WE'RE SO BACK
I was fucking locked out bro...
Helloooo everyone! Did ya miss me?
Yes I meant to take a break, but that break was extended by the fact that S*bstack’s backend is completely inaccessible AND up until very recently, getting in contact with a human being for help was not possible…yikes!
To update you on life happenings I would say that not much has changed. I am still working on the thing that I will likely work on my entire life.
I am working to migrate this container to another platform, likely Wordpress. I’m just tired of people calling PH a S*bstack and not a blog (I’m not mad at you!)
Because mother knows you need to be fed, here’s an excerpt from an essay I am writing called
On NYC and Cultural Illness:
1. ON DISCOMFORT
It is 12:11 AM on a Tuesday and I am high and I am so pissed off about the state of things. I cannot believe we are punishing people for being excellent. I cannot believe to be “respected” and liked is to have your aim set on the bottom, selling whoever else you can on your bullshit. What do you do?
New York City is a fucking cesspool, and no, not in the Republican way. It is the pit of the pits. And there’s definitely an appeal to that, but for how long? When I understood it’s pits, I understood them as geographical solace for a multi-marginalized person, and I think that was a delusion. I know at least some New York City history, and this is deeply colonized and segregated space. In the Obama years, it was comparatively, to then and now, very progressive, as people might expect. There are people like me who believe New York is a land all its own, unaffected by the rest of the country. What the Trump years have taught me is that New York is a direct reflection of national attitudes; it is the testing ground for any President. I thought of the city as a standalone place, as if Manhattan has been a philosophical and therefore material island, as if that’s why there is water surrounding it. When I read (or scroll) (or walk around), I am reminded of the housing discrimination and redlining, the encampment sweeps, the deterioration of NYCHA buildings, the deterioration of all the buildings, the deterioration of of the subway, the expense of transportation, the expense of housing, the expense of food, the competition for jobs, the competition for funding, the competition for attention, the competition for good drugs, the competition for social services, the search for cigarettes less than $20 a pack, the hunt for food that won’t turn your stomach into knots, that expense, the Doomsday attitude and general malaise, the prevalence of all illness, and I’d carry on but holy fuck. It wouldn’t hurt and it wouldn’t be a lie to say that this place is squeezing out all of what makes it the Best City on Earth (TM). I’m not sure what will be left in ten years. The Lower East Side, all of North Brooklyn, Harlem: they’ve all been swallowed up. The machine demands blood. It’s likely we will never have what we once did, but could we at least build something more beautiful?
Pits. They swallow us and they have a warmth but should we discriminate warmths even if we need the warmth of some thing so badly? Do we die picky?
I recently blocked and unfollowed about 600 people, and now I am considering deactivating Instagram specifically completely because, lately, it has been turned against me as a tool used to siphon my work, whereabouts, and habits. When I theorize about this, because it keeps me up at night, I think that some people would rather kill someone and wear their skin as a suit rather than do the internal work it would take to change into someone they might actually enjoy being. What kind of sociocultural sickness is that?
This city has the greatest concentration of influencers out of any city in the world. There are people filming something for their platforms everywhere in this city. Los Angeles built the visual mirage of film and New York is now housing the modern visual mirage of scrollable content.
All the glamor of the Hollywood film era is lost in the shine of a tiny black mirror, perpetually held up to our phases for lengths that would put Narcissus to shame. It’s hard to romanticize anything anymore and I am starting to think that is the point.
New York City is one of the world’s largest surveillance states, and it’s not only the state that surveils. I can’t go a day outside without someone following me, particularly if I walk down Tompkins, the street I live on. It’s usually cisgender black men and cisgender white women. I have had to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and let people pass me, as I could feel their eyes on me, and I want them to know I have eyes on the back of my head, and that they’re going to hell. I have had to dip into book stores to throw off someone who I let pass me and began passive-aggressively walking slower, his Poodle unbeknownst to the fact it’s owned by an asshole. I can’t go a day with my blind open, because someone will see that as an invitation to stare at me from across the street to watch me quite literally nothing. It can drive a person insane.
I don’t care to investigate what that leads a person to follow around another person as opposed to going about their day, but I do think it is mental illness. I don’t know what there is to gain, and I don’t think that’s what this is about. I think it’s about the desperation for power in a time where the Land of Opportunity is not following through on its promise.
I don’t know how long it’s been so soulless here, because I think it happened before I was born. I know the destruction of New York City’s red light district to be the beginning of a major end. The end to the inventive, making, and working spirit that made this place what it was. Another death has happened with the fare evasion crackdowns of the 2020s. Fare evasion is an invisible keeping people in the city connected, making it easier to collaborate or see family, things that can’t help but enrich someone’s life.
That’s not the purpose New York serves anymore.
I’m gonna be honest with y’all: writing in NYC is basically impossible because I am constantly dealing with so much stimuli and stress that I cannpt think. This place is giving me white hairs. So I’m gonna move on, but I’ll wait to tell you where we’re going next ;)
And OBVIOUSLY more to come about ScreamU…
Thanks for your patience loves!
-J