i lost my iphone 3 weeks ago but

from the opening scene of the lovers on the bridge (1991) (dir. leos carax)

if i had instagram stories i would post a video of the hot rods i saw slowriding down st marks last night high on their hydraulic lifts popping music 

& if i had instagram stories i would post a picture of the black snow mountains lining the sidewalk w the caption 'i love the dirty snow' 

~~

& if i had instagram stories i would post two screenshots from the lovers on the bridge: 

the opening scene, of zooming thru a pale blue tunnel cut w red light 

& the scene in the subway tunnel in autumn, when michèle says to alex, make it all big for me

~~

& if i had instagram stories & no scruples about getting out my camera when a human moment is happening,

which is not the case in real life, but if it was,

i would post a picture of sunny dashing out of breeze nails last night 11 pm waving her arm with abandon as if to a departing train, yelling, 

emily! 

oh? 

thank you for flower! 

~~

& if i had instagram stories i would post something to allude to a new expanse of feeling, a night sky observed from a mountain, something deep & suggestive & dark blue 

my apartment

the poetry reading is in a basement, with a fireplace and no windows. i want to hibernate there, three months of rest in a darkened baroque den under a pool bar. instead i get high on the quality of the verse and pitch an essay about the lifestyle of bohemian new york authoresses to a poet/editor in attendance. but i don't want to write it. i just want to write about my apartment. 

my apartment is lucky number 17

my apartment is filled with chestnut,
like my hair

my apartment's block was dutch

then italian, irish, & german

& then, since the 1960s, chinese

it has dumpling shops & art galleries

old tenements & an unfinished new build 

a boutique & a coffee shop that carried my poetry

& a parking lot between my building & george's

in which vladko works & kenny & mishka live 

audrey munson 

my three favorite statues in new york are the angel of the waters, in central park, the temperance fountain, in tompkins square park, and civic fame, which i can see from my window: a 25-foot gilded copper figure modeled after "america's first supermodel," audrey munson. the first statue bearing "miss manhattan's" likeness, called three graces, was installed in the grand ballroom of the hotel aster when audrey was 18. she posed for dozens of statues before fleeing new york at age 28 after a doctor killed his wife to be with her. she tried to kill herself at age 30, but lived on, and surpassed 100.

she's in the air here, sensitive, proud, and delicate. 550 feet up, crowning the beaux-arts municipal building, holding a laurel branch and a crown of five turrets festooned with dolphins. she looks like an acquaintance from years ago, a woman named maia who wore sequined gowns to the 8-ball space. one night we broke into my office to print dozens of missing flyers for her friend, who'd destroyed her burner and gone searching for drugs. she found her, then moved out west and had a baby. 

the parking lot 

Henry & Market, by Peter Brown

george has lived on henry street for nearly all of his seventy years. he's the super for the building next to the parking lot, where he lives on the second floor and doesn't use air conditioning. i met him in the parking lot one particularly hot day, when i'd brought down a bottle of ice for kenny and mishka. kenny was feeding mishka fried chicken. everyone loves mishka, and george and vladko told me how good it is to have him on the block. he takes care of the rats. i watched him do it one night from my fire escape. he chased a rat into a basement alcove and i heard one last squeak! 

george and i sat in the chairs in the parking lot and talked for two hours, until vladko said, "it's time, guys," and shut the gate. i received a key to the lot recently, after having been a customer for almost a year, and it felt like getting a key to the city. kenny occasionally comes by after the lot has been shut, and when i see that, i let him in. he doesn't speak much english, but we communicate. we smile at each other, and he knows i have cats, so he meows at me, and i meow back. 

four paintings 

a rose                a birdhouse                a mask                 & shapes 

A rose

steven, who recently turned forty, gave out dozens of his paintings at his thirty-third birthday party. i took the mask, set against a lilac backdrop, scrawled over in gold script: i love you. 

my dad painted landscapes in the '70s. winter scenes, mostly: dead leaves and hills and a goose in a moment of pause. i asked my mom if i could have the birdhouse hanging from a branch in the snow. she obliged, and hung in its place a sketch of a simple wooden chair. it hangs below a painting of another chair, an adirondack. 

soft grey is my favorite color, and it floats up in nick's painting behind a long-stemmed rose. 

one of kyle's stories opens with this poem: 

I am bored and in pain
For which there seems no cure,
And for which no amount of dark muttering or
Hours pacing the street in gorgeous autumn daylight,
Nor state-sponsored prescription
Seem to alleviate
This completely rhetorical question pertaining to doom, fate and death
That has plagued bored men since the beginning
That has put them through so much unnecessary pain
That is so much more funny and so much more serious
In my head,
Or in Bonnard’s painting of himself in hell
Surely better than any answer I could hope to ascertain
What a beautiful painting
What beautiful poems come after
These illusions fade,
I hope

