Bitcoin soars in value, which at this time can be indexed to an all-time high of $86989.80. Earlier this week, Donald Trump was elected, which seems to have caused this bullish surge or “rally,” and I’ve been less indecisive over my life with Adam, having moved almost all of my belongings out of his apartment, while maintaining warm sexual relations with him once a week. October and November have been warm and dry, with no real rain and daytime temperatures generally reaching 78-79 degrees. Clusters of wildfires in New Jersey have brought smoke into the city, largely over the course of last Friday night and most of Saturday. Early Decision college applications were due earlier this month, so I’m getting thin with work as an admissions essay tutor, which gives me more time to wonder what I should be doing ideally with my reading and writing and dating and exercise. The first rain in about a month came to us overnight on Sunday, November 10 through Monday, November 11.

November 11 was the first day back in Aleksandra’s office. She has just reopened her new apartment, in the same building in the Financial District, back up to her patients, after a long period of readjustment, I imagine, to the new place. I came to our 9:30 appointment directly from a date with a new man, No. 18, from his temporary residence in the West Village to 15 Dutch St. Returning to FiDi always feels like a triumph, one never “goes” but “returns,” as if to the womb, where the home island of Manhattan converges to a narrow nub. And before that, the previous night, I had biked from Flatbush to Saint Eves, a cocktail bar in Park Slope, to meet with S, who is No. 18 on the sex list, No. 38 on the list of first dates. It was dark when I left, and earlier that day, I had biked the 10 miles from Manhattan to Brooklyn, leaving Adam’s place after a Saturday at the MET and Central Park. Anyhow, the new consulting room is wonderful and dim and cozy and I was happy to sit there today, as I described to Aleksandra the beauty of the new man’s last name, which means “street cleaner.”

Meanwhile, I saw in my peripheral vision the stuffed animal of a chameleon, and of a wombat, and the papier-mache lizard on the wall. All this as I spoke about how the new man’s name, Strassman, is perfect, as it recalls for me the phrase “she’s for the streets.” A perfect contrast to Adam’s Holzman, or “woodcutter.”

Strassman, Holzman, Holzman, Strassman.

I was all smiles in the session that day, entertained by the exchange I seemed to be proposing, an exchange between Strassman and Holzman, whereby one might substitute for the other, or one might stand for what the other lacked. Cruel, she seemed to say, in her silent listening, Cruel of you to propose such a thing.

Last month I attended a book event with Adam on the new translation of Marx’s Capital, Volume I, with the translator and editor Paul Reitter and Paul North, and Merve Emre as moderator. I hadn’t been particularly interested in Marx before, though I had become aware, through my reading of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, that there might be some “literary use-value” to Marx that I was probably rubbing against.

I’ve since been fascinated and delighted by the concept of the commodity. Much of what Marx writes seems to be a re-articulation of the same fundamental precept, i.e., that the “commodity” is a unique class of object, whose value is double, since value is conferred on the commodity both according to its use-value and to the “abstract human labor” it represents. This latter form of value is equivalent to its exchange-value.

What we’re really interested in in modern economics is exchange value, which Marx describes as a kind of metaphysical entity, which lies on a different plane from the more materialist use-value: With the values “coat” and “linen,” the difference between their use-values is abstracted away, and the same thing happens with the labor represented in them: the difference between the useful forms of the two kinds of labor, tailoring and weaving, is abstracted away, too. As use-values, the coat and the linen unite a purposeful, productive activity with raw cloth and raw yarn, respectively. But as values, they are bare gelatinous blobs of homogeneous labor. Thus the instances of labor contained in these values count for something not because of their productive relation to cloth and yarn, but rather only as outlays of human labor-power. Tailoring and weaving can go into creating coats and linen as use-values only because those two kinds of labor have different qualities. They can constitute the substance of coats and linen as values only insofar as their particular qualities are abstracted away, and they possess the same quality, the quality of being human labor.

Under this notion, I wondered if it’s possible to think about people as commodities, who represent equal exchange-value, within a libidinal economy. Each person requires the same amount of abstract human labor to produce, in a biological sense: the same unit of womb, the same sequence of gestational processes. If we strip away all of a person’s specific qualities, each is the same “bare gelatinous blob of homogenous labor.” And this is why I want to sleep with everyone, because I want to experience abstract value. But in reality, use-value, or the particular “purposeful, productive activity with raw cloth and raw yarn,” matters a great deal to my experience of a person. So I’m not in fact able to live the life of a pure commodity fetishist.

