the lean days of determination
and the looking glass
It’s an artist's instinct, perhaps outside the content world, but more acutely in it, to give each micro stage of your life some rounded meaning, the parameters of a “chapter,” the plague of era. It’s incredibly difficult to do the following:
Be silent
Leave your life alone
The first threatens irrelevance and the second means the days are only days, and the time isn’t doing any work to propel your narrative forward or offering you fodder to, in turn, sell to your small, credit-happy following with their own screen time issue. The backseat isn’t a place for an artist. A mere observer? No, an artist is an observer with motive, with craft and agility and the divine touch. Without audience, an artist is another 9-5er, no better than her peers on the consulting track with an iPhone 16 Pro garnered from their parents AT&T plan.
A stressed brain doesn’t really allow you time to think about much except failure and finances and how much everyone surely hates you, so I’ve been trying to carve out time alone in order to heal that part of my brain. Notice stuff, think stuff, ignore stuff.
On Saturday, I made a very distinct choice to have zero plans and I walked into Manhattan listening to a playlist of Latvian electronic music I surely found through Eddie. Sitting on a broken bar stool in a cafe having black coffee in one of those mugs completely ignorant to shape of man’s hand, I remembered all of a sudden how often I used to sit on the blue-gray and orange mottled carpet of Barnes & Noble in the Barracks Road Shopping Center. My Dad would walk us in there and we’d all disperse accordingly. A bookstore always meant at least an hour of keeping yourself busy, so I’d find something to read, settle down onto the carpet, which smelled like burnt fiber, and think about something else until I had a hot rug burn on the bottom of my legs so bad it merited action.
That Barnes & Noble, like all others, smelled like new books and burnt Starbucks coffee and clogged toilet, and it was freezing inside. I was always the first to round us up and beg to leave, which took another 30 minutes. After I was 12-ish, we stopped going, and I didn’t return to that Barnes & Noble until I was 16 and failing Algebra II. My dad hired me a tutor that was really lovely but didn’t speak much English at all, and I got a D in the class. I don’t think that’s a big deal, and I didn’t then, and I remember my dad finding that unfathomable. Of course I got a D in Algebra II, I always thought, it has nothing to do with me.
I said something once to Miles about how it didn’t matter if I knew math because it had nothing to do with me and I remember he answered that by saying something about creative privilege and I listened because we were on a cold beach having ciders even though it felt like an attack on my character, as everything does when you’re unrooted1 and taking a stretched and unfamiliar northeast step into a new lifestyle that you’ve previously done nothing but criticize from a borough and two tax brackets away.
I wandered around McNally Jackson in Seaport and laughed to myself about the melodrama of philosophy titles, The Age of Reason, Beyond Good and Evil, Critique of Pure Reason, Love in the Void, and so forth. I wandered away from that section having read 5 pages on phenomenology before thinking maybe we think too much, and then I walked past the Nature section and saw a title in big orange letters: Does It Fart?
I thought about how books could be divided into characters that are having sex and characters that aren’t, and if there’s a type of writing I like more in this binary. I thought about how Jay McInerney and Ernest Hemingway and Eve Babitz and Cormac McCarthy are characters who have sex, and Joan Didion and Rachel Cusk are characters who don’t, and then about how there are characters who are having sex but aren’t really having sex so much as painfully and forever analyzing it, like Big Swiss or St. Augustine.
I thought also about how quickly I resign my intelligence to greater intelligence and how I can sense it exists within a paragraph or one very short meeting, and that it doesn’t feel like humility but a matter of indisputable fact and otherwise a bit relieving. And if I were ever to write a book and someone were to write about how it achieves x or y or z and how I used this method to render it so, it would be a lie because I don’t ever think about that stuff. Which is exactly what I suspected when I was learning in high school about the complicated and alleged intentions of a writer’s writing. Did I see how he employed x to create an illusion of y and that y implicates z structure which should make us rethink how we’ve just read the entire book? Sure, maybe. Some people just write. Some people just have brains that do that for them, in the same way some people can look at a cat and draw it and I have to watch three different YouTube videos, one of them in Japanese, to try and understand where to even sketch the circles upon which the cat’s physicality depends. It’s not any kind of genius, it’s just a way of seeing the world that makes implicit sense to you, and knowing to express yourself from there instead of trying to express yourself from what you see other people being good at.
That’s hard to learn, obviously, especially when your society values only certain kinds of skills, and within that equates only certain kinds of skills as artistic.
Outside the bookstore, I saw a man in cargo joggers delicately move his girlfriend to his other side before throwing his whole body into a large Spit, hands still in his pockets. She didn’t react at all.
On the subway, I read the Bukowski foreword for my new book and it sounds just like how Kate and I talk to each other after work—“It seemed as if everybody was playing word-tricks, and those who said almost nothing at all were considered excellent writers…Why didn’t anybody say something? Why didn’t anybody scream out?”
