march newsletter

mad at most. i’m coming into the month snapped. my temper is through the roof. my patience is unrest. 

i wake up irritated. tense. too early. in the last few days of february, i woke up at 3 or 4, tossing and turning, doom-scrolling on tiktok. enough was enough. this was no way to live, no way to be. so i spent it watching elvis presley films. there’s nothing like a matinee, to swim in fiction before you step out the door and deal with the real world. this is why i read in the morning. because to deal too quickly with the real world when you wake is admitting that you are more adult than you need to be.

being a kid is so much fun. what i mean by this is it’s a practice in wonder and imagination, both driving forces that drive my work, that drive me to live. 

it’s like when people ask me what i do, i say i write and read books and watch films. but no, they say, “what do you do for work?” and then all the fun ends. because i am not my work. i am not a unit, a number, a pawn in productivity. i am beyond those things.

“what do you do?”

“i read books and watch films. and call myself a writer though i don’t do much of it.” 

how do i say, “i’m most active on my letterboxd, not by the water cooler” ?

how do i say, “i’m not really at home, i’m in a book or a film” ?

how do i say, “i’m sorry i missed your message, this book was just more interesting than your what’s up” ?

perhaps i’m an asshole. and everyone has every right to be mad at me. 

i’m usually quite good at managing my anger. but throughout the month of february, i was a lot more short-tempered. and this disturbed me. this month’s playlist is a track by track progression of how my anger mutated throughout the days. there’s heat and heart, but above all attempts at control, at cooling.

i snapped at a friend. i rarely do this, but when i did, when they called me out on my behavior, i was startled. startled that i let myself be so ugly. i wanted to turn to a mirror, to see it. to see how i had turned into something that i thought i left back in high school. why had this come back? why here? why now?

so, i’m folding back. it’s in the music. you can hear how it presses, compresses, and depresses. my muscles, flicking flexes, motion towards a long sigh, a deep breath. relearning something that should’ve cemented my education in my teens. turning anger into passion. taking breaths before taking action. thinking before moving. let nature speak, measure the minutes, hit clarity and let blood run smooth, cool.

*contrastly, i think I’ve forgotten ways in how to be a kid. to roam free. 

and if i need to lash it out, i’ll do it on the dance floor. i’ll sweat, bleed all that bad blood out. murder on the dance floor. but it’s also this violence that i want to detract from.

ocean vuong has spoken at length in language, its violence, when we think of victory:

“I was never comfortable being male—being a he—because all my life being a man was inextricable from hegemonic masculinity. Everywhere I looked, he-ness was akin to an aggression that felt fraudulent in me—or worse, in the blue collar New England towns I grew up in, self-destructive. Masculinity, or what we have allowed it to be in America, is often realized through violence. Here, we celebrate our boys, who in turn celebrate one another, through the lexicon of conquest:

You killed it, buddy. Knock ‘em dead, big guy. You went into that game guns blazing. You crushed it at the talent show. It was a blow out. No, it was a massacre. My son’s a beast. He totally blew them away. He’s a lady killer. Did you bag her? Yeah, I fucked her brains out. That girl’s a grenade. I’d still bang her. I’d smash it. Let’s spit roast her. She’s the bomb. She’s blowing up. I’m dead serious.

To some extent, these are only metaphors, hyperbolic figures of speech—nothing else. But there are, to my mind, strong roots between these phrases and this country’s violent past. From the Founding Fathers to Manifest Destiny, America’s self-identity was fashioned out of the myth of the self-made revolutionary turned explorer and founder of a new, immaculate world of possible colonization. The avatar of the pioneer, the courageous and stoic seeker, ignores and erases the Native American genocide that made such a persona possible. The American paradox of hegemonic masculinity is also a paradox of identity. Because American life was founded on death, it had to make death a kind of praxis, it had to celebrate it. And because death was considered progress, its metaphors soon became the very measurement of life, of the growth of boys. You fucking killed it.”

sometimes i’m frightened with how much of man, in all its toxic waste, is still so inherent in my dna. i can point fingers and blame, but i am working it all out. breaking it down. 

that’s all this life is. a breaking down.

i’ll move differently. look at how the camera sweeps in i am cuba. how it zooms in, out, from way above, from down below. there is a magnitude in how we see and make movements. 

i want skyscrapers, not the sky, when i look up. i want allegros and punches in my steps. bouldered by batiments, shouldered by surly slogs of sentiments. i’m looking at broad shoulders, things of my past. nostalgic pockets that have stiffened trousers with maturity. la, i’ll think of you. i think i try to make every month the same. i’ll look to didion again. and i’ll look to her again next month. i’ll look at eyes and waistlines. i’ll look at what boldens a room. i’ll look at beams and colors, brightness. bombastic. plates, fresh food. outbursts. in the hitcher, look at the tightrope between evil and innocence. how they need each other to draw blood. i’ll look to dialogue. scripts. poetry. i want to look at words for what they are, before they are narrative. see, i’m holding back before the sucker punch, the breath before the blow. i’m learning how to be a boy again.

love life,

n