THE COMPOSER

11:10AM The cab drops me off at the dead-end of Chick Hearn Ct. and Georgia St.

11:11: I walk semiaround the Crypto.Com arena, where there will be a Los Angeles Kings game, to the Los Angeles Convention Center main entrance. It’s cloudy, but the light is hard, I say to myself, channeling Josh’s description of his conference back then.

11:22: I see a man holding up a sign with a laminated QR code. I do not partake in his services. Conference-goers begin fucking with my proprioception. I see the tote bags on a table. Most of the guys (not just the white guys) look like this:

No, not just the white guys.

11:24: I’m not sure if this guy is also on the line. Finally, I ask him, and he looks up from his phone and says, “I’m not, actually, and you keep getting in my way.” He looks European so I don’t punch him. I am told to go to the Help Desk.

11:25: I am asked if I have an account. I say, “I probably do. Check by my email?" They say, “Sometimes people have three emails,” and I think to myself, That’s true. I do have three emails. Actually, I have five. I give them my name. It turns out they have the right email but my incorrect address, which I won’t correct them on because why would I do that? It’s not necessary. Their hoodie says FREMONT FIRE. I am told, “We are cashless.”

11:31: I have finished paying my $25, and I look behind me. The line that didn’t exist now has 30 people on it. I feel lucky and satisfied: I have gamed the system, and it cost me $25, which is the same it’ll cost everyone else, but I earned back time, the second thing capitalism steals from you.

11:31: I look at my lanyard and badge, Northwestern Purple.

11:31: I miss my son. I wonder if my father misses me.

11:31: Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky” earlier this morning, and later a book called Why Solange Matters at Skylight annex. I heard it at the Blue Bottle coffee in the Bradbury Building, earlier this morning, across the street from Central Market. Drinking coffee and thinking about Ari’s obsession with Celsius. Thought of texting him last night smoking a cigarette outside the hotel. Had to get stoned to recover from all that family, all that society. Had to get stoned, draw back inward but to a different inward self. A woman knows when a man is stoned and she knows when he’s masturbated and she knows when he’s taken a little blue pill and she knows when he’s been looking at a hard-on made of snow.

11:32: I look closer at my lanyard and badge on the escalator to room 501, where I’m meeting the novelist David Ewald, who is attending a panel on hybrid memoirs. We went to grad school MFA (free ride) together which was like, “being in a war,” we used to say, and I think about how Avi said, who is in an actual war in the Middle East, “people in Brooklyn are always ‘in a war’.”

11:32: Maybe it’s called Selling The Hybrid Memoir. Often, at business conferences, panel titles have Selling The before the product name. I remember people are here, at AWP, desperately trying to find publishers for their books. I am just here for the experience. Trying to find a publisher is the least of my authorial problems.

11:33: We saw one of those Selling Sunset real estate annexes in Newport Beach, which reminded me of the Hamptons. Expensive women, man. Like the women on Instagram reels, but in person. Ari, who just renovated a +million dollar house in Brentwood, mentioned all the people who burned down in the L.A. fires are saying “fuck it” and moving to the OC. Less homeless people, too, so that’s good. Politics are kinda whack. Feel like this is always and forever an L.A. tension for the mobile class. “Here we are, this is fucking amazing, but where else can we go?”

11:33: I look at my lanyard again, and it says Saturday-Only-Stuart-Ross. I make the joke to myself that would’ve been my Indigenous name, Saturday-Only-Stuart-Ross, and hope I can make that joke to someone else later on.

11:34: Time moves slow at conferences. I think of that BADBADNOTGOOD song with the same title, which I’ve been humming the last few days when I was down in OC with the fam. I miss my wife. I miss my son. Time moves slow. I think of Miller’s Planet from Interstellar, and if that’s the “Miller” the Colombian president was talking about in his tweet to Trump, and how pissed Coop gets at Anne Hathaway for fucking up the future.

11:37: It takes me about three minutes to find Selling The Hybrid Memoir. The room seems large with like 60 people in it. A panelist says, “Sometimes two, sometimes three sensitivity readers.” I am in the right place. I look for David Ewald’s head, which is balding. I think of The White Lotus jokes about bald white men and how I would love to take Michelle Monaghan to a nice dinner. I see her face in Source Code, that movie with Jake G. on the Metra, and how she kind of has freckles like Ari’s middle kid. Who is so blessed in life, who has so much, out there in the beautiful house in Brentwood, where this Montana Street is not the same as that Montana Street. I am so happy for them.

11:39: About to give up on finding David’s head, I see it, and it’s only in the row in front of me. I reach the row and he scoots over. I think to myself, There are two kinds of friends: those who scoot over, and those who push their knees up and make you smush in. That’s probably the only idea I’ll have today.

11:49: This panel is a bit boring. Or I feel like I have heard these people before. I feel like I am superior. I think back to being in my 20s when, like Big Sean, I felt like I deserved it. Man, I listened to Big Sean’s “Deserve It” 5,000 times at least in 2015. “I still feel like I deserve it,” I often sing to myself. This is a consequence of being a white male, but it’s also a consequence of being anyone, especially if you’re nobody.

11:50: I start texting Josh, telling him, “I must be at AWP, I just heard someone say, sensitivity reader.” He texted earlier and asked me how it was going. At the time, I was eating a Mexican breakfast, in the Central Market, before heading over to the Blue Bottle coffee, and I was humming to myself “Cranes in the Sky,” which I’d heard for real only a few minutes later in the Bradbury Building, which I debated writing down on my “coincidences” list (jury still out). I think the food was called “Huevos a la Mexicana,” because that sounds like something you’d get in L.A., and I was hoping it would get me to take a shit, which I haven’t done since I arrived at John Wayne airport on Wednesday.

11:52: I tell Josh that it’s, “going really well.” So far I’ve seen a lot of “stooped people with lanyards,” semi-stealing a joke David Ewald made the night before at the Taiwanese place, delicious, with Elizabeth and Bart. I first heard “Deserve It” at AWP in D.C. in ~2015 when Brenna left early, sick, and I flirted superhard with a Latina English department secretary at the bar till closing, about how we feel like we still deserve it. We were both outsiders, that was the mythology we built up, me this diddling amateur with a useless yet relevant degree ruined by drugs and women, who never made it, with no published books at that time, her an admin to some fancy Deleuzebags at some leafy college, always getting talked down to, reading Clarice Lispector in the bathroom stalls. But we still felt like we deserved it, and we bonded over that.

