🍻
Maybe this is played-out in the eyes of anyone who’s spent much time in Lower Manhattan but it’s such a classic for me. Kenka is that wacko Japanese basement off St. Marks that serves a wide range of cheap bites and cheaper beverages — the cheapest prices in the city, for all I fucking know; for an emptywalleted and literally starving type boy such as myself, the prospect of an udon-bowl, a miso soup, a French fry, and an agedashi tofu for about fifteen bucks altogether is so dreamy … beers are a buck fifty, a pitcher of beers is eight. I used to come here with my best friend, who is a very beautiful girl, to play the Drunk Challenge, which is a sort of game where you challenge yourself to drink a pitcher of beer and become intoxicated … those were the days … since her attitude went more-or-less downhill, I mostly just go here by myself now, or sometimes with Patrick. When I’m alone I’ll write out some ideas or reread Tropic of Cancer or another book of that vibrational frequency or get accosted by one of the other drunk men there, which makes me drink faster so I can leave. In fact this is a wonderful thing: the sooner I’m schway, the sooner I can get all impulsive, and at least a few more hours of life are saved from the wasting indecision that has murdered so many of my moments. C’est la fucking vie.
May 10, 2023
Related Recs
I am a liquor & wine salesman. Theoretically, it is my job to go to grocery stores in the dark hours of the morning, schmooze with the lazy eyed manager, & convince him/her to purchase X many cases of alcohol to be displayed at Y location in the store's floor plan. I make the sale by doing free labor around the store for them. Those big displays with dozens of wine cases, the ones where you can just pick up a bottle on a whim, it's a large part of my job to set those up. For every one of those cases on the floor, I make somewhere in the ballpark of 5 dollars/case; this may sound pathetic (it's not not pathetic [not nothing either {50 cases at a single store can net me enough money to buy groceries for a two week period}]), but I’m paid a decent hourly rate & can ostensibly make a good living if I show up consistently, lend a helping hand to the usually decent staff of one of my many stores, etc..Â
lmao
I don't do any of this, that's the thing. I drive to the first store on my route, I clock in on my work phone & the phone takes a real-time snapshot of the location & time of my clock in. I drive back home. I crawl into bed & I fall asleep. I've been doing this for the better part of a year now. Honestly, for the majority of the time that I've worked at this job I haven't done a single thing. I guess that's not entirely true. I've slept in, gone grocery shopping, gone to the gym, laid in my girlfriend’s arms: watched movies, tv, pornography, birds outside my window while my cat would nap in my lap. Cooking, cleaning, it's all so much sweeter, so much healthier when it's on company time. Right now I'm thinking of really tackling Shakespeare. Why not?Â
I know that one day the jig will be up. Either they'll find me out & demand that I change my ways (something I would never, could never do) or fire me. I hope they fire me. God, how I want my fat milksmelling boss to waddle toward me, his pig face full of condescension, relishing the opportunity to finally cut me down to size. Me, leaning against my convertible— sunglasses on, cowboy faced, a real Johnny California ready for a full day of surfing. I’d take a long drag & blow cigarette smoke in his face or spit chewing tobacco/ zyn spit in his eye or attack him with a boxcutter & try to take one or both of his eyelids for myself. Maybe all of the above. I'm really not a sadist or a sicko in the head or an edgelord or anything, but the idea of crucifying him on a steel cross, sticking a spear hooked up to a liposuction machine in his side, and draining him of about 450 lbs is hilarious to me. The lard trickling down into a pit beneath him. When he asks for water give him vinegar. & when he's had enough & I've made him beautiful forever, I’d pull the lever & lower him into the boiling vat of his own fat. This makes me laugh a lot.
One of these days it’ll end. I’ll start law school or get a real job or get hit by a car & in my post-concussed state somehow be recalbirated to enjoy work. But for now, I’m going back to sleep. It’s 10:53 in the morning for crying out loud
Apr 25, 2024
🍻
stella in sips when i’m in love and happy about it. tequila in full gulps when im in love and sad about it. rum and coke when im in love and angry about it. twisted teas when im in love and trying to forget about it. sapporo when im in love and ready to be over it. vodka and club mixers when im in love and afraid of it. white wine when im in love and too proud to admit it. juneshine when im in love and ready to be poetic about it. soju for when it comes creeping back in. warm beers once it’s crept back in. unspecified beer pong potions when i’m still trying to figure out how i feel about it. i wrote this on the toilet while dressed like a 2010s scene kid. drinking smirnoff ice and trying to figure out how i feel about it.
