194

It does not matter what day it is, only that my finger hurts when I play a D minor chord on the guitar. I tell my band I want to add another song to our set at the 11th hour, which is how I know I’m not myself right now, because I can’t stomach doing anything at the 11th hour. But here we are. I will be thrilled not to talk about the business of playing live for at least 7 months after next week. It’s tragically uncool to make this big a deal of it, and I can tell A agrees. He’s assembling a complex pedal board to play on SNL, and this is just objectively more important, even though I believe the importance of a live performance should be measured not by its prestige but by how terrified one is to do it. By this metric I am headlining an arena tour. Do I have concert dysmorphia? You bet

Because of SNL and the rehearsal it necessitates, A’s time in New York has been gradually shaved down from a week to a mere 2 days and change. Our time together is so short and I’m so pissed about it that I see no need to remove any body hair for the occasion. But a non-refundable wax appointment is a non-refundable wax appointment, so I walk to it wretchedly, embarrassed to be female and embarrassed to be myself. This is the real walk of shame, I think, preparing oneself aesthetically for a glorified one night stand. I spend most of the day on the brink of tears, and muttering to myself “emotions are running high”. I am grateful in the end to spend time with the wax technician, who shares my name and talks freely about her upbringing in rural Hungary. She says my finger doesn’t look good, and I stare at the mille-feuille of plasters wrapped around it and have no choice but to agree. She asks whether I always wear baggy clothes and I tell her I don’t, and she says good, because I should wear very tight things, ideally a silver dress. She takes my armpit hair and throws it in the trash and sends me away

I pick up lunch and walk through the financial district to the studio, where I find two drug addicts assessing their stolen goods just outside the entrance. I had thought Sundays were the only unpleasant days in the yard, but I guess I was wrong. One of the addicts is draping various laptop bags and totes over a broken Boris Bike, bickering with his comrade. I do not think these two men would be friends if not for their shared love of crack, and isn’t that the saddest part of addiction, that it sets such a miserably low bar for friendship? The pair move aside while I enter the studio and proceed to discuss “making a call” at the “right time”. They try their luck at pushing on my locked door from the outside, and I text A, the yard boss, for help. He sends five men of different races and sizes to my aid, by which time one of the addicts is trying to push his way into V’s gallery. They leave without fuss, and I mouth “thank you” to the tallest and fattest man of the crew. They look happy to be of use, and strut away in satisfaction. I don’t exactly embody the ideal damsel in distress - my loose clothing and worn Hokas and insane hair cut - but I am definitely scared enough to qualify. Being a lone woman will always feel unsafe, and that is why there’ll always be a market for martial arts classes. It’s the first time I’ve thought of having a weapon in the building. Not a gun, but a baseball bat or a bread knife to wield

With the henchmen comes M, who I haven’t seen since the yard dog was given away to a better family. He tells me he was imprisoned in March for stalking charges, and released when they couldn’t find evidence. I have played therapist to M enough to know that he and his ex girlfriend have one of the most toxic relationships on the planet, fuelled by drugs and illegitimate children and moderate organised crime and passive aggressive Facebook statuses. Now he treats me like a jury, trying to show me screenshots of this woman’s contact with him, and her naked videos, and her pleas for cocaine. M has a court date in June where he says the truth will out. He was treated very badly by police, I assume in part because he is not white. His whole story is painful. I nod and shake my head at the correct times as he rants. I tell him I have to get to work and he asks if I’ll visit him in prison in June if he is put away

I paint, A (other other A) calls me and I vent to her and she vents to me in kind. She goes to a lunch and I walk to the tube in the rain. I try to download a book on Audible written by the divorce lawyer who charmed me on YouTube last week, titled “if you’re in my office, it’s too late”. I am heartbroken that it’s only available in the US. Too heartbroken, in fact. Beside myself even. The evening passes with a steady flow of art world people asking for tickets to my concert, despite having had ample opportunity to buy them online. One guy I am reluctant to turn down because he is my Wimbledon connection; always transferring me amazing tickets each year that he and his hedge fund manager dad don’t use. G is smart and tells me he bought a whole bunch of tickets for both nights to dole out. I do some liaising from the toilet and I don’t get too angry, because I am an inexperienced performer and therefore lucky not to be playing to 9 people at a time. I export stems, I watch a biological anthropologist explain love, do laundry, listen to the rain, eat listening to the rain, text while listening to the rain, panic while listening to the rain

193

Friday. I shut my left middle finger in the fridge, the door of which is cased in an inch of stainless steel. The first wave of pain makes me gag and drool a little, and the second is more of an aesthetic agony, when I see how much finger skin I lost to a kitchen appliance. The skin looks almost chiselled away, like a renaissance artist has begun turning my hand into a more elegant sculpture of itself. It takes a long time to bleed, long enough for me to take a photo of the injury to send to V, and when it does it covers my hand and arm. I wonder if the joint is broken, and think first about how difficult it will be to play guitar if this is true. Frankly it will be difficult either way. I gasp and hobble around the house saying oh no oh no oh no oh no. I can’t believe I am enough of an idiot not to notice that, when I slam the fridge door with one hand, the other hand is in danger. I place the flaps of skin back where they came from as best I can and apply two plasters, biking to the studio with my left hand laid perfectly straight atop the handlebar rather than wrapped around it. It looks insane, but I’ll admit that having my focus drawn to a specific body part is sort of nice. Keeps the thoughts in single file. The first time I dropped down 25mg of Zoloft, in floods of tears about some perceived tragedy I plucked from my past, I took a knife to my arm and fantasised about slicing along the tendon. But I was never a cutter, even when I knew in my heart I should be and had ready access to my father’s Japanese knife collection. I’m glad for it now, since every so often in the summer I see the scars on a friend’s arm and it feels like they’re emotionally doxxing themselves without realising, just by wearing a tank top

I water all of my plants at the studio with one hand, eat food, paint. V comes over wearing several shades of aquamarine and we talk about love. I dump a lot of dilemmas on her and she carefully unknots them. Her health has been good lately, after so many setbacks and blood clots and organ failures. Her oncologist told her she’d “eat her hat” if her cancer came back, which is a risky thing to tell a patient unless you’re ultra-confident. She tells me that I hurt my finger because I do things too hard and fast. V knows this because she has seen me paint and she has seen me cook. At home later I read one of those regular Guardian articles called “you be the judge”, in which two people in a petty disagreement write in with their points of view and the readers vote on who is in the right. This week it’s a young woman who, after coming to the end of her tether with a roommate who is late to everything, secretly set all the clocks in the house (and her roommates phone) to 20 minutes ahead. It’s the first time I’ve read one of these pieces and seen no reason to hear out the other party. Lateness is a sin, this woman is doing god’s work, and sometimes god’s work is hacking into someone else’s phone so they’re on time to a doctor’s appointment. Also, it worked! I scroll the comments protesting that “time blindness” is a “symptom of ADHD” and roll my eyes until I find my community: “Literally, [lateness] steals people’s time, people’s life. You are wasting their actual time on earth to finish washing your hair. I can't think of many things more selfish or more easy to fix. Buy a watch with a vibrating function, set an alarm to begin your routine and one to end it and stick to it.”