11:57: One of the women on the panel who wrote a nonfiction memoir says, “I don’t read nonfiction.” Another woman, who speaks eloquently, and whose next book is out on Basic Books, tells an emotional story about rape kits revolving around a routine or non-routine gyno visit, I didn’t catch the context. She keeps interjecting with, “I know, it’s disgusting, it’s disgusting,” because the crowd is tsk-tsking the monstrous inhumanity and rapacious biopolitical terrorism of the patriarchy, which is getting worse and worse every minute, and I’m thinking about, probably forever now, how at the Maggiano's in Costa Mesa Thursday night for DeeDee’s 80th birthday and Aunt Shelia’s 90th, we were talking about the etymology of the word disgusting, aka, ~against the gust.

11:57: At Maggiano’s Italian Eatery, partially named for Abbe’s dad, btw, rip, they didn’t charge for the glasses of wine Marva knocked over. “Marva has always been a klutz,” Betsy said. I shook the hands of people twice my age who can’t really hear. I hugged them. They heard the hugs. We did math with the kids. We met a 13-year-old boyfriend and I felt like my life was complete. We did Vedic math on seven fingers. We gave each other back massages. I said to my 9-year-old nephew, “Fortnite sounds awesome, buddy, glad you like it.” The cake was from Costo, the Dodgers won the home opener against the Tigers. Trying to shit in a bathroom that smelt of Bushwick rat poison, I asked ChatGPT to tell me jokes. Our balloons got stuck in a high tree and the Nordstrom was closing its shutters as we drove off, back to pueblo 7 of the Residence Inn. In Seinfeld’s voice I’m now thinking to myself, On vacation, you’re always “doing well.” You’re always finishing a meal and saying to your family, “You did really well.” In Room 501, which is getting colder, the remote panelist says really smart stuff about hybrid memoirs, but the Zoom volume is bad, although it’s also the perfect volume.

I miss my son. I wonder if he misses me.

12:01: When the mic gets moved around the room for questions, there’s the worst feedback. Just terrible. Everyone suffers. You can’t even begin to explain how terrible it is. I can’t wait to read Bodies of Sound, an anthology from Silver Press offering a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening from over 50 contributors, which I picked up at the MoCA bookstore, because you don’t see books like that in Chicago unless you get lucky or have cooler friends than I do. I say to David Ewald, “That horrible feedback? That was the ghost of Joan Didion. It’s revenge on the woman who writes nonfiction but doesn’t read nonfiction. Because that bitch doesn’t read we all must suffer.”

12:05: Josh sends me a substack about how The Book is Finished. No doubt. I click it, see the avatar, read the first two paragraphs, and read the last paragraph. I tell him the dude’s right. All nonfiction books are just articles. How many podcasts do Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have to do until we can burn all the copies of their book? What if Klein-Thompson just dropped that shit on the world and never told anybody? And I think of Ambrose Bierce’s definition of novel: “a short story, padded,” but I don’t text that, I text something, thinking of Interstellar, that the book is still the most mysterious technology. In fact, AI is just an inflation metaphor for books. It will never catch up to a shelf of books just sitting there. It’s not even close. If books were a decade of progress, books would be the 1960s. Impossible to understand. From Help! to Abbey Road? From My Favorite Things to A Love Supreme to Live in Japan? The Jasper Johns flag of ‘67 vs: American network television signing off with “God Bless America” in 1962 while Don Draper throws up in his 51^st State Club? Books are like those years. Books are a shelf of books when they fall together. I don’t know if the prophet really said ~Jews are asses filled with books—but maybe that’s why I can’t take a shit. Books contain knowledge. But they also contain nothing. How is that possible? “You know what I mean?” I text Josh. He replies, “Wow, must be a great panel.”

Like, this is a book. But what the fuck is it?

12:08: As Selling the Hybrid Memoir comes to a fitting close, and participants rush to the lectern like Earl Sweatshirt’s up there signing Dodgers caps, we look in our phones for the next batch of panels. Jewish and Muslim Poets looks good, as does a Black-centered thing on collectives. I am intrigued by the collectives because the English is “wrong” and I like it when the English is “wrong” because I be—what I white mean is I’m alive, and I exist—a dialogic motherfucker. But before we go to Jews and Muslims, because that’s probably where we’ll all end up one of these days, I want a coffee.

12:09: On the escalator down I’m humming lines from “Deserve It” which I’ve been doing all morning. I don’t play no games with hoes I play Nintendo DS, n-word-that-ends-with-an-a, even though I don’t know what Nintendo DS is.

12:09: 22% of the women at AWP are the most beautiful girls from your Modern Poetics seminar back in college. I am thinking of the Latina Secretary and how she played “Deserve It” for me in front of the Washington Monument at dawn and we were screaming, “Baggage claim! LAX! Thinking I’m deserving this shit!” and I am thinking about how all of these brunettes are petals on a wet, black bough.

The faces pound.

12:12: On the coffee line, which is long, David and I are talking about masterpieces. We’re talking about the masterpieces we’ve read, haven’t read, want to go back to, or are lost to us forever. David is reading Finnegans Wake. I’m thinking about Markson’s kvetching about the apostrophes. David explains the conceit of the novel for probably the 10th time in my life I’ve heard it, but I forget it each time. I’d rather play Fortnite than read Finnegans Wake, until nobody noticed my new aesthetic. I mention Rob Musil’s The Man w/o Qualities as “something I want to return to one day,” and remember reading it in 2002 in the lonely sun on the St. John’s campus during that The Catholic Novel symposium we attended, and I think of Matthew Davis saying in that Hobart interview he didn’t write the Catholic novel, which I thought was a semicool thing to say, as a Jewish Catholic who still hasn’t been able, as of yet, to do it, even though I should’ve just been a priest like all the other Jewish Catholic doomers.

12:17: “Espresso for Stuart,” I hear, and I hear it as “Stewart,” which is weird, because they didn’t ask my name when I paid, and I’m kind of offended they didn’t use my indigenous name, “Espresso for Saturday-Only-Stuart-Ross.”

12:19: I also bought a bag of nuts because the first ingredient was almonds—I never buy a bag of nuts when the first ingredient is peanuts—and we make a little bit more fun of Tony T., and how you publish an Obama-era novel where the white girl you luv gets in a car accident, then you tweet, then you publish a think piece disguised as fiction in n+1—like all the better tweets lamented at the time, that’s not necessarily my opinion—and then a few Miller’s Planets later you pad that with some other stuff on the nature of the writer, and “rejection,” even though you went to Stanford and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and have thousands of followers on Twitter and a book contract, and call it a book, and 90,000 people review it. This pisses David Ewald and I off because we are aging white male losers and almost nobody publishes our books, much less reviews them.

