“What else should we expect? So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities. Just think of that Paris Communard of the previous century who used to sit in cafés, constructing such beautiful little barricades out of breadcrumbs that everyone admired him; come the uprising, he built a perfect barricade out of stones — and the troops marched around it.”

— William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

In Israeli prisons, Palestinian inmates charged with lethal attacks “negating Israel’s existence” are facing the death penalty via hanging without due process… Meanwhile Lebanese christians are being told to not hide Shiite muslims or “face consequences” by the invading Israeli military who’s too busy bulldozing statues and displacing close to a fourth of the Lebanese people before the ten-day ceasefire began to follow international law… In Sudan, the Saudi-backed RSF militia has been rounding up tens of thousands in Dafur, condemning them to the firing squad... In Iran, the IRGC is preparing for a years’ long fight while the US military is preparing for a months’ long military campaign — Hegseth apparently remains unaware that Iran’s geography alone makes it into a fortress…

Over Easter Weekend, I was invited to a dinner party in Bucktown of older (mostly retired) activists, lecturers, and business-people who would sometimes throw up their hands and cry out “I sold out!” while eating tiny meatballs and tiny potatoes.

I don’t mean to be cynical. These people have been actually trying for decades, and there was real warmth in the apartment that night, and it was a beautiful apartment. I met the spokesperson for the Luigi Mangione defense fund, wearing a thrifted ‘90s windbreaker and sporting bleached hair, speaking at length about a book he was writing about John Locke. “The um Wealth of Nations guy?” I asked. He quickly corrected me, almost snapping his fingers like in West Side Story. What an idiot I am! Later in the night, I learned from an old friend at a housewarming party up in Avonsdale that this spokesperson also happens to work for the Sierra Club and has taken two-years’ sick leave from the organization to take on the role of Mangione Defense Fund Spokesperson.

Dinner parties with older intellectual leftist types are fun because, as a young leftist, you can usually make up ideology stuff and they’ll nod along and ask questions and so you can make up more stuff. It’s fun. Improvisatory. I made up a theory of media/organizational structure which I was calling “ressurectionary action.” The Loyola business professor I was pitching the idea to wore a skin-tight, black “KILL THE POLICE” shirt and seemed very enthusiastic about the idea, began gesturing broadly, and nodding back and forth to Ian and I like he was running a discussion group.

When I first said ‘resurrectionary action,’ I was thinking mainly about Easter and wanted to make some sort of He Has Risen joke at the end of my explanation but soon enough found myself carried away by the idea. It went something like this:

Media companies have overplayed their hands by going all in on digital media, and there’s a coming wave of revivalist projects aimed at bringing old, abandoned forms of media and organizational structuring back into the mix as a more stable alternative to the chaos of the internet. I wouldn’t be surprised if the 2030s are a decade of indie magazines, newspapers, and zines like we haven’t seen since the 1990s — just so long, I suppose, as the ability to print and create cheaply is somewhat expanded from its current state — and revitalizing print would be the most clear-cut way for the counterculture to rediscover itself, hence “resurrectionary action.”

On the other hand, in terms of activism, 2008’s Occupy movement led to an over-reliance on flattened organizational structures. The ‘resurrectionary action’ in this case would be to revive vertical organizational structures. Trying to avoid looking around the room, I said it doesn’t seem like horizontalist approaches are doing much. If there were to be a grand definition of the term I’d just made up it’d be this: intentional revival of discarded or “outdated” ideas and touchstones into a new, twenty-first century context in which they can interplay with the modern homogenized world in new and novel ways which might pave a path towards a future which is better than this.

That’s more-or-less what I said. Who knows if it meant anything. There are still people dying in Lebanon. Everything sucks. What’s the point of any of this. I try not to get caught in these doldrums but it becomes difficult to engage and not drift away…

The most interesting part of the night was later at the housewarming party when the hostess explained how her mother had discovered she was pregnant with her. Way back in 1995, her mother had been hit on the back of the head with a Wowee Zowee CD while on her way to a stationary job in Pittsburg. Most likely it was thrown out of a car window from the nearby overpass and had frisbee’d all the way down and into her dome — an honest accident! — but then, checking into the ER for a potential concussion, she discovered that she was, in fact, four months pregnant. Wowee Zowee was right.

I woke up this morning and the springtime, it seems, has finally reared its beautiful (though pungent) head. The trees outside my window have buds that are beginning to sprout alienlike into leaves and the breeze is warm. No need to worry about the bugs quite yet. I’m listening to American Beauty by Grateful Dead and everything is fine and well in the world.

At work last Thursday, I overheard a mildmannered fight at the bar between two older gay men:

“Well if you want to get into it, why are you hanging out with all my enemies?”

“Well NEWSFLASH: they were my friends too… before you started burning bridges…”

This newsflash was followed by a long silence. Radiohead’s Karma Police hummed soft somewhere overhead: this is what you get…

Another conversation, later in the night, between two bald men with their shirts unbuttoned three holes down, their collars still crisp, went like this:

“What AI do you use?”

“Mm? Claude.”

“Only Claude?”

“Yeah.”

“Well… I use ChatGPT for business and Grok for personal. See you have to…”

After years of working in restaurants, it’s become clear to me that people tend to be outwardly prescriptive with their topics of conversation; but whether or not they’re prescriptive to the other person is another question entirely. It’s more common, I think, for people to speak to reassure themselves, to justify their seemingly arbitrary choices and allegiances.

I tend to get off work around 11pm on Thursdays, sometimes 12am. Either way, the busses have stopped running for the night and I’ll sit at the bar for a couple minutes while I request an über. Rideshares are fairly cheap in Chicago and I’ve had many wonderful conversations with über drivers over the past two years.

Two weeks ago, after cleaning the floors and gossiping at the bar for a bit, I climbed into an über feeling exhausted but still somewhat conversational so I asked how the ten-gallon driver how his experience had been driving in the city so far and he glanced up at me in the rearview mirror before saying “an OnlyFans model masturbated in the seat you’re sitting in” to which I said: oh. huh.

“She was on the phone with someone who was paying her to do it. I think it was a kink or something. I don’t know.”

He then proceeded then to describe all of the sexcapades he would have embarked upon if only he had more body positivity.

“No no,” I said, confused but trying to reassure: “there’s no need to be ashamed of your body.”

He smirked. “I’m fat and I know it,” he said, continuing on to describe a woman he drove one time who was “smokin’, man. She was too smokin’.”

She had requested a ride from SmartBar in Lakeview to the far West Side of the city and she talked at length about how her husband “just didn’t want to go out dancing anymore” with long exasperated sighs. The driver mentioned she kept poking at his arm from the backseat and then, about halfway through the ride, she had taken a phone call from said husband and her face took on a somber quiet look while she murmured “mmhmm” and “I promise I didn’t” softly while staring out the passenger-side window. The driver glanced back at her, made brief eye contact and held up his thumb and pointer finger to make a one-inch motion. “I never know what to do with my hands,” he explained to me.

Finally, he concluded his tall tales with this: “Another lady, an older lady, asked me to come into her place with her one time. I woulda cracked her if only I wasn’t so fat.” He went quiet, looked sadly ahead down the dark Chicago bridge. Over the river, the skyline loomed like the teeth of a vast monster in shadow. We spent the rest of the drive in silence.

When I returned home, I put away my bag, pulled off my shoes, took a shower. I couldn’t sleep so I watched The Elephant Man and then fell fast asleep.

As for the über driver, he was more than happy to tell his tales so long as he saw himself as an outsider without a chance. There was no curiosity about my side of the conversation; he wanted a sounding board, which is fine. I love a strange encounter, for the most part. As soon as I said that he shouldn’t be ashamed of his body, he stopped listening to my opinion.

The landscape is always set to evolve accordingly. When the Walmart grows quiet at 3am, the bottomless pit beneath — which exists below every supermarket, I might add — is breathing in all of the dead fluorescent air, and upon its exhale the store’s incessant humming becomes complete and beautiful in a dark, dreary way. Like a silent siren. Like dead desire makes a person into a living corpse ignorant of its having already withered away, it’s all too easy to become subdued beneath our feeling like insufficient cogs in a machine...

But what would the answer be for someone like our über driver, here? To escape the machine? to return to the circumstances which make his life feel more in his own hands? To escape the bubble of his life in the driver’s seat? These solutions are not so easy when there are bills to be paid, when he makes your own hours without coworkers to share drinks and words of advice with. Is the answer for him to love himself like he loves the idea of love? It’s the only answer I can think of while I’m writing this out.

Anyways, he came to me in a dream a couple nights later. Or at least I believe it was him. He had achieved his goal of losing weight; in fact he had the physique and tan of an ‘80s Miami sunbather with which he flexed around town all year long, night and day. He had achieved his dreams, too, of sexual conquest only to succumb eventually to a dependency on B-grade amphetamines and amaretto sours. Now he lives in a house he built on the side of a mountain in Tibet where it appears he’s found some sort of peace for himself but then again one never really knows.

Dappled with sun, the custody arrangements made in summer fell surreptitiously apart in the frigid pale air of mid-winter as Patricia Durell found herself biting fingernails again, pacing carpet again; in and out of a series of work calls—all of them video—she found herself helplessly & rigidly bounding across the space of her apartment, back and forth again, over and over, and what else was there to do? Sling her laptop frisbee-style out the open seventh-floor window? Well then she would be out of a job.

There hadn’t been any legal agreement, per se, and Thomas had taken the toddler to god knows where. But, biting her tongue hard with the thought, Sabrina was set to return on Valentine’s Day as they were both single and alone and lonely and Sabrina felt a need to evacuate campus with its acres and acres of annually scheduled public displays of affection.

As if underlining (or punctuating) an empty line in a filled journal, city sounds and the wind make themselves so steady and so clear when there’s a lack in the soul. There’s something smelling of an ending in the wind’s battering of a windowpane. What is taken and What remains.

The V-Day reunion was well-enough but little felt like victory; neither mother nor daughter approached the topic of Ladislaw, or even Sabrina’s father, as she knew the answers to the questions already without having to beat around the bush. She shot off a text to her roommate back in Ithaca (sitch is bad it seems) and her roommate saw the text, didn’t respond; their mutual NSA agent also said nothing but leaned back in his office chair and blew on his cup of freshly brewed black coffee while the fluorescent lights hummed and swirled dull above the windowless office while a housefly circled and clung to the tubes a baby monkey with its plush doll.

I could say, for myself, that I’m no more than that housefly circling the white florescence, disconnected as I am from all of this narrative I’m also indifferent to bouncing off of plastic over and over again, expecting something purifying to come out of it. Nesting dolls have a grip on my imagination: each level is a part of a whole, of a grand narrative of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. It’s not something we can help, being so enraptured by these narratives of scale, but what is there to do about it? Become better people? We enjoy a world image. We enjoy levels to things. The minutiae of everyday obstacles fit neatly into the grand scale of our expectations and hangups if we look upon them as a third party. Without the small hooks and nails in walls, we will have nowhere to hang the coats of yesterday’s aspirations to carry them over to tomorrow—what would become of us if we let it all go? But I fear I already have let it all go. Plastic and glass gives no warmth. Looking over all of this, clacking my keys on top of it, I find only cold detachment from all of it.

Sabrina Durell also kept her distance from the intimate tension of her mother’s city apartment. She had no business instigating anything even if she understandably sided with her mother instead of her now so-long’d father in terms of her baby brother—of course she cared for the little person who bumped in and out of her life on holidays and breaks between studying—but she chose to keep herself ambiently attached instead of dedicated fully so that when she returned to campus on Monday she was in fine enough spirits to throw herself back into her studies and into the depthless routines that make the American university system what it has become in the twenty-first century.

She attended classes with a laptop in front of her where she drafted homework for the class she would attend later in the day. Always one step ahead, she pitched bars and clubs on groupchats in her final discussion group before rushing back to shower and dress so she could sit at a table at a bar with her phone in front of her face to ward off the more drunk underclassmen who tended to think so highly of themselves before the truth of campus isolation came creaking in from the shadows of the void that existed beyond.

Sabrina’s was no singular experience; there was little depth in her life, but who can blame her? The pain of ruptures only emerge when the ruptures were crossed and dotted.

Two or three years passed rather quickly and Sabrina Durell’s life separated in two like a latte left too long on the pass. Sabrinatheteenagebitch became a small-scale online personality and then Sabrina Durell became the maintainer of said online personality. Her mother, who recently remarried (to junior marketing guru Shel Bolicrum), went on attaching herself to the online personality Sabrinatheteenagebitch without realizing it wasn’t really her daughter that she was attaching her affection to. This isn’t to say she was looking with affection to a complete stranger —Sabrinatheteenagebitch’s sense of humor was very much Sabrina’s—but there was something essential missing in the relationship which never made itself clear to either of them. Sabrina’s NSA agent, too, had no reason to suspect that Sabrina Durell had become two people instead of one, that she had ruptured in ways unique to representations and the maintainers of said representations.

Sabrina rediscovered her own reflection almost daily, that of her falsies curling up in a nice curve and her dimples accentuated her face nicely. She didn’t put thought into the appearance. It was like a snag that caught her shirt when she pulled it on or took it off, something of a minor friction dealt with as easily as it was forgotten once the heat of friction had passed. She found herself a job where she would sit at home and delegate email communications between a team of java vibecoders and a small team of marketers. She sat on her couch, at the kitchen table, and in her bed. She grew her online following steadily. Sabrinatheteenagebitch became the figure which maintained relationships with the other representations of people, each maintained by their own real-world interlocutors who, in their own ways, also came to take their digital shadows for their persons.

As such, there’s no telling how Sabrina Durell herself actually lived.

But a message request appeared in Sabrinatheteenagebitch’s inbox one day near the end of November during a particularly stressful year from someone who may have been her younger brother, Ladislaw, now grown into a teenager. Sabrinatheteenagebitch passed this DM along to Sabrina Durell who examined the account for a brief moment and couldn’t quite tell whether this person held any relevance to her. The DM thus went unanswered. RedBike_Lad clearly held no sway over Sabrina Durell’s digital shadow. When the thought appeared like a soft breeze one morning to make an attempt to bridge the divide that her father had created so long ago between herself and this person underneath this other shadow, she found that there was no real way to bridge the divide between her and this other person so long as Sabrinatheteenagebitch stood in the way, and Sabrinatheteenagebitch had no relations to this RedBike_Lad so, when she considered reaching out, the anonymity of both figures, only outlines of people against the backlit screens, stood clearly in the way of making much—if any—progress.

There came a day, eventually, when Patricia Durell stopped pacing around her city apartment, and at her funeral, surrounded by strangers, excluding her remarried and now-quite-distant husband, Sabrina came into contact with a young man with similar dimples to her. She said the right things and they never hugged or said anything more than what needed to be said. A coldness existed between them. The only hard feelings were guilt on the one hand and rejection on the other, but both had faded over time and long waves of overstimulation into a sort of ambient numbness, into the sort of personal conspiracy that grips a person in the early hours of morning. And as the streetlights begin to fade, months and years passing, the shadows of the two Durells began to settle snug into the landscape actively losing its acuity to the growing light of day.

But what, might we ask, were their shadows so preoccupied with in the neon nighttime of their living if not one another? Like all shadows, Sabrinatheteenagebitch and RedBike_Lad were preoccupied mainly with their casters. Bordering on obsession, even, the shadows of Sabrina and Ladislaw Durell recounted the appearances and the seasons of their prisoners over the course of years. If the two of them had any real relationship in this world, it was with the bars of their cage who, in their defense, doted and pleased them incessantly, shouted and heaped praised of their achievements to any outside eye or ear that would bend to see or listen. While the world underneath the world maintained its steady course of a sad state of affairs, the Durells’ shadows cried out in excitement about everything and about nothing at all while outside the palaces and outside the shanties and outside the stores and outside the morgues and outside the hotels and outside the stadiums and outside the homes the wind bore down in greater and greater claws to rip the dust away from window frames, searing the world with the sand it might need to one day rebuild itself one particle at a time.

No one goes through life in a straight line. Six directions at once, usually. Pulled, pushed, prodded, poked in all directions. By what? Whom? Saw someone at work at a four-top idling in its convo, waiting for their food, with his phone out—$66k in checking—canoodling it like the most precious of life-rafts.

And all I can think is what a life changing amount of money that’d be! Maybe… When guy’s not looking… Hmm… Aaa nvm… Still don’t know, though, what anyone could do for work worth more than 40k annually… except maybe teaching public school… This is why we can’t have nice things… in this essay, I will—

Only hours earlier a mustachio’d man flaunting his substack growth to a friend trying desperately to read her Stephen King hardcover in peace kept looking over my way until I stood to leave, eyes down, and he stood up, sauntered over, opened the door. I yelped, a bit and he said “there goes briffin glue?” in a strange tone—a question?—to which I said yes um nice to meet you goodbye.

Caught up between all sorts of fronts between pressures, atmospheric and metaphysical, I had a terrible headache all day: the kind I get when the weather finally and fatefully drops—barometric pressure something something—and both my sinuses start hissing slightly, the sound of decompression, like my face’s about to explode somehow. Like, wouldn’t you know it, who comes dribbling down the lane but the harlem globetrotters, spinning and doing flips and dunking on me repeatedly while I’m just here trtying to massage the bridge of my poor nose. Smh. Didn’t stop me from buying the puppet, though. A muppet-style puppet, perhaps from a performance of Avenue Q. Looks something like me. I found it at a thrift store on Milwaukee Avneue. Maybe a bad call, buying the thing. Only $3, though. Easy enough costume for halloween—I can be a father and this… my son.

Okay so maybe I shouldn’t have bought the puppet. I’ve had fun putting it in various poses around the apartment for my roommate to come home from work but since buying the damn thing, I’ve begun to have terrible nightmares. Almost definitely the puppet’s cursed. But what’s new, really? Not like I wasn’t cursed before. And this being (um) spooky season, I figured I would sit nice and comfortable with the curse. See what starts floating around the apartment, what kind of ghost’s attached to this thing. I don’t mind bad dreams too terribly, just so long as they don’t happen twice. There’s nothing worse than a nightmare you can’t quite shake. Thankfully the puppet dreams have been one-shots, but one of them’s stuck with me… Shortly after wrapping up band practice on Monday… Gut full of tavern-style pizza and a pint of high life… I went to sleep and dreamt of a family of rabbits.

The leaves have finally left. Yellowed. Bronze days. So there was a family of rabbits. Once there was a family of rabbits. Once upon a tiiime. They lived in a big red house in the country. The windows looked out on sun-gold meadows, where they might drum up some food or grub—turnips, wild carrots, the like,—or on Windows XP landscapes blaring green and blue under a sicilian sun. There were no curtains, no window blinds. The light from outside came right in. And so the family of rabbits dressed well. Suave even. Three-piece suits (with pocket-watches, naturally), elaborate gowns. Alcott books on the shelves. Many rabbit-daughters, one or two hare-sons. Pots and pans hanging over a candlelit counter. Cabbage boiling on the gas stove. Among firewood and antiques, wood shelves, filled with preserves, veggies, pickled beets, etc., creaked and threatened to collapse but only ever filled with cobwebs. Pitterpattering socked rabbit paws on hardwood. A soft scurrying in the walls or the ceilings, sometimes. Mousetraps with swiss in the hard to reach corners. But… a door ajar… on the third floor… Quaint dreams careening into something sour like a rubber neck twisting too far to watch the car crash happen in slow motion, pulling eyes and ears into the gravity of the moment, eye reflecting, catching the shrapnel… The problem with dreams is they have their own logic. Whatever piano music was being played in the rabbit-parlor below has stopped. And ominously opening, creaking on the bolts, the door to this bedroom on the third floor careens softly. The camera pans in. Something gasping for breath. Behind the bed, under the window frame—a bright clear day—something shivering, quivering bloody—

And I threw myself out of the dream—ah oo no—into an upright sit, put on the lamp above my bed, and there: on the floor: splayed out on the carpet: ofc, the puppet.

It may not have been entirely the puppet’s doing. After Wednesday’s show, after unloading the drums back into the practice space at ~12:12am, a great deflation came over me. Having played music live now for just under 3 years, I’m well familiar with my cycle of post-performance blues. It’s a hard lesson realizing art won’t save you. You wake up the next day the same person. Nothing’s changed.

Playing music live is wonderful and worth the time, naturally, but performing a 40 minute set somehow feels like 2 or 3 minutes in the moment and after it’s done, you’re left in the wake of the experience to wonder where on earth the time went. And that’s where I sat on Thursday morning, finishing Minkowski’s Lived Time and rereading his description of the élan vital.

The future lives us as we’re becoming into it. It’s a back and forth. We’re coming its way, and there’s some part of us, not so different from an essential organ, that unconsciously reaches around into the future for footholds to grow. Gather these moments for what? To finally! Transform them! Into goldshadowed memories! From which I can come and go but never return! Small islands separated by oceans of forgettings (so many forgotten exclamation points!) where words fail and colors fade and concepts simplify into ambient caricature! Ah! The past! Memory! What a perfect idea to drive us crazy from the inside-out. There’s enough room in this dome o mine (enough room in this country! enough room in this century!) to forget. There’s a retirement community in all of us.

Past movements linger in their rippling. Sometimes when I read I zone out for a paragraph and think of my friends or family and once I return to the text it feels almost as though my friends or family has been in the book the whole time, along with my thoughts and feelings and love for them. The loneliness of memory enters here, reminds the remembrancer that they’re not there anymore, they’re all alone now, living inside a memory that no longer exists.

But we don’t decide or build our lives consciously-or as consciously as that. We’re puppeted by this and that, the past and the future, the earth and the air and the circumstances. We didn’t decide to be here, to write this, maybe even to read this. We are relocated, moved, changed abruptly, forces beyond ourselves working through us understand through us what’s around us. There is a time in everyone’s life when they become aware of that pesky, primary consequence of being alive. Did that first recognition of death spark something in our heads? like a candle lit from afar, filling in the gaps that came suddenly before our peewee little minds all suddenly aflame and reeling from the thought that one day we won’t be… and gosh… neither will our parents… and (oh shit) neither will the dog… What do you mean, there’s nothing after this? But then, before you know it, there’s a bald ukranian man at the restaurant ready to put in a food order. He says nothing at all but reveals his left palm with a tattoo of a hamburger in its center, giving a sly look like what do you think?

-gbe

Twas dazzling. That yawn. And now I’ve sat down on steady ground to get my bearings straight; made it home through the scarlet maw of city pre-dawn. Out all night and feeling it, too. This’s no time or place to call up family but there’s a feeling I might want to— family ties feel more snug in the early morning. But now yk there’s work to be done. But coffee first… Bald jawn sitting by the window reading a crisp Gravity’s Rainbow… Lady visibly shaking near the wall of Cassette Tapes for Sale, on iced coffee #3 or #4. Barista is an older man with more nose rings than fingers. Very cool. Sincerely.

And now… Home now, after the weekend. Coffee in hand now. It’s a solid feeling. But every cell in me wants to be in five different places at once. I walked into my apartment like forty boots—that’s twenty men! or nineteen and one quadruped. And in a life we all come back to the feeling. I was 40 boots this morning. And good god—it’s a New Day! New Start. Heated up some rice dumplings in the microwave, set out to recompile my code and run it back through the machines I have laying open and highlighted around my place. A nylon string guitar. An open window. Morning air peeling in.

I commuted to work on Tuesday on a city bus filled with schoolchildren returning from their schoolday. Overheard talk—ICE raids, AirBnBs, Jack Daniels—on this bus of backpacks and YA books on knees, speech bubbles flying allovertheplace, and then, later at work, chef told me one of the dishwashers, Manuel, was nabbed while dropping his kids off at school by two clumsy men dressed in ninja gear slinging pairs of handcuffs and plastic zip ties, one on the left with a large tattoo of Dan Bongingo on his bicep and the other on the right a legal dwarf with a severe beer belly trying to wave his arms to stop pedestrians from filming with their phones. And no one’s heard from him since. He’s been eaten up. Swallowed by the fading american darkness. A small Honduran man with a clean-cut look, small eyes and small posture in a clean polo shirt tucked into khakis, posing no threat to anyone. Just like the Tamales Guy they got. Dare I say that I care quite a bit more about Manuel and the Tamales Guy than I will ever about Jimmy Kimmel’s show? I do. And I care more about the babies thrown out screaming with the bathwater from that apartment-wide raid on the South Shore—blocks away from the future Obama Memorial Library—where tepid, COD-brained stormtroopers broke down doors and ravaged the place looking for “illegals”… I find myself feeling illegal too, now and then, texting the gc we should get drinks and find some ICE agents to harass.

Never did have a conversation with Manuel. We don’t speak the same language outside a colloquial bump o’ knuckles. Nor did I want him to speak any English; didn’t want him to take up the forced tones to find the language, arching his accent to fit in with words so foreign to his cozy spanish. I only wish I knew Spanish. All the stupid contradictions feel like they’re being swept into the same dustbin which is looking more and more like a soup (oh no) someone might soon expect us to swallow.

This notion rattled around inside my own soupy self as I went behind the restaurant to track down some napkin refills and my eyes steadied on a great pool of rainwater in the back alley reflecting the sky and the power lines and the transformer humming soft like heaven, all the threads of the world converging, a chorus breaking out en noggin… broke my attention to detail down to shit… ran food to the wrong tables… tripped on the stairs and shattered a handful of glasses into my palm… not bad enough for stitches but bad enough to get let off for the night around 10pm. Went home, poured hydrogen peroxide, isopropyl alcohol, and neosporin all over my palm…

Went to sleep early that night, dreamt of contradictions, dreamt of sweatpants and dreamt of the fear of losing control. Carlos Bringuir’s ghost casting Stephen Miller’s shadow at a bar, and a conversation, mid-dream (what’s new?): “He just imagines shapes and puts them out there,” said someone with a hundred faces and bad posture, explaining something to someone else at a bar. “Gh!” the other person clutches their head. “I’ve imagined so many shapes, too. Why did I never think to put them down in writing?” I suppose he started making up shapes himself. What else is there to do? We look out to where the people we know have disappeared to under the hand of some great mechanistic yin-yang of consent and outrage and we can only imagine what sort of shape they’re being forced into.

I woke up to my alarm clock walloping, bounding off the bedside table yelling yelling yelling the time the time the time. Is now. Get up. Make coffee, nitwit. And a neighbor’s voice is coming from the alleyway like smoke: “-without adding collagen, the tweet said not to add the collagen and I didn’t want it to turn out bad.” Now that it’s cold out in the mornings, I shut the window. There’s a pile of dishes in the sink.

The dreambearings of my last couple (more nocturnal than usual) months have passed and I’ve given them up. I handed them over to you in my two hands but now I rest here on the open palm of the grass’s carpet, writing away this thought, this fleeting little speech my fingers are making. I am sitting beneath a bur oak, a gooseberry, and a mulberry all planted in the same bit of grass, in the park, and they’re all dropping their little parcels on me sitting stupidly below. The autumn air is sweet if one dares smell it, but it’s sweet like mulch or old wood. Every falling leaf is a new world grown old, trying to forget itself. The blue past the eyelashes of what’s left on the trees was unanticipated, unhoped-for, actively growing greater than it was only two weeks ago. As the trees shed, the sky only increases; eats the world. What am I going to do about it?

Spend more time untangling dreams? No, no. I’m past that (for the most part). I’ve moved on… parts 14-21 of this series, assembling together the contents of my dreams and nightmares to see out what’s happening in there… was not enough, it turns out. But now I’m awake. And now… Sips drink… Now… Adjusts seat… Now I will… Swats fly hammerheading past ear… Think of something new… Yearn an aspiration at all of you readers like a first-cast stone—but I am not so pure of sin. I was at a party two weeks ago in a backyard in Logan where the birthday boy puked so hard small vessels exploded in his face and gave him a diabolical look but by the time his shirt came off, thirty beers for thirty years, I took a sharpie and my friend and I drew small penises on his back until I drew a massive one with its shaft going down his spine, balls bumping up to each shoulder blade.

My friend, vape dead in the morning, you now approach a crossroads. Unfortunately the only way to quit is to do nothing. Worst part about it. Sit at the intersection until the craving leaves and the leaves have fallen and the seasons changed; then once the craving is out can we move on down these dusty roads. More dusty than we might realize. A winter realization. Hold back the quivering and be present, my friend tells himself. You know you want the deferment of pleasure, don’t you? But the deferment of pleasure feels daunting when old age looms like a dark terror and all the romantic poets died so young.

-gbe

Too far back for us to know exactly who did write it — was it Cædmon? was it Cynewulf? old english scholars are still conflicted on the subject at least according to wikipedia.org — it was written that even the cross itself, two boards nailed together, complained out loud, lamented even, about how it was to be the cross of all crosses (what a terrible fate!), that would be used to crucify Christ. Why couldn’t it have been any other? It is a bad draw of straws to be a voiceless executioner without no matter the context, but especially within the context that your chosen subject for annihilation is supposedly God himself come down to earth in a package of hippie flesh, bone, and hair. I’m not a religious person by any means but even I know Jesus was likely a good hang. Such is also the plight of Pontius Pilate, who has always seemed to me more like a middlemanager annoyed he that he wasn’t allowed to leave the office on a weekend, than he was a cruel despot. Nevertheless we’re saddled with the losses that abound inside us, and outside us, small islands floating among the currents of these odd sorts of puddles of opaque life/death situations. If we’re swimming through these waters and our bodies are our given boats, the depth below us is a mystery and there’s always a curiosity as to what happens when we stop. But we push on all the same, past the messy mediations, past the maladies. We push our doubts down wishing wells. Drown em. On our merry way anyway. Anything except stick around and think about whether we ourselves are at fault. But it has to be done if one wants to grow as a person. Growing as a person is messy and takes time.

Knowledge (and happiness, I suppose) is not a direct process and it’s more of an interplay between knower and known, between ourselves and reality that results in us growing into who we are. Mediation, unfortunately, is essential, no matter what hand of cards we were granted. Walks are more than nice; and in this regard they might be essential. When I feel myself drowning in my own silly, stupid plights and overthinkings, my instincts take me to my feet and out the door to the road’s side, to look at trees and sky and birds and hear people talking, minor characters who I can reflect on without ever experiencing the pressure of being known by them. No headphones, no phone, just myself and the soles of my shoes stepping, and the world. You can settle for yourself. You can walk it out... Taking stock is the only way of taking care… And what else is there to live for if not to take care?

Even in dreams I find myself walking around Madison, Wisconsin at sunrise or at sunset or in a secret third thing we can call noon: the center of the day when the shadows become puddles. One time I was eating peaches in a dream, one by one out of a bag I had picked up from Pinkus McBride on the corner of Johnson, and walking down the street I came across a residential high school much like the one I attended in Columbus, Mississippi, except the dormitories here were brown brick instead of the terribly cheap, brutalist concrete constructions where I lived for two years when I was fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. I continued eating the peaches and realized how messy peaches were, making a fool of myself covered in peach juice but it was a Sunday morning and there was no one around to see me except the people walking strollers. These dorms, that only exist in my dream (but in a very real city), must have been built at the turn of the twentieth-century. The buildings blended in well with the urban-lite aesthetics along the isthmus with their rickety iron escape routes and antique dusty pane windows.

The dorms I stayed in during my high school years in Mississippi (at MSMS) had been similar to these I came across in Madison while eating peaches. It occured to me that within the dream I was conflating my high school with my college years. What might this encounter unlock? I remember the Mississippi School for Mathematics both clearly and in a sort of dream language: so… two options, for this post... Do I describe my time in the reality of it or in the dream that came to me the other night? Well since this here’s a blog about huffing glue with your friends, I suppose we ought to choose the more fun route…

I remember, during class, we would sit in the great grassy courtyard all in our own chair-desk contraptions, trying like hell to conceal our phones underneath the desks while the professors slapped their palms Smart Board remotes while they talked. During lunch and during exams, the individual desks would be replaced with long wooden tables that folded up in the shape of a taco shell but when laid out they made the courtyard look conspicuously like the great hall tables from the Harry Potter films. This, of course, was intentional. The movies had done so much for recruitment.