B texts a link to some New Balance trainers that “just dropped”. He tells me they are out of his size already in the US, and so we use our respective IP addresses to shop for each other’s size, since there seem to be more mens’ availability here and more womens’ there. He orders mine from his computer in Greenpoint, which I didn’t ask for and which feels extremely generous given my knowledge of these trainers is minutes old. I snag him some size 11s from the UK and B says “we have beaten the system”. I get an email a quarter of an hour later from the store I bought B’s from apologising, telling me they’re, in fact, out of stock. I should expect a refund in a matter of days. “My haters are relentless”, B says, and begins calling physical Manhattan stores. He eventually finds a pair. I try to PayPal him the money but he refuses. My disgusting finger feels sweaty inside its dressing and I expect it will begin to smell bad soon. I tell B I am worried I’ll get robbed for my footwear in New York and he tells me not to worry

192

Thursday and I’m playing fast and loose with how short one’s bangs can be, which in this case is too short and I regret everything. They at least are even, since I didn’t do this myself. My beloved Japanese hairdresser followed orders and did the best job he could, given how much he probably disagreed with the vision. The result is half librarian (a neat bob) and half non-binary protester (the bangs). I bike home with anxiety, and think of hats I could wear on stage next week. My one comfort is in remembering Shane Gillis’s first comedy special released on YouTube in 2021, and how he opened by drawing attention to his haircut, saying he panicked before the show and rushed to a Dominican barber. “I must’ve been the only white guy who’s ever been in there”, he says, “just…don’t get a Dominican haircut, you end up just looking more racist”. It’s a perfect bit. And I figure I can do the same thing, call attention to my mistake, get a laugh and win some favour

My STD tests came back negative, which is a bigger relief than I thought. I had convinced myself that maybe T gave me symptom-free chlamydia 6 years ago that a previous test hadn’t picked up. I was too afraid to ask him to wear protection, because our sexual relationship had started with me telling him I wasn’t quite ready to be physical, and him telling me that he would go and have sex with someone else if I didn’t fast-track that process. Luckily his now- girlfriend dropped some more poetry last week and reading it makes me feel better about the whole ordeal (because it is very bad). A’s results are pending. He FaceTimes me on the way to the clinic and I think about how if A were 20% more famous he probably couldn’t do this without a DeuxMoi blind item ending up online within 24 hours. I am too afraid to ask him whether he has booked his flight to New York yet, not wanting to add stress to his laissez-faire schedule of movie score meetings and peeing in cups. All I can think about is how expensive that flight will be when he books it, and how many jobs he’ll feel he needs to take to get back on good financial footing, and how this will take him away from me because he’ll be in a session, and how many more guns he’ll buy because there’s a gun store next door to his studio

It rains all day, by the way. The cold plunge is brutal and I have ingrown hairs and am reaching the natural fatigue I get in the studio when I know a trip is coming up. I watch a video of Andrew Tate saying that the idea of high blood pressure being bad is a myth: “imagine your blood flowing through your vein FASTER and HARDER. Sounds to me like you’re SUPERCHARGED. My blood flows at 400mph, and yours mopes around being lazy like you are”, he says, pointing directly to the camera, “and that’s why you’re a fuck up”. I read elsewhere that Tate’s “Hustler’s University” get-rich-quick programme is largely made up of people being paid to publicly exalt Tate and share videos of him calling himself Morpheus from the Matrix. I guess this makes it a curious mix of a click farm and a pyramid scheme, and that there really is a crisis of masculinity after all

W texts to ask whether I would be upset if he cancelled on playing tambourine at my show in order to do an event at SF MoMA next week. It’s a text I knew was coming (admittedly not the SF MoMA part, what a curve ball) but it still hurts to get it. Obviously not because the tambourine is so integral to my performance, but only because it strengthens my confirmation bias about music people, even the nice ones, being impossible to count on. I call W’s bluff and tell him that I would be upset if he didn’t come, and to tell SF MoMA he can’t make it. W says he is worried he doesn’t have a good excuse for his management, because he is deliberately hiding his involvement in my music from them. Something about money and publishing and other vague complications. It reminds me of this guy I knew when I was a teenager, the cool older brother of my cool next door neighbour, who used to sneak into my house at 3am after parties I wasn’t invited to, kiss me, and make me promise I wouldn’t tell any of his friends. Sometimes I think of him and tell myself I won in the end, and I always think in those terms about people from that era because I was treated like such a leper. But then I wonder whether I did win, because he has a steady girlfriend and he only does coke on SOME weeknights and his mother loves him more than any mother loves anybody. I remember this mother very clearly, an early adopter of cheap botox, a passionate critic of her slightly overweight daughter, and that visible - palpable - lust for her only son. But I digress. What I mean to say is that W is keeping me a secret. I tell him to be honest with his management and “live in truth”, and he stops responding. I refuse to let it get me down. I try on some hats that cover the worst of my hair

191

Wednesday, my cervix is opened and swabbed, and my urine is checked for garden variety STDs. I roll the dice and forego an HIV test, but it later weighs on my mind. I think of E visiting a prostitute in New Orleans and realise one can never be careful enough. Perhaps I’ll go to the free clinic for this, because a private blood test is likely more expensive than hiring a prostitute for an hour. It shouldn’t be, but it is. I also wouldn’t pretend to know the going rate for a sex worker. I Google how much it costs and the first hit is someone asking Quora “how much money does it cost to have sex in London normally?”. I think of T, who told me he once typed “normal sex” into pornhub

Before the medical appointments I bike to Pilates and listen to my own music, mentally turning a song I was proud to be making last night into an abomination. It’s depressing what the brain does, and with such ease. If it’s true that we can train our brain to do almost anything with enough work, I must’ve talked shit to myself so many thousands of times that I am ready to run a shit-talking marathon, a marathon you run against yourself tirelessly. I remember that “couch to 5k” NHS programme they pushed so hard on us during the pandemic. Well, what about 5k to couch

The friendly gay man in Pilates waves his arms gracefully around his head on the CoreAlign, smiling at me. “Good, Jonathan!”, says our instructor, “you should put this on your Instagram! Your theatre friends would love it”. Mildly homophobic, and yet meant with affection. I am treated like a second class citizen this class because I reported some rib pain on the back of my body to the instructor, and am barred from any challenging exercises. Relegated to lying supine and pushing bars away from myself with my legs, basic pliés, and gently swinging my hips from side to side. The older woman who loves attention is remarkably quiet today, save for the long conversations she has with herself that seem mainly to consist of shopping lists. There are whispers in the room of a lawsuit against a different Pilates studio. It was brought by a client who fell off the Cadillac trying to fetch a weight that she’d dropped, and broke her collarbone. Our instructor has to testify that the studio in question wasn’t unsafe. Imagine discussing Pilates in court, under oath

When I get home there are new house plants and young men covered in soil all over the place. It’s the beginning of a porn I might actually watch. My gardener once again gives me the ick naming every single one in Latin as he shows me his progress. I didn’t tell J, who has an irrational hatred of indoor foliage, that I was having them put in. He will have to see them next week, and realise that he doesn’t hate house plants, he has just never seen good ones imported from Holland. There are, however, a couple of plants even I don’t like, but the gardener is so British and I’m so British that I’m too afraid to tell him to remove them before he leaves. I set an alarm labelled “text Charlie that I hate the plants” on my phone for 6pm. I send a screenshot of the alarm to V who laughs heartily. It’s extra special for her because she never quite forgave him for loading her roof garden with too many pots of soil and the ceiling almost caved in