12:20: David mentions what I mishear as, “the hole in the room,” and says, “It’s because he’s Thai-American,” and says, “Therefore the way he can do masculinity,” and I say, “I don’t want to talk about the way you ‘do masculinity’ on a Saturday,” and apologize, because maybe that’s aggro. And I say, ~“I don’t think that’s what it is, ‘masculinity or Thai-American,’” and then I say something—I preface with, I mean—something I have already said or thought to myself eight or nine times in the last sixty-six minutes: “I’m sure many people at this conference [makes parenthesis hand gesture {like the Uma Thurman square}] would agree or say the same thing or something similar or approach the structure of feelings discourse I am about to speak in. What I mean is, a lot of people here, at this book conference, would think this thought of mine. To think I have original thoughts hurts my flow. It’s not him as a fellow, I’m sure he’s a swell guy. We’re all swell college guys. I just think it’s because the book publishing industry SUCKS. And it has always sucked exactly this much. Could you imagine paying some publicist $6,000 so they can send a bunch of emails nobody will respond to, and some lonely kid from Brown who will never amaze anyone can write 200 succinct words about your book in THE TRADES?? $6,000 for an uneven result? Is there a bigger email job than publicist?” And then I just say, thinking of that podcast Josh sent, “The Book is Finished! Even at this book fair. Just like the gun is finished at a gun show.”

12:22: David and I fondly recall horrible things we said to each other at MFA school. It’s too bad we were competing males before we had the language males are so lucky to have today about what’s toxic, because shit, nowadays, I bet young hot males like us never fight with each other. Wallace would’ve won the Nobel if he didn’t kill himself, although, and I make my parenthesis hand gesture again—putting the western hat over it like in Obnoxious Liberals and adding some $ signs—the culture still would’ve changed so maybe not. Wallace would’ve moved on, too. David didn’t like The Hotel Egypt as much as Jenny in Corona (although he likes the cover more) and he has been trying to walk back those comments since he made them and I say, “Dude, you don’t have to keep walking it back, it’s okay, books are books, it’s like Yoda says to Ben, ~‘no, there will be another.’”

The gesture I made eight or nine times in the last sixty-six minutes.

12:32: It takes us like ten minutes to find the Jewish Muslim panel. There are not that many people but they are all probably Jews and Muslims.

12:51: The readings are amazing. Almost all of the poets drop awesome shit. I am blessed, my body is warm, I’ve been crying, literature rules. When I look around the room, I see gray-haired Jewish women and young Muslim women so I feel like I’m in the presence of God, and the thought hits me that later tonight, after experiencing this same beautiful poetry we all just did, where for a brief moment we could prove to ourselves that art will save us, they could be raped, and that just makes me want to crawl into the hole in the room and cry myself to death within the sleeping bag structures of my power. Not the “god that sits close to my jugular vein” as the poet said, but one of the other gods I never remember because I don’t take any notes on a day like this. There are note-taking days, typing days, spirit-waning days, exercise days, masturbation days, eating days, and days like this where I force myself not to write down one single thing.

12:59: But I get the feeling everything that happens today will be worth recording extremely soon so I don’t lose any of it. It’s a sacred day, and this is a sacred space. I think of Megan Boyle probably around exactly the same time I make the 26th note in my SoCal 2025 note. “Write a Live Blog tomorrow, call it UNDEAD BLOG” because I am a zombie in this world, which is your world, not mine. I will strictly borrow that form. I’m ready for something new, but first I need to do it in someone else’s form. I’m thinking of that Bukowski poem, “Art”: As the spirit wanes / the form appears” and my spirit is not waning right now.

1:00: It’s that same thing I did for Pitchfork Fest all those years, fuck Conde Nast for ruining Pitchfork Fest, and Kathleen would be like, “I’m glad you got all that down.” I want to write it and send it to David and Josh and Brenna and I want them to skim it and say, “I’m glad you got all that down” and then I’ll be pretty happy, and then I hum to myself … just as the Jewish poet is saying her sister was thrilled to change her name from Silverman to Brown … and not have to be a Jew anymore … and I think about how that happens to Ty in my novel … how he wants to go from Rossberg to Allen … and I hum to myself the Dylan line, “It is for myself and my friends my stories are sung.”

1:11: It’s been 2+ hours since I arrived at Chick Hearn Court and Georgia Street. On the way downstairs for lunch, I say to David, “That Jewish Muslim thing was the dayenu moment.” He asks me what that means and I’m like, “It loosely translates to ‘it would have been enough,’ and it’s part of the Jewish liturgy, I’m not sure that’s the right word, but it’s like: if he only told us about the heel lock eyehole on our sneakers and its palliative care when our ankles lose ROM—that would’ve been enough. If he only promised to never have an opinion about Dimes Square or Tony T. or ‘Books’ or The White Lotus—that would’ve been enough. If he only offered us the chili oil at the ramen place, not the chili paste as well—that would’ve been enough. So like, if all we heard were those Jewish and Muslim poets, that would’ve been enough for today. Betsy and I started using it before we even got married and would hit the first ridge on a hike and we’d say, ‘dayenu.’ I think I wrote about this in The Hotel Egypt but using different words.” David gets it, although I sense he didn’t enjoy the reading as much as I did, which is 100% OK.

1:15: On the lunch line, David has to think about his diabetes, which he calls his illness, which always makes me think of Henry James and his obscure hurt. I am concerned for him and want him to take care of himself. I ask if this food, which seems to be the only food option, will be okay. It will be.

1:20: The burger is $16 and the soda is $6. The can of soda. I say to the cashier—“is $6 dollars??” And then immediately apologize because she is fucking poor and I am fucking rich!!! And think to myself my previous dayenu moment could’ve been avoiding the long line for the registration fee, but that’s anti-Semitic, and anti-Semitism is illegal in America, even in California.

1:29: At lunch I’m thinking about how people are putting non-organic items in the compost bin which is making me so nervous and David is talking about how after the second story about the femcel—and I start humming “Femininomenon” by Chappell Roan, ~get it hot like Papa Johns, it’s a femininomenon!—it just gets worse and worse and thinner and thinner and you can sense the horror the guy must’ve had finishing his book to universal acclaim, although is that true? So and so didn’t think so.

1:29: I don’t think I’ll ever finish The Recognitions, I say, resuming our Lost Masterpieces of Youth convo, but I got from it, “the arch does a lot of work,” which is an Islamic saying from what I remember, and sometimes I must steal from the arch, which spells doom. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to do all the work for the arch. I want to do less work. What if I can’t let go and give in to droopiness? What if I can’t leave the arch well enough alone to do its own thing?

1:43: We debate going to the panel on AI. The sun was up and we were at the Lincoln Memorial screaming the lyrics to “Deserve It”—in high school you had the phat-est ass and now you outta high school you got a fatter ass!—and I was thinking about her brown, obviously, nipples, and she was like, ~“No you don’t get to have a professional wife and an amateur wife and then a one-night-stand: you don’t get to have the third woman.” I could have done anything to her. You think there are cops around the Lincoln Memorial at dawn? Nobody even knows where that place is. I could have placed her in Lincoln’s false marble teeth and nobody would’ve known the difference. I could’ve sunk her in the Potomac with the rest of the country. I could’ve dressed her wounds in the American Civil War, like Whitman did for Union and Confederate soldiers. What unborn writer will do that for us, I want to read his books.