Shapes

his painting's right side is blue and angry. anger on grey, above a red liver. the left side: candy-pink flames under burgundy wallpaper; hovering spheres of yellow-brown, olive-grey; turquoise darts on a white expanse; a swish of kohl in the corner. the decisions i've made in my life don't always make sense, but they do when i look at paintings. 

redecorating 

my apartment for dolls and immigrants, i wrote on my story one day. i rarely consider function; i consider form and feeling. my apartment reflected this, and as a result, until recently, no one had a place to sit. i cherished the paisley loveseat, but i wanted my friends to visit. now they sit on a sand-colored couch that spans two walls. and i'm going to hang the shelves. and the screen. and the paintings. 

pockmarks in pink marble

i've readjusted to new york, to chinatown. i sit on my paisley couch across from the reproduction of andrei rublev's 'the trinity' that i bought at st francis cabrini shrine for $5 two years ago. across from my key-hook & keys -- mail key, apartment key, building key, silver e charm, nypl special-edition wild style library card, mini yellow baseball printed with pictures of taxis, lucky cat, & blue key-tag reading dream world. across from my prayer beads & my red chinese tassel pendant, which hangs over my door. 

it's very important to me to feel grounded in the place i'm in. the seeds of this were planted in me by my parents, raising me in a house whose muted earth tones & paintings of ducks & snowy fields & rivers reflected the landscape around us. these seeds started to blossom when i lived in los angeles & felt compelled to read history books about it, to wander the main library staring up at its frescoed ceiling, to ride angel's flight & watch the exiles & think about bunker hill. to swim in the city pools. to develop a favorite city pool (the LA84 foundation swim stadium in exposition park). 

when i moved to new york, i was miserable for about a year. i lived alone in ridgewood, which felt too much like philadelphia, & i feared that my freedom was over. the colors were over. it was back to brick red & dark brown & sage, chipped blue & sand & pale grey. i was happy about the pale grey. but i missed the pink. the lime green, yellow & aquamarine. prayer candles & tacos with radish on the side. 

then i adjusted, around 2019. i remember taking a photobooth strip & posting it to instagram with the caption, 'surprise, i love new york.' it took a while. joining 8-ball was the thing that really did it, giving me a home, a place to grow from. then at the east village zine fair in 2021, a girl with bright blue eyes bought my poetry chapbook & said she'd just gotten a job at kgb bar, & was i the sort of person who was well-connected in the literary scene, was i the sort of person who might want to bring young people back to the bar. i said yes i am that, & i was that, & i became that even more. the next year i met a man who lived downtown who asked do you know my friends, & i said yes i do know them, & i did knew them, & then i knew them even more. & then i moved here, & he moved away & i bought him a red chinese tassel pendant, so he can take hollywood by storm. 

i went to montana last summer & met walter kirn & amanda fortini. i met them at a rodeo, where men with names like fulton rutland & wacey schalla straddled the backs of writhing bulls, & the ceremony ended with a brilliant fireworks display set to 'proud to be an american.' i was 4-H queen when i was 17, improvising an acceptance speech on the concrete stage after they placed the sash over my paisley dress, but since then i've done ten years in big cities. & so have amanda & walter, though they grew up in the midwest & live in montana. when we shook hands & met each other's gaze for the first time, that was obvious. 

theo, who is interested in moving to brussels, told me the travelogue is back. i've always been slightly uneasy about world travel. the last time i did it was when i was in college, studying abroad at oxford university (i usually say 'outside london' when people ask about this, to avoid sounding obnoxious, but whatever) & visiting six countries. had i not taken a spontaneous trip to montreal & swam across the rio grande with a boyfriend in 2013, this would have been the last time i left the country. it is, as of this writing, the last time i went overseas. i would like to go abroad again, ideally this year. 

what makes me uneasy is the way i'm treated as a tourist, how much it others me. i used to feel very out of place in new york, driving up to readings when i worked on a newspaper copy desk in atlantic city, & i think part of why i explore nyc so much & read about it so much & devolve into ecstasies over new york: a documentary film (1999) as much as i do is because at some point i made a subconscious commitment to never feel that way again. & i feel out of place when traveling. you want to be a pair of eyes watching the world, & being received as a tourist reminds you that you're not -- that you have guts & skin. white skin. this becomes relevant when, like now, you want to go somewhere where the majority of the population is not white, & where the population has made the admirable commitment to resisting americanization. to remain as they are -- never colonized, never made christian, free of television for the longest any country has been in the world. i want to see it, to experience that level of peace. but i don't want them to see me. 

