MANHATTAN, NEW YORK
The foreign press is inquiring outside, “Nick Dove, are you Nick Dove?” And I respond in the affirmative that yes, I’m Nick Dove, and let me take a drag on that Gauloise, and while I smoke they ask “and what has happened tonight, Nick Dove, please tell” and I say “well a lot, where do you want me to begin” and they say “anywhere” and then I think of a little chic black-clad hipster sitting in the Paris 5th arrondissement reading my words reported as truth, eyes bugged open that out in far-away far-right Regime-era New York City Page Garcia and Matthew ‘Danger’ Lippmann threw Emo Night, where I read and opened, and about how for all day today before that pulled me back to my past, to Photobooth, MySpace, the song Vampire Heart by HIM, to Cate, Cate, who I wanted to make my emo Jackie O, Cate, who in her black tutu all those years ago AIMed me “hi Dove ;)” and the next day at the skatepark leaned her head on my shoulders and made my muscles tense up in stressful bliss, put my whole body in a steam bath, made me a testosterone boy for a harlequin girl… Yes, yes, this was news for the world! In the back pages stuffed behind the ‘Based Tariffs’ they’ll learn Aniela was Yay from high school football Texas, that yesterday when we were at her friend’s Jersey City Sikh Temple eating chapati and talking Spinoza and God and natural oneness Neurothicca stole a shawl, that there are two downtown Bulgarian Ivanovs, that Max Reality and The Grift Shop and I are dark woke rising, that Pynchon had thank God one absurdity left in him, and that in the universe, sometimes, for two people in one temporality, there can be a beautiful, shared, fragile yet durable, pure witness… Oh, xoxo, so random…! Or maybe not…!