state building is still pretty to me. I smacked your ass in front of shady police. No eye contact because to do so would arouse me. Perfume advertisement is muddled by piss. Dead people had a cupid statue on the marble mantle next to an urn. Dead people fly around the marble island. We take the wraparound train back to Myrtle, gimme a kiss. See you tomorrow for cheap Chinese, last time I may look at you across a table. Back in Midwest state, winged arms catch takeout containers. I scrape the dumplings into the marble trash hole with control. Cupid flies off the mantle, crashes through a high window, and returns to Rome. The lump dumpling ascends my esophagus and exits my mouth, plopping on the dalmatian plate.
Light from the windows entered the room, mixing with the aquatic light. The wares are encased in glass boxes on wood platforms on a grey carpet. Black flatscreens advertise silver, diamond, and gold assortments next to yellow cartoon price tags. I noticed Jeff then. His grey shirt was tucked into his pressed pants, and his hair was ordered to the side. I saw the name on his tag right away. Jeff. A black earpiece added to the serious appearance.I left with a pair of cobalt earrings. Jeff shot the gun twice. One hole through each ear.Depression made me feel like I was looking through a donut at more donuts far away. Sometimes there were no donuts in the distance. I needed Jeff like I needed a donut.Jeff took the donuts off my eyes and ate them. This was after he helped me try on earrings and select a good pair. He made me feel better, with his cheerful customer-service voice and orderly hair. The buttons on his polo were buttoned to the top. Dark hairs grew out of the collar. His face is blank to me now--blank besides the customer-service smile and the eyes. Jeff had eyes like knives through glazed donuts. Black pain stabbed through the irises, bleeding out the pupils. I saw the pain the knives were making. I saw the blood pouring out his eyes.I saw the pain through the glaze. The knives from his eyes pricked me. The sharpness seduced me, like the silver-cobalt earrings across the room.I walked out of the store with the new earrings on. Blue dots hanging off my lobes which are wrinklier now. The earring holes are elongated, stretched into slits. I still wear the earrings. Layla is lapping at her bowl. I circle my tongue around my dry mouth. My lips are flaking off. My tongue is a centipede. Layla is lapping at my hand while I talk to her, eating a treat out of it. I say to Layla: "holding hands, eye-contact in the store with those fucking donut eyes, 'I feel that' was the link between two chains, me, and him. I send a message out, don’t know where he is now, I say, meet me where the two yellow arches make an M."I close my eyes. Jeff emerges. He walks toward me. We are back at the earring store. He has the same plain face. Same donut eyes. Jeff brings me new earrings that are bigger than the last ones. The cobalts are bigger, larger. I loop my arms around his shoulders and pull him to me. I loop his remaining hairs around my fingers tightly. His hair is still orderly though sparser. I see some peach showing through.Next week, we meet at the earring store again. There, I pluck a strand from his head and loop it around my finger. I take another strand and loop it around my finger, and pluck four more strands from his head, making rings and earrings for us both. He is looking more faded, though the eyes are the same. I pull out a needle and make a hole in each of his ears. I string the hair earrings through his lobes. I place the hair ring around his finger.
I.The sound of a marble on a circular track circles down a track to hell. Faces peer out of square cells on Instagram. Sorrow fails to arouse any feeling but sorrow. I fear reality will peel off like a sticker soon. I am flying avatar in Second Life, derealized in a sim world made of products and signifiers. When reality peels, I will be awake in hell, surrounded by users, perusers, sodomites, and misers, who are better than the saintly-types.I had a flying dream, said a customer at the bar. I want to add, me too, pouring the waters, pouring the drip. Alcohol is the IV. The service-worker is an actor, butler, secret anthropologist. Sameness was the trend in PA mountain town, but individuals were nice and I enjoyed my conversations.Serendipitous encounters occurred recently, man I served in small PA mountain town turned out to be a gallery artist, and I went to his painting show and the afters. He was rude to me as a waiter, and not sure if he recognized me, drinking at his open bar. This was back when I was boozing heavy, now, no more. He ordered me around like a butler, yet treated me kindly as a fellow artist. His friend was there, at the opening, from PA town too, who I also served. After working so much, I decided I prefer destitution to consumption (I really don't buy anything now, it's sad, I look like shit) because hard work is miserable with no redeeming qualities, besides the potential for observation. Republicans here were nice to me (a white man), though I was so miserable carrying trays that I was rude, and acting out sometimes, kicking doors, swearing loudly, and being sarcastically friendly. I trace the circular track to hell again: the sky last night and the air relaxed the humans on picnic benches, sipping their sweet drinks, sitting around in costumes, dressed up for shows and events, playing roles we have been trained to play, acting proper for situations.Cool, not humid, romantic night, all of us floating and flirtatious as the sun speckled the clouds, puff balls on a lilac gold dome with green mountains hugging the township.Beverages with spice and basil syrup. Rose, apertif, seductive intoxicants.II.The air puts the human-animals in a good mood. The air puts the dogs’ dogs at ease too, they lap at their bowls as clientele sip drinks. "Dogs" is mean and dehumanizing, but I can't help but dehumanize my clients. They take my service, though I do not like to provide it. In saying "dog," I am also referring to a kind of domesticated stupor, many feel, or exist in. I miss free wandering, wolf-like prowl. Domesticated creatures in middle space. To fight, and play, and kill, and drink, and fuck in middle space, animalistic behavior. If only I could be a wing-ed dog for real, fly up like a golden retriever angel. Consumers on the grass; many friends of mine are grass consumers, lappers, treat-eaters. At work, I make up sing-song stories like Björk in Dancer in the Dark, who constructs a musical fantasy in which she is the star actress, to maintain morale at her factory job. The songs she creates are escape paths to another dimension. My stories are darker:
Rose leaps across the backseat and slams herself into a window, mimicking the deer they hit; Azalea is distracted by the charade and drives off the bridge accidentally, hair strands floating in suspense, and Aster prays for his mama. The children are intertwined with the car smashed on the icy river. Children meeting an end. The bouquet rots by spring. Their namesakes grow overtop their embrace with the vehicle. The rosy snow melts into the river, which carries some car parts to a nearby town. Aster’s mama finds a wheel she recognizes. A search party is constructed and spreads across the region, like a plague. No one finds the children with flower names. A deer sidles up to the river and finds the scent of its mama intermingled with the few car/children parts remaining by the stream. The deer is the original dead deers’ baby. The mothers and fathers in the town down the river have no flower children, but the deer knows who the culprits are for her mama’s killing and nibbles some of the leftovers off a metal bar.
III.I sweep leaves off the floor, I pick up fallen cups. After a night of being sweet, I feel drained.A night with a floating cast of characters, like my coworker Sandy (fake-name) who is hoping to get promoted, go to kink clubs in Berlin, on Xanax. She cooks Gochujang shrimp for dying farmers.I inhabit the consciousness of Sandy, spacing out of my own to join with her headspace. My dog is my girl, my dog makes me happy, lapping blood off my leaky cuts, cleaning me up. If I can work with bandages on my arms, you can too. My shaggy lady keeps me sane. I think I will get out of here someday, but I'd miss my parent-farmers and the wide-open skies and plains, and I'd miss all these cheerful and respectful regulars who tip well. Why am I so sad? I tell men about my anxieties, and they tell me to go outside more. Whatever this problem is, I will get it sorted out. Whatever, this problem is, I will fix it. The workers hate the uppers, use the uppers to work harder. Work harder to fly, go to Disney, work hard to go Soarin' in the clouds, the ladies up there, all the angels up in heaven, we'll get there. Dehumanizing the dehumanized, white Trump supporters all, in all likelihood, who worked extra to save for Disney trips for his wife and kid, works at the Hilton to get a deal on $40 hotel rooms anywhere in the world by Hilton, dream to be a band caterer so she can travel the world, on tour, convert her parents' farm to a horticulture therapy retreat. Ginger with a prison guard husband. She is trying to get him special shoes because he spends so much time standing on the concrete. She was a drug and alcohol counselor at state facilities. Coworker breathes fire, chews tobacco. Coworker who sings karaoke three nights a week, saw him out, red-faced and happy. Nice people, nice to me, with the constituents that I perform sameness and similarity, acting like an echo vessel. The queer is an expert mimic. To soar with a band. To fly through the roof of the dive bar. To wash so many cups that doing so becomes automatic, to turn on a smile in despair, style a Great Clips haircut, I hate that some have to struggle so hard to survive while others spend so frivolously. Trump gave them hope, feel bad, he never meant to do much for them, never was going to, stoked their hatred and stroked their resentment for self-gain.I was attempting in the previous paragraph to inhabit the evil collective-consciousness without identifying or aligning myself with the hateful clan spirit. To pass as one, one can understand one. I am not one, a hater, I was trying to inhabit a hater perspective. Suffering can create hatred. Reduce suffering. Stop caricaturizing evil; evil is nuanced and faceted.To have a Disney daydream, to infinity and beyond. All the valor of hard work, there must be valor in a dead life, a hard life.
Pots and pans swim in water in the sink, dirty water made up of food stuffs. What is at the end of the tunnel? A coin? Were you my coin? Of course you were not a coin; it was L.O.V.E. Have you ever experienced it in your life? Have you ever felt what it is like to love a human being or are we just experiencing the gamification of everything; dating, love, sociality, art? Do you only love who will take you higher? Humans are assigned a place on the game hierarchy. Life is not Chutes and Ladders; why are we like this? Break the ladders, break the chutes. I walk all night because I cannot sleep or sit still. I end up on a dead-end street. The sky lightens. We are no better than the pigeons and rats. Dead-end zone. Our leaders hack away at the remains, eating bodies--trans people, immigrants, children who did nothing wrong. Children are born only to die because of where they are born. And these "leaders" eat each other, too, thinking there can only be one winner. Why are we cannibals? Why do the rich patriarchs need more than they have already? Coin on the horizon. Reach coin. Coin on the horizon. Reach coin. The coin is the sun. The sun is not a coin. And you already have PLENTY. W.H.Y. are you doing this? W.H.Y. are you exploiting the vulnerable? Inhumans dehumanizing humans; greed takes us down a chute.
autotheory
I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, death, or grief over someone or something that I once loved.—Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia----Low-res images of football players are pasted on the walls. I don't hold Karim’s hand; straight Penn State students surround us.He says: The Line is a two trillion-dollar smart city being built across the desert.K is moving back to Saudi Arabia soon. He will marry a woman there and take a job at an oil company. His parents are adding a wing to their house for their future kids.I want to change his set-path. Acker writes: “Fantasy is or makes possibilities. Are possibilities reality?” (119).I try to love without reducing Karim to an object-fantasy or narcissistic-projection site. Karim is a subject, and K is more “impersonal object.” K is a letter on the horizon, and Karim is a person walking away.Trees grip coconuts in front of a pixelating ocean, and a blown-out beach on the wallpaper. I look in the bathroom mirror, and I wonder if I look like Karim. The claim is not unsubstantiated: a Greek Life couple asked if we were twins.
Karim leans on a railing in rainbow club lighting. The colored circles spin across him, while students dance to dated rap.--I lay in a field at 4 AM, pulling out the grass."The eroticization of suffering" saves me from my Death Drive (Kristeva). Pain is just pain without the eroticization of it. In pain, the utterance of pain is concise: it hurts.K sends: haha.I night wander, past mansions with rave light windows, and around a golf course, while I spam post on stories like a von Trier idiot. I drink beer and listen to music that reminds me of Karim.The erotic other is hated, loved, and admired, incorporated into one's being, then spit out.My lover is my body. Kristeva calls this joining-process "Melancholy Cannibalism" which accounts for: "this passion for holding within the mouth (but vagina and anus also lend themselves to this control) the intolerable other that I crave to destroy so as to better possess it alive. Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested . . . than lost."On our first date at a restaurant, he ate an octopus tentacle. I swallowed an octopus limb from his plate, and it turned into a phantom and flew away.
The white veil cloaks the snarling face, and the tuxedo packages the hairy animal. Can a union be outside consumption? I picture K and I, two grooms in Saudi Arabia, about to move into a room in The Line. I learn that The Line project was abandoned, or at least, downscaled. Impossible love.
"You" brings to mind K's face first. The drawing you made me after I drew you is a trace made by your hand. Veronica’s Veil. I close my eyes: the sheet holds your face on a glowing field. You saw light everywhere like you were traipsing around a prairie.I hold your face on a sheet in a darkroom. I hold your face on my phone at night.I see a pinhole full of light and you are forming, though the mental picture is inaccurate to how you looked and do. What do you look like?
The painting combines an image of Karim and me, with a still from Todd Haynes' "Far From Heaven" above. In the film, a mixed-couple falls in love, yet cannot be together due to prejudice, and social expectations.
You say: when you touched me I died. And you say that my portrait of you--goofy-serious with a lime leaf pop--is one-of-a-kind.--We face mirrors. My mirror blocks your face. I see my face with your body below my neck; my glass neck cuts off and your torso is below it. Your torso is bloodless, and pearlescent liquid mutates into the shape of your chest and then a chest prosthetic. Prosthetic pecs twist into nipples I kiss.
You said you are bisexual, so marrying a woman won't be too bad, but you've never had sex with a girl and have no desire to. I wonder if you are having sex with your wife now, and if she is pregnant with your child who will have brown hair like yours. I picture the crib, but I cannot picture the house, your wife, or your parents. Your wife is your best friend.--K is Palestinian. His family doesn't live in Gaza.I was raised with menorahs in the window. My parents don't have one anymore.In Hebrew school, they said Israel is good. Israel was hung up on the wall next to Shin. In primary school, they said America is good. I believed what the teachers said. In public school, they split us into groups. Teacher: one group play pilgrim, the other play Indigenous. They did not use the word "Indigenous." Teacher: sit at table and eat Thanksgiving together.
