Big Law Blog

8/4/2023

Today was the last day. Today was the longest day. Today was in turns boring and harrowing. I woke up and went for my usual run, which went fine. After the run I got espresso and a bagel from a nearby cafe. It lightly drizzled, it was cool out. Then I went home and started packing. I moved at my own pace, almost languidly, maybe trying to stretch the task out longer to kill more time, maybe my limbs heavy with the dread of transition, maybe just tired from my jog. I listened to a podcast and tidily arranged things into big plastic boxes. In a couple hours I had everything except my laptop phone blankets and pillows packed up and ready to go. It was still early afternoon. I talked to M on the phone, he was tough to pin down, he had to work and wasn’t sure when he’d get out, but would come to NYC after. I internally estimated an optimistic ETA of 11 pm for him, and tried to occupy my time. “Now’s the time to seize the time” goes a 1970s folk song sung by the Worker’s VIewpoint Organization/Communist Worker’s Party of Greensboro NC. “Occupy! Everything!” goes the call and response chant from the Occupy protests of 2010. What I was doing with my time matched neither of these, it was not political, it was an attempt to collapse time, evade it, fast forward.

I ate a chopped cheese and french fries, hoping to use the sleepiness generated by that greasy dish productively as a means to nap mid-day to prime me for the long night ahead. I did eat and I did lay down and laze and doze. I woke up early evening groggy and irritable, sort of regretting that decision, and decided to go to one last AA meeting in NYC for the summer. I attended a nearby group, felt like the speaker carried a fine message but was very bothered by how they mumbled and their general halting/stilted speaking cadence, and unfortunately felt preoccupied by irritability. In AA we talk about RID: Restless, Irritable, Discontent, these are the common byproducts of untreated alcoholism and spiritual sickness. I was in that headspace. The meeting helped though.

Afterward I decided to saunter aimlessly around Chinatown and Little Italy one last time. I put on the song “I Love You Always Forever” by Donna Lewis and had a momentary soundtrack as I watched the sunset in SoHo. I got sick of it and took my headphones out. I bought a couple souvenir T-Shirts with the idea I would give them as gifts to friends upon returning home: one says “Fuck You You Fucking Fuck” and the other says “Mommy’s Little Meatball.” I inadvertently had walked to the exact spot where me and G first met two months ago. It was her last night at her old job near there, I recognized, and briefly I became highly fearful that I would run into her in a supremely awkward final interaction before leaving. Luckily that didn’t happen though and I made my way home. I ordered one last italian sub with mayo from the bodega nearest my apartment and took it home to eat. I layed in bed and watched longform sports journalism videos on youtube for about four hours. It was as pleasant as I could make myself given the internal unpleasantness I was feeling in anticipation of the big move home. I tossed and turned in bed, tried to relax, couldn’t, but managed to pass the time just the same.

About 1:30 a.m. M arrived and it was suddenly time to go. I handed M a paper bag with some stamps and an ink pad I had bought for him from a little shop on the Lower East Side, the stamps were skulls, the ink was crimson, he seemed to like them. We quickly trucked my boxes and my bike out to my car, I deposited my room key and temporary student ID and in about 20 unceremonious minutes I had concluded my 2023 NYC stay and was on the road back to NC. But the ride from NYC to NC was unlike the ride from NC to NYC. (I originally wrote “the ride home” but both those trips were rides home in their way, I realized. Home has become a destabilized concept for me lately. My Mom texted me a few days ago and said I have a home in her and my Dad’s hearts. That is true and felt very good to be told. Still, spatially and spiritually I think NC is ultimately the homier home, the place I feel more rooted and at ease.) M was in a bad place emotionally. Without going too much into the details of that out of respect for his privacy, I can say that he was dealing with the fear and stress that comes with a family member being in acutely poor health. He also recently had a very close friend who lost a parent, and in fact he spent last weekend attending that person’s funeral. Death felt close at hand, he was in a death spiral. It cast a pall over the trip home. There were no cheerful sing-a-longs or deep meandering conversations about philosophical topics or silly improv jokes or wistful retellings of old stories from our old follies as punks a decade ago. Instead there was mostly silence, with some conversation that was mostly focused on the totally appropriate worry accumulating in M’s heart as he tried to navigate how best to support his family member while not becoming completely financially emotionally or socially devastated by that work. I worked to remain supportive and cheerful and kind and tried my best to be a good listener and be empathetic without giving unsolicited advice or pretending I had gone through what he has, which I haven’t. I wished we could have a vacation-y vibe, be silly and carefree and irreverent and dumb and fun together like we usually are, but that was not the circumstance we found ourselves in.

So I did my best to adapt. Which was actually possible since I’m sober and have a spiritual toolkit from AA of how to engage difficult moments like this. And while it wasn’t jubilant, it was tolerable. Cocteau Twins played softly on the stereo for long enough that every song on the album played twice; after the second coming of “Pitch the Baby” I switched it to Rancid. “New York City/well I wish I was on the highway…” was one lyric. I delved into old playlists and found songs that me and M liked, artists from our hometown, tracks with stories and positive connotations. They got little response but I think they helped. M herocially drove until around 3:30 a.m., and then we switched and I took it from there, we were somewhere just past Baltimore. I switched the music to club and house and vogue and ballroom, a playlist of high energy gay music I had made for the student walkout protest last spring. It was good to drive to. M eventually dozed off, his duty discharged, and I drove into the sunrise, bobbing my head dutifully, knowing that the energy from the music was necessary to keep me sharp, aware, awake. But the coffee and the club music ultimately proved weaker than my sleepless exhaustion. After a few instances of noticing myself start to doze and feeling that frightening jolt of adrenaline after catching myself, I made the prudent decision to pull over and rest, even though we were only about an hour from Richmond, M’s home. Safe and still in a generic Exxon parking lot somewhere just north of Virginia I slept in the car seat for about 45 blissful minutes, the car engine running, the music still playing softly. I woke up, bought an energy drink, and managed the remainder of the trip without issue.

We got to RVA delirious with exhaustion but grateful to be at a safe haven, a point of respite for our wayfarer weariness. M got news that abated his most acute fears; he learned that his family member was in a relatively safe and stable place, enough so that he felt he could relax a bit. The edge came off, it was easier to interact. While all natural reason seemed to point to going to bed at this point, instead we met up with another dear old friend from our hometown who had recently moved in with M, T, and got brunch together. Somehow we got our second winds. We drank several cups of coffee and I ate a veggie chicken cutlet smothered in country gravy and they ate biscuits and homefries and we talked about just general life stuff and everything seemed ok. Subtly we had evaded the menacing column of dread hanging over us and slipped into normalcy. We had hopped the circadian turnstile and evaded the diurnal cops and we traveled freely on a new day, ballasted only by a handful of minutes of stolen sleep in car seats.

Me and M and T had a big day that next day, which felt like it was the same day since it was uninterrupted by bedtime. We drove up to Hollywood Cemetery and found a spot to sit that overlooked the James River and the nearby freight train line. We made up silly songs and sang them together and laughed. We pretended the trains’ cargo was meatloaf not coal. We just joked around and were asinine and gleeful and it was fun and fine. We listened to oldies on the radio in the car and made up joke lyrics together and laughed some more. The pall was uncast. Drawing on some secret reserve of energy and motivation, we then drove out to the James river itself and spent the rest of the afternoon playing in it. I felt like a little boy. We splashed around and skipped rocks and then somehow got into a kind of a rock fight where we would try to skip or plunk rocks as close to the other person without hitting them as we could. Sometimes we hit each other but it didn’t matter. Sometimes we tried to catch the rocks the other person threw and it was too hard and it hurt but that also didn’t matter. We found big logs at the bottom of the river and used them to do curls, to work out and get swole, but as a joke. Eventually four other of M’s friends joined us at the river. They played Green Day and Rancid from a small bluetooth speaker. They brought Bojangles spiked iced tea and smoked Marlboros and were relaxed and kind and conversational and so funny. Somebody started calling the sun “the star.” This was the pinnacle of humor to me.

I felt deeply, deeply grateful to be where I was. I loved being around people whose identity was not tied to their career nor their academics. I loved being around silly people who were not planning ahead, not calculating their next move, not always-optimizing, people unconcerned with productivity, or better yet, who knew the secret healing power of counter-productivity, the radical respite of rest. I felt like I was nearby community. I felt welcomed into their fold. I felt a deep desire to drop out of law school and move to RVA and join a band and get a job digging graves like M used to have there, or working at a coffee shop, or screen printing, or idk fucking trying to write my novel and abandoning the careerist goals I had recently accumulated. This is typical of my all-or-nothing mind, my tendency to want to not correct but to overcorrect, the fleeting-ness of balance inside my head. Today as I type I want to believe that I can maintain and cultivate the relationships I need and want with the people I love while also trying to do what I can to be financially stable and successful academically. I hope that’s true. But there’s something just so enchanting about the punk energy I felt whereby success is irrelevant, achievement unnecessary, and presence is primary. Who knows how accurate or realistic my interpretation of that brief blissful idyllic sliver of RVA punk life was. Whatever happens, I had this truly beautiful near-perfect moment. I was present in it, it affected me, I will take it seriously. I will also try to be realistic, not hold onto the past, not make rash decisions. I am grateful to be treated with such kindness and that is my main takeaway. Anyways, after the river we all bought bahn-mis and ate them and then I fell asleep on the couch watching Pawn Stars and then when I woke up I felt it was time to go back home.

It was hard to leave. I had a long conversation with M about him and his family and I did my very best to make him feel loved and supported. I told him you are not alone in this. I told him I love you. I told him I would loan him all the money I made this summer at my BigLaw job because I have more than I need and I want you not to worry. M is resistant to receiving that kind of help which makes sense I guess. I was able to loan him my car all summer and providing that kind of material support made me feel good. I want to be a person who remains connected to the people I care about and who can support them in a way that does not feel paternalistic or patronizing or condescending. It is not simple. I want to be doing mutual aid, redistribution of wealth, all power to the communes. It is tricky. I want to be of service. Who knows what will happen. Eventually M gets the rest of his stuff out of my car, we say our final goodbyes, hug, and I hit the road.

I listen to a podcast about the Unabomber on the 2.5 hour journey from RVA to Chapel Hill. I don’t like a lot of what Ted K did but I do feel a renewed affinity for nature and a bitter resentment toward technology. I get that song from O Brother Where Art Thou stuck in my head “I went down to the river to pray/studying about that good old way.” There’s an alternate reality or maybe a distant future wherein I go luddite and squirrel away in some cabin and forsake my law education and learn which fish swim in the stream and the names of the trees in my bioregion and how to identify chicken of the woods mushrooms and go camping all the time. It’s a pipe dream. It’s pleasant to dream. I am in a dreamy delirious state of transition.

I make it home. It is quiet, it is a tranquil thicket, a gentle grove, I am home. It feels like a prayer to say: I am home I am home I am home. I get inside my house and my couch is covered in cat piss and cat shit because I told a friend they could let their cat stay at my house if they took care of it until I got home to take care of it. Evidently they skipped a day or two. It doesn’t really matter. I am all jacked up on Bang energy drink so I spend an hours cleaning my house and getting the smell abated. I am sunburnt and my skin is dried out from the river and I have some cuts on the bottom of my feet from rough rocks and I inhale a big pizza for dinner and sleep on the couch because it is nearest to my AC unit and I can’t get to sleep because the cat keeps waking me up rubbing his head against me because he loves me and needs me. Eventually I do get to sleep and I start to re-enter the regular circadian diurnal world. I am back home. I wonder what the future will hold. I will do my best to stay connected to my friends, to have integrity, to stay true to my values, to not lose myself in the corporation. I am so grateful to be here.

I am grateful to have concluded this writing project. Thank you for reading and taking this journey with me. I’ll hopefully do another writing thing soon, but this is the end of this blog. Thank you.

THE END!

8/3/2023

Today was a mostly fine day with an unexpectedly lovely ending. Again I started my day with jogging, I think I had the hardest time jogging today so far. As alluded to in earlier posts, the way my psychic furniture are arranged, or the psychic upholstrey thereupon, the set dressing of my mind has a big impact on how my runs go, even though it seems like a strictly physical activity. When my mind is upholstered with the lush, thick, inviting, warm, smooth, kindly fabric of how it feels to be in a state of trust and fulfilment toward my relationships (especially if I am feeling good about a romantic partnership I am in), the run tends to take care of itself, I just sort of have to show up for it, stand up straight, put one foot in front of the other. However, when the unfinished basement of my mind is lined with the scratchy woolen but slightly damp and mold ridden upholstery of loneliness, which of course always is a problem of perception and rarely any sort of actual real isolation from my fellows friends and family, when that happens my runs seem to take twice as long, I’m endlessly checking how long is left in the run, trying to calculate fractions to convince myself that there’s not that much more left, I’m very sensitive to the discomfort produced by running, the sweat, the unreachable itchy spot between my shoulder blades, the chafing, the aching joints, the difficulty of posture, the general heft of my carriage, and it feels more like a lumbering or a slog or a trudge than a jog. This day was like that and it sucked. My one headphone keeps breaking so I only get half a stereophonic experience and it makes it much harder to lose myself in the narrative amniotic fluid of my podcast and much easier to be irritated by all the loud startling clangs honks clatterings smashes blasts screeches cryings klaxons crunches shatterings splashes hollerings and especially the ravings, there are so many people here who seem entranced in a spell of madness, transfixed by a reverie, lowing balefully in a hyperstatus both exasperated and exultant, but also neither. These are people I believe are likely suffering some kind of neurodivergence and/or addiction and my rational mind and my higher self instructs me dutifully: these folks are deserving of compassion and empathy. My lower nature—which when I’m running and grumpy I am basically a 6 and a half foot 215 pound raw nerve barreling down boardwalks sidewalks and giants’ causeways, all lower nature—says shut the hell up get the hell away from me please exit my sensory field please never exist nearby me again please do not perceive me because if you do you will use your madness as a gravitational force, pull me in with that tractor beam, and activate the chaotic madness in me. This was more or less how I felt any time I was in a common space of the sober living and the halfway house where I spent the first 12 months of my sobriety. It’s a tough and it’s a tricky place to be, knowing that people deserve empathy and then literally darting away from them so as to not have to interact with them, to not have to participate in humanity around them. This is just part of city life I guess.

Somehow I concluded my run and, using the kinetic energy from that effort I took myself all the way up town to the Cloisters. What can I say about the Cloisters. It’s up on a hill, you can get there by climbing several dozen stone stairs that are kind of woven into a sylvan grove, it’s a beautiful natural spot that bears little resemblance to the city blocks just feet away. Climbing the stone stairs I encountered many empty bottles of beer, blunt wraps and guts, syringe caps; clearly that space inspires recreants of all sorts and it’s not hard to see why; I can imagine feeling safe and calm in that thicket. It’s a part of the Met, it’s a medieval museum, it’s a castle, it has chambers inside, it has courtyards in which beautiful lush fragrant verdant fruitful gardens grow, it is about God, specifically it is about Christianity, though there are some incidental mentions of Judaism and Islam as well. It is exquisite and breathtaking, it is unlike any other museum I have ever been to. Though all the contents of the museum were godly I did not feel particularly spiritual in that place. I felt more theological, curious and interested in the history and iconography and painstakingly intricate art produced in the name of the Lord. I liked being there alone, I didn’t feel as lonely as I did going to the beach alone. I got to move at my own pace, listen to the audio tour, and take it all in slowly. I saw the very famous unicorn tapestries which were quite special. I’m glad I went, it was enriching; I’d like to visit again with a friend and have discussions about what we see, and then after sit on the lawn out front and have a little picnic, it’s perfect for that. After a few hours my legs and back were tired and so I sauntered away from the tranquil forest fortress at the top of the city and back to the dingy bright blocks of asphalt and metal and traffic and Snapple and dogshit. I got coffee at a cafe and recharged my batteries and read a bit of the novel and didn’t quite like it but liked that I was reading and resting and in the A/C.

Eventually I headed back downtown and by the time I was near the restaurant where I was to meet L and M I had about an hour to kill. I parked myself at Tompkins Square Park and just watched the skateboarders for about an hour. I stepped in a big goopy puddle of paint and tracked that around. My water bottle came open and soaked my pants, it didn’t matter. I watched as a softball game slowly took over the skate spot, I watched two people almost get into a fight, they didn’t it was fine. It was cool and breezy, I caught snippets of conversation of other skate spectators, I was present, it was simple. Then it was time for dinner and I met L and M at Superiority Burger, and the meal was excellent, and the company was excellent, and this was the unexpectedly lovely ending to my day: spending time with two loved ones who clearly were happy to see me, who wanted to talk and talk and talk about just anything, who were stoked about the food, who were curious and engaged and present and kind. (It’s hard to not think about how my last interaction with G was precisely none of these things.) There’s this deep well of regard I have access to all the time among my friends and family. My big overactive sick sloppy joe of a brain just tricks me out of seeking that access sometimes. And that’s just who I am and what I’m like and I’m human and I hurt and I heal and that’s fine. I get multiple big goodbye hugs from my dear friends and it’s such a solid send-off and suddenly, without realizing it, without planning for it, without earning it, and without deserving it, I have unhitched the big wobbly trailer filled with baggage about relationships. Will I go searching for that stupid trailer and hook it into my beltloop and sprint with it dragging behind me and pretend like it’s not there well almost certainly yes. But I unhitched it and ditched it last night and I was free and my mind felt clear and it felt safe and easy to be in my head and I felt excited about the future and happy about the present and hungry and sleepy and well. On the walk home I saw a sick graffiti piece with Ritchie Rich throwing ceelo dice and texted a pic of it to my friend J and he said sick and it was sick and it was simple and cool. I’m so grateful to be in community. Thanks for reading.

8/2/2023

Today was a lonely day. It began dyspeptically: I woke up around 5 am with a terrible stomach ache that evolved into my body forcefully rejecting the last meal I ate, which was country sausage I cooked at home, which maybe I did not cook all the way through. It was very unpleasant, took hours, but finally subsided, and a heavy full body exhaustion came over me. I slept until 10 or so and woke up feeing shakey but restored and with a resolve to go to the beach. I asked R if he wanted to go together but he’s getting a root canal and is out of commission. So in an effort to like prove to myself that I can have fun by myself and not be lonely I made the lonely decision to bike to Riis beach by myself.

I have made a similar solitudinal mistake in the past, probably many times, but the one that comes to mind is when I ran 33 miles (50K, generally considered the shortest ultramarathon distance) to Durham and back from Chapel Hill. I had just woken up from a nap and it was about 4pm on a warm december day in 2021. Which I guess makes it only a month or so after L’s first suicide attempt. I looked up a Sheetz in Durham, printed out turn by turn directions, put on my running gear and headed out. It was a terrible route, much of it was along roads that had not only no sidewalks but no shoulder whatsoever, so I found myself running in literal ditches for miles at a time. Also, it was winter, which means dusk fell almost immediately after I left and most of my run was in the dark. I was wearing a hi-vis reflective vest and a headlamp. I was technically fit enough to run the distance, I suppose, since I completed the run, but I hadn’t trained properly the way an actual ultra runner would. To make matters worse my headphones died a couple hours in, which meant that the remaining four hours pf running was just me alone in my head (which is a bad neighborhood!) with my thoughts (the degenerate reprobates who populate that neighborhood). And this was in the pre-no-headphones era; psychically I was not ready for that kind of unmitigated unmediated suffering. And I suffered. While there were stretches of exhilaration at the thrill of my improvised ultra, the majority of the time I felt sad, stupid, tired, and alone. I made it to Sheetz at mile 17 as planned, gorged on stroop waffles and drank pedialyte and lumbered back into the country night, sidling up to the highway and trying not to let the fear of being mauled by a night-beast or hit by a car derail me. And I suffered. I wanted a hard reset on my brain and I thought an extreme physical feat would accomplish that. It didn’t. I had measured my route back such that I would arrive in Chapel Hill with a few extra miles and could uber the last bit home. First my phone ran out of data, and then of course my phone died, I had no charger, and didn’t want to go to the bars, the only thing open at 10pm, to ask to use theirs. So after the 33-mile run was completed I still had about two more miles to wall home, which was an absolutely miserable prospect. I held back tears, I was in pain, I trudged on. About one mile from my house around 10:30pm I espied an 8-pack of juiceboxes just sitting on a retaining wall near a bus stop. I felt as though God himself had express mailed me mana. I took four, downed two immediately, shoved the other two in my pocket, and made it the rest of the way home on that juice boost. I collapsed inside, somewhat shattered, bitterly angry with exhaustion, as alone as ever, and kind of satisfied that I had done it.

There’s this undeniable streak of selfishness in me. I fear I prefer my own company to an excessive degree, and it makes for a considerable obstacle to partnership and keeping company. Parcel of that selfishness is an old false narrative that does not serve me, does not serve anybody really, but that manages to persist nonetheless. The narrative goes like “i am not in a relationship and have been unable to sustain a relationship because there is something fundamentally defective about me, an unattractive defectiveness, a flaw in my soul that can’t be secreted and which invites only repulsion.” I hate this narrative and like I said I do not believe in it. I would categorize this as an unwanted thought, an invasive psychic weed resistant to Roundup, a species of self-doubt whose genesis is plain depression, a species that tends to evaporate and vanish when I am in a relationship. I don’t like it, I wish to resist it, I have faith it will pass, and I am in it right now.

That’s the state I am in. So I bundled that state up on my back and ferried it to Riis beach with me. I carried it on the 30 or so mile roundtrip bike ride there and back. It bounced and buoyed with me silently as I bobbed in the waves, trying hard to smile and feel happy for the gleeful couples littering the sea. I got a text while at the beach from G saying she didn’t want to spend the night, is it ok if we just get ice cream instead. I wish this didn’t bother me but there’s something about it that darkens my day. Why can’t we have some blowout passionate Last Night together, or else a tender and gentle evening of quiet cuddling? Neither is appealing to G for reasons known only to her and it is my job to respect her stated wishes and not react or act out or make this into a problem. She did have to work 10 hours that day, after all, surey I can relate to the way work exhaustion can make even the most pleasurable activities seem less appealing than rest.

When I’m back from the beach I go to an NLG meeting which goes good, I’m glad I’m a part of it, glad I’m making some effort, however diluted or contaminated by academia it may be, at resisting the forces of oppression in the world. Sometimes it feels horribly presumptuous and condescending to consider myself as a person who says he fights oppression. Like what a privileged and unrealistic social justice warrior snowflake positionality, what an unearned mantle of righteous indignation. Then other times I think of like bell hooks and Angela Davis and John Brown and Gene Nichol and Anita Earls and like just all the many cool kind compassionate empathetic concerned analytical fierce present non-jaded friends of all stripes I have who fight for what they believe in. I would never use any of the negativity I subject myself to on them. I respect their willingness to struggle. So I want to show up and support struggle, an act of faith in a world of self-doubt and suspended animation and analysis paralysis and passivity and enforced docility and amnesia and compliance and anomie. At least that’s where I’m at today.

Whatever the truth may be, G’s stated reason for being uninterested in spending much time together tonight is: work exhaustion. I show up to the gelato place and she has already bought herself a gelato. This is not an occasion for sharing, there is no partnership, I am no partner in this ice cream parlor. We parlay, it is brief and cursory. After 15 minutes she says sorry I’m just so tired from work. Do you want to walk me to the train station. So I do. The last thing we talk about is she needs to go to REI to buy socks. This time I wisely do not attempt to kiss her goodbye, instead I bend way down to hug her, gently and attentively, and I let go right when she lets go. This hug is the relationship: I pay attention to when she wants to let go and I let go just after that so as to avoid any static friction or conflict. This was exactly what it was, it has concluded. She says hit me up next time you are in New York and I for sure and I expect that will never happen. I’m on the other side of this, I have closure, we owe each other nothing, I pray to God to say thank you for making me a person capable of feeling affection, for seeking connection, and for being saddened when it ceases. I ask to remain receptive to love and to not let myself be clouded by the haze of despair, the joylessness of comparison. I ask to be put in a situation where both parties are enriched by the partnership, and to keep away fr action motivated by mere loneliness and base fear. I am hurting because I need people and that is a good thing. I have people and it’s my job to avail myself of their abundant love and to use my words to communicate the love I have for them too. I’m safe, I am not causing harm or at risk, I’m just in a moment of transition and it feels rocky and crummy. And it will pass. I’m happy I have the page to commit these thoughts to. I’m happy I’ll be home in just three days. I’m happy I’ll be in the car with M for hours. He is about as old and dependable of a friend as they come. He’s also recently bereft of his gf, they were together three years not just two months, I have a chance to support and be supported together with him, it will be good. I’ll hold on until then. Thanks for reading.

8/1/2023

Today was a fine day. I socialized, which was smart and beneficial. I started my day off with a run. The weather here is still fairly cool in the mornings. During my run I listened to a podcast in my earpods. One barometer of serenity I use is: do I feel I need to be consuming some sort of content most of the time, or am I up for experiencing life unmediated. It was only last year that I started jogging with no headphones; prior to that I felt like the thoughts in my head were unendurable. For whatever reason, doubt, discomfort, painful memories and fear seem to become more acute during jogging. I think when I’m in a place of high acceptance of all my circumstances, I do better alone in my head. In AA sometimes people say “I try to avoid spending time alone in my head, it’s a bad neighborhood” or something to that effect. I relate to that. I remember I ran my fastest ever 10K while I was in a relationship in 2020 that felt really good. I know that I feel lighter, less yoked, unburdened, when I believe I am well-regarded by a significant other. Without making a judgment call about whether it’s healthy or not, I have the physical experience of lightness and joy that comes with that regard. This is probably common; people like to be in love, to feel in love, to suspect that they are loved. Anyways this is not a season of my life in which I am enjoying that lightness (though I was about a month ago). There’s a weight. Still, I finish my run, enjoy the exhaustion and sense of accomplishment and the sun I’ve absorbed.

I show up on Zoom for Print Day, which is a thing for Law Review where we go page by page through a piece we are editing to put any final finishing touches on the piece before it goes to print. We’ve been working on this piece for months and it is important and well-written and insightful. It’s about trans people and prisons, and it surveys how disability law has been used as a source of trans health care, and the problems that raises. I feel proud to have helped see this through to completion. I also feel doubt about the rarified air of the law review, about the ivory tower, about academia. I try to convince myself that true change, real material benefit for the dispossessed and subordinated, comes from many directions. It can come from above and below, from street level action and from the communities affected, and from smart empathetic compassionate thinkers, writers, and editors who may be somewhat distant from those lived experiences by comparison but who have a better chance at catching the eye and/or ear of policymakers and judges and bringing about legal change. One of the biggest changes I have made in getting and staying sober is a commitment to resist cynicism. Having humility, being right-sized, accepting the world as it is doesn’t mean full compliance and docility, but it also doesn’t mean imperfect struggle is useless. I try to put faith in the work despite the feelings of doubt that inevitably crop up for me.

Print Day ends and then I hang with P and E for the next 6 hours or so. They’re my friends from recovery communities back home and are just up visiting for a few days. We meet in Chinatown and go to the oldest Dim Sum place in town, it’s 100 years old. We talk about psychiatric medication, whether or not it is “sober,” our experience as people in recovery who all have diagnoses, who all have clinically disordered thoughts, and how we navigate that space. These guys are able to speak with clarity and conviction and honesty and vulnerability about who they are and what they’ve gone through. This is why I love AA. We haven’t seen each other or talked in months but because of the foundation of rapport and support we’ve built in the rooms together, our friendship feels safe, close, easy, and automatic. In my head I thought that I would just say hi to these guys, hang out for lunch, and head home, to do what I don’t know exactly, but assuming that my time alone would be more enjoyable than hanging with them. Happily, my plans do not work out, and I end up spending the day with them at the Met. (An old prayer that comes back into my head all the time: God protect me from what I want. An essential prayer for addicts, I think.) We meet up with a couple other of their friends, and so it is a gaggle of six guys at the Met. It seems at first like these guys are kinda dumb jocks and bro-y, but quickly I realize that they are thoughtful and sensitive and knowledgable about a lot of the exhibits, and I learn more from talking to them than I do reading the little placards. The boys show a lot of interest in history, reverence for religious art, reflect on their own cultural and familial ties to the histories of faith and iconography presented. The boys do not care for the modern art, the abstract shit. E wants to know if this is supposed to be a highway or not, he doesn’t want to be fucked with, doesn’t appreciate the obtuseness and indeterminacy of the abstract stuff. P says one piece looks like scribbles, which it absolutely does; they prefer the colossal 20 foot granite horse sculpture to the Rothko. They are, however, impressed and interested in a Picasso I point out; they fuck with cubism. We go up to the rooftop where there’s an incredible view, the day is gorgeous, it’s warm but not sweltering, the breeze is cool, the air is clear, there’s chicanx pillars and sphinxes and graffiti hieroglyphs. We snap a photo together; I have friends. We head downstairs and visit the Van Gogh, I haven’t seen it before but they saw it yesterday, so I get a guided tour with helpful annotations about the various phases of his life and art. “He was definitely one of us,” concludes P, who means he was an alcoholic, after discussing his time in an asylum and death by suicide. All of us have lost dear friends to overdose and/or suicide. I prefer the company of the bereaved. They are sensitive to something I need to keep in the light, some sorrow that feels like it’s too heavy to carry alone but that also feels precious and like it needs to be protected, like an robin’s eggshell. Something broken and beautiful. This probably reads as emo or maudlin and be that as it may it feels true. I am in a bit of a blue mood lately and this typing feels restorative.

Anyways the Met closes at 5 so we make our way out, we get spicy lamb burgers and hand-ripped noodles at Xi-an Famous Foods which is excellent, we then go get gelatos and affogatos at a place nearby. Everyone is kind and excited and satisfied and easy to get along with. I think I probably often deprive myself of this sort of effortless fellowship when I make decisions to do things alone. But despite myself I got swooped up or scooped up into this day of collectivity with friends I didn’t know how much I needed, got to see the damn Starry Night painting and feel together in a way that was decoupled from romance and not contingent on any sort of physical attraction but instead borne of a shared spirituality that developed in the cavity of sobriety, of shared struggle, of mutual aid and service. I’m grateful I get to be a part of this community. Thank you for reading.

7/31/2023

Today was a hodgepodge of calm and crying and crazy and connection, culminating in a kind of comatose capitulation to the day. One time when me and M and J were trying to think of names for our punk house about 12 years ago one name M came up with was Hodgepodge Lodge which I still think is funny. As for today, I managed to find motivation to go on a morning run, mostly because it was in the 60s and the respite from the heat was too tempting to pass up. I like that running attunes me to the temperatures and the weather outside. I feel like it acquaints me with the environment the way the smoking cigarettes used to, a little window into nature in an otherwise highly domesticated and indoors-style life. One of the collective houses I lived at in Philly used to be called The Great Indoors. After my run I had a semi-family Zoom in that it was just me and my parents and not my sibling since they were out of town. It was a very heartening meeting; I love my parents and want to come back to Greensboro to visit them and have an uncomplicated and tranquil time with them out in the country beside the highway underneath the powerlines on the couch in front of the TV stuffed with takeout and seltzer. I worry about their health but trust them to care for themselves; I wonder if and when a time will come when it’s my job not theirs to keep them well. I wrote that last clause in Iambic Pentameter. I sometimes wish I would have spent my childhood memorizing poems and learning to play piano instead of running around in the woods and hitting shit with a stick and playing SNES. I guess it worked out fine anyways. I just don’t have the capacity or any call to gather the family around the old video game console at Christmas to play them my favorite level of Mario, the way you could gather the family around the old piano at Chirstmas to play them your favorite hymn or pop song or old standard or whatever. Reading novels I get this dreamy feeling of wishing I was more artistic, expressive, connective, social, sociable, convivial. I learned the word convivial because my Grandpa used it to describe himself, I think as a joke. In any event the family zoom was needed and welcomed and set my day on a good path.

Next I took the subway up to Central Park and walked to the Lincoln Square AMC Theater and watched Oppenheimer on 70mm iMax which was a pretty totalizing visual experience; there was almost no part of my field of vision not occupied by the colossal screen. The theater had hundreds of people in it. I ate a whole jumbo bucket of popcorn and drank a cherry Coke Zero that was half caffiene free. I didn’t really like the movie and also nearly fell asleep during part of it. I guess it was a cool experience to see the iMax. Afterward I walked to Central Park and got an iced latte and sat under a tree in the shade and finished my novel. The novel was much better than the movie, much more relatable and emotionally engaging and small and precious and important. I cried some. I also got distracted watching all the parkgoers, the boys playing catch and the sunbathers and yoga doers and the babies squalling like banshees and the huge group of uniformed teenagers sprinting across the open green Sheep Meadow with their healthy thick hair bouncing wildly in the unseasonable coolness of the day. I liked my book so much I went to Strand to buy another book by the same author; it felt like picking up a prescription that would keep me safe, offer me portable sanctuary for these last few days in NYC, which, try as I might to look on the bright side, just sort of feel somewhere between unwelcome and undesirable and intolerable right now. I just want to go home and I am sorta bummed to be around. But I am gonna make the most of it. And to that end I have the good fortune of having several friends and loved ones up here who wanna hang, so I’m trying to do that.

I get to see C at 5:30, we go to this amazing place called Veselka and eat pierogies and potato pancakes and catch up. I don’t think we’ve seen each other in person for a very long time, definitely more than five years, longer than since I’ve been sober. C and I dated briefly in like 2013 or something, I remember breaking up with them for no good reason. I have, unfortunately, a parade of bad memories, a series of loves I abandoned or ran away from because…why? No good reason that I can think of now. Though of course at the time I’m sure my reasons seemed sound. A friend’s friend who I never met but whose IG I follow said “I am a poet because I suffer like one.” I wonder if she was quoting something else or just herself. I don’t quite want to commit to the position that only the suffering can produce poetry, but there’s something soothing about the idea that my suffering might be redeemable for some poems, like how 100 tickets from the arcade are redeemable for giant plastic novelty eyeglasses. It occurred to me today that now would be a good time to try to start writing a novel since I have a daily writing practice and because I am slightly heartbroken. To me this seems like a winning combination as far as novel production is concerned. For better or for worse new aspirations are always popping up in my head.

I feel jealous when I see a picture of my dead friend, Fyrah, later known as Feral, pop up on the IG of a popular NYC punk. I should be mourning Fyrah, her untimely death in the Ghost Ship rave fire, her extremely oddball and unacceptable views on many things, her encyclopedic knowledge of cryptids and her extensive collection of punk ephemera and her hardcore dedication to music facts and her gender rebellion and the way I felt invited into transness by being around her. So then I am mourning those things, in this moment, now; I choose to focus on and memorialize those things in my blog at a priority higher than the feelings of jealously, left-out-ness, and uncoolness initially caused by seeing that the IG RIP post got 600 likes and that its cool gay punk follower has 10K+ followers. I ask you God to decapitalize my brain, decolonize it and decouple it from the desire to accumulate for accumulation’s sake. I entreat you to make me appreciate exactly the relationships in my life, take them seriously, participate in them genuinely with my whole heart, and never to compare myself in the petty and craven way that sometimes occurs in my grey brain’s warped folds.

It was great to see C. She and I seem to be in the odd position of being affiliated with high-dollar earning jobs while wishing to live by our values and maintain our integrity as punks, politically antiauthoritarian, and her as aesthetically goths/metal, and as a queer, etc. It’s possible, I want to believe it’s possible. We will get by the best we can and take care of our own and reject the golden handcuffs and redistribute wealth and not lose touch with our neighbors and recognize that we ourselves are society, we are not outsiders invading it, we are culture and mean no more and no less than each other soul waywardly wearily toiling under the horrible candy-colored Big Top of capitalism, and we will not become fused to our jobs nor will our hearts be monetizable. We can hold out, you can hold out, and we can create a community despite the forces of alienation and despair and doubt. The rest of my night was kind of fine, I walked around and bought some souvenirs to distribute to my loved ones back in NC, then got home and did some work for the Law Review. I ordered a burger that was tremendously greasy and not all that good, ate it, ate a big bowls of Frosted Mini Wheats, and went to bed at 9pm. I had given up on my day. I do not want to be here anymore. I will try to remember that how I feel and what I want are not the most important things in life, and to access the feelings wants and needs of others, and support and serve them where I can. That’s all for today. Thanks for reading.

7/30/2023

Today was a day of wholesome and enriching activities and also a nice long nap. I woke up early and spent about an hour on the phone with my sponsee, half catching each other up about our lives and half reading The Big Book aloud to each other over the phone, alternating each paragraph, as is our tradition. This week we read “A Vision for You,” one of my favorites, and one I have read comparatively less because I have had less occasions to get this far in the book. In fact this is the first sponsee I’ve had to’ve made it this far. I’m sure its as helpful and healing for me as it is for him. I feel still a bit heartsore and adrift today, but I dam it well with brick after muddy brick of recovery.

The next brick is that I get to the Perry Street clubhouse early to unlock it since I’m the chairperson today. Old ladies who I have known for less than two months smile and greet me and hug me and shower me with conversation and affection like I’m a grandson. I get handshakes from the gruff old men, equivalent in affection after correcting for the gendered exchange rate. And then a couple of early 20s young men friends from my Tri-city area walk in and we hug and chat gregariously for a few minutes before the meeting starts; they’re visiting for a few days and took time to come see me and our other friend, C, recent NYC transplant, speak. C delivers his usual candid, moving, highly relatable story. He has a knack for recounting moments in time with a vividness that really affects my heart every time, even though I’ve heard his story probably 10 times by now. The meeting goes smoothly, the most beautiful woman in the world is there and she comments briefly that she thought I would be gone already because last week was my last week but I tell her no this week is my last week, and that’s that. After the meeting I walk and chat with the NC contingent and feel a simple but powerful gravity and warmth toward them and from them; we are a little solar system, in the grand total of two dozen minutes we spend together I am galactically grateful for them, they are proof of home. The old Mountain Goats refrain will not leave my head: I want to go home, but I am home.

I head back to my apartment to Zoom with my sponsor. We read a chapter out of Experience Strength and Hope, a collection of old narratives once included in the Personal Stories section of the Big Book but since phased out to make space for newer and more diverse ones. We go back and forth, paragraph by paragraph, too. Afterward there is some brief good natured chatting and I feel like everything is ok and like I’m supported and like I’m right where I’m supposed to be. Riding this wave of emotional safety I call M immediately afterward. We talk for 70 minutes about our breakups, our worries, our doubts and fears. We also talk logistics: M will extract me from NYC this coming Friday. M about a decade ago taugbt me the verb ‘disinter’ which means remove from a grave. He was in a shortlived nonband called Disinterment Hook that doesn’t risk disclosing his identity because no one has heard of it. Later he was a gravedigger. NYC is not a grave, not my grave anyways, but i appreciate having a man with a strong hook on my side just the same. M is mercurial and hard to pin down sometimes but I decide to fully entrust my exit to him. I know that it is in relying on others that we develop deeper bonds; I seek interdependence.

After our good long conversation I eat a tremendous volume of ramen noodles and sesame oil, then sit down to reed my book, All My Puny Sorrows, and am so suffuse with calories and the calmness that comes over me from closeness that I allow myself to drift off to sleep for a few hours. I wake up and read some more, the book is a refuge. I play a bit of Stardew Valley but get bored with it and just watch videos of people playing on youtube and make it to sleep eventually. Things are imperfect and acceptable. That’s all for today, thanks for reading.

7/29/2023

Today was a mixed but positive day. I feel emotionally empty at the beginning of the day, waking up without G feels very specifically lonely. Thankfully I have free time and have developed good habits (they say “smart feet” up here; they also say “move a muscle change a thought”). So I start my day with a 6-mile run, which is a mood boost even though the sun is a horrible hot tarp and the air is a wet hot spider web of humidity. Then I go to sit down and read All My Puny Sorrows, the suicide novel, but after a few pages I make the smart decision to call a friend rather than be alone in my head.

My phone call with W ends up being exactly what I needed. It just so happens that each of us is moving (them last week, me next week) and that each of us has recently broken up with a significant other. The conversation with W is warm, sweet, very present. We are both sober people, both people who have therapy argot in our vocab from years of, well, therapy, both of us have faults and troubled pasts and both of us love the criminally accused and/or justice-involved people in pur lives and both of us have some neurodivergence. Talking to them I feel more like…seen, known, fully myself. As the conversation progresses W mentions they still have feelings for me, I say I feel the same way. Classic God opening a window after closing a door type shit. In the back of my head/heart I wonder if thr feelings I have for them are merely the concoction of loneliness nearby another lonely person. If that’s so I think it’s ok; maybe we are just what each other needs in this moment. I have memories of things not going great between us in the past but for now I want just to feel the warmth of the validation in mutual attraction. I’m practicing acceptance, not being willfully ignorant, right?

After about two hours on the phone with W I make my way to a 4pm meeting at Perry Street. I hear exactly what I need to hear. It’s hard to overstate just how restorative it can be to hear an alcoholic carry the message. Sometimes, often, when I just let my feelings take a backseat and permit myself to become emotionally involved and concerned with another person, my own problems diminish. They even cease to be problems; they are revealed as good fortune that I have a hard time accepting, that I’m thinking about all wrong. Someone shares their experience strength and hope and it unlocks the empathy in me, that essential relational core that defines me as a human, the font of all that’s good and meaningful in my life. That uncanny nepenthe flows freely in narrow little clubhoises and church basements and other unassuking dingy structures filled with some hulking figures and some rail thin wraiths, some polished and posh, some rough around the edges, all folls who wouldn’t otherwise mix, and I get the benefit, which is unearned favor, which is Grace. I am so grateful for AA.

The last event of the day is that after the meeting I go see the horror movie Talk to Me and surprise surprise just like many other A24 horror movies it has some serious suicide and self harm plot themes and I get wrapped in goosebumps and cry in short bursts in the safe darkness of the theater. I walk home, 30 minutes down 2nd ave, lovely sunset, feeing unsettled and strange. The day lacks a coherent theme; I am nevertheless grateful to have been present for it.