the first feature film shot entirely in bhutan came out in 2003. the first bhutanese novel written in english came out in 2005. i'm interested in engaging with them, though i feel uncomfortable with how much they seem to cater to a western gaze. travellers & magicians, the film, features a character who is obsessed with getting to america; he has even fashioned a robe out of denim. (this came out four years after bhutan lifted its ban on television.) the circle of karma, the novel, was written by a bhutanese woman who studied sociology at the university of nebraska. nebraska! she grew up in the only country in the world that measures its success by its citizens' happiness, & she went to nebraska to study how people live...

there must be some deeply human need to move. &, to put it more cynically, to try to destroy something that seems like paradise. if adam & eve couldn't hack it, why should i expect that of anyone else? of myself? i live in the lower east side, which was defined by immigrants, who left their home countries for poverty & struggle based on some promise of the new. & because they heard they could make money. in the new york city documentary, a historian talks about how new england was founded by puritans, pennsylvania was founded by quakers, & new york was founded by merchants. the rivers operationalized for shipping. alexander hamilton on the ten dollar bill. lana in her new york years: money is the anthem / of success / so put on mascara / & your party dress -- 

& in a way money, & the fight against its primacy, has been the central new york story: artists struggling to make it here & make this city livable for us (a centuries-old struggle that my friends & i are now involved in); jane jacobs fighting to save the lower east side from a highway billed as necessary to facilitate the flow of commerce; the spate of labor law reforms after the triangle shirtwaist factory fire, when the city watched in horror as 19-year-old girls held hands on the ledge of a burning ten-story building & jumped.

the other night i got to see 23 wall street, an abandoned bank made of pink tennessee marble that was once known as the 'house of morgan,' the headquarters of j.p. morgan & co. on september 16, 1920, right as the roaring twenties were kicking into gear, someone drove a horse-drawn carriage filled with 100 pounds of dynamite up to the side of the building. at one minute after noon, it exploded. like cantor fitzgerald 81 years later, j.p. morgan laser-focused on returning to business as usual, so much so that it didn't repair the bank's facade, which is pockmarked with holes from the shrapnel. there is no plaque, & this incident is not taught in schools, so you don't know unless you're looking for it, but if you're looking for it, you can find it. john steele gordon, the business historian, calls it the 'stigmata of capitalism.' i touched it that night, having come upon it by accident on the way to an afterparty for a gallery opening. fidi is seen as a chic place to hold art events. i live a 15-minute walk away; it takes half that time to get to the courthouse where they'll drag luigi mangione this spring. luigi who has such refined & gentle taste in music. who was raised in the mid-atlantic, like me. 

i want to visit somewhere that doesn't have money in its bones. that moves to different rhythms. that's buddhist. where the spirit is lighter & softer. it's difficult here. it's hard to keep loving new york. i do feel devoted to it. i've been here seven years; it's marked me & i've marked it. but new york is scary. new york natives are a whole different breed. they grew up so fast. they want to eat the whole world. 

i'm reading new york diaries: 1619 to 2009, a compilation of diary entries by new yorkers collected by the reporter theresa carpenter. every day, i read that day's entry & write in my own diary. i will do this for every day of 2025. my favorite entries so far have been by the novelist dawn powell, the painter john sloan, & the philosopher simone de beauvoir (& also, somewhat surprisingly, the president theodore roosevelt, who writes with great feeling of his wife & family). in dawn powell's entry on february 12, 1934, she writes, 'i want this new novel to be delicate & cutting -- nothing will cut new york but a diamond.' i underlined it & wrote ! in the margins, excited to read it, excited to connect it with the fact that diamonds are formed under pressure. but even so, i daydream of being in a place where i don't have to cut, or be cut. that sounds like paradise. 

adjusting

i met grace at a party on friday night and we talked about injury and change. she was stabbed in june. i was dropped on concrete two years ago. the matts, my physical therapists, eventually had to tell me my hip would never be the same. i kept asking when it would get better. 

i can't think in new york and it scares me. 

when i was 16 my mom told me that if i had a car i would always be free. it costs $420 to keep it in manhattan. it would cost $450 if the parking lot guys didn't like me. i say hi vladko, hi zvonko. they run a tight ship, as men like that do. vladko has long eyelashes and resembles a cat: an inquisitive, graceful, bright-eyed face. 