Hebrew is not Israel's alphabet.
The Arabic equivalent of the letter "K."
What is K in Hebrew, though I don’t want to translate K. I tried for a year, to write Karim's experience, and I failed, miserably.----------------Halberstam writes: "while the libido tends to ward off the death drive through a 'will to power,' a desire for mastery, and an externalization of erotic energy, sometimes libidinal energies are given over to destabilization, unbecoming, and unraveling" (209).
Excerpt from "failed" video: Forza Horizon 3 "death drive" with letter to K overlay (2024).
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Backward feelings serve as an index to the ruined state of the social world; they indicate continuities between the bad gay past and the present; and they show up the inadequacies of queer narratives of progress.—Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
(...) during the twentieth century in the U.S. a more general therapeutic or “self-help” culture has developed, in which it is presumed that individuals both can and need to fix themselves. An industry of mental health experts has flourished, focusing largely on a range of individual problems with intimacy: sexuality, family, and love are the main sites of stress and pedagogies of self-care, while concerns about food, alcohol, drug, or money addictions conventionally appear as symptoms of a person’s damaged self or self‑esteem. Many people now learn to believe or hope that they can purchase access to this expertise about surviving the destabilizing effects of desire, either by going into therapy or purchasing a variety of commodities such as books, diet foods, and over-the-counter medications, all means to supposedly enable “mental health” and/or happiness. Talk shows, advice columns, and even state agencies argue that solving problems with love and desire is the individual’s responsibility.—Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love--
THE SADSI explain consensus views to myself, so I understand the consensus: people like to be soothed and not made upset. If people are made upset, they like to feel there is a reason, message, or solution. If none exist, the distress-causer is deemed cruel. Sad people are viewed as depressing, useless, unhelpful and unfun. Sad people should get help. If sads do not get help or help does turn the sad person happy, the depressed individual is considered a burden or failure. “Recovery narratives” do provide comfort and inspiration. “It gets better” submits to a progressivist improvement fabrication. People who do not believe “it gets better” are villainized. I think of The Grinch (who is gay-coded). He is a simpering antisocial grump, who is relegated to cave-existence, until Christmas cheers him. The film’s message is clear: normalize.
Valerie Solanas, celebrity author of SCUM Manifesto.
James Forman writes: “liberalism is the refusal to engage in principled ideological struggle inside and outside of a revolutionary organization and if we are truly revolutionary we will struggle to eliminate all forms of liberalism from our social practice.”
Solanas writes: "There is no human reason for money or for anyone to work. All non-creative jobs (practically all jobs now being done) could have been automated long ago, and in a moneyless society everyone can have as much of the best of everything as she wants" (8).
THE ART FARMHopelessness and depression correlate. Right wing social-media personalities like Charlie Kirk, and Candace Owens, may be so popular, because they provide a vision of a future, that is different (even though they propose a realiving of a past, that is better passed).Alternative future: we pile up our weapons to explode them. We live on farms without calendars. Farms with greater natural resource access grow more powerful. Smaller farms envy larger farms. An overseeing force caps production. Each farm is equally represented in the overseeing body. The farms trade essentials. Humans make art, play games, or have sex when the trading is done. Overseeing forces need overseers. How do we prevent corruption and the desire for growth? We destroy depictions and examples of power or corruption.
Robert Indiana, USA 666 II, 1966–67. Oil on canvas, five panels, 102 × 102 in. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
--CORPTaking Corp's clothes off was like unsleaving a new iPhone. It was like opening the white box. The top lid lifted smoothly off the bottom lid. Corp was rose gold, and I turned him on.He befriended guys at the deli, and on the sidewalk.He gave me nice clothes to wear: no ratty jeans. He instructed me on the appropriate etiquettes: always cheers, and tap your glass on the table before drinking while making eye contact. I played the part, by performing naiveté, but I learned how to behave cultured at design school.Sex turned to acts and timed segments, where climax could and should be achieved after a short period of time, after which sexual desire was no longer useful. We moved like porn dolls; we were talking to the CEO of a social media start-up platform, for adult content-creators, about monetizing the sex.When we completed the position, we shuffled ourselves into the next best option, then Corp went to the gym.I said: why can't you just lay around, or look into my eyes?Like Karim did.Corp didn't look up from the Apple Watch.--At Apple, he was in charge of many lower rungs, and Corp liked to feel superior. He liked to denigrate "stupid" or "inadequate" people.Yet, I was attached to him. I was on the path to marry for money, which was my goal after Karim went back to Saudi Arabia.--
In "Peg," Deli Girls say: "I feel it, I fuck it." I listen to the song on headphones while I walk in Williamsburg. Corp's apartment is in Williamsburg's bloody chic heart. The concentrated wealth is immoral. I buy Oslo coffee every day with Corp's debit.Corp drinks himself to sleep again. A shovel scrapes snow off a sidewalk. I curl my foot and scrape my rough-edged toenails against the comforter.The photograph of Corp's dead dog stares me down from the wall. The dog is preserved with black eyes. He misses his earth bone.I move into his Williamsburg apartment, and then the Greenpoint loft.He exposes me to a lifestyle populated by more networked and optically beautiful humans. Instead of five-dollar beers, he buys cocktails with szechuan pepper sea foam.Corp is scowling at the rooftop.Why are you mad?You know why.I don't actually.He sits in silence until the appetizer arrives, quail crackers with cilantro dust.He is still silent.I say: I see a propping up of abstraction with a retrograde, decorative, or apolitical bend. Work that looks like something, feels like nothing.He says: huh?I say: current art often is: cute, interesting, funny, and zany, dreamy, and adjective. Where is apathy that is not apathetic? Where is numb horror?He says: I don't know.Where is non-decor? Where is non-style? Where is scrappiness that is not sloppy to look "I don't care?" Where is non-predetermined? Where is post-human without post-human aesthetic? Where is failure that doesn't look pretty or made-to-fail? Where is non-rehash? Where is care that is not kitsch or sentimental? Where is non-pretense?Whatever that means.It is fitting that adjective art would be the art for our adjective time. An insecure market creates pressure to be a decorator, entertainer, dopamine-provider, innovator, interior decorator, effortless master, and entrepreneur. Artists are expected to create Instagram spectacle for a buying class that is often not art historically aware. How can an artwork be, not just reflect, the collective fragmentation that has resulted in the cordoning of individuals from individuals? Can there be a positive hopelessness?He says it is better to focus on making money: I want you to be able to come to Equinox with me.I say: no, gym. I'm not happy here. All day, I was lying on your nice sofa and looking at the luxury around me and feeling empty.He takes a sip of his drink and says: if you don't like it, move out.From the rooftop restaurant, I look at the city below.I say: I like us.The waiter brings the calamari porridge and it is too salty for Corp. He raises his hand to flag the waiter down.He says, to the sad-looking girl: this is too salty. We need a better batch.She leaves and he says to me: only the best.--Here, he passes me the bill. You pay.I can't.You need me.--K comes to me on Corp's velvet sofa.The sofa morphs into Karim's beige couch, back in Pennsylvania.He stretches out and puts his feet on my lap. Charcoal curls outline his head, but Karim's face is gone. The candle on the windowsill glows through his missing face.--My roommate says: this is a classic NYC coming-of age experience, older man finds a newcomer to groom.I say: he's only eight years older.She rails a line, and says: he's rich.I say: I love him.My roommate says: he's an instrument to capital, a careerist in tech. You're an artist.I say: he is part of the evil, but his whole life is nice, because he works for it to be. Men take your time and dreams.Because she used to be a sex worker in Paris, my roommate is wise. Her ex-boyfriend, Euro-money, flew her all over, before he broke her heart and got her to drop out of college, he said: if you don't like to work, you'll become a prostitute.And she did.--Dating Corp, I am thinking: if all utopian possibilities are eliminated, I must do my best to excel within the conditions.Megan Thee Stallion's "Tina Snow" is my favorite album; I played Corp the album, and he appeared unsettled: are you listening to the lyrics?Get to playing with that cock and make that motherfucker bam and I walk and I talk like a pimp 'cause I am.Sex is allocated space and assigned a time frame instead of transcending the frame. Megan accepts that "sex is the corollary of capitalism and war" and advocates pragmatic strategies to win the sex-money-war game (Preciado).I try it on; I try to see sex as strategy to continue receiving Corp's paycheck. Choice is a luxury. If one is locked into production's mirror room, one will have sex in the mirror room. The mirror room looks like an Equinox gym. Can I exit the mirror room? Can production-line-sex sensate sublimity? I think of Björk's "All is Full of Love" music video, and I think for a second it was like that, two robots in limerence, until it was two robots having mechanical intercourse, and him giving me a debit card after.
Paul Preciado writes: "potentia gaudendi," or "orgasmic force... This strength is of indeterminate capacity; it has no gender... its orientation emphasizes neither the feminine nor the masculine and creates no boundary between heterosexuality and homosexuality or between object and subject; neither does it know the difference between being excited, being exciting, or being-excited-with. It favors no organ over any other... Orgasmic force is the sum of the potential for excitation inherent in every material molecule... It is a force of transformation for the world in pleasure—'in pleasure with.' Potentia gaudendi unites all material, somatic, and psychic forces and seeks all biochemical resources and all the structures of the mind" (33).Homosexual, heterosexual, trans, and non-binary sex contain potential for unregimented and non-logoed orgasmic expansion and transformation. The genderless orgasmic force is queer expression. It haunts and threatens preconceived games, orders, rulebooks, and warfare. Queerness is not a capitalist tactic; it does not play within exchange-based doctrine; it seeks to exceed it. It shares; it does not exchange. It widens; it is not narrowed by penetration. It is not focused on one giving, and the other taking. It is not financial. Queerness opposes capitalism, queerness is greater; "it is a force of transformation for the world." Do conservatives believe queerness, a transformative force, is a social contagion? To me, queerness sounds like love.Preciado writes: "potentia gaudendi... does not allow itself to be reified or transformed into private property." The orgasm is a boundless non-commodity, yet there is no shame in commodifying orgasmic exchange.The Apple employee turned out to be an Apple skin. Corp ditched me when he realized I would not trade autonomy for employment. I didn't go back to Corp, when I realized this was not love.Corp embodied my desire for capital gain and a normative relationship.
--Homosexuality and heterosexuality are viewed retroactively as terms from a dated glossary.Berlant writes: "an extraordinary amount of discipline, scrutiny, and threat keeps many heterosexuals behaving according to 'the straight and narrow'... non-normative sexualities threaten fantasies of the good life that are anchored to images of racial, religious, class, and national monoculture" (20-21).When I see a man looking like a man, and a woman looking like a woman, they look like sitcom actors to me. The actors make sex vaginal and penile. Why do they view their bodies as organs and slots? Why do they turn their organs into fetish objects, worshipping girls with preserved sex organs?
In elementary school, they made us play factory. How do you spell entrepreneur? I was the only one to get it right. I said: E-N-T-R-E-P-R-E-N-E-U-R.GOOD WORK, DOING GOOD; GOOD JOB. Language enforces the reality it exists in. Beginning from a young age, the citizen is rewarded for productive and pro-social behavior. The citizen is raised to desire a suitable mate.
Robert Indiana, Mate, 1960–62. Oil on wood and steel-and-wood wheels, 102.2 × 32.1 × 32.4 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art.
We are drawn to images that mirror our reality and reassure us that it is stable and true.
