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hey so this is really long and probably not very interesting, so i put it behind cuts so your browser will not get overwhelmed loading this page.
those joey comeau stories are a part of this big cultural thing that im obsessed with. betty showed up at my house to visit a housemate and hung out with me while we made dinner and she told me miguel puts on big multi-act shows now and his ego ballooned and he got grillz that say "VEGAN". canadian child actor (apparently Degrasse) Drake made all those super-club singles and never released an LP until now and its full of this fresh narrative, all astute and poignantly sincere. last night hannah van loon's band came over and her awesome friend kept telling this stories where everyone would look really bewildered, like about what happens in this .gif with a kitten, or about a website making fun of hipsters which she found out about by being featured on, and everyone was really endeared to her by these little things, which would in previous contexts would have clearly been stumbles. i said it works because before our culture didnt have a fetish for this kind of almost exhibitionist authenticity and earnestness, the taste for self-aware honesty which by humbling us makes us very appealing in our humanity. at large, were still fairly caught off guard by this kind of thing when it happens, and plus its the kind of thing we think of as pretty appealing anyway. i said it more concisely, and she understood exactly and responded really well. this is what i was talking about with harrison a few weeks ago. im awful at it because im so guarded and neurotic and full of shit, but i love it and identify with it more than any other massive trend ive noticed before.
last night hannahs band came over and there were three boys and a girl and gina was here and we all hung out for what ended up being all night. i got the boy i wanted, though it came together fast and fumbling and i feel sort of sheepish. we all built a fort and then hung out in and then fell asleep in it, complete with beer and cookies and truth or dare and singing and then inappropriate making out. i just assumed the blond would never be into it so i was pretty carefree about sleeping like sardines on the floor under shared blankets and where we awkwardly put our hands while squished up and cold. we all went past the threshold of sleepless delirium and/or fell asleep, one by one. the one i liked was the anxious hyper one who yelled the most dumb jokes. he had giant blue eyes and very blond hair, which is funny because i never like blond dudes. he just had this big goofy smile the whole time and fidgeted interminably, and when we were contorted awkwardly on the floor, i could hear my own unsteady breaths and his were the same. i dont know why, but as soon as he started touching my back that way i knew, and immediately i wondered about motives and other things that could be true about him that could in the future make me feel stupid and terrible. this is why i shut down ok cupid, because i feel like right now i can only touch these kinds of things with bad hands. anyway, he kept gently trying to take it further and i would deflect but it was strange of him because we were in the fort and other people were in there. i dont know him and i certainly dont know those other kids. then he pulled us both up to my bed and he tried some more but he settled for me just touching him which im wavering in feeling appropriately progressive about. it was my doing, totally, but i cant really explain why i would have it that way and im concerned my motivations might have originated in whats nuts about me. no jovial young duckling-haired jazz drummer from the midwest should have to navigate that. it creeped me out when he whispered that i had an amazing body, it just sounds fake. is it fake out of fearful clumsiness, or callous practice? i dont know why its hard for me to take it at face value. he was a bad kisser at first, but he yielded to my style pretty quickly, and he held my head at times and traced lines all over my face and hands and torso, kissing them sometimes. he kept pulling me by the waist or pelvis closer, closer, hands in beltloops, hands on skin, fists balling up donalds old thelonious monk tshirt i stole last year. he whispered "we should hang some more, i want to hang out with you" or something like that, and it sounded so stupid and compulsory but i cant tell if i was just being irrationally critical. to a certain extent it doesnt matter because im not prepared to handle anything substantial that could or could not be in the cards even just hypothetically, and its better not to include that kind of thing in the landscape of my thinking about all this stuff, if im going to be carrying on like last night. i have to just hold on to the moments where somebody anxious and funny with big eyes is holding my head and kissing me all over my face or tracing their nose along my ear and im just happy because it feels so great and it doesnt matter what it means about me or them or the two of us or anything. since ill probably never totally be a completely-in-the-moment kind of person, i have to figure out how to navigate with a coherent narrative where a bodily response is as valid as all the heavy baggage of hackneyed self-awareness, etc. while i was gingerly attending to his animal assertions i got suddenly really wet the same way as with really hot scenes in movies that sneak up on you, or watching the kind of porn with daylight in it, and i reached for why that might be, and i think not finding an immediate satisfying answer is what ultimately allowed for this unfamiliar kind of authentic eroticism.
