#back in 2021 ish (i think everything was a blur back then) he was under fire for something he did

[lunityviruz]

Uhhh the funniest fucking gag on tiktok is when Cooper Neidecker uploads a video talking about ANYTHING and a nigga stitches it with a Marsha P. Johnson joke

[hit-by-a-truck]

snooping

The elevator opens directly into the apartment. An upside down pink parasol shades the overhead light in the front hall. Past the collection of shoes and jackets near the elevator the hallway opens up to the bright main room. The kitchen is small but fancy in the perfect Brooklyn way where everything has its place, nestled tightly next to something else. Each spice has a handwritten label taped to the top and they’re organized by flavor pallet. The microwave is above the fridge, if I was any shorter I couldn’t reach it. There are fancy teas in the cabinet above the counter, but I can’t find anything to make coffee in. 

It feels strange to make myself comfortable in someone else’s home. We’re renting the apartment from a covid-runner family waiting out the pandemic in their second home upstate. Sasha is a postpartum doula, Eric is a writer, and they have two young-ish kids. On the other side of the island five chairs congregate around a circular wooden table with a floral tablecloth, which we are thankful for because we’re afraid of leaving any marks. The cabinets are filled with fancy glassware, and labels that say don’t use this shelf. We don’t, even though we are tempted. A big green couch fills most of the living room, and bright green plants poke out of every corner. With one wall covered by a massive mirror, and the other made of floor to ceiling windows, the room feels bright and warm. It holds you. There’s a set of five large Japanese prints on the wall in the living room that feel vaguely culturally appropriative, and which they probably brought back from a family trip one year.

I spend my first few hours in our new, temporary home, opening everything I can find. I’m a snooper, I can’t help it. I will eat your altoids, use your fancy hand lotion and read through the books on your shelves if you leave me alone in your room for an hour, though I know I shouldn’t. The hallway is plastered with photos of two white people in their twenties and thirties, their most memorable moments. In one black and white photo, Eric is shirtless with a tightly strapped leather vest and belt, and a matching leather hat with his arms around a man that looks sort of like him. Sasha smiles quietly, attracting your gaze without trying to. Their two daughters, around 10 and 13, don’t look very happy in any of the photos, but the youngest one looks exactly like Sasha—dark hair, bright eyes. In some photos, there’s a fluffy yellow dog, but there’s no trace of him in the apartment so I don’t think he belongs to them, at least not anymore. Above the sink in the bathroom off the hall, there are eight little figurines of men pooping. 

Sasha and Eric’s bedroom at the end of the hall used to have a door, the hinges are still there, but it's been replaced by two wooden slatted panes that meet in the middle with a latch. You can mostly see through them, and hear everything. I wonder what this means about their sex life. The bed fills the whole room, and a large mirror sits on a shelf, slanted down towards the bed. The comforter matches the curtains, a gentle turquoise. The jewelry in the red jewelry box is trashier than I expected it to be. Maybe she’s taken the best pieces with her. They keep snacks in a drawer under the bed, and we try to have enough self-restraint not to eat them. In an old wooden box, is a wedding veil, a journal, newspaper clippings, and a blue comb. They are old, disintegrating, the only little pieces left of a grandparents’ life. 

The room to the left is the largest in the house, and has its own bathroom with a jacuzzi tub. It seems they sacrificed the master bedroom to their daughters. The walls are light yellow, and the shelves are covered in neatly arranged childrens’ books and art supplies. A large set of bunk beds sits in the middle of the room, life-sized teddy bears on both bunks. A giant giraffe is tucked in the closet. 

The last room, behind sliding glass doors off the living room, is partitioned into two. In the back, a bed is tucked into the corner, with a small built in closet and a nightstand, a guest room. The front, by the sunny windows, is their study. Two small desks, back to back, and floor to ceiling cubbyhole shelves. On one shelf at eye level sits a pristine collection of extraordinarily graphic spanish hentai in which the superhero protagonist charges her weapons by forcing them into her gaping asshole. I’m sort of shocked to find them so out in the open. Do their daughters never snoop?

Whenever I was home alone as a kid, I’d dig through my parents bedside table drawers. My dad’s, messy and difficult to open was filled with clove gum wrappers, old batteries, giant pairs of glasses left over from the early 90s when his hair was long and he had a beard, and a clay print of my five-year-old hand is crumbling in the back, covering the rest of the contents in a light red dust. My mom’s side is bare, but smells like the Badger Night Night Balm she rubs on the back of her neck every night before bed. Her reading glasses sit in front and sometimes a roll of tape, a pen or some push pins. Visiting my mother last summer, I opened my dad’s bedside table drawer, missing the smell of clove that reminds me of him. Though my dad’s been gone for years, it never occurred to me that I might not find what I was looking for.  Instead of the messy assortment of my father’s things, it was filled with my mom’s new boyfriend’s astonishingly vast collection of sex toys. Sometimes, I forget snooping is dangerous. I closed the drawer and tried to forget what I had seen. 

I dig through every shelf in Sasha and Eric’s study. There’s a large collection of Eric’s journals and Sasha’s doula notebooks, detailing the birth experiences of her clients. In the back of one of them, upside down on the last two pages, scrawled in red pen, Sasha writes about her family. I can only read half of it because someone spilled water on the top of the page, blurring the red pen. She’s angry at someone named Jade, who I think is her half-sister. I was raped when I was 15 and on one cared and now they all just talk about it and tell whoever they want even though it happened to ME. The whole page is covered in underlines and all-caps scribbles. I can feel her rage. I close the notebook, knowing I should feel guilty. 

I started journaling because my dad did. He’d sit by the window drinking coffee from the huge Eeyore mug we got at Disneyland, and write his Morning Pages, an obligatory activity according to his therapist. I sat with him, drawing, doodling on pages of my own, and trying to read over his shoulder when he wasn’t looking. Now there are 23 journals on the shelves in my room, spanning the years from 2005 to 2021, and I wonder who has read them. My high school English teacher told me once that when she was diagnosed with cancer and she thought she might die, the first thing she did was destroy all her journals. She said they were a burden she didn’t want her daughter to have to hold. I think about this often. 

I wonder if Sasha’s older daughter has ever read this journal, or any of the others on the shelf in this room. They aren’t very well hidden. I wonder how she holds her mother’s rage.