suiciderealestate

[suiciderealestate]

Midnight - June 15, 2020

What a strange time and what a wonderful thing to be alive to see it. What started as something so incredibly dark is now transforming into a cleansing fire. I’m only disappointed that I’m not in New York to be more a part of it. Still, being home has been oddly good for me. I dreaded coming back to Nashville and being inexorably bored, but that hasn’t really happened. I find lately that it has been difficult to be bored when there are so many things to be done. Even when I am doing nothing, knowing that my world is suffused with things to be done has deprived me of the possibility of boredom. To be home again with my friends and family who understand me, to be able to do work in things I enjoy or at least aspire to enjoy, all of it has allowed me to get closer to my center. And yet, I still feel that lingering sensation of missing out. It always feels like the most important things are happening somewhere else, and I’ve never quite been able to shake that. But then I suppose it’s just what goes along with being human, being this atomized lump of agency and desire in a swirling universe of invisible singularity.

Everything is so uncertain right now, but it feels like there is a reckoning. It feels like the conservative forces that have left me feeling less than human all my life are finally being seen for what they are. I admit that I have internalized some of it, that there are biases within me as a southern white male that feel contradictory sometimes. But this racial revolution is so much more than just a demand for actual freedom for black people. It is a demand that we all be seen as human beings, that we are all treated with the dignity and respect owed to everyone. Sure, “All Lives Matter” may be another tone-deaf rightwing trope, but I think it’s the real meaning in “Black Lives Matter.” We are fighting for equality for black people now because we are fighting for equality for us all, and we must start with those who are most vulnerable. Yesterday in New York City there was a peaceful demonstration of solidarity with black trans women, who have proven to be one of the most vulnerable populations in our country. Around 15,000 people were there. All of my friends in New York were there. It feels like something good may yet come of all of this.

When Donald Trump was elected, I remember being vaguely disappointed but slightly amused. I never wanted Trump to win, but the fact that he did win meant something big was going to happening, and I hoped it would be the destruction of the Republican Party as we know it. I still hope for that. His entire presidency was like a game of chicken. Something big would happen and you’d think he would finally be held accountable, and then he wouldn’t be. Against all odds, he won the presidency against Hillary Clinton, even after the “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment and all the nasty, incendiary behavior that kept him and his rallies in the headlines. I mean it was really such a catastrophic political upset that you just knew the wheels of history were about to go into overdrive. Trump survived all the damning books written about him. Trump survived impeachment. Things even began to assume a sense of eerie normalcy for a moment, the feeling that a Trump presidency was a one-way train and that there would be no going back for our country.

When the pandemic landed in the U.S., it just felt like the disastrous culmination we all knew was coming. We floated through Trump’s term with much political turmoil but much less unrest than I would have anticipated. Sure, the news headlines were never-ending until things that were once surprising became mundane, but we didn’t have a 9/11 or a new war, which is the thing I was the most afraid of. No nuclear disaster. No economic collapse. Just a lot of quiet social regression and the unavoidable feeling that now more than ever we are a nation divided. When the pandemic came, that’s when it really happened though. That’s when we knew why a president like Trump is so dangerous, and it’s because he just lives in his own world, the same way that many of us do, but in a way that the president of the United States cannot afford to do. It was a loss for diplomacy. It was a loss for the sanctity and decorum of the office. It was a loss for our national pride, or at least half of the country’s national pride.

When the virus hit I was so afraid. I felt like things really were just going to fall apart. Trump didn’t care about the virus. His response strategy was and still is, effectively, to ignore it, to refuse to wear a mask, to project not strength but the delusion of invincibility. He was so confident the virus would go away, it was almost like he knew something about it that we didn’t. Cases are spiking in Tennessee and several other states where people just don’t care about safety, but it’s mostly poor people of color that are being affected. A factory of minorities falls ill in a factory outbreak and it’s business as usual. Nursing homes all over the country become easy bake morgues and it’s business as usual. And to be quite honest, that kind of apathy easily rubs off.

As the rallies and demonstrations protesting the routine racial violence began to grow and spread like wildfire all over the country, we began to experience a kind of political paradox. The Trumpers are following their messiah’s lead by ignoring the virus, celebrating national holidays en masse, grilling out and thronging together in celebration of summer. At first the liberals criticized the behavior, but now even people on the left seem comfortable to travel in crowds during protests, as long as they wear a mask. To them, that seems to be the distinctive difference, but not every protestor I’ve seen has worn a mask. Neither side agrees with the reason the other side is going outside, and yet are all going outside. When I got home, my friend and I were spraying the ATM with disinfectant. Every trip to the grocer store felt like a dangerous foray into enemy territory. The news coverage of the destruction being caused by the pandemic was constant, and the reports, voices and opinions of the reporters and pundits were always in the back of my mind. Everyone on Instagram was urging people to stay indoors. Proper quarantine etiquette became an online rhetorical trend. But when the riots started and the political fabric of our populous seemed to be ripping apart, the headlines shifted and the attention shifted away with them. Right now in Nashville there are more cases of the virus than there have ever been, and it only promises to keep getting worse. I think it was just yesterday that I saw a picture of a girl’s lung infected by coronavirus that had been taken out during a transplant. It looked like a piece of rotting corned beef covered in pus. The lung belonged to a girl supposedly with no history of smoking.  And yet I am strangely at peace. Still, it’s the same kind of peace I felt when Mary Jane’s car got t-boned and was spinning out of control. I thought I was about to die, and in that moment I was prepared to die. But I didn’t. I can’t help but wonder if this newfound tranquility is just a false sense of security, or anticipation of an inevitable sort of death. All I can really do is hope that fate will smile upon me, and if it doesn’t then I just hope to have the strength to let go of whatever tragedy comes. We are all ready to get back to our lives. We are all ready to return to a world in which this pandemic didn’t exist, but wishful thinking isn’t enough to make this chaos go away. Here we are, a nation on the edge, and we are embroiled in perhaps the most controversial presidency in American history, a deadly global pandemic, and now a revolution. When George Floyd died I was numb.

But it wasn’t because of people like me that the world is changing. To be honest, I am well aware of my complicity in a system that has more or less afforded me a great deal of comfort. Within the context of everything happening, watching black people lose their lives for no reason over and over again to the officers who are sworn to protect us all reminds me that circumstance has not been entirely cruel to me. I am thankful that something is happening. I am thankful that the protests are ongoing. I am thankful that finally our country is being forced to stand still, that the wheels of capitalism are slowing down for just a moment, so that we can evaluate who we actually are, to make necessary changes, and to proceed forward to a higher consciousness of freedom. But I know that there is a greater battle ahead of us. The opposition is rallying its forces, and though I am confident that the worst elements of our nation are their own kind of minority that can be overcome, I know it will not be without a fight.

History is happening every day, and I want to be there to document it. I want to be there to take part in it. If I am going to continue my life as a voyeur then I want to be an active voyeur. I want to tell stories that will result in meaningful change. But these are dangerous times, and I don’t only risk my own life when I attend the demonstrations. Living with my parents has given me a needed sense of comfort, but I know that being here and continuing to live my life more or less is putting them in danger, and if I wasn’t here they wouldn’t be in danger. It would be nice to stay in Nashville for awhile and save some money, to spend some time with my friends and reacquaint myself with the city I was born in as I head out of my youth and into my 30s. I don’t feel as old as I am. At twenty-nine I still feel a lot like a kid. I’ve often said that I got stuck in the mind of a 19-year-old when I did acid on Halloween in 2010. That night has remained the most impactful night of my life, and yet I have always been at a loss regarding what to do with the experience I had. I want to begin my life as an adult, to continue or at least approach with more vigor the essence of what will be my life’s work. I’ve been searching for it, and to be honest I just don’t know if I’ve found what it is.

I’ve become mostly accustomed to a life in which my major depression has left me unmotivated by most everything. I’ve been looking for that motivation everywhere. I searched for it in Kansas. I looked high and low for it in New York. I expected that New York would give me everything I needed to find that buoy of inspiration we assume every great artist has, but if anything New York just confronted me with the hard realities of our vapid, money-driven world. But as everything is dismantled and falls apart, I’ve become more hopeful than ever for a better future for all of us. We might not be able to fix the money-driven part of things just yet, but I really do believe we are taking steps in the right direction toward building a more free world. If this is just the calm before the storm, then let chaos reign. 

[suiciderealestate]

I hope you’re doing well at a time when so many of us are not. I have to admit I didn’t think Hanna’s party would be the last place I would see you. I should have had more foresight, and even when I left without saying goodbye I knew I had made a mistake as soon as the door closed behind me. I should have known how precarious my situation was and how little time we probably had left together. I think you knew it and I knew it, but I was in denial of it. I became angry with you that night because one of the first things you said to me was that things would be ok if I left, that I could have the last of the two photographs of us from that night on Halloween before everything went to shit. I know you only meant to be reassuring, but it felt like you were rushing me out the door. I was reminded that in some way your kindness was a favor to me, based probably to some extent on a sense of pity you feel toward me. You didn’t need the keepsakes of our time together because you felt, maybe rightly, that they would mean more to me than they could ever mean to you. You didn’t need me. I was the only one who needed you. Any affection between us was a favor you were doing for me, which you made clear to everyone during the pregame to my "gone" party. And so I lost it, and I made such a scene when I should have instead recognized that you’re just a sweet, stupid boy who knows not what he does. You plod blindly forward and do your best to make people happy, and for me maybe your best would never be enough. I left New York two weeks ago. With the pandemic outbreak that followed I guess my timing was pretty good. There are a lot of cases in the Nashville area, too, but it feels safer here. 

Last night I had a dream about you, that we were together at work and having fun, that you knew I loved you and I knew I loved you and that it was just ok. I find myself missing you and wishing you missed me. You never once have messaged me first, ever in the course of our relationship, which is more telling than any empty words we ever exchanged about our connection, and so this deluge of sentiment feels all the more futile. If you won’t text or call me during a quarantine, when would you ever? You wouldn’t. But today I was watching a documentary on Netflix about Ivan the Terrible, the Nazi gas chamber sadist who gleefully murdered thousands of jews at a death camp in Poland. In the documentary they showed pictures of the piles of bodies and one of the bodies had a face that looked like yours. That sent my mind reeling what with all the news coverage of the pandemic and the rising body counts that only seem to multiply after the hospital beds run out. My mom told me a 25-year-old man in New Jersey with sandy blond hair who was handsome and had been a lacrosse player had fallen into a coma because of the virus. Once again I thought of you, and my quiet panic became a little louder. I was going through pictures the other day and found some I took of you during the Halloween party. Our relationship was good then, and I am reminded frequently that I ruined it. 

