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PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS







FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2024


#6: A WEEK IN REVIEW/ LONGLEGS REVIEW



 *Longlegs review at the bottom. Warning for possible spoilers. 




Catedral de la Almudena, Madrid




When times time passes this fluidly, not in terms of speed but ease, it
unsettles me. The opening of Misery describes tides washing over wood pilings
(abandoned) either receding and revealing them or covering them completely.
That's kind of how it feels, like being anchored or moored while time washes
away (the days, pieces of oneself; it leaves some too). There was a point last
year when this feeling overwhelmed me, though now I know or have come to know it
as a sign of change. 

.

My love has long black curls that coil and spring out and you can see her
witchiness crackling through them.  This is her sixth sense, goosebumps of the
hair, when the back of her mind is turned on but humming at a low frequency or
speaking in whispered Arabic, and there are spider webs carried by the breeze,
which might as well be what the world is, because everything else is what's held
in her eyes. 

I imagine that's what its like for her. Its not a feeling of dread; more like
knowing or remembering to know something that's been there all along. It felt
different, naturally, as it was the first time. I recognize within myself of
restlessness at times, edged with panic, and assumed it had intensified. That
was only part of it. I kept thinking of churches-- old cathedrals in Spain that
have stood to watch so much happen and end up being what's forgotten. Perhaps in
that respect they are reminders of how little things actually change. There were
things I had to accept about myself and what I wanted. There were things I knew
wouldn't change and things that could if I wanted. Had I been left behind, would
I be discarded eventually, disappointing and to be forgotten, not only to
others, but to myself?

.

Stumbling down the steps, kissed, caressed, and half undressed (really half
unbuttoned) out the bar I went, into a week like a ship out to sea. It's all
been a haze, the places I've been feel like I dreamt them, like kindergarten or
European train stations. Everything looks the way Layer Cake was filmed. 

There were books, after all, what else is left. It's been a menage a trois (or
does four people make it a proper orgy?) of "The Part About The Critics" in
2666, All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby, and various excerpts of Nabokov,
Miller, Genet, and Burroughs in a copy of the Olympia Reader that I bought on
Instagram for $10. 

You ever start off with a plan and end up veering so off course that it's hard
to even conceive the idea that you had a plan to begin with? It's like finding
the direction of the wind in a tornado, like trying to get oriented and the
compass keeps spinning. My thoughts often take courses I can hardly follow, and
almost always never follow back, like following one end of string through a
knot. 

.

Random text I got: one from an old boss asking how I was and telling me that one
of my coworkers has been thinking about Carthage--no, not New York, but what is
now modern day Tunisia-- A LOT lately; Something called Kraken's B. Evan and
it's team offering free crypto training; and the good ol' "THE USPS PACKAGE HAS
ARRIVED AT THR WAREHOUSE AND CANNOT BE DELIVERED DUE TO INCOMPLETE ADDRESS
INFORMATION...". 

.

Spain, in an effort to combat its recent spike in violence against women, has
become dependent on an algorithm which determines how much danger women in
abusive relationships are in, which of course has yielded mixed results. An
instance describes one woman in 2022 being sent home by police after she
reported being attacked with pieces of a smashed wooden shoe rack by her
husband, the software having given her a score of low risk after 35 yes or no
questions were completed. She was stabbed to death by her husband, who then took
his own life seven weeks later. 

How have we become so blind? We as a species created computers to handle the
innocuous and mundane, the calculations and problems that would take much longer
if done by hand. It was supposed to make our lives easier, not take them over
completely. Are we no longer content to have machines do the practical,
unimaginative tasks, so we give them canvases to draw on, poetry to write, the
ability to make music, when those are the very signs of our humanity, what makes
us who we are? Why are we leaving it up to a computer program to determine how
people should react to a personal problem, how they should react when a person's
life is in danger? Would that even have been a thought ten years ago? What is
distracting us that we can no longer deal with the human condition and instead
are passing off the quandaries of our experience to something inanimate and not
alive? Are we trying to create AI to being computers alive?

Perhaps it is a God complex, like Frankenstein's fatal curiosity, that compels
us to fly so close to the sun and build something in our image. Since man is the
only being (on this earth) that can build machines, it is only right that it be
what replaces us, what makes us obsolete, complacent, and ultimately irrelevant
in our own lives. 

.