The courtyard was large and went back some ways passing a cherry tree and a rusted chain fence extended around its back perimeter. Near the back was an old oak with a tire swing only used by the freshmen. I’m writing this now in my apartment full of chairs, couches, stools. More stools than I could ever use in a week’s time even. I used to hate chairs and sitting in them. I remember the feeling of the grass underneath our desks and I remember thinking how much I would rather have laid out in it as the dew was evaporated by the sun. The wild world is something to discover for yourself more in-depth once you’ve graduated and realized that academic ambition was a sham that ultimately leads nowhere any more exciting than spreadsheets and loan repayment.

During meals, exams, and classes, we were told to ignore the things that registered as odd or strange; in a general sense, not to look up. There’s a time I can remember that we were busy with our heads down, running through a practice AP Euro exam. The whole class took a practice test every Friday on a different era in the long storied history of mildew-white men in elaborate dinnerwear and powdered wigs, all proctored by a short bald man with a white beard going down past his beer belly who claimed to have served in the US Navy during the cold war and that he had been stationed in a nuclear submarine with his finger on a great big round red button submerged somewhere off the coast of the republic of Karelia, ready to fire if the USSR ever got too frisky for the US’s strategic international interests to allow. Occasionally, during the practice exams, just to make sure we were immune from any and all distractions, he would embark on grand campaigns of distraction against us, his students, by bellowing out Martin Luther’s 99 theses until the bell rang or playing South Park clips on the Smart Board at top volume while we were just tryna finish our DBQs. For the WWI unit, I remember distinctly preparing for the worst during the exam only for my mental preparations to come completely flat against the small santa claus-ish man hacking at his podium to pieces with a bayonet which had, a hundred years prior, been used to gut an Austrian man in the trenches of Gorizia.

Well, there was another time I can think of when something beyond even his reach happened — and here was one of the instances that the school was trying to keep hush hush — when, during our weekly exam on the post-war period, a faded pastel locomotive train carrying crates and crates of coal the color of clouds floated across the blue sky. The only reason I looked up at all was because of the shadow it cast down over all of us; this great big thing slid silently across the sky as if it had been a .png of a train’s locomotive dragged across a .jpg of open sky by some invisible cursor. The locomotive, clearly, we all knew from our studies, in the style of the late nineteenth or, maybe, the very early twentieth century, performed a couple mid-air twirls and then rocketed, still silent, towards the horizon where it disappeared beyond the blue. This was not acknowledged by anyone, least of all myself.

Some other strange occurrences I noticed in my time at MSMS, taking classes in the courtyard:

(1) one time when I was trying to meditate underneath a willow tree, the sun became a concentrated beam singeing the grass and ants with no magnifying glass in the sky (or at least nothing visible)… Thankfully, I was protected by the willow tree (thank you to all you trees out there reading this);

(2) another day a massive statue of fleshy teeth, like a pair of dentures or a dentistry model, appeared on the courtyard for one afternoon, looking like it was ready to chomp a poor someone down into nothingness, and it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Without a word. As ghastly as doubts; disappearing under the duress of eyes, ears, and any consideration so given.

The school’s faculty kept their cool, for the most part. The school was founded on what the school declared as “Fid!” (focus, integrity, and discipline) and then, later, to a simple, unenthusiastic “Fid” (to the tune of a sigh) after the embarrassingly unsuccessful presidential campaign “Jeb!” Bush ran in the run-up to the 2016 election. The principle of the school began to worry about all of these strange, unattributable occurrences happening on campus. Were they supernatural? Extraterrestrial? The word around campus was apparently he spent most of every day burying his head in his hands in his office on the third floor. It seemed like every other day he had to call up the custodian staff at the greater University to clean up an absurdly large handkerchief that had fallen on top of the gazebo behind the male dormitories or to mop up mounds and mounds of mashed potatoes that seemed to accumulate on patches of the sidewalk outside the library. The principle took to biting his nails. But he worried less where these were coming from and more of what they might result in, in the end, namely unenrollment.

To be fair to him, it’s not uncommon to find a middle-aged principle of a private school biting their nails over impending financial collapse. What worried him more was the disappearances of younger students. Surely the parents knew. They were big stories. And parents did pull their kids out. All the more baffling to the president, though, was that the parents almost always cited financial reasons.

The cracks in the president’s psyche began appearing more and more to the student body over the two years I spent at the school. One night, at a commencement dinner, the students all up and down the yard, sitting at Hogwarts-ish plastic tables watched as he climbed to the podium like a slightly greyed, blonde and beardless Dumbledore with remarkable veneers that sparkled in the evening sun. He said the usual things that a president might say, the students have showcased that Mississippi has some spark left to it, test scores were looking good, and so on and so forth, but the pauses began to increase until, finally, he broached the subject with a “how are your parents doing?”

The crowd of teenagers sat silent. Crickets.

He tried again, after a pause. Leaning a bit more into the podium. “Why’re your parents not worried about the… um… you know…”

Nothing. Crickets. A whole lot of blank looks.

He clarified, “the um disappearances?”, voice crackling into the microphone while the teachers and dormitory staff began to break out into small sweats behind him. The PE instructor’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull.

For some reason, in this strange dream that is, of course, not the reality of my time there but rather a figment of the reality of my time there, I only knew one of the students who supposedly disappeared. I remember getting out of class together and walking to the bathroom because I had to poop so terribly and she needed to piss. My classmate L— identified as female but with this being Mississippi and all she was forced into the male bathrooms because, you know, any school in Mississippi is bound down somewhat to a top-down fire-and-brimstone rhetoric around something as trivial as social identity based on a book written close to two millenia ago.

She used the stall. I used the stall. She got out first and was washing her hands in the sink and I heard a soft sound like a hiccup from outside the stall and when I left the stall she was gone and the water was still running where she had been standing.

L— was never seen again. We all knew to not ask too many questions.

The last part of the dream came after the anxieties passed gradually. Life went on. The mystery was never resolved. One night after lights out there was a pair of eyes in the dark, bright multicolored irises surrounding retinas as dark as the surrounding nothingness. The eyes looked every student up and down in their bunks. All were sound asleep. And in any case, the students had been told to ignore any strange things like this and had been reassured that none of it could affect them in any way — it was only after their mind — but this time it was different. The multicolored eyes seemed to have selected two or three students, and unlike with the prior disappearances, the three students selected did not go silently, or in a pop. They kicked and screamed and yeah… I would have done the same.

One grabbed the doorsill on the way out and held his own there for a good long while while whatever it was with the eyes pulled on his legs. They say the students are now floating around some prison camp in latin america but I wouldn’t be pressed to know which. One of many, probably. Hopefully they knew spanish. And somehow, even after this fiasco and the economy doing even worse than it had before, parents still sent their kids to the school. The outside world must be doing terribly, reasoned the Principle of the school privately to himself, if they would continue to send their kids here where all this stuff happens in the sky and sometimes in the dirt and the water, where sometimes students disappear in a gust. What a freakshow. What a nightmare.

Fresh out of the dream now, I’m reminded of the doubts that were beginning to develop for me at MSMS, a place where I felt eerily like a racehorse losing faith in the track, those which became more and more real during my time in Madison and my feeling estranged from almost every one of my classes at the University of Wisconsin, be that because of the pandemic or because of my growing apathy to the university system.

Some people never leave high school. It’s easy to feel unsure if we can as it’s the last gasp of a social space we might experience in our lives. The reactionary vision of Hogwarts captured us too young, I think — me particularly when I was small — and YA is too big an industry to let us go too easy. High school is worshipped in American culture to a nauseating degree. Why? The yearbook keeps going around hands year after year, and for some reason we keep signing off. Finding things to believe in is difficult; sometimes it’s easier to believe in the past and its dreams. I’m lucky, in a quiet sort of way, that I never quite belonged at MSMS and I never quite belonged at UW. Lacking a sense of acceptance I had to figure things out within myself and now here I am, some strange conflation of organs we might call a person.

It’s important, I think, to keep in mind that the main goal is to find and maintain a maturity that’s entirely your own. I can’t tell you what that is exactly but you can certainly feel it eventually if you look long enough, and sometimes to look for something you need to retrace your steps, walk around the block once or twice, paying attention. You’re going to have to settle at some point and get comfortable somewhere. The silver lining here is that you can settle for yourself.

“Two horses in yellow light
eating windfall apples under a tree
as summer tears apart milkweeds stagger
and grasses grow more ragged
They say there are ions in the sun
neutralizing magnetic fields on earth
Some way to explain
what this week has been, and the one before it!
If I am flesh sunning on rock
if I am brain burning in fluorescent light
if I am dream like a wire with fire
throbbing along it
if I am death to man
I have to know it
His mind is too simple, I cannot go on
sharing his nightmares
My own are becoming clearer, they open
into prehistory
which looks like a village lit with blood where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine!”

- August, Adrienne Rich (composed 1972)

Prehistory. “A village lit with blood where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine!” Before history, but also during. The erasure of mothers from the timeline where their blood remains. Adrienne Rich’s poetry collection Diving into the Wreck is astonishing, a must-read, beyond reason but perfectly within feeling just like any truly great book of poetry is. A good poem is a frightening thing since you want to break it over your knee to get at its inner-stuff but the poem is too hardy to crack, forcing you to sit down with it for a while.

I was thinking of watching a horror movie tonight, high and alone in my room with over-ear headphones but I genuinely believe my brain and nervous system would shatter completely if I get too scared so I go outside to smoke instead in the wild air.

The devilish thing about nicotine has been for me the whispers its lack creates, that nobody likes me, that I’m unloved, that everyone hopes to avoid you until the day you die and then finally they can finally start to live. Shuffling through all the embarrassing, rude things I’ve done like a plastic picture viewer. Click… Click. Click… Click… Until, ah nicotine… the zamboni of the mind…

When I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, I spent a lot of time downtown. Downtown Madison is a wonderful place to spend college. The main stretch of road along the Isthmus (land formation of a strip of land between two bodies of water, in this case, two lakes) was closed to traffic and open for foot traffic. The bars, restaurants, and stores up and down the street were propped together like cereal boxes, but one in particular, the restaurant where I worked, had an extraordinary basement lounge that became a facsimile version of the city above for one night every year. This isn’t widely reported. I worked there as a food runner. The job was nothing spectacular. My application was accepted because the person who recommended me had told the management I was good people. I suppose I was.

In late august, before one of my shifts, I sat in the public library with a couple of friends and we had rented out a couple of instruments from the library and N— played the tuba and L— played the clarinet and I played the accordion out loud in the quiet section until the library residents became agitated enough at our Polka enough to begin throwing pencils at us. We dispersed like fog for the day — of course I would see them again the following Friday after for band practice — and I went to work.

My job involved quite a bit of leaning against metal passes and while I waited dully for tickets to emerge screaming out of the printer I noticed someone I had a phantom falling out with years ago sitting nearby at a table, sitting rather upright. By “phantom falling out” I mean I hadn’t known we had fallen out at all. He was one of my favorite people in creative writing classes, he had just simply stopped responding to texts asking him how his writing’s going. I don’t know. It felt strange and hard not to take the radio silence personally. We had been close, or I thought we’d been. The friendship must not have been a friendship at all, it seems, and only an acquaintanceship. And that’s fine. But seeing him again at the restaurant where I worked, I left the pass and evacuated into the basement through the kitchen.

In the basement, the Event was taking place. The Event, I should clarify, was nothing that hadn’t been planned well in advance by the restaurant itself, advertised by word of mouth and on social media feeds over the past couple months. There was a chalkboard out on the sidewalk saying “EVENT TONIGHT —>” and pointing to the doors propped open, letting the august breeze wash through the patrons dining and sipping and drinking.

The ordinary “bank vault” theme of the lounge as it normally is was gone on the night of The Event, replaced through the labor of a couple hundred burly volunteers with a life-sized replica of the city above — Madison, Wisconsin — underground with dark green marble ceilings hanging way above, well past the state capitol building, the apartments, the brownstones. The dark green marble hung so far overhead that, with the streetlights, it appeared dark blue. The lack of the moon becomes quickly obvious, though, when walking through the facimile city. It was a cavernous space, but everything, in fact, was made of dark green marble. The dark green somehow made the place more comfortable, a glamorous bunker. Madison, Wisconsin without the trees and underground. Patrons would get a drink at the bar and go paruse the streets, walk around, some becoming hopelessly drunk, feeling like they were now in their own version of the city with no one else around: the town had been made into a bar, or rather the bar had been made into the town. We called it Blue County. A line forms around the block to get in.

It has been speculated on what exactly the purpose of the underground city was, this underground blue county, what it had been built for — certainly it hadn’t just been built for a restaurant’s lounge or a toursist attraction. Such an impossible-sounding project had to be intended for something greater than all of this…

The underground replica of the town doesn’t hold the entire city, though. How could it? That would be far too ambitious. There’s no cell connection and no real connection to the outside world at all besides a couple of telephones used by the restaurant’s auxilery staff who work for this one night only to communicate with the kitchen above. The boundaries end on the other side of the two lakes on either side of the downtown stretch of Madison. The lakes are no lakes, though, not down here — or at least not all the time. It wasn’t even a bog. Rather it was a perfectly sterilized basin also made from the same kind of porcelin you would find in a bathtub; it was the bottom of the lakes perfectly realized in its ups and downs. Walking around the shallows, one discovers many hidden mysteries replicated from the real-world lakes aboveground such as old shipwrecked canoes and piles of beer cans off the docks of fraternities. In their centers, where the water aboveground became at its furthest depths, small black pools existed. At all times during the Event, it seems, there’s at least a small gathering of people throwing stones and the aforementioned beer cans into the black water to try and rid it of its blackness. They make their ways to the lake from the enterance of Blue County, underneath a sign blaring YOU ARE NOW ENTERTING BLUE COUNTY on one side and YOU ARE NOW EXITING BLUE COUNTY. SEE YOU NEXT YEAR on the other, and climb down ladders into the depths of the facimile of the lake to the where the black water pools. There’s a fascination with this water, I think, because it’s the only part of Blue County not completely sterilized.

Blue County is a impressive feat of overnight construction (or simulation, you might want to call it) but, in my opinion, it never feels like much; Blue County makes a person feel like what an ice cube must feel in a tray.

“Here in the matrix of need and anger, the
disproof of what we thought possible
failures of medication
doubts of another’s existence
—tell it over and over, the words
get thick with unmeaning—
yet never have we been closer to the truth
of the lies we were living, listen to me:
the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed
flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing
the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.”

- from When We Dead Awaken, Adrienne Rich (composed 1971)

Common consensus is currency. There’s a masculinity crisis. In many ways, for good reason — perhaps crisis is healthy for evolution to something more sustainable and empathetic, more understanding (re: the poem above) — but in many other ways, the deciding online of who deserves to be lonely has caused many male-identifiers to go at least a small bit insane. Sometimes very much insane. I wonder if there has been an unintentional gendering of loneliness. If there has been, certainly that’s feeding into the rise of 21st century fascism globally, right?

Can you imagine a man with his molecules rearranged? A man uncreated and trying to work with what he’s got left of this thing, this label, he’s always been told that he is? Maybe, he thinks, he can shape the bits and pieces he picks up from his podcasts and algorithms into something of a “man”. But alas! Even his imagination’s been undone. He’s adrift.

Mid-to-high class gastropubs are full of men in their late thirties to middle age and looking at these guys, I can’t help but feel a little bad. These men are broken. I don’t think they deserve what they think they deserve for the most part, but a decentered egotism tends to spiral. Egotism! What a masculine thing! Not necessarily a bad thing when comfortable (but likely to become a bad thing when uncomfortable). That’s to say, Blue County is full of the same burly volunteers who construct it and in turn deconstruct it, every year for the annual Event. Manosphere types and wellness influencers and those who aspire towards either dozen-times-removed cousin of the trickle-down death drive. That’s to say, Blue County fills up with mostly dissatisfied young men who have some sort of opinion on Joe Rogan.

That’s not all, though. To sum up Blue County as a convention for meatheads would be far from the truth. The green marble facsimile of the Barnes & Noble, very suitable to the cavernous dark-acadamia color scheme of Blue County, tends to lurk various small troupes of once-upon-a-time optimists and socialists who’ve lost faith in the people and themselves and generally don’t like one another all that much. “Whoah,” says a small child looking through the window of the bookstore at all the mustaches and beards and mullets and the hats with the red stars before their mother yanks their arm away from the window saying, “over here now,” since she had grown up in a rather wealthy family in the US during the cold war and had been trained to think communists and nazis were more-or-less interchangeable. The two of them are on a tour group of Blue County, hosted by an exuberant former film&tv student with (ngl) very well honed comedic timing.

Unfortunately, while the tour guide described the anatomy of Blue County outside the green marble replica of the Wisconsin state capitol building to the disinterested bunch of tourists more interested in the novelty of the place than the history or mechanics of its existence, the tour group was ambushed by a small gang of Blue County guerillas. Incels, mostly, who descended on the group with flags, wearing ironic (or woefully upfront) tee shirts, and filming one another and the tour group on their phones. There seemed to have been no coordination here, since each guerrilla, sporting identical fades, were filming different types of content — one was filming another with a microphone held out like a hot poker aimed at the tour group; another had hauled along some kind of newsdesk with a logo’d coffee cup seemingly superglued on top where he sat while another thick necked man filmed with his phone screwed into a tripod; another filmed himself selfie-style and yelled into the phone screen that contained his eyes, his forehead, his backwards baseball cap, and a large swath of the now rather uncomfy tour group trying to look innocuous and the tour guide carrying on with her schpiel about the history and logistics of Blue County while sweating bullets.

Another scene: the café. Two women sit by the window. There’s a barista employed here one night a year who’s making espresso behind a green marble counter from a green marble espresso machine. She runs two coffee cups, green on the outside but white on the inside, to the two silhouettes in the window, talking about sparks, and their children — now, apparently, old enough to have their own children. When is the question. They’re waiting. This is their primary wait. Nothing else has grip on the meaning in the world, it feels. Grandchildren. What a wonderful thing. They move on. Sip. Gossip. Underneath the table they hold their imagination like revolvers aimed at once another. Overhead, around a neon sign in the window, fruit flies fry themselves.

I pass this scene and walk on into the city, feeling a cold breeze from somewhere mysterious. Perhaps it was my imagination. I keep walking into Blue County and I’m reminded of a graveyard. It’s a place built on and for repression. A shrine, even. Repression, both when self-inflicted and not, is as dark a past-time as is having died.

The cold city, underground. There’s no metabolic processes here, only lingering, only stasis. No feeling but the inverse of what feeling ought to be. Aboveground, every day is the same day; down in Blue County, one day a year is every night.

In my own wandering of Blue County that night, after which I would be removed completely from the restaurant’s schedule for evacuating the floor enitrely on such a busy night, I spent a lot of time thrifting. The clothing pop-ups in Blue County are something to behold. Like at any annual event at a bar that gathers a crowd, you can buy yourself a new nice, if beat up, jacket for the winter for just shy of fifty dollars if you look long enough. Other than the jackets, though, shirts and baseball caps and unknown vinyl records were for sale on almost every street corner. The people who sell them also have quite a bit of beef with the manosphere-oriented Blue County guerrilla groups who will also set up stands selling supplements and boner pills, men who look like the hulk (they are somewhat green in the face as well) trading confederate bills and shitcoins between themselves. “Think! Of the Parable of the Cave! Plato!” one of the meatheads said to me as I passed. He was holding a flag above his head with both his arms, biceps bulging regardless. “Free yourself of the Cave!” he said. Still not sure whether he was talking about aboveground or down here in Blue County.

I didn’t end up finding a jacket I liked among the racks but I did run into an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in a while. L— had dipped off the face of the Earth rather abruptly for reasons no one quite knew, around March of 2022. Startled to see him, I said something imitating an Eric Andre bit (I was 22, tbf), something like “whoaah if it isn’t Taco Tim.”

“Oh shit, hey Griffin,” he said.

“Well if it isn’t Ground Control to Major Tom,” I said.

“What’s up.”

“Well if it isn’t…. not much.”

We caught up briefly. L— had bags under his eyes like I hadn’t seen before. He told me he felt more comfortable down here. It was kind of nice. He said he felt shielded from the “eyes of god.” This was a concerning thing to hear from him so I asked him how he was doing, really. Turns out: not good. But he wouldn’t open up to me about what so when we parted he looked like he was intently shielding me from thinking ill of him. He must have done something bad. Anyways, I never learned what it had been and I never saw him since, as he decided to stay in Blue County after last call.

The signs at the entrance of Blue County, where the bar above enters down into the subterranean simulacra, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING BLUE COUNTY on one side and YOU ARE NOW EXITING BLUE COUNTY. SEE YOU NEXT YEAR on the other, begin to flash in a soothing mauve shade of violet. There’s a voice on an intercom declaring LAST CALL, LAST CALL.

It wouldn’t be a pretty fate to become lost down here, or to fall asleep anywhere. Every year, near the end of the night, the black water pooled at the bottom of the facsimile lakes begins to rise steadily, slowly, chasing those loitering around the place up hill gradually to the entrance (which happens to be the highest point in all of the city, a green marble stairwell up into the real world), lapping at their boot-heels until they “okay, okay,” they make their way out of Blue County and out of the gastropub that hosts the Event, because the staff is tired and they want to close up shop. The patrons stop drinking wine, tea, shopping for thrifted shirts, all move uphill. I was one of these who returned to the stairs and, water lapping at my heels, I made my way back up into the restaurant, keeping my head down as not to be seen by any of my (former) coworkers. I don’t know if L— made it out. I think he may have stayed behind, drowned… It’s not unheard of... At the very least I haven’t seen him since.

This past week, two and a half years after all the above happened, I came bad with a cold, I took a bath having hoped the epsom salts could cure me. I pulled the plug and the water began to go down the drain. I didn’t move. The water flowed off of me. My body emerged, new and pale. More hair than I remembered. First there were the mountainous peaks of my knees — icecaps — and then my chest began to break through like a barge, the hair there and on my belly becoming a mat, then my pink privates surrounded by a nest of hair, then my ankles, and finally, my feet. The way the water flowed down, I felt pulled down into the tub: a strange feeling — surely it has something to do with the fluid dynamics of receding water. But in a poetic sense, the water was trying to take me along with it… Down the drain…

Once the water was gone, I continued to sit in the empty tub, my own landscape having emerged out from the flood unscathed, refreshed even, and at that moment the sun came barreling burning red through the top of my window, a reddening clarity which made my body’s landscape into a canyon where the wind could blow and the rock wouldn’t feel too cold. I was reminded — and this was a reminder I needed after having dealt with this severe and dreadful cold for three days — that my body is capable of life. A spear of sun had struck me through the window like a sieve. I’m writing these words to you in May, when the spring is finally arriving in Chicago, where I now live and where the winters stretch into small eternities.

This is set to be published in the week after I turn 26. The space between now and then feels like forever but I know the time will close before I know it. Losing your youth is a running straight into a wall, hurting yourself through someone else, a proxy against hubris, for you to feel hurt for long enough so that you don’t forgive the world or yourself. you cant let the world hurt again and you can let yourself hurt the world again (even if it’s a small hurt isn’t it embarrassing to have hurt the world by running into it?). there’s no excuse anymore. and you didn’t realize your age was such an excuse when it was. leaving it behind, growing from it. recoiling. returning from a haze. i’m here. talking to the moon again. trust yourself to learn. trust yourself to change. trust in. i’m thankful i can still find the moon in the sky. ahh luna. there you are again.

I passed by an old man who was talking to a gathered group of four squirrels all standing on their hind legs and they were all listening to what he had to say intently, his hands behind his back — I wonder if they thought he might be concealing bread crusts? It was a pleasant scene. The squirrels came right up to him. I smiled and kept walking. I realized, though, that the smile became a grimace on my face once I made it deeper into the park, approaching the lake. I was reminded that my face makes a grimace almost all of the time when I’m in public, until, of course, I notice it and push it down and try and force my face to be normal looking, thereby creating something of a twisted mask that frightens strangers. I wonder, if by forcing myself out of this grimace in a general sense, I’ll feel more open to the world? Is this a fake-it-until-you-make-it situation? Perhaps that’s wishful thinking.

The Last House Party in Lincoln Park (scene report)

No one was boring, but no one was interesting either. Everyone’s getting older, or they’re moving West, or they’re moving out of the city. That’s the way things have looked in general these past three years since I graduated, for everyone I’ve met. The truly successful or the overly ambitious ones move East to a city that’s been upping the speculative cashing-in in on nostalgia for decades now. The rest of us are scattered across different levels of disappearance so it becomes impossible to tell who’s doing better or who’s doing worse, who’s sinking and who’s managing to swim, who’s managing at least to tread water, etc. etc.

The tunnel in and out of the party felt like a curse... It’s been a year since I attended one of these parties. My profile picture is from one of these: last June, on the back porch, smiling, drunk.

The place seemed empty this time; it felt vacant. Maybe I came too early. I know enough former art school students to have an idea of their sleep schedules. They stay up late, which is easy when your work involves mostly self-scheduled artistic practices. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago isn’t the best place to secure a job but it is a wonderful base for a bohemian lifestyle, admirable in this day and age. I’m awfully jealous of anyone with a proper bohemian lifestyle. But when I try it for myself I feel disgusted with myself and with my life. I would quit my job in a heartbeat if I could ever be successfully unemployed. Whenever anyone talks to me about their career aspirations I always look at them in wonder — you want to work more hours? Unfortunately, I wasn’t born into wealth or anything like that. I’m no nepo baby. If I was, though, I would be on top of the world right now. You better believe these doodles would be in galleries by now. After all, the only thing that separates your personal doodles from the works of a Bushwick conceptual artist is a couple tens of thousands of dollars from your parents to get a degree, establish certain aloof personal airs, and secure time to come up with a memorized sort of conceptual pitch for it all. Money begets the gallery. Money begets the creation of real-world personhood.

But to be completely fair to the artists coming out of SAIC, many of them are very fun to be around. This is likely because many of them too are excluded from the gallery — in a universe of choices that an 18 year old must make for an unforeseeable future in which all they really care to do, in the end, is work at a coffee shop or volunteer at the local library, why not go to school to paint? It’s not like any of us will ever be free from the chains of debt. This is twenty-first century America, for god’s sake, a country whose currency is counted in credit! — so what do they do while undergoing this sisyphean task of attempting to break into the art world as it rapidly liquidates into fetters of the attention economy? They make their apartments into gallery spaces, of course! And what a gallery space the apartment where the party was hosted was! Knick-knacks, tweed bobbles, street signs, small sculptures made of clay, large canvases of eccentric paintings, lamp shades over light bulbs on the ceiling, ukranian vegetable spreads, antique beer cans made into a man hanging from a ventilation tube, aquariums containing frogs — if you can’t afford studio space or gallery space but you can afford an apartment, why not?

What’s surprising about all of this is that Lincoln Park is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city. And it’s only getting more expensive. This apartment on Camden Court wasn’t going to last forever. Rent prices continue to rise and rise. It’s a small wonder they could afford it in the first place. It’s very likely that this is the last party I’ll ever attend in Lincoln Park — it’s not as if I befriend very many people who make six figures or more a year.

I wasn’t at the party terribly long. The vibe felt depressed. I met, again, the man whose name looms over these parties, who I’ve met for the first time multiple times. I didn’t see his roommate who works in claymation — maybe he’s moved out? And I didn’t see my friend’s evil ex. Apparently there was a falling out. I spent my time with two friends who were lurking around the entrance and I talked to them about film and frogs and whatnot and then one of their ex-hinge matches appeared, as if out of the aether, and things felt weird and awkward so the other two of us evacuated to the porch where we smoked cigarettes and talked about — god what did we talk about? — who knows.

It was the end of an era, but not my era, per se. I’m not saying I was above it, rather I’ve never felt really a part of it. I arrived to the scene late in the cyclical nature of such things, I started coming to these events through a few friends I met in my first year of living in Chicago. And they happened to be in their fourth and fifth years of living in the city so the truly chaotic phases of their living in the city were beginning to wrap up and wind down fully. Everyone was licking their wounds, recovering from alcoholism and unemployment. This party felt like an afterword to all that being said and done. Eras are always ending, though. The only truly horrifying possibility is that a new one won’t emerge.

People started filing into the party gradually and I began to feel restless. A woman came through with a perm and her tongue hanging out of her mouth damn near constantly and so I took my cue to leave. The walk home felt right and summery. I daydreamed of Dandelion fields. I walked across Diversey, past a handful of nudist bikers on Divvy bikes, one of which picked woodticks off of another’s sweaty back. I wondered where someone would gather woodticks like that in the city. And if there was anywhere, why on Earth would anyone go nude biking there?

A deep sigh here. Walking. The crickets. I can’t seem to figure out what feels so off in my life. I keep writing about this, I know. I want to stop writing about it but nothing ever feels quite right, and couple this with the way that time moves, I feel terror stricken on-and-off consistently. We’ve all been drafted into the army of the real — but where is the real? A small bit of time goes so slow, a lot goes so quick; the search becomes desperate and the tightrope feels thinner. Time moves in a circle; but age moves in a straight line. I’m 26 now. God. What have I done? What makes any of this worthwhile?

Walking under the yellow lights, a cannon fired its shots into my insides with heavy wooden wheels spinning and grinding glass into smaller bits, so small, so small, and I don’t think anyone should be homeless when there are metal monsters such as a subway flying about, but what can I do about it? All I do is walk around the city waiting for an arrow-shaped stone to fall along my path.

All of this feels like a recession indicator, btw.

why are americans partying less? (derek thompson)

The abundance guy — not Ezra Klein, the other one — has a lot to write about the death of partying and the desolate social calendars of most Americans, but he doesn’t have a lot to say.

He’s right in that we face an anti-social century, sure. As he points out, just 4.1 percent of Americans report that they attend social gatherings every weekend, a continuing trends that’s been ongoing since the 1970s. Putnam’s book Bowling Alone is a very illuminating read on this subject and while Putnam (and Thompson) assert that (1) there are more women in the workforce, therefore women are more busy, and historically it was women who kept track of social calendars, (2) there are more helicopter parents with less kids, and (3) there are more screens in the household than ever — I’ll mention here that I’m a little skeptical of the first point as I personally know a handful of corporate women and there is no one who parties/events throws quite like they do.

Thompson, in classic “abundance guy” fashion, ignores the root cause of the social decline, that being the decline of social rights in the US since the 1970s.

The predominant headwinds of the late ‘70s up until 2020 have been aimed at extinguishing the idea of “society” as mere fantasy, replacing it with, instead, a mass accumulation of “self-interested individuals”. How anyone can’t see a direct correlate between that kind of top-down (trickle-down) political thinking bring about the insular, self-interested social culture we have now is beyond me.

In a social world in which buying things for friends could be considered a “handout”, in which communal projects around healthcare for all or housing for the homeless are considered “supporting the lazy”, and where the work culture becomes devoid of unionization efforts or any sort of class solidarity, how can we expect any sort of social solidarity?

Certainly the evaporation of American’s social lives is a part of the general class war ongoing against the lower and middle classes; who would be surprised if the 1% of wealth owners in the United States fit somewhere inside of the the 4.1% of Americans who claim to attend social outings every weekend? At its root, like so many other problems we’re facing, the “lack of partying”, or whatever, is a result of wealth inequality.

I skimmed Thompson’s article for anything to do with healthcare, unions, or social rights. Nada. Everyone is struggling to put food on the table, to pay rent, to sleep even. Those who aren’t struggling to pay their bills get the right to throw and attend events and the number of those who don’t have to worry so much is shrinking every year as the clubhouse of extravegant wealth becomes more and more exclusive.

It’s possible to throw parties as someone without wealth, sure, but it’s much more difficult; as anyone who’s thrown house parties while making under $30k a year (such as myself) can tell you. And even more, it’s discouraged. “You should be working,” is the implication of spending money on an event. “You’re just letting people take advantage of you. Don’t give away your money like that.”

The issue with such thinking is that there are no better jobs. Americans excluded from the upper rungs of ownership aren’t given social permission to host events, throw parties, go barhopping, just as we’re not given social permission to maintain any employment, health, or housing protections.

