..The weeks went by in a fog, a kind of stupor. All I wanted was to enter the mystic dream of winter. I slept well for the first time in many years, because I had given up. I read the works of Margaret Killjoy. I saw clients, and almost no one else. I became online friends with L, a trans Maoist leather dyke from Portland with an encyclopedic knowledge of lesbian history, BDSM, and ultra-left guerrilla sects from the 1970s. I read her manifesto on trans woman separatism, which was startling, though I neither agreed nor disagreed with it (except for the part about how trans women would never find love, which I agreed with, though that may not have been in the text, I may have imagined it). I became online friends with Ama, who was from Bulgaria, or a Bulgarian from Romania, who was in her mid-forties but looked no older than twenty-five, fey and beautiful, who told me about all the plastic surgery she was going to get done in Turkey, in order to completely reinvent her face, make herself disappear. I thought about artists who effected their own disappearance in their own lifetimes: the lost archive of Heriberto Yépez. I thought about doing the same. I got my first face tattoos, purple and turquoise jewels beneath my eyes, one in the shape of a tear. And also the Russian word for whore, шлюха, across my pubic area. I became allergic to almost every food again, and so I ate nothing but unseasoned chicken and broccoli for most of the month. It didn’t matter, I hadn’t gotten any pleasure from eating in a long time. I felt less pleasure the second time we fucked than the first. I quit and took up smoking several times, in fits and starts. I sent a veiled death threat to Mike Crumplar, who deserved it. I didn’t make any other death threats to anyone else, because one was enough. My feelings for my ex curdled into hatred. On the horizon, I could see indifference, vague bitterness, scorn. I was going to burn the photos we took in the photo booth at that bar in L.A. where we’re kissing and making funny faces and where we look inexplicably happy even though we would break up the next day, or the day after that, but instead I just threw them in the trash, along with the strands of her hair she left me, because reality didn’t seem to deserve ritual anymore (it had become ashen). I was kind-of-sort-of sexually assaulted, not by a client, but by a beautiful lachrymose Zionist (a Gentile Zionist, who are always the lachrymose kind), but I was turned on when it was happening, which is often the case. I began to see the sinister and lurking presence of anti-Semitism everywhere on the left, but I kept my mouth shut, because there are certain things one knows that one keeps to oneself, not out of discretion, but simply out of contempt (Cassandra’s contempt, the contempt that comes with time, with the knowledge of entropy in one’s molecules). I had a few political thoughts, such as: Most leftists lie in order to feel pure and also not to give ground to the enemy (latter understandable) but each lie comes back to bite us as a much bigger problem we end up having to deal with later. Anti-Semitism, like male sexual violence, has always been endemic to the left, it’s always a sign of decay, the truth is the left is actually often in danger of becoming fascist in myriad ways, but no one wants to face this. And (in response to a tweet by a person who said “im basically a suicidal person with revolutionary hope,” to which the billionaire possibly psychopathic heir to the Cox media empire, who runs some sort of Communist cult out of the Berkshires, said “that’s the only hope”): A left that splits between personal bleakness and sublimated violence is doomed. And (thinking of the billionaire possibly psychopathic Communist heir): we don’t need messianic billionaire kids on the left, you can join us but no psycho Succession cliched family complexes, just do the work or whatever. And (in response to Israeli propaganda about a “Hamas widow” who desperately “did everything in her power to retrieve [her husband]’s sperm so that their dream of having more children would live on even without Yahav”: Among many other dystopian things, Israel invented this creepy genetic bio-futurism that’s so popular with First World bourgeois these days. Makes sense, when even the settler nuclear family structure doesn’t have a future, you can imagine some Lebensborn survival through “your” DNA. And: I love the very serious intellectuals pushing forty who are like yes, the kids are onto something, one must really read the works of the deranged CIA asset Osama bin Laden (also Islamist takfiri bullshit almost killed off the Palestinian liberation movement, which was the U.S.’s intention). And: Thinking a lot about how everyone’s politics right now amounts to accelerationism but reality is also accelerationism (towards fascism and apocalyptic austerity), so really radicals aren’t offering anything at all but a leftist brand for the end of the world. Amal picked me up and we drove to the Berkeley Marina and sat in their car and smoked cigarettes and talked some but mostly sat in silence in the warmth created by our bodies, safe from the rain that along with the night began to swallow up everything, even the water, I realized, or remembered, that when the sea is no longer visible it still makes its presence felt, in our bodies, a kind of maternal whisper, slight shiver, that’s a mystical and also a material fact, and maybe I took some of that maternal knowledge from the sea when Amal collapsed into me and I held them, ran my fingers through their hair, massaged my hands up and down their back, it felt good because usually they were the one touching me, healing me, making art on and through and of my body, and now it was my turn to give some of that back, I could feel the deep sorrow of the summer in them, I could feel their grieving for Falastin, the way they pronounced Gaza with the Arabic pronunciation that says infinitely more, like how only certain people know the secret name of a thing, a place, while most people (the pundits and colonizer poets) only speak with a corpse in their mouth, maybe that’s why I’d fallen silent in the past month, so as not to speak corpses, I don’t think I have any coherent identity beyond all that I’ve lost, they said, I feel exactly the same way, I said, do you want to go to the shisha lounge by the lake?, they said, do you know how to behave yourself in front of the old uncles?, I blushed, I think so, you know I love that you’re a slut, they said, instead we went to a Yemeni coffee place downtown, that was the coldest night of the year and also the only night I felt warm. Later I thought about the contrast between the pain in Amal’s body and the apocalyptic insouciance of white leftists who seemed to think Palestine would or could do all the fighting for us, stand in as proxies, Jean Genet’s eternal Third World lover-guerrilla puber, just as the Jews were being made, and let’s face it, were making themselves, stand in as proxies for all the malice and the hubris, all the sins of western colonialism in its final, nightmarish danse macabre, as if the Holocaust wasn’t enough, as if it could never end, which it can’t, at least not according to its own logic. In November, I thought a lot about shame, about guilt, and about the secret of evil. I stopped believing in art, my own art, and art in general. I had nothing epigrammatic to say about the death of art, no clever pathos, I just simply wanted to let it die. In the Berkshires, the billionaire possibly psychopathic (at the very least psychopathically cringe) Communist heir said: The feeling that liberals call “love” is something like a dopamine spike. Which is why it is totally blind and unprincipled. Submission to the Revolution and nothing else in the material world, this is what is required. And if one submits to God, one must know that this is the inevitable will of any God. But the truth is, fuck that noise, too.