My French move

Hello followers of my substack

I am making a blog post about something pretty boring and mundane that happened to me recently, which is that I moved one floor in my apartment building. As I’ve stated before I find it really annoying when people feel compelled to publish work for no real reason besides doing so, but since I have no social media at the moment¹ I feel less bad for taking a moment of your attention to write this post, which you could stop reading at any time. Also, after not being really sure what to do with my now 3 year old substack blog since I am not really interested in the type of self-revealing and confessional writing I have done previously on here at the moment, I thought it could be interesting to use it as an actual style of blog about boring stuff that doesn’t really matter to anyone but me, the way blogs used to be like in 2010. Blogging should not be about pretending boring stuff is eventful or meaningful but admitting that it is boring or doesn’t matter, but writing about it anyway (in an ideal world). I am also increasingly interested in old styles of using the Internet like email, forums, chats etc. and less interested in platform styles of using the Internet. In an ideal world we would only have email and Internet cafe, which is basically the world I am living in now since the wifi in my new apartment that I moved into is not yet functional. Another reason I wanted to write this post is I was interested in the poetics of my moving boxes. I kind of hate it when anyone says they are interested in the poetics of anything but my moving boxes were literally really poetic with the French words on them forming little poems that I now can’t stop saying out loud. Placer dans: chambre principale, chambre (blank), salle familiale, salle de séjour, salle à manger, salle de bains. Anyway, here is the post (which I will try to keep short because once on twitter some random person commented about my writing that I hadn’t ever heard of “economy of words” which really stung).

5/31

There is a dead baby bird on my balcony. I sat on the ground with my back against the wall and cried and thought why do I live here I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home which is something I will generally allow myself to do for 15 minutes before I have to get up and fix the problem. I don’t really know what to do. I thought about giving the bird a proper burial but I don’t know where and I don’t know if that would be interfering even more in nature’s process. I think of the ways karma is probably going to come back for me like maybe I’ll fall off the $30 ikea chair while attempting to take a command strip off the wall and break my neck. I always forget how fragile and squeamish I can be until something like this happens. I am usually not that susceptible to acting this way and am not scared of bugs or any other animals really but there is something about birds that really unnerves me and this one is not even alive and its entrails are on my balcony. It feels like my fault. I don’t know what to do but sit on the ground. Or play a really sad song and indulge in how awful it feels only this doesn’t feel good awful only bad awful. I can’t stop seeing the way the bird looks in the back of my eyelids every time I close them but I literally have to go clean my oven. This wasn’t supposed to be so maudlin. I probably have saved a lot of birds in my lifetime being vegan but somehow it isn’t enough. You can’t sit on the ground for more than 15 minutes a day though. Objects in motion stay in motion, and sink or swim, some things I have been saying to myself lately. I tend to try to manage the amount of pain I have to feel at any given time so even if I’m indulging in pain it’s a manageable amount but this is not the kind of thing I planned for which is kind of the problem with my pain strategy. Not to be tumblr but the right side of my hip and thigh is covered in little brown bruises from throwing all my furniture down 2 flights of stairs which is penance for the fact that a bird passed away beside my former house. I hate to indulge in the poetic metaphor of birds alive or dead but you can’t get around the literalization in this case.

6/12

The bird part of this post got too macabre when it was just supposed to be about the French moving boxes I bought at the Home Depot in Westmount with a Subway in it, inside the Home Depot at Westmount. I made this list of things I would tweet if I had twitter, something I haven’t had in now 3 months.

hey just wondering if you’re still immune to my charms?

Imagine my surprise when I learned I’ve had more sexual partners than Megan Boyle in 2008²

In the Westmount Home Depot Subway inside the Home Depot in Westmount

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being

Listening to call her daddy on 1.5 speed it’s like I’m on amphetamines

What am I “doing” “this summer?” Um thinking about rewatching Girls. Looking at the phone screen of other people at the pool

