🫖 Hullo! To kick things off, I encourage you to listen to my friend Spencer’s newly-released project: WHEW! Audiozine Vol. 6. Not only was I lucky enough to contribute (I read from my post “windows” Side A, 11:03), but the zine is chock full of beauty, depth, wisdom & humor. It feels like sitting in a warm café full of your cool, smart friends. 🫖
It’s February and I’m hungry. I wonder if I’m hungry because it’s February or if it’s February because I’m hungry. It’s 5 in the morning and I want fucking BREAKFAST. It’s 5 am and I am starving because I always wake up starving. (I don’t always wake up at 5 am). I’d be famished at 3 and ravenous at 10, but I’m particularly hungry because it’s February. I’m hungry despite having three square meals yesterday in addition to sweet and salty snacks before bedtime. Picture the biggest breakfast you can imagine. I want one that’s even bigger. So, that’s exactly what I make.
My soul is hungry too. In her February forecast, Evana wrote: There is literally so much to love. So many people to love. I find myself gushing in February. I couldn’t agree more. Getting sick and then better filled me with an ecstatic, drunken sense of gratitude. It was so exciting to go outside and see all of the beautiful people again. I felt like I had recovered from a deeper sickness, my chronic complaining. It left me hungry to go outside, to shake my cynicism, to let my heart spill open for everyone, anyone, everyone.
Spring is coming prematurely. On Friday, we all greedily grinned at the sun, refusing to turn around and get frightened by our own shadows. See no evil! I was out there with everyone else, baring my calves and obstinately gritting my teeth at the occasional chilly gust. I bought a handful of pink flowers and got a noseful of brackish air by the East River and slathered on a mouthful of red lipstick which got smeared in the olive oil slick of my slice of focaccia.
Winter was only one day this year, so God made it extra cold. How did you spend your one day of winter? I put on mittens and wrapped my head in a green scarf and put on my grandmother’s plaid coat. I met Roman to walk across town to see The Banshees of Inisherin, which left us starving for a pint. I was convinced I knew where they poured the best Guinness in Lower Manhattan. A cow on the path, I pulled out my phone for confirmation. With freezing fingers, I searched “pub.” I searched “bar.” I searched “Irish.” Nothing looked quite right, but I knew it would materialize if we kept walking on the south side of Houston. At the doorway of Milano’s, recognition clicked.
Stepping inside, our noses dripped from the sudden temperature shift and we ordered a pair of pints paid with a twenty, keep the change.
In “Nine ways of looking at a pint of Guinness,” Anna Kinsella illustrates how the Irish beer has been crafted into more than a beverage—an ideal, an icon. We’ll wait, the bartender and I, for around a minute and a half. Then they’ll pick up the glass and fill it to the top. The resulting pint is handed to me, with its rich, black body with creamy pale head. For a minute or two the liquid inside the glass will seem to pulsate, amber and honey tones rippling amid the darkness.
We sipped and considered the movie. It took place in 1923 on a fictional island off the coast of Ireland, containing little more than a pub and a handful of far-flung neighbors. We imagined living in a world so small. I couldn’t help but think it would be refreshing to inhabit a place and time that is more comprehensible. I have trust issues from living in a city that can be a mean joke, a trick mirror.
I lashed myself for trying to research the bar ahead of time. I bemoaned my compulsive need to save everything on my digital map. Why can’t I trust my ability to find my way? Our phones bestow too much information and not enough. We miss a lot of juicy signals when our gaze is directed down instead of up.
It’s February and everyone is hungry for gossip. Everyone is listening and overhearing and everyone is oversharing and thinking you will write about them.
Lust is a hunger of sorts. It’s a horny weekend. A few weeks ago, everyone was in a menstrual rage. Now, we’re all ovulating in time for Valentine’s day. On Friday night, I went to a party where all attendees were encouraged to invite a crush. Blatantly crushless, I thought absently of a guy I flirted with one time in December. I wondered what he was up to. Unfinished business is always the most potent. I invited a couple of friends and boarded the Q train, alone.
I left my phone in my bag to feed myself with the show. I practiced some slow breathing and let my gaze wander to everyone’s hands. Vignettes of self-soothing. A woman gently caressed her temple. A teenager leaned dramatically on the handrail. Several protectively clutched their arms in front of their midsections, as if to keep from spilling out. I started to wonder what everyone was thinking but stopped myself to avoid getting too overwhelmed. Approaching 7th Ave, I prepared for a civilized exit. Instead, I acted like a rat in a cage when I noticed that a baby stroller blocked my path to the doors. I clawed through the sea of people muttering sorry and walked in shame past doors that remained ajar for at least forty seconds after my panicked flight. I spat my mint gum, arc-like, into the trash can.
At the party, I ate half an edible offered to me, to be fun and young. Before long, I was consuming pre-shelled pistachios and making off-color jokes about autism and vaccines and feeling itchy as the small apartment filled with so many people that I worried about getting Day of the Locust’ed. No one ever claimed THC was the perfect party drug.
I pet the cat, donned my jacket and made an Irish exit, leaving behind a Charlotte-shaped puff of smoke, and a Charlotte-shaped hole in the wall.
5 songs to nourish you
“Piazza, New York Catcher,” Belle and Sebastian
“I Love How You Love Me,” Camera Obscura
“Walk Out to Winter,” Aztec Camera
“Motherland,” Julia Jacklin
“A Menina Dança,” Novos Baianos
🫖 And, that’s all I got! G’bye. 🫖