Over more than twenty years of personal independence, patterns will emerge, episodes will recur, dynamics will echo and mirror and reappear. By the time a man is approaching forty, there will, in short, be a legible metre to his life: a fixed rhythm to which he sways, consciously or unconsciously. He will, by this point, have become broadly predictable and largely knowable: both to others and to himself. And for those men who have had the luxury of attending to higher order questions of meaning and purpose and character and destiny, which is to say, the most fortunate and coddled of men, forty is perhaps the first moment where they begin to sense that their lot in life is becoming fixed, which is to say the last moment where comprehensive constitutional change feels like it might still be possible.

I’m focused here specifically on men mostly because I am one, but also because sudden terror at the gradual foreclosure of possibility is a distinctly male tradition, a psychological phenomenon that could only ever occur among those who have never had occasion to meaningfully interrogate their lives or deeply consider the consequences of their actions, which is to say, almost all men, and almost no women.

Men, in general, get so much time and are given so many chances to vanquish their demons and surmount their dysfunction and come to terms with themselves. For many men, the first time it becomes practicable or necessary to perform an honest and probing audit of themselves is sometime around forty — and even later, or never, for many more. To put a finer point on it, men very rarely and in only the most extreme cases become objects of pity much before middle age. Up to that point, so long as a man maintains (or even just tries to maintain) the absolute bare minimum of economic and sexual viability, even the worst behaved or least appealing or lowest achieving or most spectacularly maladjusted man will be treated by most as on his way to something, rather than past the point of no return.

Women however, especially unusual women, are cursed and scorned and condemned and rendered irredeemable at the earliest possible age, for the slightest possible infractions, blasted through the Brat-to-Bitch-to-Slut-to-Ruined Woman pipeline well before the age of thirty — and younger still for the most prodigious brats, bitches, and sluts. They have almost no time and no chance to get it right.

Men glide past the wreckage they have caused, straining to make it out, behind them, beneath them, somewhere in the far rear distance, never looking long enough or hard enough to properly reckon with their role in any of it. Women live in the wreckage.

***

I’m reminded of a classmate from elementary school, a prototypically “bad girl” named Melissa who, all throughout fifth grade, was an object of abject fascination for me and every other student in the class, and a source of almost unimaginable torment for our teacher Mrs. F., a stern matron tantalisingly close to retirement who had found, in a caustic ten year-old with B cups, her match, and very nearly her downfall. From the moment she strode into the classroom as the new girl on a late summer’s day in 1996, Melissa announced herself as a problem with no possible solution. She arrived that first day of school sporting a black satin choker, a full face of makeup, an intricately pinned and clipped slicked-back bob, and a minuscule plaid skirt paired with a cropped white t-shirt emblazoned with the message “Bad Apple,” atop which a sexy anthropomorphised cartoon apple glowered, defying you to ask: “Girl: How Bad?” When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Melissa was deeply fabulous, briefly powerful, and of course entirely doomed.

Her impact on the atmosphere of the classroom was profound and immediate: by only midway through the fall term, Mrs. F. had been placed on administrative leave following an incident where she smashed a wooden yard stick over Melissa’s desk, breaking it in two in a fit of pique. The exact contours of the conflict leading up to this outburst elude me all these years later, but I’m sure it was some version of Melissa being young and vibrant, and Mrs. F. being old and brittle, utterly undone by thirty-five years of contending with successive generations of progressively more brazen little brats and bitches and sluts. She retired several years later and died soon after that.

During Mrs. F.’s absence, Melissa, drunk on power, terrorised with complete impunity a conga line of woefully ill-equipped substitute teachers, none of whom lasted any longer than two days. The mood in the classroom was, I imagine, like Berlin in the early days of 1933: thrilling in a way, but with many ominous portents. Eventually, Mrs. F. returned, and for the next few months, a frosty detente held between the two of them, both having earned, in a way and on some level the other’s respect: they both really went there in the end; game recognise game; etc. Throughout these several months of shaky, provisional peace, Mrs. F., unless outrageously provoked, almost entirely ignored Melissa, and Melissa, now lacking a true and equal adversary, did what all tyrants do in a time of peace after a hard-won victory: torment the weak and powerless for sport. And so, she very quickly trained her considerable cunning on the saddest and most naturally abject of her peers, being, as all brats and bitches and sluts are, deeply socially intelligent and frighteningly adept at spotting and exploiting the most humiliating frailties of others.

She began by spreading a bizarre rumour that a chubby, clumsy, unkempt girl named Tasha ate her own shit, which, however implausible, still proved to be a bell that couldn’t be unrung. Next, she set her sights on a strange and awkward loser named Timothy, initiating a whisper campaign that his months-long reliance on crutches was nothing more than an elaborate attention-seeking gambit, and that his broken ankle had fully healed weeks prior if, indeed, it was ever even broken at all. And finally, she turned her ire to a girl with a mild lisp, Stephanie, rechristening her “Step-on-Me,” a monicker that was all the more devastating because it did in fact resemble the lisp-accented way Stephanie said her own name. The nickname never fully caught on, and quietly, privately, many of us had to admit that it represented something of a bridge too far. Remarkably, stunningly in fact, I was entirely spared Melissa’s wrath. Perhaps for her, the fat, gay, bookish kid whose supple boy-breasts strained against his too-tight Tom and Jerry t-shirt was a limit case for her cruelty: a boundary she knew she couldn’t trespass without sacrificing the very last of her humanity. Even Hitler loved his dog.

The vacuum of power in the weeks immediately following the yard stick incident represented the apex of Melissa’s influence, and it was a slow, steady unravelling from there. First came the lies: the unnecessary and entirely disprovable lies that had the unintended side effect of drawing everyone’s attention to the sadder and more vulnerable aspects of Melissa’s life and biography. It somehow came out that she was being raised by a single father, and that her mother, presumably a bitch, a slut, a ruined woman, dead, or all of the above, wasn’t in the picture. This revelation invited far too many unwanted questions, so Melissa deflected by trying to convince us that her father, too busy and too rich to be bothered with laundry, permitted her to throw out her clothing after a single use and purchase replacements in kind from the trendiest boutique in town, a store called Mariposa whose offerings and therefore clientele spanned the vast and lucrative spectrum ranging from whorish housewives to delinquent pre-teens.

But lies, as they tend to, beget more lies, and even to a bunch of naive and sheltered and deeply gullible ten year-olds, Melissa’s strange tale of perpetual wardrobe refresh defied all logic and crumbled under even the slightest of scrutiny. She insisted that her Dad was so rich that he didn’t care about the expense, and yet multiple people had spotted her coming and going from the rent stabilised apartment complex in the ‘bad’ neighbourhood, just behind the mall where Mariposa was located — what of that? They were just staying there temporarily until their new house, their big new house, was ready, of course. And what about her mother? Where was she, actually? Working, Melissa insisted, at an extremely high powered job in the oil and gas industry. She too was rich, and she too provided funds for the near-daily Mariposa hauls, naturally. But didn’t Melissa wear certain outfits just a little too often? And hadn’t Mariposa stopped stocking certain items weeks and even months before? And wasn’t the “Bad Apple” t-shirt, her prohibitive favourite, looking a little greyed, a little pilled, a little shrunken and creased and threadbare? To these questions, and to so many others, Melissa had no credible, plausible answers. But understanding keenly that she risked becoming an object of pity (no one likes a fabulist, especially not a poor one), she began reaching for other more lurid but less readily verifiable tales of hard partying and hard living — smoking, and drinking, and getting high, and getting fingered by boys from the high school next door, stories that were, sadly, probably the only actual truths she ever offered up about herself.

That spring, Melissa was handed a week-long suspension for ridiculing another student’s indigenous heritage during silent reading hour, and also for wearing a backless halter top while doing so. I’m not sure what proved to be the gravest sin in the eyes of the school administrators — the bigotry, the insolence, or the near-nudity — but I somehow doubt that trafficking in pernicious stereotypes was the decisive offence when meting out Melissa’s punishment. I remember breathlessly recalling the day’s drama to my mother at home that afternoon, being sure to emphasise just how scandalously skimpy Melissa’s top had been, just how shockingly vitriolic her words were, just how much of a bad girl, a bad apple, a fabulously nasty little bratty bitchy slut she really was. But my mom, a reformed bad girl herself who had teetered on the edge of ruin before she could even legally drive or drink (not that that stopped her from doing both, at the same time) was entirely unfazed by Melissa’s antics and just responded: “Huh. I didn’t realise Bernadette was native. She’s so fair.”

Upon returning from her suspension, Melissa seemed different; not chastened exactly, but dramatically less interested in the goings-on of our fifth grade classroom, and dramatically less invested in exercising her power or asserting her dominance. At recess and lunch, she now tended to migrate over to the far back corner of the schoolyard that abutted the “smoking pit” of the high school next door where thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen year-olds would gather to smoke, and drink, and get high, and get fingered, and who thought nothing of doing all those things in front of and alongside a ten year-old girl. She would occasionally resurface to brag about all the smoking, and the drinking, and the getting high, and the getting fingered, but even then, even though it was novel and in that way at least a little seductive, it didn’t strike any of us as anything worth bragging about. Having lost her authority, her credibility, and now her audience, she receded almost entirely from the texture of daily life in Mrs. F.’s class: she was there in body, sometimes, but in spirit, she was always a million miles away, drunk and high in the Mariposa fitting room, deciding which tube top to shoplift next. As the school year wound to a close, everyone simply moved on: Tasha beat the shit-eating allegations, Timothy got back on his feet, Stephanie found a speech pathologist, and Melissa faded to black. Summer came and went, and on the first day of sixth grade, Melissa wasn’t there. No one knew where she went, and no one ever thought to ask.

Years later, when we were both about sixteen or seventeen, I saw Melissa at the grocery store pushing a stroller through the aisles. A small girl, perhaps one-and-a-half or two years old, fussed and squirmed in the seat (already a bad girl, already a bad apple), but Melissa registered none of it. She just shuffled along, scanning the shelves with a haunted faraway look; the sort of look that only comes with the understanding and the acceptance that nothing will ever get meaningfully better and everything will only get meaningfully worse. When I had seen her last, she was still a girl, just barely, but now she was a woman, decisively, in all the worst and most terminal ways. For a moment I considered the possibility that this child might not be hers — perhaps her father had remarried; perhaps her mother had come back from the rigs, back from her walkabout, back from the dead, determined to do it right this time around. But of course the truth was plain to see: she was a bad apple, and she had rotted. Brat. Bitch. Slut. Ruin. The whole awful cycle complete before she could even think to do anything differently; the whole awful cycle already underway for that little girl in the stroller. After all, women and girls don’t get the luxury of diminished expectations, and extenuating circumstances, and second and third and fourth and fifth chances; women and girls aren’t given grace, or compassion, or latitude, or forgiveness; women and girls have to live with the consequences of their decisions, even when they had no other choice.

Consider as counterfactual the story of Melissa’s approximate male analog, a boy named Jerome who joined our class at the beginning of the seventh grade. Tall and lean and uncommonly beautiful, with a mop of tight auburn ringlets, a sweet, slightly gap toothed smile, and a symmetrical smattering of freckles dancing across his high cheeks and his perfect button nose, Jerome caused an immediate stir in the best possible way: boys wanted to be him, girls wanted to be with him, and no one thought to probe his backstory in the slightest, which, with its sensationalist tales of sexual conquest, and petty crime, and orphanhood was at least as dubious as Melissa’s purported history, arguably far more so. But because he was a boy, a tall, lean, uncommonly beautiful boy, no one cared about his lies, no one held him to the things he said, no one judged him by any aspect of his life or circumstances or character or conduct, past or present, real or imagined. Every day was a fresh new day for Jerome, just like every day is a fresh new day for most boys, and most men, unburdened by shame, free from the judgements of others, buoyed by the simple, endlessly validating fact of their own existence.

Jerome wasn’t a good student but he wasn’t a bad kid either: he wasn’t keen or eager or notably kind, but nether was he disruptive, disrespectful, or notably cruel, or really much of anything at all except for tall and lean and uncommonly beautiful, which was then, and would still be now, more than enough to assure his social dominance. The fact that he seemed not to care very much about his power and his sway — not the desperate currying of favour of all the boys, and not the crazed, internecine solicitations of all the girls, who already at this young age, had begun to intuit that to love men is, on some level, to hate other women — only increased everyone’s fascination, only elevated his stature, only made him more desirable to everyone, in every possible way.

Thinking about it now, he was actually quite cagey, and odd, and probably already very damaged by the real backstory that he dared not share, but again, because he was a boy, and a tall and lean and uncommonly beautiful one at that, all of his strange behaviour instantly became coded as good and cool just by virtue of him being the one to do it. When he began showing his dick to some of the other boys, by the logic that governed adolescent social mores in 1998, that behaviour should have been condemned as bad and gay, but because it was Jerome doing it, it only ever burnished his reputation and encouraged everyone else to follow suit: for a season, the most popular thing for the most popular boys to do was get together after school and look at each other’s dicks. Naturally, Jerome’s dick was the best, and the biggest, so much so that one boy, the erstwhile ring leader of the popular group, convinced his mother to let him get a cosmetic circumcision so as to “make it look bigger;” so as to “make it look more like ‘Rome.” His mother quickly agreed to the request: by the logic that had governed her life, it was an entirely sound, sensible, and in fact urgent imperative for her twelve year-old son to have the biggest-looking and most appealing penis possible. Needless to say, she was a ruined women, living in the wreckage.

As the year progressed, Jerome blew his way through every hot and willing girl in the seventh grade. Every Brittany and Ashley and Caitlin queued up gamely for their first-ever humiliation and degradation at the hands of some big-dicked narcissist. So it went: two or three weeks of “dating” followed by a tearful breakup on the soccer pitch, or under the monkey bars, or by the flagpole, always brought on by Jerome’s inability to “commit.” And each time, the other popular girls would encircle Jerome’s latest casualty, cursing him and wishing for his ruin, only for one of those girls in the protective outer ring to turn around and “date” him a week later for two or three weeks, at which point a slightly different configuration of girls would encircle her, and scream and rage, and nothing would ever change, and no one, not least of all Jerome, would ever learn their lesson. The one outlier was the Serbian girl who Jerome “dated” late in the year after all the Brittanys and Ashleys and Caitlins had finally got their fill. She, probably by dint of having escaped a war zone the year prior and/or an inborn Slavic gloominess, somehow possessed the necessary moral clarity and self respect to tell Jerome plainly that he was a piece of shit and then dump him in front of everyone on the playground. It was the only time I saw him blush.

All of which is to say that Jerome behaved badly, perhaps even reprehensibly throughout that year, but he skirted all accountability, and he suffered no consequences. Like Melissa, his tenure at the red-hot centre of things was relatively brief, but unlike Melissa, he never veered into the tragic or the pitiable. He may have been a liar, and a scoundrel, and even a little gay, but he was always afforded the benefit of the doubt. When he eventually disappeared under similarly murky circumstances to Melissa sometime in the eighth grade, everyone noticed and everyone cared. For years afterward, rumours circulated about his whereabouts, and reports would surface every so often of a sighting, of a dalliance, of a hook up, of, even, a full fuck — reports that were never definitively verified, but that always made the messenger, by association, seem just a little cooler, just a little hotter, just a little more like ‘Rome.

Years ago, sometime in my twenties, my curiosity got the better of me and I looked Jerome up on social media. From what I could glean, he seemed to be doing well. His profile evinced an interest in music, art, and travel; his posts were well-written, cogent, charming: evidence, it seemed, of a young life so far well-lived. Most significantly, his boyish good looks had endured the passage to manhood. He had been an uncommonly beautiful boy, and now he was an uncommonly beautiful man: still with the same mop of tight auburn ringlets; still with the same sweet, slightly gap toothed smile; still with the same symmetrical smattering of freckles dancing across his high cheeks and perfect button nose; still with the same — I would presume but sadly can’t confirm — big dick.

That was long ago now, and I have no idea where Jerome is anymore, or what became of him in the years since. Maybe everything finally caught up with him: time, karma, consequence; maybe his luck ran out and his charms fell flat; maybe his big dick was never even that big to begin with. But somehow I suspect wherever he is, he’s continued to do well, and has continued to receive the benefit of the doubt from absolutely everyone, for absolutely everything, even the very worst of it: even for being a liar and a cheat, even for his carelessness and callousness, even for his selfishness, even for his cruelty, even for all the times he’s shown his big dick to people who never asked to see it. He’s probably always known that he shouldn’t do things like that, but more importantly, he’s probably also always known that he can. For a man like him, for a man like that, no one really minds. In fact, they actually kind of like it.

***

But what about me?

I’m not a man like that, with those sorts of charms and that type of charisma, but I’m still a man, and I still have something: something that has induced people over and over again to give me permission, to give me a pass, to give me the benefit of the doubt; something that encourages everyone to treat my failures as always-provisional and my weaknesses as never-binding; something that continually pulls focus from my more fatal flaws and draws attention instead to my virtues, however abstract or under-utilised they may be. But how much more time do I have? How many more chances will I get? When will everyone’s patience finally run out? I’m not speaking rhetorically: I really want to know. A year? Two? Five? Certainly not much more than that. I can’t imagine still doing this at fifty; I can’t imagine still living in and for some hazy idea of my potential; and I can’t imagine still being permitted to do so by anyone around me. If nothing much changes in the next ten years, maybe I’ll still be thought of as a nice man, a good man, a decent man, a man who tries his best, but I won’t be thought of as man on his way to much of anything. At that point, my character will be fixed, and so too will my destiny. Shame: he had so much potential.

Like so many men, especially those who have something, I’ve been afforded years and decades to try and fail and strive and flail and otherwise figure everything out; I’ve been given the longest, clearest, most expansive runway possible; I’ve lived, in so many ways, a charmed life, and certainly, at times, an indulged one. The fact that I’ve as yet failed to do something meaningful and durable with all that good fortune might just be an answer to the question of what will my life amount to?, albeit not one that I’m inclined to accept, just yet. Surely, I barter with myself, my highest purpose, my defining moment, my REAL life is still somehow forthcoming? Any day now.

But eventually the life you have is simply the life you have. If it’s not the life you want, it might just be the life you deserve: the life that is a product of your character; the life that is your destiny. Or maybe you simply ran out of runway. Everyone does, one way or the other. 🍎

Recently, a delightful little furor erupted that was, in so many ways, made just for me. While short lived and of little obvious consequence to anyone who wasn’t already inclined to care about and comment upon such things, which is to say, the very people who created and then sustained the furor itself, it was also one those curiously elastic online skirmishes that can bend to allow almost any possible interpretation, and flex to accommodate every possible type of frenzied overreaction.

For me, it was all quite irresistible, touching, as it did, on many of my most persistent fixations: namely, money, power, fame, image-making, parasocial affinities, and technology as a site for all the strange and funny games of all the aforementioned things to play out. And because the discussions around such subjects tend to be fraught, and because most people inclined to negotiate such things publicly tend to approach the conversation in bad faith, seeking only to air their rigidly formed opinions to either perfectly sympathetic or perfectly hostile audiences, the tenor of this particular furor was predictably breathless and deeply punitive towards the individual at the centre of it all: a generally sympathetic young man whose alleged, perceived, ostensible misstep was judged all the more harshly against the high standards of integrity and authenticity to which he had appeared to hold himself, and to which, perhaps more to the point, everyone else had held him.

So it very quickly became a pile-on, a magnet for mostly dull, mostly rote, mostly flaccid and hypocritical and unconsidered indignation, all heightened by the apparently great surprise that someone like him (pretty good and nice) would do something like that (kinda bad and yucky). As it happens, another one of my most persistent fixations is morally obtuse outrage, so it is perhaps not coincidental that I find myself drawn again and again to the subjects with the greatest potential to elicit flattened and flattening commentary from people who remain wilfully blind to the plainest and most enduring truths about human nature, and who gamely perform their entirely predictable shock and dismay at maximum decibel with minimum nuance. Made just for me.

II.
u can hear it in his voice that his heart isn’t in it

EXT. LONDON STREET - DAY

A bike glides serenely through the streets of London. From the RIDER’S POV, we see his legs, slender but toned, pedalling at a steady but intentional pace.

RIDER (V.O.)
(aloof, drawling)
Okayyy, what is up…

SMASH CUT TO:

POV: strolling along a sidewalk…

SMASH CUT TO:

POV: strolling along a mud caked path…

RIDER (V.O.)
…day in the life…

SMASH CUT TO:

LOW ANGLE: We see the Rider for the first time: a striking young man, classically handsome, with masculine but still delicate features. His raven hair is artfully mussed; pitch black ovoid sunglasses obscure his gaze; a spray of stubble creeps up and around his sharp, square jawline; his sensuous bow-shaped mouth falls open just slightly to reveal a beguiling gap between his two front teeth; and there, on his chin, a faint scar from some long ago trauma. What happened? Who hurt you? Though expressionless, he bears a distinctly mournful aspect. What happened? Who hurt you?

RIDER (V.O.)
I’m on a bike; I’m on the bike.

SMASH CUT TO:

EXT. LONDON PARK - DAY - THROUGHOUT

POV: the CAMERA thrusts forward through dense, sun-dappled, intensely green foliage. Just beyond, a body of water ripples gently: a swimming pond. It’s murky and fetid, but still somehow inviting — like most things in the United Kingdom.

RIDER (V.O.)
I’m in the park.

SMASH CUT TO:

POW: the Rider strolls across a lawn. The grass is dry and sparse; the ground underfoot is mostly sunbaked earth that kicks up little clouds of dust with each step. Summers now are long and hot.

RIDER (V.O.)
I’m alone.

SMASH CUT TO:

POV: the Rider, balancing deftly on his already bare right foot, coaxes off his left sock. He stands on a patch of cool, dry pavement next to his trainers — Margiela Sprinters, artfully soiled; perhaps by regular use, perhaps by design, perhaps both. In any event, they mark him as a man of taste, a man of discernment, a man, potentially, of some means.

RIDER (V.O.)
I’m going for a swim.

SMASH CUT TO:

The Rider relaxes post-swim. A small charm on a thin chain rests in the hollow of his chest: perhaps a family heirloom passed down through generations; perhaps a gift from an ex-lover, its sentimental value undimmed even as the love that once animated it has evanesced; perhaps a cheerful little bauble picked up as an afterthought from a street vendor somewhere in his many travels; perhaps its provenance doesn’t matter at all.

SMASH CUT TO:

POV: the Rider’s wet trunks cling to his thighs; his feet, attractive and well-formed, rest in the grass and rock idly back-and-forth, side-to-side. Passersby pay him no mind.

SMASH CUT TO:

The Rider strolls down a path. His trainers peek out the top of his overfull tote bag, suggesting that he may be walking barefoot. An unexpected but instructive biographical note.

RIDER (V.O.)
I’m in the park.

SMASH CUT TO:

INT. CORRIDOR - LATER

The Rider, stands before a mirror, preening and posing. There’s a minor note of irony to the ritual, but mostly it seems sincere; mostly he seems sincere. His hair, air- and sun-dried, is soft and downy now, while his face is ever so slightly flushed. He is serene, but distant; somehow suspended, somehow outside of time. He clutches the back of his head with one arm and his shirt lifts to reveal a flat, toned, smooth mid-section. He’s been working out, certainly.

MATCH CUT TO:

INT. ELEVATOR — LATER

The Rider stands before a different mirror, in a different outfit: a slinky dove grey silk top that clings appealingly all over. He continues to pose and preen, perhaps with slightly more irony and slightly less sincerity now, but perhaps that’s what the moment calls for.

RIDER (V.O.)
I’m still alone, but now in a new outfit.

SMASH CUT TO:

EXT. LONDON STREET - EARLY EVENING

The Rider weaves through traffic on a different bike, his top fluttering in the early evening breeze. The heat has broken; relief is palpable.

RIDER (V.O.)
Back on the bike…

SMASH CUT TO:

EXT. LONDON CANAL — MOMENTS LATER

POV: the Rider glides along a narrow canalside path, passing a young woman consumed with something on her phone: perhaps decoding an ambiguous message from a lover? Only years later, after suffering through dozens more identical entanglements will she finally come to the realisation and the understanding that all along, in every instance, the ambiguity was the message. Or perhaps it’s not that at all. We’ll necessarily never know.

EXT. LONDON STREET CORNER — MOMENTS LATER

POV: the Rider approaches his HOT FRIEND, a beautiful young woman wearing a beautiful black dress. It’s draped unusually and is dense with unexpected detail. It’s interesting to look at; she’s interesting to look at: one of those achingly chic women of obscure origin who always seems to be everywhere and always seems to know everyone and always seems to have money but never seems to pay for anything. Her name is “Chiara” or something similarly appealing but unplaceable.

RIDER (O.C.)
(faggily, swooning)
Look at youuu!

The Rider clasps Chiara’s shoulders and gives her a twirl to examine her outfit in the round. She swoons at little at being fawned over in this way. Only a little.

RIDER (V.O.)
And here are my chic friends…and…

SMASH CUT TO:

INT. ELEVATOR - LATER

An UNIDENTIFIED GAY MAN jokingly pushes his way through the aforementioned CHIC FRIENDS to reach the Rider who poses coyly at the rear of the elevator carriage.

UNIDENTIFIED GAY MAN (O.C.)
(faggily, sneering)
Step aside!!!

Limp, obliging laughter fills the elevator.

Chiara meanwhile plays along gamely with the bit, but looks somewhat perturbed at being jostled in this way. The force with which the Unidentified Gay Man pushed her aside felt deliberate and intentional: not like a joke, not like a “bit” at all.

RIDER (V.O.)
And…yeah.

SMASH CUT TO:

EXT. LONDON STREET - THE NEXT MORNING

The Rider stands before a block of prim, perfect terraced houses, all gleaming white, the quintessence of London. He sips an iced coffee and flashes a peace sign.

RIDER (V.O.)
L-O-L.
(beat)
I have a headache.

INT. HEATHROW - DEPARTURES - DAY

POV: the Rider retrieves his boarding pass from one of those awful little machines that almost never work. Today, for him, it worked.

RIDER (V.O.)
Anyways: back in an airport…

INT. HEATHROW - PEOPLE MOVER - DAY

POV: the Rider ambles along a moving sidewalk. In his right hand, a classic trio: iced coffee, green juice, smoothie. His left hand meanwhile guides a Rimowa cabin bag, atop which is perched, rather perilously, a Balenciaga Rodeo shoulder bag. A man of taste, a man of discernment, a man, potentially, of some means.

RIDER (V.O.)
Hey Meta: what’s the weather in Ibiza like right now?

BEGIN QUICK CUTS:

INT. AIRPLANE - DAY

POV: the Rider is sat in a cramped and drab economy seat. A dreadful ordeal, every time.

EXT. AEROPUERTO DE IBIZA - TARMAC - MIDDAY

POV: the Rider strides down the airstairs to the waiting ground transport. A dreadful ordeal, every time.

INT. AEROPUERTO DE IBIZA - BAGGAGE CLAIM - MOMENTS LATER

POV: the Rider retrieves his checked baggage from the baggage carousel. A dreadful ordeal, every time.

EXT. IBIZA - COASTAL HIGHWAY - LATER

From the window of a speeding car, a panoramic view of the coastline and the Balearic Sea just beyond. The water is blue and dark and the land is bright and white. The effect — there, here, everywhere you look — is one of tantalising oblivion.

EXT. IBIZA - DAY PARTY - LATER

POV: the Rider weaves his way through a dense crowd of unappealing people, all of whom look as though they are looking for somewhere better to be, not realising, not even beginning to realise that it is their presence, individually and collectively, that is ruining everything. There will never be anywhere better to be so long as they are there.

EXT. BOAT - LATER

The Rider reclines near the stern of a low slung tender boat: he’s being spirited away, on can presume, to a far more appealing, far more fitting setting for a man such as him. The sun beats down, the ocean spray leaps up, he’s where he’s meant to be.

EXT. YACHT - SWIM PLATFORM - LATER

Having made his way to someone’s yacht, somewhere in the middle of the sea — the particulars don’t matter and never will — the Rider stands tentatively at the edge of the swim platform, waiting, waiting, waiting…

Finally, hours later and hundreds of kilometres away, an answer to his query:

META (O.C.)
It’s about 82 degrees in Ibiza right now, clear with a light breeze.

And with that, the Rider finally takes the plunge. A diminutive SPLASH.

RIDER (V.O.)
Sick.

END QUICK CUTS.

EXT. YACHT - SWIM PLATFORM - CONTINUOUS

The Rider resurfaces and with a single, fluid gesture, pushes back his hair and rubs the salt water from his eyes. He stares directly at camera.

RIDER (V.O.)
Okay…
(beat)
Signing off…
(Beat)
Adios…amigos.

The Rider gives a coquettish wave, then, with a decisive kick, launches himself backwards into the endless blue-black swell. His work, for now, is done. #MetaGlassesPartner

RIDER (V.O.)
Lol.

END SCENE.

III.
darling, what the actual fuck is this?

Wait, what?

In brief: Terrence O’Connor, a creative director-cum-influencer best known for his weekly “Cultural Digest” dispatches on TikTok and his difficult-to-succinctly-characterise-but-intensely-buzzy collaborations with artists like Charli XCX, Troye Sivan, Lorde, Haim, and Lena Dunham, recently did a sponsored post for Meta’s new AI Glasses and everyone fucking hated it. A sampling of the response:

I hated it too, at first, for a moment, in a way. Before I had a chance to digest it, or pull it apart for meaning, or question the wisdom of the madding crowd, out for their pound of twink flesh, I did wince, and I did cringe, and I did feel a certain type of sadness that could have very easily tipped over into something graver and more violent. I suppose if I had a choice between this (having to shill for ugly stupid shit in order to live well) and not-this (not that), I would opt for the latter — but I don’t have that choice; none of us do. So I very quickly made my peace with O’Connor’s very understandable choosing of this, and moved on.

To get the dull and predictable part out of the way, given the opportunity, I would almost certainly accept money from Meta: ten or twenty or thirty thousand dollars (or ten or twenty or thirty million dollars) to promote their dumb AI glasses, or virtually any other unappealing, malignant product they could conceivably conjure up. I just would. And I would do it with the full understanding that the product in question and the corporation behind it exists somewhere on the spectrum of quite bad to agent of civilisational collapse, and with the full acceptance of my own complicity in those dreadful machinations. I wouldn’t lie to myself about the implications of my choice, and I would do my best not to lie to anyone else, but neither would I apologise for making an entirely rational play for self-preservation in a deeply irrational and perilous world. I would accept the assignment and I would execute it with, if not pleasure exactly, then at least with a certain cheerful steadfastness: not because I am callous or cruel or selfish or indifferent (entirely), but simply because I could use that ten or twenty or thirty thousand (or million) dollars to live a little better for a little while longer. That’s all. I can’t even promise that I would use the money well or nobly; perhaps I would; ideally I would. Ideally I would take that money, and with the time and space and freedom that it provided, devote myself to creating something beautiful, something worthwhile, something real and enduring, and in that way, transform a bad thing into a good thing. Barring that, I would devote myself to being a kind and warm and helpful presence in the lives of those around me; I would cook for them and care for them and buy them things that they wanted but did not necessarily need; I would make time for them; I would listen and counsel and comfort freely, without the expectation of reciprocity, simply because I could: simply because I had the time and the space and the freedom to do so. Barring that, I would give myself over to benign, hedonic pleasures that benefitted no one but me, but also, hopefully, harmed no one but me. I would eat and drink and travel and shop; I would buy supple leather Balenciaga shoulder bags, and black anodized aluminium Rimowa carry on bags, and ecru nylon Margiela trainers, and sunglasses that didn’t have cameras in them, and so many other wonderful, beautiful things that wouldn’t matter at all and would never contribute to anyone’s wellbeing but my own. And even this I would do happily and without remorse. I wouldn’t feel even the slightest pang of shame or regret at having taken that tainted money from those awful places to promote these terrible things; I would only ever marvel that circumstances had conspired to allow me to earn so much by doing so little, and I would stack it up — my tawdry hawking of some useless gadget — against all the other far worse and more damaging things I might do to survive, and I would feel only gratitude at being one of the very few, very lucky ones.

To get the other dull and predictable part out of the way, I do believe that most people, given the opportunity, would almost certainly make exactly the same decision, on exactly the same terms. They just would. Those who claim they would not, are, I think, lying, not least of all to themselves. I think their virtue is hollow. I think their righteousness is false. I think the people who rage against the compromised and compromising choices of others are generally insulated against the necessity of such choices by a baseline level of comfort that is almost certainly underwritten, somewhere along the line, by something equally monstrous to whatever it is they’re decrying. I think they are overly coddled and underly stimulated and entirely bored, so they seek out friction and adversity in the form of abstractions. I think people like this are naive and idealistic in all the worst and least redeeming ways, which is to say, they are not actually interested in bringing about a better world, only in claiming symbolic victories that neither change nor improve anything for anyone, except, of course, for themselves, through the burnishing of their self-regard. I think for all their passionate chatter, people like this are in fact lazy and apathetic and profoundly hopeless. I think they are the real nihilists, because people only ever cling to dogmas when they have come to believe there is nothing of value left in life, in the world, in other people. I think they have consigned themselves to misery because misery feels good in a way and demands nothing of them except, perhaps, the ritual performance of grievance, which also feels good in a way. I think many of these people are quite simply and quite obviously jealous: I think they wish they were interesting enough, talented enough, clever enough, beautiful enough to be celebrated and compensated for simply existing. I think these people are, for the most part, dull and unoriginal and lacking in personality, character, a point of view. I think they are devoid of that special frisson that marks some people as exceptional just by dint of existing. And lacking all this, but being still so deeply aware of their encompassing mediocrity, they have no recourse but to scream at charmed strangers on the internet so that they might be, if not special or interesting, then at least righteous. But even their anger is not truly their own, only a strange, neutered reenactment of someone else’s deeper, realer rage that they scrolled past somewhere, sometime. I think people like this are terrified of moral ambiguity, as most of us are, but rather than confess to that terror, and attempt to reconcile it, they turn it outward in pointless and silly ways, like excoriating the nice-seeming gap-toothed twink who’s friends with Charli XCX, and who had the temerity, along with the good sense, to endeavour to finance his summer holiday and his art and his life by simply being himself.

IV.
u kno better girlina

About a decade ago, O’Connor’s then-boyfriend, the comedian and actor Benito Skinner, began posting short comedy sketches on Instagram. The sketches took off, Skinner broke out, and they moved to LA to further his career. Shortly thereafter, they met Charli XCX at a party and struck up a friendship. One thing led to another and, eventually O’Connor, who had a background in marketing and photography, started working with Charli in what would become a wide-ranging and still-ongoing creative partnership: shooting the album artwork for her 2022 album “Crash;” masterminding the “Brat Wall';” signing off on the “kamala IS brat” tweet; etc. This association with Charli earned him a reputation as something of a pop star whisperer, which led to more collaborations with more artists, all of which conspired to make him, at a certain point, a famous person in his own right: an influencer of sorts, with around 300,000 extremely engaged, extremely over-identified followers.

I think the intensity of the furor around O’Connor’s Meta post can mostly be explained away by these biographical particulars. To an outside observer, his success seems so uncommon, so unlikely, so deeply fortuitous and entirely circumstantial that it becomes very easy and very tempting to imagine that it is all unearned; that he was plucked from obscurity more or less at random. To accept this logic — that he is the one lucky faggot who stumbled into the right party on the right night and happened to catch the right girl in the right mood — is to immediately arrive at the question and the counterfactual of: why not me? After all, the sorts of people who tend to follow hot gay creative directors on Instagram, are almost certainly the sorts of people who tend to self-identify as or aspire to be hot gay creative directors themselves. I would imagine that most of O’Connor’s followers, however genuinely fond of him they might be, look at him and imagine that they too, given the opportunity to share a cheeky ciggy with Charli, or have a little flirt with Troye, or get real and go deep with Auntie Lena, could manoeuvre themselves into a similarly charmed life. And in this gauzy hypothetical realm, where everything is beautiful and fateful, there are necessarily no uncomfortable choices, no shortcomings of character, no bitter compromises made necessary by the mess of life. Certainly his most vocal detractors are all envious that they have not been similarly smiled upon by fate, but they’re also raging against the puncturing of the fantasy that there is a good and decent and uncorrupted way to do what O’Connor does. They tell themselves that they would do it all the right way, if given the chance. But of course they wouldn’t, and of course they couldn’t, and of course they won’t ever be given the chance.

But I think there’s also an element to the backlash that’s rooted in the particularities of O’Connor’s character, or at least his followers’ perception of it. Plenty of other influencers were conscripted by Meta for this campaign, and the responses to their posts were, if not uniformly positive, then certainly far more muted and far less virulent. But those other influencers — generally Type A, proudly ambitious, openly desirous of status, largely uncritical of existing systems of power, very frequently mercenary, very frequently artless — are, quite understandably, held to entirely different standards. No one expects people like that to remain unmarred by the more sinister forces of commerce or technology because they are so clearly keen and willing players in the whole sordid game. O’Connor on the other hand, with his gentle disposition, projects an air of being serenely above the fray. He seems humble and fun and well adjusted. He seems clever, curious, and nice. He seems sweet and calm and not naturally given over to frantic self promotion. He seems like he listens. He seems like he cares. He seems, in other words, like the sort of person who deserves success but who would typically get passed over in favour of worse and less qualified but louder and more self-important individuals. And if you yourself are someone like this — someone who is quiet and modest and self-effacing but still deeply ambitious; someone who privately conceives of themselves as the centre of things but who lacks the presence, the energy, the force of will to bend the world to them; someone who awaits discovery, who craves anointing, who yearns to be deemed special — then Terry, sweet Terry, offers hope, real hope, that luck and fate may find you yet. How awful then to be confronted with the terrible but obvious reality that his success is not accidental; that he is at the centre of things because he placed himself there; that he is yet another keen and willing player in the whole sordid game.

V.
In closing its still I dont give a fuck summer

The other day, O’Connor did a sponsored post for Poppi, the prebiotic soda brand. A little over two weeks had passed since the fracas around the Meta post, which, to his credit (or perhaps per his contractual obligations) he had offered no comment on, and which, though it remained live, had faded almost entirely from view, subsumed by the many other fabulous things that had happened to him, for him, around him, and because of him in the intervening fortnight.

Ostensibly this new post, the prebiotic soda one, was about something — prebiotic soda, I suppose— but really the subject of the post, like the subject of all of his posts now, was just Terry: shirtless, bronzed, glistening, resplendent, utterly unrepentant, on a beach somewhere in Spain, summer still so far from over.

“We’re so back” one commenter opined. As if we ever left.

That so few people have so much of it, and so many people have so little of it is a genuinely intractable problem that is almost always presented as an entirely straightforward and eminently fixable one — if only someone, somewhere, did something. Once again, quite understandably, we tend to get stuck at the face of things, focusing on the greed and perfidy of the first group and the deprivations of the second, imagining that a quick and common sense recalibration of some master ledger would finally permit the masses to enjoy a sufficiently dignified life, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Mostly left unacknowledged in such conversations is the thing underlying that unequally distributed wealth, which is of course power, which is of course a thing that greatly resists equal or equitable distribution.

Money, to put a particularly dull and sophomoric point on it, is power. It is nothing more than a conceptual token that allows the holder to coerce others in a controlled and mutually agreed upon way. 1 token, 1 can of Coke. 300,000,000,000 tokens, the Coca-Cola Company. The more tokens, the more coercive power. Money, in the way that most people experience it, is simply the ability to marshal resources at scale according to one’s own needs, wants, or whims without the overt use or threat of violence.

But because we remain perpetually stuck at the face of things, the conversations around money tend to devolve into dull and circular prognostications about political expediency and moral urgency while mostly sidestepping any actually useful questions around the pursuit and exercise of power. Why does power always distribute unequally? Why are some people so profoundly desirous of it while others actively spurn it? Who is fit to wield it and who is fit to make that determination? What would a world of perfect equality actually look like? These questions are too thorny, too unanswerable, and lead too frequently to the uncomfortable conclusion that inequality is most probably humanity’s default setting. But because no one really wants to confront that probable truth and tease it out to its logical endpoints, the conversations around money and therefore power almost always become flattened into passionless back-and-forths about taxes and unions and eggs and gas, and no one actually understands or believes most of what they’re saying, but everyone nonetheless feels compelled to agitate for bold action, or counsel prudence and incrementalism, or most of all, stake out some impotent position in the vast and incoherent middle ground. Meanwhile, everything always is as it always was.

Certainly there are mechanisms within the realm of everyone’s imagination by which the immense wealth of the few could be redistributed to the many, and in certain quarters, the failure to do so is always framed as proof of some fatal cowardice rather than treated as the practical near-impossibility that it actually is. Not because we couldn’t tax billionaires into oblivion — we certainly could — but because to successfully execute such a scheme at any meaningful scale and with any degree of competency would require the spontaneous creation of, in essence, a new elite responsible for the conceptualisation, implementation, and ultimately enforcement of this new social and economic order. The power wouldn’t so much disperse as be reconstituted in someone else’s, or perhaps more likely still, something else’s hands. In this more perfectly egalitarian scenario, whatever individuals or entities assumed control of the process of resource allocation would still enjoy a level of control over global wealth that would be functionally, if not conceptually or legally, the same thing as private ownership. I don’t think it’s a failure of imagination to say that someone or something will always be in charge, and that there will always be intense strife between those who wield power and those who are subjected to it. Even in the most utopian of scenarios, we’d all still be playing the same game, just by different rules.

We could, to be sure, entirely remake the world at any point, but such an effort would always necessarily be lead and therefore most probably usurped by those with the greatest will to power, which is to say those with the least empathy and the narrowest understanding of the human condition. People who rise to positions of power in any system are generally highly capable but to some extent morally defective; people who just want to exist happily and enjoy sweet, pure, noble things are generally comprehensively decent but to some extent incompetent. Whatever the system, whatever the circumstances, whatever the scale, there will always be disparities in power: there will always be a ruling class, and it will always be comprised, primarily, of the shittiest people imaginable, inflicting their caprices and vanities on the world simply because they can and because they feel they must, leaving everyone else to fumble along in their preferred version of reality.

This, to me, is all very obvious and uncontroversial and unremarkable. The fact that a.) money is a proxy for power and b.) there is a very particular psychological and characterological profile (mostly shitty and bad) that is drawn to the pursuit and accumulation and consolidation of power should come as no surprise to anyone, and yet it seems to perpetually catch a certain subset of very naive, very dogmatic individuals entirely unawares, leaving them aghast and agog every time. Whenever a critical mass of very rich and very powerful people gather in one place to do the sorts of things that very rich and very powerful people have always enjoyed doing — attending a costume ball on the first Monday of May, for example — a small but vocal minority find themselves overcome with profound incredulity which they generally channel into mostly pointless but also utterly irresistible outrage cycles. They simply cannot believe the shamelessness! The indecency! The excess! The moral rot!

