I guess what this proves is that your odds of turning a precarious situationship into a real relationship are always slim, but never zero. anyway .

A woman walks into a Better Help zoom call. “I’m losing my mind,” she says. “The guy I’m developing feelings for is here at this party. He doesn’t like me back. He’s curbing me, but in a slow, subtle, almost undetectable way. But I feel it–something’s off. We’re barely talking, he’s turning his back to me, I don’t know how to lure him back in.”

The therapist takes a thoughtful pause. “I understand your troubles, and I know just what you need: Music. Gather your friends, go inside, and dance. The DJ will fix you right up.” “But doc,” the woman says, “I AM the DJ.”

“You’re up in 45 minutes,” M said. To DJ a party that I no longer want to be at, because things are getting really evil in my head. He’s fucking that girl. The girl with the arm tattoos and sweater vest. And if it’s not her, then it’s the girl with the really chic pixie cut. I can’t pull off a pixie cut, and believe me, I’ve entertained it. Proposing a pixie cut is a really good litmus test for whether or not you have good, honest friends, and I do.

I’ll give you an example: I recently stepped out in a bikini skirt and a bra top to go to a barbecue that was at my situationship’s workplace. It’s really cute, don’t get me wrong, Geef said. Pause. It’s maybe a bit… manic?

Never mind that. The girl he’s fucking. My BetterHelp projection chimes in: Try this: Point out 5 things you can see. The string lights on the ceiling, the large ceramic tongue protruding out from a wooden fence, and cascading down to the floor. A guy with a poorly tailored suit that bunches up at the ankle, which really bothers me. A paper-mache puppet. And a girl in a baby tee who he’s probably fucking. He probably got her number while I was in the bathroom.

Let’s pivot, BetterHelp says. Name 5 things you can smell. Pizza. Pine. Spray paint. Someone’s Nuclear BO overpowers the rest, making it difficult to discern scent. Then, under that layer of stench, there’s a very, very faint waft of J’ador trailing from the girl to my left, who’s probably in his DMs. Or they’re fucking, or they fucked already, or they’re about to fuck.

So that’s basically how the night went. Spiral, pivot, spiral, pivot, the BO that makes you forget, the perfume that makes you remember, spiral, pivot, and so on.

I did a really clumsy set and paused the music multiple times mid-song. Not everyone is cut out to be a DJ, least of all me, but this isn’t really a lifestyle you choose. The moment you rest your weary fingers on a pioneer board, it’s settled. You’re sworn in.

Then: the bar of the afters. The booth of the bar. The guy next to me at the booth of the bar. The rest of the people at the table at the booth of the bar.

Then he’s recalling the time a cyst developed in the cavity left by his wisdom tooth extraction. A chunk of clam chowder had apparently found its way into the wound, where it festered into an infection. I call this one the Cheesecake Factory sepsis soup experience. It’s a story I’ve heard many times before, in slightly different arrangements. It strikes me that he has a knack for doing that--recounting events with a subtle different shift in emphasis to gauge someone’s reaction on where in the story the joke lands.

And for my part, I entertain them with feigned obliviousness every time. Not for his ego--I really do care. It’s really endearing when someone is thrilled by their own lore to the point of repetition. I want to know someone so well that I stop wondering why certain memories hold more weight than others.

Then: a girl snakes into the booth, and he drops his arm around me. Ouch. He shifts to face her, which is a normal and polite thing to do, and it means nothing. Or it means something.

I get up and sit somewhere else. Pivot, five things I can touch: A glass cup. Hair. polyester blend. My Phone. The serrated wheel of a BIC lighter. A ripped $50 bill i found on a couch and folded into my pocket. My dad always said that I’m a lucky girl, and that every bad thing that happens to me is countered with a measured consolation from god.

A says I’m being normal. No one at this bar would be able to tell that I’m trying to pry them apart with my eyes. Like bending a spoon with your mind. If people can do that, I wonder, then why can’t I willfully force someone back into obscurity? It’s a stupid question to posit. Neither one is possible, and the spoon bending trick is, like all magic, slight of hand.

I try not to give into this instinct too often, but on this night, I need a diagnosis from my most optimistic friend. just to take the edge off. I don’t think he’s being shady, B said. It seems like you’re just really paranoid because you’re starting to have feelings.

Yea. Then again, two things can be true: I can be a neurotic fabricator of worst-case-scenarios, spinning dismal narratives out of nothing, out of meaningless gestures and all that. And still: at least some of these stories I tell myself can be true. If not by divine intuition, then by sheer coincidence.

B said it seems like he really likes me. There’s evidence to point to that. For one, he’s around–-kind of a lot, when I think about it. When I tally up the days I see him and hold those against the days I don’t, a picture forms: we’re, in some ways, together, sort of, ish.

And there’s evidence to the contrary, too. There are lots of small things that make up a big thing that make up what I’m feeling right now, which is full of dread. There are subtle changes in attitude, in inflection, in communication that I reframe to sound less bad to other people so that they can reinforce a version of reality that I want to be true. Like at that one party, when he evaded me instead of greeting me in the warm way I’m used to.

But I tell B: He said “hi” to me, and it was weird. Am I being crazy? And yes, if I’m making calculated tweaks to the event and omitting the unsavory parts, then yes, I’m being crazy. I’m getting in my head. But I’m certain that if I told her the full truth, she would agree–-he’s getting farther away, really, truly. It’s not just in my head. I really am losing footing.

This is the bummer of precarious dating situations, whatever you want to call them. ”Dating” isn’t the right word. He wouldn’t, if asked, concede that that is what we are doing. Situationship? I’m not even sure if that’s what I can call it, because that is still a label. It connotes a togetherness. It connotes some kind of agreement between two people. It even connotes a sense of ownership, not to strangers, but to peers. No girl pursues a friend’s coveted situationship. But if we haven't even reached a place where I can call it that, then it's nothing. It’s just something i decided, not an agreement at all. Which means he’s fair game. And that’s, I suppose, why the scene before me is playing out the way that it is.

I can feel myself getting indignant, wanting to seek validation from him. I need more. Come over, I texted. He doesn’t. He thinks I’m amazing and always will, we share a cigarette, i go home, the end.

So there you go. M says it really doesn't matter what's in my head versus what's real, because what's in my head is as real as the material things that are happening. True. The fact that I’m anxious is as good of an answer as a direct, clear resolution: A breakup, which would only be possible if we were together in the first place. Which I guess we weren’t.

But then again, it’s really hard to walk away when there isn’t a clear resolution. I don’t know if he would give that to me. Who knows why? Why do I keep leftovers in the fridge I know I won’t eat. Because they’re there in case I decide I want them. I can pick at them when there’s nothing else, when my groceries run out. I guess it’s that, then. Throwing something away feels too final a decision.

Home. clothes off. I pull everything out of my pockets: the lighter. The phone. The ripped $50 bill that, when i look closer at it, says: “in prop money we trust”. Figures.

My mom is a pharmacist from West Virginia. If you know anything about West Virginia, you know that it was (is) one of the major epicenters of the opioid epidemic. To this day, it’s ranked the #1 state with the highest number of fatal overdoses in the nation. My mom’s dad owned a pharmacy in Wheeling just before the crisis really took off, and sadly I can’t ask him about any of this, but I did talk to her for a whileeee. The stories from her in this blog are entirely paraphrased/ filtered through me, so don’t take these as like expert opinions or whatever. & some of this was my own research/ what I learned from Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2021 book Empire of Pain, which is really really informational and gripping. Some of it is anecdotal and fiction but based off of real people & stories

TY FOR READING! :)

I guess it’s not surprising that the Mesopotamians were the first to discover the potential uses of the opium poppy. After all, they came up with the wheel, and people say that it rolled in (yeppp pun intended) civilization as we know it.

The farmers planted the seeds, which flowered into orb-shaped pods containing a, not kidding, sticky white substance. Literally, nature’s cum. God’s a bit on the nose sometimes. That dried substance is pure, unrefined, organic, GMO-free, natural, locally-sourced, single ingredient, humanely-raised, farmer-focused, top-shelf opium. Like I said: nature’s cum. They called it The Joy Plant.

Think of heroin as like a Twinkie in comparison to this stuff the Sumerians were on. And boyyyyy did it take off. Early civilizations didn’t need anyyyy kind of plastic 20- something drug rep to sell The Joy Plant, which traveled by way of oceanic trade routes (they no had iPhone). Naturally, it made its way to the Assyrians, to the Babylonians, to the Greeks, and so on until the Silk Road washed it into China. And there you go: crushed, powdered, snorted, smoked, distilled into liquid and sipped as a tea, it was the best thing until sliced bread.

Some 3000 years later, Mel Baron Abbot, a 48-year-old Aberdeen man, is found dead in his car with the engine still running. At least I think that was his name. His family, a wife and two daughters, never went to identify his body. They hadn’t seen him in years. And at that point, coroners' offices all across the area were dealing with what they called a “cadaver pileup”; bodies found with stolen IDs or none at all or decomposed to the point of disfigurement just kept coming and coming and coming. There’s nothing unique about Mel Baron Abbot to me specifically. Only, I guess, that he was the high school sweetheart of my mom’s childhood best friend. This probably sounds off-color, but what they say about the three degrees of separation rule in LA-- that you’re probably three connections from any given A-lister-- exists in its own way along the Mason-Dixon line. It’s not even close to an exaggeration to say that every single person there is, at most, three connections away from knowing someone who died from opioid overdose. Again: At most.

The way OxyContin works is by binding to opioid receptors in the brain to block pain signals, while at the same time triggering dopamine releases in neural pathways to cause feelings of euphoria. If this makes it sound like oxy is the same as any other opioid, that’s because it is. It’s exactly that. Of course, that’s not what its manufacturer said in the 90s. The extended release formulation, they claimed in a label approved by the FDA, was believed to make the most drug less addictive. And then patients started dissolving the XR coating in their mouths before crushing up the pill and snorting it.

People are natural problem solvers, after all. If you put an orangutan in a cage who doesn’t want to be there, they will loop their hands through the bars and fiddle with the lock. From observing their handlers, they glean that it unfastens at the twist of a small fitted import placed in the keyhole, and so they’ll grab a nearby stick and attempt to mimic the motion. And people are very good at figuring out how to get high.

That’s why we have primate safeguards. Child locks and two-factor authentication and phone bricks that make you walk to the fridge for a dopamine hit. (bricks are the methadone clinics of the bi-coasts, ha ha)

Unfortunately, the methadone clinics and the black box label came too late. The company strategically and successfully turned Appalachia’s hard-working coal miners into addicts--40% of them, by some estimates--, bumping the breakout 60 mg pill to 80, the 80 to 120, and the 120 to 160. By 2011, there were more prescriptions than people in the area.

After I finished Empire of Pain, I played the Why Game with my mom, a medication safety manager at one of the top hospitals in the state. The Why Game is when you keep asking dumb questions like a child. For example: Why can’t people just keep taking oxy for life? Because your tolerance increases and you need a higher dose to get the same effects.

So why not just keep raising the dose? Because people were getting legitimately cooked. They were falling asleep at their labor-intensive jobs, some of which involved the use of heavy machinery. Many were getting maimed at these jobs, and they were already suffering from previous injuries, which is why they were prescribed the drug in the first place.

