SECOND POST

July 2, 2026 · 10:21 PM

I am locked in an endless battle.

Inside me are two wolves: the burning desire to legibilize myself, my experience, name it all plainly, and the terrible deep need to be mysterious, unknowable, and perceived as oracular, unique, crazy, and unknown.

(Both wolves are fucking gay btw)

There’s a high probability that I’m going to try out some different voices, different perspectives, different lenses in this little report.

In my dream world, this is a tight and well-written report, full of incisive and cutting commentary, while also somehow being loving and gentle and warm. It would be somewhat of a gossip blog, a who's-who of five hundred little microscenes, a widely known and loved e-blog, but contain poignant snippets, infohazards, and general points for others to talk about.

Consider: I’m ambitious and I won’t apologize for it. If I went the fully naked, early Internet Blogger Superstar route, it would work. However, this is not without its tradeoffs.

People interact with the Imaginary You they perceive and totally disregard your Real at the best of times. You start a blog like the above, and you give up any chance of not being Always On, not Always Performing in Public.

You don't get to go out to a bar quietly, or hang out with friends without noting it, without obsessively writing it all down, dissociating yourself out of the scene. You only get to be told "omg put me on your blog", only get to interrupt what you’re doing to retreat into the notes app and write some detail down, only get to watch and observe rather than Live In, and then you're on the clout chasing treadmill. I already experience this enough. I am learning to handle it better, but I don’t know that I need to torture myself.

Essentially, I wish both to link and list every single person I spoke to in a day, and also to generalize so highly and protect my information streams so well that I manage to write literally nothing while still being interesting.

I wrote an entire paragraph and then some here about identity, masks, personality, and conflict. It sucked. It was connective tissue that links the previous part to the next, and now I’m struggling to connect the rest.

The natural thing to do here is to segue into an actual report. I’ll start by sort of not starting there.

Once, a dear sweet friend introduced me to someone new by casually remarked that I always have at least one evil eye on me, somewhere, at all times. It is true, I just never realized anyone else noticed.

I have this weird half-baked theory that evil eyes don’t just ward off evil spirits and nefarious energy, they capture and store it. When one of mine breaks or goes missing, it’s because the eye was holding all of the Bad Stuff that it could, but now it’s full and can no longer shield me. This is equal parts superstition and cope for constantly losing my things, but it makes me feel protected.

Tonight I have three and a half evil eye rings on (one is just a bunch of eye-shaped things but the vibe is right so it counts as half), a pair very dangly earrings with evil eyes on them, and a necklace made up of evil eyes. I need all the help I can get.

Yesterday I had some neurosis, and realized I’d gained 10lb since my wedding. In a vaguely-self-harm shaped fit, I upped my dose of tirzepatide to something slightly higher than responsible. I felt OK yesterday, so I think I’ve actually managed to get away with it.

I have many calls, including a really good conversation with my not-Boss, and then another really great conversation with someone that knows said not-Boss. Immediately after the second call ends, my stomach does something terrible.

I end up laying first on the bathroom floor for a while. This turns into me laying down in the shower and not quite wishing for death, but something close. Eventually, I pick myself up and make it outside to my hammock. I can’t really feel the heat, and I stay there, enjoying barely existing.

At 5:45, I realize that I’ve thrown up everything I ate today. I also realize that I have dinner plans with a friend, a niche internet celebrity. Somehow, I pull myself together (probably the seventeen evil eyes), and I make it to dinner.

I tell him the struggle I started this post with. Over comically large bowls of pho, (which is a crazy choice for 100 degrees, but we’re both really happy with it) he says that I should keep it vague and mysterious. You know, keep everyone coming back for more without revealing basically anything. it’s a tricky needle to thread but I see the appeal.

We talk about many other things: consensus reality, scene anthropology, and acceptance that all things must change (necessarily) so that better things can come together. We talk about our plans, our schemes, our sense of what it means to be in a community.

I order a drink with fish sauce in it. Actually, I ordered three different drinks, because I also wanted a Diet Coke and some iced black mango tea. My friend laughs at this, but then joins me in ordering two different drinks. We cheers to the abundance mindset.

I offer up a taste of the Fish Sauce Drink to my friend. He tries it, makes a horrified face, and quickly tries to hide it. I can’t help but laugh, loudly. I like the drink, but it’s objectively not good. I’m grateful for the harshness, and how that makes it difficult to consume quickly. It’s the kind of drink that you are supposed to sip, and frankly it’s too hot for anything else.

Every time it’s hot in the city, the Nick Land bit about heat bounces around my head. Now that I’m home, instead of typing this into the notes app while I’m sweating in the subway, I’ll paste it here:

“Heat.
Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.”

This echoes through my head as I wince walking home. I’m generally uncomfortable: I can feel the heat now, and my sweat is making sure I can feel the wetness, too. My outfit is really cute but my shoes don’t quite fit right. Not in an obviously painful way, but they rub against my skin a little with every single step. It’s not the kind of thing you can discover without having already committed to wearing them, but they suck 15 minutes into a long walk. I had prepared for this with tactical band-aids, but I failed to accurately guard my pinky toes, and by the time I make it home I am almost hobbling.

I slip into something more comfortable, shedding my skin and putting on my digital formless shape, and check in on the various group chat ecosystems. The experiment from yesterday doesn’t quite seem to have caught like the fire I was hoping for. I notice tactical retreats by various parties, and roll a lavender-chamomile-mint joint while consider my next move.

A beautiful woman texts me, telling me she’ll be back in New York soon and suggests a rendezvous. I chuckle while lighting my joint (inside, like a heathen) and hit post.