That being said, I wrote the following letter to you shortly after I confessed my feelings for you in their entirety on Sammi’s birthday, because my timing is always so incredibly dramatic. I kept the letter to myself because I knew it would put a strain on our relationship and I figured that at least the process of writing it would be therapeutic. You wrote your letter to Hanna. I wrote my letter to you. But when I had my little outburst at Hanna's party I nullified any preservative effect keeping this letter from you would have had, and by now my need for an elusive catharsis has only grown. You seem perfectly content to let me float away because maybe you have rightly determined that there is really nothing you can do for me. Your stated goal is not to love me but to help me, because what you harbor for me might most accurately be described as a simple kind of good will, and though you might have called it love once before out of a sense of obligation, I think it probably more closely resembles guilt. Since I don’t really see a scenario in which we will exchange easy communication at any point in the future, I have decided to let you have access to this letter. I am afraid to let you see the ugly extent of the length of my thoughts about you and how all of this ties knots in my mind, and so I am doing it in spite of that fear.  Even four months later most of the sentiments expressed here still hold true. I love you very much, David. As the world boils around us, I think of you every single day. If I ever see you again, I pray it will be under better circumstances. I still don’t know what those circumstances could possibly be, but if you ever find that you need me, I will be here for you until the day I die. Maybe after. 

- Mark

Dear David,

I am writing you this letter now because I have nothing else to lose, and it may be that I decided to leave Pier so I could write you this letter without any perpetuated emotional consequence. In writing this I only intend to share with you a truth that is often too difficult to voice, although we have already had a conversation in person that, while it devastated me because of my own frailties, gave me a newfound clarity that I think will allow me to say what I really mean. I still run your words through my mind like a comb over and over again. “I love you. You’re my best friend. We’re perfect for each other. I’m straight, and that’s where the wall is. I’m sorry.” My body is once again my greatest enemy.

You have always expressed a willingness to accept other people for who they are, and so I am going to do my best to tell you who I am, to get it all down here without the risk of sobbing uncontrollably into the crook of your neck in the pouring rain. It’s hard to get these thoughts out sometimes in a way that doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Sometimes I sit and talk to myself in the shower, talk to a version of someone else sitting there with me, sometimes me, sometimes God, sometimes other people. Today I sat and talked to you, and I guess it wouldn’t be the first time. Under the water, the words come more easily. I don’t know what it is about warm water that allows me to say anything I want to without difficulty, but as soon as I try to channel those thoughts afterward, it feels clunky and masturbatory, like I’m writing to appease something hungry inside of me that doesn’t know what it wants or simply can’t be sated.

I have come to understand life as a series of outer illusions that can ultimately be synthesized into a fundamental inner illusion. Physicality sets the parameters of our waking experience, the rules and guidelines by which we conduct ourselves in our mad spiral into oblivion, but I believe that the material world is carefully designed, and sometimes the design is specifically intended to obscure certain truths, or at least engender an experience that wouldn’t be possible if everything were made to be obvious. For me, the dichotomy of every human can be haphazardly reduced to body and spirit in a variety of fluid combinations that are rarely understood as they are. At our most basic physical levels, we are male and female, and our compatibility is governed by the nature of our spiritual and physical magnetism. 

I have lived my entire life as a cisgender man, meaning a man who presents himself as a man to the world, as by now you well understand. But for me, on an emotional level, our conventions of sexuality and gender are painfully reductive. Emotionally, I experience myself more within the feminine archetype, perhaps not as a female per se because my body is male and at this point we’re dealing mostly in the semantics of sex, but as a spirit who would maybe feel more at home in a female body and the conventions afforded to it. Emotionally I understand myself as female. Physically, I accept that I am male, but I don’t think it defines me or my compatibility with other people. I am also aware that I cannot impose my own conceptions of my personal eligibility for unconditional romantic love and affection onto other people.

When I confessed the extent of my love for you on Sammi’s birthday, you showed me real compassion. You are such a sweet boy, such a kind man, and I think that’s what makes me love you so much in the first place. I thought your emotional depth and kindness would allow you to experience me as the person I am, but you insist that you are heterosexual, a label that continues to mystify me, perhaps because I am so removed from it. Sexuality, for me, is more about intimacy than it is about penetration or anything else, but I admit that up to this point in my life I have also had a preference. To be honest, there is a part of me that understands where you’re coming from when you call yourself “straight.” Sex between a man and a woman makes perfect sense, whereas everything else sometimes seems like a misguided physical improvisation, as you often alluded to with your jokes about “fudgepackers” and whatever else. But when I feel that way, I remind myself that the most important element of sex is emotional intimacy. Sex isn’t just fucking. Sometimes it’s just stripping yourself down and being physically and emotionally naked with another person. I think I emotionally denuded myself around you, and to some extent I feel that you reciprocated. To me it just seems strange that two people can be completely naked with each other in one way and not in another. The disconnect doesn’t make sense to me, and it is that disconnect that has brought me so much sorrow.

I can continue to wax poetic. I can continue to wax academic. The ultimate problem is that words are never enough. They’re just little boxes that can only ever be approximations of true meaning — an apt analogue to so many other things — but sometimes true meaning can only be conveyed instinctively, telepathically, empathically. Throughout all this, I guess I just wanted you to see me and experience me as I see and experience myself. I felt like that was within you. Maybe you only ever wanted the same courtesy from me. I’m sorry if I fell short. I know you have strong ideas about who you are and who you’re planning to be. I don’t want to dictate your future. I only ever wanted this present moment with you, to love and worship you as the man I adore so much. You may have shortcomings, but they never distracted me from your essential manhood: your work ethic, your reliability, your deep ability to step outside of yourself and be vulnerable and emotional with other people. I loved you for everything you are, and nothing in the construct of your being seemed flawed, only human and worthy of love.

People spend a great deal of their lives wanting to live up to a version of themselves that they aspire toward. I wanted to worship that hidden part of you that lives beneath it. I wish that through my love I could make you feel more like a man, but I fear that you see any prospective intimacy with me as a subversion of the man you want to be. I’ve seen this complex for my entire life, and by staring into that void I think I’ve developed my own complex from it, reliving the rejection I suffered when I was younger over and over again, perhaps on purpose.  I’ve known deep connections with several men, some that manifested sexually, some that didn’t, but the meat puppet my soul resides in has never measured up to the vision they have for themselves, of who they’re supposed to be. It has happened repeatedly, but it never fails to break my heart every time. There are only so many times a person can break before they become broken. I had to leave Pier because every time I looked at you I felt those deep cuts. I felt how close we could have been. I love you and I believe you love me, and all I really wanted was a chance to validate that love and let it have its moment. How long that moment would have lasted is another question, but I don’t think real love can be measured by time.

The politics of identity that are put upon us as a society preempt those visceral connections far too often. When you pulled me in and held me and let me kiss your neck in the pouring rain, almost insisted on it, I could feel the way you are at war with yourself, just as we all are in some way or another at war with ourselves. Not whether you’re gay or straight, but whether or not your manhood could be eclipsed by the expanse of your emotional debt to other people. You want that same intimacy. You need it. You just don’t want to be gay. I don’t think you’re gay. I don’t even really know what it means to be gay. Gay is just one more word we get lost in. I don’t find myself attracted to most gay men. I don’t experience a fatal attraction to penises. The reason I identify as gay is because it makes it easier to conceptualize myself in a way that is simply more convenient for everyone. The reason I don’t identify as a  trans woman is because I don’t think I should have to change my body or the way I dress for my inner feminine vibration to be validated. Womanhood is too often dictated by the standards of our patriarchal society, and I was born with a gift that exempted me from those standards. And yet, perhaps the fetish of most men is adherence to the rules or an assimilated distortion of them. It is a fetish I cannot fulfill. 

I think the only wall between us lives in your mind. I think you have an idea of who you are and who you are supposed to be, and I think you would go to great lengths to protect that idea, because it’s all you know and it’s what you have been raised to know and it’s what you feel safe in. You are not your father. You are not just a product of your environment. You aren’t just a regular, typical white boy, as you’ve described yourself so many times. You are so much more and I feel it so much within you. Words and bodies and conventions are certainly walls that exist between us, but they can and should be broken down. The essence of the material world is spirit, energy, and the resonation of that energy. That is what sex and love really are. Not a 10- or 20-year plan. Not a haircut you can lean on for the rest of your life. Not a place to hide in New Jersey until the world burns. Not a stable woman who is only stable because she has had the unparalleled luxury of being able to be at rest in her body. I would never ask you to plan your entire future around me. I just hoped that one day you would let me love you without restraint. Maybe I’m selfish. Maybe what we’ve already had is enough. You told me that maybe in the next life we could be together, and while I believe in the scientific and spiritual precept that energy and by extension matter cannot be created or destroyed, I don’t know how our energy will transform when our bodies die. All I know is that we have this energy now. We have this connection now. Now is truly all we have.

I will always be your friend. Of course we’re friends. You’ve done me no wrong and have only ever been intoxicatingly kind to me, and I’m sorry if sometimes my resentments become evident, maybe painfully so. I resent the world we live in. I resent the language our society bestows upon our bodies and how they relate to who we are. I resent the conventions that kill so many easy connections between people. I resent the walls that are built around us, that we build around ourselves, yours and mine. But beneath all that resentment, I love you very much, and I think you love me, too. I hope that never changes. 

[suiciderealestate]

Annie. Wednesday, March 18 2020. Sixth day home from New York. 

