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lying under fluorescent light / lying to everyone blues (1/14/25)

You seldom see fluorescent lighting in a place you want to be, do you? They adorn the ceilings of institutions, places of work and dingy education, shops and prisons, city buses and psychiatric wards, oftentimes places where they can be hand-in-hand with their cousin, the security camera. This is because they not only are a staggeringly cheap means of lighting an area, they are also a very total way of doing so. For the very same reason — surveillance — all of these places must completely light themselves at a moment’s notice, without waiting for incandescent bulbs to warm and without allowing something, someone to slip away. These are places for being scrutinized, every aspect. Cold blue light hides nothing, spares nothing from the people watching you under it. Not even your concealer. It is hard to lie to light. This is tantamount to mild discomfort for the average person, and it is tantamount to injury if you are somebody with my afflictions. You cannot stand it.

The hardest and most crucial lesson you take from voice training is how to get embarrassed. Your voice, after your body, is the first thing a person will notice about you, and when you are somebody with my alleviations it is frequently the subject of small talk: “How long did it take you to sound like that?” Even my girlfriend, in bed next to me, half-aware asks me how I “put on that voice.” It is a question that puzzles me now, because I remember the humiliation, the strange looks from customers and cashiers alike, everything from the beginning. I felt like a faggot. And then I couldn’t tell exactly how I ever progressed beyond that. For a time, I would simply say I “got lucky”, as I have written in the past, because luck is value-neutral, as I have written in the past. It is a way for me to hedge my bets and not look so arrogant. I simply woke up one day and I could do it. I hardly even think of it as “putting on” a voice anymore, it just comes to me. It is too passive. It may as well be another person’s voice speaking through me. Who knows, maybe my angel, maybe even God.

The revelatory nature of fluorescent light does not only stop at people. When I worked at Taco Bell, it would illuminate every possible unclean crevasse of the food production floor, and every angle of the various menu items we were preparing, so as to ensure accuracy as much as possible — if we could really be asked to care about such a thing for fourteen dollars an hour, tops. It was dirty, grim work that I despised doing and yet had to do well. I took an inverse pride in it. On the thirteen-hour train ride opening to the first of my probing trips to Worcester from Newport News, I reviewed in my head the steps necessary to make a Crunchwrap Supreme, and all the others. I recalled the motions. After, I quickly built a muscle memory in the weeks to come, so much so that my manager told me I was the fastest employee on the night shift (after him). I despised that. I had put my mind to it, I had become very accomplished at something. I could wrap a burrito faster than anybody in the store, and it did me no good at all.

Somewhere over the course of half a year, in tandem with the beginning of my tenure at Taco Bell, I took lessons from a pair of Speech Language Pathologists who I was lucky enough to have fully covered by my medicaid insurance plan. This is the drilling which I would associate most with the institutional, yet it happened behind my computer screen sequestered in my room. And they made it clear to me that none of it would matter if I did not apply what I was learning to real interactions. Outside the scripted exercises, outside the contained little snowglobe conversations we would have during sessions. Because beyond that, nobody would be there to gesture upward at me when my voice slipped. Nobody would slip me a reminder of anything. It was instead under the fluorescent lights, with which I spent most my waking time working overnights those days, that I would learn to speak in a voice that I could tolerate. Conversations are by definition naturalistic, I could not learn to talk simply by repeating words anymore. I learned by yelling requests across the production floor, or in lengthy breakroom discussions. The success of it was enough to let me stand being under those tubes. Me and the voice I somehow put on.

I try to be honest, I try to preach sincerity without fully knowing what that means, because who even does nowadays? But my spoken voice is now a lie of sorts. Though, it is one I can tell in all the places where it is hard to hide from the truth. This is where the distinction lies, it must be Good Enough. That is all anyone with my asynchronicities can hope for. Now, as I begin to allow the conceptualizing of myself as an artist of a sort, I see that so broadly in all the skills I try to build. I have something I might at last take positive pride in, for a change, and as such I reflexively attempt to be so meek, so aloof, so intent to wash my hands of the same active involvement in it that I must’ve had in my voice training. My decision was to hide from the light again. So as not to be so arrogant. So self-aggrandizing. But in that, it is a bad, dirty lie, a stagnant one. It is what cowards use, but the lights that everybody is shining now don’t turn off for them regardless. You can’t just reject your decade entirely. As the old year crested into the new this time around, I have realized that impulse is incompatible with what I want. Singer-songwriter Yoni Wolf said, all across the Sanddollars EP, “Am I sick to think I look best under fluorescent light?”

When approaching art, you ought to attempt to be a Good Enough liar like I have been in the past. For me now, this is in learning the guitar. That is what this is about. And learning the guitar isn’t just about the drills and time trials, alike the building of a taco. It is also about being a convincing liar, alike the shifting of your voice’s pitch. A lie you have to tell, in order to tell the truth. When the lights are all turned on and up, you have to first be honest and say that you want this. Then, you have to be willing to make yourself look bad. That is the basal component. And you can’t lie so poorly under fluorescent light, and with it being everywhere now, it is hard to even sleep. But you have to try it. Because the things worth doing will be done less like Taco Bell and more like voice training, those final added few steps ensouling it enough to be considered a lifetime passion — should it be deemed worth it, and some of us don’t have any other option than for it to be deemed worth it. It is twenty twenty five, there are no dark spots left, there is no terra incognita remaining for us to hide from it all. That has all been dragged out, it is all surveilled now by a scrutiny of someone’s design, institutional or not. So, lie. Build yourself a platform. Steal, rip people off, and then lie about that. I’m even doing it right now. Though, that specifically is not something I am good at yet. You only can be once you’re done getting over the embarrassment: It is basically just as crucial.

there are very few microwaves in the third world (1/3/25)

Ever since discontinuing the dosage of sedatives which once would put me to sleep, I have come across the same method of winding down as so many others — YouTube. Lengthy videos devoid of anything overly attention-grabbing or substantial at all, only a mostly consistent drone with smooth enough edges so that my mind will fail to grab onto anything and consider it. That, after all, would keep me awake. This is what I sought out, and this is what I found, specifically in a certain genre referred to as “scam baiting.” The premise is straightforward enough, and yes, the undulations are repetitive and predictable. High praise in nothing else but the venue of background noise. And it goes as follows: The scammer attempts to lead the noble scam baiter through any sort of paint-by-the-numbers scam, only for the baiter to hamper these attempts at every possible turn for hours on end — which, the genre presumes, diverts the scammers attention where it could’ve been expended nefariously, successfully, robbing some hapless person. This tactic is the foundation of the genre.

I know it well, I have watched these videos for months. But, despite their smooth and redundant nature, I would eventually find things to latch onto. I would begin to pick out flaws present all across the face of the genre. The first warbles I noticed are ones in particular tactics. For starters, most scam baiters are not contacted by scammers first, either by cold-calling or advertising. Many actively seek out their numbers to dial, or are given targets by viewers. This is a sort of job for them, of course, and a stream of scammers to bait means a stream of revenue. Another particularity is that of how scam baiters “disguise” their identities to scammers. Premier in the genre is a YouTuber going by the screenname “Kitboga” — who the glut of this essay will focus on — and his personal modus operandi is to pose as witless old grandmother, which follows in line with our colloquial understanding of a scam victim. It must be particularly evocative to Kitboga himself, as he frequently explains in the beginning of his videos that his grandmother was a victim of scamming herself. In fact, this event is what constitutes the founding myth of his channel. But it does not represent reality. According to a 2024 Deliotte survey, Generation Z was in fact the most susceptible to online scams, over twice as much as the Baby Boomer generation Kitboga and so many others imagine to be prime targets.

At first read, these seem to be minor statistical errors at worst. The proliferation of the scam baiting genre does make scamming seem more common than it really is, alright, and the utilization of elderly personages distorts the image of who the victims are, clearly. But none of this matters if the genre fails to go much further than simple entertainment, which for a while I could not see it to. Or at least, not much further than it could be said to “raise awareness” of the forms of different scams, a virtue of the genre which baiters often extoll, and I suppose cannot be entirely discounted. I was only being a pedant. So I was content to let the contradictions lie, frankly, I needed to sleep anyway.

But two weeks ago, Kitboga published a new video: “Reversing a $52,000 Crypto Recovery Scam”. For the first almost twenty minutes, the video runs procedurally. It deals with a cryptocurrency scam (tautology) in which victims are guided to deposit very real money into the accounts of very real scammers, only for them to then be guided to a very fake website which depicts supposed returns on the crypto exchange market. Of course, the money is simply pocketed, with the crypto price interface being nothing more than numbers on a screen. It is a scam designed for the long term, fleecing what is believed to be investment money from people who do not know any better and have nobody to tell them otherwise. It even demands an up-front investment, likely to gauge gullibility foremost, and as such Kitboga had to break rank and send the scammers the fee of admission, rationalizing that his $200 would be worth it if he could distract the scammer from higher-value targets — which he would proceed to do, over the course of days. Viability as a tactic aside — crypto scamming of this variety is far more intimate than a typical scam — he did successfully act out what he set out to act out. It was all typically surgical. Until the very end.

After the scam had been veered off course into a refund scam, eschewing the crypto investment aspect, there came a section titled “Calling Them Out”. By now, it is well-known what to expect. The scammer is worn down, defeated and reduced to the territory of petty insults, greatly incensed by the loss of the promised funds. The baiter has dropped their disguise and is openly taunting, “how many people did you scam today”, “how much money did you make?” At least this, word for word, is what Kitboga asks. And he must not be expecting an answer, because I’m not, nobody is. This is the point where the scammer hangs up, throws the headset, and the video ends. Because if there is one thing that the genre of scam baiting does not do, it is challenging its foundations. The genre’s existence presupposes that scamming is bad, but it never pauses to ask why scamming is bad, and most of all it never truthfully asks itself why scamming exists in the first place. Why the majority of scammers are from India or Nigeria, why their governments might frequently do nothing when more proactive scam baiters such as YouTuber Jim Browning report their businesses to the police. It never even thinks to ask these things It is a genre absent of introspection. That’s why I sought it out in the first place. But, seemingly not knowing the script, the scammer does answer Kitboga’s question of income. “Zero dollars.”

