sense! flirt! bear!!!!

I am in budapest. At the border e and I sat on the grass and what turned out to be some nettle while the buses were escorted through customs. A man with a nice smile came up to us and told me he was in love with my eyes. He gave us albanian cigarettes and chips which we so desperately needed. We got in around midnight and walked and drank and feverishly ate pizza and didn’t get to bed until 5am. 

Belgrade was the most beautiful and I loved it deeply. Storm clouds coated. At the same time every day there was a gentle thunderstorm. The sky grumbled and lightening streaked and rain fell. Then the clouds would part and the sun would beat. The first night we walked alongside the river and ate Portuguese food and talked of our fathers and their harm and their love. We came across a club where there was really great live music. We danced and bummed lights by way of hand gestures and coy smiles and smoked until the show was over. There was a gallery upstairs that we had seen from the river. Its ceilings were impossibly high and we took all sorts of pictures on cameras we have yet to free them from. 

The next night e and I exchanged tales of heartbreak with v and bounced around the city in search of good music. A tall Russian boy attached himself to e. He was friendly and a dj in dubai. I was moody and aloof and longed to be distracted but I couldn’t find it in me to reciprocate any advance. The thought made me sick so I danced. I made conversation with strangers and friends of friends and watched people find things to love in each other. A girl bummed a light from me and I was happy to pay my debt. It was 4am before e peeled the sweet Russian off her and we got to our apartment. I slept like a rock. We woke up 30 minutes before check out and threw our bodies in the shower and things together and parked ourselves at Mikan where we picked at warm bread and kajmac and grilled goat cheese and cherry pie and sucked down two bottles of sparkling water and the last of our cigarettes. I read and e texted. I continued to notice people in love. Girls with long hair and high cheekbones and sharp eyebrows. Skinny boys with their hair cut short. Women with lip filler and cat eyes. Men with bellies and bald spots. 

We talked about descartes and our disdain for our generation’s irony and nihilism and their insistence that nothing is real, etc. Oh how violent dissociation and apathy are; it must be helped because it isolates and makes people awful and uninteresting creatures who are incapable of real connection and creation. Life is something to be felt and viscerally so. Then only is passion and care possible. Sure, I think therefore I am, but I believe what is True is what our bodies experience and the sensation we feel through them. It matters how we inhabit them. How we interact with other bodies and what wonderful and terrible things inhabit them and meld with what is wonderful and terrible in us. It is a greatest misery to be detached from one’s body, to not feel wonderful and bodily sensation. I didn’t for so long. 

How bout:

I desire therefore I am. I love therefore I am. I long and swoon and my heart breaks therefore I am. I flirt therefore I am. I have addictions therefore I am. I am at the mercy of my body therefore I am. I must piss and shit and eat and sleep and cum therefore I am. I love things therefore I am. I attach to them therefore I am. I let them affect and challenge and mold me therefore I am. Other things make me gag therefore I am. I puke therefore I am. I sweat therefore I am. I cry therefore I am. I anguish therefore I am. Despair makes me howl therefore I am. I bear therefore I am. I sense therefore I am.

Last night we went to the hungarian opera and ate pasta. I wore black and e wore pink.

dining out

I’m saying a lot of goodbyes right now, especially at work... which is also my mother’s work... since I was seven... so it is also the restaurant where I have sat and folded napkins for fourteen years. Our head chef knew me as a very very blonde seven-year-old girl. My photograph hung on the kitchen wall. He likes to smack my mother’s ass and always has. It’s okay because she always gets him back. I gave him a big hug and told him I loved him and he looked at me sweetly and said that he loved me too and was proud of me. He’s a big dead head and likes to wear a shirt that says Althea which he always points out when I’m there. This is natural. His wife’s a witch and they live in Vermont. 

I hugged everyone very tight because I love everyone very much and they make me laugh and together we form something akin to family.