I broke up with my boyfriend of five dates, Dan, last month. It feels like an eternity ago, and rests in my mind without a corresponding emotional charge, but it marked a boundary stone in my experiments with monogamy. To “cut to the chase,” he had gone to a weekend meditation retreat and come back expressing insecurity about the fact that I was still seeing Adam once a week. I told him that I had learned, over time, that it was not worth it to test things with people who experience a sensitivity around a particular issue, and that it was therefore time for me to leave. I spoke with a tearful violence, as we were locked in an embrace, my head over his shoulder, my mouth breathing on the back of the sofa. I said all this thus with my back to him, refusing to look at his face. I felt violently misapprehended, and also manipulative and evil for having carried Dan along in my own fantasy of possible monogamous romance, and told him that I did not trust him enough to want to argue at all. I also felt that Dan’s affections for me had been false: how could he have liked me at all, if he could not also be curious about my other relationships, let alone my relationship with promiscuity itself. Still, I felt conflicted; I felt unreasonable for seeing him in this way, for I had presented myself as “over” non-monogamy, as skeptical of its feasibility in the long run. So, as I left Dan, I concluded with paranoiac certainty that all men would eventually reject me for my dirty, promiscuous ways, and that God was exacting justice on my sin. It was a very sad, very windy, very cold evening, and I walked down Ocean Parkway for several blocks before hopping on my bike, crying as I rode home.

O season of dumping, O season of scission and separation, O season of pruning and deadheading, O season of trying to become the isolate that I had been, monastic, a resident of the border between Flatbush and Midwood, who bikes out to the far reaches of the Southern littoral, to Plumb Beach and Marine Park, stopping at intersections for stately Orthodox Jewish men and women and their dual-seat strollers. In many ways it was a foregone and meaningless act, to declare “no future” to Z, a forceful and bloodless decree of a law: I intended to separate from everyone, at any rate, and have not quite succeeded. I have read Z’s new post on gloomwaif, and received his cute tooth postcard, sent the day before I published my last renunciation—and felt a certain satisfaction and connectedness with his style, and sensed that, because he was dealing with upheaval, there was a refreshing clarity to the piece, a sharpness and precision that tends to be effaced when writing is meant as flirtation or courtship display.

Reading what he wrote motivated me to write something new for this site, which I’ve largely neglected because I was too occupied with my work, and the ongoingness of the turmoil involved in attempting these separations. But this month, I return to efforts to advance my education, to practice my religion, which involves the enactment of a kind of promiscuity or libertinism based in Whitman, Sade, and Marx.

I had attempted to schematize or narrate this in August, in “Ledger," where I wrote about Jed, Paul, Nick, and John, a string of four men whom I all had sex with—an unprecedented continuity and frequency of new bodies accumulated over the course of two weeks. The clearest articulation of “what I’m all about” lay in the description of “my desire for a sea urchin boyfriend, a starfish boyfriend, a plankton, a diatom, a crustacean,” and “my desire not merely for a functional reef tank, but for a sea urchin whom I might have to evolve for. I’d need to dive down there and release my eggs into the ocean currents at the right time of year, when sea urchins respond to a slight rise in sea temperatures and release their biological materials […] men in finance—those who feel authorized, on account of their elite educations and facility with math or law or political philosophy, to manipulate the markets—are like sea creatures, living in a hermetic fearsome liquid universe, releasing salt tears like sea turtles and other marine animals who swallow but who cannot metabolize the salinity of their native waters.”