7/28/2023

Today was my last day of work as a summer associate at the big law firm. Undoubtedly, undoubtably, indubitably, this is a significant accomplishment for me. I proved to myself and to my employer that I can handle this work. And at our final summer event, a snack in the 45th-floor board room with the colossal marble table, the recruiting director intimated that we would all get return offers. Between that and my very positive final evaluation, I feel confident that I will be offered a job here. But as I type this my heart feels heavy. Today’s other big news is that I mustered the courage to talk to G about our future. (Although it had been on my mind for a long time, I didn’t want to bring it up until now, partly out of fear, partly out of a desire to be present and take it one date at a time.) The conversation went something like this: I say Hey, do you mind if I ask you something? G looks up from her big bowl of noodles, her big eyes even bigger with surprise and dash of something that might be annoyance, or maybe fear. She says I hate that question. Acknowledging how I also hate that question and wishing to rip the band-aid off, I quickly rephrase: I am going to ask you a question: how do you want to relate to each other when I leave town? She seems undisturbed by this question and responds immediately but not hastily. I can’t remember exactly how she worded it but she communicates that she does not want to be dating long distance, that she’s open to seeing whee each of us is at in one year when and if I return to NYC, and that in the meantime she’s happy to exchange some friendly texts now and then. A clear, perfectly rational and reasonable articulation of expectations and boundaries, one that matches my intuition about where her heart was at. I say ok cool that’s what I was thinking too, and I say something about remembering that she had gotten out of a long-term somewhat codependent relationship fairly recently. She mentions too that that relationship was long-distance for some part of its lifespan, as a data point that seems to further justify her articulation of not wanting to continue to date after I leave. She takes time to mention that she didn’t feel like what we had this summer was just a “fling,” she said she really likes me. I believe her, I say I feel the same way. This to me, from an intellectual/detached perspective, feels like the healthiest, most mature, least harmful breakup conversation in history. Certainly in my history. Still, there’s something that makes me sad about it. We finish dinner, we watch the first half of Donnie Brasco on my laptop in my bed, I barely pay attention to the movie and try to be as appreciative of the nearness of our bodies as possible, anticipating the absence of it. Although G often spends the night, this night she had already said before she got here that she would be wanting to go home. So there’s this kind of ticking clock vibe in my head. I ask her if this will be the last time we see each other, she says no, let’s hang out one more time, next Wednesday after work. I can’t tell if that makes me feel better or worse. G is very tired from work. She’s a bit hard to read, sort of impassive; she is nearby me physicall but her heart feels distant. I have gotten that exact feedback from women in the past; here is the universe in all its symmetry and equilibrium and poetic justice giving me a taste of my own medicine. Although we are usually both interested in sex and have had really good chemistry in that department, tonight G says let’s just kiss, so we do, and then we do that for comparatively only a short time, and for the next chunk of time—was it five minutes? thirty?—we just cuddle. To me it feels tender and sweet, and although it wasn’t what I thought I wanted at first, after a few minutes I am convinced that this is superior. I rub her back, she says it feels nice, her head is buried in my chest, I’m laying on my back and I feel big beside her but not powerful, I feel gentle and on the verge of loneliness, I do my best to stay present and not dissociate, I squeeze G’s small shoulder with my big hand’s firm grip, and that reminds me of Lydia, how she had small powerful hands and was very hands-on with her friends and often offered impromptu massages that were comforting and grounding. Eventually G determines that it is time to go home, I offer to walk her to the train, she says I don’t have to but she’d like the company, I say I don’t feel obligated to and we dress and hurry out the door. It’s a warm but not sweltering night. We walk fast because the train is leaving soon and there’s not another for 20-some minutes. We don’t talk much. When we get to Broadway-Lafayette I lean in for a kiss and she seems like she was gonna go for a hug but my face is there so we do a quick kiss then I say take care get home safe and she says see you wednesday. G has flaked before, for good reason; I feel about 65% confident that we will have this one final hang; if we do it will be detailed here on my third-to-last ever blog post, and if not I can say that this evening we spent together, while perhaps a bit distant and underwhelming in comparison to the sort of cataclysmically intense, romances of my past, it has been quite nice, always feeling safe, reciprocal, gentle, and uncomplicated. I am not devastated. There’s a heaviness in my heart; singleness is on the horizon, which means dating is too, which is a nightmarish thing to think about now; I should just be still for a bit and not get ahead of myself. The old lump is back in the throat.

There’s a whole host of little interpersonal dynamics from my last day at work that I could detail here but which feel eclipsed by the big romantic tide change. The long and short of the work stuff is that I felt some unexpected closeness with a couple people which was lovely, I felt some static and distance (can’t tell whether real or a product of my own insecurity) from others, and my date with G tonight took priority over the sort of informal final post-work social event where people went out for drinks. I shared my IG handle in the work group chat and felt a flush of fear that I would somehow be exposed, though I don’t even know why since my IG is just anodyne pics of me smiling and holding cats and shit. This is one of the toxic externalities of having a “professional identity,” maybe. I feel in this moment like I wish I was living in Stardew Valley, the 16-bit calmcore farming simulator computer game. I look up when its sequel, the Haunted Chocolatier is coming out; not until 2025. Alas. K used to always say alas, she was the only person I dated in law school who also went to my law school. She was significantly younger than me and there was a gulf in culture between us. We lacked compatibility fundamentally and only dated for a few months. One time she made me an elaborate picnic and sat with me on her favorite dock beside a lake in Raleigh and explained to me that she was a demisexual. We had a mostly texting-based relationship and a lot of it was small talk. I am at my core a common human man who desires partnership, companionship, a dependable buddy to trudge this frightening path with. I am eligible for love. My past mistakes don’t define me and I can and have learned from them, learned how to be gentler, more attentive, less harmful. I will work to remain receptive while avoiding desperation. I will do my best to remember that every single good relationship I have gotten into has been a product of kismet, not a marker of some virtue or a replicable result of a method of effort. Love comes and goes, I’m grateful to be able to participate in it, however broken, ugly, quirky, idiosyncratic, diaphonous, fickle, capricious, hiccupy, strange and fleeting it may be. Thank you for reading. Until next time.

7/27/2023

There’s a doctrine in the Federal Rules of Evidence that allows for hearsay to be admitted if it is a “present sense impression,” that is, that it was recorded or uttered immediately in response to some stimulus, because these sorts of impressions are thought to be reliable, like factually reliable, in a way supersedes the need to cross-examine the speaker to confirm veracity. To that end, here I present a few paragraphs I typed in a Lyft ride on the way home last night, which I feel are a bit maudlin and melodramatic but which I do believe qualify as present sense impressions. They are followed by annotations I made now, which is the next morning:

“Felt like a middle school loser at Governor’s Island. The weird comments from J made me feel like I was being bullied but they were so small and insignificant that I feel like it’s more likely that I am just irritable, reactive.”

I’m 35 and 6’5” and 215 pounds and have physically attacked transphobes and have smoked crack and survived suicide attempts and been to jail and the psych ward and ridden freight trains and have successfully run and hid from the police and showed up for a year straight as a dogged intrepid supporter of a friend with very serious suicidal ideations and attempts and squatted abandoned houses in the dead of winter and accomplished daring high-risk graffiti missions bombing billboards and bridge overpasses and have stood feet away from pure anarchic lawlessness and faced my fears and made amends to the people I love the most and taken the Shahada in front of a Masjid full of believers and spoken extemporaneously and candidly for an hour straight about my sobriety story in a room full of 50 strangers and have uncannily survived a variety of unspeakable situations and have sat for six hours with another man fully disclosing my innermost self and darkest secrets during a Fifth Step. I’ve done all these brave things and yet some 5’10” 150 lb rising 3L at a corporate law job with a reasonable haircut and a shiteating grin can cause me to fall to pieces internally by making a couple jokey comments about my outfit to me and doing that thing where a person talks to you but it feels like they’re doing it not to communicate with you but instead to amuse themselves. Like literally the slightest slights imaginable. Some shit that in all likelihood is the product not of meanness but of a mismatch between humor styles. Or even if it is due to meanness like who the fuck cares about some stupid boy at a summer internship at a biglaw firm, literally his opinion of me means nothing. And yet due to the fragility that I felt in that moment, it nearly ruined my night. Here is some evidence that not everybody is a kind benevolent force in the world, and that they don’t need to be (also I don’t need to conceive of him as a spiritually sick person lashing out either, I don’t need to pray for him to heal, I just need to ignore him, let it roll off me like “water off a duck’s back” as we used to say in rehab), and that I am only vulnerable to this sort of negative attention when I am reactive and in fear, which likely is an externality of me neglecting my spiritual wellbeing, which I know I can maintain through service and fellowship in the recovery community, and which I need to remember is not necessarily accessible to me through the saccharine false community available at a damn corporate social event. I hate hate hate that this truly miniscule indignity had such a huge impact on me but it happened and this screed is me processing it and I’m stoked to be away from J and the endless slalom of corporate wine and dine culture and back home soon.

“I feel like an alien or like a dummy or just like a blank, an absence, an abcess? No, it’s not that deep. I just fet like i couldnt vibe with hardly anybody and it got in my head. i sat next to this partner who was funny and nice and cool. And i listened to the other people have conversations around me, they seemed at ease, witty, clever, well-born, well-adjusted.

How is it that just two days ago i was raving about how nice two people were to me and how I felt at ease and known, and now i feel just exactly the opposite? I think i am in a place of disturbability because transitions are coming and i seem always to go through it during transitions. Even though objectively things are great I just have this internal rockiness, prickliness, and this distance. this feels like an emo high school diary entry. i need to take aa more seriously, i need to be around that as my primary commitment and community, i need to know if me and G are done for good, I think I need to put too fine a point on all things, I need to feel in control which I know is wrong. I want to feel desired and important and safe and well, and these things are just out of my control.”

These are my present sense impressions. I don’t like posting content that feels so negative and upset, but that’s how I was feeling in the Lyft ride home from Governor’s island. Part of what had me upset was that I have actually had two relatively stressful matters that I am still working on and which I have felt will be completed but not up to the level of quality that I would like to deliver. Which like should not matter to me since I already had my final evaluation, which was GLOWING, and there can not be any real reasonable reliance on the work of temporary summer interns, and I have also been told by the assigning attorneys I am working for not to stress about this stuff. So somehow I am internalizing all this self-criticism and holding myself to an unnecessarily high standard, and then letting the stress of that spill over into other areas of my life, and weirdly it is manifesting by me feeling just like sad that I don’t feel a closeness or kinship or camaraderie or intimacy with the other summer associates, but it’s fine that I don’t, and all this feels like it has to do with me not doing a good job managing expectations (expectations are premeditated resentments), and the root cause of that, as any good AA will tell you, is a critical deficiency of Acceptance in my life. At least that is the answer I feel like is most applicable here in this moment as I reflect the morning after. I think it might have been slightly more interesting to have done a plot and event driven blog post detailing what exactly happened on Governor’s Island, but truly it was just a bland and soulless corporate dinner and drinks thing that was a farewell event for the summer interns. I got to ride a boat, that was neat.

And I guess the denoument I will offer is that near the end of my island adventure I played spikeball, and it was me and W, a Yaley, versus my dear friend and clumpmate N and my most loathed enemy and bully J, and me and W won decisively, and we high fived and were good sports, and then I felt in that moment vindicated, which of course is completely absurd and an unreasonable response to a perceived slight which fell far short of bullying and which as I expressed earlier was just a manifestation of my own fragility and disturbability, likely products of my lack of acceptance and my anxiety as I prepare for the transition from here to back home, and my tender heart with regards to G and what will become or not become of us. And since I am repeating myself and have written way too much already I am gonna wrap it up. I know that once I am back home and no longer in transition my heart will settle down. And I know that I have a strong dependable reliable accessible group of dear friends who are ready to support me and counsel me through this, since ultimately what I’m experiencing is a manifestation of a common problem for which there is a common solution. So I will work to ask for help, receive help, not take myself and my experience too seriously, and trust the process.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for bearing with me. I want to also take a moment to flag for dedicated readers that I plan to conclude this Blog on 8/4/23, which will be my last day in NYC. So hopefully this way there’s a little bit of a heads up and expectations can be adjusted accordingly. I do deeply appreciate the feedback and encouragement and reflections and other reactions people have shared with me about this blog, each has been so affirming and grounding and welcome. So, thank you for that. Until next time.

7/26/2023

7/25/2023

Today I was in a good mood all day and I don’t really know why but I don’t really need to know why I guess. I think the most likely reason is that the internship is coming to an end and I’m excited about coming back home. But other nice things happened too. For instance I went to the “all attorney lunch” (which in this moment reminds me of this sick comic zine I encountered in like 2013 where the police held a big football game that all the police played in called the “all police football game” and while that happened the punks and anarchists looted and did whatever they wanted on the other side of town. I had dreams about looting last night, which was probably caused by me talking to my friend about looting last evening after dinner, more on that later) and had a fine modest meal of chicken breast canned green beans and bulgur wheat. During this lunch I sat with three of my summer associate colleagues, N, R, and B, all of whom go to elite law schools in the northeast. But we had just a very nice fun conversation about our experiences in high school, I got to tell them about the Future Farmers of America and some of my past as a chef and a drummer and activist and they all seemed very interested in this way that made me feel seen and important and involved and connected, which if you’ve been reading this blog lately you know that I’ve had a fitful ability to access these feelings. And I listened to their stories and we laughed and chatted and it was just easy and fun. I think that’s what was nice, I felt at ease, not ill-at-ease around them in this moment. I also felt like I was beginning to be known by them. There’s this Kali Uchis song called Loner where the lyrics go “that’s why I’d rather be a loner/that’s why I’d rather be alone/I don’t even wanna know ya/I don’t wanna be known” and it’s such a sad song and she has such a pretty voice and I identify with that feeling so much, the drive to not be known, the way it can feel so heavy to be perceived, and so much of my life these days feels like me swimming hard against that current, and it’s a privilege and blessing to even want make the effort to disclose myself enough to be known (“people who need people are the luckiest people” also the Big Book says “Abandon yourself to God as you understand God.” and “When we drew near to Him He disclosed Himself to us!” which I think interlocks here), and I guess lunch just felt like a moment when I neither had to swim hard against the current of introversion nor did I feel like the undertow of being known and perceived was going to drown me. I felt just the opposite, buoyed by my company (like keeping company, not the corporation company, esprit de corps not esprit de corporation). And although it was small and temporary those little moments and glimmers have a big impact on my whole psychic wellbeing and internal emotional ecosystem and I was pretty happy for the rest of the day, despite myself.

Maybe my mood had to do with the temperature: the weather was rainy which felt like a reprieve. I decided to go for another run down to the bridge and back after work. I got back to work around 6:30 to find some of my summer associate coworkers still working which slightly disturbed me since I was out promptly at 5 pm on the dot and have been trying to not work more than 40 hours a week, and I had a pang of wondering if I was not working hard enough. But I probably am, we’ll see soon enough, we get word about our offers on 8/4.

The final thing that happened today was that I got home and was very hungry and tired and had a little internal plan to eat takeout and watch a movie by myself, but just in the moment that I got home R contacted me and wanted to get dinner. I resisted my desire to isolate and instead met him at Spicy Moon and we shared Ma Po Tofu and some fried rice dish with tasty fake meat and chatted about school and work and politics and riots. While we ate another couple got up and left behind some spring rolls and vegan crab rangoons, and I made the brazen and illicit decision to commandeer those leftovers and brought them to our table and we ate them and they were tasty and it was the perfect crime. Because of course it wasn’t criminal at all and though perhaps a bit dubious from a germophobic point of view, completely sound and called-for from an anti-food-waste point of view, especially for two large lumbering hungry herbivores like ourselves. Anyways it was a great night, R was a delight and I left feeling like I have a good friend. Like I am in a friendship where I want to see my friend and my friend wants to see me. A simple thing but a precious thing. My heart felt more whole. Which is a good tendency since I am still, for better or for worse, tensing up for the severance between me and G. I don’t think it will break my heart, but maybe rattle or concuss it, hopefully briefly. We have plans to hang out this friday, and I plan to finally ask her about what her plan is regarding her and me and dating and the future. I expect it to be The End, but I am trying to go to the conversation with an open mind, non-binaristic thinking, and an overall code of love and tolerance. We’ll see what happens. Thanks for reading, until next time.

7/24/2023

I was in a weird bad mood throughout morning and afternoon. Feeling like I just can’t connect to my colleagues socially, also the old ambient dread/floating anxiety, the lump in the throat. So it was kind of vindicating or affirming to see the Barbie movie and have Margot Robbie as Barbie name that she was experiencing “fear without a referent” or whatever the quote was. The Barbie movie did a kind of stealth AA operation on me; when I least expected it, it invited me back into the world, it invited me to understand myself as one among many, someone with a common problem. The movie differed from AA in the solution it offered to that problem, at least as far as I could tell, there was no imperative to seek God, live by spiritual principles, pick up the kit of practical relationship-repairing tools laid at my feet, dedicate my life to service, etc. But just the same I had this glimmer of joy and collectivity well up inside me when I watched it, I got to hear the poison ideologies of patriarchy and capitalism and consumerism named and critiqued in a fin and playful way. I definitely felt like my takeaway would be “interrogate and systematically dismantle patriarchy at the interpersonal and international scales” and I did get some of that but I also left with the simpler gentler “you are not alone, you are good enough in your ordinariness” message which maybe was more for the women and femmes but I received it and it heartened me just the same.

Then after the movie I had some snowballing positivity, an avalanche of affirmation. I decided to go on a run which is usual, but this time when I got to the west side of Manhattan island I turned south instead of north, and let myself do an adventure run all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge. (I guess now is as good a time as any to disclose to the reader that for most of this summer I have had Fergie’s “London Bridge” stuck in my head and it won’t go away and I think the thing that re-triggers it is that there is someone in the office whose last name is Bridges and their name is on the outside of their door and I walk by it every day and then the Fergie starts up in my head.) Anyways the run was fun and unexpected, it was engaging and sweaty and dark and breezy and I even found myself running beside a big mural under the bridge that said seven or eight times in different graffiti fonts, some in english and some in spanish: “You are Not Alone.” And that’s one of the core fears I grapple with every day, a feeling I contend with whether I am nearby G or whether we are apart, something I worry about when I spend time with friends and colleagues and family and when I spend time in solitude. So it was just nice to be reminded it’s a struggle for a lot of people, it’s a part of the human condition, and at least in some moment someone gave a lot of time and effort to put glyphs on the wall to maybe soften that fear ever so slightly, and that was a good feeling. Then when I got done with the run I unexpectedly had a long and emotionally present phone conversation with my dear old friend R, someone whose friendship was dormant for several years before we recently reconnected over dinner a few weeks ago. I got to share about my feelings of being between homes, of being doubtful about my future with G, about my complicated feelings of love for the ideology of Anarchism and simultaneous feelings of abandonment by my particular clique but also my total understanding of their needs to cut me loose after I was acting up, by which I mean I was being an unsafe person to be around as I flailed violently in my untreated mental illness and alcoholism and addiciton. R is great because he is super affirming and sensitive and kind and insightful and we just had this long discursive gentle conversation about community and affection and care and I left the phone call thinking I had a real friend and maybe even a new community on the horizon accessible to me through that friend. It was just what I needed after a day of laboring under the cruel lash of alienation doubt and disconnection up in the imperious blue glass towers of high finance. So I went to sleep exhausted and with my heart full. Thank you for reading, until next time.

7/23/2023

This day was huge and beneficial and Went Right and although stylistically I feel like I should dedicate more text and space to the Good Days I once again am running out of time and so I am gonna only hit the highlights: I started my day off with some work on my Law Review Comment and it is more or less in the place it needs to be so I will probably give myself a break and sandbag until it is due this saturday. I attended family Zoom which is simply chicken soup for the soul and was nourished accordingly. I’m so fortunate to be in a situation where time with my family feels mutually beneficial to all parties involved. Next I went to the village and chaired an AA meeting. The most beautiful woman in the world is a regular attendee and she chatted with me as though I were a friend and member of her community, which of course I am, and it was a reminder to me to continue trying to not treat people this or that type of way because of the presence or absence of superficial beauty but instead to be a kind and attentive and responsive and involved and emotionally honest friend among friends and above all else to make myself a safe person to talk to, especially for women in the rooms of AA, who have to deal with being sexualized and objectified all the time in life and deserve a reprieve from that in this space we’ve consecrated as somewhere safe to be vulnerable honest and open. So yeah anyways me and her chatted a bit and then I got to my duties as chairperson and my friend qualified and he offered a stirring rendition of his own story, embedded in which was a clear and accessible articulation of what to me felt like the core message of AA. It may be because that was the first meeting I had made all week and I was like a desert wanderer kneeling at an oasis but also I think he just did an excellent job carrying the message. And I told him so afterward. He said a lot of good stuff, but one thing he said was “More will be revealed. . . ” (which is an old AA saw) “. . . and more will be required.” Which I hadn’t heard before, which I liked because it enjoined me gently to make use of the stability and ease and capability I now experience in life as a result of my having gotten sober and pass that benefit on to the newcomer. Anyways it was a thoroughly spiritually nourishing experience and I treasure AA; it once again felt like the most important thing I did all week. After the meeting I met with my sponsor, and we read together in AA approved literature, and I got to hear about his life and see his sweet face and things just felt correct. It’s a solid and grounding experience basically every time we meet. Then I went for a nice run, came back and read more of the novel I’m reading, and in the evening met with my sponsee. We read To Employers in the Big Book and also chatted a fair amount about both of our lives; I’m looking forward to being back in NC and seeing him and my whole AA universe down there again. It’s just a clockwork antidote to the heavy tolling feelings of alienation, uselessness, anomie, depression, malaise, and doubt that my mental illness ships in fresh every so often. I slept well having given my time for the purpose of benefiting others and given my time to benefit myself. The day felt balanced and solid. Thanks for reading; until next time.

7/22/2023

Today was an expensive day of intense sensations. Well the first sensation was monetarily inexpensive but cost me a lot of emotion: my Comment for the Law Review came in way too long and I got asked to cut it down to 16,000 words from the 23,000 it had ballooned into. This balloonification occurred primarily because I kept adding these indulgent, discursive footnotes with quotes and see e.g. parentheticals and other scholastic tidbits which were very interesting to me but not necessary to the core purpose of the paper. I also had solicited extra editorial feedback from a professor who it just so happens is publishing a comment of her own next year in a different school’s law review on essentially the same topic, and she gave me a lot of good feedback, which I used to pile more content on to the piece. So I had to go through and “kill my children” I did slash and burn for many hours since this big edit is due in one week. My main recurring issue as an author seems to be that I just write too dang much, in basically every scenario, so narrowing with precision and finding ways to streamline is always tough. But I have a doc on my desktop now that is the “unabridged” version of this comment so I can return to that digital space and visit the children, they aren’t actually dead. I am getting kinda sick of working on this paper but once I turn this latest pared down draft in I won’t have to touch it for a month or so which will be a nice break.

In the afternoon I got my chest tattooed by G (a different G, G the current tattooer not G the former dental student who I go on occasional dates with), which was a very grounding experience. The tattoos were to memorialize three friends, Lydia, Ron, and Dirck, who I have lost to either suicide and/or overdose (I say either/or because I see overdose as a sort of suicide, maybe a less intentional suicide) I got a tattoo of three images on my chest, a stylized rendering of Ron’s face, a rose Dirck drew me in a letter he wrote me from prison, and a bunny that looks like it’s falling. The bunny was chosen because that image used to be tattooed on Lydia’s chest, and it was put there by tattooer G (I will say TG for tattooer G) years ago. The tattoos took about two hours and most of that was spent discussing the lives and deaths of these three people. Mostly Lydia, since both me and TG knew her well. But I also got to tell the stories of Ron and Dirck to TG, which was special. Special because their stories aren’t lost yet, they haven’t died the final death of being forgotten, and I can keep their memory in my head and their friendship in my heart and their story in my throat and memorials of them on my skin. The tattoos are controlled wounds that I expect to heal predictably. I can’t say the same for grieving my friends. So much feels bittersweet lately. It’s best for me to remember that many of us are suffering one loss or another, and when I have the wherewithal to be patient with people as though they are hurting, I feel closest to my Maker.

The blog has in this moment taken a bit of a turn toward the morbid and somber, I notice myself typing slower and feeling kind of heavy as I sit and look at the screen. Part of that has to do with a conversation I had with my dear friend M in the afternoon after I got my tattoo. His mom is unwell, experiencing a mix of disordered thinking and an unruly body. It falls to him to care for her. That’s expensive monetarily in a way that has him significantly distressed. And that’s to say nothing about the taxing emotional experiencing of feeling like the only one she can rely on. To make matters worse M’s girlfriend of three years broke up with him recently. Talking to him on the phone I hear the sort of ugly nihilism and bitterness that characterized my perspective for many years. I hear the despair that accompanies the loss of company and regard from a partner. The world rings hollow for the companionless. Of course, he has companions, he has me, he even has his friend and bandmate, E, whose girlfriend also recently broke up with him, and whose father tragically died less than a week ago. This is a horrible set of circumstances for E to experience; I also feel glad that they did, just because it means my friend M has a person in his life who knows a pain very like unto his own, and can move through the grief without believing the tempting myth that no one else hurts like he does. I want M to arrange to have his Mom moved into some sort of assisted living situation; I want M to put up a Go Fund Me or similar crowdsourcing thing to raise funds to support him financially through this. He’s generated tons of goodwill, is in a beloved punk band, and is generally a man who prioritizes friendships above all else, at least thats how it seems to me, and I think he could get some relief by doing this. But on the phone this idea is anathema to him, and while I can’t fully understand why I don’t press the issue and try just to be present with him instead of trying to be a problem solver. Though the conversation is shot through with bitterness, it makes me very happy to be in touch with him. He’s basically my oldest friend, or the friend I’ve been closest with the longest I should say, and I treasure our connection. He’s seen me at my worst, when I was being a shithead in Philly, when I was relapsing in secret, when I was suicidally depressed after my girlfriend broke up with me when I was actually just about his age. And he stood by me and was kind and supportive and I got better, eventually. Anyways I love him and worry about him and his family and his friends and want his heart not to hurt but know it must for as long as it takes and hope that he continues to pick up the phone and spend time with his friends for as long as it takes to heal, which will in fact happen, though it likely seems impossible in this moment.

Wow I think I am taking out some kind of parallel revenge on my blog for not being able to write as much as I want on my Law Review Comment, this post is way longer than I planned already and there is actually more stuff that happened today but I am gonna abridge it because I am running out of time before work. The other major thing that happened on this day is that I went to an extremely fancy restaurant with my sister in the East Village. It was gourmet in a way I have never experienced. It was a six-course tasting menu with optional drink accompaniments. The service was exquisite, the plates were little works of art, the flavors were for the most part completely novel and inventive and decadent and delicate and delicious. I got gifted a flight of non-alcoholic beverages that were unexpectedly tasty: there was an ashwaganda NA aperitif and a reishi mushroom savory drink and a sparkling pear thing and even another different umami mushroom drink too, all were unique and excellent. I drank them from a fine crystal glass. I ate the tiny desserts at the end, one was vegan gelato with olive oil, I had a cheesecake with cherrys, and the last thing was a cosmic brownie writ fancy. I could probably write and write and write about this because of how much energy and intention was poured into every dish that we were served and how well done it was but time is running out. I will say that I have never paid this much for food in my life and I feel like I probably don’t want to again; for me, a person who feels exquisite pleasure after eating a Carolina Tray from Cookout for $9 it seems like unjustifiable decadence to be paying this much for food. Still, I got to spend time with my sister which was great, and I offered to pay for most of it which felt generous, and the restaurant is owned/founded by my old friend who I dated fully 10 years ago who I hadn’t talked to in many years, and this seems to have initiated a conversation between us and although she couldn’t be there at the restaurant because she was under the weather we have plans to get coffee before I leave town, which I’m looking forward to. NYC has provided me with multiple instances where old dormant friendships seem to be refreshed, reactivated, to bloom again. The flowers look and smell different but it’s such a blessing to be able to be present in friendship, to be eligible for companionship. I credit sobriety and my Higher Power for making me that way. Ok that’s all for now, until next time, thanks for reading.

7/21/2023

Today was a crummy day. I lost sleep because I woke up last night around 2am and again at 4am with an intense itchy sensation on my skin. I don’t know what caused it, which makes it more distressing confusing and upsetting. This morning I called my sister because during COVID she had a bad bed bug infestation and she knows all about them. She gave me the run down on what to look for and it seems unlikely that I have bed bugs, I found none of their tell tale signs in my bed and I myself had no bite marks. So that was somewhat comforting, though I’m still unsettled. My guesses now are that it could have been mosquitos or an allergic reaction of some kind to food I ingested or some kind of dermatitis, or maybe hives caused by stress, I don’t know. Out of an abundance of caution I contacted G to let her know about my itchy situation; we had plans to have a nice sleepover tonight and sleep in Saturday morning. She decided we should just hang out and get ice cream and do a rain check on the sleepover, which if I was in her shoes I’d probably want to do the same thing. My day at work was sort of productive for the first half, then I just completely lost steam and motivation during the second half. I have micro-senioritis since next week is my last week of work, and when I come to work not having gotten enough sleep I find it very difficult to get anything done; this line of work for me demands a high and consistent level of attention and comprehension that is hard to muster when I’m sleepy. It didn’t help that for lunch I went to a very tasty restaurant that served cajun food, which was delicious but heavy. We shared jambalaya and fried chicken and mac and cheese and fried oysters. We got beignets and key lime pie for dessert. The pie was excellent but I found out halfway through eating it that the whipped cream was freshly made and that there was some amount of liquor incorporated into it. We used to do that at the fancy restaurant I worked at in Greensboro. I don’t consider it a relapse because it was a very miniscule amount of liquor consumed, and unintentionally so, and disguised in food, and it had no affect on my mood, other than pissing me off because I didn’t realize I had consumed it until it was too late. Anyways that was also upsetting and threw me off. But I made it through the day, walked home in the hot heat, bought two big sloppy burgers from the halal cart near my house, devoured them in bed and watched No Country for Old Men, took some Wellness Formula (ecinacea and vitamins and stuff, I usually take it when I’m sick and I took it this time on the dubious, speculative pseudo-medical theory that if I did have an allergic reaction this would help somehow) and felt a bit better. I did meet G for ice cream and it was fine. We walked around Little Italy after, visited some souvenir stores, and then she wanted to stop in to a wine bar near her work, so we did that, and I drank a “phony negroni” which was 0.00% alcohol but which tasted terrible and also made me feel weird because like I just don’t like being in bars anymore and it’s not really fun or appealing to me to do the mocktail thing. G asked me “do you think you’ll ever be able to drink alcohol again?” which I think pretty accurately portrayed how we know each other but not that deeply. I tried to casually explain to her that I don’t believe I can ever safely drink again and my goal is to be abstinent from alcohol for the rest of my life. It was not a big deal, but I also realized that I haven’t been to an AA meeting yet this week, and the lack of prioritizing my recovery and participating in that community is some cause for concern. I am looking forward to being back in NC and getting back into the familiar routines of recovery and re-immersing myself in the fellowship and program of AA there. So today was kind of a bad day but I stayed sober, I did the upstanding and honest thing by giving G access to full information about my itchy situation (rather than avoiding telling her for the purpose of not feeling alone tonight, which was a thought that crossed my mind but which I resisted). So I’m happy that I acted with integrity, and I just wish things were a bit less irritating, less disruptive, and more comfortable and predictable right now. But I know that pain and discomfort can at their best lead to increased faith and also can induce me to ask for help in a way that brings me closer to people, so I will try to channel that energy or tendency or whatever. That’s all for now, thanks for reading.

7/20/2023

Today was a pretty uneventful day. I got to work normally, I did my work, I went out to lunch with a group of people who I found to be above-average nice to me, which made me be nicer to them, and even though the food we got did not agree with me, I felt affirmed by the quality of conversation and even felt a glimmer of camaraderie. Esprit de corporation. I went back to the office, did more work, and then decided to be social rather than antisocial by staying after work for a happy hour type event in which the finals of the summer-long ping-pong tournament took place. I got to sit front and center and spectate, and while I did I had a lovely casual and silly conversation with two of my co-workers. It was cute and easy and low stakes and inconsequential, I felt like a worker among workers, I’m glad I made that effort to be present. After this event I went for my usual jog up and down the Chelsea Piers, and made decent time despite the angry sun and the hostile air. I finished with little energy and so I didn’t make an AA meeting, which I probably should have. I ate a bunch of food and went to sleep. Sometimes no news is good news. Until next time.

7/19/2023

“Solipsism crew” I once again can hear Royal saying. Intellectually I know that I am one among many, that my experiences are mercifully garden variety. It’s a mercy because that means I am eligible for being related to and for relating to people. I am invited to be a-part-of instead of apart-from. Those intellectual truths notwithstanding, sometimes in my apart-ment, my dwelling, I dwell on my perennial feeling of apart-ness. Maybe I should look for a together-ment, maybe I should be living with other people, I wonder if that would work against the corrosive thread of fear and alienation that my life occasionally feels shot through with. Together-mint sounds like a non-profit flavor of gum. Then again there is no shortage of being nearby people in my life and I am quite often spatially together with people, my togetherment quotient is actually through the roof. Walking down Sixth Avenue from the Garment District to NoHo last night I was sort of spellbound by the big undulating knot of humanity flowing north and south on that arterial sidewalk, it was kind of a bittersweet enchantment, I had the sense that every possible lived experience was spatially within reach. I especially felt that when I walked through Washington Square Park near my nearpartment around 9:30 pm on a warm July night as hundreds of people milled about pursuing the experience that mattered to them in that moment. I get these rich but brief snippets of so so many varied, intense, meaningful moments in the lives of people here. It’s so different than North Carolina, where I spend most of my time either buried in a law book in the cocoon of my little cottage or lumbering gently beside and beneath big columns of lumber in sylfan solitude on the dirt and gravel paths of Carolina North forest when I jog, or zooming manically up and down steep hills on my steel Schwinn, or sealed hermetically in my Subaru, effectively quarantined from the experience of others by a mix of Subaru and Spotify and San Pellegrino and Spearmint and Seatbelts and Sobriety. I’ve cultivated a sturdy reserve of non-reactivity and a practice of impassivity over the last five years in that Sobriety. But much of it early on was accomplished by minimizing my interactions with others so as to lower the probability of feelings occurring. And then by proscribing my other interactions to be almost entirely among other sober or at least recovering alcoholics, to ensconce myself in recovery community, which was my refuge, which remains my refuge, which introduced me to the values I lived by today, which provided for me generally and ensured my needs were met but not my wants, which laid a kit of spiritual tools at my feet and encouraged me to pick them up. So it is jarring to be “let loose” in the city, to be interacting with all manner of people, most of whom are not sober or in recovery. It can feel like a crucible. It can feel like a fissure in a cuticle, ever so slightly unpleasant but ultimately inconsequential. Lately, yesterday, it just felt alienating. By which I mean I felt unable to connect to anyone around me. Or else it just felt hard to be present, to feel like one among many, a worker among workers, a mini-golfer among mini-golfers, a lunch-enjoyer among lunch enjoyers. And I started this silly screed with the solipsism quote because I have received the wisdom that the way that I feel is not The Most Important Thing. AA taught me that my spiritual condition can be pretty well measured by how I’m treating other people. My feelings are fickle, mercurial, capricious, asinine, and because I am a mentally ill alcoholic, can sometimes tend to be either disordered or otherwise disjunct with reality. Which sometimes results in a pleasant feeling of exceptionalism, fleeting glimmers of genius and generativity and absurd glee. But often instead feel like an invisible viscous crystal clear barrier that permits me to be spatially around other people but interferes with my capacity to be truly present on an energetic or spiritual or emotional level. I know that feeling will come and go. It just hit a peak rather than a trough last night when I made the pro-social decision to attend the after-work event at a venue that was equal parts garish bougie bar, dance music club, and putt-putt course. So I’m glad I made the effort and a bit distressed about how challenging it can be to relate to my coworkers, and am typically of the personality type to find fault in myself when a challenge arises, which in some ways comports with the AA maxims of personal responsibility and accountability and in other ways I think represents a distorted hyper-self-critical tendency I have, a tendency that has probably served me in some ways as a student and worker and so forth but which like all my instincts can get out of hand. So anyways I feel like it was helpful for me to process this here on the page, better out than in I think. Thanks for reading; until next time.

7/18/2023

Today I was in a better mood than yesterday though there is a sort of ambient low-level lump in my throat that I think corresponds to the Big Change on the horizon, the inevitable severance, at least spatially, from G, and the ordinary disruption that comes (for me at least) from moving from one place to another. I’ll try to take it in stride.

Today I had the good fortune of being assigned a criminal asylum case, a pro bono matter, my first proper criminal case as an intern (proper here for me meaning like an individual person who is not a company or corporation being accused of a crime). It is deeply interesting, I love criminal law and criminal procedure, I feel a heightened level of humanity in this field of law, it feels impactful and consequential and worthwhile to me. And so unsurprisingly my day just flew by as I worked on the matter. I am grateful to be given work that feels like this.

After work I went for my usual 6-mile jog up and down the Hudson River Greenway that runs along the Chelsea Piers. The air is poor quality and the heat is a hot wet blanket and the run was relatively unpleasant and difficult. Still, I tell myself, “the body craves motion,” and I have the good fortune to be inside and in (relative) control of a body that can move this distance and so I am grateful for that too.

After the jog I met G for pizza in SoHo at a spot called Champion. I was there early and sat on a bench in Lt. Petrosino Square and watched the skateboarders do their dirtbag balletics in designer clothes or shirtless and clothed in tattoos and sweat and implacable coolness. It was nice to just sit and watch; I feel like I am almost always heading here or there, rushing one way or another, literally running while jogging, and not really stopping to just absorb and observe. So that was good. I like how absorb and observe sounds. Observe and absorb, absorb and observe.

I met with G, we got our pizza, we made our way back to my apartment, and spent the evening together. I love spending time with her; I also dread the little imperfect moments, like when neither of us has anything to say and we look at each other in the eyes but then one looks away. But if it were all perfect it would hardly be human, and G is very kind to me and makes me feel wanted and attractive and interesting, and I hope I make her feel those ways too. We sit on my bed and watch the movie called Magic from 1977 that my friend J recommended. It is a kind of unhinged thriller about a ventriloquist played by Anthony Hopkins which pretty much says it all. We both crack jokes and talk shit through the movie, I think we are a bit more at ease around each other and can show some irreverence and playfulness, which is a great joy, something precious. Similarly joyful and precious is the moment - was it a moment or an hour? - of pillow talk after we’ve completed all our waking date tasks and activities. The conversation is meandering, silly, gentle, aimless, soft. It matches the soft gentle closeness of being side by side under blankets, it’s comfortable and inconsequential. I am also grateful for this, and do my best to not succumb to my mind’s desire to predict the future, read G’s mind, or chastise me for not always already having secured a solid predictable committed romantic partnership already. I resist time travel. It doesn’t really work but it’s fine and I fall asleep beside somebody who likes me, what a blessing. While I truly luxuriate in the niceness of cuddling I also am prickled with the dread of not getting enough sleep because I know how unpleasant a sleepy day in a corporate office can be. It’s a worthwhile tradeoff. The morning comes and I’m too sleepy but I just make my coffee extra strong. Eventually my chin makes its way back to G’s thigh, just where it was the other morning when I stayed at her house, my orthopractical expression of a desire to be a lapdog, to be obedient and loyal and petted on the head singularly loving in a way that is both completely unrealistic and deeply desirable to me. As always the moment is perfect and lasts too short, and it’s time to scurry off to work like the rat-racer I am, which I do, and G walks with me a few blocks until she gets to her subway stop, and we kiss and say goodbye and I get that floaty glowy feeling. It will fade with time; I’m glad for it while it’s here. Thanks for reading.