New York can’t come soon enough. I want the shows over with, and I want see A, but I can’t have one without the other. Every misunderstanding and miscommunication on FaceTime will be easier to forget when I’m in a room with A. Right now he is just the guy whose calls I’m waiting on and who shops for guns on said calls. I discuss him with M in therapy, the prospect of sex, what it means to get tested and use protection and treat one’s body with respect. I talk about how I’m worried if I ask A to use a condom again he’ll leave, and how an eating disorder is itself a kind of protective sheath against the world and the ways it hurts your feelings. “I’m not ready to fuck the world without a condom”, I tell M, who smiles. I tell her I felt ashamed daring to plan trips for A and me when he can’t seem to schedule more than 6 days into the future. I tell her that living like this is such a nightmare but it somehow passes as cool. “Or selfish”, she proposes. I say, “right, because to live like that is to expect the world to somehow unfurl for you, and you know what really sucks? That it usually works. And then the person that plans looks stupid and neurotic”. But I guess we don’t always see the realities of this go-with-the-flow attitude because they’re not mentioned: namely the expensive flights because they’re booked two days before you leave, or the rush to get your bearings at the last minute, the missed opportunities, the awkward “do you have a reservation?” moment with the maitre d’, the hurt and confused partners or sponsors or bosses or clients. I tell M I already know I can’t live like that, though I envy it in others. But I fear the world and I don’t trust it to bend to my will. Perhaps this is because I’m not a man, or because I’m an earth sign, or because I need more therapy. I leave the Zoom, eat an apple, and my “text Charlie that I hate the plants” alarm goes off. I text Charlie that I hate the plants, then admire the ones I do like in all their glory

190

Monday, horrifying to think that this time next week I’ll be at soundcheck in New York tearing my hair out with nerves. I wake from a heavy sleep in which I dreamt they made tiny Cybertrucks for a single person to get around the city, like e-bikes. You lie on your chest on top of them and the vehicle intuits your destination. Thank god my aptitude for urban transport planning is confined to dreams, because mine crashes outside my brother’s home (a grand suburban Victorian townhouse) and he tells me he wants to have sex with me

A and I like to sing Frank Sinatra’s You Make Me Feel So Young to one another on FaceTime. It’s one of our things now, and I even request a rendition from him to calm me down if I’m getting anxious and taking something he says the wrong way. This happens in the early hours of Monday morning when A makes a cheap joke about me giving paintings away too often, specifically leveraging them in return for music production. His sentiment is ultimately kind, which is that my paintings are valuable and W or anybody else working on my music for a painting trade is getting a way better deal. But naturally I decide that A is calling me some kind of slut. Don’t ask me how I got there, just know that it was nothing a quick Frank Sinatra song couldn’t fix

I am keen to start work at the studio but first I see S in the yard, wearing a knit sweater and short shorts and well-worn crocs. A heinous outfit on anybody but him. There is a degree of hotness and / or charisma that transcends all fashion sense, and S has it. He is packing things up from his show and loading them into his old Subaru to drive back to Wales. His tooth is chipped and his face reddens when I make stupid sex jokes. R joins us for a while, mourning his failed driving test. R who could run circles around anybody in terms of spacial awareness, and who once designed and built living quarters for eight people in a hollowed out warehouse. Not that this necessarily transfers to driving, but it connotes a level of proficiency and commitment that should win the day. That being said, I believe that learning to drive as an adult is one of the most psychologically challenging things you can do. I know because I did it. I think you need the recklessness of your teen years to get you acclimated, and by 30 or even 25 you have already developed a caution that makes driving seem too dangerous. And it is dangerous to be in control of 3,000lb of metal, but I found you have to close your mind to this reality to even pull out of a parking space. Also the brain is less inclined to learning the older you get. And being surrounded by 17 year olds at a driving test centre is an indignity of sorts. And driving instructors are deformed, bitter characters. R says his instructor found out he was an art dealer and asked him if he could help him sell a bottle of wine from the Third Reich. S and I cackle when he tells us. I propose that since Eva Braun’s underwear was recently sold at auction there is clearly a market for fascist-y paraphernalia. “People will buy anything”, I say

And speaking of people buying anything, I leave the boys in the yard and go to finish painting the bed, which has become administrative and not creative. I feel immense relief when it’s done and I can go back to painting whatever I choose on whichever surface. I start two velvets and finish some small linens. I figure out some synth for a new song so that I have something cooking when I return from New York and decrease my SSRI dose once again. Everything is just an insurance policy against depression. E was in London last week and I told her I couldn’t hang out because I was miserable and trying to paint the pain away, a dumb excuse that I make too often. She writes now to ask whether work has set me free, and I try to gauge how spiteful this question is, and whether the auschwitz undertones are deliberate. Collaboration wasn’t good for E and I, and it doesn’t help that the music video she made is sitting sadly on YouTube with fewer than 1,000 views. I am too proud to promote it any further, just as I’m too proud to try to push for more concert ticket sales. I should get over this, since people everywhere are forcing less interesting art on a less receptive audience

A calls and I overhear him tell his Jewish workout friends that I wished him a happy new year in Hebrew rather than a happy Passover in Hebrew. I give him the finger before we hang up. He later tells me that E (different E) has a colony of killer bees attacking the ridiculously expensive plants in his LA studio. “Very Passover”, I say, even though E is Jewish and should therefore have been passed over. “He must not have a mezuzah on his door”, A suggests, “God doesn’t know you’re Jewish if you don’t have a mezuzah”. He calls later in the day from the bath tub, late for his Seder, and tells me that some Thai food he ate for lunch disagreed with him. Perhaps in 2024, Thai food is one of the ten plagues. He says sometimes I don’t text him back and that he doesn’t think I’m trying. I tell him if I contacted him as often as I wanted to he would call the police, but I admit I’m guilty of over-correcting when my feelings are strong and coming off as cold. He goes to his Seder and I watch a video interview with a sex addict on YouTube. G sends me a video of a service in Japan that provides very hard slaps in the face to drunk businessmen to sober them up. I watch young Japanese women form a line and step forward to slap a man when it’s their turn. I wonder if this qualifies as sex work or whether it’s considered work in the medical field or if it’s just a hospitality job. And crucially do they take British American interns

189

It’s cold. London is clinging to winter for dear life, even though its residents are like “you have to let go so we can stop wearing turtlenecks”. I ball my fists riding to the studio without gloves, resenting every time I have to extend my fingers to brake at a light. My nose runs. All other ailments are gone, thank god. I slept long and hard, dreamt I was in Larry’s home trying to leave his 78th birthday present with the staff but also secretly hoping to run into him. Cy Twombly is there, doing some conservation on his own Bacchus painting. Larry is at a piano (?) and presents me with 4 years’ worth of birthday gifts of my own. I don’t remember what they are, but even in the dream itself I am aware of how typical it is for me to be having the dream. I get up and Jehovah’s Witnesses are at my door, asking if I’m interested in being saved. There is no good answer to this, but I tell them I have to get to work. This sounds fake because it’s a Sunday, but I figure God or Jehovah or whoever is witnessing it knows I’m not lying

Shoreditch is a sea of young professionals attending the flower market and abusing four-tops at brunch (two seats for humans and two for plants). Skaters are skating. Even though some policemen are younger than me, there will thankfully always be skaters older than me, attempting kick flips. The yard is in Sunday mode, namely empty but vaguely sus. There has been a camper van outside my studio for weeks now, its curtains drawn, and a decal saying HARRIET with a faded Union Jack on the front. I know it’s bad karma to tell the landlord about it, possibly ruining a desperate person’s temporary living situation, but I tell the landlord anyway. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like it’d take much for the universe to put Harriet in my spacious painting studio and me in the camper van. But that’s overly superstitious. My end of the yard is its own planet, neither public nor private, where three point turns are performed and drugs are taken and trash is left. The boss of the snooker club says there’s no real point in having a burglar alarm because the police can never find our addresses. So I unhooked the alarm a while ago, voided my insurance. I live on the edge. Just me and my paintings and my landlord’s CCTV camera from 1998 and I guess now Harriet

