2022: A Better Year
I drank a lot of coffee, did a lot of swimming, read some things and talked about the excess of feelings with those I love and who love to love
A lot of things happened. No one close to me died. The year was a vast improvementon the one before because I decided I would no longer tolerate bullshit.
In Paris I ate veal brain and toasted to the death of fascists in an Algerian bistro run by three brothers (who love pushbikes and hate fascists). I watched Rona smoke a lot of cigarettes and tell me hectic stories about pan-European socialising, my head dizzy with names. I read a long description from Dustan’s Stronger Than Me of getting fisted, while hungover on the Eurostar home, and struggled to keep my almond croissant down.
I went to Whitstable with Toby and Mary and ate oysters with porter while the sun kissed our faces for what felt like the first time in ages.
A visit to the Lubaina Himid retrospective at Tate Modern blew me away.
I got a new job. I waited for my job to get more stressful, and even when it got a bit stressful that stress never reached the levels of five years of cumulative stress of getting treated like shit in academia.
I went to Mexico to celebrate getting a job. I got extremely drunk with the poets in Mexico City. They took me to the most incredible salsa club. And then, on one of the worst hangovers of my life I got robbed at knifepoint, which ended up not even being the worst part of the day. A lesson in humility and social segregation.
I stared for a long time at the extremely large mural of Vlady Kibalchich Rusakov, son of Viktor Serge, located inside Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada in the historic centre of CDMX. Something I’ve long wanted to see. I saw ancient pyramids and a man called Armando taught me about the cosmos.
In Zipolite I got befriended by a Mexican music teacher who loves whales. We got drunk on the beach and he decided we were best friends. He got confused about his sexuality on the gay nudist beach while I watched men in cowboy hats try and fuck each other under the waves. The confused bisexual music teacher followed me to Oaxaca City, declaring his soft adulation for me, until I had to tell him to go away.
I continued to leave ardent and elaborate voicenotes for all the people that I love and cherished playing their notes back to me from this thing in my pocket, even though it spies on me and thinks it knows what I want.
In Oaxaca City I ate the most incredible meal of my life, including a tomato salad made from eight different kinds of tomato, all from the Oaxaca region. I got befriended by some more weirdos, including a deranged faith healer in the corridor of smoked meat, where stray dogs beg at your feet.
I listened to Rosalia’s Motomami all the time.
On May Day I went to see two of my teenage faves, Eyehategod and Electric Wizard at Camden Roundhouse on my own. I was befriended by someone I know from instagram (hi Sophie) and I savoured the delicious weight of all things doom. I got bored of the posturing of metal dudes, embracing a cheesy masculinity of misogynistic hobbits now the sporty bullies are no longer around. I left before Electric Wizard finished and this felt like a sign of growth — then I went to a rave and thought about punching an enemy, but I made the mistake of telling my friends who all ensured I did not punch the enemy. At 6am my friend introduced me to the stunningly fresh Jeremy O. Harris, who he then proceeded to make out with. It’s probably good I didn’t punch my enemy.
I saw the Pet Shop Boys from the back of the hellish O2 arena, which was like hearing something you know in the next village across. My friend Ash and I befriended two old ladies and danced with them the rest of the night and had the best time. Always on my mind.
I went to my friends’ wedding, Joel and Charlotte, and celebrated the beauty of their bond in a building that was like the inside of a ship in Kilburn.
I got covid again, and felt like shit for too long.
I put on a poetry reading with Holly and Andrew and Momtaza in that stone circle filter bed in Hackney Marshes. Momtaza’s flight was delayed so Al Anderson read, and his reading was phenomenal.
I taught my poetry class, a ragtag band of middle aged women who are now my friends, and we read T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — which I now primarily believe to be the poetry of a man trying to put himself back together after a breakdown. How much I used to reject and detest crude biographical readings of historically significant poems.
Will Rowe and Helen Dimos read beautiful poems in my garden, including Will’s phenomenal translations of Vallejo’s TRILCE (1922), that will be published next year, hopefully.
My mum came to London and I got to watch her go wild in fabric shops in Shepherd’s Bush before we sat down for Portuguese pastries in Ladbroke Grove.
I roasted a lot of cauliflowers.
Orlando and I shared a birthday, got too drunk, Pete Wollen’s daughter turned up for a reason I don’t really know and didn’t talk to anyone.
