I think we are all uncomfortable in our forced complacency, pulled into needing and wanting at the whims of the sellers all while life becomes more and more expensive and food is no longer edible. But what else is there but those small comforts when the world has been reduced so significantly?

I’ve tricked myself into believing that I’m “paying attention to whats going on” while drowning in discourse soup. I’ve been following a few recent news stories with the intention of writing about them, or perhaps not them specifically them with all their facts and figures; the ways in which a murder trial, for example, can become an internet obsession and what that says about us as humans in this moment in culture; or, how easily a person can lose their livelihood and life because a failed academic/successful eugenicist wanted to whip up a fury about Black people in the academy. In order to write about something that’s viral on the internet, one first of all has to be on the internet to know about it and then to follow “the discourse” and ideally to practice discerning when it’s a series of distractions meant to make us waste all our energy on hyper-specific individual disagreements and lose our stamina to connect the dots and our ability to build community in mind of resisting fascist encroachments.

There is always more to learn and consume, but I think I lean towards the obsessive side of consumption, with a mind that someone else will have already written what I wish to observe and so I better know what everyone has said before I try to say anything at all. As it turns out, this is a great way to avoid writing (and thinking by way of writing).

A few years ago I was reading upwards of 100 books a year, primarily literary fiction (I will acknowledge that this was perhaps a bit much). I wanted to figure out what I thought was good, what was worth reading, how various literary fictions fit next to one another and what they were commenting on (a lot of vaguely monstrous women in their 20s-40s living lives more self-destructive than mine). I made an effort to read with the zeitgeist, to know what’s going on in the general milieu. I started to distrust the recommendations of people who read 2-5 books a year, what did they have to compare it to? I started noticing the decreasing editorial quality of books, a house would go from ranch style to multiple stories and back between chapters, the confusion not an aspect of the story. I would finish books that I had grown to despise because I wanted to know why they were recommended, and hatred grants more information than indifference. Recently, a bestseller that I was certain I would love described the mechanics of knitting so embarrassingly wrong that I had to put it down… before begrudgingly finishing since I only had a few chapters left. There is a pleasure to being opinionated, discerning, and judgmental by turns.

I have a friend from college who, when he read (philosophy especially), would immerse himself in the worldview of the author taking it in and, one could argue, losing himself to the mind and perspective of the author. Only once he finished the book would he take a step back to contextualize the piece with everything he had experience and read previously, and then he would delve into the critiques and rebuttals. This put him and I into (fun and occasionally serious) conflict on the occasions that he was reading something I heartily disagreed with. He would give everything a real shot to convince him, to move him, with full awareness that he was risking himself. I could never entirely practice this, because I am a defensive reader.

I recently began a non-fiction book (treatise) that seemed right up my alley. The author had been lauded in the London Review of Books and the LA Review of Books, two of my favorite places to gather reading material. It was about the environment and the issues with modern technology/its ubiquity and role in limiting human possibility, and it had been praised by people I admire. I had hoped to learn a new perspective or perhaps gather historical and modern methods both personal and political for resisting technological creep/control. A few of the historical anecdotes about early Britons resistance to enclosure were exciting, I was reminded of my love for Silvia Federici and to return to her work. This author however had a much more cursory knowledge of labor history and cited some debunked historical papers which grated me. He clearly read an article in the 1980s, ingested it as fact and regurgitated it without double checking in 2025. The first thing we read often becomes in our minds the truth, but an author has some obligations. Fact checking has gotten harder and more of the onus is on writers than ever before, but mistrust for his ability crept in. His authorial voice was loud, almost preacherly and I prefer not to be preached at even by someone who is making the case for a world I would rather live in. My stubbornness and his perspective came into such conflict that when the library reminded me my hold was due I took the post it note out and sent the book back.

I think I read defensively because I am worry I about my susceptibility to propaganda and I don’t want to be told what to do. I think about my early days in college, how little I knew and how desperate I was to get some footing. It felt impossible, still does, at the beginning of learning about something to properly contextualize material and sources. It’s time consuming and laborious and it’s very easy to get things wrong especially with the amount of misinformation running around. That’s probably why I haven’t tried to shuck my defensive reading practice, hoping that it will provide just a little bit of cover for the constant onslaught of slop coming now even from previously reliable sources. I wonder if people are still aware of their susceptibility to everything they encounter, that we social creatures learn from one another even when it’s misleading or false information.

Okay, two books I didn’t like very much, and one that I did despite my best efforts.

About a year ago everyone started recommending I read an epistolary novel that had grown more and more popular. I am a letter writer, so in their minds, I ought to love a book based on a woman whose primary form of communication is letters. The book became a bestseller, the author shot to fame. I am disillusioned by what publishers decide to market lately (see the previous editorial failings) and so many of the recent books on the bestseller list or stack at the bookstore I side eye. There’s a reason that “I Who Have Never Known Men” and “Stoner” books from 1995 and 1965 respectively are often in the “recommended reading” section of a bookstore amid those books publishers seem desperate to convince us are “extraordinary,” or “a revelation.” So, alongside my defensive reading and mistrust of the modern best seller, when I am told I will like something… I get a bit nervous. What will you say when I don’t? Will I ruin the book for you? I’d hate to do that… depending on the book… Plus, a book as popular as the one everyone wanted me to read is bound to stay in hardback at $32 a pop for as long as the publisher can manage these days, and while the NYPL may have purchased 50 copies, the waitlist was still 2567 strong by the time I joined it. Then, two weeks ago I walked into my local branch and saw a copy on the shelf (for those patrons who do not reserve books online and in advance) and I snagged it. I thought I better give it a shot while I have the chance. Unfortunately for me and my stubbornness I devoured it in two days. I related the character. I loved the story and the style. And *gasp* I would recommend it to a friend.

So even in my cold, grumpy, defensive heart there is room to take pleasure in being moved by a (contemporary!) book.

And now I am open for recommendations from you!

P.S. The book I loved: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

I built the tiny particleboard bookcase that would function as a dresser, side table, vanity, and bookcase all in one. I went grocery shopping and planned to batch cook and freeze all my meals. Those first few days after scouring the job boards I locked down a seemingly flexible—though barely above minimum wage—job and a consistent acting class to build an artistic community and encourage myself to audition. As the millennial saying goes I was “adulting.”

Within that first week, still alone in the apartment, a heatwave hit. We had an ancient poorly working window AC in the living room that couldn’t touch our bedrooms so I slept with ice packs in my armpits and a desk fan pointed straight at my face.

And then the refrigerator broke

and so did my phone.

Some excellent New York City heatwave movies : 12 Angry Men, Rear Window, Dog Day Afternoon, and Do the Right Thing (not Spike Lee’s only film about an NYC heatwave). Only through cinema (without temp-o-vision) had I experienced an NYC summer. I thought I understood heat because of the 100+ degree California scorchers, going back to school and feeling like our sneakers would melt into the cement, but knowing that at least it would cool down once the sun went down. Not so much for NYC, the humidity was new to me. The lack of nighttime relief was shocking. It has taken me years to remember it won’t cool down enough at night for a sweater. The only relief comes when the pressure gets so great that the skies open up into a sudden thunderstorm. There is very little in this life more glorious than a warm downpour during a heatwave.

In the days waiting for the real estate bros who ran the building to get us a new fridge, and before I had to hurriedly clean the disgusting mess that we found under the old one, I took a background acting gig for some CBS drama to pay for a new phone. 5am Bethesda Fountain: I joined a handful of actors whose names I’ll never remember, but whose faces occupy the hours of 7-9pm EST on cable TV. There were no big breaks, but I was able to pay full price for the phone I still have to this day.

In the nine months I lived in that apartment I learned how to write a strongly worded email to a landlord citing both city laws and lease terms; I survived bronchitis which turned into walking pneumonia all while 5 men were installing an electricity meter in the living room; and I went through a brutal, cruel, and prolonged breakup during which my roommate had to lay on top of me while I sobbed on the living room floor. I waved to the firefighters every time I took my laundry to the laundromat around the corner, and to the guys who stood out on my block at all hours. I often got home late from work or shows or rehearsals and the guys on my block who fed the garbage can kittens and played dice would form a wall between me and anyone who seemed to be following me home from the train. If I was walking with a man they would check that I knew him, that I wanted him around, that I felt comfortable. I still wasn’t sure about New York, but I was learning too much about myself to leave just yet.

In 2019 I moved a few blocks up, in with my best friend, to a first floor apartment that we would share through the beginning and most frightening era of the pandemic, and through Walter’s potty training before, on the hottest day of the year in the middle of yet another heatwave, moving up to a beautiful sixth floor apartment where both the plants and I could stop wilting from lack of vitamin D.

Two weeks ago, and seven years after moving into the building where I spent the majority of my twenties— through some of the most frightening points in my life as well as through the raucous and tearful celebrations of Joe Biden’s presidential election (really the other guys loss) and the Knicks winning the championship!!! — I moved to a new neighborhood, a new borough. This time, with a lot more stuff in tow, I hired two Russian men to help me move. Stubborn as ever, and too guilty to watch other people carry all my things, I pulled my own weight taking many bags and boxes down the 6 flights of stairs to the point where one of the men complimented my strength/stubbornness while the other pulled me aside to say “please, sit, take a break, be careful” probably noticing how red, out of breath, and bruised I had become. And just as I settled into my new place, to recover from overdoing the moving process, another heatwave hit.

Happy hot sweaty summer, lovers.

Some cool and funky things I have been listening to:

• Prisencolinensinainciusol — Adriano Celentano (Italian musician made a gibberish song to sound like American English to see if it would sell, and by golly it slaps!)

• Breezin’ — George Benson

• People Never Change — Peter Cat Recording Co.

• Sketch for Summer — The Durutti Column

• Paper Machine — Fujimaro Band

In the last few years since my first Covid-19 infection in the autumn of 2021 (during the first Delta wave) I’ve battled a series of setbacks, some of them minor and manageable and some of them existentially disturbing. I am one of those people officially diagnosed with “long-covid” and I could tell you all the symptoms that lead to the specialist doctor giving me the diagnosis, or the things they’ve prescribed and suggested that have helped, or the medical studies that I have been a part of, but we don’t need to get into all of it here. Suffice to say, what I have going on with me is a lot more common than most people would like to believe, and also a lot more disruptive.

I think the biggest bit of evidence for how common post-viral illness is, is how many people have invented conspiracies around it. People think that Covid itself (and long-covid even more so) is over or was never real, while simultaneously believing that it’s a lab leak or that their symptoms came from being near someone who was vaccinated (shout out Naomi W*lf). The rise of the “make America healthy again” movement is evidence enough that people are sick and are looking for answers…though not in great places. The medical profession is chronically behind on the latest science, because it takes an awfully long time for the research to get into practice. Patient facing doctors also have difficulty communicating with patients, the training they go through seems to be getting better in this regard, but the lack of patient face-to-face time makes decent bedside manner and listening/comprehension skills rare. The for-profit medical insurance system only adds to the difficulty of getting decent and attentive care, though I think the hazing ritual of medical school and residency leads to spewing out too many doctors who push past their limits, ignore their own body signals, and thus have no compassion for a patient with something as vague seeming as “chronic fatigue.” “I’m tired all the time too, grow up” they seem to say to patients, unless the patient indicates that the symptoms interfere with their ability to go to work… in which case that’s considered a real problem.

In the psychoanalytic frame the term “ambivalence” refers to competing and contradictory affects (love and hate) directed toward the same target. I will always feel admiration and love for the medical profession, and the professionals who have treated me. The grandfather I shared breakfast with every morning was a pediatrician and his son followed suit, both of them having treated my injuries with respect and care, and who are two of the kindest men to grace this mortal plane. Several of my closest friends are working medical professionals or on their way to licensure, and their dedication and curiosity with their patients is astounding. And… I have had nurse’s laugh at my pain, doctor’s dismiss me, had them scan the wrong part of my body and send me home from the ER both grey and with an active infection which dropped my white blood cell count nearly to zero. So, suffice it to say I am extremely ambivalent about the medical system and medical professionals.

It’s difficult to be critical of the medical community because so many medical professionals are doing a great job and are being brutally exploited by a for-profit system which both deteriorates the level of care for patients as well as pay for workers. They have so much paperwork, they have to communicate with insurance companies which have zero regard for patient well-being, and they have few resources. They themselves have been harmed or even permanently injured into chronic illness by their own training whether they are aware of it or not. That said I think I could fairly make the argument that medical school is a ritual hazing practice which functions to make future doctors both less compassionate and less curious — the pandemic burnout has only made this worse. Not to mention, a lot of doctors themselves because of their constant and repeated exposure to Covid-19 have many of the same symptoms as I do, including forgetfulness and that all elusive term “brain-fog.”

I am not sure of the official numbers of people with post-viral illness, the dearth of data collection around this virus and it’s outcomes has been essential to propping up our skeletal extraction economy1 (more profit for the airline CEOs at all costs!!!), but I see the symptoms everywhere: the brain fog and fatigue, the newly terrible allergies and medical mysteries. The little things that people complain about with their breathing, or their attention. Often its those things that are blamed solely on social media platforms, as well as the brief period in which children stayed home from school (a whole sub-genre of white men authored airport books). Folks simultaneously fret openly and write their symptoms off, not to mention the symptoms of others, pretending that it’s completely normal to have fevers during menstruation or that the number of top tier athletes having strokes and blood clots is just bad luck. The patterns are there, and so are the experts connecting the dots—when their funding comes through. The trouble is that we have all these patterns, which humans are great at seeing, and at the same time people do not trust experts (both because of fascist propaganda, and also because a lot of experts are condescending assholes) so people leap to entirely absurd conclusions through “doing their own research” (without base field knowledge let alone research skills).

It seems we are constantly directing our skepticism and our pattern recognition in random directions. It takes a great deal of effort to combine pattern recognition and research to find the answers to the nagging feeling that something is off. And it’s infuriating when the evidence for something that feels true, is probably true, does not hold up or isn’t strong enough. Especially when it serves those in power, who can indeed have control over which evidence we see. No wonder conspiracies abound!! I sound like a tin-hat wearing paranoiac when I bring up the things that the CIA and FBI have openly admitted to. It is exhausting keeping track, and it’s also addictive to go down rabbit holes. The juicier the conspiracy the more addictive it is to follow, which only adds to murkiness around information and our confusion serves to uphold power structures. Not to mention that people are becoming increasingly reliant on AI/LLMs which hallucinate information so things become less and less trustworthy and the skills of doing research become harder to learn, let alone employ in such an untrustworthy context (“let me back into the archive!” they say banging on the locked library doors).

I classify some of my own symptoms as existentially disturbing because they disrupt the idea I had of who I am and how I function in this world. Occasionally I will have zero recollection of a conversation that someone else remembers vividly or I will struggle to comprehend something written that in previous years I could have barely glanced over and understood. I have adapted in some ways, but I am still shocked and frustrated each time it happens. Though on a much smaller scale, I have have come to understand the rage and denial that goes along with other kinds of memory loss.

I have noticed, in more than just the arena of health, that people often deal with such existential issues by stuffing them down, by getting on a horse named cognitive dissonance and galloping away. It is uncomfortable to deal with inconsistencies and contradictory truths; “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet I.v). Those who point out such things are often considered “mad.” Think of the man screaming about racism on the subway; because he broke the social contract he cannot be heard; because he is loud and has made people uncomfortable; because he is righteously angry he mustn’t be heard; and yet he is the one telling the truth in that moment in that tin can.

