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Unfinished

Hail broke my father's windshield. He repaired it with duct tape. Black tape kept fractal glass in order and covered the absence created by the hail's wound. Hail didn't know or care, how its chance destruction of the windshield would affect my father's daily drive to work an hour away, and back. Black tape bandaged the glass hole and interferred with my father's clear vision of the road ahead. Snow too obscured I-94. Pile-up, the radio announced, so my father took a U-turn, and climbed up the nearest exit. He drove past a Panera, then a series of chains.I looked around with my hat on and stared at the red, white, and blue stitches on my mittens, which vibrated into lavender, like tips of stalks on endless fields, I imagined. Really, the fields were all beige with yellow corn cob punctuations, maybe some pumpkins in the fall fronted the fields, siding the lanes that cut the fields, separating families of bugs.The window wells outside our basement filled with snow. Iron lattices, like child locks on car doors, prevented us from sudden deaths.I was head to toe in snow gear. In the cul-de-sac's center, an iceberg shimmered like an object of desire. I shook my head and crystals fell past my eyes. Snow 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, blending into the snow.Caterpillars covered the driveway, in the absence of snow now. I got a caterpillar on my boot. The sole is covered in guts. We filled the wheelbarrow with caterpillars, though, what now?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.Scrub mold off the floor and the grout lines between manmade stones on the fireplace. Dial the flame on, and stare at the flicker.Three trees were equally spaced on the green lawn. 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 spied the cul-de-sac for predators.I stared at the ceiling, high on migraine-barbiturates, and the ceiling turned grainy. I closed my eyes and saw the cornfields swaying. I saw a castle at the end of the prairie, and walked a lane to the doorway, where my parents stood, at the opening. I heard the wind chime. I opened my eyes: caterpillars drifted across the sky-ceiling, and mutated into each other.

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 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 with mop hair. I don't mop the floor. White specks on a black comforter are my head's snowfall. I don't brush teeth. No tear. Tear open eye and gash the gash. I laugh at the fridge, bed, microwave, and shower, apathetic devices. Hairs on the shower drain and dandruff on the bed under fluorescent lights. Frog on creek shore next to water lapping, restricted by the shore edge.

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.

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.

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.

• back

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.

• back

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?

• Home

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.

• back

b. 2001, Kalamazoo, MIEDUCATION
2029 (expected)
MFA, Art, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA2023
BFA, Painting, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RISOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024
Destiny hope despair alistair, Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, CanadaGROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024
NADA Miami with Afternoon Projects, Miami, FL
Art Toronto with Afternoon Projects, Toronto, Canada
NADA New York with Afternoon Projects, New York, NY
Galeria Café, Noakowskiego 16, Warsaw, Poland2023
Bliss Information, Gelman Gallery at RISD Museum, Providence, RI
Painting Senior Show, RISD Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RI
Group show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI
Group show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI2022
Identity as Context; Memory as Content, Granoff Center, Brown University, Providence, RI
Judaica, Weiner Hillel Center at Brown University, Providence, RI2021
Group show, RISD Memorial Hall, Providence, RI
Online Blush, Online Playroom2020
National YoungArts Week, YoungArts Campus, Miami, FL2019
National YoungArts Week, Sotheby’s, New York, NYRESIDENCIES
2026
Pedvāle Art Park, Pedvāle, Latvia2024
Peter Bullough Foundation, Winchester, VA2023
KuBA: Kulturbanhof, Klein Warnow, GermanyWORKSHOPS
2024
Painting workshop at Peter Bullough Foundation, Winchester, VA
Painting workshop at Penn State University Woskob Family Gallery, State College, PAPRESS
2024
“Drew Spielvogel at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver,” Art Viewer, 26 Sept. 2024.AWARDS
2019 - 2023
Honors at RISD, Providence, RI2023
Curatorial Contemporary Art Fellow at the RISD Museum, Providence, RI2020
Finalist in Visual Arts, YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL2019
Honorable Mention in Visual Arts, YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL2018
High Merit in Visual Arts, YoungArts Foundation, Miami, FL

-- david wojnarowicz, some dated "problematic" language

Rosetta

The match factory girl

Catherine breillat

Black Sun / Purple slab, 44 × 36 inches, oil on canvas, 2024

• home

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.

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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

• home

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.

Contour lines him with a bleach crown. Skin on triangle
beneath shirt collar. The smile is the
yellow- white crescent moon.
Depressed persons do not defend themselves against death but against the anguish prompted by the erotic object.Kill the bee. I use a candlestick. Husband finger on the red lips. I hit the bee with a paper towel roll.Lala would have commanded her husband to take care of the bee. So, he did.Fish iron their hats. I serve him fish, praying bone catch in the throat.I will lay, until you cut a chest flap and remove my heart.You convinced your friends to disdain me; you confirmed that they really didn't like me. Delete every photo, of you and me. Hover above me and decay in real-time. Dot and static.We never went to that coffee shop. We fought when you kept painting my floors white, even though I said not to.I spit on a tower, building hair towers instead of real ones. The hairs stand on each other. Every hair on my head, I use to make the tall line.I could fall into a hole and be satisfied to lay there with a broken leg. You snapped at me every time I woke you up accidentally. You can watch me in the hole and you will like it.I think of the few times we danced, at the club. You stopped wanting to dance, instead, you sat down with a pouty face. I'm leaving, do what you want.Okay, you can go, then. I have no problem with that. Whatsoever.At your party, a guy you hooked up with grabbed your hand. You grabbed his hand when we were fighting. I was ignoring you for being mean. Your ex hook up kept patting me and looking with pity at me, while taking photos of the kissing couple. He took the photos and smiled sadly like he knew something I didn't.Takeout from the storefront on summer street. I push the dumplings around a soy sauce stained plate. They somersault. Scrape plastic utensils against the paper pulp and small white pills appear.Dead people had a cupid statue on the marble mantle next to an urn. Fly around the marble island. And see you tomorrow for dinner.I liked your frames. Same frames you wear while driving now. Kiss cam at the stop light.Red glow on the shadowed face of an angel. I'm getting sentimental for early on. You say: we weren't together long enough to feel that way. Orange and navy lights one your face in the rain. Gone fades to goner in the eye of the beholder.A man looks at distant hotels, while standing in the ocean. Percocet pond, he was like bleach-tipped curls. I see an archway of planes from the lifeguard chair. You can ride the hill to the bottom.

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:

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.

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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.

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conceptual writing

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 pearl liquid mutates into the shape of your chest. You said you are bisexual, so marrying a woman won't be too bad. I picture the crib, but I cannot picture the house, your wife, or your parents. Karim is Palestinian; his family doesn't live in Gaza. I was raised with menorahs in the window. My parents don't have one anymore.Karim is moving back to Saudi Arabia soon, he'll 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. Kathy 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. A Greek Life couple asks if we are twins. Karim leans on a railing in rainbow club lighting. Colored circles spin across him, while students dance. I lay in a field at 4 AM, pulling out the grass. Pain is just pain without the eroticization of it. I wander past fraternity houses with rave light windows, and around a golf course, while I spam post on stories. 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. 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, a two-billion dollar smart city being built across the Saudi Arabian desert. I learn that The Line project was abandoned, downscaled. Halberstam writes: "... sometimes libidinal energies are given over to destabilization, unbecoming, and unraveling" (209). I unravel, as does he, I'm sure.Karim sits 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.We are drawn to images that mirror our reality and reassure us that it is stable and true. Is it the same for people: are we attracted to who can mirror us, reassure us of our anxieties, and confirm our self-assumptions? I dated Karim in the town where my parents lived. My mother cooks Pioneer Woman recipes, and listens to country music and Christian-parenting podcasts. She teaches Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies courses to students, 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 conservative minds, and encourages empathy. Now, her class is all left-leaning, and there are only five undergrad students majoring in WGSS. My mother assigns students a side, insisting on a dialogue. 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?Corp, my ex-boyfriend who worked at Apple, advised my mother to pivot into tech.I relayed the advice, and she said she'd rather work at Trader Joe's. She saw how miserable money-addiction made her ex-husband, a Wall Street banker, as I saw how miserable Corp's career-obsession made him.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. 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, beside police cars.In “The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MxGx Movement," Mendelberg writes: "the discursive community of the MxGx movement is one of status reversal... 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... assimilation to a uniform vision of America, and the authority of the law. The gravest status injury for many MxGx 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 MxGx movement connected these issues to a particular enemy—the corrupt elite who have unjustly hurt and maligned everyday Americans like them... 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 MxGx 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" (13).I've walked by the frats hundreds of times over the last ten years: fraternities are gangs with alpha and beta male divisions. Fraternities determine membership, based on perceived strength, power, future income, and, virility. Contained within the frats and outside them: homophobia towards self, brother, and outsider. Decorative American symbols like flags signal white nationalism and defensiveness of tradition. Underrepresented groups are selectively integrated into traditionally all-white Elite organizations. Elite organizations speak in code to keep outsiders from understanding, and knowledge inside.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.I don't agree, but I think about it, while watching Candace Owens videos (the enemy).Stigma is assigned to the queer person who counters normality; is queerness a counter-culture? If MxGx 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 violation of the normative systems, symbolized by the fraternities, that produce stigma?If queerness is criminalized, queerness can become criminal; opposing anti-queer laws, and systems. Why join a fraternity, or oppressive order; why not work at dismantling its logic and probe its rectum, like a Dadaist? PERVERSION OF AUTHORITY AND GAY TRANSGRESSIVE STRATEGY AS DIARISTIC FORM. ANNOYANCE IS DISRUPTION.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." The fling flames at the end; even with sweet Karim, we broke each other to break.FOOTNOTE: I am not a Freudian: exhibiting interest in understanding an ideological enemy places the individual at risk of being directly or indirectly eliminated from a sphere or organization. Organizational membership requires subscription to, and reproduction of, spherical belief.Corp laughed callously when I said my mother did not want to go corporate. I looked at him in the gentrification loft, with a underclass struggle down below, and thought: I am looking at a Himmler. I am the power-accessory. Why am I attracted to a materialistic megalomaniac? Why do we assign demonizing terms to replicants of systemic oppression, when we are all complicit in Capitalist Harm?Arendt writes: "the mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history... 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 limiting its voicings on belief, honor, dignity to preserve its power, social standing, and "private security."I told him I saw him for what he was, and he tried to rebuild his illusion of grandeur, or delusion I had broken by telling him I saw him. When he realized my disgust could not be bought away, he tried to break me after. Is this Capitalism? 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 tech-and-finance group, though this was nothing new, the club turning against a newcomer who learns he does not respect the club rules, or club.

In Michigan, a trans girl at my middle school was featured on local news and bullied, subsequently. My mother 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 access to that gated community, through the transphobe. Violators of normal reality were shunned; unfriending the wrong person meant losing a friend group, and access to an elite circle. Shunning: we experience a maligning of dissident individual voices by mainstream reality-enforcement.Fraternities and conservative social clubs replicate the codes of orders they fall under. Institutions and social behaviors in them, are similarly designated, hence the necessity of nonconformity, even at penal cost. My friend and I broke into the fraternity after being turned away, when The DL Guy didn't come to the front door, to let us in.The Right's "successful" populism: a screenshot from Nancy Mace's Instagram reads: “No More LGBTQ Agendas” in a cute Soviet square on a library background in Midwest cursive (post archived or deleted as of: November 17, 2025). It hides it harm in Michael’s craft store color and familiar sensibility. It is the candy red sign advertising a forty percent sale.Anita Bryant smiles like an all American Eve. Nancy Mace: “Eve” and "Pioneer Woman," too. The detournement of "The Pioneer Woman" sensibility posits Mace as a family-friendly figure to families who consume Hallmark TV-movies.A comment reads: "Nancy you're an inspiration for a lot of women God bless you Wonder Woman." Mace adopts a Marvel pose, with her arm on her hip, and horizon-directed gaze.Like a public school slideshow, or social media rant, I play lecturer out-of-work, futilely talking to an uncaring mass, who moved on to more lucrative ventures: 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. I screenshot fragments from the AIDS memorial quilt: will we erase an already reduced population from public education discourse? 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. What made Scott Slater "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 and evoked with jeans, block letters, poems, naive utopian pictures, quotes and stains, birds, flowers, colors, and rainbows, music notes, and fractals, states where they were born, and birth-death brackets. 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. 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? The quilt may be paraded as a warning: try this "lifestyle," and reap your fate. Dead lives can be a scare tactic. I think about Laura Lima's Gala Chicken and Gala Coop: anarcho-spirit. Can an artwork be alive, and dying?

ALTERNATIVE TO PRESENT: I tried to find K on Second Life. Yet, I encountered barriers, delineating property from open space, and my search was limited to public zones.

We can build anything we want and we build the same world.

Can Karim be found online? Can Arial make a body? Can his LinkedIn be him? I found him online. I am in an erotic desert, until I meet a new love.A contour lines the mattress angel with a bleach crown. Skin on triangle beneath shirt collar, denim flaps. Damp legs with hair glued down and a congested nose. Blondie has his arm around me on the subway platform at 3 AM, while police watch. Kissing him, I said: I love you, I love you, I love you. You make plans, and don't text me for twelve hours.

He says he's tired from working, and then at work. Blondie works fifty hours a week at Starbucks, despite having a Master's degree. Phone screens merge with city lights in the train window.

In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam writes of Erika's self harm in Haneke's The Piano Teacher: "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" (208).How can I enter "a cut-and-paste genre, to find another realm of aesthetic production dominated by a model of radical passivity and unbeing?" (Halberstam 209). What privileges undernote this? I return to this investigation, and think about de-privileging. Am I confused or about confusion under a censored climate? Who said confusion is not truth, or closer to the falsehood of truth, than certainty? I don't feel the attachment to sentiment. Am I sane, degenerate, or outsider spectacle? Am I defensive? This ideological breakdown is the art subject, and its form shatters the mirror, which reflects what I see.Does resistance have to be loud? Resistance-work can be quiet or "invisible": I think about my mother, who is paid little for working hard and changing conservative views. 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 sxicide urge oppose the expected: performances of wellness, active healing, and progressive optimization? 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.Byung 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 think of a decimated building: is that hope? Is renovation hope?In The Accursed Share, Bataille writes: "Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy... 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).Organic life can grow sideways and diagonal, too. Can we prioritize radiation over growth? What if we did not get any taller, but intersected with each other like X-joints?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).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.”

"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). I deleted everything I wrote about Karim, basically, he is a ghost you'll never know. I never knew him. I fell in love with the aura around him, and him, I think, but what is love? Originally, I set out to make an automaton of Karim, and failed. A miss in building a gendered subject, like Karim, resulted in an alternative possibility. Instead of recreating him, I created a partial surrogate in my memory eye. I do not want to retrieve, or relive the past with Karim, because I do not want to conjure anything past. Nostalgia is conservative.I think about looking and feeling backward, as is symptomatic of the queer experience and described extensively by Heather Love. Feeling backward is all I am doing here, returning to my past relationships. I consider other forms of movement.The present contains what we were and my present is moving sideways, or diagonal. To change for the better non-better, is to envision movement on an equal plane. I can live in a fantasy-reality, not one in which my desires are satisfied, but where my desires are non-packaged in my head. Not your property. The introspective reality deepens, if surface reality does not correspond to the individual's imagination (the imagination is non-individual, as individuality is a Capitalist figment). I envision Karim, not as a fictional device.I hope that we can continue to grow our imaginings of non-authoritarianism, even if the authoritarian 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).Can one queer from within the normative mask? The space containing the miss is the queer space.