This has been ongoing since the ‘70s, absolutely, and for tactful reason: if the poors were to gather regularly outside of work, what if they decide to start a union? That certainly can’t be allowed. So, from the top down, through intercoms and television stations, a call goes out, “There is no society. You are self-interested. There is no society. You are…”, repeating for decades upon decades. It’s hard to kick it with friends when the air is still full of sirens telling you how self-interested you are, deep down in your nature. We’re not going to be able to change that by tweaking zoning regulations, a la Thompson and Klein’s Abundance plan for re-marketing a long-dead neoliberalism which is only really openly championed by the octogenarians of the DNC and their stooges such as Richie Torres and John Fetterman.

The Pudding and the Traffic Apocalypse (website)

Here’s a fun website to counteract all the gloom above. In my (personal) efforts to be more off-the-grid and intentional with my internet time, I’ve spent a lot of my “2 hours a day of screentime” on strange little homegrown websites like this that feel somewhat like the flashgames of the early 2010s. Here’s another fun one and I were messing around with the other day.

Anyways, The Pudding is a wonderful little digital publication of interactive, forward thinking (and data-driven) articles on all sorts of subjects ranging from the divide between workers who sit on the job and those who stand to abortion availability to baseball statistics. I’d recommend spending an afternoon exploring here because, as goes with an intentionality approach to online spaces, spending time in an online space that values your attention (and doesn’t depend on its exploitation) goes a long ways.

On the topic of The Pudding, there’s been a lot of discussion about the end of the internet's legacy publication era. The infrastructure that newspapers and magazines built to survive the 2000s-era internet are rapidly failing and profits are falling with a wild punctuality. So yes, there’s a lot of doom and gloom about this, but, in my opinion, this sort of apocalyptic moment for legacy pubs comes from twenty years of ignoring the format of the internet and attempting to make the square peg of their companies’ lengthy history in print fit into the round hole of online media. Now they’re laying off significant staff and attempting a general pivot to video content to increase clicks. Publications like The Pudding and The HTML Review, though, and to a lesser extent, Byline and Forever Mag, are the future of online publishing, I think — they will survive, even if they never amass a significant following, in the same way that fan forums will survive: namely, because they’re of the internet and because they’re developed out of an unprofitable passion for making things that are engaging and worthwhile. It would be wise if the legacy publications pay heed. But who am I to say?

Wrong Mary (forever mag)

Speaking of Forever Mag, linked above is the best short story I’ve read so far this week. By . Here’s a passage:

“She turned the phone’s screen black with her thumb. The app wasn’t as good as texting. She didn’t like being Mary no last name, picture of her by the Y in the Hollywood sign with an ugly dog by her feet, its hips spreadeagle. Caption angel in disguise, caption if you’re my student no you’re not. Students = the freshman in her introduction to fiction seminar. Teaching at the university was required for her funding, the stipend for the creative writing fellows, though it barely paid enough for her to go to the bargain grocery store. She tried to write a short story about the experience with the other Mary around the time a student found her on the app. Hi, Mary. Is that you? The short story wasn’t very good.

You’re afraid to hurt your characters, her classmates had said. You’re afraid to raise the stakes.

Which characters? Mary replied. Which stakes?”

The preeminent struggle that all current indie-type writers have been trying to process for these last, overlong ten years is how the hell to portray the internet in writing in a way that feels accurate?

As the internet (primarily as its wielded through the modern smart phone) has become a sort of marble-of-magnetism for our attention and our understanding, this challenge has clearly daunted, sometimes severely. The texts I’ve read that came the closest to properly portraying life inside a networked world have been Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel, and a couple of the stories out of Honor Levy’s My First Book.

What I mean to say is the way that Ross writes about the internet as a vaguely Lynchian screen over life itself that blurs and distorts the formerly familiar, feels very pertinent, feels like a step in the right direction to understanding what the fuck this thing is and what it’s doing to us; and importantly, Ross doesn’t portray this in horror movie lighting as much as she portrays it as something uncomfortable but worked through, eventually: we forget other people exist, but then, eventually, the film we’re inside of becomes boring, nothing happens, and we find ourselves in our bodies again, after a time, and we can finally rediscover one another then, and we can finally fall in love again.

And finally, here’s the monstrosity I made this week on Craig Hickman’s KidPix

xoxoxo,

briffin

You solitary-minded devil. A romantic old house is all you’ll need: romantic old hours. Time told in dust gathered. Melt away from the world. You come to me out of the past. You come to me with grey eyes. You ask for my time? A grandfather clock chimes midnight. Now. NOW. A pet mouse in a sweater vest scurries. The sultry hours between midnight and one, stretched flat out in a blanket of wool designed to conceal and keep warm and made into a house, a small manor. Quiet hours. Be warned, however, as the coccoon may itch and scratch before it becomes comfortable; — but what else could you expect from a “Space to Grow”, concealed away from this pesky bustle outside? It’s the dilemma of our time that we must choose between an inside and an outside life that are becoming indecipherable from one another… To juggle the hours in pre-linguistic daydreams… English (as a language) being an old house in itself… The day winds down and up like a wristwatch ticking by if you let it… But you don’t have to let it…

But to get back to the question: wouldn’t you like an old house? Wouldn’t you like a working fireplace? A dock on the lake? A house whose geometry is formed from a number of drawn out lines, grey avenues, all formed together under the structure of a space alone in a wilderness, weathered by the wind, protecting a quiet interior luxury? It’s a nice house, a big house, a Bachelardian house. Dead pricks have fallen upwards out of poverty into riches to live in that house, the one you imagine. Dead pricks have held onto inheritances, settled into the seasons in that house, separated from the meddlesome masses in that house. Dead pricks have fallen downwards, too, spiraled into poverty in that house; they lost it to someone with more — a bigger fish — will that be you? Will you return from that house, back into the American sprawl and too broke to keep your shoes tied? What about you? Well… If you’re in the world today, I’m assuming you are none of the above: you were born too late in humanity’s season to live such simple life-stories.

I’ve heard you say it over the phone through invisible wires: I’ve heard you whisper that you want to be consumed. At least more than you want to be broken. Who am I to judge? Well anyways, here’s your chance: your mother’s rich friend’s vacation home on Lake Superior is yours and yours alone for two weeks. Wait, wait: what month is this? July? Oo Aa a lake house in July. Who could ask for more?

Okay I should be honest here: I’m not speaking to you, of course I’m not — or am I? — so let’s correct the course of this craft and reset this second-person skew into something more comfortably third-person. My long-time friend L—, a name I’ll blank out with the letter L (the most innocuous of all letters!) and an em dash for the sake of privacy, was fresh out of a two-year situationship which broke her foot and her heart and left her high-and-dry for an aimless post-grad depression spanning over three years. Around the start of that spiraling, L— took to her mother’s friend’s lake-house for two weeks the summer. Strange things happened. I’m going to tell you all about it, though there’s a good chance L— herself is reading this now; and if you are, and I know how busy you are these days, I’m sorry for telling your story for you. Here’s hoping I can do it some sort of justice here. It hasn’t left my head since you told it all to me on that road trip.

Before the quiet couple of months prior to her trip north, L—’s foot was broken quite severely by the rear tire of her ex-boyfriend’s Toyota Prius. It had been a quiet night of loud emotions. Underneath the blue-yellow lights outside her class-C apartment complex, hidden away in an alleyway, she attempted to convince a guy she’d met in a mid-level linguistics class four months prior to stay a little longer. He was the most recent in a long string of flings, situationships, and partners and after he packed up his things from her apartment — some of her things too, btw — she came up to his car window, politely knocked on the glass of the car’s passenger side door which the unshaven man then refused to roll down, or look towards in general, while he put the car into drive and sped around the corner. The back tire of the Prius rolled clean over L—’s unassuming foot, one toe at a time, but with a quick enough succession of pain that all five little piggies went wee wee wee all the way home together. The pain flooded in, intense and all at once, as if the breakage had lit her blood on fire inside her arteries. She collapsed onto the asphalt, howling, but soon stood up and hobbled back to her apartment where she threw pillows around for thirty to forty minutes before calling an Uber to the hospital. Besides the pain, there was a certain stubbornness in L—’s blood — and of course I love this in her. She refused to let her ex-situationship know it had even happened, that he had ever even hurt her physically, for the sole reason of Fuck him. Fuck his number. Fuck him fuck him fuck him. He broke all the toes in her foot, and he would never get the privilege of knowing, unless his soundcloud rap career somehow took off and in such an event, L— would end him with a tweet. But until then his number would remain blocked until the end of time. For all I know, since his soundcloud career never took off, his number is still blocked.

A foot with a full set of toes are simple and easy things to forget about when properly functioning; but a broken foot is impossible to forget. It’s one thing to find a job when freshly graduated into a recession; it’s another thing entirely to find a job when one cannot walk. There’s almost always restaurant work to be found; good luck finding any. The comfortable remote jobs are fiercely protected by people over the age of 30 and there’s not a whole lot of trickling down to people in their twenties these days. What’s left, then, but a diet of Frozen Microwaved Food and Bed Rotting? Head in the Proverbial Tank? Lobster in a Restaurant Aquarium?

With a phone from ten years ago chronically half-charged, with a handful of social media feeds, with a collection of pillows and blankets in enough positions to keep the bedsores and cramps from taking over completely, L— felt the disappointments settle in like so much dust. She found out from her mother that she wouldn’t be invited to Italy along with the rest of the family. “I’m so sorry honey,” her mother had told her. “But we can’t be showing weakness in front of the Thompsons. How would you even get into a gondola?”

I remember her texts to me about it, her disappointments, each text a short chip of sadness. I remember vaguely how baffled I was that anyone’s family could afford trips to Europe every year, but I knew L— came from wealth. I was trying, at the time, to get better about not being petty towards anyone with any money. And not even wealth could heal a foot after it’s been run over by a car. Even wealth couldn’t get her outside without crutches, even wealth couldn’t help her in feeling like she had any hope for the future. The last thing she wanted to do was press her parents on getting her a job somewhere. They could, sure. But that would be a defeat. She did give in eventually, but not until last year.

And I’ve been inside that post-grad desperation too, — who hasn’t? — I’ve been inside the iced-over port city of Aimless Agony, trapped inside all the time without any of metaphorical windows or doorways appearing, those which might make youth into a worthwhile transition into some sort of success, and the feeling is of aimless sinking into the quicksands of time passing. There’s nothing to do and there are cameras everywhere. I think most of my generation has experienced this feeling; we’re bound down to this strange cliff-face between two precipices — that of the undead neoliberal world order (1968-2008) and the cybernetic aftermath of it (2020-?) — and that’s all to say we will know no peace or understanding in our lifetime. All the rules have been torn up. It is what it is. At least it’s interesting.

And I like my generation. I like Gen-Z. There’s a certain hardiness in us. We’re left out of the best bars and clubs because we weren’t drinking back when they existed, we’re left trying to find something, trying to find anything that could stick, as the day becomes night and the towers that grow in the animosity of the culture at large begin to cast their shadows darker than anything I could imagine, darker than anything you could tell me on a night when we’re both too drunk on our misery to be positive. Everything’s been torn to shreds for the sake of the bare minimum. I don’t mind building things in the wake of such. It sucks that we have to; but as I said, oh well. The only answer might be to put out some straw on the floor and sleep on the most familiar patch of Earth we can find.

ANYWAYS, back to the story: as the first month of post-grad life went on, L— began to feel like slime in her apartment, and as the lease was coming to a close with no reason to stick around her college town after she’d graduated, she opted to move back in with her parents in rural Michigan. In the passenger’s seat of an SUV packed to the gills with cardboard boxes and trash bags of thrifted outfits, her mother glanced over to see L— heavy breathing at the window at the countryside going past, fogging up the glass. “You know,” her mother said. “As a matter of fact, despite you wanting to be all bohemian all the time, I know you secretly deepdown want some kind of quiet domesticity in the countryside. I was like a hippie when I was your age and all I wanted really was to settle down with a nice husband and a nice place in the suburbs, I just didn’t know it yet.” And L— didn’t know what to say about this.

“I know just the place…,” her mother continued. “A very romantic house. Up on Superior… Very beautiful this time of year… My friend, and I’ve known her since I was your age, she’ll be gone for two weeks at the end of the month and I think it would be perfect for you to recharge after a stressful run of things, don’t you think? She needs a house-sitter, after all. All you would have to do is keep the plants watered and you could do that.” Her mother glanced down at her foot. “You could do that, couldn’t you?”, she asked. And L— wasn’t in a position to say no or anything so instead she said nothing. It was July, after all. What a time to sit on a dock… broken foot or no… “I could water the plants, yeah,” L— said, as if confirming the inevitable all while continuing to watch the countryside flit by outside the passenger’s side window.

One must be sure, when leaving the house, to bring along the things that will keep you as a person who’s about something. In many such cases, this is a laptop or a smartphone or maybe a Nintendo DS. For the two week stay at her mother’s friend’s lakehouse, L— brought along a series of devices to be used against (and some for) insomnia, some reading material, and quite a bit of tanning lotion.

Her mother drove her up to the cabin soon after she moved home. When they saw the lake they sat looking out it along the side of the road, an endless cold expanse. L— shuffled in her seat. Mother and daughter, not saying a word. They drove past a rough-and-tumble whitewashed hotel with a sign declaring The Whitefin Inn, standing like any building build during its time: stocky and firm against the gales coming in along the coastline. A small meadow cowered behind it, leaves fluttering and making a loud ruckus. The hotel looked like it might belong better to Nova Scotia than Michigan but the car hummed past it all the same, not caring much for regional aesthetics, immediately arriving at a metal gate that was once painted red — some small chips of paint remain — with a passcode and a camera perched on top. The number was 1234; L—’s mother typed it in quickly. And then, past the gate’s passcode, the car arrived at a large ranch style house facing inland. Behind the house ran a long wooden dock over the grass and then over the water splaying up and over, splashing against the rocks, splashing against the roots of the ceders. There was a small blue boat house nearby. A pontoon underneath a blue tarp. The grey trunked Aspens towered at a great height over the house and their leaves speckled the whole yard with gold and yellow — through the whistling, bristling leaves high above, the dull blue of summer sky peaked through.

It was such a sight that L—’s heart broke into a hundred small pieces just seeing it all. All that was missing was a lighthouse in the distance and, well, sure enough, there was one in the distance, as L— would eventually learn. It was only visible at night by the light of its occasional flash coming out and over the dark moonlit maw of the long, dark lake.

L—’s mother’s friend, a woman named Léa, had been in the middle of packing her bags for a trip to Singapore and she gave the two of them a tour of the place, though slowly, for the sake of L— hobbling around on her crutches with her broken foot leading their way through the dark inside of the house, showed her what plants she was to water, and when. L— kept becoming distracted by Léa’s great, whtie veneers. The veneers didn’t not work, per se. But the older woman couldn’t quite close her mouth. Shaking herself free from staring at her teeth, L— mentioned the general lack of any television anywhere. “Oh this is a screenless house,” Léa said, moving a chair back to the dining table. “It’s a refuge.”

L— nodded at this blankly. Hm. “Maybe I’ll leave my phone in your car,” she her mother, who rebutted “but what if you fall and break something again?”, — L— hadn’t told her mother how exactly her foot was broken, btw — to which her mother’s friend said, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, shrugging her shoulders, “There’s a phone at the Whitefin. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

Spending two weeks without a phone or any wired/wireless connection to the outside world seems small and pedestrian in hindsight, as if it were some event written in a planner from last year — two lines across two weeks with the words “no phone” sharpied in excitedly; but in the immediate stages of preparing for a two-week phone break — a bender on friction-filled reality — such a detox feels quite a bit more unprecedented, quite a bit less certain. It becomes an abyss to cross.

When she told me the story in full, L— explained how she felt excited to feel loneliness again. “I had a feeling that I hadn’t really encountered loneliness, and I mean a healthy loneliness, since I was very small,” she explained. “Everything since I started spending my time online has been like a… I don’t know, a diabetic loneliness? Empty carbs of feeling alone. I felt like this was a good chance to get away from all that. I wanted to feel lonely but only if it was going to be a constructive loneliness. I saw my chance. I took it. You know?”

While they were touring the house, amid Léa’s grand sweeping hand gestures at various (clearly expensive) appliances, L—’s mother returned from the kitchen with a cup of chamoile tea, came up to L—’s side to say, “What a perfect place for you to recover! No stressful distractions. No pressing deadlines. No need to apply to anything. Let it filter out. I know how your generation is. How tight wound you all are!”

Léa smiled at this, now moving a couch up against the wall from the center of the living room where it had drifted. “Tell me about it — my secretary is twenty-eight.”

“What’s upstairs?” L— asked, ignoring Léa, looking up the dark landing at the upstairs. There was some sort of static in the air. As if it were superimposed. With her arms in the saddles of the cructches, L— rubbed her eyes and the static was gone.

“Oh just the same old same old,” Léa said. “A guest room, a bathroom, attic”

Her mother and Léa left together the next morning, arm in arm, like they’re setting out to find the wizard of Oz along a yellow-cobbled road, leaving the house entirely in L—’s hands as if L— were the Wicked Witch who had a house dropped on top of her. The full weight of the house was hers for two weeks and without haste she took herself outside on her crutches to do the one thing she’d been waiting for two days straight to do: light a cigarette, a bad habit which her mother (thankfully) knew nothing about.

The moment after L— had lit it, though, and took that first inhale, feeling the tension dissipate from her tense heart, arms, back, across her chest, smoking suddenly seemed like such a childish thing to do with the house glowering down on her like it was.

The second-story windows and the porch made the front of the house look terribly like a face and not at all a pleasant one. Taken with the depth of silence outside which made itself more and more clear — the leaves on the trees still fluttered, but the sound felt distant and far away — a simmering eerie uncertainty crept in. Not even a bird called. The breeze was too thin to conceal the wellspring of nothingness that bloomed and flowered around the house in a stream. The squeak of L—’s lighter sounded like a car’s brake squealing and she was stopped, sealed into the moment, by the sudden contrast the sound of her lighter made to all this dead air. The cigarette’s end burnt down away from her lips as a sense of irrelevance, smallness, crept over her and she herself felt soggy within all this irrelevance. This was an old house, it occurred to her. No matter how fresh it looks on its outside, this house has seen things: cruel and stern memories. This house has known more winters than summer, let’s be clear, being in the part of the country it’s in, and such secrets catch in the air like dust particles.

Winter, in the midwest United States, at least, is a tremendously more ancient season than summer. The opposite goes for more tropical climates. But in this part of the world, bordering Canada (Winter owns the nation of Canada), summers become grey avenues between grey bones whitened every year by fluorescent snowfall, a powdery preservative of millennia past. This house here, L— felt dimly, is a tomb. Certainly there would be more emotional and spiritual baggage in, say, a European castle with its hundreds of years of seasons and tragedy, but an American gothic house such as this is more unsettling in its blunt nearness. Certainly the American ranch style house is an offshoot of colonial gothic, but unlike the gothic architecture of the third world, here the US the colonists have eaten the ghosts of the dead and mass-murdered, and have tried to stomach the indigestion. L— felt the grey avenues of her own memory tie up with that of this great sun-stained whitewashed house; it took some of the weight off of her own back to remember the summer houses of her childhood and to stand them up next to this one, ehre — it helped take some of the weight of the silence away, but it left her feeling vacant the same. At least the cigarette was nice.

She pocketed the butt and started her hobbling crutch-walk across the front yard towards the lake. A small bird stood in her way, looking up at her: a small songbird. She stood as still as she could on her crutches, hoping not to startle the small creature away, wishing vaguely she knew more names of birds. Maybe she knew the name of this one already — a sparrow?

“We’re having a moment,” she said cheerfully to the bird. The little animal stood before her, looked up at her amicably. Another bird of the same type flew down and stood next to it. And another. And a robin. L— realized, at first dully, that despite all of these birds in front of her — what were they expecting of her? — there was not a single birdsong in the air, only a continuing dead silence. The birds continued fluttering down, landing on the dewy grass, and L— didn’t feel all too alarmed — they were small birds, she could certainly take them on broken foot or not — but something about their presence felt strangely forbidding. She hobbled around them carefully, telling them “you all look like you saw a ghost! And my god, If I was the ghost you saw, I’d be bored!” The birds watched her wobble away to where she sat on the dock in the bleached summer sun, the splashing water cooling her feet and legs and wetting her cast, where she forgot entirely about the birds for the time being.

Later on during this first day, after idly poking around the flowerbed in the back yard, she went to the kitchen to cook herself some pasta at the narrow gas stove and she, for the first time since, reflected on the birds in the yard and wondered about their silence, whether the quiet of the place had steadied their usually loud birdlives into something akin to a quiet contemplation. She looked around outside the window for the birds. What was with them?

The water began to boil. Steam rose thick. She reached over the counter for the box of angel hair and tripped on her crutch, pushed a nearby empty glass jar of dry rice onto the floor, and with the back of her wrists as she caught herself. Too late for the jar, though. It fell to the marbled floor and exploded rice mixed with glass across the four quadrants of the kitchen. “Fuck,” she said. She assessed the damage for a couple minutes, looked around the empty kitchen. Her eye came to rest, finally, on a small black ball on the wall above the dish rack: a round security camera she hadn’t noticed before. Had it always been there?

“And there was a camera,” L— said, throwing her hands up over her drink. An elderly couple walked into the Whitefin Inn behind her, and the bell above the door chimed. She turned to watch them walk down to a table on the other end of the empty bar.

“There was a camera?” asked Sue, glancing at the elderly couple who just sat down as the older man took a menu up in his hands, fogged up his glasses with his breath, rubbed their lenses on his thick flannel shirt. Sue was one of three bartenders at the Whitefin, in her late 30s. L— and her had been quick to get along after L— hobbled into the place. It was early in the evening and the summer regulars were beginning to come through for food and drinks. There was a Friday fish fry special — a massive draw for the Irish Catholics in the area — but the place swarmed anyways with tourists during the summer season generally. According to Sue, though, The Whitefin became a husky solitude the winter and was often abandoned outside of regular maintenance check-ins to make sure no one had broken into the place.

“I hadn’t noticed it before,” L— continued. “It was above the cabinets, like the security cameras they have in stores and outside restaurants in alleyways. You know.”

“That’s interesting… A camera…”

“I mean she might be watching me. Privlidged rich bitch that she is.”

Sue laughed. “That’s not what I was thinking of,” she said.

“I think I was just embarrased at destroying her rice jar,” L— said sheepishly.

“I know Sue. She wouldn’t care. I’m just thinking. Keep me updated next time you come in. Wouldn’t want to cause a hubub without reason.”

“A hubub?” L— asked, then quickly changing to topic of conversation to Léa but she couldn’t get a whole lot more out of Sue in terms of information. Sure. Whatever. “What’s this drink called?” L— asked, eventually, changing the subject.

“That one’s Time’s stopped. Not terribly popular but I like it. Gary made it. Kind of a pain to make, though.”

“Hmm.”

“Let me know if anything else happens at the house, okay?”

L— said sure, finished the cocktail and left and, as she hobbled out the door, hobbled home, hobbled up the stairs. the shadows all along the stairwell had grown with the evening of her second day staying in this house wearing down to a close. the lamps took on a yellow light in which everything in the house began to levitate softly until she shut off the bedside lamp and the house went dark.

While L— slept that night, something strange happened. Something she would never know about. Various pieces of the nineteenth century furniture furnishing the place came alive. First was the table with the waxed and sanded legs who walked about on her nightly routine, to the kitchen, then to the library to meet up with a rosewood chair with a red cushion whom she drank tea with to pass the time. Keep in mind, though, with all of this: the table with waxed and sanded legs didn’t know that she was a table at all… she didn’t know what a table even was, how could she?… for all she knew her name was Rhodna.

The second to come alive was the rosewood chair, who drank Rhodna’s tea and gave quiet compliments on the botanical quality of the tea — “quite.. hm.. scrumptious!” — in her cockney accent.

Rhodna the table blushed at this, a slight red in her cherrywood, but wanted to change the subject and talk about the “daarling, and might I add, rather raavishing,” second-floor loveseat, Björn, who was known around the house as rather quiet and mysterious, himself keeping his own past on the DL — he didn’t know how any of the others would react knowing he was IKEA furniture, hadn’t been handcrafted. That’s to say, he didn’t feel too much of a desire to explain his origins to anyone or anything, thank you very much — and Rhodna hadn’t the faintest idea about him, which Sharon the rosewood chair insisted was important to remember. “You don’t know his origins, my dear,” she reassured. “He could be from Turkey or worse, Ireland.”

It wasn’t just Rhodna, the table with waxed and sanded legs, and Sharon, the rosewood chair, but the rest of the house came to life slowly also, though not necessarily for a prolonged period of time; for instance, the china plates behind the oak display only came to life for minutes at a time, small blips of consciousness before a fading away inside the great dull beast of the antiquated display cabinet they were trapped inside of, which itself clopped around the dining room like a great bull for a handful of minutes before exhausting itself into a dull mopeing around the place.

As the sunlight began to filter in, the furniture rearranged itself to where it had been, though memories, even in habit, are not always accurate and sometimes they would be an inch or two off the mark. The shadows lengthened again as morning arrived and all became as it had been at sunset.

L— pulled down her sleep mask and looked around at the room from on top queen bed. She looked at the side table, the dresser, the nightstand. Nothing obvious had changed, so she slept for another two to three hours before getting up out of bed to pour herself some cereal from Léa’s collection of fiber-full cereals sourced from around the world.

Here’s a poem by Dylan Thomas:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“Out of the sighs a little comes,
But not of grief, for I have knocked down that
Before the agony; the spirit grows,
Forgets, and cries;
A little comes, is tasted and found good;
All could not disappoint;
There must, be praised, some certainty,
If not of loving well, then not,
And that is true after perpetual defeat."

(Out of the Sighs, Dylan Thomas)

The days went by slowly. L— came across the above poem in the small library in the back corner of the house, with a northfacing window (the room was consistently washed with yellow sunlight) looking out on the lake. She came across a book of Ginsberg’s collected poetry too, this one placed perniciously out of reach on top of a bookshelf for some reason; she had had to place a chair beside the shelf to get the copy down but it was all worthwhile as the collection had helped her decide one morning, near the end of the first week, sipping her second green tea of the day, that she would try and find a way to love and trust again, broken foot and all.

She played the role of idle gardener too, now and then, putting her hands into the mulch, feeling out the roots of the flowers, petting black-eyed susans. She caught a ladybug crawling across her hand and she felt okay with this. She brushed it off, though, once it began running up her arm and became more of a nuissance than a nice little thing.

The wind outside had increased throughout the week and she began to hear the waves spray against the dock grow louder against the silence of the yard. The silence… Looking up from the flower bed she noticed a slight hum in the air. Some metallic sound. Hm.

During this rather uncertain period of her stay, she spent more time with her mother’s friend's collection of pocket paperbacks. Most interestingly was, in the far corner by the window, yes… Way in the back… Léa owned a vast, wide-ranging collection of yellowed religious works from around the world made into handy portable (and pocketable!) books ranging from a king james bible, a 1967 edition of the new groovy testament, man!, the new living translation of the bible, the Hebrew bible, the Quran, seeds of contemplation, various confessions, the Baghdad Gita, the book of mormon, the talmud, Crowley’s book of law and book of troth (interesting…), Ram Dass’s be here now, and new seeds of contemplations. While perusing this last book and finding an odd moment of kinship with Thomas Merton, L— noticed above the small nook where all the religious works were stacked, another camera: a round black ball of a security camera, just like the last one.

Another Camera? L— thought incredulously. Where are these coming from? She looked back and forth along the wall. The ceiling fan moaned softly. A thin layer of dust coated the air. The iMac monitor at the desk had a thin layer of dust on top of it. Modern electronics seem to gather dust rather quickly. There was no dust on the security camera, though. How odd.

She turned back to the book, read for a small bit in the red chair, opened another, a pulpy 50s paperback of Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel, and came across the line, “The bellhop beat on the door of the bedroom while I was still underwater in the tub. It surprised me that I could hear him. The noise came through the thick steel tub and through the water, a thumping, ringing sound.” And as soon as she looked up from the page, L— realized the metallic ringing sound had returned: a low hum, almost inaudible.

She looked up and around the room. Above the doorway, a new security camera had appeared. L— stood up like a shot and almost collapsed on her broken foot. Maybe she had missed it? No, there’s no way I missed it. It has to be me, she thought. I must be going insane. She had to touch the camera to make sure it was there, she decided, so she pulled the wooden chair behind the desk to the doorway, climbed on top, and found herself close and intimate with this newly appeared camera, all the more sinister because of how sneakily it had appeared.

She tapped the lens softly. “Shit, it’s real,” she said, blushing, now fully aware of her face being right smack dab in the center of the camera so that if Léa was watching her, she’d be seeing nothing but L—’s face. She stepped down to the floor and hobbled back onto her crutch.

Dragging the chair back, she tucked it under the desk but… as the chair skidded, and as she glanced around the top of the room’s drywall, she noticed something strange: A hazy, black dot, like a sticker on the wall above a shelf of business books. Maybe a spot from straining her eyes for too long, but no, it stays on the wall when she moved her eyes and looked at it from different angles... She hobbled to the wall and noticed, with a shock, that the dot was very real and appeared to be growing in size, growing slightly out from the wall as if the drywall were opening around this object, giving birth to this object. L— realized with horror that something was emerging from the wall. Round and black, it was another security camera. L— almost fell over. But she held strong to her crutches, swung the chair to the bookshelf, and climbed up to get a close look at this newly birthed camera. She tapped its glass once, put her hand around it to feel if it was fastened to the wall and… just like that… the security camera popped out clean from the wall, leaving clean flat drywall behind it as if it had never been attached at all.

Now holding one of the round and black security cameras that had so haunted her these past couple days, L— took this opportunity to drop it on the floor where it thumped and rolled. The humor of this struck her before the terror: she laughed. Cackled, almost. An insane sort of laugh that she couldn’t hold back. Her life had been something of a long series of resigned adaptations to moments of crisis like this. (A breaking point? Perhaps.) Without thinking she climbed down and slid the chair to the doorway to remove the camera that had appeared above the religious texts, too. But after she had plucked out this second camera, she noticed that a third had appeared above the iMac, and the situation became rapidly less amusing and her face became stoney, her mouth narrow.

“They just kept appearing, like they were spawning in from the walls, like the wall was making them and pushing them out and it was organic, like the wall was making them, like the wall was growing cameras inside of it and pushing them out, like it was giving birth to them,” L— said, holding onto the “like” statements until she was completely out of breath. She took a long and slow sip from her cocktail and looked at Sue with crazed eyes. “Afterwards I went around the house with the vacuum cleaner with the attachment just like sucking them off the walls and I feel so weird saying all this and I feel so fucking absolutely insane right now and-”

Behind the bar, Sue stopped rattling a shaker and gently interrupted. “It’s not you, it’s the house” she said. L— looked back at her as if she had been slapped across the face.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Sue sighed. “Give me one second.” And she finished shaking the drink at-hand and pouring it for an older man in wraparound shades, she returned to tell the following story.

The house was renovated shortly after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the general market collapse which followed shortly after. Within months the neighborhood around the Whitefin Inn filled with rich escapees from finance and banking spheres, one of which was a middle-aged woman named Sandra Bennet who renovated the house directly across from the Whitefin, built a metal fence, and assembled a rather intricate security system around the place. A self-proclaimed germaphobe, she had been one the few women to break into a senior position at New York City’s branch of Jane Street in the 90s, and she was one of the few to see the writing on the wall before the American markets imploded. She also, I might add, saw the writing on the wall with her marriage the year before, and had quickly and efficiently filed for divorce from Mr. Bennet, who was still well connected despite the market crash.

Sue herself only met Sandra twice. Sandra would come to the Whitefin only when things became especially bad at the house and she would say something about her germaphobia, make a big show of wearing nylon gloves, but order enough gin and tonics so that her germaphobia became a thing of the more-sober past. Most of this tale comes from Sandra’s housekeeper, a small indigenous woman who was thrice vetted through an intricate application-interview process that lasted three or four months after Sandra moved into the residence and was looking for someone to cook and clean for her. The woman’s name was Waasnoda (“Dawn” in Ojibwe), went by Waasy for short, detested when anyone said “Waaasy-up”, and proudly never took an English name even if english was her first and only language; she eventually pushed herself through studies of Ojibwe later life but only after she saw the things that she had supposedly seen in Sandra Bennet’s house that summer of 2009, and only after she was put on trial to give testimony on the disappearance of Mr. Bennet.