7/17/2023

Today I woke up and I did not want to get out of bed, wanted just to snooze and dream and not put my dainty mind to work in the service of the big corporate law machine. Still, I somehow managed to extract myself from the perfect splendor of bed island, mowed down all the hair on my face, polished up the chompers, eliminated most of the natural smells I produce and disguised them with mint and fluoride and teatree oil and orange neutrogena, placed supple translucent plastic discs on me eyeballs and loped downtown like a healthy foal, Reebok-shod and shiftless at heart but determined to discharge my biglaw duty. My heart was heavy and my throat had the lump in it, the one that comes from being flaked on by someone who may or may not be a girlfriend, and the one that comes from being unexcited to go to work, and the one that comes from too many friends being dead. But I prayed and meditated as I walked, to the extent one can meditate while walking, especially in new york, where for me every 30 seconds or so something makes my heart jump up and knock into the throat lump, an errant hellbent E-cyclist or a sonorous honk or a kamikaze pigeon or a breathtaking beauty or a person experiencing acute, aggressive-seeming neurodivergence or a blast of either the most intoxiciatingly delicious or elaborately repulsive smell imaginable, or just that old familiar cascade of memory crashing down like a big angry waterfall through my spine, welling up like a geyser, sometimes producing tears, other times just electrifying my spine, hyperactivating my kundalini energy. D, one of my dead friends from AA, used to say ‘kundalini’ in this heavy Southern accent when he shared his story, it was in fact one of the first things I noticed about him that made me want to pursue a deeper friendship with him. He was in his fifties, he was a lifelong addict of heroin and psychedelics and alcohol and cocaine, he was gentle and had big gnarly working man’s hands and a sort of bent spine and matching bent gait that comes from being a stone layer and being bent over half your life. But he was very kind and sincere and stayed sober until I guess he didn’t since his death was apparently an overdose. We were penpals when he was in prison for 18 months, he said he stayed sober through that and I believed him. I guess he died about a year ago now. R my other friend died aout three years ago now, him and me used to make music together in Philly, our silly little project was called Therapy and I made album art and everything and we were both depressed as hell, self-medicating mostly with weed and alcohol, though i was drinking in secret around him, I made the beats and he rapped, his encouragement was something that kept me going, he always called me Primo, referring to DJ Premier, which I thought was such a wildly inaccurate piece of hyperpraise, but which always made me feel really good and motivated. He would remember a bunch of 80s and 70s songs that his parents used to play and tell me to look them up on youtube and I would rip the mp3s and chop them up into samples and put them over drum loops and play them over the PA speakers I had inside and we would vibe for hours on Ludlow street near 40th in Philly. I am going down memory lane about some of my closest dead friends, chiefly I think because I had a very powerful and moving and deeply nourishing and vital social experience last night, where I spent about four hours with two of the closest friends to L, my friend who died by suicide this January. We got dim sum and then walked from China Town to the southern tip of Manhattan and around Little Italy and the Lower East Side and eventually snaked back to NoHo. We just checked in with each other about our lives and the law and tattoos and grad school and such during the first half of the hang. Then I brought up suicide and L and the second half of the hang was a mix of memories of our lost friend, processing feelings about her, trying to make sense of ourselves in the cavity she left behind, staying still in the senselessness of it too. It’s unsolvable and often for me feels unspeakable. G said they saw themselves become two people, walking hand in hand with one version of themselves who screams silently and is basically inconsolably devastated and who is also a baby and who is mostly invisible to almost all their friends. LL said they occasionally ask themselves if they should get All New Friends, because it feels so impossible to be with people as the person they have become in the wake of the loss of L. They talked about false starts, fits and starts, the impossibility of explaining what the death of L has done to them, being anxious about doing stuff they would like otherwise, wanting only to be around people who want to talk about grief or loss. We talked about the suicide media that feels more helpful than hurtful, talked about the various support groups on Zoom and in person we attend, some for sudden loss, some for AA, etc. And we got to do the very precious thing which is to recount little slivers of memories to each other about our times with L. I got to hear about the time L taught G how to fish and how the fishin was no fun for G because just at the moment G caught a catfish the mushrooms started to hit and it was Too Much. I got to hear about the time L visited LL in NYC and most of the time was spent convalescing as LL endured a painful migraine, and we all agreed that we had many good times with L in the context of convalescing. Then later when L confronted LL about their bad conduct the first thing LL needed to talk about was to ask L why she was talking shit about NYC when really it seemed like she liked it. I told a story about how me and L bonded over peeing in jars, which we had both done at various points in our lives to avoid leaving our rooms, and how once you cross that line it feels sort of like a lifehack. It was sweet and bitter and somber and morose and necessary and uplifting and enriching and a bit devastating to be around LL and G. It was heavy, my heart felt very heavy during the whole hang, even though it was a Good Thing to be around them. It’s just hard for me to really look at what this is, this loss of my friend, the loss of one of my best friends. People keep dying, LL had another friend take their own life less than a month ago, I have had two AA acquaintances that I know of die by OD since L has died, I went to one of their funerals. I can tell by the way I am writing this morning that the space we created together last night opened up my heart for the better, and I feel shaky but clear against the hazy morning NoHo sun. Speaking of which I am gonna be late to work because I overindulged in this blog post so I gotta run, but I feel deep love and appreciation and fragility and faith and am so grateful that I was able to not avoid or give up on these two friends and that we all took time to hold each other last night. Until next time.

7/16/2023

Today I went on another morning run, this time it was in the rain which was lovely. The streets were only about 25% full, the rain cooled me down and helped me run faster, and I got to see a huge ominous cloud that hung like a veil over the cluster of skyscrapers in FiDi/WTC area, and that looked cool and gloomy, which actually is how my weekend was, emotionally.

I met with sponsee on the phone and that was the best thing I achieved all day. I’ve said this before but the direct service of sponsorship and the depth of intimacy and the ability to bear witness to someone (who very much reminds me of me) go from being at his very worst to rebuilding his life, his relationships, his marriage, and desiring to be a better person, it’s just truly a precious experience that I deeply treasure. I feel like he’s a part of my family. Thank you God for allowing me to be of service! But the joy from this interaction would not last, sadly.

My sponsor was busy so we couldn’t meet, I know his mom is going though some health problems, I said a prayer for them, I hope they are ok. Another flake in the big bowl of flakes-for-good reason. It’s a situation where I of coure accept and understand why he couldn’t make it, and because I rely on him and care about him and benefit from our relationship, it made me sad to not see him. And also the stuff I said last week about being a bit fragile in terms of having my schedule disrupted. He’s also like one of a few very solid lifelines to NC, my home, or is it my home. I keep going back to that Mountain Goats lyric: “And I wanna go home/But I am home.”

Also, I didn’t meet with my family on Zoom because of a schedule conflict, that will be tomorrow, I am looking forward to seeing all of them, I think sometimes I take for granted how important they are to me and how good for me it is to see them regularly. A classic case of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone. But luckily they are not gone, just temporarily unavailable, and not even unavailable fully, just for our Zoom. I’m really lucky to have such a good, supportive family.

I chaired Perry Street, what has become my de facto home group, and that was another injection of the goodness and warmth produced by service into my frail and fickle spirit. The Most Beautiful Girl in The World was there again but this time she mercifully sat in front of me such that her face was not facing mine, and it required less work to not look at her. I still struggle to deprioritize and dis-obsess over love, romance, beauty, attraction, etc., and felt relatively successful at letting that pass and holding recovery from alcoholism in the center of my mind and heart during the meeting. It didn’t hurt that the speaker qualified beautifully and with candor and vim and honesty. The meeting ended, I swept the floor with a broom which was awesome and tactile and physical and completely honest and no one saw me do it except God and that was just right for me.

I ran into an old friend from NC AA on the street, C, who was glad to see me and who walked and talked with me for a bit. (A random story about C is that we are both 6’3”+ and probably both around 200 lbs and two summers ago we nearly got into a fight playing pickup basketball because we were both going way too hard playing D and fouling the shit out of each other. I actually got so heated that I just walked off the court. It felt like the best I could do in that moment but I felt like a real heel afterward. It’s this sort of hypercompetitiveness that I usually work to tamp down in most contexts and that I don’t like about myself, an instinct run haywire that doesn’t serve me. Except in some ways it does get channeled into like my studies, my desire to perform well academically, and probably that strain of my personality has something to do with why BigLaw feels like a viable career space for me, for better or for worse. In any case C and I squashed the beef and are now friendly again which is good.) We went to a Cafe in Greenwich Village called Do Not Feed Alligators and I saw my first NYC celebrity there, Awkwafinah, which was cool. I didn’t approach her or anything I just stared probably a bit too long. I got to chat with C about his life, his struggles, videogames, working and living in Manhattan, etc. C has a face that looks like a chiseled sculpture of a talented chiseler responding to the prompt “composite presidential bone structure,” hollow cheeks, high cheek bones, pronounced brow that sort of makes him look intense/angry, huge jutting chin with that little cleft dimple thing. I saw women checking him out as we walked, he’s a certifiable hunk. Anyways me noticing that probably just speaks to some insecurities I have about my own collection of shapes, body-wise. We concluded our hang, walked out separate ways, and that was the last social and structured part of my day, which means I spent the next 8 hours or so alone in my apartment.

G and I had plans to hang that evening but she flaked last minute, tired from a long shift at work. I was placid and magnanimous about it on text, but of course it bummed me out. Hard not to think about the Big Flake on the horizon. For better or for worse, our cancelled hang resulted in a big empty cavity or crater of time, which I chose to fill, for better or for worse, with media relating to suicide. I will say for the peace of mind of all my readers that I am in no way feeling suicidal and, thank God, have not felt that way for the last five years. I do, however, think a lot about the friend I lost to suicide this January, L. L’s loss was tectonic; grieving her has been glacial. It comes in fits and starts; I often don’t want to think about it, think about her, think about suicide, etc. Although last winter and spring I wrote feverishily about the law of Involuntary Commitment (IVC) in NC, and included personal narratives of her suicide and my previous suicidality at the top of the paper in the CRT tradition, and in that way was able to do some processing (maybe paraprocessing) of her loss.

Anyways I found myself completely engrossed in a book lent to me months ago by D, a book called All My Puny Sorrows. I read 100 pages over the course of several hours. My heart ached as I read it but it was also nourishing. The scenes in the book were so relatable, so evocative of what it’s like to be in the impossible position of being a close friend and supporter to someone who wishes to die by their own hand. The book’s protagonist was a concert pianist; I listened to Rachmaninof and opuses and Chopin and so forth on my phone as I read, which I never do. The book I felt like opened up this portal and I wanted to stay inside it and live in the false fiction world where suicide is only a story about a novel’s character and not a life-fact, not a reality. I thought about calling my one friend who I became very unexpectedly close with in the wake of L’s death. Me and this friend even dated briefly, or kissed on two separate occasions I should say, one of which was the morning after the memorial service held for L that this friend had come into town for. It was a whirlwind, we spent the next couple months in a very intense texting and long phone call style relationship that was both romantic and platonic. I probably could spend a very long time outlining and trying to process this relationship, and probably should, but I don’t have the time now. The point here is that them and me are bound in many ways, one of which is our mutual love for and loss of L. I thought for a long time about calling them but was afraid too. I just wanted to live in the narrative world, I didn’t want to leave the cavity/crater. It was a strange place to be in; I feel usually like I am less fearful socially; it is a raw nerve. Anyways the night consisted of me reading 100 pages of this excellent and bittersweet and melancholy and funny but heartwrenching book, which put me in a tender and fragile place, me ordering fried chicken and watching I’m Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix, which I think is an excellent movie so far but which I think is very very hard to watch and which took too much out of me so I switched to watching a nice documentary of the 2008 epic tennis match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. And that was nice and I hoped to drift into the blissful drowsiness fried chicken so often invites me into, but instead I had insomnia, likely a product of a mid-day nap and 8 or so hours recumbent reading and watching TV in bed. Every loud noise happened at just the wrong time. I tossed and turned, it was too hot, the sunday scaries loomed large, past relationships danced mercilessly across my mind’s eye, it just sucked. But after awhile it quieted down, the noise outside and the noise in my head, and I managed to fall asleep. This morning I wanted to sleep in, which is a bit of a warning sign for me, it means the day is daunting for me, it means life as I can imagine it is a bit unappealing, and so that’s tough. I am entering the liminal space again, the transition period between NYC and NC, I have about 20 days left here, and I suppose 20 days left on this blog as well. It’s tough to be transitioning, it stirs shit up. But this morning I prayed and meditated and journaled and at this moment I am stowed away in an empty office allowing myself to type my little heart out as a means of further processing my feelings at the (I think very reasonable) expense of about 20 minutes worth of productive time on the firm’s dime. And in fact I think an emotionally based me is more valuable and more capacious and more productive in the long term than a me who is preoccupied by grief that is unprocessed. So anyways that’s what I’ve got for now, life is a bit tough and raw but tolerable and ultimately good. I have a family Zoom meeting tonight that I know will be grounding, and also a meeting with some of L’s surviving friends and I think visiting with them will be healing for all involved. Thanks for reading.

7/15/2023

I was kinda slacking yesterday and today and it is now Monday morning so this post is gonna be brief and choppy so I can get them done and be current blogwise.

Morning run, malaise, finished work on DWLR comment, edited other comment. Stayed in bed mostly, watched some of a Netflix movie, feeling a bit down. I know I need to get God involved, which I feel like right now means Group Of Drunks; I have only been to one meeting this week, and I am feeling like my spirituality is at a bit of a trough. Perry Street AA meeting. Got in touch with that G.O.D. mentioned earlier, was good to be social and around recovery.

K birthday party at bar in Brooklyn. Also got in touch with another Group Of Drunks, though these were not sober drunks like in AA. It was good to see K, also got to see friends of his who are sort of acquaintances of mine at this point who used to be friends back in the band days, E, J, J, T, and especially D. But it’s like alienating and weird to be at a bar, and the friendships just aren’t that deep yet, since I haven’t been contributing to them. And many of the people are heading art-wardly in a direction I have kinda given up. Anyways it’s not that deep, I’m glad I got to see my friend for his birthday, I hope to deepen all friendships and treat them as the precious valuable things that they are. I biked home in the extreme humidity, bought an italian hoagie and ate it and went to sleep.

7/14/2023

Which is worse: spending a workday on the precipice of falling asleep, or being extremely awake through an unpleasant workday experience? Wishing not to participate in any hierarchy of suffering, this blog-court assumes without deciding that both are deeply unpleasant in their own special ways.

The unpleasant workday experience I had today was the experience of giving an oral argument before a biglaw firm attorney roleplaying as a judge in a moot court proceeding. More specifically, the unpleasant experience is doing that but (1) not preparing adequately and (2) not caring during the proceeding itself. We had a couple weeks notice that we would be required to do a mandatory 10-minute oral presentation on a mooted case before an attorney acting as a judge; we were given a 60ish page packet with briefings from multiple adverse parties to prepare with, and as far as I know we were not to do outside research. In fact, the instructions were to “spend no more than a few hours preparing” because this was supposed to be a “fun” practice event. I happened to be assigned to go in the very last slot, which meant that in the earlier days of the week, I got feedback from my summer associate peers which I used to calibrate my expectations. Each of them said it was chill and that they overprepared. Each of them said it was not very serious and that it was easy. I doubt they were trying to trick me, as they had nothing to gain from doing so, but I must say that my experience was precisely the opposite. The “judge” was not chill, he was aggressive and mean, asked questions about areas of law that were not covered in our packet, and seemed to relish his chance to disrupt us at every turn. I will say now that I get it. You want to convey to the summer associate a kind of worst case scenario, offer them a glimpse of how bad it can be doing oral arguments before a judge, such athat the summer associate takes their first real oral argument seriously and prepares adequately. I think I took that lesson away from this whole thing, so if that was the goal, super, you did it. That being said, I just didn’t spend much time preparing. I read all the briefs, extracted talking points that were essentially just my party’s brief argument, and that was it. I didn’t practice in the mirror, I didn’t try to memorize anything, I didn’t spend a lot of time immersing myself in the other side’s arguments to steel myself for possible objections, etc. etc. etc. It didn’t help that the case was also a deeply boring case about whether or not a corporation could get a putative class action case against it consolidated via the law of multi-district litigation, which if you’re anything like me you struggled to stay awake through this sentence. Also I was on the side of the corporation, like that was my assigned role. So you know like the “correct” thing to do in this role is to act as a zealous advocate for my client. I think that if this were a real case, I could probably muster the give-a-shit and rise to the occasion. But I just didn’t bring that energy to this moot court proceeding, and I got excoriated for it. I also memorized nothing and had no meaningful internal sense of the facts or legal theories, so I only was referencing the notes I printed out, which included me awkwardly silently shuffling through the papers I was holding from time to time. I actually went second (I was respondent, the other poor summer I was paired with was the movant), and I got to see just how harsh of a treatment I was in for. The movant was a summer who plans to be fully corporate, transactional, does not want to do litiagation at all. She clearly prepared more than me but fared only marginally better if at all with respect to being shit on by the “judge.” As I watched that happen, I had a miniature moment of acceptance and in that moment I grieved the death of any shred of putative capability I might have been hoping to convey to this associate. In that way, my actual “performance” was a bit easier, because I had fully conceded to my inner-most self that I would fail, and fail I did. I did my best to keep a straight face, even though I felt variously like crying, leaving, and rolling my eyes. Eventually it ended, I was able to remain non-reactive, I thanked the associate for his time at the end and did my best to scrub that thanking of any of the psycho-metadata that could belie how fundamentally at odds I was in that moment to the act of thanking. Anyways it ended. I will not be selected for any trial team’s oral argument based on that performance. I doubt I will be docked in any meaningful way or that I will be denied an offer because of it. I hope that if I do find myself in a situation where it is my job to argue before a judge in real life, I come more prepared and with more zeal. I did feel more or less gut-punched by the experience, and have been doing my best to shake it off since. It was a bad feeling.

I went for a run after work, lightened somewhat by the This American Life piped into my head as I ran, though it could not completely crowd out the heavy feeling of “failure” I was contending with as a result of the moot trainwreck. I managed to finish my 6 miles which always makes me feel accomplished, and I was especially nice to the door man, and he was especially nice to me. (Also I forgot to mention that I worked double hard on an actual real legal assignment for an hour or so after I got done with my moot thing, driven, perhaps pathologically, to prove that I do give a damn and am a worthy employee, and probably subconsciously repeating a mantra in my head to the effect of “my voice is strong on the page even if it is weak in my throat” or something to that effect. Not a pretty picture! But true.) Anyways after my run I attempted to balm my pitiful work moment with french fries from the restaurant whose name is Pommes Frittes, which serves the poutine I got the other day, and the only items on its menu are french fries served in various ways. This time I got “Greek Frittes” which was a double order of french fries piled with feta and dillweed and lemon and some peppers or some shit, it was fine but not as good as poutine; still, I devoured it with great relish and kind of watched the first episode of Season 2 of the Bear while I did so, which I found unpleasant, mostly because I was already in a distressed mood and didn’t want to watch TV about people being stressed, I think. I sort of threw in the towel on the day and went to bed around 9:30 p.m., soothed by the amniotic monotone of my favorite youtuber, Bosh n Roll, who makes Magic the Gathering Online daily content. It is for whatever reason deeply, deeply comforting to me. I got to sleep. I live to moot another day. It’s not that deep. Thanks for reading.

7/13/2023

I didn’t get much sleep last night and so I was sort of zombified at work today. I think today was the closest I have come so far to succumbing to the desire to curl up under my desk like a dog and sleep. I didn’t succumb, but I came close. It took four cups of coffee to keep me upright and awake but my mind was underwater so it wasn’t a very productive day. Still, there’s a kind of pleasant zaniess that tends to come over me when I am sleep deprived so I got to enjoy that. One of the partners on our floor ordered us lunch from Bubby’s nearby and I ate a colossal hot friend chicken sandwich (in the Nashville style that has become popular recently, with pickles, it was so good), and a slice of cherry pie and a quarter of a big ol pancake, which I dressed with ample butter and syrup, which was none too wise given how I was already on the precipice of sleep, and it was this decision that really pushed me to the brink of twilight, though I somehow managed to abscond from the jurisdiction of the sandman and finish out my day. After work I waded through the pool of sweat-wet heat and sunshine between work and my apartment and arrived in my apartment which was a cool enclave and alcove of air conditioning that I appreciated all the more in contrast with G’s tiny cubicle/sauna room. I had a Zoom call with a dear professor who taught a critical legal theory class I was in last semester who graciously offered some very specific, very critical, and very encouraging feedback. She offered lots of criticism, but also rich veins of praise interspersed, just enough to keep me keen and motivated, not daunted or doubtful. It was mostly critical, but it was delivered in the way that a colleague delivers serious critiques to another colleague who they expect can rise to the occasion of producing top-quality work. Or at least that’s how I received it, and there’s not really any good reason not to have received it as such. As anyone familiar with my writing via this blog or otherwise will be unsurprised to learn, I was told my writing was beautiful and my observations interesting, but that I needed to apply a more rigorous and coherent legal argument to make my piece publishable in a law review. She encouraged me at the end, saying “this is gonna be great” and commended the work, but reminded me that I needed to think hard, to grapple with the tough problems, and produce a clear, sustained, focused, and legal argument, not a theoretical or philospohical or policy or poetic one. So I have my work cut out for me. But it is this sort of encouragement from a talented and capable and highly accomplished professor and mentor that really steels my nerve and makes me believe my work can be completed, and I deeply appreciated it. I will try to get on that once I have finished my current Note for the law review; it feels so exciting to have so much writing on the horizon just ahead. Ok, I’m running out of time, so that’s all for now, thanks for reading.

7/12/2023

Hot night run. It was 85 at 8pm, and it’s so so humid here. I have confirmed that there are in fact mosquitoes living in the stairwell of my building, which sucks. Last night I ate Thai takeout and watched John Early’s standup special, which I really really liked. It was not just funny, it also made me feel feelings like sadness and nostalgia and bitterness and relief. It reminded me of early Zach Galifinakis’s standup like Live at the Purple Onion, where music figured heavily into the comedy routine and there was a certain patina of wry melancholy over the whole act.

Anyways that was last night. Today at work we did a corporate Leadership presentation that was pretty good and also pretty boring. They talked about the Chilean miners who got trapped and survival under the most adverse circumstances. I was in a kind of giddy good mood all day because I was looking forward to seeing G. I had excellentl burgers from Au Cheval for lunch and then nice coffee from Landskap in the afternoon, and honestly not that productive of a workday. I was able to have a meeting with one of the partners of the law firm who is a very accomplished civil rights attorney turned BigLaw guy. I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive. I asked him in soft gentle terms how he holds to his values while working for the big company with all its clients of dubious ethical integrity. He gave a thoughtful and non bullshit answer that included advice that I check in with myself regularly and be prepared to leave and take a pay cut to pursue what really drives me and to not fall victim to the golden handcuffs. The advice was solid, happy he gave me the time of day, left feeling not too terribly different than I did when I entered, although I did leave with a book recommendation: Ethical Ambition by Derrick Bell, an author I am familiar with as of last year, when I took Critical Legal Theory and Race and the Law, which introduced me to Bell as a foundational CRT scholar, so I’ll try to pick it up and read it seriously. Will it be the one book that unlocks the secret of how to be simultaneously rich in spirit and rich in riches? Will it moulder mercilessly unread on the shelf beside The Ethical Slut and Sacred Activism and The Alchemy of Happiness and How to be Kind of Happy in Law School? Or will it get the kind of dogged, dog-eared devotion I give to the big book, Alcoholics Anonymous? Who knows. I can leave that conversation feeling at least somewhat confident that I am abiding by the AA maxim: ask other people—people whose lives you admire, people who maybe you even want to emulate—how they did what they did, how they got where they got, and what they think you should do. The main point is to not enter this profession with prejudices one way or the other, to remain teachable, in every season and every shade of my life, and to also try not to silo off my work life in such a way that I trick myself into believing that my Higher Power isn’t in operation, worth consulting, worth fearing and following and disclosing myself to and drawing nearer to. Just like I have to not cabin my romantic/sex life in the same way. Silo and cabin are buildings that became verbs that basically mean “block off.” You could use other buildings. Apartment could be a verb to describe apartness. “I apartment my discussion of Magic the Gathering to online forums only, thereby sparing my friends family colleagues and comrades.” Needs work, but I like the idea. I remember that there is a early 2000s rap song that uses ‘church’ as a verb. Update I just looked it up and it was a T.I. song but he wasn’t using church as a verb he was saying ‘when I chirp shawty chirp back’ which speaks to a now disused walkie-talkie functionality on a cell phone. Anyways so I guess that means church is up for grabs, verbwise. “I churched the weed in the DVD case until I can be sure my parents aren’t going through my room snooping anymore.” Even though these are dumb I think it’s a fun idea. Ok moving on…

I hung out with G, it was just nice. I have been working to steel myself for a severance that feels inevitable while also not future-tripping such that I can be present and wear whatever it is we have like a loose garment. It’s just a bit bittersweet when we hang and I feel like our chemistry is at about 85–90%; not perfect, occasionally a prolonged pause where I scroll frantically through my mindpage looking for a good thing to talk about, but we essentially vibe just fine, and we are both kind and breezy and we get along easily, and there are little moments of unexpected tenderness that feel to me like the way it feels to be in a relationship with someone who you don’t expect to not be in your life in three weeks time. Like for example this morning we woke up at her place together after I cooked like a cage-free chicken all night in her tiny Brooklyn apartment bedroom, we woke up together and drank coffee (a tragically weak, watery affair that I drank two cups of and felt barely any more awake; this is a consequence of me preparing my usual morning cup with an aeropress whose extraction ratio whatever produces a thick luscious espresso-like cup of coffee all in 90 seconds with no muss or fuss and in the comfort of my home, anyways I digress), and there was like ten minutes where we just talked idly and she sat on the arm of a big oversized armchair such that I could sit in the seat of the chair and rest my chin on her thigh and in that moment I felt like maybe the way I felt was the way a happy dog feels around a human companion it trusts and relies on fully, without doubt, slobbering and empty-headed in the best way. Obviously the moment passed, goodbyes were said, texts and smiley faces exchanged in an affirming rhythm, and just like the other times I felt the tide of closeness fade back into that big ocean of people and feelings whose waves I am at least today and in this moment grateful to be slapped around by. I also got another book recommendation from G, which was B.J. Novak’s recent book of short comedy stories, and I read a couple and had that specific feeling of being like this is excellent and beyond my capacity as a writer and simultaneously this looks so easy I could do it why don’t I do it, which I think is not a very humble or realistic way to think, but it’s where my mind went, and there’s something pleasing about having this little weird germ of a dream to be an unhinged pointless inconsequential comedy writer whose contribution to society is absurd delight via prose instead of, idk the benefits that litigation brings. I’m happy when I’m holding a dream in my chest, I’m also in many ways feeling like my life is dreamy already, so thank you, thanks for being a part of that and inviting me into your dream. Thanks for reading, too.

7/11/2023

Today I am much less agitated. In AA we say “if I’m disturbed it’s because I am disturbable.” A paean to personal responsibility, ode to owning up. I remember very clearly a phone call I had three years ago with an AA old timer who told me that I needed to work on becoming less reactive. While this might not seem like much of an insight, in that moment it seemed like alchemy. I am reactive, like a big chunk of lithium in a lake. In my head I draw a fine distinction between being reactive (a liability, a maladjustment of instinct, a product of disordered thought and wounded spirit) and responsive (an asset, a proof of presence, a talisman of interactivity, the opposite of my old frenemy: dissociation; and also kin to responsibility, which can manifest as an ability to respond, for me). So whether it was because I was summarily flaked on or because my needs weren’t met or because I was lodged in a maladaptive thought loop or whatever, I was agitatable. Perhaps I had agita (a word the NYT crossword puzzle website says first appeared in the American English lexicon in the 1980s, when it was primarily used by Italian-American and Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers, and is a slang word that can describe a feeling of anxiety or the indigestion that comes from eating too much spicy food, perhaps derived from the Italian word “agitare,” or “to agitate,” or maybe derived from a dialectical pronunciation of the Italian word “acido,” meaning “acid.”), the ur-agitaiton, psychic dyspepsia with a gastronomic root. Who knows. My agitation is evidence I am human. My ability to choose not to act out in response to it is a blessing. I notice myself counting my blessings on this blog a lot, it’s weird how in a moment in the day I will feel unspiritual, reduced to a research machine, a finely tuned Googler, a receptacle for free lunch and $7 lattes, a 200-pound air-conditioning sponge. But when I get to my little safe place, my electronic enclave wherein I have the time and motivation to type words for my blog, where I can be recumbent and silly and prosaic and cursory and asinine and unauthorized and apocryphal and emotional and insane, well I guess I just get put into a nice mood by that usually, or if not put in a nice mood invited to be in a flow state or something, an existence undefined by the corporeal and corporate…and unbound by style or conventions. I don’t really have a point. I did my work today, I felt my feelings, I moved capably through my obligations, met most tasks with satisfactory attentiveness and vigor. It is very hot in the city. The sun is a hard block of heat, turns all the hard blocks into hot stovetops, the blacktop and sidewalks are hot as a bad laptop with a fan problem except instead of just warming up your legs uncomfortably the heat clothes you. Fully dressed, all dressed in hot flowing robes of breathless sunshine and a permanent sweatshirt of heat that is also sticky as wet taffy because somehow it gets just as grossly humid in the city as it did down south, it feels like, though I bet I’m just in a grass-is-greener type situation. Two meetings today with mentors fell through, more flakes with very good reasons, maybe the summer heat is melting the adhesive that usually holds calendars together. I have to say it was a relief; I get to luxuriate on the page and in my air-conditioned apartment instead of sitting up straight and making eye contact with my webcam, taking notes and so forth. I feel like I want to say in the shade for a year. I have a big cold water bottle next to me and faith that I will recharge. Thanks for reading.

7/10/2023

The first part of today was crummy. Crumby? It stretched my patience like Gumby. It was one of those days that is low quality for no particular reason, or at least for no discernable reason. It is I guess presumptuous of me to think I am perceptive enough, that my mindheartbodyspirit is capacious enough to contain an understanding of what turns the days—once thick slabs of well-buttered texas toast—to crumbling crumbs on the bedsheets of my psyche.

Nothing bad happened today, I was just in a bad mood. I think maybe I was in a bad mood because things didn’t go my way yesterday and because I ended up spending too much time alone and overindulging on my consumable main vice these days: food. And speaking of food, perhaps the day was crummy because of people being flaky. I was wondering yesterday: what do I mean when I use the term “emotional honesty” ? Do I mean I am telling the truth about how I feel? Again, seems a bit presumptive of a premise, in as much as, if such a thing as emotional honesty of that sort exists, it would require me to be able to know how I feel all the time, be capable of articulating it, and be willing to communicate it. So it’s one of those things where like idk maybe I should interrogate that phrase a bit before using it all willy nilly. Anyways, to be honest about my feelings (I think) I felt let down by a series of flakes. It’s not nice to call them flakes and I want to make space in my heart to acknowledge that people cancel and modify plans for very good reasons, that I typically see only the surface of the complex deep lived experience of the people around me, even the loved and liked ones. So like it’s no one’s fault that flaking occurred. But it was just a situation where I had plans to hang with E, the new person in my life, the borderline friend, the attractive person garlanded with newness in my eyes. They have studying to do for the MPRE, I know exactly what it’s like to stress about that test, they pushed our hang to next weekend, I totally get it. Also my sponsor’s Mom is sick and in the hospital, so our meeting too was postponed. Also my sponsee, a new Dad, is sick with a virus and needed to postpone. Also my regular family Zoom call was postponed due to scheduling conflicts. Again, no one did anything wrong by flaking; I feel like I want to be clear that the crummy-ness I feel is a product of my limited capacity to cope with unexpected changes to my routine, especially when they cascade like they did yesterday. And it’s like as I type this that I can kind of see, more clearly now, how it was my own craving for predictability, my own expectations (premeditated resentments) that put me down in the crumb dumps. So like basically I had this great day yesterday in the first half but then after my planned tasks ended I was left to my own devices and chose to just be alone and read and eat and watch TV which felt good until it didn’t and put me in a sour mood. I should say that I have now been living without SSRIs or mood stabilizers or sleep aids for nearly two months now, which is a huge deal in my book, and this series of events, looked at in that light, to me seems like an unfortunate but ordinary life circumstance. And I got through it.

Today I managed to stay on task at work even though I am assigned to an intellectual property case that I find very boring and got assigned to without asking for it: welcome to working for a job in capitalism, I get it. The blessing is that I was able to take care of business, not nap or mutiny or go AWOL, all of which crossed my mind, probably because I watched Pirates of the Carribean last weekend. I was in a crap mood at 5pm when work ended, I walked in the scorching city heat to a meeting and tried to call friends in AA to chat and get out of my head but they were all indisposed, so it was just me and the peanut gallery of my psyche. Thankfully, the meeting was just what I needed, and it did that incredible thing that is so hard for me to find a way to safely accomplish: it softened my heart. My vim and venom simmered down, I allowed myself to be concerned with and involved emotionally in the life narratives of others. I got more right sized. I exited, still somewhat barbed and bristly but much less sour. I decided to go buy myself poutine from a french fries restaurant which was 0.4 miles from my house because this city is fucking amazing and hyperdense with a cornucopia of wonderful food that I can enjoy, hopefully that I will enjoy in moderation and reasonable portions. I ate most of my delicious poutine, watched a documentary about surfing, and then sat down to type this and yesterday’s entry, a huge blessing for someone like me who is naturally inclined to tamp my emotional experience down, to avoid it, to run away. Instead I sat with it, articulated what I could internally, and my trusty fingers managed to type all this out. It is a blessing to be alive. I am grateful for today. Thank you for reading.

Update: I realized as I finished typing this that today's date is 7/10, which is 7-10, which is the most loathesome split in all of bowling, which numerologically helps explain why today was so crummy. Glad I got to the bottom of that.

7/9/2023

Today I worked on my law review Note a bit in the morning, decided to go for a run down Chelsea Piers before it got too hot, and that was fine. I found a nice bagel place on my block and got a big fresh delicious bagel with a solid shmear of cream cheese and a double shot of espresso and I was as happy as a pig with breakfast. I got showered off and biked to Perry Street to chair the noon meeting there. It was a wonderful experience, I felt like my soul was glowing by the end of it. That is 95% because of how I felt like I was finally in the middle of service in AA in NYC for the first time since I’ve been here, how it feels consequential and needful to be the chair of a meeting, to conduct it, to be the rails. I listened attentively to the shares, I identified, nodded hard, kept track of time, and got us out of there exactly on time. The other 5% I’m not proud to say is that I saw perhaps the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen and she was sitting in the side front row in such a way that our faces were always pointing at each other. And I was like idk awed by the splendor of how pretty she was, which feels objectifying or like not feminist to say or something, but for better or for worse this was my experience. And so like the whole meeting I was trying to do the spiritually fit thing, which is to look exactly and only at the person who is sharing and to listen actively and attentively and to fix my gaze at theirs so as to not get into the situation where you get caught accidentally looking at the face of someone you think looks nice. Both because generally that’s good etiquette and because I want to make AA a safe space free from leering and because it almost feels like some sort of spiritual crucible for me to resist the instinct to be awed by beauty and preoccupied by crushes and to feel the exhilaration of excitement that attractive people cause me to experience sometimes—often, these days, this hot summer, in SoHo and in the Village and surrounded by people who just seem like they look like models to me, extremely posh and fashionable. Sigh. I wish I were less preoccupied by the superficial, by aesthetics, by looks, by shapes. But this is me being emotionally honest, maybe.

Anyways I spent more time on this page than is proportional to the amount of space in my head this beauty took up, which was actually not all that much, and it was the carrying of the message that carried the day. And then the meeting was over and I sat on the stoop and called R & S and had a lovely amorphous conversation about this and that and nothing at all and it was clear they were happy to hear from me and I was so happy to speak to them and I went home still glowing from that. I stopped and got big NY slices of pizza, ate them in the park, threw crust crumbs to the pigeons and those little hoppy brown birds. I came back and took a nap because I was tired, and then woke up, drank coffee, and finished my book, The Professor and the Madman. This took several hours, and I figured was a great use of my unexpectedly unclaimed time. I did like reading it and it does always feel special to get to the end of a book, especially lately because I never read for pleasure anymore with law school. But by the end of it I was feeling that strange warped way I sometimes feel post-nap. I tried calling a friend but they were busy, and so I decided to cook frozen fried chicken, but then I decided I wanted Japanese Curry/katsu sauce to go with it, so went to the grocery store to try to find some, and I couldn’t find it so I got some weird barbeque sauce and I also got a Twirl and some pistachio baklava and a crunchy cadbury candy bar and I figured I’d treat myself but well long story short I overindulged and just ate way too much food and felt too awake for how late it was and watched a Nathan for You documentary called Finding Frances which was fine but left me feeling weird and then tried to watch Magic the Gathering youtube videos to fall asleep but it was too hot and muggy and I swear there was a mosquito in my room and people outside kept honking their horns late into the night and at one point I dreamed I was falling down a flight of stairs and got a jolt of feeling startled so visceral that it woke me up and I found myself contending with my first really crummy night of insomnia since I’ve been in NYC, borne of that poison combo of having-taken-a-nap and coffee-after-5pm. I did not sleep well, I woke up with a riotous heart that wished to stay in bed indefinitely, it was a classic caustic case of the sunday scaries, I hated it.

7/8/2023

I haven’t posted for the last two days because I have had the good fortune of being-doing-spending-time-with-friends for most of the time I have been awake and not running or working for the law firm or working for the law review. Which is a blessing! Today I spent the first six or so hours working as an editor to another student’s piece of legal writing for the law review, then switching to revising my own piece which will be published next year. The work was a bit tedious, a lot of attention miniscule detail and work to make statements authoritative via scholarly citation, which was cerebrally fatiguing, and even irritating by the end, just because so much effort can result in very little progress sometimes. But I’ve given myself plenty of time to just chip away at my piece, and so I have the luxury of only spending a few hours at a time on it, and I have the previously unattainable capacity to create a writing/editing routine, I regularly encounter and surmount the fear of writing that has paralyzed me for many years, I have made a practice of being in the word doc, spending time on the page, and giving myself permission to do next to nothing, for the sake of keeping up the practice. So I still have a ways to go, but both my piece and the other student’s piece have improved significantly over the months thanks to the editing regime, and I think both have gotten elevated to a place they could never have reached if either author was just working alone. To me that’s inspiring and encouraging, and I’m proud to be a part of that process.

The second half of the day was spent with G, who is fun and kind and lovely and sharp and canny and has savoir faire and who I like being in the company of. In yet another moment of uncanny encounter, I went down to the subway at the exactly right time to see her getting off of a car to transfer from the line she took from Brooklyn to the line I was going to take to meet her at Times Square. Dime’s Square on Friday and Times Square on Saturday. We rode the subway together, she did the cool thing where she didn’t need to use the pole/handrail to keep her balance, though at one point we did get violently jostled and she grabbed on to me to keep from falling, which ruled, and made me feel strong as an oak tree. We got to the AMC in Times Square and watched, of all things, Pirates of the Carribean, the first one, the movie based on a Disney World ride. It was fun and action-packed and provided just the right antidote to a morning overloaded with intellectualism. We shared a giant popcorn bucket and a large Sprite freestyled with Blueberry-Pomegrantate syrup which was crazy sweet and tasty. We got to hold hands during the movie and I felt really happy to be close with her in that moment, appreciating the date for what it is, and I did not find myself stuck in the past or preoccupied with the future. Thank you Captain Jack Sparrow; me timbers somehow remain unshivered. Also we had a moment on the escalator where she was a few steps above me and she turned back to me and we kissed briefly because our faces were at about the same height, and I loved that and it ruled. After the movie we went and watched almost an entire game of basketball at The Cage on west Fourth Street, and that also ruled. Some spectators said “hi Larry!” to me in a good natured way, referring to my uncanny likeness to basketball legend Larry Bird, which happens to me about 60% of the time that I am around people who play basketball. There was a tinge of worry or doubt in the hour or so we spent watching basketball, which was me being like oh no this is just another form of media, we aren’t really being present with one another, we are just side by side viewing moving pictures and moving bodies. But that passed, we chit chatted through the game, made our way to Washington Square park afterward, and enjoyed some slide guitar played with a lighter in a refreshingly cool and overcast and breezy day that was just on the verge of rain without raining. We got to talk just a little bit about relationships, though not our own; instead I got to hear a bit about how her last five-year relationship went, how it was not too toxic but ultimately codependent, how she felt she lost herself a bit in it, how she was happy to be out of that and also out of the prescribed/proscribed/circumscribed life-path of dental school world. She was happy to be striking out on her own path, improvising, and she felt she had found more of her own genuine identity outside that old relationship and outside the professional school world. It was helpful context for me; I think knowing that she is so weary of codependence and got out of that kind of relationship relatively recently helps me make sense of why I feel like I’m being kept at arm’s length. I think it’s practical and reasonable given my temporary availability, and I sort of like the idea of me being a kind of palate cleanser to help her move away from codependency and hopefully toward a relationship where she can find and be her authentic self without fear. So it feels important to me at this point to give her a lot of affection when we are nearby, because that’s emotionally honest for me, and to give her plenty of space otherwise, and to not allow myself to get caught up in expectations, because that that’s probably the safest for both of us. In AA we say expectations are premeditated resentments. Speaking of which, I have committed to go chair a meeting at Perry Street near Kip’s Bay, so I am gonna go bike over there now. Thanks for reading.

7/7/2023

I got to encounter the wonderful fecund phenomenon of finding out an old friendship is/was dormant-not-dead. I hung out with R for the first time in many years. We became friends about 13 years ago in the context of the anarchist subculture. He’s younger than me by a few years but has always seem more learnéd in punk. He told me wild stories about what the covid years looked like for him: collecting unemployment checks, surfing every day, going to wild protests every evening, and going to big lawless open-air raves every night, and all the while falling in love with the person who became his current partner. It sounded like pure pleasure, anarchic hedonism, uncontrollable jouissance. We ate dinner at a nice vegan thai place in the Lower East Side, then R took me to Dime’s Square, then we got ice cream and R walked me home. It was a hot, muggy night. We actually, sadly, watched a cyclist on a Citibike get doored pretty bad, tried to comfort and counsel him a bit, he was a bit dazed but also clearly fully adrenalized, a place me and R had both been in the past as long-time cyclists who have both gotten in wrecks. Luckily it wasn’t too violent of a collision, but it was still scary to see. I asked R to tell me about a good surfing story and he told me about going to Puerto Rico and jumping in the water with a bunch of bioluminescent organisms late at night and seeing the ultra-rich colors of the sea through snorkel goggles. We talked about love and relationships and video games and old friends and exercise and work and poetry and the city. It was easy, effortless; our friendship was an old empty building, abandoned for a few years but structurally sound, still welcoming, still capable of providing shelter. I’m so grateful that I get to be in relationships like this.

7/6/2023

Today was a calmer day. Fear did not define it. It was generally uneventful. Text messages were returned, emails too, and the inside of my head felt more like it was upholstered with reality. E and I were supposed to hang out tonight, her little cousins are in town from Florida so she’s gonna hang with them. Good to keep family first. I honestly am not sure why she asked me to hang out; I’m trying to abide by the AA saw: “what other people think of me is none of my business.” Die-hard biglawblog readers may remember that E was an early crush I had here, the subject of my little minisaga “disaggregating the crush,” wherein I tried to make sense of the knot of attractions I felt toward her—the romantic, the aesthetic, the political, the academic, the ideological, the kinesthetic. When I see her I hope I can be exactly myself and that we can become friends. I think the fact that I’m dating G will help with that. Although there was some fleeting thought this morning that it would be electrifying if it turned out E had a crush on me and that that somehow came up when we hung out; I fantasized about being put in the ethical dilemma that I might feel if I knew two people I had crushes on had crushes on me at the same time. It is I think a childish and common fantasy. I live in America where excess, especially sexual excess is at once monetized and weaponized and commodified and lauded and lorded over and my prayer practice and my meditation and my spiritual seeking, the goal of all that is to board it over. I will get over it. I hope to be a kind and present and realistic acquaintance or friend to E and to be unencumbered by the ugly yoke of crush-preoccupation that could spoil an otherwise mutually beneficial nascent connection. I will try to stop overthinking it!