1:43: I was thinking the AI panel might be cool because it is an hour and fifteen minutes and that seems long enough to cover the splenda of AI and Christian Bök was appearing on it, and theirs is a name I remember from grad school of scholars who are doing things with “the book,” who gave me horrible advice like, “maybe you should’’t focus on pop culture, it takes a long time for a book to come out,” because geniuses who are focused on the future of “the book” are lost in space and have no grasp on the contemporary, therefore no purchase on the future. Artificially modern.

1:44: David, though, is not Saturday-Only-David. He has been here since Wednesday. The only things he’s heard more about than “un[de]represented voices” is “artificial intelligence.” We talk about novels and how most of them are horrible and the writing is shit and we’re looking forward to AI authors and how some AI authors will have agents but some will be like, “Hey will you buy my book at AI-AWP?” We talk about how Trump wants to turn the country to shit and the last line of David’s second-to-latest novel, The Book of Stan, an incel-ish novel, a word that makes me think of how Intel stock is undervalued, which is a good book and has (the last line) two meanings.

1:44: David asks me about “my production.” At first I think he means I threw a tantrum, like my nana used to say, “Don’t make a big production,” but he means in writing, how I seem so productive. I tell him “being sober helps” but he doesn’t believe I’m sober anymore than I do. When do I find the time? I tell him writing is high-intensity interval training followed by transcendental meditation, being totally sober w/ white wine, unless social reality gets so intense you must get stoned a little w/ more white wine, and I think about Philip Glass making eggs for his family in that documentary, and also about the Maggie Nelson quote of leaving turds everywhere, but don’t say it out loud or mention the Glass family, though I do remember Mulholland Drive is playing somewhere, and I tell David more about how much of an influence MH was on The Hotel Egypt, the scene near the end when Maggie Nelson’s, I mean Naomi Watts’s, eye shadow and mascara are all wrong and you finally grow up and realize, like Caroline Polachek when she breaks up with her father so she can turn into desire, that nothing, no nothing, will ever be the same again.

2:02: “6 dollars??” the guy a few tables down says. And I’m like, “Yeah, $6 dollars,” and then I say my money-conversational things, like, being in NY/LA is like a different currency, amirite? Or how it’s price gouging, or how it should be illegal. I’m happy to be talking about money. It’s my going concern. The guy, a fellow conference-goer, who has red cheeks—probably just call them ruddy cheeks—says, “What if she was just like, $7 dollars??” And I’m like, “I probably still would’ve bought it! I was thirsty!” and we all laugh so hard, man we were good for those few moments.

2:24: It takes forever to find the AI conference center and when we do it is FREEZING. I think to myself, This must be what it feels like to be in a data center. Christian Bök is talking about AI but I could not give a shit. It’s too cold in here. We sit down. Then stand up. If I wanted to be cold and monocultural, I would’ve stayed in Chicago.

2:35: Use bathroom to piss, shitting is not even on my mind. Dumb thoughts about conference rooms, parallel parking, waiting for trains and buses, non-places, Station Eleven, masturbation. Work emails that say somebody responded to a comment somewhere else. Approving requests. This Tesla I saw with the vanity plate PIZZAHH. PowerPoint boxes. Social Security being threatened. Outsourcing. Layoffs. Will I end up in tent too? The future of AI. The future of smells. Three in the morning got the Fatburger. This is the brain of a man who needs to see a tree. Miss my son. Get some water.

Little Tokyo tree

2:39: On the walk into the Bookfair, where we will spend the rest of our time, I tell David how much I love AI, and at this point, it’s the same as a $75 editor on Upwork. Sometimes AI tells me the exact same shit people have been telling me since 1998, and I mean that as a good thing. I’m saying pretentious shit like, “The prompt possibilities are endless.” Only as endless as you. I quote something I read donating sperm at Little Chompers, the pediatric dentist up my block, that ~“nobody knows how humans work, really, and nobody knows how GenAI works, really.”

2:39: I’m humming “really” like Ratking does about the new generation of rappers—~you ain’t got any frame of reference, really, a whole new generation different from Biggie and Pac—at the beginning of “*”, the first track off 2014’s So It Goes, and on the album cover NYC tectonics are the same brown color nail polish the cashier at the kombucha palace in Costa Mesa wore. She was fly. This is true. It’s like when younger autofictionists say, I-only-read-Tao-Lin-on-Vintage. And that is comforting and chilling at the same time, because sometimes I feel middle-aged, and sometimes I feel like a whole different generation from my own, some generation that will exist in the future.

2:40: “One could even prompt the machine to recreate the miserable experience of being in an MFA program,” I’m saying to David with emphasis. “You could character-sketch all the people from our fiction writing workshops to the AI, and then get critiques again, as a grown man, from those children, two of whom were us. You could prompt it: Army weight fit & confident Jewish-Italian cunthound from Central Queens, too talented for his own good, thinks he deserves something, who won’t make it, and you would get Saturday-Only-Stuart-Ross critique. You could tell it: Christian chick who has never seen an ocean and writes shithouse reader, I married him, and has never put her finger in her ass and then smelled it, and you would get that girl from southwestern Missouri who always used to give us creepy looks at the gym, but we bonded over sour straws. You could tell it all the people we went to school with, and they would critique you, and you would feel horrible all over again, just like in that Storytelling movie, just like in that season of Girls, but it could happen, once again, to you. Or, you could be like Ottessa, and never show your work to anyone until it is 100% finished. Or, you could be like Cormac McCarthy, who said, ~Creative Writing teachers should be shot. Maybe he meant the students should be shot. Or both. Before man was, creative writing critiques waited for him.

2:42: I see a college literary magazine table. We go over and say hello. I say, “these look nice.” I can tell, and this I am sure will become a theme, how tired everyone seems, because they’ve been doing this since Wednesday, and I am Saturday-Only. I buy the small magazine for $5. I probably won’t read it. I probably won’t even take it back on the plane. But if we’re not buying small magazines put out by college students, what the fuck are we doing here.

