#like a house brownie specifically for sauna!

[tseneipgam]

“That specific brand of young male. An ‘alternative’ to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. ‘Dudes’ reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn't brush their teeth enough, spent hundreds of dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side. Nobody up there listened to the Moldy Peaches. Nobody up there gave a shit about “irony” or Dogme 95 or Klaus Kinski.The worst was that those guys tried to pass off their insecurity as “sensitivity,” and it worked. They would be the ones running museums and magazines, and they’d only hire me if they thought I might fuck them. But when I’d been at parties with them, or out at bars, they’d ignored me. They were so self-serious and distracted by their conversation with their look-alike companions that you’d think they were wrestling with a decision of such high stakes, the world might explode. They wouldn’t be distracted by “pussy,” they would have me believe. The truth was probably that they were just afraid of vaginas, afraid that they’d fail to understand one as pretty and pink as mine, and they were ashamed of their own sensual inadequacies, afraid of their own dicks, afraid of themselves. So they focused on “abstract ideas” and developed drinking problems to blot out the self-loathing they preferred to call “existential ennui.” It was easy to imagine those guys masturbating to Chloë Sevigny, to Selma Blair, to Leelee Sobieski. To Winona Ryder.”

“Watching her take what was deep and real and painful and ruin it by expressing it with such trite precision gave me reason to think Reva was an idiot, and therefore I could discount her pain, and with it, mine.”

“The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fuelled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate” their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind.” 

“So now I was stuck with TV. I surfed the channels. A commercial for cat food. A commercial for home saunas. A commercial for low-fat butter. Fabric softener. Potato chips in individually portioned packages. Chocolate yogurt. Go to Greece, the birthplace of civilization. Drinks that give you energy. Face cream that makes you younger. Fish for your kitties. Coca-Cola means “I love you.” Sleep in the most comfortable bed in the world. Ice cream is not just for children, ladies: your husbands like it, too! If your house smells like shit, light this candle that smells like freshly baked brownies.”

“THE THIRD AWAKENING MARKED nine days locked inside my apartment. I could feel it in my eyes when I got up, the atrophy of the muscles I’d use to focus on things at a distance, I guessed. I kept the lights low. In the shower, I read the shampoo label and got stuck on the words “sodium lauryl sulfate.” Each word carried with it a seemingly endless string of associations. “Sodium”: salt, white, clouds, gauze, silt, sand, sky, lark, string, kitten, claws, wound, iron, omega.The fourth awakening, the words fixated me again. “Lauryl”: Shakespeare, Ophelia, Millais, pain, stained glass, rectory, butt plug, feelings, pigpen, snake eyes, hot poker. I shut the water off, did my due diligence with the laundry, et cetera, took an Infermiterol, and lay back down on the mattress. “Sulfate”: Satan, acid, Lyme, dunes, dwellings, hunchbacks, hybrids, samurais, suffragettes, mazes.”