The impetus behind this articulation was, I suppose, to disavow this fantasy, and to move back to Brooklyn and begin exploring a different terrain. I saw a film critic and a social worker with a French degree. For whatever reason or circumstance, neither of these men “worked” for me. After things broke down with Dan, I wrote the following, a kind of recuperation of the previous statement, and an attempt to understand why I couldn’t accept certain kinds of men: I used to think I wanted a sea urchin boyfriend, a boyfriend with radial symmetry. I wanted someone who would be spiky and textured and purple and used to saline waters. I considered a crab, and I considered a sand dollar, and a dogfish shark. I sought out or defined this archetype in accordance with the figure of the “man in finance.” And I sought out neurotic, rough-edged Jewish men who for some reason appealed to my sense of smell, proving that I was in fact an animal of the mammalian order who liked my warm-blooded kin. Jewish men, it seemed, were able to fetishize me as “shikse cunt,” whereas Christian men had to pretend to own my pure, virginal self before they could decide if they really wanted to own me. So I clip-clopped around lower Manhattan making eye contact with strangers getting off work, and wondered about the lives of the high earners. Sometimes I met with them, through the apps, though they tended to be boring software engineers who appreciated my verbal clarity. It was a nice life. Sometimes I complained that I felt dead, or sleepy, and would take long naps in the late morning and early afternoon. I recognized my foreignness to these lands on the basis that I could go for random walks at 2 PM. It was nice to have this freedom, but the life I led had to be temporary, for I was aggressively unemployed, and I wasn’t married, and I didn’t have a child, and I didn’t want to be married. What’s more, I loved Adam very much. But since my notion of love fed on freedom, I slept around, and felt cleansed. Perhaps this is because there’s a dryness to the act of sleeping around. I think of the way sparrows take dust baths by swishing their feathers about in the fine, sand-colored dirt of the pathes in certain urban parks, and how this has often struck me as the cleanest way to wash oneself, as water is a substrate for bacteria and fungi to live on. Water is a kind of inherently dirty substance, whereas dirt is clean. Is salt water cleaner than fresh?

I still want to collect sea urchins, beings with radial symmetry, spiky and and purple from echinochromes, resident only to iodine-rich waters. I still consider my desire for a crab, and I still consider the possibility of a sand dollar, a starfish, a brittlestar, or a dogfish shark. Add to the list a free-floating tunicate, or an edible, stone-bound one like piure, and a coelenterate, which encompasses coral, sea anemone, hydra, and jellyfish.

Last night I dreamt that I had left open the container in which I had housed an inordinate number of adult tarantulas. They were black and fuzzy, not identifiable as belonging to any real species, as most tarantulas exhibit some contrast in color between their setae and the velvety fuzz on the surface of their exoskeletons. Some of the tarantulas in the dream had escaped, to who knows where, and my family was around, so I had to tell them what had occurred, though I considered hiding the fact.

Now I see the loose resemblance between the x marks in the chart below and the spiders, colored uniformly, like glyphs. Though I was worried in the dream, I marvel at the simple satisfaction I derive from writing out this frequency chart of the new sexual partners I’ve accumulated over the course of my life (the o’s denote those with whom I didn’t have penetrative sex). Looking at my chart, and my dream, I think to myself with an air of criminality: there’s nothing more satisfying than fucking with a stranger. I marvel, too, at the simple truth of this statement, which feels all the more true for having been laid out in the form of a negation combined with the intensifier, which amounts, in the end, to a superlative: nothing more satisfying. I think of the difficulties I have with manipulating the symbolic structure of this string of acts otherwise. It was weak of me to have nothing better to do than chart out my list, which was previously flat, a numbered sequence of names. I could have tried instead to write down a description of a setting, a character, a dialogue, in other words, to narrate a story.

                           x
                           x
                           x
                       x   x
                       x   x
                       x   x
                       x   x
                       o   x
                 x     x   x
     x           o     x   x

    '15         '22   '23  '24

In another dream, which came to me after a difficult, tearful weekend with Adam, I encountered my “ideal object”: an aquarium, rather large, which contained several outstanding marine organisms. There was a snakey brown fish with beautiful fins, not like an eel, not like a shark, not like any bony fish I had ever seen, though I’m sure it was a teleost. There was a red tubular thing, which I discovered was a tunicate, a free-floating one, about as long and thick as the snakey fish. There was a cluster of small seahorses, inverted, as if their heads were attached to the bottom substrate. I showed this tank to my mom, and said it was the most beautiful thing I had ever owned or created. I watched the fish grow, though the rapid timelapse of the dream was presented to me as static, in the sense that I only noticed, in a discrete moment, that the fish had grown, and remained just as beautiful and healthy. The brown fish was my favorite, the red tunicate was an object of wonderment, and the seahorses an object of concern. They seemed wimpy, unhealthy, but curious because they were upside down.

