I lay in bed all morning watching old XFactor auditions. Something nostalgic to ease the nausea from the continued chaos. Jeffrey and I talk about Kelly Clarkson.
“She really changed the game.” I tell him.
I don’t know if I believe anything I say, or if I care about it, or if I’m just trying to take up space by having an opinion. Most people are posting about bell hooks. An endless stream of quotes, threads for free PDF’s, and photos of books that are on the shelves of people who have or have not read them. The death of a radical scholar metastasizes into fodder for social currency. I wonder if anyone who has actually spent time with her books would be posting about her. Most of the people the discourse has consumed in the past 24 hours were generally too angry with theory books in undergrad, claiming they were inaccessible, to verbose, or quipped that they were written by white men, and in effect, useless in combatting one’s unconscious bias. Unsurprisingly, it’s all the same people.
I’m reading Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. He writes about many nights in Paris sleeping in unmade beds and restaurant floors, searching for work with hopes of rummaging up enough money for bread and some wine. Most weeks, he pawns his coat and some shirts for enough money to eat, and usually with a stroke of luck, buys them back the following week, only to pawn them again in a few short days. Despite his misgivings, his writing is romantic, almost idyllic, and I can’t help but laugh at the irony of my own finances while reading. $4.10 in my bank account and a looming $600 credit card bill. I could sell my Bitcoin, pay everything off, and take myself to dinner, but I won’t. I don’t want to pay short-term capital gain taxes, and besides, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. In two years time, I’ll be a millionaire, or so I tell myself by throwing money at random internet assets that I fail to understand entirely.
I spent most of my evenings this week on Grindr. Before I left for France, I was manic, and scared of all the mounting change, so I spent, on a bad day, upwards of four or five hours on the app at a time, looking for a hookup. One was a fat 27 year-old doing something I presume is simply synonymous with pre-law, and the other was a 30 year-old who left his front door cracked and waited for me upstairs, masturbating and doing poppers. The 27 year-old messaged me for a few weeks following our hookup, but I dodged, even though after I left his house, I told him I had fun and we should do it again. I messaged the 30 year-old, but he dodged me. Predictable in both cases, and yet I still felt guilt. Guilty for not responding to a series of messages, and guilty for sending that same series of messages. I don’t know why I get like this. Jeffrey tells me I should get it out of my system but I’m too scared of the new COVID variant. I’m scared of the sex being bad, too, but I’m even more scared of not at least trying. I can’t help but feel like I’m trying to thwart something deeper inside of myself; I never kissed a boy in high school, much less fucked, so I can’t help but wonder if I’m trying to create some precarious circumstances that are reminiscent of naive yet romantic adolescent sexual encounters. Sex is desirable, maybe I’m not.
I can’t help but feel like I’m living like a vagrant. Paying a negligible amount of rent to Jeffrey while sharing his bed, working in a restaurant, and spending most of my money on dinners, drinks, and clothes. It doesn’t feel glamorous like I thought it would. If anything, it feels impoverished, absent of any meaning at all, except for the loss it all incurs. It used to feel romantic, but more recently, it has lost all romance, and even on the good days, I’m undressed until the afternoon, and unmoving until I’m running late. I read about Cryptocurrencies and COVID, maybe submit an application for an entirely farfetched job, or remain paralyzed from all of the chaos for long enough that the morning passes into the afternoon, and by 2:45, I have to move quick enough to catch the 17 bus by 3:15. On any given day, the events are likely to proceed in such order as the aforementioned.
I am not affixed to anything in particular. There is a changing of the season, and it is growing colder, but I am not mourning the late-summer months and early Fall, nor am I looking forward to the period of sustained cold that is encroaching. I am not looking, nor am I anticipating, nor acting on any such beliefs that I have held close to myself, and in turn narrativized so concretely, that they coalesce around the seemingly innocuous, turning the quotidian into vignettes of grandeur. Often, in a time like this, the desire to discover the momentum is wavering. The movement of things feels to rapid, or too neurotic to pin down, and the effort it takes to insert oneself into such movement is far too much a challenge. Getting another job, starting a new project, most things falter shortly after they begin. Instead of waiting for the other shoe to drop, I finally leave the apartment. I am walking down 18th street with Jeffrey, and we move quickly, somewhat queerly and without much concern. I tell him that I am happy to be in Philadelphia, that I’m sorry for being so lazy, and that we should go somewhere and grab a drink, or just pick a up a bottle of wine and more Juul pods. I tell him that it’ll be my last pack and that I need to drink less often, but that I also don’t really care. It is another one of those things that holds the space; diffuses any inherent meaning that I believe may exist in relation to my actions. It is just another one of those things.
“ In two years time, I’ll be a millionaire, or so I tell myself by throwing money at random internet assets that I fail to understand entirely.”
Oops! This is me. I’d rather invest in a scheme that might make me rich instead of paying some white collar loan shark who takes a lead pipe to my credit.
Your writing has this almost cozy melancholy that I really like. 🥰
Fantastic