[suiciderealestate]

3/23/2020

I can’t sleep. Every time I have chest pains or cough and it’s dry and could be construed as itchy, I become gripped by a panic that I have the virus and have already infected countless others and then my heart races and my mind races and my blood becomes still in my veins and everything in the world feels so incredibly, hopelessly fragile. Trump gave another televised press conference today and backpedalled on his promise to implement social restrictions to offset the spread of the virus. Trump says the “cure can’t be worse than the problem,” meaning Trump is so terrified that the stock market will only continue to plummet into a Great(er) Depression that he will happily risk the health of the nation’s populace. I suppose his reasoning is that on average only 1 percent of the nation will die but those deaths will be in service of the preservation of the economy. But the 1 percent death rate is contingent on the hospitals being equipped to assist patients with severe cases of the virus, and the economy’s health is contingent on people feeling comfortable going outside without constantly hearing about soaring numbers of infections and deaths, on people being healthy enough to work, on people being confident that their decision to leave their home will not risk the lives of their family and friends. The only thing more important to the Republicans than human life is money. When you abort a baby, you’re not aborting a living soul, you’re aborting a market consumer, and that is a greater sin than any other under Heaven. I feel myself slipping further and further into the snares of this quiet panic. Today I smoked marijuana and cigarettes and my chest has been hurting off and on and my brain feels like it’s bubbling in my skull and my blood sometimes seems to flow in reverse, and there is so much disharmony in my body and all of it feeds the crippling fear that I have contracted this virus and what it could become. I am struggling to sleep because I feel that I must be vigilant of death. Trump says a great depression will bring more death to Americans than the virus ever could, but it seems to me that the virus has mostly brought life to the Earth, a cleansing. I am so painfully aware that human folly is the real scourge upon the Earth, and these viruses are only the natural world’s way of trying to correct an imbalance. For as long as we are against our planet, our planet will be against us. I just wish it didn’t have to hurt so much.

[suiciderealestate]

[suiciderealestate]

3/19/2020 - 3/20/2020

Today is the first day of spring and the second day of my Saturn return. Last night I went on a hike in Mount Juliet with Annie, and though we both broke more promises to ourselves that we would remain in quarantine, the world felt so oddly at peace with our decision even amid this quiet panic. The sky was overcast, the trees emerging into a slow bloom and the ground alive with the first green of spring, baby grasses and flowers and mosses bursting in verdant jubilance as the world quietly boiled around us.

The air in Nashville tastes fresher than I remember air ever tasting. My house feels like a redoubt against this plague, but I won’t know if coming here was really a good decision until the last of the virus is gone. By coming to Nashville I made a bet, that if I sequestered myself away from the pathogen and prevented myself from ever getting it then my life would come out for the better somehow. The only catch is that though my chances of contracting the virus are currently less than they would have been in NYC, my chances of contracting the virus and then spreading it to my parents when they probably would have never otherwise come into contact with it is exponentially higher. If this virus takes the lives of my parents because of me I do not know if I will ever be able to forgive myself.

Saturn is supposedly the planet of discipline, and so I have become constantly wary of my impending celestial castigation. Last night after our hike, Annie and I made the selfish decision to dine in at a Mexican restaurant one last time. We went to my old favorite, U.S. Border Cantina, a restaurant I’ve celebrated as my favorite since I was a child. The quality there has fallen off a little bit, but you can’t blame the owner, Mrs. Naranjo. I’m sure she’s doing the best she can after the death of her husband a few years ago.

We went into the restaurant and there was hardly anyone there, save for a decently filled table on one side and another booth near the front manned by a solitary geriatric. On the tables there were none of the usual menus with drink specials and other offerings, no salt or pepper, nothing save what was brought to the table after we sat down. I can only pray that means the table was properly sanitized because as I ate my mediocre beef chimichanga and drank what will probably be the last margarita I drink for some time, I couldn’t help but think that the risk wasn’t really worth it. There are still only 154 documented cases in Tennessee, but I can only imagine the actual count is ten times higher than that. Davidson County has seventy-five of the recorded cases, which is forty-five cases more than have been documented in Williamson County, the county with the second highest number of recorded cases that at one point had more documented cases than Davidson County.

America’s response has been slow. The ignorance of the nation echoes the ignorance of the people. Just as people who have not truly experienced tragedy think themselves immune to it, so, too, do relatively prosperous nations. The United States has known hardship, but with its quickly rotating cast of presidents and executive administrations, our democracy seems blighted by a sort of systematic amnesia. President Trump, who typically refutes reality in favor of his own blinkered phantasmagoria, has proven to be a particularly ill-equipped figurehead during this crisis, which has not been replicated in its nature and intensity for more than a century.

When the virus showed up in Wuhan, China, people, including myself, looked upon it with a sort of detached amusement. It was like standing on a beach and watching a fire erupt on a distant island, the smoke rising up to the sky with a promise that the mayhem could never cross the water. But a virus is not like a fire or a tornado or a hurricane, things you can see and theoretically run from, things you can confront and fight or deliberately hide from. This virus is dangerous, especially in the era of “fake news,” because no one can see it and it uses our friends and loved ones as vectors to enter our bodies and lives like so many tiny Trojan Horses.  

But I see how someone might see this as senseless hysteria. Spring is coming into bloom. The birds are chirping. The air is cool but refreshing. It feels like the world is so gentle right now, a mother to its newborn year, cradling the awakening life with a tenderness that belies the virulence of this pandemic. In Venice, where the intensity of the Italian lockdown has cleared the canals of boats and their attendant pollution, dolphins and swans have appeared in the elucidated waters for the first time in sixty years.

The world keeps spinning, even flourishes, in the face of this pandemic. While humans sequester in their quiet panic, Earth seems to rejoice in our temporary absence. And once our planet catches wind of a solution to its perennial blight, it may give recourse to these invisible antidotes once again. The Spanish Flu ebbed into human consciousness lightly when it appeared in January of 1918, around the same season COVID-19 appeared in China this year. Then it tapered off during the summer months when temperatures rose, but then when fall returned the flu came with it and with a vengeance. The Spanish Flu terrorized humanity for exactly two years before it finally disappeared in December of 1920. This illness isn’t going to go away any time soon. This is a cleansing. The virus is an immune response to the human contagion.

I couldn’t have left New York at a better time. When Sami told me he didn’t want me to live with him anymore, it hurt at first but then I remembered the containment zone in New Rochelle. About forty-five minutes later I notified him I would be leaving in two days. I left in three. The night before I left, Eli expressed some semblance of disappointment in me for what must have seemed to him a waste of investment. When I left the next day there were just more than seventy documented cases in New York. Today, eight days later, there are more than 5,100.

I remember the morning it was decided that I would be leaving. I was in an Uber home and the sun was just rising, casting fiery reflections across the glass faces of office buildings in SoHo. I had spent the entire night with Rin, banking on a $100 payment for taking photos and video that ended up being only $60. She told me I hadn’t done as much work as last time when in reality the only difference between the two photo sessions was that this time she did more cocaine. I suppose I did more cocaine, too.

She had begged me all night not to move home to Nashville. She was to be my Candy Darling or my Edie Sedgwick or some other such downtown superstar, and I was to document everything — a more submissive, pay-as-you-go, mono-talented Andy Warhol. If anything, I was to be her Andy Warhol and she was simply to be a benefactor. But those last two weeks I discovered an authenticity and a sadness in Rin that stripped her of her mean girl facade and made her seem much more human. I left that morning knowing it would be the last time I would see her for awhile. But now, even being at home, I am constantly shrinking at the invisible threat that my time with anyone, and especially my parents, could be running out.

The day we left New York, I could feel something ominous in the air. It wasn’t a prescience. I knew the virus was there, even if I couldn’t see it, but something about that day felt different than the days before it. Face masks were becoming more common. More people than ever were walking around with them on when we passed through Manhattan. There was a palpable anxiety that made even the sunlight feel like an omen. I alternated driving for seven hours and drove the last seven hours to Nashville myself. I didn’t want to stay at a hotel. I wanted to minimize as much as possible my time in the radius of what would become the virus’ epicenter over the next week.

Two weeks have not yet passed. I still have the better part of a week before the fourteen-day incubation period ends. At that point I will know for sure that I didn’t contract the virus in New York, but in Nashville I’m still not safe. There are almost three-hundred confirmed coronavirus cases statewide. In Davidson County alone there are more than one-hundred confirmed cases, more confirmed cases than there were the day I left New York City, and just over a week later there are more than 5,600 confirmed cases in NYC and forty-three have died, more than half of the number of cases confirmed a week ago. In almost one week, the number of cases in New York City has increased one-hundred fold.

All my life I have been irreverent. I have used my irreverence to cope with the everyday traumas of existence, to make a joke out of the manifold circumstances that routinely render me despondent. If there were ever a time for reverence, it would be now. What is happening across the planet could be considered a very holy thing. It is in a way a rapture, a culling of life force that has overstayed or overstepped its intended cycle on this planet.

I have already been irreverent in the face of this disease. I have not respected its potency or reach in my actions, only in my words. Every choice I make is now unavoidably an active choice. For my family, the decision to get takeout from Taco Bell could be a life or death decision. The decision to dine in one last time at a mostly empty Mexican restaurant could be a life or death decision. Even the decision to see a friend and go with that friend to a park to unwind could be a life or death decision. I have already decided to do each of these things against my better judgement, and I will not know the consequences of any of these actions for up to two weeks, which means I will never know which decision I am being punished for if I am in fact punished, only that I am being punished for one of a host of decisions, each marked by the same sense of ignorant irreverence. And for our irreverence, the price is death; not necessarily ours, but probably someone literally and figuratively close to us.

People are cracking under the pressure of this forced tedium. For some, like my parents, this new “social distancing” protocol is hardly a deviation from their established way of life. But by merit of the simple fact that so many simple things in our lives have become potentially deadly and only will become more so in the coming months is or at least should be deeply unsettling. And if not unsettling, then maybe freeing, freeing in the sense that this invisible thing will wash over us and change everything. Events like this mark both endings and beginnings. We choose the way we manifest them.

