My roommate came back from Michigan on Wednesday with twelve dollars worth of weed gummies,—and twelve dollars can buy quite a bit of weed in michigan, it turns out. We each took one, cheersed one another by tapping together the powdered gelatin, and I went downstairs to change out my laundry in the basement and take a walk while he went at his tuperware with a brush found near the sink. I stopped on the way at the Bourgeois Pig for a cup of black coffee the same price as bus fare.
I didn’t end up making it to the lakefront, but I did made it eventually to the nature conservatory in Lincoln Park. I sat by a small pond and some geese flew honking overhead, giving me quite a fright because a dog had lunged at me on the walk there, as Lincoln Park dogs tend to do. I’m not sure what I ever did to the dogs in this neighborhood.
Anyways, it was a beautiful view of the pond. The grass had yellowed ever so slightly and swayed long. Across the pond from me someone smoked a joint in solitude. The Dreyfus lecture I listened to baffled me like a burial album and made me scrunch up my eyebrows but as the recording went on more students in the lecture hall began to ask more questions I couldn’t make out because they were simply too far away from the microphone and so my mind began to wander in the silkdust of an autumn evening:
~1~
Under her arm she carried a jug of orange juice. On the clock, she returned from the store because two guests waited in the restaurant where she worked for orange juice, sat numb until they would get what they paid for. When she returned she went to the backroom and poured the jug into twelve 8oz bottles held in place by a cardboard box, and she sealed the lids, wiped away the juice from their sides, and brought them out to the floor. The MOD had finally arrived at work and looked over at her from the register as she asked one of the servers who all was waiting on OJ. “The juice, the juice is finally loose,” said the water knowingly. He pointed out the guests.
She became more and more aware of the MOD watching her as she distributed the juice to an old man and a toddler who wouldn’t stop bouncing besides his chair. She remembered vaguely an email from the night before, from the owner, asking for a quick chat soon. She had sent a follow up email but to no response. Polishing silverware, the MOD approached and said “hey” softly, “we need you to go home, you’re not working here anymore.”
“Wait, why?”
“I’m not sure, I’m sorry.”
And so she walked home and on the way home she passed the store where she had bought the orange juice. There was a fleeting temptation there. She saw a couple, one tall, one short, come hand-in-hand come out of the store, the guy with a twelve rack of beers in his free hand and her with a loaf of bread in hers. Still having a bit of orange juice on her skirt, contributing to a general restaurant air about her, she thought about picking herself up by her bootstraps with a jug of orange juice. You know. To celebrate getting fired. But no. She thought better of it. Not until she can find another job. Then it’s OJ time.
And what had happened, anyways? She couldn’t make heads or tails of why she was let go,—had it been because she dated one of the kitchen staff for two months? She drafted an email full of questions in her mind.
~2~
Grant walked out of North Clifton hall and up Lincoln Avenue and down Diversey. A beautiful day to make a zigzag. The sun was shining. A breeze wafted through the buildings. He tried to piece together the lecture he’d just heard;—The Age of the World Picture had been far too heady a draught of thinkstuff for his thinking to properly digest sitting down. Heiddegger only really made sense to him when he took long walks afterwards, thinking to himself applying the connective tissues of the theory to the trees along the street, to the Ginko in its rapid yellowing.
The Iglesia Cristiana Unida, a big cube of a church on Diversey, had been completely fenced off in the past couple days, the stained glass windows had been removed and replaced with plywood squares. Grant walked across the street from it idly watching an excavator rip into its side and begin to roll up the mound of debris. He stood to watch for a moment. Took a picture.
The foreman held a power drill like a Tommy gun and why on earth would he even need a power drill like that if they’re only set on destroying the place? It didn’t make a lot of sense to me when Grant told me the story in full, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to him in the moment. Maybe it was for the excavator?… Anyways, moving on…
Inside the church, while the excavator roared through, in the corner of the place, there was an elderly, stately yet decrepit old man with his arms raised slightly above his waist. They had missed him. He stood in the corner. The place had been falling around him. His sleeping bag, general trinkets, all wrapped in a nylon tarp, were now also wrapped underneath the ceiling of the church.
