Heyo heyo
Happy thursday
Welcome back! to how to get to new york, a series wherein i avoid the question.
Just the other day, my macbook air said,“,/;ds ZSWEQQ2 aqwa aqaaqAwe456aZZAZxcq 60-,” when i wiped its keyboard clean w a damp bit of paper towel. I walked through my kitchen for some coffee,—what’s left has caked along the bottom of the pot by this point,—and while I poured it into my cup (with a small bit of oat milk), I did two small kick backs with my left leg to try and get off some stray bits of dry jasmine rice from the soles of my feet, flung off into the abyss. I also attempted the nyt crossword in the living room on this hungover saturday in june and I didn’t get very far. I munched on a trader joe’s spicy dill pickle1.
A pigeon sat outside and looked into my apartment through a window and said something so i looked up, but only for a moment because my looking at something soon became a looking at nothing, a looking at the blank slate between us2.
We’ll ahh we’ll come back to this.
For the past two years, i’ve cut my own hair. Every afternoon I walk back from the gym and step into the shower Rubadubadub, step out of the shower, dry myself off, neti pot, shave my face, and sometimes, every once in a while, i’ll sling a comb and a pair of scissors around my head with two mirrors and a vague attempt at triangulating the choppy waters of the back of my head.
I’ve found this whole cutting-my-own-hair thing to be a neat little expression of solidarity with myself. It is my head after all.
Men cut get their hair cut with budget in mind mostly, i think, and i’m not saying i’m any exception to the rule,—i started cutting my own hair mainly as a way of saving money when i was struggling to pay rent during the end of the pandemic,—and the haircuts that have been normalized for guys have then become some of the most utilitarian, boring looks3. like fades? comeon. not on me at least.
But of course my cutting my own hair became something of a problem w my boss who shook my hand, pulled me aside, took out a binder with the dress code printed out, said she hates doing this but servers are required to get their hair professionally cut. “See, it says right here.” She was quick to add, “it looks good, but it simply isn’t allowed.” Over the next six days my boss brought it up three more times (“it’s been a minute, you said you had an appointment on saturday,” she said; “oh yeah, i slept through it,” i said, “i’ll get one tomorrow, i promise.”), and i eventually relented and went to see an actual barber.
Now i’m stuck with a haircut i dislike; the barber was cool despite his insistence on me trying out a french crop (again, i hate the fade), and my hair does look decent,—it just doesn’t feel quite like me, it doesn’t feel like a part of myself and when i look at myself in the mirror i feel so slightly estranged.
On friday i arrived at work around 3:40 with my digital camera, my notebook, and C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite in my drawstring bag, this new haircut on my head, and a feeling of general estrangement from myself. My boss was enthusiastic about the haircut; that’s fine. It was a friday night (so it was busy) and i had a weird night; couldn’t seem to connect to any of the tables. Vaping in the bathroom4, i texted the group chat to see who was going out tonight and well.. hmm.. Cole’s it is, i guess.
Cole’s is dive in logan, a land of a thousand signatures, drawings, quotes, lines, sketches, all of them scrawled across the walls. That’s all to say that it’s a very logan logan square bar.
I took an über down; only $13,—not too terrible, and it beats an hour and a half bus commute down to logan from lincoln square. The über was a black tesla and i prepared myself in advance, reminding myself how to open the door to a tesla5. When i climbed in, the driver was down in his seat, rocking a fade and playing lofi radio hiphop. I joked that i can never open the doors to these things and he said “heheh i love thees car.” Anyways, i tipped $3 and you should always tip your über drivers no matter how obnoxious their car is.
The disparate idle chatter of Cole’s on a friday night is that of a hundred twenty somethings who consider themselves an artist, not to say that they are not, crying out for some sort of hegemony for our generation, some sort of unified sense of hopes and aspirations, a madcap desire for social outings and experiences,—there’s more confidence and hope in the future than there was two years ago on display at bars like cole’s, but at the same time there’s too much uncertainty circling around for anyone to really break down the social paranoia that clings to the corners of a place like cole’s: gen z loves gen z, i think, but we’re still as a whole very uncertain of one another.