I will not be subscribing to anything… thank you though

I used to make lists of things I would tweet when I didn’t have twitter that would be really long and I would post them when I remade twitter but I stopped doing that because literally who cares. I started writing around 500-750 words a day in my diary on Google docs instead, words no one will ever read. I think there is great utility to words no one will ever read. I am constantly narrativizing about my life to an audience of one: me! I find that when other people read it is my problem with writing. I guess I have subsumed my former tweeting practice into 22,500 words or 50 pages each month of completely unpublishable and useless material and I’ve never been happier. I’ve been wondering more and more about removing things from the internet as opposed to putting more things on there. I lied about never being happier but it’s true about the futility of considering the audience and self-surveillance when you could be surveilling your own soul by producing 600 pages of unpublishable content each year. More things should be done for nothing (cope because I am maybe bad at writing for an audience except for in a very particular way or too lazy or not diligent enough or maybe just don’t want to). It feels very self-evident why one would delete the twitter app or any social media really³ and it sort of defeats the purpose to even discuss my new obsessive diaristic practice but I still wanted to. I am wondering about new forms my words could take that are not posts that could legitimize me as a writer and person. I am also wondering why I even need to feel legitimized as a writer or person, why I can’t just speak from the heart. I am wondering whether a post could ever come from the heart. I am also wondering about mediating true feelings and sensations and experiences through posts platforms different styles or vessels words come in the mediation provided by something like social media or even something like medication like they talk about in Leaving the Atocha Station. Whether it is even possible for anything to be truly unmediated and why I need it to be. Maybe intervention is good. Maybe numbness is actually a good goal to have, considering the range of negative experiences that seem to define modern life. Could this have been a tweet? Then maybe it wouldn’t have been so damn long.

Ok back to the moving boxes. They were so funny I drew on them with cursive and regular lower-case. Cursive was for French and normal was for English. It was so funny to pack up all my stuff and throw it down a staircase only to unpack it all one floor lower after doing this less than a year ago. I might do it again in a year in Ridgewood or somewhere in a forest. Objects in motion stay in motion. Which is sort of my problem. I need to be acted upon by an unbalanced force. What should I do with the $240 I am saving each month from my French move? I am open to suggestions on this. My new apartment is not that much smaller than the old one and it has huge windows which I have not bought curtains for yet. Whereas my former goal was to get my neighbors to fall in love with me Body Double style I think I might actually be falling in love with my neighbor in my new apartment Body Double style. I’ve never actually seen her face but enjoy looking at what she’s working on with her laptop.

That might be it about my move. I listened to Elif Bautman’s The Idiot audiobook while I completed it, which I’m worried I’m subconsciously imitating in my prose style. I liked it despite the fact that nothing happens. I was waiting for something to happen the whole time and nothing did. My goodreads review: Good ending. I’m experiencing all of this at 25 because I don’t have Harvard level intellect⁴ just pretty selective state school.

I am thinking about the self-imposed obstructions of my life, as well as the non-self-imposed ones. I am thinking about whether I failed⁵ in my attempt to be non-confessional. I am thinking about the last photos I took of my reflection in the windows of my depressing old apartment and about the guy who said he would paint Lana’s banisters blue on Blue Banisters. About this one poem, which I really had to search for because I could only remember half a line. I kept searching lines I half-remembered into google photos to try to find it but nothing. Just different screenshots or images containing text but none with the text I wanted. And this one photo I took of a street lamp at night when I lived in Berkeley last summer. About what Elena Ferrante said about ellipses. About the tens of thousands of photos on my phone, about the hundreds of thousands of words I could have said instead of these ones. The times I said the wrong words or when I said nothing when I should have said something or when I said something when I should have said nothing. About the same words in different songs. A different apartment in the same building. A country in North America that is not America. Editing the sad parts. What is unnamed. Place-names. Naming everything, insisting upon the interestingness of something that matters only to you. About the books I left on the street the last time I moved. Which I took a photo of so I wouldn’t forget. When someone said the time will pass anyway. How bad things can get at the end. And everything seen is something seen for the very last time.

1. except letterboxd and goodreads and the discord app and the substack app things I contemplate deleting off my phone every day

2. negligibly

3. I want 0 apps on my phone. I also have OCD possibly unrelated

4. Harvard of Canada level intellect

5. I promised myself I wouldn’t do stupid footnotes for this and failed at that too. Failed genre experiment. Is substack post a genre? I think so