The shamelessness, the indecency, the excess, and the moral rot of something like the Met Gala is abundantly clear, but I just can’t summon the outrage, much less the disbelief at a group of people whose paramount imperative in life is doing whatever they want whenever they want gathering to do just that. You’re free to be disgusted by it, I suppose, but you certainly shouldn’t be surprised — not when they’re gathering every other day of the year in far less conspicuous settings to do far more nefarious things than finance the cultivation and display of exceptional beauty.

The historical precedent for the corruption of art/beauty with money/power is, after all, rich, long, and entirely universal. It is a symbiotic but also deeply asymmetrical arrangement, with the clear advantage almost always enjoyed by the corrupting parties. The Medicis could have survived without Michelangelo, but Michelangelo could never have survived without the Medicis. Similarly, Jeff and Lauren would be fine without Vogue and the Met Gala and the Schiaparelli gowns, but legacy media and the Costume Institute and haute couture as an art form will almost certainly not endure without their patronage, or the patronage of someone just like them or even worse. At least Jeff has a certain swashbuckling joie de vivre and seems to enjoy existing in the world — it’s refreshing, actually, to see a man like that thrill to his big boats and his fast jets and his wife’s juicy giant tiddy-widdies. He’s human after all! At least Lauren is so thoroughly media trained and so tactically congenial that her default stance is always to pretend to care about boring, small people and boring, small things, and however false that interest may actually be, on some level she really wants to care, even though she certainly doesn’t. At least they’re naive and gauche and desperate enough that they can be easily manipulated into spending their money in fun and dumb and random ways like blasting Katy Perry into an infinite vacuum or paying for a party that no one wants them at. They’re pathetic and shameless and still grasping even though they have everything in the world. They’re a presence, a scene, a whole fucking thing. They’re impossible not to have an opinion about. At least they’re compelling.

If the Sánchez-Bezos’ shamelessly transactional patronage of the Met Gala represents a bridge too far for some, I do wonder, in their view, at the risk of being condescending or patronising or flip: what’s the alternative? The most appealing but least likely option is probably a robustly taxpayer-funded public institution that doesn’t rely on billionaire largess, whereby we all get to enjoy unlimited on-demand art and culture and beauty without the tainting forces of capitalism. The least appealing but most likely option is probably that things like the Costume Institute and therefore the Met Gala simply go away because they’re frivolous, and impossible to maintain uncorrupted, and no one actually needs them, particularly not when so many have to go without so much. I can appreciate the sweet idealism of the first option, and understand the brute utilitarianism of the second, but both strike me as even more imperfect solutions than the very imperfect solution we currently have. Hold your nose and enjoy the great gowns, beautiful gowns.

I personally value beauty enough to allow for the ugliness that is sometimes necessary to permit its flourishing. Many others don’t, and that is an entirely intellectually and morally coherent stance to take, albeit, in my opinion, a joyless one. We all stake out our positions. Meanwhile, everything always is as it always was.

***

If I was forced to live a life that I knew was an affront to my own nature; if I had to move through the world not as a person, but as an image, an idea, a parable, an entity; if I had no durable sense of who I was outside of the desires and the manias projected onto me by everyone else; if I experienced life primarily as an amnesiac traveller who had washed up on the shores of some foreign land with no knowledge of where I came from or who I was, other than not here and not this; if I woke up every day feeling first of all confusion and panic and dislocation and alienation, and this sensation never fully left me and was only ever dulled in the face of stranger and more crushing terrors; if I knew that I could never escape any of this, that it was too late for me, that my fate had been decided many years ago, well before I could have consented to any of it; if I had everything in the world except control over my own destiny and if my recompense for this strange and vexing existence was fame beyond all comprehension and wealth beyond all utility, as miserable as I might be, caught in this terrible double bind — so rich that I could do anything, but so famous that I could do nothing — I’d like to think that I would still try to make the very best of it.

I’d like to think that I would be generous, sharing the spoils of my immense good fortune so that others around me might have a chance to build lives that felt, to them, good and real. I’d like to think that I would seek novel and edifying ways to spend my money, buying objects of uncommon beauty, facilitating experiences of transformation and transcendence, patronising art and design and film and literature and thought. I’d like to think that I would be able to find some small measure of peace in ritual, falling in sync with the quiet, private rhythms of daily life. I’d like to think that I would, at times, be able to stow away in some private corner of my psyche where I could feel, even if only partially and provisionally, like the person I could have been and rightfully should have been. I’d like to think that I would greet this life that felt so thoroughly not my own with some degree of acceptance. And I’d like to think I that I would eventually be able to say “I didn’t choose this life, but it is the one I have, and for that, at least, I am grateful.” And I’d like to think I would actually mean it.

And when the time came to be the thing that everyone else needed and wanted me to be — the idea, the image, the parable, the entity — I’d like to think that I would perform that role gamely, and that I would be able understand it as such: a role, a character, a performance of a lifetime. I’d like to think that I would study, and prepare, and tend to every little detail until everything was just right, just so, exactly as it should be. The dress, the hair, the makeup: just right, just so, exactly as it should be. She gets it, they’d say. She understands the assignment. She knows exactly what she’s doing. I’d like to think that I’d get it. I’d like to that I’d understand. I’d like to think that I’d know exactly what I was doing. But I probably wouldn’t. It would probably be just another strange and vexing day in my strange and vexing life. Oh well. At least I’d look amazing.

I want to assure you at the outset that when I say I hated “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” I’m not speaking hyperbolically, or winkingly, or archly. I’m not affecting a stance of grievance, or being wilfully contrarian, or self-consciously trafficking in negativity, or otherwise nosing around for a fresh or controversial or attention-getting ‘take’. My motives, I assure you, are entirely personal and entirely particular and entirely rooted in a desire to more fully account for my own curious reaction to the film. This is not a screed or a hatchet job, though perhaps it is a lamentation, albeit a muddled and entirely tentative one. At any rate, I am much less interested in making a case against this film in particular, and much more interested in understanding the source of my general distress. More specifically, I want to try to begin to understand why: why did this film, which is so much the type of thing that I tend to enjoy — not love, or admire, or seek to emulate, but certainly enjoy — land so thuddingly with me but so warmly with so many others?

Why did seemingly everyone else find it to be a mild disappointment at worst, and a welcome delight at best, and not, as it was for me, an encompassing source of displeasure? Why did it make other people feel light and sweet and easy and nostalgic while it only made me feel the precise opposite: heavy and dolorous and freighted with worry and trapped in a terrifying present, haunted by visions of an even more catastrophic future? The idea that this film might be unusually, upsettingly, powerfully bad in terms of what it does and says and represents seems not to have occurred to many other people: not to the critics who reviewed it warmly, albeit with a few minor reservations, and certainly not to the audiences who rewarded it with many hundreds of millions of dollars (my ticket was comped), and perhaps least of all to the chattering classes who greeted its arrival with reactions ranging from relief (it’s actually pretty good!) to rapture (it saved cinema, vanquished ageism and sexism, wrested control of our most cherished institutions back from the billionaire overlords, and spoke truth to power — all while look great and being the most fun you could possibly have at the movies!)

It’s not that I consider myself to be unusually astute, unusually discerning, unusually possessed of good sense and good taste — after all, I am generally amenable to lowest common denominator fare; I usually find mediocre or even bad art to be entirely forgivable and oftentimes redeeming; I tend to judge art entirely on relative terms — but I am, nonetheless, quite certain, actually entire convinced, that this film is not, per more or less everyone else, excellent, or pretty good, or good with a few qualifications, or merely fine, or even just mediocre: I am quite certain that it is bad. Uniquely bad. Consummately and irredeemably bad. It is bad in a way that made me hate it, and I hate very little, especially in art, and especially in art that is intended to be entertainment. But I did hate it, very much, and very completely.

I hated it. I hated everything about it and everything around it and everything it produced within me. I hated how it looked, felt, and otherwise operated at the level of cinema in particular, and at the level of storytelling more broadly. I hated how it was received, perceived, discussed, and interpreted, and I hated how it slotted so frictionlessly into the warmest and least critical corners of the zeitgeist. I hated how it made me feel, which was bad, and sad, and confused, and unsettled, and piqued on some level that I still have come no closer to understanding. I hated all of that. Relatedly, I also hated the sense of unease that has stalked me for days after the fact, the persistent whisper of “this must mean something more” wafting past me, reminding me of my near-total ability to imagine what that meaning might be, much less articulate it to myself or anyone else. I hated that very much. Even now, days later, having expended considerable effort contemplating the precise shades and contours of my loathing, I feel no closer to any kind of understanding: of the film itself, or of my adverse reaction to it. I hated it, and I don’t understand why, and that makes me hate it even more.

Purely at the level of craft I hated how it was written, directed, acted, shot, scored, styled, costumed, edited and even colour graded, finding it to be cliched, formulaic, lifeless, chaotic, jarring, ugly, tasteless, schizophrenic, and over-bright, respectively, although in fairness, any one of those adjectives, alone or in combination with each other, could be applied to any one of the elements enumerated above. I also hated the pacing which was herky-jerky, and the characterisation which was thin and erratic, and the tone which bounced indiscriminately between “Gossip Girl” and “Michel Clayton,” and I especially hated the dialogue which was wooden and for the most part, purely expository, simply a matter of getting us from here to there as expeditiously as possible, which might have been fine in a film that was somewhat more plot-driven, but “The Devil Wears Prada 2” had no plot, only a random sequence of inciting incidents, each one superseding the next without any explanation, and certainly without any resolution. I also, incidentally, hated the plotting.

On a somewhat more abstract level, I hated it formally, conceptually, stylistically, philosophically, and even politically, finding it to be unrepentantly commercial, devoid of any intentionality, utterly lacking in a point of view, deeply nihilistic but also entirely self-deluding, and utterly resigned to all the most malignant strains of illiberalism, respectively, but once again, one could easily mix-and-match any or all of the above descriptors and find that they apply equally well and equally poignantly to all or any of the aforementioned concerns. I also hated the discrepancy between what was promised — low-stakes escapism — and what was delivered — a meditation on the long slow death of culture, taste, and humanity, both through the toothless, gormless on-screen parable it offered, and through the fact of its own existence. Somewhat relatedly, I hated absolutely everything it had to say (including all the things it neglected to say) about money, power, class, ambition, art, media, technology, the sweep of history, the arc of the moral universe, and the past, present, and probable future states of the human condition. On all of those subjects, the film put forth only the most bizarre and wrong-footed stances, only the most flattened and flattening insights, only the most dangerously naive formulations. But how could it have anything trenchant or worthwhile to say? The film itself is a wholesale product of all the forces in our world that the world within the film is valiantly trying to resist: a design-by-committee machine for profit that whatever its other professed ambitions exists only because the proposition of its existence satisfied the conditions of some spreadsheet somewhere at Disney. I hated that too, almost as much as I hated myself for indulging, even for a second, in the naive hope that it ever could have been any other way.

I also hated that the film professed to care about the death of legacy media, but that it offered no solutions to this conundrum other than bootlicking this or that billionaire in the hopes that some well-timed appeal to their vanity, sense of civic duty (lol), or ultimately, their desire to fuck over their ex-husband will succeed in buying a temporary stay of execution. I hated that the happiest ending this film could possibly summon, the dreamiest of dream scenarios, was that some billionaire’s ex-wife, feeling immense overwhelm at the immense burden of her immense wealth decides on a whim, deus ex machina, to buy an unprofitable media empire because…she likes it when people use nice words to convey good ideas to other people? I hated that this resolution was presented as any kind of a relief or any sort of progress, and I hated that this stupid and too-tidy contrivance was actually the only plausible and grounded element of the entire film: there is almost certainly no viable business model for an institution like Vogue any more outside of being a billionaires’ bauble and plaything. In our world, it’s likely only a matter of time before the crown jewel of media is snatched up for a laughably trivial sum and installed front-and-centre on the already over-festooned tiara of the Alivest Girl in the World — and that, indeed, represents the very best case scenario. On that note, I particularly hated that the real-world counterparts to the movie’s villains are, in the real world, in every way victorious and ascendent: an inescapable and undeniable presence wherever they go, which is everywhere, feted just last night on the First Monday of May, the whole thing bought and paid for with pocket change. And I hated that even though it was so obviously inspired by it, the film had nothing interesting, poetic, or remotely subversive to say about the Mephistophelian pas de trois of Jeff and Lauren and Anna, no counterfactuals or hypotheticals other than the following thought experiment: “Maybe if Mackenzie Scott was more of a fashion girlie, she’d drop 6 or 7 yards of her Bezos Bucks to buy Condé Nast for the absolute hell of it thereby inaugurating a new Golden Age of Journalism and then Plum Sykes could finally get that Pulitzer???”

I also hated that in spite of the many terrible things I have said and could say about it, this film was precision-engineered to be entirely impervious to criticism. To take issue with any part of it, per its many defenders, is to entirely miss the point. It’s fun! It’s campy! It’s nostalgic! And I hated that those were my options: being a drab, humourless, impotent scold, raging on about some unplaceable sense of spiritual rot and slumping into lazy, predictable, faux-populist takedowns of the billionaire class, or being lobotomised. It’s escapism! I escaped nothing through watching this film, and was in fact, throughout its 119-minute runtime, only ever violently confronted with the ugliness and hopelessness and gravity of life in our time. I left the theatre feeling sadder, and more disturbed, and less sure that humanity would endure for my natural lifetime than ever before. I hated that. I also hated that following that experience, my first impulse was to pen some snarky, aggrieved takedown, and I hated having to immediately confront the reality that there’s no market, appetite, or need for that sort of thing any longer: it’s all been said before, and we all ran out of superlatives for how depressing and depraved everything is years ago, and anyways, no one reads anymore, or even really has the capacity to think, which isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon, but at least in the past, the ignorant, illiterate masses could weave, or bake bread, or fuck to completion, or fall into some sort of meaningful alignment with the rhythms of nature. And I hated how even as I was busy cataloguing all the things I hated about this film, both during and after watching it, I could already feel the essential impotence of the gesture; I could already see how taking umbrage at a piece of populist entertainment would, in no small way, be even more hackneyed than the piece of populist entertainment itself; I could already intuit that a critical mass of people needed this film to mean something that it didn’t and to become something that it wasn’t — a source of genuine hope. I hated that perhaps most of all.

I also hated, in no particular order and to no particular end:

• That the clothes were ugly and tacky and unwearable and in no way current and in every way forgettable, except for the aforementioned ugliness, tackiness, unwearability, and datedness, which did rather stick in the mind.

• That Lady Gaga’s cameo was so squandered and so pointless as to be rendered just another weird and improbable and tonally off thing that happened. And then it was over and on to the next weird and improbable and tonally off thing, made all the more weird and improbable and tonally off by its immediate juxtaposition with the weird and improbable and tonally off appearance of Lady Gaga that preceded it.

• That Andy’s new apartment was a bland gut renovation in Nolita with builder-grade finishes, and that they couldn’t even get that detail right: an apartment like that might be soulless and generic but it would still be nice; it would still have Gaggenau appliances and Breccia Violetta countertops, and wide-plank oak flooring and it would still cost at least $12,000 a month which no journalist could ever afford, even if they just got a big promotion to features editor literally overnight

• That Andy’s love interest was an Australian handyman, and that it was left entirely unexplained and unremarked upon that he was somehow living and working in New York. General contractors from the Gold Coast can’t just come to America and set up shop. I needed more information on his immigration status and I never got it.

• That they cast an Australian actor in the role of Andy’s love interest in the first place. Whenever an Australian shows up in an American movie with no explanation or context, it’s always so unsettling, so destabilising, and begs so many more questions than it answers. There are plenty of Australians in the US, to be sure, but not so many that it can just be treated as an unremarkable and unremarked upon feature of daily life in America.

• The brief and pointless contrivance of Miranda having to fly economy: it would never happen, it could never happen, and the categorical impossibility of it ever happening defanged whatever comic potential it might have had as a set piece, which was almost none.

• That I missed Donatella Versace’s cameo, which, to be clear, I didn’t miss because I looked away, or left the cinema, or otherwise broke focus. Even with my eyes trained on the screen for two hours, the film thrust me into such an addled, dissociative state that I was, it would seem, temporarily blinded and did not see, could not see, one of the most recognisable women in the world projected on the 50-foot screen directly in front of me.

• That our greatest living actress was forced to traipse about in high editrix drag on an interminable year-and-half-long press tour to drum up interest in a movie that has no reason to exist at the level of art but every reason to exist at the level of commerce, and that she, our greatest living actress, had to pretend that it was the precise opposite.

• That whatever indignities Miranda Priestly had to suffer in the film, her real-world counterpart has suffered and continues to suffer so many far more humiliating debasements. Whatever sort of Machiavellian phantasm Anna Wintour has come to represent in the popular imagination, the reality is, even after all these years and all that she has accomplished, she is still just a hired hand with a great many masters. Whatever her faults, and they are assuredly legion, I hate that for her. Even she deserves so much more.

That’s all.

But for now, it’s still good to be human and to do human things, and for that reason and in that spirit, I’ve recently been revisiting much of Didion’s work for the first time in well over a decade. Reading her in the middle-to-end of my twenties, I experienced, as many people do upon their first encounter with her, an intense shock of recognition: as though I was reading dispatches from some alternate version of myself — a more interesting and confident and technically accomplished version, of course, but still, she wrote in a register that felt native to me in some way that I had never experienced before and have yet to experience again with any other writer.

Because of this, it was tempting then and remains tempting now to imagine that there is some real affinity between us, that we are plumbing the same depths of feeling and understanding and experience, that we are, her and I, tuned to the same rare and particular frequency. But the infinitely more likely explanation is that it has everything to do with her, and nothing to do with me or anyone else who has ever fancied themselves her acolyte or progeny or stylistic fellow traveller. Her prose is simply ‘sticky’: expose yourself to it, even just once, even just in passing, and you will not only begin to sound like her, you will begin to think like her: you will begin to see the world on her terms and in her light.

Take, for example, this passage from her 1966 essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”:

This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school.

Note the repetition: how the brisk succession of overlapping and interlocking couplets and triplets — this is the, this is the, this is the; without, without; the country, the country; a belief, a belief — becomes almost chant-like: an incantation that propels you forward in the piece.

Note the imagery: how plainly observed banal details — the teased hair and the capris — segue into imagined but more telling ones — the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school — and how the interplay between the obvious appearance of things and their somewhat more concealed true nature tells you everything you need to know about this world and its denizens in fewer than fifty words.

And note finally the subjectivity: how Didion doesn’t announce herself in the first person, how she declines to insert herself into the action, how she never explicitly stakes out her position, and yet, there she always is. There can only be one way — her way — in which to read this scene and understand it. Her judgements, her preoccupations, her biases, her anxieties, and perhaps most of all her humour are writ large across the passage. It is an entirely factual account, strictly speaking: nothing is fabricated or exaggerated, but the facts in questions are details that only she could have noticed, arranged in a way that only she could have fashioned, directed towards an end that only she could have conceived of.

It’s this last point, her subjectivity, that people often get stuck on: because she was such an intensely personal writer, and because she never strove for neutrality or professed to value objectivity in her own writing or anyone else’s, she tends to be held up as an example of an author who was unduly concerned with herself. And I can see why: over the course of her career, she wrote freely and unsparingly of grief and marital distress and medical trauma and psychiatric unravellings and financial strife, and she gossiped and sniped and most of all judged everything and everyone that she found in any way bothersome or dull, which was many things and most people; and above all, she centred herself: things mattered when and because she was the one looking at them.

She is an author whose subjectivity intrudes on everything, but the meaning of that feint is, I think, generally misunderstood. She inserts herself into the discussion because it is necessary, if she is to conduct a truly honest conversation, to disclose her stance as author relative to the subject. Who is she, where is she, from what vantage point and with what presuppositions is she viewing all this? But because she is so compelling on the page, and because she came to be such a singular presence in the popular imagination, it’s all too easy to come away from her writing with the misapprehension that she, in fact, is the point.

When I was younger and somewhat more inclined to romance and self-mythologising, that is precisely what I saw, or chose to see most of all in Didion. The main lesson that I took away then was that if I wanted to be a writer like her, I would need to be as intensely personal and self-focused in my writing as she seemed to be. (Perhaps it’s a lesson I’ve yet to unlearn). By this logic, routine and entirely banal events in my life became freighted with significance, and pregnant with the potential for transcendence. By this logic, leaving one city and moving to another, for example, became a seismic event redolent with meaning not only for me, but potentially for my entire generational cohort. By this logic, it was the project of my life to fashion myself into the most interesting, vital, distinctive version of me and then report back breathlessly from the frontlines of my very own greatest story ever told. We, it seemed to so many of us then, were the point.

I can see now of course that this conception of things — Joan of Malibu, Patron Saint of Self-Actualisation and Chic AF Bi-Coastal Living — was an insipid and juvenile misreading of Didion herself, and even more so her writing, but until I started re-visiting her work with the benefit of no longer being so fucking young and so fucking dumb, that truthfully was my baseline understanding of her meaning. Reading her now, I can see that while Didion is a deeply personal writer, she is not a writer who is particularly interested in or preoccupied with herself as subject. She is interested rather in her own phenomenology — her way of seeing things. Insofar as her own subjective experience of life is the only interpretative framework she has complete and unfettered access to, that is the one she privileges. This may seem like a splitting of hairs, but it’s a crucial distinction: she doesn’t look out at the world to better understand herself, she looks in at herself to better understand the world. Her interiority is a tool to get at the broader understanding, the deeper meaning, the crystalline essence. She is rarely the point.

We read her then and mistook her subjectivity for self-regard. We read her then and imagined that there was some supreme truth hidden within each of us, and if only we looked hard enough, and for long enough, it would reveal itself to us, and it would matter. We read her then and took magical thinking, and telling stories in order to live, and saying goodbye to all that as beautiful promises to be fulfilled rather than the direst of warnings to be heeded. We read her then and dreamt of houses in Malibu and lunches at the Polo Lounge and Corvette Stingrays and famous friends and good taste and bon mots and being old and being young and bearing witness to history and writing its dazzling near-perfect first draft, and it all seemed so wonderful and so vivid and so real: realer than anything any of us had ever experienced or could ever hope to. We read her then and fatally missed the point. Or at least I did.

***

I’ve heard it said that there are two types of writers: those who believe they have something to tell the world, and those who believe the world has something to tell them. I am more so the former. I’ve also heard it said that there are writers who write for the sake of what they have to say, and there are writers who write for the sake of writing. I am more so the latter.

To those categorisations, I would add, or perhaps just qualify, that are, very generally speaking, writers of substance and writers of style and a minuscule minority who are both and a great majority who are neither. For as long as I have been conscious of myself as a writer, and for as long as I have been aware of the overly general but also generally accurate rubrics of substance or style or both or neither that most writers fall under, I have quite happily and without any real qualms considered myself to be a writer of style. Whatever it is that I might be trying to say or even (often) declining to say in a given piece, my primary metric of success or failure is always whether or not it was a pleasure to read.

If the type of writer one is is even is a thing that one can choose, I chose writer of style years ago during college when I first observed in art history seminars that speaking stylishly and amusingly could paper over my near-total lack of comprehension of the dense theoretical texts under examination, and not just in the eyes of my peers, but in the assessments of my professors as well. This was a particularly happy discovery, because I had also begun to experience, around this time and in these rooms, the hard outer limits of my cognitive abilities. Whatever sort of intelligence I possessed, it was not the sort that lent itself to parsing and making meaning from higher order abstract thought. It was the first time that I had encountered a humanistic intellectual pursuit that no amount of time or effort could meaningfully unlock for me.

And this realisation — that my failure to engage with these texts was not a surmountable challenge but a hard-and-fast constitutional shortcoming — really could have been my undoing. But just as I was confronting the possibility that I possessed neither the stamina nor the intellectual fortitude to operate at even the most introductory levels of serious academic inquiry, just as I was forced to face the likelihood that no amount of study or focus was liable to overcome these hardwired limitations in me, just as I was beginning to comprehend the supreme truth that not everything, or even in fact most things, would always be possible for me, I stumbled upon another, perhaps even more supreme truth: that being clever is very often mistaken for being smart, and even when it’s seen for exactly what it is, many (most) people actually prefer cleverness to smartness, and they respond to it, and they reward it.

And so it was for the great majority of my professors that the pleasure of reading my slight but lovely dispatches was entirely preferable to the labour of reading the substantive but effortful attempts of my more serious peers. Throwing my hands in the air and glibly, gleefully admitting intellectual defeat at the hands of Deleuze and Barthes and Foucault, then spending the next eight-to-ten pages on discursive, frequently autobiographical asides consistently yielded top marks, the sole exception being the drab and humourless professor for whom the point that I prematurely declared myself liberated from was still very much the art, architecture, and material culture of Mughal India.

I even managed to win over the head of the department, an especially dour and piqued Frenchman who, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually was still on the barricades of ’68, while in the physical realm, he was consigned to the made-just-for-him hell of shuffling up and down the halls of the crumbling tower block that housed the humanities department at the university perched on the literal and metaphorical far western shore of western civilisation, mumbling in vain about the Society of the Spectacle to rooms of dull, incurious provincial children whose highest aspirations were all of his worst nightmares realised to such a profound and literal extent that it would have been quite poignant if it weren’t so sad for every reason, for everyone involved. But even he found himself so charmed and swayed by my breezy, easy, entirely appealing, entirely evasive ‘scholarship’ that he awarded me an unprecedented final grade of 94 in his seminar, an achievement that handily bested the efforts of my departmental nemesis, a deeply bright, desperately ambitious, deathly self-serious aspiring academic whose rigour, ambition, and cogency was rewarded with a still-impressive but very much precedented 91. That he went on to an illustrious career studying and then teaching at one of the the very best universities in the world and I went on to an ignominious career of commercial bottom feeding and frantic, as yet fruitless creative striving is certainly a point worth considering, but it’s quite beside the one I’m circling here.

And so, buoyed by these early and easy successes, for the first time but certainly not the last, I internalised all the wrong lessons in all the wrong ways, and took this embrace of my cheeky, winking dilettantism as permission to lean into all of my worse impulses and least productive instincts. And to this day, that’s more or less where you can find me: mincing and swaying around, above, beside, and beyond the point, claiming exemption from all the most bothersome details of creative life, and frankly, from all the most bothersome details of life more generally.

I am not the sort of writer who is apt to unveil some hidden truth, nor the kind to draw out the invisible connection, nor the type to scour the margins or probe the underbelly or look askance or divine the telling detail that somehow evaded everyone else. I am simple and predictable and mostly dull in my analyses, but rich and voluble in my explanations. The stating of the things, my stating of the things, is, for the most part, the point.

So I am indeed a writer of style and not one of substance. But what of it? I figured that out long ago; I found peace and clarity and acceptance around who and what I am in the crumbling tower block at the edge of the world in 2006. The question was and remains settled. There is nothing more to say. And yet I keep finding more to say about it; it always seems there’s something more to say.

In light of all this, perhaps the most pertinent question now is not what it means to be a writer of style rather than one of substance, or whether it would be better or worthwhile to try and be a little more of the latter and less of the former, or whether such a recalibration would even be possible. Perhaps the most pertinent question now is simply why? If the point of writing in general is to communicate something, but I, by my own admission, tend to have nothing in particular to convey, why do I do it?

Why do I write?

Like many writers, I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During my years when I was an undergraduate I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract. In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor.

During those years I was travelling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order, I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.

And there it is. The point of all this. That’s why I write. It’s also, as it happens, why Joan Didion wrote. And finally, for now, there’s nothing more to say.

Of this vast experiment in parasocial contempt, I now find myself asking: What did it solve? What did it answer? What did it produce? The answer to those queries, individually and taken together, is of course resoundingly: absolutely fucking nothing. Our decades-spanning project of sneering self satisfaction projected inwardly and bitter cruelty hurled outwardly at the frequently nude pear-shaped girl who spoke in a grating register has made no meaning, produced no fresh understanding, and vanquished none of the apparently mortal sins she was guilty or at least emblematic of. All along it was just anxious over-identification, and bitterness, and most of all jealousy. We loudly accomplished nothing, and she quietly accomplished everything.

And after all the panic and hand-wringing and impotent attempts at making meaning from her meaning-making, where did we land up? We (I) know nothing more now — about ourselves, about our generation, about the world, about life — than we did back then. We (I) remain vibrationally preserved in amber c. peak-Obama Era when we were all lightly online and heavily self-mythologising, and both modes of being still felt entirely pregnant with the most delicious sort of possibility. We (I) have flailed, stagnated, and consummately failed to launch, all the while imagining that deliverance from our problems lay in the fevered denunciation and ritual flogging of a woman whose only real sin was and is “having the temerity to be talented when so many other people, through no fault of their own, are not.”

To this day, the only truly honest and cogent explanation anyone can offer to account for the volume and intensity of vitriol that she received is some variation of: she was fat and annoying. Maybe so. But even if you found her to be, as a baseline, unlikeable and unfuckable (either or both), and considered those perceived deficiencies to be scornable, punishable offences, the fact that she managed to so handily surmount both impediments — still surely among the greatest handicaps that any woman can suffer — is all the more testament to her rare level of talent. Without the benefit of a conventionally appealing face, body, or personality, truly the only explanation left to account for her success is just how fucking good she is at everything she has ever set her mind to.

She is of course a talented artist, but crucially, I think, her gifts extend to a whole constellation of other traits that are typically deficient or missing entirely in people of an artistic temperament. Namely: tenacity, resourcefulness, pragmatism, equanimity, and even, in a certain way, egolessness. It’s one thing to be endowed with an uncommon allotment of raw talent; it’s quite another to be able marshal that potential to productive and indeed, prolific ends. Dunham is successful because she’s a good artist, but she’s also successful because she’s good at getting art made. And that quality — the capacity to actually deliver on whatever potential she had, and to actually leverage whatever advantages she enjoyed — is, I suspect, the true source of most people’s ire.

Most of us, especially those of us who have ever believed, on any level, that we have something crucial and special to convey to the world, routinely fail to realise our potential and serially squander every one of our advantages — to frequently pathetic and sometimes even tragic ends. The set of qualities that make us believe we have something to say are the very same qualities that prevent us from ever actually doing so. She might not be the qualitatively best artist of her generation, but she is quantitatively better at being an artist in the outward-facing sense than just about anyone else. We all hate her for being so good in the one way that matters most of all. At least she’s fat and annoying!

From the moment she shuffled onto our screens and proclaimed herself the voice of a generation — through her fictional on-screen avatar, yes, and hedgingly, sure (“a voice of a generation” — even more fucking brilliant, even more fucking apt) — she was treated less as an actual person and more as a crude assemblage of everyone else’s worst tendencies: a hideous, monstrous, crowd-sourced effigy about which we could all stalk and shuffle, onto which we could all project our least productive, most unresolved insecurities. (At least we were all in it together). Meanwhile, she said she would and she fucking did. Meanwhile, the rest of us, full of all the same ambition but critically lacking some essential gumption, found ourselves stymied and flummoxed at every turn: by money, by power, by institutions, by ourselves. Meanwhile, now we’re old and no one cares. She’s old too, but everyone still cares.

She is the voice of a generation, and not just because she loudly and publicly declared herself as such while everyone else who secretly believed that it might be them was too-timidly nosing around, waiting patiently to be discovered and anointed by who-even-knows-who — some editor at The Awl? She is the voice of a generation because she is a generational talent. It’s tempting (so tempting!) to attribute all of her success to a one-time fluke-y chance-y accident of fate that spiralled out of control and took on a life of its own, or to chalk it all up to her not-inconsiderable nepo credentials, or even to imagine that all of the chatter and furor around her person(a) has artificially inflated the stature of her art, but there are so many other lucky, well-connected, attention-seeking and/or -producing individuals (especially of her/our/my generation) who failed to achieve anything of note; who failed to do anything at all. If my mom had been able to help me get my debut feature into SXSW in 2009, I suppose I might be further along than I currently am, but first I would have had to actually make a really good debut feature at the age of twenty-two, and I’m not sure that any amount of privilege or access would have helped me to do that: then, now, ever. She always had something that made her success a foregone conclusion.

But perhaps on some level she was the chosen one. Certainly, there was always going to be someone like her; some straw man (straw GIRL) for the very first online generation to collectively lose our shit over (in a bad way). History proffered her as tribute and she gamely fulfilled her duty at immense personal cost. Whatever it did mean or could mean to be young and alive then, she captured it, explained it, made art from it, then at exactly the right moment, ended her project and mostly went away until she felt like coming back — on her own terms this time. She had the first, best, and last word on all of it. It could have been any one of us, but it wasn’t. It was her. It was always her.

I’ll be done by the end of the year, at the absolute latest! I lied to myself. It couldn’t possibly take any longer than two months! I reasoned, conveniently eliding the tortured, months-long process of extracting several thousand words from myself that each of the eight initial posts had entailed. A post per month! I deludedly chirped, indulging, once again, in the sick lie that this time will be different, even though it never is. But here we finally are. What a year (and four months) it’s been.

At the risk of sounding defensive and spiky and deflecting, my problem (and I do have one) isn’t that I start things and never finish them, or that I divide my attention between too many things, or even that I begin things without a sound idea of what I want them to become and therefore lose myself in infinite refractions of what could or might be… My problem (and it is a problem) is simply that I’m really very fucking slow.

But once again, at the risk of making yet more excuses for myself, I don’t think that my sluggish pace is indicative of a lack of discipline, resolve, or intentionality. I begin with a clear vision of what I want to accomplish, then I show up, diligently and consistently, until the work is done; until it’s as good as I know it possibly can be. Which, for whatever reason, for me, tends to be a really very fucking long time.

This process, this attitude, this way of being (really very fucking slow), is, I’m aware, entirely anathema to the Twin Cults of Efficiency and Productivity that have gripped our culture (More! Faster! Always!), and while I can see certainly acknowledge the limitations of operating in this way (really very fucking slowly), I refuse to see it as a liability (and in fact tend to view it as a virtue). I just don’t believe, for me, that embracing the imperatives of More! Faster! Always! would actually produce success; at least not any version of success I consider worth having. So where does that leave me? And with what? Less! Slower! Sometimes! I guess?

Anyways —

For me, 2025 was a long year. Almost all of the things that would come to define the year emerged in late 2024, and are either still actively playing out, or are only just beginning to resolve, settle, and give way to something new. Perhaps it’s all just some elaborate post-rationalising hallucination, but the last sixteen months really have felt like a distinct and self-contained chapter. And everything that I wrote during that time, really does feel as though it was, in one way or another, speaking to the same central concern: namely, my failure to live up to my potential (as I see it) and my refusal to give up on the almost mythic, certainly grandiose, quite possibly delusional idea of what my life ought to look like, feel like, be like, and mean.

So in that sense as well, this feels like an opportune moment to revisit these ten pieces: perhaps to better understand this bewildering, maddening, oftentimes miserable period in my life; perhaps to better see myself, and all of my very best and very worst qualities; perhaps, simply, to move on.

And so, without further delay or any additional bitching, moaning, or whinging (don’t tempt me with a good time!), the Top 10:

#10

Wherein I Whinge and Moan and Bitch About The Perils of Being an Artist

Famously the piece that inspired a wellness check from my aunt (“I read it once, then I read it again, then I knew I had to call you.”) this essay is my without a doubt my most difficult: difficult to get read, difficult to write, and now, difficult to revisit.

A pained and painful many-thousands-of-words lament on my failed attempts at creative fulfilment and self-actualisation, it just leaves me (and left others, evidently) feeling sad, bad, heavy, and gravely concerned. That being said, at a basic stylistic and syntactical and even conceptual level, it’s well crafted, well-considered and there are plenty of passages that, in a vacuum, I would consider among the stronger pieces of writing I’ve produced in recent times. At least my misery is stylish and cogent!

But this piece, for all its weaknesses and limitations, really did help me to clarify what, for lack of a better or less nauseating term, my creative raison d’être actually is and ought to be. As precious and naïve as it might sound, I really do want my writing, or anything I put out into the world, to feel more good than bad; to induce more happiness than sadness; to be more positive than negative. That doesn’t mean that I only want to write about good or happy or positive things, like some doe-eyed, slack-jawed, shit-eating, congenital optimist, but I do want the things that I create and disseminate to have a certain lightness of being; a joy; a verve; a calm, cool, level quality that errs on the side of everything was, is, and will be okay, actually.

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

I’m perpetually too busy indexing and categorising and pathologising the movements of those around me to ever fully or un-self-consciously participate in the great drama of life. I’m forever finding myself at the margins of things, looking on, imagining what it must be like down there in the fray, feeling terribly alienated, terribly apart from, terribly other.

#9

The Great Vanderpump Peephole Paradox

Prior to revisiting this piece, I really thought it would land much higher in the rankings: I remember being so delighted with myself at the time: so certain I had done it. But upon re-reading it now, even though it’s good at times and in ways, I just can’t get past its two most glaring flaws: the somewhat banal commentary up front, and the clumsy experimental nature of its bloated back half. Alternately stated: all of it.

It starts out with a perfectly serviceable introduction to the tone, tropes, stakes, and impact of “Vanderpump Rules.” It’s all entirely competent but hardly revelatory: clever and amusing enough, but it decidedly doesn’t break any new ground. I manage to come up with a few genuinely great lines (I always do!), but overall, my analysis feels tepid and anodyne and, shall we say, heavily indebted to all the other professional writers who have already tackled the abject spectacle that this show represents; writers whose expertise, even genius, is high-minded dispatches from the frontlines of vulgarity for upmarket audiences to whom low-brow culture, like poverty, is a curious anthropological phenomenon only ever indirectly encountered in the pages of their preferred cultural digest of record. It’s giving Naomi Fry or Emily Nussbaum or Naomi Fry again, but a decade too late, and not as well considered or insightful or good.

But in my defence, and to my credit, the aim of this piece wasn’t ever to perform some sort of definitive vivisection; rather, my ambition was always to hone in on some utterly incidental detail of the show, and build out a whole elaborate scene study around that non-event. And I did do that in the latter half of the piece…just not all that well. It’s not terrible, but I know there’s a better version out there that could do so much more, so much more compellingly, with the same basic conceit and the same basic elements.

A bit of a swing and a miss, but hey, at least Brittany got her new tits.

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

“You’re a fucking alcoholic!!!” one alcoholic with six weeks of sobriety will scream at another currently drunk alcoholic before breaking down and tearfully confessing that their anger only comes from a place of profound empathy — after all, they too used to be a fucking alcoholic; all those many weeks ago.

#8

À La Recherche Des Merdes Perdues

This is one of my earliest pieces, and while there are certainly moments where it’s clunky and underdeveloped and palpably in search of a point-of-view, I think it holds up, more or less.

My only real quibble with it is the meditations on memory and the passage of time feel a little tortured, a little grasping, a little sophomoric. Looking back on it now, I think it would have sufficed to write a long-form essay about that time Oprah examined a pile of shit live on-air and leave the Proustian ruminations to someone who’s actually bothered to read Proust. But then I wouldn’t have had an opportunity to reflect on my nice friends from high school, or that one tweaky skank from biology class (you were so misunderstood, Stephanie), or that terrible woman at my after-school job with the fried hair and the hormonal acne who bullied me for being gay when I was seventeen. You’re a bad person, Krista. That’s why you always looked like shit.

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

Every day that I could manage, I would watch as Oprah evangelised the cult of self actualisation, and probed the strange folds of the human psyche, and embraced then-fringe identities and communities and ways of being with curiosity and compassion, and conducted deeply humanising conversations with the victims and perpetrators alike of all the strangest and cruelest and most unthinkable vicissitudes of life…which is to say nothing of the more frothy and pulpy and prurient elements of her show and persona: the whiplash of weight loss and weight gain and wigs and code switching and hand clasping and the ecstatic fucking roar of the most exciting fucking thing that anyone’s ever fucking heard in the entire fucking history of the entire fucking world: IT’S. MY. FAVOURITE. THINGS!!!!!!! And all of this madness and spiritualism and pseudoscience and consumerism and good old fashioned American derring-do would somehow coalesce into an intoxicating new secular religion that seemed to me, and to millions of others, to be the surest path to individual fulfilment and collective uplift — as if those two things weren’t definitionally at odds.

#7

I, Like Megan Markle (Sussex, Actually!) Recently Rebranded

By a certain logic, and judged by a certain metric, this piece should rank much higher. It’s tight: perhaps the leanest, most focused piece I’ve written to-date. It’s accessible, digestible, relatable, somewhat timely but also timeless, and personal without being self-indulgent. I also wrote it quickly: in four days, which is, by a considerable margin, the fastest I’ve ever written anything like this. And it shows: there’s a certain ease to it; as close to an off-the-cuff quality as I will ever be able to manage. What it is not, however, is ambitious, daring, novel, or challenging in any way. It’s polished and enjoyable, but slight. Just like Meghan!

In essence, this piece is the very best and most focused example of what I intended this publication to be: medium-form humorous commentary on pop cultural ephemera. What this publication has actually become is, well, I don’t know…but definitely not that. A vast auto-fictional experiment in which an unnamed narrator grapples with his own artistic impotence and ever-looming financial ruin once every three months? If only I could write compact and pithy weekly, or even bi-weekly, or even monthly dispatches, this whole endeavour would be so much further along. But I can’t, and I won’t, so it’s not.

NB: I can’t decide whether it’s fabulous or pathetic or entirely irrelevant that the whole first section of this piece is about my rebrand…which I immediately rebranded. Most likely, as I note, it doesn’t matter, no one cares, and I’ll rebrand yet again whenever it feels freshly urgent to do so.

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

If nothing else, she is the consummate American everywoman: publicly ambitious but privately inclined to leisure; performatively conscientious but constitutionally self-interested; superficially congenial but fundamentally bored and un-caring; and above all, pathologically fixated on the project of her own self-actualisation. What of it? Her and millions of other shiny-haired, clear-skinned, Cartier-bangled women lace up their Golden Goose sneakers every day and tiptoe around the same gossamer cloud of privileged oblivion. Good for them! Or bad for them? It simply doesn’t matter. To try and extract real social, political, cultural or historical understanding from someone like Meghan is like trying to understand nuclear fission by examining a dewdrop on a cherry blossom three seconds after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima: no matter how closely you look, all you’ll see are refractions of looming oblivion, mostly obscured by your own reflection, dancing across the face of beauty.

#6

God is Dead, Time is a Flat Circle, and Lauren Sanchez’s Rock-Hard Bazoongas are the Axis About Which Our Brave New World Turns

Some housekeeping upfront. This piece was originally published under the a different title:

That Bitch Jennifer Aniston Almost Ruined This Essay!
She Honestly Seems Lovely and Actually Really Helped Me to Work Through Some Stuff

Something about that title never sat well with me: it was so chirpy and flippant; so hollow and arbitrary; so not what the piece was actually about. I remember grappling at the time with what to call it, and settling on that name at the last minute because I just needed to call it something and be done with it. But it never felt right; it never entirely made sense. Because while the piece does indeed build up to a discussion of Jennifer Aniston, she, and all that she represents (being a good, kind, sincere person) is ultimately more of a punctuating anecdote than the central thesis.

