🫖 Hello, little babies. It’s been a while! This is a free essay for all subscribers. No mixtape today—I couldn’t quite find the music to match the mood. If you miss it, I hope to return to the format soon. 🫖
I go to another part of the world and carry something back with me. My body is its manna. In my belly, it took the instructions to be fruitful and multiply.
In my mind’s eye, a parasite is an animal with sharp teeth and no eyes. A worm or a bug or a monster seeking to wriggle around horribly, feast on my flesh, drain my lifeforce. The truth is less visually evocative—a puny thing, a single cell that registers as nothing more than a squiggle under the lens of a microscope. Tiny creatures can still wreak havoc.
Suffering from undignified symptoms, I become an animal with a short leash. A servant to my body’s most debased urges. A homebody, a body at home. I eat saltine crackers in bed, with no witness but Ross and Rachel. Untended, my vices fall away. I paste on a smile at work and sleep for twelve hours every night. After eleven days, it is time to do something. I forfeit every bodily fluid to a doctor who, in turn, gives me a bottle of pills I am convinced will turn me lactose intolerant. My convalescence ends, but I have lost more than the contents of my stomach. For a month, I try on agoraphobia like a dubious thrift find.
To my surprise, I grow accustomed to this lifestyle. I hemorrhage double-rent to achieve near-perfect solitude. My desires crawl under a rock to hide. I lose my taste for coffee. I begin to valorize purity. Cleanliness, godliness, thriftiness, temperance, chastity. Yoga with goddamn Adriene. I steal a line from a friend, I don’t date. No prospects and no loose ends. Even my bartender crush moves to Los Angeles. The list of people I want to see dwindles to three. I tell a friend my resolution to not date until 2024. I’m razzed. That’s like… three weeks. That’s pretty much been my life for three years. I remember that I’m a fool and life is long. I remember that life is not always long, and my eyes well up with tears for my recently dead friend. I go to bed. I don’t drink. I don’t write. I don’t think. I watch Friends with a blue glint in my unblinking eyes. So no one told you life was gonna be this way.
//
Danny and the Deep Blue Sea is a play about a man and a woman snarling at each other like wild beasts until they fuck each other and forgive each other to be cracked open and potentially make it out on the other side. Our protagonists are Roberta and Danny, respectively Aubrey Plaza and a crutches-bound Christopher Abbott, when I saw it at Lucille Lortel.
I don’t know anything about theater. The last performance I saw was Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, which I spent the entire time aghast as a bunch of pigtail-clad elder Millenials fist-pumped and bopped their heads around while saying, fight this generation! fight this generation! My problem with plays is that they usually look, feel, and sound like a play. To me, there is something unnatural, even inhuman, that makes it hard for me to suspend my disbelief.
For the first twenty minutes of Danny, I listen to the actors’ dubious bridge-and-tunnel accents and worry that I might never witness a piece of theater that feels worth my time and money. But as I adjust to the world, I am increasingly immersed in their angry, injured lives. By the end, I realize what a gift it is to watch two people scream at each other for two hours when I’ve never had a yelling fight in my life. To see characters embodied in three dimensions, with all their spit and swinging arms and messed-up hair. They look like people, hateful and tender.
After the play, Alex and I eat children’s food at a diner with relish. We wander through the Village, spurning bar after bar for being wrong. We land somewhere and nurse one beer apiece for hours. She asks me to name my “one cop opinion” and I pose the stinky-fresh continuum to her. I propose that there’s nothing cool about not wearing a seatbelt, and she speculates that she’s 30% stinky and 70% fresh. I tell her about the time I accepted a hit of a joint from three girls on the street right before entering a party and how it made me so nauseous I barely talked to anyone and threw up in the toilet like a sick dog. We name the women in college who made us feel like jealous animals. We forgive each other for being petty. We make starter packs for our coworkers. She lists her exes who might still think of her from time to time, and the ones who have probably forgotten her existence. I doubt anyone could forget the existence of such a stunning being as Alex.
//
Evana and I are dressed up and on the floor. Our skirts are draped around us, precluding us from sitting crisscross as we might prefer. Wine in plastic cups. Spiced cookies. Rolled cigarettes on the fire escape. Could a holiday party in Carroll Gardens be any other way?
