_{Sam and John knocked on my front door after school one afternoon with their cousin Jack. I knew Jack from the Boy Scouts but we didn’t hang out much outside of that. I was babysitting my niece because my sister had to work and my mom wasn’t home yet. I was working the swing shift. It really freaked me out to be alone with a two or three year old because we had no way of communicating if there was a problem. Why couldn’t she just use her words and tell me what was wrong? Upon her request through various grunts and pointing, we’d watch Monsters Inc. every single day and that seemed to smooth everything over.}

_{When I opened the front door I noticed Sam and John were holding a backpack and immediately said “let us inside”. I knew them well enough to say no. They kept pushing for me to let them in the house and after asking them why they needed to get inside so badly, they opened the backpack and showed me that it contained a live Canadian goose. I should’ve been more shocked than I was. I made them go through the side fence, past the above ground pool and into the backyard. Once we were all out there I asked them how they got the goose. They said “Jack is really fast.”}

_{I felt strongly that the goose needed to be in some water. I couldn’t imagine how jarring it would be for the goose to be in a lake, thrown into a backpack and then dropped off at a 3 bedroom ranch house. I know I wouldn’t like some giant to grab me, throw me in a sack and make me live in a lake. Putting the duck into our pool was not an option. I was the one in charge of skimming the pool and cleaning the filter. I also wasn’t too keen on getting a mouthful of goose shit the next time I’d cannonball off of the ladder, even though it was a four foot above ground pool and there was a higher risk of a horseplay-related broken leg with every inch I grew.}

_{After digging around in the shed we found one of those red 19 gallon beverage buckets for cookouts, filled it with water and placed the goose into it. I’m not sure where the bucket came from. We barely had people over after my parents divorced. Or before that. The goose didn’t seem to care about how or why it got there. It just plopped down into the bucket and sat there, slowly bobbing up and down and taking in the scenery. To be hospitable, we fed it some of the Slurpee I had just in case it needed the energy. We wanted the goose to feel at home.}

_{As soon as my mother came home and saw us all standing around the bucket in the backyard she said “absolutely not” and made Sam and John and Fast Jack take the goose away. She said she didn’t care where they took it but there couldn’t be an illicit goose in our yard anymore. We weren’t allowed to have regular pets so the goose was a real no-go.}

_{We had a blind cat for a few weeks but my parents made it live in the backyard and it would get so agitated when you’d bring its food outside that it would jump up and scratch your legs and hands. One night there was a bad thunderstorm so my parents brought the cat inside but my dad hated how the cat jumped on his lap after each thunder clap so it was quickly gone with no explanation.}

_{Eventually, they trafficked the goose to Sam and John’s house where their mother had a similar reaction to mine. The goosenappers had to ride their bikes two towns over to the pond next to my preschool to return the stolen goose. That’s where these same geese would run up onto the playground and bite us on our asses and elbows until we were all standing on top of the picnic tables and our teachers had to shoo them back down to the water.}

_{Sam and John lived down the street from me. I went to a few different elementary schools and we never spent much time in the same place even though we lived 11 houses apart our entire lives. Our neighborhood didn’t really have a lot of kids playing outside so there wasn’t a huge opportunity to stumble upon a game or a group and try to become a part of it. We were born a little before the full childhood surveillance state that exists now but close enough to the fearmongering of child abduction and the siren song of sitting inside to play video games that the idea of a neighborhood baseball game in the street seemed as antiquated to us as home milk delivery or parents who stayed married.}

_{We became close in middle school because we had to share the bus stop on my corner. This corner was the perfect spot to do a little 7am bonding. We all pretended to be better at skateboarding than we actually were. We were navigating the early 2000s transition from giant pants towards slimmer silhouettes. We never really mentioned girls because they got in the way of hanging out. We’d silently listen to Howard Stern in my mom’s minivan if the weather was too rough. It took us way too long to figure out what a Sybian was.}

_{We’d wear our finest hoodies to the bus stop every day. I don’t know why we never got winter jackets. Masculine posturing while being ravaged by puberty, most likely. We’d stand in the freezing cold and snow waiting for the school bus in just a sweatshirt. Sam would wash his hoodies every single day after wearing them. I didn’t want mine to fade so I wore them until my mother forced me to throw mine down the laundry chute into the basement.}

_{One day at the bus stop, I somehow showed up late. This was shockingly hard to do since it was about 75 feet from my front door. When I got there, Sam and John were in some sort of scrap with another set of brothers, the Ocasios. They were nice enough kids but pretty dumb. Chris was the older of the two and super lanky. One time on a Boy Scout camping trip Chris tried to hang himself in one of the cabins as soon as we got to the campsite but it didn’t work because he used a bungee cord. His feet hit the ground and we all had to pretend it never happened while we earned our Totin’ Chip. Anthony was a year or two younger and a full foot shorter than his brother. When I got to the bus stop, John was trying to shove him headfirst into the storm drain on the corner while Sam held Chris back. I was always jealous I didn’t have a brother to team up with. My sisters never wanted to shove someone down a storm drain with me.}

_{Male friendship has always been the thing my life revolved around. Once I felt like I was accepted by a group of guys, I did whatever I could to make sure I kept that acceptance. I stopped being frightened and emotional. I was always available to hang out, even if I didn’t actually want to be there. I couldn’t lose my place in the group.}

_{I spent enough time laying on the couch in their living room that I learned their laundry habits and their parents’ smoking habits and their sister’s sitting in her room habit. I spent enough time laying on the couch that their dogs stopped getting excited when I’d show up because it was so normal. I spent enough time laying on their couch that their dad got tired of seeing it and forced me to learn the riff from Smoke On The Water on his white Fender Strat. That’s the first thing I ever learned how to play. I own a white Fender Strat now.}

_{Occasionally I’d sleep over their house because we knew we wanted to sneak out and be bad but needed a centralized location. We weren’t actually that bad. We’d steal candy bars by placing them inside our Slurpee cup at 7-Eleven but still pay for the Slurpee. We’d go break bottles over by the Long Island Railroad tracks but not where anyone could walk or drive. We’d sneak into the abandoned mental institution through a 6 foot tall hole in the fence and a 15 foot high hole in the wall, begging us to walk around and throw pieces of concrete as far as we could. We’d buy packs of Little Debbie Zebra Cakes and throw them out of our friend Poundcake’s car window at people. We called it “going Zebra Caking”. One time Sam and John got caught trying to throw a car battery onto the Southern State Parkway from an overpass but weren’t able to and I wasn’t there so it doesn’t count towards our total of badness as a unit.}

_{The focus of one of our sleepovers was the golf course in our town. The fence around it had fallen down and it was easy to get onto the green unobstructed. We decided, that night, we were going to prove a point. It was time to show those rich fucks who golfed there that we didn’t much care for them. Our working class town had no room for their highfalutin leisure activities. We struck after nightfall.}

_{Their house was much easier to sneak out of than mine. Sam and John shared a room and we crawled out of their window undetected once it was pitch black outside. We rode our bikes right onto the green and tore the grass up with a rake. We threw the orange Gatorade water cooler as far as we could. We tossed the little paper cups all over the ground. We did bunny hops off the bunkers into the sand. We showed those rich fucks who golfed there that we didn’t much care for them.}

_{There was one minor detail we never considered. The golf course wasn’t attached to a country club. And it wasn’t for rich people. It was a 9 hole par 3 municipal course maintained by the town. You had to pass the civil servants test to work there. There wasn’t a bunch of rich fucks playing there. There were garbage men. There were teachers. There was my grandmother. Whoops.}

_{Slowly we started to drift apart. That was my fault. I wanted out. I got new friends who lived in different towns. They’d pick me up in their cars and we’d drive to the rich mall which was really the middle class mall which was really just the mall for white people. My new friends and I started bands and went to shows. I finally felt like I was cool now. I dropped out of high school. I saw Sam and John less. I left town when I was 18. I saw everyone less. My visits home became more infrequent every year after I left. I started to feel guilty when I drove past their house. My dad would tell me about seeing them every once in a while down at the 7-Eleven we used to shoplift from while he was buying coffee.}

_{A few months ago, I got a text from my sister. Every text from her is either bad news or it’s my birthday. I knew for a fact that it wasn’t my birthday. “Did you hear about what happened to Sam?” I hadn’t. My stomach dropped. Sam was dead.}

_{The longer you live, the more dead people you’ll know. You’ll go to the funeral or you won’t. You’ll send flowers or you won’t. You’ll get your suit dry cleaned or you won’t. You’ll cry or you won’t or you won’t and then eventually you will.}

_{Sam had gotten into some trouble but I didn’t know about it until after he died. I was being nosy and googling his name and a bunch of articles about his arrest came up. That’s the normal trajectory of where we’re from. You either stay and get in trouble or leave and try to stay out of trouble. It usually finds you anyway. All of his memorial posts were vague. He was too young for them to have too much detail.}

_{My dad’s getting ready to sell the house I grew up in. Soon enough I’ll have no reason to be eleven houses away from where Sam and John lived. There will be no more glances at their front yard when we drive by, hoping they’ll be outside so I can wave. I regret not walking down the street and knocking on the door to say hello and catch up.}

_{Sometimes you want to apologize for how you’ve acted in the past but it’s been so long that you can’t tell if it’s even worth it to the person you’re apologizing to. The thoughts spiral into trying to figure out if the apology is just to make you feel better or if you’re genuinely sorry. Is it worth reopening someone else’s old wounds just to make yourself feel better? Will your apology be rebuked? Do they even have old wounds or are you thinking way too highly of how your actions affected someone else? I should have walked down the street and figured that out but I was a coward and now I can’t.}

_{I’m not naive enough to think that if our friendship was stronger, anything would’ve been different. I just know someone who meant a lot to me is gone now. And that’s what happens when you keep living. The people you care about will keep dying and then one day you’ll be dead and hopefully people cared about you too. But you won’t know because you’re dead too.}

Some things I’ve been into lately

-My Manhattan Portage backpack. A hefty price tag but maybe the most useful thing I’ve purchased in years. Worth every penny.

-Swampy’s Diary

-Molly Young on Johnny Knoxville

-Books:

• _{Work by Bud Smith}

• _{Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker (which led me back to The Mezzanine. The re-read might’ve pushed it into my top 4 books of all time)}

• _{Fights! by Scott McLanahan}

-Peter Books Lit Chat videos

-Movies:

• ^{I Like Killing Flies}

• ^Sicario

• ^{Brokeback Mountain}

• ^{The Invite}

• ^{Maddie’s Secret}

-Joel Golby’s Me Thanky

-Zercher squats

-Music:

• ^{Sex Prisoner- Cautionary Tale}

• ^{Sun Kill Moon- Dogs (live)}

• ^{Strawberry Switchblade- Cut With The Cake Knife (Peel Sessions)}

• ^{Fury- Paramount}

-Live sets:

• ^{Self Defense Family @ Warsaw}

• ^{Death Side & Nisemono @ Bowery Ballroom}

^{Standing in a cafe in Paris, I was filled with panic. I looked at the barista and spinelessly mumbled “Uhhhhh… English?”. She tried to keep her eyes from rolling out of her head and said “Yes, English.” I ordered the first thing I could imagine someone would order. A cappuccino with oat milk. It felt right. Or at least, I didn’t feel entirely foolish saying the words.}

^{After one cancelled direct flight, one missed layover flight in Frankfurt because of a long line at customs (the myth of German efficiency was shattered there), one vegan schnitzel sandwich that tasted a little like armpits and one angel in a skirt suit from Air France that got us onto a packed flight, we finally landed in Paris. I was exhausted. I hadn’t had any caffeine since JFK and still had my midflight melatonin coursing through my bloodstream. I needed energy, stat.}

^{I’m ashamed of how little I’ve traveled internationally. There’s been many self-imposed roadblocks that have stymied my ability to see the world. No money; lack of confidence that I could figure it out without money; dead end jobs with no time off; relationships that I believed kept me tethered to one place. My deepest jealousies are of my friends who’ve hitchhiked and regular hiked and trainhopped all over the world on a meager budget. I’ve never had the chance to be Down and Out in Paris and London. I thought I’d spend my life Barely Getting By in Brooklyn and Queens.}

^{Wistfulness is not an emotion I love feeling but I am filled with it when I think about the time I realized an old friend and I were in Melbourne, Australia at the same time and decided to meet up for some exploring. I was there visiting my girlfriend at the time (on her dime) on a very planned three week vacation from the sole office job I’ve ever had. He was there visiting friends but in a much looser and more chaotic way. Running into him always feels like seeing the Tasmanian Devil wearing a denim jacket with a backpatch. I envy the way he travels (and sees) the world so freely. We hiked the wrong way up a huge incline into the middle of a forest that had been ravaged by fires and skinny dipped in a reservoir before we meandered through a suburb and ate ice cream bars on our way back to the tram.}

^{For him, it felt like a normal day of activities but I’ve spent my entire life so inhibited and upright that it sticks out so deeply among a sea of days I feel like I’ve wasted. I feel great shame that I am unable to loosen up and traverse through days untethered. Instead, I must abide by some schedule I have decided is unable to be altered. I would love to spend days just seeing what happens but unfortunately for me, and everyone around me, that makes me so anxious that my entire body feels like a rubber band pulled as tightly as possible, ready to snap with one small change.}

^{I’ve seen a great deal of the United States but the majesty of the Waffle House in Dayton, Ohio doesn’t fill me with the same emotion as the first time I walked along Princes Street and saw Edinburgh Castle. A feeling that was followed immediately by devouring my first of many vegan Burger King Long Chicken Sandwiches. A moment in my life I will never forget: seeing a building older than the country I live in and then immediately eating the most modern and genetically modified food that was available to me. I was once again riding the line between high and low. I felt like John Waters. I was ecstatic}

^{.Almost all of my international travel has been in the English-speaking world. My three years of middle school French 20 years ago did not prepare me to drop directly into a country where my native language is not primarily spoken and I was feeling uneasy about communication. I would later find out that if you spoke French so poorly in an attempt to seem cultured and local, every single person would immediately start speaking to you in English so I had nothing to worry about.}

^{Walking around Grange Aux Belles trying to find a can of Monster Energy was a challenge. I am not so deluded that I think every city will have New York-style corner stores (I will not be wading into bodega discourse) but I thought a major city should have a place to conveniently pop in and grab some sort of mass-produced ultra-processed poison to lift my spirits. I took a few blind turns until I grew weary of searching for something that may or may not exist and decided to turn around and head back empty handed.}

^{One block before returning to the apartment, I noticed a bustling coffee shop that said VEGAN CAFE in big bold letters on the overhang. That sparked something inside of me. I have been disgusted by coffee for years. I once drank a mouthful of what I thought was iced tea from my friend’s refrigerator. It ended up being a carafe of iced drip coffee. I ran out of the screen door into the backyard to spit it out while shouting “It tastes like bitter sticks.” But that day, I was in a new place so maybe I was a new person.}

^{Over the past few years, I’ve half-heartedly been trying to enjoy coffee. My friends would offer me sips of their cold brew. Disgusting. I tried to order lattes ranging from unsweetened with almond milk to something called a Campfire Latte featuring maple syrup and smoked sea salt. Much too far. That’s like trying to start enjoying music with free jazz. I was grasping at straws hoping something would take.}

^{Not liking coffee doesn’t square with my personality of being elitist and judgmental. Traits that have no basis in reality. I’ve just decided to feel superior to people with no real proof if it’s true or not. How could I mock people for being unsophisticated while I walk around sipping on a yellow and black striped can of C4 brand Frozen Bombsicle flavor energy drink? The amount of caffeine I seem to require has taken me from the tier of the enjoyer to so much that it elicits shock and awe whenever I reveal the milligrams I’m dosing myself with at this point. There is no natural source that is concentrated enough for me. And for what? I need to induce heart palpitations so I can look at my phone better?}

^{My first cappuccino was good enough for me to be open to trying it again. Within a few weeks, I’m sliding down the slippery slope of coffee enjoyment. I’m checking out different coffee shops. I have preferred baristas. I’m meeting up with friends for a quick cup. I am learning to hold strong against the siren song of the pastry case most days. I’m having quick and fun conversations with employees and patrons, which feels incredible. The repartee at the kind of places you usually purchase an energy drink is a bit dull. I’ve basically kicked my dependency on Monster and the like. That tiny paper cup has freed me from the shackles of public neon tall can consumption.}

^{For years, I couldn’t fathom a world in which I would be a regular coffee drinker. Now I’m sending my friends opinions on the darkness of the roast at the coffee shop. I’m taking my headphones out and chatting with the baristas about the Knicks or their t-shirts. I’m walking around with my friends, gesturing with an espresso drink in my hand saying things like “You guys NEED to try dipping a cookie into coffee. It’s incredible.” and “You know they don’t tip in Paris since they actually make a living wage there but I was told a polite conversation with your server is considered the tip.”}

^{Finally enjoying something that the majority of people love fills you with an almost childlike wonder. I’m taking every chance I can get to bring up my new lifestyle with people the same way a kid will interrupt a family meal to inform everyone of a new fact about lizards or who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. I don’t think I invented the centuries old notion of the coffee shop as a community hub or the combination of coffee and pastry but if I was so incorrect about who I am in regards to coffee, what else am I wrong about? What other long-held beliefs would crumble with a tiny nudge?}

^{Previously, I had shunned all hot liquids from my life. I would tell people “I just don’t *do* hot liquids.” Tea, coffee, hot cocoa, broths and soups were all off the table. In my mind, they were in the same category as meat or dog food. They didn’t register as something I ingest. I didn’t even consider them food for a guy like me. And who’s to say what “a guy like me” even means. But with my recent sojourn into the world of fitness and the internal consequences of trying to max out my consumption of plant-based proteins, I started drinking a cup of hot water in the mornings to aid with digestion. Another habit cribbed from the elderly Chinese population. The benefits of hot liquids have been shown to me in real time but they must have a purpose beyond pure enjoyment.}

^{Self-imposed rules are incredibly comfortable for me. I love to push back against what I deem to be unfair protocol imposed by others but when I’m both the warden and the prisoner, I’m incredibly strict. Once the rules are set into place, I seem to have left no wiggle room for myself. I’ve sentenced myself to living in an emotional version of The Box from Cool Hand Luke}

^{.Finding out about straight edge when I was 13 felt like I finally knew how I should live my life. Realizing I didn’t have to partake in activities that didn’t suit me and I could feel pride in that abstinence was eye-opening to me. Veganism felt like the only moral way to live in such a way that I don’t even have a good argument for it other than “As a good person, how could you not do it?”. It’s the morally correct diet.}

^{The further down the list of guidelines we get, the more arbitrary they become. I don’t believe in God because I decided I didn’t when I was in middle school. I spent years as a staunch atheist. I still don’t believe in God and have no use for an organized religion in my life but as I’ve lived a longer life, I have started to understand the use of it in a practical sense. People need a place to gather and something to tether their worldview to. If Catholicism was good enough for a woman as kind, smart and thoughtful as my grandmother, it can’t be wholly unnecessary.}

^{I’ve employed some self-limiting beliefs around so many things that did not matter in the name of “being punk”. I used a subculture based on breaking down societal norms and thought patterns to build up internal guardrails. I thought working out and physical fitness was “not punk”. In my head it fed into a form of masculinity I had no interest in, prized an archaic beauty standard over uniqueness or intelligence and rewarded the naturally fit. To me, that had no place in the world I was a part of.}

^{Except when I looked at pictures of Youth of Today, Henry Rollins, the Bad Brains or any group of shirtless, testosterone-fueled men with veiny biceps jumping in unison on stage. That’s who I thought looked the coolest but I couldn’t make the connection between them and me. I desired to be fit through some sort of osmosis so I could chalk it up to the genetic lottery instead of admitting that how I wish my body looked. Now I’m in the midst of an 18 week workout program called “Hoss Anabolic” and have become too cognizant of the MyFitnessPal app on my phone.}

^{For years, I eschewed any music that didn’t fit into the small scope of what I considered “for me”. This was an arbitrary classification of whatever I was into at that moment and some records I liked but hadn’t ditched in an effort to distance myself from whoever I was at the time I was listening to them. Embarrassingly enough, I don’t believe I listened to a full Bob Dylan album until the year 2023. If it wasn’t two-man powerviolence or fervently straight edge hardcore or bands with riffs so rudimentary that you’d think they were written as a parody of the idea of music, I was not interested. For so long, I boxed myself out of the music of the great American songwriter because he didn’t know who Discharge was}

^{.As independent of a thinker I believe myself to be, my worldview has been molded by circumstance as much as anything else. How different would I be if I wasn’t born into a fairly liberal, white, working-class family from the Northeast? Where would I be if I hadn’t fallen ass-backwards into most of the good things that have ever happened to me? How fat and drunk would I be if I went to barber school in Albany, NY in 2009 instead of refusing to have my parents cosign a loan for me because I wanted to Do It Myself?}

^{The idea of marriage rarely, if ever, occurred to me. Around the same time that I decided I was an atheist, I decided I would buck the traditions of marriage and children. I was different. Marriage was a way for men to own women as property and a way to tie you down. Why would I need the government to be involved in my romantic relationship? Why would I need to sign a document to prove I loved someone? Why wouldn’t my pediatrician recommend me for a vasectomy once I turned 18 but still hadn’t gotten a new primary care physician?}

^{As I’ve spent more time in actual relationships, my staunch opposition to marriage has softened. It may be more logical than romantic but if I’m with someone I love deeply and can’t see myself living without, why would I let that slip away because I made a decision that I was morally opposed to marriage before I had even had sex? Bringing logic and reason into the idea of love make me feel like a Big Tech CEO trying to figure out the ROI on human interaction but if the choices are:}

^{lose the greatest thing a person could ever receive (true love and understanding)}

^or

^{do the thing that billions of people have done and is almost instantaneously reversible if you decide you no longer want to be a part of it}

^{the choice is pretty clear to me.}

^{In Notes From Underground, Dostoevsky writes:}

^{“It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone.”}

^{While The Underground Man is supposed to be a loathsome and miserable protagonist, I saw a lot of my younger self in those pages. Underneath the rage and pride, there was the internal struggle between how he thought and who he felt he should be. The Id and the Ego.}

^{I’ve spent most of my life scared. Scared of feelings and situations that make me uncomfortable. Scared of new situations or relationships that I’m not in complete control of. Scared of being seen as weak, stupid or ineffectual. I thought I could cover that up with judgmental and curmudgeonly behavior. Like The Underground Man, I thought it made me seem discerning and intelligent. Hoping that lashing out at people would be seen as the result of being so smart I couldn’t understand where people were coming from and not emotional instability. My unflinching stances would be a sign of intelligence and moral uprightness and not a fear that those morals may crumble with some introspection.}

^{Life is complex. Too much moral rigidity and you stagnate. Not enough moral rigidity and you’re a coward who stands for nothing. Nuance is not sexy. The ability to see things from multiple perspectives is a curse. It’s easy to hold on to your first thought and never change. True power comes through self-reflection and deep internal inventory. I’m not done with mine yet. But at least I enjoy a cup of coffee now.}

^{The author enjoying the French delicacy Scoubidou}

Some things I’ve been into lately

• Lots of biking Youtube channels (Genosack, Calling In Sick Magazine, Gary’s Projects, Two Good Wheels, Heirloom Cycles +more)

• Not wearing headphones as much as I can

• Blue Heron

• The Office Of War Information at Pioneer Works and a fully deep fried veggie burger at Brooklyn Ice House afterwards

• Mirage- s/t 12”

• JoeBox

• Harold and Maude

• 10:04 by Ben Lerner

• MetroNorth’s on-train bike storage

• Demystification Radio Hour on NTS

• Shorts

-Mike

As soon as I open my phone, I am assaulted with videos on how to become The Optimized Man. Some tanned and vascular stranger screams at me directly through the screen with the devilish glow of a ring light in his eyes. He always has all of the answers. How many hours of sleep I should be getting. How many grams of protein I should be eating. How much natural sunlight I should be receiving. How cold my shower should be. How important journaling is. How life changing doing ketamine and ayahuasca is as long as I have the correct guide. How the only thing more important than your physical health is your mental health (they say this one through gritted teeth because they don’t believe it.) It never ends.

