This starts out about one thing, and then becomes about some other things, but ultimately is all the same business. 

Today Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tragic sudden death from an apparent heroin overdose has been all over my social media feeds, vastly overwhelming the Superbowl (or Puppy Bowl)-related posts, or the usual buzz of “come see my show!” and “my friends are/this food is really phenomenal.” Instead, my friends–many, many of them actors and directors–are posting clips from his films, photos of him, even fond memories of meeting or knowing him. He was one of the most universally admired actors of our time. I have by no means seen his entire body of work (I kept saying I would wait until I finally read In Cold Blood before watching Capote), but have always greatly respected him. Synecdoche, New York is one of the best movies I have ever seen. I thought about what to post, what to say. I kept scrolling through my feed.

And there, nestled amid the PSH posts, and the sports talk, and the usual business, were a couple of posts from members of my family. Three years ago in early February, my cousin Denise died suddenly. We saw each other rarely and were not close; she lived in Alabama, and was about fourteen years my senior. But I remember vividly the last time I saw her, a family gathering down South a few years ago. She was a kind woman. A nurse. Two young children. 

I don’t recall the medical details, just the mental image that flooded me as I cried into the telephone: a woman alone in a hospital bathroom, falling to the ground. 

I didn’t really know her, barely at all, not enough for the phrase “missing her” to make any sense. But I see the words written by her younger child, now, I think, in the seventh grade, and weep. I think my own strange thoughts:

Sometimes when I’m lying in bed with you and you’re asleep, I stare at your body, waiting for the next slow breath of deep sleeping, and when it comes I realize I’ve been holding mine, heart racing, because any one of us could die at any second, but if it was you, if it was you I think every bone in my body would break at once, giant carrion birds tearing through my mouth for weeping. Every screen would go dark, a last twitch of static spelling out your name. The sun, burning out and dropping, like a peach pit in the snow. 

my reticence, little witch boy, my backing up and off. your tiny body made of collarbones and aching. my disappear and reappear. it’s for you, because I know I’m stronger in your head.

to wet my lips with the tongue of the woman you imagine me to be is to be a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing. it calms my nerves to make you nervous. five strides into a crowded room, my hand your neck the wall. 

if I keep you begging and guessing and at arm’s length, you will not know how afraid I am, how uncertain, how lazy and distracted. you will not know how much I hate myself for my lack of follow-through. yes, I’m telling you, but: actions, words. 

instead: to build some little corner of the world inside your body where I am utterly in control, where my hand holds the needle and the hand of time. where I can point at something and say yes, this is good, or no, that is not, and the way you lower your eyes when you look at me bears more weight than all the thousands of things I am always failing to do. 

open up your skin and show me what’s inside. I, too, am always bleeding, often and everywhere and improperly cleaned, even if I’m being figurative. I want to taste someone else like pennies and tensed limbs. Some strange climate where these parts of me rise to the top, slough off the others, grow over me with a crown of bones. 

found in Drafts, unsure if ever posted or completed:

I see a man who looks like you from the back and the bus I’m standing in explodes.

Great swathes of metal are unfurling, are throwing themselves down Lake Shore Drive and sparking into nothing. The dead bodies of strangers pile all around me.

All the water in the air vanishes at once, and the breeze is on my hands on the Natchez Trace.

I no longer know birthdays; aside from my immediate family, a few somehow-still-remembered childhood friends, my most recent exes, that’s the type of information I glean from my machines. I do not mind this. I do not think it signifies some end of sympathy, some un-fuck-giving of friendship. It’s more like the way I sometimes rely on autocorrect while typing–I have the ballpark information, and these funny little ticking beasts make me more precise. This does, however, occasionally lead to surprises.

I for some reason bother to click “and 1 other,” to know who else is turning something, who else is going to a fancy dinner or ignoring a barrage of notifications, who else is going to get way too drunk or get some jewelry. It’s you. You won’t be doing any of that. Not ever, no, not again. I don’t think I ever saw you on your birthday; our friendship was for summers, and for long-distance calls. 

You’re in the ground, or in some scattered ashes, I was no longer close enough to know. You are over, over, ended. But your voice is still playing through my speakers, like it always has. 

I suppose this is a reason to write music. So that even in the face of a sudden drop dead, even when the pieces of us that belong to you get pulled through our chests and plunged into the dirt, into the late-night waters of the Long Island Sound, even when I will never, ever see you again, not to laugh at our matching tattoos or smoke cigarettes in the driveway of my mother’s house or trespass in New York City private parks, even when it will never stop hurting to know that I should have gotten on that fucking plane to Texas like I said I would, even when the closest I will ever get again to holding you is your beautiful shaking girlfriend crying in my arms, even when my shit memory is fading and fading, I will always have your voice. We will always have the sound of you to hold us. 

Fucking hell, Jay. I miss you so fucking much.

I don’t even know how old you would be today. I guess I could do the math. Thirty-six. 

There we are, all those years ago, somewhere floating in time. And even when my body joins the pile, every grain of sand we stepped on will remember. 

Jason Rosenthal, I will miss you always. Thank you for everything.