In these past couple weeks I prodded at the invisible barrier just beyond me, and at times even felt I was pushing up against a taut veil or a scrim at the back of a theatre and that if I kept trying to push past the barrier it would become more and more solid until I lay dazed on the porch, a bird knocked out by flying headfirst into the glass. I was unable to use any of my previous tools of sheer will or trickery to force either my body or my attention through. Perhaps if it was only physical I would be able to accept it, sitting still and reading or writing my way through while I let my body rest, like a corseted lady with tuberculosis taking to the sea for respite. Or else if it were emotional, I could take long walks while contemplating my own existence. Even reading in this state as it turns out felt about as effortful as running a marathon without water and seemed to have similar outcomes.

There was an essay I wanted to write to submit to a collection that was due April 1st, and while I had both an idea and the requisite desire, my ability was diminished. Each time I attempted to pull myself or my thoughts together for more than five minutes at a time, I came up for air bedraggled and panicked at how weak I felt. Even as my therapist encouraged me to write about the experience, even as there was an exciting deadline for an essay series that fit an idea I have been wanting to explore, even as I have the desire to explore through walking and writing through my ideas, I plodded my way into writing and a few sentences in (either handwritten or typed) I sputtered out. I had been tired before and I will be tired again, but this bone deep all encompassing exhaustion meant that I didn’t have the grip strength to hold my coffee to warm my hand without the risk of dropping hot liquid over myself. I had to focus solely on the fact that I was indeed holding the cup because I was so out of it that I was forgetting what was going on with my own hands — two avenues for a third degree burn because no one can stop my love for piping hot coffee. It seems now as I write this, dramatic and impossible, I feel the need to repeat myself for emphasis because it would be so easy to elide over the experience now that I am somewhat recovered. My energy remains low, but I now have the ability to think without the fear of being trapped and drowned in my own body, which is a kind of freedom that I usually take for granted, and if I am fortunate, I will come to take it for granted again.

Our futures, ourselves, our ability to think for ourselves and imagine collectively are being foreclosed in a number of ways both active and passive. If we cannot even admit what is happening in our own bodies and how much our medical system (through intentional neglect and out of profit motives of insurance companies and the US government) has screwed us over, then we become susceptible to dangerous misinformation not just about “wellness.” Yes, our medical system is broken and doctors don’t believe patients (especially those with marginalized identities), but that health guru telling us to sun our rectums and drink raw milk also doesn’t have our best interest in mind. We will not make the medical system better or more accountable by completely avoiding it, we will have to confront it, and that will be uncomfortable… and we also might be seen as “mad” as we do so.

I don’t love that I have to make choices with my time and energy. I have always resented it, the idea that I have to close one door in order to open another. I consistently wish I was the type of person who had endless energy to do it all. You know those people? Those folks who seem to be able to do everything and never tire and never sleep, those who are painters and actors and writers and singers and for some reason (that I disagree with) also investment bankers??? Those people who seem to never spend time doubting themselves, instead taking risks and betting on themselves and then following through!!! Whew. I mean I know in some ways this is a fantasy of a person, even thinking about it or comparing is a distraction in and of itself, another roadblock that I add to my collection of ways to get in my own way. I should like to think that my increasing awareness of this habit will interrupt the pattern, we will see.

It’s almost as if the moment I become excited about an idea or a project I find a way to squash it, or at least diminish my desire to work on it. Sometimes it isn’t immediate, I let it percolate until it gets to that funky middle place where the excitement of inspiration and the relief of finishing are as far apart from one another as possible and that is where I leave it, in the most hopeless position unlikely to ever be picked up again. Usually in this mini dark night of the soul I convince myself that I know nothing, that I could not possibly have anything important to add, that I fundamentally misunderstand what I am curious about and that if anything I should return to the research phase, or perhaps give up all together and know that someone has already covered the topic probably better than I ever could.

What I think I fail to acknowledge in these moments, that I am keenly aware of at other times, is that writing is thinking. Reading someone else’s ideas and theories forms a relationship that allows new thoughts to emerge, but those thoughts most often cannot be worked out alone in the space of the mind. This isn’t to say that writing is the only way of thinking or digesting big ideas; conversation, repetition, translation, or sharing in some way all are modes of integrating new material into ones mental collection. I, however, hold a special place in my heart for writing as a form of thinking things through because I often surprise myself, not knowing what will come out of my mind through my hand. Thinking can be a series of frustrations and frictions. There is a reason the Rodin sculpture “The Thinker” in its intensity and contortion is recognizable and why so many writers say that they find the process of writing painful. The process of thinking/writing though does not leave us with nothing. Thinking through writing is like tending to a garden of the mind; all the labor that goes in can eventually bear fruit, even if the first few seasons all it produces are hard green tomatoes and minuscule yet floppy carrots.

I have a preference for writing by hand. For the tactility of pen and paper. That I cannot erase the thought, the mark on the page, compels me to continue onwards to some form of completion (so long as I don’t become distracted by something off-page). Without the delete function, the typewriter encourages this continuation as well, but typing misses all the psychological, physiological, and developmental benefits of writing by hand. Hand writing is a significantly more complex motor skill which usually takes longer. It is connected with increased cognition, memory, and retention. One way of putting this difference is that the complex materiality of the physical movements and cognitive connections involved in handwriting, what I might call choreography, inscribes the act of thinking and learning into the body/mind. In college I took all my notes by hand, mostly by choice. For many of my professors and courses this was a requirement, and computers were banned from the classroom apart from specific accommodations. I would listen and handwrite all my notes and when it came time to write a paper or study for an in class exam I would look back over my notes and transcribe them into my computer, allowing new connections to pop up over the course of the review.

When I was in middle school my father compelled my brother and I to do summer touch typing lessons on the computer. Our school had the classic computer classes where we learned to type, to use the Microsoft suite of tools, and played on Kid Pix (<3), but it wasn’t enough to become extremely speedy typists. My father was and remains a quick and accurate typist, and knew that it would be useful for us to never hunt and peck a day in our lives. The three of us would compete for fastest and most accurate typing, and both my brother and I came to type almost as fast as we think. My mother still gasps when she notices me typing because according to her it sounds like I’m just randomly hitting keys while staring out the window. When I did a verbatim theatre performance at the end of high school and had to transcribe hours of audio interviews onto the page, I was able to do it rapidly in a mode that almost felt like connecting my ears straight to my fingers. My speed has significantly declined in the last ten years, but I still use it to get an idea out quickly that I am fearful of losing — and yet I often come across typed notes that I’ve taken on my computer and completely forget having written them.

Handwriting is harder than typing, it involves more physical friction (the pen and the page) as well as stamina to avoid hand cramping, and yet it is more fruitful cognitively. So there is a negotiation between the efficiency of typing out a thought and the material choreography of handwriting which all evidence shows is mentally richer.

I am fairly good at creating systems of efficiency, and I rely on the systems I create to allow for the space and time for freedom. For example: I am, as most bartenders are, rigorous about my bar setup and breakdown in order to have the most efficient night no matter how busy it is. I want efficiency because (if used carefully) it can lead towards certain kinds freedom, particularly under capitalism. I like bartending because I labor hard for fewer hours and I have the rest of my time free, rarely thinking about work outside of the building. By all accounts I am pro-efficiency, but I do wonder about the ways in which people are becoming obsessed with “hacking life” in order to maximize both their experiences and their output using tools that are far more deleterious to their ability to think than a keyboard is.

This is complicated by my existential crisis at the beginning of this essay. That I have a human body and human needs as well as the failure to complete projects that I care about, is inconvenient. Or maybe it’s two sides of the same coin?

Efficiency tricks meant to free people from the most banal and rote tasks are now being used to complete creative tasks, to free us from our pleasures rather than our frictions — as if we could separate pleasure from friction. I think we might be using tools of efficiency thinking that we are freeing ourselves, but towards what end? Freeing ourselves from thinking? From feeling? From interacting? From remembering? From learning? From tasting? From changing? Just have chat write your novel…you don’t have to talk to the sommelier the machine will tell you what to drink…it can even show you what you’d look like in a Miyazaki film!

We have become so overwhelmed and exhausted by the input thrust on us and the output expected of us that it is harder to want to protect the areas in which difficulty and friction are useful and good. Perhaps encouraging or romanticizing difficulty sounds like the stoics stretching their bodies to the limit of deprivation in order to build resilience. I don’t think this outsourcing is a character flaw, in fact I think it’s a human trait to find the shortcut, but it is also removing us from the things that are beautiful about being human in all our complexities. We are becoming worse and worse at dealing with difficulty and inconvenience. And it’s becoming more and more of a problem. To not use AI tools, to handwrite, to be practice encountering difficulty and friction in any regard I think has to be a social and moral good. Skills atrophy without use.

So perhaps this bit of writing, the act and the act of sharing, is my dedication to the friction of dealing with all the kite strings, of committing to using my mind and allowing myself to be less efficient even if I remain frustrated with my own foibles and idiosyncrasies.

Things I have been reading and thinking with:

novels:

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke — I went to the book launch at Symphony Space by myself and got my book signed.

• Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

memoir/nonfiction/philosophy:

• Strangers: a memoir by Belle Burden

• On Giving Up by Adam Phillips

• The Joy of Consent by Manon Garcia

I originally thought that the term 6/7 was an iteration of “six and seven” which can be found in Chaucer and Shakespeare, and is a phrase roughly meaning befuddlement and chaos and which originates from an early version of craps called “Hazzard.” I was quickly disabused of this notion, but I think they are more related than it seems. Repetition throughout history being what it is.

This contemporary version apparently originated on various short form video platforms and from a song about a basketball player who is six foot seven (Wikipedia is my trusted source here, love you Wiki Editors <3). It’s considered “brain rot” content, the kind of videos that are of little to no informative or generative value, just pinging dopamine levels and keeping eyes on the scroll, and which are particularly popular with generation alpha. I have been told that the phrase “means nothing” and is “kind of like skibidi toilet.” Which is a reference to an absurdist YouTube series featuring human headed toilets who also repeat nonsense and are at war with humanoids. Among Generation Alpha there seem to be several of these viral and “meaningless” repetitive phrases stemming from “brain rot content” whose reiteration serves especially to irk people searching for any meaning in them.

I have a confession…

I sort of love it.

There is an obvious pleasure in resisting meaning and by golly repetition is deeply pleasurable in and of itself but particularly for kids when adults are so irked by it. Kids are some of the most marginalized members of our society, so their resistance through annoyance makes a lot of sense. Cultural texts (and memes) serve as social tethers between us, and their increasing abstraction is both a response and a result of the context we live in. The economy of extraction and the void of meaning, as well as the lack of power and control we as people have over even basic parts of life under this totalizing system, is much more extreme for children.

While I am not personally a consumer of such “content” (the term for pretty much anything posted online), I do see in the absurdism of “brain rot” the ability for something to evade the capture of meaning and thus usefulness. Of course it’s not as simple as that, because time on any platform is valuable to the owners of the platform, our attention is an essential commodity in addition to the surveillance of our behaviors and thus ability to control and commodify every single aspect of our lives. For this, I use the term coined by Shoshana Zuboff “surveillance capitalism.” The methods of surveillance capitalism are intentionally hidden, platforms colonize our attention and normalize abolishing privacy, creeping into every aspect of our lives without ever directly asking for our consent, merely expecting (and receiving) our acquiescence because they sell it to us as convenience when in reality they have created both the problem and the solution in order to more effectively extract. We are the resource they are extracting, and we are often blissfully ignorant in our distraction.

So, how do we evade the most obvious demands of our surveillance capitalist overlords (who by the way are not only evil but also boring and stupid)?

I should like to think that the absurd is one mode of evading surveillance through nonsense, to make their extraction slightly less profitable and to carve out areas of privacy/unknowability through excess. The absurd, I think, is one mode of resistance to this encroachment by big tech and data. If we cannot fully escape the constancy of our attention economy (or surveillance capitalism) then can we make it so absurd, so meaningless, that they will have a slightly harder time extracting from us.1 Or at the very least through repetition and absurdity perhaps we practice within ourselves a resistance to the constant demand to conformity and we foster our imaginations for something other than what we have been told is inevitable and good.

The absurd has historically been a response to encroaching fascism. The fascist does not care for meaning, and the well-intended liberal tries to answer them with reason, to account for their hypocrisy, to win using rules that the fascist laughs at. The absurdist knows that we must practice other tools!

In the mid 1900s existentialist art surges as a reaction to the horrors of the first and second World Wars. Through what is later coined “the theatre of the absurd” playwrights Beckett and Ionesco and Pinter among others explore meaninglessness and isolation, as well as the end of childish comforts and certainties. They paint circumstances from the banal to the cartoonish and employ repetition of non-sequiturs and nonsense (or repetition until it becomes nonsense) to engage with the futility of human communication and depict/present our alienation as well as the frightfulness of human conformity. The world that emerges through the brutal efficiencies of these wars as well as the compliance of so many people with totalitarian and genocidal aims, through the amount of death and destruction makes obvious the impossibility of reason, as well as innocence.

These plays have a tremendous resonance today.

A sometimes playwright, my guy Albert Camus also wrote treatises and novels exploring the absurd and possible rebellion in light of and through the absurdity of this existential human condition. Absurd rebellion becomes a tool to combat the hydra headed creep of fascism which seeks to interpolate and condition humans to submit to a violent hierarchy of isolationism, and which has no use for reason or consistency. This may seem familiar (waves hands wildly at *circumstances*).

Camus defines the absurd in a few ways, but briefly it is the ability to hold onto multiple contradictory truths simultaneously, most especially the indifference of the universe with our desire to find purpose and meaning—giving up on neither. It is a descendant of Nietzsche’s “god is dead”, and a sibling of the existential (I woke up as a giant bug, but I still have to go to work!!!!). Camus’ exploration of the absurd confronts that old carrot “to be or not to be” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Shakespeare making a return in this essay!!). The answer he comes to in his most famous philosophical work “The Myth of Sisyphus” is that while Sisyphus pointlessly and without end shall continue the repetition of his task/punishment we must also “imagine him happy.” The absurd ends up playing with the nihilistic “nothing means anything” in order to evade the traps of both naiveté and cynicism—or perhaps to inhabit both simultaneously.

Art during the imperial boomerang2 of European fascism that is the 20th century suddenly overflows with new forms attempting to both reflect the political times and to resist them. I think we have a great deal to learn from the past, the fascists are certainly repeating themselves so too perhaps we should repeat ourselves loudly and annoyingly like we are trying not to get mauled by a cougar on a hike (fascism is the cougar and this life is a hike I guess? sorry to cougars… not a super fair analogy to big cats.)

Now that we have been through a brief tour of absurdism in the 20th century we can return “brain-rot”. Even the term is not original to the contemporary era or circumstance, nor is the idea that the media we consume might be trivial and time wasting, as well as potentially corrupting due to their inanity (Thoreau had a fair bit to say about such phenomena).

We are all inundated with input, we even seek it out to drown out other input (or at least I do, and in my vulnerability would prefer to imagine myself in good company). On the subway I put my noise canceling headphones on and play a podcast in the hopes that the deafening ding of the door closing and the tracks screeching won’t rattle me emotionally or cause permanent ear damage. I am constantly trying to understand the world better, trying to find some purpose, trying to be good, trying to put order to things so that I might not be frozen in the face of the overwhelming fascist demand to believe that they have already won and that we should give up (which by the way they haven’t and they are very frightened of our ability to resist them!)

It’s rarely encouraged, and incredibly difficult to carve out time to be completely with one’s own mind, primary because it’s not profitable to those who run the algorithms nor can they extract data from us — which is why it seems they wish to colonize more and more of our time as well as our interiority through whatever means possible (including freaky implants in our noggins). They wish to make the world they are attempting to create seem inevitable, that it always already was so. We have a few options; give up and give in (boooooo) or ultimately to embrace the absurd. To embrace the absurd is to hold onto the contradiction of our existential circumstances in an indifferent world and to also find joy as we enact rebellion against such indifference and certainly against fascist creep in its myriad forms.