I haven’t seen M in months when he rings my doorbell. He has been in Venice along with the rest of the art world, working too hard both professionally and socially. We catch up in depth, and I make him late for his next appointment. Heaven is painting and then having M over to smoke cigs, just like during the pandemic. And we kept the tradition going long after the pandemic, which was even better because there wasn’t the obligatory probing for possible exposures to covid during the week. Not that this ever worked, because covid was always caught from nowhere and everywhere. It was also different back then, because by the time M arrived I would have had around 7 or 8 calls from Larry, who was lonely and introspective in Amagansett. Or at least as introspective as somebody like that can get. Sometimes I still see videos people repost of worried-sounding women announcing to the world that their closest friends have stopped wearing masks and how much of a betrayal this is. I forget that in 2021 these women were reflecting a very real societal uncertainty, but the same women still at it in 2024 (and still expecting everybody around them to fall in line) are a nightmare. They remind me a little of the people I was in rehab with who didn’t want to go home at the end of their 28 days. And when I say they didn’t want to go home, I mean they really didn’t. Some even stayed, pretending it was to “cement their recovery��, but really they were scared. And I can’t blame them. People like known quantities, even unpleasant known quantities. I couldn’t get out of the rehab door fast enough, for the record. But then I also relapsed within 3 months, so who am I to judge

188

Saturday, band practice, my drummer telling us about the ultramarathon he ran, and that completing it in 11 hours is normal. The keyboardist says his wife is running the regular marathon tomorrow and that her toe is infected. She soaks the toe in a tray full of salt water every evening. “I used to make lasagne in it”, he explains. We decide to forego the in-ears for this session, because to mic everything up and feed it into a mixing desk and then eventually into packs that clip onto our trousers, as you can imagine, consumes time that we don’t have. The other bands in the rehearsal rooms have particularly insufferable names today, things like DYNAMIC CALORIES or BIG LOZENGE or DIANE AND THE LARVA. But I must ignore it, just as I must ignore the fact that my throat still hurts and that I get a headache when I lift any of my three large equipment bags. And of course, in the end, the upside of being distracted from feeling sick outweighs the downside of singing for 4 hours while feeling sick. And we don’t sound terrible. We could play the shows tomorrow with no serious trouble. We pack up and I strap my guitar and Juno keyboard to my back. I shove my pedal board and backpack into the plastic basket of an e-bike and unwittingly crush a sextet of bananas in doing so, later finding the backpack filled with banana purée. I scoop it out with my hands, then paper towels, then wet paper towels, then I put it in the washing machine. I watch influencers make food from scratch. I watch a show V mentioned called Baby Reindeer that might be one of the worst TV shows I’ve seen since The Undoing starring Hugh Grant. And it’s crucial to note that The Undoing aired in the pandemic, when our threshold for bad TV was higher. Baby Reindeer tries too hard to be Fleabag, tries even harder to be I May Destroy You, and fails. I can’t help thinking that British men probably shouldn’t be writing autobiographical television about their trauma, which is sad because it’s not as though there’s a dearth of experience to mine. There is a gap in the market. But Baby Reindeer is also not funny or clever. It hobbles along, relying on badly-written voiceover narration with unpleasant cadence. It jumps from Big Life Event to Big Life Event as though an audience sits down for 7 hours to watch just the headlines of somebody’s life story, and not the granular details. The show seems so afraid to be boring that it piles too much on the plate. It feels like a man in therapy who waited too long to admit he needed therapy and everything comes tumbling out in one go without context. Also did I mention it’s not funny or clever? In some ways it’s the best advert out there for a Fleabag or an I May Destroy You, at least to this viewer, who can’t load the two shows up fast enough after this hatchet job. And sure enough, they are both heaven

187

Sore throat, smoking anyway. Absurd behaviour for one’s 30s. But I am in Sloane Square, visiting my psychiatrist, and am just one of many smoking women. They fall cleanly into two categories - the rich and lost teenagers who haven’t yet learned to hold a cigarette without affectation, and the older Margaret Thatcher doppelgängers with gravity-defying hair. C and I discussed recently how good Thatcher’s Wikipedia photo is in a sea of unflattering celebrity thumbnails on that site. She seemed to know someone who knew someone at Wikipedia, the photo is that stately. It’s still funny to me that she proudly told the public she needed no more than 4 hours of sleep a night, only to develop life-altering dementia. “She did die in the Ritz, though”, C added, “chic as hell”

There is no good time to take a further step down in SSRI dosage and inflict withdrawal symptoms on loved ones. All I know is that I’d rather it not happen during a trip abroad, because I’d like to be able to paint my feelings, which rules out the tail end of every month til July. There is also no real fool-proof strategy, and visiting a psychiatrist is almost totally useless in this regard. But sometimes it’s nice just to be witnessed by a pro, ready with the scales and a prescription pad if I show sudden signs of emaciation or psychosis. She tells me my whole former eating disorder team has retired except for her, and that they’re all owners of multiple dogs. I hope for everybody’s sake that a new set of specialists comes to take their place. But hopefully this is no longer any of my business. I tell the psychiatrist I’m going knife shopping, and that she shouldn’t worry, which makes it sound like she should worry. I wonder if I stabbed a bunch of people as a result of the next decrease in milligrams, whether my psychiatrist would fight my corner in court. I also make a mental note to ask V or someone else to confiscate my bank cards for a few key days. Who knows what I might buy to score some off-label serotonin. Perhaps it’s a conservatorship I want, after all

There are no knives I like in the end, and instead I buy a knife sharpener to make the most of what I have. I ride the high of how sensible this was all the way home. By the time I’m back it’s both too late to go to the studio and too earth to unwind for the evening. I plug in and learn how to use the TV in my bedroom, mainly checking that Curb Your Enthusiasm is watchable at the click of a button. I read, I update computers, I practice playing my own songs on guitar. A is in a session with an electronic musician so I go without a call, and instead search for the exact address of a childhood friend’s house using her father’s name and Companies House records. I remember every inch of the home’s interior and grounds since it was the biggest and fanciest house I’d ever been in at the time. I threw up there due to food poisoning, and I drove a small motorbike into a hedge that scratched me up very badly. In the end I find the house, predictably on a street that Google street view refuses to cover. It was sold in 2007, shortly after my friend’s mother died of cancer. It hasn’t been sold since, and the only picture online is a grainy one from the English historical buildings website. It is 2am when I am through, but I have no regrets, only a vague urge to move to Hampshire because that mansion is valued at half what I paid for my current home

By Friday I still feel like garbage and I sleep til noon. I cold plunge and drag myself to the studio, paint for an hour, and gratefully welcome V over. She tells me the Venice Biennale headlines, relays the hellish nature of what she calls “art flights”, where everybody from our industry books the same itinerary to and from a big event, and so the plane cabin is full of people you do your best to avoid at sea level. She found herself on the dance floor with two professional enemies at two separate parties, and this prompts a bit in which we pretend to be dancing seductively while loudly chastising someone for their shady art dealing behaviour. “YOU RESOLD YOUR MURILLO IN 2012”, V yells while doing the Macarena. “THE CONSIGNMENT DIDN’T REFLECT YOUR BEST WORK”, I scream while twisting my body around with my arms in the air. We collapse in laughter. V leaves to go to a collector’s house and I walk to the tube between rain showers. I still do not feel good, and I wish whichever virus plans to develop would take hold before New York

Later at night, the police are at my door investigating an “incident” that took place in the square an hour prior. Did I hear any screaming? the police officer asks. I tell him no more than usual, and that the one time I did hear real screams it was an independent film being shot. He takes my name and date of birth, and I forget how strangely good it feels to talk to a policeman when you haven’t committed a crime. I suddenly want him to ask me more questions, as many questions as he can. I also notice that he is younger than me, and I can’t recall when I became older than law enforcement. I guess I could find someone in every branch of the public sector that I was born before. But then again these jobs are so legitimate compared to mine, they will probably always feel like the grown ups