Chris thinks of this dream, this aquarium, as my “big dick,” which I show him whenever I mention my new conquests. He wondered, in a recent chat exchange, why I keep on showing it to him, and I claimed that it’s because “i want to feel less isolated,” but that “i’m acknowledging that i need to stay underwater”; “water/land creatures don’t mix.” He said this was a cop-out, and I agreed: I am isolated, on account of my disjunctive encounters with strangers, but there’s no reason why water and land creatures shouldn’t mix. But I am so impotent in the face of life. I don’t know how to craft stories that invite the reader in. I favor cold, dissertative statement instead.

It’s striking to me that in my studies with poems, I never asked, who can or cannot hear what the poet or poem has to say? Instead, I grappled with the fact that the manifest content or expressive effects of poems tend to be alienating to many readers, because they seem to speak above everyone’s private or particular concerns, and use language in ways that break with the norms of verbal communication. The way of appreciating the poem with others was to not only intuitively feel what could be intuitively felt, but to speak about each poem using the broad category of “form” to guide a communal experience of the poem’s inventiveness, and an exploration of the roots of the need for such inventiveness. And it was exquisite to see how the most successful poems concretize the impasses of communication by addressing dead or absent or mute entities, a tendency known as apostrophe, which takes the asymmetries of communication to an utmost extreme, and therefore voids the question or problem of the reader’s unreceptiveness to the act. Blinded by the dazzling force and beauty of poetic apostrophe, I never asked, who cannot hear this, and why can’t they hear this?

Today I’m very sleepy. I’m thinking about how I actually really like being with foreign bodies. I like bodies insofar as they isolate the real for me. The real is in the thing that happens when I lie on his body, and have no thoughts formulated in my head. The things I have to say are very basic: that his body is warm, that it is soft, that there is weight to it that comes from muscle and fat and blood and bone, that it has hairs on it, particularly on his chest, the sides of the face, the the top and back and sides of the head, the chin, and that it’s some shade of blond, and his eyes are brown, a lighter shade of brown that veers on amber. It doesn’t feel dirty or clean to be with him, it feels warm and soft and a bit like a heath or plateau, a resting point, a bit elevated. Flat, with smaller undulations and irregularities that don’t amount to a great change in elevation over a given area, but which do produce their own small differences.

The body I chose to illustrate my idea with was Dan’s body, though unfortunately that body had to be disposed of. I think Z was right when he said that something can become “nothing” if one member of a pair of communicating subjects decides to end communications. I think it’s true that we can forget and dispose of bodies and that that process of burying something in an unmarked grave, or of scattering ashes to the winds, is one of the fundamental tragedies, and an anthropological constant. Refusing to consolidate and honor the body of the deceased is worse than any murder or torture.

Aleksandra thought it was cruel, or “sadistic,” the way I told Adam that S was “beautiful.” “It was like a bubble popping, the way that came out,” I said. I can’t stop thinking about the way I said “beautiful,” like “buuuutiful,” the way Barron Trump says that he loves his “sooootcase” in the one video of him speaking as a child.

In the seven days since I last saw him, I’ve almost entirely effaced my memory of what he looks like by writing and speaking too much about beauty, to the extent that when I meet him for dinner tonight there’s a very real possibility that I’ll fail to recognize him, or that something even more devastating might happen: the convulsive reaction to seeing a ghost or monster, or a collapse, a syncope. Beauty distances us from the object, from the object of the drive. This week, I learned that sea urchins have pentamerous symmetry, not radial, and begin their lives bilaterally symmetric.

Sam is a water creature, for sure, something like Marill or Azumarill, two pokémon, one a water mouse, the other a water bunny, which I’ve discovered while preparing to present my work with an autistic man in class this week. Adam is Rockruff or Herdier, which evolves to Stoutland. These are dogs, strong, fierce, and loyal. I’m Raichu.

I find a kind of warm restfulness in involving myself in such infantile typologies and comparisons, thinking of the possibility that Sam wants to discover me, and that I want to discover him, and that something about the beautiful body or the beautiful mind keeps the other forever inaccessible; at first, we struggled to plug into each other, struggled to become hard or dilated, struggled to stop talking, which mean it was hard to enter a state of sensual absorption, though I like to think that the fine border between absorption and reflection had become a thing-in-itself during our encounter.