So, I think, we have something to learn of resistance from the inanity of repetition, and especially from the kids, and we ought aim to foster joy in each form of rebellion we practice. Send in the clowns!

Phillips writes, “Sometimes I think I write to remind myself of what’s been inside me all along, that I hadn’t noticed or just forgot at some point and them, remembering, just assumed was lost.” He writes on to contradict this impulse, to say that writing is more a roadmap, a cohesion or a negotiation of “the distance and intimacy between [his] obsessions and [his] demons.”

To make art, and for Phillips to write poetry specifically, is to come to know oneself and through this exploration of the self perhaps grow and change in unanticipated ways. His first book of poetry was written in tandem/conversation with discovering his sexuality. So through the process of creating art, of writing, one comes to be (just as through reading) finding the intimacy and distance with the words on the page, the characters, the events, the movement.

The process of creating art, of writing, I find is intimately related to laboring towards kinds of birth/rebirth. Over the past few years I have become an occasional poet, allowing free form poetry to skim the surface of my psyche picking up on things that otherwise would remain below and using highly structured poetic forms like the sestina as a sharp tool to push through blockages. Spending time with words, choosing them for their texture and taste, for the architecture they form on the page, for the slivers of thought I so desperately wish to weave into something tangible even if only to myself.

Most of these poems, and most of the writing I do will never leave my notebook (or notes app if its written on a train), though I still have the urge to salvage the vast majority of what I put down for fear that I might throw away something important that I’ll never be able to get back. I think this is because the writing process is an expansion of thinking process. Not an original claim certainly, but one that I have often resisted, desperate for my wandering thoughts to not require material solidity to take shape and to transform. There is a desperate piece of me, afraid of wasting time and energy, that wants my thoughts to form in the abstract and to gain the skill to easily pluck them down and lay them out fully formed onto the page. In the same way I fantasize other things will fall into my lap just through dreaming them. As I have mentioned before the persistence required in the act of knitting, is far more vital than the skill required, if you want to knit a sweater all you have to do is knit the sweater. You will eventually get better the more reps you put in, I have to remind myself, while I simultaneously think about my hatred of a certain hack airport book writer who decreed 10,000 hours is what makes an expert (though for a man so prolific in his writing and “research” he certainly has not gotten better or more accurate).

In practice, quite literally right now, the writing itself has become the process of thinking. Without it my thoughts dance on the surface, flitting between certainty and anxiety and quite suddenly proliferating so violently that they are beyond capture, resulting in a complete blank, a racing heart, and a compulsive desire to distract myself in some way. I, as I am sure you do too, consume a lot of media which I justify by my desire to stay informed. More time with information will make me a better thinker and community member. I have become who I am through my consumption of theory and information, I can always deliver a fun fact and I hav often tasted the theories I am reading to see if they fit on my tongue in order to get myself closer to what I really think whilst attempting to insulate myself from forming a completely out of touch opinion. I am also susceptible to the intentional manipulation of my emotions and the constant proliferation of more more more, because I am human (rats!) that is so common in our day and age (especially through video format). Thankfully, I also cultivate an intentional resistance to what I perceive as manipulation. For example, if I find a theory or an idea a little bit suspect I dive into the deep end to understand its history and relations, who else agrees and how disagrees and how. In college I loved reading the federalist papers alongside the anti-federalist papers. I loved even the tiniest quibbles between philosophers and theoreticians and tracing their vague snipes at one another. The gossip held my attention and helped me hone my own thoughts, though that only happened if I practiced writing and rewriting and editing both their words and mine.

I distance myself from the acute vulnerability of my own writing practice, and indeed my own mind, through leaning into the complete work of writers/artists I admire, which serves conflicting purposes — I see that such writing and solidity is possible and at once lose any path towards it. It reminds me that when I am driving in my hometown I can easily get from one location to another, but if I try to imagine the route as it happens I tend to skip the middle bit (how tedious to make the whole entire drive in ones head). The brain does this magnificent trick of allowing us to skip some tedium in our fantasy, but but but… we cannot avoid it in life. And, as I have argued on other occasions, nor should we (june 8 and august 4 of last year). The friction and the tedium is essential, in fact I think we can lose our sense without it. As a bartender (and former server) in a fancy restaurant, I have served many people who are so accustomed to leisure and ease, who have had nearly every aspect of friction removed from their so very important lives through their wealth. It is embarrassing to watch how they react to the slightest inconvenience.

I’ve heard a lot of people saying “now more than ever we need poetry, laughter, art etc.” We need these forms to understand the world, to have it reflected back to us in surprising ways. I also recommend dabbling in a bit of writing even if it will never be seen beyond your gaze, having thoughts materialize outside the skull… well it can be good for us. Of course all this thinking, this discovery of ones positions and moral stances is nothing without the material skills and habits that we enact to bend the arc of the history toward justice. It’s important that I hate fascism. It is important to spot it where it is, to be able to think hard enough to describe it to those who have been so thoroughly distracted by its tactics, to consistently resist that distraction ourselves through thinking and writing and talking. It is most essential to fight it with every single ounce of our beings, in every way imaginable and enactable.

My latest poem published:

cantaloupe in the passionfruit review

Renee Good’s 2020 prize winning poem:

on learning to dissect fetal pigs

it’s more than just compassion or empathy, I think we learn how to be human through these stories and the multiplicity of encounters through fiction allows us to live many more lives than just our own, it expands our time and ourselves beyond ourselves and our time. This is possible alone with a book (and ideally also a cup of tea and a fireplace), but I would argue we do it best, perhaps most pleasurably, in the company of others.

A few clinical psychologists have done studies trying to track if and how and why we those who read seem to be better able to understand complexity as well as highly charged emotional situations. I find it endlessly fascinating which human endeavors people feel the need to use statistics for, as if we do not understand the innate need for art and storytelling in our lives… but as it turns out, it seems we don’t. To be fair to the statisticians and the clinical psychologist (who tend to take my teasing with great humor), it is extremely human to try to understand why we are the way we are and of course statistic (those damned lies and statistics lol) are an avenue for those who love measurable outcomes to see the value in the things we humans have always done.

The failure to make good art, or make it into art school, is one thing historians point to in the course of Hitler’s rise to power. He couldn’t paint so he became a mass murderer. How many men (and let’s be honest it’s mostly men) in their frustration to be relevant and celebrated have turned to cruelty and harm. That said, a lot of painters who could paint also sucked (my forever enemy Gauguin)! Earlier this year I read Monsters by Claire Dederer, which delves into her personal as well as professional (as an art critic) relationship with the art of monstrous men (and people generally), and I though I did not agree with everything she said, it was fascinating to be dropped for a moment into her mind and her world, to trace the landscapes of her experience and I most certainly related to her struggle to understand how to approach art made by people who do monstrous things (it often ruins the art completely for me, but so long as I am not contributing to their financial success now I am able to look at it).

You may have seen that clip of El*n M*sk suggesting that his AI tool is most perfectly used to roast people at a party because of course, why come up with banter yourself when you can outsource it to a bot. Or, as I have written about before, Z*ckerberg’s dystopian announcement that “the average American has 3 friends but has demand for 15” to which he can provide the solution! And guess what, it’s not actually more friends it’s something that he can both sell you and also surveil you through! My mom texted me an announcement in my alma mater’s magazine that fellow alum and Netflix founder R*id H*stings donated a bunch of money to set up AI bullshit at the college – and in bolded title of the announcement “humanities” is spelled wrong.

So, it seems the artless but rich losers of the world continue to wish upon us less and less joy and beauty. They may also wish for us less friction; like that awkward moment when your joke lands with a thud and you have to use social grace to recover; or the difficulty of making friends in this world when we are all so consumed by the phones that they addicted us to; or the tremendous effort that it takes to actually think and write something for yourself without the assistance of a large language model. This may seem like a generosity, “I’ll make your life easier and yeah I may get obscenely wealthy doing so, but you’ll definitely think you’re benefitting from it enough to let it happen.”

Well to this I say, have you ever seen the tantrums extremely wealthy people throw when they encounter a minor inconvenience because their lives contain barely any friction? Whenever I witness something like that (which as a fancy guy bartender I do a lot) I thank goodness that I experience a fair bit of friction in my day to day, just to inoculate myself against being an entirely insufferable brat. I think in addition to the friction of daily life, art (in all it’s many forms) is a huge part of maintaining and expanding my understanding of the world and myself.

As the inimitable James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

After work on Christmas Day, my roomie (mother of Walter, my best friend, and very cool clinical psychologist) and I went to see Hamnet in theatres. I had read the book a couple of years ago after my mother had so loved it. I tend not to enjoy reading about theatre or Shakespeare in fiction, inevitably writers get something so terribly wrong that it pulls me out, and I would most often rather listen to a play itself, but I loved the magic in Hamnet. However, I think Hamnet might be a rare case of the film being better than the book. The lines from Shakespeare’s works playfully leap out on the tongues of these skilled performers, and it’s a reminder of why these plays were meant to be heard, one did not go to a play to “watch” but to hear it.

The next paragraph contains some spoilers, skip if you wish, but I promise reading it will not ruin the play just as the choral prologue of a Greek tragedy has never ruined the experience of the full thing.

You probably already know what happened which is true to history: a child dies and a father writes a play with the title character named for him (spellings of names were not codified in that era so what we may see with our modern eyes as two different names were much closer then). This is a book/film about grief and the unimaginable loss of a child, as well as the isolation of this experience even when it is a shared loss, it is not the same for each one of us. Grief can be an island, which makes it all the more torturous. I have often thought in those moments of monumental loss that the only person I could possibly imagine sharing my grief with is the person who is no longer there. The main actor, Jessie Buckley, took my breath away with her artistry and humanity. During the final scene in the film, inside the Globe Theatre, I was transported back to every time I have stood in those stalls surrounded by people all staring up at the stage. A reminder that all the world is a stage too. Buckley as Agnes at first resists the performance, enraged that her sons name is being spoken by people who knew him not, and her realization that his father has swapped places with their child, to bring him back to life in this play, is… well it was beautiful. But the extraordinary part is the way that the performers and filmmaker show the shared feeling through the audience, that suddenly a mother is not alone in her grief. We as the audience to the film mirror the audience in the Globe.

Here is a film about a time, not unlike our own, in which people are dying and being disabled at extremely high rates because of communicable disease. Though I cried throughout, I look forward to seeing it again. I believe in the necessity and humanness of diving into these uncomfortable emotions, in particular as an audience member. This film exemplifies both in and of itself and as a member of an audience, that humanity of sharing grief. That we must have catharsis in order to understand the world that we live in, we must explore the myriad woes both major and minor through art, especially together. We are so often led to distraction and isolation instead of together looking at the belly of the beast. Affect studies (vibes vibes vibes) is the exploration of shared emotional experiences that are so difficult to put words to, but which can be understood in the language of eye contact held or knowledge that skin has of its proximity to another. Often poetry is the only way to put it into words, and dance does it even better. So I will leave it to the movement because my words are running dry.

To the necessary frictions of life and to holding hands as we look into grief and find new ways of holding it, together. To the stories we share, and to our shared humanity.

As always, love to you all, to nature and creatures and to the things I don’t understand, and a big old bird to artless loser tech overlords.

Happy New Year mes amis, see you in 2026!

In school, I am of the generation of students formally taught to use computers; we learned to type, to format things, and to use basic internet search functions (ask Jeeves was my personal favorite in the computer lab). Computers and the internet were seen as tools for learning and exploration. There was very little fluff, save for club penguin (a glorified chatroom) and neopets, the vast majority of computer games we played were educational and by golly did I love doing math in some Mayan ruins. There was an abiding hope about the internet, that it was like building a modern library of Alexandria, an allegory which portends our current circumstances in metaphorical ashy ruins.

Computer time started playing a much larger role in my life when my family moved to another country and then back again. I wanted to keep up with my friends in both places. Despite the age limit being 13 for almost all the early social media and internet communication platforms, it was easy to check a box “affirming” ones age. So, at 11 years old I opened a MySpace account alongside my friends in the school computer lab. I decked my virtual wall out with a repeat motif of a brown short haired dachshund (manifesting Walter?) and set my music to some Cream (probably Strange Brew). If you were to look at the background of my current computer you would see a similar repeated tile motif, but this one is of Glurpo the underwater clown.

I tried to reopen my MySpace to verify and boost my recollection, but alas it’s long deactivated along with the email associated with it. At the time I had an AOL instant messenger account and a yahoo email, but MySpace was the future, it was how all us intercontinental 11 year olds were going to really keep in touch! I don’t remember the last time I logged into the account because Facebook quickly took over by High School, and friends from school in London dispersed across the globe, the urgency of our connection dissipating with age and distance from those intense middle school years.

Though we often called one another’s homes after school, speaking to parents to get to our friends, messaging quickly took over. Later, in high school I recall a friend and I sharing clips from the website “stumble upon” which with a click of the cursor took you to random independent webpages across the internet. At this point in the mid 2010s it was already becoming difficult to find new things on the internet, and, though I doubt I was aware of it, all our attentions were already being corralled into a few spaces to extract our time and our data.

In order to both sell things to us more effectively (and really to sell *us* better), these big corporations began to practice dictating our desires. Their methodologies, the ways they perpetrated this heist of desire and attention are neither new nor are they hidden, but they are so psychologically devious that people do not believe them. It is easier to believe that my inability to get off TikTok is my own failing, that if I were more disciplined I would be able to extract myself from the repetition of the endless scroll, but I am a human and in all my flawed wonder I am susceptible to certain pulls. Some of those pulls are used by a bunch of greedy fuckwits who also benefit from each of us blaming ourselves for our flawed relationship to the technology they wish us to willingly (or think it is our will) surrender ourselves to. Resistance by willpower is simply no match for the trillions of dollars put into making individual resistances futile.

What felt like a side part or novelty of (post)modern life, time spent on the internet, is increasingly becoming the entirety of life. I am sure you have heard the stories of people falling in love with chatbots, developing psychoses, or children who are unable to emotionally regulate because of the constancy of input they experience. I often hear people of my generation talk about how we “got the last chopper out” before AI took over higher education, before cocomelon took over children’s entertainment, etc… But we are just as susceptible and in fact we are being convinced, often successfully, that using AI or being online constantly is NECESSARY to our thriving, to having a good life, to even having a sliver of the comfort that recent previous generations were able to have.

All the while people whose greed and self adulation are their foremost qualities still somehow can’t live in their tremendous fortresses of wealth without subjecting us to their shitty personalities and desires. They, the only ones allowed to have true desire that doesn’t funnel into some algorithm that will enrich them, are the most boring people on the face of the earth. They cannot enjoy their spoils because all they really want is to be interesting which is the one thing money will never buy (cue Elon Musk talking about making AI come up with “sick burns” at a party to get laughs… yawn). I would feel bad for them if they had even on redeeming quality, but I can’t even muster pity.

That the masters of internet 2.0 (or 3.0 or whatever the heck its called) are the least creative people on earth is so deeply infuriating because of the promise of the early internet, in which people were creating all sorts of independent websites full of esotericisms. And yet here are these overlord losers trying to normalize their heist of our time, our ability to focus, our ability to think for ourselves, our memories, our ability to organize our labor, and crucially our ability to imagine a different outcome than the one they have on their HQ manifesting boards.