Kitboga now for the first time has a line, so he does what has not been done before. He interrogates a little further. After all he has not only time, but a sum of money invested in this. “Do you think you deserved to steal money from me?” He asks. Rather lamely, he arrives at what he must believe to be the cardinal sin of scamming — that being, that it is a Lie — and he asks for a confession to this, which the scammer gives. “We are scammers. What we do here is scam people.” What kayfabe there was left has now been entirely broken. Kitboga, the improv artist and YouTuber, is visibly surprised. “We’re trying to make a living here,” continues the scammer, who uses the name James, “I know it is not the right way, but it is the opportunity we have in this country.” Silence. “It is a very sorry world we live in,” he concludes. Kitboga stutters, concurs that there are “dark” parts of the world, and makes an attempt at some paltry hope for James. But James stays stubborn, he lays it bare. “If I was living in Canada like you, I wouldn’t be doing this.” (It is worth noting Kitboga is an American, and had falsely led the scammer to believe he was Canadian) All Kitboga can offer is: “I hope you find a different job.” And then the world goes on.

But the genre unwittingly becomes recontextualized. India is a poor country. It also has one of the largest populations of English speakers. These factors, both of which make it a prime candidate for overrepresentation in the scam baiting genre, are also on account of the country being a former colony of the British Empire, and now a present client of American capitalism. Well over a billion people are made to subside on an average monthly income of roughly $95-$220 USD, by OECD metrics, far flung from the relative decadence that their scamming victims in developed countries live in. For all its dishonesty and played-up nefariousness, only about $10 billion total is lost to fraud annually in the United States, per the FTC. Even if every single cent of that somehow found its way to India, it would account for not even an eighth of exports from India to America alone. And if it were to be expropriated directly for the common good, this would come out to a sum just shy of $7 per Indian citizen. Of course, it would not even begin to scratch the surface of the true dollar value of the labor stolen by various foreign extractive regimes. It is not terribly effective for what it wishes to do. It is arguable that it finds the wrong targets, even, although in the right place. So this scamming can be understood as an act of simple desperation, now turned into not just cheap entertainment for the listless to fall asleep to, but righteous “revenge” enacted by scam baiters on the liars and thieves. But what of the liars and thieves who comprised the East India Company, the government of the Raj, the Fortune 500 companies? Those who dump electronic waste and disused ships and all sorts of trash onto India, those who pay them a pittance for the pleasure? Those who stole sums untold from the ground and from labor, to be redirected to the first world Anglosphere? It must be asked, who might truly be enacting revenge here? Or, who deserves to be? Because it is not the YouTuber internet vigilantes of the West. As of today, January Third, a commenter on Kitboga’s video asks: “how do these people sleep at night!?” But I ask the same. How do you sleep at night?

as an artist, that is incredible to hear. but as your friend? (12/15/24)

My father once – and only once -- gave me good advice. “Be true to your word.” Canned, re-frozen, served. I could’ve pulled the lesson from twenty-two minutes of animated television, plus eight minutes for advertisements and bumpers, as I often had with all the other formative lessons of those years. But this was different. It was coming to me from a human, all flesh-and-bone, and what’s more – it was coming to me from one of the bigger liars I’d met. The affair was shockingly perverted to me, even then. So it stuck around. Years later, I still remember, I still factor it in. Adulthood must be when you can share in a stable friendship with somebody you’ve reached second or third base with, I thought to myself while riding the bus in Worcester. Adulthood must be when you are mature enough to realize just how young you are, I thought to myself while getting off. Adulthood is when you can tell people your own tinned life-story advice, and then maybe half-follow it yourself.

My childhood demanded I keep journals, and many of them. Journals written in books pilfered from the storage room, bought at CVS, even in composition notebooks given to me by psychiatric ward staff. Journals in which I changed my handwriting several times to hone in on whatever would make me seem most interesting. Journals which had been stolen and photocopied for evidence in court cases, journals which had been torn up for guilt or anger. It began as a pedestrian exercise nearly a decade ago. Then it became a way to make sure I wasn’t crazy, that things were genuinely getting to be as bad as I thought. Then, finally, the project matured into a means to examine everything in relation to myself. The letter “I” features most prominently, alongside such hits as “ashamed”, “argument”, and “boy.”

My mother also gave me advice. In keeping with her own personal styles, she told me to “prove your father wrong”, and then promptly returned to her boxed wine. In later years I have found I look up to her just about as much as any wayward child can look up to her mom. Live your life in opposition to him, that was what she asked of me, though clearly it had given her little reprieve to live in opposition to her father. I had noted this especially when, over the COVID lockdowns of 2021, I took to my journals in order to break apart her life-story to see how it worked (much like one does with consumer electronics). She could tell a tragedy of her upbringing, an emotional history of the family with little left obscured. I could tell her the thing people now tell me: “you’re a damn good storyteller.” And then I could cry. But still, whenever I falter and lose motivation, I don’t think of my father. I think of my mother, thinking of my father.

These things are the past, I try to make them be. I brought myself and all of my journals (fifteen to be exact, plus the three supplemental notebooks from my detours through inpatient care) to Boston earlier this year, and was subsequently very pleased with the one thousand miles of distance I put between myself and the rest. Until my mother visited in the summer and my father took a mostly-remote job with a firm downtown in the fall. Nothing could more quickly become rendered pointless. I could trace, almost exactly, the shape of the narrative arc bringing me to this, even though I am certain that those do not Really Exist. Not even when I would attempt to bring them into existence, they do not. The perfection of it is almost teasing and you can see the words on the pages, they were telling me that this all was not over.

Am I self-obsessed? It is a question I asked myself at sixteen when I was struggling deeply with my sexuality and gender, among other things. I asked it again at seventeen, when I was struggling to formulate a way to live that would not damn me to acting out my parents’ lives again. I asked it at eighteen, nineteen, now twenty. And I suppose the answer is “yes.” It would have to be, or else I would not be writing this, or else I would lack even the self-awareness to even be “struggling deeply” with sexuality and gender and my parents as I was then, in the first place. But it is inarguable that self-obsession is the operative theme of the new millennium. On one of those nights where I feel less like an atheist and more like a bad Christian, I decided that we all must be self-obsessed. Further still, we are all now living in a narrative bubble – and it is exactly my sort of curse that the only reason I can be aware of this is that I have trapped myself deep enough to actually see its basin. You can refuse to know -- or just be plain unaware -- of the water you swim in, but the ocean floor is always unmistakable.

This is not the sort of neurotic thought-pattern you would seek out in a lover, or a parent, as if anyone could really seek lovers or parents out. It is the reason we regard a trait as insufferable in our day-to-day interpersonal relationships, but then find we adore it when it hangs on the walls of the MFA. The piece of art next to a short paragraph’s worth of context, explaining the tortured artist’s tortured life, it almost would not be complete without that accompaniment. And this exhibitionism must be worth something to You. But the worst part of me is that I find it all inspiring. My father gave passing glances to music and my mother from time to time would engage in drawing – and my God, it was the best part of them. Behind doorways I would page through sketchbooks, listen to idle singing. Because I have an entire lifetime’s worth of contextual paragraphs for the two. I don’t know where the things my parents said fits into their own story, but I know where it fits into my curated version of it, and most of all I know where it fits into my own self-dedicated life’s story. It took years, but I backed myself into this. I think about things, and all I can hope for is the same thing I always have. I hope that this ‘curse’ is different enough from my parents’, for me to be different from my parents.

People frequently come to me for the dispensary of advice which I am ill-qualified to give. At work, grown men and women will ask me in earnest for cooking advice. Friends will attempt to consult with me for relationship advice, or ask just how I got through voice training. My answer to all of these, after much consideration, is typically much the same: “I don’t know, man. Get lucky?” Because despite all the thousands of pages filled, that is still the truest answer I think I can give. Anything that might credit myself feels unearned, anything that might degrade myself is a cloying lie. Luck is value-neutral, we by definition don’t deserve it, and it is at the same time a means to disqualify myself from ever really having done anything at all besides think about how little I’ve done. “Who am I to give advice?” Goes the unspoken question, implied my response. I know nothing, I exact zero of my values. I just get the chance to self-address them. I must be proving somebody right, here.

Though. My very first journal tells me this: in fifth grade, we had a class-wide “secret santa” gift trade. When the day of exchange came around, and a crooked-smile peer of mine walked up to me to hand-deliver my gift, it turned out to be a football. I accepted it, graciously, as I knew by that age you had to – but I was no good at sports, this was well-known to my class. And football, I was among the worst at. And I had thought to myself at the time, maybe he had just forgotten, or maybe he had just misjudged me? But now I know. He was making fun of me. And for once, I am tired of pretending he wasn’t.

laundromat (12/3/24)

[I actually wrote this several weeks ago, yet am only posting this now. I will pretend that this is for a reason other than general ennui immobilization. Who knows? Maybe.]

Whole Foods Market is where a great machine is at last assembled. In a lengthy PBS broadcast, economist Milton Freidman explained that there is “not a single person in the world who could make a pencil.” The steps involved in the process are too many, he says, wood is taken from one part of the world to be painted with dyes harvested from the other corner of it, all parts of the whole so wildly far apart in origin. Thousands of men and man-hours, thousands of miles – he means this all to be a charming advertisement for the free-market system, the efficiency of “the impersonal operation of prices” he describes which brings disparate strangers together in cooperation. You could -- rightly -- trifle at this defense of the economy, with how sanitized and self-admittedly impersonally it treats the human laborers involved, you could even just question if the evidently byzantine network Freidman described is particularly efficient at all. But you cannot argue that, in this modern globalized economy, you can lay out the litany of steps involved in the production of a pencil. Or of anything, for that matter. This is what I often think about when I sit in the back rooms of the meat freezer, staring at the seal of New Zealand etched into a series of cardboard boxes, and wondering how all this lamb came to be here in New England. How many hands put this together?