LONGLEGS: Overall I thought it was good. I'd recommend it and I'll probably buy
it when it gets released. I like it more aesthetically than I did for the plot
or the characters or anything else like that, and that's not to slight any of
it, but here's why. It felt like someone's dream of the 90's some late 20th
Century dystopian left-turn episode of Stranger Things. It gives Mindhunter and
Silence of the Lambs. I, personally, am not a fan of horror plots that have to
do with cults. I don't know, I just find it kind of stupid, and lazy. The proper
horror villain has to have a mythos about them, an identifiable, individual
trait that defines them and sets the stakes for the story. A cult usually relies
on tropes like the common sacrifice and resurrection ritual. Now in this case
since its the Devil and Satanism, it veers more into occult than cult, like, say
Mandy, and the antagonist, the titular Longlegs (why he's called that is never
explained) has enough tension and presence about him that he is a convincing
macguffin to the real dark forces at work. Praise goes to the script for keeping
the the pace and making every scene a corner to peer around. 

The film has atmosphere that could curdle milk. It's heavy and tense and
maintains a  WTF and Oh Shit kind of expectation set up from the opening scene.
The exposition scenes are gripping, though its like waiting and looking around
like after a gun has been fired or in a Mexican standoff. Its imagery and score
establish lead-heavy dread whose culmination is upsetting like the end of Se7en
is total and bleak. The acting stands out with an almost Lynchian aloofness,
specifically Maika Monroe's main protagonist, whose aptitude for sleuthing and
constant observing-- she moves her head like a panning security camera-- make
her seem like an alien. Nicholas Cage as Longlegs is Nicholas Cage as a
maniacal, violent, eccentric satanist, unsettling like that one neighbor, with a
face that hangs off his skull from a botched plastic surgery job.

The element of her being inextricably tied to the killer was a bit of a reach
for me, as at that point I was accustomed the realism/ I had felt that the
film's albeit highly stylistic yet grounded approach was sealed for its
entirety, so I was not expecting for it to go the way it did and while I wasn't
disappointed, I was not expecting that. It is perhaps when that realism is
shattered by the supernatural is when the film shines for some, with that
ambiguous and total gut-punch of an ending. 


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WEDNESDAY, JULY 17, 2024


#5: PAUSE



And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Someone turned 24 on July 12, a Friday. The next day there's a surprise party
for him at his house. He vaguely suspected something was in the works but acted
surprised and was amused nonetheless. Family, friends, their spouses, sat a
table arranged like a bracket on its back, like looking at a keyboard from the
side. A hibachi chef was hired. In fact there were two of them. They walked
around with a Super Soaker full of sake and goaded (more like chanted or barked
at) people to take shots, but the sake was warm and not very good, so after a
while they stopped or mainly concentrated on the birthday boy. He had been out
prior and was already pretty drunk. The chefs made steak and chicken and shrimp
and fried rice with eggs. There was a bar with a TV that had been showing the
news since the party started. A presidential candidate had been shot, though
he'd survive. 

The dinner show ended and everyone finished eating, standing to drink and
socialize. Someone lights cigars and the birthday boy blows O's. Someone asks
him about his brother. He was here but he left, he says, adding, He said he was
coming back, although he doesn't sound so sure. Someone else brings up another's
recent engagement, a mutual friend of theirs through lacrosse... and the news
keeps playing... job talk, recent trips, the last time in the City; somebody
grabbing for the remote, changing the channel to another news station, while
leftovers are being wrapped up, the bar and tv are empty except for two men and
their cigarettes... and the news keeps playing... while somebody is running,
stripping his shirt off and diving into the pool, everyone turning their heads
and then looking back and around and assessing the collective question "are we
doing this?" until it is decided not much later that they, in fact, are, and one
breaks from the crowd, and then another, and another, until those remaining, the
few, mainly parents and a set of grand parents, are stepping over puddled up
shirts and blouses, wallets, watches, some underwear, deep spots in the slightly
overgrown grass-- like Van Gogh's strokes, which, if you look at The Starry
Night or Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds from the sides, you can see the deep
impressions of the brush, like carvings or signatures-- filled in with dabs of
color; stinging reds, smarting pinks. Whites like memory, that shine in the
dark; the rest swallowed by the shadows in the grass. 

***

Hip-hop is characterized by misogyny the way the Beverly Hills Cop movies are
characterized by destruction of property. I don't think hip-hop itself is
misogynistic. And I don't think it's misogynistic elements are endorsing hatred
of women, but it certainly describes some mistreatment. That aspect is largely
hyper-masculine, advocating for a type supremacy over women through
demonstrations of power. These are exaggerations for comedic effect, or that
touch upon-- slightly grazing the outer borders, really, like an astronaut
adrift in space and grasping for the severed tether to their space station, the
longest rope in the world-- the homosexual fault lines upon which the foundation
of masculinity (as we know it) rests. 