when i picked up my car yesterday, a blonde twentysomething and her mother passed me, the blonde in a hurry -- come on, mom -- and her mother trailing behind, calculating the cost of a day's parking for their maryland SUV. the blonde was so prideful, so happy to move at a different pace than her mother. eager, cocky, a bit disdainful in an offhand way -- a way i had myself at that age, and feel sorry for. i thought, of course you're in this neighborhood. 

nobody in new york ever stops moving and it scares me. 

i drove from the forest to brighton beach. it was frigid, the shore like a tundra. last summer i wrote a poem about standing in the ocean watching the sun set over coney island. called streaks, it was published in the car crash collective anthology in the fall. i read at the anthology launch in december, alongside richard hell and katherine faw, which was a huge honor. i stayed with kingsley and bunny because my apartment was still out on sublet. i was so excited to be back in new york. i felt unsteady, but i was rolling with it. 

this time, i was back for good. i went to brighton first, before my apartment, before the house party, before seeing anyone or anything. i went because of streaks, because i wanted to take pictures of the sunset and post them with the poem to my instagram grid. i like how the photos turned out, but the sky is not pink in them like it was in the summer. like it is in the poem. 

I always come here
when my life is changing
in ways I don't understand

i was trying to be excited. sometimes that works. cranking the wheel on the disposable camera sent a shot of pain through my ice-stung thumb. it was too cold to be on the beach but i was there anyway and i found a triangle of clear sea-glass. it slipped from my fingers on coney island avenue and shattered next to my tire. i stared at it and let it ripple through my body for a moment before unlocking the car. 

i must make myself pliable, mind and body. i must adjust.

early 17th c., latin to french, in the senses harmonize discrepancies or assess loss or damages. to become familiar with a new situation. used in a sentence: [a] i can't adjust to living on my own. [b] the lifestyle is so very different -- it takes a while to adjust.

backbeat

i sequester myself away so i can solder together little pieces of thin steel called music wire. it's called music wire because it is what's behind the keys of a piano, lifting them up and allowing them to make sound. i listen to the metallic ripple of the wind chime, something delicate moving through the air. my mom had a mystical experience out back near her metal angel ; she saw jimmy in a sunbeam and felt a new sense of peace about it all. when i wind the bend near their farm at dusk i think about it. 

i fly somewhere for five days and don't tell anyone. i buy speedboat but don't read it ; i start narcissus & goldmund instead. i miss the sauna ; i miss my friends in new york ; i am also, childishly, afraid to return. i must remember that i dreaded coming back after montana and then i came back and not only was i fine but i was happy and it was my birthday. i took a photo of a neon red heart and a photo of periwinkle smudges in the sky and a photo of a statue of mew behind glass and a photo of yellow and white flowers unfolding. 

i use the soldering iron on the good days. on the bad days i think about the past. i never used to think about the past. i wrote a poem called 'time's fake.' later i wrote another poem called 'mumblecore 2 (low-quality contemporary poem) / alternate title: time’s fake 2 (maybe time isn’t fake).' i've only let madeline read it. riley says the poems in my chapbook are nostalgic. i said how dare you, no they are not. she points out a poem i wrote about a boy running toward the full moon. i said okay, sure. 

i think maybe i should become a buddhist. i place mystics and zen masters on my nightstand. my parents go to church every sunday, small white clapboard structure with a single wooden cross on the wall. in a clearing in the woods with the new, young pastor, who has a spiritual gift. i write in my diary that my parents have seen their lives as an opportunity to build structure and i have seen mine as a vessel for feeling. now i am building a structure out of music wire to serve as a vessel for a feeling. this as i am synthesizing the aspects of my life, the orientation toward art and the orientation toward stability. 

i think kitty has an astrological gift, a real sense for the tone and the mood of the stars. i follow her astrology-instagram which she decorates with the paintings of hilma af klint. new york felt different after that af klint show at the guggenheim. i think that was the start of the change. i think about the term vibe shift and how some people used it to refer to entering a post-enlightenment age of enchantment and some people used it to refer to a cultural movement called indie sleaze that arose from early 2010s nostalgia. kitty says venture capitalists are trying to buy her entire catalog for $100,000 and a commenter says it's because they sense that tumblr nostalgia is the next wave ; i mean, yeah, it's already happening, it's not separate from indie sleaze, so sure, yes they see dollar signs. she says she won't sell for less than $5 million and i think that's right, girl. she was always the coolest, so spring breakers, with the ethic of an indie artist. i hope she gets her due someday ; like charli she was ahead of her time. 

i listen to the song she has pinned on spotify, a 2019 track called look demure, and it's good. it has this one part where over a sparkly lofi dance beat she sings on repeat i'm used to it by now. she is in her 30s also ; i think about how aging feels like this. chariot, also in their thirties, describing moving through the heartache of a recent breakup: i'm used to it by now. what lifts me up is the backing track. she may be in a place that is heavy with the past, but the beat is so hopeful, so expansive, so new. 

tweets

Not joining the fediverse

I think citronella candles are my new obsession. Did someone say “the flame's subtle flicker has cast a magical glow upon my picnic”? With a side of pest control?!?! 