I wear a masc-normative mask for navigation ease, even though I am queer.I'm not claiming to speak for anyone, so much paranoia in the air, and this thought results from the culture of critique and competition, to advance in an American society that kills its losers off, "spiritually," or physically, "for New York City is a very expensive metropolitan area," and America is expensive too (Acker 86). The child is killed by the organization coach.Halberstam writes: "when the Sex Pistols spat in the face of English provincialism and called themselves 'the flowers in the dustbin,' when they associated themselves with the trash and debris of polite society, they launched their poison into the human," and became politically necessary rather than cynical for its own sake, or pure negation and defensiveness (172).Halberstam accuses Edelman's definition of queerness as not as being too hopeless (172).I don't want to be hopeless. Can we be punk still? In 1990, Kathy Acker wrote: "I searched for younger or more radical work or just something other than stock. But the New York art world seemed to have closed its ranks: the old community in which an underground gradually became commercial has disintegrated into a market whose share-holders, frightened, are determined to take no more chances" (86).Why do we fake revelation, instead of admitting confusion? What am I trying to do here?Reckon with queer erasure, and the irrelevance of queer theory to M-G- UXA.Everything I know and am good at is useless to Corp.The call-and-answer format/ voice split is the schismatic culture manifested in the individual, which requires we break into performed and private parts: secret and public voices, policed by ideological correctness and controlled by the bourgeois leaders. I am poor and powerless. There is no freedom of speech. There is no freedom of expression if dependent on an economy.Italics insert conflict. You are reading the breakdown of an essay and the ideological frameworks it applies to itself, which is what queer art is: uncertainty in itself as counter to normative forms of knowing, mastery, and "genius," which I am not.CUT UP 1: Dumpling caught in my throat. I gulp. Fork against the paper pulp, and white paper pills appear. The beef got caught in their teeth. Blondie and I are out for dumplings, in Corp's neighborhood. Somersault across my plate. What? Just say. With care, I scrape the dumplings into the trash hole. Not enough for me. Don't text me for twelve hours. Tired from working, and then at work. Blame me sitting here and trying to have a nice fucking night with you. He says: I don't know what to tell you. Friends at tech jobs and start-ups, and with the corpses eating Chinese food around a marble island. Appliances for self-improvement, Use and disuse. Unuse. Free time is: be free. Ditched Corp, disgusted wasn't impressed tormented, unhappy. disposition. Untrue, sip my Heineken. happier alone. dead people I ate dumplings with, cupid statue Corpses. Cupid return to Rome. Blondie smiles & turns to me. Drives me to Queens flirt with other guys (I tell him: I might flirt with other guys). Glasses I liked, knock-offs. Prada glasses on the subway. Said goodbye. Nice laugh. Same frames, demeanor is different. Funny car ride. sullen, knees to my chin. I might flirt with other guys. Graduation, had to leave. always sad. hateful. successful. with you. Let's move out of the city to a cheap countryside. I can't do that. you can, you don't want to. He turns the wheel, says nothing. Hand on his neck like a claw and steer his head. Car in park. I love you. I love you too. We can work this out.CUT UP 2: sxicidal document for whiteness; is queerness good? useful to the empire? theory OBSOLETE? low status. ACADEMIC TONE: IS QUEER INTELLECT OBSOLETE? Is earnestness weakness, or effeminate? IS WEAKNESS ANTI-FASCIST? (...) INTELLECT OBSOLETE? Is earnestness weakness, or effeminate? IS WEAKNESS ANTI-FASCIST? AMATEUR AND NON. called cruel art: constraints of REDACTION. Convolution CLIENTELE. CLIENTELE, LUXURY REDACT OBJECT CONTENT. TEXT. not STATE. lament. not; REDACT. CLIENTELE. TEXT. paper. I am not STATE. Dustbin Flower, Psychiatric Material. DO YOU LIKE ME cute, sweet PSYCHIATRIC Pay Buy sex. emotion. human. sweet. humor. Entertainment value EVIL, CAPITAL CAPITOL BODY: ANARCHO-SERFS in NEW YORK die. lament, I am not; WAIF, really, FOE. DIDACT. breakdown DXE. I am weak. SUBTRACT REDACTED and Disturbed MIND, said the LAWYER! sensitive viewer, YOU are beautiful. I am REDACT, stabilized science-fiction. FEEL GOOD escape, what you want to call it? November 15, 2025, said the snarl. GRINCH: ART STATE. STATE ART. dead PEARL. GOOD BOY. redact. CLIENTELE TEXT STATE REDACT. OBSOLETE? AMATEUR NON. LUXURY OBJECT. negative. COIN UNPENITENTIARY, I AM THE GOOD BOY. DEAD BOY, do you like GAY INTIMACY? DEAD BOY, do you like to fuck a dead body? Do you want to fuck the painting? FORMALISM AND LANDSCAPES? ADVANCEMENT OF SELF AND HIGHER INCOME? HIGH INCOME, HIGH INCOME GRAFFITI TEXT IN A REST STOP KINDNESS.CUT UP 3: Hugh Jackman Reminiscence,cyberpunk on a plane, I try to remember K. sex scene more trope pornographic interlude, a male gaze fantasy fruited. Perfect sanitary and well-acted sex with self-aware acting, a raised leg, a dress pulled up from the knee for the camera man, build-up to sex and cut-away Hugh Jackman peels a device off prior sequence memory: device realive her audience witness resurrection. Writing: resurrection and regurgitation; don't know what happened to you, so here you are, a fragment pointless sad masturbatory give it up waste years . evades capture. opposes power kaleidoscopes diaristic, poetic, and academic, blog-writing, non-totality and atonality.recursive. deteriorates in the recursive machine. instability. Instability destabilizes enforcement. cries and eats itself.contradiction. masochistic opposes the sadistic unproductive responses. non-productivity. mutant baby. killing machine splits its citizen-parts. The citizen splits. IT dollar. pop song remix. morally inferior. attempt. gay DADA. priest Stories.CUT UP 4: Corp's clothes like unsleaving iPhone. opening the white box. top lid lifted off the bottom lid. rose gold, turned him on. He befriended guys at the deli, nice clothes to wear: no ratty jeans. proper etiquettes: cheers, tap your glass cultured at design school. Sex climax after a short period of time, sexual desire was no longer useful. porn dolls; talking to the CEO of a social media start-up platform, for adult content-creators, monetizing the sex. completed the position, we shuffled to next best option, then Corp gym. I said: lay around, or look into my eyes? Dream journal. Karim Corp didn't look up from the Apple Watch. -- At Apple, in charge of many lower rungs, Corp liked to feel superior. marry for money, Karim went back to Saudi Arabia. "I feel it, I fuck it." song on headphones Williamsburg. bloody chic heart. immoral. I buy Oslo coffee Corp's debit. Corp drinks himself to sleep shovel scrapes snow off a sidewalk. rough-edged toenails against the comforter. The photograph of Corp's dead dog stares me down preserved with black eyes. misses his earth bone. Williamsburg apartment, Greenpoint loft. networked and optically beautiful szechuan pepper sea foam. scowling at the rooftop. Why are you mad? You know why. I don't sits in silence quail crackers with cilantro dust. He is still silent. I say: propping up of abstraction retrograde, decorative, or apolitical something, feels like nothing. huh? cute, interesting, funny, and zany, dreamy, and adjective. apathy that is not apathetic? numb horror? I don't know. non-decor? non-style? scrappiness that is not sloppy non-predetermined? without post-human aesthetic? failure that doesn't look pretty or made-to-fail non-rehash? care that is not kitsch or sentimental? non-pretense? adjective art for adjective time. insecure market decorator, entertainer, innovator, interior decorator, master, entrepreneur. Instagram spectacle for a buying class not aware. collective fragmentation that has resulted in the cordoning of individuals from individuals? positive hopelessness? He says it is better to focus on making money: come to Equinox with me. no, gym. I'm not happy here. lying on your nice sofa and looking at the luxury around me and feeling empty. if you don't like it, move out. rooftop restaurant, I look at the city below. I like us. calamari porridge too salty for Corp. flag the waiter down. to the sad-looking girl: this is too salty. We need a better batch. : only the best. -- Here, he passes me the bill. You pay. I can't. You need me.classic NYC coming-of age experience, eight years older. She rails a line, and says: he's rich. I love him. instrument to capital, a careerist in tech. artist. part of the evil, but his whole life is nice, because he works for it to be. Men take your time and dreams. 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. if all utopian possibilities are eliminated, played Corp the album, unsettled: are you listening to the lyrics? Get to playing with that cock and make that bam and I walk and pimp 'cause I am. Sex time frame not transcending the frame. "sex is the corollary of capitalism and war" and advocates pragmatic strategies to win the sex-money-war game (Preciado). sex as strategy Corp's paycheck. Choice is a luxury. locked into production's mirror room, one will have sex in the mirror room. The mirror room Equinox gym.exit the mirror room? Can production-line-sex sensate sublimity? 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, 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." conservatives: queerness, a social contagion? queerness like love. Preciado writes: "potentia gaudendi... does not allow itself to be reified or transformed into private property." Apple employee, Apple skin. not trade autonomy for employment. not love. Homosexuality and heterosexuality terms from a dated glossary. man looking like a man, sitcom actor. vaginal and penile. organs and slots? fetish objects, worshipping girls with preserved sex organs? elementary school, they made us play factory. entrepreneur? E-N-T-R-E-P-R-E-N-E-U-R. GOOD WORK, DOING GOOD; GOOD JOB. Language enforces productive and pro-social behavior. suitable mate.CUT UP 5: met Blondie at a bar with racing turtles Maneater Blondie was from Long Island. I am from Penn State. Long Island and Penn State . “falling in love” “I Love You All The Time” Corp. Blondie pleased by the kiss, but still interested in Corp. not mechanical like with Corp. not robotic reenactment of a straight romance. high with a bland comedown. magic was gone. Regalio Deli, respark the magic wand, and he fine breaking it. Reality kicked in.

CUT UP 6: love in Capitalism (or post-capitalism) cannibalistic? Attachment to possession, ownership, and/or control. Fuck to possess and consume, have fun, or actualize a contract. fuck to Link? honey pool, productive or reproductive. oppositional. bedroom dissent. -- Poor or abused don't know who to blame self-destruct. neoliberal state conditions people to blame themselves, excusing power structures of their role in manufacturing suffering, and excusing power structures of guilt and responsibility. Maladaptive or masochistic behavior is a symptom of a systemic wound. Maladaptive or masochistic behavior fetishizes and self-administers. crazy to neoliberal believers, who are unable to see outside of the societal construct. labeled crazy or "ill" by the state and psychiatric system, in order to discredit radical or dissenting thought. Psychiatry necessarily treats individual suffering; it does good. trauma confession details what happens when you are poor excising trauma confession, Rage concerns. UNSTABLE “scary” or “angry” or “concerning.” If a person is seen as “scary,” “angry,” “disturbed,” or “concerning” they are “crazy,” CALM. stay calm. logical and make careful and logical arguments silencing enrages sublimate the rage . disaffected tone. People like to be soothed If people are made upset, they like to feel there is a message reason to be upset. not made upset for no reason. made upset for no reason, the upsetter is “cruel.” work details sadness, presented without solutions, “depressing” and “useless.” Sad are often socially outcasted. unhelpful and unfun. sad people should get help. burdens. The sad person get better. If they do not “failure.” Treatment eases life. Medications ease pain and make the individual a productive citizen. “Recovery narratives” “It gets better” submits to a progressivist improvement narrative. do not believe “it gets better” are villainized.grinch character (who is coded as gay). antisocial grump, cave-existence, made happy by Christmas cheer. normalize by adopting a positive Christian outlook, and you will be accepted by your American community. Despair happiness performance or transformation worsens despair. Eliminate improvement and depressed may “improve.” happiest when the men I date aren’t telling me to be happier. happiest not mimicking happiness. Happiness is not the goal,Despair is valid Depression has to express regardless of utility. Punishing a viewer with despair, while perhaps “cruel,” may unsettle the settler-colonial front. Confusing a viewer or reader can confuse colonial logic. Overwhelming with emotional contradiction resists the flattening of aura under capital.mimic an ideological stance Rubik’s Cube an enemy ideology. Rubik’s Cube is not unsolvable; the Rubik’s Cube presents as a familiar object, banal toy. mutable. has infinite solutions. No solution is permanently correct. enigma. work to solve it, never solve it forever. resets. struggles to solve the Rubik’s obsess over. fascist. enemy is closer to friend. What is the significance of a Rubik’s Cube? Thing disseminated. Thing copied. reproduced. Cube preoccupies. absorbs time.

CUT UP 7: no stable solution. the depressive’s preoccupation. distracts from despair. kills itself, through deletion, anticapitalism useful. “does not get the point.” Urgency, more dire. Rubik’s Cube asserts its existence. different. diversifies the text. made readymade. go on a date ; he attends the top ivy. He : the best art is more community-engaged. liberal: wants to make surface changes to the state & earn a large paycheck ,deserves this, coming from a working class background. 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.” revolution may be impossible. Revolution may be possible; I don’t know. he sees me as futile. Bad contributor and bad income. Medium attractive. Ivy League date shocked by the writings of Diane di Prima or Valerie Solanas: “dark,” “disturbing,” “pessimistic,” need radical dissent. conservatives may be a lost cause. art like techno: mutable and abstract, queer in refusal to resolve or settle. revolutionary in its refusal to conform to time and space norms. is not for everyone. NTS umru set: “I don’t think we need a government.” A good anarchist mayor would disband the corporations and allow peasant ransacking. NO GUNS DAY burn all guns. frat boy can call me a faggot. bash his head in They act like the “first American” missionaries who were KILLERS. Gays shoot them. play shooting range. if total anarchy occurred, so anarchy may not be best. If money was eliminated, differences are not so great. ART FARM. Blaze the guns first. Envy for larger farm. Capitalism or bureaucracy. Happier commune. suffering shared. bureaucracy. wish humans could not be greedy or power-interested, eliminate power, eliminate the idea of power.

"Object-libido changes to narcissistic libido... when love changes to identification" (Silverman 193). Karim had a different experience, uncommunicable and non-understandable, though he tried to tell me about his life. 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, a lie.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.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 wrote poems about his leg hair, and posted them online, resulting in loss of followers.Berlant writes: "love is always deemed an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no attachment and no love" (7). When does fantasy turn into delusion?"(...) melancholia becomes integral to love itself..." (Berlant 19).I had a wonderful night with you at the Penn State duck pond. What's the baby's name?

WORKS CITEDAcker, Kathy. “The City.” Bodies of Work: Essays, Serpent’s Tail, 1997, pp. 106–25.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated by Robert Hurley, Zone Books, 1988.
Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Dead Letter Office (an imprint of Punctum Books), 2012. DOI: 10.21983/p3.0015.1.00.
Bettcher, Talia Mae. Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Björk. All Is Full of Love. Homogenic, One Little Indian Records / Elektra Entertainment, 1997. Directed by Chris Cunningham, music video, 1999.
Deli Girls. “I'd rather die.” 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.
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.
Mace, Nancy. “Farmers feed America.” Instagram, 2025, www.instagram.com/p/DLNgfLNNLtP/.
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.
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.
The NAMES Project Foundation. The AIDS Memorial Quilt. 1987–present.

I saw Karim on Tinder after we broke up, a week or two before leaving to Saudi. He was hunting for other guys, flexing his arm, and looking at his reflection in a building's side glass.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.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

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.

Bite, oil and charcoal on canvas

Karim, oil on canvas, 20 x 26 inches

oil, acrylic, paper, and charcoal on canvas

Wilma in the stars, acrylic, oil, paper, graphite, on canvas

oil and acrylic on canvas, 24 x 48 inches

Drawings from KuBA: Kulturbahnhof residency in Klein Warnow, Germany.

Klein Warnow, pastel on paper, 2023

Purple winter, oil on panel

Fighters, oil on canvas, 10 x 23 inches

Pennsylvania winter, oil on panel

charcoal on paper

30 x 40 inches, oil on canvas

12 x 20, oil on canvas

I sit in a hooded bench. Bullet train traces right to left. A stout man waits to use the gun tower, while the insects walk over my eyes. He stands at the foot of the hunting tower, and I climb down the ladder, so he can go up.The sky is orange above hay rolls on a plain. Blonde children play hopscotch outside a town hall: white pillars on a white building. It surveys the town.Human-shaped sacks are dressed in military uniforms on front lawns. The dolls pose in lawn panoramas or on fire trucks, holding hoses between gloved fingers. 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. A man smokes outside the window, across the stone yard. The train appears every hour. I photograph three spinners: pinwheels, bladed farm machines, and turbines. I snap a glass door with an orchid Fathead. A blue flower is next to a rail. They stare; I stare, rattling groceries in my backpack.--At the microphone, the aunts all say Lala was strong in death. I was silent staring around, while the room cried. Closing my eyes, half a decade later, I saw Lala standing in the glass door. She looked out, wearing gold and silver jewelry, black yoga pants, and a purple shirt. Lala stood like a sleepy pillar. The bricks assembled, and the plow drove down through the soil to make a basement. Lala was a mother of twelve. Lala, Lala. Earring bangles on the pillow, while the crowd wept in a huddle. Windows opened to the backyard. The room was white and polished brown wood. My feet were pressed on the carpet. She handled the silverware well. She was a good hostess. Lala only went out to the hair salon or out to dinner. The grandfather clock ticked. The chimney pumped gray out. Lala got the aunts to do her dishes, while she looked at glossed pictures: European bedrooms and BBC murder dramas. She wanted to be a Broadway actress, and instead she ended up there, comfortably reading the magazines. Not so bad.At Christmas, Uncle Fred gave Carson an extra small hunting jacket. Carson kept the hunter jacket clean and ironed the creases. Mud and shot birds leave marks. Carson picked the red and brown scabs off. We were pudgy kids gnawing chocolate pucks. I wiped chocolate on my designer jeans. When the jeans stained, I tossed them in a hamper. Crumbs fell out Carson's mouth and onto the grass below, where birds ate the cookie dots, and Uncle Freddie shot the birds after. He brought game jerky to the tailgate.--The SunChips bags were plastic fires, stacked pyramidal in the common area bowl. Sam and I shared SunChips, getting red and orange dust on our fingertips. Sam smiled and licked the dust off her thumb, in front of the cafeteria window. We walked in a V between grey windows in a hallway with glossy tile floors and a low foam-core ceiling, like middle school. Behind us was an older woman who said her son was coming to get her. A short statue of liberty stood nearby in a lake, while crawfish ate at critters on the monument's rubble pedestal. Earlier, the older woman stood at the free payphone, with a thick metal shoelace going back into a box. How long have you been here? Four weeks. They won't let me go, because I keep having an issue with the head doctor, who has scanner eyes.Gwen wanted more time to get ready and do her hair first.I drew the portrait quickly, and handed it to her.Make me look younger.I saw Gwen six years later at Home Depot. She was working at the checkout counter.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. 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, who gave him a bed. 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 ran out. I thought: why would someone be an anarchist? That is not allowed. Lala and the crowd were staunch Hilary Clinton democrats, so I shared the views.In the cafeteria, the women circled their hips and slashed the air. They slapped their stomachs. SunChips hung around the side of the tray. Mashed corn next to a black pudding cup, and sloppy Joes with Hawaiian rolls; the meat was a syrupy pile with soft pork strings. I want a better burger. Sam sighed and poked the damp roll.--Dark stab with mop hair. I don't mop the floor. No tear. Tear open eye and gash the gash. Frog on creek shore next to water lapping, restricted by the shore edge.--Clouds up there; boxes below. Clementine peel, pee slime on cilantro, green onion gloss. Rinse slime and chop.--Families in button ups and long sleeves push strollers. A young Black man takes care of an older white man in a wheelchair. The young man spoons the old man food, and they both are happy in the sunshine. A woman says she is moving to Puerto Rico in a loud voice on her cell phone. The same young man from the park pushes the same older man in a wheelchair across a road.--Fraying rope and hair strand, fried up, fries on a plate, fry cash, we’re fried. Fried hair strand, bleached hair looks fried. Strapped for cash. How strapped are we, strapped for what, strapped for cash. Few pennies can add up to a dollar. Denim-hugged legs. Crash into storefront. I’ll keep driving without you. Beige lumps with black edges, steering wheel. White O on a black grid stone, grey blocks together. Yellow block in me I colored. Cat got shoved into a box and its little head poked out. Red dot on the smiley face button on the computer taunts. Xanax sliver for him.--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. He was haunted by her early passing. He’d call me late and ask if everything was okay. His daughter was painted all over town, in many roles: ballerina, hawk, and graduating student.--I blocked Carson and the rest, so I'm free of their eyes. Haven't seen the kid since 2020, or a photo. Before I blocked him I saw him making muscles on the deck of that old place where Lala sat all the time reading her magazines. It was what money was supposed to look like. Forever, when I think of that beachfront, I will see her there in purple, dropping cracker crumbs on the beige carpet surrounded by tacky seashell sculptures, a nineties TV. Cracker crumbs stuck on the purple lipstick.

