my not-so-anonymous essay first started on this blog moved to print abt working as a server. written on the brink of crazy, quit a day later. a post-script i added wasn't printed so its here: 

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I wrote this essay a couple weeks into my first serving job in New York. I was exhausted and confused: I found myself not exactly good at my job and that created frustration. I also found myself in a new city, unable to spend time exploring, meeting new people. I was spending all of my time at this job I could barely justify to myself as wanting. It's been months since my last day at the restaurant, which in ways I had grown to love and hate deeper. I only lasted four months (Which is to say, four months at a Bad Job is a fairly good run for me.) I am surfing the never ending tide of finding another job, moving to another gig, constantly searching for something that will fit. Now I am tired and my anger is less frontal. I do not think apathy is at play, but reading back on this essay is a reminder that so much change can be enacted when things are so undeniably in your face. When you lean into something, find comfortability, get better at the job, get to know and love the people, pay your bills, it is much more difficult to dip into that sunken beginning rage, insecurity, fear, etc. a reminder to Demand Everything.

three stories for a tuesday

ONE

The man first felt the tingling on the train. It began in his toes and slowly moved up towards his skull, each vertebra activated. He burst from the station and realized his fingers looked paler, almost translucent. He walked on. By the third block his hands had all but disappeared. As he passed the school he didn’t notice his head had disintegrated and his shoulders were quickly fading. His torso felt warm, a scarf flew from his body, his hat was long gone. When he reached his destination nobody noticed, as the man was just two shoelaces scuttling in the wind.  

TWO

Though they, like most machines, have on/off switches, and are operated by a trained individual, many people do not know that buses have minds of their own. That they breathe with their own life and we simply comply with their whims by refilling the diesel. It is easier to tell the public that the bus drivers are driving the vehicles when in reality it is much more like a walker guiding a dog. There is some control over the bus’s movement and direction, but like a canine companion they can choose when to slow down, speed up, take an unexpected turn, or simply stop. Buses have heartbeats and, many too, attitudes.

Anyone who rides buses often would be unsurprised by this truth. It, however, upsets the idea that man has power over machinery, so many, when they learn this news, discredit it as rubbish. The next time you are on the bus, pause, and take in the signs of mechanical life. Notice how the bus reacts with aggression when a car is double parked in its stop, how territorial the vehicle becomes. Notice how each movement is taken with aches, grunts, and lurches, much like how your grandfather moves. Notice how in the morning, full of elderly riders, the bus moves with caution, and in the afternoon, filled with teenagers, it lurches with annoyance.

We bus drivers never spoke this truth aloud. I had begun to wonder about five years into driving, when my bus began acting up. She wouldn’t turn when the route had temporarily changed, if a difficult repeat rider came aboard she’d grunt, money from some would be spit back out and for others she would demand a second payment. I looked foolish, of course, unable to drive, and I was embarrassed. But the mechanics cleared the bus and I began to understand there was a partnership here, that I wasn’t in control how I’d thought I was. Some of us believed the rumors and others thought them foolish, but we made comments about it constantly. When a bus would break down we’d knowingly say, She’s got a mind of her own, and those of us who believed would shake our heads. Accidents and anomalies didn’t surprise us. City buses, unlike their school or charter counterparts, were known to be stubborn.

My usual route was the morning. I shuttled people to their jobs, children to school. It was peaceful to manage a rush hour together, machine and man, linked through years of understanding. One evening I picked up a shift from a colleague down with the flu and I was driving through the night. Finishing my shift I locked the bus and began my walk through the depot. It had rained all through the day but the evening had opened up to a clear night sky, light from the crescent moon rained down on the lot, an endless concrete expanse with  potholes and divots. My head was heavy with exhaustion but as I looked up I caught sight of a bus moving across the lot to begin its early morning route, the bus driver at the helm fast asleep, the bus turning gracefully out of the depot on its way to begin the next day. 

THREE

The first apartment was in the city center. It was housed in a sprawling brick building that from the inside seemed to go on endlessly and from the outside was barely noticeable. It took up less than a city block, nestled between single family buildings and other apartments, and having been built several hundred years ago, the trees, planted inaugurally, had sprouted into giant elms that gave the building a constant shadow. It was built of a brick rapidly degrading and was decorated with fire escapes doubled as porches. Families that had passed down the modest square footage of 1-3 bedroom apartments generation to generation lived alongside new tenants: the man recently divorced in 4c, the four twenty-somethings crammed into the two bedroom in 2F, the devoted dog-walker on the first floor. It had been her first home in the city and she lived there for only one year. Browsing open apartment listings had taken her nowhere. Eventually, she found herself pacing streets, writing down phone numbers from For Rent signs, calling every landlord in a ten-block radius. It had been a time of housing instability in the area, even more than now. This landlord had just been the first to call her back. 

Her apartment was on the third floor, a studio facing east. Every morning, sunlight flooded through the sheer curtains she had hung up, and by late afternoon the apartment was dark and sleepy. The room was modest: a small kitchenette sat on one end of the long space and her bed on the other side. A radiator was tucked into the bathroom and clamored violently all winter long. She littered the floor with small lamps but left everything else rather bare. In the evening when she got home from work, her ritual began with a tall entryway lamp on which she also hung her keys. Removing her shoes she flipped this light on and then tiptoed around her space, tugging each cord, pressing each plastic dial, until the room was aglow with soft yellow light. When she first moved in, the super had explained that this building wasn’t only a great place to live, it was unique in its height. When the building was constructed, he’d said, the city had mandates for taller ceilings. But the people were shorter back then, can you imagine! He’d laughed and walked out of the empty apartment, setting the keys on a lone counter. A week later the lightbulb burnt out. Calling the super was more conversation than she’d like, and thus the lamp routine was born.

Tonight, in a different era, she found herself only a block away from her old building. Leaving a colleague’s party she walked west, tracing her old route from the train station home. The cafe was still in business but its hours had changed—no longer a late-night workplace. The market that sold meats at considerable markups seemed to have changed ownership, a flashy neon sign in place of the familiar hand-painted one. where the laundromat had been was an empty lot, the grass barely peeking through the pavement. Dumped trash spilled into the sidewalk. 

She turned onto her old block and noticed the trees first, how beautiful they looked in early spring, how they seemed both larger than before and yet somehow exactly the same. She counted the ten rings they must have grown in her absence. The old building startled her; she didn't remember it imposing such a presence on this block, how wide it really was. The ivy that crawled up the entryway, the stoop her neighbors would gossip on, the communal mailboxes that never seemed to all close. It rented such a presence in her memory,but here in front of her, she thought it was completely ordinary, almost surprisingly boring. Scanning the windows she moved through her former neighbors: the family on the first floor that moved away before her, whose infant daughter she would play with in the lobby. The man she flirted with on the top floor, name never acquired, was he still around? Moving back and forth she squinted in the night searching for any evidence of change. Even a new crack would do! And then, she saw it. Where it had always been, nine years since and ninety years prior sat her old window. A rush of warmth filled her body, the reassuring feeling of familiarity. But something was off and she couldn’t put her finger on it; the space emitted a soft uncanniness she didn’t remember from all of her late nights home many years back, when she would look up at her dark window and feel the relief of arrival.The windowsill was falling apart; chunks of stone held on barely and nobody had figured to replace the flower pot she had once maintained, if poorly. The window was slightly open and a thick curtain danced in the chilly breeze. And then to her horror, she noticed: the lights. Ten thousand watts of unforgiving blue overhead LED blared down, penetrating the fabric and opening out onto the street below. The woman decided she would return tomorrow. 

