11/5/2024, 1:07am
Stream-of-consciousness composition on this, a day of national reckoning. Why am I writing this? Fun, I’ve decided just now. To give a window to my world, unedited, unmoored from care but tethered to reality, freed from curation on this, a day of political Armageddon, of social apocalypse, of what once was my greatest joy. Politics was my sport, and not like baseball, but boxing – this is a game with blood, and stakes, where the fighters brawl but only the audience gets pummeled. A game, like everything, a game, like anything. Everything, anything, becomes a game, in some way, the world is inevitably made theater, if not in absolution by observation, observation enough for reification, the establishment of truth amongst a fragmented eternity of falsities. We are serious. We are sarcastic. We are both. We are neither. We laugh and we cry and we react in ways unknown to us but which are always familiar. We are nothing if not paradoxes, our only consistency our inconsistency. What better explains this, this election cycle, all of electoralism, now, in the third decade of the third millennia? The body politic is wrought with selective memory and summonable ignorance, riddled with barely-bandaged bullet wounds striking right above the heart of Western liberalism, brushed right against the core of the Enlightenment ethos. What are we doing? Where are we going? Nowhere good, no matter the winner, one man the candidate for disruption and destruction, one woman the choice of decay and dissolution. Who, or what, to prefer? For me, the latter, begrudgingly, Kamala, Momala, the choice of the ‘Thinking Person,’ the woman who doesn’t fight time, who doesn’t kick the ocean in foolish contest with the tide of history, but joins, albeit awkwardly, albeit ignorantly, with it, in uneasy harmony, guiding oblivion with a shaking hand and shaky voice. A moron for the machine, but a machine that “works,” albeit barely, staffed with smart people that think themselves smarter than they are, but are clever enough still. Trumpism is a doomed lament, a romance for a dreamed time, its namesake an impostor, but so good an actor, and so regardable for it. He is the true spirit of art-as-life, the total art, the art beyond the page, the painting outside the canvas. The Chappellean “honest liar.” A human Gesamkunstwerk, and therefore a monstrous Frankenstein. You couldn’t write him. He couldn’t write himself, and he probably did. Masked himself, then murdered his face beneath. I haven’t watched the movie yet. The Apprentice. Maybe I will. Would be anticlimactic if he loses, though. Less relevant. Less prescient. So maybe not. Or maybe that’s just my dumb teleological bullshit. Maybe it’s interesting beyond whatever implication. Should probably sleep. Heavy eyelids. Heavier thoughts. Everyone crashing out around me, everything crashing down tomorrow. The last days of these vibes. The ‘vibes.’ What a cringe term, however useful the shorthand. But how juvenile it seems, especially in relaying the seriousness of the situation. The seriousness that you just opined as being simultaneously silly… But that’s your chosen view, it seems, for this moment, anyway. What are “vibes,” anyhow? What makes them, measures them? They’ve got to be rooted in some data. Some quantifiable, and therefore interpretable, thing. Post-Bacon, the immaterial is made from measurement. It must be… What else could source it, convey it, otherwise? Knowledge is produced from record, and social climates are produced from “knowledge,” whatever its veracity. I wanted to do a piece on this, I wanted to talk of this in writing about the MSG Trump Rally. Reference how it altered them, about how tense the atmosphere was, as Crumplar said, and how braindead those were, are, who express their enjoyment of it on that, the “vibes,” and nothing more… like that parasocial relationship of yours, MD, the naive moron, and the screed he posted… Rent free in your head… “Deeply powerful to see a guy come back and pack an arena in a city whose leaders have tried to bankrupt him and his family and put him in jail. The things people cheered for either won’t happen or don’t matter (no tax on car loan interest??? Who cares?) it’s about a certain vibe. A great moment for New York City!” so easily manipulable, so easily memeable, even if, perhaps, obviously, to the point of hyperbole… “Deeply powerful to see a guy come back and pack an arena in a city whose leaders have tried to bankrupt him and his family and put him in jail. The things people cheered for either won’t happen or don’t matter (Lebensraum and annexation to the Urals??? Who cares?) it’s about a certain vibe. A great moment for Germany!” These people are on holiday from history, free, or if not free, unconcerned by its consequences, which is so funny, because should their candidate win, he’ll rip a tsunami at their trip, and conjure and make a more unpleasant atmosphere, one more ill-suited for their desires, their aspirations, one more difficult for them to be so blasé and libertine. They should want Kamala to win, they should want a thousand year Brat summer… and yet, and yet… The vibes, the vibes, they submit to it, they don’t surf it, they don’t see what’s beyond and behind it. It’s a tragedy of thought. So sadly stupid, however sadistic they are. But alas, I never made it so far in the piece, and it’s too late now… Or at least that’s my ‘vibe’ about it. Maybe it just didn’t have the juice. I didn’t wander around so much, or at least not enough to warrant writing like some sort of Hunter S. Thompson knockoff… Things happened, sure, especially with Crackhead Barney, and her imposition of strong black womanhood on white-haired red-hats. “I’m trying to get a white man to pay for me!” she screamed to the confused crowd. But narrativizing these ‘things’ feels silly, disjointed, only valuable as part of a broader, more comprehensive diatribe, of which, well, there was no real, unique purpose, besides personal reflection. Which isn’t to stay that isn’t useful, no, but really, it felt forced… Not ‘authentic.’ We shouldn’t force communication of reflection, I think. Right? But what is ‘authenticity’ in writing, especially with regards to one’s self? And does that even matter? It must though, right? As the readings of most people towards personal accounts are one-to-one face-value belief, everything becomes memoir, even if unintended. And everything passing through this medium portends some form of alteration, of personal stylization. Is there any such thing as a pure, true, written ‘sincerity?’ I’d imagine no, not really, and any description of that a dumb, actually contrary evaluation. Sincerity seems stifled by curation, and curation, even in service of craft, inseparably underlaid with a fear of being ‘found out’ in some way. Obsession with subverting that presentation, too, has a similar function. This ‘schizoposting,’ this intentional ‘weird,’ poetically esoteric prose, a cringe counterpart put-on affectation meant to signify a similar semblance of smartness and coolness to an altogether more pretentious, more strange, more DSMV’d crowd. Some philosopher probably credentials this point, this argument. Better than me, Nick Dove, with my ~2440 Instagram followers. Maybe I’ve read them. Maybe I haven’t. I can’t be bothered to cite it, though, especially since I can’t be counted to remember. Wouldn’t be honest. Can’t feign some latent knowledge, codify that degree of well-readedness. Thinking about it, concern with presentation is a function of the ego, rooted in survival… How does, I wonder, sincerity impact survival? Unhesitating selflessness is, it seems, objectively foolish, against nature. Maybe that’s Darwinian. Not that the concept isn’t something worth striving for, even if the totality of it is impossible. But conveyed selflessness, absent complete selflessness, safeguards the continuance of evil… A masking of misery for the security of comparatively more healthy social norms. That’s really just liberalism overall. And unfortunately leftists, however ‘noble,’ in peeling back the curtain, only facilitate the construction of a new one, a regime of their own lies, with their selflessness selfishly imposed, they themselves forever slaves to their nature, or whatever nature that’d developed in service of the previous moral code. They would remake a world unable to be remade, or at least not to that extent, and certainly not absent ‘abundance...’ But, too, isn’t that what so much of the world is, already, now? Liberalism, not leftism, laundering itself, protecting itself, using the instruments of power to impose itself on the masses? All maintenance of power this way, necessitating force and sleight-of-hand in a prisoner’s dilemma game, a world of verity always vulnerable to violent ends… Ack, go to bed. Big day tomorrow. Today, actually.
11/5/2024, 6:57am
Oh fuck no. More sleep. Body feels like shit. Throat feels like shit. Sick? No, not sick. Just unrested (a word? A word now), unrecovered. At this point, feels unrecoverable; how many months, years, have you operated with sleep debt? Absent any sort of sustained period of uninterrupted, healthy slumber. You need bodily submission for mental relaxation. Perhaps after you eat a spoonful of natural Jif peanut butter… maybe two spoonfuls… Perhaps three… Okay, drawing the line at three. No… four. Okay. Okay. Yeah, four. Disgusting slob. Leaving the jar on the floor last night. Whatever, you were tired. Out the window, the sky is so gray, gray to the point of white. Grayness often signals bleakness, but there’s another reading, possibly, in ahead of today’s event… The absence of color is a cloud of uncertainty, a fog of war, no blue, no red, no nothing, everything equal before the battle. Okay, five… Okay… six.
11/5/2024, 9:08am
And you haven’t slept. What the fuck is wrong with you? You closed your eyes, did your thing. And nothing. Maybe you’re like Trump… Maybe you don’t need to sleep. One of those rare people who require less. No, you know that’s untrue. Maybe a final attempt. Another hour, at least. But maybe it’s just the edge in you, your body knowing this is an important day… Or the fact that you’re drinking three cups of coffee in the evenings… Maybe Maxine has the right idea, “no stims November,” not that that is going to happen, no matter the intention, for you or for her… Really, it just comes down to sleep. What is RISE saying right now? RISE, where the free trial expired, but if you open and close it really quickly, you can see the indices? 10.5 hours? Hmm, that’s better than it’s been, at least… Tonight’s going to be a terror for that, though, booling around Sovereign House and EARTH and Erection Day at Heaven Can Wait? Amongst reactionaries, dilettantes, and sex workers, above downtown right as it’s about to be upended… And on this, the last night you desire to be out in Dimes Square, or at least out with this consideration, in this composition, with external awareness obfuscating, roadblocking, a better, internal one. Will you be out? Assuredly, yes. But are you out? Absolutely, even more so. Especially after what happened…
11/5/2024, 12:13pm
Eh, I’ll take it. That’s enough time. Still a bit groggy. Did I dream of Bryan Davis? I think I did. Wonder where he is… If he’s reading me… Seeing me… Been about five years since we first met in that smokey Shanghai hookah lounge, when we found each other at Found158…
11/5/2024, 12:30pm