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.

A tucked into serviceable sheets after taking off his puffer and jeans. In the morning, A donned his puffer. The all-male household looked up from its coffee and straightened its postures when D and A left together. On the oceanside walk, A wore a tin man's coat below purple hair. The coat flashed light shapes on the blue sky and sand.M 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. D's legs crossed. A eyed M 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 A's chair. D looked out a window behind A's chair. D clicked his pen; A clicked his pen; M clicked her pen. A's coat was ahead of the window, pressed into the plastic chair back. D peeled his sunburn. M 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. M 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 touched A's coat sleeve trailing on the floor. A 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 fruit drawer's rectangular monocle, while the men ate separately, except for D and A, who ate together. Across from each other on the twin beds, the two's pressed knees pointed in different directions. Plates on laps. A's purple hair was neon on the white wall and his eyebrow had a piercing, whereas D had a shaved head.There would be Thanksgiving here: the five men at the table staring down, while M had hers in the separate place. D used the silent one's dandruff shampoo.The sun looked through the shoegaze. Cars and bikes smoked-out and voices outside were quiet. Like a crank D's arm lifted his hand to his mouth to insert a spoon.--A gray head appeared on the sea. Saran water undulated with the moon's pull.--Plates from yesterday were on the floor still, and the men moved the plates to the dishwasher.

The ornate-patterned paper blocks converge at peeling seams. She steps on the carpet and the floor creaks. The carpet will be torn up, and the planks will be polished back to their original look.On the landing, there is a door with a red sweater hanging off the Venetian doorknob. Egyptology books will be sold. Library rooms will become entertainment-guest rooms with pull-out couches for too-drunk guests. The kids can watch TV, while the adults drink hard seltzers outside and gradually remove clothing, fall into the pool. The TV volume will get louder to block out the splashing and screams.Amanda knocks over a stack of old decor magazines she plans to store in the clock glass cabinet. She restacks them; sees the plum sofa her mother envied, and so bought. It's downstairs with a stain; it's downstairs with her mother's spit-up on it. The painting by her other foot will go: a cracking rose. The stairs ascend to a window that frames the deck and backyard temple. A white fence separates the deck from the trees; the trees separate their yard from the neighbor's. The new ones she's never met. Bulldoze the temple to make room for the saltwater pool. They will build a marble countertop bar in the backyard. In photos from her wedding day, her hair is more vibrant. She puts a finger on the baby bump to concave her stomach. She kisses the man she lives with still, though they only talk property details.Every object can be replaced and will be. The guest room on the top floor has become her father’s sickroom. 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, she washes his sheets. She feeds him a pill and pours Evian water in his mouth.What's a little more wet. He swallows it. Water on his cracked lip and she wipes it off with the damp sheet. Blood dot on the sheet from his lip. She pats the cheek, and wipes her hand on the blanket. She snuggles the blanket up to his chin and gives him a kiss. 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 and post old photos in a slideshow video. Black & white filter and rock and roll will play. The guests will pat her back.Convenience store it is for beers tonight. She slots the key in the front door with a deer cam above. Brian likes to keep an eye on.She keeps her hand steady on the key. She walks steadily up the stairs and brushes the beer off her teeth. She checks the children's rooms. She checks to make sure her dad is sound asleep. His chest is moving up and down in the green square. She slips under the sheets, and stares at the ceiling. Never wanted the girl with my husband's face. The girl was born shrunken, premature. Let her die. Please, God, let her die.Dad liked Brian, so Dad bought Brian a car. She looks over her cart—toggling between pool chair cushion color options. Brandy or mint? Amanda pulls a hair out and inspects the ombre from strawberry-blonde to silver. She pictures Randy's face. She slid down to him on the rope she made out of tied sheets: it sailed out the window with her, into his arms and convertible Mazda. Her hair tangled around the headrest and he looped it around his stuck-up middle finger. They hid their cans in the glove compartment. And ducked down in the creek they parked in, blue and red lights from the coppers, while giggling.Dad caught her of course. Never again, her father wagged his finger. Tomorrow, she draws a ketchup smile on the hash brown. Before she goes to the bus, she gives her daughter a side hug.

He orders the car from the pier. In the backseat, I pinch the vertebrae on his neck, going up and down as he watches my arm and looks at me. We get out. In the lobby, I picture the architect slicing me up, and dragging me out to the river. At the elevator door, a couple smiles with a groomed dog on a leash. The bellhops are smiling too. I compliment the hotel room. The architect relaxes on the couch, with hotel art above his head: Franz Kline lookalikes, the smaller framed drawings are curvier and more symmetrical than Kline.Skyscrapers with fireworks above. He says they are like childhood bombs.I adjust the couch cushions to be at a slight angle and dim the lights. I read him Wojnarowicz smut. He talks about a blonde European noble with a desperate face. They dated for nine years and broke up a few months ago, but I will be the replacement.I talk about my ex, who picked out a camouflage thermos. He ate a corndog coated in vinegar cheese dust, and wiped the dust on his pants, going back and forth like a grater. I dipped the brush in turpentine, then dragged it across his face.--In the car, I have my hand on the architect's leg. The buildings are gravestones taffy-pulled by the architect on a y-axis.--Two planes overlap overhead. One leaves a trail and the other keeps going. Though the one plane's trail is more visible now, it will disappear. The architect will build skyscrapers and mausoleums across the world.--The first night in the hotel, I knocked on the wall: no one can hear us.He said: exactly.I said: you're making me nervous.Why?Your eyes.My eyes?They're so cold and your face is so blank and hard to read.You think I am a robot here to kill you?No, but you're scary.And you like this? He rubbed my arm, moving from my wrist to my shoulder and going back down to the area where the shoulder bump meets the bicep and holding his hand there.I moved to the bed edge and looked at myself in the mirror.I like this. I laughed slightly, questioning why I was there.--Are you going to Uber, or take the train?The wall in my room turns into the hotel window. Through the window, I can see a grey tower the architect builds. It has a golden cap. The cap points down instead of up. I stand by the water, and look through the skyline to see his building. The skyscraper-in-progress is thin and surrounded by cranes. It hasn't been covered in glass yet. The upside-down gold head is not on there yet. The architect said: it reflects the people.I am flat on my floor bed looking up at the ceiling. I am flexing my toes and rubbing my ankles together, looking at the blue jacket the ex wore in the rain to Maryland.The architect said: you see darkness; I see light.In my dark room, I know every object. The blue coat my ex wore on a cobblestone bridge. Books like a flood over the window ledge. We kissed for the camera.Headlights and taillights shone on wheat like four rays. Your dad's car, will he care you took it? We watched TV: Jerry Springer and Million Dollar Listing reruns on Bravo, while I drank blue beer and he sat narcotized.Snow fell down the window, surrounded in oak paneling. Snow fell outside. Passed out drunk on the bed, while the cats ran scrabble. Rank, but lived-in. Drank. Do it again tomorrow. Drink the cat piss. I was happy. Snow on my skin melts in indoor heat. Scrabble game on the floor. Clink cheap champagne in best glasses, like we'd just bought a house, when really we were cat-sitting.Lying in the architect's hotel room, I asked if I was there to make him less lonely. He said: yes, but you're the one I called. Not phrased like this, not so blunt. Insinuation. Does everyone here speak like this? Read between the lines. The architect is a shirt with an invisible seam. On a decrepit pier, the architect told me I reminded him of it. He said: whereas, I am more like the other pier. He pointed at a distant, more sleek pier.Our car pitches off an uphill mountain road to aim at the moon. Windows tint the sunlight.I scroll on reels, laughing to myself and hitting my vape, while he drags lines on a digital architectural model.Woah, that looks cool.Do you have anything to drink?OliPop, only. He is sober with few friends, saying, "I have never been to a club." I tell him about techno and dancing, inviting him out the upcoming weekend, but he declines.

I studied him like one might study a great object: with suspicion. He admitted he had a different conception of kindness, that had more to do with strategy. I helped him set up his new apartment. The workers came up with the furniture and he tipped them. He emphasized being empathetic to them, and to the construction workers who labored on his buildings. He complained to me about the moguls, executives, and leaders, called them sharks and asked me to draw him: a boy amongst sharks. He said: I'll frame it.We sat on the hotel couch listening to my songs, while he munched in a bathrobe and I vaped, staring at the wall, and out the window of that hotel. Low-cal salt and pepper cashews. Earlier, I savored the rainforest shower. I blew vapor at the skyline, then placed the device on the coffee table. He moved it towards himself; I moved it back to me. Then started huffing it again, staring at steel buildings.Why do you do that?What?Vape.I have since I was fifteen.It's unhealthy.I shrug.Why are you sad?I'm not. Are you?No. Then, he tugged at my waistband.I want to listen to the song. Music is important to me.He laughed.--I liked Myra Lee at the time and internet trap with violent lyrics. Played the music for him, and I saw how he felt targeted. I would never do this now. He condemned the music and changed the queue, replacing it with sleek pop songs from fifteen years ago. They played from a laptop on the corner plinth. I took them seriously.--I just have nothing to say. You should say something.He shrugged, and said something vague.I didn't know how to respond.We sat in the Georgian restaurant and he talked about architecture: grey stone buildings with one black box window. I had my arms crossed and was asking questions. He was talking about his box car back in Italy. Like a small two person thing running on eco-power.He said: I would never buy a Lamborghini.I nodded with a blank pleasant face. The restaurant was empty besides the waitress and owners, who filmed us eating dumplings. The liquid burst out and ran down my face and I laughed embarrassed, while he stared around, then smiled at me. He said: you have to be careful when you are eating these. We split the check and I was happy to do this.He asks me if I want to buy a Lamborghini.I say, no, I don't think so. I like things that are more modest. Small box car would be nice; black, sleek, and cute. Bugatti, or something.

Face, scaffolding, sediment. The grey Authoritarian wall turns from spectral to backdrop, bird shit sky, gender blur on the convention. Loss folds into a larger erosion of state-reality which the Right reasserts via emphasis on the hetero-gender-strict construct. Who do you want to be resilient, and who would you prefer to disappear, or silently continue providing goods and services to the RWB vampire (the painting subjects and who they serve as avatars 4 AND also who they are, which is where love is. Isn’t an interesting dialogue better than placid vacancy)? Uncertain under smokestacks, water towers, sears houses being renovated into mansions, or being pried apart, by the builders, who are paid to unmake the houses and re-lay the Lego bricks. The maintainers live in the houses the builders build, the maintainers and city planners give orders, yet are subject to direction. blue is a harsh and garish color. Royal blue rain turns to a feathered garb clay-caked. The face slides off in the rain to reveal a stoic pose, and the kitchenware clatter, subaltern is loud. The grey sound-wall is punctured with windows for shrillness, and the wrongfully imprisoned escape like pink dots, while the office chair, maintaining convention, breaks into fossil noise. The negative spaces in a chair make tombstone-reminders, of complicity (for every dollar made, someone is harmed) while the driveway turns into an exhaust-pipe-internal-organ: a tunnel beneath the city is given breath, and the green-gold lawn has a dirty veneer. There is no purity, and the stripes, like the white wind, are muddied flesh-like yet holy still or -ish in impurity, beside the hairline scaffold on the arm-chair, while the legs grow feathers and the air turns to the vapor sail-wings of a cement gargoyle. Though exhaust scents the air, the inhabitants forget the smell, or turn it to mauve perfume: the perfume is the manufactured separation which is always a military-industrial complex product veil-screen-glass, through which we see, unfortunately. If I could peel off the layer of grime, though learning to see through the grime is bleak life, not sad or Greek life. Yet loss ⚓️tattoo&CEMENT=strength.

A hail stone broke my father's windshield, and he repaired it with duct tape, then drove an hour in the white-out on I-94 to work at a Christian liberal arts college and an hour home.I stared at the red, white, and blue stitches on my mittens, which became like lavender stalk tips. The fields were all beige with corn cob punctuations. Pumpkins in the fall fronted the fields, siding the lanes that cut the fields.Snow filled the window wells. I was head to toe in snow gear with mittens, ski socks, and boots. In the cul-de-sac's center was an iceberg. 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. They blended into the snow. My dad cried seeing this. School, work, home, and church—off the highway. You are here on the world rug.I tossed caterpillars in the wheelbarrow when the snow melted. They smooshed on our feet and tires. The projector tilted. A virtual fire glowed in a projected parallelogram shape on the flooding basement’s wall. Water spilled filled the basements through window wells. Black mold on the concrete, so we tore up the carpets. Three trees were equally spaced on a green lawn next to the 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.I closed my eyes and saw the cornfields swaying. I saw a castle at the end of the prairie, and walked a lane to the doorway, where my parents stood, at the opening. I heard the wind chime. I opened my eyes: caterpillars drifted across the sky-ceiling, and mutated into each other like mates.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. The kitchen table was a square made of glass with foam on the corners. Rags & Windex maintained crystal clarity. Foam corners on the fireplace prevented us from hitting our heads, and car locks prevented children from accidentally falling out of the mini vans. Disney stickers on the glass curve obscured the sound wall, behind which, our cul-de-sac was. Later, my father scraped the stickers off, using the same scraper meant for ice. Unlike the ice, which turned to water that dripped off, the stickers left a permanent residue. No amount of scrubbing could restore the glass to perfection. An air-freshener tree hung from the curved rectangular mirror of the car. The mirror reflected my glasses on a squished face. My glasses reflected the mirror. The Honda Odyssey door opened automatically with a mechanical groan, and beeps. 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, and it was determined this was "inappropriate:" word from our parents. Her Catholic father surveyed drivers from a highway billboard which advertised his law practice. A snake nest is the neighborhood on a satellite map. A snake swallows Americana-mash-up houses, crashes through the sound-wall, and eats the long roads. A yellow Beetle sits still on the cul-de-sac. From a Facebook post, we learn, the car's owner has died. Cold light illuminates the car interior and cul-de-sac. In the highway town, we live on earth and in builder's textures: mud, pastel vinyl siding, and rock glued into a facade. We designed the lives of caterpillars and straight virtual families, assigning gendered tasks to the animals and sims. Yet alternative possibilities were made possible, game options expanded with LGBTQ+ rights, and we experimented with strange pairings. 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. We role-played architects and killers, shot toy guns, played dead Native Americans, and ate at symbiotic Thanksgivings. We drew paths in the snow, game maps, territorial demarcations, for small pillaging-games, Capture the Flag. We drew boundaries with boots or fingers, on the windshield, which broke again from the hail. Again, my father laid the tape over the break, like a wardrobe craftsman. And I cried for the rupture and its anesthetization. Black tape bandaged the glass hole and interfered with my father's clear vision of the road ahead. Snow too obscured I-94. Pile-up, the radio announced, so my father took a U-turn, and climbed up the nearest exit. He drove past a Panera, then a series of chains.

Hail broke my father's windshield. He repaired it with duct tape. Black tape kept fractal glass ordered and covered the absence created by the hail's wound. Hail didn't know or care, how its chance destruction of the windshield would affect my father's daily drive to work an hour away, and back. Black tape bandaged the glass hole and interfered with my father's clear vision of the road ahead. Snow too obscured I-94. Pile-up, the radio announced, so my father took a U-turn, and climbed up the nearest exit. He drove past a Panera, then a series of chains.I looked around with my hat on and stared at the red, white, and blue stitches on my mittens, which vibrated into lavender, like tips of stalks on endless fields, I imagined. Really, the fields were all beige with yellow corn cob punctuations, maybe some pumpkins in the fall fronted the fields, siding the lanes that cut the fields, separating families of bugs.The window wells outside our basement filled with snow. Iron lattices, like child locks on car doors, prevented us from sudden deaths.I was head to toe in snow gear. In the cul-de-sac's center, an iceberg shimmered like an object of desire. I shook my head and crystals fell past my eyes. Snow 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, blending into the snow. My father cried seeing this, melting like the snow. Crying like a child with skinned knees, whose mother'd died, yet the child never properly mourned the mother's loss, so the skinned knees, shorn skin, a small superfluous pain, set him off. Cried like an icicle under a fingernail, peeling the nail off, I know that cry.Caterpillars covered the driveway, in the absence of snow now. I got a caterpillar on my boot. The sole is covered in guts. We filled the wheelbarrow with caterpillars, though, what now?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.Scrub mold off the floor and the grout lines between manmade stones on the fireplace. Dial the flame on, and stare at the flicker.Three trees were equally spaced on the green lawn. 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 kept check on the cul-de-sac. Predators, you never know.I stared at the ceiling, high on migraine-barbiturates, and the ceiling turned grainy. I closed my eyes and saw the cornfields swaying. I saw a castle at the end of the prairie, and walked a lane to the doorway, where my parents stood, at the opening. I heard the wind chime. I opened my eyes: caterpillars drifted across the sky-ceiling, and mutated into each other like mates.

