carnal

last week

At w’s we sat around his new round table and told stories and made jokes and slurped salsa and tortilla chips and lost drops of red goop onto each other's legs. July is wet, hot, and moving slowly, and I miss people. There’s a little black bird on my windowsill and he’s all wet and looks very frazzled. My camera is not turning on. I wear the same clothes over and over.

I’m eating a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and drinking a lot of watered-down lemonade from a jug someone bought me at white castle weeks ago. When it gets to about three-quarters empty I fill it with water and shake it around. It's getting sour. I could fall asleep at 7 o’clock. I reread Just Kids and I feel like just as much of a dog as she did. it was nice to read smith's words and feel united in a lineage of dogdom.

I managed to pick myself up last night and get drinks with l. We talked about women we find striking, Lily Rose and Jemima Kirke among them—I’m watching girls. We could stare at them for hours.

Today it rained and rained and I laid in bed a lot. After I dropped a drawer on my foot I limped all the way to molasses and carefully selected two books to spend my crumpled twenty-dollar bill on: kafka's the castle and my mother: demonology by kathy acker. Tax brought it to 21.50 but the person behind the counter accepted my bill so I thanked them and scurried out embarrassed by my lack and then my limp. 

I sat on the bench outside in the rain and felt my toe throb. I sat there for what felt like a while, trying to muster up the courage to go home or somewhere else, to at least get out of the rain. I boarded a bus, got a sandwich and an orange, went home and canceled my plans. 

I watched Buffalo 66 and Bad Timing where Christine Ricci and Theresa Russell respectfully possess a kind of sexuality that has little to do with how they look. Different kinds of course, Ricci’s is supple and comes from an earnestness, Russell’s burns and dissolves at the sides. 

This sexuality is something I've obviously been thinking about. And Jane Birkin, who’s sexuality both as a young and old person, came from her grace and poise and self-assuredness, of course died yesterday, and the times’ lede to her obituary read: Jane Birkin, who helped define chic female sexuality of the 1970s as an actress in arty and erotic European movies and in her relationship — equal parts romantic and artistic — with the singer Serge Gainsbourg, died on Sunday in Paris.

There seems to be some kind of collective horniness that’s exploding in the city. Men have been approaching me on the street, quite respectfully actually, to tell me how gorgeous I am and to get coffee with them. I don't pretend to have my finger on the pulse of anything. I’m not on tik tok, not that online, and I can hardly find the energy to type the words I write on paper with a #2 pencil to post on my blog (lol), but I and I think people other than me are drawn by carnal desire right now, perhaps because it's summer and hot and the proverbial pendulum is swinging after the sanitization of the pandemic and it's just a part of the ever-present nineties resurgence, but sex is hot again. Lily Rose and Sam Levinson know it. Karina Longworth, as evidenced by her podcast’s new focus, the erotic 90s, knows it. And I certainly do.