The only person who enjoys a poem written by a chatbot is someone who hasn’t spent time with poetry, they perhaps only appreciate the cache of a poetry lover without putting in the time to learn what they like or why. I recall in a high school poetry class discovering how much longer it took to read a poem than it did a short story, because the fewer the words the more condensed the puzzle of meaning, which is also bound up in form and history and reference that requires one to read lots of other poems. So one poem… well that could be a lifetime affair. There may be a spark that inspires a work of art but the reality of it is that art is labor and to remove or extract the labor from it (an AI needs to read thousands of pages of stolen human writing to spit out some garbage based on a dream) is to completely eviscerate everything worthwhile from it. So these boring jerks not only want to steal our time and our attention, they want to be seen as cool doing so, they want to “fit in” without any of the context and without understanding the references.

And here I have tuckered myself out writing this all on my own without a freaky little AI’s help, so I will leave you with this: Perhaps a monkey will eventually type out Hamlet on the typewriter.

Here are some interesting websites that remind me of the old internet:

• https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Main_Page

• https://accent.gmu.edu/

• https://fontsinuse.com/

• https://www.last.fm

And if you want to think about the internet as it stands now, these are a couple good reads:

• Surveillance Capitalism by Soshanna Zuboff (academic, but well written and readable)

• Stolen Focus by Johann Hart (by a journalist, very accessible)

Yearner as I am, I’m not sure exactly how often I have experienced unrequited love in my life, it’s rare. Perhaps once in middle school and it was pretty pathetic. I’ve always been frightened by the implicit demand which exists in all desire, and therefore have hidden my desire especially from myself. And even here I wonder if it can even be called “my” desire when I have so thoroughly buried it underground, disavowing and ignoring it. A professor in graduate school reminded me that my focus on the lines of desire in epistolary correspondence also implies a demand for a reply (to paraphrase Shonda Rhimes “pick me! choose me! send a letter back to me!”) A fairly obvious point in hindsight but at the time I was convinced I was attempting to expose my own desires without demand as if they could be disentangled from any response (cause I’m like so chill and cool).

I see bravery and, at times, stupidity in unrequited love, that level of pining that is most often portrayed in teen movies and psychological thrillers. Brave for thee stupid for me. There are moments in any relation when a person is more desirous of proximity to an other, ideally this is a trade-off never growing too out of sync, but in the period of falling in love (in whatever sense you experience love) the dance which pushes and pulls is the essential material of desire. The negotiation of intimacy or even just proximity and desire – even the annoyance of too much too close, then suddenly a fear of losing that. There is inherent danger in the other (I’ve written about Berlant’s book On the Inconvenience of Other People ) – friction is always present in the encounter of the other, and that friction can range from painful to ignorable to pleasurable. To acknowledge that the other is other than oneself is existentially terrifying, particularly in *this* cultural context. People so often encounter others as representations of facets of their own self, or else as partial, as objects. To encounter the other as other requires, I think, a comfort with the instability of ego – or perhaps a “fuck it” attitude with discomfort.

I could accurately be accused of constantly looking for connection (between ideas, people…etc) – this may partially be a sublimation of my own desire to create, but it also inspires pretty much everything. I even, gasp, start brief conversations with people while waiting to cross the street. Even so, as a public chatter, I walk through my day occasionally more than occasionally opening up my phone to check… well nothing mostly. To attend to the red button of flattened and perpetually unmet desire so nihilistically curated by the attention economy. Opening my screen to flick around and perhaps to be outraged, to learn, to laugh, but mostly to be distracted because sitting with my own thoughts is far less lucrative for a bunch of overgrown twelve-year-olds in silly cone valley who fantasize living forever. This is the flattening of the impulse to connect, also decreases our ability to live with the friction of encountering others. It’s very easy to be siloed in a world of just the right amount anger and agreement on a little screen to keep us glued to it. It also, I think makes it much harder to encounter the reality of the other in the world, and even to encounter the complexity in oneself, because it starts to feel too risky.

In love through friendship, I’ve often taken the leap, devoted myself to someone before really knowing them or they me. Some ineffable quality that piques my curiosity, or perhaps a brief shared experience and some extended eye contact. I don’t mind showing a little more desire than is respectable in this context because friendship is my number one priority, favorite thing ever, and is also pretty cute. It rarely turns out poorly and even if ‘in the end’ it goes pear shaped, at least I have a story and perhaps it was really lovely along the way.

Desire otherwise I have historically (reader: currently) treated as dangerous, desire for you to read this for example feels like some embarrassing festering sore that I should not admit to but instead keep between myself and my GP and perhaps the medical student brought in to look at how disgusting it is. As a perpetually self-frustrated performer with a constant itch to create something worth watching, this disgust with self-promotion often gets in the way of the creative process.

A while ago I was talking to a college friend, explaining the intricate barriers I have put up within myself and the frustration that I have with their excellent construction. Would I have rather constructed a beautiful solo clown show? Yes, but instead I built a rigid system which allows me to punish myself for taking up space and let any progress I make on a project I might totally love wither away. Not cool kid behavior! She was confused because she saw me as social and brave, willing to go out of my way to connect with people and wondered why I couldn’t seem to just “do it.” Same. But here I am hoping that in exposing my annoying underbelly I will trick the walls into falling on their own.

Perhaps the key, for me, is to treat my art and my creative life like a friend. Stay tuned.

That said, this wish to make things publicly, to display them which I am attempting to attend to more seriously, hiding my own self-disgust is materially complicated by my commitment to comradeship within the context of an ongoing pandemic and mass disabling event. To perform, to go to performances is fundamentally dangerous and inaccessible, and I feel pretty fucked up about it. There was a brief period of time when performance spaces across the board required audiences to mask to protect one another and especially to protect the performers, now we are seeing just how many musicians and comedians and actors are taking breaks from public life because they are repeatedly getting sick while performing and they are experiencing the longterm effects of repeated illness.

Recommended reading:

Disability Intimacy edited by the brilliant Alice Wong

• Anthology of first-person essays about disability experiences and the many forms of intimacy, love, and desire. If you want to read a

Radical Antiquity by Christopher B. Zeichmann

• How some communities in antiquity lived without leaders, how they organized themselves and what kind of radical imagining those social experiments can teach us about our own possibilities.

P.S.

I am not sure how to write my gratitude for two very important people who passed away this week. Two people who I did not know personally, but whose advocacy for disability justice, Covid realism and long Covid was fierce and beautiful and unflinching. Alice Wong and Leslie Lee – two people whose legacies will be their spirit, their generosity, their tenacity, their intellect, and the courage they encouraged in those who were so lucky to have been affected by their work. Wearing a mask is a basic act of care which has been made to seem radical by people who profit from your illness and do not care if you are abandoned. Mask up at the very least on transit, at shows, at the pharmacy, in grocery stores, and in healthcare settings. We are all much more vulnerable than we think and it’s the decent thing to look out for one another.

^angel booty!

So, what am I? What are you? Define yourself (so I can sell you things…)! A date once pulled out her computer at Bethesda fountain for me to take an online personality quiz because I didn’t know which number I was, in… was it numerology? Correct me if there are other numbers-based personality tests that I can remember to be irritated by, by name.

There is a social divide between self-identified “introvert” and “extrovert,” despite the absurdity and racist origins of most personality typing, people become attached to their labels, and even think themselves superior (or inferior) because of the qualities of those identities. Introverts like to say that they are smarter, that they read more, that they are more observant. Extroverts like to say that they are more socially competent, with leadership qualities, and that they are inherently more charismatic (and even that they are hotter). There are the inversions of these qualities, the downsides that folks may discover, but I won’t get into that (you can worry on your own or with a therapist about your inability to be alone, or your desperation to foster meaningful community).

The trouble I find with identifying some quality as innate or inherent to a person (let alone binary) is that… people change over the course of a life. We learn how to do things. A friend of mine and I were discussing how overwhelming we sometimes find New York, and the subways in particular. When we first began to use the subways again after the initial surge of COVID precautions the noise in the subway tunnels was overwhelming.

“How had we been able to ignore how brutally loud the squeaking was?? How had we not simply dropped dead from it??”

We would say as our entire bodies convulsed with discomfort at the bone chilling shrieking metal on metal friction. And then, we had to take the subway again. And we had to go to work, in person, in a service capacity!! And we had to talk to people. We had to perform sociability on hard until it became easier. I feel pretty lucky that I didn’t have to opt into sociality of my own volition, because from what I hear it’s very hard to prioritize as a skill lately.

I talk to a metric shitton of people per day at work, even at a relatively tiny place. As a bartender I am ostensibly a pretty cheap on demand a public use therapist who also doles out an extremely unhelpful drug for coping, and which often results in people just repeating their woes and getting nowhere. I feel conflicted about this role, given that I know and like my regulars, one of them has even become so dear to me that everyone in my life knows his name. I have coworkers I love, and I somehow give off a vibe that invites people to ask me for directions in public. I had a therapist once suggest that I might have an easier time walking through life if I “made less eye contact,” but for someone who enjoys clowning I think I have siloed that into a perfectly weird outlet. I say hello to strangers in coffee shops and I do small talk on the street. One of the things I love most about living in a big city is how many people I have come to know in the routines of each day; the two night-doormen who know me by name and I know them because they watch me walk home every night, my regulars, the fellow actors in the audition waiting room, the folks who consistently show up to the clown shows, the guy whose name I don’t know but always smiles over his computer at me in the backyard of my local coffee shop. Sociability, it seems to me, is both a muscle to work on (which I am fortunate my day job forces me to maintain) and a runway to expansive and enjoyable connection which actually requires less effort than it first seems. And, despite all this chitty chatting and the genuine pleasure I get from it, I would still not classify myself “an extrovert”… though I might be justifiably accused of being a shameless platonic flirt.

Through all this chit chatting I do I am noticing a dearth of charm. Sometimes I think it’s fear, anxiety, disgust at the other, a lack of social awareness as to who and when people are open to connection. People repeat the aphorism “no one owes you anything” … when in reality we owe each other everything, and that everything also includes knowing when to have a little chat and when to leave someone alone (know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away – as in poker so in public life). Lately, I’ve found it notable when someone is charming, when they have the practiced skill of creating a game or an inside joke with a stranger. Bartenders make great practice for flirtation, and I think its part of the job to create a safe space to practice flirtation in (nothing is gonna happen here but try out your best work and I’ll give you a grade before your date or before you give someone your number, I may even be your wing man, or prevent you from humiliation – you can call me lube, social lube).

More concerningly than this anecdotal charm drought (none of you guys don’t worry, you’re so funny and charming I’m laughing just thinking about it) I’ve been seeing accounts of people (usually teenagers) on the internet saying that they are hopelessly asocial, that they cannot imagine talking to other people. That they are so terrible socially anxious, shy, traumatized by “lockdown” (to be clear the United States did not experience a lock down, yet people confuse the first spring of the pandemic as a lockdown because more people were being cautious by choice and some cities changed rules for how businesses could run). They seem determined to bemoan their inevitable loneliness. I can’t lie, I see it, I see how socially anxious people are, and I see that there are lots of contributing factors to it. I see people struggling to communicate at all with strangers, and even with people they know well.

Mark Zuckerberg recently said something along the lines of “people on average have 3 friends and have a demand for 15, this is what gen AI can fill in” immediately resulting in memes justifiably calling this ridiculous “I have 3 eggs but the recipes demand 15 eggs, so here are 12 pictures of eggs”. An ad has been filling the NYC subway system called “friend” in which a little AI device sits around your neck and responds to everything in your life… ew yuck wtf. Obviously, they are being graffitied because this is a grotesque invasion of privacy barely masked as a product. A huge theft of personal and public data, and just in general a weird grift on the loneliness epidemic not to mention a horrifying indication of our increasing cultural tolerance to giving away every piece of our lives (and the lives of every person we pass, consent much?!) to tech companies. If you are curious to think more about how the hell we got here, I highly recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s book Surveillance Capitalism.

Our loneliness is profitable. Our stagnancy makes us vulnerable to predation. Individualism is a scourge, and that is a hill I will endlessly play on (I refuse to die on it, only to dance in the shit and fling it at the fascists). So, even when it seems hard, even when it feels like the most terrifying thing in the world, how do we maintain connection?

One might think it is not sociable, or that it prevents connection to wear a kn95 or an n95 mask. I wear one every day at work to protect my health as well as the health of my coworkers and guests. Obviously (given that it’s a bar) my guests are not masked, and so I have to overcome the potential social awkwardness of them asking me why or feeling alienated because they want to see my face. So many people, and my peer bartenders especially, say that they can’t wear masks because they get worse tips, or they do not connect with the customers as easily etc. I went a week without masking during a particularly low rate of covid period in the summer of 2023 (? I think?) and honestly, the experience was not that different. I don’t doubt it would be harder at another bar but I have been fortunate. I have a pair of regulars who are doctors from out of town, they come in every few months to go shopping at cartier and to get shnockered at my bar and gossip, I love them. They told me once that they didn’t even notice I wore a mask until another guest asked about it1.

The muscle of sociality, of community, even of seemingly stupid small talk is well worth flexing even for those of us whose cups are also filled in the quiet hours alone. It might save you and your loved ones from being surveilled by an extractivist AI company who will sell you out the nearest fascist dictator for any deviance.

Flirt on cuties ;) Walter certainly will be

I went to college around a particular height of right-wing interest in university life and learning. There was a panic that conservative voices were being silenced on campuses, that students were turning their backs when the schools invited race scientists to talk (how rude!). It was a moral panic that students were not being sufficiently deferential to people whose stated intentions were harmful. What I think I was vaguely aware of at the time, though I didn’t realize how easily people would acquiesce, is that this was intended to breakdown of the possibility of opposing fascism using ideas like “civility” and “fairness” (the notion that all sides of a debate are of equal merit and thus deserve equal time and deference).

Through the entrenchment of “both sides-ism” in which it seems nearly everyone has come to agree that expertise and serious in-depth thought are irrelevant. Instead, we have bad faith (and blatantly unskilled) debaters who espouse bigotry which then goes completely unchecked by even left-leaning moderators or interlocutors. I think what frightens me most is that I am not entirely sure that people remember what real intellectual honesty and integrity look like anymore. The ubiquity of all this bigoted noise has perforated our bullshit-meters. These performances of intellectualism (which resemble in no way real curiosity) encourage us to waste our time fighting against bad-faith arguments or else acquiesce and lay down letting our own minds atrophy into endless consumption and even becoming outraged when someone asks us to think (but I don’t know anything about that!!! Why should I have to have an opinion!! I’m not even interested in politics!).

BUT, and here is the hopeful nugget!! I have also noticed a turn towards self-guided learning. Not the “do your own research aka read an anti-vax blog by a woman trying to get you to drink raw milk” style, but real significant ongoing learning which includes the practice of processing new information and making connections in order to retain information. I couldn’t be more excited. The folks are yearning for some learning! I’ve found numerous accounts of the development of personal curricula and I have personally joined fellow curiosos in structured classes.

A lot of it, from folks’ accounts, is the creeping realization that we are all propagandized (particularly in the United States, but also everywhere) to all get out. Many are noticing, or just allowing themselves to finally notice, just how absurd our political and social discourse has become, that the temperature has shifted radically while we were all scrolling. Of course, we were warned, both by history and those who are good at pattern recognition that pandemics and mass death events have historically speed up the turn to fascism, and we were certainly already on that road despite the condescending disagreements of podcasters and op-ed writers who fashion themselves public intellectuals but who pave the road to fascism just the same by “just asking questions” and giving their platforms unquestioningly to hateful ideas in mind of “open debate” – not everyone who has guided us into unthinking has been anti-intellectual or even seems to realize that this is what they are doing.