Walking through the many, many cloistered vibes here, i saw Ty in the distance sitting at the end of a wooden booth. “GRIFFY POO,” he announced, as he does. “Ty guy,” i said, as i do. We hugged,—or i should say i leaned down and hugged his head and he reached up from his seat. It’d been a while, or at the very least a week and a half. Ty is a force of pure exuberance, a purely excited, purely interested human being. Talking to him on a good night, his eyes smile.
I said hello to momo and to ollie, hugs all around,—i had arrived when they were on their way out, so goodbyes followed shortly after. Owen, alex, and jessie sat across from me and we talked about last friday night. Earlier in the night jessie hosted a letter writing party where they all wrote notes and letters with stamps and envelopes to mail them fully. I asked ty about his moving apartments and he said, oh it’s been exhausting.
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I would like to get better at remembering conversations. I think a big part of this will likely have to do with carrying this typewriter around with me more often and writing about things that happened to me and the conversations i’ve had with people i know. but the truth of the matter is also that a lot of the conversations we have are not really conversations but a sitting with people in reality, a mutual happiness in sharing space.
I stood to get a drink and, leaning at the bar by the taps, i look down into the dull lacquered surface of the bar where i can see the red and white lights reflected back at me, dissipated across the dull surface of the wood and it seemed to me in this moment that the bar is itself was filled with a deeply opaque brown liquid containing deep inside itself red and white swirls.
Above the bar is a mirror, to remind the patrons where they’re at in the night, a little check in device, a question: do you really need another drink? I’m reminded of the silver jews lyric6. Rest in peace, david berman.
Around me there are people who i don’t know and to my left there’s a guy with dreads i say wassup to, and he says wassup back, asks if i speak spanish and i say no, only englias, lo siento, and he says he’s from the dominican republic. Heck yeah, i say. He points to a booth of white women in tube tops where a man in a green shirt sharpied w brat just pulled up a stool and talks to an uninterested brunette about something or another (ty said he looked gorgeous, and that guy’s just his type,—you want me to talk to him? i asked,—ty shook his head no). I say haha, yeahh, and order a chicago handshake (a short of malört and an old style for $7).
Alex Trevino passed by and alex n and i said, oh my god it’s Alex Trevino, hey what’sup, Alex Trevino. And Alex Trevino said oh my god, what’s up you two, and man i believed him.
We walked outside w Alex Trevino and I asked if i could bum a cig and he said ofc, i have one right here just for you.
Trevino was chatting up a couple people leaned against the glass and it took me a moment to recognize them. I kept saying, you look very familiar and they said that i probably knew them from cole’s. Suddenly it came together: “OH you’re soft and dumb,”—this being the name of their band, their actual names being travis and elena, i remembered in that moment,—“i saw you two at a show in madison, it was winter, there were cars passing outside, they kept getting stuck in the snow and we kept having to push them out, and you had a camera and you were life filming everything.”
Travis’s eyes grew, “OH you were at the first dead prairie show?”
“Oh yes i was.”
Dead Prairie was the project of Sam Paumpauch, a wonderful Madison sound engineer, in collaboration with his roommates,—they fitted the basement space of their rental house off East Gorham, right across the street from James Madison park in Madison, with curtains to conceal the sound gear and carpets on every other wall, pillows nailed in the ceilings, etc, and i attended a couple of their shows with my bandmates in *perf (rest in peace, *perf) and we watched soft and dumb play a bill with combat naps and my good friend alexandria headlined with her band interlay, and i remember standing shoulder to shoulder down there in that somewhat damp basement with its carpeted walls and the cavernous space made the sound fully immersive, viscous enough to almost swim in.
Anyways, travis has been the printer for the chicago music mag/zine, Gush Magazine, a stunningly printed and typeset local music publication,—and i only know this because travis had a copy of their debut hidden inside their jacket which they gave to me to parse through for a couple minutes.
Hel showed up around the time we went back in and and there were disparate cries of Hellennnnnn from around the bar.