Every second of your day must be accounted for. Take a break from your work spreadsheets to check in on your personal spreadsheets. Your life: compartmentalized into tiny rectangles. Are you productive? Are you reaching your goals? Everything has the stink of corporate tech startup life on it now. You no longer have to figure out what to do with the vegetables about to become overripe in your refrigerator because there’s a company that will send you a single serving of precut zucchini in the mail. All you have to do is slowly murder the earth with unrecyclable dry ice packets, cardboard, plastic and exhaust from the planes and trucks moving these items around. But there’s no food waste happening, so you’re being efficient. God forbid some spinach wilts.

Everyone’s obsessed with the stories about that wet looking freak who drinks his son’s blood. But I think a lot of people are missing the point. Yes, it’s funny to dunk on him because he doesn’t look much younger than his actual age of 45. But vanity is not entirely why he’s doing this. He wants to run at 100% capacity. Tech people think the human body can be treated like a machine. He’ll take 30+ supplements a day, wake up at 4:30am, do the exact same fitness routine and monitor everything he ingests down to the exact calorie just so his knees don’t hurt in his 50s. I’m sure he also wants the poreless sex doll skin he has achieved but, more importantly, he wants to be shoved into a tube and have his whole body scanned so a computer can tell him that his CPU is running at optimal capacity.

Wonder and joy has ceased to exist in the world of The Efficient Life. How could you have a nice meal at a restaurant you’ve never been to before unless you accost the staff about the negative health benefits of seed oils? How could you spend time laying on a couch next to an open window reading something enjoyable when you could be participating in the horrendous 75 Hard challenge? Why have a rich and fulfilling life full of friends and interesting experiences and sex and spontaneity when you can spend two and a half months with no cheat meals, two separate 45 minute workouts, reading only self help books and chugging a gallon of water? You have one precious life and you’re supposed to spend it like you’re training for Mr. Olympia?

There’s only so much mental bandwidth a person can dedicate to these types of things before they lose who they are as a person. Someone with a personality and interests can quickly become the type of person who has to carry a shaker bottle and duffle bag everywhere with them and will say things like “You know David Goggins said...” I’m spoonfed this content because I’ve spent the last year getting working out and losing weight. I’ve lost about 75 pounds, which is no simple feat. But I didn’t have to become an apostle of any one ideal. The people making money off of these lifestyles don’t want you to know how simple it can be. For me, I made sure I did a lot of cardio, a decent amount of weight training and was mindful of what I’m eating.

There’s no money in that line of thinking though. You need their programs, their supplements, their books, their Patreon which has access to the real information. It’s not just fitness content. The same model is used across all of the Optimized Man Universe. Here’s how to make $1000 a week while sitting in your living room. Here’s which stocks to buy for the best return on investment. Here’s how to turn yourself into a brand. All you have to do is get behind the paywall and your dreams will come true.

No longer can you solely be someone who likes books, now you must become a book influencer and monetize that part of you. Any second of your day that isn’t growing your bank account or lowering your BMI is pointless. Hobbies are for the inefficient. Oh, you “love” “riding your bike” because it “feels nice”? Why don’t you grow the fuck up and strap a GoPro to your chest and do UberEats deliveries while you’re riding?

I’m not immune to any of this. Why do I know that bodybuilders prefer 97/3 ground beef for their meals even though I’ve been vegan for 16 years? Why do I know how many apps are needed to do retail arbitrage? I’m not above going Huberman Mode. Waking up early (in context to my lifestyle), getting sunlight into my eyes as soon as I can and eating the same things all the time make me feel better. But I don’t need to disrobe and self-flagellate in the middle of a monastery if I mess up and don’t do one of them.

Is life to be lived in the most efficient way possible or are we supposed to have a decent time while we’re here? Is there no room for Efficiency Sometimes? Maybe this is all a coping mechanism because I’m not as disciplined as I’d like to be. I thought I’d have rock hard abs by now but I can soothe the pain by saying life is all about having fun and letting it rip. I thought I’d have enough money to afford a bedroom with a real window but I can just say that I’m keeping my overhead low for the freedom of life as an artist.

I think the reality is that everything is a coping mechanism. Life is long and difficult and expensive. Live long enough and you’ll probably have your heart broken and go broke and get fat and then get thin (you can also reverse the order [and repeat the process as many times as you’d like]) and work a job you hate and tie yourself to a partner and a house you regret. So whatever you can do to feel a little bit better while you’re doing that is probably ok. Just don’t shout it into your phone camera and make it my problem.

Some things I’ve been into lately

Jeans in the summer

Nothing in this world can be said to be certain, except death and taxes and me not enjoying wearing shorts. Every June I get the bright idea that I’m going to change who I am as a person and all of a sudden be comfortable in shorts so I’ll buy a new pair. By July I’m back to shoving my sweaty legs into some Levi’s yet again. I’d rather sweat through my jeans than walk around feeling like a little boy every day in shorts and sneakers. Some people will wear a leather loafer or derby with socks that look can lean Republican On A Boat or Guy Who Says His Favorite Band Is Boygenius So He Can Get Laid very quickly so it’s best to steer clear unless you’re really fucking good looking.  

Enhanced Water

You can either die a hero or live long enough to become the suburban mom you’ve always mocked. On my journey through low-and-no calorie beverages, I have ascended into the world of Enhanced Water. Growing up, we always had a pitcher of Crystal Light in the fridge. Usually raspberry. My mom’s diabetic and vaguely tried to manage our sugar intake so I grew accustomed to the aspartame taste quickly. Recently I tried to Hit The Crys again with those little packets of powder you pour into a water bottle but 1) I don’t really buy small plastic water bottles and 2) if you don’t shake them up enough you just have some fruit punch flavored scum in a bottle. This is where those bastards at Mio got their claws in me. They make a little bottle of goop you spray into a glass of water and 1) the flavor is literally just blue and 2) it has caffeine in it. I try to pretend I’m a man of taste but if something’s blue, there’s no way my ass ain’t drinking it and unfortunately I’m enhancing the shit out of my water lately. 

Buying whatever I want

For the first time in my life I have a little bit of disposable income and apparently I have shifted immediately into the You Can’t Take It With You mentality. Someone mentions a book on a podcast? It’s already on the way to my house. I’m at one of my favorite vintage stores in the country (Scorpio Rising in Tacoma) and I find 4 shirts that I love? Hope there’s room in my bag for all of them. My friends and I are illegally streaming the UFC fights and I think about a delicious pizza? Order’s up, bitch. My friend is moving and selling a cool chair in their Instagram stories? That thing is gonna have my assprint welded to it within the week.

Laughing at people dressing up for Barbie

This also could’ve been called “being a hater” but that’s more of an overarching theme in my life so why not get specific? Adults wearing costumes is barely tolerable on Halloween but to get dressed up to sit in a pitch black theater is another level. I know everything is now solely done for photos but I can’t imagine the shame of having to hold your Amazon one day shipped pink cowboy hat for 2.5 hours of a movie. A guy I went to high school with posted photos of him and his girlfriend in their little outfits and afterwards posted “we hated the movie” and I’ve been using the joy I felt from seeing that to propel me through the world for weeks. 

A regulation size bag of Skittles

They really knocked it out of the park with that one. Original, tropical, wild berry.  Pop that son of a bitch open and enjoy. 

Cutting my shirts so they fit correctly 

I’m not doing this in a Tik Tok Fashion Guy Who Talks Into The Camera way but more in a Guy Standing On Stage During The Bad Brains At CBGB 1982 kind of way. Shirts are made for truly almost no body types and they’re only getting worse. Brands targeted towards men who need good fitting shirts make some of the worst dogshit you’ve ever seen in your life. Untuckit? Cuts? Buck Mason? Hit me over the head with a shovel before you see me wearing them. Don’t like a raw hem on your shirt? Oh, all of a sudden the king of England reads my newsletter. Grow a pair or buy a sewing machine.

SNAKE: Why doesn't anybody have good furniture?

Self Defense Family- Law of Karma Live: Fake Shit Wins But Not Tonight

Andy Roddick’s Open Era

Out There: John Fitzgerald

The Life and Errors of Molly Young

BEST CROISSANT IN PARIS

Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder by Samuel W. Fussell

THE APARTMENT (1960)

-Mike

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Nice socks

You deserve to feel good. I can’t believe I went this long without some good quality socks. I didn’t fully upgrade my entire sock drawer and I haven’t delved deep into the world of cashmere or other prohibitively expensive socks but lordy lordy does it feel different to pop on some quality socks. Quality, warm, handknit socks in the winter? Comfortable and well-made sport socks in the summer? You’ll feel better almost immediately. More confident. More comfortable. More you. Get yourself some nice socks this year and realize your grandparents were right when they gave you socks as a present. 

Working out/losing 50 pounds

Sorry to do this but I cannot overstate how much this has changed my life. I’m a better and more confident version of myself now. My clothes fit better. My face isn’t the size and shape of a gallon of milk anymore. I’m not in pain every single day. I can ride my bike up a steep hill without having to stop halfway up and walking the rest of the way. I don’t spiral into a depression every time I see a candid photo of myself. I don’t talk about killing myself every day. Unfortunately, lifting weights and eating better makes you feel really good. It’s awesome to sit on your ass and eat 3-5 huge meals a day. I’d much rather be doing that but it really puts a strain on your belt after awhile. I’m no evangelist and I still have a lot of work to do but I implore everyone who is feeling negatively about themselves to try exercising in whatever way they can. Go for a long walk. Stroll on the treadmill. Lift some 5 pound weights once a week. Do push-ups in your office at work. It’ll make you feel better, I swear. Physical activity + sunlight on your face early in the morning + caffeine = I am no longer mentally ill and my plantar fasciitis has disappeared. 

Quitting my job

Doing this ran concurrently with working out in the Top Reasons I Stopped Being Insane This Year. Working in a windowless room with an hour commute each way for 3.5 years will turn anyone's brain into mush. I highly suggest quitting your job to follow your dream if you can. Even if you dream is to be a person who lays around and does nothing. That is a noble dream. 

Fragrantheart.com

Got more into trying to care of every part of myself this year. Mentally as well as physically. Guided meditations have really helped me calm myself and become more controlled. This is a website of meditations in a myriad of categories recorded and narrated by a woman from New Zealand with a very pleasant voice. Try meditation if you haven’t. What’s the worst that could happen? You feel nothing? How is that any different than now?

Telling people you love them

Doesn’t matter who it is as long as you mean it. It feels good.

Raymond Carver

I’m fairly self-conscious about my lack of formal education. I don’t think you need it to be intelligent or successful but there are a bunch of great things that I’ve missed because I never had someone pointing me in the right direction. I was an avid reader as a child but fell off in my early 20s. I’ve been tearing through books the past few years and trying to play catch up. An insurmountable task. You’ll see on my list of books I enjoyed this year that there are a few classics I never got to. I was too busy presenting as an anti-intellectual because I was ashamed at how little I had learned. 2022 is the year I finally discovered Raymond Carver’s writing and it knocked me on my ass. Sparse and intentional and bleak and beautiful. Stories about working class folks that felt familiar. Stories that start in the middle and stop before the ending. A peek into the most private moments of people’s lives. I could read them all 200 times and find something new to love every single time. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was the first collection I read and probably still my favorite but every book has something that will blow you away. Start wherever you wish if you haven’t. I wish I had picked this up a decade ago. 

Spending money

You can’t take it with you. Get yourself something nice. 

Energy Drinks

I know this is not a new thing for me to love but this year all of us here at Please Enjoy Inc. LLC dove headfirst into the low/no calorie energy drink world because we are no longer drinking our calories. Sorry Yellow Red Bull. We loved you but it’s time for a little break. It’s not you, it’s us. Some would say “If you’re not drinking your calories, why don’t you just drink water?” and to that we say “SHUT THE FUCK UP.” Anyway, 2022 was mostly about Celsius coming from out of nowhere to being my first choice of energy drink. Great flavors that don’t feel like poison when you drink them. Mango Passionfruit is my #1 but harder to find so I’ll have to grab a Kiwi Guava or even a Tropical Vibe (rough name) if I see it. I’m not happy with how much I enjoy the Mtn Dew Energy line because it’s slightly embarrassing to be seen drinking a 16oz can of bright blue liquid in public but the Baja Blast, Code Red and Pomegranate Blue Burst flavors are all 5/5 and get purchased as soon as I see them. Also, Monster Ultra Fiesta Mango has gotten me through some really hard times this year and I will choose that over a Celsius if I want to feel a bit more insane than usual.  

A good rug

You want a room to feel welcoming. You want a room to feel put together. You want a room to feel a little sexy. You want a room to feel intentional. I’ve become (some people that I’ve been around would say too) obsessed with making sure every room I’m in hits at least some of these markers. Fiddling with lights, rearranging and tidying up and trying to redecorate. My budget is minimal so I want to get the best bang for my buck. For forever I had cheap and kind of crappy area rugs from Ikea or Amazon. I got put on to this Etsy store that sells really affordable, well loved Turkish rugs and I immediately fell in love. I got a new rug for my bedroom and it completely changed the feeling of the room. It felt warmer and more mature immediately. You can find a good quality, decently sized rug for under $200 that people will want to talk to you about. 

The Civil Dead

My favorite movie of the year. I really enjoy Whitmer Thomas and Clay Tatum’s collaborations but this went far and beyond whatever expectations I had. A haunting and stunning meditation on friendship. I’m really excited for its wider release and to go see it in a theater. Plus it had a great cameo from my friend Steve Hernandez so that’s more than enough of a reason to check it out. 

Wolfgang Tillmans- To Look Without Fear

This MoMA retrospective of Wolfgang Tillmans’s work was one of my favorite experiences of the year. I went up to the MoMA by myself on a Monday to take it all in. At first, I had my headphones in playing Brian Eno’s Music For Airports but quickly took them out. I wanted to block out all of the noise around me to experience the photos solely on my own. After 2 or 3 minutes, I realized this was a fool’s errand. I wanted to experience like everyone else around me was and in the way the exhibition was set up. Seeing some of these photos that I was familiar with, and many I wasn’t, in such a large number and on a huge scale amazed me. I was particularly enamored with this photo. A touching and intimate show that showed me an artist does not need to stick to one thing to show you how they express themselves. 

eBay

The Achilles heel on my bank account this year. I dove headfirst into being a nasty eBay freak long after its heyday. THE spot to buy used books. You don’t need them tomorrow from Amazon. Plus they’re cheaper on eBay and you can choose your preferred cover if the book has multiple editions. The best spot to find reasonably priced vintage clothing. Some outstanding pickups from this year have been: a 70s Oakland A’s season ticket holder jacket (purchase inspired by Moneyball), a Walls Blizzard-Pruf winter jacket, a few beat to shit 70s/80s hoodies, what feels like 9000 books and a 5 foot tall French poster for the movie Mikey and Nicky.

The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan

Unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Completely raw and vulnerable and sick and sad. I read this at the worst possible time for myself and it crushed me like a ton of bricks. The story of a man losing it all as a result of his own bad decisions. McClanahan narrates the audiobook, which I highly suggest. I do not suggest listening to the audiobook directly after finishing the physical book unless you’d like to compound all of the negative feelings inside of your body into a neat little diamond. “Sarah told me she’d think about it as long as I promised not to kill myself and I told her I wouldn’t kill myself. Then we both smiled. This meant something. Sarah might have sex with me again if I promised not to kill myself.” 

Traveling with friends

Spent 8 or 9 months traveling the country doing stand up with my friends and there’s literally nothing better. You truly don’t need the stand up part either. Hop in a car. Get on a plane. Take the Amtrak. Pop on some music. Get some snacks. Talk about your feelings. Get into an argument. Share a hotel room. Buy a hat from a gas station. Randomly meet a beautiful stranger. Find a restaurant you love. Eat dinner from a 7-11 because nothing else is open. Flirt with a flight attendant. Swim in the ocean. Get some baseball mitts to keep in the trunk and play catch on long drives. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money but just go somewhere. 

SHEER DRIFT: The Snake America Newsletters (1-100)

Speaking of buying vintage items on eBay, I have espoused my love for Sami Reiss’s SNAKE/Snake America newsletter multiple times. It has been the source for pointers on purchasing tasteful items online for a good price for a long time. Shining Life Press down in DC has compiled and released the first 100 issues of the newsletter in a beautiful book. I’m a huge fan of Shining Life Press and this was a match made in heaven for me. I grabbed the spiral bound version at the NYABF. I highly recommend grabbing this. SNAKE 100 is one of my favorite pieces of writing of all time and worth the price of the book alone just to have a physical copy of. 

Having people over

Moving into a larger and nicer apartment in December of 2021 has given me the opportunity to have a space where I can host people if I wish. More and more people are coming over to spend some time and I love having people in my home. I hosted Thanksgiving for some friends and I this year and I’m now trying hard to not become a Dinner Party Guy because that requires so many dishes and vessels. 

The Andre 3000 sandwich from Two Beards Deli in Grand Rapids, Michigan

As a proponent of the Big Sandwich Lifestyle, this is the best one I had all year. I stumbled upon this deli while in Grand Rapids this summer and loved it so much that we went back the next day and I ordered the exact same thing. I also discovered what could possibly be my favorite chip to eat with a sandwich there: the Cherry BBQ chips from Great Lakes Potato Chip Co. With all of that and Diet Mtn Dew on the soda fountain, I give Two Beards a 10/10. If you’re curious, the ingredients are: Blackened Tofu, Caramelized Onions, Avocado Spread, Banana Peppers, Vegan Bacon, Tomato, Chipotle Veganaise, Romaine Lettuce on Nine-Grain Wheat. (I get mine without tomato)

Forgiveness

A quality present in all of the people I admire. I have gone through the process of forgiving people for whatever perceieved slights I held against them. Life is much easier without the weight of anger holding you down. Let’s see if this sticks. 

Documental (& Pie Hell)

A discovery from my roommates that I immediately became obsessed with. A Japanese game show where 10 comedians have to stay in the same room for 6 hours and are not allowed to laugh. Some of the funniest and worst things I’ve ever seen have happened in that room. The first few seasons are streaming on Prime and then you’ve got to dig for them (live with someone who knows how to torrent). The creator of the show Hitoshi Matsumoto is also the subject of one of the most insane tv segments I’ve ever seen called Pie Hell. The youtube clip is only 5 minutes long but do yourself a favor and find the 20 minute version if you can. The amount of pies that can be thrown at one man is unbelievable. 

