exercises in remembering
I suspected him above all of amusing and interesting […] for his memory was inexhaustible and [he] recounted his reminiscences without hesitation.1
I cannot remember anything anymore. My brain feels inflamed. I am sitting in bed on the top floor of Kino Roland, an old, retired erotic cinema on the main street in Zurich. My window locks eyes with the brothel on the opposite side of the street, where colorful lights illuminate the curtain-pulled windows. The red curtains open slightly — sometimes I see a girl putting on makeup, getting ready for work. Sometimes the green-lit-room girl comes back from work and hovers around the room, wrapped in a towel, before taking a bath.
It’s my last day here; I transport my body to the bar, where I meet my studio host, staring out of his face with a drink in his hand.
His face. Covered almost fully in tattoos, with Maori spirals on the cheeks and a barbed wire for a moustache; eyelids, neck, and forehead covered in scribbles. It took me one full day to get used to looking at him. Soon I learned to love how a certain boyish innocence seeps right through it.
He spends the whole studio cut on drugs, drinks, and an Uber ride to his loving, much younger girlfriend. I go back to the old erotic cinema and pass a row of whores hiding from the rain, softly putting their hands on my shoulders.
I am trying to remember in a Perec fashion. Just for myself, and maybe if someone asks. Maybe if my children ask what I did in October of 2025 or how I eased into being single again. I have a family curse of “suck it up, bottle up, and die,” and I have a family blessing of laughing your worries away. Both have failed me thus far, so I must write. My brain is inflamed and I cannot remember anything anymore. I am sitting in bed on the top floor of Kino Roland.
I am sitting at a café in Bethnal Green, listening to Slint. I am compulsively archiving my own Instagram posts, possibly going through some kind of identity crisis. My waiter introduces himself as “Jackson, as in Michael Jackson,” and brings me eggs Benedict — a simple yuppie breakfast that gentrification won my heart over with. This, and warm ambience.
I read that the Middle Eastern preference for cold, bright white LED light is an aesthetic of cleanliness and utility over “moodiness” - a mix of economic factors and a stubborn response to whatever is “cool.” I think there is something interesting in the moral and communal opposition to dim lighting, which invites secrecy, alcohol, and romantic suggestion — as if the cold white were honesty itself. Too bad I have an aesthetic preference for half-lies.
The quality I respect most in any creative practice is rhythm. Second to that must be refinement.
I tried to enter a nicely rated hostel, but the receptionist (male) came out with an impatient face and told me the facility was only for women.
I went around the block and spent a night at a two-star hotel with a train line right next to my bed, which made the whole compound epileptic every twenty minutes. Upon checking in, a lady came down the stairs and said she couldn’t sleep because there were ants crawling all over her face. Why wasn’t she at the all-women hostel?
There are no ants. In my dream I am once again in high school, trying to sneak out of classes, but constantly getting caught and brought back. I also dream of a girl I met in Austin, and how we fall asleep on a grassy hill under an oversized cloak, before she has to leave to see her grandpa after a “blood arm surgery.” I dream of her again after a few days, and again we fall asleep together, this time on a bed in a room full of people.
I am in Milan.
I traverse a broken park gate after a seafood platter dinner and sluggishness chased away by what seemed to be a triple shot of Fernet. I arrive at a venue with a tiny door that opens at the whim of the dwellers.
Inside, folk gather for a screamo show where both opening bands have a singer who looks nearly exactly like my American ex, which makes me enjoy it less. Or maybe enjoy it more? She bops around the scene playfully, and has quirky mannerisms that stand out from the tragically sad and angry format of emoviolence. My punk Icelandic friend leans over to my ear. “Phony”, he whispers.
We hang out with the only Italians we know. There’s a type of people who look as if God is punishing them for having to go out.
The last three nights are drenched in pastis, Guinness, discourse, and banter with Madjestic Kasual & friends. I really love them, and they make me feel welcome. Even when the velocity of London banter makes me feel like a retarded little cousin from Ipswich — not as in mental illness, but retarded as in one who has vaped his mind away. The London level of verbal IQ is astounding.
On my first day, I went to play tennis after years of hiatus, where I learned that I have a powerful serve and a good backhand slice, while the rest is irreversibly lost. Straight from the court, I went to record a podcast, where I half-drunkenly produced an image of myself I can barely remember. I’ll never listen to it anyway. I can only hope the inflammation doesn’t show. God protects the hairlines of pure-hearted men, etc., etc.
