Nov 20 25
I think I should have picked summer to try to start the diary up again. I feel sluggish and morose lots of the time. Forcing myself to be outside of the house as much as I can manage helps, but mental health is not a perfect science. Its dark and I feel uninspired. I’m also more liable to think of the substack as malignantly pointless, and also embarrassing, obnoxious, bordering on immoral. I think it may be caustic to the one’s humanity to have a blog, a patreon, a letterbox, an instagram, certainly a twitter account. And yet here we are again, dear reader.
The other day I was walking to meet my friend’s dad for the first time at the Met and I was passing by the rows of hot dog vendors and a man was holding his hot dog aloft, shaking it in the vendor’s face. He said “You call this a hot dog?!?!” and then said something about the quantity of mustard. I couldn’t make out if he expected more or less mustard, but he was absolutely outraged about how far off the mark the hot dog vendor had been when applying the mustard. The grit of New York city on full display right next to its iconic Central Park.
In the Met we saw the
This is where I stopped writing. I saw the Man Ray show at the Met, so presumably that is how I was going to finish the sentence, but unfortunately the sentence and ensuing paragraph has been lost to the sands of time. I started this entry on the 13th, and I have no recollection of the events of the last week. Theres currently a brutal miasma poring over New York City, though I fear I alone am aware. I’m leaving an AA meeting I was just at which ended in a brawl- half of the alcoholics throwing their chairs and coffee cups at the other alcoholics. The church basement was desanctified. Someone chased someone else around with a flask trying to force them to relapse. Afterwards we all smoked cigarettes in the cold and noone mentioned what had happened.
I’m on the train now and a man is holding himself up with the hand-holds- passing himself along down the train car like they were monkey bars- but not in the manner of showtime, but rather slowly, like a sloth eating leaves and dawdling about. If you squint you can make out a bare transcluscent haze tinted impossibly green-red. A faint acrid smell is present just above the normal acidic smell of the city and of human bodies.