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. 

sweet squishy and pale

All the people driving nice new cars pass by. I'm in the tree in Joyce’s front yard, looking over all the things we splayed out on blankets for people to take. The people driving beaters slow down to eye, some park, pick up, and together we cackle. Alicia, tanned, wrinkled, blonde, found leather chaps in my grandma’s closet and wore them over her daisy dukes. She flirted with the movers: Oh, you’re so gentle, so good with sharp corners. Is that a hickey on your neck? The mover, who obviously dawned a hickey, said no, that it was a tattoo. Oh the hickey’s a tattoo? She asked my aunt to write their names on each side of her neck with the sharpie in her hand: Zane and Jon, short for Jonathan. They had to come back for a pair of snowshoes that are allegedly Alaskan. And Alicia’s number. Their names are now smeared all over her face because she’s been sweating. My dad and I threw a grapefruit back and forth until it fell apart. Then we picked another from the tree. It, too, splintered and sprinkled drops of juice on our t-shirts and made our hands stick together. After sucking from it, avoiding bits of gravel, I threw each carcass in the dump truck, in with the birthday cards and envelopes and receipts my grandmother saved in her Ethan Allen dresser. 

People thanked us for Free Stuff and came back the next day with wheelbarrows. They carted away glasses, pitchers, picture frames, cabinets, jewelry, candle holders, clowns, dolls, Santas, roosters, needlework, vases, jewelry boxes, bibles, plates with weird portraits of John F Kennedy, Elvis, and Abraham Lincoln on them, baskets, crosses, coasters, pots, pans, shopping bags, lamps, tables, strainers, plastic and glass dachshunds, plastic and glass swans, plastic and glass fruit, plastic and glass. We drank Red Bull, Fireball, vodka, Coors Light, and Polar seltzer. 

Sometimes my dad howls with laughter and other times he cries. Alicia does her best to keep him laughing and I do mine to keep the tears at bay. We watched Jumanji and Fried Green Tomatoes and clips from America’s Funniest Home Videos. In Sacramento the breeze can keep you cool, at least in April. My aunt found my vape on the couch and half-heartedly lectured me. It was something she felt like she had to do, since she was here when her mom died and she watched her lungs fill with water after contracting COPD. I was not, nor was my dad. She calls it a horrible death. I shrugged and told her that I’m only 21 and she was 84 and anyway vaping isn’t what did her in. And everyone was begging Joyce to go, to please stop stringing us along. Alicia doesn’t know where she’s going to go next. Neither does Sabrina. Neither do I but I do have a place to live. No one likes Sabrina, anyway, because she thinks it’s funny that rats ate the chicken off the stove last night. And they blame the infestation on her because she lived here with Joyce when she was dying. I also found it funny but I didn’t tell anyone that. I laughed when I heard them scurrying on the ground at night and squeaking to each other because I imagined them doing the dishes, cleaning the house, even sorting some of my grandmother’s things so I didn’t have to. Though I did squirm because I was on an air mattress, on the floor right next to the kitchen, so I put on my headphones and played Ryuichi Sakamoto. 

It’s quiet now in a way certain to a Sacramento suburb during midday, and we're all sitting down, smoking, sipping, fiddling, scrolling, each with our own experience of grief that we're trying to distract from. I haven’t cried and probably won’t. I didn’t have much of a relationship with the deceased, and didn’t really care to. But I am mourning this tree and lawn and all the grapefruits, and hoping that I find them somehow in my life somewhere down the line. I only really just felt her absence yesterday morning, while on the porch eating a grapefruit off a tree in her backyard she supposedly hated and I never knew existed. The piece of fruit was sweet and squishy and pale, like her I suppose. It’s an odd thing, feeling both a new absence and a new sense of the absence of a lifetime, knowing that I will never recover any kind of time or share any kind of space with her. But I’m okay with that. I am able to sit with melancholy, though it makes life dreary and wilted and me sleepy and slothish. My dad, though, is packing up her entire house and transplanting it to his, hoping, too, to transplant a lifetime he spent mostly without her. Of course, of course, his grief is more acute. Of course, of course, his grief is more acute. And perhaps I will eat only grapefruits for the rest of my life in an effort akin to his.

debauchery szn

I’m moving to New York soon, have been re-reading Meetka’s nym96 blog (probably why I’m here right now), working at a restaurant, absorbing various types of laissez faire lifestyles via my porous scrolling habits, and generally growing disillusioned with moral high groundism, self-righteousness, Honor, and “wellness,” because all those things are dreadfully boring and simply meant to satisfy the needs of the user. I’m also watching Sex and the City and films from the 90s, reading Anna Karenina, and consuming more red meat and gin than I usually do because both are just so tasty. I guess I’m practicing indulgence after studying for three years and earning a degree that I think looks ugly on my wall. Perhaps it’s the indie sleezification of pinterest boards or the fact I recently started dating someone I’m crazy about and invariably committed to, and thus acting out only within the confines of my mind, writing, and consumption habits. This new relationship, too, because I’m in (redacted), makes me feel perpetually drunk on a cocktail of emotions, which makes my stomach feel more Full and Earthly matters much less compelling. I told him that my heart is fat and juicy and that I wish we could eat it for dinner with the sharpest knives, and now that I’m thinking about it surely a whole head of garlic, bottle of wine, and stick of butter. He hasn't responded yet.

Within Tolstoy’s enormous volume, which I am about 200 pages deep in, I am (unsurprisingly) interested in Vronsky and the revelrous, morally depraved, seductive circles in which he dallies, plays, and stalks Anna: There was another sort of people, the real ones, to which they all belonged, and for whom one had, above all, to be elegant, handsome, magnanimous, old, gay, to give oneself to every passion without blushing and laugh at everything else. Of course this is a bit silly. The people in this group are very hunger games district One. They are wealthy so they have reckless fun. They are the elite so they don't worry about it. They take nothing seriously, because nothing, to them, is that serious. And of course their uber wealth is unseemly and ridiculous, but my delusions are making me empathize with this ruthless group. They are free to feel whatever they want, indulge in any emotion that is available to us as a species. Because what, if anything, is serious enough to rob someone of their full spectrum of emotion. If you’ve been around me for only a moment, I’ve probably espoused my one true philosophy: We as humans exist only to feel. And no one feels more than a nihilistic son of a bitch. Oh the irony.