I spent all day working on a memo on the law of psychedelics in America which I am finding unexpectedly extremely interesting. As I research, I don’t feel tempted to use at all (I never really liked psychedelics anyways, I mostly always had bad trips; I much preferred stimulants and benzos and opiates and booze and dissociatives…basically every other category of drug besides psychedelics). I do feel this like glimmer of hope for the potential recipients of the drugs, many of whom it turns out are potentially going to be veterans who have suffered PTSD and TBIs and Operator Syndrome and other horrors. AA has taught me to have empathy and love for categories of people who people in my political affinity group often dehumanize and mock. Like I hate the military and I hate the police state, but I want also to be able to preserve my capacity to honor the humanity of soldiers and cops, who have probably been coerced by capitalism, who may be traumatized and emotionally warped by their work in a way that felt permanent before they had the opportunity to potentially receive treatment, and it seems like psilocybin and MDMA and DMT may have therapeutic outcomes for them, and I want them to have that chance at relief, because I believe hurt people hurt people, and that the worst of us deserve compassion, and that we are not our careers or our worst decision, and so forth. And there’s also inevitably a thread or throughline that connects psychedelics to spirituality, as many have roots in indigenous rites and faith communities. I know pretty little about it all right now, but I am taught by AA to be quick to see where religious people are right, and I like how there is a certain sacramental quality to the way advocates for legalized psychedelics talk about them. I think for me a mood altering substance is 100% out of the question in any circumstance. But I think for non-addicts this may be a path people can follow to their Higher Power, and if that is so, I am for it, and if I’m wrong I hop my Higher Power will forgive me and get me back on the right track. I think it could be interesting to try to write a law review article about psychedelics, and am wondering how much of the work product I’ve created for the firm I could maybe take home and use as a starting point for my own research project. If that were to happen it would be far in the future, I actually have another piece I wrote that I am having a conversation with a professor about next week, with the hopes of getting it into publishable shape. But I have to remember to actually get this current piece finished first. One article at a time. It’s an unbelievable blessing to believe I could even possibly get one, let alone multiple, articles published. I am basically writing all day these days, and I love it so much. I’ll leave it there for now. Thanks for reading.

7/5/2023

The fear.

I think the fear is a human condition. It goes by a lot of names. We simultaneously evoke it and ward it off with all sorts of symbols: evil eye nazar amulets, the endless iterations on the human skull that adorn the banners hung behind punkers and embroidered on tattered denim raiment, neatly printed warnings on poisons and perils, gruesome and fearsome tattoos inked deep in our skin, the violent, menacing pareidolia of police cruisers’s grills, one could extend the list endlessly. (I had to look up pareidolia, it’s the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none; the specific phenomenon I’m talking about here is how your standard issue Dodge Charger or Challenger or Ford Interceptor outfitted to be a police cruiser has a front that looks like an angry face, anyways now this is a huge digression.) And one more digression which I think about all the time: when I was about 4 months sober, living in an apartment in Charlotte with six other men and sharing a room with one of them, one of my men I shared a room with had a physical ailment that kept him bedridden most of the time, he I think had gout or some sort of debilitating goiter, he was one of my favorate people in the house because he was so quiet, and he often slept with his shirt off in our hot apartment in the summer of 2018, and on his back was a tattoo with a face that looked like half-skull half-jester, slightly demented grinning rictus; a fully, totally, nightmarishly menacing gestalt countenance—and beneath the face in ornate but legible letters was the maxim “YOU WILL DIE.” I think about it all the time. I don’t know that I’ve ever come across a tattoo quite like that one. It was completely accurate. In my head, based on the shabby but capable aesthetic of the tattoo, and the checkered pasts we all had in that place, I made up a story that my roommate got that tattoo in prison. Who knows if that’s true. But it made a deep impact on me. Anyways, the fear. It comes and goes, it visits unannounced, silently departs, lingers unwelcomely at inopportune times. One of its favorite haunts is on Sunday nights, at least in capitalist corners of the globe. As the last little trickle of autonomy and self-determination circles the drain ahead of a week of alienated wage labor, the fear comes. But the fear is manifold and bespoke. For me lately the fear comes up a lot when I think of G; when I think of what it will be like to be without G, when I begin to think of myself as a man nearing age 36 who has been unable to sustain any relationship for more than two years, and most for under one year, and I begin to needlessly ascribe negative meaning to that pattern, as I compare my life trajectory with the status quo cadence of love and marriage. Today I was alone in the dreary catacombs of the fear for too long. Any little thing can send me there it seems like: a perceived lack of enthusiasm (via text, of course) to a proposal to hang out with G does it this time. When a smiley face is included in a text that comes in three hours later, likely an afterthought to her, it feels like I have been dunked in an above-ground swimming pool full of ice cold crystal clear water after wandering the desert for three days. I am melodramatic because sadly my internal experience feels rather severe when it comes to the troubles (real or self-made or both) that come with dating, that come with the dangerous business of being concerned with cultivating partnership, coupling, connection, reciprocity, mutual regard, shared vulnerability, safe tandem imperfection, that interlocking interdependent intimidating intimacy so carelessly called love. I was there for awhile today. It hurt in there, it’s scary, I feel like when I’m there I start cataloguing all the minor and major arcana of mistakes I’ve made over the past decade or so, start to index each missed opportunity, romancewise, start to list in my head every person I dated who I thought at the time wasn’t the right match who I wish I was with now, and cursing every ms. right who decided to move on to greener pastures without me. It is exhausting to be so fearful, it is heavy, it is ego, it is self, it is absence of faith, but more than that maybe it is a lack of appreciation—an inability to attend to and embrace—of the solid non-romantic intimacies that surround me, that make themselves ambiently available, that are prepared to answer that phone if I would dare pick it up and ask for help, that abundant care that flows invisibly when I become fixated on the one person who I think I’m not getting enough romantic love from, a fixation wholly decoupled from reality and based in simple base primal fear.

I hate being there. I got out of it. Not on my own, never on my own, but I got helped out of the hole by the one-two punch of attending and sharing at an AA meeting, and then having a long heartfelt conversation with a dear old friend who I hadn’t caught up with in awhile. M, it turns out, is suffering, is going through it, is having a hard time of it. His girlfriend of three years pulled the plug on their partnership; he feels betrayed and abandoned, pessimistic and maudlin, but yet he’s wise and circumspect and sage in his natural bitterness. I love him. All around me there’s this thicket of thorny blooming nourishing sylvan friendship, I just have to bother to reach out and grasp it, let myself get grasped, become entangled with the lushness of it all. I hate that M is suffering and I love that we shared our moment of despair together, that we got to be alone together, as Des Ark said, that we collaborated on misery toward a settled acquiescence to a season of despair and a commitment to surviving it. I got to be present for my friend. I heard about his struggles, I did some commisserating and mutual affirmation. M told me he reads the blog, that he loves it. Hearing that my writing resonated with him did me a world of good. I have a mind that makes the meticulous recurrent mistake of believing it is apart-from, as we say in AA. But I am a part of. M is wise without a program, but we arrive somewhere that is familiar to me as a product of the kind of shared struggle dialog that takes place so commonly and candidly in AA. AA or no, both M and I are fuckups and good friends, we have trauma, we have traumatized, we have lived hard and lived soft, have made plenty of mistakes, and have accumulated wisdom and a deep practical empathy along the way, maybe despite ourselves, or maybe inevitably we get tumbled toward our higher natures for no good reason other than the best reason, which is unearned favor, which is Grace. I think that if we lived lives of pure comfort and had all needs met at all times we would wither. Whether this is kind or cold comfort to M I don’t know; it doesn’t matter, what matters is the time spent together, nearby, keeping company, keeping warm, keeping close. I was going to write other stuff but it feels unimportant and small now. The bullet point scaffolding I made originally but which I will not expand on (for today and tomorrow) were: Work, The fear, Treadmill 10K, AA Meeting (shared) Conversation with my dear old friend M, Biscuits and Bacon.

7/4/2023

(Continued from 7/5/2023 post, which was written at the same time as this one because I was out all day yesterday): Work on Note, Coney Island rained out, Went to the Met instead, Coffee, Exhaustion, Very good Greek food, 53rd and Third, Walked to riverside to see fireworks but went home at 9pm because it was too dang many people and because I had to get up early and switch from long weekend mode to work mode. It was good to be out and to not spend the day alone, which I kind of wanted to do at first. I hung with A and M, good friends from Law School, and was proud of myself for making time to spend with them instead of just doing my own thing. I like them and I’m glad we’re friends. It was cool to see the stuff in the met, and several paintings made me gasp because they were so beautiful. I will keep the experience of encountering art in my memory and not bother with trying to communicate about it, and in that way maybe I am being mindful or meditative or in-the-moment about it, who knows. All and all I am glad to have spent time with friends even though America is a country I have very bitter enmity toward for all its degradations, deprivations, subordination and subjugation, recent and for centuries. That’s enough for now, thanks for reading.

7/3/2023

The first thing I did today was work on my Note for Law Review. I finally got through all the comments I received from a Professor who I asked for feedback, and I think the piece is much stronger because of it. I feel passionately about the project, I also feel like a bit of a pretender, I also feel like I could have written a paper with a more deferential thesis, one that is not quite so radical. I guess this is the tradeoff, that I might be asked to answer for my views if I get like a judicial clerkship interview down the line or on the character and fitness part of the Bar Exam or whatever, but on the other hand I get to feel like I am making an argument that matches my values. Is it virtue signaling? Am I doing a performative thing? I think that would probably be a critique someone could make but I am trying to just be honest and earnest and then let the editorial staff determine what can stay. Ultimately it is nice to be invited to write. The experience of writing the Note is technical, rigorous, and exhausting; there is some glimmers of joy to it but not in the free-flowing improvisational way that this blog is. But I had the dream of being a writer and I do more writing today than I ever have before, between Law Review, all the memos and briefs and so forth I write at work, and this blog. I am grateful for that.

The Ramones have a song that goes "Rock rock, Rockaway Beach." Today I went back to Rockaway beach for the first time in several years, and I was pleasantly surprised about how not-covered-in-trash it was. It was a bone-jangling two hour bike ride each way, a ride that required constant vigilance to prevent from being clobbered by maniacal E-Bike zoomers barreling the wrong way down the bike lane, fiendish mo-pedders overtaking at every opportunity, the endless blockade of automobiles parked in the bike lane, and the ever-present caucus of absent-minded pedestrians in the phone zone. That’s not to mention the truly skeleton-rattling state of some of the roads, and my thin 100 psi road tires and total lack of shock absorption and aging body did not help with that. But I got there and there were some truly breathtaking vistas and it was a fascinating sampling of the vibes of many neighborhoods between the beach and my house.

I got to the beach and ate an enormous salami sandwich and a big bag of barbeque chips and chatted pleasantly with my friends there. We all got in the water, I played in the waves, I love playing in the waves. The ocean is humbling, I feel small, I feel like a kid, I laugh and delight at the big walls of water, built in an instant and demolished over and over, tidal riparian and salt. I could not help but smile bobbing and buoying around in the big drink. There’s something primordial and delightful about being whipped around in the seafoam.

I read a bit of my book, the Professor and the Madman, which was nice. There were a cacaphonic cornucopia of sounds for the sampling, lifeguards going just apeshit on their whistles, pop-trance and reggaeton and reggae and trap thrumming out of bluetooth speakers, the barking of enterprising outlaw beer and cocktail salesmen listing their wares, the barking of a dog left by itself by its surfing owner, the thwap of volleyball against forearm and soccer ball against instep, bird chatter (also I saw a budgie in a birdcage that someone brought to the beach), prop planes and helicopters overhead, and the smattering excerpts of conversation, all sonically ensconced by the tide.

Chill w E & E & S. They were easy to talk to, inviting, kind. It was a low-stakes lazy vacationy vibe, a great antidote to the severity and consequence of both academic writing and BigLaw firm work.

I do have to say that I felt kinda lonely and off on the way there, thought I felt better coming back. There’s a sinking feeling that has been hanging around a bit, not a big one, but not nothing, and I think it has to do maybe with wondering about what it will be like (or not like) between me and G when the end of July arrives, and also just kind of bracing for the destabiliing impact of moving back to NC again. It was a big thwap on the way here, though one that was both endurable and in many ways unexpectedly positive. The upshot always is that I am taken care of. That faith is easy to access when I’m in a good mood, when I’m well-rested, fed, in a quiet place, when it’s bright and early, when Being feels light but not unbearable, when my needs are met. It can feel harder to access when the chips are down; this is being human, this is having feelings, I value and treasure this blog practice for helping me move through that, and I hope any readers might also get invited to accept their sine wave/crest trough feelings flux and be gentle with themselves through the jostlings.

When I got home at the end of the night I had the distinct honor and privilege of chugging one of those big rectangular prisms of coconut water, which I poured over ice, which restored vitality to my sun-baked bike-shaked body like an elixir. I do really like how it feels to exert physical energy vigorously, become parched and starving, and indulge in a big meal or big drink (non alcoholic of course). Maybe this is borderline disordered eating; I hope it is not or if it is I hope my experiencing it is non-offensive, it feels like an okay vice or disorder to have, if it is one of those things. This handwringing brought to you by me having a friend who once expressed criticism of how I talk about this very phenomenon; I used the word “deserve” to describe eating a big muffin after a hike, which prompted a critical discussion, and this is me I guess trying to honor that while also honoring my own experience, which is tricky!

Going back to the beach trip, I listened to Foucault’s Pendulum on audiobook on the way there and back, constantly interrupted with navigation instructions by google maps, possibly the worst book to try to listen to as an audiobook. That book, by Umberto Eco, is exceptionally dense and hard to follow when read in print, nevermind the audiobook inability to reread and/or look up passages and references. Why do I go for books like Infinite Jest and Foucault’s Pendulum? It is enjoyable to see virtuosic writing. I also may be trying to test the limits of my comprehension and my vocabulary, or trying to prove I am smart. After four jerky bumpy hours of Foucault’s Pendulum I feel like I want an antidote, a book written by a woman in easily perceptible language about relationships and not about intellectual men. I lent somebody a Lucia Berlin book, A Manual for Cleaning Women, I need it back, need to calibrate. Still, there’s a labyrinthine pleasure to reading the savants, I can’t help that I like it, and so I will try to finish these ones. It makes me appreciate Borges, who would never waste time writing a 600-page novel, and instead would write a 12-page short story that contains all essential parts of a 600-page novel, and I love that about him. So maybe first to Berlin and then to Borges after I exit the Eco chamber. On a macro level: being sober, being sane, having a steady attention span and a mind that comprehends, all of these are big blessings. Thank you.

7/2/2023

Spent the night with G. Tried to explain my feelings about Pablomatic but didn’t feel quite right, and got kind of flustered and insecure trying to talk about something I really didn’t know much about. It’s tough to talk about art in a way that feels duly informed and respectful; so much of my life art-wise has been “fuck that shit” and me wanting to do graffiti and diss murals and discount or dismiss the art in museums as bourgeois and irrelevant. So inhabiting the relatively new position of being a person who takes things seriously, who tries to live in reality, who tries not to be disrespectful of things or cultures or peoples or phenomena etc. and instead tries to involve myself in society and understand as much as I can, well all that is new-ish and I’m not great at it! So I left the convo feeling sorta like a dummy but it’s fine and it wasn’t a big deal. That next morning we drank Hologram and Grumpy’s coffee and went sunglasses shopping and went to Hudson Yard to the mall and went to a diner near there and couldn’t finish our meals and walked to film forum to see a movie. It was a long, hot, summer walk.

A Library of the World - Umberto Eco movie. Truth from falsehoods, semiotics. Difference between noise and knowledge, critique of internet-age data overload. Which I identify with! These days I often feel stupid, overloaded, analysis paralysis, but also like I have outsourced my cognition to the computer and phone in a way that makes me less fully functional without technology. Like lately I can’t remember an album I like when I want to put on music when me and G hang out or when I take a bike ride. That feels like a fundamental 404 error inside me, a bad cavity. I remember when I lost my mind in 2016 and stayed awake for seven days straight and like a flood all my favorite albums from ages 15-19 came to mind and I listened to them with great relish, though they were not “cool” — Gorillaz, Fatboy Slim, Zero 7 discographies of work produced prior to 2009. I envy M and others who make time to intentionally encounter absorb and then spin webs of connectivity by their deep music tastes. I should spend more time on that I guess. I also should spend more time on AA; though I made 3 meetings this week and met with my sponsee and sponsor briefly and reached out to other drunks, I can feel the spiritual sinking feeling.

Watching NYC basketball in The Cage on W. 4th street was a treat. Just being so close, seeing the expertise, the athleticism, the twitch reflexes, the finesse. A great joy to spectate, and it felt like a classic NYC summer thing to do.

Then we went to a used book store, where I bought The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. There was a feeling of great weight and tedium walking slowly through the narrow isles of this unremarkable used bookstore in NoHo. “If you’re bored then you’re boring” is the lyric that springs to mind: in a moment like this I have absolutely nothing interesting or insightful to say. No stories are accessible in my memory. No history seems to have occurred in the last few decades worth mentioning and also I have run out of questions to ask and worse I feel uninterested in the answers to the ones I can come up with or else have already asked them.

G goes home, I walk her to the station in the sporadic rain. I feel like a nice guy, with all the boringness and decency and solidity and milquetoastacity that goes along with that. I just don’t know about me and G. We click but I don’t know that there’s a deep compatibility. Then again maybe I am using that as a rationalization to prep my fragile heart for the inevitable cleavage in four weeks time. There’s also the little fissures in conversation, like where she asks if I date younger women because I am young at heart or because I am a creep. One of those jokey non-jokes, or else a joke that is a true joke that is wrapped around a perceptive perception of an insecurity, the venomous pearl that grew around an ugly speck. I reply by saying this thing that we say in AA, which is that the time spent in active addiction is time when a person is not emotionally growing, or is at best emotionally slowed, and I leave it at that. It feels true to me. I remember once my dad saying how he felt the same inside as he did when he was a kid. I wonder if that is my fate. I preserve some childlike wonder, I am silly and I have a boyish face and childish humor and an immature disposition at times. It’s hard for me to make sense of myself, age, time. The moment passes, conversation flows, we hold hands, things seem fine. It sticks in the back of my mind.

I receive very bad news that an old friend Terry has died. Friend isn’t the right word. I met Terry in the first 6 months of my sobriety in Charlotte and he had a few decades of sobriety and was perhaps 70 years old and was just a solid old-timer who did the bread and butter AA thing of being decent and inviting to newcomers and we exchanged numbers and I made his homegroup my homegroup, my first ever proper homegroup, the Triangle group. Then after I left Charlotte I was on a group chat where he sent out daily texts with the daily prayer and meditation and a brief reflection on recovery. Simple and completely dependable.

I feel depressed tonight, something about the space left behind, the way it feels to sleep alone the night after a night of very tender cuddling. Whatever chemistry G and I may lack, there’s an undeniable comfort that I believe is mutual between us as bodies keeping company. I in this moment choose to try to be present and appreciate that, and not focus on an unguaranteed lack in a future that is not promised.

The night ends with me eating a lot of cooked frozen food and watching all of How To with John Wilson. He’s a talented artist and I feel the voice he inhabits is one very close to how I’d like to be able to be with my readers. It’s kind and earnest and a bit funny and irreverent and clever and heartfelt. I hope I can make good use of my media making and media absorption. I need to wrap this up for now, thanks for reading, see you next time.

7/1/2023

Only got a few minutes to type tonight so there will be no wandering thicket of poeia this evening, sadly. Yesterday I got to meet up with M and A (not mergers and acquisition, though A is in the corporate law universe), which was really nice. We get along good, we’re more familiar to each other, we have shared history as lawschool classmates and also people struggling, to varying extents to support abolitionists and the project of abolition, which for me as a law student can feel near impossible sometimes. I paid for M’s dinner but felt kind of weird, like I wanted to be doing the good communist/class-conscious thing of using my comparatively higher pay rate (M is at a nonprofit public interest law outfit) to make their financial experience in NYC a bit less bone-rattling (dinner was $33 each, and it was like a pretty normal non-fancy meal). Anyways I’m still trying to figure out how to inhabit the excessive revenue and how that maps onto relating to people. I want to be generous, kind, giving; to make my abundance a communal experience. But that’s a bit of a pipe dream I think. Hopefully as time passes I will figure out how to be simultaneously frugal personally, generous interpersonally, and pecuniarily of-service to my friends family comrades loved ones and strangers in need, in a way that matches my values. Anyways it was nice to chat with M and A and catch up on news and gossip and compare summer experiences and walk around. There’s a nagging feeling I have in the back of my head that I am not as close of a friend as I could be to them, that I have not spent enough effort to build up those relationships. I do feel like I prioritize lawschool and work relationships under recovery relationships and the relatively precious few pre-sobriety friendships I still have. It’s a problem of abundance; I am so lucky to have enough people in my life in whom I want to invest my time and energy and care that I have a hard time deciding; that is a blessing. I hope I can be present and good and kind for whatever level of relationship is available and to not mourn or mope just because something doesn’t seem perfect.

Today I had a few varied experiences, one of the mundane boringness and agitation of trying to get a simple broken thing fixed in my apartment, one of the borderline manic tenacity, focus, and intellectual involvement I brought to a session of revising my Note for law review, one of the most excellent immediacy and certainty of right-action-ness of meeting in person with a sponsee who happened to be in NYC, one of the half lonely half lovely experience of going to the Brooklyn museum by myself, and one of the half horrifying half charming task of biking to Crown Heights from NoHo and back over the Manhattan Bridge and the surrounding streets. No one of these events took too much out of me, filled me up with too much, nor sent me into too good or bad a mood. I would say the best thing I did today was show up to meet my sponsee, spend an hour with them, read in the AA literature together, share honestly about my experience strength and hope in sobriety, catch up as friends working to be better to those around us, and demonstrate a continued commitment to this recovery relationship, which has lasted for about exactly a year so far. That feels substantial, weighty, like it matters. It was cool to go to the BK Museum and it was free because it was the first saturday of the month and I got to bop around the five floors at my own pace, and I could really spend a solid hour noodling syntactically through all the cool art I saw, doing ekphrasis and reflecting on the ideology of the art experience and the kind of wonder and alienation and mastery and craftsmanship of it all, but I am about out of time. I will say that I think it would have been better to go with someone else; just being able to determine my own pace didn’t quite make up for the soft solitude of encountering all that beauty by myself. Lesson learned. Sleepover with G tonight and then a trip to the Bronx Botanical garden on Sunday! Until next time.

6/30/2023

L sent me Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘I taste a liquor never brewed;’ my knee-jerk reaction is to use it as a template to write a poem in parallel, let’s see how it goes:

* * *

I Taste of Conrdogs Ably Fried

I taste of corndogs ably fried –
From plate to ketchup pool
To mouth. German Texans’ food –
Frankfurters in comforters, piled

Child-height high, then frozen. Chilled
For supper later, high in the refrigerator –
Nevermind the supperator –
Pig-blankets to dress the wound.

The “hotdogs” sold at Sheetz were three
For a dollar: choice lunch
In squat-digs I once called my home –
Furtive squalor, noise hutch

Where I was in a band called Glum.
Wherein my numb gloom bloomed.
Whereby my supple mind succumbed
To cold. Frigid, consumed.

Till Nathan’s saber cuts my cheek,
Till Sabrett’s scim’tar slits –
I’ll ever relish, relinquish
Nothing, sport-pepper repertoire persists!

On Funyun dust I’d gladly choke
On Cheeto mist I’d gag
Before I e’er revoke
My ardent zeal for bright pink dogs.

Till thy ship, steer thy bilgey barge –
“Hamburger sentinel,
Dear sir, my Coke’s a large.”
Behold the spectacle

Of how capaciously I am
Become receptacle –

Abundance with abandon
Gourmandly redundance.
Be not ungrateful, man!
Plod with the processional –

Without food my life’s a sorrow
With vittles my life’s grand –
Diet starts, I swear, tomorrow.
I say, biscuit in hand.

* * *

That concludes the poetry part of this post. Nothing too notable to report in non-poem/non-hotdog life other than the fact that today I ate lunch at Sugarfish which was likely the very finest sushi I’ve ever had. It was served omakase style. Omakase (Japanese: お任せ, Hepburn: o-makase) is a Japanese phrase, used when ordering food in restaurants, that means 'I'll leave it up to you' (from Japanese 'to entrust' (任せる, makaseru). I indeed entrusted my meal to the mind of the chef and was exquisitely taken care of. I at this point have no choice other than to concede to my innermost self that I am Bo-Bo, I am become Bo-Bo, or at least ensconced in Bo-Bo, temporarily BoBo, tempoBoBo, and that just is what it is. BoBo is a phrase I heard which means Bohemian Bourgeouis, or vicey versey. Evidently David Brooks wrote a book called Bobos in Paradise that describes Bobos as "highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success.” I may have a deep rich nuanced past and the complicated interpolations of mental illness and addiction to tack on, but I can’t deny that that phrase describes me fairly accurately. I think this is a “I contain multitudes” [as ably conveyed in that poem above I think] slash “inside you there are two wolves” [“The bourgeois were materialists and the bohemians were antimaterialists. The bourgeois were polite; the bohemians were raw. The bourgeois were career-oriented, so the bohemians were experience-oriented. The bourgeois pretended to be chaste, and the bohemians pretended to be promiscuous.” –Brooks] type thing, and I will now hereby attempt to use the AA skill of acceptance to simply accept that I contain these qualities. God willing I can still do some good for the sunburnt proletariat (L’s Dad’s word for rednecks, which I feel like I am sometimes, which I feel far away from sometimes), for the dispossessed and the earth-inheritors, which I feel one recession away from being materially among again; my claim to BoBohood feels threadbare piebald and frayed, but it is what it is. I am grateful for the chance to taste fine fine sushi and hope I can preserve what’s good about my heart and keep a values-based life intact and live with integrity and do service while enjoying free high quality food—for now I will just keep posting and let the reader decide.

6/29/2023

Today as I type this I am enjoying the blessing of my whole body feeling pleasantly exhausted from a lot of physical effort. The day started normal, 2.5 hours in the office. Then I went to a food pantry in Harlem and volunteered for about 3.5 hours. It was me and about a dozen firm summers. We worked filling orders for people who came to the pantry to get food. It was the manic, crowded cadence of food service work. It amounted to a much more efficient and much more scaled-up impact of what we were going for back when I did Food Not Bombs. We filled big bags full of apples, bananas, oranges, bell peppers, eggplants, sweet potatoes, potatoes, lettuce, plantains, carrots, zucchinis, cucumbers, cereal, pasta, white and brown rice, dry and canned beans of many varieties, almond and cow milk, canned tuna, and a handful of other staple foodstuffs. We worked quickly; I felt somehow like I should be the best at what we were doing since I used to be a chef and a caterer and a food lion stocker and a food-not-bombs volunteer, so I worked hard, said “behind” and “heard” and deployed that sense of urgency that would have made my old head chef proud. After the orders were filled we spent time getting the space prepped for the next round of orders by processing vegetables out of their big bulk bags and boxes and into crates where they were more easily accessible and could be staged to facilitate quick refills. It was a genre of service that I probably like the most, or at least that feels like it comes easiest, matches my default disposition. That genre is: back-of-house / non-client-facing, organizational, stock-centric—and all for the purpose of giving away free food, which I think for me feels like one of the most primordially Good things I have the ability to do. It feels Right and Important and direct and impactful and caring and correct and kind. I felt very in the moment, I felt in the zone, I liked the rhythm of it, I liked how present it required me to be. I like that I got to be upright, moving, embodied, effortful, mobile, and tactile at work. It provided a strong, welcome foil to the still, staid, digital, mediated, alienated, intellectual, abstract, immaterial work that fills most of my days. I felt like I did well and I did good. The volunteer staff seemed quick to learn my name, ask me for help, and praise me for my effort. I love that feeling. My summers all worked with kind diligence. I think we have good in our hearts, all of us. There’s a cynic in me that wants to say: this is just a thing to make you feel good about yourself, or something. But I choose to dismiss that internal cynic and honor the effort and the material benefit we helped to bring about today. After volunteering I took my first jog around Central Park, since we were nearby. It was my first run without headphones in a couple weeks: that is evidence that I feel safe and peaceful in my head, among my thoughts, unmediated. That’s a great place for me to be, and I feel so grateful that it’s even on the horizon of possibilities, given how toxic, warped, disordered and unkind my internal psychic environment was just 6 years ago. I ran around the entire loop of the park, it was hot and difficult, and I swear it was mostly uphill somehow, and also more convex than it should have been, but that’s probably just me being unfamiliar with the route. I slowly drank a giant coconut water, rode the subway all the way back to the office, drank a coffee, rode the subway home, got clean, got dry, got cool, and am now about to eat a big meal of fries and grape leaves and chicken shawarma. Everything feels simple and complete in this moment. I know it will change, I’m present for it now. Until next time.

6/28/2023

It was fun to do haiku yesterday, I always really liked the structure of formal poetry, especially meter, it could feel like scaffolding, or like the poem was inevitable and I just had to find out which words fit in the slots, or maybe it was more like the words were already on the page but turned face down, with only their scansion and syllable count showing, and so the process of writing those types of poems was sort of like solving a puzzle. The poetry zine I wrote circa 2013 was shot through with meter. It’s a little breathtaking to realize that was ten years ago. I wrote that zine not long after moving to Philly, and I was in love then with Z. I had a promising career as a nihilist ahead of me, a glittering horizon of petty crime and anticapitalist screeds and barely understood English translations of French critical theory to reference and misapply, endless catacombs of fashionable microgenres of dance music with which to become acquainted, queerness and gender fugitivity, and glossy gossip and intricate horoscopic interpersonal drama and secret relapses into madness and relapses into addiction, some secret some not, and that glittering horizon eventually felt like dull static tuned to a dissociated shell of a psyche, and before I knew it I was single, ostracized (appropriately, for the self-centered harm I had caused), anomic, adrift. There actually was a second zine of poems that never got released, that was maybe 60% finished, a lot of raw and maudlin copy, attempts to reckon with something that was immense that was happening to me and through me and that I could neither comprehend nor come prepared to propound, je ne comprends pas. I do remember the title of that zine/chapbook: Unbecoming; Done. Or was it Becoming Undone? The latter is more likely and certainly apropos of my general status as an entity at that time. I remember chose the title as a reference to another friend’s poems, R had a tumblr with poetry that I wanted to be in conversation with. The fate of that zine is: unknown, though almost certainly deleted and never to be recovered. It was on a laptop of mine that got stolen in 2019 (robbed from me at gunpoint, to be exact), and I assume the thief would not have taken any time out of his busy schedule to drill down from Documents to Poetry to Becoming Undone and scrolled through the InDesign file that already had the zine laid out. Doubt that greatly; much more likely deleted and forgotten. And that’s to say nothing of the dozens, maybe hundreds of aborted text fragments in text files and word docs and scribus files and digital sticky notes, many with the morose musings of an undiagnosed self-medicating alcoholic who was by turns suicidally depressed, exquisitely infatuated, and habitually vandalizing, both in the material graffiti sense, and also informally and immaterially as an agent of petty thoughtless dismissals and defacements to the institutions and relationships that surrounded me. In fact, during that time, there was an activist collective, I believe of the socialist or marxist praxis variety, people whose work I respected, that called themselves The Facing Reality Collective, which of course is a fine name for a working group interested in intervening against the violent material conditions of capitalism for the betterment of a wide swath of proletarian stakeholders. However I never helped them with any of their projects and my main contribution to their work was to suggest multiple times (unbidden of course) that they change their name to the De-Facing Reality Collective, which I thought was endlessly clever and droll, and which of course they never did, and which I’m sure stood as a barrier, self-imposed, between me and some earnest activists. I feel like that approach, that posture—my thinking a clever pun is God’s gift to society—captures fairly well the sort of way I related to people back in those days. It is sad to see myself as that kind of person. But there is some hope: the fact that I can even look back at myself and see myself critically but still love myself is progress. I think a lot of that season of my life I have for many years tried militantly to forget, dissociate, amnesiate. And it’s only through the values and interpersonal principles I picked up in AA that gave me a bit of insight into how much of a louse and slug and lout and nuisance I was back then. And I love that crumbum who I was because I was sick and complicated and in fact sometimes funny and clever and often loving, and even kind, though my love was so often misguided, desperate, insecure, transactional, contingent, conditional, conniving. It’s important for me to create a lens for my past that does not knee-jerk push it to one extreme or the other, neither valorizing nor talking only shit about myself. It’s easy to go to extremes and one manifestation of my mental illness is all-or-nothing thinking. Anyways that was a tremendous unexpected diversion. I had wanted to recount my day in some formal poetic structure, maybe I still will. I googled formal poet and found Petrarchan (named after Petrarch, a poet) Sonnet (“little song”) so let’s go for that:

Today I’ve eaten several croissants
Laminated butter-basted treats
But maybe I should worship. Stars, crescents,
Orthopraxis, duas, liturgy…
Gift Of Desperation, Good and OrDerly.
Saturated fat’s lessons, essence:
Jouissance, nuisance, stickiness and sweet.
Captivated, captured by denseness.
What will I become, what will become of me?
Discard this senselessness, tamp ego’s immenseness, come to your senses.
Step gingerly to circumvent the dogshit on the street.

Today at work I did what I was told,
Which satisfied my dogheart, pet the cur.
I raised my hand at AA, wasn’t called,
Enabling me to better hear the cure:
Help out when your heart is warm, reach out when it’s cold
Entangled, we endear and we endure.

* * *

End of poem (note: I added more lines than a classical Petrarchan sonnet is supposed to have, due to the fact that I wanted to put some more words in there)! I like poems, poems are fun, nice to just make one and let it be done!

6/27/2023

For the sake of catching up, my entries for today and yesterday are going to be brief! Actually fuck it they’ll be haikus

Little sleep, worth it
No work to do. Almost alept
At my desk at work

Five cups of coffee
Korean BBQ lunch
A moot court online

Summer-hot 10K
Heaving in breaths of sea air
Weaving like a loom

Long walk from fi-di
To no-ho for some katsu
Black Mirror dinner

“Morning Has Broken”
Has been stuck in my head for
Days. 8pm bedtime.

6/26/2023

Worked real hard all day.
Good meeting at Perry street.
Rejuvenated.

It had been a week
Since my last AA meeting
I was squirrely.

Two big pizza slices
Exquisite slumber party
So nice, so so nice * * *

G offers insight
I am putting false distance
Between myself and

Colleagues, assuming I
Am “other” so I don’t have
To work to get to

Know them, befriend them.
Got to remember to treat
All people right, nice

Like they matter lots to me.
Not just people I like, not
Just people I love,

Not just people I
Am in like/love with, not just
Recovery people.

The spiritual
Principle I think God wants
Me to live by is

To make everyone
Feel important and well-kept,
Feel well-regarded.

Tolerance should be
My baseline, bare minimum.
Help me be kind, God.

6/25/2023

How does a person know what to make of the big knot of feelings lumped in the throat just above the heart? How do I make sense of the thick and sticky and too-sweet glut-clot of thrumming sensation heaving softly in my ribcage. Is it a curse to even be inclined to discern the feeling, a mistake to try to encounter emotional experience with the rational mind, a big scientific blunder to empiricize the felt reality, which is plush and soft as felt when it is good, and dry and scratchy and abrasive and unappealing as felt when it is bad? (I think, without evidence or authority, that high-school sweethearts have it easy, made a brash and foolish decision early but made the deeply wise and sound decision to stick together afterward, and have secured themselves against this mid-life romantic turmoil; I know also that I am likely plain ignorant of all the difficulties and trials that people who have been together a long time go through; just a thought that occurred, unfair and uncalled for as it may be.) Is dissagregating the crush a fool’s errand, heartfelt folly? I know of many internal phenomena and can’t get my head around them. I like G. Not being able to see her this weekend I spiraled in loneliness. I couldn’t pray my way out of the hot tense feeling in my shoulders I felt when she said she was too hungover to hangout this morning. Yet I fell to my knees and prayed duas of gratitude when she said, minutes later, let’s have a slumber party tomorrow. I don’t like my mood being so contingent upon the decisions and availability of someone else. I also prayed to be made not-codependent, for my affection to be free from desperation, to be moved not by loneliness but by the mutual reciprocation of enrichment and benefit that comes from good healthy interdependent love. A song lyric from an artist whose name I forgot keeps popping into my head. The lyric is: “there’s no love in fear.” I put that song, inter alia, on a playlist for a person who I was infatuated with seven years ago. The infatuation wasn’t reciprocated, though there was affection. The care she had for me I think persists to this day, but can’t be romantic. Am I poisoned by being socialized masculine? Do I degrade or discount or dismiss the non-romantic love I receive from women? Or, put another way, why do I feel so preoccupied with establishing romantic love with G? Surely many of our needs could be met, both of us enriched, lifted up, nourished by a strong platonic friendship. I think I’m overthinking it. “I think—that’s the problem” goes an old AA saw. You hear about women in their 30s becoming distressingly attuned to their “biological clock;” at 35 and in occasional bouts of heart hysteria as I am, I feel like I can identify; I feel like I can relate.

The upshot is that G and I will spend the night together tomorrow. Between now and then I will attempt to use my faith, tools from therapy, AA maxims, and the grace of friends and mentors to be as stable as I can be. That being said, there’s something undeniably human about all this, the hurky jerky (dare I say…achey breaky) heart, “the state I am in,” as Belle & Sebastian said. This feelings-having business is still new. More precisely, my earnest ideological commitment to live a life where I encounter feelings and endeavor not to falsely eliminate or amplify them through chemicals is new; about five years old, the length of time I’ve been sober. And with that sobriety too comes the imperative to practice avoiding bouts of emotional inebriety. But I am not a machine, and I have to concede that I will sometimes be derailed and disrupted by feelings and seek a balance between feeling them and being fed to them, being consumed by them. I originally typed “allowing myself to feel them” but that misses the point I think; I’m essentially powerless and not in control, and through faith I can hopefully be ok with that lack of power, in as much as I trust the power at play to be a Higher Power who is benevolent, gracious and kind. And I have no reason to believe otherwise. I listened to “Morning Has Broken” by Yusuf Islam and cried and cried this morning. The simple refrain of ‘praise every morning’ meant something deep to me, and I can’t articulate just what. But I am grateful to be in a position where crying is an option, feelings exist but are impermanent, and I have affection and regard on the horizon. That’s enough for now.

6/24/2023

Today has felt small. NYC is so expansive, so shot through with activities, so lousy with events, so surfeit with sensory information, so ambiently stimulating, so eager to generate and relieve cravings, so buzzing with brushed-back bespoke-slacksed Cartier-shellacked businessmen and businessthems and bizniz wimmin and savvy travelers, doubtful dabblers, cloutful cavalcades of klaxon’ed escalades and famous quads and esplanades and empanadas and xanned out tweakers with Byzantine minds holding corrugated signs, near-blind from moonshine, pried from the hivemind with ill-defined skills divined from pills capsules powders and pods who, I have thought, “there go I, there I walk, there I plod, there I trod, there I tread, dare I dread—but for the Grace of God.” That sentence is a stylistically intentional run-on to try to convey the endlessness I feel steeped in when I’m in the city. And so but (as David Foster Wallace would begin) my point is that a day spent in my room feels small, ensconced in endlessness as I am overall. Friendlessness? Overruled. Object-impermanence-style fool! My friends still exist even when I can’t (or don’t) see them. Ripened, grilled, and twisted like limes: rinds hewn to summer season. I penned doggerels and wished I’d holorhymed like DOOM. Bummer he went. Some are heat-bent or street-pent (pent-up, sty-stuck, still as cement). Still as concrete. Still my heart-beat. I worry my heart’s too sweet, molasses masses, candy rock, hard and meltable, plaque-prone as a heart or a tooth and liable to rot and liable to soothe and a ventricle’s a cavity we put to good use.

I’m not so sure why the poetry and the rhymes and nonsense are flowing today. I do feel like I owe a debt of gratitude to MF DOOM (mentioned already) and Lil Wayne for their stylistic splendor. I feel like each of them play with language like virtuosos, and when I am in full rhyme mode I feel like, at my best, I’m channeling them, or at least aspiring to vibrate on their frequency. Anyways all that poetry and nonsense is evidently one syrupy byproduct of a day spent alone. I did stay on task for 8 hours working on my Note, which will be published in the Law Review next year. I reverse outlined the whole thing which was a daunting and taxing process, but I finished all 30 pages and now feel better acquainted with the piece, which I had more or less neglected for the last three months, knowing publication was on the horizon but knowing that horizon was distant enough that I could deprioritize it. And yeah it’s like, the world feels weirdly falsely small when I spend a day in Manhattan typing on my bed. I did get out for a jog which was good. I also spent an hour on the phone with H, someone who I think needs help in almost exactly the way I needed help when I was new in recovery, which they are. So I feel like I did something meaningfully selfless by counseling with them, trying to offer advice gently, in the genre of self-experience narratives that AA trains us to use. They are going through it. It felt hopeless on the phone with them. I know that means I have faith, to have kept up the conversation in spite of that despair I felt in them. They have faith too. I texted them after the call: I know that no matter what you will be taken care of. I hope that was a helpful thing to say.

