I ask her if she wants me to get cheese on my trip to the grocery store.

“Asians don’t digest cheese properly.”

“Really!?”

“Yeah, it’s a genetic trait.”

I think about this. I think about all the things the body refuses on principle, all the ways we are written before we arrive. I hand her my cigarette and she takes a hard drag and blows it out of the side of her mouth, expert and unsentimental. I watch the smoke curl and go thin and vanish into the popcorn ceiling like it was never anything at all.

“...but get some anyway.” A pause that has real weight to it. “And some kimchi.”

There is something I love about a person who can contradict themselves without shame. She’s watching a show about celebrities, their houses, the square footage of their existential superiority.

“God, I hate rich people,” I say.

She doesn’t look at me. The television light moves across her face.

“The working class see money as pragmatic and vital for life and dignity whereas the wealthy see it as a number, an abstraction that isn’t tangible.”

I let that sit there between us. It seems true in the way that things seem true at this hour, in this light, in this cluttered, popcorn ceiling room.

“You’re sure full of wisdom today.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I think it’s the vicodin.”

She finally looks at me then and there is something in her face I can’t quite name, amusement maybe, or tenderness, or just that particular tiredness of someone who has thought carefully about the world and found it mostly tedious. The dog outside has stopped. Whatever it was barking at has either gone away or arrived.

I had already fallen. That’s the thing I need you to understand. Whatever romantic architecture I’d constructed around the Mapplethorpe moment (the notion of a precise lit wick, love as singular bomb explosion) was retroactive fiction, the kind of shit the brain produces to give chaos the dignity of narrative. I’d belonged to her for weeks. Maybe months. The timeline had blurred in the way that timelines do when you stop sleeping correctly.

I texted her the Gun Club, “She’s Like Heroin To Me.” Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s voice doing what it does, which is sound like a man being pulled apart at a cellular level and finding this, somehow, erotic. I watched the delivered receipt appear. I watched the three dots pulse.

I know I’m like heroin to you. Duh.

I sat with that for a long time as I poured two fingers of bourbon into a found dirty glass. (finally!) I thought about the way heroin actually works…the way it doesn’t feel like destruction, not at first, not for a while. It feels like the body recognizing something that has always been missing. I thought about how she knew this about herself, carried the knowledge lightly, almost cheerfully, the way beautiful and intelligent women sometimes carry the knowledge of their own devastation potential.

She knew all the films that mattered. She’d read Murakami and Proust and Baldwin and could explain why each one mattered in ways that were not performed. She dressed like Debbie Harry circa 1982…not the idea of Debbie Harry, not costume Debbie Harry, but the actual granular specificity of that year, that silhouette, that particular quality of not-trying-but-absolutely-trying.

Fifteen hundred miles. A number I converted, compulsively, into flying hours.

I did nothing. I admired her from a distance that felt, in its way, curated. There is a kind of love that exists most perfectly at the level of signal and response…text, image, the three-dot ellipsis that means someone somewhere is thinking of words for you. To close the distance might corrupt the frequency. I told myself this the way you tell yourself the things that are not quite true but function as a necessary operating system.

She had cried at the photographs. The bodies. The flowers that looked like bodies. Something in her had opened and she had told me, and I had been sitting in my expensive apartment with my surrealist prints thinking: yes, of course, that’s exactly right, that’s exactly what they do. Thinking: I understand this. I understand what you’re describing. Also thinking: the photographs did to you what you have done to me, which is find the place where beauty and damage become identical, and press down hard.

I did not say any of this, of course. I said: That makes sense. Or something like that. Something that was true but not what I meant at all.

I found it again on a Tuesday or maybe a Wednesday. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the feeling that came with it, that astounding feeling of being returned to yourself from a great distance. Who was the person who put that there? What were they waiting for? One gets older and the artifacts of your past life start to feel like they belong to someone you once heard about, someone you might have pitied or loved if you’d known them in the right light.

The things you learned when you were young, they don’t stay the way you think they will. Life comes in and works on them and bends them. Sometimes it seems like it breaks them completely, like whatever you understood back then was just a child’s version of a thing, too simple to survive what was coming. You let go of it, or you think you let go of it. And then something finds you — a bookmark, a smell, a song playing in a parking lot at dusk — and what you thought was gone turns out to have only been waiting. Not broken. Just deepened by everything that tried to undo it. The early truths come back as larger truths. They were always larger, you just didn’t have the life yet to hold them.

The bookmark had no words, and that seemed perfect. Some things don’t need to say anything. They just sit inside the dark of a closed book, patient as a held breath, waiting for the light to come back in.

I walked into the Tower Records/Books/Video on Beach Blvd. with the specific intention of stealing a copy of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and I was stoned, so the fluorescent lighting was humming this low frequency with a polite annoyance. There were these college kids browsing the literature section wearing obscenely baggy Abercrombie jeans that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. I could peep the checkout girl through the aisles, black Louise Brooks-style bob, checking her nails like she was waiting for her real life to start and I knew she wouldn’t notice, because she never noticed anything.

The book went into my jacket like it had always lived there. This is the part where I should say something about Miller, about the irony of stealing a book about a man who stole everything and was stolen from in return, about transgression as homage. I won't, because it wasn't any of that. It was just a dipshit shoving a book into a jacket.

When I approached the counter to retrieve my bag—they made you check bags, policy, whatever—she grabbed it and just tossed it across the Formica without even looking at me and when I heard the thud, I had a heartbreaking premonition of my American Spirits breaking inside the soft pack (why did I buy a soft pack?) and something went cold in my chest. I stared at her and she stared past me at nothing, at the door, at her shift ending in two hours, where, apparently, something far more interesting than moi was happening.