Reading it back now, it’s so clear that the heart, soul, and comely bosom of this essay is, in fact, the impossibility of satire and the impotence of irony in our time — a trend that is either synecdochically or metonymically or metaphorically or allegorically (I never know which!) linked to the New Mrs. Bezos’ heaving bronzed ta-ta’s. Indeed, eagle-eyed readers may have already noted that Lauren’s fat hard jugs have emerged as one of the more persistent leitmotifs of this publication: each era gets the hero it deserves, if not the one it needs.

With all due respect to Jen — and she really does deserve an immense amount of respect for threading the needle of remaining both publicly and privately sane in the face of a life that should have driven her to madness and depravity long ago — this essay isn’t really about her at all. And so much the better: let’s keep her kind, pure heart decidedly out of the fray. She’s far too good for this terrible, fallen world.

Alive Girl on the other hand…

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

Radical candour is in; subtly and nuance are out. And as for Satire? Shame: she was euthanised last summer on the aft sundeck of Jeff Bezos’ yacht (a mercy killing), and her cremains have been lovingly upcycled into a 20-carat pear-shaped diamond pendant, gorgeously nestled between Lauren Sanchez’s glistening ochre tits. Rest in Power, girl.

#5

Kim Kardashian: Once and For All, the Absolute Last and Final Word (Part 1)

I was so sure this would rank nearer the bottom, because — and I say this with all the love and respect in the world — I really am so done with Kim. Not because I’m sick of her, or because I consider her to be a malign influence, or because I blame her for any of the grotesque sociocultural phenomenons that she has become associated with in the popular imagination. Really, truly, honestly: it’s not her, it’s me. Or rather, it’s us. She hasn’t done anything except for exist, compellingly; all the rest of it? That’s on us.

And in spite of the main gag (The Absolute Last and Final Word (Part 1) — Do you get it? Is it funny? Are you laughing? Do you love me?) I really did, on some level, want and need to be done with her. I really did intend to pen a definitive final take on her, then be done with it. I really did believe that there was nothing more to say. But of course there’s always something more to say.

Here, the broadest possible discussion of Kim’s cultural import is placed within a much narrower and more personal discussion of her impact on me, specifically. Not just what I happen to think of her as a public figure, or symbol, or abstraction, mind you; rather, what she actually means to me. How she has impacted my view of myself; what she makes me feel about my place in the world; the changes she has wrought within me. Really! Truly! Honestly!

And so, when I read this piece back now, I not only see cogent commentary and bracing confessional woven together to pleasing ends, I see a new clarity of vision and a deepening maturity of voice; I see, in real time, myself becoming a better writer and even (this might be a stretch) a better person. And what better or more fitting takeaway could there be from a discussion of Kim than a deepening regard of and for oneself? Goddamnit Kimberly: you’ve done it again.

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

I happen to like Kim’s taste. If I were a hot and sexy billionaire with fat jugs and a snatched waist, I would want to live and dress and be exactly like her. After all, we’ve settled, her and I, on more or less the same constellation of design references and aesthetic inspirations: a compact and rarefied ledger of mostly gay, mostly French, Belgian, and Japanese contemporary design practitioners operating at the highest echelon of institutional Luxury and capital “D” Design. The only difference between us is that she’s in a position to call up whatever French or Belgian or Japanese design faggot her heart desires to order matching mother-daughter leather bustiers, and I’m sitting on my mom’s couch at 5:45 AM on Christmas Eve scrolling through Instagram, trying to find one of the aforementioned design faggots’ boyfriend’s OnlyFans.

#4

Just G!ve Me a Reason to Throw a F!stful of F**kin’ Gl!tter !n the A!r!

I really like this piece, and I don’t know that I have all that much to say about it: it’s amusing, honest, quietly ambitious, and it earnestly endeavours to answer a series of intriguing and (in my opinion) under-considered questions:

• Who are P!nk’s fans?

• What is the nature of their fandom?

• How to account for the discrepancy between P!nk’s immense commercial success and her light cultural footprint?

And I think I managed to, more or less, provide compelling and complete responses to all of those questions. The answers, respectively:

• Walmart People

• Communion with the secular divine

• The snobbish fags who control the means of cultural production don’t fuck with her

This was also my first-ever attempt at a roadtrip narrative, and I think I nailed it. It’s basically “On the Road” but in an Audi Q5, and instead of getting sucked off by a hooker and contracting dysentery, it’s listening to P!nk and daydreaming about rimming an extravagantly fat assed gas station attendant and contemplating whether or not to clandestinely snap a picture of his outrageously straining Levis to send to your boyfriend, but then thinking better of it — you need to keep some things just for you.

And honestly, shout out to all the P!nk superfans: wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I hope you’re happy; I hope you’re good; I hope you’re getting everything you ever wanted.

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

The pleasures of being a P!nk fan are simple, direct, and profoundly uncomplicated. She has an breathtakingly powerful voice that she uses to sing instantly catchy, masterfully crafted pop songs about universally relatable themes of love, self-acceptance, and self-respect. You’re fucking perfect! Tell your ex to go jerk himself off!! Blow me!!! So come-on-and-come-on-and RAISE!!! YOUR!!! GLASS!!! P!nk belts, with crystalline clarity and perfect pitch, all while soaring overhead on a zip line at sixty miles an hour doing backflips in her own personal gyroscope. There is nothing to unpack or interpret at a P!nk concert; it is a pure, visceral experience; a shortcut to the sublime. You leave the world behind, and P!nk leaves it all on the stage: it’s a closed loop. There is no meaning beyond the experience of the experience.

#3

After All of the Striving and Seeking and Self-Satisfied Fuckery…I’m Starting a Substack!

I was entirely prepared to rank this piece last of all. After all, it’s not even really a piece as such, but an introduction; a setting of terms; a necessary bit of administration before the main event. I even designated it as Volume Naught: it’s not meant to be regarded; it’s not meant to be considered; it’s not even really meant to exist.

But reading it now, I was struck, repeatedly, at how clear, focused, and honest it was; how incisive it was about all of my own worst and most persistent foibles; and how utterly prescient it was about how, exactly, all those foibles would come to undermine the stated aims of this publication. From the jump, I knew that that I would find a way to make this all about me. No one can ever accuse me of being insufficiently self-aware!

It’s deeply reassuring to revisit a dispatch from your former self and still feel a kinship. When I read this, I recognise the person who wrote it: it still sounds and feels exactly like me. I’m not embarrassed or perplexed or otherwise alienated by anything I said, sixteen months ago: it still sounds and feels exactly like me. All of my virtues, all of my flaws, all of my hopes, and dreams, and fears, and ravings: it still sounds and feels exactly like me.

Perhaps in a more cynical light, this could be construed as a bad thing: stagnation, regression, a long, slow surrender to all my worst and most dysfunctional tendencies. But I don’t see it like that. What I see instead is someone who has always been remarkably clear about who they are, what they want, and how they intend to go about getting it. And I also see someone who, despite having every reason to doubt himself, disparage himself, and even, perhaps, hate himself, persists in believing that it will all still work out. And that’s nice to see.

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

But I’m not that kind of person; I’m this kind of person, which is to say, a vain, preening, selfish and self-regarding, desperately ambitious but equally self-defeating closet narcissist cursed with the ego of an artist but the temperament of an especially timid civil servant who, because of all these qualities and so many others too numerous and too tedious to enumerate here is still, at nearly forty years old, desperately fucking concerned with the question of his own relevancy.

#2

You’ll Never Believe What ACTUALLY Went Down at Kris Jenner’s 70th Birthday Party!

On a certain level, I really do wish that the premise and the conceit of this piece was that Kris and her ilk are bad and dangerous and morally defective, while I, the Everyman Chronicler of such excesses, am good and innocuous and sufficiently virtuous. It would be so much easier (and so much more appropriate!) to straightforwardly share in everyone else’s disgust at what she represents, and what she abets, and what she does and doesn’t do with her money, power, and influence. But unfortunately, I’m entirely enamoured of her, and the whole foul circus, and I really do desire, on some assuredly bad and dangerous and morally defective level, to be intimately embedded in the whole abominable spectacle. Really!

There’s just something about Kris that tickles me in a very particular way. She activates some part of my prefrontal cortex that makes me want, more than anything, to be a drooling, obsequious faggot cooing and fawning and tittering over whatever EPIC! DIVA! happens to be gliding past at a given moment, saying absolutely nothing of note, doing absolutely nothing of worth, just living and vibing and basking in the megawatt fabulosity of whatever New Best Friend is picking up the check that day. I would gleefully lobotomise myself just for the privilege (and it is a privilege!) of mincing around the frictionless, borderless, amoral, and apolitical dominion over which women like Kris reign supreme.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”

Absolutely. And:

“When someone tells you who they are, repeatedly and at nauseating length in their self-published newsletter, hold space for the possibility that they’re just having a bit of cheeky fun.”

I’m quite sure Maya Angelou never intended or expected or least of all desired for her words to be massaged to suit the egotistic ends of some flippant f-slur living in Blade Runner times (except everything’s ugly and shitty) — but here we all are, and this is what it has come to, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Cheers!

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

And then we’ll all nod and fawn and titter and coo, and then someone, somewhere will ask, just by the by, whether McQueen isn’t, well, um, you know, like…dead? And then Kris will say something devastating and perfect like “I don’t know…does it matter?” And everyone will laugh because it’s funny, and laugh because it’s macabre, and, laugh, most of all, because it’s true: it simply doesn’t matter. Nothing matters in a place like this, to people like us. At this level, at this calibre, at this magnitude, everything in life, including death, becomes an abstraction, a thought experiment, a series of curious inconveniences that happen to other people, but will almost certainly never happen to us.

#1

Jacob Elordi & Joan Didion & That Guy You Blew Once & Everyone You’ve Ever Dated & Anyone Who’s Ever Achieved Anything of Substance, Value, or Note

This was a difficult piece to write.

Some ideas arrive fully formed, or at least coherent enough to grasp at, while others only reveal themselves to you very slowly and very indirectly, only after much tortured rapprochement with other unrelated, most often stupid and bad ideas. But still, you persist! And eventually, nested within some other unrelated, most often stupid and bad thought or gesture, you’ll notice a kernel of something. It won’t make sense to you then; it won’t mean anything to you at the time; but something about it will feel right in a way that none of the other shit and dreck and drivel that you’ve been agonising over has. And so you continue down this path, following the one dim impulse that feels somehow good and right, and gradually, something real and durable and perceptible and graspable starts to come into view: the idea you were seeking all along. So it was with this piece: it took a long time to get there, but I did, and when I did, it all felt worth it.

If the emerging formula for these posts is something like: Diaristic Musings + Cultural Commentary = Existential Succour, then this piece is, I think, the most perfect and complete expression of that gesture to date. Perhaps I lack the objectivity to make an assessment like that, and perhaps this post is, in fact, yet more masturbatory dreck and drivel, but because it is, to date, my most lavish and unrestrained deep-dive into my favourite subject of all — me! — I’ve gone ahead and anointed it The Very Best Thing I’ve Ever Written.

But I really do feel like I got somewhere with this piece: like I finally managed to exorcise something that had been unhappily and unproductively brewing within me for years; possibly forever. And maybe no one cares, and maybe it doesn’t matter, and maybe personal catharsis isn’t actually the point of writing, and maybe writing can only ever achieve transcendence when the author vanquishes their ego, surmounts their subjectivity, and removes themself from view.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. (I hope not!)

Best and Most Instructive Passage:

You want to look like Jacob Elordi, but the other day someone told you that you look like Ralph Fiennes — “a young Ralph Fiennes!!!” they were quick to add, upon seeing the sad shock of recognition on your face. A scant eleven years separate you and Jacob while a vast twenty-four exist between you and Ralph, but the terrible reality is you’ve already crossed that invisible threshold beyond which, in every meaningful way, you are more like a sixty-three year old than a twenty-eight year old. From now on, and for the rest of your life, you will always be closer to the things ahead of you than the things behind you: closer to middle age, closer to obsolescence, closer to death. And in any case, Ralph is in much better shape than you. It’s a devastating comparison in every way.

Having now revisited these ten posts; having reflected on their meaning, their quality, their virtues and their flaws; having considered them as a connected and sequential — if not always entirely coherent — whole, I have three main thoughts:

1.) I need an editor.

I know that I am a maximalist writer. My prose is consistently dense, looping, florid, overwrought, and deliberately over-articulated. My sentences are most often lavishly run-on, overly and/or clumsily and/or incorrectly punctuated, filled with unnecessary enumerations and explications and redundancies and mixed metaphors and double negatives and tense slippages and a whole host of other grammatical flubs and foibles that could very easily be fixed by someone who is not me. I need an editor.

I don’t necessarily want to eradicate my tics and neutralise my affect and sterilise my voice in the interest of becoming a clearer, more palatable, more viable writer, but I do want to present the very best, most considered, least catastrophically error-riddled version of whatever it is that now constitutes my “style.” I don’t especially value or aspire to economy, sparseness, or even clarity (clearly!) in my writing, but I do very much value and aspire to ease, delight, and readability. And I must admit, however grudgingly, that those aims can — somewhat! at times! ever-so-slightly! — be undermined by the unwieldy nature of…this. I need an editor.

It’s neither this, nor that, but rather — in a certain light, in a certain way, if one is inclined to view it as such — the other. So go most sentences I’ve ever written. There’s always some point, and I do always get to it, but first I must negate it, question it, qualify it, expound upon some related but tangential point, and finally circle back through a succession of functionally identical descriptors, modifiers, and attributives, always lovingly separated by Oxford commas, and interrupted at regular intervals by — what else? — a surfeit of m-dashes. I need an editor.

And I refuse to change! Because for me, the joy of writing is found almost entirely in ambling through and around the expressive potential of language, happening upon maximally delightful, minimally efficient ways to say whatever it is that needs to be said, even if, especially if, the thing that needs to be said is of no real consequence. For me, the simplest and least compelling of thoughts (I’m sad! Pay attention to me! Lauren Sanchez has big fat fake shiny tits!) routinely stretch to paragraph-length ruminations that ultimately produce no novel insights, only scattershot reflections on the fact of my own ruminating. I need an editor.

2.) I need a therapist.

Reading these pieces back now, it’s apparent that I’m afflicted by a profound anxiety around the question of my own self-actualisation. In so many ways, overtly and covertly, I keep returning to the same central idea: that there is something I not only want to do, but feel I must do; something — if I’m unconcerned with sounding like an asshole — that I feel I am destined to do. That something, of course, is write. But I don’t just want to write as a hobbyist, or eke out a living in some vaguely adjacent occupation: I want to write — really write — and be a writer — a real writer. But in order to really write and really be a real writer, other people really need to read what you write; other people really need see value in the way you put things; other people really need to tell you, with their attention, and their praise, and most of all, sadly, with their money, that you, uniquely, matter. To be clear, I don’t expect or believe that those forms of external validation will bring me any meaningful or durable happiness, but I do suspect that the type of fulfilment I seek, if achieved, will entail those outwardly-defined markers of success. External validation can’t and won’t make me happy, I know, but I also fear that I will never be fully happy without it. This can’t possibly be a psychologically healthy rubric by which to judge the success or failure of your life; by which to understand happiness; by which to be a functioning person. I need a therapist.

Reading these pieces back now, it’s also apparent that I’m intensely committed to the idea that the path that I’m on is good, right, righteous, necessary, and noble. There is sadness, frustration, fear, disappointment, and weariness writ large across these ten posts, but never self-doubt; not truly. Never a deep and sustained probing of the goals that I have set for myself, or the means by which I expect to achieve them. Never, on any meaningful level, a willingness to entertain the possibility that all of this was a terrible idea and none of it will ever work out. I am apparently so convinced that I am doing the right thing, in the right way, for all the right reasons, that even when I stop to acknowledge the wreckage, the pain, the chaos that following my bliss has wrought, these momentary digressions into accountability and self-censure are always swiftly negated by soaring self-absolution. By my own monstrous logic, it is impossible that the priorities about which I have oriented my life are wrong and bad, because, to me, they feel right and good. I need a therapist.

And reading these pieces back now, what’s most apparent of all is simply a comprehensive failure to cope. These are not the musings of a man who has found balance, harmony, peace, success, or sustainability with much of anything in life. Not with work, not with creativity, not with money, not with family, not with friends, not with love, not with life, not with himself. Being self-aware isn’t the same as being self-actualised; articulating all of your problems isn’t the same as solving them; conducting a one-sided conversation with a tiny, lightly engaged, assuredly equally self-focused audience isn’t the same as growing, changing, or getting better. I need a therapist.

3.) I’m honestly kind of cooking.

Forget the clunky turns of phrase, and the inapt metaphors, and the tortured run-on sentences; forget the glaring technical flaws, and the stylistic excesses, and the inability to advance any thesis outside of Talking About Myself — At Length!; forget the sadness, and the struggle, and the vain existential pleading; forget even the dysfunction and the inertia and the egotism and the toxicity and the endless cycles of self-doubt and self-loathing and self-sabotage. If I’m being honest — really, terribly, mortifyingly honest (and why not be at this point?) — my main takeaway from revisiting all of these pieces is simply how good they actually are. Fuck it: I’m done with modesty. Fuck it: I’m done with self-effacement. Fuck it: I’m honestly kind of cooking.

xx T

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These are behaviours that are, if not shameful or secret exactly, still strange and difficult to explain and even more difficult to justify, and therefore best carried out discreetly: in private, on your own time, during the leftover moments of the day that neither concern nor are owed to anyone else. And while you would never strain to conceal these things, neither would you rush to advertise them. Unless, of course, in advertising them, you realised that you had stumbled across a really rather compelling conceit, one that would tidily frame a discussion that you had been struggling to articulate for weeks, even months. And in this event, where you realised that the broadcasting of all your strange and private rituals might be of some literary utility, you would most likely rush to enumerate them, with bracing honesty, characteristic verve, and and even more characteristic self-effacement.

You might mention, for example, how you oftentimes spend these solitary evening hours reading. You might then carry on to note, casually, but with evident self-satisfaction, how you read, almost exclusively these days, writers who write about writing — your peers, in essence. Writers like Joan Didion, who you’ve always liked; and Janet Malcolm, who you only recently discovered you like because some guy you blew once posted something intriguing about her book “The Journalist and the Murderer;” and Susan Orlean who you always assumed you would like because she writes for the New Yorker and Meryl Streep played her in a movie, and it turns out those are, as you suspected, the only bonafides that actually matter; and Norman Podhoretz, who Janet mentioned somewhat dismissively in her book and who you wanted to like but honestly don’t, probably because his particular brand of self-absorption and grandiosity rings just a little too true; and Norman Mailer, who you actually haven’t read at all, so you can’t say for certain if you like him or not, or whether or not he’s a good enough and important enough writer to look past that time he tried to kill his wife with a Swiss Army Knife, but at any rate, you couldn’t resist the tidy cadence of putting the two Normans together like that, because you, like Susan Orlean (just like Susan!) “[love] the musicality of language, and [delight] in creating a tone and rhythm that [sparks] the reader, even subconsciously, firing them forward in the piece.” You’re not sure if your clumsy pairing of the two Normans constitutes the sort of artful meter that Susan was talking about, but “and Norman Podhoretz … and Norman Mailer” just has a certain sweetness to it that is, to your ears anyways, just a little more pleasing than “and Norman Podhoretz … and Tom Wolfe” — another writer who you pretend to know, and pretend to like, and presume has written extensively about writing, and has perhaps also committed acts of violence against his spouse(s), but you can’t be sure of any of it, and you won’t be sure unless and until you finally get around to reading your mouldering copy of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” which won’t be anytime soon because, among other self-inflicted impediments, it’s currently in a box, on a ship, in the middle of the Atlantic.

You might also mention how other times, you spend these solitary evening hours writing. You might then pause to congratulate yourself, dubiously, of course, for being the sort of person who utilises their solitary evening hours in such a productive, constructive, virtuous way; for being the sort of writer who is so committed to his craft, to his practice, to his identity as a writer that he would gladly and freely give over these hours to such a noble pursuit. But if you’re being completely honest and utterly transparent — and you do always strive to be both — you have to admit, and you have to concede that much of what you’re characterising here as “writing” is in fact not writing at all, but rather, thinking about writing: contemplating and anticipating and envisioning the conditions under which writing would most optimally occur. Because apart from the occasional flash of transcendence and the dangling promise of external validation, the anticipatory phase of writing is almost certainly the very best and most fulfilling part of being a writer. Actually committing to an idea, actually beginning to set down the words to express it, actually persisting at it long enough to happen upon the aforementioned flash, and to earn the aforementioned validation is almost entirely dreadful. Writing is difficult, very frequently boring, entirely private, and most of all, intensely time consuming. But planning to write, intending to write, setting and fixing and adjusting and readjusting the preconditions for writing to occur: that is easy, very frequently thrilling, can be boasted about at length to anyone who will listen, and most of all, offers essentially instantaneous gratification. Marinating in the most preliminary phases of transmitting knowledge, wisdom, beauty, and truth — someday, somehow, whenever you get around to it — is one of the very best feelings there is.

Or you might confess, truthfully but humiliatingly (the truth always is), how most often of all, you spend these solitary evening hours neither reading about writing, nor writing about reading, but instead, lost in idle fantasies of different, better, more perfect future versions of your life and your self. For lack of a better term, you’re manifesting. In search of a more accurate term, you’re delusional. And in these quiet, private midnight hours, you’re even more liable than usual to accept anything — anything at all — that affirms your wishes, that promises salvation, that prophesies your hour of ultimate triumph. In this fevered, desperate state, you’ll grasp at anything — anything at all — that confirms your absolute and unwavering conviction that a different, better, more perfect life is both imminent and inevitable. You consult astrology and tarot and pop psychology and personality tests and even, occasionally, the wisdom of the ancients, slickly repackaged into apocryphal, smooth-brained nuggets of existential succour, scrolled past aimlessly. You’ll latch onto anything — anything at all — that will transmit to you some version of what you want and need to hear most of all: that everything has happened the way it was supposed to; that you are exactly where you are meant to be; that your different, better, more perfect life and self are both tantalisingly close at hand; that there is nothing more to do but patiently wait.

But right now, lying in bed at 9 o’clock on New Year’s Eve, next to your 27 year-old boyfriend who’s asleep, albeit fitfully — thrashing and snoring and choking and whimpering and tearing the covers away from you then hurling them off himself — you’re neither reading, nor writing, nor fantasising about your different, better, perfect life and self. Nor are you thinking about your boyfriend, even though he’s right next to you thrashing and snoring and choking and whimpering, afflicted in sleep by all the same things that afflict him during his waking hours. Nor are you thinking about the year that just passed, or how difficult and long and slow and pointless-seeming it often was, or how it was a year of slumping gradually and passively into second, and third, and fourth choices, and finally into last resorts, or how, over the last twelve months, absolutely everything you did or tried to do felt provisional and temporary and as though you were just biding your time, lurching from one minor crisis to the next to the next to the next, or how, hopefully, with a little more time and distance, this year that just passed will come into focus as a year that decisively ended one thing and confidently began another. Right now, you couldn’t possibly begin to know what might be ending and what might be beginning. Right now, all you can see is what’s what right in front of you. Right now, all you’re thinking about is your upper, inner thigh.

***

In the dim light of your bedside lamp, you suddenly notice these faint striations on the skin of your upper, inner thigh; tiny little creases, normally imperceptible, running diagonally from your quadriceps, terminating somewhere near the hollow between your leg and groin. You pinch a portion of the skin and the striations multiply; the texture is slack and thin: old-looking, to be more pointed and precise. When did this happen? you wonder, even though the answer is clearly: sometime in the last decade. And how?! even though the answer is obviously: the passage of time. And why?!? Even though the answer is simply: you’re forty.

You creep out of bed and sneak off into the adjoining room, a spare room where you migrate to most nights to engage in some or all of your private nighttime rituals: reading, writing, fantasising, and now, idly scrutinising your body. You turn on the lights, and sit down on the bed, and continue your examination: under the harsh overhead lighting, it’s even more clear that time has come for your lower half. Which is upsetting: your legs have always been your best physical attribute. Long and shapely and taut and toned; strong but elegant; impressive; arresting.

Suddenly, a flash: the upper, inner thigh of someone you dated, briefly. “Dated” is perhaps an overstatement: you went on a handful of dates, spread out over the course of a summer, a decade ago. He was older than you — around forty to your nearly thirty — but you always felt like peers. In a few crucial ways, he was a little younger than his years, and you a little older than yours, and at any rate, the age difference was the very last and the very least reason why things didn’t work out. Shortly after Labour Day he ended things, or more to the point, prevented things from starting, but proposed remaining friends. You, having already become intensely infatuated, agreed, wagering that he might just be playing hard to get, and at any rate, the depth of your infatuation was such that the prospect of keeping him in your life in some terrible, constrained way seemed preferable to him not being in your life at all.

Over the next two years of friendship, you cycled through every possible iteration and permutation of torment and pleading and humiliation and self-abasement until finally it became too much: the pain, for you, of limerence, and the tedium, for him, of having to find fresh ways to compassionately reject you on a near-monthly basis.

The following summer, at or near the apex of your infatuation and the nadir of your self-respect, you met up one day to go to the beach. The plan was to bike there, and even though you entirely hated biking, and mostly hated the beach, you enthusiastically agreed, because every invitation from him was an opportunity to indulge in the fantasy of your always-nearly-impending coupledom. It was easy enough to get lost in the delusion: there was something kindred between the two of you that could be construed as something more if you were so inclined to see it as such, which of course you were.

So you were constantly pretending to like the things that he liked, constantly agreeing to do the things that he wanted to do, constantly professing to be the sort of person who liked and even loved all the same things as him. You were greedy for any time together, doing anything at all, and you would rearrange your day, your week, your life just to accommodate him, and his schedule, and his preferences, and his whims. You would cancel on friends, and shirk work obligations, and creep out at dawn from the apartments of lovers who actually wanted you just because he had texted to say that he might be around to grab a coffee that morning. You would fly across oceans to be nearer to him when things seemed promising, and around the world to get away from him when things seemed (and in fact were) hopeless. You would do anything and say anything and contort yourself into any version of yourself that you imagined, or hoped, might induce him to love you back.

On this day that you were to go to the beach, you met up at his apartment beforehand and found him in the hallway, shirtless, kneeling down, repairing something or other on his bike. Even at his age, his body was always so much firmer, trimmer, and leaner than yours. His was a naturally beautiful body, effortless in a way that yours never was and never will be; a body that, left to its own devices, trends towards six-packs, and pelvic creases, and those lovely little lines that look like ribs are but are actually tiny anterior muscles.

And so you stood there in that oppressively hot hallway swooning and yearning and poring over ever inch of his glistening, beautiful, effortless body, memorising the sway of this and the crook of that, not even out of physical desire or attraction, exactly: just yearning. Yearning for the love you thought you felt to be reciprocated in any way.

You love him! you told yourself, and for so long, you convinced yourself that whatever this thing was — this yearning, this desperation, this obsession — must be love. What else could it be?! You would cry, conveniently ignoring all of the most obvious and most literal answers. YEARNING! DESPERATION! OBSESSION! The reality of the situation blared and flashed and paraded before you, taunting you, screaming out for you, defying you to not see it. But still, all you saw, all you were able to see, all you chose to see, was love.

But occasionally, very occasionally, in a few, rare, clarifying moments, you would see things clearly; you would see things for exactly what they were, in the harshest and soberest of terms. And in those rare moments of clarity, you would begin to understand and accept that whatever this thing was between you, it couldn’t possibly be love. Love couldn’t possibly be like this: desperate, frantic, hypothetical, ever-pending, one-sided. As naive and inexperienced and unfamiliar with love as you were back then, and as committed as you were to denying the reality of your situation, you still knew, on some level, that this couldn’t possibly be that.

And in those moments, you would of course feel pathetic and sad and small and as close to nothing as you had ever felt. And even though this terrible feeling made you want to hate him, you never could, mostly because all of his worst traits were all of your worst traits too, and that affinity just made you think you loved him even more. That your shittiest qualities were shared felt to you like some sort of cosmic sacrament rather than what it really was: the chance collision of two similarly dysfunctional people. So you never could attack him on questions of character, because, in essence, you’d just be attacking yourself. And even if you could have somehow sidestepped the hypocrisy of it all, you wouldn’t have wanted to. Because then, as now, you were far too enamoured of your own flaws, far too convinced that they were beautiful and necessary and good, far too certain that they would ultimately prove redeeming. So to see all of your own worst qualities reflected back to you — vanity, judgement, ponderousness, inertia, avoidance — and even to feel them, at times, trained against you…as painful as it was, it was also comfortable, familiar, and in a way, really very nice.

Which is to say nothing of the fact that even then, at the deepest depths of your love-sickness, you were stalked by the possibility that you, actually, were the villain in all of it. Even in your most committed phases of victimhood, you retained some dim sense that perhaps his selfishness and cruelty, as you perceived it, was actually just his unwillingness and inability to accede to what you wanted. In a certain way, in a certain light, you were the selfish, cruel one: pushing and prodding and ignoring clearly articulated but loosely enforced boundaries, and viewing absolutely everything he did or didn’t do through strange and convenient lenses entirely of your own devising.

So because of all this, it was never easy, or really even possible to to find something of substance to dislike about him, which meant that you were left searching for stupid little things to be bothered by, to judge him for, to be repelled and even, ideally, disgusted by. Meaningless things; superficial things; things like the skin of his upper, inner thigh.

Standing there in the hallway that morning, poring over his otherwise youthful and ideal body, you noticed for the first time how the skin on his upper, inner thigh was, at least in this lighting and viewed from this angle, ever-so-slightly slack, and thin, and old-looking. Then you looked down at your own legs: long, lean, shapely, strong. Your quadriceps straining against the fabric of your too-tight, too-short denim cut-offs; your skin taut and tan and luminous; the fine, short hairs creeping up and around your thigh sun-bleached to a shimmering flaxen. You feel a swell of pride, a wave of superiority, a rush of vindication: as though some crucial judgement had been rendered in your favour. He may not love you, and he may not want you, but the skin on his upper, inner thigh is slack and thin and old-looking while yours is taut and plump and youthful, and on that count, and by that measure, you have won and he has lost.

You’re about the same age now as he was then, and you finally understand most of the things that he kept trying to tell you, in one way or another, about people, about life, about love: all the things that you kept insisting you understood but actually didn’t, and actually couldn’t, because you simply hadn’t lived enough yet.

You now understand that people will almost always do exactly what they want to do, and almost never what you want them to do. And even if you can coerce or compel them into doing what you want, their acquiescence will always feel hollow and false and precarious, and will ultimately be so much worse than not getting the thing you thought you wanted.

You now understand that life only really matters, and only really makes sense at the extremes of scale: zoomed all the way out and viewed in the aggregate, or zoomed all the way in and experienced in the most granular, immediate way. Minute by minute; hour by hour; whoever’s next to you; whatever’s closest at hand.

And you now understand that love is not and can never be something that you project onto another person. It can be asymmetrical or coequal, conditional or total, withheld or given freely, but it cannot be willed into existence by one party alone: it must exist, on some level, for both, or it doesn’t exist at all.

So now, a decade later, you finally have some level of understanding and some level of acceptance about the way things are: people, life, love. But you also have slack, thin, old-looking skin on your upper, inner thighs.

And so it is, and so it goes, and anyways, you’re hungry.

***

You slip out of the adjoining room and begin to head to the kitchen to fix yourself a snack. Everything is quiet and dark. You flick on a light and you immediately catch your reflection in the large, tall mirror at the end of the hallway. Without even thinking about it, you’re drawn to it; to you. You can’t explain it but you’re compelled on some sub- or supra-conscious level to go and commune with your likeness. It’s not narcissism, exactly, that drives you, but rather some other strange, terminal form of self-regard that in your case is really rather literal: you simply need to look at yourself. There is some strange compulsion to “check in” on yourself; to make sure, in a way, that you’re still there.

You’ve been joking recently, with an insistence that should make it painfully obvious it’s not a joke at all, that you want to look like Jacob Elordi. More specifically, you want his body: his long, lean, ideal body. Surprisingly enough, you don’t actually want his face. Fine as it is, you’re quite content with the face you have: it’s handsome enough; pleasing; warm; distinctive without being peculiar. And you suspect you’ll age well too — not in the sense of defying the passage of time, but in the sense of being burnished by it: yours is a face that will likely look good, perhaps even better, when it’s a little older. When the very last vestiges of your boyish aspect disappear (any day now!), the gradual coarsening and hollowing out of your features will produce an entirely pleasing result, you think. You hope.

So you don’t want Jacob’s face, not that you could get it even if you did, but you do very much want his body, and that, you reason and bargain with yourself, you could, at least in theory, attain. It is literally, physically possible for you to achieve some reasonable approximation of his long, lean, ideal body. Difficult; unlikely; but still possible.

Your boyfriend keeps reminding you, cruelly but truthfully (the truth always is) that you will never look like Jacob if you keep consuming this much olive oil, and that much cheese, and all of those sweets, and all of those treats, and that glass of wine, and that second glass of wine, and that tiny little top-up oh-sure-why-not. Jacob would never; Jacob could never. Or else he’d look like just like you.

You take off your top and appraise the state of things. More or less, you’re in the best shape of your life: you’re reasonably lean, and decently muscular, and in certain contortions, under certain lighting conditions you have pecs abs and pelvic creases and those lovely little lines that look like ribs are but are actually tiny anterior muscles. And when you clench or flex or otherwise exert yourself, a very pleasing network of vascularisation appears on your arms, including that one vein that runs in a long, straight line along the ridge of your bicep. But in most positions, under most lighting conditions, the picture is rather more grim: diminutive, underdeveloped pecs; long, spindly arms; a flat but still too-soft midsection; too much hair on your chest, back and upper arms, but too little on your forearms; stretch marks on your lower abdomen and flank and in the hollow of your underarms; flakey, inflamed, silver-dollar-sized patches of plaque psoriasis that recently appeared on the small of your back and seem to be expanding by the day.

But still: you feel good most days. Your body is sufficiently strong and ambulatory and free from pain or even any discomfort. Most days, you don’t need to think about the fact of your physical body at all, if you don’t want to: it is merely there, carrying you through the world and through life without fanfare or incident. It is a good, strong, fine body. It is not, however, a body like Jacob’s, and because you are stubbornly and persistently vain and superficial, that discrepancy, however absurd it may be, remains deeply distressing to you.

To try and assuage your insecurities, your boyfriend will often offer some version of the sentiment that your body is merely a container for your brain. You know what he means, and you know what he’s saying, and you know that he’s saying it with love and respect and even reverence, and you basically agree with the proposition that you are primarily a cerebral rather than physical being, but still: it would be nice, you think, if the container for your mind was a little more ideal, a little more finely honed, a little more Elordi-esque.

So you keep mentioning it: your desire, your need, your very real and serious intention to one day look like Jacob Elordi. And even though absolutely no-one has demonstrated a willingness to indulge you on it, you keep dangling the thought into most conversations, on most days, with most people. “Who?” Says your mother, and “Oh?” says your boyfriend’s mother, and “Well…you are kinda tall?” says your boyfriend’s brother. He’s sweet like that.

“I’m on the Elordi Shred…” you winkingly announce to your boyfriend as you add a scoop of protein powder to your frutti-tutti breakfast smoothie, but he doesn’t laugh, mostly because it’s neither funny nor a joke. Because on some level, you really do hope, and you really do believe that a single scoop of protein powder coupled with moderate exercise every other day will get you to a single-digit body fat percentage, which will, by extension, bring you enduring happiness and psychic calm — just like Jacob. But of course it will only bloat and constipate you and leave you so hungry and unsatisfied that you will have no choice but to drink three or maybe four or maybe even five shots of espresso after breakfast so the sharp ache of acidity in your gut can dull the hunger pangs long enough to make it to lunch.

You want to look like Jacob Elordi, but the other day someone told you that you look like Ralph Fiennes — “a young Ralph Fiennes!!!” they were quick to add, upon seeing the sad shock of recognition on your face. A scant eleven years separate you and Jacob while a vast twenty-four exist between you and Ralph, but the terrible reality is you’ve already crossed that invisible threshold beyond which, in every meaningful way, you are more like a sixty-three year old than a twenty-eight year old. From now on, and for the rest of your life, you will always be closer to the things ahead of you than the things behind you: closer to middle age, closer to obsolescence, closer to death. And in any case, Ralph is in much better shape than you. It’s a devastating comparison in every way.

But Jacob. Jacob. Has anyone ever been unhappy, truly, to see him languidly ambling their way? Unreceptive to the things he says in his low, sweet, unassuming cadence? Unmoved by his coy smirk, his rosy flush, his shy downcast gaze? How intoxicating it must be to be able to shift the energy of another person, of a room, of the entire world, just by dint of existing in your physical form. And the older you get, and the further you get from the possibility of ever experiencing that sort of beauty and the power that comes along with it, the more you find you want it. Not because you actually believe it would make you happier in any meaningful way, but just because it would be nice to have your worth be so clearly defined, so outwardly evident, so much more a matter of fact than of opinion and circumstance.

One time, when you were 21, one of your aunt’s friends asked if you had ever done any modelling, and you of course politely demurred and deflected and then proceeded to get extremely drunk and throw up in your aunt’s bathroom hours later, sometime after midnight. Just like a model. Some years later, you recounted this comment to your then-boyfriend: a transparent ploy to extract a compliment from him (you were always transparently ploying to extract compliments from him). “Was she DRUNK?!!?!!!” He shrieked, exaggeratedly (he was always shrieking exaggeratedly at you). She was, you had to concede, but that was hardly the point, hardly what you were getting at, hardly what you had wanted to hear. Your relationship never fully recovered.

Another time, when you were 23, you dated a man who was 43, and he used to call you beautiful, which was sweet and nice, and he really did mean it, but looking back on it now, you realise that most of what he perceived as your beauty was really just your youth. He was beautiful too, with a long, lean, elegant swimmers’ body, and sharp, symmetrical, Nordic features, and sad eyes on an otherwise happy face, and tiny little creases where his earlobe met his jawline, which for some reason was always the most beguiling thing about him to you. But because you were young and he was old, you got to be the beautiful one. Not that you appreciated it, because when you’re 23 you have no real conception of just how finite and fleeting anything is, not least of all, your own youth and beauty. At that age, you might be able to understand the nature of such things on some detached, theoretical, intellectual level, but you won’t actually be able to grasp it. No matter how perceptive, worldly, wise, or mature you might be at that age (and you were none of those things then), you will never be able to fully metabolise the fact that you will not always be this way. To a 23 year-old, age and decrepitude are abstractions and misfortunes that happen to other people, including the future versions of themselves. Not until the passage of time has pulled you sufficiently away from the 23 year-old’s experience of things and shoved you sufficiently close to the 43 year-old’s will you ever understand just how brief but potent youth actually is.

But from your vantage point now, so much closer to being a middle-aged man dating a college student than the other way around, you realise just how willing you would have been, or frankly, might yet still be to let someone half your age utterly destroy your life just for the privilege of basking in their youth and beauty. You didn’t destroy that man’s life back then, but you could have, and given even a little bit more of an opportunity, you almost certainly would have. If only you had been slightly more chaotic and slightly less constrained by shame; slightly more selfish and slightly less concerned with decency; slightly more unstable and slightly less burdened by a general proclivity towards honesty, you really could have ruined everything for him. Not because you would have wanted to, but because that’s just what happens when beautiful 23 year-olds get the chance to play with the hearts of middle aged men who should know better, but never do, and never will.

He very wisely never let you fully into his life or heart, probably because he could see, even through the haze of infatuation, that you were capable of terrible (or at least terribly inconsiderate) things. Things like cheating on him. Things like cheating on him with your doppelgänger. Things like cheating on him with your better-looking bi-sexual doppelgänger: taller, leaner, younger, blonder, thicker hair, smaller nose, bigger dick, fatter ass. Who could resist? And why would they? Even though you knew cheating was bad and wrong, in this instance it felt right and good, and the only explanation you could summon then, or now, is that you were 23, and the novelty and urgency of sleeping with your better-looking bi-sexual doppelgänger temporarily exceeded the power and potency of being perceived as beautiful by a middle-aged man with tiny little creases where his earlobe met his jawline. Tiny little creases that, come to think of it, you also now have.

