#this is very messy i am aware yes its bc i spent too many hours on the bg and i just have up halfway

[acekindaneat]

wawa month Week 3 - Me Time <3

click it for better quality :]

[circumswoop]

perfect, really easy

I hope I can still do this. Write on my phone. Write at all. I still have a messy novel that’s really more of a deconstructed memoir buried in a google doc and I think I have a heart buried somewhere nearby too. The pilot Ben and I are trying to make has been slowed by technical misfortune, substance abuse, and literal distance. I was told from a neutral corner that my dialogue, which is my main consultancy, is too cerebral and will make the show Hard to Sell. If u gave me cash up front, I would be willing to make it dumb. If it’s spec only, I think the smartness of it swings a kind of bellum against my own boredom. It is, indirectly, a show abt a woman who’s turning 30, has two boyfriends, and is constantly thinking up ways to avoid both of them. 

I’m in a rental car with two friends in the middle of New Mexico. Scheduled to go to Marfa two weeks ago, we got into some leftover coke one of us had, mere hours out from our flight, and then nobody woke up on time. Hence the rental. This has got me fucked up, the mind-blowing lack of quality control that went into this. Who books a flight and doesn’t show up? Who does coke and then oversleeps? I now have credit toward a future flight, to a destination I can’t imagine, bc the future rn is the only thing I truly believe to be fake news. Where shd I go next–home for christmas? A beach where the sand looks and feels like broken glass? I want to breathe into a balloon til it turns into another planet where depressing inadequacy is not so elemental. I feel like a farmboy who cannot get all his chores done. This year and the whole headlong rush of this epoch toward certain death by profit cannot be sensationalized enough, and yet sensation is almost all it consists of. An indefinite, generalized body feeling is what we are all turning into as news and politics hammer us with detail. All hammer, no sickle. In the time it took to write the last paragraph, which also involved a lot of staring out the window while eating Taco Bell to be honest with you, we crossed from New Mexico into Texas. Welcome to Texas here’s your white hood. Welcome to Texas the state that killed Kennedy. Actually it was a supreme leftist who killed the centrist Kennedy, but the John Birch fascists get all the credit. Such is our myth of Texas that we empower their racists with more historical thought and influence than they ever exerted over their most famous export which is assassination.

I am in Marfa for the unaccustomed luxury of time spent with friends in an unfamiliar place.

At the start of summer I wrote in an email “even better than love’s confessions are its permissions”. According to the Invisible Committee, much of being a radical is refusal of the world. As abstention makes me feel more miserable not less, I can’t relate. Maybe the reason I can’t go full radical, or am fatally reluctant to, is I like being able to say yes a lot. Anytime I feel desolate or estranged, I get kitted out and go be seen in public even if I don’t talk to anyone. Which I usually don’t. My friend Chloe says she does this too. Love only makes sense to me as a radical act. Much of what passes for functional love in this culture is really just a bunch of hyperextended reactions to institutionalized sadness, but lots of luck finding anything better. I’d like to beat bourgeois coupling unconscious as much as any self-made cynic, but when you compare American marriage to, say, American corrections, both of which are needed systems lost for good in insane blears of greed and paranoia, abolition may not be the answer. It’s like, you can fix it only by starting over which is not the same thing as abolition. Abortion maybe, bc you can always try again if u want. Habitually getting mixed up with ppl already in committed relationships is probably just emotional vampirism. Some call it looting, I call it eating. As a marginal figure slightly on the spectrum with anxiety and repression who can still somehow lie and flirt and manipulate at the executive level all while having no interpersonal or socioeconomic prospects that I don’t want anyway, I am a really good last chance for someone with a probably basic, art-damaged kind of life. Married women always speak of their husband figures in slightly awed tones like they can’t believe how lucky they got, like the man is good in all caps and would instantly unravel at the slightest seam in the stocking. Like if he ever caught them stepping out via some OPSEC mistake they made and not even by his own subatomic awareness level, he’d be demolished simply by never having had anything go wrong for him before. Husband is such a specific kind of person-state, grown and trained, and if I were to ever try to be one i would have to hack the shit out of it–although I’m not convinced they’re any less toxic just bc they’re more high-functioning. Meanwhile the wives or wives-in-waiting pretend not to know they’re already starring in a commercial for how much sweetness and light and GOOD do not fulfil. In short, this is the kind of lawlessness that permits radical love but briefly, before turning again to refusal–the refusal to tamper with status quo, to make any kind of permanent alteration. If it’s secretly very trendy to decry structures the existence of which you not so secretly benefit from, what’s worse is to treat those structures more like fabrics to loiter in or on, or touch longingly. Essentialism doesn’t rend.

If you fall in love with someone you’re not really allowed to, and then that love goes mutual, you’re at least tagging yourself in a picture of paradise. But eventually you’ll be asked to leave. And since paradise is just a picture anyway, your image will feel decayed and exposed. Now it’s 2 days later and I’m back in New Mexico. Despite being a dreamlike Klono-state of pleasant denial, Marfa is still in Texas, the roguest of states. We drove near the Mexican border thru light so splendid the terrain looked recently refreshed. We put our hands in natural running water and looked at millipedes stranded on rocks. A thunderstorm diffused somewhere off to the side. Every picture arrives on your phone instantly airbrushed. The sky dies in pinwheels of color every evening and then reblooms like it never happened, sunsets and sunrises as breakdowns and recoveries scaled to look like natural events. Texas is beautiful but it is not art. Drive-thru banks, courthouse annexes, touchless car washes, parked backhoes, so many f150s.

Halcyon Digest, the Deerhunter record that didn’t define a decade but definitely translated it, was on repeat all summer. So we were playing that as we barreled thru arroyos and past rock formations so intricate they looked cut with string, and I remembered a night earlier in this terrible terrible summer when Ben and Andrea and I were doing coke and playing dominos at like 3am and the song Helicopter was on–that’s the one abt the Russian fashion hopeful murdered by sex traffickers. Its lyrics are too beautiful to edit so I will not reprint them here but I remember as Bradford sang “I have minimal needs/and now they are thru with me” something resetting as I looked at the faces of my friends, like a key of exquisite sadness being turned but I did not know in what lock. I’m certain it wasn’t just a drug reference, and I’m certain I won’t realize exactly what it was for years. 

On the 10 out of town, just before the Prada store, there is a zeppelin, part of the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, used by border patrol. Its role is surveillance. Unmanned, it hangs perpetually off the ground, secured by a single cable, from which it can reach altitudes of 15,000 feet, a white bulge of eerie focus, as various homing info scatters and beams. If you ran for your life, this is the thing you would imagine hovering over you, just out of frame. The kind of thing that knows it doesn’t have to hurry to get you. So run. Maybe I can still do it.