The first red flag that occurred to Waasy while she worked and cleaned and cooked for Ms. Bennet while the rich former-comopolitan spent most of her days sunbathing on the dock, or vigorously checking her emails to see if any of her peers have been indicted for fraud, was that her former husband, Mr. Arnold Bennet, would fly in every three or four weeks and the two of them would proceed from where they left off as if the divorce had never gone down.

Mr. and Mrs. Bennet broke up for good reason, it seems, as they can’t help themselves from going on terrible drug-addled benders and, as if like clockwork, Mr. Bennet would become crazed and redfaced halfway through, punch walls, chase squirrels around the yard, and throw dishes at the wall. Waaby made herself scarce in such situations, sometimes fled the scene and when she herself interacted with Mr. Bennet, she did so very quietly. “Why is she here? You need someone to do everything for you?” Mr. Bennett asked his ex-wife one time while Waaby scrubbed caked on potato from a cast-iron pan with a metal wand. “It gets awfully lonely here,” Sandra responded.

“Well why are you here then?” Mr. Bennet said.

“To get away from it all,” Sandra Bennet said.

The next red flag came when Sandra began to bring up “the furniture” and how it supposedly moves around during the night.

“I can hear it,” she said to Waaby, responding to her somewhat horrified expression. “I feel crazy about it but I can hear the furniture moving. I can hear so many people dragging the chairs and tables around all night long.”

Sure, every morning the furniture had moved from its original position, but certainly not by enough to warrant thinking that it was moving on its own. Waaby assumed, without bringing it up to her employer, the house was not completely level — not uncommon in a house as old as this — and put up with Sandra’s paranoia, helping eventually to assemble a surveillance system throughout the house designed to catch any furniture in the act of moving. “I’m going to prove it to you,” Sandra was saying, but Waaby wasn’t so sure Sandra was talking to her as much as she was talking to herself, or maybe abstractly to her husband who was in London at the time.

So the cameras went up in every room, all of them connected to a single cctv system assembled in the attic where a variety of flat screens were arranged across the two rafters. Waaby disregarded most of this, turned a blind eye, just so long as she continued to get checks written cashable to her name. This changed, though, once the cameras revealed that nothing was happening, at least nothing that was picked up by the infrared. After a couple days of seeing very little of her employer, Sandra came down from the attic and pulled Waaby up to the “observation deck” in the late afternoon, almost as if by the nape of her shirt, and she pointed at one of the screens, this one of her dining room table — Waaby suddenly had the uncomfortable realization that her employer had begun spending most of her waking hours watching footage of her furniture for signs of movement — insisting “look, did you see that?” at a faint motion in the leg of an armchair.

“Oh hm,” Waaby said. “Yeah I think there was something.”

Soon enough, an angsty Mr. Bennet returned from Scottland — frustrated, mind you, at his ex wife’s seeming mental breakdown — with an air rifle and after a few days’ drinking he began to shoot down the songbirds outside the apartment because they were “too loud” for his concentration. This horrified Waaby to seemingly no end and she brought this up with Sandra who was sitting behind her desk in the attic, transfixed as always by a still shot of, say, a recliner, who replied “if it helps him blow of stress good, there’s bigger fish to fry.” without looking up from her screens.

Soon enough the dead birds began to pile up in the yard. The crack of the air rifle interrupted Waaby while she sliced carrots, irritated her — crack — with every — crack — shot, and one time she tossed down the knife and walked out to the porch and put her hands on her hips. Mr. Bennet turned to her. Waaby shook her head severely. Mr. Bennet cracked a rare smile and laughed and turned and shot down a titmouse from a branch where it exploded with a squeak and fell to the Earth.

This was around the time Sue at the Whitefin Inn first heard about all this. The chaos in the house started to outweigh the NDA Waaby had signed. She had been crying over the birds, explained it all to Sue, who began carefully watching the whitewashed house across the street from the Whitefin with something of a mute fascination. When she was leaving work for the night, around 2am, she would look back on the silent, dark mass of house through her rearview mirror. The lighthouse out on the lake peaked through like clockwork, well past the house, a soft white blip. Something seemed to be growing out of the darkness there.

Anyways, after two weeks, Mr. Bennet finally seemed to convince his ex-wife that the furniture wasn’t moving on its own. He convinced her that they should throw out all the security cameras in dramatic fashion — into the lake! And around this time the wind began to grow icy despite the July sun, began to hammer the house and the dock, but Waaby, now tasked with carrying three sacks of security cameras to the lake to toss off the dock, had to make her way into its wicked sharp maw, so she draped and smothered herself in a wide-ranging collection of furs compliments of Sandra Bennet. Fox, Beaver, Rabbit, and some other unidentifiable colors, textures, animals, creatures. Nonetheless they were warm. They did their job. Waaby pushed out onto, this great mass of fur carrying sacks of security cameras over her shoulders to throw them into the lake one by one. She noticed Sandra watching from the second-floor window of the house before the blinds snapped shut.

“And they’re still down there?” L— asked in the bar, interrupting the story.

“I believe so,” Sue said. “No one has gone down to check as far as I know.”

Mr. Bennet had meanwhile been lounging in a lawn chair, sitting outside watching Waaby walk back and forth, smoking a cigarette, sipping on a martini. “Great job you’re doing!” He yelled to her as she carried the fourth sack to the lake, stepping around the dead birds in the yar. On her way back to the house after that last sack had been discarded into the lake, there was suddenly a great (confusing) commotion where Mr. Bennet sat.

“It was like nothing I have ever seen,” Waaby would later say under oath. “It was the birds that carried him away. Not just one or two or even a dozen. It was close to a hundred. They covered him and carried him up and away. He was thrashing about, trying to take his shirt off the whole time, I saw that his face was bloody, and they carried him away. I don’t know where.”

This was carried not carried in court and Waaby was soon discharged after being vetted by a psychologist who checked her pulse and gave the judge a thumbs up and a nod. They never found what happened to Mr. Bennet. For all I know the birds did carry him away. Sandra Bennet moved out of the house soon enough. Nothing much else happened. Waaby married eventually and now worked as a dinner server at a diner in a nearby town.

After this story, the night crowd of elderly retirees began to pile in. “You might want to consider, you know, getting out of there,” Sue said, concluding the story.

L— couldn’t argue with this. She asked to use Sue’s phone and she called me. This was back when I had a car passed down from my dad: a wonderful fuel-efficient silver toyota camry from 2011. She asked if I could come pick her up the next day. I wasn’t doing anything and I love a summer drive so I drove up to the coast, blasting Ween’s The Mollusk the whole way up.

That’s about the extent of my involvement in the story. L— told me about all of this on the drive down. Here’s hoping I did the story justice. As for L—, I think she lives in New York now but I could be wrong.

p.s. if you notice any typos or funky looking grammar in the above piece, please feel free to reach out over DMs or in the comments. since i edit all of these posts in a manic 3-coffees-no-lunch type of haze and also have a severe personal allergy against LLMs, typos sometimes slip through that process. let me know!

The first is announced, a booming voice overhead, enunciating: Alexander von Humboldt. Born in 1756, Alexander von Humboldt was a prussian researcher, explorer, and polymath who came of age around the time of the French Revolution; Liberté, égalité, ane fraternité embody both his political and his scientific thinking. He pioneered the idea of natural connections within nature, that everything in the natural world, when taken together, creates a wide romantic portrait of life itself as a positive force; he’s called the father of environmentalism and ecology and resurrected the term cosmos from the greek to explain the interconnectedness of the universe. Humboldt bounces his boxing gloves into one another. The gloves look oddly appropriate for the formal dinner-wear he has on: the puffy silk shirt with the crisp white collar. He’s talking into the microphone now but I don’t know what he’s saying because he’s rattling off words so incredibly fast, not to mention in a thick german accent, that everything said all fuses together into one single word, almost. He slams his boxing gloves together again and says, a bit more clearly: “and now I vil kick Monsieur Herzog’s vittle azz.”

“Ja ja,” Herzog says from the sidelines. “Cute idea, Alexander.”

“Werrrrrner Herzog!” Spotlight. Herzog’s face hardens; it’s full of creases like he’s been left out in the sun for days and he’s been looking rather thin in a general way, sporting a mustache like a wide, precise block across his face. He wears a longsleeve off-white shirt, his white work cargo pants are covered in blocky 80s’ era AV equipment, and he smells crazy. The boxing gloves, unlike on Humboldt, look foreign on Herzog. He smacks them together all the same. “It is the miracle of the human spirit which entrances me,” Herzog says to the camera, into the large WWE-logo’d box of the microphone. “It is what keeps me moving along through this world of brutalities.” He claps his boxing gloves together again.

Herzog is a pioneer filmmaker of the German New Wave, perhaps better known in the US for his documentaries (such as Grizzly Man) even though his Nosferatu is probably better than Eggers’s (sorry); but he’s here in the ring, clapping his gloves together, bounding around on his long thin legs — back and forth — and getting ready to fight because he’s also spent significant time in the rainforests of South America to shoot his film Fitzcarraldo.

Fitzcarraldo, to give a quick explainer, is about a European man in the early 1910s who wants to build an opera house in the rubber-trading town where he lives but to do so he has to raise funds by entering into the rubber trade by hauling a pre-war steamship across a mountain between two rivers to get to an unexploited part of the Amazon river basin.

Herzog, when approaching the project, became adamant that the filmmaking would use no special effects and over the course of four years of shooting he paid people from the local indigenous tribes to clear a section of forest and haul a steamship over a mountain for the sake of getting realistic footage of it happening. To be a small bit fair to him, he paid the indigenous workers double the standard; but to be less fair to him, he paid them to do the ridiculous for no reason other than to provide performances and raw labor for European audiences in cinemas. I wonder how many of the laborers on Fitzcarraldo were able to see the final film.

But here we have it. An unstoppable force and an immovable object. The bell goes. The fight begins. Humboldt squares up like a street fighter from the eighteenth century. Herzog like an American boxer.

Alexander von Humboldt.

Sometimes the universe conspires to force us into a new curiosity, a new passion. Sometimes it finds a thread to pull, dropped once and long since forgotten, and reintroduces it to us. This past week I found myself deep in thought about the Amazon rainforest, thinking about its wildlife, its native peoples, about exploitation, etc. etc.; this train of thought — something of an echo of my time majoring in Botany at UW resonating with my time majoring in Global Studies (also) at UW— came to me through two separate legs, the first being this: while I wandered around a branch of the CPL near my apartment last monday, somewhat bummed because the books I had put on request hadn’t yet materialized, I browsed the collection for something interesting to leaf through and I happened across Andrea Wulf’s wonderful little book on Alexander von Humboldt and took it home to read it rather compulsively. This is how I am with good nature writing and good biographies though I will admit there’s a small bit of hesitation and dread that comes along with approaching any biography titled something like The Invention of Nature about some dead European explorer who was alive during the peak of the evils of spanish colonial rule, but at the very least, considering his name is so synonymous with one of my favorite parts of Chicago, I figured, at the very least, I’d have something to rant and rave about at parties if he turned out to be as comically evil as was his time.

But Humboldt turned out to be quite an interesting product of eighteenth century enlightenment thought. Born in Prussia in 1756, Alexander Von Humboldt was a Prussian researcher and polymath who came of age around the time of the French Revolution’s more optimistic period and with that, his greatest achievement — or I should say, the central theme tying together all his work — was his fusing those ideals with German romanticism, perhaps best embodied by Goethe’s works (a close friend of Humboldt’s, Mephisto’s character in Faust is supposedly inspired by Humboldt), and with a heavy empirical analysis of the natural world through expeditions.

He weaves these threads together as he wrote for twenty years, digesting all the measurements taken, about his multi-year journey through South America, across the Andes, through the Amazon, later through Russia, and he could viably be seen as first real writer of Ecology and Enviromentalism. Of course Enviromentalism is an offshoot of the Englightenment in Europe, and of course it’s tied back to the New World. The Graeber Thesis that the Enlightenment in Europe was kicked off by indigenous critiques of the European system seems more and more plausible every time I return to the idea.

I should also mention here before I get yelled at in the comments that Humbodlt, despite his time, was adamantly anti-colonial and anti-slavery; he was horrified by the conditions of the slaves in the United States, horrified by the treatment of natives under Spanish Rule — his multi-volume book on the political economy of the South American colonies were so critical of colonialism that Humboldt was not in any way, shape, or form allowed from setting foot in any colonized countries ever again (despite lobbying the East India Trading Company for decades to allow him access to India so he could explore the Himalayas) because of his condemnations the evils of Spanish control in South America. And there’s a section of Wulf’s book which details Humboldt’s friendship with Simon Bolivar well before Bolivar returned to South America to begin the decades-long campaign for liberation against the Spanish crown, and Humboldt’s main concern about the endeavour when Bolivar brought it up to him in conversation as a personal dream, was that Boliver was of Creole birth and being from such a privileged class wouldn’t necessarily make him the best representative for the average indigindous Peruvian or Venuzuelan. Any enlightenment thinker worth their salt is going to stand for representation, it seems.

And the key to understanding Humboldt’s place in history is to understand that he’s the clear connection between the spark of thinking that sparked revolutions across the world for human equality and liberty and the writings of Thoreau, Darwin, the genre of nature writing, and the entire fields of ecology and environmentalism.

A lot of what he was doing was taking constant measurements wherever he went, trying to figure out why something was that way (such as climate zones, the magnetic shape of the Earth, etc), corroborating his theories and hunches with the native population, and writing long letters back to Europe about his findings. That’s not to say he properly cited the local natives much beyond his being generally, again, very anti-colonist, but he did certainly play a major role in the public perception of South America in the world, a public perception previously tainted by the only European writer who had been allowed in the colonies before having written that the animals and plants of the new world are feeble and smaller than their European counterparts, and Humboldt explained the grandeur of the South American country and its peoples in romantic flowing prose.

I think it’s reasonable to say he was the first mainstream, widely-read ecologist to explain to the common European reader (in the heart of the colonial empires, mind you) the reasons as to why deforestation causes the evaporation of lakes and how overdevelopment causes the destruction of native ecological structures. That’s something. That’s significant. Bringing a New World view of the world into the institutions means something. Maybe even more than that as David Graeber and David Wengrow would argue that such a sharing of knowledge across the Atlantic was the genesis of the Enlightenment notions of political liberty and equality in Europe.

Werner Herzog was a well-meaning filmmaker (though his reasons for doing many of the things he does seem as mysterious to him as they do to us, hence the mystique).

Many of Herzog’s films are fantastic and I do think that Ebert, for all his flaws, put it perfectly that even Herzog’s flops are fascinating portraits of a man who’s ambitions and instincts draw together to make his filmmaking into almost a performance art in itself. For this one, Fitzcarraldo — aka the film where a bunch of indiginous South Americans haul a steamship over a mountain “for the sake of Opera” or whatever; aka the film in which Klaus Kinski went so insane on and off camera to warrant a documentary by Herzog about how insane Kinski was (inspiring, in turn, a truly wonderful Documentary Now! episode) – this rings especially true.

My friend and I watched Fitzcarraldo last Wednesday on his recommendation. I had never heard of it but it looked perfect in the square of my CRT — god I love this thing. Little did I know this was a film about the jungle.

I think the both of us were most transfixed by the opening shot of the opera in which, in the bottom left corner, a woman sings and performs the part which is being performed on the stage by an actor in drag. The voiceless providing a voice for the performers. This has to tie into whatever Herzog is attempting to do in terms of allegory with the native people he uses throughout the film — some might say exploits — but I can’t quite make heads or tails of it, or maybe the heat wave is finally getting to my head.

Anyways, the shoot took around 4 years to complete. The tensions with the native population gradually increased. An airplane crashed. A crewman was bitten by a deadly snake and quickly amputated his leg. After one off Kinski’s physical, screaming crash outs late in shooting, a local tribe’s chief offered to kill him for Herzog, who declined the offer, saying they had to finish the shoot first. The work was brutal and dangerous.

Here’s a quote from Burden of Dreams, a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, from Herzog himself. At this point in the film, Herzog looks twelve years older than he did at the start. It’s likely that he is only three years older than he was at the start.

“Of course we are challenging nature itself. And it hits back. It just hits back, that’s all. And that’s grandiose about it and we have to accept that it’s much stronger than we are. Kinski always says it’s fully of erotic elements, I don’t see too much erotica, I see more full-on-obscenity — it’s just, nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here, I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there’s a lot of misery but it is the same misery that’s all around us. The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery I don’t think they sing they just screech in pain. It’s an unfinished country, it’s still prehistorical. The only thing that’s lacking here is the dinosaurs. There’s like a curse weighing on the entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse, so we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It’s the only land where the creation is unfinished yet… Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony. It is harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we, in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle… we in comparison to that enormous articulation… we only sound and look like unpronounced and unfinished sentences in a stupid suburban novel… a cheap novel…”

Sounds like the production wasn’t going too well for Herzog.

The jungle was never going to cooperate fully. When they cleared the trees over the mountain so they could lay the tracks down to haul the steamship over, the ground quickly became a waist deep pack of mud. The tides went down well before they were supposed to for the final shot of the film, which had to be delayed a full year. It was a brutal four years.

And by its end, there’s no Humboldtian wonder conveyed of the jungle and of the wild places. Klaus Kinski’s character sells his steamship and uses the funds to pay a troupe of Opera singers to come down and perform on the very steamship that was hauled over the mountains. It comes across as a flat feat of gentrification, “european high art” brought to the densest jungle in the world. Something about it all makes me feel cynical.

But Herzog’s work does, in its own way, open up the jungle to our eyes. Footage from the set is probably the last to be shot before South America modernized more fully. It’s a glimpse into the jungle of the past. Ripples break through the film of the pure wilderness, the sweat, the encroaching jungle. The tribes having such a large role in the film reveal the people, in a way, as they were at the time, somewhat akin to Sean Baker’s work in the Florida Project of depicting the residents of a housing project in Orlando as they are through the lens of performance. Whether this is exploitative or not is a real question; but quickly condemning seems more and more silly to me in cases such as these because where does exploitation end and positive representation begin? I suppose we can count on history to guide our hand. I heard from a friend, when discussing his legacy, that Humboldt is still celebrated in Peru for the way he wrote about the tides of the ocean; Herzog is, unsurprisingly not remembered as fondly for employing natives to carry a pre-war steamship over a mountain for the sake of his allegorical film. As Alexander Mooney writes in his wonderful commentary on Burden of Dreams, the behind the scenes documentary on the making of Fitzcarraldo, as Herzog’s photograph is depicted in negative, “the subject becomes a ghost, the devil becomes benevolent and merciful, and the camera becomes a mirror.” But maybe it’s the background, rather, that should catch our attention.

Who won the match? Probably Humboldt. But Herzog gets points for trying.

“What if life is just some hard equation on a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts? Then you can live again, but you’ll have to die twice in the end.”

So sings David Berman on Inside the Golden Days of Missing You. It’s a wonderful little song, pointing to the idea that if there’s any reason to untangle all the threads that might make a life “lived well”, then such a reason would be posterity. We live life well for the sake of our memory of doing so. We live to become ghosts, in a way. Oftentimes for ourselves.

The other day a friend and I drove to Montrose Beach in Chicago and we laid on our backs and watched the clouds standing miraculously still against endless blue. She asked me what I thought happens after we die and I thought a moment, said Whitman probably had it right, that the grass on graves is probably the souls of the dead.

“The energy never goes away,” she agree.

I rolled onto my stomach, shoved my hands into the sand. “I believe in grass more than ghosts,” I said. But looking back, I was wrong. To not know a person anymore can apply to one’s own self and sometimes it feels like it’s the tragedy of death that separates the dead from the “lost contact with”, and certainly a person can lose contact with themselves over the years. But ghosts serve as a suitable symbol to represent the capacity by which the dead and the lost-contact-with still exist in our lives, though perhaps only in the ectoplasm of memory.

None of this matters of course. The clouds above are still white all the same. The sky is still the dark kind of blue only possible in July. I can’t stop trying to figure out my life, though; and to figure out life is to solve it out in hindsight, it seems. It’s a small blessing that every year there’s a bit more hindsight, more yarn to thread.

I’m not terribly old yet (please tell me 26 isn’t that old), but the clock is ticking louder now in the back of my head. I have yet to find a real job. I have yet to figure out how to make money in a reasonable way. I have yet to figure out how to fall in love and stay in love. I have yet to learn so many things — and thank god there’s still time in this body of mine. I might need to find health insurance for myself now but at least nothing’s chronic (for now, at least). My body’s gone through these motions for 26 years now. That’s a quarter of a century! How can such a long time feel so short?

Anyways, in staying true to the Substack newsletter format, here’s 26 thoughts on turning 26:

26 thoughts on turning 26

1. you don’t hate being bored, you just haven’t gone deep enough inside of boredom to find it interesting.

2. That’s to say, when boredom is cultivated properly it blooms — somewhat like a garden — to thinking words (words!) which grow into sentences (sentences!) and finally, if you get really good at thinking on your own, into paragraphs (paragraphs!). And this is where the action happens, where thinking becomes action. You can just do things. It’s been a slow-dawning realization spread across my twenties: you can just do things. And the boredom→thinking pipeline is the one of the better ways to get the motivation to do the right thing.

3. If you’re allergic to love songs, you should probably interrogate that.

4. A quote from Kierkegaard:

   “The old person loses memory, which as a rule is the first faculty to be lost. Yet the old person has something poetic about him; in the popular mind he is prophetic, inspired. But recollection is indeed his best power, his consolation, which consoles him with its poetic farsightedness. Childhood, on the other hand, has memory and quickness of apprehension to a high degree but does not have recollection at all. Instead of saying, ‘Old age does not forget what youth apprehends,” one could perhaps say, “What the child remembers the old person recollects.’”

   I’m caught in the in-between of pure remembrance and pure recollection.

   I find it’s a commonly held misconception that one can change their life from anything that it is — there is simply no way to escape the bounds of flesh and culture that surround and shape a person. The benefit of reading deeply into a writer such as Kierkegaard, though, is that one can begin to follow roads and routes of thinking unknown, craft for themselves a rubric to delve deeper and deeper into the experience of their own life as to find some sort of renewal. The change we seek, that which keeps us forever leaving, is really bound and gift-wrapped deep inside of ourselves, it turns out.

5. Knausgaard wrote a wonderful essay for Harper’s last month about his relationship with technology and the dream of a “reenchanted world.” Here’s a quote that’s been stuck floating around the empty spaces of my cranium:

   “To understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty, Napoleon is supposed to have said. The quotation is probably apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

   Where were you when you were twenty? A part of me worries that having been twenty-years-old at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic has forever instilled in me a set of mental tics and problems from which I’ll never recover. Whatever. It is what it is.

6. It’s important to be intentional with what media you consume, and what media habits you make, because it’s those habits that will shape you into who you become down the road.

7. Nobody has the answers for you. Especially not some 26-year-old. Don’t listen to me. Disregard. Close this window. Go climb a tree or something. Like trees, you’ll have to find answers on your own. Such is the terror of silence: being confronted with the questions you yourself have to phrase and respond to.

8. Say you want to start a band; say you want to make a film; say you want to run a marathon; say you want to start a local newspaper; say you want to run for local office; say you want to run for national office; say you want to read every book written by some obscure philosopher or writer (Bachelard?); say you want to learn a new language, or three; – don’t let the time investment discourage you: the time will pass anyways. Wouldn’t you rather be three years older and also fluent in Spanish?

9. Try not to overthink friendships and relationships of the past: don’t let them loom over your life! Don’t be haunted by falling outs! If anything, resolve to not repeat past mistakes and get out into the world to meet new people.

10. Speaking of people: you can always expect people to be people. Of course this is sometimes a bad thing as people are the most neurotic and insecure things on the planet; but it can also be a wonderful thing as sharing a moment with someone else or multiple others is one of the few things that can approach perfection. That’s to say there’s really nothing like harmonizing with the boys. And besides, the spirit shared between you and other people in the best of times is the closest thing we have to God. If Sartre’s (overly quoted) phrase “hell is other people” is true well certainly heaven is also other people.

11. I haven’t meditated regularly since I was 21. I think about the Nietzsche “tight-rope over the abyss” allegory sometimes; that if you start walking the path of deep introspection and communication with the divine, you mustn’t stop walking that tight rope because if you fall you’re spiraling forever until you find the tight rope again. 26 should be my year to get back into spirituality. We’ll see if it is. My experience with meditation is that it’s difficult to commit to; this is likely because I only feel the benefits of meditation after doing so for thirty minutes. But, then again, by that thirty minute mark I feel at one with the universe and when I open my eyes I realize the universe is one with me as well. That’s worth the time spent, right?

12. If you haven’t yet, invest in a loofa for showering. My roommate convinced me on this point and it legitimately will change your life.

13. Today is also the fourth of July! — What a curious time for a birthday — I’m a true yankee doodle dandy with macaroni in my hair. I eat hot dogs and shoot off fireworks while eating cake. What a perfect calendar day to be born.

    Growing up and watching fireworks from my grandparents’ pontoon in northern Wisconsin, I was always left a bit confused as to why fireworks weren’t a part of every birthday celebration. Lighting explosives and running away is always going to be more fun than blowing out candles.

    Anyways, the United States is 249 years old today. My mother being the Tocqueville fanatic that she is, I feel well acquainted with the history of the country — we trade book recommendations back and forth on occasion, an abridged copy of Democracy in America from her for The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America from me — and how strange is it to be turning 27 next year, in 2026, on the same day the United States hits its Semiquincentennial (mouthful, I know).

14. Every year, before my birthday I’ll reread the Carl Jung essay The Stages of Life (I couldn’t find an online version, otherwise I would have linked it here.)

    Whether it’s the hazy mysticism of summer or just the approach of my birthday that draws me back to Jung, I always find this essay in particular helps me relax and come to grips about getting older. The main point of the essay, and much of Jung’s perspective on psychology, is that we grow as people because our psychic problems force us out of our childhood instincts into consciousness and it’s only this conscientious contemplation of the problems that our instincts created — say, problematic behavior or simply knee-jerk terror at being alone in a seemingly uncaring world — which force us to change into better people and to widen our scope of consciousness.

    As he writes,

    “the artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is required to give us the certainty and clarity we need… We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness.”

    Naturally this relates to the notion of a Hero’s Journey (also a familiar trope to return to with the annual act of “noticing age” that our birthday inspires inside ourselves), but by Jung’s firm placing of that journey into the (often) unconscious intricacies of our lives, that every year we’re able to — if growing well — expand our consciousness to better take in the world, the act of aging doesn’t appear as frightening. We’re all works in progress. It also helps that Jung’s definition of “young adulthood” begins at 25 and that the time before that is more-or-less indistinct from puberty. I personally feel like I wasn’t at all, in any way, shape, or form, an adult before I turned 25. So at 26, I feel nice and comfortable (and most importantly, still young), as if my life is still ahead of me instead of behind me.

15. Another quote from Jung, a bit longer than the above:

    “I would like to come back for a moment to the comparison with the sun. The one hundred and eighty degrees of the arc of life are divisible into four parts. The first quarter, lying to the east, is childhood, that state in which we are a problem for others but are not yet conscious of any problems of our own. Conscious problems fill out the second and third quarters; while in the last, in extreme old age, we descend again into that condition where, regardless of our state of consciousness, we once more become something of a problem for others. Childhood and extreme old age are, of course, utterly different, and yet they have one thing in common: submersion in unconscious psychic happenings.”

16. The arc of a life is not only lived in the world, that is to say; the arc of a life happens through conscious reflection of one’s own instincts: we live based on ourselves.

17. Make use of your public library! More importantly: treat your local library like you would a streaming service. Rent out whatever books and read what you can — outside of Goodreads or bragging rights there’s no reason to finish a book, even if you like it; and by not purchasing the book yourself, you can exist in its world for a little while without the pressure of finishing it. Also, I’m a big believer in finding books through books. Look at those footnotes and those references, you can maybe find something new that few other people have read. There’s something fun in having read something that feels like a secret.

18. As Robert Pattinson’s character says at the end of Mickey 17:

    “I have to stop feeling guilty. It’s okay for me to be happy.”

19. You can just do things. Roll around on the floor. It’s okay. I won’t judge. Drive to the ocean to take a swim. Leave your phone at home and go explore the city. Do whatever.

20. Dopamine detoxes do, in fact, work. Taking a week to not consume any social media, music, podcasts, television, films, books, or articles sounds somewhat horrifying on its surface but this is a silly reason to be scared. Your body will still exist. Your mind might even sober up a bit. Some of your problems might reveal themselves to not be as heavy as they seem.

21. Every phase of my life has felt somewhat like an endless expanse of desert, but by looking back on all of the past landscapes of my life they seem small and quaint compared to my current endless expanse of desert. I have to imagine that when I was inside each of these topographies, the previous expanses felt small and quaint too; it’s a chain reaction that goes back to my childhood, elementary school days from where my first memories stem, Christmases, backyard playings, and VHS tapes, before I knew about mortality.

22. I started blogging a little over a year ago and thank god I found it when I did. On my 25th birthday I posted a piece on here called i want someone to kill me and that more-or-less summed up how I had been feeling throughout my early twenties. Thankfully no one has killed me yet. But I felt so aimless I almost wanted to die. I felt adrift. I had so much energy and so much loneliness and nowhere to direct any of it: this is a disastrous equation, as anyone who has been in such a situation can tell you. This was the state of things for three years straight, until I turned 25, found a new roommate, found a new job, and starting blogging regularly. But blogging and overwriting about whatever I feel like on Substack has genuinely given me an outlet for my anxiety. And beyond that, it makes me feel like someone who is doing something. It’s a big thing and it’s completely changed my life. Writing and publishing here isn’t doing much, I’ll admit, but it did me some good in that it gave me reason to exist, and having a reason to exist can do wonders for a person’s self esteem. After writing for a year, I feel like I’ve found a vocation and it never occurred to me before finding writing that something as mundane as “finding a vocation” was what had been missing from my life.

23. On that note, ever since I began writing six years ago (mostly for myself, at nineteen, trying to pierce reality with words, stoned out of my mind on a dab pen), I’ve been chronically anxious about the quality of the work: always trying to get better and better. As my friends all know, perhaps too well, I’m very neurotic about my writing and my writing habits.

    I’ve come to the conclusion in recent years that most musicians put out their best work in their late twenties, that most authors put out their best work in their early forties, and that the mean age for creative people putting out their best and most significant works lies somewhere in their mid-thirties. With that in mind, turning 26 isn’t so scary. I’ll be really freaking out by the time I’m 33, though, if we’re still alive by then.

24. Rereading books is worth the time and rereading specific books in accordance to the seasons is even better. Moby Dick, for instance, feels as much a part of the springtime as do fresh leaves on trees and cold brews on coffee shop patios. Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space feels as much a part of December now for me as does Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or the Jim Carrey Grinch movie (I know it’s bad but I love it all the more for that).

25. The only way to really “find your people” is to find cultural centers and start participating in conversations. This irl space could be a club, a political org, a bar, a DIY basement venue. I was very lucky that, during the pandemic, I was locked in a house with eight roommates and an incredible talented indie band who practiced in the basement and attracted some of the coolest artists from around Madison to our house so I could talk them up and learn from them.

26. Everyone is constantly in motion. My body at 26 is different than my body was at 19 — literally many of my cells are different now — but my memory holds this package of flesh and bone together. Who I’ll be at thirty is up in the air but whoever I am now, this version of me will surely be buried inside as I get older. Like the point I made at the start of this post, we all live many times and we all die many times and that gives us a certain permission to be reborn.