I couldn’t say how many there are, or where they are, or what exactly it is that they do, but of all those laborers involved in the supply chain and the production of grocery store food, my suffering at the end-point of the service industry must be the least of all. Though from it, I do glean the unique displeasure of staring eye-to-eye with the one who is the reason for all this suffering to be set into motion, however indirectly: the American middle-class consumer. He who will point at a filet mignon, buy it, and then ask me how to cook it. Into his gaping maw goes unspeakable amounts of trash food and then, as a byproduct, trash trash. They are typically pleasant, soft-spoken and even genuinely kind people. Do they even consider it?

I don’t read it as a sort of personal virtue that I do happen to consider it. I can’t help that I have a sort of hypochondriac’s view of the world, always so starkly aware of each part of the body and its every possible feeling and ailment – it isn’t the product of some hyper-empathy. Even if it were, hyper-empathy doesn’t do anything, anyways. When the upstairs sink is turned on, the decades-old plumbing of my triple decker apartment conspires to dump scalding hot water onto me through my showerhead. My neighbors are none the wiser, it is unintentional and nearly random. When the student transcripts I had requested as part of the college admissions process became lost in the mail back in September, I agonized for nearly two whole weeks over an image in my mind of each and every one of the corners and floors in mail trucks and service centers that my envelope could’ve ended up crumpled into. It’s all so impossibly big, and so all ready to buckle and fail. The USPS, my apartment, only if it were a human body, and we just assume each of those parts is doing what it is supposed to. So it goes for the grinding of Whole Foods, where I again became terrified by the world of adults who do not know what they are doing, who cannot see the scope of what they are nominally running, even though I grew up expecting they did. Oh, the frailty! Is it right for every part of a system to conspire, to hate another? It seems inappropriate that my body is not just a brain.

There is a nicer side to this. When the rain outside the bathroom window at last falls parallel to the water in the shower, I am just one part of it all. And then at the laundromat. Growing up, such establishments were confined only to the screen, on reruns of Seinfeld that my mother would always hurry to turn off before I could hear any inappropriate words. They were relegated to that world, on TV and separated by ages, and maybe one of those strange cultural phenomena that only New York City has, like the subway or the bodega. All I knew was, they didn’t have them in the suburbs. What apartment buildings were allowed to exist there kept the washer/drier firmly in-unit, neatly kept in a single box for a single family. But when you move to a city and use a laundromat yourself for the first time, not only are you expected to contain your shock at their very existence, you are as well expected to know how to use it. Which is fair, the procedure is all very self-explanatory, very easy. Except one part – it is momentarily embarrassing to pull your underwear out in front of the crowd. There is no remedy for that. Sure, it is as expected as stumbling when the train rushes to pull out of the station, but still no less difficult to confront. Though, everyone else there is doing it, too. Bearing this little vulnerability of themselves. I carry on after a moment’s hesitation. I am just one part of it all.

The basement in Roslindale I lived in for a time, much like the suburbs, also had an in-unit washer/drier. It was befitting of the one I had shared it with, her parasite internet island to trade in pity money and guilt from vulnerable trans women such as myself, to which she would order DoorDash delivery for takeout and groceries and otherwise be a part of that which sets off these vast chains of exploited labor and other assorted human sufferings. While it is no virtue in of itself to be aware of these systems, and for them to consume your thoughts from time to time, it as well is certainly no virtue to knowingly choose to pull the wool over your eyes and remain ignorant of it instead. To reject that you are a participant at all, to reject the world of other people around you. To settle for only yourself. The body is not just a brain. Try as you might, your body is not just a brain. A world of buzzing paranoiacs, all banging off one another, is not one I wish to slip into. I do not wish for a stranger to spit on me and for my first impulse to be to have them jailed. Some among us, who do not wish to be among us, might wish for this. They might even already be in this world. Milling about supermarkets or sitting on the couch with their laptop. But for the rest, at least we can still have jobs, crushing as they may be, at least we can still be briefly humiliated when we pull our clothes from the drier at the laundromat. There are overwhelmingly complex chains of people in everything we do, not all of it is so “impersonal” as making a pencil, as packing meat at Whole Foods. At least we can still feel a lover’s breath across our collarbone. At least we can still build machines.

missing persons (11/22/24)

It was at a young age that I first discovered my mother’s pregnancy tests. The attached bathroom of your parent’s master bedroom is typically a place children are forbidden to go, and the arrangement of my upbringing was no different – not only was it assumed that we were forbidden, its very geography was hostile to us, the bathroom itself being secluded behind multiple doorways and past the very end of a lengthy Jacuzzi bathtub. So it was that, when I made my discovery, I could not tell anyone. Among myself and my siblings, there are three of us altogether: yet there were four pregnancy tests. It follows that I could not tell you when my mother eventually revealed to me what I had already deduced, that there had been a miscarriage, precisely because I had already deduced it. The emotional impact had been lost, rather, it had already been had, and my memory of it stays hazy and placeless. It must’ve been when things were getting very bad, though, because in all recollections of it, the entire house has a very strangled air to it, and my mother tells me that the miscarriage nearly splittered the marriage, there and then. Until they decided to have me, she tells me in a sigh. In the seventeen years to follow between then and their eventual divorce, the death, the absence of life would hang over them. They hardly spoke a word of it between the two of them. And yet, I still think of him. Nobody ever knew him. He could’ve had my name.

Shortly after the turn of the year, the time for coordinating gofundmes and adjusting Amtrak departure times, I stood in the upstairs bathroom of the house I was renting a room in and had a short revelation of sorts. Looking myself in the eye through the mirror, I put it plainly: “Some of the people you know right now are going to be dead soon.” It was a cold thing, only a matter of statistics given the spaces I’d come to find myself in. This is the sort of thing that will happen in spaces populated by trans women. I was saying it without grasping it, but I was at the very least saying it. It was at last a recognition of the world I’d become a part of, been becoming a part of since I had secretly let my resistance to transitioning finally wither away in late 2021. I would still not be prepared for it to continue to come true in the time soon to follow.

There have been multiple, multiple deaths in my life lately. Autumn came heavy. I will not share specifics, out of respect I assume, because death can be grieved in private. Usually, by assessing the thing that isn’t there. The ghost now left by calls you had just prior to their death now sitting in the logs of your Phone app, waiting to be pushed off the screen, the plans you made to see them just days after. At darker moments, it feels heavier than life. People live on in our memories, then, because it’s the most alive they can be now. It’s a pithy truth to say that, really. But, still – if it weren’t true, it couldn’t be a pithy truth. So I still take comfort in it. If we don’t have memories of the person, we can choose to make them up. You can even do it to nefarious ends. They aren’t going to be able to stop you.

It came to me in the process of planning this that there is nothing new I can add to the concept of death. Before even the breakup, it is probably the most trodden ground in human history, we are utterly neurotic about it and that is the reason we level sections of our cities to make room for the dead, why we speed home from work on the Interstate. We will be them someday, we are fucked for time and we know it. We give a moment of silence to those who have no more moments left to give, and then carry on so rapidly. So I won’t attempt to crest any hills here, I’m too tired to. Writing this is simply how I give that moment.

And to my older brother? He has no grave and has never been in a speeding car. There is no place he could’ve plausibly been, no plans he could’ve plausibly made. So he could be anywhere at all. But the bathroom in the master bedroom, with which he is most associated, is now long gone. The house has been sold and then bought, the doors I grew up behind now locked. I am more banned from that room than I ever have been in my entire life. The pregnancy tests were likely lost in the move. Though, privately, I doubt that my mother could’ve truthfully told you which test was whose. They all look the same. Pink and white and two striped lines. I suppose one of them is me. One of them is dead.

missouri and my identity (11/6/24)

"Just like there are only so many sorts of ways a person can look, there are only so many sorts of taste in music," is what my coworker imparted to me in the wake of my shock. Because what do I know of coworker music? In my working life it has been identified by myself and the online others only in the KISS FM surplus, the imitations of Top 40 and inexplicable The Beatles covers that trickle out of the overhead plastic speakers at retail jobs. It follows, then, that when a man removed from me so both in age and geography plays the very same tracks I might've listened to on the subway commute there, it startles me enough to ask him: "How?" "If I looked though your high school yearbook," he continues, "I'd probably find somebody I thought I recognized from my own." This theoretical grouping of music tastes as a category of people is the same concept by which recommendation algorithms such as Spotify's must build from, and by which David Berman was convinced that he was entirely within Pavement's shadow. And, it is the very same as what compels me to build my own taste in music -- which I had once privately prided, though never voiced aloud, as seeming so eclectic -- around what I now think I am funny when I jokingly refer to as the "western canon", though what my girlfriend now thinks she is funny when she jokingly refers to as "rym bait." But I can't help it.

If you're from a family like mine, chances are the first music you heard was Mozart. No doubt some tactic lifted from the pages of a parenting advice themed self-help book on how to raise The MIT Grad, or God forbid a book on "tiger moms" written with very questionable faith at heart, the ritual of placing plastic headphones over the womb and playing the popular ideal of classical music from an mp3 player had swept the suburbs of the early 00's. And if you are from a family even more disconcertingly like mine, the next music you heard was likely by They Might Be Giants. Perhaps your father loves John Linnell, perhaps they've recently come out with albums about the alphabet and numbers. He will beat you far later, but now he has his music to share. Sonically, experentially, that is about all you need to be primed to cry to "Ana Ng" as an adult.

It does all add up, and the score is, in fact, kept. When you finally connect to the internet, so unsupervised and with the stars still in your eyes, the music you wind up finding is not only defined by discovery algorithms, but very much by what your parents had played for you in your youth (as with many things). Those first few formative years, the years when all the music you listened to was about playtime and school -- because that's all that dominates your life at that age, the ABCs and 123s and playdates with the Mormon kids of your parent's Mormon friends, all of which you are beginning to see nakedly and with no priors. Good luck. A decade or so of wading through the Imagine Dragons-adjacent trash of a free Pandora account, then whatever I could run into on YouTube, and the inscrutable workings of my Spotify subscription's algorithm, I was not only prime for listening to Ana Ng, no, I was at full-blast on the so-called genre of midwest emo.