I wrote the italicized text above last month, but it feels true, and of course makes me wonder what I’d write for S. It’s not the case “that his body is warm, that it is soft, that there is weight to it that comes from muscle and fat and blood and bone, that it has hairs on it, particularly on his chest, the sides of the face, the the top and back and sides of the head, the chin, and that it’s some shade of blond, and his eyes are brown, a lighter shade of brown that veers on amber.” Neither is it the case that “it doesn’t feel dirty or clean to be with him, it feels warm and soft and a bit like a heath or plateau, a resting point, a bit elevated. Flat, with smaller undulations and irregularities that don’t amount to a great change in elevation over a given area, but which do produce their own small differences.” S isn’t this at all. But saying that he isn’t this feels more informative and true than saying what he is; I refuse the descriptions I’ve written.

It also reminds me to write about what it was like to fuck Adam after election night. I hated Adam for having chosen to front one form of power and freedom over the other. I had just discovered the weekend before that Adam intended to vote, which meant for Trump, and I had, over the course of the next several days, hated him for it. Though this was no surprise, I was unable to separate the stance of “pro-free-market” from the specter of the Dobbs Decision, from the notion of a man who was anti-slut, anti-freedom. “I’d like to have five children by five different men, and kill each after they’re born,” I said to him the previous night, writhing in vituperation, hoping to destroy his affections for me. When we reconvened, I refused to look at him, packed my clothes in a suitcase, and went for a long walk. But when I returned, I embraced Adam, who then gave me pure friction, pure erotic heat, and though I can never remember the specificities of an orgasm anymore I can remember the onset of that sexual encounter, the hatred and contradictoriness of fucking, and of the jubilance of the aftermath of that encounter with difference, this time of true political difference.

And as if blacked out I remember nothing of the specific fuck, I just know and knew that Adam was friction incarnate. I can never write about him, perhaps because of the intensity of this sexual bond, which makes sight and sensation shatter and fragment, so even my specular sense of who he is broken, broken, or “broka” by all those baby’s words we’ve come up with together. The next weekend, I found another Trump voter, a quant trader living in a tower in Downtown Brooklyn. He was a strange, harmless, violent man, and we came at the same time, in one of the better first-time sexual encounters I’ve found. After that, I took the train to meet Adam in FiDi.

And thus I continue to evade the task of writing about S, substituting whatever interest I have in him with the stories of others. In the mean time, Bitcoin has hit $90000, and my body count increments to 19; no doubt I will tell S about my new acquisition today.

What I wrote about Adam in an email to Alex, before writing the post “Kill”:

He walked fast and it continued to rain—I dodged puddles. His living room was full of boxes, as he had told me in advance, but even without the boxes it would seem to me that he was living in a kind of squalor. The bathroom seemed small, cramped, with dust on the floor, and the kitchen sink could produce only warm water, as I discovered when trying to refill by water bottle. It was an old unit in a fancy condominium complex with ugly hallways—random grey tiles and yellow shiny materials “complementing” the grey. His bed had a sort of cheap looking polyester blanket and his desk had a laptop and two smallish external monitors. The AC units were loud and on, too cold, at 66 degrees. I turned one of them off later, and turned off his lamp, and compelled him to turn off his screens, which he said he keeps on constantly, even when he goes to sleep.