Today has felt small and today has felt lonely. I feel like I’m doing a mini-fast from the nourishment I experience being with G. Is it nourishment or is it junk food. Or is it comfort food. Or is it multiple of these things. And am I a bad person for comparing a relationship to food. Am I a gourmand, am I out of my gourd, am I out of my got-dam mind. In the speaker tape I listened to yesterday I heard that I ought not to seek a relationship for the potential pleasure I might feel if I were in it. Instead, I should seek the relationship that I understand can be rewarding for both parties involved. That was arresting for me. I think I seek relationships like shelter. If not as a means to feel pleasure, a refuge from despair. Cover from the elements. The elements are: a nonstop gyre of unconscionably beautiful people undulating like one of those thousand-bird airstreams, those rhythmic curving collective consciousnesses of a hundred or a thousand birds migrating in unison, all generally moving toward a goal as a body of birds even though no individual bird seems to be anything other than a cell in the larger metaorganism. A cursory googling tells me that what I am describing has a name: a murmuration. At least when it refers to starlings, which is probably what I have in mind. It occurs to me that one thing I deeply appreciate about writing or typing is that what I convey is crisp and crystal clear, fully articulated, completely pronounced, elegantly (I hope) enunciated. It is the opposite of murmuring. And I suppose to the extent I am a single writer, it too is the opposite of murmuration; I guess if I were in a google doc composing a novel realtime with a thousand other sensitive typists I could count myself among the syntactical starlings. But for now what I have is a simple solitude that feels slightly sad. I think it is also the kind of distance that makes the heart grow fonder; I hope I can keep that close and not let my morbid mind wander into the moribund pond of ominous ponders, and keep my porous horoscope free from the ponderous haunters that spawn when the dawn’s gone. The first though I had this doggone morning was how I wished a certain ex had not gone. I felt it was the exactly wrong way to start a day. Thankfully, I prayed and meditated and the ex-debt abated. The smack of the lack of her faded. I’m glad that I’m no longer an ape that craves sedation. I just quietly rave about erstwhile relations, a childish knave importuning impatiens (love me/love me not flower queries, petals discarded into reliquaries) wracked with impatience and preoccupied with eliding elation, or else alluding to Allah and ablution as solemnly soothing spiritual solutions. Sobriety eyes see in high resolution, I’m happy my liver’s not brined in pollution. I decline compulsion, trust divine collusion, spline my mind and mode to poems, holy ghost allusions. I push through lush notes, sweet as slush, pile it on and on and on.

I kind of couldn’t stop myself, didn't need to stop myself, from writing there for a bit, felt like I was in the flow state so just went with it, forgive the fugue. Tomorrow’s a fuller and more interpersonally interactive day; hopefully that will stem the swell of poetry to a tidy undertow. Until tomorrow!

6/23/2023

Numerologically speaking today is hexed! At least from my idiosyncretic (idiosyncratic + mathematic + syncretic) POV. That’s because today is 6/23/23 and 6 = hex (as in hexagon) and 2 x 3 = 6 = and 2 x 3 = 6. It’s a simple case of triple sixism. My google docs tried to “correct” ‘sixism’ into ‘sufism’ which is interesting; my mysticism here is unmoored from the rigorous pursuit of self-annihilation that I associate with Sufis.

Then again, “the rigorous pursuit of self-annihilation” would not be an unfair reading of the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous, or at least its thrust, though I know no one who has ever used that particular terminology in the realm of recovery. We say that self-centered behavior blocks partnership with those about us. We recognize self-centered fear as the chief activator of our character defects. (I had a spell of that today. Just the thing, a spell, a hex, a devilish mood coating the inside of me like so many deviled eggs, that thousand-island sorcerer…anyways I’ll get to that later). We concede that mere self knowledge is no medicine. We call self-pity “pride in reverse.” We clambor up out of the ruins of self-constructed prisons of isolation together. We parry self-deception with service. We see self-preservation and self-destruction as two sides of the same small coin. Perhaps our closest kin to self-annhiliation is that Franciscan axiom: “For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.” Or maybe the subtle quote in the despised chapter of the Big Book, To Wives: “We have been unselfish and self-sacrificing.”

I learned–in an AA meeting actually, if you can believe it–that the etymology of the word ‘sacrifice’ is to make sacred by giving up. Whether that’s giving something up, as in lent, or giving up, as in admitting powerlessness, I like this definition, regardless of its accuracy. So the To Wives quote therefore, I think, implies that it is sacred to give up the self. And if this is so, we seem fairly close to a practice of self-annihilation for the purpose of spiritual betterment, which, ideally, will manifest material and relational benefit, will improve the lives of those who encounter the one who annihilates his self (or perhaps his nafs, which, in terms of annihilating, I think ‘ego’ is the best candidate for a translation, though nafs can also mean psyche or soul). ‘Lower self’ may be an even better translation.

Whether that’s my animal and satanic nature, my reactivity when agitated, my avarice when I see glittering trinkets and curios (whether material, spatial, shapes-based [I think this is a big one actually; it sounds silly, but I think I think way way too much about the shapes of faces and of bodies and of cars and of buildings, for example], or relational), my prodigious sloth my poor decisionmaking when tempted, my capacity for bitter venom when deprived, my malice when jilted, my lust for war, which is competition, which is differentiation, which is a false imposition of hierarchy into a naturally horizontal world, whether it is any of those, I like how ‘lower nature’ approximates ego, the aspect of self we can do without, or else at least that we would do better with less of, since naturally none of us but the messengers and prophets and perhaps the saints get much time to operate on earth sans lower-self.

So today was a bit of a hexed day for me. My tender heart got hexed and suplexed (a suplex is a wrestling hold in which a wrestler grasps his opponent round the waist from behind and carries him backwards before slamming him on his back, splat on the mat). But not because of anything significant. Rather, two small things occurred. One is that I found out that NC Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls--my top choice--informed me that she will be hiring someone else to clerk for her. So it goes; I'm sad but not wrecked.

The other, and the one that took up much more space in my headheart, is that G told me she was busy this weekend after I texted to ask if she wanted to hang out. I offered suggestions: sleepover, go to a museum, go to the botanical gardens. But she declined. In my head I made a big deal about it, got worried she wants to break up with me, assumed the worst, ‘catastrophized’ as we say in AA. In a quiet mania at my desk-clump I downloaded all the dating apps (which I had happily shitcanned after date two with G), matched furiously, chatted, and re-deleted them all, within the course of an hour or so. The heart is a delicate and, at least for me, malleable muscle. I think all the lofty pomp of the wedding in the barn yesterday had me twisted up, tortuous as DNA and gunked up as molasses inside. Too-sweet as well, excessively keen, riled up.

I had the good fortune grace and sense to reach out to another alcoholic, and when he didn’t answer, I didn’t panic, I just focused on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for six or so hours, went for a jog (“move a muscle, change a thought,” we say in AA), called him again, he picked up, and we chopped it up, hashed it out, and my hashbrowns, which were previously smothered with that stinkiest of cheese, loneliness, became, miraculously, plain, unencumbered by the fretful fromage that tends to accumulate when I am permitted to hyperfixate on a text message sent by someone for whom I harbor high levels of romantic affection.

I listened to an AA speaker tape on youtube halfway and cleaned my room, then set myself down to do a big and luxuriously wandering, hopefully somewhat wondrous and minimally ponderous, blog pos, which is what these words are. The big insight I got from D, my phone friend, was that, even though it’s unlikely, my worst case scenario–that G wants not to date me–is a fine and ok event to take place, because that means I am being made available for whoever is next, and hopefully, whoever is truly right for me. That is a rationalization to a cynic. That is an act of faith to me. I get relief buying into it, so I wouldn’t blame old nihilist me from 7 years ago for talking shit about this perspective.

Also, respectfully, no offense to me like, but that me back then was suicidally depressed and in the throes of active addiction, so I need not make myself too beholden to his take on things. The simple fact I keep coming back to is that I will be taken care of no matter what. I may not accumulate accolades or be in the relationship I think I should be in or possess the top possessions, but I will be taken care of. To the extent I can trust and feel and believe that in my chest, I enjoy serenity. It will come and go, I may cry over the state of my life’s forlon fact pattern tomorrow, but today it is cool and gray and calm and I have time to clean my room and exercise my talent, which is writing, which I so cherish and enjoy.

I will end with this: my mentor sent a deeply affirming message today about the quality of my writing here on this blog that was like the exact perfect foil to the hex of imaginary abandonment. It was the opposite of a hex. It was the unspell, the kind counterspell, a gentle disenchantment. I want to be in the world someone who provides unexpected gentle disenchantment against the small manias and invisible hexes under which my fellow Googlers quietly toil. If I can pay that kindness and grace forward, my life is generally going good. Generally Going Good, GGG, I say that's the opposite of 666; GGG≠666; therefore: hex over!

6/22/2023

Wedding day. D & S got married in a big barn in a rural area of NC I’d never heard of before. I am bleary and drowsy riding home to SoHo from Laguardia as I type this with my thumbs. I got up early, too early. All my laundry was spread out on all available nonfloor surfaces and also many floor surfaces because it didn’t get quite dry in the dryer last night. I save money and spend time by catching public transportation to the airport. I read more of The Professor and the Madman. I think about its colonialism; the empire in language. I am bothered by last night’s imperfection, I pray to be unencumbered by perfectionism, to enter the human race as one among the falible gullible foolhardy awkward love-weary love-craving many.

In a heavily uncanny turn of events, I encounter A, a dear old friend from the same recovery circle I know D from. We are both catching flights to NC, him for work. It turns out we are seated one in front of the other, and chat sporadically on the flight over the back of A’s seat. We walk leisurely from the flight to the parking deck. It is such a joy to find an old friend on a path I expected to be singular and alienated. A gift of unearned favor, which is grace.

I get my car-share rental car and make my way to a Longhorn Steakhouse chosen for its proximity to the airport and meet my parents there. We are all so happy to see each other. Both parents have had small but serious surgeries on delicate body parts recently. They are in good spirits. I get embarrassed for blowing my nose in a steak house napkin, my Mom says I shouldn’t. There’s a barely perciptible barb in it; I decide to chalk it up to my triple fragility from little sleep, recent job criticism, medium date, and the emotional rawness that accompanies me to weddings. Quad-fragility. The steaks are really good. I don’t detect an appreciable decrease in quality from the Porterhouses that cost roughly triple per ounce on the firm’s dime. A lot of lunch conversation is Mom recounting Suits and catching me up on the quotidian sagas in her life; it is a great ball and comfort to be able to sit next to her in person and hear about it all. There’s extra time so we go to the adjacent Caribou for coffees. I give a rundown of my life in NYC sich as it is, try to convey what work is like, what worries me, what I like. Dad is very proud of me, they both are. I can see it hurts them to think about me being far away long term. Dad is selling the 1961 VW truck, I hate to hear it because I think of it as a talisman of him, but I do support his general culling of possessions l, so I react inertly to the news. Eventually it’s time to say goodbye, I hug them both extra firm and for longer than usual, say about a half dozen total goodbyes.

I drive the rental to the wedding grounds and cry hard most of the way there. I’m listening to a NYT playlist my Mom recommended, stuff I think is certifiably Not Cool, stuff that is pulling all of my heartstrings hard. I’m homesick, I’m lonely, work is too hard, I fear I’m not good enough, I fear I’ve abandoned and forsaken community, every worry and ugly doubt pours out of me. There’s a relief in this, I pray to God to say thanks for letting me feel my feelings, for not having me cower before them and evade them with drugs.

I get to the wedding and get to see a handful of my close NC AA friends. I love them, I also feel a bit removed and distant from them. I feel slightly hurt when I think about how I have not been the caliber of friend to D to merit my being included among his groomsmen. I would not want to be a groomsman, it’s the greedy thought of a child who sees a toy he didn’t know existed and then instantly covets it. This feeling passes. I cry and cry through the ceremony. It’s beautiful. S’s vows in particular are poetic, so well written, such a convincing declaration of love. The vows are solid. There is a lot of God in the ceremony. I have thoughts during the wedding about how grateful I am that I have friends here; I also have thoughts about how I am too selfish and not deeply involved enough in the lives of these friends or other friends, and not deeply involved enough in service and building community. But it’s not binary, not all-or-nothing. Friendships wax and wane, flourish and go dormant, and typically I get out what I put in. The fact of the matter is that there are a dozen solid guys in this wedding who I believe love me unconditionally and who would help me out, no questions asked, if I got into a bad scrape. I believe the same is true of me for them. In the meantime, yeah, I should call and text them when I can, try to show up to the practice of friendship like the practice of yoga or meditation. Be interested in their travails, involve myself in their concerns, be a sounding board, check in, listen intently, share my experience, allow myself to be known by them, and I will be taken care of friendship wise. Only 6-7 years ago I was actively ruining weddings by getting drunk at them and making ghastly faux pas. I’m invited, I’m present, which is good enough. It’s quiet consistency like this that will build up strong relationships, I think.

I say a long prayer on the way home asking for God to direct my thinking, to help me be a good partner if I get into a partnership and to be content in my solitude otherwise. I pray for a lot of other stuff. I try to keep a channel open with God, I ask to be able to listen to God and not just speak.

I don’t text G today, she doesn’t text me. I wonder what will happen with us.

I catch my flight, I read a lot, I thank God for enabling me to focus on my book and to follow through with this commitment to read, which has been on my mind for like a decade (the idea that I want to be more literary and less visual, more of a reader so that I can participate actively in my media consumption, and to become a better writer and story teller and poet by more frequently encountering the craft in its many forms). I have the exhausted glow, the crumpled contentment of a man who has been crying all day. I feel emptied out in a healthy way, the emotional equivalent of the physical feeling at the end of a long trail run. The Lyft home is $50, the driver’s gum chewing is louder than all the horn honking and subway clanking and spirited conversation and industrial noise and capitalist clamor in all five boroughs combined. I stagger to a pizza stand nearby and sit criss cross applesauce on my bed at home, home at last, inhale the pizza with great relish, eat a bowl of teddy grahams and whole milk, drift in to the amniotic bliss that is youtube videos of magic the gathering online competition. I have made it home safe. Tomorrow is a new day.

6/21/2023

The pink cloud is over. Or, the pink cloud is precipitating. I have a dual tendency to be charmed blind by newness, and then to find fault unduly once the newness has worn off. G says: inside you there are two wolves, and both of them are gay. She says this because I said ‘we contain multitudes’ after apologizing to her for assuming that she never went to detention in high school, for implicitly accusing her of the high crime of being a goodie two shoes. In the moment it felt awkward and embarrassing, why would I assume that, why would I use my past of badness as some sickly sweet badge of coolness? As I type this I’m like, who cares, get over it, take things less seriously. Everything feels so consequential right now. Contingent, fraught, foreign, distant, dilute. I am grateful for what I have and I’m fearful of losing it. I want to be in a romantic partnership so bad. Am I letting that ache cloud my vision? I feel out of sorts. But materially and emotionally there’s nothing wrong. I am experiencing the life of a human: I make mistakes, moments are imperfect. But the flaws are so minute, so hairline. My reaction to them betrays a palace of privilege. I am doggy paddling toward the Higher Power called God, I am smacked by the surf and pulled by twin currents of work and love as false higher powers.

A lot of this is abstract. The concrete is: simple small moments of awkwardness and humanity. I forget my keys as soon as G comes over and I have to ask the doorman to let me use the spare set behind the desk to get let back in to my room. I can’t pick a place to get takeout from. The place G picks is packed and I’m distracted by the flight I have to NC in the morning. Conversation is amiable but surface-y and jerky. We go to the laundry room because I made the dubious decision to start a load before she came over, we get a glimpse of great sunset from the 17th floor window, she helps move my clothes from the washer to the dryer. We go to the top floor to see about roof access,there’s a sign on the door to the roof about suicide prevention, she laughs and I say it’s not funny, she says it’s a nervous laugh and she didn’t mean anything by it, I try to be gentle and say I wasn’t judging I’m just still affected by L’s suicide, we talk about the rash of suicides inside Bobst, the NYU library just down the block, such that they had to install internal netlike barriers to orevent further deaths. We talk about the suicides on UNC’s and NC State’s campuses, some of which were executed by jumping from the tops of high-rise dorms. I don’t mean to be judgy or a downer or morbid. This conversation mercifully is neutralized and set aside by Netflix, Derry Girls. I think the nicest moment in the night was just me sitting behind G on the bed, holding her while we watched TV. But that goes by in a flash, and then I’m preoccupied by needing to get my laundry and to walk her to the subway station, and I’m not in the moment, half-dissociated, dissolute, dissolving in self, dis-solving: creating problems.

Whereas the last hangout felt like hours of bliss, ease, synchronization, and wavelength alignment, this time it’s clunky, unlovely, rote. Which like of course is fine, human, inevitable the more time I share with G. She will see I’m damaged. She will and likely has seen that I’m fun, curious, intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful, kind, and attentive. But my alcoholic/mentally ill/spiritually sick mind fixates on my perception of being perceived imperfect. The way it parallels my job is ugly, unwelcome, uncomfortable. I want to be my full self, which is weird and silly, unprofessional, and nonjudgmental. I want to be immaterial, by which I mean not fixated on superficial things like shapes and decorations but instead attuned to the realness underneath all that, I want things to be smooth and safe and sound. Maybe that’s greedy or unrealistic. It’s complicated to inhabit imperfections but that is who I am at my core. I’m guilty of envying the neurotypical, the elite, the affuent, the putatively unbroken. But I serve no one by trying to wear a mask. My best self, my higher personality, is showing how I love my broken self, how I grieve and care in the titration of tragedy, how I fail early and fail often and keep space in my heart for my fellow failers. God help me be gentler, all around.

6/20/2023

Today we got our mid-summer performance reviews. While the majority of my feedback was overwhelmingly positive (“joy to work with,” “high quality work” etc.), I was criticized for performing poorly on my very first assignment. Internallly I panicked. The counsel (higher in the hierarchy than senior associate and just below partner) delivering this feedback was firm and didn’t coddle me, but she did assure me that the sort of mistakes I made (turning in overlong work, not communicating clearly that I wpuld be unable to meet a deadline, failing to ask sufficient clarifying questions to avert these mistakes, failing to ask for a correctly completed finished work product to go by) are fairly common among summer associates. Now, in my head, some fault lies with the assigning attorney, who I feel communicated her expectations ineffectively and whose expectations were unreasonablly high given how novice I am and how little time I was given to complete these tasks, tasks in legal writing genres (“talking points memo” and “one-pager”) O was at that point wholly unfamiliar with. But the fact of the matter is that a metaskill of being an attorney is discovering unfamiliar genres of legal writing and finding my voice in them, producing streamlined (rather than expansive) work product, and assertively asking clarification questions when I don’t fully understand the assignment. My law school exam-taking strategy of throwing everything at the wall is inappropriate for this job. Being precise and concise, very quickly, seems like at the core of what makes this job very stressful and why it commands high pay.

I’m happy to report that I didn’t allow that internal critique of the assigning attorney leak out during my evaluation. I used the tools of AA, specifically the Ninth Step (clean up your side of the street) Tenth Step (when we were wrong we promptly admitted it) and the general ethos of taking personal responsibility and not assigning blame to defect from accountability. I admitted I made a mistake and said I had room to grow. I think this was for the best and the spiritually correct thing to do, which is good because it also seemed like the professionally correct thing to do.

I tell myself: Take it in stride as a learning experience, don’t morbidly self reflect don’t wallow. And give myself grace as a fallible human who will inevitably make mistakes. A bruised ego is best! That’s because it reminds me that my identity is not my career, what’s good about me is not my being perfect. Yasiin Bey’s words come into my head all the time: “I ain’t no perfect man I’m trying to do/the best that I can/with what it is I have.” In a different song he says “I’m trying to live my life in the sight of God’s memory…” I think God made me a mistake maker. That means I can relate and care for and love my fellow mistake makers. God also gave me the capacity to learn and grow and correct myself and to listen to criticism. So I have to choose to pursue that capacity and not succumb to my other God-given tendency, which is to hyperfixate on the bad, no matter how small, and neglect the Good, no matter how big. God help me not do this latter mistake. The honest truth here is that my fuck-up rankles. I'm working through it, it will be ok, but in the moment, it got to me.

Metadiary moment: part of me is frankly surprised about how much I am blogging about God. I didn’t necessarily set out to make this a spiritual or religious blog. I just keep finding myself using the spiritual lattice from AA to make meaning, to respond and to grow and to adapt and to react. I think it might be offputting, and I think sometimes the God talk is a shorthand or an idealized version of who I am and how I think. Like this blog is actually a prayer sometimes. But I feel like I am being honest, emotionally and spiritually, with how I approach this writing practice, and evidently my Higher Power is showing up a lot in that, and I will note that and try to accept it, and see how it evolves. That’s all for now.

6/19/2023

I have run out of time but I want to get caught up so here’s some sketches of the past two days:

Early run on the cliff walk path. Mansions and surf. It’s unusual for me to run early. Glad I had the time and energy to get it in before leaving Newport.

Irritable train ride home. The chaos and exuberance and exasperation and love and din of kith and kin. My fragile aegis of a nonfiction book and rainforest sounds on my headphones barely held up against it.

I am reading a book called The Professor and Madman; it is very interesting. I feel proud and actualized that I am reading for pleasure, and I’m pleased that I can read 60 pages during the train ride, as distracted and agitated as I was.

I learned the etymology of serendipity from the book: serendipity (n.) "faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries," a rare word before 20c., coined by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann dated Jan. 28, 1754, but which apparently was not published until 1833. Walpole said he formed the word from the Persian fairy tale "The Three Princes of Serendip" (an English version was published in 1722) whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of" [Walpole].Serendip, (also Serendib), attested by 1708 in English, is an old name for Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), from Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa "Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island."

One of the protagonists in The Professor and the Madman is a lifelong autodidact philologist polymath and reading about him made me reflect on my desire to just learn for learnings sake, without further purpose or consequence. Law-learning can feel dreadfully purposeful and grave. But hopefully I can keep space for caprice in my journaling and creative writing practice.

I got to hang with G again tonight. It was on my mind through most of the Newport vacation, and I was happy when I got invited to come over and see her as soon as I texted her that I was back in Manhattan. We got to spend a lot of time in each other’s company yesterday. The feeling of uncertainty and doubt that seems so often to suffuse me when reading (into) the texts of someone for whom I have romantic affection, that feeling gave way to a certain certainty that the interest regard esteem affection and attraction between us was and is solidly mutual. That for me is a tiding of great joy and comfort. Of course, my alcoholic mind or my wounded spirit or mentall illness or whatever you want to call it pushes my mind into a realm of new doubt and worry, simultaneously that I’m getting too much of what I want and that I’ll lose what I have, that the great font of pleasure that is new love is somehow unsafe for me since I have made such a diligent business of turning down many of life’s pleasures, the glib and probably inaccurate but nevertheless tempting analogy between love and drug stubbornly persists. There’s more to say but I’m out of time; I hope I find more time to think through this on another tday.

6/18/2023

I only have time to offer bullet points, sadly, but I am committed to posting even if imperfect. This is the roundup of my last full day in Newport:

Bird sanctuary - mourning doves, catbirds, bluebirds, red-winged blackbirds, crows, turkeys, mockingbirds and finches.

Today's activities included hiking Hanging rock, me doing amateur haphazard plant identification with my phone, and birdwatching.

Gooseberry Beach - ospreys, gulls and cormorants

Rough rocks, slimy seaweed

Clear seawater felt icy at first but got tolerable

Family Zoom call

Day after mom's birthday, father’s day, grandma’s birthday, Dad eye surgery. Lots of days, wish I were more around my family for those, but glad they seem to have a solid community of friends and peers to celebrate with.

Rescheduled with sponsor and sponsee. Feeling a bit dislodged/blocked/disrupted spiritually

Emmett learned me the ampersand etymology. Here it is copy pasted: 1797, contraction of and per se and, meaning "(the character) '&' by itself is 'and' " (a hybrid phrase, partly in Latin, partly in English). An earlier form of it was colloquial ampassy (1706). The distinction is to avoid confusion with & in such formations as &c., a once-common way of writing etc. (the et in et cetera is Latin for "and"). The letters a, I, and o also formerly (15c.-16c.) sometimes were written a per se, etc., especially when standing alone as words.

Pasta Beach - gorged on orchiette, ear-shapes pasta. ate more than O should have, thinking that by finishing my playe I could demonstrate gratitude.

Bohnanza bean game

Trash pandas

Big laughs, silly and fun, weary of competing but it was fine

There is a big abundance here, healthy happy family, ambient and quiet and peaceful, and I am in some ways mimicking the behavior of the superelites by visiting Newport in late July. Until next time.

6/17/2023

Last night I took the Amtrak from The Garment District/Chelsea to Kingston, Rhode Island. On the way I read most of the play Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, which was ok but not captivating to me. But I did like the act of reading as opposed to being on my phone or passively listening to media; I hope to do more pleasure/frivolous reading this summer. I also got to pass some time just looking out the window auditing the menagerie of graffiti whizzing by, trying to recognize and decode the glyphs.

E&E Kindly ferried me from the RI train station to E’s parents house in Newport. I ate a burger and a hotdog and slept. The next morning I did some editing for the law review, walked to a coffee shop and got caught out in the coastal New England rain for the first of three times that day. After quietly eating scones and croissant at the dining room table I retreated to my guest room quarters to do more editing, a lot of fine detail work, a bit tedious but also satisfying.

E drove me and E around in the car for a brief tour of Newport. Aquidneck, the name of the island on which Newport sits, is littered with Gilded Age mansions, which sit along either side of Bellvue avenue. Elsewhere more modest colonial era architecture flourishes. I’d really like to do a historical dive into Newport because it’s a really fascinating place. In lieu of that, I’ll try to recall some of the many historical tidbits and factoids I’ve heard so far: The town was founded in the early 17th century; I have yet to hear much history on the indigenous population that existed here prior to the colonization, which was undertaken at least in part by Portuguese settlers. Many streets are lined with dry stacked stone retaining walls, most originally built by slaves. Evidently the island was a favorite vacation spot for the uber-wealthy during “the season,” june and july. The Cliff Walk gives a striking tour of the back of many of the mansions, with the regal, elite grounds of the houses on one side of the path and the craggy cliffs and coves of the atlantic ocean on the other. That path used to allow the servants and workers egress from their jobs at the mansion. E’s Mom does work inside the mansions and says that going inside these places will turn you into a socialist. Some of the gaggle of mansions has been absorbed by the local private Catholic university, Salve Regina, which gives off a vaguely Duke-ish vibe. Appropriately enough, Doris Duke had Rough Point, a summer mansion stuffed with priceless antiques. The largest employer is the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. I asked E’s dad if Rhode Island was run by the mob and he said Providence was, and we didn’t talk much more about it. At one point E pointed out a strip of nature preserve which to me looked sort of like a lush ditch next to a green ridge. E speculated that this was the part of the island where you were most likely to be murdered by a highwayman laying in wait, possibly with some sort of pentagram affixed to his person. It was a funny speculative addition to an otherwise fact-based tour. There’s more factoids but I’ll leave it there for now.

I got to jog along a few miles of the Cliff Walk by myself in the afternoon. It was raining and so I was alone for a lot of the run, which was really pleasant. I got back and got dried off, spirits buoyed from the effort. We had a wholesome family dinner together: me, E, E, E’s mom and dad and sister. It was tacos with all the fixins. In many ways right now my life is tacos with all the fixins. I keep coming back to this word abundance. My heart feels full, my life feels full. But the fullness is not always a joy to bear; sometimes, despite myself, I let it feel like a yoke.

As I type this I feel a kind of heavy knot in my throat and chest. There is nothing wrong as far as I know. I feel like I wish I was closer to G. But we have plans to hang out Tuesday evening, we will explore the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn and hopefully get to be close by each other for a few hours. I had the unseemly thought on the way out to Rhode Island that I was in a sour mood on Friday because I was experiencing withdrawal from G and the analgesia that comes with loving touch. I say unseemly because I wish to cultivate a sensitive, multidimensional, multichromatic (to use a word I came across in a sort of overwrought legal brief last week), deep, textured, interpersonal relationship with G. I do not wish to understand G as a neurochemical fixer, an esteem font, or a dispenser of pain meds. Bill Wilson would probably say “addicts are just like that.” Unchecked we tend to see the world in terms of what it can do for us, how good it can make us feel, what we can get out of it. The solution, I know, is to find a way to be of service, because it short-circuits that selfish cycle in my cerebral echo chamber. I think also this is just a typical externality of love that need not be fully shunted into the realm of alcoholic spirituality. I think it’s probably common to feel extremely excited about someone with whom you seem to fit and click and jibe and vibe just right right away, and then to feel a bit tortured when you find yourself far away from them due to a prior commitment. I think the heavy knot comes from a fear of loneliness. The fear is valid, also I think it should wane when faced with the abundance of nearness and regard that I have in my life. Ultimately I think adjusting my attitude to being thankful for what I’ve got is key. I don’t love to conclude that attitude of gratitude is the key to nonloneliness but I feel like it’s probably right. Also service, also taking myself less seriously, also trusting that I will be taken care of. Gratitude, service, humility, faith. I intend to find a way to inhabit these in the moments I’m away from G to keep my spiritual architecture solid. I also just now realized that i neglected my prayer and meditation routine yesterday which probably has me somewhat out of sorts as well. Ok enough from me for now, until next time…

6/16/2023

Today has been a bit of an off day. I decided to work from home today, which all summer associates have the option of doing on Friday if they wish. But something about being at home (“home” feels a bit generous; “my place” or “not-work” is probably a better approximation) made being productive feel next to impossible. The sounds of chatting building-mates, construction in the building, ambient street noise, and of course the many internal narratives chattering away inside my head were all quite distracting. It feels like shirking to not be busy for the full eight hours of the day, because I am being paid so much. I will try to ensure that I stay busy starting next week, and I will not work from home anymore, I think, since it’s so much harder to find motivation here than in the office.

G shared with me a Fran Lebowitz quote that keeps popping back into my head: “generally speaking it is inhumane to detain a fleeting insight.” When I first read it, it made me feel small and petty for keeping a blog, since that quote is excerpted from a chapter critiquing writers, and I thought that each time I journaled I was detaining a fleeting insight. However I think there’s another interpretation that is more supportive, which is that the insights I have and keep to myself are the ones I truly detain. The mere fact of recording a thought, whether insightful or not, isn’t detention so much as it is retention, although I’m sure Socrates would be pissed I said that. My point is that however trite my writing may be, the act and ritual of recording it and making it available for others to see is at least a little connective and relational, and it is by interrelating that I escape the detention of solitude and isolation that tend to be my default as an alcoholic. As someone said after the meeting last night: my disease wants to get me alone.

So I will try to gracefully receive the wry acerbic wit of Fran Lebowitz and appreciate her as a standard bearer of the strident New York opinion-haver genre of social interpretation and relation, but will gently resist arriving at the conclusions she reaches, since I disagree with some of her premises.

Otherwise there’s not a lot to report, today feels a bit soft and small. The best thing that happened today is that I got taken out to Korean BBQ by associates at the firm, my first time trying that style of meal, and it was really excellent. Another thing somebody said after the meeting yesterday is that the rise in suicides in America is directly proportional to the rise in people eating by themselves. Who knows if it’s empirically true, but I am convinced that communal meals are healing, whether with colleagues or co-recoverers or family or just plain friends. I’m looking forward to some of that this weekend in Rhode Island with E & E.

The last thing I’ll say for this entry is that I feel a sort of sickly sweet anxiety about love. I feel a lot of affection for and attraction toward G. I feel like I want to be around her a lot, and to also be in touch with her a lot, both like in communication and nearby, bodily. I know that if left unchecked my tendency is to want more and more and more of anything that makes me feel good, even past the point when the presence of that thing is good for me. And that’s to say nothing of how good it is for G. I know that my ideal is interdependence, which for me falls between the extremes of codependence and independence. I want to form a true partnership with another human being, which for me feels like it would be the ultimate vindication of my recovery. My internet died just now; a temporary banner appeared at the top of the page: “Trying to connect…” which feels apposite. What I mean by that last thing is that I think to form a true partnership with mutual regard, reciprocity, compromise, and interdependence, would require a fundamental abandonment of the self-centeredness that encapsulates alcoholism for me. Of course, there’s a danger that I’m trying to use the abstract concept of a relationship as proof that I am good enough and/or valid, and of course that would not be any meaningful vindication of sobriety. I guess there’s just a part of me that wants to see proof that I can be in a healthy relationship, there’s a part of me that feels ready for that, and there’s a part of me that feels really sincerely excited about G. And all that exists side-by-side with the fact that this summer will end in about six weeks and a difficult discussion will have to be had. Again I will try to be where my feet are. I hope I can reset a bit in Rhode Island, connect with my Higher Power and find a way to be of service to those around me, so that when I get back to NYC I can be of service to my employer and to G, to bring material and emotional benefit and enthusiasm to the people around me generally, and to practice love and tolerance, which, as I was reminded last night, is our (alcoholics’) code. Until next time…

6/15/2023

Today I experienced the disruptive glee of being in like (the thing nearby being in love, the thing you don’t want to call being in love, because if you were in love so soon, wouldn’t that say something about how you are too easily wooed, or too quick to give your heart away, or reckless with your affection, or something like that?). I study and sweat each text message I send out to G, wanting always to capture the honest essence of my affection in an attractive light. I think Willow Smith said it best: feel my heart’s intention. I really like that phrasing. I want to be my exact self, without artifice subterfuge or duplicity. I also know there is a stylistic veneer to everything in life, I can communicate and convey myself in different styles, and so I want to bring some verve and intention and coolness and grace and silliness and impressiveness and passion and tranquility, that whole contradictory messy excited melange, I want to bring all that to G, I want my texts to form a constellation that glitters for her. My heart feels a little jumpy talking about this stuff. I want to make her a playlist. I sent her one already, ambient music for her to sleep or do the crossword puzzle to. She says she likes it. It certainly seems like she likes me. I am certain I like her. It’s so important for me to box out doubt right now. Thankfully, my prayer and meditation practice, this e-diary routine, and the availability of other men in recovery to talk to, as well as friends and family who I listen to and am listened to by, all these are resources I have to make good decisions that prioritize the health of me and G’s hearts. I am going to trust that I will be taken care of, since so far I always have been.

Here’s a few other things that happened today. I feel some uncertainty about whether I am working (hard) enough. Mentors and my leftist friends say let them court you, rest is resistance, kill the clock in your head, etc. But, to borrow a phrase from R, “I am a dog-hearted cur” when it comes to employers, and I feel deeply grateful for my job this summer, both as a career path opportunity and as a source of income. And, barring true catastrophe, my employer will never read this blog, so here’s me trying to form an intention to make gratitude an action, like we say in AA, and to balance that work gratitude with some semblance of internal pace, dignity, and wellbeing that is non-work-contingent. We’ll see how that goes.

Today I got to hear from a judge during lunch. It was fine, he seems to have achieved a great deal, most notably of which he was once a clerk for Thurgood Marshall. It’s a little arresting to feel so nearby greatness. Then again, greatness, especially the greatness of a “great man,” is something suspect, and I know better than to be fully smitten by such presentations. Still, there is an undeniable sincerity and commitment to service exuded by this judge, and a real plain sense of conviction. However, I find it hard to relate to judges, chiefly because my understanding is that most judges (at least high-level federal judges like this one) arrived at their position only after being thoroughly vetted and found to have more or less sterling pasts. As someone with a criminal record, a history of drug use and mental illness, and some pretty unsavory affiliations (anarchists, nihilists, street organizations, etc.), I feel like that particular role would never be offered to me. I also don’t think I would ever want to be in that position, to me it is a pretty unenviable task. In any case the judge was a nice guy and I asked him a question and it was fine and I went about my day.

We had a juneteenth presentation at work which was great. I learned a lot about soul food and its connection to enslaved peoples’ traditions of resistance and community.

I went on a good run, I told G in a text afterward that I felt as healthy and springy as a young foal, which she thought was funny. I hope I can keep running and keep running into G.

I went to an excellent meeting in the Kip’s Bay area. It was a huge, all-men meeting. In a truly uncanny moment, one speaker shared about his daughter, a law student, who was stressed about judicial clerkships. He mentioned her name, which was a unique name, and I realized that it was probably the person who I sit next to at my job. I went up to him afterward and confirmed that this was in fact the same person. That was truly a trip, a very unexpected conneciton to make. I will probaby not reach out to her and say “hey I met your alcoholic dad at an AA meeting I was at because I am an alcoholic” but I guess he may mention it to her, and since I have such a unique name there’s a chance she may connect with me about it, but I’ll leave that up to him and/or her. That was actually kind of a side note; the meeting was really excellent, encouraging, rejuvenating, connective. I stayed afterward and connected with a guy from NC whose number I actually had already acquired years ago but we had never connected. We all went out to a diner together, like 20 of us, and filled the place with happy raucous conversation. I was preoccupied a bit with texting G, wanting to stay engaged and interesting to her, but I was able to put the phone away and be present in the fellowship. I got to meet a handful of people, one guy with 90 days, one guy with decades, some others in between. I walked home down 3rd Ave and got to have a great casual conversation with C and with J. I felt like it was a perfect evening. Well, as perfect as an evening not cuddling with G can be, if I am being completely honest. Still, an important moment of connectivity, fellowship, and community building in recover, which I know forms the foundation of my ability to respectfully, kindly, sensitively, generously, non-selfishly form relationships with people outside AA. So I said a big prayer to God about that when I got home. To end with, here are a few fragments of quotes I typed down during the meeting itself:

“what is spiritual is what is not intellectual, it is not material. it is an unfolding”

“the brain is not a generator, it is a receiver”

“we recover together”

That last one seems so simple but it is a big deal for me to remember, because I spend a lot of time in this blog space kind of feeling like an individual in recovery. But my recovery is was and always will be a collective endeavor, and one that accumulates meaning weight impact and effectiveness only in terms of its mutuality and interpersonality. So this is me trying to set an intention to return to the simple but not easy maxim, and invite you into it to, to the extent that you need and want it: we recover together. Until next time.

6/14/2023

Just now I was thinking: “Is this what I like, is this what I’M like, or is this just what’s easiest?” I guess what I'm wondering is: how much of my personality in life has been me doing the thing that's easiest, and how much of it is some other kind of intentional construction or essential aspect of my nature? A philosophical question for bing-bong heads only, I think.

I got home after a long, full day. I thought to myself: I can’t wait to lay in my bed and do nothing. But actually that’s not quite right. I love to lay in my bed and do nothing. It’s exquisite, especially when it comes after having done lots of things. But since I’ve been in NYC I have had this recurring experience: over and over, I find that I can do more than I thought I could. I think that this is probably common; I think anyone who was exposed to an environment where they were welcomed, invited, had all their needs met, made to feel important, well compensated, treated kindly and treated to many free meals, listened to, (and even in the case of one person, G, embraced physically), kept company with, greeted, tended to, and invested in…well the sentence has run on far too long but I think anyone in these circumstances would be likely to find themselves with a higher capacity than they previously understood themselves to have.

This reminds me of the Harvey Milk album title: “My Love Is Higher Than Your Assessment of What My Love Could Be.” This I feel like is a good phrase to describe how my Higher Power probably feels about me, if I can ascribe a phenomenon so base and human as “feeling” to an entity like HP. Harvey Milk is an experimental sludge/doom/noise outfit whose best songs, to my ears, are the bone-rattlingly heavy stoner metal dirges. Which is why it is cool that they have one song that is just their singer singing the Lord’s Prayer in a soft voice that breaks with tenderness occasionally. That song is on a short playlist I made for myself called “Remember God.” It is easy for me to remember God in this season of my life. I first encountered God in a season of deprivation, spiritual privation, emotional emaciation. It was the worst time in my life, I felt hollowed out. I felt as empty as a drum, as Norah Jones said. Now I am encountering God in a season of abundance. I have thought a few times about what tint faith takes in prosperity versus dispossession. I wonder and worry that the former contaminates or distorts faith. After all, my first and fiercest faith came when I was a filthy frustrated forlorned fallow fellow. But that faith hasn’t been revoked by doing well. Yet, anyways. I remember reading in the Quran that this world (the material world, that which precedes the afterlife) is nothing other than mere play and amusement. So there’s something about material ease that can be suspect, suspicious. My old nihlist anarchist queer insurrectionist friend N used to say “comfort? More like chumpfort.” Which pretty much sums it up. I actually don’t think N would count me among their friends anymore, both because I was shitty to their friends in the depths of my addiction, but also because what I do with my life today likely qualifies as having sold out. However, as I heard in a meeting today: what other people think about me is none of my business.

I had the great fortune and privilege of being asked to qualify at a meeting today. It was in a slender clubhouse not far from Greenwich Village. I got tapped by the chairperson (who it turns out is a young person working at a boutique law firm in the city) to speak on Step Two: “came to believe that a Power Greater Than Ourselves could restore us to sanity.” As most AAs will tell you, the talk I gave resembled the talk I intended to give but little. Luckily I did no dissembling, which is the important thing. Having been asked to speak only a few minutes before the meeting, I gave a frantic and frazzled and highly truncated account of my drinking career, my experiences with insanity (suicidality, detox, psych ward, rehab, mental illness diagnoses, non-malingering work with psychiatrists, therapy) and tried to offer up the several God-proxies (God prostheses?) that helped prop me up in my first few months: Good Orderly Direction, Gift of Desperation, Group Of Drunks: these were the manifestations of God that I could rely on. I finished somewhat abruptly, although not before reading a couple paragraphs out of the Twelve and Twelve, which I think was grounding. I got to hear a lot of people share on the topic, and also off the topic, and got to hear from day-counters (people either new to the program or coming back from a recent relapse) about what they were struggling with. I got classically cornered by a sixty-something man who had twelve days today, cornered in a loving and enthusiastic way, but cornered nonetheless. The exuberance and exasperation of early sobriety exuded everywhere from this fellow. I wrote down my number on a piece of paper; he says he will call me when he’s in rehab. It is very grounding for me to be able to feel that I am being of service. It was the perfect antidote to work, which while in no way “bad,” was just shot through with striving, careerism, achievement, accolades, and the like. People are getting their interviews with judges for clerkships and as magnanimous and gracious as I try to be, their success slathered on my plain white crustless no-interview-offer bread was an unpleasant sandwich to be a part of. But I felt like it was perfectly washed away, like a PBJ safely shepharded down the esophagus by a heroic quaff of whole milk, by my qualifying at the meeting.