…more drinks, more conversation lost to the abyss…
Finally, getting outta dodge: the last thirty minutes at any bar in the summer, the standing outside, the bike gangs going by, the “love tap” of one car’s bumper into another’s as it tries to leave. A conversation about that; a conversation about seeing the world through the web of media which we’ve planted ourselves into; a conversation about phyiscal media, CDs and cassettes; i talked to a tattoo artist whose name i forget, the both of us leaning back against someone’s toyota, about haircuts and barbers and tattoo artists, what it means to have such a vocation; owen showed ty a meme he’d been talking about; and in general there was a winding down of all the threads that had been spun in the night and a general feeling of exuberance from everyone around: it was a good night, almost everyone here were cool this time around; and my über home arrives eventually, quite a bit more expensive than the tesla earlier.
ritz crackers look soft like cushions. and i ate so many when i finally got home at 2:30am.
Now today is saturday, the pigeon flies away from its spot past the glass and all that’s left is brick wall, five feet out. The front of house manager texted to say that they’re not opening the patio because of rain so I make plans in the evening to check out the Yearning dance label’s zine release/exhibition at podalaise club in logan with alexandria and kp, and maybe, just maybe, i would make it out to the boots rave at the metro.
I left my apartment at around 9pm with my digital camera (ofc) wearing my arthur russell singing tractors shirt, jean shorts, and, feeling a couple drops from above but no big deal,—it’s not supposed to start raining until… and suddenly, without warning, thunder snarled and the heavens cried down sheets onto lincoln avenue so thick one could surf them.
Thirty steps before me, a group of thirty somethings celebrating a birthday,—with two metallic gold balloons, a 3 and a 1,—quickly dived underneath an awning and i ran beneath a small boxelder planted in the sidewalk sometime in the last year or two. the box elder was not enough to hold back the waves of rain for long so i made for an awning forty steps away, took off my glasses, and tried to wipe them dry on my already soaked arthur russell shirt.
It’s remarkable how difficult it is to photograph rain. With nothing much else to do while stranded under the awning, i tried for a while aiming at the sky to catch droplets mid flight around the streetlight, then aiming towards the ground revealed rugged puddles, those dappled by the drops, but still i couldn’t capture the drops themselves. I could only manage to grab onto mere whisps of rain in these photos.
It’s a cosmic shame how anything we photograph becomes merely a photo; never will a picture become anything more than a picture, no matter what it’s of. I spend so much effort in attempting to capture and conceptualize parts of my life that surprise me and bewilder me, like the first couple drops of warm rain on a june evening,—i still find myself wonderstruck when the sky decides to water, in the summer when warm rain sashays vertically down in waves, etc.,—and through attempting a capture of the real i forget the moment and i forget the experience of being here. I find myself looking, over and over again, at nothing, at the interface between the pigeon and myself seeing the pigeon, between the small conversation in a moment and myself perceiving the moment.
I continued sitting in the awning of an abandoned storefront in lakeview, waiting for the heavy rain to pass, listening to in rainbows. Two men, soaked, sprinted past smelling worse than anyone ever has. I sat on my haunches and then i listened to dragon new warm mountain, or the first few songs anyways, until the rain died down enough for me to walk home and write this for you now.
I’m not going to the podlaise club tonight for the zine release. I’m not going to the boots rave. This rain against the window is music to my right ear; i’ve become just sleepy enough to call it an early night.
goodnight everyone
xoxoxo,
briffin
I wish i could have gotten a picture of the pigeon outside, but alas!
I do like a guy with big hair but (unfortunately :() my hair goes straight out,- there’s no curl to this head.
It would be crazy if my boss reads this, not that this is rare at literally any restaurant you could go to,—i guarantee that if the servers are using the same bathrooms you are that those bathrooms have developed a fine coating of vape juice across the years,—but in that she would not be at all pleased with this. She already thinks i’m far too idle on the floor.
My first experience getting a tesla from über was a disaster,—it was halloween night and i had just gotten out of a logan theater screening of the john carpenter movie at around midnight,—simply because i could not, for the life of me, figure out how to open the damn door.
Well, I wish they didn't set mirrors behind the bar
'Cause I can't stand to look at my face
When I don't know where you are
And then the feeling fades away
But you sort of wish it would've stayed