2:47: Walking through the aisles is already exhausting. Someone says, “I don’t even know what all of this stuff is.” Someone says, “I don’t mind fucking up at 26, then I’ll know where to be at 30.” A press that published Susan Howe’s novel already left, but left a sign, have a book for free. I’m probably never going to read Susan Howe’s novel, that’s not the Susan-Howe-Kind-Of-Guy-I-Am, but I take it with me, plus a bookmark, a postcard. I wish I could leave money, or Venmo them. Money, money, money, “drains your energy,” Heti wrote in ABC Diaries. Then again, I do like Rachel Cusk’s early novels even more than the groundbreaking stuff. Or I like the idea she has a number of normal early novels, like Geoff Dyer, her man-version who, unlike Cusk, benefits from a physical body that wasn’t threatened a single day in his life. I like this idea our geniuses of autofiction didn’t emerge from the head of “Rachel Cusk” or “Geoff Dyer” as a fully formed autofictional British godheads who both share an infinite love for D.H. Lawrence, who was an asshole, it’s true, but was uncompromising and more-often-than-not lived like a slumdog for his art. Like when Heti said ~”we’ve been done a disservice by being taught that what we are to be authentic to is our feelings, as opposed to our values.” But that won’t happen with Susan Howe, at least for me.

2:54: So many bookmarks, postcards, books. There’s one dude hawking his own self-published novel. David says, “it’s gotta be tough here to be that guy.” We agree it’s tough to be here. Makes me think of how Jerry doesn’t come.

2:55 Lots of tables have Saturday sales. $5 only. But a lot of tables don’t have sales because their books are just too valuable. Their books are like a pair of Buck Mason stonewashed jeans. Like this table, it’s a table from a beloved L.A. indie store, I think it’s probably Silverlight, or maybe that’s called Skylight, I’m confusing it will Silverlake, selling Percival Everett’s, “the white man’s Paul Beatty,” James, NUMBER 2 BESTSELLER for some reason, and Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! NUMBER 3 BESTSELLER, yeah those books are not, I don’t think, on a steep discount. Two books, like The Hotel Egypt, a WORSTSELLER, that came out in 2024, that participate in the same 2024thingness; and I think about that old Crumps post that rips into Jenny Zhang, ~NYLON MOST IMPORTANT NYLON STOCKING STUFFER OF THE YEAR; and I think about that Kerouac letter where he looks into the window of the midtown book store and doesn’t see The Town and the City and says fuck all these other books, and I think about the God poem by the Muslim at the Jewish and Muslim Poets panel, cuz his name was also Kaveh, Kaveh Bassiri, the first names are the same, and all Muslim names can sound like the most basic American names like James and Huck to me, which is something I find so beautiful in a wordy sense.

2:56: I tell David after 50 pages of James I wanted to die. I just felt so bad for any person who had to write that book. Could you imagine waking up every morning and being like, time to go remix Huck Finn? Feel like one day if I have the time I shouldn’t rewrite Under the Roofs of Paris from the perspective of Miss Cavendish. Maybe this is my white guilt talking. I haven’t read Martyr! yet, or Rejection, but extreme Everything is Illuminated-ish vibes from the former, spaghetti with no meatballs from the latter. You don’t need to read books to develop opinions about them. They’re not going anywhere. We are not in an arms race with the book. We thrive in Ruscha’s DISCONTINUED CHINA of the novel. “Psst, I guess everything ain’t for everybody,” we screamed, my Latina Secretary and I, from the balustrades of the Museum of African American History, and then we blew it in front of the Veterans Administration Building, spreading our stumps. When I said, “You be dancing with your titties out” she said, “The black man’s misogyny is the white man’s game.”

2:59: David hasn’t picked up James yet, although we both agree American Fiction, the one that became Erasure, was really great, and we get that tingle of making auditory a universally accepted opinion that never needs to be voiced. Like I was getting my bar code scanned, the joke we used to make in 2002, that is now an internet meme cliche, when you’re under the curse of being most anticipated.

3:09: Not exactly looking for it yet we stumble onto the Pioneertown/Thoughtcrime table and say hello to my main friends-slash-AWP acquittances (sic). As Saturday-Only-Stuart I feel like I don’t know anything that’s happened, but it sounds like a lot of the same things have been happening in those years I was Thursday-to-Saturday-Stuart-Ross. And have a glass of wine. And then I think about how the other night at the Taiwanese place someone said, all my Asian students look the same, which wasn’t cool, made me feel like shit, the maraca of death rattles inside me when a racist joke is just a joke. It’s insane to me that I knew Josh’s sentence from his blog about the light being hard, and I think about hard light every time I’m in this kind of environment, but I didn’t meet Josh until 12+ years later. So this is a different Josh here at Thoughtcrime, Josh Gaines, a guy who is totally comfortable seeming in everything he does, and I have a framed poem of his in my office about the CTA Green Line train, “heat it’s own kind / of violence” and I haven’t seen him in 2 years, his hair is longer, grayer, which is hot on a man or a woman, and I tell him, for some reason, that he “looks good.”

3:11: Even though I haven’t been here all week a lot of the same things have happened. There’s a photo with an ass. Somebody almost fell over the railing, a few railings. The mushrooms got people through but they are gone. Brenna is like, “Next year we’re going to get t-shirts made that say, WE DONT DO PANELS.” I take a photo of Anya’s phone with a description of a reading after this. And we spend some time talking about the 2020 San Antonio year and how insane it was, and we know we’re talking about Covid but Anya also tells me, “I was shit on by a grackle.” I think of a line in my work-in-progress about an “electric blue grackle” and how it’s precisely because I don’t believe in that line that the novel is doomed. Put it in a poem, maybe, recuse the novel. I am deeply happy to be back in Anya’s DNA, which is how I felt seeing Elizabeth the other night, back in the DNA of her world. I could not be happier right now.

3:19: Get into a long, lovely conversation with a woman Brenna knows who offers community services for writers. I like her blue nail polish and she has good cuticles, kind of makes me a little horny, cf. with the Los Feliz waitress who liked David’s jacket who had similar nail polish and made me extremely horny, in a flowery way. I tell her how community is so important to me at my age, at my standing. All writers need each other but unagented writers mired in this fruity indie thing, we need each other “more than ever” or I guess I mean, “always and forever.” Whereas corporate writers at Big 5 presses or whatnot just need to make sure they keep on pumping through the blood structure like a piece of oil, us indie people are forever like, “please, a transfusion.” Remembering the night before at the JW Marriott bar Rebecca introduced another guy as, “shares my agent,” and you know you realize there are business relationships which are not community relationships, like how it’s ironic share is in the word shareholder. When Rebecca introduced that guy David Ewald and I still hadn’t finished our tête-à-tête about inequality in Los Angeles, and I don’t advise adding more têtes to a conversation about inequality because it brings the new têtes down. It’s offensive. I say a lot of that, in a much more homely language, arms spread out, like I’m gathering wheat. In order to say a lot of it like that, I’ve put my bag down on the floor, foolishly thinking, from time to time, that someone will “steal it.” I’m so Queens.

