Reichstag fire

But the separation from our friends and our scene took a strange toll. The more time we spent alone together the more isolated I became from Andrew. Among the roses and the sunlight life took on a surreal and timeless quality. The days were repetitive and featureless and I had trouble thinking of anything to write about.

“When everything around you is a machine then you become a machine,” James said, a sentence that I knew, as soon as I heard it, would continue to echo around my mind for years.

problem. I would be tasked with completing a particular assignment as a journalist, which demanded in the writing the adoption of a tone of authority and a focus on information. But in every journalistic assignment there would be a parallel experience, the real one, which would have been far easier to write about but useless for the task of

the hangover acted as a reducing valve that made it easier to focus and write. Occasionally blowing my mind with drugs had the consequence of focusing my thinking to a single channel instead of multiple ones, such that I could concentrate with rare intensity.

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

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

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