epoch opus filth

man who even knows anymore

Recently, writing has been an exercise to stave off this life’s permissible laziness. ChatGPT, efficiency, sanctioned corner-cutting, etc. I’m proving to myself that I am still a dedicated pupil to the arcane human existence, or whatever high-brow thing you want to call this. An eternal ebb and flow of creation and consumption :)

The weather has been hot lately. The New York sky-line wavers in the simmering heat, bringing with it suffocatingly long days, stilling even the pigeons. I’ve never seen so much variation in pigeon coloring before coming here. Everyone outside is sweating: employees with armpits stained in three-piece suits, West Village strays in Princess Polly blouses, and new Pace students in lanyards following tour guides. It’s a wonder we don’t drench the sidewalks. Still, the park by my new apartment shines verdant, fireflies sparkling in the dusk.

The fire alarm was pulled in my building a couple days ago: “LEAVE THE BUILDING NOW. TAKE THE STAIRS.” I walked/ran down 9 flights of stairs. Again, blisteringly hot stairwell. All the residents files out into the crushing humidity. In the thickening, viscous silence, I took stock of the people living in my building: a young boy had grabbed his small, brown dog and was holding it in his arms with no leash. Families had split into their own little sections. A daughter was crying. I got a text from a friend then: “got any shrooms?” No, I do not. I don’t even know where I would begin to get them. 15 minutes, 2 firetrucks, and a DoorDash delivery later, the doorman finally told us it was a false alarm.

I got into an elevator with an old woman with gray hair and intense spray-tan and a white man in a polo. She complained to him about the situation, the racket, having to stand outside like a roadshow exhibit. Given that I was the third and last stranger in a talking elevator space, I thought it would be appropriate to also acknowledge her complaints. The man was barely listening. Smile and nod, express agreement with small talk. I had been practicing as an adult. Important to develop these skills. It did not land. The old woman glanced at me, slouching Asian girl with tattoos in PJs, and the elevator dinged at my floor. I chose to awkwardly nod again and step out (I’m never trying that again unless I suddenly turn into a charismatic white man).

There is a sort of faceless agitation here, racing up an ant hill with no idea of ants. How boring are we, how brave, to be sitting on a curb outside of a club flinging cigarette butts and talking about personal philosophies, glad to be free of our hometowns yet always returning home. It’s addicting, this rush of freedom.

When I was really young, my parents would take me to McDonald’s for a treat — a fascination they only kicked as they aged and discovered what other capitalist wonders could be offered. Burgers and fries, served fast at your fingertips, not to mention the McChicken sandwich that they always ordered as a “Mickey Chickey Sandwich” with stumbling English at the drive-through for a dollar (my memory fails me here. I tried to corroborate this information with web searches, but unfortunately am too lazy to find the accurate price for a 2011 McChicken sandwich).

My freshman year, I had taken a class on drag queens for an English requirement. In the context of this class, I interviewed my dad about some time in China (that I won’t really divulge, since I’m still scared of the Chinese government despite my 18-year old audacity. I hope that spies cannot break into seditious Canvas assignments). While I asked him questions, he was working on the business my parents had started nearly 17 years ago in the field of selling knitting needles. The most recent shipment from China came with defective needles; my dad was unloading each package and cardboard box by hand, electing to carefully clean the needles himself with alcohol swabs, one by one. Everything was strewn across the living room, and Mango sat in one of the boxes and watched us labor away.

When I proposed the interview, he had scoffed at the prospect, replying that “I hardly remember what happened. It was years ago. Also, my English is not good at all, so how are you going to get a good interview?” Regardless, I got my story out of him. And then I submitted it for a grade.

When I was finishing sophomore year of college, I got a text in a Michigan Dave’s Hot Chicken with my brother that my friend died. Warm honey dripped onto my fingers underneath bright LED lights while I booked my flight for his funeral. That summer, I walked into his house for the second and last time in my life, my first college summer ever spent in the passenger seat of the Honda that eventually burned up and killed him. We used to go everywhere together: my face pressed up against the windows to gaze up at the palm trees in LA, stopping to grab Asian food, running after him in the barren hikes near the city, bringing our gaming laptops around to play League in person. His mom didn’t speak English, and I didn’t have the Chinese words to tell her anything real for a mother who lost her only son. The friends we would play with organized, for her, the GoFundMe and funeral and lawyers as grown-up children. She made us fruit. We all had to sort through broken and new languages in the absence of his presence.

A week later, I sat in the pews of a squat building, watching Buddhist monks chant their way to his afterlife. My memory of him stays in a Discord server called “Limit Testing,” a virtual, bodiless tribute in a chat titled #bby-girl-yao-shrine, and whenever I listen to Porter Robinson — a ticket with no person to attend. After he passed, seeing how he was the person who actually made the server, I lost the urge to open it (despite nearly 3 years of midnight to morning calls). I just checked it now: the most recent messages: “i just found yao’s windforce janna account” / “dont disturb the dead”. Private in life, still private now.

Assimilation into the country that gorges upon itself. The anthill: a Vietnamese mother who gambled on her family’s entire childhood home and lost, where I then watched them slowly pack up and move to a small apartment with 2 fat cats in tow. A daughter in Troy High who drank a whole fifth in my basement and threw up all over herself, only to start posting her nudes on Twitter after cutting us all off. But another girl did that for money on OnlyFans and let me sleep on her couch for half a month, taking me to maid cafes and her corner of life. An ex whose brothers were “enrolled” in college for 10 years — where does this realness begin and end? It’s hard to recognize what should be ordained. We talk and talk, the ones who made it to a job, a place of safety, the ones who made it out the vagaries of life with safety nets. The detritus of adolescence. The sweet scent of living, a bereft feeling of decadence amidst a slaughter. Where else can you find a place where you are defined by your maximum output of assets? There is no orthodoxy, no orthopraxy. Nothing matters in this holy land of money and God.

Glitz and glamour. A mimesis of life compared to those wretched enough to be free from it. Strip the ideal of life from living it, and we are here: praying to the free-market pantheon of Google, Meta, Deloitte, and those who would have us. Instill a ritual and shared ecstasy of partying and drinking yourself to death for the modern-day shamans and priests. Imitate realness in a packaging that’s shaped suspiciously like a pair of Prada sunglasses and a bandana tied over a baseball cap.

Where did the magic go? Did you know that the original pharmacopeias were in the minds and mouths of women, before being made palatable and systemized by men with the education of literature? Realness happens at the fringes; now we only see a resurrection of the obscene voyeur, a form devoid of virtue. My best times were the strangest times, with interesting people and interesting hobbies. (Or playing League for hours and hours with faceless voices, nothing but a name tag and a voice channel).