Health and Safety: A Breakdown

But was I really going to end things with the person I loved the most over weed smoking and dirty dishes? Why not just do the dishes and not make a big deal out of it? I resolved to do so. His depression would pass, and for now I would fix things. We could open a shared bank account and stop worrying about who was spending more. When the pandemic s

Afghanistan. Americans loved an act of cheap, self-congratulatory patriotism as a cover for a botched response, for systemic failure.

I understood it was impossible for any writer to see outside the contours of the history they inhabited. I often thought about Edward Said’s explanation that we still read Joseph Conrad in the twenty-first century not because he had been capable of condemning racism and imperialism but because, as someone trapped within a totalizing ideological sys

That still-nascent stage of our era of New York dance music made a lot of us feel as if we had double lives. Most of us were well-behaved people. We had professional jobs in the city and then we would come home to Bushwick and do drugs and have experiences that people in our larger demographic had no idea were happening, at least not to the depth t

The two conflicts, the closing down the party when he went out and the generation of the black hole on nights when he stayed home, were in fact the same, and rooted in my hatred of being forgotten altogether, and of the way Andrew could simply turn me off in his mind when he needed to. I had no such ability. I was always aware of where he was in ou

The confusing thing was that I liked that he was a stoner. I had an extant teenage fetish for skateboarders; I would be flooded with affection watching him sit in the windowsill, his deep inhales and slow exhales, the soft bubbling of the bong.

The door people, who were functionally anthropologists, had the task of maintaining the vibe while also keeping the club porous enough for the unexpected to happen.

In the beginning I had asked some of my writer friends to come on the nights when Andrew was playing, but they found the music cold and repetitive; they preferred conversations in bars or living rooms. They didn’t stay out all night. They did not see the freedom I saw in music with few lyrics. I sensed their skepticism and their judgment of my incr

The weeks after the book’s publication were filled with interviews where I discussed the pursuit of sexual freedom at the very moment when I was being relieved of its burdens. In my public appearances I spoke as a fraud, because for all of my optimism in the book, which was about my willful search to find meaning and sexual connection while being a