[suiciderealestate]

It has been almost four days since I left New York and I’m still showing no signs of a fever so I’m hoping for this streak to continue. I have had cold symptoms for about the last three weeks or so: cough, headache, dry throat, shortness of breath caused by mucus in my lungs, etc. There are still so many more common ailments floating around that have the same or similar symptoms as the corona virus. Being home with my elderly parents has given me a bit of anxiety, especially because I left New York City on Thursday and in the week leading up to Thursday had spent time in Times Square, around people who suspect that they are now sick with the virus, around people from areas not far from the New Rochelle containment zone, next to a man from Italy on the train, in numerous Chinese restaurants — it goes on and on. I often sit and ruminate about all the times I could have been exposed to the virus, and then I wonder how long it will take for the chest pains to start, if they will come, or if I will just end up being an asymptomatic carrier. I think right now the panic that this illness is causing is one of the most debilitating aspects of it. We don't know a lot about the illness or how it spreads. All we know is that it spreads more easily than almost anything we've seen before and that the official tallies of who has it and who has died from it are woefully inaccurate because we can't possibly keep up because our medical infrastructure can't possibly keep up because our country seems to have made a point under the Trump administration to not only be unprepared for this but to ignore it as much as possible. I called the corona virus hotline in Nashville to make an appointment for a test and sat on the phone for forty-five minutes waiting to speak to someone before I gave up. Even in Tennessee, anxious people are flooding the system, and how can anyone blame them? I am reminded that it is distinctly possible to contract a common cold, show symptoms of that cold for weeks, then go on to contract Covid-19 and seamlessly go from a benign seasonal condition to a deadly and extremely contagious virus while attempting in vain to guess at how long I might have been incubating it based on when I might have first shown symptoms (never mind that there are apparently TWO strains of Covid-19 that can be contracted independently of each other). This is stressful. The cough I've had for the last few weeks has developed into a "wet" cough, when supposedly the novel corona virus cough is a "dry" cough. Mucus has become something I pray for. All of this is to say that the amount of anxiety right now about the virus will be one of the lesser discussed threats to people's health. Every time I cough in public I want to duck into a trench. Every time I make physical contact with my parents, I wonder if I just passed them a death sentence. When I joke about the virus, I wonder if my coping mechanism is a form of aggressive denial that I am currently more likely to have it than any regular person in Tennessee, and when I spend time with friends I haven't seen in a long time I wonder if I'm seeding this pandemic by prioritizing sentimentality over social responsibility. Should I quarantine for two weeks every time I cough? Nashville is probably a little safer than New York City in theory, but it unnerves me that people are still going about life as if nothing is happening when we already know that Davidson County and Williamson County share almost all of Tennessee's confirmed cases. I was at the bar the other night and people were hugging and doing the most as usual, and as I sat there coughing into my elbow pit I wondered if I had any right to be irritated. Today an official said we will probably be dealing with this global outbreak for the next six months, and in that time it could bloom back into full swing as soon as we get too comfortable again. My parents don't leave the house very often. If they get the virus, it will probably be because I gave it to them, and for the next six months or however long this all takes I will be blaming myself for putting them at risk simply by living in this house with them as we attempt to weather this storm. Meanwhile, I don't have a job because I left my employment prospects in New York, and I'm hesitant to get the kind of jobs that might be readily available to me in say the service industry because then my chances of exposure increase that much more, and my chances of killing both of my parents — my only real family — increase that much more. I’ve been joking about the virus a lot, trying to calm myself down and have a laugh about the severity of it all, which is something I’ve done to cope with life for quite a long time. But this really isn’t funny anymore and it’s not going to just blow over. Watch the news. Look this shit up. America has criticized China for being slow to acknowledge the virus while our government has quite literally preempted itself from being able to handle this mess. Look what’s happening in Italy. You see death toll percentages like “1 percent” and think, “Oh, it won’t happen to me.” Yea, until it does. I read a story about an Italian woman who was trapped in her apartment with her dead husband for days before his body could be retrieved because of the quarantine restrictions. Imagine living through that horror. Now think about that fact that top health officials have predicted that 150 million Americans will be afflicted by this virus. Even as I basically fled New York’s contagion, driving nonstop for 14 hours to Nashville, part of me assumed that the virus would just concentrate in the international hubs and the rest of the country would be mostly spared. Now I’m getting a sinking feeling that this will not be the case. Every part of this country is about to feel the effects of this virus. When the virus finally does infiltrate rural areas more completely, the health care infrastructure there will be that much more incapable of handling it. I am done leaving the house for any reason other than to get food or medicine as necessary. Everyone needs to stay the fuck inside, stay about a meter away from people you encounter in public, wash your hands routinely, and remind others that this is a concerted effort we must all participate in to avoid infection, especially people in areas that are still not seriously affected by the contagion. It seems like there are two philosophies to coping with this outbreak: panic and disregard. Both are dangerous.

[suiciderealestate]

Passive Aggressive

10/21/2019

Today was a mundane day almost in its entirety until I arrived at the train platform on my way home. There were people cluttering every bench so I kept moving further down until I found a vacant seat, even as one man was sitting on the dirty ground eating a square piece of pizza. To the left of the empty seat were two men sitting together who clearly knew each other, one wearing a pair of big headphones, and to the right was an elderly man sleeping, leaned over the bench and resting his head on his hand, propped up by the arm of the bench and his elbow. His face was striking. His cheeks were hollow, but one more than the other at least in appearance because his head was resting at an angle. His lips were chapped. His mouth was agape and his features had such an unreal, otherworldly quality to them. His cheekbones reached up and out as his eyes hung back in their sockets. I had my small Lumix camera with me and I took it out of my bag but couldn’t bring myself to take the photo. As soon as I pulled it out people started watching me. One man, who was standing probably one hundred feet away, held his gaze on me in a curious, fearful kind of way, skittish but judgmental. I was probably a ridiculous sight. I turned my camera on and the little automatic Leica lens extended. I half pressed the shutter, enough to trigger the loud little beep noise, a noise shrill enough to garner the attention of bystanders, but I never pressed the shutter down the entire way. I just kept pushing it, preparing myself for the attention but never setting myself up for the crucial moment of arranging a composition, one I had already clearly envisioned in my head, but coming very close to the man, leaning into his face, and pushing the shutter, with the first cringe moment being the shrill “beep” and the second being the release of the tiny strobe on top of the camera, right in his face, possibly waking him up, possibly attracting the ire of those around me who would down upon my ostensible shamelessness and think me some kind of exploitative creep with a morose interest in those less fortunate, when all I was really interested in was confronting my fear. The truth is, I have always been horrified by and enthralled with the process of aging, with the experience of fading away into the inevitable while still confronted with the reality and hardship of an ongoing life. I’ve been reading the biography by Patricia Bosworth on photographer Diane Arbus and underlining virtually everything in the book, every testament to the way she saw the world. She and I have much in common, I think, but I wonder if I followed her path if I would find the same end, if people would read my work only as exploitative and attention-seeking: a spoiled child poking fun at tragedy. But I know my story, my truth, and that my interest in tragedy is not as someone on the outside looking in, but as someone who becomes more consumed by the dread of everything each and every day, as someone living in this thing together with those others. I could easily be that old man in a few decades, life permitting, and it is that horror, that anticipation, that drew me into him and made me want to photograph him. The conundrum of taking that photograph was a double-edged sword. If I took the photograph, I would have possible, but not certainly, seen as shameful by those around me: that I would take such a confrontational picture without asking, that I would risk waking the man, that I would possibly be mocking him in some way by creating a record of his vulnerability. And then there is the shame that I feel, that I had been reading all day about what makes an image, that there is more than just composition and visual quality that goes into creating something with true resonance, that the Universe had all but propped up this perfect moment for me, gave me a sleeping baby to photograph and flee from without consequence, and I could not do it because I was worried about the temporary judgement of people who are presumably not preoccupied with the same art as I am, the same urgency. That man was a living testament to our reality, to its deeper contours, a perfect metaphor that was offered to me but that I was incapable of accepting. Every day I feel like I learn more and more, and every day the Universe gives me chances to test what I have learned, and routinely I fail. I am too distracted by the things that surround my art to the effect that I cannot drown myself in my art, in writing, in photography, because I am utterly and insurmountably distracted. Yes, I sidestepped the momentary shame that may have come from those around me, but now I am left with the shame of simply being too afraid to do what I needed to do. Every good image has a story, and every good image comes from resisting that which we are afraid of. The defining moment, in its purest form, is an opportunity given by the Universe to act quickly and without thinking in synchronicity with its abrupt bounty and to know that we were able to recognize its generosity and act upon it without trepidation. If I had taken that photo, as I knew I had been intended to take it, I would have been brought to life by the adrenaline of resisting the mundane, knowing that I had honored my own code of ethics in honor of something bigger than me. As I rode the train home, I thought of getting off at every stop and turning around, of returning to the sleeping man, who was probably resting int he same position I left him in, and taking that photograph, just once, just one deliberate, careful moment, And each time, each subsequent opportunity, I remained on the train, because that was what would have been easy. For me, taking that photograph would have been difficult, even in the ease of the motions, and so I chose not to do it. I chose to eschew the judgement of others and wallow in my own regret: the regret that I proved, even momentarily, that I was incapable of the kind of confrontational approach that I believe I need to be a good photographer, to be a good documentarian of life.

[suiciderealestate]

