The death drive, or, a misunderstood lust for life

And if the body was mechanical, what would change about us?

On top of the MetLife building we smoked cigarettes and took pictures with flash which we will never post anywhere. They elucidate my vision, all blurred silhouettes and vague cityscape in the background, scratching some metropolitan itch I’ve had in the back of my mind for as long as I can remember.

Days before, at the show squished between bodies, limbs bumping into anonymous limbs, the smoke from blunts blurring together with fog machine exhaust, I remembered the darkness of the Valencian beach, where the moon shone down like a spotlight, where the ocean was as black as the height of the ceiling I cannot see. Everything ended too soon. But what is there to do about anything?

Because I am a man of my word, because I promised someone beautiful, here is how you successfully drink all day on your day off without losing your spirit: Start with something light first thing in the morning, like a White Claw Surge (8% ABV, very efficient). Go somewhere efficient and classy, like Conwell Coffee in the Financial District, where you can cosplay as someone productive to society. Order an espresso martini or something sufficiently versatile before 11 AM. When you start feeling the energy surging in your veins, take your first Adderall (I recommend at least 10mg). Read, write, ponder, do whatever it takes, but make yourself useful, even to the invisible judge presiding over all of your actions (or is it just me?). If you release your ego enough, you might even channel out something profound, something which begets a few likes from strangers parasocially following along the trainwreck of your life. By noon you should be feeling proper powerful. Take your first kratom pill, legal in America, easily acquired at any random smoke shop. Go on a walk, ask a bystander for a cigarette. Time should have evaporated at this point, and you might check your watch (which you haven’t yet adjusted for daylight savings) and it may be the afternoon. Time for the second kratom pill. For fun, as a little treat, take a pill of ashwaganda and Vitamin B-52 alongside it. Why not? Don’t you deserve to thrive as well? Then you may remember that you have obligations and meetings to attend. Return home, reluctantly, relishing in a short sweet nap on the uptown train. When you arrive at your hovel the opiates should be close to obliterating you, and you may even have a notification on your phone reminding you about overdue electric or student loan bills. Ignore those. This is a critical moment. You should have an extra hard seltzer in your bag; pour it into a coffee mug and drink it liberally during the meeting(s). Your colleagues will think the bags under your eyes indicate a hard-working nature. Accept their compliments with a smile. Head to the home of your most hedonistic friend afterwards after a bird bath, and guilt them into buying pizza, cocaine, and beers for you. Take off your watch. Indulge. And then…

(I can’t divulge all my secrets, can I? Check back in next week for an update, maybe, if you’re so inclined!)

The tunnel of the empty Bryant Park subway station, 7 train closed all weekend, footsteps echoing amidst engraved quotes of Goethe and Joyce — Dublin just a dead memory now, the shivering and the impending distance all I can clearly recall. We can be angels on the earth for each other, yielding lessons and sensations and karmic conclusions. What else is there for us to do? What else is there to say, after everything has ended, once all I can think of to beget to you lives in my head in untranslatable Spanish?

The art fair in my new double breasted jacket, silver tie beneath charcoal wool, wondering: what is the worth of all this when no one will remember it, tomorrow or next year or the next millennia? I could have been wearing rags and my legacy wouldn’t change at all, would it? There are stupid pieces on the walls with stupid prices, ironic art paraded above our heads for the sole purpose of making us feel special and exclusive and intelligent. These too will be forgotten soon. Because these are only ideas, not concepts, and ideas implement the concept, and the artist cannot imagine his art until it is completed, crystallized, and killed.

Today I learned Casanova was a real person, and he started his romantic journey with what looks like molestation now, looking back. I’m a mandated reporter and I waited until the last minute to complete the updated NY state training on what constitutes abuse. It’s 3 AM now and I’m almost done with the final quiz. I can hear the echoing of drunken laughs outside my window. The moon is absent.

What time is it there, where you are? Are you thinking of me? Do you remember how I shivered when you grazed your hands along the back of my neck? Did you feel as I did when you were vulnerable with me, the vast power, the strength you held momentarily over life and death and pleasure? It does not matter what city we convalesce in. What matters is what is unsaid between us, the tension around us, the unrest of the body in conversation with another, the desired, the unearned release from the stasis we were born into.