Pepto bismol drainage emerges out from the milkdark depths of the remaining tube section like blood out from an artery, spooling, pooling; a dot of pink, moving fast, now bright under the headlamps, now it's no longer a little (it’s a lot) sludging out from pipe to gravel pit. Gulg, glug. Intestinal sound. The floodlights surrounding the pit are white and efficient. Soft murmurings, nervous chuckles — it is too late in the night, all the hard hats gathered around here want to go home. It’s been a long and hot summer and roads need to be worked. The crane looming above in the dark blinks red twice and places the removed concrete section at a distance from the pepto bismol now pouring out from this pipe, here, where one man in a hardhat and overalls has just detached the pipe section by hand and now is laughing vaguely and stepping in the pepto bismol pooling around his work boots. “What a strange thing!” he says. The foreman of the project, a small bit baffled, pours over the maps on his ipad of grids and tubing all throughout the area… Ahh yeah there… it’s the pepto bismol pipe…

But the man down in the pit, smile now gone as the pepto bismol continues rising, keeps his heroic proletariat chin clenched, dead flies now coating his helmet's brim, a small unnoticed source of concern in face of such viscosity, the sheer amount of all this pink at his feet — in the florescent industrial light it looks vaguely like blood — he caves and lets out a quick, panicked yelp.

A poisons control specialist, on call but dozing quietly near the guardrail with his mask down, is called over and he rubs himself awake before grumbling over to his binder, flipping through a binderclipped fluttering of charts & tables, and muttering to himself. He eventually comes to the conclusion no hazard. “It’s pepto bismol,” he says. “It’s No Hazard.”

I can’t imagine the man in the pit felt releived. The pepto bismol was up to his waist by this point. Three other roadworkers, who sensed danger was afoot, leap in one after the other, splashing about in the pink they pull him out to safety. The deeply-soaked man is then hosed off with an industrial hose, on its softest setting, naturally. His leather gloves and orange vest are stained with deep splotches of an opaque pink and he blinks septically, holding back tears, but after he shakes a cigarette out from the interim foreman's carton and smokes the whole thing in three or four pulls, his hands steady. “D-damn p-pepto bismol pipe,” he says.

Also awake at this midnight hour: a small grey & brown bird skims from tree to tree, perhaps in search of love but who’s to say.

There, here, back & forth: a dark flash too furious to be a bat, puttering into some foliage; but it’s far too breezy to be a baseball and not elastic enough to be a tennis ball — the way it flutters around the edges of trees in a way no curveball could dream is something of an actualized hallucination of nature — does nature dream of baseball? Anyways, a hopscotch between branches to the upper boughs of a Linden tree, a variation of its same tune, on its cheetoh-dusted beak — the enriched corn meal certainly has something to do with the gusto on this small bird — twee twee. An anxiety not at all that uncommon in today’s age grips this bird. It’s not native to the area and has come a long ways on vague notions. But still it flies on.

A well-seasoned swimmer pushes off from the tile poolside, letting the water to take them where they need to go. A late summer dandelion balances on a breeze, not indecisive exactly, nor submissive, just tolerant of directionlessness. The direction eventually takes hold. Summer is coming to an end. Where does the wind go?

Soft whispers from the upper knots of trees, — a soft poutee-poutee, and a zoned out, off-the-cuff, warbling call from the little bird before the flight continued onwards and upwards, — Back into the night! Back into that silver-streaked wave pool above the grey and brown city, Madison, Wisconsin (little does the bird know names such as these) — and beyond, outlined against the skyline, panning out, another sky out there beyond this one, and another endless pool of dark water out beyond that sky in turn, with a moving twinkling satellite here and a stationary star there. The bird glances at the satellite, wonders: who?

So far unclear. A rat scuttles below, makes love to a Chipotle bag. The summer has sweltered for too long; it sweats down the buildings. The windows keep themselves open, the blinds keep open, but the AC units keep them unexpressive, thrumming and brooming and sometimes kerchang against the cricketsongs. A quiet clings to the city, a sweaty sleepiness like a common cold in hot bedsheets. The tourist months came to a trickle with the temperature's rising. The university has not yet reopened. The downtown is often saturated with upperclassmen but they've been keeping to their air-conditioned boxes, clanking drinks and standing in front of box fans. There’s not much but a dull droning outside. The heat is bad. People have died. Importantly: Everyone knows the reason this is happening, the reason why it’s so hot now. This is acknowledged either somberly or in winking, pitch-black sarcasm, or not at all. The heat death of the Earth under the furnace of humanity looms sweeping and heavy. Gusts of wind gather up the heat into invisible clouds, invisible pockets, roving the sidewalk in the afternoon, invisible spinning slobbering Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil devils of pure heat rippling the asphalt at a distance and unbearable in the close up, flooding pedestrians at startling speeds, ambushing bikers on their commutes. Hot. HOT. AUGH.

Meanwhile, a man with his dog cuts the corner, walking around a church, crunching the grass under his feet, turning left, moving down West Doty and they arrive with some odd fateful lingering at an electrical box. This means nothing to the man but everything to the dog. Its nose wriggles. It sniffs. Pees. The man looks up and above: on a lowhanging branch, the largest small bird he has ever seen. Round as a tennis ball, its soft warbling sounds like a crosswalk beeping. "C'mon, bud," the man says to the dog, tugging the leash and not taking his eyes off this frightening rotund thing on the branches above him. The dog obliges after a couple good sniffs. It doesn’t see the bird, thankfully.

In the distance there is a clang of metal, muffled sounds of drills and of men & women yelling and coughing. The dark specter of a crane, barely an outline and speckled across with a watching red ends, turns to retrieve another section of piping out from the manmade Earth and lowers another into the sliced artery of the road from where the city continues to bleed undiagnosed blood.

From a distance, the man and his dog watch the road construction workers move a bulldozer across the closed down avenue. The dog finishes its good work in a small section of grass between sidewalk and asphalt and they step onwards past boarded storefronts, the homeless laying in the cracks between. Front porches, empty and dark. Watching. The shadows of students sitting outside on porches, relaxed and idle for the summer. They too watch the road construction from a distance but don't see it any more than the dogwalker does.

The workers hammer and drill. It all feels comic, in a way. A nearby sprinkler system makes a rainbow florescence around them. In the depths of Carhartt pockets, humming at inaudible frequencies, are phones with saved pictures of family and friends. It’s easy to forget everyone has a family. The steady forward stomp of progress must continue its march, though. Its mechanisms must remain unseen, unquestioned. What would be the point otherwise? Profitable enterprise as such must remain under the guise of mystery to keep the profitable enterprises as the only viable future. These men & these women in their hard hats, themselves facilitators and mediums of change, accommodating of the future, accommodating new modes of transfer, perform their work, their upgrades to the city, without complaint or question. This new era of human history, — of mankind! — comes through the sweat of hundreds of two gloved palms, two-voiced throats (english and spanish, obviously). All is to be built, all is to be reinforced, to keep gears grinding, to keep same-same sets of bedsheets filled with warm bodies. All must be kept in the correct mold, and the spell must be sustained. The same old rituals year after year. The same gloves. The same routines.

A large combustive sound, from over that way. The narrator is distracted from his speech; the camera swings on its tripod to the right. Oh! The construction workers rush to another pit in the road wherein Mike Jr. is trapped beneath a concrete section of pipe. He yells out, “AHhh” but he is unharmed — thank heavens. He’s stuck and half sunken in, his face & glasses caked with dust as he smiles with yellow teeth and keeps a proud face at this dilema he’s found himself in. The other hard hats grab their heads and panic, yell. There is a vague rumbling about his body from somewhere inside the earth. The asphalt is shaking, rattling the small walks. Mike Jr. says “whoaaaaoaha” as he feels the vibrations through his boots and back and buttocks and the asphalt walls of the pit around him are shaking off debris, each layer around him like a tree growing thick with rings except these rings are asphalt: black, toxic, and crumbling like a pastry. A nearby spins towards the commotion and lifts out the pipe section after two men jump on and attach it to its claw and the men yanked Mike Jr. up and out of the ground quickly, watching the ground around him as it continues to quake and shake. Some Lovecraftian horror?

Sqsqsqsqsqs go wet rubber heels somewhere inside, quiet, and waxed. It is a young analyst for a shadowy branch of Internal Transmissions stepping down the hall of a secretive branch of the Wisconsin State Department of Transportation. He’s stepping hard and fast, urgently.

He opens an inconspicuous door and the night watchman sits sipping his coffee with his glasses pulled down to the jolly red end of his nose. Looking up from his crossword, studious and plump he asks, "Yes?" And the young man informs him: “Seismographic information, tracked and fast approaching, a veritable and vetted B417 on John Nolan Drive. Real shit. It’s coming for the road crew on shift.”

Two calls are made with haste. The team is now currently suiting up and climbing aboard the trucks, loading aboard minivans. "Emergency procedures call for the replacement crew," he says in monotone, closes the door behind him. “Absolutely,” the old man nods, now to himself. He takes his glasses down to his chest where they hang like the dead. He rubs his eyes with a crusty finger. God did it really come to this? "Mhmhm," he clarifies to himself; he coughs into his elbow before saying anything into the handle. “It’s happening,” he says. “B417.”

Back on the roadside, Mike Jr. has come to his senses, been patted on the back by many gloved hands, and feels a bit better about himself. The foreman has cut him loose. He can leave, go home, feed his cats. Pedro Esquilla picks off the dead flies from around his helmet rim.

The rest of the roadside actors continue tonight’s premeditated tasks based on a rather archaic map of the subterranean realm. Every year has introduced something new to bury and besides the usual replacement of natural gas, electricity, sewage, and common drainage infrastructure. Mystery abounds. With the endless variations of pipes and wire, the workers, wiping sweat from their foreheads, have to focus on the scientific exactitude of fitting tubes to other tubes.

What’s in the tubes, though, and what the purposes of the piping is, remains hazy. Some pipes are filled with silver wire, others with bright orange cables thick as a man's arm. One channels a carcinogenic blue gas and another some sort of sewage-like substance smelling of rotten cabbage & raspberries, this one piped between churches and public libraries. Whatever it is, it bubbles when in contact with the air. Another, this one aluminum and narrow, has the bottom of its copper cylinder discolored into a deep black color, by whichever of the faceless fluids it streamed. Liquid earwax and the unmentionable fluids of the brain and bodily joints went through another, smaller piping system to create some sort of lubricant between moving parts of the city. Whether or not the city was cognizant is a question no one dares ask. Some of the charts remain entirely un-placed as of now but ready for future implementation. The construction is ongoing.

Inside a garage behind electrified twelve-foot fences, six serious men suit up in hazmat suits with shovels and truckfulls of teflon roadwork equipment, spades and drills. They pull their boots up to their knees; one by one, they are consumed by the boots, — by all means, they themselves become the boots. As they roll out of the secretive dept. of transportation facility in unmarked vehicles, there’s no telling them apart.

Occasionally a rupture happens, as we have seen above: an unintended pipe is broken enough to start a spouting out of something aromatic and oftentimes dangerous. Orange vests become stained and sometimes the splatters, when in contact with the skin, never fade, so a number of workers now have brightly pastel bands around their wrist between where the gloves and the sleeves break apart and sometimes upon meeting one of these workers on their off-days, you can reach out and shake an entirely neon pop-art-looking hand.

Medical coverage remains slim despite union contracts. When someone down in the pit is covered in an unknown, proprietary substance, there is an immediate rush to wash the man off, naturally, to clear his eyes and clear his mouth. People have died. People will die. This is often neglected. Pedro will be next; Mike Jr. will take some sort of cancer to a hospital bed; L will die young, not so soon to make it a destination point on his mind but certainly soon enough to make it a destination point in the mind of his preteen daughter. All of this unfolding will be years in the making, of course... Always a slow trickle, not all at once. Nothing much makes full sense... This is okay... Preferred, even… Nonsense can be productive, as we’ve seen…

The emergency crew arrives on the scene within minutes and one of the faceless men, this one wearing a suit and tie on the outside of his hazmat suit, whispers something to the interim foreman who then tries to waves the replacement crew off like large houseflies. Another pipe is removed, meanwhile. The ground is still quaking somewhat. The workers, now distracted, eye these new replacement workers. “ET heh ET phone home heh,” one of the original road crew says to a hazmatted member of the replacement crew.

Upon another whisper by the head of the replacement crew to the interim foreman and a grabbing of his arm, the interim foreman, this beer-bellied portrait of midwestern alcoholism, scratches his goatee amicably, nods for his crew to evacuate the area, and shakes his head in resignation to big government. Alas!

The replacements then step in. They familiarize themselves with the moving parts and they spray the insides of the road with tested and effective amounts of insecticide and sealant. There’s still a faint rumble under the Earth. Whatever it is, it’s close. They work quickly from behind their bubble helmets. The hazmat suits are here for one specific contingency, praying silently to God they don’t encounter it. Meanwhile, they are working, sealing the road up, until 2am.

Underneath the city and the national highway systems, a creature of unfathomable size and power has been tumbling and consuming and expanding itself. Snake.io’s inspiration. Its creation and upbringing have been a collaboration between various levels of authority and unlooking faith in capitalist systems. Year after year it discovered new pathways, new channels, new modes of revenue, growing larger and larger. Seldom did even its handlers know the true extent to which it lived, how it breathed, how it consumed. Few have seen it come up to the surface, felt its heartbeat through the soles of their feet, seen even a glimmer of it underpinning the world, enough to make anyone lose their convictions.

This giant of the underworld can only be understood quantitatively; it is only huge by its own metrics. Many years in the baking, — planning & calculating, adjusting schemata & making secure shifts, applying pressure & friction in the right doses to those in power and to those not in power, like the interrim road crew, now evacuated from the area, many have had an unknowing hand cultivating a beast such as this.

That’s not to say the operation hasn’t been a ravishing success and repaid its original investments a thousandfold. The whole global economy is on its uncertain knees to this force. Few would have imagined this thing would have any real movement outside the confines of its harness — those who could imagine either have no power or think that they control its movements — or that it could escape at will from the reigns of its corporate masters. Nobody imagined it could breed like it has. And since nobody could have imagined, everyone denies. Harmless, natural. Of course this night I’m describing here takes place during the pandemic, in the summer of ’21, before the creature became a quote-on-quote issue…

Some ways down the road from where the hazmat-clad crew worked, a distance from the clanking and the clanging, the small rotund bird landed on a curbside.

It hopped in a circle and says twee to the open air, still on its pursuit of some sort of affection, cosmic or domestic, before the underground rumbling finds its time & place. The asphalt splits wide around the bird and the great cubist worm living underneath the city erupts silently, engulfs the small bird completely. The small bird takes its fate with one last breath and one last chirp, — no way out of it — leaving the road rippling like a pool of water... becoming perfectly still... nothing left except a spattering of feathers clung to the asphalt... one by one, they are pulled away… one by one, into the underhanded late summer breeze churning through the city as one of millions of turbines spinning across the planet.

Mere blocks away from all this, in the center of all this quiet commotion, I was at the Lamp House getting down and funky wit it:

Designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Lamp House currently sits in the middle of city block, surrounded by high rises, only a block removed from Wisconsin’s capitol dome.

Three of my closest friends at the time lived there, renting rooms for less than a thousand a month each, one of whom, leader of successfully under-the-radar indie group Interlay, would throw shows which would devolve into drunken ragers.

The building is considered a historic site because of its architect. Frank Lloyd Wright has name recognition.

On that hazy summer night during the pandemic, I remember climbing out of a back window to talk with a man who was whispering to me through the window that he’d sell me a timeshare if I wanted. I climbed out the window. I remember vaguely we had a good long chat about life, the universe, and the liberatory power of music or whatever.

Halfway through, I pointed out a small, though extraordinarily fat bird sitting on the asphalt down the alleyway from us. We both laughed like children at this bird, how manic and angry its presence felt, until, of course, it disappeared with a pop as something emerged out from the road to swallow it. Him and I both agreed that it must have been a trick of our drunk imaginations, that it must have flown away. The conversation became less fun then and we both nervously said our goodbyes to each other. I’m not sure where he lives now. Maybe he’s in new york.

“Have you ever seen two or three dozen rats scurrying out of a dumpster?” he asked, looking off into the blue yonder down the wet street. “I have. I have and you wouldn’t believe it.” I tried not to roll my eyes at this but I did laugh and ask what he meant.

I found him smoking outside a coffee shop. He was the most interesting person here — not in a good way, I suppose — because he was the only one here who I hadn’t seen before sitting with a cup of coffee, a laptop, or a book in some capacity. It was a rather wet spring afternoon and the rain had started again, slashing at the windows while I waited behind him for a small black coffee. He talked the barista’s ear off about Guy Debord and The Spectacle so after the fact, when I saw him underneath the terrace outside, lighting up, I had to go see what he had to say for himself.

“Have you ever walked past a crackhead,” he continued. “Going absolutely wild on a slide whistle, saying he’s going to destroy you just as soon as he’s done with this tune here? There’s the Bronx for you.”

“That’s fascinating,” I said.

“But that’s what it’s like,” he said, looking off into the distance again. It felt like he was insisting. I didn’t get his name though I would get it later.

A handful of weeks later on a significantly drier and warmer night, I ran into him again outside a house party in Bucktown. One of the crucial on-ramps to the I-90 was closed for construction and so the traffic back-and-forth down Diversey had become a standstill for the length of a song on my summer playlist and, almost as if on queue, traffic would give in and the bus would move forward twenty feet. Thank god for airpods. I had been into big band film scores at the time. This trip took the better part of an hour and was, for me, a trial in self-discipline: the small car stuck in traffic to the side of the bus, something like one of those small fish that attach themselves to large sharks, was a prius being driven by a small man dressed like a revolutionary war soldier complete with hat, powdered wig, and brown buttoned jacket. He was sweating profusely and glancing up at the bus every couple minutes up in a red-faced grimace. This wasn’t the man I met outside of the coffee shop, he doesn’t come up in this story after this — I never met him again, or at least I haven’t yet — but his inclusion here feels important to the story in some way I can’t quite put my finger on.

The man I met outside the coffee shop weeks ago was loitering outside the party when I finally arrived. He had been drunkenly talking shit about the Argentinian president (and I agree, by the way), leering between two feet and making small gestures with his third american spirit of the night. He looked something like a thirty-something Johnny Rotten with his hair slicked back but resisting the gel and standing straight up in accidental spikes. I learned soon enough that he was still in his twenties despite the severe bags under his eyes. “Always been told I have an old soul,” he said when I asked him how old he was.

I learned quite about him that night after we went back inside: his name, his relationship status, two rather severe breakup stories — which, I might add, didn’t paint him in much of a good light — four musical groups he’s been a part of but none of which are currently active, his favorite writers, bands, film (Breathless, because why wouldn’t it be), and his finally his name.

Anyways, I’m going to refer to him L— for the sake of anonymity and he eventually asked me what I do and I told him I write a blog. He said, “oh.” I said it was basically Only Fans for journal entries. He said, “oh,” again. He asked for my Insta and I relented. Upon returning home at around 2am, I made a quick scroll through his Instagram, worried vaguely at whether scrolling his account would lessen his bizarre presence in the world, whether his account would feel like a robbery from the very real eccentric I had met twice, but thankfully this wasn’t at all the case.

L— turned out to be an unemployed graffiti artist living in Logan Square whose dayjob was spray painting the bathrooms of a Chicago coffee shop chain with a graffiti sink next to a real sink, a graffiti toilet next to the real toilet, a graffiti toilet paper holder next to the real one, you get the point. Much more interesting to me, though, was that for the past couple years he’d been in what appeared to be a poorly dampened manic fervor attempting to recreate one of the slogans from the May ’68 revolutionary moment in France, those being

REVOLUTION CEACES TO BE THE MOMENT IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO BE SACRIFICED FOR IT

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID

NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS

DOWN WITH THE ABSTRACT, LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL

AFTER GOD, ART IS DEAD

DOWN WITH A WORLD WHERE THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WON’T DIE OF STARVATION HAS BEEN PURCHASED WITH THE GUARANTEE THAT WE WILL DIE OF BOREDOM

CLUB MED, A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE’S MISERY

DON’T CHANGE EMPLOYERS, CHANGE THE EMPLOYMENT OF LIFE

NEVER WORK

CHANCE MUST BE SYSTEMATICALLY EXPLORED

RUN, COMRADE, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU

BE CRUEL

THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE

LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME, INDULGE UNTRAMMELED DESIRE

PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHS

and

UNDER THE PAVING STONES, THE BEACH!,

but rather than merely repeating the above phrases, his goal was to place them in an original and modern context without changing a word.

As he typed out in his manifesto, which consists of a handful of Instagram posts consisting of four squares of sans-serif fonts separated by deep fried images of pop culture mid-century intellectuals in black and white ~grain~ (not unlike the aesthetics of Instagram account avadaco_ibuprofin’s social media output), L— makes the claim that he has uncovered a schematic for resurrecting the Situationist movement from the 1950s-60s moment in France, from the scrapyard of history, to bring it roaring back into the zeitgeist of the mid 2020s by evoking one of the above phrases as if the words themselves could be ancient incantation. However they would have to be rediscovered — they couldn’t simply be repeated. The phrases would have to be discovered organically as they were discovered in the 60s by a member of the Situationist International, only in the 2020s as they pertained to the 2020s.

“The phrases would have to have space to breathe”, he wrote in one of what turns out to be a handful of manifestos (he appeared to write a new one every 4-6 months). “The connections would have to be of this world and not the world of post-war France.”

So, to keep himself honest, he claimed to have avoided reading the above phrases himself, had copied and pasted them into the instagram square, for the sake of the manifesto, without looking at the forest for the trees for himself — so that, rather, he could discover the trees for himself (and hopefully, by extension, for everyone else); to keep himself honest, he deputized a friend with the phrases on hand to check his work after each session. Each session appeared to be an hour or so of him spray painting random phrases in black lettering across the same while wall of his apartment before repainting. He was, by all means, a serious artist.

Further on into the Instagram explainer, on the third square, he wrote that this life’s purpose was originally inspired by a hazy fugue surrounding a Borges story he had one time read out loud to one of his ill-fated flames while he was coming in and out of a shrooms trip. Afterwards he had decided to embark on an attempt at reverse engineering some future-minded protest season from history and bring it into the actual future, the future according to where the various revolutionary movements lingered anyways, where it could be fully realized: in the now. The French Revolution had been far too violent and the American Revolution too pedestrian and bourgeois, so L— had gone with the Situationists. At first, he wanted to himself somehow become the Situationists by studying French, moving to Paris, attending the few cafés that still exist from the time. He had an idea from his teens that time travel might in fact be possible if, instead of transporting an individual backwards to a long-gone era, the long-gone era could be brought into the present to surround an individual. There wouldn’t be too much of a difference, he reasoned, if one wanted to live in the 60s instead of the 2020s, in pulling the collective reality of the 60s forward into the 2020s like a tie-dye shroud one could reside in. It very well could be possible to time travel the world, rather than the individual.

But this never quite panned out for L—. Having barely made a dent in finding a work permit or even marrying a French widow, he quickly realized Paris wasn’t the city he thought it was. This wasn’t the romance he’d expected. This wasn’t the food. He moved back to New York, eventually, but also found that this wasn’t what he had hoped either — the rent prices far too high and expensive retail and crumbl cookies dominated seemingly every city block of manhattan — so he settled for Chicago instead, a more “real and grounded” city where he would spend the next six years attempting to reverse engineer Situationist slogans in the context of our times, taking up the “synactical habits”, as he described them, of the Situationists, the main habit being “wielding a spray-paint can as anyone else would hold a pen”, to resurrect their dream. “Keep the dream alive!” he declares over and over again on Instagram, along with “the moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.”

The rest of his Instagram feed is assorted attempts at the phrases listed above. He seemed to just have thrown words onto the wall, photographed whichever seemed promising, sent them to his friend to check his work according to the Situationist texts of the 60s, and posted the best efforts on his feed. There’re hundreds. Here’s a couple, not the actual words of the Situationists but rather his own attempts at nailing down their graffiti’d language:

DON’T FORGET THERE’S MOVEMENT INSIDE PIPES

FRANKENSTEIN ALIVE ALL SYMBOLS SO WE CAN KILL THEM

DECONSTRUCT THE DERIVATIVE

and

SAY NO TO BOREDOM. SAY YES TO SURPRISE.

But then, finally, in the final post following in this format of black spray paint on white walls, dated three months prior to my meeting L—, he had appeared to have achieved his goal finally. He (appeared, at least) to have resurrected a phrase.

In the May protests of 1968, a prominent slogan, penned by Raoul Vangeiem, went,

PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHS,

and such a slogan feels like a decent critique of the cultural forces of the 1960s in postwar Paris. After the war, the Catholic Church and nuclear families were encouraged in France just as they were in the United States. Stability was paramount after the world wrenched itself apart with heavy oil powered machinery for six years. I imagined some of the old McCarthyist types would adjust their glasses on their gnarlish noses and purse their mouths if they saw something like this on the wall of the subway. And besides the prudes, weren’t there so so many Leninists and Trotskyists, the occasional dastardly Stalinist or Maoist running around, taking themselves and their theorizing with the utmost seriousness? Certainly this above quote also lampoons them effectively. But it can’t seem to escape the 50s and 60s, can it? To this day, it’s still locked up in the 1968’s moment and it lacks a certain contemporary pizzaz — like, sixty-something years ago? — Can you even imagine? How could the above phrase possibly be relevant to our contemporary world? It was written for a time of reunification after disaster, not for the crumbling we now experience in 2025, so it’s easily forgotten, cast aside, moved on for something less aged.

But what L—’s done now, decades later, is he wrote the following on the wall of his bedroom in spray-paint,

PEOPLE WHO TALK ABOUT REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT REFERRING EXPLICITLY TO EVERYDAY LIFE, WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS, HAVE CORPSES IN THEIR MOUTHS

and posted it to his instagram. The last line alone, HAVE A CORPSE IN THEIR MOUTHS, gives such a massive blow to the chest, to the heart area that’s beating a little faster now like a steady beat on a set of toms, and it’s become impossible to look away or plug your ears anymore. The phrase as a whole ties together Twitter/X nihilists perfectly, the Dimes Square scenesters, the assassination of Brian Thompson by Luigi Magione, the political machinations of Curtis Yarvin, all of it, together in a startling package, and lights it on fire. WHAT IS SUBVERSIVE ABOUT LOVE AND POSITIVE ABOUT THE REFUSAL OF CONSTRAINTS. Yes! YES! More! MORE! Because certainly our political leaders, whether they’re liberal or republican, all have a corpse in their mouths. The connections go everywhere. A web is created. L— is writing here for a generation of thinkers and visionaries, but also for the youth. He’s writing for the present moment. He himself said that he’s never read the quote above from the situationists, and that he came up with it on his own through this delicate process of his. I believe him. I can only imagine how ecstatic he must have felt when his friend, with the copy of quotes in his hand, confirmed that it was indeed a quote from the Situationists of the 60s. I can only imagine the glee he must have felt, resurrecting the past like this…

Mark Fisher’s work on Hauntology still lingers with me like the smell of toothpaste does when I can’t quite fall asleep. There have been revolutionary moments in the past, revolutionary instincts, but now what’s left of any of them but t-shirts hanging on racks at Urban Outfitters? I sometimes feel like I’m cross-legged at the thrift-store of history, like we all ought to be, but that something feels off: the smell is not quite right in here. History ought to smell like fertilizer or, at the very least, furniture — not like hand sanitizer.

Could you imagine unearthing the past in thirty-forty years’ time from today, a future where all sources of stimulus are non-real noise — by this point the natural world is more-or-less dead, and attempting to find the bones of history in there? Could you imagine… Think of the universe it could create, after forty-years of post-Truth, to create new formations, whole new cultural contexts entirely from the ~now~ and not from the ~then~. This, more or less, is my estimation of L—’s project in resurrecting the Situationists. If the past isn’t resurrected now into this new world being born, will it cease to be?

Lefebvre, kicked out of Russia by the Soviets over his theory on a “dialectics of moments” spoke about the Situationists, looking back on the sixties, in an interview in ’75:

“The theory of moments converged with research on the creation of an ambiance, of situations… The idea of escaping from the combination of elements of the past—of repetition—was an idea that was at once poetic, subversive, and audacious. It already implied that this was a project with a difference. It isn’t easy to invent new pleasures, or new ways of making love… an utopian idea—but not really—since, effectively, we lived, we created a new situation, that of exuberance in friendship, that of subversive or revolutionary microsociety in the very heart of a society which, moreover, ignores it.”

And society has forgotten the Situationists, it seems. Except for L—, who still bandies on with his crusade to bring them back as if he could exhume Debord’s burial plot and find that he’s still in there, twiddling his thumbs waiting. But L—’s achievement never resurrected the Situationists, not really. And, based on the little I know about him, mostly based on his social media, his lie has rotted from the inside out because of this mad, enraptured pursuit towards resurrection. The idea of copying over the Situationists has seemed to eat him from the inside out. Now I am imagining a person’s canker sores eating them alive, mouth first, feet last, and the image I have in my head of this is not too different from what must have happed to L—. But perhaps that’s just a part of his process and it has yet to divulge its true potential to the world — after all, he’s only in his twenties. There’s plenty of time. And I’m not one to judge. We all have our processes. All the romantic poets died young it seems, sure, but Whitman took his time with the first edition of Leaves of Grass, released when he was 36. And the final version wasn’t out until he was on his deathbed.

Maybe L— still does hope that he himself is Debord reborn in some way. But probably (my guess) is that he wishes he had been there when the May ‘68 protests were happening. The memory of an adventure lives long after its conclusion. Maybe L— was smarter in this regard; perhaps he realized, as almost all armchair revolutionaries eventually do, that the flashlight we try to shine at the future reveals nothing as vividly as it does the past.

The last time I saw L— was at a live performance at The Whistler, in a performance he called called “LETTERS”, something he promoted on his Instagram before it went dark.

This winter had been a long one with plenty of emotional turbulence for me and spring had finally opened the doors to some sort of stability, some sort of brushing off of emotional malaise to become a better and more exciting version of myself, so I had to get myself out and about before I became as sedentary as a rock in my apartment, so when I saw L— was running a live performance in Logan, I had to check it out. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since the summer before so here was a chance to check in on the oddball, see what was up.

I went with two friends of mine whom I went through great lengths to drag along: one from an old job at a restaurant that no longer exists where we served tables together, and another I met through a dinner party. She brought a joint we smoked outside. The rest of the bar was filled with a typical Logan Square vibe of burnout poets, media students, twenty-something alcoholics in graphic design, and burnt out older millenials and gen x punks who are still looking for whatever social life they had before the pandemic, as if it were underneath a rock or something. Gen Z has no such past relationship with the world, though, and they’ve only ever spent their social lives reposting square flyers; Gen Z will be remembered as a people passing through without leaving much of a trace, I fear.

Anyways, before the performance and before L— took to the stage, I returned from the bathroom where I looked at myself long in the mirror, worrying for a brief moment whether I was becoming a mollusk or some other clammy thing of the high seas and the performance began.

A massive flat piece of styrofoam was put against the back wall by two men in massive pants. L— stood up from a chair near the stage, stepped up the steps, and began to speak to the audience. “At the screening of my first student film, who knows how many years ago, back in college, I waited for the scene in which footage of a Sinclair-era meat factory was played underneath the audio of sand being poured out of a pint glass with the flashing letters blaring across the screen, saying, ‘YELL NOW’, and while the scene played I emptied six bags of all-purpose flour onto the crowd from the balcony above, and you couldn’t begin to imagine the sounds created.”

The audience sat silent, some looked vaguely up at the ceiling to check whether there were any sacks of flour lurking.

He then began to speak loudly, “THE MEANING OF MODERNITY IS IN ITS NEGATIONS. ANY SIGN IS ABLE TO BE TRANSFORMED INTO ANY OTHER, MAYBE EVEN ITS PERCEIVED OPPOSITE. CULTURE IS UNDEAD. ECONOMICS IS A HOAX. THE FREE PRESS A PARODY OF ITSELF. I STILL BELIEVE IN MY OWN DESIRES. I STILL BELIEVE IN CASTLES OF ADVENTURE, TREE HOUSES, AND HACIENDAS” and with a sudden convulsion began going at the large styrofoam wall like he was fighting it with a spray can of black paint whirling out streams of black paint while he yelled out letters at random.

It took us a minute or two to figure out there wasn’t any intended pattern to the letters L— was yelling out — at least three phones out filming — and the words he spray painted on the styrofoam, with frictionless, efficient technique, I might add, were by all means nonwords, or pure gibberish.