The internet is out in my apartment and my roommate is out of the weed he got for free, so I don’t feel justified in taking a morsel from the bag of weed he paid for. And because of these absences and indignities, I have little to no way of hiding from my feelings at this very moment. This must have been how it was for so many even a century ago when writing was much more in vogue than it seemingly is now for the sole purpose that there were much fewer things to distract ourselves with. And so I take this moment to write and to confront my feelings and to put them down in a way that will hopefully quiet my unquiet mind. In moments like these, it feels almost impossible to do. Every sentence I write feels like a great undertaking, each more herculean in its accomplishment than the last. Today the sky is a somber gray, and my room is littered with the detritus of personal neglect and overcome by a suffocating absence of any order whatsoever — an environmental self-portrait of my troubled thoughts. I had never envisioned my life would be this way when I was young, and even when I think I’m making some sort of headway, I am reminded that I am moving at a glacial pace while the spell of youth constantly threatens to be lifted at any moment to reveal the shriveled, miserable creature I’ve been all along. When the circumstances of one’s life become conducive only to panic, anxiety and melancholy, it becomes the yoke of the beholder to change those circumstances on their own and for the better. And yet, I am paralyzed at a fork in the woods with paths as myriad as the branches of the deadened trees just beyond my window, and I can’t seem to decipher between the paths that will only carry me farther down into darkness and the paths that will lead me through a black tunnel to brighter skies. Working nights on weekends means that I see very little of my few friends on days when the sun is out. And when I do see the sun or, even rarer, feel it on my skin, it is often only because I am en route to another place in which I will continue my long reclusion from daylight. These are circumstances I chose because I felt the sacrifice would be rewarded in the end, and yet I keep making sacrifices and am only ever self-sacrificing. There has as of yet been no rise on the third day to reward me for my ongoing crucifixion, and I fear that there will not even be a burial, that I will have no tomb from which to disappear and will only continue to decompose in broad daylight as my heart keeps beating and my eyes flicker on from their deep pits. I have not written for a single publication since coming to New York, and writing for many publications was the primary rationale I used to justify my abrupt exodus from Kansas, a place where I saw much more sun, had a cat and was on the whole very happy to be mostly alone. But we never fully know what we are giving up until we have given it up, and by then it is often too late. Even now I am quite probably in the process of giving things up very dear to me by staying in New York, and the gravity of those additional sacrifices will not be felt until the blood has been let. My parents are getting on in their age and I am constantly afraid that one day they will suddenly die or vanish from the face of the Earth, the same way my cat did and the cats before him. The cats in my life have had a funny way of vanishing into death or new residence, and, with no trace of irony, the people have as well. But I am not unlike them. We are vanishing from each other’s lives, but we are all still together in the act of vanishing. If I could vanish more completely I think I would do it, but it would be a horrible thing to attempt a vanishing and to have only part of yourself disappear while remaining trapped within the mottled remainder — to be a stale vegetable pitied by strangers who tell those too young to understand not to worry because “His soul is with God now” even as my ruined husk continues to anchor me to this grim Eden. But there are still days when I feel hopeful for the future. There are days when I’m happy and assured that I am following my own path and that it will lead to my own unique destiny. But those feelings come and go rapidly. They are easily set into motion and easily wrecked. I have good reason to fear all of my moods, both high and low. A good mood can easily lead into recklessness which then falls to paranoia and anxiety and then yet more unmitigated abandon, the fallout of which will predictably give way to more depression, from which I will escape once more only in another bout of perilous mania. My manias and depressions waver in their severity, and though they could be much worse, their subtleties are still destructive. The other night I was told by a girl on the scene I frequent that I seem “stable,” which was a real laugh for me as I mixed tequila with Red Bull and huffed poppers until the chemical stench drilled palpable holes into my brain. But even though I know the damage I do in my affinity for gross intoxication, I also know that sobriety is not a golden ticket to happiness and is often even more damaging to my mind than the alternative. At least with smoke and drink I can give some sense of punctuation to the unending, shrill soliloquy in my mind. Sometimes I just want to numb myself, forget myself and feel free from the troubles of a mind that so vividly senses its own shortcomings and inadequacies. I can either dull my mind and deal with the aftermath, or I can let it sharpen until every day is filled with the stabbing pains of doubt. But as all roads led to Rome in antiquity, so it may be that all roads of the mind lead to doubt and regret: regret for things that have already been done, regret for things now set into motion, and regret for things yet to be that will almost inevitably become manifest — or at least within the yawning landscape of this endless disappointment. I already regret that I will never find someone to truly love without boredom and its resulting cruelties. I regret that my career will teeter in all different directions until it eventually falls on its side, a scribble across the face of my potential. I regret that I will lose the only people that mean anything to me in my life — my family and close friends — and that I will surely not have loved them enough when the death knell tolls. I have all but lost my love of journalism and writing. I have lost the boy I once considered the love of my life because I wanted to move to New York City, almost for the sole purpose of spending the slim remainder of my youth away from him. I miss my family. I miss my favorite restaurants. I miss driving my car with the top down in warm weather and having enough hair to blow in the wind without producing within me a suffocating sense of insecurity and shame. I miss kayaking down the narrows fo the Harpeth River. I miss good Mexican food. I miss the city that Nashville used to be, when it was still a place I could comfortably call home. I miss having any sense of home at all. The other day I found a fortune I had left discarded in my room that read “Home is where the heart is.” And yet, on days like this and many others, I do not feel that I have a heart within me with which to call any place home. And for as long as I have no heart, no love for my own life or the things that now fill it, I will continue to have no home. This day may in fact just be another day, and tomorrow may be different, tonight may be different, three hours from now may be different. But this melancholy is the greatest constant in my life, and no matter how far I find myself from it, it always finds its way back to me with a loyalty that borders on murder.

[suiciderealestate]

This morning I left work a little after 8 a.m. following a shift that lasted approximately sixteen and a half hours. They say New York is the city that never sleeps, that if you can make it here you can make it anywhere, and now it is apparent why: because the demands of New York-based enterprises require bodies to remain perpetually in motion, and if there are only a few bodies available for a specific job then those bodies will simply never stop moving. My long work absences often left Elic, who I have somehow begun to communicate with once again, disappointed. He always seems to want to talk when I’m at work, when I am occupied and not talking at all, and when I am available he no longer suffers the same itch. His boyfriend left him and now he is retreating into what he knows, which is me, and I feel that somehow I am doing the same. He wanted to live in New York for a moment, and I think that really he only wanted to live in the city he idealizes as New York and not the actual New York City, which he would find completely insufferable. But now he wants me, I think, to move home to Nashville again. It is something I’ve considered, because all things considered, I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing here, and if the city has taught me anything it’s that not all that glitters is gold. On the one hand, I held the door for and was looked at directly by world-famous super model Bella Hadid, and on the other hand I am only finding myself in a position of holding doors for such people. I only encountered Bella because I was checking a hallway for carts. She was leaving a Michael Kors shoot, walking alongside one of the production assistants who she apparently hadn’t seen all day, and to me she was just a smartly dressed, lissome woman speaking warmly to someone who may or may not have been a total stranger. At the time I thought, “This attractive woman is really behaving so graciously toward this nebbish young man she doesn’t appear to know very well,” and when she turned toward the elevator as I began to walk away from her she looked to us both and said, “Have a good night!” That was Bella Hadid. I’m really never any good at spotting celebrities, but Bella caught my attention and earned my recognition because even in person she looked exactly like the Bella gracing the covers of magazines the world over. In person she was warm, energetic, kind, genuine — happy. I sometimes like to tell myself that celebrities, even with all of their fame, money and glamour, are just as sad as me, but Bella didn’t seem it. Of course, appearances can be deceiving, but there was a woman who seemed as if she had been spawned by an effluence of universal energy that simply had nowhere else to go. The life-giving essence that may have gone into six or seven average sentient flesh pods instead converged into one, resulting in a radiant humanoid with zero pores, perfect, glowing skin, and a smile that puts toothpaste models to shame. To think, if I hadn’t shown up for that sixteen-and-a-half-hour day I never would have been spoken to by Bella Hadid, who looked to me and the production assistant in those parting moments and said, “Have a good night, guys!” In my excitement, I immediately recounted an abbreviated version of my experience on my Instagram story, only to be reminded by two other photographers who have experiences working at Pier 59’s rival studio Milk that in posting that information to my Instagram I was undoubtedly violating a NDA I signed at the outset of my employment at Pier 59. But, as anyone in Hollywood will tell you, nobody honors NDAs and absolutely everyone talks. God forbid someone find out Bella Hadid was in America’s most populous city at one of the most trafficked photography studios modeling for one of the world’s most renowned designers and she was actually a decent human being who was surprisingly down to earth in person, and that for a fleeting moment she looked at me and my mostly unremarkable life collided mundanely with hers in this Universe that is always so full of surprises. If I hadn’t moved to New York City I wouldn’t share proximity with people like Bella Hadid, Allie X and Rose McGowan — people doing great things with great teams behind them, but who are only ever human beings living different experiences with the same anxieties and insecurities that we all face to some degree or another. But still I think of home and I think of my family and my friends, two elements of life that are stridently absent in my life in New York City. Today my mother sent me a quilt with beige florals, blacks and earth tones that she’s been sewing for about two years. With it she included in her characteristically beautiful handwritten cursive a note scrawled on looseleaf paper torn from her organizer that says, “With All My Love. Miss You! Mom.” I imagine this quilt will become one of my most prized possessions, but it reminds me that my mother hasn’t seen me in almost a year, may not see me again for some time, and has not even seen the place I live in New York City. Over the phone she reminds me that she feels disconnected from me, that she misses my journalism because my stories gave her a greater sense of place and occupation, and that she worries she may never see me again. I, too, miss journalism and writing. Just the other day I heard a knock at my door and when I opened it I found a manilla envelope that held within it a plaque from the Kansas Press Association. The KPA had given me first place for a story I had written about a medical marijuana refugees in Kansas, one of the very last of America’s fifty states to withhold successful legislation of any law allowing any consumption whatsoever of medical cannabis. Though I enjoy the possibility of crossing paths with celebrities at Pier 59, I am reminded that my life path requires more variegated attention to the talents I so often neglect. I have not written an article since my departure from the Telegram, much to my dismay, and in fact I have hardly really been writing at all. My photographic documentation of New York City nightlife has been ongoing but my photography has begun to stagnate in every other regard. Money is becoming more forthcoming, but not enough. My hands are beginning to reflect my age, and in the battle against time I am reminded by the young 20- to 24-year-olds in the fashion magazines I’ve been browsing lately that the time for magazine covers and notoriety began almost a decade ago, if not more by the new American standard, and for me may soon expire. I have never been hungry for fame but I share the common human desire to be validated and recognized for my talents, that I may feel in myself more value than simply being another cosmic fart. It’s hard to live life on the run, flitting from place to place even as I drag the vestiges of my many previous identities with me in every step. I have already been so many people, but none of them match up to the person I want to be. I think what I’m learning at this age, though, is that I may never live up to the apotheosized version of myself that lives in my head, and even if I do, the experience of it still may fall short of vertiginous expectation. And so the question remains: Do I return to a simpler life in Nashville and spend time with my family in their golden years? With my friends? With a boy I claim to love? Or do I keep climbing, never knowing if I’ll reach the other side of the mountain, or even if I’ll like what I see? (Edit (10/3/2019): I am reading these words again and can see how tired I was after that shift, how desperately I wanted to be happy and see meaning in the things around me, and I am honestly embarrassed.

[suiciderealestate]

I was twenty-two years old, inconceivably almost six years ago, when at the encouragement of a friend named Sadia Khatri from Pakistan I decided to purchase a monochrome deep purple copy of “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie at what must have been the only English bookstore in all of the Moroccan capital of Rabat. The edges of the paper were violet and the cover was a deep eggplant purple and the title and byline were imprinted in amethyst. It was one of the most beautiful books I have ever owned, and yet I do not know what became of it. Sometimes when I scan my memories I think I can see it sitting on my bookshelf in my room in Nashville, but the memory is dubious, a possible fabrication. Truth be told, I have no idea what became of that book, if I gave it to Sadia or Ella Hilaire, an artist who currently resides somewhere presumably near me in Bushwick and who, despite our close friendship at the time in Morocco, hardly ever speaks to me. I often wonder if it was her I lent that book to, because I would not give her my favorite sweater, an extra large black Cosby sweater stitched with vertical blue lines that I purchased at a thrift store in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood near Boy’s Town at a store called Ragstock. Perhaps in my shortsightedness I handed the book over as a substitute, out of guilt. I didn’t give her my sweater and in this moment I feel that maybe I made the right decision. We are no longer really friends and she hardly makes any effort to speak to me, though she now apparently reads poetry at salons in Chicago and is going on to spend her family’s plentiful money on an MFA at the School of the Art Institute. I shouldn’t be bitter, but the mere thought that I could have let that book slip into her ungrateful hands haunts me. There are people who become tourists in our lives and collect souvenirs of relationships that they will only inevitably discard into the opaque annals of forgotten memory. Worse perhaps is the fact that I am completely incapable of conjuring a reliable memory of what I did with that book. If I had it today I would read it immediately and would not let it go. I would keep it to myself. I would be unapologetically selfish, something of growing importance. I would not throw my pearls to the swine, and I would possess the uncanny ability to recognize such a swine every time I cross its path. But, on the other hand, if I gifted it to Sadia, then I would be happy that it has such an appropriate home. Even now I consider Sadia, who lives across the ocean in the Pakistani city of Karachi, a close and inspiring friend — an activist, writer, artist, rebel, saint. I could sing that woman’s praises infinitely, and that is because she is a true friend, not simply a collector of people. We all have within us the ability to be either one, and many times we can simultaneously become both. I suppose I would do well to remember that, and so maybe it would be best to simply assume the book was given to Sadia. Maybe it would be best to let my forgetfulness do its good work and let the book go. It came into my hands by some fateful, magical enterprise and maybe it’s still on its way to its ultimate destination — a book with a destiny, free of all ownership.