There are too many examples to enumerate or describe, but we can all think of at
least one thing common trope of masculinity that even though seems in-line with
traditional masculinity, is inherently gay. Or at least kind of gay. Hear me
out. There are lyrics and attitudes that walk the tightrope and may ultimately
be just plain nasty, like when rappers talk about passing it to their
homies-- it being, of course, pussy. The term pussy is not as personal or as
demeaning as saying women or bitches because of the  picture it forms in the
listener's mind; pussy comes off as something commercial, innocuous, playful
even. It's all very transactional and service-like, like handing the lighter to
the guy next to you, only in this example this may be more like lending him your
chap-stick. 

But he's the homie. Why would I want to be where my brother or any close friend
of mine has been, when it comes to intimacy and the exchange of bodily fluids?
And I can only wonder, based on what I've heard throughout my years listening to
hip-hop, how much more personal or intrusive or familiar can one really get with
their homies when they're in the studio lounging about, women literally hopping
from one to the next, not being passed around so much as they are making the
rounds. 

All my homies gotta eat. Like, I get you're looking out for your friends, as a
good friend should, but that kind of generosity changes a friendship dynamic
doesn't it? When one friend is procurer within an already possibly lecherous
relationship? I'm assuming the guy who is talking about passing it to the homies
and the homies gotta eat is the same dude yelling homies over hoes in the club
and is in some sort of position of power or influence or has access to the
resources associated with either-- or he just has a lot of money. The friends
around this individual may truly be his boys from way back in the day or have
been around long enough to where it's hard for this individual to imagine
getting to where he is without them, either as actors or witnesses. But most
them may have stuck around to catch whatever fell to the floor, and have been
getting fat or staying afloat by continuing to do so. However they may
reciprocate, it's enough to keep encouraging the generosity, the privilege to be
privy, in the successful friend.

Sex in vain, for show, is an extravagant, excessive act. It is a demonstration
of the worst kind of hubris and apathy and disregard for humanity. There's
nothing wrong with sex, but it is an act of ultimately base-level function that
it can be perverted by the act itself; the context in which it occurs. 

Talk about learning to love the process, is that not the true appeal of sex?, of
life itself, since sex is what leads to life, or life is what leads to sex,
although a strong argument can be made for sex as the origin of life in a
chicken-or-the-egg sort of way. The reproductive urge masquerades under exterior
stimuli; the engine beneath the body. What we call desire is merely perfume.
That's what gets us in trouble. The senses are what tantalize the imagination
and therefore torture the soul, inspiring ideas within us that spawn through
association. 

Take Louis C.K.'s SNL monologue from 2015. Through its entirety C.K. treks
through murky waters, but its when he arrives at the child molester bit that it
becomes relevant to this blog. C.K. jokes that if a child molester is willing to
risk being shunned by his community and society at large, to risk being
imprisoned and subjected to what he inflicted on the child he molested and much
worse, the impulse must be strong because the act itself must be feel extremely
good. It is the idealization of the features of children that have convinced the
molester that it will be heightened experience from the norm, unique even,
however the function remains the same, as the abstractions the molester has
married with the consummation of the act have no bearing the act itself, which
remains constant no matter the context. 

But would that not make it, by definition, a guilty pleasure? It deserves this
designation because a guilty pleasure should only inspire guilt if the pleasure
experienced or what is giving pleasure from is hurting other people. Any form of
sexual misconduct, violence, or any activity that robs people of their security,
sense of self, or at the very least possessions, should be seen as something
that should inspire remorse in the perpetrator, although there are countless of
those who are numb to that, out of twisted reasoning brought on by desperation
or what they think of as desperation, or because they genuinely enjoy it. Those
are the acts that should not be condoned, and which demand punishment in the
form of correction, not discouragement. Outside of that, there are no such thing
as guilty pleasures. Pure, consensual pleasure, is nothing to be ashamed of, so
long as you are ready to bear the consequences on the other said of the
experience. 


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THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2024


#4: RICHARD BURTON READS THE PHONEBOOK



 





We opened the restaurant on Monday after it was absolutely dead the day before,
so much so that my manager called me before my shift and told me don't even
bother coming in. I noticed there was a guy sitting in the lounge that we share
with the coffeeshop next door. He had a pile of four or five books in front of
him, on top of which was a stand or a lectern with a book wide open on it and
from which he was typing on his laptop. I went about my business and eventually
made my way there to wipe down the tables. He struck up conversation as he
started to pack his things. 

