“you shamefully jerk off your ego.” (4/23/25)

My girlfriend said that to me. It was in a conversation about the various metaphorical forms of sex, a topic which she had earlier contrived to parody the subjects she assumed I must think about. I could not blame her for that. She was not terribly far off the mark about me, and she regardless did not mean to insult, only to tell some joke (exasperated, albeit) that’s likely half true anyway — and to prove my own pretentious self-fascination right now I could list all the ways in which I think I am a bad girlfriend to her. Though, that would be embarrassing for the both of us, and only I would get off on that sort of thing. I could, as I often do, tell myself that such fetishistic honesty might spell a sort of higher quality here, a sincerity if you will, which I attempt to make present in all my Whatever art. And I could, as I often do, tell myself that this might vindicate me. I could cheat my way to truthful honesty and Great Art by way of humiliation, in a similar manner to how I answer the question of what college I go to. I have a new job, now, so again and again I am asked this, and again and again I give the same answer. I have come to be very familiar with it. I have, through practice, whittled it down into a very precise shape. I pause, then tell them: Bunker Hill Community College. I do not let this answer hang in the air for long, instead I deny them their impending judgements, quickly moving to break its stasis before anyone else can with a rehearsed, fashionable stutter — b-but, it’s just to save money! My friends, they all tell me I ought to transfer to Emerson as soon as I can! And I let that then imply about me what I cannot imply by actually attending school there. I cheat my way to it.

What exactly it implies about me, I am unsure. I know little about the school I’ve fake-casually vaunted in conversation, I mostly just understand what it means about me to my friends, who really do tell me I should transfer there as soon as I can: Emerson means reaffirming their jokes detailing an overwrought wannabe scholar, a not-singing-songwriter, somebody with at least the potential to do something grander with her skill and All This. And then, I understand what the school was to musician Adam Green, whose songs I love. But, what I love about him (and his resultant music) must ultimately come from the fact that he had the good quality and confidence within himself to drop out of Emerson. I, knowing myself well enough at age twenty-one, can say surely that I do not have the good quality and confidence to drop out of any school at all. I am simply too insecure, to deeply imbued with the need to prove myself. As is any good middle-class striver. Going to Emerson College does not mean I could write Friends of Mine. But I sometimes imagine that, in two years, it will. And to survive in the meantime, anyway, my school shame only ends up counting against me until I’m provided with the opportunity to twist it into something I can leverage against other people, to feel even just morally superior to somebody for once (mainly, the yuppies and college kids that infest this rotten town). I wear my college-print sweater purchased from the school bookstore, branded in scarlet lettering with the title of COMMUNITY COLLEGE printed all-capitals, as I wander the more prestigious campuses of the area. As something of an ironic joke to myself, yes I tell myself this, but also a means to feel a bit better about myself. A bit more assured in my values. Smugly, I can look at the clueless students making their way to their lectures, smugly, I can say: I haven’t sold off my soul to Harvard admissions like you, man, I am a self-made Nixonian with a true-blooded resentment for the East Coast elite like you, man.

My girlfriend told me another thing, too, though perhaps this actually crueler. I was attempting to weasel my way out of seeing her one evening — likely with the excuse of something factually true but honestly inconsequential, like having to do my homework — so that I could write an essay. She saw through this, as is typical of her, and said to me in a leveled voice: “you know, I’d respect it more if you just said you were going to write an essay.” Because what I write is an exercise wholly in me saying here is what I think — nobody cares what you think! — it is something which I am conclusively ashamed of. I cower from the prospect of speaking about my essays aloud, and despite my goals of publishment I am a poor advertiser. But she is not ashamed of them, she even asks me about them seriously, she here now filling the role of my audience personified rather than my girlfriend (which enables me to speak about her so decisively in this manner). She takes a real interest in what I think, she mentions my various writings and short films with the same cadence as one might reference actual real cultural touchstones. And no matter how much it maddens her, I continue my chore of insisting I do not deserve it. In this continues the erosion of my skill, the narrowing of my futures as I selfishly hide from the risk in actual confidence.