[suiciderealestate]

Kalby

When winter comes it comes with more than just dry, cold wind and slick walkways. The emotions, too, are tested by the weather’s frigidity, and sometimes in our feeble attempts to find human warmth in a world that knows how to be truly cold in any season, we slip up and forget that even in freezing temperatures we can become susceptible to the mirage of a somatic oasis. Alex Kalb was one such oasis, and from November 11, 2018, to February 28, 2019, I prayed that he would keep me warm through this terrible winter, one that started at puberty and has been unrelenting ever since. But though I found what felt like respite in those blue eyes, the blanket of warmth that washed over my body didn’t come from him. It came from me. It came from the hope that something so beautiful could ever be mine, that I might look upon another body as a mirror and find in myself something worth holding onto. When I met Alex in New York it was for the second time and I was at a party for the first and probably last time called “Daddy Issues.” I looked down at my phone at 11:09 p.m., and about two minutes later he walked through the door. I like to tell myself that I set eyes on him at 11:11 p.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year, and those repeating numbers, or at least my assumption of their existence, gave me hope that this time I would not find myself once again mired in unreciprocated love — that this was instead an ordained, angelic love. But despite the patterned magic of existence, the patterns of the mind can often be reduced to wishful thinking. I had previously had a class with Alex at Columbia College Chicago during my last semester of senior year. Alex had a girlfriend at the time, and I remember one of his photo collections that depicted a contrived sexual tension between them. It was then that I began to fantasize that Alex was using his girlfriend as a beard, mostly because I fantasized that he would somehow instead end up with me, but only half of that fantasy turned out to be true. After our class that semester, I graduated and left Chicago, and though I sometimes attempted to talk to Alex on Facebook, I came to the eventual conclusion that we would probably never see each other again. But destiny is never so kind, especially to those who tear away their flesh to pry open the doorway to forbidden want.

There is something terribly cruel about infatuation, that it is possible for two people to come together and for one person to be overcome by empathic connectivity and an intense desire for intimacy and for the other person to experience precisely nothing. I have presumably been on both sides of such a situation, but that does little to assuage the intense cynicism about the nature of reality encapsulated by the logical conclusion of this unfortunate truth. The Hindus believe that life is suffering, bound by samsara, the repeating cycle of death and rebirth. I had thought that perhaps the experience of love and its approximations would be exceptions to the mandate of suffering in a universe with a truly benevolent essence, but even the deepest resonation of universal truth is subject to the cruelties of this endless bodily illusion. Rousseau famously wrote, “Man is born free, and everywhere else he is in chains.” I would venture to contest that no living thing on the face of this Earth is truly free, because none of us chose our bodies or their physiological eccentricities, and by that absence of essential choice we are in this physical world constantly bound by our somatic prisons and the resulting experiences we are consciously forced into. The truth is that life itself is a prison from which there is no escape. While humans fear death, it is really the greatest mercy. Few of us consider how terrifying it would be to know that we will live forever, and so the promise of a long, perhaps permanent, slumber keeps us sane. But despite its mercies, life is still mostly merciless. To fall in love with someone who doesn’t love you back is one thing, but to use every wile in your arsenal to capture someone’s heart, only to find that you only wanted it to satisfy the unending demands of your ego: that is the definition of inadvertent evil. And yet it happens so naturally. I had a cat who loved everyone. He recently disappeared. Before moving to New York I left him at my parents’ home in the distant wooded suburbs of Nashville because I thought he would be safer there. There were animals for him to hunt, but he too may have been among the hunted, and after seven months he vanished, as the objects of my love and its imitations often do. And so it is with Alex Kalb, who gives affection to many so freely and withholds it from me because I am too old, too white, too thin, too frail, too recalcitrant, too opinionated, too jealous, too intelligent, too cruel, too transparent in body and mind. I am so many things that I am too many things and hopelessly, inescapably not enough. In the tempest of my emotions, I overflow and drown any fool who would deem it safe to loiter in my shadow. As we speak Alex is touring northern California, or maybe further into the Pacific Northwest, passing beneath the sequoias on his way to cliffs on the oceanside, drinking wine and living a life he should be proud of. And I hope he enjoys it there and that it keeps him distracted. I hope we do not see each other again, and if we do I hope it’s like we’re meeting for the first time. When I shared my feelings and looked up into his eyes, becoming so small in that moment of emotional nakedness, he transformed into a doleful executioner, someone who knew the bloodletting must commence and that no pity could stop the forceful guillotine of rejection. He told me he wanted to be friends, that if he didn’t he would simply have stopped speaking to me. I wish he would have. I wish he would. I still hope that maybe he will – spare us both of my fondness for vengeance, crybaby eyes that conceal this relentless, bloodthirsty soul. I cannot be sated, and that has always been the problem. This sadness demands a sacrifice, every hour on the hour. Love is the ultimate drug, and in its absence there is only destruction, the suffocating absence between bodies and the calamity of the eventual collisions between them.

[suiciderealestate]

Allie X

Recently I’ve had the blessing of being commissioned to photograph the new monthly Play Now party orchestrated by party glitterati Linux and Susanne Bartsch in Brooklyn. I’ve been photographing nightlife as an unpaid hobby for the seven months I’ve lived in New York, and it has given me the ability to talk to people who might not ever otherwise talk to me, let alone look at me. But lately I have been trying to monetize my hobby with mixed results, and let’s just say that effort hasn’t been totally seamless on the social front. I am learning that in New York you can run into anyone at any time in nightlife, especially during fashion week. Being the oblivious troglodyte that I am, I hardly ever recognize celebrities, even when they’re sitting next to me for forty-five minutes at a time. Just the other night I ended up at Paul’s Baby Grand during a typical drunken Tuesday/Wednesday AM odyssey, where Rose McGowen socialized with members of my group for a surprisingly long time, completely unbeknownst to me as I sat beside her. I consummated the experience by drunkenly taking a blurry series of photos of her and the group, against the repeated requests by security for me to stop. However, I spent most of my time with Rose texting and filming myself on Instagram, expressing hapless confusion about where I was and what I was doing. It was only the next day when I was watching friends’ stories that I realized the petite blonde with the pixie cut was an icon. But some things just are what they are, and though I once applied for a job as a celebrity spotter for TMZ, it seems I wouldn’t be able to clock a celebrity if they tackled me to the ground. The following Saturday I had rearranged my work schedule so I would be able to photograph Play Now. I recently started work at a photography studio covering weekend night shifts that can easily last fourteen hours, and the extra demands brought upon the staff by fashion week weren’t helping. That means I’ve been missing most of the best parties and events, instead viewing them exclusively through social media. When I spent my Friday night watching Allie X through my phone between set builds as she sang happy birthday to Aquaria, who was in full drag at Ty Sunderland’s Heaven on Earth party after a long absence from NYC nightlife, a small part of me died. Images and videos online depicted Allie in a look sporting an enormous top-braid and a series of circles that in photos resembled toaster strudel icing radiating outward from the center of her face. “Maybe next time,” I thought to myself as I became consumed by an almost terminal case of FOMO, the same illness that impelled me to move to the middle of everything (New York City) from the middle of nowhere (Garden City, Kansas) in the first place. I had no idea how soon “next time” would be, or how horrifyingly unprepared I would be. About an hour and a half into Play Now I was much more intoxicated than I should have been and looking for my next moment to photograph. But first I needed another drink. As I quickly made my way toward the bar, a woman in a technicolor faux fur jacket, cerulean and violet eye shadow, and meticulously laid hair asked me to take her picture. I was an alcoholic being delayed his next fix, but I agreed and did a short set, neglecting to ask her to take her purse off of her shoulder and haphazardly moving through the photos, the best compositions of which were less than perfectly in focus. I was also standing way too close. “Can you get a full body shot?” she asked. “I want to get the pants and the boots in the shot. “Well the bottom doesn’t really match the top,” I said without knowing the extent of my sin. I wasn’t lying. The black boots and navy latex leggings weren’t exactly the perfect complement to the fuzzy rainbow exploding across the upper half of her body. Her hair was tied into a tight bun at the top of her head and gelled into two thick, winding rivers that channeled FKA Twigs in the curves cascading along the contours of her prominent cheekbones. Her eyebrows were blocked into near invisibility, and her colorful eye shadow served as a less than subtle but effective garnish to the upper half of her ensemble. From head to waste, she had a cohesive concept, but everything from the belt down felt like an afterthought. Still, we took some a full body shots, a constant favorite of club kids and fashionistas everywhere. When we finished taking pictures she asked me the perennial question: How would she get the photos? Because I was photographing the event for a client and the photos had a post embargo on them until they could be used as promotional material in the days leading up to the next party, I told her she’d have to wait about a month for her pics. “Oh, well I was looking for something to post tomorrow,” she said. “Well,” I said,” if you want to post them tomorrow I can send them to you and you can just refrain from tagging me. Just send me some money and I’ll send you the pics.” “How much do you want?” she asked. “I don’t have that much money, dude. Like forty dollars?” “No, around twenty-five would be fine. Just message me on Instagram.” As she typed on her phone I walked away and headed back toward the bar when I received the notification. I looked down at my phone and saw that “Allie X” had added me. When I clicked the notification and her profile emerged on my screen, the blue check mark was almost blinding. My mouth dropped. The feeling was a strange mix of elation and utter horror. I had interacted with Allie X for nearly three-hundred seconds without knowing it. I had taken her picture without knowing it. But most mortifying of all: I told her that her outfit didn’t match, and then I told her to pay me. I abandoned my mission to acquire another drink and suffered the walk of shame back toward the pop star standing in plain sight. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re Allie X?” It was a statement more than an inquiry, but I still delivered the words with the cadence of an implied question mark at the end. “Now I get the respect I deserve,” she said. “I tried to be subtle and show you my phone but you didn’t get it.” She asked if I wanted to do another photo set and I agreed. We attempted a shoot with moody lighting and the full-body moment. The pants still didn’t match, but now she was Allie X, not just another partygoer. I raised the ISO on my camera to 8,000 in an effort to get the right light in the photos, but they still didn’t capture the vision I know we both had. I even forgot to change the settings when we were done, and for the rest of the night I photographed the party with camera settings that could be considered by anyone with even remote fluency in digital photography to be completely fucked. After the shoot we were approached by Justin Moran, the digital editor of Paper Magazine, who just so happened to attend the same college as me in Chicago. “You know she’s a pop star, right?” he asked after I recounted the oblivion of our hapless encounter. “Yea, I know who she is,” I said. “I just didn’t know I was taking her picture. “Well, I’ll never forget you,” she said. “That’s for sure.” She noted that she was returning to New York in April to play some shows. “You should come,” she said, in a way that almost felt like a personal invitation. Sometimes in New York, leaving any impression at all is what matters most. For a pop star, not being noticed is much rarer than servile flattery, and for anyone, departures from the norm are always more memorable, even if they’re slightly insulting. I still don’t think she likes me.