Grant recognized the old man from a Chicagoland tabloid his father had read in 2012 describing a man losing his house because he’d broke all the fingers of his left hand by trying to pull the keys out of his pocket. Hadn’t been able to hold down a job afterwards. Very funny. At least according to Grant’s father who brought the story up during odds and ends of the daily in-and-outs.
The old man waved his arms a little higher and yelled, mouthing stop; certainly the excavator’s driver hadn’t heard him but after a couple moments he must have seen him. When he noticed the old man up close for the first time he jolted his body like he’d been shocked. The old man had been such a short distance from the trough of his petroleum bull, he could have killed him. The excavator growled quickly and curtly to a metallic stop. “Hey, hey Bill,—there’s a guy in here,” He said. And then: “I can’t stop,” to the old man, regret in his voice. “We have the permits.”
And the old man said, “At least let me get my things and get out.”
After a moment, tense standoff that this was, a union rep on staff, who must have been Bill, trundled onto the scene and stumbled a bit on the rubble, dinged up his knee, and said, looking between the two of them, “what’s the problem? Why are you here? Who are you?”
“My things, they’re underneath.”
A moment of silence. It all came together. “Hmm. Your things?”
“Yes.”
“Well let’s get you out of here at the very least.”
“But my things.”
“Your things are er,—your things are gone... If you would have told us before we started the tear down, maybe… See we’re on a bit of a schedule with this and we can’t be going back underneath the rubble for all of your things. If they’re underneath, they’re underneath... ” The foreman made a glance at the man in the excavator as if the smell of the old man was getting to him. He glanced back again and said, “Call the fire department.”
Behind him the old man nodded glumly and climbed out of the church, onto the street where he would wander for days and days, cast into the world with nothing yet again, himself being the world entire seeing itself for what it was. Grant felt like he understood this at the very least.
~3~
A coworker of mine has begun to target his triglycerides through a digitized regiment based off of an app he found on a bodybuilding page,—an online free trial for Peter Thiel’s Palantier For the Body which works by accumulating data-driven pointers sent directly to his phone by way of a series of small injected sensors, tiny microchips, that would surveil all the corners of his body like robotic white blood cells.
One day The App tells him to work out one arm, the next his wrist; one day to run for 1.24 miles, the next to do 7 burpees and four sit-ups. It’s all very regimented. All very precise. All very confused. He doesn’t know if anything’s happening. He can feel the burn sometimes, other times not so much.
Once the free trial expired and he lost the war against his triglycerides, the small plastic sensors continued floating dead around his body while he continued announcing food orders and manicuring plates of barbecue ribs and bowls of ramen for table service.
~4~
The other day Iran fired multiple missiles into Israel, hitting military fields of things that have been killing Palestinians for the past year, not a serious attack, but a message of ~chill the fuck out~ to Israel’s genocidal heads of government.
Tomorrow it will be one year since that great excuse for mass murder. The death toll of innocent lives has stopped ticking back last winter after the last people in Gaza and the West Bank who were counting the dead were themselves killed. Who knows what it’s at now? There have been estimates of the dead but the numbers estimated have been far too terrifying to grapple with. I know I can’t. Someday we’ll all have to.
But now it’s autumn in the city and everyone’s either losing their jobs or holding on to them for dear life because the cold dry winter is biting at our shoe heels to keep us at an anxious trot.
~5~
Sweaty as an ovenmade tater tot, I decided to stay in on Saturday, sick and blowing my nose, as my phone blew up with people doing things — the whistler, wii night, various questions, doing anything tonight? — and well, i’m sitting in my apartment watching Videodrome for the first time and feeling just gross enough to relate with all of these cronenbergisms coming across my screen. Great film, though. Videodrome feels like what David Foster Wallace didn’t have the guts to do with Infinite Jest.