I drank a lot of coffee.
I started writing a play. I haven’t finished it yet. It’s a grotesque, historical comedy about revolutionary failure and revolting peasants.
I spent all summer staring at the sunset — including two beautiful ones by Tower Bridge.
Sometimes my friends had sex with celebrities and we gossiped about it by the side of rivers and lakes outside of London, keeping our bodies cool during the ever rising heat. We developed ever more elaborate picnic snacks and cocktails — I discovered the joys of vermouth with tonic and ice stuffed with a wedge of orange, lemon, lime and black olives.
I made elaborate meals for the people I love in my garden and we talked about the brute irrepressible reality of our feelings and the limits of our bodies.
I ate a lot of Szechuan food (Anthony Bourdain said a joint, a cola, and Szechuan food is the best hangover cure).
I went to Whistable again and ate too many oysters again.
I drank a lot of red wine (because it’s healthier than beer, naturally).
I swam a lot — if it wasn’t the sea or a river then it was Hampstead Heath and Hackney Lido.
I messaged my friends in other countries who miss all their friends in London and we talked about the people we can’t talk to anymore.
I ate some more meals in gardens as the candlelight flickered and the chat flowed.
Notting Hill Carnival happened and some friends threw an after party in a tunnel that was so hot that I felt like my face was melting to 2/4 rhythms.
Autumn came and I embraced layers, coats, and Guiness, oh and I stopped doing any exercise.
I spent more time at home and I got into buying furniture for the first time in my adult life.
We said goodbye to Wild’s Rents — a place where so many people I love formed so many memories and bonds.
I drank overpriced martinis in basement bars in Soho where washed up actresses, mobsters and the odd high end prostitute still dance around pianos played by geriatrics. The last remnants of pre-digital criminality and excess.
I went to that art fair with Mary and thought about post-digital criminality and the all the boredom and unfreedom trapped in the contemporary.
In Marseille I got covid again, wrote one short story, caught up with two old friends and then left. I worked in the same cafe every day, saw the same people, and ate the same things. This was pleasant. I swam in the sea every day until the clocks changed and then I didn’t have the time. I watched the Marseille ultras let of fireworks and crackers before their game against Spurs and I fell in love with these hooligans.
I saw the Carolee Schneeman at the Barbican and her work made me reconsider my entire personal definition of the erotic. Caitlin wrote about it better than I could.
Mike Davis died, and then Pharaoh Sanders died, and then Bernadette Mayer died — each death shook me into a lament at their capacity to be singular, to constantly turn away from themselves in the pursuit of keeping it fresh. Kay Gabriel called them “three visionaries,” she’s right.
I saw my friends most viciously attached to political identities based around moral virtue and cultures of exclusion, gossip, and suspicion continue to work each other and themselves into paranoid frenzies and manifest unhappiness — I made better friends with people who see how cultish and dangerous these modes can be. I devoured that BBC reality show, The Traitors, based on the parlour game Werewolf, precisely because it demonstrated how deranging paranoia and suspicion are, and how little anyone knows about shit.
I wrote a lot of things, the most important things are still not finished.
This was my favourite thing I wrote. But I was wrong, and Kanye really went further down the brainworms rabbit hole than I thought was possible, even for him, and we grimaced as we laughed.
Half Lists
The books I read this year that really stuck with me, were, in no particular order. From this year or last:
Fernanda Melchor – Paradais
Guillame Dustan – The Works of Vol. 1
Lisa Robertson – Anemones: A Simone Weil Project
Jesse Darling – Virgins
Donald Moss – Psychoanalysis in a Plague Year
Missouri Williams – The Doloriad
Andrew Key – Ross Hall
Al Andersion – Tenderloin
From any year:
Mary Gaitskill – Two Girls, Fat and Thin
Dennis Cooper – The Sluts
Angela Carter – The infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
I mostly listened to old music but the Rosalia and Pusha T albums were fantastic. For the entire month of September I only listened to baroque music and thought about stile galante.
I hate PTA but I loved Licorice Pizza. I watched The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover for the first time and it blew my mind. I watched The Long Goodbye for the third time surrounded by film nerds, on reel, at the Prince Charles and indulged in its ridiculous splendour.
My new years’ resolutions are to learn to drive and to bury the past in the past. Not at the same time. Toast to your enemies, you don’t need them anymore.