As schools are being defunded, as misinformation is having a heyday, as AI is both hallucinating and grading hallucinated homework, as a huge portion of people also seem to be completely disengaged with material reality – I return to those who are dedicating their time to learning about both broad and niche topics. Personal edification *heart emoji*.

I have seen folks developing (and sharing) personal syllabi for gothic literature, psychoanalysis under occupation, fiber arts both practically and theoretically… this list could go on quite literally forever and it should. As right-wing influencers and faux intellectuals reign the YouTube space making fun of the charming titles of classes at liberal arts schools, I watch individuals and book clubs gather to take pleasure in the expansion of experience and knowledge (and of the self and community) that learning provides.

In the year 2020 I turned 25, I brought together friends from various parts of my life and my only biggest wish for the day was that it would snow (spoiler, it did, it was awesome, I love snow). I was, at the time, taking what I thought would be a brief break from working while I figured out how to not be so burnt out. For the entire prior year, I had been working two jobs while taking classes, auditioning, performing, and sometimes teaching, as well as attempting to have a social life—I was never home, and I have honestly no idea how I was doing it all. I was also disillusioned, and I felt creatively drained, not sure how to make something that I thought was worthwhile. My 25^th year was meant to be one where all this labor and exhaustion would come to do something (mean something?), where I would find the art that I was meant to be making, where I would gather community together to make some really cool stuff, where I might start graduate school in person, and maybe I would even do a play that paid me a living wage!

Well, it didn’t go that way as you may have guessed. Instead, I went to graduate school online, I went to protests, I learned more about public health (and its failures) than I ever thought I would, I felt isolated and frustrated, I lost any creative intuition, I got the kind of sick that doesn’t ever get fully better. Thankfully, I was held back from the abyss of nihilism by my much earlier flirtations with it and subsequent discovery of absurdity (what a gift) and I was able to develop marvelous friendships and admirations. I felt that I was unable to contextualize my experience or the things I was learning in the murky liminal space of ongoing crisis/mass disabling event and I felt a bit cheated. Afterall graduate school is notoriously where you’re supposed to go when you don’t know what the hell you’re supposed to do and be and here I was becoming even more lost, less confident, and increasingly compositionally incoherent—all this personal/emotional/intellectual expenditure at great financial expense! I wrote essays about desire while my own in every sense was ebbing away from me and no matter how many buckets I ran back up from the shore, a lagoon refused to form.

And yet, even amidst all the poop, I never lost the love of exploring new perspectives and finding niches to dig into. The drama! The intrigue! Which psychoanalytic theorists were lovers? Which became enemies??

Perhaps because autumn is my favorite season and because the light chill in the air is threatening to make both my dog and myself giddy skipping through fallen leaves any minute. So, I have decided that Autumn 2025 is one of learning (every subsequent season will be as well). So, here are a few things on my docket and let me know yours!

1. I have *finally* returned to clown class which I imagine you will hear more about it but certainly it will be foolish.

2. I am taking an introduction to filmmaking – gasp!

3. I am making a loose syllabus to focus on Indigenous North American history/politics and modern representation in politics and media

4. Another loose syllabus on fiber arts and theory – if you have ideas send them my way! (I will be knitting and reading)

More ongoing learning, less formal, though I will attempt in an act of generosity to formalize it for myself — if you’d like to hear my theory on the generosity of the syllabus I may write about that soon.

What are you learning this quarter? What are you investigating? How will you digest the information that you take in, weaving it into your bag of treats?

Chloé Caldwell’s new book TRYING comes out tomorrow and in it she writes, “writing publicly is so embarrassing, but someone’s gotta do it”. So here we are writing online once again, returning to the embarrassing venue of the attempt! I wont even tell you how long it took me to write this and how little time I spent editing it (but you can see my typos and grammatical errors for yourself where’s waldo style).

I tend to prefer the in-class essay to the take home exam or the final paper. The time limitation, do it here now and what will be will be, I find it freeing. Not to mention the prompts, a few choices which even if I hated the options still gave something to push against. Very few distractions possible in the little blue notebook, supplemented with my own copious and usually fairly unhelpful notes about phrases I thought were pretty annoying in that Edmund Burke essay. That said, my education was entirely pre-AI. Distractions abounded but I wasn’t yet addicted to the internet, and none of my peers seemed to be using much more than their own minds to do the work. Cheating was still considered pretty yucky.

In my post formal educational life, I remain intimidated by unlimited time to adjust whatever I am working on. I find myself fretting over the best thing to write for days, continuing to explore new topics and forgetting where I even began, only to succumb to the extreme guilt over my reluctance to edit my own writing and the disgust at reading my own voice. To dip into my stream of consciousness here are a few questions I could fall into while writing: hasn’t all this been said before and better? And what is the point of writing, isn’t it a bit masturbatory? Then again, I used to work in dildo shop, so who am I to be against masturbation? Isn’t pleasure for pleasures sake a good? But in fascist times should we aim higher than pleasure for its own sake?… and then I fall into the rabbit hole of thinking that everything that becomes “something” ought to “do something” a little important… which is a great way to kill impulse.

The stress of unlimited time (which I am then in charge of using effectively) inhabits my mind beyond writing. I love the rehearsal room and despise learning lines and doing character work on my own – I can of course force myself to do it when necessary, but by golly is it far less efficient than playing the in space and time allotted, the container of rehearsal, with the rest of the fools.

I love a container of time or space. School set deadlines for designated assignments and I could develop my own internal structure for completing essays giving myself a couple of days of distance from the first draft in order to edit with a clear eye. The rehearsal room, the analytic consulting room, even the hours of operation for the restaurant allow me to turn work brain on and off. And I have always taken pride in creating systems of efficiency for certain tasks.

I think living in a big and unforgiving city makes this somewhat essential, even addictive. Not that I am efficiency obsessed or always looking for the hack, but I like to know that I can make cooking or cleaning or (my job) bartending much less arduous by doing tasks in a certain logical order. Sometimes it leads to an automation of action, which, if it persists for long enough, I forget how I even systematized or why. The streamlined process leading to a kind of mindless action that feels like the commute you do every single day but forget the middle of because it has become so automatic that to actually experience it is no longer necessary to completing the journey. I am not so much a fan of mindlessness (though I do have beef with the mindfulness movement…) Though I proud of most of my systems. I even like helping people come up with or research systems of their own so that that they can make the most out of their day. There is nothing like learning from someone’s grandmother or some obscure reddit post how to mop a floor efficiently, or a knitting pattern hack, or a great way to wash and moisturize your body (wash your ass!!!).

All this order and systematizing should lead to more free time to f**k around creatively. I’ve never attempted an efficiency hack for creativity (I don’t think it exists and I am afraid of anyone who is trying to find it). However, I think it can also lead to a dissociation from the process, going through the motions or as actors will often say “phoning it in.” It’s like that moment on a zoom call when you can see the reflection of online shopping in someone’s glasses and that they are only half paying attention.

We are all dealing with pretty constant stimulus, unless you have escaped social media and cities and live in the woods and have stumbled across this Substack from a future printout accidentally forgotten by a neighbor in the local library of some fishing village on a lake in the Midwest (which if so, I’m jealous, come pick me up). Amid this constant stimulation, I find, even innocuous interactions can feel demanding or even aggressive: “I can’t believe someone would ask me a question when I am already so overwhelmed and beyond the point of calming myself down (even though I am fairly adept at looking neutral and being kind regardless of how overwhelmed I am)!”

You may have noticed, like me, that people are outsourcing more and more of both their mundane and creative systems to machines like AI. I have seen parents who say that they co-parent with ch*tgpt, people who use it to create their entire schedule, to maximize their health, to brainstorm creatively. I find the introduction of this kind of “assistant” into the creative and the mundane frightening. I think it gives people the idea that they do not need experience the discomfort of not knowing how to do something or the demand and frustration of making the effort to learn… and perhaps sucking for like… a really long time.

For example, I knit constantly in public, on transit, in a café, just sitting on a park bench, waiting in the doctor’s office. While knitting people will often ask me how I learned, how long I have been knitting, what I am working on, and pretty inevitably they say that they could never do that, that it looks too hard or that they’ve tried before or considered it but that the learning barrier was simply too high to get into it. To which I call bullshit. If you want to knit, just start knitting (not necessarily recommended to people with tendonitis and arthritis, but still do-able, just you know… be kind to your body). At this point I knit fairly quickly, but I often make mistakes and have to go back to fix them, I find myself seven rows beyond where I should have been decreasing because I fell into the automated zone and I have to return to the pattern and return my attention to the task at hand. I am constantly learning new things and I feel both far from a beginner and much further from any form of fiber expertise, which I like to believe is the perfect place for a hobby. I feel sad when people express a clear desire to knit and yet refuse to try it because they are frightened of the effort and time not knowing, which reminds me of all the things that I am afraid of being so awful at that the bar for entry feels too high.

Perhaps this is one reason AI has become popular, or at least why the owners of these systems are succeeding at normalizing outsourcing our minds and abilities and effort to a machine. It gives people a false sense of expertise and skill. It is soothing to not need to sit in the discomfort of learning and not yet knowing. It used to be embarrassing to not try and now it seems to be the norm. New York City often feels like a place that enforces the binary of success and failure, you either suck or you’re great… trying is not so much a pathway of learning, but one which drives you out of town. Trying itself then is already a kind of failure and failure is devastating. In such an environment people must already know how to do things extremely well, effort is cringe and failure seems unacceptable. Which… what an awful impulse and joy killing trap.

For me, doing anything feels a bit like returning to the beginning (embarrassing and also freeing), a constant starting over to see if I missed anything along the way. I may have been acting my whole life, writing for much of it, and clowning too… but here I am starting again from scratch (with the memories of each previous encounter etched into my funny bones).

So, my friends, what are you going to return to? What new scary thing will you do? What are you going to fail at? What are you going to put some effort into that seems a bit embarrassing? What will you try? I can’t wait to hear, and I promise I will carve out the space in resistance of the constant stimulus of slop, to listen and be psyched for you.

For example, a man presumably in his 70s sat next to me on the subway, and I noticed him noticing my knitting (not to brag but I finished my first sock!), and I noticed his southwestern quilted jacket. I took off my over the ear headphones (of my own volition!) and we proceeded to have a delightful conversation at the end of which I told him, truthfully, that whenever I wear these socks I will think of our conversation.

Sure, people leave me alone when I’m crying in public, but that is actually something I like to call “reading the room” which is a learned social skill from being around people nonstop – do they want to talk to you? Is there an opening? And yes, I believe a lot of us feel joy as well as a totally normal level of obligation to interact with people around us when we have the time and space to. A reminder that we are in a much wider community, that we have obligations to our neighbors and that the inconvenience of other people (shoutout Lauren Berlant) isn’t a bad or harmful thing, it is an inherent part of being a social creature (which even those who define themselves as asocial are).

And those who involve themselves in campaigns, in social causes even more so are unafraid of the other/the stranger. It is necessary, in organizing, to learn to get along and make the ship sail with people who you may find irritating or difficult. The friction of other people is extremely obvious when you are trying to get something done. I say this with mixed deep affection and joy in the experience of trying my own feminist collective, that it can sometimes be … super frustrating. But if you know how to deal with friction, and annoyance without crashing out! oh boy what a good life, and what a good future we are in for (and good job on the emotional self-regulation babes!!!)

Today is the day, the hottest day of the summer so far and election day. The heat bulb is filling up and so is my phone with messages from Con-Ed and every candidate down the ballot.

There is a palpable, if damp, excitement in the air here in New York City. Flyers for two popular candidates line the streets and people have been out volunteering in droves to campaign for an upstart mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, who has cross endorsed with city comptroller and fellow mayoral candidate Brad Lander. Even on today, the hottest day by far, two women with a Zohran table are giggling and drinking water under the shade of some scaffolding. By some estimates 1 in 200 New Yorkers have volunteered their time for Mamdani’s campaign (which completely contrasts the paid “canvassers” for Cuomo limply handing out flyers, and telling people they don’t even like the guy, but $25 and hour is $25 an hour).

Both these progressive candidates, Mamdani and Lander, show what public service is, and crucially they walk hand in hand with the people of New York City (and adorably with each other). Lander, who has been showing up to immigration court to stand with his immigrant and undocumented constituents facing brutality, kidnapping, and deportation, himself was arrested by DHS/ICE (who I am now referring to as gazpacho agents for their likeness to the gestapo as well as my desire to throw tomatoes at them). Mamdani, who has faced violent threats and constant Islamophobia, walked from tip to tip of Manhattan greeting and chatting with voters, his now famous smile on full display. One thing about these two candidates and that they clearly love New York and New Yorkers.

Mamdani, who went to the same college as the young and talented democratic Tennessee Congressman Justin J. Pearson (where I went too!), has been crystal clear in his inarguably sound economic agenda. He is an effective and affective communicator of his agenda, and he is surrounded by serious, smart, and skilled people. Nothing says popular like people out canvassing in 93 degrees with 80% humidity, who maintain a positive spirit of hope even when they are yelled at. Zohran is someone to be excited about, young and passionate, kind and generous. He is the definition of a public servant, who wishes for the city to be a better and more affordable place for New Yorkers and has serious plans in that direction.

Referencing a campaign video of Mamdani’s journey down Manhattan Island, John Favreau (of the Obama administration and pod save America fame, spoiler the pod did not save America but the boys get a lot of high paid speaking gigs) tweeted “Put whatever views you may have about Mamdani’s politics aside for a moment: When was the last time you saw a candidate campaign like this?”

I think what John is attempting here is “look democrats, we could campaign like this, it doesn’t just have to be young, smart, passionate, good looking, socialists—it could be us too!” Except that this entire campaign actually has been about substance, and views, and his political agenda (which ought to be the point of every campaign, but I digress). One couldn’t recreate the energy behind this campaign without the substance. An incisive critique of the Kamala Harris campaign shows that her campaigns failure to outline her views, policies, agenda, and in particular her failure to distinguish hers from that of Biden’s was a huge mistake. Her website was blank and when asked about controversial topics she deferred to her boss, the sitting president who was in direct cognitive decline (and had also been a segregationist, but again I digress). So, unlike many major democratic campaigns, this campaign is entirely about his politics1. And it makes the democratic political establishment look… pretty bad, especially those who are endorsing and pouring millions of dollars into the coffers of the icky icky other guy who we KNOW is bad at his job.

There is very little I need to say about the other top billed candidate, the former governor who resigned in disgrace because he is an admitted sexual predator and caused the deaths of disabled and elderly people through his capricious negligence, and then tried super hard to cover it up. Former president Bill Clinton just endorsed Cuomo at the last house, which isn’t great given that Clinton is, to gen z, known as “Epstein’s other president friend”. There is absolutely no one who ought to be excited about that man, though I hear some very angry folks are supporting him. If you are outside of NYC and the last you hear of him was his townhall COVID updates and you felt he was avuncular, well… I’m sorry to tell you that he sucks even on that front. If you are wondering why reasonable New Yorkers hate this former governor, read Rebecca Traister’s substack on the election.

The soundest critique of the current democratic party is that it is comprised of people who are unwilling to give the next generation, or the one after, or even the one after that, a go. It is filled with leaders who ought to be living out their twilight years sitting on a porch drinking a pina colada and congratulating their grandchildren on graduating from graduate school while asking them vaguely offensive and out of touch questions about their research. I don’t expect these folks to become radicals, but it has been baffling to watch them succumb to the inevitabilities of time and cognitive deterioration while refusing to pass the baton on to young and energetic and smart young people (or even middle aged people).

