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Reflections on 2024

The new year was marked by an encounter that I did not take seriously but curiously. It became entangled with some of the remains of 2023 (an ex) that I was actively clawing into, grasping at fragments until I realized I was talking to myself. It became clear that I had created an imaginary friend and introduced him to everyone. So I drove all the way to Arizona to pick up a new lover. Back in LA I seemed to feel both a proximity and distance with everyone I loved, with anything that interested me, with the ongoing genocide. A sense of self loomed over me but not with me and in its grappling it was both embroidered and dampened by an arrest, preceded by the linking of arms with a friend and masked, faceless strangers found at the front. Afterwards I proceeded with dispassion and submission as I dragged myself to New York, London and Cairo. I found myself most ambivalent in New York and most asleep in London. I felt boring. I framed my ambivalence as enlightened. In Egypt, I got caught in a riptide and went to bed at the intersection of the sun, sea, and dessert where i could make out the outlines of interest. Anywhere, love and depression felt muted and I remained confused as to whether they or I were present. Yet both were vessels that I used to pour out onto myself. So that by the end of the year, out of boredom and impatience, aided by a change of home and my best friend's move, i found myself in proximity. The last days of the year take place in New York, strewn about and across the same encounter, in the hopes that with repetition i am reaching approximation to something. I am not sure what.

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yesterday we went to a screening of francois pain's films about psychiatry and la borde. I'd heard of la borde through my familiarity with Fanon's work but I hadn't made the connection before the screening. I arrived with an acerbic attitude because juan made us 24 minutes late and we had to sit on the stairs. i moved away from him and thought about:

we feel and understand first through our feet -> eliza brings up her work in skid row and the unwell and unhoused walking, walking, endlessly and barefoot, the images of their feet and legs surreal, misshapen. these are the legs and feet of those who feel, and sense and stabilize most directly. whose bodies engage with the urban in a way no one elses in this city does. swollen legs and bulging veins are the city mapped onto them

i then think of dodie bellemy's essays on the homeless and the "insane"...how those on the outskirts of society are our beacons of hope -> francois pain talks about the blurred distinctions between sane and insane, mad and well, how patients at la borde became doctors and doctors, patients

left thinking about the guerilla practice of psychiatry, the need to not numb your patients in order to fulfill such a practice and the way in which my social work friends need to create something similar

lastly, i love thinking about those who live within us despite the fact that to move forward in life is to separate your inner self from them

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Chris Kraus on LA

“There’s nothing here except for what you’re able to project onto it. No information, stimulation. No digression. No references, associations, promises and so your own reality expands to fill the day. And this is freedom.”

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On Dodie

I spent 15 minutes looking for a line I read in Dodie Bellamy's collection of essays in which she very simply says, in passing, that she was on the phone, crying, breaking up with an on again off again lover. I don't remember the context but need it.

I never step foot in the school library but today I am at the very edge of said library. A handful of steps in and I sat. It was obvious that it was temporary. I wish I could say it was with the intention of being productive, but really I just needed to charge my phone. To do what exactly but only to be even more unproductive. I open my computer, I pull out Dodie's book and I flip through the pages. There are probably a number of other things I could be doing. My planner left in my bag. Why is that when I try so hard to look for something, to figure something out, and it takes so long that I cannot see a way out and I start to get these pins and needles in my legs and a nausea spreads over, the only solution that I see is masturbation? Is it because technically speaking I am already masturbating on this one thing? This one fetish I have that won't be satiated but by the acquisition of its tangibility? If I cannot touch it relief needs to be sought elsewhere? pleasure, satisfaction and determination redirected. I found this: "legibility is always on the verge, within reach but never quite here, like the orgasm you've spent your entire life grunting for. "

;so yeah I guess.

I find another quote: "My Vietnam vet boyfriend was very sexy, and he fucked with an abandon I have not experienced before or since, I was addicted to fucking him, would have done anything to get more of it, so in a way I relate to party-crazed Casey Anthony."

I remember reading them in tandem. I remember filing them away as I laughed, thought of Will and made mental note to find them again. I even stopped in the middle of writing this post for another 15 minutes to search for it. These are the ways in which I am stubborn. It has yet to manifest in something useful. Mainly its just me getting stuck, a brainless player in a game hoping to walk through implicit/explicit density. To try repeatedly, the same exact method, to begin to be frustrated and to break. I'm not scared to allow my methods to work towards a burgeoning destruction. Just yesterday, in my room, in blind and stupid determination, I hammered off the singular wheel left on a filing cabinet that I needed to have perfect at 10pm. All I needed was a bigger wrench and I actually could not fathom waiting 24 hours for one. I would have banged the cabinet to destruction, or at least until our downstairs neighbors crawled up to plea, if it was not for a guest in the house.

I'm looking again

I found it: "Memory: Finally breaking up with my on-again off-again long term lover over the phone while spending the night at Abigal's." PAGE EIGHTY SEVEN

thank god, this time it only takes 3 minutes.

She was 28? Still uncivilized; "a blur of raw emotions, ranging from the ecstasy of encountering a particularly beautiful day to panic attacks that left me doubled over."

So I guess I have at least another year of this.

Yesterday I said in class that context is one step closer to truth, provision of context itself is fact checking, I want context for my own life and I seek it in the life of others. Is that right or wrong?

I hope someone says I fuck with abandon...

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I dreamed I forgot by Leila Chatti

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she is so funny and smart <3

Dodie Bellamy in her collection titled When the Sick Rule the World

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i saw an interview with oklou where she said that she encountered a song on the internet during a time where she was consuming everything romantically, as in having deep emotional attachments and reactions. i've been recently feeling similarly. the last time when i was living in new york near the end of my relationship with kalim. i was excited by devouring. this song by rebe moved me while in the back of the car with asha and matias on our way to three rivers. what could be more romantic than the moon? the cameron winter album made me feel nostalgic,< im not sure for what. in advance for the very same memory i was experiencing? > with will driving on a radiating LA day and yet again, with another fanny howe book which fills my life with so much beauty ...

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my kitchen window at 6am. had woken up too early because i had slept too early. i love when that happens, it allows me to pretend that i am a morning person

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me asha matias joined augie julie alex, who are not pictured, in three rivers, an escape from the fire. picture of us facing the sun's reflection on ice. we were very unprepared

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Moyra Davey, “Dust, Amp, Trees” (2016), 4 C-prints, tape, postage, ink, 12 x 18 inches each, 24 1/2 x 36 1/2 inches overall (all images courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York) (click to enlarge)

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萩原 卓哉／Hagihara Takuya

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