Happy New Fear

It’s 2025 and I’m still gay and on Wellbutrin. I haven’t written on here since August. Not that you care. Or maybe you do. Maybe each day you’ve been waiting for me to fire up the ol’ ‘stack and hurl my word spaghetti against a window and watch the red sauce drip for twenty minutes or so — an hour at most — until you take a wet rag and wipe it off your brain to make room for something more important. There are theatrics in absence and I love drama. I love don’t like leaving a mess, but this time I did. I liked leaving garbage up on the window. I liked that no one was there to clean it away. It stayed on the glass until days became weeks becomes months. It hardened in the cold winter sun until ants got to it and began dismantling the red wreckage of my insides, bit by bit, until nothing remained. A dark ring of tomato crust. A desperate handprint at a crime scene.

I’ve been busy, you see! I promise I do things. I live in Los Angeles and do things with my days, just like everyone else. Famously a city of people with jobs. Something has shifted in LA, I’ll say that much. And for the better. I mean that. I wouldn’t say there’s been a vibe shift because I am an adult, but it does feel like there’s been a reckoning here. Collectively so. Like we all stewed on it in our sleep each night. Somewhere, in our furthest, interstellar psyches, we made LA good again. Well, it’s not actually good. I don’t know if it ever was. But it’s beautiful. I feel certain in that. It doesn’t feel like we all are all walking around in the early stages of carbon monoxide poisoning anymore. At least for now. Or maybe I've simply had a reckoning. I have reckoned with California and accepted it. Accepted is better than resigned. Resigned is better than disappeared. To disappear into California is a terrible thing. It’s my greatest fear. But I have simply come to terms with the fact that I live here and that’s okay. I had a brief and seismic fixation on moving back to New York this fall. My husband, too, shockingly. He’d told me countless times that he’d never live there, but there we were in Manhattan in late September, seeing the sun on every street corner. Our burn to pack up our dog and move east—mostly colored by a genuinely euphoric week in Fire Island that same trip— petered out quietly over the next month. It wasn’t New York, it was LA. In this essay I will share How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love LA. I’m kidding. I don’t love LA, but I know it’s my home.

Out of everywhere I’ve ever been, here I am. When I look up into the hills at night —their silhouettes snaking around the city; the light pollution from the valley beyond it spilling over just enough for you to pretend you’re not alone — I love it.

Yesterday I went to a screening of “The Brutalist” alone and saw some nice gays I know socially before it started. I accidentally knocked one of their popcorns to the ground while gesticulating and didn’t immediately want to kill myself and felt comforted by progress. Still, I bought him a new popcorn because I want to be beloved. I liked the movie but there was an intermission and it threw me off. I started getting anxious and then left 20 minutes after the “second act” of the movie began. I drove home feeling like a simpleton. I’ll watch the rest when it’s streaming like a good little pig.

Last night when I was driving to Rite Aid at 10 pm and a coyote ran across the street in front of my car on an otherwise empty Hollywood Blvd, I thought, ‘Cute!’ At that same Rite Aid where most of the shelves are cleared out in the crushing avalanche of Amazon and near-bankruptcy, and the shelves that hold things are kept behind anti-theft cases and look like museum archives, I had to ring a bell so an employee can unlock it for a pack of Mucinex that they don’t trust me not to steal, and I followed that same employee on a death march to the register where I wasasked to show my ID before purchasing it because some customers “abuse Mucinex,” I thought ‘Only in LA!’

Rite Aid only exists in LA. I’ve decided to make that fact. Don’t tell me otherwise.

I learned to stop worrying about LA and start worrying about the end of the world. I don’t think the world is ending, but I do think it’s sputtering. People always talk about post-apocalypse, but what about perma-apocalypse? Where the world is always ending but can’t commit to doing it. It just keeps going. It edges eternity and oblivion at once, until nothing makes sense anymore and no one believes anything or anyone and we go insane and decide to pull the plug ourselves and finally cum. Humanity desperately needs to cum at all times and can’t. Humanity is chaffed and in a compression wrist brace from fapping in vain. ICBMs don’t help. Neither do drones spraying thermite. Or bird flu. Or elderly Congress members falling down marble staircases. Or mass starvation. Or centibillionaires with 12 children. Or Boeing. Or Bethenny Frankel. But I don’t think this is the end, which is almost worse. I think it’s the beginning of the beginning of the end that will never come. But if it’s never really over, it can’t be that bad. Right? Didn’t Katy Perry say that? Where is Katy Perry? I saw her at the Charli XCX concert hanging over the railing and taking videos of the performances on her phone. It made me kind of sad. I want things to be good for her. I do. I know she’s friends with Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos, though, so she definitely has a spot in their bunker when the time comes. I guess I’m not that worried for her. She probably did Ibogaine therapy in Mexico during the holidays and is feeling better about things.

Celebrities are so random now. The Golden Globes were last night, and everyone seemed like they were on Ketamine. Aside from a few people, no one really said anything when they accepted their awards. Some made coded illusions to the incoming Trump presidency. Others referred to “turbulent” matters around the world, or something. Network-approved murk. “I know people are scared.” Okay. Thank you. The future is murk. The end of the world is vague.