…

The city found itself in a streak of gloom. The sun had not shown itself in days and it was evident in the way its people held themselves: heads were hung low, small talk was kept to a minimum. She stood in front of the building again. Nothing changes that much, she thought, gazing at the fire escapes lined with downtrodden plants. In ten years it will look the same and I will know it even less. She rummaged in her bag for a set of keys she had unearthed from the depths of the past. Arriving home the night prior she was giddy with alcohol buzz and potential, and subsequently turned her present apartment upside down searching for two small ordinary keys from many years ago. Her cat had followed her around the apartment, witnessing the one-woman show of madness. The floor held: boxes pulled out from under the bed, suitcases brought down from the closet shelves, shoe boxes usually filled with printed 4x6 pictures strewn across the floor. The woman was grateful only a nonhuman creature was witness to the mess. If anything, cats understand territory. 

To her delight, this time the lights were off in unit 3B, making gazing up at her old home much easier than the night prior. That light, she scolded to herself, horrible. Though it was late morning, the cold weather meant the elderly women who usually guarded this building were off duty, their hunched backs and grumbled Hi dear’s held off for another day. Her fingertips grazed each buzzer code, stopping on her old unit for a moment, then continuing onwards. Looking up, facing the building right at its center, she felt an incredible sense of loss. Like a dollhouse she saw the bisected view of the communal hallways, the wood-paneled lobby, the similar layout of units going upwards and sideways. She could see her people cooking in their apartments, nine years ago, today, and she could feel this emanating from the structure in front of her. The loss was that nobody else could see what she could see, all radiating from this decaying brick structure.

When neither of the keys fit into the front door, she was unsurprised but disappointed. She jimmied the key in the lock but it was useless. Her forehead resting on the window she looked as far as she could into the dark vestibule, a child looking longingly in a shop window at something they cannot afford. With a thrust she pulled the key from the lock and confronted the reality that it had been changed sometime in the past nine years and nobody thought to inform her. She was getting irritated. A squirrel ran across the path leading to the door, stopping in a frenzied state behind her. Its beady eyes met hers. The creature, though emanating anxiety, grasped firmly to a held seed. It was a joke among residents that squirrels in this part of the city were well-fed. They were huge, she had conceded, and in their bulk they guarded their territory more fiercely than other common gray squirrels. She was intimidated by the creature, felt it was kicking her out of its space and she had better comply. But in a blink the squirrel was running away, across the front yard and up the tree. She watched it climb higher, jumping from branch to branch, legs spreading like a frog, its tail choreographed in a frantic dance. The sound of a door buzzer shocked her back to life. She turned the handle and walked inside. 

The elevator doesn’t work, the maintenance man had explained to her when she initially toured. Never has, never will. This had only been annoying when she moved out, as by that time she owned several pieces of furniture and many small lamps, all which needed to be carried down five flights of stairs. He kept his word, she thought, though she tried the elevator call button to no response. Some actions were meant to be repeated even if they were useless, and most of these actions—pressing the broken elevator button, checking the empty mailbox—are fueled by the often dubious hope that this time will be the one. This wasn’t the one, so the woman ascended the stairs.

At her door she sat in silence for a moment, looking it over and noting any changes. The scratches from a previous tenant’s dog were still in the bottom left corner but a new coat of paint had been applied. The new tenant had seasonal decorations on the door and a matching doormat, which she found both tacky and endearing. The woman looked up and down the empty hallway, a long corridor of uncovered bricks and doors every ten feet or so. It was silent except for the occasional violent clang of a radiator pipe, which nobody batted an eye at once they’d lived here a couple of days. The constant bangs were a melody that brought communal griping; it was their song. She pressed her ear to the door and heard nothing, just the sound of her own short breaths. She knocked on the door lightly, and then harder, and counted to thirty in her head. Nothing. She did it again, louder–knock, count, hold breath. Silence. She rummaged in her coat pocket and picked out the keys: a large (now useless) communal key, and the smaller, meant for a single door. Into the keyhole she placed it, jiggled it to the left and then to the right, a muscle memory reactivated. She opened the door and stepped inside. 

…

The smallness of the space allowed her a safe entry, to scan for signs of life, witnesses to her breaking and entering. She locked the door behind her without looking back, a maneuver seeped into her body akin to breathing, eating, something done thoughtlessly. The room was quiet, unoccupied, and decorated to the nines. The room breathed a life her apartment never had: furniture, linens, trinkets, books, shelving, desks, the whole of human sentiment was  crammed into the single room. The walls were lined with framed photographs of a happy couple, candid shots of them and their friends. The voyeurism excited her, to reimagine a space in the hands of someone else, and to admit they may have been a better match for it. But her sense of ownership prevailed, quieting any potential guilt she could feel. 

The woman quickly began her work. From the kitchenette she borrowed a barstool, from the sofa several decorative but firm pillows she thought were lucky to finally have a use. From the bookshelf she found the sturdiest books and from the coffee table she plucked dusty artist monographs. She shook free a milk crate filled with knitting yarn, promising each thread it would be returned to their rightful place soon. With the barstool positioned in the center of the room, she began to stack: monographs first, milk crate next, then the thick literary collections affectionately dubbed door stoppers, and finally/lastly the pillows, then the woman. She wobbled the way acrobats do as they ascend a pole and beckon their partner to jump upon their hands. The rocking motion of her creation frightened her with an excitement she’d not felt in years. She knew the old apartment held emotions long suppressed and each passing minute in it unraveling the layers of change. The acrobat sways and the whole room gasps. From her position at the top of the room she could see out the window to the tenement building across the street, her bird’s eye view shot straight into the apartments of work-from-homers and families going about their weekday morning, totally unaffected by the crime being committed right across the way! She saw the room in its present state and she saw the room the day she moved in, its empty floors and white paint still drying and her measly belongings stacked in a corner near the mattress. From above she saw her friends who had come to visit and left her life since, the lovers who had done the same, the belongings that accumulated and left and the lamps she still held with her. It made her sick with nostalgia. Nauseated she reached upwards, a last Herculean effort, and unscrewed the lightbulb. 

…

She returned to her home, now, in the present day, to an apartment so similar in its outward appearance but when bisected, looking in as if a dollhouse, it exhibited an entirely different world. It held relationships and love and sentiment and laughs and cries she couldn’t imagine, the walls separating each tenant neatly. The woman had tossed the lightbulb in a city trash can, wavered, and then threw the small keys in as well. She returned to her living room and turned on each lamp with the dance of ritual. Something had settled into her body, a curiosity, an itch she couldn’t help but scratch, and its entrance that day had left her exhausted. Later in the evening, as she prepared to sleep, she pulled from a recently organized kitchen drawer a set of several keys, long unused and dusty. On her nightstand she set her second apartment keys and slept soundly until morning. 