Rose leaps across the backseat and slams herself into a window. Azalea is distracted by the charade and drives off a bridge. Hair strands float in suspense. Aster prays for his mama. The children are intertwined with the smashed car. Flowers grow over their car hug. The river carries car parts to town. Aster’s mama finds a wheel. A search party is constructed and spreads across the region, looking for the children. A deer finds the scent of its mama in the few car parts left by the stream.--I forget that I am sitting. The sitting room is gone. He painted my head; I sit in the chair. Far away one can see smoke from our cottage. He likes it cold, so it stays like that.I hold an apple in my hand and look at it closely, pretending to be fascinated. A woodpecker is slamming its head into a tree. Inside posing for the picture, I tilt my leg out in the chair.I decide I will create a new genre of winter pictures: cold with mud preserved under snow. I picture me far away without a coat.The painter is spinning his brush around the tin cup. Painting me pregnant, it can be like painting you inside of yourself.How about a trip to the village?You pretend not to hear.How about a trip to the village?A trip to the village, you say. How about it? A trip to the village.I will buy a horse in the village.And what will you do with that horse?I will ride away.--

An orange aura on the mountains. The two are skin stretched over frames. There’s chirping. They step from rock to rock. Goblet gets stuck. Lights zip across a grid and accumulate, moving skyward. Marsh and Goblet reach a thin river and continue their descent to an evergreen at the base. Flowers in the grass: soft white petals are magenta-streaked. Windows project yellow rhombi. Marsh is surprised the shelters have curtains on their windows. One stares. Marsh looks down.

I lay my head on Paul’s shoulder while he sleeps. The twin bed is crowded and there is blue winter light coming in. A courtyard below wafts up a weed smell, techno, and laughter. Paul’s hand rests next to his face with painted teal nails. Paul’s wearing my white T-shirt and some plaid pajama pants. Back pimples like speed bumps I run my nail over. He stretches his arms. Winter outdoors, and warm in here. Snoring and I can’t sleep, lay my head on Paul’s shoulder and then remove it. Too bony, wrap arms around the narrow body. I sleep a few hours, and grab a muffin before class. Tanned arm on his face, on a pillow below morning light on a ledge with long-armed potted plants.At the club, he said, remember that time, we filled it, with the smell of weed.Oh, yeah, from that drug dealer, what was his name?A letter.What letter?Oh, I remember. G.I throw my head back and laugh at the ceiling. Yes, G!I say: I miss G. I wonder what G is doing. And remember us both in G's backseat.He says something I don't remember.Our conversation was surface-level.Art history slides with Manet's Olympia. Laid on that twin bed, a summer casket. Summer turned to fall and he is asleep on the twin bed in a shared dormitory with large windows and a view of churches and bell towers. Paul's head: a ball with light and shadows.

In summer, branches make his cut-up face. One branch an eyelid, the other a slit mouth. Diesel bags bump on hips.Daniella passed me the dust bag: I’m going to Paris tomorrow.What about your studio work?She laughed.I think there is some angel dust here.Paul's house has African masks and framed eighteenth-century maps on the walls.After we broke up, I cut irregular holes into my jeans and cut my hair at odd angles and danced with a guy whose mother cooked me Pakistani food, while Paul ignored us. I ate the Pakistani food, then ghosted like an American emblem.Paul appeared in doorways wearing one to three quarter zips.I had to self-reinvent, and find new friends. I had destroyed my reputation, though I was unsure how exactly, or when. And no one would fess up, which was typical. Perhaps I was too ugly to be popular now. I stopped putting effort into my appearance, and became visibly poor.Art students said the Texas goth was a schizophrenic. Her sister was murdered by the cartel; it was true, but not believed. Diva is a fake-provocateur. Diva and I bought Doritos and wiped orange on our pants while smoking Newports. Her knees were scabbed in ripped black jeans next to my shabby pants with gaping holes. She had a crosshair tattoo next to Hello Kitty on the exposed skin, which was similar to my blurry weapon stick-and-poke. I blew cigarette smoke at Paul’s posse, who wrinkled their noses, and I painted piss-yellow men with guns on their temples. Expression is caused.My roommate and her boyfriend watch television with a cat at their feet. The cat slowly stares around. Paul was recommended as a best app match: someone to offer a rose to. Paul was recommended a second time, as a best match.A thin man fills a cup with liquid from a dropper. Paul taps me on the shoulder. Oh yeah, I saw him again at the club. Should have explained. Cold daylight. We sit on concrete blocks in the club yard. Danced and went home separately. Our conversation was unremarkable, though I spent years missing him and fantasizing about a random meeting.

Mangled Adorno from Minima Moralia. Separate Copy-paste cut-up ongoing notes

...the realm of the private is wholly swallowed up by a mysterious enterprise [Geschäftigkeit: business, activity, busyness]... Those who are afraid, from the unemployed to professionals who in the next moment may come to feel the wrath of those whose investments they represent, believe they can win over the ubiquitous company executive only through sensitivity, assiduousness, accessibility, by one way or another, through the qualities of traders, and soon there is no relationship which is not seen in terms of other relationships, no impulse which is not subjected to prior censorship, in order not to deviate from approval. The concept of relationships, a category of mediation and circulation, never prospered best in the actual circulation-sphere, in the market, but in closed, monopoly-like hierarchies. Now that the entire society is becoming hierarchal, opaque relationships adhere everywhere, wherever there was still the appearance [Schein] of freedom. The irrationality of the system is expressed not less in the economic fate of particular individuals [Einzelnen] than in the parasitic psychology of such... Today whoever engages in something private, which does not have a discernible goal, appears as arrogant, foreign and improper. Whoever isn’t “out” for something... is almost suspect: no-one trusts anyone else to help them get by, without legitimating themselves through counter-claims. Myriads of people make their living out of a condition, which follows the liquidation of occupations. These are the nice people, the popular ones, who are friends with all, the just ones, who excuse every sort of meanness as “human”... and incorruptibly defame every non-normalized impulse as “sentimental”. They are indispensable thanks to their knowledge of all the channels and back doors of power, they guess its most secret judgments and live off the dexterous communication of such. They are to be found in all political camps, even there, where the rejection of the system is taken for granted and for that reason a lax and cunning conformism of its own has developed. Often they win over people through a certain benevolence, through the sympathetic sharing of the life of others: selflessness as speculation. They are clever, witty, sensible and flexible; they have polished the old trader-spirit with the achievements of the day-before-yesterday’s psychology. They are ready for anything, even love, yet always faithlessly. They betray not from instinctual drives, but from principle: they value even themselves as a profit, which they do not wish to share with anyone else. They are bound to the Spirit [Geist] with affinity and hate: they are a temptation for the thoughtful, but also their worst enemies. For they are the ones who subtly apprehend and despoil the last hiding-places of resistance, the hours which remain free from the demands of the machinery. Their belated individualism poisons what still remains of the individuated... Nothing is harmless anymore. The small joys, the expressions of life, which seemed to be exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have a moment of defiant silliness, of the cold-hearted turning of a blind eye, but immediately enter the service of their most extreme opposite. Even the tree which blooms, lies, the moment that one perceives its bloom without the shadow of horror; even the innocent “How beautiful” becomes an excuse for the ignominy of existence, which is otherwise, and there is no longer any beauty or any consolation, except in the gaze which goes straight to the horror, withstands it, and in the undiminished consciousness of negativity, holds fast to the possibility of that which is better. Mistrust is advisable towards everything which is unselfconscious, casual, towards everything which involves letting go... The evil principle which has always lurked in affability develops, in the egalitarian Spirit... into its full bestiality. Condescension and making oneself out as no better are the same... the class-relationship, however denied, breaks through all the more irreconcilably... All of the playing along, all of the humanity of interaction and participation is the mere mask of the tacit acceptance of inhumanity. One should be united with the suffering of human beings: the smallest step to their joys is one towards the hardening of suffering.WITHDRAWAL: For those who do not play along, there exists the danger of considering themselves better than others and misusing their critique of society as an ideology for their own private interest... That is why every impulse towards self-withdrawal bears the marks of what is negated. The coldness which it must develop is not to be separated from the bourgeois one... The subjugation of life to the production-process degradingly inflicts something of that isolation and loneliness on every single person, which we are tempted to consider the matter of our superior choice.... There is no exit from the entanglement. The only responsible option is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence, and as for the rest, to behave in private as modestly, inconspicuously and unpretentiously as required, not for reasons of good upbringing, but because of the shame that when one is in hell, there is still air to breathe....the concept of austerité [French: austerity], though far from being completely sea-worthy, remains nevertheless the most suitable lifeboat.Objectively threatened, the power elite and their functionaries become subjectively utterly inhuman. Thus the class comes into itself and makes the destroying will of the course of the world into its own.The nominalism of tact aids the triumph of that which is most general, the naked reach of administration, even in the most intimate constellations. The write-off of conventions as outmoded, useless and extraneous ornaments only confirms the most extraneous of all things, a life of immediate domination. That the discontinuation of this caricature in schoolboyish camaraderie makes existence even more unbearable, as the mockery of freedom, is merely a further sign of how impossible it has become for human beings to live together under current conditions.Thoughts concerning money and the conflicts attendant on such invariably reach deep into the most heartfelt erotic, sublime and spiritual [geistige: spiritual, intellectual] relationships.The fear of the powerlessness of theory yields the pretext of declaring fealty to the almighty production-process and thereby fully concedes the powerlessness of theory.Traces of malice are not entirely foreign to authentic Marxist discourse, and today there is a growing resemblance between the spirit of business and the sober, juridical critique, between VULGAR MATERIALISM and the other kind, in which it becomes increasingly difficult to properly separate subject and object. – To identify culture solely with lies is most disastrous at the moment when it really becomes absorbed by such, and this identification is enthusiastically lauded in order to compromise every thought which resists such. If one calls material reality the world of exchange-value, and culture, that which refuses to accept the domination of such, this refusal is indeed illusory so long as the existent continues to exist... Human beings who belong together should neither be silent about their material interests nor reduce themselves to their lowest common denominator, but should reflectively grasp their relationship and thereby move beyond such. To be non-interested or uninterested in material conditions betrays that one is above material struggle.If society is truly one of rackets, as a contemporary theory teaches, then its truest model is precisely the opposite of the collective, namely the individual [Individuum] as monad. By pursuing the absolutely particular interest of every single individual, the essential nature [Wesen] of the collective can be most precisely studied... One need only observe outbreaks, in which the individual [Individuum] reacts energetically against the environment, as for example RAGE. The enraged always seem to be their own gang-leaders, whose unconscious has received the command to strike mercilessly, and from whose eyes gleams the satisfaction of speaking for the many, which they indeed are. The more someone is taken up with their aggression, the more perfectly they represent the repressing principle of society. In this sense, perhaps more than in any other, the rule applies: that which is most individual would be the most general. Not true, totalizing. Individual can only speak to dwindling bracket, not 'collective universal.' Bracket is self, explaining narcissism and auto-genre. Individual held accountable for "truths," private experience only possibility for material.No work of art, no thought which does not innervate the rejection of false wealth and first-class productions, of color films and television, of millionaire magazines and Toscanini, has a chance to survive. I WISHnature of organization: The true believers, or those in related factions who are all too similar, meet you and expect solidarity from you. They appeal expressly and implicitly to the common progressive agenda [Einverständnis]. However, the moment when you hope for the slightest sign of the same solidarity from them, or even mere sympathy for your own share of the social product of suffering, they show you the cold shoulder, which is the only thing left remaining of atheism and materialism in the age of restored popes. Those who are organized want intellectuals of prominence to issue proclamations on their behalf, but the moment they fear they have to issue proclamations for themselves, the latter are capitalists, and the same prominence on which they speculated is now ludicrous sentimentality and stupidity. Solidarity is polarized in the desperate fidelity of those for whom there is no way back, and in the virtual extortion of those who want nothing to do with prison wardens, nor wish to deliver themselves to robbers. NO LEADERS: means no assembly?the mishmash of manipulated-enlightened public opinion and unconscious action, all this is another expression for desiccated experience, the vacuum between human beings and their doom, in which their doom actually consists. The reified, frozen mold of events, as it were, substitutes for this itself. Human beings are turned into the actors of a monster documentary film, which no longer knows any viewers, because even the very last one has to participate on the silver screen.The genesis of the belabored talk of the “phony war” lay in precisely this moment. It originated to be sure from the Fascist technique of dismissing the real horrors of the war as “mere propaganda,” precisely in order to facilitate those horrors. Yet like all tendencies of Fascism, this too has its origin in elements of reality, which ends up prevailing only by virtue of that Fascist attitude, which sneeringly hinted at such. The war really is “phony” [in English], but its “phonyness” [in English] is more terrifying than any terror, and those who make light of this only contribute that much more to the calamity. Culture war spectacle horrifying due to it becoming playable spectacle: all made characters in the REAL fight made phony via saran-ing and gamification.The logic of history is as destructive as the human beings which it begets: wherever their inertia tends to go, it reproduces the equivalent of past calamities. Normality is death.Those who think in the form of free, distanced, disinterested judgments, were unable to assimilate the experience of violence – which really and truly rendered such thinking powerless – in these forms. The almost insoluble task consists of refusing to allow oneself to be rendered dumb, either by the power of others or by one’s own powerlessness. His power to be free of violent urge and manufacture distance. Distance can be accorded to representatives of an oppressor meaning what.German culture had stabilized itself in the spirit of the Berlin illustrated magazines, which conceded little to the strength through joy [notorious Nazi slogan], national auto highways, and upbeat exhibition-classicism of the Nazis. In its broadest measure, German culture pined for its Hitler precisely where it was most liberal, (art). Whoever intends to do something against cultural fascism, must come to grips with... if one does not wish to discover that, in the end, ambiguous figures such as Fallada under Hitler said more than the spotless German personalities, who succeeded in transferring their prestige.!...such an investigation would have to show that contemporary sickness exists precisely in what is normal.!The “regular guy” [in English in original], the “popular girl” [in English in original] must repress not only their desires and cognitions, but also all of the symptoms generated by repression in bourgeois times. Just as the old injustices are left unchanged by the generous mass display of light, air and hygiene, but are concealed precisely by the gleaming [blinkende] transparency of rationalized enterprise, so too has the most internalized [inwendige] health of the epoch cut off the flight into sickness, without changing the slightest bit of the latter’s etiology... Where the light is brightest, is where the fecal secretly rules... one can frequently observe something empty and mechanized in successfully analyzed patients, which should be reckoned not on account of their sickness, but on their healing, which breaks what it emancipates.Part of the mechanism of domination is that one is forbidden to recognize the suffering which that domination produces, and there is a straight line connecting the evangelical lecture on the joy of life to the construction of slaughter-houses for human beings... That is the schema of the undisturbed capacity for enjoyment.NECESSITY OF "SICKNESS:" Once it recognizes the ruling generality and its proportions as sick – and marked in the most literal sense with paranoia, with “pathic projection” – then it finds the cells of healing solely in what the standards of that social order portray as sick, absurd, paranoid – indeed, “insane,” and it is true as today as in the medieval era, that only fools speak the truth to power. In this respect it is the duty of the dialectician to help this truth of the fool to attain the consciousness of its own reason [Vernunft], without which it would indeed perish in the abyss of that sickness, pitilessly dictated by the common sense of others.The beautiful, as something unitary, true and appearanceless [scheinlos], emancipated from such individuation, is not represented by the synthesis of all works, by the unity of arts and of art, but solely corporeally and actually: in the downfall of art itself. Every work of art aims at such a downfall, by seeking the death of all the others. That all art reckons on its own end, is another way of stating the same state of affairs. It is out of such a compulsion towards self-annihilation in works of art, from their innermost concern, that drives towards the appearanceless [scheinlos] picture of what is beautiful, which stirs up seemingly useless aesthetic disputes over and over again. While they stubbornly and obstinately wish to find what is aesthetically correct [Recht] and precisely thereby fall victim to an unquenchable dialectic, they are more correct than they can know; by delimiting each art-work, whose energy they take into themselves and raise to a concept, they work towards the destruction of art, which is its salvation. A pluralism that does not kill is a safety net. A destructive and self-destructive artwork within pluralistic pool can/should exist (?).(...)Mobilized against this is the sanctity of what is alive, which is reflected precisely in what is most ugly and distorted. But its reflection is nothing immediate, but solely something refracted: what is supposed to be beautiful just because it is alive, is for that reason already what is ugly.Rampant health as such is always already sickness. Its antidote is sickness which is conscious of itself, the delimitation of life itself.