Full-blast enough to need for see it for myself. Real and authentic, I convinced myself. Something must be out there in the bona-fide midwest. So at a time when I was scraping by on a few hundred dollars a month, I resolved to take what was left of my car and my checking account and migrate west for a bit. I needed time away from Virginia, you know, and I luckily had a friend in Missouri. Despite the risks associated, manifested in such times as when I emptied my checking account and had to beg for fifteen dollars to pay for enough gas to scrape back home, I hardly even needed to rationalize my decision. I knew what I was expecting, it was more important than all that. I expected such a monumental drive west to be more memorable -- but I was wrong. I had expected this new frontier, past the gateway to the West, to be more memorable. I was wrong. Because what I first noticed was not the stupendous difference in our states, so far apart, but the sameness. As my car rattled into the westernmost point of Missouri, eighteen hours after I began driving nonstop, a thought flashed across my mind and never left, especially as the music proved it to me again: This was only Virginia, with all her copper wiring stripped out. I was there for a week and yet could hardly fill a page with what I remember from it. The novelty was seldom, the novelties were only two:

Above Branson, Missouri, there is a great steel cross, painted down its face with twelve fat tears. It stands so obscenely tall that it needs beacon lights to alert passing airplanes to its presence. And I couldn't tell you much about the shows I would end up attending near its shadow, not even the one which was nearly busted up by the police for a noise complaint. But I could tell you about the cross, seeing it rise over the highway well after midnight while I was nearly too busy nervously watching the arrow on my gas meter tick toward empty to notice. It felt like such an anachronism, certainly having been born from some Bush-era performance of "compassionate conservative" revival -- but it was opened in 2019. Entirely surreal. I was not roused, I was not turned toward the good book in that particular moment. But I did find what must have been the last open gas station just afterward. You can see a lot of hollow Protestant religiosity in Virginia, but never of that scale, which nearly was enough to make up for the state tourism board's cynical insincerity. If God can be in the bramble of lit-up empty white billboards I saw driving outside Indianapolis, could He as well have been in the lit-up empty white cross outside Branson? I carried that.

By the streets of Springfield, Missouri, there is a decaying parking lot with hardly any painted spaces still visible. Weed is still not legal in Missouri (though this made little difference for me, I am still at an age where all substances are illegal for me anyway), and this parking lot is where we bought it, from a trans woman who my friend explained conducted audio production and mixing for local live shows. I was nineteen, not even yet having begun HRT, and primed now to be completely starstruck by the prospect of her. Immediately after having only briefly met her, I decided that ought to be my path. Being so craven, I set aside my sixteen-year old's dream of retreading Will Toledo's footsteps, or whatever. It should be my job to perfect the work of other people, Lord knows I didn't have my own. But what was the work of other people? It was that simple. Later that day, I realized. In a basement in southwest Missouri, a place with such a chip on its shoulder about its "midwestern identity", and it follows a place so desperate to prove it, I realized that even this invigorated midwest emo now failed to resonate with me. It was only so demystified now, the alibis and new air I wanted it could not provide me. My playlists then began to wither and the short-lived audio mixing dream died just before. So Branson is the midwest, sure, but I do not care. I carried that, too.

It was these things that made me realize that the type of person I wanted to be had so suddenly changed, changed from my parents making and now changed from my own. And that type of person I now wanted to be was no longer one who listened to midwest emo. Because it was missing something for me, something which I imagined could possess the Real Midwest I had seen, and I was disillusioned. It was not actually about something I could not be sold back at home in Virginia, as I had imagined priorly. Because the genre, in truth, goes no further than you can throw the Suburbs, and I wanted to see something else. I wanted to hear something truer, something foreign, that metal cross and the consequences of that quickly-dead dream. My eyes crossed on the drive back, and I passed a thought similar to how my coworker now thought just a few days ago: sure, the days of looks determining behavior have been gone since the time of Ancient Greece, but if there's only so many ways to appear and so many ways to listen to music -- I extrapolate, then there must be only so many ways to be. So many ways to want to be. Our sense of music is greatly tangled up in our sense of self, it seems, and so I would too carry a third, more dormant novelty. A worn old GAP coat which would take me through the inbound mild Virginia winters, and stay with me further into the far harsher, far later Massachusetts winter I witnessed earlier this year, where the sort of person I wanted to be would change once more. And, it followed, so too did the music I listened to. I left the coat in my ex's apartment when I moved out this summer. I finally had no need for its associations anymore.

But, I still listen to bands I picked up when I rolled through that among a series of very doomed relationships, just as I still listen to some of the music of my very doomed parents. Even when other people are assigning it to me, even when I am trying to be another thing for them, I still must be pulling something honestly for myself. And now time again, I walk myself into being every single joke anybody has ever made about me. My own nascent worldview tells me I must avoid self-parody, but surely, in group settings and in the presence of those we look up to, one always will become a parody of themselves. At least, sometimes. Why shouldn't you? As the old saying goes, other people know you better than yourself. So what do I know? I listen to Yoni Wolf despite my ex, I listen to John Linnell despite my father, yet I also listen to both because of them. I cannot help but question it. I must be more similar to them than I care to admit if I listen to their music. I must be more wrong and they more right. After all, did I not date, was I not raised by? There are more similarities than I'd ever care to admit, and I cannot ever hide from it when I browse through my saved albums. Perhaps the gap between our selves lies in the ways we choose to receive the music we do, perhaps on my worst days there is no gap at all. I wish I had a steady conclusion. Either way, I'm set. I will be accused of stealing from things I have not seen or read from people I have never met, because I will be permeated by the same music as a hundred others just like me, because there really are only so many ways to want and so many ways to be. Even if this may change. I may have found my way to want to be, and it was not actually in Missouri nor in midwest emo. And between me and my coworker, me and my ex, me and my father? I have arrived, I can only try and mind the gap.

(11/6/24)

There is so much body heat in the room where the people have gathered to recieve the news of death. It is somebody I did not know. There is so much body heat and then they all leave to smoke, there is no more body heat and I am sitting in a living room alone. A friend of mine died on October Fifteenth, she was twenty-three. I had been privately upset at the time that nobody had anything to say to me about it. But now I am their position, and I learn that there is nothing to say to anybody about it at all. You can't say shit.

She had a question to ask me and she never got the chance to ask it. I didn't let her. I never got back to her message in time. The dead don't get to say shit, neither. I am so sorry I have to reduce these things to words, I have a photo of her grave and a thousand messages and multiple dormant accounts. It really isn't my place to.

digital graffiti of an eye (10/14/24)

When I first moved here, months and months ago, the people I met loved to tell me stories best described as "portending." It was all a flurry of names, half of which I did not know, and places, all of which I did not know (outside of one or two mentioned in a Modern Lovers song), and the shape of only a single vignette really stuck with me through it. Told to me by a friend of mine, it would be the most prescient, though I did not know it at the time -- or rather, I did know, but I did not want to know. Of course, I will not relay specifics, but it is likely one you've heard before: girl moves to a city, and after a long enough time begins to see things on its walls that she hates. Reminders. Things put there by other people, representing other people. So lucky me, the public works of both Boston and Cambridge can bail me out of some of these instances of vandalism. But cities are made of the stuff that happens in them, actually. And white-out still leaves indentations, even when it is painted over.

This constant buildup takes up more than just physical space in our Real World, it also much more visciously permeates the digital space. While idling for a bus recently, I read a piece by Lauren Goode for Wired describing how she was persistently trailed by photos associated with her abortive wedding by way of the "memories" feature now-ubiquitous in all photo storing apps. I myself am hounded in the same way by years of accumulated photos, of the interiors of psychiatric wards, of the aftermath of messy domestics, of my own doomed relationships. In an interview with Goode, an employee for Pinterest refers to this consequence of data accumulation as "the miscarriage problem," so to speak, the algorithms across the internet know to cater content to you if you are having a baby, and they do not know to step off if you have a miscarriage. So the old axiom repeated to us in every computer lab class went: "if you put something online, it is there forever."

It doesn't just stop at photos, or even advertisements, though. The piece reminded me of something a friend pointed out to me. While sitting on the deck of my new apartment, shortly after I had moved in, she noticed how obsolete her set of pinned locations in her maps app had become. Names attached to places now long-vacant, queer housing situations long-fallen through, new adresses not yet made old. Reminders. She said it was nearly something out of a Phillip K. Dick novel, to which I nodded even though I hadn't read anything he'd written since freshman year of high school. I figured that I must've gotten the gist of what she was getting at. This bizarre science fiction we live, to immortalize a fragment in time kept just as alive as it was when we set it. I was unsettled for a bit after. Returning to this thought, though, I decided to look back on my own.

When I first moved here, months and months ago, I was completely lost. As a young child, my mother had barred us from the DC Metro -- and anywhere with numbered streets, more generally -- and by the time I was able to leave the house I was huddled into reliance on my car until I was nineteen. Living in a city for the first time, I had no idea how to navigate by subway, or bus, and consequently found myself often leaning on the crutch of Google Maps to get anywhere, taking tangled and backwards routes to get across the city for work. It remained that way for a few weeks, until a friend finally noticed my error and set me on using Apple Maps, which she said had far better public transit routing. It was after this that my Google Maps account remained, now locked in stasis. There remains the uncomfortable pins from my childhood strewn about Virginia, the town halfway to Harpers' Ferry that I marked with the help of an ex, certain that it was the one sung about in Beach Life-in-Death, all the places I knew and hated for nineteen years. And, in Boston. Shadows of my prior twenty-twenty four and my spectacularly failed relationship stared me down. People I would come to know were absent from the map, and the home I had then still was marked so defiantly. The brand's old label still sits next to the new look, unaware of its hypocrisy. This haunted me, this I had curated for myself.

The Boston portrayed to me by Google Maps is a very different city from the one I see most days on Apple Maps. And even with Apple, it is one which has to constantly be updated to keep pace with the Real World. Bike stands are put up for the winter. People move. Little red and blue dots disappear, only to reappear elsewhere. In her article, Lauren Goode references Kate Eichhorn's book The End of Forgetting, from which she pulls, "our lives play on a constant digital loop." The life I had then still lives on, then, in the implications of this map. Ultimately, this fake world on my phone is projected from a server farm somewhere in a Valley, which will too dissolve in the rain or be subject to physical human forces, just as the posters and graffiti associated with my past do across town. But it is in transit, but it is always in transit, again and again and again, bounced between mirrored servers and other peers. I can close the app, it doesn't cease. I could prune it all from the map, I could even delete my Google account of twelve years. But I won't. Some part of me doesn't want to disturb what I put there. So it exists there. A reminder.