I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell this bored creature that she was everything wrong with Orange County, with customer service, with this particular strain of minimum-wage spite that masquerades as existential cool. That her apathy was not, in fact, not a personality. That Generation X had promised us a certain quality of disaffection and this maliciousness was not what any of us had signed up for. What a fucking drag.

I didn't say any of this because hatred is exhausting, and I had a stolen book in my jacket and broken cigarettes in my bag and the automatic doors were already sighing open with a pneumatic resignation that seemed, in the moment, to be aimed specifically at me.

Oh, her name was Jenny.

Two years later we would fuck with grim determination in her apartment in North Hollywood; the one with the water stains on the ceiling, the waft of Korean food from the restaurant downstairs, and the gloriously theatrical gay roommate who hated me. She wouldn’t remember Tower Records or my cigarettes or any of it, and I wouldn’t tell her because by then it didn’t matter. We’d order Thai food at two in the morning after popping some ecstasy—she could really feel it, and I’d nod and smoke the cigarettes she kept in her freezer and watch her face melt and the room ripple while we listened to Sisters of Mercy. I often thought about that day, that moment, how much I’d hated her in the past and how little it meant now, and I thought: this is the closest I am going to get to a satisfying narrative arc, and I should probably appreciate it, but I didn't.

We saw each other a few times after, with the mild goodwill of two people who had tasted each other's worst morning breath and no longer felt the need to perform. The Tropic of Cancer is on my shelf as a sort of anthropological artifact. It sits there doing the thing stolen books do, which is nothing, which is the whole point, which is what I apparently needed badly enough to risk a misdemeanor over, at twenty-two, in Anaheim, under fluorescent lights, while a girl who would later let me swap bodily fluids and take the ecstasy she could really fucking feel stared past me at the wheezing door.

My grandfather drove a forest green Ford Explorer that smelled of Marlboro cigarettes and Old Spice, a combination that should not have worked as well as it did. This amalgamation of aroma produced something so specific, so entirely located in a version of post-war America that believed, without irony or apparent strain, in both quiet masculinity and slow suicide. The old dude would pull up to the curb on Pacific Avenue in Venice Beach without fully stopping, the car still moving fractionally, and I would lunge out, ungovernable, with my skateboard under my arm the way you disembark from something you’ve already stopped thinking about.

Venice was still gritty back then, and this matters. What exists there now — the cold brew installations, the 18 dollar burritos, the nepo-babies in their Lululemon doing outdoor yoga with the focused expressions of people who have recently discovered that capitalism has a wellness dimension — none of that existed. What existed instead was a granular, salt-damaged realness that the city has since pressure washed into something more legible, more palatable, more fundamentally dishonest.

If you didn’t know anyone, or ended up on the wrong street, things could end badly for you. I knew this the way most fatherless teenagers knew things, not through reasoning but through some pre-verbal threat assessment running constantly through the crawlspace of my mind like a process you can’t quit. There were gang members on certain corners who looked at you with an evaluative blankness that had nothing to do with hostility and everything to do with mathematics. They were calculating your material worth and whether that was worth exercising their time and effort.

The skate crews had their own pecking order, and you learned it or you didn’t. The older guys at the park had a taxonomy for kooks that was precise and merciless — the kids who came down from the Valley with the wrong energy, the ones who tried to insert themselves into situations through sheer aggressive presence, who confused fashion with talent, would be dealt with swiftly. The consequences ranged from social erasure to something more tactile and destructive. I learned it quickly, and was good enough on a board that the learning had a certain velocity to it: skill as social currency, which is the only currency that actually matters when you’re 16 and trying to exist in a space that wasn’t designed for outsiders.

My grandfather would pick me up at 6. The Explorer would materialize at the curb like a hallucination, and I would climb back in carrying whatever I'd accumulated in those hours—bruises, the exhaustion of sustained social performance, occasionally a phone number, occasionally just the feeling of having briefly been someone slightly different: not the high school kid who existed among the normies and candy ravers, nor the one who sat at the dinner table with the 5 o'clock news and a plate of soggy peas and mashed potatoes.

He would ask if I had a good time and then simply say, “Good.” It contained no follow-up, solicited no elaboration, made no bid for intimacy or disclosure. Just: Good. A full stop masquerading as a word.

The Marlboro smoke moved through the air conditioning in slow, democratic tendrils. Merle Haggard was crackling through the radio about a love so absolute it required no qualification. The 110 freeway opened up ahead of us, wide and indifferent, and my grandfather drove the way he spoke…steadily, without excess, and without the desperate over-correction of a man who had ever once in his life second-guessed his lane.

“It gets into everything…” Arlo said. The beer in his bottle had been cooling for some time, approaching what engineers call ambient temperature and what the rest of us call the temperature of piss water. “…the drain, my clothes, my food.”

He took a slug off his Red Stripe.

I understood this. I understood this in a way I didn’t tell him I understood it.

There is something worth dwelling on here, which is the persistence of a woman’s hair. It is a persistence that bears no relationship whatsoever to the persistence of her presence, or the persistence of wanting her, or the persistence of the conversations you had in the early months when you were still performing a version of yourself you found credible. The hair simply continues. It turns up in drains and coat pockets and, yes, wrapped around the lint trap of a dryer you share with two other people who do not have long black hair. It is not tracking your emotional situation, it is a filament of protein doing what filaments of protein do, which is go everywhere and remain.