If human beings were no longer possessions of any kind, then they could also no longer be exchanged. The true affection would be one, which speaks specifically to the other, holding fast to beloved traits and not to the idol of personality, the mirror-reflection of possession. What is specific is not exclusive: it lacks the impulse towards totality.Texts which anxiously undertake to document every last one of their steps, decay unavoidably into what is banal and into a boredom which relates not just to the tension during the reading, but also to its own substance... Cognizing involves on the contrary a network of prejudices, intuitions, innervations, self-corrections, assumptions and exaggerations, in short in dense, grounded experience, which is by no means transparent in all places. What is a "truthful" shabbiness? When should a thing become a strive? The rose-scents of Elysium, far too voluble to be vouchsafed the experience of a single rose, smells like the tobacco in the functionaries’ office, and the lyrical backdrop of the moon was modeled on the oil-light, in whose guttering light students slog for their exams.(...) opacity merely mirrors the untruth of the bad generality. Thus the beautiful does injustice to justice and is nevertheless justified in doing so. In the beautiful, the frail future offers its sacrifice to the Moloch of the contemporary: because there can be nothing good in the latter’s realm, the former makes itself bad, in order to convict the judge from the position of the vanquished.In the immanence of society, the consciousness of its negative essence is locked away, and only the concrete negation stands in for the truth. Anti-ethics, by rejecting what is unethical in ethics, as repression, simultaneously makes the latter’s innermost concern its own: that every form of violence ought to vanish, along with every restriction.Negation becomes an opening.The need to be precise:Authors find that the more precisely, painstakingly, realistically and appropriately they express themselves, the more the literary result will be regarded as difficult to understand, while as soon as they formulate phrases in a lax and irresponsible manner, they are rewarded with a certain understanding. It does not help to ascetically avoid all elements of expert discourse, all references to no longer existing spheres of education. Rather, strictness and purity of linguistic arrangement, even in the most extreme simplicity, creates a vacuum. Shoddiness, moving along with the familiar currents of language, counts as a sign of belonging and contact: one knows what one wants, because one knows what the other wants. To focus on the thing in the expression rather than the communication, is considered suspicious: what is specific, not already hidden away in automatism, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion. Contemporary logic, which puts so much store on its clarity, has naively absorbed such perversion in the category of colloquial speech. The vague expression permits those who employ it to imagine more or less whatever they wish and what they mean anyway. The strictly enforced unambiguousness [Eindeutigkeit: directness, decidedness] of the construction, the effort of the concept, from which human beings are consciously weaned, presumes the suspension of the prevailing judgment before all content, and thereby a radical separation of oneself, something which they react violently to. Only that which they do not need to know counts as understandable; only what is in truth alienated, the word molded by commerce, strikes them as trustworthy... Whoever wishes to escape this, must see through every piece of advice which tells one to focus on communication as a betrayal of what is being communicated. Yet, colloquial simplifications can be charming and add up to an anti-elitism that is trendy (?). Proletarian speech is dictated by hunger. Hunger is informed by lack. The poor chew words. What is a poor speech and poor painting spliced into a bourgeois language? Explains a lot: So desperate however have human beings become in their culture, that they are ready to cast off the frail signs of a better state of affairs, if only the world does their worse side the favor of confessing how evil it is.International patriotism meshes seamlessly with hurrah-optimism. Those who are loyal are supposed to pledge allegiance to a people, regardless of which one.The insistent spot-check, that everyone should affirm that everything will turn out just fine, casts those who remain unyielding under suspicion of being defeatists and turncoats. In fairy-tales, the toad who came from the depths was always a harbinger of great happiness. Today, when the sacrifice of utopia looks as similar as its realization as the Antichrist looks like the Paraclete [the Redeemer], toad has became an epithet among those who themselves remain in the depths. Left optimism repeats the pernicious bourgeois superstition, one shouldn’t speak of the devil but should focus on the positive. “You are not satisfied with this world? Then you can go search for another one” – this is the colloquial speech of socialist realism.The fascinated eagerness to consume the newest procedure, does not only create indifference towards what is transmitted, but comes to benefit stationary junk and calculated idiocy. It confirms the old kitsch in ever new paraphrases as haute nouveauté [French: high novelty]. The defiant and narrow-minded wish to respond to technical progress by buying nothing which isn’t a hit, to refuse to remain behind the production-process, irregardless of the meaning of what is produced. Everywhere, following the crowd, swarming around, and standing in lines substitutes for the somewhat rational need. The hatred of a radical, all too modern composition is scarcely less than that of a film which is already three months old, to which the newest one is preferred at any price, even though this last is not the slightest bit different. Just as the customers of mass society wish to be in on the scene, they can leave nothing out.Under capitalism, the utopia of the qualitative – what by virtue of its difference and uniqueness does not enter into the ruling exchange relationship – flees into the fetish character. But this promise of happiness in luxury presupposes once more privilege, economic inequality, precisely a society based on fungibility. That is why the qualitative itself turns into a special case of quantification, the not-fungible into the fungible, luxury into comfort and in the end into senseless gadgets.

on appraisal of usefulness and sorting of individuals into friendly-or-enemy camps as symptom of fascism: whoever is engaged in praxis, as it is called, is pursuing interests, is realizing plans, automatically turns the human beings they come into contact with into friends and enemies. By looking at them as if deciding how they fit into their intentions, one reduces them in advance, as it were, to objects: those ones are useful, the others are not. Every divergent opinion appears to the reference-system of predetermined purposes, without which no praxis could manage, as burdensome resistance, sabotage, intrigue; every agreement, even if it came from the most despicable interest, turns into support, something of use, a testimony of alliance. Thus impoverishment appears in relation to other human beings: the capacity to perceive the other as such and not as a function of one’s own will, above all however that of fruitful opposition, the possibility of going beyond oneself through the imbrication [Einbegreifen] of what contradicts, withers away. It is replaced by a judgmental knowledge of human beings, for which even the best are ultimately the lesser evil, and the worst, are not the greatest. This manner of reaction however, the schema of all administration and “personnel policy,” already tends, before any political formation of will and commitment of exclusive political tickets, towards fascism. Whoever has once made it their business to judge acceptability, views the person being judged, to a certain extent out of technological necessity, as an insider or outsider, one of one’s own people or a foreigner, accomplice or victim. The stiffly scrutinizing, ensorceled and ensorceling gaze, which is typical of all leaders of horror, has its model in the appraising one of the manager, who tells the applicant to take a seat and illuminating the latter’s face, so that it pitilessly disintegrates into the light of usefulness and the dark of what is objectionable or unqualified. The end is the medical investigation, according to the alternatives: assignment in the labor-force or liquidation. The New Testament sentence, “Whoever is not for me, is against me” was from time immemorial spoken from the heart of anti-Semitism. It is a fundamental feature of domination, that everyone who does not identify with such, is relegated for the sake of mere difference to the enemy camp: it is not for nothing that Catholicism is merely the Greek word for the Latin totality, which the Nazis have realized... Carl Schmitt defined the essence of the political precisely by the categories of enemy and friend. Progress to such consciousness makes the regression to the child’s mode of behavior – children either like things, or are afraid – to its own... Freedom would not be choosing between black and white, but stepping out of such a proscriptive choice.one’s entire life is supposed to look like an occupation, and to hide, through this similarity, anything not yet immediately dedicated to commerce.... It is not merely that human beings no longer have the capacity to imagine what has not been drilled into them and shown in abbreviated form. Even the joke... has passed over into illustration... one is supposed to see “what’s happening” faster than the significant moments of the situation are developing. What such pictures act out, in anticipation of their completion by the well-versed observer, is the throwing of all meaning overboard like ballast in the snapshot of the situation, in the unresisting subjugation to the empty hegemony of things. The state-of-the-art joke is the suicide of intention. Whoever commits it, is rewarded by acceptance in the collectivity of laughter, which has horrifying things on its side. Even if one wanted to try to understand such jokes by thinking, one would remain helplessly behind the tempo of unleashed things, which race ahead even in the simplest caricature, like the concluding chase at the end of animated films. Sagacity turns immediately into stupidity in the face of regressive progress. No other understanding is left to thought than the horror of what is incomprehensible. Just as the sober-minded gaze, which meets the billboard smile of a toothpaste beauty, perceives the misery of torture in her manufactured grin, so too does the death-sentence of the subject, implicit in the universal victory of subjective reason, bristle from every joke and truly every visual representation. Dated phrasing of "toothpaste beauty" comparison. The sloganeering or diagramming of negation in the language of the snapshot becomes form of acceptance to be subjugated to reducing content: opening space to be non-diagram or non-illustration occurs through the handmade, or mechanically failed. Faulty object-system can produce a laugh, but also unease providing glimpse into possibilities for non-dominant machinery. If kitsch is an acceptance for the state of being, then a non-state, even a failed-state is a non-kitsch. To submit to kitsch is to submit to being dominated; which can be form of liberating submission (?). A reshaping and redefining of one's subjugation, and a reshaping of the definitive bounds of the subjugate-definition externally assigned to the individual is redecoration of cell: utility of doing so (?). Utility a necessary question? Utility for whom? What does submission to be utilized mean? How can disorder occur within one's reluctant transformation into utility? Is transformation into utility a death-sentence? To be utilized or not is not a choice: utilization occurs. Being is being subjugated to mechanisms not controlled. Self-power becomes form of self-promotion. What is outside? Water, forest, trees, not a sentimental, romantic, or subjugating picture of those, assigning non-human a function.I can become functionless and non-capitulating in a space that cannot exist.Meaningness [Deutigkeit] indicates the point of indifference between objective reason and communication. It is right, insofar as the objective form, the realized expression, speaks, turning itself outwards out of itself, and wrong, insofar as it damages the form through calculations aimed at the audience. Every single artistic and also theoretical work must show itself equal to the urgent necessity of such ambiguity [Doppelsinn]. The explicit [deutliche] form, however esoteric, yields to consumerism; the inexplicit kind is dilettantish according to its immanent criteria....the myriads who know nothing any more except their naked, rambling interest, are the same ones who capitulate as soon as organization and terror rope them in. If today the trace of what is human seems to cling solely to the individual [Individuum] as something which is perishing, then it is a warning to put an end to that fatality, which individuates human beings solely in order to be able to completely break them in their separation.

It is the essence of what is vanquished to appear inessential, dispensable, whimsical in its powerlessness. What transcends the ruling society is not merely the potentiality developed by the latter, but equally that which does not fit into the historical laws of movement.

Genuineness [Echtheit] is nothing other than the defiant and obstinate persistence on the monadological form, which social oppression stamps on human beings. What does not wish to wither away, should rather take the stigma of the non-genuine on itself. It feeds on the mimetic legacy. What is human is attached to imitation: a human being turns into a human being first by imitating other human beings... all art... is related to acting... what is genuine itself turns into a lie the moment it becomes something genuine, that is to say in the reflection on itself, in its positing as something genuine, such that it already steps beyond the identity which in the same breath it claims... Whoever holds fast to the self and shakes off theological concepts, contributes to the justification of the devilish positive, of cold-cut interest. It borrows from this last the aura of significance and turns the power of command of self-preserving reason into a high-flown superstructure, while the real self has already become in the world... a ghost... The entire philosophy of inwardness, with the claim of having contempt for the world, is the final sublimation of the... brutality, that whoever was there first, has the greatest rights, and the priority of the self is as untrue as the priority of all who feel at home right where they are... The discovery of genuineness [Echtheit] as the last bulwark of individualistic ethics [Ethik] is a reflex of industrial mass production. Only when countless standardized goods pretend, for the sake of profit, to be something unique, does the idea crystallize – as its antithesis, and yet according to the same criteria – that what is not to be reproduced is what is authentically genuine... The deception of genuineness [Echtheit] goes back to bourgeois delusion regarding the exchange-process. What appears genuine, is what commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced to – above all, gold. The genuineness [Echtheit] abstracted like a proportion of a fine metal turns, like gold, into a fetish. Both are treated as it they were the substrate, which is nevertheless in truth a social relationship, while gold and genuineness [Echtheit] express only the fungibility, the comparability of things: they are precisely not in themselves, but for others. The non-genuineness of the genuine rests on the fact that it must pretend, in the society ruled by exchange, to be what it stands for, without ever being truly able to be such. The apostles of genuineness [Echtheit] of power, who dress down circulation, perform the dance of the money-veil at this latter’s wakeThe utopian image of the unrestricted, energetic, creative human being has been infiltrated by the commodity fetishism, which in bourgeois society brings with it inhibition, powerlessness, the sterility of monotony... Perhaps the true society would become bored with development, and would out of freedom leave possibilities unused, instead of storming alien stars under a confused compulsion. Risks being misread or redeployed as doctrine of non-action (under governance which equates art and endorsement), yet he is not proposing an actual non-doing: aiming or talking about horizon in which action does not have to equate itself with violence (?). None of the abstract concepts comes closer to the fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. Which ends up enforcing a status quo and state of subjugation (?). In not doing, progress steamrolls on and no sum not-doing can occur. Yet, he is not being literal, trying to break notion: only progress. A sum not-doing would preserve social conditions; become a snowglobe of static weather. Strategies for snow-globe break: introduce qualities non-native to its logic to show its 'reality' as fallible. If picture presents itself as undoubtedly "real," becomes a form of reality-enforcement. To avoid non-redeployment as form of hegemonic domination, picture must non-heroize, non-celebrate its position, and non-iconize. Or become the icon suspicious or critical of its own depiction. Representation does not equal endorsement, and a sick, deadened, or self-critical representation can create possibilities for non-normality.Poverty has indeed always been glorified as asceticism, the social condition for the acquisition of precisely the wealth in which morality [Sittlichkeit] is manifested, but nevertheless “what a man is worth” [in English in original] signifies, as everyone knows, the bank account – in the jargon of the German merchants, “the man is good,” i.e. they can pay. What however the reasons of state of the almighty economy so cynically confesses, reaches unacknowledged into the mode of conduct of individuals. The generosity in private intercourse, which the rich can presumably allow themselves, the reflected glow of happiness, which rests on them, and something of this falls on everyone who they consort with, all this veils them. They remain nice, “the right people” [in English in original], the better types, the good. Wealth distances itself from immediate injustice. The guard beats strikers with a billy club, the son of the factory-owner may occasionally drink a whisky with the progressive author... Subjectively, too, the “society” [in English in original] is so thoroughly stamped by the economic principle, whose manner of rationality concerns the whole, that the emancipation from interests – even merely as intellectual luxury – is forbidden... What helps to eternalize the real distinction between the upper and lower strata, is the fact that the distinction between the modes of consciousness, both here and there, is vanishing more and more. The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich from that of their own. The consciousness of the rulers is inscribing in all Spirit [Geist], what previously religion endured. Culture turns for the high bourgeoisie into an element of representation. That one is clever or educated, is ranked under the qualities which make one worthy of invitation or marriage... . The “high life” [in English in original] wishes to be the beautiful life. It brings those, who partake in it, ideological pleasure-winnings. By turning the shaping of existence into a task, in which one follows guidelines, preserves artificial styles, and keeps the delicate equilibrium of correctness and independence, existence itself appears as meaningful and calms the bad conscience of those who are socially superfluous. The incessant demand, to say and do that which is exactly appropriate to one’s status and situation, demands a kind of moral effort. It becomes difficult, to be who you are... the affinity of snobbery and Jugendstil [Art Nouveau], the attempt by a class defined by exchange, to project themselves into a picture of vegetable beauty, as it were, purified of exchange. That the life which organizes its own events is not any more of a life, becomes apparent in the boredom of the cocktail parties and the weekend invitations to the countryside, in the golf, symbolic of the entire sphere, and in the organization of “social affairs” [in English in original] – privileges, where no-one has any real fun and with which the privileged only deceive themselves, about how little opportunity for joy in the unhappy whole exists even for them. In the latest phase, the beautiful life is reduced to what Veblen characterized it as throughout the ages, ostentation, the mere being-selected, and the park offers no other pleasure anymore than that of the wall, against which those outside can press their noses. What can be crassly observed in the upper classes, whose malice is in any case being irresistibly democratized, is what has long been true for society: life has turned into the ideology of its own absence.

Identification with not fetishization of. Refusal of closure, happiness performance, and/or success narrative.

David Wojnarowicz: Heads of Family; Heads of State.

Jackie Wang: ...my dances on snow as freedom of speech are forbidden... We exaggerate it to the point of absurdity, and we may do this to cover up the fact that we are still these overfeeling and fucked-up human beings; we have these little pimply and confused teenagers inside of us yelling and demanding a voice, but we hush that voice... To not necessarily strive for shamelessness but affirm one's abjectness, or at least reconcile oneself to the possibility that what might register as a personal defect in the way that one relates to... others may actually be a site of potential?

David Wojnarowicz: For all I knew I was the only person for miles and all alone and I didn’t trust that fucking mountain’s serenity. I mean it was just bullshit. I couldn’t buy the con of nature’s beauty; all I could see was death. The rest of my life is being unwound and seen through a frame of death. And my anger is more about this culture’s refusal to deal with mortality... History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people... He talked about the hypocrisy people embody when they can step over the dying alcoholic sprawled outside their front door on their way to the newsstand where they buy a paper and become horrified at a printed photograph of a starving XXXXXXXX. He said: “It’s the separation people feel from those who commit acts of violence or murder... life was essentially a series of activities designed so that one could pay out money to keep from dying; if one stopped paying, one died; whether from exposure, starvation, lack of medical care or invisibility... Aside from the insane, anyone who lives in america carries a rage and an impulse to shred the screens of physicality and the fake moral codings that fence that rage in... I also marvel at how death can be so relentless and constant and how such enormous sections of the social landscape can be viciously exploded by a handful of rich white people, with an entire population’s approval and participation... Once you recognize the void, how do you fill it? Most people fill it with money, fill it with romance, with thrills—but most people are afraid to carry it out to it’s logical end, to where they really want it to carry them, so as a result we have tv shows that show people getting caught by the cops and doing all these crimes because it’s real people doing real crimes that we wish we could do...

gutter music, means of production

McKenzie Wark: To think that we live in an illusory world of capitalist realism still might concede too much reality to the belief in eternal.