I remember on my mother’s birthday in 2011 I visited her at work. Then the waitstaff was completely different, but I remember some of their names: Stetian, Juliette, Erin. Stetian was sweet and quiet. Juliette was older but very beautiful and loud and used to give me very big wet kisses. Erin was also very beautiful but younger and tweezed her eyebrows very thin. She also made me scrapbooks on my birthdays. Anyway I visited my mother at work on her birthday in 2011, and this birthday was special because she was born on November 11. We went at 11 o’clock and all cheered when the clock struck 11:11. It felt very special, partly because even my dad cheered, and they usually avoided each other. What peace repeating numbers can inspire, I guess. I really and have always deeply loved the restaurant where my mother works. It once mystified me and then ensnared. I learned how to run food, host, and then wait tables there. Work hard, drink habitually, commiserate. I began to think theoretically about dining. I adopted firm beliefs, ie. the host should be in control of foh, completely in step with the kitchen, and strikingly beautiful and disarming in her apathy, because she stands in contrast with the waiters’ desperation which they, by their very nature, wreak. 

Menus should be paper and of good quality; qr codes are the worst thing to happen to dining quite possibly ever. And settings should be uniform. I am a sort of zealot, huh. But I love dining so much. When orchestrated well it is so luxuriously pleasurous (not a word but should be). And it costs so much money, so it should be done well. A lovely, leisurely, and properly lubricated meal with an intimate group: Delicious. On my last day, I heard a table order a beautifully coursed meal: 6 oysters, bone marrow, and our lunch special: a soft shell crab, all to share, plus a few glasses of Chablis. I also enjoyed the company of a beautiful, older couple, who were from Connecticut but did not wreak of it, and who owned a house in a nearby village where they made their bucolic escape. They were so charming and ordered so well that I couldn’t help but want to be 50 and hot and married and visiting from Connecticut. And I never thought I’d say that.

things of loll

I believe winters are for toiling and in summer we as humans are meant to loll with our loved ones and cultivate intimacy that will, theoretically, sustain us for another winter. The last few days and nights I spent with g at her and j’s house. The three of us lolled around in bed and talked about big things like love and community and the end of our collegiate careers and what might come "next.” After the graduation ceremony I ate a lot of food in front of my family and returned to g’s bed where I slept for three hours to recover. Once g returned home and I awoke, we lolled around some more and then went out to a bar with r and r and g’s brothers. We lolled around in a booth and chatted and caught up like always and I wish we could always, but I'm always far, at least recently. I drank tequila and leaned on their shoulders to be close while I could. m ran into us and I squeezed her tight. We talked about our future abroad and how she's now a kept woman. She wore a Hysteric Glamour dress backwards over jeans, a stroke of genius, especially at the sill. All the boys, and there were only boys, were shy as boys tend to be in boston: No one's kissing. I told r and r and then m about how I'm newly heartbroken and they cried for me and gave me advice and shared their own Grizzly anecdotes. I hugged r and r goodbye and promised to see them soon. m showed me her Lorde shower curtain, another stroke of genius, and I hugged her goodbye and promised to see her, too, soon. We went home and g and her brothers and I lolled on the ground and talked about money and labor and politics and human motivation and their fraught father until four in the morning. Tears fell from an unlikely party. In the morning j and g played with a soccer ball and I photographed them. I’ll attach a few below. We got tacos and met g’s grandparents and j arranged a beautiful bouquet and I got around to leaving finally. Today e and I lolled around on a couch and then on the village green and then dripping wet on the rocks where we took to basking. All the while we talked about the nature of relationships, so-called feminine enchantment, historical aesthetics of suicide, and the way we long, against all our better judgment, for partnership. When we loll we shrink so we can consider how to grow and uninhibitedly talk about all that are different degrees of enormous—say, government, who we love and hate, what we are reading and wearing and watching, where we want to go just for fun. All the wonderful things of loll. I know in my bones the first salon was born in the summer, probably prior to a sleepover.