---

thank you to meghana and mrittika for invaluable editing help and friendship <3 

leaning into melodrama in my local park

I can only write on the precipice of exhaustion. A body macerated by labor and long walks on the off days. Vivian says Idle hands make […] and her smoke detector goes off

The cemetery is the only green space near my apartment, rare silence in the midst of an unfamiliar town so expansive! so codified! To write, to focus, my body must ache. I walk miles, dry mouth, water breaks in the cemetery info center, nodding to groundsmen, myself and rare mourners coming and going ad Infinitum, my mouth dry again. 

in death capital is so extravagant, stained glass mausoleums & burdensome obelisks. miles further, rubbled stones sinking into the earth, oak roots weaving through coffins. a hidden dumping ground of shopping carts, appliances, objects discarded. Curious, the urge to categorize spaces sacred or not, to moralize the inevitable cycle of refuse , zooming out. myself and the joggers nod to each other, nobody else is ever here. 

I scribble down my favorite tombstone sentences, curious at the language people use to commemorate when the character count is limited. to b spoken on behalf of forever and always, seems cruel to me. Which is to say, think before you speak. Ha! the cliche of writing in a cemetery passes over me, I’m unashamed. tropes must reproduce themselves somehow. (and well, real estate gave way to very little public space.)

Later another drink with Vivian, walking a new city with bars and restaurants and parks and cemeteries and live music we tap our toes to but say nothing more of. There are endless desire paths to create. I tell her I’d give her a giant mausoleum shaped like a croissant, an obelisk to our friendship. She says monuments are of most use when they are a place to return to, a place to go when a memory of a person is placeless. She asks that I not erect the croissant. 

Death isnt much fun as dinner topic unless it’s tragic or triumphant. I’m told to investigate the gray space more. 

ritual romances of evening hypnic jerks. direct to home mattress monopolies, LED advertisements slowly installed in every mta station. I am shocked by how many ppl have brooklinen sheets. the the train lags and the teenagers fall in unison

i am unsure how empathy is read through conflict when the conflict is my own (the comfort of abstraction). broken momentary trusts, reminders to fall back on longevity though we are machines of forgotten memory. I walk thru the mind palace of boxes, shelves overflowing with recirculated anxieties. how the boxes open in my dreams, and i awake in a panic, some subconscious revenge in which I can never Live It Down. clutter reproduces. I am easier to love in abstraction

the laptop screen is dusty, the fishbowl is dusty, the top of the bookshelf is dusty. chickens swim in dust and dutifully I scoop the feed from bucket to bucket. Like God I compartmentalize. Like God I swiffer.**

**ive been reading a lot of diane seuss

ok but my feet hurt!

I like to go fast. i prefer to barrel through time, days stacked with activities, believing in the preciousness of my time. Moving to New York was, in part, a desire for movement, a reconfiguration of space to go even faster! self preservation in the form of exhaustion. escapism in the form of exhaustion. You tucker out the toddler so they sleep through the night. 

Working in food service is this same inclination; by working in a so-called fast-paced environment the hours spent laboring are quick, dissociative. If I must labor I may as well play the game of waitress. But everything spins out at some point, right? This personal inclination towards busyness is, at least partially, my (warped) brain chemistry. I couldn’t possibly rest!! But I am also thinking a lot these days about "hospitality" labor, how it warps time in a unique way. How the constant buzz doesn't give us a second to stop and think. And once you have a second to stop, in the whiplashed buzz, you begin to see the insanity of ur experience: this comedy you’ve stepped into as an unwilling actor.

as I delivered a $20 cucumber salad to a drunken english man they other night, he informed me that I mispronounced norwich, as in the namesake of the cucumber’s farm but also, to my apparent interest, a place in his home country. His friend sitting by looked at me in an uncomfortable earnest, his bald scalp crimson with the wounds of a recent hair transplant. I watched myself from above try to formulate a response. I was pulled out of the car on fire, my neck snapped with whiplash. what the fuck am i doing here, how did i even get here, this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful middle aged kitchen husband!

These guys were looking for someone to listen to them, which is ultimately the role of front of house hospitality workers. To be fair, I have worked in a restaurant for a little over one week. I may be under-qualified here. After cumulatively eight years working in a cafes I recognize proper restaurant labor is as different as it is similar: the physical structure of a bar creates a separation between the customer and the employee. But I also have the advantage of getting it written down at the precipice. I am both a laborer and a spectator; the It of it all hasn't sunk in just yet, burnout hasn’t commenced. 

Giulz sent me an instagram post one day while we were working together. Ashtin Berry (@thecollectress) uses her posts to discuss the care work of the hospital industry, broadly. I crouched below the lowboy and read the post: 

“The hospitality industry is an ecosystem built to supplement care by a primarily invisible labor force that works to maintain empires both socially and financially. 

The question no one has asked is why does the customer have the right to be cared for?

Is the purpose of America's unique hospitality subservience economy to actually provide enriched experiences or maintain a labor force too exhausted to put the empire on its knee?” 

 It reminds me of a conversation with my new coworkers recently. After the show The Bear gained huge success, customers began to use kitchen jargon seen on screen. I was sitting in the tightly packed servers hallway and a customer walked behind me and said “Behind!” I remember turning around in shock, like, I’ve begged coworkers to do this before! But later talking to my seasoned peers they argued this is a clear performance of something: a good intentioned adoption of jargon that in its misuse further shows the clear divide between us and them.

The performance of the kind or understanding customer blurs the social lines in deeply disheartening but unsurprising way. Food, coffee, wine, u name it, are being served to u in a transaction of capital rather than a transaction of care. I’ve seen many eateries of late varnish the very simple act of purchasing a meal as an act of feeding people, an act of love. Yes, I am happy to not work as an immaterial laborer. But it's idealistic to think of the hospitality industry existing to provide actual hospitality. 

Ok all service workers have had this exemplary interaction: a customer has turned against you and mere moments before you had the friendliest of rapport. You did something wrong, or didn't do something right, or a food item wasn’t prepared in the way a customer intended. The wall breaks and the concertized but ultimately mythologized belief that the customer must be cared flies away like ash.

I watch myself momentarily let down the barrier of professionalism with select people I’ve determined as unlike the others (see: gay people, extremely kind mothers, people my own age who seem Similarly Employed). When its weaponized against u, u realize that it's unclear who is acting nice for politeness' sake and who u would maybe *actually* get along with outside of these tiered cafe walls. i am a chronically nice person: i am never going to adopt the fran lebowitz style of new york bluntness. But i’d like to think my kindness comes from a genuine place and not a burdensome act. 