“I found one of her’s wrapped around my dick,” I said. I said it the same dry way you would mention a minor irregularity on a bank statement.

Arlo was quiet for a moment. Outside, the city continued its tedious, mechanical functioning. A delivery truck. The air brakes on a city bus hissing to a stop.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Same. That’s happened to me too.” He traced the logo on the beer bottle with his forefinger. “Weird, isn’t it.”

This was obviously rhetorical and I was far beyond bored anyway. We didn’t say anything else about it. It went easily, which is what subjects do when they have already said the only thing they had to say.

I’m in the kitchen that has one of those refrigerators that costs as much as a car. I’m making my usual three-finger cocktail, the kind of drink that announces you’ve given up pretending to care about things like liver function or appearing competent in the morning, when Lula taps me on the shoulder. She’s wearing something expensive that’s supposed to look cheap; the usual 40-something bohemian aesthetic.

“You gotta cigarette, cowboy?”

The cowboy thing is from some movie we watched together in 2012. I don’t remember which one, but I believe we were sort of “together” then. Time doesn’t work for me anymore….it no longer arranges itself into years or seasons, only into two great territories: the world before cell phones and the world after. Everything else bleeds into everything else.

I hand her a rollie and she sparks it with a novelty lighter where, once tilted, the clothes slide off a woman exposing her tits and bush. She told me she bought it in Tokyo or claimed she did. Everything has a story attached to it now, or a psychological narrative.

“You bored?” she says, exhaling smoke that mingles with her perfume and my knock-off Dior Sauvage.

“Lately I’ve been enjoying conversations that aren’t constructed on anything reality based,” I say, though even this feels rehearsed. The truth is we’re just apes that want to fuck someone but have to pretend we’re interested in each other’s lubricated yapping about documentaries or, god forbid, conspiracy theories.

The music was aggressively mediocre; that shitty indie music everyone pretended to like fifteen years ago but had a shorter shelf life than raw seafood. Lula touches my arm like she’d read about flirting in a manual, and I curl my finger in her pant loop because that’s what you do when someone touches your arm.

We stood there doing our little dance, both knowing exactly where this was headed, both pretending we didn’t…

She whispered that we should “blow this joint” and go to my art studio a few blocks away. I had always thought of it as a place of solitude, but she was welcome there. She had always been welcome, and to my surprise, she still had her own key. In the past, she used to organize little film parties, projecting movies onto the wall, gatherings that served as pretexts for mingling with artists who were more local celebrities than serious professionals. I would wake hungover in the morning and walk to the coffee shop a few blocks away, daydreaming as I went, and it was during those walks that ideas would come to me. Ideas for paintings, or essays, fragments of thought that seemed to arrive from nowhere.

These were good times, perhaps the best times, and yet I had never spoken of them until now, had never tried to put them into words. There was something about the silence surrounding those days that felt necessary, as if speaking would somehow diminish what had been. But memory insists on its own schedule, and now, years later, the words come anyway.

“What is left of a man and all his pride but bones.” —Jack Kerouac

Somewhere along the way, I learned that my ex-girlfriend had published a poem in The New York Times. The news arrived without ceremony, a fact presented in passing, and I accepted it for what it was. No jealousy, no bitterness…just another detail in the unfinished story of someone I once knew. She had always been a serious writer, the kind who sent her work into the world at the age of 19, (under a pen name she had used in college) certain it would find a home. By the time I met her, she had already written a book. After she had evaporated from my landscape, there were others.

I read the poem. It had that careful, antiseptic cruelty of someone rewriting history for aesthetic purposes. In its lines were fragments of our life, rearranged, turned surreal—her eating kimchi in a laundromat, me carrying her home in my arms from a party, her vomiting that same kimchi onto my jacket after too many cocktails and Kool cigarettes. She wrote about the skyline, about fluorescent loneliness, as if she’d emerged from the wreckage purified. I stared at the words, the room humming with a kind of dull inevitability, and it occurred to me that I’d been erased long before she even knew she was capable of doing it.

Had she remembered these moments because of me, or had they dissolved into the warm tide of her own imagination, stripped of their private significance? I imagined a timeline where she had written these lines while I was still sleeping beside her, where she had already been processing our life into art while I, ignorant of these pen strokes, had been living it.

After reading the poem, I sat motionless in my chair and stared out the window. The city outside pulsed and moved, indifferent to my thoughts. I went out for a walk, and the streets were wet from the previous night’s rain. I walked without direction, past coffee shops filled with people working on their laptops, and past bookstores with their artful displays of newly published novels. I considered stepping inside, picking up one of her books, and running my fingers over the pages. But I didn’t.

Instead, I continued walking until I reached the park and sat on a bench watching the trees sway. I remembered how she had once told me that poetry was a way of making sense of things, of pressing order onto the untamed edges of memory. And maybe she was right. Maybe the city in her poem had nothing to do with me. The uncertainty pressed against my ribs, weightless and unrelenting. I let it stay.

I met the founder—owner, big boss, magazine messiah—for dinner one night at this Chinese restaurant that tried way too hard to be upscale. The staff wore black button-downs and pained expressions. All the writers and designers had on jackets or ties like they were auditioning for some retro newsroom fantasy, while I wore an Alice Cooper t-shirt. One of the wives asked the server if the rice was “the type with plastic in it.” I thought she was joking until she launched into this deranged explanation about something she read online. I was then politely informed that the kitchen would almost certainly spit in our food. It was that kind of night.