Daniel Arnold- Pickpocket

My favorite photobook of the year. It’s no secret that I'm a bit of a Daniel Arnold fanboy but the way this was printed and presented is beautiful. I love his writing about the photos almost as much as I love the photos themselves. The little supplemental zines in the middle are great too. I almost never received this because it was shipped to my old address but luckily it was left on the doorstep and my friend Jess rescued it for me because my old landlord turned it into cat litter or something. This is super expensive online now but if you’re my friend and want to see it, just come over and I’ll let you put your greasy little fingers all over it. 

Buying people gifts

If you see something that makes you think of someone, get it for them. Who cares why or when? It doesn’t have to be all the time and you should not expect reciprocity. 

Coke Zero

Nectar of the gods. Will make the list every single year. What’s better than a nice frosty can of CZ? I can’t think of one thing. 

Movies That I Watched This Year That I Really Enjoyed:

RRR

The French

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

20th Century Women

Jackass Forever

The Celebration

Husbands

The Worst Person In The World

Music From This Year That I Really Liked: 

The Flex- Chewing Gum For The Ears

Living World- World

Electric Chair- Act of Aggression

Long Knife- Curb Stomp Earth

Chainsaw- When Will We Die?

High-Vis- Blending

Puffer- Live and Die In The City

Savageheads- Service To Your Country

Drug Church- Hygiene

Militarie Gun- Let Me Be Normal

Warthog- s/t 7”

Hotline TNT- When You Find Out

ICD10- Faith In Institutions

Compassion- Pacing Animal

Phantom- Demo

Shaved Ape- Demo

B.R.A.T.- Promo?

Peter Davison- Rest and Be Thankful

Fugitive- Maniac

Rose Glass- Demo

Persona- Free Your Mind!

Music Not From This Year That I Discovered and Really Liked:

Walter Bishop, Jr.- Cubicle

Pharoah Sanders- Love Will Find A Way

This live version of Work Hard/Play Hard by Place Music

Bill Evans Trio- Sunday At The Village Vanguard

Private Sector- The Darkness Burning Bright

John Lee Hooker- It Serves You Right To Suffer

Prison Affair- Demo

No Tolerance- No Remorse, No Tolerance

Grateful Dead- Cornell 5/8/77 (live)

RXKNephew

Sublist of music I already knew but couldn’t stop listening to:

Project Pat- Mista Don’t Play

Integrity- Psychological Warfare

Eric Clapton- Layla

Rixe live in Paris

Favorite Books I Read This Year In Chronological Order:

Among The Thugs by Bill Buford

I Used To Be Charming by Eve Babitz

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemmingway

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq

Cassandra At The Wedding by Dorothy Baker (a must read)

I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava

-Mike

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Every once in awhile I will be sitting in the park, trying unbelievably hard to seem both intelligent and sexually desirable. After I unfold the blanket that I shoved into an undersized tote bag for the job, I will see an attractive woman having fun with a child in the middle of an open field and the thought “I would like to have a child with her” will shoot through my brain like an asteroid. I understand, on a biological level, the desire to procreate. We’re wired to keep our species alive, unlike the suicidal nature of the panda. I do not actually desire to be a father but you can only do so much to fight nature. 

I’ll probably get a vasectomy before the year is over so the conversation is becoming increasingly moot. Either a vasectomy or a silver tooth to fill the gap where my missing tooth is. Or maybe I’ll buy a few more rugs and pairs of jeans. Or I can get my neck tattooed. Either way, I will yet again not be opening a savings account.

There’s got to be some secret to happiness that I don’t know yet. I know people with and without children who are satisfied with their lives. I also know people with or without children that are unsatisfied and angry. The answer can’t be that satisfaction only comes from within and outside forces don’t really help that. It has to be something else. I’m begging you. 

If we dare listen to Freud, we all know that a parent's actions are responsible for their children's personalities and neuroses and I am not one to answer for my own mistakes or shortcomings. I don’t want to pin the blame on my parents as the sole reason I’m both twitchy and mean with no ability to control the tone of their voice so I always sound condescending. But I need to blame someone who isn’t me. 

I can only imagine the psychic damage I would unknowingly instill upon my child. My problem with children is the same one that I have with most animals. They’re unable to vocalize what their needs are and it drives me insane. I’m too much of a prick to communicate with them in a way that suits us both because I feel personally attacked when I have to do anything other than exactly the way I want to do it. 

Sure, I want the couple thousand Instagram likes you get from having a baby but I could also become successful or adopt a dog or get hit by a city bus and I can get them that way.I do not look down on people who have children. It just seems like a foreign lifestyle to me. The same way I look at dog food and go “ok that’s food for someone. Not me, but someone.”

I used to look down on anyone who didn’t live exactly like I do but then one day I realized I was deeply unhappy with my life, so why would I force that on someone else? I have worked hard to rid myself of envy and pity. Now, if someone I don’t like becomes successful or if someone I love does something I would never dream of with their life, I clear my mind and think “I hope they are happy.” because anything beyond that is poison for your brain. 

The last year or so of my life has been dedicated to changing it almost completely. I’ve lost jobs and women and weight and money and old hangups and sanity. I’ve gained freedom and friends and strength (both physical and emotional) and responsibility and perspective. 

I am, for all intents and purposes, a professional comedian. I pay my rent with money from talking. I’ve traveled more in the last year and a half than I have all of the years of my life before that combined. Seeing the green rooms of Improvs and Funny Bones again and again and they never change. The soda is kind of flat and the fries are kind of soggy and the staff looks at you sideways if you don’t want wings or a beer. 

At the beginning of 2021, I didn’t even know if I would do comedy again and now I’m here. I was on a date at Doris last March and it was going well. While I was walking her home, we passed by an apartment and she pointed at it and said “My friend used to live there and host a comedy show in the basement.” I said “Oh yeah, that’s (name redacted)’s old apartment. I’ve been there before.” I had not mentioned comedy once up until this point because just breaching the subject would have caused me to spiral in a very unattractive manner. I had to finally admit that I was (at least at one point) a comedian and had performed in that basement. She said it was “sociopath behavior” to not mention that over the previous 2 or 3 hours we spent together. The jury’s still out on if she was right or not.

In February I had just quit my job so I could tour full-time and I celebrated with a run, a thing I never really did before then and have barely done since. On that run, I passed right by Doris and paused. I gave myself a few seconds while I caught my breath to acknowledge the massive shift I had made since the last time I was there and then kept moving forward. That’s all there ever is to do. Put your head down and trudge towards change until you get there and then keep trudging. 

Fitness has, unfortunately, become a big part of my life lately. I never envisioned myself as someone who stretched every day or worried if they were doing too much cardio for their weightlifting results to really manifest or ate oatmeal with goji berries and flax seeds for breakfast every morning. Considering caloric intake, protein levels and portion control instead of eating an entire family bag of Lay’s chips for dinner. I must maintain control because if I am mentally strong then I can become physically strong. 

It takes a lot of work to have a body that is this unremarkable. I’m eating rice cakes and not drinking calories. I’m utilizing the gym in every hotel I stay in. I’m feeling so energized after lifting weights that I’ll try to drag Diego out of his bed in our hotel room and wrestle him. I’m seeing real results from the work I’m putting in. I am actually fitting into the bag of shirts that never fit me labeled “ONE DAY CLOTHING”. My arms and shoulders and traps are bigger than they’ve ever been. My stomach is flattening. My jawline is coming back. My eyes look tired and my hair is greying. My body is sore in places I didn’t know had muscles every single day. I think I need to buy all new pants. I accidentally dug a knife into my palm while putting a new hole in my belt. You can’t win them all, I guess. 

People keep congratulating me like I completed a marathon. There’s still a part of my brain that won’t let me accept compliments or anything nice anyone says in general. When anyone says anything nice about my weight loss, I take it as them patronizing me. I assume everyone has some kind of ulterior motive and the goal is to make me feel bad. Instead of knowing that everyone isn’t out to get me and could even possibly be happy for me, it registers as some worldwide conspiracy.

I owe the bulk of my physical transformation to biking. I picked up a side gig doing bike deliveries while not on the road to supplement my Nighttime eBay habit. Nighttime eBay is when you don’t know what to do with yourself after the sun goes down and you’re alone so you spend all of your money on books that keep piling up but you never read or sweatshirts that remind you of ones that your mom wore when you were young or pants that fit you so poorly you’re not sure you even know what your body could look like or a dozen boxes of the same incense because it’s the one scent your roommate doesn’t hate and you’re finally a big enough person to compromise or pieces of art that will sit in a pile in the corner until you one day live in a home with enough space for all of the ephemera attached to your long line of personalities.

Biking around New York City is a beautiful way to tell your friends and family that you don’t care if you live or die without having to use too many words. Half of the people on the street think you’re invisible while the other half see you as a target. The beautiful and dangerous yin-yang of existence. Riding around unlocks buried memories like a road being built in front of you while you walk on it in a video game. The mental map of my life in the city populates in real time. 

Make one left turn and we see the coffee shop where a famous writer read me her AA apology letter, which sitting through was worse than what she actually did to me. Cross the bridge and there’s the apartment of the woman who said I was the fattest guy she’s had sex with. Head a few blocks north and pass by the bar I spent 5 nights a week in for years that is now a fake fancy Mexican restaurant. Little do the people eating overpriced breakfast tacos know that this is where I was once covered in fake blood and my friend rubbed his penis on my head during a comedy show. Head uptown towards Penn station which is one of the only places I’ve ever been drunk. I laid in the middle of a walkway, screaming at my friends that the soldier holding a rifle was going to shoot me because I was drunk. We’re all glad that’s behind me now.  

Delivering to people’s homes gives me one of life’s greatest gifts: getting to see how people live. I’m obsessed with it. I want to see how every person I’ve ever met decorates their home. What’s on their walls? What kind of couch do they have? Do they own a goofy headboard? Do they have a clear rack to show off their sneakers like a 15 year-old hypebeast? What’s their candle or incense situation? What type of lightbulbs do they use? This is more important to me than who someone votes for. Plus you can usually deduce a person’s political stance from the way that they decorate their home.

Seeing how someone chooses to live feels way more intimate than having sex with them. I have an app on my phone where I could have sex with a woman while her husband watches tonight. I don’t have an app where they’ll show me how they arrange their living room. I know it’s possible to catch glimpses on Instagram or YouTube or Tik Tok but it’s not the same. I watch all of those celebrity house tour videos but there’s no feeling to them. That’s how everyone acts anyway. Regular people have propstyled and organized their entire lives into little corners that are always ready for a photoshoot just in case they get famous suddenly. 

I don’t want to see The Curated You. I want to see You You. It’s the same with photos. I’m not particularly interested in how you look while you’re posing for a photographer. I want to see how you look at a party while you’re talking to someone you may or may not sleep with later. Candid photos show the person you truly are.

I don’t know if I’m in a good place just yet, but it finally feels like the train has left the bad place it was stationed at for a long time. All I had to do was upend every single facet of my life with an insane amount of effort. The funny thing about your dreams coming true is that you still have to keep living once they do. I had no idea there could be more than my meager desires but I guess I’ll just keep trudging forward until I can’t anymore.

SOME STUFF I’VE LIKED RECENTLY

Cassandra At The Wedding

In Heaven There Is No Beer? (1984)

Nuclear Family- s/t LP (2010)

Hal’s Fruit Punch seltzer

R. Crumb Means Some Offense

SHEER DRIFT: The Snake America Newsletters (1-100)

Celsius energy drinks

Matsumoto H. goes to the convenience store

Let the Sunshine In (2017)

Agaric Fly Earthship incense

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz Shared an Unlikely, Uneasy Friendship—One That Shaped Their Worlds and Work Forever

Waking up early and standing on my stoop staring at the sun

Ordering A Salad At Subway

-Mike

My cousin Patrick killed himself in 2014. Technically, he's my mother's cousin but we were close enough in age that that was negligible. He stopped taking his medication and wandered off silently. He stopped taking his medication and he jumped off of a bridge. Everyone hoped he was just missing until the police found his body in the river. 

Everyone in my family has their funeral services at the same funeral home. A location made heavy by tradition. I know it more intimately than most of my friends’ homes. The horseshoe driveway out front. The floral furniture in the seating area outside of the viewing rooms. The overhang everyone smokes underneath to hide from the rain. It’s always raining while we’re in there. The clinical backroom you can have a meal in between services. That room feels like you’re on your lunch break at the worst job you’ve ever had with all of your grieving family members as your coworkers.

My great-aunt had a priest come lead a service during his wake. It's hard for the Catholic Church to recruit priests nationally so a large number of new recruits come to America from south Asia or western Africa. Patrick had no ties to the church, so this priest didn't have much to go on. He was giving his normal A Young Person Has Died service. Reading from the same passages I'd heard at friend's funerals. Reading from the same passages he'd read at a number of funerals for young people he’d never met. After reading them, he took a pause and in his thick West African accent said "Patrick's death……. Sad death." which was true. It was a sad death. His comment took me by such a surprise I had to cover my face and pretend I was weeping so no one saw me laughing. 

I used to spend every Christmas day at my aunt Anne's house, where Patrick lived. After our Christmas morning at home, we'd drive over and end up in the same living room with the same furniture at the end of the same gravel driveway and the same people and the same food and the same basketball games and the same secondary fridge next to the piano that was filled with soda. Up the stairs next to the refrigerator were the stairs up to Patrick's room. He lived in what used to be the attic, just like I do in my apartment now. His room was filled with plastic milk crates. Dozens of milk crates holding thousands of records. Thousands of records that I wanted to listen to. KRS-One next to Bolt Thrower next to Annihilation Time next to Lil' Kim next to some of the worst bands you've ever heard in your life.

Patrick would let me have free reign over his room and his crates and his turntables and his headphones whenever I was there. I couldn't wait to get to his house and show him what new CDs I had gotten that morning and he'd pretend to be impressed every year. That feeling never really leaves you, even as you grow older. You want to show off what you have to someone that you deem cool and hope they see you the same way that you see them. A culture of people waiting to have their older cousin pat them on the head for a job well done. 

After he died, my aunt told me that I could go over and take whatever records of his that I wanted. I couldn't let myself walk up those stairs. I had a mental block. If I walked up those stairs it was all over. They ended up getting hauled away by the local record store. I do have a few of his t-shirts in storage that I got after performing on a memorial show booked in his honor. The lineup was: a man doing spoken word, me doing stand up, my uncle doing stand up and then a The Clash cover band. I bombed for 20 minutes straight in front of my entire family and had to remember that the night wasn't about me, even if it felt like it at the time. Sweating and babbling my “art” on the stage of a rock club where I’d previously been kicked in the head by a flying Doc Marten boot, waiting for some guys to play a cover of some other guys songs in memory of a guy who wasn’t around anymore.

The timeline for healing from grief is not linear. You never know when it will pop back up for you. After Patrick died, I shoved it all down. I didn’t allow myself to feel any of my feelings. Living with the boot of masculinity on your throat is an impediment to your progression as a person. I was sad at the funeral and that was that. I thought I had gotten all of my emotions out already but that's not how emotions work. They don't go away if you refuse to deal with them. They flow and seep into all of the crevices of your body like you're trying to seal the cracked head gasket in your heart. One day it'll catch up with you. It always does.

Two months after Patrick died, Robin Williams killed himself. When I found out, I sat on the front steps of my apartment and wept. I wept for Patrick. I wept for my family. I wept for myself. I wish Robin Williams meant more to me so the reaction felt warranted but that's not how emotions work. That day my emotions caught up with me. They always do.

I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of life and its consequences. That's where you can get hurt. That's where you can disappoint people. That's where people can disappoint you. I've spent my entire life pretending that I don't care about everyone in my life as deeply as I do so they can't hurt me and now they all believe that to be true. I’ve covered my body in a suit of armor that is actively hurting me.

When people found out my most recent relationship ended, they'd put their hand on my shoulder or forearm and softly tell me how sorry they were. They'd say how much they liked her or that it was all such a shame. Underneath it all, I could feel them thinking "please don't kill yourself, Mike." It's a valid concern. I talk and joke about it in the abstract often enough. But I never wanted to be alive more. To know that I had loved someone and they had loved me is proof enough that life is worth living. 

When I was 13 years old, I pretended to attempt suicide. I did it to impress a woman. Well, a girl. She was a girl then and is a woman now. That's how time works. I was in seventh grade and she was in eighth. I thought I was in love with her because I had seen that in movies and tv shows. The forlorn boy is infatuated with the seemingly indifferent girl until some inciting incident propels them into the greatest achievement possible to my young brain: a kiss.

Her name was Katie and she was goth in the most 2001 way possible. Thumbholes in the sleeve of her hoodie. Sharpie marker all over her Converse. A winter hat with some sort of ears on it. The whole kit. I figured the only way to impress an older goth girl was to show her exactly how dark and brooding I was. If she thought I was suicidal, she'd have to fall in love with me.

We talked on AOL instant messenger occasionally. During our conversation one afternoon, I concocted my plan. Sitting at the family computer in the corner of our wood paneled kitchen where my father used to make us Mickey Mouse shaped pancakes, I told her I had eaten an entire bottle of Advil a few hours earlier. I thought this made me more desirable for some reason.

Katie did what any sane person would do in that situation and immediately told some administrators at our school who, in turn, told my parents. I had no idea it would go this way. I thought I would tell her what I had pretended to do and, at worst, she'd say "weird." and we'd keep on living our lives. Somehow, my genius plan had backfired.

Since the school was notified, they'd have to do something about this. It was suggested that I start seeing the school counselor who I had no idea even existed until that very second. I was in a tough spot. I could acquiesce and begin counseling or I could come clean and tell them the truth. I could let them know I had faked a suicide attempt to gain the attraction of a girl. I could let my parents know their son was a weird, lying loser. I could let her know the details of my disgusting little plan. I could tell the truth and not start a long pattern of small lies snowballing into uncontrollable stories that I could barely keep up with. Or I could let everyone think that I had tried to end my own life and they could all worry about me for a very long time.

I started counseling the next week. In the room behind the wooden doors with the wooden walls and the wooden furniture. The only thing in the room that wasn't made of wood was the drab grey high traffic carpet. I would sit in there and talk about whatever problems I had while the counselor looked vaguely concerned the entire time. They let me know that I was at a tough age and a lot of kids had problems then. I was in a new school, my body was changing, my parents were getting divorced, and my sister was pregnant while still in high school. This was a lot of pressure for a young man and I was acting out, but it wasn't uncommon. I let them think this about me. That I was so consumed by what was going on at home that I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't tell them that I was a nasty pervert who had no idea how to talk to the opposite sex and needed to use stunts to get their attention.

The attention didn't last. Quickly everyone forgot or pretended it never happened. It never came up again. Not with my family. Not in school. Not with friends. Not in counseling, which quietly ended. Not with Katie, who was visibly uncomfortable speaking to me after this whole fiasco and eventually moved to another state. I'm pretty sure that wasn't my fault though. The only person left thinking about it was me.

A few months ago, I received a message from someone chastising me for how often I joke about suicide. This person I do not know. They counted off the ways suicide has affected them in their life. Never once asking if it had factored into mine. They said I was lazy and a hack for going to that same well so often. I never replied because 1) I am a coward who does not desire confrontation or to be reprimanded and 2) messages like this are more for the sender than the recipient. They had purged their demons and my response is an appendix to their tale. 

I don't think their appraisal was entirely incorrect though. I do joke about suicide a lot. I think about suicide a lot. I think about it in the abstract and in the practical. It's something that has affected me personally and something I ruminate on. It's also one of the most extreme things one can do with their own body. Extremes are easy to lean on in comedy. They illuminate your point quickly and with a big bang. I think about it mostly because my life feels out of control. I'm not sure who's piloting this ship but most of the time it doesn't feel like me. When I think about suicide, I'm thinking about control. I can't control much in my life but I can control this. But I don't want to die. I want to live. I want to love. I want to fuck and to eat and to talk and to walk and to swim and to kiss and to fight and to hurt and to cry. I want to live.  

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This tweet:

-Mike

Squatting with my heels planted firmly into the mats. Noticing every breath in and out. My heart is pounding in my ears. I have decided to once again punish my body for the sin of being overweight. The punishments, all self-inflicted, have varied over my life. There's the punishment of eating your daily allotment of calories in one meal as fast as humanly possible so that no one sees you. There's the punishment of only eating rice cakes because your idea of fitness is stuck in the 1980s. This punishment was with a kettlebell.

34 years old. I’m 34 years old now. The 27 Club is long in the rearview mirror. I'm now old enough to know better. Old enough to break these oft-repeated patterns. Old enough to know my brain is my enemy and it always has been. Old enough to not have to live like this. Old enough to know this is probably as good as it’ll ever be. Old enough to know the reality of that depresses me.

I'm embarking on yet another fitness journey. This cycle has played out countless times in my life. I would compare myself to Sisyphus but at least his eternal punishment included blasting his core and shoulders. My eternal hellscape is living in an apartment with thin walls and overhearing my roommates working out in perpetuity. Inevitably, I will work out for a few weeks, or even months at a time, and get to a place where I feel like I "did it" (lost enough weight that I'm a good and valuable person). After I've hit some arbitrary goal or milestone, I will completely let go of every single good habit I've learned since the last cycle. There's no parachute to ensure a safe landing. I get to where I feel I need to be and then jump out of the plane hoping I sustain the least amount of damage upon hitting the ground. After a bit, I'll see a photo or a video of myself (usually shot from the side) that makes me physically ill and then it's time to get back on the horse again.  

