You’re the one that keeps me from feeling satisfied. It was a line in a film, typically French and mid-budget, with the same actors you see doing the rounds in these mid-budget French films, littered with the kind of all too earnest sex scenes that border on the ridiculous, and are not erotic in the least, but I found myself doing a voice piece out of it, this line, into my phone, thinking it could have been yet another album title, running it over, you’re, the one, that keeps, me from feeling…, sa…, rearranging the syntax, troubling the intonation, and seeing where that took me, until it took me into seventeen hours of daylight, where I am now, and in the film the line comes from a French author but I did not catch who, because I had lost all interest by that point, and when I Googled it, I got Hamilton’s “Satisfied” off Broadway, and no other relevant results, and Moondog is on the other tab and it is the third of June and so I’m counting the months until my birthday, how can this be?, my birthday, coming around again? Already? Moondog, the God of DIY, wandering around NYC and standing on corners selling his broadsheets, blind and homeless, out of step, out of time, most thought him mad, now he’s a genius, and so it goes, the tube, rumbling through my bones, checking my stats, and ‘revenue’, hallucinating lost summers, laughter floating out of the open window and down the street, getting broken into, but it was summer anyway, and they were opportunists, B.O., and the general stink of it all, the thing is, we even like it, this non-space, non-time, nobody on your back until you get off, looking down, or across, or anywhere, but at each other, watching someone nod off, or studying someone’s face, expression, I read a quote the other day that said most people die at 25 but live till 70, cross my legs, craning their necks into their phones, why am I the only one looking up?, again?, gaming, stock exchange-ing, emailing, reading, scheduling, DM’ing, streaming, content providing, Wordle-ing, Pornhub-ing, all those dead eyes sailing down the line, that night I went round and round on the circle line until I sobered up—the mystery of the night bus, Les Dennis drowning his sorrows in Café Nero, Karl Marx’s grave (before you had to pay), Sting just down the road, what am I even doing here?, (I don’t belong here), the sun emoji, 19 degrees and climbing, a soft breeze, blowing, under my lilac cotton dress and all the wild flowers—seeded, the barely there breeze, between my legs.
What I’m reading.
Filterworld (2024) by Kyle Chayka, London: Bloomsbury.