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Just performed this work for the first time last weekend. Spilling my archives everywhere as performance art, spilling beer down my chest, citing ‘On the Risk of a New Relationality’, citing Dorothy Iannone’s apologies, citing my old wedding pinterest. Getting over it, getting back in it, hey, hi

did I ever tell you about the time my mother burned a stack of letters from her ex-boyfriend, put them in a red velvet sack, and then drove around town in her honda civic, 9 year old me riding shotgun, and shot bits of ash out the window at relevant sites while screaming lines from a lady macbeth monologue?

mama’s blood is thickkkk

explaining my spotty undergrad transcript to an admissions advisor: “I guess I was a teenage anarchist?”

sick of men being brainwashed by porn!! dating yet another guy who has a sexual fantasy about rescuing anne frank and running away to join the french resistance together.

I’m sorry I stole your collective library’s copy of The Poetics of Space; I thought your video screening was careless about anti-Semitism and didn’t know how to say so without sounding like a Zionist. Maybe it’s because we were in a crematorium basement in Berlin

my ex is moving away in a week and we’re having a goodbye fling, it’s all weeping and lingerie

You know when you do something that feels like a choice but barely a conscious one? Just ripped out of you, as though any capacity you’d had to maintain an outdated or false dynamic has instantly faded and you just need, you need only, you desperately need to do whatever it is you’d been resisting. When you know you’re going to fuck up your life or at least the life you’ve been maintaining but nothing else is bearable.

My ex wants me to feel that I did something monstrous when I left him for someone else but it just felt at the time like nothing else would do and I don’t know if I should be apologizing for that anymore. I think the really shitty thing I did was staying with him because he felt like a home even though I knew it was the wrong home. Still, then again I didn’t know that type of love would feel so numbing until it did. And by then I felt numb and inertia took over. Until it didn’t, anymore. And I’m not even with the other man anymore. I just wanted that life to end, and now I’ve wrecked it and I’m guilty and lonely and energized and free and now all of a sudden I read constantly, and I like music again, and no one kisses me and it’s partly a relief.

I wish he wasn’t so wounded, I wish I’d been gentler and more cautious but then again I just needed to leave. I needed to leave, I left, I never felt like wife material until I met him and I didn’t know how compelling I’d find that narrative but it was almost primal, like oh maybe I can be the sort of woman who feels that this is enough. In retrospect of course not. I would’ve predicted the outcome better as a teenager, but loneliness is grinding. It wears you down.

Still it is a radiantly human feeling to have left a safety that was intolerable. This recklessness is so joyful. I’m so sorry but then again how can I apologize for this? Just I wasn’t brave enough yet or intact enough when I met him but at the time I don’t think I knew how much pain that could cause. And so what, we’re not intact, we slam into each other’s lives, that’s what we do, I’ll try not to make this mistake again at least not in the same way but I’m also singing.

Draft purge

I just want to come hang out, mostly.

I’ve been thinking about wasted time for like forever, which maybe started years ago when I was devoting my life to binge drinking and waitressing and one hungover day was all, ‘Oh hey, I just feel wasted in every sense of the word’ and readjusted my apron and sighed, heavily. Drunk, but also like there was no world for me, you know? Maybe a world somewhere, if I got my shit together, finished my degree, more therapy, or best of all came from a totally different class background and just lived at Neiman Marcus or whatever. Maybe a more positive attitude, maybe writing morning pages, maybe renewing my Y pass, but meanwhile…just wasted. But I was also a queer theory baby, reading and rereading The Queer Art of Failure (which I actually never finished, idk), and something in me said there could be something in my wasted time.

The thing is, I feel like all my genius friends talk about their aimlessness as something that needs to be cured, repressed, overcome, and it’s like, yes. Do what you need to get your shit together. But also, Adam Phillips, saying roughly “What we need now is fallow time, spells of vaguely dissatisfied restlessness in which desire can crystallize.”

Maybe wasted time is partly a holding-space and the best way out is through, like my obsession with reality tv or that bad ex or general flakiness wasn’t casual but a first draft of some grander project . Isn’t it annoying that sometimes the work is invisible until it reaches its final form? Suddenly everyone (my parents, people I hated in high school, unfriendly curators) sees that work was happening. But only after the fact. What sustains us before the fact? Just wondering.

