offstage II: not really poems
More experiments in writing and sharing
Thoughts and Feelings, April-May 2025
Topics: Vanity/Cultural Vanity, Time (duh), Artificial Intelligence/Nature, Anxiety(?), Music, (Identity Politics?), and such.
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People and their unbelievable bodies casually satisfying their orbits around me.
I’m always outside a coffee shop.
People and their beautiful faces pass in front of me. I had to adjust my hair so many times before leaving home and then again after. The cap and the headphones, you know? How the hair spills out? The concept of hat hair.
Crazy to think Joni Mitchell can sound like a long drive, how Phoebe’s specificity taught me new ways to be vulnerable in my sharing, how Lana covered For Free and tangentially wrote Venice Bitch, which feels like the ultimate road trip. California. California. Canada. Paris, Texas. Lafayette Street and East 4th. La Colombe. I hate milk alternatives. Juhu, Mumbai. Bombay. Woodstock. NYU. I’m headed to Tisch. I graduated a year ago. Time is happening and refusing to be abstract. Apple Music is back. For me, not necessarily for the culture. Spotify’s algorithm started being too dishonest for me last year.
♭
I’ve been struggling with the humanization of AI because I think it defeats its utility. And now I’m reading a book about how animals understand death, and it’s explaining to me the anthropocentric biases in our understanding of other animals’ capacity to have characteristics of intellect and emotion, and it’s gagging me because it’s sort of aligns with how I feel about a polar opposite to nature. Artificial Intelligence. Intelligence based on and from humans/human understanding. I don’t think we can understand Nature or AI till we learn how to stop attributing human characteristics to things that are not human.
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Oh no, something in my understanding of vanity is shifting! Everyone is so stupid! But something clocking the ugliness has revealed to me more about myself than it is about society at large. So I’m not trying to wax about how people should and shouldn’t behave. I am just perplexed and meditating. I certainly have no more of an accurately calibrated moral compass than the next animal or contemporary homosapien counterpart.
Cultural vanity is superseding true diverse unity at an alarming and counterproductive rate. How do I tell you that you are more than you think you are without sounding like I’m trying to say to you that you aren’t?
I’ve been afraid of my vanity because I’ve conflated it with the idea of self-image. I don’t mind being a peacock or catching my reflection in every surface. I don’t think that’s evil vanity. But I’m finding a deep malignancy with the centering of self and identity at the center of self and identity. Maybe it’s because they’re inseparable. I’m investigating. Can’t say I know much about much. I had been afraid to be selfish for so long. Passive selfishness. Then I tried more actively to be selfish in some sort of self-love hurrah. It worked for a while. It works to a degree.
But how is it that I find or feel that it’s becoming more and more common to center our identities around things beyond our control? Things we would BE regardless of what we DID. I like boys at a baseline, not a punchline. I am queer at a minimum not maximum. I was born where I was born. Who caaaares. Whole skyscrapers of life sprout, but the soil is the point of interest?! The foundation of the building is the showstopper? I have to live my life through and as the things I cannot control? But I don’t know what I’m complaining about. I guess at least I can’t say I don’t care.
YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE NOW WHAT?!
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I just need a second to breathe
I am just a little frenzied
There’s sun on the other side of the street
And my favorite overpriced coffee shop behind me
I don’t want to get into a habit of reconfiguring my fuck ups into okay-things
I don’t want to miss out on opportunities this purposefully
There’s a strangeness in my calmness, but it’s what’s keeping me together
The sun inches to my side of the pavement, but hasn’t yet breached the threshold of where it would reach me
So it’s cold in the wind but it’s not so bad
And I can’t see too well because the sun’s in my eyes
And the sun’s all I’ve wanted
But I’m perched instead
On this black high chair
And all my old selves.
Calm presented itself to me at the strangest stage
In the eye of my chronic panic.
Maybe it was the thickening of a lobe or
a 50g potential placebo
I recently befriended calmness and we make an odd couple
In my calm I found some strange
But strange is always familiar
when calm was always stranger.
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Forgot to pay my phone bill and now I’m forced to confront the firefighters in front of Vita Cafe with me.
Firefighters smoking cigarettes on a fire truck and I’m vaping in front of them.
Yesterday the sun was out and it was so hot and a couple emerged and perched on the lowest fire escape across the street.
I hate sitting right in front of the entrance to the Cafe, but it’s the only seat open to me right now. It’s not so warm. I’m dressed like it is. Today feels more like the reality of NYC than yesterday. Yesterday was idyllic. But also it really was too hot. Both are the reality of NYC, surely.
Woke up super early, slept without eating dinner, with my contacts in, with the AC off, and my blanket on the floor at the foot of my bed. I finally dropped off my laundry but my house is still a mess. Last time’s laundry is still not put away properly. I vacuumed a little. I forgot ChatGPT required the internet so I had to ask them for the WiFi two years after Vita Cafe became my everyday coffee place.
✨If you enjoyed offstage II, consider reading offstage I!
The last one was more poetry-y IMO, if you’re into that kinda stuff.
love the poetry-y stuff