The day before Halloween I meet Rachael and we find relief in a nice, American-style conversation. An hour later I see her singing, and she sings like it’s the peak of prom, or like it’s the end credits of the last Twin Peaks. Soon after, we go get bagels at a place with cold white overhead light, and I feel like someone lifted my giant comfort-rock of a lousy autumn eve.
I have been indulging myself as of late, and acquired a mentally porous structure. I complete my biannual $200 book order on Amazon, which does not fill up the holes, usually, but solves the related self-esteem issues by piling unread volumes in front of my hazy eyes.
JUSTIN BIEBER FANFICTION
Dream. Hailey’s mother shows him a clock she has hung in her apartment.
“One hand shows the entrance, the other the exit to the house,” she says.
She takes the clock off the wall. They walk for a bit around her impressive manor.
She hangs the clock somewhere else.
“One hand always shows the entrance. The other shows the exit,” she says.
Justin wakes up in his sweaty linens and sits on the side of his bed. The warm and jaded rays of Californian sun glimmer at his feet. He prays for a while. The universe is always in motion, but the day only gets traction when you command it. And time flows differently in Chinatown, each and every one.
He descends to the kitchen and grabs a banana, and notices that the fruit is green, unripe. The black part is where, supposedly, the tropical spiders reside, and he eats it. He has been questioning his preservation instincts lately, since he found out the Japanese drink shrimp brains with sake, and they live the longest.
- Good morning, baby.
Hailey speaks from behind the kitchen island. He did not notice her at first. Little Jack Blues is resting in her arms, his big brown eyes locked with his dad’s chest. The baby seems to be looking right through him. Justin turns around and sees horrible rubber marks on the floor as if something tried to force its way into the basement. He knows this song. The radio plays trap with a low-frequency static filter.
- Let’s push back the father duties a little bit.
He says, and descends into the séance room. He locks the door behind him. The tiny, rotating lamp with hand-painted tigers is still on from last night. He prepares a fat line of The Usual and a headrest.
The tigers dance on his face as he leans back and locks his hands behind his head.
He shrinks into a little spiral and twists up and down and then right through a tiny tube. From inside the tube he sees a little keyhole. The motion stops. It is okay to peep when no one is watching. The inside of the tube is fuzzy and warm. “Mould,” the word appears before him, and it is decorated in gold and jewels, so he will not be scared. He feels like “woah.” The door next to him opens and a gentleman invites him inside.
“What’s on for today?”
“Let me show you, young master.”
The pit boss takes him around the cruise. The games are in motion, and the warm lights radiate like a set of candles. People seem to enjoy themselves in cordial ways. Glasses of brandy are passed around by spirit-worn yet courteous waiters, and cigar smoke hangs ominously beneath the ceiling.
“This is the slot section”, says the pit boss.
Cheating starts in your thoughts — that’s what Justin lived by, thus trying to connect his eyes with each waitress on the slot floor, testing himself for the early signs of emotional treason. The moment they show, he is to leave his wife immediately.
“Do you want to see our new game?”
“Yes, please.”
The pit boss takes him through a red curtain that reveals what seems to be a roulette wheel three times the size of the standard one. The roulette stands still, and a few very distinguished gentlemen sit around, stiff and still like marble statues.
“The classic roulette is a game of hope,” the pit master says.
”You hope to find out that your desired outcome is sewn into the fabric of the future. Your selected roulette number is a testimony to a moment that will only happen once — a moment that will, preferably, make you rich. It reduces possibility to actuality.
In the pre-recorded universe the game of chance unfolds your life minute by minute, and the beauty of the casino is betting on this pure mechanism of being, the very experience of life itself.”
“Yes”, says Justin. “But how is this game different?”
“This game, young master, is the Reverse Roulette.”
“You might think about what exactly is reversed here. It is not the order of the betting, nor the flow of time itself — which would make everyone leave the facility richer than they were. Not ideal for a Casino.”
“The reverse roulette provides a reality that reverses the basic informational function. It is the game where actuality is expanded into possibility. The observation of the outcome makes it less defined, producing ignorance.”
