🫖 Hello, subs! Two weeks’ worth of jumbled jargon, all in the scope of ONE post? It’s true! Lucky you! If you’re looking for a good read, check out Evana’s ground-shaking one year anniversary essay for arbiter of distaste: One for you. It’s an ode to friendship, and I think anyone can see reflections of their lives in the glimmering pool of her writing. All of the photos in this essay are interpretations of “Berkeley weather.” 🫖
The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective of snow-burdened days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and furious air, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the gritty wind ground into the skin. Selden, immersed in his work, had told himself that external conditions did not matter to a man in his state, that cold and ugliness were a good tonic for relaxed sensibilities.
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
I waltz out the door without my keys and am stranded adrift for hours. An end to the season of forgetfulness.
I text my friend the same question a few days apart. An end to the season of redundancy.
I drink too much on a Thursday for no reason but the revelry. An end to the season of indulgence.
I call my fumbles and bad habits ‘seasons.’ An end to the season of seasons.
Flat interfaces are rounder than they seem. A swipe is a push of a pendulum that swings circularly to hit you on the other side. If new is new and no is no then why does it feel like I’ve rejected everyone before? Yeses, too, are extended-release nos. When I was 18, it was a funny game to collect familiar faces on campus. Evil Michael Cera. The Poli Sci twins that everyone knew and no one liked. The British guy who looked like a tall Ellen Degeneres. The first time I saw someone I knew in New York on a dating app was the last person I wanted to see there. I’m sure he felt the same.
Three days of no work and Berkeley weather, a nostalgia-tinted description tossed about by my cohort of Bay Area ex-pats. More energetic than meteorological, impoverished by any weather-pertaining adjectives. Bright and thin and awe-inducing. It feels like change and it feels like dusk and it feels like a dream and like the bittersweet moment before the credits roll. It’s oppressive in its sense of springlike freedom.
I decide to get my nails done for the second time since moving here. It’s not a luxury I typically cherish, despite appreciating the outcome. Protect your cuticles, my mom always advised. Push but don’t cut. On my own, I never give special instructions. My last manicure was three years ago. At the cheapest spot in town, we were packed like the cows unsanitarily cramped in the slaughterhouse off the 5. During those drives north from LA, I’d look away to not cry but there was nothing that could block the meaty manure smell. A cleaner but equally repellant odor of acetone and bleach at the salon. A slip of the clip. Every time the technician apologetically dabbed the wound, a new red pearl percolated from underneath. I felt sorry too.
I walk past a pizza shop that always catches my eye but never appears to be open. It beckons me to backtrack. I am greeted by the owner as if he’s known me his whole life. Or, at least that’s what I’m gleaning from his tone. I only understand every fourth word of his Queens-inflected dialect amidst the din of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me.” I push the conversation forward with vehement nods and vague agreeable sounds. I wonder if he’s conflating me for someone else. See you tonight! He says. Haha yeah. I leave. It wasn’t me.
We go on a scavenger hunt looking for our friend in the park. To call her to determine her precise coordinates would be spiritually empty. It’s not a very large park, and there are only so many plausible places to sit. i ain’t no god damned son of a bitch, says a mosaic I’ve never noticed before. She’s sitting in the last place we look: a scavenger hunt is no walk in the park.
Two weeks of running into people.
Alyssa gets bodied by a bird-sized woman.
I stay an extra fifteen minutes at a cafe and run into a girl from my town, a classmate of my older brother.
I walk home the long way from class and see a friend I haven’t seen since we paddled around Hamilton Fish Pool in the July heat.
Charlotte! A voice yells from a car. I hop in the passenger seat right as the light turns green and ask, where are we going?
At the coffee shop, we see one boy we don’t particularly want to see and don’t say hi. At the taco shop, we see another boy we want to see even less and avert our eyes. We split up, and that night, she runs into the first boy again. He pretends that he didn’t notice her earlier. She didn’t confess either. We are all in fourth grade.
On Valentine’s Day, we predetermined not to see each other. Would probably be best to be our own Valentines this year. The day elapses and we run into each other on the street. We hug gleefully. I had a feeling I would run into you today. So did I.
I close my eyes on the subway, reciting a line in my head. Like Mitchell. Like Franny. On Wednesday, I try to take peace in the fact that I am dust, but instead I feel angry from the rumbling in my core.
I whiff two familiar perfumes in one day. A urine-like, dilly wood scent. A cunty cherry bourbon. I internally chuckle at how all the most desirable fragrances are so excretive. We are all little animals.