3:24: We’re still talking. About some questions she can suggest for “writer speed-dating.” “What masterpiece did you or didn’t you read at age 20?”—“Do you let the arch do its own work?” I see 6-dollars from lunch and I holler, “96,000 dollars!” from In the Heights, thinking about how in my teenage years the only thing I wanted to do was win $1,000-a-week-for-life from the New York Lottery, because I knew that exact amount, minus taxes which I did consider, would keep me in weed, cigarettes, and women, and Anya asks $6 dollars if he wants a glass of wine and he looks terrified and I say, “It’s not six dollars, it’s a gift,” thinking, “from a woman who got shit on by a grackle a few weeks before Rudy Gobert from the Jazz got diagnosed with Covid,” and he replies, “I will have the littlest amount possible.” I took a beat to watch Anya’s pour. And watch the tiny sip of Mr. Six Dollars. Before you go to bed tonight, say a prayer for the abstemious. They need our love, too.

3:41: Leaving the table and walking the aisles. I can’t see. I am scared of the end. Please let me be a man for the rest of my life. I don’t want to end up in a tent. I hate camping. Although it can be nice to wake up to the sun but I feel like forced tent people just wake up to traffic, or, they never sleep, which is the first thing capitalism steals from you. I keep bumping into people. The University of Iowa table is 7 tables long. I’m sober, that’s the problem. Hungover, I would know how to control my own space.

3:41: Books are hardcore. Books are king. Saying nobody reads anymore is like going to dinner and saying nobody fishes anymore and then being like, “I’ll have the miso honey sea bass.”

3:44: Run into a professional woman I did a reading with a few weeks ago. She doesn’t remember me. I enjoyed her reading and bought her book and gave her husband a free one of mine because he seemed like a guy who needed male recommendations, what with being married to her. I’m sure he loved All Fours, we all did. So I realize the entire reading I did of my own work, at the reading with her, which meant the world to me, did not mean anything to her world, or, she was so wrapped up in that own world of hers, mine couldn’t be mapped.

3:44: “Well, you know,” I say, making a joke, “all of us white men look the same,” which gets a roaring laugh from a guy on the outskirts of our semi-awkward convo who, paradoxically, seems central to it. Henry James would call him the interlocutor, I think? Even though we’re all standing, this is a sitting room drama. Like in the Strauss Capriccio, shit is not as placid as it seems. The interlocutor arranges writing retreats in Door County, which I surely mislabel as Spring Green, and both he and the woman who doesn’t remember me says, “Oh no, no, no,” and I say, “Well, you know, I’m from New York.” And then I kind of want to be MAGA about it and “double down,” as they say in our news reports, the way my nana taught me to when I had two eights in blackjack, or maybe two sevens, I can’t remember; as Anne Boyer says, ~they never taught us math and they want us to die. And I want to say, No, fuck you both, Spring Green is in Door County, it is on the doorstep of Door County, And then I’m like, feeling lowbrow, “The best place of all is The House on the Rock,” which gets a chuckle from the interlocutor. It’s an insane museum. Talk about uncompromising. One of the craziest places I’ve ever been. A house of mirrors filled with porcelains playing viols and the whole thing smelling of the worst of fat America, smelling like corn-fed beef and the Swiffer aisle of a Walmart. It’s a better thing in Spring Green, which is in Door County, than all that Frank L. Wright stuff people like us, because we’re intellectuals, shoot our loads over, just like the new James Patterson novel is better than Rejection or James or All Fours or Martyr! and I’m sure all five bestselling authors would agree.

3:49: Still somehow talking about Door County and how “nice it is to get away to really concentrate on your work, which of course we can’t do in a conference environment like this,” and I think about this rejection I got in 2005 where the woman said, “I can see your work is important to you.’ Always thought that was the most intense shade. Like the same woman in Fuccboi who says, “have a great summer!” But also, that rejection was helpful in a growth sense. Still growing from that. The God that is your pituitary cancer.

3:49: Running away from the woman I ran into who didn’t remember me, David asks, “So you knew her?” and I’m like, “No, not really.” Maybe she missed my reading and has no idea who I am not because I’m a white male, but because my work just blows, or she was in the can the whole time, or she was feeding the lovely little Chicago parking meter, ~owned by a Saudi hedge fund domiciled in Canada, and she missed my reading buying an Earl Grey tea, and that’s why she doesn’t remember me.

3:50: Maybe we suck. Maybe we’re just not good. Or as good. This is a hierarchy, for God’s sake. This is patriarchy, motherfucker, it’s not for the weak and sickly and it has no room for the thoughtful. Maybe people aren’t ready to respond to us. Maybe Damien Hirst was wrong when he said, ~“I make art for people who aren’t born yet.” Maybe we should listen even more to the people who make art for the living. Maybe there weren’t enough reviews of Rejection. There is still some masculinity for us to mine, we will need it for our electric car batteries. Maybe there aren’t enough copies of All Fours in overstock at Silverlight Books on that rainy night, even though it’s not supposed to rain in this empty-hearted town. Maybe we’re just not there yet. Maybe we’ll never get there. Maybe we’re stuck. Maybe we’re free. Maybe you went to City College with Alisha and you got lost forever in this system of cruelty. Maybe all we will ever do is freestyle in the cafeteria. Maybe we underlined all the wrong things in all the wrong books.

He needed a male recommendation.

4:11: See Siglio Editions and get really fucking happy. Tell the publisher how beautiful her books are and what immense joy they bring me. I tell her last-week-or-so-ago, I spent an hour at Women and Children in Chicago, where I’m from, thumbing through Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers. Weirdly, I had spent the whole morning writing a book review of a novel called The Sleepers, and in order to get away from that I stepped outside, stopped into Women and Children, and saw displayed on the shelf the Siglio edition of Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers. I thought to myself, I cannot get away from book products called The Sleepers!

4:11: In her The Sleepers, Sophie Calle is filming people she “knows and doesn’t know” sleeping for 8 hours, for this 1979 project, which started on April Fools Day, if they have such a holiday in France. With a little interview first, a novella. Kinda like a porno. Those sleepers of Calle’s have more freedom, and I’m not just talking about dreams, to do as they please, than the young Brooklynites in Gasda’s novel, who are constricted by his narrator, kind of like actors and directors in plays. Later, at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, which reminded me of the City Lights street in North Beach, only without the aura of beat history, because this is Los Angeles where history skips-to-my-lou, and they had more copies of All Fours than, natch, the Bible, I’ll overhear a woman with low-slung baggy jeans and white Hanes briefs tell her boyfriend, “I love how he said on that podcast (she pronounced it pudcast, as slick girls are wont to do) he doesn’t improv—I love how he said he doesn’t improv—and he only makes his actors read the lines he wrote,” and I’ll wonder, somewhat self-absorbedly, if the young woman dressed like one of the kids from Another Bad Creation is talking about Matthew Gasda, because he appears, from what Avi tells me, on pudcasts. I don’t listen to literary pudcasts, but I get it. But the novel is different from an art project, goddamit. An art project is different from a play.