He asked about the restaurant, how long we'd been open, that kind of stuff. We
exchanged pleasantries, talked about nothing. He said his name was Chris. His
energy was awkward but pleasant and he spoke straightforwardly but his eyes were
shifty. I got the impression that he didn't have much of a personality, and
whatever he did have was not anything that I would want to get to know. He
seemed like went to the gym and got one of those stress balls that sculpt your
jaw (the angles of his mandible were like the fins of a '60's Coupe de Ville)
for posterity or to maintain normalcy. 

The whole encounter was fine, and we walked away from it most likely having
forgotten about the whole thing after a few minutes. However it was after those
few minutes for me that the owner of the restaurant approached me. Hey, did you
see a guy in there, black t-shirt and a bunch of books? Yeah. Did he just walk
out? No, he left a while ago, I said. We spoke for awhile.

Really?, asks the owner. What did he say? Nothing much, I said. I recounted the
banalities and told him his name. Well, that's not the name on his credit card.
Turns out the guy's some sort of sexual deviant, haunting coffeeshops in the
area. A few other businesses already have pressed charges against him. Since
we're closed tomorrow you'll be spared this, he said, but I'm gonna tell him
that he's not allowed in here. 

Damn. You never really know who you're talking to. This job is comprised of
random encounters with strangers, I'm used to that, although it struck me then
that I don't really think of them as strangers. They're customers, and they're
goals are very clear and our roles to each other are very defined. Maybe
sometimes I'll get curious about them, or they about me, but I can't say I've
ever had an instance where we've walked away as friends. Perhaps it's the
setting that erases the context of their lives outside so that my brain doesn't
make the obvious leap. I feel like I have intuition for when things get weird
but I'm not a naturally suspicious person. And then there's this guy, this
quivering yolk within an approachable shell, who set off no bells, and that's
probably how he likes it. 

                                                            ***               
             

Recently the algorithm has blessed me, which it's been known to do from time to
time. A video of Richard Burton, the Welsh actor with the voice of a lighthouse
horn welcoming you home after a long hard journey at sea, slid onto my feed. He
was reciting, from memory, Hamlet's response to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in
Act II Scene II. Though I go through ebbing periods of interest, I have endless
appreciation for the Bard, due in no small part to a certain high school English
teacher of mine who rightly pointed out that he is EVERYWHERE, at least in the
English speaking world. As one steeped in literature as I am (I have no life, or
at least, not one worth living without the written word)the musicality of
Shakespeare is nothing short if arresting, especially when performed by someone
as talented and mellifluous as Burton. 

What is it about the Welsh that they've got such great voices? Burton, Tom
Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Dylan Thomas. They command one's adoration, admiration,
attention. Maybe it's the salty sea air, or the soot of the coal mines that
coats their throats and gives their English a vibrato that feels like they gave
us the language. The tongue has arguably never sounded better than from theirs.
Burton especially. Many of the comments on his videos said that he'd make the
phonebook sound good. I'm inclined to agree. I think if he read the S&P futures
and stock information each morning, he might make me a finance bro. 

I always regarded him as that guy who was married to Elizabeth Taylor (twice),
known as being too drunk most of the time to hone his God given acting talent
and thus squandered it. But of course, he's much more than that. Performances in
films like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and his countless Shakespeare productions (in particular his run as Hamlet on
Broadway in 1964 opposite John Gielgud) prove that he was winning a lot more
rounds against alcoholism than he lost, and that he deeply cared for his craft. 

That's another thing the teach taught me: Shakespeare was meant to be performed.
His works are plays (I'm woefully unfamiliar with his sonnets) written to heard
aloud. The enunciation within Burton's recitation demonstrates the level of care
given to the material and the places which are meant to hit the ear; he does not
stumble, the verse is too well constructed. When someone like Burton performs
Hamlet, someone who can connect so personally with the material, you can't help
but be moved. Shakespeare has a way of resonating with the human spirit-- I'm
inclined to think of him more as a psychologist than Dostoevsky. Lines like this
and Hamlet's famous soliloquy are vehicles that communicate the human
experience: it's wonder, it's anguish, and the frustration of being unable to
understand either.


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WEDNESDAY, JULY 3, 2024


#3: WHAT'S THE FREQUENCY KENNETH?






On October 4, 1986, CBS News anchor Dan Rather was turning onto Park Avenue from
E 89th Street when he noticed two people following him. As he walked they got
closer until they caught up to him and began beating him while asking "Kenneth,
what is the frequency?". Obviously, they got the wrong man. Or did they? Much
later, in 1997, a mentally disturbed man named William Tager was confirmed to be
the assailant after he was arrested for the murder of an NBC stagehand outside
of The Today Show three years prior. Tager believed that television networks
were beaming signals into his brain. I heard about this incident through a
YouTube video I'd come across, and while this was all new to me, the phrase rung
familiar. I'd heard it in a song of the same name by R.E.M., although I can't
remember where I'd heard the song. 