He looked into the small crowd from the stage, continuing to say letters out loud, “J… X… D…”, as if he had expected everyone else to join along with the random letters spoken out loud, and eventually he locked eyes with someone in the crowd, a twenty-something with a ponytail and a perfectly trimmed mustache, who stood up and also began to speak letters randomly. “B… J… O…”

L—, still standing on the stage, clearly excited though perhaps also a little nervous by this development, continued reciting letters, “D… Q… T…”, when suddenly the man who stood up in the crowd began unleashing what can only be described as a explosion of scarcely-phonetic sounds that defy any available lexicon. The entire bar turned and watched with an awestruck sort of horror. Unknown tongues and languages from throughout human history stripped for parts unleashed across the room, bounced off the walls as purified as linguistic organs could possibly be. Floating in the bourbon-barrel scented air they touched down not all at once into all ears not quite recognizing what they were hearing. The man’s tongue thrashed against the sides of his mouth and his teeth snapped and snarled. Sounds flew out of his head as if they were launching out of the top. A bartender stopped shaking a cocktail and L—, still standing on the stage, his stance unchanged from before, stopped speaking himself and merely watched. The noise felt broad and piercing at the same time, as if it could end the dictatorship of language as a whole in which “the discourse” feels like a small spot more minute than even the smallest of lice. It was a bottomless pour of noise which made everything in the old syntax feel obsolete, broken, alien; it opened the doors for new and personal contexts that closed again once the noises were absorbed.

As the audience member’s howl began to slowly dissipate, he attempted to continue but he could barely stutter out the vowels and consonants at this point. He coughed, said sorry, and sat back down.

The room remained silent for a moment. L— looked at his graffiti’d wall behind him and spray painted a large X across everything he had written. He looked at the crowd. All were silent. There was some shuffling towards the door. A small cough from a man in a trench coat. The audience member who had stood up looked around with an ecstatic smile. L— said, “I don’t understanding this bit at all anymore. I’m sorry. I afraid I should go.” He left the stage, stepped into the small crowd, walked out the door. We watched him go in silence. His Instagram went dark that night. I never saw him again. I’m not sure where he’s living. I imagine he moved back to where he came from, Bushwick or wherever.

I like to imagine the pre-phonetic babble that was spoken that night somehow slipped out the door of the Whistler that night, that no matter what it was, it still circles the Earth like a satellite waiting to return home. The sounds still exist and will never not exist. Any lack once spoken persists until resolution. Like the uncashed cheques of history, when it returns it will return casting off new echoes.

Next week:

The times don’t make a person but they can reveal them. A mirror on the wall in passing is a formidable encounter for anyone to come face to face with as it’s made up of the same bitter stuff recollection now uses to buff up the horizons around memory — glass is always as alluring as it is a threat. I can’t help but notice my own reflection in the screen as I write this, I can’t escape it. Is it right for our reflection to be everywhere we look? Mirrors and phone screens, one for the present, one for the past; we’re in a glass century, looking at ourselves, now and then, forever.

Context is so simple yet so hard to place in the depths of a camera roll. The context remains murky like a name or a face you can’t quite place to a who, when, or where. A snapshot taken and captured doesn’t carry along its context. Any photograph, like the one above for example, has been picked up and put down, in a personal regard, so many times since it was taken and it will remain where I need it if I ever might need to refresh the memory, unravel the moment, lend light to a time not too terribly far back.

I remember who I was back then — I can’t help compare my recollection of the who to who and what I am now — and the photo helps in this, lends a hand, commemorates a single moment in time before the canyon of the pandemic ushered in the twenty-first century, proper. This is nice. I like this. I existed before. And unless you’re six years old or under, you existed then too.

But, looking at it now… Is the above picture even true? Is it doctored? Generated? Edited? I’ve developed a tic when looking at any photographs wherein my eyes do a sweep for all the tells that might indicate generative AI. Is that me, there, on the far left, or is it someone else? It it someone who only exists in pixels and one chemical copy glued down in my friend’s personal moleskin? I was twenty then; I’m twenty-five now, feeling like a Ship of Theseus, and it is true that my molecules have been replaced one by one over the years but these even with these changed eyes I can recognize these faces on my screen, I can read them from left to right like a handwritten letter to myself from five years ago.

I’m now reminded of the first photograph ever taken of a living person. Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype and also, in general, the reason for daguerreotype being such a hard word to spell, took two pictures from the window of his Paris studio in 1838 with this machine he had just assembled out of metal and chemical parts. The first take was of the city early in the morning; the second in the afternoon. These pictures took in light for around four minutes, four minutes of exposure time, creating a long enough pause between the start and finish of the chemical process of capturing that most of the city life becomes removed and ghostly due to its movement. But in the afternoon daguerreotype, two figures happened to remain somewhat still throughout the entire four minutes, two unknowns who would forever be captured in two-dimensional resin, two unknowns spending an unassuming four minutes on Earth that would be made infinite. They would remain in place for centuries, without their knowing or even comprehension. You can see them now below, near the bottom left corner. One stands with one leg raised. The other sits.

And I can’t help myself from trying to imagine what they talked about, what their lives had been like, what their relationships were to one another. Old photographs and daguerreotypes fascinate me endlessly. I can’t help but wonder. Were there others? Was there anyone else involved with these two made invisible because they had been in motion? — If there were, certainly they’ve escaped the tree sap of a camera that Daguerre had created.

We’re not so lucky in our own time here on Earth to be so oblivious of our own images and outlines as they’re taken up by mechanical systems of representation and depiction, a process that hangs forever just beyond our comprehension. We’re stuck in perpetual, back-lit amber, thinking to ourselves this is fine, thinking to ourselves this is how things are. And they are like this; and they’re most likely fine.

The photo at the start of this piece, with the distortions of light feeling appropriate to the time and conditions of our lives at the time, was taken in January of 2020, just over five years ago, on my friend’s 30mm camera. I remember the date well — January 26th — because Kobe Bryant’s helicopter had crashed right before we took a heavy dose of shrooms blended together with orange juice, banana slices, and frozen berries, all of us sitting around a coffee table on a Friday near the end of Winter Break in the loft space that our secret ninth roommate, who I’ll refer to here as L— , would soon enough make into his bedroom and later his aviary.

The lot of us had been roommates for eight months — it was a tentative agreement between people who knew each other through the dorms, through classes, and through facebook marketplace, a typical case of student housing — but soon enough, two months later, the pandemic lockdown would begin across the continental United States and we would be locked in together for almost two years.

Last night, back to present, in 2025, mumbling and curving, a projector screen was pulled down across the tarp of my skull and a small troupe of character actors from the 1960s, all wearing low budget cowboy outfits, put on a series of skits, scenes from box office hits, sung karaoke, acted out one act plays, and on occasion drew out long pauses and held tense narrowed eye-contact with another, fingers twitching near the triggers of plastic guns. After the movie was done and finished — the Criterion Channel is a blessing, isn’t it? — I went to bed and I dreamt I was living in Madison, Wisconsin again.

This was my own damn fault. Hazy-headed and kind of stupid a couple nights before, on the way home from the bar, a little drunk but not severely, I had scrolled down into my photo roll. I saw people I once knew, people I don’t know anymore, saw parties I attended, saw parties I’ve since forgotten, saw people I dated, saw people I’ve not spoken to since, saw people I ran away from and ran towards, saw friends of friends whose names I’ve forgotten and friends of friends whose name I remembered better than their faces. Notice, now, the sheer number of “I”s above, strewn across this paragraph. The “I”s remind me of a dark forest made up of solitary trees casting shadows of what-if imaginaries across the dark of this post. It’s funny to have so many pictures of myself in my phone of who I was then, and pictures of the people who’ve shaped me into who I am now.

A photo roll grown long over the years is a sawmill that never ends. These moments of connection, screenshots saved to text a friend and all the rest of the photos I’ve had reason to take and save will eventually sever from their retrievable, rememberable context. It would be an oxymoron to claim experience can ever be fully preserved. Thankfully, though, a good photo roll is a productive saw mill. People come in and out. This isn’t any sort of dig, just the way a life lived exists in a modern, interconnected context. We meet, we leave. Repeat.

But it feels like a shock to the system, doesn’t it? The leaving and returning. The sound of a saw splitting a length of wood is only ever going to be a loud cracking noise, especially in memory. And I feel trapped in this cycle. Meeting new people, drifting apart. Such is the plight of the graduate, I suppose. I’m as aimless as they come. Such is maybe also just the curse of being in my mid-twenties during the century’s mid-twenties. Stars align and everything feels significant when no one knows what to do next, which direction to start walking.

In the dream brought on by my tangle with my photo app, I woke up nineteen again, on the cusp of adulthood. I suspect the last step of our teenage years is a hazy time for most of us. We can imagine a blooming social life on the horizon, something like a sunrise, just past the bar where you and your circle can sometimes manage to sneak past the bouncer. Nothing much happened in the dream. I just happened to be in the bedroom of the house we lived in on North Bedford Street, a house with holes in the walls and peeling paint and duct-taped carpets. This house in particular:

Upon waking from the dream, the long-held desire to be young enough to make better, more correct decisions was no longer with me for the first time in years.

Such a desire has been a phantom that I shook hands with and watched leave the room. It had evaporated somewhere along the way of my waking up like the sun blasting away the morning dew. To go back in time, to redo things… I don’t talk about this terribly much in person but I suspect I write about it to death here on this blog, that my life, like any real modern life, has been a sporadic series of meetings and leavings.

I become a new person every two-year period and then, the next two years I spend in the trenches of embarrassment at the person I was last, the person I worry I’m becoming again for no reason other than “that was who I was two years ago” and merely having been someone is warrant enough for embarrassment, it seems for me, deep down. Personality is branding. But god, do I hate branding. The contradictions only grow out from there.

Anyways, by twenty-five, there’s a lot of thread to work with in this great yarn of recollection. One has to knit the memories out to make anything coherent out of them. Maybe a scarf? After all, Jung writes that a person doesn’t reach adulthood until they hit twenty-five and twenty-five is around the time I finally started to wear a scarf in the wintertime.

But adulthood is oftentimes too messy to make coherent, to straighten out. It’s too messy to focus fully on the act of knitting. Whether or not you can save those memories and feelings only depends on how well you can knit with a keyboard, how realistically you can flesh out the memories. Such is the use of an old photograph. And with old photographs, melancholy is a marble that grows in your mattress and if you try removing it, you have to look at it dead on, you catch a glimpse of yourself in its reflection, and that is a hard road to walk back along.

I have always been stupid in my own ways; reverting back to myself nineteen would be like money changing between hands. I simply wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I wasn’t who I am today. Fantastical thinking gets one nowhere. I like to think I would have a more clear-headed understanding of what this life would look like, where I’m coming from and where I’m going, but there’s no assurances that my nineteen year old brain wouldn’t just revert back to whatever piddling distraction it would have been on anyways. And I wouldn’t want to go through that loneliness again, and I wouldn’t want to relive the pandemic.

The pandemic was what appeared to be a rock thrown through the window of our house and it wasn’t until a week or two passed that we realized it had been thrown the window of every house.

The pandemic is the rupture I’m talking about in this piece (with its ominous title). It was the great rupture of everything social in our lives, we could almost feel the earthquaking below our feet. I’m constantly surprised that the pandemic is talked about so little. It was an event which (permanently?) changed our worldviews, defined our era, thrust us into a strange portal of desensitivity and unreality where we now float in a suspended animation. I think the reason no one speaks of it outside a muted whisper is that there’s no need to acknowledge it. Millions of people died. The social structures across the world imploded. These are things we feel. Speaking about all of it would make it almost feel as if we were doomed from the start, by the time and place of our birth, to exist inside a dead photograph of the world in the process of changing towards something more inhuman than even the industrial revolution.

The international system of communication and trade emerged as a real, living, breathing thing frankensteined into horrible life during the pandemic. And I think that’s reason enough for some more thoughts on it, written out and focused on. The idea of a “pandemic novel” has a lot of people rolling their eyes online, but why not? Should we not write about it? We could see the new world stomping outside our windows as we huddled inside and coveted our remaining toilet paper rolls, and we scoff at the mere thought of talking about it?

But the facts of my particular situation during the pandemic were good, maybe great. A lot of people had very bad times, a whole spectrum of very bad times were had. I’m thankful for my privilege, I guess. I was twenty and living in a walkable city with weather just fine enough in the summer and shoulder seasons to spend most of each and every day sitting outside, sipping coffee, throwing darts at cans of light beer, sitting in lawn chairs, reading on rooftops, smoking on balconies, etc. The indie bands in Madison were great, are great, and will forever be great (check out Disq if you haven’t). The food is cheap and carb forward. The bars are all quaint and reasonably priced. Two lakes, multiple parks in walking distance, many nature trails, hidden public docks (and sometimes private docks) out onto the water (if you know where to find them, at least), bike trails, hidden DIY venues, monstrous sprawling student houses more like playgrounds than anywhere fit for someone to live. What a place to go to college during the lockdown! And between, a midwestern summer crisp like an apple. You could almost taste it. I could feel the ground beneath my feet as I walked. The trees in Madison have a beauty like nowhere else.

But a morning that is still a morning after three weeks of morning, and then still morning after two months of morning, and eventually, still morning after two years of morning, time becomes changed. Everything settles into a strange, strangled routine. Relationships with people outside of the house become furniture. The expectation is safe stagnation. A staleness unfolds. But then a football explodes in the street outside the window, run over by a 2020 Jeep Cherokee driven by the assholes down the street with a trump 2020 flag in every street-facing window. Things were dull and quiet until they weren’t. And when they weren’t, I became reminded that the world was nosediving into something strange and alien.

Again, I don’t mean to say my circumstances were’t good: A lot of my pandemic involved laying on the floor and staring at the ceiling, or at a book, or at the wall. I’m maybe a rare case but these are things I love to do. Perhaps the things I’m best at. I discovered spirituality, Borges, and LSD around this time and, just like the hippies seeing UFOs in the skies, blinking their eyes, and mistaking the blaring lights of postmodernity for extraterrestrial visitors, I began to notice the webs of soft power in the world — conspiracies having come to light, talking here about Jeffery Epstein’s downfall, the murder of George Floyd, a discovery of left-wing politics through readings and through podcasts, conflated with suspicions and hunches about Amazon services and mask mandates (and the protests against them) and the new centers of power. I feel lucky for having gone through this discovery in such an environment, one in which I could actually talk to a bunch of different people whom I lived with about different things. I was never completely relegated to a chat forum or group chat like so many other people I know. For this, I’m still thankful.

But that didn’t stop the ascendency of the unreal, the murky underbelly of what’s not being said asserting itself in a populist fervor like we haven’t seen since, probably, the 1930s. During the pandemic, the homes, apartments, rooms, dormitories, and townhouses, became incubators in which, almost as if the pandemic relief money worked as some sort of fertilizer or lubricant to bring the furniture to life. The objects surrounding us in our lived lives gradually came into a social dimension — our couch was now as friendly as a beloved coworker — and they spoke in their own voices.

The consumer economy has a fairly brief history. It didn’t really begin proper until the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s allowed for mass reproduction. But by the time the late twentieth century came around, objects became objectified so fully that they started to develop into something as living and breathing as the markets of stocks and bonds which undergird most of our modern lives.

Now objectification is complete and the mad doctor’s cries of IT’S ALIVE have faded so much so that people wonder whether there was really any mad doctor in the first place. Cars try and sell people on car insurance. Speakers ask the listener questions in automated voices. This was all alright when the ascension was happening, during the pandemic; it was nothing if not interesting to watch the first efforts silicon valley made at developing a proper internet of things but I thank god I had other people around me to talk to so I didn’t become subsumed by it. Thank god there was a small, rotund (cute word) cat wandering around the house clawing at closed doors. God, what a wonderful cat.

I could hear S— pacing back and forth in his room. I could hear him occasionally climb on top of his bed and jump for a couple minutes, maybe once every day during the middle of the academic day; I could hear A— listening to his Eagles podcast in the other room while he showered and brushed his teeth. I couldn’t hear either M— or E— from my bedroom. They were downstairs, but when I walked past their rooms I could feel bass vibrating the floor from their record players, the new Molchat Doma and Hop Along records, sometimes they were on the phone talking.

And little did the rental conglomerate we rented from know, L— was our secret ninth roommate. He slept in third floor’s loft, on the couch, and didn’t have a room to himself.

At the time, for some reason I can’t quite remember, I was scared of every single person in the building. This might just be a nineteen year old thing. I was terrified of other people, generally. At the same time I was barely securing rent, preferring not to eat food as a general rule of thumb. It is true that, when chronically hungry and unfed, everything appears more profound and spiritual in a way; but it is also true that long-term hunger makes a person fearful of others and themself. I felt like the lowest of lowlifes. I would wander out to the back porch to smoke or work out at the bench we had back there, the dumbbells gradually gathering rust, and I would wave at the neighbor in his balcony directly across from the gulf of gravel separating our run-down student rental houses from one another. I never got his name.

L— would come out with me to smoke sometimes and we would talk about things. He would tell me things that did make me worry a small bit, like how he contained a lot of anger and noise inside himself. He was unaware of where it came from or where it was going, he would say. “I’m not really sure what to do.”

In response I would say something stupid like “don’t we all, god, exam season” while thinking well it could be you’re sleeping on a couch and he would say nothing at all but he would look off into the distance, dejected and terrible.

It didn’t worry me. L— didn’t seem like he much anger in him, not to me, anyway. To me he was simply the guy who was sleeping on our couch. I brought this worrying moment up to one of my other roommates, S—, who had overheard one of these conversation from the kitchen sink when the window between the kitchen and the patio had been open. He was whittling a sharp point into a pink wooden paintbrush when I approached and he told me L—’s mother had died recently. I said “oh” quietly. The things people don’t tell you.

I then asked S— what he was doing with the now-sharpened paintbrush and he said he needed it to get the weed out of his one-hitter.

It was lucky for L— that we had two living rooms in the house: one on the first floor and one on the third. It was okay in a more unacknowledged way, for the rest of us living in 117 N Bedford, when he began to take steps towards shifting the upstairs living room into more of his own personal space.

More and more one of us would climb the stairs to the third floor’s living room to watch a movie, or watch an episode of some show on streaming, only to find L— standing on the couch for some unknowable reason, pacing back and forth, his hand on his chin. He would stand on the handrail of the back porch and joke about climbing to the spot on the roof where nobody had ever climbed before. While I began emerging from my own shell, he went deeper into his. He dyed his hair twice after he started dating a girl he met through one of the dating apps; they spent all their time together for three weeks, mostly at hers (as his bedroom was, remember, also our second living room), but I noticed, when he was at the house without her, he would become more and more quiet and anxious. He had begun simmering.

And when the relationship was over, his bleached hair frayed out into a dry feathery mess. He never acknowledged what had happened between him and her with any of us in any meaningful way, none of us knew whether he himself had done the dumping or if he was the dumpee. He began to grow quiet. He began to close the door to the living room for his own privacy and the rest of us began to steer clear, accepting that he’d just been through a lot and needed his space. The rotund little house cat wouldn’t stand for this afront to its domain, though. It was sit at the closed door for hours, mewing loudly, scratching the wood until its claws pulled out chunks. This all became much more dramatic when L— brought in his first pet bird to the unit.

The first bird L— bought was a small parakeet named Timothy. L— loved this bird dearly and to be fair it was a very sweet, maybe overly affectionate bird. We all tolerated the buildup of bird droppings in the third floor’s living room because there was a spark of light in L—’s eyes again and as the pandemic wore on, everyone began to develop their own coping strategies. I remember how the bird would perch on his shoulder and nip at his ears until he started laughing while, meanwhile, outside the house the pandemic changed in tenor and became more serious. We received news that UW Chancellor showed up at an “illegal” house party, a frail older woman riding along with the police and sternly scolding a group of shirtless, frankly wasted frat brothers for risking the spread of Covid-19, and we all became much more worried about our own little gatherings. If they were going after the rich kids certainly they wouldn’t hesitate to go after us too.

The spring began to become summer and the six-feet mandate felt more and more oppressive. We stopped inviting people over in general. One of the roommates more-or-less disappeared to a frat house for the entirety of the summer. The rest of us spent more time getting in the living room watching (and placing bets on) marble racing videos or Andrew Callaghan videos.

Amid this hazy anxiety, the rest of us were shocked to discover that L— had bought two more birds. They made loud squawks and flutterings throughout the day which we would sometimes have to apologize for, to the class in our laptops — “sorry about that, just my roommate’s pet bird.”

The two birds had been (1) another parakeet, a “companion” for Timothy and (2) a grey parrot named Merlin.

One time, not having been aware of these new birds, one of my other roommates had gone up to the loft to watch an episode of Nathan for You while L— was out of the house only to see what he thought was a bat hanging near the ceiling and he fled the space, barreling down the stairs and returning with a pillowcase and a baseball mitt only to realize that it wasn’t a bat at all but a massive grey parrot asking him if he had a cracker to spare. He didn’t.

I’m not sure, looking back, whether any of us interrogated L— very much on this newly amassed collection of birds. I think that, as the pandemic wore on, there was an increasing fear of confrontation, at least with real people who existed beyond a phone, and we all assumed L— was still very clearly rattled by his breakup even as the months went on. The best course of answer was to give him space. We could all use some space at the end of the day. And besides, he was paying a fraction of the rent. Besides, the birds weren’t becoming too much of an issue. Well… They weren’t until they became an issue around the time L— bought his first chicken, a large hen named Helen who boked and tored huge chunks out of the carpet.

Around this time the small rotund cat was going regularly berserk inn the hallway about the birds behind this closed door. It was howling and mewing and doing flips and tearing chunks at the door with its claws.

We asked L— about the chicken a couple nights after it arrived, as we had all heard it by this point. We brought up the topic of the chicken delicately with him.

“The chickens will lay eggs and it’ll all be worth it,” L— said.

“Chickens?”, asked M—. “Plural?”

And so the tensions began to rise quickly. Google ad services throughout the house began recommending pet-bird related products on all of our devices and platforms: feed, cages, nesting material, golden hoops, peg legs, etc. The sounds from L—’s bedroom were getting more erratic. He was keeping to himself for days on end. One of the roommates said he had smelled something cooking from L—’s bedroom and that it smelled like an omelette or something; — it was then theorized by the rest of us, in the group chat equivalent of a hushed whisper, that L— hada hot plate in his room and was living off of the eggs his chickens laid, presumably drinking rainwater and such. “How’s he using the bathroom, though?” I remember asking. I remember no one had any ideas.

The breaking point to all of this — another titular rupture — arrived on a Friday night. We played a drinking game in the second floor’s kitchen and L— was making a tremendous ruckus upstairs with his birds. He had around a dozen or so birds by this point. They would all gather around him and on him while he echoed their calls back to them, and they would echo back to him, and it went on like this for hours until until finally my roommate S— had had enough. He yelled something incomprehensible while he was aiming a ping pong ball at a red solo cup and threw the ball bouncing on the linoleum floor and stormed upstairs to the top room in the house with E— following close behind, pleading, “don’t mess with him man, just let him be, comeon.”

And when S— threw the door open and L— was standing inside, dumbstruck, wearing a crown of feathers on his head, laced through his hair, and large feathery wings were tied to his arms, himself speckled with bird droppings, S— really blew his shit, saying “fuck your birds. Look what they did to the carpet man. Look what’s becoming of you. This is out of hand man.”

The floor was covered in white droppings. The carpet was in shambles. The walls were stained. The room smelled insane. Oh god how will we explain this to the landlord, I remember thinking, distinctly, looking at the pile of eggshells stacked somewhat neatly in a milk crate. L— said “wha” and The birds fluttered off his shoulders to the far corners of the room.

S— walked to the window quickly and pulled it down, opening it to the night air. The birds saw their chance, as birds do, and launched out the window like a steady stream of water.

L— made a small, meager attempt to convince the birds to stay with him. But as all of the parakeets and chickens and the one parrot flew out the window, and as it became startlingly clear which way the wind was blowing here, L— began chasing after his fleeing mass of avian subjects with his arms spread wide like wings, as if he too were preparing for take-off, but instead of taking flight he crashed square into the latch, cracking his nose loudly, falling to the floor, face down, making a noise like a dying engine.

“God damn it,” said S—, looking between E— and I. We tried to pick him up but L— said “no, go away,” and refused to get up, continuing to lay face down on the floor.

There wasn’t a bird left in the room except for the large hen, Helen, who was in the corner hiding from the rotund little cat that was prowling the room with razor thin eyes, now finally in the kingdom of its desire. We kneeled next to L— and asked quietly if he was (um) if he was alright. He said he couldn’t stand up even if he wanted to. The paramedics arrived eventually and they checked his pulse, stuck a q-tip up his nose, and they scratched their chins through their face masks as the results came through and gazing around vaguely at the chaos in the room what with the bird droppings and the feathers and everything. They told L— eventually that his laying down here was of his own free will. Or it wasn’t covid-19, at least.

“It’s my own fault that my face is connected to this carpet?” L— asked the carpet.

“Yes,” the paramedics repeated, informing him there was nothing wrong with him but that there might have been some psychological misteps that could (and should, they clarified) be addressed under a therapist’s guidance. After the paramedics were gone, clearly somewhat startled by the farmhouse state of the living room, the rest of us turned L— over.

On his back now, still laying on the floor, his nose slightly purple at the bridge, L— transformed into something twisted and mangled, to be given away by his body language alone, a tortured soul in the shape of a person.

His light was fast extinguishing. We could all see it happening. Something dark and dangerous. A disaster. Someone had to stop this. Whatever heroes we had left to trust, their phones pinged and they were en route. The UW Chancellor urgently called the authorities telling them what was happening — certainly they were on their way. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were racing in. The Scooby Doo mystery team had just unmasked a villain, and the reveal pointed towards the direction of L— losing the world, or the world losing L—, and they were en route. Jack Reacher and Jack Ryan and all the Jacks from all the spy novels got in their paramilitary gear, ready to pull a nonlethal Seal Team Six operation to pull him out of his despair. Batman, cowl on, ran up the steps to his batmobile. Somewhere Wonder Woman was on a city block, winding up her Lasso of Truth, running like hell to the rescue. Somewhere Peter Parker pulled on his mask and Spider-Man swung through the tall buildings as fast as he could — time was of the essence. From the North Pole, Superman flew down like a jet, scanning the whole of Madison, Wisconsin with his x-ray eyes to find whatever rupture had just happened there. Somewhere Iron Man suited up and made for the sky. In the UK, Harry Potter and his bombastic crew of posh magic-folk mounted broomsticks. Captain America rushed through a crowded city street, his shield up. Maybe he could have made it in time if everything hadn’t gone differently. Maybe. Almost. All of them were too late, though. It wasn’t the thought that counted then and it’s not the thought that counts now. This was an ending. Sad songs go like this. The damage had been done. The damage might never be undone. L— was gone.

In the year and a half I still lived in Madison after I graduated, I lived alone. Most of the roommates I weathered through the pandemic with had moved out of town and I became lonely enough to start talking to the moon.

Something about the pandemic broke me down too, reduced all my aspirations to false American dreams, murky shadows. What the hell would I do with a real job? What would I do in graduate school? Everything felt like a shadow of the old world carried over. Well here I am now. And I still feel broken in a way. I could blame the pandemic but maybe it’s just me. Maybe it took the pandemic to revealed me to myself; maybe it took the pandemic to reveal the world as a hollow bodied guitar still resounding yesterday’s chords making up a song no one believes in anymore.

Inspired by What Kingdom by Fine Grabol; Inspired by Birds by Bruno Schulz

Next week:

Thanks for reading How to get to new york season 2, brought to you by this laptop here and a couple dozen cups of coffee some of which were piping hot and most of which were forgotten at my desk for probably too long.

when i was born i weighed thirteen metric tons and have since shrunk down to a submissive one hundred and thirty-six pounds of muted colors and liminal pastiche, waking up in the middle of the morning to the birds screaming in from my windowsill, dragging themselves around the screen window like teabags, taunting me and making mild threats, chirping something in birdlanguage like “you’ve squandered your potential” or something else derogatory and mean-hearted.

oftentimes i’ll throw whatever is sitting on my bedside table at the window and roll over to try and fall back asleep until these aggressive feathered aviators inevitably discover the neighboring apartments can better keep their tempers in check, and so they flutter back to my windowsill where i’ll finally relent and — after maybe throwing something else at the window — give them what they want, their dues, a piece of stale white bread and a pat on the head.

so all the extra weight i was born with was almost entirely in my penis which said tally-ho! and left the planet when i was around six or seven, before i really knew what was going on, who i was, or what that was.

my great, long dong walked to the door, put on a baseball cap, said “oh mm hm don’t mind me just getting a pack of… mm… smokes!”, and left the house, actually (secretly) leaving for a rather well-documented trip (in local print, anyways) to the ISS aboard a BlueChew branded rocket that quickly lost course after takeoff and lost itself among the vacuum of space and perhaps also time.

my penis and the rest of the assorted genitalia aboard the spacefaring vessel, almost all of whom had found themselves pleased beyond belief at being trapped with one another in such a small sterile space, having a truly out-of-this-world parlay with one another within the terrible, cold vacuum of space — except, of course, for the melancholy two-and-a-half-incher in charge of general navigation, having completely flubbed its job at the get-go, finding itself with a rather severe case of ED for the duration of the expedition — eventually came crashing down on the planet neptune. and thank god for that! the tensions onboard were beginning to grow more and more rigid as pacts of monogamy broke between the genitalia and reformed into new pacts of monogamy, all of which, you can be reassured, were just bandaids slapped on top of what was by all means a two month long season of a gender fluid, X-rated The Bachelor in Space, and when the ship crashed down, there was an immediate relief and the tension dissipated against the neptunian landscape.

anyways, my penis lived on neptune for years and apparently it did quite well for itself among the neptunians and began blazing new & previously unrealized routes in decolonial theory, apparently, according to its longhand letters sent back to earth — my penis is a family member, after all, in a way — despite an obvious slight feeling of disappointment at having not crash-landed on venus or uranus instead.

when i was old enough to schedule myself for clinical appointments, only fourteen, i went to go see a urologist about my penis’s trip through intergalactic space and the urologist waxed poetic about the last time he died, completely changing the subject on me. “but,” i tried to interject, that wasn’t the reason i made this appointment. it was too late, though. the urologist was already gone off in his own dream. he ate some powder out of his pocket and was all lip about some epiphany i don’t at all understand at all which resulted in him now having developed a passion for collecting phalluses, rods, antennae, proboscises, penises, vaginas, and assorted bendy straws from around the globe, offering me a tour of his collections. “i think.. um,” i remarked at a picture he showed me on his phone held out in front of him. the doctor beamed. “wow,” i said. and then i remembered my penis was still on neptune and i became sad that he didn’t care about it.

