20-08-2025

07-08-2025

The editor from ******** took me out to dinner. His best critic was 25 years my senior. Age is but a number, but it stuck out to me. He couldn't cobble change together from his pockets to pay for our drinks at the bar.

Dinner had been elegant and charged to the publication's card.

The critic walked around like he was expecting gangs of hysterical girls to chase him in the streets - as if he were a Beatle or Mick Jagger or a One Direction member.

Every few months he flew from **** to Vilnius to "dry out." He looked at me the whole time he detailed "ordering" women "to his room." He was daring me to be a prude.

I dared him to pay for my cab home.

**** 

The next night I went to a party at a crumbling townhouse just outside the city center. Everyone thought the proprietor was generous, but I suspected he was a shameless pervert, and that was how he managed to host all of us while seemingly asking nothing in return. It was enough for him to haunt the edges of the room, watching, to circle silently the dancefloor, to slip in and out of rooms with no entourage. 

At a certain point in the evening, I saw him drift upstairs, securing his exit with a velvet rope. Specterly, if you blinked you would miss his figure and only see the shadow on the stairs' landing. 

ended up in the courtyard alone with *****. There was a girl retching into the fountain, and it was a point in the night where no one else seemed to notice or care, and went on with their gay conversations around her. Her companion absentmindedly rubbed her back, without breaking her gaze from the rest of their table. 

***** was opening up Ozempic factories in the West. He told me they were testing the drug to see if it could be effective for any addiction. He talked about users and addicts being offered this drug instead of others at safe injection sites. He talked to me about the addiction for food, the addiction for alcohol, the addiction for sex.

I asked - its a drug to cure desire?

He told me how many lives it would save if it worked. 

I would never want to be cured of that condition. 

Then ***** spoke at length about his professional ambitions, surprised I could follow along or offer any meaningful advice.

Self consciously, he asked me a question about my work. 

I told him that I was interviewing someone who told me that women were "natural victims." that the most natural role for a woman was a victim.

He shook his head adamantly, protesting against this, telling me the scientific and biological facts why this was not so. 

He told me he believed in me, believed I would be great, do great in this world, that I really had something to say.

Talking about his upbringing, it became clear he felt he had something to prove.

He told me growing up his mother scooped ice cream as if he was saying she had a needle in her arm.

He looked deep into my eyes and expected me to tell him how awful and terrible and miserable it was, to be from where I was from. All the things I had to do to make it out. I hated disappointing him. The fantasy of my hardship crumbled. 

I'd had a magical childhood that I thanked God for every day. That I wouldn't have traded for anything. He was shocked I knew anything. He told me I had made it.

And yes of course I had made it, I must have to be sitting right here, next to him. 

5-01-2025

5 ways to tell you’re becoming enlightened

5 things you WONT expect on your spiritual journey

All their heroes were men who dealt in violence, all of them on the silver screen. There was no complexity to the characters. The all wore jeans that showed engorged groins white shirt that showed off biceps. They hit women and they smoked cigarettes. They died racing cars or decimating pipe bombs

She fell asleep watching true crime

She fell asleep conjuring her great great aunt Obedience

She fell asleep crying about her great Uncle Otis who slept with saltine crackers on his bedside table. 24 children living through the Great Depression

Her best friends name appeared in Instagram head lines for negotiating the 19th highest salary per episode on a network tv show. She was proud. She was living in this friends pool house. This news seemed to secure this situation for the foreseeable future.

Cult of identity v cult of personality

Cult of tragedy

Cult of getting excommunicated

Cult of nothing

She was no match for someone really believing in something. This sobered her up quickly

The cruelest part of it was that that’s what she believed all men wanted, and now they would only confess it to message boards to other men, never to women

Ali gave me miu miu heels. They gave her blisters. They matched my purple purse. She’s got them from Chloe Sevigny’s closet, when she was taking care of her newborn baby during 2020.

I wondered if we should go to Paul’s baby grand.

Ali’s ex boyfriend had gotten blasted on the internet for making paintings so terrible that it made onlookers hate all art and all artists, or art galleries, and male painters.

He was a total fuck boy. You know somethings wrong if they are over 6” and single?

At the last show I attended he hung a canvas that said “cafe Penis”

I thought..... wow this is really transgressive and special. So life affirming to live and love in New York City.

Sometimes I really zone out when bae talks about video games. I hope it’s not too hurtful for him. I think we’re doing just fine. My grandfather said never date anyone you wouldn’t marry.

Ask yourself this question: If nothing changed about this person could I be happy with them for the rest of my life?

Never marry anyone you would not want your child to be like.

I wondered if my friend would be able to break up with her boyfriend before their Euro trip or if it would happen in scenic Greece. It’s so sad that I can be such a judge mental bitch about men when I have truly strung along some of the worst.

I shuddered to see an ex was wearing Birkenstocks in a recent photo.

We made hot or not lists for the new year but I didn’t know which column our tik tok dance addiction fell into. I wondered why I wanted to spend soooo much money on Collagen gummies and face masks.

What did it mean that I was buying the things people were selling me?

We made pineapple coconut smoothies and waited for our boyfriends to call, Laying out on my bff’s slanted roof.

Her dad was moving the lawn and I could see his head moving through the gaps between my toes. I danced and wiggled them as he bee lined through the green.

My friends best friend grew up 3 blocks away in a ranch style house with a heart shaped sunken rock pool. We went all the time and her mother soothingly described the benefits of salt water. She brought out gin and tonics and smoked a spliff as the sun set. Green lizards were peeking out on the periphery of the fenced in yard.

I wondered how my girl friends could ever leave California. Especially when they had all this here, a mom and a pool, and the sun dipping like that.

The taco truck by Echo Park had a line stretching down the block. The air was thick and stretched time. I saw everyone I ever knew at that truck. They all passed me by while I waited in line to order.

Then I drove to Pasadena early in the morning to see my friend Ramona and her parakeet Apple. The bird perched on her shoulder, and ate pancakes off her plate.

Her mother was taking a long shower and I could hear her gorgeous opera singing.

The red clay around us held heat. We rubbed our backs into it. I stared up at the sky and prayed to God life could get better than this. Or if not it could just stay as good as this one precious moment.