when you’re not trying too hard to live but not
looking to die you might finally be over him/her.
When you have to choose between eating dinner
(somewhere nice! and local!) with your coupled friends OR going alone to a trans-people
performance in Way Outer Bushwick where the trans-people are. With names that defy
your preferred gender pronouns. Call them “vees”
He might be there. Your phone says, he is “Going.”
He’s lately taken to painting drag queens. When you sincerely utter that
“Club-kid Toulouse-Lautrec” you earn his condescending smile.
You have to leave South Brooklyn if you plan to live
in the world of the living and the young. Say this everytime you swipe your
Metrocard at your home station.
Comfort is the luxury of people who know they’re
dying or really don’t. Thoughts on
Baby Bjorns.
No signal here. Fashion is the denial of death, the
denial of nature, the denial of fleshly pleasure and paradoxically our embrace
of all those things. So glad we saw the McQueen show at the Met. One bar and 4G
closer to the trash can where crackhead Willie Nelson with the aqua bandanna
tucked in his back pocket is taking a long piss. Gotta get the heel on the Chloe boots fixed before the
Gagosian dinner. “Oh my god, he is
flagging. (yes he likes watersports, OBV!)” Comments left on the photo I
instagrammed.
The impotent anger of a stupid person tempered by
the cool rationality of an intelligent person but there’s no in between. My father is a Vietnam Vet and my mother
is failed German literature enthusiast and all of are ethnically Korean
Atheists. Go figure Immanuel Kant.
This is the first draft of the artist statement I’m
never sending to the residency I’d probably hate to get into if only I ever
applied. If English is your second language I apologize for that last sentence.
Is performance art the only way we can feel anything
anymore. I observe a lot. I see nothing that I can remember for
very long. All my recent memories
have been outsourced to my friend’s timelines. Vow now to only tweet 140 character thoughts whenever I nearly
commit to being an unpaid freelance copywriter. You LIKE LIKE
LIKE LIKE LIKE every single one of her profile photos. I’m seeing you LIKE them
in not so real time forever. In five years when I start to feel like I’ve
forgotten about you I’ll still be able to see it and feel guilty you once did
this to someone else with me. Unless we all leave Facebook. Unless the world ends. Unless the North
Koreans come up with the AIDS of computer viruses—Sorry! That’s dated—the Swine
Flu. You’ve never uploaded me with you for your friends. This is me being for real right now. I like the repeated trauma of your cock
inside me. LIKE LIKE LIKE your mobile uploads. It does make it better to know
I’m not the only one who knows that feeling, this week, at least I know her
face and what Bowie songs she and you favorited on YouTube. Lies I tell myself
to give me the courage to ring your apartment buzzer. But I don’t ring it. I text you and
wait.
Feeling
the weightlessness of racelessness is the charm of living somewhere bougie,
white, overpopulated with overeducated mixed race couples. Outside where I can see them, they don’t
see me, instead focused on not dropping organic groceries or squeezing in a
SoulCycle Bikram session before pick-up at Pre-K. I’m buying a fistie of Jim Beam at 3.
At the bookstore where time stops because children
need to be read to by strangers so mommy can call her lesbian friend and gossip
about how being married proves the hatability of men. When I think I like reading Heidegger in
public and looking at other people’s children in “their happy places.” Chinese, Korean, and Japanese wives
look through me as if to laser me off their small tight, hairless-- pupils. White
husbands look at me-- fresh real estate in brownstone Brooklyn--barren unused
ovaries. Bookmark this page.
Spent
three days this week registering for every Tumblr name that captured how I felt
about you, him, and the one before him that really hurt me. Whiteguyswithasiangirlfriends.tumblr,
uglyguyswithasiangirlfriends.tumblr, yetanotherasiangirlfriend.tumblr. They
only let you register for 10 a day.
This is my fucking domain now.
Everywhere I go lately, men want to asphyxiate me
not-erotically. They tell me so in public instead of keeping it on the internet
where those thoughts belong. Derrida privileges the written over the oral
himself. They want blood to spew out my mouth uncontrollably until it cant no
more. No words =no thoughts. You can see very well why: they like to think of
themselves as visual artists.
Their work is very catholic. They like female icons only if they’re
martyrs. “Bad mothers make Good artists” isn’t that how the saying goes? Google
that for me next time we’re drunk together at an opening so that we don’t have
to talk about anything quietly.
I go to Times Square sometimes just to be completely
empty and rich. Eat food that still costs one dollar. People so green they try to pay in Euro
coins. A slice of pizza. A single hot dog sauerkraut ketchup
mustard. When you’re so poor that condiments feel like luxuries, consider
moving to Europe.
Time is Squared. This place has no residents, no streets, there are jagged idea
segments reified by LEDs that scroll and bob off and on. All points bulletins for unrealized desires. The husband from Minnesota leading his
family’s plodding march through one of the fake plazas of “New Times Square” is
about to fantasize about slashing the throat of his wife who’s been cheating on
him with her online Scrabble buddy, the daughter popped her cherry masturbating
for her classmates on Snapchat, the son has a dust covered Percocet in the 5th
pocket of his classic re-issued Levis. They’ve only been trying for the past 3
hours to summon the energy to find that sneaker boutique in The Greenwich
Village for him. Are they sad that all that’s here in the belly of the beast is
the flagship 24-hour Walgreens with New York’s fastest one-hour photo? Here
they buy more waters. At home,
their beds float like ice floes over a basement full of gun closets and each of
them knows where the keys are. I get wet hoping this is all true.
We are all here to “get the job done” that’s how
it’s always been.
There are some images that can’t be tagged. When I was small, I was wheeled down
these streets dotted with neon fuck palaces where men with wives at home would
emerge from the doors with crotches damp with men’s mouths. I would look up at my nervous mother
through the plastic hood of the stroller as my father fed me bits of hot dogs he
chewed off with his own mouth, making sure they were cooled enough for me to
eat. It never burned my mouth. That much I remember fondly.
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