More Adorno notes:The insidious superior dismissal of “I don’t understand” becomes form of cataloging object as worthless consumer good, and infantilizing the object becomes form of domination and alignment with “acceptable” bourgeois status quo. Reproduction of the status quo appears natural; all non-reproduction of domination appears other, calculated, threat, etc.
The abstract interest, as something entirely mediated, creates a second immediacy, while those who are not yet completely encompassed are unnaturally compromised. In order to not be ground beneath the wheel, these latter must thoroughly outbid the world in worldiness and are easily convicted of clumsy overcompensation.Suspicion, lust for power, lack of camaraderie, falsity, vanity and lack of seriousness are what they are compulsively reproached for. Social enchantment unavoidably turns those who do not play along into self-seeking types, while those without a self, who live according the reality principle, are called selfless. Meanwhile selflessness becomes another form of egoic virtue signaling.Cultivated philistines are wont to demand that the work of art should give them something. They are no longer outraged at what is radical, but draw back with the shamelessly modest assertion, that they just don’t understand. This latter clears away the resistance, the last negative relation to the truth, and the offending object is catalogued with a smile under its own, under consumer goods, between which one has a choice and which one can reject, without incurring any responsibility. One is just too dumb, too outmoded, one just can’t keep up, and the smaller one makes oneself out to be, the more reliably do they participate in the mighty unison of the vox inhumana populi [Latin: INHUMAN voice of the people], in the guiding force [Gewalt] of the petrified spirit of the age [Zeitgeist]. What is not comprehensible, from which no-one gets anything, turns from an outraging crime into mere foolishness, deserving of pity.They displace the temptation along with the spike. That someone is supposed to be given something, by all appearances the postulate of substantiality and fullness, cuts off these latter and impoverishes the giving. Therein however the relationship of human beings comes to resemble the aesthetic one. The reproach that someone gives nothing, is execrable. If the relation is sterile, then one should dissolve it. Those however who hold fast to it and nevertheless complain, always lack the organ of sensation: imagination. Both must give something, happiness as precisely what is not exchangeable, what cannot be complained about, but such giving is inseparable from taking. It is all over, if the other is no longer reachable by what one finds for them. There is no love, that would not be an echo. In myths, the guarantor of mercy was the acceptance of sacrifice; love, however, the after-image of the sacrificial act, pleads for the sake of this acceptance, if it is not to feel itself to be under a curse. The decline of gift-giving today goes hand in hand with the hardening against taking. It is tantamount however to that denial of happiness, which alone permits human beings to hold fast to their manner of happiness. The wall would be breached, where they received from others, what they themselves must reject with a sour grimace. That however is difficult for them due to the exertion which taking requires of them. Isolated in technics, they transfer the hatred of the superfluous exertion of their existence onto the energy expenditure, which pleasure requires as a moment of its being [Wesen] all the way into its sublimations. In spite of countless small moments of relief, their praxis remains an absurd toil; the squandering of energy in happiness, however, the latter’s secret, they do not tolerate. That is why things must go according to the English expression, “relax and take it easy” [in English in original], which comes from the language of nurses, not the one of exuberance. Happiness is outmoded: uneconomic. For its idea, sexual unification, is the opposite of being at loose ends, namely ecstatic tension, just as that of all subjugated labor is disastrous tension."Message" [in English in originall turns into "escape" [in English in original]: those swept up in cleaning the house in which they live, forget the ground on which it was built. What "escape" [in English in original] would really be, the antipathy, turned into a picture, against the whole, all the way into what is formally constituted, could recoil into a
"message" [in English in originall, without expressing it, indeed precisely through tenacious asceticism against the suggestion. and against both psychology and infantilism.Art as what is not socially acceptable not confirmation of what has been deemed acceptable antisociality or resistance. True antisociality is the actual OTHER. Not performance of one’s othering pre-prepared to be co-opted into bourgeois acceptability. And anticipating or manufacturing its own acceptance. Becomes another form of domination, which (?) sure. If you are after power and the promotion of GOOD cause. BE THE COLLECTABLE!Adorno speaks to eccentricity as only viable form of survival.Conformity of taste and consensus Every judgment is approved by friends, they know all the arguments in advance.
That all cultural products, even the non-conformist ones, are incorporated into the mechanism of distribution of large-scale capital, that in the most developed lands a creation which does not bear the imprimatur of mass production can scarcely reach any readers, observers, or listeners, refuses the material in advance for the deviating longing. Even XXX is turned into a piece of inventory in the rented apartment… already so firmly established, in their isolated spheres, in what is confirmed, that they can no longer desire anything which is not served to them under the brand of "highbrow" [in English in original]. Their sole ambition consists of finding their way in the accepted canon, of saying the right thing… The subjective precondition of opposition, the non-normalized judgment, goes extinct, while its trappings continue to be carried out as a group ritual. Stalin need only clear his throat, and they throw Kafka and Van Gogh on the trash-heap.if they no longer write for an imaginary posterity, but solely for the dead God?Art to GOOD:
The transformation of expressive content from an unguided impulse into a material for manipulation makes it however simultaneously tangible, presentable, salable.Idiosyncrasy as the choice: Expression negates the reality, by holding up to it, what does not resemble it, but it does not deny it; it looks at the conflict straight in the eye – the conflict which otherwise results in the blind symptom. What the expression has in common with repression, is that the impulse finds itself blocked by reality. That impulse, and the entire context of experience which belongs to it, is denied immediate communication with the object… It is so strong, that it experiences its modification to a mere picture, the price of survival, without being mutilated on its way outside. Instead of setting the goal of its own subjective-censoring “processing,” it sets something objective: its polemical revelation [Offenbarung]. AND thinking not as proof of thinking but (?) every successful expression of the subject, one might say, is a small victory over the play of forces of its own psychology. The pathos of art stems from the fact that precisely by withdrawing into the imagination, it gives the hegemony of reality what is its due, and nevertheless does not resign itself to adaptation, does not perpetuate the violence of what is externalized in the deformation of what is internalized. so a non-messenger and non-escapist art can become breaker of bounds.

• The Corner

• Failure to Meet Under Administrative Conditions

• The Blue Shed

• Dollar Fabrics on the Marble Bed

• Rotten Apple Fell Off The Shelf Like a Head Off a Neck

• Prazosin

• NDA / The Distant Architect and His Coat

• Cassandra

• Pillar for Non-Saints / Violence of Sterile Light

• unfixed position

Failure to Meet Under Administrative Conditions, 44 × 36 inches, oil on canvas, 2025

Dollar Fabrics on the Marble Bed, 24 × 36 inches, oil on canvas, 2025

Rotten Apple Fell Off The Shelf Like a Head Off a Neck, 36 × 44 inches, oil on canvas, 2025

The Corner, 16 × 12 inches, oil on canvas, 2026

Prazosin, 34 × 22 inches, oil on canvas, 2025

Cassandra, 14 × 10 inches, oil on canvas, 2026

NDA / The Distant Architect and His Coat, 24 × 36 inches, oil on canvas, 2025

The Blue Shed, 26 × 44 inches, oil on canvas, 2026

Pillar for Non-Saints / The Violence of Sterile Light, 17 × 48 inches, oil on canvas, 2026

The blanket is a grey sea and the man sits on it with his thighs pressed together, staring at the invisible mirror, while I am standing outside the room. He has a jacket on him like a nylon cape. He moves his feet on the carpet and takes off his shoes, then presses his toes into the beige plush. He pulls his toes closer to his heels. He is sitting there and looks up at the mirror to inspect his face; he wrinkles his nose and leans close to the mirror, placing sharp elbows on his thighs. Black fabric on those, high quality. He puts his hands through his hair. It looks windswept; baldness at the top corners of his temples extending back. A triangle. I'm leaving.I'm heading out.What?Leaving.Oh, so soon you're going?Yeah, it was great and then I gave up.I walk out into the grey-striped hallway. The floor is hard on my shoes, even though it is carpet. It is a thin one. My shoulders are tight. I walk down the hallway and take a left turn. Another long hallway. I walk down that one. I press a button. Circle stars red in its metal box. The two red buttons. Two buttons can turn. The red button I pressed is lit and the arrow above the elevator tells me it is going down. Elevator will take me down to the street. 2 AM, a lonely ride home. A fine ride, I self-correct. The image of him is on my eyes, anonymized. His face is wiped. Guy, I know well. Well, I have known him for a little while. The doors open and I walk in. Face the hallway. I stare at the lined wall, wallpaper covered. Exit the elevator and walk out into the lobby. It is not worth describing. Cold street, the same. Wind and sirens, headphones on.

• note on drawings✏️

fictive

2020 Voyeur

Pillar for Non-Saints/ Violence of Sterile Light, oil on canvas, 17 x 48 inches

notes

Flop taxi over infinity dior...

literature techniques used to create dominant languages and "criminal types"

Reading list relating to queer negativities, structural critique, non-normative and/or underclass or carceral experience:Wh*re by Nelly Arcan
Anarchitecture: After Everything https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=Vj9mJOJ1Ro8
Love Me Tender by Constance Debré
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Artless by Natasha Stagg
Bodies of Work by Kathy Acker
Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun by Jackie Wang
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
True Love by Sarah Gerard
Binary Star by Sarah Gerard
Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval
The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam
The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson
Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu
Machines in the Head by Anna Kavan
History of Violence by Édouard Louis
Ice by Anna Kavan
Rent Boy by Gary Indiana
The Melancholia of Class by Cynthia Cruz
Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan
Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen
Berg by Ann Quin
Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima
Was by Geoff RymanForman, James. Twenty Enemy Forces Within a Revolutionary Organization That Must Be Combatted. Black Panther Party, 1971.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/forman/forman-20-enemy-forces.pdf
GenderFail. Manifesto, Profit-for-Survival: Discourses on Anti-Capitalist Publishing Practices. 3rd expanded ed., GenderFail Press, 2021.
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-kg4QRa3Ic.
Mendelberg, Tali. "The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement." talim.scholar.princeton.edu/publications/symbolic-politics-status-maga-movement.
Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. AK Press, 2004. https://editions-ismael.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1968-Valerie-Solanas-S.C.U.M.-Manifesto.pdf
Armed Anti-Imperialist Struggle (and the Defensive Position of the Counterrevolution in its Psychologic Warfare Against the People)
by Ulrike Meinhof https://rohandrape.net/ut/rttcc-text/Meinhof2001a.pdf
https://iai.tv/video/the-new-moral-elite-with-catherine-liuFilms:
Wings by Larisa Shepitko
My King by Maïwenn
Chain by Jim Cohen
Devils's Playground by Lucy Walker
Poison by Todd Haynes
Notes on a Scandal by Richard Eyre
The Ice Storm by Ang Lee
Querelle by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Belle de Jour by Luis Buñuel
Monsieur Hire by Patrice Leconte
In the Bedroom by Todd Field
In the Cut by Jane Campion
Coal Miner's Daughter by Michael Apted
Life After Bob: The Chalice Study by Ian Cheng
The Lives of Others by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Braguino by Clément Cogitore
The Damned by Luchino Visconti
O Fantasma by João Pedro Rodrigues
Krisha by Trey Edward Shults
Fox and His Friends by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Polytechnique by Denis Villeneuve
Nowhere by Gregg Araki
Wuthering Heights by Andrea Arnold
Veronika Voss by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Keane by Lodge Kerrigan
Hard Truths by Mike Leigh
Anatomy of Hell by Catherine Breillat
Dying at Grace by Allan King
Bully by Larry Clark
L'Argent by Robert Bresson
Sudesha by Yugantar
Yeast by Mary Bronstein
Workingman's Death by Michael Glawogger
The Seventh Continent by Michael Haneke
Surviving You, Always by Morgan Quaintance
Barbara by Christian Petzold
Underground by Emile de Antonio

Victorian novels worth skimming/reading for context and analysis of highly organized and low-opportunity-for-mobility society:Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope

I create clouds for associative thinking and fantasy. I redact dead or wishful contours and forms from wet paint, and scuff color out of previous layers. The works begin with a photograph, impression from a mirror, or rendering of a personal object. Subjects are diminished, tinkered with, and redrawn. Attention is inconsistent. Actions are alternately careful and impulsive, precise and disordered. I preserve, question, or remove components after considering what should be visible. States hover in dim light, low-resolution, or under fluorescence. I reshape textures and colors of non-aspirational clothing and decor, tolerating complicated attachment and ambivalence towards what I am describing. I think the act of missing an imagined mark can create melancholy for a possibility that was not reached. I preserve what I observe, while acknowledging forces of sterilization, luxury design, and replacement. If I strive for a Utopian or better-picture, it is one with less hierarchy, and greater impoverishment to the useless luxury object. I don't mean "useless" pejoratively. I am talking about a queer proletarianization of the useless. I am interested in how classed and gendered inheritance and time-after, are recorded by an object or subject growing old, or staying young in the rectangle. I think it is worth speaking to where/when art was made, which was at night in a small windowless NYC studio. I realized any attempt at making something look day-lit would appear fake.

The graphite drawings stage blunt or common materials, performative masculinities, and incompatibilities. I am interested in extracting or foregrounding noise or smudge within the ideological to override its signal. In my everyday environment, I have not seen very much resistance to standards; I see conformity and adaptation more than disobedience. Misalignment becomes resistant. The pencil works against what is being depicted and the elementary connotations of pencil and paper. How to incorporate a disobedient act within a default or conditioned form? I see how the picture responds to, or mismatches the friction, or interruption, which can appear as rudeness. Whether or not rudeness can actually be radical in art, I cannot say, but it can feel accurate to expressing common frustrations. I pair captures from my life, moving around a lot, with departures from the mimetic. I question, overwrite, or undercut glimpses of rural and urban social life and show misalignment between people in roles. Past and present interlink, and forms are detached from clarity, sign, or inspiration. The composite becomes split, grey, or partial. Transitions are described by buses or transit areas; white columns repeat with defaced or mutating patterns, estranged from viewers with different knowledge sets. They are executed on a small and standardized scale (9" x 6" - 10" x 8"). I think it is worth speaking to where/when art was made, which was in my bed, in a small NYC apartment bedroom with no natural light, and material sourced from my camera roll and surroundings. I only used inexpensive materials and a scanner in a communal apartment.

