Dispatch From The Mundane 031
out of the skillet and into the air fryer and other mixed metaphors
Hey Loners,
It’s been awhile.
Never said this before but if you do not want these letters—unfollow. I give you permission to unsubscribe. Ghost me. Let me go like Jack in Titanic. Realize that there is room on the door but not for me and let selective
I am telling you right now to look away or do what you need to take back control. I am one of those self-help InstaGurus telling you to practice consent by unfollowing people who do not contribute to your socio-emotional 401k.
This is car, I am saying this is a crash but the simulation they show you in junior high to discourage drinking and driving. I am also saying that you should relieve yourself of the burden of trying to wonder if any of this will ever make sense.
I think I’m still talking about unsubscribing but I could be talking about a larger thing, a big old something— you never know with pesky poets or the maudlin and aging millennials that keep public diaries.
I O U a letter about moon songs and weddings and seeing people I love and dance under a bright and starry sky. My friends have found people to love and walk into the night with— for now— to step into the day—for now— and I am glad. They are happy in love. I am seeing the combination of their handholding and noses in a new generation. I O U but there’s a letter about how I hate everything but then I just want a simple kinda life with all those mundane fixings but it’s not on my bingo card. I O U but I’m a loser baby, why don’t you — & I O U Liberian recipes and little old ladies holding my face. I’m not sure why my face has been held so much by strangers, by little old ladies but if they stop—no one will ever hold my face again.
I O U. S2G. Screenshot this and send it to me. Demand from me what you have never asked. Do you want to know about what I’m cooking while unemployed?I am walking into the bodega in neon flip flops, a dress, and jeans and a cropped hoodie. All of these garments on my body. I’m incognito. My Lyft driver says I still look like a baddie. I say I’m in my villain era, chief. I look like a Lizzie McGuire. There’s something about starting something and knowing the more time that gets away from a state of writing it either hardened and calcifies or gets sappy, suspended in an honey colored resin.
There’s something about looking back and seeing Jane in Ceci’s car before boarding a train. There was also something about feeling like I’m always waiting for my life to start or my old life to end. There’s something about joy interrupted and hormonal disturbances and abnormal masses.
There’s something about living right now and how same-same and then painfully different everyone’s life is right now. It’s wanting to grow my hair out and how I’m in my thirties and I’m taping flyers to trees and utility poles in search of all the lost time. I’ve called to notify banks of fraudulent activity on my life—I swear to you that I didn’t live in 2020-2022. I swear to you. Please suspend all accounts. Find the thief.
There’s a long letter about telling someone that astrology is cool but have you ever considered wracking together your failures and fears and applying to martyrdom? Tracking your friends by their instagram stories and making rash and illogical conclusions regarding their state of being, happiness and who their real friends are is cool but have you ever considered bringing back public displays of humiliation? Lock me in the stocks and throw your Hello Fresh old produce at me.
It’s something kinda shitty to write even though life has gone off the tracks. I’m the sorta idiot fatalist that when things are wrong— it’s all wrong. I’m a pillar of salt in Gomorrah, you know? I feel so bad that I get biblical. I want to be nailed— in so many ways but let’s go back to the top— I love all turn-of-the-last-century automotive phrase. I love how I’ve never seen a train derailed personally— although I’ve boarded a train or two behind one — and yet it makes sense.
We don’t think about all those who labor and die to make sure we can get on the train everyday. There’s someone inhaling muck so we can grab the express home, so that I can compare my fumbles and follies to derailment. I see the same bus drivers on the routes I take lately— for a time, it’d be one or two people and then never the same face.
I’m listening to Cassandra Wilson’s cover of “A Day In The Life Of A Fool” which is the US version of the bossa nova classic and theme of the film Black Orpheus (1959) “Manhã de Carnaval”.
Hey Loners—
Be honest!
Are you well?
Are you hurting?
Would you tell if you were?
Why not, we’ve all been at oversharing or sharing nothing at all. You’ve been hate following your frenemies— what can you really be above than wasting your time to say that existing is a series of high highs and low lows and we were promised a valley, a paradise of in-between. I think we were promised this— it was in the last TOS but I’m not sure about the recent updates.
I’ll go first—
I am aching but it’s nothing new.
I am wanting and it’s nothing new.
All the kids say they’re in their era. Bad Bitch era. I’m in my bag but I’m also in the Nile. I think I’m in my villain era. I’m bad. I’m in my ego death era. I am just a loser and you know the refrain. A long time ago I got the opportunity to talk to singer-songwriter Michelle Branch about the idea of the return of saturn. We aren’t friends but we were making small talk— the kind when you meet someone famous and linger. She said she believed in it and explained to me the concept. Before I got my first tattoo (a month or so ago) Erika explains to me the concept of a Tower Year. A Rapunzel-esque Tower on fire and people throwing themselves out. I think I’m there but I’ve decided to call it my Woodstock ‘99 Year. This means nothing
.
It’s my Y2K. Everyone is wearing pajamas or almost nothing to club. There’s all kinds of epidemics. We are loading up on Narcan and epipens— we’re self medicating and autoimmune. I am being trampled to death, I am ripping my hair out, I am screaming myself hoarse yearning for a different time— this my Tower Year, ‘99.
That’s all this newsletter ever was– it’s an opportunity to hope that if I write enough words I’ll time travel.
If I yearn long and hard enough, if I beg for forgiveness at all hours of the night, if I swear to the setting and rising suns that I’ll do differently– I’ll go back and do things differently. Tonight I’m thinking about all the times I could’ve been a real person while watching beloved Himbo, coexist sticker in flesh Gavin Rossdale take his shirt off between sets and screaming myself hoarse. I am a chemical. I got me fucked up. You are a chemical. Get me fucked up. Our carbon atoms are bumper cars. We are so fucked up. We are all human or something.
Summer’s over and for all that I regret– I am hopeful for the relief of an autumn wind on skin that burned under an unbearable heat. A summer of moon songs and smiles. A grotesque and morose summer. It wasn’t all bad but it wasn’t all good. I fucked up. I sunk my battle ship and kill all my healthy gut bacteria. Hope a few come back from the war one day.
If this is your stop, farewell.
Godspeed, loners.
Kx
alone in my room is an occasional newsletter written by a gifted and talented deadbeat. the world is a scary place & even in death you pay rent for a grave.