However, on the walk home I got an emotional punch in the gut. I walked down waverly place, saw one guy who made me think “hm he looks like a drug dealer,” saw a guy ten feet down the sidewalk holding what, to an addict like me, was unmistakably a homemade crackpipe, then two feet down the sidewalk from him I saw a woman squatting down with a rubbery tourniquet wrapped around her arm and fastened tight in her teeth, syringe with orange plastic cap in one hand, very near to a self-administered intravenous dose of something. I had the brief thought that I hope she isn’t shooting crack, because that’s a miserable place to be in life. Obviously shooting heroin or meth or whatever else is also horrible, but for some reason I really hoped it wasn’t crack. I saw her eyes, which were bloodshot, bulging, and wild with need. What I saw was not emotion but plain lack, frenzied by the nearness of its foil. I was surprised by how hurt my feelings were after seeing this. Like I tend to think I have a pretty thick skin for drug stuff. I’ve seen people shoot dope in the streets in Vancouver. I watched a movie with G just last weekend, Panic in Needle Park, rife with gratuitous closeups of junky self-injection. But for whatever reason, on a sunny evening near Washington Square, the sun bright but the streets cool since it had just rained, for whatever reason it really hurt to see her like that. I said a dua for her and asked God to help me stay sober. God forbid and there but for the grace of God go I. There is something satisfying about how consequential and direct AA is. It requires no striving or jostling, unless you count the effort spent on enlarging your spiritual life and increasing your service capacity. The shock of sadness for this addict woman subsides and I get home safe and sound. My thoughts drift.

Today I had friends ask me: Are you grieving this summer? Are you going to grieve? They are talking about my friend L who took her own life this January. It’s hard to know how to answer. I feel like I grieved when I wrote and researched about insanity and NC’s IVC (involuntary commitment) law for a class last semester, but that in its own way was detached and clinical. I don’t talk to L’s family and am in sort of stilted sporadic conversation with the constellation of mutual friends that had spent so much of our hearts on being L’s support circle over the 18 or so months prior to L’s suicide. I grow weary just typing about this. I do not know if I will grieve L; I will probably always be mourning her, I do not feel sorrowful in this moment, I miss her so so much in my heart, also day to day it is easy to not miss her at all and fill my mind with activities and sensations and flavors and tasks. I don’t know how it will be without her; I don’t have to know.

6/13/2023

One little metapedestrian thing is that I am feeling more like a New Yorker in my gait and confidence traversing intersections. The constant sense of urgency in each stride feels like it comes naturally.

Today is clerkship day for some. But not for all!

At the firm for my matter, I do some Second Amendment caselaw research. Justice Thomas’ jurisprudence is maddening. I am working under someone whose BA MA JD goes Yale Cambridge Yale. I wonder what I could possibly offer. I work against my doubt, tamp down the imposter syndrome, copy pasta legalistically until my brain and typing fingers are fatigued.

I get taken out to an exquisite restaurant called Tamarind and get curried brussel sprouts and due to a windfall I am allowed to go home with the leftovers of half the people there.

I go for a run. As ever, the body craves effort. My flexing muscles get me up and down the Chelsea Piers route that has become my default. I like looking at everyone and weaving through the pedestrian traffic. Sometimes I thread the needle a bit too close and feel rude, mostly I feel big and a bit slow but happy that I can move so feely, and on demand.

Jewels. I get to peruse them, inlaid on charm bracelets and forever bracelets and rings and necklaces and so forth. The store is littered with scented candles shaped like food. For some reason there is a fishnet bag of sardine-shaped and sardine-sized chocolates that are wrapped in foil that looks like sardines. I meet G there, it’s a bit awkward but cute, she gets off her shift, we go.

We get sweet sweet pastries from Little Italy. One enormous pastry called a lobster tail, a pastry crust like a croissant but more tensile and crackly, filled with what feels like one pound of cream filling. Also we get a chocolate cannoli. I am impressed and want to eat them all but feel a level of appetite much lower than usual due the fact that I am in crush mode and am fully preoccupied with the cuteness and kindness of my company.

This is the part of the blog where it feels uncouth or nongalant or something to carry on in too much detail; poeticized vagueness incoming.

Me and G embrace. I feel connected. I feel embraced. I am connecting and I am embracing. It’s not just physical, we play a silly word association game for a long time, in bed, not dressed, close, chatty, aimless, perfect. We talk a lot about music and architecture and some about plants and some about what we want and what we like and some about food and NYC and books and so forth. I tell her she has to read Jorge Borges’ Library of Babel and listen to Kate Bush’s excellent fanfic breakout track “Wuthering Heights.” We talk about so so much more and I can’t remember a lot of the details but I can remember vividly how good and smooth and easy it felt to be in that conversation. I feel completely in the moment, which is like a superposition of time going by indulgently slowly, lovely slowly, and also time passing in an instant, it’s over already somehow, four hours have passed and I’m walking G to their subway stop and casually stopping on the way for prophylaxis and listening to G tell me about their old haunts and stomping grounds as a bartender, and I see the old bar they used to work at, which is quite close to where I’m living this summer, and I see a man with a shirt that says “ALCOHOLICS UNANIMOUS” on the back and I pull out my phone to snap a pic of it before he ambles into a bar. We get to the subway stop, we kiss gently, and suddenly I’m by myself again, walking home, thinking about when and how to send a pithy nonchalant text that conveys just the right amount of affection without being clingy or overexcited-seeming. I stop at a deli for an italian hoagie on a hero, make it back around midnight and have about five minutes of perfect indulgent silence as I chomp on my big sandwich. It occurs to me that all my needs are met. I want to be careful with my heart, I want to be prudent, considerate, measured, circumspect, and placid. I want to be not-reactive, un-inflammable, sangfroiduous (a word I made up, adjective form of sangfroid). These are practical emotional positions to take and maintain in sobriety, bulwarks against the excitablility that so often amounted to poor conduct for me prior to recovery. I know all that intellectually. I let that intellect get counterbalanced by the big bright warm full heart inside me. I can’t know what it will be like next week or next month or next fall. I pray to live by my values, practice the principles of the program in all my affairs, let God into my love life, trust that I will be loved and cared for no matter what. I’ll be interested to see how future posts on this matter look. For now, I am for G, and for me, G is for gratitude. :)

6/12/2023

Royal used to say “solipsism crew!”

When I was on tour with my band in 2020 I met a man, who I will call Royal, who used to say that, I guess to poke fun at how he/we were self-interested/self-obsessed people? Solipsism = (1) the quality of being very self-centered or selfish (2) (philosophy) the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

I think about this random quote from this passing acquaintance from the neo-no-wave days as I listen to an AA speaker qualify, listen to him share his story. Call this guy Spike from Rockaway, not because that’s his name or hometown, but because it kind of captures his flavor. I think about how important his story is. I think about how important his story is for me to hear. I think about how I am in a big church basement full of sixty or so men, each of whom is a minor miracle in my eyes. I think about how the time I spend involved in the stories of the people in my life who are not me is time typically well-spent. And I know that each of these men, myself included, struggles in their/our own way with centering our/theirselves, trapped in a centripetal vortex sometimes, but also jostled kindly in the gentle centrifuge of AA to get some time outside ourselves.

I think about the Steely Dan song Time Out of Mind, which when I heard it made me think about how when you do drugs you get to spend some time out of your mind, which is an accurate way to hear that song since it is a song about doing heroin, but today I read the phrasee “time out of mind” in a legal brief and learned it actually can also mean like “time immemorial” or “a time in the past that was so long ago that people have no knowledge or memory of it.” That makes me think about the axial age, “broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BC,” how the world turned on its axis big time during those centuries, how it was an age of prophets, and how the time before it seems like the horizon beyond which there’s a lot more time out of mind.

I was thinking the other day about how maybe in two thousand years or so the people of the present will describe William Wilson and Robert Holbrook Smith as a prophetic pair. That’s a natural thought for someone like me who can, if I’m not careful, treat the two as prophets already today, since they were the figureheads of a movement that has so captivated my spirit. But they wouldn’t want that I don’t think, and I know better than to idolize, and luckily there’s no official culture in AA to valorize them in that way, no tradition of hagiography, thankfully.

AA is on the brain big time right now because AA is the counterbalance to the state I am in. I am in a moment of jubilance, I am ebullient, I am a newly mint(ed) token of affection, I feel very present in the future and am reminded of Future, who famously said “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression/I need love and affection.” I know that I have to not “future trip” as we say in AA, I need to be where my feet are. But those things are hard to do because I am bubbling with excitement about a love-style feeling I have. The crush may never be disaggregated, or maybe crush-as-germ (generative germ, like the germ of a plant’s seed) will elucidate more about the nature of the crush as its hull is left behind and a new hue of me-and-you blooms.

What I am getting at is that I feel giddy about a romantic interest, G, with whom date two went extra good and on Tuesday we meet for date three. And yeah right now G is for glee. Which is tricky for me. G is for get a grip, goo-brained googly-eyed guy! G ≠ HP! Love is lovely but when quaffed in brash draughts can be a nefarious elixir, a perilous punch. So I am trying to not get overexcited, and also I am trying to remember what my one friend said one time, which was: “don’t overcorrect.” So don’t get too un- or underexcited either I guess.

A thing about me is that I am very analytical, sometimes excessively so. Often I want to use my analysis to make decisions that I feel like I know what their outcome will be, and in so doing can sometimes be taking back my will and trying to run the show in a way that’s both not helpful all the time and also can like betray some of the spontaneity and uncertainty that make love or its nearby neighbor emotions so special. If I knew when exactly each individual bubble in the seltzer was going to pop it would probably be less excellent of a drink. Even now as I try to strike an emotionally honest balance between my poetic side, my analytic side, my sober side, and my reflective side, I feel a bit overwhelmed. My head is spinning a little, so I’ll end with a copy-paste prayer that I’ve shared with others over the years and had others share with me and that I want to remind myself to abide by:

“God, today help me set aside everything I think I know about You, everything I think I know about myself, everything I think I know about others, and everything I think I know about my own recovery, so I may have an open mind and a new experience with all these things. Please help me see the truth.”

6/11/2023

I let the journaling practice fall by the wayside over the last few days thanks to an abundant life and a willingness to socially improvise. So I will briefly gloss over my current events and try to get back to daily entries.

Today was a slow day on low sleep. It was also a glow day, my body is thrumming with the feeling of connectedness that comes as a consequence of communion with a crush. To sleep not-alone, to be held and cuddled and nuzzled and patted and pet and embraced—it’s such a precious thing. Just this week I was feeling like a bleak bloke, post-black-bloc heat stroke knees bowed going leech mode in the street troves, incapable of forming a true partnership, weak from the thought of myself as a withering individual, an inevitable introvert, discomfited disaffected unselected mood dejected brain defective heart decrepit apologetic apoplectic culled from the collective, thrall to cointreau, caustic, dyspeptic.

Now I feel just the opposite: Connected.

Calm and collected, reflective, reflected. I feel lit up and light. My heart is light and the world seems like an accepting and peaceful place. “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.” I know love is ephemeral, slippy, slippery, fickle, wispy, picky. A capricious leasehold on handholding. But handholding is not a landholding! It’s improper for me to see intimacy in terms of property. It’s proper to treat like a fussy caprice. I’m gonna try to not be suspicious or fearful or cloying or desperate or clingy or needy or greedy. I’m gonna try to be assertive and generous and to try to give of my affection without hope and without fear. In this moment I feel like I am present with the thing I wanted the most: close mutual romantic affection. So I want to try to just let that be exactly what it is for as long as it is, no more no less, without expectation. I prayed a lot today to say thanks to my Higher Power and to ask to be put to service to others in this moment of seeming actualization and blissful nearness. I know this writing is a bit baroque and maybe I adorned the page with a few too many ornaments and garlands, but I think stylistically it does a good job of reflecting just how precious this moment is to me. And also strings of broad-strokes text and abstract mood noodling feels in this moment like a good mode and a good move. That's this googler's smooth truth. In any case, I hope someday you and me can return to this page for a draft of proof of love when we need it. Until next time…

6/10/2023

Two different mentors reached out with warm, deeply validating things to say. Both had canny, prescient affirmations to offer me in response to the esteem dilution they knew can occur as a BigLaw neophyte and as an aspiring clerk. I had a chance to candidly talk through some of my trepidation, receive sage advice, and have my resolve steeled. I was reminded that I have really good friends with brilliant hearts looking out for me and looking after me, and that meant so much.

Went to see Panic in Needle Park with G at Film Forum. Big walk to the Little Island, caught the sunset during magic hours. Tons of easy, free-flowing conversation. Casually marveled at plants. Thai food in the meatpacking district from a surly waitress. About four hours in G says: "So is this a date?" It turns out it is. Then: holding hands with G for the first time. Palms sweaty, mom's spaghetti, electricity everywhere. The sky opened wide like the tide. This was the best night yet.

6/9/2023

Work was a ghost town. But not the good kind of ghost town where there’s Ghost Town DJs. The boring kind where nobody’s around. I got coffee with my partner-mentor, and had a chance to press him a bit on the ideological tension between doing undeniably good work in the realm of pro bono for the firm and work that is morally gray at best, repping big corporate clients, to pay the bills. I got a complicated and nuanced answer from him. He seemed like he took my question seriously. I left feeling privileged and optimistic. I keep coming back to the idea that I am deeply privileged to even have a chance to do a nonzero amount of good as part of my labor for money in capitalism. So I will try to hold on to that and give myself grace for the rest. This may be a rationalization.

Went for a run. The air is breathable, the body is springy, it craves effort and movement. I am blessed to be inside this old heavy carriage.

Got to go see K’s band in Alphabet City. He’s such a sweet sweet lovely friend, always has been. I don’t know how I have earned such good fortune to have friends like him. I think the answer is that it’s unearned, which is my working definition of Grace: unearned favor. So I will pray for acceptance and gratitude and try to reciprocate all the abundant goodwill that streams into my life.

Ate a big regular italian hoagie and BBQ chips from the corner store late at night and watched youtube and just felt hungry and happy and tired and ok. Things are ok. I’m taken care of. I’m very grateful.

6/8/2023

Clerking is on the brain. I’m jostling and jockeying to try to make myself more appealing to get a clerkship interview. I see people at my job frantic with energy about their prospective clerkships; my clumpmate (person who sits at the clump of desks with me) says she will work from home next tuesday because she expects to be crying if she doesn’t hear she got an interview from the judge(s) she wants to clerk for. She’s YLS and a NY native and she is nice and kind and she laughs very easily which I think is such a winning way to be in the world, and it’s infectious and fun to be around, except when I am on a call or trying to concentrate, and then it can feel exclusive and unfun, but that happens not too often. I hope I get a clerkship with a certain judge but I know if I don’t I am still good enough and capable and esteemable. I think at some point the striving must cease. Plus even if I don’t get what I want now I can maybe clerk on the way out of a firm down the line. It’s also kookoo to think about because it’s just a whole year of life that may be in a different part of the country and like what if I have a partner or something or what if I want to be working making maximum money at the firm right away! Too much to think about for now, let’s just see if I even get any interviews and then any offers and if so then I can worry about this, no reason to expend heart energy on it now.

Today was a lot but all basically benign. But like I feel like J would say for me to not immediately undercut the emotional reality I’m in. So I can just say today was a lot. It was so a lot that here is a litany of how I felt like today was, which I feel like my stylistics teacher would approve of, because I use too many words where fewere would do, but I do so in order to characterize a moment of profusion. Today was a day of excess, satisfaction beyond need, satisfaction beyond desire, the superfluity of affluence flowed superciliously all around, the glamor glut, the gilded glut, the polished profligacy, preening prodigality. I know that at other white shoe firms the excess is said to exceed even more excessively. There in those hallowed halls the goose hangs double high.

So one component of the excess is that I got taken out to another lavish lunch today, somehow even lavisher than yesterday’s. Me, two other summer associates, and three junior associates went to a very very fancy steakhouse and five of us got steak and one of us got lobster. And the steaks weren’t individual they were these mammoth cuts of porterhouse that came served on sizzling ceramics pre-sliced, perfectly cooked, put onto our plates by the servers, and spooned with the basting liquid, liquid gristle and butter. We got some sides but they meant nothing. This was the best steak I’ve eaten. Easily. The microtragedy is that I attempted to be civil by not eating as much steak as I wanted, and there were leftovers, but the vibe became clear later that the leftovers were going home with the junior associates, so basically I could have eaten more steak. This is like a ludicrous sentence to be typing. I could be in the streets rioting or squatting or wheatpasting or doing petty theft or whatever. I could be living an interpersonally communist life. I could be desecrating confederate monuments. These last three sentences are equally as ludicrous. Whether I like it or not the fact of the matter is today I ate roughly $70 worth of steak at a lunch for six that ended up costing $640 ish dollars according to the glance I stole at the check at the end. This is while Victor is being detained by ICE. I don’t want to be like glib or maudlin or whatever and do juxtapositions for their own sake. But it’s hard not to look at my material circumstances and see their violent contrast with the material circumstances of people nearby or comrades or neighbors or peers or fighters or strugglers whose hearts I trust or just folks whose life is their own personal life but J sent a meme today that said the personal is political and the political is personal and I am suspended in this moment in an osso bucco atmosphere, immobilized in the thick plexiglass prism-case of privilege, a construct I willingly entered and now stare cow-eyed out from, up to my udders in posh cud.

I am sleepy and full of expensive food in this moment and I cannot make sense of it.

So I will allow myself to simply document this feeling, undefined and wisdomless as it may be.

Kafkaesque is a word that gets thrown around, like quixotic. But today I had a truly kafkaesque moment, and the reason is that both yesterday’s lunch and today’s lunch were facilitated at least in part by this extremely kind junior associate T, who I won’t talk about in too much detail for the sake of anonymity, but who notably studied Kafka extensively in his ten or so years between undergrad and law school. He studied at the most elite universities in the western world and focused on Kafka, Nietzsche, and even some Marx and Lacan. He and I geeked out about Kafka’s “The Trial,” which I said I had read recently, but which in reality I had listened to on audiobook about five years ago when I was roughly one month sober, in rehab in Charlotte. The Kafkaesque moment I guess is that two fans of Kafka were talking about Kafka and the law and enjoying a very anti-dystopian afternoon together, one filled with order and comfort and logic and ease and sensibility, quite contrary to many of the modes of Kafka I think of when I think about his writing. But there’s so much I don;t know about Kafka. I should try to get my hands on T’s dissertation, maybe I could divine something there.

I did do some substantive work today. I got a chance to sit in on a mandatory settlement conference for one of my matters, it’s essentially like a mediated conversation except the mediator in this case was a federal magistrate judge. The big takeaway from this for me was that I suddenly gained a sense of investment in and concern for the matter. The MSC was on zoom, but I still got to see the plaintiff, who we believe has suffered a harrowing ordeal, the defendants alleged to have grossly abused her, the counsels for both sides, and other relevant parties. This is a real life situation with real people. It is not a law school hypo. It is not an exam question. It is not an alienated anonymous text-based task. But it felt like all those unreal things up until I saw the people involved, because it was just me and a stream of emails and Teams messages and Westlaw and Google up until then. I feel like there is a chance for me to begin to invest myself in the real relationships and life experiences that correspond with the practice of law. I think that would add a tremendous dimension to what I have so far, which is mostly legal academia and some pro bono real life stuff. It was not exhilarating, but it was like anti-dissociative. I like that, I want to move toward that generally in life. Then again, there’s a fear that comes with the consequences that entails. I fuck up a law review article and no one gets hurt; I can see a mistake on a case like this costing someone hundreds of thousands of dollars or relief from mistreatment, failed accountability for a perpatrator, and so forth. There is a lot at stake. Luckily, my role as a summer associate is relatively minor and inconsequential, at least for now, so I should have a chance to wade into this anti-dissociative pool.

It just occurred to me that I don’t think there’s any person at the firm I would be willing to share this blog with. The obvious reason is that it is in many ways about them. But is that the reason? Is there something about me writing this blog about my experience here that puts distance between me and them? Am I objectifying my summer associate cohort, turning them into subject matter? I don’t think I am, but I might be. And this is the sort of worry I have expressed earlier regarding David Foster Wallace’s treatment of the narratives and people in AA. I think this has more to do with me coming to terms with who I am as a writer, what my writing practice means, and how it can serve to block or bloom relations in my life. Not sure.

Tonight after work we had a dinner with the partners on the waterfront. This was the other thing that made today the day of excessive excess. It was at a fancy space on the waterfront near the Statue of Liberty. The Staten Island Ferry lumbered to and fro in the big gray body of water. It was open bar, passed ordervs (I don’t want to look up how to spell hors de ouvres or whatever), and that was challenging but fine. I say this is just a part of work, just a different shift. Luxury shift. Clocked in to collect tons of thin tin grins, click tongues and leverage. Sociable shift. For the amount of money we are making I would probably lick the partners’ shoes for three hours. So being asked to stand around and chat and eat free food and drink ice cold seltzer with lime is truly not bad. I am just a personality type that tends to find fault with my present situation. I hyperproblematize, veer toward negative essentialization of situations, and tend to make myself into a surly outsider by default. I have this like natural affinity for understanding myself as put-upon, beleaguered, enduring some indignity. The truth is I am garishly privileged and am asked to do some networking for my job, while being fed fancy food. So I do that on the waterfront. The worst part is where we move from standing around talking to sitting down at our tables, and there aren’t assigned seats, and I am trying to strategically choose a spot where I will be near several interesting partners and cool summer associates who I like, and instead quite the opposite happens, and I am at a partially full table with no partners and some summer associates who I actually like just fine. But I feel like I pay immediately a cost for my social avarice. Dinner is fine and I get over my networking fomo. P is actually especially nice to me and we exchange numbers by the end of the night (after he is several drinks in). He says he thinks I’m cool and wants to be my friend. He’s the only person who I’ve felt like has shown me their real non-pro/non-academic/non-best-foot-forward self. I figure more of this will come with time, and I know it’s a two-way street, and I know it’s perfectly logical and strategic to in fact actively avoid being anything other than a polished peer in this context. So like I get it, no shade to any of the other summers, even if they do sometimes feel far off to me, like strivers. And then that makes me feel like a striver. "The material life/endless strive" is a lyric I like from Men I trust. Or was it "the cerebral life/endless strive" ? Or "surreal life/endless strive" ? Oh well.

At one point a partner comes and sits down at our table and is clearly drunk and holds forth with a surprisingly nuanced take on the tension between anti-gun legislation as a matter of public safety and the carceral consequences of such legislation, leading to poor and BIPOC people being disproportionately caged for charges that don’t actually neatly match up with any threat to public safety. Another partner comes and sits and talks about her crypto practice. She says no one knows how crypto works. The currency market is a gamble, she says, but crypto will come to be integrated in our technology as a background service, much the way GPS is. Seems plausible to me. I am done with networking. It’s been 3.5 hours and people are finally getting up and milling about and filing out. I should have done more description of this place but suffice it to say it is a very fancy venue. There was like a valet for our bookbags. Anyways a bunch of the people, partners and summers alike, decide to head to a bar to keep partying afterward. I am invited and I decline a bit too abruptly, I say “it’s a hard no.” I have an edge, I can be cool (like standoffish cool) when I am fatigued, I wish I had said no with a bit more grace and warmth, oh well. I uber home, and thankfully have enough energy to type all this, probably burning the most high-dollar calories I ever have had. I’m a financial furnace.

At the end of the night my self esteem is thin, papery. I leave with a weird sweet feeling in my heart. Not a good sweet, the sweet that comes from eating too much sweet food, sickly sweet, the sugar syrup of excess. But a big cold glass of water and a soft safe bed is a good remedy for all the Too Much of today. My heart softened typing all this up. I thanked God for my life as soon as I got back to my apartment. Yes let’s now end the typing with a big cold glass of water and a soft safe bed indeed. Until next time.

6/7/2023

Last night after I got done typing I had a dish called tea-smoked duck fried rice from a nearby Chinese food place on Mercer. I justified spending $30 on dinner (very easy to do here) by having been given a free Chipotle lunch at work. The meal was tasty but too rich. Is the $30 tea smoked duck dinner a metaphor for me? For me in NYC? If it is, am I the duck or the duck-filled? Duck-filled platitudes from a duck-filled placid dude. Generally I’m thrilled with the food culture and the chorus of flavors that hums and thrums nearby from all angles at all times. I wish I had a systematic way to go about it. There used to be this zine called Slice Harvester where the author just wanted to eat a slice of pizza from every pizza place in NYC.

Anyways night happened I slept I awoke I went to work.

Right now I am taking the PATH train from NYC to Hoboken to go to an AA BBQ. Piles of Ash Trickledown from Heaven, I am Not Yet Cool (fashionwise), After All Boutique Buying’s Quite difficult.

What I mean is that the air quality index has reached an apocalyptic 326 as of now, a quality level indicated on the map by the same grim crimson-plum hue used to denote catastrophic thunderstorms. Appropriately enough, then, was the sickly yellow haze that loomed in the air around mid-day today; the only other time I had ever seen the sky look that spoled champagne horrible honeycome color was as a kid in my backyard just before a tornado warning. Or was it hurricane weather? Some significant stratospheric scourge. The other summer associates and me typed away nervously as a plague of ash silently cocooned us. A partner sent out an email saying that since the world was ending, everybody come get donuts at 4pm in the kitchen area, which we did and which were quite excellent. They came from Donut Plant. I will say that I’ve had excellent donuts in NC from Donut World and from Donuts in Graham that could contend with these, but the truth is each donut in its excellence can exist unto itself, and I need not ply donuts with the violent hierarchicalization of law school. From each donut according to its flavor, to each tastebud according to its need. Mine was roughly ⅖ of some sort of yeasty strawberry melange, also half a cakey glazed affair.

Lobster spaghetti was my lunch. It costed $55 plus tax, expensed on a senior associate’s company card like it was nothing. Also we had octopus with a red onion and caper slaw and a tall stack of delicate zucchini chips with a rich dill dip (like uber upscale ruffles and french onion dip at a superbowl party) and four colossal grilled shrimp in a buttery lemon remoulade, all to share.

But weary Googler it was not the exquisite and excessive meal that meant the most to me, it was the earnest, careful concern lavished on me by these two associates, complete strangers before today, who listened intently to me diplomatically explain how I experienced today more difficulty working. They were so nice and told me about reaching out to the secretaries and using the firm’s database of go-by documents, and they told me about how there is a kind of meta-skill I am also in the process of crafting that is part of being an attorney, which is learning how to triage assignments, manage time, set boundaries, calibrate expectations, and ask for examples when I encounter a new type of assignment. My legal writing professor and textbook taught me about the Genre Discovery Method. It’s my job to learn how to learn. As I sit and type this with my thumbs on the PATH my work worries seem small and shallow. But in the moment, seeing the Important Email barge unceremoniously into the inbox with an undertow of expectations, the threat of disappointment lurking, the fear of unfamiliarity buzzing through me, the work worries feel like the whole world. I am so fortunate to be in touch with people who remember what that’s like and who want to help. It seems like they’re able to manifest the service mindset and service praxis that I go to AA to absorb and operationalize and consecrate and hone. It’s cool to see a convergence of vaues irrespective of connection to recovery.

Speaking of which, I had the great fortune today to visit a friend’s homegroup in Hoboken, and got treated to a celebratory barbecue meeting, which they evidently do once a year. I got to soak in the thick Jersey accents, but I know enough about AA to know to look past the stylistics and into the substance. And the guys here are the same essential guys as back home: humble, rowdy, grateful, rough around the edges, faithful, fitful, festive, sincere, fun. I get to hear a long “qualification” from an old-timer of some notoriety. I think about being a writer at an AA meeting. I wonder how David Foster Wallace did what he did. I wonder if it was worth it. I wonder if I have the same capacity to record rework and elevate the minute granular texture of the stories of AA people the way he did, I’m sure I don’t, I feel some relief though, because I feel somehow it could take me out of the group, dissociate me. As a strong counterpoint to my expensive lobster spaghetti lunch I eat a free hot dog and a free hamburger, each with ketchup and mustard, each cooked on a grill by a man named Stewie, and pound for pound this meal was every bit as sustaining and flavorful as my expensive lobster spaghetti. Today was a high-contrast day. The last thing I’ll say is that I got a message from a friend/mentor that just said “I’m thinking about you” and that made me really happy. I am grateful. I will try to make gratitude a verb as we say in AA, and reach out to someone in my life to extend that same goodwill toward. Until next time.

6/6/2023

Workwise, today was like yesterday. Tough legal research assignments, statute sifting, caselaw perusal, synthesis, analysis, brevity. It does not feel like no dang sinecure by golly. My assigning attorney offers the kind of useful but sharp feedback that I used to regularly receive from my head chef when I was a commis/sous chef. This feedback is not the gentle, encouraging, exclamation-point-littered type of feedback I give to students in my capacity as an editor on the Law Review or as an enrichment group leader. It is precise, and it has an edge. It is not attempting to be gentle. I believe that I can absorb it and use it to serve me well and grow as a legal researcher and attorney generally. I can hold that truth beside the truth that it hurts my feelings just a bit. Maybe it isn’t even hurt feelings but more like…growing pains. The discomfort that comes with learning something new. I remember I used to get this feeling in the back of my throat like I was about to cry when I learned a new fact about something. It’s like exciting and scary and a bit painful, but in a way that I think is healthy. Like teething or something. I’d rather be tithing. Better teething than pthisis though. (Pthisis is a word I know from magic the gathering, it is an archaic term for pulmonary tuberculosis or a similar progressive systemic disease).

Speaking of pthisis, I was going to go on a run but the outdoors is hazy, air-quality index is in the red zone, so I’m gonna stay inside and type instead. I have been carving out time in the evening after my daily post-work spiritual maintenance tivity (mostly AA, today therapy) (tivity is short for activity…more often than I’d like to admit I say to myself “too much tivities” when I am at home and feel that I have been assigned too many activities; I said it tons during finals last semester and it hasn’t left me yet). That time is carved out like the space where a ham once was, and I am filling it with that good glazed gastrotextual fare we on the internet like to call good bloggsmanship. I sort of feel sleepy and dumb and silly, I get to be like that on the page, on this page at least. It’s fun, it’s fine. I’m convinced it’s therapeutic.

Also today I did proper therapy. Therapy was affirming, insightful, helpful, grounding. I was told that in the Gestalt school (the modality of therapy I get is Gestalt), they have a saying: the field identifies the need. Or something to that effect, basically what we see and how we see the world is guided by what needs we are experiencing in any given moment. That was the insight offered by my therapist, who rightly saw that I was zeroing in on the outward manifestations of love and connection and romance in my view, because I feel that is a need that is being unmet. I love getting these gentle reframes from my therapist. One time he said “we see the world not as it is, but as we are,” which as I think about it means basically the same thing as the field of need thing, but in any case which I think is such a super profound and useful insight. I see the world as warm and inviting and generative and kind when I am in a good mood, I see it as cold foreboding bitter and bristly when I’m in a bad mood. Except with therapy and recovery and meditation and spirituality I get some critical distance from that first mood and a chance to set it aside and be still when it doesn’t serve me. My therapist is very kind and encouraging. He asked me a lot about my creative writing practice, and it made me feel important and accomplished just for having consecrated the time in my day to keep this blog effort up. Because he reminded me it’s not just a blog, it’s one among many behavioral choices I am making in this season of my life to prioritize connection. It’s an emblem of my receptivity to relation. He said he sees me as someone ready to attach. At first I thought it was a pejorative, but he meant it like the opposite of detach. He very helpfully and correctly pointed out that much of who I used to be was a person who defined myself in terms of detachment. For me that looked like withdrawal, being anti-, being derisive, combative, rejecting, denying, defacing, and destroying. Putting distance between myself and others. Thinking of autonomy as solitude. Relying heavily on myself. Relying heavier than heavy cream on myself. And, accordingly, whipping myself with the flagellatory flagella of self-disrespect, low self-esteem, guilt, shame, and shattering anxiety. Of course those reactions were fairly appropriate and commensurate with my conduct at the time, and of course they cycle in and do a feedback loop, a vortex where it’s impossible which was the cause and which was the result. Today I’m outside that sickly gyre. I grieve. I receive help. I am teachable. I falter and fumble but I’ve got a core group of gentle janitors interested in doing spiritual upkeep at no cost at all, and I get to return the favor frequently. There is chaos in my new home city, there is hurt in my heart, there is strident stress at work, heavy opulence in my building, shivering stratification on all sides, subtle subordination and sunstroke-blunt subordination above and below me, cages and fires and stenches and screeches and scratches on my skin. But I’m healed, whole, hale, and held. I keep coming home to a feeling of unexpected safety, belonging, and peace. I keep coming back. There’s a nonspatial home in me, I get to come back there, its fabric is all the loved ones everywhere, it’s woven across space and time and even between the living and dead, it looms large, it’s lush loam, I’m safe when I’m known, I’m far away but I’m home. That rhymes pretty good, let’s end it there for tonight. Until next time…

6/5/2023

My day at work was kind of bleh. The work is challenging, and I know enough about the work to know how much room I have to improve. I think being new at any job is so hard. Basically they just have me doing legal research, and the work requires a lot lot lot of focus, very high reading comprehension, and the ability to synthesize, apply, pare down, simply, and compose something pithy and accurate. It’s very hard to do! It feels kind of like taking an exam, it’s about that level of brain power demanded, and a comparable level of fear and desire to please my reader. I have these little lapses where I want to do the thing I do on exams, which is pile on the words to kind of inundate my reader with things that are certainly nearby the correct answer, but which don’t require the level of insight and synthesis mentioned above. But there is a living client on the other end of this memo, there are consequences, there are in fact correct answers, there are definitive points of law to be understood collated calibrated collected and composed caltrops-free for the purpose of actually having an Effect in the World. This is a daunting difference between the exam answer and the summer associate legal research memo. I eventually have to make a decision to turn in work I know is neither fully complete nor fully accurate, for the purpose of demonstrating to my assigning attorney that I tried. It’s not a great feeling and I can see there being a time in the future when I will have to stay two or four or six hours late to make that memo complete and accurate. But I am trying to allow myself to not be a perfectionist, even in this space of hyperprecision, and I will trust that I will get feedback, get assistance, learn how to work better, and improve, with time. That’s enough on work for now.

Today I felt fixated on fashion, just like I used to in middle school. In middle school I would always walk everywhere with my head down, eyes glued to peoples’ shoes, and I became really obsessed with and fascinated by shoes ever since, and actually some of the Air Max 98 TN Airs and related shoes that used to be the pinnacle of coolness in my middle school head are coming back into fashion, and so sometimes I see the same shoes in the same colorways as I did back then, and that is a trip. I wish I were a bit less aesthetically preoccupied. I’ve already talked about it before on this blog, so I will try not to redundify or duplificate myself here. As I type this I feel bored about caring about fashion and more excited by the idea that maybe one thing I can do that A.I. can’t do is create fun neologisms, although it probably can. Let’s bingoogle some word creation solutions.

Ok here’s what I got so far from some sites: burgerarium and catabernacle from DeGraeve.com’s invent-a-word service. Ok fine they can invent the words but I will invent the definitions for them: burger place; place of cat worship. I need not be in competition with A.I….we can peacefully coexist. I hope. Let’s do some more. A random sampling from the fake word generator service from https://feldarkrealms.com/ offers the following words, with my what I imagine to be their definitions in parentheses: gnoluork (a motionless pedestrian), yabile (optimistic about one’s flexibility), luethun (a flimsy barrier), psost (a softly worded reprimand), and yeocel (celibate due to yeomanry (celibate due to spending all one’s time holding and cultivating a small landed estate)). Randomwordgenerator.com gives us hexteria (the bouts of temporary insanity experienced by every six-year-old), hiturnil (an annoying and easily avoidable injury) and, finally, pompsh (the act of allowing oneself to flop onto a couch sofa or bed with reckless abandon).

That was pretty fun. It’s nice to spend my cerebral effort on senselessness. It’s nice to be generative/expressive but not productive. And I like how computers can be used to dislodge logic, to illustrate illogic, to illuminate the ineffable weirdness/wordness that us humans are capable of.

Speaking of words, a man I met at a meeting today used the word ‘sinecure’ in a sentence with me and did not parenthetically define it, he thought I would know what it meant. And I figured it out from context clue but didn’t remember it immediately, other than remembering that it was one among many words I learned wheen I studied for the GRE in Philly in 2016 in a brief moment of false tranquility between episodic collapse, inside and out. Sinecure is like a cushy job basically. “A position requiring little or no work but giving the holder status or financial benefit.” The guy was using it to describe what he heard summer internships at BigLaw firms are like. And I don’t think he was wrong. I took no offense. I felt today like I should start to try to change my attitude toward my work. I am deeply privileged to have access to such a high-paying job. I am one among many people who will make decisions according to the flow of capital. I can choose to preserve my core ideology of anticapitalism. I know that you don’t have to fuck people over to survive, that scarcity doesn’t equate to value, that property is theft, that wage labor is alienating and degrading, that nature isn’t disposable, that productivity isn’t joy, that rest is sacred, that coercion is not necessary for peace. I want to keep this ideology, weave it with my belief in God, and give myself some grace as a subject in a system, not individually responsible for the social order. I feel like I often want to wring my hands and apologize for being able to access a lot of capital in this moment. It feels like anathema to me. I feel disgusted by the excess here, the deprivation, the stratification, the callous waste. I felt at home dumpstering meals and dumpstering goods to sell and being kind of a slug. But I was being taken care of by people who made compromises in their life to accumulate funds and capital and to put them to use supporting loved ones like me. I want deeply to be able to use whatever I gain to first survive and keep myself well, live modestly, and use the excess to reciprocate the grace I received, and to not let my surfeit of surplus work like a curse to psych myself out of the knowledge I have of my heart, which is good in its poorness. I say all this like I have money, but this is relevant screed-stuff only for a certain future version of me in like four years whose debt is paid off and who is actually saving money, which I am big time Not Doing right now.

I’d like to do more meditation on my relationship to money and finance and capital, it seems supercritical. I feel like I need to read more Jackie Wang, and reread her. Her poem book got nominated for a National Book Award. One thing I’d like to change about myself is that I’d like to be able to experience simple sincere joy upon hearing the news of others’ success, uncontaminated by envy. I’d like also to be less prone to compare myself. Lately the comparing has been me comparing myself to the many partnered pregnant pretty much marred and fully matrimonial people in my life. I feel genuinely able to feel joy for them, the preciousness of their unions and partnerships, but I have to actively struggle to not compare myself to them, to see myself as slowed, fallen-behind, being-left-behind, and so forth. I actually had therapy on the day I am typing this, which is 6/6/2023, so let’s now go to that date to try to get up to speed.

6/4/2023

Another slow day, spent the bulk of it grading. Decaffeinated myself a bit and moved slowly, another nap day. Nice 10K on the Chelsea Piers greenway. Bobbing and weaving throught the sauntering stream. I’m plenty strong to make it six miles, my lungs are big strong blocks of air and containers of breath and I have spirit and pep and the water is nice and it’s a fine thing indeed to be inside a bounding body.

Sponsored by D. It is deeply grounding to have a sponsor. It is simple and effective. I trust the process.

Sponsored J. It is maybe the best thing I do in my life to be a sponsor. I mean being like a present son and brother and coworker and comrade and community member and sometimes boyfriend, all those things are an important thing. And no one thing I guess is the best thing. That’s that old capitalist compete-o-logic completely composting my fecund mind for the second time! More like second millionth time. Anyways. It is a precious thing that I cherish to be a sponsor. I offered my sponsee advice on something we both struggle with. I told him I still struggle with it, like as a caveat to my advice. He said he trusts my advice because he knows I really get it, because I know what it’s like to struggle with this specific thing. That trust is at the core of recovery. It’s why I go to meetings and listen to my sponsor and try to ask for advice and to let myself be known. I work against my lower nature. I pack something into the stream of life. I cast light, I catch light. We read together in the book, say goodbye, I think we both leave heartened.

G!

Today is the day I met G. I really like G. I have a crush on G. Why I am I crush crazy! >:-0

I have the inclination to type lines that talk about how the way I am is wrong and how I should edit my nature to be different to conform to some stoic standard or some such nonsense. Instead I, in this moment, choose to accept that I am especially receptive to affection. I set an intention to be open, to not be preoccupied by loneliness, to discard desperation, but to be actively knowable and eager to know the people who share their time with me, who let me bask in their gaze, who break bread and break cheese fries with me, who let me tell the latest iteration of a sliver of my story to them. So that’s the idealized text-block version of the mood and mode I am arriving to G with.

Somewhere between Nolita and Soho me and G meet. She’s in what she describes as a cottagecore sweater, plain dark pants, black Blundtstones. I am in a wal mart black t shirt I bleach-dyed and a warm nondescript black flannel I procured from a certain Amazon.com shopping web site and black Levis and black Docs and some gray and black and white smart wool socks. It’s not really warm or cold out, the weather is weird. It’s pre-dusk, sevenish.

We introduce ourselves, triangulate our friendgroup mutuals, and just start walking in some direction. G tells me about her professional and academic background, which are remarkable and unassuming at the same time and I think so unique that if I put details here it might make her identifiable. G decides to take me to her favorite spot, Elizabeth Street Gardens, a small wedge of fescue and granite blocks just a few streets over. It’s closed for the evening but we peer through and I see statuary that I think of as gothic and almost grotesque. Like there’s this spiny sphinx thing and big slabs of marble that look like graves. I say I must come back to visit when it’s open, or some shit like that, we move on. I explain the very strange thing about how I was like an anarchist squatter dumpstermeister anticapitalist extraordinaire with Big Time Mental Illness but now I am a borderline BoBo (bourgeois bohemian), blue-face hewn by beaucoup boons and sidling up to silver spoons. Also: no saloons. However, some salons. I try my poetry on. I feel kind of confident around her, also I am remembering how N (oh btw N texted and said she thought I was sensitive and kind but that we are too different and that she doesn’t think we should date. Honestly a really classy move on her part; she didn’t owe me anything other than a summary ghosting, and so I replied quickly that I was a bit sad because she was quite pretty and fun and interesting but that I accept and respect her assessment of her own heart and our incompatibility and said I wished her “success and peace” which looking back idk why exactly those two things are what I chose but sometimes I’m a few clowns short of a circus, I guess is what I’m saying. Anyways that is probably relevant context for this G story and an important datapoint for the disaggregating the crush saga. Anyways back to the outside of the parentheses) said I should be more confident, and how I kind of begrudgingly agreed with her, like I can do a bit of stylistics in my first impression and my new acquaintance need not know a full catalogue of my insecurities for me to feel like I am living by my values and being emotionally honest. So I am speaking in a way that feels closer to how I type, a bit purple and word-playful and occasionally jargony and locquacious but with plain prole prose peppered in so as to demonstrate I am not a horrible chump. And like yeah for me that level of articuluity (articulable acuity) doesn’t always come so it feels nice, and it feels like it is being at least politely if not energetically received and reciprocated. (As I type this I want to text G, whose number I now have, but I don’t. I am trying to let it marinate a bit, to come off as not-too-eager, to be interested and interesting but not cloying. We’ll see how this approach goes.) Plus G was an art history major and a college radio DJ and seems to have some affinity for the baroque. Also literally she told me she likes to go see classical music at Lincoln Center Plaza, so true baroque, not just the adjective baroque I use to mean ornamented and complicated and intricate and gilded and perhaps a bit overdone, like my speech and writing is. I tell her I fuck with harpsichord music and chamber music, she seems supportive of that for me.