4:11: In the morning, I was in a Blue Bottle coffee across the street from the Central Market where I had those “Huevos a la Mexicana” which I thought might make me finally drop a deuce, and I saw the Third Edition of Play Directing: Analysis, Communication, and Style, by Francis Hodge, which is why the book is a weirder technology than the computer. I plucked it down from the shelf, thinking of Interstellar, and Gasda, and saw highlighted (yellow highlighter; it’s a textbook) phrases like “Tension Arrangements” and “Techniques of Composition” and “Acting Areas” and thought to myself, I'd like to read a book on being a theater director, maybe a book just like this one, I’d learn some good shit.

“Because Realistic plays involve dramatic actions in domestic environments, such as living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, porches, backyards, and offices, they are “sit-down plays” in a literal sense, in contrast to the stand-up nature of historical drama.”

My head started spinning. Just like it had at Women and Children. Wondering if Calle’s The Sleepers and/or Gasda’s The Sleepers is a sit-down or stand-up drama? And how it’s too bad that the words drama and genre sound alike. A book conference like AWP is probably a stand-up historical drama, not a sit-down play, and trying to square those two things together reminded me of David’s comment about teaching 1984 and that history is not a concrete square, it’s a tense arrangement. Of possibilities. History is a tense arrangement of obnoxious liberals. Life is more complicated than what I’d said the night before, when we saw a facedown Lime scooter in the middle of the sidewalk on Flower Street, and I said, “If you want a vision of the future, picture a facedown Lime scooter stomping on a human face.”

4:19: Stop by the Archway Editions booth because I want to buy Blake Butler’s Molly, I’d only read the excerpt in Harper’s although David read the whole thing, which pissed off his wife. Lotta wives not into the Molly thing. They fear husbands would do the same? Molly is the most male book imaginable right now. I told David about the thoughtfully careful and carefully thoughtful review in Bookforum. David told me the day before he had stopped by the Archway booth and picked up Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, which is his big thing but odd to me, why anyone would ever want to read a filmscript, and did the whole Molly rigmarole convo, which is not something I wish to get involved in today, no thank you, sir. It’s so nice to be offline even for a few hours. Also happened to see an email that morning on the winner of a contest in Molly’s name so kismet. It’s a lot, the winner can do whatever they want with the money, probably won’t buy stablecoin, it’s not enough to buy a stable of thoroughbreds.

4:19: The Archway Editions people look really true. And tired. They mention during our convo they came out from “Brooklyn” and I remember something I’ve noticed for the many, many years I’ve been doing AWP that the people who come from “Brooklyn” always have this really sad way of saying that perfect word, like “Brookyln” is farther away than the wormhole around Saturn, I don’t know why, even when it’s in L.A., which you know, is like Brooklyn in some places, like Echo Park or Los Feliz and all that, they still say “Brooklyn” really sad and I love that, and how “Brooklyn” the word is like a Muslim name, or maybe it’s Dutch, like how in elementary school they were Queens-hazing us by letting us know “Flushing” meant “toilet,” just to keep us in our place. It’s not called Queens-Brooklyn day, you know, and on the way back to Chicago they’ll be no traffic because it’s Cesar Chavez day, which is like our Pulaski Day, and I wonder if anyone told Trump about Cesar Chavez day, probably shouldn’t be a holiday no more, maybe Gavin can school him on a pudcast.

4:19: Talking in L.A. to these beautiful sleepy people from Brooklyn about books, I’m again thinking of the idea in The Sleepers, not Calle’s, Gasda’s, that L.A. is all about having a perfect aura and New York is all about having a crack in your aura, like Jeff Goldblum at the L.A. party scene in Annie Hall asking his car mechanic if anyone has seen his mantra. Somebody cracks a joke about Lin Miranda and I start humming “we are powerless, we are powerless,” from In the Heights.

4:19: Archway put out Selected Writings from cokemachineglow: writings around music 2005-2015, so it ends with my Latina Secretary, and that’s a blog name, cokemachineglow, I deeply recall that makes me think of a blogroll and how it was so important to keep your blog roll updated back in the day, it’s kind of like the “Substack recommends” function but not quite because nothing on the busy-dying internet is exactly like it was back when I was young and things were cooler than they are now. The Archway people—and it’s not lost on me how arch, and all the work it has to do, is the word that did me in today—say they are also going, probably, to the afterparty-thing that most people have been saying, probably, they are also going to go to: the lead singer of Thursday will be DJing, I learn, and I say, feeling immediately stupid for some reason, “You mean the old band Thursday?” wondering when I will use my Saturday-Only-Stuart-Ross joke: not right now, not just then. There’s a discount on Molly and cokemachineglow and I almost want to say, “I’ll pay the full price,” but don’t. It’s not like Sheila Heti didn’t love going to A.P.C. to buy scarves. I love going to Club Monaco to buy a crisp white button-down. I love spending money, spending money is really the only way I can lose energy, which is one reason why I love L.A. even more than Brooklyn. I am really good at spending money and it is so easy to do here. I hope I don’t end up shitting in a tent. I hope I never see an end to my paper.

4:20: REJOICE! OUR TIMES ARE INTOLERABLE!

4:25: Brenna lost her voice. I’m losing my voice. Strikethrough larynx. I hate my voice. I love my voice. I am my voice in twenty years. I am the dream of my voice. I need to be amazed. Nothing else will do.

4:26: Stop at the Dispersed Holdings booth, books look beautiful. I ask the man to, “Tell us about it.” He starts telling us. At the end of him telling us I tell him I want to give him a copy of my new book, The Hotel Egypt. I brought two copies with me and he was the first person I wanted to truly truly give one to, although I thought about giving copies to other people. He tells me he’s excited to read it and that the night before there was a reading with a bunch of people from my publisher, Spuyten Duyvil. I feel horribly stupid that I didn’t do the work of sending the 20 emails I would’ve needed to send to get involved in that, to hook up with those people, even though I meant to. If I had done the right thing for myself, not to mention for literature, I could’ve read the night before, Friday-Night-Stuart-Ross. Man, I feel so horribly fucking stupid for messing that up, for not taking part in the things—in all the things—I am supposed to take part in, but maybe all those things are not all the things I am, and I am also, at this same time, so fucking thrilled to learn about Dispersed Holdings and their projects and really fucking thrilled to get into Sal Randolph’s The Uses of Art when I get back to Chicago and so fucking excited I was able to share my novel with the Dispersed Holdings publisher.