I am not Casanova reborn but I am something different, newer, greater. Researching his biography, I feel almost vindicated in my long history of wanderlust, poor financial decisions, aesthetic and esoteric inquiry, and trepidation of the heart. Too few of us truly understand and digest that the world is our oyster, meaning it exists to be devoured. Oysters are my favorite food, did you know?, if I love you we’ve gotten them together, and as the Count of Barcelona that I am, I love to describe them as going to the beach in your mouth.

I’ve given birth to a new project and I didn’t know I was almost done with it. Now it is here, not ready just yet, but I’m empty all the same. Last night I lay awake on a bosom and wondered: who am I now? I’ve changed, I’m a newer version of myself now, and I don’t quite recognize myself yet.

I can’t tell you what my book is about because I can’t describe or explain to you the specific color of my blood before it leaves my veins. The color just may belong to a wavelength our eyes aren’t able to comprehend.

I’ve known for a while now that I won’t find myself outside. Yet I keep immersing into the night all the same. I still remember everyone I’ve ever been, but they haven’t met me yet.

I say with impunity and not an ounce of shame within me: the shadow over my eyes can create diamonds.

I did not expect to live this long. For a very long time I was unsatisfied with the life I was born into. And no one taught me how to desire: in fact it was the first thing I learned, even before how to breathe.

It’s like we have this obligation to be who everyone else thinks we have to be: but there are only invisible bonds keeping us tied to the vessel we were born in. If we can’t even decide to destroy who we have built ourselves to be, how could we ever imagine we could destroy and reconstruct the world we occupy?

Tears and the great vast ocean taste the same. Everything is beautiful, because we are doomed.

And if the body was mechanical, what would change about us? Androids, like God, want most what they can’t have: to be touched. There’s nowhere to go that desire won’t follow. We would always be cold, lacking in lushness, imperfect because we’d be so well-designed there’d be no flaws to remember: like the shortness of my torso, the slight asymmetry of your eyes, the synergy between badly chewed nails and the bumps of my spine protruding through my back, the redness around the bone in the bunion of a foot, the appearance of bags beneath eyes when the memory of you keeps me up at night.

I told a client that their drive for death is really a misunderstood desire for a better life. I was exercising my powers, saying something into the world that traveled backwards in time and arrived on my doorstep when I most needed to hear it, years and years ago now. And in the future I will be remembered when this client is smiling into the wind, their skin sparkling under the sun, and they may have forgotten my face and my name, but the seed I planted grow into a great maple which towers over them, providing a little bit of shade in the form of leaves making shadows interlaced over their body.

From my new book, my latest project, my second or third little bastard:

You can pour all your being into another and the moon can change and soon you will be alone again under another sky. “The moonlight glimpsed in your beautiful memory is a gift from me,” says the sun, whom you turn away from, as you couldn’t bear to look your son in the eyes when you took his life away. Then, of course, in the distant future, after us, when you have learned finally how to live, when you have multiplied yourself, and this era of despair is as far behind you as your shadow, which you cannot escape yet. Only after, when the light was gone from them. “I giveth and so again I may taketh,” my mother said, or was that God, or is there any difference? How minuscule the difference between “yours” and “ours”. How the royal “we” is actually the implicit communal wholeness we should all aspire to. How dastardly, the world around us has been built around exclusion and hierarchy; and yes, how vivid (y)our dreams of revolution, alterity, and utopia! The priests called us heretical, foolish. The scholars would have called us idealistic. The doctors diagnose and peddle their pills and potions to us. Needlessly. They do not listen. They gambled. They judged. They asked me to speak and ask why I speak so much once I do. All for diagenesis. All because we imagine a world in which all are allowed and encouraged to be their best fullest self simply on merit of their being born. Who among us asked to exist? Which of us have lobbied with the gods to be born? None, not now and not ever. And yet we are punished for having stolen away our breath and our bodies from the atmosphere of dust. For what end? To whose profit?