2.5.25
Diary entry // Drift party, delusions, fascism, sex as a hipster hobby.
As aforementioned, I’m beginning to post reworked excerpts from my private diary for public consumption. Most chunks of this piece were written the day after the Drift party, which was… I guess a week and a half ago? I’m not really remembering right now. Only that it has some distance at this point. This is both an abridged and manicured form, some places touched up, others removed altogether, not really cohesive or comprehensive in any grand sense. Still, hope it’s enjoyable/insightful enough.
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
Drifting to the Drift party, to the ‘serious’ people writing ‘serious’ literature, upstream from downtown, or at least my downtown… I’m still downtown, at some marble-laden restaurant modeling Mykonos. Only these people read Carrère and sip wine, my people read Houellebecq and snort coke. Well, these people also probably snort coke, I just haven’t been around them enough. I’ve been living in the sewer, surrounded by junkies and jackals, con ‘artists’ and thieves, where people say slurs, then say they don’t mean them, or say they’re a means to power, a proof of their freedom, some evidence of their voice… But is that true? Maybe, maybe not. And is that complicity? Maybe, maybe not. I’ve found post-irony to be merely masked sincerity, an artistic feint to hide hate. But on that complicity, why is complicity always seen as an external reckoning with the world, and not an internal dialogue with the soul? Is this some byproduct of our divorce from the natural world, the world of God? The old world where one would walk into a church, hear its chimes, hear its chants, and feel a transformation of being, a transcendence of life and time, a transmutation into a sublime above?
Behind me Nietzsche rears his dead-eyed head, his moustache twirling with my mind. “Weak is the man who submits to convention,” he scolds, “who lets the outside affect his inside, and abdicates his own agency to the dictations of others.” He droops over my shoulder and unfurls a snarl. “Dove, you bitch of a behemoth, embrace your destiny as the best of them all!”
Der Deutscher Verrückter!
Do I? Dare I?
Nick Dove, the barbarian at the gates, unkempt hair and clad in black a Goth at Rome!
Breaching the inner sanctum, setting fire to its temples!
Sacrificing its priests with a smile, telling them their words are of poseurs!
Symbolic of nothing but their own superficiality!
Overcrafted and incomplete!
Affected, but unaffecting!
They’re heretics, they’ve forgotten the old ways!
What do they know of life, of living?
Only reading and ruminating, never doing and acting!
They write of authenticity, but their authenticity has no gravity!
No weight, no meaning!
No romance, no zeal!
Just passionless emptiness, cosmopolitan constipation!
Weak and feeble, boring and pedantic, they know Pelevin, but not Petersburg!
They’ve never ran rooftops, they’d never run rooftops!
Stare into the stars of the subpolar sky, and pull down from them a pale-eyed lover!
Dart with her on a mad dash around the world!
Hunt snakes in Hong Kong!
Escape sickness in Shanghai!
Astral walk in Anatolia!
Party with narcos in the Yucatán!
Kerouac had On the Road, but I was in the air!
“Where have the literary outlaws gone?” A Substack asks.
Right here!
I’m the literary outlaw!
A scribe with a scope!
The camera slung around my neck a loaded gun, I shoot decadence, depravity, the profane and mundane!
Tonight I will again!
I arrive after sundown, after chowing on Chinese. Sam comes with me, talking heartbreak, soft hellos, our American hellstorm, our New York hedonism. If our American hellstorm is a byproduct of our New York hedonism, or vice versa. Who knows if New York hedonism is relevant at all anymore. When once culture transmitted vertically, sent from above like commandments, now it speeds horizontally, rarely rising, scarcely lowering, accelerating around in flat, disc-like circles. We’re pooled with fellow travellers, trapped in suggested temptations. We don’t know who matters or what matters, and when we do, are powerless to stop it. A coup is underway in the United States. Fascism has come to America. People seem to care, but no one is doing anything. Because we can’t do anything, we’re all too fried. We can riot, but not revolt. Change takes concentration, and less and less of us are capable of it. We can shift styles, but not structures. Not easily, anyway. It’s either controlled demolition or total destruction. They’ve chosen the former, but we’re not at the point for the latter. We won’t risk chaos for a new order. Who knows if we ever will. Who knows if we even should! Violence begets more violence, and more volatility. Maybe we should have horrid certainty over ‘honorable’ chance! The greater good often turns bad. But the greater good is theoretical, not actionable. Not now. The numbers say we’re at inequalities unequaled by anything since the Ancien Regime. But our inequalities still carry abundancies, trappings of comfort. Flat screens, big and small, feeding dope. The metrics don’t mean anything, the Jacobins didn’t have iPhones, sedating distractions fracturing attentions. They were focused solely on their suffering. Even as we know of suffering, too few of us know suffering. And we need to suffer, all of us, if we want our salvation.
A salvation that could, as always before, become damnation.
For now, I suppose, we’ll live in purgatory, carrying rocks on our back.
Our crushings will come later.
Within the white walls between its marble columns I’m looking for a woman in a red dress, not with intention, or at least not thinking so… I’d indicated earlier that it was with intention, but as cartoonish expression… My memery is often made mimicry, I say something not meaning it, then become attached to it, considering of it. I am, as stated, snared by the liminality of post-irony… The woman in the red dress, like the first Matrix, has become an object of desire… Though it helps she’s flagged herself as desiring…
On On The Rag she’s revealed herself as on the prowl… Ready to give it up at the literary party, to the literate or not…
Does it sound like a good time, a worthwhile endeavor? Contemplating it, no... Not really… Rationally, sex is messy... Complicated… Complicating… But still, there’s an energy to it, a romance to spontaneity. Seduction without expectation is enthralling, addicting… And ever decreasing… Sex is being supplanted, automated away… Soon, very soon, a million AI-VI constructs will cross the uncanny valley, or at least enough of it, designed for your pleasure, and your pleasuring… True sex, real sex, will be the realm of hipsters, like vinyl and PBR… “No bro, bro, I like the real shit, the real girls… I like feeling like an animal, don’t forget we’re animals man, man is but a beast, rapturous and unrelenting, wild and unconstrained… Don’t put me in the pod, man, don’t have me fuck the dolls, man… I want a real woman… And sometimes, a real man… Don’t tell nobody that though, bro… I usually leave that one in the clouds…”
I’m talking to an old lion, he’s putting me on game, telling me how to hunt. “You’re not a pussy, Dove,” he says, “you’re a cool cat, you’ve been pushing some good shit out there lately, just keep grinding, gnashing those teeth.”
“Thanks, mane,” I tell him.
Then he takes a bite out of a gazelle.
Toward the end of the night, I’m sitting alone, cradling my camera. A woman approaches, no red dress, but wearing a scarlet face. She sits next to me, hits my arm.
“You ever take a picture of a cougar?” she winks.
very good