Subways are transit, cars are transit. They are conduits, they are between here and there. But they are too places unto themselves. It is for that reason I had various rituals when driving, I never played Tyler The Creator while behind the wheel again after getting into an accident while listening to New Magic Wand, I always kept my hands on the bottom half of the steering wheel. And it is now why I attempt to avoid that final stretch of Orange Line, inbound towards Forest Hills, and keep a weary eye out for Car 1461. These impermanent places can still violate us. I can still wince as I do in corners of Fenway, just by opening an app on my phone. It's inescapable, now. Staring down a ghost of what I was. Static in transit, always going somewhere but never being there. Moving to a future doomed not to happen. The bus ends up being late, and I feel sick.

virginia (10/2/24)

Singer-songwriter David Berman loved to mention places in his songs. Each one given a little love and a little purpose, popular status be damned, each one was perfect for whichever vignette he was portraying. Cleveland is for drinking and Kentucky is for leaving. San Francisco is for seedy men and Manhattan is for hosting strangers. Nashville is for losing love and Dallas is for scoping out your potential oblivions. All given neat and tidy form and function. And then there is another place, stretched thin across his discography: Virginia.

In his songs Virginia lingers, it hangs. It is the expanse in which subjects wander from Kentucky, lost in thought, directions to old farmhouses are followed, phone calls are placed from train stations, "strong young poets" are interned in psychiatric wards, and -- above all else -- the birds of Virginia, they fly within you. It is there, in so many of his lyrics, though not always as stated as other locales. It is instead taken for granted, and why wouldn't it be? Berman himself was born in Williamsburg, a historic city on Virginia's southeast coast, and for a time studied in the foothills at the UVA before being taken on by my now-adoptive Massachusetts in order to study at her UMass (Amherst). When you are from a place, you don't treat it right. This is doubly so for Virginia.

I, for one, could not believe it when I first heard Virginia name-dropped in one of his songs. As a native, I couldn't let myself believe it. We are so undeserving! (With apologies for the reference I am about to make), I recall hearing a fairly accurate description of my very own home state in the podcast Those Good Old Fashioned Values: to paraphrase, Virginia is a crossroads of Northeast and South and Appalachia. And, yes, it distills all the worst of the politics and cultures of each region, the debauched and cold northerner met with the morally bankrupt and seething southerner, mixing with all the runoff backwash coming down from Appalachia and the Blue Ridge Mountains. I hated her, I hated her, and immediately I bought my way out of the Commonwealth when Boston presented herself. As far as I am aware, the rest of my family feels the same. My mother clamors at retirement elsewhere as my brother averts his gaze outward.

But each place is a canvas, sometimes. You don't hate that poor city, it did nothing to you. You hate the people in it and the experiences you had. I hated my childhood and the way I was sent reeling from it for years, all across my home. Virginia did nothing, but Virginia was nothing without a native culture to its name. Virginia has tourist merchandise of our demonic colonial past and Virginia has town centers with parking garages. Nothing there existed to distract me from what was happening, what had happened. A few months removed and I have clearer eyes now, but I still see her in a poor light. Though one a few degrees tilted to the right.

It may as well still be a place for leaving and never going. It is so, so overdone to hate your hometown, though, that even despite my copious reasons to do so, I feel a bit bad about it. That ever-living contrarian in me, in everyone. There are still things to appreciate -- I still remember the electricity I felt when I discovered that my teenage years' idol, Car Seat Headrest, had formed in a town just a few miles over from mine. But those were vapid and fleeting moments. A town a few miles over from mine still looks like my own, and the familiarity didn't bring me any closer to the art. This could be anywhere. The band didn't stick around in Virginia. It had fled west, like I once intended to.

Brightly lit smoke shops on Denbigh still haunt my memories, folded back into an impossible timeline on a single street alongside childhood car accidents on overwide roads and a garish, pathological tangle of hateful houses with hateful families. Things separated once by years now breathlessly play back-to-back when I least want it. I rode my bike drunk at 3 AM on shattered sidewalks in Newport News just after I learned to ride for the very first time down my too-steep, too-steeped driveway in Fairfax. No matter how hard I try, I will never have been born someplace else. Because the truest way to feel about a place is hatred. To hate some place in a certain, delicate semi-paternalistic way is to know that it is where you belong. I didn't formulate that specific that specific shape of hatred for Virginia, but I do at least hate Virginia -- and it is how I know I will always be from there. More so than Boston, yet of which I am still too smitten with the city trappings of the subway and the scene. Though Boston does get there, so slowly. Maybe all places do. Maybe it is right for us to keep moving. Knowing someplace means that on a long enough timeline, you will hate it.

You can leave the state, leave it forever, but Virginia never leaves you. Maybe more than most other places, some of who have the constant din of collective humanity to overwrite the old, Virginia is far too lonely. And so all that nothing she has, only empty strip mall parking lots where the burnout kids did drugs laying on tire skid marks, her hands are damned instead to be full with everything that happened to you. Virginia follows. After you are gone, all the places you signed your name behind bleachers and in wet cement, all the blood you left in the bedding and all the shit you forgot to take, lives forever. Virginia accumulates. It scares me, to know that this is the only way it'll ever be. I do not particularly hate the person I am becoming, but I can so clearly see me becoming that and the process by way this happens terrifies me. Doors are closing to never again be opened, and I think about how thoroughly I set my own path when I first decided to pay any mind to language. Choices made without my consent or with such reckless abandon have now set my life. It can't be helped. Matt Christman, in the October Thirtieth, Twenty-twenty episode of cushvlog, says that he is certain that he will not contract the then-looming COVID-19 virus. Then, for a moment, he pauses, then stutters. Then, he continues. "Until I get it. And then I will have always been destined to get it."

Ryan Walsh, in a piece written for Stereogum on the twentieth anniversary of The Natural Bridge, likens the album to something of a Pan-American road trip, Berman arriving at all these various places across the contiguous forty-eight states, all with something to say. Yet across this extended journey, there exists an overarching piece, the title of the album itself. As a friend of mine shared, The Natural Bridge is in part a reference to Natural Bridge State Park in Massachusetts, just south of the Vermont border. But I only recently discovered that there is another natural bridge which Berman knew of during the album's creation, in fact, the one which played the operative role in naming the album. Southwest of Charlottesville where Berman studied, some ways down I-81, there lies the Natural Bridge State Park of Virginia. Berman told Walsh that he had been in the tourist gift shop when he realized he could hijack all the promotional material there for his own album, in some ways an attempt to claim some helpless piece of Virginia. And all across the album, Virginia stands, from Albemarle Station and more. Virginia lingers, Virginia hangs. Virginia follows, Virginia accumulates. Like it or not, forever.

quick memory of a stupid answer (9/29/24)

From a very young age, you learn to contend with the 'icebreaker.' It is a functional and streamlined means for introducing a litany of people -- say, a class -- to one another. It is almost never fun, at once both demanding far too much vulnerability on display to total strangers, while as well expecting you to perform to them. Gradually, as school years grind by, you begin to compile a list of possible prompts and acceptable answers, filing down the edges as the performance aspect overtakes the initial vulnerability aspect of it. Acting is still uncomfortably betraying of the self, but it is in a different, more manageable way. In my own case, it was by the freshman year of high school that I had arrived at a carefully pruned answer to the favorite: "If you had a superpower, what would it be?" With put-on nonchalant, I had decided. "I would choose to let other people read my mind."

It was perfect to me, I was enamored with its subversion and my own portrayed sensitivity. I let on a fakery that first day of school, of a young boy craving only openness, sacrificing even the omnipotence of the equal-but-opposite power to read others' minds, all for the opportunity to be an open book. In hindsight, though, despite my counterfeit it let on exactly what sort of kid I was. And on top of that violation, I was lying, too. Of course I wanted to read other people's minds, I wanted more than anything to know what people were thinking and saying about me behind my back where they all must be. Of course, it must've been obvious to anyone listening. I'm a poor actor.

Icebreakers still continue into my adult life, though frequently in an informal and semi-ironic fashion. Recently I was posed again the superhero question, and the same old answer came clattering out by way of autonomous reaction more than anything else. It felt like a foreign object. I did not have the same personality to comfortably tell such a lie anymore, and what's more, I found myself genuinely wishing that I wanted it to be true. To wish to turn myself open like the ideology I've been scratching at lately demands of me. As I was rightly poked fun at for my answer, I quietly lost myself in the paradox my fourteen year-old self had trapped me now in, lying about wanting total honesty while wanting it to be true. It must've been some divine punishment for it all. I now so desperately want to genuinely be the person I had once only wanted other people to see me as, and there is a palpable difference. You can live a lie in public and sleep just fine, but if you begin to do so in private then you cannot live with even the person making your bed.

Perhaps it doesn't matter though. We will never have superpowers beyond that low-stakes thought experiment. It is at most just an expression of your own personal worldview, which is a luxury that, in capital-R Reality, we cannot Really afford. There is only one world, one view, and everything we see is reflected and refracted through our own looking-glass, then approximated from there. So I can only want to want It, and even then I will never know if I really do want It, because any threat of It coming to pass is hollow. All I'm doing is banging words together without any program of action. Personal beliefs chafe against the social reality, and a culture of narrativization and individualism is applied to us, socially -- how ironic. Even deeper, maybe, the individual conscious self is positioned versus the collectivist unconscious. Little burning contradictions within and without each of us. I tell a story about how I want to be honest while lying, I tell a story about how I want to not tell stories.