I've wanted to be fast my entire life. My place was always in the back of the pack. Running, riding a bike or pushing a skateboard, I was always bringing up the rear. The older I got, the more I gravitated towards things that had no need for physical acuity. I didn't need to be able to complete a 40-yard dash in under five seconds or bench 225 because I was above that. I knew a lot about music you've never heard of and movies you've never seen so I thought of myself as a higher being. Why sully my beautiful mind with such base interests? Pretending you're better than something because it intimidates you is the oldest, and most transparent, trick in the book. 

Running has always been my white whale. I've tried, and failed, countless times to become a runner. One afternoon while in high school, I put on my best running outfit because that day was going to be the day that I changed my life. If only I knew how many times I would think that. In my little grey zip-up hoodie and worn out Reebok classics I was dressed as a chubby teenaged Rocky Balboa. I set out to run. There was one insurmountable hurdle. I had no idea how to do it. 

I knew what it looked like when other people did it but I was at a complete loss. I didn't know what to do with my body in the slightest. The only speeds I knew were sprinting and walking. Gym class and two years of pretending to use the leg press before sneaking out to play table tennis during middle school wrestling team conditioning sessions had not prepared me for anything in the real world. My teacher letting me walk a mile around the school track every year instead of running had led me to a life of sloth and inability. 

I'm not sure if I've ever felt a runner's high but I know for a fact that I've felt a jogger's low. I've never gotten to the point of feeling natural while huffing and puffing through my neighborhood in the little purple Nike running shorts that the saleslady at Paragon Sports said "don't hug" my "ample backside too much". Why she had to announce this so loudly in front of my friends is a mystery that haunts me to this day.

I don't want anyone to see me this way. Working out, as someone who does not have a positive history with fitness or their body in general, is one of the most intimate acts of my life. Reserved for the eyes of only my closest friends and anyone who paid $15 a month to work out at the Blink Fitness in Bushwick until I cancelled my membership on account of "c'mon look at me". I think at this point, gyms would pay me to not wear clothing with their branding on it.  

Yanking, pulling, stretching, sewing. A piece of clothing has never felt right on my body without some sort of alteration, however slight. While doing an impression of me, multiple people have included the motion of yanking forward the part of your shirt that covers your stomach. One of my many ticks. I believe it will stretch out the fabric of my shirt the perfect amount, as to hide all of the imperfections of my torso. I've done this motion thousands of times and never once received the desired effect. 

It’s exhausting to have to think about how I present myself all day long. I can’t slouch in my seat too much or I look like a slug. I can’t arch my back forward while I stand or I look like I’m in my third trimester. I can’t let my neck and head relax or the skin underneath my chin folds into the shape of a ruffled potato chip. I must keep my eye on everyone I'm at the beach with in case they take a photo I'm not expecting while I'm shirtless. I can’t eat too fast or too much in public or smell bad or have stained clothing or let my pants sag too much because that’s what sloppy fat guys do. That’s why I stand almost exactly the same way in every picture I'm in. I know what the results will be. Every single movement of my life becomes calculated or else I will be embarrassed with the documentation. 

Moderation is not a familiar concept to me. My brain seems to be able to obsess about almost everything except the act of working out. I don't own a few t-shirts; I had to buy two industrial racks from Home Depot to place them on. I don't hold on to the few VHS tapes that mean a lot to me; I have enough to start a small library. I don't eat a sensible meal until I'm full; I eat the most calorie dense food until all of it is gone.

One day I’d like to kill the part of my brain that thinks it can outsmart my body. The logistics of losing weight have never changed. Calories in versus calories out. Eating less and moving more. Pushing weight and getting your heart rate up. That’s how it’s been since the dawn of time and I’ll still sit in my room thinking things like “ok if I eat some potato chips really quickly and then sit perfectly still, maybe my body won’t realize what I’ve done to it.”

Every meal needs to be fun. Without the release of drinking or doing drugs, I let it all rip on my dinner plate. That's where I blackout. I can't escape my own mind via chemicals but I can dull the roar with fat and carbs. The discipline I have in one part of my life does not bleed into the other parts so easily.

Food & sex. The two pillars of pleasure and pain that I base my entire life around. A feedback loop of feeling good & feeling bad & feeling shame for feeling bad & being angry that I let shame run my life once again. The only two things I truly care about in the world. Obsessing over what my next meal will be and when the next time I'll have sex is. Most of the time neither of them measure up to the grandiosity I've built in my head so the journey for a good time continues. 

The shame felt after a particularly unhealthy meal is the same that I feel after spending the night (or afternoon or an hour in the bedroom of their shared apartment) with a person whom you don't care for as much as you'd like to. You must sit with the decision you've made but you can't help but rub your face and wonder what got you here in the first place. It's always the same thing: a lack of discipline and a desire to self-destruct. Another indulgence that helps no one in the long run. 

Sexual attraction is one of the main reasons I've been obsessed with my own body for the majority of my life. As a younger man, I used to blame my weight on why I couldn't seem to date in the same fun and carefree way my peers did. I was convinced women didn't like me because I was fat. I would blame it on the fact that I've always hung out with guys who are skinnier than me. I took their ease in popping their shirts off at the beach as a personal attack. I would be offended when they'd go out with girls I harbored feelings for. I never told my friends that I did because sharing your feelings didn't happen and I never told the object of my affection because I was terrified of my worst thoughts about myself being true. If women only hate my body inside of my mind, it might not be real. Once I brought it into the real world, I could be rejected for what I looked like or, even worse, who I am as a person. 

Never once did I consider that women could see the bright red aura of anger and rage that frames my being at all times. Or that maybe not everyone was charmed by my I'm Too Punk To Wear Deodorant phase. During that time, I had a girlfriend who informed me that my armpits smelled so rank that she could smell on her body where I had touched her during the night. After rubbing shampoo, soap and baking soda into the offending region to no avail, my only choice was to completely shave my armpits. This is a much more repellent characteristic than having a bit of a potbelly. 

Young me had no idea he'd hear things that people think are compliments like "No, I actually like your body." and "Yeah, I don't subscribe to the notion of conventional beauty standards." That is the perfect sentence to make my brain huck itself into a negative thought loop because you're saying that there IS a conventional beauty standard and I am below it. If only I knew what was in store for me. In my personal experience, there is a large swath of the population who is attracted to men of a fuller figure. Especially after they spend years dating the emaciated slackers of north Brooklyn or if I vaguely resemble their father in some way or another. 

It seems that, subconsciously or not, men do not actually work out for women but for other men. We want to be accepted, respected, admired and feared by every man we pass by on the street. Generally speaking, women seem to be less concerned with exactly how in shape you are and more so that you are exhibiting any kind of effort at all (going to therapy, showering regularly, keeping your money in a bank account instead of a shoebox in your closet). I've skated by for decades solely on assumed potential and small flashes of effort. The men in my life are the first to notice even the smallest changes in my body composition. Never once has a sexual partner complimented the work I've been doing on my delts but multiple roomates have pointed out the most miniscule progress I've made physically. 

There’s this notion that no one is looking at or thinking about you as much as you think about it yourself. That’s true, to an extent. It doesn’t mean no one is looking at you. More than likely, I am. I’ve been so obsessed with myself and my body that I’ve outsourced it to other peoples bodies too. I project all of my feelings and neuroses onto anyone that falls within my line of sight. Animus directed towards any man who I have decided has a better body than mine. Feeling pity for the poor saps who were cursed with one worse. Lusting after anyone who has enough of the qualities and features I’ve decided are attractive. My self-loathing transformed into leering. 

34. Single. Overweight. Alone. Face getting rounder. Spine turning into a question mark. A small and scared man inside of a hulking, decrepit shell. I want to fill out a suit in the right ways. No buttons struggling to hold on for dear life. A good profile. A man that men envy. A man that women dream about. Not a boy masquerading as what he thinks a man is. I want to be strong, but in every sense of the word. Strong in body and mind and spirit. Strong in my convictions and my word.

While writing this, I stumbled upon a discarded exercise bike on the street near my apartment. I dragged it home at 1 in the morning and plugged it in to make sure it works. Bingo, it does. Now I have to use it or else I've clogged a decent amount of our square footage with even more garbage. Just another thing to add to the long list of items I think will change my life. Let's see if it does.

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Trudging through the curving lanes. Eyes fixed to the middle distance. Pretending you’re unable to notice anyone else that’s near you. Trying to control your sweat glands while you walk by the security dog even though you’ve done nothing wrong. Members of the security screening chain gang. Everyone knows everything about you now. Are you organized? Do you mind holes in your socks? Did you somehow forget you can’t bring a full water bottle with you?

I think I’ve traveled more in the past 3 months than I have in multiple years of my life combined. My family didn’t take many vacations. I’m not quite sure why. One of my father’s favorite activities was sitting my sister and I down in our kitchen after digging his pull down screen and slide projector out of the back of his closet to show us photos of various destinations he’d been to. Landscape shots of the mountains of Colorado and Washington, his motorcycle parked in the foreground. The beaches of Hawaii, the Philippines and Southern California. All places he was stationed while in the Navy as a Vietnam era veteran who never had to actually engage in any battle.

Our only summer family jaunts off of Long Island were:

- To a horse ranch in upstate New York (Awful; Hot. Dusty. A horse I was riding fought another horse on our first day there. I didn’t ride a horse again and spent the following 6 days in the arcade or swimming in a green pool that had a fence around it tall enough to make sure the feeble brained horses of the ranch didn’t drown themselves. [My friends made me ride a horse for the second time ever in the summer of 2021. Quite unimpressed and another horse tried to bite the horse I was riding. The prophecy repeated itself.])

- To my father’s coworker’s vacation home in the Poconos (Unmemorable, except for the moment when I was yelled at for using my candy cigarettes to mimic the way my dad leaned against a wall smoking at the outlet mall.) 

- Two (2) separate trips to Virginia to go to Busch Gardens and Kings Dominion amusement parks (During the first trip I got my head stuck between two bars of a metal handrail on the second floor of a motel while trying to tell my dad who was in the parking lot that I was physically above him.) 

On the rare occurrence of a family vacation, we never flew. All of our trips started with my father meticulously pouring over the spiral bound Hagstrom map books the nights before we left. Spreading them open wide on the kitchen table to see which interstates would get us there in the most direct way possible. My mom’s job was making sure we all piled into our gold Plymouth Voyager and then holding onto the handle about the passenger door for dear life until we arrived. Something about not being in control of the van made her anxiety skyrocket. She reacted the same way when she taught me how to drive in our Kia Sedona that was missing at least one door handle. In her defense, I drove about 8 inches away from cars parked on the shoulder of the road because I was frightened of oncoming traffic. In my defense, be cool. 

Most of our drives, long or short, were spent switching between reading magazines and shoving my pointer finger into the cigarette burn in the middle bench seat. The hole got there from my father flicking his finished butt out of the driver's side window one night and it, somehow, flying into the sliver of popped open window next to me. The burning cherry glanced off of my thigh, an act I thought my father did on purpose to hurt me (which would have taken an unbelievable amount of timing and precision), before landing on the tan fabric. It was the first new vehicle they ever purchased and it was almost immediately sullied by the business end of a Kool. 

I don’t fault my parents for not taking us many places. It’s hard enough to wrangle four or five of my friends to get dinner in the city we all live in and I’m not legally obligated to keep them alive. I can’t imagine how annoying it would be if I also had to help them use the bathroom. 

I’ll never forgive myself for getting TSA Precheck. I willingly gave the US government 85 of my hard-earned dollars so I could be treated with the amount of respect that a human normally should be. Not being forced to walk through an airport in my socks like it’s Sunday afternoon and my mom just mopped the kitchen isn’t too much to ask. Nothing makes you feel like more of a pervert than having to put your belt on in the middle of a crowd. The only thing worse than taking too long to slide it through your belt loops is being a little too good at it. Why are you so good at playing with your belt? Do you have some sort of weird kink that we’re all a part of now? Watching me take my belt on and off should be reserved for only the most intimate moments, like before and after sex or when I’m in the locker room at a gym. 

I think it’s a good trajectory that everyone is spending more money to have a worse experience in every facet of their lives now. Airlines are charging you more for less. You must pay for a carry-on bag and a “snack tray” that is, at best, a gussied up Lunchable for adults. You can get free movies, but you have to watch them on your phone and your headphones with the compromised speed of their free wifi. Hotels no longer clean the rooms or change out your towels under the guise of environmentalism and Covid safety when the reality is they don’t want to pay cleaning staff a full time wage or benefits. 

Most of this is a very American problem. I took a domestic flight inside of Australia a few years ago and almost had a meltdown about how easy it was to travel there. I flew from Melbourne to Sydney and basically walked directly to my gate. I wasn’t humiliated by having to get undressed in public or admonished for bringing a tube of toothpaste that is one ounce “too large” according to their metric. My bag wasn’t prominently unpacked by a federal agent who is genuinely confused by the mere existence of a film camera. I remarked to my girlfriend that it felt like flying in August of 2001. 

At dinner with friends the other night, we waited over an hour for a table. It was a fairly in demand restaurant that doesn’t take reservations and we had a large party, so that wasn’t a problem. We were going to stand on the sidewalk and bullshit for an hour either way. But I was blown away that once inside, we were prompted to use a QR code to look at the menu (ugly and infantilizing, but de rigueur in the last two years). I didn’t love this but it wasn’t fully out of the ordinary. Where I got upset was when we had to order, pay and tip for the meal from a website on our phones at the table. Never once interacting with a server until the food arrived, like we ordered chili dogs through a speaker at a drive-in. At least they’d make it interesting and show up to your car on roller skates.

This was not an Applebee’s or a Chili’s, who have the decency to also give you a few free games to play on the tablet you order from. This is a dimly lit, intentionally decorated restaurant in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where a one bedroom apartment costs more than I’ve ever made in a month. They charge you $21 for a small pizza. A can of Diet Coke costs more than a trip from 96th Street to Coney Island. They have now transitioned into giving you what is basically a Seamless order at a reclaimed wooden table. God forbid you decide you want dessert after you eat your meal because you’ll have to do another full Apple Pay checkout for one piece of cake. 

On my deathbed, I will look back and marvel at how truly breathtaking it was to live through the ugliest time period in human history. Everything’s made of cheap plastic and piling up in landfills. Tactile objects are obsolete. It’s now a download card for a digital copy of a movie that can only be watched on a program that will become irrelevant in a handful of years. All pants have drawstrings and elastic waistbands because comfort has become paramount over style. I have to watch Selma Blair endlessly shill for CVS on Instagram. Every single couch in every single home is grey and boring and the same. 

Why does everything have to be so boring and drab and sexless? Every product is neutral and rounded and direct-to-consumer. An entire unfulfilling life delivered to your front door in a cardboard box. Even the fonts used in advertisements have their sharp corners sanded off. They couldn’t dare allude to excitement. Company’s aesthetics can fall under two categories: Casper or Monster Energy. There’s nothing in between. Are you a mid-30s couple working in PR in Clinton Hill who are too scared to discuss your dwindling fertility window or do you think you should legally be able to shoot someone in the kneecap for kneeling during the Pledge of Allegiance? Choose your camp or be annihilated. 

Dolly Parton was heralded on the internet as our new god-emperor after she donated a tiny amount of her vast fortune towards the development of the Covid vaccine. She became so beloved so quickly (not to say she wasn’t already loved) that her massive amount of goodwill was leveraged into making us watch her pretend to write a jingle for the relaunch of the Taco Bell Mexican Pizza. Another addition to the long list of items taken away in the name of false scarcity. You still have all of the ingredients used for Mexican Pizzas sitting there in the restaurant. Stop fucking around and give the people what they want. 

There are people who talk about how good things used to be and they usually mean when it was great to be a white guy. Gay people couldn’t get married and John Wayne’s giant head was in most movies and every meal was meatloaf that cost a nickel. That’s the world they long for. I’m speaking more of a time before it was necessary to have 10-15 streaming services that, when cobbled together, are almost as good as having cable tv was a decade ago. 

You’ll hear their cries from far and wide. “New York was better in the ‘70s.” “Paris was better in the ‘20s.” “San Francisco was better in the ‘60s.” Well, guess what you old fuck? I’m alive now and I have to deal with the consequences of that. Every single day I have to wake up and figure out which brands I will align myself with to show that I’m a good person. Mike Abrusci in association with T-Mobile and Wells Fargo present the I’m An Ally, I Swear concert series for Pride Month. 

Sure, there are pluses to living in the future. You’re able to find every song that’s ever existed rather quickly. There’s so much pornography available you can make yourself insane trying to look at all of it. High fructose corn syrup runs down the side of every mountain like a beautiful, viscous river. You have the right to burn to death inside of a self-driving car that you paid upwards of six figures for while the dash cam films you. 

That’s the trade off we have now. You’ve never had more items and ideals and lifestyles available to you and all of them seem underwhelming. Manufacturing has been decimated to the point where you can choose to buy a shirt between 200 different fast fashion websites, faux luxury brands that make their clothes in the same factories but slap a different tag on them or paying someone $500 to make you a shirt that looks like it was sewn backstage at a middle school production of Fiddler on the Roof. You can find a quality pair of jeans that are made in the USA but they’re going to cost $350, weigh six pounds, be stiff as a board and have a long enough inseam where you’ll have to have 4 inch cuffs and look like you rode your motorcycle to the barbershop you own that morning. 

We’re beyond the paradox of choice. We’re drowning in subpar options. Nothing is correct and we need more and more to still feel unfulfilled. Everyone’s scrambling around, putting together their little jigsaw of contentment. Happiness dangling like a carrot on the end of a stick in perpetuity. I have a spot where I sometimes buy enamel pins from the 1970’s and I have one attached to my favorite fall jacket. It’s gold and in all caps it says ALL I WANT IS A LITTLE MORE THAN I’LL EVER HAVE. No amount of buying and taking and doing will satisfy me until I’m satisfied with myself. 

A PLAYLIST FROM ME TO YOU

SOME STUFF I’VE LIKED RECENTLY

Marcus Aurelias - Meditations

Out There: Kevin "Spanky" Long

A Moveable Feast

GENUINE RISK, WINNING COLORS, AND REGRET AT THE KENTUCKY DERBY

How Ben Got His Penis

Lili Anolik Grub Street Diet

I saw these three movies in theaters this week and they were all great for vastly different reasons:

The French (2021) // RRR (2022) // Life Is Sweet (1991)

John Darnielle Wants to Tell You a Story

Jake Anderson's "STOP" Part

-Mike

Every day I’m stuck. Stuck behind a slow person or a dumb person or a fat person or an old person. Stuck dealing with someone not doing the thing I want them to do. Stuck with someone who reminds me of me, the person I hate the most. Stuck in a place I don’t want to be at. Stuck with people I don’t want to be with. Stuck in a body I hate. Stuck staring at the same three apps. Stuck saying the same things over and over again. Stuck in a hell I’ve made for myself. 

Whenever I’m standing at a street corner waiting to cross and someone walks in front of me like they’re going to walk faster than I am, it feels like they’re attacking me as a man. Immediately, we are in a competition and they’re my enemy. Even if my body is hurt or I’m not in a rush, it’s a race. If I lose, I’m weak and would never be able to protect my family. An old woman tried to push around me to get out of the train first the other day so I turned around and said “What exactly are you trying to accomplish?” directly in her face. 

I’m trying to be different. It’s tough to change who you are at your core without pulsing electricity directly into your brain. You can work out and you can go to therapy and you can read books and you can develop a personal mantra to chant during meditation and you can get an angular haircut and you can move to a new city but you’re still there the entire time. Good intentions and habits slip away as quickly as you start them but your basest proclivities won’t go away so easily. 

Why can’t I sit alone quietly in a room? Why must I immediately grab my phone or listen to music or watch tv? My worst nightmare is to be by myself in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but me and my thoughts. Nasty little evil thoughts. Thoughts I wouldn’t dare share with anyone or else they’d know who I actually am. At least in prison you can hear other people. 

Stuck in another line. Having to wait in line is subhuman. Why am I waiting in the cold to get into a Chipotle like it’s a breadline? Why am I even eating at Chipotle? I should value myself more than this. My penance for poor planning is having to overhear midtown Manhattan Patagonia vest men talk about their fiancé and the amenities of their new apartment. “That’s a pretty good price for the East Village and now I can afford to Uber wherever I want”. 

This is still less embarrassing than waiting to get into a bar. One of life’s biggest indignities. Standing on a sidewalk outside of some shithole while the pregamed masses bump into your back and ass because two drinks destroys every  person’s spatial awareness. All for the pleasure of attending an acquaintance’s birthday party that you only went to because they cornered you at someone you actually like’s party and invited you. Every time I hear about the process of being let into Berghain and clubs of that nature, I think about how I’d rather be forcibly castrated on live television. 

One day I’ll stop needing everyone to like me. Me me me me me. That’s my only thought. My favorite subject. I want everyone to love me, but especially women. If women are attracted to me that means I’m desirable which means I’m a good person. 

In my mind, I need to hoard any and all attraction that is pointed my way because it is a finite resource. Liable to disappear at a moment’s notice, never to be seen again. It was once nothing and can become nothing again. I’ve stayed with partners who obviously hate me just so I don’t have to be alone. 

I want everyone to love me while I stay wildly indifferent to them. 

I should say “yes” more often. I should tell people I appreciate them. I should call my parents. I should stop taking everyone I know for granted. I should stop having to add “coming from me, that’s a compliment” to statements as often as I do. I should stop thinking I deserve praise when I occasionally do these things. I should stop thinking that acknowledging these flaws absolves me from having them. 