—

If you want to hear the sounds I’m hearing, here are links for streaming: 

On the Might of Princes - Where You Are And Where You Want To Be (2002)

On the Might of Princes - The Making of a Conversation (1999)

On the Might of Princes - Sirens (2003)

dream:

there is a team of us, we are in a compound in the woods, a scientific research station. a group of us had just arrived, traveling a long way from some city, to join the researchers who had been there for some time. perhaps too long. 

stretches of plexiglass, the light through the trees. rows of potted plans inside, with small hand-written labels. we were all introduced, a strange tension running through the room, but he and I were laughing about something, excited to learn some strange new thing from these people who’d been working on growing living tissue that was somewhere between plant and animal. the how of it was murky. 

some argument occurred between the two teams, and then resolved, at which point the leader of the older team, a tall man with a long beard, shoved open one of the plexiglass doors, only for a moment. members of his team instantly panicked. “Vapors will get in!” they were yelling. Our group was confused; the door opened to the outdoor path around the building, where we had walked up on our approach. We had undergone no sterilizing precautions, and had no reason to think the air we had been breathing outside was hazardous. 

somehow, everything became very dangerous and moved very fast. they had been using alien tissue to grow creatures far more ambitious than we had known, and as they were exposed to something from outside, long stretches of vine, hefty spikes of aloe, blooming flowers, they started writhing, moving violently toward us. vines like powerful snakes, and bulbs like blades, driving at our bodies. there was only one snarl, and it attacked us. the thing, or things, pierced through his body like an arrow, low on his chest. I killed it, or he did, we somehow subdued the thing, pulled it into pieces with our hands. My initial thought, and probably his, was that he would die, that one small blade gone straight through. The look on his face. All the things I wanted to say were flowery, were beautiful sentiments that would not help him, so instead I called out instructions to the others, medical equipment, the removal of the beast, calling for outside help, did we have surgical equipment. I had my hands pressed against him to hold the blood in his body, and in that moment of panic, he looked at me and grinned. We stood there, bodies pressed together motionless in a flurry of activity, and grinned at each other like fools. How strange and exciting the world is, how lucky we are to see it and for someone else to get the joke. Then we both knew, with utter certainty, that he would be fine. 

Trying to write a grant proposal while in the throes of stupid, debilitating depression. 

Discuss your artistic goals and plans for the next three to five years. What kind of work do you hope to do? Note any changes in your creative direction and the reasons for these changes. Maximum 2,000 characters.

This feels a little bit like a joke. 

Here, yes, now, when you are feeling your least competent, your least being-of-worth, when your head aches and your cunt bleeds and your thoughts cloud, when all you are becomes one maw of selfish lazy wanting, slick with the tempting sickly sweet of self-loathing, self-pity glinting green in the hot dark– push words through that diseased wall of meat into the world. State clearly your intent. Mark out each logical step of progress on the way to all the things you knew so certainly you wanted. 

This, of course, is where this bout of terror comes from. Being forced to face my muddled pits of desire, to take the scattered bones and read them clear. To say, yes, I know what I want, and why it matters, and to be sure I will not fail because I believe that I can overcome my fear, and my sloth, and my constant distraction, because I believe that I can win more times than I do not in the fight against this sinking, this sabotaging melt into the grime. 

I think a lot about a scene in a goddamn 1982 fantasy action movie, The Beastmaster, that I haven’t even seen in years, but where he’s in some quicksand or a tar pit or something, he’s going to sink in and die, but his tiny little ferret friends somehow save him, he makes it out. Sometimes it feels like that, except I’m the Beastmaster and the ferrets, and also the quicksand, and the whole strange primeval landscape, the trees moving quietly in the wind.

I reach my fingers into my eyes and pull out long, thick ropes of time. 

I tuck my nails under my collarbone and yank. The room fills up with steam.

I want to forget my laziness and fear. I want to crush my crumbling thoughts into a diamond. I want to be a perfect star. I want to burn the sky. 

My lungs balloon with laughter, harsh, the scent of stale air. 

The cruel truths of cruel men ring out in the stillness. 

What, then, girl, do you do? Give us the word of your inaction, bleed that ambition to the floor, your big talk and your little body crumpling in broken metal and wasted time. 

The fear of death, of the running out of time, could not engulf the fear of failure that fallowed all the crops.

But then, here, this little pricking change of day and day. 

I could grow a woman for this body, build her out of the wreckage of all my former selves. I could make you proud. I could make me. 

I will let these trivialities propel me, if only to keep swimming through the dark. I want to be the kind of girl you think I am. (I kind of think I am to be the girl you want.)

I will sharpen my machete. I will put on my mascara. I will cut down the field of terrors that spreads itself before me. You will see my face on billboards, fear oozing out my mouth, bent and desiccated. You will hear my voice in the boiling seas. A thousand little girls will weep, for we are holding hands. Rose petals will burst from the car stereos of small-town tyrants, and I swear to god even if just for one night we will sleep well. 

Oh, help, this heart has stretched to let the world in, and your hand is at the hilt. 

ghostmodernism:

from making Inter. 

hey hey check it out, this video I made, it’s sort of dumb, but features me being a total creep wearing something I made.

ghostmodernism:

sometimes you do a shitty job of setting up your sequence and export settings, and instead of the video you made, you get this, which is probably just as pleasing as the video you made.

lololol look i “made” some glitch art