It is uncertain how to rectify this. Caught up in modern anxieties like Am I Living A Life That Someone Else Has Already Lived Or Is Still Living Right Now, modern anxieties like They All Think I'm A College Student Despite My Insecurities About Not Being That. Telling things through words themselves confine it to the boundaries of narrative. Sometimes I say nothing at all and look into her eyes, and convince myself that is the honesty of honesties. But even I grow uncomfortable with prolonged eye contact, even with her. Telling things at all is a story, seeing things at all is a story about the outside, being things at all is a story we tell to ourselves. As in an icebreaker, as following a rubric, it is not fun it is unresolvable conflict. We cannot knowingly say things which are completely true, the crucible of what we say and what we are is from where the truth may be unwittingly pulled.

autumn why? (9/22/24)

In the first part of the documentary Get Back, which altogether is unintentionally a mutedly tragic look at the dying days of the Beatles, a section is dedicated to an early version of what will become the song "Carry That Weight." At first, it is a song about a man running afoul his wife by drinking, and then waking up hungover -- the subject of which prompting a remark, either from George or Paul, describing it as "finding out there is a weight on your head, and then realizing it is your head," to paraphrase. Common troubles, as the band would put it. And we know how they end. The song about a spatting couple would eventually be reworked into a song about the spatting band, which would then ultimately break up forever like lovers tend to. And to me? It was my own drunk, my own breakup, and my own head, the weight, which I was carrying as I stumbled back to the room I was bunking in, when decided to create this website. It was very late August. I had no mission statement, I just wanted to write something again.

Of course, a raw drive to create, to say and to see, is only going to take me so far without anything to cohere it. I tend to begin these projects with little concept in mind, allowing that to form only as it goes, and so more often than not letting the thing burn apart when said concept fails to manifest. So while this is not some certain artistic project, I do want this to have a goal beyond words just for the sake of them. I start college soon, and I am sure my writing makes painfully clear that I have no higher education and have not so much as read a book in an academic setting since twenty twenty two, let alone done anything else in such a setting. In fact, I know it must be obvious, so much so that a friend of mine lightly joked at me, saying my letterboxd reviews were painfully that of a college freshman. Unsure if that was an insult or a compliment given my unschooled station, I asked, to which she only shook her head and said that I "will make a great English major." I would be lying now if I said that my two-year long "gap year" wasn't now a source of insecurity for me, particularly living among the degreed denizens of America's Athens. I feel so far behind. Until the semester begins, I think this will suffice to re-establish any amount of confidence in my own writing, or if nothing else give me an avenue to practice where I can receive genuine criticism, a bona-fide public eye.

Because why write, why create anything at all if you plan to show only no-one? At that point it is only journaling, which there is a definite place for, Lord knows I have shelves of my own journals (and have faithfully since I was eleven) -- but that's just it. I already have journals. I don't need to add to that now. If one is supposed to have any amount of trust and confidence in themself, then they will allow some piece of their inner core to become folded outward, intentionally or unintentionally, and present bare in their art. Publish something. In earnest, in honesty. We all betray at least something of ourselves when we make anything, it is an unavoidable byproduct of the process. With that in mind, the worst thing you could betray is that you yourself are insincere. So I needed to say anything, and above all I needed it to be true.

I oscillate frequently between either of two venues, really. When I have not decided to myself, as I wrote priorly, that art is some universal cosm, that we all have a unique voice layered underneath somewhere if only we allow it to be heard -- I am convinced that all I could ever want to say has been said already, and then it follows that the most logical answer to this is for me to kill myself. Which must itself betray how much this all intrinsically means to me. I know the latter of these two lines of thought is an improper impulse, defeatism of defeatisms, but I can't help it. Because I think at some level I know it is not true, only that I sometimes want it to be. It's my own idea, because it would make the whole ordeal simpler. But simplicity is not the point. I knew the type of person I was, I knew it was coming for me when I was sixteen, and still coming here today at twenty. For however much I can try and convince myself that I have walked all avenues in life, that teeming futurist inside of me so determined that at my young age I am already obsolete, I know it isn't true. Van Gogh's older brother was an art dealer, and as a young man he must've been steeped in culture. But he himself did not pick up a brush until twenty-seven. This looms over me. It's only over because you want it to be. I'm doomed.

Having been so denied it throughoutt my life, I am now loathe to not have my own voice. I told my girlfriend that she has a nice view of the city, but she only grimaced and said it wasn't much. Just a few buildings to the treeline. Though the concrete outside still stunned me, such a welcome human break from the operative color green of my apartment. Its outside tree canopies and its mint-green painted walls. "Well, sure, but the city ends at the treeline, as all cities do," I told her. She smiled. "Yeah, you would say something like that."

a review of apple music (9/20/24)

I was sixteen, and I was fucked. Drunk out of my mind and blacking out. It had become typical. I was sixteen, and I was probably the biggest Car Seat Headrest fan you would ever meet. So it was that I was engaging with both at the same time, drinking myself into a stupor as the Twin Fantasy demos played from my cell phone speakers, anything to stop from confronting the realities of my life at the time. It was a two-pronged strategy, really, the shows I had seen on TV prescribed drinking as the traditional remedy for ailing people, and the lingering doom in my heart advised I listen to music. At an indeterminate hour I woke up, still half-drunk, the album still looping from my phone, now lost somewhere in my childhood bedroom. Disoriented and without light, all I could do was let my thoughts grasp around at things while the final thirty seconds of Times To Die/Open-Mouthed Dog played me into complete ether. In that moment, the soul won. I remember it. I knew I was gay.

Times To Die/Open-Mouthed Dog would be reworked into the third track on the album Monomania, incorporating parts of an earlier song "Fuck Merge Records", then altered further still into a re-recording on the album Teens of Style. My revelation that night would be reworked too, associating it with an older crisis of the self from when my cousin came out as trans, all the frequent times I drank and insisted to people that I "wanted to be a girl," and I would eventually come to the final conclusion that I was a woman in the following year. The songs still remained, though. Even now when all the prior strife is just a memory, I can return to the songs. It meant a lot to me, being as intensely self-obsessed as I am, that I could return to their associated memories demanding constant appraisal, forever. It was why I signed up for Last.fm. It was why, afterwards, I bought a Spotify subscription.

But things change. Four years go by, and Spotify decides to raise their prices just a bit too high. I become just a bit too concerned with nonsense like "codecs" and "mixing." I finally make the reasonable push, the one all my friends had been urging me to make, and moved on to Apple Music. I was expecting much the same, just better audio quality (and I use wireless earbuds mostly, anyway) and namely a price that was one dollar cheaper. While it agonizingly does not have the Hang Onto Your Ego recording of I Know There's An Answer, much of my music library remained untouched. The Last.fm integration, or lack of proper, left something to be desired, though remembering to press the "scan" button every day or so in the app was little hassle. Though, I did very quickly realize something -- Spotify had changed how I interacted with music, and for the worse.

In an era of on-demand streaming and constant information, we are a bit spoiled. And to little good end, too. Nations (in both the Westphalian and Leninist senses) are leveled for the American's maw, gaping as it is, and it is done all in the service of a new plastic box to watch Netflix Original Content on. Blood-money cell phones to watch Saturday Night Live on. Of course, I'm not the first to take issue so impotently with this. But I did not realize my complicity in an on-demand economy had reached so deeply as my perusal of art. I was still there, though, answering to the Spotify algorithm's auto-generated "mixes" which dictated much of the music I discovered. Taking songs as they came, piecemeal. Removed from context.

When I primarily took my music from YouTube and my parents' old CD collection, I understood it, the nature of the album. Why artists choose to make cohesive, identifiable albums as opposed to only singles and unbound compilations of songs. It wasn't a concept that was ever explained to me, I simply knew it on instinct. Much like one knows to read a book, when given an album, it is generally best to listen to it all the way through. I gradually lost that unspecified knowledge, though, with the constant stream of music I would become bombarded by on Spotify. Without the guidance of the medium, I fell through. Sure, the songs given to me were adequately related to one another, could adequately approximate what I might want to hear when in any certain mood. Yet times would come when I would hear two songs back to back, ones which were meant to be heard in that manner either as part of a medley or just a pairing, and I would get a quick glimpse at what I was missing as I listened to music in this way.

Apple Music is different. In a phenomenon which makes a lot of sense given the company's history with iTunes, it is arguably far more centered around the album than the individual song, far more skeuomorphic to the actual experience of owning an album. From its inclusion of standard and deluxe editions, various mixes and re-recordings, to its very design layout. When you open the app, you are dropped into a "home" page, which, unavoidably in our age, contains a few mixes of different tracks. Then, avert your eyes down, and you are met with your own recently played albums, then a slew of further album recommendations. Beneath that still there are also approximations of radio stations, though my slavish devotion to my Last.fm statistics constrains me to not using them. Instead, I listen to music solely in my library, which isn't an intended feature of the app but rather out of my own peculiarity. When I find new albums, either from the homepage or from my friends recommendations, I add them to my library. At first, when I was transitioning my heavy rotation over from Spotify to Apple Music, I only added individual songs -- though I quickly realized that this was taking up a lot of screen real estate. I can only fit about six album covers at a time on my phone screen, and it was becoming very unhelpful to have only one or two songs behind each of them. So, my hand was forced.

David Lynch has famously, correctly expressed his chagrin with people viewing films on cell phone screens, and I think a similar principle applies here. Singles do exist, and with reason, of course. It is perfectly fine to listen to a track isolated, and it has been a thing long before technology caught up with individualist social rot. But to never listen to a full album is cheating yourself. How could I experience the sweeping medley of the B-side of Abbey Road, without ever knowing it had a B-side? How could Twin Fantasy have resonated with a sixteen year old me so much as it did had I only experienced parts of it in Spotify mixes? I would've been missing out on an artistic work which calls back to itself, which builds into a whole. You can, in fact, take excerpts from a book. But to never read the whole thing is to read nothing at all. To rob yourself of the whole. An album, all art in fact, demands you sit down and receive something as it is given to you, not as you take it. It becomes rarer and rarer, though.

