give in but don't give up

find me in LA, on blue sky, on the hill

Hilma af Klint, Tree of Knowledge, No. 1, 1913–15, via Artforum

LA is more of the weird half-apocalypse it’s always been: one fire is nearly contained but two more erupted yesterday; we’re on week 2 of bottled water; we mask outside, which is funny because a few years ago the big thing was masking inside. we are lucky.

my love to everyone affected, i hope you and yours are staying safe. i talked about this a little on instagram, but my parents’ house, the home in which i grew up, burnt down early in the palisades fire. they took very little with them. there is so much fear and grief and paperwork, including the re-traumatizing process of meditating on every single thing you lost, to document it for insurance purposes. i don’t really want to talk about the house, or the fire—or, i can’t really talk about it. i feel irrationally resentful of everyone who has enough distance to narrativize what remains, to me, unspeakable. instead, i’ve been living in other people’s stories for the past couple weeks. here’s what’s held my attention:

• love island all stars, which started last week. i will watch these british idiots do anything. i crave their blithe toxicity, their sunny entitlement to a world in which good things roll up the pebble driveway, waving from a convertible, calling to them. i love them.

• perfume and pain by anna dorn - pure hot lesbian pulp, campy and engrossing

• american mermaid, by julia langbein - acerbic and silly and smart in equal measure

• the hearing test, by eliza barry callahan - i checked this out from the library, read a chapter, and then ordered it online because i knew i needed to underline it. beautiful, careful prose

• the telepathy tapes podcast - i know i’m a little late but oh my god. i’m fully telepathy-pilled. thank you to my friend nada alic for pushing me to listen—if you haven’t read nada’s book bad thoughts, it’s so smart and funny and demented in the right ways, and you’re in for a treat. listening to this podcast is an experience of weeping and wonder. more than anything else, its protagonists give me hope: hope that there is a world bigger than ours, that the terrible people “in power” actually don’t have power at all. it’s the paradigm shift i needed.

i’ve also been driving around looking for cheap home renovation tools—mostly windows—which compelled my to re-download facebook, for the marketplace. and look, i knew facebook is a toilet bowl, but i didn’t know it’s like this:

a horny engagement-baiting AI monster crafted from the primordial depths of my own algorithm (i love horses, my husband is a bread baker), and posted by a christian mega-page? i cannot express to you how upsetting this image is to me.

so anyway the social media-scape is now, unequivocally, owned and propagated by fascist losers. twitter, meta, tiktok: the big three! all of them! there is outer and inner pandemonium, ash in the air and doom in the feed. anecdotally, i’ve “lost” about 1000 followers in the last few days via deactivation/divestment—which, hell yes, be free!! but here’s the thing: i really like putting words on images. the process sparks joy, or at least a dissociative peace that is joy-adjacent. also, i like being online with you. the people i’ve interacted with through the internet have been 95% percent smart and interesting and lovely, which i know is a statistical anomaly, but idk, you all rule. thank you for gatekeeping me from your worst cousins etc.

i don’t know what social media will look like or feel like over the next few years, but i’m wondering whether it’s even possible to get back to a place of like, not whatever the fuck this is. i’m not leaving instagram yet, but i just joined blue sky, if you’d like to meet me there. setting up my profile today, i admit, i felt some “no one is coming to my birthday party” anxiety. what if no one follows me? wouldn’t that be shameful? but, like—what’s shameful about a tight community? isn’t it more shameful to bow to the golden calf of Engagement, to treat one’s little craft project with the risk-reward scrutiny of a stock exchange?

being cool on the internet is dead. it’s all cringe anyway, so we might as well choose the path of most happiness.