186

Wednesday and I find myself looking longingly at screengrabs of the website Silk Road, the few that remain from 2011. I remember visiting and using the website myself, cupping my hands around the computer screen at my dad’s house to stop the glare of sunlight compromising my vision. My dad had had a conservatory built on the back of his very narrow Georgian house, which he called an “orangerie” because he sought so badly to cast off his working class upbringing, and thought conservatories were tacky. Reader, it was a conservatory. The house was one of many on a street owned by divorced men. Women and children would come to stay, and leave in tears. Herb gardens were grown and meticulously tended to while each man waited for someone to die nearby and score a coveted allotment membership, hoping to graduate to vegetables. Alliums, brassicas, squashes. My dad did eventually get an allotment spot, which I’ll never forget visiting. I asked to borrow his iPhone to take a photo of a courgette blossom and upload it to Facebook, and as I flicked through to find the best shot, I accidentally scrolled to find both my dad’s penis and his then-girlfriend’s pussy in the camera roll. Worse still were my father’s accusations that I’d sought these photos out, and that this is what I get for being a pervert. Kind of an amazing 4D chess move on his part if you think about it, turning something that scarred me for life into a mere symptom of my Electra complex. And it turns out I *am* a pervert, just not where it concerns my dad’s dick pics

But I digress. Sigh. Before my Silk Road nostalgia spree I get some texts from W telling me he has good news, that the engineer he wanted to mix my songs has taken time out of his love triangle with two Haitian strippers to agree to the job. W asks for more songs to work on, but I can’t think of anything worse than willingly entering into another 7 month professional entanglement. “Let’s get these two over the line first”, I write back, copy and pasting the paragraph of notes I sent for each that haven’t yet been actioned. Before this, I sit in an office with two wealth managers and a frazzled assistant who pours me new water faster than I can drink it. I am shown things on laptops and large wall-mounted screens and am asked things about my properties, peppered with questions about how the art world works. The main guy both grilling and somehow schmoozing me thinks that when I refer to “my galleries”, I am talking about actual buildings I own. He then breathes a sigh of relief when I clarify

Before this meeting, I do an exercise in Pilates called “snake” that threatens to break my ribs and wrists. It is the first time in a long time that I have refused to obey orders, instead removing myself from the machine and glaring at it. The older woman in the class with a new ailment every week says her memories are giving her anxiety. “It only happens when I lie down”, she explains, “and I only lie down when I’m here”. I don’t ask how she sleeps, even though I want to, very badly. Before Pilates I am sound asleep, dreaming that most cliched of dreams where my teeth are coming loose in my mouth. I am googling emergency veneers and telling friends I don’t know which dentist to trust. Nobody else’s teeth seem loose, and I ask to check their stability vs mine. I know I am in Miami because there is art deco architecture and Swarovski Crystal Mickey Mouse sculpture everywhere

Before I go to bed I watch a YouTube video of a divorce attorney giving his thoughts on love and marriage. He says he would like to be invisible for a day and go into the homes of around 8 of his clients to find their wedding albums. “I’d like to see what it looked like when these people loved each other, because now they’re weaponised against each other…in fact they’re trying to kill each other and they’re taking every secret, every intimacy……you know marriage in legal terms fits the definition of negligence. And by this I mean the burden of not doing it is LOWER than the potential for harm in doing it. It’s like owning a lion: there is a very high risk of someone getting very seriously hurt. And yeah I still get misty-eyed at weddings and part of me thinks oh you know maybe it’ll work out but I’ve been doing this 20 years and I find that love and marriage have very little to do with each other”. I am rapt. It helps that this attorney is extremely charming, just arrogant enough, foul mouthed and Waspy and wise. It crosses my mind that he might be on Adderall for this interview but I choose not to dwell on this because I want to remain enchanted by him. Adderall really cheapens charisma, which is why Americans are so rarely charming and so often creepy or domineering. I am both taking notes on the concept of prenups for my own hypothetical future marriage and the ways my parents’ marriage may have disintegrated. He recalls asking a client if there was a moment she knew her marriage was over, and she said yes, there is this granola I’m crazy about that you could only get from one store in the city. And whenever I’d get to the end of a bag I’d find a new bag in its place the following morning because he’d noticed and gone out to get more. He didn’t ask for credit, and yet it was always there. And then one day I got to the end of the bag and it didn’t get replaced. “That’s when I knew”, she said. The divorce attorney asked her if there was an equivalent of that gesture, one that she used to do for him and later stopped doing, and she said, “probably blowjobs”

185

Restaurateur Keith McNally seems to post about that time he met Christopher Hitchens every other month, somehow never falling to namedrop Anna Wintour in the process. Only this time I decide to watch some Hitchens content for the first time (careful not to confuse him with his POS still-living younger brother Peter). I remember vaguely how soothing his voice was, that posh British lilt sometimes called obnoxious but to me denotes big dick energy. Maddeningly calm even on big topics. I watch some of his debates, many of which have not aged well, but others that have. Most moving is the interview he granted Jeremy Paxman toward the end of his life, bald from chemotherapy for oesophageal cancer. He describes having fewer than 5 years to live as only he can: “so that's not ideal, but I have a strong constitution for it that has served me quite well. Though if I hadn't had such a strong one I might have led a healthier life”. He continues: “when I was young were all afraid of polio and, the generation before, small pox, and then TB, but none have the same horror that I think cancer has been allowed to acquire. And I think it’s the idea of there being a live thing inside of you, a sort of malignant alien that can’t outlive you but does, in a sense, have a purpose to its life which is to kill you and then die. It’s like an obscene parody of the idea of being pregnant. In fact I always feel sorrier for women with cancer than men, because for men the idea of hosting a life of any kind is somehow hard to think about. But for a woman it must be a grotesque nasty version of the idea of being a host to another life”

I wonder what V - the cancer survivor I’m closest to and who has the least desire to become pregnant of anybody I know - would make of this. I of course live in fear of her cancer returning for a sequel, which I think is normal. I never think of getting cancer myself. I guess I quietly expect it, knowing that my love of smoking, bulimia and aspartame is practically begging for repercussions. I’m smart enough not to want it, although show me someone young with an eating disorder who hasn’t at one point longed for the weight loss opportunities afforded by chemotherapy. And actually even the opportunities for a kind of sympathy and care that a disease that looks self-inflicted denies you. Nobody is taking their daughter to Auschwitz to “get some perspective” on her cancer. People can’t say a word. I suspect this must also be its own kind of prison for cancer sufferers, the insistence on sympathy from society when sometimes you don’t want to be treated like a sick person. Also I learned from V that weight loss and chemotherapy don’t always go hand in hand. So fuck you, 13 year old me

The weather is chillier again, necessitating gloves for my commute. I make a futile attempt to shoo a drug addict out of the bike lane, the shit and blood-stained waistband of his sweat pants falling further and further towards the back of his knees. He pulls them up every 10 steps or so (every TWELVE STEPS?!!) and doesn’t move from my path. It’s wild how recently we (society) began discussing drug addiction through the lens of trauma. And it’s still a luxury debate, confined to rooms that men like the man staggering along the road in front of me cannot quite enter. Or perhaps so much of the damage of trauma had already been done to him while Gabor Maté was replying to requests for Ted Talks in the early 2010s, so much that it could be too late. There is no meaningful way backwards or forwards, just the next score and a justified disdain for cyclists. I don’t know if we will ever treat addicts the same way we treat cancer patients, but maybe that’s correct. Being an addict turns you into an asshole, and there is nothing harder on this planet than having compassion for an asshole