I expect a lot from people. Probably too much. I try to make myself feel better by saying I also expect a lot from myself but everyone knows I’m full of shit when I say that. Especially me. I don’t expect that much from myself. I expect to fall ass-backwards into everything and have it all work out. So far, I haven’t been totally wrong. 

A lot of people want a lot of things from me but I don’t know what else I have left to give. There’s too much of me in the world but if I don’t keep making things, I have no worth. Whether it’s true or not, my worth is entirely tied to what I produce. I have nothing to offer other than that. Bad friend, bad partner, bad son, bad sibling, bad person. 

When I told my roommate that I don’t care about anything anymore “but not in a negative way” he said that I am now enlightened. I agree with him because it makes me sound intelligent. It’s not egotistical to tell everyone that I’m enlightened because I’m quoting someone else. I’m a journalist reporting the facts of my life. 

There’s things I’m unable to change, as much as I’d like to. Where I’m from. How I grew up. The way I’ve been treated. Things that I’ve done. The way I’ve treated people. 

The things I can change are all in the present. I can change myself. People are too stuck in how they think they’re supposed to act. Whatever little box they put themselves in is how they are for the rest of their lives. Where they were raised and where their great great grandparents are from become their excuses for everything. “Oh I’m just a New York Italian and this is how we act.”. No, you’re rude and loud and you should change that about yourself. 

I quit my job in the middle of writing this. A small step towards the Great Unsticking.

Some Stuff I’ve Like Recently

RARE: Raymond Carver Reads "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

Pedestrian 24: A Space to Think

You’re Wrong About Juergen Teller

[hate5six] Scowl - January 08, 2022

Mos Def and Kanye rapping Two Words

Bob Odenkirk’s Long Road to Serious Success

This Crucifix pillow. It makes me laugh every time I see it.

-Mike

Compared to thousands of hour-long fail compilations on YouTube and Tik Tok videos of teenagers who seem to be in the middle of a steroids cycle “pranking” one another, Jackass seems quaint and lo-fi. The twenty-five half hour episodes spread out over three seasons (along with three movies) were mostly filmed on commercially available camcorders. While the clarity of a cell phone camera bests the quality of the clips that made Jackass famous, most videos and shows that claim to be influenced by them lack the heart that the series contained. 

My completely not peer-reviewed armchair sociologist theory is that the popularity of Jackass caught millennial men at the perfect time in their adolescence to influence their perception of masculinity. Teaching them that touching your friends is ok. Touching them beyond slapping each other in the nuts or a bit of grappling on the front lawn. Repression still reigned supreme but its grip may have loosened a bit. 

For decades, male bonding in America was very rigid. This was in a period between the rigid and constricting John Wayne masculinity of generations past and the more fluid acceptance that’s available for 2020s teens. Kissing your guy friends could be funny and not a relationship ending action. This is, of course, viewed through a lens with heavy heterosexual male overtones. The underlying punchline is that kissing your friend is funny because it’s so outside of the realm of possibilities that you’d be attracted to one another. A relic of a mostly bygone era. 

The cast members clearly had a real deep love for one another, whether they were part of a tight knit crew of friends who grew up with one another or the employees of an irreverent skateboard magazine filming themselves being shot with actual guns while wearing bulletproof vests. Their love was even apparent when they secretly planned to slap each other with a giant foam hand on a hinge that’s covered in baby powder (the glorious denouement of the activity known as “antiquing” [throwing flour into the face of your sleeping friend which makes them resemble a marble statue or an old tchotchke covered in dust] that they brought into the zeitgeist.). The stunts were everything I loved as a teenager: part skate video, part Looney Tunes gag, part gonzo journalism all backed by a soundtrack of punk and metal. 

The love they exhibited makes their fracture with Bam Margera even more disappointing. Margera was fired from Jackass Forever mid-filming for breaking a contract stipulation that he would remain clean and sober while filming. For a time, they were bonded in a way that you can only achieve when a group of people go through strenuous times together. Members of championship sports teams or bandmates who endured years of sleeping on top of one another in a cargo van or men who dropped billiard balls on each other's genitals from the top of a garage. I shouldn’t have been as shocked as I was by the group’s splintering after watching dozens of sports and rock documentaries. Egos, addiction and money get in the way of everything. 

It was a revelation seeing something that so closely resembled my everyday life on TV. Jackass highlighted the malaise of the 21st century suburban teen. Perpetually bored, mischievous, rebellious in a safe way. We weren’t living like we were in Kids but it also wasn’t Leave It To Beaver. 

No longer did you need to have insider knowledge on where to buy your subculture indicating accessories. You could have your mom bring you to the nearest mall to grab some pyramid spiked belts, leather bracelets and high-top Chuck Taylors at Hot Topic to complete your Johnny Knoxville costume. No grocery store parking lot or Wal-Mart sporting goods section was safe from us, even if the worst we would do was hitting each other with a stray dodgeball or putting Mentos into a Diet Coke while skateboarding off of their loading dock. 

I was shocked that it seemed like you could get paid to hang out with your friends and goof off, a small precursor to people vlogging every detail of their lives while shilling mail-order mattresses and subscriptions to therapy apps. “Hi, I’m Johnny Knoxville and welcome to Jackass”, a declarative introduction to entertainment has been replaced by a chorus of “Heyyy guys, welcome back to my vlog.”, a greeting used to simulate a genuine rapport between viewer and presenter.  

Immediately after seeing the first episode, my friends and I began to copy the Jackass boys. We tried to produce our own show that we so brilliantly titled Dumbass, even though MTV blatantly told viewers not to send them any clips. We were convinced they’d see us and draft us to the minor leagues until we were ready for primetime. Principal shooting began with segments of us jumping off of roofs into garbage bags full of leaves; rounds of “The Bush Game”, which was us running up behind one another at full speed and shoving each other into whatever shrubbery we were near;  tying our sweatshirt hoods as tight as possible while we smashed fluorescent light bulbs that we found in the garbage behind Kmart across each other’s backs. 

Activities such as these stayed with me into my 20’s but mutated into roman candle jousting (four people line up in an X formation on bicycles, light their respective roman candles and ride towards a center point. The winner, so to speak, is the one who stays upright on their bike and is burned the least) and maybe or maybe not setting old CRT television sets on fire in the woods depending on the statute of limitations. 

There’s a strong force inside of teenage boys to destroy. There’s an entire genre of memes dedicated to young men punching holes in drywall instead of addressing their feelings. The intriguing part of Jackass pranks and stunts is the aim was turned inward; at oneself or the friend group. This was not your “white kid pranks people in the hood” videos of today (dispicable) or your 1950’s tar and feathering the class nerd on the front steps of your high school(hilarious but I’m entirely unsure if this ever actually happened outside of movies). 

Most people who showed up on screen that weren’t official members of the Jackass Cinematic Universe were passive bystanders. Merely witnesses to Preston and Wee Man running through an intersection in tighty-whiteys, Johnny dressed as an old man wearing short shorts that expose his excessively long prosthetic scrotum or Chris Pontius dressed as the devil urging you to keep god out of California. Of course, the experience of shopping carts, Bam Margera’s father, some unsuspecting golfers and rental cars notwithstanding.

The hardest I’ve ever seen my mother laugh was at two separate Jackass sketches. The first was a segment from the very first episode called Body In Trunk. Johnny Knoxville drives a beat up car into a gas station to fill up on gas and Chris Pontius pops out of the trunk, hands tied and mouth gagged, shocking all of the customers and employees. The second was entitled The Hearse which consisted of parking a hearse at the top of a hill and opening the back door, causing a casket to slide out and down the hill while someone walked past. Using gravity to its comedic end. Tears rolled down her face the first time we saw that. 

I feel like I grew with the members of Jackass, as much as you can do something like that with a group of people you’ve never actually met. I’ve spent a large portion of my life watching Johnny’s hair turn from dark to salt and pepper to bright white; watching Steve-o get sober; watching Bam publicly fight his demons; watching them all mourn the loss of Ryan Dunn. 

Their journeys parallel the march through time so many friend groups take. Highs and lows. Successes and failures and redemption and fissures. I’m not sure how much I want to watch a group of men pushing 50 years old throw themselves down a flight of stairs for my amusement but I’m still drawn to it. It’s not nostalgia. I’m not particularly interested in seeing people doing the same thing over and over again. The only thing I know is I'll be there opening night with all of my friends. All of us older and greyer and, hopefully, mature enough to not hit each other in the nuts while we wait for the movie to start. I might wear a cup just in case. 

Jackass Forever.

Here’s a few photos I took that I like but didn’t want to put into the essay.

Some Stuff I’ve Liked Recently

The Civil Dead

He Was in Witness Protection in Maine. But His Harlem Life Kept Calling.

Bukowski Reads Bukowski

The Humans of Daniel Arnold’s New York

SELF DEFENSE FAMILY - LIVE @ The Masquerade (Atlanta, GA)

The Worst Person In The World

Alex Jovanovich on Iiu Susiraja

As I watch the coffee filter through the diner style drip machine in the kitchen of my office, I realize life is not worth it. Not in a way where I actively want to die but that same sinking feeling when you’re 30 minutes into a movie before you realize it’s awful. Life is odd like that. You get to have friends and fall in love and fuck and go out to long dinners filled with stimulating conversations but the whole experience of living is tempered by dating people who end up hating you and paying rent and stilted conversations with coworkers and everyone you love eventually dying. 

Every office building uses disgusting overhead lighting to remind you that you’re not welcome there. The bulbs are at the correct temperature to create a simulacrum of sunlight, fooling you into thinking you are being nourished. They’re the same type of light bulbs used in mine shafts so the workers aren’t driven insane in the dark. It is an uninhabitable space. I’m not sure what I envisioned my life to be, but it didn’t involve fluorescent light bulbs and changing copier toner.

Following the same maze every day. Down the stairs into the train by my house, up the stairs then the escalator then the stairs to the connecting train, up the escalator then the second escalator and across the station and up the third escalator and down the hallway and out of a revolving door to leave the train station so I can cross the street and swipe my card to walk through another revolving door and go up an elevator to reach the floor that I work on. This entire commute could be done blindfolded if it had to. The only thing to snap me out of the daze I travel in was accidentally tripping up the third escalator in front of people a few weeks ago. 

Oftentimes during my ride into work, I’ll catch a glimpse of people on a different train line in the same tunnel. All heading north. Staring straight forward. Only making eye contact with the void, lest they alert the other commuters to the fact that they’re shoved in with other living, breathing people. I pity them and their sour faces until I am reminded that they are also me. Sentient cogs in the machine becoming upset with who we are when it’s reflected back at us, like when a dog barks at a mirror.

Coming from a long line of manual labor jobs, the level of micromanagement in offices was a full body shock. I was once tasked with replying to emails inside of someone else's email inbox from mine but as them. If that seems convoluted to read, imagine doing it. Having to endure reading the reply of half a dozen people that are cc’d on an email telling you how to do something in slightly different ways feels like putting your soul onto a judas cradle. Your interactions with your superiors should include only the following:

-What is or is not for lunch (only if they are buying)

-Which radio station will be played on the work boombox

-When and in which manner they would have sexual intercourse with either of your parents

-The size of your genitalia in correlation to your ability to work

-How, and why, you could never satisfy your chosen lover

-What the clothes you chose to wear to work say about your sexuality

The resentment for the office hierarchy has begun to ooze out of me slowly. I no longer endure anyone’s anger directed at me. I used to take it on the chin, believing I am below them because of the difference in our salaries. I’ve never felt a purer joy than looking at a millionaire and asking them why they’re talking to me that way. To see their eyes widen in shock while they stumble over their words has made the constant humiliation almost manageable. Telling someone who owns a penthouse in Manhattan and a house in the Hamptons for the fifth time that they do, in fact, need a camera attached to their computer for people to see them in video meetings is a small victory for me and a large indicator that financial gains have no tie to common sense.

The lowest rung is an interesting place to reside on the corporate ladder. You’re the most stepped on and yet, the most important. Seemingly, nothing can run without you and also you are not worth being paid a living wage. I do not wish to be thanked for coming into my job when everyone else is told to work from home for their safety and I am not given the choice. Nothing I have ever done can be described as “essential” yet the entire company comes to a grinding halt whenever I decide to take the day off.

If you are lucky enough to not be forced back to the physical space of your employment, your home is now also your office. Sure, you get no tax break or compensation for this but at least the company also gets to spend less money on their physical footprint and more on their board members’ bonuses. For the low price of your salary, you can now resent what once was a place of solace. Tasteful decor now being ravaged by ergonomic desk chairs and multiple computer monitors. Your coworkers now know how you decorate your home without even engaging in an ill-advised post-happy hour messy hook up. What’s the point of someone from accounting knowing you have a Japanese poster for the movie Happiness if you also don’t get to avert eye contact by the coffee machine because you both know what you’ve done?

It feels as if everything that surrounds jobs like these is designed to be incredibly demeaning. Sliding into whatever you have decided business casual clothing constitutes and doesn’t smell enough that it needs to be washed. Carrying your little lunch in a little tupperware container from your home and putting it into the office kitchen microwave is enough to drive a man to suicidal ideations. Your only other choices are buying a wet lunch in a compostable bowl that you never compost from a restaurant that looks like the waiting room of a tech start-up or standing in a line on the sidewalk to be served slop of indiscriminate origins in an aluminum tin. 

The closest one can get to heaven on earth is the ability to eat their lunch in an unoccupied office. A space vacated by someone, unlike you, with the confidence to leave a job that’s slowly killing them. Sitting there with the lights off and hiding in the shadows so as to not draw attention to yourself. Shoveling whichever protein+grain+vegetables you’ve chosen for yourself into your mouth under cover of darkness like you’ve stowed away on a freight train heading west.

Office jobs are obviously not physically demanding, other than eventually turning your spine into the shape of a question mark if you are not diligent about stretching. It’s not breaking rocks on the side of the highway or carrying sheets of plywood up a two-story ladder but there is a certain emotional toll that they take. Slowly crushing your goodwill into a small chunk of coal inside of your chest every time you have to fill the dishwasher in the company kitchen or not scream while someone explains to you how to send a regular letter through the mail like you’ve been living on a different planet your entire life. 

In my heart of hearts I do think that the concept of a job is bad, even beneath me, but that is mostly because I’m lazy. The self-flagellation of posting online to the tune of “I can’t believe we have to work during a global pandemic” is fruitless. I surely didn’t want to go to work years before any of this happened. A loving community taking care of one another is a beautiful dream but at the present time, my landlord refuses to accept anything other than money in exchange for me living in my apartment. 

I don’t think we were made to work 40 hours a week at a job we don’t care about but I’m not sure if we were made to not work either. Studs Terkel (whose book, I believe, is the end-all and be-all of writing on the American work ethic pre-computerization) said “Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding.”

People are surely not meant to be sedentary. They are wired to do something. Anything. Every day that I sit for too long, I begin to pace in circles inside of my home like a lion at a zoo. Animals become cage crazy when they’re forced into a small space. Everyone that I live with starts to become fatigued by the seemingly unending stream of questions, jokes and non sequiturs. I must complete some task outside every day, even if it’s just sitting in the sun, or I begin to spiral out. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings and an idle Mike is a roommate’s nightmare. 

True freedom is to be delighted by your work, whatever it may be. The tortured artist is an unenviable archetype. Nothing seems sexier than the idea of someone seeing you hunched over a desk, smoking a cigarette with your sleeves rolled up while creating masterpiece after masterpiece, only to crumple them up and toss them into the garbage because they don’t live up to your standards. In reality, we’re all plugging away at half-ideas that will maybe one day come to fruition while our spines slowly become question marks bent over keyboards.  

There’s no one I’m more envious of than someone who is truly delighted by what they do. Waking up every single day and looking forward to putting up drywall or installing computer servers or filing people’s quarterly taxes. Never once have I had a job that I had to clock in to that didn’t fill me with dread the moment I opened my eyes. I am Sisyphus. Starting at the bottom of a mountain and pushing the rock of employment to the top every shift only for it to slide back to the bottom as soon as I’m done for the day. 

I try to take a worker’s mindset to art. Every day I am a tradesman, chiseling away at whatever may become. Pride comes from making the thing, not any praise that you may or may not receive afterwards. You wake up, you create, you go to sleep. The task is the reward. The fact that there once was nothing and now there is something, regardless of quality, makes me more powerful than god.

Here’s a Spotify playlist I made to accompany the newsletter. You don’t have to listen to it while you read but I’d prefer if you listened to it in order.

Some Stuff I’ve Liked Recently

Opinion : “Curiosity Is Not a Good Reason to Get Married”

Leap Year

Why Don’t You Dance?

In Defense Of Shame (written by Julia Claire who I interviewed in Please Enjoy #13)

A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers At Full Speed

The Tao of Wee Man

Photographers in Focus: Richard Billingham

Bill Close Hostage Crisis

Domestic Bliss: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt At Home

Early Work & Cool For America by Andrew Martin

I had to stop myself from reading Early Work too quickly because I knew I’d be angry once I finished it. It’s not an entirely new story. An underachieving academic gets caught in odd romantic situations. I just loved Martin’s voice and writing style so much that it pushed the story beyond how vanilla it could have been. Cool For America is a collection of short stories that expands upon some of the characters from Early Work and they overlap like a literary Magnolia. Super fun and quick reads. Neither of these came out in 2021 but they’re the books I enjoyed reading the most this year. I’m eagerly awaiting whatever he puts out next. 

https://bookshop.org/books/early-work/9781250215017

https://bookshop.org/books/cool-for-america-stories/9780374108168

Season 2 of How To With John Wilson

With the second season complete, I can officially say it’s my favorite tv show ever. Part gonzo journalism, part comedy show, part surveillance footage. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to see and make. Before I left Ridgewood, I’d see John walking around all the time and only fanned out one time which is another beautiful showing on restraint by me. 

Perfectly Imperfect newsletter

I love a little list of things people enjoy (obviously) so getting this in my inbox 2x a week is a fun treat. Some stuff that’s recommended makes me roll my eyes a bit but that comes with the territory. 

Perfectly Imperfect

Recommendations from Real People. 2x a week.

Licorice Pizza

I’m a sick little freak for PTA movies and this is no different. Possibly his funniest movie. High on the list in the Chubby Guy and Girl With Long Brown Hair canon, which I’ve based my entire life on. 

@directorfits 

An unbelievable Instagram account that shows great outfits on directors. I have a folder of screenshots from it on my phone for outfit inspiration but I’m too much of a coward to really go 100% into some of the looks. 

Militarie Gun- All Roads Lead To The Gun I & II

Possibly the best guitar band on the planet right now. Hardcore-adjacent music filtered through noise rock, garage and pop. Their entire discography is flawless (being 12 songs in total). These two EPs were supposed to be one LP with some additional songs but I think they are a testament to the EP being the perfect format for louder, aggressive music. Not an ounce of fat to trim. 

How Long Gone

As a white guy in his 30’s living in a major metropolitan city, I am contractually obligated to listen to this podcast. 

Articles:

https://www.thecut.com/2021/08/the-red-pilling-of-kitson-fraser-ross.html

https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/culture/the-oral-history-of-apartamento

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/magazine/motorcycles-sturgis.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/magazine/sopranos.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/11/magazine/quarantine-insanity.html

https://www.gq.com/story/life-death-and-dad-at-the-grand-canyon

Dirt

Dirt: The Internet vintage hardcore shirt scene

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment. Jason Diamond on the overlooked vintage band T-shirts of his youth A few years back I found myself at the great Brooklyn vintage shop Wooden Sleepers when it was still an actual storefront in Red Hook. I don’t recall everything I purchased, but I definitely bought my yellow W.S. dad hat that I love, and, I think…

Read more

5 years ago · 12 likes · Dirt

https://www.grubstreet.com/2021/08/leon-neyfakh-grub-street-diet.html

https://www.gq.com/story/johnny-knoxvilles-last-rodeo

https://www.vulture.com/article/big-and-tall-the-unlikely-bookstore-birthplace-of-alt-comedy.html

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/john-swartzwelder-sage-of-the-simpsons

http://archive.today/wFkLN (St. Vincent Told Me To Kill This Interview)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/us/tom-garvey-veterans-stadium-living.html

Pedestrian

Pedestrian 20: What's in a Walk?