And so it is, and so it goes, and anyways, you’ve lost your appetite

***

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

You’re back in bed, in the dark, lying next to your 27 year-old boyfriend who’s still asleep. It’s still New Year’s Eve, and you’re still hungry, and you still don’t look like Jacob Elordi, and in your first act of self-loathing for the New Year (why wait?) you’re going to deny yourself sustenance and rather scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll until the hunger — physical, spiritual, existential — subsides.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

The guy you blew once who reads Janet Malcolm is subletting his apartment, again: that’s nice for him, and good for him, and fun for him. You wonder where he’s going? Maybe London for work, or LA for fun, or somewhere else for something else? Somewhere like Berlin, except Berlin isn’t chic or interesting anymore, and he’s someone who’s very much at the forefront of being both. Maybe Marseille? That’s chic. Marseille in the winter? That’s interesting. And there’s his new boyfriend, who’s beautiful; very beautiful; almost too beautiful — but of course there’s no such thing; of course there’s no outer limit to beauty, only more and better and more. But what happened to his husband? Are they open? That’s chic. Are they divorced? That’s interesting. Are they divorced because they were open? That would actually be boring, but it doesn’t matter, and it’s none of your business, and you’re sure everything worked out precisely the way it was supposed to for everyone involved.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

A writer who writes about film and art and literature and aging and fucking and being gay and the intersections therein and thereof wrote something again. You click on the link and scan the first few lines. It’s good. Fuck. You read a few more. Quite good. Fuck fuck. A Few more. It’s excellent, in fact. Most distressingly of all, it reads like something you would have written, could have written, should have written. Fuck fuck fuck. If only you were more disciplined, more enterprising, more ambitious, more focused, more determined, and better connected, you too could (and would!) be writing about film and art and literature and aging and fucking and being gay and the intersections therein and thereof in the New York Times. And he wrote something else. And something else. And something else. And something else. He wrote a lot this year, and it’s all good; quite good; really very good and excellent writing that you could have written and should have written and would have written, if only, if only, if only. But wait: he’s shirtless, and he looks good, and his boyfriend’s there, and he looks good, and they look happy, and their apartment looks cute, and for the first time since you left, you kind of miss New York.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

An actor who used to be a writer is somewhere glamorous with everyone fabulous. He looks good; great; happy; healthy. Is he skinnier than you now? He might be. Fuck. You can’t tell. He’s bundled up in some not-necessarily-nice-but-certainly-interesting ensemble that you could never pull off. It looks cold wherever he is. Maybe Seoul? That’s chic. Seoul for Christmas? That’s interesting. But more pressingly: is he skinnier than you now? You’ll have to wait until he’s naked again for confirmation, which probably won’t be long, because he seems to love being naked: on here, on camera, with others, by himself, really anywhere at all, anytime the circumstances call or allow for it. You envy that about him — his comfort with being naked — along with almost everything else about him. His talent, his success, his fame, his friends, his world, his life, his mind, and now, his body. He’s naked again, and he has lost weight. Fuck. He’s not necessarily skinnier than you, which is a relief, but he does somehow look better than you, which is a blow. Fuck Fuck. His pecs are sharply defined, his arms are brawny, his abdomen is toned, and if you’re not mistaken — and you aren’t — he now has those lovely little lines that look like ribs are but are actually tiny anterior muscles. Fuck Fuck Fuck. Once, early on in the pandemic, before he was famous, he posted something about needing a roommate in LA, and you very nearly responded, and maybe you should have? Maybe if you had, you’d be somewhere glamorous with everyone fabulous with sharply defined pecs and brawny arms and a toned abdomen and those lovely little lines, and you’d all be naked, and it wouldn’t even be sexual, it would just be fun. Unless it was sexual, and that would be fun too.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

A woman you sat next to at a wedding is blonde and in St. Barths. The last you checked, she was brunette and in London: both developments suit her exceedingly well. She’s the sort of person who, through no fault of her own, makes you feel desperately naive and hopelessly quaint. She’s pedigreed; you’re common. She’s a native to money and status and power; you are a stranger in a strange land. Her life’s work is leveraging, or perhaps just maintaining her birthright; your life’s work is bartering and shilling whatever meagre endowments you have in order to transcend your obscure origins and hopefully leave behind a little something more than what you came in with. She’s here, at a wedding like this — a fabulous concentration of money and power and status — because this is her world, because these are her people, because here is where she belongs. You’re here, at a wedding like this, owing to a one-time quirk of biography: because someone who you’ve known for a very long time, someone who spectacularly transcended their own obscure origins, wanted and perhaps needed you there as a kindly talisman from the quaint and naive before times. You were invited to give a toast that night, and it was well received, and afterwards, and for the rest of the evening, strangers kept coming up to you to compliment your words, to commend your delivery, to acknowledge your effort and sincerity and depth of feeling. And maybe they really meant it, or maybe they were just being polite, but at the very least, you left behind a little something more than what you came in with, and that felt like something. Even the woman sitting next to you, so constitutionally impassive and unimpressed, seemed at least a little moved, as did the man sitting to your other side, who you later discovered was Elon Musk’s chief of staff. But now you’re lying in the dark, and she’s blonde in St. Barths, and he’s presumably somewhere, in some version of hell, and in a funny way, everyone’s exactly where they’re meant to be, getting exactly what they deserve.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

A Gay Guy Comedian speaks fondly about the year that just passed. You find it refreshing to hear someone speak fondly about anything anymore; at a certain point it became so customary to preface and qualify discussions of good and nice things with enumerations of other, oftentimes unrelated bad and upsetting things, that you’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to hear someone straightforwardly and unrepentantly comment upon the fact of their own happiness and success. The two comedians interviewing him on their podcast — Another Gay Guy and, as is customary, a Bisexual Woman — seem perplexed by his genial air. Evidently, they’ve had bad years: both are visibly exhausted, limping towards the arbitrary finish line of December 31 where of course nothing will actually finish or start or reset or recalibrate unless they actively choose to finish one thing, and start another, and reset their priorities, and recalibrate their habits, which they could do anytime, but don’t, and won’t, and you can certainly relate to all that. Sensing their dismay, observing their distress, understanding that he’s in imminent danger of losing his audience, the Gay Guy Comedian deftly pivots. “Do you know what quote has been really hitting the spot recently?” He queries. “Telllllll” drawls the Bisexual Woman, somehow even wearier than just seconds before. “Okay, are you ready for this???” he teases. “Zora. Neale. Hurston.” He makes the proclamation with meticulous enunciation, as if each of the three names is a complete thought unto itself. The Bisexual Woman is roused somewhat and starts to nod along expectantly; the Other Gay Guy stares blankly into his laptop camera, perhaps not listening, perhaps unsure whether “Zora. Neale. Hurston.” is the quote in question, perhaps frozen by a poor internet connection, perhaps all three. The Gay Guy Comedian vibrates with anticipatory self-satisfaction for a moment, then finally delivers the inspirational payload. “There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.” The Bisexual Woman’s mouth falls open. “FULL BODY CHILLS” she exclaims. “Why am I tearing up???” The Gay Guy Comedian nods along, gleefully mirroring her astonishment back to her. A beat. “Wait, can you say that again?” the Other Gay Guy asks.

“There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.”

The year that just passed decidedly asked you many questions but provided you with few answers. Perhaps the lack of answers is, in a sense, the answer, but you’re still far too lost in the thick of things to take very much solace in that thought, much less find it clarifying, or motivating, or in any way redeeming. But still, it bears consideration. Maybe all of the not this, and not that, and not now, and not yet, and the quarterly cycles of fresh gambits followed by false hope followed by not very much of anything is the answer to some vital question you didn’t even know you were asking. Maybe what you experienced as chronic failure and unanswered prayers and deafening silence was actually some critical recalibration that is only just now settling into place? Maybe it will all still make sense? Or maybe it just wasn’t your year.

***

Imagining all of that, given all of that, in light of all of that, you might now find yourself wanting to end this off — whatever this was — on a hopeful note, or at least a clarifying one. You might instinctively reach for some final meditation on the year that just passed, or some fresh benediction for the year to come. You might imagine that there is one, final, perfect, redeeming thing to be said that would unify everything else that you have said, or tried to say, with the nearly eight thousand words that precede. You might believe — you might need to believe — that the answer to this strange and sad and confounding year will come to you yet, if only you think a little harder, work at it a little longer, yearn for it a little more. But of course it doesn’t, and of course it won’t, and of course you’ve already said everything there is to say. For right now at least, you have nothing more to offer.

All you have is this:

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.

And you don’t even have that. Joan Didion does. Or did. But it’s nice, actually, to think about how everything’s been said before, better and more completely than you could ever manage, and how nothing ever did make sense, even to the people whose job it was to make sense of everything, and how none of it really means anything at all, except for all of it, if you let it.

And so it is, and so it goes, and anyways, Happy New Year.

It must be noted that I do have plenty of friends in general: friendships that persist across distance and time; that are able to withstand strife and sustained periods of alienation; that are in no way context-specific or dependent; that are intensely bonded and durable; that are the closet thing to a guarantee that one can hope for in this life, and from another person. True friends.

The friendships that I lack in particular at the moment are the casual ones; the situational ones; the friendships of convenience, contingency, and most of all, proximity. The friendships that pad out your schedule, and buttress your emotional wellbeing, and otherwise fill in the gaps that all of your true friends, scattered across the globe and preoccupied with their generally noble and in any case entirely consuming lives, simply cannot tend to day-to-day.

Generally speaking, my tendency has always been to deprioritise friendships like these, and to focus instead on the connections that feel profound and fated and cosmically ordained. In the absence of that intensity of feeling, I tend to not try very hard, or even at all, to nurture and subsequently preserve a friendship. Without an immediate flush of something very near transcendence, I treat the connection, and I suppose by extension, the person, as entirely disposable. For years, perhaps forever, I took these sorts of friendships entirely for granted. Entirely, as it turns out, to my own detriment.

Because we need friendships like these. And not just as some second-best stop-gap measure, but as a necessary component of a full life and sense of self. My grave mistake, repeated serially throughout my adult life, has been to assume that casual or contingent connections are a cheap and inferior version of some more ideal bond, rather than their own specific and necessary thing. As wonderful as it is to be seen clearly, and understood fully, and loved unconditionally by a best friend, or a partner, or a family member, existing as the most honest and encompassing version of yourself all of the time can begin to obscure, and then erode some of your stranger, thornier, more idiosyncratic qualities. And paradoxically, over time, this has a way of making you feel less and less like yourself.

Indeed, there’s something liberating about showing up as a bracketed version of yourself some of the time: not contrived or false, exactly; just limited and particular. There’s such a premium placed on personal authenticity, as though we’re fully independent entities with fixed, context-neutral preferences, prerogatives, standards, and mores, rather than social beings who are constantly moderating their behaviour, subduing their impulses, and otherwise labouring to say or do or be the most optimal, most palatable thing for a given audience in a given situation. Sometimes it’s nice to put on a bit of a show for someone who doesn’t know any better.

But right now, without the opportunity to indulge these stranger, thornier, more idiosyncratic facets of myself on a consistent basis, I’m just the median rendition of myself all of the time: the most honest and authentic version, perhaps, but also the most generalised, and frankly, the most boring. Because in this state, you do start to lose touch with certain parts of yourself; you do start to forget how to relate to different types of people in different sorts of contexts; and you do start to, as I’m becoming increasingly aware as the undifferentiated weeks and months of excessive solitude whip past me, lose your fucking mind.

***

“Did you see the photos from Kris Jenner’s birthday party???” my boyfriend’s mother hisses in a delicious, conspiratorial tone. I look up from my phone and over at her, past my boyfriend who sits between us and who looks at nothing and no one except his bowl of cream of rice, and maybe not even that; maybe he’s actually looking through and past everything, trying to rip apart the fabric of his reality and reassemble the tatters into some different, better life than the one that has found him sitting around the kitchen table with his middle aged boyfriend and his middle aged mother, half-listening to them talk about someone they don’t know and likely never will as his porridge rapidly congeals into an even less appetising gummy mass.

It’s 7:30 — or maybe it’s 8? or maybe it’s 9? — on some midweek morning — not that it matters which one anymore — and everyone’s miserable because no one slept well on account of the sinus infection and the bladder infection and the back pain and the neck pain and the shoulder pain and the stomach pain and the psychic pain, which is to say the depression and the anxiety and the worry and the dread and the shame and the regret and the obsessive-compulsive fixations and the sheer exhaustion of having to deal with all of this, and each other, and ourselves, day after day after day after day. And then there’s the Heat! (AAH!) And the Cold! (BRR!) And the NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! of the TV which is on more or less continuously, more or less always at maximum fucking decibel blasting out dispatches of death and destruction and discord and despair that rip through whatever threadbare veil of calm any of us might have managed to drape about ourselves in the brief quiet of the night.

It is, in short, a bad morning in the midst of a bad week in the midst of a bad spell for all of us: modest disappointments piling atop serial false starts piling atop the very real and increasingly difficult-to-ignore possibility that things might just never work out even a little bit like how we had hoped. There were defining choices and we erred; decisive junctures and we strayed down the wrong path; moments of fierce urgency and we simply stayed still, and allowed all the wrong things to happen around us and to us, Meanwhile, we fumble along. Meanwhile, we try our best. Meanwhile, we wonder why nothing seems to be getting easier and everything only ever seems to be getting more and more catastrophically difficult.

If only we could just get out of our own way! (We can’t!)

If only we could just appreciate our good fortune! (We won’t!)

If only we could just be straightforwardly and unproblematically happy like all of those fools we despise! (We simply never will!)

But I’m not thinking about any of that right now. All I’m thinking about are Jeff and Lauren and Mark and Bill and Hailey and Justin and Harry and Meghan and Paris and Nicky and Kathy and Kyle and Kim and Kourtney and Khloé and Kendall and Kylie and Tommy and Toni and Tyler and Chris and Martha and Mariah and Bey and Jay and Adele and Oprah and Gayle and every other functionally or actually mononymous person in America and the world having the time of their lives at the party of the year for the woman of the century.

“Did you see the photos from Kris Jenner’s birthday party???”

“I diiiiiid…” I coo faggily. “It was…” and I trail off, searching for just the right word to capture the I-don’t-even-know-what-ness of that confluence of that level of fame and money and power in the same place at the same time. The whole incredible spectacle — and it was a spectacle, and it did defy credulity — absolutely demands that you talk about it, about them, about what you think, and what you feel, and what it means, and what it portends, and what it says: about them, about us, about everything. But at the same time, the sheer audacity of it preempts and arrests and nullifies any and all attempts at meaning-making. Because really, what is there to say? It’s exactly what it seems to be.

But still…but still…but still…

It’s just…it’s just…it’s just…

“It’s DISGUSTING” my boyfriend’s mother announces, which was not at all what I was expecting her to say. I briefly wonder what, in her eyes, was disgusting about it, exactly? Other than the obvious? Other than everything? This probably points to something profoundly broken within me, but what’s worse? I immediately begin to bargain with myself: being morally defective or lying about it? Abetting, in principle, monstrous things, or performatively wringing your hands over things you couldn’t actually care about in the least? Being an asshole, or being a fraud?

“I don’t know…” I demur. “I thought it was kind of fabulous!” Like the morally defective asshole I guess I am.

“Well, sure.” my boyfriend’s mother quickly concedes, as if there’s absolutely no contradiction between the two states, disgustingness and fabulousness. And there isn’t, actually. They’re two sides of the same coin in some tortured mixed metaphor about fame and money and power and abjection and obscenity that I can’t be bothered to tease out right now.

“I kinda wish I had been there…” I sigh, which is both a truth and a lie: I do wish I had been there, but not just kinda: I wish more than almost anything that I had been there, and not just in some pathetic, incidental way like as a plus-one, or a hanger-on, or, God forbid, as the help: I wish I had really been there, intimately embedded in the whole sordid circus, swanning and mooning and mincing around the room kissy-kissing and mwah-mwahing and whipping myself into a froth of champagne bubbles and whatever amphetamine rush is the hottest, newest, most fun and fabulous high for people like us on nights like these.

“Well, I bet it was really boring. I bet NONE OF THEM have ANYTHING interesting to say.” My boyfriend’s mother snarls, which is almost certainly true but most definitely beside the point.

“I don’t think anyone really has anything interesting to say…” I retort.

“Well, sure.” she once again immediately concedes.

“I LOVED her dress…” I offer, in an attempt to steer the conversation back to more genial terrain.

“STUNNING.” She affirms. And it was. It really was.

Then I lean in and across my boyfriend who’s scraping the last few globules of fortified rice meal from his bowl, utterly not listening to any of this. “Archival Givenchy. McQueen-era.” I whisper, as if it’s a secret only I’m privy to. A flush of excitement passes across my boyfriend’s mother’s face, followed by a speck of consternation.

“Shame…” she says, and we both understand that the “shame” in question is McQueen’s life cut tragically short by suicide. We sit in this uncomfortable feeling for a beat, grasping for something profound, or poetic, or healing, or apt to say about a man who gave far too much of himself (indeed, everything) to the pursuit of transcendence, only to be crushed by it; only to have his life’s work be reduced to some bauble donned for an hour or two by a woman who has everything, can get anything, and therefore values nothing. But none of the words to express any of this come to me in the moment, so instead I offer:

“I loved the LAYERS…so much MOVEMENT!”

“Mmmmmm…” my boyfriend’s mother purrs approvingly before leaning in and whispering, as if it’s a secret only she’s privy to: “…but I HATED Kim’s dress.”

And so did I. For once, it just wasn’t her night.

***

I’ll arrive late, which is to say, at the perfect time. And I’ll walk into the marquee, which is deep crimson and astonishing, and I’ll immediately spot the hosts who will seem so happy to see me, and that will make me so happy to see them. And I’ll give Jeff a firm but warm handshake, and Lauren a warm but firm hug, and her fat, hard tits — bigger and better and bronzer than ever — will press into my ribcage just so, and it will quite literally take my breath away. And I’ll say as much, and we’ll laugh about it, and then she’ll refer to them as something obvious and banal, like her “lethal weapons,” and then we’ll all laugh about that even though it’s not particularly funny, and even though she’s said it a hundred times before — every time, in fact, her fat, hard tits accidentally impale someone, which is every time she hugs someone, which is constantly, because she’s a hugger. And then they’ll breeze away to do a lap, or do a bump, or do something crazy like make out, or fuck, or spray champagne all over each other’s fat, hard tits until they’re both sticky and soaked and happier than they’ve ever been or ever thought possible (alive girl!).

And then I’ll meet Harry, and I’ll be impressed by him — but not in the way I was expecting to be impressed. And then I’ll meet Meghan, and I’ll be disappointed by her — in precisely the way I was expecting to be disappointed. And we’ll all say Hi! Hi! Hi! then make our pleasantries, then make our excuses.

Then I’ll head to the bar where I’ll bump into Adele — unless she’s sober again, but probably not — but in any case, we’ll kiss, and hug, and talk about how much we love LA, or how much we hate London, or maybe the other way around, depending on our mood, depending on the season, depending on the traffic, depending on the weather, depending, quite literally, on whichever way the wind’s blowing, because around here, if it’s blowing the wrong way, it could all go up in flames. The metaphors are fucking literal in this town, man. And then we’ll order a drink and take a shot, or maybe take a shot and order a drink — unless she’s sober again, but probably not — and we’ll promise promise promise to finally do that lunch, and even though we both know we never will, it always feels nice to imagine that we could, and that we might. And then we’ll laugh and toast to nothing and smash our empty glasses down, because you can do things like that in a place like this — smash your empty glasses down (wait, is Joni here?) — comfortable in the certainty that someone else will always be on hand to clean up your mess. The metaphors are fucking literal in this town, man.

And then I’ll see Kim, luminous and seductive and gloriously, profoundly vacant as ever. And Kourtney too, whose chronically shitty attitude will somehow suddenly seem terribly chic. And here comes Khloé! Bawdy and lewd and overly familiar at the face of things, but her defences, as ever, a mile high. Then a quick, somewhat stilted hello-hello to Kylie, who’s growing more forlorn by the day, but who also, in a funny way, finally seems to be at peace. And lastly, a cheeky little fist bump to Kendall, because that’s our little thing, Kendall and I; our funny little bit; our cute little schtick: ‘sup bro; ‘sup bru; pound-pound. And that’s it, and that’s enough.

And then Kris will breeze past, a dazzling vortex of hi-hi-hey-hey-kiss-kiss-mwah-mwah. And she’ll be draped in some archival masterwork by some dead or suicidal (or both!) creative genius. Alaïa? Gaultier? “McQueen-era Givenchy...” Someone, somewhere will clarify. “A gift from the designer…” Kris will wink, as she minces and swans and twirls round-and-round-and-round so we can all behold it, and her, from every possible angle. And then someone will say it’s art, and then someone will say it’s poetry, and then someone will say it’s theatre, and then someone will say it’s sculpture. Yes! It’s SO sculptural! But also architectural! But also political! Yes! Yes! Yes! It’s POLITICAL! Everything is! (But also nothing is, you know???) Of course; of course; of course; of course. And then we’ll all nod and fawn and titter and coo, and then someone, somewhere will ask, just by the by, whether McQueen isn’t, well, um, you know, like…dead? And then Kris will say something devastating and perfect like “I don’t know…does it matter?” And everyone will laugh because it’s funny, and laugh because it’s macabre, and, laugh, most of all, because it’s true: it simply doesn’t matter. Nothing matters in a place like this, to people like us. At this level, at this calibre, at this magnitude, everything in life, including death, becomes an abstraction, a thought experiment, a series of curious inconveniences that happen to other people, but will almost certainly never happen to us. And then Kris will mince and swan and twirl her way into the crowd, into the night, and we’ll all continue to nod and fawn and titter and coo for quite some time, even in her absence, because somehow, even though no-one can explain it or account for it, somehow, a drunk old woman in a fabulous dress with nothing much to say about anything at all will be the single most electrifying thing that has ever happened to any of us.

And eventually, after the contact high of Kris! starts to wear off, we’ll all disperse, and I’ll find myself, as I often do, alone. There I’ll be: on the inside of the inside, at the tippy top of whatever heap I’ve been climbing my entire life, surrounded by everyone who could possibly matter, but still, I’ll be alone. But how? But why? But of course. This strange and chronic solitude that has always seemed to stalk me was never external or circumstantial at all. It was always entirely self-inflicted; it was always entirely me: judging and spurning and discounting almost everyone, almost always. And in the moment, this realisation won’t even make me feel sad, or remorseful, or resolved to do anything differently; mostly, it will just feel like a final confirmation of everything I’ve always known to be true about myself but still hoped might be changeable or fixable under the most right, most ideal circumstances. I always imagined that maybe in a place like this, with people like these, at this level, at this calibre, at this magnitude, I would somehow be meaningfully different: freer, easier, lighter; less guarded, less forbidding, less critical, less judgmental. More, I always imagined, like myself. But of course, I’ve just been me all along. Up here; down there; on the inside; on the outside; with him; with her; on my own: all along, just me.

And then—

—And then: a familiar touch will caress my arm, and I’ll turn around and see a friend: a true friend in a sea of casual, contingent, convenient, situational friendships. And we’ll greet each other with a big, warm hug, and she’ll hold on for just a split second longer than is comfortable or natural for me — but it’s okay: she’ll know that I need to be pushed like that; to be held like that. And then she’ll slowly release me from her embrace, and immediately clasp both of my hands tightly within hers. And she’ll look me in the eye deeply, honestly, profoundly and ask “Are you okay?

And I’ll sigh a little, and I’ll smile a little, and I’ll meet the loving intensity of her gaze and simply say: “I’m okay. Better now that you’re here, Oprah.”

And then I’ll lean in very close, and I’ll say “this party is just…” and then Oprah will say “I know…” And then I’ll look at Harry, and look at Meghan, and look, most of all, at Lauren’s champagne-slicked tits and say “and this crowd is just…” and Oprah will say “I KNOW…” And then she’ll look at Kim, and look at Kris, and look, most of all, at Lauren, whose sticky wet jugs are heaving in time to the Up-Town-Funk-You-Up-Uptown-Funk-You-Up, and she’ll lean in even closer and say “It’s DISGUSTING.”

And she’ll be right, of course: it is disgusting; all of this; all of us. What else is there to say? Everything is exactly what it seems to be. So I’ll just clasp her hands tight in mine, the way she just did with me, the way she always does with everyone, and I’ll look her in the eyes deeply, honestly, profoundly and say: “But still: it’s good to have friends.”

Ours is one of those odd little relationships that only exists because of the lives and choices of other people to whom we are both, respectively, intimately linked. On a purely interpersonal level, there is almost nothing to our dynamic. There is no prior conflict, no obvious personality clash, no meaningful discord in our value systems to account for this utter failure to connect, but we have never come even remotely close to broaching the most rudimentary threshold of emotional intimacy. Circumstances have simply never conspired for us to meaningfully bridge this gap.

In nearly two decades I have seen very little, almost nothing, of who they really are or how they actually live or what they truly think, feel, value, or aspire to. Not that I ever asked; not that they ever offered. Nor have I ever really volunteered up anything of myself beyond the most perfunctory updates on my general whereabouts and goings-on. I routinely give more of myself to, and get more in return from total strangers.

Even now; even after this shared journey through grasslands and deserts and mountains and canyons and valleys and deltas, I still know very little, almost nothing about this person. But in the course of our drive, I did learn one, rather crucial thing about them. A defining trait. A thing that, without knowing anything else about a person, provides you with a solid-enough armament about which to hang all the rest of your assumptions, inferences, and speculations about them. It is a foundational quality. Because I now know this one thing about them, in a certain sense and from a certain vantage point, I now know everything there is to know about them.

This person — the Driver — is a P!nk Superfan.

***

The drive starts with a tacit negotiation of terms: do we opt for silence punctuated by occasional conversation, or conversation punctuated by occasional silence? Which is preferable? Which is sustainable? For you? For me? For us? But of course all of this must remain unsaid. As the passenger in need of a ride, which is to say, the one who has inflicted this unnatural proximity on both of us, I feel a responsibility to offer the possibility of relaxed, easy small talk. Not that I’m any good at it.

Occasionally — very occasionally and always at random — I’ll find myself overcome with a strange and foreign gregariousness. But for the most part, I struggle to drive, or even sustain, or even contribute at all to most conversations with most people under most circumstances.

Tristan was SO chatty the whole drive! I imagine the Driver enthusiastically reporting back to our mutual relations after the fact. But no such report materialised, probably because I was, in fact, spending quite a lot of time lost in silent contemplation, imagining their future awe at my present talkativeness rather than, well, actually talking.

But I try; I really do try to keep the conversation alive and flowing (somewhat). When I really put my mind to it, I can actually approximate a kind of chatty ease, or at the very least, talk enough to make the dominant impression of me something other than silent.

I start with the obvious: idle gossip about the two people we have in common; the couple whose marriage, seventeen years prior, set into motion a chain of events that would culminate in (among numerous other, more significant things) the two of us driving down a deserted highway in the summer of 2025 talking about them behind their backs. It’s fun, for a moment, being mean and critical about people you love, and it does, briefly, and in a limited way, bring us closer together. But I can tell the Driver is fundamentally uneasy with the tenor of the conversation. They’re a straightforwardly good and nice person; they don’t like where all of this is going. Silence.

After a while, in the distance, I spot a deer standing at the side of the road. Something to remark upon, I remark to myself.

“There’s a deer…” I announce.

“Oh yeah?” They reply.

“Yeah.” I confirm.

The deer ambles across the otherwise deserted highway. We slow. The deer freezes (as they are famously want to do) before bolting to the other side of the road. An intrusive thought about killing the deer drifts through my mind. I contemplate sharing it, because however macabre, at least it would be a thing to say. And at this point, not even an hour into a day-long drive, having already depleted most of my conversational reserves, “it’s a thing to say” has become my sole criteria for determining whether or not to say a thing.

I suddenly remember the dead deer that I saw on this same stretch of highway several years ago and I feel compelled to mention it, and so I do. It is, after all, a thing to say. “Some asshole in a Land Rover…” I find myself adding, for some inexplicable reason choosing to present myself as a person who feels affinity for animals and contempt for the rich, even though it’s honestly probably much closer to the inverse.

It’s terrible, we agree, even though I’m quite certain they mean it’s terrible for the dead animal and I mean it’s terrible for the human assailants. The loss of life is a split-second cosmic misfortune for some creature who can’t even comprehend the fact, much less the value, much less the stakes of its own existence. The bureaucratic morass that awaits the driver following such an accident? A thing like that could easily cannibalise weeks, even months of your life. Which is to say nothing of the day-of logistical wrangling: presumably you have to alert some sort of authority? But who? But when? But how? Reception is terrible, practically non-existent out here. What would you do? What could you do?

Honestly? I’d probably just drive off.

I say as much to the Driver. My confession perturbs them to a degree that’s perturbing to me. Not caring about animals is a form of psychopathy, but so is caring about them too much, and one is a lot more annoying than the other.

I then find myself wondering aloud if it’s actually illegal to leave a wounded or dead animal on the side of the road, or if it’s more of a fine/ticket/infraction type of thing? By the tone of my questioning, it’s clear that I think it should just be the latter, and by the tone of the Driver’s response, it’s clear they think it should be the former. “It’s probably just a fine,” I decide, “or maybe some points on your insurance…” We both nod and shrug unhappily at this conclusion.

“Well, someone should do really something about it,” the Driver then adds. I quickly agree, even though it’s unclear to me whether by “it” they mean additional roadside signage instructing drivers what to do in the event of vehicular doe-slaughter, or the bigger picture issue of the violent and destructive human incursion into fragile ecosystems, or the poor phone reception, or the hassles of car insurance, or all of the above, or something else altogether. I don’t press the issue for any sort of clarity or closure.

Faced once again with silence, I contemplate asking the Driver about their dog, but unfortunately, I’ve forgotten everything about him, other than he’s annoying, he hates men, he has one of those funny old man names that people love to give to their dogs, and he tends to eat his own shit. He also may or may not have died a few years ago and been replaced by a different but similarly annoying, man-hating, shit-eating puppy named after some other imaginary old man. Oscar! NO!!!! Om-nom-nom. 💩

People love to talk about themselves.

A person who’s particularly good with people told me that years ago, by way of trying to give me some professional networking advice. If you can make someone feel like the most fascinating and vital person in the room, so the reasoning goes, they’ll be inclined to perceive you as fascinating and vital, and therefore more worthy of their time and resources. Or something like that. It’s sound advice, and I’m sure there’s some legitimate psychological basis to that anecdotal observation, but if you’re as deathly incurious as I am about people you’ve already prejudged to be dull, and as comprehensively incapable of masking your boredom and disdain as I also am in such cases, the whole gambit tends to fall flat. I once sat next to Elon Musk’s Chief of Staff for an entire wedding reception and all I could think to say, or ask, or add to our conversation — which spanned multiple hours — was “and did you also have to relocate to Texas?” Reflecting on it now; reading the words back to myself; really sitting with it, I have admit that there’s a real possibility that I’m the constitutionally dull one, but I prefer to think that I’m just a bad conversationalist and a judgmental cunt.

People love to talk about themselves.

Not the Driver. Without prying, I keep trying to leave little openings in the conversation that would induce them to divulge something, anything substantial about themselves. Without being impertinent, I keep scattering little leading comments and witticisms about the nature of life, and love, and family in general that could serve as openings for them to talk about the kids; the divorce; the estrangement in particular. But each time it falls spectacularly flat. I change tacks slightly and start to offer up vague and mostly minor vulnerabilities about myself in the hopes that it will inspire them to similarly bare something of themselves. But my little confessionals go entirely unreciprocated.

People love to talk about themselves.

Fuck it. If they’re going to give me nothing, I’m going to give them everything. I launch into my big gorgeous speech about my overlapping professional/personal/financial/existential crises-du-jour. I spare no humiliating detail, and make sure to recount every mortifying failure, fuck-up, and false start with astonishing clarity and candour. I drag myself for being irredeemably vain, and supremely impractical, and even, at times and in ways, fully and properly delusional. I soberly concede the supreme improbability of my hopes and dreams in one breath, then defiantly double down on them in the next. I deploy the phrase “mortgage my future” multiple times, because on some level I genuinely believe that toxic and self-destructive behaviour is always entirely neutralised and even redeemed by the mere act of naming it. The Driver nods along sympathetically, but it’s clear that they consider me to be odd, and frivolous, and that they find nothing charming or redeeming in my pantomime of self-critique. Or maybe they just don’t care. Fair enough;

Just like I don’t know them well enough to ask directly after the kids or the divorce or the estrangement or the dead dog, they don’t know me well enough to opine honestly on any of this mess. So all they can really do is smile and nod and furrow their brow and exhale and say things like “oh…” and “sure, yeah” and “well, you gotta try!” at appropriate intervals until my wretched little monologue comes to an end.

“Anyways! I’m sure it will all work out!” I cheerily but unconvincingly conclude about my manifold current travails.

“I’m sure it will!” The Driver cheerily but unconvincingly concurs. I’ve never been less sure of anything, and they’ve never been less invested.

After a few more moments of silence we veer inevitably but regrettably into politics. It turns out that both of us are supremely ideologically muddled (at last, something in common!), so we keep ending up to the extreme left or the right of each other, on an issue by issue basis, with absolutely no discernible or coherent through-line to any of our ill-informed, capricious, extremely loosely-held positions.

Them: FOR electric cars, small government, a robust social safety net, institutionalising addicts against their will, greater environmental protections, and bootstrapping capitalism, but AGAINST wokeism, billionaires, land acknowledgements, China, Russia, America, Europe (as a vacation destination, not a polity), and Kelly Clarkson.

Me: a gay nihilist with a New York Magazine subscription.

Because neither one of us really knows what we’re saying, or saying it with any real conviction or intentionality, the tone of our exchange does remain fundamentally jolly and collegial, and not altogether unpleasant…sort of like a latter day William F. Buckley and James Baldwin, except neither one of us has any real stakes in the things we’re talking about, and we’re both white. Sensing that we’re rapidly approaching a rhetorical cul-de-sac where one of us will probably end up accidentally endorsing some alarmingly illiberal position, I course correct and reach for the least political thing anyone could ever possibly say.

“Did you see that Taylor Swift got engaged?”

“I diddddd…” the Driver coos. This is the most animated and expressive and alive I’ve seen them all day; perhaps ever. We proceed to exchange enthusiastic banalities about the most famous woman in the world for the next fifteen minutes.

“She really got her fairytale ending.”

“She could NEVER date someone NOT famous.”

“She manifested this…”

“He doesn’t need to be smart.”

“Everything was leading up to this.”

“I wish I had gone to the Eras Tour…”

“I could have gone in Seattle…”

“I could have gone in Edinburgh…”

“It would have been such a moment”

“I KNOW…”

“Well, she’ll tour again…”

“But it won’t be the Eras Tour.”

My benign pessimism stops the conversation dead in its tracks. The silence returns, but it’s strangely more comfortable than before; less in need of frantic remedying. I look outside: at some point in the past hour, in the midst of my frenzied attempts at conversation-making, the landscape has shifted entirely. We’re in a desert now. Arid, reddish-brown hills rise sharply to one side. To the other side, there’s a steep, nearly sheer gorge that plunges hundreds of feet down toward a great river, whose waters are a luminous, pearlescent turquoise hue that I’ve never seen before in nature, or anywhere.

Suddenly, jarringly, with no forewarning or explanation:

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na

Na Na Na Na Na Na

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na

Na Na Na Na Na Na

I look at the infortainment screen. “So What” by P!nk plays. I look at the Driver. They’re enthusiastically drumming the steering wheel in time to the melody and mouthing along to the lyrics of the song.

I guess i just lost my husband

I don’t know where he went

I stare at them expectantly for a beat, trying, I suppose, to extract some acknowledgement of the choice to put on music in general, and the decision to put on this song in particular.

So I’m gonna drink my money

I’m not gonna pay his rent (Nope)

No such acknowledgement is forthcoming.

I got a brand new attitude

And i’m gonna wear it tonight

“P!nk…” I finally say. Is it a question? A statement of fact? A critique? A provocation?

I wanna get in trouble

I wanna start a fight

“I LOVE her. She’s an INCREDIBLE singer.” the Driver volunteers.

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na

I wanna start a fight

“Yeah, she’s pretty great” I agree, because she is, come to think of it, an incredible singer.

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na

I wanna start a fight

“I just LOVE the message of her music.”

I allow a pregnant pause to stand in for my uncertainty at what that message might be.

So so what?

I’m still a rockstar

I got my rock moves

And I don’t need you

“She just does HER OWN THING and doesn’t care what ANYONE thinks.” The Driver clarifies.

And guess what

I’m having more fun

And now that we’re done

I’m gonna show you tonight

“No, totally!” I chirp in that awful, hollow, reflexively agreeable way. But it’s fine: the strange collision of the natural sublime and Pre-Recession pop-rock overwhelms our faculties and renders us both non-verbal.

I’m alright; I’m just fine

And you’re a tool

From this point on, we barely speak. For the next seven and a half hours, we just listen to P!nk.

And so what

I am a rockstar

I got my rock moves

And I don’t want you tonight

I know every word to every song.

***

P!nk occupies a curious place in the celebrity firmament. She is certainly a household name. She has enjoyed extraordinary longevity in her career. She has had dozens of hits and sold millions of albums. She tours to sold-out stadiums and arenas all over the world. She has won every major industry award, and has had numerous lucrative and longstanding endorsement deals with many of the world’s biggest brands. She is ubiquitous; prolific; objectively A-list. Now well into her fourth decade of fame, she has more than earned her pop star bonafides.

And yet…

Her cultural impact is, if not limited exactly, then certainly muted; discreet; a little forgettable. She’s just there: racking up hits and selling out stadiums and bringing down the house, night after night, year after year, decade after decade…but no one’s really talking about any of it. Indeed, as far back as 2006, she was (apparently) battling for relevancy, releasing an album entitled simply “I’m Not Dead.” She wasn’t then and she isn’t now, but neither is she fully alive, at least not in the fullest, zeitgeist-iest sense of the term. She’s neither firmly in nor decidedly past her prime; neither especially relevant nor notably irrelevant; neither broadly beloved nor widely maligned. She’s just there: a part of the pop cultural furniture.

But why?

First a caveat: it’s entirely possible that the premise of this argument is fatally undercut by my own subjectivity. When I say “no one’s really talking about any of it,” what I mean, of course, is “no one like me, in any of the extremely particular outlets or forums that I frequent” — primarily New York Magazine and New York-based gay male comedians’ Instagram stories. But however much of a liability my blindspots may be, I’m simply unwilling to ever subordinate the delightful rip and crackle of my exquisitely over-articulated but supremely under-reasoned opinions to anything like fact, research, critique, or the insights of others. Not on my Substack.

So while it is certainly possible that there is a vast, vocal, activated, and engaged P!nk fandom out there, just beyond the aesthetic and intellectual and ideological walled garden that I’ve tricked myself into thinking is the entire world, I really do think that she is significantly underrepresented in the cultural conversation relative to her actual level of success. There simply must be something more to extraordinary un-phenomenon that is P!nk.

But what?

The simplest and most straightforward explanation, which is also the meanest and the laziest, is that P!nk’s music/art is just not that good. The custodians of culture and arbiters of taste that a person like me would turns to in order to understand what is valuable, interesting, novel, and powerful, pop culturally speaking, would tend to disregard an artist like P!nk, writing her off as tacky, contrived, maudlin, artistically scattershot, and nakedly derivative of other, more daring and distinctive artists.

She is lowest common denominator pop schlock for Walmart People, so the mean and lazy reasoning might go. And to be quite clear and quite candid, there is a part of me that is absolutely inclined to accept and endorse that line of reasoning, and stop my analysis there, simply because it makes me feel good to imagine that I have uniquely good instincts, while a plurality or even outright majority of humanity is hopelessly undiscerning.

And to be clear, there is plenty of lowest common denominator pop schlock for Walmart People out there in the world wreaking aural, visual, and spiritual havoc. There are many commercially successful but critically middling (or even maligned) artists who forge long and lucrative careers without the approval of the chattering classes. There always has been and there always will be a large and vibrant market for mediocre and even outright bad art. But I think there’s something else at play with P!nk.

A digression. Consider, for a moment, the career of another pop star; someone who is, if not a peer exactly to P!nk, then certainly a contemporary; an artist who emerged at around the same time; who was shaped early on by similar cultural forces; and who has enjoyed an equally long and varied career. I’m speaking of Beyoncé.

By any reasonable standard, Beyoncé is a better artist than P!nk. More original, more nuanced, more intelligent, more intentional, more impactful, more lauded, and more skilled overall in the execution of her craft. Whatever quibbles one might have with her, or however disinterested in or alienated by her artistic and creative point-of-view one might be, her primacy in the cultural conversation over the past twenty-five years is simply undeniable. Whether viewed through the lens of adulation, hatred, or pure neutrality, no one can argue that she is anything other than an epochal phenom. To even put P!nk in dialogue with an artist like Beyoncé feels a little odd: one strains to see how a relevant or productive comparison could really be made between the two. They are such different artists; they produce such different music; they appeal to such different constituencies. But beyond those obvious and vast qualitative differences, there is an even more striking quantitative difference between the two: on the basis of numbers alone, P!nk is, very plainly, not in the same league as Beyoncé.

Right?

A digression within the digression. Consider now two very specific sums of money: $579.8 million and $693.8 million. The first figure represents the total box office take of Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour in 2023. An immense sum commensurate to the cultural imprint of that tour, to be sure. The Renaissance Tour represented an apotheosis of sorts for Beyoncé; a new high in a career marked by a more or less uninterrupted succession of paradigm-shifting highs.

The second figure represents the total annual touring gross of another female pop star who mounted a similarly sold-out worldwide tour that same year. $693.8 million. It’s a even more immense sum of money. To put a finer point on it, Bigger than Beyoncé. But who? Surely, there’s only one real possibility: Taylor Swift and her similarly era-defining (sorry) Eras Tour, which, both in and of itself, and in accidental dialogue with The Renaissance Tour, became a pervasive and inescapable moment throughout 2023: the closest thing to a true monocultural event (that isn’t a crisis or disaster) that we can hope to experience anymore.

But it’s not Taylor. (Fear not; she made even MORE money touring in 2023: 1.04 billion, to be precise). It’s P!nk. Fucking P!nk. Her Summer Carnival Tour (what?), together with an adjunct 34-date North American tour that autumn (when?), generated Six-Hundred-and-Ninety-Three Million dollars (how?) and attracted Four-Point-Eight Million attendees (huh?). To recap:

• P!nk sold $700 million in tickets in a little under 8 months

• 5 million people came to see her perform

• P!nk is a bigger touring artist than Beyoncé

• No-one has ever heard of this tour

Of course money is an imperfect metric by which to measure impact; it doesn’t make P!nk a bigger artist than Beyoncé, or even three-quarters the star that Taylor Swift is. Touring is very much its own beast. But getting within spitting distance of a billion dollars does feel like a significant achievement, and in this case, a significantly under-reported one.

How did a sold-out, worldwide, bigger-than-Beyoncé live music event occur and no one really talked about it? How did nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars trade hands and it didn’t even fleetingly register in my New York Magazine/New York-based gay male comedian echo chamber? I might be disdainful of cultural happenings that fall outside my snobbish/faggish bubble, but I’m never disinterested. I’m constantly being made aware of things I don’t care about, then voluntarily devoting days and weeks of my life to more fulsomely understanding them.

But with P!nk, there’s scarcely been a blip on my radar. I’m not being cute or glib or hyperbolic when I say that my personality and worldview is “Gay Nihilist with a New York Magazine subscription” — that really is the crux of it. Let’s put it to the test: a cursory search of “P!nk” on nymag.com reveals only two articles in the last three years:

Which P!nk Song Induced a Concert-Goer’s Labor? and P!nk on Her Most Death-Defying Stunts and Polarizing Songs

Both are fabulous, and fabulously chaotic-sounding headlines (not that I bothered to read the articles) but…is that all there is? How can it be that she is that famous ($693.8 million!), but this underrepresented in the snobbish/faggish cultural digest of record (2 articles!)? But I suppose I can’t really divine anything by querying myself, or by probing ecosystems that are, as a baseline, disinclined to care about someone like P!nk. The only useful insights about her will necessarily have to come from those who are already invested in her. If I want to better contextualise her success, and better understand her meaning, I’ll have to ask someone who already gets it: what’s the f**kin’ deal with P!nk?

It turns out, in a sense, I already have:

“I LOVE her. She’s an INCREDIBLE singer. I just LOVE the message of her music. She just does HER OWN THING and doesn’t care what ANYONE thinks.”

There it is. The pleasures of being a P!nk fan are simple, direct, and profoundly uncomplicated. She has an breathtakingly powerful voice that she uses to sing instantly catchy, masterfully crafted pop songs about universally relatable themes of love, self-acceptance, and self-respect. You’re fucking perfect! Tell your ex to go jerk himself off!! Blow me!!! So come-on-and-come-on-and RAISE!!! YOUR!!! GLASS!!! P!nk belts, with crystalline clarity and perfect pitch, all while soaring overhead on a zip line at sixty miles an hour doing backflips in her own personal gyroscope. There is nothing to unpack or interpret at a P!nk concert; it is a pure, visceral experience; a shortcut to the sublime. You leave the world behind, and P!nk leaves it all on the stage: it’s a closed loop. There is no meaning beyond the experience of the experience.