In other more indulgent news: nobody bought the ridiculous bed I tried to sell online last month, so I’m painting it, as I expect someone will want to buy it after I’m done. Cynical, but true. I lean the mattress up against the wall like I would any other canvas and go to town. It’s substandard. It’s both a poor example of my own work and a poor homage to Tracey Emin’s “My Bed”. I feel like a fool. I hate it when painters try to expand the definition of painting or vere into sculpture or other fine art media out of shame, and I have become what I hate. I suppose I can always burn it. The upside of nobody asking for an artistic gesture is that they don’t get mad when you destroy what you made. Plus I am still riding high on relief after A finally called the night before. I had told N on FaceTime just before that “I guess it’s over” and she laughed and not only rolled her eyes but her whole head too. She as good as told me I was being ridiculous, and she was right. A told me about his weekend in the desert and that he and his cohort saw the famous Instagram couple Pookie and Jett at The Parker Hotel in Palm Springs, where A and I ate dinner in March and he befriended all those Canadians. A had no idea who Pookie and Jett were, and has since been keyed in. He took MDMA at Coachella and floated in a pool and bought more Ralph Lauren than anybody should buy at an outlet store on his way home. I have given up trying to convince him not to come to New York to see me play. If he gets the ick over my D+ guitar playing, he gets the ick. Though if I can survive him at Disneyland, I think he can survive me on a stage. Remains 2 b seen

184

Monday, windy as hell. I’m taking only what I need from the internet, which is email and learning more about Kathy Griffin’s pedophile brother. Also, dentists can tell when you’ve been giving blowjobs from tiny red dots on your soft palate. “Will we say anything?”, says the dentist on YouTube, “absolutely not. Unless the patient is young enough, in which case we have to report it”. I wonder how many child abuse cases are caught early by dentists, and conclude that Kathy Griffin’s brother’s victims’ dentists should’ve, as they say, “done better”

Therapy is as cathartic as the wind is forceful ie. very. I text C after to tell him you haven’t lived til you’ve explained both the Whatever podcast and OnlyFans to a 70 year old therapist. C can’t believe my therapist hadn’t heard of OF, and we agree that it would be a huge power move on her part to pretend not to know. How often do the online sex work and severe eating disorder worlds collide? Are people selling nudes in order to fund a gym or laxative or binge habit? How many of us are choosing instead the more on-brand mukbang, which in some cases kills two birds with one stone? There is a woman I’ve looked at in the past who posts videos of what I guess could be termed white girl mukbang: fewer slurpy gelatinous noodle and meat dishes and more bland pastas baked with feta. She also promotes a vicious work out regimen alongside the potluck-sized trays of food she consumes. I wish I didn’t know about her in such detail, but I do. I haven’t told my therapist about her yet, because lately we have mainly been discussing men. Men on the Whatever podcast, men who cold plunge, men who commit various types of violence, all the way back to the boys I longed to impress back in school by showing them that “one man, one jar” video

This sparks a long (but frankly not long enough) conversation about Sándor Ferenczi’s theory of “identification with the aggressor”. It ties in nicely with the reading I was moved to do on the id and the ego and the superego during the week between sessions. I thought I knew what these were before, but I didn’t. Turns out the id is the raging baby, the superego is the moralising parent, and the ego is the struggling mediator of the two. As I understand it, unbearable desire and an equally unbearable inner code of conduct are always at war. This is where shame rears its ugly head. Defence mechanisms come from the ego factory, of which identification with the aggressor is one. I am terrified of men, angry with men, want to murder men? But I can’t kill men, nor is it practical to cower before every man I meet because it’s a man’s world or whatever and my livelihood and romantic life would go to the dogs. So I sometimes cosplay male traits, however badly. I call myself a pussy before I get in the cold plunge and I fake stoicism and I look down on what I perceive as weakness. Sometimes I even catch myself thinking a man’s opinion is worth more than a woman’s. You could call it internalised misogyny, or you could call it keeping the enemy close. I don’t know. And the fact is I am a woman. I am sensitive and soft and under all the igneous rock of my posturing I have a maternal urge. Not that these things make up a woman, but you know what I mean. Also I could be getting all of Freud and Ferenczi wrong. All I know is I watch a lot of men humiliating women on YouTube, unsure whether I’m enjoying myself or trying to protect myself. I picture my therapist logging off and tapping “Whatever podcast” into Google with one finger in the name of research. I open my DMs and see that somebody is trying to diagnose me with ADHD based on my work. I’m sure I don’t have ADHD or ADD or anything like that. Plus I only take Freudian diagnoses from now on. “Complexes” and whatnot

183

Have been in too bad a mood to write for a couple of days. Everything felt too batshit to put into words and this blog felt suddenly too indelible. On Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, Matt (a married man) warns Shane (single) and the audience about women: “they’re world builders”, he explains, “they are capable of like 4 different thoughts at the same time”

He’s not wrong. I only realise how much my head feels like it’s going to explode when V gets back from Asia and I spill the last month to her in the form of one long run-on sentence. I have been both over- and under-analysing, by which I mean scrutinising the smallest most trivial details of my interactions with A that don’t warrant such scrutiny, while also not questioning enough the unpleasant conclusions I draw from them. I cannot, in other words, see the wood for the trees. I am a world builder. I know this because I have built a world in which I objectively do not deserve of A. I let some air out over text with N, who writes me on Friday saying “i feel like family toward A but i’m willing to turn it around to complete hatred at your merest signal”. I laugh and laugh. I tell her I love her. But even I have to admit this won’t be necessary, at least not in the realm of logic. But it sure is comforting to have a female friend offer to surrender her own logic for you, just in the spirit of camaraderie

I prepare chicken schnitzel, with tahini in the egg batter and sesame seeds in the crust. V has eaten it before, but I don’t feel like playing fast and loose with my own culinary skills tonight. J sends his secret salad dressing recipe for me to use, and I slather it onto endive. I make rice. V shows me pictures of rare birds she saw in Bali, and the more flamboyant and snootier-looking ones remind me of a post I saw ages ago about “only liking birds that look twice divorced”. I get my tears out of the way before we eat, leaving us free to discuss child molestation and non-domiciled tax status. I drive V home, thinking that with her jet lag I am doing her a favour by sparing her the 15 minute walk from my house to hers, but we get stuck at a temporary traffic light that keeps us in the car for twice as long as that walk would’ve been. I drop her, and come home to a missed call from A who I try to call back and he doesn’t pick up, calls me, I’m doing laundry and I miss it, I call back while doing dishes, but to no avail. It’s comical, it’s annoying

It would never occur to me to read the news, but on occasion B is my own private anchorman. I get a text from him saying, simply, “u like ww3 bb”, and I know something weird has happened in either Ukraine or Russia or Israel. Turns out Iran has decided to send missiles to Israel in a tit-for-tat gesture after Israel bombed an Iranian consulate, which I had no idea happened. B’s friend in Jordan reports that the missiles are intercepted. The war has become war-ier. B sends me a tweet by LeBron James: “Nothing like 2 heavyweights doing What They Do Best! For the love off of the sport”. All the comments are approximations of “this is about Israel and Iran, right?”. I know now it’s time to go to bed. I am reading books again, which gives me a sudden rush of moral superiority. I’ll be on my soapbox explaining the importance of “sleep hygiene” by next week

182

Wednesday and I spend far too much time on YouTube, having various beefs between the famous and non-famous explained to me by peppy young men. There is one about a girl who claims her friend is after her boyfriend, and another about why one comedian doesn’t like another comedian, and another about a child star pilloried by her cast mates for defending somebody accused of grooming. I must really not want to live my own life today, because I am more soothed than usual by diving into the business of others. I have no drama in my own life except the crises I invent in my head and allow to drive me insane. I have also been neglecting my London friendships. I have had zero adventure since returning from LA, no unexpected outcomes, a very closed mind. I fell off the socialising wagon and now worry about being weird in social situations. It’s easier to work hard and hide in the hard work of YouTubers who generously collate information for me, cook it all down to a manageable video length like a red wine reduction