After weeks of studying with anthropological focus the behavior of commuters, it is in fact not confirmation bias but wholly true that the most likely people to shove you, cut in front of you, and let the doors of the Fulton St. stop slam behind them with no regard for the cattle-like shuffle of the others off to slaughter 11 minutes past 9, are white men in tapered blue slacks with messenger bags.
On Monday, I went to Prospect Park to watch kids sled. I had my AirPods in, and saw that a guy was trying to speak to me and when I took them out he looked and sounded exactly like Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I didn’t hear what he said but he just kept saying never mind. I watched kids drive their sleds on top of other kids and not care at all—the driver or the recipient. The mission, if you remember, on a good sledding day, is only to sled down as many times as you can before your hands are so raw, red, and stinging you have to stop.
We had neighbors with a great sledding hill, just past the basketball courts. They hated kids but there were so many of us accumulating in their backyard on snow days there was nothing to do about it except watch us shred the grass, screaming on one and a half inches of snow.
A lot of my childhood was spent looking intensely at relief maps while my dad made friends with rangers in various visitor’s centers across America. I’ve seen a lot of America, in relief maps and otherwise, most of it before I was 15 and much less of it afterwards.
After an hour or so, I stand in a short line at Winner, the only coffee shop in the park. It takes 30 minutes, which doesn’t matter because I’m watching kids sumoed in their snowsuits hauling plastic sleds up a hill at a 15º angle like it’s the toil of their short life. I see a couple waiting for the drinks—she’s applying Aquaphor for him and using her fingernails to pull the dead skin from his chapped lips. When their order is called for two hot chocolates, his eyes follow her to the door and stay there until she comes out. I keep waiting for him to pull his phone out of his pocket and he doesn’t. When she comes back he kisses her before he has a sip.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how little men have to seek out women these days, and how intensely women seek them out in turn. My roommates saw a Tik Tok where a girl says the Hinge hack is to reverse image search your paywalled “standout” picks, find them on LinkedIn through Google images and ask them out in their DMs. I fear some people will call this feminist.
I never hear the term “fuckboy” anymore. Maybe because I’m turning 28 this year. I’ve aged out of the navy sheets and Pulp Fiction poster tropes. Now the navy sheets guys are “working on their mental health,” and the Pulp Fiction poster guys have an unresolved and sometimes sexual relationship with the unfriendly and territorial girl from their college friend group.
It’s depressing to me that having a radio now is a “lifestyle choice,” and quite likely to appear in a Substack roundup about aesthetic ways to be offline. I remark to my roommates how dystopian it feels that people have to denote themselves “unsponsored” when talking about something they like.
My boss introduces me to someone who works at Vogue in some way I don’t understand. She asks where I was before Condé and I say “Pratt.” She hears “Pret” and says oh! “The art school,” my boss says to clarify, and the woman responds, “Oh, god I thought you meant Pret, like Pret a Manger, and I thought ‘what an interesting pivot!’” I think to myself how interesting that pivot actually would have been, how much more interesting it might have been to work at Pret, anthropologically speaking, and how if I’d known that maybe I would’ve navigated my life differently. Not better, just differently. It’s funny because when people ask me that question and I say “Pratt,” and they hear it correctly, they respond exactly the same—oh!
Someone’s blinker is so loud I can hear it from the cracked window of my fifth floor apartment. I miss knowing when someone’s home by hearing the car door close in the driveway. It’s strange to live in such a way that there’s no reason you’d hear that sound again with any meaning for a long time.
I’m listening to this and Eddie’s this. You will notice a lot of crossover because I source my personality from Eddie’s backwash
I’m reading this but I don’t like it, I’m reading this, a gift from my dad for Christmas and it freaked me the fucked out; I’m reading this and I love it, and I read this before its publication because my friend and mentor and biggest fan, Adam Ross, wrote it and had me read it pre-release. It’s now emerged in tellurian form and I’m reading it again because it’s blowing up (LA Times, NYT, New Yorker, Vogue). Some of y’all reading this were at that EmRata release event, which was a mashup the devil himself could never have imagined and I know that shit was awesome. I went to the Nick Paumgarten event at McNally the night after—also rocked—and then met a woman co-writing a novel with ChatGPT whose skincare secrets were Kundalini yoga and glycerin and she invited me to her studio in Red Hook. So congrats Adam, my skin is going to look amazing & I can’t wait to see what fiber art is in store for me
yes, un, not up, this was an Editorial Choice™
It's been a while since I have fallen head over heels for someone's writing--- my goodness, does it feel good. The way you write feels so familiar and cozy and correct that I could cry. Thank you!
yeah so this was amazing