Welcome to Pedestrian. I’m Alex Wolfe. For those of you joining me for the first time...hello! This is a bi-weekly newsletter about walking and our everyday surroundings, which went on an unannounced hiatus as I walked 158 miles across the length of Long Island over nine days (you can view a map of my journey…

Read more

5 years ago · 3 likes · Alex Wolfe

(but you missed out if you didn’t subscribe to the walk newsletters)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/10/arts/artists-coronavirus-lockdown.html

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/slavoj-zizek-sounds-off-on-big-tech-sex-dolls-and-leonardo-dicaprio

https://www.floatmagazine.us/interviews/stacy-kranitz

https://www.thecut.com/article/kate-gladstone-roommate-west-village-nyc.html

Sitting Pretty

Sleep the Days Away

In “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” the second novel from American writer Ottessa Moshfegh, the unnamed narrator, a dejected woman in her mid-20s — misanthropic and thin and beautiful in equal measure — seeks to cure her problems in an unconventional way: She plans to sleep the year away by continuously drugging herself. And …

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6 years ago · 9 likes · Tyler Watamanuk

https://www.thecut.com/2021/01/profile-lauren-oyler-author-of-debut-novel-fake-accounts.html

https://www.vogue.com/article/daniel-arnold-inauguration-day-washington-dc

https://artreview.com/byung-chul-han-i-practise-philosophy-as-art

Books I Read This Year That I Liked And Didn’t Necessarily Come Out This Year But Some Of Them Did

Lust & other stories by Susan Minot

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

Sleeveless by Natasha Stagg

Fake Accounts by Lauren Olyer 

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

Open by Andre Agassi

The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

Horizontal Rust by Ned Russin 

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Every Force Evolves A Form by Guy Davenport 

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerny

Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin

Acts Of Desperation by Megan Nolan

Running The Light by Sam Tallent

Mislaid by Nell Zink

Working by Studs Terkel

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Other Music From This Year That I Really Liked

Great War by Rudimentary Peni

shut the fuck up talking to me by Zack Fox

The Mutt’s Nuts by Chubby and the Gang

No Longer Human by Hologram

Social Capital by Electric Chair

The Exciting Sounds of Menahan Street Band by Menahan Street Band

EP by Smirk

Blood Hunger Demo by Kontaminate

Hc45-2 by Alien Nosejob

1집 LP by Slant

Retaliation by The Chisel

Two Step To Hell by Chain Whip

Bug Bite by Anytime Cowboy

Habitual Offender by Spy

Between The Richness by Fiddlehead

ULTRAS by ULTRAS

The First Day Of Spring by Dollhouse

Blunt Instrument Demo by Ideation

Hunting Season by The Pack

…PEACE ON EARTH? by Tower 7

Knife Talk & You Only Live Twice from Drake’s Certified Lover Boy

One Rostam song and that’s it

Other Movies From This Year That I Really Liked

The French Dispatch

Pig

No Time To Die

Bad Trip

Shiva Baby

Judas and the Black Messiah

The Power Of The Dog

The One Other TV Show I Watched This Year Because I Don’t Really Like TV Shows

Joe Pera Talks With You season 3

-Mike

Sitting in front of my old apartment. Photo by Britney Goodman.

Moving is the worst thing that could happen to a person. Worse than famine. Worse than being frozen like Kurt Russell in The Thing. Worse than being a retail employee hearing the same 8 Christmas songs on a loop during every shift for a month straight. I didn’t agree to be born and now I am forced to live my entire life, plus I’m expected to always have somewhere to live. Feels like a bad deal to me. 

Having to move unexpectedly is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy (of which I have many). I found out my roommates and I were kicked out of our apartment via text message. After flying from New York to Salt Lake City in a middle seat with a broken tv, I popped my phone on when the plane was about 10-15 feet off the ground. I know you’re supposed to keep it on airplane mode until you reach the gate but I figured if I can see the tarmac in detail, I won’t be doing any damage to the controls by checking Instagram before our huge rubber wheels once again make contact with Mother Gaia. Life is about seeing exactly what you can get away with. 

Falling back to Earth while realizing you need a new place to live felt a bit on the nose. A weak punchline to the cosmic joke. Quickly, panic started to set in. I know what my bank account looks like. My credit score is so low you can see it on a stove. Finding an apartment that would take me seemed like an insurmountable task. All of my failures exploded out of their hiding places. Why did I max out that credit card when I was 23? Why don’t I have a savings account? Why have I stayed at a wildly underpaying job for so long? Why can’t you get your life together? Why can’t you afford to live alone?

My mind immediately went to visions of me being homeless. Having to ask my friends if I can sleep on their couch for a bit and oh yeah, I’m bringing my cat too. I started pricing out storage units and tried to see if any of their Yelp reviews said anything about there not being a lot of cameras around to see when you come and go. Showering at the gym won’t be so bad. I’m paying for a membership every month. Maybe I’ll actually work out if I’m already forced to be there for basic hygiene purposes. Might as well get a pump in before I hit the locker room. 

Asking anyone for help of any kind is tantamount to waterboarding for me. I pace back and forth in my room, wringing my hands and talking to myself before I can work up the courage to request assistance in any form. My personality is already enough of an emotional burden on the people in my life. Adding a physical or monetary element to it seems preposterous.

After the panic subsided a bit, I momentarily felt relief. I lived in that apartment for 7.5 years and I don’t think any of them were peaceful. I was at war with my landlord for almost the entire time. She seemed to hate me and struck a nerve deep within me that would send me into a full rage during every interaction. She would open and inspect our garbage bags that were full of dirty cat litter. She’d tell us that the city would find one plastic bottle in the bottom of the bag and fine her. She told me I need to secure my air conditioner better or it would fall out of my window and crush her head while she took out the garbage. She put a wind chime on the door that leads to the roof to alert her of any fun that could have been had. She accused my roommate of stealing $700 of the rent we were made to pay in cash and never apologized once she realized she had it in her purse the entire time. 

Just once I’d like to live in an apartment that I don’t have to explain. Never again will I have to warn someone about the step that magically appeared in the hallway between the kitchen and living room because our landlord didn’t get actual flooring guys to replace the tile. They said the floor was uneven and they’d have to raise it six inches so now you had to step up to get into the kitchen and step down into the bathroom, whose door was also in the hallway. After jazzercising to get in and out of the bathroom multiple times a day, you become blissfully unaware of it. Many a guest weren’t properly warned and fell into the bathroom. 

I am not a completely innocent party in my relationship with my ex-landlord. I refused to talk to her after a while. I tied the garbage bags with 7 or 8 knots so she couldn’t undo them. I would hit the wind chime with my bag whenever I could. One time her cat threw up outside of my bedroom door and instead of just cleaning it up, I picked the vomit up with a litter scooper and threw it from our landing into her hallway below. I’m not proud of any of these (except the wind chime one) but I justify it by saying I was driven to madness. 

I haven’t always been a model tenant. I’m not sure on the statute of limitations but let’s just say in the year 2011 that a man who has a very similar name, build, face and personality to me stopped paying rent for 6 months and then moved out of his apartment without notifying his landlord. That’s a quick and unexpected move. At the apartment I lived in before that, I may or may not have had my band’s record release show in the living room which ended up with fireworks going off, lots of broken glass, me hitting someone with my bass because they were trying to break the ceiling fan and a couch getting stuck 7 feet high in a hallway because it was too wide to be moved into the kitchen. I’ve never received a security deposit back and it is entirely my fault. 

Having to pack all of your belongings very quickly forces you to reckon with everything you’ve been sweeping under the bed, both physically and mentally. Your roommates want answers for why they have to carry boxes with 350 VHS tapes in them. What emotional hold do they have over you that you can’t pare down the collection? No amount of writing “Sorry, this is really heavy” on a box makes it easier to carry or store. The line between maximalism and hoarding is razor-thin. 

The anguish I end up in while parsing through the contents of my closet feels akin to the Judgement of Solomon. Sitting cross-legged on the ancient linoleum floor holding a t-shirt that’s covered in stains with holes in the armpits and saying “I can’t get rid of this. I stole it from a rest stop in New Mexico in 2009.” like that means anything. 

The Marie Kondo method never resonated with me because every single item in my home sparks some sort of joy for me. The Joy Of Stuff. I can’t get enough of it. The weirder and crappier, the better. It all means something to me. When I hold it, I get to feel a little bit of that jolt I felt when I first found it. It’s simple to buy shitty, replaceable stuff online. That's why it’s easy to throw it out and help stock the landfills. I would smash every Ikea bookshelf in sight if I could. Holding something you had been searching for for a long time or, even better, something you never knew you needed (in a spiritual sense) but stumbled upon, feels different. It’s the contrast between eating a tv dinner and a meal that took hours to create. The former may tide you over, but you will never be satiated. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve defined myself through my possessions. Every time someone  visits my home, I have to fight the urge (and usually fail) to give them an excruciatingly detailed house tour. Pulling out thrift store hats, magazines I bought so I could have a hard copy of one article, pictures of me sitting on the toilet as a child and explaining how I’m not religious but the amount of crucifixes and praying hands in my bedroom would lead you to believe that I am quite devout. These books mean I’m smart and worthy of love. This record means I’m interesting. This shirt means I’m cool and all of my friends enjoy my company. This rug shows you that I’m a good person. For me, the clothes truly make the man.

There’s much less of a connection to the physical space. I hadn’t lived anywhere other than the house I grew up in for as long as I was in that apartment but it meant almost nothing to leave it. I’m not sure if the disconnect comes from renting, the fact that everywhere I’ve lived in my adult life has been various levels of shithole or if it’s a part of aging. Lots of people passed through the doors but them being there is what made the place special. All of my apartments are the same as a weird sump you’d party in while you were in high school. The spot itself wasn’t suitable for sentient creatures but what happened there meant a lot to you. 

The only emotion I had while leaving my apartment was frustration, triggered by having to move my giant pile of stuff. Sure, I made some memories in there but I can’t say I’ll be missing the giant crack forming on the wall outside of the bathroom or the weird sticky feeling on every cabinet after you cook even if all of the windows are open or the faux wooden floor that is a different shade than the wood paneling in the living room or the radiator that we weren’t allowed to turn on because it leaked into my landlord’s apartment and she refused to fix it.  

It’s easy to become complacent. Complacent in relationships, in jobs, in living situations, in lifestyle. I would have stayed in my cold, falling apart apartment until I died because it was just easier. The easy way is not the noble one. Taking the coward’s path only leads to an unfulfilling life. Sometimes you need your sense of security ripped out from under you. 

Some Stuff I’ve Liked Recently

While You Were Partying

Griffin Dunne Answers Every Question We Have About After Hours

Nicole (2021)

Interview: Militarie Gun’s Ian Shelton On Self-Expression, Motivation, and ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE GUN I and II

"Bag of Suck" - The Untold Story behind the Enjoi Classic

I Fell in Love With Motorcycles. But Could I Ever Love Sturgis?

Interview with Andrew Martin, Author of Cool For America

Frank O´Hara reads "Having a coke with you"

The Creation - If I Stay Too Long (1967) (obviously)

Every interaction I’ve had lately has felt a little off. Shaky and frustrating like when you’re first trying to steady a screw before you drive it into a wall. You’re standing there thinking “I’ve done this countless times before. Why is it so difficult all of a sudden?” I’ve hung out with a few friends who seemed to have stayed tethered to a vague approximation of normalcy but mostly there has been a mass wave of regression. No one can handle this new world as an adult so they’ve self-imposed the disease from the movie Jack. They’re all small, scared children in hulking, hairy bodies. 

All of sudden, every adult you know is buying the brightest and ugliest clothes you’ve ever seen and wearing it all at the same time. They’ve taken a first day of school approach to getting dressed. Each new piece must be worn together so they can tell the story of buying them. The story is always the same. You say “nice shirt” and then you’re trapped in a corner learning about how they bought their entire outfit online but they haven’t left the house in awhile because of you know why hahahah so they want to wear everything but couldn’t decide which one so they said fuck it and wore them all but yeah other than that life has been pretty boring but how are you oh my god wait this person I matched with on Hinge just showed up should I talk to them hahaha its suuuuuuuper weird ok anyway how are you do you want another drink or something?

People in their 30s are getting High School Party drunk on weeknights. I figured I had aged out of the Watching A Drunk Woman Frantically Yell About How She Lost Her Cell Phone portion of my life but I have been dragged back against my will like I’m trying to escape from Freddy Kreuger but I’m just not quick enough. Seeing someone pull apart a couch while everyone else in the room slowly moves away from it shoots my heart rate up like I’m being physically attacked. 

The internal life is dead. We are a society that has decided to live externally. There is no more inner monologue. After being stuck inside without real social interactions, the dam has broken. It’s all going to Instagram Stories now. Every drink. Every breakup. Every visit to the fitting room. Every sunset. I have watched entire vacations happen while never leaving my couch in Queens. The Close Friends list has become a minefield of throwaway posts, shit talking and severe mental health breaks. I have had to stop myself from replying “It seems like you need a stronger support system.” to multiple people. I have used my Close Friends list exactly one time and it was to ask where I could find sliding scale therapy in New York City so no one is immune to its soul-bearing siren song. 

Everyone’s talking about nature. They were just at the beach. We should go to the beach. You wouldn’t believe how clear the Mediterranean is this time of year oh my god you’ve never been you HAVE to go I swear you’ll love it I’ll email you a list of where you should go. They want to go to the woods for a while to decompress. They just got back from an Airbnb upstate and wow what a beautiful view they had it’s just so tranquil and different from the city you’ve just got to go. All of a sudden, people who won’t go above 14th Street unless they’re getting laid or fucked up think they’re Ponce de León and have discovered the Catskills. No one before them has realized the beauty of nature and its healing properties. They’re leaving their marketing job to build a treehouse outside of Phoenicia and mine Ethereum. 

People can’t help but note that it’s hot out. Humid too. The summer in New York is always bad, they tell you, but this one seems worse. Muggier. Heavier. Lots of people at the parks too. Don’t all these people have jobs? Why are they here in the middle of the day while I am also here in the middle of the day? Did everyone in the city call out sick today because they didn’t feel like going to work again? I wish the park had AC. It would make spending time there a much more enjoyable experience. 

There’s an odd tension in the air everywhere you go. Everyone seems ready to fight, or yell (which is what most people think is fighting). I’ve walked around with my fists clenched for roughly the last decade, so this isn’t a new feeling for me. My mania around this grew to a fever pitch last summer when I logged onto Wish.com and purchased myself a collapsible baton. There were reports of a man attacking women in and around the Morgan L stop. I figured if he was insane enough to punch random women in the face, he’d have no problem fighting me and if I saw him in the act, I’d have to do something. 

My first thought was to purchase a weapon from a website that also sells t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase CUM IN ME BRO!, $2 headphones and jewelry that somehow turns your skin green before you put it on. I ordered a collapsible baton because, in my head, I was the vigilante hero who was going to save the day. I’d get off at the Morgan stop (a stop I do not live at and had no need to be at while the entire city was closed) and when I’d see this man about to pounce, I’d retrieve my baton from my trusty canvas tote bag and clock him once over the head with it. My singular hit would make him realize what he was doing was wrong and he had to turn his life around. 

Once the baton arrived in the mail, my entire mindset changed. This wasn’t some simple thing used for self-defense. I ordered a straight up murder weapon and planned to use it on a stranger. The weight of it in my hand immediately sent a message to my brain that said “You're not ready to kill”. It is now merely a prop for Instagram photos that I keep tucked secretly next to my bed.

The world reopening feels a lot like the baton to me. Everyone really wanted it. They couldn’t stop thinking about it. It would be the thing that finally made them feel whole. But once they held it in their hands, they immediately freaked out and knew they weren’t able to handle it.

SOME STUFF I’VE LIKED RECENTLY

I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994)

BIG PASSION: HARDCORE WITH DANE BARKER

Militarie Gun Secret Show- July 23rd, 2021

My Afternoon With Papa Roach An excerpt from Tom Scharpling’s memoir, It Never Ends.

OUT OF STATE

SMIRK NIGHT LIVE

This Man Does Not Make Poppers

Mastermind Behind "Layla" - Tom Dowd

That video of the orangutan with sunglasses

In my head, I’m the type of guy who’s a regular at a bunch of local cafes where all of the employees know who he is and are glad to see him. I walk in and am greeted warmly because I’m nice and my money is helping keep a local business afloat. In reality, I don’t do much small talk with employees out of fear of being the person who thinks they’re friends with everyone. I’d love to frequent places that have delicious fresh vegetables that excite me on the menu. Places like that don't sell Coke Zero so I am stuck having a rolodex of which delis within a 10 block radius of my apartment stock my favorite liquid poison. There’s an independent, but equally important, ranking system based on how often it looks like they mop their floor and if it’s sold in cans or bottles. This is precious space inside of my brain that could be used for storing woodworking skills or the names of people I’ve met a few times but can only remember their face.

At one point, I was a regular at the Hana Natural in Bushwick. I lived one block west of the deli and worked four blocks east. If I only went in once a day, I was lucky. Eventually the guys behind the deli counter knew my order since it was the same exact sandwich every single day. We had a formalized familiarity. Any slight deviation would send our entire interaction into a free fall. If I wanted anything other than the usual, I’d have to scurry over to the counter and explain it before they could start making my ol’ reliable. 

Hana is one of those places where all of the sandwiches have goofy names like the My Girlfriend Is A Whore or the Jim Carrey. Your spirit is broken a little bit every time you have to say the name of what you want out loud. They had a habit of addressing me as the name of my sandwich whenever I walked in. Entering a deli and having multiple men yell “Shrek!!” at you is never a boost for your self esteem. On one hand, even if they aren’t physically comparing you to a giant green cartoon ogre, it sure feels like it. On the other hand, it’s nice to be noticed.

There’s a Subway sandwich shop pretty close to my apartment. Actually, there’s quite a few close to me. It blows my mind that they can all stay open in such close proximity to one another. I don’t understand why you’d ever go there if you live in New York City. New York is the land of the deli sandwich. The streets are basically flooded with Boars Head products and you’re going to Subway. The ad on the window right now is promoting a footlong turkey sandwich meal that comes with a Gatorade. The culinary version of a suicide note. A meal that says “I can’t go on like this any longer.” 

Going to the same places over and over again is very easy. You know what you’ll get and don’t have to stress about any new thing happening to you at all. It’s the same reason why people don’t leave the town they grow up in. It’s why some men pick an age where they felt cool and never develop a new wardrobe from there. The cargo shorts and comic book t-shirt of the soul. Never progressing for the sake of comfort. 

A refrain of “Why would you ever go to the city? We have everything you need right here.” rang out across the shop I was working in. I was 23 and living in my mom’s house which also happened to be my grandparents’s house. My coworker, a 19 year old semi-professional powerlifter, was befuddled that I would leave Long Island and go into Manhattan for any reason whatsoever. A 40 minute train ride from where we worked was a city full of museums, galleries, independent movie theaters, restaurants from every country in the world, stores selling books and clothes for more money than you could ever imagine. He had no idea why anyone would want to be exposed to that. 

His stance was not uncommon. Most people who live on Long Island still think that New York City looks like Taxi Driver. City life is thought of at best as an annoyance but more often than not as some affront to however they choose to live. They go to Applebee’s and the bar closest to where they live and the marina where their cousin who owns a sheetrocking business keeps their boat. Maybe they go on a guided tour of Greece between high school and college because you can drink at 18 there. That’s what they desire. When they get into their leased cars, a notification on their phones pops up to ask if they’d like to drive to the same Starbucks they go to every day. Why they would need directions to get there is beyond me. Little do these people know that Times Square is now basically an overblown strip mall not much different than the one a few blocks from them.

Most things are made for comfort now. People spent an entire year talking about only wearing sweatpants, which is a cowardly decision. Pants are supposed to look cool, not be comfortable. Fast food is the same as reality tv which is the same as pop music which is the same as Instagram accounts showing you screencaps from tv shows you've already seen. Panacea for the drudgery of everyday life. Something to consume without thinking. 

Something being easily consumable doesn’t make it automatically bad. Some of the greatest things ever created can be purchased at almost any store. A grey crewneck sweatshirt, an ice-cold can of Coca-Cola, a pair of Levi’s jeans, a hot dog, a copy of Purple Rain, an iPhone. None of these things are hard to find but they are exceptions. Most mass produced items are not meant to be the standard-bearer. Most things are the Pet Rock, a disposable fad that I’m only aware of from people talking about how stupid it was.

I have to fight the urge to fall into complacency. I actively have to try to not be the “Why would you ever do that?” guy. Every day is a fight against the part of my brain that has been programmed to desire moving back to Long Island, shaving my beard into a goatee and becoming the second funniest landscaper at the company I’m working at. Nights spent forcing myself to watch a foreign movie I will pretend to have known about before last week instead of sitting down on the couch and putting on YouTube videos of what bodybuilders eat in a day (a beautiful art form in its own right). In my eyes, it’s better to be seen as pretentious than unexceptional. 

The great American photographer William Eggleston said “I am at war with the obvious.” I’ve taken that quote and focused the war internally. You’re better than the Paneras and H&Ms of the world. You just have to believe it to be true. 

LAST 10 WITH JULIA CLAIRE

Julia Claire is a good friend of mine and very funny/unfortunately quite intelligent comedian and podcaster. You can follow her here and listen to her podcast Reply Guys. I asked her a few dumb questions a while ago and here they are now.

Here’s a playlist I made a few weeks ago to listen to with your windows open and a stick of incense burning.

SOME STUFF I’VE LIKED RECENTLY

John Swartzwelder, Sage of “The Simpsons”

Two videos of Eminem at Taco Bell

Why Can’t We Hold Each Other?

The Stone Roses Waterfall Live The Other Side Of Midnight

Broadcast News (1987)

SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 13

I found out my grandmother died while I was in line at the post office. The lighting inside of the Grand Central branch is piss yellow and dreary. I wasn’t shocked when my mother called me. It was inevitable. I had spent the last few weekends traveling back and forth between Long Island and the city to visit my grandmother while she was receiving hospice care. Usually my rides on the Long Island Railroad were to see my family under the guise of someone’s birthday or a holiday but these trips were much heavier.  

It wasn’t surprising but I was flustered. I hadn’t finished sending out some certified letters for my job that I hate and I was still standing in the window. My god damn AirPods wouldn’t connect to my phone and I almost launched them both across the room like a shot put. I normally dislike being on my phone in a customer service situation but everyone feels that their life is more important than social etiquette sometimes. You’re never one to cause a scene until the time that you do. 

