procrastination post
about red rooms and such
(originally published Jan 21, 2024 on Substack)
i’ve got some books on aesthetics on hold at the library. i’ve been trying to write a post about -cores and internet microtrends and i’m doing that thing where i’m writing around a hole because i don’t have as much to say as i thought. i typed the first draft of this at 1am after getting high and staring at the other document for 45 minutes, picking at my face.
i’ve showered and my face is plump with aquaphor. i have on the top half of a flannel pajama set with mean little gingerbreads printed on it, part of a matching christmas pajama set with my mom, buttoned underneath a carpet-textured coat with some of the pile dyed to form roses. it’s cold in my apartment. i should go to bed.
my planner sits in front of me, my day job and my unpaid post job where i post things online hoping people see both broken down into neat little bullets. i need to call the bank tomorrow. gotta treat my passion like a job if i want to get anywhere since shouting for attention isn’t working like it used to. there are people who are talented at getting and maintaining virality and i am not one of them — hard to do so when i’m just learning how to conceptualize myself as a Self. i make a lot of different things and hope something will stick, a naive hope that resists learning from others, even if it’s myself.
my behavior grew out of a home kinda enmeshed by my mother’s force of will, a kind of avoidant style of rebellion that defines itself through opposition. i already didn’t like to be bothered and the pandemic pressure cooker covered me in antisocial plate. i pried off just in time for the winter.
it’s still a bit raw underneath, i’ll admit. in a recent fit of post-viral paranoia, i packed a go-bag of identification and cash because i thought government agents were going to bust down my door. people are being doxed and fired for tearing down propaganda and i was being posted across the internet for clocking propaganda — attention and empire do not mix. i’ve been conscious of the surveillance state ever since i had to ask to use the computer room, but it’s been rather acute lately. once i calmed down i got a vpn and one of those door stops that’s a metal pole from your doorknob straight to the ground. can’t barricade the windows but i can get a fire escape ladder. solutions and executions, process improvement, my mom would say.
but that door stop is serious business. try breaking that down, deep state!
of course i have no reason to worry, i’ll be swept along in a mass, not targeted. i’m not at the center of the world, in fact, there are no centers if everyone’s their own universe.
(i wonder how the guy down my childhood street is doing. i need to text people more. i’m sure, later, my dad will tell the groupchat his weekly neighborhood findings and receive no answer.)
inertia is my worst enemy. i’ve got lots of practice at sticking things out, not grinding things out. my self-evaluated absence of effort bothers me. it’s an american/black/victimofcapitalism trait, yeah, but i want to be someone that crushes through stuff, that just does it, i want to be ayo edebiri memorizing her pages, everyone else’s pages, watching a season of tv, writing journal entries, and knocking out five chapters of my current read. a bit greedy, considering my lethargy.
the ingredients are there for sure: i’m a good writer and artist, my cooking is good and my taste is better, my ideas are solid, my personality can be charming, and i’ve worked for all that to be true. yet in the five years since mediocre grades got me a bachelors none of that effort went to a creative career. late to start, i’m launching an enterprise in a dead mall. my mom gave me a lot of productivity and self-help books in that time, trying to help. she’s the worst liberal i know.
i’ll tell you something i’ve only told my college roommates: i believe my first memory is of dying. before i can remember being Someone, when i running across my parents’ bed in san antonio toddler-legged and onesied, there’s a memory of laying down in a red room and closing my eyes. there’s explanations for sure, none that line up with my two-year-old reality, but they exist. you can have your theories, i have mine.
one that presents itself during an anxiety spiral is simple: i am in hell. the obstacles in my daily life and the horrors of my country’s government are hypertargeted against my personality and morals as recompense for a crime i’ve committed before that red room. there a world that hates me while i create for my little audience. someone out there can recognize my old face in my smile lines and panic. i can be hated in complete bliss. guilt-by-osmosis sure is something. america is the perfect country for hell.
the day before mlk jr. day it snowed. it snowed twice more in the same week — not too heavy, just a couple of inches that made me nervously watch the tree branches outside my window droop. i first saw snow as a blizzard congratulating my family’s piecemeal move from louisiana “up north” to virginia. it was a fresh 2007, and my dad and i went first in a red truck i would crash 13 years later, followed by my mom and our eldest cat who would die 12 years later.
i called virginia the north until nyc natives in moschino gloves and small-town pilgrims from the rust belt asked where i was from. if i went to vcu like my mom wanted, maybe the state would still be the arctic. i might’ve kept with my “i was born in texas, then moved to louisiana when i was 5, then moved again to virginia when i was 7, so kinda all over, i guess. yeah my parents were military. they were army, but like, ethical army. medics, not butchers.” those ages feel so remote now that i’ve typed them out. it was a different life of catching lizards with the kids in the cul-de-sac and looking for the toad hiding from summer under our porch.
a fire alarm is going off somewhere down the hall. the me that drafted this wondered what i would take if i smelled smoke. i took a lap around my apartment building to make sure nobody else had evacuated. i entertained theories such as every alarm besides the room down the hall got disconnected. the me that first revised this knows that maintenance shut it off after an hour, and i sit here again, revising again after a building-wide fire alarm had me shivering alongside two women living four floors below me, disproving my hypothesis within 48 hours and introducing another: this place is rent-controlled, and a corporate arsonist might be test running burning it down for insurance money. a late night apartment conflagration could’ve been the red room i remember.
(i’m writing this long after the sun went down, at 8pm and 11 pm and 3am. i’ve always been a night owl. i’m embracing it now, but i definitely could have started working earlier. that’s the thing, though — anticipation is always worse than the act.)