Why can’t they just take enough to ease the pain without getting high? Because opioids actually alter your sensitivity to pain. The receptors eventually stop responding. And it’s not just that it no longer works to treat whatever condition you’re in pain for--it gives you pain where you didn’t even have it. You go in for a back problem, pretty soon, you hurt all over. The drugs actually become as necessary as breathing. Have you ever taken a fish out of water? it’s like that. And once that shift happens, you want to start taking more pills than what you’re prescribed. And more and more and so on. And back then, back when the new medical frontier was pain treatment, back when pain was the fifth vital sign, back when a headache was cause for a schedule 2 narcotic prescription, medical practices were the Wild Wild Wild Wild West. doctors just kept upping the dose until their patients were taking hundreds of mgs a day. And once you’re on that much, it’s pretty much impossible to quit.

Let’s say someone keeps upping their dose but takes the medication as prescribed. Let’s say they just take enough to soothe the pain but not get high. Why can’t that go on indefinitely? You’ll die from overdose. I don’t understand how, if your tolerance to a drug raises to the point where 300 mgs is just enough to make you feel normal, how are people overdosing? Aren’t they tolerant to that dose? Well, while the drug produces euphoria, it also suppresses breathing. Your pain receptors and breathing functions are two different parts of the brain, which means they build tolerance at different rates. The euphoria-addicted part of the brain gets dependent quickly, but your respiratory functions can’t catch up. So it suffocates people? Right. They stop breathing.

Like a fish out of water, indeed.

Like Richard sackler, the father of OxyContin, I’m somewhat of a pharmaceutical nepo baby myself. My grandfather owned his own pharmacy in Wheeling, which was robbed at gunpoint twice in the 70s (this was before oxycontin hit the market). Mom was there for the first robbing. She said she was the first person to see the gunman, who took her to the bathroom, handcuffed her, and told her to stay quiet. He said, as long as you do exactly as I say, I won’t hurt anyone. He held my grandfather at gunpoint & cleaned out the safe: Steroids, narcotics, stacks of cash. Mom was 15 then. In the early 2000s, my grandfather sold the business to Mom’s cousin and retired. He wanted to pass the pharmacy onto my mom, but she knew something very, very bad was coming to West Virginia. She booked it to California and never looked back.

She was smart. If you go to google right now and search “West Virginia Pharmacist Shoots, Kills Armed Gunman” what you will get is multiple articles about different incidents in Kanawha County, Pinch, and other areas in West Virginia. If you want to find the article about my mom’s cousin shooting and killing an armed robber, you’ll have to hyperspecify: Wheeling, 2012, Elm Grove Pharmacy. Even still, it’s hidden in the third or fourth google search page. That’s because pharmacies in West Virginia, Kentucky, Alaska, Delaware, New Mexico, etc were getting robbed all the time.

So the 2012 incident. The robber, tweaking the house down boots, comes into the pharmacy and points his gun at the clerk, going Fuck You Fuck You Give Me My Pills and demanding to talk to the head pharmacist (Mom’s cousin.). Mom’s Cousin says, from the other side of the door, take whatever you want and go. Robber demands he comes out. He wants the stuff that’s locked up--the sweet, sweet oxycontin. He fires off his gun at the ceiling. Mom’s Cousin sees the Gunman through the security cam footage, points at him from behind the door, shoots, and clips the robbers’ side or something. Robber starts to flee, Mom’s Cousin comes out and shoots him two more times. Dead on the scene.

Purdue knew about all this, by the way. Company execs said it was sad that street junkies were ruining things for legitimate pain patients who needed access to their lifesaving medication. The truth is that legitimate pain patients were to street junkies what tadpoles are to frogs. Basically the only difference between them is a year’s worth of checkups, give or take.

Mom says the family’s small pharma business aside, we sure felt the effects of the crisis. there’s my aunt Redacted, who kicked her heroin addiction in what, 2005? Nope. She’s still addicted, Mom says. She went to jail a few years back, and by the time she got out, her bum ex-boyfriend had gotten squatter's rights in the apartment my grandparents bought for her.

There’s her daughter, too, who, at 15 years old, took Gary and Pam’s checkbook, wrote herself out $500, and left for I don’t know how long. Maybe weeks. I haven’t seen her in years, but I remember getting a Talking To before we would visit West Virginia. My mom would tell us to be careful and not play with her toys. I was eight, so I don’t remember much. I remember she had patchy skin and really thin hair and looked much older than my brother, who was her age. He looked like a kid to me. That part was confusing.

Ostensibly, cousin Redacted used that $500 to buy heroin, which I think is about $5 a bag on the street. She was on that stuff all the time. When she had her first baby at 16, he was on it too.

Of course, so few users actually started with heroin. It’s not exactly a beginner’s drug. Kids took pills from their parents and distributed them to their friends, blah blah blah, you know the rest. And this is all still going on. The opioid epidemic had its first wave in the late 90s when Oxy was launched, the second wave in the 2010s when opioid regulations tightened & Oxy users turned to street drugs, and the highest wave in 2021. fentanyl.

I used to go on long walks in my grandparents’ neighborhood, situated in the proverbial right side of the tracks in Wheeling. Pam, now 86, still lives in that great big house--5 bedrooms, a grand dining room, a sun room, and even a piano room for the Nobody In My Family Who Played Piano--with just herself and Redacted Cousin’s firstborn, whom she got custody of like 10 years ago.

And let me tell you something about West Virginia: it’s not all dip-chewing hicks and hunters. Not that there’s anything wrong with those folk. I know some bona fide hillbillies, too, and they’re great. My mom’s other cousin lives on a ranch where we could do anything we wanted: ride ATVs & throw rocks at hornet nests & shoot guns and all that. There’s something really so beautiful about total freedom. The air is different. You don’t get that out west or up north.

But we never ventured out too far from Gary and Pam’s area. I reckon that you could drive 10 minutes in any direction from their house, and you’d see rows and rows of unoccupied, dilapidated houses that once belonged to good hard workers who then lost their jobs, their health insurance, their cars, their valuables and priceless heirlooms, and then eventually their homes.

What has always struck me as so fascinating about the opioid epidemic is how Purdue even pulled it off. The people they were sending into hospitals and private practices were not clinicians or drug experts or people who knew anything about medicine at all. They were jackasses with MBAs, handsome, well-groomed door-to-door salesmen, consultants who didn’t have the credentials to get into McKinsey. I guess that was the point. You give a jackass with an MBA three weeks of training materials and scripted lines to feed doctors, and you’ll get a blizzard of prescriptions.

I asked my mom more. How did they even sell this to doctors with medical degrees? Didn’t they know that oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin, is highly addictive? It’s tricky. They had a great marketing campaign, for one.

The entire principle behind good salesmanship is to make the person you’re selling to not know that they’re being sold to. What’s that line about selling me this pen? You’ve got the perfect storm here: Patients living with chronic pain, doctors who want to believe there’s a miracle solution for that, and a government agency rubber-stamping it all.

Here’s an even crazier fact my mom told me: The touted long-release formulation that “made oxy less addictive” already existed for morphine. So doctors knew the long-release morphine was addictive, but didn’t question the OxyContin marketing? Yep. Why? How? Everyone knew morphine was addictive. The drug is basically as old as dirt. All painkillers, percocet, oxycodone, morphine, fentanyl, even heroin, they’re all different recipes of opium. But it’s really effective to just use a different name.

So that’s it, then? They figured, if we sell oxycodone under a different name, we can get away with it? Seemingly, yes. It sounds like the stupidest thing in the world, but yeah, that’s a big part of it. That & the fact that doctors typically get very little drug training.

It also seems to work like dominos, the way she described it to me. Once one major orthopedic program accepts a standard of practice, others follow suit. So you really just need a few prestigious doctors to brainwash an entire nation? Well.

Mom first raised concerns about Oxy 15 years ago when she noticed that her hospital’s head orthopedic surgeon was ordering it for post-surgery patients. That was odd to you? Yes, you really shouldn’t be putting those people on long-acting painkillers. Why? Because they’re experiencing temporary pain, which means they should be taking painkillers when they feel it. And not all pain is bad. You should be feeling pain when you’re healing from a major procedure or injury. We shouldn’t be teaching healthy people that any amount of hurt is intolerable.

I should note that my mom has always been a bit of a hard-ass when it comes to meds. I didn’t even know you could take steroids for strep throat until this past year, and you’re literally a pharmacist, I told her. She’s proud of that. She raised us to tough through sicknesses and injuries because life comes with a lot of pain. And as you age, it gets even more painful: achy joints, weakened immune systems, and then even worse things like heart disease and cancer.

Here’s the part of the informal interview where mom takes the reins and steers things away from the direction I was hoping to go in. So bear with me if you are even still reading and I’m sorry for this being so long.

She asks me to think of a drug today that’s being heavily marketed. Ozempic? That’s right.

It’s the new Oxy, she says. No, that’s not right. Oxy is highly addictive and poses a serious risk of abuse. No, it’s not comparable in its chemical properties or uses or effects, but we’re talking about Purdue Pharma, we’re talking about The Drug Marketing Business. This is a drug that is brand spanking new, and there are no long-term studies. We have no idea how it’ll affect people 5, 10, or 20 years from now. And it’s taking over Instagram feeds and TV screens, blah blah blah.

Two years ago, she says, 1 in every 8 Americans were on a GLP-1. And those are just the people who were prescribed. We don’t even know how may people are taking unregulated, unapproved peptides. In 10 minutes or less, you can send a few messages to an AI bot and order GLP inhibitors straight to your door in discrete packaging (ad alert!) She pulls a few recalled drugs that had devastating effects from memory: thalidomide, fen-phen, etc.

Basically, her idea is that medicine is supposed to be clinical and sterile and boring. There’s a reason why so few people actually make it through 10+ years of school or whatever, residencies, specialty training and all that. So if a drug is being sold with a catchy tune, something is very wrong.

So far, GLP-1s seem fine. That’s true, she admits. It really is changing lives, no doubt about that. But it remains to be seen. Every drug seems fine when it’s first introduced. It’s not like they go right from the production facilities to shelves. There are animal studies, then clinical studies, FDA approval processes, and all that (whatever that’s worth).

My mom left me with kind of a banger. For someone whose entire 40+ career is about drugs, she’s more skeptical about them than anyone I know. Medicine isn’t infallible: “There’s no magic pill.”

In any case, I wrote a list of things that are “in” this year for me personally. They only have to make sense to me for me to do them and I don’t have to explain them to anyone else. but here they are:

Being polite. Something I’ve been noticing lacking in the way of community harmony is basic politeness and manners. People tip. They tip because to not do so is, at this rate, a pretty blatant social faux pas that even the worst of us would hold contempt for. People open doors for each other, sometimes. People say hello to strangers. I guess what I’m getting at here is that there is a sense of obligation to community that we all inherently have, and we show it in everyday gestures that are so natural we don’t even perceive them. They’re almost reflexes.

But there’s another strange phenomenon happening, which is the impulse to offend or shock for the sake of offending or shocking. I’ve grown weary of this, of seeing it done to others, of having it done to myself, even of doing it myself. I think that good manners are mistaken for adherence to Polite Society, something that’s posh or elitist or establishment blah blah blah. Good manners can just be good manners, and that’s it. They’re just something you do for the General Vibe. And refraining from rage baiting or trolling or whatever can be exactly like letting someone with fewer groceries cut you in line, or offering someone a ride, or washing someone else’s dish, because, if nothing else, kind gestures are reciprocated. And even when they’re not, they’re paid forward.