The turn towards specialty, local foods in my lifetime has coincided with a generational shift in reverence of the wealthy or upper classes. It is no longer cool to be wealthy in a leisurely way. It is cool, however, to eat at a certain fancy natural wine restaurant in Williamsburg or grab a draft latte before hitting the tech workplace. Shows like Chef’s Table and other recent streaming hits wax prophetic of the hospitality industry often without showing the exploitative, exhausting side of working in these spaces. A head chef and an eater having the ultimate gastronomic experience is fun! But what about the servers? The busboys? The many people in your kitchen cut off from your common English language but still providing for themselves through minimal (often untipped) kitchen labor? It is sexy on the surface, to watch skilled people create delicious food and drinks. But it's not palpable to want to be waited on any mode, or really, show that u want to be **Truly** waited on.

Its not the hierarchy of the customer vs. worker that I am annoyed by. I signed up for this! Its the performative jumping between customer and friend that insults me. Moments I perceive as pleasant interactions where custies genuinely surprise me with their kindness and grace quickly turn to moments where if i am not on my A game or an order is fucked up, whatever grace or facade of humanity i was being granted before flies out the window. If I fuck up in caring for the customer I am punished through the tipping system, or, through actual verbal reprimand. But the care that Berry questioned earlier is a care mitigated through unspoken, unclear expectations. Each person comes to the experience with a different premonition of how they expect be waited on and its my job to figure that out in the space of several hours.

This performance is also darkly humorous in that that the average office or tech worker wouldn’t ever want to do the actual work of waitressing, line cooking, or bartending. As I earlier mentioned the generational shift in reverence of the wealthy, it seems paramount to this frustration to discuss the ways in which so-called middle class workers (exemplified in the the millennial tech workers that flooded my previous place of work) socially want to relate to the poor people who wait on them but wouldn’t last a day doing this type of work. 

I am reminded of when i worked at a hilariously short lived cafe and record store in Chicago where my boss was a long-time white collar worker with a dream to open a coffee shop of his own (ie, directly engage with the hip working class if only as their boss). Ask anyone in service and you'll eventually find someone who has worked for a person like this: a tech-funded thirty-something who has never worked in hospitality but is intrigued. Taken over by this dream they all too often want to to try it out for themselves. (like its *fun*???) I don't necessarily have a theory here. But to work for one of these people is literal torture. Firsthand you watch someone who so badly wanted to learn the tricks of the trade, how to be a chef, how to be a barista, by doing it themselves, descend into exhaustion and discouragement, realizing that the industry they were infatuated with really fucking sucks. 

People love the experience of being cared for at the food establishment but they would never sink so low to work in the restaurant! God, the way my father attempted to hold in his shame when I told him of my serving job: “So you’re managing? Oh, just waitressing? No no that’s great!” 

Much of this is its own generational shame: as a sixty year old man he barely dips a toe in the speciality food and beverage world. He values the immaterial jobs I once worked; pride is rooted in careerism and thus this type of work is transitional. I do not want to wax prophetic about parental qualms, because honestly, yawn! however i do notice the simultaneous expectation of care and social awe as a unique experience of young people. I’d almost rather the wealthy boomer complex of distanced service; at the very least we’re getting rid of the bullshit that we’re on the same hierarchical plane. 

At times I make great money and at others I tap my toes and watch the hours pass with no assurance of income. In general restaurant workers are deeply underpaid and overworked, and I won’t say that I’m not both of these things despite being momentarily surprised at the wages earned by servers. But the inconsistency is crippling.

Its funny because despite the generally snide disrespect of the working class, I make better money than any pink collar job I had in and out of undergrad. I’m white and speak english, which grants me access to more jobs, more privileges in the workplace and undeniably more money. Resentfully i emotionally care for adult babies for barely enough money, but I am surrounded by people who feel similarly. ultimately i pity the 9-5ers :/ having experienced both sides of this example I would always choose my current choice, even if it means I have to kiss the customer’s forehead. i am larping care.

When i first transitioned from working in an office (hell), then a bookstore (dantean), then farming (tbh complicated) and finally back to working in a fucking coffee shop, I had a crisis of self worth. I had fallen out of yet another potential career path and I was back to waiting on people. I realized i was (a) holding myself to stakes i didnt care about, ie the necessity to choose a job-driven life path and (b) falling into shitty patterns of valuing some labors over the others. another moment of whiplash, but this time I can buy the nice butter!

Working as a server is being simultaneously pitied and admired. The diner values interactions with their servers where they feel listened to, cared for, and made to feel a part of the spectacle. The restaurant economy of care is so successful because it convinces the customer that we are all just people; that though they would never consider doing the remedial labor they are witnessing they are able to take it in like a movie. And in its vapid draw towards the Customer Is Always Right, people get this experience wherever they go, especially in the new-age farm-to-table concept restaurant. As employees we are drilled on the faces we must put on, the ways in which we must ensure the seamlessness of the circus that is the kitchen is unseen. At my restaurant in particular, guests must physically walk through the kitchen to reach a dining area. They walk through silently, or film the line cooks, or graciously thank us, or skirt away quickly. It's such a tangible moment of uncomfortability, the forced removal of the mask of misunderstanding. A un/warping of our time tables: the leisurely customer, the mid verbal assault line cook. I’d have whiplash too! Its like we actually haven’t superseded class differences at all.

may the nightmares burn like the politicians

a dream like a video game running from ghoulish little monsters who consumed you and spit you out as one of their own, Barricading the only door I could lock, and wondering if I should jump out the window and risk the neck break, to get away from the hoard of ghouls outside my door, and I needed to get my laundry from the freaking laundromat because I’d been wearing the same loosening jeans for days.

time had sort of dissolved with isolated survivalism and suddenly their was pounding on the door: legible voices, my sisters arrived to save me, they had missed me! and were so worried they thought perhaps I had died but little did they know I’m impossible to kill! and now we were communally trapped in this strange home with its airbnb energy with its destitute ikeaesque decorations and discarded luggage from lost friends now turned to monsters, and we needed to escape.

The part where we did is foggy (lost to the REM) but suddenly we’re on a highway and it seems that everyone who is driving hasn’t been eaten up by the monsters, and after we leave from the our little hell, about twelve minutes out, i realize I forgot my laundry so we turn around.

We choose to uturn in this church parking lot near the off-ramp and suddenly there’s an entire toilet sliding down the hill, a riderless sled! a grizzly man looks up from the bottom of the hill, a hill bisected by our parking lot and he is waiting for the toilet with an ax and I’m like ?? Why are you waiting for the impending falling toilet?? Do you need it?? Is there a markup on porcelain these days ????? The apocalypse will be axed it seemed and we turn around,

And though I was in my bunker without electronics, now I am using a whole gps to get back to my video game town: we get my laundry because that seemed of most importance, to get a fresh pair of underwear. On the road: Nani Kai and I.

I’m awake and thinking of the growing distance of kin that was once so present and I’m trying to unearth purely positive memories of childhoods.

it is 4th of July in beautiful Chicago IL a day for me to skip to work for my holiday pay and look at the video my mother sent of my hometown’s laughably small parade, a single tractor, a volunteer firemens cheer, a revving convertible carrying a local young celebrity of feminine desire. I am quietly reflecting under the watchful gaze of my manager’s panoptic video monitoring system, texting in the bathroom, texting in between the lowbar and the coffee grinder in a place of blissful in betweenness.