Scroll into news in The Cut about Taylor Swift. She’s not spending her time at the finish line with Kamala, but at the goal line with her husband the football player Travis Kelce, and the ‘Trump-y’ Mahomes family… This act of callousness will not be forgotten in the coming Bratreich, there will be 365 prison for the sadgirl partygirl! No, she is never, ever, ever, getting out. Crumplar writes in our chat, “if I was this level of celebrity, I’d be straight line D, saying vote, vote, vote!” Then Cantor says underneath, “feeling Dovish tonight, smoking loud, saying fuck the right.” Interesting juxtaposition… Do I say “fuck the right?” I’m a civil man, a post-directions person… a post-leftist, a post-rightist, a post-designationist, a pragmatic humanist, a realistic idealist, I’m pro-human, anti-suffering, desiring to break definitions of thought to maximize my capacity for knowledge… These paradigms, I feel, are often recursive, creating allegiances to settled beliefs, imprisoning the self to preset procedure… And these thoughts, these unsettlements, discrepancies, fluidities, often make it difficult to read me, define me… I suppose I’m a lib, albeit a based one, though still a woke one, one should be based and woke, both and neither, as I always say… In the original definitions, before their developed connotations…
11/5/2024, 12:41pm
With the trappings of celebrity comes the amplification of voice, and therefore power, it isn’t one person, one vote, no, not really, that’s not how things are effected, naturally, even if it’s rare a voter might switch over, directly, consciously, based on the word of a megastar… It’s more about contribution to the cultural current, and how one’s character insertion broadly affects yes, the overall ‘vibe’… and I haven’t always done that, at least in my perspective. Flexed my agency. Sometimes I have, but occasionally I think never ‘enough.’ I’m always contending with this idea that I’m never doing enough; I actually do believe in the power of agency, the responsibility of the platform, that no matter how small the soapbox, that one should stand with one’s opinions and solutions on it… If one cares about them strongly, that is. Democracy, actually, is authoritarian, it vests responsibility in the individual to participate, demands of its citizens attention and time. Two things unfortunately in increasingly short supply, and when possessed, often purposed in polluted ways. Yarvin’s commentary, despite my disagreeing with its conclusion, has merit; we aren’t really a democracy, not really, but an oligarchy of managed equilibrium and disparate interests. But beyond that, it’s ‘normal’ that people wouldn’t want to do anything. I also, really, really, don’t like being wrong… especially publicly. A me problem, but a common instinct. An assault of the ego that promotes paralysis. Am I, are we, so lost?
11/5/2024, 1:15pm
Yana made pasta. Yana, my wife, the green card goth girl for Trump. Funny how that when I met her she was studying Kropotkin and reading Chekhov, and now she’s MAGA, if only MAGA for Russia. “I’m a real nationalist,” she swells, placing her fist over her chest. I understand her, I guess. Self-interested voting is legible to me… The pasta’s good. How did she do it? Right Italian sauce, I think, and for only three dollars. Sprinkled salt overhead. So good.
11/5/2024, 1:26pm
Jared is texting that he’s hearing none of the swing states should make much noise tonight. Maybe we won’t know the winner, like the last one. Should be prepared for that outcome, seems logical, given how close this has been. But didn’t we know in 2016 rather soon? Sometime in the early morning? That wasn’t really a ‘landslide’, not like the electoral college suggested, which wasn’t decisive by any historical margin anyway… The term ‘landslide,’ is becoming so easily applied. Gone are the days of total routs; the partisanship in this country is so potent, so powerful, that anything resembling a real drubbing is impossible.
11/5/2024, 1:30pm
Yana’s going to apply for a dishwashing job. “Nick, I’m leaving.” “Yeah,” I say. “Nick.” “Yeah?” “Are you listening?” “Yeah, sorry.” “Nick…” “What?” “Don’t you think I’m too pretty for this job?”
11/5/2024, 2:33pm
I walked to the park to lay on the grass on the hill facing the smokestacks and decaying American industry, and the great bridge to Newark, which was assuredly, once, the pride of Jersey City… Lincoln Park is a pocket of Americana passing by, so liminal it could be anywhere, by no indication close to the great American metropolis, New York. No, this is Anytown, USA, but the idyllic USA, the USA of imagination. The USA of apple pie, the show Arthur, the band American Football. At least to me, the woman at the checkout counter earlier disagreed. “Sure it’s nice, now… A decade ago I saw a dead body every other day.” Actually listening to American Football right now. Midwest emo for the California boy, my melancholy go-to, not that I’m melancholy now, but more generally, more pervasively. A state I try not to surrender to, but which is so easy to succumb. Thinking of Bryan Davis again, but no longer about us in Shanghai, but where last I saw him, in Hillsboro, Oregon, during that little road trip I took to see the Pacific Northwest, and break free of the lockdown lockup. Election Day 2020, when before seeing him I rode my bike around boarded-up Portland, chatting with the pretty barista poet in the Hello Kitty mask, who was pre-preparing for a Trumpist triumph… Ah, how then I overlooked it, such antisocial behavior; the threat of violence facilitates peaceful change, the two exist in tandem, sure, but how useful is such violence against the overwhelming might of the state? Especially when so diffusely targeted? Given the instruments marshaled against it, it’s a naive freakout at best, an aesthetic lashout at worse… And one that effects, and turns, the less radical, the more apolitical, citizenry, to consternation and antagonism. Rebellion is chic until it has consequences, until it inconveniences the ‘normie.’ But you know, with politics, there’s nothing clean, there’s always an inconvenience, nothing is pure, nothing is without some harm, that’s the state of things, the messiness of people, the nature of the world. For these uncompromising visions, the ends must justify the means… too much consideration of the means otherwise imperils the project. I wanted to see the action that night, I remember. It’s memoryholed, I think, that there was a flare-up in the Portland downtown that night, after the ‘red mirage’ (the ‘red mirage,’ coined by the father of my friend Reality) manifested and it appeared Trump might win. But Bryan didn’t, and his wife Jenny neither. Of course, both of us were too blazed on Blue Dream to get behind the wheel of a car. Nick Dove, always looking for the danger tourism, “a fucked-up sort-of Forrest Gump.” And what may happen tonight… In some short hours…
