feedback

Hey everyone. I hope you are all doing well. Spring came and went and now we’re back in winter. It snowed several feet yesterday. I don’t know how many because I don’t look at numbers like that.

Do you remember when you were first on painkillers? I’m sure you felt the fog. Some people call it a haze, but I like to think of it like fog. Fog comes from steam. Steam comes from heat. There’s something hot about painkillers. Pain is cold, opium is warm. Do you know how they make medicine out of poppy plants? They cut open poppy buds and harvest the goo that seeps out. It’s thick and sludgy and looks kind of like maple syrup. What happens next is what differentiates fentanyl from heroin from oxycontin from percocet. If you’ve never been on painkillers, you’ve never lived. It’s a lot like death. You have to die to have been alive, or something like that. Painkillers are like microdosing death. You get to experience the release of dying: full body relaxation, absolute dissolution of stress, complete erasure of the possibility of a future. The chemical becomes everything, walls, paint, ceiling, feeling, warmth, body, until it becomes even you yourself. I liked Bulgakov’s book Morphine because it felt like the main character doctor guy truly loved the chemical that destroyed his life. I guess he literally got a taste of his own medicine. I’m rambling again.

Have you heard of Hyperstition Theory? It’s consumed me lately. The idea is that ideas give rise to materials give rise to ideas and onwards et aeternum. Any thought has the potential to become reality. It’s Aristotelian in that way, but what makes Hyperstition unique from the theory of potentiality is the idea that these actualizations can then, in turn, become thoughts, creating a feedback loop which inevitably accelerates and creates the future. When you turn the feedback knob all the way up on a delay (echo) guitar pedal, 100% of the output frequency is fed back into the delay effect, creating an endless loop of creation, process, and re-creation. It’s much like neoplatonic emanation: all things come from the one. Thomas Aquinas said we will return to the one through the process of exitus-reditus, exit-return. I’m rambling again.

What if all things come from you? Right now.

The other day, I sat at the cafe I frequent on weekends trying to work up the courage to ask this cute man I see there from time to time if I could use his computer charger. Instead of asking for the charger and risk revealing that my computer dies and my phone dies and I have these things too and I rely on them just like anyone else and I am not out of space and out of time, but actually a product of the feedback of history, future, and present, I asked him what forum he was vigorously typing comments in. He said it was something to do with the mafia. I was interested because he was cute in this sort of boyish, anxious way, so I asked something about the mafia. He ranted for ten maybe twenty minutes about Montréal’s rich history involving the mafia and mob violence and mob money and all that stuff and I truly enjoyed every word. It’s such a gift to hear someone talk. It’s even more of a gift to hear someone ramble. Once I realized that he too is a human being, a product of feedback, an artifact of time and space, and not some dollish idol for my homo-masochistic worship, he gave me his charger. He was sitting by the door at a high top attached to the front window. The sun was blasting through the maybe nine foot tall windows, so his face reflected clearly, hovering over the street the cafe tucked into. The sun or the clouds or the whole building moved and his reflected face was superimposed over his flesh face, the real deal. I was shaking from the coffee and the homo worship stuff, so it looked like his eyes were jittering over themselves like when you push a bit on your eyelid and your vision doubles, warps, makes little ghosts. 50% opacity, overlay.

I’ve been sending emails to a guy I went out with a few months ago. We went out the week of Valentines day because we were both lonely, but I think really only I was lonely and he was just curious. I took him home and we kissed. Eventually that kiss became sex and he came quick. I thought it was cute that he liked me that much, enough to cum and keep going without question. My whole body shook because his penis was huge and I felt that this must be liturgy and this must be worship. My antique photos, paintings, etc shook above my bed with his thrusts and I was truly unsurprised when he said he couldn’t sleep over. We showered and it was funny the way his body still existed after sex. He smelled like skin and yesterday’s cologne. We’d had several drinks, but I think we were both sober from the adrenaline of good, slow sex. I’ve sent him a few emails since that first date. He replies to some of them with a smattering of pleasantries and laughs at my little jokes and a “I hope to see you around” smiley face sincerely his name. I said, “You say you hope to see me around. If I’m anything, I’m around.” He didn’t reply to that one, so on a particularly lonely evening I sent him another email asking him to go out with me again. I said I’ve been yearning for a good conversation. What I meant to say is that I wanted to feel the kind of excitement I felt when we first met and chatted for however many hours over cocktails. That feeling, the freedom of creating yourself in front of a stranger. That feeling, the feedback loop of mutual desire, mutual attraction, all lubricated by alcohol and perfectly dim lights. In that light, anyone would fall.

He never replied to that last email. That’s to be expected. Afterall, I gave him what he wanted: interest, conversation, drinks, music, body, shower, texts, distance. In that exact order.

I remember looking up at my ceiling in my childhood bedroom, the cobalt blue fairy lights I’d put up to give the space some teenage atmosphere had reflected into stalactite trees. Their shadows weaved a whole blue-black forest. It was hard not to get lost. I’d put on a playlist of music I try not to listen to these days and wait until the lights, shadows, blue, black, music, lyrics, breaths, comforter, skin all became feedback. I woke up at the hospital. I wonder if my brother ever knew I’d steal his cash.

I guess I am trying to separate who I am from who I want to be. To separate who I want from who I want to be. Sometimes my heart feels like an open mic night at a cheap dive bar. It’s really corny, I know, but I think maybe I’m whatever you want me to be. I’ve been sweating through my sheets almost every night. I’m too scared to open a window and let in the cold air. What will I become when the lights are off?

Second Look by Nathaniel Lovett

I was home recently. My sister got engaged to a lovely man from Texas. They are happy together and have a little genetically modified dog they treat like a princess. I flew into Georgia the morning of the engagement, red eye. I’d slept for two, maybe three hours before boarding the plane. The engagement went well. The party was held at my family’s country club. (I know.) My brother brought his girlfriend from up North and everyone asked me where my “partner” was. I didn’t know what to say. One of my family friends asked me why I was single. I told her “I’m just doing my thing.” She said, “You look skinny. What’s your deal?” This kind of talk is normal between rich people and their dissociated teenage entertainment. I said I like to run and she said she’s jealous. “I’d only run if someone was chasing me!” I’d run out of funny things to say by the time my sister and her new fianceée walked through the door. The moment I saw her and him smiling like that I burst into tears. No one else was crying. I was thinking about Leyton, her dead ex boyfriend. I wondered if his mom had already seen photos of the ring. I was so happy for my sister and so sad for all of the dead people. There was an open bar, but the bartender skimped on shots. My gin and tonic tasted like sprite. The champagne wasn’t nearly enough. I kept crying until my head hurt. 

My mom had hired my old piano teacher to play some music with his jazz trio. They played various anonymous standards in the somewhat refurbished “Founder’s Bar” of the country club. The space was adorned with Southern charm, the kind of colonial aristocratic residue the Brits left in the South before they were kicked. My piano teacher showed me photos of his infant son. He was chubby and Jewish and named something chubby and Jewish sounding. Maybe it was the crown moulding or the endless array of paintings of old white dudes, but I felt watched. It was probably all the people watching me.

So I’ve sweat through my sheets again. Things are looking up. My friend says I should start watching TV. I don’t know how to tell her that I believe everything to be true.