Contrast that to the experience one could reasonably expect to have at a Beyoncé concert: before you even set foot into the arena, you must be prepared to enter into decades and even centuries of discourse around the history of music, race, art, fashion, culture, and politics. Beyoncé’s musical and visual and experiential expressions are always densely coded bricolage: layers upon layers of meaning that collapse in on themselves and then collide bizarrely, wonderfully, ecstatically with other artistic, intellectual, and even metaphysical frames of reference. She is, in short, a master semiotician. With everything she does, with every note, word, movement, gesture, and reference, she is actively re-framing and re-litigating our shared past, crafting a more vital and immediate present, and proposing a dizzying array of potential alternate futures.

For these reasons and so many others, it can be immensely rewarding to be a Beyoncé fan; seeing her perform, for most, is an encompassing, even transcendent experience. But it’s certainly not escapism. It’s work, of a kind. Beyoncé gives a great deal to her fans, but she also demands a great deal from them. I’m sure there are some Beyoncé fans who enjoy her music in a purely visceral, anti-intellectual way; who just let the sounds and the imagery and the movement and the energy wash over them. But I would guess that people like that are in the extreme minority. To be a Beyoncé fan is to be constantly activated and highly engaged. Which, while deeply fulfilling, is not always pleasurable, strictly speaking.

P!nk, meanwhile, demands no such exertions from her fans. If Beyoncé tends to ask questions like: Who are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? and leaves those questions tantalisingly unanswered, P!nk tends to ask questions like: Have you ever thrown a fistful of glitter in the air? And then invites you to, well…throw a fistful of glitter in the air alongside 26,000 other beautiful hearts in a packed-to-capacity hockey stadium in a place like Anaheim as she spins and soars and swoops and twirls overhead, soaking wet and entangled in a giant silk ribbon.

And if Beyoncé requires that her fans be political and politicised in order to fully and correctly receive her art, P!nk invites a far more expansive (which is to say incoherent) set of ideologies to the table with messaging that could, quite literally, mean anything to anyone.

Even her most overtly political songs, like 2017’s “What About Us,” which P!nk has confirmed repeatedly is an anti-Trump screed, can be interpreted in an almost unlimited number of ways. To wit:

What about us?

What about all the times you said you had the answers?

What about us?

What about all the broken happy ever afters?

What about us?

What about all the plans that ended in disaster?

What about love? What about trust?

What about us?

These are lyrics that could mean everything and nothing to anyone and no-one in every possible context. They could be railing against Trump OR Nancy Pelosi. Decrying ICE Raids OR Pizza Parlour Child Sex Trafficking. They could be the cries of a Democratic Socialist agitating for a living wage, universal healthcare, and a rent freeze OR a QAnon Acolyte agitating against whichever Jew they’ve decided to blame for whatever problem (all of them for all of them!). With lyrics like these, you could equally be addressing a politician or a priest; a cruel mother or an absentee father; an abusive ex or a friend lost to the ravages of addiction. You could even be addressing yourself.

You don’t have to strain to find meaning in lyrics like these: the meaning announces itself to you, for you. You just feel it.

And therein, I think, lies the appeal: P!nk is the triumph of emotion over intellect. She is pure sensation.

***

“Have you ever been whitewater rafting?”

The question lingers in the air for a few seconds. At the base of a canyon several hundred metres below us, at the convergence of two great rivers, a few tiny yellow and red specks are tossed around by the phenomenal force of the currents. I look up from this scene and over to the Driver, who was the one who posed the question. I think carefully and seriously for a moment until I’m able to grasp at some faraway recollection; a memory that is so tenuous and indistinct that truly feels like it happened to someone else.

“I have!” I announce excitedly, as though it’s a fond and vivid memory, rather than a neutral-to-negative and extremely distant one.

“And? How was it??” The Driver presses leadingly. They so obviously want to hear that it was great; amazing; f**ckin’ perfect.

“Well…” I demur, and the Driver’s hopeful expression immediately falls. “It was fine, I guess. It wasn’t very exciting though, to be honest with you. It was actually kind of boring. It was mostly just a lot of work to keep yourself headed in the right direction.”

“Oh…” the Driver replies, obviously troubled by both the substance and the delivery of what I’m saying.

“And I got really wet.” I add, reaching for what is quite possibly the most banal, least meaningful observation one could make about this activity — just to put a bow on this whole sour, awful anecdote.

“Well, I’ve always really wanted to try it!” the Driver announces, with an uncharacteristic note of defiance sounding in their voice.

“You should!” I chirp in false, self-abnegating way. “I guess I’ve just never been much of a thrillseeker…” I then offer up as some sort of conciliation. Shifting the blame and the shame onto myself seems to relieve the Driver somehow; their mood immediately softens and brightens.

“Fair enough!” The Driver allows, before doubling down: “But it’s good to get out of your comfort zone sometimes…”

“I guess…” I sigh. “But for me at least, getting out of my comfort zone looks more like…learning a new language, not throwing myself off a bridge.”

The Driver laughs a little at this, which is nice of them. None of my melancholic self-effacement or doleful musings on the essential futility of everything has penetrated their defences up until now, so this feels like progress, of a sort. I don’t think they necessarily found it funny, but I think that they could tell I was trying, and they at least appreciated that. We’re both trying, and surely that counts for something.

We fall back into silence. A song, which has been playing this whole time fills the void between us. The lyrics immediately speak to me; to us; to the moment.

Where there is desire

There is gonna be a flame

Where there is a flame

Someone’s bound to get burned

But just because it burns

Doesn’t mean you’re gonna die

You gotta get up

And try, try, try

We both take exactly what we need from the sentiment, even though our takeaways are almost certainly diametrically opposed. That’s the power of P!nk.

***

If you had asked me, as a closeted 14 year-old circa 2001, (and I really wish you had) which of the circa-then pop girls would still be relevant 25 years later, I don’t think I would have pegged P!nk as having the potential for decades-long staying power. If you had pressed me then (and I really wish you had), on what her most likely fate would be, I probably would have regretfully lumped her in with the other slickly produced but somehow under-distinguished emergent pop stars who burst onto the scene around the same time: artists whose stars briefly burned bright with one, or two, or maybe even three solid pop songs of steadily diminishing quality before a rapid descent into abject obscurity. Pour one out for Willa Ford, Christina Milian, and Blu Cantrell. Or rather: RAISE!!! YOUR!!! GLASS!!!

Even her stage name, “P!nk,” is a strange artefact of that bygone era, and a tacit acknowledgement of her intended disposability: faddish and contrived and already dated-sounding before she even debuted. You don’t give a name like “P!nk” to someone you’re positioning to be a legacy artist. A name like that could only be cooked up by a room full of coked out A&R men (and one Xan-ed out A&R woman) whose only concern is extricating maximum short term gain from whatever talented, hopeful, fuckin’ sexy-as-hell underage girl washed up at Arista Records HQ that week. The name, just like P!nk herself, was never intended to endure.

Boys, whatta we gonna do with this Jewish girl named Alicia with the killer voice? Jeff? Ben? Anyone? Fuck it: let’s just circle back to Liz’s plan: dye her hair day-glo, call her “Pink,” get her in the studio with Babyface like, fuckin’ yesterday, and heavily imply — but never outright say — that she’s biracial. Could work! What’s that Jeff? With an exclamation mark? Hell yeah, brother! Great work everyone! So who’s going to the White Party???

P!nk wasn’t supposed to still be here. She was never anointed as a superstar in the way that her contemporaries like Britney and Christina and Beyoncé were from essentially the outset of their careers. With those artists, however underestimated or condescended to they may have been at times, there was still a fairly broad and immediate consensus in each case that a significant, generational talent had been discovered. But P!nk, despite looking and sounding like a superstar from the jump, was, for whatever reason, positioned a rung or two below that rarefied realm: she had hits, she moved records, the demons got their pound of flesh, but I don’t get the sense that anyone was really setting her up for the sort of career that she ultimately ended up having. But she just kept going; she didn’t give up; she’s still here; she’s not dead.

She’s a true workhorse pop star: an artist for avowedly normal people who don’t have the time or the energy or the will to decode obtuse imagery, decipher dense metaphors, unpack years or even decades of lore, or traffic in ambiguity of any kind, but who still desire (and deserve) the communion with the secular sublime that really good pop music can provide.

She’s a pop star for people whose lives are sensible, practical, and grounded in responsibilities outside of their own self-actualisation. Her music is a balm for people who don’t have the luxury of self-mythologising their way to catharsis. She offers quick and easy and contained and manageable transcendence for people who are, for the most part, too busy doing the right thing for themselves and everyone around them to bother with the poetry of life. She is skydiving. She is whitewater rafting. She' is a cheap but vital thrill.

And maybe, in that way, her art is second-rate: a smoothed over version of some more sophisticated, complicated, challenging, nuanced something? But so what if it is? Maybe that split second of deliverance, however you get to it, is all that actually matters?

***

As we exit the highway and make our final approach toward the terminal where I’ll continue on to my next destination — not home, exactly, but a place where there are people I love and who love me — I look over to the Driver and I see it; unmistakable and writ large across their face: relief. It makes me a little sad, and a little self-conscious, but I understand; I feel it as well. It’s nothing personal.

Fifty metres ahead, a traffic light turns amber. The Driver rapidly accelerates, swerving around the braking vehicle in front of us, clearing the intersection with a split-second to spare. I compliment the swift acceleration and deft handing of the car. The Driver concurs and pats the dashboard affectionately, then trains their gaze on the road ahead. It’s a straight shot now to our final destination.

We arrive at the terminal. They drop me off, and help me with my bag, and hug me warmly, and wish me luck. I thank them and wish them the same, even though they don’t really need it: their life is good and stable; they’ve found their place in the world; they’re already lucky. And I am too. I wave goodbye and disappear into the crowd of people.

Moments later I board a ferry, and not long after that, we’re out at sea. I make my way to a quiet spot on the upper deck and take a seat on the starboard side of the vessel. It’s been a beautiful day and now it’s a beautiful evening: the late-summer sun is low in the cloudless blue sky, and from my vantage point I’m afforded a perfect, unobstructed view of its slow approach to the horizon. Like nearly every other part of my journey today, it’s an indescribably beautiful scene. I wonder for a moment why I felt the need to leave a place like this all those years ago? Why wasn’t it enough for me? Why did it never and why does is still not feel like home? But there are no answers to questions like that. The lives we could have lived don’t actually exist, even if sometimes, in moments like these, it can really feel like they do.

I don’t know what to do with myself: I don’t want to work, I don’t want to read, I don’t want to scroll, I don’t even want to think. I just want to be and feel and exist. I want to listen to P!nk. So I do.

Some time later, the sun begins to dip below the horizon. Slowly at first, and then all at once, the light outside takes on an astonishing amber hue; it’s so intense and saturated that the air almost seems to have density, and mass: like you could reach out and grab it by the handful.

Crowds of people immediately descend on the deck to try and capture the scene. They can’t help but try and make something durable of the ephemeral: it’s the oldest and most natural and most human impulse there is. I watch them all carefully, from a remove, as usual. I try and decide what this scene should mean: to me, to them; in general, in particular. Firm conclusions elude me.

After a while, I turn away from the crowds, and away from the sun, which has now set. I reflect on the day, and on our journey, and on this strange season of life where I find myself mostly existing in various states of in-between. Is it a temporary condition or a persistent feature of my life: this drift, this placelessness, this tentativeness of being? It’s hard to imagine, after a certain point, what a life of certainty and permanence would even feel like. It’s hard to know if such things are even desirable — or even possible — for someone like me anymore.

Or maybe a life like that isn’t actually possible for anyone? Maybe we’re all just drifting from here to there, from this to that, looking in vain for somewhere firm to settle. And maybe all of this — all of our attempts to see and feel and comprehend and grasp at something beyond ourselves — is, in the final assessment, nothing more than a brief shimmering in a vast and unknowable darkness: a fistful of glitter thrown in the air.

Well, sh!t.

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A few weeks ago I started to become very bothered by the fact that the branding for this Substack was so nakedly derivative of the New Yorker’s brand identity. To briefly recap, the name of this newsletter is a riff on a now-defunct vertical in the New Yorker, “Annals of Culture,” so when I initially set out to devise a logo and overall look and feel for the publication, it seemed logical, and tidy, and perhaps even necessary to opt for a clear and unmistakable reference to the source material.

“Oh, I get it! Like the now-defunct vertical in the New Yorker!” I imagined my readership exclaiming upon seeing my meticulously plagiarised logomark. As it turns out, the response was rather more along the lines of “Wait, so is every post going to be about shit?”

I even went to the trouble of designing my own version of the New Yorker mascot, Eustace Tilly, a top-hatted, bespectacled dandy who can canonically be seen examining a fluttering butterfly through his monocle — a play of erudition and whimsy that succinctly captures the ethos of that publication. My version, still formally unnamed but whom I’ve always privately referred to as “Michael B. F-Slur,” depicts a baseball-capped, be-AirPod-ed Millennial fop fingering a highly stylised cartoon anus — a play of vulgarity and flippancy that succinctly captures the ethos of this publication.

But as fun and (self) satisfying as it is to riff and crib and pun and pay homage to, as the tone and purview of this newsletter has come more into focus (considerably more earnest and autobiographical, and less ironising and evasive than I ever could have imagined — gross!), the foundational gag of it all has become less and less relevant, and more and more distracting (to me). I still like the name, because it’s arch and winking and fundamentally un-serious, as am I, but the whole blatant, screeching Hello, I’m a New Yorker Parody Publication vibe just started to feel limiting and tired and redundant and most of all thoroughly beside the point.

In my former life where I was paid handsome sums of money to, among other unsavoury things, design logos for mostly fake/hypothetical brands, I got a great deal of practice distilling the essence of things into handsome, plausible, tasteful visual identities. Nearly everything I designed was nakedly derivative of some other bigger, better, real-er brand, but for the litany of fake/hypothetical tech companies, sovereign wealth funds, telecommunications conglomerates, real estate developers, eco-resorts, museums, archaeological sites, fashion designers, celebrity chefs, defense contractors, police unions, presidential candidates, disgraced Olympians, excommunicated Vogue editors, haute joaillerie brands, amusement parks, and kleptocratic regimes that came across my desk, handsome, plausible, tasteful, and nakedly derivative was generally just fine.

All of which is to say I don’t fancy myself to be a particularly original designer, merely a competent one with reasonably well developed taste who is broadly conversant in a wide-enough range of styles and references. So when I set out to rebrand my own publication, all I really wanted to achieve was something that was less specific and referential, and, more, well, handsome and plausible and tasteful.

Let me walk you through it.

For the new wordmark, I’ve opted for a classic combination of lower-case serif and sans serif fonts as a way of signalling to my reader that in addition to cheap scatological puns, this is also a publication that very much concerns itself with good taste and good sense.

For good measure, I’ve included an abbreviated version of the wordmark which unfortunately overlaps with the monicker of a certain over-publicised progressive congresswoman, but I don’t anticipate a great deal of crossover in either our audiences or messaging, so I think it will be fine.

I’ve also introduced a new logomark. All the best and most memorable brand identities have multiple meanings encoded within them, and so it is with the NEW Anals Logomark: it can be read simply as an asterisk — a nod to my propensity for dense, looping, parenthetical asides. But it can also be read as a highly abstracted and really rather cute gaping asshole — a nod to my gleeful predilection for all manner of cultural excrement, and also gay shit. Two disparate but equally potent abstractions brought together in sublime symbolic, conceptual, and graphic unity. Paul Rand could (or rather, would) never.

And after an all-too-brief brief tenure, Michael B. F-Slur has been officially retired as the face of the publication. He was both too much and not nearly enough. Rest in Power, King.

To state the exceedingly obvious: none of this really matters to anyone but me. But that’s always been true of this whole endeavour, and for that matter, everything I’ve ever done or tried to do creatively or artistically: I’m forever playing to an audience of precisely one.

Perhaps I would do well to consider the needs, wants, and expectations of someone other than myself when writing, but I find it impossible, and moreover, deeply false to do so. Try as I might to pander to audiences, real or imagined, or to optimise my content for whatever content is supposed to be optimised for anymore, I keep returning to the same entirely subjective, entirely self-defined and self-reinforcing criteria: am I Delighted? Piqued? Edified? Soothed? Then it’s a success. My boyfriend justifiably ridicules me for being so perpetually amused by myself, and rightly so: it’s diabolical to be this enchanted with one’s own intellect, one’s own wit, one’s own esprit. I’m never more myself than when I’m sitting alone in front of my computer marinating in me, writ large across the screen. It’s diabolical, but also fabulous.

So I’m not rebranding because anyone was clamouring for it, or because it was recommended to me, or because I gamed out some sort of grand strategy and wagered that this was a necessary investment of time and resources that will pay material dividends in the long view; I’m rebranding because I was less than fully enamoured of this particular reflection of me, and I simply couldn’t leave it alone until I felt satisfied.

I’m sure, in time, I’ll grow weary of these new designs and feel compelled to tweak them, refine them, or perhaps even discard them outright and start all over again. I’ll manufacture some new issue, some perceived deficiency, then pour weeks of toil into an effort that will go entirely unnoticed by anyone but me, and redound to no benefit except my own private pleasure. But for now, for the time being, whenever I open Substack to peruse my publication — just to make sure that it’s still there, that I’m still there — and I see my handsome, plausible, tasteful, orange-ish, reddish logo stationed at the top of the screen, I’m more or less happy with what I see. And whenever I click on a post and skim through, stopping at random to read a sentence or two in full, I can’t help but chuckle to myself; just a little. How could I not? It’s almost always the funniest thing I’ve ever read.

***

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about Meghan Markle. Which, surprisingly (astonishingly, even) isn’t something that I’ve ever really done before, at least not seriously or with any degree of urgency. For the decade or so that she’s been flitting about the uppermost strata of the pop cultural firmament, I’ve studiously avoided forming, holding, or expressing any sort of opinion on or about her — which I suppose is an opinion of sorts. My opinion of her has always been the absence of one: she is neither as bad as her detractors maintain, nor as good as her champions proclaim. She’s an entirely banal individual (not an insult, just a fact, like the colour of her hair, or the symmetrical smattering of freckles across her exquisitely high, round cheeks) who has been thrust into an extraordinary and arguably impossible set of circumstances. Some might fare better, most would fare worse. And?

If nothing else, she is the consummate American everywoman: publicly ambitious but privately inclined to leisure; performatively conscientious but constitutionally self-interested; superficially congenial but fundamentally bored and un-caring; and above all, pathologically fixated on the project of her own self-actualisation. What of it? Her and millions of other shiny-haired, clear-skinned, Cartier-bangled women lace up their Golden Goose sneakers every day and tiptoe around the same gossamer cloud of privileged oblivion. Good for them! Or bad for them? It simply doesn’t matter. To try and extract real social, political, cultural or historical understanding from someone like Meghan is like trying to understand nuclear fission by examining a dewdrop on a cherry blossom three seconds after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima: no matter how closely you look, all you’ll see are minute refractions of looming oblivion, mostly obscured by your own reflection, dancing across the face of beauty.

Because thing that she has become best known for and is most persistently judged by has absolutely nothing to do with her as a person: that is to say, her associations with various dehumanising institutions/systems of power. First, the British Royal Family, which briefly tried to launder their irreparably tarnished reputation through her, and next the American Entertainment Industrial Complex which saw in her, for a fleeting moment, the next great multi-billion-dollar franchise.

But of course it was all hallucinatory. Fairytale weddings predicated on the fantasy that the fleshy descendants of minor German nobility represent something transcendent, and multi-million-dollar deals predicated on the fantasy that a global media frenzy, perfect bone structure, and a thick haze of Diptyque Do Son could somehow conspire to generate evergreen ten-figure revenue streams: both are things that happen to someone, not because of them. And so, as fascinating as these phenomenas are to behold, and as irresistible as it is to ascribe primary meaning to the person at the centre of the maelstrom, I just don’t think there’s much there, there.

Is she hideously unrelatable and damningly out of touch? Dangerously striving and irredeemably contrived? Terribly underestimated and woefully misunderstood? Maybe so. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll never know.

I have no idea what Meghan is like in whatever constitutes her “real life,” or if indeed she still possesses any meaningful sense of self separate and apart from the performance of “Meghan.” That’s not a knock on her, or a suggestion that she somehow uniquely lacks interiority; it’s just a basic psychological reality that our understanding of self is heavily mediated, perhaps even entirely defined by the way others perceive us. It takes extraordinary characterological fortitude and self-possession to cling to some durable and unmoving sense of self even under the most ordinary of circumstances, even in the most ordinary of lives. One person questioning who and what you are can be profoundly destabilising; life destroying even. But thousands, millions, the whole world opining on every facet, real or imagined, of your life, your character, your values…who would any of us be under those circumstances? What, if anything, would be left of us?

More likely than not, there’s still some private corner of her psyche that has remained untouched by the mania of her existence over the past decade. But we will necessarily never know, nor ever see that part of her. All we have to go by is what we see at the face of things. My very best guess is that she’s exactly what she seems to be: a superficially warm and personable individual with a palpably calculating streak coursing just beneath the surface. Not quite nefarious, but not entirely guileless either. She strikes me as the sort of person who would give you absolutely no reason to doubt their sincerity, decency, or goodness, but who, nevertheless still leaves you with vaguely unsettled feeling. This bitch would probably fuck me over if given the chance, you might remark to yourself, apropos of nothing; as a matter of pure intuition. But until then, let’s have another bottle of Chablis and toast to absolutely everything continuing to go our way.

A true American Everywoman.

My hottest of hot takes on her is that she’s simply the latest and most prolific case in a long and unbroken chain of naïve Americans who have made the grave mistake of having a fling while on vacation on Europe and then thinking “Huh! Maybe this could really be something?!” If circumstances had been just a little more ordinary and a little less fated, her story would have been exactly what it should have been for a woman like her: come to London for a long weekend with friends; get a little drunk on watery Aperol spritzes at Greek Street; hook up with a charming but vaguely twat-ish guy with a polite uncut dick; cackle about it over boozy brunch at Chiltern Firehouse the next day; pop into the Conran Shop to buy some tea towels you’ll never use and candles you’ll never burn; then take a £160 Uber Black to Heathrow and never come back.

But instead, her life, as she knew it, has been destroyed. She, as a person, has been utterly ruined. She will never again know peace; not truly. For this, at least, I have some measure of compassion.

But more than any of this — more than the vicissitudes of public life in general, more than the impossible bind that she, in particular, has been placed in, more than the gradual downward arc that the rest of her life will almost certainly take — the thing that finally compelled me to form an opinion on her, finally made me feel some measure of sympathy for her, finally provided me with an opening to understand her is this: I think she’s one of those people who simply can’t get out of their own way.

Girl, I relate.

The consensus around Meghan these days, even in the most sympathetic of quarters, seems to be that she has squandered what, in retrospect, was an unprecedented and never-to-be repeated lavishing of positive attention, genuine good will, and, well, lots and lots of money. Implicit in these critiques is the assumption that someone else, or anyone else, or everyone else could have and would have done better if presented with an identical set of circumstances. It’s possible, I suppose, but unlikely. From the start, she has been positioned as a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s all wrong; it’s all backwards; it was always going to be this way.

If Netflix wrote me a check for $100 million tomorrow with only the loosest of mandates to create…something, would I fare any better? Or would I similarly spin my wheels and drift from this to that with a maximum of effort and intentionality, but a minimum of output? As tempting as it to imagine that I would flourish if given even a fraction of the resources and institutional access that she’s enjoyed over the past five years, there’s a high degree of probability that I would flounder just as she has, perhaps even more so. It’s all too likely that I would have even less to show for all of my obscene good fortune if I were in her shoes.

50 jars of jam, 14 episodes of reality TV (and some other stuff), 2 podcasts, one and a half brands, a slam-dunk interview with Oprah (a slam-dunk for Oprah, at least), and simply too many fake-seeming charities to recount. Is that all she could manage? we collectively sneer, imagining months-long stretches of unearned, remorseless leisure, callously kicking the can down the road, dangling her benefactors along, doing the absolute barest of minimums to ensure that the next quarterly payment clears before disappearing again for another two-and-a-half months. Sorry team! Terrible reception up here by the apiary! And I suppose it’s possible that that’s precisely the game Meghan’s been playing. But I somehow doubt it.

My intuition tells me that she’s really trying. Like really, really, desperately, tirelessly, feverishly trying. For every jar of jam, or episode of television, or podcast, or brand (re)launch, or interview, or dubious charitable endeavour that’s seen the light of day, I’m certain that there are dozens, if not hundreds of aborted, rejected, abandoned, or otherwise failed attempts that were all made with the very best of intentions and an enormous amount of thought, care, effort, and resources.

I think she works hard, but inefficiently. I think she’s overly self-conscious and underly self-possessed. I think she chronically mistakes her own subjective whims for universal yearnings. I think she wants to be perfect, or at least undeniably really, really good, but it’s that very impulse toward perfectionism that is ruining everything. I think she is her own worst enemy.

Girl, I relate.

But still, in spite of all this, in spite of the false starts and flameouts and unmitigated failures, she continues to try, and she continues to believe that this next project, this next brand, this next whatever will finally be the thing. In spite of everything that has happened, and all the many things that haven’t, she remains doggedly convinced that her defining success is ever close at hand. And so she tinkers and tweaks and polishes and primps for weeks and months and years until it’s just right. And when it turns out to be all wrong, she calmly starts over again, swiftly rationalising away the failure not as a failure at all, but as a necessary chapter of learning and growth, without which she never would have been able to arrive at this next thing, which, by the way, is really and truly The Thing. All those other false starts and flameouts and unmitigated failures? They were all building up to this one perfect moment; to this One Perfect Thing. It simply had to be this way. And she simply can’t wait to share it with all of you.

But not just yet. Soon; soon; so soon. Next month, most probably; or next quarter, almost certainly; or next year, at the absolute latest! It’s nearly there; it’s nearly right; it’s nearly ready. She just needs a little more time. Then it will finally be perfect — just perfect. It will all be worth the wait. You’ll see.

Girl, I relate.

As ever,

Tristan

Because I have an awful tendency, in writing and in life, of entirely sidestepping the point and couching my true intentions in lovely-sounding but mostly meaningless agglomerations of words, I’d like to state my intentions and ambitions plainly at the outset:

Thus began my inaugural post nearly six months ago. Six months later, I’m somewhat dismayed but at any rate entirely unsurprised to report that I’ve made absolutely no progress whatsoever on shedding that awful tendency. If anything, my propensity for evading, denying or otherwise deflecting from the ostensible point has only intensified, and my prose has only become more dense, looping, florid, decadent, self-regarding, and blissfully point-free. Clarity and economy in writing are virtues to be sure, but only if you regard the principle purpose of writing to be the maximally efficient transmission of information, which I very clearly do not. Writing is for marinating in one’s own intellect and ego. Clearly.

But still, I must admit, however grudgingly, that my near total inability to clearly and concisely get to the fucking point does occasionally present me with a problem: lost in the thicket of my own words, I often find myself struggling to recall what it was I even wanted to say in the first place, much less why, or how, or for what audience, or to what ends. And there is, believe it or not, always some point that I’m trying to make: there is always some critical sentiment lurking somewhere in the gorgeous jumble of verbiage. But when even I can no longer begin to discern, much less articulate what-in-the-actual-fuck that critical sentiment might be, I have to concede that perhaps I’m ever-so-slightly too enamoured with the sound of my own voice and attempt to somewhat rein myself in. Only perhaps; only somewhat; only ever-so-slightly.

And so, in the interest of getting out of my own way and to the fucking point, I’m returning now to first principles:

Because I have an awful tendency, in writing and in life, of entirely sidestepping the point and couching my true intentions in lovely-sounding but mostly meaningless agglomerations of words, I’d like to state my intentions and ambitions plainly at the outset:

I want to discuss my aspirations to be a screenwriter and outline the particular appeal of this form for me: when and why I committed to it; how I believe it plays to my strengths; the challenges I’ve faced up to this point; and what I hope to accomplish by working in this medium.

Great! Why?

Well, for one thing, all of the unsavoury reasons I’ve already repeatedly professed to over the past six months: vanity, a desperate need for validation, congenital smugness, bottomless self absorption, and so on, and so forth, and whatnot, and whatever.

But most of all, I’m writing this because I don’t know what else to do: having now pursued this ambition in a serious and sustained way for nearly five years, but having not yet achieved any meaningful or durable success, the pressure is mounting, internally and externally, to make a firm and final choice: revert to the sensible, practical path which would see me pausing, diminishing, or forgoing these dreams and attempting to rebuild a stable, decent life by deploying my skills, talent, and experience in a sensible, practical way, OR continue along the brazen, deeply impractical path which would see me doubling down on my dreams and putting even more effort, resources, and blind faith into the supremely uncertain project of attempting to build a life, career, and identity on exceedingly shaky ground.

Of course I know which path I want to take, but the cost of continued failure, of continued struggle, of continued nothingness is considerable; grave; fatal even. So if I’m going to continue down this path and redouble my efforts, as I want to do, I must be very certain of why I’m doing all this. I need to see the words staring back at me.

Enough time has passed since first committing to this ambition that it can no longer be dismissed as some sort of whim or flight of fancy: there’s no going back because there’s no longer anything to go back to.

Piece by piece, I have shed, spurned, discarded, destroyed, or been stripped of nearly every marker of my former, outwardly-defined identity. Perhaps I internalised the belief that some degree of discomfort, struggle, even suffering is necessary for one’s artistic bonafides, and then set about quietly sabotaging myself to engineer the discomfort, struggle, and suffering that has otherwise been absent from my placid, charmed life. But mostly, the choice to dismantle this former identity and way of life was, in fact, a choice, and an entirely conscious one at that.

My old life was pleasant and comfortable but also entirely alienating: a succession of stuff and things and experiences and tried-on personas that were nice enough but mostly felt like they were happening to someone else. It was less so an actual life, and more so an adolescent fantasy of what a big, beautiful, wonderful life should look like, haphazardly patched together from the outside-in.

Important-sounding fake-ish creative jobs with six-figure salaries, and impressive-looking metal credit cards with airport lounge access, and beautiful clothes from places like Belgium and France and Italy and Japan, and trips to all those places and so many others to buy said clothes and so much else: random baubles and trinkets and bowls and vessels, and books I would never read, and candles I would never light, and architecturally significant kettles I would never use except as a talisman to signal my superior taste to friends and lovers and twinks from Grindr, and every other kind of gorgeous distraction I could possibly hoover up during the many deafeningly quiet, achingly lonely in-between moments when the true cost of my — by the way, utterly ordinary — Faustian bargain became impossible to ignore, and when the vacuum of meaning and purpose in my life threatened to consume me whole.

But now, nearly all of those things have gone away. They were nice; wonderful, even, at times, and in ways. But on their own, these lovely little ornaments were not enough to sustain me. These sorts of things, when relegated to their proper place — that is to say, marginal and incidental — are absolutely fine to desire and lovely to possess. But when they are falsely elevated to a place of central meaning in your life and central importance to your sense of self, they become enervating, corrosive, and most of all, deeply sad.

So stripped of all these things, absent most of my former external markers of identity, what’s left?

My character, I suppose, which even at my most selfish and nihilistic still always veers toward decency and gentleness. My intellect and sense of humour, to be sure, which even at my worst the qualities that I always wish to be defined by and valued for. My talent as a writer, without a doubt, which even at my most confused is the one thing has always felt the most like me. And then of course, there’s my potential, as yet unrealised: all the many things I could do and indeed, very much dream of doing if only my character and my intellect and my sense of humour and my talent could come into some sort of productive harmony and foster a long-anticipated, much-needed breakthrough.

But as of yet, I’ve had no breakthrough, large or small. I can envision the life I want, and I can even occasionally commune with the freer, lighter, easier version of myself that will hopefully exist within such a life. But right now, today, I honestly don’t know how to get there. It all still feels so far out of reach, so obscure, so abstract.

There is, at present, very little external inducement to continue: no job in the offing, no contract under negotiation, no project in development; nothing remotely firm that I can train my attention on and direct my efforts towards and point towards and say: that. And so, the only thing pushing me forward is some strange but persistent sense that this is simply what I must do, underscored by the terrible reality that I have effectively foreclosed every other viable path.

But once again, I fear I’m sidestepping the point.

***

Years ago, close to twenty, a then-new, now-old friend happened to read something I had written. Noting, for the first time, a certain flair with language, she told me quite matter-of-factly that I should be a writer. I reflexively demurred and feigned ignorance of any special aptitude, even though it was then, as now, the one thing that I hoped to be noticed for and distinguished by in the eyes of others.

This was back when I still had an extreme aversion to professing to things that I liked, aspired to, or was good at, and preferred instead to glide through life waiting for other people to take note of my gifts and talents and proficiencies and announce them back to me. I’m still prone to this awful self-defeating tendency, but now I have a Substack which, contrary to its (my) professed purview, is much less “a newsletter about pop cultural ephemera from the near-past that I’ve deemed to be worthy of a close-read and/or re-litigation,” and much more a forum for me to reflect deeply, luxuriously, and without restraint on that one subject that is, to me, the most fascinating, urgent, and desperately under-examined of all: myself.

I’m still frequently embarrassed, ashamed, and otherwise reluctant to profess to my ambitions out there in the world-at-large, but in here, in this safe, cloistered, extremely lightly trafficked corner of the internet, I simply cannot shut the fuck up about wanting to be a writer, and needing to be a writer, and all the many associated perils and virtues therein and thereof.

Growth, of a sort?

You should be a writer, she said. And after cycling through all the requisite handwringing and shows of false modesty and ritual disavowals of ambition, eventually I conceded that yes: being a writer is something that I might like to do.

Well, what do you think you might like to write?

If one of the very best feelings in the world is having your hidden potential be recognised, then one of the very worst is what tends to come next: the assumption that you have already done something meaningful with that potential, or barring that, are in the process of doing so, or barring that, have at least somewhat of a plan of how to leverage and exploit your talents. But if you are in any way apathetic, evasive, or hesitant about what you ought to do with your gifts, other people’s enthusiasm very quickly curdles first into confusion, next into disappointment, then into frustration, and ultimately, into uncaring — and perhaps finally into disdain outright. Because there is something unseemly, and pitiable, and even a little contemptible about unrealised or underutilised potential: no matter how you try to frame it, justify it, or explain it away, it is a failure of some kind: of nerve, of grit, of confidence, of drive, of determination, of resourcefulness — and perhaps, if it goes on long enough, it’s simply a failure of talent itself.

Well, what do you think you might like to write?

At the time, all the many, very necessary questions that surrounded the prospect of being a writer — How? When? Why? About what? For whom? To what ends? By what means? — remained entirely unanswered, and in my mind, firmly someone else’s problem.

Surely, I reasoned then, someone will eventually come along, take note of my gifts, tell me what I should do with them, and provide me with all the resources, access, platforms, outlets, and opportunities to fully realise my potential?

And even if this other person fails to materialise, I wagered, surely some future version of myself will, at some point, summon whatever is needed (Courage? Gumption? Vanity? Idiocy?) and finally figure it all out?

But whether by the intervention of some beneficent stranger, or the straining of some hypothetical future version of myself, absolutely none of these terribly pressing and essential questions felt at all like the concern of nineteen-year-old me, which left me free to respond with the astonishing combination self-seriousness and naïveté that only a nineteen-year-old can muster:

Well…I think I’d like to create...sketches of people…

I then paused for dramatic effect.

…but with words.

Lol.

Reflecting on this exchange now, other than my own stupidity, what I’m struck by most of all is how much wasted time and fruitless agonising I could have spared myself had I just taken myself seriously and literally back then. As trite and reductive as it might be to put it like that, honestly, what else do writers do? What else should they do, other than take note of novel character tics, and compelling relational dynamics, and all the ways that systemic forces manifest in the individual experience, them render all of that as discrete, hopefully affecting vignettes? As writers, we look out at the world around us, we search for the general in the specific, and the specific in the general, and we do our best to characterise it all in a way that will hopefully mean something to someone else. Sketches of people…but with words. Isn’t that kind of all there is?

I’m endlessly fascinated by people, even though I’m mostly terrified of them. And in spite of my mostly very quiet, extremely reserved air, and my near-total inability to ever comfortably or naturally navigate most human interactions, I actually think I have a greater-than-average grasp on the basic contours of human nature, the range of characterological types that tend to exist, and the general ways that humans tend to arrange themselves in social units. But the fact that I so often feel ill-at-ease in interpersonal dynamics is less a reflection of some essential incomprehension of people, and more a byproduct of my compulsive drive to over-comprehend people, and their natures, and their interpersonal machinations.

I’m perpetually too busy indexing and categorising and pathologising the movements of those around me to ever fully or un-self-consciously participate in the great drama of life. I’m forever finding myself at the margins of things, looking on, imagining what it must be like down there in the fray, feeling terribly alienated, terribly apart from, terribly other.

But no one has ever relegated me to the periphery. Indeed, nearly everyone around me, at every phase of my life — childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, now — and in every arena — personal, romantic, familial, professional — has strained tirelessly to try and pull me out of myself, but only ever with marginal, provisional success. But why? There is no formative external trauma to account for this way of being: no rejection, no cruelty, no silencing, no diminishment, no marginalisation that was ever inflicted upon me. For the most part, anyone who has ever mattered to me in the slightest has been unfailingly loving, and kind, and encouraging, and wonderful. And yet?

Whenever I stray too far into the midst of life, I very quickly find myself wanting to retreat back to the periphery to regain my bearings and metabolise all the living and doing that has transpired. There’s a distinct sense of safety and comfort to this way of being, of course, but for me, the real utility to existing somewhat tangentially to the mess of life is the vantage point it affords: it’s only from a position of relative remove that one can ever be afforded a comprehensive and expansive view of things. One might counter that the truest, most essential, most complete view can only ever come from life’s midst, and that may well be true, but that is not who or what I am — as a person or as a writer. I watch, and I wait, and I bide my time until I feel I have grasped, in full, the supreme truism, the crystalline essence, the single perfect object lesson of whatever it is I happen to be observing.

It’s just who I am.

***

Having then at answered in the extremely general sense the question of what to write, the rather more pressing question arises of how to write: that is to say, in what form? And for whom? And to what ends? All writing requires some sort of formal container, presumes the presence of some audience, and strikes at some sort of overarching target, whether that be conceptual, intellectual, emotional, moral, artistic, or commercial. Even those writers who attempt to radically disregard or upend tradition, who profess contempt for any presumed audience, who claim no agenda apart from the act of writing itself are still entirely bound up in and beholden to questions of form, ambition, and intended impact. Being a writer, in any meaningful sense, is an entirely public affair.

So many other writers tend to write from a place of biographical urgency, moral clarity, insatiable curiosity, or radical imaginative potential. But I neither possess, nor particularly strive to cultivate any of those things. For these sorts of writers, the form that they choose to operate in is largely a byproduct of their greater ambition: it’s simply a matter of selecting the most appropriate formal vessel to articulate and transmit the overarching goal that they have already decided upon.

But for writers like me, who tend to write simply because they can, and because it feels good, and because it nurses their ego and offers the occasional spasm of transcendence, the act of writing itself, more so than the form, or even the subject matter is the point. So long as pleasing combinations of words tumble out of the ether into their consciousness and pass through their fingertips to then be received by some adequately appreciative audience, they will feel essentially contented and fulfilled. The actual writing itself could take any number of forms; it could be any number of things.

Except it can’t really. At a certain point, it has to become something that is firm and fixed and comprehensible to someone other than yourself.

Because if one is to ever escape the terrible, undignified limbo of being a somewhat-more-than-hobbyist, somewhat-less-than-professional, it becomes necessary to commit, at least provisionally, to a container for your creative efforts. Eventually, you simply must stop dithering, and start narrowing the range of possible forms that your creative output could take. You must full-throatedly choose the thing that is to be your thing so that your ambitions are legible to others (and, for that matter, to yourself) and then you must go do it. You must choose your choice.

We could all theoretically be and do a great many things with whatever range of interests and aptitudes we have been endowed with and/or care to develop. But unless you find some way to concisely explain yourself and your creative ambitions to others, and then focus your energies on publicly achieving some version of those ends, you will flounder. Take it from me! If you equally entertain the possibility of this, or that, or the other, you will end up doing precisely none of anything at all. Take it from me! You must be absolutely certain of yourself in order for others to take you seriously, and you absolutely must be taken seriously by others in order to feel certain of yourself. Take it from me!

I want to be a screenwriter.

Great! Why?

I’ll spare you the torturous process of elimination that led me here, but in brief: I’m too frothy to be an academic, too artless to be a poet, too unimaginative to be a novelist, too incurious to be a journalist, too agreeable and desiring of consensus to be a critic, too tepid, safe, and prone to inaction to be a memoirist, and too desperately vain, materialistic, avaricious, status conscious, and otherwise in and of the world to pursue any more experimental creative practice that defies ready categorisation and easy monetisation.

I’m mainstream. I’m commercial. I’m a hack. It’s just who I am.

And even though I’m somewhat framing the decision to pursue screenwriting as the last stop on a grand tour of failure and burnout and rejection, overwhelmingly, it was a decision that was made entirely on positive terms. It was a choice that was emphatically and enthusiastically chosen, rather than one that was reluctantly slumped into. (I chose my choice!)

Film and television (specifically television) is and always has been, for me, the most affecting and resonant narrative art form. The slice-of-life dramas and melodramas of the 1970s and 1980s (and today) opened my eyes to the casual devastation but also supreme tenderness and beauty of even the most ordinary-seeming people and lives. The formulaic but also often brilliant sitcoms and romantic comedies of the 1990s and early 2000s are what I patterned my affect, sensibility, and style of humour after. The prestige television of the early 2000s and up to the present day is where I discovered my most enduring constellation of narrative, visual, conceptual and formal references, and it is what first alerted me to the possibility of creating, which is to say specifically writing, sprawling, expansive portraits of individuals, relationships, and the world at-large — both as it is and as it could be.

Sketches of people — but with words!

For years, forever really, I’ve watched films and television (specifically television) and felt some version of: I could do that; I should do that. When I read a great book, I feel nothing but benign admiration. When I watch a great TV show, I feel admiration certainly, but I also convulse with envy, and vibrate with yearning. But jealousy, if properly apprehended and constructively heeded, is entirely instructive. Because at its core, all jealousy is trying to say is: you could do that; you should do that. To me, cinematic storytelling is simply the most expansive, free, and interesting way to tell the types of stories I want to tell.