house politics are worsening. the complaint is going to cabinet thursday morning and as of like 230 today, my witnesses hadnt gotten it together to call monique. i guess two of them did after i texted everyone, but im scared. apparently in our first meeting, monique meant to somehow communicate to me that alex and patsy said they would drop it if i agreed to stop using that kind of language, and she said that when presented with this option i refused, and that it didnt matter because they rescinded that option as soon as i signed for fall. i didnt understand that at all at the meeting, and its awful because i wouldve taken it, for sure, and if they had agreed to that with no other stipulations they could not have strong-armed me in the way that they are now. i emailed monique to tell her to ask cabinet that if the decision turned out not in my favor, that cabinet be advised that i need to stay in berkeley to finish this intensive treatment, and could i stay at the coops until i finished, and she responded asking if id like to seek an informal solution to this complaint and agree to leave of my own accord in the fall. even though im not really sure if i want to live here in the fall, i feel like this is a social atrocity and im not sure i can take the crushing fucking heartbreak of surrendering in a fight where im sure im clean as a whistle and my social position is being taken such thorough and shameless advantage of. i need to win this, or at least i need to know i fought it as hard as i possibly could. if i think about how unjust it is for too long i usually cry, not because it could uproot me in this overwhelmingly disastrous way, which it certainly might, but mostly because its just so egregiously unfair and unfettered by reason and im powerless to have stopped it. this is why i got so good at fighting while i lived in the mountain compound with all the other fucked up teenage kids. they just repeatedly kicked the shit out of me in these terrible intentionally degrading ways just out of their own chaos and spite, and i cried because i was so small and white and young and soft, so unprepared for their absurdly hard backgrounds, so unable to stop them from usurping violent control of my body until the staff would come and pull them off after a few minutes. eventually i guess the sense of being overwhelmed abated a little and i figured out slowly how to defend myself, but even when i won most fights, my eyes always watered. i dont know why. i have no skill set for the kind of fight im in right now. everything is arbitrary and irrational and to a certain extent aesthetic with this administration, particularly in matters like this one. the policy is somehow both ambiguous and in favor of the accusing party. monique said off the record that she though i had "good qualities" but that she didnt think i was "cut out for this organization", and i said "well couldnt i be a pioneer for other people who might not seem to fit the mold, but are reasonable, invested, and well-meaning?", and she said, "frankly, i hope not" and then something like 'i think there are kinder ways than this to communicate' or something. shes supposed to be neutral. tony thinks she called him looking for dirt. im really afraid i wont be able to win this and then not only will i have suffered this crushingly depressing defeat, but ill be fucked in terms of shock and where i will stay. last night, when we were on the roof patsy came up and said we needed to get down because it was past quiet hours, and she was furious, saying she had been yelling for awhile, and i told her we hadnt heard her and she said we absolutely must have heard her, and someone said that we hadnt, and she didnt believe anyone, even though it wasnt just me- she was accusing seven other people including hannah who lives here of being terrible assholes and ignoring her. we got down right away and went to my room. today, when i came home from walking gina to the BART, i didnt have my keys and i knocked and she came to the door and saw who it was and refused to open it. i waited on the porch until eventually, alex came to the door in his fucking wheelchair and opened it. im really afraid of what might happen.
i asked chappell to call my dad after a real hard phone conversation where he didnt believe me about serious a bunch of stuff is and he said hed like to ask her himself, and now hes saying she told him a bunch of things that make my life much harder, like that she strongly recommends that i move back to LA after i finish treatment, and that im resistant to her diagnosis and have refused drugs before, and all sorts of things that are fairly puzzling. i asked her about la on the phone, and she said she thought i should be with people who care, and we talked about it and it came up that she didnt know my dad doesnt live at our house and that if i were to come back down there to finish treatment, his plan would be to hire someone to take me to and from, not drive me himself or have anyone in our family do it. he hadnt mentioned how that would be impossible because of their schedules. as for the thing about diagnosis, its true that im a little skeptical about her theory, because none of the dozen drugs weve tried have worked even a little. however, ive told her explicitly many times that i i trust her competence and im willing to go with it even though i have doubts, and ive followed her every direction shes wanted to take me with this, and have never refused drugs from her at all. i dont know what shes thinking, or what she said, or what he understood. maybe she said my disease is resistant to treatment and he didnt get it. i dont know. in any case its super fucking illegal to do that. i asked her about that and she said that when situations get this serious its different, and i said yeah, but then you have to get a waiver that says the court finds me incompetent and my dad assumes guardianship or proxy or whatever, and you dont have one, and she said that shes really afraid for me, and she felt it was right to do this illegal thing. hearing her say that scared the shit out of me. not only did she clearly assume i wasnt a significant threat in terms of legal action, but she was crazy or stupid enough to ignore the overwhelming legal liability she was creating for herself, and it shakes the hell out of my confidence in her judgment. maybe shes invested in an outlandishly personal, familiar way and what she was doing was extending trust to me in a very serious way, and i should be thankful i found someone like that, but i have serious doubts. jesse would never have done that in a million years. he has a bachelors in philosophy and a blackbelt, and chappell is 0 for 2 against him as a doctor at this point. i hope to god that shock works and that i can stay here to finish it. fuck.
in the midst of it all, last night while we were in the fort and everyone was laughing and singing and laying around on each other, and the light was glowing through the blanket walls it was so pretty and good that a couple times i actually thought this is what its like, this is the real thing, this is the kind of thing people remember like photos in memory. this would be a perfect place to end the book, youthful and beautiful and laughing, floating above all the badness before the glow gets swallowed up and youre blinded and dying again. i just pressed my eyes shut for a second until i could discredit the instinct to self destruct, in favor of the present moment. it was a pretty fun night.