If you have a premium subscription, Spotify does not force you to listen to its mixes. You can, if you know well enough, decide to listen to complete albums. But nothing of the app's gimmick-laden homepage or its library interface encourage that, on the contrary, they discourage it, burying them behind user-curated playlists and auto-generated mixtapes and even podcasts and audiobooks. I am glad I finally had the clarity to make the switch, but I am nervous inertia has already swung too hard the other way. I am nervous that some day, the album, with all its emotional and artistic weight, might die.

on a song i recently heard (9/16/24)

I was drunk with friends the other night, the social aspect making it dissimilar enough to drinking alone that it was something I could abide, when one raised her voice and decided we should do karaoke. As is typical, we cycled through the same old half-joking suggestions of the most mood-killing artists to possibly pick from, Silver Jews, Car Seat Headrest, and finally arriving at Lex Walton. "Hyperconfessional and Overwhelmingly Sincere," from the album I WANT YOU TO KILL ME. Despite everything that should compel me to, I have to admit that I've never personally listened to the album in full, and this might've been my second time ever hearing this particular song. This was far from the ideal setting. The karaoke never came, though, as thank God the lyrics were not on Spotify. Instead of drunk singing, I heard from someone in the apartment: "this is why I poke fun at this album, this is embarrassing." I'm unsure if it was derision, though, because on its face it is such a neutral statement. You can poke fun at something you love, and something can be embarrassing without it being an appraisal of quality. I remember thinking that then. Of the so few other things I remember from that night, the song itself sat with me, and in the hungover morning to follow my girlfriend read the lyrics to me in full. When I am hungover, my own thoughts flow so much more freely, the usual background static no longer present to cling to. In my clarity, it all felt pretty clear. I really loved the song.

Embarrassing, though. Isn't that the point? The song somehow manages to tell what I imagine are all personal vignettes without the self-aggrandizing "look at what crazy things happened in my interesting life" importance that characterizes so many other things which might be termed as "masturbatory," but it also doesn't fall so self-effacing as the Woody Allen-styled faux self-deprecation (we all know the excerpt about him from the one Orson Welles interview, I'm sure). It's an impressive balance to strike. But I'd be remised to stop there, that's almost all technical. It would be like admiring a painting strictly for the brushwork. Be more specific -- why, instead, are the brush strokes like that? I discovered only a few months ago how incredibly fake almost everything is, and ever since it's been driving me mad, I've been appraising it from every possible angle, from my ex and our hyperreal trans 4 trans polyamory to the way plastic bleeds into my water and then into my brain. How you can have two completely different conversations at once with one person across two messaging apps, how you can put wildly disparate books on your shelves to show to people and know you'll never read. And I've been trying to find any sense of something real. "Overwhelmingly sincere."

When I set out on this website, it was on a whim. I just one day remembered I had a command of very rudimentary HTML and CSS, and stackoverflow to fill in whatever other gaps. My lack of any cohesive statement becomes clear with every entry. When I write here, I increasingly strain against not only what I want to do and say, as anybody would, but also justifying this. Why say anything at all here when I have my near-decade worth of journals to continue to fill? Why write something which could instead be tucked away into a notes app or thrown half-composed into a tweet? If I am to have an audience, why waste their time with something specific only to me, but as well why waste their time with something numbingly universal? It is an impossible juxtaposition to compose, but a personal essay worth seeing does need to somehow be both specific and universal at once. Masturbation should have something in it for the viewer, voyeurism is no fun when nothing can be meaningfully seen. Finding this balance as well is something that the song manages quite neatly. This website is not the end of what creative output I wish to have, I am only twenty, and all the other things I have to remind myself of so often. But I do want to hammer something worthwhile out of it while I am here. And for that, I have been provided a reference point of sorts.

It's not all about me, though, I just don't find myself well-studied enough to seriously rate music. I only want to say I really value this song. I ought to write while more sober.

on transit (9/14/24)

I grew up in Fairfax County, a sentence of little note. If you have seen a suburb, you have seen my house, my school, the people in my life and likely even me. It is an observation of what is common, so common that even noting what is gauche in it has become gauche itself. Sitcom commentary layered onto sitcom commentary. At the very beginning of twenty twenty four, after two years of meandering south in Virginia, a hard turn was demanded of me. So is Boston the pinnacle of human development? I dragged two suitcases and an overfull backpack off the Amtrak in South Station. In hindsight, I should've got off at Back Bay, and skipped the transfer from the Red Line to the Orange Line. But there was no way of knowing that then, inside the days I stared at subway maps as though they were hieroglyphics. It was a brand new city. Though there should be no excuse for this, I would curse, regretting spending so little time in DC. They have a subway too, don't they? But I never went so far north. I had never felt so much like a hick. A city was brand new. Boston must be the highest buildings have ever gone.

Two weeks were given to me, between my arrival and my first day at work, to settle in. Two days after this period would conclude, my then-girlfriend would be struck by a car while crossing a street, and I would spend all day in the hospital explaining our uninsured, fresh-off-the-boat predicament, and hearing in response to this apparent new arrival, repeatedly, "You'll Love Boston!" But there was no way of knowing that then. I was still set on loving the city, though, before even hearing that I should. I burnt down my savings and then smoldered into my credit card getting here, and then razed further still spending my money on a card named Charlie. My then-girlfriend had crossed the United States to reach Boston, so I gave it that same sunk-cost reverence. I played out my part, and at her recommend, I was touring the city between subway stations at what must have been ten miles per hour. It was slower back then. I was attempting to fill out some arc in the dead air, and the slow zones declared in areas of deferred railway maintenance refused to cooperate with me.

Living in a city, among such an impossible amount of people, seems to evoke either of two responses: tremendous self-importance to stand out completely, or humbled acceptance in part of a whole. At nineteen, I felt like I was poised in any given of these directions. I knew it was tied up in the great worldview questions that had in part brought me here, that were so central to the lacunae chasm between me and her, I just wasn't sure exactly how. I wasn't sure which ideology (if any one in particular) either fit into. So instead of arriving at a conclusion, I was simply seeing from the train windows the extreme foil to the isolation of my rented room in Newport News and all the other rooms before it. I was still desperately alone in those first few weeks, when all the people I know now were just subjects of stories suggested at, names I did not glean. But I was alone among many for the first time ever. I wasn't sure how to reckon with it, so it nearly drove me insane. In the space of those two weeks, I learned no answer to the question of my course, and only saw that the city scared me more than I could imagine. By the end, I was grateful to begin my job instead of just considering all day long.

I turned twenty two days after that period concluded. That same day I spent in a hospital hearing how much I ought to love Boston. Hearing what a great girlfriend I was, and how much she ought to love me. The latter of those two loves did not work out and never will, and all the transplant convert's zeal I felt the first few times I feverishly rode the subways, before panic set in, seems to have subsided. It's just a means to a place, all of it. Transit is agonizing regardless of method, it is necessary, it is awful. But I spent that whole day in the hospital with her and thought the place I was then would never end. I had at last crossed over, over the Virginia over the Northeast Corridor and over those first two weeks. I couldn't then know that this, with her, would be yet another movement between stations, that the time in that apartment would become just a space between February and July, just as Newport News had been a space between August twenty twenty two and January twenty twenty four, just as Waltham would immediately after become a space between July and August. It would never end. I would just be asking the same accumulated questions under a new ceiling.

It wasn't just a loss for me, it was the reckoning of a worldview which she so clearly, so dearly bought into. I have friends here who are so incredibly down to Earth, and after enough study I can only surmise that it's because they had more typical parental roles. This is not to say, of course, that they had "normal" or even traditionally stable nuclear families, only that theirs were absent the violent crimes that I became accustomed to growing up, and so too became accustomed to this were the people who almost had me with their world of plotted narratives and self-heroism. We grew up without communities, more so than most, and lacking even the simple family structure, you find whatever groupings you can muster still ripped from you in the cracks of psych wards by wicked nurses confiscating papers with phone numbers, and high school social scenes always failing under the weight of their typical entropy. I'm still trying to put this all to adequate lyrics, be patient. A friend told me that I am more "well-adjusted" than most she'd met with such upbringings as mine, and I didn't believe it. Because privately, I knew part of my own insanity. I knew I was being seduced by the broken-home chapel. I would ask myself its questions, not my own, "Am I plural?" "Am I a God myself?" "Is this all the character arc of a TV show warrior forever fighting antagonists in twenty-two minute blocks?" Anything to break up the cold hue of reality, the reality that there's a world outside of just me, just her. Anything to stay in the shadow of where I am from. The atomic single-cell units of suburban rooms across Virginia and anywhere else. And I went on like under this spell until the millions of the city cracked its back. Too many people I was confronted with, I could not help but disentrench. As the relationship failed, I abandoned the suburban storytime fascism.


Tallahassee by the Mountain Goats was the last album I bought before I left for good, from the moment I saw it at Armageddon Records I knew I needed to have it. I took it back to the apartment and immediately displayed it as a sign, much like my parents had done when they both blasted opposing breakup anthems as their marriage drew its last days. There is very little new I think I could add and laud onto the much-lauded artistry that is singer-songwriter John Darnielle's body of work, and more specifically his famous, winding subject of the doomed "Alpha Couple" who's final notes dominate much of the album. But clearly, there was some of it that I could've still said to her, as at last a message on display she failed to receive. Regardless of my signaling's failure, I would be driven out, or was it I left on my own accord? days later, though the album would still remain, faced outward. Boston my Tallahassee. I thought. And now it remains on my shelf, still faced outward, still, when the damage is long done and the relationship is long gone. It is a bookend, an exit fare paid to the subway operator. I remember the space I traveled. Despite all my refutations of it, I still attempted a steadily complete ending. It is so grossly seductive to me still, why I spend so much time in the stage of reappraisal. But Darnielle's story of the Alpha Couple doesn't end. They live and probably die with their dysfunction, even after one tries to leave, they still return to the other. Like poetry, when the words stop but the body keeps going. The plot doesn't end, because it doesn't start, it lives and probably dies in media res, in media res. All things are born already unfinished.

short thought on plurality (9/8/24)

I've received some amount of good word after my last post, which I wasn't immediately expecting. I had assumed that whatever I had said would be seen by no-one, and was still okay with that, hence why I took the time to write it in the first place. As long as I could see it, that was enough, as long as I could say something in a hypothetically public forum, that was enough. It's different to have people actually read it, though. In this case, it only served to further reinforce the thing which has been causing me so much strain -- what I have just endured is so, so common.