(...) this tree, I say, is a divinity, a holy thing, and a thousand lashes to the unfeeling and impious owner of it if he dare make all this golden, divinely green magic of leaves vanish to gratify his thirst for money, which is the vilest and most contemptible thing on earth.—Robert Walser, The Walk--
My mother is a "trad-wife," who cooks Pioneer Woman recipes, and listens to country music and Christian-parenting podcasts. Her ex-husband worked on Wall Street, and she got a PhD from Yale: she is no stranger to money and the Elite spheres. My mother used to teach aerobics in Tokyo, where her best friends were sex-workers and strippers: she is without the typical religious judgements. She teaches Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies courses to students in Pennsylvania, many of whom are ex-military, or conservative. Her job is at risk, because the same populace she is trying to educate, voted for eliminating DEI programs. Yet, she changes people's minds, and they tell her.Or, she did. Now, she says her class is all left-leaning, and there are only five undergrad students majoring in WGSS, though she deals with non-majors.My mother assigns students a side. She insists on a dialogue between two sides. How long will this continue? What are the ethics of a classroom dialogue, with no hate speech or anti-human assertions allowed, and personal viewpoint set aside? What do you think of my mother's job and livelihood? Do you believe she should be fired?I told Corp the situation and he said: get your mom into tech. She would be a great asset.I relayed the advice, and she said she'd rather work at Trader Joe's.Arendt writes: “The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (338).Because the "new mass leaders" do not understand "gender ideology," they persecute it.While the quote addresses what is occurring in government and its subsidiaries, Arendt is gesturing at a relevant, diffuse problem: the devaluation of art and humanities, fields that encourage "activity that is not entirely predictable," or original thought, and the replacement of experts with obedient Loyalists. The obedient thrive under leadership that rewards obedience. Any fool can take a Corp job: Corp followed orders and gave orders. No fool can replace my mother.Arendt also writes: "the mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything—belief, honor, dignity—on the slightest provocation" (338). I believe we will see the anti-culture and bourgeois sacrificing morality--"belief, honor, dignity"--to preserve their power, social standing, and "private security." I would encourage people to do what is right, if they are able, prioritizing resistance and minimization of their harm-impacts, over personal-advancement under corruption. Doing so may require forgoing bourgeois status & career accomplishment, and acclimating to a life of greater precarity.I respect my mother, because she would rather interact with good people as a cashier at Trader Joe's, than work with, and under people willing to sacrifice morality for money and personal gain. She refuses to aid in the growth of tech-power. The reward for her goodness will be a decreased paycheck, yet my mother does not need a lot of money to be happy. She makes less than what is considered average in New York, and is happier than anyone I know there; I believe her happiness results from the pursuit of intrinsic fulfillment, over money or advanced standing. She saw how miserable money made her ex-husband, as I saw how miserable Corp's career path, and life made him. Another szechuan pepper cocktail, is another drink.She is moral, and a better Christian, than any "Christians" quoting bible verses to defend CEOs & White-Supremacists.It is not enough to speak out against White Supremacy, I believe one should take every effort possible, not to aid in its flourishing. In attempting to opt out from American progress myths, can one find greater personal satisfaction? Though Corp looked down on me for my "degenerate lifestyle," in a worse neighborhood, I did not envy his life when I realized what is consisted of: work, gym, and alcohol. I needed to see what the Corp life was like (even though there are "cleaner" versions) to realize, like my mother, it was not worth pursuing and would not result in happiness. Now, despite the hopelessness of the American climate, I, like my mother, am reducing my harm-impact. Happiness is the side effect. It may be best to adjust one's goals to be more "modest" or humanitarian, instead of achievement-based, and give up on American dreams; if dream-pursuit means corresponding with power, or propping up, and benefiting from intersectional hierarchies. I speak to a subset of people: who may have bourgeois origins, which I do. Yet, I have never seen bourgeois, like the Corp life: it is the difference between Converse and Chanel.Still, there is naiveté in this: you will see that being poor is not so good, albeit better than the Corp life. Poverty denies the impoverished person access to necessities.--Karim looked out at an equal field: how can we start here with no displacement? Karim was an organizer for the Free Palestine protests at Penn State. At secluded Penn State, we saw Trump gain friends. A Trump rally emptied the town. The queer café moved its flag indoors.--White SUVS drive around with American flags flying off the top, and white men wear backwards hats inside the cars with gang signs out the window. Jacked boys stick their tongues out with backwards hats on in front of Greek letters. They sit on benches high up and watch the streets. Police cars sit on the block.Mendelberg writes: "... the discursive community of the MAGA movement is one of status reversal (Mendelberg 2022; Petersen 2002). The key grievance for many was a perception that mainstream society, captured by political opponents with immoral beliefs, had unfairly judged them, their values, and their customs to be undeserving of respect and honor. Their critiques of schools, of teachers, of workplaces, and of government were grounded in the notion that these core institutions of society should be signaling the supreme value of “traditional” mores such as military service, assimilation to a uniform vision of America, and the authority of the law. The gravest status injury for many MAGA adherents was the loss of institutional stamps of approval and signals of esteem for a way of life and a set of values they viewed as morally superior. Like many right-wing populist movements, the MAGA movement connected these issues to a particular enemy—the corrupt elite who have unjustly hurt and maligned everyday Americans like them (Hawkins and Kaltwasser 2019). The movement constructed a populist notion of the virtuous “American people” called to fight against domination and oppression by those in power. In doing so, the movement combined the status concerns of MAGA participants with a sense of righteous injustice about this loss, coupled to a normative vision of how the country’s problems could be solved by re-centering the traditional status order" (Symbolic 13).Replace a frat hat with a MAGA hat and you have the MAGA-boy uniform; aesthetic similarity is not the same as ideological resemblance. MAGA bros are not the same as frat bros, yet there is a conservative overlap. Fraternities are gangs with alpha and beta male divisions. Fraternities determine who is allowed to become a member, based on perceived strength, power, future income, and, virility. Tolerance of pain and humiliation are tested through hazing ritual. Brotherhood is formed via shared experience of pain; lifetime bonds are made. Respect is gained by accumulating sexual partners. What is each fraternity's "uniform vision?" What is the vision that connects fraternities at Penn State to each other, and back into history? What connects fraternities in central Pennsylvania to fraternities all over?All contained within the frats and outside them: homophobia towards each other and outsiders, white nationalism and defensiveness of tradition implied in the flags and Americana symbology that graces the walls of the compounds and shouts itself on the yard, selective integration of underrepresented groups into traditionally all-white organizations, sometimes.Is the fraternity system a miniature model of how Elites and elite frameworks maintain power by constructing exclusivity--a jargon exclusive to the system, in the case of the fraternities, the Greek-letter system? Only those in Greek-life can distinguish between superior fraternities, and inferior fraternities: it provides the fraternity bros, a knowledge inaccessible to outsiders. To "get into" a fraternity party, as a man, one usually has to know a guy in the frat. A friend and I tried to get into a fraternity once, via a connect my friend was chatting was on Grindr, yet the DL Grindr Fraternity Brother, refused to come down and say he knew us, as he was closeted. The trope of the closeted fraternity brother, is another separate idea: though it speaks to the non-acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals within the elite-fraternity system, and the willingness of individuals to play as a normative copy, in order to reap the social benefits of conformity, in conservative orders that reward integration into the status quo.Boys attend the same frats as their fathers. The frats are defensive of their history: insist on a "traditional status order." They are inherently non-inclusive, due to an insistence on cis-male-only membership.Instead of status-reversal, the fraternity structure is interested in status-preservation: maintenance of power, and building connections that can cement one's future power, status, and reputation. Is "status-reversal" built on a misconception of status loss, or self-victimization? Does it result from an authentic loss, or is the loss invented? A loss is a loss, in relation to a gain? The elites gain: yet MAGA worships elites who fit their bill. Why is MAGA so angry? Why are the fraternities so exclusive--what does exclusivity provide the participants, that inclusivity, or an open-door policy could not?I've walked by the frats hundreds of times over the last ten years: the questions result from a lifetime of non-inclusion. What is this "mythic order" I cannot enter? The "mythos" and "allure" is present, because of inaccessibility. Are the guys in fraternities actually hot, or perceived as hotter, because they are associated with a selective club?Fraternities are often channels to elite spheres of business and influence, and not rooted in the "grassroots" quality Mendelberg believes the MAGA movement possesses (implied in his association of "grassroots" strategy, to the alt-right, is a co-opting of the Leftist-connoted concept, by the Right. Can the "success" of MAGA be attributed to its populist-bend, and strategic adoption of Leftist political strategy?).Will MAGA-USA look like Greek Life? The pan-hellenic mob cheers a Christian Nationalist: yet, I could never paint such a picture, for aesthetic analysis is mistaken for sympathy. We have seen the rise of the Aryan for years too, in art, with the re-emphasis on "purer abstraction" and Neoclassicism. Does queering the lineage improve it?Who is allowed to participate in a fraternity party? The backwards hat boys guard the entry-points. The stereotypical consensus is that women are the first picks, for fraternity parties. The sentries decide, which women are allowed in, it is not unlike a techno club. No men allowed: unless you are a "brother," or brother's friend. I tried breaking into a frat with my gay friend, and we got kicked out. It's the only time I've ever been inside one of the gothic mansions: I was unimpressed by the architecture, but the architecture is not what magnetizes students to the frats. The fraternities cultivate a mystique, by creating a VIP illusion. To learn more about the frats would mean piercing the walls, yet one can only understand what it is like to be on the inside, if one is an insider, or has insider access to the secret society, which I cannot obtain due to homosexuality, though I tried, to go to the frat party, the legal way, before I broke down the wall, and committed an act of trespassing. Lee Edelman provides a definition of queerness that is: "(...) the dismantling of identities... Rather than be an identity," he says, "queerness can only disturb an identity... queerness is always what is outside a structure of norms" (Edelman 00:15:12–00:16:54). Queerness is an identification with "not," queerness is aligning and identifying with what has been stigmatized, and according to Edelman, only exists in relation to what the "norm" demonizes; its existence is presupposed on reclaiming one's stigmatization. Stigma is assigned to the queer person who counters normality; is queerness a counter-culture? If MAGA and conservative orders endorse a reassertion of the "authority of the law," isn't the most effective form of anti-authoritarianism, law-breaking and law-disturbance; a continued rupture of the normal systems that produce stigma? If queerness is criminalized, queerness can become criminal; meaning, exist and operate in opposition to anti-queer laws & systems.Opting out of success under oppressor logic, like my mother is doing, demonstrates one has or had the option to be in the club (privilege, yes, though she worked her whole life to gain access, and the club proved to be unstable, and dislike her). Why join a fraternity, or oppressive order; why not work at dismantling its sense of identity? I stripped the alluring apple of its skin, tasted its flesh, and looked at the arsenic core.--Paraphrasing Freud, Berlant writes: "the will to destroy (the death drive) and preserve (the pleasure principle) the desired object are two sides of the same process." Berlant points out that some Post-Freudians view the characterization of desire as unnecessarily masochistic (25).The fling flames at the end; even with sweet Karim, we burned each other in order to dis-attach. Yet, even fighting with K, brought ecstasy, a co-mingling of pain and pleasure: in fighting with him, I realized how deeply I desired him, and felt intensely alive: in fights, in lulls, and in repairs: it was always passionate. Tension and friction created more desire. Absence created more desire; presentness added to desire: desire kept accumulating until I became my desire, and only my desire to/for Karim. Call it healthy or unhealthy according to neoliberal boundary and attachment rhetoric; it was a great bonfire. The bonfire became a raging forest fire.Corp got me hard, for a while. Corp, who was originally an outsider, to the tech-elite sphere, managed to break his way in, and because his standing was newly earned, and thus insecure, new money and new corporate-club-access, he became a staunch defender of everything tech, and/or elite. He became a party member.The more I resisted the pull and ethos of his lifestyle, the more he clung to its values, and refused to see the use in other ways of being. I told him my mother had rejected his offer to go corporate, and he, laughed, callously, as if to say: I hope she enjoys being a checkout girl. I looked at him in the Greenpoint loft, with a class struggle down below, and thought: I am looking at a Himmler.I told him I saw him for what he was, and he tried to build himself back up to me. When he realized my disgust could not be bought away, he tried to break me after.
He waved his money over me like an American flag, and I took it from him. Finally he retracted his money and clothing from me, and humiliated me in front of a group of tech-and-finance people, though this was nothing new, the club turning tides against a newcomer who learns he does not respect the club rules or club, and I had already mentally severed myself, saying fuck the club, in my head.In Michigan, a trans girl at my middle school was openly bullied. She was a big deal, featured on local news. My mother's friend's daughter slammed her into a locker, and my mom said, privately—it was wrong for her to hurt that girl, and unfriended the mother. The mother and her daughter were members of the country club; my mother had fragile access to that gated community, through the transphobe friend. Violators of normal reality were shunned; unfriending the wrong person meant losing a friend group, and access to an elite circle. Shunning. We are experiencing a maligning of dissident individual voices by mainstream reality-enforcement.
Found-image, discovered under #pennstate on Instagram, combined with a personal photograph (2022).
Found-image, discovered under #pennstate on Instagram, combined with a personal photograph (2022).
Penn State football, still from Cameraperson by Kirsten Johnson (2016).
I took this iPhone photo in State College, Pennsylvania. It is from 2024 pride-month.
I wrote the below before Charlie Kirk was killed, and edited it to enhance clarity.--In a Turning Point USA's video, a sociology professor talks unemployment facing recent graduates. Kirk blames higher education's inability to provide students with useful workplace skillsets. He says: college is not really a good use of time. If the students you're talking to can't find jobs, why are they learning from you?MAGA youth cheer Kirk, and his advocacy for their under-education.--Can an accessible or populist language change minds without oversimplifying and demoting itself?The Right's "successful" populism:
Anita Bryant
A screenshot from Nancy Mace's Instagram. It hides it harm in Michael’s craft store color. “No More LGBTQ Agendas” is the candy red sign advertising a forty percent sale.
Anita Bryant: the "Eve"
Nancy Mace: the “Eve” and the "Pioneer Woman." The detournement of "The Pioneer Woman" sensibility posits Mace as a family-friendly figure to families who consume pastoral media and Hallmark TV-movies. A comment reads: "Nancy you're an inspiration for a lot of women God bless you Wonder Woman." The pose Mace adopts has something of a Wonder Woman heroism, with her arm on her hip, and gaze on a horizon.
What I see is the landscapes and sensibility I grew up with being used to promote bigotry. Is the sensibility fascistic?
A screenshot of a Turning Point USA Instagram post. The pride flag is symbolically erased, and the settler-colonial flag is reasserted.
I watch a video of Nancy Mace calling a trans woman a slur, repeatedly.The banality of evil: a comment on the post reads: "well, that's creepy and scary! Great job for keeping your cool. 🙌"The trans person is referred to as a "that."The trans other is deemed "creepy and scary." Mace is thanked for doing a "great job," cooly using a slur.Mace or her social media team respond: "Thank you for commenting! - Team Mace."--
It is not so long ago that America genocided thousands of queer people by refusing to prioritize AIDS research. Reagan neglected to address AIDS until thousands were already infected and dead. If conservatives wonder why it seems there are more young queer individuals, it is because past generations of young queer individuals were in hiding, straight marriages, or died from AIDS.Conservatives, like Mace insist on a single reality. Paraphrasing Talia Mae Bettcher, I think queerness destabilizes the reality-enforcer's conception of reality. Queer lives can and do haunt the conservative simulacrum.
