Heat your macaroni, it's time for Notes From Friends.

This Is Not a Mosh Pit — Anonymous

My manner with strangers is typically mild, unassuming, polite.

I’ll graciously surrender the middle armrest on domestic flights. If you jostle me in passing, I’ll apologize. I’ve been known to offer to squeeze one more person into a tight elevator.

But I become a totally different person at concerts. At concerts, I grow some elbows. And I’m not afraid to use them.

I don’t know whether it’s the limited floor space, the musically heightened emotions, the sting of an overpriced ticket… If you shuffle up to my space and start dance-bumping on me, encroaching on the window I’ve diligently carved out between two guys way too tall to be in front - you’ll feel it in the ribs.

I love this version of myself. I’m powerful, formidable. I will not be stepped on. My elbows show no mercy.

Don’t get all worked up - no one has been seriously injured and they were dance-bumping on me, remember?

Anyway, I’m working on other, less aggressive channels for my repressed belligerence. My therapist says I should be more assertive and open to confrontation, but I’m pretty sure she means in life, not in general admission.

For now, though, I’m grateful for this mode of expression. This one goes out to my elbows - for protecting this little square foot of space, for making me bold.

Practice — Tom

To ask “how do you keep the nagging intrusive thoughts, which are brought about by a core of intuitive morality which I believe inhabits all humankind, from producing a panicked insomnia?” does not roll off the tongue quite as well as “how do you sleep at night?” And what’s more, to answer requires an awareness of practice that would undermine the goal itself. From the POV of an outside observer, however, the practice that Maggie regularly employs requires rolling over onto her stomach, lying impatiently for only about 15 seconds or so, then propping herself up on her elbows and looking straight at the wall, eyes adjusting to the darkness. And now we have to leave the POV of an outside observer, and pretend such a thing exists as an inside observer, privy to patterns of thought, the hops/skips/jumps of reasoning and emotion (we also should try to leave religion and concepts of the omniscient Creator out of this inside observer concept, unless we want to undergo some morality nagging in His observations).

Maggie, 45, among the best at what she does for a living, a job which goes strategically unnamed. She has a favorite song, and it is not always in the front of her mind in these moments, but is worth mentioning in this case. It’s a song by Aimee Mann, and when Maggie listens to it she feels a kind of kinship with Aimee, imagines that they would get along. The feeling when a song seems to understand you so well that you think, I could have written this but for lack of musical talent, writing talent, etc. It feels as though the song has empathized with you rather than the other way around.

When Maggie is propped on her elbows, her mind does not go to standard moral talismans. There are no crying children, no beggars disappointed by indifference, no refugees, no victims of abuse—hmm— Maybe her mind goes to “victims of abuse” in quotes, but she turns the phrase over in her palm, feeling around its sides, and asks should the quotes stay? The quotes must stay. They must stay if we are to retain our “cultural sanity” (the quotes here around “cultural sanity” being an editorial choice not on the part of Maggie, but rather our inside observer). The odd thing here is that she is not arguing with herself now, but with Aimee. A year ago, Aimee Mann publicly spoke out against the man for whom Maggie works (or, more accurately, a man of a similar circumstance, cultural niche), and Maggie felt this required her address. She is honest and self-critical in these imagined arguments, and graciously acknowledges when Aimee makes valid points. Still, Maggie wins the argument every time, wakes in the morning and laughs at the brief insomnia. She goes to her unnamed job, and does it well; in the face of such victories, all external arguments are trivial, and to even engage them—

But still, almost every night, Maggie lies in bed, finds herself turning over, propping herself up. And the argument materializes again, and Aimee is again indignant, with no recollection of prior defeats.

And even still, this is false. In reality Maggie sleeps easily, the original question is all bluster and false pretense. She is concerned with the day to day, the things she is good at, the little stressors, the weekly challenges that motivate her. She loves that Aimee Mann song, but feels no compulsion to argue with celebrity phantoms. When she’s pitched up on her elbows, who knows what she’s thinking? Not us. The inside observer has been invented, remember, as a little comfort.

Noventa De Gris — D’Quiche

In the belly — Aaron

In the belly of your back

I rest my elbows

Knuckles tucked

Spine alive

Movements small

You say things I want to hear

Unaloud

But I'll see you in the morning

And that will be enough

C-minus — WK

“Napoleon was all elbows on the dance floor.”

“Elba.”

“Napoleon was all Elba on the dance floor?”

“He was exiled.”

“For dancing?”

“Among other things.”

“Napoleon taught the world to dance in the Russian winter.”

“No, start again.”

“Napoleon was begging to be exiled. He elbowed his way across the disco hall and started giving dance lessons to the Christian kids.”

“No, that’s not what he did.”

“—he started giving a speech about regret and the passage of time, and aging and the tragedy of all the lives he had not lived.”

“You’ve got all the details wrong, that’s a given. But in the bare essence, yes, that was Napoleon, through and through.”

There are no bad ideas when you’re brainstorming. It’s not a bad idea to do a modern retelling of the Napoleonic wars through the lens of malapropism and Footloose. It’s not. I told my history teacher it’s not, but he wouldn’t believe me. I got a C-minus on the French history project, largely out of pity.

Olecranal Triptych by weenus villiams