My girlfriend texted while I was still at the restaurant.

“How’s the circle jerk?”

“Expensive. Someone just asked if rice has plastic in it.”

“Jesus.”

“They’re talking about market penetration now. The deodorant demographic.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“The cover? I already did it. Took like thirty seconds.”

“Is it good?”

“Fuckin’ sucks. That’s the point.”

“You’re such a cunt sometimes.”

There's something exquisitely repulsive about these lavish dinner parties—like observing a housefly drown in slow motion, performing its entire pathetic death ballet for an audience of nobody. Capital, it turns out, functions as an extraction device for anything resembling human sincerity, and here was the demonstration model: money hemorrhaging in all directions, projects conceived during cocaine reveries, the performed ecstasy of people incinerating currency as a leisure activity. The persistent American mythology about wealthy people possessing some mystic competence is, naturally, complete horseshit.

The insider jargon came fast: buzzwords, half-truths, fantasies about “the male demographic,” mass-market deodorant and beer and cars, all delivered with this frat bro earnestness that blurred fantasy and reality until they were the same joke. At some point I decided, instantly and with a kind of perverse joy, to make the worst cover I could muster, just to see if these slack-jawed dipshits would green-light it.

I had already slapped my contribution together in under a minute, cutting and pasting additions to an already tactile collage on my laptop while folding laundry, the glow of the screen flickering across an ashtray piled with cigarettes. It was barely a design, more like an uninterested middle-finger dressed up as art. But for a couple grand on a Saturday afternoon when I was hungover and hollow-eyed and the world felt like a busted amp, it was perfect.

By 1969 everyone was on speed or acid or both, and here was Cheever still doing his alcoholic humdrum Connecticut thing, except now the repression was so thick you could practically hear him screaming underneath it. The WASP suburbs were rotting from the inside out, which wasn’t news to anyone who’d been paying attention, but Cheever was writing about it like a man trapped in a burning building who kept insisting everything was fine, just a little warm, perhaps we should open a window.

“You think he knew he was losing relevancy?” a friend asked me when I mentioned the Playboy piece.

“I think he knew he was losing himself,” I said, “which is probably worse; in Bullet Park he’s essentially screaming ‘I’ve been wanting dick this whole time and also I want to die.”

The real enigma isn’t whether Cheever knew what he was doing. It’s whether he could survive doing it. The drinking, the decades-long performance of heterosexuality while he cruised men and filled his journals with homoerotic longing, the careful maintenance of the family man facade while his interior life was collapsing like a badly constructed soufflé. All this turmoil created a kind of static interference that made his late work nearly illegible to an audience that wanted their suburban ennui served with a twist of irony, not a shot of existential terror.

The estate sale where I bought the Playboy felt like a Cheever story, naturally. Spanish Revival architecture doing its best 1940’s California fantasy, the rubbish of a B-movie screenwriter’s life being liquidated by children who flew in and couldn’t be bothered to sort through Dad’s strange pathologies. I bought the aforementioned Playboy and a first edition Play It As It Lays with an inscription that read: For when you need to remember that things can always get worse. Joan Didion as a sympathetic get-well card. Very California. Very ‘70s. Very much the kind of object that accumulates meaning in inverse proportion to its monetary value. ($)

…and as I reminisced about the detritus of a stranger’s life, I thought about Cheever again, about how we’re all just hoarding evidence of having been here, really. Collecting the ephemera of our disasters and calling it a life. The enigma is believing there was ever supposed to be a coherent narrative in the first place.

If you come out of a movie saying, “Well, that was interesting,” then it was a piece of shit.—William Friedkin

My girlfriend and I were watching Andy Warhol’s Blowjob the other night—this utterly silent, aggressively minimal thing where the camera just stays locked on some guy’s face while he’s supposedly getting head off-screen. No soundtrack, no context, just his expression shifting in these faint, almost pathetic increments. After ten minutes it felt less like a film and more like a staring contest with someone who wasn’t even looking at you. We started talking because, honestly, there was nothing else to do.

You know, maybe it’s just me, but whenever I’m actually getting a blowjob my mind drifts anyway. Bills. Childhood. Mortality. Stupid shit. So the idea of maintaining focus for thirty-five straight minutes of someone else’s half-interested pleasure felt impossible. I kept imagining what would be going through my head if the camera were on me in the throes of ecstasy. It wasn’t pretty.

I told her I’ve been having trouble writing lately; that everything I produce feels like this shapeless slurry of sentences, just letters collapsing into each other, no structure, no pulse. She looked at me, smirking the way she does when she’s trying to pretend she’s not making fun of me, and said, “Writing an essay is kind of like having kids. They’re not all gonna be winners.”

Goddamn right.

We started to talk about her boss, that bovine disappointment with the beard that looked like it had been glued on by a half-blind taxidermist. She hated him, or rather, she hated the way he existed in her peripheral vision like a persistent rash, and was the kind of mediocrity that arrives in corporate casual and performs “team spirit” like a doomed piece of performance art no one asked for. “He’s in a band, you know,” she said, rolling her eyes so hard I thought they might detach and drift into the next room.

“Really? I bet they fuckin’ suck.”

“Of course they do. No bearded fuck-face could ever be in a decent sleazy post-punk band.”

She’d seen his band once, purely by accident, and described it as “The Black Keys if they sucked.”

“But the Black Keys do suck!”

“Exactly.”

“You call this a collection!?” she says.