It is the Fourth of July and I only know because they look at me in the eyes, our pupils connecting as my muscles contract with discomfort, and they thank me for my service: to be working, serving coffee , heating croissants, on such a day of importance. and I miss the cafe at times , it’s Comfortability, that I knew where every cup went, and the joy was job security.

fuck America may this country burn to pieces in my lifetime ,

bless my friends may all good come their way

i typed this in the park , furiously

I have a fantasy of being a nyc nanny with a designer child in a stroller that the mother calls a buggy and wraps the toddler upright in quilted down. It’s easy to imagine myself living another life, any number of lives, and it’s always been the easiest mental exercise. I watch two modelesque brooklyners, my age, skinny and tall, push children down mrtyle avenue while they gossip and drink coffees from the cafe we all just exited. I held the door open as they wheeled the tots out. Another person at the cafe has a dog that barks violently whenever another dog passes by. The first time I jump, feel the fear rush from my scalp to my toes in a split second and then realize I’m alright, it’s not directed towards me. I have never been afraid of dogs. I’ve never been afraid of any animals, not even for self preservations sake, and I feel personally hurt if a creature doesn’t want to connect with me. Why don’t the pigeons realize we are on the same page? 

In elementary school I had trouble making friends, and when I did, our classes would change at the end of the year and I’d be ripped from the easy structure that seeing someone daily allowed. When I moved from first to second grade, my best friend Allison was no longer in my class. I was devastated, unable to regulate any emotions, unable to talk to other kids, I lined the cubby of my desk with the beanie babies I had (two or three, if I remember) and would feel rushes of tears take me over. I would sit with my head near the babies and cry. Mrs montgomery would ask me what was bothering me and since I had just recently switched from glasses to contacts, I would lie, my contacts are bothering me. Imagining myself as another person came naturally at this time, and I surrounded myself with horse figurines and american girl dolls. (This was also the time that i began eating lunch with my school’s behavioral counselor.) My younger sisters were twins and had an inseparable bond that left me lonely and angry. I lashed out at them, bit them and belittled them and let feelings of left-outedness compound into spite. I would get off the school bus and sit in the forested nook behind my neighbor’s house—my impenetrable secret space—and talk to the squirrels and birds that stumbled upon me. I felt at home with animals that didn’t talk at me and imagined myself as a wildlife expert in my adult life. What do you want to be when you grow up? morphed from wildlife photographer to biologist to zoo veterinarian to an eventual giant question mark that comes with adolescence. 

When I made my first email in fifth grade, my address was [email protected]. I remained good friends with Allison despite our classroom differences and went to her house after school even when she moved out of my neighborhood. Her family ran a horse stable and I would beg her to play with me in the pastures. She would comply sometimes and we would run alongside ponies in the ravines that made up the family land. I was obsessed with a horse named either missy or misty, who had bucked me from her back many times, but would tolerate us jumping on her back while she tried to graze. Allison didn’t enjoy the horses it seemed, as they came with chores: feeding, cleaning stalls, hanging tack, walking younger children in circles as their parents cheered from the arena sidelines. I wanted her life and the solace of horses in my backyard. I imagined my life if I had a stables or if my parents would buy me a horse. It was so easy to imagine myself as someone else it became obsessive. Allison wanted to stay inside, hide from her mother who would inevitably put her to work as all farm parents do. We would sit at her computer and play sims and zoo tycoon. We typed up elaborate scripts and performed plays for ourselves. We would print off worksheets and times tables and imagine we were teachers, little grasps at the authority we wanted as children. When I made my email address sitting at her mother’s desk, it was a necessity: we were making our own websites. I was not allowed to have a myspace and ultimately did not have anyone to add, but her older sisters showed us their accounts and we were hooked. A platform where you could craft your image exactly the way you wanted, sculpt your social interactions behind the comforting anonymity of early web browsing. I felt comfortable with Allison but I did not feel comfortable with my peers and was constantly encouraged to make friends, try more. Early social networking seemed like a great way to fill this expectation without the waves of humiliation that followed talking to kids on my bus to then be made fun of when I turned around. As we were not allowed myspaces at the tender age of ten we began crafting crude html websites that acted as such. We had free domains hosted through webly or wix and filled the pages with images and words we found self reflective. It was a freeing exercise, to put everything I found interesting about myself on a shiny page and sneakily look it up later in the computer lab, it was still there! I’m still here! I remember having my name listed on the website in bold letters, stock images of horse breeds I found the most beautiful, and short synopsis’ of the life I lived. That I grew up near a missouri lake, that I had younger sisters and still married parents, that I enjoyed reading in the school library and browsing magazines on the world’s most endangered species. When my father found out about our website creations they were quickly shut down. To a parent unaccustomed to the internet this seemed a perfect platform for predatory adults to find young girls who wanted different lives. I was devastated, angry,  resentful. I saw all of their parental actions—wiping my computer access, enrolling me in endless team sports, bringing me to parties with their rich friends and prettier daughters—as squashing my individuality. I felt forced into endless activities I could care less about and my parents felt frustrated that they had a strange chubby child. It was a pulling down to earth when I wanted to float away to an imaginative space where things didn’t feel so difficult. (I was, and am still, extremely melodramatic.)

 I think about all of this as I watch New Yorkers walk past me in the park, as I imagine resculpting myself as a more desirable version of gabi. I make a mental note to look up platform boots as a hot woman walks past in some, I make a mental note to buy more books so I have more to talk about, I make a mental note to pick up yet another hobby to find some sort of meaning. Yesterday I had drinks with my oldest friend, the one boy on my neighborhood block who extended kindness when I was often harsh and mean to him. We would play in his backyard, rolling down the long hill and laughing as we edged up to the lakefront. I felt comfortable around him in a way I didn’t feel with the other neighborhood boys. We would take turns riding on each other’s bicycle pegs though the other neighborhood kids taunted us, Noah and gabi sitting in a tree … (it makes so much more sense, retrospectively, that we are now the two out people of our neighborhood posse.) we were discussing the pains of high school and I casually mentioned that I considered killing myself often when I was 16 and he was shocked. I of course felt guilt for dumping that on him, and also confusion that he didn’t too. Does everyone not ??? He said, well, in high school you changed a lot to be the person you wanted to be and not everyone has to deal with that. It must have been hard. It was hard! When I turned 16 I had a car, a job, and cuts up and down my arms. I could only imagine how amazing life would be once I got out of this place, once I was able to be my true and full self away from the people I’d known since kindergarten. I tried to change interests and personalities often throughout middle school, social climbing and falling, fitting out for years. I had several friends who I’d remained constant with throughout the years but as I rollercoastered through interests and hobbies and values they often mentioned my phases. That I was always trying out something new, rebranding myself as something fake. It was really alot for a young person to take, to be constantly grasping for a sense of identity and being told that you were trying to hard. No wonder I found the predatory solace of self harm tumblr! Noah said all of this and it felt kind, that he saw me changing and morphing and trying to find myself in the wretched flows of puberty. But I snorted when he said it, as well, was I really a true version of myself at 17? At 18? At 25??? I mean here we are in the lesbian bar and I am imagining myself as the aging leather dyke sitting by the front door, not because that’s who I really feel myself drawn to become, but it’s easy to imagine that my life would look different in positive and interesting ways if I was just anyone else. Its so simple to imagine the good other lives would bring and not the turmoil that comes with being an individual. Nothing ever really changes. I flop between interests as if I’m being paid to do so, and I watch my social abilities fall and rise as I practice just what to say and eventually become more confident in just saying whatever comes to mind in the moment. I’m not much of a true version of myself as that seems an unattainable cliche. It’s fun to imagine myself as other until it’s not. It’s fun to fantasize about another existence until the world I’ve built is unattainable. I often imagine these little worlds and let them slip away. The nannies pass and I know I’ll never be a nyc nanny nor do I want to be, but what fun was that Exercise! The children in the park are blowing bubbles that the pigeons are flocking away from and I am drenched in sentimentality. Vacation allows you to fantasize about endless other existences until you must go back to work, go back to the routine and the normality, and maybe that is what I am trying to fight. I close my eyes and see myself: taller, thinner, emotionally regulated, balenciaga sneakers tied up, pushing a toddler down the Manhattan streets, matcha in hand, exhaust fumes of confidence trailing me down the block. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oP9K74VugE