The two parties have behaved in remarkably similar ways for my entire life. they have acquiesced to money and power, they have lined their own pockets, and they have condescended to the young, and excited constituents who see that we can make things better for more people. As Traister says in the above linked piece, “It’s just so stupid, and again, so humiliating, how afraid those with institutional power are of what comes next. These people—the Times, Clyburn, Summers—are so scared, so unable to conceive of a world without them and their worldview at its core, that they will, every time, choose the monsters they have known for generations over anyone they can’t imagine gaining access to.”

So here I am having a coffee waiting for my roommate to wake up so that we can walk the half block to the school to rank Zohran Mamdani #1 and Brad Lander #2 and obviously to leave Cuomo in the dust. These candidates, how accessible they have made themselves, and the responding enthusiasm which New Yorkers have volunteered their time and passion to get out the word and educate strangers and neighbors about rank choice voting, and about their agendas. Oh boy what a community, what hope for a better world. Thank goodness for the return of real deal public servants!!!!

The levels of noise as well as the constancy of the cacophony, like that one person at the party who doesn’t realize that their shouting is what’s making everything louder, feel completely out of control. So, everything is getting louder as our ear drums are beaten out of condition, and like puppies pretending not to be dysregulated we hold onto our comfort devices. One of the primary methods folks (including myself) employ is to cram more in, to always be reading a book, to have a task, to stare at your phone, to have music in the headphones so that at least the noise of surrounding life is reduced to the choice of a singular input (or two if you’re listening and scrolling, which I notice is popular).

There is only so much input (data, information, noise, language…) that’s reasonable to take in, let alone digest. In this perpetually information rich society, it feels like missing out to slow down one’s intake, and of course our attention is such a lucrative commodity that companies are incessantly vying to snatch it in all the noise. We know this, there are articles and books and podcasts and canaries warning in the internet coalmine that we are losing our ability to pay sustained attention, flitting instead from one thing to the next until we drop off into sleep holding our little black boxes repeatedly playing someone’s front facing cam “storytime” long after we are breathing deeply. There are some who have successfully absented themselves from the majority of this attention economy, though I can’t imagine it’s easy to do once the addiction sets in, particularly since access to much of society seems to require a smartphone, a computer, social media… etc.

Like children whose appetites are specifically attuned to growth, craving sugar at a rate alien to adults, many of us tend toward packing our senses full full full (it makes sense evolutionarily, information is good, its tasty!), so much so that our own thoughts can become stultified, we ourselves becoming absurd halfway thinkers so overwhelmed with taking in more that we lose our ability to turn anything over. Or that’s just me, but I prefer to think that I am not alone, and as I stare at people on the train their chins touching their collar bones as they blankly smile at their phones, I type a reminder in my note app “morphing our bodies (as well as our culture) to prioritize constant input” and think, next time I’ll dig into my bag for my journal.

After college I remember being recruited for jobs that involved reading long books (usually classical literature) and summarizing them for people who were “too busy to read them” but who wanted to understand the gist so that they could participate in dinner party conversations. I recall thinking it was the Sparknotification of socializing, the pretense of literacy at that point was still important for social capital in certain circles. I didn’t know how rapidly that would change. Now with “artificially intelligent” chatbots which can deliver rapid answers (often factually inaccurate ones, but who cares cause its fast) one need not hire a college grad to read a book and summarize it. The name hits the nail on the head, “artificial intelligence” aka the pretense of knowing things without actually having to put in any effort at learning, retention, summarization, accuracy, interpretation, connection… all the good stuff. In fact, who even needs to interact with other humans at all, Mark Zuckerberg is going to “meet the demand for friends” through chatbots, and I’ve now witnessed people on the subway having full text conversations with “chat” full of the emotive language usually reserved for lovers.

In the constant overload we are also being trained toward apathy: “aaaaah its all too much let me pay attention to the cute animals, to myself, to who has a new face, to my own tiny little pleasures as everything burns, and I might briefly complain that my treat is more expensive than usual or that that strawberry smoothie made me feel sick (it’s the e coli) but I don’t want to learn why because that’s depressing and besides my platform isn’t political, and anyone who wants politics can go elsewhere because I like my head firmly planted in the sand and you can’t guilt me to stop!” So, it feels like there is too much to pay attention to, a sea of constant distractions and pitfalls one could fall into while learning about *all this* and judgement for being late to learning, for not knowing enough, so even trying to partake in political life feels fraught and dangerous. Which is, I fear, the point.

I think of my mind like the cramped wine cellar I can be regularly found sweatily rearranging, filled with too many boxes, bottles overflowing on the wrong shelves, trying to anticipate what I will need readily available. In this constant rearranging, and adding more and more and more, I am avoiding the discomfort of what to do with my own mind. Instead, when I sit down to write I spend the majority of the time trying to find all the holes, waiting instead for the perfect lightning bolt of inspiration, while consuming more, hoping, like a squirrel, that I’ll both be able to fine and use these acorns of information when the inspiration miraculously arrives.

Minor note on the distractions!!!

I could write about how the Trump/Musk messy breakup is a distraction from Palantir and Peter Thiel taking all our data (which yeah no shit). I could write about how much of what comes in front of our senses is both sales tactic and distraction from the onslaught of fascist policies and actions as well as any resistance (the ICE raids and also direct community resistance in LA, take a look at that skater kid slowly walking past and flipping off a line of fully outfitted agents sending flash bangs at his feet, ICONIC, ily sk8terboi). It could be said that nearly everything we experience as input has increasingly been only a distraction and that distraction is of course the point… at least to distract us enough that we lose the ability to focus our attention, to connect the dots, and to see what’s coming next. Or worse yet, to disdain those who see the writing on the wall as paranoid and silly. And, of course, we can see this happening, people no longer view political awareness as a social norm, instead distraction and niche interest have become completely dominant, and anyone who suggests that social/political/ethical/moral awareness is an obligation is not only paranoid but an asshole1. I could narrate how the rightwing attacks on college campuses from even before my time in undergrad were the warnings of a mass accepted anti-intellectualism and that of course the rapid uptake of AI usage by regular people in the last three years has driven anti-intellectualism across party lines, everyone is partaking in ignorance soup. It’s bizarre how quickly people have acquiesced and also how aggressive they have become in their defense of their own ignorance and complicity.

Perhaps in contrast with what seems to be the direction of this bit of writing—do less! consume less! think more! retain your own attention!—I think I am about to argue for reading multiple things at once. But, hear me out, I don’t think they are in conflict.

This past month, I have been reading a few books at time, letting each percolate and rub up against each other in my mind as well as on my bedside table. Normally I am a mostly monogamous reader allowing myself one nonfiction and one fiction2^[2] at a time trying to read them in a linear fashion front to back so that I *get something out of it*. As if reading one thing at a time, in a semi-militant fashion is less consumptive, less ‘packing stuff into the corners under the stairs’, than reading books in tandem. The essays and books I read in undergrad and graduate school I recall mostly for the conversations around them, for the other things I was reading at the same time, the cross-disciplinary inspiration and surprise confluences that remind me that most writers are also readers and we are sharing a conversation that is possible only through the repeated and absurd endeavor to communicate thoughts with preserved language on a page. This especially intra-human activity (probably intra-whale too, which is so heckin’ cool, but I digress) which is filled with yearning and desire and care and attention and failure and frustration has no possibility of being perfected, which is totally absurd! and cool cause it means that we… have to keep hanging out and banging on about things and caring and being little social animals and it actually prevents us from descending into total cynicism or nihilism and perhaps even love being human enough to dig us all out of the shitfest of fascism.

Let me know what you think! What’s rubbing up against each other in your sphere? What is holding your attention? What do you wish you could attend to more thoroughly? Gently? Passionately? What do you want to hold lightly? What are you reading? What are you listening to?

Here are some things I am reading, listening to, thinking around/with, tasting, feeling,

1. Car Seat Headrest – The Scholars (latest album)

2. Right Story, Wrong Story by Tyson Yunkaporta

3. the folks doing direct community safety action in LA <3

4. The Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

5. The Freedom Flotilla with Greta Thunberg and peace activists from around the world

6. hazelnut syrup in an iced coffee

7. Noodler’s southwest sunset ink in my LAMY safari

8. sitting criss cross applesauce on a poof in front of my color-coded bookshelf and wondering how many infinite combinations of books touching are possible with just this small selection

9. this article on chatgpt — “Please do not conflate word form and meaning. Mind your own credulity.”

In these long individual and group conversations, friends and I delved deep in ways I hadn’t experienced since the long hours between classes in college, laying on the quad passing back and forth words and sounds like a Meisner class. I discovered that a lot of folks were struggling with the people they lived with. They were suddenly stuck in the same apartment all the time and learned how they reacted differently during a global crisis. Some, even in these very early and most frighteningly uncertain days, discovered that friends or family or housemates simply did not care about spreading disease, didn’t want to think about it at all or listen to any research, they only wished to pretend the ongoing mass death and disabling event were already over. At the beginning of this current pandemic, this was a much more shocking position than it is now, it was generally conservatives and conspiracy theorists who refused to wear masks, who would spit on people and say, “well it’s only the chronically ill and the elderly and we should sacrifice them to get back to life as normal.” Nowadays the entire political spectrum has moved sharply to the right on eugenics and refuses to attend to the expertise, evidence, and research because its overwhelming and scary. And yes, “sacrificing” people to “return to normal” or to not think about the ongoing effects of the pandemic is eugenics even if that incites weird/bad/guilty feelings. So, we discussed how to talk about research and mitigation efforts and how to get out of bad living situations when there were so few options, as well as how to grieve relationships lost due to these harms.

I was and am grateful that the vast majority of my close friends and I had built our relationships on the basis of intense and deep interrogation of how to be and act in the world, in essence on our moral obligations and what we were doing to stay aware and active. During these talks we dove in, and as the spring wore on and turned to summer the relevance of these conversations to intimate relationships only became more acute. With the resurgence of nationwide protests for Black Lives incited by the highly publicized police murders of George Floy and Breonna Taylor, suddenly white friends of mine were having conversations about race and complicity with their families and friends that they had never touched before. Some were shocked and horrified to discover the racist assumptions undergirding a family member’s assumptions about talent or merit, or how little diversity they themselves had in the media they consumed on a regular basis. How to get out of a shame and guilt spiral for not attending to the ways that racism has shaped this country’s politics, culture, economy, and even one’s own personal and intimate life.

During college I had begun having much more serious conversations about the surge in anti-trans violence and rhetoric, how trans kids were being used as a wedge issue in politics, being considered “a problem” when previously (and not only because I grew up in the theatre community of the Bay Area) we witnessed a fairly consistent increase in the acceptance of and care for trans people and children (which is hard to believe now when violent and fear-based rhetoric is so normalized).

So, these three themes (eugenics, racism, anti-trans gender-based violence) became the basis of my focus, and the focus of most of my moral conversations, as well as the increasingly obvious guiding tools of fascist politics.

During this particular walk in April 2020, my friend and I found ourselves discussing what, for ourselves, is the basis of friendship (this person’s academic life focuses on morality in democracy). This is an unsurprising topic of conversation for me because, if you have read anything I’ve written or hung out with me ever, you will notice fairly quickly that I am pretty obsessed with friendship and my friends. Friendship as a basis for life babies!! I have a whole section of my bookshelf dedicated to writing on friendship and a few folders on my computer as well. The politics of friendship and intimacy have always been essential to my lens on the world.

Anywho, I stated that shared moral curiosity is the essential ingredient for friendship in my life (still is), which is why I found that I hadn’t lost any close friends in this tumultuous time, that I was not surprised by the actions of my intimate friends with regard to public health or being involved in liberatory protest because I already knew their moral and ethical stances. This friend, despite his academic interest in morality, was shocked to discover that someone might decide the intimacy of a relationship based on moral beliefs or that one might confront a friend whose actions do not align with important moral stances. His basis was closer to loyalty and a shared sense of humor, two things I also value greatly (but which to me are intimately connected to shared moral engagement). I have since been trying to unpack his genuine disdain for my “moral basis of friendship” stance, because it’s a reaction I have seen again and again. As if a friendship based in morality is less stable, because disagreement can be uncomfortable. Is a friendship on such a basis more precarious, if we disagree will you just dump me??? But I do not think of moral perfection as a good basis, in fact I agree that it could be quite dangerous (it would be easy to be excommunicated from the church of one persons moral opinions!) Instead, I think of moral curiosity as the consistent dedication to imagining and enacting liberation and care and equity in friendship, in all relations and in the world. It is sharing in the practice of "how do we do this, how do we make this better? do you know? can we imagine better together? even when we are scared and tired?”

There are a huge number of people who would rather brush the harmful actions or beliefs of a friend under the rug, to avoid talking about difference, to shy away from confrontation and who instead find that any confrontation is the problem. For example: a mutual friend might litter constantly but the person who points out that littering is shitty becomes the “real” problem and experiences social ostracization. So those who say that choosing friendships and intimacies based on shared morality is bad often decry it because they themselves do not wish to experience discomfort or ostracization for their shitty or harmful positions or action, and yet they are fully willing to enact a shunning (shame on thee but never on me!)

I have as of late discovered a whole group of conservative or centrist leaning people who are outraged at the idea that they are not invited to be in community with liberal or leftist people with whom they share hobbies or interests. They cry out “but you guys are all about acceptance why won’t you accept me!!” I do believe that people with even fairly large differences in their political stances can be in community, but the actual differences matter a great deal. For example, in college I was friends/acquaintances with a few conservative students, one of whom was a conservative Catholic. We shared a fundamental belief in the flourishing and safety of all people, we definitely disagreed on what it would take to ensure it, but we both knew that it was an unequivocal necessity that all people experience food and housing security and because of that we could get somewhere in conversation, we could hear one another.

I am pretty serious about the boundaries of community for the safety and integrity of the community and its members. This is primarily because of my firm belief that if there is even one N*zi welcome at the party, it’s a N*zi party. Also, I didn’t sleep through the class on Karl Popper and the paradox of tolerance.

I keep returning to the conversation with that friend who didn’t understand why one would want a shared moral curiosity to be the basis of friendship – and it has me wondering what else we might possibly base friendship or intimacy on? I keep coming back to moral curiosity and moral courage. Maybe you’ll find me stuck in this position, and if so I would love to hear what you think the basis of intimacy ought to be, what works for you. I am not sure how else we might manage cognitive dissonance, avoidance and denialism in relation – and I will not give up in the fight against active and passive complicity in systems of harm and oppression, and I don’t think you will either, and I think we ought to sustain ourselves with hilarity and delicious shared meals on the way.

And then I remember that the lacework master didn’t start out with any more skill than I have now (image below).1 There is something however, about having already put in the hours of work to gain a skill or practice it in the creation of an object that makes the effort seems so much smaller than it was at the beginning. Like forgetting the middle of a long drive and only remembering the leaving and the arrival, what is all that middle stuff, all that carrying on going? This can be applied to practically everything, hindsight 20/20 and all that.

There do seem to be people who are able to almost spookily predict what is going to happen next. My favorite novelist Octavia Butler is a prime example. Butler called her work “HistoFuturism” and in 2000 wrote an essay in Essence Magazine (which I will link here) in which she says, “I didn’t make up the problems… All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and geive them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” Some have lauded her as a genius (and she is that but not) for her predictions, undermining her observational skills of the present to fantasize that she had some kind of crystal ball unavailable to non-geniuses. What Butler had, in my opinion, was a hell of a lot of hard work and determination to write her books, to make them excellent and to fight like hell for them to be read (and to be praised, she had a list of all the publications she wanted to publish in, and to be on their bestsellers list). She paid attention to the world, to the present and to historical inheritances and drew out logical pathways. Ideally, her readers would be able to see the present in a clearer manner and to take a series of actions toward a different future, to take us off the path she clearly outlines. In the often-terrifying circumstances of her stories, her characters are never hopeless. They may be living through the apocalypse, but they never EVER give up hope for a better future, crucially, while also dealing with the realities of the present. Butler, both through her characters and writing as well as her perseverant writing practice exemplifies a dedication to the future, to bringing something good and useful to fruition and investing in hope even in the darkest times.

