..Disappear into beauty, the desert whispered to me at the beginning of World War III.
***
..Profane disciples of Jodorowsky, we promised to be each other’s spiritual warriors.
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..There are spiritual weapons the powerful will never know, Zosie said.
***
..In the hot tub at our Airbnb outside Joshua tree, H asks how we would kill ourselves. They’re always asking questions like that. Questions about death, depression, sex, the body: the horror and humor of the world. I forget what Maya and I answered. H wanted the most painful, the most spectacular death possible. To drink boiled tobacco, to tear apart their insides. H was telling us about how their ex-husband was a Nazi now, or had become a Nazi and chilled out a little bit (now he was just a Christian). Maya said they liked Alex Jones as an artist. On our walk in the desert the next day the two of us talked about the difference between extremism and the appreciation of extremism, how Maya loved people who devoted themselves to just one thing, one form, one idea. And then they just become that, they said. But the two of us were more vague, dreamy. Maya felt they had no form, that reality would disintegrate. They laughed at everything to stave off the self-loathing around the corner. They lived in Tlön, and felt they were among the only ones to notice that objects were disappearing from the world. People, too. In the hot tub they told us about how Alex Jones had a coffee brand and was inadvertently buying coffee from the Zapatistas. How do you know it was inadvertent?, I asked. Maybe he’s a Third Positionist who believes in allying with indigenous anarcho-communists in the apocalyptic battle against the Jews and Lizard People. The next day, in our walk among the Space Age campers and futuristic flora of the surrounding landscape, we talked how we liked and didn’t like the desert people. Maya had grown up around hippies, hippies and Nazis (who were sometimes both), on their mom’s pot farm in –. They’d had enough of these survivors and rejects, these schizos and ideological magpie manics, for one lifetime. And yet, they rooted for their autonomy. As we were talking about them we saw a middle-aged man, some kind of Odinist and probably a veteran, blasting black metal and training with nunchucks and a bō staff. Then Maya’s mind drifted back to coffee and they started telling me about an anti-Semitic coffee brand called Black Rifle Coffee Company owned by veterans. It’s the official coffee of the far right, they said. Do they buy from the Zapatistas, too?, I asked. They probably do, they said.
***
..I’m listening to leftist talk radio and a very excited schizo calls in talking about how a tank battalion is flying the Soviet flag outside the city of Mariupol. He knows the names of seemingly every Russian general, as if he were a history buff or board game enthusiast talking about the Second World War. He thinks the fact that this tank battalion is flying the Soviet flag means that the world hegemons are no longer in control, that the situation has spun out of control, that the falcon cannot hear the falconer, that the Soviet Union has been resurrected, that world communism is on the march, that the Battle of Kursk was being fought once again, or rather never ended. What does this mean?, he keeps asking the hosts. They seem nonplussed. I don’t think any world leader controls every single tank battalion. I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, one of them says. I’m talking about Mariupol, in Ukraine, a real place not a rhetorical place, the caller says. I’m talking about the New World Order and the End of History, how that’s all over now. What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
***
..I’m driving home in the Tehachapi mountains. Maya’s asleep in the back seat. H asks me when I first knew I was queer. Then they ask me if I only fuck hot people. I don’t know how to answer that. I’ve fucked a lot of people, for all sorts of reasons, I say. But yes, generally, I like to fuck hot people, or people I think are hot. They say that they like to fuck hot people, but they like to fuck ugly people even more. Or rather, they think ugly people were hotter than hot people. Earlier they told me their go-to porn to get off was nasty, fat old men fucking hot young girls. The older, the fatter, the nastier the better. I like it when they have to struggle to get their dick in because they’re so fat. Maya also found this really hot. But for some reason, they said, I only fuck fat women, not fat men, in real life. H says they can only feel attraction towards friends, towards their minds. One of my friends said the phrase “the sex I give” and I fell in love with her, I went home and masturbated to those words. Later when Maya’s awake we discuss taboos, if we have any. In general, we have very few. But I find it appalling that they would cum in someone’s urn, in their ashes (unless that was a sacrament the dead person had requested). It’s just ashes, just shit, both of them said. Are you religious? No, I say, but I don’t think life ends after death, or not quite in that way. On the other hand, I was okay with breastfeeding a baby while fucking. Individuation begins gradually, I say, the metabolic universe of a mother and child preexists and outstrips the concept of consent. H was okay with pregnant sex, but not with the post-natal scenario. It’s interesting, they said. Your taboo revolves around death and mine around life, the beginning of life. I wonder what this says about us.