(well, the last time i died i sent a text messages to a contact in my phone the moon asking for one more chat before i leave the planet for neptune to look for my long lost penis. the moon responded that there’s something wrong with you clearly if you think your um thing is on neptune. so here’s hoping that the next time i die the moon is full and helpful and not new and all judgemental like this.)

on the walk home from my trip to see the urologist, i had to swim through puddles having become lakes by the sheer amount of rainfall. lake charles, louisiana is nothing if not a place for pools and puddles trying to transition into full-blown bodies of water. i had to swim through a gulch that was once a sidewalk, swimming past the aligators minding their own business. when i returned home my mother picked all the leaches off of me while i cried from all the leaches that were on me.

my grandfather, in town for the weekend, collected the leaches in a shoebox and set it outside the front door for collection by the leach authorities. he had recently returned from his own interplanetary voyage which, i might add, caused outrage in the international ecological preservation community because of his callousness towards the at-risk and the endangered. three headlines were taped to the fridge, as my father was following his exploits with a quiet fascination over the years.

the newspaper clippings explaining the situation went as follows,

MATHEMATICALLY CAPABLE NINETY-YEAR-OLD GORILLA FOUND IN UGANDA: CAN MENTALLY COMPUTE MASSIVE SUMS IN STUDIES INVOLVING BANANAS

WISCONSIN MAN THINKS HE IS SPACESHIP, BREAKS FREE OF EARTH’S ORBIT

SPACESHIP MAN RETURNS FROM NINETY YEAR SPACE VOYAGE; REMAINING MOUNTAIN GORILLAS KILLED OFF BY HIS LANDING IN THE UGANDAN RAIN FOREST

anyways anyways, having chalked up my lost weight to a great and general loss from which i might never emotionally recover from, i’ve decided all i really want in life is to be a self-motivated schemer. i could make up for my (um) lack by becoming (um) filthy rich. deciding that the best self-motivated schemers seem to live in the big apple, i decided i would go there.

i went to college to try and scheme my way into a degree on big apples (english literature) but i didn’t scheme smartly enough, i suppose, and my diploma was delivered to an old, outdated address where someone else now uses my name and degree title to get all the jobs for themselves.

my alma mater refuses to send me another diploma. the person on the phone listens to my calls patiently when i ask for another diploma, they say “mhm”. i ask them whether i can swap out my degree for english for one in (idk) marketing — how hard could it be? — and they say that’s impossible and an insult to the integrity of the university and i say “oh it’s easy you can just change one of the words.” clearly the operator on the other. end is losing their patience so i try and explain that i’ve had a hard bout of things in terms of life generally what with my penis having been lost in space since i was six years old but at this point they usually hang up and i’m left alone without a penis or a diploma.

ever since i’ve resigned myself since to spectacle-ing myself to the slop economy. here i am spectacle-ing myself for you. i don’t really expect to find success in life and might as well have fun while i’m here. here are some cover letters i’ve written for various job postings on linkedin:

• “good afternoon. i found this on linkedin. i apologize if i come off as unprofessional here. just keeping it real. my name is griffin and i once wanted to be a copywriter. i don’t want to be a copywriter anymore because there are no copywriter jobs. do you have any copywriter jobs? i would say i’m asking for a friend but that would be a lie. thank you for your time.”

• “i would be interested in a job but i’m not interested in having a boss. do you have any jobs that fit this description? best wishes.”

• “when i was much younger than i am today my parents signed me up for the soccer leagues and whenever i goalie’d i would notice the ants going up and down their mounds of dirt in the grass and i would get on my hands and knees to watch the ants walking in a line. this shows i have strong attention to detail. i have tried to tell this at my last interview and they only asked me what i thought about advertisement and i said i don’t like commericals at all and they said they were looking at other candidates but would get back to me. this felt like a promising moment in my lifetime of moments. i felt a rush in that moment so i told them something dumb like i would throw away my television if they hired me so that i could be more focused at their company but they just looked at each other and asked me how on earth that would ever help my chances. thank you for your consideration.”

• “dear job dealer, i have never considered being a receptionist but these last two days it has become my life’s driving purpose/passion to become a receptionist but only at your company. if i could kiss being a receptionist i would kiss being a receptionist with tongue. i’m looking forward to meeting to talk about the position, griffin.”

• “please delineate me. i want to be streamlined. give me a job snorting up someone dead and their father’s powdered prestige. i’m worthless now because my father is not being sold on the online marketplace. let me bury myself in your company. maybe i could be profound. profoundly yours, griffin.”

• “this is a robbery. give me all your jobs.”

• “i thought i had it all figured out once but now i know that i don’t have it figured out and all i need to figure it all out is a job at your company. i once had a lot of cool friends who would dance and sing but i couldn’t get myself out of my own head or my own feelings of guilt and so i had to go through a long isolation just to get myself to a place where i felt it alright to reenter the company of people who i look up to. i think i could look up to you. would you care to look down on me? my qualifications is that i can read, write, and my penis flew to neptune on a bluechew rocket. i think this makes me a perfect candidate to be an administrative assistant. i have always wanted to be an administrative assistant since yesterday. thank you, griffin.”

• “the other day i was reading rodgrigo duterte’s wikipedia page. the 16th president of the phillipines, a nationalist populist who was elected in 2016 and retired from politics with a surprisingly high approval rating (but who’s doing the counting there?) only to be shortly thereafter arrested by the International Criminal Court for his crimes against humanity. In his war on drugs campaign he urged police to kill drug addicts and said he would pardon the police if they did and, well, it turns out the police took such an offer at its complete face value and killed almost thirty thousand people over five years. he was arrested in manila and now lives in a prison in the hague. this is all not good but it’s interesting stuff and i would be happy to talk to you more about it you gave me a job to talk to you about it. you could give me a job of telling you about other places too. this could work. please give me money so I can pay my rent.”

if you want to use any of these to apply for jobs, feel free. maybe they’ll work for you. i don’t know. stranger things have happened.

for instance, in the morning the other day i was sleeping in and i dreamt that i was at the sleep store and that you were there too. i had to use the bathroom while the sleep customers all lined up and pointed at sleeps under various brand names behind the counter, arranged neatly in little boxes. the sri lankan man at the register checked i.d.’s. when i woke up i realized i was all out of cigarettes so i walked to a 7/11 and asked if they sold any jobs there. the man behind the register shook his head, no.

dejected, on my way out the door, i heard the atm machine cough and sputter and start beatboxing at me. “what on earth do you want?”, i asked it.

the atm spoke to me in a breathy voice: “if you’re not a part of the “in-crowd”, you are part of the “out-crowd” and nothing you could possibly do would be right. kafkaesque would be right. if you are on the outside of the centrifuge of this, you’re doomed from the get-go: you’re nothing but a guilty embarrassment. i’m just speaking as someone close to the center of the centrifuge.”

i took this to heart, hung my head about being on the outside of the centrefuge and walked around until i ran into C— and L— getting back from playing arcade games at an arcade bar where scantily clad octogenarians, to the dismay of the bartenders and barbacks, climb on top of the arcade machines and dance to samba tunes from the 90s. we decided to get drinks at a nearby jazz bar. they said i looked like i could use one or two.

i know L— only a small bit because L— and i, last July, snuck into the republican national convention and, in an attempt at something resembling a prank, we passed around pamphlets titled “why i want to fuck donald trump”.

in the end, though, the prank failed because the pamphlets were taken at such face value that three or four overweight men in patchwork three-piece suits began to cry anxious tears, saying they finally felt seen, they had been waiting so long for someone to make an argument about why the president’s sexually appealing, having obviously not read the pamphlet yet. but that’s not the—, i was about to say something about oh it’s a prank before L—caught my eye and shook his head, patted me on the shoulder and later said “we did great,” but i wasn’t so sure. we drifted apart for a while.

at the jazz bar, i talked to C— and L— about notes apps. we all agreed that there was some new sort of artistic expression to someday emerge out of them, not anything that fits into the twentieth century’s media categories but rather something new and more in your face, more novel and modern.

smoking outside the bar a bit later, we saw a large man get thrown out of a nearby bar for throwing a barstool at the wall(?), his toupee slipping off his head and sticking to his jacket, caught on the velcro. he walked slowly up to the three of us to discuss in serious terms how all of this was happening because ariana grande licked a donut in 2015 and because she said “fuck america” she cast a sort of dark incantation over the land. “she’s a witch man… wicked, you know?” and he made a motion like ohmygodman and we all said variations of yeah, uh-huh, hm, nods. i couldn’t take my eyes off the toupee stuck to his shoulder like a black pet squirrel.

“i don’t think ariana would do that to us on purpose,” the man clarified in ariana’s defense. he continued on saying that if we really wanted to fix this country we would need to (1) deport ariana grande, and (2) end affirmative action. C— asked what affirmative action had to do with anything.

the man put two sausage fingers on his chin, “let’s say an american agro bro and a russian agro bro meet in a bar. the american agro bro talks a lot of shit, points. the russian guy says nothing but by the end of the night the american is on the floor. the idea of a russia manosphere is nothing short of frightening. think for a minute about it, when did that happen? when did american men start becoming less men than the sissie russians, man? like the commies, comeon! we need a manosphere that can compete, right here. we need a manosphere that can fight.”

“hm,” i said, rubbing my chin, mirroring.

“well anyways now that i’ve got your attention, i want to show you something.” the man reached into his pocket and held something between cupped hands.

“um.”

he opened his hands and showed us a supplement.

“let’s just” L— said. “get out of here.”

“what?”

“i’m sorry i just fucking hate manosphere stuff,” L— said, giving a shrug.

“hey HEY i don’t want to hear it,” the man with the black toupee still on his shoulder said. i was immediately reminded of humpty dumpty before the fall. “i’ll have you know that i flew to neptune and back,” the man said as we walked away. “now i’m working for discover card. i sell product. i push product. i am atlas. watch me shrug. i make the economy run. what the fuck have you done with your life?”

suddenly, like a jolt, i realized that this was not just any mere man — oh no no no — standing in front of me, here on milwaukee avenue was my long estranged penis returned. he didn’t recognize me but why would he? i was six when he left. he had flown to neptune and returned, likely having gone through some time warp fuckery like matthew mcconaughey in interstellar, at least based on his age, and now here he stands. i had no desire to make it clear we had been cut from the same cloth so i kept my mouth tight and shut.

after this little outburst, we started walking. i was more or less leading the way. my penis continued to yell incoherently and pound his fists on the brick wall; he tore down a plastered poster for the new Carti album, saying “you’re not music I AM music.” and eventually once we were out of his range, we continued talking about notes apps and what it could mean for artistic expression.

together, talking, walking, the three of us came to a certain point of contention with one another but against ourselves, namely: none of us will likely ever truly write a great book because the book is a dead art form — this was declared a while ago (the death has been much bemoaned) but even moreso the novel probably should die: hasn’t the nineteenth and twentieth century been a good run for the format? and certainly the novel will always persist (as has poetry in new and exciting forms) but are there no other long-form written forms to discover and explore? nothing new to create? is the novel the end of the road and there’s to be nothing but an increasing, rapidly multiplying whirlpool of shorter and shorter content? — or are there new long forms and styles just waiting to be invited to party?

in a way, the internet has made the book form obsolete as firepowder made medieval walls obsolete. there’s no protecting the town anymore against maruders when they have cannons, when this wolf can huff and huff and blow your house down. what is a book but a protectionary vessel? containing a small pool of interior writing reliant upon the body of the rest to validate and clear itself of all charges?

throughout the history of the written word, the book has almost always been compared against itself, in most every situation. the age of mass reproduction allowed books to be everywhere, though, to begin to be compared with one another, a culture of literary review slowly began to gather steam which borges’ work would one day come to subvert at its cultural pinnacle before all roads lead to a postmodern disintegration (or is it a heat death? maybe a siesta?).

it’s difficult to imagine comparative literature departments before the age of mass printing. the novelty of the book form still protected the contents from the outside world, the book form maintained a separation of its contents from the world. but this paradigm is over. at long last, language has killed the book. the book form has been murdered not by the written word, necessarily, and not even by the spoken word, but rather by the cybernetic word.

there is no protection that a book can give itself anymore if it’s written after the event of iphone photos, notes apps, tweets, captions, and blog posts that use the same words and connect to one another as an established whole — cyberspace, if you will — which, through the users,, lays siege on whatever isolated work outside its domain. the spirit inside the machine, the liberated, freeflowing language of the internet yearns to be all consumptive: a book, isolated away, poses a threat to that project of cybernetic language (spoken or written in compressed yet immediately accessible form) properly eclipsing reality. the novel form died because writing won the war. writing won the war in terms of what was most immediately accessible and profitable — books never stood a chance.

remember what happened with lena dunham’s biography? the whole of a book cannot protect bits of it from being taken out of context, and when a book on-its-own-terms is attempted, disaster may be soon to follow. despite headlining one of the more pervasive satires of the 2010s, dunham career hasn’t recovered from the outrage of what seemed to be one off offcolor joke in a comedy book? an insane slip-up that, of course, has to be seen as to represent a broader trend in media.

after the book, now’s a time of giants and monsters. shadows. here we are, living underneath the shadows of collective fictions unbound to the page and floating around us every moment of every day. cybernetic language is great at developing shadows in the margins. steinbeck wrote in his profile for the paris review that a big book has an undeniable power, it’s a mass that can wedge itself into your life, can become a companion as you grow over the span of a couple months’ time, can be lifted up and down by each arm to make each bicep bigger and bigger. but new forms towards similar ends are possible… think of podcasts that lean towards year’ long intellectual projects, newsletters that construct worldviews piece by piece over months and years, musical careers charting new routes every year… there’s so much ground to cover… there’s so little time to be alive… really, you might as well find something new and try and make it your own… if we’re to be trapped in a new world forcibly detached from our own methods of mediation and long-form humanity, shouldn’t we make new ones that can survive? we need new projects; we can take the spirit we found in old books of our nostalgia, but we have to bring it into something new.

“i just worry about legitimacy,” L— said, as we were talking about the above. “Like i think what holds me back in part is that my parents wouldn’t see ‘exploring the podcast format’ as a career path, you know?”

i said i worry about content, how there’s already enough of it. and on this topic, we all returned place where we talked and smoked a joint inside and danced around a small coffee table to some wonderful content: Handsome Dancer’s Coincidance.

i felt strange and wonderful. afterwards, collapsed on the couch, scrolling through my notes app, i told C— and L— that my notes app has somehow diagnosed me with every mental disorder under the sun but now everything is good, everything feels fine, i feel wonderful. “i worry that my notes app has been in cahoots with the hiring community, though,” i added. “maybe that’s why no one’s responded to my applications.”

“could be your cover letters too,” C— said.

“it really could be that, yeah.”

L—, not paying any attention to me, gazing out the open window at the slicked back world, fresh with a spattering of summer rain, said to me: “it’s crazy to imagine lewis and clark ever dying. it’s crazy to imagine the wright brothers ever dying. the mario brothers…”

“what?”

“what?”

“the mario brothers?”

and L— just said, “lewis and clark and the wright prothers. whatever,” and, now drunk enough to survive the fall, he escaped, climbing out the window of the third floor and landing in a bush with a FWUMP. he climbed out of it, brushed leaves off from his pants, and gave a thumbs up at me and C— standing, gawking. we cheered, clapped. L— stood there beside the street, beaming. he looked both ways, and crossed the road after a Subaru passed by.

i fell asleep on the couch soon after and slept with a supernatural depth of dream but at the same time it could have been the moment i moved on from my loss of my penis as it had become such an obnoxious, embarrassing manosphere influencer that i wouldn’t (to this day) want anything to do with it.

quick cut now! to the cast of this week’s episode kissing their hands, just like the weekly credits of snl, under the massive yellow-lit sign saying SEE YOU SOON. see you soon. until next time. roll credits.

inspired by the poetry and prose of Mark Baumer

Next week:

Having figured dinner parties fall under the unwritten Habeas Corpus that hangs dry and sordid over places like Chicago in January, I went slipping and sliding down Lincoln Avenue to a dinner party hosted above a doggy daycare outfitted like a Starbucks that smelled like a sandwich shop.

I dodged past an elderly man in a bright red ski suit cruising downhill on cross country skis while I was stepfooting across the street, trying like hell not to slip. He had come rocketing down along the bike path, making it really hard not to slip, yelling like hell wearing round dark goggles and a wide mouth with teeth bared. I watched him disappear over the hill, the dopler effect moving off and away, and I felt a chill like a draft had seeped through my jacket.

Snow came down in sheets and bursts and spurts and waves and concertos and ensembles and shy horsehair strings played quick but without resin, pale whispers and greyed colors grow like shadows. Winter. The most wonderfull time of the yeaaar! The most winter of winters. Cars slid into red lights. The line between the sidewalk and the road became smooth white patted down by footsteps and plows. Because plows went by, making a godawful noise and pushing together white mounds at intersections, each shaped like the sphinx — a separate sphinx for each intersection, all across Chicago. Tight huddles passed me by in the general shapes of people going the other way, michelin men of down and polyester I imagined throwing themselves into cardboard boxes when they returned to their apartments and mini houses. They could ship themselves off somewhere warmer, anywhere warmer, after paying a small fee.

The street was in a shadow and some sun hit the buildings piercing through the clouds painting the brick gold. Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) hits me like a cinder block from an overpass. Nostalgia for the sun. When the memory of the sun seeps away, where does it reappear? In the dark? Late winter is a sludge salted served under clouds. Everything’s dark, clouded, mumbled. Fumbling with gloves I can’t think to use my phone on long walks like this. It’s just me and a barren gray city as gray as it’s ever going to be. It’s a sad eternity. Winter is the oldest season by far. On wandering meanders around the neighborhood I’ll pass by a set of footprints in the snow, marks from the same thrifted Pumas I’m wearing now, and it takes me a small moment to remember these are my shoes. I’m going in circles, it seems. As if this snow and I have met before… Snow remembers footsteps longer than a puddle could ever imagine.

Underneath the sun so painting the dull world I thought to myself Well, if I can’t find peace here at least allow me a bitter glory until I can find peace again. And I spent twenty minutes picking out socks for this dinner party. I shaved and everything.

There’s nothing like a gathering of twelve friendly strangers to warm a place up. Warm like the inside of a glove, lined with rabbit fur. Warm like the insides of a bed. Warm like bottles of wine on bottles of wine. Warm like candlesticks. Warm like The Incredible Shrinking Man playing in the flat screen with the sound off. I— brought his camera along. S—, in the other room, finished chopping cucumbers, brought the bowl to the center of the table. D— poured another glass of wine. B— had brought Oreos (a rare example of a vegan and gluten free snack). and L—, having recently secured a job after months of a dire and desperate unemployment, sat celebratory in the center of the table.

At the very start of things, the winter still feeling young and fresh — the classic early December feeling — the snow coming down outside was still more of an aesthetic than it was an existential threat or all-consuming greyness. The conversation was good enough that I can hardly remember any of it looking back. Such is the sign of a good time that cotton balls grow around memory.

Just past I— and S— sat a large mexican-american man with a small mustache and a comically overfilled glass of wine, who had had a hellish fall, it seemed like. C—, as it turned out, had grown up with his grandfather, rather young for a grandfather, a man who took to both a strong penchant for Chardonnay and an overwhelming thirst which went well beyond it. C— himself avoids sparkling white wines specifically because of this. He claimed the affliction to clear wine is a genetic trait and so he avoids the stuff like the plague. He explained to us, “white wines represent a promise impossible to fulfill whereas reds are more comfortable in themselves. You know?” We nodded somewhat. L— sat back and threw his hands up.

C—’s old man, as he continued to explain, was in the business of selling trash compactors and other large metal things that constricted and contracted and rumbled and shook when in use, heavy machinery that shouldn’t be operated while under the influence, even the smallest bit. The smallest he sold direct from factory was a line of pastel colored garbage disposals; the largest was an industrial furnace the size of a Dollar General. This business created a bit of a conundrum for his grandfather, the alcoholic geriatric that he was, as he himself wasn’t legally allowed to operate any of what he sold. But this contradiction ended neatly as he came up with now-copyrighted tagline “I’m too drunk to touch any of this!” on his business cards, a phrase which, believe it or not, had bumped up the overall sales of waste disposal systems by 3% even if it caused a 0.8% drop in sales of cardboard compactors for whatever reason.

When the old man finally died, C— had been left quite a hefty inheritance in place of any real memories of the man. Three different nannies had raised him. He mentioned then that his biological parents resurfaced a couple months ago, tried to make amends for not being a part of C—’s life, and had wrecked havoc on his social life by asking him repeatedly for money, showing up at bars where he worked and taking free drinks until they were sloppy and falling all over the place off of white wine, and now he considered himself lucky, he said, that he had come out of the encounter in one piece and not crashing out considerably.

The heart is truly made of strong stuff; it’s nothing soft, oh great wad of muscle the heart. Like the human being, the heart is not only a stone island but a canoe of meat too. You and I are both bound together to this brute fact: we are both flesh surrounding an archipelago of organic rock, these bones. How mortifying a thought to be only flesh and bone. It’s a fear-realization feeling natural in the dog days of winter. We’re all in this together, though, at the very least, and that includes the trees showing us their skeletons.

Across the table from C—, still sipping his red wine, B— stood from her chair and scooped green beans onto a china plate. In college, she said later in the night, she wanted nothing more than to be a prolific enough marine biologist to one day release a coffee table book filled with underwater photography, nature facts, findings, the works, etc., only to give up on the dream of marine biology once and for all after her summer internship two years back involved taking four dead dolphins out of the massive plastic bags which they were collected in on a beach near Fort Lauderdale to poke at and prod with metal tools and rods to test their blubber for Fentanyl.

Around the same time as the dolphin postmortem (which came back very, very positive, I might add), her boyfriend of four years had texted “you don’t love me do you,” and their relationship had slowly evaporated under the Florida sun over the course of four months. It was apparently a long four months. Untangling visions of the future into something new to knit — perhaps a scarf — she had been taking her time since graduating to reconfigure herself and figure out a new set of aspirations. She was still, from what she was saying, trying to figure out a new cross-section for herself to stitch.

In terms of people around the table who’d had fantasies detatch themselves, I— had made the move to New York in the early spring of last year only to spend the entire summer and fall urgently rushing door dash orders from restaurants to apartments to try and pay for half a bedroom the size of a broom closet. Phone in his hand on his bike without having much time to look around him and take in the city he’d always dreamed of living in, he dodged Eric Adams’ select breakdancing corps of the NYPD who had the time of their lives last summer, blocking streets and gathering up crowds of tourists to gather and gawk and attempt audience participation with the tourist families all together singing Bruno Mars’s Uptown Funk while he was simply trying to get this Five Guys burger to a seventh floor apartment on the upper East side while it was still warm and it was a rare feat that he could pull off such a thing in the central crammings of Manhattan. He realized gradually with his own two eyes and ears, New York City might be dead huh. Since he moved back to Chicago, he’s taken to running dinner parties and scheming out an indie monthly print publication that could fill coffee shops because he can afford food here.

I was taken aback by all this. Everyone was telling the rest about themselves in such sincerity. I was surprised how startling it was to hear anyone narrate their own personal tragedies to a group of friendly strangers! My only story of the night was from my old apartment, back when I was nineteen. My bedroom was a former attic space attached to the apartment below, the stairs leading down to the living room which was being used at the time by one of my roommates to watch a long stream of Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes with the girl he was seeing on the couch next to him. They were sharing an ice cream pail and I had to use the bathroom so terribly that my feet paced themselves back-and-forth in my room where I had been trying to sleep a couple minutes before, too embarrassed and coy to make my appearance like a dark specter in the living room to have to pee again, and because I had already gone pee an hour earlier and didn’t want to have to make justifications for my weak bladder, which soon began stabbing me with spikes. Underneath the sound of Larry David saying “pre-ttay pre-ttay pre-ttay good.” coming through the door, I pissed into a potted aloe vera I kept by the stairs. The plant later died from this disgusting affront to its integrity and later I switched my major to Botany for three semesters, I think because I was trying to make amends and I have always loved plants but never been good with them…

After I had finished this story to a rather silent table (I had been hoping for what? A laugh?), we all sat around contented and plump from all the wine and gyros and we noticed the snow falling outside had only increased in its falling. It drew our eyes one at a time. The window was a white sheet; waves of snow brushed against it ever so softly as the flakes were big. We stood and gathered around the pane, looking out on the Chicago streets having become a barren wasteland of snow with the occasional snowmobile whizzing past or a CTA bus dutifully blowing through, half submerged in the white. The city seemed empty, abandoned. It felt vaguely apocalyptic. The sun had set fully. “I guess I can text my parents I won’t be making it home for the holidays,” B— said under her breath. The waters were rising, only they were frozen and crystalline.

I don’t mean to cause any trouble by saying it, but people used to be happy here in Chicago. Only a few months ago the city was teeming with life. The summertime, the falltime, even Halloween, all of it is wonderful here in the city. I have to hope deep down that the people here will be happy again here, one day.

The winter is a cruel joke. Who can really say they’re cozy in the wintertime when they’ve filled their lives with such busywork and mandatory distraction that they build a moat around themselves, keeping them from ever truly knowing themselves? To survive winter I drown myself in media and weed and nicotine.

The sun reflects off of the snow three stories below my bedroom, blanketing the space in an unnerving whiteness. While the summer sun makes for an ecstatic companion, so elastic like a rubber band, the winter sun is a dreadful florescent overhead: life support for the Earth. The winter sun is behind this, I want to say, ignoring the tilt of the Earth. It’s because of the winter sun that this time as dark and cold a meditation of the futility of life as only a mid-century hospital is really capable of.

And worse, the winter makes me into a mummy. I feel geriatric in the winter; deeply depressed at worst, mildly anxious at best. Mealy mouthed, dried out, decomposed, I shuffle to close my curtains every morning. The sun is a cold laser. I’m a corpse. Am I sinking? I am sinking. Am I floating? I am floating. Which would be worse? I’m not the one to ask. How to survive winter? Clean your room: there’s your easiest answer. If you want a more complex one, get out of your apartment for a bit. Find somewhere else to be bored.

And I found a good place to be bored that night of the dinner party and when such a thing happens, night loses its situation within time and time itself begins to transpire in secret. The unbearable block between my eyes and my brain that develops in the winter had dissolved when confronted with other people’s own blocks dissolving. What an idea. Solidarity against poor weather and brain fog.

We forgot about the window and returned to our conversation, the night became morning and the morning became night again and we were still seated, all of us still around the table, the food still fresh, and the wine still pouring like the snow still poured outside, clouding up the windows and the whole world felt contained. No one wanted to leave. A question floated unacknowledged in the air too as to whether we could leave. The outside world became more and more clearly inhospitable the longer we sat around the table. The snow was certainly well past the door in and out of the apartment complex by this point. Before we knew it the clock had made two rounds and with the sun setting, as it does, ushering in a second night of the same dinner party, the dogs downstairs in the doggy daycare began to howl and whine and winnow their voices and we joined them, wine mad, howling, and the dogs downstairs waited a beat before responding in turn.

But: “wait, did you hear that?”, I— asked. We wall went quiet except for B— who broke into a coughing fit from all the howling. We waited, and there it was again: a slight, tinny hum. From the floorboards. “I think it’s coming from… over here.”

S— crouched in the corner, pointed to one of the floorboards. I— nodded. S— pulled up a board from the floor and looked at us for a moment, smiling. It sounded like a phone in the floorboards. It was a phone in the floorboards. He pulled out an iPhone 4 covered in dust out from the floorboards with two fingers, rumbling off the dust, a comically small phone now in today’s age of giant (but so so thin) consumer electronics. He placed the phone on the table between a bowl that had once contained chopped tomatoes and a half-emptied half-gallon of Yellow Tail pink moscato. We all gathered around the phone, baffled and chatting. Manic, exasperated… Shane was calling. Shane?

After the buzzing stopped, we noticed “Shane” had left over two hundred messages over the past eight years. There was no passcode on the phone — “Were there even passcodes on phones back then?” I wondered out loud — and the background was still the iOS “blueprint” wallpaper which framed the apps which gleamed like light was reflecting on them. The phone hadn’t apparently been updated since 2012 but the two hundred or so messages had kept track of time since, ranging from innocuous “how are you?”s and “hey”s to more assertive “Hey”s, almost all of which came from this Shane number

And since everything before 2012 had been wiped from the phone, whatever this relationship had once been, we could only see it in its far away, one-sided echo. Whatever it had been, and it very much was a “had been”, it had apparently driven whoever owned the phone to bury it deep in the floorboards. I’d never seen anything like it.

“Shane” left a new voicemail then, while we were all crowded around the phone like a pack of chimpanzees having discovered an ipod in their travels and having heard American Idiot for the first time, we’re now hooting and hollering, excited suddenly at this notification for the voicemail from this Shane guy. We listened: “Hey Georgia, I’m really not in a good place right now, if you could pick up I would love to…”

And we didn’t end up doing much anything with the phone. There was a moment there, in passing, where we considered texting back and pretending to be “Georgia” but as a group we decided it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. Occasionally L—, sitting closest to the phone, would reach over to unlock it, scroll through it with some sort of mute fascination, and sigh to himself, and put it back.

It pinged again twice the next day of the dinner party — day three — with an “i’m sorry about that voicemail,” and “if you really want to bury me you should bring a shovel”. Yeesh. But hey. To a certain extent, I get it. Winter is hard. Becoming lost in the sauce of recollection and melancholy is a poor place to swim for months on end. Sometimes we reach our wits end and the only thing to do is to reach out even when we know we’re unwanted; sometimes we bury our phones because our exes keep texting us; sometimes we bury our heads in the sand, or blankets, or in one another, until a Springtime of the soul finally turns its green ecstatic face our way.

We forgot about the phone gradually, since outside the snow continued to pour down and the general vibes inside were beginning to grow more manic.

Winter is an essential mediation between the highs and lows of the social year but the season breaks, dutifully though harshly in terms of its long-drawn out pauses, the illusion that our social lives could ever be a constant flow and not the dynamic living things that they are.

Extensions of ourselves, our social lives grow and decay in accordance to natural cycles. This drives me, at least, to manic holding and non-relinquishing. If we are to survive winter every year, over and over again, we must learn to let go of everything and rely on what we need to return to, what we need to regrow with improved hardiness come Spring. What is an ellipses but a series of dots who’ve lost their attention and stand waiting in line, bored… There is going to be no end… no resolution to their plight… We have to leave them behind… their thoughts unfinished… It is their purpose, after all, to allude…

Winter is best when a candle flickers, when the candles sputters and coughs up. The winter is best when I can trade in my digital eyes for real ones. But eventually even the paper becomes oppressive. The winter is best when the other side of your pillow is cool enough to flip around and rest your head against, the feathers becoming warm against the grain of the hair on your head. The winter is best when you’re dressed the part: in a gigantic scarf. The winter is best when it is toiled around inside of (you: a motor’s piston back and forth; your home: a machine keeping active despite the desolation surrounding it) until the ravens gather outside the third-floor apartment directly across the street from yours, all of them (a concerning number of ravens — and you forgot how big the birds are) peeping in the window directly across the street to something you can’t quite see from your own window, something secret and out of sight. You wonder out loud did someone die? and you wait for an ambulance to prove your case, suddenly forced again to come to terms with your eventual mortality and that you’re betting on someone else having lapsed in theirs and expired from this world. Winter is best when you can sleep at night.

Statues darken under the weight of the snow. There’s no one to look to except yourself. And you’re so sick of seeing yourself in this light.

Heavy and white, the sun keeps me moving. My heart beats all winter and I can hear every beat because the doors in my ears have closed for the season. The heart is an audible puzzle box; speaking in binary, its beating soaks whatever ear is cupped to my chest: quick, what do you hear? ThudthudthudthudThisThursday. This thursday? What’s this thursday? That’s a question for you and not for me. What is this thursday? But alas! It’s already Friday! Too bad, loser. Thursday’s already passed us by. We let our leaves rustle for too long and now the trees are all bare and dead-looking. We let our thoughts wind themselves into the dirt like signposts declaring a thought died here. The snowflakes came down and stuck to the sidewalk, covered up everything like bedsheets over a scandal, building up into massive formations, wonders of the wintertime world, and the snowmen created begin to move on their own…

The dinner party continued into its second week. L— had to leave the dinner party, eventually. His manager had threatened him over text with a bad time, i.e. unemployment, after L— didn’t show up for his shift on Thursday, and he announced to all of us with a wave of his hands that he was leaving because he desperately needed this job but that he wouldn’t be gone forever so please don’t worry about him after he’s gone.

We tried to convince him to stay, the winter wasteland outside wasn’t looking great, for instance, but he wouldn’t stand for it. “Everyone leaves the dinner party at some point,” he reasoned. “I’ll be back. I really need to get paid.” We all agreed with this logic, getting paid was important, and so together we fashioned a rope made of kitchen towels so he could escape (the downstairs door was sealed tight by the snow) and a pair of snow shoes made of tennis rackets. He descended out the window onto the snow, which I might add was now a little over eight feet, or two and a half meters, with a crunch and we watched him trek away into the white yonder.

“Let us know how your first day was!” B— yelled his way. “Text us!”

L— turned to wave. He was bound head to toe in scarves and jackets so he didn’t even try to say anything but he did wave, gave us a thumbs up. A minute or two after he disappeared into the snowfall, we watched a massive creature made out of snow move slowly past the window, down Lincoln, wading through the snow as if it were high water. From the window we watched this (um) thing move past and after it was out of earshot we slammed the window shut, checking out the blinds to make sure its eyeless face hadn’t turned our way. Fully now out of food now and slightly panicked and biding our time in this apartment where we had been trapped for weeks by this point, hunger became a raw boredom. After he left, we never saw L— again. We eventually ate the dogs down in the doggy daycare.