It reminds me what a fringe world we've built for ourselves here. One part of it, which must be so alien to the average person, and which continually leaves me restless is the concept of plurality. That is, to put it lightly, the real-world re-enactment of dissociative identity disorder as shown on screen. It's incredible to me, a filter of a filter, it feels so perverted to even look at it and yet I cannot look away. I get a juvenile sort of pornographic thrill from paging across old tumblr and fandom wiki pages about or adjacent to it (as an aside, "fandom" really is such an apt term for it, especially with the inclusion of "fictives" within its mythology). I've known people who self-identify as plural, and chose to never really press on it, for however much it set off my bullshit alarm. It was a harmless sort of private literary device for contending with various parts of the self, I had rationed. It was harmless, I left it at that.

Only, it isn't harmless, because it isn't private. It is very much designed to not be private, in fact. There are, as I touched on earlier, entire psuedo-communities based out of the internet (and I'm sure in real-life Portland, Oregon) which militantly enforce various fractious political lines within and without the space of plurality, ones which mimic real ideological conflicts within trans spaces. These cleavages form along questions such as: Are traumagenic systems the only valid ones, or are endogenic systems just as legitimate? What is the exact nature of fronting? What type of system are you? They mimic genuine politics, but have absolutely no weight to anybody outside the group, who would without a doubt find it entirely inscrutable without having some sort of pet interest in it, like me. It is hyperreal. It serves only to further divorce individuals from broader society, outreach hardly ever enters the question because it by design should not. This, of course, it what sets it apart ultimately from recreating trans politics.

On an interpersonal level, it became harmful, too. I have both heard of and been subject to the excusing of a person's behavior by alluding to this vague condition of plurality, never further elaborating beyond pointing to a somehow even vaguer wiki page. My alter made me do it. This is far less interesting than the broader implications of plurality, though, and I'm sure speaks more to the character of any given individual within plural-themed spaces rather than some systemic factor of it. Really, it's just me and a collection of others griping about exes and former friends.

And unfortunately, there's not much more to it that I can say. I haven't conducted some great anthropological dig into the world of plurality, though I do know more that I'm choosing to hold onto for now in case I ever decide to. I think it may be interesting. Or maybe it won't. All I know is it'll take a lot of time, and sadly the market forces dictate that work is a more productive use of my time than reading old blogs from the mid 00's.

Last fall, a friend-turned enemy-turned friend in Worcester told me that adulthood was when the homeless ask you for cigarettes. This happens to her all the time, outside train stations and dollar-themed stores, yet even now it has never happened to me -- despite my frequenting of the same places, despite my own habitual carrying of cigarettes. I am left unsatisfied with her answer. And even more so back then, when I first heard it, as I bided my time out in Southern Virginia, when I couldn't stand to hear something that would ask me to leave my room and be in a city that I'd already forsaken. Didn't they know I was meant to be in Boston? Boston, where my love was? Boston, which when I left for, I swore was the end of The Hard Part? Boston, where I would never be asked for cigarettes (but I did not know that back then)? Boston, where I am now?

She would turn enemy soon after she told me the bit about cigarettes, actually. Fate, or my sort-of-girlfriend, would dictate as much. And so too was it fate, or my sort-of-girlfriend, that would drag me up here, to Boston. That's how it felt. I had been entirely sold on the narrative of magic that is so stapled to trans 4 trans styled love, alongside the polyamorous angle which I would later be caught off-guard by, but still choose to accept. I was just that in love. Why not at least try it? I decided as much when I visited my sort-of-girlfriend, then turned girlfriend, in Worcester. I would hitch my proverbial wagon to her. Finally, a reason to save my money for, instead of burning it on whiskey and amarettos bought on my behalf by my coworker. I was becoming tired of messaging him under his Discord screenname of "Mommy's Little Femboy", anyway. I was nineteen and ready to give over my life to this girl I met online. Or, I said I was. And there must've been some truth to it, too, because I was already charting a course for moving in with her as soon as that winter, after her Housing Situation began to fall through in record time.

When you're just starting out in your transition, especially when you are reeling from a broken home, you haven't yet lost the stars in your eyes about The Community. In my case, I hadn't seen a functioning Community to speak of, not even the small-scale sharehousing that is the nuclear family, no, that all imploded a long time ago. Human beings are social creatures! We haven't had our hearts ripped out by capital, we couldn't! Or, at least not us, not us on the fringes of society. We know better by necessity. It happens back when the internet is a tool for organizing and not mass alienation, when the girl calling herself an angel is doing so with all the earnest of a real poet. You hear murmurs of these stories about exploded queer homes and other high dysfunction and tell yourself that they are edge cases, that you will learn and do things differently. Again, I was nineteen then.

And I am twenty now. In the very same Raising Cane's as the one I went to with my now ex-girlfriend after I first moved into what was our slapshod basement apartment in Roslindale, I would celebrate with my friends my moving in to a new apartment (namely one without her in it). Only six months later. Which, perhaps to my own credit, is longer than she lasted with her then girlfriend and friends at their place in Worcester. We would all reach back out to each other in the wake of my breakup, rebuild burnt bridges and thank God for that. Because now the facts of the matter are cleared in my own mind, and private. I am not here to re-air grievances, as much as I think that'd be cathartic. Instead, only to corner myself: how did I make this mistake? How did I fall for her? In the months after, during my interim exile in Waltham, I would find out a crucial detail that only confounded me further. It is not that she is so special, so alluring that I dropped all my knowing-better for her sake. No, the sort of person she is, is in fact very common in The Community. And I fell all the same. How?

I think I at least scratch at something when I talk about stars in my eyes. Living in a state of depression and a Commonwealth of Virginia, I didn't get the chance to steep myself in the incredibly boutique inner politics of The Community. I wasn't inside something enough to be able to do that, not even with my participation in the internet, because whenever I stepped outside to go to work or bike half-drunk to a Target, I was very much on the outside still. The world I was still a part of spoke louder than any capital-D Discourse or horror story I could hear online, it spoke louder with a voice between the disphit U.S. Navy tranny chasers and their dipshit Trump 2024 flags. I did not recognize the type of person she was. Now I do, and so do the people who ask me to relay my recent life to them. Their eyes light up with recognition as they immediately incorporate her with whatever avatar for this certain type in The Community they were unlucky enough to know. And they tell me: "She accused you of cheating when you decided she shouldn't be the only one to sleep with other people, too? She threatened to kill herself when you left, too? She tried to make a callout post about you afterwards, too?" Even more granular things: "She called herself plural, too? She tried turning your longtime friends on you, too?" But these aren't things I knew at the time, it was not an archetype I could've yet been familiar with even as I was warned of it by her exes. I was ready to engage with her in her world, instead. Because she had one thing that the TV static monotony around me didn't -- a narrative.

But, it's such a plastic way of interacting with the world. Because, like we all learn as we get older, life isn't a story being told with neat plots and defined character traits. Things meander on and we act at the whims of our inscrutable unconscious. In order to convince yourself it is all a part of a plot, you need to cut various events out and invent entirely new ones, write your own fiction and come down with a bedridden case of "Storyline Fever", as David Berman once put it. It was a way of living I wanted to try with her. Because this goes deeper than luring in trans girls from shattered homes and exes they aren't really yet over, this exploits some deep hole with the way we are made to live in twenty twenty four. Absent any Gods or real communities to give ourselves over to, we have to fold back inward, develop some narcissistic cult of ourselves. She had done it so well, so well that she very well might believe it all. But I was too much the skeptic for it to work. I suspect most people would be. She invited me to live with her in a world of shonen-influenced make-believe, and so I came with her to Boston and it instantly began to fail. Like it always would. Quickly, neatly, I would be shunted into antagonist to whatever faux-religious holy war she is convinced her life's story is.

Engaging with it all set back further still whatever maturity I had been cultivating. Maybe even more so than when I plunged into drinking in the latter half of twenty twenty three. I still don't adequately grasp why I ended up making the mistakes I did, and so I cannot trust myself again after it. I'm keeping a close eye on myself as things develop again. The war-weariness of right now might do me some good when it comes to growing up, anyway. Being out of that awful apartment, too. I can do all the things I wanted to, but couldn't, when I was stricken with the guilt she would instill in me for leaving the house to be with people. I can visit friends, I can apply for college, I can even learn to play guitar. But I am afraid I might never be an adult.

Recently, a steady friend in Worcester told me that adulthood is a product of forgiveness. She is, I will say, religious with a conviction that I seldom see despite the consistent ungrounded appropriation of religious decor by so many in The Community. And so it is not only this forgiveness she speaks of, but also of accepting yourself as a part of something greater, as not just a hyper-Individual but a piece of God, who is all around us and is all of us -- I still recall when she, months ago, paraphrased to me physicist John Wheeler speaking of his theory of the Universe: "It's all one electron!" I call on this memory when I want to return to some perspective, or just feel a certain chill down my spine. Though this all scares me worse. Because despite how intuitively it comes to me, I am afraid I cannot, I cannot believe in a God and there is no true community here left to turn to, nowhere but in. In this late era, it is my problem as much as it is every other individual person's, but it is not Our problem, so to speak. In a video log with a name I can no longer recall, Matt Christman spoke of this, how nearly all of us are rendered immature by this alienation in ways that our God-fearing ancestors could never be. I've carried on with a weight on me ever since hearing that. I was seduced by this immaturity by Fate, and my ex-girlfriend, and now I can never be unaware of it again. I might never be an adult.

At the very least, even bereft God or community, I have found people who will help me move, who will give me a floor or a couch on which to sleep and recognize what's coming before I allow myself. I am so deeply thankful for them, and so deeply thankful for the chance now, months later, to finally sit and reflect. It is the only thing I have, maybe, that sets me apart from the people who have nearly ruined my life. The exile has ended, I am back from the suburbs. As long as we do kind things for each other for the sake of each other and nothing more, there will always be a chance to rebound, a place to slowly mature in a world of petulant storytellers. In a world of petulant storytellers, say something true.