We visit a book store, she suggests I look at a book of poems by a punk, or a book of punk poems or something, I forget who the author was. The book store is a tricky situation, sticky matriculation of clicking confabulations borne of typewritten tabulations. I show her the Semiotext(e) intervention series and try to explain how I copied the aesthetic for the layout of the zines I used to make, also I try to explain why a certain book about prison abolition and finance capitalism is very important to me; I believe I do neither satisfactorily but luckily no one asked me to and it wouldn’t matter if I did, and also luckily she’s just sort of kind and blithely interested in a way that makes me feel welcome and heard and also appropriately unimportant. It’s nice to hang out with her.

Dusk is falling and a thing not unlike the thing that happened on me and N’s first date is happening, the thing being that I have absolutely no plan, have no idea what to expect, feel more or less completely in love with a beautiful stranger, and am trotting like an obedient doggy at the side of my new New York friend. G asks if I want to get ice cream I say yes of course, she says oh but did you eat dinner I say no, so she says lets get dinner and so then we Google Maps food and try a few places but one is too busy and one has nowhere to sit and so we settle on a little place called Le Burger that has hardly anyone inside and is mostly a bar. The owner/server is old and has a heavy NY accent and extra convivial and we each get Diet Cokes and we each get Le Burger Américain which is a regular cheeseburger and we also get cheese fries. We sit opposite each other on stools and we look at each other face to face for I guess an hour or so, eating and chatting and sipping Diet Cokes and chomping cheese fries. Our conversation is easy and her smile is extremely warm and kind and I feel not too self conscious around her although I do eat like a big boar and do my best to wipe my hog jowels between snarflings. We talk a lot about movies and letterboxd and spotify and media and parents and school and money and what part of the city this or that is in and where we will live and plans for the future and so forth. I offer to buy the meal and say that I am making a lot of money this summer, which makes me feel like a strange alien to myself, but she’s not mad about it and offers to buy me ice cream later, which she does do. We leave and walk more aimlessly and talk about A24 movies and Doc Marten platform creepers and discuss ways for me to beat the country bumpkin allegations, chief among which is me knowing which subway stop is nearest to where I live, for each line that has its own stop I guess. At one point G mentions how she used to have a poster of the flatiron building on her wall in NC in high school, and in that moment we are it turns out exactly standing beside the flatiron building, which we both realize together after we cross the street from it. We ask each other about what our earliest memories are. I say I remember being in preschool eating grass because I wanted to be a cow. And also I remember hearing the months of the year song. What did she remember? Fudge now I can’t remember. Luckily its her memory not mine. We talk about ambient music. One thing I do remember about her is that she said her favorite movie is Godfather Part I and that her other favorite movie is Ten Things I Hate About You and also her favorite genre of movie is old lady buddy comedies. So I was paying some attention! Also we both agree that excessively obtuse music tastes can be wielded kindly and invitingly (see my dear friend M) or can go to the other extreme and be gross and exclusionary and mean. We talk about outfits and pants size and cuffs and fit. The conversation wanders like we do.

Anyways we are out and wandering, I guess at this point up near Rose Hill and Madison Square Garden, almost to Chelsea. I know this only because I am consulting a map after the fact. I still have a lot to learn about getting around. But there is this special kind of weakness I feel here that is making me receptive to help, accepting of others’ expertise, in a word, trusting. Which I know is not always the safe way to be in a big angry capitalist scam world of deceit and vampirism. But it is working out ok so far and I just get to be like…in someone else’s stride. It’s not necessarily spiritual but I feel like it’s adjacent to spirituality, something like surrendering, giving up on the idea that I know what my night will be like, how long it will be, where I will be, etc. Actually, as I type that, it feels like the healthy film negative version of the wreckless abandon I used to like about drinking/using. The difference is, this time, I was able to politely say “I think it’s time for me to call it” around 10:30pm when I had determined that any further wandering might make it difficult for me to get a good night’s sleep ahead of work on monday. And so I find my train stop and in an instant I am subterranean hurdling Soho-bound back home, alone and exhausted and pleasantly dazed and full of Le Burger Américain and a honeycomb vanilla ice cream scoop she bought me for like $8 and also full of the familiar old butterflies that accompany my old friend The Crush. I text her when I get home safe, like she asked; I stay up late enough to see that she responded in kind, I painstakingly craft a text whose purpose is to indicate a casual interest in seeing her again without making it seem like I am in fact Very Very Interested in seeing her as soon as possible. I feel like I accomplish that goal, she says she’s moving this weekend so maybe this week or next week we can get together again. Not to be melodramatic but I do drop to my knees and praise God to thank God for the chance to meet, to fall in and out of love, for the willingness to connect and relate. To be fair I try to get on my knees each morning and night and say thanks for being sober and to ask for help staying sober one more day, so it’s not so out of the ordinary for me to add in a few other petitions of gratitude or litanies of fear or whatever while I’m down there. In toto, ultimately, I hope I can appreciate whatever good there may be in having this immediate spark of affection for G, and I hope I can gracefully meet whatever circumstance follows, whether that be more interactions or none at all. I feel like I will be taken care of. That’s a good place to end. Until next time!

6/3/2023

Spent most of the day incorporating edits into the law review recent development for which I am the primary editor. Also grading write-on submissions by hopeful 1L applicants. The work can be procedurally tedious, but I believe it’s worthwhile.

First day since I’ve been here in which I ate all meals at home and took no social appointments. A day whose cadence and tenor resembled my days back in NC. I took a nap. Nice to have a slow and uneventful day. Looking forward to being done with LR summer commitments so I can do a bit of wandering. Treated myseld to a buffet of episodes of the new season of ITYSL, which felt like childhood christmas eve level of excitement.because I love the show so much. A quiet and uneventful day to recharge. Let’s just let that be that for today.

6/2/2023

On Fridays the office is quiet. I said it felt peaceful to one of the partners, and he said that’s an optimistic way of putting it. I split my day between researching for one project and researching for another. The first project required some keen insight into the way two administrative acts interlock with one another; I found it very very difficult to make sense of the law, very very difficult to apply it to the situation at hand, but gave it a shot nonetheless, and made my struggling transparent to my supervising attorney. I didn’t exactly get guidance about how to do better, but I also didn’t get criticized for not doing better. So hopefully it will come with time. I will say that I had a moment where I thought I should reach out to someone to ask for help on how to go about this task, but chose instead to struggle through it solo, which was probably ill-advised, looking back. For my other project the work was more straightforward, less demanding of a keen legal mind, and fell more under a category of work I like to call glorified googling. Not to knock it; it takes acuity and insight and perseverance and mental stamina to do, and I was proud of myself for the amount of consistent effort I put into the work. I will try to finish that project Monday.

After work I went straight to Times Square for an AA meeting. It was in a beautiful, ornate, narrow church jammed in between some storefronts. I found myself in the main sanctuary, with high vaulted ceilings, dozens of rows of beautiful dark-wood pews, glowing stained glass windows, lots of ornaments of faith. I don’t know my way around and had never been to this meeting before; only one time ever in my five years of AA did I go to a meeting in the main prayer service space of a house of worship. This would be no exception; I ran into another person new to the meeting, we got helped by a worker at the church, he showed us the staircase that led up to the floor where the meeting was held. This makes my third total NYC meeting so far, two this week as compared to one last week, which for me feels like progress-not-perfection. I once again introduced myself as a new guy in town, told a fractured fragment of my story, allowed these friendly strangers a glimpse into who I am, did my best to listen intently to the other people who shared, did a lot of nodding an identifying with (relating to) the feelings I heard shared. I still don’t feel anything like “plugged in” to AA here, and I know that I stand to benefit more, and I stand to be of more service to others, the more I can “get in the middle of this thing,” as we say. So I’ll try to carry that intention as I seek out meetings moving forward. That last sentence feels like an externality of my prosaic indoctrination as a professional emailer. So here’s some other words that aren’t like that:

I’m a transmission machine, I transmit, I transmute; I’m an alternator, I lurch in and out of subculture in helictical jerks, and but so like tbh I feel like a Resurranarchist Polymorphic Cryptoamory Inside-Outer, an Outsider Heart Decrypter, a too-big cryptid among well-heeled kings’ kids, whattamybid.

Today I texted N to ask if she’d go on a third date with me, she responded with these exact words: “I’ve got class.” By which she meant she has to work as an educator, but also she is like Very Rich, paraprincess levels of prosperity, and like is a member of an elite class, socioeconomically, at least so far as I can tell, which I feel like both makes her more attractive and more repulsive to me. And not to say my relationship to a city is like my (non)relationship to a pretty (lady named N), but I feel simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by NYC. I doubt this is an uncommon phenomenon; I see people effortlessly emanating statuesque beauty hundreds of times a day, also I see ballistic puke piles and smell olfactory cocktails that have physical stopping power. I hear a melange of worldwide dialects and tongues, also I hear so much angry screaming and dastardly mufflerless big-chop car and motorcycle throttles and there is a constant clank-clank outside my window due to a big rectangle of metal in the road that every car must drive over, and also the very precisely venomous sound of women who sound beautiful laughing with elegant, fun-loving abandon in a way that makes me feel small and plain as an original Yoplait. And yeah if it isn’t clear by this point in the paragraph the subsequent texts to N leave me pessimistic about any future dates. Which of course is completely fine, as we were complete rollerskaters to each other a mere two weeks ago, and our interactions have been perfectly cordial and sweet-tart as cherries.

It just so happens that after work during the AA meeting a Hinge acquaintance contacted me and we made plans to hang out that evening. Her name also starts with N so, per the laws of mathematics, she shall be referred to hereinafter as N+1, though I think of her as no better or worse than N, just different.

After the AA meeting I chat for a bit with a newcomer and with a different person who is less new who said they went to IOP in their share and we connected a bit. It was brief and cursory and I made my way outside and toward Long Island City, Queens, from Times Square area. It started raining, but not too hard, and it was quite warm outside, and I had an umbrella in my bag, and I decided to just walk toward my destination, since I had a phone call scheduled with a friend in the time between then and the date.

They called, our conversation was good, although it was distracting for them to be talking to me because there was so much ambient environmental noise going on around me. It is very loud here. But it bothers me less than I thought it would. Anyways we discussed some relationship troubles they were experiencing, I did my best to be a good listener and validate their experience, and I think that felt good to them. They had something unexpected happen where a person in their life ended up very unexpectedly becoming a kind, intuitive, understanding confidant, and someone to process a specific hard phase of their life with. They said this unexpected connection allowed them to close a very hard chapter of their life. We both agreed that this kind of uncanny grace is well-attributed to a Higher Power. Neither of us is religious, both have our own very different relationships to spirituality, and it was really nothing we had discussed before. But there on the phone in Queens I got to talk about how good God is with a friend a thousand miles away whose day, whose life, got way better out of nowhere. I just love to hear about this kind of thing. My life got way better out of nowhere when I got sober, and since then it has happened again and again and again. These clumps of benefit or grace or good luck get trapped together in a loom, woven together into a fabric, the fabric holds me, the fabric feels like faith.

The phone call ends, I head to the piers, I meet N+1. She is sweet and unassuming in a way that N was not. She and I quickly discover we both love metalcore and horror movies. She is not from anything like a princess’s prosperous pedigree; she is the kid of working class parents, more or less a Queens native, though she’s bounced around due to one military parent. She’s easygoing, she reminds me to keep my bookbag close while we’re sitting so that nobody walks up and steals it, she said that happened to her once. It’s helpful advice because my attention is fully dedicated to sitting just close enough to her, looking intently into her eyes often but not leering, modulating my spine such that I’m not crumpled but also not doing any like yogic preening. The posture thing is always tricky because I tend to tower over people and hunching allows me to get more on their level. But the thing is, and Trillville has proven this empirically time and time again, you could never ever, ever ever, ever ever, ever ever ever ever, get on my level. And that’s truly ok. That’s just level as in latitude. Spiritually interpersonally etc etc our frequencies will vibrate and harmonize and become consonant and I, like all men, am no island. Just wanted to quote that Trillville song I guess.

Me and N+1’s date is cute and easy and a bit awkward but mostly fun and fine. We get a meal together, I pay for it, this is me paying forward N’s goodwill, I think to myself. I venture, I volley, I fumble, and we end up going to her apartment together, via a train called the 7. Inside the hallway to her apartment it smells truly ghastly, like a chemical poison aroma spliced with hot dog chili and Fabuloso and perhaps a bit of urea and ambergris and pure poison. We watch a film called Master, which is about the horror of race, and which I like pretty good, like a solid B grade on the F to A scale. But we also kiss and cuddle on her very big couch and I am much bigger than her in a way that facilitates me kind of cradling her with my big old body and the excitement of kissing dies down after a few dozen minutes and we get to just be close. Being bodies nearby each other and kind of lazily caressing each other and being completely hugged by a big couch is so so nice. It’s soft and easy and gentle and not a problem. The movie eventually ends, we do some more kissing, and then it is time to go home, an easy mutual determination made by people who are basically strangers but who did a good job being with each other. I do embarrass myself by not remembering her name when she gives me her number at the end of the night. She gives me shit but it’s fine, we are new to each other, I repeat her name over and over so I won’t forget it. This reminds me of something my first love said to me about 15 years ago, when she said saying my name was like saying a prayer. She wrote it, actually, I think, in a florid purple email. That love feels precious and irreplaceable, there was something sacred about its newness and the intensity of it. I wish I didn’t wish that I could be in that relationship instead of dating strangers at age 35 in a new smelly weird city. But I do wish that, I wish I was always already dating my first love, I wish everything clicked the first time and I got it right and didn’t totally torpedo that and several other excellent relationships with my self-absorbed sickness. So it goes. If I weren’t sad about those sunken conjunctions, I probably would not be so inclined to bang out these screeds and soliloquies. There is something generative about having an incomplete heart.

I sort of like that last sentence so I’ll wrap it up. I got home safe, me and N+1 will try to hang again this week. In the meantime I get to visit G on Sunday and I’ll be most likely swiping ambiently hoping to maximize my exposure to the person I miss dearly and whom I’ve not yet met. Being in a city that is so very big reminds me I am in a world that is double big and that whether I like it or not love is inevitable. So I pray now on this google doc that I treat my heart right and clean up my heart and be careful with the hearts of the strangers and rollerskaters and princesses and bombshells and comrades and counsels and sparklers and the baddies seeking highest honors and the working class lasses and that I don’t let myself get lassoed by no nefarious lariat but instead get clean hogtied by the cowgirl with the fully compatible interlocking heart piece each of us needs to be completed and that she breaks in and lockpicks and gently graffitis my heart with glossy glossolalia and polyglot generosity and our tongues tangle through text tangents and stylistic missives that sieve off the foam an leave us packed and nourished like perlite and loam. Enough already! Until next time.

6/1/2023

[Blogditor’s note: today’s entry is a bit jagged/jerky because I didn’t have enough time to go through and zhuzh the way I like to. This will occasionally happen!]

I am happy to report that for the first time in my law school career I got all A’s! Technically two A’s, two A-’s, and two P’s (passes, as in pass/fail). It feels like an immense accomplishment to me. Also, in the big marble superslab, the towering glass obelisk, the horrible steel colossus, or should I say $teal ¢olo$$u$, by which of course I mean the building where the law firm is, in this place, the A’s feel small. Like a’s instead of A’s. But Stevie Wonder made a profoundly beautiful thing out of only “As,” and so I will take his virtuousic musicological mastery as a sign to be thankful for what I’ve got and to celebrate it.

During the work day I get coffee with someone who I will just say is “important” at the firm who has experience with addiction/alcoholism. She got very heavy health news today, I shared about losing my aunt. The connection we made felt deeper than any other I’ve made with another firm person, summer associate or partner or anywhere in between. Talking about recovery is like that. We just immediately both told each other some of the very hardest shit we have on our hearts. And we talked for like an hour. She seems very weighed down. I will plan to reach out to her again soon. It feels unlike networking. It feels like fellowship. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love AA.

Microbullying update: I told J I have been practicing my interpretive dance. I, in this moment, feel stronger than a silverback. I have seen goliath, walked toward him calmly, squared my shoulders with him, and I did not flinch. I am not broken or belittled by your little joke, J. I am a big giant law student who has a big giant support network who taught me how to let the bad stuff roll off me like water off a duck’s back. I can take a joke!

Imaginary slight update: I managed to walk side-by-side with JF, who actually in my imaginary narrative has been paying too much attention to J (my microbully) and not enough to me; we talked and it was clear she was perfectly willing to engage with me and is simply affable with the person nearest to her, and perhaps a little aloof with some especial affinity for J, but also each of them has their own boy or girlfriend. The point of this report back is that I remain the hyper aware self-conscious vacation bible school attendee, suffer through self-made narratives of exclusion, probably as a result of my alcoholism/mental illness/personality, and that’s ok, and I get glimpses and glimmers of social generosity that disabuse me of my internal narrative of disconnectedness. This, as many things are, is a reminder of why AA is so effective for me, because it provides me with operationalized relief from apartness, and when I attend meetings regularly, I have access to a steady stream of sociability, the warm saline-sanguine IV drip of being made to feel a-part-of rather than apart-from.

I have been skimping on my traditional morning routine of prayer and meditation again, to work on this blog and to do work for the Law Review. I will say that it occurred to me that this writing feels prayerful. I feel like it’s an opportunity for me to encounter my higher power and to take inventory and to allow myself to be known, albeit from behind a one-way mirror type thing. Anyways just putting this down in black and white to remind myself not to abandon the traditional routine, which is tried and true as a means of balming the spiritual malady.

The baseball game. I went to it. I ate three hot dogs. There’s too damn much socializing at this job, damn it. But I manage to get a corner seat and chat with some very earnestly friendly unpretentious co-workers who are chatty enough to make my life easy and not so overbearingly locquacious that I get sick of them. Beauty after genius beauty at my firm peppers in the presence of a boyfriend during our casual chats. I learn that one of my summer associate class mates is dating another, they met at a certain ivy league school, they are both perfectly kind and quite likeable, and it makes me want to tear my hair out and rip all of my clothing to shreds and rewild and become feral, go to the forest and return to the primordial ways and cast off this coital coil, go be a damn forest monk and live in non-interactive verdant solitude until such time as I no longer care whether or not I or anyone else has a girlfriend. I’m being dramatic it doesn’t really bother me that much, I’m just like, very aware about how exquisitely epoxied in amorous ectoplasm all these elite wellborn non-mal-adjusted charmers are and it puts a barb of hate in my handsome heart. That’s all.

Prisoner letter writing night is the very big good thing that happened today. I go to an infoshop (radical book store), I get shook loose of my petty preoccupation with relationships momentarily and invited into a space of comrade-love, solidarity love. I get to absorb a talk by U, who says that abolition is an act of love. I’ll give that its own line because of how good it felt to hear:

Abolition is an act of love.

U offered a reminder to each of the attendees to recognize themselves as a fractal–a fern–of the abolitionist project and to take small concrete steps in our bodies and interpersonal lives to stop reproducing carceral logic. It resonated. I wanted to have a life where this always felt top-priority, workable, true, and supported.

I later got to chat at length with U about radical theory, abolition, and love. I talked a lot about AA, described it as a paraanarchist apolitical spiritual-not-religious horizontal mutual aid network, as a site of radical love, a practical and effective and robust system of unconditional peer support. She seemed interested genuinely in it, said she would study it more. She has a syllabus she says she will share with me. She makes me want to be a Political Person. She makes me want to try harder to Fight, Resist, Struggle. I get like this around people like her. I am moon-faced, I wax and wane. J from back home (we’ll call her J^H, J to the power of Home) said to me once: we are all always in transition. The reason I met U is J^H; rather, J^H is a but-for cause, as we say in torts. I risk de-anonymizing if I go into any further detail about that, I think, so I’ll leave it oblique for you weary Googlers to puzzle over.

After prisoner letter writing night I get drinks (well, they get drinks, I get quiet) with E and U and Q and another friend. Confirmed that E is 25 going on 26. More on disaggregating the crush: I like E like I like U like I like J^H: because being around them makes me feel like I should take a stand, take a side, make a sacrifice, live by my values. It feels very much like age 25 thinking to me. It feels dissonant with AA’s acceptance imperative, it clashes with the go-along-to-get-along mindset I have been trying to inhabit as a means to abandon my righteous indignation, my imperious activism, my savior complex. Oh gosh. It is so hard! To be! A person with feelings! It is a complete blessing to be a person who is here now in my body with all my fulminating fulsome foolish fluttering blustery full-flavor feelings. I am so tired from being social all day. I am sitting around the outdoor bar thing in whatever excellent part of Brooklyn we are in. I am wishing I had cooler clothes, a fuller-throated conviction to convey, a righteous hatred to perform, an uncomplicated vial political vitriol to smash like an amulet of aromatic virtue to fill the nostrils of these cool new yorkers, to be drunk on the perfume of my own capacity for revolutionary change like I once was, or else, that I had some savvy sophisticated soft-spoken subtle solution secreted away in the velvet lapels of my obtuse mind, that I was giving off a scent of something cloak-and-dagger attractive, the clandestine insurrecto incense I used to catch comrades quaffing and taking big whippet-sized whiffs of a decade ago. Instead I am in a wal mart T shirt and my eyes are beady and I feel just slow enough on the uptake that I participate in roughly 2% of the conversation and when I do it comes out of a voice that is too deep and tonally drab in a way that makes whatever dull points I make come out double dull and so I mostly sit like a big boulder on the stool, dumb as rocks. I walk to the subway, I’m on the subway, I am near E, I feel like a paragon of boredom. I want to bomb grafiti and play 145 BPM club music and shoplift lavishly and rattle off fugitive histories and speed fast so that my long hair and cool clothes flutter in the breeze like a flag that says “know me/no peace.” Like literally seven years ago I was smoking crack and giving talks entitled “Why Nonviolence Doesn’t Work.” So to sit before you, E, a soft-spoken doe-eyed dough-brain with an abiding commitment to not taking up too much space, to being deferential and sensitive, to tamping down my ego, to being measured, even-keeled, considered, to being non-reactive, to avoiding being opinionated because of how entrenchment can foment resentment, to sit before you in normcore fatigues, well, idk what to say. I feel dilute. Tepid. Inert. But I have to remember that this is just one wave of feelings, one of a thousand I will feel today. Tide will take me who knows where. And what’s more, the whole impassivity thing, the whole nominally boring worry, it may be so, but it is as a result of me trying very hard to live by a set of values and to have integrity in recovery. I have learned how to live with myself and with the world and without a drink. And I’m not always only boring. I am just nervous and out of my element and a bit crush-crushed. There is some distant universe where in ten years we have a young kid and it turns out somehow you have read this, you have also learned this from me, the primary source material, substantiated this tangled citation, cited to me in your sights. I am way beyond out of gas and it is time for me to stop typing!

But one last thing on disaggregating the crush: I felt when I went home after that bland tran ride that romantic attention from E was less important than I did at first in that bright fourth-floor room of the public library back home, flooded with light and possibility. What I realized is that I may be getting put in a situation by my Higher Power where I got magnetized to a person because of an old trait, my tendency to fall in love with beauties I don’t know, but then a thing happens where that beauty doesn’t love me, and in the space left by that asymmetry of romantic desire, a substantial friendship or comradeship can grow, one whereby a greater service is done, where people are helped, where benefit takes place. It is true that I still deeply identify with the tarot card depicting The Fool. Sometimes I have to follow the rose; I almost always do. But I don’t have to fall offf a cliff anymore. I can look ahead to where my feet are.

In AA they say: be where your feet are. So I will be here, in my soft bed, safe, present, sober, sane. Thank you. That’s all for now.

5/31/2023

The day started out with a sparklingly exciting moment! At 7am I received a message from a kind, pretty stranger (not via dating app; via social media). They are just a fellow NC to NY transplant reaching out. We will hopefully get coffee soon. (What I mean is that I hope we will get coffee soon, but there is a chance that when we do, soon, we wil both be hopeful in our coffee getting, like maybe each of us hopes for a new dimension or connection in our life via this coffee, and if that is so, then I will have typed a gramattically correct sentence there. These rigid rules-based thoughts come to me after years of being a serf of the AP Style guide, and now the Bluebook.). I really have no idea what to expect, but it was a boost to be cold-contacted in such a friendly way. They suggested I check out Elizabeth Street Garden, I suggested they check out the band ESG. We’ll see what happens.

Walking to and from work in the morning the air is coolish. Later at lunch I feel foolish. The reason is a moment so minimal and inconsequential that it makes me feel double foolish for being so affected by it. I will refer to this as the microbullying incident, though truthfully I don't even think it was bullying. The essence of what happened is that I was eating lunch in the employee cafeteria at the firm, sitting around a table with a half dozen other summer associates, people competently chomping and conversing in perfectly amenable terms in between bites. This one guy, J, I think I actually like a lot, because his humor is wry and he seems pretty unpretentious. His wit is quick and he’s sort of holding court as the most capable conversationalist. People, myself included, seem to be made at-ease around him, and most of his jokes land, and people seem to pay attention to each little rejoinder he tees up. This is not the case for everyone at the table; some poor souls hazard humor and are politely ignored as the conversational gyre pushes ever forward. Anyways for some reason he’s talking about musicals and says something about wanting to choreograph me as a dancer in some hypothetical joke musical and I, in an attempt to be good-naturedly self-effacing, try to describe myself as a poor dancer, and then the conversation turns to interpretive dance, and people are like yeah you express your innermost self through interpretive dance and then I say that if I did interpretive dance it would be disturbing, and then J is like “disturbing? geez you should see a therapist!” In this completely harmless way that is clearly a joke and I’m sure barely noticed by anyone else, but I bristle and feel hot and shy and embarrassed and too big and ugly and mute and socially defective and charmless and less-than and odd-one-outified and sad because of it. I am brought back to summer vacation bible school in like 1997 or something when I overheard a teacher describe me as self-conscious, I think in response to I guess my poor performance at a little skit we did or something? And it had this deeply (and evidently lifelong) self-fulfilling-prophecy effect. Or else she was just right and I have, ever since, struggled to accept her assessment, which to me felt incharitable, even petty, a mean thing to say about a little kid. I guess it is summertime again after all. I’m not on vacation per se, and the Bible is conspicuously absent from almost every dimension of my life up here (not a complaint, just an observation) so far. I did pray about it though. I asked to be able to let it go, to let it roll off me “like water off a duck’s back” as we used to say in rehab in Charlotte in 2018. I get back to my merciful desk and am thankful that I have a lot of complicated work to do, and that my brain allows itself to fixate on legal research instead of this micro-slight. The amniosis of paperwork. I made that word up, amniotic hypnosis, pleasantly numb busywork. Anyways, I remain a sensitive person, more on that below.

During the afternoon I’m taken out to coffee by mentor, I ask if I can get a juice, she says the world is your oyster, the juice costs $13, it is fresh and green and bitter, talking feels like another interview, I bat away that fluttering feeling that I am a bore, try to engage, it’s low stakes, it takes 10 minutes, it’s nice to have a formal mentor role. It feels financially kookoo to be in such regular contact with $10+ (non-alcoholic!) drinks. I’m on something like 4-5 cups of coffee a day so far in NYC; I’d like to cut that in half. But everything at the firm seems so urgent and important and so demanding of my finest and most precise acuity and attention.

I do more real work today, I stay late because yesterday I was the first to leave and felt like if I develop a FIFO reputation I will somehow be deemed unworthy. There are a lot of strivers and overachievers here, I suspect; I know I am one. And God, I know, I’m one. It feels hard to make friends in that context, I hope it’s just an incomplete perception I have of folks here and not a fundamental aspect of law firm social life.

I go on a run after work, I feel slow and sluggish but I end up getting a few PRs (5K, 10K), not sure if I am just internally miscalibrated or if the watch’s GPS is a bit haywire, hard to tell.

Seeing a little girl on a scooter being encouraged by her Dad. She looked so free. Don’t be sappy but it was like my heart was softened watching that sliver of simple joy unfold among the untold millions of moments dancing and firing and smoldering all around us…doesn’t matter if it’s cliche becaue it is a true feeling that happened in my brainbodyheart!

R called right at the right moment, after I had finished work but before I started my run. We talked about each of our new lives in turn, me as a suddenly social NYC lawman, him as a newlywed; we agreed we need God especially when things are really good, since for us alcoholics the high highs are just as perilous as the low lows.

I’m walking down Canal street typing this out, audiating the sound of my voice as a voiceover narration, and it occurs to me that I am essentially mimicking Carrie from Sex in/and the City. Just a random thought.

I got done with my run, decided to walk home to enjoy the city predusk. It’s weirdly quiet on Broadway . Mom called, my Aunt has died. This was not unexpected, she lost a long battle with COPD. She did not die unloved, but among the dead I’ve known it seems like she strained or broke the goodwill of thise around her more than most. My Dad, her brother, in particular says something like her death doesn’t make much of a difference, given how sparse their interactions were over the past few decades. I heard oblique stories growing up about her being a heroin addict. I remember my Dad also bothering to impress upon me, more than once, as a kid/teen, that a person who becomes addicted to heroin will never overcome that addiction. He would say that at best, they become addicted to something else, perhaps methadone, alcohol, etc. Much later in life in AA I would encounter this same argument, stylized and reconfigured to produce hope. That is, AA is, or could be construed as, the benign, restorative, adaptive replacement addiction. And I sort of believe that without a program or spiritual practice of some sort, the addict is likely doomed. I don’t exactly agree with my Dad’s reasoning but our arguments are in parallel.

I feel like I’d like to write an elegy for my aunt, mostly because I don’t think anyone else will. I identified with her temperament—cynical, subdued, beleaguered, withdrawn, wry. We played scrabble. She lost a son to suicide. I found myself at ease around her, she felt kindred in her quiet sorrow. I know so little about her. We probably saw each other fewer than a dozen times. My Dad has his reasons to react how he did to her death. My Mom was so graceful in how she reacted to his reactions to her death; it makes her sad but she says she has to respect his response, whatever it is.

I don’t know what to make of this loss, which is how every loss feels at first for me. I noticed that it slowed me down, that hearing the news made me feel like i was walking through waste-high water. Waist not waste. Any time there’s a death, I guess slowing down is a fine way to react. There’s an unopened letter that my aunt wrote to her surviving son, with instructions on what to do upon her death. I think about how lonely it must have been to write that. But also how for that one document the writer has maybe the most authority on the page that they will ever have. I wonder if she took space to mention her values, her memories, her gladnesses, her regrets. Or if it was just logistical, mechanics of an expected death, a small smoothing of a ruffled comforter. Discomforter. I am discomfited, fitful, pitted like a date. I feel like this matter (a law firm word that has seeped out) deserves more space but also like it’s time for me to stop typing about it.

I hazarded some texts to N, who always responds quickly, but who seems hard to read, hard to fully engage. I fumble through some flirting but it sort of fizzles. I wonder how I make her feel, what good I might do in her life, the humblr summer tumbleweed, the pasty hayseed (actually I have some tint from the sun, peach-red and tan), six foot six pollyanna, naive lummox, emotional hand-tipper, and so forth. Best to not dwell and let it sit. Be still, as my middle school gym teacher used to say.

I try to be responsive myself when friends from back home contact me. people are consistently offering friendly hellos and gentle check ins, which is really nice. I want to keep my heart open, I want to keep the paths from my heart to the south kempt and tidy. I hope that’s adaptive and not retrograde.

I was very hungry in SoHo and night had fallen by the time my phone call and trxting and sauntering were done. I ordered Japanese comfort food, katsu curry, to go from a spot near where I live. As I exited the curry spot I found mysef beside a quick moving march, a protest. Probably 50ish protesters and at least that many cops, if not more. I asked one protester what the protest was for, got asked if I was press, I said no, and then I got ignored. I was in my work clothes, maybe they thought me knowing posed some kind of security threat. I certainly was hostile to perceived outsiders when I was an Anarchist protestor. Who jnows what they were thinking. I asked somebody else and they said it was a protest for pride. The protesters shouted that the cops are fascists. I joined the protest for the two blocks that it headed toward my home, then broke off and ate like a ravenous raven humgry for a big birdfeeder fullnof birdseed, and was not disappointed. The chicken was hot and crispy, the curry was dark and mild, the rice was soft and chewy, I was in heaven. I was in bed by 9:30. Days are exhausting. Briefly I was feeling bad that I don’t make an identity and life out of Struggle, Resistance anymore. I’m inside a system where resistance is unnecessary. For a bit I felt this way: Like I don’t fit in anywhere, ugh how middle school, but really it’s like I’m too punk for big law, not punk enough for the protest.

Not to always be praising AA or anything, but AA is the one place I never feel out of place at. It’s like a misfits club, and part of the deal is you know everybody is sensitive about feeling like they don’t fit in anywhere so most people go out of the way to make you feel like you are supposed to be there. And that goes a long way for a sensitive fellow like me. I remember one time a long time ago I told my friend R I thought of myself as oversensitive and my friend R told me he didn’t think there was such a thing. That was a really really special moment for me. A moment outside masculinity maybe. A moment where someone saw how I reacted to the world, and told me that’s ok, how I am is ok. And I think R was inviting me in to a reframed understanding of myself, not just because that would benefit me, but because it would alter how i treat other people. J resuscitated this sentiment in the context of law school, where I would sometimes offhandedly chide myself for being too emotionally involved (“reactive” as we say in AA; a condition of disturbability, of “uncomftorbility” [people categorically prefer “uncomftorbility” to “discomfort” in the rooms of AA], something to be avoided, corrected, de-defected), and J would sternly remind me how important it was to stay emotional in law. This is precisely counter to the unspoken culture that law school indoctrinates. J is always so elegantly and persuasively and effusively contra. And they invite me outside an impoverished or diminished or incomplete understanding of myself, just like R did. There’s maybe some tension between the AA echelon of impassivity and the EE (emotional existence) necessity to allow myself my feelings, to avoid the tamping down, rounding off, sanding down, smoothing over, muffling, shooing away and shushing of the human experience of having a feeling in response to an event or condition. There’s maybe some tension is all I can say.

I have a brief aesthetic thought as I walk down Broadway near Canal that my choice to dress plain is still a choice, and that causes me a bit of sartorial despair. Some liturgy admonishes the pious to avoid ostentation. Am I being spiritually honest if I explain my fashion (or its absence) with a half-remembered bit of sacred text? There were prophets who dressed plain and I like the idea of dressing plain too, not because I think of myself as anything like a prophet, but because I like plainness. But then I think, don’t I have some sort of responsibility to give strangers a sense of who I am and what I’m about and what I like and what I’m like with a curated collection of symbols, shouldn’t I clothe myself in signifiers as a service to the people who might like to become my friends if they had an in? This kind of thinking makes my head spin…

Enough for now. Until next time…

5/30/2023 - Evening

Internally I feel tension between the (healthy? validating?) internal-psychic-biome-stewardship act of seeing myself as ~special~ and capable, and the (healthy? humbling?) internal act of recognizing myself as one among many, a worker among workers, a drunk among drunks, a poet among poets, etc. Being around so many talented people at the firm made me feel unremarkable today. I randomly came across an excellent poem by Jackie Wang (someone who I really look up to as a writer) about dumpster diving, and it makes me feel unremarkable. I think that is a healthy thing but also maybe not? Having trouble articulating exactly what I mean by this. Occasional basting in uncerainty is probably for the best. Best to baste not boast.

I forgot to mention that yesterday I rode my bike up 6th Ave from SoHo to a meeting near Central Park, and down 2nd Ave back home afterward. The experience was harrowing; I’ve never had a more white-knuckle bike ride—biking in L.A. and Philly doesn’t even come close. Rarely have I encountered a phenomenon like this: highly ordered system suspended colloidally in pure chaos. I’ll spare the reader the details of what made it so impactfully frightening; I’m not eager to do it again, though ten years ago I almost certainly would be.

As to the first paragraph, it’s maybe a manifestation of a sickly individualism in me. it’s better to just heedlessly delight in my weirdness-commonness. Maybe the individual/community member binary is false, the way so many other binaries are. Maybe my individualism is colloidally suspended in community. Maybe my sobriety is colloidally suspended in recovery. I'll level with you, weary googler, I don't super know what colloidally suspended means, I just like the way it sounds. One time in 2010 I saw a tincture bottle whose label read 'Colloidal Silver' and was deeply confused about how ingesting precious metal could be in any way supportive of health. Then again, what I don't know could fill a big barn.

I'd like to be calm and comfortable in my mercurial moods, fickle follies, sickly silvery screeds, purple prose. Need to imbricate the shingles of plaintext with strains and strings of zany trains of thoughts and zones of tenor and tone, need to get pomed to the bone (pome = poem). I endeavor to ladle you ylayful flavorful tables-full of relatable data pools; I pray I get swaddled with fabulous fables, I pray that the ladies will see me as datable. I pray a prayer that AI can't tank me or tear me or sink me or sync me, that my knots of tangled syntax and tinted text and textured tales braid well and dutifully, that the my flailing feelings find a home here, moodily, beautifully.

[Some time passes. I guess I'm doing stage directions here occasionally]

Hit my second AA meeting just now, introduced myself, shared briefly, listened. A wave of exhaustion just hit me. I’ll try to write more later. Feeling happy and tired and milder; not exceptionally good or bad, which for me is a safe place to be.

I had a bit of a hard time getting to sleep, and found myself relying on old habits to feel numb and comfortable in the face of insomnia, which thankfully today is just me watching Magic the Gathering youtube videos and eating more than I think I should. I wake up in the middle of the night and eat a bowl of Raisin Bran for comfort and ballast. I imagine myself being spooned and comforted, and get back to sleep before too long. What would life be without these unexpected difficulties! I try to find grace in the hard stuff, especially. The whole purpose of my faith is to provide asylum through the difficulties, and to honor the uncanny potential we all have to survivie in the face of horror tragedy and loss. I miss Lydia. I know so many of us miss so many we've lost. I am unique and common. I will be taken care of. Until next time...

5/30/2023

It’s morning and I feel renewed. Like a library book or a blockbuster video. During meditation this morning a thought occurs to me: I feel like God is operative in my life. This doesn’t mean I am doing divination or that I am divine or that I am holy or pious or chosen. Mostly it means I am looking for the good in life. My original purpose in seeking God was to find refuge, after the most deeply disturbing and destabilizing moments of my life, time spent in the worst throes of addiction, suicidial, in jail, in the psych ward, in detox, and in rehab. God was the term applied to the practice of letting ego go, of setting myself aside, of being powerless over the problems that had come to consume and dominate me. I say God is operative in my life because I am looking for God, I am looking for the good, I am looking for a way to make meaning that is not materialist, I am looking for away to relate non-transactionally. As I type it occurs to me that my conception of a Higher Power is intrinsically anti-capitalist. That’s a fleeting thought. More than anything, God is me choosing to believe that I will be taken care of, no matter what.

I like the feeling of God because it helps tamp down the insecurities I feel elsewhere. I feel worried I’m not as attractive to N as I might be, but God scales that worry down, makes it trivial. I feel a bit exposed because yesterday I shared the link to this blog with a handful of trusted friends. But I remember that allowing myself to be known is a component of my spirituality, and so I feel like there’s some paradoxical safety in that exposure. Lofty thoughts like these seem to bloom in the morning for me.

It’s bright and cool in SoHo and the city is waking up. I’m just about to walk to work for the first time. My clothes are clean and they fit well, I took a shower and I smell good, I feel excitement, not dread, about the tasks to come. After work I’m scheduled to meet with F, a friend of E who may have some career trajectory wisdom to share. I will try again to find an AA meeting because my attempts yesterday fizzled (the first meeting I went to was cancelled because it was Memorial Day, the second one was a business meeting instead of a regular meeting for the same reason). I say fizzled but there’s always wisdom and goodness in disrupted plans: a newer member of AA from my home state called me up and I spoke with him on the phone for about 30 minutes. I wouldn’t have picked up if I was in a meeting. We discussed the ninth step (making amends), humility, willingnes, and accountability. He told me stories of harm he had caused and complicated feelings he had toward making amends to people who had harmed him. I offered stories of failed amends on my part and talked about the importance of seeking wisdom from a sponsor, following the instructions laid out in the Steps, trusting the process, and letting go of outcomes. He has the rare and valuable energy of someone with about a year sober, it’s vibrant and it reverberates in me, I remember how important the program is to me, I hear myself in him. I feel useful and in community. After we got off the phone last night I listened to an AA speaker tape, Clancy R., who talked about the history of the program.

In some ways I think of AA as a way to sculpt my imagination, to put some contours and boundaries and healthy channels in place for a mind that is prone to going off the rails when left to its own devices. I am up here in NYC because of the program. It is my psychic foundation. That feels a bit melodramatic to read, but it's how I feel!