AIDS Memorial Quilt. Will we erase an already reduced population from public education discourse? I am not thinking about private schools with high cost-for-entry, except that I wish they could be free, or cheaper.
Of course, many died alone in alleys and didn't get spaces.The quilts can be playful and clever in the face of mass death, which gestures to queer resilience.I wonder who Scott Slater is. I wonder what made him "COOLNESS."Needless death is transformed into a craft collage of pattern, care, and personality.The subjects are re-embodied by their families, original or found, and ex-partners. Sentiment asserts life lived.
The dead are provided rectangular lots.The dead are released with angel wings and doves. The dead are evoked with jeans, block letters, poems, naive pictures of trees and utopias, peace signs and scales, voids, quotes and stains, birds, flowers, colors, and rainbows, music notes, and fractals, states where they were born, and birth-death dates.Structures that lean on power and allow for maintenance and expansion of power: scaffolding on a FiDi skyscraper or U.S. capitol building.Erase the quilt from public school classrooms: dead queers meant nothing. Isn't that right, Nancy?Do Kirk's followers know the quilt exists or recognize a single name of the dead?But they love Charlie.--
The genocider wraps itself in its victim's cloth, or discards its victim's clothing.Will teaching children about a gay death memorial be called an act of grooming, or indoctrination?Or examples of queer death may be permitted in curricula.I don't mean to be an alarmist, I'm only taking erasure to its natural end.The quilt may be paraded as a warning: try this "lifestyle," and reap your fate.
----Dead lives can be a scare tactic.--
Laura Lima, Gala Chicken and Gala Coop. 2004-2011.
Can artwork be alive, and so dying?
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John Barlow & early-internet dreamer white men hoped the internet could be free of colonizers and police and money; created a new world for it to be divided into property. It could have been being, like wandering a forest is being. I tried to find K on SL. I flew across towns and biomes. I looked in castles, cathedrals, cyberpunk cities, abandoned malls, and beach towns. Yet I encountered barriers, delineating property from open space, and my search was limited to public zones, or forgotten sites.
A museum on the floor of a colonial building.
--We can build anything we want and we build the same world.------
Can another be found, not captured?
Can Arial conjure a body?--------------
Coré, the melancholy cannibal in Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day (2001).--
A contour lines the mattress angel with a bleach crown. Skin on triangle beneath shirt collar, denim flaps. Damp legs with hair glued down. My nose is congested.--Blondie has his arm around me on the subway platform at 3 AM, while police watch.He says: poor people are punished, and punished again by a system, that drains them of life spirit, and profits off their near-lifeless submission to hard work.I say: you make plans, and don't text me for twelve hours.Yes, because I am tired from working, and then at work.Blondie works fifty hours a week at Starbucks, making slightly-above minimum wage, despite having a Master's degree.Apply for a different job then. You have two degrees.I'm too tired from working all the time. The problem is you can't be happy with what I am giving you.I laugh and say: I'm not asking for much.What are you asking for exactly?Text me in the morning.I can't make any promises.--Phone screens merge with city lights in the train window.Blondie sighs: humans are opportunistic. No one's going to help you, so stop waiting for a savior, and whining like a misunderstood teen.I don't want to die poor; I don't want to get rich.Blondie says: it sounds like you'll be stuck in stasis. And on your death bed, you'll be a poor man grappling with a lifetime of inaction.Silence and conformity are rewarded, in general. Positive and good-looking nonconformity is accepted, in general. Rich overlook service workers, I was a waiter, you know, and the person treating you good is the exception. The techs believe in a hierarchy, and their superior place on it, so they're cruel to lowers. Anyway, I ditched Corp, because I realized the only way to advance in his world is to view others as appliances for self-improvement.Enough about Corp. No matter what scenario you are in, you will find a way to be unhappy.Untrue, I say. I am actually happier alone.--Blondie drives me to Queens to see a concert in the rain.I think: I might flirt with other guys.In the car, on our third date, he wore glasses I liked, knock-offs from a chain.He wears the same frames, driving now, but his demeanor is different.High, he says, time distorts, man over time.He snorts to himself.I say: funny. Funny car ride.He hits his vape, and I am sullen, with my knees to my chin.I say: if you don't think this is working out, I might flirt with other guys.You're always sad.I say: Ngai says ugly feelings can't be absorbed into capitalism.You're holding you back.Let's move out of the city to a cheap countryside.He laughs and says: I can't do that.If we were rich, we could be in love. It’s so unfair.He says: have a good night.I say: fuck you. Don't text me. I slam the car door.--A woman sits in her puffer looking out at the black ocean from the boardwalk. I can't see her face.Waves shush on the shore. A man stands with the water up to his knees, looking at the grey hotels on the horizon. I sit on the lifeguard chair.I arched K's back on my bed, which floated on the sky or water. I take the subway back.I am unhappy.My phone dies.The rice hisses and crackles in the pan and on the hush.I eat a bowl of butter rice.
Andrés Serrano, Immersion (Piss Christ), 1987. Cibachrome print, 152 × 102 cm.
She then wounds herself with a knife, stabbing herself, not trying to kill herself exactly but to continue to chip away at the part of her that remains Austrian, complicit, fascist, and conforming. Erika’s passivity is a way of refusing to be a channel for a persistent strain of fascist nationalism, and her masochism or self-violation indicates her desire to kill within herself the versions of fascism that are folded into being—through taste, through emotional responses, through love of country, love of music, love of her mother.—Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure--SUICIDE, or not?Digital death is social suicide. Is social suicide self-punishment or self-immolation? Can non-participation be a hunger strike, or is silence "neutral" compliance, or a gesture of defeat? Can suicidal expression function as resistance? Does resistance have to be utilitarian? Does resistance, too, have to work toward "productive" goals? Non-productivity can be inadvertently productive.Does resistance have to be loud? Can resistance be near silent: a frequency that alters perception by operating subliminally, or almost undetected? The most important resistance-work can be the quietest: I think about my mother.In "I'd rather die," Deli Girls shout: "Nothing you say will make me change my mind. You can't make me change, so just am I just supposed to die? I'd rather die. Nothing you say can make me change my mind."Can the assertion of a suicide urge opposes the trending "clean" lifestyle imposition and the performances of wellness, active healing, and progressive optimization it endorses?The subject can (try to) refuse to participate in a genocidal economy, if able; the subject is a human, not a subject.I am walking around Bushwick and end up at a bookstore that is doing a book club with McKenzie Wark. She says (paraphrasing): the way to not be property is to be a subject.Why do we always need more?Non-participation is a hunger strike; it results in starvation. Non-participation is a strike against comfort; it results in being made houseless, and thus invisible--or an obstacle or active disturbance to the bourgeois workday route (like the masochist who wraps himself in a carpet outside Basement nightclub, step over or on me).Can invisibility be an act of solidarity? To be invisible is to stand with the houseless, dead, and disappeared.To stand with anyone is to try to bridge toward a subjectivity I am not. Not performatively or demonstratively, but in spirit.----
DIAGONALITYByung Chul-Han writes: "Without hope, we remain trapped in beenness or in the badly existing. Only hope generates meaningful actions that bring the new into the world" (59).I have attempted to create something out of "beenness," and "the badly existing." Hope comes at the end. The expectation of hope is unfair, to people, who are rightfully hopeless, or subjected to hopeless circumstances. "Meaningless" lives are more meaningful than any "meaningful actions." Why bring "new into the world," when old is being killed to create new?I think of a decimated building: is that hope? Is renovation hope? I don't think so.In The Accursed Share, Bataille writes: "Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe. But, first, living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth" (28).While growth may be a given, organic life can grow sideways and diagonal, too.Can we grow diagonally?Can we prioritize radiation over growth?What if we did not get any taller, but intersected with each other like X-joints?Despair can be useful as a positionality if it assists a greater cause. Poor existence is a greater cause. Queer existence is a greater cause. Creating art in/through depression is an assertion of subjecthood, and an assertion of queer subjecthood rejects commodification, the specter of AIDS death, and the alt-right affront.Halberstam writes: "the dream of an alternative way of being is often confused with utopian thinking and then dismissed as naïve, simplistic, or a blatant misunderstanding of the nature of power in modernity. And yet the possibility of other forms of being, other forms of knowing, a world with different sites for justice and injustice, a mode of being where the emphasis falls less on money and work and competition and more on cooperation, trade, and sharing animates all kinds of knowledge projects and should not be dismissed as irrelevant or naïve" (83).Can we alternative-future-look under fascism and the eternally, it seems, genocidal nation? To fund one is to be one. Can we be pragmatic and still future-looking, not towards the progressivist-mechanical, but to non-hierarchal and non-Supremacist sites, while aiding and paying people who need to be paid more, more? Can we help each other?GenderFail’s “Manifesto, Profit-For-Survival” states: “we need to prioritize black folks, indigenous folks, trans and non-binary folks, undocumented folks, to normalize access to not just PROFIT-FOR-SURVIVAL but PROFIT-FOR-FUTURES. In this I do mean PROFIT in a capitalist sense, but also in the sense of how PROFIT can help create non-capitalist futures. This is not utopic, rather it is about facing the reality of living within a colonialist capitalist racist society.”
THE MISSED GOAL"Indeed the centrality of failure, negativity, and partial successes in the striving for gender to provide the foundation it promises but always fails to be is the condition for its symbolic and practical transformation" (Berlant 62).A miss in building a gendered subject, like Karim, resulted in an alternative possibility. Instead of recreating him, I created a non-body, a partial-body, an invisible body, seen only through my biased memory eye. His penis is a ghost phallus; his mouth is a transparent hole. While I am an architect recreating his image, can I become the queer or non-phallocentric (masculinity can become a site for play) architect, by constructing a body through “failure,” “negativity,” and “partial successes?” (62).It is not in a utopian imagination that a meeting with Karim can take place, but a future-less present, containing a non-real, but no less true or Real past, a re-birthed series of fragments, spoken from the mouth he was in. Instead of idealizing the past and moving toward a conservative imaginary, can stories of the past be rendered banal or surreal, and thus anarchically opposed to normative histories? I do not want to retrieve, or relive the past with Karim, because I do not want to conjure anything past. Nostalgia is conservative, it longs for what is past, and I believe we should avoid it if we seek to be non-conservative, unless we are looking at, Indigenous or non-colonial pasts, which are not past, but present. The present contains what we were and my present is moving sideways, or diagonal, rather than forward, with the Fascist march, or American progress lie. To change for the better non-better, is to pivot on an equal plane. In my mind, I can live in a fantasy-reality, not one in which my desires are satisfied, but where my desires are non-packaged; my mind is an untouchable place: my mind is my only place.The introspective vision grows richer and more detailed in appearance, if surface reality does not correspond to the individual's imagination (the imagination is inherently non-individual, as individuality itself is a societal figment). I hope that we can continue to grow our imaginings of non-totalitarianism, even if the totalitarian state requires we alter ourselves to become more outwardly normative (normative is what the state defines as normal, not what I personally think is normal, or abnormal).--I speak from my experience, I cannot speak for others: my body is a normative masculine gender-presentation, for navigation-ease and to benefit from what conformity allows for, but I am still queer. I believe my "trad-wife" mother in a straight-marriage, would also qualify as, or identify with queerness; queerness does not always correlate to conventionally "queer" gender-presentations; a masculine-presentation can be filtered and presented through an internally genderless, or non-masculine eye. Can one queer from within the normative mask (keeping in mind that an ability to be "conventional" is a luxury, and the ability to be non-conventional is not available to all, though I hope it can be)? The mask will never be normal; the space containing the miss is the queer space. Queerness can exist under a convention-copy; appearance does not always have to match internal feeling, or belief. In insular and Midwestern communities, where certain externalizations of non-conventionality can results in social-outcasting or a negation of privilege, it can be strategic to adopt a normative mask; rather than alter one’s mask to correspond to internal subjectivity. The mask can be deceptive, but a deceptive mask does not have to cloak harm.
K, LASTLY"Object-libido changes to narcissistic libido... when love changes to identification" (Silverman 193). I cannot relay Karim's experience, because it is not my own.Karim went to Islamic schools, and had sex with Grindr men. He didn't know if the hook-ups would turn out to be cops. I went to public schools, and dated openly. I didn't know if the relationships would last.Acker writes: “If I’ve died to you, if I am dead, who am I? Because I love you I’ve destroyed myself; I’m you… love destroys common time and reverses subject and object… I’m your mirror; identity’s gone because there’s no separation between life and death… the final model of time is that the mirror reflects the mirror: time is our love” (116).I loop back to K who deserves even more, yet I cut it here.--He leaned against a railing on a porch, in a Stories snapshot. I took shot after shot. He and I made out in a stall. The frat voices were slurred bros.I saw Karim on Tinder after we broke up, a week or two before he was meant to leave for Saudi. He was flexing his arm, and looking at his reflection.Later, in New York I met a guy, who said he and Karim hooked up once.I said: that sounds casual, then.It was casual. He has a big dick.True. I sipped my drink.Corp's friends told me he had a pattern for going for younger guys, artsy-types. The guy I saw at the bar in Chinatown, looked sort of like me, and I wondered if Karim had a pattern too.--"Repetition is what enables you to recognize, even unconsciously, your desire as a quality of yours" (Berlant 19).I begin again, in second person."Desire can overwhelm thought..." (Berlant 25).I wrote poems about your leg hair, sexual arousal to your thigh, and posted it online. I could not cope with being a dead-end.Berlant writes: "love is always deemed an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no attachment and no love" (7). You became a romance protagonist to me: when does fantasy turn into delusion?With a horror movie on the TV, touch escalated into sex.After, you said: I wish I could make movies, like A24.I said: you can.He said: you're betraying your American delusion. That's not how it works; I'm getting married soon, Drew.I could have embraced your family: who do not know you are gay. College was your time to be gay.You walk out from behind a bookshelf to say: my sister just had a baby.What's the baby's name?--"(...) melancholia becomes integral to love itself..." (Berlant 19).I had the most wonderful night with you at the Penn State duck pond.