On the couch we talked a little more but then he lunged at me, and his motions were so aggressive that I told him when we were in bed that it seemed to me that he was “dying.” He laughed hard with his face on my neck and I became ticklish as I laughed in return. He seemed to me like a soldier clambering through a trench in order to get somewhere, or in order to escape an enemy. I was not turned on at all but I found all the aggressive touch interesting and pleasurable, and much like the first time I hooked up with you he went down on me almost immediately, which made it all seem like a quest, or as the swooping and lowering that I might associate with a fighter jet (this is a stupid conceit, but I couldn’t stop with the militaristic associations). I found his nails in my cunt were too sharp, or not angled in the right way, so my general sensation was one of vaguely liking him and of feeling hurt—squirming away from him while being sure that I liked him, a strange combination. I told him he was the most aggressive person I had ever had sex. This was among various comments I made; I said I often feel it is my job to do so, to make little comments. His penis struck me as nice, which I said to him, something about the size and roundness of the testicles, the impression of heaviness offsetting the more simple and streamlined form of the phallic shaft. But he had a certain difficulty maintaining an erection after a while, which reminded me of Michael’s soft dick, the first time I had sex with him—soft dicks are one of the most immediate manifestations of all neuroses, all mental blocks. He would make comments now and then on how he felt that sex was stupid, that everything was stupid, and I told him he was probably too sad to have sex, or I guess what I wanted to say was that he probably shouldn’t try so hard to have sex with me in that particular moment, if what was happening for him in that moment was a kind of dissociation. I told him, in a cheerful tone, that it was sort of degrading for him to say that sex was stupid while having sex with me—he countered this by saying something about how sex is always stupid, but I am smart, with the implication that this makes it a bit better for him. I’m wary of men who tend to denigrate themselves and others, and who raise you above this baseline denigration, but I didn’t dislike him for it, because it also seemed to me to be sort of reasonable, given where he was coming from—that is, from a position of having found himself in a line of work he found stupefyingly stupid. Much of his complaint about his life circulated around this sense that he was supposed to have become an academic, not a person who writes these tweets that make stock prices go down, and so “irony” is a catch-all term for this sense of contradiction between what he wishes he were and what he has come to do with his life.

This was some of the best, most straightforward writing I’ve mustered on a first sexual encounter, and apprehending the straightforward rush of writing that these sentences represent, I am better able to see what it’s like to desire, what it’s like to meet Sam.

Recollection’s love [Kjœrlighed], an author has said, is the only happy love. He is perfectly right in that, of course, provided one recollects that initially it makes a person unhappy. Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection’s love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasy adventurousness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection—it has the blissful security of the moment. Hope is a new garment, stiff and starched and lustrous, but it has never been tried on, and therefore one does not know how becoming it will be or how it will fit. Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an indestructible garment that fits closely and tenderly, neither binds nor sags. Hope is a lovely maiden who slips away between one’s fingers; recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies, for one becomes weary only of what is new. One never grows weary of the old, and when one has that, one is happy. He alone is truly happy who is not deluded into thinking that the repetition should be something new, for then one grows weary of it. It takes youthfulness to hope, youthfulness to recollect, but it takes courage to will repetition. He who will merely hope is cowardly; he who will merely recollect is voluptuous; he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is. But he who does not grasp that life is a repetition and that this is the beauty of life has pronounced his own verdict and deserves nothing better than what will happen to him anyway—he will perish. For hope is a beckoning fruit that does not satisfy; recollection is petty travel money that does not satisfy; but repetition is the daily bread that satisfies with blessing. When existence has been circumnavigated, it will be manifest whether one has the courage to understand that life is a repetition and has the desire to rejoice in it. The person who has not circumnavigated life before beginning to live will never live; the person who circumnavigated it but became satiated had a poor constitution; the person who chose repetition—he lives. He does not run about like a boy chasing butterflies or stand on tiptoe to look for the glories of the world, for he knows them. Neither does he sit like an old woman turning the spinning wheel of recollection but calmly goes his way, happy in repetition. Indeed, what would life be if there were no repetition? Who could want to be a tablet on which time writes something new every instant or to be a memorial volume of the past? Who could want to be susceptible to every fleeting thing, the novel, which always enervatingly diverts the soul anew? If God himself had not willed repetition, the world would not have come into existence. Either he would have followed the superficial plans of hope or he would have retracted everything and preserved it in recollection. This he did not do. Therefore, the world continues, and it continues because it is a repetition. Repetition—that is actuality and the earnestness of existence. The person who wills repetition is mature in earnestness. This is my private opinion, and this also means that it is not the earnestness of life to sit on the sofa and grind one’s teeth—and to be somebody, for example, a councilor—or to walk the streets sedately—and to be somebody, for example, His Reverence—any more than it is the earnestness of life to be a riding master. In my opinion, all such things are but jests, and sometimes rather poor ones at that. (Kierkegaard, Repetition, “Report by Constantin Constantius”)