Her voice is soft but exact, like it’s designed to wound. I shrug. It’s not even really a collection. It’s a few Nitzer Ebb 12-inch singles, a handful of Dead Kennedys LPs, a Repo Man soundtrack, and a scattering of Psychedelic Dub seven inches I’d rescued from flea markets and basement bins. Hardly worth cataloging.

“You were a lavender-latte guzzling, trust fund, xanax queen like two years ago and now you’re an expert on 1980’s punk rock!?”

“Fuck off.”

She flips through them with the methodical precision of someone who believes organization can substitute for meaning. I watch her perform this ritual of domestic expansion, this gentle violence of rearrangement. There's something erotic about being judged so thoroughly, about submitting to someone else's vision of how your life should be ordered. She hums something by The Cure….The Lovecats?

A yellowed flyer tumbles out of one of the records that I’d obviously picked up years ago, folded and forgotten. It listed the bands but no venue. In its place was simply: “ask a punk.” Below that, in jagged, typewritten letters: “jarring, dissonant, low IQ bullshit.” I’d kept it because it reminded me of everything I hated and half-loved about the scene—the way it simultaneously embraced and rejected intellectualism, the way it made stupidity into a virtue while demanding you be smart enough to understand the performance.

There she was on the floor, legs crossed like a delinquent schoolgirl, thumbing through my records with the casual menace of someone who knows exactly what she’s looking for. When she pulled out the Samhain bootleg (immaculate, untouched by the ruin of years) she smirked like she’d found a secret I didn’t deserve to keep. “You really were one of those guys,” she said, holding the sleeve up to the light and illuminating the demons that had parents in the Reagan Era shitting their pants, even if they had the moral equivalent of canned soup.

This is the choreography we substitute for honesty—the paternalistic smile behind her “reorganization,” my little pantomime of defiance dressed up as integrity, both of us auditioning for some version of ourselves the other might still want to fuck.

“Babe, can you go pickup one of those burritos from that vegan place? I’m starving,” she says in a fake whine.

She’ll reorganize them again next week. Maybe by color. Maybe alphabetically. Maybe she’ll throw them all in the trash. I don’t care. And neither does she, really. We’re both performing some kind of domestic theater, pretending to be adults. But don’t mock my collection, not when the first pressing of the Repo Man soundtrack exists.

“Wanna beer?” I ask with a wink.

“Duh,” she says.

Most mornings, I wake before the sun rises. I brew a cup of coffee, black and quiet, and sit in the kitchen with the radio playing low jazz from a distant station. There is something comforting in that music, like it exists on a frequency that time forgot. As I sip, I slowly run my fingers across my forehead. The creases are there, faint, but persistent, like a whisper in another language. I try to listen, but they say nothing.

The days repeat with minor variations, like verses in a poem you half-remember from childhood. You wake up, look in the mirror, and realize the face staring back at you is no longer provisional and it’s the one you’ll grow old with.

The mirror doesn’t lie…not like people do. The mirror says: You’re older now, pal. Take a look. You’re not twenty-two with fire in your blood and a girl waiting in every dive bar from here to Bakersfield. You’re forty-something, alone in a room that smells like old coffee and regret. You’ve written half a novel, and the only person who read it was a girl who left you for a guy with a mortgage and superior social skills.

And so I’ve started noticing the details: a dog wagging its tail at you on the street, the warmth of sunlight through a dusty window, the sound of Sinatra on a scratchy record. Time slides past like a train you missed, and then another, and another. When I was younger, I believed there would always be more trains. more chances. Now I know better. Each day closes behind me like a door I can’t reopen. That knowledge doesn’t bring sadness exactly—more like a quiet clarity. A reckoning.

We are all drifting. Through memories, regrets, brief encounters, half-finished books. And yet, each morning, I brew coffee, listen to jazz, and stare out the window. And maybe that’s all aging really is: learning to wake up, again and again, dragging your ass in a life that you didn’t know you were writing all along.

A dream within a dream that vanishes without warning and completely.

Sometimes I call my girlfriend and we go to In-N-Out and then watch shitty, underground B-movies in a haze of hash smoke. Jenny always orders the same thing—a cheeseburger, no onions, animal-style fries, and a Dr. Pepper. This never changes, which in itself is a kind of comfort, even if I sometimes pretend to be surprised, just to see if she’ll roll her eyes and say something passively sardonic about men and selective memory loss. She always does.

In the car, she kicks her feet up on the dashboard, and I notice the chipped red nail polish. She paints her toes a new color every week—black, purple, or neon blue. That blue always makes me think of David Hockney’s pools: hyper-saturated, sinister, vaguely about wealth and dread. The air smells like grease, over-salted fries, the tang of sunblock, and some random environmental collapse we’re all pretending isn’t going to happen.

“I had the weirdest dream last night,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“You were cheating on me with someone who looked like Aubrey Plaza but with, like, spiky tits and a lizard tongue.”

I glance at her and understand that this is a pretext. “Sounds accurate.”

She doesn’t laugh. She stares out the window. “Do you think we’re boring?”

“What?”

“I mean. We do the same thing every weekend. Eat. Watch some shitty movie. Maybe fuck. Maybe not. You don’t even pretend to like the movies I pick anymore.”

I take a bite of my burger. “That’s not true. I pretended to like the one with the cult.”

“That was Midsommar. You called it ‘meh.’”

“I said it was ambitious.”

The apartment is small and sparse. There’s a Warhol print on the wall (yard sale, five bucks, probably fake) and a bookshelf with some Capote and Didion and Camus. No TV in the bedroom. I read a lot of art history and pretend it’s for work. The sunlight comes through the blinds in the morning and it’s harsh and cinematic.