What happens before the performance, before the language that allows an understanding of the work as work, in the weeks after the preamble to the performance when life is unstructured again, in slacking off and dreaming of and waiting for whatever to begin. As always, interrogating late capitalist logics of productivity while also remembering to attend to the work, whatever it may be.

Love affair, all ruined

But at least it’s reminding me of my intensities.

I’m off to London for a theatre festival and then Berlin for nothing, binge drinking and self-pity and like, museums.

I used to read more and I miss it. The flight was delayed and the airline gave me too many food vouchers and now I feel lethargic. I wish this love was tenable because I’m not ready to move on. I hope strangers find my accent cute.

My collective is creatively and intellectually unsatisfying.

All breakup energies and self-indulgence. God I need a bath. The hotel shuttle is late again. I come home the day before Valentine’s Day which now seems like a mistake. What if my debit card doesn’t work in European machines? Really I’m so lucky. Really just so solipsistic right now. Really I wish my ex-fiancé hadn’t quoted Simone Weil when he told me he was still devoted to loving his ex. Though at least he had the decency to aestheticize.

The shuttle’s finally here. I’ve gotten two grants this year but I still live uneasily with roommates.

I’m all heartbroken self-pity right now and I can’t fix this bad attitude nor would I want to, especially not now that I’ve named it a ‘bad attitude’. Half self-aware though.

Bhanu Kapil’s urban dictionary definition of a soft day, with no edges and poor nutrition at the airport and travelling in the opposite direction of your heart’s desire who responds inadequately to your goodbye texts. He’s probably sleeping.

Don’t date alcoholics and if you do don’t believe their proposals and devotion unless you’re willing to listen to their absences as well. He told me I don’t listen when he says no which is probably true but it’s hard to tell. Could keep trying to cajole his love but. This dynamic brings out a type of violence and desperation and high-pitched little girl voiced “whatever you think is best is fine for me, just love me, just stay.”

At the airport now. Hopefully London soon. At least I get to be down and out somewhere romantic.

Tbt the document we left on my best friend’s fridge for 6 months because they were perpetually sardonic with my (now ex) boyfriend. The contract was largely unsuccessful, but we tried, and now Evelyn is spectacularly here for the breakup processing

#friend praxis

withoutyourwalls

Tracey Emin, Birds 2012 London Olympic Print, 2011

Grade 8 diary excerpts, thanks mom for the excellent quote book

A couple nights ago, my new love and I ran through our mutual friends list discussing who would be a Nazi, who a collaborator and who’d be in the resistance if the situation was dire. Later, we read excerpts of Masochism by Deleuze to each other, and the next morning he called his mother to introduce us and tell her he’s in love with me.

It’s such a fucking relief, to feel my intensities so expertly matched. Why’d I ever bother with placid men?

carole maso is perfect

(One week ago I left my boyfriend of a year and a half for another man/for myself and now I feel wild all the time)

I have been teaching all my non-Jewish friends the word verklempt. Do you know it? Underlined in red as a type but that spelling is correct and the word (I keep typing ‘world’) is real. Verklempt: Yiddish for overcome with emotion. And I’m like, so in this thing.

I haven’t needed or felt drawn to post on here in years, but suddenly it feels urgent and I’m like, oh right. That world I used to love. When I was 17 I decided to make myself a sort of care kit for the next time depression really grabbed me, filled with my favourite quotes and books and essays and dresses and music and snacks and all of it, everything that makes me feel like I’m in my body and in my life. I never made it. The task was too daunting when I was unhappy and then the desire faded when I was well. But just this week I’ve been back in my archives, combing through old books for my favourite lines and listening to all the old songs I’d forgotten I love. And here, too. The archive was the care kit. I already made it, unconsciously, out of this drive to immerse myself in a world of the things I love. I guess that might just sound normal, just like a thing everyone does, so maybe it’s my childhood bpd trauma training that makes this practice seem like a revelation. I was just so trained to distance myself from myself. Still, I love my books. I love my clothes. I know how to be radiantly happy in my own ways. It’s nice to be reminded.

Love to our shared archives, and love always to the other desperate archivists. I’ll never stop needing you.

coocoolah-deactivated20190601

The more we mystify and pathologize children’s relation to sexuality, evacuate childhood of the stain of sexuality, and reify simplistic notions of child powerlessness, the more we disempower children and foster their uninformed curiosity, desire, risk taking, and psychological maladjustment to emerging erotic orientations.

Steven Angelides, “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality” (162)

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