Writer's Diary
11/17/25
Saturday. A really fun night at BCTR, after the closing of Little Murders last night. Some kind of magic has returned to this place. Energy is good, after a few months of calibrations and change.
a shot I took after the last reading of Last Days of Downtown (coke fake)
Sunday. Up very late—the party ended up at 1, was at Troost bar with friends til 4 (4! we didn’t even realize). Now—do the dishes. Clean up some clutter around my apartment. Have to go teach soon. I’m going to make some coffee.
Watching a scene from Over the Moon in the scene study class I teach—I couldn’t help but be moved, because I’m not very far removed from the emotions I encoded in that play.
Lately, I’ve felt my emotions frozen by stress and by the simple busyness of my schedule. Maybe there’s an all-too-terrible loneliness that I’m afraid of.1
There are many points—there have been many points along the way—in which I have betrayed myself, my own belief system and values. I’m far from the person I might have been and still could be. I still find myself at times to be selfish, blind, addicted, even lazy, self-deceiving.
What emerges in the quest to find moral life other than the soul, other than the soul that you carry with you into the next life? And into the next day, and into the next hour.
An hour of reading by the fire makes my brain feel whole again, and the symbolic fires light in front of the real fire. And the cultural mechanization, sterilization that accompanies my time on the screen, on the scroll, quickly finds an antidote.
I think for readers outside of New York, it’s hard to really capture how much a quotient of negativity and shit-talk2 and sniping comes with every two quotients of success. There’s literally no way not to generate opposition if you’re simply carrying out the dictates of your own heart and mind (or especially if you’re carrying out the dictates of your own heart and mind).