brunch

My tables have been very sweet to me. One called me very beautiful and said that I reminded them of their daughter and then slipped me the card of their church along with a 60% cash tip—I was slightly offended. Another was just passing through and picked a new surrounding village off Apple Maps for me to describe each time I returned to their table. I returned six times and described six villages and had woven a web by the end: In Alstead there’s a beautiful library where my dear friend’s mother used to work. In Marlow there lives my dear friend’s mother. In Surry my dear friend went to the charter school. And me and him and our other dear friends like to hike in Stoddard and swim in Gilsum; and Marlow and Surry and eat pizza in Alstead. There was also Charlestown, which I could only say is the town where my mom’s boyfriend is from and rumor has it there’s a good food truck parked there right now. Another was Ken Burns and his friend. We talked about death doulas and a documentary I had watched at Sundance and how to perfectly poach an egg.

I desire It

I have been thinking about mystique, or what makes a person alluring or inspire intrigue, probably most certainly because of that New York Magazine issue. And that specific graphic on today’s so-called It girls, who are not at all that, just itfluencers on Itstagram. That aside, it did make me wonder about the ineffable thing that people assign to It girls like Chloë Sevigny and what Vronsky and most of Russian high society assigned to Anna Karenina. What is it that resists cringe and cliche and why do as many figures today, probably just as symmetrical and waifish, lack that particular lure. Sure, mystique was easier to conjure when there was a more specific code of conduct to adhere to. Sure, the internet and modern society makes that harder. But I’m not willing to give up on the It factor. I love it too much, because what I’ve concluded is that it’s the inkling of a rich inner life, often signified by a certain sneer or destructive habit, ie. a diet coke, cigarette, or cocktail in-hand, that leaks out via channels of charm and wit in such a way that is controlled by the user to both impress and never let the well from which the channels flow run dry. And of course this is all informed by a level of beauty and confidence that makes such leakage all the more seductive. And perhaps because the people and civilizations that live and conduct business on the internet are always, and often in very entertaining ways, dumping their inner lives out without ever exercising restraint, literally filming whole parts of their lives and doing so all in the name of radical transparency, they demolish any notion of mystique that could have existed before it could even take shape. I spoke a few days ago with my hairdresser about so-called process videos — ie. the video which allows thou to to entertain the idea of one day completing the demonstrated project thouself, ie. a painting, a meal, even the construction of a home, and sells that idea — and how they make the finished project all the less compelling, and all the more amateur-seeming. Often a good work of art or craftsmanship or creation in general—consider: a newborn baby—leaves its viewer dazzled by what a feat it truly is—consider: spawning life. It asks you to sit with its grandeur or prowess or beauty and bask in its mystique. The desire to know more keeps it alive. Because once desire achieves, it ultimately dies. Such is the case with It girls and Anna and Clarice Lispector and any figure who continues to inspire curiosity and thought. They revealed, or had revealed about them, only enough. Social media, to both its detriment and great success, trades in the portrayal of process, that which has led to each of our current forms, ie. our social performance. Our lives are traceable. We leave a trail of personal breadcrumbs that leads to the house which is our so-called self. Of course, some are more sparse than others. And don’t get me wrong, a trail can be mystical, enticing, awe-inspiring (ie. so many of my friends' instagrams), but it can also be dull, disenchanting, and boring. And most people on the internet who boast large followings and who are itfluencers on Itstagram leave so little to be desired that their it factor has been demolished, blasted to smithereens long ago when they first accepted a sponsorship deal. 

I love desire, it makes me feel in my body. That’s why I bought a ridiculously thick and expensive Studio 54 photo book off eBay when I was 17. Images of celebrities partying in print, as silly as it sounds, compelled me to desire and live my life. Photos taken in a bathroom or on the beach or in a street that are posted on Instagram do not, perhaps because the people posing in them are laid bare, and not in a hot way.