I have been spending my mornings, as inspired by my friend Kim, sitting in my room with the record player playing1 with nothing but a cup of coffee and maybe a notepad to write something down if it’s really feeling urgent. Otherwise I look out the window.
I feel far away from my own apartment when I wake up but through this practice,—if you want to call it a practice,—I come into the day gradually like it’s a garden, and my real space comes spiraling into my knowing it, softly like a fallen leaf is eventually eaten by the Earth. I’ll sit in my room. Nothing at all happening. My brain is thinking throughout the day. It is inside the day, almost.
I see a sedan float down my street, going somewhere it has never been and this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Then I spend the rest of this time thinking about an essay titled “comfortably numb” with the subtitle, “on zyns.”
~6~
Jones and Mia, sat at the bar at Proust in Lincoln Park, saw Anthony Blinken talk to the American people about the missile attacks on Israel. He spoke from the war room with a camera perched on the table itself with a casual demeanor, a small confident yet serious smile, and talking points about Israel’s right to defend itself. A bartender at Prost avoided a number of patrons with cash held out in their hand, empty eyed like Kaonashi in Spirited Away, while he searched dramatically around the back wall for the remote to the televisions overhead that were a second ago playing a Cubs game.
The two continued their a conversation about work drama, who had slept with who, but now there was an added element of suspense beyond the sparks;—things unknown were happening in the far reaches of the world and God forbid any of them affect the United States proper, none of it ever seems to.
~7~
I found a molten chickpea underneath my stove’s right burner. Having a gas stove is nice in this way. Everything’s charred but not gross. The food that gets lost in the apparatus of the stove doesn’t get lost, doesn’t grow mold; instead it hardens into small bits of coal in the shape of a carrot or a chickpea. These, the ants can’t eat, I don’t think. In general, the ants haven’t bothered me too much in this apartment. They’re absolutely annoying when they do, but at the end of the day they’re small reminders to keep my space in check. All they want from me is to keep my beloved frying pan clean, to keep my counters wiped, my cutting board dry. If I don’t do these things, the ants will let me know.
~8~
Sputnik launched in the Fall. It was that first great leap from our planet’s gravity by a manmade object. Science fiction has been since given its due as capturing the moment, and it’s surely captured our minds from then on with dreams of escaping the earth, escaping climate change, but really we’re trying to escape from the cold winters of our lives and those cold winters will follow us, even into the stars.
~9 1/2~
I’m back to the same old questions. Like a mouse who’s found a hole in a great maze, I’ve become comfortable in Chicago this past year (Tuesday was my first year anniversary of living here) but I remain hopelessly unable to cope with intimacy. I can’t seem to catch that train. Every time, I seem to let it go by without me.
And now i take hot baths with a dash of green tea body wash and then go outside to smoke a cigarette, light my lighter, but that flame’s only half a fire.
Anyone who shows me the least bit of affection, asking for me to open up through opening up themselves, I run and I run and I run,—leaving them behind holding their own heart. Running seems to me to make me into a version of a person as to protect myself from myself with a thin layer of thrifted clothing between who I am and who I want to be. I run and I run and I run. I wish I could stop, just like I wish I could never talk about myself again. I wonder if there’s a pharmaceutical that would help. But that’s a wash. I run and I run and I run. And worse, I lack even the courage to tell anyone that I’m always running away.
But I love the fall,—and I’m so in love with time. The way it clarifies. What was and what wasn’t a big deal won’t always seem so massive in the wash of a life well lived. But then there’s a new question: what’s a life well lived, anyways? It can’t possibly be one in which we’re separated from one another, in which intimacy feels constantly impossible, in which we’ve left the Earth’s orbit for our idealized destiny. I worry my love for fall is tied up to my love for separation, for isolation… But as for time, the time to live openly in the world again will always return after an inner journey’s end.
Adrienne Lenker’s Music for Indigo is an all time great piece of ambient music, perfect for this at least
i’ll tell my future kids abt this
the paragraph about running away from affection is sooo real, hate that i relate