Still in the middle of my work day, I walked uptown from my office on my lunch break and took a seat in a nice marble plaza. Slowly, I noticed people with cameras and cell phones in their hands crowding around me. I figured everyone had heard that I was sad and wanted to document it to mock me in the future. Quickly, I realized I had sat underneath a brand new 30 foot tall KAWS statue and people were taking pictures of it. Another day of my life ruined by streetwear culture.  

On an usually hot October Friday night, I was darting around Manhattan trying to navigate which stores were even open in compliance with New York State’s reopening phases. Sweating through my jacket, I elbowed through a Uniqlo for the first time in 7 months as naturally as a swan entering a lake. I didn’t want to buy a suit. I didn’t want to go to a funeral. I didn’t want to deal with grief. I just wanted to go home after work. 

Death never comes at a convenient time. It’s quite rude in that way. In its defense, there’s never a great time to mourn. Very rarely am I thinking “This is the perfect time for someone I love to die.” while sitting in my bedroom. 

My phone lit up on an April afternoon. I had been laid off from my job a few days prior. Coronavirus was ravaging the world, especially New York. Living a few blocks away from a hospital in Brooklyn, the sounds of sirens were so frequent that they became white noise. The refrigerated trucks used to hold the bodies of people that had to wait to be brought to funeral homes were about to enter the hospital parking lot. 

My niece texted me “Did you hear about Pop?”. I hadn’t. My grandfather had been living in a nursing home for a few years at this point. Him being 6’4” and bearing the wide frame he passed on to the rest of the family became too much for my family to carry up and down the stairs multiple times a day. Every day I am frustrated I was granted the familial width and not much of the height. 

Only 10 people were allowed at his funeral in accordance with New York State Covid protocol. Travel on public transit wasn’t quite illegal, but strongly advised against. I couldn’t make the trip from the city but even if I could, I wouldn’t be allowed at the service. The possibility of a live-streamed funeral seemed odd. What does one wear to such an event? Do you put on a suit to sit in front of your laptop? Do you turn the camera off? Do you keep it on so people can see you crying? Luckily, the idea for a Zoom feed was quickly abandoned. 

A great deal of emotions get projected onto the dead and dying. Why they’re “holding on”, or if it’s even a conscious effort. Their unsaid desires for the family once they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. I can’t imagine how someone nearing the end of their life feels. I can barely understand how I feel and it looks like I’ll be alive for quite a bit longer. 

When someone dies, all of a sudden everyone knows what to do. The delegation of tasks becomes an unspoken agreement. People who can’t agree on how to prepare a french fry all of sudden understand their respective roles.

My mother is the oldest of 6 siblings. As soon as my grandmother’s health started rapidly deteriorating, she immediately clicked into her role as leader. This self-appointed stance earned her the nickname of The General. Letting everyone know exactly what they should be doing and, at some points, announcing how they should be feeling. Everyone in the house seemed to have an opinion on how everyone else should be processing their emotions. Some were deemed as having too much fun while others extreme politeness was seen as annoying.  

We all took shifts sitting in the bedroom with her. The once vibrant woman was now weak after deciding to stop doing her chemotherapy. She had beaten cancer before but, as cancer is wont to do, it returned. Each person in the house had their preferred style of communicating with her. Some would burst into the room and loudly ask her if she needed anything, even though she was dying and not deaf. Some couldn’t bear to look directly at her. Some used their nursing skills to help her be as comfortable as possible. I sat in silence and held her hand while we watched The Women on Turner Classic Movies because that’s all I could think to do. 

Her wake was held in the same funeral home every single person in my family has had their services. The same funeral home where a priest looked off to the side and quietly said “sad death...” in the middle of his eulogy about my cousin. In between services, we ate in a bland and soulless room down a hallway I had never noticed before. None of the dark wooden tones or comforting floral prints of the reception areas were present. Everything in there was that dusty cream-tan-grey of corporate office buildings and modern catholic churches. A color so devoid of life it should have had its own wake. During our meal, my mother leaned over to me and said “oh, by the way, you’ll be a pallbearer tomorrow” with the same sense of urgency you ask someone to grab you a glass of water while they’re up. In my head, helping to carry the casket signified my spot as an adult in the family hierarchy but mostly just meant I was the oldest and heaviest of the male grandchildren. 

I hadn’t been inside of a church in close to a decade and what struck me the most was a small altar off to the side with a beautiful white tablecloth and one single bottle of hand sanitizer placed upon it. I guess even the anointed need to protect themselves. After the funeral, we drove through the pouring rain towards the cemetery. Dark grey skies and rain during a burial of two of your family members? Felt a bit on the nose to me.

They were buried together in a plot originally owned by some version of a great-great-uncle that was passed down. Everyone couldn’t stop remarking how lucky we were to inherit a plot and not have to pay for one. A damning indictment on the funeral industry as a whole, wringing every red cent out of grieving and vulnerable people. A young man in a crisp uniform played Taps for my grandfather while tractor-trailers released their air brakes on the road behind him. We were handed a perfectly folded American flag to commemorate his service in two different branches of the armed forces.

My grandparents passed away exactly six months apart. A lot of people would believe that to be some cosmic occurrence, fueled by the divine, mysterious powers of love and the universe. I think it’s a coincidence. The truth might live somewhere in the middle. I feel the same way about ghosts. I don’t believe in them but I do hope I see one. 

I spent as much time at my grandparents’s house as possible when I was young. It was a labyrinth of levels for me to explore. The basement was half finished and it felt like a military bunker. Concrete walls and wooden shelving and little crawl spaces to get underneath the deck that reminded me of foxholes. Getting to my grandparents bedroom in the attic felt like climbing to the top of the Empire State Building. The staircase that lead upstairs was covered in a red paisley carpet to muffle the sounds of their children and their children’s children running up and down them. 

My grandfather loomed large, cursing at whatever project he dove into with more determination than skill. My grandmother flitted around the house like a cardinal, boiling me hot dogs and answering the phone that always seemed to be ringing with friends who wanted to chat with her. My uncles still lived there sometimes and I could raid their bedrooms for Metallica cds and The Far Side books. It was my personal vacation home. 

It’s where I spent every Christmas Eve eating cheeseburgers, fries and chocolate milkshakes. I was given the job of cooking the hamburgers for everyone even though I hadn’t eaten meat since I was 17. Standing in the freezing cold backyard with my cousin holding a flashlight over my shoulder so I could see the grill. It’s where I lived for a few months when my life fell apart in my early 20’s. I slept on a twin sized bed designed for a young girl, my grandmother would open my mail and my grandfather would be mad if dinner wasn’t on the table at exactly 6pm. 

The house is sold now. Too large and in need of repair for my mother and her husband to keep for themselves. The family converged on it in the fall to pillage anything of interest from the depths of the cellar and spruce up the place for the real estate inspection. Yanking out tree stumps and divvying up old photos. I climbed into the attic to figure out if I wanted to save anything that I had been storing there for close to a decade, which mostly consisted of a milk crate filled with dusty Garfield books and a box of cables for early-aughts Dell desktops. Junk not even worth selling but, for some reason,  I needed to hold onto just in case. 

Most of the items I ended up taking with me weren’t originally mine. My grandmother’s pearl necklace, my grandfather’s wedding ring, a porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary, a vase, a giant wooden crucifix, a glass tray from a dance she had gone to. My bedroom now contains enough Catholic ephemera and items my grandmother owned that I’m frightened to even whisper a curse word in there. One of the greatest personality shifts I’ve seen in my lifetime was my prim and proper grandmother, after getting sick, starting to put weed-infused honey in her tea and saying the word fuck. That’s when we all knew something was different. 

During The Great Purge, I rescued a huge stack of letters that my grandpa sent to my grandma while he was still enlisted in the Air Force from a garbage can because no one wanted to stumble upon any racy letters from their parents. All of the contents ended up being my grandfather teasing my grandmother for cribbing stationary from the church to write him letters, him saying he was going to use his newfound karate skills to attack her and professing that while he’s always loved her, he was now starting to like her. I guess flirtation styles are passed down hereditarily because they felt a bit too similar to my courtship strategy. 

This past weekend I dropped a bottle of cologne on the glass tray, shattering it. I wanted to beat myself up for it. She held onto this for 60 years and I couldn’t keep it together for 6 months. Inside that tray was all of the phone calls I should’ve made and trips home I should’ve taken and times I shouldn’t have been annoyed with my family. In the long run, it doesn’t matter much. I have all the items and memories I need for a lifetime of remembering. I just wish I wasn’t so clumsy sometimes.

SOME STUFF I’VE LIKED RECENTLY

Bigger Black: 5 Easy Pieces w/Steve Albini

Twisted Thing - Sacred Cement

Sherman’s March (1986)

Stephen Tanner Spends a Lot of Time at His Local Checkers

STACY KRANITZ - Float

Chubby and The Gang Full Livestream Set | Blackstar

Searching for Shelley Duvall

JENKEM - Discussing Skateboarding with Filmmaker Werner Herzog

Mike Leigh's women

Straight Shooter

It’s January 1st and I feel like I should be a different person all of a sudden. A better, thinner, smarter and fitter version of me. Last year’s me was a piece of shit. This year’s me will be good. 

I don’t like what I see when I look in the mirror. I don’t think I know many people who do. Even the most ripped, taut and toned people I know get upset when they catch a reflection from the side in a storefront window. The dreaded side reflection. A thing that has crushed more egos than hearing a recording of your own voice when you aren’t prepared for it. 

Currently, I’m at a weight where if two people were discussing my body for some reason (a situation that is my personal hell) and one called me fat, they could get into an argument about if I am or not. I’m a man who could be described as: husky, chubby, large, thicc (the number of c’s you add depends on how attracted you are to me), big, etc.

My weight has been a dark cloud over my head for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories involve my thinner and more agile cousins effortlessly climbing over the fence in their backyard to go play in the schoolyard on the other side. A combination of fear and my 9 year old potbelly relegated me to walking around the block to meet them on the playground instead. 

The fat child is always a punchline, be it in media or reality. Jiggling their belly for the amusement of more slender children. Hiding in the corner to eat a candy bar, only to emerge with chocolate all over their face because they couldn’t dare eat it normally. At best, the pudgy kid on the Little League team hits a home run that no one expected him to so his team can win the big game. The shock of that event is heard around the world and a new tubby king is crowned. Hoisted upon the strained shoulders of his teammates. Finally, he is accepted.

I was at my thinnest as an adult when my rent was only $200 per month so I was free to be underemployed. I spent all of my time riding my bicycle around the beautiful city of Albany, New York while subsisting on a diet of only yellow rice, black beans and Stewart’s Shops lemon iced tea. Every once in a while, my dirtbag friends and I would weasel our way into the university dining hall even though none of us were enrolled there and absolutely pig out. Cereal with chocolate soy milk followed by a heaping plate pasta with marinara sauce obviously from a huge metal can followed by veggie burgers that were, for some reason deep fried, and french fries followed by a dessert bowl of cereal, which is much different than the appetizer bowl of cereal because you eat it at the end of the meal instead of the beginning. My early 20’s metabolism could handle it all effortlessly.

My perception of myself is warped. Sometimes I will see pictures of myself from the past (it’s hard to see a picture of yourself from the future) and remember feeling at the time like I was a large gelatinous blob that shoved itself into some black jeans and a seasonally inappropriate jacket, only to realize I was actually quite svelte. My brain works in such a way that no matter what size my body is, which achievement I accomplish or milestone I hit I am not allowed to be satisfied. To crib a phrase from the only band that has ever mattered (Hatebreed): satisfaction is the death of desire. To be content is cowardly. You should always be striving for more. 

As a man who is not “in shape”, how should I even be feeling about my body? Do I embrace body positivity? I don’t think the body positivity movement is bad by any means, but I know it’s not for me. Personally, I’ve never been positive about anything in my entire life. Why would I start with the thing that has brought me the most shame over the course of my life? 

I’m not so deluded to think that people aren’t attracted to men of a larger carriage. As unbelievable as it may be, I have had sex before. There’s enough Tony Soprano related Instagram accounts with heart eye emojis in the comments to show proof of an undeniable Big Man Magnetism. I have a mental catalog of which version of Chris Pratt the women in my life find attractive. My current partner said Parks And Recreations season 1 Pratt is her ideal, which comes at no surprise. I’ve spent time standing just outside of a circle of people who were discussing how bad he looked before he got Marvel Movie Fit, hoping they wouldn’t realize that his before body was better than my current body. The bear community celebrates round and hairy men and I am deeply indebted to them for the occasional boost in self confidence.

A common American sitcom trope is the big, doughy husband with the hot, adoring wife. In the past few years, I’ve seen some women voicing dissatisfaction with this. It’s an unrealistic scenario to them even though roughly two-thirds of Americans are considered overweight or obsese. If you’re going to date a man in the good ole USA, you’ll probably be seeing a man with a sturdier frame.

I assume, to them, overweight men are not allowed to be with a partner who are more fit than they are. I’ve had multiple women bluntly ask me how it’s possible for me to sleep with and date people that they deem very attractive. It’s a very nice way to say “I find the idea of sex with you disgusting and I’m curious about what exactly is wrong with the women who may enjoy it.”

There was one woman who did not find the idea of that disgusting but she did remark in the morning that I was “the fattest guy” she's “ever had sex with”, which was so mean that I almost took it as a compliment. It seemed like that was her way of asking me to leave but I decided to lay in her bed and read some of her magazines so she had some time to really let her decision sink in. 

When you’re ashamed of your body, you’re able to convince yourself of things that aren’t true. I’m not entirely sure if I hate the beach or if I’ve programmed myself to think that I do because that’s a place where you take your shirt off. The water and the sun and the ability to play a little frisbee without the social pressures of it having to be “ultimate”? It should be heavenly to spend time there. But that dreaded stroll from your towel into the water with nothing protecting your torso? That’s the real walk of shame. 

Being categorized as overweight or obese is usually tied to a person’s Body Mass Index, which has mostly been debunked as a way to judge a person’s health. I mostly measure health by how much my gut is trying to fold over the front of my pants while I’m wearing them. I’ve tried so many different weight loss and exercise methods. Cycling, running, smoothies and salads, saving a whole playlist of YouTube prison workout videos, resistance bands, weightlifting, kettlebells, intermittent fasting, my ill fated dip into the world of jump roping. Nothing has stuck. The only thing that I’ve ever related to is watching videos of how much 4-time World’s Strongest Man Brian Shaw eats in one day but I don’t really connect with the part where he starts working out. 

I was once a part of a Facebook messenger group of men who were all doing Weight Watchers. It was nice to have an app to lie to about what I had eaten that day in addition to the people I’ve been lying to my entire life about my diet. Filling a spreadsheet with half truths like “General Tso’s tofu (looked at it, didn’t eat it)” even though I was the only one who could see what I was inputting. Every day I’d get a little ping in my pocket and read a message from a friend that said “Just had a huge salad for lunch! Only 4 points and really filling!” while I wondered what happened in my life that led me up to that point. A healthy diet feels like absolute shit compared to laying on the couch with a big bowl of chips and a nice frosty soda. 

Knowing what I should be eating has never been the problem. Unfortunately, I’ve become quite adept at jumping through mental hoops to convince myself that whatever I’m eating is actually good for me. I’ll eat two or three bagels in a day and then lovingly remind myself that marathon runners will carb load the day before a race. It just so happens that I never get around to that pesky running 26 miles part. The whole sign up process seems asinine to me. I have to fill out paperwork so I can go for a run? You sound like a cop. 

Sometimes one of my very lovely friends will kindly offer their assistance or invite me to work out with them, which I take as a personal attack. To me, they’re not trying to help a person they care about who often laments on their lack of physical fitness and overall dissatisfaction with their appearance. They’re saying I’m a fat piece of shit who should be pitied. 

It’s not that I am unable to exercise. When I do it, I feel good and I do lose weight. It’s the consistency I have a problem with. I will work out hard for 2 months, lose 20 pounds and then go “Look at me. I lost 20 pounds. I’m basically a professional athlete now. I could play any sport with 6 to 8 weeks of training. Seems like I’m all done here.” while wiping the dust from my hands and throwing my Blink Fitness pass into the garbage can. 

My roommate and I are best friends. Pretty convenient how that worked out. He also happens to be a personal trainer and MMA instructor. He’s shredded. We have a real Timon and Pumba dynamic. His goal the entire quarantine has been to gain weight, a thing I can’t even begin to fathom. Why would you want to be heavier? To me, that means you’re worse. Living with him is great but having your bedroom door 8 feet away from someone who is very in shape while you hate your body doesn’t always help your mental stability. Sometimes I feel like he’s having abs AT me. Both of my roommates have spent the last 9 months in quarantine on separate but concurrent fitness journeys. My bedroom is directly in the middle of the apartment and I have often heard two men grunting through workouts in stereo, whci

My rational brain knows no one is physically fit just to make me feel bad, but it does feel like it sometimes. Just once I’d like to see a guy with a big honking gut modeling a shirt that isn’t sold at Casual Male XL. Finding clothes as a man who isn’t Big & Tall but isn’t sample size is a unique journey. You aren’t yet relegated to the world of Hawaiian shirts and golf polos but you can’t always take the risks you want. Do I want to try the shag haircuts and flared jeans I see downtown artsy twinks wearing? Of course. But with my build, I’d look a lot less Mick Jagger and a lot more Grateful Dead roadie who drowned in the San Francisco Bay. 

Bags of clothes that I have dubbed as “Almost Clothes” fill the small amount of storage space in my apartment. A body that’s always in flux requires variables. Shirts for when you drop 10 or 15 pounds. Sweaters that help conceal your winter bloat. Pants that range from wide legged to skinny fit depending on how much of my body I would want accurately described to a police sketch artist for some reason.

The only goal I’ve stuck with for longer than a few weeks is to never become “buttcrack fat”, which is a term I invented. Buttcrack fat is when your pants can no longer handle the g-force your stomach and love handles are putting on them and they slide down to permanently expose the top of your buttcrack. I have circumvented this by proactively becoming a Tucked-In Shirt Guy. There’s a threefold reason because 1) it eliminates any and all buttcrack visibility 2) I saw cool teenage skateboarders doing it and I’m still trying to be one of them in my 30s and 3) it makes me feel strong, powerful and sexual. If I’m in control of the visibility of my gut, no one else can be the first to point it out. It’s the mature version of being the big goofy party guy who pulls his shirt off after half a can of Bud Light.

Right about now is the point where I should say that I’ve learned to love my body and accepted myself for who I am but it’s just not true. Shame directly tied to body image issues is something I’ll probably deal with for the rest of my life. Therapy and incremental positive changes will help, of course, but I don’t know many people who can soothe the beast. You can lose the weight or achieve the body you’d like, but most people are then fixated on maintaining it. You’re quite literally running from your past.

A thing I’ve done recently to deal with anxieties of all sorts is cribbed the Serenity Prayer that is used in Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ve never had a problem with alcohol and haven’t believed in any high power since I was a preteen but the message of the prayer sticks with me. 

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The thing I cannot change is the fact that I have anxiety, especially around my body and appearance. The thing I can change is my relationship to my body and the body itself. I can exercise. I can lose weight. I can eventually accept that this is what I look like naturally. I cannot change that at the end of the day, the person inside of my body is me. The wisdom is knowing the difference. New year, same me.

SOME STUFF I’VE LIKED RECENTLY

THIS MEME LITERALLY WON’T GET MEN INTO THERAPY

Martin Parr on The Late Show (22/11/89)

The Patch

Militarie Gun - Life In Decline , A New Low For Progressive Society (MIXED BY THE MAC SESSIONS)

Pretend It’s A City (2021)

Chris Verene - Fine Art Photographer

FUCK A FAN

Kris Kristofferson: The Last Outlaw Poet

To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

Hey hello. What a fine year this was, huh? Nothing of note really happened. Can’t think of a thing that effected the entire planet. Just a typical year where we all did well, both mentally and financially. Anyway, here’s a list of things that made me happy this year in no particular order. I hope you like some of them too. I’m not getting paid for any of this so like it or don’t. I suggest paying for it all but if you want to steal it, that’s cool too. Ok, see you next year with your regularly scheduled drivel.

-Mike Abrusci

Editor’s Note: Please Kill Me

How To With John Wilson

I’ve never watched something and immediately thought “this is exactly what I’ve always wanted to make, I just couldn’t articulate it.” before seeing this show. I was a fan of his Vimeo shorts and couldn’t wait for this show to come out. It’s beyond anything else he’s done before. It’s been tightened up and he’s really found his voice. A beautiful portrait of a place I love dearly. 

A few days after I finished watching the series, I witnessed a woman try to steal a bird off of the street and thought “wow just like in How To With John Wilson”.

Pocket app

Shout out to the hot woman who I saw post about this earlier this year. If a hot woman posts about something, I usually check it out. They’re wonderful PR people. A free app that lets you keep all of the articles you’d like to read downloaded in one place instead of having one million tabs open. Works best on your phone (can read downloaded articles underground on the train) but I used the site on desktop too. Makes me feel like an elite Silicon Valley businessman who cares about efficiency and life hacks. 

Chubby & The Gang - Chubby & The Gang Rule, OK?

Pub rock and oi-adjacent hardcore from heavy hitters in the NWOBHC scene. Music to fight your best friend to. Put on your boots and your favorite soccer scarf before you skull someone with a pint glass. Chubby & The Gang certainly do rule. 