Jenny says I’m emotionally distant, that I treat everything like a scene from a movie, and that I narrate our life like I’m writing voiceover for some nihilistic indie film from 1995. I tell her that’s not true, and then I do it again because it’s reflexive. “You’re impossible,” she says, chewing on her straw that swims in a watered-down soda she no longer wants. I shrug. “Everyone fuckin’ sucks,” I say.

Lately, I’ve been sleeping in later, doomscrolling through a news cycle that feels like déjà vu on a loop, watching reels of strangers reenacting lives they don’t seem to actually enjoy. There’s a kind of numbness hanging in the air—like static, or humidity, or the vague chemical scent of a grocery store freezer aisle. And I don’t know if it’s L.A., or the internet, or just the slow erosion of hope masquerading as adulthood.

So I keep ordering the coffee. I keep watching the movies I know I’ll hate. I keep answering her calls. Not because of love, or desire, or even connection, but because the ritual itself becomes the point. The comfort of the routine, the illusion of intimacy. Not being alone…even if that’s the biggest lie of all.

We’re in her West Hollywood apartment, which clings to the edge of decency the way a drunk clings to a velvet rope at a washed-up club. The windows open onto downtown, a view that used to whisper gentrification and now shrieks fentanyl, influencer stabbings, and those idiotic NFT billboards… ransom notes from a civilization gone apeshit ironic.

“That is where the real money lives,” she says, gesturing vaguely toward the hills, where “real money” gets its own landscaping team and lives behind 12-foot walls. “And these—” she points to a black leather sectional and a sad, sloping IKEA bookshelf, “—these are trash, but respectable for now.”

I sit. The couch exhales a faint aroma of cigarettes and I couldn't help but to imagine the legions of bare asses planted there before me. There are no books on the shelf; just pastel candles, a Hermes cologne bottle, and a framed picture of Lucia with someone whose face has been scratched out in a way that suggests both heartbreak, performance and the anger of someone who still checks his Instagram at 3 a.m. I didn’t ask.

“I thought you quit sugar,” I say, being cheeky and holding the Coke like a game show hostess.

“Only in public,” she replies. “Here I’m just a person. Or at least I pretend.”

She still talks like someone who once had a callback for a pharmaceutical ad—an actor turned “brand identity consultant,” which is L.A.-speak for professional ghostwriter of other people’s taste. She’s the kind of person who spends an entire afternoon deciding whether a lotion bottle should feel more “Lana during Ultraviolence” or “early Sofia Coppola.” She also used to paint. Or said she did.

She’s thinner than when we were dating—gaunt really—but in a very retro 90’s way. Like she’s one ubiquitous cigarette and sharp camera angle away from being relevant again. Kate Moss would be proud.

“Do you miss it?” I ask.

“Which part?” she says, deadpan. “The coke or the Coke?”

“The art. Painting. Making things.”

“Oh, please,” she groans. “Making things is for people with parents who die and leave them houses.”

“Do you want to see the balcony?” she asks. I do not. I follow her anyway, and from this height, the city looks like it’s doing fine: obedient, glittering, half-sedated. You could almost forget the water’s running out and the hills were recently hell on earth.

We stare out at the city for a moment: helicopters make lazy arcs over the skyline and a siren screeches somewhere east. Lucia lights a joint from a tiny matchbook printed with the name of some forgotten hipster nightclub, long since turned into a drug den for squatters.

“I keep thinking I’ll move,” she says, exhaling smoke. “But the view keeps me here. It’s like a screensaver for my real life.”

I nod, sipping the Coke. It’s warm.

“You should visit more,” she says. “It’s good to see someone who remembers when I used to be interesting.”

“You still are,” I lie.

“Sleep, those little slices of death–how I loathe them.”–Edgar Allen Poe

It was something I read once, maybe in a book I’ve since misplaced or a footnote in someone else’s dream.

The witching hour, they called it.

A narrow crevice of time, wedged between three and four in the morning. Hours when the world loosens its grip and begins to unravel at the seams, and mischievous spirits slip through like fish between rocks. Hell, even that demonic dipshit Satan might appear in a theatrical fashion, smelling vaguely of dirt weed and no doubt screaming obscenities at his former employer. A disgraced actor in the scene of a play no one remembers asking to see.

Picture: Laurence Olivier with hooves and bourbon breath, delivering a Truman Capote monologue to no one in particular.

But I don’t believe in that sort of thing. I keep odd hours, it’s true. Hours not tethered to anything but appetite and insomnia. In the end, I tend to regard the supernatural with the distant skepticism of a man who has read too many books and trusted too few of them. For me, the hour is rarely haunted by ghosts, but more often by hunger. I make coffee. I heat a croissant and drizzle it with honey and then tune in to Japanese baseball, which for reasons I can’t explain have become a small comfort in the chaos.

Tonight: the Yokohama BayStars vs. the Tokyo Yakult Swallows. Names as whimsical and precise as haiku from another dimension. In Japan, baseball exists in a parallel register. Not the brute spectacle it’s become in America, but something quieter, more intrinsic. You don’t obsess, you absorb. There’s reverence, but never the manic entitlement of American fandom. People care, but with the elegance of someone folding a letter they’ll never send.

The players bow before the umpires, a gesture that seems ceremonial and human at once. The beer girls—ponytailed, efficient, nearly otherworldly—glide through the stands with their portable kegs like clockwork dancers in a forgotten dream. It’s all been arranged, you sense, not in the name of spectacle, but order. Harmony. Not just about rules of the game, but rules for how to exist within the space the game creates.