It's interesting to see the YouTube comments strung under a song, like the
scrawl of those before you on the walls of a bathroom stall. Epitaphs, fun
facts-- did you know that the guitar being used is actually Kurt Cobain's
personal Jagstang that Courtney Love gifted to Peter Buck after Cobain's
death?-- and memories the song invokes, where they were when they first heard
it. If art is proof of life, this is the supplementary evidence. A testament to
humanity. We should print these out and bury them in the time capsule or end
them into outer space so the aliens can know what we're about. 

I'm to young to know R.E.M. well, but in this day and age, no one is too young
or old to get into anything. We exist in a vacuum facilitated by the internet,
and propelled by a constant nostalgia kick, which in a way can't be helped. Good
art is always a call back to something else, and on and on. There is no more
linear progression, everything sort of exists at the same time, like a flat
circle, speaking strictly in terms of pop culture on the Internet. Oddly enough,
the theme of the song, according to Michael Stipe in an interview with Rather,
is about being out of touch with the new age, asking questions that lead
nowhere, only to more questions. 

The randomness and chaos of Rather's attack, of how we got to this moment, are
things that can be explained technically with what we know or think we know, a
lot of it is just what we've been told, but why in itself is a futile basis for
any question, because it's one that never has a true answer. Not all questions
have answers, and it is perhaps because of some conditioning that we think
there's some kind of causality when we pose them, as if us asking immediately
manifests an answer, or the answer gets lost on its way to the tail end of the
sentence, behind the question mark and colon. 

You said that irony was the shackles of youth

.

I know what they mean now by "Hill Country." "They" being the people who coined
the phrase, whoever that may be. Though predominantly used to describe central
and South Texas, Nashville, or at least the area surrounding it, the
metropolitan area, where I spent most of my time on a recent trip there, is all
hills: soft green sea undulating with rolling knolls and houses nestled in their
peaks and valleys. 

I was there for a wedding of a high school friend-- two of them actually, as
they were marrying each other. The service was Russian Orthodox. It wasn't long,
only 53 minutes according to the chronograph I wore to the service, although the
early summer humidity and made it seem so, coupled with having to stand for the
majority of it. At least it wasn't in Russian, that way I (and pretty much
everyone else in attendance, I doubt anyone except maybe the priests and the
choir spoke Russian, so we) could follow along and look for any markers of time,
looking for any similar cadence that it might have with a Catholic ceremony,
although that would have been pretty cool. The venue, on what was most likely
old farmland or a ranch at some point, was lovely. There was a patio between the
reception hall and the chapel where people were coming out for air, taking
pictures, and smoking. I shared a few with two brothers from my hometown and
family friends of the bride. 

The youngest and I spoke about bloat: what was in our lives that we'd given up,
what was in the way of our goals, and specifically how we felt at the moment,
having hydrated with rum and seltzers and local IPAs since the service ended. He
told me a story about a step-cousin of mine, a friend of his, who once got so
drunk that he peed on his dining room table. 

"What?" I'd heard of some of his other drunk antics, but nothing this
egregious. 

"No seriously. He'd passed out and at the end of the night I wake him up to
drive him home and he gets up and walks off. We're waiting at the door. A few
minutes go by and we think he's in the bathroom. One of us goes to knock on the
door and out the corner of his eye-- the sound, not so much the sight-- is the
splattering drum of urine, and this man, with his head back and his eyes closed,
holding steady with both hands. He called me the next day and asked what kind of
flowers my mom liked. My dad told him ' You're always welcome here, just use the
toilet!'."

The oldest and I talked about Mexico. I'd been last year. He'd lived in
California for a few years, first in the Bay Area, then in Los Angeles and San
Diego where he'd made a few trips across the border. 

"First of all"-- he confirmed for me-- "they only search you on the way back in.
You drive over and there's a train that takes you to Tijuana. You leave your car
in the lot. I went to this bar there-- I'd been there a couple times. The girls
are dancing on the ceiling, like fucking acrobats! There was this one, dude, I
had never seen eyes like hers. They were blue in a way that I couldn't
understand, like if someone were to describe to you blue, how it feels. I kept
calling her over but she just kept swinging. But there were plenty of others.
Those places are all run by the Cartels. You can tell. Those guys that are
dressed way to nice to be in a place like that, those are the ones you watch out
for. One of my friends one time was in the back with one of the girls. He liked
to smack ass. They told him to keep his hands to himself. The second time they
dragged him out of the room and roughed him up, like, they left marks. All we
could tell him was 'They told you so'."




