where to go

I keep writing because I think it will help. I keep sleeping because I think it will help. Rest is restorative, expression, all that. (Help what? not here, i'll tell you another place another time.) I sleep until 11. Read in bed until 12. Broil a piece of toast in the oven slice a tomato that I salt to death and fry an egg in a lot of butter that I dribble on top of everything. There are fruit flies in my apartment because I like to keep my tomatoes and oranges in baskets that hang above the counter. They mold easier but taste better. I’m sure my roommates despise me for this because they all refrigerate everything, even hot sauce. I think that’s disgusting. I buy my own hot sauce and keep it on the counter. 

I would like a person to pop up, agree to be my partner for the time being and not refrigerate Our hot sauce or tomatoes or oranges, split my rent with me, have a friend who knows a guy who can get me a job so we can each pay like $1,500 for a loft in Chinatown. Or I can up and leave the city for a place far away and be all alone again but not buried, not pay so much for food, not smoke such toxic-seeming cigarettes. My heart is flighty and nervous. I had a psychiatrist back home and a job that helped me pay for it. I would like to have her back—at a discounted rate, but alas:

I try to stay out all day. I wrap peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in tin foil so I don’t spend money on food. I grab an orange from the basket for good measure. Sometimes I eat the sandwiches in bathrooms, on park benches, while walking. Sometimes I don’t and save them for the next day of walking. 

Not sure where to go today. Maybe the library, maybe an exhibit that just opened up, maybe Molasses, as per. I have a roll of film to be developed, but I’d need money for that.

birthday scary

I get so resentful and restless around my birthday. I need someone to lay on me, and not an animal. Like a guy. Animals have been annoying me extra hard. I can’t be surrounded by Such ignorance and optimism. And they want so much, I cannot give that much. I can only be around people with healthy doses of reality and who practice cynical acceptance: lean into it. I’m so bored. God I could make a list of my resentments and I probably will. And nothing will make me not bored. I went to Montreal last weekend with beautiful people and even there, at clubs cafes ice cream parlors bookshops bars parks sidewalks streets stores shops, I was bored. I’ll coin this particular state of angst as soul boredom. Please don’t pathologize—I get it. Summer does this to me. Heat depresses me. I can’t wait for winter. I can only watch tv and read in small doses. When I’m alone I miss eating with people so I try to gather around meal time. 

I’m getting tattooed tomorrow, an appointment I booked when I had more money. It’s a guy off instagram so they can’t take my credit card. I have just enough money to put a deposit down on an apartment that I can afford (<1000/month), and I have to move, so I really can’t spend any money, especially after tattoo. This complicates meal time. I apply to jobs everyday. Some are surely scams. Some are real. Some require portals. Most reject. My ex is sending me a package with my stuff in it. I told him to make it birthday-coded. He agreed, thank god.

I kept a lot of company this weekend. g visited and watched me drink glasses of wine while they talked of their newfound mental stability and love for themselves which they’ve worked so hard to achieve and then cultivate. I spoke drunkenly of my sheer lack, my poor self esteem and insecurity and pits of depression. The contrast was stark and funny and not rubbed in. I’m outside of Molasses. Ten minutes ago I sat here with s in the same metal chairs leaning against the same piece of plywood attached to the same rusty stand. He smoked a cigarette and I watched him. I’m not sure what we talked about. I walked him to the L afterward.

Saturday g and I parked on a bench outside of casa maya and talked to a girl on molly for hours who moved like a dancer and turned out to be one. The bouncer told us about his cats. A beautiful Russian girl asked me for a cigarette and cried when I gave one to her. She promised to invite me to a party and handed her Modelo over in exchange for my kindness. The dancer now off molly crashed on the floor of my bedroom. When I caught up with s the next day and told him all of this he seemed impressed. Men love women without direction because they are free to fall into their arms. Prime wife real estate. This made me loathe my ambiguous positioning all the more.

I will never wear jorts and Hanes tank tops again because there are too many people doing the same. I will, though, keep smoking cigarettes outside of cafes. I have a big bruise on my leg that's growing bigger. Now I am home and the dog whines because I’m washing my sheets and won’t let her on the bed. The dishwasher, washer, and dryer try to drown her out. I will surely let her on soon.

Saturday night we stayed out until morning. I slept four hours and then watched tv for four hours. Then we moved a mattress and had dinner. W fried shrimp and b chopped vegetables and together they wrapped everything up in rice paper and mixed together a peanut sauce. I sat on the windowsill, leaned and peaked my head out of it and thought of how it must rain soon. The air was full of gloom and rainy weight. They live in an apartment on the west side with high ceilings and big windows and a rooftop terrace that's soft under your feet. Tourists pose for photos on their stoop. Wine made me talkative and then sleepy. It was good to be hungry, tired, eating, sweaty, fed, and merry around a table with burning candles at the center of it. Today I watched more tv and read a little. It’s finally storming.