Write what you know. It’s generally taken to mean subject matter: lives and worlds and characters and contexts that you have, on some level inhabited yourself. But I think that questionable advice also applies, perhaps with greater urgency, to the question of form: you must write how you know. It sounds self-evident, but for years I entirely missed the point. A poet must know poetry; a novelist must know novels; a screenwriter must know film and television. If you don’t know the form you’re operating in, if you don’t love it deeply, if you don’t gravitate towards it naturally, if you aren’t literate in its history and conversant in its customs, then whatever you write in that form will almost certainly be absolute fucking shit.

The things you write might still be absolute fucking shit — love of art is no guarantee of anything — but at least you’ll enjoy yourself along the way and be able to stand behind the absolute fucking shit you’ve written with some degree of pride. At least you, if not anyone else, will actually find some meaning and worth and pleasure in the funny little scripts, for example, that are squirrelled away in the bowels of your iCloud.

Contrary to absolutely everything I’ve just written, absolutely nothing I’m doing or aspire to do, creatively or professionally, is actually all that serious. Really, I just want to have a laugh, engender some pathos, and commit some pleasing combinations of words to the page (and the screen). It’s why I tend to write things like a White Lotus season 3 spec script with more gay incest (fun!), less poorly-thought-out patricide (who cares?), and about the same amount of rich people chafing at the essential meaninglessness of existence (cheers!) or an Industry season 3 spec script with more Miami crypto bros (fun!), less British class politics (who cares?), and about the same amount of incomprehensible but also thrilling depictions of arbitrage (cheers!) or the fictionalised life story of my old neighbour in New York “Jessica” based on all the random shit she threw away over a five-year period (Jessica is her real name) or an ultra-high-budget jukebox musical and Troye Sivan star vehicle based on a three-minute interaction I once had with my boyfriend’s mother’s sister’s friend “Gina” (Gina is her real name) or a limited series adaptation of a short story from the 90s about Courtney Cox’s asshole called “Courtney Cox’s Asshole.” What can I say? I’m mainstream. I’m commercial. I’m a hack. Staff me in your writer’s room.

To the extent that there’s any sort of conceptual or thematic through-line to the things I write, it would be: vaguely satiric dramedies featuring terminally underestimated women, fatally overestimated men, celebrities playing themselves, and also gay shit. But other than those scant few artistic signatures, there really isn’t a point, as such, to the things that I write, nor is there a singular project that I imagine all of my efforts to be building towards. I don’t have an agenda — formal, conceptual, political, moral, or otherwise — other than, I guess, trying to be funny, and clever, and hopefully somewhat insightful in my assessment of people and relationships and the world at-large.

Maybe, I’m wagering, that will be enough.

***

There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell for a while now. The struggle to tell it hasn’t been a failure of motivation, or effort, or ambition, or imagination: somehow, I just can’t quite grasp it, even as I kept returning to it over and over, again and again. I suspect most writers experience some version of this phenomenon wherein a fixed set of themes, images, motifs seems to materialises in absolutely everything they write: they are powerless to stop writing about it, but equally ignorant of what it actually is, or where it came from, or why it (apparently) so urgently needs to be told, over and over and over again.

So it is with me: no matter what I try to write, this one story keeps asserting itself. To be sure, the characters change, along with the setting, the genre, the themes, and the ostensible point, but the actual point, which is to say, the actual story, is shockingly consistent. There it always is, in some form or another: the same beats, the same tics, the same conceits, the same framework, the same story. It’s a simple story, really; maybe even a little derivative and rote and pat, but I just can’t seem to let it go.

The story centres about a quiet and reserved but deeply perceptive and intuitive Protagonist — the sort of person, in other words, who tends to write stories. And usually, that’s precisely what they are: a writer. If not by trade, then certainly by temperament. Through some contrivance or another, they find themselves in the orbit of a very rich, very famous, very powerful, very prolific person — the sort of person, in other words, who stories tend to be written about.

Whether as employee, biographer, friend, lover, muse, or some other arrangement, the Protagonist becomes insinuated in the innermost world of this charismatic figure — let’s call them the Subject. Fascinated by, admiring of, even in thrall to the Subject, the Protagonist latches on to them, and quickly jettisons whatever life they had before (usually nothing worth mentioning) and fashions an entirely new identity for themselves. Whoever and whatever the were before, they now exist primarily in relation to the Subject. And the Subject, in turn, becomes equally enamoured with the Protagonist, seeing in them something pure and unspoilt. The Subject feels to them like the one crucial thing they’ve always needed but that had always eluded them.

Initially, this new relationship feels to both almost transcendent; as if, in each other, they have found the supreme sense of purpose and meaning that they have been seeking their entire life. They both feel newly seen, freshly understood, and properly appreciated. They make each other feel special.

And for a while, this arrangement between the Protagonist and the Subject is as close to perfect as any relationship can ever be. But eventually, inevitably, the inherent asymmetry of their relationship starts to become evident, and a rift begins to emerge between them. No longer content to merely be appreciated by the Subject, the Protagonist finds themself wanting to become like the Subject — the sort of person, in other words, who stories tend to be written about.

Because as wonderful as it felt, for a time, to bask in the glow of someone like the Subject, eventually the same old doubts that had always dogged the Protagonist begin to creep back in — that they are fundamentally dull; unremarkable; nothing and no one of note. They begin to feel like little more than the plaything of the Subject, and this, to them, is the very worst feeling of all. Existing in solitude, and anonymity, and obscurity, they realise, was preferable to being proximate to greatness but denied it themselves.

The Protagonist starts to see the Subject as someone they must surmount and surpass, and as someone to be used to achieve their own ends. But even as they descend into deceit, betrayal, treachery, subterfuge, fits of ego, the Subject is always portrayed as so much worse: a beguiling but ultimately slight figure who deserves whatever comeuppance the Protagonist is conspiring to serve them.

And so, the Protagonist embarks on whatever gambit they think will take down the Subject and secure them their glory, infamy, riches — whatever the Subject has that they feel they lack. And in doing so, they finally wrest themselves from the margins and hurl themselves decisively into the fray: their late-breaking act of ego-driven mania highjacks the plot and entirely reorients the drama around them.

And every time, in every telling, they succeed. The Subject is felled, the Protagonist is vindicated, and everyone who deserves to lives happily ever after does so. They were the main character all along!

But were they? Really?

Because on a purely narrative level, none of my Protagonists in any version of this story actually function as protagonists. The action always happens around them: sometimes to them, but never because of them. The story that most people will be drawn to will always be the one that is happening somewhere else, and because of someone else. The principle function of all these Protagonists of mine, on a narrative level, is simply to observe and record and react to and re-contextualise all the things that everyone else does. They may find themselves proximate to, or even intimately embedded within the main drama, but they are in no way the driver of it. Even their eventual act of uncharacteristic boldness which subverts and subdues the Subject (the ostensible main character), is still just a reaction to a set of pre-existing conditions created and/or mediated by other characters. The sudden, third-act shift in perspective may amount to a fun little twist, but it doesn’t actually change who the main character is or what the story was actually about.

And even if we allow ourselves to imagine a version of this story told entirely from the point-of-view of the quiet and reserved but deeply perceptive and intuitive Protagonist, what would we actually be seeing from their vantage point? What would actually be happening, on-screen, as they observe and react and commentate upon the characters and events around them? What would they actually be doing? Very little, I fear.

The most fascinating thing about characters like my Protagonists — their introspection — necessarily cannot be made external. Characters who are fundamentally oriented towards their own internal world very seldom become the hero of the story — not because they are uninteresting, but because there is so little happening outwardly to observe, react to, or make meaning from. These characters may well be the most interesting, complex, and deeply felt person in any given scene, but to everyone else, all they appear to be doing is, well, nothing. Narratively and dramatically, they are non-entities.

So why then do I keep compulsively writing versions of this same non-protagonist Protagonist fumbling through the same rudimentary psychodrama? If they don’t function at the most basic formal and narrative levels, what am I actually trying to express? Why are they of such persistent fascination to me? Who are they, really?

Isn’t it obvious?

This story that I keep trying to tell isn’t really a story at all. It’s a vision of what my life could be when or if I finally pry myself away from the periphery and abandon once and for all the idea that someone is going to pluck me from obscurity, and anoint me as special, and mould me into what I ought to be. It’s a potent fantasy — that someone else will make sense of my life for me — but it’s ultimately just that: a fantasy, not to mention a particularly devious way of forestalling all the necessary work.

So I suppose all that’s left to do is muddle through and continue to try, and continue to hope, and continue to believe that one day, hopefully very soon, all of my ambition, and talent, and resolve, and self-regard will cohere in the way that I’ve always imagined it would, and that I will be one of the fortunate few who find themselves rewarded for their extraordinary hubris.

And maybe then, whenever then is (hopefully very soon), all of this uncertainty, and aimlessness, and yearning will amount to nothing more than fodder for a hopeful, smoothed-over platitude that some future version of myself will deliver to a striving young writer who needs to believe, just as desperately as I do now, that it will all, somehow, work out. Whatever you do, don’t give up, I’ll tell them — and I’ll really mean it, because I’ll really know that it’s only thing — more than talent, more than luck — that ever made a difference. And then I’ll wish them well, and politely excuse myself, and drift away into the sea of people, into the party, into the night, looking for someone more famous, more fabulous, and more interesting to talk to.

I came across that line the other day and I immediately placed it in the very specific corner of my mind where I warehouse brilliant things that other people said but that I wish I had thought of, and will probably try to pass off as my own original insight, intentionally or unintentionally, at some point in the very near future. (I won’t!) Like all the very best takes, it was clarifying, precise, and economical in the extreme — three things, incidentally, my writing is emphatically not.

I’ve been circling some version of the thought for a while now — that reality and satire have converged to, shall we say, discomfiting ends — but somehow I could never quite pin down the implications of this very palpable and heavily commentated-upon phenomenon. Reality mimics satire, therefore… The last part eluded me.

That everything feels like, and looks like, and functions like a cheap farce of itself is entirely self-evident, and that notion has long ago passed into conventional wisdom. At this point, it’s just another one of the impotent clichés that we parrot back and forth to each other, not because it provides us with comfort (nothing does), or gives us hope (nothing could), or spurs us to action (nothing will), but simply because we need to say something to pass the time and fill the awkward silence as we wait for the last few corroded fragments of our formerly shared reality to be carted off to some cosmic foundry, melted down, then recast as giant gleaming dildos that we can all use to go fuck ourselves.

Because of course. Of course that’s what’s happening. Of course we can all see it, feel it, intuit it, experience it on any number of levels, and interpret it in any number of ways. Of course the farcification of everything is the defining characteristic of our time. And of course we’re all grappling with the fallout and implications of all of that, all of the time. You can become hysterical, or you can become numb, but what you absolutely cannot do anymore is make some cunty little observation about the state of things and expect for it to have any currency, potency, or meaning whatsoever.

Which is a shame, and frankly a bit of a dilemma for me, because cunty little observations about the state of things have always been a great strength and personal passion of mine. But alas; no more. And it’s not because cunty little observations are suddenly impolitic or insensitive or reckless or dangerous or otherwise in poor taste; it’s because they’re toothless and pointless and desperately unimaginative. It’s all a big fucking joke, and it’s all at our expense. We are the joke.

For reasons so staggeringly self-evident I couldn’t possibly deign to articulate them here or anywhere, now or ever, the zeitgeist has decidedly shifted away from snark and cheek — the default stance of the chattering classes for most of my adult life — and pivoted toward saying precisely what you mean in the most radically unadorned terms possible. It’s not at all the case that earnestness or sincerity have in any way made comebacks, it’s simply that there’s absolutely nothing to be gained by looking at things obliquely any more.

There are no dispatches from the margins of anything these days. To attempt to behold things askew is simply to see a great scattering of flattened, fragmented impressions: images of images, ideas of ideas, illegible from any angle but head on and full frontal. The only insight to be gleaned is that there are no more insights to be gleaned.

Satire as a form can only function when there is a meaningful discrepancy between the appearance of things and their true natures. When the way things look and the way things actually are don’t fully accord, the space between those two conditions becomes fertile ground for commentary. Under these conditions, satire becomes productive, provocative, delightful, and necessary; under these conditions it’s actually possible to observe and then articulate something vital but previously unknowable. But today, there is no gulf; there is no discrepancy. Everything is exactly what it seems to be, and everyone’s either too busy, too lazy, too needy, too narcissistic, too cynical, or too emotionally incontinent to conceal who and what they truly are. Appearance is reality.

I don’t say any of this in a despairing or pearl clutching way, nor do I say it with any sense of callous delight. It is neither something to be celebrated nor something to be lamented; it simply is. For better or for worse, in ways terrifying and liberating, everyone is saying exactly what the fuck they mean, and saying that shit with their chest.

Radical candour is in; subtly and nuance are out. And as for Satire? Shame: she was euthanised last summer on the aft sundeck of Jeff Bezos’ yacht (a mercy killing), and her cremains have been lovingly upcycled into a 20-carat pear-shaped diamond pendant, gorgeously nestled between Lauren Sanchez’s glistening ochre tits. Rest in Power, girl.

But having said all that, the fact that satire as a form has been rendered impotent and irrelevant is ultimately only of marginal importance to me. I like satire, I admire satire, and I don’t at all delight in its demise, but what I’m rather more personally concerned with and urgently impacted by are the related deaths of irony and indirection. I’m sure we’ll all regroup and find brilliant new ways to be snide, nasty, self-satisfied cunts in due time, but for now, a shift is decidedly afoot.

For as long as I can recall, deflection, discursiveness, and opacity have been my preferred creative mode. I’ve occasionally smuggled in some achingly sincere confession of frailty, or offered a split-second glimpse at some formative hurt, but such feints at vulnerability are always immediately followed up by something so wilfully vapid and so comprehensively insipid that the potency of whatever I was saying in earnest immediately becomes subsumed by whatever far frothier, punchier joke I was teeing up. I’ll bare my soul, but only as the set up to a punchline.

And it makes perfect sense why I gravitated toward this affect for so many years: there’s a safety in never copping to precisely what you mean and always maintaining some degree of plausible deniability around everything you say. If you habitually cloak your true motives, and chronically deflect from your true feelings, you can claim credit for anything good, shirk responsibility for everything bad, and sidestep all responsibility for more or less everything, according to whatever whim or exigency crops up at any given moment.

Even more appealingly still, by the logic of this stance, the value of your attitudes, ideas, opinions, and creative output as a whole becomes entirely everyone else’s problem. They didn’t like it? They didn’t get it? They didn’t find it to be funny or clever or relevant or pertinent or original or worthwhile or germane? How embarrassing! For them! When everything you say could mean anything, including nothing at all, you become invincible, infallible, and effectively beyond reproach. And who wouldn’t want to float through life on a candy floss cloud of unearned moral and intellectual superiority? It was fabulous while it lasted.

But writing this way, and, to put a finer point on it, being this way — which is to say slippery and diffident and smug and impassive — is of course untenable. But it’s also so much a part of my conception of self, and so much a part of how I interface with the world, that to confront the very real possibility that this posture no longer has any currency is to confront the very terrifying possibility of my own obsolescence. And as I mentioned in my inaugural post several months ago (NB: finally having a body of work from which to quote myself: bliss!):

“I’m someone who is desperately fucking concerned with the question of his own relevancy.”

So there it is. That’s why, and how I’ve (once again) ended up spending a month fiddling with this missive, only to arrive at something that is (once again) about nothing so much as itself. Writing a Substack about writing a Substack? I hate everything. Except for the sound of my own voice. Allow me to reiterate: I’ve spent a fucking month writing about writing about something. But to once again deliciously quote myself:

“As if there was anything better or more worthwhile I could have been doing during that month; as if this particular squandering of four weeks is somehow unprecedented; as if these lost thirty days is anything other than completely consistent with my tortured, self-defeating perfectionism.”

It was true a month ago, it’s true today, and it will most likely continue to be true in a month from now when I once again find myself crushed by the unbearable weight of simply trying to do the thing that I allegedly like most of all.

What should I write about? And why? And how? And for whom? And to what end? Every time I endeavour to write anything — truly anything at all: of any length, form, or level of ambition — it seems that I must earmark a minimum of three to four weeks upfront for moaning and hand-wringing over the existential perils of attempting to articulate whatever it is I’ve decided to train my attention on. Until one day, after weeks of sifting through the fat, steaming dung heap that I projectile sharted out onto the proverbial page over the preceding month, I finally succeed in plucking out a tiny, solitary, shit-covered kernel of something worthwhile. Only after all of that do I have my point of departure. Only then can the true work begin.

Oh no! A writer who’s tormented by the creative process and stalked by fears of irrelevancy!?!?

The process of writing anything at all, much less anything worthwhile is of course necessarily circuitous and fraught and deeply destabilising. Or maybe it’s not necessarily that way, but for me it very much is. The friction and the agony cannot be sidestepped. The cost of creating art — fuck it: let’s just go ahead and call this art (lol) — is terrible, but it is a debt that must be paid.

For every flow state, every sustained harnessing of brilliance, every beneficent visitation from the muses, you will pay for it tenfold in the form of crippling self-loathing, suffocating dread, and the most hideous boredom imaginable — boredom with the world, with life, and most of all, with yourself. And worst of all, you’ll know all along that all of it is entirely your own fault, and entirely within your own control. At any point, you could just stop. At any point, you could just not. At any point you could just acknowledge the exceedingly obvious truth that plucking words from the ether and arranging them in novel, pleasing ways is, for the vast majority or people in the vast majority of circumstances, a deeply frivolous pursuit of steadily diminishing returns. You could just go do literally anything else. But then you wouldn’t be an artist. Not truly. Fucking hack.

So I keep paying the terrible cost, and keep trying to find better ways to endure the friction and the agony. It’s all good; I’ve made my peace with it. In for a penny, in for a pound. But the fact remains that my old and familiar impulses have felt somehow…off as of late. I feel as though I’ve reached the logical endpoint of some era in my creative life that was principally characterised by arch commentary and snide asides and dense thickets of smart words about dumb things. It was indeed an era, and it served me well, but it feels over now. The world’s moved on, and I’ve moved on with it. And as much as I keep despairing over the question of my own relevancy and affecting the air of someone more vain and preening than I actually am (ironically to deflect from the true breadth of my own vanity and preening), I really am grappling with the question of what is relevant any longer?

What should I write about? And why? And how? And for whom? And to what end?

Over the past few months, I’ve felt both an urgency and a genuine desire to do something different. Yet every time I try to start something, I keep returning to the familiar and the well-trod; I keep nosing around the same old ideas; I keep revisiting the same fallow pastures of celebrity worship/derision looking for some promising shoot that I can nurture and grow, only to find that it’s a dustbowl. Successive waves of terminally online locusts have ravaged the landscape. It’s an extinction-level event for cunty little commentators. Salt the earth and move on.

It’s not so much that the subject matter of celebrity is tired — there will always be famous people who tidily function as mirrors to society and act as vessels for our collective manias. It’s rather the tone of condescension, and the attitude of unearned moral superiority, and the perpetual sidestepping of what I really mean that feels expired — both to me personally, and at the broader cultural level.

For years, the basic proposition of most of my writing was some variation of the following:

Wouldn’t it be hilarious if Famous Person X possessed the very specific type of self-awareness of Smug Verbose Gay Dude Y (me) such that Truism About The Human Condition Z was unexpectedly illuminated?

I had a lot of fun with that really quite straightforward formula, and I managed to tease out a lot of strange, and provocative, and occasionally brilliant things from it. It helped me to build my confidence, and develop my voice, and hone my craft (barf but true), and clarify that yes, in fact, this is the thing that I want and need to be doing above all other things. My cunty little observations about fame and money and power and vanity and ambition were of course terribly fun to write, and on purely technical grounds, often quite good: at an absolute minimum, I’ve succeeded in plucking some pleasing combinations of words from the ether.

The real utility of operating within this tidy, predictable, pat framework however was that it provided a low-stakes safe zone within which to freely experiment. When something is superficially frothy, trivial, and minor, it’s easier to take a big swing. The surest impediment to creating Good and Important Art is self-consciously endeavouring to create Good and Important Art. But scratch just beneath the surface of any of my cunty little observations, and it’s clear that the actual point was always more so pathos than lolz. Not that lolz and pathos are mutually exclusive, but it’s always better to aim for idiocy and end up with insight than the other way around. By only professing to be engaging with Silly and Trivial Things, I could comfortably toy around with Serious and Important Things behind the scenes without any of the pressure. If anyone ever caught a whiff of the Serious or the Important in something I wrote and found my framing or analysis to be stupid or bad, I could swat away that criticism by saying “well of course you found it to be Stupid and Bad: it’s a Silly and Trivial Thing! It’s not meant to be taken seriously! It’s not meant to be profound! It’s not meant to be good! Fucker.” And then I could just carry on trying this and trying that and seeing if anything worked, stuck, or resonated without any of the awful pressure of having to profess my true intentions and then stand behind them.

So of course I’m attached to this style, this form, this subject matter. It’s fun to write, it plays to my strengths, it obviates most critique, and it has evergreen appeal: there will always be some new Famous Asshole to skewer and mock and fret over and incite a moral panic around (in a fun way!), and there will always be an audience for content that demands nothing of them except for rudimentary cultural literacy and a desire for moral superiority. Why change now? It would be so easy and so comforting to just keep doing the same thing.

But that doesn’t mean I should. In so many ways — ways that I can’t quite explain, even though I’ve already expended so many words trying — it’s just time to move on.

Creatively, I feel decisively at the end of one thing (the Cunty Little Observations era) and slightly more tentatively at the beginning of another thing (the Diaristic Monthly Dispatches era?) I’m still unsure of what this next thing will be and what form it will take, but whatever it is, and whatever it becomes, I suspect it will somehow be more honest, more earnest, less guarded, and less defensive. Or maybe not? Maybe it will all be too difficult, too vulnerable, and worst of all, too boring and I’ll collapse right back into irony’s clammy embrace.

Who knows? Who cares? What next? What now?

Jennifer Aniston.

***

About a decade ago, Jennifer Aniston was the brand ambassador for Smartwater, the ubiquitous bottled water brand owned by Coca-Cola. For a period of several years in the early- to mid-twenty-teens, ads featuring her in various states of glorious ease and untroubled repose seemed to be absolutely everywhere (at least to me). At bus stops, on billboards, in magazines, there she always was: rendered in sumptuous, high-contrast black-and-white imagery, relaxing in bed, melting into a chaise lounge, sprawled out nude on a pool deck clutching a big bottle of Smartwater with one hand and her tastefully-sized breasts with the other. I have no idea what the point or the angle or the hook of these ads was intended to be from a marketing perspective, and it absolutely doesn’t matter. The copy on these ads, if there ever was any, was always beyond incidental: precision-engineered non-statements rendered in tiny, nearly illegible blue-tinted sans serif typefaces, tucked away in the literal margins so as to not obscure or in any way detract from Jen’s exquisite face, abs, ass, tits, hair, vibes, aura, and mien.

“Vapour distilled water, inspired by the clouds.”

Oh, uh, for sure…

“Smart because it’s made that way.”

No, yah, uh, for sure….

“Live a life well hydrated.”

Oh, uh, yah, no, for sure….

You were never meant to read those words, much less parse meaning from them, much less be swayed by them: they were always just words selected presumably at random by some diabolically literal marketing professional to fill the word-shaped spaces that some straight-up diabolical Soda Pop Executive mandated as necessary.

Nothing is being said, or promised, or elucidated except for Jennifer Aniston. The pitch? Jennifer Aniston. The strategy? Jennifer Aniston. The call to action? Jennifer Aniston. The only thing actually on offer? Jennifer Aniston. All you are supposed to think, or feel, or be in any way cognisant of when you behold these ads is: Jennifer Aniston.

At the peak of their ubiquity, around 2015-2016, I remember seeing these ads almost daily and remarking to myself, almost daily, “this is the most successful marketing campaign of the twenty-first century.” I really meant it then, and I stand by that assessment now. I talked about it endlessly at the time — my theorising around the ads’ singular efficacy and the strange sway they had over me. No one really cared, of course, back then, but I kept talking about it all the same. Plus ça change.

There are certain classes of products that are so self-evidently what they are, and whose utility is so clearly defined that they don’t actually require the manufacturing of desire in order to sell. For items like these, you either want it, or you don’t; you either need it, or you don’t. You know precisely what it does, and how it will be used, and what you stand to gain from it. The space between the best and worst versions of these products is functionally nothing, so the decision-making process usually just comes down to availability in the moment.

For products like these, fixating too much on intrinsic properties or demonstrable quality or proven benefits actually diminishes the desirability. It’s tiresome and irksome to be oversold on something as prosaic as a bottle of water. It’s a bottle of water. All you really need to know about it is that it’s water, in a bottle. If you’ve found yourself in a scenario where you think you might need it, you almost certainly do, and so, you’ll buy it. And all you really need to feel about it in order to choose this one over any other one of the dozens of functionally identical alternatives is something good and pleasant; literally anything good and pleasant will do.

It’s precisely why, for example, puppies and kitty cats and teddy bears and softly falling leaves tend to adorn toilet paper packaging: it’s a happy and pleasing thing to hold in your mind’s eye before, during, and after you pry sticky, wet clumps of shit flecked with undigested grains and pulses from the stubbornest folds of your asshole. Not dissimilarly, I don’t especially want to think about the Coca-Cola Company distilling grey water runoff and selling it to me for $7.49/500 ml at every Hudson News at every airport in the world, but I definitely do want to think about Jennifer Aniston while I’m drinking it.

“Here’s a broadly liked and respected famous person, and here’s a bottle of shitty water that you’ll only ever buy out of desperation in some dreadful interstitial non-space: do with that what you will” these Aniston-era Smartwater ads seem to say. It’s actually brazen how little they endeavour to do, and yet that brazenness only endears them to me more. It’s flagrant; it’s provocative; it’s a stroke of genius. It’s the most successful marketing campaign of the twenty-first century.

***

Jen.

Jen!

Fucking Jen, man!

Here’s someone who’s actually happy, actually fulfilled, actually a good person.

Here’s someone who actually seems to deserve her richly blessed life, and what’s more, actually appreciates it.

Here’s someone who’s enjoying every goddamn minute of her good fortune, and spreading it around, far and wide.

She’s kind. She’s warm. She’s just like us…except better! But, crucially, not in a way that ever makes anyone feel worse about themselves. She’s your best friend, your fun aunt, your chill ex-girlfriend who you’ve always remained on great terms with because why wouldn’t you? She’s just so great.

I really mean it.

And I really feel the need to clarify that I really mean it because in spite of the fact that I’ve just expended a great deal of time and energy disavowing irony and indirection, I’m well aware that there’s still very much an air of is this snide, smug fucker for real??? lingering over absolutely everything I say. Old habits die hard. But re: Jen? I’m for real. For real.

I just like her; I just think she seems like a nice person; I just honestly want to be her friend. There’s no angle, no take, no agenda around my embrace of her. It’s not like Kim where I’m obsessed in a weirdly dismissive and vaguely hateful kind of way, or like Oprah where I’m obsessed in an overly reverent and potentially maladjusted kind of way. With Jen, I’m honestly not even obsessed at all. We’re chill; she’s chill; I’m chill; everyone’s chill. I just fuck with her, plain and simple.

I know a guy who knows a guy who years ago went out for an anniversary dinner with his girlfriend at some fancy restaurant in Vancouver. At the time, they were young — maybe nineteen — and they obviously looked a little nervous and out of place in that environment. In the middle of their meal, someone came up behind them and tapped on their shoulders: Jennifer Aniston. She greeted them and asked if they were celebrating something special, so they told her that yes, in fact, it was their anniversary. She wished them well, then said “I just came over because I wanted to tell you that you’re a really cute couple, and you seem really happy together.” So they thanked her, and chatted for a minute, then she went back to her table, and they carried on with their meal, and that was that. Later in the evening, after dessert, they called the server over and asked for the bill—

“Ms. Aniston took care of it.”

I fuck with that.

***

God, I feel refreshed—

You wake up: you've been asleep; but for how long? It's hard to say — you've had such a life-affirming, PRESENT day that you haven't once looked at the time since you rose with the sun this morning.

You weren't tired, but the sleep settled over you, gently, like a sheet of soft, washed linen. Not, in fact, dissimilar to the actual sheet you're now lying beneath. AND THEN! The thundering crash of the Pacific rings out: the supreme majesty of the ocean overwhelms your already hazy faculties.

Outside, a single gull swoops in and out of your field of vision, riding atop a great column of air. You feel a powerful communion with that bird, and your spirit soars to meet it in a state of unfathomable freedom.

Suddenly you become aware of a quiet warmth that has begun to creep up and through your body: a gorgeous, tingling sensation emanating from your core. You allow yourself to fully inhabit this sensation: you are enveloped; saturated in the purest grace.

Gradually, the origin of this perfect pleasure becomes clear. You peer beneath the sheets and are greeted by the sight of your husband: his arms, outstretched, support his powerful torso; his head, lodged between your legs moves gently and methodically as he pleasures you. He's hard. But he won't enter you; not today. Today, it's all about you.

Finally, you feel release: you surrender to it, and the richest, most complete pleasure of your life overtakes your whole being. Every cell, every molecule, every atom in you is alive, pulsing with pure energy. You're kinetic.

As this sensation gradually subsides, you exhale deeply and turn your head to the side. You see your husband, now standing beside you. Here, in this hazy, golden hour, you realise for the first time that he's the same size soft as he is hard. This strikes you as neither good nor bad — it just is.

He wordlessly offers you a glass of water and you accept. You raise the glass to your lips and empty it in a single, grateful mouthful.

In this instant, you know perfection.

Perfect Calm. Perfect Peace. Perfect Refreshment.

I'll have what she's having — I’ll have a Smartwater.

This is the first thing I ever wrote that I actually really liked. It was sometime in 2016, and I wrote it in a single evening. I remember very clearly wanting to challenge myself to write about something with no expectations of what it could or should be: nothing important; nothing significant; nothing of consequence: just whatever I happened to be thinking about in the moment.

Reading it back now — this piece, or short story, or scene study, or whatever it is — I still enjoy it. It’s amusing, reasonably well-crafted, not dreadfully dated in either subject matter or tone. To be sure, it’s decidedly a very minor achievement: a first draft of a first draft; a sketch. But there’s still something there; some nascent capacity for something worthwhile; some germ of a voice, or a stance, or a viewpoint that is distinctive. But most of all, it just feels like me. And not the version of myself that I so often wish to be perceived as — the slippery, diffident, smug, impassive version; the actual me: sweet; earnest; cringe.

Reading it back now, it still makes me happy.

***

When I started writing this post, my first impulse was to reach yet again for bite, and snark, and heavy handed satire. How can I make a joke and a mockery out of Jennifer Aniston herself, or my fascination with her — and ideally both? I queried myself while typing out then deleting flaccid truisms about how fucked everything is for the better part of the past three-and-a-half weeks.

But like my attempted, aborted defenestration of Kim last month, something about this approach just felt off and wrong and most damningly of all, really fucking boring. As has been fulsomely articulated above, the manicured, airless version of myself that deflects and denies and hides behind dense language and faux moral outrage and cartoonish sneering at the state of the world has become desperately goddamn dull.

I don’t want to do that anymore; I don’t want to be that anymore; approaching the world in that way does harden you. Slowly, slowly, bit by bit, the degrees of remove compound, and you find yourself more and more alienated: from other people, certainly, but also from yourself. You can make yourself invincible, infallible, and effectively beyond reproach, but it comes at a terrible cost. I want to get back to the version of myself that wrote a silly little story about Jennifer Aniston one evening with no expectations, and for no reason other than something about it made me feel nice.

As much as I might want to be, I don’t need to be the cleverest person in the room, or the funniest, or the most incisive, or the most original. And even if I succeeded at being that person for a period of time, or in a certain milieu, it would all be so conditional, so fleeting, so slight. So rather, I’ll endeavour to be the actual me: discerning but also sincere, clever but also trifling, sardonic but also decent.

Just a sweet, earnest, cringe guy writing silly little stories about a nice lady with a beautiful life trying to make the absolute best of whatever all this is.

God, I feel refreshed—

“No, nothing…” I cheerfully but unconvincingly lie, not wanting to burden him with my silly little insecurities and completely manageable, and in any case, entirely self-inflicted anxieties. Which is another lie. I’m actually desperate to burden him and everyone else and anyone else with my silly little insecurities and completely manageable, and in any case, entirely self-inflicted anxieties. And what’s more, I’m absolutely dying to have them be validated as, in fact, rather grave, really quite large, actually entirely unmanageable woes, and to be invited to deliver the lovely little monologue I’ve prepared, which is virtually identical to all the other lovely little monologues that I’ve previously delivered to my boyfriend, my parents, my friends, my family, my colleagues, my acquaintances, that Brazilian guy, my therapist from 2019 who I selected by Googling “gay therapist NYC” and picking the most attractive one (Hi, Scott) — really anyone who by blood, choice, proximity, billable hours, or annual subscription has wittingly or unwittingly made themselves available to me as an audience.

Last week, last month, last year: it’s always only ever a slightly different version of the same old story. A comforting tale of striving and self-actualisation articulated with self awareness, humility, and a dogged — one might even say naïve — sense of optimism, all of which successfully diverts everyone’s attention — including my own — from my near total inability to get out of my own way. The only reason why it’s not completely insufferable is because every time I embark on my latest retelling of my new old tale of woe, I so earnestly believe in the novelty and profundity of whatever insight I feel I’ve unlocked that it’s somehow disarming, or perhaps pitiable, or perhaps both.

The only thing that ever really changes or improves is the artfulness with which I outline whatever tedious, desperately low stakes crisis of self-actualisation I’ve settled on at that particular juncture. Every time I tell the same old story, it gets a little better, a little richer, a little more nuanced and formally complex. In my tellings, every failure to launch, every squandered opportunity, every misstep and detour and extended period of complete inaction is but a prelude to some spectacular catharsis, some wonderful, inevitable culmination. A beautiful story, well told. At least I’m thriving creatively.

What’s wrong?

No, nothing…

Well actually, now that you mention it…

But not now; not in his state! I chasten myself. Now is the time for strength, and stoicism, and self-abnegation. I must be strong for him; for us. There’s simply no time, no space, no bandwidth for my troubles, I remind myself, not because I actually believe it, but because I surmise that’s what a good and selfless person would think and feel in a moment like this. That’s what this moment seems to call for: goodness and selflessness. I’m basically good, which is great, but unfortunately, I’m not at all selfless.

Unlike selfishness, which is, I think, a deliberate, methodical, malign prioritising of one’s own interests over everyone else’s, a lack of selflessness most often manifests as simply forgetting that other people exist because you’re lost in some delicious reverie of your own making. Oops I forgot to order you a coffee as well because I was stumbling around in a fugue state mentally composing a 10,000 word essay about the violent murder of Martha Stewart’s cat at the hands (paws) of her geriatric Chow Chow named Genghis Khan. This is the flavour of my un-selflessness. Daft, sweet, benign neglect: certainly still a problem to be overcome, but in no way deliberately cruel or malevolent. Or maybe these are simply the elaborate reconciliations of a true narcissist — a properly selfish asshole — who manages to coast by undetected as such by dint of his good nature, general agreeableness, and the fact that he is most often completely silent?

And yet, and yet, and yet…I wonder to myself, leadingly, would a truly selfish person ever concern themselves with the question or possibility of their own selfishness? Certainly not! I conclude, without ever truly considering any alternative.

In fact… I continue, as a deliciously circular and entirely self-justifying rationale begins to reveal itself to me …my denial of self is actually terribly selfish, when you really stop and think about it! Secrets and lies and half truths and diversions and emotional stonewalling — even when benign and well intentioned — are ultimately so much more damaging and corrosive than even the most imperfectly delivered and inconveniently timed truth! Certainly I owe him that — the truth! He has a right to know what afflicts me! For his sake, I simply must unburden myself to him, immediately and in full! It’s simply the right — and only — thing to do!

I break eye contact and stare longingly into the middle distance in an attempt to look forlorn, and therefore solicit his concern, even though all of my previous attempts at looking forlorn have just registered as physical discomfort, and all of my previous attempts at covert emotional manipulation have just registered as…exactly what they are. I wait a polite amount of time for him to interject with a loving and patient “are you sure?” or “I can tell that something’s wrong…” but no such inquiry is forthcoming.

I turn my gaze back to him to indicate that I’m ready to be asked after, only to find that he has now diverted his gaze from me and is staring longingly into the middle distance — looking so much more spectacularly forlorn than I could ever hope to. Bitch. He’s so much better at the performance of misery than I am; he’s so much more naturally grave, tortured, and stricken. A true artist. This fucking sunny, cheery, self-effacing, optimistic disposition that I’ve been cursed with? No one’s ever going to take me seriously.

He closes his eyes and winces, no longer merely forlorn, now actively, viscerally distraught. Masterful.

“Are you okay?” I suddenly find myself asking, a reflex that has far less to do with concern for his wellbeing, and far more to do with my own unimaginably entrenched insecurities. Maybe he’s finally realised that he actually fucking hates you? some sub-sub-conscious goblin posits every time I perceive anything other than euphoric, worshipful love and devotion emanating from him; from anyone really.

“Yeah, why?” He replies, still entirely avoiding my gaze, still forlorn, still distraught. In fact, he’s quite literally doubled over in apparent agony now.

“You look…pained.” I clarify.

“I’m shitting…” He grunts.

And so he is.

PLOP!

From my perch on the foot of the bed to his on the toilet is no more than two meters, and yet it seems an unfathomable gulf has opened up between us. How alone and misunderstood we both feel in this moment! How awful it is that over time, intimacy so often becomes nothing more than a dissolving of meaningless, superficial proprieties, while the walled gardens of our hearts only ever become more closed off, more shrouded in darkness! How tragic it is that two people who love each other so deeply, can, in this and countless other moments, show themselves to be so spectacularly incapable of attending to one another’s most basic and fundamental needs — to be seen, heard, underst—

“So what’s wrong?” He asks, his question punctuated by the softer, smoother, longer PLOPPPPP! of a follow-up turd which slides out effortlessly and without strain. His countenance softens. He unclenches. He unfurls himself and sits upright. Finally, he finds and holds my gaze.

He does love you after all! My supra-conscious ego monster swoons. Of course he does: you’re the best and most special guy in the whole world!

“Oh…nothing…” I start, momentarily collapsing back into the same detestable martyrdom before catching myself and course correcting. “It’s work.”

“Work.” Not work as in a job; not work as in something I’m actually routinely compensated for. Work as in writing; work as in this.

“It’s bad.” I clarify — “it” being some verifiably dreadful previous draft of this post. “I just read it back, and it’s just…bad”

“So rewrite it” he suggests, cunningly attempting to foil my self-pity with pragmatism and good sense.

“But I’ve spent a month working on it…” I moan. “A month!” I cry, as if there was anything better or more worthwhile I could have been doing during that month; as if this particular squandering of four weeks is somehow unprecedented; as if these lost thirty days is anything other than completely consistent with my tortured, self-defeating perfectionism.

“Well what’s it about?” He inquires, once again infuriatingly reaching for solutions and action steps rather than permitting me to luxuriate in dread and hopelessness and self-loathing just a little longer.

“Kim.” I say. Kardashian. She is mononynmous in our household.

“Oh.” And in that solitary “Oh” a whole technicolour array of disappointment, frustration, and most of all boredom flashes before my eyes. “Oh.” he says, really meaning “Honestly? This again? Her again? Really, Tristan? Really?”

“What?” I inquire sheepishly, entirely feigning ignorance at the towering, blinding, white-hot subtext.

“Isn’t she just a little tired?” He sighs. “I’m just a little tired of her.” Then he literally sighs.

“Yeah but everyone is.” I defensively chirp. “That’s the point. That’s the ANGLE.”

(It wasn’t).

“Great.” He says in a dismissive tone that suggests that absolutely nothing about what I’m saying is, in fact, great at all. “So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know.”

FLUSH!

***

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to write a piece about Kim Kardashian, but I’ve failed abjectly. I was endeavouring to write an essay that explored Kim and the concept of taste, charting her trajectory from a person with markedly bad taste to a person with notably good taste because…why, exactly? And to what end? After a month of near-constant contemplation on the matter, I couldn’t possibly tell you. All I can say about the attempt is that it loomed over the entirety of the holiday season, imbuing otherwise serene and life-affirming moments with a persistent, low-level anxiety, made all the worse by the knowledge of how patently ridiculous and entirely self-inflicted it all was. The stakes couldn’t possibly have been lower, and yet to me they couldn’t have felt higher, and that disjuncture only made me feel shittier and more consumed with dread.

And so it went for most of December: getting up at dawn nearly every day to pen thousands upon thousands of flaccid, mealy, redundant words, circling a point that almost certainly didn’t exist, and if it did, it was one that had already been articulated perfectly and in full by any number of writers, thinkers and cultural commentators, amateur and professional, repeatedly over the past fifteen years. But nevertheless, I persisted in trying to summon a coherent and compelling body of thought from my wafer-thin un-thesis statement: she used to have bad taste but now she has good taste. Sure?

“What’s wrong?” my mother politely inquires a few days before Christmas after noticing that I’ve been staring at my computer in a dissociative stupor for much of the past week.

“No, nothing.” I reply. “Just work” I clarify before swiftly returning my attention to the impotent jumble of words blighting my Notes app. “Work” indeed; my life’s work, for better or for worse.

Because really, what was I supposed to say, to my mother, or to anyone else asking after my visible distress? “My long form self-published essay on, among other things, Kim Kardashian’s recent architectural patronage isn’t quite “punchy” enough?” There’s really nothing productive that anyone can do with that information, nor is there anything they should do with it: it is my trifling, absurd, meaningless cross to bear, and mine alone. It would practically be stoic if it weren’t all so fucking stupid.

So instead I just swatted away my mother’s concern with a curt dismissal and continued to bear down even further on some elusive non-point, until finally, after nearly a month of this, I was forced to confront the awful truth: that it was a flawed and futile effort from the start, and it couldn’t — and shouldn’t — be salvaged. There were simply too many fundamental issues and too little actual substance.

Oh well.

***

The first issue I encountered in attempting to write about Kim and taste is a problem that tends to arise in most discussions of taste, which is that it very quickly, perhaps inevitably, devolved into an entirely masturbatory, self-congratulatory exercise that has everything to do with telegraphing my own (self-annointed) superior instincts, and virtually nothing to do with, well, anything else.

People — myself very much included — love to talk about taste as though it’s something that can be firmly and objectively defined, when in fact it’s mostly just a vague constellation of entirely subjective preferences wielded as a cudgel against other, apparently less discriminating people to make yourself feel superior. After more than a month of rigorous contemplation, the best definition I can come up with for “good taste” is “deliberately and legibly cultivating intentionality around one’s aesthetic choices.”

Great!

Wait, what?