Ok, time’s up, time to head to work. Until next time…

5/29/2023 - Evening

Just got back from a brief date with N, wasn’t the best experience, feeling a bit insecure. The date was sort of impromptu, she was in my area, we walked to a random restaurant and split a chicken sandwich and fries, she paid again, was very generous and said “of course!” when I thanked her. We had a good conversation, discussed addiction, eating disorders, recovery, and mental illness. She made a comment that she thought she should avoid dating people with mental illness and I made sure to pipe up and remind her of my having mental illness (we had actually both mentioned suicidality, anxiety, depression, and bipolar 2 experiences in the coursee of this meal) and said if it’s a problem for her, it’s best to end things now and respect the known boundary she has. She made a kind of noncommittal response that didn’t seem to foreclose the possibility of us continuing to hang out, but it wasn’t exactly the most reassuring thin either. On the one hand I love when I get to meet people and can talk about the real, difficult stuff, early on. On the other hand I feel a bit exposed, raw, and vulnerable in these situations. Like I could play my cards a bit closer to the chest, try to put on a more “normal” front, and hope that that would make me a more attractive candidate for a casual summer date, which is really all I think I could be to N anyways; it’s not clear to me that we have the sort of deep compatibility and chemistry that would justify trying to build something bigger over just the summer. But my approach is to try to tell the truth early and often and to not hide things about myself in dating, because I’ve done that before and it caused heartache.

We leave the restaurant and amble a bit. N is talking about how she’s had a bad experience with other guys she’s met on Hinge who FaceTime her without warning to get a candid look at her, to try to make a judgment about her looks while she’s off guard. I say that sounds upsetting and wouldn’t be my style. I mention that I feel a bit self-conscious about my looks and that I would prefer to generate some interest and intimacy over text first because of it. She says, a bit patronizingly, but perhaps as an act of genuine kind dating advice giving, that I should not let on that I feel self-conscious. I tell her I want to be emotionally honest and that the honest truth is that I don’t feel confident all the time. She says that’s the problem and suggests the solution is to simply feel confident all the time. It rubs me the wrong way, mostly because I think she’s right and I don’t want to accept it. It’s weird trying to be my most authentic self and to portray my best self at the same time. I’d like to believe they are a perfect circle venn diagram, but obviously that’s not quite true. N walks me to my place, which is my dorm. I feel a bit infantalized. I tell her she’s invited to come see my room anytime she wants. She says has a work thing tonight. We hug goodbye and she thanks me for walking with her, I tell her I’d love to do it again, she says “that’s really nice!” I have low hopes for a third date. Then again, she may just be aloof or capricious. She herself admitted having low self-esteem at the beginning of our date, so I think the two of us are not on all too different footing. Except for the fact that she is a NY expert and I follow her around the streets of SoHo like an excited puppy. She seems to have a type: tall men and/or people in recovery (she’s mentioned exes of both varieties). I know I have a type, but I also want to believe that it’s a mere aesthetic/superficial proclivity and not determinative. She’s short and curvy with big, dark eyes and thick hair. Her nails are perfect and she wears small but tasteful jewlery that appears very expensive. It seems like her family is rich. I have to resist the urge to make her more in my life than she is. She’s a stranger, she’s a rollerskater, as Donald Fagen would say. Oh but she texted me just now and I feel a flood of gratitude and relief. Interested to see how this plays out. I must not make a date my higher power! Lord help me. It’s time for me to go to a meeting, I’ve been putting it off too long. Heading to Rhinelander now; I think I’ll ride my bike.

Updates to come, I’m sure. Ups or down, I know I’ll be taken care of. Some time spent in intentional spiritual reflection will do me good. Until next time…

5/29/2023

I spent the last few hours collecting my previous blogarithms from my notes app and textedit on the computer, scrubbing for anonymity, and placing line breaks between paragraphs, since I have seen fit to use a web 1.0 blogging platform for this endeavor. I like the simplicity of presentation so I feel like it’s worth it. Now I just need to share the link with people. When will I get around to it?

I’m recumbent in my dorm room bed. I’m full of sandwich and placid and placated. I went and got groceries earlier, and now the spot feels a bit more homey. I have emergency ramen and cereal and milk and butter and jelly. It’s weird to shop in a different city with no car. Food prices are ghastly, like twice as much as back home. Food is heavy, a thing I remember being reminded of when I was in rehab in the south and had to do my grocery shopping such that it fit in a bookbag that I could carry back to the apartment complex on a bus or van.

This morning I finally was able to do my full prayer and meditation routine, which was grounding. I got some grading done, which was a bit tedious, but I’m chipping away at the work dutifully, earning my credit as an editor, paying back the work that was done on me that enabled me to be a part of the publication.

After grading I went for another waterfront jog, 6 miles again. The legs feel sturdy and bouncy, the work of running is as effortful as ever, but not impossible, and I’m comfortably exhausted from that work as I type. I had a chance to finally have a proper sponsor-sponsee meeting with my sponsor after the jog, we read in Experience Strength and Hope and caught up about our lives. I found myself feeling a bit impatient with my sponsor, which I think is proof I need a meeting. I hope to go to one tonight at 7. I may allow myself a nap before then. It’s a savory lazy breezy holiday monday. We did family Zoom which was good, I got to see my aunt and my dad and my mom and my sister, all appear well and in good spirits. That’s especially heartening in the case of my mom, who underwent surgery to excise cancerous tissue recently. As far as we know, the operation was a complete success and the expectation is that she will remain cancer-free. It’s hard to fully feel how scared she must have been and how relieved she must feel now. I wish I was close by to support her but I’m glad my dad and his sister are there for her. I’m honestly just tired now and feel like since I have my home relatively set up, I can safely doze. So maybe I’ll do that instead of trying to type a whole lot more right now. I have work tomorrow and so it would feel nice to just do nothing for a bit. So I think I will…

5/28/2023

Last day of living with E&E in Ridgewood. It’s been a real blessing to be able to stay here. And I’m ready to be in my own space. Had a nice pizza dinner from Fazio’s last night, drank fancy sodas I’d never seen before, low sugar with probiotics. We watched a weird movie, After Hours, a 1985 Martin Scorsese oddball dark comedy set in Manhattan over the course of a night. It’s interesting to see stuff like this, I never had heard of it and would never think to seek it out. I think the density of culture up here and the premium placed on good taste make for more rarified media choices. Feels like it parallels food: I’m used to frozen pizza from food lion and its media equivalent; people in NYC have ~excellent taste~ and seek out superior sensory experiences to satisfy it. I feel like I’ve maybe made some identity out of blandness, like I’ve conflated aimlessness and tastelessness in my consumption with humility or proletarianism. I think it extends to my fashion choices as well. I think there has been a desire to exhibit some modesty, a lack of ostentation, a disinterest in the material world through these choices for me. Is good taste incompatible with spirituality?

I’m looking forward to building my prayer and meditation life back up; I can feel the agita and reactivity start to build in me as more days pass without a proper morning prayer and meditation routine and more days without a meeting slide by. I know I am baseline disturbable and that AA—the program and the fellowship—is my daily reprieve.

I texted N a photo of the lefthand side of my daily inventory journaling practice, which is adapted from pages 86-88 of the Big Book, and tried to encourage her by saying it only takes a few minutes each day and the be efforts are well worth the effort. She struggles with an all-or-nothing perfectionism borne of childhood strictures around learning that to me sounded borderline abusive. But she said they serve her, as old unkindnesses sometimes do.

The Intergenerational trauma of capitalism and individualism N discussed yesterday still looms in my mind. But now it’s time for cinnamon roles…

Update: the Cinnamon rolls* were excellent, probably the best I’ve ever had, which basically means superior to tubed Grands. But that makes them seem less exquisite than they were; and they really were exquisite.

K, the musical mastermind behind the band I was most recently in, texted to tell me he was nearby and that we should hang out, so I took my first NYC bike ride in a decade or so down St Nicholas to the tip of Ridgewood to meet up w him and J. He was so stoked to see me which made me feel so good. He bought me a seltzer and we sauntered. I asked him about his life up here, he’s in two bands and working in the art departments of film/video productions. I told him I’m trying to blog this summer to prevent my creative spirit from withering under the weight of the skyscrapers, which made us laugh. He’s a good friend. The last time we saw each other was at Lydia’s funeral/memorial in February. He said he had been back to NC between then and now for another friend’s funeral. He didn’t know whether they died from an OD or a suicide, but it was one or the other, maybe both.

Sadly he and his gf had just broken up this past monday, but he seemed upbeat about it. We walked up the street to meet with J, who was kind and shared part of his cauliflower sandwich with me. J seems to have climbed a bit higher than K in the art and music world; a film he did work on is about to premiere at the Tribeca film festival, K said J was buying an Armani suit for the red carpet. Also J has a record deal as a DJ and is releasing a single soon. K said the current iteration of our old band will be shooting a handful of music videos soon. There’s a part of me that feels jealous/envious that these guys seem able to make a living as creatives. I once wanted that, during my time in Philly. But I was mentally wrecked and always felt like a pretender. But the jealousy is small and brief; I have a certain newfound self-possession thanks to the steep salary my new job pays. Still, I want to be weary of sourcing my esteem in either pay or play. It should be pray. That is to say, prayer, spirituality, which should be materially me offering kindness and support and service in every part of my life. Is this a sincere desire or a rationalization to protect me from feeling sad about being a failed artist? To paraphrase the Big Book: any life lived by self-will alone can hardly be considered a success. The corollary is that a life lived by service can’t fail to be successful. This is just for me, these are maxims I adhere to because of my alcoholism; I don’t mean to diminish the hard work, value system, pattern and practice of K and J or anyone else.

I dozed on E&E’s couch for about 10 minutes and then Marty’s punk friend movers arrived. They got my modestly containered life safely out of Ridgewood and piled it into SoHo, without any incident more severe than a dropped box’s chintzy plastic handle shattering. I paid the fee and said my goodbyes; we were done in an hour. My new home is spare and plain, and gives off hotel/dormitory vibes. It is in fact a dorm. I have a single. I feel excited to nest a bit and to regain some agency over my downtime. Particularly I am eager to refresh my morning prayer routine. I had to buy some lamps from Target, and now I’m heading to Prospect Park to lounge on the lawn with my sister and her friends. E will be there too, we plan to say hi, I hope it’s cute and not weird. We’ll see. Until next time…

It’s a couple hours later and I have completed my visit to Prospect Park! It was really nice and cute. Me and E managed to find each other in the vast park and chatted for maybe 20 minutes about her work in the Bronx PD’s office, my work at the firm, financial independence, politics, and supporting our mutual friend currently under the lash of our repressive capitalist police state. I like E a lot and hope we can be friends. We were showing each other stuff on our phones and I noticed one of her usernames ends in 97, which likely means she’s fully ten years younger than me. I feel like that’s at or just beyond the lower bound of acceptability when it comes to relationship age differences. This thought occurs to me notwithstanding the fact that I have zero reason to believe E would even be interested in relating to me as anything other than a friend. I think about how it would be meaningful to cultivate a sincere platonic friendship with a younger woman I feel attracted to, as an act of spite against my lower nature, an attempt to dislodge intimacy from lust, to be a real comrade to E and not man whose attention is just a facade. I think about the books on the shelf at E&E’s house, one of which was Lolita, a book I’ve never read. I think I know what it is about, although I remember hearing it was also an allegory for the author’s love of language. I think about Marty’s band shirt for the band called Lust For Youth band. I think about how the commodification of "beauty" and "youth" and "women" and especially their interseciton are archetypical vehicles for capitalism. It's as simple as "sex sells." I think about my friends who sell sex. I think about how I learned in my critical legal theory class that Catherine MacKinnon said that sex is essentially the eroticization of force. I feel bitterness toward myself, then men, then gender, then sex. I think about how my lustfulness has interfered with and derailed relationships over the years, how I want to be able to de-preoccupy myself with sex. It will be easier as I age, I hope. I know I have a capacious heart, I know I continuously love people sincerely without regards to my sexual attraction. I have to remember that one of the ways my mental illness and alcoholism manifest is through my attention to sex. I have treatment options, and they work. I have new channels of thought that serve me well. Discipline is a part of emotional sobriety, and I rely on God for help with it.

I think about how I keep assuming my activism will pale and fade away, but how I keep finding myself close to people who reactivate that tendency in me. E invited me to an event next week, it’s political and we both expressed a desire to weave ourselves into community that feels ideologically sustaining. E mentions she might move to a certain southern spot because NYC, her hometown, feels too atomized, depersonalized, individualized. It’s a sentiment that harmonizes with what N said on our date yesterday. I take it as a reminder to pay attention to the communities I’m in rather than the accomplishments behind or ahead of me. I feel like I should call J. I know I need to attend to relationships for them to thrive. I also know they live on in dormancy much much longer than I expect/ I know I need to be present, to be where my feet are as we say in AA.

Happily, each interaction with E and me has been perfectly friendly and I feel no trouble or pressure or tension there. I’ll let it be, I hope.

Time to walk home...

5/27/2023

Yesterday I went out to Porcelain and treated E and E, definitely the most I’ve ever paid for a meal, but well worth it, mostly just the gesture of gratitude to them for letting me stay in their place. Went home and got to eat E’s homemade peach cake with whipped cream, which was tasty.

Thursday and Friday I began my first real substantive work at the firm, it was basically just legal research, and we had very little time to do it. I neglected to use the most effective boolean terms and connectors, and I missed the most on-point case in my search because of it. But I think it was ok, the assigning attorney was very gracious for our effort nonetheless. I do feel like I have a lot of room to grow and sharpen my skills as a legal researcher with regards to practical material law (as opposed to the sort of highly technical and sprawling critical/theoretical legal research I spent this semester doing at school). But I get the sense that I’ll adapt and optimize with practice.

Got lunch with my senior associate mentor. Relatively anodyne. A kind and helpful woman.

In the afternoon we had a wellness talk as part of our orientation. The partner leading the talk mentioned being in recovery and experiencing depression, I reached out via email to thank them for their candor and said I believe visibility is the first step toward eroding stigma. I mentioned being 5 years sober in recovery and offered to be of service supporting other firm employees in recovery if it would be helpful. We’ll see if they respond. I didn’t expect to feel so safe disclosing my SUD/neurodivergent status so soon. But this talk set the tone. And regarding that stigma, I know it can lead to secret suffering, which in turn can lead to death. Lydia’s mom spoke passionately at her memorial about how our culture needs to change how it engages with mental illness and suicidal ideation. To me, being frank about my own adjacency thereto feels like a meaningful way to strive toward that call to action.

Went for a jog along a certain river and nearby piers, first ever jog in NYC. Came back to office and showered in the fitness center, which felt like an elite corporate perk activity. I feel like I might should try to meditate more deeply about my relationship to the abundance of luxury here. Hopefully I will in time. Days are passing so fast it feels slippery, like I can't hold or think through it all, the volume of facts and experiences is overflowing.

I haven’t meditated properly since I’ve been here; somehow my internal triage of priorities has kicked prayer meditation inventory and meetings to a lower tier than work, hanging out with my sister and Emmett, doing work for the law review, and going on dates. Hopefully when I get settled in Manhattan I can get that routine back up and running.

Speaking of which, I’m about to go on my first date here, with a woman named N. Will report back soon…

6 hour date w N, long brunch at Turkish-ish spot in Manhattan, walked around Lower East Side, NoHo, Bowery. Excellent eclairs from Super Moon Bakery, bought my sister some croissant donut muffin thing, Iced Chai and hot chai with cardamom from the chai spot, long talks about debt, credit, capitalism, art, aesthetics, typography, pedagogy, the pathology of Western Individualism, all this while I was following N around like a puppy, essentially lost and without any meaningful sense of direction, often getting lost in her eyes, feeling really happy to listen, feeling also a bit like a bumpkin and a rube, but like it was safe to be that around N, like my goofiness was seen but that I wasn’t docked for it. N and me managed to mutually disclose that we do strange pointless arithmetic when we encounter numbers: I try to do simple operations to get to zero (4:55 on a clock would be 5x5 = 25, 25x4=100, 0xx0x1=0); N goes for multiples of 7, though she used to go for multiples of 9. She isn’t sure why it shifted, I postulate it may have been something that happened between ages 27 (9x3) and 28 (7x4); she gets what I’m saying but says that’s not it. I don’t get my metrocard to swipe correctly on the first try, feel like a rube, get it to work, square up with N, hug for an amount of time that felt more than polite but less than true love, and go our separate ways. I nearly topple while texting her stupid puns on the train ride home.

I know it’s bad form to fall in love with the first person you go on a date with so I’m resisting that impulse. N’s IG has no photos on it so I’m just trying to remember her face from today, which is easy so far because I spent so much time staring at it, trying to wear a meaningful, attentive look, trying not to get distracted by how I feel ugly sometimes, trying to give myself the benefit of the doubt that she thinks I’m cute, trying to absorb the fact of the 6-hour date as proof she—a curator, an aesthete—found my face tolerable, serviceable, sound. E texted just minutes after I got home, she invited me to visit with her tomorrow while she studies; I really want to but I have to move from Ridgewood to NoHo/SoHo tomorrow, also I need to do more grading, but maybe I can squeeze it in.

I do think E is very lovely, based off meeting her once in the electrical daze that reverberated through me on the day I finished my last exam. I’m feeling like I’m going to have a lot of chances at love up here, and like I need to be careful with my heart. It’s all so stimulating and charming, the flavors, the personalities, the pace. The city gyre.

All that said I have no real reason to believe E feels anything other than friendly affinity for me, so I will try to tread lightly and keep my expectations soft and malleable. It would be great just to be a friend to her. Until next time...

5/26/2023

It’s early Friday morning; I got up when the sun was just barely up. Most of the time I’ve been in NYC I’ve been trying to be as social as possible, and I’ve been really successful, which is a huge deal if you’ve known me for a long time. Phenomena like depression, anxiety, alcoholism. addiction, nihilism, introversion, shyness, and simple fear, all have felt very present and big in my life. I have traditionally felt so much discomfort in social situations that I generated a story about myself as someone who functions better alone, or who recharges alone, or who is essentially socially deficient, or who needs chemical assistance to survive socially, or who accuses society and/or community of some amorphous interminable evil, and who habitually withdrew and sought solace in silent abandoned places as a result of it. Abandoned architecture away from people always made me feel calm. I loved spray painting empty factories, feeling small, feeling like a ghost among ghosts as I absorbed the energy of others who had haunted the space. That was a core part of my identity for some time. So it’s a stark, astonishing contrast to be spending almost all of my waking hours here so far in conversation with other people or in their company. I’d say my time has been divided something like 65% firm people, 10% my sister, 5% conversations with my NC friends and family on the phone or text, 5% strangers, and 5% time alone. Versus idk 40% time alone, 30% school, 20% recovery back in NC. For some reason making these add up to 90% instead of 100% makes more sense to me. Maybe God reserved 10% for his self...? Math is not my strong suit.

Anyways tl;dr the chrysalis is fully off and I have been a social butterfly here so far and it is a trip to see myself able to accomplish sociability without feeling the need to drink or use or run away. The big book says Abandon yourself to God. I like the idea of abandoning myself when it comes to the old malfunctions and maladjustments and warped coping mechanisms that no longer serve me. Of course there’s some fear of changing for the worse too, but I haven’t felt that yet. It’s a blessing to be feeling so dynamic. Because a lot of the time I used to fear I could never change, that I would be stuck.

I have been feeling so so grateful for the mentors in my life lately. I reached out to the managing attorney at the traffic law firm I worked at back home, thanking him for taking a chance on me five years ago. For anyone who doesn’t know, I got a DWI in 2018, unexpectedly hit it off with my attorney (whose office was next door to a legal research firm I worked at prior to getting sober), got offered a job by him, eagerly said yes to it hoping it would provide a pathway back to law school (I had received my acceptance letter to law school just a day or two after my DWI, then immediately got un-accepted because of it). I honestly hated the job: I was answering telephones in a half secretary half salesman capacity, absorbing a lot of bitter vim and vitriol from people sickened by the experience of getting traffic tickets, advising them about what our attorneys could do to help them get the best outcome. I hated the work but I felt doggedly loyal to my employer, because I thought I had thrown away my future, had revoked any semblance of goodwill or trustworthiness, and my employer gave me a shot anyways. I grew in the company, learned tons about traffic law, and was the company’s all-time leading salesman at the time I left. I didn’t really like being good at sales, but I was. And after a couple years there, I got the managing attorney (an alum himself of the school I was trying to get into) to write me a letter of recommendation, and I think that helped a lot in convincing the school to re-admit me. This is all background but it’s relevant because I don’t think I could have gotten to where I am today without that experience, which I let the attorney know. It feels good to remind people of the positive impact they have had on my life. He responded with “make us proud.” I really love that.

I also reached out to my mentor to thank her for encouraging me to apply to the firm I’m working at now. I would never have known about the existence of the firm without her. I also absolutely thought I was not qualified or elite enough or whatever to work for the firm. But she made it seem possible, accessible, doable. It’s truly incredible how the confidence of other people can open up new worlds. It’s astonishing. And so as I rode the subway home yesterday after 12 hours of either working or socializing at the firm, I texted her to thank her for advising me to seek this job. She was magnanimous as ever and encouraged me to sample a variety of practice areas if possible, but to stick to litigation. She said “I feel fairly certain you are a litigator at heart.” I told her it felt like I was being spoken to by he Sorting Hat. It’s hard for me to put into words how special it makes me feel to not only be mentored, but to have someone see me, assess my proclivities and capabilities, and to nudge me toward a career path where I have the best chance to succeed. I pray that I can absorb this feeling, capture its importance, and reciprocate this kind of mentorship to someone else down the line.

I’m out of time, I gotta go commute to work again, today I begin some substantive legal research on my first matter. I will try to go on a jog tonight. I have a date scheduled for tomorrow. As Michael Scott once said, “my heart feels full.”

5/25/2023

Morning

This morning on the subway, the car was completely full, and nearly silent. For about 30 seconds the doors were closed, the A/C was not running, and no one spoke as the train stood still. This moment felt perfectly contrary to what I expected of NYC during the weeks in my home town in the south as I laid awake fretting about my future. My brain is wonderfully creative and vividly ignorant, both. My thoughts are brain broth.

Part of disaggregating the crush is recognizing that the more or less constant undertow of crushes I feel is likely a result of my receptiveness (receptivity?) to love. I’m not shut down, not withdrawn, not closed off. Standing on the train I try to avoid locking eyes with people as a courtesy, but it still does happen periodically. Occasionally it happens with paralyzingly gorgeous people, and then I try to look away politely but not fearfully. This is different than Rob Thomas’s “dodging glances on the train,” a symptom of being unwell. I feel well. I feel like I’m supposed to be here.

Evening

Today for the first time I felt like I saw cracks in the facade. Whether that’s the face of the firm (could such a thing even exist) or my own face, I’m not sure. The doubt I feel is small, wispy, hairline. Fickle and likely the result of fatigue. The cracks came from me feeling like one person in particular wasn’t being very nice to me. Like not at all actively mean or even unkind in the slightest, just them failing to affirmatively go out of their way to be effusively nice to me. It’s wild that that has become my baseline, and that my (likely erroneous) perception of a perfect stranger deviating from it causes me distress. It speaks to the persistence of my spiritual sickness/mental illness, which admittedly is currently being less actively treated than it was a month ago, just in terms of making fewer meetings and spending less time in prayer meditation and recovery fellowship. Also not doing therapy. Also today was the last day of my Trazodone taper, which means tomorrow marks the official first day of being un totally unmedicated in more than five years. That is momentous. I feel plenty stable and well. I just need to remember not to abandon the routine of recovery, the dependable procedure that has produced and preserved my sobriety. I know the little glimmer of feeling under-engaged by this person is a product of that, and I hope to use this as an object lesson to get back into more regular meetings. Also I haven’t gone for a run in almost a week which is likely a contributing factor, though the amount of walking and standing I do each day now does feel like exercise.

Returning to our segment on disaggregating the crush, today I learned that yesterday’s crush has a partner. It was no less charming and fun to chat with them, this time in exasperated tones of excited earnestness after a 2.5 hour stand-up networking event with passed canapes and unlimited refreshments where associates, counsels, and partners all joined us in the multipurpose room to conviviate (a word I just made up).

We talked about activism, about how both of us have working class parents and no legacy connection to the world of elite law or academia. We both feel stunned, humbled, grateful to be forty floors up with a magnificent board room panorama having our capabilities praised and our high capacities courted. We talked about wanting to live with integrity and according to our values, and about how that would likely be compromised, at least a little, working in BigLaw, no matter how much valiant pro bono our firm does. I talked about getting right-sized, (an AA phrase), how I no longer believe, as I once did, that I am responsible for saving the world, how my life is unlikely to move the needle much in one direction or the other, how it would be nice to be the financially stable one in the family. I said these days I want to scratch the itch of activism by being good to the people in my life. The crush said they never thought of it that way. Personal activism. No need to fly to Palestine when we’re hurt and deprived right here. They said they had to take inventory on their own tendency to equate geographical distance with volume of genuine positive impact. I like talking to them even though they have a partner. I hope in every relationship in my life I can like it for what it is, and not forsake it for what it isn’t, not cancel it for what it can’t be.

5/24/2023

Today I learned about the Insular Cases, which essentially deprive of full Constitutional protection US territories like Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands.

Had a really nice conversation today with another summer associate. Internally debating whether and how my capricious experience of having crushes on people could appear on this blog. I feel like the most I can responsibly do is obliquely reference the fact that I am having a crush at the moment, and try to unpack it a bit:

I feel like I have been in a blissful vacuum since I have been in NYC. Especially at the law firm. It feels unreal. Specifically, today I had the overwhelming realization that the experience/emotion/vibe of contempt has been conspicuously absent from every interaction at the law firm. To me this feels like an extrapolation or elaboration or evolution of what I have felt in law school: I feel like people treat me extremely nicely. Some of it, maybe most of it has to do with genuine kindness. I don’t want to discount that. But a thought occurred to me today, which is maybe not all too original or surprising: people are nicer to you when (1) they have no financial insecurity (2) they understand you to be in that situation as well. I don’t know if it’s a class thing per se, or some hybrid of class and career and academics and privilege, or something else, but I can’t shake the feeling: there is no contempt at the firm. Maybe it is like a pink cloud, a term we use in AA to describe the first two weeks or so of sobriety, when, for some (but not all) people, everything feels unbelievably positive, a warm amniotic wash of optimism and connection replaces the jagged cold despair hopelessness and isolation that was a daily experience for most of us in active addiction.

Am i on a law firm pink cloud? I have been socializing during roughly 90% of my waking hours over the last four days, and me, a self-identified introvert, feels great about it. I feel occasional social fatigue, but mostly I feel game. I feel capacious. I feel like I want to be around people, I like the way it feels. I stand up for much longer than I think I could at the Sun Ra show, I am packed tight among 100+ people, and think I will want to leave, but end up staying. The same sort of unexpected social endurance has been at play in my work interactions. I expect to feel burnt out by the conversations, but I’m not. And everyone seems so earnestly nice.

I’m trying not to make my excellent situation into a problem. My old approach to life was to find fault in all things. I think that was a product of my mental illness, my depression specifically, a facet of insanity that’s still inside me, but one I’ve learned to respond to differently. I want to let myself think in new ways. I want to create new grooves. I want to get out of old bad habits. And the internal environment of my mind, my psychic ecosystem, feels like ground zero. So I want to acknowledge the nihilist class warrior anarchist proletarian state smasher tendency in me, honor it, and not be suffocated by the cloud of miasmatic negativity that part of myself so often generated. I want to be ok with feeling happy in a situation without that happiness somehow being an indictment against me. I hope this does not make me a traitor somehow.

All of the preceding three paragraphs were preamble to help contextualize what I called a “crush.” I have a suspicion that the truth of the matter is that I was treated kindly and earnestly and attentively by a gorgeous colleague whose intention was nothing more than to be present and to regard me the way they would like to be attended to and regarded. I received collegial energy and my nature is to want to transmute that energy into romance when it vibrates out of the mind and body of someone I find attractive. Or maybe that was my nature. I want to decouple kindness and romance, disaggregate the “crush.” I want to appreciate the kindness of each stranger on the street and each partner at the firm. I want them all to count equally, without regard to the shape of their face or their curves or their skin’s shades. I personally feel like I am a bit ugly and like that’s ok, and I want attractiveness to matter less to me. I want to just be present and trustworthy and emotionally honest and transparent and most of all safe. I want to feel safe to be around, and I want to feel safe around the people I choose to be with. So I have some responsibility to take inventory, decouple, decant, decode, but not decay.

A lot of this all feels very personal, singular, internal. So I’ll end by trying to remind myself that God belongs here. There’s room to surrender and to cede power and to find safety and solace in my limitations and ignorance and human excitability. There’s also a simple and joyful truth in all this: I love people. I need people. I am paying attention to people. "People who need people are the luckiest people." I’m in community. Community is always beginning and restarting and reconfiguring and congealing and contracting and cracking and getting ground down to glitter and saturated into clay and recast into ceramics and stained and glazed and polished and shattered again. I’m one among many lumps of clay in that lifecycle of the vessel. I’m glad to be alive.

I have had a very easy time making my way through each waking hour of the day since I’ve been here. I have had an easy time being in my head. I have not felt a need to blot out my thoughts with media. I expect this will pass, that the seasons in my mind will change, and that I will feel hurt and fear and sorrow before the summer is over. But I don’t now. And I want to allow myself to wear this lack of worry, clothe my mind in it and trust that the wind will take away this diaphonous raiment but that I will survive the chill, or survive the sweltering heat, or whatever wash of feelings comes next. I’m grateful right now because it feels safe to feel. Thank you to whatever is out there. Until next time!

5/23/2023

Each day so far here has been packed. My life is brimming with activity. I have met new people every day, tried new food every day, heard new sounds and seen new sights every day. So with all this going on it’s hard to find time, even a few minutes, to get away and write. But I’m trying!

Yesterday was day two of work, more logistics, tech training, getting acquainted with the physical space of offices, getting settled at our desks, and that sort of early-days-of-work work. My firm occupies four total floors of a big skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan. Even though there are a lot of law students from Ivy League and other elite schools, everyone I’ve met so far seems down to earth, not snooty or elitist or gatekeeper-y. Although I guess it’s probable that the gate at this point has already been kept and I am on the other side. The gate of grades has favored me; I found out today I got an A in criminal procedure, which feels really good.

I get to calibrate my gait up and down grades here, I do tons of walking. I am commuting about an hour each way to and from work so far, from Queens to Manhattan, and I like just people watching and not listening to media so far, though I expect that might wear off eventually. I do feel very present. I haven’t felt the need to turn on youtube videos to fall asleep; I have been naturally tired enough to just go to bed unmediated each night.

I made my first AA meeting here last night. It was in a stunningly gorgeous church off of Park Avenue. We sat in a mezzanine room overlooking a basketball court. I noticed Cartier watches and high-quality stitching and other ornaments suggesting great wealth. But the message I heard carried was strikingly similar to the one I am accustomed to hearing in the south, carried by the sunburnt proletariat (as L’s Dad used to say) whose drawl is used on yawl instead of cawfee. I did what I was supposed to in the meeting: I introduced myself as the new guy in town, I shared a bit about my experience as a means of allowing myself to be known and to participate in the operationalized vulnerability that has habitually saved my life one day at a time for the past 5+ years. I was welcomed by this group full of strangers as they had known me all my life, which in a way they have, to the extent that each of us is a garden variety drunk, and we have known our own stories our whole lives, and only recently got disabused of the myth of terminal uniqueness. I love AA.

I made it back to Queens and got dinner with E, which was lovely. They make time for me each day to see me, spend time together, plan things for us to do, chat with me about their life and my life. I’m so blessed to have such a kind and accomodating sibling. E says I could write a memoir. I say thank you; she specifies that she didn’t mean it as a compliment necessarily, more like it’s just plainly true that the content of my life could fill a book. I still really appreciated it. I think about how my dream for so long has been to be a writer. The truth is, I am a writer. I am a writer every day when I write my daily tenth step inventory in my notebook as a spiritual practice. I am a writer when I write emails. I am a writer when I work on my Note for the Law Review, and when I edit the student scholarship of my peers in my capacity as an editor. I am a writer when I do this blog. It’s so deeply profoundly special to me to feel as though I have got this thing. Like I don’t need to be worried about striving for some echelon beyond this; I can be satisfied with who I am and what I have done. It comes back to gratitude and accepatance, I think. These are core AA life skills. I am so thankful for recovery.

I have so much more to say, I want to capture all the nuance and flavor and flowers and details of my life here, but there just isn’t enough time. I had one final thought though, which has popped up in my head a few times, which is that each writing endeavor is an act of curating and archiving and crafting an identity. I think I like writing because like Aesop Rock says, “all I ever wanted was to pick apart the day, put the pieces back together my way.” And so I feel like to be emotionally honest and present in this blog I have to name the fact that I want to use the blog to craft my identity. At least that’s one of the competing motivations here. I think rigorous honesty is compatible with that motivation, and that I can create content here that isn’t misleading. But I was more just thinking stylistically how there is an everflowing abundance of thoughts and experiences inside me, and the act of recording some, however stream-of-consciousness it may feel, is in fact an act of me curating and archiving myself.

So I’ll leave you with that for now, weary Googler. It’s time for me to go to work. I sacrificed my morning shower to type this out. I feel really solid about that decision. My coworkers may fell really squalid about that decision. Until next time!

5/22/2023

Dear Googlers: note that you are gonna see the occasional fragment and unpolished textual artifact here and there in this blog. In order to stay motivated and active I am giving myself permission not to rigorously edit for style or stylistics. This was your warning!

Sun Ra Arkestra

Sequins and light, a kaleidoscope of a dozen people heaving sound at us, packed too tight into TV Eye. One vocalist, but then two and three vocalists, but also every wind instrument sounds like a voice, waves hurling at us, songs about space, or I’m about space all the time and I just synced up with some fickle aperture in Ridgewoood.

I like the idea of the music experience even when the notes don’t sound good to me. I’m getting invited out of my preoccupation with precision, a side effect of the aptitude fetish I picked up in law school. And invited out of the myth of individualism; the unimportance of any single experience measured against collective. A crowd of notes crowds out the hurt back and tired legs and empty belly. There’s energy above just comfort. And there’s an element of the otherworldly that the Abrahamic faith traditions get at from a much quieter angle. I’m not of this world.

But I have to get up early tomorrow in this world to go to work high up in a skyscraper.

Which is what I did today, my first day as a summer associate at the Big Law firm. I struggle a bit to socialize but I hit my stride eventually. I can’t quite keep up with the pace and the volume and the effort and effusiveness of some of the eager energetic people in my cohort but it seems like it doesn’t matter. People are kind to me in the way that comes from some expectation of shared aptitude and capability. Sort of the inverse of AA, where the glow of kindness comes from an expectation of and thoroughgoing love for ineptitude. I need to make an AA meeting, I’ll try to hit one after work tomorrow.

I feel ready to fall in love. I got a chance to connect with someone over text who I have a crush on. We made plans to meet this weekend. I hope we just...

[and then the author, me, just trails off! sometimes the blog gets interrupted by sleep!]

5/21/2023

The last 36 or so hours feels a bit like a blur. In that time, I went to R and S’s wedding, which was beautiful. I talked with M for a long time which was really nice.

Drove from my home to another southern holler from 8pm to 10:30pm.

Met with M in that holler, got to see F, meet M’s new housemates.

Drove from that holler to a big Garden State City from 11pm to 5:30am. Long talks and loud music with M, felt really earnest and vulnerable and present.

C graciously woke up at 5:30 to let us in, had an air mattress and couch set up for us. We got some light sleep from 6am to 10am, then got up, deflated air mattress, left C a thank you note made from a paper bag and ballpoint pen for his kindness and hospitality. Then we wandered half dazed through a promenade in the big Garden State City to a coffee shop, got 8 dollar iced latte, felt like an NPC.

We drove from there to Ridgewood in about an hour, was able to snag a spot and unload my four big plastic tubs containing all my belongings for the summer and my bike, hauled them up into E and E’s apartment, and parked the car.

Got some lunch consisting of chilequiles (wet chips!) and cold brew. Then M had to head back, he found a rack. Like just a free rack on the sidewalk, he'll use it for his fledgling screenprinting biz I think. We were only together for about 16 hours but it was such a big important closeness I feel to him. I am writing this about to fall asleep, not feeling articulate at all. M left, was going to visit EC on his way out, and then I spent the rest of the day hanging with E and E and E’s high school friends Z and E. They were weird and cool and kind and E talked about making Ibiza tracks and we bonded over DJ Diamond Kutz from Philly.

The group of us met in that park near Green Point where E used to live (McCaren Park?), sat around and people watched and shot the shit. It was overcast and sunny in turns, breezy and almost chilly, but ultimately perfect May weather to me. We eventually ambled from there down to Williamsburg and to the East River and to a park near there, conversation was slow and aimless and amiable and I got to just kind of soak everything in and let them lead the way.

Eventually we went to this pizza place and got pizza with pickled vegetables on top which was nice and sat on lawn chairs around a table on the sidewalk which to me felt like the Sopranos. There were silly word jokes and Z did some prop comedy with his used up paper plate from the pizza. I bought E a Coke, the pizza was on the other E. We sat around until the sun went down and it got more chilly, and then made our way to the subway, Parted ways with Z and E, and went back to Ridgewood on the L. The L is the name of the train not a person!

E's cat I is not so friendly at first but it’s ok. I don’t have much energy to talk or make conversation, but that feels acceptable and I feel really fully welcomed by E and E’s hospitality. I’m in the front room so I get loud bursts of night time sounds randomly, music and yells and sirens and stuff, but it’s actually been a pretty tranquil day the whole time, like weirdly quiet to me, at least compared to the cacophany I had steeled myself for. Also there’s like this cottony dampening effect of only having gotten four hours of slleep. That puts a sonic cocoon around everything sometimes. I feel like there is no conflict inside me or with this place. I feel sure the conflict was only an externality of anxiety, a psychic projection of worry. I feel peace here.

I’m now laying on the thin mattress and tami mat on the floor feeling unarticulate and unpoetic but proud of myself for dragging my fingers across the keys enough to sketch out the skeleton of the last day and a half. I will try to go back through and edit for fun and prettyness tomorrow morning if I have time before work. Otherwise I’ll just post it and try to keep it moving.

The big thing I feel right now is that I am in the good graces of many friends in many states. From NC to VA to NJ to NY I was carried and/or cared for by loved ones who made space in their schedules and in their hearts to accommodate me. I feel like I am receiving goodwill. I don’t fear or doubt it. It’s so different to be in the city five years sober. There’s not a cloud of misconduct effusing from me, collecting static, causing charges, emitting shocks, casting shade, smogging things. Instead there’s a bit of a slowness in me, and maybe even a blandness. But there’s a wide clarity here this time. I feel like my eyes are open and I’m not afraid like I used to be. I feel like I don’t have to run or withdraw or seek thrills or test boundaries or take risks or numb myself.

I feel like i can just be.

I hope that feeling persists. I hope I can use my wit and presence and material resources and personality and care and emotions to show all the people who love me that I am grateful for them. I hope I can do right by everyone. Not sure why but my head feels like it’s spinning a bit now, so it’s time to close the laptop and try to get some sleep before my first day of work tomorrow. Thank you to all my friends, thank you thank you thank you

5/20/2023

Hello weary googler. It’s your old friend, N.

You know my name, and I know my name, but I'll be keeping things on a first-letter basis for the sake of anonymity and opsec. I don't expect anything all that juicy will surface on this plain patch of internet, but I'm being abundantly cautious since I may allude to both alcoholism and potentially sensitive and/or confidential legal matters here. And who knows, maybe an air of mystique will make puzzling over this babbling brook of text a bit more entertaining.

Ok, let's get started.

I intend to keep a blog during my summer in Manhattan. Just in case I do, this is where it will be.

I will try to make a nice fabric for you to look at by weaving together my many selves: recoverer, law student, attorney-in-training, silly poet, sensitive clown, athlete, food enjoyer, screen auditor, gentle giant, content receptacle, glorified googler, etc. It would be my great privilege to upholster your eyes with this nice fabric.

It’s been hard for me to keep a consistent blog over the years. My mind is multipolar and fickle and sticky and occasionally the works get gunked up. But I love words and the life on the page and I think this medium is a place where I can let myself shine, share whatever light I have, and hopefully it will help us keep company over distance and time.

In a few minutes I’ll go gorge on BLTs with my parents, then dawdle some until it’s time to go to R and S’s wedding, then drive from there to Richmond to meet M, who has volunteered to accompany me into the city. We may stay in Jersey City tonight with C before going to see E and E in Queens, where I’ll stay for the first week as I await my sublet to properly begin. After that it’s summer associate intern work for 9 weeks at a BigLaw firm. The plan is to live in an NYU law dorm somewhere between NoHo and SoHo.

The plan is to absorb as much culture and flavor as possible. The plan is to let myself be known. The plan is to be receptive to romantic love should it appear, but to not be preoccupied by its absence if it doesn’t. The plan is to determine whether Manhattan as a place and BigLaw as a law genre is a good fit for me for the first part of my career after graduation.

The plan is to make meetings all summer, to make use of contacts shared with me by trusted recovery confidants, to continue seeking to draw nearer to my Creator and to cultivate spiritual fitness. The plan is to not let my new external environment disrupt the healthy internal biome I’ve developed over the last five years. But the plan is also to allow myself to be a little disrupted, to expect and embrace change for the better, and to grow along or around the change as needed, like a big tree near power lines.

I've lived so many lives in my life. I’ve moved so so many times in my life. But these last five years have had the fewest moves of all. So I feel some apprehension, some doubt that I may be leaving a good thing behind here in NC. I’ve certainly made that mistake before. In 2008 I abandoned a florid, enchanting relationship for an internship in L.A. I’ve done all sorts of fleeing, trying to geographically reconfigure my life because it seemed cleaner and more permanent than an internal adjustment. Luckily now I have the perspective and wherewithal to recognize that as an unhealthy behavior pattern, and I feel like my motivations this time are more solid, and like I haven’t forsaken anyone or anything with this choice. But the worry persists, and I hope to make good use of my past and falter better this time.

I’m running out of time so I’m going to end this post even though there’s tons more on my mind. Part of my practice needs to be accepting incomplete and even incoherent transmissions from mind to keyboard, I think. Hopefully I will return to this practice and there will be some interesting updates tomorrow!

What will happen tonight?

What will happen this week?

What will happen this summer?

Will I be tricked?

Will I lose something I underappreciated?

Will I gain something I didn’t know I needed?

Will I be able to shed the brittle carapace of prose-style that years of hyper-friendly email writing and dozens of cover letters has caused?

Who knows let’s find out together...!?