Reading garbage. I realized this year that you don’t actually have to read nietsczhe and shit. You can read low-brow stuff entirely for fun, sort of as a 1:1 substitute for reality TV or Netflix originals or whatever other garbage you look at on your phone. Maybe colleen hoover isn’t so bad. I reckon even that is still better for your brain than reels. And even the most incomprehensible sentence written by the most incompetent author is, at the very least, words strung together by a real person. I can’t lift the bar from the floor…Wayyy too heavy

Going Pro Contact. My resolution this year is to talk on the phone more. I want to get a landline so I can lay in my bed and kick my feet in the air and twirl the phone cord around my finger while I catch up with my besties. I do a lot of Micro Catching-Up—like responding to a story or sending a reel etc etc—just to keep in touch with people. Going Pro Contact means giving these interactions more substance.

Dressing up to go nowhere in particular. I love this. Dressing up for strangers feels wonderful. It’s just one of those wonderful feeling rituals. I learned from my friend fritzie that you can wear a dress to the movie theater, even to the AMCs or the Regals and all that. Because no one can tell you not to and because you’re an adult and because compliments are flattering and because impressing people feels good

Living with Lots of color. I made up a statistic that people who wear and decorate with lots of color are 30 percent happier than those who live in muted tones all the time. I extrapolated this from studies that associate different colors with different dopamine responses. Warm colors can boost arousal, cool ones can promote calmness, etc. And anyway, it’s common sense. You feel something when you look at a sunset or a lush green hill or the golden specks on the ocean when the sun hits it just right. My friend Rachel was telling me that she did an acting workshop where the teacher instructed the class to eat an imaginary apple. He said to see the apple in your mind, hold it in your hand, taste it in your mouth, hear it crunch. And then you can add all these other emotions: fear, desire, rage, etc. I suppose the exercise is designed to help you conjure something tangible and familiar (eating an apple) & from there, learn to really embody an experience—not just act out the motions.

I’m thinking about that because it’s a testament to the power of association. We associate colors with all kinds of sensory experiences, tastes and textures and sounds and all that. hmmm. I suppose the idea here is to reflect—with your body, style, and home—that which makes you happy. Mimi Rose Howard’s ex-boyfriend in Girls says that colored doors are a reason to liveeee. Maybe this is true

Little dogs? I’ve been thinking of Elle woods and her chihuahua and that is really chic to me

Intentional positivity? Ok I know everyone is on this tip about embracing cringe and being positive and all that… Discernment is good, too. Being critical has its own positive energy; it really, truly connects people in conversation. It’s extremely stimulating. Intentional positivity is a deliberate, selective process — not to be confused with toxic positivity. I remember my ex would always talk about the good parts of his day before venting or complaining about anything else. & after some time, I noticed that I developed the habit as well. I think this is why no one ever really spoke badly about him, and he never spoke badly about anyone. He’s just happy. (On this topic, this is also why I didn’t include an “out” list. I don’t care to focus on things I don’t like…)

Intentional positivity is not just about focusing on good and happy things. It’s also about using language in a high vibrational way. Basically, speaking colorfully. Like I said before.

Also, I’m watching this series called “Does Rice Care”. A guy sets up two jars: A “good” rice and a “bad” rice. He berates the Bad rice and gives the Good rice lots of praise. Based on his isolated study, rice does seem to care if you speak negatively about it. The bad rice molded after a week. 3 weeks in, the good rice is still mold-less.

Specificity. My favorite thing about my best friend Soap is her overall facility for language and ability to describe someone in a way that no one else can, in such acute detail & anecdotal tact that I can picture them clearly (no, not just that—I can understand them completely) from her description of them alone. The other day she said that a man had a forehead wrinkle so deep, it looks as though someone carved a ravine right into his face. That made me laugh. So what I want now is for everyone to get more eccentric with and particular about language. And to not see everything in the world as a discrete, individual thing, but as just one small part of a large and interconnected network. That’s why soap is such a great analog; everything has the potential to be a great metaphor to her. Here is an example of me putting a specific metaphor to use, which I’m sure she would execute far more gracefully: She’s like a character in a sandbox game gathering experiences for her inventory, and then carefully arranging them by relevance, then using them for a story or observation or description that makes the world just click into focus for anyone listening. It’s pretty electric.

BEING HORNY. Has anyone delved into Napolean’s letters to Josephine? Men used to fuck. Before our (men’s) pleasure receptors were destroyed by porn, before we optimized dating via rigid categorization and algorithmic matchmaking, before these two things heralded the death of romance…men used to fuck. Writer james joyce wrote this to his lover Nora in 1909: There is some star too near the earth for I am still in a fever-fit of animal desire. Today I stopped short often in the street with an exclamation whenever I thought of the letters I wrote you last night and the night before. They must read awful in the cold light of day. Perhaps their coarseness has disgusted you. I know you are a much finer nature than your extraordinary lover and though it was you yourself, you hot little girl, who first wrote to me saying that you were longing to be fucked by me yet I suppose the wild filth and obscenity of my reply went beyond all bounds of modesty.

This base level of horniness men had back then is the only thing that gives me the sense that I was born in the wrong generation….I’m the only bitch with a libido in here! 🤣

anyways. What i want is for people to try more—or try even a little. I want us to collectively decide to bring romance back.

Being regular. I start to lose touch with reality when I’m at some party in new york & realize that nothing being said would be understood or relatable (or, most importantly, interesting) to anyone who is largely offline. The things we do and the people we surround ourselves with and the things we talk about are our entire lives. What else is there? That’s why it’s really important to make sure we’re really living in the world. Like, the tangible, actual world. The world, where you can engage with any random person, and it’s not a chore or a waste of time. It’s just social humans doing exactly what we were designed to do, which is basically just talk and talk and talk and talk.

I came up with an exercise that might help everyone stay more grounded when they’re among a sort of sceney crowd: Imagine your most normal cousin is in the room with you, and act accordingly. Use words that are in the dictionary. If possible, make a conscious effort to avoid referencing something you just saw or read online. Tell stories or share funny anecdotes that don’t require a lot of context or explanation of who this or that person is. Etc . This is a way to shift the Overton window I suppose…

That’s it. Goodbye!

So there’s this load-bearing wall. Four of them, actually. And a ceiling. A floor. A house. 
There’s this passive indifference. There’s this cultivated distrust of others. There’s this fear of vulnerability, overpowered by something more visceral: a discovery that it won’t be returned with cruelty. 
There’s this dining table, chrome sides, formica surface, spotted cadmium and canary yellow from sun damage. There’s this antique seller who said it looks that way because it’s actually from the 50s—she's an antique collector, after all. 
There’s this frowning arched window across from the table, and there’s this tall beam of light that hits the worn oak wood straight in the center. A perfect target for the sand ottoman. There are these curved leather seats that subvert the American tradition of community through shared consumption—they face each other, talking amongst themselves, provoking eye contact and gossip. 
There are these walls in between the load-bearing ones, poorly insulated walls through which music echoes. Shaggy polyester to land on when we want to feel closer to the earth. There’s this precarious ceiling that can’t withstand much at all. It gives into the sky’s tantrums, crumbling inward. 
There’s this bathtub drain that can’t distinguish tears from the rest. A basin that is perfect for kneeling down and praying, on our worst days, when god gives us his toughest battles. 
There’s this perpetual friend. There’s this abundance of flavor: This chalk-textured cookie, cardamom and pistachio, decorated with sea salt flakes, garnished with dark chocolate and raspberry sauce that is called compote for some reason. There’s this novel idea that cooking is the very intersection of science and religion; that it, like modern medicine, heals the body physically, and, like religion, replenishes the soul spiritually. 
There’s this devotion to beauty: To find it in other places and bring it in here. To fill up the negative space with as much beauty as we can find. 
There’s this inexplicable feeling of nostalgia for the present. There’s this implicit understanding that it needn’t be explained.
There are these dirty dishes, these empty cans strewn about, these jackets piled on a chair. There’s this load to bear, and there’s this wall to do it. Four of them. 

So that’s how it goes. The bechdel challenge—aka the guy cleanse, according to Geef—has no definitive end date; you’ll know it’s over when you no longer need it. You’ll know you no longer need it when the lack of romance or pursuit of romance starts to feel comfortable, even preferable (ie, because you want it). And at that moment, you must send yourself back into the Scary world of dating. It’s rather sad, really. But there it is.

The bechdel challenge. The rules are very simple: no hinge, no dating, no sex. My roommate and I went into this “guy cleanse” with the expectation that a period of deliberate celibacy would give us a sense of clarity and intention when we lifted the temporary intimacy ban. It did not. What it did do, for me at least, is allow me to regress back to my teenage sexual awakening, when all of my relationships were fantasies. One thing that aging teaches you is that no romance in the flesh will ever compare to the ones that exist in your head. So it goes.

There’s also the fun of celibately navigating adult dynamics. When you abandon the stakes involved in dating—the stakes being sex—flirting becomes a girlish, diabolical game. I started doing this thing when I went out called a dialogical hostage—it’s when you time yourself to see how long you can keep a man’s attention in conversation before he realizes he won’t be sleeping with you. The point is to talk about completely vapid things, things men think women talk about when they aren’t around. Things like why virgos and pisces are the most compatible signs, like the dream I had last night that I can barely recall, like that episode of Glee guest-starring Gwenyth Paltrow—or really anything involving Gwenyth Paltrow. In the end, this exercise didn’t yield any reliable data. Being an attractive woman sometimes means your performance of vapidity is taken at face value—but then again, so does being a complete stranger

The law of aversion. Call it boredom or misplaced priorities, but I actually do want to fall in love. You might be thinking that a guy cleanse is antithetical to this desire, but I decided that it actually makes perfect sense.

The law of attraction posits that the things you focus on and put energy toward will come to you by way of positive reinforcement. But the universe sets up a bit of a cruel loophole to this whole operation—that is, by focusing on the things you want but don’t have, you might just be reminding your subconscious of that which you lack, and in turn, inadvertently deter the very things you’re asking for. The universe is like a guy in this way: demanding, yet avoidant.

So there’s a very thin line to toe, with the universe being a guy and all. You have to be eager and ambitious, but not desperate. You have to want, but not need. That’s why I came up with the law of aversion. It’s essentially the inverse of the law of attraction, designed to trick the universe and its metaphysical powers by way of reverse psychology. It, too, follows the Nanny McPhee Principle: Some things only come to you when you don’t want them anymore.

Does it actually work? Not that I can tell. In any case, both the law of attraction and the law of aversion are instances of confirmation bias; to the pattern-seeking mind, anything that happens is evidence that they exist.

***wanted to add a quick quote from Horse Crazy about a tumultuous relationship: Victor said he had the impression that they key to the whole thing was: whatever I wanted was exactly what wasn’t going to happen. If I wanted to know just one simple fact, I would find out everything except that single piece of information.***

(Musing on confirmation bias also got me thinking about a phenomenon that I can’t quite name: The way that people don’t notice negatives. If lightning were to strike the top of my house on this day every year, then I would mark this annual date as The Day Lightning Strikes. But there are 364 days in which lightning would not strike at all, and I wouldn’t mark any of those days as The Day Lightning Does Not Strike. 364 days are Not My Birthday. I guess it’s sort of like how you don’t remember what being sick is like until you are sick again, because all of the general functions that make you a living, breathing person are invisible until they’re not.)