REFERENCES:
Acker, Kathy. “The City.” Bodies of Work: Essays, Serpent’s Tail, 1997, pp. 106–25.Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harvest Books, 1973.Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 1996. Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
. Accessed 26 Aug. 2025.Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated by Robert Hurley, Zone Books, 1988.Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Punctum Books, 2012.Bettcher, Talia Mae. Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2023.Deli Girls. “Peg.” Take It It’s Yours, NUMB Records, 2016.Forman, James. Twenty Enemy Forces Within a Revolutionary Organization That Must Be Combatted. Black Panther Party, 1971.GenderFail. Manifesto, Profit-for-Survival: Discourses on Anti-Capitalist Publishing Practices. 3rd expanded ed., GenderFail Press, 2021.Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.Han, Byung-Chul. The Spirit of Hope. Translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, 2024.Indiana, Robert. USA 666 II. 1966–67, oil on canvas, five panels, 102 × 102 in., Museum Ludwig, Cologne.Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1989.Lopes, Ricardo, host. “#715 Lee Edelman – No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.” The Dissenter, YouTube, uploaded by The Dissenter, 2 Sept. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-kg4QRa3lc.Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard University Press, 2007.Megan Thee Stallion. Freak Nasty. 300 Entertainment, 2018.Mendelberg, Tali. “The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement.” Department of Politics, Princeton University, forthcoming, 2025, talim.scholar.princeton.edu/publications/symbolic-politics-status-maga-movement.Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson, Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013.Silverman, Kaja. Masochism and Male Subjectivity. Princeton University Press, 1992.Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. AK Press, 2004.
VIDEO LINKS:https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLYhMZy7nx/?utmsource=igwebcopylinkhttps://www.instagram.com/reel/DLLUOlPhxDV/?utmsource=igwebcopylinkhttps://www.instagram.com/reel/Cv7dPISbvz/?utmsource=igwebcopylink
I begin again. I saw Karim on Tinder after we broke up, a week or two before Saudi. He was hunting for other guys, flexing his arm, and looking at his reflection in a building's side glass pane.Later, in New York I met a guy, who said he and Karim hooked up once. He said it like he didn't know it would stun me, which he couldn't have known.I say: that sounds casual, then.It was casual. He has a big dick.True, I say, and sip my drink.Corp's friends told me he had a pattern for going for younger guys, artsy-types. The guy I saw at the bar in Chinatown, looked sort of like me, was an artsy-type and I wondered if Karim had a pattern too.Karim and Corp were mean, but I can be. The sweetest people have a knife inside. When they feel betrayed or undermined, they stab to kill.I begin again, in second person. I longed for you obsessively. I wrote poetry and posted it online to perform my obsession. I could not cope with a life I perceived to be dead-end: so what? You became a romance protagonist to me: when does fantasy become delusion?What is the line between me and you? We had sex with beheadings on the TV, horror movies, not real ones, and it was hot?I don't want to forget you. Do I regret the chokehold you had on me? I have had some very hot sex in my life; sex between two men can be passionate and intense.Meet me in heat. I am who you want to see.I could have embraced your family: who did not know you were gay. College was your time to be gay: then, back to Saudi Arabia.I think you got your behaviors from American movies and television.At our final meeting, you walk out from behind a bookshelf.You say: my sister just had a baby.Oh, really.Men play their darts, play their pool. Gold and brown beers are consumed. At a bar in Chinatown, I ran into someone who knew you back in Pennsylvania and he said: oh yeah, we hooked up.I say: green chintz duvet and green eyes, no brown, meant nothing to me.Nothing?Nothing at all. Though I wrote letters with lines like: I had the most wonderful night with you at the Penn State duck pond.I did the same.And, and, I wrote, every time I vape now, I'll think of you.I wrote the same.--Karim, sits on his rug, making eye contact.In the bathroom of the first sports bar with a beach along the wall, I posted a selfie captioned: love is an attempt to bridge an unbridgeable gap, and love is the feeling of bridging it.Did I love you or love that you could take me away? I say to Karim on a bridge, high above the water. The bridge is in the clouds.Both.Your hair is like a cloud.You cut yours.Yes, I shaved it after you, and I have kept it cut short.The sky is too blue overhead, on the bridge. Turns out, we are characters in your Animal Crossing world, and not my SL game. You walked your short character across the world to meet me here. We are both shorter on the game.You shared your world, in an apartment that was private, too. You showed me your private--Life.I look for you around: how many hours have I spent looking for, and constructing you?Obsessively resurrecting you has stunted my progress, and I do not mind.You should leave me.So I do.
Sounds like clickbait: people who don't post on Instagram may be dead already, symbolically "suicided," or in the process of being worked to death offline. Digital death is social suicide. Is social suicide self-punishment or self-immolation? Can non-participation be a hunger strike, or is silence always misread as "neutral" compliance, or a gesture of defeat? Can suicidal expression function as resistance? Does resistance have to be utilitarian? Does resistance, too, have to work toward "productive" goals? Non-productivity can be inadvertently productive. In "I'd rather die," Deli Girls shout: "Nothing you say will make me change my mind. You can't make me change, so just am I just supposed to die? I'd rather die. Nothing you say can make me change my mind." The assertion of a suicide urge opposes the trending "clean" lifestyle imposition and the performances of wellness, active healing, and progressive optimization it endorses. It opposes conservative arbiters in power, by refusing to perform "okayness" or "involvement" in power-scaffoldings. Symbolic suicide can be an act of radical refusal to further be transformed or optimized by a system, which is killing the subject. The subject refuses to be healed by a system killing it. The subject refuses to participate in a genocidal economy. The subject is a human, not a subject. The subject asserts humanity to rupture the distancing academic tone. Non-participation is a hunger strike; it results in starvation. Non-participation is a strike against comfort; it results in being made houseless, and thus invisible--or perhaps better or worse than invisible, an obstacle or active disturbance on the bourgeois workday route (like the masochist who wraps himself in a carpet outside Basement, step over me or on me). A poverty-spectacle functions as an abject intrusion. A poverty-spectacle reminds the middle and upper classes, of their oppressive statuses and active compliance in a murderous socio-economic scheme. A glimpse of an outskirt, or a dissident thought is a different note in the echoing bubble-cavern.Poverty kills. White patriarchal Imperialism kills its underside. Despite progressive efforts at diversified representation, state-sponsored slaughter still occurs. We change what we can. I refuse to "get rich" or invest in "becoming better" while people are dying of class discrepancy, misogyny, anti-queerness, racism, and genocide. Is this an expression of white privilege? We refuse if we can. We act when we can. We act how we can. We act if it kills us.
IN PROGRESS
For K: a gay anti-gesamtkunstwerkOne year and eight months ago, I met K.
You told me about Saudi Arabia: Islamic school, your religious sisters and their husbands, men on Grindr hacking your phone and threatening to send your Grindr chats to all your phone contacts, and The Line, a two trillion-dollar smart city being built across the desert. You told me the first time you had sex was on vacation in Germany because you were too scared of being arrested for hooking up in Saudi Arabia. You said some Grindr profiles are undercover cops. I was mesmerized by your eyes while you were telling me about the cops."He" becomes "you" as we become more familiar. You suggested a handsome escape. I made all your attributes charming and looked for a star-crossed narrative.Men play their darts, play their pool. Cups of gold and brown fluid are consumed.
You will move back to Saudi Arabia. You will marry a woman there. Your parents are adding a wing to their large house for you, your wife, and your future children. The financial incentives provided by staying at the oil company will keep you there, and overpower your desire to live a gay American lifestyle.
I made K into a prince and this is the problem with my gaze. K is a subject not an impersonal object. K lives in Saudi Arabia now and I don't know him.
write through the despair that makes my limbs and body feel greasy and heavy and my lungs slimy and full.
Ugly feelings that have no use cannot be absorbed into capital.
"The eroticization of suffering" saves me from my Death Drive. Pain is just pain without the eroticization of it. Pain kills. Pain is terrible.
The erotic other is hated, loved, and admired, incorporated into one's being, then spit out.
K's leaving was intolerable; he became an intolerable reminder of future loss. I wanted to remember him, so I wrote him down. I tried to splice K into a video work. I couldn't find the right tone or point. I couldn't arrange him across a page to frankenstein him. My "melancholy cannibalistic imagination" repudiated "the loss’s reality," and I still couldn't have him in my mouth again. On our first date at a restaurant, he ate an octopus tentacle. I swallowed an octopus limb from his plate. The octopus limb is a phantom limb of K's. Rather than “cannibalize” you, I wanted to join with you. Marriage promises eternal attachment. The white veil cloaks the snarling face, and the tuxedo hides the hairy body of the animal. Marriage groups citizens into expanding units. Marriage is a veil on our animal being; the veil is made of interlocking white lines, the grid screens the bride from his/their/her bride/groom.
The depressed person defends themself against death anguish and anguish caused by the erotic object. The depressed is dead until the melancholy goes away. "You" brings to mind K's face first, which is holy and spotted with absences. Holy drape on a green glowing prairie.
You said: When you touched me I died.
K's family was Palestinian. I swore off Judaism when Israel dropped the bombs (again). I did not have to swear off Judaism, but I don’t feel attached to Judaism. In Hebrew school they said Israel is good. In primary school they said America is good. I believed what the teachers said because the teachers were authority figures. In public school, they split us into groups.
Teacher: one group play pilgrim, the other play indigenous. They did not use the word indigenous.
Teacher: Sit at table and eat thanksgiving together.
Why do people feel pride for a genocidal nation?2: CORP
Corp saw me across the room, with a broken iPhone. I should have been invisible wearing no designer brands, but you noticed me. It was a chance meeting between us (like fate) my second week in NYC. He helped me fix my iPhone.A dog stares off the wall in a photograph. It is preserved with black eyes and misses its earth bone. The heater keeps rattling like a cobra who doesn’t rattle.
.
I tried to be your housewife. On the TV of the apartment in Greenpoint, I lie on a plush couch and learn how to be a restaurant host from YouTube videos. You say I should get rich so I can go to Equinox like you. I don't want to. You say: "Go back to Bushwick then. Go back to your trash apartment on Myrtle Broadway, with shit all over your doorstep, and your cracked-out coked-out roommates. Do you want that lifestyle or do you want to be an Equinox-er like me?"
.
I talked to my "cracked-out coked-out" roommate about this when she was doing kitchen lines and I was drunk. She said: "This is a classic NYC coming-of age experience, older man, slightly predatory vibe picks up young newcomer, who is bright and bushy-tailed just like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. You'll be fine..." And I was. She is wise, because she used to be a sex-worker in Paris. Her ex-boyfriend said: "If you don't like to work, you'll become a prostitute." And she did.
.
If all utopian possibilities are eliminated, we must do our best to excel within the stated conditions. Megan Thee Stallion says: "Lick on my hand, then I put it in his pants. Get to playing with that cock and make that motherfucker bam and I walk and I talk like a pimp 'cause I am." Megan accepts that "sex is the corollary of capitalism and war" and advocates pragmatic strategies to win the sex-money-war game. I try to see sex as strategy. I use sex to get what I want from Corp. I withhold sex when I am unhappy. I have sex like a soldier with a soldier. Paul Preciado writes: "...the raw materials of today’s production process are excitation, erection, ejaculation, and pleasure and feelings of self-satisfaction, omnipotent control, and total destruction... sex is the corollary of capitalism and war, the mirror of production." Sex is absorbed into capitalist exchange; providing sex acts to/for money in a direct or indirect exchange is a strategy if one wants to or needs to profit. Choice is a luxury. If one is locked into production's mirror room, one will have sex in the mirror room.
Paul Preciado writes: potentia gaudendi," or "orgasmic force... This strength is of indeterminate capacity; it has no gender... its orientation emphasizes neither the feminine nor the masculine and creates no boundary between heterosexuality and homosexuality or between object and subject… Orgasmic force is the sum of the potential for excitation inherent in every material molecule... It is a force of transformation for the world in pleasure—'in pleasure with.' Potentia gaudendi unites all material, somatic, and psychic forces and seeks all biochemical resources and all the structures of the mind" (33).
Homosexual, heterosexual, trans, and non-binary sex contain potential for unregimented orgasmic expansion and transformation. The genderless orgasmic force is queer expression. It haunts and threatens preconceived games, orders, rulebooks, and warfare. Queerness is not a capitalist tactic; it does not play within exchange-based doctrine; it seeks to exceed it. It shares; it does not exchange. It widens; it is not narrowed by penetration. It is not focused on one giving, and the other taking. It is not financial. Queerness opposes capitalism, queerness is greater; "it is a force of transformation for the world." Is it a privilege to strive to be outside capital? Corp thought so, but capital will have this effect on a corp.
Preciado writes: "potentia gaudendi... does not allow itself to be reified or transformed into private property." The orgasm is a boundless non-commodity.
What are Christians supposed to do without a priest's validation? What are Capitalists supposed to do without a consistent salary check or promotion on the horizon? What is the point of life? What is life without heaven?
Keep up the GOOD WORK. Your job is DOING GOOD. You're doing a GOOD JOB. Do you see how language enforces the capitalist reality it exists in?