Jun 3, 2024
🍸
When I was a cocktail bartender I got drunk with Ian McKellen and drunkenly danced around the room with my friend to Jeff Buckley and was fed tequila from a bottle while on my knees while Sean Mathis cheered. They were in the private bar all night and only tipped £60 for two of us, which considering their bill seemed a little off, but I guess the story is a good one so it’s worth it.
Apr 18, 2024
Top Recs from @saoirse-bertram
🌅
Bring forth to mind, if you will, the ill-fortuned Orpheus; Odysseus, ill-fortuned but cruel- and cleverest-enough to make it forward; now lovely Inanna; loving Dante; Fritti and Ida and so many other brothers and sisters; so many poems, songs; yes, meet me tonight in Atlantic City; I’m in love with a dying man, yes, yes; now the post-midnight train to Coney Island, smiling in the summer, tears in November; a minivan to Cape May one grey day; prison-taxi down to Long Beach with the sun coming up; one thousand leaps into the East River and the Danube and the Seine and then… this is just what comes to mind. Oil pipelines. Black licorice. Oh, coincidentally, have you yet read the fiction-piece One Hundred by brilliant blonde Zans Brady Krohn? (printed, of course, in Heavy Traffic 1 — where else?) Yes, that too comes to mind, naturally, yes, I think so… Terrific story. Atlantic City story. So, katabasis story. In more ways than one, really … And following: certain buildings, certain seasons of mood. I’m running dry. Greenlight on the edge of the dock. Absinthe and stolen vodka. “Curiousity killed the cat, satisfaction brought it back.” That’s half anabasis. I’m just spitballing. Trying to remember.
May 10, 2023
🪺
Bereft of a true home, I dwell instead in sentiment and practice the collection of numerous small tokens thereof: an olive-pin, a tea-tag, a berry-shell, a fortune. I treasure the incitement of memory brought about by these little markers in time-passed, as I do that incited by the more obvious strains: postcards and Polaroids and locks of hair … and these too I try to accumulate, these too light me! But perhaps what is most meaningful is the undisplayable — that which is gone — letters received and lost, letters writ and never sent and lost; a poem misplaced in the loose-leaf of a moulting notebook. A garland of flowers or bouquet that remains only in a blurred photograph; a collection of photographs drowned in a flood. Since my adolescence, some of most beautiful pictures I’ve made on my cameras have been the nonexistent — the mechanisms failed or my Nosferatuesque fingers blocked the lens or or the memory card betrayed me or the film was overexposed through actions entirely beyond control — yes, the most beautiful, I say! It is just so. I can picture them all behind my eyes in perfect clarity — so so beautiful — as beautiful as the flowers that nevermore will fragrance a room and all those words which forevernow lay unread. I can’t speak exactly to the wider benefit of this “recommendation”. But somehow this is the sort of thing that makes me happy.
May 10, 2023
〰️
There’s a limited selection of poets that can move me to tears without even reading through their stanzas but allowing the recollection of their words to pass over my mind — the aforementioned Bachmann is one of the real ones, T.S. Eliot is another; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on occasion; sometimes-too Hölderlin, Herbert, Hadewijch; at least one Donne piece has this power, at least one Brecht; perhaps-too I would add cuttings of Young’s Literal Translation of the Holy Bible — contemporarily, the lines of Paris Reid, an absolutely gorgeous young Canadian I discovered several years ago (her first published prose piece can be found in the most recent Heavy Traffic) certainly effect this movement upon me time and again … who else? — well, the only other living writer to fall on this list, and quite honestly my most exalted favourite of all-above, should be obvious to anyone who knows me … yes, yes, of course: singer slash poet slash emotional-genius Lana del Rey, my personal saint and hero … truly, her words either brought to sound or put to page surpass the Scripture to me and this I would not say if I did not mean it violently. She has held aloft my life: she is probably the third factor to my continuance. You know — as I type this — I can hear the lyrics to Venice Bitch, perhaps the greatest lyrical song ever written (though a strong case could too be made for Video Games!) echoing within and my vision swims — so overcome with emotion am I! Good God. My friends, it’s unbelievable. And everything she does is fantastic, of course, but lately I have been really been spiralling about in her demos and bootlegs and regional exclusives dating around the release of Ultraviolence, her third studio album. Pray listen; I’ll leave you with this. Say Yes To Heaven: breaks my heart. Fine China: breaks my heart. I Talk to Jesus: well, you know, onward and onward, from here to eternity…
May 10, 2023