note written by my grandfather, found in a North American tree identification book

cinematic desire paths

i am grateful to the sea of phone concentrated riders on the grand bus, heads down and focused, and I can write on my phone in peace. Imagine how embarrassing it would be! A time before cell phones. You’re on the bus with your journal, commuting to work as you are right now, but the other bus riders give side glances. Nobody wants to be the guy drawing people on the subway, right? To feel watched, drawn, sketched. Now I can write about my other copassengers in anonymity, only looking out for the sideways glances and quick photos passengers snap of each other (subwayhands instagram). I readjust my body, having felt my back begin to slump and my abs stop working, as usual. I detest my poor posture! I recently saw a picture of me at 16, taken by my grandmother inside the lobby of caribou coffee, my first job. think she mailed it back to us. I’m turned around from some task shooting my grandmother a very contempt smile. My sister, Nani, is good at this affectless grin—it speaks to unhappiness in an enduring way. My posture is horrible! My back curves a C; I was so embarrassed when I saw it now, nearly ten years later, and even now it’s remind me to sit up straight and do my daily stretches. I wonder why I stayed at that job so long or even why I felt the urgent need to work. What an idiot I was! In hindsight, i saw a new social ladder to climb. The baristas at downtown cafes were so nice to me and i wanted to be just like them. It’s so embarrassing: girl saved by coffee industry! I also wanted money and more importantly, independence. My parents had told me at the beginning of high school, you have to play a sport but just your freshman year. They assumed I would fall into the activity and eventually feel a desire to keep going back to practice. Sophomore year rolled around and a job was my way out. Realizing I clearly wasn’t taking the devotional route to a sport, my dad began saying, well then what are you going to do with all your time?, which perhaps speaks to a spooky bootstraps american mentality of working hard until your body is so broke it simply cannot do that anymore. Enough of that, you get the picture. A job would satisfy my parents and also get me far away from the tennis courts. I had been on tumblr for years at this point, also, and needed an American apparel tennis skirt like it was lifeblood. (Can you blame me??? Remember this icon???) This is all to say life changed when I got my first job and it hasn’t really changed again. I’m commuting to my fucking coffee job! Earlier in the year I had a lot of shame about leaving a job in farming, the same I felt when I left my gallery job, that look, she’s right back to her old self. Nobody told me it was a bad choice, nearly everyone told me the opposite. But there’s something annoying about going backwards, which was undeniably the only way I could see this decision: as returning to my slumped sixteen year old body, grimly smiling into adulthood. I feel less melodramatic now, I’m significantly happier, slightly more confident, and blogging again—which is miracle enough perhaps you too should try quitting your job and see what happens. I like to focus on the forward though. Turning to an old skillset felt like i was giving up my ability to try something new. And if you know me, you’ll know my last three years have been spent quitting any job or activity I can’t stand, which is ultimately positive, but sometimes feels like emotional whiplash.

I’m nearly at work. I’ve transitioned to the much worse type of person looking down: a distracted sidewalk walker! Ive not ran into anybody but just narrowing avoided a giant pile of dog shit smeared across Morgan street. I suppose it’s the price I pay for typing en route, my time on earth precariously balancing on clocking in and out. And another pile! I’ve been thinking about dogs recently, having seen lots of them wrapped up in little shoes and jackets to go on their Arctic walks. My idea of hell is being awoken in the middle of the night to go outside in 5° weather, but that’s just me. There’s something so embarrassing about picking up dog shit from the sidewalk, maybe I’d run away too! The next poor sucker can deal with it. It’s the same type of embarrassment as being caught drawing someone on the bus. Everyone is looking at you: the person doing the unfortunate task, whether it’s picking up shit or keeping voyeurism alive. What I’m saying is life is Embarrassing a lot of the time and I’m thankful when I can avoid it, but when I can’t, I’ve been trying to keep going, making little progresses, and not just grinning and baring it all. Stand up straight! Happy Thursday!

desire paths of logan sq

to the walnut people’s garden.

Blog,

Im starting my post in the way my friend Joshua does, as a letter to a digital realm of writing / reading / whatever u want to say about the cybernetic makeup on the tumblrverse. Mostly, I didn’t know how to start. Insert the meme format, every day I open Microsoft word and write absolutely nothing. Its paralyzing – to have some aspect of my identity wrapped up in “writing,” to be a “writer,” but to really exist as such in bursts. Every few months I’ll write something and lay it to rest in my hard drive, go back to living as a sentient being trying to scrape by eleven dollars an hour.

Its getting colder – the wind knocked over some plants outside, I opened the window and immediately closed it. Im worried about the lettuce dying from the frost. Im doing some reflection because there’s nothing else to do. Im googling depression lamps and silly tips to quit smoking and “psychiatric evaluations for cheap.”

My sister is in town and was asking me about my move, the semi-chaotic summer I lived when plans A and B fell through and my ass tumbled back to my hometown. Its depressing if I read too far into it, coming back to a place I swore I never would, being proof that “you always come back home” (because home is a vapid suburb). She had come to the garden last night, to see the space that picked me up and saved the move, to meet the people that have made this city feel like something new and worth appreciating, and not an exemplar of postgraduate failures. I think the garden might be the only thing that kept me in my hometown, feeling ashamed that I hadnt made it anywhere but here.