I liked being with Corp because he was a "normal man," with a "good income" and "stable situation."
Why can’t YOU accept people? Why are YOU obsessed with genitalia? STRAIGHT PEOPLE can only understand sex as penetrative. Individuals with narrow conceptions of reality determine who is or is not worthy of rights, or acceptance. Normalcy asserts what it is normal through “reality enforcement,” yet straight reality is constructed and not “reality” at all. Straight reality demonizes alternative and marginalized realities as products of mental illness and disturbance in order to discredit alternative experience. Alternative experience disturbs them.
During sex, I imagine you are wearing K's face, and I wish we were in a sci-fi movie where I could press a button that would project K's face onto yours. I do not remember K's face.
"You" becomes "he" again, is this epistolary? I can't decide if he can be you.
Closed-eye hallucinations of you, you hover above me with a smile stretched wide over a skeleton. The fantasy decayed in real-time. The smiling face turned static.
I am still posted on your Instagram. I am the cold dead-eyed puppy hanging in a photograph on your wall. I am preserved for you and others to see in my happiest state, with a wagging tail. Delirious in the windowless room, I move to the light-filled kitchen to cook pasta. Empty streets remind me how empty streets are without you. Big eye murals stare at me. A rat smacks into my foot. I pass Nook. We didn't fight at Nook; we fought later that day when you kept painting my dirty studio floors white even though I said not to. I'm doing this for you, you said. I said, I'm telling you not to. I am going on a date with the guy I was seeing when I first met you. Your eyes will watch us make out on the ceiling.
When body is gone, there is soul. When soul is gone, there is money. What am I without money. Only money I have is yours.
I return to my door stoop, and there is the sad pimpled smoker outside again who never says hi, just stares at the ground, with his grunge music blaring. He is me again.
I cook an egg in chili crisp and garnish with cilantro.
I did not want to be a smiling face with a clown nose, honked for entertainment in a service-relationship, where I am a product-person, being conscripted into a life where one person does something for another, expecting something in return. I don't want to be a good investment, or prove to be one.
I want to be a frowning clown.
I stand on my shit stoop slamming cigarettes.
I ate the food Corp gave me, and when I look at the vomit, all I see is his money.
—
I think about early net.art. And the hope that the internet could be a radical realm, free of colonizers and police, and money. And capital turning humans into capital; apps turning humans into optimized bots. The post-future mourns past future visions. Maybe the creation of a free realm was a manifestation of American manifest destiny. Part-infinity. New realm was created and colonized. We created a new realm to tame it. West Coast hippies, LSD-takers tried to be outside the mainstream and create an a-capital way-of-being. Radical lawless, yet cooperative place it could have become with no hierarchy and equal opportunity. Being like wandering through a forest is being; I tried to do that on Second Life during COVID, just wander, just fly around. Yet, I encountered barriers, delineating property from open space.
In Second Life, I was a ghost finally. I looked in the mirror and saw nothing; I was wandering with no body. We choose what is familiar to imitate. We choose kitsch.
Can an artwork compose itself of decomposing fragments of Self and internalized Other? Can arial font conjure a body? Can a webpage? Can an artwork be genreless, media-fluid, and non-commodity? Can an artwork be a chopped and screwed diary?3: BLONDIE
Blondie was the angel twink I thought could save me from my sick room and despair. He was a Starbucks supervisor, not a corporate high-up like Corp. I thought maybe he would have internalized capitalism less because he was on a lower class rung than Corp, but I was wrong. People with less money or influence are often still indoctrinated in "work hard, earn more" propaganda. If they work hard, they do earn more. Blondie was working fifty hours a week at Starbucks, making slightly-above minimum wage (and addicted to stimulant drugs), despite having a Masters degree. He saw valor in this, despite disliking the Starbucks corporation. I thought the dislike was a good sign until Blondie began resenting me for not wanting to work my way up a corporate ladder like him. He did not see me as a person who could take him higher. I agreed.
He thought I was a star, initially, because he saw me shining at my art show. He did not realize that was a blip, though I tried to tell him "I am a low creature, like a rodent here." I realized Blondie was a CGI star, a person made of signifiers with nothing but the desire to shine brighter underneath. Starbucks captured his solar energy and used his sociability. It flattened him like Corp’s Apple job flattened Corp. Starbucks was transforming him into a star buck. I don't think Blondie should have to work fifty hours a week on drugs with a Masters degree at a fast food chain to stay alive in New York. Starbucks enabled him to pay rent and have fun, while on prescription-stimulants (like many). The job was good enough to sedate him. When not at work, he wanted to have sex or have fun. I was too sad and difficult, obsessed with my own problems and the worlds' like many liberals. I did not want to have sex because I felt neglected.
Close the door and I suck the pink hook right away, hit the floor. The narrative climax is an orgasm.
Blondie and I go out for one last supper. The vegetable dumpling tastes fetid. It reminds me of Midwest takeout from the yellow storefront on beige street where everyone was drunk. Drunk, the now-dead people played with each other and yelled at their children. I push the dumplings around, beige lumps on soy sauce-stained paper plates. Scrape plastic utensils against the paper pulp and small white pills appear. I sigh. Why are you sighing? I sigh--trying to calm down. Why are you trying to calm down?
Phone screens merge with city lights in the window. Empire state building is still pretty to me. I smacked your ass in front of shady police in the subway after.
I scrape the dumplings into the marble trash hole with control. Dead people had a cupid statue on the marble mantle next to an urn. Dead people fly around the marble island. Winged arms catch takeout containers. Cupid flies off the mantle, crashes through a high window, and returns to Rome.
The lump dumpling ascends my esophagus and exits my mouth, plopping on the soy-sauce-spotted dalmatian plate.
—
You drove me to Queens to see a concert in the rain. You told me to flirt with other guys. I danced beside ensnared couples alone. In the car, you wore the glasses I liked, knock-offs from a chain, and they reminded me of our early dates, when you would wear them in the car and I would tell you I liked them, then tear them off.
Make out at stoplights, drops on the windshield made shadows on your face. Same frames you wear while driving now, though your demeanor is different. Time distorts man. Driving in the rain, orange and navy lights, your face is splitting. Before, I waved at roommates who looked at me like I was a cat being readied to get put down. You said: take your grey sweatshirt, said we would be better off friends, driving in the rain, though I disagreed.
I eat a bowl of butter rice.
I undo the squeaky bottle cap while waves shush on the shore. A man stands with the water up to his knees looking at the grey hotels and buildings on the horizon. Percocet pond with bleach-tipped curls. Green blips on the horizon and an archway of lights, maybe planes. Arch like the St. Louis one. Arching blips on a black sky. I arched his back on my bed which floated on the sky or water. I take the subway back. Phone dies. Wander through the Hasidic neighborhood and fry rice at home. Hiss and crackling on the hush. Lifeguard chair watched the whole time and held me. Lifeguard chair under the St. Louis archway is made of plywood, no matter. The lifeguard's chair was safe.
ACT II
When I was dying five years ago, drugged on random circles in the bath, the water turned yellow and warm. I began to dissolve into urine, who is like god. God is a warm and sunny pool.
Belted to the bed cot in the ambulance, I made small talk with the EMT.
Sour cream bedsheet is a noose around my neck. I take the noose off."Without hope, we remain trapped in beenness or in the badly existing. Only hope generates meaningful actions that bring the new into the world.""Living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth."What would happen if we all grew diagonally, if our arms and communal shelters shot out like tree branches, and we did not get any taller, but rather began to intersect with each other like X-joints? No more skyscrapers, only branches weaving together.“PROTESTERS INTERRUPT WALL STREET AND SHUT IT DOWN DURING PRIDE MONTH FOR PALESTINE, SIMILAR TO SOME OF THE ACTIONS OF GRAN FURY AND ACT UP DURING THE AIDS CRISIS.”And: “A GENERAL BOYCOTT OF FIRE ISLAND, MOST OF THE FANCY, RICH AND GLAMOROUS GAYS WON'T LIKE THIS ONE BUT FUCK THEM. SIDENOTE, I DON’T WANNA LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE FIRE ISLAND IS THE IDEAL WITH ITS RICH YUPPIE GAY POWER BULLSHIT… IF YOU FEEL LIKE A BAD FUCKING PERSON READING THIS, THATS THE POINT: DO ANYTHING, OR ELSE YOU WILL SLIDE EVEN FURTHER INTO THE MORAL ROT OF THIS HORRIBLY UNJUST SOCIETY.“ACT III
K, LASTLY
I loop back to K who deserves even more, yet I cut it here.NOTE ON THE STRUCTURE:
The document evades capture. The document opposes power and power's sensibility. It kaleidoscopes diaristic, poetic, and academic registers.
The self is recursive. The self deteriorates in the recursive machine. The self is polyphonic instability. Instability destabilizes and disturbs panoptic enforcement. The self is the document. The document cries and eats itself. The self is contradiction. Its masochistic performance opposes the sadistic engine. It kills unproductive responses. Its unproductive responses are non-productivity. Fragmentation is form and content. It is past, present, and future cut up and spliced. It's its mutant baby. Fragmentation is produced by the killing machine who splits its citizen-parts. The citizen splits itself first. The citizen is an IT. The citizen is a dollar. The citizen is not a star. The document is a pop song remix. The document is morally inferior. The document is an attempt. The document is an attempt at gay DADA. And it is an attempt at a non-total atonal work, that is play.
Who the fuck likes to sing
to dead roses.
I buy a bouquet, and I watch him
Eat the petals like Lays.
While I lay here like a thumbs up.GOD’s small dot is the teary eye.
I lay on a chip bag.
The crinkle is in my sleep.
I project a psychic bruise onto the lost coat (which carries a note and conceals a collar) and I look at myself in the mirror. A bird flies across the black fabric of the coat which is a bloody night sky. Its wings make a V. The coat floats off the nail, and goes from where it was hanging, while windows glow green (far off, unattainable vistas) and the black coat turns into an opulent purple mountain. Guess I have to climb it like a Gorp, take a winding path to the mountain’s collar. The mountain is nailed to the sky, yet floats above it. I look down at the sky. Wipe your fucking tears.I am lesser than "The Great Unknown." Is It located in the excess? Are They?White light pierces the psychic mess, which is a mound-mountain.Have you ever lost anything? Have you ever lost a coat you didn't own? The net worth of a nice coat is greater than me. My college tuition was an investment I haven't paid off. I am forty dollars. I am lesser than The Great Unknown.The coat was a triangular shape hanging off the hook like a mountain.I am a coat. My body is a coat I unzip. Do you want to wear me? Do you want to come inside the warm coat?
Bite, oil and charcoal on canvas
Karim, oil on canvas, 20 x 26 inches
But rain/pain was nothing 2 me (justice mallets, though no justice in USA), oil, acrylic, paper, and charcoal on canvas
Wilma in the stars, acrylic, oil, paper, graphite, on canvas
Hell diva, oil and acrylic on canvas, 24 x 48 inches
Psycho-romance fairytale with K, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches
Drawings from KuBA: Kulturbahnhof residency in Klein Warnow, Germany.
The field ran through us, oil and acrylic on canvas, 44 x 60 inches
Extension of a hand/ purple is the color of excess, oil on panel
Fighters, oil on canvas, 10 x 23 inches
YMCA child, oil, acrylic, ink, and denim on canvas
St. John the Baptist with Vogue Dancers and Octavia Butler, oil on canvas. Exhibited at NADA New York 2024 with Afternoon Projects.