I’m semi-sui. I got the semi-sui (suicidal) bug this week. It burrowed itself in my consciousness like a brain-eating parasite; the kind that wriggles out of a grasshopper’s ass when a lab coat holds it with tweezers and forces it underwater. Extracting the brain-eating worm, which I’m told you must do via drowning, is a tricky thing—sometimes it’ll just kill both organisms. I wonder if chronically sui people feel the same way: Better to live with a brain-eating parasite, or both die? Not sure, not sure. A neurodivergent person’s approach to this dilemma might be that, like all the other tasks in life, even something as pressing as killing yourself can be indefinitely procrastinated (not to mention all of the planning and logistics involved). And besides, a parasite that takes over your executive function doesn’t sound all that bad

Lost my overalls. I had my overalls for seven years until a few weeks ago, when I accidentally donated them along with several bags of clothes I didn’t want. This doesn’t mean anything to anyone who doesn’t understand that clothes are the ultimate tokens of sentimentality (or to anyone who isn’t sentimental at all). It’s my personal belief that long-held garments are more spiritually significant than knick-knacks you keep around the house, because they’re physically on your body when you experience things, which means that they, too, experience things. This is the shirt I wore to Mario World with my cousin and Fritz. That is the jacket I bought at the Los Feliz flea with soap. Etc. I had my overalls through all of my boyfriends and breakups and Deaths of family members and Births of family members and my move across the country. I thought I would have them for my whole life: 80-year-old me in my overalls, one of my oldest friends, tending my garden behind my cottage in Maine. But who was I kidding? I’m a terrible garden keeper. I won’t live in Maine. And I’ll die before 80. (Popcorn lung). According to my law of aversion, they’ll come back to me as soon as I don’t want them any more, which will be never; and so, they will never come back.

What else is new. I finished Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (thoughts for later because they don’t tie into this theme) and started on The First Bad Man. I was one of the four token spinsters at my sister’s engagement party. Figures. I threw Haunted Bushwick Beach Fest and spent the following 48 hours in Geef’s bed, watching Ja’mie the Private School Girl and getting greasy pizza stains all over her sheets—our friendship anniversary honeymoon. I started working on a short story that I have to finish by Christmas, and I’m holding myself to it. I bought a new pair of overalls that look exactly like the old ones, but they feel distinctly different, like getting my hair trimmed—no one can tell but me.

The coming weeks revealed more depth to her word. She’s not saying Let’s Not Take Life So Serious, she’s saying Let’s Take Not Life So Serious. Let us, the receivers of the word, take not life—aka death—so serious. And when we take death so serious, we understand the sanctity of life in turn. So really, she’s saying: let us take life deadly, totally, completely serious.

So I have a small part of my day dedicated to receiving Alexis’ holy messages. And another part of my day dedicated to parsing them out, imbuing them with new meanings, spreading the word and all that.

The other thing is that I’ve been sick all week and consuming lots and lots of media. I have time to analyze a one-minute video and make its contents last a lifetime. I’m sick as a dog (is that a turn of phrase?), so I’ve been reading like a horse: A Horse Who Is Hungry For Books (Not even close to an applicable turn of phrase).

Anyway. My Week Is Going Like This.

Day 1: All Fours by Miranda July. I tore through it in a day and it was good and I hated it. Our premenopausal protagonist finds herself sexually infatuated with a twenty-something Hertz employee—a tale as old as time. She’s masturbating every which way and refreshing his tagged photos on Facebook and—the part that really made me wince—driving to a motel to post a thirst trap just for him. It’s relatable, too relatable, and that’s why I couldn’t stomach it.

The idea that you can get to your 40s—that you can make it through the woods, get past all the troubles of dating and “building a life” in your 20s and 30s—and have a successful career and a somewhat happy (or at least bearable) marriage and a child and still regress back to desperate-posting thirst traps… It’s too much for me to bear. I do that now, and I’m already embarrassed about being too old for it. Before the 24 hours are even up, I’m already chastising the younger version of myself for having the vanity, the gall to attention seek in such delinquent ways. (then I do it again later bc who really GAF…)

But really, I resent her, the protagonist, because of our shared sensibilities. I can’t be endeared by the premenopausal married woman posting a thirst trap for a 20-something because I’m looking straight down the barrel of my future disposition. I am her now, I will be her then, and if there’s a lever I can pull to make the trolley go a different way, I’m not aware of it—it will only come into focus when I’m years past it and can’t go back. And what’s worse is that her life, I imagine, is the best-case scenario for someone like me.

It’s like when my dad tells me about his dating life. So I’m not marrying Nadia… Who the hell is Nadia? Carly and I broke up…Never heard of her. I have a new girlfriend…Oh? (Finally, I’m hearing about a woman in his life before they’ve already wrapped things up.) Well, I think I do. We’ve never met… Okay. Hand to temple, hand to temple. My life flashes before my eyes: I’m 65 years old, sitting at a diner with my daughter and her two friends, and I’m saying, So I have a new boyfriend, I think… She puts her hand to her temple; not from embarrassment, but from the harrowing realization that I’ve just passed the generational curse onto her.

Oh well. It could be worse (the ghost of Wendy Williams chimes in: Nope. This is the worst.)

Anyway. These are my GameMasterAnthony moments. I said in my last Substack that I reread that Nick Mullen blog about GameMasterAnthony and turning 30. GameMasterAnthony was a 33-year-old man living in his mom’s basement (presumably?) and posting daily cartoon fanfic on a forum. GameMasterAnthony is a near death experience, oblivious to himself, he says. But how close were you to being this miserable? Are you afraid that you’ll end up like this, or that you already are?

I think about this all the time. Sometimes I’ll check in on former peers throughout my life; randoms from high school who went off the deep end or got married at 22, people from college who moved back home and stayed there, pupils from Hebrew school who became—or I guess they always were, but now publicly—vehemently Zionist. And it would never be me, getting married at 22 or being vehemently Zionist, and I know that. But what if this or that insignificant incident hadn’t happened in my early 20s—whatever it was—and things had gone an entirely different way? If I really wanted to, I could weed through those years and find the linchpin moment that set off the chain of events that led me here instead of there—wherever there is.

But I like to humor the thought: One fart in a different direction 5 years ago, and now I’m a nurse in Idaho. I’m engaged to one of those military guys who has to travel a lot for work. Next we go to Hawaii. (I understand this is the entire plot of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, but in my version of it, every Deciding Moment leads to an equally banal outcome: Laterally the Same, but Technically Different.)

What I’m saying is that the people we resent—people who settled for a life we swear we would never want—are actually so close to us. They’re separated by the thinnest veil, by one split decision made 5 years ago. Maybe. or maybe not idk

But I guess, and this is really a stupid epiphany, before I read All Fours, it never occurred to me that life doesn’t just reliably move on an upward incline. There is no single linchpin moment when you decide exactly who you are and how you will be forever—it just keeps inching forward. There’s still time, always still time, to become pathetic. Maybe I’m pathetic now, and I don’t even realize it because i’m only using my own GameMasterAnthonies as a point of reference.

So it was a great book after all, or else I wouldn’t have so much to say about it. Clearly, it moved me.

Day 2: Season 2 of Glee and Back to my emotional support Gary Indiana. I reread Horse Crazy again (just my favorite parts). Couldn’t help myself…. Gun to my head, and I still wouldn’t be able to not mention it in every substack. I guess it’s a palette cleanser. I wanted All Fours to be about an obsessive romantic, but it was really more of a pervert’s daydream. All in all, it was the story of a restless and horny woman whose menopausal journey transformed her life and marriage. And I’ve got no gripes with that, but it’s not my bag.

My bag is the obsessions that do the exact opposite, which is ruin your life entirely. That’s something I can really sink my teeth into. Perhaps I’m crazy and doomed, after all my efforts in the opposite direction, he says. I’ll ruin myself over him, and he’ll get anything he wants handed over by a bunch of fools like me. Too true, too true.

Antagonist (love interest) Gregory ends up bleeding him dry, emotionally and financially, and the best part is, they never once have sex—it may as well have been all in his head. And it’s always about Gregory, even when the infatuation manifests as deep hatred. The trouble is he’s so fucking convincing. He could make a million dollars in Hollywood, he’s such an incredible actor. But then again, if he ever came close to a real opportunity, he’d fuck it up big so he could still feel like a victim…He’s a rotten monster, if you want to know the truth… Wow, I think. Imagine loving someone so much that you entirely despise them. That’ssss my shit right there 👉🏼〰️〰️〰️

Right, I also started season 2 of Glee. Every time I watch the show I become more of a die-hard fan of Leah Michelle. She really doesn’t have a lot of us fans. I feel that she’s gonna be Lena Dunham-ed (vindicated) soon. Also I want merchhhh

Day 3: Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill’s series of short stories. This is another one I found on a “Readers Who Enjoyed Your Favorite Book” page. Did they really? Enjoy it? Because if they did, I feel strongly that I wouldn’t be going down the list of book recommendations and always feeling disappointed that the itch wasn’t scratched. Hmm. I liked the one where the veterinarian becomes enamored with a prostitute, but not that much. Kind of boring, all in all

Day 4: Gave up on reading. More Glee.

I tried (again) to read 1Q84 and couldn’t get through even the first chapter. Oh man, he really is as misogynistic as they say. Titillating, at least, to know exactly how short Ayomame’s skirt is when she climbs over the railing and how much of her legs are exposed by the act. Good to know, I think.

So I went with Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow. I’m not far enough in yet to get into it.

Back to Glee. I’ve heard people say that misogyny from gay men is worse than from straight men, and it’s really not (this is the ultimate gen Z psyop and I don’t know who started it). Done properly, misogyny from gay men can be funny AF. Like ryan murphy

Day 5: At war with the post office. another call back to the GameMasterAnthony blog, only I’m not demanding dick pills— I have a very very important package there. The lady yells at me that my package that was supposed to be delivered to my house is not there. I say yes it is, it has to be, and if it’s not, then where is it? It has to be because my birth certificate is in there because my passport got lost in transit to my house so I need my birth certificate to go to a passport agency to request a new one. (must everything be so difficult… I often feel that my life is a video game, and each time I complete a task, I’m actually just uncovering a series of new tasks, indefinitely. Kendall called it a Kafkaesque loop: You need x to do y, but in order to get x you have to get z, but it turns out you need Y to do z, but you need x to do y, and so on. So there you go: the task can fundamentally never be completed in the end). My mom would say that most things aren’t inherently difficult, I make things difficult, and it’s true, I do.

I’m nearly in tears. If I do not find out where my birth certificate is, forget Christmas in Costa Rica—there may be no record of me even existing. I’ll disappear like people do in those time travel movies. First, I’ll be erased from family portraits, then my hand will go, then my whole arm, and so on.

Like I said, It could be worse. (Wendy Williams chimes in again, and I wish she wouldn’t: nope. This is the worst.)

So I guess the point of all of this is that i’m going to be taking life deadly seriously from here on out. Or, I will be taking not life so serious

I took 25 Mg of alprazolam before this. The reason is that this week I was quasi-dumped (we never dated) in theeee strangest way—it was SO strange that I can’t walk a block without stopping dead in my tracks and impulsively covering my mouth with my hand. Because I Remembered Again. (I’ve been having a lot of these Fleabag moments lately, moments in which I can’t help but betray my internal monologue with physical gestures and reallyyyy visibly sour facial expressions. I think ppl think I have tourettes or something, which actually is fine with me...)

25 mg of alprazolam and a Pilsner do not do the trick to quiet the intrusive thoughts. First, I was left on hmmm. (That’s when you ask someone out and they say hmmm and nothing else...) The day after I was left on hmmm, one day after turning 27, God gave his weakest-willed soldier an additional footnote to the dating fail anecdote that, now that I’m writing it all out, isn’t all that funny or interesting or even worth paying lip service to at all. I’m walking home from errands, and I see so-and-so pass me on his bike. He pulls over to the curb for reasons behavioral experts are still trying to figure out. We have a painfully awkward chat about baseball, he reminds me the pandemic isn’t over, I nod my head compliantly, he asks when i’m free, I say Thursday, Thursday rolls around, and what do you know, he wants nothing romantic but is happy to be friends, exclamation point! It’s really a nothing story in the end. A completely mundane interaction that bears no weight on my dating life, a moment that I’ll forget in a week, blah blah blah.