I used to run every day. I’ve been flighty for years. Escaping made-up situations in my head in most cases is just a justification for running away as much as I do, but knowing that doesn’t stop me from finding some way to justify my escape. It might be confirmation bias to think I’m in the right, that I was “escaping” anything at all except for real human feelings and commitments (big and small)…

But at the end of the day, sometimes you need to confirmation bias. A dreary wintertime and a sense of solipsism is a disastrous combination. Let yourself be drawn away to far horizons when you need to be. Let yourself be reminded there are stars in the sky. There’s no reason not to let your daydream sing quietly to you from the insides of your own head but don’t think for one second that that makes you unique or that the daydreams of others won’t ever harmonize with your own.

Spring arrived quietly, eventually, and all at once. I had been idling by the window with my head in my arms leaned up against the window frame when it happened. This was the third month of the same dinner party. I don’t have words for the things I had seen outside in the haze of winter over the course of those three months, the homeric battles between men riding dogsleds, great duels between jacketed men wielding golf clubs, the annihilation of a cybertruck underneath the massive flat foot of a snow golem. The list goes on. I remember B— had eagerly taken pictures of the many wintertime monstrosities that passed the windows, rediscovering the idea of producing a bestselling coffee table book, but after the fact no publisher would publish the photos, accusing her of generating the photos of Midjourney.

Meanwhile, C— had gone fully and properly wine mad by this point, a couple months into the dinner party, his latent genetic alcoholism causing him to clear out the pantries and try eventually to invade the neighboring apartments in the building who happened to have prepared for just this exact situation, having barred their door with wood nailed into the floor. After C— knocked, a small note slid out from under the door saying “no wine for u.” And once C— began to pound on the apartment’s door with his shoulder and knee, we would hear a cackling from inside and a “good try, boyo! this white’s allll mineeeee,” which would only enrage C— all more and he would return red and puffy-faced to the apartment where I— and I would talk him down from punching a hole in the drywall.

The shock of it the winter had lost its flavor by this point. It became mundane. Slow. Plodding. The whole winter being what it was, it became drab. We were still here, all in the same three bedrooms, living room, and kitchen, but we were only quietly here now. We were not wine drunk. We were not ecstatic. We were not well fed. We were not happy anymore by each others’ company, we were only occupying it. We were growing old. I had felt my the block between my eyes and my head begin to regrow.

Sunrise was approaching, though. A new day broached the horizon as I leaned into the window’s sill. Well here it was. Spring was coming, alright. The snow down the street was beginning to sag and to melt. I sat up in the window. I watched a snow person throw up its snow arms in defeat to the rising sun, beginning to melt its body into the Earth and the greedy mouths of the Honey Locusts up and down the avenue.

Over the East hill, the direction from which the mass melting came, I heard a familiar sound; a distant screaming, growing out of the warmth. Here he was again, the same old man in a red tracksuit and goggles who had nearly plowed over me in cross-country skis just months before, now jogging slowly but steadily the opposite way, from the East instead of from the West. Instead of wearing the ski-suit he now wore a bright red Adidas tracksuit, yelled in a single screeching note like he was a megaphone and he held his arms up while running, pulling the grey winter along with him, the winter peeling off of everything like a sticker to reveal, underneath it all, a blue and green world.

Inspired by the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and the Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. I write this in early March… but I write for you, in June. Here’s hoping this piece, now written, can become a length of twine to haul my small wooden vessel back to summertime through the thick fog of a back-and-forth, truly undressable springtime.

next week:

But at the end of the day, eventually, I make my way home. Having denatured this atom for as long as I can stand, I’m finally sitting down with it to cultivate a flame, rubbing two twigs together until something goes. Something will spark. Eventually. Here’s hoping.

And with this spark my life will feel more alive, complete despite the unreality of our situation. And then a greater picture comes into clarity; enough of one to finally relax in a daydream and not feel like it oppresses our every movement. Untangle, denature — or should I say re-nature? — I want to be here for you like a potted plant, like a ficus in the window, like a vine across a brick wall. That’s what these words are to me. Are they anything else?

Teeth, perhaps? A jagged row of teeth all too natural — maybe needing some veneers for the screen, but then again I’ve moved past screens, I think. They don’t have the hold on me now that they used to. A life lived creates situations that you have to be an adult for — like the flaming lips said, “I’m a man and not a boy and there are things I can’t avoid/ you have to face them when you’re not prepared to face them” — and I find myself woefully unprepared. Every time. Fine. Whatever. Growing up is coming to terms with all of this and trying to be better prepared for the next time.

And then trees rebud with the spring, reminding us that a “next time” is, in fact, possible, and I feel myself growing again like a weed. The water is running. The tap is growing hot. It takes a while for the hot water to make its appearance. It takes a while for a pot to boil even if you’ve watched it for bubbles from across the room… the boil is coming and when it comes it will roll and overflow the pot… when it comes it’s threatening to put out the fire that started all of it…

Let us put a wooden spoon at the top of it, then, and see what happens. Maybe the flame underneath needs to die. Maybe I need to be free of it. I need to be free of this over leveraged feeling. Too many hats. Too many notifications. I can’t open my phone without feeling it linger over me like a feeling of impending gas attack. But I can not open my phone and then I feel the anxiety dissipate across my brain, a heat death, an entropic demon releasing energy out of the room. Here I am still in the room with a low murmur as my heart thuds along, I can see you clearly in my head even if I can’t see your face. Can you see me? It doesn’t matter unless it does.

I think I’ve found a friend group I can age gracefully with. We will certainly see if this is true (and certainly you’ll catch heavy whiffs if it’s not on this blog) but if it’s true that it takes 4 years to feel at home in any place you live, like one of my good friends from freshman year of college once told me, then my second year here in Chicago has been a startling success. Bandito hijinks. Crossword blues. The long cold winter is winding to a close. I’ll be here two years in October. Still some ways out, I suppose.

Birds chirp outside my window, it’s spring again!, but the garbage collectors skipped today and there’s a maelstrom of horse flies in my windows trying to break through the glass like they’ve already broken through the screen but these idiots can’t seem to find their way out through the way they came (smh!) and so they’re all buzzing and knocking about inside the glass like tiny vampires. Please come, garbage people. I need you. You’re my only hope. And it’s supposed to be nice out today. Let’s go get mimosas and find a nice patio somewhere in the city. I can tell you all about it,—

I want to grind up the world, I say while sipping my drink until brain freeze, put it in my pocket like a small spur of laundry’d paper towel. As the world’s been reduced to a flat surface, this idea — grinding up the world — seems likely to have become a relatively simple and innocuous task.

Something bugs me, though. I’m wearing a calico colored suit on this patio and everyone’s looking at me? No, no, not that. It’s that I didn’t dream a single dream last night. At least not any of my own. My legs are sore from walking so many miles in my sleep. Auditioning dreams until dawn I returned home empty handed. I just can’t imagine this thing I do matters very much. I find myself frightened off by the number of things I could be but in all that fright, I tend to forget I can only be this thing that I am and then I flip out and lean my head on the drywall and doze.

Botanical busy drywall. What a hole I could put through you. Is there life inside of you or only insulation? Would vines be released out if I punched you in? Or are your insides as dry as I could expect from any American wall? I don’t see what the point is. Of any of this. This way we’ve constructed a world for ourselves… What is the point of any of this? What does it want from us? I grind up the world and snort its ashes and what?

To dream of bikers on mars?

Cancerous proposition! The dream of colonizing mars should go up to the attic along with all the other old toys.

First of all: could you scarcely imagine the human rights violations that would go on in a Martian colony? Even if the idea of oldhead leatherclad motorcycle gangs roaring across the Martian steppe is blossoming in my head like the handpainted cover of a ‘50s pulp sci-fi magazine, one that I would gladly pick up for $5 at a used book store, the reality of “space exploration” will only ever be a sedative to keep our current system of capitalist production and consumption a tad bit more palatable for us as both of them continue to become more and more untenable, both for you and I as individuals living underneath an unceasing drive for profit, and for the planet’s climate as a whole, rapidly deteriorating under the strain of our production… Why worry about climate change when we can just one day move to a new world? They say. You could drive a Tesla-brand chopper on the red planet? Wouldn’t you like that?

Second of all: I hope Elon Musk slips and falls down a long set of stairs.

apple-

The Boston city streets were sweating with beads of water the same diameter as those on Dom’s forehead as he woke up from a deep sleep to the sound of the morning train shaking the glass of the french style windows just above his mattress laid out flat on the hardwood floor covered in wood shavings that reflected the morning sunlight, making the whole room into a loving and glowing gold-brown.

The bedroom was used by his uncle to carve small wooden horses, giraffes, and unicorns to fill shelves and cardboard boxes. Dom didn’t know where his uncle had gone off to but sensed deep down that he was not home. He couldn’t imagine his face when he tried. He rubbed his eyes awake — probably just to asleep to remember — and the window continued to rattle, glass on glass violence. He tossed and turned onto his side, and then “Ergh” onto the floor where he lay for a moment or two face down, breathing in and blowing out wood shavings. He got up.

The window continued rumbling. Glass thumping. He fumbled with the latch and pushed the window open and the rumbling dissipated and the cool morning air swept the floor clean of the wood shavings. Summer? Cricket songs swelled in the breeze. Summer again? Only yesterday it was Spring. He remembered the redwoods. The city outside the window was quiet and covered in dust. The clock towers and the three story constructions were all built in close conjunction. Cobblestone streets. Many stairs in the streets. Europe?

He pulled on a black shirt that had been tossed in the corner, found a rolled up pair of long white stockings, and wandered down the creaking steps out the front door in only the shirt, stockings, and blue striped boxers. He walked out onto the street, scratching himself and leaving the door cracked. The breeze pushed it back open, creaking. No one on the street. The sunlight felt nice. A gazelle wearing a mailman’s uniform passed with grace and a knowing eye. Dom watched it vaguely, now scratching just under his left eyebrow, until it was gone. Hm.

Walking, he saw Margarette and Seren sitting at a small patio on the sidewalk in the distance down the street. Seren waved. Dom waved back half of a wave before becoming distracted by a loud bang coming from an alleyway nearby, the sound of wings fluttering and another loud banging and a familiar voice making loud exclamations, hoos and has. Dom followed the sound behind the dumpsters and a cool breeze swept up through his boxers, making him shiver deeply but perfectly.

Of course it was Saunders. He stood perfectly still in full hunters’ attire behind a graffiti’d dumpster with an air rifle underneath his arm which he aimed at the pigeons fluttering about.

“Wha,—why?” Dom asked, again rubbing under his eyebrow.

Saunders steadied out another shot. “If I don’t someone else will.”

“Okay sure.”

“Did you find anything different in the forest this time?” Saunders asked Dom, firing again. Missing again. “You were gone for a long time.”

Dom looked up and down the alleyway and his eyes eventually rested on a camera mounted on the brick wall. “No,” he said.

Saunders said something of a sound that sounded like an agreement, a placid agreement like his mouth was all full of cotton spiraling out from his lungs. Hearing this, like he had caught a cold, Dom suddenly began to wheeze and cough and he coughed up a small piece of paper that quickly rolled away, pulled by the breeze before he could grab it and see what it said on its inside. Saunders, having watched the paper lop quickly away, looked at Dom dumbly, didn’t say a word, continued shooting at the pigeons.

Dom left the alleyway without saying another word and he stormed down the middle of the street towards the café patio where Seren and Margarette sat but four mopeds driven by black and white geese swerved by, the geese honking wildly at him for standing in the street. Dom yelled and shook his fist and swore. They disappeared in a roar of small motors harmonizing. One last goose, also on a moped, trying to catch up with the rest with its head swung low in concentration and honking at the now distant other geese, nearly bowled Dom over too before it disappeared out of sight. Dom continued yelling and waving his fist. He swore, screamed, threw his hands, stomped his feet, punched at the air, pulled his hair, collapsed on the curb, splayed his legs apart in the street and continued scratching under his left eyebrow like there was something buried underneath that wouldn’t come out.

Seren and Margarette sat only five paces from where he sat on the curb. “Whatt’s goin on,” Dom said once it clicked for him how close they were. Margarette shuffled her Tarot deck blithely and shrugged at the phone line strung over the street.

“Oh!” Seren said, as if this was a sudden encounter. “Nothing too much. Nice being here on such a nice day,” she said. Dom looked down at the cobblestone.

“Absolutely,” Margarette said, now sitting back with her paper coffee cup held between two hands. “The coffee here is quite good even if the cup design is a bit too much.”

She held out the cup. Dom stood and wiped his hands on his boxers and leaned forward over the table to look at the design on the cup, a large printed YUM covering the cozy.

“A little on the nose,” he said taking a seat. “Is it?”

“Is it what?”

“Is it Yum?”

“Mm yeah I suppose it is yum,” she said.

“Saunders is in that alleyway. He’s shooting pigeons.”

“Bit of a freak isn’t he.”

“Yeah but I’m not wearing pants so who’s the real freak here.”

Seren shook her head and hailed down the waiter, a large male bull wearing hornrimmed glasses, hooves clacking on the cobblestone. It approached wearing a brown apron under its neck. “Those sandwiches on the menu?” Seren asked the bull. “On the chalkboard? Mm do any of them have mm hummus?”

The bull looked amicably at the chalk sign, nodded.

“I’ll have whatever that is,” she said.

The bull nodded again and disappeared back inside the café where faceless shadows talked and worked on small metal laptops and got caught up in conversation. “Who’s all that inside?” Dom asked.

Seren and Margarette sat up in their seats and looked to the glass door. A creeping shiver came down all of them. The shadows of people inside. “You know,” Margarette said, after a moment of shared, stunted silence. “I don’t know.”

Dom said nothing but wiped his sweaty palms on his boxers, made ready like he preparing his courage.

“I’ll go with you,” said Margarette. A couple steps and Dom pushed open the door and all was lost and scattered again.

-juice-

Sheryl Lee High stood on the top of a hill at the flat end of a blunt intersection where the asphalt split three ways. There was a procession outside the front of the school of emperor penguins with their flippers together in front of them. Six of the emperor penguins carried a penguin sized coffin between them on their slippery shoulders, and another emperor penguin had a small funny hat with a cross on the front and it clutched a book while behind it a smaller emperor penguin swung a thurible emitting black clouds in starts and stops of thick perfume that hung over the funeral procession making its way to the graveyard just down the hill from where the school shimmered like a glass beacon. Morning sunlight reflected off the school onto the small town of red painted barns and gas station diners and threatened blindness to anyone dumb enough to look directly at it.

In one of the school’s dark and cool hallways, Barth closed his locker softly. He hated the sound of metal slammed against metal. He pulled the sleep out of one of his eyes with two fingers and drop kicked it into the middle of the hallway where no students walked past. The school was empty. Except Dom walked past with his textbooks stacked in his arms along with his backpack neatly on top of the pile, looking vaguely sleep delirious.

Barth followed and sat next to Dom who put his head under his hands. Fast asleep. Saunders sat behind them and snapped pencils. Margarette and Seren were in the classroom too and Margarette kept passing Seren small handscribbled notes written on notebook paper and Seren kept looking at them held between her fingers and tucking them into a zippered pocket in her zippered binder. At the front of the classroom, clutching a piece of chalk in its beak, a massive magpie warbled in low tones about the global history of terrorism while a large ocelot wearing a badge roamed back and forth between the aisles of mostly empty desks in the morning light coming in through the shades. Saunders, quickly bored, began slipping small tornoff bits of paper into the collar of Dom’s polo and Dom kept scratching his neck and saying stop, holding out the p to get his point across, as he tried generally to get back to sleep.

The magpie continued its unknown but seemingly comprehensive lecture and eventually wrote out the most generally agreed upon dates, beginning and end, of the gulf war on the chalkboard.

It was a long day of lectures given by different types of birds the most interesting of which was a large parakeet teaching geometry which Saunders had convinced somewhat easily to repeat dickandballs over and over again. After all was said and done Barth walked along the train tracks skirting the space between the hill where the school stood and a lake below. The evening sun reflected off the school onto the lake and the color it gave was unlike anything the sun could ever produce. Dom joined in the walk. Neither were quite sure if they had a home here. The two of them walked and sometimes stopped to look out on the golden cattails and rocks into the water from high above. Fall was here. Eventually the train tracks dissolved.

-ification

Skipping dilly dally up the lane to the mossy brick pentagram etched into the side of a thorn bush, little Pealey Saunders knocked once and knocked twice and the Pewster club’s door opened up. Dom and Barth looked out from inside pensively. Barth’s father had recently cut Barth’s hair using a cereal bowl and now his hair looked ridiculous to little Smelly Saunders but little Smelly Saunders said nothing about it because he wanted into the Pewster’s club, named after the small sound a child’s finger gun makes when fired — pew pew — and he pinched his leg through the pockets of his jeans because he was nervous about this encounter and didn’t want himself to laugh at Barth’s hair.

“What do you want?” Dom asked.

“I want to come in,” said little ashy-handed Saunders.

“Why?”

“Because it’s starting to rain.”

“Why don’t you go home?”

Little Beady-Eyed Saunders looked around.

Barth groaned loudly. “Okay come in.”

When Saunders stepped into the pewster’s club hideout he was offered a cigarette from Dom and Saunders quickly took it in his mouth and lit the end with the lighter on the overturned milk crate underneath the camping lantern hung from a length of red yarn from some branches that made up the ceiling. He sat back on the floor against the bush. Ahh. They sat around in a half circle and occasionally aimed their fingers at each other: pew. Ahhhhh. Saunders coughed over and coughed, over and over again, and Dom kept laughing. Why would he laugh at me? Saunders thought.

“Here we have a place and a space to ourselves!” Barth said. “A place free from oppression!”

“Ah yes.”

Still sitting, Saunders noticed a large boar head across from him. The marbles where the eyes once rested, gazed, slept, looked… “What’s the head? Where did you get that?”

“Um I don’t know it was here when we found the spot,” said Dom. “Maybe it was like an uncle or a parent’s.”

“Maybe a cousin’s?” Added Barth helpfully.

“Yeah probably a cousin,” Dom said, looking at the head. “Maybe my dad killed it with his bare hands." He made a contrived motion with his hands like he was fighting a boar. He then shifted uncomfortably in his seat and pulled out two slips of paper from underneath his butt and the slips of paper flew into the bush and out of sight. “Huh,” he said. “I wonder what those were.”

“That’s always happening to you. Why is that always happening?”

Before Dom could respond there was a loud crunch overhead and a demon scream came into the Pewster’s club “LET ME IN.”

“Oh god,” Barth said, standing and racing out of the Pewster’s Club enterance where Margarette was waiting with her hands on her hips and she pushed up her clear-framed pink glasses. “You had better let us in.” Barth spun on his heels, chirped “no,” and looked at Seren who was fully climbed on top of the bush and shaking the branches. “Seren’ipiy you’re wrecking it! Seren’ipipy stop that!”

After a minute, clutching his hair and quickly assessing the potential damage to the Pewster’s Club headquarters, Barth let them into the organization with a single sigh and he sat on the ground and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, it’s always gone so quick anyways,” he said.

Dom took this as an afront, though. He stood and paced back and forth with a hand on his head as Margarette and Seren came in and made themselves comfortable. “I really miss the coffee we had in the last place. Wait no, the place before last. The yum coffee. I miss the yum coffee,” Maragrette said. In a huff, Dom stormed out of the pewster’s club just as the sky began to cry.

Walking in the park whetted sharp by the rain it feels damp and it feels there! A puddle! A dove! What is the dove doing in the rain? “What are you doing in the rain?” Dom yelled.

The dove told him with its eyes that he should seek help.

Dom ignored the dove and caught rainwater in his mouth and lightning flashed overhead.

“Watch out for the ball when you’re up to bat,” the dove said. “But at the same time its the sand in the dugout that gets everywhere and taking a ball to the shoulder is at least one base. Failure can be reliable.”

The thunder boomed.

“I don’t believe you,” Dom said, scurrying away. He hid underneath a cherry tree where he was protected from the rain and he dozed into a light sleep.

apple-

Barth worried that one day he would wake up submerged.

Overnight somehow his grotto on the beachside had filled (miraculously!) with papers rollingtumbling about, swirling in small tornadoes of price tags, receipts, other vague floatings of no particular origin. The spiderwebs hanging over the cavern, those draperies he couldn’t quite reach with his duster but which soaked up the rain coming in through the cracks at the top of his cave, caught paper too—and when the spiders sunk their teeth in, they drank down the ink which unfortunately tasted the same as blood and made the spiders sick and made their eyes cloudy.

He pushed his toes into his sandals one at a time and stepped outside where the waves sprayed against the rocks. He stepped rock by rock down to the sand. The sky cooled from its bleeding red trumpeting (the sun is a rooster) into a more meaningfully round shape and some sort of gossamer floated between the sun and the water, and and and

Sand stuck to the bottoms of his sandals. There: a seashell. Above: a seagull. Strange how they cry out like that. Seagulls. Piercing. Fitting. Seagulls. Seashells. The sea… The jungle behind him and the mountains closed up with the trees and the rocks and there were no people to be imagined even. The same seagull cried out again—or was it a different seagull entirely?—and the trees sashayed and the water ran on into the land, and and and

A strange thing to think without anything to think about. He stood with his hands on his waist and looked out to the waves. Nobody else, he thought. Except the others, he added in his head with a wince. And where are the others?

From a distance, he found Saunders by himself in a blue hawaiian shirt with undereye bags large enough to announce him as Saunders and nobody else, sitting at an empty tiki bar somehow out of place despite being perfectly in place, framed by the mountains and the palms.

Barth approached from the water, hiking up the steep from the water with big steps. Saunders saw him approaching and threw an empty Modello bottle with a squeezed lime wedge rattling around inside. It flew well over Barth’s head and he said “heyy” and continued walking to the tiki bar where he sat next to Saunders who said “It’s nothing.”

“What’s up with you?”

“Bottle was empty.”

A rattling behind the bar: a tremendously large deep green crustacean with a wide, elliptical body, just short of the bar’s ledge shifted back and forth and eventually lifted up another bottle of Modelo to the bar with one massive claw and placed it firmly in front of Saunders who watched in silence as the claw cleanly popped off the cap and another similarly massive (but slightly smaller) claw placed a lime wedge into its lip. “Thank you,” Saunders said as he used the palm of his right hand to shove the lime all the way into the bottle.

“How’s your uh how’s your morning been?” Barth asked.

The large deep green crustacean turned,—or, attempted a turn,—and knocked over a large stack of dirty plates and plastic cups, and clumsily gathered them all up in its claws.

“It’s the same as yesterday,” Saunders said.

“I know, I know,” Barth said. “I wonder where we are.”

“Who knows…”

“Where’d Dom escape to? Seren and Marg anywhere?”

“In the forest somewhere looking for something. I don’t know where Seren and Marg are.”

“Dom’s still in there?”

Saunders turned around on his barstool and leaned towards the woods, the mountains, and called out into the jungle, “Dom! Have you found it yet?” After a handful of seconds a voice called back from the depths: “Nooo.”

“Huh,” said Barth.

“Right.”

“Have you been out here long?” Barth asked, almost murmuring so that the microphones underneath the bar wouldn’t hear. He knew they were down there. He assumed Saunders knew they were down there and felt a vague curiosity as to whether acknowledging them out loud would accomplish much at all.

“I’ve been out here since last night… I wonder if it can keep on like this…”

-juice-

A couple minutes passed. Margarette looked down at her right hand with her fingers held together to make the shape of a spoon. Her eyes went between looking at the creases in her palm and to nothing at all when she spread out her fingers and looked through them. How odd.

What? Seren sat across from her sipping from a cup of coffee with a cigarello in one hand smoldering red at the end, looking at her with a baffled but mild expression. Margarette took out a deck of cards from her purse and looked off into the distance while she separated the deck into two and shuffled them into one another—shumpshumpshump—and laid out the cards on the table and whenever she disliked the reading she gathered up the cards in a great huff to reshuffle and rearrange until… well eventually… finally… she would find her proper reading and then she will leave for the autumn.

They sat together at the mouth of the café, and the breeze came through the small patio overhanging the forest where they sat shaded by enough deciduous dark green foliage to keep them shaded, it pulled the morning’s fog away. There was a crisp to the air under the shade. The cool of protection. The sun is a laser. But the Earth is a cold mother. The birds fluttering through the patio sang about this but they lyrics they sang were too obvious and on the nose and Seren clearly resented them for it. “No wonder we’re the only one’s here,” she said, glaring at a bluejay whose lyrics could be an Ocean Vuong poem. “What does that bird know about maternity?”

Margarette shrugged, shuffled her deck. “What do you know about maternity?”

Seren glared at Margarette, and then at the bird, and after a while she glared around more generally. She wondered out loud how all this might look in the fall. Her glare dissolved and she sipped her coffee, placing the butt of the cigarello into the ashtray where the red ember slowly faded.

“Do you think we’ll ever get out of this?” Margarette asked, in almost a whisper.

“I’m very weary of myth,” Seren said, waving her hand. “Manufactured truth must be taken at arm’s length, you know. I don’t completely buy the idea that we are anywhere at all and so escaping it doesn’t make much sense. Making myth, making illusions, call it what you like. I would rather try and remove a gross ‘understanding’ from all of it… But at the same time… when I see a morning like this… suddenly it becomes clear to me that there are idyllic things in this world.”

Margarette looked up from her deck of cards—she had drawn a reverse page of cups for a signifier—and she sat back, taken aback by what Seren had said. Margarette looked out to the trees. She couldn’t stop herself looking. Wonderful view. A small bird darted past. In the wooded area below, she thought she saw a figure trudging through the deep green… Was that Dom? The figure was gone though, unfortunately, before she could confirm that it wasn’t a wildcat or deer.

“I think I saw Dom down in the woods,” Margarette said.

“Of course he’s down there,” Seren said.

-ification

Evergreens drank up dew from the fog; daybreak, births of small animals in their dens, the deaths of clouds against a blue eternity, the sinking of the moon, the electrical pulse underneath the soil, all taken in with the dew, all digested by the wood soft softened softening. The redwoods towered. Their roots were whole houses. The underbrush was an alleyway in a city of giants. In the bay far below, the waves spoke echos and the ocean’s cold breeze pushed up the sleeve of the land, releasing a brisk hair-standing-on-end.

Underneath the redwoods, Dom pressed on with his hands and knees damp with mulch from climbing uphill and he pushed through the underbrush into a clearing with moss carpeting and sunlight speckling through the moving branches. Dom wiped a dribbling of sweat from his brow and now there was dirt on his face.

A piece of paper, no more than a receipt slip, cartwheeled past him. Something was written on its inside… He was going the right way then after all. He followed the paper in its tumbling until he began to notice more pieces and slips of paper all moving in the same direction along the same dirt path out of the mossy clearing.

The trees narrowed and the branches formed a damp hallway. Pink and blue stickers appeared on the branches, on rocks; he stepped over the pieces of paper tumbling between his feet, catching on small twigs and branches, more and more the slips of paper became a flowing stream in itself. Here he was again.

Why did he suffer himself so to seek this place out over and over again?

The pathway became gradually darker until finally a figure emerged from the shadows, lurking on a small, gnobby stump in the center of a small den made up of wicker branches bound together by twine—without the twine one would be forgiven for thinking this was a natural formation.

The figure came gradually into focus. Dom wasn’t surprised this time by their face. He had seen it before. They sat completely hairless, their pale bald head covered entirely with small blue and pink hello kitty stickers.

“Where am I?” Dom asked the figure sitting crosslegged.

The figure opened its eyes. A startling deep ocean blue in one and a grassy hazel in the other.

“Bold of you to ask such questions,” replied the figure, eventually.

The restaurant where I work, a nondescript hole in the wall, is on a city block slowly sinking into the Earth. No one, from what I can tell, has noticed this except Epi, a small Honduras man with a wispy mustache who pointed it out to me one day. If they had known the city block was sinking into the Chicago earth there would be teams from the city gallivanting, pulling up in exhaustive metal monsters to pour elaborate amounts of cement into the underneaths of buildings, patting it down, look at one another very contented, hands on their belts. Even back in November, the block had begun sinking into some grey obscurity; by now it is merely an unreadable grey construction in a grey city.

Well there I sat in the restaurant window. A bus went past. Camp is a GUN said a headline (so unserious) on my phone next to a very serious text from a friend who wasn’t doing particularly well. After responding I looked (vague) at the book I was reading for a beat before I took back up my phone to retrace my previous scroll and find whatever article I had in my head, not Camp is a GUN, — though, if camp is a gun, what is it loaded with? Bits? — but an interview with David Lynch in which he exclaims “A little mouse, huh? And he's your pal! Well isn't that great.” Wonderful, I thought.

My shift at the restaurant started soon but there was nobody holding my hand.

After I clocked in, — and this is where the story gets going, — I carried a trash bin outside to toss last night’s waste into an unfathomable amount of trash bags, cardboard boxes, oil buckets, aluminum cans, coffee cups, furniture, grocery bags, designer bags, and paper bags with a sort of black ooze like tar covering the top of it all like the frosting on a cinnamon roll.

Studying the breath coming out of my mouth and how much of it there was, swinging the trash bin back and forth from its handle, avoiding the icy patches on the asphalt, I heard a rustle from the fence and noticed a mid-sized rat rushing away through the decomposed leaves from the fall.

Thinking then of David Lynch’s mouse remark, I said “what’s up.”

The rat stopped scurrying and stood in its anthropomorphic fashion.

“What’s up guy,” I said, now a little perturbed.

“What do you want from me?” The rat asked.

After the rat responded, I quickly walked back inside the restaurant with the trash bin but after standing around the dull, empty pass, I returned to the back alley where the rat still stood on its hind legs. “So now you want to talk,” it said.

“Look… I wasn’t aware that you could,” I said.

“I’ve been in this city a long time,” the rat said. “I’ve heard lots of people talking. It’s not like us rats haven’t been trying to figure things out too.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I speak spanish too, do you speak spanish?”

“Um, no I don’t speak spanish.”

“Okay. Well…”, the rat looked disappointed.

Folk tales line our imagination of traditions, and all traditions are more or less a catalog of talking animals, whispering winds, angry storm clouds, — if the natural world speaks to you in a human tongue, you listen.

“You know,” I said, disregarding. “This is just like Ratatouille.”

“What? The dish?”

“No, the movie.”

“I don’t know it.”

I attempted to explain the plot of ratatouille.

“That’s disgusting I would never touch your hair.”

“You would pull it,” — I motioned like Remy from Ratatouille, — “to puppet us around to make culinary um masterpieces.”

“Why would I want to do that? I have better things to do.”

“Because you want respect?”

The rat shook its tiny head. “Now why would I want that?”

“Because you want to be a person?” I said, unsure but trying to argue my side.

“You don’t even want to be a person,” the rat said.

“But I am a person. Can you hardly say that about yourself?”

“I’m fully a rat but are you fully a person?”

“I don’t need to take this kind of abuse from you,” I said, walking back inside the restaurant.

Five minutes later I returned to the alleyway. “See that sign,” I pointed at one of the anti-Rat alleyway signs. “This alleyway is rat free. Stay here any longer and you’ll be dead.”

“Wow, threats of violence.” said the rat.

“Well I’m a person and you’re a rat.”

“Do you really think that anymore? That I’m below you anymore?”

The rat had trapped me in its web of deceit. “Listen here, rat,” I began, standing up now for all of mankind. “We have um… We have ideals!”

“Ideals?” The rat said. “What ideals to you have?”

“Don’t tell me I don’t have ideals.”

“Well what’s one ideal you have?”

“That I’m a human being!”

“But do you think that, actually?” The rat asked.

“Yes. Yes I do.” I crossed my arms.

“Give me your shirt, then,” the rat said.

“What?”

“Show me you’re serious.”

“Okay, sure, whatever,” I said, taking off my shirt and dropping it over to the rat who took it in his small hands and pulled it over his body until his head and whiskers poked out from the collar.

“Happy?” I asked.

“Thank you for the shirt,” the rat said.

“Of c-c-course,” I said, now sh-sh-shivering. “What were we t-t-talking about?”