Explication: a few nights ago, though I now realize it was a week ago, A was talking to me about my writing compared to my transcriptions — how the two things operated differently, how he used transcription for his dream journals, how in that conversation I realized that the main reason I use this form is to think, to think in a way anchored by the text, anchored through my fingers — I mentioned the Flusser 'Why Typewriters Go Click' essay to him. This morning, or rather this early afternoon, I talked through the problems of last night with S. In this situation, I thought through the problems one way, and now I'll think through them another way. I also like this framing of these situations as problems, with the implication that there is a solution, there is a proof that can be reached — but also, there is the problem of calculation that emerges too. I settle into this problem-ouroboros.

Last night when I was drinking beer with M, I was explaining my web of proposed front companies and websites and he said something I'd never heard before: out of the the snake eating itself a man emerges. We drank two beers, before that I ate a dollar slice, which was all I had ate all day. We talked about universal cradle death and how the internet feels like it's dying, along with that how we think of art, culture, et cetera et cetera. Now I think of the prostheticizaton of the self, how I float myself out into the posting vessels, then contract back into myself, like blood flowing in and out of my body. We split paths, I went to Ulrik, I ran into A2 and A3, who have the same names, and then L and F and E and L2 and E2 and Z and E3 and R and met some other people who I'd met before, and I glanced at the art briefly and I liked it but it wasn't the time or the place for that, nor did I have the time and/or mental wearwithal to give it proper consideration.

This morning I talked with S about how I'm good at going through the motions. You show up to the place, you see people, you chat, there's variance in how good or bad things go, but most of the time I'm with people I enjoy being around so it's good. People at Ulrik were going to The River. I'd told S that I would meet him at the sportsbar he was watching the UConn game at. Going through the motions involved going to the river, I was two beers in on a mostly empty stomach, but I also didn't want to pay for drinks at The River so I walked to a liquor store in the opposite direction. E3 and R walked with me, we talked, it was my first time seeing them since last summer, which was a very different time, and it was also my first time seeing E3 since she and J broke up. M was talking about going through a break-up with Y when we were getting drinks. That break-up seemed very adult, amicable divorce — a move-out process from the apartment, talk of how spending time at The River would be split, so on. I didn't talk about J or hanging out with him or that he was with me when my teeth broke to E3 — it seems like a thing that's very much wearing at her based off of her tweets and social behavior at large. She seems lost, and she admits to this, leans into it, there's a theatricality in which she talks about her grad school application (a Masters in Divinity at Columbia). After we bought our liquor E3 and R went back towards The River — they told me to tell S to come because they wanted to see him, even though they almost certainly didn't, or at the least wouldn't care too much about his presence.

I went to the East Village, met S at the sportsbar, finished the UConn blowout while he sipped a guiness and another E, E4, tried to get S to go to Cherry Tavern with him because he wanted to have gay sex with him (presumably). He said he pays 585 dollars a month for his studio in the neighborhood. He's been there since '86, his neighbor pays 5500 a month — a new one moves in every year because no one ends up wanting to pay that much. We took a taxi down to The River but The River was closed for another 30 minutes for a private party so we went to Dr. Clark's. The same crew as before, again, just going through the motions. We migrate to The River once it opens. There's two things that E3 does that irk me. I'm standing talking with her and J2 rolls up — I think about his opening and reading about it on O's tumblr, as well as reading about his (non-)relationship with I, who was working that night — while I'm talking to her. He wasn't rolling to her so much as past her but she said hi to him and he said hi back and then she turned to me and was like "J do you know S2" and we did the dance both more or less knowing who the other was and then he said something like "really making all the introductions tonight" — the kind of slight off-hand asshole remark that I'd really expect no less from. The other thing was smaller, she wanted to introduce me to someone called D, who was a DJ. A minute into the interaction she said "S2 is friends with The Dare's little brother" — which bothered me because I don't like name-dropping relationships and I'd also consider myself to be friends with H in the same way that I'm "friends" with many people. That boundary line between friend and acquaintance, and I thought about J describing T as a frenemies, my mind sliding into who I consider frenemies.

The third thing: the complete shift in how E3 was acting in The River. The two previous things coalescing into everything else from that night and all of her nights in the time since I'd seen her. I was explaining how art people act to S, not as a defense of it, but moreso just an explanation via the Caillois text 'Man, Play, Games' — that there's rules to the game - social codes and such mostly, and that The River, given that Y runs it, and the people who populate it, is a key part of the [art/culture etc. world] gamespace. E3 kept mentioning The River Challenge, but what made The River Challenge so fun was that it was a rejection of the gamespace and its accompanying rules, which of course, as I type that out, re-assimilates itself into the gamespace in a certain way. But it can't be done again, like so many things, like the blogs of 2023, they can't be ran back, it won't be the same. Time passes, situations change, sites, in the sense of in situ but also the website, change. The entirety of how she acted was depressing to me, how she'd been running around, it felt contrary to things she'd written about The Great Pumpkin, it felt like a total lapse, and the whole thing made me sad.

Months ago I talked with J on the phone about a night he had at The River that was depressing because it felt like everyone was pretending to have fun, and that's what it felt like. S and I left shortly after midnight, we went back to Park Slope, we grabbed a couple sandwiches and beers, we watched the Sydney Sweeney and Ice Spice Hot Ones and basketball highlights on his laptop. That was great. Then I went down into the basement and felt ever the more depressed. A4 had texted me a mix saying it reminded her of a video I had made. She texted me a lot about her break-up and has said really kind things about me. I think she has a crush on me, but we also haven't seen each other in about a year. She lives in San Francisco and I'm not really inclined to make anything happen. The last track of that mix was Body Double by Fatima Al Qadiri, which made me put that track on loop and sort of spiral out — I thought about how the migration crisis hasn't stopped, how Senegalese people are dying every day at sea trying to get to Europe. I painted some watercolors. The sadness of the night washed over me. I wrote some fragments, I made some images, I went to bed.

And then in the morning I talked it over with S, and by now it feels mostly fine. The crisis, the crisis, the crisis. The main thought I had when I woke up: I'm older now, I have to make better decisions. It is true. I'm still learning.