11/5/2024, 3:09pm
Thinking of that tendency, that propensity for personal insertion, for chasing adventure, for finding romance in the world… I’ve always justified it by some sense of wanting to see it before it all disappears… I’m a bit of a doomer, on this, I share the sense others have that the world is trending towards sameness, a giant blob of similar conversations, similar styles, still in technicolor but comparatively gray, flat, certain, knowable, searchable… The ‘cheat code’ has been entered, as Jin said, and the black, hidden zones of the map, revealed… Though of course, not all is always in focus, there’s always something going on one is not privy to… The human mind can only contain and conversate about so much. The Trumpist, the common trad, hates this, and I broadly sympathize with them, I do. I don’t believe in centering beauty in politics, but I certainly understand the sad sentiment at the disappearing of variety, the march of what they call “globohomo” (global homogenization, not the portmanteau slur). But how do they propose to stop it? Their solutions are half-measures, antiquated stop-gaps, this transformation comes from innovation, the inevitable, inexorable march of technology… We’re bound to be borderless, in time, not just in theory… To halt this trend, they’d have to move towards deconstruction, I believe Kaczynski and Elull on this. But such is impossible, so what’s the natural next thing? Seizure of the state, the media, the internet, isolation of communication, create of a common hive of consolidated, nationally-bounded thought… Be more like China, with their censorship. Unthinkable for the United States, or the broader English-speaking world… especially considering the range of their cultural imperium and linguistic dominance. No, no, the solution is synthesis, and yes, I’m aware that it’s a compelled choice… But, yes, perhaps, management of this molding is necessary, lest there be systemic, societal turmoil… Carefully guiding the tug-of-war notating the inevitability of the future, paying attention to the realities of the present…
11/5/2024, 3:29pm
A woman stops me as I walk by St. Alyosius. I unplug my headphones, now shuffled to some Naruto opening. “Excuse me?” Oh no, here we go. “What kind of camera is that? I’m trying to get into photography myself.” Relief. This never happens. “A Sony A7IV.”
11/5/2024, 3:48pm
Mom calls. Asks about the election. She has a sinking feeling it’ll be Kamala. She hates Kamala. “She’s trashy, talks different to different people.” Can’t say I disagree. She’s right. I’ve spent nearly fifteen years hating Kamala, out of my primordial political ooze finding her fake, dumb. Actually dumb, a bad politician, a shortsighted person. Unprincipled, with her only consistent pattern self-promotion and entitlement. But is Trump any different? Not really, and we don’t vote for candidates, we vote for culture, and conditions. And were they better under Trump? No, decidedly no, his return would mark chaos, it’s so curious that the law and order people are voting for chaos, for the acceleration of conditions they find unpalatable. They don’t see the broader, underlying picture; they are wreaking the continuity of government, messing with the functioning of the imperial core. You vote for Trump if you want the world to burn; there is, I find, talking to her, a discrepancy of orientation towards politics, and towards this election. I’ve been saying that this election feels less charged then 2016 or 2020, and I find it true; imagining the MSG rally as being so sparsely protested, given what the opposition claims it represents, even what it represents, felt indicative of a broader feeling of burnt-out energy, dimmed defiance. A few hundred ’resistance’ libs, scant a leftist activist to be found. Of course, maybe, you know, they’ve been that beaten down. The War in Gaza, the complicity of the American state underwriting genocide. A vote for Kamala doesn’t change that. A vote for Trump might make it worse, but also might make it better. Though it probably makes it worse. The high volatility play. Though he did recently threaten to deport student protestors… But he’s kidding, you know! Words don’t matter, unless THEY say it… But really, words hold less weight… But language shapes, constructs, constricts thought… Wittgenstein, bending of reality under words… And words, so flippantly used, revelatory of our societal nature… Mom is talking more, she got the CT scan, no more clots in her lungs. “But now I find out I have air pockets, and now I find out my spine is deteriorating. I don’t even feel pain. Welcome to 60. Multiple levels of degeneration in my spine, God, thank you very much…”
11/5/2024, 4:04pm
Maxine calls me to compliment me on a picture I posted of myself I took a year ago. “Very handsome,” she swoons. Well, shit.
11/5/2024, 5:20pm
A pit of anxiety is in my stomach, the mental anguish starting, the bodily tension building. A million reasons for nervousness, put off till now. Social situations, societal implications, a sense of determined finality. Everything changes tonight. Cringe to say? Who cares? Expression of commonality being cringe stems from a desire to be different, when some things are just self-evident. Everything does change tonight, shift situationally. For yourself, and for the world. Who are these idiots saying this isn’t an important election? May be the boy who cried wolf, the endless “most important election of our lifetime…” regurgitation, but it’s actually true, never in the modern era have we been more divided, these visions more disparate, and the stakes have kept rising… but does life continue? Yes, inevitably, one way or another.