Let me explain myself. Im a little sick of the ‘2020 was a bad year [insert sad face]’ discourse, but it was a fucking bad year. So was 2019 and every year dating back to industrialization and colonial exploration, but im getting sidetracked. The year started with a silly (actually devastating and heartbreaking) breakup and months of depression. Of going to aa and spilling my sorrows to a group of gay 50-somethings who hugged me like I wasn’t a lost case. Of later fearing my loved ones, as if they were virus-carrying rascals, or worse, that I was and would infect and kill them all. Of having my visa cancelled but still needing to leave Chicago – fueling myself with the potentially false and certainly romantic idea that running away from ur friends and problems will fix it all. Im lamenting.

What im saying is im as surprised as you are at the success of kc. At the community and love ive found here, all cooked up in the garden squat. The day I met syd and cass and felt really shocked at the ease of meeting the anarchist poets, as if they were just waiting for me. when syd invited me to the garden one night and it all made sense – to take back the land and grow sunflowers. I wont go too far into my gaden-becoming (lol). As it will potentially be ripped away from us by landlord bastards in this next month, I need to solidify some reflections. To poorly paraphrase Audre lorde, you gotta write it down so you don’t forget how you felt. How you thought. Maybe in five years the garden will be flourishing. Or we will be sitting at the track tagging ‘fuck fascism’ as we approach our thirties. Or both.

The endless garden bonfires. Indistinguishable from the next. All the bonfires and cookouts melding into each other. The 200 Hams that showed up one night, maybe 180? The joy of collective drunkenness, peeing behind the shed, grabbing another beer on your way back. We began having movie nights. Thank god cadence brought all of the anime, secretly hoping nobody could possibly want to watch Edward Scissorhands. geeking with syd about poets. Spreading mulch at our first work day, gossiping about sean bonney and wendy Trevino with amalia, the excitement that someone else gave a shit about obscure poets. Later making a book club for just that. picking up two trunkloads of bricks from a gentrifying couple in the northeast, how they wanted to rid their property of the old chimney and practically begged me to take more. Making a path later with neve, I think, and being nervous about becoming friends with everyone. Having met so many people in such a short time. Planning to camp at the garden together, and instead, going to an impromptu occupation. The absolute failure of it all, when the occupiers began to police each other. ‘A world without police’ my ass. The walnut people’s garden tent we squeezed into. Playing ‘never have I ever’ with other twenty-somethings, realizing that the game is only spicy when nefarious activities are taboo—and they’re not taboo to us. Almost winning several games of chess in several different tents, though I think I always lost. That time when Syd’s birthday, when their literal hoard of friends came and went and I watched them from one of the garden beds. That art students look like art students everywhere I’ve been. I think I was talking to cass, about something, poetry maybe, at the garden bed. we were avoiding the group dynamic, that specific stomach feeling that arises when you don’t know anybody. The outdoor space fostering some normalcy, people being able to come and go and celebrate years around the sun. afterwards we went to jail support, a reminder that nothing is normal. “the new normal.” I had just dug up my own garden bed, which if I made decisions financially, was a huge money drain. But it taught me how to grow lettuces and how not to grow cauliflowers. I kept a journal with garden notes, which vegetables liked each other. I left it at the garden one night and it was rained on, completely disintegrated. A sweet first kiss on the garden bench, later, the garden bench showing up in a flash sheet that we’ll all choose tattoos from. the subsequent meme. the continual talk of memes fueled by @dante. A massive group tattoo session. The slew of items always left at the garden after a night of drinking. My debit card, my jacket, somehow always sydney’s backpack. Cullen always finding the objects since he was up earlier than us all. Later, dante’s birthday when I walked from the garden to sade’s apartment, which had a living room—quite literally—filled with only couches. Feeling warm and included, invited to something. Discovering sade is best friends with sue, who lives with Vivian. Facetiming Vivian from the garden, facetiming Vivian from the backyard. Feeling so lonely for so long, and then, suddenly pulled into this weird collective embrace. Pulling up to the the garden and freddy howling. Laying with freddy on the couch. The celebration of life erin and Cullen threw for freddy, when miranda made him this foul-looking peanut butter cake and someone took a bite of it. stealing a thousand cigarettes from bobby or kim or anyone who pulled out a pack near me. meeting syd dante and sade at the garden to break into an apartment complex’s pool. But residents were having a pool party with a vague america theme and we felt out-of-place. When we were driving home from the pool and dante spotted a note on the garden sign, our formal eviction notice. How hard it is to meet common ground with landowners, as a group of ppl who don’t believe in that shit. My dad telling me to just ‘buy the land.’ Are you interested in paying rent? The neighborhood association meeting, the landlords pushing for increased value moving into the neighborhood. Us leaving when the meeting proved too boring, typical leftists unable to sit through bureaucratic garbage. Send someone in our place. The giant saw that looked like an oil rig. How I was disappointed in my own passivity in the situation, letting them reverse screwdrive our land! How sometimes you make concessions for the big picture, but then you feel like a fraud in the moment. How maybe that is just an excuse. Cullen eating a grasshopper, suddenly everyone eating grasshoppers. A grasshopper loose in quicktrip, we considered asking to take it home with us. When we painted the sign and we didn’t like the proposed name, so we made up another one, which was admittedly not very anarchist of us. No collective decision making. The sign was later repainted after a meeting and it looked so much better. The meeting showing that we could fight and come to collective decisions and maybe we’d make it through the eviction. The eviction coming in two weeks, the plans for occupation. A slumber party with demands. A giant slingshot to launch discarded objects at construction trucks. A trebuchet. Maybe we’ll make it through the eviction.

To the walnut people’s garden. 