By nighttime I am making a lateral move to Reddit, watching clips of people wielding knives and smashing plates in diners on r/publicfreakout. I watch a man hide in the back of his car while the police smash its windows to get to him, then somehow re-emerge and drive away. A woman in pyjamas threaten to stab a waitress with a pair of tongs, another woman bite the tip of another waitress’s finger off, police in Madrid strangling a black man, a drunk driver pulled over for terrible driving crying and claiming she has breast cancer, a grandpa being tased and robbed as he enters his own house, some lady attempting to order a pizza by calling 911 and screaming when it doesn’t work. I’m not sure how many of these fall neatly into the “public freak out” category, but it’s not about taxonomy. If you want to feel like the world is unsafe, Reddit is the perfect skewed sample

I don’t get a call from A. He is helping tape a performance for The Daily Show, having helped the same band perform in Austin, and will go to Coachella in a couple of days with the band to honour a last minute invitation to play. He produced and co-wrote their record, but outside of this he is not being paid to work. Truthfully I’m not even sure what his role is in this mini tour of the US. I begin to wonder if the band’s lead singer has some kind of incriminating information on A that keeps him tethered to the operation. Perhaps this is all philanthropic, though I didn’t know such a thing existed in music production. None of the producers I know seem to go the extra mile if there isn’t a Grammy or glory or money or sex on the table. But perhaps, again, I have a skewed sample

By Thursday I am treating myself to a day off, stocking up on B12 vitamins at Boots and wandering Islington listening to Charli XCX. Her music is so unabashedly hook-y that it sometimes feels like eating too much ice cream. I find myself running my tongue across my teeth and around the inside of my cheeks after four songs, craving something less pristine and more mistake-filled. The drug addicts in my square are beginning their days when I return to the house, making plans to get more drugs. If I must choose a group of people to share my neighbourhood with, I prefer the drug addicts’ presence to the teenagers, who are infinitely scarier with their unchecked hormones and love of playing UK grime through crappy Bluetooth speakers

Most scary, though, are the thoughts that catch up with me when I’m at home and there is nothing to make or do. I try to banish them with food (duh), eating three cucumbers in a row dipped into tuna mayo, with writing, with reading, with pacing and smoking and with sitting and smoking poetically. Usually they go away, but I guess I’m without that extra 100mg of SSRI armour or something. It is a relief when V’s gallery art handlers come to deliver some art and hang the art around the house. They also mount a TV in my bedroom, which I figure I’ll either need if A and I lie together in bed during the summer or if A leaves and I plunge into depression. I will dust off the PlayStation if that happens, and finally allow myself to try Red Dead Redemption, which I bought during the pandemic but never got around to playing after Grand Theft Auto

C stops by in the afternoon after a heated call with A who stops just short of reneging on the handful of plans we made to go to Europe in June. Some band stuff came up, and some friends will be in London, and he alludes briefly to a “boy’s week”. C laughs when I fill him in on the call, expressing my frustration. He tells me I am now no different from any other woman in the UK whose boyfriend wants to go to the races or to a football match instead of the proverbial friend’s wedding or couple’s holiday. He’s probably right: my situation is the same, just more indie. Instead of sports it’s salivating over guitar pedals and modular synths, and instead of the couple’s holiday it’s a week in Athens going to art dinners and shows. Cliches aside, A is simply not a planner, and I am a planning fanatic. He lives in the moment and I live in the Google calendar. On the plus side, my garden is beginning to bloom - vines and leaves snaking up the walls and pale green buds on the brink of exploding. C has also never not cheered me up. What’s crazy is he would appreciate a trip to Athens more than A ever will

181

Tuesday it rains diagonally almost all day, but I find the wealth manager of my dreams. I hate that a devoted reader will be able to track my discussion on this blog of less and less relatable topics over time, but I never claimed to be a woman of the people. I still keep it unbelievably real and shop at the cheapest supermarkets. But I know in my heart this is because all eating is (still) a source of supreme guilt for me and so I try to spend as little money as possible on what must be bought. I mostly live in a bubble, as my therapist is quick to point out. I bike from private space to private space, no roommates, no colleagues, very few mirrors. I must have designed things this way accidentally because I love people, at least until they chew gum in my ear

I meet the wealth manager at my accountant’s office, and all the staff there keep asking what I think of their big renovation so I lie and say it’s great when truthfully it looks no different. There is a painting of Pete Doherty on the wall, rail-thin from heroin. My accountant tells me he doesn’t look like that anymore and I tell him I know and we lock eyes for a minute as though willing one another to state the obvious, which is that Pete Doherty is now fat. But we don’t. I am poured water and the wealth manager enters the glass cubicle, young and British with a fiancé vest and mysterious scars on his face. He is perfect. The immaculately put-together assistant shadowing him takes diligent notes while we talk, and I realise that my particularly shabby choice of outfit (raincoat covered in stains, Pilates trousers, New Balances also covered in stains) could be construed as a giant power move

I also realise how badly I needed an in-person encounter with one of these finance people, how much more relaxing and humane it all feels than the other two, conducted on Zoom. I tell the guy that the first woman I met with had a stock image of a boardroom as her Zoom background with the watermarks still on it, and how I felt I had no choice but to hold it against her. My accountant stays for the meeting and chips in with his tax wisdom. I am reminded I should make a will. “Unless”, my accountant says, “you plan to get married soon, in which case don’t bother because it’ll be voided by the marriage”. I nod obediently. All the information I’m given actually makes it to my brain for the first time since beginning my #investmentjourney. I agree to a second, more in-depth meeting, which I’m warned will be gruelling. I will be fiscally frisked, not only in having to explain my past decisions and having my present scrutinised, but I will also have to lay out a series of possible future career and life decisions that could affect my bottom line. I’m probably wrong, but it sounds alluringly like therapy. The wealth manager and his assistant zip their fiancé vests up and head out. I hug my accountant and pee and leave with something close to peace of mind

This allows me to work with an empty brain, and opt to fill it with Joe Rogan instead. I wish he would have that bee expert woman on again, with her gentle voice that seems somehow made for saying the word “bee” in as soothing a way as you can imagine. I would rather hear her elongate the word “bee” in my ear until it gives me tinnitus than hear one more person ask “do you condemn Hamas?”. I pack up and walk to the train as the sun sets, sit opposite a miniature schnauzer for two stops. I take a scalding bath with the remainder of my Epsom salts and before I get out I am moved to send A a nude for the first time ever. I cast aside any worries about this opening a can of worms later. I can’t remember the last nude I sent, except the non-explicit but definitely-suggestive ones I sent to Larry during the loneliest part of the pandemic, half of which show me giving him the finger. Sometimes I fear his Blackberry being searched after he dies, but I can’t be the worst of what is to be found there

One of the greatest joys in life is having female friends to whom you can send your nudes for appraisal, even after the fact. N approves from New York, and reciprocates. We trade gossip and opinions and outrage. I finally finish The Zone Of Interest after three sittings, definitely not how a film of any kind (let alone this one) is meant to be watched. But I’m a renegade. I can only do 25 minutes of Naziism at a time

180

Monday, an eclipse in the US. I look at maps that track the “path of totality” arcing from Mexico, whose sun will be covered by the moon first, to New England a few hours later. A news reporter for Sky says Airbnb saw a surge of bookings mapped perfectly onto the path. I get texts from A with videos of Austin suddenly plunging into darkness, and people howling at the sky. He says he immediately needed to shit when the eclipse happened. For some reason I am not into our call, nor was I particularly into the call A and A (other A) made to me last night, drunk in the daytime. I was invited to fly to Austin for 2 nights to join them, but I didn’t. And maybe that makes me dull and non-spontaneous. Maybe A is fucking other women. Maybe he is fucking his doubles partner. I have decided this may well be the case, and am trying to pretend to be okay with it. I find myself googling “how long can men go without sex” and getting upset when no clear answer presents itself to this ridiculous question