11/5/2024, 5:47pm
I make contact with Dingo. Dingo voted for Jill Stein. Dingo’s telling me that we need to go third party, that America needs to normalize the third party, that we need the Green Party to qualify for slush funds, that we need the Green Party to get Super PACs. That we need Green Party billionaires. That maybe then, America will be different. What an admission of hierarchical inevitability from the former communist. They’re going off to Argentina, then Mexico, then Venezuela, playing with their band, whose Spanish name I heard then forgot. They invited me on the tour to Mexico, and then I invited myself on the trip to Venezuela. But I may be gone then. Ran off to China, to complete what I’d began, to find myself as myself, alone in the world… Will I? Well, that’s a ways away, months in New York are years, despite minutes passing like seconds. A paradoxical duality of time. But I want to go, want to see, given all I’ve witnessed here… and am not longer willing to bear. Anxiety rising, hairs with it. Not like you to be this way. Not entirely, or perhaps even primarily, due to the election, obviously. At least you look fly, in your brown jacket, your black pullover, your white pants, and gold cross. Toussled hair. Mr. GQ.
11/5/2024, 6:02pm
Kerouacian spontaneous prose is the future, it always was, the skill issue being the lock-in and ability to create value on a consistent basis, and with real, purposeful direction; think Substack, its rawness, the casualness in its writing, and the attitude of all serious ‘writers’ you know to it (‘it’s only a stack,” Sam said). Substack is interesting, too, in how modification after posting is forever allowed, years down the line; what is print is no longer permanent, though I guess you can no longer label it ‘print’ at all… What does Lukács say in Theory of the Novel? About the novel reflecting the broken, subjective nature of reality, the dissolution of person and planet, of man and earth and God, and the epic being the archaic construction from an earlier time, when all were in harmony with one another? What does it mean when in the digital realm texts can be altered, and are never permanent? Perhaps on the blockchain, they will be… A record, for time immemorial, situated right next to a chibi girl NFT with big, bug eyes and a cigarette… A Milady.
11/5/2024, 6:31pm
A Milady, indeed. On the PATH train downtown toward Sovereign House, for perhaps the last time, this time for real (oh, who are you kidding!). There’s so much toxicity, but the volatility here, tonight, on what is certainly its crowning night, is too interesting, too compelling to ignore. Right-wing reaction mixed with apolitical, dark hipsterism, the venue the host of a memer Manson Family, or so you told the Business Insider reporter. Not trying to ape Crumplar, you’re involved in some way, you’ve never had that same visceral disgust for the politics, you disagree with it, that’s true, assuredly, but you aren’t allergic to it, not like many others with your beliefs would be. No, your issue is the immoral excess, the thievery, the depravity, the duplicity and evil from the root down, maybe not intended by the space, but perhaps inevitable given it, given the people and the substances which gravitated and flowed from it. Safe to say? Maybe not. True to life? Assuredly so. Everyone’s delusional until they aren’t, as it circles the citadels of power, Elon, Thiel, Yarvin. The party is hosted by Bronze Age Shawty, who you knew before the fame, or infamy, who is now championed by the richest man in the world as he attempts to remake the American court system and their attitudes towards free speech. A wild world you’ve led yourself to, Nick Dove, and one you are, ultimately, grateful to have experienced. And one you have, for this past year, captured on your camera, with access unparalleled by anyone else…
11/5/2024, 6:53pm
Somewhere around Delancey-Essex, a woman says “wow, you’re the tallest man I’ve ever seen.” It had to happen once, assuredly. The law of averages, the regression to the mean.
11/5/2024, 6:56pm
Off at East Broadway. Listening to FEIN, by Travis Scott. Night’s about to begin. Entries likely to shorten, or drop off. And who will win? Who knows. This, the first time you’ve ever felt that way, you could make the case either way. So much noise, so much fucking noise. The betting odds by Kalshi seen at the West 4th Street stop have it as Trump 59/Kamala 41. But the market is under manipulation, no? All sorts of reports of Trumpists ‘buying’ the reality they want real. And aren’t you more likely to be a Trump voter if you’re a degenerate gambler? Who is this mythical snake-eyes good ol’ boy, putting it all on Momala and letting it ride… He must exist… Somewhere… But if you had a gun to your head, it’d be the man who took a bullet in his, no? Doesn’t it make sense for it to be Trump, forget the data, the statistical noise… When you were at Madison Square Garden, you remember what you saw… Only a few hundred protestors. When in past years, assuredly there’d be a few thousand, if not more. Much more. Has to be indicative of something, no? A marker of energy, a harbinger of a new Trump era?
11/6/2024, 7:03pm
I pull up to Sov, and sitting on the steps are Carrie Sun and JPEG, who gives me his name, but only whose handle I remember. They’re talking roots, they’re both Italian. I tell them I’m Italian too, to their surprise, but didn’t gain the complexion. I slip out of the conversation right after, as results started coming in, Indiana and Kentucky, immediately red, Vermont blue, no surprises. Heading inside to talk beef, oh god.
