There was a point in time I would have finished the essay about Taylor Lorenz I was writing. That time is not now. The time on the clock is 2:45 am. 

But it’s time, instead, to tell you what I would have wrote if I didn’t can the essay. 

Both Taylor and I survived the white supremacist attack in Charlottesville in 2017, her as a journalist and me as a counter-protestor in the crowd where the attack was aimed and perpetrated via Dodge Challenger. I can’t speak for her. I can only speak for myself. The attack in Charlottesville has been used by a number of liberal politicians to win campaigns, but they have miscalculated something. Unite the Right did not happen for most people. To be deeply impacted by it means nothing to most of the people I know. Writing about who gets ownership of the event makes us no better than dogs arguing over who pissed on a wall. 

It only serves to make the following more absurd. The nine years since: I have felt a sense that any moment could result in another of those attacks, that the world is a deep rupture. I have been hospitalized twice. Complications with depression and PTSD have never let me get any solid ground, yet pointing towards the difficulty of living with those makes me feel boring. Everyone who is boring has to spackle the cracks in their history with an easy diagnosable feeling you can make palpable via short form video. I do not want to be boring; surviving a terrorist attack should not make you boring, yet I know on some level I am, because I am bored of myself and the sensation of being alive as a bumbling failure who won’t even finish a bitchy essay about Taylor Lorenz. 

In the end, I am a liar. Only one of us survived, because I am there every day, taking the same anxiety medicineI did on that hot August day I learned there was no point in giving this country a chance. 

American muscle always wins.

SCENE HERD RED

• Destroy All Monsters: not enough monsters. 

• Juletane by Myriam Warner-Vierya is a wonder. A French woman discovers the titular woman’s diary, written carefully in black crayon. The diary is about Juletane marrying into a polygamous relationship under false pretenses, how she reacts. This is an obscure, slim novel, and I don’t want to oversell it to you. What’s most interesting is how it acts as a simulation of reading about the colonized world with a lack of post colonial insight and the devastating conclusion those quite bridgeable gaps can cause. Haunting stuff. I’ve been reading slowly this year. Now that my temp job has ended, I’m hoping to pick back up the slack. 

• Current reads: Fat City by Leonard Gardner and How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev. Fat City is one of those novels they shove in your ass pocket if you say, “I would like to write fiction about people who don’t read my fiction.” Irish, is, of course, one of the classic “critical race” texts and is written in the Ignatieviean polemical style, though its central argument that “whiteness” is a social construct is one of the most useful arguments, especially in America. It won’t surprise me if I don’t have much to say about this one in depth. 

• What the hell do you even say about Jalen Duren? You hope this is a mental blip or a young player facing play-off scheming for the first time; there are indications Jalen Duren’s basketball iq and overall touch could mean he has a Bam Adebayo style development. The problem is this: Cade Cunningham and Ausar Thompson have arrived. Duren was supposed to come with them. Another under-discussed matter: the reason Cade Cunningham is turning over the ball more is because you took away his best weapon. I wouldn’t have brought him to the ball if I thought he’d turn into a pumpkin.

FROM THE TOMBS AND COMING SOON

Apophany is about one year old. I went back to the very beginning for this one, which is a criticism of the over-aestheticized “film” quality. I think I’m supposed to call it Letterboxslop or some obnoxious shit but I would rather hit myself in the face with a hammer than start talking like that. I’m obviously

This month’s Apophany is going to be about it being about a year old. You’ll see it by the end of the month, I’m wrapped up in standing work.