"What’s the export?"

A garbled dispatch that was supposed to be about love.

Hi, it was supposed to be love week, but now it’s stream of consciousness week! One thing I want to do in this space is diffuse this self-pressurized container I’ve created and experiment. In the months since I launched this newsletter, Substack has become a capital-T Thing. Users are asking what the point of this all is, legacy media outlets are taking note of the influence Substack writers can wield, and the app's founders are just certain this landscape is the digital promised land of the future. When MishMashy was born, I literally just wanted to have fun and yap on here, but quickly felt like I needed to optimize whatever I was doing to provide “value” or be of “service.” I was asking myself what Jack Antonoff had asked of the Dimes Square scene: What’s the export? Is it me? Is it my taste? My point of view? My voice? What I consume? The links? I started feeling bad when I sent something out that didn’t read like I had St. Francis de Sales (patron saint of writing) literally floating over my keyboard, guiding my fingertips. It’s literally not that deep! It’s not that serious!!!! I don’t think I want to be one thing (I’ve never been good at being one thing) or serve one purpose or think about a freaking social media platform (sorry! That’s what this is!!!) so hard. I just want to let myself play on here. Maybe send shorter, spurt-y newsletters out. Maybe send ones out that are just links. Maybe just pictures. Maybe just a massive, painstaking essay. Maybe more interviews. I don’t want to agonize over this. I don’t want to picture my peers and writers I like reading my jumbled little newsletter and snickering in a “get a load of this guy” way. I feel like I keep looking over my shoulder and thinking, “am I doing this right?” ICK!!!!!! WHO CARES!!!!

Below, you’ll see the beginnings of the essay I had planned to write, which was surely going to turn out to be insufferably drawn out tumblr prose, and the garbled stream of consciousness my brain wanted to communicate to you instead. The former just didn’t feel real beyond a graf or two. In fact, I’m reading Martyr! right now (do you guys think I can read the next 300 pages by my book club tomorrow night?) and this part stuck out to me, stuck with me:

“I’ve read your poems. I get that you’re Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that’s part of you. But you’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones? Do you see what I mean?”

Microaggressions aside, I took that to heart. When I was 14, my art teacher made us sketch still life drawings on our first day of class. She told us “sometimes we draw lines we think are supposed to be there instead of what’s actually there.” And in writing, sometimes we create what we think we’re supposed to rather than what’s real. We (I) back ourselves into corners we have absolutely no reason to be in, and then we ruminate over what we think is supposed to matter, but might not, at least not at that moment. Maybe the real Artist’s Way is all the newsletters we send out without overthinking. Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest I guess?

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When I was a child, I knew I wanted to grow up to be loved. Back then, love poured out of me — I loved my glittery butterfly clips, the ones whose wings jiggled when I ran, I loved hearing my dad’s car drive in from work, I loved sitting too close to the TV and watching Wheel of Fortune with my mom on our corduroy couch, I loved the minutes just before sunset when the yellow walls of our living room would glow, I loved the neighbors orange cat who sat in my lap each day and I loved a boy up the street who broke both his legs one summer at the lake. Love poured out of me so freely and unabashedly. I knew I wanted it done unto me one day.

X

It’s raining in New York and the streets are filled with slush and I honest to God cannot bring myself to write anything frilly or with substance, especially not about love. I am an empty well where words ought to be and am instead filled with meandering thoughts that simply float by and never unravel. Worse yet, all these ruminations are on loop. All I can think about is how skinny everyone is getting, how broke I feel, what it is I’m trying to say, my parents, home.

Valentine’s day came and went, and I’m filled with some sort of misplaced sorrow that the streets are no longer littered with visible acts of love. Blah, blah, blah, Hugh Grant saying “If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around” blah, blah, blah. Do you know how high I get from seeing overt love out loud? On Friday, in the span of 20 minutes, I saw about 16 men carrying flower bouquets pass by my window. I was just absolutely salivating, Pavlov’s dog waiting for affection, looking for the next loverboy to walk by with roses.

That’s something I do love about New York — how much of our lives have no choice but to unfold out in the open. For better or worse, a life lived in New York is one lived in public. Crying on the subway is a rite of passage, fighting with your boyfriend in the dairy aisle of C-Town is too. Our commutes are spent pressed up against one another, our hands nearly touching on the railing, the music in our headphones leaking out into unguarded ears, blocks of text on our phones for our neighbor’s wandering eyes. In the summers, we throw birthday parties in the park for our friends, for our babies, for our dogs; our numbered, mylar balloons bat passersby. And in the winter, people under bundles of wool meander those same park pathways, clutching hot coffees from the corner shop, searching for a spot of sun and yearning for spring, all together in one silent chorus.

I miss my car and driving myself to do errands and playing music out loud and even singing along to it and being alone (sorry :/ every public transport absolutist just projectile vomited all over their keyboard and is drafting a “have you seen this woman?” hate-poster of my face, with little, tear-off pull tabs that say something like “if so, tell her she’s scum” to be plastered on all the light poles in downtown Manhattan), but being an island in that way, that uniquely American way, is a surefire way to plague yourself further with all your own neuroses. Remember that devastating (ultimately sweet) 2015 Pixar short about that anthropomorphized isolated island? And how his solitude drove him to misery, and the only salve was companionship? This city often makes me feel more insane than I am while somehow also pulling me out of my own head. To be confronted with life, especially the lives of others in these fleeting vignettes, is good for the human condition. I wonder where the guy with eight leashed Vizslas lives, the one that walked past me in the Upper East Side like it wasn’t insane he had eight leashed Vizslas tailing him. I think about the employees at the used bookshop I live near and how one of them told me her name was Thirteen, and what her parents must be like and how hard it must be to do any sort of bureaucratic paperwork with a name that’s also a number. I dwell on them all instead of myself and whatever might be stupidly gnawing at me.