11/6/2024, 7:10pm
Knock on the door, and Rick Barry opens. “What?” he says. “I need to talk to Odette,” I say. “Odette’s not here, she left.” He slams the door. A giant Milady poster looms in the background.
11/5/2024, 7:14pm
Odette is off in the distance. A conversation to be had later. Maybe. If I feel like it. I might not. Do I owe her anything, do I want to engage with anything?
11/5/2024, 7:15pm
Charlotte Fang is supposed to be here, Carrie Sun says. It was on the flyer. I didn’t know. Reality and Cantor roll up. Reality says he’s going back home, back to Michigan. Carrie Sun tells him he’s in psychosis. Reality shrugs it off. I don’t know if I agree. Reality may be in psychosis, but he doesn’t seem like it now.
11/5/2024, 7:21pm
I’m thinking about Knausgaard, and autofiction, and the implications of making one’s familiars one’s characters. The ethics of it. The impact of it. That it’s actually kind of shitty, and assuredly pretty selfish. The roman o’clef is preferable, more moral. Writers and photographers too rarely consider the weight of their practice, their imposition of it on their subjects…
11/5/2034, 7:28pm
Cantor is telling us that we’ll know the winner “by 9:30 baby, 9:30,” and that knows who’s gonna be the winner, that he’s got Kamala on a six-state parlay. I guess he’s the snake-eyes Momala good ol’ boy I wondered about. “I bet on Iowa bro, Iowa,” he says to me, eyes narrow as a shark. “And Eli’s even crazier. Eli’s got a thousand on Ohio, bro. Mad man! And he might even be right.” These guys are the original bros for Kamala, the type I tweeted about.
11/5/2024, 7:43pm
A man in a Trump costume tells Carrie Sun that “the listless, they’re doing horrible things, they’re doing Onlyfans,” and that “they don’t know who’s going to win, when he’s going to win.” He smirks in pride. Carrie says she truly doesn’t know who’s going to win. Cantor chimes in and says he does, and it’s “Kamala, of course.” The Trump impersonator then gets angry. “Fuck off, I’m going to win! Did you vote? Yes? Bet you didn’t have ID! You gotta have ID, you’ve gotta have ID, folks…”
11/5/2024, 7:46pm
Another guy daps me up, he recognizes me. He’s wearing black shades and a black Remilia hat. “Yo Nick Dove, you the man, you take good pictures,” he says. On closer inspection, the hat announces he’s ‘immune to propaganda.’ Is he though? Somehow I doubt it. “What you doing man?” he then asks. “You go hard, man, why they making you stand in line, man? You, man? Damn man. FUCK! I’m worried about this, man. There’s no women at this party, man. That’s not a good thing, man. I might dip if things get bad, man. The men might get weird, man. But check it, yo, yo yo… I watched Hillbilly Elegy last night, man. I thought it might be weird, man, but nah, nah, and now I fuck with Ohio, man. Just like I fuck with you, man. Nice gold chain...”
11/5/2024, 7:51pm
He’s right. There are maybe five women at this party, this is the worst ratio I’ve ever seen, perhaps even the worst ratio in the history of downtown Manhattan…I suppose it makes sense. No ladies at Milady…. Besides this goth girl with huge tits with duck-taped crosses concealing them. I wonder if Yana would like her.
11/5/2024, 7:57pm
Tushar shows up, missing me for once. When I point it out, he joins me in line. A man then walks up to us and tells us not to worry about the wait. “This is okay, this is based, we’re fascists, we know how to wait in line, bro… Hail Milady!”
11/5/2024, 8:04pm
I talk to Tushar about former KIRAC Tarik Sadouma’s Unsafe House party in Amsterdam, and how that party, not this one, is probably the wildest in the world, and how Yarvin is there, and then coincidentally, I receive a Substack post notification from Dollboy, a poem about Yarvin’s wedding…
11/5/2024, 8:11pm
Finally inside, and underneath the watchful gaze of the Milady poster, which reads “THERE IS NO GOVERNMENT, I LOVE YOU,” is a big, beautiful, bountiful, McDonald’s buffet… I haven’t eaten all day, besides the pasta, and palm two Big Macs with glee. I then take a photo of Rick Barry… Behind him is a giant Polymarket sign… This party is, hilariously enough, sponsored by Polymarket… No word from Maxine, if she’s coming, if she plans to be here…
11/5/2024, 8:18pm
I run into Coldhealing in the backyard, and he elucidates to me that the markets are moving towards Trump, but that it’s not over, and that it’s still close.
11/5/2024, 8:21pm
I see Crumplar, and devour more of the McDonald’s as he explains to the surrounding observers that he’s a vegan. I gesticulate to him to take the fries. He takes them. I wander off, wondering what else is going on.
11/5/2024, 8:25pm
I meet two Russians, one from Moscow, the other Saint Petersburg. There’s always Russians afoot, it seems… I try to flex for them. “Я прожил в России много лет, я тоже могу говорить на этом языке, как давно вы здесь, почему вы здесь. Шпионов?” I ask.