Pennsylvania January, oil on panel
With this flower and a dagger for you, oil on panel
NYC barter-economy fantasy/ an apple for a coin, a coin for an apple, charcoal on paper
Shapeshifter, 30 x 40 inches, oil on canvas
Crying at the Sheetz with a Jon Serl musician and Die Grrrrl-boy graffiti (Sheetz is often located in rural alt-right regions), oil on canvas
autofiction
A framed photograph of a model with a crotch bulge in white underwear hangs above a crowd of mostly men with good haircuts and tight tops with maximum skin exposure. They dance and go home.—Near his apartment, the word Clone is spray-painted in black and white block letters and dripping on the side of the building like a loose gash.L says: It's all over the US. Hex's friends are trying to paint it in all the major cities to remember Hex with.Why Clone?It was Hex's tag, so they're trying to do it forward and make him live on.—On the stoop still later, D says: If he didn't want to get off fentanyl, he would have died regardless.L says: he was going to move to New York in a couple weeks. He would have lived near you.D says: he would have died here.—At the cocktail lounge, a few days later, L sits swinging her legs with flip flops hanging off her toes.You make me feel like not a terrible person, L says, because you’re connected to your shadow self like me. Everyone else thinks I have a moral failing.For what?Like people think you're evil if you cheat, or drunk drive. You understand. Evil is caused, and evil actions are committed by good people. Good people are not real. We both know some pretty evil people.They're always normal. They won't admit they're evil sometimes, or complicit. They're in denial. Good Christian-types and good citizens are the worst. The ones they hate are where it's at. Anyone hated by a good citizen is hated, because the good citizen is seeing in that person something they hate in themselves, or have repressed, or rejected, or never been allowed to contact. Or they're judging humans based on their acts. But so-called degenerate acts result from need, conditioning, or hardship, like the crimes in Bresson. Victims and oppressed people lash out, and then are called immoral. They are called immoral before they lash out too, or have to prove themselves as upstanding in order to be taken seriously or considered fucking human. And yeah, the real-real immoral degenerates are never caught, are the ones in power, rapists and pedophiles and the sorts. Those guys are the winners. They always win.True. And a drunk-driver is not inherently a bad person, but you say that to anyone and even the mere voiced thought, makes you a bad person for voicing it. Speech is dead. I'd rather hang with a drunk driver who regrets it, than a man who cannot imagine or fathom the idea of "drunk driving," while doing the socially acceptable version of it on the daily.She takes a sip of her drink and says: I'm confusing myself, but a poor drunk driver is better any day than a rich man accused of rape.D says: poor crimes are more acceptable and understandable than rich crimes, I agree. Rich get away with their crimes, because they have the money to swipe the crimes away. Rich are so blessed and they don't even realize; they are always finding problems, still. They commit crimes, because of greed and wanting more, not because of actual need, or marginalization.L laughs and says: my friends and I drunk drive, and smash up rich people cars at night.D: the people in this bar have probably done worse things. I think you're still a better and more interesting person than all the people in this bar, and I actually understand you and why you do what you do, unlike these people.He sweeps his arm around the room.L: same with you.D: I don't judge you. It's not good. But I hope you don't kill anyone, and also can't stop you.L: used to, we used to do it, after Hex died, and I didn't care about anything or anyone. Haven't you ever driven drunk before?D: hm, I've driven after one or two drinks, but never more. I don't want to risk DUI, or kill anyone. And I also don't want to die.L: true. Same.D: aren't you scared of getting in trouble? Or killing anyone?L: I won't. I'm careful. And I don't do it anymore. Never mind.The people at the table next door start talking about the buzzy ArtNet article: young artists are jumping to blue chip representation and skipping the usual steps.L says: where would I be if I hadn't moved to Seattle?D says: back in Pennsylvania doing skincare, where you got your license.L says: everyone loves me. I just tell people what to do all the time, and they listen like my little minions.—On the second fruity drink, L says: it's so pathetic that poor people imitate and worship the rich and suck up to them and do whatever they say and do whatever they can to get rich, but yeah I hate being poor.True, D says, when you're poor, it's so easy to get stuck in a cycle of poverty and addiction. But you don't do drugs, and I don't either.L says: no, I don't, but I did. I had a bad coke habit before Hex died. But him dying made me want to stop.That's good. We sound like a PSA.D stirs his straw around.D says: Drugs are bad. My ex-situationship was a meth addict, and then that turned into coke addiction and alcoholism. But he told me I helped him stop drugs, though he'd do them in secret, then cry about not feeling well and not knowing why. It was terrible, but he was a good person. It was too much pressure. Anyways, I would date a kind, yet poor drug addict over a mean, though rich man any day. Also rich can be drug addicts too, but all the drug addicts I know are poor, unfortunately, so it consumes all their finances.L says: yeah, yeah. The average citizen is a good listener and follower. People believe in conventional morality. It's a hoax.D says: we judge the wrong people. Judge the top of the hierarchy, instead. Judge the crown.L says: I wanna be the people's princess like Alex G.D: I can see that for you. I want to be reclusive.Wait, I have to show you this. L pulls up a video. She's hopping out a minivan and spray-painting the door, crouched over.Yeah, they have been sending this to all the neighbors, saying watch out for me. L points at herself.L sighs and looks around the room: I wish I could kill them all.Woah there, I say, who?I-d-k, she says, but I'm serious.The tables next to us are talking louder.I want them to know, I am right next door.I am sure they know.L says: I want to be rich.You want to be a husk?Yeah, I want to be a big shell. L puts two hands on the table. I want to be a mega mega big shell. I want to be a hot air balloon.D: But we're fine, though.L: We are.D: We're both happy, and will be fine.D & L: We will be.They clink their glasses.L: Are we evil?D: What even are stocks? What even is art?L: I have no idea, like investing in a future?D: I have no idea.L: The best artists are all unknowns on the west coast, like in Seattle and Portland making tortured shit on drugs, and spraying it all over the street and no one will ever see it. They will die unknown, alone, poor, and uncelebrated like Hex, dude—I loved him—like my friends, dude. They'll die unknown.D nods and says: you won't.L asks: how is art here?D: art here is—He presses his palms into his eyes and sticks his tongue out like a dead dog. He shakes his head and looks down at the table.D: I don't know. It's all money everywhere. Money, money, money. I don't know.You do know, and I agree. She rubs her fingertips together—pointer, middle finger, and thumb—looks around, and mouths: BILLS.You know.D straightens his posture.And we're not evil, D says. We have anger still.I hope there is heart and soul.We have so much time.L says: I do have so much time. I'm going to be painting in New Mexico if Seattle doesn't work out, and you can come and live with me.I might. I can go anywhere now.You can. My room is four-hundred. You could find something like it. It's not that hard to pay, I work like four shifts a week.Come to Brooklyn.Maybe I will, L says, putting her hand under her chin, and she laughs.They clink their glasses.
At the cocktail lounge, Layla sits swinging her legs and dangling her flip flops off her toes. It's dark in the room, red and black, and everyone's wearing nice but unfamiliar clothing, like I don't know the brands or what this style is. A man's manicured moustache stands out, it's cute like him. Layla and I are in our worst clothes, public pool style.You make me feel like not a terrible person, Layla says, because you’re connected to your shadow self like me. Everyone else thinks I have a moral failing.For what?Like people think there's something morally wrong with you if you cheat, or like everyone's Christian and stupid.True, like Christians run the country.The people at the table next to us start talking about the ArtNet article about big galleries picking up young artists, so they skip the small gallery to mid-gallery step.Layla says: it's so pathetic that poor people imitate and worship the rich and suck up to them and do whatever they say and do whatever they can to get rich, but yeah I hate being poor.Yeah, I say, when you’re poor, it’s so easy to get stuck in a cycle of poverty and addiction.True, Layla says. Where would I be if I hadn't moved to Seattle?I say: probably aesthetician in one of the small Trump towns like the one where you got your license. But instead you've managed to integrate into this PNW DIY scene.Layla takes a pause and sips her drink.Like all my friends are crystal-heads, though.Wait, I have to show you this. Layla pulls up a video of her hopping out a minivan and crouched over on a door stoop spray-painting the door.Yeah, they have been sending this to all the neighbors, saying like watch out for--The waitress interrupts and takes an almost empty drink without asking.Layla grabs it out of her hand, I wasn't fucking done, she says. Layla sighs and looks around the room, I wish I could kill them all.Woah there, I say, who?I-d-k, she says, but I'm serious, she laughs.The tables next to us are talking louder. Is it to match or surpass Layla's volume level?I want them to know, Layla repeats, I am right next door.Escalating the volume of our conversation, I say, I am sure they know. Anyways, rich people are sad.True, dude, she says, like they sold their souls for cash.Seems fun, though, I say.If you're into being a husk.I want to be a husk, I say. I want to be a big shell. Do you?Yeah dude, she says. I want to be a mega mega big shell. I want to be a fucking hot air balloon.D: But we're fine, though.L: We are.D: We're both happy, and will be fine.D & L: We will be.D: But I'm angry.L: I am too.D: Who are you angry at?L: Rich people.D: Why?For hogging all the fucking money, and killing the poor, while they have their fucking parties.That's aggressive. Let's toast.They clink their glasses at the cocktail lounge.D says: at least we fit in here.And they both laugh.
creative nonfiction
I sit in a hooded bench, raised for hunters to aim at deer. A bullet train traces a line from my right periphery past my left's. The bullet train announces itself with a sail note. A stout man waits to use the gun tower.The sky is orange above hay rolls on a plain. Blonde children play hopscotch outside a town hall. It is a white building with white pillars. Plain.Human-shaped grain sacks are dressed in military uniforms. The dolls pose in lawn panoramas or on fire trucks, slumped drunk, or holding phallic hoses.I’m taking photos of a mirrored gazebo at a hunting lodge. Inside, two women kiss while statesmen parade, a town over.Tire piles are black snakes on steamrolled trees.The RV lot is a white sail on moving video.Back close to my yellow house, turbines spin. A truck carries a sediment hill.My Israeli feminist neighbor gifts militant Acker books. She invites me to watch Black Mirror and we watch it without speaking. Earlier, townspeople gawked her trans wife, who bowed her head carrying a grocery bag. A man smokes outside the window. The train appears every hour. He's silent while the sail passes. He sits in a chair in front of his stucco house.A rubber horse lies fallen over. I drag flower pictograms over the image with my finger. Its eye looks at me after the symbolic burial. The eye reflects my eye and resembles my iPhone lens.I photograph three spinners: pinwheels, bladed farm machines, and turbines.I snap a glass door with an orchid Fathead. A garage door has its door removed, replaced by wood planks surrounding a hovering jeep tail. A pug is perky in a lawn pot on a sidewalk square before a car factory. A blue flower is next to a hot rail.
A glass door with an orchid Fathead. A garage door has its door removed, and in place of the door are wood planks surrounding a hovering jeep tail. A white pug sits statuesque in a lawn pot on a sidewalk square before a factory, like an altar. The 16:9 images are flat on my phone with enhanced color and contrast.Three spinners: pinwheels, farm machines, and turbines. Pinwheels are planted in the lawn next to farm machines with spinning blades on metal circles. I sit in a hooded bench, raised high for hunters to aim at far deer. A bullet train traces a long line from my right periphery to my left. The bullet train announces itself with a sailing sound. A nine-petaled blue flower is next to a hot rail.The sky is orange above hay cylinders and blonde children, who played hopscotch outside a white pillared building near the Lidl we visit once per week. Exercise machines are lonely next to slumped medieval houses, made of stone and x-ed by black planks close to the eyeglass store. Halved buildings rot next to new ones. Chairs sit on sagging floors suspended above a people-less street.“Basket” is scrawled on a checkpoint wall. “Basket” is painted over a castle mural.Human-shaped grain sacks are dressed in military uniforms and posed in lawn panoramas or on fire trucks, slumped drunk, or holding limp phallic hoses, ineffectively putting out forest fires in former East Germany.In the quiet car, the Danish woman says, my mother was an East German.Holes break up a flat wall with a sunlight shape on it. The sunlight shape moves across the concrete and turns from rectangle to rhombus on my neighbor's house.I bike to a nearby hunting lodge. I’m taking photos of a mirrored gazebo. Two women are kissing inside, and look scared to see me. I apologize in German. Two women kiss with a military parade the next town over. Pennsylvania is not dissimilar: trees, militaria, and private queerness.The landscape is an archive erasing. Stone stubs with faint names appear like spawn. A low field is an empty cube cut-out with cornstalk hair on the bottom plane.Tire piles are black snakes wriggling on steamrolled trees.The turbines are visible, always, turning steadily in the sky.Losing it, I mutter while clutching the tire-printed handlebars, and blow smoke over my shoulder. I arrive at the gun tower. A stout man wants to use the gun tower, so I let him.The sky has some slate in it. I see the slate in between black trees. The ground is black too, like space. I see two headlights like star trails on the earth. I trip over a log and sink my teeth into a bush.Rail-thin men riding bikes frown, and I quicken my bike pace. I go fast down a hill next to an RV lot. I go faster while filming the RVs, which blur into a white sail.Back close to the yellow house, I see my turbine friends again. The turbines are as wide as the yellow house, where greying apples spill behind a window from a bin.I slice cucumbers at the window. A military truck drives past with a sediment hill making a humpback.The train comes again.My neighbor was an Israeli feminist who gave me militant Acker books. She invited me to watch Black Mirror and we watched it without speaking. Townspeople gawked her trans wife who bowed her head buying groceries. A man smokes outside the window. The train appears every hour. He did not speak, though he was only twenty feet away. He sat in the chair in front of the grey building. I saw him there every day.I lay down in the grass and say "AAHHHG" into it.I spin around and lie down in the steamrolled field. A white van passed by earlier. I’m the only person for miles, unless a hunter sneaks up. I spin around while the turbines, pinwheels, and tractors spin. We are present-tense and absence.The train climbs off the ground, arching over the RVs on a brown-brick structure flying up from the water.A rubber horse lies flat next to a pinwheel. I drag flower pictograms over the image with my finger. At last, only its eye is visible, and it resembles a human eye overlapping my own. It resembles my iPhone lens. I filter the sacred.
autofiction
Abe tucked into serviceable sheets after taking off his puffer and jeans. Two neighbors in the room woke to Abe's alarm. Abe donned his puffer. The all-male household looked up from its coffee and straightened its postures when Drew and Abe left together.On the oceanside walk, Abe wore a tin man's coat below purple hair. The coat flashed light shapes on the blue sky and sand.Maria ate chips in the sandstone building at lunch. She placed each chip in her mouth with two glossed fingers. Her lip-glossed mouth was above a mask sling. Flaky salt stuck to the pink gloss. Her legs crossed. Drew's legs crossed. Abe eyed Maria wiping her fingers on a paper napkin, while ocean sounds musicked the room—real and machine-made. A chip lay curved on the floor below Abe's chair. Drew looked out a window behind Abe's chair. Drew clicked his pen. Abe clicked his pen. Maria clicked her pen.Abe's coat was ahead of the window, pressed into the plastic chair back.Drew peeled his sunburn. Maria picked chip crumbs off her lipstick: she pressed her finger on the lip and smeared its edge. Her fingertip was pink with crumbs landed in the residue. Maria wiped her finger on a paper napkin. And then rubbed her hands over her jeans, up and down. The napkin was a crumple on the floor: a white flower with a pink bloom. It bumped into Abe's coat sleeve which was trailing off the chair. Abe pinched his earring and rotated his bracelet. Arms stretched up with interlocked hands, and chins pointed at the window.Back home, lobsters sat on each other and clicked. They tapped the glass of the fruit drawer.
