The Day The Music Died
Tuesday, July 19th — Park Slope, Brooklyn
I’m broken. Out the front end of me streams an incessant creek of tears and snot, out the rear, every 20 or so minutes, diarrhea. I’m like a dirty rag that can’t stop talking about its ex-boyfriend, being wrung out repeatedly to expel dishwater and fermented thought patterns.
I’m housesitting in Park Slope at the moment. It’s painfully illuminating: life can be so much better when one is not doomed to work from home in Bushwick. Of course, New York City has decided to teach me an invaluable lesson: even here, in the idyllic, tree-lined streets crisscrossing around Prospect Park South, a jackhammer is drilling into a stoop for cosmetic purposes (renovating the decorative iron trellis), preventing me from attaining the peace of five minutes’ silence.
I’ve just written out an email to my ex through tears, while Lana and Billie Eilish trigger me into further despair. I don’t know that I’ll send the email, as it seems like the behavior of a deranged person. Yet isn’t that what I am? Only time will tell just how far I’m willing to go.
I have one refuge at the moment: books. Imogen Binnie’s trans masterpiece Nevada, which clocked me hard and made me realize I have no choice but to write a book about biking (stoned) in my kitten-heeled sandals. Agatha Christie’s murder caper The Man in the Brown Suit. Ottessa Moshfegh’s disgusting fairytale Lapvona. These are the dolls.
The clock has finally struck five. I huff down the final drags of a leftover joint in the ashtray — a roach, as linguistically-savvy stoners would call it. Then I take a Stella Artois from my friend’s fridge and guzzle back half the bottle.
It’s hot. Their air conditioning unit isn’t working very well. An email I’d received earlier that day from the New York Department of Health had advised to be wary of heat-related deaths.
Rather than doing any work that day — besides interview Michelle Visage, who made me cry with her inspirational advice (to not give up) — I spent the day sexting, or, rather, posting suggestive photos of myself online and then pining for attention, constantly checking to see who might have sent a smirking face in response.
I’d decided to go off my depression medications — they weren’t doing anything except killing my boners. The psychiatrist said to stop safely I should take a pill every other day for a week and then every three days the following week. After a few days of the first week had passed I went to Park Slope and forgot to bring my Zoloft, so I decided to just stop there. I began experiencing strange sensations in my head — not headaches, but more like a twanging of a guitar string threaded through my brain. It felt odd, and unnerving, and made me dizzy. I glugged more drinks and tried not to dwell on it too much.
Thursday, July 21st — Park Slope, Brooklyn
On the last day of my retreat to Park Slope (Slope girls do it better!) I realized I’d lost my AirPods. I tore apart my friends’ apartment looking for them, removing and carefully inspecting the landscapes beneath each couch cushion like an archaeologist poking at sand in pursuit of trilobite fossils, but to no avail.
I spent hours searching. Finally I conceded defeat, and decided it might be an interesting thought experiment to exist for a while without music constantly wearing down the delicate little hairs (or whatever the fuck) slowly being flogged to death inside my eardrums. I thought to myself, “I’ll listen to the interesting sounds of the outside world and compile my findings into a new Substack titled ‘The Day The Music Died.’” I became excited by this fabulous idea. On the street, I was startled by how rote the things strangers were saying sounded: a Park Slope thirty-something graphic-designer-type squawked into her cell phone, “No, literally, like, fuck her, she’s so annoying, anyway, yeah, work has been really stressful.” A few hours later, back in Bushwick, I found my AirPods in my pocket and decided that that had been some good scientific fun but that my efforts would be more productively expended analyzing again whether Lana is saying “Pretty when I cry” or “Pretty when you cry” in the song shockingly titled “Pretty When You Cry,” my current favorite track in the world (she says both).
Monday, August 1st — Denver, CO
In fact, that track would play as I cried in real life, while sitting in an R.E.I. parking lot in Denver, Colorado with my mom and little sister Lexi a few weeks later. I was crying about Tom, of course, the man who’d left me. It was all very poetic: my mom patting my shoulder and coaching me on how to inhale and exhale as I sobbed and wondered if I looked pretty when I cried, too.
Denver’s interesting. I oscillated between two personalities over the course of the trip: the boisterous court jester that I tend to inhabit when I’m at peace with my dolls in social settings (shout out to all of my four younger siblings and my mom, we ate that), and the wistful weeping woman conjured if I’m in a position to gaze blankly out a window, or am otherwise triggered by anything that could possibly remind me of Tom (hint: everything).
The Denver airport is where I sit as I type now. I unsuccessfully attempt to seduce a Lacrosse player walking by with my eyes. My luck for eyefucking in Denver is considerably dismal when compared to the string of men (and infants) who ogled me on my way out of LaGuardia a few days prior.
On the way to the airport this morning, I pressed my cheek against the plexiglass of the train window as it chugged out from Denver’s Union Station. I hadn’t yet put my headphones in, hoping to make one last attempt at learning something by soaking in the sonic world surrounding me (also, most music had started to make me nauseous at that point with its repetitive mediocrity.) A crusty old bat with an unappealing orange spray tan began barking at extremely inappropriate decibel levels into her phone to an unfortunate friend of hers dubbed “Girl.” I decided that while hearing the planet around me might be great once in a while, it was hardly a full-time option, and to be approached only with extreme caution.
Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Lilac Wine” came on my shuffle, and immediately my eyes began to well up. Lilacs are my favorite flower. Tom’s favorites are camellias. In our old apartment in Greenpoint there happened to be bushes of each growing next to each other in the garden kept by our first floor neighbor. I thought how perfectly cinematic it would be if the tears began cascading as Jeff Buckley crooned the titular lyric “Lilac wineee…. Is sweet, and heady, like my love.” With a bit of a strained push from my tear ducts (similar to forcing out a stubborn poop) I was able to time the fall of my teardrops with what can only be described as the bass drop of the song.