In any case, my pattern-seeking ass—the ass that is now tightly glued to the blue bench—is going to spin this meaningless incident into a narrative. So I’m using this 45-minute commute to reflect on the parable of the drowning man. The story goes that Devout Man stands on his roof in a rising flood and asks God for help. Rescuers come to his aid, and he refuses them, saying that God will save him. So he drowns. He chooses to drown, to put it harshly. In death, standing before god, Devout Man asks why he was not saved. God says he tried to: Who do you think sent the rescuers and the life rafts, etc etc.

I’m thinking about the parable of the drowning man because I don’t believe in coincidences. Running into Mr. Hmmm was too serendipitous in the bad way to be just another unfortunate accident. The Devout Man Who Drowned learned that god does lend a hand to those who need it, but he does so inconspicuously—maybe because the theatrics of a complete and total unmistakable miracle are a bit on the nose for his or her taste. God gave us free will; the free will to trust other people, the free will to not throw our hands in the air and hope for divine intervention but instead to help ourselves, the free will to discern good men from nasty ones. The clammy-ass-stuck-to-the-L-Train-bench Elena learns that god sends a trail of emo-unavail men, each one slightly worse than the last, to teach her the same damn lesson. Maybe get in that raft and float toward a thriving career, a sharper sense of self, a bag, or God forbid, a Person Who Actually Likes You.

Anyways. This journal is shit from a butt and im sorry for that but I had to do something to end the months-long hiatus. sometimes you just have to vomit something out and then make peace with it being shit from a butt . okay yay here we go

CHARLIE KIRK DEAD AT 31. I watched it on an instagram account called @charlie_kirk_shot_video. There are about 10 videos from different angles on the page. The bio says: “if you want a video for your self just follow me then dm me and then I will send it.” not sure for whom that would be necessary...

MY BIRTHDAY. I understand this whole journal is really navel-gazey & talking about my bday doesn’t help…I got a lot of really nice messages and yes my ex did text me. He also sent me a video of himself at 16 rapping “a cappella style” at my request. one of the lines goes, fresh off the boat in panama. Told her to smash the damn camera… there’s a couple harry potter references in there too

I re-read that nick mullen confessional essay (?) about Game Master Anthony and turning 30: How close have you come to being an unfuckable loser, turning 33, alone, posting about a fictional birthday party with your only friends, Mickey Mouse and Sailor Moon? How often do you look up from your own life, thinking about how just-ok it’s going, and have the same feeling you get when you realize you almost stepped off the curb in front of a bus? What happened? Could that have been you? Is that you? Did I die and this is the afterlife? Am I GameMasterAnthony, sitting here, eyes closed, turning 33, imagining friendships and contentment built on terms other than my own? He’s terrifying; a near death experience, oblivious to himself. I hate him, I want him to go away. I hate myself.

Also I went upstate and had an adult sleepover with the besties. Adult sleepovers are super quiche

QUICHE. It’s from Ja’mie the Private School Girl (another sacred text). Quiche means a step above hot & sexy, but I also use it as an umbrella term to refer to anything that is good

It Don Don Me. This girl on Twitter said “something just don don me” instead of “dawned on me.” went viral etc etc. I reallyyyyyy love using this one. It just don don me that i got off the train at the wrong stop… it suddenly don don me that he never cared about me…That kind of thing.

VINE BOOM. Maddie VB says this when something Shocking happens. it suddenly don don me that he never cared about me—vine boom.

Swoon town. This is where my friend is at. She’s swooning over a guy, she’s at swoon town, population her.

Manufacturing the Ick. Since we’re on the topic of romance and dating and all that…I tell my friends who are trying to get over someone to Manufacture the Ick. Sometimes it’s just a matter of recognition. You can recall an embarrassing moment— a fart or an off-putting comment or a weird orgasm face—and use it to sort of smother the part of you that is still “at swoon town”. But you can also force it: the metaphorical pulling trig.

Think of it like eating eggs. You open the carton and pick two out and slam one against the counter, the liquid seeps out of the cracks, you throw what you can in the pan, shell bits and all, and when you bite down on something crunchy, you remember its the shell, and you realize that the shell is from an egg, and that the egg is from a bird, and that the parts you meant to eat were some form of mucus—all slimy and wet and weird—and that mucus came from a body, and that body came from an egg, and What Is An Egg Anyway, Is it Chicken Period? vine boom, you’re not eating eggs anymore.

So it’s a matter of reframing. Actually, it’s a matter of pulling something from memory—something you used to look at with endearment—and making it disgusting in your mind. The mind is a powerful tool, and you can do anything you like with it. You can use it to turn the mundane profound, to romanticize the mediocre, to conjure repulsive images and then expel them permanently. And if or when it suddenly dons on you that he or she doesn’t care about you, they never did, not even as a friend—you can use it to Manufacture the Ick.

Baby you dating a wig. So the tweet goes like this: all he does is fall off and embarrass you. Baby you dating a wig. Love it love it love it

On earth we’re briefly goated. Straight from the mind of Addie damn Price. We say this when we want to reframe an unpleasant situation

*******BEEEEEEEEP. It was some family drama that I was scolded for sharing. I’m almost resentful that I have to keep quiet about the Family Business—the business of Unstable Men Causing Messes and Rational Women Cleaning Them Up—but the deal with Father Issues is that everyone has them. The first humans ever created were baited into disobeying Dad’s Rules & then punished for doing what Dad knew they would do all along. So I’m not all that bothered by omitting the story bc there are a million more from millions of girls just like me.

I also wonder how anyone manages being a Confessional Essayist. Seems like a burden to always toe the line between self-expression (catharsis) and oversharing (airing out dirty laundry). And then there’s the matter of discerning what I do or do not have the Right to Disclose. Anyway. ************

So. Bushwick Beach Fest and Circumstantial Forgiveness and IBG and Mr. Marmalade and Planet Courtney and Lena Dunham's New Show etc etc etc. It's been a stimulating month and I've got mad shit on my mind lately ....

on "masking." Soap said it's important for people to maintain their "masks" in relationships and keep it that way for as long as possible. I disagreed because to me, Love is the privilege of not having to perform for someone. She said that’s not what she means— the "mask" she's referring to is how you present yourself to the outside world and to the people who are close to you. Maintaining that mask means doing things that generally align with your outward persona, even when you're being Vulnerable. I said, still, to really love someone is to know all of the unsavory parts of their character & still love them despite those things. She said, still, that’s not what she means.

What she means, really, is that the way you present outward should be an extension of who you truly are, deep down, when no one is around. Imagine, for instance, that Sensitive Girl is dating Sincere Guy. He's sweet and corny and sappy and writes poems and love songs about her. One would expect that in conflict, Sincere Guy would react like a total pussy—he'd cower or stutter or burst into tears or whatever. Girl finds out this isn't the case. He responds to her earnest admission of hurt feelings with uncharacteristic petulance and cruelty. When the mask slips, it reveals rage and contempt—not a deeper well of softness and sensitivity. Sincere Guy's mask isn't an extension of his Inner Self at all, it turns out. That is the nasty part: that someone would perform a character that is completely the opposite of their true nature.

And I'm so sorry, I reallyyyyyy hate to reference Zizek, but I read First as Tragedy when I was 21 and I still think about this quote from time to time:

When we think we really know a close friend or relative, it often happens that, all of a sudden, this person does something-utters an unexpectedly vulgar or cruel remark, makes an obscene gesture, casts a cold indifferent glance where compassion was expected-which makes us aware that we do not really know them; we become conscious of a total stranger in front of us. At this point, the fellow man changes into a Neighbor.

Sooo moving on .

Gary Indiana. Gary Indiana is the name of a city in Indiana and the pen name of a writer I love. I finally got around to finishing Horse Crazy because my friend has my old copy and my new copy from thriftbooks dot com came last week, totally unmarked and crisp and not yet damaged by my clumsiness—grease stains and hot cheeto dust and all that. I'm nasty! 🤣Life is about accepting that when someone has your book, you don't get it back unless it finds its way back to you by serendipitous circumstance. Life is about lots of things like that, things that are small yet significant, because for instance, when you happen upon a book as opposed to seeking it out, that is the universe telling you that there is something for you in there.

You should never ignore a sign from the universe, which people say Isn't Its Own Entity Capable of Feeling or Imposing Its Will Onto Others. People tell me that a message from what I consider "The Universe" or "God" is really just my subconscious telling me to do this or that: A Gut Feeling. But the universe or God is everything, living and not: the stars, the earth and the people on it, My gut, My subconscious, Me. So I would argue that my Gut Feeling actually is the universe telling me to do this or that. How could it not be?

Anyway. Horse Crazy is a book about a gay man in the 80s who falls for a crazy bisexual and goes crazy in turn, and during all this, his friends are dying left and right of AIDS—so maybe my friend will find meaning in it and maybe not.

Ex Box. Kim Kardashian says that she keeps an "Ex Box" under her bed. It's basically a box full of mementos related to your exes: love letters, photos, small gifts, etc etc. My ex box sits on the top of my red bookshelf. It has a handwritten note from my very first boyfriend after my very first breakup. A charm bracelet. A pamphlet of my last boyfriend's film photos. A cassette tape of ****'s first album. Some photo booth prints.

Things that come from Inside A Guy. There's a very thin line between men who have swag and men who don't have swag.

Drip biters and try-hards don't have swag. Men who disingenuously contrive a signature "thing" are completely swagless (something that comes to mind is my ex's friend who used to carry around a flip phone at the bar & use his iPhone at home. Not to be a bitch but like whattt are u doing like Are Hoes Actually Falling For This😂😭)

Soap says that things that come from "inside a guy" are really sexy. What that means is it's really hot for a guy to have something that he just does for himself. Like keeping a picture of his mom in his wallet. Or I met this guy one time who used "his niece's sock" as a phone case. He'd take the phone out of the sock every time he wanted to use it. Or I knew this guy in college who would use paper clips to earnestly get his hair out of his face. And you could tell he really wasn't trying to elicit attention—he really just didn't have anything else.

The misconception about swag is that it's ostentatious, but really, it's all about subtlety. Things that come from inside a guy are pretty much inconspicuous and instinctual.

The foreskin. I started saying this instead of "foresight." I go, Back then, I didn't have the foreskin to make a thoughtful decision. Or something like that.

Like Breathing To Me. I'm always saying X or Y or Z is Like Breathing To Me. This works two ways. The first way is that something is so natural to me, it's as if it's part of my autonomic body functions. I hardly even have to think about it, if at all. Posting Is Like Breathing To Me in this way. Mostly, Writing Is Like Breathing To Me in this way.

Or, the act of breathing is entirely something else: difficult and laborious. For smokers of 20 years and people born with a Bum Lung, this is true. Acting Is Like Breathing To Me, in this way. Difficult and laborious. And so I'm not an actor.

Hare Krishna. Sarah P. says that this mantra is reserved for when you are dealing with a real moron. You say, Hare Krishna, and then you let your anger go.

Reaching Irie. Speaking of mantras…Soap said this on the phone to me the other day. Reaching Irie is a new way to say Achieving Nirvana. Irie is Jamaican Patois for "alright." Google dictionary defines Irie exactly as the following: used by Rastafarians as a friendly greeting.