People in their 20s have my permission to thrive 

Locking in for the next few months to do something arguably random but actually chosen for me 

Unfortunately when i put “the only people for me are the mad ones” in my facebook quotes section when i was 17 i was being fr

Is it perhaps gauche that my favorite hymns are from the 20th century? Yes. But it’s also that rarest of things … indie … 

Free dinner party conversation starter: How would you react to being thrown in jail for life

Me writing alt lit: “…… …….. ………….. ……… ……… ……… ……… ……… supine …………… …… … …… ………… …… … …… …… ……… …… ….”

In alt lit 1.0 supine means you’re high on the couch 

In alt lit 2.0 supine means you’re in contemplative prayer 

He’s got that over-educated anti-rizz

If she hasn’t broken her hip, forget about it 

nail diary 4

i think part of me does want an audience for this blog, as much as i founded it with the idea of keeping it secret in mind. i thought that if i only linked to it on my website and had no direct link to it on my instagram, the people who found it would feel the thrill of discovery. i wanted to give them that feeling. i wanted to, as meetka wrote when describing her plan to blog about mahler's symphonies, "trust it will find its right audience the way most anything does." but also, i want people to engage with it. that's the difference between a blog and a pen-and-paper diary, which i also keep, and have kept for years. that is genuinely just for me. i think i will place the little advertisements i've been making for the blog on my instagram story into a highlight that will live on my profile. i think that is what i will do. i want to give it a chance to find that right audience.  

today was a saturday, sunny and warm. i'm writing to you from my bed, in a room that overlooks henry street in chinatown. i can hear the faint thrum of traffic from the manhattan bridge, some stoop-sitters chatting in chinese outside my window, and lu's favorite cat toy and the air conditioner whirring in the other room. now the train, thwacking over the track. i've always been sensitive to noise; i often wear noise-canceling headphones in here, though the apartment isn't new york loud. (in the same way it's not new york small, though it would likely be considered both 'cozy' and noisy anywhere else in the U.S. i have to smile, juxtaposing the memory of my mom offering me a wall decoration that read, 'though the home be but small, the welcome is big' with the memory of my friend remarking last night at little poland, beaming, 'your apartment is huge!')

i was going to meet ethan, riley, and coco at the mother cell and blix show at trans pecos, but riley and coco couldn't make it and when i stopped by home to drop something off after a day out in the east village, before heading to brooklyn, i stayed put. i'd already missed the mother cell set, and tomorrow is another day of activity, so i thought, best to spend the evening blogging, reading, going to sleep on the early side. [ed. note: i stayed up till 4... it's fine.]

i got my nails done today. i get them done about once a month. i skipped june; kept chipped silver from may on my nails throughout the month, through montana and colorado. when i got back, i went to 

Where: Sugar Nail & Spa downtown

When: 13 July 2024

Occasion: To make my nails look like the Montana sky

Manicure/pedicure color: "The King's Navy" ~ navy blue, frost finish

and then today, i went to 

Where: Breeze Nail & Spa in the East Village (this place was great, and it's the only nail spot with respectable hours below 14th)

When: 10 August 2024

Occasion: Last New York manicure before leaving the city for four months. Decided I wanted to have nice nails for what'll be my last few weeks here for a bit. Looking put-together is important to me.
Manicure color: A warm pink

Pedicure color: A buoyant yellow

~Optimistic colours~

afterward, i caught my friend lily's show at palo gallery, got a meal at caravan of dreams, and then saw taylor moderate a talk with the critic david rimanelli and the artist gb jones at 6bc garden. walked home afterward, no headphones for most of the way. watched the street, and recorded some of my watchings, like this one. i invited a new friend to follow an instagram account on which i regularly record watchings like this, and she did; i feel happy to have made this connection with her, because she uses social media in a similar way to me (diaristically, like a scrapbook) and i like the way she looks at the world. we are going to visit a friend of ours who's been staying uptown tomorrow.

currently listening to: "miss independent" by ne-yo (heard it playing from a car while walking down avenue a near third st) 

🎵 manicured nails to set the pedicure off 🎵