8/23/16
precarity
Yesterday Jamie Lee Curtis type art lady hustled her way onto the train behind me at Bedford so forcefully I though it was a gay dude (because haircut) but when a seat opened up greedily jumped in front of me (and everyone) to sit down and open up the New Yorker app on her phone. The face of gentrification. The feeling that you have to be proactive of taking what's yours, what you've paid for. She has someplace to be. She's from somewhere, she's somebody, she has somewhere to go and is ready to fight for autonomy.
My neighbor was talking about the new building by the Grand street stop where the former store Liberty was. He said it's gonna be that many more people on the subway. Well yes. But there're new buildings all over town. Everyone's clogging the subway-- that's what the subway is for, no?
I guess I'm lazy. I'm taking the ambition the rudeness the entitlement personally because it feels like who I am. The person who gets trampled on by rich hipsters.
Certain death - either way I lose - why suffer? But then how to proceed in any other way ethically? How to act like I'm a person without acting like white older art butch lady gentrifier on the train. Even the New Yorker app is gentrifying because of the way it uses data and battery your phone.
My jaw hurts for the first time. It's a new pain. Do I have TMJ? Is it related to my other sicknesses? Is it stress? Why do I keep falling apart.
How to convey?
Wanting to share, to explain the context.
To project, imagine together the circumstances I'm operating under.
How can anyone know? What can I do to give you a sense?
Of the precarity.
The entropy.
My house being literally devoured. It's collapsing slowly around me. Everything's falling apart.
I'm watching the world end. Silently.
If you knew how chaotic it was you'd see how I'm actually doing a lot. A lot of beautiful goes into making even the smallest peace here. On planet chaos.
I want to instead of showing something beautiful I worry about adequately conveying the ugliness of the context.
I want you to appreciate the void I'm screaming across. It's a miracle any echo makes it through at all.
Typing this morning on my iPhone I imagine isn't so unlike stenography shorthand which my
Grandmother did.
Free writes. Feels like cages. Got bars got chains. Got jeweled cuffs. Got perspective. Got lenses.
To have to move. To go to school or something. Just be a fiction writer or something. Be an artist somewhere else?
God, can you imagine if I moved to some new city and had to make new friends, now, at 32? That would be cool. Imagine at 65. Maybe it's easier.
Do people even have friends
I mean does anyone.
All I want is to be someone. To mean something. To be a thing, to mean someone.
I sound like a fucking idiot.
I went away and I came back and I feel myself dragged across the surface of a stucco wall. Suburban and bloody and burnt and irrelevant. Aborrhent. Escape-bait.
Last night my analyst was saying how I'm hiding, how I've been hiding for years. How I'm afraid to come out. What would it take, he asked, for me to have a coming out party. What would it take for me to be able to come out?
Other people, I said.
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