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#2: REGULAR WEENIES, $50 SURFBOARDS





She's the bartender at the restaurant I work at. The last time I saw her, a few
nights ago, we were driving to my house in her car after work. 



We talked about French literature. She said she liked Marguerite Duras. I'd
never read her. I said I liked Arthur Rimbaud and Albert Camus. She said that
the way we read the first sentence of The Stranger completely different in
English than in French, which is how it's supposed to be read. There's nuance,
she said. Maman doesn't mean Mother or Mom or Mommy, but something in between,
something else. She turned at a stop sign and we talked about France. She she
missed it and that she wished she stayed. Her visa ran out and she came back,
then her father got sick so it worked out so she could take care of him. Maybe
when he dies I'll go back, she said. He'd fallen ill suddenly and it was grave.
Illness tends to give the impression of time remaining, and his time seemed far
off.  

She left me on the corner of my street. I got home and laid in bed and thought
about what we'd talked about, what she'd said about Duras' time growing up in
Vietnam, the miles on her car, my own time in France. 

The week after she'd left all the windows open in her car. There'd been a
heatwave. It was nighttime and once we got going it wasn't so bad, You could
still hear the radio over the wind. A fan of the Traveling Wilburys, are we?, I
asked, assuming her dad was. This week I am, she said. 

.

I go down rabbit holes with watches. This week after reading about John Lennon's
long lost Patek, I spiraled down the endless lineup of chronographs that Google
loaded up for me. I already have one, admittedly, a nice one: a Jacques Lemans I
bought in Vienna. But watch collecting (more like an addiction) is all about the
chase, what's missing, although what is missing from what we already have is
ethereal; it's intangible. It's an idea, more like abstraction that we project
onto each watch we covet or acquire. It's rarely about what we need. Most become
accustomed to a watch's functions after they buy it either to justify the
purchase. 

.

This guy I work with said he was going with a friend to a concert in Brooklyn.
When I asked where they were sitting, he said, "I'll be in the pit. He's gonna
be in the stands with his friends."

.

I thought I'd be working at some high-end-but-intimate Captain Jack local
watering hole but instead of Pabst and Guinness it would be red and whites. It's
just another spot on Long Island for rich assholes to congregate, another
pleasant setting for their conversations; pretty plating over which to fling
their gossip. Was there ever a time when a restaurant was offering a public
service, perhaps even an education (that might be a stretch) instead of being a
place where people gorge themselves and like to be seen at? 

There was an elderly couple who came in the other day. The man had dementia, his
wife said. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, I was looking at an
abandoned house: door agape, windows smashed, hollowed and pitch black on the
inside with howling draft blowing throughout. 

They sat at a two top and she arranged his silverware and talked to him, holding
his hand and occasionally wresting the bottle of from him after he'd overfilled
his glass. She ordered for the both of them but only she got wine. When their
food arrived she cut his up and left him with a smaller portion while the rest
was moved onto a separate plate and eventually thrown out. While she was cutting
she knocked over a votive candle and spilled wax on the table. I went to clean
it though it dried quickly and wouldn't come off and she apologized and then
said nothing and after a while she went back to cutting. At one point a woman
two tables came over. She spoke to the wife but I couldn't hear. The old lady
nodded a lot and at one point started to tear up and then the woman left and the
old lady went back to her food. Eventually they finished and got up to leave. I
watched them walk to their car out front, which I assumed was the Mercedes sedan
(navy blue) from what looked like this model year. I just had a feeling.

I heard a story once about a homeless man who used to wander around downtown
Manhattan, near NYU. His hair was overgrown and unkempt like his beard. He wore
a suit that was ratty and filthy and would always lurk around this one street
corner. Once a month he'd stand at the corner and a limousine would pull up.
He'd get in and a few hours later he'd return clean-shaven and well-dressed only
to regress back into his tattered appearance in a few days time.

I watched the woman, elegant in her kerchief, her head held high, purse on her
arm, and her husband, in a polo shirt shirt and shorts and tall socks up to his
knees, get in the car and drive away. 

.

"My hands are of your color but I shame to wear a heart so white." I've been
trying to put this in context with my life and the world today. I don't know
when or how I'd ever use it in a sentence. 

.

Halal carts are the new hot dog stands. But that's not news. Some friends and I
were shooting pool on East 11th and found our man outside Penn Station. I've
come to find out that that area is called the Penn District now. Anyway, the
three of us stood by the stairs of the Madison Square Garden entrance, our combo
over rice platters colored like the Italian flag (if it doesn't look like this
you're not doing it right), stuffing our faces.