[suiciderealestate]

Where does my mental illness end and my sense of self begin? I have known something is amiss with my mind for a long time and I have called my affliction by many names. But now in its newest iteration it is shifting slowly from Major Depression to Bipolar Depression, or, maybe more inclusively, Majorly Bipolar Depression. With the exception of vitamin assistance, I have been unmedicated for a few years. The last time I took medication it was Wellbutrin, which made me more manic than I have ever been in my life. At half of the prescribed dosage, I was throwing McChicken’s at my mother’s head, hiding in bushes at 24 years old, planning my self-managed exodus from Nashville to Los Angeles, and getting my license to serve alcohol — I passed the test with flying colors. When I consulted my GP about the mania resultant of my medication, she told me I might be bipolar. I have and had bipolar friends, and though they say birds of a feather flock together, I didn’t feel my symptoms matched the bipolar symptoms exhibited by some of my companions. Their mania was unmedicated. My mania was medicated. Clearly there was a difference. But I’ve since learned that there are two different kinds of bipolar. As my bipolar friend Meredith would say: You’re either Amanda Bynes bipolar (Bipolar 1) or Catherine Zeta-Jones bipolar (Bipolar 2 - Bipolar Depression). Amanda Bynes has since publicly stated that her erratic behavior from 2012 to 2016 wasn’t the result of a mental illness but the result of substance abuse and all the problems that come with it. But, as I’ve found, once a sicko always a sicko. And so while she may currently be in an upswing in her cycle from stability to chaos, it pains me to say that her future holds all the inevitability of her past. That’s just the way it is for people like us. We can stage a return. We can find success. But in reality we only ever really learn how to shove the thought patterns that haunt us under the carpet, close the curtains and muffle out the noise. But the noise never goes away. It’s always there. Whether the buzzing of your mind be plaintive or strident, the buzzing persists and it never goes away.

Today I called my mother to go down the usual lists of complaints: nobody loves me, my hair is falling out, and my body is a prison that makes my life a kind of perpetual Chinese water torture of the soul. A pragmatic, sensible woman, my mother rarely knows what to say. She doesn’t know how to give me advice on topics pertaining to romance because of my homosexual lifestyle; she doesn’t know how to talk to me about my emotional struggles because she has never had a history with mental illness (neither has my father, who is in many ways the same as her); and she doesn’t understand me when I ask her for help. At best, she says, she can let me move back into a home in Nashville with no rent other than the constant tax of corrosive misunderstanding. The comfort of my home in Tennessee is a tomb perfectly prepared for me to waste the rest of my days away in anticipation of my approaching demise. But I know that I have been dying for some time now. Decomposition comes in varying stages, and in this particular manifestation the rot has started first with my mind and will then work its way outward. It is not an uncommon way to go, and in my extended family there is a history of dementia. Dementia took the mind of my next-door neighbor Dan, a former engineering professor at Vanderbilt University who struggled to remember his loved ones or even who he was in the last years of his life. It took the mind of my paternal grandmother in her last days and rendered her final bouts of consciousness a public fever dream on perfect display for my family to see. I only heard whispers of it, being that I was young at the time of her death, but I remember visiting her in the nursing home and then the hospital, and I remember the smell of sterility and decay that lived easily alongside one another. I remember the first time I saw a dead body, one that belonged to a man who was only ever called “Uncle Ronnie” and who I had never actually met. To meet someone only after they are basted with formaldehyde is a curious thing. When I saw his pale corpse in the open casket, a corpse whose lifeless pallor, resistant to every cosmetic effort, must have startled other attendees at the wake, I felt nothing. I learned that even dead bodies are held to a standard of perfection, and even dead bodies often fail to meet those standards.

Even today I often think of Uncle Ronnie. I still remember his face, his black hair, his delicate features. I remember that all I’ve ever known of him is death. For me, that is his legacy: that he died and that of all seven billion people upon the face of the Earth, his corpse was the first I ever witnessed. For my mother, bipolar disorder seems to be a kind of little death. She once had a good friend named Jill. Jill was bipolar. She forged checks and stole from her employers. She used to babysit me once upon a time, and when I was only four years old she would let me watch graphic movies like “Alien,” in which aliens can only give birth by planting their seed in the body of a living being. When the alien finally gestates and is ready to be born, it simply bursts from the host’s body and leaves them to die in a mess of blood and fleshy pulp. I remember watching the cartoon “Ren and Stimpy,” and it was at that point in my life that I learned the aesthetic potential of the grotesque and macabre. I forsook companionship with children my age for others who were three to five years older than me. Even they said I was “warped,” because my knowledge of sex, profanity and vulgarity was more advanced than anything they had known at my age. I was exposed to cigarettes early, alcohol early, everything just a tad earlier.  I learned most of what I knew from other children at St. Henry’s School, a place my parents had desperately tried to get me admitted to. It took a little coaxing from a family relative, but after much reluctance I was admitted. Even at a young age, I wasn’t looked upon as a genius or even as someone with average potential. My great aunt Emily had to harass a priest at St. Henry until they decided to give me the formality of an admissions test. And once I proved lackluster at that, she had to harass him some more. Little did my parents know, I would be reared in a den of charlatans. And though my mother constantly reminds me that she didn’t raise me to exhibit the behaviors I am prone to, she unwittingly unleashed me into a realm of the most expensive sin money can buy.

For much of my early exposure I have Jill to thank. But Jill has cemented in my mother’s mind a stigmatized perception of people with bipolar disorder. God forbid her son should have a variation of it, so even now she is in denial. When I told her over the phone today that I believe I have bipolar 2, she said, in desperation, “But you don’t have any of the symptoms!” The symptoms, according to the most direct Google search, are as follows: 1) mood swings, sadness, elevated mood, anger, anxiety, apathy, apprehension, euphoria, general discontent, guilt, hopelessness, loss of interest, or loss of interest or pleasure in activities; 2) irritability, risk taking behaviors, disorganized behavior, aggression, agitation, crying, excess desire for sex, hyperactivity, impulsivity, restlessness, or self-harm; 3) unwanted thoughts, delusion, lack of concentration, racing thoughts, slowness in activity, or false belief of superiority; 4) depression, manic episode, agitated depression, or paranoia; 5) difficulty falling asleep or excess sleepiness; 6) weight gain or weight loss; and 7) fatigue or rapid and frenzied speaking.

Looking at all of these symptoms, I can’t help but think that all of this is simply innate to the human condition. But at the end of the day, I can only speak to my human condition. In this lifetime, I can speak to no one else’s. And yet, to feel that there is some possibility of error in my cognitive makeup, that I am broken with little hope of drugless repair, is to know that there is a part of me that will always be lacking. Today I told my mother that in the last two months I stole merchandise worth thousands of dollars during my seasonal employment at Bloomingdales. More troubling still is that every time I stole from Bloomingdales I was in a good mood. With this condition it just goes to show that both highs and lows are dangerous. If I’m in a bad mood I might kill myself, and if I’m in a good mood I might happily commit several felonies. You really never know.

When I reported all of this information to my mother in demonstration of the fact that perhaps I do embody the erratic behavior she associates with bipolar disorder, she insisted on getting off the phone. She made me promise I would never steal again, which I obliged to with fingers crossed, and then she hung up. It’s not that I want to steal again. It’s just that I can’t make promises I know I can’t keep. For my mother, bipolar disorder is not unlike a prison sentence or a death sentence. Jill disappeared, and we never saw her again. We didn’t hear from her. We didn’t hear about her. She just vanished. Sometimes I wish I could do the same. I wish I could just disappear from everyone’s life over and over again, constantly remaking myself until I finally crash and burn. But these days, with social media and all the rest, it just isn’t that easy. We are bound to who we are, until we aren’t. I hope my family can salvage some sense of understanding until that day comes. I know it’s a lot to ask. I hardly understand myself.

[suiciderealestate]

Have you ever wondered at all the things you’ve done in your past life? In your past lives? In this limitless moment? Do you think it’s possible that death is really just birth? That you instantly forget everything you’ve ever known by design as you roll seamlessly from tomb to womb, and that somehow that is the greatest mercy of existence? The possibility of an unburdened future, of an unburdened present, of freedom from these countless cycles, to give us respite from ourselves by punctuating our perception of eternity. Do you think it’s possible to hold an old book and be holding something written by a manifestation that was at one point the closest thing to being you? Have the words of your previous life streamed through your mind as you unwittingly finger through the pages of your past and future? When you were a child, did you look up into the great blue sky, the vague promise of infinity, and wonder to yourself, “How long have I really been here?” Every day that I live feels more directionless, and in my dreams I hear the whisper of a secret that I am living many lives at once. I am a river, forged of many rivers, and I am heading out to sea, carrying in me the undulating waves of an ocean of spirit rhythmically taking me from great heights to chthonic lows. My mind is radical, unhinged. Every day I want to die to live again. And so it goes.