Of course, there seems little-to-no point in me publishing intimate details from my four-and-a-half years with Tom online. What’s my motive here? At this point I’m just a malnourished arachnid, spinning my own web of narrative blame and guilt that hardly even considers the facts of the situation: ultimately, he did not want to be with me anymore. Why am I even bothering to share this stuff? Is it out of a need to paint myself a pitiable party? More likely I think it’s because this newsletter has become my only possible form of communicating with him since I blocked him on all platforms (self-preservation, or a cry for him to notice?). I don’t believe he still reads this, anyway. What would my publishing patterns be called by an analyst: Desperate? Vain? Incredibly selfish and narcissistic? Maybe so. Or maybe it’s actually extremely awesome of me. The jury is still debating.
I think about the stages of grief: Am I still in denial? Yes. Am I in anger? I’m definitely starting to be. Bargaining… I’d have to have expendable income to do that. Depression I entered long before any of this ever began. And acceptance.. Now that’s a laugh and a half. Would “Dabda” be a nice name for a little girl? Dabda seems like someone who is pretty (in a plain way) and has a decidedly bad personality.
In the airport, I assume my traditional scowl, communicating that I’m not to be spoken to as I stomp purposefully between Colorodan families dawdling in front of the gates. It’s one of the many concepts that deeply resonates with me out of Imogen Binnie’s Nevada: constructing a stony, unwelcoming arrangement of facial features with the purpose of avoiding transphobia or otherwise unwelcome interactions. The score of The Father transports me out of fluorescent lighting and into a movie, where I’m a heroine with a secret, a broken heart, and a greater purpose than trying to smuggle a 12 oz container of shea butter back to Bushwick.
You see, on the way out to Colorado I’d taken a leap of faith and tried to bring a large tub of shea butter through TSA, hoping they just wouldn’t care. It was confiscated. In Denver, I bought a new tub, and thinking optimistically, decided to try the whole ordeal again. I’ve now lost two tubs of shea butter to airport garbage cans. The fact of it makes me physically ill and did cause me to stomp up two respective escalators with extreme vitriol pulsing through my (unsung) prominent arm veins.
Tuesday, August 9th — Southampton, Long Island & Bushwick, Brooklyn
After Denver I was back in New York for a night to see the Bodies, Bodies, Bodies premiere in Fort Greene Park — absolutely loved, give Rachel Sennott a goddamn Oscar nomination! Then I traveled to the Hamptons to stay at a beautiful home rented by my gorgeous friend Natalie’s gorgeous mother Ellie. What can I say — it was heaven to be surrounded by eleven of my closest lesbians. God, what a week around women instead of gay guys can do for the soul!
Now I’m back in Bushwick. Last night I saw Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. I’ve only cried at Toy Story 4 harder than I cried at this. It should win Best Picture. It doesn’t help that the director is someone I had once met through Tom, so I obviously was thinking about him the whole time. Thanks for the trigger.
On the way home from Marcel, I collapsed to my knees in Irving Square Park, wracked with sobs, while the moon bore down on me, threatening to flatten me into a non-binary pancake. If you think I’m exaggerating, honey, good luck passing that third grade you speak of!
I understand if you’ve gotten this far in today’s post you may be thinking: “Hm, this feels a bit like a retread of the last newsletter…” or “I don’t care about this.” I wish I had a sunny conclusion to tie everything nicely together. Being around friends is the closest I can get to that. My friend Tati and I had a really invigorating conversation on my roof the other night where it was revealed to me that the secret to happiness and security and fuckability is to just have fun.
I will surely be having a lot of fun very soon at The Chromatica Ball on Thursday. I bought my tickets when they first went on sale, years ago, for Tom and I. Instead, Thursday night I will be taking my bestie Alec. It will be a full moon — isn’t that absolutely insane? It will mark the end of one chapter of my life and the dawn of another. I will be looking like a broke, aspiring drag queen in head-to-toe Dolls Kill. I don’t expect to return from that concert alive, at least in life’s current form.
In Other News:
A week or so ago, my dad married a woman named Megan (have not met her, nor had he if we want to turn back time by two months) in a surprise wedding on my little sister’s birthday at a Brewers baseball tailgate in the parking lot. Congrats to the happy couple! It’s hard to walk the line of how much to share and how much to keep to myself regarding the facts of the lives of the people I’m connected to — obviously, as this post exemplifies, I’m not above waxing poetic about the intricacies of those I’ve known intimately. But for now, I don’t feel like sharing more details about this particular story is helpful to anyone.
I think Ricky Martin and his adult nephew fucking is hot.
I received a rimjob in Prospect Park the other evening. When we talk about an eatage occurring, it should be noted that this was a serving of a five course Thanksgiving dinner. Those who can understand these words will be seeing heaven (if it exists, which it probably doesn’t).
I interviewed some of the all-time greats: besides the aforementioned Madame Visage, I talked to Amanda Seyfried, Murray Bartlett and Jake Lacy, Connie Britton, Emmy Rossum and the makeup team of Angelyne, Mrs. Deadpan herself: Martha Kelly, and a bunch of other television titans whom have yet to be published. Stay tuned!
Manifesting that I will escape New York to Berlin, Greater Europe, and Los Angeles from late fall through at least spring. I will be needing money as well, if anyone wants to employ me! Any member of the LGBTQIA+ or ally community whom can help make any of that happen should please report to the principal’s office when convenient.