Shugo Maki steps to the plate. The crowd sang “Happy Birthday” with brass horns and reckless devotion as the rain clattered against his helmet and reflected stadium lights, giving me major Blade Runner vibes. He grounded into a routine fielder’s choice, a play already forgotten before he reached the dugout. But later—and this is how baseball gets you, how it absolutely slithers into your bloodstream—he connects…a home run! The ball crashes into the ozone above the left-center stands as the stadium escalates into pandemonium and fluorescent green rain ponchos scatter like startled birds. My eyes betray me and they start to close. Sleep sidles in with a velvet rope and says, “You’re on the list, pal.”

The room around me softens. The refrigerator hums. The moon lays a pale blade of light across the linoleum. Somewhere in the house, an old floorboard shifts its weight. And from nowhere, I remember a teacher whose name I’ve long since lost. That leads, as such things do, to a boy from that same classroom who died before we turned twenty. A crash. A whiskey bottle. The memory uninvited, but present. They come like that. The dead, taking quiet attendance.

These stories from the dream world fascinate me…they rise like petty regrets and vanish just as fast. Yet through the fog, one major detail remains: yesterday I made a girl happy by giving her a book. This was a rare edition she had long coveted, and then she kissed me. That fact, that moment, shines brighter than all the rest, and I desperately hold onto it like a lunatic because I love her. I adore her. And it may be the only true thing I’ve done all week in this world of chaos and static.

Did I finish the game? I don’t think so. At some point, I passed into sleep—if sleep is the right word for the muddled terrain I dissolved into. I am not wholly awake…I am not wholly asleep. A greasy pillow anchors me to the bed, and thoughts drift into essay form, scattershot and fragile. I spy a notebook somewhere nearby and scratch this onto paper, not because it matters, but because I had to. There are moments, I think, that ask to be acknowledged. Even if no one’s listening.

Her name was Madeline, a name to me that was vaguely upscale and cold, like a luxury lipstick shade or a West End boutique. Blonde, obviously, but not the American kind: hers was platinum in that studied, overprocessed way, like she'd chain-smoked through every bleach job since she was fourteen. The conversations were either ironic, or worse, knowing—those lazy postmodern utterances that reveal nothing except a fear of sincerity. She didn’t want to be understood; she wanted to be glanced at, interpreted in fragments, perhaps envied, then left alone.

We spent our days hungover and over-caffeinated, wandering through Notting Hill, Camden, Shoreditch, whatever, like bored extras in a Godard film about two people who were trying really hard to seem like they weren’t trying at all. Every conversation was padded with quasi-cool and mutual disinterest. Every dinner ended with cocktails and Valium, or Valium and then cocktails, depending on how bad the afternoon had been.

I don’t think I ever really knew her. She was curated—like, everything about her felt outsourced. Her playlists were immaculate (Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Drab Majesty) but impersonal. Her apartment was minimalist to the point of anesthetic. Even the sex felt like a performance piece titled “Disassociation and the Decline of Post-Capitalism”—stylized, practiced, slightly angry. One time, mid-thrust, she said, “Don’t fall in love with me. I’m just filling a void.” I laughed, but I don’t think she was joking. Duh.

On the last night, she dropped me at King’s Cross in a black cab and didn’t kiss me goodbye. Just kind of nodded, like a transaction had ended. No kiss, no bitterness. The week had simply ended, like a short-term lease or an expired prescription. I didn’t feel loss. I felt the return of my own autonomy, which had been on pause for a brief period of mutual distraction in a country I was indifferent towards.

….and just like that, I was off to Milan.

When I was twelve, my life was basically split down the middle: Star Wars or baseball. Outer space or outfield. I’d spend my mornings pretending to be Luke Skywalker blasting down the Death Star trench, then grab a glove and sprint out into the street, trying not to get flattened by a wood-paneled station wagon as the neighborhood ragamuffins organized yet another scrappy game of pickup ball. We broke windows…a lot of them. And with every shattered pane came a kind of punishment—screaming adults, the ominous snap of a leather belt on bare ass, and some vaguely defined “consequence” that usually involved no TV for a week.

Eventually, out of pure self-preservation, we got clever and made our own baseballs out of wads of newspaper wrapped tight with duct tape. They didn’t go far, but they didn’t break anything either. They were beautiful in their way, and disposable. Like our summer days.

That was also the summer I attended my first Major League Baseball game. I had no idea then that it would become a date lodged in my memory, tethered by the thinnest thread of nostalgia and myth. It was “Reggie Jackson Day,” and my grandfather—the most constant and enigmatic figure of my childhood—took me to see his hero honored in Oakland.

The game itself has dissolved into a smear of vague impressions, though one detail endures with painful clarity: Reggie batted once, a pinch-hitting appearance that ended in a pop-up, stranding runners on second and third in a 3-2 loss to the White Sox. An affecting lesson that heroes do not always rise to the occasion. Even now, I can hear the echo of his voice after the game: “I’m not into talking about how wonderful things are for me when we’ve lost four in a row... My self-importance is microscopic.”

The box score later filled in the gaps of memory, but I remembered none of it. What I do remember is the way the field looked—vast, green, almost too big to believe—and the acrid smell of Marlboro Reds as my grandfather chain-smoked quietly through the innings. I also remember the communal discomfort of the men’s trough urinals, a nightmare rite of passage consisting of trudging through swill, spitting and grunting, and avoiding a side glance of various dongs seemingly in every direction.