driving through California today

I ran into all this traffic on the interstate today as I was driving through las vegas, which I’d never seen, but it was beautiful. I don’t think anybody really sees vegas and thinks, beautiful, but it was so elaborate in this way I couldn’t touch that I could only see it and be blown away. Yesterday I drove through Utah and felt similarly. Everything is massive. I’d never seen the desert and really only thought about it in relation to the films Holes and Wristcutters. I stopped at this gas station, which was literally the first thing in over 100 miles, this 7-11, and I bought cigarettes and had one of those movie moments where you kind of look out at the landscape and think abt ur life, and are like, ‘huh, this is it.’ I felt that again in Vegas. The hundred-foot tall blue men group portraits. The fake louvre (or maybe just another weird pyramid?). the knowledge that zak bagans of ghost adventures was near. My friend Alison from undergraduate lives in vegas, and I was thinking about her as I drove through. It kind of bummed me out that I couldn’t see her, not like I even texted her, but knew w/ covid and her mom being a nurse the chances were slim. We were suitemates our freshmen year of college. I didn’t like being around my actual roommate, so I’d go into her room and lay on the ground. We had so much time and we were in downtown Chicago. Probably our fourth day living there we bought weed in grant park, which is this massive centrally located park in chicago’s downtown with shitty public sculpture and a skatepark and also its where lollapooloza happens. It turns out the weed was laced with pcp and we both had crazy hallucinations. She saw her long distance boyfriend in her bed. I think I saw something much more morbid. So I was thinking about all of this as I drove down the highway. I was listening to this song, a thousand stars burst open on repeat. I don’t like the rest of the album but that one track is moody in a really specific way – I don’t know music terminology but there’s this distant repetitive guitar noise, kind of new wavey, and other sounds that are likely synthesizers or something. Anyways, it makes you feel small just like Utah or vegas. It’s a good background track I think. I actually first heard it in a Gregg araki film I think, which always make me feel like I should be doing something more w/ myself, if more = more chaotic. the doom generation trilogy, when I first saw it in its whole, made my head spin with want. I want to be a cool 90s LA grungey dyke. I want to drive down the pacific coast highway at like 150mph with my stupid friends. Not that that’s what I actually want – even if its pretty damn close – but that film series kind of implants want in you (queer desire, if you will). I first watched those films in this really amazing queer film history class with professor micky <3 mickey was cute as a button, this 5-foot-tall balding old queer. He was absolutely terrible at facilitating discussion. It didn’t help that our classroom was a theatre. There were probably 15 other students. When we came to class we couldn’t see each other’s’ faces, just the backs of heads and necks when turned. He really showed me so many facets of queer history and I’m really grateful for that. Gregg araki, Barbara hammer, Gregg Bordowitz, vaginal davis… The tenderqueers in the class would always take hold of the discussion. The ‘lesbian week’ we watched a bunch of early films, such essentialist of course. Poor micky wanted a conversation about the changing nature of queer communities, what it means to be a dyke, etc. he told this story about going to the michgan womyns music festival, and being on one of the comittees that took it down when they got super anti-trans. The next week we screened bound. I had never seen it. He was really giddy before. I saw him before class and he was practically jumping. Right before the screening he announced a friend was going to say something before the screening. Out walks lilly wachowski. I was now also losing my mind. Its that sayng that all gays know each other and I was seeing it in real time and across generations. Lilly gave this really sweet introduction. she talked about filming it and ‘being’ a man at the time, but always really being a woman and what that meant in relation to creating the movie w/ her twin. She didn’t stay to watch it. She said something like, “I’ve seen it before.” Later I saw micky in lilly’s new cw show, he played a mall cop. I sent a screenshot to my one friend in my class and was so happy to see micky thriving outside of that terrible classroom, doing things! thriving! I was thinking about all of this with the Gregg araki film soundtrack on repeat, and suddenly it was California and the sun was going down.

feral cat that followed me around the ihop

the sun setting over the campground swimming pool

wow things have been long and right now the sun is setting in a really beautiful way over eastern colorado which is really an armpit-type of area. my cousin and I are staying in this cabin and in the cabin next door these older dudes are trying to hide their weed. i was making the click click chhh chhh sound towards these bunnies and one of the dudes told me ‘those things have fucking rabies.’ 

i’m helping my cousin drive west but i feel a little silly being here, since i’m feeling sad to leave kansas city in a way that i didn’t feel sad leaving chicago -- e.g., it felt like there was something growing there in terms of friendships and movements and opportunities or whatever and im bummed to have just up and left even if that was my initial “real” plan. i guess the idea of working on an extremely remote farm rn sounds not only the normal amount of isolating but also really hard b/c so many people are actively fighting for abolition in literally every medium-to-big city. maybe im just confused abt being in my 20-somethings doing rrly nothing but not wanting to do anything, looking for friends & lovers & things to feel something abt. previous sentence reads like a frankie cosmos lyric.

today when we were driving against my maybe better judgement i picked up some wooks on the side of the road b/c it was like 105 degrees in kansas and when i pulled up they didnt totally look wookie. then the dude would not stop talking abt his rainbow family so i just made them get out lol. anyways they left their hybrid keyboard oboe instrument behind accidentally and im totally not going to use it but it reminded me of taking drum lessons w/ my friend casey and also my friend luc literally year(s) ago and never really practicing and thus not playing drums :( maybe nows the time. thinking abt having a band and playing post-punk or maybe just random notes rrly loudly.

i bought a car and i feel like im whipppppppping around at all points which is good because its distracting me from the financial reality of that decision. when i back up there is a rear-view camera which really blows my mind and also all of the turn signals work so im living a new found luxury i think. i took my old car (reggie) to my mechanic and sold him for parts which was really sad. ive had that car since i was 15! there was a wooden shoe bookstore (philly?) sticker on the back and i pulled it off before he went to his death & underneath was a coexist sticker!!!!!! in probably 2016 i still had the sticker on due to laziness and one of the first times i hung out w/ kris she saw it and literally gagged. i was so embarrassed b/c i thought she was super cool and didnt want her to think i aligned w/ coexist bumper sticker ideologies. so reggie went to the grave with his original sticker and the pacifism of 16 yr old gabi.

the campground is filled with bunnies, as i type im looking at three of them just lounging about. they lay around like cats which is super unexpected and so devastating in a cute way. theyre really skittish and when it started to rain they hid under all the cars. the moths are attacking my computer screen and im being eaten by mosquitoes and these kids are swimming in the rv campground pool (the water is actually brown, lol). i drank a beer w/ my ihop meal & felt proud that i can do that now & its just a normal thing even if i have to take a lap and convince myself not to have another beer (insert substance abuse counselor voice: sobriety is a spectrum). im taking deep breaths and rocking on this cheesy porch swing and i can see horses nuzzling on the other side of the interstate. 

i guess what im trying to say is im grateful to be here, even if here is a brown swimming pool. 

A long time ago in passing my friend Joshua told me of something an advisor had told them - that poetry does not need to be pulled truthfully from lived experience, that there can be fantastic lies woven throughout a narrative, or that in fact, a poem can be entirely fictitious itself (imagine my sweet friend who talks like a poet explaining this & it will feel bigger i think). They seemed a little blown away by this and I was too but could not express as such because I was at work. I had to run away when a strict manager had her eyes on us talking and I could see the police cogs of her brain churning. I’m not sure my friend remembers this exchange though I’d like to think they do, but I think about it often—that an essay, a poem, any piece of prose can be imaginative and sprinkled with bits of fabrication. When I’m drafting an essay—never really a poem—I feel somewhat on-guard about lying or pretending something happened that didn’t, I felt something that I didn’t. I’m not sure why I police myself like this, as I’m not really fearful of lying but more so of getting caught in a lie. Someone close to me asking when this happened and I say “it never did” when the form of the essay implies truth, right? I was reading a different friend, Nate’s, chapbook they emailed to me and there is this poem about waking up on a beach with a lover. After delighting in the fact that my friends are so talented (something I’ve been delighting in often, perhaps a sentimentality fueled by quarantine, but that is a different story) I was very worried about Nate finding himself in this situation. Barely awake on a beach, which is beautiful in poetic form, of course, but weren’t they cold??? How did they get themselves into this??? (Drugs, likely.) Then I remembered the conversation with Joshua, my own attempts at truthfulness in prose, Nate’s wellbeing as of our coworker zoom chat yesterday, that I needed to feed my cat so she would quiet down, that sometimes I’ll tell a slightly embellished tale and immediately feel as though I’ve done something terrible. But mostly I was never really truthfully worried about these friends and I felt better or more enlightened or pleased with myself just for finally writing something down. I got out of bed and made burnt coffee.