A regular weenie and bun doesn't cut it anymore. The diasporas blowing through
the United States, especially in NYC, and the cuisine that comes with them are
the spinning vanes marking the winds of change. Maybe it's also a sign of the
change in dietary habits in country since hot dogs were the staple snacks of
city corners. That's not enough to fill you; maybe satisfy a craving, sure.
People are more on the go, the time constraints on their lives more demanding.
Our hunger reflects that. The taste of halal reflects that too. It's naturally
eclectic enough for other cultures to see themselves in it or find something to
like. Two white boys and a Latino had a moment of silent understanding and
unity, outside of our friendship and shared life experiences. 

But our group was light by one. The fourth leg of our shiver had ghosted us,
which hurt as not only was one of us leaving for the rest of the summer that
week, but dude works right in Manhattan and could have easily met up with us. I
saw him and a mutual friend of ours a few days later at our local greasy spoon.
He didn't have an excuse for skipping out on us, not really. But he did have a
story. 

Two days after that night in the city, on Friday, he was walking home from a bar
in town when a car pulls up. The window rolls down and its a girl who said she'd
seen him at the bar and thought he was cute. 

Me?, pointing to himself (he was walking with a friend). 

They exchanged numbers and halfway down the street to his house he gets a text.
Wyd tonight?

Hanging out with you, he says. 

Wanna go skinny dipping?

I'll call an Uber. She sends the address. 

The car winds down a private road. She's home alone so the house seems bigger.
They kick it in the kitchen then head to the back. She rolled a joint and they
smoke by the pool on two lounge chairs, strip and wade in. They kiss on the
stairs and take it inside, and it's almost four in the morning when he leaves.
He's still in the daze though; I see it on his face and the way his arms hang
from his hands folded in front of him on the table. 

.

Another friend just bought a surfboard for only $50 and it is in great shape. I
have not had such luck. I'm tall, maybe that's my curse--- I've definitely heard
that one before. I've wanted to surf since I first tried it in O'ahu when I was
14. It's since become one of those underlying interests,  that reveals itself
whenever I brush up against it or something close to it in my day to day life:
an episode of JRE with Kelly Slater or Shane Dorian; William
Finnegan's Barbarian Days, which I thought I snagged a copy of (due to... the
luck of the draw, just life I guess, my books have been in no discernable order
since 2022. And as the library grows, I forget what I have); Instagram reels.
But essentially, the throb always returns. 

Some people are afraid of the water; I've always taken to it. Maybe its from
growing up on the island, or maybe because of my sign, I don't know. I think it
has less to do with swimming or knowing how to swim or even what's in the water,
which is certainly and legitimately a valid concern, but more to do with that
feeling of weightlessness. It's been said that riding a bike is the closest
thing to flying, but then what is surfing? The momentum of the wave under you is
the closest that the singular, average human will feel to the propulsion of air
currents beneath a bird or a jet plane or Superman. If there's one force of
nature that humans are constantly pushing back against, it's gravity. With
surfing, it is through nature that we are unshackled from the G-force despite
the current hurtling us back to shore each time. 


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FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 2024


THE JOY OF CERTAINTY







"I'm against certainty more than anything else. I like doubt and I abhor
certainty. Anybody who is absolutely sure of anything I'm very wary of."
-Anthony Bourdain




In the mornings, on my way back from the bathroom, I turn on the radio on my
dresser. It's a Crosley record player that's also part Bluetooth speaker. I keep
it tuned to the news while I make my bed. Recently, I heard the whistle of a
jingle during an ad for psychic readings. I thought I was still dreaming. 

But no, these psychics were real, and from California no less. Experience the
joy of certainty, the ad boasted, or your money back. What an odd insurance
policy, I thought as I tucked in the corners. How does one report a psychic's
lack of prescience or the misfortune caused by it? I would think that most would
only know when it was too late. Can you imagine calling their hotline and being
placed on hold as the plane you're on, the one taking you on that trip that you
weren't sure about going on, nose dives into the Atlantic? 

Knowledge of the future inevitably changes it. This is pretty weighty stuff that
carry serious repercussions; it shouldn't be doled out willy-nilly. The
government must, on some level, run the racket on psychics, so it would be no
surprise if they allowed a few of the low level (or perhaps low perception or
low concentration) ones to employ their foresight for profit. But if the U.S.
government (or any government for that matter) did have any sort of credible
resource for looking into the future, it would cast events like 9/11 and the
COVID-19 pandemic in an entirely new and sinister light.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, and I know that's not how psychics work. There are
aspects of reason and deduction and logic that goes into the questioning of
clients during readings. It's veiled deception and guidance, specifically a
false sense of the latter that acts as reassurance. Certainty provides a sense
of security, feeding that deterministic need, that feeling of agency, that we
crave. It appeals to our sense of control. 