..While Maya’s asleep, H tells me that when they were in high school they fantasized a lot about being a school shooter. I’m not a violent person, but I was so tired of being treated like shit for being fat and brown. I needed them to understand what they were doing to me. I say it makes sense, it was only natural. You can’t strip people of dignity and expect them not to fight back, in the same way they would for water, food, housing, land, etc.
..When Maya wakes up they tell us about “lot lizards,” the sex workers of the desert. It becomes an image I can’t get out of my mind. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about lot lizards, as if I were one of them, and that was the life I’d been living all along, without knowing it, while dreaming up this life, this nightmare.
***
..Sometimes I think I knew Maya in another life, or that they’re an ancestor returning to tell me a joke. Sometimes their face looks like an Easter Island moai to me.
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..World War III started so I went to the desert.
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..Desert, will you teach me to sing your sweet song?
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..It’s R’s birthday. She’s turning thirty-one. It’s been ten years since we first met. I don’t wish her a happy birthday. She eyes me like a pisces when I am weak…
***
..What does it mean that I often date women with no incest taboo? (Specifically around the sibling relation). Is this somehow related to my childhood Anne Frank fetish? Is it wrong to sexualize the Holocaust (Industry)? Am I Anne Frank in this fantasy, or her S.S. predator, or her quiet, dreamy companion in the attic, or maybe the self-sacrificing one who hides her? Do I want to be saved? (No). Do I want to be a martyr? (No). Well, then, what do I want? (Sex in the desert, the search without finding, the end of the fucking world).
***
..What did Bernie know when he watched Melancholia over and over again on the 2020 campaign trail? Did the little Menshevik also have eschatological dreams?
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..I shouldn’t call Bernie a little Menshevik. He probably has a big dick.
***
..Someone suggested to me that AryanGirl88 is a quiet, pretty Juilliard student, a pianist with a secret life or a fun side hustle as a raceplay findomme. When her friends go to bar Clandestino to do coke with the heirs of the New York City finance-media elite, she stays home to practice her Debussy and logs on to masturbate to extreme, dehumanizing racism. Something out of Haneke’s The Piano Teacher: the domineering mother, the sadomasochistic frenzies, the frozen sea inside her, etc. At night, she dreams of a different life, or its photographic negative. I talk to a trans boy online who wants to be an actor. We talk about Bertolucci’s films and they tell me they’re cutting calories and throwing away their hormones. Is this a game? I don’t know. There are pangs of guilt and panic, and I want to tell them how much they matter, that they’re loved, etc. But then the game would be over, and sometimes the game is a refuge of infinite feeling in a world that doesn’t give a shit about you. A girl comes to visit me and she wants to be kept in the closet for the entire weekend, as a comfort woman. Amelia, the communist daughter of Michoacán field workers, jerks me off languidly and tells me the cruelest and most intimate things about myself, the part of me that’s never been touched, until I cum and break down sobbing. Alison, a sober ex-punk and mom in her late forties, wants to relive her sexual assault, down to the most traumatic detail, while I tell her how much she deserved it: when she cums, it’s a howling orgasm, like a dying animal glimpsing the abyss. We go to the very edge, sometimes we go over the edge, in the search of feeling, a kind of emotional interoception. Is all this ickiness ok? Am I ok? Am I loved? Yes, no, yes, no? And then of course there’s the desire for a little freedom, and to be someone else for awhile. And just the desire to get off, to be twisted for its own sake. I become obsessed with a girl I hooked up with in August (a Ukrainian who talked to me about Soviet imperialism before we started making out), who didn’t want to see me again. I look at photos of her and try to become more like her. I want to make an altar to her. I want to give in to the obsessions I’m not supposed to have. Creep, tranny stalker, fetishist, I hear someone saying. But it’s all in my head, pace certain online astrologists, who claim masturbating non-consensually to someone is rape on the astral plane. I cum to my most shameful memories until shame stops making sense, and memory, too. I cum until I forget who I am. Until I can be alone, without my double breathing down my neck.