Eddie Pepitone- For The Masses

The best stand up special of the year, by far. Eddie’s jokes hit something inside of me like no one else’s. The joke about trying to write his wife a poem made me scream. This is truly the only special that makes sense in a post-corona world. Eddie’s been screaming about corporations taking over and the world ending for decades. Finally, everyone else is catching up to him. 

Mutations by Sam McPheeters

Besides from being the frontman of legendary hardcore punk band Born Against, Sam McPheeters has been one of my favorite writers since I read his 2008 Vice magazine profile on 26 (formerly Doc Dart of the Crucifucks). I managed to track down a copy of that magazine a few months ago after looking for it for years. McPheeters has long avoided writing directly about hardcore or punk for a very long time but this year in Mutations, he went all in. His writing style is blunt, funny and a bit abrasive, sometimes even outright mean-spirited. He has a perspective only a person who has been deeply entrenched in, and subsequently let down by, a subculture can have. Some of the essays have been repurposed from other publications (including the aforementioned Vice profile) but the real gold mine in the book are the footnotes. Context and explanations for the uninitiated and inside jokes and jabs for the more informed. I loved it. 

Lovers Rock

A striking film set entirely at one London house party in the 80s as a part of Steve McQueen’s series revolving around West Indian immigrants in England. Beautiful music. Beautiful people. Beautiful shots. Franklyn calling Patti “Beef Patti” every time someone says her name still makes me laugh now. This felt at home with Mike Leigh’s British slice of life films that I enjoyed so much.

Militarie Gun - My Life Is Over

Started as a side project during quarantine, this EP hit me like a ton of bricks. The demo that came out before it was half of the songs on this record and I listened to it on repeat on one particularly long and dreary walk during the height of the lockdown. It has been described as melodic hardcore but don’t let that categorization steer you away. There’s not much by way of corny heartfelt spoken word passages. It feels closer to something that would have come out on Dischord in the late 80’s/early 90’s if they also listened to a lot of the Jesus Lizard and Cro-Mags. A New Low For Progessive Society is my song of the year. 

The films of Mike Leigh & Kelly Reichardt

Being inside so much this year has let me watch some movies I might not have seen without the urging of some friends. Basically, I’m a Movie Guy now. Love talking about my Letterboxd and saying the word “Criterion Collection” out loud. Sitting with my legs crossed while wearing a sweater. Both Leigh and Reichardt’s movies, while not totally similar, are mostly quiet, semi improvised contemplations on people in a specific place and time period. Small portraits of life that start before and end after the movie is over. They’re not the totality of the characters, just a little slice of life. 

Being unemployed

I know it’s been rough for a lot of people and I’m very lucky this year. I was technically “furloughed” from my job for 6 months and luckily qualified for government assistance. I loved not having any responsibilities. Felt freeing in an almost crushing way. All the time in the world with nowhere to go and nothing open. I became intimately knowledgeable of the backstreets of Ridgewood and the surrounding neighborhoods. If I had to choose between working and not working, why would I choose working?

Hoka One One recovery slides

My feet are fucked from years of dogwalking in inadequate sneakers. I have been self-diagnosed (by a very sexy doctor) with plantar fasciitis but these slides really help with it. I became a house shoe guy in quarantine and these took it to the next level. The footbed is exactly the same as their running shoes. Just like everything else they make, they’re crazy supportive and also kind of ugly. A perfect combo. 

Getting a reading chair

Longtime subscribers know about The Chair. We love The Chair. It’s comfortable but not too comfortable. It’s bright orange. I like to read in it but mostly look at my phone while I’m sitting there. I couldn’t recommend getting a chair enough. 

Thrasher’s Out There series

Combining all of my favorite things: short documentaries, seeing the inside of people’s homes and watching skateboarders try to speak intelligently because there’s a camera in front of them. 

Natural Man Band - Living In A Chemical World 

This was a 2019 release but I found it this year. Saxophone punk for people who wear alien eyeball sunglasses. Makes me wanna go to the beach after robbing a bank. More saxophones in bands that aren’t ska bands, please. I’m begging you. Stop retconning your awkward teenage years attending Warped Tour in a hot parking lot into some sort of “ska revival”. Let it stay dead along with Airwalk shoes and Orbitz drinks.

Trying to play golf

I needed to find something physical to 1) get me out of the house sometimes and 2) keep me social. My grandmother gave me her full set of golf clubs earlier this year (which absolutely do not fit me) and now, almost weekly, my buddy Nick and I drive out to Douglaston, Queens and smack some balls at the driving range. We are so horrible that the old Korean men who seem to only walk back and forth outside of the stalls but never play will exclaim “Oh!!!” and laugh at us while we swing but it’s still fun. 

D.L.I.M.C cassingles (and ripping mp3s again)

I’ve gotten stuck in the rut of only streaming music for the past few years. I recently found a collection of the cassingles of D. Leopardo Industrial Music Co. (aka D.L.I.M.C., a project from Mark Winter of CCTV, Coneheads, Big Zit, Liquids & more) on YouTube. They’re not available anywhere to download so I did the only thing me 5 years ago would’ve done: ripped the audio from youtube and used a free editing software to cut it into individual tracks to put onto my phone. Ripping stuff that’s not available anywhere else is my new passion. For some reason Teenage Cool Kids’s Queer Salutations isn’t available anywhere so I made it available to me. (Sidenote: if you have that Queer Salutations LP, I will buy it from you.)

Nomadland

A beautiful film about the disappearance of American manufacturing and the middle class. Frances McDormand grounds every scene she’s in. Nomad culture is never looked down upon in this, only shown for what it is. Special shoutout to the group of oogles that show up a few times throughout. My only tiny gripe is working at an Amazon warehouse being shown in a positive light, but individual heartwarming stories can happen in any hellhole. 

Actually listening to Guided By Voices

Guided By Voices’s extensive back catalog always seemed overwhelming to me. To listen to it all, and appreciate, would be an insurmountable task. A buddy of mine made an intro to Guided By Voices playlist years ago that I finally checked out and was immediately hooked. I’m not sure what I thought they sounded like or why I didn’t give them a chance. I think I always conflated them with They Might Be Giants whose nerd adjacent college rock I find absolutely grating. GBV ended up being my second or third most listened to artist this year. Wish I would’ve given them a chance earlier.

Subscribing to magazines

Not to sound like an old man, but god damn do I love the feeling of holding a magazine. I love opening the mailbox and seeing a little present in there for me. There’s even more magazines that I don’t subscribe to but still end up at one of the many beautiful magazine shops in lower Manhattan to grab occasionally. They’re fun to read, they look good in your home and they make prospective sexual partners think you are an educated and cultured person. What else could you need from something?

Whitmer Thomas - The Golden One

A very fun and inventive twist on the normal stand up special. Jokes, songs, documentary footage beyond the usual slog of “this is a picture of me as a kid holding a microphone so I was destined to be a comedian” kind of thing. The intro felt like the beginning of an old Alien Workshop video. The songs stand on their own, outside of the special. I played the accompanying album a lot this year. 

Muting friends on social media

This will change your life. You love your friends. They’re great people. Or maybe they aren’t and you love them in spite of, or because of, that. Either way, Being Online has a way of making someone you love into someone you hate. Pop them into time out for a little bit. They won’t know and you’ll still answer their texts without rolling your eyes. 

The Gradient

A new-ish vegan restaurant in Bushwick. The chicken sandwich whips ass. The french fries are good. The wings are above average. The mac and cheese is whatever. Tastes like Daiya boxed mac and cheese with some pepper. The tres leches cake is by far the best vegan cake I’ve ever had. It’s probably in the top 5 desserts I’ve ever had, period. Go out of your way to get it. The chicken sandwich is worth the trip too. 

Spike Art magazine columns

I loved reading both Dean Kissick and Kaitlin Phillip’s columns on Spike this year. Musings on the downtown art scene and culture at large, I’m often sending screenshots of their writing to people before I’m even done with the article. I’ve suggested stuff from both of them at the end of my newsletters before and Dean’s 2020 wrap up will be linked at the end of this. 

Finally buying a warm winter coat

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get one. I worked outdoors for five New York winters and mostly I was cold and wet the entire time? This winter I took the plunge and grabbed a North Face puffer that some guy had sitting in his closet on eBay. Long gone are my high school days where I would just wear two hoodies at the same time and hope the bus came quickly. Long live warmth and long live clothes that do their job. 

Ted Lasso

Who would’ve thought an Apple TV+ show that originated from a commercial could actually be great? I watched Ted Lasso on a whim, after figuring out that my niece adding me to her Apple Music account means I had Apple TV+ for free. I like Jason Sudeikis enough. I thought he was great on SNL and everything else after has been a bit lackluster but he really knocked it out of the park in Ted Lasso. The entire time I watched the show, I expected it to take a dark and cynical turn. Trading in interesting dialogue for layers of boring Friends-style sarcasm. It never happened. The show is just nice, funny and pleasant the entire time. Usually, something like this would feel a bit saccharine but I truly enjoyed every episode. Hopefully your niece also signed you up for Apple streaming services because other than this and Boys State, their selection is pretty much dog shit.

Millenarian Spectacle zine

Very rarely will the release of a hardcore record have more than accompanying soft goods to go with it. Hats, t-shirts, hoodies, maybe sweatpants or even a silk screened poster if they’re going wild. Every once in a while, the bands will throw a hastily put together zine in the dust sleeve. But not Mil-Spec with their Millenarian Spectacle zine. Closer in feel to a glossy art magazine, this goes above and beyond any zine I’ve seen a band put out. It includes fully annotated lyric sheets for the album, an exhaustive spread of every piece of merchandise they’ve made, album reviews from friends and even movie reviews from SNAKE (whose newsletter you should be subscribed too). This was put out (along with Lockin’ Out Records) by Shining Life Press who deal in the exact ephemera I enjoy. I also highly suggest their zines of Toy Machine ads/interviews and their complete anthology of Chunks.  

Good records that I do not want to write about, in no particular order:

Erik Nervous & The Beta Blockers - s/t LP

Xylitol - I’m Pretty Sure I Would Know If Reality Were Fundamentally Different Than I Perceived It To Be

Dame - Dame

ALL HITS - Men And Their Work

C.H.E.W. - In Due Time

Liquids - 100% Shit

SMUT- First Kiss

Self Defense Family - Live From Krazy Fest 5/20/11, Jesus of Nazareth & Australia 7”

Youth Dispute - Demo 2020

Cold Meat - Hot and Flustered

Fried E.M. - Modern World

Mil-Spec - World House

Bib - Delux

Cry Out - More Echoes Of A Question Never Answered...Why?

Spy - Service Weapon

Powerplant - A Spine / Evidence

Gen Pop - PPM66

Drug Church - Bliss Out

A FEW LINKS FOR THE END OF THE YEAR

THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: 2020

Life of Agony '93 River Runs Red live @ Wetlands in NYC

Snake America 100

Rachel Rabbit White Finds Perspective in Cemetery Nudes and False Lashes

Stephen Shore: Taking photographs that "feel like seeing"

Jerry Hsu on the Apology podcast

Rate The Cookie (with Jo Firestone)

The Best of Trends: How ‘Tiger King’ and Cameo Combined to Define 2020

Farewell to China Chalet, the City’s Hottest Dim Sum Disco

JENKEM - Parts with Riley Hawk

A Filmmaker Bared His Soul. It Ruined His Life.

Make yr crib 73.3% more popping w/ rare Ellen Van Dusen wisdom

A quick and tiny update. I’ve switched over to using Substack so hopefully this works a bit smoother. I’ll be sending out my year end favorites list later this week. All of the older Please Enjoys have been moved over here too so you can still read them if you’d like. Ok cool well see you later this week probably.

-Mike

The internet has been a staple in my life for at least two-thirds of it. I remember the day my dad unboxed our first PC in the living room. He promptly placed it on a desk in the corner of the kitchen, underneath a decorative washboard hanging on the wall, and that’s where I spent most of my adolescence. The window directly next to this setup is responsible for a large chunk of the Vitamin D I got in my teens. 

American Online chat rooms were my first glimpse into talking with people I didn’t know in real life. Rooms with topics such as “punk” or “skateboarding” or “The Simpsons” lead me to message boards. There was one for the Long Island hardcore scene I started using quickly after attending my first show at 12 years old. It was mostly for posting details about upcoming shows, ragging on your friends and a great way for me to get the AIM names of various band members. I was truly a punisher to them at that point. Asking them pointless questions about equipment, songwriting and even “girls”. I shudder at the thought of any of those conversations being found today.

The server that board was hosted on also hosted a forum for the New Jersey post-hardcore band Thursday, a band I liked enough to buy a baseball tee of theirs from Hot Topic but not enough to listen to any album put out after 2002. There was a sub-board that was for the members to talk about anything non-Thursday related and that’s where I spent all of my time. I ended up meeting people on there who would let my band crash with them while we were on tour 9 years later and some I’m still in contact with to this day. 

That was a more innocent time period of the internet for me. Everything felt smaller. I later joined the message board for the Boston based hardcore record label Bridge 9, colloquially known as “the B9 board” and then later just “The B9”. A few thousand members strong, I also made friends there I still have today (and may have dated a person or two I met through their various “exchange your address/BBM pin/Myspace page” threads, to age myself) but this is where I feel it took a left turn. I’m not sure if it’s because, as with most things, the larger it gets the harder it is to control or if I just became more aware of what was going on. 

The B9 Board had a seedier feeling to it. There was revenge porn posted and real life beefs formed from posting on what should have been a forum to discuss a genre of music that 99% of the world has never even considered. This was the online tipping point for me, where it started to feel like it might be doing more bad than good.

This isn’t to say I do not love being on the internet. Some of the people closest to me would say I am hopelessly addicted to my phone. They’re not entirely wrong. In 2008, my girlfriend at the time dressed up as me for Halloween and duct taped a broken Blackberry to her left hand. I don’t think it’s gotten much better since then. 

It’s not a new or inventive thought that social media platforms make you feel like a rat in a Skinner box, alternating between levers that will provide you with a treat or with pain. Twitter and Instagram do more psychological damage than the rest, by far. I seem to have escaped the claws of Instagram’s body image issue factory by 1) being a straight man who is more concerned with being “cool” than physically fit and 2) hating my body since I can remember so there’s nothing anyone can have or say that I haven’t already thought about. The only one that can pierce through my armor is when a guy who was fatter than I am suddenly becomes skinnier than I am. My only comfort is convincing myself that his head is now too big for his body and he “looks weird”. 

Not everyone is unscathed by the Instagram algorithm. The waves of young women (and men) who get plastic surgery to achieve “Instagram face” is a shocking trend. You are presented with picture after picture of insanely good looking, in shape people without ever having the amount of work (both natural and with the help of doctors) explained to you. People are left shaping their features to appear as if they are permanently filtered and contoured. They end up looking like an unholy hybrid of a Jenner, a cartoon baby and some sort of woodland nymph. 

On Twitter, you are treated as a genius if you can figure out the formula of virality. “(Thing X) is like if (Thing Y) went to (Place That Is Being Discussed In The Zeitgeist).” “Do you remember (Experience 95% Of Humans In The Western World Experience)? It hit different.” and so on and so forth. Your funniest or most original thoughts are not usually the ones that go viral. Morons with no personality do not go crazy for nuance. If you can become popular with the same tired horse shit, you’ve effectively dumbed yourself down for the frothing masses. Zombies scratching at the door for more quips about the difference between men and women (or “boys” and “girls” if you want to really get the numbers up). 

Virality, and the attention received afterwards, seems to change a person’s entire relationship with the platform. The huge boost of serotonin when the numbers start to skyrocket, the overwhelming avalanche of replies from people who lack basic reading comprehension and the withdrawal that sets in once your notifications go back to the normal amount take your brain on an emotional roller coaster ride that only the sickest of amusement park tycoons could dream up. 

This gives some people the idea that they’re the main character of the day. Meta tweets about their own viral posts ensue over the following weeks. They’ve created their own narrative in their heads and will not budge from the stance that people are interested in the fact that they had a popular post. The Story Of Them feels more engaging than forming new or interesting thoughts. If no one else will write your folklore, you might as well write it yourself. 

The healthiest reaction to a viral tweet is to immediately mute it, leaving any and all replies or obfuscations of your original point (if there even was one) in the dust. Unfortunately, the one I see much more often is people immediately trying to chase the dragon. All of their posts become slightly reworded versions of the one that originally popped off. Eventually you become a human See-N-Say, pulling the string so you can spit out four to six topics over and over again.

Some people revel in the negative attention and have even built full careers off of it. Right wing grifters like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder have made full time jobs out of posting about the crumbling masculinity of American men and cancel culture. Each quote tweet “dunk” on them is usually dull and boring and only gets their posts seen by a wider audience, which seems to be their exact point. If you want to shit on how poorly written Shapiro’s newest book is on your podcast, you’ll probably have to buy a copy of it first. 

I recently watched the 1955 western movie Bad Day at Black Rock and somehow a line from it encapsulated internet culture down to a t. Ernest Borgnine’s character is trying to intimidate Spencer Tracy inside of a bar, calling him yellow bellied. Before the altercation becomes physical, Tracy remarks to Borgnine “You're not only wrong. You're wrong at the top of your voice.”, which is how most people seem to be online. 

Nothing is more painful than watching a 36 year old tweet about their “crushes” or which mall store made for teenagers and Kardashian clones they like to shop at. Self-infantilization has grown rabid because it casts the widest net. High schoolers will quote tweet you with the caption “omgggggg”. Meme accounts will crop out your handle to be shared on people from your hometown’s Instagram stories. 

Clout chasing has transformed a wide swath of people from being unique, funny and interesting artists into “content creators” doling out drivel to people they seem to actively resent. Once you start believing in whatever version of yourself that you put out there, it’s all over. It’s no longer a facade. You become one with the character. Your posts about how awful you are at dating, how you’re vapid and obsessed with appearance or how socially awkward you are become the reality you live in. A prison of your own making. Now all of a sudden you’re the “depression guy” or the “why am I STILL single???” tweeter. I love thinking of someone sitting in their room bedroom, in front of the computer trying to formulate a way to be even edgier and more offensive. Pacing back and forth and saying “ok, I’ve gone to the Hitler well too much. Maybe….abortion???” while ripping up index cards and throwing them into the air like confetti.

Even worse is the affectation of a more popular account’s tone. People who feel stuck in their current gimmick start looking at who’s doing well online and pivot to their voice. All of a sudden two dozen accounts are tweeting in the same way and taking the same style of selfies. You can no longer differentiate between accounts because it all melds together. Photocopies of a photocopy of a photocopy.

The posts start as small self-deprecations and jokes that begin to reach more and more people. Suddenly, you start to worry about your “brand”. The dreaded b-word. Something no one outside of creative consulting firms should be concerned with. Now the tone of your account with 2000 followers is set in stone. Compression molding your personality so you can hawk fast fashion and fit tea, the gaudy merchandise for political candidates or, in the most extreme cases, being paid to help rehabilitate the public image of Saudi Arabia. Taking perfectly lit selfies while sitting on a sand dune, urging people to visit without mentioning how their government bombed Yemen, killed and dismembered a journalist inside of the Suadi consulate in Turkey and crucified prisoners charged with terrorism during their executions. Anything to make a buck.

There’s a certain undergarment company that markets solely by sending products to people they deem to be “cool”. In exchange for free product (and no money), you are prompted to post pictures of you wearing it. The posts became so ubiquitous that I’m not sure they actually sell anything or if their whole business is picture based. A strange reaction started happening where people became vocally obsessed with not being chosen to promote these wares on their timeline. Choruses of “why not me?” and “when will I be chosen?” start to crop up. Self-worth plummets when they think they aren’t part of the Chosen Few Dozen. Too many people with too much to offer getting caught up in making sure they have the same thing as everyone else instead of carving out their own niche. 

Of course, not everyone who achieves internet noteriety is interesting or noteworthy. Peruse who is selling video shoutouts on the app Cameo to see people clinging to what they once had. Tay Zonday, Ken Bone, The Bagel Boss, the guy who almost sucked someone’s dick for bottled water at Fyre Festival. A short video with a customized greeting from them can be purchased for a small fee and for a second they are relevant again, if only in your phone. Each time the little Cameo chime plays on his phone, Ken Bone has to pull on his atrocious red sweater and tell your cousin happy birthday while you laugh. “Isn’t it funny that we paid money to Ken Bone? Who even cares about him anymore?”. A year later they’re all in a Geico commercial winking into the camera because, purportedly, they’re in on the joke too. 

People don’t like to have their worst traits reflected back to them. Narcissism, unoriginality, moral posturing, self-aggrandizing. I’m guilty of all of it. I have to actively tamp those feelings down. Watching it go unchecked in people I know, and even like, is unsettling. People believing their own hype. When someone leaves a positive comment, it’s true. When they read a negative one, that’s “just how the internet is”. They seem to have had a tiny mirror installed into their belly button to make navel-gazing that much easier. 

It’s easy to slip into an almost Kaczynski-esque pessimism in relation to technology. To borrow parlance from twitter:  When Ted Kaczynski said that “technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering”, I felt that. But it’s wrong to solely blame the technology on your connection to it. It is made to keep you looking, to keep you scrolling, to keep you engaged. You must know when it’s time to step away. Personal responsibility is making sure you don't get in so deep that you’re making “WE BROKE UP” clickbait videos or airing your own dirty laundry in exchange for some likes and retweets. It never seems to be worth it in the long run.