What they're selling--- certainty--- relies on faith. The business stays afloat
because of the faithful who continue to pay for these readings, impressed or at
the very least satisfied with the results. It's non-committal. They dispense
their forecasts and premonitions and send you off, whereas religion asks of its
followers to pledge their loyalty and promises that they will be rewarded in the
long run. Certainty cannot exist without faith because the two offer no
guarantees. One can never know for sure what will happen outside of immediate
cause and effect.

Faith is more personal as it is the individual, for the whatever reason,
trusting or deciding to trust a belief or belief system, while religion is the
bigger picture, the system which supports faith, what you are trusting. Faith is
the belief while religion is what you are believing in.

The psychics offer a purely transactional service that  is immediately
gratifying, or at least more immediate than organized religion. The magic of the
psychics is its singularity, its focus on the action of the individual. You make
the call, you pay the fee, they ask the questions and orient you towards the
answers.  

Narrative is perhaps the predominant form our thoughts take to understanding the
world around us. Everything is narrative, which means that it can be
manipulated. There are modes of persuasion for this very reason, but the meat
and potatoes of the rhetoric/ narrative is information--- what is being
conveyed. That's where the questions and guessing come into play. Religion is a
system, it's sequential. A sequence is a narrative, cause and effect, a binary.

Professional psychics (if there really are such thing) are adept guessers, using
any clues or information at their disposal to shape a narrative specific to you
but vague enough to account for agency, doubt, the unexpected. Second sight is a
narrow lens after all. What is life if not a narrative sequence, a pattern, with
some predictable elements?

The psychics won't promise you anything--- they know better. Traditional faith,
aside from having a socio-cultural foundation, is predicated on promises,
commitment; a covenant. It erases autonomy as two or many become one and create
a entirely new thing.

It's funny how over time the world has lost some of its magic as science and
critical thinking have dispelled some of its mystery. We hear stories of fairies
and dragons and urban legends of weird phenomena that have been dismissed as
myth as time goes on. Spirituality has been largely replaced by practicality as
people's needs have changed, and so a new system--- capitalism--- is implemented
in order to service them. For centuries people thought that sailing was a
suicidal endeavor: you'd fall off the edge of the earth if the kraken or the
sirens didn't get you first. Once it was established that that (generally)
wasn't the case, global trade routes were established, facilitating travel and
immigration that took advantage of the economical opportunities created.

Despite their predictions, the responsibility of the outcome falls entirely on
you. The service is the example made flesh of "I don't know though," that
zafa-cure-all defense spell absolving any advice giver of responsibility,
insurance against uncertainty. People like a sure thing, fine, but it's the
risk, the change agent, that acknowledgement of the binary, the other, possibly
countless, infinitesimal possibilities simply summed up as "or" that puts that
reminds the client of the unknown random variables out of the psychic' sight and
out of both the client and the psychic's control. 

They say you can't put a price on peace of mind but that hasn't stopped people
from trying. Certainty is not an easy commodity to come by or supply/provide,
making it all the more valuable. Insurance is only there for you for when things
go wrong, but who can guarantee that things will go right, or at least advise or
warn you to anticipate change?


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SATURDAY, MAY 25, 2024


THREE DAYS IN MAY












The third week of May hammocks and sways as the summer approaches. It's been in
the high 70's, low 80's, with a cool breeze blowing like a long silk ribbon
between the knees and behind the neck. 

It smells like fresh-cut grass and there are church bells tolling. Schools seem
to burst open at the end of the day and everyone is outside. 

There's a forgiving brightness to the sun, a benevolent light that, if it were
any hotter, would glaze everything visceral, instead casting colors pleasant and
vibrant. 

Flowers burn purple, red, yellow, against green hedges and lawns, alive and
teeming, as if they've never been there before. 

Maybe this is what the rain relents for; the clouds have wandered elsewhere for
moisture and everything feels so light, like you could fall into the sky above
and keep falling and see nothing but blue. 

There's a buzz of machinery and a low hum of traffic. On the water there are
boats quivering in their moorings, flags that fold and flutter and fold again in
the itinerant wind.

People are laughing, like music playing--- a familiar song. It's a tone that
hopefully sticks around for a while.


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