“This room is an isolated chamber. When players sit down to play, there is only one, single roulette spin. The moment the ball lands in a slot, the information becomes reversed; the slot turns into adjacent ones, then slowly into all possible slots of the game. The bets expand from reds to blacks, odd to even to every single field. The decisions made before the bet expand into infinite possibilities. There is, and there isn’t, a wheel. The players themselves become the cloud of unknowing.”
“The ball is an anti-eraser: not erasing all but one information, after the fact, but erasing the fact that there was ever a fact.”
Suddenly the players lift from their seats and leave the room in silence.
'“What happened?” asks Justin.
“There is only one thing that can disrupt the game of reverse roulette - it is when someone else enters the system and collapses their sea of possibility into a single set of coordinates. Like us, when we went through the red silk curtain.”
“What is the point of all this ?”
“The game reveals only one truth”, says the pit master.
“The insight that nothing ever changes. When the players dissolve into possibilities of configurations, they stop experiencing the flow of time and see that the only motion there is is their own, individual perspectives. They see the universe as static, motionless, existing only as geometry. The moment we walk into the room, we turn the ball into an actual eraser and place them back where they all started. And we collect their bets, obviously.”
“Those men just left without remembering what happened?”
The pit master nods, while Justin looks at the roulette wheel. A white ball rests on number “23”.
The slow banging on the door brings Justin back into his séance chamber, and after a while he climbs up the stairs to see the source of the commotion, only to discover a Roomba vacuum cleaner leaving horrible tire marks trying to force its way into the basement. Something like that.
Miscellaneous stills:
Man standing by the park fence shushes himself, as if he were about to spill his own secret. To himself.
I pitch a “Twin Speak” show idea to my twin friends.
Pink-haired girl hands me a Sayaka Murata book over the bar counter at a punk show. “Keep it,” she says.
I see a man wearing a T-shirt that says “BORN TO SHIT / FORCED TO WIPE.” I read it as an extremely bad omen. The day after, I tear my tendon.
I sit in a different café, far up north in Clapton. I close my hands as if I am praying, but all I’m thinking of is the metaphysics of gooning. In front of me sits my best friend and flashes cold blue light into my eyes. Open in front of me is the infamous online piece.
I reflect on how the most sublime I ever felt was through hardcore withdrawal of bodily pleasures on meditation camps. I am surprised that you supposedly achieve sublimity through acceleration of those pleasures. A thought spread thin along the lines of “the only way out is through.”
I read the Harper’s “Goon Squad” piece because Zeitgeist demands it of me, which is very well written but very ugly conceptually. It would be much better if only he transformed himself — or the literary subject — into a total braindead gooner. I would love to read apocalyptic goon praise at the very end; that would make the piece much more anti-gooning (for an independently thinking reader, at least) than the straightforward didactic ending: “It’s not for me,” he says. “I hope they leave their caves to seek real love.” Boring.
I know from a friend of a friend that Harper’s cut out 2,000 words of his masturbatory experience that he had written “stroke by stroke.” That’s pretty funny, and a tiny redemption too. Yet - I - don’t - think - they - truly- understand what blissful communion with the internet happens in the aforementioned caves, and I don’t think he fully does. If I didn’t like sex as much as I do, I’d definitely get into it. Now I sound just like the author.
You can call me retarded, but you can never be call me boring. That would be the death of me.
I see someone walk in who reminds me of my high school English teacher, a woman I despised for the way she dressed, cut her hair, the complacency in what she said, laughter, and bad sense of humor. One day she asked me out of the classroom to scold me for wearing a Hysteric Glamour-like DIY hoodie with a female butt on it, saying it was completely unforgivable to bring that into her classroom.
I’m about to visit a few charity shops to complete my Liam Gallagher Halloween look.
Halloween last year was a blast. I remember lying morbidly sick in my bed in New York, greasy hair, corners of my mouth inflamed. I might as well have been dead, without realizing it. Back then I was still smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, which made every day a little bit worse.
I remember being lonely, and reaching out to a beautiful girl who I fell in love with, and soon creating a blissful, harmonious household, which is now over. I think I know why I pulled the trigger last month, but I doubt myself now — maybe because I am immature, and my brain is inflamed. That seems about right. I have learned to trust my doubts retroactively and calculate less; maybe that was the biggest lesson of this relationship. I have sacrificed love for the possibility of a better love, which might never come, a cliche, worn-our, Madame - Bovary - curse. Thank God the universe is static, and we are all holding hands, indefinitely.