I watch The Zone Of Interest, and I watch cats staring into koi ponds. I find a rare link to Harper’s Bazaar’s since-deleted episode of Food Diaries, where Kelly Ripa walks us through her blatantly orthorexic meal schedule. Ripa looks like she’s been captured for ransom and forced to send a message to her family claiming all is well. “Sometimes I will indulge in a handful of almonds throughout the day”, she says, in between sharp breaths and not blinking. W sends me a first draft of the second song he agreed to work on for me, just when I’m losing all hope. Unfortunately he has made it a better song, heavier and fuller, like the music itself gained 50 lb. He asks me to record new vocals to replace the existing, poorly-cut and tearful ones when I’m in New York. I tell him he will have to say something mean enough to make me cry, so as to emulate the original. He says he is too afraid of “devine [sic] retribution”. I tell him the song is about being raped, and we have a long conversation about it. He tells me I should tell A about the incident as soon as I can, that he was in a relationship where the woman was being sexually harassed by her boss and her not telling W was a stumbling block. I want very badly to suggest to W that the main stumbling block may have been that she was a 25 year old Goldman Sachs intern and he was a 53 year old musician who puts 44 on his Raya profile. But I don’t, because he is being kind, and though I don’t fear “devine retribution” I know not to take for granted a music producer in a rare affectionate mood. I tell him I’m going to unwind with the second half of The Zone Of Interest and when he says he’s shocked I didn’t see it sooner, I tell him I hate movie theatres because of the chewing noises, and I wait for films to come out on my laptop

179

Two days of band practice, the second slightly better than the first but this could just be because I knew it would end on the second day. The joy to stress ratio is, as always, wildly mismatched. It is a carnival of loss of control. I subject my boys to so much passive aggression that I find it hard to look in the mirror on occasional bathroom breaks. I often forget that, when dealing with Brits, active aggression makes us freeze with fear, and so passive aggression is the only thing on the menu. It is the language of our earliest authority figures, our British mothers

We play 4 songs for the first time on Saturday morning and they turn from total trash to passable by Sunday evening. I try very hard to find the beauty in this process, like watching (or rather hearing) an infant learn to string a sentence together. But I can’t find it. To me, these songs were done when I released them, and I don’t care much for stripping them down to their bare bones only to try to weld them back together. And I would rather not learn, from watching them be played, how inconsiderately structured they all are. I think of them as simple, spare pieces of music because they took so little technical skill to make, but they are actually cruelly confounding in a way that even I can’t explain. What happens on Ableton should stay on Ableton, but we nonetheless muddle through. I meet T’s new baby over lunch, who sits on my knee and holds tight to my tobacco-stained finger. The baby wails when it is time to be fed, and wails more when it is time to be burped. He feeds so voraciously that he kicks his shoes and socks off his own feet. T’s girlfriend says she sometimes feels sad that he was born the day those people stormed the US Capitol, especially when their new baby book asks for press clippings from the child’s birthday

During a break, T shows me how Chat GPT makes images on his phone, something I’d never seen before. “Make a medieval tapestry depicting a synth technician with giant hands”, he types. And sure enough, it appears. We discover together the wonders of asking the AI to involve words in the images it generates, delighting in the mangled English. “Motivational poster for a struggling synth technician”, I type, having wrested T’s phone from him. “IN EVERY TANGLED WRES THERE'S A MOLODY WAITNG TO EMBERGE”, says the poster, complete with a lurid keyboard surrounded by wires floating in the cosmos. We laugh and laugh and laugh. “Billboard for the best guitar ever”, I type. “Inage nagine nialgic: the STARTOCARTER”, reads the result. I make an executive decision to purchase my own ChatGPT account, bidding farewell to any future hope of reading a book

On the plus side, spring has finally grown and pair and sprung. Any latent stress or disappointing texts are easier to handle when the sun is on one’s face. W, having asked to play piano on the song he is producing when we perform it in New York, writes to say he gets back from Sweden a day after both shows. I know to text N immediately, my go-to shoulder to cry on when being let down by men. It works both ways, of course. Turns out that even if you are happily married like N, there are still a sea of dudes waiting to make you feel both too-much and not-enough in every conceivable way. And naturally, N and I are quick to feel wretched in this way. It’s what keeps us from feeling ashamed in each other’s presence. I ride the train home and think about the many indignities of calling oneself a musician. Though I feel I have suffered many, certainly more than I would like, I have suffered fewer than most. And let us not forget I could opt out at any point, of all of it. But I don’t, because ultimately it hurts so good

178

Feeling lost, wondering what art is for, what SSRIs do, how mutual funds work. ODing on girly advice from Call Her Daddy, and I see the appeal of this podcast more and more the further I delve into its archive. It is the female id run wild, dumb and passionate and perhaps morally bankrupt. It tells you some of the most resonant and reassuring things about sex and love you’ve ever heard, then informs you that Emrata is a feminist, then teaches you how to sleep with a famous athlete’s best friend to upset him. Sometimes I think gender is less a social construct than a mental illness, which is to say that women are no crazier than men, just a different subcategory of crazy. The way listening to Joe Rogan will reveal men as deeply weird beings with their sports and their theories about the Clintons, is the same way Call Her Daddy reveal women as deeply weird beings, with their skittish libidos and theories about men

And a great friendship between a man and a woman is a beautiful thing, which is why I’m so grateful for J, who comes over on Friday afternoon to make me laugh and make me make him laugh. He tells me he has been advertised the same thing online for some time now, which is a blanket for the bed that he thought was for incontinence, but is actually to reduce some of the mess from female ejaculation. J says he wonders why the algorithm would offer him such a thing, and I tell him it’s because it knows he has two girlfriends. When he goes to the bathroom I open my Spelling Bee to score a few words, and J tells me when he’s back that his new favourite game is one by the OEC (Observatory of Economic Complexity) that has you guess which countries export which materials and resources. “It’s been really good for my geography”, he says

I’m about to bike home when B sends me a Google maps screenshot reporting that New York suffered an earthquake earlier. I tell him that’s crazy because I was on a zoom with one of the financial advisors hell bent on breaking my brain just a couple of hours ago who made a joke about his building in midtown Manhattan shaking. He briefly reached for the wall as though doing so would steady the whole structure, and went right back to estimating my net worth when I’m 90. B’s picture shows that the earthquake was 4.8 magnitude, which Google tells me is not severe, and which is why it’s funny and not depressing seeing a photo on Instagram later of t-shirts being sold with “I survived the NYC earthquake April 2024” on them. I like New York a little less every time I visit, but I can’t fault its residents’ resourcefulness and speed. I believe they were the first to embrace to-go cocktails during the pandemic, and I would expect nothing less

I bike home and think about Gaza, and my venting to J about how unpleasant it was to discuss the war with A. A had said “look, Israel has always had bad PR”, and I nodded obediently in the moment, but found myself stuck on this question for days after. Because on the one hand yes, history is one long undeniable campaign against the dignity and safety of the Jews and so a Jewish state was never going to be any different. Pretty bad PR. But then again I have never seen people lose their jobs, or artists chastened by their galleries, or actors fired by their agents for criticising a country before. Pretty good PR. In a nuance-less world, a bad faith critique of Israel and a good faith one are impossible to tell apart on Twitter or in the news cycle. And I think a lot of Israel’s flak is really meant for America, a country that manages to curdle everything it touches in its quest for power. And my country too, the colonial grandpa who fumbled the bag, baited and switched in the early 1900s and caused all sorts of trouble. Oh and Germany because you know why. It’s chaos. It is neither satisfying to ponder nor satisfying to write about. There should be a switch in the brain that forbids a person from mulling over something they’re not licensed to mull over. Stick to Call Her Daddy, I think. But I have to tell you that Emrata is not a feminist