I have my neighborhood mapped out: Aguas frescas on wilson and suydam, 5$ mango on stockholm and knickerbocker, i's cream also on stockholm and knickerbocker. Knickerbocker is the street with the action. It's where the guy with no legs who called me CRACKER lives, and for the record, he's also a cracker. It's also where the red and blue cars have a LOUD AF RUMBA-OFF. Summer is a terrible time to have no money and sensitive ears :( But it's a really good time to be ¼ latina and wasian-passing :)

Anywayyyyyy.

here are my Things of the month…

in the crib and at the club. That's where I've been lately. People such as my cousin have been asking me Why Haven't I Posted a Substack in Weeks. I've been really really really busy at the crib planning Bushwick Beach Fest (Fyre Festival 2) and in the studio (my living room) and playing outside and nibbling on adderall immediate release (off-brand) at 7 pm so i can really lock in on having fun at the club.

BTW the club im always talking about being at is not necessarily a club. The club is just wherever I am at any given moment. Geef and maddy and i wrote a song the other night that touches on this idea: im home at the club, it goes.

Call me Ishmael. In my last substack, I postulated that either New York is endowed with forces beyond nature that keep weak people out, or that I'm just too Stupid to live here. It's a little bit of both, I think.

I'm naive. A Naive Person. I'm naive enough to read the first chapter of Moby Dick on clickhole.com published under the clickbait title "The Time I Spent On A Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective On The World." I finally caught on at this line: Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of.

Odd, I thought, that none of this reads as a 5 point listicle. Then he says something that I love love LOVE: But BEING PAID,—what will compare with it?

A century and a half after Moby Dick's publication, cardi B expressed the same thing: nothing in this world that I like more than checks. Like I said before: In the beginning was the word. Everything beyond that is plagiarism.

Going weeeee!!! There are two types of people.

Actually there are millions of types of people, but I want to focus on one dichotomy that my friend coined: the people who go weeeeee and the people who don't. The story goes like this: American Girl meets Indie Drummer Englishman during her month-long Model Abroad in the UK. They court, then they Romance, then they part ways, resolving to long-distance yearning.

When she's back in London months later, she tries to reconnect, and he resists. So she tries harder, and he gives in (insert cheeto door lock image).

(In case it isn't clear, the cheeto represents Englishman's willpower at that time)

So they date for a few weeks—then he actually, and this is 100% true, dumps her because he "Likes Her Too Much" (I know how this sounds coming from a Pining Woman—but this is not a fabricated excuse on his end. Models are crazy because the shit you only hear about in urban legend forreal happens to them). Englishman issues a No Contact order because, after all, they can never properly date. They live in different countries.

American Girl doesn't accept the terms. American Girl is the person who goes weeeeee, and Englishman is the person who does not go weeeee.

People who go weeeee weigh their decisions based on their opportunity to extract pleasure, while people who do not go weeeee weigh their decisions based on their probability of causing pain. Weeee folk justify their recklessness on the basis of radical acceptance: Heartache is not only inevitable, but temporary. You hurt and heal and hurt and heal and so on. Non-weeee folk think that you can circumnavigate the Hurt by avoiding certain risks (never mind the fact that any person or situation, familiar or not, is a potential risk).

Case two: Another friend of mine told me that she wants to break things off with a guy because he "doesn't want a relationship" & she doesn't want to get in any deeper. The Weeee Philosophy of Radical Acceptance proposes that even though you cannot change someone's mind about dating—through sheer force of will or coercion or manifestation or whatever other means you can think of—you should still go forth into the Situationship with peace. Be of good vibe. Hold fast that which is A Guy. Render to no one Body for Body. In other words, just rock with it. Because nobody—not oneee body—gets out of Love or Like totally unscathed. And what is the point, I wonder, of moving through life in a constant state of emotional equilibrium?

Anywayyyyyyyy NEXT!

I actually done a zoom in north Korea. hawk tuah girl said this on the hawk tuah podcast. You say this when you do a zoom (embarrassing thing) in North Korea (at a party or social gathering). You can apply this format to anything else. I actually done a suffering in solitude. I actually done a fest at Bushwick Beach. Etc etc

Women be talking and shopping and posting. One thing you should never do is ask the guy you're seeing what he Doesn't Like About You, because the chance of him being honest is more likely than you would think.

You're Just So Online, a guy once told me. ok. im Fine About Hearing That Piece of Information….

I’m not embarrassed—it’s true. My friends and I act annoyinggg af online and we love doing it and we don't care if we're misinterpreted as shallow or immature, because it really isn't that. Girlhood and things of that nature are special and sacred to me. In adulthood, Girlhood Observers embrace modernity and tradition all at once: We make dumb lip syncing videos on TikTok and post create modes and all that to honor our younger selves, who choreographed routines to Kesha at sleepovers and wrote Tumblr poetry. It's allllll the same shit to me, or at least, it all invokes the same feeling of Girl Play and closeness and sisterhood. Sisterhood—the most profound and Complex bond on earth.

Because of everything she's been through and she's still singing. I've been thinking about that woman named Rita (just guessing) whose absolutely absurddddd street interview went viral—she was playing one of those games where you pick between two singers, and the winner moves on to the next round. Beyoncé vs. Rihanna, Rihanna vs. Lady Gaga, and so on. Her final pick was Selena Gomez—Because of everything she's been through and she's still singing, she said. Perioddddd

I kind of miss shameless celebrity worship— to me, it's as human as love and empathy and intellect and philosophy and etc etc. Before there were celebrities and socialites, there were monarchs and their royal courts, and before them, there were patricians and plebeians, and before them, humans and Gods. Every iteration of the Gods brought them closer to the masses—and now, they're here among us, separated by only 6 degrees. They're the Gods of Popular Culture, and it never occurs to me to question their character—did Socrates ever posit that Ares was lowkey a male manipulator?

This is why I argue with men about pop stars, and I even go to bat for the ones I don't care for at all. People tell me that these matters are really class issues disguised as feminist ones—I'm just siding with a Billionaire over Regular People. But we aren't really talking about Selena Gomez's lupus or Taylor Swift's politics or Ariana Grande's retired blaccent. I'm not defending the Billionaire Girl Boss—I'm defending Rita, who said what she said and she did not stutter and she stands on business. I'm defending the Girls who are socialized to be embarrassed of their interests because they aren't Serious or Deep or Thoughtful. I'm defending the Girls who, when they turn 16, take down their Harry Styles posters and replace them with Elliot Smith album covers out of internalized spite for the Mainstream.

If it really comes down to class, then so be it; bitch, I'll Go There! The girls who love pop culture are Regular People, too. They're running fan accounts like the navy and writing wattpad fan fiction, like their foresisters did when they were Teen Girls. It's culture, and it matters, and Girls matter. I was once a girl who loved pop culture trying to curate a cooler front to the outside world. Now I'm a Woman who Loves Pop culture trying to curate a cooler outside world for the Girls. We alllll love Elliot Smith and Christopher Nolan and blah blah blah. Whoooo cares. Selena Gomez has been through a lot, and yet, she's still singing.

If gypsy rose blanchard is mother. I read a blog by this guy named Anti Art Ryan back when Gypsy rose blanchard got out of prison & all of these fan accounts were making cap cut edits of her court appearances to azealia banks. Anti Art Ryan lamented about the morbidity of the whole situation & basically scolded everyone for "memeifying" a convicted accessory to murder. He said that taking a life is wrong & that nobody, under any circumstances, should be saying that Gypsy rose is "Mother."

Anthropologists like myself don't moralize Gypsy Rose or the Gypsy Roseanators, because we know that there are indisputable truths in this world. Earth orbits the sun and two plus two is four and Gypsy rose Blanchard is Mother. She's been Mother since her father and mother’s DNA fused at conception, creating a unique string of genomic code—which is to say, before she was even a human life capable of suffering or feeling at all (no pro-life). She was Mother when she stabbed Dee Dee in the back figuratively, and Nicholas Godejohn stabbed Dee Dee in the back literally. I don't decide, she doesn't decide, and Anti Art Ryan doesn't decide. That's just the way it is.

Champagne papi. Drake's ig name. champagne for my real papi, real pain for my sham papi. that’s something that i came up with recently

It started yesterday when I was writing this post while walking to the laundromat in the rain. Water droplets landed on the surface, then they seeped into the cracks, then they meddled with the mechanics, then they caused a stroke, paralyzing only one side. When I woke up this morning, I could only type letters to the right of the GVT divide.

I figured, with half a mind and half my phone working, I can still make it to Fire Island. I'm just barely resourceful enough to make it work, and if I can't, so be it. Whatever will happen, will happen.

So I do the trek. I go from the L to the J to Jamaica station, get on the correct Long Island Railroad track 5 minutes too soon, and it takes me 5 stations to realize that the stops on my phone are different from the stops displayed on the train's monitor. I'm in Hempstead. Mrs. Train Conductor tells me that if I wait here—she doesn't know how long—I can catch a train back to Jamaica station. So that's where I'm writing this from—Hempstead. On a computer with no wifi. On the bench at the Hempstead stop, my phone breaks entirely. I will have to retrace my steps back home and hope for the best— no Fire Island for me, or at least, not today.

Natural selection. Days like this in New York only come once in a blue moon. They're special in that way. The city's very own Powers That Be exist for a reason: To deter anyone who lacks the resilience and the fortitude to be here. I've already resolved to go Back West, I tell the Powers That Be. They don't care. This is what sets New York apart from the other places. Every time you step outside, you are completely at the will of uncontrollable factors, which is exhilarating when everything cosmically aligns and terrifying when everything catastrophically falls apart. And that Network of Happenings is fragile—one wrong step can set into motion a series of mishaps that all coalesce into an abject failure of a day. Either that, or I'm just a stupid person trying to make sense of why life here is so difficult. There's a reason Los Angeles attracts influencers, and New York attracts intellects.

While waiting for the train back to Jamaica station, it occurs to me that I haven't hit rock bottom just yet. Rock bottom is when you fully surrender to the Powers That Be. You find a wall to sit against, put your head in your hands, and sob— passersby be damned. I think I may have surpassed that emotional register because it also occurs to me that the horseshoe theory is the perfect analog; sometimes, things can get so fucked up that they just become funny again.

In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy says, "You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from." What a soothing cope. Something worse happened on the train I'm supposed to be on, I decide. That's why I'm here. Real New Yorkers say that an oncoming train isn't the trouble when you fall onto the tracks— it's the third rail you really ought to be worried about.

With no phone, no book, and a two-hour commute ahead of me, I've got nothing to do but notice things. A denim baseball hat with a bedazzled NYPD logo. An iPhone 16 ad: One for every member of your polycule. A six-foot-tall What I Assume Is a Cello secured in a ballistic nylon case. Far too thin a material for an environment like this, I think.

(Update: I got a new phone the night of the bad day. Alex told me that I was actually on the correct train. I was halfway to fire island all along.)

Memorial Day Monday was different. It was another perfect day at Bushwick Beach. There on the concrete shore, adjacent to a cardboard box of someone's trash and hoarder Christine's treasure, back to the UV 7, MIAMI lettermark to the heavens, and hand covering the top of my screen so I could just barely make out the faces of licensed professionals on psychologytoday.com, I started a new journey: Online shrink shopping.

Why I'm going shrink shopping. Going shrink shopping is what you do when your soothing rituals just aren't hitting the same, and your bargaining with God (manifesting) isn't panning out as you'd hoped. Shrink shopping is a form of submission—not to a person, but to your disposition. When you want something that is categorically out of reach, you eventually have to settle for the next best thing: the serenity to accept the things you cannot change.