This Halloween is a boat party with consistently amazing music. All my favorite DJs gather in uniform euphoria on a rainy night. One of them goes through a tragic experience earlier that day and plays the most chaotic, unhinged set I have ever seen. I chat about hip mobility with some random Australians; suddenly there is a single, shivering haunt that shakes my spirit and makes me go home.
The recent Hollywood Superstar post is hilariously tragic, theorizing why “Contemporary Art Baddies” don’t get laid. I keep wondering if it’s bait or not.
It’s more than clear that the art world is either one big psyop to fuck, or endlessly accumulate symbolic prestige, or both.
If the post is for real — then it is indeed tragic when you hold so much power that men — or whoever else — are afraid to approach you. That is one “first world problem.” Perhaps it is the drive to write such a piece — to theorize yourself, and your peers, into art-world goddesses — which may be the reason why people “stoop down,” that is, go for someone, well, less self-obsessed?
If it’s bait, then it’s wittily Zeitgeist-aligned. A man gains immediate prestige by writing about gooning, and the well-prestigious baddies complain about scaring the bros away. Interesting discourse shift from the “no sex” into extinction, Angelicism-adjacent movement (which has made me roll my eyes for a good three years now).
I have a book character in the works, from two years ago — a woman so obsessed with her prestigious image that she refuses to have sex with anyone below her corporate position, which makes her celibate as she becomes the very head of the company. Her libido is arrested in symbolic structures of power.
The woman finds out about a conspiracy — a secret society that rules over the whole corporation.
That thought itself makes her drunk with lust. She masturbates on her carpet, while twelve white mice dance around her in a circle, and a syncopated Eberhard Weber record spins slowly on a brass, jewel-encrusted record player. Something like that.
I have found myself in an opinion crisis. I have been feeling like I project my personal anxieties onto anything I want to speak about. Maybe that is the very nature of an “opinion”: to confidently force your complexes on other people.
A lot of things feel thrifted lately, instead of made or bought brand new. I mean, conceptually. Except for Reverse Roulette. Also, the only thing that has ever cured me of personal anxieties is private exposure therapy. The prerequisites have always been: doing it on my own, at my own pace, to see things for what they are. It sometimes works!
I enjoy the music world, and surrounding myself with musicians. It’s an earnest crowd. The London men drink pints and talk banter and sports. Yet I know for a fact they would all listen to Taking Back Sunday and get sad and weep (on the inside) when exposed to it.
There is much more authenticity in text read quietly, read out loud, or in text sung to a crowd of introverts — the prom’s peak lonely song. Even when you spot a phony, you can close your eyes into a private daydreaming vehicle (and erase your ex from in front of your eyes).
It feels far superior to the art world, as it has time as an intrinsic part of its logic, and organized time is nothing but an agglomerate of feelings. I never get the same depth of experience from static visual media. Shakespeare said “the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures.” Or something like that. I wonder why “still life” is called “dead nature” in Polish, and I come to learn we had, obviously, borrowed it from the French. FUckkkk
That’s all I remember. I promise. October did not feel as planned. It felt like an escape artist whose prop handcuffs were replaced with real ones. It felt different to write serious essays over winter with the promise of a long summer ahead than now, when the cold and dark days have only just begun. The writing must be seasonal, just like everything in my life is. Make of this thrifted opinion what you will.
I write these words looking at a potato field outside my window, a land worth millions, which the already rich owner has decided to keep, simply as field until the day he dies. I remember how green it was this summer, before the harvest, and I remember how the warm nights felt — the feeling of something so obvious and forever that only things about to end can feel like.
Jean Lorrain, Errant Vice, p.75.
love these memories and i intend to selectively preserve and distort them as needed
how is there only one comment on this
the way in which you’ve organised or rather disorganised the information (which was cleverly/descriptively expounded upon) is phenomenal!! i felt as though i was liquid travelling swirling cylindrically through a funnel until being pressurised into a can of unreposed transition. an existential character albeit but can truly remember quite a bit..
reverse roulette actually sounds much like my 21st birthday, going to the casino by myself, making money without even playing a game.