It’s good; it’s bad; it’s relative; it’s absolute; I have it; you don’t; vice versa; all of the above; none of the above. Whatever. The only people who ever seriously embark upon a discussion of taste are people who are already convinced that they have it, which means that the animating impulse is not to illuminate anything new or interesting or compelling, but simply to reaffirm — mostly to yourself — your own heightened level of discernment. But discernment of what exactly? The history of art, architecture, fashion, design, and technology? Material culture more broadly? Aesthetics? Semiotics? I guess? I don’t know? So what? Who cares? How exhausting! Let’s continue!

So when I say that Kim used to have bad taste but now she has good taste, all I’m really saying is that she has, of late, embraced a style that I personally happen to enjoy because it aligns with my longstanding preference for neutral, minimal, austere, extremely expensive things. I could quibble over who discovered this style first (me), and who has the better and more complete and more academic command of it (also me), but taste, unfortunately, is far more practical than theoretical. Either you have the resources to fully and vividly commit to your taste and convey it to the world (like Kim) or you don’t (like me). And if you don’t, all you really have is a couple of mood boards on some old hard drive, three actually nice outfits, and a terrible attitude. Without the cold hard cash, it’s all just an abstraction.

I happen to like Kim’s taste. If I were a hot and sexy billionaire with fat jugs and a snatched waist, I would want to live and dress and be exactly like her. After all, we’ve settled, her and I, on more or less the same constellation of design references and aesthetic inspirations: a compact and rarefied ledger of mostly gay, mostly French, Belgian, and Japanese contemporary design practitioners operating at the highest echelon of institutional Luxury and capital “D” Design. The only difference between us is that she’s in a position to call up whatever French or Belgian or Japanese design faggot her heart desires to order matching mother-daughter leather bustiers, and I’m sitting on my mom’s couch at 5:45 AM on Christmas Eve scrolling through Instagram, trying to find the one of the aforementioned design faggots’ boyfriend’s OnlyFans.

Like Kim, I personally yearn to live in a mute, colourless void where the only decor is one architecturally significant chair per room, and the only ornamentation is light, space, and the passage of time. For people like us — Kim and myself — home is not in fact a space for living; it is, rather, a place for existing — in the purest, most unfettered sense of the term. Liberated from all of life’s most noxious and stultifying bric-a-brac, all that’s left to do in a space like this is just be. Which is of course, a state that can only achieved through the deployment of an immense amount of resources. Austerity of the finest, purest grade is, like everything else truly worth coveting, wildly expensive.

But does my preference for that particular aesthetic actually signify…anything? Any superior faculties? Any heightened levels of discernment? Any cultivation of anything worth cultivating? Or is it just another meaningless and interchangeable style that one happens upon and then subscribes to in an attempt to differentiate oneself from the hideous, tasteless masses? Farmhouse Chic! Coastal Contemporary! Belgian Minimalism! Aren’t we all just doing the same thing?

To be sure, this aesthetic has existed for many years, even decades, and there are certainly better and more complete expressions elsewhere, but it was Kim’s embrace of and subsequent evangelising around it that thrust it decisively into the cultural firmament. For better or for worse, rightly or wrongly, accurately or inaccurately, she now owns this look. And because of that, it has now become mainstream, which is to say, it is currently in the process of being flattened and commodified into just another meaningless, de-contextualised “style” that once had integrity and intentionality and meaning and point-of-view, but is now just a loosely-defined set of qualities that can be haphazardly slapped onto poorly made, mass produced goods — the same old tat, now more thrillingly beige! In short, the very style that catapulted Kim into the realm of Good Taste has already begun to devolve into generic Middlebrow Taste, which is of course just a brief layover on the way to Bad Taste outright.

Really the only option for Kim, or for anyone who is, at any level or scale, engaged in manufacturing desire, is to remain perpetually on the move, stylistically speaking. Once your style/look/vision/whatever has reached a certain critical mass, you must immediately decamp to ever more esoteric, impenetrable, and unattainable aesthetic territory. Because good taste, in addition to being about discernment and literacy, is also (perhaps even primarily) about exclusivity and gatekeeping: if everyone knows about it, and anyone can get it — even a cheapened, tawdry, bastardised version of it — it can no longer truly represent good taste. Good Taste must induce envy in others either because they didn’t find it first, or because they can’t have it — and ideally both.

So just because Kim and I have alighted, for now, upon this particular set of expensive and rarefied and ever so slightly harder-to-come-by references and sources of inspiration doesn’t really signify anything other than a willingness, or in Kim’s case, the ability to seek out expensive and rarefied and ever so slightly harder-to-come-by references and sources of inspiration. Japanese this; Belgian that; Italian and French the other; architecturally significant chairs over here; light, space, and the passage of time over there: references upon references upon references upon references that look great and sound even better but that are, in the final assessment — like so many other things these days — just a vibe.

***

The second, somewhat thornier issue I ran into is that the whole endeavour ended up being freighted with a certain kind of mean-spiritedness — both in its premise and execution — that I simply couldn’t stand behind. There are many undesirable things I can abide being — smug, aloof, judgemental — but mean isn’t one of them. Reading it all back, in addition to being mean in a way that was very obviously rooted in my own insecurities, the whole discussion just felt a little tired, a little played out, a little redundant; as though it belonged to a some bygone era of easy ironising and toxic snark. Yes, it was bitchy, and sneering, and needlessly cruel, but even more damningly (to me), it was all a little outré; a little passé; a little O-V-E-R. It was simply in bad taste.

Because what was at the heart of my thesis, really? That not so long ago, Kim Kardashian was just another tacky and whorish young woman tottering around the outermost margins of fame in Los Angeles, looking for whatever D-list event with a step-and-repeat would have her? And the fact that she managed to so spectacularly sidestep her most probable fate — as a tacky and whorish middle-aged woman rhapsodising over her brief and fleeting brush with fame at her junior McMansion in Orange County — is astonishing, even miraculous, and therefore worthy of praise? Really?

And what about all the other young women tottering alongside Kim in 2006 who didn’t defy the odds? The women whose moment passed them by and whose worst case scenario was always accepting plausible lives in affluent exurban enclaves tantalisingly close to the epicentre of everything they ever wanted, but also so very far from it? Are people like this, real or imaginary, famous or not, really so deserving of my contempt? What sin have they actually committed? That they allowed themselves to be transfixed by fame and money and power — just as we all are? That they trafficked in whatever capital they happened to have, in this case, their youth and beauty and charm — just as we all would, if/when given the chance? That they prioritised a decadent, distracted, surface-level type of existence over a life of integrity, meaning and purpose — just as we all do, serially and repeatedly, often without even realising we’re doing it? And even if all the worst and most horrible things I could possibly think to say about Kim and her vastly less fortunate sisters-in-bandage-dressses were entirely true, my judgement of her and them them will always necessarily say so much more about me than them.

And what exactly does it say about me that I’ve been agonising for a month — a month! — over the most artful way to smear a woman I’ve never met as venal, carnal, superficial, materialistic, narcissistic, dim, dull, dumb, and a whore? Nothing good or admirable, that’s for certain.

But as is the case with absolutely everyone who’s ever underestimated or attempted to make an example of her, the joke is entirely on me: look at who she is; look at what she is; look at everything she has accomplished. And me? Who am I? What am I? What have I done? Whatever potential I may have, whatever accomplishments may still await me, next to Kim, I am nothing more than a nasty, bitter, whinging nobody clinging to a sad little illusion of moral superiority.

But what moral superiority, exactly? There’s practically nothing I wouldn’t do for even the smallest fraction of her success. I’d debase myself — fragrantly, gladly, repeatedly— for amounts of money that are, to her, mere trifles; rounding errors; afterthoughts. APPROVED she absent-mindedly texts one of her assistants regarding an invoice from a vendor for her least favourite niece’s birthday party, the sum of which could sustain me for a decade and fully secure my future. My whole life, my whole future: to her, just some background baubles that went mostly unnoticed and unremarked upon, tossed into a dumpster after their few hours of marginal utility had expired, decomposing to mulch. That’s all any of us are to her: trifles; rounding errors; afterthoughts; mulch.

For years now, I’ve mocked and jeered and snickered at her, as if to insist that no matter her wealth, fame, power, or influence, she will always be, on some level, that same tacky, striving woman-about-town desperately chipping away at whatever crumbling fortifications of respectability still remain intact. But in addition to being mean, it’s simply not true: she long ago breached the fortress, razed the keep, and erected her own exquisite palace of Good Taste, Good Vibes, Fat Jugs and Snatched Waists. I’m the one clawing at the gates begging to be let in.

***

And finally, the most problematic, most intractable issue that I found myself butting up against is one that has become true of any discussion of Kim these days, and that is: I think we may have exhausted all there is to say about her. Which, to be clear, isn’t some fresh way of maligning her, or a charge of irrelevance, or even commentary on her worthiness to be commentated upon: it’s about us; it’s about me: my fascination with and fixation on her has run its course and reached its logical extents.

With any subject, at least those that rely on subjective analysis, there is a point at which further study ceases to produce meaningful new insight. There is a saturation point for meaning-making, and with Kim, I believe we, and I, have reached it. To continue to write about, and contemplate, and opine on her now is actually just to write about, contemplate, and opine on oneself: one’s own fears, anxieties, and formless rage projected upon the smooth and shapely body of the most exquisite cipher the world has ever known.

The phenomenon of her fame — and it is well and truly phenomenal — feels like both the logical culmination of a certain type of mass media-abetted superstardom birthed in the latter half of the American Century, and the first iteration of something entirely new that we necessarily can’t yet see or comprehend in full. Kim is a transitional figure, equally the dying breath of Pax Americana, and the natal wail of some rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Calabasas to be born. The old is dying, the new cannot be born, and a great variety of morbid symptoms have appeared — and who better to blame and shame and scorn for our collective existential maladies than a hot and sexy billionaire with fat jugs and a snatched waist who bested absolutely everyone at their own ridiculous games?

For years I attempted to explain away my fascination with her by pointing to the broader cultural and sociological implications of her fame and insisting that it was this unique and unprecedented confluence of forces around her that intrigued me, all the while smugly insisting that I actually found her, personally, to be really quite dull. But that was always a lie.

Never mind the serial slights against her intelligence, the attributing to her of only the worst and most base impulses, the rendering of her as nothing more than a hyper-sexualised, bitchy, pouty, vain and vapid imbecile…all along, all of this was nothing more than the schoolyard taunts of a lovestruck little boy desperately seeking the attention of the coolest, prettiest, most popular girl who doesn’t even know he’s alive. (But in a gay way).

Because truly, what I feel towards her is so much more than mere fascination: in the most literal sense of the term, I idolise her. Perhaps she is a false idol, leading me to my own demise: a luminous, gleaming effigy that promises transcendence but is all surface and lustre; hollow, flimsy, blinding. But I cannot look away, even though I know I should. Just one more essay, one more post, one more meme I barter with myself before swiftly capitulating to my baser instincts every time. But the finality I seek is always somehow just out of reach: I’m never quite satisfied, never quite fulfilled, never quite done with her. She always seems, somehow, to demand further study, further contemplation, further veneration.

And yet…

She already has been studied; she already has been contemplated; she already has been venerated by the best and most brilliant minds of our time, all of whom have concluded, resoundingly, that that she is one of the most impactful and consequential figures of our still-young century. The matter has been settled: she is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon who changed absolutely everything for absolutely everyone.

There is no new take, no unexamined facet, no fresh revelation to be divined. She has always been utterly transparent about who she is, what she stands for, how she perceives herself, and how she desires to be perceived. On every level, her meaning is now hyper-abundantly clear. She is exactly who and what she seems to be, and everyone who possibly could or should comment on her, as a person or as a concept, already has. Why am I even still talking? Go read this nine-year-old profile. The history has been written — brilliantly and completely.

And even if you proudly and defiantly claim to have remained free from her impact; even if you detest everything you think she represents; even if you reject the proposition that she is one of the pre-eminent architects of the cultural landscape we now all occupy, it remains essentially undeniable that she so cunningly, so keenly, so advantageously, and so prolifically grasped at and then capitalised on the potential of this nascent new era that it may as well be hers, and hers alone. She won, and we all lost: our privacy, our dignity, our scruples, our shame, our sanity. The skeptics and the naysayers and the haters simply can, and simply must suck her clit.

What more can I possibly say?

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There are certain topics that I intended to banish from this newsletter, at least for a while, for fear of reaching too soon and too predictably for low-hanging fruit, or cheap laughs, or holier-than-thou sneering at obviously vulgar things. I promised myself I wouldn’t be trite or moralising or obvious, either in the subjects under consideration, or in my analysis of them, but in the end, I gave in to my baser instincts the first chance I got and went running right back to the familiar, the comfortable, the exceedingly well-trod, which is to say, reality TV.

But even though the whole premise of this endeavour is that there is no such thing as unintelligent subject matter, only dull analysis conducted by dim and myopic individuals, there is still a part of me that looks down on myself for being so uniquely susceptible to lowest common denominator art. There is still a voice within that needles at me, perennially asking: is my general aversion to high-brow artistic and intellectual output and my general propensity for low brow fare because I possess superior critical faculties and am therefore able to sniff out hidden brilliance and cut through pretence and vacuity and bullshit? Or, do I sidestep consensus Good and Important Art because I’m just too fucking dumb to properly grapple with anything other than Dumb Shit? TBD!

And even though I keep insisting that I’ve made my peace with all this, and even as I remain more or less steadfast in my conviction that most Good and Important Art is bullshit, I’m still stalked by the doubt, or I suppose just the very real possibility that the reason why I so persistently gravitate towards dumb and vapid things is because I myself am fundamentally dumb and vapid. And because I can’t ever fully allay those doubts or conclusively rule out that possibility, I still find myself, mostly in little ways now, raging against my nature and trying to dress up the Dumb Shit that I clearly care about most of all in the language of more serious (or self-serious) endeavours.

And yet, and yet, and yet…

There’s clearly a reason why I am so intensely and persistently drawn to Dumb Shit above all else;

There’s clearly a reason why I hate — truly hate! — the bloated, ponderous, self-referential nonsense that all too often passes for Good and Important Art;

And there’s clearly a reason why, time and time again, when presented with the opportunity to hone my taste and sharpen my mind with art that is intense, demanding, and complex, I instantly recoil, and go running back to the pablum and the schlock and the intellectual packing peanuts and attempt to convince myself all over again that if I approach this Dumb Shit with a sincere intention to make meaning out of it, it will somehow transcend what it actually is and reveal some essential truth that all the pretentious assholes have been searching for in the impenetrable art of other even more pretentious assholes, all of whom will continue to fail in their quests for meaning because we’re all just blobs of carbon being tormented by random electrochemical phenomena, raging against the awful truth that we’ll never understand a damn thing about our experience of seeming to exist, so instead we create smaller, more manageable illusions, like art, and science, and God to make the encompassing illusion all around seem a little less terrifying than it actually is.

So unfortunately, given all that, it’s already come to this: I’m going to need to talk about Vanderpump Rules.

***

For the uninitiated, or those who simply don’t care, Vanderpump Rules is a reality show that, at least nominally, follows the goings-on of the staff at a West Hollywood restaurant (and lounge!) called SUR Restaurant and Lounge which is owned and operated by a British expat of exceptionally dubious provenance named Lisa Vanderpump, who herself rose to widespread notoriety as a cast member on another reality show, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. If none of those words or concepts mean anything to you, don’t fret and rest assured that absolutely none of it matters in the slightest. All you really need to know is that VPR, as it’s frequently referred to in shorthand, is a long-running reality show that takes place in LA, and its predominately young and hot cast members’ livelihoods depend on finding progressively more baroque ways to hurt, disappoint, and otherwise wound each other emotionally, spiritually, and physically, on camera. You also need to know that “SUR” is an acronym for “Sexy Unique Restaurant” making the full name of the establishment “Sexy Unique Restaurant Restaurant and Lounge.” For whatever that’s worth.

The specifics of the show don’t matter in the slightest: there is no ostensible point, no central project, no apparent trajectory, no deeper significance other than, perhaps, as a primary source documenting the evolution of the formal tropes of reality TV. Close your eyes and imagine attractive people talking animatedly about perceived under-reactions and alleged overreactions to some prior conflict, footage of which will very helpfully be spliced into the current scene, which is typically some sort of event that has been contrived of as a forum for them to angrily probe the aforementioned under- and over-reactions, all of which, under the influence of unlimited alcohol and the meddling of sociopathic producers, inevitably escalates into another conflict that will then necessitate the contrivance of another future forum to hash it out, at which point a slightly different combination of players will be goaded into some new conflict about a conflict about a conflict ∞. This is Vanderpump Rules.

If there are essentially two types of reality TV — Hot People Doing Nothing and Ugly People Doing Something — then Vanderpump Rules is perhaps the most perfect and complete expression of the former. Because truly, nothing ever happens on the show. Even things that would, in any other context, be very much something — break-ups, relapses, depressive episodes, physical altercations, jail time, weddings, births, deaths — here become flattened into nothing more than occasions to bitch and quibble and be aggrieved over only the most inconsequential, often entirely hallucinated slights. On VPR, all of life’s greatest milestones are recast as elaborate set pieces that exist only to foreground narcissistic outbursts colliding into one another at maximum velocity, with virtually no learning, growth, change, or accountability ever occurring, at least not while the cameras are up, because who the fuck would want to watch that? And on the vanishingly rare occasions when, against all odds, a cast member has been able to meaningfully evolve or mature in some small way, that positive change is always instantly deployed as a cudgel against one of the other unreconstructed train wrecks in the cast, and/or transformed into a flashpoint for fresh conflict. “You’re a fucking alcoholic!!!” one alcoholic with six weeks of sobriety will scream at another currently drunk alcoholic before breaking down and tearfully confessing that their anger only comes from a place of profound empathy — after all, they too used to be a fucking alcoholic; all those many weeks ago.

Especially in recent seasons, as the principal cast members have become increasingly (in)famous and successful(ish) as a result of their participation in the show, the reality (😶) of their lives off-camera has become harder and harder to sidestep, and yet these “real” lives are generally only ever referenced obliquely and in passing, if at all. Mentions of paparazzi camped outside one’s home are casually tossed out as if it’s an irksome but inescapable feature of life in LA; waking up to find that one’s partner has been potentially criminally implicated in a several-thousand-word exposé in a national paper of record is treated as a distressing but ultimately anodyne happenstance that really could, and really does, happen to anyone; creating a million-dollar-selling line of merchandise emblazoned with catchphrases that emerged in response to active cross-litigation between a plurality of the cast is framed as nothing more than plucky, lemons-to-lemonade girl-bossery at its most chill and relatable.

And yet, the show has had to adjust, however reluctantly, and at this point, whatever else it may claim to be, Vanderpump Rules exists principally as a reality show about the occupational hazards of being a reality star, and the terrible bargain that this has entailed for most of its cast: too famous and well-compensated to consider doing anything else, but not famous or well-compensated enough to stop debasing themselves on camera well into middle age. Which is a fascinating and tragic and even poetic state to be trapped in, but unfortunately none of them are really allowed to talk about any of that in any level of detail because the paramount rule of all reality TV remains firm and unwavering: don’t acknowledge you’re on reality TV.

And so, all the cast members have ended up in this strange limbo where their “real life,” to the extent that they have a life or an identity outside of the the one that has been constructed for them on TV over the past decade, isn’t really permitted to exist, even though, nominally at least, that’s precisely the thing that everyone is tuning in to see. No one wants to watch a 37 year-old multi-millionaire divorcée pretend to be a waitress, but neither will the producers of VPR ever consent to fully pulling back the curtain on the life that has been afforded to her through her decade-plus of pretending to be a waitress while the cameras were rolling.

So the show has, of late, ended up in an uncomfortable and untenable position* where the cast members can no longer credibly perform the roles that they were originally cast in back in 2013, but neither can they honestly share the most consequential, and arguably the most interesting aspects of their current lives as professionally famous people. The best that the show can muster is nodding to a series of mostly fake and fleeting brand and media ventures, all of which are obviously only made possible by the notoriety afforded by the show, along with the occasional mention of some unflattering rumour appearing in a gossipy news outlet that even more obviously has a sweetheart deal with the producers of the show.

*(NB: the entire VPR cast got fired last week and they’re rebooting the show with a fresh batch of hotter, cheaper, even more poorly socialised 22 year-olds — can’t wait!)

So barring those few incomplete glimpses at “reality,” such as it is, mostly, what we’re left with is a show where all of the cast members seem to do nothing but appear on camera for obviously contrived conversations at obviously contrived events, and have even more obviously contrived follow-up conversations while straining to choke down unhappy bites of heavily-dressed salads at conspicuously empty pan-Latin eateries that bill themselves as “Tapas-inspired” at 9am in full faces of stage makeup.

Which is, of course, the essential formula that most mainstream reality TV of this type has converged upon at this point. For these characters — and they certainly are characters and players and pawns rather than actual people — have no meaningful life outside of the experience of being a cast member on Vanderpump Rules. And yet that life, in all its complexity and nuance and genuine novelty, can necessarily never be shown on the show; at least not fully or truthfully.

***

Somewhere in West Hollywood, California, there is an apartment building. Low-slung, boxy, and dreary, it likely dates to the late 1960s or early 1970s, and apart from the relatively lush, palm-dotted landscaping out front, a building like this could be almost anywhere else in the country; and many other places around the world.

Inside, the apartments are uniformly featureless, plausible domestic spaces that featureless, plausible people tend to favour. These are the sorts of homes for which the only positive comment that can be offered honestly is “there’s so much space!” because indeed, the only thing they undeniably succeed at is demarcating a certain volume of physical space. Each is nothing more than a series of adequately proportioned and appointed rooms rendered in drab colours somewhere on the surprisingly vast spectrum between pinkish beige and brownish grey, with finishes that are especially poor synthetic renditions of natural materials, and with furnishings that lack any design intent, aesthetic integrity, or consistent point of view, but are instead just the median rendition of the item in question. Mentally superimpose ten thousand examples of “couch,” for example, and behold the blurry, jaggy, pinkish-beigeish-brownish-greyish result: a couch that lacks any positively defined traits and that exists primarily as a thing that evokes the idea of a thing.

“It’s an investment piece!” the female residents of these spaces will chirp about their already soiled pinkish-beigeish-brownish-greyish sectional couches to justify the exorbitant prices paid. “Babe, you’re getting crumbs everywhere…” they’ll then timidly admonish their dim but charismatic male partners who have permanently installed themselves on the long flank of the L-shaped unit. “Huh??” the men will absentmindedly but still dismissively mumble as they brush crushed tortilla chips from their shirt onto a pile of ugly and unnecessary throw pillows that they’ve pushed carelessly to one side. “The chips, babe…” the women will plead, asking — begging in fact — for even the smallest gesture of consideration or kindness from these perfect strangers that they’ve deluded themselves into believing are the loves of their lives. “Oh. I just finished them…” the men will reply, misunderstanding, on every level, the nature of their partner’s plea, before tossing the empty chip bag on to the cluttered and trash-strewn coffee table at their feet, but missing, and not noticing when the bag lands on the ground and spills its last few crumbs onto a Moroccan rug made in Bangladesh; not noticing anything in fact, except for their phones where social media, and online gambling, and hole pics from naive, pliant, self-loathing women they met the night before at their buddy’s event all provide a welcome respite from the joyless, sexless, nagging bitch who tricked them into this awful pantomime of domesticity.

Because this couch isn’t actually an investment piece at all: it’s kindling for the bonfire of humiliation that these foolish, hopeful women stoke day in and day out with every unnoticed act of service, every unreciprocated gesture of care, every unanswered declaration of love. Absolutely nothing in these apartments is built to last; absolutely nothing will endure; and absolutely nothing will ever pay dividends of any kind, because absolutely everything, including (and especially!) the relationships of the people who live in them is entirely disposable. And if these couples could look ahead from their current vantage point they’d see that in only a few short years, they will have already cycled through the milestones of engagement, marriage, and divorce, upgrading along the way to some much bigger but even more nondescript home on the undesirable side of an interstate highway, a move that was supposed to represent a hopeful new start but actually just served as a catalyst for the completely inevitable ending.

And kicking aside the wreckage of these shattered lives, a new, next generation of other, probably equally miserable and ill-suited couples will move into these apartments, and everything will remain exactly as it was, except for these fresh unfortunates, the rent will have doubled, the synthetic finishes will have degraded, and the men will have cunningly rebranded their serial infidelity and total abdication of care as ethical non-monogamy and self-actualisation, respectively. The tune changes but the song remains the same.

And so the story goes, over and over, always with the same essential beats, always with the same doomed players, always with the same tragic outcome. And if this were any other building, in any other place, these people’s stories would remain just that: stories. Abstractions and generalisations and conjecture about essentially unknowable types of people and types of lives, conjured up by some bored, wistful, self-satisfied man, sitting on his couch, staring at an empty Notes app page, searching for inspiration on a particularly bleak late-autumn day.

But here, in this building, in these apartments, in West Hollywood, California, these lurid stories of unhappy couples are more than just stories. They are the very real lives and travails of four very real people who lived there not all that long ago: namely, Jax Taylor and Brittany Cartwright, and Tom Schwartz and Katie Maloney — two of the couples who formed the main emotional axis of Vanderpump Rules throughout the majority of its eleven-season run.

If individually they represent tried and true and reality TV archetypes — Jax the lout, Brittany the good girl, Tom the scoundrel, and Katie the scold — then together, as couples, the staggering summits of dysfunction that they ascend to, and the chasms of shame and humiliation into which they plunge are always thrillingly unpredictable and utterly original. For even the most astute student of human nature, the keenest psychoanalytic mind, the most superb dramatist could scarcely begin to fathom much less convincingly render the kaleidoscope of misery that these four otherwise dull and predictable individuals have succeeded in visiting upon each other, both on- and off-camera. To paraphrase one of the great chroniclers of self-inflicted human suffering: all happy couples are alike, but each unhappy couple is unhappy in their own way. So it is with Jax and Brittany and Tom and Katie: the same basic ingredients — asshole guy who coasts by on inordinate reserves of charm, girl with low self-esteem and a saviour complex, a little bit of money, a lot of fame…shake-shake-shake…and yet? The results couldn’t be more different.

Of the two couples, Jax and Brittany are perhaps the more straightforward pairing to parse: Jax is a narcissist and an asshole and a felon who obviously has a huge dick and knows exactly how to use it, while Brittany is a fundamentally kind and well-adjusted-seeming woman from Kentucky who, like pretty much everyone who comes to LA from some provincial backwater with a hope and a dream, struck a truly awful Faustian bargain the second she hopped off the plane at LAX.

“Let this terrible man abuse you…embrace all of his backstabbing, venal, tedious, and insecure friends as your chosen family…subject yourself to ritual humiliation and betrayal and grief in front of an audience of millions for the next decade…and in exchange, you’ll get…1.8 million Instagram followers...?” the Devil, cleverly disguised as a gaudy British faux-ristocrat, cooed in Brittany’s ear over saccharine cocktails at a Sexy Unique Restaurant deep in the bowels of West Hollywood sometime in 2014. “Gosh, I dunno y’all…” she hemmed and hawed, but the Devil was persistent: “how about a huge new set of tits — on the house???” “Ooh!!!” Brittany squealed with delight, and the demon got her pound of (mammary) flesh, and they all lived unhappily ever after.

“Oh, you poor girl…” you might intermittently murmur to yourself about Brittany, affecting her thick Kentucky drawl, as you half-watch her discover on national television and in front of all of her friends that her boyfriend had unprotected sex with her coworker in an assisted living facility with an unconscious 93 year-old woman in the next room. “Rawt in HAILLLL” you then hear her snarl in Jax’s obviously unrepentant, merely inconvenienced face, in that moment unwittingly collapsing weeks and months and years of the most insidious emotional abuse into one exquisite meme. At least it was all for something.

Tom and Katie are a rather more complex pairing to grapple with in that they’re both monstrous pieces of shit, but in entirely different ways. At first blush, Tom seems to be nothing more than a well-meaning if woefully underdeveloped man-child, bumbling his way through life on a surfeit of vibes and sk8er boi good looks. But peer a little deeper and his diffident, genial, floppy exterior starts to give way to a flinty, manipulative egotist who always has and always will pursue his own agenda at any cost. He’s clearly the smartest guy in the room (all things being relative), but he plays it as if he’s the dumbest, and he mostly gets away with it because he’s — and it really does pain me to say this — just so naturally likeable.

Katie however is one of those people who is just so naturally unlikable in some completely inexplicable but utterly undeniable way that she inspires the most intense cruelty imaginable in absolutely everyone who spends any prolonged amount of time with her. And if that sounds like victim blaming, well, it is, but bear in mind that she has also cruelly victimised every single member of the VPR cast with her vengefulness and vindictiveness and emotional stonewalling and endless demands for total and complete fealty as dictated the extravagant whims of her victimhood. In earlier seasons, she was more of a flat, genial sounding board for the more interesting, which is to say more obviously toxic characters on the show, but she clearly realised somewhere along the line that for someone so totally free of personality as she, endeavouring to be prolifically vile, sour, and aggrieved all the time was the best and perhaps only viable path forward in this medium. The result of this gambit is that she has successfully insinuated herself at the centre of nearly every major conflict over the show’s eleven seasons, all while having precisely no stakes in any of it, other than the deference she feels she is owed by everyone she even fleetingly encounters.

The only drama in which she actually ever had any stakes was her long-term relationship and subsequent short-term marriage with Tom, but in that case, the combination of her tedious moaning and his nauseating whimpering rendered what should have been an explosive coming-undone as nothing more than a particularly dull years-long supercut of two people who have nothing in common conducting parallel lives largely in silence. He obviously never loved her but stayed out of apathy and some sunk-cost fallacy logic, and she obviously only ever loved the idea of him but actually hated everything about who he really was — to the extent that she even knew him at all. Their final, long overdue separation occurred off-camera, between seasons, and when it was mentioned or dealt with at all, it was as C- and D-plot filler that could only be massaged into something halfway watchable through clever editing and frequent flashbacks to more dramatic conflicts that involved all of the more dynamic characters on the show.

But for a brief and fleeting moment in time, between about 2015-2019, these two couples were together, living side-by-side in their featureless, plausible apartments in the nondescript building in West Hollywood, and if not happy exactly, then at least trying to enjoy the spoils of their still-fresh fame, insisting they never could have imagined any of this, but secretly already desiring so much more. By this point, both couples were already well on their way to their inevitable dissolutions, and likely for this reason, all four had begun to invest quite heavily in the idea of their broader friend group as a source of meaning and identity: if nothing actually bound them to their chosen partner, then perhaps they could all find meaning in some larger and more diffuse network of mutual support and dependency? Maybe in the end, those were the sorts of relationships that defined adult life? Maybe, in the final assessment, your friends were the most important thing of all?

***

“Y’all, I was just thinkin’…we are literally just like F·R·I·E·N·D·S...” I imagine Brittany dreamily slurring one drunken weekday evening as the two couples sat around one or the other’s apartment. “Ohmigawd yah totally!” Katie would chirp in response, incredulous but also needing to believe that she did indeed have at least one real friend in the world. “Dude, you’re totally fucking Chandler!” Jax would bark at Tom as a thinly veiled way of saying that Tom seemed kind of gay, even thought they both knew that Jax was the only one to have done gay shit, but it was in Miami, and for money, and in 2006, so it didn’t count. “And you’re like…you’re like…you’re like…Ross’s lesbian ex-wife!” Tom would then retort, and even though it made no sense, they’d all laugh, because again, Tom is just so fucking likeable.

“No, but actually, y’all ARE Chandler and Monica, like for real!” Brittany would continue, as a not-thinly-veiled-at-all way of saying that Tom does seem gay and Katie is an irksome bitch. “Yah, and you guys are like, totally Ross and Rachel…” Katie would then chime in. “Aww, thanks babe!” Brittany would respond, even though it wasn’t meant as a compliment at all, just an acknowledgement of the consuming vortex of drama that their ill-fated pairing had already produced, one that would continue to churn for the better part of the next decade. “We were on a break!!!” Jax would then yell, ostensibly in jest, but actually intended as an earnest attempt to absolve himself of his most recent indiscretion(s). “We weren’t on a “break” Jax; my grandmother was DYING.” Brittany would then snap and suddenly a terrible pall of resentment and loathing would fall over the otherwise light and pleasant evening. “Oh, uh, I was just making a joke…’cause like, in the show, Ross was like “we were on a break!” when they really weren’t because I, uh, yeah…” and he would trail off, uncharacteristically shamefaced, for once. “Well NO ONE’S laughing...” Brittany would hiss in response. And then the evening would abruptly come to an end, not because anything so terrible had actually been said or done, but because they had all just come face-to-face with the awful truth of their loveless relationships, and if they sat in this discomfort together for any length of time, none of them would ever be able to go back to pretending that any of it would ever be okay.

But all the same, the next morning, relaxing on her pinkish-beigeish-brownish-greyish couch, enrobed in some synthetic velvety throw of a coordinating non-colour, Brittany would find herself thinking back on the evening before, and remembering, or more to the point, choosing to remember only the good and nice moments. “We really are like F·R·I·E·N·D·S …” she’d think to herself, sweetly. “…and these are the days we’ll always remember…”

And then, something would occur to her, and she’d smile a coy little smile, and start to feverishly tap away on her iPad. And after a few minutes she’d find exactly what she was looking for, and she’d add two of them to her cart, and press ‘BUY’. And then, a few days later, a modestly-sized package would arrive at their apartment. “Something came for you…” Jax would absent-mindedly announce, before tossing the box on the ground and disappearing to the guest bathroom to first shit and then jerk off to pictures of some naive, pliant, self-loathing woman’s holes. “Ooh!” Brittany would exclaim, as she rushed over to fetch her parcel. “Oh. My. Gosh! They’re PERFECT!!!” she would squeal with delight upon unboxing the items: two identical ersatz reproductions of the golden curlicue picture frame that famously framed the peephole on the front door of Monica’s apartment in F·R·I·E·N·D·S.

“Hey sweetie, what’s that?” Jax would inquire warmly, a few minutes later, his prickly, mercurial countenance temporarily lightened post-shit and post-nut. “It’s the frame from F·R·I·E·N·D·S! I got one for us and one for Katie and Tom! ‘Cause you know, we’re all like, young, and still figuring it out, and just like, knocking on each other’s door at all hours of the day and night…” Brittany would trail off wistfully.

“Aww, that’s so sweet babe; so thoughtful!” Jax would reply with uncharacteristic warmth, not because he actually found it sweet or endearing, but because he had just made a split-second wager that if he showed Brittany even the most meagre of kindnesses right now, she’d probably blow him, and even though he’d just busted to some strange woman’s holes, he could always be up for another round.

And then a couple hours later, post-blowie, Brittany would pop downstairs to Katie and Tom’s to deliver the frame that she had thoughtfully wrapped, with a little card included that would say something like “For the Monica to my Rachel…I’m so glad to have a F·R·I·E·N·D like you!” And Katie would gush and fawn over the gesture and Tom would say something dumb-seeming but actually profound like “but why is it empty?” while clandestinely looking at the latest photos of strange women’s holes that Jax had just sent him.

And they’d chat for a few minutes about this and this, this being Katie’s latest unwarranted grievance, that being the resurrection of some long-forgotten vendetta from three years ago. Then they’d say their farewells, and Brittany would head back upstairs to her and Jax’s apartment, and both Brittany and Katie would straightaway set about installing the frame on their respective front doors. Then life would go on, and neither one of them would think much about the little golden frames, or what they signified; perhaps, from time to time they would register them on their way in or out and they would inspire a contented little smile, but for the most part, they would just recede into the great colourless backdrop of their lives. Until one morning…

Brittany, once again ensconced on the pinkish-beigeish-brownish-greyish couch, would be sipping her morning coffee and gently rubbing at her freshly bruised and bandaged chest — the Devil had made good on her end of the bargain after all. Suddenly, a KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK would sound at the front door. “JAX! SOMEONE’S AT THE DOOR” she’d shout in the direction of Jax’s home office on the other side of the apartment, which was really just a room where he played video games and masturbated, and Brittany knew that, but “home office” was a more palatable moniker for all parties concerned. But there would be no response from Jax.

Another KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK at the door, a little more insistent this time.

“JAX!!!” Brittany would again shout, but to no avail. So she’d just sigh the first of many resigned sighs that day, then slowly start to disentangle herself from the warren of colourless pillows and throws, raise herself to an upright position, gingerly push herself off the couch, and begin shuffling toward the door, wincing in pain with each step.

KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK. KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK.

“Coming! I’m coming!” Brittany would exclaim cheerfully, even as every step sent a surge of the most acute pain she’d ever experienced radiating throughout her whole body.

KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK-KN—

Brittany would fling the door open. Katie!

“Oh! Hey babe!” Brittany would exclaim warmly, even though privately she’d be thinking “I really don’t have the bandwidth for whatever toxic, circular, self-pitying bullshit this bitch is fixin’ to be on about today…” But then she’d catch herself and think “Wow: I’ve become real cynical since moving to LA and joining this friend group…I need to get myself right!”

“So what’re you doin’ he—“ but before Brittany could even finish the question, Katie would just launch straight into her most recent carnival of grievance.

“You are NEVER going to believe what just happened with Tom. I’m at my FUCKING wit’s end with him, and I’m like, SO angry, and SO hurt, and NO ONE is backing me up on this, and I just like, don’t UNDERSTAND why this keeps happening to me, and I just need to like, VENT about it to someone who like, ACTUALLY has my back…” Katie would moan, reaching for — and attaining, yet again — astonishing new heights of un-self-awareness.

“Oh no…” Brittany would reply, less because she was concerned for Katie’s wellbeing, and more because she could, in that very instant, feel the last of her already severely depleted reserves of humanity and grace and compassion scorching under the red hot heat of Katie’s belligerent narcissism.

“What happened, hunny?” Brittany would inquire, flatly and without interest — not that Katie would ever notice or care to notice the effects of her toxic misery on others. And as Brittany would shut the door behind them and gesture for Katie to go sit on the pinkish-beigeish-brownish-greyish couch, something would catch Katie’s eye and a strange bemused look would pass across her face.

“Oh!” she’d exclaim. “That’s weird…” And Brittany would try to follow her gaze and guess at what could possibly be eliciting this reaction, but all she’d see is a colourless, featureless space filled with colourless, featureless things, none of which could ever really be characterised as “weird” or really characterised as anything at all.

“What’s weird?” She’d inquire.

“The frame…the F·R·I·E·N·D·S frame…” Katie would respond.

“Oh…what about it?” Brittany would ask.

“Well, it’s just…no, never mind…” Katie would trail off.

“No, what?” Brittany would insist.

“Well, it’s just…you mounted it a little…off-centre, I think…” and then Katie would point to the front door where, indeed the frame has been mounted decidedly off-centre such that it framed the peephole — which was itself, decidedly off-centre.

“Well, yeah…because that’s where the peephole is…” Brittany would counter, strangely more annoyed by this curious little critique than any of the very real emotional abuse Katie had inflicted upon her throughout their short but long-seeming friendship.

“No, yeah, I know…but it’s just like, in the show, it’s mounted right in the centre of the door so this is just like, a “funny” way to do it, you know?” Katie would insist, making limp little air quotes with her fingers as she said “funny” which for whatever reason triggered a new kind of rage in Brittany that she had never before allowed herself to feel.

“Well, it’s actually not “funny.” It’s just right.” Brittany would rebut, a deeply uncharacteristic hardness and coldness sounding in her tone. “The frame frames the peephole. That’s the whole point. Like, where else would you even put it???”

Taken aback by Brittany’s bluntness, Katie would reflexively assume a defensive stance and sneer “Uhhh…in the centre of the door…like on the show???” And then she’d tap-tap-tap the door right in the centre where, according to her, the frame ought to be placed.

And something about Katie’s whole air of condescension, and the cunty little way she said “like on the show???” while tap-tap-tapping the door would just set Brittany all the way off. “That makes NO sense, Katie! What is it framing? A random patch of beige paint? That’s like, SO fucking dumb!”

“I’M not fucking dumb; YOU’RE fucking dumb!” Katie would snipe back, wilfully mishearing Brittany so that she’d have maximum ammunition for the victimhood narrative that she was already starting to assemble.

“I didn’t say YOU were dumb, Katie, I said THAT’S so dumb. THAT, not YOU!” Brittany would rage, finally free to say everything she had been thinking all along. “But actually Katie, you know what? You ARE dumb. You are SO FUCKING DUMB! Your boyfriend HATES you! Your friends HATE you! Everybody HATES you! The only thing anyone in this goddamn group of sociopaths can ever agree on is that you are a fucking nightmare and we all FUCKING HATE YOU! But somehow, you ACTUALLY think you have friends! Somehow, you ACTUALLY think you have a partner that loves you!! Somehow, you ACTUALLY think you’re a good fucking person!!! You wanna talk about dumb? Bitch: that’s DUMB.”

And because there would be absolutely nothing she could say in her own defence, Katie would just huff and puff and sulk and stalk toward the door and fling it open, and then she’d look over her shoulder in a way that she intended to be menacing, but actually just looked uncomfortable and contrived — like everything she did. “You know what, Brittany? You’ve changed. Or maybe…maybe, this is who you REALLY are…”

The Brittany would get right up in Katie’s face and look her dead in the eye and say: “Hunny: this is EXACTLY who the fuck who I’ve ALWAYS been. And you wanna know what? It feels FUCKING AMAZING to be me.”

And Katie would just stand there, mouth agape and eyes bulging as she tried to decide whether to be strike back, reckon with the truth, or marinate even more luxuriously in delectable victimhood, before swiftly settling on the latter.

“Wowwww….” Katie would then sneer in that way that’s supposed to convey moral superiority but is really just something to say when someone else is completely right and you’re completely wrong.

“Oh and Katie…” Brittany would start, subtly re-adjusting the F·R·I·E·N·D·S frame to ensure that it was perfectly plumb and square in its off-centre position.

“Yahhh?” Katie would respond in a prissy, expectant tone, so deluded as to think that even now, even under these circumstances, an apology would be forthcoming.

“RAWT. IN. HAILLLLL.” Then Brittany would slam the door shut in Katie’s sour, crumpled little face. “Fucking Monica-ass, crazy ass, psycho ass BITCH!!!!!!!!” She’d scream at the top of her lungs as she stomped down the hallway shouting even louder “JAX! YOUR BEST FRIEND’S GIRLFRIEND IS A FUCKING PSYCHO BITCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

But from a distance, all he’d manage to catch of Brittany’s tirade would be a muffled “fucking psycho bitch.” Assuming, not unreasonably, that one or more or all of his recent indiscretions must have come to light, he would sigh and mutter “ah, shit…” before turning to the naive, pliant, self-loathing woman who had been showing him her holes over FaceTime for the past forty-five minutes. “Kylie, sweetie, I’m going to have to let you go. My, uh, sister just woke up and is calling for me…” he’d lie, so cooly and effortlessly that it felt true, even to him. “It’s Kailee, silly!” Kylie/Kailee would reply, feeling a sharp stab of shame that she’d later be able identify in recovery as her absolute personal nadir. “I miss you, baby…maybe I could link up with you and your sister later for drin—“ and Jax would hang up just as the door to the room would swing open, and there Brittany would be, breathless, flushed with rage, doubled over in pain.