One of my Problem Areas is my tendency to fixate on the past and then reduce any given situation to XYZ. If I didn't do X, then Y wouldn't have happened, and he or she wouldn't have done Z, etc etc. That kind of thing. In The Rehearsal, Nathan poses an interesting question: If you could control every possible factor with mathematical precision, down to the position of a chair or a sip of water, is it possible to actually contrive the desired outcome? By way of force, or rather, meticulous planning? I'm not sure—I don't even learn from lived experience, apparently. I do everything with my Hard Lessons in mind, and it still gets me nowhere. Hempstead isn't the first place I've been stranded, and it won't be the last. It's like Hegel said: "The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."

I'm not interested in knowing what would happen if I could relive a scenario in a thousand different ways. If I start playing the What If game, even for a moment, it will just end up taking over. And then I'm back to square one. Capitulating is the better deal, I think. Sometimes, it's the only option; if that's the case, it's because you resisted for too long.

Dwelling in healthy doses. ED coaches say that food addiction is unique in that, unlike drugs or alcohol, you can't just expel it entirely. Food addiction recovery takes the opposite approach: You have to understand that all foods are morally neutral and then forge a healthy relationship with them equally. I'm trying this with reflection—it is a necessary part of growth, and you can't do away with it altogether, but like with anything, you have to practice it mindfully and in moderation.

Whether or not you glean anything from the past, you still have to make peace with the present. The sip of water or the chair facing the wall would have made no difference—and even if they might have, here we are. I don't have any more time in my 20s to waste waxing nostalgic (wistfully, then resentfully). Soon, I'll be 30, and whatever I'm doing now will be another Hard Lesson that I will struggle to implement into my relationships then. So, like I said, it's time to outsource. Changing the System from the Inside is a two-person job. Back to scrolling on psychologytoday.com.

Leaning on metaphor. I read an essay last week about how there are writers who see things figuratively, and writers who see things exactly as they are. I'm MISS Metaphor. A shrink would say it's because I'm insecure that my feelings aren't relatable, so I have to illustrate my experiences by comparing them to other things. The shrink would say it's because, above all, I want people to understand me. It's true, I would say, I never feel more lonely than when I am misunderstood—and all of this is compounded by the fact that Little Things are Big Things to me. The shrink would say that I assume other people don't feel the same way, but that isn't necessarily true. It all depends.

To me, speaking figuratively allows you to take something that, if stated explicitly, is nothing more than a train of thought: I thought he liked me, but he didn't. Through metaphor, that train of thought becomes a profound universal truth that can apply to a million unique experiences, big or small: I thought it was a bird, but it was just a paper bag. This rhetorical crutch affords you a great deal of plausible deniability, too—anything and anyone may be the metaphorical paper bag. Multiple things or people may be the metaphorical paper bag.

In Girls, Hannah says that her road trip to Jessa's rehab "just isn't a metaphor." Sometimes, this is simply the case. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. Etc etc

One more thing about The Rehearsal. I observed an argument the other night about whether or not Nathan Fielder is a "sick fuck." Guy One thinks that Nathan baits naive aspiring talents into a very public humiliation ritual. Guy Two thinks that Nathan positions himself as the butt of the joke more often than not. And me? I guess I don't care all that much. Whatever ethical dilemma at play here is a low-stakes one, and besides, people have been making fools of themselves on reality TV for decades—that's what the industry is designed for. (On The Bachelor, participants are always disparaging each other for "being in it for the wrong reasons"—the wrong reasons being for fame and attention. Really, it's the other way around—the right reason to go on a dating show is to be famous, and the wrong reason is to find love.)

Last week, it came out that a woman called Lana Love flew from New York to LA three separate times on her own dime to audition for Wings of Voice. It turned out that Wings of Voice—a competition judged by pilots, hosted in a replica of the Houston airport, and only allowed the use of public domain songs—was a hoax. So she did what many of us do when we find out we've been played—she stuck it out till the very end, then publicly crashed out. She went to the media, broke her NDA, and released a song called "Nathan Fielder." Please don't torture kids anymore, it goes. Adults are ok to torture.

Geef said the whole ordeal is like watching someone trip and fall. There are two types of people, she said: people who laugh at themselves and grit through the pain, and people who say Guys it's Not Funny That Actually Hurt, and then pathetically limp away. The limper is the kind of person who would prefer to be pitied than laughed at; sympathy is, after all, a form of social currency. Never mind that if the sympathy isn't warranted, or at least if it's deemed that way in the Court of Public Opinion, you inadvertently invite even more derision.

It goes without saying that Lana Love is the limper. Nooo hate, but the proverbial dunce cap suits her. Because it's not about the money or the waste of time and energy. It's not even about the principle of it all…. It's really about having the last word, for better or worse. When you're in that deep, with no reputation to ruin, tripling down seems just as sensible as standing up and walking it off. Weirdly, I sort of agree with her. The difference between being Woman Who Was On Wings of Voice and Woman Who Was On Wings of Voice and Wrote a Song About It is marginal enough to ignore.

But readers, there is a reason it's fart then walk away… not queef then haggle away. You may be heartbroken or down astronomically or embarrassed on national television, but it's never too late to opt out, cut sideways, and preserve whatever dignity you have left. After picking myself up from heartbreak #1, I promised myself that I would never again broadcast my humiliation unless it's curated to look cool and artistic and somewhat detached.

Back in crush jail. For months, Soap and I have been taking turns serving sentences in crush jail. I always say that I prefer to get rejected or bested for superficial reasons because they are tangible and measurable to me. Like, her hair is longer, or she's skinnier, or her nose has an upward slope, or she has more swag—these things can be easily written off. The truth is, you only spend a handful of years being hot, but you spend your entire life being you.

A self-own. Vanity is something that is irritating yet ultimately forgivable in women, but totally repulsive and unacceptable in men. Take the self-purported Chad, for example. I saw a reel the other day that said, "TFW she gives you attitude but she's not even #1..." The #1 in question is the main hoe. The chica in question with an attitude problem is ostensibly the side hoe. The implication is that #2 shouldn't complain or have expectations because she is ultimately Le Benchwarmer.

Sometimes, I wish taking to the comments wasn't completely Loser Behavior. Feeling the need to comment is as embarrassing an impulse as making Alpha Male content, I think. But on my Substack, in my own personal enclosure, I can say anything. For example, my thoughts on the Side Hoe With Attitude video: If you are dating women for The Game and not for the sex or intimacy, then what you actually are is an asexual, aromantic, and sinister gay man (the use of a certain Ivy Wolk-ism would be appropriate here, but I'm too old to say Pernicious Faggot without there being social consequences). When I refer to The Game, what I mean is subjecting women to the attention-seeking cycle. Part of The Game is relishing in treating women poorly and bonding with other men about it. Like I said (or would say if I was allowed to): Pernicious Faggotry, through and through.

Ozempic as an antisocial practice. When the Ozempic wave first hit los angeles in 2023, I read that article in The Cut— you know the one. One of its anonymous sources said that Ozempic is like adderall, but with all of the benefits, and none of the bad side effects. She said it doesn't make you feel jittery or tweaky or weirdly antisocial. But see, ozempic does make you weirdly antisocial—because food is an inherently social thing. We learn about other cultures and share generational family recipes and laugh over oysters and cab sav. We lean against the counter eating cheese and olives while sauteing onions and cherry tomatoes with basil and pepper. In the kitchen on Edgemont, Haley dirties 6 pans for one dish, and I scrub them down, one by one. I push the pans sitting on the gingham cushion in the nook to the side, sit down, and watch her dirty more pans. And at the table, we pass the plate, serve one another, and indulge over stories about LA characters and roses and thorns and so on.

Food is ingrained in every culture on earth, each with its own distinct palette. And yet, it's a universal language. All over the world, mothers prepare hot soup for their sick children. There's a reason that, when two adversaries end a feud, it's called "breaking bread"—because sharing food is sharing love.

Removing the part of your brain that enjoys food, then, alienates you from these experiences, thus alienating you from others. All of this—to be thin. I would hope that if this option was presented to me—to be thin or to participate—I would choose to participate. Enjoying food is the better deal. Enjoying life is the better deal.

Corny rant overrrrrr like sorry…..

Oneeeee last thing about The Rehearsal (for real this time) and whether or not Nathan Fielder is a "sick fuck." Okay—so maybe I do care about the ethical dilemma after all. My verdict is that he's not a sick fuck. People say the beauty you see in the world is just the beauty that exists within you, and I think the opposite is true, too. Perhaps the viewers themselves are imbuing Nathan's work with cruelty. If you interpret it as sneering and unkind, maybe you're the sneering, unkind one.

Frog Unlocked. My cousin showed me a new comedy special in which a peculiar man does surgery on a frog. I have a lot of thoughts that I will have to save for another day, but I want to end this journal on a positive note. It's been a long time since a truly new performer has emerged. I've seen all the gay sons of John Early, thot daughters of Kate Berlant, and autistic nephews of Andy Kaufman. Peculiar man who does surgery on a frog is not a character I've seen before...

Update: Fire Island. I made it to Fire Island in the end. My friend says she can't tell if the guy she's flirting with is gay or not. She said the Fire Island house is creepy at night, he says he'll come down to "protect her." Couldn't be gay, I think. Gay guys have only ever put me in harm's way

A stabbing today. A guy at Bushwick Beach. It’s true what Soap said: We have generated so much buzz around Bushwick Beach, random NPCs have started to spawn at our third place, which is really our second place, because we don’t have a third place. This summer will be different—we will invent a third place.

One last thing about Bushwick Beach—it’s yet another recession indicator. Nobody gets off at the Bedford L stop, someone on Twitter said. No one on Depop is sending me counter offers anymore bc we take what we can get. Girls (me) buy shooters at the liquor store to put in diet coke at the bar. Etc etc

Nobody at this artist co-op space knows I’m writing a substack post. It’s the second time in my life I’ve smoked a cigarette inside. The first time was when me and soap booked the smoking room at a motel 6 in San Diego and I threw up in the bathtub because i got put on too much ketamine (notice how I wrote this in passive voice— this is a clever little trick you can use to deflect accountability here and there). Anyway.

Here are some things I’ve been thinking about lately…

Never kill yourself. Why? Because of FOMO. You want to be alive when your dear friend says something sooo funny that hinges on an entire friendship’s worth of context: a Babushka doll inside joke. A babushka doll joke starts as a riff between friends and devolves into basically a primitive gesture. Picture this: I’m looking at Haley and TJ from across a dinner table, curving my finger into a hook, placing it on my lips, and accentuating the gesture with a slightly raised brow. Then they laugh. We all laugh. Hook to lips again. We laugh again. Let’s twerk the pad back on, I’m saying.

And of course, there are all the other reasons to live. kitten heels clacking on the pavement. Rain when it's 80 degrees out. $5 mango with tajin from a street cart. Prospect park. Orange and pink and yellow tulips. 7:30 pm on a Thursday night. blumarine ss22. June in New York, July in New York. strawberry matcha with the seeds sunk to the bottom of the cup from KIJITORA. And they give you plastic straws instead of paper yayyy.

Warding off The Feeling. my most male-coded opinion is that Working With Your Hands is the single most effective way to sublimate melancholy—something that diverts 100% of your attention away from whatever ur spiraling about. I learned this when I started playing guitar 3 years ago bc I was going through a Gnarly and basically brain altering breakup. I got to a point where I couldn’t keep lying in a fetal position in the shower or chain-smoking on walks or writhing around in bed or going into Hakey’s room and throwing myself onto the floor. God told me this: Whenever you get the impulse to do something self-destructive, figure out where you should be putting your hands.

