Death and text threads
north hollywood 2025
I get a third email in as many hours. It’s the longest one, and least coherent (so far). I decide it’s time to step outside for air.
I’m muttering unhinged conclusions to myself. Geriatricisms like, ‘god they really breed a certain delusion in this generation,’ and ‘get a fuckin job already.’
I pass you the j. You like smoking it down to the crutch. Waste not, want not. You exhale a long smoke stream and it clings to the air. I hate this block. People dump their shit on the street. Reject furniture. A set of tires. The ugliest couch you’ve ever seen.
I’ve convinced I’m carrying around an ancient curse. Sure that this is actually paranormal stalking- a ghost from culture wars past. Specters of tumblr warriors seem to have wormed into my brain to make a sick little nest to perch in. There’s always someone out for their pound of digital flesh.
‘Yeah, I think they have some issues they need to work out…’ you say with a certain grim resolve.
My phone dings again. Another message. It’s shorter this time but no less embarrassing. I feel the paralyzing flood of id wash over me. A tropical storm personality ripping through the ether ready to consume anything in its path. An engine running on certain, holy disdain.
I dig my nails in at the crown of my head. Press down into the scalp. Scratch the phantom itch. My nervous system is frayed from exposure and my body feels like it’s one big scab to pick at.
‘It’s like emotional kamikaze.’ I mumble.
‘Ok, problematic.’
Leave the gun take the iphone. I wish there were an app I could blow my brains out with. Access to a smart phone doesn’t make you smart. You wouldn’t give a child the keys to a car and have them test drive it around the valley would you?
Ding. Another ‘have you seen this?’ from another person dragged into the bog of eternal narcissism.
I want to scrub my brain and wash the saturation off. This caked on series of words. I feel like I’ve been drowned in bird shit that’s baked over in the pacific heat. Maybe that’s the intention. Punishment by inbox. No formal sentencing, just the slow extraction of time and energy. A parasite feeding on division, attention, frustration. All publicity is good publicity.
‘Maybe you should unplug for the rest of the day…’
‘I had this thought about General MacArthur.’ I tell you as we zip past the Sherman Oaks Whole Foods just before the on ramp to the freeway. I hate this part of town.
‘Sexy.’
Your standard response to my non-sequiturs.
‘Were there any other supreme commanders or was it just him?’
Upon reflection none come to mind.
‘I’ve been driving past MacArthur park a lot lately. I’m not, you know, a fan...’
‘All right. So what about him?’
‘You know he’s got that quote, the core, the core, the core.’
‘Do you know that because it’s a line from The Sopranos?’
‘Yes, but it’s a valid avenue to spark discourse.’
I get on the freeway heading south into the sensory overload of the suburbicaust that is West LA.
‘McArthur really made PTSD look so hot. He really sucked on that pipe.’
‘I’ve been notice all these people obsessed with religious mantra? Like god, uncle sam, supreme commander or whatever... You think that’s why people join churches? It’s like, Jesus help me I’m desperate for two seconds where I don’t have to be myself… Or, you know… Something like that.’
We crest over the 405 past Mullholand and remember the year this canyon burst into flames.
‘Mmm, fuck that guy…’ you trail off.
Sometimes our conversations dead end like this. Neither of us know how to wrangle the train of thought into anything decisive. No digestable message or throughline. Instead it spins into subtextual nonexistence, even though you know the exact feeling I’m getting at.
‘It’s like this place.’ I say gesturing to valley around on us, the collection of malls, high rises, office buildings.
‘Like when people say they’re from LA. They live in LA, they love LA. But they don’t even really fucking know the place. For years they can live two minutes from some place with absolutely no idea it even exists. It’s always where’s frogtown? Or what’s Winnetka? It’s not a city it’s a cult.’
You give a deep sigh and go back to looking at your phone.
I sit inside as the dust begins to really kick up outside. The weather service predicting a possible ‘life threatening’ wind event.
At the bar I’m on damage control already. Everyone on my phone is angry. It’s a tsunami of animosity, bearing down without prejudice. I find myself just another rock face against the rogue, taking shots for my sins.
There’s a pod of killer blue whales all screeching rage through the seas of text.
‘The worst person I’ve ever met’
I stack this label up in my mind over and over. Swapping through faces of the people from my life that might fit the bill. The overlapping attributes of the true shitheels I’ve met in my time. The monologues of self righteousness from braindead narcissists still taking up too much of my brain’s memory space.
Hyperboles keep merging into new, more hyperbolic hyperbole. The sights and sounds and effort all become a one lane highway blurring at fiberoptic speeds. It sounds like we might be looking at the same thing, but it’s impossible to tell. Versions of the same thing, certainly. Overlapping details on the wheel of fortune grinding us into a paste, trying to make sense from the compost heap.
As the temperature drops and the draft makes the muscles in my neck contract, I strongly contemplate becoming a monk. As I stare at my inbox, text chains, dm’s I wonder, is this the only way I exist anymore? In a spiral of forced digital correspondence between people I would have nothing to do with if we could pull the clocks back 75 years?
I don’t want to be stuck in the digital afterlife together.
Hard to know when to use the word ‘occupation.’
Maybe it’s not. Armored vehicles barrel past. There’s 50 guys in military combat getups and 15 horse mounted stormtroopers on that opposite bridge. Feels fitting as I stare blankly at the stockpile of firepower the city has on flamboyant display.
I read an anecdote about the LAPD exploiting the 84 olympics to steal a plot of land in Elysian park and I’m disappointingly unfazed. Not particularly shocking to learn about another LA land injustice.
I wonder if I can apply this tempered set of expectations to other scenarios. It’s really no one’s fault but my own that I’m getting so worked up over an inevitable conclusion. I presume a baseline of self awareness that is woefully niave. I don’t enjoy the nihilistic destitution, but maybe it’s a better alternative to the motion sickness that comes from spiraling out? I should just assume the worst and save the fuckin headache.
When I think the flood of cop cars might finally slow to a drip it just continues unceasing, unrelenting, on and on and on up sunset boulevard into some presumed bastion of decay, some masturbatory temple to the gods of authority. The pulsing stream of red and blue lights seem to set me into a hypnotic state, and suddenly I’m back at home with the memory of this never-ending snake slithering towards downtown.
When I regain awareness I seem to have materialized on my familiar spot on the couch, phone compulsively in hand. The screen flashes another batch of sentences that make such little sense my head hurts and a swarm of lights flash behind my eyelids and sirens ring in my ears.
When I die delete my google drive.
No one needs to see the desperation, the misapprehension, the middling prose. The world has a lot going on, and no doubt it’s headed towards even more calamities.
When I die blow up my substack. I don’t need anyone glimpsing through the void and remember what an insufferable drag I was. What a blathering nimrod I could be.
Take our texts and throw them into the digital incinerator. Do the stoic widow routine and let my bloated thoughts have a final resting place so no one has to read through the murk.
When I go I’ll be tired of the cosmic game of chicken. I should dump the fuckin screen now and end it early. I can slip away into nothing, and you can forget how much nothing I was to you.
No matter what I’ll find a way to overthink the beyond, convince myself I’m an asshole from the grave. A panicked spirit hand-wringing about the right thing to say. The proper and respectful way to haunt my enemies.
Bury me with the drama. Spare everyone the tawdry details.
Give me the big unplug. The permanent clearance. I want to commit to the silence and float away in the ocean of 1’s and 0’s.