“THAT” … “FUCKING” … “BITCH!!!” Brittany would huff.

“Who, sweetie?” Jax would timidly coo, sitting up ramrod straight in his chair and neatly folding his hands in his lap to affect a sort of a schoolboy innocence, all the while making real-time calculations about how to best and most effectively defend himself against what he imagined would be the coming avalanche of irrefutable incriminating evidence.

Bracing herself against the door frame, Brittany would gradually begin to catch her breath. “That bitch...down the hall…Maloney…”

Realising that he’d almost certainly gotten away with all of it once again, Jax would immediately relax and slump back down in his chair, draping one arm over the top of his head, and shoving his other hand down the front of his loose grey sweatpants to fiddle with his still-hard dick. “Who, Katie? Yeah, I’ve been saying for years that she’s a cunt.”

“Well congratulations: you were fucking right.” Brittany would sigh. Then she’d look over at Jax and notice the unmistakable bulge straining beneath his sweatpants.

“Oh what the HAILLL, Jax??!” She’d drawl, disgust dripping off of every word.

“What, sweetie?” Jax would reply, immediately reverting to his meek, solicitous persona optimised for gaslighting.

“You’ve got a BONER, Jax. Don’t think I don’t know what you do in here…” And Brittany would look at his dumb dace, and his big boner, and suddenly it would all seem so silly, and all she’d feel about any of it would be an utterly clarifying contempt.

“What?! Sweetie!” Jax would protest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just these pants; they bunch up in this weird way and—“

“Are you talking to girls? Are you in here you FaceTiming with girls again???” Brittany would demand to know. “Because I know ALL about that. I hear you late at night when you think I’m asleep, moaning and whimpering to these whores like a bitch in heat. You’re disgusting. DISGUSTING. Barely even a man.”

“Sweetie, I don’t know what you’re talking about! I was just on the phone with my therapist!” Jax would lie, every bit as effortlessly as he had just lied to Kylie/Kailee. After all, he had had a therapist at one point, but she had fired him as a client eighteen months ago when she had caught him trying to steal $200 out of her purse, and Jax now used these fake therapy sessions as an alibi to account for his many otherwise unaccountable activities.

“Well…” Brittany would sigh, finally seeing everything for exactly what it was “…I’m sure she’d suck your dick too, given the chance.”

She would. And she had. Before the whole $200 thing.

Then Brittany would quite literally throw her hands in the air and exclaim “You know what Jax? I don’t even care anymore. I don’t care about you. I don’t care about Katie. I don’t care about anything, or anyone. That’s what y’all have done to me. That’s what this place has done to me. You’re all dark spirited; every last one of you. All I can do now is hope, and pray that when the fires come next year, the good Lord above sees fit to wipe this whole demonic city off the map! Because honestly? I want to watch y’all BURN. So go ahead: call up one of your girls, or your therapist, or whatever slut pops up first in your inbox, and go get your dick wet one last time before the inferno comes and sweeps you and everyone else in this god forsaken place down into the fiery depths where you can all RAWT IN HAILLLLLL!!!!”

***

And while this should have been the end of it for Brittany, of course it wasn’t. She’d go on to spend the better part of the next decade cycling through the same awful patterns with Jax, and Katie, and everyone else in the cast, little by little becoming more and more inured to all the terrible behaviour of all the terrible people that her terrible bargain had chained her to.

And even after Jax would get himself, and by extension her fired from Vanderpump Rules for being racist, or sexist, or just an asshole — no one can any longer remember precisely which it was, or in what combination — Brittany privately wagered that if she just laid low long enough, and let it all blow over, eventually we’d collectively reach some post-hope moment where the time would once again be ripe for vacuous entertainment anchored by a kind, relatable, steadfastly apolitical southern sweetie pie. And sure enough, the fever broke, and as soon as it did, right on cue, the Devil came shuffling back around, looking to re-up what had ended up being a very lucrative deal.

“But darling, why NOT let the dissolution of your miserable marriage play out on national television???” the Devil whispered sweetly as the gorgeous flickering candlelight of the Sexiest, Most Unique Restaurant in the world illuminated the constellation of fresh injection sites all across her frozen visage.

“Gosh, I just dunno…” Brittany fretted, weighing the likely meagre compensation against the assuredly abundant humiliation.

“But just think about it darling: your own show? Where you’re the star? It can all happen on your terms this time…” the Devil slickly lied.

“Wow! I mean, that does sound nice…” Britney conceded. “But honestly: do I really want to go through all that again? Plus, I’m a mom now…”

“Look at me Brittany” the Devil commanded “I’m going to tell you something right now, and you’re going to damn well listen and listen damn well: don’t EVER put your children’s interests before your own…they’ll take and take and take and never once give you or your happiness a second thought. And for what? For what! Women like us: we have to look out for ourselves — God knows these useless men we surround ourselves with won’t do it. They can barely get it in the right hole most of the time — and thank fucking God, otherwise we’d have an army of their bastard children to look after on top of every-fucking-thing else.”

“Hmm…I mean, I guess I see your point but…I just don’t know if it’s all worth it?” Brittany agonised.

And the Devil leaned in even closer and took Brittany’s hand in hers: “Just for you, Brittany, because you’re family: I’m going to throw in a fresh new set of tits — gratis. How’s that sound? I’m calling my surgeon right now…because by the look of things…”

“Damnnit Lisa! I can never say no to you! Okay: what the Hail! let’s do it!” Brittany exclaimed.

“Fabulous! Let’s have a toast!” And the Devil motioned for a bottle of cava that was listed on the menu as champagne to be brought over to their table.

“But wait: do you really think I need to get my boobs redone?” Brittany sheepishly inquired.

“Oh, desperately darling! It’s practically all anyone can talk about!”

***

Of course it’s easy to pass judgement on Brittany and all the rest of the cast of a show like Vanderpump Rules; it’s easy to relish in their frailties, and pathologise their bad behaviour, and mock their glaringly obvious blind spots; it’s easy to collapse their expertly stage managed but still fundamentally very real suffering into fodder for memes and gossip and idle chatter because in truth, we have absolutely nothing of interest or substance to say about our own lives. But are any of us really so different from any of them? Under the harsh and clarifying light of this type of fame, would any of us fare any better? Would any of our better angels prevail? Would any of our relationships survive remotely intact? Would any of us actually succeed in coming off as anything other than petty, needly, bitchy, totally self-centred, utterly un-self-aware assholes? Somehow I doubt it.

Yes, on Vanderpump Rules, conflict and dysfunction is always dialled up to the maximum possible intensity, but strip away the more glaringly sensational contrivances and what you’re left with is, in effect, a decade-long morality play that depicts human nature and relational dynamics more clearly and with greater nuance than any Good and Important work of art I’ve come across in recent memory. And even though I don’t aspire to be like the cast of VPR, or to pattern my relationships after them, I nevertheless still see myself in them and their travails, and they have nevertheless been a comforting and constant presence against which to measure and mark my own progression through adulthood. They are, in a sense, my F·R·I·E·N·D·S.

Because much in the way that a show like F·R·I·E·N·D·S offered a heightened, broadly-drawn rendition of emerging adulthood vis-a-vis an ensemble cast of beautiful, catchphrase-spewing, mono-dimensional archetypes, so too does VPR offer, well, exactly that, albeit in a wildly different format, and to wildly different ends. There are numerous differences between the two shows, of course, but perhaps the most interesting and telling one is that F·R·I·E·N·D·S, however treacly and hollow and problematic, has always been (and remains) essentially aspirational fare, while Vanderpump Rules is and always has been defiantly, emphatically, categorically anti-aspirational. Even those who would seek the precise sort of fame and success that the VPR cast enjoys would never directly pattern their own lives after those of Brittany and co.; they’ve all given far too much of themselves for far too little in return. The Devil gave them a bum deal.

And so, unlike F·R·I·E·N·D·S, the fundamental pleasure of watching VPR derives not from identifying with the characters and wishing you had some version of what they have, but rather, from looking on in horror and being able to congratulate yourself on being absolutely nothing like them. And how sadly fitting that is for our time, where almost nothing is aspirational, almost everything is smothered in disdain and irony and degrees of remove, and increasingly, most people relate to their friends in part, or in whole through ritual performances of closeness that are submitted to some real or imagined public for idle consumption, critique, and judgement. The Vanderpump gang truly are the F·R·I·E·N·D·S we all deserve.

***

CODA

Somewhere in Los Angeles, a group of beautiful and talented young stars assemble on set. By all accounts, everyone likes everyone well enough, and at various points they’ve all been close in the way that they so memorably portray on screen, but that’s hardly the point anymore: this is a job, first and foremost, and they’ve all come ready to work. They’re consummate professionals; they know just what to do. They hit their mark, they deliver their lines, they make their magic. Whatever it takes to get the job done, they’ll do. Take after take after take until it’s just right; until it’s damn near perfect, until it’s as good as they all know it can and must be. They can tell as soon as the cameras stop rolling that they got it —again. It’s electric and unmistakable, this thing that they’ve created together. Another day at the very best job in the world. They can scarcely believe their good fortune — even after all these years. They bid each other farewell, but just for now: they’ll be back: maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe next year, almost certainly next season. And even after this exceptional run concludes, and the very last episode has aired, they will remain bound together as a unit in the popular imagination for the rest of their lives, and even beyond. For all of them, truly, it is the role of a lifetime. But it’s getting late now, and it’s time to go home. So they all wave goodbye, and get into their chauffeur-driven cars, and head back separately to the beautiful, quiet, empty homes that have been afforded to them by pretending, so convincingly, for all these years, to be the very best of friends.

2004 was the year that I graduated high school, moved out of my family home, and went to university. It was, in other words, a transformational year: one in which the circumstances of my life were very obviously changed between January 1 and December 31. 

I’m sure there were plenty of moments throughout this year that, at the time, felt seismic, but I don’t remember any of them now, at least not in any detail, so I can only conclude that they didn’t really matter, and that they in fact weren’t seismic at all. The memories that I am readily able to summon from this year are less specific moments in time and more a series of vague tableaux that I know correlate to this period in my life, but otherwise exist entirely outside of time: places, people, relationships, objects, media etc., none of which I can reassemble into discrete episodes, but all of which I can be reasonably sure were there, unfolding adjacent to one another at roughly the same time in some combination or another. 

Which is just the nature of memory, I suppose. Outside of the very best and the very worst that life has to offer, so much of what constitutes our memories, even of very recent times, is nothing more than a dim set of images and sense memories and emotional states and relational entanglements drifting past and sometimes into one another, and taken together we call that the story of our lives. 

Which is why the memories that do persist, vividly and with intense specificity, carry a particular kind of weight in your own lore, especially after you reach the age where the passage of time seems to suddenly accelerate, and life becomes mostly an obliterative blur. If, at 38, all I’m left with from the past two decades are fifty or fewer crystalline memories, those memories automatically take on an outsize meaning. Even when those memories are seemingly random or trivial or otherwise undeserving of enduring, surely the fact of their persistence signals some deeper meaning waiting to be divined, or at the very least, the possibility for some deeper meaning to be constructed retroactively? Surely.

There are plenty of things, or types of things that I know I did in 2004, but all I’m left with now are generic, sweeping, textureless recollections that are occasionally punctuated by an errant, highly specific detail that for whatever reason has remained lodged in my memory. 

I know, for example, that I had a part time job working as a cashier at a grocery store, and I know that I worked there a minimum of twenty hours each week. But I don’t remember a single definitive thing about the experience except for one of my colleagues, a grotesque woman in her late thirties (or maybe she was younger but just looked like shit) named Krista who bullied me for being gay. That and the produce code for long English cucumbers — 4593. 

I also know that I had friends, and I have the vague sense that at various points, we did most of the conventional things that teenagers in 2004 would have done, like go to the movies, and go to the mall, and go to the beach, and drive around to all those places and to nowhere in particular in our parent’s cars listening to whatever music happened to be on the radio, or whatever CD happened to be in the glove compartment of your friend’s mom’s Jeep Liberty. 

And then of course there was school. I know that my life was oriented around that place, and that I was there, every weekday, for around six hours a day. Although, by 2004, it was often less than that, and some days I didn’t go at all, because by the time I got to the final year of high school I had sufficiently established my reputation as a model student such that I could do things like just not show up for no fucking reason, and the teachers would either hallucinate my presence, or just openly admit that they didn’t care and it didn’t matter when I did it. And before either one of us could say anything else on the matter, some exquisitely tweaky skank named Stephanie would do or say something absolutely deranged in the back corner of the biology lab, and suddenly the least of anyone’s concerns was the truant faggot with the obviously forged note standing contritely at the front of the classroom. It was the first of many experiences that taught me if you accumulate enough good will at the outset of something, you can eventually fuck off and abdicate almost all responsibility with near total impunity down the line.

So even though I can say with absolute certainty that all of these things did happened, there’s remarkably little specificity or nuance to any of these memories: apart from Krista and Stephanie and the Jeep Liberty and the long English cucumbers, I could equally be describing the senior year of any middle class suburban teenager anywhere in North America in 2004; I could equally be cribbing all of these anecdotes from any one of the middling, cliché, under-realised teenage sex comedies that were released contemporaneously; I could, in fact, just be making all this shit up. Because most of these memories aren’t really memories at all; they’re just faint, minimally plausible impressions of things that I’m pretty sure I must have done at some point during this year.

The one memory (or set of memories) from this time that I do recall with intense specificity is the time that I spent sitting on my mother’s couch watching TV. The couch was plush and oversized and the colour of mulled wine or cranberry sauce or some other autumnal slurry — as was everyone’s mom’s couch in 2004. The right side was mine, because it had a more direct sightline to the TV: a taut, boxy, silver 28-inch flatscreen Toshiba that I remember thinking, for some reason, was actually quite chic.

Nearly every afternoon, beginning immediately after school and creeping well into the evening, I would install myself on my side of the couch and watch hours of TV: talk shows and game shows and cooking shows and syndicated re-runs of sitcoms and nothing in particular and whatever the fuck else happened to be on.  

What’s up? Nothing much. What are you doing? Watching TV. What’s on? Whatever. Okay. 

So went countless conversations with my mother who was almost never seated on her side of the couch, but was almost always up and about doing things like working a full-time job, or putting fresh chicken breasts into the freezer and taking frozen ones out, or making lists on small pads of paper emblazoned with the grainy black-and-white likenesses of local real estate agents, or feverishly thumbing through her daybook, combing through the scant interstitial spaces between dentist appointments and bill payments and menstrual cycles, as if searching for a portal to a different, better, easier life — as did everyone’s mom in 2004.

So she’d be busy with all that, and I’d be not busy with all this — all this being melting into a bordeaux velveteen cloud as the glow of lowest common denominator media bathed my perfectly still, supine form. For hours and hours, day after day, ensconced, or perhaps more to the point, entombed in my mother’s squishy crimson couch doing nothing much and watching whatever the fuck. This is what I remember most of all.

Except! Every day between 4 and 5 PM: out of the dense fog of nothingness emerged a shining beacon of utterly clarifying something-ness. That hour was special. That hour was sacrosanct. That hour was Oprah.

Every day that I could manage, I would watch as Oprah evangelised the cult of self actualisation, and probed the strange folds of the human psyche, and embraced then-fringe identities and communities and ways of being with curiosity and compassion, and conducted deeply humanising conversations with the victims and perpetrators alike of all the strangest and cruelest and most unthinkable vicissitudes of life…which is to say nothing of the more frothy and pulpy and prurient elements of her show and persona: the whiplash of weight loss and weight gain and wigs and code switching and hand clasping and the ecstatic fucking roar of the most exciting fucking thing that anyone’s ever fucking heard in the entire fucking history of the entire fucking world: IT’S. MY. FAVOURITE. THINGS!!!!!!! And all of this madness and spiritualism and pseudoscience and consumerism and good old fashioned American derring-do would somehow coalesce into an absolutely intoxicating new secular religion that seemed to me, and to millions of others, to be the surest path to individual fulfilment and collective uplift — as if those two things weren’t definitionally at odds.

There are dozens of episodes of Oprah from this era that I could write about with near-perfect recall that would be incredibly germane to our present moment: episodes that document the now-forgotten nuances of our collective fin-de-history malaise that curdled into whatever this is today. The 9/11 widows, and the opioid addicts, and the morbidly obese, and the plastic surgery addicted, and the husbands and wives cheating and lying and fighting for control of a life that neither one of them wants, and Barack and Michelle before the hope faded and the change became drone strikes, and Beyoncé when we were still permitted to glimpse at the pathologically banal woman who somehow coexists with the world’s most compelling performer, and all the many hacks and cranks and pseudoscientists who were platformed before “platform” was a verb, whispering the secrets to health and wealth and happiness to a rapt audience of tens of millions who knew in their marrow that everything was all wrong even though they were still being told it was alright. I could, and perhaps I should write about any one of these episodes; there are real lessons to be learned, real insights to be gleaned, real meaning encoded in these 43-minute dispatches from an only-just-barely bygone era. 

But I’m not going to write about any of these episodes. Because even though it’s tempting to try and draw tidy through-lines between whatever was happening then and whatever’s happening now, that’s not really the point or the purview of this newsletter. There are more than enough highly skilled and incisive commentators already weaving together in real-time the encompassing narratives that will quickly transmute into whatever remains of conventional wisdom. Bravo. What I care about most of all, and what I believe I’m uniquely well suited to writing about, above all else, are things of little to no real importance. Banality, exquisitely rendered. Bravo!

Which is why, instead of any of that, I’d like to recount that time in 2004 when Oprah examined a pile of her own shit live on-air. Allow me to set the scene. 

It was, I believe, a typical mid-winter day. Sometime in January or February most probably, when heavy, deep grey skies become lodged above the Pacific Northwest and render the world in a permanent twilight, for weeks, even months at a time. I’m sure on this particular day, I would have come home directly after school. And if school let out at precisely 2:39 PM, and home was a brisk fifteen-minute walk away, even accounting for a few perfunctory farewells and miscellaneous teenaged milling about, I surely would have been home no later than 3:15 PM. 

Upon arriving home, I almost certainly would have straightaway fixed myself some sort of snack: cereal or toast most likely, but perhaps something stranger and more chaotic like a fistful of deli meat eaten straight from the package, four or five bites of cold leftover pasta, and two or three chocolate chip cookies. 3:30 PM. 

I would have then proceeded to amble around the house for no particular reason, wandering in an out of every room, including my mother’s bedroom where I’d rummage through her makeup bag looking for tweezers to excise a few unwanted eyebrow hairs, which would have, no doubt, quickly escalated to a meditative fugue state wherein I rip out large, irregular clumps of my eyebrows with my thumb and forefinger, a nervous tic that persists to this day. 3:45 PM. 

Maybe after this, almost certainly in fact, I would have pissed, or shit, or at a minimum just sat on the toilet for a while to decompress from whatever happened that day — not that I could tell you anything about that now. Then I would have flushed and washed my hands — or honestly not — and proceeded to examine myself in the mirror above the sink, perhaps even reaching for the small hand mirror that my mother kept in the medicine cabinet so I could behold myself from strange, oblique angles, as if to catch myself unawares; as if to see myself, just for a moment, as the rest of the world saw me. 3:58 PM. 

Sensing the hour was drawing near, I would have rushed back to the living room, perhaps finding the time to grab some ancillary snack like a small handful of tiny greasy crackers or a few loose slices of marbled cheddar cheese. Something quick and portable; there wasn’t any time to waste. 3:59 PM. 

I’d sit down. Turn the TV on. Navigate to channel 11. An ad for a local Toyota dealership would play and the acronym “APR” would be repeated multiple times, and even though I didn’t know then what that meant, and still don’t today, I imagine it was the basis of a deeply compelling, even irresistible offer, and I hope it enabled so many people in my community to finally get that brand new 2005 Highlander. 4:00 PM.  

A warm, honeyed, otherworldly glow fills the screen of the 28-inch Toshiba, and as if to announce a collective ascendence to some higher plane, the dulcet harmonising of a gospel choir pierces the silence. ♫ Ooooh-Ooh-Ooh-Ooh-ooooh…♫ Blurry, hazy, indistinct imagery flashes on screen, illegible at first but gradually becoming more discernible: lights and cameras and cables and monitors and mirrors. Instruments of seeing and being seen. A slow, rhythmic clapping rises, punctuating the ever quickening stream of images. ♫ Ooh! Ooh! ♫ Women of every age and race and colour and creed spring to their feet and stand at attention, screaming, laughing, crying, trembling with anticipation. ♫ Yeah! Ooh! Ooh! ♫ Backstage: SHE examines her makeup, SHE fans her face, SHE adjusts her mic. In the studio, they call out to Her. With Her. For Her. Her name is an incantation, and every utterance delivers them closer and closer to a state of the purest grace. ♫ Ooh! Ooh! ♫ Then! From beneath the audience stands, monumental double doors swing open and There. She. Is. OPRAH. She beams, seeming to radiate pure love, or perhaps just reflecting back the adoration that is being showered upon her, or perhaps both, in perfect reciprocity. ♫ Yeah! Ooh! Ooh! ♫ Outstretched arms flail desperately for contact with or even proximity to her. If I could just touch the hem of her garment, I know I’ll be made whole their fingertips seem to cry. She makes glancing contact with the fortunate few, anointing them with her touch as she makes her way to centre stage, her floor-length ivory satin overcoat billowing behind her with a lightness and ease not quite of this world. ♫ Ooh! Ooh! ♫ She dances and shimmies and throws her head back with joyous abandon. ♫ C’mon! C’mon! ♫ She clasps the hands of an elderly white woman and smashes them together in time with some unheard melody, as if to give her permission to finally live authentically. ♫ Yeah! Ooh! Ooh! ♫ She grabs the face of a young, obviously gay man with both hands and squeezes his cheeks tightly, wringing out all the self-loathing, and shame, and inadequacy and torment that she can intuit with just a single touch is eating him alive from within. ♫ Everybody Oprah… ♫ She looks straight into the camera and thrusts her fist skyward as if to proclaim some sort of total and final victory on behalf of her millions of apostles. But a victory for what? On what terms? To what end? ♫ Ooh! Ooh! ♫

We cut to: letters of differing sizes and typefaces dancing across a shimmering golden substrate, twinkling and gleaming and glowing brighter and brighter and brighter until finally the screen is subsumed in a blinding, obliterative incandescence and all that remains is a giant handwritten cursive “O,” a letter that was then, and is now synonymous with only one thing; only one person: OPRAH.

At the beginning of most episodes, Oprah would emerge through the double-doored entrance beneath the audience’s tiered, bleacher-style seating. The doors would swing open, and she would strut out to deafening, hysterical, euphoric applause. Then she would make her way to her mark at centre stage, hugging and squeezing and grasping and otherwise communing with her adoring public for a few precious moments before introducing the subject of the episode. But on this day there was no such ritual gauntlet. At the top of the episode, Oprah was already on stage, at her mark, staring directly into the camera. The Cold Open. 

On Oprah, the Cold Open was reserved for only the most serious of topics. It was a way, I imagine, of conveying urgency; of impressing upon the audience that the subject under discussion was of such paramount importance that there wasn’t even a single second to waste. It was also a way, I imagine, of avoiding the uncomfortable juxtaposition between crazed idolatry in one moment, and a discussion of childhood sexual abuse, or Guantanamo Bay, or the Holocaust in the next. Every regular viewer of Oprah knew what the Cold Open meant.

So on this day, greeted by the sight of Oprah staring soberly into the camera, understanding what it almost certainly signified, my first thought was: please let it be Something Gay. Please let it be some gay Mormon husband secretly fucking literally hundreds of dudes behind the back of his tremulous wife named Trisha. Please, Oprah, give that to me on this Tuesday afternoon. 

Oprah begins: “Today we’re going to be talking about something that affects us all…something that we all do…hopefully every day…maybe even twice a day…”

Hmm…

“Today, we’re talking about poop.”

Oh!

There had been a rash of celebrity and celebrity-adjacent colon cancer scares/fatalities around the turn of the millennium, and as a result, there was at the time a particularly heightened awareness and sense of foreboding around the comings-and-goings of the region. Intuiting that the nation’s distressed GI tracts were, in today’s parlance, having a moment, Oprah, in her inimitable way, swiftly moved to recast something shameful, stigmatised, and taboo within a framework of self-knowledge, self-love, acceptance, and ultimately empowerment. 

It’s important to note that by the dictates of Oprahism, things are almost never self-evidently what they seem to be: everything that happens to or around or because of you is never just a contained incident, but is instead a key, which when properly wielded, can be deployed to unlock some ever-deeper, ever more sacred inner sanctum in your Temple of Self. It therefore follows that your shits are not just a routine bodily function to be contended with quietly and privately; your shits are, in fact, a perfect — and perfectly honest — representation of who you really are. Everything you eat, everything you do, everything you indulge in or abstain from, every habit, every pattern, every choice you make throughout every second of every day is right there, mirroring you back to you from the murky depths of the toilet bowl. Your shit is a revelation. 

After a brief introduction to set the terms and establish the stakes — which couldn’t possibly be any higher! — Oprah brings out Dr. Oz, and they make their way over to a station that has been set up with two specimens covered by sheets of blue medical paper: one is the shit of a healthy person, while the other is that of an unhealthy person. Privacy screens are installed as the samples are unveiled, which require Oprah and Dr. Oz to narrate in lurid detail the various properties as they examine them. Matters of texture, colour, viscosity, size, and composition are discussed in astonishing levels of detail and with lavish metaphor; mousse and mousse-like consistencies are repeatedly invoked; “Everybody poops!” Oprah exclaims at random intervals. “Evvvverybody poops.” She adds, even more declaratively, which somehow makes it even more true. 

Reaction shots from audience members are spliced throughout the segment to punctuate the information as it comes. Plump middle aged black women nod along smugly as they recognise themselves in the discussion of healthy ochre-coloured logs of medium-firm consistency expelled painlessly. Desiccated white women from states that begin with “I” blanche as the conversation turns to talk of concerningly tiny and infrequent black-brown nuggets the consistency of beef jerky. And a few tubby, rosacea-addled men in the audience who were brought here under duress and false pretences by their wives redden even further with shame and fear as they recall the pale, loose, bloody, shits they just took in the Harpo Studios restrooms mere moments before.

After the basic parameters of fecal health cues have been established vis-à-vis these paradigmatic shits, Oprah announces that she has a surprise. A frisson of excitement ripples through the studio audience: a surprise in Oprahland almost always and usually only ever means one thing: giveaways, presents, free stuff. But free what, exactly? What item could possibly be on theme? What could Oprah possibly gift under these circumstances?

Is there any version of reality where I walk out of this episode about literal human shit with a pink iPod Mini? seventeen women named Jennifer wonder simultaneously before concluding that yes there fucking is because this is the Oprah Fucking Winfrey Show where fucking miracles happen every fucking day! The anticipation builds.

“I have a sample for us to examine…” Oprah announces. 

A symphony of tiny gasps and confused titters reverberate around the room as the Jennifers and the constipated Iowans and the incontinent husbands and everyone else waits for confirmation that they’ve understood her correctly. 

“Evvvvvvvverybody poops!” Oprah clarifies with an insouciant shrug.

I’m about to see Oprah’s shit… 335 strangers now bound for life by this experience think in unison. 

But shock swiftly gives way to acceptance which even more swiftly gives way to anticipation. Of course I’m going to see Oprah’s shit today! Frankly, I can’t fucking believe I haven’t already seen it already!

The specimen is quickly retrieved from beneath the table, as though it were nothing more than a swap-out for honey buttered biscuits made during a holiday cooking segment with Patti Labelle. Left entirely unremarked upon is the fact that this pile of Oprah’s shit didn’t just materialise causa sui beneath this table, but was in fact deposited there with great care, great concern, and only after days, possibly even weeks of intense logistical wrangling that no doubt ensnared, in some fashion or another, dozens of individuals in Oprah’s employ — and beyond. Just consider, as a start, the likely chain of custody around the specimen: retrieval, packaging, transport, storage, art direction. At every step, a fresh hurdle to be discussed, debated, and ultimately surmounted by some of the most ambitious and accomplished professionals working in American media circa 2004. But no one speaks about that or even thinks about it: by some exquisite logic that absolutely everyone involved unquestioningly accepts, a pile of the world’s most famous woman’s shit is on-hand for the edification of the masses, and there’s simply nothing more to be said on that.

Dr. Oz begins to scrupulously examine the sample. Oprah watches him, and we watch her: ten, twenty, thirty million souls, waiting breathlessly, for the official real-time prognosis on the world’s most famous pile of shit.

“Oprah, I have to tell you: this is a very healthy stool!” Dr. Oz happily proclaims.

“Really??!” Oprah exclaims, feigning disbelief that her expertly stage managed shit is, of course, an ideal specimen.

“Great consistency; great colour; looks like you’ve been getting plenty of fibre…” Dr. Oz trails off momentarily, his light, jovial countenance darkening somewhat before continuing “…now, the one thing I would say is—“

“Uh-oh!” Oprah interjects, less to express concern for the prognosis, and more to remind him that if he steps even a fucking hair out of line and does or says any-fucking-thing other than exactly fucking what was discussed explicitly and repeatedly with her executive producer Sheri, she will fucking DESTROY him.

“Maybe, mayyybe, a little more water! But we could ALL drink more water!” He quickly adds. 

Oprah nods along, not exactly chastened, but certainly taking it all in; really letting herself sit with the discomfort of having let herself down in this small, but still significant way. But all that shame and self-censure is quickly redirected to more productive ends, because ultimately, her failure to drink enough water isn’t actually a failure at all: it’s an invitation to do better going forward; it’s an opportunity to understand herself more fully; it’s a teachable moment. “I. Just. Never. Drink. Enough. WATER!!!” Oprah exclaims in the staccato cadence that’s reserved for only her most important edicts. “Do y’all EVER drink enough water???” she demands, leadingly, of the audience.

“NOOOOOOO!!!!!” The audience roars in response. If Oprah doesn’t drink enough water, neither the fuck do we!!!!!

After this, they quickly wrap up the segment, and the rest of the episode is filled with tips and tricks from a panel of telegenic gastroenterologists and oncologists and dieticians and various and sundry other unaccredited hucksters, all giddily auditioning catchphrases and mnemonic devices and neologisms in the hopes of landing a lucrative fiefdom somewhere in Oprah’s vast cultural imperium.

As the episode ended, it transitioned, as it always did, directly into the Five O’Clock News. Then, as now, disinclined to allow the worrisome state of the world to intrude upon my interiority, I immediately pressed mute and sat for a moment in perfect silence and near-total darkness, illuminated only by the flicker of whatever mudslide or bridge closure or building collapse had plagued Greater Vancouver that day.

I can’t say for certain what I would have been thinking about in that moment, but I know that nothing about the preceding hour would have struck me as likely to be remembered, much less aggrandised, much less memorialised in the way that I’ve attempted to do here. It was a simply average episode of Oprah; amusing at times, mildly informative, watchable, but on the whole, a little dull. It certainly didn’t even begin to approach the dizzying, ecstatic, revelatory heights of all the many Something Gay episodes. I would have never guessed then that anything about this hour of television would endure.

No part of me would have predicted that everything else that was to come that year — the last day of high school, the first day of university, coming out, the death of my grandmother — would, by 2024, be nothing more to me than flimsy abstractions, while the precise contours of this episode would remain utterly clear and present at the very forefront of my mind.

No part of me would have comprehended that nearly all of the most monumental-seeming things that I would fret over, strive for, yearn after, and drive myself mad in the pursuit of over the next two decades would either happen or not happen, and then in shockingly short order melt away into almost-nothingness, while the image of Oprah examining multiple piles of shit, including her own, would only sharpen, clarify, and become ever more persistent. 

No part of me would have been able to conceptualise this future version of myself on the precipice of middle age, sitting on his couch — the left side now  — at his home in London, straining to extract humour and pathos and meaning from a curious little memory of a funny little non-event, then straining even harder to spin all of that into some self-mythologising, mortifyingly self-published personal essay destined for, as of right now, an audience of precisely one. 

No part of me would have been able to predict, or comprehend, or conceptualise any of this, but I think in the broadest of senses, on the most general of terms, I would have been fine with how it all turned out; satisfied; happy even. And I would have been happier still to learn that this future version of myself was still striving, still hopeful, still fundamentally more concerned with the future than the past, and still absolutely fucking obsessed with Oprah.

For the infinitesimal cohort who have followed with any interest my painfully timid and woefully intermittent attempts at cultivating a public persona over the past decade or so, you’ll most likely recall that my thing, insofar as I have a thing, is dense, meandering, overwrought, ironising meditations on various and sundry pop cultural ephemera. And that’s still very much my thing, so that’s what I’m going to be doing here on a formal and consistent basis. I’m hoping that it will be an outlet that allows me to be a little freer and a little less precious, as a writer and as a person. I’m also hoping that someone, anyone will actually read this, and like it, and tell me I’m good and smart and special. Because as unseemly as it is to admit plainly that I crave attention, require validation, and desire fame (of a certain kind), it’s actually more pitiable, I think, to deny one’s own ambitions, however awful they may be, and choose instead to cower in the respectable margins of life.

If you’ve come here expecting dispatches from the bleeding edge of the cultural discourse, I regret to inform you that I’m far too ponderous and self doubting to ever produce anything approaching real-time commentary, much less the fun, loose, extemporaneous-seeming, up-to-the-second content that the leading cultural commentators churn out ceaselessly. I need days, weeks, months, whole seasons to life to parse, then formalise, then finally express my thoughts on even the most trivial of things. Even this simple introductory entry is an object lesson in the perils of being an absolutely fatal perfectionist: I must first write about the thing I intend to write about, laying out the terms, setting the parameters, solidifying the interpretive frameworks… only then will my imagined public be prepared to receive my dispatches; only then will I be prepared to share them. Fuck me.

I’ve already spent months — literal months! — agonising over every little preliminary detail of this endeavour, deflecting my boyfriend’s daily inquiries as to what I’m doing by defensively mumbling “writing” when in fact the more accurate and complete answer to his question is “engaging in an iterative design process by which I hope to find the ideal design for a cartoon anus, derivative of the New Yorker style, which will be an integral part of the brand identity system of the Substack newsletter that I’m secretly working on that I won’t tell you or anyone else about until it’s ready, fuck off.”  Because in fact, what I’ve been preoccupied with for all these months — literal months! — isn’t writing at all, but instead creating the conditions for writing to occur which, as any writer will tell you, is the very best and perhaps the only truly pleasurable part of writing. 

I’ve tried to not be that way; to become more spontaneous and unguarded and improvisational in my creative life, and in life more broadly. I’ve tried to rage against my nature and force myself to become more terminally online, more breathlessly engaged with the zeitgeist, more public, more performative, more in and of the world, but these efforts always inevitably collapse in on themselves under the weight of my own desperate overthinking. And for years I really loathed that about myself and saw it purely as a liability that needed to be overcome. But now, at 38 years old, I’ve accepted that this is a characterological rather than behavioural issue, and I’ve made peace with how and what I am, more or less. At any rate, my only recourse now is to try and make a virtue of it. 

To that end: I do think there’s a distinct merit to ruminating on things over long periods of time, especially when the things being ruminated on are, superficially, random and dumb and unimportant. Cultural phenomena that is self-evidently Important and Good, or for that matter, self-evidently Important and Bad instantaneously creates the conversation around itself: there’s a brief rush to pen the superlative take, then variations of that ricochet around the Internet for a day or a week or at most a month, then everyone forgets about it, because there’s always some new, even more self-evidently Important and Good or Bad thing to fawn over or be outraged by or most often both at the same time. Things that happen in the cultural firmament that are of minor importance or weird or a little outside of time or just kind of whatever ultimately have more to give over the long term, I think, because their interest lies in their extreme particularity. And weirdly, counter-intuitively, particularity is actually far more timeless than universality. And if there’s one thing I aspire to be other than fully self-actualised and really fucking rich, it’s timeless. 

Put plainly, if it happened within the last five years and absolutely everyone was talking about it, we almost certainly won’t be discussing it here. Anals of Culture is not for making sense of the present moment or what remains of the monoculture; it’s for delving into the recent past and elevating the curious, the mundane, the base, and yes, the deeply personal and particular in the hopes of finding something worthwhile, delightful, even transcendent.

My highest hope is that this can and will become something of an antidote to the culture of immediacy that demands speed, frequency, intensity, and timeliness in cultural production. Let’s allow ourselves the luxury of thinking about things for a while, a long while, a very long while, even when — indeed, especially when — those things are, at their core, really fucking dumb and unimportant.

***

Recently it was brought to my attention that I’m no longer young. As is often the case with entirely self-evident truths about oneself, my initial awareness and subsequent acceptance of this fact was brought on by a quiet personal humiliation at the hands of a loved one who loves you enough to finally stop lying to you.

I was having lunch with my boyfriend and his cousin, and in the course of our conversation, I found occasion to punctuate an anecdote with a certain social media-born catchphrase that had recently achieved intense and widespread ubiquity. But as soon as I uttered it, I could tell something was amiss. I looked to my boyfriend’s cousin — who, at 37 is more or less my precise generational peer — and saw…nothing. She, a successful and accomplished professional with two young children, didn’t know what I was talking about because why would she? The demands of her daily life are such that she no longer has the time or the will to marinate in internet effluence for hours at a time and affect the vernacular of people twenty years younger than her. And as I observed her utter non-registration of the reference, rather than feeling the usual rush of smugness at my own superior cultural literacy, I started to feel a little silly, a little small, a little juvenile, even a little pathetic for caring about and attempting to co-opt the affect of Internet Teenagers. Next, I looked to my boyfriend, more than a decade my junior, and saw…disgust. Something beyond disgust, in fact; something closer to torment. “Don’t do that…” he hissed, and the conversation moved on, and we never spoke about it again.

“What a cunt…” I thought to myself, as I often do, moments later while in the toilet, using the interlude, as I always do, to nurture a baseless resentment and rehearse all the things I know I’ll never say. But even then, as I shook off the sting of his admonishment, along with the last few droplets of piss, I knew that he was right: I shouldn’t have done that, and what’s more, I didn’t actually want to do that. As soon as the words left my mouth, even before I observed their catastrophic non-impact, I felt it: regret, discomfort, and most of all, shame. Shame at grasping at something that isn’t mine to wield, but then wielding it nonetheless; shame at being old and clumsy where once I had been young and vital; shame at being, in a word, cringe. Which, even more devastatingly, I can’t even say without becoming even-more-fucking-cringe, because just like the catchphrase that I never should have said, so too has “cringe” — the word, the concept, the feeling — been entirely recast and reframed and re-contextualised as something that, definitionally, is not for me but about me. You’re so fucking cringe. What can you possibly say to defend yourself against that charge? If it can be said, it’s already true.

And as I wallowed in this relatively new experience of doing something that is unbecoming solely on the basis of my age, I realised that I had finally arrived at the precise demarcating line between youth and not-youth: that exact moment where you have to consciously decide whether to clumsily and with steadily diminishing returns grasp at relevancy, or settle, fundamentally, into some version of redundancy.

And if I was a different kind of person, or if I had charted a different course in life, none of this would matter at all. I’d be far too occupied with the tedium of being a functioning adult, or the joy of having attained some durable and meaningful type of happiness, or barring all that, I’d at least be preoccupied with enjoying the frivolous, meaningless spoils that would surely accrue to a person like me if only I could ever get out of my own way long enough, and follow the rules closely enough to find and sustain some version of conventional success.  

But I’m not that kind of person; I’m this kind of person, which is to say, a vain, preening, selfish and self-regarding, desperately ambitious but equally self-defeating closet narcissist cursed with the ego of an artist but the temperament of an especially timid civil servant who, because of all these qualities and so many others too numerous and too tedious to enumerate here is still, at nearly forty years old, desperately fucking concerned with the question of his own relevancy. 

Which is to say: I don’t want to be relevant; I need to be relevant. Or at least I need to be relevant in order to succeed on the extremely narrow, deeply improbable terms that I’ve set for myself. I need you, the world, everyone, anyone to affirm my relevancy over and over and over again because I’ve so completely mortgaged my future on the entirely unproven and deeply unseemly-to-say-out-loud premise that I’m special and interesting and capable of something out of the ordinary. 

“But Tristan!” my small but intensely loyal chorus of apologists and enablers will cry “you’ve already lived an interesting, beautiful, charmed life! To the extent that you feel under-realised, surely your great, defining success is just around the corner! Any day now! We can feel it!” And from a very particular, very myopic vantage point, their supplicating words are true, and I often allow myself to take comfort in them in lieu of doing anything that would actually hasten the epochal success that I’ve convinced myself is nigh. 

Because yes: I’ve lived a superficially interesting-enough life to be able to recite a biography that will elicit a few disinterested nods of approval from most people in most settings — the sort of generic, plausible, cosmopolitan-sounding life that most moderately privileged millennials aspired to and found to be more or less attainable. I’ve lived in interesting-sounding places and done interesting-sounding things, and yet I’ve accomplished virtually none of the the things of substance I set out to accomplish, nor anything that comes close to representing a realisation of potential or a culmination of purpose. I’ve neither failed spectacularly nor succeeded wildly, and for someone like me, there’s really nothing in the colourless expanse between abject failure and stunning success that will ever feel acceptable.  

All of which would be fine, and even normal, and in certain lights, even admirable if I was young. But as we established above, I’m not-young. Not old, but certainly not young. And when you’re certainly not-young, certain qualities and patterns of behaviour that used to be, if not good then at least justifiable, start to become a little unseemly, a little untenable, a little tragic. It’s charming, at twenty, to think yourself exceptional absent any tangible accomplishments. But at forty? Girl.

And what if my moment has already passed? What if the very narrow and very fleeting window of opportunity open to the delusional few who are convinced of their own specialness has already closed? What if I lack the resiliency and determination to truly grasp at something out of the ordinary? What if my timidity and passivity and serial willingness to take the path of least resistance isn’t some irksome but ultimately changeable pattern of behaviour but an absolutely unmoving core characteristic that will consign me to a lifetime of false starts and unrealised promise? What if after all of the striving and seeking and self-satisfied fuckery that has been the defining characteristic of my entire adult life, in the final assessment, I’m just deeply fucking average?

Honestly, I don’t really have satisfying answers to any of those questions. To answer wholly in the affirmative is to capitulate entirely. To answer wholly in the negative is to indulge in comforting but unhelpful delusions. To hedge and qualify and litigate and prevaricate on every individual point is to remain mired in inaction. So instead, like so many others who are afflicted with the curious derangement that tells us there’s something novel, vital, and needed in the way our brains arrange words and concepts, I’m starting a Substack. For whatever it’s worth.