🫖 This came with difficulty. Writing is toil! 🫖
When God Save the Animals came out, a friend and I joked that Alex G has entered his tradcath phase. Yet, there we were, pushing our way through the crowd at Brooklyn Steel just in time for the lines: “God is my designer. Jesus is my lawyer.”
I was delighted to discover that Alex G can sing. This may sound like a banal observation, but I’ve never listened to his recorded music and thought, this guy has pipes. But he’s held a place in my heart for years, and was even one of the first people I played on the radio. House of Sugar had just come out and I serenaded the lonely 3:00 AM Bay Area airwaves with the rhythmic trance of “Walk Away.”
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On Sunday evening, I cooked a thoughtful meal for myself. The first in weeks. It’s a little too often that my roommate and I parrot a John Mulaney bit when looking at our sad, piecemeal repasts: “Mmm, dinner! Mmm, good dinner!” I put it on a pretty plate and felt happy when its design revealed itself to me, forkful by forkful. This process helped me to shrug off a day that felt like a borrowed sweater—itchy, too small, with an unfamiliar smell on the collar.
When watering the plants, I also watered a good portion of the credenza. I burned the hand that was holding a paper cup of scalding Earl Grey. Every card in my wallet clattered to the floor when I nervously groped for a $5 bill at the farmer’s market. I took the wrong train and ended up in Brooklyn when I was already twenty minutes late to a rehearsal in FiDi.
I felt that my body had betrayed me that day. My taurus mind was a bull in the china shop amongst such delicate hints about reaching the point of exhaustion. Bar, concert, bar, comedy show, afterparty, clothing swap, karaoke, brunch, date, bar, karaoke, bar, coffee, aura photography, rehearsal.
“I’m learning to say no,” I said with surprising honesty. It was an introductory Zoom call; the icebreaker was to share something you were learning. A colleague said that he was learning a lot about Ted Bundy. This was a month ago. The Netflix docuseries was pretty new.
It seems I have learned little this month.
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Boys only want one thing. And it’s to tell you about philosophy at bars. I have learned about boys from these conversations about philosophy. I’ve learned less about philosophy from these conversations with boys in bars. I wonder how many years ago I stopped trying to be smart. When I stopped memorizing album names and stopped reading things because they sounded cool and stopped compulsively watching French movies. I want to say that this was some big stride in personal authenticity and the ability to say “no,” but the truer answer is that these things probably fell to the ocean floor when I got into a serious relationship with a boy and didn’t feel like I had to prove as much. Now that I’m single again, the sand is a’stirring.
Evola or Burnham?
Which is which again?
Evola is the guy who says Fascism isn’t radical enough. Burnham is about as libertarian as it’s possible to be. But both are highly concerned about technocracy. I also read a lot of feminist writers.
Are people bad and society good? Or is it the other way around?
One boy told me about a study about a particularly murderous group of chimpanzees. I wonder what it was about this story that he thought I would like. Or, what about this interaction he thought would make me like him. Then, I consider that not everybody has conversations with the purpose of trying to be liked. Maybe that’s just me.
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In their latest essay for evil female, Charlie explores the original meaning of the male gaze, as coined by John Berger in the seventies.1
They astutely note:
There is no way of dress or speech or action that can reject the male gaze because it is not a material condition, but a psychological one. To “reject” the male gaze is two-fold: not only must men stop assuming that women’s lives are performances on their behalf, women must also deconstruct their own socialization to rid themselves of this voyeur.
In one of my earliest fantasies, I imagined that a crush was secretly watching me while I showered. Forbidden enough to excite my prepubescent idea of sex, but abstract enough to feel safe. It astounds me how young I already eroticized the voyeur in my head.
In Dreamers in Broad Daylight, Leslie Jamison writes: “A frictionless daydream feels like vapor. There’s more traction when you let reality poke through the dream—like splinters emerging from the grain of the wood, catching in the palm.” Of course, discovering that you are actually being watched in the shower would be a horror and a violation. But the pleasure of the fantasy derives, in part, from its tension and discomfort. Being perceived and desired and romanticized from a distance, protected by the steamed-up glass of a bathroom window.
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I spent most of Veteran’s day naked because I could. According to my research, I am the last American who had the holiday off, so it appears that all those brave soldiers died so that I could take a day away from typing emails and eat pad thai in my living room with no clothes on.
I’m no longer particularly turned on by the idea that someone might look through my window to see my naked body. I’m not embarrassed either. I could pretty much go either way. Look or don’t look.
I asked my friend which is more toxic: criticism or autofiction. Unearned opinions or girlblogs. We agreed that they both are dumb and bad in unique ways. I feel increasingly dubious of the value of unabashedly pouring out so much of my life into my art, but I also recoil at the idea of expressing serious opinions about external cultural artifacts. It’s true that we don’t need another critic, but I also wonder if my fear of writing criticism is also a fear of making something inherently less likable, ergo being less liked.
You are a cultural institution; You as in the entity that is Charlotte, a friend texted me. This struck me as one of the nicest things anyone has ever said. But, I missed the blood moon and I didn’t vote. My favorite color is green and when I went to a museum, I liked pretty much any painting that prominently featured green. I think I am just a simple woman.
I got a photograph of my aura in Chinatown. It was a sea of blue with a halo of green and an anomalous white light hovering over my left hand. The reader told me that I have the aura of an artist and that my future is bright. I am embarrassed to admit how much I want these two things to be true.
“King Fish Pies,” Midlake
Little twee ditty that I always find endearing because its name reminds me of my favorite bar in Oakland.
🎶 Particle separation room
Is made without windows.
They say it's because someone might break in
And take whatever they chose. 🎶
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In the evil female about page: “A native of Portland, Maine, Charlie enjoys staring at the vast and grey Atlantic ocean, listening to Alex G, befriending cats on the street, and talking at a million miles an hour to anyone who will listen.” Compelling evidence that my friend might have been right about Alex G’s target audience. Or maybe, we can meet in the middle and say it’s femcels.
They are true.....