There is a door near the ceiling of the diner. There is no ladder; no nothing. I think of how this would have fed my imagination as a child. These days, I can’t tell if I want a kid or if I want to be a kid.
The show from hell. Love hurts. No house sound until five minutes before start time. It’s a rancid crowd. People pushing in without tickets. Stories of bitterness. Stories that are not stories. Heartbreak with no clarity, no moral. The most impactful story from your life still might not be enough to crack a smile from a room of NPR listeners busy compounding their list of issues with the organization’s website. I am a tough guy with a clipboard until I call my mom and jokingly wail, Momma! like Sylvester from It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the cute sound engineer smoking a cigarette by the subway station. Damn.
Everyone is waiting for something that will never happen at the American Museum of Natural History. It’s stuffy and stifling and every surface is coated with an even layer of RSV, conjunctivitis and strep throat. It’s charmingly analog, reminding me of all the unriveting museums I’ve visited across the country, perfunctorily placed in their respective towns. There’s not much natural about these museums, though they are certainly American in their myth-making.
We clutch each other in mock-but-not-totally-mock fear in the dark corner where the squid is attacking the whale. The path to the hall of gems is mazelike, and the proliferation of signs pointing the way assures me it’s the big attraction. A man gazes at a black oily stone and remarks, Dude, that obsidian is fire. Walking through Central Park, we quip: On God No Cap That Obsidian Was Fire, Bro!
We’re laughing but it’s true. The obsidian was fire, just like all the stones in the cases. Glistening, perfect, coldhot desire. So beautiful you want to eat it or worship it. I suddenly understand how someone could kill for a material thing.
It’s dusk. It’s a dream. It’s the bittersweet moment before the credits roll. A little boy with a voice like a bell cries out, Charlotte! He is chasing his sister, a fawn-like blonde of eight. They run around on the rocks and my eyes water in the wind.
There is no savory sustenance in Williamsburg past 11 pm so Danielle and I get dessert for dinner. We sip chlorinated water out of plastic cups to wash down apple pie and carrot cake. Fruit and vegetables.
There is an energy at the Bowery Hotel which is to say that my ass is literally vibrating in the seat. Amaro, Diet Coke, Coffee, Mimosa, Hazelnuts, Pistachios, Almonds. We joke about spying on the hotel guests through a newspaper with two eyes cut out. We reminisce about the panopticon of Caffe Strada. I tell her about the one time my friend asked us to spy on her date. A friend and I staked out, newspaperless because he didn’t know us anyways. College antics. We ask if we can order food, but food is reserved for guests. Fifteen minutes later, we are asked to move because the table is reserved for guests.
Last week’s Berkeley weather melts to raw sunshine and furious air. I text: Should we be downtown monsters tonight? We could go to some goddamn speakeasy and the reading. Le Dive, The Dancer, Manero’s. A bargain basement Cobrasnake drones about memories (the concept) and an inexplicably famous trailer trash Parker Posey is fucking hilarious. I am eye level with her knockoff winged Giuseppes. We can’t justify hanging around in a room where kids are trying to look cool and smart under the blare of Gwen Stefani’s “Sweet Escape.” Looking for a cab, we decide to walk one more block. We walk one more block, one more block, until we have reached our doorsteps.
Cram-packed on the L, it’s 6:30 pm and I am standing over a woman enjoying an iced coffee and a chocolate glazed doughnut. The way she takes each methodical, crumbless bite before sipping from the orange straw is sensory enough to make me salivate. She takes another bite and raises her coffee cup. In lieu of another drink, she swirls it in circle, making a vortex of ice. I hold my breath, enraptured.
5 songs for redundancy and roundness
“Answer,” Sitcom
🎶 Honey’s in a hurry so she scurries downtown
All the kids, hippie kids with their big fat frowns. 🎶
“Take It Easy Freestyle” A$AP Rocky
🎶 Fancy, fancy met her on Delancey.
Pum-pum so good I eat her through her panties. 🎶
“All I Do is Lie,” Stef Chura
🎶 I’ll be waiting in your living room,
Call me if it’s too late, call me if it’s too soon. 🎶
“Six Feet Under,” No Doubt
🎶 In the morning I wake up
And in the night I sleep
Since the day that I was born
Repeat, repeat, repeat. 🎶
“Smoke,” Blood Orange
🎶 The Sun comes in, my heart fulfills within
The Sun comes in, my heart fulfills within. 🎶
🫖 Buh-bye! Hope you enjoyed. Thank you so much for being here. You can support my work, by liking, sharing your thoughts in a comment, or throwing a few dollars my way! Have a gorgeous Sunday, lovelies. 🫖