[suiciderealestate]

Twitch

Lately I wonder if it matters which medium I use to record my thoughts. If I write something by hand in my journal, it becomes more personal and tangible but both jeopardized and romanticized by the very fact that my words are bound to a destructible object. Conversely, I wonder every day if the poems, essays and journal entries I have added to this website will be lost to a sudden shift in corporate consciousness, the decision to terminate a web domain that has become the repository for so many people’s thoughts, their predilections, mirrors of themselves wrought of disparate but similar things. It has been more than three months since I have uploaded anything to Tumblr. Though Tumblr is primarily used as a place to upload and share images, I have always used it predominantly to share articulations of my thoughts. For some reason lately words have been elusive to me, and though much more is happening in my life, it sometimes feels like the landscape of my mind better reflects the yawning plains of Kansas. I left Kansas to escape a monolithic life, but in New York I have often reduced myself to a monolith of empty drunkenness as my mind quietly unravels. For a long time, I wanted to be a writer, a journalist, somebody who transforms the written word into a sword or a hypnotic dance. But lately literature, journaling and even journalism have lost their luster. Whether the loss is impermanent remains to be seen. Everywhere I’ve lived I’ve been a different person. In Chicago, I was an average writer and an average photographer with radical sensibilities. In Washington D.C. I was a copy editor and a decent writer on the verge of throwing myself off the roof of 25 Massachusetts Ave., but hardly a photographer at all. In Kansas I was an excellent writer and a casual but enthusiastic photographer. And in Nashville, I was scarcely either of those things, but maybe that’s because Nashville, even in the midst of rapid change, feels like a suffocating, stifling dose of redundancy. Even the nature of my work changes as I go from place to place. But if the things I create through words and images and whatever else are ripples upon the surface of this aqueous karma, then I hope the Universe accepts my appeal that in New York I may realize myself fully as both a photographer and a writer. I find that I hardly have the energy or attention span for either, but taking pictures of New York nightlife has at least given me some kind of creative cliff to cling to. Still, I can’t decide if this is the right choice for me. Should I stay or should I go? The famous question immortalized by The Clash plagues me every day. And more important still, if I do write, what is the most important medium through which to record my thoughts? Does it matter at all what I say or where I keep them anymore? In today’s modern world obsessed by fast content relentlessly purveyed through social media, a dedication to literature and poetry is gravely on the decline. Even in myself, I feel the symptoms of the modern age. I am hardly ever able to concentrate on what I’m reading, hardly ever able to concentrate on what I am writing, hardly ever able to concentrate on who I am and who it is I actually want to be. As both a consumer and producer of written texts, I am glacially slow and far from prodigious. Yet I feel in myself the truth that I am a vessel of karma constantly in flux, and that ripples from distant eons may not yet have found their way into my being. Through the fermentation of my body and spirit, I might find in myself the literary prodigy I have always hoped would be born. To be told relentlessly that I have a talent and not be able to birth anything of substance through it is a terrible malady. It sometimes feels as if this writer’s block wrought of indecision is simply a kind of creative sterility. As I write about these faults, it could be argued that this in and of itself is a type of creation. But it is a redundant, self-involved kind of creativity. Though I live in a world that often resembles fantasy, I am so completely obsessed with things that are real. As Oscar Wilde once said in an 1889 essay titled ‘The Decay of Lying,’ “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” The same sentiment was famously repeated by Lana Del Rey in her song ‘Gods and Monsters.’ Indeed, journalism and creative nonfiction and documentary photography and documentary filmmaking are all things bound predictably by reality, but through the human lens we find that the stuff of our wildest imaginations suffuses everything around us, and further that even our imaginations themselves are animated and based on figments of truth informed and manifested by the extension of an omnipresent universal agency. The real and the unreal are intertwined in a seamless tapestry, a continuum, and the experience of the human mind is only subject to different layers of perception that inevitably lead to and depart from singularity. Regardless, my aversion to fantasy for fantasy’s sake through the genres of fiction across various mediums has probably been engendered by my commitment to removing the veil of the world that hides just below the surface and scintillates in the symbolism of ubiquitous synchronicity. In creating I don’t always see the purpose of what I’ve made until it’s already completed, but upon its completion I realize what I was trying to say, what something else was perhaps trying to express through me. In that inverted realization of my creative intention, I see the truth in Wilde’s anti-mimesis, that art is an essential element of universal manifestation at once inherent to and transcendent of human agency. But it is through our interaction and resultant collaboration with the universe that an artist can find his ascendance. The only question then, another born of redundancy and indecision, is what medium is best to express this collaboration in a way that produces a more resonant emotional impact and thereby a greater karmic splash on the planet that accords with contemporary expectations for convenient consumption. But even still, there is something to be said of creation for creation’s sake, to make something knowing full well that you may never be recognized at all and moving forward anyway, proceeding not because you create for clout but because you make to feel alive, to feel some semblance of meaning, to observe the arbitrary nature of eternity and carve into it a more vivid image of the illusion. And so, though I desire some consistency in my manner of spreading these breadcrumbs, I admit that between the pros and cons of recording my thoughts in an inconspicuous little black book and a mostly defunct web domain there isn’t much difference. The pieces are all there to be seen or not seen, but the important thing, more simply, is that they exist in the shadow of a promise that one day they will not, because even the loudest echoes, the most potent waves, recede into nothingness. And so, I suppose I shall continue to spread these bread crumbs aimlessly in hopes that the chaos will one day be made clear, if only for a fleeting moment.

[suiciderealestate]

New York ate me alive. I’m still lying here, but I use the past tense of the word “eat” because it is now a certainty and an inevitability that I am leaving. My abrupt departure from Kansas was ill-conceived and born of a lazy aversion to applying for jobs at a time when I was still employed. And so it was with my arrival in New York. I told myself that it would be much easier to find a job once I arrived, and I found some. I worked at a coffee shop in Brooklyn that let me go after two days. And recently I found work as a copy writer at a nightlife events company located in the heart of Times Square. When they offered me the job I didn’t understand the value of it. The office was a dump. The impression I got from the company was unsettling. I had a bad feeling about it from the beginning. But only after a new hire joined and told me just how many people she had interviewed with did I understand the competition in New York. She said the group interview she participated in was pregnant with hopeful candidates.

So many millions of people live here and so many millions are applying for work. I thought the magic of the city would see me as something that stands apart from the usual fold and lift me up into its ecosystem. I know that maybe could have happened, and maybe I simply did not try hard enough to make what I considered my dream a reality. The nightlife company, called Joonbug, fired me after five days of employment. The girl who helped me get the hang of things, named Taylor, quit after my second day. She told me no one trained her. She told me she had only worked there for a month. She told me one of the bosses, a woman named Jo Ellen who often dresses in black, is a psychopath. When I met the black-clad Jo Ellen, it was like a foul wind swept through the office. Her energy had an eerie emptiness about it. She was so hollow, and from the moment she smiled down at me, I could feel her hateful indifference. Nothing in her face betrayed it. It was just there. It filled the room. I knew I didn’t belong there, and I wonder now if Joonbug is only a microcosm for my placement in New York.

When Jon, the company CEO, hired me, he told me the writing sample I submitted matched the company’s voice and offered me the job. When he fired me, after a series of conversations with Jo Ellen, he told me my writing did not match the company’s voice after all. Jo Ellen had told me it was just “not good.” The day before, Jon had taken me and the other copy writer into a meeting with his project managers. He told me repeatedly that maybe I should be a project manager. He talked for more than an hour about all the things he’d done first in establishing an innovative profit model in the event ticketing business. None of it had anything to do with my job. Nobody had attempted to train me. It felt like a slap in the face to have no real instruction while sitting there listening to him grandstand about something completely unrelated. The morning of the day I got fired, Jo Ellen told me over the phone that the venue description I’d sent her the night before wasn’t good enough. I rewrote it, sent it to her and went outside and wandered through Times Square. Watching the throngs of people passing relentlessly through the streets crowded by towering buildings, I knew I would get fired. I didn’t feel like the description I’d submitted was terrible, but I could feel that Jo Ellen didn’t like me. The day I met her I noted that I had been working on several wholesale changes for descriptions that had been posted to the website, something I thought I was supposed to be doing, and I could tell she took offense. “Oh,” she said, lightly but with a subtle, vivid malice. “I thought those were pretty good. I didn’t think they needed to be changed.” I think her goal from that point was to show that there was no problem with the descriptions she felt so proud of, but rather a problem with me. I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t understand Joonbug’s voice. In retrospect, it feels like my time here was supplanted by the petty whims of an old woman who felt slighted.

I told myself this is where I was meant to be. So many people had said to me in Nashville that I belonged in a city like New York or Los Angeles. But now I am in New York and I find myself on the brink of packing my bags and going home. I have been holding onto hope for some time now that a tailwind would bring me to a place where I no longer felt blighted by repetitive rejection. Some people fear rejection, but I live in it. It stews all around me, and I suppose I’ve grown accustomed to it, fond of it even. And so I moved to New York City, the capital of rejection. I don’t know why I felt this would be any different. I don’t know why I told myself the city was calling to me. In people’s admonishments for me to come here I thought I heard the winds of fate. But this may truly be the end of my addiction to magical thinking. I’m going home, and not happily. I am going home with the crippling sense that I have utterly failed in what I set out to do. I did not make the necessary sacrifices. I didn’t adopt the sense of grit that I knew I would need to survive. I came here in a daydream, and in a daydream I have remained.

Even now I am laying on the couch, and as I type this I’m looking out the broad windows that let onto the balcony toward the moving clouds that hover above the sunlit projects just across the freeway. I am lost in a lazy, ethereal reverie. And though I revel in dissociation, in the hazy escape from this reality that so often feels like a grim nightmare, I know that I am on a journey that is completely my own. The road has not been paved for me. I have to pave it myself. And though I am now nearly twenty-eight years old and completely lost in the timeless persistence of this frail manifestation, I am hopeful that I might still take strength from this experience. I don’t know how to make my words count. I don’t know how to monetize the images and thoughts I breathe into the world. I don’t know how to save myself from this lugubrious convalescence. I lay here now, as I did then and as I fear I will continue to do. I am so incredibly tired. I feel perpetually in need of rest. This malaise has sabotaged me for almost my entire life. I don’t know how to escape from the tomb of idle comforts. I feel like I’m being buried alive in a coffin of my own lackadaisical making. I thought New York would exhume my body from this pit, but in this moment I only feel myself sinking deeper beneath the surface, suffocating in a miasma of my mendacious fantasies.