4:27: So the good things, the awesome things, all that, happened at the same time as the bad things, the-realizing-I-missed-the-reading thing, and that is just the wonderfully arch and hardscrabble story of my life. My life, and the failure of my career, and the success of my loco feelings. I am just like the novel, in other words, using social heteroglossia and individual multivoicedness to orchestra my themes as a means of representing and expressing the whole objective Crypto.Com arena. “The novelist always and everywhere,” in this book I was reading in bed earlier today, after masturbating again to the tight stepdaughter who shouldn’t have come, Simon Okotie’s The Future of the Novel, “in all the historic literary epochs known to us, finds “languages” rather than language [with the active literary consciousness] confronted by the necessity of having to choose a language.” And my kike-cracker-christ-refusal, n-world (sic)-ending-in-er, you could say, is never having to choose a language, and never having to choose the language you’d prefer me to. Fuck that noise. Literature is going to break my heart, so are children, and Thursday dancing. I’m so excited for what happens next. And I need to buy a copy of Pioneertown Pairings.

4:31: We saunter back—why not just use the normal verb, walk in this case, like Franzen suggested—to the P-Town booth to say goodbye to everyone and most of the people are exhausted, tho Josh had a recent allergic reaction to alcohol and seems less tired than everyone else. I buy a copy of Pioneertown Pairings. We take some pictures with disco ball tits--first with Brooklyn puss and then with American smiles--and talk about who has red eyes and who has something else. We leave the Conference Center and I want us to go back to exactly where I got dropped off five hours and twenty-some-odd minutes ago, at Chick Hearn Court and Georgia Street, because I want to take David to the 73rd floor of my expensive hotel so I can buy him a six dollar seltzer with lime and myself a $19 Peroni draft which’ll smell like weed and we can do some L.A. psychohistory, and it’s kinda tough to coordinate the Uber, which is actually a Lyft, what with the Kings fans streaming into the Crypto.com arena, how weird it is Los Angeles has a hockey team, and David’s like, “Los Angeles has two hockey teams can’t forget about the Anaheim Ducks.” The brown Toyota Sienna will arrive in 7 minutes and I think of that diss when The Suburbs by Arcade Fire dropped and someone was like, “This is music for kids who are nostalgic for being in a Toyota Sienna.” That’s Los Angeles for ya!

4:35: Maybe this is all pretty whack. The “fevered state has no place in art,” like Henry Miller, the Zeus of autofiction, said, and I have certainly been in a fevered state these last few hours. But, as Miller would be the first to casually inform me, not everything needs to be art. Fuck art. And fuck my stupid dishonest books. I have done enough art for this moment, and I am sick and tired of art. Channeling Don Cherry, maybe this is the new, this is “the offspring of wisdom.” Maybe this “sounds the chord of change.”

4:38: In the Lyft now, there’s all these ads around town for Drop which keeps making me think of the Tom Hardy James Gandolfini movie 2014’s The Drop and how hard-on inciting beautiful Tom Hardy pronounces “Brooklyn” in that movie, falling in love with Noomi Rapace, from Lamb and Prometheus. It’s another one of those movies where finding a dog teaches you about humanity, which is why Trump hates dogs, like Equilibrium from 2002 which Will Menaker loved and wrote that Letterboxd review, ~“what if they built a society that actually worked?” but it is not a good movie, I’m telling David, Equilibrium, but rather my favorite Letterboxd tweet-review of it: “an Aldi version of The Matrix.” Man I love movies, IDK, seems like there were a lot of bad fellas in this one, and yeah Collateral is good for L.A. neighborhoods the way Die Hard with a Vengeance is good for New York ones, and Brett Easton Ellis masturbates over that way, in Century City, probably likes to dress up as Richard Gere in all those miserable suits he bought after American Psycho, how lonely to have a bestseller instead of being a person like the rest of us, and burned in a Hamptons fireplace in Lunar Park, and sip Negronis at the Beverly Hills Pedicure Salon and try not to snort blow with busboys from San Pedro who didn’t get Cesar Chavez off. Not that I have a planned future it’s all critique and exploitation.

5:09: Back in DTLA I’m thinking of screaming out the lyrics to “Deserve It” and I promise David I’ll send him a mix for his drive back to Modesto, and in my head I’m at the Jefferson Memorial with the Latina Secretary: “‘07! LAX ! First time up in baggage claim! Driving with Ye and looking at the houses in the hills—one road in, one road out, Ari said, when the fires come—like I’m swerve, swerve, deserving this shit!” and we’re waiting for the light to change on Wilshire, this is iconic, some homeless dude wrapped in a Jedi cloak is beating a young padawan to death and now he’s licking the headlights of the Texas Christian in the EQS with Florida plates, who is more scared of this master Jedi than he is when his wife gets back from her pussy shave and says with her horrible Dallas breath, “baby, I’m sore but I’m horny,” and the padawan stands the same chance of surviving as all the children of the world do, which is a chance, and the Lyft driver, who is African, “demurs with the African accent,” like Billy Woods does when he’s ~thinking of killing Donald Glover outside the Dakota.

5:09: I’m thinking of the Los Angeles Times building, and how it looks like a ruin of the United States civilization, similar to the Chicago Tribune building, how all the newspapers, the lawyers, the consultants, the teachers, the students, and our lovely white & offwhite conversations: we’re all cooked; although like Chicago Josh I am optimistic, and that other Lyft driver on the way back from Monty’s where I saw a framed photo of J. Phoenix after he won the Oscar, a sight that made me burst into vegan tears, and how Charlotte Shane is right that most men can’t do it because most men aren’t heroes. The driver asked me if I minded if he stopped at McDonald’s for a “senior coffee,” and I reluctantly agreed in I’m-a-white-man-with-things-to-do voice. He told me, while we waited nine endless minutes in the McDonald’s drive-thru off Sunset for his senior coffee, and I thought about how I spent small six figures the last few days on Blue Bottle coffee, that his daughter—when he said the word daughter I heard the same wholesome plenty I know from my identity as a father; I wonder if his daughter misses him—who works for the AP, and yeah the whole Gulf of America thing, has colleagues who came back from Gaza and didn’t come out of their rooms for 3 months or are on suicide watches because of ~“the terrible things they have seen” and how he’s really worried about his daughter, with this new “terrifying administration,” and I hear James Baldwin saying, “this terrifying globe,” even though he knows she’s safe in New York, and I say, “we are safe in New York, I think,” and I want to give him the copy of cokemachineglow: writings around music 2005-2015, but it’s back at the hotel.

I cried vegan tears.

5:15: “Nobody talks about it,” he said. “Nobody talks about it.” Then he exactly said: “Israel controls the news even worse than my own country, Iran, but I am an American.” And when I get out of the car at the corner of Sunset and Laveta I go to say, “Good luck to your daughter,” but then I double down, and say in my pure voice, which is my nana’s voice in her yellow chemise, “God bless your daughter for the work she does for our country.” Life’s ill, but at least there’s 9-ounce pours of Cassavetes, and that’s downtown Los Angeles for ya!