Reader, you will not be surprised that I recommend reading Butler’s entire oeuvre.

In the future I will weave in the ends, in the future I will edit this piece. I must continue to tend to this object for it to exist in the future, this thing that I’ve committed to bring to fruition. That, inherently, is a hopeful series of actions. There is no apathy when it comes to the creation of an object, or to developing the skills necessary to do so. I am invested in our future, and I want it to be a good one.

As I write this I am looking at my first (nearly finished) hand knitted sweater. I am very proud of her even if she turns out wonky. I couldn’t tell you the number of hours I have spent with this rusty red yarn wrapped around my fingers or why it took me so long to pick up needles for a garment. With every row and change, I become more confident in my ability to fix my mistakes and carry on. I have previously knitted blankets and scarves and thought my skill level was better suited to simple projects, with repeated patterns, a little bit of texture but nothing crazy. What I discovered in knitting this sweater (other than how many more patterns I am looking forward to knitting once this is complete) is that there is no more skill needed than any other project, just a lot of perseverance. Each new technique stacks on the others I’ve learned and there is an infinite library of expertise and style that I can draw from. Similarly, to what authors say of writing a book, I think the hardest part of knitting a sweater is just knitting it. There is very little preparation that could possibly help one more than just starting the project and carrying it through. It’s usually both easier and harder than I anticipate.

"Apathy is useful to the bourgeoisie. It disarms the masses by replacing revolutionary fervor with individualized despair. Instead of seeking collective liberation, the subject internalizes failure, turning inward." South African Tswana poet, activist and rapper Thebe Neruda Kgositsile (aka Earl Sweatshirt)

I think what Butler teaches us through her stories, is to not be terrified into apathy, not to say “oh things are bad there’s nothing to be done about it.” But instead that even in the direst circumstances, we are not at the end. That a series of small actions, continuous and persistent changes and resistances are the real substance of enacting hope for the future. Her work is a reminder that we exist in a historical and material context, that what happens next also exists in that context and that context in the United States (and honestly all over the world) is chattel slavery, anti-Black violence, eugenics, fearmongering, (surveillance) capitalism, and radical individualism.

We are witnessing the normalization of no effort, of apathy. We are all exhausted, certainly. And many of us have been disabled by the ongoing pandemic (now tetra-pandemic) which we have been actively lied to about, actively betrayed about. And frankly, it’s looking bleak out there whether you have been paying attention or not. So, we have reason to be exhausted. The lie that we are all individuals who must look out only for ourselves makes us easy targets for fascism, we become despondent and apathetic and thus we acquiesce because how could one alone resist? It is not easier to succumb to fascism and experience encroachment on every single thing you hold dear, to watch your neighbors be disappeared, to close your blinds to it, than it is to resist it. All of this is exhausting, that’s sort of the point, so we might as well be putting our effort together toward hope. The future is not born out of nothing, the future is born out of where we do and do not put in effort, and fascists are putting in a lot of effort toward their ideal future (which is a shitty one for everyone btw!)

In college and then graduate school I remember seeing the stacks of books in my professor’s offices that they could easily reference and connect to the questions I came with. That someone not only had written about this before, but that my mentors could point me to the page where the same questions were outlined ready for me. That their physical and internal archive of knowledge and literature was so vast as to touch what I couldn’t yet even imagine, was incredibly seductive to me. I wanted to have such a vast archive, but I wanted it immediately and resented all the effort that goes into developing one. I recall my frustrated inability to make those connections myself, knowing that I had not read enough yet and desperately wanting to take in more and more (and crucially, to recall it for later reference), until there came a glorious moment which felt both like a single tiny step forward and the clouds opening up to angelic song, which was me drawing a single squiggly line between my own curiosities and a few big theoretical works. It was as if my feet found ground. I had read and wrote and thought just enough to be able to connect the next thing back to my baseline, if shakily. Now, I am determinedly tending and adding to the garden of my textual/theoretical/physical/artistic archive perpetually anxious at all the connections I could neglect or let wither, and still a bit resentful that it continues to take quite a bit of maintenance and adjustment.

If you’re like me, then perhaps you too find it difficult to comprehend the will (even with an intense desire) to learn a new skill, complete a new project, write a book, write a frickin’ clown show, move to a new place, or to start a garden. Sometimes I see my 12.4lb dog exhibit 10x more intensity of will than I can comprehend as he stares at me eating a tamale or holds out a toy for me to play with him. If I could harness his unyielding perseverance as well as his ability to completely forget when it doesn’t lead to his intended outcome, whew.

All this cultivation of skill and thought and perseverance, to me, brings forward the lies of individualism. The most frozen I have ever felt is when I feel I am supposed to do something from nothing all alone. In reality, nothing is alone, every single move I make is influenced by countless interactions. And if you ask me… I don’t even entirely believe in “the individual” as such. If I were to track it in my archive, I could point to a little bit too much mycelial theorizing (anna tsing, mel y chen et. al), but I don’t have space for that here (these weavings are already unsteady, lots of stitches dropped and too many picked up)

To begin at the beginning in the sludge of life without language, touch and sight and sound perhaps, but no baseline tethering them to meaning, we develop it so quickly. We teach one another how to be together and how to have our needs met. Ideally, we cry and we are fed, social creatures from the womb to the grave never not reliant on other beings, never not offering something to them in return. If life isn’t about trying to do the best we can with our circumstances for our communities. It better be about joy and beauty and art and understanding and pleasure and connection.

We owe each other everything.

1

my current political and theoretical lacework project

Near the end of class, the sun is setting through the windows, and I, desperate to get a little further out of my head and deeper into my body, rest my head on the floor and roll my legs up past my tightened belly into a headstand. I enjoy feeling the blood rush and knowing that I am holding myself up (side down), which I rarely remember is a bit of a miracle when upright. And when I come down to let my forehead rest and my body curl under me, my arms at my sides, I feel the same kind of calm as the cold tranquility after a dip in a winter ocean. And finally, in shavasana (corpse pose) at the end I start to silently cry.

I find it incredibly irritating that connecting the mind and body through meditative and intentional movement is an effective tool to experience emotion as opposed to working through thought alone and bypassing the body by force. I know it works, I have experienced it, even been grateful for it, but I resent it. Maybe it feels too obvious? I would much rather (would I?) observe and work through big feelings without it being so messy. I guess I imagine myself remaining upright and stable so that other people can melt. But of course, once I write it, or say it, I see how ridiculous it is, because I am incredibly emotional! The discrepancies between the snapshot idea of myself in a moment of grumpy resistance and the multiplicity within my entire self, well, at least I can laugh at them.

So, having been reminded that embodiment (a quarterly remembering – re-member) is good and helpful and important blah blah blah, I return to thinking about other embodied and grounding practices. What can we do to strengthen our roots to prevent the winds of extremism from blowing us down, and also to prevent our own panic from making us ineffective and incoherent in our resistances? What do we want? What is the world we are building for? For whom? What are our values and how do we nourish ourselves (in all senses) to become effective stewards toward this future? And who is making cookies? And who is gonna shake their ass with me when we get scared???

We (I, you, a lotta people?) increasingly are cornered into living at least a decent portion of our lives online. There are a ton of benefits to being able to connect virtually, particularly for disabled and immunocompromised folks, social media has been an incredible tool for connecting and sharing experiences/skills (while also a dystopian nightmare of surveillance boooooo!!!) But at the same time, everything we do (virtual and material) is being interpolated as “information” and information as well as attention have become two of the most important commodities in our current age. So important that we experience, revel in, and are even told to be grateful for much of our own extraction. This is all without the ability to opt out of nearly any of it. The constant normalization of surveillance and extraction is sold to us as convenience, all while it ends up functioning as a mode of not only predicting (profitably) our behavior, but also shaping it. A docile public which is accustomed to constant ease and convenience won’t look closer to double check a fact, will not fight back, will be easily riled up by lies and overwhelmed to the point of inaction.

So how do we fight the ease that is “generously” handed to us in a devil’s bargain in which we give up so much more than we realize?

Here is where I try to make some tenuous connections that are sticky in my own mind, but hopefully you get the gist of what I’m trying for (or have already formulated it eloquently in your mind and can just smile and nod at my clumsiness).

I think one of the primary modes of resisting ease and comfort handed in particular from the tech industry is to just do things the hard way. Just practice doing things the harder way a little bit.

· Go to the local hardware store instead of ordering from Amazon (cancel Amazon!).

· Go to a local bookstore or library to get recommendations instead of reading what’s “trending”—find the book you never knew you wanted to read because it is adjacent to the one you came in for.

· Delete the app that you scroll the most (this is a hard one for me, which I hate to admit).

· Have a conversation with a friend or lover or parent about something you really disagree about.

· Read the longform book you have been putting off – even go to the book club and chat about it!

· Develop the ability to be confronted and to confront without letting any fear or anger detonate at another person. Feel the feels, just don’t throw them!

· Wear a mask on public transport and inside, even if you’re the only one doing it.

· Do shit scared.

· Get a little more comfortable talking about all the bad stuff happening, you gotta stay awake without letting yourself sink toward nihilism.

· Do shit grumpy.

· Develop a material archive.

· Keep asking questions.

· Download Signal.

· Develop a material practice.

· Let yourself look like a fool because you’re figuring it out.

· Practice sitting with a feeling, maybe moving physically, without diving straight into a distraction.

· bark at the door incessantly because there was a small noise outside (Walter wanted me to add that one)

Things have been bad, and they are getting worse. We are also overwhelmed, and often the solution to the feeling of overwhelm is to hide and distract and ignore, but it turns out that actually makes things worse! It also atrophies our ability to emotionally regulate in the face of fascism. And emotional regulation is actually pretty key when one of the major tools of fascism is to make us so freaked out, we feel like there is no possible resistance (WHEN THERE IS!).

I am very pro the material world, despite also having become an ardent scroller in the last few years (and being generally grumpy when told yoga will make me feel better). I grew up primarily without internet and television, and thankfully well before I could’ve even been at risk for an iPad childhood. My childhood best friend was a texter, she was a nonstop texter, her long skinny fingers constantly bopped keys on her slide out phone under the dinner table type texter. I was not. And now she barely texts (sometimes to my chagrin when I have to look at my own changed relationship to my phone)! So, I like to think of her as the test case that anyone can get change their relationship with their devices and habits. (Plus, she throws a mean dinner party and by golly after 25 years of friendship we can talk about just about anything).

I am, despite the illness risks associated with my bartending job, pretty glad I have a job that is both memory related and hands-on. I also like having to go to a place and interact with people, to know my coworkers and to care about their lives. I am glad to have a variety of relationships with people with various forms of intimacy. I often think about what it means to be hands on, to do material labor and be consistently present with people (often people I would not otherwise spend time and attention with). There are numerous benefits (practical, emotional, material) to intricate and laborious material engagement. The evidence is anecdotal, vibes based, and also there’s some good old neuroscience in there too. Here is an article which describes some of the benefits of hands-on motor-skill related activity including my current favorite hobby: knitting!

One of the best questions I heard recently, as a tool to shake up our predictable thoughts is: What do you not need evidence to believe? – as a way of asking, can you commit to a practice of needling out the biases and assumptions that are so ingrained you only notice them when they are challenged?

Of course, this question relies on being able to find and trust expertise because it is completely foolish to “do your own research” about nearly everything. Some people, particularly those who hold extremist positions against expertise, are determined that “common sense” is the best solution to every problem. The issue with that is that obviously things change the more you learn about them, in many cases the more complex and contradictory they become. A cursory understanding of a topic gives the illusion of knowledge but cannot replace deep engagement. How a number theorist thinks about numbers is different from how a 10^th grade algebra student might.

So, can we practice sitting in the discomfort of not knowing? Can we look deeper until we really get down to our values and look in depth at the information and sources and keep on digging and allowing our minds to be changed? Can I go to yoga again this week and stay grumpy about it helping me? Yes. We got multitudes baby!!

Here are some things I’ve been consuming that are informing my thoughts. Check them out, let me know what you think.

PODCAST:

Diabolical Lies (this ep is on the politics of sex work and content creation).

• two women who grew up conservative, deconstructing their thoughts and biases and just being cool and honest and smart and funny

BOOK:

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

• so… google is like way more evil than I thought and I already thought a lot…

DOCUMENTARY:

Soundtrack to A Coup d’Etat

• just watch it. do it.

So, here I am unpicking this habit. Remembering how to breathe in and out, gaspingly. Repeating and repeating the winding practice of connecting to myself, connecting with you, and hoping that in some way through remaining curious and devoted to such connection that I may participate in bringing forth (with you) the ways of being together that help us all survive (ideally with our wonder and love intact).

I turned thirty this past weekend. I have been waiting, superstitiously for my thirtieth birthday. Hoping or invoking a turning leaf and giving myself a small of break from self-criticism until then. I allowed myself until that allotted date to be a bit of a mess, to fail at letting go of my held breath, to be some things I am frightened of being—forgetful, self-interested, lost, in shock, desirous, afraid, angry, lazy. I’ve tried to allow myself to not know who I am and to fumblingly figure it the hell out; to think and write about desire; to scare myself; to want what I’ve never allowed myself to want; and to cry in the club. I’m not so sure I have been good at any of these things, which is also freaking frustrating! What the heck!

Turning 30 feels like a cleanse, turning over a new leaf at the decade. I am a bit superstitious that way. Anniversaries have always felt potent. And now, 30 and freezing cold, I am letting a breath out, and it turns out it may be okay that I kind of suck at a bunch of stuff.

*breathe*

As I sit here writing I’ve been watching people walk past this giant window, sometimes making eye contact, sometimes noting their gait bundled up as they are for this frigid weather. As I contemplate my own unpickings, I try to remember that my curiosity with myself is fundamentally entwined with my curiosity with the world and our interconnectedness. That in paying attention to unsticking myself is never just about myself. I’ve always been terrified that if I think too much about myself I will lose touch with the world, with community, with my ability to know others, and worse yet that I would lose the ability to be of use. As many of you may already know, it turns out you have to put on your own mask before helping others (a metaphor that irritates me because as you may have noticed, I am prideful about my breathholding skill). This year I have had to rely an awful lot on community, and to learn to both ask for and accept help and comfort in a way that scares the living daylights out of me. As it turns out, one of the best ways to convince myself to accept help and community care, is to remember that I am not immune to the neoliberal mythmaking of individualism. That it is my own indoctrination that has prevented me, thus far, and that asking for and accepting help and comfort is an essential part of being in community just as much as offering is.

I’ve been mulling over what will help all of us be useful and good to one another as we move and gather comrades in this dangerous climate. How we may hone our critical thinking skills. How we may practice resisting compliance, resisting going along with things because we wouldn’t want to atrophy into total compliance! How we resist the memification (and normalization) of fascism. How we can practice sincerity and tenderness. How we may welcome friends to practice rebellion with us. How we may hone our survival skills (what skills do you have that you could brush up on or teach? Can you sew or darn? Can you forage? Can you cook? Can you garden? Can you build a fire? Can you translate?) There are so many ways to be useful that I cannot even think of. But I do know that sharing in our skills and our intimacy will be our liberation. I have been thinking of how we can divest from the scarcity mindset that puts us at odds with our friends and neighbors, that has us competing for who can be more cynical and alone.