11/5/2024, 8:30pm
Inside on the main stage, Fake Trump is giving a speech. “Thank you for coming to the Sovereign House tonight. I’m happy to be here tonight. They said I should be elsewhere tonight, but you know, I’m here tonight. This is a beautiful place, a beautiful space, get a load of this place, and the women, now I see there are women coming in, finally, it was a real sausagefest in line, folks, the kind Tim Walz likes…”
11/5/2024, 8:38pm
He’s right, there are more women appearing. I talk to one of them, Lily, whose paintings I shot, about Werner Herzog, and how she saw Grizzly Man, and how Werner Herzog is a libtard but a ‘based libtard.’ A based libtard? She said the bingo. I’m a ‘based libtard.’
11/5/2024, 8:59pm
Back outside in the backyard I’m sitting near Crumplar and Cantor, and Cantor, watching the returns, is now wearing a MAGA hat, no doubt following the trend of the evening, socially and politically. I prod him for how and why he’s converted, and ask if he’s still a neoliberal. “Get the fuck out of here,” he says, and takes a drag of his vape. “I’m THE neoliberal, I’m Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan in 1998, cooking crack and doing deals, I’m me, a few years ago, bending over George Soros’ granddaughter in a Bushwick basement. Dove, I’m THE neoliberal. THE neoliberal!” Carrie Sun then says something unintelligible, but which is assuredly misinterpreted by Cantor. “Nah, yeah, girl, I’m gay, I’m bi, I’m trans, I fuck everybody, anybody, anybody with a pulse, and maybe, sometimes, not even that…”
11/5/2024, 9:09pm
My battery starts dying, endangering my writing ability, my recording ability, so I put my phone on airplane mode to conserve power.
11/5/2024, 9:12pm
Run into Noah of the Mars Review of Books, who alerts me that his mother has been reading my Substack, and that she enjoyed my piece on his party.
11/5/2024, 9:26pm
Sitting on the steps with the ‘ADHD Hooker,’ a gorgeous escort I’d met a few months prior, who asks me to photograph the scantily-clad MAGA goth girl, and points out a beautiful black woman in a saree getting rizzed up by Fake Trump. She then says, “it’s a great American synthesis, a wonderful sign for our country.” My mind is beginning to blank, despite my body’s not consuming more than one Modelo.
11/5/2024, 9:41pm
By the screen, I see Amine and DULL freaking out over Amine’s selling of something. I wander over to peek at his screen. 98% loss, a total wipeout.
11/5/2024, 9:50pm
David Clarity.
11/5/2024, 9:52pm
I wander over to Cantor, deep engaged in derangement, still wearing the MAGA hat. “Not liking those Kamala Polymarket odds, bro,” I tell him. “Fuck the market man,” he scoffs. “Fuck the markets. The markets don’t mean shit. Gambling don’t mean shit. Indicative of nothing. Needs more blacks, needs like four billion people, needs Jews…”
11/5/2024, 10:33pm
In the corner with DULL, listening to DULL explain his political philosophy, that Trump is accel, that Kamala is decel, and that we want accel, and that we want disruption, social and cultural chaos. “I think about this a lot,” he says. I can’t help but think about how opposite our philosophies are, here, how cautious I am towards this shit.
11/5/2024, 10:52pm
Dollboy wanders over, “I WANT TO THANK THOMAS MATTHEW CROOKS AND HADRIAN BELOVE FOR MAKING THIS HAPPEN!” he screams.
11/5/2024, 11:01pm
BRGLuvbug of the Based Retard Gang daps me up, then dips to a corner. I don’t recognize him without his trademark black shades. Crumplar sits in front of me. “It’s looking over,” he tells me. “They’re going crazy on Twitter,” he then says. “Well, at least this is good for your career,” I tell him. “Yeah, and bad for everyone else,” he says. “These people are now the ones in power.” The thought gives me both a shiver and a laugh. A man walks up behind him, and tries to slam a MAGA hat on him. “NICK DOVE GET THIS ON ME AS I PUT THIS ON CRUMPS! HAHA! HELL YEAH!” Crumplar dodges.
11/5/2024, 11:09pm
With no call, a man in the backyard yells and sings, “DEMOCRACY’S OVER, DEMOCRACY’S DONE, DEMOCRACY’S OVER, DEMOCRACY’S DONE, TRUMP IS THE WINNER, TRUMP IS THE ONE!”
11/5/2024, 11:20pm
Rasputin, man.
11/5/2024, 11:30pm
It was the two of us then, now swapped out and swapped around, and I loved us, I did, I still do, I’ll forgive you, I’ll try, I’ll move on and move up, that is my task, my duty, my difficulty, especially after what I’ve seen, what I’ve witnessed, what I’ve experienced, seen, heard, lived in my skin and felt in my bones, but oh, how we fit together, and oh, how we laughed together, and how we had that beautiful snow globe, that respite from the world, one year ago, now seeming ten, all time really an illusion… You, Maxine, once mine, the center of my all, the height of my life, the breadth of my soul… Your laugh, your smile, your charm and wit, your beauty, your radiance, even in your mistakenness, how it drove me crazy, made me mad... I’m not without sin, I know that, I do, but even still, for all this to be put through… Now should I be honest? Now should I be true? Should I write this, should I tell all this to you? It helps to get it out there, with permission, of course… An ask to be made later, in some due course. Am I rhyming? Is this meter? Poetry, perhaps? I don’t know, I don’t care, a fucking Seussian brain lapse.