My friends, who constitute the glut of my remaining audience beyond my lover, also take a more legitimate approach to what I write. Despite their relative social removal from me as compared to my girlfriend, which I could perhaps assert unclouds their eyes as to the quality of my work, their words too I can contort into something wielded against myself. When a friend recommends me a song after reading something of mine, it usually becomes a terrible omen for the course my next week will take, doubly so if they inform me that it is “like something I could have written.” Yes, when I hear the lyrics in Full Life Consequences, “Been reduced to awareness of my processes,” I do begin to feel same, remembering that is my lot in life, as my breath shortens and I become aware of the dangerous sick-animal shuddering exhibited by the engine of the city bus I am in. And when I hear in The Bostonians, “It’s what you wanted to be not so long ago,” I half-laugh, and I shake my head to myself in a tired agreement. This will then grip me for a week or so, typically a few specific couplets in the lyrics that I will listen for intently as I loop the song from my phone and begin to think such thoughts as: if it has already been written, then I don’t need to. My nasty streak of self-serving complacency shows its face, again. And, this starts to itself imply: my talents are their talents, through some bizarre and clinically mathematical application of the transitive property.

There are more of these little stories about myself that I need to keep up with, too, it does not confine itself to simply my hobbies — I am not immune either to the primary disease of our age, after all. It is in this play-pretend where I reach the height of my own egotism, imagining all the other people in my life as an audience for me to project towards. For them, I frequently pretend to know less about math and the “hard” sciences than I actually do, even coming to fake arriving at the wrong answers in questions of basic arithmetic done in passing conversation. This means I even stymie the flow of friendly information for the sake of my acting. In fact, I had been so insistent that I did not “have the head for math" that it began influencing my academic life: in the past semester I have over-studied to the point of extreme personal stress for my relatively simple Statistics course. It goes further still. In elementary school, I became so aware of and so convinced that I probably best fit the character archetype of the “nerd” as I had seen it on animated television, that I decided I must need glasses and I must need braces. It was only happenstance that my eyesight later began to fade and my teeth later began to grow in crooked. Though I do wonder, from time to time, if my conviction then had been so strong that I ended up doing it to myself, through some strange psychosomatic process I do not understand. If only it could actually be that way. If only I actually could be more like what I curate the appearance of, if only the sheer will of thinking something is that way were enough to actually change it. Then I might have a cause for this. But everybody must see right through me, that is why they joke about my traits instead of simply saying them, straight-faced. Fallen cherry blossom petals stir on the wet street pavement and it rouses no poetry in me, I feel if I were more like what I portray myself to be — when I answer the question of what school I go to, of course, because it does all come back to that — it would. So what I am writing here is a sad attempt at a substitute. But, awareness of your failings cannot dismiss the failings, no matter how precise a model of them you build. It only makes them louder, actually.

So when I reach this conclusion, my moment of clarity about what all this self-obsession really achieves (or fails to), I immediately drift into a world of fantasy as some self-protective habit. A world architected for me, by me, to again reintroduce some clarity as to what I must be. Where reading on the subway is okay again now, it always was actually. Nobody will think you are putting on a show, you won’t be putting on a show. You’ll just be reading on the subway. And if you don’t know the city, you will stand on your rightmost edge of the sidewalk, nose in a paper, real paper, map that you can later hang on your wall as a souvenir. The community colleges are here institutes of the highest learning and they are not built into the sides of subway stations, they themselves are the subway stations, and we all learn so much from the working masses union local 529 as they pass by on a train through the heart of the classroom, right where the professor once stood just a few seconds before. The city could get me off, there, I could watch the traffic signal dance in the wind wildly as it is hung off a pole traversing the road, and I could be so moved to tears and true artfulness by this display that I could miss work that day and it would be fine for me to. This is a place where I could see my words on the stage without trying, my writing on the printed page — God, if I could, I might reach orgasm. Because that that would be something real, and I know when something is real.