short fiction
The tattooed guy shows an hour late to the third date with a phone on five percent. The Australian was waiting for him. He says: I almost left.I'm sorry.Let's try to have a good time, still.The Australian speed-walks to their seats, and the tattooed guy speeds to follow. The Australian is trying to lose him. They sit down next to a couple.The couple is from Utah. The wife introduces her husband: he's a construction-company manager.He sits beside her, silent. He watches the game with his knees curled to his chin. His beer can, a tall boy, is crunched between his knees.The tattooed guy looks down at colorful shirts and faces ringed on a ramp jutting off a green stadium floor, which has a blue rectangular court on it with a tennis match occurring. Neither men talk to each other, but the tattooed one keeps making moves: bumping his elbow into the Australian's arm, or positioning his shoulder slightly behind the Australian's shoulder, or grazing his finger on the bulging thigh. Both men watch the game. The Australian watches the game like he is watching a long-awaited installment of his favorite franchise. The other watches it with a neutral mask. A win looks like a loss.Men in collared shirts and men with barbed wire tattoos wait in a stream to use the stalls or urinals. The tattooed one pees and comes back and resumes the drink while continuing to look down at the game. The Australian focuses on the game with a headset on, which plays the TV commentary.The Australian passes his headset to the tattooed guy, who tries it, yet the audio is not synched to the gameplay, so he passes the headset back.A player smacks her thigh with a racket when she misses a point, then throws her tennis racket across the stadium, and it bounces a few times. She collapses in her chair and puts her head in her hands while the stadium cheers for her opponent.The Australian says: the loser was a known racist.The tattooed one says: I'm glad she lost, then.The tattooed one grabs another drink, and comes back. The Utah woman is laughing loudly, because the Australian is cracking her up.The Utah man adds an empty can to the floor row, and the can falls over. Going to grab another, he grips the almost vertical railing with two hands crossing over each other.The tattooed guy, Joe, talks quietly, and is talked over, so he sips his drink and watches the game. The Utah woman is swatting the Australian, and laughing.The Utah man watches the game, while sipping his new beer, number eight. A few times, Joe looks over at him, but the Utah man doesn't make eye contact.What is tennis? Joe says quietly.The Utah man grunts: tennis is sport.The Utah woman and the Australian are whispering with heads together and pointing out insider tennis moves. She pitches her head back and laughs hysterically.Joe mutters: what's so funny?The Utah man's knees crunch his beer can tighter. Joe adjusts his face to boredom and texts live date updates to a man with a boyfriend.The Utah Mormon woman has seven drinks on the floor, souvenir cups with miniature tennis balls punctured on toothpicks on the rims.Joe taps the Australian on the shoulder: I'm going to go. Have a nice flight home.He and the Australian hug in front of the Utah couple, who stare at the game, with synchronized postures--both have knees to their chins. The Australian kisses Joe on the cheek. The stairs steep down, and a woman stands on the rim of their stadium section with her torso a two o'clock arm over the railing. Below her, the shirts are moving dots and chiseled marks.Walking down the steep staircase, Joe does not fall. He looks up, and the Australian is looking down at the game.Past twelve beers and midnight, the Utah man leaves a dotted line trace: the beer cans stay. The souvenir cups go home with the two.
(...) and I armed myself for this highly perilous attack with qualities such as courage, scorn, wrath, indignation, disdain, even the disdain of death; and with these indubitably very appreciable weapons I hoped to advance, successfully and victoriously, against biting irony and mockery lurking under a simulation of friendliness.— Robert Walser, The Walk--Men Like To Feel Better Than Other Men & Humiliate Other Men To Feel Dominant:
The Influencer sits on the beige couch, sniffling meth-am-ketamine, while I stand in the kitchen. He asks: why did the chicken cross the road? Why? Because the chicken was trying to find an answer that he thought was across the road. Stand there. He points at one side of the kitchen. You're the chicken. And this, he gestures at the hallway-kitchen floor, is the road. Now, shove your head up your ass. What? Actually, the entire time we have been talking, your head has been up your ass. Okay. Walk to the center of the road. Look ahead at the cabinets. Picture they are pretty green trees. Now, I want you to take your head, and I want you to shove it up your ass. See? All the shit you talk is shit.No, you are.I'm going into the city.I board the beige train. The train goes over the water. I imagine these buildings will have penthouses soon. The penthouses are top prisms, and the Influencer wants to live in one. From the penthouse, you can look out at the sea without seeing the choppiness of the waves. I want a country with no penthouses. Let plants grow in the already-built ones.I tell Mom that I am sick of average sadism.You can work towards becoming a therapist, or teacher.Why do I have to pay to learn altruistic work?My mother says: that's how it is. You have to learn the skillsets.What are the ethics of the Ben Shahn retrospective? A man looks out with a cut log substituted for a leg. He is what he can cut (actually, I misremembered, and it was a metal machine holding wheat, that was a substitute for his leg, which shows how little I know, about agriculture. The worker is part automaton. The face is confrontational, but plain, dignified, and spectral).Families in button ups and long sleeves push strollers. Quieter than I remember, though this is after museum hours. A young man takes care of an older white man in a wheelchair. The younger man is Black, and a hired caretaker. The caretaker is seated on a grey bench in a swirling grey Central Park gate. He is the only one that sits on the gate. His legs are crossed like a girl's. The young man spoons the old man food, and they both appear content in the sunshine. It is dead and calm, on the Upper East side. A woman says she is moving to Puerto Rico in a loud voice on the phone. The same young man from the park pushes the same older man in a wheelchair across a road. A monochrome advertisement depicts a woman in a Jackie Kennedy dress turned toward the Statue of Liberty. This is just backward-looking. In a window advertisement, an older woman with an orange coat sneers at walkers. A grandfather in a suit jacket holds his grandson's hand. The grandson is wearing a mini suit jacket. I smile slightly at the image. I smile slightly at street walkers, who occasionally smile back.
short fiction
In a movie, a man says: you are a dutiful daughter. What do you expect when I die?His daughter responds: I expect nothing.The dialogue echoes.Amanda climbs the stairs to the second floor.The walls are ornate-patterned: divisions meet at peeling seams. She steps on the carpet and the floor creaks beneath it. The carpet will be torn up, and the planks will be polished back to their original complexion. In the cramped landing, there are three doors. On the first door, a burgundy sweater hangs off a Venetian doorknob. The second door is glass with clutter pressed against it. It could open to a hallway, at the end of which, is a balcony she can lean off, and look at mountains faraway. On the balcony, she can think about a house she could build on a mountain. Behind the third door, is a study that has become a place for crap.Egyptology books will be sold off soon. They will keep a small selection of novels for display, but knock down nuisance bookshelves, and put up flatscreens. Library rooms will become entertainment-guest rooms with pull-out couches. If a guest is too drunk, he or she can stay over. The kids can watch TV, while the adults get drunk below. As the night progresses, the TV volume will get louder. She knocks over a stack of old decor magazines that she will store in the grandfather clock glass cabinet. She restacks them now. The painting by her other foot will go: a rose with paint cracking.The stairs pause at a window that looks out on the deck and temple in the backyard. A white fence separates the deck from the trees. The trees separate their yard from the neighbor's. She knew the ones who left years ago. The new ones she's never met. Ever since the old neighbors left, she has avoided all neighbors.The temple will be bulldozed to make room for the saltwater pool. She is choosing the backyard furniture, stacking windows on Pinterest. They will build a bar into the backyard and it will have marble counters. She will stock the fridge with green dips, brie, and Truly seltzers.In photos from her wedding day, her hair is more vibrant beneath the grecian triangle and she wishes she could shave the baby bump off. She kisses the man she lives with still, though they only talk property details. He drips burger juice on his shirt. Barbecue sauce mats his beard and crusts the pubic-like hairs. After her dad is dead, she is filing for divorce. The guest room on the top floor has become her father’s sickroom; there are no guests anymore. Her father used to have a bulky body, with a beard.She goes over to the floor mattress and stares down at the shrunken man with fish eyes. The room smells like sweat and baby powder. Sweet and salty. He is swimming in a sweater, red like her mother’s was. An electronic candle sits on the window bed’s alcove above his wet head.She pulls the sweater over his head. The collar sticks under his chin. She yanks up the fabric, while pulling his chin down through the neck hole with a curved finger, and he flops back on his pillow. She adjusts the pillow, so the neck is more comfortably held.Every week, they wash his sheets. She feeds him a pill and pours Evian water in his mouth. What's a little more wet. He swallows it. A trickle gets on his lip and she wipes it off with the damp sheet. She pats the cheek, and wipes her hand on the blanket. She snuggles the blanket up to his chin and gives him a kiss.I love you. Everything will be okay.He murmurs: I love you too.She will throw out the sheets and her father’s clothing will go to Goodwill. She will keep her mother's sweater, and wear it.The living make the lists.She will cry at her father's funeral like a widow. And then she will post on Facebook, with old photos in a slideshow video and a black & white filter on it all. A sad seventies song will play, and flowers will fall down the screen. The motley of well wishes will make her feel like a tragic figure: heart you, love you, thinking of you, heart.She goes to the convenience store for beers tonight.Back home, she brushes the beer off her teeth. She checks the children's rooms. They are alive. She checks the live cam app to make sure her dad is sound asleep--his chest is moving up and down in the grainy green image, good. The Samson beard man sleeps too. She slips under the sheets, and stares at the ceiling with the alcohol glow in her chest and abdomen. She looks at the ceiling fan. It spins, fanning her face. Soon, this house will be listed and sold. She will take her father's. She looks over her cart--toggling between pool chair cushion color options. With a hand on her chest, she selects old photos for the post: her and her dad, her and her mom and dad. She thinks to herself as she's falling asleep: this is not so sad, like it was with mom, no, it's rote. It's like doing the dishes, and everything else, with a bit more dread attached. Yet, a dish may slip and break.
autofiction
The architect and I coordinated to meet at the pier. I was unaware of the cruising connotations: I thought it would have a good view of the city. A man paced on his phone and looked across the river at the skyscrapers, while the architect and I got to know each other.The architect said he was collaborating with important figures.This pier, he said, is like you.Rough-looking? Lonely? I laughed at my insecure joke.He responded: giving Bushwick vibes. I am more like the other pier, which is more designed.Do you come here a lot?He shrugs. I have been here before.--In the Uber, I pinch the vertebrae on his neck. I hold the spine and go up and down. I rub underneath the skull.The lids squint around the eyes, looking into mine. The eyes are organs in the skull.The midtown hotel lobby has a bar; it is the lobby of a building in which a murder could occur. I picture the architect slicing me up, and dragging me out to the river.He is relaxed on the couch, with hotel art above his head: Franz Kline lookalikes, the smaller framed drawings are curvier and more symmetrical than Kline. I think about a book psychoanalyst who said the mouth and ear are the most sensual areas of the body. I play with his ear, while I touch his lip. He moans, while staring, unblinking. He says: you seem sad. Is there a reason? You are overthinking something. What are you thinking about?Nothing. I'm always thinking. Aren't you?No, he says with a frown.Eyes are squishy spheres in a skull covered in skin that is nice, he takes good care of his skin, I can tell.There must be some evil, or narcissism. I am looking for the streak.I suggest we move to the bed. He lies on his stomach, and then I lay on top of him, and suck and kiss his ear, and the neck area near the ear. Is he charming, or trying to be charming? Is he seductive or calculating seductiveness?I climb off him, and cross my arms on the bed, with my clothes still on except pants, which are on the floor. I cannot decide if the dark eyes are sad, tender, or menacing.Your turn, he says. Lie on your stomach with your arms out.Like a wingspan?Yes.Like a crucifixion?Yes.Why?You'll see.No.Why not?I don't want to.Why not?I'm in your hotel room and I don't trust you, or I do but it's unwise, and for all I know the second I lie on my stomach, you could have a knife somewhere that you pull out of a drawer. And I wouldn't be able to see you stabbing me.The wallpaper is grey. The bed frame is outlined in a warm halo. The light helps de-sterilize the greyscale room.He says: you have a very dark view. I hope there is a way for you to allow some hope into the darkness.Better safe than sorry.You're misreading the situation, and constructing a scenario that isn't true, based on your ideas of what you think is happening.Back on the couch, he says: I know you're going to go and overthink this. I hope tonight shows you that you are rigid. He knocks on the table. I was meant to meet you tonight and show you not all rich men are the same.I say: I feel uncertain and uneasy.He asks: do you want to Uber home, or take the train?Train.I kiss him on closed lips.Goodbye. Will I see you again?He is silent.I put my shoes on.He says: I want to see you again, but I am very busy. May be flying back to Leningrad for a project.I might not be able to see you again, because I am really busy trying to finish paintings, but I'll see. I give him a closed lip smile, and close the heavy door.--Later, we met again to walk the streets. We bought ingredients to make dinner in the hotel room. The eyes corrected, and I realized I had seen him wrong. The man robed and disrobed, was interesting both clothed and without. Public stories become private, and something curious develops. I stare out the window of the Uber Share, and cannot sleep for seven hours when I arrive home. I made plans for the future though I thought I should not. For seven hours we talked and it was revealed he was a secret prince. He said: why is it that in New York the classes don’t interact. I looked out at medieval castle dispersed: all its turrets skyscrapers, with fireworks exploding austerely atop the view from our riverside bench, and he said this is like the bombs from my childhood. What war? Oh. Why is joyful turning nightmarish? I told him: take your socks off. I adjusted the couch cushions to be at a slight angle and dimmed the lights. I came to talk, I said: I’m no town whore. And he disliked this comment: I never thought you were. I know. I said. That’s good.