The over-production becomes camp and sabotage through trying to manifest importance. The tragic sign painter, the Midwest teenager’s bedroom wall, and the populist manufacturer. Dark corner, the online, the honest Dreams. The morose drunk, the failed-influencer, the genocidal dancer, and the Dory (the ditzy, forgetful, or silly, which Halberstam creates a definition and category for in The Queer Art of Failure). The grandiose and the breakup text. The Sims, alt-right mountains, and Michaels craft store.Aspirational pressure and stuckness in consumption of advertisements for marriage and religiosity, linked to the contemporary painting's becoming self-advertisement or reassurance of liberal reality that is not accurate to what occurs in non-liberal and non-coastal realities. Painting can become a site for liberal or corrective projection onto, oversimplifying or "fable-izing" complexity of astringent and nebulous Western dominant cultures and persistently infectious fascisms. I feel like I was seeing this in a lot of MFA art and market-oriented painting at least; I think it was/is required by a climate where artists must stand against what is evil, and connects to a history of politically reactionary anti-dominant-power American painting. And so, to stand against, the enemy is reduced and made simplistic or iconographic, same with the figurative subject who is granted superiority. Components of the painting support the image. The irrational or non-functioning is streamlined out; the pleasing, systematized, and communicative is prioritized. Painting becomes a form of convincing and persuading; baiting and selling, mimicking capitalist models. It can be a necessary painting. I think it is a liberal-capitalist painting model. I am being very general, but I am trying to describe an atmosphere of making/consumption that I was in, the early 2020s. Ultimately, the orientation of this painting is to/for collector legibility and institutional recognition. It is a success-oriented painting, and some have no choice but to be successful. What is the alternative, when in the free market, which has trended more recently toward the anti-intellectual and consumer-oriented?All my life I have sort of been perceived as naive or ditzy, and reinforced this perception, or genuinely just been ditzy, while navigating challenging or unfamiliar systems. Playing naive becomes a way to risk wrongness, cliché, or failure. The drunk and sloppy; the party mess. It is also a way to stay modest in the face of all one does not know; our culture does not reward ditziness in men, it rewards people who feign to know. There is no person who knows. There are people who know more about certain subjects, or life experiences. There are experts; I think we should listen to experts, with skepticism and awareness of where their position comes from. I am not some fucking expert. I do not claim to know everything and I do not know a lot; I do know about some Western painting and I do know about some dominant American image cultures. In the eighteenth century (I think) there was a British painter who profited off making sentimental paintings of the poor; obviously suffering becomes commodity. I like the spot between embarrassing earnestness and satire or self-parody; Paul Klee satirized the image culture of his era within ultimately non-satirical and irrational compositions, transforming a Nazi athlete's head into a line-dash abstraction; if anything is art and painting is not some sacred thing, then anything can be a subject and all connotations are to be evoked; taste is classed; the person new to a city wears the flashiest clothing, and I think there is something sweet and authentic about that naïveté. Why can't painting be cheap?Any effort at making something completely earnest also turns into embarrassment; if an artist feels like a conventional failure, the painting can reproduce that feeling becoming a panned object, or a flunk out. When I was painting, I was thinking about an emoticon on Instagram stories, depicting the animation of tomatoes towards an image and trying to figure out how to make something grand, but also pre-engineer difficulty and potential failure for myself. Ambitious tasks that cannot be won; I wanted to speak to multiple realities. Being stuck in MAGA-reality through liberal eyes without irony; living in a world that cannot be packaged. In some ways the shield or guise of a joke becomes a defense, when dealing with something real, and not really funny: how to package despair and negative feeling into a market object? Religious indulgences and realization of fake-ness, yet sadness? Irrelevance, entertainment, and spiraling into destruction while holding it together, without distance. The numb laugh at the real display of feeling in others, yet making to protect against that laugh or laugh with any criticism, is not good. The anesthetized laugh at suffering; poverty becomes something to ridicule (thinking about reality TV and self-made exploitation content on reels, people finding new ways to sell and rebrand their lifestyles). The person becomes a self-ridicule, or spiteful toy, refusing to be instrumentalized for satisfaction. Serving on a platter while disliking the act of serving, and serving role. Serving grey-butter, serving poison. Becomes a way to reclaim one's role; being treated like prop, or discarded. Remains true to feeling, yet without liberation. Loser manifesto, treat me like trash? I can recook it.Undoing the need for meaning, for transformation of classed suffering into an ultimately fractured billboard-thing or painting made on a craft store board, defeats function, or has a destructive function towards commerce and viewer. I also wanted to evoke the acceleration of right-wing populism that I was witnessing in Pennsylvania in 2024 glimpsed as fragments online and in person, not through some distanced or ivory-tower-locked critique but through showing the way that its ideology, and the social media mechanisms that accompany advertisements leak into the headspace and dream-space of the artist. Canonical Western painting has reinforced white power, so there has to be an acknowledgement of that, but also a beheading, or death that occurs or is implied in the painting . The danger and problem is that destruction becomes aesthetic, or the desire for escape through painting overtakes the critique. Yet, this points to fantasy and glamour which are necessary; artifice can be necessary. Why do individuals construct artifice, and what does the artifice overlay? I do not understand how people can have legible and coherent personalities that lead to mechanical and predictable actions. I do not understand how an art practice can become so fixed and predictable: why are we even doing this to people? For money? I am so confused. The artist may be a content creator. When I was painting, sometimes it felt authentic, and sometimes contrived. The questions and contradictions contained in all of this may ultimately lend to a more advanced critique, though ultimately, there is not a shared mental database between people, so I think the overly personal, subjective, or experiential risks becoming opaque or diaristic. A composite of contradictions can become simultaneously true and untrue, almost psychotic or nothing. I was also thinking about evidence of labor, and beauty as entry points ; but when those qualities become overly involved in themselves, losing sight of honesty towards subject, art can become overly aesthetic. When something becomes too beautiful, I want to make it ugly; but this impulse is reacting against. The dressing distracts from the skeleton. Art stays embedded in its same media-conditions without sight of a cleanse, which I think is accurate to a type of experience I want to speak to/from. For many people there is no escape from advertisement and addictive sources of pleasure and circumstantial escape through seductive offerings; there is no escape from style and image. I do not think Painting as a language is as legible to majorities, as style and internet image. Can painting be separated from style? Majorities do not understand, or see the point in abstraction; it becomes a niche language understood only by people who claim to know it; yet so much of the abstraction I see is in assistance of decoration, or mimics past abstraction models, applying them to the production of luxury, rather than the new breaking of and formation of space. The introduction of contemporary gimmick into a mimicry of past abstraction cannot redeem replay from replay. What if replay is felt?Some may not believe there is a true separation or parcelling of abstraction from commodity. Again, atmospheric generalizations. Outside specifically-educated bubbles, abstraction feels pointless and non-communicative if it is not utilized for the production of a function. There are true separations between groups and individuals, and forcing or manufacturing consensus is not an answer. I am unsure if people are conscious that they are consuming constructed culture and not fact; it is disturbing to me and I feel isolated from consensus of what is good, liked, or deemed valuable. Communication becomes pointless when you do not understand the people you are speaking to. Communication becomes futile, if communication and belonging requires homogenization. Or, endless arguing about and leveraging of privilege or lack. Attendance or belonging to an art space is a major privilege, not available to majority populations. I want to resist totalizing or generalizing, though generalization can speak accurately to feeling, which may or may not be evidence. Advertisement can feel more resonant than abstraction, though what is the value of emotional resonance? What is the use of a value-model? Without value, standard is lost.There is no use making sweeping or totalizing value judgements; people unqualified to be critical speak critically, and anti-intellectualism becomes its own badge. Voting into importance due to sheer popularity becomes a problem. Entry into art is bought, or inherited; education is bought, or inherited. There is no use pretending otherwise. Authority can mimic authoritarianism. Don't we equate authority with value? I refuse to supply a takeaway reassurance.Curated restyling of one's image consumptions, and self-fashioning on and offline become methods of re-styling circumstantial surroundings. I was thinking about forms of amateur social media expression: creating an Instagram story collage or screen-like billboard of captures as a painting. I am now conflicted because I do not want to reproduce or produce new desires, and participate in these manufacturing and manipulative economies: be legible to/for whom? The ability to leave, be skeptical of, or be distant from these economies speaks to a new privilege and the very "ivory-tower-ness" I wanted to step down from. I do not believe in taking a purist or non-contaminated painting position: my mind is damaged by the culture I consume. I think purity and immunity from mass cultures and economies that construct being can be a dated and entitled posture. Yet, I think submitting to populist tendencies in the art and political climate may be worse; art now has to be legible, create a consumable quality, asking to be bought while pretending it is disinterested in or above commerce, or provoke an immediate reaction, which is so irritating. I am interested in the position of the degraded and consumed; I am it. Why does subjectivity have to be consumable if it isn't inherently? Or it is; in capitalism, we consume and exploit, it takes new and invisible forms. I think systems of consolidated power mask hierarchy, humiliation, and exploitation under bureaucratic or indirect language; what proclaims to reject hierarchy reproduces it in new creative form. We create new languages for inclusion and exclusion, and new currencies for participation and/or hierarchical cache. Paying for art school is oxymoronic; paying for art school is moronic, same with paying for art.I think these questions are overwhelming and cannot be encompassed in painting without failure or non-communication occurring; yet non-communication, or associative expression is not failure. I think clear communication without stakes or risk is failure, or pragmatic. I think many of the "good" and clear paintings of today are advertisement-like, delivering a feeling and conclusion: I do not think they are good, but they are understandable products of climate and necessity. If a painting is not aware of how it is functioning and does not contain a critique of itself, I think that is compliance in the reproduction of kitsch and replacement of art with market kitsch, or effective advertisement. Artists participating in the market should acknowledge their relationship to economic exchange, yet many cannot and are dependent on manufacturing for market economies and buyer tastes. I think this is genuinely terrible and sad. I am not interested in moral judgements of individuals. I refuse to believe that art is capitalism, though I flip between believing art should critique in, and thinking art should try to do its own thing, while risking the hermetic. I have tried to be resistant, and it is isolating, when the climate is one that accepts hierarchy and treats accomplishment as meaningful. Accomplishment is meaningful, but life is not this. I have lived through intense periods of cynicism, despair, and self-destruction, and made art throughout; authentic making is not going to result in consistently good or successful output, but expression is meaningful. I do not think models that force artists to be successful capitalists or image-producers are good, but whatever.Why is painting so entrepreneurial? Critique is often marketed. The painting becomes a market node, and the artist, a business person. I don't think sincere investment is enough to redeem this, but I do not fault artists for wearing the clothing of their models. Human. Business-fashion. The human is business-fashion? Over reliance on style and melodrama may point to conventional artistic failure. Or may be authentic expression. Authentic expression and sincerity cannot make Good Art, though they can approach something akin to camp or the embarrassing realness embedded in an adolescent social media post or diary entry. The problem also is that the thing that engages with the current, both visually and psychologically, dates itself quickly, so it may be worth striving for a less style-dependent, or non-internet reactionary art, though I am not sure. I think the way to proceed is to systematize art more, and separate it from myself, and a notion of direct individual expression; individual expression is ultimately a Western construct, and emotion becomes consumable content. Expression becomes something to like or dislike, value or devalue. I do not care to subject my psychological expression to being further evaluated or consumed, but whatever. I think it is all very dehumanizing, though that is the cost of participation.

Re-finding and cementing in a historical may be good after a period of making my practice non-traceable and estranged from coherent history, which I wanted to be like the unplanned wandering of virtual and non-virtual worlds. In some ways connoting something with an internet quality now is dated, or harkening to an earlier net.art, yet detaching from explicit critique further swimming in data pools without tethers or ladders out, getting so lost. I get lost... There has to be a discovery rooted in, or reason to return to observation, not with nostalgia, but the same destructive and naive urges I brought to the hyper-saturated and drunken painting I was trying to do, which was ultimately too interested in providing pleasure or manufacturing a response. The lostness became coherent, crystallizing to image or recognition instead of hovering more on the verge... I am learning it is better to focus and do less, without forcing or needing discovery and/or pleasure from art. Finding new ways to get lost within increased structure is a way to survive travesty capitalism and overlapping genocides perpetuated by the American dominant culture. Yet, the lostness cannot be new escape primarily. Also you can have a lot of ideas, and not be disciplined, which is true of me, in a lot of ways.

I am not really a disciplined painter; I am dedicated, but many are far more disciplined and invested in craft. I do not like to work, so perhaps need to make painting playful again, instead of treating it like an unappreciated job. I try to show what is not appreciated by the culture and markets.

There is too much showy and refined painting. There is too much uncritical decorative painting. I am not an authority. There is a responsibility to report what is absent, and horrible. Asking questions, poking holes, and saying taboos. Artists are not supposed to be honest. Artists are supposed to obfuscate. Money is a BAD WORD. Money is supposed to be covert, like taste and hierarchical signal.

Not everything has to look good, be right, be familiar, or be new. Not everything has to be exciting, or amusing spectacle, becoming a new form of desire-reproduction that mimics the certainty of delivery present in advertising, images, and mass cultures. Painting creates new power for its creator by mimicking methods of power demonstration and reproduction of authority present in histories of Western painting and influence. This creates narcissistic images of creators, and new cults of power. New power utilizes strategies from old power, and derived from legacies of self and regime-linked advertisement, to reinforce its independent market image, remaining embedded in familiar models of success, advancement, and spectacle reproduction. Style and finesse become band-aids on the hollow engine of endless reproduction. Liberal-capitalist institutions assist in creating new supply and demand, convincing artists to become branded manufacturers, with the self-justification that better brands are better options in a money and gallery-dependent model, while charging fees and utilizing seductive promise, to ultimately not deliver any certainty. Or re-deliver to open-world non-meritocracies with new specialized, and non-useful knowledge. I am not rejecting higher education; I am rejecting advertisement of, cost-barrier, and false-promise. I am rejecting alignment and identification with new capitalism.I am not providing individual examples because I do not want to target individuals and nodes of the larger model that reproduce systems without having choice, or risk sounding bitter. I don't know if individuals can change larger nebulous webs of power and destroy arrangement of capital; especially individuals who are dependent upon these systems, and manufacturing capital.I am forming connections between disparate ideas, feelings, and experiences that shape thought and perception. I am identifying internal conflict without self-censoring. I am often wrong.I am pointing to the dehumanization and hollowness in capital-dependent models and worlds.Art is dismissed for the sole reason the viewer does not agree with or relate to the worldview. Disagreement and lack of viewer patience or capacity for relation means nothing. Unproductive worldviews are productive and products. Is the point of art to manufacture agreement, or connection? That is a talent of advertising, and entertainment, which can be art.Acknowledging business cannot become new business. Art can look exactly like the world it critiques, and mirrored reshuffling is defeated submission. At this point my frustration is manufacturing total claims and certainty; I do not want to make total claims.Why impress or reproduce want, unless one has to do so out of necessity? Why make capital if I don't like it?Going into college I did not know much; I knew a lot about style, aesthetic, and artifice. I knew how to write in a clear way, aimed towards a professional path. I knew what I thought was cool or different and I knew how to reproduce that, clashing new styles together. Education and self-education has been a way of catching up: learning the backing beneath the veils and advertisements. I would say things unclearly without knowing what I was saying or why; I still think this is common, obfuscation utilized to confuse without knowledge of under-backing. Rather than create authority, I think it is better to admit not understanding.Mystifying process, self-promotion, and tricks tried in new forms: no.Is art the blind and oblivious celebration of new money? Is art the endless plugging of old into new, or corrected? What are we celebrating? The bankruptcy of moral value and passing of money and power into new hands while people die elsewhere, or on the street? The transference of power? The maintenance of hierarchy? Innovation in fashion?People need fun.Endless arguments about the privilege of a statement or position, that becomes shorthand for silencing. And signaling or demonstrating better knowledge, 2020s. Arguing about privilege in institutions where attendance itself is a major privilege. The linear argument reproduces linearity and argument. Rather be circular, or not a shape. Rather be nothing.There is some kind of amnesia that happens when we cannot fully acknowledge or see what we are doing to the world and each other.If I am not saying or creating anything new, whatever. I think summary and synthesis is useful, same with calculated or uncalculated destruction and improvisational gesture as human proof.Art should show the world as it is, with moments for break, yet there is too much art pretending the world is what it is not, submitting to role as serving goodness, or acting parcel of market-related and institutional narrative. If goodness is what someone has experienced, I am happy for that person; but it is not what I have experienced: I see exploitation and apathy everywhere. I am always honest and I will never be fake. Many artists are alienated from the narratives institutions speak to, living in worlds that do not correlate or align with optimism, clean critique, new advertisement, or lived liberation from negativity. People should read Parable of the Sower; it is very accurate.Who am I for? Who am I even talking to, and why? This is a world of dying animals.Getting lost while remaining high enough on the hierarchy to have creative freedom is the only way.

Trying to define my relationship to a relentless negativity, while also grappling with my like for inspiring narrative podcasts. An empty glass can be a way of seeing through if the glass becomes an ocular device.

Where is the more sensory reckoning with being unsure painting can do anything? I want to see the visible fraying.Art should still have a social function. New reverence of the West and its products is doing nothing to change socioeconomic inequality. I think about Rirkrit Tiravanija and actions of redistribution/giving back and I wonder how painting is supposed to do this, if it is hedged in. In making the show, I shared my studio with a muralist in Central PA, who was able to communicate with and venerate individuals in public art, yet dependent on organizations and mired in this. Would the urban wealthy find these tribute-like depictions of mainly rural white people important, or significant? I think it is important to/for the families and communities depicted. In this making mode, easy mass-communication takes precedence; the act of making becomes totally subservient to a public and while its not high expression, I think it can be more relevant and impactful than a "high" expression oriented to wealthy urban viewers, that decorates the walls of an LES business, though fine. Many "high" expressions are so low and I don't think irony or virtuosity can redeem that. I was trying to plug the low into a market format, which the perfectly stretched and made presentable canvas kind of is, and still reach something not able to be described, yet not sublime. The almost dead. The mass-art becomes subservient to preserving an archive, memorializing, and making tribute, and I felt conflicted. Can sentimentality aid in emotional impact and create greater accessibility to the "low" populations, which I am part of? I like sentimental things; the dramas of Mike Leigh, Terence Davies. It can be part of a gay or "ordinary" sensibility, which can also be a dominant sensibility, yet the sensibility I am pinpointing is not that: it may be about finding the varied failures, in dominant and specific medias, to account for diverse experience. What is at the failure point; it can feel like an opening. How do I be at a failure point without illustrating it, picturing a flop well, or producing a Fail? It may be as simple as depicting my American surroundings, though that can be too general an idea. I have never knowingly made or reproduced a successful hierarchy and I will not. Back to sentiment and region. Growing up I found out what art was somewhat from the internet and going to local art and craft fairs, which I still like doing. Still sort of ditched the idea of sentiment: I don't know, it is easily written off. Ultimately think art should be a public good, but doesn't mean it has to appeal to a public like a mass fantasy novel, even though I like those. I do think there is general potential in a social media art form, something like mail art. An un-institutionalized. A dime novel. A penny art form. A penny candle. In sad times, people need sentiment and I can prefer it to a Market Art, though there is sentiment in that too. Swap earnest for irony and other high-strategies. Swap low for high, still can feel the same, but the earnest form has a dedication that is not masked, though irony can be earnest for some. Sentimentality was natural to me; same with self-contradiction.Unfortunately, there is little glamour in failure, mostly suffering. There may be some glamour in success, though the cost should be visible.This is not a dogma or philosophy and I could change my mind tomorrow, but I'm trying to remember and catalog my values, and speak candidly, which hopefully is important or at least better than lying or falsifying authority, though I don't have a problem with either if it comes from a good place (?). The objects people collect: may be drab, unfashionable and the opposite of shiny or new, but I think those qualities can be honest, revealing, and human, showing time and being nonfunctional, but still evoke. If goodness or advancement occurs great. A painting can evoke a past time, without being nostalgic for that time. A painting does not have to be contemporary in a visual sense. Complex politics can be truthful as climate reportage; "bad painting" can create feeling. Bad painting does not have to look like historical Bad Painting to be different Bad Painting. Bad painting can be so heartfelt and gushy that it is "bad," hooking back to sentiment. Bad can reflect anger, impatience, Bad Feeling. Angry Louise. Maybe would be useful to pull from definitions of the bad, as addressed in a seminal text, The Queer Art of Failure, and specify that I'm also talking about Bad Painting the movement/category, and bad feeling as related to Ngai who I have basic-to-average familiarity of. I am going off my modest knowledge and skimmed understandings. I don't think artists should be afraid of being bad; I think it is smarter to be more cautious of being "good," because where are standards made? Simultaneously, not all can be "bad." What does it mean to be bad on purpose versus bad on accident? Best effort's bad would be better than approval-seeking effort's good. Best effort's bad or good can be against the grain and not if it is relying on obvious or knowing adoption of bad strategy. Bad shouldn't be good, bad should be humiliating, yet revealing or not revealing, and maybe then good. Terrible can be better than fine, though fine can evoke experience of non-greatness. A practice with no standards or different standards can be different or negation of quality-control. Punk does not have to be punk-style to be punk; punk is in cognition. Queer is in being and appearance; same with poor. Yet, the object will be consumed by a greater swath. And same.I am also aware that I am simplifying and condensing large overlapping ideas, and creating some false binaries for the sake of creating some defense around the authentic non-normative, or trying without always getting it right. I also don't even think Market Art is a real category, but what I think I mean is "market-dependent."Art can be a way to Open Share.Drain and collide.A painting can hold erotic capital, without becoming capital. A painting can be expensive or valuable, because the maker decides it is. A painting can be pure money or a dead dollar bill. A painting can decide it is going to ignore currency, but that decision is dependent on the existence of currency, unfortunately. The substrate of a painting is money. How artists respond to the base tragedy of using money on a dollar bill is their prerogative. Same with art-time; as both work-time and/or leisure-time; making is on a clock. Time is regimented, so art made in time has to deal with its being subjected to time. Do you want to fuck around? Do you want to make slop? Or, do you want to make Advertisement? Do you want to make something else? There is no best choice in a choice-based system.New construction is not sufficient; new art may not be necessary, unless new art is trying to destroy. Why depict destruction of social fabric? Why create new idols? Why reference the past, with reverence? Why make a new combination? Why demonstrate resistance? Why not act against? People should know their gestures are embedded in 2026 American consciousness, and various exchanges, and should work against normalizing impulses and currents. Recognizing what is productive and moving toward unproductive actions. An antagonistic impulse that does not harm another individual is a positive impulse in a negative climate: harming larger, rather than participating in New Advertisement production and new circulations. Though there are multiple ways of showing cultural atmosphere. Still, it is tempting to disown American belonging and move towards a corrupted pure or unified thing. The pure cannot persist how it is.Institutions and bands of power are not friends; I am not talking about the people embedded in or reliant on these systems. Making to/for institutions, and oriented to popular or scene-related taste may lead to individual success, but individual success is not historically meaningful. Art should not orient toward being liked. Orienting oneself towards pleasing and/or fashionable tendencies can dilute what one has to express. Creating instability within orders and status quos, rather than providing new consumptive solution, or reinforcing reassurance within self and group. Destabilization of currency and stasis. Moving toward non-authoritarian models requires becoming non-authoritarian, rather than adopting authoritarian fashion, or communication-style. Not creating new dogma. It is better to be delusional of other possibility, than to submit to what is accepted, which is assumed hierarchy and servitude toward entrepreneurial conglomerates and people with money. The powerful are not evil and do not think any differently, though they have benefited. Rerouting one's walking route or using a strange color to describe a form. Minor and different gestures can be resistant. Authoritarian fashion can only be adopted if it is being stirred from within; I am talking about style which is only clothing.