blurry

I think my vision is getting worse. Up to this point in my life it’s been perfect. Lately things have taken a little longer to come into focus, like when I wake up or stand up too fast. Plus I can’t shake this feeling that I don’t know what I’m doing. New York feels dead and not due to any orange sky. it's probably been dead awhile. I’ve been walking so much just around. I walked to the brooklyn museum and back. I walked to manhattan and to the angelica. I walked to bushwick and greenpoint and williamsburg, all alpha beta gamma variants of the same kind of Thing. I make up an aim for these walks because I can’t bear to be so transparently aimless. Like the museum, a bookstore, a pop-up. I bought expensive Tribeca movie tickets just to have an aim that I was excited about. I saw a film there thursday about the siege of Sarajevo. It made me miss Belgrade and think about how art thrives to spite siege, how it is most powerful and cathartic when it’s desperate to get out of the bodies that contain it. Last year I went to a gallery opening when I was in Ireland of an artist's work that he created in the six months he'd been out of Ukraine. it was probably twenty enormous, pretty incredible paintings. He said that the work bled out of him. My friend made a film that she couldn't help but make about something that made her and her country bleed, and it was the best student film I'd ever seen. Inevitability is perhaps the one true hallmark of good visual art. an artist's intent to create or insistence on creation is the one thing that is crisp and clear, at least in these cases.

It seems all the discourse right now and for the past five years has been about the state of society and how it differs from past states of society. Everyone makes claims about it that are really just half-baked, asinine observations. And then people nod along and yassify the observations that come from people they like because there exists a precedent in which they yassify each other. They will surely yassify each other to death, crushed under a pile of fraudulent exclamations and affirmations. I’m feeling cynical because everything is out of focus. I keep walking and the sky is orange and the air tastes like the clothes I burned when I fell into a campfire at eight and I have no idea where I’m going. This is normal: Summer usually depresses me. The stick and sweat is heavy and tiresome. I'm lethargic and unhungry and bloated and have no interest in water despite being terribly thirsty. Plus I'm broke. Sometimes I sit so long in a place that I forget I’m occupying a seat. Then I get up and sit in another place. I’ve been sitting in cafes all over the city, disappearing into couches and benches and chairs (oh my). Perhaps I need to stop reading because I don’t like disappearing so much. Thank god I’ve been pulled aside a few times by tourists asking for directions and people needing signatures or donations that I always tend to give so they can just go home and get out of the smoke that’s blurring my vision. Each time I thank god they talked to me, because I’m glad to be a body that people can pull. 

seeking patronage or a job

The bathroom that my toothbrush is in is locked shut. I’ve been rubbing toothpaste into my gums and chewing a lot of gum.

I went to an exhibit on Picasso yesterday at the Brooklyn Museum, and people were very mad. It was all about how he treated women as objects, “dick flesh vases” or something obscene like that. It felt reductive and clickbaity; the title of the exhibition was It’s Pablo-matic. One of the sections was titled (Powerful) women doing (powerful) stuff. My eyes rolled out of their sockets. They juxtaposed insidious quote-bites of his with pseudo-inspiring excerpts from feminists. Like any artist I am primarily the painter of women, and, for me, woman is essentially a machine for suffering. A lot of the work on display featured women being dominated by men who had the heads of beasts. They were sort of sad and uncomfortable. And I kind of thought: so true. No one suffers like a woman being overpowered by a beast, and that shit happens. It focused on how Picasso portrayed sex as something both tender and savage, deforming and destabilizing. Though this is something that many women artists have depicted as well with their own work, which were also featured: ecstatic dissolution. Sex destabilizes at its core. It’s primarily concerned with the exchange of liquids, after all, another state of being entirely. It forces vulnerability while asking one to let go of their body and inhabit another. That shit is scary, though titillating, and sexy. Feasibly a form of beast is one’s own mind faced with this task, because it’s not an altogether unconscious one. Sure, with a loving partner or someone you are just so attracted to or of course a certain level of inebriation these things become easier, and it is easier to let go of your body and trust it to another person, but naturally nerves arise and they can overwhelm. Pleasure therefore is imperative, because it’s the only mode of restabilization possible, and that Picasso excludes in his work. That is his evil as an artist, not a drunken diary entry. I believe Picasso was perverted. I don't need to revel in his perversion.

I found Hadji Murad being sold on a table outside of the museum for eight dollars, which I’ve been looking for forever. I thought maybe this is why I’ve come to New York, jobless, just to find this book—though I fear it’s a bad translation and I’ll have to find another copy. I slept all of friday and saturday. Read a book a day tuesday, wednesday, and sunday. Walked around some more listening to a podcast about how people are leaving New York because one can’t build a Life here without being Rich. I sort of shrugged at the irony since when have I ever wanted to build a Life. Sure I want to make money and maybe buy a house one day but for now I like writing and taking pictures and reading books all day. It’s a foundation I’m building. I wouldn’t want to have a Life without having read all these books and walked around so much and laid in so many parks, so why not be in New York. This is a Life. I am, though, painfully aware of my unemployment. I’m one to work and do believe in the merits of labor. Anyone reading this need help with something? Like moving a couch or whatever. God I wish I had a patron.