11/5/2024, 11:38pm
Life is for the living, and living we do, but no one gets out of this without feeling dead inside… At least, at some point… All is recoverable… Hard to see you, but wonderful to know you… In my, our, blue heaven…
11/5/2024, 11:58am
David Clarity.
11/6/2024, 6:41am
At the Lambs Club, the morning after, alone and charging my phone after a night of electricity, of surreal sensation, of indescribable shifts and yet altogether, knowable ones… What this retrospective will be, what this reaction will miss… What are your thoughts? What is going on? What is to be done? The night, sober, and yet still a haze, all that I know, the partons subsumed in joy, but exalting rage, I’m tired, Jesus Christ, exhausted, I’ve nearly passed out… Are you okay? Two hours ago, at Remedy Diner, the man who stood over the table, and asked me, so brazenly, “are you a fucking Marxist?” for not marking the election of Trump with excitement, but dread, over the phone with a friend. “I hope you’re proud of yourself.” “Fuck you, don’t talk to me,” I talked back as he walked out. And he looked way more Marxist than me! With his long, scraggly brown hair, coke bottle glasses, stained teeth and self-satisfied sneer… Is this the New America? No, this was always America, this is only an anecdote of a long hyperpartisan freakout, but now the reprisals start, the glowing, the crowing. A fifty-percent plus margin, not a landslide, but talked of as such, just as you thought it might be… A Trump win, not a surprise, but a triumph in the popular vote, certainly so… But should it? Think about it… How astroturfed was the Kamala campaign? How forced? And how fractured was the Democratic coalition? The left energy was gone, you saw it yourself, both in life, and online, how ever small the true-believers may be, their zeal sustains fights, creates buzz. Where was any of that, for years? Not anywhere in Democratic politics, not since Bernie. There, for a while, for reproductive rights, for women… but not long enough, it seems. That was a winning issue, but ultimately subordinated in a time of perceived economic distress. Was 2020 a poisoned chalice? The inflation was baked in, the financial hardship inevitable. You can’t print so much without paying up. And they actually stuck the landing, Powell and the Fed, tamed the beast… but not until after the damage was done. Food not indexed to inflation, people paying three, four times as much for eggs, bread, basic foodstuffs, and not knowing why, let alone knowing how… But one can’t just blame the ignorance of the voter, but the skill of the messenger… And how shitty the Democrats have been for so long… Whatever Shor’s attempts to hone it, reign it in, they were too little, too late… “Woke” language, identity politics policing, even if now antiquated and out of use, its disposal and widespreadedness four, five years ago, came back and haunted the party… A complete overreach. And Shor’s attempts, as it turns out, ineffectual… There are metaeffects already built-in, sloganeering only works so far, when the public has been inundated so much. Attempts to reverse course are disingenuous, as rightfully seen as such. What did Jin joke when we joked outside Unik’s on Canal? “The Democrats are basically saying ‘JUST LIE!’” That’s the core of popularism, a weak lie to make up for real, if past, thoughts. And the way they say things… The Democrats run as HR, and the Republicans nominate a class clown… Guess who’s going to win? Guess who’s more communicable, likable, to the American people? Democrats need another “culture candidate,” a real lighting rod, someone who can conduct the current and seize the imagination of the public… The last one of those was Obama. Remember how hilarious it was, midway through the night, when that Waka Flocka Flame parody from fifteen years ago popped up and played on screen… Baracka Flocka Flame, “I’M THE HEAD OF THE MOTHERFUCKING STATE!” How many people, in that crowd of reactionary hipsters and crypto brothers, like Obama? Or liked Obama? Not all of them, assuredly, but a sizable number, the more apolitical, the more drawn to artistic freedom than political power. And all of them, dancing in delirium as the results poured in, and what Litts said as he got lit, in jest, surely, but… “I’m not really about books right now, but rap music, and divine messages from above…” Was Trump that sign from above? It seemed that way, it so seemed that way, with everyone in exuberance, vibing into the beyond, “All Red,” by Playboi Carti playing, “Donald Trump,” by Mac Miller bumping, their consciousnesses coalescing into a great Trumpian national spirit… How unthinkable would this be, to so many, so long ago, Trump’s strength with the youth, popularity in a New York City counterculture? Partying with Yeonmi Park? Yeonmi fucking Park? The left, liberals, are so arrogant about these things, thinking counterculture can only stem from them. They have such calcified views of the world. You know why people hate them, Nick Dove, why they’re frustrated with them… because you, too, are. You’ve been so your whole life, despite your social liberalism, your environmentalism, your embrace of the welfare state, and your skepticism of unfettered capitalism and corporate greed… But you remain grounded in these real and practical concerns, acknowledging of their existences, and the gaps between the parties on them. How many of these people are? How many people did you talk to, who saw no difference? And when the difference was pointed out, scrambled towards something else? That seem to lack empathy, beyond their immediate concern? It’s understandable, perhaps, the paralysis of our political culture, and the sclerotic nature of the American state, makes noticeable change impossible, and restricts the capacities of its caretakers… Absent that, it really is just all “vibes.” Both parties realize this, and in their own way, are exploiting the levers of power to their benefit, whether directly or indirectly, through electoral or media manipulation. The system is collapsing, and Trump’s return heralds a new one, or at least, the attempt to make a new one. That much is clear. “A new golden age for America,” he proclaimed in victory. But is King Midas a Judas?