We are talking about writing—a topic we typically reserve for meandering voice memos when one of us needs to clarify our thoughts by speaking them into the welcome, empty air of someone, somewhere who loves you. She recently finished a draft of a novel, and that afternoon, I finally sent her my notes. We talk impassionedly about the characters. An eavesdropper might think we were gossiping about some beloved, difficult friends.
I tell her how I’ve been trying to write about the ways we are animals. She pulls out her phone and reads me a poem by Nicole Sealey. There’s a name for the animal / love makes of us—named, I think, / like rain, for the sound it makes. / You are the animal after whom other animals / are named.
Love puts a beast in us, but its not the only thing that makes us beastly. Later that night, we end up at a party in East Williamsburg. A party—a true party—is a portal that dissolves workaday boundaries and resolutions. We walk through a door to be confronted with a wall of odor vacillating between vagina and vomit, depending on where you’re standing. There’s a DJ and flashing lights. People circle each other like wolves. A stranger and I sniff the remnants of perfume on each other’s wrists to escape the stench. In a conversation with a very drunk man, I am asked about my worldview, and what I’ve actually written. I tell him that I don’t believe in having a unified philosophy of life and that I just want to be good to the people in my life and try my best to make something real. I say that I’ve published two years’ worth of work on my Substack. He has a look on his face like he just smelled a fart, which makes it clear that he was looking for an answer more like I’m a true believer in effective altruism and I’ve been published in Byline and Forever and the Drift. He takes my hand and tells me that he would never subscribe to a Substack other than his girlfriend’s. Later that night, I see an inky puddle of piss on the couch where he had been sitting.
The next morning, Evana and I are a flurry of voice memos. We confess to our broken resolutions and debauchery. We lament our Irish goodbyes, as our nights devolved into scampering after prospective lovers. I tell her about the things the piss-drunk man said to me, at first with a lighthearted scoff. We agree that whether or not you’ve peed your pants at a party is a good litmus test of whether you’re truly fucking up your life. I like this, Evana says, absolves me from so much. I laugh, pretending that a seed of insecurity hasn’t been planted. My sleep deprivation waters this sinister feeling until I am convinced that I am self-published scum that has never written anything valuable. I admit to a growing doubt in the value of keeping this project alive. I feel ashamed for yet another year of not submitting work to a single publication for terror of rejection. I suspect that I am neither cool nor talented enough to ever take flight. I tell Evana that I need to be more ambitious, need to do more than live a vaguely aesthetic life. It’s hard to understand why it’s been one of the hardest years of my life. It’s hard to understand why I feel so injured and angry. It’s hard to feel valid in all of my grief when the facts of my life are so lucky.
She sends me Baldwin’s essay on the Creative Process, which I read to myself out loud in the bathtub.
It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know! We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are a great many other things that we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of these forces within us that perpetually menace our precarious security.
Baldwin is right. There is nothing stable under heaven. I begin to approach myself with a little tenderness, a gentle hand extended for my snarling mind to sniff or bite. I’m percolating. I will be in a generative period again soon. Time and time again, the balm to my insecure fear is gratitude.
Tomorrow, Evana and I will slouch toward our respective family homes for the holidays. We tell each other how much we love each other. How grateful we are to have found each other, in New York of all places. How much we’ll miss each other in our ten days of absence. But, as we often say, we have the rest of our lives to spend together, until one of us dies.
O, how we entertain the angels / with our brief animation. O, / how I’ll miss you when we’re dead.
🫖 Until next time! Thank you for being here. While there is no new music this week, feel free to check out my prior playlists on YouTube or the full archive on Spotify 🫖
This is such affecting writing...I listened to it first at 7 am - and at the end I wept...such a writer you are and to read the depth of your doubts about your worth and ability was so moving after such a bravado display of your talent.
I know we are all so riven with insecurity (BTW- I only just got the cleverness of your chosen title... duh) and maybe that’s a key part of why we do this painful thing. But I hope you can put that dipshit of pisspants’ ignorant remark out of your mind soon.
Please keep writing-you have 700 followers FFS we need you to keep writing.
Might I suggest the Pogues song, Fairytale of New York. Tis the season.