As I sit here writing a man dropped his glove in front of the window and kept on walking. I knocked on the window, but he didn’t hear. I ran into the street, leaving my computer on the counter, grabbing his glove and I made it to him. It was freaking cold. Score for his hands, and maybe he will pass on that attention and offer an act of care to another stranger. It was no grand gesture, but gosh the number of times people have looked out for me or for others near me sure makes it easy to feel good about humanity. And this is the sort of thing I see everyday (especially in a city like NYC where in my experience people tend to look out for one another no matter what the news says). It is common decency (and I love how common decency really is) to go a tiny bit out of your way for another human being. And even better yet, turns out we are social little animals, and it feels freaking great to connect even just for one moment!!!

So, what are some tools you want to share?

Here are a few off the top of my hat:

Reading and writing in longform have been essential tools for me to unpick my own internal resistances and there is plenty of evidence that they are essential tools for practicing critical thinking toward freedom. So, I will continue to read and write and talk about what I am encountering with you all.

Dancing!!! Alone, with people, just more wiggly wiggling!

I have also been knitting pretty nonstop (highly recommend), and the satisfaction of creating a warm blanket or garment is unparalleled.

Going to protests (masked!)

Mending things and buying used rather than buying new things.

I can often be found using one of my many library cards and supporting local libraries (wink wink nudge nudge).

Offering cash or food to folks asking on public transit when I have it.

I have worn and will continue to wear a high-quality masks at work, on public transit, and in high traffic areas.

Connecting with local mutual aid networks and grassroots organizing.

And even smaller things. I love to remember how someone takes their tea or coffee. It feels like an opportunity to practice tenderness in connection.

Of course, of course of course letter writing. (Including writing letters to incarcerated folks).

Running after the stranger who drops their glove on the street.

Trying to release my own cynicism when it comes out. Welcoming people who are coming into the awareness of the disaster we are in without criticism.

Everything in my mind comes down to staying both curious and committed to community, and not complying in advance!

Okay here are some books:

The Art of Repair by Molly Martin

Blood in My Eye by George Jackson

Enter Ghosts by Isabella Hammad

Disability Intimacy: Essay on Love, Care, and Desire edited by Alice Wong

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Couplets by Maggie Millner

the complete works of both Octavia Butler and Ursula K LeGuin

I grew up only having to shovel snow when visiting cousins; I spent college in an idyllic town where I could watch flakes lilting from the fully insulated but still romantically shaped windows of a tower; and I now live in a city that plows the streets in an apartment with radiator heating. All this to say I’ve never been subjected to cruelties of winter (aside from a few black ice events which made me grateful for the mandatory falling classes at clown camp) and yet, my second thought when it snows and when it starts to really feel like winter (it was 10 degrees F yesterday) is fear.

It’s snowing Christmas Eve and the libraries will all be closed tomorrow for the holiday which means hundreds fewer warming centers to protect vulnerable people from the cold and wet streets. The reliable places will be closed, and any temporary set-ups are incredibly hard to find online.

Folks often seek shelter from the elements in the subways, because they are some of the very few reliably open spaces. And yet, a man from Long Island (I find this piece of bio extremely relevant) has just been acquitted of murdering a man down and out on his luck on the subway. I have been on the subway hundreds of times with individuals, like the deceased Neely, who have expressed their terror, frustration, discomfort, rage, disbelief at the conditions that they face. Rarely have I ever felt in danger, even when someone has yelled their frustration splittingly in my face. The fact about public transportation is it is in fact public. There is a certain 6^th sense for danger that you develop living in the city for long enough, who it is a good idea to make eye contact and smile to and whose gaze it would be best to avoid etc… This sense requires actual thought and experience, it requires being aware of the circumstances of people, knowing that people do not just randomly yell their frustration, it requires perhaps having had a day so bad you feel like you yourself could yell in the subway and knowing that a person without shelter has had days 1000x harder. Everyone who rides the subway knows that the person yelling isn’t the dangerous person, they are most often a victim as we saw with the murderous Long Islander.

“To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one's own species.”
― Isabel Wilkerson

I think the fear that people feel in witnessing someone signal their distress publicly is actually that we are being made aware of what so many people desperately seek to avoid; that the system is set up to hurt a lot of people while it makes other disgustingly wealthy. People are afraid to see the outcomes of the system, they wish not to witness it so that they can go on soothing their own anxieties through consumption. Folks rarely want to confront our individual (and often collective) impotence in the face of these systems, let alone the knowledge that most of us are one injury, disability, medical bill away from destitution.

Earlier this year police shot into a crowded subway murdering a man over evading the $2.75 fare. Even more brutally, a few days ago a man set a sleeping woman on fire on the F train. Her murderer and many many bystanders (including a cop) watched without intervening to save her life.

My experience of New York has not been marked by witnessing such tremendous communal neglect, such disgust at the suffering of others. In fact, one of the things I’ve loved about living in New York City is the sense of community. Strangers looking out for strangers, certainly neighbors (sometimes too nosily) keeping an eye and an ear out. The doormen who say hi to me at the beginnings and ends of my walk back to the West Side late at night from work on the East side. The regulars at my bar who show me pictures of their children or dogs or play jeopardy with me to keep me sharp while I sling Chablis and a million espresso martinis late on a Friday. I have found a tremendous amount of kindness in this city. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t had my fair share (some might argue more than fair) of intense events, but those have never been the things that have turned me off this city – people entering the subway before anyone can get off and walking through Rockefeller center filled with tourists who have no spatial awareness are a different story.

People here may not always be nice about it, but they will generally help you out, the kind of people who will tell you if you have something on your face. It may sting a bit to hear you are taking a selfie in a “stupid fucking place, like a goddamn idiot” but it could save you getting run over by a horse later. I have only been here for 6 years, and I’ve heard from wiser sources that this sort of “look out for your neighbor” attitude has always been around, some say it changed after 9/11, that people became softer and say hello more, try to find the sweetness in each interaction. This would make sense to me though I am not old enough or long enough lived in this city to determine the veracity of these claims. I have however lived here throughout an ongoing pandemic and have worked in public facing service industry positions for most of my time in this city. So, you could say I have noticed some shifts.

“Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”
― Audre Lorde

I am not sure how to express that all these events are connected, that the state apparatus of violence, the acquittal of Neely’s murderer, and the ambivalence of onlookers during a brutal murder are all a part of a trend of dehumanization and othering that is a direct symptom of rising fascism which has been helped along through the abandonment of public health measures while people are disabled and debilitated in an ongoing pandemic and an active genocide which we have been witnessing through our phones for over year. There are several readily available examples of this growing fascism a few of which I have already shown, but the laundering of state violence through the media apparatus I find incredibly disturbing. One of the most obvious egregious is the Atlantic printing the sentence “It is possible to kill children legally,” which has been defended by its context to an absurd degree. Who might defend such a thing? Possibly you, if you aren’t thinking too much (which would be easy given all the distraction and shades of propaganda we are being fed constantly).

There are times when I feel like a conspiracist saying, “but don’t you see! it’s all connected!” Thankfully, there are some historical precedents to my assertions uncomfortable as they may be. The 1918 pandemic left many people destitute, disabled, and dehumanized. This dehumanization of disabled people allowed the Nazi party to directly target them without too much fuss, beginning the holocaust. Dehumanization of vulnerable and disabled people is a tool of fascism (this includes people made vulnerable through any political efforts including racialization, poverty, anti-trans rhetoric and violence etc…). The normalization of dehumanizing rhetoric (and actions), which is so violently defended with fear as its basis should be combatted at every level. Of course, it’s important to fight dehumanization on a political level, but we also have the obligation to do so internally and interpersonally. We have to be open to hearing from our friends and loved ones that a position we may fully defend and believe in might actually be rooted in propagandistic fear and we might be unwittingly participate in dehumanization, we mustn’t fear confronting our own indoctrination because the worst thing we could do would be to stay stagnant, stay complicit. WE cannot save ourselves or one another by shoving our heads in the sand (or in the endless stream of pithy “content” no matter how much I love scrolling twitter).

Watch out because dehumanization and distraction are everywhere. Even writing this I felt the urge to give some sort of cheery holiday message lest you stop reading. Any time I bring up what might be considered a difficult subject, but is in fact just reality, I notice people turn away and I feel the desire to maintain connection, so I often go quiet. Or friends in new company might laugh off my vociferous opinions as a quirk so as not to “bring down the vibe.” I wonder that it is so frightening to look at reality, and I am concerned that people feel they will not be able to have joy if they experience or witness pain.

I feel the fight in my own mind worrying that through describing these events and their connections (albeit ineloquently) I am alienating you my dear reader and friend. But there is a bee in my bonnet and a tremendous amount of hope in my heart that we together are capable of holding very hard things, and joy, and the energy for the struggle against fascism together. Because we have to witness the horrors in order to know how and what to change and then we have to dance and to laugh during the revolution.

Read a good book of theory. Read about community. Hangout with your community. Confront the propaganda when you see it or even when you somewhat suspect something that smells faintly of dehumanization, even if you just practice flagging it in your own mind. Be kind to people on the subway (bring packs of socks or water bottles or protein bars with you to hand out. Yes, also give people cash). Talk to your family, talk to your friends, for sure talk to your therapist. And if you’re really desperate for an interlocutor, talk to me.

Okay now I’m off to make some persimmon syrup for mezcal sour. Happy snowy Christmas Eve!

“There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don't expect you to save the world I do think it's not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.”

― Nikki Giovanni

Here is Walter pondering why he isn’t being given cheese:

A few years ago, while working a retail job that lent to the acquisition of colorful anecdotes – and through its salacious intensity simultaneously obliterated my ability to recall them – I spent a great deal of company time reading and responding to the New York Times op-ed section. It was my first year in the city and I was feeling lost as to my purpose, but I was acting occasionally and writing prolifically (if angrily), and though I shared little of it I was tending a creative drive and I felt the energy of the people around me (frustrated as it seemed we all were) driving toward the same. Occasionally I return to that writing, mining it for access to that drive even if little of the content itself is salvageable. I wonder, for example, what the energetic 23-year-old Sarah might dive into with Artificial Intelligence, what kinds of questions might they ask of our acquiescence to the ubiquity of AI and its “artistic” endeavors. What must our assumptions become to believe that AI can make art? Or that it might be worth engaging with?

I am pretty sure I know what Fran would say. The most famous clip of her features her contention that most art is bad now because we lost an entire generation of both taste and talent to the AIDs epidemic. Anyone who was good at anything or good at looking at anything was having sex. The arts community, having lost a generation of skilled and talented artists has been floundering ever since, and Fran herself pulls no punches in her critique of the art that has been made since this chasm of talent opened up.

There’s a notion in language learning that you are not truly fluent in a language until you dream in it and until you can joke in it. The tech bros dream of an AI comedian, they dream of an AI storyteller, songwriter, artist, poet, even an AI reader to summarize fiction… They dream of an AI Cyrano that can imbue them with charm and give them access to passion and love and wonder without the effort of looking and listening and breathing the world in. They do not have time for the frivolity of a novel, of art, of learning the context to enjoy these things, they would rather a quick memo/summary of what the “important” parts are (as if the experience itself couldn’t be it). They would like to become important themselves without having to put in the work to become talented or to develop taste (someone else can always curate the bookshelf behind me in my zoom meeting after all). They would like a summary of the essence of being alive so that they can get back to work. All the while the AI machine sucks up all the water. They not only believe in but hope for this neutered version of the human experience while they wile away their lives behind desks in vast complexes that provide all the creature comfort they could ask for. So little resistance, such comfort.

An excess of anything can be dangerous (or as Foucault said, everything is dangerous), and as of late I’ve found the asymmetry of comfort to be a particular danger to creative possibility. Creative possibility itself is so often based on connections; those between audience and performer, reader and author, across mediums, in the humming of a tune that gets stuck inside your head based on the rhythm of your step. Friction.

There is this loneliness epidemic that everyone has been panicking over for the last decade or so, increased by the ongoing (though denied) Covid-19 pandemic. In part, we are afraid of being infected by one another, being changed, that all contact and friction reads as harm when we do not have the tools to distinguish. Connection is dangerous and so art is dangerous, because it might change us and who knows how. So instead, it is easier to think of things in black and white, ease and pain and we must avoid pain (or discomfort) at all costs. So, can art (even not very good art) come from pure and constant ease? What do we lose access to when we have constant ease?

The next set of children behind me crawl all over the rock, telling stories and squawking with laughter.

“Spontaneous laughter breaks through a protective façade, places the body in a vulnerable position, and, since laughter is contagious, has the potential to operate seductively, lure bystanders’ bodies to places their conscious mind may not choose to carry them” (Nuar Alsadir, Animal Joy, 137).

Take comedy, an example of a dangerous medium. Humor is often described as the result of a violation of expectation. Children can be unwittingly hilarious because they do not operate with same baseline assumptions, their observations alone can take us by surprise either through the absurdity of the comment or that it comes from such a young speaker, which can put into question our own position as “adult”. Children are malleable, they observe the world and those observations can catch us by surprise, upend the categories we have so carefully curated and forgotten about.

I think essential elements of humor itself are friction, discomfort, and the unexpected. A joke lands when it twists our expectations, when its teller guides us down a known path and shows us something alien that may have always been there and we shout “aha” in recognition. We see it again, fresh, with new eyes in a different context and we are often surprised to end up where we are, our diaphragms as the indicators of our delayed arrival as they are also on a roller coaster. There is danger to comedy, we can sometimes find something out about ourselves that is uncomfortable, and we can be changed by it. Perhaps the comedian, like Maria Bamford, shares a nearly grotesque savant-like vulnerability with such clownish elegance that we are forced either to condemn her for subjecting us to such honesty or to contend with it in ourselves. Another comedian, a different style, Daniel Sloss, often leads his audience through a long personal story in a night filled with punchlines back around to a moral conclusion (which is generally a variation of: try not to be such a dickhead and hold your friends accountable when they are dickheads). Both of these comedians touch on dangerous subjects from obsessive thoughts to sexual assault and death, but through their engagement with the unthinkable or the unspeakable they have developed loyal audiences who trust them to guide us through the wilderness of danger and humor and place us on the other side, perhaps changed.

Comedy here, humor, is about connections and relation and friction and surprise and recognition. It is pleasure. It is human. Art is so very human, the desire to turn our senses and use them as a tool to better understand or connect with what it is to be human, to be human among humans and animals and machines and ghosts and even fungus.

I am, as you may be unsurprised to discover, dubious that AI could ever make a decent joke. And I am downright against AI created “art”. After all, why bother to look at a piece of art no one bothered to make, something devoid of connection and desire and which has never experienced pleasure, it wouldn’t even be a dead thing but a thing that never lived. I am no sadist who believes that all art should be created by suffering artists, but I do think for the creation and consumption of art a certain tolerance of discomfort and of the unknown are entirely necessary. To allow ourselves to be open to wonder, to be open to laughter, to experience desire or pleasure, we must be vulnerable to the other and to being changed.

So why would we want to take the life out of living? To take the pleasure out of getting good at telling a joke and sharing a laugh with another human? To forgo connection with other people, with the lineage of a piece of art or writing, to lose our connections because they are arduous to maintain and we have chosen ease and comfort? We will be safe from discomfort but we will not know hope, nor pleasure, nor laughter. So I say, practice art and humor, cultivate desire and connection. Let shared paroxysms of the belly foster such pleasurable intimacy that they rival good sex and also have some good sex.