something about larger and personal failure and shrill interruption. the feeling of embarassment and internalizing systemic while it goes on. addressing higher ups while being unsure of standing. acting improper in formal settings. and ultimately, a punishment that is redeemed by a laugh. the gesture disappears and is forgotten by a mass, but the non-subservient gesture is the point. the flake on a gold bar. or the internalization and reproduction of travesty, to show it. seeing value while being in transit... what is there if the relief is removed or denied? Something more calm? Or something more degraded, the picture and reception of the action? Not the action. The action is fine.

some sentimental, some Art, and some ordinary junk. I obsessively document my life. I have for the last few years, taking photos of everything and organizing what I come across. this was from 2024.

Jutta Koether and her dilettantism in the "laddish" climate .. that was also her trying her best..

may relate to what I'm thinking/ saying ...

connection between discard and discarded value...

Cecelia hit the tab to fire up the water, then that went into a cup with a fluff of steam.Inside was her domain. She had walked on every inch of every four hundred square feet.Cecelia is wearing a nightgown at three PM and I am wearing the same clothes I have been wearing. Tarry-eyed. Vapid sunlight highlights used spines. Two standard window frames, tall rectangles containing hollow metal squares with a slim gap at the top of one, the width of a magazine.On days when she leaves, the nightgown changes to a cotton dress.Do you think you might be able to turn off your bathroom fan please? She squeezes a honey bear sleeve. Crusty cap and sticky shelves with gnat fanbases. A wooden tower for condiments that needs a new foot. The fan is on.Yes, I say in an ape of her sweetness.—Cecelia is crying distantly over Phillip. The sound is going out her window to the brush.I buzz in. Honey Nut Cheerios in sealed plastic bowls on dinky racks.A blue car color coordinates with a hose just outside the shadow cast by a mint Shell awning. Shredded upholstery in an open window like Scissorhands got to it. A triangular junkyard where two roads meet down the street. An abandoned car is raised above the road in the barbed enclosure.Cec would have worn charm bracelets, Alex and Ani.When rain falls, it goes lightly over trees.Cec doesn’t celebrate holidays, and I am getting rich this year. With love. I am getting married in America.Rockefeller Christmas tree draws Midwest crowds. Rockefeller Center, where I kissed my sweetener in winter, where everything was melting, or on the verge of it. Sideburn prickles and soft hair smiles on the heather green monument. Tall pyramid with wings. Double looks from a mother in pink pilly camo, LGBT community, move the child away. Share French fries with poutine. Eighteen dollars. He buys. Drink beers while acting like friends. We have nothing to talk about. I don't like dogs or sports, but I try to take an interest. He shows me photos of a dog Christmas card, and describes his animal. Not knowing what to say, and asking the only questions I can think of (what's the dog's name, is it a boy or girl, how old is she, saying aw), I admit I don't have special feelings towards pets. He looks crestfallen, which makes me sad.I might buy some French fries and reheat them with new seasoning.No reply. No reply unless I am expressing misery, depth, or personal misfortune.Yes, I say. It was terrible tonight.With, who? She says. The bleep.Ya, I say. I'm trying to get a check though. Like, ultimately.Better options. Cec says, and goes back to the movie.Merry Christmas, I say and open the door of my room.Merry Christmas, she says. On the television screen, there is a man in a jail cell. I think: I will watch something similar.I say: I think it's a good thing there is no one, and I think it would be better if there were no holidays.I chose it like a dialogue option, creating a lying-opinion. And she says: nothing.Yes, I say. Better if there was nothing.And she does not have a response. Only nods her head up and down with glossy token eyes.So, I close the door of my room. Because now there is nothing to say, and I have made up my mind that I will get drunk which will make the sad movie better.Do you want anything? I ask her.Nooo, I'm good.Okay, I say. Are you sure? Like some orange juice?Sureeee.Okayyyy, I say. Are you sure you don't want to have a fucking party?I'm sure.I can call bleep.Nooooo.Okayyyyyy.Her hair is stringy on the couch arm, wet from a shower and turned into ropes.My plastic bag bumps cans on my hip. There are no carols, but I romanticize the street with headphones music, and think how wonderful it is to be unburdened, though when I return home, I will wear my sad face, so as not to be ignored, or punished for any gloating. It is a wonderful life to be barren.Back at the apartment, there is a hallucination scene in the jail movie.How is the movie?Oh you know, just another autopsy of a troubled psyche.I say: socially punished.Yes, ostracized.Isolation treatments.Sounds right, she says and crosses her arms.Ugh, I wish there was something to do.Phillip isn’t responding.You should block him.I’m sending him a Christmas selfie.You should send him a photo of like, something that will make him really jealous.Like what? She sits up.I don’t know like just.Cec snorts.I continue: like just, I don’t know be nothing or do nothing and then like just take a photo doing nothing. And he will just wish he was there probably.I don’t think it works like thattt.Well, okay. Um. I take a sip of my drink. I wish there was something fun to do on Christmas nearby. I want to go to a bar.Cec does not respond and goes back to watching the movie, so I contemplate going back to my room.I say: I might FaceTime Damian.Oh reallyyy, hahaha, and what would you even talk about?I don't know like what presents we want.What presents you want? Like for Christmas?Ya, like for Christmas.Ok, have fun, then, she says and snickers.Thanks. He'll probably show me his fucking dog.Ew, his puppy?Ya like his fucking dachshund. It's going to be barking at me on camera.Oh my god, hahaha. Like his actual dog?Yeah like his pet. It's seriously crazy how crazy he is about animals. It's so pathetic.Oh my god, so pathetic. Like why would you even want an animal. They are soo gross.Oh my god, I know. We're just lucky we don't have a pet.Ya. It is sweet though.What is?Loving a pet.Yeah if they make your life better, go ahead.I say: maybe I will grow to love his dog. And by next Christmas, it will be over here. Barking up the nonexistent tree.Cec doesn't respond.I say: or maybe we can get one.And have a combined family. With Phillip, too. Maybe he'll buy me a better apartment.On the Upper East Side.Investment bankers and business leaders with family issues and unfulfilled desires.They're not self-actualized. They like the fantasy. I stare at the floor.They want a business bitch, Cec says. Aritziaa. Cec has a mean smile.Yess, I say. Girl getting her money. I smile too.I should have majored in finance. Cec sighs.Sweetgreen, ugh, I want it.Positive on Christmas. I can be so chipper. Do you think Phillip would like me better if I smiled more?Ya, I move my head around with a fake smile on my face. Cheerful, see.Cec starts smiling fake. Okay, that's the plan.Society of thieves.Be the finery.Be the tinsel.No, the wreath.Yes, the holy circle.On the doorway to.Hell!!You think that's what they fucking want, hell?Yeah that's what they fucking want, hell.Cec sighs: I'm the devil.Same.Better that than Miss Claus, huh.I vote no to all options.Um, that's not an option.Um, ya it is.So you want to be a hater?Um ya, isn't that what we are literally doing?Literally.Um literally, cancelled.On Christmas.Yes, um, literally cancelled on Christmas.Barbaric.I snort. Just like wrong. Just like don't even ask, just like bad. Just like don't ask questions. Just say the right thing. Be a good person.Group morality-enforcement devices, she says. Lassoes on language and vocab.Be supportive. Be supportive. Let them have their holiday and pretend you like it, and you'll never have to be alone.Cec stares at the TV.It's better to say the right thing, than to say the smart thing. Just say the right thing and life will get better for you.In an airy tone, she says: the birds all flock together. Just fly like a bird.I chug my beer and Cec is drinking now too. I say: I am literally optimizing my personality and it's working. You have to. You're doing yourself a disservice.I just can't do it anymore.What?Cec is silent. Like, for what? Why am I doing this? She looks sad.Um, money, fame, um, success meaning dollar signs. Power in society. Probably real pleasure in being the best contestant.Ya, ya. Real girl boss. Ya, ya.You can do it.House in the Hamptons.Villa in paradise. All the Jimmy Choo you want, girl.She snickers. Jimmy Choo? You're so drunk.Oh yeah, that's wrong.The first thought is not always the best thought, Cec says, smirking at a nonexistent audience. Corporate notoriety.Who? I say: there's something to be said for that. There is. Life will get better. People dream of being comfortable.Playing the loser card in gamer city. Cecelia says it to the air.This sucks. It sucks. You know it does. I narrow my eyes at Cecelia.Cec says: I miss the valley. I just wish Phillip loved me. Then I wouldn't have to worry about this. I literally have no health insurance.Yeah, I say. It's evil hahaha. But whatever. I get up to walk around the room, saying, can't dwell on the negatives, in a singsong tone.Cec is crying and staring out the window.Do you want another beer? I'm having another.Sure, she says.At least we're not drug addicts or prostitutes.Yeah, we're not in prison. She wipes her runny nose.Niceness is not that hard. Actually, it can feel really good. Just tell them what they want to hear.Really? She says in a high, young voice.Yes. Just try to be invested in others. Just try.She shifts her leg on the couch and moves a cup to the arm.Just see. And then they will return the investment.It's so frustrating. She looks out the window with a frown.You're expected to be playing a good part. I'm being serious. You have to do a good job, or you're fired. It's applicable everywhere.An eyebrow goes north on her face and the other is following. Cec yawns and looks bored. Not at Princeton, I am guessing she is thinking. Neither of us are at Princeton anymore, and generally people expect niceness and reciprocity, which I have had to learn. Cec has no responsibility to anyone. She and I are selfish together. And like a military pilot, we are capable of normal cruelty. There is no difference between me and the others. I am good. I am a good criminal.Cec checks the time on her phone.Are you thinking anything?She laughs, then shakes her head and looks at the hallway.I stare off into space for about a minute, then go on my phone.Cec yawns again.I scratch my head and dig my finger in my ear, then look around the room.Cec is staring at the wall with a smirk on her face.So, I say. And laugh quietly to myself.Cec nods and drums her fingers on her knee. It is silent for about twenty seconds longer, then I stand up and stare at her. Her gaze has moved again to the window where there are some flickering lights. I think I must have talked a lot, so I just stand there for a few moments, also looking out the window.Have you ever met someone who's your dream come true in real life? I ask Cecelia.Phillip is the key to my world, Cecelia says.--Hey.No response, so I clean up the kitchen.I start again: what are you doing today, Cec?I'm actually really busy.Oh, that's okay.--Hey, how was your day?Cec says: everywhere I go, I am reminded by my lack of a job.And you tried applying for academic positions?I haven't published my book, so I'm focusing the search on mid-tier corporate positions in the New York area.What about being an adjunct?She says: the pay is not what I am looking for, actually.Have you tried expanding your search to other cities?My whole circle is here.You might like a small Midwestern town.My life is here.It is so unfair.She is silent.I say: they want someone with a communications degree.Yeah, obviously.Good people skills.Sugar-coating and delivery. The other candidates are like marketing, communications, marketing experience.You have an ivy league degree, though.Cec is silent.She says: oh yeah, thank you.Well, I am going to a nice restaurant on the river with Damian. Have a good day.Do you think you could clean the kitchen? Before you go.Yes, sure. I can do that.—Lying on the couch, Cec says: I just feel so isolated. None of this is right. I don't relate to anyone.I don't either.They're all walking around in their clothes and bags.That can be us. I say: do you want to starve?Downtown scary girl. Airport style. Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage. Cec says: no. Benefit, she trails off. Cecelia is looking out the window with no expression whatsoever, wearing the same beige fit.Like a puppet with more awareness of its strings. Haha, I say.Cec says nothing in response.I continue: don't say anything that can used against you in a court of law. That is my overarching advice.Don't detach too far from a shared reality.Being crazy doesn't get you very far. Do you ever feel mocked?Yea, every day of my life.And why do they do that?You do it, Cec says, making eye contact.I hate public morality.Do you mean that? She says.No.What do you mean by public morality?I don't know. Just saying it.Why are you saying it?To seem smart and opinionated, I say.Don't you think it might have the opposite effect?Now, I am silent.Cec says: substitute teaching is a nightmare of the worst garden variety.I could never.Phillip's not texting.Damian's an alcoholic.--I’ve taken on the look of my street, gathering it on my jean cuffs. Travel between neighborhoods is permitted, so I am doing that, going from one area to another. Near a courthouse, a sailor-like man with a buzzcut holds the arm of a golden-haired woman in a white dress. She’s made the curls herself. On his other arm is a younger man with a similar cut, though it tapers in the back to the bare neck and is longer on top. I eat a mayonnaise salad. It’s too strong the mayonnaise flavor, but I like it still. Below ground, a woman wearing a wool origami jacket wails for change. There are dirt marks on the jacket and pocks on her screaming face. I have no change, and everyone is ignoring her like it is the thing to do.Boat shoes with cocaine psychosis, a type Cecelia’s on-and-off who may or may not be anything, corresponds to. A category Cec would invent for a type of person. Phillip is a Douglas, not a Phil.--Rain lowers volume to signal its end soon. Like the tea whistle. Rain comes back. Bumblebees float through my open windows when it is raining.At night, who do you see on your body? That crab phantom weighting the air with varying faces and gear. Phillip, Damian, go down the list.There are photos of me with diamonds on my wrist. There are low-grade images of bangles on Cec’s throat. Purple and orange scaffolding makes the image of jewelry on necks, like zooming up on tree bark. We have one another. You cannot know the depths of my former riches, and Cec's. Losing something no longer there.

Not enough washing of cups. Phillip played pool at the Alligator Lounge, gaining a free slice every time. Mozzarella puddles. Mozzarella rains. I am not sure where he played. Somewhere near his apartment. Cecelia wears a black dress to meet him. I leave a lip print on the side of a glass, which goes back to sit on my lap. Chapstick on the rug for a toe to push sideways. I broke a glass yesterday, getting a glass chip in my foot and it hurts still. I dragged blood across the apartment.If we had a dog, it might be a good thing. The E-vac cleans the floor.

--At least he's not a cokehead, Cec says.Plenty of successful cokeheads.I miss it.I can't. I pause for a while twiddling my thumbs then say: how do you talk to someone that's not talking to you?I had that problem the other day with this girl at a party just lying about her dad's grocery company.Saying what?Just faking an inheritance off a multi-decentralized empire. And cutting the tip off a straw the whole time.The birds were watching from the rafters.On the pirate ship that is Princeton University, Cec says.The side river we took to the bay.True.And the bay came back to ourselves.We are the bay.Talking about ourselves.Cec doesn't say anything. Should I go on a date with Marcus?Yeah, just to see.I want Phillip to know.I hit my vape and blow a cloud of vapor at the window. Send him a photo.Are you gonna break up with Damian? She asks.Ya, in like two weeks.What are you gonna say?Just like this isn't working out, I say.How do you think he'll respond?Total devastation.The cut child, she says.Ya, but I love him, so.Do you?Ya.How many kids do you think Phillip and I will have together?I don't know. Quite a few. It doesn't matter.Yeah. Doesn't matter.--

Light looks in from the window. Cec is taut-necked and wearing the change on her ring finger, a diamond. It looks okay in the glitchy zoom-in. Curtains say: not much. I swipe to the next, and there is a kiss, not with Phillip, but someone healthier and older.