When my grandfather died, his children bickered over his belongings. It was a quiet, petty war that unfolded over anything of monetary value, and I stepped back from it all. I didn’t want anything. I just wanted to remember him without the noise. But then, months later, my grandmother handed me a small white orb enclosed in a protective case with Reggie Jackson’s signature curled across in sharp blue ink. “I saved this for you,” she said. “Grandpa would have wanted you to have it.” I knew the ball well. It had occupied the prime position in his display case, the centerpiece of his modest collection.

Sometimes, the past finds a way to return to us. Sometimes, it arrives quietly, without fanfare, like a pop-up to short that lingers longer in the sky than expected.

I still love when writers speak in hushed tones about the rhythms and rituals of the game; about the silence between pitches, the geometry of the field, the endless pageantry of batting averages and drunks in the bleachers. I love it because I recognize it. And yet, part of me wonders if the game is merely a container for something else: a longing not for baseball, but for who we were when we first loved it.

Earlier, she had hissed at another woman, “Look bimbo, he’s with me,” and I was embarrassed because all the girl had said was that I was wearing a cool t-shirt: a faded Alice Cooper print that was, at this point, more symbolic of my antiquated taste than rebellion. I was humiliated, but also bored of trying to rationalize her behavior. She came from money, so she was protective of things that were hers, coming from a kind of wealth that believed in ownership—of property, of people, and of time itself. A few shitty examples: her father, born into wealth himself, once bulldozed a Frank Lloyd Wright house because it obstructed his mountain view; and her mother donates to progressives she privately despises, owns a boutique as a hobby, and pops Xanax like candy. Truly awful people.

The collapse of empire, when it inevitably comes, won’t touch them. They’ll pick through the ruins with gloved hands, acquiring loss as if it were owed to them. With the help of shell companies that sound like modernist sculptures, they will purchase the ashes of civilization and call it legacy. They’ll fervently buy your water, your coerced compliance, (prepackaged as lifestyle) and your dead grandma’s tan-carpeted home (where she died watching the Weather Channel) legally, efficiently and dirt cheap.

************

Inside the bar, someone was screaming along to Guns N’ Roses on the jukebox. A woman in platform heels threw a drink at her boyfriend. Another guy pissed on the wall by the bathroom and no one stopped him. This is America: numbed out, blacked out, sold out.

My girlfriend lit a cigarette, dragged hard, and looked at me like I belonged to her. Maybe I did. Escape, like dignity, had become abstract.

We met at a laundromat, naturally. She needed change, and I thought there might be poetry in that. She was rifling through a Joan Didion tote bag stained with what I hoped was coffee.

"I don’t have quarters," she muttered.

"Me neither.”

We just stood there for a moment, silent, bathed in fluorescent light, the hum of the machines filling the void between us. She glanced at me.

"You look like someone who listens to Joy Division," she said.

I smiled. "You look like someone who pretends not to."

She tried to laugh but coughed instead, which felt more honest.

I handed her a single crumpled dollar bill like it was a proposal.

She looked at it, then at me, expressionless. “Cool.”

Palm trees swayed with the slow, hypnotic rhythm of women dancing for money. A guy in a muscle tee with a depiction of a rottweiler wearing a baseball cap and waving an American flag offered us coke.

We declined. We had already overdosed on irony.

I don’t remember disagreeing.

When she finally left, she didn’t make a scene. No crying, no dramatic airport goodbyes, just a text: Booked a one-way. Be happy for me.

Be happy for her. Right.

I imagined her drinking cheap wine on a balcony, pretending to love the taste. Sitting in cafes where Kafka scribbled notes, pretending to read a book she hated. Staring at some ancient building, pretending to feel moved. She always loved pretending. A few days later—reality!—she posted a photo from a café in the Marais—a cappuccino, a Gitane. The caption: Finally, I can breathe. I certainly didn't overlook the irony of the cigarette smoke curling into her face.

Meanwhile, I stayed. The city stayed. The same neon glow of gas stations at midnight, the same shitty bars with the same shitty people. I still went to work, still drank too much, still woke up in the mornings feeling disembodied, like something was missing which led to numerous scrapes with street urchins who were incapable of much more than smirking and loitering.

I half-ass tried dating, but the women were interchangeable, incapable of producing even a flicker of real emotion. None of them possessed her peculiar, absent-minded indifference, that way she had of staring straight through me, as if I were already obsolete, a presence so negligible that my eventual disappearance would go unnoticed.

Months passed. Then a year. She acquired a French boyfriend, some skeletal filmmaker with a cocaine habit and a name that sounded like a brand of mineral water. He was a Godard clone, and his films were about nothing—long, static shots of rain hitting a window, a woman staring at her hands for seven unbroken minutes—but because they were in black and white and featured dialogue that resembled nihilistic diary entries, critics gushed over their lyricism. She started dressing accordingly: severe tweed coats, scarves knotted just so, and dark lipstick that made her mouth look like a bleeding wound. The transformation was complete. She had finally become the thing she spent years posturing as.

We ran into each other at a party in the Hollywood Hills, some trust-fund kid’s house. She wore a turtleneck and a beret like she was suddenly European. She air-kissed both of my cheeks and told me how much she had grown.

“Didn’t work out?” I asked.

She frowned. “You wouldn’t get it.”

She was probably right.

An hour later, I saw her on the balcony, laughing at some guy’s joke, fingering a Negroni and tilting her head just so. It was all so familiar and instantaneously tedious.

I then decided to shut this window of time.