The only problem is that when you get better at your Distraction Activity, its effect starts to dull, and you need something more difficult and more demanding to get that same feeling of relief from The Other Stuff. Tolerance too high type shit… and THAT is why I’m learning the Elliott Smith song that makes you want to kill yourself and then go on a walk. wateva

2 weeks ago wasn’t great. It was so bad that I started a damn substack. Soap told me to take a cold shower, clean my room, light a candle, and pretend that I just got home from a long day at the beach. That way, you break up the rotting routine, and the Rest feels earned. Rest. What rest means to me is that I’m horizontal and my computer is propped up sideways on my bed. Mostly when I’m doing this, I’m also tweaking and trying sooo hard not to be on my phone.

Also, I’m reading Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana. It makes me yearn for the time I was going through a different breakup 7 months ago. What’s awesome about a breakup is you can easily identify the source of pain. I’m depressed because I’m heartbroken, I’m heartbroken because I’ve been rejected, I’ve been rejected because of who I am as a person, and so on. When you aren’t going through a breakup but you feel like you are, you have bigger problems. oh well…

In Horse Crazy, he tells you all the ways you can stop thinking of someone. Read books on thermodynamics and try speed if you have it. Well, I don’t care about thermodynamics, and I don’t have speed. Is speed coke?

Fuck it we ball. my new mantra that I bit from a friend who said it in response to getting crazyyyy fucked over by a crazy woman (it’s not miso to call a woman crazy unless ur a man). You say this when you want to reframe an unpleasant situation.

Miso. Short for misogynistic. Of course it is also a seasoning paste but it really depends on the context. Like everything else

Fart then walk away queen. my other mantra that I decided applies to all romantic woes. I’m not being a wise guy—there is a metaphor here. The fart is the moment when everything clicks. It’s the sudden epiphany. When you are lovesick or clawing for something or trying to compel someone to feel a certain way, everything feels so disorienting and hazy, and you can’t trust your instincts. The fart is what cuts through the noise, throwing your solution into sharp relief. The next time you are wailing into a pillow, wait until it’s over, deep exhale, and then be very, very still. And just listen for it. Next comes the walk away queen, which is when you walk away queen

a list of words I want to bring back into the popular lexicon.

• shrink (instead of therapist)

• “my old man” (father or boyfriend)

• hooker (I actually can’t speak on this one, but it has far more bravado and swag than Sex Worker. Sex workers tap in & LMK what you think)

And that’s all. One thing lists never need is excess. This is why I stopped participating in end-of-year in/out lists—I always give up on discernment and just Be Saying Anything.

Sincerity. Speaking of in/out lists, I’ve seen this on every “in” list for the past few years. Eye roll…... For me, the pendulum has swung so far the other way, I even think being Fluent in Sarcasm is cool again. On some millennial type shit

Nathan Fielder said it best: “Sincerity is overrated. It ends up punishing those of us who can’t perform it as well as others.” I think I’ve always been skeptical of public displays of vulnerability—they almost always read as disingenuous. Maybe I am just cynical :/

An interesting thing that comes up with Sincerity discourse is that it’s always presented as the direct fundamental opposite of Irony. It’s not to me. Not in the world I’m living in… But I’ll humor it to explore this fun little dichotomy:

poets vs jesters. I resent the notion that Serious Artists are interesting and Comedians are embarrassing, because it’s much more often the other way around. Soap clocked it: the purpose of being funny (or at least trying to be funny) is to make people laugh, which is a kind and good-natured inclination. The purpose of waxing poetic is to make people admire you. Both types of people want attention, which is fine, so long as you are also serving a public good. Joy and laughter are indispensable public goods. Drawing admiration from ur peers is not really a public good at all.

Happy for Zendaya. I’m happy for her. She seems happy.

The candid girlfriend. Some girl got litttt the fuck up a couple years ago when her Subway Take went viral in the bad way. Main character of the week. She said guys don’t want a cool, artsy girl— what they really want is a candid girlfriend. Candid Girlfriend is a pick-me final boss, she said. Candid Girlfriend has mousy brown hair and is exclusively photographed in 35mm film. People got really mad at Subway Takes girl for having internalized miso, which is something you should never reprimand a woman for. But like many modern visionaries who have been “Womened” (as Rayne Fisher Quann would say), she’s since been vindicated. Because she’s right: Men want a candid girlfriend. And it’s not inherently miso to use helpful identifiers for a type of girlfolk.

In any case, I’m not a candid girlfriend. I’ve never read mary oliver & its no charcuterie board photos in my camera roll… I like the idea of doing those things, but I worry that if I do them, people will immediately know that I’m being phony. Because my true nature is whatever the girl version of a loser is

when someone is spiritually Unc. If you aren’t cousin, and you aren’t nephew, then what you are is Unc. The qualities of Unc are partially aesthetic— maybe you have a beard or a receding hairline or a beer belly. But mostly, they’re vibe-based. These qualities are more nebulous and can’t be easily pinpointed, but being Unc is like pornography— you know it when you see it. Carmen Christopher is Unc.

Coworker hot. Someone you wouldn’t match with on a dating app, but you would have a crush on if they were your coworker. Many a man fall under this category. I didn’t come up with this idea, of course, but I’ve just been thinking about how many coworker hot guys I know. It would behoove me to pretend that any old dude is my coworker so that I can manufacture attraction to him…

Gigi. He’s Just Not That Into You is a sacred text in my household. Protagonist Gigi is always tweaking over a guy. She’s a paradigm for the boy-crazy modern woman.

The idgaf war. An oxymoron. Having an indifference-off is the most GAF thing you can do. My official statement on the matter is that feigning apathy rots your soul, AND it’s corny, AND it’s undignified.

Still, even the most resilient among us might find themselves in an idgaf war, and if you do, here are some ways you can proceed:

1. Fart then walk away queen. Like I said before.

2. Detached mirroring. If you are serious about participating in the idgaf war, you have to operate under the assumption that the person you are dealing with actually doesn’t care about you, and that their carelessness isn’t calculated. Mirroring means you mimic their actions with benevolence and in good faith. If you do this with a spiteful spirit, you lose. If you find yourself attempting to provoke jealousy from them, you lose. Mostly, you lose.

3. Forced perspective. This is a filmmaking technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear larger or smaller than it really is. With a little imagination and creative vision, you can apply this to anything. If you are crashing out over someone, make up a guy to get infatuated at. Remember that whatever qualities you project onto someone can be projected onto anyone else.

4. Rock with it. I always say the most fun you can have with a guy is when you are hung up on someone else, and it’s true. You can have a lot of fun when you lean into being Gigi. “I’m never more miserable than when I have a crush,” Coco said. Same, but I’m also never more stimulated. Sometimes U have to let your penchant for amusement take over, as I imagine Kendall might say.

John 1:1-3. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I heard this on TV. Sooo freaking beautiful. This passage came to mind when I was thinking about plagiarism. how Nothing is plagiarism bc Everything is plagiarism bc Nothing exists in a vacuum bc Everything is an extension of whatever came before. In the beginning was the word— everything beyond that is plagiarism

Banned from hinge. Either because I made a joint account with my roommate or because I was panhandling for iPads and money

helpmegetovermyex30. the username of a guy I saw on Tinder, which I go on exclusively to complain about how ghetto it is

radical bisexual. I went on Feeld looking for a specific line cook, but had to delete the app when I saw someone who identifies as a Radical Bisexual. Sometimes it’s best to just cut your losses

men don’t have dinner parties (???). I’m coming to this revelation now at Bushwick Beach— the sidewalk in front of my complex that faces a meat-packing facility. I know they’re not actually packaging meat in there, but it smells, and I’m bitter about it. I’m bitter about a few things. Bushwick Beach is ghetto— that’s one. There are teens vaping in a parked car in my peripheral (this is the brooklyn equivalent of whale watching). A waft of smoke that smells like how nyquil tastes. Then back to trash.

I’M ghetto for laying out here in a bikini top and sofee shorts, which a millennial lady at the spa recently told me are a “relic of her time.” Okay. A long piece of saran wrap keeps blowing onto me, and then away, and then back onto me, and I feel like a seagull who’s about to be asphyxiated. And I’m bitter about that, too.

The truth about my Screen time. It is amazing that no one in history has ever had this much access to information. And of all the ways it could serve me, I use it to become a worse, more solipsistic person (ayyyy). Being a zillenial is lowkey about using technology to indulge your neuroses.

I tell myself that if I had a choice, I would forgo my access to information, but then I remember that I do have a choice, and I don’t. I just keep rocking with it. Me and my phone…we’re locked in. Confirming things that your intuition already told you about…it’s soooo satisfying for masochistas like me. It’s like pills to me. Never let anyone tell you not to check your ex’s spotify playlists.

Bushwick Beach. We go here because it’s important to offset all the physical (aesthetic) effects of depression. I’m rocking with Succumbing to the malaise but there’s something about UV 7 from 12-2 PM. U CAN’T be pasty at a time like this; in this economy, in this political climate, in this Culture war, etc. If you have a blanket and tanning oil, what’s happening is that you are at the beach. Never let anyone tell you that you aren’t at the beach.

In crush jail. This is where my friend is at. I told her that the universe has to find ways to balance us out when we’re Up. We can never be too Up because that’s not how it works. My advice is to Always pretend you’re making a choice, even when you’re not. The red-pill-blue-pill analogy: In one hand, ur crush FWU. In the other hand, u have something astronomically better. (Keep in mind that I would choose the crush still). Never ever ever ever let anyone tell you that you got curved or dumped or ghosted or anything like that. If it happens (allegedly), it’s because you chose something better (the catalyst), and whatever came next was the universe’s reaction—balance. And it doesn’t matter if this is a self-involved or delusional way of thinking, bc you can do whatever you want in your head. Just don’t say some of these things out loud, is all.

Spring crash out. March was about tweaking my ass off, april was about denying it happened, may is about depression/acceptance. Sometimes u have to streamline the stages of grief by clumping them together. The whole year (and every year) is about seeing a guy to get over the guy u dated who u were with to get over the guy u dated who u were with to get over the guy u dated and so on. Losing track & then feeling guilty for being so transactional. About the march episode—I kept feeling like I was about to be arrested or gunned down in the streets. Never let anyone tell you that you aren’t being hunted for sport.

Nothing core. This is how I described a play I recently saw. It’s the negative space between Having something to say and Retracting a statement. And I think it’s a tiktok trend, but when I looked it up it was just a video of snow. Snow is something. Never let anyone tell you that snow is nothing.

The pea method. It’s this new thing I came up with where u eat a huge bowl of peas every day. My cousin used to tell me that I would get scurvy in new york because I don’t eat vegetables. So now i do the pea method because suddenly I’m afraid of scurvy…

Yeast infection. It’s something that i have at the moment.

Nature’s ozempic. It’s heartbreak and the vindictiveness that immediately follows. then it’s the residual vindictiveness that kind of just tapers off indefinitely. Is that just me? Everyone who has ever hurt me merges into one guy, and he’s just here chilling with me. At Bushwick Beach & other places, too. (wherever u go, there u are— with a guy). He’s my emotional support Vessel for me to channel my resentment toward. He’s the coolest guy I know because he’s the reason I keep getting hotter. The opposite of The Guy is a loving boyfriend. And the opposite of natures’s ozempic is emotional healing.

whether or not i’m eating subway. It’s a litmus test for my mental state. If I’m eating subway it means I am not doing so well. If anyone is eating subway it means they are not doing well.

Massimo. The name of a guy my best friend went on a date with & pretended to fall asleep so that the date would end. Also the name of the clothing brand at target . also the name of my cousin’s foster dog with two colored eyes